The Span Of Empire – Snippet 41
Chapter 20
Zhao leaned forward and poured more tea into Lim’s cup, followed by his own. The last few drops fell slowly from the spout of the dragon pot into his cup. “Last of the pot,” he said with a smile. “We must savor it.”
Cradling his cup in both hands, Zhao looked at Lim. “Tully said you want to learn to fight. Can you explain?”
Lim went still, holding her own cup before her and looking down into it. The tea seemed to be an ebon fluid as it sat within the black enameled iron cup, and she caught a glimpse of her own face reflected within the dark mirror.
“I . . . The Ekhat have driven us and harried us for so long. We have lost so much. We . . .” she looked up at Zhao, to see him sitting very still, “we Lleix are not a warrior people. We have no elian like the jinau, or your human armies. I told Tully, I no longer wish to be helpless.”
“Ah,” Zhao said, a small smile crossing his face. “That is a worthwhile goal. And it is one in which I may be of some small help.”
He drained the last of the tea from his cup, and set it down on its leaf saucer with a click. “To begin with, we must ask and answer the question, ‘Who is Lim?'”
Lim followed suit in drinking her tea and setting her empty cup down. Her hands moved to rearrange the folds of her robe, without thought or volition on her part, almost as if they were separate discrete beings. “I am Lim, of the Lleix,” she replied after a long moment of silence.
Zhao shook his head gently. “No, that is your source, what you are out of. It is not who you are.”
“I am Lim of Terralore elian,” she tried again.
“That is what you do, not who you are.” Zhao’s voice was calm and soft.
A very long moment passed with no sound but the whisper of her fingers adjusting the brocade of her robes. At length, she forced them to still and looked back at Zhao. “I am Lim of the dochaya.” She felt empty as she said that, expecting him to accept it and refuse her.
“That is what shaped you,” Zhao said. “And from what Tully has told me, it was a hard shaping, one that wounded and scarred you.” He stopped for a moment, and Lim felt the depths of the wounds and the strictures of the scars as she had not since right after she had been rejected at the Festival of Choosing years ago. She looked down, not surprised to see her fingers grasping her robes, crumpling the fabric. It took another effort to force them to relax and smooth out the brocade.
“But . . .”
Lim’s head jerked up as Zhao continued.
“. . . that is still not who you are.”
Lim tilted her head as she studied the faintly smiling human, who sat across the table from her, motionless with his hands resting lightly on his thighs. She considered him; then tilted her head the other direction as she considered his responses to her statements.
“I . . .” she hesitated, “am Lim.” She said nothing more.
After a moment, Zhao’s smile grew broader, and somehow brighter as his eyes narrowed and the skin crinkled at the outside corners. “Precisely so,” he said. “Exactly so. You are Lim. You are a person of worth. That is the foundation of your life, and upon that foundation we lay the first stone–you are now my student.”
****
“Electromagnetic signals detected.”
Flue Vaughan’s head snapped up at that announcement from the human sensor tech, and he hit five separate control pads on his workstation with two motions of his hands.
Terra-Captain Uldra faced the tech. “Artificial or natural?”
“Very regular,” the tech responded. “Analysis indicates data content. Artificial.”
Vaughan hit more controls.
“Source?”
“Out-system.” The tech tapped controls of her own. “Weak signals that aren’t aligned with any significant bodies in the system. Not much out that direction except gravel and dust until you hit the system’s edge.”
Terra-Captain Uldra looked to Vaughan, who touched another control on his workstation.
“What is it?” he heard growled into his earpiece a few seconds later.
“Sorry to disturb your rest cycle, Fleet Commander,” Flue said, “but I think you’d best come to the bridge.”
“Why?”
“Signals.”
There was a click in his earpiece. Vaughan looked back to where Uldra was still looking at him. “She’s on her way.”
Uldra nodded, and returned her focus to the tech.
****
Third-Mordent felt Ninth-Minor-Sustained’s forehand blade slice across the tegument of her left foreleg as she spun away in panic from the harmony master’s attack. She leapt to her right, trying to get far enough away that she could turn and resume her defense.
“Stop.” Ninth-Minor-Sustained’s voice fluted down an arpeggio, cold as steel that had been in space in the shadow of a planet.
Third-Mordent froze in place. That had been the first lesson that her ancestress had taught her. It had been painful to learn, but learn it she had. When Ninth-Minor-Sustained said halt, she meant it.
Third-Mordent waited in position, trembling with both fear and bloodlust, as Ninth-Minor-Sustained walked softly around her to face her, looking her eye to eye. “You do not anticipate well,” the harmony master intoned. “You should have blocked that last cut, as well as the two before it. Your jump was ill-advised at best, and most likely would have resulted in your death if you had faced an opponent of any skill and experience. You will study the files I send you tonight, and we will begin again tomorrow.”
The harmony master turned and walked away down the performance hall, leaving Third-Mordent still frozen. As she neared a door, she looked back and sang, “Release.”
Third-Mordent almost fell when the tension released from her limbs. She straightened slowly, folding her forehand blades away and raising her manipulators. They trembled a little; her mind was trembling, as well.
The door opened at Ninth-Minor-Sustained’s approach. There was a squeal as she made a sudden lunge through the doorway, then the door closed again as she turned back with an Anj servient in her manipulators. The creature squirmed in the harmony master’s grasp, its piping squeals echoing from the walls of the hall.
“Control,” Ninth-Minor-Sustained whisper-sang, “begins with control of yourself. Do not move.”
Third-Mordent froze again. The harmony master walked up to where she stood, holding the Anj right before her. The squeals of the servient were beginning to affect her; her vision began to narrow.
Ninth-Minor-Sustained exposed the edge of one forehand blade, and barely kissed the Anj with it. Dark blood began to ooze from the resulting slice, and the servient’s cries grew louder.
The harmony master took one manipulator, dipped the tip of one of the dactyls in the servient’s blood, and then dabbed it around one of Third-Mordent’s olfactory sensors. The scent of the fresh blood impelled Third-Mordent toward predator mode; vision further narrowing, manipulators dropping and forehand blades rising.
Ninth-Minor-Sustained’s manipulators twisted suddenly and snapped the spine of the Anj. The servient shrilled in agony, then subsided to moans as the harmony master dropped it to the floor in front of Third-Mordent.
She lost sight of the harmony master’s great form as she focused in on the wounded servient, dragging itself across the floor, leaving a dark smear of blood behind it. Low chirps and moans accompanied its struggles, further inciting the young Ekhat to go into predator mode.
“Control,” Ninth-Minor-Sustained sounded a whisper-aria behind her. “Do. Not. Move.”
Third-Mordent managed, somehow, to continue her freeze. Inside her skull, her predator senses raged, seeking to leap onto the Anj and rend it into gobbets. Something, though . . . something kept her still. Some facility of her mind, dimly awakened as yet, still exerted iron constraint over her and locked her body down. Nothing twitched. No shivers or trembles. Nothing.
Ninth-Minor-Sustained gave a whisper of satisfaction.
The moans of the Anj began to shape a motif in Third-Mordent’s mind. A chaconne, it would be, she thought. The blood on the floor took on a luster to match the music beginning to form in her thoughts.
****
Zhao Jiguang picked up a cup of tea and sipped on it as he contemplated the medical images.
“Hmm. More proof that God has a sense of humor. Ball and socket joints for the shoulders and hips I understand, but for the elbows and knees? Wow.” He set the cup down and grasped his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, at least she’ll be flexible.”
“Hmm. Center of mass is lower than on a human. Female thing? Human similarity?” Zhao flipped over to another file and compared two images side by side. “No, same propensity in the males. Hip structure is massive. Wonder if they developed on a heavy-gravity world?” He made a note. “Ground and center will be affected.”
Zhao flipped back to the first image file. “Okay, flat feet. Very flat. Wonder if they can move up on their toes at all?” He made more notes.
After a few more minutes of study and thinking, Zhao was raising the tea cup to his mouth again when he flipped to the circulatory system mapping, at which point he blew tea all over the workstation’s view screen.
Zhao didn’t curse as he wiped off the workstation surfaces. That was not due to lack of incentive, but rather to lack of sufficiently inspired invective. Two hearts? Two parallel circulatory systems? How was chi supposed to flow through a system like that?
It was about that moment that Zhao realized the depth of the challenge he had accepted when he agreed to teach Tai Chi to Lim. It was also about that moment when he decided that Gabe Tully, while not precisely evil, perhaps had more than a bit too much yin in his system, and apparently not enough yang. He would have to meditate on how that was possible, given that Tully was otherwise the poster child for yang-ness.
He turned back to Lim’s med file, and continued his research.
****
Caitlin was roused from a dream featuring her husband by a com pad tone. It took a few moments to come to full consciousness–she really didn’t want to leave even a dream about Ed. She finally opened her eyes. “What?”
“Sorry to disturb you, Director,” came the voice of Lieutenant Vaughan. “Fleet Commander Dannet requests your presence on the bridge. We’ve got signals, ma’am.”
“On my way!”
She threw the covers back and bounced out of the bed. Two steps into the bath cabinet, where she shucked off her sleep suit, used the toilet and grabbed a cleaning towelette to wipe face and body in place of the shower she really wanted. She stepped back into the other room, pulled on fresh clothes from the drawers under her bed, ran her fingers through her hair, and grabbed her com pad as she headed toward the door. It irised open just before her nose hit it.
“Bridge,” she said to the bodyguards who snapped to as she plunged past them. She heard them following as she trotted down the corridor towards a lift.
****
The lift door opened. Caitlin strode out onto the command deck, followed by her bodyguards, and headed for where Fleet Commander Dannet stood with Uldra. Behind her, the lift door hissed again as it irised open. She looked behind her, and saw Wrot enter and follow in her steps. A moment later, the four of them were standing together.
“Talk to me,” Caitlin said. “What have we got? Intelligent signals?”
“Yes, Director,” the fleet commander replied. “Signals with structure, at any rate. The assumption is intelligence-generated.”
“Can we . . . no,” Caitlin corrected herself, “of course we can’t read them yet.”
The lift door hissed yet again. Dannet nodded toward the Lleix who entered the command deck. “They will begin the effort to decipher and translate. But we need not understand the content to locate the source.”
Chulan and Helot headed for the sensor techs. Pyr and Garhet split off and stood near the command group. Caitlin nodded to them, and returned her attention to Dannet.
“So, do we know where they are coming from yet?”
Dannet’s frame assumed the angles of awaiting-assured-information. “Several of the flotilla ships are spreading out now. It will take some time, but we should be able to establish sufficient parallax to be able to determine the source star.”
Earth is currently one of the brightest radio objects in the galaxy, mostly due to military radars. I once read something about the technical improvements in the efficiency of our communications systems, such that we are using less broadcast power than in earlier decades, and many signals are beamed more than widespread. Assuming this trend is normal, then it is very important how far away the fleet currently is, from the world they are looking for. The more time that passed while those radio signals traversed space, the more advanced the world’s technology could be.
Regarding Lim and the possibility of a heavy-gravity home world, there was a novel by Gordon R. Dickson (“Hour of the Horde”, I think) that pointed out that evolution in such a place would lead to faster reflexes than Earthlings have. That is, the faster gravity tries to pull you down, the faster you need to move, to prevent a damaging fall. SO, if the Lleix evolved on a heavy-gravity world, they might have lost some strength, living on lesser worlds for many centuries, but their reflexes should still be superb. They could be formidable unarmed-combat masters.
It seems that Third-Mordent and Ninth-Minor-Sustained are serving as a dark reflection of Lim and Zhao Jiguang.
The interesting thing to me is that at the end when desperately trying to avoid making a suicidal attack and remain still rather than moving, Third-Mordent started hearing music in her head.
I wonder if concentrating on music was how the ancestral Ekhat managed to think well enough/sanely enough to build their tech; and the actual purpose of the obsessive cultural interest in music has been lost over the intervening millennia.
The current Ekhat really don’t make sense as an advanced culture, who invented their stuff? We’ve seen no sign of real creative thought and they are almost randomly destructive which doesn’t go well with technological civilization. Ninth-Minor-Sustained is obviously trying to teach Third-Mordent how to control the destructive/predatory urges. I wonder if music will play into this at all.
I’m reminded of something I read in one of Christopher Anvil’s stories, where humans evolved into a caste system which blocked any chance of changing by never being exposed to the slightest real danger, and as a result became so hidebound that they couldn’t advance further than where they were. It seems like the Ekhat fell into the same trap.
The Jao were uplifted and shaped by the Ekhat. Think about ALL the implications of that.
Well, the lack of imagination that the Jao exhibit overall is obviously one of those implications. And I noticed earlier that the Jao timesense and Ekhat music were subtly linked.
Wait a minute, it was one of the imaginative Jao (Kaln, I think – yeah, confirmed by finding the relevant snippet) who intervened at a crucial moment and prevented the Ekhat leader from counterattacking the jinau assault team. And more to the point, it’s obvious she was using her flow sense to do it.
It isn’t just that the Ekhat didn’t put imagination or improvisation into the Jao – I’m almost certain they actively blocked anything like it from developing in the first place. They wouldn’t want the Jao improvising and interfering with their music…though that doesn’t quite explain why.
Oddly enough, the words “stream of consciousness” kept popping up in my head while I was trying to work this out in my head. Then I finally realized why – it’s because music is intimately linked to Ekhat consciousness somehow. If something interferes with the music badly enough (what the Ekhat refer to as dissonance), it disrupts their ability to think and plan, and they just react blindly. Like when the alliance took out the second Ekhat ship and caused Descant-at-the-Fourth to lose the harmony (meaning the Ekhat ships started acting on their own), and later on, when Kaln knocked out the World Harvester’s power plant and reduced her to shrieking rage because the Ekhat could no longer act freely.
I suspect that would be why the Jao have done as well as they have against the Ekhat – because their flow sense lets them anticipate what the Ekhat are going to do.
You’ve got a little bit of it.
What does chi have to do with the circulatory system? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is: nothing. Chi flows through the meridians, which are not associated with either the circulatory system or the nervous system.
Actually, chi has quite a bit to do with the circulatory system. It’s true that ancient Chinese medicine assumed it flowed through chi meridians, but the whole concept is strongly associated with the act of breathing, since that’s what differentiated living things from non-living things. So that would be why Zhao is talking about the circulatory system in reference to chi.
I tend to go with the people who invented and used the concept, not with revisionist “explanations.” In any case, the word “breath” doesn’t just mean the physical act. It also means life energy.
For what it’s worth, that passage was directly modeled on a discussion had with a long-time tai chi instructor.
You do realize science is all about “revisionist explanations”, right? You figure out something that explains a phenomena, then later on you find out things aren’t quite as you thought, and so you revise the explanation so that it works again. I see no reason the same idea can’t be applied to concepts like chi.
Saying that you go with the people who invented a concept rather than those who revised it is kind of like saying you go with Newtonian physics models and don’t truck with general relativity because it’s a revisionist explanation. Or like holding with alchemy and not ‘revisionist’ chemistry.
I’m pretty sure you don’t go with either of those, so why make a special exception for something like chi, which was far more ancient than either of them?
Additionally, the guy thinking about circulatory systems is a future guy, he’s perfectly capable of using revisionist explanations even if someone else doesn’t like them.
I just realized something. I was drooling over the idea of Lliex (aka giants) *infantry*… but here we’re talking about Lliex *ninjas* essentially! I mean, Chinese ninjas aren’t really a thing, but you get my drift. I’m…a little excited. :-D