Chapter Twenty
Twenty
“Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but take a bow and leave the stage. The most powerful words in the world are all too frequently ‘goodbye.’”
—Enid Healy
The abyss without name or end, eternal in its emptiness
THE COLLECTIVE CONTROLLING THE TERRITORY around Ka’krin was comprised of five queens, all survivors of the final, sometimes fatal instar that saw them to the pinnacle of our species’ power.
As they rasped against me like sandpaper against a rough piece of wood, I began to learn them.
Two had been here for hundreds of years, solidifying their positions in the city: two were more recent members of the collective, brought in to replace queens lost in a local conflict.
The fifth was Collate, who still remembered her original name, even as she viewed it with distant disdain, like it more properly belonged to someone else.
She didn’t need it anymore. She had been revised.
But as Artie and Annie proved, revision could be undone.
I didn’t know how it was accomplished, but it had to be something any member of the collective could do.
That was the danger of sharing your mind so completely with others that the boundaries between you dropped away: the four older members of the collective could no more keep secrets from Collate than I could keep secrets from my own left knee.
She brushed against me, the sharks circling my small sphere of telepathically etched safety, and I unfolded a tendril of thought, dangling the bait in front of her.
Fetch and Carry grieve you, I informed her.
They have never forgotten you. They have never forsaken you.
They would gladly welcome you home if only you came back to them.
Those are the names of menials, she shot back, before I cut the connection. They are beneath me. They will be beneath you. Release your barriers and join us. You promised.
I pulled back, hard, retreating into myself.
My family was gone. They’d been sent home, and I truly believed that, because I had been able to find nothing in my brief brushes with the collective to imply they had lied.
Still, my family had been returned to Earth because I’d agreed to become a part of their collective.
If I didn’t keep my word, what was there to stop them from going back to steal my family away again?
Or all of them this time—Elsie and Alex and the children?
The thought of Charlotte and Isaac in the hands of my birth species made me feel physically ill, despite my current lack of a true physical form. I could only play this game for so long. I would need to make my next move with tactical care.
When the queen who had been Collate circled around again, I opened my shell a little wider, trying to make it seem like an accident, like I was so eager to tell her how much her former friends missed her that I had forgotten the danger I was in.
They know revision can be undone, I thought. They just want you to come home. Remember who you are, Collate. Remember, and return to them.
As I had hoped, she darted forward, wedging her thoughts into the gap I had opened and reaching for my mind like a starfish forcing its way into a clam. I pulled away from her, fleeing as far as my sphere would allow, and she pursued.
She began to wrap her mind around mine, and I twisted and writhed, trying to put on the appearance of a good fight, even as I started the function I had been mentally preparing, a series of numbers designed to mirror and record everything she did to me.
She wrapped herself tighter. I felt the other four queens behind her, egging her on, lending their support to the fight.
I went limp, letting her pull me in, and she began, as she had planned from the start, to revise me in the image they desired.
It hurt. It was like having new channels cut into my mind with a rusty scalpel, ripping and shredding and leaving devastation in its wake.
I felt pieces of who I was dropping away, and I couldn’t even mourn their loss: once they were gone, they were gone, like they had never existed to begin with.
I was an equation in my own right, complete within myself, but I could be streamlined and made to fit.
I didn’t try to resist. The function I had created while my mind was still entirely my own was ticking away, noting every snip and cut, every piece of the process, and it was small: it was tucked behind most of who I was, hidden in memory and motivation.
As long as she didn’t notice and stop it, there would be a guide to putting me back together buried deep inside the person I became, like a pearl inside an oyster or an encysted tapeworm tucked into muscle tissue.
It was a gross comparison, but it made me feel oddly better.
I held to it as Collate—no, the queen—no, the collective—continued to revise, cutting away all the pieces of me that I wasn’t going to need anymore.
Was this how Arthur felt when my construction began to fail?
I wondered, and then wondered who Arthur was, why I would be worried about someone I didn’t know.
Deeper and deeper she cut, and the shell around us dissolved into thought and memory.
The other four queens came rushing in then, the five of them gathering me close as they spun around me, remaking me in their own image.
The best image, the only image anyone could ever truly want.
Why had I been fighting this? Why had I wanted to?
Fighting didn’t make any sense. This was peace.
This was perfection. Just me and my sisters, spinning in the void, ideal and untouchable in our flawless union.
The last of the cuckoo I had been fell free and the five of them poured into my thoughts, and we were six and we were one, a collective, powerful and poised to lead our people into the brightest of all possible futures.
And deep within my psyche, a pearl nestled, glossy-shelled and impervious, filled with the instructions for reversion.
I was of the collective now. No one would ever be able to access such an unimportant token.
So we left it as it was, untouched and unremarked-upon.
It didn’t matter anymore. In a way, I put the contents of my mind out of my mind, and focused only on the restorative unity of our collective in combination.
We were six and we were one, a single mind in many bodies, so tightly harmonized that we were the living manifestation of a single mathematical phrase, a single scintillating song.
The awareness of my body returned by inches, until I knew the shape of my own skin and with it, the shape of five more skins which were now equally my own.
Five sets of eyes opened and looked at a crumpled form on a floating platform, dressed in the striped grays of a cuckoo whose transgressions had been great enough to summon her home for punishment.
That would have to change. Whatever she had been before her revision, she was of us now, part of the immutable we, and we couldn’t be seen in cuckoo’s colors. That body would receive a new jumpsuit in the proper colors soon enough, to show caste and status to anyone whose eyes were open.
But first, we had to remember her singularity enough to move her.
That was one of the hardest parts of apotheosis: first you had to move beyond what you had been, dismiss and transcend your limitations.
Then you had to find a way to put them back on like a bra that didn’t fit properly anymore, twisting and contorting enough to squeeze it on.
Like a—what? Lingering bits of who I had been were still sticking to my thoughts, unwanted and serving nothing of any true use. I tried to shake them off as best as I could, feeling their residue staining my perfection.
Returning to the body for the first time after unification required a comprehension of singularity that felt as difficult and transgressive as the concept of zero had been to the earliest mathematicians.
They’d known it was necessary, but it had defined a thing as it wasn’t, rather than something as it was, and that had been difficult.
This was difficult now. The collective detached itself from me as much as it could, leaving me almost alone, still reeling with the speed of everything that had happened, now devoid of any past before the moment they embraced me, and I was “I” again, cold, lonely “I,” shivering in a world without unity or unison.
I hated it. I hated it as I imagined I must have hated my former existence, to agree to the assumption into this one, and so I turned and reached for the collective, trying to rejoin the harmony.
My questing thoughts hit a wall, the rest of the collective pushing me away.
Somehow the worst of it was that I actually understood why, thanks to the knowledge they had already shared with me.
Many queens could ascend to the part of apotheosis, combining themselves into a collective mind.
Few of them could handle the process of returning to their bodies.
If one Johrlac in ten could become a queen without dying in the process, one queen in ten could become part of a collective without severing their connection to their physical body.
A disembodied existence was all well and good, but it would inevitably mean my dissolution.
When my body died, I would go with it, coming to pieces in the thoughts of my sisters.
That could poison the entire collective.
Unless I was strong enough to go back, I was doomed, and if I was doomed, they would revise me away and try again.
I had only existed, inside or outside the collective, for a few minutes, but I was alive, and like all living things, I wanted to go on existing.
That thought briefly raised a concerning flag—why hadn’t the me who had existed before me fought?
The collective remembered her, and so I did too, and she had simply acquiesced to her own erasure. She hadn’t tried to fight them. Why?
The collective had promised to release her family—a petty word for what those people had been to her.
None of them had been Johrlac. They could never have come together in collective, no matter how much she wanted them to, and so she could never have known true apotheosis, never have reached her true potential—and she must have known the collective could still reach them, no matter where they were.
She had given herself away to save the people she cared about, and that was almost admirable, in its misguided way.
Not that it mattered why she’d been willing to lie down without a fight.
Her surrender allowed me to exist, and now that I existed, I was going to continue for as long as I possibly could.
The collective brushed against the edges of my self, encouraging me, urging me onward toward the body that belonged to me.
All five of them had survived this part of the apotheosis, the long, hard crawl back into flesh and bone, the freezing cold of separation.
They knew the way. They showed it to me.
Bit by bit I folded myself smaller, bending the pieces of my mind into the shape they needed to fit if I was going to contain them in a shell of skin.
Bit by bit I let my sisters go, until only the thinnest of tethers still connected us, and I was able to slide back into a body that no longer felt fully like my own.
It was cold there, and dark, and all but dead.
The lungs were empty, pressed flat of air, and the muscular systems that were supposed to pulse autonomically, keeping the hemolymph flowing through the venous structures, had gone still.
The first thing to do was to start them up again.
Without a working circulatory system, this body wouldn’t last for long.
It wasn’t dead, only in a sort of torpor brought on by the departure of the guiding consciousness.
I focused on the need for circulation and managed, barely, not to throw myself back out of it again as the pulses resumed, aching like a pulled tendon, slow and grinding and agonizing in a way I knew they hadn’t been before.
Chronic pain that severe would have desensitized the body’s responses in a way that had nothing to do with the controlling mind.
The lungs began to expand, pulling in air without my explicitly ordering them to do so, and bit by bit, sensations other than pain returned.
The body breathed, and the air fed into the systems that needed to be fed, and it was going to live.
My mind would continue to possess an anchor, and I would continue to belong to the collective.
I was no longer this body. None of us were the bodies which housed us.
But as long as I had it, I could endure.
That was better than the alternative.
Moving slowly and using all the focus I could muster, I opened the body’s eyes, and saw the world from my own perspective.
It was mixed with the perspectives of every other mind in the arena, all of them combining to form a single compound image of my surroundings.
It was kaleidoscopic and stunningly beautiful, and as I pushed the body to its feet, I marveled at how fortunate I was to be part of a collective, to be able to see and understand such beautiful things.
The body answered smoothly to my commands, and I turned it to face my sisters. Their eyes flared white as they reached out to tangle their minds with mine once more, and I was safe, and I was home, and I was at peace.