She missed the question, someone shouting how Lesko knew.
“I heard it from the Genii myself,” he called back. “They showed me the video of Radim’s speech. They showed me the video the Genii took inside the hive ship.”
“But there are other Wraith,” someone said.
Lesko nodded. “The Genii and the Lanteans are making a treaty with them. Some of the other Wraith attacked Queen Death too.”
“A treaty with the Wraith?” the grandmother said incredulously. “You can’t make a treaty with the Wraith.”
“You can make a treaty with anyone,” Elizabeth said. “With the right leverage.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” someone behind her in the crowd said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Elizabeth.” She was sitting at a desk in a room full of people, looking up at a green board covered in words. A man was leaning over her, dark rims to his glasses, dark hair. “You can’t negotiate with people bent on global domination.”
“I don’t see how you can fail to,” she responded. Her hands were young and thin and she wore a white sweater with blue floral trim around the wrists. “What other choice do we have? To simply say that we acquiesce? Or that we consider global thermonuclear destruction a viable alternative? Chernenko is a rational man…”
“It is not rational.” Mr. Henry’s mouth pursed. That was his name, Mr. Henry. He was her teacher. She was fifteen years old. “The Soviet Union does not pursue rational foreign policies, but rather ideological ones. Even when faced with Mutual Assured Destruction…”
“Surely there are rational voices.”
“The rational voices are powerless.” Mr. Henry shook his head. “As are those elements in the Eastern Bloc who oppose him. I’m sorry to tell you, Miss Weir, but Solidarity is just as doomed as the Prague Spring or the rebels in Budapest in 1955. The moment tanks roll into Gdansk…”
Elizabeth blinked. Kyan was shaking her arm. “Are you ok?”
“Yes,” she said. The crowd was still yelling questions, though Lesko held up his hands.
“All in good time!” he said. “Come on now. Let my people unload. We’ll have plenty of time for news.”
“Did you remember something?” Kyan asked cheerfully.
“Yes. I think.” Elizabeth shook her head. There was no more of it, just that moment, that frustration, those words that were so freighted with meaning that no one here would know.
Elizabeth put her hands at her side, watching the Travelers. Who am I? she thought. Who am I to feel that I should carry such responsibility?
“This is Atelia Zel,” the grandmother said. “Atelia, I’d like you to meet Elizabeth. She is the woman with no memories I told you about.”
“I’m pleased to meet you,” Elizabeth said.
They stood in the shade of the Travelers’ ship, its bulk casting deep cool shadows. A striped awning had been rigged and their wares were laid out on the tops of boxes and shipping crates, bulky things in front and the most valuable things displayed on cloths back near the open hatch where the sellers could keep their eyes on them. Lesko and a number of others haggled with the Mazatla, trading food for cloth, hides for medicines. Some few of them, the most valuable, were kept in a strong box, bottles neatly labeled and swathed in cloth. She only saw them for a moment, but some of them… There was something wrong, something familiar about them. Ramipril 10 mg… Erythromycin…
“Atelia is Satedan,” the grandmother said, calling her attention back, and Elizabeth turned to look at her.
Atelia Zel was of average height and young, with lighter skin than the Mazatla but not as pale as Elizabeth’s. Her black hair was braided tightly to the scalp, each braid worked with a single strand of gold thread. A little boy perhaps a year old peered curiously over her shoulder from a harness worn on her back over her spacer’s coveralls. He looked at Elizabeth curiously, then gave her a four-toothed smile.
She smiled back. “What a beautiful baby!”
At that Atelia smiled too. “Thank you. He’s a handful, and I have to watch him every minute so he doesn’t get into things.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face as if looking for something familiar. “They said you might be Satedan?”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t remember much before I found myself on this world. Everyone here has been very kind to me, but nobody knows me or where I came from. The few things I do remember cities, technology, suggest to these people that I’m Satedan.” Even as she said it, it felt wrong. And yet this young woman’s face was like so many she’d known, her clothes, the casual way she handled the electronics…
“What do you remember?” Atelia asked.
“Cities. Buildings with many stories. Vehicles.” Elizabeth shook her head. “Steel bridges over rivers.” Her eyes fell on the bottles carefully swaddled in the compartmented box. “Bottles like that. A hospital where sick people went for operations…” Corridors with nurses in white, a kind dark haired man with an instrument around his neck who stood outside her father’s room, talking to her in a low voice…
“We had hospitals and high rises,” Atelia said. “Medicines like these.”
“Are those from Sateda?” She didn’t quite pick them up. Not quite.
Atelia shook her head. “Not these. All our cites were destroyed and all our industries too. These came from the Genii who traded with the Lanteans for them.” She touched the one labeled Erythromycin gently. “These pills are for people who have a sickness in their lungs, a cold that has gone to the chest and their lungs are filling with fluid. When nothing else will save them, these pills will.” Her eyes searched Elizabeth’s face. “It’s a wide spectrum antibiotic for respiratory infections. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, though she couldn’t have said how she knew. “For pneumonia.” And it was a good thing, somehow, that these pills were here. A cheap drug, worth almost nothing per dose, rendered nearly priceless to these people, just as she’d seen it in clinics, where? She looked at Atelia. “Are you a doctor?”
Atelia laughed. “I’m a scholar. Or I was going to be. But all that ended a long time ago.”
“How did you escape when your world was destroyed?”
“I wasn’t there.” Atelia looked up at the awning above, put her head back against the baby’s cheek. “I was in my last year of studies. I was going to be a scholar who studied other peoples, finding the common threads of culture that help us understand who we are and where we all came from. I was doing field work when Sateda was attacked.” Her mouth pursed. “Everyone I knew was killed.”
Elizabeth put her hand on her arm. “I am so sorry. And so sorry to have asked.”
“It was a long time ago.” Atelia forced a smile. “And I’ve found a place with the Travelers. The technology that everyone understood on Sateda is rare and complicated everywhere else. I have skills that are valuable. I understand what these do.” She touched the bottle. “I learned.”
“And you have a family,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh yes.” She nodded, glancing back over her shoulder at the little face behind hers. “I have a son and a husband, though he’s not with us now because he’s a Hunter.”
“What does he hunt?” Elizabeth asked.
Atelia’s smile wasn’t nice at all. “He hunts Wraith.”
Chapter Three
The iris filled with blue as the gate opened, and Daniel leaned back in his seat as John threaded the needle’s eye neatly with the jumper. He was used to missions beginning with a hike, and found it an unaccustomed luxury to be able to take the jumper and as much gear as he wanted to haul along without having to be able to carry it all on his back.