11: Ease Of Identification

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I don’t know what I am.

I know who I am, of course. The first shape I mastered was that of a perfect ceramic bowl with a fine white rim. My template had been produced by a large blue worm that, in the manner of its people, had first molded the ceramic clumsily before refining the shape by crawling around and around and around in perfectly even undulations, the resulting bowl a testament to its control and mastery of its body.

Even I, young and confused and without context, had found the artistry hypnotic. And in the way of my people, had sought to imitate it. I had no way to replicate such a dance, no method to coax such coordination from my form – I was barely old enough to hold a coherent mass. But the results I could imitate in my own way. With my own dance. After long, exhausting hours of trial and error, I could coax my own body into the perfectly even shape. It wasn’t the same, it wasn’t the part of the craft that had so fascinated me. But it was the best I could do, at the time.

Who I am is an easy question to answer. I am Facsimile Of A Perfect Ceramic Bowl With A Fine White Rim. What I am is a much, much harder question.

It’s memory that’s the problem. I’ve lost a lot of it, and much of the replacement has been second hand. I remember imitating Kit, but I have far fewer memories of the time before fleeing with the Faceless Princess than I should, which means I have far fewer memories of living in a properly structured aljik nest than I should. The Stardancer wasn’t normal, and this nest is too small and meagre and desperate to be normal, which makes it difficult to remember what went into the things I remember doing and thinking. Humanity is worse – I remember seeing and imitating video from Charlie’s device. I don’t have the device to refresh my memories of the actual footage. Which means all I have is Charlie, and extrapolating a species from a single template is… difficult. You need to be able to compare the template. Would I have been able to imitate that ceramic bowl so well if I had not seen less skilled artisans make inferior ones?

What am I? I know what’s important to me, but I can’t remember why. And these aren’t things I can simply ask the rest of the nest about. They wouldn’t know, either.

And the thing is, memories aside, from what I’ve observed in this nest… I don’t think that this would’ve mattered to me all that much in the past. Dohl generally don’t bother with such reflections. A dohl rarely needs to worry about his own motivation and judgement; he just needs to worry about the reliability of his Queen’s, and whether it’s superior to the judgement of her neighbours and daughters. In the past, I could have been ripped apart, lost over a third of myself (don’t think about that, dwelling won’t help), and gotten back to work the moment I was coherent. I would’ve had the rest of the nest to rely on to hold me to the line.

I don’t have a human nest to do that. From what I’ve seen of Charlie, I don’t know if human nests even do that. Her flexibility and caste-freedom comes at a price, I think.

I think. I don’t know.

I don’t know what I am.

—————————————-

Morin shifted her weight to favour the right side of her body. The marks left by that traitor aljik Princess were still with her, and might be for life, but had healed far better than she’d expected. Sulon’s ‘flesh stitches’ were a miracle, apparently.

She looked up at her tree, strong and pale and proud, and starting to bear fruit.

It was a bit small for the job. Most drakes would let their tree grow barren for a good couple of years, perhaps longer if the local conditions weren’t great, until it was strong and unshakable and the roots spread deep and vast, able to support dozens and dozens of gestation pods. Starting early got babies sooner, but less babies in the long run, by slowing down the tree’s growth. But Morin had always been remarkably impatient.

There was some irony in that, perhaps. Patient mothers were successful mothers, but the nature of their situation meant that of course the least patient would be the first mothers. The patient people had been able to resist the urge to shed so often, and were still men. The first core seeds were planted by the impatient, and the very, very first of those had been Morin’s.

And the others weren’t even close to bearing fruit yet. Only hers. Partly because of the head start she’d received in both planting and in the assistance of so many other drakes in caring for and protecting the tree that they saw as their true hope and legacy on this planet. And partly because the other mothers were allowing their trees to grow to a sensible height first, and absorb as many skins from as many men as possible.

Morin didn’t think there was time for any of that. They had to have children before the entire colony was too old to raise them. Besides, core trees weren’t usually planted this closely together, all packed in a forest where their carefully woven labyrinths spread into each other and intermingled into one huge tangle. At least, not on a colonised planet. This was the behaviour of a first settlement (which they were); particularly a first settlement that was desperate and limited and defensive against outside hostile forces. And the soil would only support so much. There may not be enough nutrients in it to support so many core trees at full size. It may very well bee that letting them put all of their energy into growth would merely have them struggling for space and nutrients faster, pit them all in competition for resources with each other before they could bear. And if that happened, if her core tree starved and shrivelled among others, hers would have already borne fruit, her sons would already be spreading out to settle in new forests, ready for the day that they would plant their seeds there.

Or perhaps there would be no problem, and she was just impatient.

A passing man noticed her favouring one side of her body and rushed up, respectfully, to check on her. That still felt strange. Her impulsivity and sideways thinking had never garnered her much respect aboard the Stardancer, but here she was the pride of the colony, the first mother on the planet, and almost sacred. The honour heaped upon her had only increased with the appearance of the gestation pods, a move that would have gotten raised wings and tilted heads on a colonised planet, and gossip about poor judgement and weak sons. In no sensible world should she be in this position, the recipient of such respect and protection and care. And yet, here she was.

But then, this was hardly a sensible world.

———————————

Lln paced the tunnels around the egg chamber, pausing regularly to check the soil. The dirt was within tolerances, just like the temperature and air quality had been. It was a well positioned nest, a good nest, a proper nest in dirt and stone and not like the harsh, bitter metals and filtered air of that big, noisy spaceship. That nest had been wrong shape, wrong design, wrong people right from the start. And back on the heart world, the empire’s true nest, that had been a good nest, a big nest, right shape and right people but old and mined out and full of metal, not as good as this new and fresh one. This was a good nest, all of her instincts said so.

But only the nest itself was good. The people were wrong; there weren’t enough. They were mostly the right people, all aljik except for the interpreter and the Charlie, but not enough, and wrong kinds, no kel and no ahlda and not enough dohl and not enough of anyone, and not enough food, because the forest was dangerous and they might be seen from the sky so foraging had been banned for the moment. They were getting the right people with the eggs, but more people meant even less food.

But that wasn’t Lln’s problem. The other aljik would decide how to fix that and tell her what to do, and she would do it, and there would be enough food. Until then, her job was to check the air and the soil and clean and maintain the nest and carry messages and supplies and dig. And right now, now that she’d finished checking the egg chamber, her job was to clean out the big storeroom and move all of their food to side storerooms. That wasn’t normal, but it was the Princess’ command.

The tunnel to the storeroom was already choked with fellow atil, which cheered Lln considerably. Being with her caste sisters was always better; more atil meant more eyes to spot danger or problems, more claws to work, more minds to share puzzles or spread messages. And there weren’t enough out here. Everyone working in one area like this was the only time that the nest felt properly populated.

Lln shouldered a load and headed back down the tunnel. Something strange was clearly happening, but she didn’t ask what or why. If she needed to know, somebody from another caste would tell her. Otherwise, it simply wasn’t her problem.

—————————

“They’re edible,” Kit told me the next morning. I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant until he added, “People are still testing whether they can swim. They do drown easily, but we want to be certain.”

Right. The crab things. “It won’t be enough to feed the whole nest, especially when the eggs hatch.”

“It won’t be enough,” Kit agreed. “But it’ll help. Buy us some time, perhaps.”

“And our only ways out of this are to find some way to convince the drakes to let us tunnel into the forest, or some way to get rid of the forces above the planet before they spot us.”

“Yes. And the drakes will have core trees by now. They are impossibly territorial once they’ve planted core trees.”

“So Impossible Task One or Even More Impossible Task Two.”

“Yes.”

“Fantastic.” I was struck, suddenly, by the memory of one of Kate’s long, impassioned Biology Fact Sharing sessions. This one had been about naked mole rats. “You know, there are animals on our planet that are a bit like you.”

“You’ve said. The very tiny ones with exoskeletons like ours.”

What? Oh, ants. “No, different ones. Soft creatures like me. Thy live in big communities of closely related individuals and build huge tunnel networks looking for underground food. They barely every come up to the surface because all the food they eat is underground.”

“Well, I doubt we’ll be lucky enough to find that here.”

“Pity. It’d solve all our problems, wouldn’t it?” But Kit’s probably right. A society of alien bugs focused on digging up huge yams to eat? That would probably be stupid.

The aljik needed to be able to move about freely aboveground. If we knew more about the planet’s ecology, we might –

The Faceless Queen’s forces probably didn’t know anything about the planet’s ecology, either. Much less than we did, most likely.

“The forces above don’t have any… any complicated way of finding the nest, do they? Since we’re not signalling our location for other survivors any more. They’re just looking, right? Searching the planet with telescopes?”

“We have to assume so. If they had a sophisticated method to pinpoint our location, we’d be dead by now.”

“So have we tried – and stay with me here – have we tried disguises?”

“All nest entrances are carefully disguised and concealed; from space, they won’t see the nest so long as they can’t see people moving to or from it.”

“Not disguises for the nest. Disguises for the foragers. This is a trick that my people use in times of war sometimes, hiding something or building a fake base or something that looks real from the sky. Our enemies can’t know what lives on this planet or how it behaves, right? So if we make some kind of disguise to put on the atil, like, I don’t know, a big frame with coloured silk on it that trails behind them to make them look like huge worms or something, or… it doesn’t matter, honestly, just anything that looks really non-aljik-like from above. Then they can forage, right? We’d have to hide their tracks, have to instruct them to move in groups or patterns that atil don’t usually move in, but then we’re basically invisible from the sky, right? Just alien worms and their burrow, or something.”

“It’s risky.”

“Riskier than starving to death?”

“Well, no. And it should work, if we can make such disguises, but I mean it’s risky because we’d be sending atil out to scavenge without any guards. Tahl would be far harder to disguise than atil.”

“So what? If we stay away from the forest, the drakes aren’t a problem, and I haven’t seen anything else on this planet that a tahl can handle but an atil couldn’t.”

“The drakes could also move away from the forest and ambush them if they realise they’re unprotected.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because they’re our enemies!”

“I think they probably just want to be left alone.”

“That’s what they want us to think. They’re very devious.”

Yeah, I wasn’t going to be able to change his mind. “Well, devious or not, they’re a bit busy planting and defending their core trees now, right? They don’t have soldiers to spare any more than we do. They’re not going to send them all over the place looking for random scavengers to kill, and they wouldn’t risk doing that anyway, because if they destroyed their disguises then it would risk the Faceless Queen finding us. I don’t know much about aljik weaponry, but I’d imagine that this nest getting obliterated from space would probably be pretty dangerous to the drakes’ core trees, right?”

“Well… yes. That is true. And it’s a risk worth taking anyway, for food. I will look into the idea.”

“Great.” Ha! We were going to do it! We were going to solve the food problem!

We were still stuck in a dead-end nest hiding from an insurmountable force above, but, y’know. Baby steps.

At that point, we were interrupted by an atil. “The Princess wants to see both of you in the big storeroom.”

“Both of us?” I ask. “That can’t be good.”

“Maybe she’s found a clever way off the planet,” Kit says.

“Ha! Sure. It’s definitely going to be good news.”

The tunnels leading to the main storage chamber were somewhat crowded, which was pretty unusual given the population of the nest. Atil, tahl, us…

“Is she gathering together everyone?” I asked.

“It looks like it,” said a familiar voice behind us. Glath. “Kit, do you know what’s happening?”

“No. She didn’t tell you either? What about Ain?”

“I haven’t seen him. I assume he knows. If she’s gathering everybody for some purpose that she hasn’t confided in a single dohl… well, I don’t know what that could be about. But nothing good.”

“Nothing good,” Kit agreed.

I didn’t know enough about aljik culture to have much of an opinion on that, but ‘nothing good’ seemed to be the general trend of news here. I adjusted the assistive device on my shoulder (I was missing the presence of the drakes, who could always repair and calibrate it much better than I could) and hoped the news was merely Pretty Bad instead of Devastating. We had little difficulty getting through the crowded tunnel, people making way for Kit and Glath as they usually did for dohl, and made our way into the storage room, which was…

Empty.

Our meagre stores had been cleared out, presumably to other storage rooms. A couple of electric lights scrounged from one of the escape pods illuminated aljik packed against the walls, all doing their best to leave as much room as possible in the middle of the room, where the Nameless Princess stool alone, spear-tipped arms raised, wings spread wide. I hadn’t dealt with her enough to know the subtleties of her body language, but she seemed tense, focused, ready.

I wished I knew what for.

And that wish was immediately granted, because the moment we entered the room, her gaze fixated on me. She raised herself higher, raised her wind covers higher, and stood still. It wasn’t a normal pose; it was clearly a specific posture intended to communicate something. Like genuflecting, or pointing a sword, or taking the opening position for a dance. A ritual pose.

“Ah,” kit said, behind me. I glanced at him and Glath for answers, and they looked back at me like they were seeing me for the first time. With interest and wariness, and expectation.

I glanced around the room, to see the same thing reflected in the posture of every aljik. All looking at me.

“What the fuck is happening?” I asked.

“What is happening, Princess,” Kit explained gently, “is that you are being challenged to a regency fight.”

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