Quiet Invasion(104)

“I will not forget this,” D’seun said.

“You should not.” T’sha let go of her perch and flew into the corridor. She was aware of the Seventh Team strung out along the corridor like lanterns around a nightside room. She did not speak to them. Instead, she took herself straight into the refresher and ordered the door to close tightly behind her.

The air in the refresher was rich, thick, and heavy. T’sha took it in gratefully, relaxing her skin, drawing the life-giving air in through her loosened muzzle and feeling her internal poisons release from her pores. It was so hard to feel full here, in this beautiful, empty world. Back home she needed to refresh perhaps once every dodec-hour. Here, every four or five hours that passed left her drained. She relaxed skin, muscle, and bone in the room’s gentle breeze and let herself drift.

She’d done it. Oh, she had done it. She’d spent so much effort controlling her body, she’d obviously forgotten to control her mind. Did she really mean she’d call D’seun’s sanity into question?

She did. Her skin rippled with small fear. She’d do it. This was too huge. It meant too much. If D’seun would have her sacrifice the New People needlessly, if he had taken one of their lives, he might really be insane. The sane spread life, served it, nurtured it, and in return were served and spread and nurtured by life. The insane were greedy. They killed. They stunted and confined and hoarded life. The sane and the insane could not live together.

T’sha remembered when her family had met on a question of insanity. She’d only just been declared adult, able to fly with the others and add her voice to the consensus. T’thran, a second cousin to her birth family, had deliberately destroyed an entire square mile of canopy. He offered no reason, however closely questioned. He had only wanted to do this thing. It was bad, he said. It was rotted, and the rot would spread.

But there was no evidence. No one else in the entire latitude had witnessed this corruption. Not even Ca’aed could say it had existed. The family asked; they asked everyone they could reach. The wind blew them from day through night and back into day again while they turned the question over. But in the end, every voice polled had called him insane.

Insane. Nothing left to contribute to life but his own raw material. So that raw material had been taken and used to help re-create what had been destroyed.

As would D’seun’s be, if she did this and the Law Meet found she was right.

The problem was, of course, that D’seun could make his own case against her. He had already convinced the Seventh Team she was greedy and careless. What if he or some ally took that to a court or the Fitness Review Committee in the High Law Meet? There existed the very real possibility that she would be removed from her special position here, and then who would speak for the New People? D’seun would not, his bullied team would not, and back in the High Law Meet, Ambassador Z’eth most certainly would not.

T’sha floated between disasters and did not know which way to dodge. She only knew that as long as the New People were alive and sane they could not be dismissed, could not be flown over without regard to their needs and their claims. That was right. That was the first Right and the final Right and it would not change, no matter how closely D’seun argued his case and no matter what Z’eth had asked her to do.

“I cannot choose which life to serve,” she murmured, calling back the words the living highland spoke to Ca’doth.

T’sha floated, blown by the room’s gentle, random breeze, taking in its nutrition and its calm. She had made her move. All that she could do now was wait and see how D’seun would respond.

The Veneran doctors agreed Vee could sleep in her own room if she wore the monitor belt and patches under her shirt and swore to drink two liters of water before she went to bed.

So there she stood in her spacious, comfortable living room, with its autoform furniture and its walls set to a static pattern of mountains and clouds based on Japanese watercolors, and the purple rag rug on the soft-tile floor, completely at a loss about what to do. Angela, Lindi, Isaac, and the Venerans were all going to live, thanks to the intervention of the aliens. She drew a large glass of water from the tap at the sink in the kitchenette and drank some absently. What were they doing down there now? What were they doing there at all? Who were they? Why had they decided to help?

For the first time since coming to Venera, Vee felt trapped. There was a whole new world out there now, and she couldn’t reach it.

Nothing you can do about it now, unless you want to put the act back on and try to bully Failia and company to let you back down there.