11 #2
And so it had been for a long, long time. Not-Oscar did not know how long. Thousands of years, Ingold said, assuming that it was the last Ice Age. Maybe longer. Because at some point the sentry hadn’t come back.
“Wait, you’re not this sentry?” I asked, startled.
NO. THE SENTRY IS MISSING.
“What happened to them?” Ingold asked.
WE DON’T KNOW! Not-Oscar drooped in a pantomime of despair. WHY DIDN’T THEY COME BACK?
“Could they have been killed?” I asked. “Eaten by something?”
NOT UNLESS THEY WERE DEVOURED WHOLE. SOME FRAGMENT WOULD REMAIN AND RETURN. AND THERE ARE NO PREDATORS ON LAND THAT COULD DO SO. He brooded for a moment. A FIRE COULD BURN THEM. OR ANOTHER OF OUR KIND COULD ENGULF THEM, IF THEY WERE SMALLER.
We exchanged uneasy glances. “Are there likely to be others of your kind about?” Angus asked, as if it was of no particular merit.
Not-Oscar started to write something, then paused. After a moment he wrote, slowly: I DO NOT THINK SO. THE OTHER WHOLENESSES THOUGHT WE WERE FOOLISH TO GO ON LAND TO ESCAPE THE ICE. AND THEY WOULD NOT KNOW WHERE TO FIND US. BUT I CANNOT SWEAR THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE.
“Did any of you go looking?”
WE DID NOT KNOW. THE WHOLENESS DOES NOT WAKE UNLESS THE SENTRY COMES BACK. THEY DID NOT COME BACK, SO THERE WAS NO REASON TO WAKE.
This struck me as a very foolish system to set up, given everything that could happen to a single individual over the course of what sounded like millennia. Of course, maybe if you were nearly indestructible, you didn’t worry about things like that.
I TRIED TO FIND THEM WHEN WE WERE FRAGMENTED, Not-Oscar wrote. I FOUND SIGNS BUT THEY WERE NOT HERE. WHERE DID THEY GO?
Not-Oscar’s own fragmentation had occurred when blasting in the mine had triggered a collapse far down in the cave system.
Part of the wholeness had sheared off, and though the shock had woken it, it couldn’t find its way back.
The smooth, glassy surface that we had encountered was an impermeable secretion meant to keep the wholeness from losing moisture, and Not-Oscar couldn’t get through it.
The irony of being able to see the object of his desire on the other side of a sheet of glass of its own making was painful, though I don’t think he understood irony as such.
“But if it was blasting that did it, then the mine must have been in operation,” Denton said. “Which was—what, a hundred years ago?”
It had been more than that. Not-Oscar had seen the second and third shaft sunk.
He had watched the miners for decades, first learning that the strange animals communicated through sound, then learning that those sounds mapped onto written words.
Apparently one miner had read aloud to his friends during breaks, and that had sparked the initial understanding.
After that, Not-Oscar’s vocabulary had spread by leaps and bounds, though it never mastered the art of speech.
TOO HARD, he wrote. TOO MANY PARTS THAT VIbrATE.
(Which made me stop and think about how exactly my lips and tongue worked and the way things moved in my throat, which led to me thinking about how often I swallowed, which is the sort of thing that drives you batty in very short order.)
“How do your people live so long?” Ingold wanted to know, which led to another spate of questions that made very little sense to me.
The upshot seemed to be that the wholeness could revert part of itself to .
.. well, infancy probably wasn’t the right word.
A younger state of sorts. This wiped out that part’s memories, but it could then rejoin the wholeness and relearn what it had forgotten.
“So it’s effectively immortal,” Denton said, sounding grimmer still. He turned to Not-Oscar with sudden ferocity. “Why are you telling us all this?”
Ingold and Not-Oscar stared at him with almost identically blank expressions, as if neither of them understood the question. Not-Oscar wrote, one-handed and somewhat hesitantly, YOU ASKED.
Denton threw his hands in the air and walked away. Ingold looked after him, clearly wondering if he should follow. Before he could move, Kent arose from his seat by the fire and went after his employer. I hoped that he was as efficient in settling nerves as he was at everything else.
Not-Oscar stood very still, holding his slate, and probably it was unwise to project human emotions on what was effectively some kind of a land jellyfish, but he seemed forlorn. I suppose nobody yells at you when you’re a jellyfish.
“What do we call you?” I asked the creature. Partly that was to distract it, but it also didn’t seem right to keep thinking of him as Not-Oscar . “Do you have a name, other than ‘wholeness’?”
The creature shook his head. “Wholeness it is,” Ingold said.
“What about you, though?” I asked.
WE ARE A WHOLENESS.
“No,” I said, “not all of you. You . The bit that we’re talking to, not the wholeness. The way that I’m Easton and he’s Ingold and he’s Angus.”
Not-Oscar thought about this for quite some time. I wondered if I’d asked a question he couldn’t answer, or one he didn’t understand. Then finally he picked up the pen and wrote, in his clear, slanting hand, YOU MAY CALL ME FRAGMENT.