Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
B run and the new technical crew walked along the side of a long, thin slurry tank.
The new techs had all been other things in their past lives: an industrial mathematician, an architect, a civil engineer.
They all had decades of expertise and success behind them.
It made them pains in the ass is what it did.
“I have a question about the middle sequence,” the civil engineer said. “This part where the fluid’s already been cleaned and we’re starting to inject stuff into it.”
“Nutrients,” Brun said. “That’s where we start putting in the casein and lactose and lactoferrin. The lipids and fat-soluble vitamins come in at the next stage.”
“Yeah, that stuff,” the engineer said. “So what I’m wondering is why is there that physical drop-off between the sections? It seems like that’s going to mess with the flow. What you need to do is get those level with each other and put the whole mess on a half-point grade.”
“We can look at that,” Brun said. “Let’s just finish training up on how it works now before we start remaking everything, all right?”
He knew from his work in the old days that having a bunch of fresh meat come in who didn’t think they already knew everything would have been better.
But this was who he had, so this was who he’d work with.
Everyone who looked at the slurry tank saw something different: a problem in fluid dynamics or a less than perfectly optimized system or a piece of equipment that occupied a particular space in a particular way.
It was his job to make them see what he saw: the garden that would feed their children when they came out of the lamb sacks.
If they couldn’t keep this working every shift without fail for years, the kids would starve.
And now this was his lab, his factory, his team, so that wasn’t going to happen.
He’d shut down everything else if Alkhor and the librarian didn’t come through, but he wasn’t seeing babies die on his watch. He was a union man, not an asshole.
The new woman came in from the archway to the east like she was heading in from the legacy labs.
Gold-brown skin, light brown eyes, and black hair.
Her build was thin, almost adolescent. When she smiled, he felt bad for staring, but he didn’t know who she was, didn’t remember seeing her before. That was weird.
“Hey there, Brun. Am I interrupting?” she said.
“Um,” Brun said, holding up a finger to the others. “Give us a second, folks.”
The woman stepped back a few paces and he went with her. There was a strange smell around her. Not unpleasant, but peppery or something. Like she’d been sitting in a temple space, and the incense hadn’t quite loosed its hold on her.
“Been a while,” she said. “I was sorry to hear about Tonner.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Brun said, his mind working triple-time. Whoever the hell she was, she acted like they knew each other. Looking at her, he found that he really wanted to remember her too. “Tonner was a great guy.”
“He’ll be missed. But that means you and I should probably talk. I don’t want to bind you to the old plan… and you don’t remember who I am, do you?”
“I’m sorry,” Brun said through a chuckle. “I really don’t.”
She laughed, thank God, and touched his forearm. He felt the skin there tingle, like he was some kind of horny teenager. He coughed and looked away, trying to hide his embarrassment.
“That’s all right,” she said, smiling her forgiveness at him.
“I won’t hold it against you. Clae. Clae Audin.
Dyan Academy. I was Else Yannin’s senior research assistant back before she shifted over to Tonner’s team.
He and I were talking about integrating me into this group, but the Carryx tapped me for one of their goose chases before we could nail down details. ”
“Else Yannin?”
“Clae,” she said, almost like she was correcting him. “My name is Clae.”
The swarm sat at a table in the commissary with a salad and a bowl of hummus, and bright, ebullient sensation growing in her— her —chest. For long, painful, hungry days, she had kept herself sequestered in Jellit’s room while she remade herself and then remade herself again, looking for something in the mirror.
Looking for something in her growing sense of a place in the universe that she could belong within.
She made decisions that felt like discoveries.
She burned excess mass because she couldn’t leave the cell even to get food.
And because no one brought food. Not even Dafyd.
She’d turned back more than once, intimidated by the risk and the enormity of the task.
But when she tried to remake Jellit, she’d felt a sense of revulsion she still didn’t understand.
Where once she had been a secret sharer of his life and experience, now becoming him felt like putting on his corpse as a costume.
Even when she wanted to go back, she couldn’t.
And while she waited for her flesh to remake itself, for the pain of reknitting bones to subside and the tide of blood displaced by her alterations to reabsorb, she’d traveled the unimaginably vast sea of the Carryx archive.
She had followed the rise and fall of the Gundrux of Catiborn, the taming of the Lauf-moss that evolved to live in the faint light and instability of the heliopause and pointed the way to asymmetric space.
The record of the endless, tedious, grinding war that the Carryx gnawed at like termites chewing holes in the fabric of the universe.
She saw the report from when the enemy forces arrayed against the eighth exploratory dactyl collapsed.
When the Mulbeth of Canam were judged no longer worthy of their moiety and five billion of their number were culled.
And because she knew to watch for it, she saw the report when Rickar Daumatin died.
Leaving the room as her new self had been a way to escape that as much as it had been anything. And it had been terrifying. She had spent hours standing motionless by the door, not able to move forward and unwilling to move back.
She knew—of course she knew—that the fear and anxiety were outworkings of patterns that she had used at the start.
The anxiety and courage, the decision to have softer cheekbones, the preference—lightly held—for existing as a woman’s body and mind.
Everything about her had begun in Ameer and Else and Jellit with the original nanoparticles of the swarm as a kind of connective tissue and phage.
But Ameer and Else and Jellit had all begun as gametes.
Patterns of molecules that had come together unexpectedly, that had interacted, had unfolded implication upon implication in the context of a changing and unpredictable environment until they became the people who they had been.
The mechanics were different for the swarm, but the process rhymed. The hummus tasted the same as it had when she’d eaten it with Jellit’s mouth, and it tasted a hundred times better because it was hers. There was no contradiction between the two facts. They were simply both true.
“And maybe you know Clae here?” Brun’s voice came from behind her, and she turned.
The woman at his side was a researcher from Dyan Academy.
It took a moment to find her name—Ennil Day.
In the ancient times before the Carryx, she had worked in the lab beside Else’s.
Brun had smelled something a little off and wasn’t entirely comfortable with her story. He was checking on her.
That wasn’t unexpected.
As she had when she met Brun, Clae flooded the air around her with pheromones.
Love me, believe me, want to be my friend.
While the room filled with the scent of her manipulations, she grabbed onto a memory.
Ennil’s half-drunken, impassioned arguments against Else making herself second to Tonner Freis no matter how unpromising the spiral analysis data were.
The memory let her spider along it to other, connected thoughts.
“Lecturer Day,” she said with the near-subliminal bow of a research assistant to a full researcher. “I don’t think we overlapped at the labs, but we met a few times.”
“Did we?” Ennil Day asked, shaking her hand politely.
“At the support gala for Sevrinson,” the swarm said, plucking a moment from Else’s past that was her own past now. “The girl who spilled wine all down her front? That was me. I wore my hair differently then.”
That had actually been a woman named Daan, but the incident had been years ago, and memory—as the swarm knew better than anyone—was fragile.
There was maybe a flash of uncertainty as the other woman tried to remember the moment the way the swarm had prompted her to.
And then the discomfort resolved as she did, and Clae Audin’s roots traveled back into time and memory.
She became someone who had always been on the periphery, but always present.
“Oh, of course,” Ennil said. “I didn’t know you were in captivity with us.”
“I was sent out running errands at our masters’ bidding,” the swarm said, gesturing at the window and the wide sky beyond. “But I’m here now.”
For Dafyd, the strangest thing about conferring with the Deep Lothark was the variety of bodies that it arrived in.
When he had first encountered the species, Soft Lothark had been indistinguishable from one another: long limbs, thick bodies, greasy pelts.
He wasn’t sure when he’d started being able to tell one individual from the others, but it had been right around when they’d been assigned as guards.
Now, each new session was like meeting a stranger for the first time and picking up the thread of an old conversation.
Today’s Soft Lothark was lighter than average coloration with a scar across the back of its hand and close-set eyes. It stared at the little fountain while Dafyd changed the glowing Carryx shape-script to read something like Can the Deep Lothark command Soft Lothark against the will of the Carryx?