Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Sixteen

Tell me you’ve solved it all and the secrets of creation have laid themselves out before you,” Campar said as he swept into the lab. “I need good news this morning. We ran out of cream, and I had to drink my coffee black.”

Dafyd shot a glance at Tonner. The lead researcher’s smile was thin and bloodless, but it was a smile. He was amused. Or he was doing his best to be gentle, given Campar’s recent breakdown. Either way it was better than most of the previous eight hours had given. Dafyd had worked in Tonner’s lab for a little over a year, but he’d never worked this closely with the man himself, or for this many hours at a time. His focus and intensity were exhausting. His moods shifted with less warning than the weather. And three times in the past week, Dafyd had understood something new about biological systems so profound and unexpected that it had taken his breath away.

Else came in just behind the big man. They all wore the same pale tunic and trousers like they’d become monks in some obscure Gallantist order, but Else’s seemed to fit her better. Her hair was back in a simple ponytail. There were no cosmetics or beauty products to be had in their Carryx prison. All of them had been scrubbed down to whatever genetics and fate had gifted them with. Even so, Dafyd found he had to make an effort not to stare at Else when she walked in. He hoped she was carefully not looking at him for the same reason.

Tonner crossed his arms. “The silicate pulp in the middle of the berries isn’t a gut or a separate organism,” he said. “It’s a farm.”

Campar’s lighthearted performance vanished. He hoisted himself up to sit on the countertop, his gaze turning inward. They’d all known that the berries were a thick red complication of organs around a sandy and undifferentiated center. They’d spent the better part of a week debating the nature of the pulp: if it was a cytoplasmic analog and the berries were a large cell the way an egg was, if it was a dependent mutualistic organism like mitochondria. Then, for reasons Dafyd didn’t understand, Tonner had decided to test the thin pink soup of the sacrificed samples for metabolic activity. When the berries were ground to pieces, their metabolism rose. Dafyd hadn’t known what to make of it. Everyone else apparently did.

“Microorganic farming,” Campar said. “That’s clever. So the shell organisms feed sugars into the sand.”

“To little bastards in the silicate matrix who hand complex nutrients back up to keep the shell alive and functioning,” Tonner said. “That sandy crap isn’t an organism, it’s a hundred different ones. Or a thousand. I don’t know. It’s an environment. And it’s under management. Constraint.”

Else let out a low, appreciative whistle. “That complicates things.”

“Or it makes them simple,” Tonner said. “The organism is already a nutrient factory. If we find a good candidate species in the farm, maybe we don’t have to worry about working out berry metabolism at all. Leave it as it is, and focus on using the farm for ourselves.”

“Or introduce something from outside that can benefit from it,” Campar said. “A cuckoo.”

“Depends on the farm’s immune response,” Else said. “Assuming it has one. That seems like an easy initial test, though.”

Dafyd crossed his arms. For the most part, he followed what they were saying. If not the full depth of implications, at least the gist, but the leaps of insight and understanding that were so automatic for them left him feeling stupid. All Tonner had to say was It’s a farm and the others were already halfway to making a protocol.

While the three of them debated the merits of introducing a novel organism versus figuring out plasmid analogs for the berry’s existing microbiota, Dafyd washed out the gel trays and ran the CCA’s cleaning cycle. His jaw was uncomfortably tight.

“Any sign of our jailer?” Tonner asked, changing the subject at last.

Else answered. “No. The librarian didn’t make an appearance today either.”

“It did say to tell it what we needed, right? I didn’t imagine that? Hard to do that when it doesn’t show up.”

“They have strange blind spots,” Campar said. “They know we brush our teeth, but not that we clip our fingernails. They know we use utensils to eat, but what exactly they are seems to baffle them. It may have left us some way to make requests that we haven’t fathomed.”

“Good point. We need to remember how little we understand about this place,” Dafyd said. It didn’t seem like the big man was in danger of losing it again, but Dafyd found himself wanting to be agreeable anyway. Campar was taller, heavier, and stronger than any of the rest of them. If he lost it and needed to be restrained, it would be a bad day for the entire group. Dafyd shot him a smile. Campar smiled back.

Tonner made an impatient sound. “I don’t have time to figure out all of this and them too. Dafyd? Are you ready to go?”

I’ll stay a little and finish cleaning up was on the tip of his tongue. He could already see the ghost of a smile on Else’s lips. Her embarrassment that he’d been so obvious. Instead, he said, “Sure.”

As he passed her, Else touched his arm. Not a caress, not a clasp, just a tap of her fingertips against his forearm. The kind of gesture that didn’t mean anything unless it did. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You look tired.”

Dafyd hated the way his heart leaped. “I’m a little tired. I’ll get some rest.” He followed after Tonner before the man could look back and see anything. Not that Dafyd was sure what there was to see.

Tonner marched out through the vast shared room with his head down staring at the deck ahead of him and his hands in fists at his sides. He didn’t look at the strange creatures around them, didn’t acknowledge they were there except to step away from them. Dafyd couldn’t tell if it was disgust or fear or the strategy Tonner used to keep from being overwhelmed by too much that was new and inexplicable.

They were almost back to their quarters when Dafyd’s gut went tight. When they slid the wide door open, Jessyn and Irinna would be there, or if they weren’t, Tonner would call them to come out. Dafyd would hear about the berries and the farm again. Rickar and Synnia wouldn’t participate, but they’d listen and be impressed. That was fair. Tonner could be impressive.

“Hey, boss,” Dafyd said. “I need to walk around a little. Work out some kinks. I’ll catch up.”

“Don’t go back to the lab,” Tonner said. “They don’t need the distraction.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” Dafyd said, and it mostly wasn’t a lie.

Tonner grunted and returned his attention to the floor. Dafyd watched him go, then walked back toward the cathedral. He didn’t have a plan or place in mind, but being anywhere that wasn’t the lab or their rooms felt like an escape. He found a little outcropping in one of the walls that stretched between alcoves. It wasn’t quite a bench, but it was close enough. He put his back against the wall, pulled up his legs, hugged his knees, and took a moment to stop doing anything.

It was strange the way that life kept going. They had lost everything—homes, lives, their place in the vastness of the universe—and Campar still made coffee every morning. Irinna still sang in the shower loud enough that they could hear her doing it. And he, apparently, still mooned after Else Yannin. He didn’t know if it was a sign of their strength or their weakness. He didn’t know whether Anjiin still existed or if the Carryx had taken what they wanted from it and burned the rest to ash. He didn’t know what had happened to the other prisoners from the ship, from all the ships. What the Carryx wanted or intended, how they would be treated if they managed to solve the biochemical puzzle they’d been given, what shape the future could be. It wasn’t just unknown, it was probably unknowable. And in that fog, the thing that shook him was still Else’s smile.

“You’re an idiot,” Dafyd said to no one. “Just a total idiot.”

The huge room filled with alien bodies didn’t disagree.

Dafyd rested his head against the wall. The cathedral rose above him, its high windows glowing with sunlight. A wide knot of dark filaments swirled slowly in the upper air like the tentacles of a huge diaphanous jellyfish. He didn’t know if it was alive or a piece of Carryx technology or something else, but there was a beauty to it. The tendrils flowing with the invisible currents of the air.

When he’d been a child, Dafyd had been terrified of spiders. Even imagining one in its slow, eight-legged crawl would send a shiver down his spine. But always simmering under the fear, he’d felt angry. Angry at himself for being afraid. And then one day the anger was stronger than the fear, and he forced himself to pick a spider up and let it crawl on his hand. He lasted only a few seconds before he fled, screaming.

But the next day he lasted a little longer. And within a few weeks, he was catching spiders in his bare hands. When he showed his mother his great triumph over fear, she’d just laughed and said most people who are scared of spiders don’t force themselves to get over it, they just leave them alone. My little Dafyd just hates anything telling him what to do.

She’d been right. All his life Dafyd had felt an irrational need to pull left when everything was telling him to pull right. It was petulant and petty, a childish need to not be controlled, even by himself. It had gotten him into trouble more times than he remembered. But he also wasn’t scared of spiders anymore.

When he’d first seen the cathedral and the alcoves, the hallways and ramps, the endless parade of terrifying creatures moving about, it had been overwhelming. Everything screamed at him to run away and hide in his room. So he sat and forced himself to stare up at the nauseating heights. To look at the monsters moving past. And the more time he spent there, the less assaulting it felt. The space was vast, but no more so than a few sports stadiums jammed together. What had first seemed like a hundred different species of creature, each more grotesque than the last, had turned out to be maybe twelve or fifteen. He’d seen more varieties of life in zoological parks, and nothing here was more hideous than a tapeworm or a sea cucumber.

His mind spent a lot of time attempting to shield itself using an irrational fear of the unknown. But like picking up that first spider, forcing himself to engage with the fear without looking away was the best inoculation he knew.

A pair of large beasts the size of horses but with bone-colored exoskeletons ambled by, their joints making little green flashes like static. A dozen glowing globes flew past, clicking to themselves or each other. Across the wide, open expanse of the cathedral floor, one of the Carryx skittered with its hind legs and plodded with the front, accompanied by four Soft Lothark. This one looked different from the librarian. It had a lighter coloration, almost yellow, and one of its massive forearms was banded by white in three places, like scars or tattoos. Dafyd watched the aliens move past him, pretending they were fish in an aquarium, and he found it almost restful. None of them had emotional lives entangled with his. Strange as they were, there was also a kind of beauty in all the ways evolution had solved its problems through luck and environmental pressure. Half a dozen of the amber-eyed monkey-like things that kept invading the laboratory bounded past, saw him, screeched, and ran away.

Most of them, he didn’t have names for. The few he did, he’d been told: Rak-hund, Soft Lothark, Sinen, Carryx. The others, he could come up with his own signifiers—click bubbles, feather monkeys, whatever else—but that didn’t seem as satisfying to him. The Carryx turned and its soldiers followed. They seemed to be homing in on one of the crow-ape things that Dafyd sometimes saw facing the walls in the hallways. Hallway crows. The crow only showed that it knew the Carryx was approaching by turning its back. Over the murmur that filled the cathedral like a train station, Dafyd thought he could hear something harsh and staccato coming from the Carryx. Not its usual bass birdsong, but a kind of ripping sound. The hallway crow flinched and made a similar noise in reply.

Because that was the difference, wasn’t it? The species that he knew by name had been able to speak. They were the ones that had the little black squares. The translators. Now that he thought to look, it was almost exclusively the Carryx and their guards that had translators. He thought that one of the big bone horses might have had one around its neck, but they were gone by now, and he wasn’t sure.

The hallway crow was screeching now and trying to walk away from the Carryx. The four Soft Lothark shifted into its path, blocking its retreat. If Dafyd had had one of the black squares, he might have been able to fathom what the hallway crow was upset about. Or learn its name. Ask it what it knew and how it understood the Carryx and their shared prison. The Carryx lifted its massive forelegs. Its fighting arms. With the clearer view, Dafyd was almost certain the white bands were scars. The hallway crow dropped to the ground screeching like an exhausted child, and a moment later the Carryx lowered its forelegs again. A pack of black things like crabs the size of large dogs scurried across the floor, their feet making a sound like dry rice being poured over stone. In the high air, dozens of the clicking orbs were rising, converging on the dark filaments that still wafted and spun.

It was all strange, but some of it was also beautiful. The horror behind it was real. There wasn’t a moment that Dafyd couldn’t feel the fear and tension in his body if he just turned his mind to it. But there were some moments when there was also awe. The clicking orbs reached the massive jellyfish thing and started wrapping themselves in its black threads. Dafyd wished there was someone there to see it with him. To wonder with him what it all meant. To remember it with him later. Instead it was just his. A private moment that couldn’t be shared.

The hallway crow, still splayed on the floor, screeched louder and started flailing its limbs. It looked like a toddler throwing a tantrum. The movements were almost the same.

“At least you can talk to your librarian,” Dafyd said. “You’re ahead of me.”

They have strange blind spots, Campar said in his memory at the same time the librarian said You are all permitted access to this pathway. And also to the complex. It was almost synesthesia. Dafyd saw the two thoughts, and how they fit like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. How together they made something new.

He got to his feet before he could talk himself out of it. The hallway crow had worn itself out. The four Soft Lothark stood around it, looking at each other like they were deciding whether to kill the thing on the floor or let it be. The scar-armed librarian stood back a couple steps, letting whatever was happening play out. Dafyd went to it.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Please forgive me. I’m very new.”

The pale Carryx shifted. Its feeding arms were as thick as a human’s, and longer. Its fingers were spidery and it didn’t have thumbs. Its wide, flat eyes found him, but it didn’t speak.

“The librarian of my moiety said I was permitted here at the complex and my quarters and the path between them. Am I allowed to go other places?”

The thing’s fingers plucked at each other, and the Carryx whistled and burbled. The voice that came from the dark square around its neck was the one from Anjiin. The dispassionate conqueror’s voice. “Permission in one place has no bearing on other places.”

“Thank you. So there are other places I am permitted to go?”

“There are places you are permitted and places you are not.”

A little flush of pleasure rose up Dafyd’s chest. “We have made a mistake. I need help finding the way to the librarian of my moiety.”

The Carryx didn’t answer. Not to him. It let out a flurry of hard clicks. The prone hallway crow replied in kind. When the Carryx turned and walked away, the Soft Lothark went after it. After a moment of uncertainty, Dafyd followed too.

The Carryx and its guards or orderlies or soldiers moved quickly to the far side of the cathedral and through a wide archway to a passage that sloped down. The air felt thicker here, and it smelled like smoke from a chemical fire. Dafyd coughed, but the Carryx didn’t look back at him. If this goes badly, he thought, they will never find my corpse. He didn’t know why that was funny, but it was.

The passage dropped. Other archways opened into it, and he caught glimpses of other cathedral spaces. The gateways to other sets of alcoves. And other things too. A place that looked like a vast web, spider silk too fine to see the strands but so thick that the far walls were hidden. A pool of water as wide as a small lake with disturbances on its surface where something was moving beneath. He wondered if any of the other captives of Anjiin were through those archways, in labs or workrooms of their own, facing tests that were all really the same test. Are we useful?

Other aliens walked along with them or passed in the other direction. Some were Rak-hund and Soft Lothark. Some were other things that he hadn’t seen before. Most if not all had the black squares on them.

After what felt like most of an hour, the Carryx left the passageway through a wide, low gate that the Soft Lothark pulled open for it. Dafyd followed into a maze of low halls with inward-tilted walls like the ones in the ship coming over. There was a sound here that his mind kept wanting to interpret as water flowing over stones. It wasn’t that, though. It was the voices of Carryx. Dozens of them, maybe. All speaking at the same time.

One of the Soft Lothark shifted in front of him, stopping him with its body as the scar-armed Carryx went on. To Dafyd’s left, an archway led to a ramp that curved down. He pointed to it. “There?”

The prison guard didn’t answer, but turned and walked away. Dafyd squeezed his hands into fists and released them again, trying to relax. He walked down the ramp slowly, willing his senses a little farther around the curve of the wall than he could actually see.

The ramp ended in a room as cramped as Dafyd’s first apartment, and the large-eyed Carryx was squatting in the middle of the space, manipulating a series of glowing, floating cubes with its thin forearms. Its wide black eyes locked onto Dafyd.

“I’m, ah…” Dafyd cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m Dafyd Alkhor. With the workgroup. You told us to make one thing food for the other one?”

“I know these things,” the librarian said in its reedy voice.

“You also said we should tell you if there was something else we needed in order to do our work?”

“Where the fuck have you been?” Tonner said as Dafyd stepped back through the wide main door. Outside the windows, the sky had turned stormy and dark. Rain pattered against the glass, making the orange lights on the ziggurats shudder and run. Else and Campar were sitting at the table, and Dafyd was flattered to see the worry and relief in their eyes. Jessyn and Irinna, he assumed, were back at the lab.

He’d been gone more than eight hours. He was hungry. He was exhausted. He was elated. He was spent.

Dafyd put down his little metal crate and closed the door behind him.

“What’s that?” Else asked.

He lifted the top of the crate with a clank and pulled out a thick sheaf of pages that were something like paper, if not actual paper itself. Then two pots with sticky, black, butter-textured ink and a handful of metal styluses.

“I got pens,” he said.