The New People will corrupt us. They will take our world from us, as the rots have taken this world from us.
New Home must be for the People alone, or they would all die. He hovered alone, surrounded by death and life, and he was the only one who understood what it really meant.
His understanding had come to him the day his village, K’taith, had died. He’d huddled under his mother’s belly upwind of the village and listened to the speaker and the ambassador telling them that the village could no longer care for them. Its bones were too brittle; its skin and ligaments could no longer heal themselves. Their presence was hurting the village. It had asked for death, to be disassembled and its few healthy parts put to use elsewhere. The vote would be taken to see if the citizens would honor that wish, of course, but, said the speaker and the ambassador, they could not believe that anyone who loved the village would insist it continue in pain and helplessness it could not bear.
The vote was taken, and all free adults voted to let their village’s suffering end. D’seun had just watched the discolored walls and the limp, tattered sails. He felt the wind against his own skin.
The wind that fed him had killed the city and taken his freedom. He knew that instinctively. Everyone knew what happened when their village died.
He had seen it then. There was no balance. The life that killed his home, his future, did not in any way serve him. The People were not strong, they were weak. Life did not serve them; it hated them. It planned against them in its wildness. It left no niche for the People to fill. Life on Home was closed utterly to them.
Oh, he’d mimicked the proper words and ways of thought. He had no wish to be declared insane, but he had known it all to be a lie.
Then he had spread his wings in the pristine winds of New Home and he saw how it could be. Life built by the People, life that truly did serve them because they laid down every cell and commanded how it should be.
If they permitted death to flourish there, they would never create this new balance. Life would once again cease to obey them and the death the New People lived in would take them all.
He saw the truth. He tasted it. He touched it every day, but T’sha remained numb and had convinced the others, even his hand-picked team who had promised to him so freely.
And there was nothing he could do.
Was there?
If Ca’aed were ill, if a quick rot took hold there, T’sha would have to see the truth. T’sha was not so far gone that she did not love her city. She spoke of it with fondness and concern, despite her tricks with Village Gaith.
Or if she would not see, at least she would no longer be able to interfere. She was not Z’edi. Without the wealth of her city, her ability to make promises would be gone, and with it her influence in the High Law Meet.
No. D’seun huddled in on himself, glancing furtively around the hiring fair as if his very thoughts could have touched those flying past him. This is insane. To take life, to give nothing back, to treat life as raw materials (that did not happen, it did not. The New Person was dead. Dead).
But if what I do ultimately serves life, our life? If T’sha’s resistance and lies are broken, the truth can be heard. The danger the New People represent can be fully understood then. Yes. Yes. That is the way it is, the way it will be.
There were so many ways a city might sicken, even a wise and ancient city like Ca’aed. Especially when passing by a living highland when the winds were so thick with life. Even the most careful of welcomers and sail skins could miss something, say a few spores transferred from a quarantine that was no longer life-tight? Such things happened every day and could be made to happen again.
It serves life, for it allows the People themselves to live. Yes. Yes.
Z’eth was waiting for his answer. Waiting for him to decide whether her promise was worth the expense. It was. Oh, yes, it was. Life would grow from death, and in that way life would serve life.
“Call us an archiver,” he said to Z’eth, his words steady and weighty. “I will accept this promise. My children will serve your city if you follow my vote on the disposition of the New People on New Home.”
The smell hit Michael first—the sour acidic reek that he could taste in the back of his mouth. Then came the sight of Kevin and Derek, side by side on the white beds with soiled sheets, surrounded by a battery of monitors and tubes trailing limply into various injectors and samplers, all of which sat in an eerie silence.
“Sorry to haul you out tonight, Michael.” Antonio Dedues, Venera’s chief physician, stuffed his hands into the pockets of his traditional white coat and didn’t look at Michael. Antonio’s gaze was on the corpses in their beds with the useless, attendant machinery. “But you’ve got to witness the death certificates.”