Date Point: 12y6m1w3d AV
Grand Enclave of Females, Planet Gao.
Sister Myun
“Faith?”
Being Yulna’s personal protector was generally an easy job. After all, who would attack her? The Mother-Supreme was, well…the Mother-Supreme. Any male who so much as scratched her would never mate again even if he survived, and the Females were clan.
Myun still took her duties seriously, though. Especially now, especially after hearing those words that the Whitecrests had somehow managed to acquire and forward. Even the Gaori translation had been engaging but as a fluent English speaker herself she had felt the full impact of Sartori’s address. She wasn’t sure her fur would ever settle.
Yulna was listening to the recording with much more calm, resting her jaw lightly on a curled forepaw while tracing a claw idly across the glass surface of her desk.
“Sister Shoo tried to explain the concept once,” she said, addressing the Mother who had asked. “It is… a difficult one. Do you remember, Myun?”
Myun duck-nodded solemnly.
“It means something like… trust, or confidence,” Yulna elaborated. “But more. Trust based on conviction rather than hard evidence.”
“So this Sar-toree is saying that he trusts his people despite not having a good reason?” the Mother summarized.
Yulna angled her head contemplatively. “No… No, that would be an admission of weakness. ‘Faith’ is a strong concept. He’s saying he doesn’t need a good reason to believe it, he knows it to be true anyway. Something like that.”
“And this is the species that the Whitecrests want us aligned with?” Mother Suri asked, with an ill-concealed lick of contempt. She had been Yulna’s rival to the position of Mother-Supreme and while she had accepted Yulna’s accession in the end she had still maneuvered herself into the heart of Clan power.
Yulna insisted she was useful. Something about it being good to hear a dissenting voice and Suri still being one of the good people, even if there were profound differences of opinion between them.
“That ‘faith’ kept Sister Shoo going where any of us would have curled up in a mournful ball and given up,” Yulna replied. “It let the humans trust Regaari despite only meeting him once, and it let them trust me, too. I don’t really know what it is or how it works, but it does. The Starminds might know better… Father Gyotin has thought long and hard on the subject, I understand.”
Myun couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. “You’re overthinking it. Faith isn’t anything supernatural or anything like that. It’s just belief. It’s belief that good people are good and will do good things. It’s belief that there is such a thing as justice. It’s just ‘faith’ in the basic sanity of the universe. Why is that so hard?”
Suri and several of the other Mothers shot her mingled looks of irritation, impatience and disgust at the interruption. Yulna, for her part, chittered indulgently.
“You should know that nothing is ever simple with humans, young one.”
“Nah, they’re really simple. They just…do everything intensely. Everything. They’re like Whitecrest that way. If they don’t like you, you’ll know it. If they do…well, they’ll have ‘faith’ in you, and they won’t be wrong.”
Suri growled slightly. “You are a bodyguard, Myun, not an advisor.”
Myun displayed a rare bout of political tact and duck-nodded respectfully, backing down.
“Good advice can be found scrawled on the wall in a stinking back alley,” Yulna observed, though the set of her ears made it plain to everyone in the room that she wasn’t insulting Myun in the slightest. “What matters is that you listen to it, not where it came from. And Myun, frankly, has studied humans rather more extensively than anybody else here.”
“Nevertheless…” Suri flicked an ear.
“Yes, yes.” Yulna waved a paw at Myun that said ‘please shut up’ in a kindly, materteral way and Myun stepped respectfully back into the corner. She was learning a lot about politics.
“The whole speech is just… paranoid, though. Surely?” one of the Mothers asked. “They’re deathworlders, they must be primed to see danger behind every corner.”
“Maybe…” Yulna agreed thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, does it?”
“If you see danger behind every corner, sooner or later you’ll be right,” another Mother agreed.
“And they are primed to sense danger, are they not? That let them build an advanced society on Earth, which from what we know may in a practical sense be the deadliest planet in the galaxy.”
“Mother Ayma survived it, didn’t she?” There was a doubtful note in Suri’s skepticism.
“With the aid of an environment suit and full-time medical escort.”
Myun whispered “Beef Brothers” to herself quietly, with the faintest chitter.
The Mother who was taking Yulna’s side—Memi? Memya? Something like that—didn’t seem to notice. “No,” she said, “I think we can safely say that when a human is taking a threat seriously, then that threat is worth taking seriously. From what I know of them their lives are so… saturated with constant low-grade dangers that they tend to just ignore them, or view them as an inconvenience.”
“Example?” Suri’s ally demanded. Mother… Sesal. No, Sesala.
“They have to scrub enamel-eating bacteria out of their mouths every morning or else their teeth literally rot,” Yulna offered with, Myun thought, considerable relish. “And apparently a lot of them just don’t bother, or forget. And sometimes that doesn’t even matter. But sometimes it does and they can actually die from it. They have medical professionals who are concerned only with their teeth. ‘Dentists’ I think.”
“This seems contradictory,” Suri complained. “They’ll ignore a threat like that but we’re supposed to take them seriously when they get concerned over… what, a conspiracy to eradicate their whole species?”
“Well…if the mere fact of waking up could prove dangerous, wouldn’t you be numbed to all the little threats? What would it take to get your attention if a cut on a finger, a bit of food in the teeth, even brushing up against the wrong plant could kill you dead or leave you permanently scarred? You would be a neurotic wreck in short order.”
Suri and Sesala both lapsed into thoughtful silence.
Yulna let them think for a second as she sipped a contemplative glass of Talamay. “Besides. What happened to their city ‘San Diego’ is hard to explain except by conspiracy…I think the correct approach here is to at least entertain the possibility that their fears are valid. We can leave final judgement for when we know more.”
“And until then?” Memi inquired.
“Until then, I will speak to Champion Genshi and the other Champions as I see fit, and we shall discover what this threat might be. Because if it threatens the Humans…sooner or later, it will threaten us. The recent rumblings in the Dominion Security Council about our world…”
“We are not a deathworld,” Suri asserted, sharply.
“Does it matter? The official classification is headed that way and if it is…Well. I won’t debate whether or not Gao really is or is becoming a Deathworld, leave that to the Highmountain philosophers. I am more worried about the attention it draws and the political consequences.”
“Besides, the Guvnurag prove that it doesn’t really matter,” Mother Memi observed. “They are most definitely not deathworlders, and yet they bore the worst of it this time.”
“Yes, what do we do about them?” Suri asked. “We’re obligated to do something, aren’t we?”
“We offer as much aid as we can, discreetly, and we communicate that to the Clans,” Yulna declared. “I suspect they may not be willing to entertain a public gesture given our burgeoning relationship with the Humans. Perhaps a sanctuary colony on Gorai? I’d need to pay a favor to Stoneback…would the Guvnurag accept? Hmm…” She trailed off in thought.
“And what do we do if the Hunters decide that we’re next?” Sesela asked.
Yulna chittered darkly. “Get eaten, I suspect. Though I for one will claw a few eyes out, first. And I’m sure Myun here would go down fighting.”
Myun said nothing but she did flex her enormous, Stoneback-ish claws just for a second, feeling smugly superior. She savored the intimidated flick of Mother Sesela’s ear.
“…That cannot be your whole answer?” Suri seemed aghast rather than accusatory.
“Unless the males have somehow managed to build a million ships of their own in secret? It is the whole answer.” Yulna chittered darkly again. “And so we come back to the strange ways of danger and threat. That particular threat is simply… too big to worry about, for now. And that, my Sisters, I think is what the Humans must feel all the time.”
“…I should at least see if there is anything we can do to protect the cubs,” Suri suggested.
“Yes,” Yulna duck-nodded emphatically. “You’re right. Sensible precautions, of course. Precautions we should all take, I think.”
They all took the hint, duck-nodded respectfully, and made themselves scarce.
“Well. That was easy,” Yulna commented.
Myun resisted the urge to chitter, barely. As Yulna’s permanent protector she hadn’t moved while the Mothers let themselves out. “Easy?”
“I’d expected…a real fight. That was barely a token resistance. The death of billions sharpens the mind, I suppose.”
Myun found she couldn’t argue that point, and simply duck-nodded agreeably.
“Tell me, Myun, if a Hunter charged in here right now…?” Yulna let the question hang.
Myun broke out her human grin, the one she had practiced endlessly in front of a mirror and that showed off all her teeth. ”Just one?”
“…Good girl.” Yulna nodded with a pleased set of her ears then sighed quietly, recomposed herself and asked, “Next item on the schedule?”
Myun consulted the list. “Grandfather Meyku, Clan Straightshield.”
“I invited Champion Reeko as well, didn’t I?”
“He’s on Gorai, Mother. Something about a new precinct…?”
“Ah. In light of recent events…maybe we should take another page from the Humans and discuss our civil defense.”
Myun was learning that when Yulna asked a question like that, she wasn’t actually requesting an answer, it was more a way of helping herself think. Rather than reply, therefore, she busied herself straightening the office so that it seemed as though the Mothers had not been there. She also alerted the staff discreetly, who prepared an agenda and a briefing in the few short minutes before Grandfather Meyku arrived.
She hadn’t expected to be doing so much minute organisation for Yulna when she took the job, but she found that she quite enjoyed it. Just standing around with a sword would have been boring after all, but the moment she started thinking of herself as the gatekeeper for the Mother-Supreme’s attention she had realized that guarding Yulna’s body and guarding her schedule amounted to almost the same thing.
She was getting to know the Grandfathers too, and they were all entertainingly different. Garl of the Stonebacks tended to prowl into a room and throw himself onto the furniture as though he wasn’t twenty years the wrong side of old, and he left white hairs on everything. Myun found herself oddly and powerfully attracted to him…maybe one day. Soon. Before he died of too much mating, the smug sexy ‘asshole.’
Grandfather Myro of the Goldpaws was sleeker, slimmer and flowed across the world like one of those ‘otters’ Myun once saw on ‘Planet Earth.’ Yulna had once said he was as sleek and slippery in the world of finance as he was in real life. Myun didn’t know what was meant by that, but there’d been no mistaking the wink in Yulna’s voice when she’d said something similar about Myro and mating contracts. Mothers could be such ‘hens.’
Meyku sailed. He was upright, polite, direct and mostly unflappable, and had a pole up his ass that could have moored a megafreighter. But somehow he was friendly, too. Weird.
And he got right to the point. “We have a lot to discuss, Mother-Supreme.”
“That we do,” Yulna agreed, doing an excellent job of hiding her weariness. “Myun, some Talamay please?”
“Yes, Mother,” Myun duck-nodded and attended to her own role in this long diplomatic dance. She now had readying the snacks and drinks down to an efficient art.
“So, Grandfather…” Yulna said, as soon as the stage was set. “There is an interesting recording I think you should hear…”
Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
Vemik had once spent half a day watching the wriggling things in the gut of a dead Neyma and watching them blacken and buzz away. The rotting flesh had made the air taste awful, and the flying buzzers had wanted to land on his face, but he’d kept watching hoping to catch the moment when little white wriggler became little black buzzer.
Right now, his head felt like that Neyma carcass—full of wriggling things. It always did after his ‘wessons’ with Shyow. Or like she had somehow packed a handful of smoldering tinder in there; his thoughts just refused to settle down and turn into something that made sense.
Or maybe like that time Jooyun had taken him into the flying hut and a strange yellow light had made his whole body tickle, especially his teeth. That had been an exciting day, and in the end the Sky-People had resorted to begging Yan to drag Vemik out of there again, which he did with an amused snarl. The big Given Man hadn’t even paused at the ‘anatomy dispway,’ either! He just threw Vemik out of the ship and wrestled him half-dead. Like always.
It wasn’t that ‘Engwish’ was difficult, not at all. He’d been shocked and surprised to discover that the words Shyow, Jooyun and Awisun spoke were so…easy. Strangely so. None of the words changed, or at least never by much! Each word was like…a little stone. Whether he held it, put it down in front of him or threw it in the air, the stone’s shape never changed. It didn’t matter what you did with a word in Engwish, it kept its shape.
Which made sense, when he thought about it. The meaning never changed after all, so why should the word? And like stones, the order that the words were laid down in mattered: Nobody ever made a trail mark by just throwing the stones down in a rambling heap the way Vemik often did with his words when thinking out loud. Every time he wanted to say anything in Engwish, he was forced to pause, think hard, and say it only after he had already built it in his head.
Clearly, the Sky-People thought about everything they did before they did it.
He was getting good at it too, or at least he thought. He knew how it behaved at least, but that was the easy part. The difficult part was how many words there were. It was like trying to make a trail marker while having more stones to choose from than there were stars in the night, several of which would mean nearly what he wanted to say, but only one of which meant exactly what he wanted to say..
There was only one thing to do: Keep learning new words.
And Shyow said she had mastered the words of three sky-tribes who spoke in such intricate ways. And she had mastered the words of Vemik’s tribe in just a hand’s-worth of days. The idea that any head could be so full of so many different words, especially when so many of those words meant things that Vemik had simply never thought of…
There were words to describe different kinds of word! The very thought of all those words in Shyow’s head made the feeling of things crawling around inside Vemik’s own skull get worse.
Jooyun at least was sympathetic there.
“Heh!” He made that strange, friendly laughing-sound the sky-people made. His was quite different from Awisun’s, which was a harsh bark, or Shyow’s which was a kind of bubbling musical thing. Jooyun’s was soft, deep and warm but never loud. Jooyun was never loud, for that matter, not even when he played. [“Don’t worry, buddy.] Xiù [makes me feel dumb too, sometimes. And I’m supposed to be the ‘science’ guy.”]
They were out exploring after the morning ‘wessons’ about sky-people words—‘wanguage’ he remembered—and after Jooyun and Vemet had come back from the day’s hunting. They had eaten, and Jooyun had snuck some more People-food when Awisun wasn’t looking, and shared some of his. It had little balls of meat and a red sauce of some kind, very tasty! It also had ‘noodows’ that were a kind of ‘pasta.’ Vemik avoided ‘pastas.’ They were tasty too but they made his stomach unhappy and he would fart loudly for the rest of the day.
After that there was the usual camp chores, and a solemn moment with Yan and Singer for the day’s blessing, and then…they went exploring. Vemik had, naturally, asked why it was that Awisun objected to about Jooyun eating a fresh kill.
[“We come from a long way from here,”] Jooyun had answered. [“Where the sickness is different.] Allison [worries that I might get very sick if I’m not careful.”]
Vemik had thought about that, picking his words carefully. [“Is not she right?”] he ventured.
[“Isn’t.”] Jooyun corrected gently. [“And…yes, she is. But we carry all our food with us and…You know how sometimes, you need to smoke something to keep it good, but the smoke tastes bad? Or you get bored of the same thing for a whole season? Yeah. That.”]
Apparently, exploring was what Jooyun, Shyow and Awisun did. As they had explained it, their flying hut could go anywhere. Shyow had said that the stars were other suns, or that the sun was a star up close and that under each sun there was another sky above other People with their own gods. Jooyun had invited him to imagine being far from his village at night and looking back to see the village fire in the dark, small and cold and distant but still there.
Jooyun refused to talk about his own gods, though, but he had promised to explain why when they had the words.
But the smoking thing. Vemik had a hard time believing that! [“But your bag-food is tasty!”]
[“Rations. The word is ‘rations.’ Rations are a kind of preserved food.”]
[“Wations.”] Vemik tasted the word, aware yet again that he was getting one of the sounds wrong, which was annoying because he could make the sound sometimes but not always. It turned out that sky-people had different-shaped tongues to go with all their other strangeness. And they could ‘smeww’ with the face-holes! They didn’t taste the air at all!
That reminded him of a question he’d been meaning to ask since learning about ‘smewwing’ yesterday, and he shot off on what Awisun had described as a ‘tangent.’ He had no idea what a tangent was exactly, but there were other questions he wanted to ask before he got to that one.
[“What do we ‘smeww’ wike?”]
Jooyun laughed in his quiet way again. He had more patience for the way Vemik’s questions jinked and dodged like root-birds than Shyow or Awisun did, mostly. [“Not too bad. Like you’re doing honest work all day.”]
That sounded like a good thing to Vemik so he trilled happily in response. At that same moment he spotted a different kind of herb that Jooyun hadn’t gathered yet and bounced over to point it out. Jooyun shook his head in the way the sky-people did when they were happily indulging Vemik’s questions. Like Yan, really. Yan would share if he wasn’t doing much else.
“Mazaanok! [Careful, this one has…”] Godshit, another word he didn’t know. He thought for a moment, then bit down on a finger with one of his small young-man fangs and made a big show of hurting.
“Mazaanok, [huh? Good name.”] Jooyun nodded and approached carefully, then peered at it from a safe distance. [“Ah. Those are ‘thorns,’ and big ones too. Are they ‘poisonous?’”]
[“Thorns. Thorn!”] That word had a nice sound and Vemik liked it. He tilted his head at the other word. [“Poisuunus?”]
[“Poisonous. The root word is ‘poison,’ which is something that’s not alive that can make you very sick. The ‘-ous’ in this case means the word is ‘full of’ the root. So something that’s ‘poisonous’ is full of poison. Make sense?”]
[“…Poisun.”] He corrected himself. [“Poison.”]
[“*Pois*on.”]
[“Poison.”] He got it! [“Yes. The ‘thorns’ are ‘poisonous.’ Make skin burn and itch.”] Vemik suddenly thought, [“But plants are alive!”] In People-words, plants were always a living thing when you stuck endings on a word.
Julian knelt by the mazaan bush and dug in his bag where he pulled out a pair of the limp hand-bag-garments called ‘gloves’ that he used whenever he wanted to handle something without touching it with his bare skin. [“Yeah, they are. But the poison itself isn’t, it’s just as dead as a rock.”]
That made sense to Vemik. [“Okay.”]
Jooyun worked in silence for a few seconds, respectfully clipping off a few bits of the plant and storing them in strange clear things like a kind of small pot made of warm ice. As he put the ‘samples’ away in his bag he tilted his head and asked, [“So what do we, uh, taste like?”]
[“Like…you three, not the same. Shyow tastes like water and fruit. I don’t know what Awisun tastes like. I…no words for it.”]
[“‘Solvent’ and ‘soap,’ probably. I’ll tell you what those are later, I promise…I think she smells nice. They both smell…pretty ‘incredible’ actually. To me.”]
Vemik nodded. Jooyun was always good on his word about explanations.
[“What about me?”] Jooyun asked.
[“You taste wike a Person, in a different way. Your hair tastes strange.”]
He knew that taste from one of their moments of play while out exploring. Vemik was pleased to learn he was a good wrestler compared to Jooyun, and could do things like wrap his tail around Jooyun and squeeze the same way Yan often did when playing. But Jooyun could do things Vemik couldn’t like stand up and ‘run’ instead of charge, and when he started ‘running’ he just didn’t stop. He could ‘jog’ slower and way, way longer too.
And he could carry lots of heavy things in his clever, rough-feeling many-pocket-bag—his *‘backpack’*—and carry them forever and not get tired. Vemik wasn’t sure how that worked, because he was pretty sure he was actually a good bit stronger than Jooyun…sky-people were strange.
Jooyun made a satisfied noise. [“Ah, that’s probably the ‘shampoo.’”] Jooyun said. [“It’s a kind of soap. Soap, by the way, is really good for cleaning hides and tanning them. I can show you how to make it one of these days—ah!”]
He turned and jogged a few steps off the trail to study an exposed rock. [“Limestone. Perfect. Add this to your list of ‘things you should have lots of’ ‘cuz this stuff is really useful.”]
Vemik gave the pale stone a skeptical stare. [“Is it? It breaks and you can’t make bwades from it.”]
Julian laughed again. [“Vemik, this stuff can help you make blades like this one.”] He patted his axe. [“You just have to know the trick. But you need to be patient,”] he warned, [“The trick is ‘complicated’ and we need other things, too. Like ‘Hematite.’ And clay. And you’ll need to make a big pile of charcoal too, unless we find ‘Anthracite’ lying about…”]
[“What are—?”] Vemik began. Jooyun aimed an apologetic smile at him.
[“Believe me, you’ll understand much better when I show you. But the simple way of saying it is that if I take this stuff and some other rocks that you probably don’t think are useful and put them together in a really hot fire, then the rocks flow like water and glow like fire and you get this stuff.”] He patted his axe again.
[“We have a story about rocks flowing like water!”] Vemik blurted, and bounced around Jooyun and halfway up a tree out of sheer excitement at getting to tell the sky-person something he didn’t already know.
Jooyun rocked back on those long, straight sky-person legs and folded his arms, grinning. [“Yeah? Tell me.”]
Vemik took hold of a branch with his tail and both feet and swung upside-down in front of Jooyun’s face. [“Yan said that in the time of his old grandfathers the mountain spat fire and rivers of fire ran down it!”]
Julian always laughed whenever Vemik hung upside down or something, but this time his laughter faded and he frowned. [“…This story. How long ago?”]
[“Yan said…the time of his grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather?”] Vemik hazarded. [“Maybe there was another grandfather in there, I am not sure.”]
[“…How long do you expect to live, Vemik?”]
[“Uh…well, Yan says he’s been around for two hands of four hands of seasons?”]
Jooyun looked like he was sky-thinking. [“So he’s about…‘fifty’ then, so that’s at least one ‘eruption’ within the last…‘two hundred years’ or so…well. Fuck.”]
Vemik already knew that word, and had figured out he wasn’t supposed to. It was comforting to know that sky-people had swearing too, and he liked ‘fuck.’ It had weight.
[“Is…that bad?”]
Jooyun sighed, exactly like any of the People would. [“Yeah, it’s a big problem. It means your whole ‘species’ is mostly living in and around an ‘active caldera’ and that is bad in a big, big way.”]
There were Important words in there that Vemik didn’t know, but he had to start at the bad part first. [“…how bad?”]
Jooyun stared at him, then turned around and headed back in the direction of the forest camp. [“We should get back.”]
Oh.
That bad.
Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
The Entity
The Entity knew what ‘frantic’ felt like, though the emotion didn’t quite map to anything it permitted itself to feel. Frantic overlapped with panic; panic robbed precision and thought and got in the way of +SURVIVE+ and thus the Entity had done whatever it could to expunge that particular emotion altogether.
Nevertheless, it was as close as it ever got to being frantic with worry right now. Somebody had come to this planet. Somebody with a spaceship, and thus who was capable of understanding and discovering the Entity. If they had implants, then any Hierarchy demons riding in their brains would know immediately that 665’s operation had stalled and never resumed. The Hierarchy would investigate, the Entity might be caught…
And physical objects were so slow! An Abrogator had a maximum overland travel speed under optimal conditions of about thirty miles an hour, but a dense temperate rainforest was decidedly suboptimal.
After too many days of travel it was finally getting close now, though. The Entity didn’t have hands or any physical part to its being at all but if it did then those hands would have been shaking and its palms sweating. There were too many unknowns here, too many variables. It had no idea who or what the landing ship belonged to, but it had come down near the destroyed Abrogator and the last known location of 665’s problematic tribe.
The scout drones were faster, but Hierarchy technology had never quite managed to produce miniaturized power sources that could meet their energy demands. They were battery-powered, and thus had a limited range. If it didn’t care about getting the drones back it could have already sent them, but needlessly wasting those drones on an over-reach scouting mission would interfere with future scouting, multiplying the unknowns.
Unknowns were lethal. Unknowns violated +SURVIVE+. Unknowns would be eradicated with extreme sanction.
It launched the scout drones.