Twenty
Twenty
T he day Tonner Freis died started out unremarkably.
The woman he woke up next to had been the finance minister for Abbasat and Olan.
Now she was training with Bastien Korham to help construct the infrastructure that would, in theory, house a thriving human population for generations to come.
She didn’t like Korham much, and Tonner guessed that their present tryst was at least partially a means of cultivating a meaningful connection outside of that project.
He didn’t mind. In his experience, sex almost always had a transactional element.
Also, from the way she pretended to be asleep, he expected the relationship was coming to an end.
The prospect left him melancholy and relieved in about equal measures.
He slid out of bed and pulled on his clothes, pretending to be quiet about it, since that’s what they were doing, skipped the shower, and headed out to his daily rounds.
It was strange, the patterns that got lost when the Carryx scooped them up and the ones that persisted.
Anyone would think they’d lost everything when they came here.
Their families, their friends, the planet they lived on, the plans and expectations they’d built their lives around.
He had. He’d lost all that. And now instead of the most important scientist on Anjiin, he was the most important one in the human moiety.
Instead of sharing a bed with his second-lead researcher, he was waking up beside an ambitious infrastructure worker who thought that by letting him use her, she could use him. And who was probably right about that.
Vices, kinks, sins. Humanity had been trying to flay them off their souls since someone came up with the idea of souls, and they’d never managed.
Even the Carryx hadn’t been enough of a break to change human nature.
Not that the big fuckers had tried enforcing any ethical guidelines.
They’d have been fine with humans murdering and eating each other if the projects kept producing useful results.
He stopped at the commissary and made himself a cup of almost-tea, then headed for the local shop.
He wanted to get back to the legacy labs, out in the cathedral near the old apartments they’d had when the team first arrived.
The most interesting protein translation work was happening there because he could control it better with fewer people around.
But he wanted to check in on the babies before he left.
The lamb sacks had been transferred as the fetuses developed.
The hundred and seven that remained hung in rows, looking like bags of chicken broth, each one with a tiny, half-baked monkey a little larger than his two balled fists floating in the soup.
The maternal blood analog was standard stuff, but it was milk white, so the placental mats all looked weirdly pale.
The pseudoamniotic fluid was yellowish and dark, but not cloudy.
Tonner walked along the rows, checking the reports.
He’d gotten them along this far. It was still weeks before they’d be capable of gas exchange, and protocol for animals gestated artificially was to let them cook a little longer than a mother’s body would have let them anyway.
A ten- or eleven-month baby just had a little bit of an edge over the usual spat-out-at-forty-weeks kids, and there wasn’t a mother’s health to balance against. It wasn’t like a lamb sack was going to get osteoporosis or dislocate its pubic symphysis.
He stopped at sack thirty-four and peered in at the little not-quite-human floating there.
It was moving its legs. She. She was moving her legs, not kicking, but stretching out like she was trying to find something to push against. Her eyes had formed—little darknesses under lids too thin to stop the light.
Her brain was too disorganized and protean for any rational person to expect conscious thought from it, but he let himself pretend that maybe she was aware of his shadow looming out there on the other side of the sack.
He tapped the skin of the lamb sack very gently with the tip of his index finger.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “It’s me. Daddy.”
The fetus pressed her lips together like she was trying to shit, and he grinned.
It was against the guidelines he himself had written to check parentage on the babies, but the Carryx hadn’t been able to get rid of hypocrisy either.
When the Carryx had taken the captives from Anjiin, their Sinen managers had gotten tissue samples from each of them as a way of keeping track of who was who.
Even when the tissue was gone, the genetic sequences were still recorded, and spinning up fresh chromosomes was third-year practicum work.
He could do it in his sleep. Dafyd Alkhor might be the little king of the human moiety, but Tonner was the father of Else’s only child.
Brun’s voice interrupted him. “Hey, boss. Everything all right?”
Tonner stepped back from sack thirty-four with a little shock of embarrassment. Brun was walking toward him, all lanky arms and legs and wide honest smile. “Fine,” Tonner said. “Just checking on the next generation.”
“You’re not the only one,” Brun said, falling into step beside him. “Everybody wants to come take a peek. People are starting to get excited.”
“About what?”
Brun frowned, unsure whether it was a joke. “Having babies. Everyone loves babies. They’re like little poopy bundles of hope.”
“Well, we have between now and decanting day to make sure there’s enough formula to keep them all filling their diapers.”
“Nah, that’s on Korham now,” Brun said. “We gave him the specs. Making it happen is a physical plant problem. The biochem is all established stuff. We’ve been feeding kids forever.”
Tonner grunted in reply. Brun didn’t take the hint. “Are there any reports you need before the meeting?”
“What meeting?”
The frown came back. Tonner was starting to feel annoyed by it. “Your update meeting with Alkhor. That’s today.”
“That got put off until he gets back from his extended picnic with Jellit Kaul.”
“They got back three days ago.”
Tonner’s footsteps slowed. “Really?” he said, but he was already restructuring his day.
He’d swing by the legacy labs in case there was updated assay run data, but he probably wouldn’t be able to set up anything in response until tomorrow.
It was a pain in the ass. “All right, fine. I’ll go justify our budget. ”
When they’d returned, Dafyd had a bench and a desk brought into his room.
They hadn’t been for him. The connection that Jellit—the spy, the swarm, he still didn’t know how to think about it—had made when they’d found the archive was still there.
The fields of information being traded all around them were invisible and intangible to Dafyd, but the spy could see them.
Navigate them. For hours at a time, it could move through an abstract space that was the Carryx archive.
But to do it meant subtle alterations to Jellit’s body—a darkening of the eyes, a change to the texture of the man’s skin.
Dafyd didn’t know what was being adjusted or rearranged to let the swarm become its own node in the vast alien network, but it would have been hard to explain away.
And the spy’s distraction, its gaze shifting, its hands moving like a dog chasing rabbits in its sleep, would at the very least look weird.
Better that it was done in private, where the Rak-hund lurking outside the door kept casual interruptions away. And where Dafyd would be there when the secret research turned up something important.
Explaining it to the visualization group had been trivial.
Dafyd told them that Jellit was doing other work for him.
No one questioned what it was or how long Jellit would be away.
That utter, immediate acceptance as much as anything reminded Dafyd that the image he had of himself—harried, overwhelmed, trying desperately to keep the human captives safe and supplied—wasn’t the only picture of him that existed.
To other people, he was the man who made the rules.
Who told them how things were and how they were going to be, and then that was what had to happen.
That those two versions of himself existed at the same time—that they were both true and both false—left him deeply uncomfortable.
“It goes back…” Jellit said, then seemed to forget he’d been speaking.
His skin was taut and shining in a way that reminded Dafyd of the swelling after an injury.
Jellit took a long, shuddering breath the way he did sometimes now.
“There’s another bank in here. Every time I think I’m at bedrock, it opens up and there’s more. ”
“Are you all right?” Dafyd asked from his perch on the side of the bed. “You need food? Water?”
“Probably,” Jellit said. “I’m burning through a lot of energy doing this. Can you… bring me a meal?”
“I’ll bring something back after my meeting, sure.”
“Thank you,” Jellit said with the same inflection Else would have used.
“There was a battle ten thousand years ago. There were three hundred planets involved, and it went on for hundreds of years. A single battle, hundreds of years. I think. I mean, it’s like trying to find the surface of something when you’re looking at atoms. There are atoms of air and then there are atoms of concrete or wood or something, but the clear line between isn’t so clear when you get small enough.
It’s like that, but for violence. It’s all war.
All the way back. Everywhere.” Jellit grunted and shook his head.
His eyes were on something that wasn’t in the room. “There’s so much of it.”
Dafyd smiled before he realized he was smiling. “You keep saying that.”
“I keep realizing it,” the spy said.