Chapter 12 #3
“I am of a higher professional position, but more importantly, I am a keeper of the histories. I know and understand the ways in which collectives have collapsed. Attacking the people they control rarely destroys them. It is more likely to strengthen their position, as it causes all those who have not been incapacitated to flock to the feet of those they consider strong protectors.”
“This really doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with me.”
“Every queen is the living seed of a potential collective. They look upon your existence as a threat. They know not the exact shape of your strength, only that you were able to navigate a crossing between dimensions with multiple people and a large piece of your innate territory. That whispers to them of great and terrible power. You could overthrow them.”
“Is this why people don’t use their telepathy even as much as I do back on Earth?
” I asked. “I used to dream of being a telepath in a telepathic society, where everyone would be sharing thoughts and there wouldn’t be secrets or hidden meanings or misunderstandings.
But here, it’s like everyone’s afraid to do more than brush up against somebody else’s mind—how does that work? ”
“The collective—”
“The collective changes. You just told me that. And if there’s more than one collective, that means they aren’t some unquestionable authority. So you must always be this reluctant to lower the barriers between you and everyone around you. How does that even work?”
“In the days before the cuckoos, we were better at unity,” said Annalist. “We had never considered that anything else might occur. We left our barriers down. But then, out of the disharmony, came conflict. Came discomfort, which grew and grew and left little room for lowering of barriers. We became insular once we realized we could have conflict with our own, and in the rise of the collectives, we discovered that only through self-protection could any trace of singularity be preserved.”
I shook my head, looking down into my half-empty salad bowl. How had I eaten that much of it—and when? “It seems silly, to be able to be so close and to spend so much time trying to be far apart.”
“The collectives must be obeyed,” he said. “How did you learn the way to apotheosis? It seems impossible for someone as isolated as you to have found the path.”
I frowned, trying to formulate an answer. It seemed suddenly hilarious that half my salad was gone. What was I, some sort of grazing animal? Laughter bubbled in my gut, and I swallowed it, blinking slowly as I refocused on Annalist’s face.
How long had his eyes been glowing? It wasn’t bright, but it was present, a pale, lambent light behind his irises, brightening his sclera until they were so white they were almost bleached. He was doing something. Telepathically. I recognized the glow, even if I didn’t know the purpose or intent.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “What did you do to me?” Then, and most importantly: “Who are you?”
“Any Johrlac born and raised to Johrlar would recognize the taste of marikana pollen, but we assumed you would have no such frame of reference, and indeed, you didn’t. You knew nothing. You know nothing. You offer no true challenge, whatever you may think you do.”
I stabbed my fork at him, vaguely aware that we were too far apart for me to do anything other than posture uselessly.
Still, at least I was trying. That seemed like the only thing left that I could really do at this point.
“Put something in my food?” My voice was starting to slur. Oh, I didn’t like that.
“Yes, little cuckoo, we put something in your food,” said Annalist. He rose, taking the fork from my hand and placing it carefully on the counter.
“The collective is essential to the survival of our species. You are outside the collective. You will always be outside the collective. There is no world in which you overcome our unified voices and make yourself their equal, much less their superior.”
I had never wanted any of that. I had never even wanted to be here.
Johrlar was the land of my nightmares, the place that birthed cuckoos and stole freedom away.
Stole family and peace and comfort. As a child, I’d prayed for the Blue Fairy to grant Pinocchio’s wish and then come to do the same for me, to make me a real girl with red blood and a heart seated firmly in my chest to drive that blood along, to close my mind and let me sleep in singular peace.
I’d never wished to go back to Johrlar. All this talk of overcoming and equality, it was so much noise, empty and meaningless.
He threatened me over something I wasn’t trying to achieve.
“We had hoped to find out how you claimed your current instar before the pollen took hold, but it doesn’t matter that much.
According to the scouts who visited the backwater dimension you consider ‘home,’ your apotheosis destroyed all the other adult cuckoos in your world.
It will be decades before any of what you’ve left behind could rise to challenge us, and by then, we’ll be prepared.
We’ll destroy your Earth for the crime of threatening us, and take its residents to serve us.
” He chuckled, dark and cold and nothing like the polite academic who’d been speaking to me before—because he wasn’t, was he?
Annalist wasn’t here anymore. I was speaking to the collective.
“And if you still wonder why no one wants to touch your mind, this is the reason: your thoughts are inferior, and we don’t want to be tainted by them. ”
He circled the table where I was seated, and I tried to track him. The effort made me dizzy, and my eyes slipped closed without my willing them to do so. I was still awake enough to feel my head hit the table, but nothing more than that, and when my body hit the floor, I was solidly unconscious.
The white void around me was infinite and featureless.
I pushed myself to my feet, taking a few steps into the nothingness, noting that my feet remained stable on the same plane: there was a floor, even if I couldn’t see it.
There were no distinctions between up and down, the floor, ceiling, and walls, but I existed here, and as long as I existed here, I could figure something out.
“Hello?” I called.
My voice echoed into the distance, bouncing off surfaces I couldn’t see before finally bouncing back to me, distorted, yet still clear enough for me to understand. I scowled. Fun.
“All right,” I said. “So you brought me here, set up some little test or trap or whatever, and then knocked me out so you could … what, exactly? What is the goal supposed to be? Am I supposed to start crying and wailing and begging for your mercy? Or open my mind all the way so you can get inside and go rooting around the shelves for whatever it is you think you need?”
“We wanted to meet you, Sarah McNally-Baker-Price-Zellaby,” said a voice from behind me.
It was sweet, female, calm, and sounded exactly like my own did when played back over a recording.
It was my voice, stripped of bone conduction and transformed into a stranger’s.
She had no accent, which was interesting.
None of the people I’d met on Johrlar had had what I would think of as a recognizable accent.
This wasn’t just another country; it was another planet, in another dimension.
I wasn’t sure the people were actually speaking English—it would have been strange if they were, and on a planet of telepaths, it wasn’t too far out of the realm of reason to assume that they might be using some sort of universal translator.
I should really have asked when I had the chance.
Oh, wait. “What language are you speaking?” I asked.
Non sequiturs have a power all their own sometimes. There was a pause before the stranger said, sounding bewildered, “The tongue of the collective. We have never bothered to name it. All queens speak the same language. Why would we seek another?”
“Language evolves to suit its surroundings,” I said, and turned to face her.
Unsurprisingly, she looked exactly like me.
More, even, than Fetch and Carry had; this was an idealized space, and we both appeared as the ideal Johrlac.
Any scars or bruises had been wiped away by the transition from reality to the nebulous solidity of the mindscape.
She was wearing a jumpsuit like all the others: unlike the others, hers was a solid, almost iridescent black, gleaming and shifting with the light every time she moved.
It made her hair seem less glossy than it actually was, pulling blue highlights out of the black, and making her skin even whiter than it would normally have been.
“You would be a massive hit in the goth clubs back home,” I blurted.
She blinked. “I understand all the words there are,” she said. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“Goths are a subculture of people who like to wear black and listen to gloomy music and put on too much eyeliner—although I guess that’s a judgmental way to describe it, since they wouldn’t put on that much eyeliner if they didn’t feel like it was just the right amount.
So I guess they’re people who like to wear black and listen to gloomy music and put on a perfectly reasonable amount of eyeliner that some people will consider excessive, because some people don’t really have a sense of whimsy after they turn nineteen. ”
She blinked again. “I still have no idea what you just said, only that you said a lot of it,” she said. “Please do not attempt to explain further.”
“Why not? I thought you wanted to meet me. And all those names aren’t mine. Just Sarah Zellaby.”
“You’ve used all those names at one point or another, and they all belonged to you when you used them.” She tilted her head. “Unless you intend to abandon all names and enter into our collective, they belong to you still.”