14: Broken Brakes

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“Smon Earth make forty three Javlyn, Smon kind inside, eggs inside, food inside. All go to other suns, other Earths.”

“Do all the sentinels have people on them?” Tyk asks.

“No. Smon people see no other people. Only Smon people on Smon star.”

“People on Tyk star?”

“Not see! When go from Smon star, not see people, grass, moss, crabs anywhere different, only Smon Earth. Only us. We go to other star.” She places another large rock and scatters some small rocks in a line next to it. “Other sentinel. But, Javlyn…” she breaks the very end off the twig. “We try not go…” she moves the twig past the star, past its sentinels. “No not go! Javlyn not not go, the… sky inside Javlyn is…” she puts a claw over her mouth and the orifices in the appendage above it. Tyk knows Smon well enough by now to know that that’s how she breathes. She holds the gesture for a few seconds, then lowers the claw. “We make air well, no can make Javlyn well. Go, go.” She moves the twig on, away from the sun and its sentinels.

Tyk has seen a cart slide out of control before. Near the end of the wet season a few years back, when they’d been replenishing their supplies of the tall bamboo to the North, the kind that could be used to make beams for the communication tower, somebody had overloaded a cart. This isn’t usually too big of a problem – a heavier cart just needs more force to pull, and the Redstone River Hive has some very strong, capable women – but a moving cart is a rolling weight, and the issue is not getting it moving, it’s steering and stopping.

The cart was loaded at the top of a hill, a hill made muddy and slick by the constant drizzling rain. The puller, unaware that it had been overloaded, started to pull it down the hill, where it gained speed too quickly and the weight was too much for her to stop. Even locking the front wheels with the physical brake made little difference on the mud. The cart was headed straight for a delicate logging construction at the base of the hill, and all the heroic effort of the hauler couldn’t stop the cart and mitigate damage entirely. All she could do was steer it enough that it clipped the edge of the logging station and damaged one end instead of destroying it entirely, and get out of the way before it crushed her.

Tyk imagines what it must be like for Smon, to be inside such a cart.

“No stop, no fall. In sky forever. Cannot do. We stop very very slow, very far away. So. We find sentinel to fall on very far away. We look, we look, we see…” She moves the stick towards the little rock representing Earth. “Place with sky that… place we…” she indicates her mouth with one claw and takes a deep breath. “This sky, special sky, from grass, moss. So we… head see… grass, moss. Crab things, yes or no. But people…” she rocks her head ‘no’. “Smon people look for other people, call of other people, long long time. We see no other people. Smon people, no other. We land. I see you, Tyk.” She does that stuttering vocalisation that indicates joy. “You and Redstone River Hive, you are big big thing, big ever thing. Will you help me?”

“Yes.” Of course, always. Had that ever been in question?

“Will Redstone River Hive help me?”

“Y – ” Tyk cuts herself off. Thinks.

That’s a good question, actually.

They will, right? They’ve been planning to. All the hives have been banding together to help. But a baby god in distress is a very different thing from a Hiveless foreigner staggering in from the sleeplands, even if those sleeplands are the sky itself, even if Smon isn’t technically Hiveless so much as her hive is scattered across the continent. Smon is very strange; presumably, the rest of the sky people are equally as strange.

“You can’t go back into the sky, can you?”

“No.”

They’ll probably help. Probably. Get the sky people together to build their hive, help them set up; it’s the normal, decent thing to do. But it would be irresponsible of Tyk to automatically consider that a guarantee.

She’ll have to make sure it’s a guarantee instead.

“I’ll make sure they help,” she says firmly. “I’ll make them, if I have to. We’ll get your hive back together.”

Smon relaxes, and Tyk realises that this must be what had been bothering her. Once she’d realised that they’d mistaken her for a baby star, she must have wondered (with good reason) how much of the hive’s friendliness and cooperation was based on that mistake. Tyk tries to imagine being adrift on the ocean in a boat, unable to land, dragged away on a current and washed up on a completely unknown shore only to discover a new kind of people there, people as different from her as she is from Smon. How important their goodwill would be, and how difficult it would be to be sure whether she had it.

But Smon has nothing to worry about. Of course Tyk’s hive will help. And Tyk would find a way to make them, if they didn’t; not that it’ll come to that. They’re good people.

“We should explain all of this to the rest of the hive,” Tyk says. “There might be no reason to go all the way to Starspire. It might be safer and faster to gather you all together somewhere closer.”

Smon bobs her head and follows her back to the hive. On the way, they expand Smon’s vocabulary with the sorts of words she’ll need to explain. Words like ‘think’ and ‘want’ and ‘need’ and ‘know’. Words like ‘hurt’ and ‘sick’ and ‘danger’ and ‘die’. ‘Breathe’ and ‘air’ and ‘poison’, Smon seems to think are particularly important to get right (there’s something in her story about the air in her sky boat being poisoned), and ‘poison’ isn’t an easy one to trap.

“What will you do, when you are all together?” Tyk asks.

“Live,” is Smon’s simple answer. “Live is very hard alone.”

Of course it is. That’s why people have hives.

“Most big thing,” Smon continues, “is Tyk people safe. Most big thing, no trade for that. Next big thing, Smon people safe. All together, make food together. Find place to be, not problem to Tyk people, make food and hive. Later, make many baby.”

“Babies?”

“Many baby come in many egg. Not… real… yet. Sleep forever, not hurt. Smon people bring all egg things together, when not danger, wake some baby. But sure Tyk people not danger first.”

“My people won’t be a danger to you,” Tyk promises.

Smon rocks her head. “Other kind.”

“Another kind of people?”

“Smon people not danger to Tyk people. Smon stop people if danger.”

Huh? There are fourteen of them and they don’t even have a food supply. If one of Smon’s magic stones is capable of hive-destroying violence, Tyk is yet to see it. She really doubts that Smon, or her people, are any kind of danger.

They do want to gather and make a hive. Good, that’s doable. It’s… politically tricky. The existing hives are going to have to make space for them, which isn’t unfeasible, but is complicated. Although actually, the sky people don’t seem to use the wingsong stream, which simplifies things a lot. The world is full of spaces that are largely unoccupied because they’re currently in a wingsong dead zone. Some dead zones are now over areas that were occupied last cycle, meaning that there are still old hive entrances there, made of durable fired mortar; they might require excavating and building supports (even fired mortar is not completely ageless), but one of those would make a good starting point.

Yeah. It’s very doable.

Tyk picks up her pace. She can’t wait to explain everything to the Hiveheart. This, too, could fulfil her Wanderer’s destiny, if she plays it right; if she spends a long enough time in the new sky people hive, helping them set up… if they’re out of the wingsong stream then they’ll need somebody going to and from their hive regularly, for communication purposes, and if she manages to take control of the situation then she can convince everyone to put their hive really close to tot he Redstone River Hive; she can walk there and back all the time, that can be her destiny…

The communication tower comes into view. And the mound of the hive below it, where people are rushing about with great activity, for some reason. Said reason becomes clear as they approach – the mound is littered with the bodies of men.

Forgetting Smon for a moment, Tyk breaks into a run, desperate to find Kesan, Kedahm, Kepol. But it quickly becomes apparent that things aren’t as bad as she first thought; the men are sluggish, half-aware, but not dead. Other people, men and women, run about between them, checking on them, giving them water, and occasionally cleaning something off their wings.

“What’s happening?” Tyk asks a little girl who’s passing her by with a large tank of water on her back.

“Pollen storm,” the kid says, and gets back to work.

A… pollen storm?

Their wings do look a bit dull; probably coated in pollen, although not thick enough for her to see the pollen herself. Some of the pollens up in the wingsong stream have an intoxicating effect, and there are stories of men climbing old towers and big mountains and getting poisoned by it. Some of those stories are cautionary tales; in others, the intoxication leads to great visions and revelations. Tyk once heard that on the West continent, men who wish to become master sages have to travel to a specific communication tower built right in the path of pollen storms and spend two days at the very top, communing with the gods. About a quarter of them die.

Which might just be a rumour, but you never know. Foreigners get up to some weird things.

It’s unlikely that anyone was seriously hurt in this storm, Tyk thinks. The tower would’ve been evacuated as soon as the pollen hit. Beside her, she sees someone brush some pollen off her truebrother, pick him up and carry him home, looking concerned but not overly worried. The afflicted will be fine; much more important is what this means for the Redstone River Hive.

There aren’t supposed to be pollen storms in the clear currents of the wingsong. The places where the current is strongest, where communication between towers is easy, are free from this sort of thing; this kind of pollen collects in slow currents and dead zones. And if it had been a danger, everyone would have known about it. The behaviour of the wingsong currents is regular and predictable, interrupted only by extreme weather, which is also predictable. Something in the wingsong has changed very drastically, and very suddenly. Something that nobody up there had seen before, and nobody knew how to predict.

What does this mean? Is it permanent? And why now, when this sky people issue makes inter-hive communication so important?

Remembering the sky people, Tyk glances back at Smon, ready to explain the problem. But Smon isn’t looking at Tyk. She’s staring at the men, totally frozen – frozen, that is, until a water carrier passes too close to her, at which point she jumps back as if expecting to be attacked. She looks up at Tyk, the fleshy bumps on her face stretched into an expression that Tyk has never seen before.

And then she turns and bolts away from the hive at a dead run.

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