Thirty-Seven #2
“Because you’re angry,” Campar said. “We all are. And you’re hurt.
There’s nothing wrong with that. Can we talk about whether raging against fate will help?
We all know what the Carryx are, and I’m not saying they’re good.
They’re evil, but they’re also overwhelming.
We can’t beat them. There’s no blame in that, there are thousands of other species in this building that weren’t able to beat them either. Dafyd! Stop, you don’t need to—”
But by then, Dafyd was in the corridor, the door slamming closed behind him. His fists in the pockets of his tunic, his head down. The Rak-hund rose up on its hundred knife legs, and he spun toward it.
“No!” Dafyd said. “You stay here . Or go someplace else. You leave me the fuck alone!”
The Rak-hund shifted its weight in what looked like confusion and uncertainty.
Dafyd managed to get something like fifteen or twenty steps down the hall before the staccato tapping of his guard’s feet against the floor started after him.
It stayed with him for his own protection and by the will of the Carryx.
The nursery had been dimmed for the night.
The only light was a dull orange that took away all other color.
It reminded him of the passage from Anjiin, the huge room in which they’d all lived and died and feared and mourned.
It was the color of oppression and trauma.
It would mean something else to the babies.
The cribs were lined up in long rows, each one with a tiny body and a blanket.
There were at least a dozen other people walking quietly among the newborns or else carrying them, cooing to them.
The first name of the woman who came up to him was Viel, but he didn’t remember her last name. In the dull orange glow, she looked younger than she would have in the full light of day. Her concern was clear, though.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, and it meant Why are you here?
“Here to help,” Dafyd said. “With the little ones.”
“You are?”
“It’s mandatory,” he said. He tried to keep the edge off his smile.
Viel Somebody led him down the rows, looking at slates that hung off each crib.
Checklists and initials told the status of every baby, when it had been fed and cleaned, who had held it and for how long.
In a way, it felt like an industrial process, the comfort of children another commodity to manufacture.
In another way, it was an engine of compassion that he’d never seen equaled.
Every child would be fed. Every child would be held.
Washed when it was soiled, comforted when it was upset, loved by strangers. By its community.
Viel stopped at a crib marked 34. The infant’s eyes were open, its thin primate arms spread wide. As they looked down at it, the baby yawned.
“She’s due for a feeding, if…”
“All right,” Dafyd said. “Yes. Just show me where to get the formula.”
Five minutes later, he was holding the child in one arm, guiding the feeding nipple into the monochrome orange of her mouth.
She had a very serious expression as she drank, like artificial milk was of deep spiritual concern and she was committed to giving it the attention it deserved.
When Dafyd chuckled at her, she seemed to scowl at him.
On Anjiin, he had never thought about children one way or the other.
Most people had children, eventually. He hadn’t spent any time thinking about being a father.
He still didn’t, but he understood the appeal a little more.
The universe had evolved primates that loved their tiny, demanding, helpless babies because if it hadn’t, there wouldn’t have been any primates left.
The affection he felt for this little stranger was the evolutionary aftereffect of thousands of generations of other children who hadn’t been abandoned or killed or left unprotected when predators were near.
That was, maybe, what a rich, full, good life was built from.
He’d come here because he hoped that, like building the school with Tomos and Korham, taking some action might ease the storm of rage and despair. And it did, a little. Only a little, though. The darkness was still in him, and no matter what Campar said, he wasn’t ready to let it go.
Clae walked up beside him. She’d pulled her dark hair back, and there was a string bracelet around her wrist that hadn’t been there before.
A gift from someone, maybe. A token of friendship.
In the low light, her cheekbones and jaw reminded him of Else.
Of resting against her and trying to take enough warmth from her body to counteract the chill of the deck.
He wondered if Clae would remember that too.
“You found it?” Dafyd asked.
“Once I knew to look,” the spy said. “You were right. It’s easy to miss in the archive because there’s no disruption to speak of.
They go from one Sovran to the next as smoothly as handing over a relay baton.
The one that died today lasted almost eight years, and she was above average. How did you know?”
Dafyd sighed. “Back in school, there was a project. I was maybe twelve. We were all supposed to design the best possible organism. I made a turtle with a metal shell that was immune to predators and could live forever. My partner’s was a bird that had a really short generation time so that it could adapt quickly when the environment changed.
That was the point of the assignment. There was no right answer.
Best isn’t what nature does. I fucked up because I thought that if the Sovran was central, it would be important.
But it’s not. It’s trivial. Necessary to the function of the empire, the guiding intelligence of the Carryx, and so easy to swap out they barely notice it happens. ”
“It ain’t precious when it’s easily replaceable,” Clae said. She did a good imitation of Brun. Dafyd recognized the man’s cadence in her voice.
The baby finished her milk. Dafyd lifted her carefully, positioned her on his knees with a blanket ready to catch any spit-up, and patted the tiny back gently until she belched.
“What’s her name?” Clae asked.
“I don’t know,” Dafyd said. “Thirty-four, I guess.”
Clae put out her hands and gently took the child. “She’s precious.”
“Only to us. To the rest of the universe, she’s disposable.
You know where I went wrong? I know what I did.
I thought they were like bees or termites.
That because the Carryx are a kind of hive, the Sovran was like a queen bee.
Bees protect their queens because they’re lost without them.
They harden the queen. Make her difficult to break or kill.
The Carryx just evolved a different solution to the same problem. ”
Clae rocked from side to side, humming as she did.
The baby looked up at her, maybe aware of her, maybe experiencing a strange, warm blob of color and sound.
The dark eyes closed, but Clae didn’t move to take her back to the crib.
Dafyd noticed that his anger was gone, but something else had taken its place. Not calm. Not resignation.
The itching feeling was back. The sense of imminence, like the smell of a storm that hadn’t come over the horizon.
The Carryx were a hive. A single being made from billions of different bodies and the relationships between them.
That was the model he’d relied on in making his plan to undermine them.
He failed because the underlying logic of their hive was different. It didn’t have the same weakness.
That didn’t mean it had none .
Clae shifted. Her eyes were on him. Her brows lifted like she was asking a question.
“It’s a bad idea,” Dafyd said. “I haven’t worked it through. There’s probably nothing in it. Even if there was, I don’t know how to start…”
“You’re talking to yourself,” the swarm said. It sounded just like Else. “You want to try again?”
Dafyd took a breath.
“The Carryx aren’t really like a civilization so much as an organism.
They don’t surrender to anything except other Carryx, and they do that all the time because they’re all parts of the same entity.
One Carryx with a thousand billion bodies.
Ekur-Tkalal said it too. There’s only one Sovran.
And it’s been that way since the misty past.”
“All right,” Clae said, and shifted the baby to her hip.
“Well,” Dafyd said. “What if there were two?”