12: Baby Blues

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Smon is fascinated by the communication tower. As the pair approach the hive, she points up at it. “You see other star from there?”

“Stargazers see stars from up there, yes.”

“Stargazers.”

“Men, with job to see stars. We see some stars from ground. Easier to see from up there, up high, with men eyes.”

“Job.”

Tyk hesitates. How to explain the word ‘job’? “Job. Make or move or do for hive.” She indicates some of the women hauling dirt out from the collapsed tunnels. “Their job, dig. Tyk’s job, talk to Smon. Stargazer’s job, see stars.”

“They see Smon and thirteen other stars.”

Well… yes, but… “Redstone River Hive stargazers see Smon. Other hive stargazers see others.”

“They talk? Hive to hive?”

“Yes. On the windsong stream.”

“How far away?”

Tyk flicks a mandible uncertainly. She’s not really sure about the tides of the windsong stream; the details of that sort of thing are more relevant to the men. She knows that the current in some areas is strong, allowing communication across the continent, and in others the stream barely moves at all, creating pockets where communication is impossible. She knows that there are some areas where communication can go further in one direction than the other, and some areas where messages have to take circular, roundabout routes between several hives to cross a relatively short straight-line distance. She knows that it’s not unusual for the currents to change temporarily, resulting in lessened communication for a day or two at a time, and that very rarely, it’s possible for the currents to change on a more permanent basis, sometimes resulting in the moving of whole communication towers or even, in extreme circumstances, moving an entire hive; it’s why the Redstone River Hive doesn’t sit exactly on top of where a hive sat before this land slept last time. The currents of the wingsong stream are different now, rendering communication better in their current position.

What she doesn’t know is how to effectively tell Smon how far communication on the wingsong stream can travel. Communication is a little more difficult than that.

Smon doesn’t press the matter. She takes the uncertain gesture in stride, then reaches up and… begins to climb the tower.

And Tyk realises that Smon was right; she doesn’t have mandibles. Those are definitely claws; nobody could climb that way with mandibles. (Well, people can’t climb that way with claws, either, but still.) Smon, who can’t fly, instead ascends the scaffolding like a spider, using her arms and singular pair of legs to pull herself up beam by beam until she can stand securely on the lowest platform, a small temporary storage area for goods being moved up and down the tower. There’s nothing on it right now except for a spool of rope, waiting to be carried up for building some platform or hanging some drapery or other; Smon inspects it a moment and then, after asking permission from an utterly bewildered passing man who was just going about his day and hadn’t asked to be involved in this sort of thing, ties it around her waist and uses it to help herself climb to the next platform. Again, like a spider.

Tyk doesn’t bother to try to stop her, or to follow. With a lot of time and effort, she could probably scramble up to a couple of the lower platforms, but there is simply no way that she could keep up with Smon’s ascent. Someone might set up a winch to pull her up if she asked, but Smon would be halfway up by the time she got it organised. It’s probably faster to just leave Smon to her explorations and let the people up in the tower deal with her. She’ll come back when she’s bored.

That’s what Tyk’s mother always used to say about Tyk, at any rate, and she was generally right. Tyk busies herself helping to haul some dirt away from the hive entrance, a job where she can keep a decent eye on the tower and know when Smon comes back down.

Smon does come back down after a little while. She mustn’t have climbed too high; even at her speed, there’s no way she had time to get to the top. She seems excited, in the same way she was excited after first meeting Tyk, the same way she was excited at inspecting the way the hive entrance was built. She’s breathing hard, and Tyk notices (with some revulsion) that she can see that very clearly; Smon’s torso expands and contracts under her silks with every breath.

“What did you do up there?” Tyk asks.

Smon rolls her shoulders. “Talk. See.” A vague answer, but Tyk gets the sense from her demeanour that Smon isn’t trying to be evasive; she just doesn’t have enough words to say what she wants to say. At least, that’s what Tyk thinks, until Smon turns to abruptly walk away from the hive again, and this time, gestures for Tyk to come with her. They don’t go far; Smon stops when they’re far away enough from everyone else to have a relatively private conversation.

“Tyk, men say many many stars, not fourteen. Question?”

Does Smon not know what she is? Tyk hadn’t considered that. She was born knowing her name, after all. “Many star in sky. Many many in sky, big stars, old stars. Baby stars fall.”

Smon considers this a moment. ‘Baby’ is a new word.

“From stars,” Smon says, indicating herself.

“Yes.”

“From star. Baby star.”

Yes! She understands! “Yes!”

She indicates Tyk. “Tyk from Redstone River Hive.”

“Yes.”

“Baby Redstone River Hive.”

“Uh, no.” Smon thinks she’s a baby? An understandable mistake; Smon arrived knowing nothing of mortal biology, and Tyk is smaller than the adult women. “Wait,” Tyk says, and heads back towards the hive. She finds Ayan.

“Tyk,” Ayan says.

“Ayan. Come with me.”

“Um. No?”

“Come on! Smon wants to see you.” Which is a lie, but Tyk is pretty sure that Ayan, vicious and jealous and resentful of any success or notice that Tyk gets, will jump at the chance to be chosen by Smon for something over Tyk, and she’s right; Ayan follows her a little way back down the slope of the hive to where Smon is waiting. Tyk indicates Keyan, on his truesister’s horns. “Keyan is a baby.”

“Keyan,” Smon says. Then points at Ayan. “Yan.”

“Ayan,” Ayan corrects.

“Ayan. Keyan. Good to meet you.”

Ayan dips her head in a silent return of the greeting.

“Keyan is a baby from the Redstone River Hive,” Tyk says. “Ayan is not a baby.”

“She doesn’t know what a baby is?” Ayan asks.

“She knows a lot,” Tyk snaps, surprised at her own defensiveness. “She just doesn’t know the words for things.”

Smon leans a bit closer to inspect Keyan, which Ayan allows. Tyk knows Smon’s body language well enough to know that she wants to get even closer, maybe even touch him, but she doesn’t try; she keeps her claws locked together behind her back (an unnerving posture that gives Tyk the distinct impression of somebody with two dislocated shoulder joints) as she looks him over carefully. Tyk wonders whether Smon sees any of herself in him, with his still-soft, slightly transparent carapace and no strong colours in his wings yet; Keyan is a pale cream-white in colour, unlike Smon’s dark brown, but there’s something to the quality of their soft bodies that seems similar.

And then Smon steps back, gives Ayan and Keyan a polite head dip, and turns to Tyk. “Keyan is baby man,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Smon is baby star. Question?”

“Yes! Smon is baby star.” She gets it!

But Smon, for once, does not look excited about clearing up the meaning of a new word. She sits on the grass, thinking. “All baby stars go to Starspire. Why?”

“Starspire is tower to sky. Back home to sky.”

“After we go to Starspire, what we do, what you do, question?”

“We don’t know. Maybe you know.”

“No.”

“Maybe you know when we go. A larva knows when to climb out of its shell when it is time. A fire crab knows to dig down deep in earth and sleep for winter when it is time. When we get to Starspire, you will know when it is time.”

“What if no.”

“You will know,” Tyk reassures her. “We don’t know how long stars are baby. Maybe short time, maybe long time. But when it is time to be in the sky, you will know.”

“We wait at Starspire until then? All baby stars?”

“Yes.”

Smon stares at the grass, deep in thought. All of her bouncing energy, her excitement and enthusiasm, is gone. Tyk can’t tell if she’s upset or sad or scared or what, but she remains still for a long moment, before suddenly asking, “Stars fall in past, past from Smon, question?”

“No,” Tyk says. “For all of time that we have hives, no baby stars in that time. You are the first after hives were made.” There had to have been baby stars on Earth before then, before their stories started, because how else would the sky be so full of stars? They had to come from somewhere. But Tyk isn’t sure how to explain that, with their limited language.

Smon stares at the ground a bit longer, then leaps to her feet. “I must look at farms,” she says. “Goodbye Tyk, Ayan, Keyan.” And she takes off down the hill towards her egg without waiting for a response.

“Oh, look at that,” Ayan sneers. “You scared the star away.”

“What? I didn’t – ”

“Tyk, even I can tell that she’s freaked out. I don’t know how you managed to upset her, but you’d think that the chosen one would be better at this.”

“At least I’m chosen for something important,” Tyk snaps, and stalks off. Not after Smon, who clearly wants to be alone, and not back home, just… off, somewhere. To be alone for a bit.

To get away from Ayan, mostly.

But she cools off almost immediately, and finds herself just staring at the grass, thinking, like Smon. The more time she spends with Smon, the less about her makes sense.

The very first time Bette had agreed to teach Tyk a thing or two about tunnelling, way back when Tyk’s own shell was barely hard, the old tunneller had taken her to a broad, safe, new tunnel still in the process of being dug and had said to her, “We’re looking for sweetroot. Can you tell me where it is?”

It had been a fairly easy assignment, as first assignments usually are. The taste of the rhizomes had been strong and sharp in the soil. Furthermore, the tunnel had a clear direction; it went down, levelled out, and veered sharply to the right before continuing about eight lengths, which was as far as the diggers had dug so far. So little Tyk had gone to the end of the tunnel and began tasting around, looking for minute differences in nutrient strength to determine just how much more right the tunnel would need to veer to hit the sweetroot. Where, specifically, was it?

And she’d been thoroughly confused. The tastes weren’t giving her a specific direction. In the end, she’d simply agreed with the tunnel’s current direction – it’s straight ahead, of course.

Then Bette had taken her further back up the tunnel, behind where it had veered, and directed her to try the soil there. And to try the soil on the left side of the end, that the tunnel was veering away from. And explained to her that actually, the sweetroot was to the left. The reason that the diggers were veering right was to avoid disturbing a hibernating pod of fire crabs; it was simpler to dig around them than to deal with the crabs and had to essentially rebuild and reinforce the tunnel through their sandy, easily-collapsed home.

It is easy, Bette had explained, to trick oneself into a wrong conclusion if one makes a wrong early assumption, and interprets everything afterwards as if that assumption must be true. Tyk had seen the tunnel turn and had assumed that it was turning toward the sweetroot, and working with that assumption, had no chance of finding the truth.

Tyk had seen something fiery and egg-like fall from the sky, and had assumed that it was an egg. She’d seen somebody larva-like crawl out of it, and assumed that they were a larva. But Smon’s biology could not be compared to Tyk’s; she was so very different in so many ways. Why would Tyk assume that she knew what a star larva would look like? Smon had more knowledge, more physical dexterity, more practical skills, than any baby. She knew her name and knew how to use all the magic stones and materials within her egg (and why would such things be inside an egg?), yet she knew nothing of all of the land and had been very confused during the discussion of babies and stars. Almost like she was born knowing her own name, but not knowing what she was.

Or what Tyk, and what everybody else in the Redstone River Hive and every hive in communication with them, had assumed that she was.

She had asked if baby stars had ever fallen before. A strange question to ask, if this is a normal part of a star’s life cycle; the sky is full of stars, after all. Not so strange a question if you had reason to expect that the answer might be ‘no’.

What is Smon?

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