Chapter 9 #4
From the way she said it, she meant that literally. She sounded like even trying to harm a queen would destroy her.
She shook her head, hard, like she was trying to shake away something sticky and foul. “It’s not possible, they can’t— You’re here.” She sounded momentarily triumphant. “If the process of maturing destroyed the queen’s mind, you wouldn’t be able to be here.”
“I was able to create a distributed processing system to absorb the brunt of the equation before it could consume me. It still took pieces of my memory, but not as many as it could have without the extra processing power. It wiped out the minds of the people I used to process the numbers, but I lived. What does it say about your judiciary system that my crime wasn’t being forced into an instar I never wanted, but surviving the process? ”
Fetch sagged. “It says the cuckoos are monsters, if they can harm a queen so. But more, it says we were wrong. I knew this already—how can a natural stage of existence be incorrect?—but I thought there might be some nuance to the situation that I was missing. I’m only an assistant, after all.
I lack the intelligence to fully understand the law. ”
“Okay, hang on,” I said. “How does getting a job work here?”
“There is always a list of positions which will need to be filled in sixteen to nineteen seasonal cycles,” said Fetch.
“The administration maintains it, and sends the breeding assignments to the nurseries. Members of the appropriate professions are offered the opportunity to reproduce, and upon the production of healthy young, those offspring are given jobs and names appropriate to their purpose. Then we just have to wait for the memories to mature. Is that not how work is assigned in your culture, Sarah? What does a Sarah do, anyway? I do not recognize the title.”
Oh, for the love of … “Sarah isn’t a title or a position, it’s my name,” I said.
“It was given to me by the humans I was originally left with.” I didn’t remember much about the McNallys—youth and trauma will have that effect on the mind—but I remembered that they’d loved me very much, and they’d died never knowing I wasn’t really their daughter.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t have a job right now. When you ask ‘What does a Sarah do?’ the answer is something like ‘Math, and spending time with my family—I have a little brother, his name is Isaac, and he needs cuckoo role models to look up to so he doesn’t grow up to be a total asshole like most members of our species—and taking walks with my pet spider.
’ I’m not required to do any one thing just because someone thought we were going to need the position filled before I was born. ”
“That sounds … scary,” said Fetch. “I’ve never tried to live without knowing exactly what was going to happen next. But it also sounds kind of wonderful and very exciting.”
The doors opened, and Carry stepped through, followed by an older male Johrlac in a blue-and-gray jumpsuit.
I frowned. The jumpsuits meant something, that much was obvious, but this was the fourth design I’d seen incorporating the shade of gray that had corresponded to red when I’d been able to view it through human senses, and that seemed irrational.
Johrlac can’t see red. They had no reason to be designing around it.
“What do the jumpsuits mean?” I blurted.
The man paused, radiating confusion. Clarity broke through, and he straightened. “You mean our uniforms.”
“Er, yes.”
“They have developed a fascinating means of saying hello in your hive,” he said.
“It is considered impolite in most professional capacities to look beyond the partition of the people with whom you interact, and many do not have a range of more than two body-lengths. The uniforms allow us to distinguish one another during working hours, that we address others properly and according to our need.”
I blinked, very slowly, before turning back to Fetch. “I’m sorry. I know I’m at a cultural disadvantage here, and I think I must be misunderstanding. Did he just say that you all wear uniforms so you can tell each other apart?”
“One civic assistant is exactly the same as any other,” said Fetch, reaching almost frantically for Carry. “Why does it matter if they address me, or Carry, or Collate?”
“I— Because— I—I don’t even know how to begin answering that sentence,” I said. “Do you ever not wear uniforms?”
“When we are outside of working hours, we may dress as we prefer,” said the man. “I assume you are the cuckoo queen?”
“You must be pretty sure of that assumption, since I’m starting to think the people who run this place will kill you dead if they find out you’ve been talking to me,” I replied. “My name is Sarah.”
Carry had reached Fetch. The two tumbled into one another, Fetch clinging like she was afraid the sky might fall, Carry stroking her hair to soothe her.
There was nothing sexual about it. They were like puppies, seeking comfort in the familiar.
My talk of harming queens had unsettled Fetch more than I’d realized.
“Sarah,” said the man, rolling the syllables of my name in his mouth like they were the most fascinating thing he’d ever heard. “I am Annalist.”
“Analyst?” I asked.
“Annalist,” he said, stressing the word slightly to make it clear that we were not saying the same thing. “I gather and remember history. It is what I was made for.”
“All history?” I asked, feeling suddenly, strangely fragile.
I was on a world I should have known as well as I knew the family compound in Portland.
I should have known the bird-sized moths and the cleaner plants, the uniforms and the social structure, and I didn’t know any of it.
It had all been taken from me by the people who’d decided to exile my ancestors, and while I couldn’t say I was sorry to have grown up the way I had—I loved my family, my friends, my life, and my world—I still resented the fact that the choice had never been mine to make.
“I approached Fetch and Carry after my records were accessed,” he said. “The judiciary came to me to request information regarding cuckoos. How you can be intercepted, how you can be restrained. If you have ever produced a queen.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Everything.”