The Sea is Full of Stars

Kalinda

Ari looked at the pages of cuneiform-style characters and decided that he probably would never be able to learn it. Although it was actually printed by some kind of electromagnetic process on a stiff sheet that obviously was impervious to cold saltwater, no two of the little squiggles looked alike to him. How were you supposed to even start? Not, of course, that he could read actual writing even back in the Realm, but very few people could or needed to. You talked to the computer, the computer talked to you. You wanted drama, it was performed holographically all around you. You wanted information, the best research systems in the universe were at your beck and call. There were even just readings, from fiction to news, with no pictures if you were on the move or had some time to kill. For most people, except historians, archaeologists, people like that, and others who might be dealing with primitive new races, there simply wasn’t any use for it. It was like being skillful with a broadsword. At one time that was a good way of staying alive and not becoming a victim. In the Realm it had been, at best, impractical, and at worse, highly messy.

This book, however, did have things of interest. For one thing, the numbers for some reason had stuck in his head. Interesting souvenir of that link, not nearly as odd as having Ming along for the ride, but useful. He could look at the map and count and then check the guide to the races of the Well against the numbers. Reading the descriptions was out of the question, but there were some impressive photos on metal that had a holographic look and feel, showing each race. A few questions of his ever-present police “associates,” as they preferred to be called, as opposed to jailers—which they were—told him which race went with which number. He was impressed that just about all of the cops could read this stuff.

By now he’d had the history and briefing of what Josich and his cronies had already accomplished with the willing help of certain native rulers and races. It impressed him as it had impressed them, and made him understand all the more just why Kincaid had hunted them down for so long and so fanatically, and also why he hadn’t yet succeeded in polishing the bastards off.

It had looked so simple when he had his first interview with Shissik. Debrief, get him together with this “other,” find out what could be found out, then probably get them both jobs, although what jobs they could do without becoming literate that anybody from the Realm might enjoy doing wasn’t clear. In fact, those faceless superiors had kept him away from them and the other and stuck in endless repetitive debriefings for months now, and basically assigning him menial tasks in and around the police building, never without escort. Finally they’d enrolled him in the equivalent of basic adult education classes, intended for people who either hadn’t had much due to circumstances or who were still trying to figure out “big” and “little” in the flash cards. He’d learned a lot, including how to write and recognize his name, as well as day-to-day facts and even some history, but reading had so far completely eluded him. It was damned frustrating.

Take this basic kid’s anthropology book, kind of “The Peoples and Lands of the World,” local style. Gibberish. And it was supposedly at about a second grade level. Still, it was useful when you had some help; and because, even though they’d lightened up and loosened up considerably, he was never without some sort of “help,” he at least could make some use of it.

The fact that Josich was building up along the western edge of the same ocean they were in made it imperative to know just what they were up against. Check that—he was one of them now, too.

Chalidang… Type 302. Good God! They looked like cuttlefish! Triangular-shaped creatures with huge but very Terran human-looking eyes and a face full of tentacles. The tentacles all seemed quite short, but he was assured that they were coiled up in the shell and that at least some of them could flash outward up to four meters in milliseconds. The suckers could secrete a paralyzing poison that worked on the vast majority of races that could absorb through the skin, and squirt a nasty fluid to get into eyes, nose, ears, ass, any opening, to achieve the same end with those races that couldn’t be directly afflicted. Hydraulic jet propulsion could move the Chalidangers at incredible speeds as well, and selective natural jets allowed them to hover, rise, fall, or turn at angles that seemed impossible. Add to that the nasty weapons of their own design that attached to their extremely thick shells, and you had one mean batch of nasties.

“They’re not much on sentiment, either,” one of the cops assured him. “Kids who don’t measure up to expectations don’t tend to grow up. They’re species-specific level one telepaths, which means they can’t really read minds but exchange surface thoughts the same way you and I speak. They can also regenerate most anything. You can blow ’em away one by one if you can get them in the tentacle area, but you have to be able to drill a hole right through the eyes to get their brains and really take ’em out. Not easy when they can move like they do.”

“You sound like you’ve already fought some of them,” An noted.

“Not yet. But my sister was trade rep for us in Laskein. The Laskers got no love for ’em—they’ve had to live next door. There was a dispute over border rights to some minerals while she was there. Stupid little thing, but you say ‘good day’ to them wrong and they get insulted. Chalidangers, that is. Nasty little fight. The Laskers only got semi-tech, and they make sure they stay on their side, but over the eons they developed some stuff that can take out the ’Dangers. Got some nice volcanic steam vents and they harness the power really well. Steam-driven harpoons specially designed to bore into hard shells, that’s what they shoot, at a speed the ’Dangers have a hard time seeing until it hits ’em. Sis says that when one of the shells is bored through, the thing goes nuts and spins in jet-propelled circles until the pressure and life bleeds out. ’Course, you kill a ’Danger, they got to kill more of you just to fulfill their code of honor. They’ll do anything at all. Ugly people.”

“And yet they have allies? How could anybody talk to them?”

“Oh, they talk fine. Like-minded folks and ambitious types. The Quacksans got that spooky hypnotic thing and a yen to raise their tech levels, and they breathe air and have a rocky terrain and the ’Dangers breathe water and just aren’t designed for land, even to limits like we are. So them two get along just fine. All they need is an air force, so to speak, and they’ll have perfect balance. Then watch out!”

It wasn’t a pleasant thought. He turned some more pages, stopped at Type 41 and stared at it in surprise. Man and a woman, nicely built, in perfect condition, medium-brown complexion, kind of primitive-looking but very definitely relatives.

The sergeant in charge looked at the picture. “That your old people?”

“Sort of. I think we were related, anyway.”

“They were nasty, too. No more conscience nor respect for other races than the ’Dangers. Invaded and slaughtered a lot of their neighbors to get farms when they screwed up their own land. The neighbors finally got together, gassed them back into the age of rocks, and forced them all to switch to the neighbors’ nontech hex. Ain’t amounted to nothin’ since.”

Yeah, that sounds like Terrans all right. Only we don’t usually lose. “How long ago did that happen?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Who knows? It’s way, way back in ancient history, I’ll tell you. Just kind of a legend races like ours tell the kids as object lessons. It may or may not be true, but if we could ever work that kind of shit on the ’Dangers, we’d probably have another thousand years of peace.”

Somehow Ari doubted it.

Many of the other races had familiar parts, or were familiar either from ancient mythology or even from his uncle’s fabulous art collection. Half man, half horse—centaurs. Only these didn’t look as fierce or as noble as the paintings and sculptures. Satyrs, nymphs, minotaurs, man-sized bat things, angels like in the religious pictures only with no clothes on, little fire-breathing dinosaurs, lots of others. It seemed half the myths and legends of the dozens of races of the Realm were represented here.

One caught his eye. Absolutely drop dead gorgeous young woman with good breasts, long hair, and from the waist down scales and a fish tail. Mermaids. Somehow he thought Kalindans were the mermaids.

“Nope. Those are Umiau,” the sergeant informed him. “There’s a kinda similarity, but there are some elements of some of us in ninety percent of the rest of us, it seems. They say some of the lower-level gods of creation didn’t have such great imagination and did their stuff by stealing parts from the plants and animals and such from the ones already here or done. Could be. Depends on which race was first, I guess. That one’s a mammal, though; don’t let the scales fool you. Free breasts, real hair, no dorsal, much more similar to your old Type Forty-ones from the waist up and, if you look close, overall. Bear live young and nurse them. No intermediate pouch stage like ours. And no gills or similar stuff. They’re air breathers, period. They don’t even need to be wetted down much, but, of course, they’re not really any more built for land than we are. They only got one sex, too. They don’t change like us or have separate kinds like most others. They tend to hang around in shallows and even up in river mouths. They like fresh or brackish water best. They’re from way up in the northwest corner of the Overdark; the whole hex is a flooded delta.”

“You’ve been there? Or another sister got posted?”

The sergeant gave the Kalindan equivalent of a grin. “Naw, nothin’ like that. Foreigners from that part of the world, they sometimes confuse us with them. Hard to see why when you compare the two.”

The remark about Umiau hair being real was something he only recently learned about his own hair, and that of the rest of his new racial kindred. These translucent strands that could glow if he willed, or not if he didn’t, were actually tendrils that exuded a nasty and painful series of acidic stings when in contact with living flesh other than Kalindan flesh. It may have served an evolutionary function once, but now it was mainly useful because wild things in the sea, or those things likely to be encountered in Kalinda, knew to avoid it and thus tended to leave Kalindans alone unless really hard up for a meal. The tendrils could also be made to exude an odor that smelled quite nice, and was individually distinctive, to Kalindans, but considered by most other species, intelligent and not, as one of the most noxious odors imaginable. More insurance that when you took a little swim you would be able to pick and choose your own company.

It was one of those continuing self-discovery facts, like the transparent eyelids. He hadn’t noticed that in himself, but it became obvious once he was in company and in close quarters with others of his kind.

He was, however, beginning to feel as if he were abandoned and, if not forgotten, consigned to ward-of-the-state status and out of the swim of things. Too inconvenient for them, potential unknown, but at least he didn’t seem to be a Hadun.

They even let him go topside once, to see the island and tour the large facilities there. If you didn’t just materialize on the rocks, and if the weather was decent, they had little electric cars on nice little roads that were designed to carry Kalindans to and from the plant and exits to the sea, as well as in and around the plant and the rest of the island. Since crawling on your hands, dragging your body behind you, was the only alternative, it seemed very practical, once you got the hang of the semi-sidesaddle seat. The thing was, though, he was still basically a fixer and a kind of private detective completely out of his element no matter whether on land or sea.

What appeared to have doomed him from any better status was the very real reappearance of Ming Dawn Palavri.

She had always been there, sort of, and had surfaced for brief but confused periods when he’d daydreamed or sometimes in dreams or just when he woke up, but at the start this had all been new to him, and she’d had only those brief times. Now that this had dragged into weeks and months and the novelty was already well worn off, it would be Ari who went to sleep and Ming who woke up. There weren’t any physical changes as such; that would take weeks under Kalindan biology, maybe longer. But the moves were different, the voice was different to a degree, and it began to spook the detail around him. He wasn’t waking up during this period, either, and so had no idea what went on when she was dominant, a fact Ming discovered with some satisfaction.

At first they thought he was faking it or, worse, was really crazy, but after they decided that this was in fact a second personality, they called the experts back in, which meant that Inspector Shissik traveled once more from the capital to Mahakor and waited around until she appeared. When she did, they notified him and brought her to the interrogation room.

Shissik had been frustrated in any attempts to bring the two newcomers together or to free either one from their ward status so that they could take whatever place in society they could manage and contribute. The politicians were too nervous to do it; it wasn’t rational, but if you saw what appeared to be a well-organized and prepared nest of agent provocateurs show up and create revolution and war along a large area, you might well be excused, he knew, for not trusting anybody.

The female, though, was so very gentle, and so very different even from the male, that he felt certain there was no danger. He simply didn’t have the authority to grant them freedom.

Now what was either a unique psychological condition, to Kalindans, a new wrinkle in newly processed aliens, or something to back up that incredibly wild story his superiors refused to credit as truthful, was just beginning to come to light.

Shissik was a trained investigator and one of the best interrogators in all the Interior Ministry, and before a word was spoken he knew that, while the body was the same, somebody else was now inside.

“I am Inspector Shissik. And you are…?”

“I am called Ming Dawn Pa—Palavri. The last is my family name.” She seemed to be distressed that she had problems getting that name out.

“You know where you are and what this is all about?”

“I have a good idea by now,” she admitted.

“Do you remember any of my conversations with Ari Martinez?”

She shook her head. “No, not real ones. I saw this room and a guy like you over there like now, but it was like in a dream, and I could make out no words.”

“How much do you remember?”

“Not much at all. I see me shot. I see—Ari—shoot me. Then there is a time like a long, dark—” She paused, as if groping for words. “—bad dream where I can see things here and there but not as one, and then I just blank out.”

“Do you feel complete? Mentally, that is?”

She thought about it. “No. There are holes. All sorts of things. Little things. Not just from the bad dream time, but way before, when I was a cop, and even stuff from my real life. It is like some of it just is not there. Like it has been— wiped out—by a flat black-and-white line art that kind of says what was once there, but gives no sense of real. Some of it is all gone. I—I have been told what they did to me, but that is a blank. I am not even sure I would like to know what it was like. To be—owned. To be owned and love it.”

Shissik nodded to himself and jotted a few things down in his notes. “It is not unusual for someone who has been entirely subjected to another’s will for a period to lose those things. The old personal feelings, personal memories and values, things that meant a lot to you but were irrelevant to the ‘new’ you, as it were, were either overwritten or filed away in what the brain uses for dead storage. Sometimes that storage can be retrieved when there is sudden stimulus, but I suspect not in your case. I think the dead storage was left when you sort of united with that computer. I think it’s still back there.”

That frightened her. A part of her, some of the most personal parts, gone? “And I just seem—slower. Less intuitive. I feel like I’m talking slower and looking for the right words. That, too?”

“Some of that can be because Ari considered the link-up a total genius working at the fastest imaginable speed. Coming back to normal might seem grindingly slow.” He didn’t mention the possibility that her emerging as mistress of the right brain and Ari master of the left brain might be part of it. Like Terrans, Kalindans—and many other species—had two halves to their brains. In the Kalindan case, according to the biology text, the brain was divided much like the Type Forty-ones. Just a comparison of how she talked, her problems in coming up with relatively simple terms for some things, was a textbook case of the sort he’d studied in braindamaged victims. She was entirely in the right side of this body’s brain. She clearly had a dominant left hand and left side; the right barely moved. She thought in pictures rather than words, and had to grope for verbal expression. He was surprised she had much of a vocabulary at all; it must have been how the stuff was stored up. Ari was over on the left side. He’d been right-handed almost to a fault. He’d been verbose, but totally incapable of interpreting or doing graphics. Sooner or later these two were both going to be awake and aware at the same time. He wasn’t sure whether that meant cooperation or a mental lockup.

Still, laboriously, he got much of the story from her that overlapped Ari’s long recorded themes and variations, and they did tend to confirm each other when they matched up.

Finally he asked her the big questions. “If you and Ari are both in the same body, do you think at some point you can come to terms with each other? The alternative is madness, you know.”

“We must. It—It will be hard. He did shoot me, and when that bad dream was done to me, he did not do one thing to stop it. But I do not want to die, so I have to learn to live like this.”

“Why do you want to live?”

“I want to see the faces of the ones who did that to us when they are caught or die. I want to stop them. If Ar—if he helps, he will be on the good side.”

And the kicker. “What do you think would happen if you came face-to-face with this Jules Wallinchky again? Knew it was him no matter what he looked and sounded like here. Would you have to obey him? Would that programming and conditioning appear again?”

She had been mulling that over herself. “I—I do not know. I wish I did. I hope not.” She paused a moment. “Do you know where he is? What he is?”

“Not yet. Right now we aren’t even certain that he was still alive when he went through. We know pretty well where and what everyone else is. A couple have memory problems much worse than yours, although not two people in one body, so it’s so far been impossible to match some to the names. Still, so far there is no unaccounted-for odd one. Either both you and Ari are truly in this body and count as two, in which case he is one of the ones with no memory, or he’s someone and something we haven’t come across yet. It is entirely possible that this could happen. At the moment, though, we have much more serious problems than finding everyone. We have every evidence that a nasty, wider war is building. It may well come our way. Until then, you two may have to work out your own truce.”

Ming? Is that really you?

She had been sitting in the room that was a low security cell of sorts on the fifth level, staring out at the complex beyond through electrically charged bars, when she heard him in her mind.

She made no effort to speak aloud. Yes, I think so. You are…? A holographic memory picture of Ari as he was came up.

Yes, it’s Ari. This is—strange. I was linked up with you when you were one of Uncle Jules’s grotesque creations, but this is you/ This is a real person!

You made me into that thing. You shot me. You gave me to Jules.

Her stream of thought was clear but unusual, composed less of words than of a series of images. Images of actions, images of people old and new, images of startling if subjective quality. Clearly she could understand everything he or anyone else was saying, but her method of communication was almost entirely visual. With trouble she could create simple sentences, but he found he had to prompt her for her to properly think of certain words. Still, it was easy to have an exchange, and it certainly felt like her. Or sort of like her. She seemed to bubble with emotions, to use them in her communication as well. He understood them but didn’t have that kind of intensity; in fact, he realized, he felt curiously cold and detached.

Still, they began a dialogue, one at the speed of thought, back and forth, simultaneous and intertwined, yet never synthesized into one. She had the right brain and a little bit of linkage to the left allowing very basic vocalizations; he had the left, and all the words and phrases and cold mathematical abilities that were both present and latent, and maybe some left over from the union with Beta.

Ming, I had no choice. I think I was just a more subtle version of what he did to you, only I didn’t even know it. I hated what he did. You can see and feel that; I can’t hide much from you like this. I wanted none of it. I had to do it. Look into me, check my memories such as they are, and you will see that I’m telling the truth.

Incredibly, to her, he did open up, drop virtually all the barriers, let her poke and probe and look at memories and feelings he’d had, the memories now stored throughout the left brain. She found no evidence that his uncle had him under that kind of control, but he certainly had some of it implanted or he could never have been linked to Beta. If in fact he had a transmitter and receiver in his old, original head, he might well be telling the truth. Or it may not have been necessary. He believed that it had been done to him, though, and that was as good as she could expect.

She also found other things. Guilt over some of his actions, which suggested some free will, but whether he was rationalizing or was enslaved and didn’t realize it was beside the point now. His genuine affection for her, his feelings when he saw her after a year’s absence on the City of Modar, was more instructive. He’d actually been smitten by her; his feelings of affection were undeniable. She’d never suspected that depth in him for anybody, least of all her.

We are stuck with each other now, she noted.

More than if we were married, he agreed. So now what do we do? We’re in a single body that needs both sides of us to be whole, but I don’t want it to be that way. I would much rather that you had one body and I another and we could still get this closeness. This is a chance to start anew, but here we start as freaks.

Well, we cannot change what is. What do we do about it? How do we live the rest of our life?

As partners. We can’t do anything else. Partners, or we die and be done with it. I would love to know, though, who that other one they have is or was, and how much memory and personality remains buried there.

I think the same. And where is poor Angel? Can she be the other? We need to know. And we need to find your uncle. And kill him.

He gave a sigh that, oddly, came only out of the left side of the mouth. If we can, he replied. If we can…