4: The parable of the Child

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No way. No way. There had to be another explanation. He couldn’t… he couldn’t actually be alive? I’d been trying for this, I’d been planning for this, but…

I scooped up a few spiders and moved them a little way away from the pile. Not too far, only a finger-width or so. Slowly, sluggishly, they crawled back.

He was alive!

Why wasn’t he moving, then? I wish I knew more about ambassador colonies. Maybe he didn’t have enough mass to relay a thought more complicated than ‘stick together’. Or maybe he was conserving energy? That was entirely possible. He hadn’t eaten in a month; how long could his spiders stay alive, even motionless, without food?

I tossed the bag over the spiders to protect them from any stray gusts of wind and soforth and ran back to camp as quickly as I could. I brushed off everyone’s questions about what had alarmed me so much, told them everything was fine, and grabbed some clean water and a blob of the sweet, gelatin-like substance we made from the jellyfish. I paused for a moment, realising I had no idea what ambassador colonies could actually eat, and grabbed some of Tyzyth’s leftover flesh too, in case that was more palatable for him.

The others tried to stop me from leaving long enough to explain, of course. Seeing me run into camp like that, obviously alarmed, giving no information? Who knows what horrible thing they thought was happening. I brushed off their concerns and ran back to Glath; if they cared that much, they’d just follow me and see for themselves.

When I returned, the spider pile was slightly more animated. It was immediately obvious why; the purplish rootlike growth that stretched all over the ground in a vast net was somewhat diminished under the pile. Glath had been industriously eating it. He showed no interest in our jellyfish food or in aljik flesh, but when I set the water down, his spiders flocked to it. I watched him eat and drink his fill, then looked up. The rest of our little crew were staring. They looked from Glath to me, and back.

“Told you he was alive,” I said smugly.

“He can’t even maintain coherency,” Kerlin pointed out. “He won’t be able to recover from a wound like this. Too much information has been lost.”

“I guess I’ll have to keep searching for pieces, then.”

“We’ll have to keep searching for pieces,” Kit corrected. “He’s actually alive. He’s… Gth, can you… can you make any shape at all?”

Glath didn’t show any signs of hearing or understanding anything we were saying. Kit watched him for several seconds, approached hesitantly, and then quickly backed away, as if afraid that the smallest touch might kill him. I’d forgotten, I realised, how close Glath and Kit were. They’d run off to join the Stardancer together. They’d done everything together. Every ambassador colony tried to use a fairly broad range of template creatures to base their imitation on, if they could, and Kit hadn’t been the only dohl that Glath had observed and imitated, but he had been a favourite, a primary template, a confidante and somebody that Glath had followed out of one life and into another.

Back when Glath was being a dohl, anyway. Before he’d started learning from me, and decided that he was human instead.

I wondered if he’d ever told Kit about that.

Glath had eaten his fill and was just kind of sitting on the ground, mostly motionless. I gently scooped him back into my bag. It was pretty easy; any spiders I missed bunched together and flew right in to join the mass. I shouldered the bag and tried to look unaffected. Like I’d totally expected this to happen. Like I’d been a fraction as sure of his survival as I’d been telling everyone I was.

It was probably too late to fool anyone, after they’d seen my state when I’d run back into camp. Still. Had to try.

“Well,” I said calmly, “I’m going to bed.”

And then I walked calmly back to camp, not looking back. Cool girls don’t look at mindsplosions.

—————————

Charlie wasn’t sleeping. She probably thought I couldn’t tell the difference. She was lying down, eyes closed, breathing regular, forelimbs protectively wrapped around her bag full of Gth.

I repressed the urge to snatch the bag away.

The feeling growing in me was familiar, but nonsensical. It was pretty common among dohl. Hekln; that sense of vague threat and territoriality that came when one’s position of favour with the Queen was displaced by another dohl. It’s one of the first emotions a child learns to manage; squabbling dohl are a danger to the whole nest.

But there was no threat; there were no other dohl, and we weren’t with the Princess. Even when we did reach her, my position was in absolutely no danger; there were far too few dohl, we were both too valuable. I might even be the only one left. Charlie was just an engineer; important, yes, but in very different ways. Her position had no overlap with mine.

I dismissed the feeling. A healthy next had no room for such nonsense. Our little team was already full of problems, I didn’t need to be one of them.

“Any results yet?” I asked Harlen.

“It needs to sit overnight,” was her reply.

“And then we’ll know if the water’s safe or not?”

“Then we’ll know whether or not it had any toxins that I can detect. I can’t detect everything. This planet could be full of dangerous chemicals I’ve never even conceived of.”

“You were able to get us a safe food supply.”

“I was able to get us a food supply that hasn’t killed us yet,” Harlen corrected. “I can probably do the same for the water, with luck. But it needs to sit overnight.”

We sat in a tense circle, silent. Charlie gripped Glath a little tighter, still pretending to sleep. We couldn’t trust the drakes, and everyone knew it, which meant they probably didn’t trust us either. Banding together for survival alone in the sands had been one thing, but if we could reach the Princess…

Could we trust Harlen to be honest about the safety of the water?

“Whelp,” Kisa announced to the silent circle, “I’m bored. Game of Lies?”

“Me first!” Lln said. “I have a story that’ll fool all of you.”

“Lln, we’ve been in the same nest since you hatched,” I pointed out. “I think I have a pretty good idea of anything that’s ever happened to you.”

“We’ll see about that! Once upon a time, on the heart planet…”

——————–

The sun made its slow, laboured way over the horizon, pouring wine-red early light over the sands. Across said sands walked the only human on Sanctuary, step after step in a confident, steady pace. To her left, the crystal clear ocean crawled up the sand just a little way, then retreated again in slow, gentle waves. The beach wasn’t large; Sanctuary had no moon so the tides, at the whim of the sun alone, were small. Even the waves were small; the ocean was shallow, and the wind minimal.

To her left, the gentle ocean. To her right, her long shadow stretched over the root-strewn sands. But it wasn’t the only shadow about her; her long black cape moved not with the gentle morning breeze but of its own accord, and the shifting darkness of it appeared more a living shadow than solid material. From the sky, panning slowly in in a long establishing shot at the beginning of a movie, maybe with some cool music in the background, it would have looked fucking awesome.

I bet I looked fucking awesome.

Pity nobody was there to see it.

Now that Glath had had a bit of food and enough spiders to move, he was a bit more difficult to carry around. He didn’t seem to have anything that could be classified as real intelligence. So far as I could tell, his spiders sought out food, water, and each other, and that was about it. And there wasn’t enough of him to make a really cool Batmanesque coat; he drifted about me more like a dark lace train, spreading from the bag on my shoulders to the tasty vegetation on the ground. I didn’t bother trying to scoop him back up. So long as I had enough spiders in the bag to keep the others attached, they could do what they wanted, and there was no reason not to let them nip down and eat as we moved. Besides, it meant I didn’t have to search for more spiders myself; he’d just vacuum up any we travelled over.

Harlen’s tests had revealed that the ocean was fairly corrosive, but otherwise contained nothing dangerous that she could find with her limited equipment. We wouldn’t be able to swim in it for any length of time and breathing the vapour for a long time might do a bit of lung damage that would take time to heal, but we should be okay in a boat, probably, unless there was something in there she couldn’t test for. Kit had decided to risk the journey; I’d been against it, but the aljik weren’t moving on the issue, and I’d decided that we were safe sticking together on the Lifeless Mystery Ocean than I’d be wandering the land alone, or with the two drakes. (Glath didn’t count. Besides, I was pretty sure that if we split up, Kit would try to take him.)

It was alright for the aljik, they didn’t seem to breathe. Or if they did, I had no idea how. Their exoskeletons couldn’t expand to pump air through lungs or anything.

We’d decided to wait another day and night to plan the trip and distil enough clean water. Once the distillery had finished its job, I was going to have to cannibalise it, the few scraps of escape pod hull we’d taken with us to form a shelter in case we encountered bad weather, and anything else non-absorbent I could find to make something that could float and keep all six of us plus Glath out of the corrosive water. Given that I was the smallest of the six, that was going to be a trial. And we’d need oars. And a rudder.

I had a basic plan for how to build it, but I couldn’t start until it was time to take the distillery apart. Later I’d have to get more jellyfish, too, but the sun would have to be much higher before I’d plunge into a freezing swamp. So I was taking one last long walk on the ground, appreciating how I could take off in pretty much direction without slipping and drowning in acid, and hoping that I could successfully build a boat. Shouldn’t be hard, right? I wasn’t going to even try to make sails or anything, but some oars, a rudder, a big floating bowl to stick them to… yeah, seemed simple enough.

I was sure that the fact that I knew nothing whatsoever about boats wouldn’t pose too big a problem.

—————————-

We were probably all going to die.

I didn’t need the Queen or her dohl to tell me that. It was obvious in the fact that she only had one dohl left. She only had two of us tahl left, too; just me and Tak. I hoped some of my other sisters were alive out there somewhere, raising chaos. Or crushing chaos. Whatever needed to be done to chaos at that moment.

Anyway. There wasn’t much for us to fight at the nest, so Tak and I had been reduced to hauling loads for the atil, mostly.

“To the left, Gekt,” some atil told me. Yeah, yeah. I knew. I nudged the rock slightly left.

The view from the top of the observation tower was dizzying. It changed depending where you looked. To the West, Queen-sized rocks and chalky sands stretched downwards until they met the ocean. To the East, the rocky landscape went most of the way to the horizon, where it suddenly became the tree line of the drakes’ forest. Just North of the tower was a cliff; the ground vanished and somewhere far below was a big, black… something… that all of my senses told me to keep away from. And South was, of course, the tangle of sticks and mucous that made the nest itself.

Even the nest looked strange. Sticks should not be rubbery, smooth, and bright green.

“Do you see anything?” one of the atil asked. I growled at her. What I saw was an oncoming headache. Dealing with this much stuff at once was dohl work.

“Does it need to be any higher?” I asked.

“No. Higher would be dangerous.”

I climbed down the side of the tower. Like everything else, it was made of sticks, stones, and scrap metal, and the local sticks and stones weren’t great for building. We’d used carapace to shore up what we could, but we’d run out of dead aljik.

There was a steady stream of atil moving in and out of the main nest entrance. I ignored them as I marched in. They got out of my way, as I knew they would. Now, where would the Princess be…? She almost never went outside, the atil were working on the supply tunnels, she tended to avoid the quarters and birth chamber… storage, probably.

I moved through several air quality chambers, down a long corridor that contained multiple tahl guard posts even though me and Tak were the only tahl in the nest (without an engineer around to help, the atil could only tweak their tried-and-true designs so much), and dropped into the central storage chamber. The Princess was there, conferring with her single remaining dohl, Ain.

“Moving the signal to the top of the tower would give us a better range, Majesty,” Ain was saying. “But it would also put several more atil at risk. Our numbers are simply too low. And you need me up there as lookout anyway, so – ”

“You can’t go up there. It’s too dangerous. The atil will manage.”

“They’re not scouts, Majesty!”

“All they need to do is notice if anything approaches and alert us about it. They will be fine. What is it, Gekt?”

“Tower’s built, Majesty,” I said. “You want Tak and me to go knock around those drakes until they come home?”

Silence.

“Uh, no thank you, Gekt,” the Princess said. “There are probably more productive routes at our disposal.”

“It’d be easy,” I offered. “Nothing here to attack the nest so we can both go. They’re pretty squishy, and the girls can’t use their wings right. They have those big teeth but they can’t hurt me.” I tapped the thick carapace on one of my hindlimbs to make my point.

“Be that as it may, beating them up would only anger them.”

“Then we beat them up some more. We tell them, ‘we’ll stop beating you up when you come to the nest and do what your captain says.’ Then we have the drakes back.” I kept the impatience out of my tone. Princesses were so stupid sometimes.

The Princess and Ain looked at each other.

“What if they attack the base while you’re gone?” Ain asked. “Even with the lookout tower, you might not get back in time. I can’t hold all those drakes off by myself, Gekt.”

“Good point,” I conceded. “Also, we can’t have you in battle. There’s only one of you.”

The Princess fluttered her wings in agreement. “You must stay here and protect Ain and myself,” she said firmly. “When we are sure of our security, we can plan assaults.”

“Yes, Majesty.”

———————-

Charlie’s boat was no an impressive machine, compared to the spaceships that we were all used to. But since it was made from scrap metal, it was probably the best that we were going to get. It was basically an uneven mess of pod segments fixed together, as if our shelter had been upended and bits of our other equipment stuck to the sides to increase the floor space. It would barely fit the six of us. The whole thing had been covered in jellyfish skin for another layer of protection, as had our exposed flesh. Charlie and the drakes had had to cover their entire bodies, but the extra protection of jellyfish skin was nonexistent compared to aljik chitin; we only had to cover our more delicate joints.

“This is the rudder,” Charlie explained to me, showing how the handle directed a long fin that would go underwater. “It controls the direction of the boat better. The paddles, you have to push through the water to move forward, like this.” She showed me the motion.

“I understand,” I said. “So we need three people to control the boat at any given time?”

“Yes. If we have to stop, we have this anchor that should hold us in place. I think. I’m not sure what the currents are like, or how to calculate anything with them, so I’m kind of just hoping it’s heavy enough.”

I looked over my group. “Okay. Two teams. Lnn and Kisa will row with Charlie on rudder. Harlen and I will row with Kerlin on rudder. While one team rows, the other rests and prepares. We’ll set proper schedules when we’ve tested our endurance. Pack up what’s left and we head out.”

“Um,” Charlie said, “shouldn’t we test it first?”

“Test it?”

“To make sure it works.”

“Well, you’re the engineer. Did you build it so that it would work?”

“Yes! Well, as best as I could. But I still think we should row along the beach for a bit. If there are problems, I want to find them before we’re away from shore.”

I clicked my mandibles. “Very well. If it’s necessary.” I gave her a long look. Was she stalling? Trying to avoid the Princess? Ready to betray us and…?

No. That was the hekln talking. I needed to hold together. I couldn’t destroy my own team by falling to suspicion. Charlie had always been unpredictable; she frequently did things that she wasn’t supposed to, but she’d never betrayed the nest.

Although she wasn’t bound by exchange like the traitorous drakes were supposed to be.

And hadn’t she been in the control ring, when the battle started? Gth had reserved room for her in an escape pod, waiting for her to return from the control ring. Why had an engineer been in the control ring?

No. None of this. There would be time to throw suspicion and blame and bad feelings around later, when we had the security of a nest. For now, there was rowing to do.

We packed the boat, pushed it into the water, and climbed in. Charlie’s team took the first shift, with Charlie feeling the rudder in her hands and moving it about. The atil quickly picked up a rowing rhythm.

“Hmm,” Charlie said one-handed, “rudder’s a bit harder to control than I thought it would be.”

“Will it be a problem?” I asked.

“No. Kerlin and I are both strong enough for it. The rowers will wear out before we do. Any leaks?”

“It seems to be holding,” I said. “I don’t think we’re moving very fast.”

“We’re not. Dammit.” Charlie chewed a lip. “It’s not enough rowers. We’re not going to be able to move the boat against those wavers like this. Maybe with four?”

“Four rowers means remaining motionless while they rest,” I pointed out. “Will your anchor work in deeper waters?”

“Depends how deep they are. Hmm. Okay, I have an idea. Let’s get to shore, and give me the paddles.”

We got to shore. Charlie pulled some metal off the boat, took the paddles, and made their submerged ends much wider.

“These’ll be much harder to use,” she said. “I don’t know if any of us are strong enough.”

“We will try. Lnn, Kisa.”

We piled back into the boat. The atil took the oars. Charlie took the rudder.

I could see the atil struggling to move the boat in the water, but they did it. Pull after pull, they did it. I watched them for a little while to estimate how far they’d be able to get us before needing a rest, then we swapped teams.

The paddle was as hard to use as it had looked, but I’m stronger than an atil. I could manage it. When Charlie was satisfied that the boat worked, Kerlin pulled the rudder to one side, and we headed out away from the firm sands that had been our home, and into the unknown, guided only by the ever-strengthening call of the nest.

————————–

Do you remember the Parable of the Child, void?

Well, of course you do not, because in no reality outside my fancy do you have the capacity to know, understand or remember anything. Or perhaps me claiming such a thing is arrogance – after all, can I fathom the connection between matter and thought? I cannot. Here I am, negating the very parable I am about to recall!

I remember the Parable of the Child. It was told to us all, as children, and we did not understand. And then we grew up, and we did. That is what growing up means.

A teacher goes to a child and says, “I have but one test for you, and if you can pass it, you will have surpassed my tutelage.”

The child says, “Elder, you have taught me to measure the heat of a star and the tilt of time, the movements of the tiniest of particles in the most crowded of gravity wells. Please give me your test.”

The teacher says, “The test is a simple enough calculation. I will give you three compositions of matter at a single point in time. You will analyse them, and tell me which two are the most similar to each other. I can provide you with a quick look at the forms, or a semicomplete data set, or if you really want it, the complete data for every particle at this point. What would you like?”

And the student, suspicious of a trap, says, “Please give me the complete data, that I can analyse it very thoroughly myself.”

So the teacher gives the data to the student. And the student analyses it. The student matches every atom to another, looks at their position and velocity in sample A, compared to sample B, compared to sample C. In the end, the difference is very obvious. The student goes to the teacher and says, “B and C are the most similar. They have almost identical composition, although many of the atoms have moved somewhat and B has a slightly lower mass. A is completely different.”

And the teacher says, “A good try, child, but you are wrong. A and C are the most similar.”

“But teacher,” the student protests, “I have run every analysis. B and C are so much more similar!”

“You still have much to learn,” the teacher says. “Should I show you the data you would have seen had you asked for just a quick peek?”

With the student’s consent the teacher reveals nothing but three simple images. Data set A is from a Gyrordian sand rat with long, black fur. Data set B and C are also Gyrordian sand rats; the same sand rat, in fact, with shorter, brown fur. The only difference is that B has had its throat cut and much of its blood is outside its body. It is not yet dead, but it will be very soon.

The teacher looks at the student and says, “Look again at your careful calculations of molecular composition. Do they truly tell you which sand rat is the odd one out?”

And the student looks and says hesitantly, “I see now that this strange molecular placement is an excretion of stress hormones, and I see where the blood is outside the skin. Perhaps I did not calculate thoroughly enough. Sorry, teacher.”

And it is with this statement that the teacher knows that the child has learned nothing.

I remember this story, Void, from my own childhood. I think we all do. They say that you are grown when you understand it, and I do… or at least, I did. But I feel that I don’t, any more.

As a child, I would think, ‘the student is wise; their calculations were not thorough enough’.

As I grew, I thought, ‘the teacher is wise; the calculations obscure the truth, and even if the student did find the signs of death in them, the calculations would not tell the essence of the issue, but merely allow the student to infer it beyond them.’

But now I wonder further. I wonder, ‘Are they not both right and both wrong? Because the issue is not with the calculation. It is with a disagreement on the term ‘similar’. The whole parable is built on a semantic misunderstanding, and with it, perhaps our whole understanding of nature – what does it even mean for something to be similar, or different? How can we be said to have any knowledge at all?

I don’t remember a parable for this part.

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