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“I need good news this morning. We ran out of cream, and I had to drink my coffee black.”
For the most part, he followed what they were saying. If not the full depth of implications, at least the gist, but the leaps of insight and understanding that were so automatic for them left him feeling stupid. All Tonner had to say was It’s a farm and the others were already halfway to making a protocol.
It was strange the way that life kept going. They had lost everything—homes, lives, their place in the vastness of the universe—and Campar still made coffee every morning.
He didn’t know if it was alive or a piece of Carryx technology or something else, but there was a beauty to it.
When he showed his mother his great triumph over fear, she’d just laughed and said most people who are scared of spiders don’t force themselves to get over it, they just leave them alone. My little Dafyd just hates anything telling him what to do. She’d been right. All his life Dafyd had felt an irrational need to pull left when everything was telling him to pull right. It was petulant and petty, a childish need to not be controlled, even by himself. It had gotten him into trouble more times than he remembered. But he also wasn’t scared of spiders anymore.
And the more time he spent there, the less assaulting it felt. The space was vast, but no more so than a few sports stadiums jammed together.
Dafyd watched the aliens move past him, pretending they were fish in an aquarium, and he found it almost restful. None of them had emotional lives entangled with his. Strange as they were, there was also a kind of beauty in all the ways evolution had solved its problems through luck and environmental pressure.
It was all strange, but some of it was also beautiful. The horror behind it was real. There wasn’t a moment that Dafyd couldn’t feel the fear and tension in his body if he just turned his mind to it. But there were some moments when there was also awe.
Dafyd wished there was someone there to see it with him. To wonder with him what it all meant. To remember it with him later. Instead it was just his. A private moment that couldn’t be shared.
It was almost synesthesia. Dafyd saw the two thoughts, and how they fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. How together they made something new.
It was almost beautiful. She felt a surge of hatred for it. How dare it be beautiful.
It wasn’t the first informal memorial Rickar had sat in on. A few people in a strange place at a strange time talking about the one that was missing. They weren’t even friends, not really. They didn’t need to be. The ritual was the thing. As Rickar half listened to Campar and Dafyd and Synnia taking out their memories of the dead woman and passing them around, he wondered if this was something universal to humans. If the prisons and labor camps of history had been made a little more bearable by people sitting together in groups like this one. He hoped so.
The calculus had changed for all of them. He wasn’t sure what it had changed into yet, apart from the joys of equipment transport during wartime.
He wondered, looking back at all the forced labor in the darker corners of history, if some percentage of the victims had always taken pride in their work. He wasn’t sure which answer would be more disturbing.
One picture had shown a line of young men carrying a massive tree on their shoulders. Staggering under its weight, but because they were together, not being crushed by it. Not quite. Seemed appropriate somehow.
Tonner turned on the boy, but Else made a sound. It was a soft thing, a little glottal click, but it pulled Tonner up short like he had a leash on. The little line drew itself on her brow.
“We’ve been… What if we’ve been thinking about the test wrong? We’re treating it like it’s the protein translations, and why wouldn’t we? It’s what the librarian told us they wanted. It said that was what we’re supposed to do. But just because it’s what we’re supposed to do, that doesn’t mean it’s the test.”
So either the Carryx are stupid or they’re testing us for something besides good lab work. And I think it’s the worst mistake we could make to assume the Carryx are stupid.”
When he spoke, he sneered, “So they’re hiding some secret agenda?” But under the derision was something like hope. Campar glanced over at Else, but she’d gone still and weirdly focused. Her mouth was a careful O, like she was blowing out smoke from some invisible cigarette.
“Or they’re not hiding it,” Dafyd said, “and what they mean by ‘useful to the Carryx’ isn’t what we thought. We assumed the task they gave us was the thing they cared about. But maybe it’s just the thing that keeps us busy while they see if we can self-organize. Or if we need a lot of protection they’d have to supply. Or if we die easily. Hell, if we smell bad. I don’t know. I don’t understand how they think.
The moieties have always been a project of exploration and learning. Not of preservation. Preservation is irrational because it glorifies what cannot be. The universe is in constant change from the smallest measures to the greatest. To cling to one state of being over any others is foolish and futile and doomed.
In the meantime, all she had were the usual sad, not-quite-impotent behavioral interventions: Get enough sleep, shower every day, force herself to eat even if she wasn’t hungry, talk to people, exercise. Clean. Participate in things like salvaging a proteome dictionary. It didn’t fix anything. But some things, it improved.
Campar shifted ahead of her, putting his body between her and the threat. This was what it must have been like, evolving up to human. Being part of a group. Closing ranks together in the face of an enemy.
“Move pretty fast, don’t they?” Rickar said. Jessyn shrugged. “Humans are endurance hunters.”
“Those things are a ten-minute walk from our lab,” she said. “That close, and we never saw them. We made our world too small.” “I think Tonner has been keeping our eyes more at our feet than the horizon,” Campar said. “All of us except maybe young Alkhor.”
Campar put a hand on her shoulder. “You were magnificent. I’ll follow you into battle any time, little sister.”
The game had gotten bigger. Only, no. That wasn’t true. The game had always been bigger, and now Dafyd wasn’t the only one who felt it.
He was curious because he chose to be. It didn’t make him stupid.
Dafyd’s head felt full. He wondered what the others would think if he told them that the librarian seemed on the edge of killing him. If they’d think he was playing up the story for attention. If they’d believe him. “What can I do to help?” he asked.
Who they were to each other after Irinna’s death was different too. Dafyd saw it in the way Tonner focused on the work instead of on managing the schedule for everyone around him. He saw it in Campar’s brewing fresh tea for people whether they had asked for it or not. In Rickar’s unspoken inclusion in the work, his exile part of a social order that no longer existed.
Even cutting Rickar out had been a way to keep continuity with the past when connection to the past was just an illusion. They were all letting the illusion of control and continuity go now. Or else it was slipping away despite them.
Nothing fit together, but he was certain that something would if he could just find the right perspective.
This moment of improbable calm, these people in the little bubble of time and space and safety that they’ve made with each other despite the death and violence around them, is beautiful because it cannot last. It’s beautiful because even with all they’ve seen and experienced, they don’t know how lucky they have been. Or how badly things can go.
Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with him, and his work now was to understand that he’d always been a minor character in her story. And that maybe she’d been only a small part of his, however it had felt at the time.
But along with it, he felt a rush of amusement and affection. The enemy had come, bent on murder. They’d broken into their home, assaulted them, and the first impulse of the team was to see what they could learn from it.
“They gave us rooms with windows,” Dafyd said. “These buildings are massive. Most of the space in them will have no windows.” “So?” “So, did they do that because humans need more sunlight than other species? Is natural light high status? Low status? An accident based on timing? Does it mean everything, or nothing at all?”
“No, I mean… I don’t understand the Carryx. I don’t understand how they think.”
It’s what they are that confuses me. I thought the librarian was going to be happy to have a chance to tell us what it wanted. Why wouldn’t you want your servants to be attentive and willing?”
They’re doing something right, and I think about what I expect from a species or government or organization that could do this. I expect them to be open to learning, but when I made the offer, it was like I’d insulted it.
The librarian said, ‘Possibility is irrelevant.’ What does that mean? Can an advanced scientific species really not understand probability and inquiry down multiple paths?
“Does it matter?” she asked. “Yeah. Probably more than anything else right now.”
“Why? I mean, I don’t disagree, but you know whatever you find here, it’s not going to get us where we were.” He took her hand, lacing his fingers in hers. “Might help keep us where we are. We’ve lost a lot. But I’ve still got some things I’d like to keep.”
When she’d been young, she’d seen other children building themselves up to schoolyard confrontations, and she’d thought that they were overcoming a natural urge toward peace. That fighting meant working up enough emotion to force your way past essentially peaceful nature. It turned out that sometimes it was easy.
They’d made two weapons from what they had. She was one of them.
Some other prisoner has come to this place and made art from it. Created something meaningful and joyous in this place of loss and terror. The swarm is surprised to find that inspiring and sad.
In captive species that had been taken through the normal course of expansion, the half-minds would have had signals to absorb and model: patterns of chemical release and sound and controlled radiation of light and heat that the enemy produced in its natural environment. By consuming the ways in which the animals conversed with each other, the half-mind would have found the ways to mimic them, shape them, translate the thoughts and meanings of low animals to the Carryx, and issue instructions to the animals in ways they could comprehend.
The translation half-mind pulsed once as it passed this on in terms the captive could comprehend—a mist of esters and cyclic terpenes, a burst of radio waves on a combination of frequencies.
“We are designed life,” the half-mind said, then paused for a very long time as the captive muttered through the electromagnetic spectrum, exuded clouds of scent. The interrogator-librarian remained patient. “We are like half-minds made from life.” A thrill of disgust ran through the librarian’s body. The Carryx had come across manufactured life-simulacra before. Stick-flowers on Ursin-Qin, the Stone-Mind of High Lothark, the Ambients of Cahl and Deáphan.
She’d known people like Allstin before. Natural performers who made themselves the center of every conversation. Usually, they grated on her nerves, but not now. Not today.
“And as soon as we had the translator, we found them. The same day. I keep wondering, if we’d thought to ask the librarian for one of these of our own, would it have given it to us?”
