"And their sentences?"
"Enough meaning to fill a small book. But it's the precision that's important to Brumallians; they don't often misunderstand each other."
"Hence their success in creating a society without leaders?"
"Yes."
She paused to sip her drink—and I to sip mine and contemplate her.
"Why are you actually here, Rhodane?" I eventually asked.
"Why're any of us here?" she countered.
I winced, not wanting to play that silly game.
She gave a tired smile. "Many Sudorians come here to carry out research, or to work in the Fleet ground bases. It's not that unusual to find people like myself here."
I didn't believe her for a second. She had yet to explain her comment about being both Sudorian and Brumallian. I rather suspected I knew the explanation already, and that no other Sudorians here would be Speakers as they did not possess sophisticated biotech growing on and inside their faces.
"You're a researcher, basically?"
She stared at me very directly, then said, "My brother Harald is Admiral Carnasus's top aide and therefore wields a great deal of power. My sister Yishna is similarly the right hand of Director Oberon Gneiss on Corisanthe Main. Orduval, my other brother, could also have been very influential had it not been for the constant fits he suffered. He disappeared. I too have disappeared, in my way, and can be considered a failure too."
"I've met Yishna. Your elder sister?"
"We're all precisely the same age: quadruplets conceived on Corisanthe Main during an information fumarole breach. We were born there, then transported planetside after our mother, Elsever, died in some stupid accident."
She had just told me something important, yet I could not decide what it was. Perhaps I could integrate it at a later time. "Did you feel a need to disappear…to escape some kind of pressure?"
Rhodane set her drink down on the table and sat back with her fingers interlaced below her breasts. She gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then directly at me. "So how is it, with Fleet's ban on Polity technology, that you manage to watch us so closely?"
I raised an eyebrow. "Why do you suppose we do?"
"I've already analysed much of what you've said and done, and it seems quite evident that your knowledge of us extends beyond what has been transmitted via the U-space link on Sudoria."
"If you're capable of such analysis, then surely you can answer your own question?"
She nodded mildly. "Of course, while we regressed and had to start over again after arriving here, you kept on progressing? So you possess technology we are unable to detect?"
"Small regressions, but nothing on the scale of what happened here. And as for the technology you mention, I can't comment."
"I see…"
I was slowly coming to realise I was dealing with a formidable intelligence here. I felt her analysis of me went beyond that comparison between my overt knowledge and what I could have learnt from the transmissions from this system to the Polity. As we had talked she had been providing just enough for me to grasp a point, where she wanted me to. This showed she had made a deep assessment of my intelligence, and perhaps knew more about me than I would like. "You still haven't answered my question, Rhodane."
"Why am I here?" She smiled, reached up and began running her finger over the ridged skin on her jaw-line. "Well, I am here because here is where my driving force impelled me, just as Yishna's impelled her to Corisanthe Main, and Harald's sent him to Fleet. I was not trying to 'disappear', but I feel I've managed to do so."
"What is this driving force you mention?"
"I think it only fair that I ask some questions too."
"Ask, then."
She leant forwards. "There used to be much dispute amidst Sudorian biologists about what the human strain was like before we began tampering with ourselves, but in recent years we've agreed on a basic format. Yet my contacts on Sudoria tell me you're not even close to that format. I've learnt from them that you are strong enough to toss about Fleet personnel and snap the locking mechanisms in armoured space doors, and I myself saw you toss a three-hundred-pound quofarl about twenty feet. You can eat grobbleworms and breathe the poisonous atmosphere beyond that door. What are you, exactly?"
"Human."
"Not good enough."
"Very well. I am both human and hooper. I was born and lived a substantial portion of my life in the Sol system, but I eventually made my home on a world called Spatterjay. On that world an alien virus infects all indigenous life forms. Humans can become infected too. This virus roots inside us and grows as a fibre connecting to other cells, gradually networking through the body in a fibrous mass and at the same time perpetually maintaining it. But the virus also caches, and engineers, the genetic blueprints of its various hosts. Should I be harmed or my environment change, the virus can change me to its optimum physical form for survival. For me those changes could be very nasty, because the bulk of additional genetic material the virus has cached—and uses for such changes—is of its original hosts, the Spatterjay leech and other creatures on that world. A mutuality exists between leech and virus: virally infected prey becoming a perpetually reusable food resource for the leeches, whilst the leeches themselves continue to spread the virus."
"So by coming here you risked that 'nasty' change?" Rhodane could not keep the fascination out of her expression.
"It can be staved off, slowed down, by my eating foods lacking in any nutrition suitable for the virus." I gestured to the empty dishes. "In that way I retain my humanity. Drugs also inhibit it, but I don't have any of those with me. Without either, infected humans can transform into chimerical creatures that are a random combination of Spatterjay fauna."
"But that's not all, is it? There's some additional problem…"
I had no idea how she worked that out. "I believe you are one question ahead of me already. My question remains: what is your driving force?"
Rhodane tilted her head as if listening to something. The Brumallian chatter remained audible in this room, though muted. I had already noted the pherophones on the walls and wondered just how deep was Rhodane's understanding of their complex language. "The answer to that will have to wait," she announced. "The other Consensus Speakers are almost ready for you." She stood, then beckoned to me as she headed for the door.
"Finishing on your question," I said. She turned to gaze at me as I stood up. "My problem, Rhodane, is caused by a second virus that's killing the first. In essence my problem is mortality."
Her eyes widened in shocked appreciation, or maybe disbelief, as she absorbed the implications. She then gave me this quid pro quo: "And your question, David. I don't know the answer, yet I cannot shake the feeling that you yourself are perhaps the best person to discover it."
"Yes…" It was opaque to me at that moment, yet I knew the answer lay within my reach. Information fumarole breach…Corisanthe Main…
"When we return I have something you should see," she said.
"Let's hope I'll be allowed to return."
"Yes, let's."
She opened the first door of the airlock, and we stepped inside. After a moment the temperature abruptly dropped, as if someone had just opened a fridge nearby. Shortly the outer door clonked and she pushed it ajar. As we stepped out, my lungs tightened and my eyes began watering. Two quofarl stood waiting for us.
Rhodane led off and I followed, the two big guys falling in behind me. My lungs began to ease; I wiped my eyes, cleared my nose. It seemed almost like a touch of hay fever that quickly passed. Rhodane led me in the opposite direction to the one we came in by, heading towards a stone stair that wound up and up. Eventually we turned off that to enter a short corridor terminating at an armoured door. I noted a lot of cable trunking and sealed boxes affixed to the walls on either side, probably control circuitry, fuses or relays, I surmised.