41: Some Reservations

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Their conversation for the rest of the trip is fairly light, upbeat, and focused on the task at hand, careful not to mention death or grief or hives or burrows. When their hunger is sated and they turn back toward the burrow, collecting food for later on the return journey, Tyk finally asks something that she’s been wondering about for hours. (Well, something that she’s been wondering about since last night, but now, she’s pretty sure Sakeya won’t kill her for asking.)

“Hey, um, Sakeya?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I ask you a personal question?”

“You want to know how I lost the claw? I promise you, it’s a really boring story.”

“No, not that.” Tyk has hivemates who have lost limbs, and it’s usually in a tunnel collapse or similar accident. “You’re from Glittergem, right?”

“Yep.”

“So how did you and Kekeya. Um. Come out here?”

“You want to know what we were exiled for?”

“Well, I, uh – ”

“Murder. I killed two men of my hive.”

Tyk fumbles the tuber she’s pulling out of the ground. She’d suspected something bad – exile is an extreme punishment for extreme crimes – but, well. To fight a man, let alone kill one, is inherently dishonourable; even the smallest, weakest girlchild can outmatch a strong and healthy man in a direct conflict. If you have a problem with a man, you take it up with his truesister before you get physical. And to murder a hivemate? The ultimate abomination. And here Sakeya is just casually revealing that she killed two men of her own hive without a shade of shame in her tone.

“W-was it an accident?” Tyk asks. “Like, you didn’t see them, or – ?”

“No. It was revenge.” She keeps walking, cutting off the conversation.

Two hivemates. Two men. For revenge. A revenge that she had to know would cost both her and her truebrother their place in the hive, in any hive. What could those men possibly have done?

When they get back to the burrow, it’s empty, except for Kekeya standing guard. Sakeya shares food with him while they wait for everyone else to arrive.

The sky people come back next, still terse, but Smon does indeed seem to be fine. They’re barely back before everyone else shows up, laden with food. Tyk had thought that her little group had done pretty well in their gathering, but the others make it obvious just how much teaching a couple of children had slowed Sakeya down; Saima, Samet and Sabin carry large bundles and baskets on their backs, apparently full of food. It looks like a good two days’ worth of food for the group, which is slightly incongruous with how little food they have stored, so Tyk asks about it.

“It’s so nobody has to forage in the rain over the next couple of days,” Samet explains. It’ll be heavy enough to destroy honeyblooms, so we collected as much of those as we could just for that. And there’ll probably be quite a bit of flooding. Can’t you feel it on the horizon?”

“Feel it?” The traders speak sometimes of being able to ‘feel’ approaching rain, but Tyk’s never really understood. In a hive, the day-to-day weather wasn’t a major factor unless an egg was hatching; if there’s a storm, you just put off your aboveground work and do underground work instead. The men have ways to see and map the weather up in the communication tower, so they know when to shelter the silk farms and soforth and which few days per year it’s dangerous to climb the tower at all, but otherwise, a storm is not something that takes much preparing for.

Unless you forage all your food on the surface, apparently. It probably is important, out here.

“We’ll have to spend the next couple of days inside,” Samet continues. “After it passes, we’ll get a shoot bloom. We’ll show you how to harvest the fresh leaves.”

“I know how to harvest from a shoot bloom,” Tyk snips.

“Heh. Sure you do, hiveling. But we’ll show you a few extra tips, okay? When your lifeline is surface plants, you get really good at harvesting everything you can and taking care of them as best as you can.”

“We can’t stick around that long,” Tyk says. “Thank you for your hospitality, but we really need to get to the Glittergem Hive.”

“Through floodwater? With that big heavy load of yours? It would be faster to wait.”

“No, it wouldn’t. It’ll be faster when the ground dries out, but we can make progress before then and still take advantage of the dry ground.”

“Doesn’t help you much if you’ve worn yourself out struggling through mud, does it? Besides, you’re already worn out and underfed, and our star-sailor friends tell me that your companion is in even worse shape. You want your health to stop you out in the middle of nowhere on the trail?

“Saima’s read the signs and says that it’s almost time for us to move North. Stick around for a little while longer, maybe ten days or so, and we can make part of the journey with you. We’ll certainly move faster with one of us carrying that farm than with you doing it.”

Tyk’s no expert, but even she can tell that there’s well more than ten days’ food left in the area. Are they moving on early, just to help her and Smon? “You don’t have to do that. We can continue on our own.”

“You can continue on your own, and we can stay, but why should we? We need to move on early this season anyway. You need to get to Glittergem as fast as possible. It costs us nothing to walk together.”

“Why wait ten days, then? Right after the rain, we could – ”

“Saima says ten days or so, and she knows how to read these things,” Samet says vaguely. Which Tyk takes to mean ‘you’re having a rest and recovery period whether you like it or not’.

It’ll be fine. She’s not ready to lay Ketyk, yet. She’s not sure exactly when she will be ready to lay him.

But the day is getting closer.

That night, alone in the dark with Smon in their storage room, Tyk asks, “What was that fight about today?”

Smon crawls in close and makes the echo stone speak very, very quietly. “When I was first working on the farm, I told you that there was another way I could feed myself, but that it was very dangerous and I’d rather die than use it. Do you remember?”

“Um. Vaguely?”

“Right. Well. The Reservoir is that way.”

“What?! What’s wrong with it?”

“It is a farm. Like mine. But much better. More food for less work.”

“And that’s… bad?”

“You remember how food is made from the sun, and then other animals and mosses and people eat that food? And how my farm works by taking food made by your sun and eating it until it becomes food that I can eat?”

“Yes.”

“That reservoir is a big puddle of… tiny water plants, I suppose? Teeny tiny water plants, millions of them so small that they just look like green water. And they are making food from the sun directly. Like other plants.”

Smon’s explaining the concept like it’s a difficult one, but it seems straightforward to Tyk. “It’s the opposite of a glow pool. Making food from light instead of light from food.”

“Yes! Yes, exactly that. It is the opposite of one of your glow pools. But Tyk, these tiny-water-plants are from our Earth. It makes our small-sunlight-shapes, not yours.”

“That’s what you need, right? I don’t see the problem.”

“The problem is control. My farm only works if I feed it. The food needs to be boiled, and then put in one tank and then another tank. Without me, it dies. If my farm breaks open and spills into a river, that’s bad for me, but not for the river – the life in it will starve and die. This is the same for all the small life on or inside my body. But that reservoir can leak, or flood, or the plants in it get carried elsewhere on somebody’s claws, and they won’t starve, because they eat sunlight. It can cause infection in your life systems. Now, any one infection is probably nothing – they end up in the dark and die, or the reservoir floods but the puddles dry up and the tiny-water-plants dry up and die, or they don’t have the right other tiny-water-plants – there’s a whole lot of different kinds all working together in there to make food parts, and many need each other to live. But, some chance that that does not happen. Some chance that they live on rocks or in puddles or in other plants, or even go to the river. And the same as your life might have poisons for mine, my life might have poisons for yours. What if something in these plants is bad for sweetroot?”

“Then we don’t let it near the sweetroot,” Tyk says, puzzled. “You just said that this is really, really unlikely, right?”

“Unlikely. But possible! And over many, many generations, possible will happen! Poison to something in the river, maybe, or to sweetroot or moss, or to bamboo. Or to you! We cannot take that chance.”

“Maybe,” Tyk says. “But we have dealt with ecological disasters before. We – ”

“Not like this! This is not some Tyk-Earth infection getting out of control in your moss farms. This is from an entire other Earth, an entire new type of life! You have never dealt with something like this!”

“Have you?”

Silence. Eventually broken by Smon asking, “What?”

“You said that this was the only other Earth you’d found life on, right? So your people haven’t dealt with this either.”

“Right, so even we can’t predict how bad it could be!”

“Or how likely it is that there’s no risk. Since your life can’t eat our life, right? Maybe it has no way of growing wild in a place too full of our life.”

“Maybe. I am not a life lorekeeper. Neither are the other sky people here. A life lorekeeper would know the risk better, but still, some risk is too much risk.”

“What abour the risks for your farm?”

“The life in my farm can’t grow on its own! It has no risk.”

“No? I’ve seen how much you need to feed it. The area around your dropping boat will be damaged for years and years. Which is fine! It is a very small area. But how big of a farm would you need to feed all the sky people? To feed the babies you want to hatch? To make an entire hive; probably many hives, in the future? To feed one sky person, in a very small amount of time, you had to strip that area bare; how fast would you need to strip the ground bare to feed everyone?”

“That’s only because I have to use grass and things,” Smon says. “Once we’re in one place, we can use things like sweetroot – ”

“How will you get it? You don’t have a body shaped for burrowing. Do you intend to make a hive with your kind and our kind? Because it takes almost every woman in a hive to dig up enough sweetroot and farm enough moss to feed a hive. Each hive would not be able to support very many of you. And you have said that your magic heating stones will stop working eventually – will you boil the whole farm, all the time, a big one to feed all the sky people, using bamboo and charcoal alone?”

“Then we find another way!”

“What other way? You need food. Either it eats sunlight or it eats our food. Those ate the only two options, right? You say, eating sunlight is too dangerous, maybe, you can’t be sure but some risk is too much risk. But living on food that eats our life, but needs you enough that it can’t escape? That’s impossible. The only way forward is to make the sunlight-eating food as safe as you can.”

“Or die out.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“If we have to, we – ”

“If you meant that, you wouldn’t be going on this journey. You’d have died by now. Or you’d have killed those other three at the reservoir. I think… I think you’re just scared.”

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