Nora left. She skidded quickly through the tunnels, holding
one leg stiff. Waves of pain dug into her, knotting her body.
Without the spinal crab, she could no longer stop the cramps.
The pirates had been through the radio room. They had
smashed about them wildly in the darkness. The transmitters
were saw-torn wreckage; the tabletop console had been
wrenched off and flung aside.
Fluid leaked from the liquid crystal display. Nora pulled needle and thread from her hairnet and sewed up the gash in the
screen. The CPU was still working; there were signals incoming
from the dishes outside. But the deciphering programs were
down. Ring Council transmissions were gibberish.
She picked up a general frequency propaganda broadcast. The
slashed television still worked, though it blurred around the
stitches.
And there it was: the outside world. There was not much to it:
words and pictures, lines on a screen. She ran her fingertips
gently over the scalding pain in her knee.
She could not believe what the faces on the screen were telling her, what the images showed. It was as if the little screen in its days of darkness had fermented somehow, and the world behind
it was frothing over, all its poisons wetwared into wine. The
faces of the Shaper politicos were alight with astounded triumph.
She watched the screen, transfixed. The shocked public statements of Mechanist leaders: broken men, frightened women,
their routines and systems stripped away. The Mech armor of
plans and contingencies had been picked off like a scab, showing the raw flesh of their humanity. They gabbled, they scrambled for control, each contradicting the last. Some with tight smiles that looked wired on by surgery, others misty-eyed with secondhand religious awe, gesturing vaguely, their faces bright as children's.
And the doyens of the Shaper academic-military complex: the
smooth-faced Security types, facile, triumphant, still too pleased
at the amazing coup to show their ingrained suspicion. And the
intelligentsia, dazzled by potential, speculating wildly, their objectivity in rags.
Then she saw one. There were more, a dozen of them. They
were huge. Their legs alone were as tall as men, enormous
corded masses of muscle, bone, and tendon under slickly polished corrugated hide. Scales. Brown scaled hide showed under
their clothing: they wore skirts, glittering beads on wire. Their
mighty chests were bare, with great keelbone ridges of sternum.
Compared to the treelike legs and the massive jutting tails, their
arms were long and slender, with quick, swollen-tipped fingers
and oddly socketed thumbs. Their heads were huge, the size of
a man's torso, split with great cavernous grins full of thumb-
sized flat peg teeth. They seemed to have no ears, and their
black eyeballs, the size of fists, were shielded under pebbly lids
and grayish nictitating membranes. Ribbed, iridescent frills
draped the backs of their heads.
There were people talking to them, holding cameras. Shaper
people. They seemed to be hunched in fear before the aliens;
their backs were bent, they shuffled subserviently from one to
another. It was gravity, Nora realized. The aliens used a heavy
gravity
They were real! They moved with relaxed, ponderous grace.
Some were holding clipboards. Others were talking, with fluted,
birdlike tongues as long as a forearm.
By size alone they dominated the proceedings. There was nothing formalized or stagy about it; even the solemn narration
could not hide the essential nature of the meeting. The aliens
were not frightened or even much impressed. They had no
bluster, no mystique. They were businesslike. Like tax collectors.
Paolo burst in suddenly, his eyes wild, his long hair matted
with blood. "Quickly! They're right behind me!" He glanced
around. "Give me that panel cover!"
"It's over, Paolo!"
"Not yet!" Paolo snatched the broad console top from midair.
Wiring trailed behind it. lie catapulted across the room and
slammed the console across the tunnel entrance. Placed flat
against it, it formed a crude barricade; Paolo whipped a tube of
epoxy from his belt and glued the console top against the stone.
There was a gap to one side; Paolo pulled his slingshot and
fired down the corridor. They heard a distant howl. Paolo
jammed his face against the gap and screamed with laughter.
"The television, Paolo! News from the Council! The siege is
over!"
"The siege?" Paolo said, glancing back at her. "What the fuck
does that have to do with us?"
"The siege, the war," she said. "There never was any war, it's
the new party line. There were just . . . misunderstandings. Bottlenecks." Paolo ignored her, staring down the tunnel, readying
another shot. "We were never soldiers. Nobody was ever trying
to kill anyone. The human race is peaceful, Paolo, just-good
trading partners. . . . Aliens are here, Paolo. The aliens."
"Oh, God," Paolo moaned. "I just have to kill two more, that's
all, and I already winged the woman. Just help me kill them
first, then you can tell me anything you want." He pressed his
shoulder against the barricade, waiting for the epoxy to set.
Nora drifted over him and shouted through one of the con-
sole's instrument holes into the darkness. "Mr. President! This
is the diplomat! I want a parley!"
There was silence for a moment. Then: "You crazy bitch!
Come out and die!"
"It's over, Mr. President! The siege is lifted! The System is at
peace, do you understand? Aliens, Mr. President! Aliens have
arrived, they've been here for days already!"
The President laughed. "Sure. Come on out, baby. Send that
little fucker with the slingshot out first." She heard the sudden
whine of the power saw.
Paolo pushed her aside with a snarl and fired down the hall.
They heard half a dozen sharp clicks as the shot ricocheted far
down the tunnel. The President cawed triumphantly. "We're
gonna eat you," he said, very seriously. "We're gonna eat your
fuckin' livers." He lowered his voice. "Take 'em out, State."
Nora clawed past Paolo and screamed aloud. "Abelard!
Abelard, it's true, I swear it by everything between us! Abelard,
you're not stupid, let us live! I want to live-"
Paolo clamped his hand over her mouth and pulled her back.
She clung to the barricade, now glued firm, staring down the
hall. A white form was drifting there. A spacesuit. Not a
Mavrides one, but one of the bloated armored ones from the
Red Consensus.
Paolo's slingshot was useless against the suit. "This is it," he
muttered. "The cusp." He released Nora and pulled a candle
and a flat bladder of liquid from within his blouse. He wrapped
the bladder around the candle, cinching it with a sleeve-tie. He
hefted the bomb. "Now they burn."
Nora threw her sash around his neck. She put her good knee
into his back and pulled savagely. Paolo made a sound like
broken pipes and kicked away from the entrance. He clawed at
the sash. He was strong. He was the one with luck.
Nora pulled harder. Abelard was alive. The idea gave her
strength. She pulled harder. Paolo was pulling just as hard. His
fists were locked around the belt's gray fabric so hard that
blood oozed from his nail-cut palms in little crescent blisters.
There were screams down the hall. Screams and the sound of
the power saw.
And now the knot that had never left her shoulders had spread
into her arms and Paolo was pulling against muscle that had set
like iron. He was not breathing in the sudden silence that
followed. The wrinkled ridge of the sash had vanished into his