Chapter 10 #2
“It means we killed all their known queens, which should have dissolved their collective, but they had managed to hide a few of their younger queens within the masses of their population, and so their collective endured. It was weak and fragile, and still it connected them. It kept them from accepting our collective as their own, from assimilating as they were intended to into the greater good of the Johrlac. Their incubators dreamt unapproved dreams. They filled their young with ambition and ideals that were not our own. Those young grew to disrupt systems, to demand independent thought, to attempt to change their stations after they had been born to them. They were … inappropriate. They were dangerous. And they were like an infection in the hives that sheltered them, tainting everything they touched.”
Annalist paused, looking at me. “I hope you can be like your ancestors,” he said, inexplicably.
“Again and again, we routed their queens, and each time we did, they would simply prepare the next, for some of them had retained the memory of the process, and continued passing it along the generations. Hives collapsed. Innocents died. And still their collective endured, until all the historians and annalists were called together to give our advice. My ancestor was among that number. His suggestion was deemed the best.”
“He said you should banish them.”
“Yes, but not only that. He said when we had battled the Apraxis, they had been ejected from this world as a danger to the Johrlac, but it had worked only because they had been unable to return. So he suggested we excise each member of the second collective and open their minds for analysis. Once this had been done, the queens would examine them for the knowledge of how to cause a queen, the equations that allowed for manipulation of dimensional barriers, and the instinct toward collective, and they would remove those things where they were found. After the members of the second collective had been successfully edited to eliminate the danger they might present, they could be pushed through the rifts we had opened for the Apraxis, and we need never concern ourselves with them again.”
“Our afternoon leisure is concluded,” said Carry abruptly. “Annalist, will you remain here with our guest?”
“I have concluded my labors for this period,” said Annalist. “I must finish my accounting, and will then discuss what is to be done from here with the Sarah. Please, return to work.”
“There is food in the kitchen,” said Fetch. “We will return when our shift is ended.”
I wanted to ask them if they would get questioned about my absence—or rather, Gather’s absence, since they’d claimed to need “her” in order to complete their current assignment. But they understood this system and I didn’t, and I needed what Annalist was currently willing to tell me.
Inwardly, I was seething. Cuckoos were almost defined by their sociopathic lack of concern in the well-being of anyone else, even other cuckoos.
The only thing that seemed to overwhelm that disconnection was parenthood, and that for only as much time as it took to get the baby to a suitable host parent.
They just didn’t care about anyone but themselves.
Since cuckoo children were loving and compassionate and as empathic as any other intelligent child I’d ever met, we’d all been assuming they inherited their misanthropy from the ancestral memories they received during gestation.
I’d always wondered how an entire intelligent species could evolve like that, and what advantage it could possibly have conferred back on Johrlar.
Now I knew. It hadn’t evolved at all. Their ancestors had been psychically edited to resist the call to community, and then they’d passed that revision along to their own children. Punishment as pathogen, turning political prisoners into monsters.
Fetch and Carry turned, heading for the doors. They didn’t look back or say goodbye. They apparently didn’t feel the need.
Annalist was back to watching me, earnestly pushing hope in my direction. “Do you understand?” he asked.
“I understand that you took political prisoners, edited their minds to make it impossible for them to settle peacefully somewhere else, and threw them through the wall of the world into a place you’d been filling with killer wasps since the moment you’d figured out the math that would allow it to happen,” I said.
“Anyone would have turned a little sour after that.”
“We had no idea they had been left with sufficient fragments of information to rebuild the transit equations until they had already done it, and were loosed upon the universes,” said Annalist, voice turning subdued.
“We believed that, without the urge to collective, they would be unable to raise their own children; they would have no creche keepers or workers suited to childcare. We didn’t anticipate the number of realities which contained intelligences close enough to our own to nurture the young up until their first instar. ”
Well, that explained why everything I’d discussed with Alice said that cuckoos were mostly an issue for dimensions with a reasonable mammal population: they needed people who could understand the care needs of their babies well enough to keep them alive.
That realization was small in the face of the new layer of horror Annalist had just added to what he’d already lain down:
“You were hoping their babies would all die?”
He radiated discomfort. “Less hoping, more … certain. There was no way to remove the urge for collective without also truncating the parental urge that would have allowed them to nurture their young.”
“Well, I guess your little editing project didn’t work as well as you hoped it was going to,” I snapped.
“I feel you are angry with me,” said Annalist.
“Because I am,” I said. “I know you personally didn’t have anything to do with this, even if you want to keep talking like you did—it happened centuries ago, probably millennia at this point, and the math doesn’t work if I try to assign you blame directly—but you keep using the first person like one of your ancestors being involved means that you’re directly culpable. ”
“Because I am,” he said, earnestly. “I hold the memories of my ancestors and my collective, and they made this decision on their own, freely and with all the information they had available at the time. There is nothing they did that I would have done differently had I been put into their position.”
All right. This wasn’t going to get us anywhere. I took a deep breath. “You said you hoped I could be like my ancestors,” I said. “What did you mean by that?”
“Before they were edited into cuckoos, your ancestors destabilized the collective by their presence. They caused ordinary people to question whether they could hope for something more than the position they had been born to fill. They made people want. You are a cuckoo queen who has survived the barrier that was meant to prevent your kind from ever arising again. If we can keep you alive long enough for the collective to be forced to face your existence, you may cause unrest, and that could be enough to set us free.”
I blinked, very slowly. “Oh,” I said. “So that’s why you went to Fetch and Carry. Because you thought I might be useful.”
“Because I am a proper Johrlac, who serves the queens, and I wanted to save you,” he said, earnestly. “My ancestors condemned yours. I am ready to atone for what they’ve done, and to welcome you home to what should always have been your own.”
My stomach clenched uncomfortably. I rubbed it with one hand. “Speaking of welcoming me home, Fetch mentioned food?”
“Yes,” he said, with some relief. “We will eat.”
The kitchen was the first thing I’d seen that really made me believe these people had any form of advanced technology rather than depending on plants and fungus to provide all of their creature comforts.
The room looked almost familiar. There was a sink, complete with running water, and a cold box that was clearly plugged into the wall.
When I opened it, a light came on. It contained several bamboo tubes full of various liquids, and plates of cooked meats under a light film that looked like a thinner version of the substance that made up the walls.
“What do you like?” asked Annalist, opening the box and poking at its contents.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never eaten anything from this dimension, and I doubt you’ll have anything I’d recognize from Earth. Hit me with whatever’s easy.”
“Very well,” he said, and began pulling things out of the cold box, piling them on the counter. “I appreciate how reasonable you’re being about this entire situation.”
“Come again?”
“You are a cuckoo. I had expected substantially more resistance when you were told that we wanted you to help us.”
“Fetch and Carry got me out of custody. I can’t imagine the people who snatched me from my home were planning anything good for me.”
He began mixing things into a bowl, making a sort of salad.
“You were to be held in the dampening chamber until they had finished gathering the evidence against you. Our law requires you be given a trial. It doesn’t require that you be allowed any defense, or that you be permitted to open your mind to display memories which might prejudice the viewing gallery against the judiciary. ”
“So a show trial, in other words.”
“Yes. The punishment for the crime of being a cuckoo queen is death. It has never arisen before, but it was set many generations ago, to be prepared for precisely this situation. By setting the punishment long before the commission of the crime, we can avoid the appearance of bias.”
“I thought you couldn’t harm a queen.”
“I can’t. Fetch and Carry can’t. If we were to try, our minds would turn against our bodies, and the resulting conflict could be fatal. The other queens are not so limited.”
I opened my mouth, then paused, huffing out the air through pursed lips. “So you can’t kill me, but the people who should understand where I’m coming from can?”
“Yes,” he replied, calmly. “You are a threat to their power. No queen can be uncontrolled. They needed to retain the power to destroy what threatens the collective. No one is saying you are a particularly terrible queen, only that all cuckoo queens are forbidden. The punishment for murder, which you are also charged with, on a scale which is frankly impressive, is revision. Either punishment could be applied to you.”
“What is revision, exactly?”
He poured one of the liquids onto the bowl of greens, chunked vegetation, and meat he had been preparing, then carried it over and set it on the counter in front of me, along with a small three-tined fork made of polished wood. “You should be aware, as you have performed the process.”
I blinked. “I have done no such thing.”
“But you have. Our researchers have been traveling along your path. They found evidence of your having removed foundation memories from your allies on Pteracercus, of revising the reality experienced by a native of the same world, and of fully erasing and rebuilding the individual you refer to as ‘Arthur Price.’”
I bristled, food forgotten as I glared at him. “Don’t say Artie’s name. This doesn’t involve him.”
“Oh, but it does. He is evidence of what you’ve done—perhaps the best evidence we could ask for. He will be a key part in your trial.”
“What?”
“If you cannot be found before the trial arrives, I believe they may try him in your stead.”
“They can’t—they can’t do that! He’s not even here!”
Annalist looked at me, radiating bemusement. “Oh, but he is. He was collected shortly after you were. He’ll stand trial, one way or another.”