Eleven #2
After they finished lunch, Tonner went back to the main labs.
He’d been able to give most of the food production and aquaculture maintenance over to Bastien Korham, but the interesting bits, he kept for himself.
There were some nutrition assays that he wasn’t quite ready to let go of, and the whole progeny project.
Right now, the lamb sacks were one hundred and eighteen blisters of fluid the size of his palm.
Each one had a tiny spray of pale cells, no bigger than his thumbnail.
He’d spent two years when he was first attending medrey on a project that grew its own experimental animals, but those had been pigs and lambs.
Even if they looked the same, these little webs of pale nothing wouldn’t develop into animal models with specific kidney disorders or designed immune systems. These were going to be people, or at least the ones that made it to gestational independence would.
Thirty-two of them had already failed and been flushed.
It wasn’t that far off from normal miscarriage rates.
People who didn’t work with living systems never understood how much failure was built into nature.
For them it was all some playtime fantasy of one-thing-fits-into-another as part of a great and perfect design.
Near misses and mutations and combinations of protein and sugar that worked most of the time but also crashed out for no clear reason or re-sorted into random chimeric fuckups—those were the truth of life.
The mess and imperfection and well-fuck-it-close-enough of evolution.
But this was his lab. God might be okay with losing a third of every crop, but Tonner was not.
He knew he could do better than that, and so the lost samples bothered him.
And also today, everything bothered him.
Jellit had put the memory of Else back in his head, and the echo of her was like a splinter in his eye.
Since the day the Carryx had come to Anjiin, Tonner had been carrying an oceanic fear in his belly.
He’d done enough brain function work to recognize it as a trauma effect.
You see a bunch of people you know murdered in front of you, your personal autonomy is stripped off you, and you live under the constant threat of death for a while, maybe suffer a traumatic injury—a broken arm, say—and sure.
It fucked you up. Sure, you woke up from nightmares every few days.
Sure, you agreed to make children for your masters despite the fact that most of your life, what you’re doing would have been monstrously criminal.
But Tonner could keep that down, swallow it.
Bring up his dead ex-partner over lunch salad, though, and boom. Stress levels through the fucking roof. He could already tell he’d need something chemical to let him sleep tonight. It was ridiculous.
The new work—the more interesting work—was based out of the old labs, the ones they’d been assigned before he and Alkhor had proven that humanity was a net asset to the Carryx empire.
And odd as it was, the walk from the new human facilities to those old places was calming.
When they’d first arrived, he’d hated the corridors and open spaces filled with the servants and captives of the empire.
Now, he walked past dog-sized crablike things studded with jewels and huge, hulking beasts like silverback gorillas with a dozen eyes and a mouth that opened sideways, past the occasional Carryx with their restless four-legged abdomen and stone-still thorax resting on massive fighting arms. It was like going on a crowded bus.
Even the swirling jellyfish that shifted in the tall air of the cathedral-huge commons was familiar now.
Still miraculous, still overwhelming if he stopped and thought about it, but the same miracles and horrors as the days and weeks before. That was how he survived it.
He’d thought Brun would be at the new old lab, the one they’d won when they’d triggered the genocide of the little feather monkeys that called themselves Night Drinkers.
The old old lab was the one where Irinna had died.
Someday, he’d be telling that story to a child that he’d helped make.
How humanity came to the world-palace, had been murdered by their enemies, and then murdered them back.
History lessons, as empty to them as lectures on the Serintist wars in Abbasat had been to him.
Brun wasn’t there, though. Sommerson, with her red-gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, was finishing a run in the resonance imager, and one of the new ones—a pale-skinned man whose name Tonner hadn’t bothered to learn—was in the back sterilizing sample plates.
And one of Dafyd’s pet Soft Lothark was loitering at the mouth of the lab, bits of fur clinging like lichen to its absurdly long limbs.
Tonner watched it as it moved its weight from foot to foot, its small black eyes shifting around.
“Hey, boss,” Sommerson said. “You’re just in time. I’ve got a functional site analysis that’s got some interesting data.”
“Functional site analysis can be bullshitty. Too many false positives,” Tonner said absently.
“If Soft Lothark were social groomers, they wouldn’t look so ragged and moth-eaten, would they?
I mean, if you were a social groomer, you’d look groomed, right?
And what kind of pressures drive you toward cannibalizing your dead?
There’d have to be something really useful to outweigh the infection risk. ”
“I don’t know what we’re talking about, boss.”
Tonner rubbed his eyes with one thumb and the knuckle of his index finger. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something a friend of mine said, and…” He shook his head.
Sommerson moved to her right, making room for him at the imager.
Instead of looking at the offered data, Tonner hesitated, then walked to the back of the lab.
The pale man looked up. He’d probably run financial systems for a continent or something back when that mattered.
Tonner ignored him now, plucking up a bench glove and a sterile plate.
On the way back out, he put the plate by the imager and snapped on the glove.
The Soft Lothark ignored him until Tonner reached out and touched its arm. Even through the glove, its pelt seemed greasy and hard. The Lothark placed one large hand against his chest and shoved him back hard enough to nearly knock him off his feet. It took one aggressive step in his direction.
“Whoa there, buddy. I’m not a threat,” he said, backing away and waving his hands at it to show he had no weapon. “I’m Tonner. I’m in charge of the labs here and back at the main site for the human moiety.”
The Lothark stopped moving, but its arms remained half raised, as though it were still considering whether or not to throw a punch.
The half-mind hanging from its neck made a series of wet growls and clicks, and the Soft Lothark relaxed a bit.
It spoke, and the human voice that came from the half-mind was calm and affectless. “Do not physically interact.”
“My apologies,” Tonner said, taking another step back. “Humans often engage in social touching as a friendly gesture between peers.”
The Soft Lothark made what seemed like entirely too long a response for the translated reply. “Humans and Soft Lothark do not.”
Tonner smiled his ongoing apology and continued backing away.
When he was sure the guard wasn’t going to run him down and beat him to death, he turned and walked back to the resonance imager.
He popped open the sample plate with his ungloved hand, then carefully pressed his gloved fingers against it, first the back and then the front to capture as much discarded matter as he could.
Even with his naked eye, he could make out little patches of oil with darker flecks in it.
On impulse, he sniffed the plate. Soft Lothark fur had a smell like potting soil.
He closed the sample plate, sealed it, and fed it into the resonance imager. A basic run wouldn’t take long.
“Something up?” Sommerson asked.
“Not really. Just, you know. Curiosity.” Tonner stripped off the glove and tossed it in with the waste. “All right, so show me what you’re working on.”