Thirty-Five #2
And the hell of it was, he did. It was like a weight placed on Campar’s sternum, a little pressure just over his heart. “In other circumstances?”
“We’d be other people,” Ghati said, and the door nudged open. A nacreous blue-gray lump pressed into the room.
“Have you said the things?” Vaudai asked. “Has the grief passed?”
“No it hasn’t,” Campar said. “It’s barely started. You can come in. I can be sad without you blocking my doorway.”
Vaudai writhed its way in, pushing the door with its bulk, and came to a stop beside the table. “This one told me that you would regret being excluded. I reminded it that you had almost expired last time, but it thought you were so fond of us that wouldn’t matter.”
“It’s true.”
“That’s maladaptive,” Vaudai said. “If you were functional, I would enjoy risking your existence again.”
“Well, there’s always next time.”
“Until one or all of us dies,” Vaudai said, but it spoke with an air of agreement. “The stellar armature has not been reviewed in six thousand local rotations. I expect this to be a fascinating exploration.”
“But safe,” Ghati said.
“Oh no,” Vaudai said. “Not at all safe.”
Campar laughed. It didn’t take the heaviness away, but it did make it a little more bearable. It would be worse again when the pair of them had gone. “I think Ghati was trying to reassure me that you two would be all right.”
“We will,” Vaudai said. “We are mortal. It is all right to eventually die. It would be concerning not to.”
“I am going to miss you, you vast knot of mucus.”
“I expect to regret the absence of your grotesque odor as well, sticks-with-meat.”
“If this war is ever over, I hope you’ll call me,” Ghati said, and Campar’s heart leaped a little. He’d broken off connections before, and he recognized when a man was leaving a little hope by the door on his way out.
“I will,” he said, because they both knew that he meant if .
“The war will never end,” Vaudai said. “It cannot. The Carryx will never cease their aggression, only redirect it.”
“Well, maybe they’ll lose,” Campar said.
“They will not,” Vaudai said. “The enemy is in retreat. Their holdings are collapsing in five of the seven essential strategic zones. The war has stretched over eons, and the enemy has never been in a worse position than it is now.”
“No hope, then?”
“Of peace?” Vaudai said, cheerfully. “Absolutely none. The Carryx will be victorious, and then they will go on with the war at every edge of the empire. They have no choice. What is, is.”
“Humans are not the deathless enemy.”
Dafyd sighed. “It’s late,” he said.
“Would you be sleeping if I weren’t here?” Clae asked.
“Not really. I seem to have forgotten how to do that.”
The knock had come at what felt like midnight.
Dafyd had answered, reassuring the Rak-hund and Soft Lothark that were stationed in the hallway outside his quarters that Clae didn’t pose a threat, and brought her inside.
He was aware of what that would look like, and it bothered him.
With all the terrible things he’d done, all the terrible things he’d committed himself to doing, the idea that people would think he was using his authority to leverage sex from the new girl left him deeply uncomfortable.
“It didn’t quite make sense when Jessyn said it,” Clae went on. “I mean, if humanity had been fighting this war back into the ages, wouldn’t they have recognized you as their opponent when they took Anjiin? How would they have left any of you alive, much less brought you here?”
“I have some tea,” Dafyd said. “It’s lukewarm and it isn’t really tea, but it’s something. You want some?”
“Sure.”
“They did fight humans, though. Campar saw them on the ship. Jessyn saw them on the planet. We have related languages. That’s pretty strong evidence.”
“That humans are on the other side,” Clae agreed. “That’s not the same as being the great enemy . Not any more than I think these pentapods are the great enemy.”
Dafyd poured dark liquid into a cup. It smelled minty and rich. Another little gift Tonner Freis had left them when he went. “That sounds very much the same to me.”
She took the cup from him and drank it at a gulp, then sat at the table and raised her finger like a lecturer delivering an important point.
“The Carryx are going to see humans as animals. When they come across a species in war, they don’t necessarily see them as the enemy so much as the enemy’s tools.
Their possessions. That’s what they’d be if the Carryx had them.
That’s what we are. I doubt the deathless see Rak-hund as their great enemy, right? ”
“All right. So humans are a client species of this enemy?”
“And Anjiin was like a pack of wild horses. Not tainted. Available to take and exploit for themselves.”
“Except we weren’t.”
“Except you weren’t, because I was there,” she agreed.
“I went back after we talked to Campar. The archive’s too big.
I can’t be sure. But I found references to what sounds like humans going back eight thousand years.
The deathless enemy? The black things that keep fighting even after they’re dead?
They go back millions . The earliest references I found, they were associated with something called the Logothetes of Shun and Sum, but even in those it seems like the Carryx had been fighting the deathless before that. ”
“You have a theory,” Dafyd said, and sipped his lukewarm tea.
“What do you know about lichens?”
“I know they’re primitive soil-generating life-forms that showed up in both trees of life on Anjiin.”
Clae picked up her empty tea mug and put it down again.
Her fidgeting reminded him of Carryx feeding hands plucking at each other.
“A lichen has an algae-like function that can pull energy from light and a mineral decomposer like a fungus that can mine nutrients out of the environment. Together, they’re what makes soil out of stone.
I did a focused study my last year in medrey. ”
“Which you?”
“Ameer,” she said without missing a beat. “But the thing is, they’re different organisms. The algae and the fungal decomposer? Not genetically related. The same algae on a different substrate organism is a different lichen. You can mix and match. The deathless may be the same.”
“You’re thinking there’s some other species out there like the Carryx that’s been using animals like humans since the beginning of the war, whenever that was,” Dafyd said. “Like a master enemy that’s behind it all, and humans are pawns on both sides of the board.”
“No, I don’t think it’s a species. I don’t think it’s alive . I think it’s like me. Like I was.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“What if it’s just a set of instructions?
Like a virus, but instead of how to make more viruses it shows how to make a substrate organism unkillable.
How to take a body and make it into a soldier that’s stronger, more robust, more effective than it would be without.
Then that idea or set of ideas or techniques gets passed on from species to species to species.
For the Carryx, it’s like they’re seeing new aspects of the same enemy using the forms of different client species.
They see it as a singular thing. But it isn’t.
It doesn’t have a self. It doesn’t have any consciousness of its own.
No will, no self beyond what it co-opts from the bodies it appropriates. No intention. No awareness.”
“All right,” Dafyd said. “Say that’s right. What does it change?”
“There might be other things out there like me.”
“And what does that change? We’re still here. We still need to make contact. We still need to coordinate the assassination of the Sovran with an invasion force. We still need to bring down the Carryx. Whether you’re the only thing in the universe like you or not doesn’t matter to any of that.”
Her mouth opened as if she were about to speak, but no words came out. A blush started in her neck and rose to her cheeks. It was a very human response.
She said, “I should go. I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“You feel like you’re alone in the universe, and it hurts. I understand that. You saw a possibility that maybe that could change, and you got excited. I understand that too. But it’s a distinction that doesn’t make a difference right now. Stay focused.”
Clae stood. The excitement had drained out of her, and what was left looked like shame. It was strange to think that, since the part of her that was her hadn’t been conscious before it reached Anjiin, there was at least one sense in which she was very, very young.
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I’m sorry.”