Fifteen
Fifteen
I n the dream, Dafyd knew he was dreaming. It didn’t help.
He was supposed to be reporting to Ekur-Tkalal, the keeper-librarian of the human moiety, but the hall that led to the librarian’s chambers curved the wrong way, splitting and turning and splitting again into a labyrinth crowded with the bodies of Carryx lumbering about the business of the empire.
The half-mind wasn’t working, and every effort to fix it made things worse.
Dafyd felt the rising panic—if he failed to report, he’d be killed along with all the others, the babies would be raised without them.
The thought of children cradled in the thin feeding arms of the Carryx was more terrifying than the thought of death.
The nightmare played in a loop. He would approach one of the Carryx in the halls, trying to ask how to find the librarian.
When the half-mind failed, he would try to pull up the shapes that were the Carryx written language, manipulating the soft, glowing objects into the physical representation of thoughts.
But the sentences would be wrong, the shapes moving out of grammar and into incoherence.
And then the Carryx would be gone, and the loop began again.
A Carryx, a failure to speak, a failure to write, and start over.
He was trapped in the dream, and the fact that he was dreaming made no difference to the panic.
When, after a night that lasted decades, the pattern finally broke, it broke like this:
A huge silver Carryx stood at the intersection of two dark bronze hallways.
Its abdomen was still, the four legs braced as if it was about to engage in combat, but the massive fighting arms were planted on the floor.
Its insectile feeding arms were folded in against its thorax, and a hundred eyes shifted on its face.
Dafyd ran to it, throwing himself to the deck and begging for help. I have to find my keeper.
The silver Carryx rested on its fighting arms, adjusting its vast weight.
It spoke in its own tongue, like birdsong pitched down until it was almost too deep for human ears.
And this time, instead of reaching for the square of the half-mind or summoning up the glowing symbols of the written reports, Dafyd trilled back to it.
He felt the flutter of the song in the depths of his throat, like he’d grown a secret beak in the cartilage of his voice box.
He repeated his question in words and phrases his human mind didn’t parse.
The silver Carryx replied in kind, and he knew it was saying There is no need for agitation. They are expecting you.
Dafyd leaned forward on his fighting arms, his abdomen skittering behind him restless and excited, as the silver beast stepped aside and made way for him.
The meeting he needed was down this corridor, and as Dafyd lumbered into the darkness, his weight carried by the immense strength of his fighting arms, his merely human eyes opened, the nightmare broken at last.
He let out a long, shuddering breath and rolled to his side.
His sleeping room wasn’t more like a prison cell than his old one had been.
It wasn’t much sparer than his apartment at Irvian had been.
The bed was comfortable and wide enough to accommodate two, though it never did.
The blankets that the Carryx provided were warm and soft when they weren’t wound into ropes between his legs and around his left arm.
One of the other human captives had started making art out of wire left over from the hydroponic labs, and she’d given Dafyd one of her pieces: a set of three concentric circles that seemed to float on a background of bright copper triangles.
He’d mounted it on the wall. It was the only decoration.
He rolled onto his back, willing the dream to fall into forgetfulness.
This one was tenacious, though. He could still feel the mass and power of Carryx arms, the agitation of a four-legged abdomen he’d never had.
The visceral quality of the experience made it worse.
The night hadn’t let him rest, but the idea of drifting back to sleep held no charm.
Neither did getting up and facing his day’s work.
So instead, he let himself float for a few minutes, not awake and not asleep but some third state in between.
Thoughts rose into his mind and drifted away.
The spy was still hiding among the humans.
He had reports to get through from some of the human explorers that the Carryx had taken.
Andermus had canceled the day’s meeting, busy as she was with some aspect of policing the human moiety.
Korham was supposed to deliver a list of the supplies they’d need to build the nursery for the generations of babies they were about to bring into the prison world, and Dafyd would have to make the case for it all.
There was a kind of lemon ice he’d had when he was growing up that came in a green cup with a flat bit of bamboo for a spoon.
He had loved it, and he’d never have it again.
He breathed out, forced himself up to sitting.
His eyes felt gritty. The shower was in a closet at the edge of the room, and he stood under the warm spray, head bowed, for a long time after the last of the red goo the Carryx used for soap had rinsed off his body and washed down the drain.
He cracked open a waxy tube and unrolled a fresh tunic, a clean pair of trousers.
Someday the human moiety would make its own clothes with embroidery and tailoring.
Robes. Vests. Skirts that would flare out at the knee when the wearer spun in a dance.
It might not happen in his lifetime, though.
And if they didn’t teach the children to want it, that it had been that way once and could be again, maybe it wouldn’t happen at all. That was a grim thought.
His Rak-hund chaperon was waiting outside his door, and as he walked to the commissary, its knifepoint feet ticked against the floor behind him. When the doorways and halls cleared out ahead of him, he didn’t know if the others were avoiding him or his alien murderer or both.
The common spaces were less common when he was in them.
In the commissary, he sat alone to eat except for the Rak-hund that stationed itself behind him, watching his back.
The only ones who ever shared his meals were his five advisors.
Four, now that Jellit—the thing living in Jellit’s skin—was avoiding him.
Three, since Tonner always found something pressing to do.
Andermus, the chief of police. Korham, the architect and builder.
And Tomos, who called herself his minister of propaganda every chance she got.
Uuya Tomos, who was walking toward him now, and dragging Ver Cannedan behind her.
The choreographer whose punch had summoned the Soft Lothark, Rak-hund, and attention of Ekur-Tkalal.
The arrogant little dancer whose moment of selfish spite had upended all of them.
Dafyd felt heat shoot up his neck and into his cheeks.
“I was hoping we’d catch you here,” the old woman said, pulling the little choreographer down to sit beside her. “We have a proposal. Hear me out?”
“All right,” Dafyd said, and realized they were the first words he’d spoken that day.
“I want Ver here working for me,” Uuya Tomos said. “I’ll put him out in the world with a translating half-mind. His project is to observe the Carryx. Watch them interact with each other, with other species.”
“Why?”
“Movement study,” Ver said.
“Everything we do with the Carryx is through language,” Uuya Tomos said.
“Little voice boxes that spit out words. Your writing things for your reports. Sure, the writing is in three dimensions instead of marks on a page. Yes, the translators are turning our words into whatever they’re listening to.
But it’s all through language . And language is by its nature incomplete, isn’t it?
Do you see what I’m getting at? How much of normal communication is nonverbal? Non linguistic ?”
“If I go out and observe them,” Ver said, “I can suss out how they use their bodies as signals. When they shift, and when they go still. How they hold themselves when they’re being dominant and when they’re submitting.”
“Carryx body language,” Dafyd said, and he could hear the skepticism in his own voice.
“And ways to duplicate it—or at least gesture toward it—with a human frame,” Ver said, and then looked away like he’d embarrassed himself with his enthusiasm.
Uuya Tomos, on the other hand, was leaning in, her eyes bright and her jaw forward.
It was like they were making her case by example.
A wave of memory ran through Dafyd. Walking on fighting arms he didn’t have.
The shifting of his abdomen on four smaller legs.
He imagined one of those fighting arms snapping around and wiping the grin off Cannedan’s face.
“It’s an interesting idea. I’ll think about it.”
“These things call us animals,” Uuya Tomos said, “but they had to evolve up out of the ooze, just like everyone else. And evolution is an imperfect system, so they’ll have limitations and shortcuts just like any other species.”
“Doing it might also be dangerous. Our former librarian almost killed me once for telling it I wanted to understand the Carryx. But I’ll think about it.”
Ver put a hand on Uuya’s arm like he was holding her back from a fight. “That’s all I would ask. Consider it. Know that the work is available for you.”
He rose to leave, but Uuya didn’t. When Ver looked confused, she waved at him to go but didn’t rise from her seat. The choreographer looked from her to the Rak-hund lurking in the corner of the room, and left in the other direction.
“We have other things to talk about?” Dafyd asked.
“We do, but I thought we could start by discussing Ver behind his back. You don’t like the idea.”