Five
Five
T onner Freis scowled at the sampling sheet like it had insulted him personally. The sheets of crystal were thin enough to pull the water out of the tanks by simple capillary action and clear as air. The sample itself should not have been cloudy.
The sample was cloudy.
“God,” Tonner said, then took a breath, “ damn it.”
“It’s like that in tanks five and six as well,” Brun said.
Tonner dropped the sampling sheet into the sink and ran his hands through his hair. His left foot was tapping fast, the way it did sometimes when he needed to think through a particularly hard problem.
“So twelve, five, and six,” he said.
“I ran assays—”
“No,” Tonner said. “Not talking, you. Being quiet. Twelve, five, and six. But not one or two or three or four. What am I looking at?”
Brun swallowed. His larynx bounced like a fishing bob with a trout on the line. What did twelve, five, and six have in common? There had to be something…
“Tonner!” Jellit called from across the lab. Another tall, lanky man was striding between the hydroponic tanks. He and Brun could have been manufactured from the same mold with just a few alterations. “Tonner, why are you still here? We’re supposed to be in the meeting.”
“I am in the middle of something.”
Jellit took Tonner by the hand, drawing him gently forward. Tonner felt a flash of incandescent annoyance tempered by an unexpected nostalgia. It was the same thing Else had done to get him moving back during some other lifetime.
“Fine,” he said. Then, over his shoulder, “Brun! Have Kirrik and Abfoss check for viral proteins. Make sure we don’t have an infection in the plants, yeah?”
“Will do,” Brun called after them.
They stepped into the corridor that led to the living quarters and, past them, Jellit’s visualization lab.
A long, sweeping ramp led up to the next level, and then the levels above that.
Distant sunlight stained the pale walls reddish.
It could have been dawn or sunset, Tonner had lost track of the cycles of natural time in the world-palace.
“What does Lord Alkhor need that’s so fucking urgent, anyway?” Tonner snapped. Jellit, wisely, didn’t respond.
Tonner Freis had been the top mind in the scientific demimonde of Anjiin.
Now he was troubleshooting food tanks and getting rushed to meetings that his dishwasher had called.
It was ridiculous. A part of him—the small, sane voice behind all the rest—told him that the invasion and abduction, the violence and the loss, had broken him in some fundamental way.
And quietly, privately, he accepted this fact the way he would any new and irrefutable data point.
Then he set it aside and went back to the business of being himself.
They were all broken, one way and another.
That didn’t make Dafyd Alkhor’s mandatory meetings any less bullshit.
There were two unfamiliar faces in the meeting room, for values of unfamiliar approximating knew of but not approaching knew .
The older woman with the thin face and the wreath of iron-gray hair standing out from her skull like the halo of some Serintist saint was Uuya Tomos.
She was a folklorist and social historian who’d reorganized the medrey system more or less single-handedly.
He hadn’t read any of her work, but there had been a couple of years when he’d just started his studies that her Wolf of the World mythic novels had been ubiquitous.
The thick-bodied man, he couldn’t quite put a name to.
The hand he held out to Tonner was the bleached white of a melanin disorder and much stronger than Tonner had expected.
“Bastien Korham,” the thick, pale man said. “Good to make your acquaintance.”
“Same,” Tonner said, trying to match the man’s grip strength. “Except I’m Tonner Freis. Same about the acquaintance part.”
Korham smiled and let go of what was left of Tonner’s knuckles. Jellit took a seat at the long bronze table. Tonner made a show of looking around the conference room.
“Isn’t Alkhor supposed to be here?” he said. “I was under the impression this was his meeting.”
“He’ll be here,” Jellit said. “We split the duty of rounding up strays.”
Tonner took one of the empty seats. “So what were you in the before times, Korham?”
“I was the plant manager for the Gallatian church in Amreth, Astincol, and Bar.”
“Plant manager?”
His smile was almost apologetic. “The church provided shelter and work for thirty thousand people. My crews kept the lights on and the water running.”
Tonner remembered that now. There had been a scandal about sweatshops and economic exploitation. This didn’t seem to be the time to bring it up. He made do with “Sounds like a big job.”
Korham bowed his head, but Uuya Tomos was the one who spoke. “The Carryx took a lot of leaders when they came, but not many followers.”
“The best managers of work,” Korham agreed, “but not, I think, all the best workers. I’m an indifferent plumber.”
“Shows something about what we used to value,” Uuya Tomos said with a thin smile.
Dafyd’s voice echoed from the corridor. Tonner couldn’t make out the words, but he knew the timbre and rhythm like an old and disliked song.
The voice that took the other half of the conversation was higher and almost querulous, and the woman it belonged to was thin, pale, and vulpine.
If a gray fox had been remade as a woman in her late thirties, it would have been the person who walked in with Dafyd Alkhor.
Dafyd himself looked like he’d aged half a decade in the time since his elevation.
The lines around his mouth were deeper and furrows in his forehead had a look of permanence.
More than that, he held himself differently.
Alkhor had raised himself up to be the lord of all humanity in the world-palace, but at least he didn’t seem to be enjoying himself.
There was something to celebrate in that, anyway.
“Thank you,” Dafyd said, and took his place at the table. The fox woman nodded to each of them in a series of precise movements like a clockwork toy, then took the stool to Alkhor’s left. “Does everyone know everyone else?”
“I don’t think we’ve met officially,” the fox woman said, addressing the whole room without making it feel awkward. “I’m Llian Andermus. I used to be director of operational security for Itzibahn Common.”
Uuya Tomos went still, and Korham leaned forward.
Tonner knew Itzibahn Common as a small nation in Anjiin’s southern hemisphere with a history of colonialism and more wealth than its territory created.
It felt like something out of a children’s story now.
Once upon a time, there was a country called Itzibahn Common.
The name Llian Andermus didn’t mean anything to him, and he felt a little surge of annoyance that it seemed to carry weight for the others, like he was at a party where everyone was discussing a song he hadn’t heard.
“Tonner Freis,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Andermus said. “Professor Tomos. Mr. Korham. Professor Kaul.”
“I wasn’t a professor,” Jellit said. “I never taught.”
“I stand corrected,” Andermus said.
“So I asked you all here because things are changing,” Dafyd said, and the meeting part of the meeting had started.
“Since the invasion, we’ve been scrambling.
Either we were trying to get our bearings with the experiments that the Carryx wanted from us or we were trying to reconnect with each other.
Or now, we’re coming together in the new quarters and figuring out how that works. ”
Tonner leaned back. He noticed that Alkhor had dropped Plotting vengeance against the bastards who put us here or else selling out the plotters from his list of activities. He didn’t feel the need to point that out. Everyone at the table already knew it.
“We’re coming into a new phase,” Dafyd said. “Those first tests were to see what humans were useful for. They’ve made that decision. The Carryx want us to translate between trees of life, work on improving their stealth technologies, and become as self-sustaining as possible.”
“Is that not what we’ve been doing?” Tonner asked. “I feel like that’s been pretty much the mandate from the start.”
Dafyd took a breath, but Jellit was the one who answered. “They tested a lot of things. Art, music, organizational capacity and logistics, physical strength and endurance, mathematics. Those first few months, it wasn’t just us. There were hundreds of little experiments going on.”
“Throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck,” Dafyd said.
“And because of the way it all happened, we’ve got a terrible, ad hoc organization.
Tonner here is essentially in charge of both the translation between trees of life and getting a consistent food supply.
That’s two-thirds of everything, just on him.
Jellit lost most of the visualization team with Ostencour.
And now we have thousands of people who were at the tops of their fields, but their fields don’t matter anymore.
If we’re going to do the things the Carryx want, we have to change…
everything, really. That’s why you’re all here. I have a proposal.”
Tonner looked around, trying to judge how Dafyd’s speech was going over.
Korham’s eyebrows were high on his forehead.
It made him look like a surprised raccoon.
Jellit was nodding along with Dafyd’s every word.
Uuya Tomos, on the other hand, had a frown that could have cut glass, and Andermus had a poker face.
Which only left him. In truth, he felt a little glow of warmth that Dafyd at least acknowledged how much of the human project among the Carryx had fallen on his shoulders.
If the plan moving forward was to get him more underlings and the power to make things work the way he needed them to work, Tonner thought he might almost be all right with the changes.