Sixteen
Sixteen
E kur-Tkalal lived now at the bottom of a great chain of being.
Keeper-librarian of the human moiety, it directed all things that touched upon the animals under its control, as it was itself directed by Moqid of the cohort Tlannan, who was directed by Dalkin of the cohort Astur, who was directed by the supervisor-librarian of animal assets.
And so on, up to Surur-Tlassen, regulator-librarian, and through him— him —to the Sovran herself with whom Ekur was honored to share a planet.
Ekur’s place was more honored and honorable than its former role as subjugator-librarian.
Then, it had been a librarian to soldiers, and a soldier was the lowest caste.
There was nothing less than to be a Carryx who died at the hands of animals.
To interact with animals was fundamentally degrading, but at least here, it was not facing them as equals as it had in battle.
Ekur’s body had changed when it was given its new place, and because of that, its mind, but there was an echo of its old life that remained.
It had been almost a soldier, but it had been high among subjugator-librarians of its dactyl, coordinating violence and spending the lives of Carryx who mattered even less than it did.
Now the only things beneath it were the humans of Anjiin, and it had half-unconsciously made one of them its factor, putting the human’s frail body and unpleasant, squeaking voice in the place that the lesser librarians had once filled.
Ekur had seen other animals make effigies of those they had lost as a kind of comforting doll, and it was disgusted to see some version of that impulse in itself.
But to spend more time directly with the animals would have been worse. This way, even though its factor was acting as a perverse parody of a Carryx librarian, there was only one that Ekur had to meet with on a regular basis.
Except that today, it had brought another.
“The tools that the lensing workgroups are designing are very delicate,” the factor—Dafyd of the cohort Alkhor—said.
Or, more truly, the translating half-mind said for it.
Humans were very small and had no resonance chambers.
It was miraculous they could make their primitive grunts carry as much meaning as they did.
“To be certain they will work properly, the group will need to survey local variations in gravity at several points around the planet. The leader of the research group is willing to make the survey himself.”
“Where would this survey take you?”
The leader of the research group—Jellit of the cohort Kaul—stood behind Dafyd-Alkhor. “It depends on what we find.”
Ekur-Tkalal’s feeding arms plucked at each other as it thought.
There were animals of service throughout the world-palace, but they were selected and bred for their functions.
If the humans of Anjiin stumbled into places where their presence was noxious, they would be killed.
If its factor and the lead of its research group both died, that could reflect poorly on Ekur.
But if the information led to a technology useful to the Sovran, it would certainly elevate its status.
Ekur felt ambition awake in long-dormant parts of its body.
An elevation in status would change the flow of hormones and growth factors in its blood.
Challenging Moqid-Tlannan for its position was a natural and appropriate goal, and more likely to succeed if Ekur-Tkalal curated its body into fighting trim before the attempt was made.
If it failed, it would know it was in its right place.
If it succeeded, it would know it was in its right place.
Seen from this perspective, the risk of two human lives was beneath notice.
“This can be done,” Ekur-Tkalal said. It could smell the relief flooding through both of their bodies, and it was repulsive.
The day they were scheduled to leave the human moiety’s little village in the world-palace, Dafyd sat in his garden, formulating the report. Jellit sat beside him, legs folded, watching the shapes form and shift under Dafyd’s fingers. The wind was cool, and it smelled like rain.
“How about this?” Dafyd asked.
Jellit concentrated. Something odd was happening just under his skin like the shadows of waves on the bottom of a pool. After a moment, he nodded. “All right. I’ve got it.”
“You’re sure you’ll be able to follow this?”
“No,” Jellit said, and grinned. One dimple on his left cheek. Two on his right. “It’s just the best I’ve got.”
“It’ll have to do,” Dafyd said, and saved the report.
The information that had been an array of ten glyphs set at angles to each other and placed in a volume of space had been a report on Tonner’s work creating a universal food following Ekur-Tkalal’s specifications.
It became the same thoughts translated into some other form like a voice becoming radio waves.
From Dafyd’s perspective, the message blinked out of existence.
For Jellit—the spy, the swarm—there was a whole different set of senses.
An awareness of pattern and energy that Dafyd couldn’t imagine.
Somewhere on the Carryx world-palace, the report entered an archive. The needle in their haystack.
“I… I think the signal routed someplace to the south,” Jellit said. “There’s a wave that comes from there. Let’s see what we find, yeah?” Then he paused and frowned. “Are you all right?”
“It feels wrong. We’ve been in this structure since we came here. It’s a prison, and they’re just letting us walk out.”
“We’re not prisoners. We’re part of the empire now. Tiny cogs in their vast machine.”
“Worse,” Dafyd said. “That’s worse.”
“Are you ready?” Jellit—not Jellit—asked. Dafyd hesitated.
There was still time to change the plan.
The spy could go on its own, or he could assign Tonner or Uuya Tomos to make the journey instead.
Someone who knew about the conspiracy against the Carryx.
Only no, he couldn’t. None of them knew that the spy was still here, that it had killed Else and taken Jellit.
If they went in his place, they’d have to be told, and the fear that came with the revelation of that secret was a shock to the gut every time he imagined it.
His shame in working with the spy was the chain that kept him in place. His goal was the destruction of the Carryx. His goal was to avenge the dead, including Else. Including, in some fundamental way, himself. The man he had once been.
If the price was his soul, it was cheap.
“We can go,” he said.
The only other time Dafyd had been on a Carryx transport, it had been a floating platform that gathered the humans together before the Sovran to see their first keeper-librarian honored and killed.
The one that Ekur-Tkalal had made available to him now was smaller and enclosed, but clearly the same technology and design.
A simple set of controls let it turn, rise or fall, move forward or back.
If there were other functions, Dafyd didn’t see how to use them.
He assumed there was a half-mind ready to override any attempt he made to use the thing as a weapon, but maybe there wasn’t.
Maybe the Carryx were willing to let damage be done as a lesson to the survivors.
“What is, is, after all,” he said.
“What?” the spy asked, but Dafyd didn’t reply except to shift the transport out into the open sky and turn it to the south.
The massive structure that they’d lived and died in since they came under the Carryx yoke fell away behind them until they were so far away that Dafyd could see the curve in it, rising up from the cloud cover below and then up toward the busy, inhabited sky.
He counted four other structures like it, like ribs of a fallen god.
The dark ziggurats that he’d spent what seemed like years watching from windows and the shelter of his garden shifted now, changing shape as perspective flattened them.
Wind muttered against the transport, only shaking it gently.
Lights in the distance glimmered gold and pink and blue.
Their transport was one of them now. It felt like the loss of something, but he wasn’t sure what.
The spy leaned against the glassed-in side of the platform, his—its—eyes tracking something Dafyd couldn’t see. The rippling under Jellit’s skin was gone. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the spy was just a man searching the world for some familiar landscape.
“Did you lose track of the message?”
Jellit smiled ruefully. “Yes and no. There’s a lot of information.
The whole planet’s in conversation all the time.
There’s a kind of stuttering in them. Data on a carrier wave.
It gets echoed, one pulse picks up part of another one, passes part of its own signal to something, picks up a bit of another pulse and incorporates it. ”
“And you can read them?”
“When I was Else, I used to go walking sometimes just to see how much of it I could listen in to. Magnetic pulses from—” He pointed down, toward the planet surface.
“Someplace, it comes to rest. I mean, if there’s an archive, there’s some kind of storage site.
Until then, imagine you’ve got everything that anyone’s said in the past year, and I’m listening for one particular sentence.
Or transformation of it. Or paraphrase. And I can only listen.
If I ask a question, the intrusion will be detected and we’ll both be dead in an instant. ”
“That sounds both nearly impossible and insanely dangerous. So yeah. About right.”