11: Star Farms

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The pair stare awkwardly at each other. Silence stretches, and Tyk realises that neither of them are really sure how to interact. There’s absolutely no way that Tyk would risk biting or shoving anyone with a fragile newborn boy in their care, and absolutely no way that Ayan, mindful of Keyan, would risk pushing Tyk that far. So they just kind of look at each other.

“Ayan,” Tyk says.

“Tyk,” Ayan says.

“Blessings be on Keyan,” Tyk says, which is a fairly standard thing to say to a new truesister. “May he grow up strong.”

“Blessings be on Smon,” she replies, “may your little god grow up strong.”

Normally, Tyk would flash a warning at something like that, but Keyan, resting on Ayan’s horns and far too young to fly away from a conflict, makes even a mild and clearly false warning feel inappropriate. Instead she just says calmly, “Smon isn’t ‘my’ anything. I’ve just been chosen for the escort mission.”

Ayan tilts her mandibles in that smug way that she likes to do right before delivering a barb, hen hesitates. With Keyan acting as an unwitting living shield, any sort of taunting or provocation would be cowardly and inappropriate. Either it’s teasing someone who can’t bite back or, if she pushes things far enough, putting her truebrother at risk – neither of which is a desirable result.

Instead, she straightens her posture and says, in a carefully reasonable tone, “Indeed. I hope the journey goes well.”

“Thank you,” Tyk says stiffly. “I’m sure we all do.”

And then Ayan backs away and moves on, giving Tyk a wide berth.

Tyk heads back down into the hive, trying to see it through Smon’s eyes. She’d been fascinated not by its size and majesty, but by the small things; the gems and their origin, the bricks and flooring, the sculpted designs and the stores of mundane goods. It makes sense, when Tyk thinks about it, that a star would not be impressed by the size or beauty or wealth of a hive, because what hive could measure up to a star’s expectations in any of those areas? Smon is destined to traverse the sky itself, she carries magic and starlight on her body. The hive must look pitiful in comparison. But why the fascination with sticks and stones and worker’s art?

San had once told Tyk that the Glittergem Hive don’t care overmuch for gemstone decorations and don’t wear their accomplishments as gems on their carapaces. Gems are commonplace, she had explained, in the places that they are mined. Perhaps to a star, bamboo and dirt is rare and valuable? Perhaps to Smon, born of a complicated stone egg that must have taken forever to grow (if it is, as Tyk suspects, some sort of geode), substances that can erect towers and shore up tunnels within days or seasons are their own sort of magic. She had been delighted when Tyk had made her those mortar sculptures, after all.

If Tyk is to understand Smon, she will have to fundamentally alter her way of thinking.

She heads through the entrance dome to the long, branching residential tunnel that houses her family and their neighbours. Past Dahm and Kedahm’s chamber, a sharp left, around that really annoying rock that’s just a bit too big to be easily excavated without collapsing a bunch of chambers to do it so everyone just kind of lives with it being in the way, and into the little chamber that houses San and Kesan, and, until she’s grown, Tyk herself.

San is home, milling moss into food with her powerful claws. Tyk notes that the small amount of extra space in the sleeping chamber (sleeping chambers tend to be fairly cramped spaces) is taken up with balls of eating moss that weren’t there yesterday. Odd. Like most people, Tyk’s family usually eat in the mess area or, if they’re going to be inconveniently far from the central hive, bring food with them and prepare it there; storing and eating food in one’s own burrow is simply not practical. It’s the sort of thing that lonewomen do after coming to terms with the death of their truebrother, before they start retreating deeper and deeper underground, and seeing San behave like that is alarming, to say the least.

And then San wordlessly offers her some milled moss and a look of wary concern and Tyk realises, with a sudden rush of gratitude, that this is for her. Her mother wants to spare her the attention and scrutiny of a hive likely to descend on her, now that the distraction of Smon is gone. Tyk isn’t sure that hiding away will solve anything – if people can’t ask her questions today, they’ll just ask them tomorrow – but she really doesn’t want to explain her progress with Smon over and over again, and her mother is going to a lot of trouble for her sake. So she thanks her and bunkers down in the residential chamber to eat.

When Kesan comes home, he informs the pair that Smon went straight back to her egg, and some new guards have gone out to relieve Yat and Keyat, and everything seems to be going fine. The hive wants to get the Starspire journey underway as soon as possible, hoping to beat the wet season’s flooding of the river; if they can’t beat the flooding, they’ll have to wait at Green Hills Hive until the end of the wet season. Tyk isn’t sure how she feels about that – she’s never been to a foreign hive, and spending so long in one sounds daunting. But it is the sensible decision. Green Hills is perfectly capable of hosting them for that long, and everyone wants the gods at Starspire as quickly as possible. Given that the Green Hills Hive is close to one of the best places to cross the river, it’s possible that several parties could get trapped there and Smon might meet the other godlings sooner than expected. Perhaps it would be better to do that, and all head to Starspire together.

Either way, heading off as soon as possible is the wisest course of action. Which means the hive needs to put together everything as quickly as possible, and that means that Tyk needs to learn what Smon needs as quickly as possible. She sleeps restlessly that night, gets up early, and heads out to Smon’s egg as soon as the sun begins to rise.

Pol and Kepol are keeping watch. Tyk touches claws courteously with her half-mother. She knows Pol, of course; the pair have worked together on occasion, and Pol taught her how to grind sweetroot when she was small, but the pair aren’t particularly close. Pol doesn’t have the sort of relationship with her parents that Kepol has with Kesan, that close, enduring partnership that brings them into each others’ families and sometimes makes Tyk feel like she has two fathers. Kepol settles on her back to hum for Ketyk while Tyk asks, “How is she?”

“Busy,” Pol says. “She’s put a new chamber on the egg.”

She has. The egg’s entrance is covered with a large tent of silk, secured on some sort of internal frame. It looks well-constructed; apart from the door, there don’t look to be any breaches anywhere. The tent is three times as long as the egg, so if Smon was finding the egg too cramped, that problem is solved.

As Tyk approaches the egg, Smon’s head peeks out of the tent. “Tyk!” She rushes forward, delighted. She has more silks on today, strange clingy coverings hiding the flesh of the ends of her mandibles and covering her mouth, which she peels off as she approaches. “Are you well?”

The echo stone says ‘well’ in Pol’s voice. So she’s been collecting words from other people. That’s good! Nothing to be jealous about. The more words she can gather, the better; the more people she can talk to who have different perspectives and knowledge and ways of talking, the better. No reason she has to only use Tyk’s voice.

That’s nothing to get possessive about.

“I’m well,” Tyk says. “Are you well?”

“Yes. Are Redstone River Hive well?”

A note of concern in her posture. Is she worried that she upset people yesterday?

“Redstone River Hive is well,” Tyk assures her. “What is Smon doing?”

“Build food. Try build food.”

“Try build food?”

“Smon no eat person food. Smon eat star food. But, not forever amount in egg. Build more food. Build is difficult.”

That’s concerning. They absolutely do need to secure a food source for Smon. “Can you do it?”

“… Yes. Try yes, or no, but try yes.”

She probably means ‘maybe’. “Redstone River Hive will help. There are many, many foods. We will dig deep and fly far and find something for you to eat.”

Smon wobbles her head in the way that means ‘no’. “All food wrong for Smon,” she says. “Food is wrong… shape. No find, only build right shape.”

“Wrong shape?” Food can be made into any shape.

“Wrong small shape. Very, very small shape. Wrong kind.” Smon thinks for a bit. “Sun and water and air is food for tallgrass, and tallgrass is food for people. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Sun and water and air is food for spine thistle, and spine thistle is food for deep moss. People grow deep moss on spine thistle, and deep moss is food for people. Yes? But spine thistle is not food for people. Yes?”

Pol has been teaching her about farming, it seems. “Yes.”

“Tallgrass and spine thistle and algae and bamboo and all sun eating things, they make type of thing which is food inside. Small shape. All same sort of small shape; sometimes little different, people cannot eat, other thing eats first to make small shape into shape people can eat, but all same sort of small shape. Type of small shape that feeds people and plant and bug and all earth things from the light of sun. But that is for earth things. Star need different type of small shape with sun in. I think probably not found here, not found anywhere on earth. Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Maybe find. I not see all of earth. But big, big earth, very small shapes, no time. I try to build.”

“How?”

Smon rolls her mandible joints in an uncertain sort of gesture. “Change shape, different ways. Cannot see shape, too small. Try many many things. Same how people use moss to build food from spineleaf. Moss cuts up shape with sunlight inside in spineleaf, builds shape with sunlight inside that people can eat. In egg is many things same as moss, for stars. But, first make small shape in earth things so that star moss can eat it. Try many ways, try many star mosses. Find a star moss that will grow.”

She’s building a star farm to feed herself, and she doesn’t know what the right ingredients are. That sounds… unreliable. “Will it work?”

Smon does the mandible joint roll thing again. “I try. Is other way, but… is bad way.”

“What way?”

She rocks her head ‘no’. “Bad bad way. I try this instead. If I need to use bad way… probably better to die.”

Tyk wants to press for details, but Smon seems agitated, and Tyk’s not sure she’s even understood Smon’s farm plan. There’s nothing for it, she supposes, but to hope that Smon can succeed, and bring her whatever she needs to make her farm.

The real issue that is Tyk’s problem specifically is the mobility of said farm. Smon is either going to have to take her farm with her, or use it to make enough food to take her to Starspire and keep her alive long enough to start a new farm, and Tyk doesn’t think that even star magic can make a farm produce food that quickly. The entire organisation of the Starspire caravan depends on what they need to bring for Smon, how to move it, and how quickly. Smon compares her project to a moss farm, but if they need to move enough dirt to support a moss farm capable of feeding one person all on its own, that’s impossible in the timeframe they have. It’d be easier to establish a food trail of moss farms over the course of years for all the star larvae to migrate along to Starspire. That could be an option, depending on how Smon’s farm works, and how long stars remain larvae. Things to consider, if putting together a caravan becomes impossible for some reason.

“Tyk and Smon to Redstone River Hive?” Smon asks. She’s picked up some old words with new inflections from Pol and Kepol, it seems, that are better for asking questions. Hearing the echo stone speak in a mix of different voices is a little jarring.

“Do you need to build farm?” Tyk asks, indicating the egg and its new tent.

“Wait. Many, many wait. No work here.”

Alright then.

Back to the hive it is.

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