But Rhiow got the cold, no-nonsense feeling in her gut, when she turned to the Whisperer, which suggested that this might indeed be the case.
If this Choice was incomplete… it can be completed now. By a saurian wizard… and those intended to help him complete it, to judge by the language in it. His assistants: his people’s supplanters…
Us!
She writhed a little, then cursed, and went over the Whisperer’s head.
Ian, why are you dumping this on me?
You were there,came the answer, definite and instantaneous, its Source unmistakable.Or rather: You werenotthere. You are there now.
Choose.
And the choice was plain. Choose one way, refuse your species’ help, and drive the serpents out into the cold and the dark, and damn them all. Let life be as it is, unchanged and stable, to be relied upon.
Choose another way and lose your species’ autonomy forever, or whatever illusion of it you have had until now. The People’s whole proud history becomes merely a footnote, a preliminary to the advent of these newborns, unable to make their own way without help; midwives to a race that had its chance and lost it, a million years ago. Nature killed them. Let nature be the arbiter: their time is over for good.
Yet nature is not innocent when the Lone One drives it Or, rather: it remains innocent, not knowing who holds the wheel and uses it as a weapon. Is the storm to blame, or the Lone Power, when the lightning strikes and kills some noble soul about the business of saving life? Do you blame nature or sa’Rrahh when a cab comes too fast around the corner and—
Rhiow’s tail lashed.Devastatrix,Rhiow said inside her, Iknow your work. You will not fool me twice.
Yet it was not a question of anyone being fooled, anymore. Here was a Choice that had not been completed at the beginning of things. The Lone One—illegally??Rhiow thought, shuddering at the concept—had convinced another species that its Choice had been made. They had suffered, had died in their millions (billions?) for the Lone Power’s amusement, for the sake of a technicality, an injustice done that the victim-species was incapable of perceiving.
Now someone had come along and perceived the injustice, the incomplete Choice.What do you do?
Pass by on the other side?Rhiow was a New Yorker, she had seen her share of this.Make a stink? Get yourself killed as a result?She had seen this too.
And getting yourself killed would be the least of it You were interfering in the business of gods and demigods, here. What happens, in the human idiom, when you take the Lone Power to court and try to convict It of malfeasance? A slippery business, at best. But the destruction of much more than your body would be fair to expect if you failed.
Oh well,Rhiow thought,what do I need all these lives for, anyway?The thought was bitter. Memories of Hhuha, unbidden, definitely unwanted at the moment, kept shocking through her like static on a rug in winter every minute or so, and the pain they caused Rhiow was beginning to tell. Anything that would stop that pain was beginning to look welcome.
Yourhands on the wheel, though,she said inwardly to sa’Rrahh, fluffing up slightly.Not an accident. There are no such things.
Unfair, that at the time when I would most like to die, I must now fight hardest to live longest. And for the sake of these miserable, bad-smelling, cold-skinned snakes.She hissed in fury, causing Urruah to open his eyes a little wider and stare at her.Iau, you rag-eared kitten-eater, I hate this, I hate You,why me?
No answer, but then, when someone was yowling abuse at you, a dignified silence was the preferred response. Rhiow thought of the two Himalayans down the block and growled at herself, at her own bad manners, at life in general.Unfair…
You found it. You fix it.
The universe’s eternal principle. Repair yourself if you can. Spend the least possible energy doing it If you can’t manage it… tough. And Ehef’s succinct comment on Rhiow’s observation long ago that this seemed mean-spirited of the Powers, and hard on Their creation:What do you think this is, a charity?
She sighed. Iwas right,Rhiow thought,we are certainly all going to die.For during Choice, some of the participants always die: no Choice is valid without that most final commitment. And if even one of the team died, all would be trapped below: all would die together.
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 mastersof 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.Youhaveto 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 headagain!.’Urruah, did you know that he—”
“Rhi, you’reloudsometimes 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.Yousee 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 canIchange 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 destroyusas well… laughing that we were fools enough to be Its instruments. I hear Its laughter even now, for the process is well begun.