The only thing we can do, I suppose, is make sure we make it work… make it all worthwhile.
Yet the other side of the paradox was that, for the Choice to take, some must also survive; otherwise there will be no one to implement it.
That’ll be Ith, I suppose.
But who even knows if Ith will cooperate? For everything would turn on him, at last. It was all very well to think about him taking the part of the saurian wizard who should have been present at his People’s choice, and remaking it, or rather making it for the first time—becoming, as it were, his People’s Father. But his ambivalences were likely enough to destroy any such chance: he was as angry and uncertain in his own way as Arhu had been.
But if we don’t get him to cooperate somehow… Those empty doorways in the upper corridors … they would not be empty for long. Rhiow thought of places like the great Crossroads worldgating facility on the sixth planet of Rirhath B: many permanently emplaced gates, leading into thousands of otherwheres, and used freely for travel by species accustomed to such technologies, part science and part wizardry. The Old Downside would become such a place if the Lone One had its way with the saurians. Those doors would be filled with vistas of other worlds, forced open in places previously innocent of such travel—and out through them would pour armies of warrior lizards, intent on killing whatever they found. “Misused territories”: that had been the line from the catechism taught to Ith by die Great One. Ith fortunately seemed to have renounced it, but millions of others of his kind, it seemed, would not. They would take other worlds gladly: the lost race would become masters of an interstellar empire—even an intercontinual one.
Still… Arhu had said it when asked who Ith was: The father. My son. You’ve got to bring him along…
She glanced up at them and found them nearly nose to nose now, against the wall and glaring at each other again.
You can’t just sit around when this is what happened to your people, Arhu was saying loudly to Ith. You have to do something. You saw. You were tricked! His tone was just a touch uncertain; he was new to this kind of advocacy… but he was doing his best.
Then Rhiow blinked. “Why, you little monster,” she muttered, “you were in my head again!.’ Urruah, did you know that he—”
“Rhi, you’re loud sometimes when you muse,” Urruah said, with slightly malicious amusement. “Sorry, I know it’s probably to do with—Sorry,” he said abruptly, and sat down and started to wash.
Rhiow felt the pain bite her again. She swallowed, licked her nose a couple of times, tried to put it out of her mind.
The Great One would have His reasons, Ith said, very slowly.
Yeah! Killing the whole bunch of you, and everything else It can get Its hands on! Can’t you see?
I see too much. You see too much. There is blood everywhere; it runs across the world’s face, and nothing we do will stop it.
Arhu licked his nose. That’s not right. It’s to stop that kind of thing that we’ve come.
You cannot stop it or even change it. Much less can I change it. Ith bowed his head down to Arhu again, locked eyes with him. This is typical mammal-thought: quick questions, quick answers, the hope that everything will be all right with action taken now and done in a moment. Perhaps matters would improve for a year, or two, or ten. But in fifty? Two hundred? Five hundred? All will be again as it was. More will have died. The pain will go on, the blood will run.
You’re wrong, Arhu said. You have to help us with what we’ve come to do. It’s not just for us. It’s for everything!
Everything, Ith said, is foul.
Arhu couldn’t find anything much to say for a second.
All there is here is death, Ith said. Those who will kill eat those who must die so that others can kill. When we come up into the sun, we will kill again. How many lives must pass before it all ends? Here, under this so-warm sun, and on other worlds, and in places where there are not even stars to shine, places completely strange to us: how many more of every kind will die? Each of those places has its own life: we will come into each one and destroy it. The image, which had run vaguely through Rhiow’s mind, ran clear through his own—his gift, or Arhu’s Eye, could see it alclass="underline" endless planes and planets, devastated. The immense distances between galaxies, between continua, would not be enough to stop a race of saurians made immortal by combined technology and wizardry. And finally, That Which has used us to destroy everything will destroy us as well… laughing that we were fools enough to be Its instruments. I hear Its laughter even now, for the process is well begun.
…And you know all this to be true, Ith said, leaning down more closely to Arhu; and suddenly the air itched with wizardry, spelling done without diagrams, but in the mind… if it was spelling, and not some saurian congener to the Whispering. I see it in you, as you have seen it, though you have denied the sight. I see you too have heard the laughter. Forward in time: and back.
Arhu looked up into Ith’s eyes, an expression of horror growing on his face, his eyes going wide, slowly going almost totally to dark. He crouched down, still gazing up into Ith’s eyes, his claws starting to dig into the stone, scrabbling at it. Arhu seemed unaware of what he was doing.
“They were crying, first,” he said softly. “Not laughing. Ehhif have such weird sounds, you can’t tell them apart half the time… But it was warm. Our dam was there, so we weren’t afraid of the noises they made. The little ones, the ehhif-kits, they were crying, but they did that a lot if you scratched them, or when they scratched each other. I didn’t know the words then. Now I know them. ‘Daddy, please, Daddy, let us keep them, let us keep just one, just one, Daddy!’ ”
Rhiow rolled quietly upright, glanced over at Urruah. He was still sitting leaning against the wall, his eyes closed down to slits, but he was awake, watching and listening. Saash had her back to Rhiow, but Rhiow saw an ear flick, just once.
Arhu lay still gazing up into Ith’s eyes, his claws working, working on the stone. “He said, ‘We can’t keep them, the landlord won’t let us have more than one, I told your mother not to let her out until we got her spayed, well, it’s her fault, you take it up with her…’ He picked us up. He wasn’t bad about it, he was always careful when he picked us up. He put us in a dark place. It rustled. He closed it up. We couldn’t smell our mother anymore. We heard her crying then, we tried to get to her, but we couldn’t see, it was dark, we were all jammed together in the dark, and then the noise started.”
Rhiow swallowed, watching the convulsive, obsessive movement of Arhu’s claws on the stone. “It was loud. We didn’t know what it was. A bus, I think now. We couldn’t smell anything but each other, and some of us got scared and made hiouh or siss in the bag, it got all over us and smelled terrible, we could hardly smell each other anymore. The noise stopped; we were crying, but no one would let us out, we didn’t know where our dam was— Then something pushed us hard against one side of the bag. It felt strange, we were falling, we tried to come down on our feet. Then there was another big noise, we came down hard, it hurt…”