The Path of the Four

The hologram, vision and sound, disappeared.

“And, Chief Engineer, your plan is--what?”

“I don’t know. I just have to be down there.”

“Ariana! Damn! Look, you’re not a diplomat. OK? And this is more than outfoxing one hard case and tripping him with bootlaces.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“What you should do! Let the professionals handle this!”

“You just about tore that man apart in that hotel hallway because of one child. This is even more important than one child.”

“Aren’t you suppose to be an engineer, a scientist? Then think that way. People like Roselle and--what’s-his-name? Voh-Heem. They are going to have their hands full down there. And Ab-Druh. What’s the pragmatic, logical reason for you going down there into that mess?”

Ariana opened her mouth to say something, found no words, closed it.

“Ha! The manager out-logics the engineer!”

Ariana said, “Going down feels right.”

“‘Going down feels right’? What are you--a poet all of a sudden?”

Ariana gestured at her bed. “This felt right too.”

“That’s such a U-turn it made my head snap. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re experience is like, but sex doesn’t work as a comparison to anything else.”

Ariana put on her jacket. All dressed, she stood before the still naked Joe.

“Order me, I’ll ignore you. You can force me, with those fists of yours. I know that. I’ve seen it. You want to do it that way?”

Joe’s voice got quiet. He lowered his eyes. “At heart, I’m a violent man. That doesn’t make me a thug.”

Late morning in Kah-Zee, Ariana arrived on a gwyr. An Upper Clan Zah-Gre named Dee-Lur introduced himself to her.

“I thought it was just the Outer Clan in the Rim Villages.”

“Some of us in the Upper Clan reside in places other than in the larger communities.”

Dee-Lur helped her down from the gwyr.

The Zah-Gre in the village were sitting outside their tents, or sitting just inside, looking up at the crowed hill. Even from this distance, she could make out the uniforms of Human Security and the robes of the Upper Clan and the Side Clan.

Her eyes passed over the mountain dotted with cave openings, the mountain that stood next to the hill.

A hundred jet bikes passed over, in the sky.

“Jet bikes?” Ariana looked at Dee-Lur. “I thought the Friendship Bureau’s agreements with the Upper Clan--”

“Our restrictions about human, technological-style transportation on our planet still holds, Miss Orlando. However, Zah-Gre are pragmatists. The Humans needed to get to where they needed to go in a hurry, this time.” Dee-Lur looked up at the hill. “Well, it’s happening. Up on that hill, and over on the other side. Others are deciding whatever destiny our worlds can share.”

“The two Humans and what they did to that child--”

“Are not representative of Humans. I’m aware of that. But I’m not the one Humans need to convince.”

“I’m going up there.” She paused. “Aren’t you going to try and talk me out of it?”

“No. Why should I?”

“My boss tried to talk me out of it.”

At the top of the hill, Ariana made her way through Upper Clan, Side Clan Zah-Gre and Human Security, made her way to Voh-Heem. He just glared at her and grunted.

“And hello to you too,” Ariana said.

Out on the water, the masses of Lower Clan were close and getting closer.

Roselle walked by listening to one of his H.S. insignia rings.

“Golden Horizon is telling me the cameras are picking up two, three times Lower Clan than previous estimates.” He stopped when he saw Ariana. “Whitney’s Chief Engineer. What’s she doing here?”

Voh-Heem said, “Is that what you want to ask me, Captain Roselle?”

“No. Two questions. How many Lower Clan are there, really?”

“Humans and numbers,” Voh-Heem said with obvious distaste. “And the second?”

“Where’s your guy? I thought he was going to be our power forward on the diplomatic front. ”

“He’ll get here when he gets here.”

Ariana noticed that the Human Security officers had their small, silver laser pistols and nothing more. The Side Clan, as always, was unarmed. (It was a point of pride for them--their specialty in unarmed combat.)

Ariana speculated that if the Lower Clan began an advance toward the Old City and other enclaves of Human residence, other Human Security officers would emerge, and with heavier weapons, like the Reynolds/Hume 67, a laser canon a user could fire from his shoulder, a device with ten times more offensive power than the majority of laser pistols. There were even rumors, weeks old, that Golden Horizon had a secret, emergency purpose--a military station with a large, offensive laser cannon that could emerge from the glittering tourism haven in the sky, slaughter most of the natives below, and help establish the planet as nothing more than an outpost of Earth civilization and society. Such an action would reduce the Zah-Gre to a weird blip in the pages of universal history. Yes, Humans, even in “the New Universal Age,” could still be bloody-minded, to an outrageous degree, if their backs were to the wall. Living through the Pan-Asian War, and the healing efforts of the Better World Foundation had, Ariana suspected, made the whole Human species aware of how history flowed. A near genocidal action against the Zah-Gre, no matter how much justification there seemed for it, would awaken the buried pain of the war that had engulfed the Earth more than twenty years ago, and the bloody fight of the Universal Resistance League on the home front against the iron hand of Washington, D.C. that had made being disagreeable a crime.

“Voh-Heem,” Ariana said. “Wouldn’t the maze on the beach stop them, at least slow them down?”

“No,” Roselle replied. “They can hop on top of each other like acrobats, use that trick to get over the walls. Voh-Heem had some of his boys show me, just before you got here. They can pour through that maze like water out of a faucet.”

Then Ariana saw Ab-Druh. He emerged from a thick group of Upper Clan closer to the beach. He spoke. The language, Ariana assumed, was Center Land Zah-Gre. Harsh, guttural, blunt, rasping--it was a shock to hear it come out of Ab-Druh’s, friendly round face, an extraterrestrial who, with a little costume and makeup, had the right general build and personality to play a Santa Claus back on Earth.

The volume that came from the Inner Clan Zah-Gre’s mouth was astounding. It commanded attention by the quantity of volume, of decibels--but kept it because of its quality. There was no distortion, and Ariana detected Ab-Druh’s little sonic, tonal dips and upturns that he put in his oration, in an attempt to be more sympathetic.

The gestures added to the sympathetic effect. The hands and arms were more expansive than Ariana had seen them in all her weeks of knowing Ab-Druh. Each gesture ended with holding out his hands and arms to the masses of Lower Clan Zah-Gre out on the water, nearing the coastline.

For no apparent reason, Ariana started to feel dizzy.

“Voh-Heem,” Ariana whispered to Ab-Druh’s bodyguard and attendant. “Translate for me. Please.”

“Why should I?”

“To be polite?”

“Hmmmm. ‘My Fellow Zah-Gre, the One joins all in the Turning. The Turning does not give us knowledge of the full movements of the One. It is not our place to understand each detail of the Turning’s will. I share your anger and outrage at was done to the child. The Humans have taken all possible steps to restore the balance in the shadow of that foul act. What you contemplate today feels right, smells right, but it spins away from the movement of the Turning, excluding the Humans from the working of the One.’”

A Lower Clan Zah-Gre stood up in a boat near the front of the flotilla. He shouted back a response to Ab-Druh. After a moment, Voh-Heem continued his translation.

“We listen and are in balance with Inner Clan of the North Land. Know, Ab-Druh, hearer of the One that parts of us may fall out of the revolution of the Turning. We are not in cycle because we lack, still, the One Who Will Complete Us. What was done to the child tells us we can no longer neglect this question of symmetry. However, you have our consecrated word that we will not do what we have contemplated this day--for--” And here Voh-Heem had to take an extra moment to translate, and seemed to be doing some calculations in his head. “Seventy-two hours.”

Everything spun and darkened.

Ariana headed to the ground.

From the mountain, from one of the many caves, strange and terrible energy thundered.

She woke.

She lay on her back, on this hill, as she had done with Ab-Druh in the recent past.

Human Security and Side Clan Zah-Gre, including Voh-Heem, surrounded her in a tight circle, most with their backs to her, some looking down at her with interest and confusion.

Voh-Heem looked at her with an expression of glum certainty.

Ariana couldn’t see it, but outside that circle of protection, she could hear that all was confusion, panic, and chaos and, buried close to the surface, anger.

There was a smell of burning.

Fear?

Sometimes, in rare moments in the past, she had seemed to have had the ability to smell strong emotions, and she wondered if she were smelling anger, or panic.

Ariana, with difficulty, got to her feet.

Inside, she cursed her shortness. She could not see over these tall natives and tall men! She could not even see between them, they packed themselves so tight.

“Voh-Heem, what’s going on? What happened?”

“You--fainted.”

“I know that, but something happened while I was out. What?

Voh-Heem exchanged a few words with some Side Clan Zah-Gre.

Voh-Heem nodded.

He turned to a Human Security officer.

“You heard her, right? When she was--out?”

“Yeah, but I have no idea what she said.”

“I do.”

“Voh-Heem,” Ariana shouted so these natives and Humans could hear her over the noise. “Where is Ab-Druh? What has happened?”

Voh-Heem hesitated.

“Ariana Orlando, Ab-Druh of the Inner Clan Zah-Gre is dead.”