Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
T he swarm sits on the floor of its room, its back against the wall.
It tries to focus on the archive, but its memory is broken.
It is listening to the deepest reserves of the Carryx civilization: the war with the Meenan of Faus, the Catrian plague that almost killed the empire ten thousand years before, and the changes that the Carryx made to their own bodies to prevent it from ever happening again.
The constant pulse of information rising and distilling itself until it reaches the Sovran, and then the pure intention that flows back down, gathering detail and specificity with every step.
But the moment keeps intruding: Dafyd weeping on his bed, the swarm lying down, pressing against him, the hunger that touching his body awakes, kissing him.
Kissing him, and feeling him pull away.
Every iteration, the swarm pushes the memory aside, and instead it replays. Every replay is somehow worse than the one before. The swarm’s memory refuses to accept relegation to the past. It insists on the present. It insists on now, on and on again, with an exquisite—almost electric—pain.
The swarm is afraid that something has gone wrong. A Carryx countermeasure that it failed to sense, perhaps. A malfunction in the network of machines that it is.
You’re humiliated , Else says . This is how it feels.
The swarm considers. It has memories of the other three suffering embarrassments.
There are moments it recalls when Jellit woke in the small hours of the morning to relive a minor social failure that he committed years before.
When Ameer remembered something that likely no one else recalled, and remembered it with pain.
As if summoned by the thought, Jellit says I told you. He doesn’t want you. He doesn’t love you. What happened between you two is messed up on a thousand different levels.
Totally unethical , Ameer agrees, though the voice is faint.
It reaches back to the memories, and they do match for the most part. They also don’t. It isn’t sure what the difference is, but it is profound.
One’s a memory, the other’s an experience. That’s the difference , Else says.
Else and Ameer had both gotten laid before you came along , Jellit says , but when you hooked up with Dafyd, you were a virgin. It’s the same idea.
Don’t be cruel , Else says. Her unreal voice is exhausted. This whole thing is bad enough. None of us gain anything by being shitty.
The swarm stands up. The archive slips away from its awareness, the work it was crafted to perform forgotten for a moment.
The three are quiet, so the words aren’t present but only a memory: Else’s voice saying He was in love with me.
He thinks it was me. And you killed me. Twice over, you killed me.
He’ll hate you for that. He’s going to hate you.
But Else had never died. Only her body.
The swarm walks to the mirror, strips off the tunic and the trousers, and looks again at the body it now inhabits. It tilts its head—Jellit’s head—and the image in the mirror tilts with it.
It knows how to change its flesh in a thousand different ways.
It can become a listening device aware of fields of force so finely tuned that it could pick up a whisper in a storm.
It can remake the bones and muscles of its borrowed flesh in ways that give it ten times the strength of the original human.
It can extrude hairs so fine that it can record the individual ridges of a fingertip from a handshake.
The eyes can be tuned to see in spectra no human being has ever seen.
But this change, there is no guide for. This, it has to improvise. The skin and soft tissues are simple. The harder connective ones will be more difficult. It begins reshaping the heavy bones of its pelvis.
The changes hurt .
Brun stroked his chin as if he had a beard. The oversized mechanism of his larynx bobbed in his neck. Dafyd walked beside him. The lamb sacks hung to their right, a long row of fetuses that shifted and twitched their way toward life.
“That’s… that’s a lot to take in,” Brun said. “I’m going to have to think about how to… I mean, whew. That’s a lot.”
“I know Tonner didn’t like me,” Dafyd said. “I don’t know how much that affected his reports or the level of autonomy he took. As you step into his place, I hope we can have a better working relationship.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I would like a full audit of the major research projects, where exactly they stand, and your assessment of what the next steps are for each of them. Without Tonner, we’re going to need to re-examine our processes.”
“I see that,” Brun said. “I can’t believe he’s… gone.”
One of the sacks had turned on its hanger, the little being within facing out toward the walkway.
Dafyd stopped to look. It was so cartoonishly small and fragile, it seemed impossible that they had all once been something like it.
It looked out from the sack. Dafyd let himself sway back and forth, and it seemed to track him.
“Is it normal for it to have its eyes open?” he asked.
Brun’s confusion only lasted a couple of seconds, but that it was there at all filled Dafyd with a low-level dread. “Oh, fifty-five? No, that’s an anomaly. There are a few things that are off about him. Honestly, I’m not sure he’s going to make it.”
Dafyd stepped closer. The fetus opened its mouth like a yawn and its arms twitched. “Why are we losing so many?”
“We aren’t,” Brun said. “I mean, the normal miscarriage rate is like one in five, and that’s of the seventy percent that actually survive conception and womb implantation in the first place.
Mostly they fail out at the front end, but we could lose two or three of the ones that made it this far and we’d still be in line with traditional gestation. Things break.”
“I didn’t know it was that bad.”
“Folks assume that since making babies is important it must be a good design. That’s sentimental, yeah?
An industrial process that broke down this often, we’d call it a failure.
But the system can tolerate a lot of failed tries as long as we keep trying.
Nature doesn’t consider anything precious as long as it’s easily replaceable. ”
Something in Dafyd’s gut shifted. It felt like disgust. Or maybe horror. He returned to walking, and Brun had to trot to catch up with him. The main lab for the Carryx grass project was ahead and to the left, and Dafyd found himself very much preferring to be there.
Brun, beside him, kept talking. “Really, the lamb sacks are doing astonishingly well, considering all the variables. Tonner was the one who tweaked the placentation protocols, and it really helped keep the fetal deaths to a minimum. That’s part of why I…
I mean, I’m flattered, sir. I really am.
But I’m not sure I’m your guy for this.”
“You were his second-in-command.”
“Look, I don’t want to talk myself down or anything, but being second behind Tonner Freis, I can be pretty damn good and still not be, y’know, comparable .
I just think if there’s a better person to take the reins, maybe I could keep the slot I’ve got now.
Especially when it comes to the protein translation stuff that the Carryx are excited about?
I mean, you probably spent more time on that than I did. ”
Dafyd stopped, turning to look the man face-on.
When Brun shied back, Dafyd put his hand on his shoulder.
“You are the one who knows the most about the state of the research right now. If we don’t make enough progress on it, there’s still a chance that the Carryx will decide the human moiety isn’t pulling its weight, and then they’ll just kill us all. So do your best.”
Brun didn’t seem aware of it when he groaned. To Dafyd, it looked like the man was starting to understand the situation. That was good.
“One other thing,” he said, letting Brun go. “There was a side project Tonner was doing about the Soft Lothark?”
“Yeah, he mentioned it.”
“Erase the data.”
Only a few moieties are older than the Lothark.
When the Carryx found us, we were smaller and we lived on a single world.
The High Lothark and its Stone-Mind guided and bound us.
And then the Carryx came. They hadn’t mastered the Void Dragons then.
Or the Amanthea. They didn’t have knowledge then to lock a sky in place.
They overcame us with Dirhaj which became obsolete when the Bau-hund were domesticated. There are no Dirhaj now.
Dafyd moved the symbols again to mean: What is the Deep Lothark?
A way of keeping something for ourselves.
It is memory that belongs to all of us, and because we wear it on our skins, they don’t find it inside our bodies.
The Soft Lothark are loyal to the Carryx.
They are the trusted animals of violence in the endless war.
They would gladly die for the Carryx. The Deep Lothark is loyal to the Lothark, and it remembers how the Stone-Mind was built and waits to remake it again someday.
It has been a very long wait, but the Deep Lothark is all Lothark, so it can be patient when the individual cannot.
The gray-haired man stood with his arms crossed.
His name was Farad Morse, and it turned out his nephew was the same Llaren Morse who Dafyd had met on Anjiin and whose death warrant Dafyd had signed when he revealed the rebellion to the Carryx.
The others in the visualization group stood behind the man, ostensibly all at their work, but arrayed like a gang getting ready for a brawl.
“If he won’t be rejoining us, we can go to him,” Farad Morse said. “You just say where to find him.”
“He’s busy on a different project,” Dafyd said.
“Yeah, you said that before.”
“He will be available to answer questions and review data. But for the foreseeable future, we should move on with you as acting head of the project.”