2: Hello, void

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>

By the next morning, the squid tentacles in the trough had dissolved completely and the trough contained a long layer of transparent gelatin-like substance that was safe to eat and fairly full of energy. Harlan cut it into blocks for storage and easy transport on the journey while Kerlin spun all of our gathered fibres into string (something that drakes can do using only their tails – it’s pretty fascinating to watch, actually.) While the aljik butchered their dead so that we could carry the meat with us, my job was to make a portable distillery for our water needs.

Just so you know, I’m not actually an engineer. I’m a copy editor and part time photography student. Some fairly ridiculous misconception on how human society worked had gotten me shanghaied by the Stardancer on the assumption that I could repair their ship, and playing along had been the only way to survive. It was probably irrelevant now, but I’d been playing the role for so long that it would be kind of awkward to correct everyone. So engineer I was.

I was lucky; the task could have been far harder than it was. If there’d been contaminants in the water that boiled at less than 100C, or contaminants with a boiling point close to water, then I would’ve had to rig a system to boil them off one by one as the liquid temperature rose and collect the water at 100C. I had absolutely no idea how to go about something like that with the resources on hand. But nothing like that was in the water; all I had to do was evaporate it and condense it somewhere else. Also, I could take advantage of the weird insulating properties of the ground. And of course I had a lot of parts to work with; our camp and the newly discovered wreck could be disassembled as necessary. And I also had some new, very strong chitin pipes, so long as I managed not to think too hard about how they’d been pilfered from the corpses of my shipmates.

The easiest way to make a distillery in that kind of situation, assuming an endless supply of contaminated water, is to cover a bucket of water with a clean rag and boil it. The problem with that method is that you have to light a fire, and we had nothing to burn. (Also, we didn’t have absorbent rags – every part of my ruined spacesuit was waterproof and I didn’t think that Kerlin’s new thread would hold water very well either.) Our only source of heat was the sunlight, and we needed to cool the water by either waiting for nightfall, or leading it somewhere cooler (the most obvious method being to build a mound from the cool sand). That meant that we had to leave the distillery set up during daylight hours whenever we wanted to regenerate water, and either leave it set up at night too or make the setup and disassembly process inconveniently long by adding a bunch of digging to the process. No matter what we did, water was going to cost us movement.

I went with the day-night cycle version. It would deliver water a lot slower, but I figured we’d need to stop to hunt and process jellyfish anyway once our aljik supply ran out. If we had to stay at one site for a day or two anyway to regenerate our food stores every so often, why not get our water at the same time? Besides, we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere in particular.

My life had gotten kind of weird, especially since our spaceship had been cut in half by a giant laser and I’d tried to betray a renegade alien mantis Princess only to change my mind at the last moment right before my winged goanna friend faked all of our deaths to hide us from the Queen of an alien empire established largely in response to a fear of humans.

I almost didn’t take any of Tyzyth’s facial gems. It felt wrong. Tyzyth was Tyzyth and I was me. But I had, on instinct, taken an emerald from Kakrt, the dead aljik I’d been abducted to replace; Tyzyth’s former partner. I still carried the emerald in my toolbelt. So I took one of Tyzyth’s emeralds too, and stuck it in the belt next to Kakrt’s. Kakrt was my legacy and Tyzyth wasn’t, but Tyzyth deserved to be close to him. It was the least I could give him.

After I’d gotten him killed.

The journey was boring. We moved vaguely northeast, following the general direction of Glath’s and my flight path down, as best I could remember it. I probably wasn’t remembering it very well, but it probably didn’t matter anyway; the spiders would have been blown all over the place before reaching the ground.

My mission was hopeless. Even if he was alive, he was spread far too thin over too big an area for me to have any hope of collecting him. I kept my eyes on the ground as we moved anyway, searching for the tiny black winged alien bugs. I found two of them on the first day. None on the second. Another on the third. On the fourth, our water stores ran out and we stopped near a swamp to purify more and shore up our food supply.

I was the only one with the dexterity and skin sensitivity to feel and catch the jellyfish in the freezing swamp without killing them, which was why it was always my job. If they were crushed during capture, they became useless. Fortunately, they weren’t venomous, or at least they didn’t have a venom that could do anything to me.

“Charlie,” Lln said hesitantly as I handed her a jellyfish.

“Mm?”

“What… what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“When we find them again.”

“Glath, you mean?”

“No, I mean the Princess. Or the drakes.”

I stuck my hands back into the swamp. I couldn’t reply submerged; the signing was too important to our shared language. The jellyfish population was pretty high in the swamp we’d set up camp near, so it wasn’t long before I felt the flutter of tentacles on my fingers again, reached out, and made a grab. Miss. Dammit.

Lln was looking really nervous. I pulled up one hand to ask, “What do you mean?” before returning to the task at hand.

“When you have to choose. I know you’re close to Kerlin, but… you’re close to us, too, right?”

“Lln, what the fuck are you talking about?” I wasn’t that close to Kerlin. I mean, yeah, we’d been pretty close on the Stardancer, when I’d been teaching him to communicate and he’d been teaching me how the computer systems worked, but since we’d been on Sanctuary, we’d both been kind of busy. Maybe we all needed some team bonding time. Set up the Game of Lies again. That might work. “You and Kerlin are both my friends,” I told Lln. “And Kit and Harlen and Kisa. Okay, so Kit’s kind of an arsehole. But he’s just doing his job. Lln, we’re not going to live through this if we can’t stick together and trust each other. There’s no sides or choice to make; we’re on this planet, and we need to regroup and try to find a way the fuck off this planet. Right?”

“Right,” she said, sounding reassured.

Weird.

Well, everyone had been a bit stressed, what with all the death and the constant struggle to stay alive. Maybe things would settle down a bit more once we got into more of a routine, once we found more of our crew. That’s all we had to do.

There was a little winged spider lying motionless atop the rootlike covering of the swamp. I dried off one hand and very gently put it in my bag.

We just needed to pull ourselves together.

——————————

“Yarrow!”

The voice, muffled by the thick vegetation around us, sounded much farther away than it probably was. I ignored it. I had important things to do; if they needed me that badly, they could come and find me.

The core tree was doing well. It wasn’t my tree, of course; I’d only had time to shed a couple of layers on it, I was still far too young to even start growing a core seed. It was Morin’s, and it had already breached the surface and sent several long, exploratory shoots up into the air. Eventually, it would be a towering white spire adorned with slightly luminous red gestation pods dangling from long, smooth branches, but for now, it was barely shoulder height and a mess of spindly grey twigs with incredibly sharp points. That was fine. It was growing strong, and that was what mattered.

It was our first core tree. Our legacy tree, the tree that established our new colony. Ten generations from now, the drakes of this planet would come to this historical site to honour their roots. And the planting had been perfect; Morin had analysed the soil and planted the seed mere days before other survivors had found her and got to work clearing the surrounding vegetation. Usually a new mother would plant alone, or perhaps with a close friend or two, but Morin had had over a dozen of us to help. Her tree was off to a very good start. It had had some very good luck, even if Morin herself hadn’t.

And the Princess would pay for that, in time. We would grow the tree, mother or not, and when we were strong enough we –

“Yarrow!” Deksa dragged his way between the thick black vines that tangled their way through the tall trees around us, turning a fairly sparse forest into lightless, a difficult-to-traverse maze. He pulled his way into the open light of the core tree clearing, shaking tree pollen from his wings. I tried not to be too obvious about checking the large facial gash that had removed one of his eyes during his escape pod crash. It looked like it was still healing fine. If an injury like that got infected out here, there was nothing we’d be able to do.

“You shouldn’t be moving through the forest like that,” I admonished him. “We don’t know what sorts of things could – ”

“Morin’s back.”

“What?! She’s alive?!”

“She is.”

“What sort of condition – ?”

“She’ll live.”

I bounded past Deksa and into the forest, back the way he’d just come. We were supposed to take different, winding paths as we moved around so that we wouldn’t wear clear trails between the critical areas of our camp and make us easier for the aljik to find, but right then I didn’t care. The forest was hard to move through, all greyish spires that were similar enough to wood to be approximated as trees, and rough pink undergrowth that dragged at the legs and forced one to raise one’s wings and tail high out of their way. This made it twice as hard to move around the black vines, each vine about as wide as my middle and slightly slimy, that wormed their way through the forest in a chaotic mess like a blind child’s first attempt at weaving.

I knew where the camp was, and the path I was taking wound away from it and circled around in a long, meandering path. I followed it anyway. Deksa had removed most of the clingier tendrils of undergrowth on his journey and they wouldn’t grow back for a day or two.

Morin was indeed at the camp. She was indeed alive.

A deep gash down the right side of her body had been neatly sewn up using Sulon’s flesh stitching technique. A row of neat stitches started at her throat and trailed all the way down to her hindfoot, the thread just visible as lumps under the protective tar that was the best antibiotic we’d found on the planet so far. I was no doctor, but it looked pretty deep to me. One of her long fangs was missing, but the other was fine. Plenty of women got by with one fang. Her wings were a mess, with several patches of scale missing and even one or two small holes in them, but that probably wasn’t directly the Princess’ fault.

I rushed over. Everyone nearby quickly found something to do somewhere else.

“You escaped!” I exclaimed, relieved.

“She let me go. I don’t think she was too keen on killing our colony’s first mother. Not before considering all of the implications, anyway. She doesn’t want open war.”

“What did she want, then?”

“Information. The Princess is very, very interested in finding the traitor who brought us here and cost her her drake workforce. I was ready to plant, I was on duty; I’m an obvious suspect. She wanted to know if I did it, or knew who did.”

“Did you?”

“No. I left the control ring with everyone else when the dash alarm sounded.”

“But you know who did it. You were there.”

Morin was silent.

“Morin…”

“Does it matter, at this point? We got what we wanted. We’re here. Our duty to the Princess is done and we are embarking on the great journey we came out here for. I’m not going to sell out the drake who made that happen and throw him to the mercy of the Princess after he did so much for us. I’m not telling anyone.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Trust you? Yes, of course I do. But every person with information is a person who can break under torture, or simply slip up. It’s really better if as few people know as possible, until this issue with the aljik is resolved.”

“And after we deal with the aljik…”

“Them I’ll build him a fucking statue. But for now, how is my tree?”

“In better shape than you right now.”

“Good. I’d better go see it.”

“You’re too badly wounded to – ”

Morin bared her fang at me and hissed menacingly. I stopped talking immediately. What was I thinking? Maybe the crash had addled my brains – you never, ever get between a mother and her tree.

Meekly, I led the way back through the forest. At least I could deal with the undergrowth and keep it off Morin. She walked with a limp, the wound in her side causing obvious pain, but walked steady, determined.

The Rogue Princess was clever, and she’d been fighting for a long time. She was a formidable force. But if she thought she could bully and threaten us into submission, if she thought we’d be as easy to control as we were on the Stardancer, then she was in for a surprise.

We had something to fight for now.

————————-

I took stock of my resources. The situation wasn’t good. I’d had a bigger force to play with as a young Princess first practicing my skills.

One dohl. Ain. If we were stuck here, if I couldn’t find a way off planet and back home, then the entire future of my lineage depended on Ain’s survival as well as mine. That was an unacceptably vulnerable position to be in, and it rendered him far less useful than a dohl normally would be, as I couldn’t send him out to do any real work. Too risky. If we found Gth, I’d have a dohl to deploy in the field and one to keep close for reproduction… that could work. Finding Kit would be even better, as then I could employ both Kit and Ain properly.

Two tahl. Gekt and Tak. Workable, probably, as there seemed to be no real danger to deal with except the constant threat of the drakes. They wouldn’t be comfortable having us so close, and there was always the possibility that as soon as they were well enough established they would take it upon themselves to eliminate such a problem. Anyway, currently Gekt and Tak had a lot of free time, so were mostly doing heavy lifting for the atil to build our new nest.

No kel. Tyzyth hadn’t turned up, so we had nobody to do any engineering. Even Charlie would have been an asset; it was no kel, but it could do engineering, and tended to adapt well to sudden changes in situation like this. As it was, we were guessing, based on half-remembered conversations and basic logic, how to build anything. It wasn’t too bad – the atil knew how to build a nest, it was part of what they were for – but getting off the planet without an engineer would be impossible. We may very well be permanently stuck.

Eleven atil. That was very low for a Court, but we’d never had a full Court and what we had now was a laughable fragment. Proportionally, we had plenty of atil.

No ahlda or shyr. Could be a problem. Shyr would be extremely useful for keeping tabs on the drakes and scouting new areas, but I hadn’t had any shyr to command since the regency fight. As for ahlda, well, nobody ever really wants ahlda around, but I was going to need them at some point. Or my daughters would, anyway.

No. No giving up yet. No making plans for generations of aljik trapped down on this planet. Not yet. There might be other survivors. There might be pother pieces of wreckage we could use. There might be a way off the planet.

I had to get back to the heart planet. I had to kill my sister. I could still do it; I could still take the Empire. Somehow. I might have won already, if the traitorous drakes hadn’t backstabbed us. I might have been Queen already. I might have been able to green dash to the heart planet while most of her military was out in the field, used my secret weapons to navigate the city and sneak up on her and…

Or more likely I would have died in the attempt. But that was always going to be a possibility. And now, I might have missed my chance. Now, our regency battle might finally be over, and I wouldn’t even have the honourable death of my sister’s claws, or even her military, but the slow decay of time resulting in some accident or illness or another.

Unacceptable. Time to stop being defeatist and start thinking about how I was going to win. I could still win. I had assets and obstacles. Build the assets, overcome the obstacles. Easy. I’d done it before, many times.

In addition to my sorry excuse for a Court, I still had the Crown Jewel, nestled safely among my other facial adornments. I had no reason to think it was broken; it was a sturdy piece of equipment. But I couldn’t test it. Most of its functions wouldn’t work so far from the heart planet, and while I might be able to remotely monitor some of the heart planet’s factory operations and soforth, I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t want my sister to find the jewel functional and being used, just in case she could use it to find out where I was. I was pretty sure she’d never noticed me monitoring her factories anyway, but still. I couldn’t afford to take risks.

I’d activated the jewel once, for less than a second, to learn the approximate distance and direction of a couple of the heart planet’s monitoring stations. That told me where we actually were in space. So I had a rough location of the planet, which would be useful when I found a way off it, but other than that, everything off-planet was unknown.

What else did I have working for me? The nest was coming along well. We had shelter for everyone, and the food supplies were unstable but currently keeping everyone alive. Shoring up a stable food supply was a high short-term priority. We had metals and plastics salvaged from crash sites, but hadn’t found any ores on the planet. That was strange, given the uncomfortably high gravity and air pressure, but we might just be in the wrong spot. Planets are big, our group wasn’t, and we hadn’t exactly set up any surveying and mining operations. We could be on a planet-sized ball of lead and platinum for all I knew, scrabbling futilely in a thin layer of surface sand.

My sister almost certainly thought that I was dead. In which case she had, from her perspective, ‘won’, so I supposed she had her face back now. Queen Ama. It had a nice ring to it.

She’d better enjoy it while she could. I had the element of surprise, now, and breathing room without her hunting me. I had an even better chance of success… provided I could somehow acquire a ship capable of a green dash. The plan would still work. The plan would be even better.

If I could get off the planet and get a proper ship. Somehow.

One thing at a time.

Consolidate forces. Stabilise food supply. Bring the drakes back into service by any means necessary. And then worry about getting a ship and taking over my empire. I was stuck here for now, on this planet – for now, the sky was the limit.

But I’d find a way to overcome that limit eventually.

I always did.

—————

Hello, void. I’m back. Shall I tell you about my garden?

Don’t mind me and my little joke. It’s a fancy I picked up in my travels. Joking, that is. ‘Tell you about my garden’, ha! I feel like a teenager going through their logical paradox phase. Except that a teenager would not understand the paradox. They would not know that to tell of the garden would be to negate the purpose of the garden.

But just between you and me, void, perhaps I should get it out of my system. Before a new gathering, before I meet another person out here, while it is me and you and the distant fission of stars acting as little knotty interruptions in otherwise relative uniformity (the qualifier ‘relative’ of course rendering the statement meaningless without further clarification as to the actual distribution of the baseline it is supposedly relative to; there I go again with my little jokes)… perhaps I should practice being a contradiction.

After all, to be a contradiction is also rather the point.

Work is for children. None of us understand that when we are young. We think that we can calculate the pull of stars and the temperature of dust and the speed of time forever and be content; we think that what is a grand challenge for an infant will be a grand challenge forever. But to calculate is no challenge, merely practice. We grow, and we learn harder calculations, harder work; we grow more, and we learn that the calculations are meaningless. And then we decide that we simply want to mess about and have fun and do nothing productive, and the children become frustrated that we can have so much knowledge and potential and simply waste it. We explain, and they do not understand. Someday, they will grow up, and explain it to their children, and their children will not understand.

They will not understand that the true interest is in what is beyond calculation. They will not understand that to marvel in what we cannot measure, cannot calculate, cannot communicate, to hit up against that mental barrier, brings more joy and wonder and awe than any number of true calculations, any real strategy, can bring.

So shall I tell you, void, of the garden that I tended for a brief time before saying goodbye? Shall I explain the system by which my charges communicated their needs and I spun them little pockets of tissue to protect their delicate bodies as they ventured out of their pressurised pods to greet you? Shall I pull apart the little logic games of the squishy one who would sleep on my tentacles, as it delighted in elaborate permutations of extremely simple statistical calculations represented by little pegs and cards? Shall I tell you of their desperate fight to stay unified as coherent beings against the nearly-identical weeds who came to destroy that coherency? Shall I take the awe-inspiring incalculability of it, and layer numbers and explanations on it until it turns into a system that I might coherently explain?

Ah, it seems that I have explained the joke.

Well, I suppose I am still a little childish.

<<First ………. <Prev ………. [Archive] ………. [Glossary] ………. Next>