Chapter 11 #4
“Oh, I remember this part,” said Alice lightly, for all the world like she was talking to herself. “Never liked it much. The decontamination jets always mess with my hair, and I don’t care to have my hair messed with.”
Thomas bit his lip in obvious amusement. Apparently, she was telling the truth.
His acceptance of her statement gave me the beat I needed to brace myself.
The door closed behind us, and gusts of compressed air blew out of the vents, pushing my hair to the side.
Multiple small beetles and flying insects were blown off of us and into the plants in the corners, which began to devour them with disconcerting speed and enthusiasm.
I knew about Venus flytraps and the like, of course, but this was more Audrey II than anything outside of a horror movie had any right to be.
Sam’s tail tightened around my waist again, and I glanced up at him.
He was grimacing, unsettled by the air hitting his face.
I put a hand on his tail, giving it a gentle tug, and, when he looked at me in surprise, offered him a smile.
He was putting up with all of this for my family, because Sarah and Arthur needed him to be willing to try.
That was more than worth a little clinging.
The air stopped, leaving everyone’s hair in disarray.
Alice reached up to smooth hers back into place as the interior set of doors slid open, revealing a large atrium that extended upward for several stories, terminating at a domed ceiling of glass panels, like the segments on a wasp’s wing.
That comparison caused everything else around it to click into sudden focus.
The gray-brown material used for most of the buildings we’d seen?
That was “paper,” the same kind wasps back on Earth used to make their nests.
These were just massive wasp’s nests, even down to the mud.
All the other building materials were just filling in the gaps they couldn’t cover with what came naturally.
The floor wasn’t “paper.” It was polished ceramic tile, like the street outside, which made it another form of mud.
They had textured it such that it was lightly rough beneath our feet, providing the traction and grip that would otherwise have been absent.
A single rainy day could have turned this entire place into a slip-and-slide without that texturing.
Alice walked through the open doors, stopping about six feet deeper into the atrium and gesturing for us to join her.
We clustered close around her, and I watched as people walked by our group without pause or sidestepping, even when it meant they nearly bumped into one of us.
Only Alice appeared to register with them on any meaningful level.
She looked around herself, eyes sharp, expression serene. I tried to follow her example, peering at the people as they passed.
They were all Johrlac, naturally enough, and watching them I began to truly understand why their species had never bothered to evolve facial recognition.
Every single one of them was functionally identical, tiny differences of gender aside.
And they were tiny: they all had the same face, the same delicate bone structure and pale skin.
They all looked roughly the same age, too.
If not for their jumpsuits and hairstyles, I wouldn’t have been able to follow any single one of them across the atrium.
Very few of them were carrying anything.
A few had sections of bamboo larger around than the average industrial thermos, and others had scrolls that could have been made from the same material as the walls, but the vast majority were empty-handed.
It was strange, especially in comparison to what I would have seen in a busy human building around this time of day.
The doors opened behind us, admitting two more Johrlac in black-and-yellow jumpsuits. They ignored us as they walked across the atrium, heading for a doorway on the other side.
“Alice Price,” said a voice, brighter and more enthusiastic than the other Johrlac we’d spoken to thus far.
I turned. An older woman in a blue-and-red jumpsuit was walking toward us, eyes glowing white and hands outstretched in greeting.
She looked more like my grandmother than she did like Sarah, old enough to have faint seams around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but still oddly young compared to the demographic I would have expected in this sort of building on Earth.
Alice turned toward her, beaming. “Verix!” she exclaimed. “I didn’t think you’d still be working here at this point—haven’t you reached retirement age yet?”
“They’ll pry me from my map room when my legs give out on me,” said the woman, still sounding jovial.
“I did my duty by the collective, and now the collective does its duty by me.” She paused, and for a moment, I thought she was looking at the rest of us.
Then the moment passed and she took Alice’s hands, squeezing her fingers for a beat before letting them go. “You need reference? Come, come.”
She turned and walked briskly toward another doorway—not the one she’d arrived through. Alice laughed and followed her, Thomas by her side. Sam and I trooped dutifully along after them. We were in too deep to back out now.
Besides, the architecture was really working at reminding me that what we called “cuckoos” were just extremely well-adapted wasps.
And even with the anti-telepathy charms, getting caught could have dire consequences if they decided to treat me as an invader in their hive. Arthur was reminder enough of that.
We had all adapted to the idea of Arthur.
We’d had years to do it, and as time had passed, he’d become more and more clearly his own person.
First the grafted-on memories had fallen away, and then he’d replaced them with memories of his own, experiences he’d had that Artie hadn’t, opinions Artie had never held.
While there were still similarities, and probably always would be, no one could really look at him now and take him for the same person.
No one had expected Artie to be the first member of our generation to die. It wasn’t a race he’d ever been interested in joining in on, while Verity and I had been vying for first place since we were children. Arthur was proof that he was gone.
And if I offended these people, I could join him.
Alice and the older cuckoo—Verix—weren’t slowing down.
They moved through the doorway and into a long, smooth-walled hallway.
There were fewer people on this side of the atrium, but more of them were carrying scrolls.
All were in the blue-and-red jumpsuits, reducing what little variation I’d been able to track before.
At the end of the hall, Verix pushed open another paper door, revealing a room like the inside of a honeycomb.
Hexagonal cubbies covered the walls, each one containing at least one rolled scroll, while several large tables dominated the center of the floor.
A few people worked at smaller tables around the edge, their aims unclear from where I stood.
They straightened and stood as Verix entered, pulling brushes and styluses aside.
“What do you need, Alice Price?” she asked, with a wave of her hand. “Whatever you require of our archives will be offered up to you!”
“You’re doing an excellent Verix impression, Collective, but she never sounded that enthusiastic about being asked to do her job,” said Alice, with audible boredom. “Please either let her surface or leave me to my research. I know where things are kept in here.”
Verix’s face fell, joviality replaced by annoyance. “We offer you the courtesy of the familiar,” she said. “You do us no courtesy by rejecting it so bluntly.”
“Forgive me,” said Alice. “Among my people, wearing someone else’s body like a puppet isn’t viewed as a courtesy. We call that ‘body-snatching.’”
“If you have need of assistance, please call,” said apparently-not-Verix, and turned to walk out of the room, followed by the researchers from the smaller tables.
Alice watched them go, waiting until the last of them had made their exit before turning to the rest of us. “All right,” she said, voice gone low and tight. “We’re in.”
“Uh, can you maybe explain what’s going on right now?” asked Sam.
“They know me,” she said. “I’ve done some jobs for them in the past. So when I show up asking to see maps, they’re pretty well inclined to let me see them. It helps their reputation in the region if they’re assisting me with bringing criminals to justice.”
“And how does that explain why they’re ignoring us?” he pressed.
“Oh, that.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Right now, the three of you represent a telepathic dead zone. When they try to ‘look’ at you, there’s nothing there. So they either dismiss you as non-sentients, some sort of mechanical assistants, or they don’t notice you to begin with.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I protested. “If they can see us, wouldn’t they realize they’re just not picking up on our thoughts for some reason?”
“How much media have you seen where someone has an invisibility cloak or a magic ring or something, and because of that they could sneak around anywhere and no one would notice them?” asked Alice.
“They still made noise. They still had a smell. They just couldn’t be seen.
But people dismissed them as not really there, if anyone noticed them at all.
Most people don’t jump first to ‘Someone invisible is lurking around in the corners.’”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Sam, slowly.
“Who is your friend?” asked Thomas.