Twenty-Three #2
The older Morse blinked in surprise, and the hardness at his jaw softened. “Acting head, eh? So you’d be wanting me to direct research? Call the shots?”
“Is that a problem?”
“No,” the gray-haired man said, and half a smile touched his lips. “That’ll be fine.”
There is no war with the Carryx. War is what they are.
Enslavement is what they are. A state with no conflict is incomprehensible.
Before the deathless enemy arrived, there was war.
When the deathless die, there will be war.
But the deathless never die. War will never end. We will be here in its mouth forever.
Dafyd moved the symbols again, got the grammar wrong, and reset to start from scratch: How many Soft Lothark are there?
We are on every world that our bodies can be made to tolerate.
Over half of the Carryx worlds and colonies, we aid in holding.
But if they chose to kill us, we would die.
The dream of insurrection is a dream. These things that own us are capable of such casual violence that on a word, they would end us all and forget us before the next day.
The Deep Lothark guards against that word, that ending, and it waits.
Dafyd shifted the symbols again: What do you know about the Sovran?
I know this. There is only one Sovran.
Uuya Tomos’s private room was laid out like any other, but she had made it something entirely different.
The bed had a spread of lacework made from knotted string that made Dafyd think of old children’s stories of magical fish pulled up from the depth of the sea.
The air smelled of sweet incense, and a mural covered one wall.
The image was of a muscular man with a long beard and bald head wrestling a tiger.
A woman with a glowing triangle over her head floated above them both, radiating rays of light.
“You like it?” Uuya Tomos asked. “It’s by Ferdan Bellenn.
I had a painting of his back in the old days that cost me half a year’s pay.
I got it as a present for myself when I retired the first time.
It was—” She made a square with her thumbs about a handsbreadth apart.
“This one, I got for taking on his dishes rotation for a month.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“He said it was a kindness that he got to make things again for someone who cared,” Uuya Tomos said as she rose from her desk chair and offered it to Dafyd.
He sat, and she went to stand before the mural, her arms crossed.
“There’s a lot of that in the rank and file, you know.
People who dedicated their lives to something that doesn’t matter anymore.
Honestly, I’m shocked we haven’t had more suicides. ”
“Day’s young,” Dafyd said, and the old woman laughed. “Where did you get the incense?”
“One of Tonner’s apprentices was a Regran priest. She figured out a way to make her own altar out of the byproducts of the research. It’s a little acrid for my taste, but it’s intentional. That’s what makes it art. So what brings you here? I didn’t miss a meeting, did I?”
“I need to have a ceremony for Tonner. A memorial. I’d like you to help me figure out what to say.”
She turned back to him, arms crossed. She looked like she could have stepped out of the painting herself. An image of skeptical age translated into flesh, as beautiful and terrible as the goddess on the wall behind her. “And what is it you’re looking to achieve from the ritual?”
“Acknowledging the passing of an old friend isn’t enough?”
“Not for you. Not in your position. Freis was a hell of a character even before we came here. People feel the loss. It reminds them of all the other losses.”
“Everything rhymes.”
“Damn right it does. Only you’re here asking for my help. My help to do what?”
Dafyd crossed his legs and wove his fingers together across his knee.
The woman had a gift for making him feel exposed and small.
“I keep thinking that it’s all going to go back to normal.
That we’ll make some grand gesture and then get back to Anjiin.
Or to the way things were before they came. It’s nostalgia.”
“No, it’s denial. No judgment. I know what you’re talking about.
A lot of us want to pretend that this is a temporary aberration from the right and normal working out of history.
It isn’t, and we know it isn’t. But we’d like it to be.
Part of that is we’re old as shit, some of us, and God help us if we have to keep reinventing ourselves. ”
“I’m glad to know I’m not alone.”
“Oh, you’re very much alone. Just not that way. What does this have to do with the Rak-hund killing Freis?” Dafyd kept his expression empty, and Uuya Tomos’s eyebrows hoisted up her forehead. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“There really isn’t,” Dafyd said. “Except that I need the story people remember about this to be about something other than the details of how it happened.”
“Give our brother Tonner’s passing a story to edge out any other stories that might find their way in?”
“Yes.”
“Have you told Andermus?”
“I haven’t told anyone anything,” Dafyd said. “I haven’t told you anything.”
“Good. Keep it that way.” She sat on the edge of her bed.
“As your minister of propaganda, I’d say you call for a memorial service, but don’t make it mandatory.
The narrative that fits is the way Tonner’s faults and his virtues lived in balance.
Who the real man was in all his complexity.
Brilliant and temperamental… But you can’t give the speech. ”
“Why not?”
“If it’s you, all anyone will talk about is how the pair of you were sleeping with the same woman back in the day, and that’s why he tried to attack you. Is that what you want, or is that too close to what we’re not supposed to talk about?”
“No, let’s lean into it,” Dafyd said. “I humiliated him and he carried a grudge. And that’s why he lost his temper. The old wounds overwhelmed him, and he lashed out at the wrong time and place.”
“Because that’s not what happened.”
“It’s exactly what happened,” Dafyd said. “It needs to be.”
Uuya Tomos blew out a long breath. “Fucking palace intrigue. All right. Let me see what I can work up. You have a date for this memorial service?”
“Not yet.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that too,” she said. And then, a moment later, “You look rough. Are you doing all right?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.”
“Are you asking me to do something about it?”
“No,” she said. “You’re a grown man. You can pick your own hell, same as anyone.”
The will of the Sovran is what makes the Carryx a single thing, one being in a thousand billion bodies. It was the great leap that lifted them from the tide pools and salt marshes of their original world. We have studied for centuries to know this. Do you know things like this in your world?
Dafyd thought of his survey coursework. The work with bees and ants. Colony insects with a single queen around which everything was organized. He nodded, and then remembered that the Soft Lothark might not know the gesture. He shifted the symbols again: We do.
Then you will know that the different selves vie for food, for territory.
The Carryx were once like this. But then, back when their bodies were smaller, when they didn’t yet dream of stars or worlds or the deep things that live in the void between them, a Sovran rose, brought all moieties into one, and the petty struggles of one against another became something else.
The little wars between groups became the grand war of the Carryx expansion into the universe.
They press out the bounds of their territory because that is what they are, what they have always been.
What they find, they use or they destroy.
Anything else is unthinkable for them. Not taboo , not known but forbidden .
Unthinkable . It cannot be conceived. They are what they are. They do what they do. What is, is.
Dafyd put out his hands, ready to shift the symbols again, but then he stopped. How do we kill the Sovran? seemed too dangerous to ask, even here.