Nineteen
Nineteen
T here were times—few, but significant—when Surur-Tlassen felt the weight of the empire’s scope.
He feared these moments. In them, his dreams became nightmares of his body dissolving.
The symbolism wasn’t mysterious. He was the conduit of the living empire to the Sovran, and in truth, he was growing old.
The flow of knowledge that entered him daily, poured into the imperfect vessel of his mind, would never overwhelm him.
One of the librarians beneath him would sense his weakness and depose him long before his weakness could harm the war effort.
Or he would end his service and ascend to the private creche.
As day by day and year by year that moment came closer, he found himself growing less certain which path he would prefer: defeat at the hands of his subordinates, or the final and irreversible change to a keeper of the private creche.
He took comfort in the fact that his preferences were irrelevant.
He waited now, his day’s sleep cut short by the only summons he experienced besides the Sovran’s.
The private creche was set deep in the flesh of the palace, surrounded by it, but not connected except for the meeting chamber.
When the time came for the Sovran to meet her child, the benches would be filled with the highest of the Carryx on the left side and the keepers of the private creche—all of them former regulator-librarians like himself—on the right.
Today, however, there were only two: himself, and the eerie, scentless thing that had once been the most important male in the empire.
It had been Urur-Atlak then, and Surur-Tlassen had known it. It was something else now.
“Regulator,” it said as a greeting. Its flesh was pale and thin.
Its fighting arms had withered to white sticks that seemed too weak to support its frame.
Reflexively, Surur released a flood of pheromones into the air that in any other Carryx would have commanded its respect and obeisance.
Urur shifted its diminished abdomen in something like amusement.
The sensation in Surur-Tlassen’s core would have been fear if feeling fear were possible.
“I have answered your summons,” he said.
“The Sovran has a new daughter that is preparing to meet her,” the monkish remnant replied. “You will make the necessary arrangements.”
Surur spread his fighting arms wide, as if in surrender, but there was no change to his flesh. The hormones associated with loss failed to leak into his bloodstream. The sensation was unnatural and unpleasant.
The remnant spread its own fighting arms out even more widely, offering its own vestigial surrender, then turned and made its way across the chamber toward the passageway that no full Carryx had passed since the day the private creche had been constructed.
Unseen controllers opened the creche door for the remnant, and they closed it again once it had passed inside.
For a moment, Surur-Tlassen was alone. The private creche had many needs.
Blank eggs, germ line matter from the most promising of the living Carryx.
And sometimes other, less explicable things as well.
The mysteries of the private creche were not subject to the empire.
The Sovran’s will reached to the stars, to the complex surface of death and violence that was the empire’s edge, to the deepest regions of the Carryx mind, but not to the private creche.
Not to any of the private creches. Only the neuter monks who lived inside knew its secrets.
And one day I may know them too came unbidden to his mind, and Surur-Tlassen felt a shudder pass through his entire body.
He made his way out from the meeting chamber and turned onto the passage of conveyance that would return him to his more usual areas within the world-palace.
At the mouth of the passage, a service animal failed to remove itself quickly enough.
He crushed it to death and left it for its cohort to clean away.
One failed individual cut away was a small correction, but small corrections repeated over time would eventually lead the other animals to excellence just as a failure to act would degrade them.
The sense of a small virtue comforted him.
He arrived at the Sovran’s palace later than he would have otherwise, but the Carryx who guarded the archways had no standing to chastise him, and such failures were beneath the Sovran’s notice.
If Surur failed in his duties, correction would come from below just as guidance came from above, and none of his underlings of sufficient status offered challenge.
The air in the Sovran’s quarter was thick with her scent.
Surur’s blood thrummed in his body in a way that echoed satiety.
The structures of his nerves and apt channels took on rhythms that occurred only during mating and moments of deep sleep.
His joints grew looser, and the ceaseless motion of his abdominal legs slowed.
His loyalty to the Sovran was renewed as it was every day.
The Sovran towered in her bath, larger and stronger than any other of the Carryx.
Her abdomen glowed with the gentle luminescence of her kind.
Several of her hundred eyes shifted to him with audible clicks, and Surur—the highest of the librarians in the empire—abased himself before her without shame or regret.
The Sovran moved, and waves lapped at the edge of her pool.
“Begin,” she said in a single syllable with deeper harmonics than his own throat could have produced. It hid layers of meaning inside it. Begin your report, prepare to receive my instructions, serve now and always.
“Word has come from the private creche,” Surur said. “You have a new daughter preparing to emerge.”
“Yes,” the Sovran replied, and then, “What more?”
Surur-Tlassen closed his eyes, and in the darkness of his own consciousness, he gave her his understanding of the day’s movement.
In instances where the truth could be told fully with only a few details, he did so.
The second harvesting body had produced the larger supplies of baan-wheat and deep copper that had been requested of it, but it would require another hundred days to manufacture the song field housings and spinfoam mirrors.
The three hundred worlds of the spinward holdings remained quiescent.
The animal unrest in Sado and Herusant systems had been burned out and the animal moieties had selected new species to replace the lost populations.
In the few instances where some smaller-grained incident seemed of interest, he passed that on as well.
A tender of the Void Dragons in Caarlast had been inhabited by larvae but not died, and now claimed to have insight into a new technique to deploy void tendrils.
An enemy ship in Ashtin-Kah system had fought against the third dactyl of the seventh limb of the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body and failed to destroy itself when the enemy fled, and the subjugator-librarian of the dactyl was preparing animals of service to examine it.
The planets that the deathless enemy had been forced from in Horol-Sa and Dakku had extensive manufacturing structures, and the strategic half-minds believed their loss would further weaken the enemy fleets in the coreward systems.
As he spoke, the Sovran sang to herself, her voice fluting up from rumbles so deep he felt them resonating through the floor to the high, musical trills that signified the electric dancing of her thoughts.
His earlier uncertainty left him as he spoke.
The dreams that had been his mind compressing the thousand things he had learned the previous day became the hours he now spent breathing the richest air in ten thousand worlds.
The Sovran’s attendants brought her plates of golden ruus and bowls of black amask flesh prepared in sour gum.
When he was done, the Sovran let him remain in silence for an hour while her will reached through all he had delivered to her and she shaped again—as she did every day—the vast, slow, implacable organism that was the Carryx.
“This revealed weakness of the enemy will be pressed, and the subjugator awarded increased resources,” she said, and the harmonies of her voice lit a dozen nuances in his mind.
“The second harvesting body’s failure is noted and will be resolved.
We will prepare witnesses to the arrival and meeting of my daughter. ”
He shuddered, his mind drinking in her words and their implication, his brain already leaping to fill in the gaps created by the details she had omitted, already composing the directives he would give to the librarians below him that would best express her will.
For another hour, she spoke, and he took in all she said, swelling with it. His thorax grew slick and warm. His abdomen throbbed in synchrony with her voice. His mind was a part of hers and nothing to which a separate self could lay claim.
She ended her directives with those few things that she felt deserved her specific mention. These would be transmitted to the honored among the Carryx unchanged by the bodies and minds of the librarians through which they would pass.
“The enemy ship which failed to destroy itself is of interest,” she said. “Bring the enemy’s attention elsewhere to give the animals the fullest opportunity to examine it, the cost of this is not a concern.”
“Yes,” the regulator-librarian said, and his assent was as deep as a soul. Her words were simple, they were beautiful, and billions of lives changed their shapes within them.
Surur-Tlassen shuddered in ecstasy and in awe.