Twenty-Nine #2
The enemy managed to fold a jamming mine past the Carryx defenses, effectively cutting the subjugator-librarian’s connection to half of its forces, but the librarians on those ships understood the shape of the battle.
The loss of direct communication gave way to independent control so smoothly that the enemy might not ever know it had succeeded.
The evacuated animals appeared to be of little concern to the enemy forces and most reached a safe distance from the star’s gravity and the transition to asymmetry unnoticed and unremarked.
Apart from one significant anomaly.
“Rickar, I need you for a minute. Can you wake up?”
I really don’t think I can.
“Like this.”
And they were at a café. The Anjiin sunset in the west was pink and gold stripes on a field of blue.
The grown coral walls of the Common behind them were flooded with lights and the sounds of music and voices, like they’d just stepped out from a great party.
Else sat across from him in black-and-gold robes and a black headband.
Gallantist mourning clothes like she’d just come back from a funeral or was just going to one.
“Else? Is that you?”
“Sort of. A remnant of a copy, but a remnant of a copy of me, so sure. It’s me.”
“Am I dreaming?”
“Technically, I am. But I’m using your brain to do it.”
“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “it’s a pleasure to see you again.
Even if it’s just in a dream.” He was wearing his old tailored jacket.
He didn’t remember how much he’d missed it until just now.
“You’re beautiful, you know. I never told you that, because you were with Tonner or Dafyd.
But I always thought you were a beautiful woman. ”
“Thank you,” Else said, smile dimpling.
“Is this going to be a sex dream?”
“Would you like it to be?”
“I’m still in that Carryx fish thing, right?”
“Yes. But I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For what’s about to happen.”
The silence between them was rich with meaning. “I’m going to die, then.”
She nodded. “It had to be someone. There’s no reason it was you. I just needed to put the cyst into one of the people who was leaving the world-palace.”
It should have been mysterious, but it wasn’t.
He knew what the cyst was, what the swarm was, what Else had been and what she’d become.
The logic of dreams told him all of it like being reminded of something he’d known before and forgotten.
He felt a pang of fear, and then a warm rush of something like ecstasy.
They were naked in his bed. They were making love.
“Are you doing that?”
“Flooding your pleasure centers? Yes. I’m doing that.”
He laughed. “You’re very kind, but it’s all right. You don’t have to do it this way.”
“Okay,” Else said, giving him her lopsided smile, and they were back at the café, the sunset-filled sky becoming a darker red and purple.
“This thing we’re doing,” Rickar said, picking up a coffee off the table to take a sip. It was perfect. He smacked his lips at her in appreciation. “This will hurt the Carryx?”
“It will.”
He took a moment, remembering the filthy light that crossed a planet and erased the cities and lives. Remembering the black smoke only partially hiding the molten ruin below it. And because he remembered it, she did too.
The thing that was and wasn’t Else took his hand for a moment. He felt her regret like it was his own and squeezed the idea of her fingers and let them go.
“Everyone dies,” Rickar said, “but not every death matters. I’m grateful to fuck these assholes up on my way out.”
“I’m still sorry.”
He waved her words away. Behind them, the Common was empty, cold, and dark. The party had been over for hours. The sunset was the color of blood.
“Can you give me something?” he asked. “I mean, since it’s all just a dream.”
She smiled, and he lifted the cigarette to his lips. The taste of the smoke, the brightening of the ember, even the small, subtle crackle of the paper as it burned. The illusion was perfect. He blew out a cloud of blueish smoke.
“God damn I needed that,” he said. And then, “Let’s do this thing, shall we?”
In the evacuation pod, the cyst reshaped itself, reconfiguring the body of its host. On fifty overlapping frequencies, everything that the swarm had learned between the time it had landed successfully on Anjiin to the day that it had placed the cyst in Rickar’s body shouted out to its allies and creators.
The energy used for the broadcast unmade the complex molecules that had been Rickar Daumatin’s flesh like he was a human bonfire.
After fifteen seconds, the evacuation pod failed catastrophically under the unexpected burst of heat and the pressure of the steam that had once been blood. But when it exploded, nothing on board was alive to notice.
Surur of the cohort Tlassen, regulator-librarian to the Sovran, abased himself before his one true master.
Sensations that had never—could never—provoke anything less than awe washed through his body and his mind as the Sovran folded her massive abdominal legs beneath her.
Her feeding arms—as thick as a soldier’s fighting limbs—lifted bowls of syrrin and white amask to her beak.
She cracked the shells of the syrrin with her beak and licked out the flesh with her broad, thick, blood-colored tongue.
He had delivered most of the cycle’s information, filtered and consolidated as it was by his hours of sleep and dream.
The seventh exploratory body had taken possession of sixteen life-bearing planets that the deathless enemy had failed to protect.
The second body of memory was completing its work in the Nin and Sorillai systems ahead of schedule.
Plague had broken out among the Chinic, sickening one out of three and killing one in ten, so the keeper-librarian had slaughtered the moiety to prevent the contagion from spreading to other animals.
There was neither praise nor condemnation for any of these things.
They simply were, and Surur was honored and fulfilled to report them.
“The keeper of the private creche has confirmed that your new daughter is prepared to meet you. The last of the chosen attendees is preparing for transit,” he said.
A dozen of the Sovran’s hundred eyes shifted toward him, and something like amusement seemed to suffuse the symphony of scent and pheromone that wafted from her flesh.
“You are concerned,” the Sovran intoned, her voice making the thought into a poem.
“What is, is,” Surur said, neither denying his unease nor pretending that the tides and eddies of his emotional experience mattered. The Sovran returned to her meal. “What more?”
“Only one thing,” he said, then hesitated.
He didn’t like it. The report had come up from the three hundred and fifty-second exploratory body almost unchanged.
In the chain of librarians that spanned the empire, none had chosen to simplify or summarize the anomaly, and now it reached the Sovran herself without Surur-Tlassen finding a context to surround it with.
“In the battle at Jurupe system, an evacuation pod failed strangely. It lost coherence without evidence of an enemy attack.”
“There are many ways for a complex system to fail,” the Sovran replied, both an admonishment and a question.
“The explosion stuttered,” Surur-Tlassen said.
“There appeared to be a structure within it that is not congruent with Saren-hund death. The cargo was an animal of use from Anjiin system. The human moiety. They were assigned to the mission to discover whether they might develop novel assessments of the engagement.”
“Did they?”
“Members of the moiety proved convenient in Ashtin-Kah. The one that died was of no importance. There is no evidence in others of the moiety for death communications.”
The Sovran looked away. The empire was so vast, the thousands of billions of lives it encompassed so overwhelming, to speak of a single death felt like sacrilege.
Surur abased himself again without meaning to, and the Sovran ignored his gesture.
She was already lost in the oceanic complex of her thoughts.
As he waited, Surur-Tlassen felt himself relax and broaden.
He hadn’t liked bringing undigested news of the Jurupe anomaly.
It felt like presenting a fine meal with a bit of gristle at its heart.
But it was done now and could be left in its proper context and perspective.
His mind turned to the new daughter, the meeting outside the private creche.
This would be the sixth daughter that the Sovran had met since he had taken his position.
The last had been larger than her mother with a shell that shone like burnished metal and eyes in a dozen different colors.
He still remembered that one in his dreams.
The Sovran shifted, and he sprang to attention. The scent coming from her was as thick as smoke, and he breathed it in.
“Challenging that which we do not understand yields unexpected insight,” she said. “A pattern of anomaly clouds the Anjiin moiety. Clarify if this outweighs their utility.”
“Yes,” Surur-Tlassen said, as he always did, transported by the beauty and the wisdom of her words.