Rituals of Sacrifice, page 6
Clinging to his small hammock of wadded material, Dizzy extends a flair of golden tentacles.
“What have we here? Well, my goodness! I have never known human beings to carry Xaxafraxalax.”
Symbiont augmentation can’t quite negotiate this last word. Which is odd. I don’t recall it letting me down too often, previously.
“Xaxafraxalax?”
How might I even plot out such a word?
zaks-ah-frax-ah-lacks
Meaning? Based on my read of this particular Moorad’s intentions? Let’s see. Ah! How funny! He seems to think that maybe, just maybe, some special human beings run around with small creatures permanently tasked with bodily cleanliness.
Image of cleaning fish like gobies or wrasse as they visit puffer fish or groupers. Image of flocking oxpeckers aiding rhino and or impala.
Terrific.
One more thing Dizz wouldn’t want to know.
I suppose the guy has never seen a male Cass. Or has limited attention when it comes to entertainment videos exhibiting the prominent lifeforms of distant worlds.
Then again, Dizzy is a solid pro at gathering any crumb I might shed throughout a meal. He sometimes extracts sunflower or pumpkin seeds from my pockets. I’ve even seen him tug the occasional grape or orange slice from a countertop.
Just as I decide to offer these examples, the security officer’s eyes go blank and dull. He glances at the line building behind me. His posture settles. And it is just our good luck that this near discussion over my little, exotic friend has augured such boredom that he embosses our travel documents and passes us on our way.
Way to go, Dizz!
Much like Cleve, the Moorad do not seem to approve of avenues or street grids. Structural blocks erupt from sandy shields of perpetually moist pavement and rise almost perpendicularly into the sky. Where top floors collide, inverted V-shaped channels form dark passages. Where the deep cobalt sky remains visible, ground level movement feels like walking through a narrow canyon or wind-sculpted chasm. The buildings are uniformly gray-white. The air is filled with the odor of ozone and the whispered rush of energetic transportation.
Colorful awnings camouflage passing cable cars. These travel between and across structures within a multitude of up-down diagonals, almost always seeming to zip from the shadows without warning or sound. Riding thus along one catenary or another looks to be the routine of an older set of Moorad. Younger members of the tribe travel in the wake of these same airborne trolleys by means of dangling rings and hooks. This has an interesting effect wherever the passing whistle of canyon breezes through support wires combine with what must be the singsong of Moorad laughter and crosstalk. Built up heat in each roller may somehow transfer into mechanical motion for use in powered ascent. Between each burst of commuter traffic, empty tram lines whistle an eerie chorus.
Small shops and eateries radiate from every tram stop. Many sell what appear to be colorful scarves, posters, and zippered bags of edible lighting bugs. There is also a type of candy that looks more like stained glass than anything you might want melting on your tongue. Some stands sell bladders of spring water along with tight, woven bales of what may be seaweed. Packets of wine-purple butter help soften these to the point of satisfaction, at least for some. At one point, I enjoy slurping squeaky, cheesy noodles from what looks like a sieve all the while struggling not to laugh as my symbiont forms sporadic translations from passersby.
None of these simple explorations further delay our arrival at the city’s chief medical center. How could they? Asking directions seems an impossibility. The best advice one poor fellow traveler offers comes down to, “Ah, the medical center. Well, if you are meant to get there at all, so you shall. All in good time.”
Tegwin’s ventilators thrum. Lights blink. When an IV bag drapes flat, the float gurney automatically sees to its replacement.
Coming across what I take as a wafting, medicinal smell, I retrace one building’s perimeter at an elevation of perhaps twenty meters. Pocking the walls like nesting cliff birds, vendors now hawk weapons, psychotropic lichens, and a variety of gleaming prayer mirrors.
I veer well clear of the mirrors. One, because each view reminds me of the modern equivalent of a wanted poster. Two, not only do my eyes look too old for my face just now, I’m not always sure who might be looking back from my reflection.
I urge Tegwin’s gurney through plastic battens and sliding partitions the texture of worn vellum. Dizzy scurries along my arm. Flanking my jugular, he throbs an odd counterpoint to my racing pulse.
“I know, Dizz. I know. If that’s a free clinic up ahead, we are so in luck.”
As my fingers graze the establishment’s corrugated entry panel, it whispers aside to reveal a gathering of mixed exotics on a variety of raised nest baskets, dangling racks, and cushioned mats. The air holds a flat medicinal smell. The beep and whirr of diagnostic equipment all but cover some strain of scarcely audible music. Though lacking a direct view of the full waiting room, I sense frozen despair and persistent animal yearning all coiled and hidden beneath veneers of compassion and alert stoicism.
We take a number.
Seated in an adjacent office, a receptionist eventually calls us forward.
The kangaroo-shaped Breslan, a centenarian by bone structure, squats on one corner of a desk, sucking steaming marrow from a bone. My symbiont relays little interaction beyond a feeling of mutual disdain. Considering the time of day, the bone may be this creature’s afternoon wake-up treat. Bresla are not binary in sex, so instead of being he or she, this individual—I’m counting cranial flutes now—may be what our Diplomatic Corps has classified as a Breslan “twelve.”
I tolerate a sweep of eyes, sensory booms, and antennae as I approach the scheduling desk.
“Please present your insurance chip,” says the twelve. “Point to the area of primary concern.”
I draw Tegwin’s float gurney to present a better viewing aspect.
“Sorry,” says the twelve. “We do not accept stasis cases. Try two doors down.”
“She’s not in stasis. Tegwin’s just—”
“Two doors down.”
“Terrific.”
We’ve just made it back out to the building’s true façade when the window above us shatters. Another pane of glass to my immediate right also bursts. Alarms scream. Shards scissor and cascade. An awning cleaner loses purchase and falls. Scouring rotors whirling, he hits a pair of hapless travelers and, together, they pachinko down past speeding cable cars and more lacerated awnings.
A whirling shadow whistles inbound.
I duck, but something still tugs at the roots of my hair in passing. Somehow, my imagination classifies this bolo. Comprised of webbed leather and twin stones, it is a Dhydan weapon.
Dhydan?
But Bréant couldn’t be anywhere nearby! Even if she and Iswa retrieved their courier—
Spak! Spak!
Shallow craters pit the wall beside me. Erupting grit needles my cheeks and shielding hand. Someone’s letting loose with some kind of silenced weapon.
Spak! Spak! A pause. Spak! Spak! Spak!
Judging by the occasional soft-landing ricochet, the thimble-sized beanbag rounds may be meant to be nonlethal.
Spak! Spak! Spak!
Another volley cracks a loose arc along a shop’s interior wall. Customers run and scream. Packages spill. Spak! Spak! Divots pop from the walls. I catch gusts of musk plus a secondary rotten-egg stench and glance back to challenge the gaze of not one, but two Dhyda.
One slim female with dark, sable body fur.
A larger male who I somehow believe I ought to recognize.
Using their claws as shears, they have ripped a horizontal void in the fabric wall of an oncoming tram. Squatting under the big Dhydan’s elbow, a smallish Cleve brandishes what looks like an over-and-under shotgun.
I catch a glint of reflected light. Rising at an angle from below, another trolley carries four more individuals not native to this world. An elderly Gxat. What looks to be a Millerite, of all apparitions. A man of largely Terran ancestry wearing the ruana of a retired liaison, and a woman hefting a tine gun.
Concentric with the reflex sites of the gun, her eyes come across as blue but undercut by dark crescents. Taut jawline. Broken nose. Auburn hair in a severe braid.
Who the hell?
The tine gun’s collimation prongs shiver. As the weapon coughs a dart of silver, momentum is all that saves me. I try to yank Tegwin’s float gurney into a hard turn, but it does not obey. Although weightless or even buoyant at this elevation, the souped-up levitation sled drags me forward and spins me off my feet.
Something slices a hot diagonal under my ribs.
And now we’re falling. Or, more precisely, drifting downward as though tethered by a brace of helium balloons. Spiraling, struggling to hold on, I’m an easy target.
I can’t let go!
Words of encouragement push through my thoughts.
“Focus,” voices one of my inner terrors. “Surrender to the process. Do not strive or strain to reach your goal. Open yourself as a channel through which the universe may work.”
“Right.”
Once again, the voice is neither a memory nor a product of my imagination. Quantum physicists say two similar atomic particles, though separated by vast distance, often betray a lingering connection. Appearing to communicate at several times the speed of light, something in their essential nature allows an almost instantaneous sharing of information.
I wouldn’t know much about that. Yet, since gaining my lingual symbiont back on Earth, I’d accepted the possibility of remotely discerned emotion as fact. Intense feelings, especially from those few beings with whom I’d established some special bond, often come to me as glimmers of color or as tremors deep within my bones.
Still, I recognize this particular voice as coming from one of several individuals whose essential nature has taken residence deep within my psyche.
“Hush. Release your mind from all distraction. There is work to be done. Center yourself, and the answer to your predicament may surface.”
Spak! Spak!
Again: I can’t let go. Don’t let go!
Thump.
Searing pain radiates from my hip.
“Who are these people? What do they want?”
Tegwin’s float gurney catches a ledge, and its nose pivots toward the sky. My wrist and elbow keep pace with the turn. At this rate of descent, even if I can hold on, it’s going to take us as long as five or six minutes to touch down and skid to a halt.
Options?
The second tram is level with us now, although all I seem able to focus on look to be bristling weapons. Then it dawns on me. I don’t have to be confined to this flight path if I don’t want to be. Meanwhile, these others are stuck following their passing tram lines. Hoping I’m recalling the gurney’s touchpad as well as I’d like to think I am, I blindly reach to activate full interior stasis. Then, with a careful thrust, I completely deactivate the sled’s upward drag.
Thus now: falling!
Where were we? Up, maybe 16 meters? Under Måyveth’s easy gravity, that comes out to a hard landing in approximately 2.1 seconds.
Which, incidentally, feels like forever when someone is still tracking your fall in their gunsights!
Fortunately, we shear through an awning or two ahead of splashing down, side-by-side, in some Moorad’s idea of a shallow reflecting pool. If not for floating refuse and broad lily pads, wading out and walking away might have been difficult. The gurney’s neutral buoyancy returns at my command, and I glance up to find a luminescent arrow and ‘H’-icon urging us toward the nearest hospital.
So, Tegwin in tow, I take off jogging hard in the opposite direction. Believe me, it is not easy to freak out and still maintain pace as well as situational awareness!
I mean, I’m used to feeling out of place, but I’m getting sick of feeling like an interloper in my own head. Maybe Riskin’s advice had saved us—even though it seemed mostly off-topic—but any interaction of that sort effectively leaves me with a throbbing headache and almost lethal levels of self-disgust.
I hate the way my moods seem to switch for no apparent reason. I don’t like worrying about going crazy. The only things helping me hold it together, forcing resolution and drive, are (again) more terrible images of Tegwin sprawled in that alley.
My fault.
All my fault.
Twenty, thirty minutes later, still freaking out, another waft of gritty chemical orders yanks me back to reality. As I slam on the brakes, chest heaving, boot treads hot with friction, I realize I may have found a smaller clinic more to our liking.
“Dizz? What do you think?”
The little guy taps a merry beat.
Chapter 6
If I could contrive a do over, I’d stroll right in through the expansive foyer and shout demands as if I owned the place. Instead, I breeze in guiding Tegwin’s gurney and I’m pushing through a double set of thick glass doors when my guts chill.
I am making a grave error. I used to think a liaison’s symbiont is mostly in place as an aid to communication and interpretation. Body language. Radiated emotion. Nuances of the spoken word. Given a symbiont’s ability to heal and somewhat glance forward in time, I sometimes forget how good they are at delaying culture shock.
I’m not sure what made Dizzy and I view this refuge as an ideal medical center for us, but I am wrong. The depth of the room’s patterned carpet gives this away before I can so much as gather my bearings. I stagger and almost trip. Obviously woven by a multitude of hands, the patterned carpet brings to mind bonsai gardens and channeled streams. Fish cavort. Something like dragonflies wing and chase. Dwarf trees blossom and fruit.
Above, globular chandeliers—several times brighter than necessary—generate more shadow than clarity. The walls … ah, the walls. Although I discern joints in the patterned marble, the walls are wide flutes seemingly polished from native stone. Shallow hearths appear as arbitrary slashes of varying height. Green flame. Red flame. Bright white fire. Though none provide heat.
Fabric rustles. A receptionist sprawls in what looks like a beanbag chair. Radiating entitlement, she sips bubbling liquid the color of autumn. A tiny spoon tinkles rim-to-rim as she stirs a loose figure eight.
I freeze in place. A fluid tingle sweeps the back of my neck. I find myself listening intently.
There are other people here—I can make out muffled voices piping along one of several passageways. Setting aside her beverage, the receptionist takes my measure for a long, uncomfortable minute.
As I back along my arrival path, some dialogue-without-sound eye contact takes place between her and a piece of furniture I had taken as a large coat rack. I have cut the distance to the exit in half when the largest Moorad I have ever seen descends from this tiered perch.
He gathers a pair of curved, shiny objects, and advances. My heartbeat accelerates, and I wonder if some hidden device has gained its measure.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say. “Thought this was the stock exchange. My bad.”
Drawing on his speaking strands, the guy sings, “We do not cater to your kind here!”
“Duh,” I say, working to appear disappointed. The place is too rich for my blood, or wallet. “Obviously. Although your decor surely oozes decency and kindness.”
We are out the door before he can close the distance. I don’t even look back as I turn to circumnavigate the building. We pass loading docks, an area for sky ambulance arrivals and a courtyard devoted to the ground necessities of first-response rescue ships before I find what I am looking for.
The morgue entrance.
“Dizz? Time to come out and play.”
And here is where I send Dizzy on a mission of his own. Sensory filaments flair. Velvet wetness pushes under my earlobe. In fact, I don’t have to explain more than a vague outline of all I require, before he leaps down my ruana—shoulder elbow knee—and zigzags down the walk; a blur of gold speckles on yellow over a smear of buff white. As a friend of mine once said, “It’s not the size of the dust weasel in a fight, is the size of the fight in the dust weasel.”
Surely hoping that I’m not about to disappoint him on my end, I louver a ground-level window. Rust flakes. Hinges squeal. Whitewashed glass rattles. Using Tegwin’s sled with improved reflex, I guide her through the gap and descend to floor level. I have put off getting her help way too long.
As darkness enfolds us, the coruscation of remnant retinal currents lends the gloom a sense of hidden movement. Small, colored lights show themselves. Thin lines of soft radiance outline doors. Oatmeal static pops and spills across large panel displays. Curved reflections reveal the housings and lenses of boom-mounted cameras. As opposed to the splendor of the clinic’s reception area, everything about the morgue speaks of competence and pure function. The floor may be stone. It may be poured concrete. Air scrubbers draw the scent of embalming preservatives and cleaning fluids.
I take station behind a cylindrical refrigeration unit and wait long enough for my thoughts to return to the attack in the city.
Who were those guys? Ever since I errantly united factions of the Cleve and Dhyda, it wasn’t unusual to find them in one another’s company.
But there had been two Dhyda out there. And only one Cleve, leastwise as far as I could tell.
Also, Gxat and humans and Millerites rarely have much in common. While some part of me—Kitosh actually—seems to know more than I am willing to let her voice, current priority has me more focused on the task at hand.
A door whisks open. Ceiling lights flicker and snap-snap-snap to uniform brilliance. I’m in luck. Draped corpse and float gurney in tow, the two Moorad physicians do not notice me until I’ve blocked the door. When one lunges for an intercom pad, I wave her off.
“Please don’t,” I say, hands open and in view. “I can explain. I am a Diplomatic Corps liaison, and I require your help. My companion is ill. We’ve come a long way.”
“There must be some other facility!”
