Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
T he Soft Lothark that sat across from him was large for its species, with markings in the thin, scraggly pelt around its eyes that made it look sorrowful.
As Dafyd composed his question, it looked around the garden like a bored child in church.
Occasionally, it nibbled at the back of its hand or the front of its arm.
When Dafyd sat back, it considered the glowing object, coughed wetly, then rose and walked away.
A few minutes later, a different Soft Lothark ambled by and shifted two of the symbols before leaving.
A few minutes after that, a third guard came to him and added a second run of virtual objects that commented on and expanded the first. The conversation went on like this for the better part of a day.
You are asking about the Epikainot and the great loss.
Yes, many Soft Lothark were there when it happened.
The Epikainot were a powerful enemy. Clever and ruthless.
The Carryx had found them only a few hundred years before, and their battles rivaled the conflict with the deathless, though they were not deathless themselves.
The end came with no warning. Those who were within the world-palace did not escape it.
The Epikainot had discovered an interaction between field effects, a manner in which the changes made by one innocuous beam would amplify and resonate with the effects of another, so that either one alone was beneath notice, together they would feed forward in a devastating torrent.
In the course of an hour, the crust of that world dissolved.
Towers and seas and the ancestral pools of the Carryx all vanished in fire and boiling stone.
When the Epikainot were finally eradicated, the weapon was taken.
The Carryx use a version of it now when they wish to unmake a world utterly.
It is still very effective against opponents who do not expect it.
Dafyd cleared the symbols, careful not to impress them into the archive as he did, and formed the next question: What happened to the Sovran when the first world died?
The Sovran died as did her librarians. Some part of the archive was lost, though much of it remained on the other worlds.
Only those messages that had not yet been sent outside the planet were lost utterly.
The moieties that were exclusive to that world became extinct.
There were other animals elsewhere. The Carryx are resilient and robust. They did not mourn their dead world.
What is, is. Instead they turned their full attention to the Epikainot and ended that species and everything related to it.
Dafyd shifted the symbols again—How do the Carryx recover when a Sovran dies?—and went to eat his midday meal. When he came back, two Soft Lothark were standing by the symbols, remaking them. They walked away as he approached.
The Sovran is born in the private creche, built and designed and selected there for perfection of function.
There is always one at the ready should an accident befall the empire.
When a promising new daughter is born, she is sent out to meet her mother, and the survivor of that meeting carries on.
Age and time weaken all things, but not the Sovran.
Before the entropy of life can weather her, she is dead.
There are always blank eggs at the ready to prepare another if the need arises.
There is a private creche on all the world-palaces. Hundreds, each in its order.
When the Epikainot destroyed the first world and the voice of the Sovran went silent, the creche on this world opened, and the Sovran emerged. The librarians here became the librarians that had been. The empire shifted its attention a few degrees, and all carried on as it had.
This is the resilience of the Carryx that no other has ever matched. Each can become the tool that is needed. None are valued because none are valuable.
We have waited for millennia to see the empire fall, but it rises from every stumble.
It wears down every enemy. Other beings feel loss or sorrow, other civilizations grow sick from war, but war is what the Carryx are.
They will never mourn their dead, they rejoice that the weak give way to the strong.
They will never grow tired of violence. They will never be other than what they are.
For them, conflict ends when the last stars burn out and all life dies.
Not before.
As Dafyd took away the last of the symbols, the stars were coming out; pinpricks of light almost hidden by the Carryx grid and the horizon-wide glow of the world-palace.
The little black fountain muttered to itself like it had a complaint but not the courage to announce it.
For a while, he didn’t move. His body felt heavy, and his mind was shifting inside his skull like a feral monkey trapped in a house, bouncing from window to window looking for a way out that didn’t exist. The sense of living on the edge of a perfect insight was gone.
A breeze came up, not cold, but not warm either. He sat with it and the smell of the water for a while, then sighed, set hands against thighs, and hauled himself up. There were more stars now, even if they mattered less.
The labs were shut down for the night, and Clae wasn’t in her rooms. He found her in the common room, sitting in a group of people.
They were laughing together and playing a game with dice and a long white board with markings on it.
He got himself a bowl of rice and protein that was almost, he thought, as good as the street food from Anjiin.
He ate with only the constant company of his Rak-hund guard just out of earshot and waited until she noticed him.
He let her make the approach, then told her what he’d learned and what he wanted her to look for in the immensity of the archive.
He watched her expression change: the thinning of her lips, the tightening of her jaw.
She knew what she’d find as clearly as he did, but they had to look. They had to be sure.
After that, the others.
They gathered in Campar’s quarters. Dafyd, Jessyn, and Uuya Tomos.
The only conspirators besides the spy who were still alive.
Campar sat on his bed, head resting against the wall.
Jessyn and Uuya Tomos on chairs across the room.
Dafyd stood. He told them what he’d planned, and he told them what he’d learned.
What he suspected. He told them about the Deep Lothark and the dead homeworld.
He didn’t tell them about the spy or Jellit or Else.
After he was done, there was a long silence.
“If there were a way,” Jessyn said, “to locate all the planets that had these private creches, and get that information to Garral? Is there a version of your plan that could still work? I mean, I see that it would have been simpler if we could just do the one thing here, but taking out the whole Sovran class at once… I mean, it seems like that might actually work.”
“Coordinated strikes to decapitate every possible Sovran on at least several hundred heavily fortified potential throne worlds?” Campar said.
His scorn for the idea was also a kind of mourning.
“If this so-called great enemy could do that, I’m not sure they’d need our help in the first place.
And it wouldn’t match the battles I saw. ”
Dafyd didn’t speak. He felt the despair in the room, and took a little bleak comfort that he wasn’t the only one.
“We’ll need to go back,” Jessyn said. “Learn more. Killing the Sovran and taking the world-palace seemed like a good goal. Seemed like something that would disrupt them. If it’s not, well, all right. So it’s not. Let’s look for what is. It’s a setback.”
“She’s right,” Uuya Tomos said. “We may be playing a very long game. It may be a game we leave to the great-grandchildren of our great-grandchildren.”
“The Deep Lothark has been playing that game for millennia,” Dafyd agreed. “Maybe thousands of generations.”
“Well, that’s a cheerful thought,” Campar said.
“I take some comfort in it,” the old woman said.
“Consider that this isn’t a problem we can fix.
By ourselves, we don’t have the power. It’s never your responsibility to do something that can’t be done.
You do your part, and you help the next generation carry it a little farther, and then the one after that. ”
Campar picked up his pillow and grunted as he tucked it behind his back.
His skin was thinner than it had been before he left, and there was a darkness under his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
“If the Lothark have been following that plan forever and haven’t made any progress,” he said, “then maybe this is a puzzle for which no solution exists.”
“We have things they don’t, though,” Dafyd said. “The Lothark don’t have an enemy fleet.”
“I’m not entirely sure we have much of one,” Campar said. “And by the time that batch of babies we’ve ushered in grows up, we may not even have that. I have it on authority I trust that the war is going poorly for our deathless cousins. There’s another path here.”
“Which is?” Uuya said.
“Have we considered not?”
Dafyd leaned against the wall. “Not what?”
“Just not ,” Campar said. “What bird had the highest population on Anjiin? Evolution’s darling. The one avian with the best strategy?”
“Chickens,” Jessyn said.
“Chickens,” Campar confirmed. “Because we raised and fed and protected them. The most common grasses were farmed grains. The most successful mammals besides ourselves were food animals.”
“So give up,” Dafyd said.
“Decide that dying as heroes is less appealing than living as corn and chickens. Maybe stop pouring your heart into the thing that can’t happen and start building the best version of what can.
I don’t mean to be depressing, but you look spent, Dafyd.
You look worse than I do, and I almost cooked myself to death. ”
“I’m not going to do that.”