Two
Two
T he swarm walks the length of the physics lab, its hands clasped behind its back.
Around it, the others work to perfect the lensing techniques that gave Anjiin warning of their doom’s arrival.
It had not helped them, but if the enemy—the deathless enemy that the Carryx didn’t know had smuggled the swarm into its lair—discovers the same techniques, the Carryx will already have a guard against them.
The brilliance of the empire will again have been made brighter by the animals that it controls.
In the dark prison of the swarm’s consciousness, the dead man fights.
Jellit is the only male it has taken, the only one who had already dedicated himself to violence, and the only one who carried the weight of that trauma on his soul.
The swarm can’t say if any of these differences explain why this body is more dedicated to asserting itself.
To fighting the possession. To denying the death that has already come for him.
You all right? one of the other physicists in the lab asks. A woman named Kadey.
The swarm nods. Some things on my mind, it says.
This is the day it has resolved to reveal itself to Dafyd.
Oh for fuck’s sake , the dead man sneers in the chaos of the swarm’s mind . Again? You’ve got more days-I’m-going-to-tell-him than Else had last cigarettes.
An echo of amusement comes, but not from the swarm.
It might belong to Ameer Kindred or Else Yannin.
Or the two might be seeping into each other now.
Ameer, the first human that the swarm took when it bloomed into being on the surface of Anjiin, is now so attenuated that her thoughts are hard to distinguish from the swarm’s own.
And with her flesh abandoned, Else Yannin has begun to lose some clarity and definition as well, bleeding at the edges like a watercolor left where the damp could reach it.
The body reinforces the mind in ways the swarm is only starting to catalog.
If it had known before, it might not have shifted to Jellit.
But so many things are firsts for the swarm.
So many things only learned in retrospect.
Yes, you still would have killed me , the dead man says . God, how self-pitying can you be? Poor you, the people you murder aren’t emotionally supportive enough.
It is a lot to ask of us , the echo that is still Ameer Kindred agrees .
The swarm stops at one of the sensor connections.
The device looks like a wire suspended in a glass tube three times Jellit’s height and about as thick as his thumb.
The experiment is supposed to detect interference in very-long-wave electromagnetic resonances.
Done correctly, it will create a computational lens.
Done poorly, it will lose coherence and turn to noise.
Around them, invisible to everyone else, a magnetic pulse rises from the planet below, vibrating with information that the swarm records, though it hasn’t yet learned to decode.
The swarm is a weapon of war. A spy sent to collect everything and transmit what it learns back to worlds it has never known.
It is designed to survive for as long as it can, but it is not designed to survive.
I can finish this run if you want , Kadey says, then gives a little frown . Having some time away from home would be a kindness.
Trouble? the swarm asks because Jellit would have.
Roommate problems.
The swarm’s laugh is short and harsh, and it doesn’t seem to come from any of the three it has taken, or maybe from all of them.
Thanks , it says . I’m actually going to take you up on that.
Pay me back later , Kadey says, and the swarm walks away .
The rooms it has now are the first private space it has had since Anjiin.
Ameer Kindred had lived in a little rental loft by the Scholar’s Common with a yellow door and a cat that wasn’t hers but still came in through her window at night.
The swarm remembers hunching in that loft, its senses straining at the sky while Ameer screamed in its still-unfolding consciousness, confused and horrified.
The swarm had been almost a pure mechanism then, a thing of technique and programming so sophisticated it approached instinct.
Now it has the room Jellit had been assigned, but the assignment came after Jellit’s death, so in a real sense the little table with its two broad metal benches belongs to the swarm.
The little kitchen where it prepares its rations is not shared with others.
The little bed with polymer foam for a mattress is its alone.
But, depending on how the coming conversation plays out, perhaps that could change.
It remembers the dry-mouthed fear Ameer felt asking a girl to come back to her room for sex the first time, the almost clinical way Else accepted an erotic invitation when she had first come to the medrey.
It remembers sneaking a girl into Jellit’s room when Jessyn was asleep next door, and then coupling quietly to keep from waking his sister up.
And it remembers its own times with Dafyd, and the comfort Else’s body took in him.
Is it so strange to think that it may return to that time, rekindle what it once had?
Once Dafyd knows that the woman he loves didn’t die, but only changed…
I was dead before you kissed him using my mouth , Else says . Everything that happened between you was a lie.
There is a way that this is true, but there is also a way in which it isn’t.
There were aspects of itself that the swarm could not reveal to Dafyd, but it knows from the memories of three people that this is always true.
No romantic coupling ever included absolute honesty, if such a thing were even possible.
Rationalizing , Jellit says . You are undercover behind enemy lines, so every awful thing you do is justified. Poor, burdened hero that you are.
But the swarm had no capacity for love when it first gained awareness.
Everything it knows of love, of sex, of the complications of the heart, it took from Else Yannin.
From her body, from her mind. It was attracted to men in the ways that she was.
It was complicated the way that she was.
When it made love, it lifted its arms because she liked lifting hers, pressed Dafyd down because it satisfied her appetites, took him into her flesh with a joy and selfishness that didn’t originate in the swarm, though it resided there now.
Could we please not do this? Else says, and the swarm feels her shame and humiliation at being so exposed before it and Ameer and Jellit.
The swarm rises on the balls of its feet the way Jellit once did when he was anxious or excited.
The movement is natural. Unconsidered. The swarm is tired, and the sweat of the day makes the tunic that the Carryx machines produce for their human subjects cling to its back.
Today is the day it will reveal its presence to Dafyd, will tell him everything that it has withheld, but not like this. It will clean itself physically, before the emotional and metaphorical cleansing comes. It tells itself it isn’t stalling.
After its shower, the swarm stands naked before the strip of mirror, considering the body it inhabits.
The cells and structures are, in most senses, Jellit.
The scar on its rib from an accident Jellit had when he was a boy.
The one on its leg from an act of violence that happened after they were all prisoners of the Carryx.
The DNA in its nuclei has the code, for the most part, that Jellit was born with.
The superstructure of the swarm directs and permeates Jellit, allows the body to become what it needs to be: a listening device, a transmitter, a chemical sampling machine.
None of these aspects of its existence seem as important now.
It takes down a fresh set of clothes, cracks the wax coating around the cloth, and pulls on trousers and a tunic the match of every one it has had before, every one that it expects it will ever wear again.
In the mirror, it looks… handsome? Pretty?
It smiles the way Jellit smiled. And then the way Else smiled, only with Jellit’s lips. The expressions are different.
All right , it says aloud . It’s time.
The other parts of it are silent for once.
The swarm senses Dafyd’s distress as soon as it enters his room. It’s in the smell of his skin and the angle he stands at, the lines of his face and the barely audible sigh he makes when his mind is elsewhere.
Rough day with the boss? it asks in Jellit’s voice .
Dafyd’s smile is brief but sincere. Yeah, I have new problems. I don’t know what to do with them.
You want to talk about it?
Dafyd shrugs and sits at the table. His little kitchen area has black laminate counters and chairs that are a little too wide, a little too tall.
They make the people sitting in them seem like children.
This was all easier when there was… I don’t know.
Hope? There was that moment when it seemed like there was hope.
The swarm’s heart leaps. He means it . He means the moment it revealed itself and the great war to him. The moment an ally against the Carryx appeared. It had to have been like a miracle for him, and it will be again. The swarm takes in a deep breath.
He thinks you died when Else did , Jellit says . He thought you were riding along with her, like an add-on. Not that you’d eaten her. He didn’t know you ate people.
The swarm pushes the thought away. It isn’t what it told him.
It’s what you let him think , Else says . You knew. Even back then, you knew to hide how it actually works. If he understood what you’d really done to me…
It goes to Dafyd’s cabinets. There is very little food there, and what there is has the thin, desperate feel of emergency rations.
The swarm’s cupboard is as bare. But there are cups for water and a kettle to boil it in and a small box with an amber gel and a scoop already taken out of it.
The gel is an imitation of Tonner Freis’s favorite tea.
The swarm starts the water boiling and holds up the box like it is displaying it.
We’re going to have a whole menu based on the food Tonner likes.
I could tell him to make things he doesn’t want, but I don’t think he’d do it , Dafyd says. There’s a little laughter at the corner of his eyes, and the swarm feels a rush of pleasure at making him feel pleasure. The kettle ticks as it starts to heat.
I haven’t heard from her , Dafyd says . I haven’t heard from any of them. I think I will. I’m technically in charge of them, but I don’t know what that means, exactly.
He thinks you’re here because of Jessyn , Jellit says .
He doesn’t think you like him, he thinks you need him to keep tabs on my sister.
He’s not your friend. We weren’t buddies back on Anjiin.
We didn’t have romantic feelings for each other.
You are hauling all of this around by yourself.
This thing you want to have happen, won’t.
The swarm spoons bits of gel into the cups where they will melt when the water comes. Its eyes feel uncomfortable. A little sting of tears. Dafyd pretends not to notice, thinking that the emotion is about a brother missing a sister. So many levels of misunderstanding.
It’s all right , the swarm says to Dafyd. The words mean half a dozen things.
It will finish making the tea, hand the cup to Dafyd, and then it will tell him.
The war against the Carryx is still being fought.
The spy that was here before in the flesh of his lover is still here.
It is still gathering intelligence that might turn the tide of violence against the empire.
They may still find the way that they can burn the Carryx worlds to ash.
The water will boil. The gel will melt. It will tell him.
And the rest? Jellit says . Are you going to tell him about smuggling out the data you’ve gathered?
Tell him how you broke off a piece of yourself and hid it in someone who was shipping out?
Tell him that as soon as it’s in range of your buddies on the other side, it’s going to pop like a hand grenade?
Go ahead, tell him that your mission is about to kill another one of his friends.
See how much he loves you for it. We’ll watch.
The water boils.
This is not the day it will reveal itself.