Eight #2
“Survey work so far,” she said, and sipped her water. The cool was pleasant, and it had a little mineral bite to it that tasted like stone. “Plants that look like plants and bugs that look like bugs. I’ll know more when I can start taking them apart and seeing what they’re made of.”
“Plants that look like plants is interesting, though, no? I mean, wouldn’t you expect something different?”
“It says more about what kinds of pressures they’re under than anything about the organism. Back on Anjiin, you could mistake oaks and mirrins for each other, and they came up through completely different trees of life. An environment tells you how to live in it.”
Garral took a slice of bar off the grill and tossed it between his hands until it cooled enough to eat. “That’s a hell of a thought,” he said, and she thought there was something unexpected in his inflection. Sorrow, maybe. Or anger.
“It’s like the way so many organisms that move through water wind up some variation of fish-shaped.
Or things that live around light develop eyes.
Oxygen makes a great electron acceptor, so if there’s oxygen around, things will use it for respiration.
If there’s an atmosphere thick enough, something will figure out how to fly. ”
“And if your environment is under the Carryx’s thumb…” Garral said, and then didn’t finish the thought.
Jessyn felt the bitterness in his words like the clenching in her own neck when she thought about the world-palace. She wasn’t sure what it meant between them. Only that the conversation had changed somehow.
He sighed. Not too far away, something sang four falling notes of a broken chord. The sun had fallen below the horizon while they talked and ate and did whatever it was they were doing here. The warmth in the sky was what it left behind, and there were stars in it.
Jessyn thought that, if she wanted to, she could do anything just then.
“You have someone?” she asked, her voice small.
Garral looked at the fire in his grill. She hoped he wouldn’t lie.
“A friend on the Carryx world, yes,” he said. And then after a long pause, “And a wife and two sons back on Anjiin.”
“And what would they say about…” Her gesture took in the two of them.
“I don’t know,” Garral said. “We didn’t have a chance to talk about it. Either time. What about you? You have somebody?”
“No,” she said. “Not like that. There was someone I was sort of infatuated with for a while, but she died.”
“In the invasion, or after…”
“After. She never knew, I don’t think. We were close friends.
More than anything I think I was desperate for safety, and Irinna was very kind,” she said.
They were some of the most intimate words she’d ever spoken.
Saying them relaxed something in her that she hadn’t known was tense.
It felt like finally letting Irinna go. Maybe it had been a mistake to bring up her romantic failings.
Or maybe it hadn’t. Either way, they both knew that a moment had passed.
“Do you think,” Garral asked, “that they’ll take us back to the world-palace when we’re done here? Or do we just keep going forward? Move on from here to wherever they want us next, and then the one after that, and the one after that.”
“I think we’ll go back once this is over. But I don’t know.”
“That’s the part I hate the most. Not knowing.”
For a while, they were both quiet. A V formation of Euruk or something else like them passed overhead calling to each other in small, cooing voices. Jessyn ate a last bite of her food, drank the last of the bottle of water. The embers in the grill glowed golden and red.
“It’s getting late. I should get back to my camp. Scare off anything that’s looking to eat my samples.”
Garral stood, brushing off his tunic with the palms of wide hands. “Of course. I’m glad you could spend the hour. You see things with a different lens than I do. It helps me, getting out of my own head sometimes.”
“I know what you mean. We should do this again. Make a practice of it.”
She took the hand he offered and let him help her up, even though she didn’t need it. In the falling light, he looked rueful, but not peevish or annoyed. She would have been disappointed if he’d been annoyed.
“I could reach out to some of the others,” Garral said. “See if they wanted to come along too.”
Jessyn looked up at the darkening sky. The twilight was still too strong to make out the galactic disk, but there were stars. “I was thinking I should host next time, and my place isn’t as well-appointed as yours.”
Garral’s gaze flickered and was gone. “Maybe the time after next, then.”
“Maybe,” Jessyn said.
The walk back to her camp was cool. A thick, sweet scent made her think that something had waited for the darkness to pollinate or exchange signaling pheromones.
Night changed the shape of the landscape and the sounds of the wild.
Intellectually, Jessyn knew that there was probably some danger.
Night was a good time for carnivores to track down sleeping prey.
She didn’t feel it, though. An unknown beast here seemed like less of a threat than the Carryx or their soldiers or the other captive species.
Alone in the wilderness of an alien world was about as safe as she was likely to get.
Her thinking had a thick sense of effort, like she was working her way through a particularly complicated dataset, only without an actual problem she was trying to solve, the back of her mind furiously busy with something but unwilling to let the conscious sliver participate.
She put one foot in front of the other, her breath rising and falling in a deep, steady rhythm, the work of her muscles keeping her warm.
When the profound depths of her mind were ready, they could heave up some flash of insight.
Or, more likely, whatever bathypelagic struggle Garral P?r had started in her would work itself out and never rise to awareness except as the smile she found on her lips when she reviewed the night in her memory.
When she reached her little shelf of sandstone, she shook out the blankets and dislodged any little local creatures that might have taken refuge there.
She thought about starting a fire, but she could feel the first dip of tiredness that would, she knew, become a need for sleep.
She didn’t want to go through the effort of starting something just to put it out again, so she lay between her blankets, looked up at the sky, and let herself simply be for a moment.
Of the billions of stars, one of them might perhaps be the Carryx homeworld where Jellit and Tonner and Dafyd were waiting for her to come back. Another one might be Anjiin, where she’d lived without dreaming of the horrors and wonders that were coming for her until they had arrived.
But in all the billions and billions of systems, in all the galaxies too faint for her to see, none of them had Irinna.
Or Synnia. Or Nol. None of those suns shone down on Else Yannin or Llaren Morse.
And one day, the stars wouldn’t find her either.
Her or anyone she knew. All she had was the moment and the starlight.
The back of her mind seemed to find some peace in that.
Before she gave herself over to rest, she rolled to her side, propped open the notebook, and drafted a plan for the next day’s work.
There were four sites she’d noted that might be interesting.
Two had unnaturally round layouts that made her suspect they’d been cultivated fields, one was a thick copse of bamboo-like cane grass that didn’t match any of the surrounding vegetation, and the last was a stretch of treelike organisms that, even though half were burned, had the look of an orchard.
That last one was the farthest from the Carryx base, and it edged in closer to Garral’s camp. It was a stupid, petty reason to choose it over the others, and she marked it anyway before shutting down the notebook and curling into the blankets.
Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.