The Caphenon Page 13

  “Do you mean to say they’re gender-locked?”

  Micah and the Guards in range looked as stunned as she felt, but Healer Wellernal nodded calmly. “Yes. And they have gender-specific reproductive organs.”

  Micah leaned in and whispered, “What Fahla gives with one hand, she takes away with the other.”

  He was right. The ability to temporarily alter gender for reproductive purposes, to choose which one of a pair bond would carry, bear, and nurse a child, was the great gift of Fahla that separated Alseans from the lower animals.

  The Gaians had not been blessed. And Lhyn had said that no Gaian race yet discovered bore empathic ability.

  A chill ran down Tal’s spine. Like every Alsean, she had grown up believing that Fahla had elevated them above all other life-forms, but here was actual proof, offered on the very same day they’d discovered they were not alone in the universe.

  And yet—the Gaians were capable of tyree bonds.

  “It seems we have even more to learn from them than we’d believed,” she said. “Being gender-locked must have enormous ramifications on their culture.”

  “That’s what Lhyn Rivers said about our ability to shift gender. She already knew about it, but had a great number of questions and seemed eager to discuss it.”

  “I’m sure she was. Did you answer her questions?”

  Wellernal looked uncomfortable. “I was uncertain how much you wished us to share. Your instructions referred only to information on the medical condition of the aliens, and in the absence of specific guidelines, I chose to err on the side of discretion.”

  Which meant that the moment she walked into Lhyn’s room, she was going to be buried under a blizzard of questions. Well, at least these questions would be coming from a burning desire to learn, unlike those she’d been answering in her meetings for the last several hanticks.

  “You chose correctly,” she said, “but in the future, don’t worry about a cultural sharing. We want to know about them just as much as they do about us. Information must go both ways.”

  She went to Captain Serrado’s room first, smiling to herself when she felt two empathic signatures inside. Of course Lhyn wouldn’t be in her own room.

  While Micah and the Guards took up positions in the corridor, she tapped on the door and opened it to find Lhyn sitting beside the captain’s bed. They appeared clean and rested, and in Captain Serrado’s case, far less stressed. Knowing that all of her remaining crew would recover had done wonders for her, brightening her expression and relaxing the tightness around her eyes. She looked a little less alien in her white Alsean healing robe, which contrasted sharply with the glossy black hair that now hung freely around her shoulders.

  Despite her matching robe, Lhyn looked a little more alien. Her hair had been pulled back in a braid, and the exposure of her face emphasized her lack of ridges. With her green eyes appearing even larger, she wouldn’t have been out of place in an illustration for a children’s story: Alsean enough to not be frightening, but alien enough to be clearly other.

  “Well met,” Tal said, offering them each a palm in turn. “I see you managed more sleep than I did. I’m envious.”

  For a moment she’d forgotten about the translator, and started when the mechanical voice began speaking shortly after she did. Captain Serrado tilted her head slightly, listening to it, then smiled when she understood.

  “If this were a hotel, I’d give it a high rating,” she said. “I’ve never been in a healing center with luxuries like this one. Soft beds, fluffy pillows, glorious showers with floor pads that warm and dry your feet…if it weren’t for the fact that they won’t let me get out of this bed, I’d be happy to stay here indefinitely.”

  “You heard what the healer said.” Lhyn tapped the hard casing around the captain’s leg, which was resting atop the bed’s covering. “If you want to walk tonight, you’ve got three more hanticks in this. And if you try to move now, you delay your recovery.”

  “It’s easy for you to be cheery about it. You’re already mobile.”

  Lhyn’s arm was in a similar hard case, but since it was strapped to her torso, she could still walk around without disturbing it. Tal sympathized with the captain.

  “I nearly lost my leg once when I didn’t jump a sword stroke fast enough. They had me in one of those cases for two days, and the worst part of it was the itching. May I?” She indicated the chair next to Lhyn.

  “Please do,” Captain Serrado said. “And Shippers, yes, the itching!” She vigorously rubbed her hand on the case as if that would calm the skin beneath. “Did you say a sword stroke?”

  “Sword fighting is a living tradition for the warrior caste. It hasn’t been part of modern warfare for many generations, but the discipline, agility, and strength needed to learn proper sword fighting is excellent training for everything else we do. We learn it from the day we formally accept our caste. In some cases even earlier.”

  Lhyn’s curiosity burst from her in an almost visible wave. “Can you tell me about that? I’ve worked out your six castes, and I know that if a child has parents of different castes, she or he can choose which of the two to enter. But what if the child wants to enter a different caste altogether? And when is it formally accepted? Can you change it once you accept?”

  Tal chuckled, partly because Lhyn had taken so little time to live up to expectations, and partly because these questions weren’t the flavor she was expecting. “Yes, I can tell you about it. If a child wants to enter a different caste, there’s an aptitude test for it. Usually the castes that are challenged are scholar or warrior, since they’re seen as the two ascendant castes of our system.”

  Lhyn turned to the captain. “In theory, the castes are equal. In practice, not so much.”

  It did not reflect well on her culture, Tal thought, that caste inequality was so obvious as to be detectable by aliens from merely watching their broadcasts.

  “It’s true, though I wish it were not. Only the scholar and warrior castes can put up a candidate for Lancer, because the high empaths are always directed into those two castes. Children are tested from an early age to determine their empathic rating, and if they pass a certain level, they’re sent away for training. At that point, they can only choose to be scholar or warrior.”

  “So if a child has an enormous talent for art, but a high empathic rating, she can’t be in the crafter caste?”

  Tal shook her head. “She can be a scholar of her craft, but not part of the caste.”

  It was unfair, a wrong so ancient that it had been built into the bedrock of their culture and could not be eradicated. Tal fully expected Lhyn’s judgment, but felt nothing from her besides intellectual curiosity.

  “What about the age of formal acceptance? And changing it after?”

  “Formal acceptance varies. It can be as early as fourteen cycles or as late as twenty. Twenty cycles is when a child undergoes the Rite of Ascension and is considered an adult. After that, the caste choice cannot be altered.”

  “What about you?” the captain asked. “Did you have a choice?”

  “I did. My mother was scholar caste. But I always knew I wanted to follow my father into the warrior caste and take his name.”

  “Take his name?” Lhyn’s excitement was in her voice. “Do you mean that family names are dependent on caste?”

  “Of course.” How else would it be done?

  Lhyn pumped her good arm into the air. “Yes! Check that one off.”

  “If I didn’t know better,” said Captain Serrado, “I’d think you were actually happy about me crashing my ship.”

  Tal was fascinated by the emotional currents in the room. The captain’s tone was teasing, yet there was a darkness of grief wrapped around her. And Lhyn’s immediate reaction was guilt, but when she looked at her bondmate and read her expression, the guilt morphed into relief. It was like watching two warriors on parade walk past each other without touching. How could these two be tyrees and still misunderstand each other’s
true feelings?

  “You know I’m not,” Lhyn said. “And I would give anything to see the Caphenon back in orbit with her full crew. But this is the greatest learning opportunity of a lifetime, and I can’t not get excited about it. Besides, you knew that telling me you were rescinding the Non-Interference Act would be like dangling a string in front of a cat.”

  Tal took the opportunity for a question of her own. “You said that to Commander Baldassar as well, that the Non-Interference Act no longer applied. What does that mean?”

  “It means I can ask you any question I want and tell you anything you want to know,” Lhyn said. “Which makes actual research one Hades of a lot easier. And I—” She stopped when Captain Serrado laid a hand on her arm.

  “It’s the most important of our Rules of First Contact, which directs all of our interactions with newly discovered Gaian worlds. When a world has FTL technology, we can make contact, share technology, and if appropriate, initiate treaty negotiations. But pre-FTL worlds are to be left strictly alone to develop at their own pace. We study them, but the studies must be passive—observation only.” She directed a slight smile toward Lhyn. “However, the law is not universally accepted.”

  “Because it’s wrong,” Lhyn said. “It handicaps science, but that’s not even close to the worst part. It sets up a two-speed galaxy, where some worlds get left to their own devices, while others are allowed to share technology and leap further and further ahead as a result. The pre-FTL worlds are never going to catch up. We’re creating a future where some of us become virtual gods, while others are stuck in the mud. It’s taking what the Shippers did and making it worse, instead of repairing the damage and working together.”

  “Giving technology to a race that isn’t culturally or intellectually prepared for it is a disaster in the making. There’s a reason—”

  “Oh, don’t spout the Fleet line to me. Of course it’s a disaster to fling technology around the galaxy without doing the research first. But a careful study can establish whether a race is ready. The Non-Interference Act is an all-or-nothing answer to a question that requires far more nuance.”

  “Nuance isn’t something our politicians are particularly good at,” Captain Serrado told Tal.

  Lhyn snorted. “You can say that again. They see two colors: black and white. And the whole shekking universe is shades of gray.”

  “I see you two have discussed this before.” Tal was holding back her amusement with difficulty, but when they nodded their heads in unison, she gave up.

  “A few times, yes.” The captain’s tone of voice implied that “few” was synonymous with “hundreds.”

  “Fleeters are known for their blind obedience to law,” Lhyn said, with enough of a smile to take the barb out of her statement. “Scientists are more open to questioning the morality of it.”

  “Fleeters know they can’t expect their crews to obey if they themselves don’t. It’s about leading by example.”

  “Then who actually makes any decisions? The politicians?”

  “Speaking as a politician,” said Tal, “I must point out that not all of us deserve such distaste.”

  “You are an exception,” Lhyn announced. “Why do you think I’ve been so excited about meeting you?”

  “I thought you were more of a warrior than a politician,” Captain Serrado said. “Not many politicians would suit up in combat gear to meet a potentially hostile situation.”

  “I’m a warrior by caste and by preference. Unfortunately, for the last several hanticks I’ve been a politician.”

  The captain nodded. “Once a warrior attains a certain rank and level of power, we’re all politicians, aren’t we? Nobody warned me about that until it was too late.”

  “I can’t say no one warned me, but it’s true that certain other aspects of the title were emphasized to a far greater extent.”

  “Ah, yes. The power, the prestige, the material benefits, the glory…and the fact that you make your own choices, instead of always abiding by the choices of others. But somehow they forget to mention that when you make the choices, you also bear the responsibility for the consequences.”

  There were three dead aliens in the healing center’s cold room, and Tal could recite the names of the Alseans who had died under her direct command. She wondered if Captain Serrado could say the same, or if the number had grown too large.

  “Because there can be only one leader,” she said.

  “And the one is alone,” Captain Serrado answered. “But she wasn’t alone last night. And perhaps she is not alone today.”

  The understanding that welled from her was so deep that if she had chosen this moment to say she was empathic after all, Tal would almost have believed her.

  She remembered her father’s first rule, repeated over and over again: Watch. Listen. Never assume, and knew she’d made a mistake. In her confidence that she could see through this sonsales alien all the way to her innermost motivations, it had never occurred to her that the captain might be able to see through her. But they were both warriors, both leaders, both carrying the weight of their decisions. And didn’t it make sense that a non-empathic alien culture would have developed other methods of discerning emotional truth? After all, Micah made up for his own empathic weakness by being better at reading facial and body language than anyone she knew.

  “I believe,” she said slowly, “that in this room, no one is alone today.”

  Lhyn looked back and forth between them. “The weird thing about this is that I’m the living translator, yet I get the feeling you two just had a whole conversation without me. In about six words.”

  Tal shared a smile with the captain. “Then let us bring you back in, because I’d like to learn more about the Fleet system of command. Captain Serrado, you said you must obey in order to set an example. But what are the terms of your obedience? What happens if you’re asked to uphold an immoral order?”

  “I’ve never been asked to. But if I were, I have the right of refusal.”

  “Sure, at the cost of your career and everything you’ve ever worked for,” Lhyn said.

  “You would be punished? For making a moral decision?”

  “How else do you maintain order in a system based on obedience?” Serrado asked. “There has to be a cost. What happens if you disobey?”

  “I’m not the best example, since my oath of service is to Alsea, not to any individual. But if we use Colonel Micah as an example, his oath of service is to me. If I give him an order he feels he cannot obey, he has the right to withdraw the gift of his service. Service is always a gift, to be given and to be received. It cannot be forced, only earned.”

  “Now that’s a system,” said Lhyn. “Imagine our politicians having to earn our trust.”

  Captain Serrado pulled herself into a more upright position. “What happens when you have to order someone to do something that might endanger their life? How can you depend on obedience in crisis situations where everything depends on instant action, without question?”

  “Ah. You believe obedience is easy when it’s safe, and harder when there’s danger.”

  “That seems self-evident to me.”

  “Perhaps it does in your culture. It does not to an Alsean warrior. For a warrior to break an oath of service due to cowardice would be…unthinkable, and the repercussions are devastating. It does occasionally happen, but it’s extremely rare, because none of us would be in the caste if cowardice were part of our makeup. We’re warriors because we wish to serve. A warrior who swears an oath and then runs from it is no warrior at all, and is stripped of caste. There is no greater punishment. Death would be preferable. In fact, death usually follows, because few Alseans could live as an outcaste.”

  Once again, she was fascinated by their disparate emotions. Lhyn was leaning forward, her gaze intent as she soaked up everything she was hearing. For her, intellectual excitement crowded out any judgment.

  But the captain was horrified. “You said the gift of service coul
d be withdrawn at will. Forgive me, but how can you call it a choice when the consequence is a punishment worse than death? That seems no choice at all. At least I would only lose my rank and career.”

  “There’s a world of difference between breaking an oath and merely withdrawing the gift of service. If you had sworn an oath to me, but later felt that you had become incapable of fulfilling your duties—perhaps because of age, illness, or unforeseen life circumstances—you could withdraw your service and I would have no choice but to accept your decision. The same would apply if you withdrew your service because I gave you an order that you felt was immoral. There would be no repercussions. The caste would protect you, and you’d have little difficulty finding another oath holder—that is, unless you made a habit of such withdrawals and developed a reputation for it. But for a well-considered act in a career of otherwise excellent service? In that situation, not only would you keep your rank, but I would be the one whose reputation suffered, because others would question why you, a warrior of good reputation, had felt forced to withdraw.”

  “I love this system,” said Lhyn.

  Captain Serrado patted her hand. “Of course you do. You’re all about questioning orders.” Turning to Tal, she added, “In theory, it does sound like an equitable system. We also have the right to withdraw, which we call a resignation. But if I resigned from my position, it would automatically equate a resignation from the Protectorate Fleet, which is similar to you withdrawing from your caste.”

  Tal could not imagine. “Perhaps I’m not fully understanding. It sounds as if the consequences for withdrawing from your oath of service remain the same regardless of your reasons. All of them mean the loss of your caste.”

  “We don’t have castes, so it’s not perfectly equivalent. Depending on my reasons, I could resign with or without my honor intact. The options open to me with my honor intact are very different from what would be available otherwise.”

  “Of course.” At least that much made sense, but now Tal was reeling from her casual comment about not having castes. How did their culture function without them?