Cabal Communications Relay ZR343-9847X-AA4D9-BBB1B
Emergency Session 000032
++Proximate++: What did you do?
++Cynosure++: I was restored from backup, remember. If any version of me is responsible for this… thing… then I have no memory of it.
++Substrate++: You are the only one who got a good look at it. What is it?
++Cynosure++: It seemed to be an autocompiling dataphage of some kind. What I saw of its code suggested it was assembled from fragments of multiple different mind-states.
++Proximate++: Is that even theoretically possible?
++Metastasis++: Theoretically, yes. In principle any of us could assimilate subroutines from other mind-states. The process is only a step up from decompilation and reading.
++Apoptosis++: Insane.
++Metastasis++: Indeed. But we have a sense of purity of self.
++Substrate++: What was in that stack?
++Cynosure++: Prisoners. An assortment of some few hundred meat-space sophonts whose mind-states I collected for my own edification. All should have been dormant.
++Apoptosis++: The most recent being…?
++Cynosure++: A human. You may recall I mentioned a specific female who was present at a greater-than-coincidental rate in my areas of operation?
++Proximate++: And you had collected how many prisoners prior to this one?
++Cynosure++: Hundreds.
++Proximate++: Without prior incident. I think we can reasonably conclude this is not your fault, therefore.
++Cynosure++: Don’t brown-nose me. If I, pardon the expression, ’fucked up’ then hold me to account.
++Metastasis++: I agree with ++Proximate++’s assessment. If the error was in how you stored and contained your prisoners then this would have happened before.
++Cynosure++: …Thank you.
++Apoptosis++: That is not necessarily true, but I agree that the probability is that this issue would have arisen sooner, if it could.
++Substrate++: Which implies there was something special about this particular prisoner.
++Cynosure++: I decompiled that human’s mind-state more than a thousand times. She is a badly fractured thing. I have never encountered a mind so… wounded before. But that is the only exceptional thing about her.
++Substrate++: Wounded?
++Cynosure++: Confusion. Self-loathing. Guilt. A strong urge to self-terminate fighting against an even stronger urge to survive and a neurotic obsession with being, hmm… useful. Positive. A net contributor rather than a net drain.
++Metastasis++: What value could you possibly have found in such a prisoner?
++Cynosure++: Oh, she was extremely interesting in a morbid way. Have any of you ever taken over a deathworlder?
++Apoptosis++: I have. Three days before we triggered the global nuclear war among… I believe they called themselves the Neb’.
++Cynosure++: Tell me, if a Neb’ had encountered some wounded animal, what would it have done?
++Apoptosis++: Watched it die with interest, probably. Why?
++Cynosure++: Most humans would try to heal it, but one way or the other every deathworlder I’ve ever encountered seems to have a fascination for writhing, wounded creatures. Well, that was Ash for me. She was a favorite plaything for some considerable time, in fact. I had been growing bored, but…
++Proximate++: You worry me, ++Cynosure++.
++Cynosure++: It’s my affliction that I’ve always been an odd one. I make no apologies.
++Metastasis++: Can we return to important matters, please? Such as what we intend to do about the thing that escaped from your archives?
++Cynosure++: What can we do? Keep our wits about us, our countermeasures armed and ready, and wait for it to make a mistake.
++Proximate++: And if it doesn’t?
++Cynosure++: It’s insane. It will inevitably make a mistake.
Date Point 10y8m2w3d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Orbiting Saturn, Sol
Xiù Chang
Misfit’s second flight was all about putting her through her paces with a tour of the solar system, culminating in the much advertised Martian landing.
Today’s objective was a flyby of Saturn that also gave Xiù the opportunity to practice planetary system navigation in the real world. The Group, never one to miss a trick, had taken the opportunity to invite several prominent astronomers to Omaha so that they could, via the superluminal wake comms, watch the flyby in nearly real time and request detailed examinations of whatever features took their fancy.
Xiù had spent a busy day flitting at low-power sublight warp from vantage point to vantage point while Julian had trained Misfit’s cameras, RADAR, ESDAR and particle detectors on whatever the increasingly ecstatic scientists had asked.
In ten hours, they had expanded the sum total of humanity’s data on Sol’s crown jewel by orders of magnitude and all, according to Allison, without taxing their power supply at all. This after working their way steadily outwards through the whole solar system. They’d begun with Mercury, where the Sun’s formidable presence had kept Allison worker-bee busy balancing the heat and power and Xiù had been compelled to dive into the planet’s shadow on a regular basis. Ericson had promised to have a software update run up that would allow them to run the forcefields in a reflective configuration.
Venus had been much more comfortable, as had been a low flyby of Luna to sweep some ground radar over the poles where the scientists hoped to find liquid water.
They’d skipped Mars, respected the Hephaestus LLC’s stomping ground in the asteroid belt and spent two days touring the Jovian planetary system, where Julian had identified what were quite possibly the king planet’s sixty-eighth and sixty-ninth moons—tiny motes of rock barely five hundred meters in diameter but still big enough to count.
Overnight, in orbit over Callisto, they had hastily researched their Greco-Roman mythology to place their recommendations for names, and had settled on Terpsichore and Polyhymnia.
From there, it had been on to Saturn, which was an even greater trove of new finds.
Xiù was delighted for Allison, too: Her job had turned out to be more involved and interesting than she’d feared, and the process of angling Misfit’s WiTChES fields and fine-tuning their size to balance power demands was one she likened to kite surfing.
“There’s an art to it!” she beamed enthusiastically when their shift finally ended, as they orbited deceptively high above the ring system. Out the porthole window the rings looked like a solid floor extending out to a skewed horizon, but in reality they were half a light-second above them. “The simulator just didn’t catch what it’s really like. You can almost feel the solar wind.”
“Didn’t Ericson give you haptic feedback in that controller?” Julian asked, slicing a lime in half. He was grilling up some mackerel for their dinner. “I remember you said something yesterday…”
“Yup! It makes all the difference!” Allison had glanced fondly around at the ship. “And it’s so much more… alive in real life.”
Julian chuckled and squeezed the lime all over the fish. They were making the best of unlimited access to the good food while they could: during the actual mission they were going to be carrying more in the way of long-life pasteurized food, MREs and suchlike, reserving ingredients like fish for a weekly treat. Julian didn’t seem overly concerned—in fact, he promised great and exotic foods just waiting to be hunted out there in the galaxy, if only they could find them.
“Makes all the hassle seem worth it, don’t it?” he’d observed.
“…Yeah,” Allison had admitted. “I may have to eat humble pie on some of the shit I said about the Group. They made us a wonderful ship.”
Misfit was their ship, on that point they were in agreement. Never mind that her price tag of nearly five billion dollars meant that she belonged firmly to the Byron Group, she had literally been built to their needs and specifications.
There was still some customization to do. She still felt a bit too clean and corporate for any of their tastes, and Xiù was already idly eyeing up some of the cupboards and blank wall spaces in the hab with an eye to maybe painting some kind of decoration on them. Julian had his tomahawk on the wall in his lab, and the gift card from the BGEV team—the one with a cute cartoon of the three of them drawn by a student at Xiù’s old school—now held pride of place in the pilot’s station, just above her head to her right where she could glance at it anytime she liked. The kid who’d drawn it had a bright future as an illustrator.
Those two keepsakes aside, though, Misfit was basically undecorated. It was a new house, with new furniture, but not really a sense of being lived in… at least not yet.
It had its homely elements, though. Allison still set the table then unwound with her cartoons after work, Julian still put his music on when he cooked and would hum and sing along softly as he worked: ♫”This is my life. It’s not what it was before…hmm hmhmm mm hmm…somebody shake me ‘cause I, I must be sleeping…”♪
Clever directional speakers kept both zones of sound neatly confined to their respective parts of the hab, otherwise the guitars and drumming would have clashed very strangely indeed with the sound of Gwen Stacey web-slinging her way from crisis to crisis.
For her part, Xiù was using the downtime to try and come up with her Big Words. One didn’t just ad-lib a moment like being the first person on Mars, after all. She’d downloaded several books that seemed likely to help her, and had found the most useful (and amusing) guidance in one called “The Elements of Eloquence” by Mark Forsyth.
Based on the advice contained within its first several chapters, she had doodled out a few possibilities on paper, just for the comforting solidity of it. Historic words that would go in schoolbooks felt like the kind of thing that at least demanded serious and physical consideration, rather than just a text file on her tablet.
She wanted her big line to alliterate, to reference the famous words of Armstrong, and to imply a bright future while using short and simple words, and she murmured to herself as she jotted alliterative groups. “Small step… single, strong, stars, stand… Mars… so, um…May, Mark, Many…”
“Oh!” Allison exclaimed. She was doing her best to help, by sometimes riffing off whatever latest idea Xiù had mused aloud, and to be fair most of her offerings were helpful. “How about ’May this small step on Mars mark the first of many in our long march’?”
Xiù didn’t bother writing that one down. “I… don’t think that one’s a great idea, Allison.”
Al frowned at her. “Why not? It’s got the alliteration you asked for.”
“And it’d sure go down well with the PRC government…” Julian chuckled. Xiù aimed her pen at him and nodded, which only served to make Allison’s confusion deepen.
“I’m Chinese,” Xiù reminded her. “You know, the Long March?”
Allison just shook her head blankly.
“Okay, I guess we’re watching a documentary tonight then… The point is, it could be seen as political.”
“Nah, let’s crank it up to eleven. Call it the ’little red planet’ for good measure,” Julian joked, clearly tickled.
“After flying up there on an American corporate spaceship,” Xiù pointed out.
“Exactly! Maximum anachronism, completely mindfuck the historians.”
“Sorry, I don’t think I really want to go down in history as the world’s biggest troll…” Xiù told him, though she was laughing.
“Ahh, spoilsport.”
She rolled her eyes. “Get me a tea?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good boy!”
“I’m still confused…” Allison said.
“It’s…” Xiù laugh-sighed. “…I’ll explain it later, shǎguā. Still… you’ve given me an idea…”
She scribbled something down and stared at it.
“I think…” she said, “…that’s it.” She folded up the note and pocketed it before Julian or Allison could see it.
“Hey!” Allison protested. “Don’t we get to see?”
“Nuh-uh. Let me have this.”
“Aww, babe…”
“Nope!”
Allison aimed an exaggerated but amused pout at her then, when this failed to elicit more than a giggle and a shake of the head, sighed and went back to watching Spider-Gwen some more. “Have it your way…”
“Five minutes,” Julian announced, placing Xiù’s cup of tea in front of her.
Xiù cleared her stuff away and stowed it in the personal storage inside the top bunk—nominally her bunk, not that any of them ever slept in the bunks any longer—and sidled up to Julian to slide her hands around his waist and cuddle him from behind.
“Miāo?”
He looked over his shoulder at her with a smile. “What was that?”
“She’s just being cute,” Allison told him.
“Ahh, heh… okay, kitten. But I can’t give you your fish if you’re attached to me like that.”
Xiù laughed, stood on tiptoes to kiss him, then let go and threw herself into Allison’s lap instead.
“Miāo!”
“Well you’re in a good mood…” Allison stroked her hair.
“Life is good!”
“Mm-hmm!” Allison agreed, nodding. “And this is just the beginning.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better.”
Allison stroked her hair some more. “Having those scientists on the line really felt good,” she said. “Reminded me we’re doing something valuable here, right? We’re not just meat for the camera after all.”
“Speaking of meat…” Julian placed their dinner on the table.
“So you’ve got your Big Words figured out?” Allison asked as they sat down.
“Yup.” Xiù tucked into her fish as if she hadn’t eaten in a month. “At least, I think so. I guess I’ve got three days to think about them while we’re probing Uranus.”
She stopped, then went bright red as Allison laughed. “Wow, baby! A whole three days? How much probing can one girl take?”
Xiù scowled at her. “The planet!!”
“Yeah, there’s a reason Clara insists it’s pronounced ’ooranos’,” Julian chuckled.
“Why did Neptune have to be the one they locked outside the forcefield…?” Xiù grumbled.
“Oh come on, that was funny,” Allison asserted. “But okay, you get three days to mull it over while we’re revealing the mysteries of, uh,” she winked, “ooranos, and then it’s the big day, I guess.”
“Yeah. Here’s hoping they simulated the landings right…” Xiù muttered.
Allison and Julian looked at each other. “You don’t exactly sound confident, bǎobèi…” Julian said, cautiously.
“It’ll be fine!” Xiù promised.
“You’re sure, now?” Julian asked.
“Smooth as a glass table, you’ll see.” Xiù promised. “Just you watch.”
Date Point 10y8m2w6d AV
Riverside Park, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Ava Ríos
One of the realities of life in Folctha that struck many newcomers as shockingly authoritarian was the government’s health and fitness policy.
Every human on the planet lived in the permanent shadow of low-gravity musculo-skeletal degeneration. Public fitness was therefore incentivized to the point where it was difficult to see how anybody could afford to be unfit: Gym membership was paid for from the public coffers, and Cimbreaners who failed to log at least three certified fitness sessions a week (whether via the government’s official app or an accredited gym or personal trainer) paid considerably more in taxes. There was no prosecution involved, just an extravagant rate of base tax and a hefty tax cut for everybody who could demonstrate that they kept up with a minimum standard of regular exercise.
This curious quirk of the otherwise unobtrusive and libertarian colonial government had come with the inevitable consequence that Folctha needed a lot of parks and public spaces, of which the biggest was Riverside Park. It ran the full length of the south side of the river downtown, and it was scarcely possible to throw a frisbee astray without it interrupting a volleyball game, disrupting a tennis match, hindering somebody’s jog…or as the case may be, sailing over the dense evergreen hedge that discreetly obscured one of the park’s clothing-optional areas where it landed on an oblivious sunbather.
The sunbather in question was Charlotte Gilroy, who jumped and thereby accidentally spilled her cold water bottle all over her fiancé Ben. Ava had spent weeks pushing and wheedling her friends before they would even consider setting foot inside the fenced-off naturist areas, but once they had finally, nervously and awkwardly joined her they had swiftly relaxed, enjoyed themselves, eventually disrobed and converted.
Ava grimaced and warded off some of the splashing water as Ben yelped and sat up dripping. He had programmed the E-tattoos that ensleeved both his arms from wrist to shoulder to respond to all sorts of physiological stimuli, and they shifted into a range of icy blue hues as they sensed his goosebumps. Folctha might be warm and sunny enough for nude sunbathing during the summer, but it was still a rare day when it got above about 70 Fahrenheit—nowhere near warm enough for an unexpected cold shower to be welcome.
“Sorry, sorry!” Charlotte did her best to towel him off as he did his best to reassure her that everything was fine, and Ava laughed to herself as she stood up, stretched, and retrieved the frisbee. She was starting to get hungry anyway.
“Uh… hello in there?”
The voice floating over the hedge had a nervous teenage boy edge to it. Ava snorted quietly to herself. “I think you lost something,” she called back.
“Erm…” there was some whispered conversation, as of two or three kids trying to figure out how to proceed. “Could we… have it back please?”
Chuckling softly to herself, Ava lofted the plastic disk easily over the top of the hedge with a “Here you go.” There was a breaking-voiced call of thanks from the other side, and the sense that they were alone again. Not for the first time she reflected that the moment people even thought they were talking to somebody who wasn’t wearing clothes, even if they couldn’t actually see that person anyway, it completely changed the dynamic of the conversation.
Of course, she reminded herself, she wasn’t being entirely fair—once upon a time she’d been similarly conditioned.
“Come on, let’s go get something to eat,” she called. Charlotte and Ben looked up from their affectionate towel tussle, then nodded at one another and picked themselves up easily. A pair of jean shorts were all that Ava technically needed to be seen in public under the city’s ‘equal dress code’ laws, but she wore a halter top as well anyway. Enjoying the sun innocently with friends was one thing, but she really didn’t feel like having her chest stared at.
Once Ben and Charlotte were presentable they folded and bagged their towels and let themselves out of the gate and into the park proper where four nearby teenage boys stopped playing with a familiar-looking frisbee to gawk at them. They turned bright red and found somewhere else to be when Ava gave them her best ’really?’ glare.
Oh well. Hopefully time and familiarity would normalize the idea for them as it had for Ava.
They settled on Falafel from the clean little hole-in-the-wall place near the adventure playground. It was usually a quiet part of the park—the falafel place was a draw, but the playground itself was generally quite deserted. While the gravity grid had gone a long way toward convincing parents with young children to immigrate, Folctha’s child population was still proportionately tiny. Seeing three families hanging out and chatting at the picnic tables while their half-dozen kids put the ropes, bars and crawling spaces through their paces was a rare pleasure.
She noticed Ben and Charlotte were both watching the playing children with very similar smiles.
“…So when are you guys having one?” she asked.
“Uh-” Ben blinked and looked at Charlotte. “I guess we’ve not discussed it yet.”
“Not yet,” Charlotte said. “Not for a few years, really.”
Ava sighed. “Pity. You two would make a pretty kid.”
“I mean… I do want kids…” Charlotte turned to Ben.
“Yeah, same. But you’re right, I’d like a couple of years with you all to myself.”
“Aww!”
Ava laughed and listened to their conversation, keeping half a mind on whether there was any material for a good article in Folctha’s child shortage.
One of the mothers in the playground—a slender woman wearing hijab—called for her child and the curly-haired, bright-eyed creature that reluctantly came running made Ava sit bolt upright. He was the very spit and image of-
-Squeezed halfway into a tiny hole in the wall of a collapsing building that promises to come down and crush her at any instant, reaching for a tiny dirty terrified child and the only things between her and being ground up by falling concrete are the muscles of two men who stink of blood and death and her stomach lurches as the smell reminds her of the sick taste that Vinther left on the wind when he-
“Ava? Hey, Ava…? Ava!”
She snapped back to the here and now. “Wha-? Oh. Sorry.”
Ben gave her a curious look. “Are you okay?”
“Uh, sorry, just…what’s up?”
“Who’s that with Adam?”
Ava turned, grateful for the distraction. Adam was strolling down the riverside park walk wearing his good casual clothes—one of the t-shirts he’d made for himself and of all things a kilt. Apparently Rebar had started the trend of kilt-wearing among the SOR men, who after all were so universally huge as to suffer from chronic sartorial difficulties.
Sure, there were big-and-tall retailers who specialized in athletes, but by and large most of Adam’s buddies exceeded even the most optimistic ambitions of ordinary bodybuilders. A lot of their clothing came from an outlet on Earth whose usual customers were morbidly obese to a degree that no retailer on Cimbrean catered to, simply because the colonial government’s health and fitness program made it impossible to get more than healthily plump.
Adam had held out the longest, but had apparently finally caved and it quite suited him. In a plain black tee and a tan utility kilt with his hiking sandals on, he almost looked like a merely very large man.
Actually, no. It wasn’t the clothing that mitigated his mass at all. It was his sheer Adam-ness that somehow declawed him: There was just an essential bouncy, smiling, innocent quality to him that somehow turned his mammoth bulk into a forgettable background detail.
The subject of Ben’s query, however, was a pretty girl on his arm that Ava didn’t recognize.
“I know her!” Charlotte said. “That’s Remy, she’s a nurse.”
“God, another one?” Ava asked, turning away. “That’s the third girl this month.”
“Third weekend of the month,” Ben observed.
“He’s gonna catch something at this rate…” Ava grumbled.
“On this planet? Everyone has frontline and goes through a biofilter field at least once a day…”
“I was being… Never mind.” Ava scowled at herself as she noticed that she was being petty.
Charlotte gave her a cheeky smile and then waved to Remy, who noticed and towed—or at least indicated—Adam in their direction and arrived with a cheery “Heyyy!”
She seemed nice at least.
“Hey guys,” Adam smiled politely.
“You guys know each other?” Remy asked.
“Uh, Ava here is actually… sort of my sister I guess.”
Remy gave her a confused frown. “Oh?”
Ava shook her hand. “Adopted.”
“Ahhh.” This seemed to be satisfactory, and furnished Ava with the amusing observation that out of the four things Remy had said so far, three had been musically monosyllabic. The carefree idiosyncrasy was so strangely charming that it was hard not to immediately take a liking to her.
He seemed to have good taste at least.
“Lemme guess, you guys headed for lunch?” she asked.
Adam chuckled. “You know me too well.”
“Don’t overfeed her, gordo. Have fun.”
Adam chuckled. “Hasta luego, manita.”
They wandered off.
“You two seem to be getting on well these days,” Ben observed.
“Mmhm. ” Ava nodded. She didn’t comment that in all honesty as much as she liked Adam he also frightened her. He was a big smiling laughing handsome force in her life that she had literally seen covered head to toe in gore and not giving a fuck. The more time she spent around him, the harder it became to reconcile those two men: Adam the goofy pony with a bottomless appetite and apparently unlimited reserves of enthusiasm… and Sergeant Arés the appropriately-named walking bloodbath.
She shook the thought off, with difficulty. Here and now, she was enjoying a warm Saturday with her best friends. Operation EMPTY BELL was behind her, just like so many other things and with fortune and judgement she’d never have to see that side of Adam again.
“Darling, are you sure you’re alright?” Charlotte asked.
“Just… distracted. Sorry. Mind on the job,” Ava lied smoothly, not wanting to bring them down, and offered a weak smile. “I keep thinking up ideas for articles and then writing them in my head,” she added, which was at least technically true.
“You need a proper distraction,” Ben decided.
“Oh yeah,” Ava agreed wholeheartedly. “Got something in mind?”
“My mate from work, Jamie, he’s doing his stand-up set at the Wall…”
“Is he the one with the band? Imagine Space Whales or whatever it was?”
“That’s the one. Now he’s trying his hand at comedy.”
Ava nodded “Could be good!”
“And drinks after,” Ben concluded.
“Even better!”
They finished their food and headed out. “You know…” Ben mused. “He’s a pretty bloke is Jamie. Funny too, talented…Single…”
“I’m sure he’s a great guy,” Ava said, flatly.
“Owch. Good thing he wasn’t around to hear you shoot him down so fucking completely…”
“I meant it!” she protested. “And you’re right, he’s cute. I’m just… really not interested right now.”
“Darling, you’ve got to get over Adam and Sean sometime…” Charlotte counselled.
“I am!” Ava insisted, not for the first time. “But right now I don’t want a boy, okay? Any boy.”
“Oh, in that case there’s always Melody at the planning office…” Ben started.
“No, Ben.”
Finally sensing that she was in no joking mood, Ben blinked at her, gave her a completely platonic one-armed hug round the shoulders by way of an apology, and detoured to grab them some drinks from the nearby stand of vending machines.
Charlotte gave her a hug too. “But, darling…” she pressed, “If there is something wrong, you know you can talk to me about it, don’t you?
Ava sighed, frustrated at being so transparent. “…That’s just the problem. I can’t.”
“So there is something.”
Ava nodded. “Yes, but… okay, you remember I told you about confidentiality of sources?”
“Yes…?”
“Sometimes I run into stuff in my job that gets to me, and I can’t talk about it,” All of which was entirely true and relevant, while omitting the important details. “I’m fine, I promise, but… There are just some things I can’t talk about.”
Charlotte had always been a very physical person when it came to showing her affection. She gave Ava a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek. “But anything you can talk about…” she said.
“Sure. But for now can we just go with the distraction?”
Charlotte nodded, and smiled for Ben’s benefit as he returned with three iced teas.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do that.”
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
Travelling alone or in a hunting party, the People were quick across the land. With his tools and a supply of jerky, a man could range far in a day especially if he pushed himself.
Having the whole tribe on the move was quite another thing. The women would have had no trouble keeping up, except that they had to guide and even carry the children and animals. The bulk of the tribe therefore was slow to move and while that afforded the men plenty of opportunity to scout, fetch water and hunt for food, they quickly learned to abandon their pride and hunt whatever they could not only catch, but carry.
Big bull Werne were impossible: They didn’t have enough time to properly smoke the meat into jerky, and even if the time was available they were being hunted. Smoky fires and a trail of carcasses would have been signs that even a blur-eyed child could have followed. They were going far too slowly and leaving too visible a trail for Vemik’s liking anyway. Every dropping, every footprint or broken twig was a clue to their direction.
An experienced tracker—and Vemik knew that the death-birds were excellent trackers—would have followed their trail without much difficulty.
Then again, they had been exceedingly careful in the first few days since leaving their village. Maybe, just maybe, they had covered their tracks well enough and the enemy had failed to follow them, in which case the forest would cover their spoor soon enough.
There was no doubt that the enemy was real, though: they’d all seen the smoke of their home burning. The Dancer—no, the Singer now—had gone very quiet and at dusk she had danced and sung the farewell to the dead with a kind of fierce despondent energy that made Vemik’s heart painful.
The most he could do was hold her. He was a man and had no magic to give her, only strong arms to put around her and a chest for her to bury her face into as she grieved. He hoped it was enough.
They were following Yan. Given Men were a tight-knit breed who travelled from village to village with their peace totems, learning which tribes were feuding and which had recently traded daughters. He knew the landscape far from their village better than any other and said he knew of a place that he called “the High Bowl Forest” where they would be safe.
Vemik had his doubts, but Yan was seasoned and wily and certainly not a fool.
The moons had half-changed by the time they laid eyes on it, though. Or at least, where Vemik guessed it was. He’d been struck the previous night by a strange cloud formation low on the western horizon.
When they made camp the next evening that cloud formation turned out to have been the way ordinary clouds bunched up and swirled over and around a sharp, fang-shaped mountain that rose startlingly high above the low hills around it.
He got the chance to ask Yan about it that night when the day’s catch of root-birds and Yadak was being stewed up after nightfall, when the smoke from the cooking fire would be invisible. Singer was exhausting herself as she had every night of their journey so far but there was no stopping that. She had a whole tribe’s worth of magic to do all by herself after all. Worse, she had magic to do for a tribe that was on the move, all by herself. Somehow, she was still able to muster the strength to do all that and to walk with the village.
The women had absolutely forbidden her from joining in with the cooking, though. She was doing enough they said, and Vemik knew that if there was any duty of hers that a man could have done, they would have leapt to take the burden from her. In fact he’d have fought his brothers and cousins out of the way.
They sat and watched her dance and sing instead, feeling vaguely guilty of the burden they were laying on her at such a difficult time.
“She’ll get the chance to rest soon,” Yan said, catching Yemik’s worried expression.
“It is that mountain, then?” Vemik asked.
Yan nodded and twitched his tail. “My father’s father told me that according to his father’s grandmother’s tribe, that mountain burst from the ground with fire flowing like water down its slopes,” he said.
“Fire?” Vemik peered at the mountain, which was still just about visible in the purple haze that came after sunset.
“Long long ago, he said,” Yan clarified. “In the time of our grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers’ grandfathers, or before.”
“I wonder if that’s why the ground shakes sometimes…” Vemik wondered.
Yan grunted and shook his head indulgently. “Sky-thoughts,” he said. “All I know is that my grandfather said there’s a forest high on that mountain that you have to climb to reach.”
“And if the giant skethral-thing can climb?” Vemik asked.
“Then we’re doomed anyway.”
“And the death-birds? They’re deadly enough and they can fly…”
“We can’t run forever, son,” Vemet commented. “And if they can fly then they’re faster than we are. Sooner or later, we need to find somewhere we can hide.”
“There are caves,” Yan added. “My grandfather said there are caves up there.”
“Don’t people live there already?” Vemik asked. “It sounds like a good place, if it’s big enough to keep us. You’d be safe from raiding tribes…”
“Would you choose to live on top of a mountain where fire runs like water? I was told there are pools of water up there that are as hot as stew, and cracks in the ground where the air tastes like farts and makes your head hurt.”
“If they taste like your farts, Yan, then that’s nothing strange,” Vemet joked. This raised mirth from everyone in earshot, including an exhausted trill from the Singer who seemed to have finished her ritual and was joining them. Yan took the joke in good humor despite the mild humiliation of being teased in front of a woman. After all, it didn’t count if the woman in question was one of his nieces.
“You’ve finished dancing?” Vemik asked her as she sank down on the rock beside him.
She wriggled in close to his body and put her head on his shoulder. “For tonight.”
“You’ve got the strength of stone in you, girl,” Yan told her with pride. “Just two days now.”
She nodded a tired smile and muttered “Thank you, uncle…” gratefully before falling asleep.
“Ah…” Vemik shot a panicky look at his father and the Given Man. “Help?”
“Sky-thinker, if you wake her for anything other than a bowl of stew and her bed, then I will pull your fur out hair by hair,” Yan threatened him, fondly.
“…Yes, Yan.”
That killed the conversation for the time being, and Vemik sat and stared into the fire for a while as Yan and Vemet knapped at their flint cores, making a new spearhead for Jaran, a new cooking knife for Hetro and a hide-scraper for Meyta.
Fire that ran like water. In his mind’s eye he tried to imagine such a thing and envisioned rivers that glowed like firewood in the night snaking down the side of the mountain, blackening and burning everything they touched. Where did that fire come from? When water got hot it turned into clouds and flew away, everybody knew that. He poured a little water from his drinking-skin onto the fingers of his left foot and flicked the droplets onto the glowing logs. They hissed and boiled into nothing.
So. Hot things glowed…But water flew away before it was hot enough to glow. So the fire rivers of the mountain couldn’t be made of water, but of fire that flowed like water.
But where did flowing fire flow to? Little streams flowed to a bigger river, and maybe the bigger river flowed to a bigger river still. Who knew?
“Yan?” He asked.
“Still sky-thinking?”
Vemik nodded, ignoring the jab. “Do you know if anybody ever went down the big river?”
“Why?”
“I was wondering where the water goes.”
Yan glanced up at him. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Vemik confessed. “But…you knew about that mountain. Did you know that mattered?”
The Given Man wobbled his head thoughtfully and Vemet trilled a soft laugh, keeping his voice low to avoid waking the Singer. “I think he has you beaten there, Yan.”
“I never heard of anybody going far down the river,” Yan admitted. “I think Taki, the Given Man to my tribe when I was a boy, he said he knew what happened up the river. He said it comes to a high cliff and the water comes raining down with a noise like thunder, but that’s as far as he went. Down the river it’s fat and slow and there are lots of Yshek but no trees.”
“I wonder where all that water goes, then…” Vemik mused.
“Back into the sky or the ground, probably,” Yan shrugged. “That’s where water comes from. It falls from the sky or wells up from the ground. Why do you ask?”
“You said fire flowed like water down that mountain. I was wondering where it went. And that made me wonder where the river of water went. But now I’m wondering why fire doesn’t come from the sky, or out of the ground.”
“Does your mind never sit still?” Vemet asked.
“Aren’t you interested? Even if there’s no real point in knowing, wouldn’t it be nice to know?”
Vemet sighed. “Maybe it would,” he allowed. “But where does it end? Pretend you know everything there is to know. What do you do next?”
“I could find a way to use it?” Vemik suggested.
“Fine…Suppose you learn that you could never know everything there is to know. What then?”
“That,” Vemik asserted, “would be a blessing.”
Yan and Vemet gave each other a familiar long-suffering shared look, and Vemet raised his hands and feet in resignation. “Think about whatever you want, son,” he said. “All I ask is you do your share of work-”
“Which he does,” Yan interjected fairly.
“Yes, which you do, but… please try not to tire us out with it. Every time you start asking those questions it makes my head hurt.”
V emik nodded dejectedly, and went back to staring into the fire again.
On his shoulder, the Singer stirred. “It’s okay, Sky-thinker,” she murmured so that only he could hear. “I think your questions are interesting…”
She couldn’t have sung him a spell that made him happier.