Fifteen #2
“I think it’s interesting, but I don’t trust him. How are you doing with the work for the nursery? They’re going to be born sooner than you think. You can already see their fingers and toes.”
“Let’s not change the subject just yet. Ver Cannedan is a brittle soul of the type only small men who become bullies ever achieve. He also spent four years studying bear, dog, and praying mantis movement for a project. I saw it at Sollan Amphitheater. It was astounding.”
“He can’t be trusted,” Dafyd said. “And honestly, it’s not even about getting punched, not really.
Humiliation is my daily gruel, here. If getting the occasional punch were the worst of it, I’d be thrilled.
But because Ver threw his little tantrum, we have guards now.
There are Soft Lothark patrolling the labs.
He’s why that fucking carpet of knives follows me everywhere.
That man’s selfish impulse made everything I’m trying to do a thousand times harder.
So it’s not that I don’t like him. It’s not that I don’t respect his ability.
It’s that I don’t trust him to not do something else in the spur of the moment that completely fucks up our world.
And I can’t work with people I don’t trust.”
“Is that what happened with Jellit Kaul?”
The words hit Dafyd’s bloodstream like she’d pulled a gun. He glanced at the Rak-hund, but it was too far to hear them. And hopefully not sophisticated enough to understand them if it did.
Uuya crossed her arms and hoisted her eyebrows. “Did you think no one would notice that he’s fallen from grace with you? You might be a low-level bureaucrat to the Carryx, but to the rest of us, you’re the man who decides how we live. If we live. Everything you do, we watch.”
“I don’t do anything,” Dafyd said. “I get up in the morning, I try to tell Ekur what we’ve accomplished, what we need, why the Carryx will be stronger if we get it. Then I go to bed hoping we won’t all be killed the next morning.”
“Except for every now and again when you recruit someone into a conspiracy,” she said, and her smile was more than a little mean. “How’s that going for you, by the way? Not a lot of spare time for it? Not many hands on the rope pulling along with you?”
“What do you want?”
“I want Ver Cannedan out studying the Carryx.”
“And I’m telling you that’s a huge risk. What happens if he feels disrespected and takes a swing at one?”
“Of course it’s a risk. So is not doing it. If you’re waiting to have the perfect instruments—people who’ll do things just the way you would and not have warts and flaws and screwups—you’ll be waiting forever. You work with what you’ve got. And what you’ve got is me and Ver Cannedan.”
“And Jellit.”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “And Jellit.”
They sat in silence while Dafyd finished his meal. Twice, others arrived in the commissary, but once they saw him and the Rak-hund and Uuya Tomos, they left again. He’d forgotten to shave, and his chin felt rough with the stubble.
“Use your best judgment,” he said as he rose.
The Rak-hund skittered to its feet and made its serpentine way after him.
If Uuya Tomos had anything else to say, he left before she said it.
He was supposed to go meet with the Sinen overseer to have his reports checked for grammar and form.
Instead, he turned down the long ramp to the south and made his way toward the visualization lab.
His stomach felt tight and cold, the way it sometimes did when he was getting sick. He wasn’t getting sick.
Since the last time he’d been to the visualization lab, someone had covered one of the long, dark walls with diagrams in white and vivid blue.
A matrix of yellow numbers showed responses at different wavelengths along the electromagnetic spectrum, and a graph beside it showed the same data in a different form.
Two ways of seeing the same thing. The shorter wall at the end where the archway led back toward their personal quarters was well on its way to exhaustion, filled with design schematics that seemed to describe the device that lay in the middle of the floor, halfway through being born.
Jellit and four others were talking about adaptive pseudoprimes when Dafyd walked in.
In the moments before they saw him, they seemed happy.
Jellit’s eyes went wide and he took an unconscious step back.
The others, sensing his fear, fell silent.
One of them—a gray-haired man whose name Dafyd didn’t know—put himself between the two of them as if he were preparing to defend his project lead.
Behind Dafyd, the Rak-hund skittered and tapped but stayed in place.
A brief, powerful loneliness washed through Dafyd.
He put the grief aside because he had to.
“I’m sorry to interrupt. Jellit, could I talk to you for a minute?”
“Of course,” Jellit said as he handed a coil of wire to the woman at his side. To his team, he said, “Keep going without me. I’ll be right back.”
Dafyd motioned the Rak-hund to stay where it was, and he and the thing in human skin walked to the corner where they could speak softly and not be overheard. The Jellit-thing’s eyes were cast down the same way Ver Cannedan’s had been.
“You’re making progress?” Dafyd asked.
“Some. We’ll have a prototype we can share with the librarian in a week. Maybe two.”
“And will it help them?”
Jellit looked up at that. Whatever he saw in Dafyd’s expression seemed to reassure him. “It will. Some. That’s the tension in the situation, isn’t it?”
“And you’re able to train the team up the same way he would have.” Dafyd didn’t inflect it like a question, but it was one.
“I am him,” the thing said. “And I’m her. And I’m Ameer, who you didn’t know. I’ve said it before. We’re all still here.”
The gray-haired man was staring over at them with distrust. The others were pretending to ignore them. Dafyd almost left. There was a moment where he felt the impulse to turn, to walk away, like it was already moving through his nerves, like his body had almost done it.
Instead he said, “I’m in trouble. I can’t… I can’t do any more than I’m doing, and it’s not enough. There are things I need to know, things I need to understand , and I can’t find any way to learn them. But you’re made to do that, aren’t you?”
The thing didn’t speak. It only nodded once.
Dafyd took a breath. Once, when he’d been a student, he’d heard a speaker on ethics use the phrase moral nausea .
The memory was as clear to him now as if it had happened yesterday.
He hadn’t understood the idea at the time.
“I need your help,” he said. “I need you to help me. Come talk to me when you’re done here. ”
“I will,” it said.
Dafyd clapped it on Jellit’s shoulder the way he might have if they’d been only what they seemed to be. He walked back to the archway that would take him, eventually, to his room, his little garden, and he wondered how many more ways the universe could find to compromise him.
The swarm walks back to its team, relief pouring through its mind. It had thought, when Dafyd appeared, that he had discovered how it had sent back its findings. That the weight of another death had pushed Dafyd past reason and redemption. That it is this— this —is a cause for joy.
He’ll find out in time, and his hate will return , Jellit says, but Else and Ameer don’t join in his chorus.
If it had known Dafyd was coming, it would have built a supply of pheromones. Would have done what it could to calm the man’s mind until it could reason with him, influence him, bring him back to the place they had been when it had lived within Else Yannin.
Seduce him , Ameer said softly as if from a great distance. The word you’re looking for is seduce .
Everything all right, boss? Baran asks as he hands back the coil of wire.
Yes , the swarm replies . Actually, things are great. Nothing to worry about at all.
It turns back to the work, mining Jellit’s memories, his knowledge, folding all that he was into the swarm’s consciousness.
Else, though, is thoughtful and quiet. Else, who was most nearly the one who felt the love that Dafyd had shared.
Who most nearly knew what it was to long for the man who had just come to ask it back into his company.
Else, who might, alone among the voices that are the swarm, understand how precious this is. A chance to make things right again. A chance to return to who they were. A chance—however slim, however fragile—to be loved.