Ten
Ten
J essyn decanted the liquid from the bottom of the glass sheets drop by drop.
It smelled musty and a little astringent, like medicinal tea and acorns.
She had scratched a line in the side of the little cup she used.
When the fluid reached the mark, she closed the stop and dropped the molarity sensor into the cup.
While the reading took, she topped her little farm up with fresh distilled water, glucose, and a powder of micronutrients.
It was astonishing, really, how many different biomes seemed to like glucose.
Some molecules were just friendlier than others.
She heard the clicking of Rak-hund legs against the deck and the wet, slapping sound of Sinen speech a moment before the half-mind translated the words. “Why are you on the ship? Your work is elsewhere.”
Third Gardener stood in her doorway, its elongated pupils taking her in.
“Just topping off some supplies,” Jessyn said.
“You need further supplies?” the Sinen said, making it a question.
It felt like a trap. There was a curve, she was certain, that measured the value the Carryx extracted from her and the cost to them to make that extraction.
She didn’t know where she fell on it, but she knew what happened if she fell off.
“No,” she said. “What I have is sufficient.”
The Sinen made some low grunting noises that either weren’t speech or weren’t meant for her and waddled away. She drank down the medicine. It was objectively repulsive, but she was starting to develop a taste for it.
The makeshift plaza between the ships was busy with researchers from the various species.
The ground had been trampled flat by the feet and paws and pseudopods, the local plant life crushed to mulch.
There were two other humans—a gray-haired woman and a relatively young man she recognized as the geologist who’d lost his notebook down a crack.
Jessyn paused, looking around the crowd of strange bodies in case she’d overlooked just one other human being, but he wasn’t there.
The gray-haired woman met her gaze and nodded her greeting.
“How’s the fieldwork?” she asked.
“Well, nothing’s shot at me or exploded yet,” Jessyn said. “So I’ve got that.”
“Good for you, then,” she said. “Keep it up.”
Jessyn moved on. Something about being around other people lately had started to grate on her. Not everyone, true, but everyone else.
The path to the half-burned orchard led up over a series of low, rolling hills.
She walked with long steps, the satchel with her notebook and her half-mind and her sampling kit bouncing against her thigh.
The ruins of the city rose up to her right, looking ancient.
That was probably an illusion. Something had lived there not long ago, just the way she’d lived on Anjiin.
And then it was gone, just like her life and all that she’d expected of it.
War aged everything as if time and violence were two concentrations of the same thing.
The grass and plant analogs along the path were familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
Broad leaves on some, narrow on others, each one conforming to its niche in the eternal struggle for light and nutrients.
Her legs ached pleasantly with the walk, and the sky above her felt endless.
In other contexts, it would have been a beautiful day.
Or maybe it still was a beautiful day. That was a hell of a thought.
The maybe-orchard, when she reached it, showed every sign of having been intentionally cultivated.
The first thing was the regularity of the trees in a square, fourteen to a side.
A fire had burned about a third of the southern edge, leaving blackened trunks over scorched ground.
There was also a series of what looked like irrigation ditches about a hand’s width deep and overgrown now with weeds and grass.
The leaf analogs were very familiar—a deep green that spoke of something that had learned the best ways to absorb light, a simple vasculature, an oblong shape with a little roughness at the sides.
The fruit was green and oblong too, and it reminded her of pears.
It even smelled a little like pears when she sat cross-legged in the shade, cut one open, and dug out spoonfuls of the pale flesh for the initial test run.
The sampling kit was a miniature version of tools she’d only ever used in labs before.
The static centrifuge was the most obviously Carryx technology.
It was the size of her index finger, and it didn’t spin, but all the calibration runs showed that it gave the same results as the traditional kind.
The resonance scanner was too small to have very good resolution.
The reactivity cards looked like something she’d have used in general science classes when she was a teenager.
And still, it was science. She was here, the first human being to glimpse inside this particular set of evolutionary solutions, and the idea left her a little giddy.
As she loaded the resonance specimens, she found herself humming a song that had been popular when she had first been placed in Tonner Freis’s research group.
After a few minutes, she started singing, fitting in new words where she couldn’t recall the original lyrics.
There was no one there to judge her or think she was being silly.
When the run started, she pulled out her notebook and a couple of ration bars and started a report on what she’d found and the steps she’d taken, working through the draft without saving it to the local archives until she could go over it again.
The sun was warm against her skin, though. And the food, bland and familiar as it was, still filled her belly. Postprandial stupor , that was the term. She lay back on the ground, her head pillowed by her right arm, watched the clouds, and waited.
This was as close to free as she might ever be.
Third Gardener kept watch on her work output, but not on her.
If she decided to keep on pushing south past the evacuation line, she didn’t think she’d be valuable enough to chase after.
What is, is, the Carryx said. A bad servant that lost herself was better off lost. A defective person driven away by her defects made the empire stronger by her absence.
She could get up right now and go. Maybe the forces of the enemy would find her and kill her.
Maybe she’d stumble into a trap they’d left for the Carryx.
Or maybe she’d bumble her way through the minefield and find a little lake someplace, and the grass and mud to build a little shelter for herself.
She could live there until her brain went bad and the food ran out and she died alone—blessedly alone—with no one to notice or mourn her.
With no one to weep. She was tired of sorrow and anger and responsibility.
The idea of being truly alone, even for the short time before her food ran out, left her feeling intoxicated.
Off to her left, something buzzed. A yellow thing that her mind placed somewhere between finch and cicada had landed on one of the burned trunks, the brightness of its carapace showing boldly against the black.
She watched it as it shifted slowly counterclockwise, then shuddered and launched into the air again.
Whatever it was, it could have been alive when the trees were unburned.
It could have known the city when it had inhabitants and a community of life that ran through it.
Maybe the little thing was trying to make sense of what happened and why the bark that had once tasted sweet had turned bitter.
“I’d explain it to you, little sister,” Jessyn said to the empty air, “but it barely makes sense to me.”
The bug-thing, wherever it was, didn’t reply, but some larger animal shifted in the tall grass at the orchard’s edge, startled by her voice.
She rolled over onto her belly, propped herself up on her elbows, and looked.
Nothing emerged. She checked the kit. The estimate was 42 percent complete, but she didn’t believe it.
Resonance scanners always made that last five minutes more like fifteen.
With a sigh, she returned to the report she’d prepared, read through it again for clarity and accuracy, and saved it to the archive.
Somewhere north of her, Third Gardener was probably very pleased that its vassals were being productive. Weaselly little shit.
She lay back down.
The clouds shifted, moving too slowly to see the changes but changing all the same.
She could relate to that. She wasn’t remotely who she’d been before, and while she had noticed the more dramatic, violent transformations when they’d happened, there were others—deeper ones, she thought—that had come over her too slowly to notice.
She wondered how Garral P?r fit into that.
If anyone had asked her, she would have said there was negative chance that she’d get involved with a man who had a wife, much less a wife and two sons and a sex buddy back on the Carryx world-palace.
It would have been a disgusting thought, except that it wasn’t.
Would a fling be such a terrible thing? Did she think there was something to protect by holding on to the rules and standards of a different circumstance?
The environment tells you how to live in it. That was what she’d told him. Part of her had been listening too…