Twenty #3
Uuya chuckled and shifted her weight in the chair. “Movement study was the obvious next move. Minds are something that bodies do. They’re not just connected, they’re different ways of looking at the same damn thing.”
“I said you were right.”
“I’m just rubbing it in a little. Give a woman her little pleasures. There’s no wine on this planet, so smugness is the only vice I’ve got left.”
“If I get Tonner to synthesize wine, will you be nicer to me?”
“Only when I’m drunk. So. Yes.”
In the distance, one of the three pink lights veered off.
Heading, Dafyd now knew, in the general direction of one of the archive’s physical nodes.
His understanding of the universe and his place in it was growing again, and the relief was the first sign he’d had of how much his stagnation and overwhelm had bothered him before.
“You’re working with Jellit Kaul again,” Uuya said.
“I’m working with every tool I’ve got. How are you progressing with the curriculum for the nursery.”
“I’ll have it done before the poor little bastards need it.”
“Stay focused,” Dafyd said. “It’s coming sooner than you think.”
In the archway, Tonner Freis appeared with a handful of papers in his hand. As he stepped around the Rak-hund, giving it an almost theatrically wide berth, Uuya Tomos hoisted herself to her feet. “All the tools,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Dafyd watched her leave and Tonner approach. He didn’t notice the Soft Lothark guards attending to their half-mind, and even if he had, it might not have changed anything that happened.
Alkhor was sitting under his single, weedy tree like some kind of half-baked religious figure. The writer woman, Tomos, was limping away from the end of her meeting with the boss just as Tonner walked in toward his. They met with the archway—and the Rak-hund—maybe ten steps behind Tonner.
“All well, Professor Freis?” Uuya Tomos asked.
“I’m putting off real work so I can justify myself to the Carryx’s favorite pet and his knife-legged centipede-lion,” Tonner said. “So sure. Everything’s lovely.”
“The burdens we bear,” the woman said with a tangibly false sympathy, and passed him by.
Two Soft Lothark guards were loitering not far from Alkhor, all long, lanky limbs and squat, furred bodies.
That was good luck. Hopefully, they wouldn’t wander off before he got to that part of the report.
If they started to go, he’d maybe have to break in with the results of his side project a little early. It was all about presentation.
Alkhor was gazing off at the open sky. Tonner took the seat that Tomos had abandoned, then waited.
His former research assistant looked… Well, frankly, he looked like shit.
There were dark smudges under his eyes, and his mouth was set like he’d just tasted something bad.
His skin had a little ash to it that it hadn’t had before.
To judge from appearances, Alkhor wasn’t enjoying his position at the top of the human moiety.
Not that Tonner was particularly surprised.
Some people weren’t cut out for leadership.
After a few seconds, Alkhor reached the end of whatever train of thought he’d been riding and turned his attention outward again. “Tonner. Good to see you. I get a little tired from not having anyone from before left.”
He seemed almost plaintive when he said it, and Tonner felt a stab of something like shame. He covered it up by being dismissive. “You’ve got Jellit.”
“Sort of,” Alkhor said. “But anyway. Where do things stand?”
Tonner took out the reports, going over the next-to-most-recent assay as if it were the state of the art.
Admitting that there was more recent data, but they just hadn’t been able to find it, would have been more embarrassing.
Some part of him kept expecting Alkhor to roll his eyes or sneer at the apparent lack of progress.
Instead, he seemed distracted, like there were other, more important things on his mind.
That was actually worse. Tonner found himself pushing the importance of fairly minor yield improvements in the new generation of pseudo-grass.
When he got to the end, Alkhor just nodded and then kept sitting there with a vague expression on his face. Tonner moved the other report to the top and handed it over.
“There is another thing,” he said with a little smile. “Just a side project I was working on in my spare time.”
Alkhor glanced at the new papers, then frowned. Tonner could see the man starting to focus for the first time since their meeting had started.
“What…” Alkhor said, then stopped and leafed through the next pages. “What am I looking at here?”
Tonner stretched. Now that he had Alkhor’s attention, he could withhold the punchline a little. With as long as Dafyd had made him sweat, it was only payback.
“So we’ve been talking about convergence, right?
Organisms under the same environmental pressures stumbling into very similar solutions, even if the substrate tools they’re using are wildly different.
Back on Anjiin, you could barely tell if a fish was DNA- or QRP-based by looking at it.
Arborization made akkeh and trees look mostly the same.
Anything that wanted to get access to light was using the few best strategies.
Sooner or later, everyone winds up getting something that kind of looks the same, right? ”
“Right,” Dafyd said, and there was a hint of annoyance in his voice. Which, fair enough. Tonner was talking down to him a little. Didn’t mean he was going to stop.
“So here we are in this environment, yeah? You, me. The human moiety. But all the other moieties too. We’re all under the same thumb.
We’re all busting our asses to deserve a place with the Carryx.
Maybe fuck up the competition the way the Night Drinkers tried.
But when you’re in prison, there’s things that you want.
Like a way to talk without the boss or the other moieties listening in.
And there are only so many good strategies for that. ”
“These look like plasmids,” Dafyd said, holding out the pages. Plasmids were the little circles of DNA that bacteria swapped like trading cards. It was actually a pretty good metaphor.
“They do look like that. But they’re large-scale.
Brun pointed out that our friends”—Tonner nodded toward the Soft Lothark guards—“nibble each other hello. He thought it was vestigial grooming, but Jellit talked about how they eat their dead too. Well, I started looking into it, and I found these. Tiny little information-dense nubblies that they pass back and forth like notes in study hall. Can’t be overheard.
Hard to intercept. Decoding the message requires being a Lothark.
Our buddies here have a whole second channel of communication that—”
“Tonner!”
The world made a thumping sound, deep and low and intimate, and Tonner was on his hands and knees without knowing how he’d gotten there.
There was pain, but it was so intense he couldn’t find where in his body it belonged.
It was just pain. He tried to stand up, but the two Soft Lothark guards were there. When had they come over?
Tonner turned to look at Dafyd. Something like Hey, get your toy soldiers in line was trying to form in his mind, but he couldn’t get the words quite right.
One of the pair kicked him in the ribs, and it didn’t seem to hurt, but something about it was wrong.
Like maybe his rib cage was softer than it should have been. And he was on the ground again.
He put a hand on the ground to push himself back up, and there was blood on it.
Shit , he thought. I could really get hurt if these fuckers aren’t careful .
He looked up to see one bringing its foot down. The first blow pushed him back down. The second one was on the back of his neck. It made a wet crunching sound that seemed louder because all the other noise in the world had faded out. And then the world faded out too.
Dafyd saw the life go out of Tonner’s eyes. The change was subtle, small, and unmistakable. A moment before, this had been his friend and his rival. A man he’d admired and betrayed. Now, it was his corpse.
The Soft Lothark guards kicked the dead man twice more, then shifted to look at Dafyd. Their eyes were small and black, and if there was any emotion in them, Dafyd couldn’t make it out.
“No no no,” Dafyd said, his hands going up and out before him ( Look, I’m unarmed, I’m not a threat , Ver Cannedan whispered) and he stepped back. The closest shifted its weight, reached out to grab him—
And flew to the side, carried down by the weight of the Rak-hund.
The evil, pale knife legs worked, stabbing into the Soft Lothark’s flesh.
Its screams were wild and raw and tearing.
Dafyd watched, stunned. The other Soft Lothark jumped in, trying to bend the Rak-hund back off its bleeding companion.
The Rak-hund shrieked like a tortured cat, the sound chittered and ripped.
And something in Dafyd’s subconscious spoke without words. He was going to die if he didn’t do something now. Right now. Deep instinct told him to run or to freeze or to ball his fists and jump in. They were all wrong. If he did any of them, he was going to die.
The Rak-hund convulsed, broke free, and brought half a dozen pale knives down into and through the fallen guard.
Dafyd pulled up the floating images that the Sinen had schooled him in.
The logic of Carryx grammar slid away from him like a living thing trying to evade him.
Like it would die with him if he caught it.
He knew the symbols for Soft Lothark from when they’d been assigned to him.
Possession was a soft cone-like diacritical mark…
The dead guard pulsed. Like a balloon someone had blown a breath into.