Eleven
Eleven
T hey nibble each other hello,” Tonner said, and took another bite of his salad.
Jellit, sitting across the table from him, seemed to regain focus from wherever his mind had been wandering.
The commissary was three levels down from his lab, and functionally the heart of their little township.
Architecturally, it wasn’t much different from the other spaces—bronze walls that leaned subtly in at the top—but it had a bank of windows along one side that looked out toward the horizon.
The natural light made the place feel almost welcoming.
He’d heard that someone had started holding religious services there, but that wasn’t something that interested him.
“The Soft Lothark…?” Jellit said.
“Nibble each other,” Tonner repeated. “Brun pointed it out last week. They’re always hanging around my lab.”
“Mine too.”
“They would, wouldn’t they? You and me are the only ones doing anything important.
But the point is, when a new one comes in, they talk to each other, and each one of them takes a little bite off the other.
Just a quick—” Tonner clicked his teeth together.
“Looks like parasite removal, except that it doesn’t last long.
Vestigial grooming behavior, Brun thinks. ”
The tables were laid out in an intentionally casual fashion.
No defined aisles, no columns or rows. It was, he thought, intended to give a sense of egalitarianism.
The commissary was public space. They were a city now.
Or the seed that would bloom into a whole new branch of humanity that lived and died as the pets and domestic beasts of the Carryx.
Or a township a few thousand strong with a serious demographic problem—too many old people and not enough young.
It was something Tonner had been thinking about more, now that Dafyd’s lamb sacks were in place.
The way that the quarters of the human moiety, for all their windows and murals and artfully arranged dining tables, still felt like a prison.
Having children there would change that.
Someday, there would be adolescents sneaking off to make babies of their own away from the prying eyes of their grandparent-aged caregivers.
There’d be schools and families and birthday parties, or something like them.
But there wouldn’t be zoos, because everything was already a zoo, and they were on the wrong side of the bars.
“I don’t know,” Jellit said. “I’m not sure I buy it.”
“Buy what?”
“Vestigial grooming.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Jellit said. “It just feels… off.”
The truth was, Brun’s theory seemed a little glib to Tonner too, but Jellit wasn’t in the life sciences, and Tonner still had enough of the old prejudices that he didn’t want to agree with someone of lower status too quickly.
It was petty, and Tonner knew it was petty.
In a better world, that would have been enough to make him abandon it.
Across the room, a table of other captives laughed at something one of them had said.
When Tonner looked over, the others were all careful to look away.
He and Jellit were, after all, two of Alkhor’s inner circle, which put them at a certain level of status and power.
It might almost have felt good, except that the path to it ran through Dafyd.
He ate more of his salad. The leaves were crisp and heavy, they tasted like chlorophyll, and he could almost mistake them for real lettuce instead of the modified kelp that they were.
He was proud that the aquaculture gardens were cranking out enough that the commissary could offer it.
Lo, I am Tonner Freis, and here is my bounty for you all.
“What?” Jellit asked, and then, “You laughed.”
“I was being ridiculous,” Tonner said. “You’re lucky I kept it to myself. How’s it going with the new team?”
“They’re training up,” Jellit said, and put the spoon into his bowl of grain mash as if he might actually ingest some of it. “It’s slower than I’d like. We lost a lot when we lost the others. But we’re starting to get results that seem like progress instead of just catching up.”
It was where their worlds met, these days.
Jellit had lost his team to slaughter at the hands of the Carryx.
Tonner had lost his by being their special favorites, and too valuable to keep on a single project.
For both of them, training up a new team had been the order of the day, except for all the other orders on all the other days.
It seemed to be wearing Jellit down more, though.
The man didn’t look exhausted so much as vaguely bereft all the time.
And while Tonner couldn’t put an exact reason for it, he had the impression that Jellit had had some kind of falling out with Alkhor.
Which, well… they all would, eventually. Kings don’t have friends, they have subjects.
“I’ve just gotten some new marching orders for my people,” Tonner said.
“Not two animals like the berries and the not-turtle, but a kind of grasslike thing and a listing of what they want it to produce. Along with a few please don’t also make it poison restrictions.
I don’t know what’s planning to eat it, but it’s nice to be back on something that’s actually cutting edge. I wasn’t born to be a farmer.”
“Nothing against farmers,” Jellit said, distractedly.
“I assume it’s streamlining food supplies for the soldiers. Maybe it’s Rak-hund chow. It’d be funny as hell if those bastards turned out to be herbivores.”
Jellit leaned forward and tapped a single finger hard on the table like he was pinning an idea down so it couldn’t flutter away. “They eat their dead too.”
“Rak-hund eat their dead?”
“No, the Soft Lothark. On the ship coming here, when Ostencour tried his first failed rebellion, they stabbed one of the Lothark guards to death and it exploded. Made everyone who got the goo on them sick. But then the other Soft Lothark came in and they ate the body. I figured at the time whatever the poisons were, they were really metabolically expensive to make, so the organism would have evolved to, you know, conserve the supply. Like eating the dead to reclaim their toxin. But that’s two examples now where they’re processing each other orally.
That’s interesting, right? I mean, I think that’s interesting. ”
Something flew past the windows, and Tonner’s mind matched them as pigeons even though they absolutely weren’t. That happened a lot, the way things used to be impinging on the way they were now.
“Didn’t you come over on the ship with Allstin and that woman with the big teeth,” Tonner said. “Ostencour was with Alkhor and Else and them.”
Chagrin flickered over Jellit’s face, and he shrugged. “Jessyn told me about it. I guess I kind of internalized it.”
“Weird the things that stick in your mind. Yeah, I remember the others talked about that. I didn’t really put it together.”
“It’s probably nothing. The two things just kind of chimed off each other in my head,” Jellit said. He finally took the spoonful of mash. It looked gluey and cold. He should have eaten it faster. “Do you… Do you think about them much? The team from when you were first here?”
“Like Jessyn? Hell yes. There’s probably ten times a day I’d give an eyetooth to have them back together.
Even with Campar’s stupid jokes. Hell, even Rickar Daumatin.
I mean, Brun and Kirrik and Sommerson are decent, but we had something special with that group.
There was a chemistry there. We made progress . ”
“Do you think about Else?”
Tonner kept his voice light. “I think about her too, sometimes. She was a good lab partner. Wickedly smart and had a gift for organization I really miss.”
“She didn’t…” Jellit began and then seemed to lose his way. “She could have treated you a little more gently.”
Tonner speared another leaf of almost-lettuce, bit down on it slowly, savoring the feeling of the cellulose crushing between his teeth.
He tilted his head. “Are you going through something?” Jellit leaned back, blinking in a way that meant yes, he was absolutely going through something.
Tonner gestured with the empty fork. “It’s just that you don’t usually bring up personal stuff.
So when you start asking me about Else dumping me for Alkhor, it makes me wonder if you’re maybe dealing with some shit of your own. ”
The thin man almost denied it. The shake of the head had already started when he sagged forward. “Yes,” Jellit said. “I guess maybe I am.”
“Someone turned you down?”
“Yes,” Jellit said, then laughed once harshly. “I thought I was going to be a happy surprise, but I wasn’t.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Someone from the lab.”
“I mean, I’m not in a position to lecture anyone about mixing work and relationships. When Else and I got together, there were plenty of people who were happy to explain why it was a bad idea,” Tonner said, then went on eating.
“I remember,” Jellit said. “I mean, I got it all thirdhand, but… I don’t know. I don’t think I understand… people. It’s strange, you know? I dedicate my life to finding things out, and the thing that breaks me is the one that everyone else has just by default.”
“That’s not true. No one understands love. Or sex. Or whatever went wrong for you and whoever turned you down. We’re all just bundles of evolved instinct and performative bullshit.”
“I don’t know if that’s comforting or not.”
“You want to tell me what happened?”
Jellit was silent for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think I do. Just… When you think about Else, about how she turned out not to be what you thought she was, can you forgive her?”
“I don’t know,” Tonner said. “She never asked.”