“You’re not supposed to talk like we’re all different people,” said the girl. “We’re all the voice of the world spirit. And you mean my aunt. She abdicated last week.”
“Abdicated!” Mortified by her mistake—Ashiban had been warned over and over about the nature of the Sovereign of Iss, that she was not an individual, that referring to her as such would be an offense. “I didn’t know that was possible.” And surely at a time like this, the Sovereign wouldn’t want to drop so much responsibility on a teenager.
“Of course it’s possible. It’s just a regular priesthood. It never was particularly special. It was you Raksamat who insisted on translating Sovereign as Sovereign. And it’s you Raksamat whose priests are always trancing out and speaking for your ancestors. Voice of Iss doesn’t mean that at all.”
“Translating Sovereign as Sovereign?” asked Ashiban. “What is that supposed to mean?” The girl snorted. “And how can the Voice of Iss not mean exactly that?” The Sovereign didn’t answer, just kept walking.
After a long silence, Ashiban said, “Then why do any of the Gidanta listen to you? And who is it my mother was negotiating with?”
The Sovereign looked back at Ashiban and rolled her eyes. “With the interpreter, of course. And if your mother didn’t know that, she was completely stupid. And nobody listens to me.” The voice of the translating handheld was utterly calm and neutral, but the girl’s tone was contemptuous. “That’s why I’m stuck here. And it wasn’t about us listening to the voice of the planet. It was about you listening to us. You wouldn’t talk to the Terraforming Council because you wouldn’t accept they were an authority, and besides, you didn’t like what they were saying.”
“An industrial association is not a government!” Seeing the girl roll her eyes again, Ashiban wondered fleetingly what her words sounded like in Gidantan—if the handheld was making industrial association and government into the same words, the way it obviously had when it had said for the girl, moments ago, translating Sovereign as Sovereign. But that was ridiculous. The two weren’t the same thing at all.
The Sovereign stopped. Turned to face Ashiban. “We have been here for two thousand years. For all that time, we have been working on this planet, to make it a place we could live without interference. We came here, to this place without an intersystem gate, so that no one would bother us and we could live in peace. You turned up less than two centuries ago, now most of the hard work is done, and you want to tell us what to do with our planet, and who is or isn’t an authority!”
“We were refugees. We came here by accident, and we can’t very well leave. And we brought benefits. You’ve been cut off from the outside for so long, you didn’t have medical correctives. Those have saved lives, Sovereign. And we’ve brought other things.” Including weapons the Gidanta didn’t have. “Including our own knowledge of terraforming, and how to best manage a planet.”
“And you agreed, your own mother, the great Ciwril Xidyla agreed, that no one would settle on the planet without authorization from the Terraforming Council! And yet there are dozens of Raksamat farmsteads just in the Saunn foothills, and more elsewhere.”
“That wasn’t the agreement. The treaty explicitly states that we have a right to be here, and a right to share in the benefits of living on this planet. Your own grandmother agreed to that! And small farmsteads are much better for the planet than the cities the Terraforming Council is intending.” Wind gusted, and a few fat drops of rain fell.
“My grandmother agreed to nothing! It was the gods-cursed interpreter who made the agreement. And he was appointed by the Terraforming Council, just like all of them! And how dare you turn up here after we’ve done all the hard work and think because you brought us some technology you can tell us what to do with our planet!”
“How can you own a planet? You can’t, it’s ridiculous! There’s more than enough room for all of us.”
“I’ve memorized it, you know,” said the Sovereign. “The entire agreement. It’s not that long. Settlement will only proceed according to the current consensus regarding the good of the planet. That’s what it says, right there in the second paragraph.”
Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable—and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But—also like most off-planet Raksamat—she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.
The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”
Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.
“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes—plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes—had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”
The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.
“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.
Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.
A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.
And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.
Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.
Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.
Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.