Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

PART FIVEFISSURE

He wasn’t unique, or not more than any other individual being would be. He had no insights that changed the way I saw the order of things, he didn’t have any particular philosophy that opened the doors of reality. He was one among many, with variations as any of them had. The only thing that I think made him stand out at all was the depth of hatred that the others came to have for him.

—From the final statement of Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety of the Carryx

Twenty-Six

Jessyn was drunk. All they had was water and the slowly degrading mix of simple foods they’d had before. None of the alterations they’d made to the berries produced euphorics or intoxicants, though now that she felt this way, it occurred to her that they could. It would make for a better party.

Still, she was drunk. Inebriated by relief at the presence of her brother, by the novelty of new human faces. The long, leonine jaw and flowing white hair of the man named Allstin. The stark remnant of a man that was still recognizable as Llaren Morse. Their presence—their existence—put a grin on her face that was so wide it ached and so deep she felt it in her chest.

Llaren Morse stood at the window, looking out at the vastness of the sky like he was seeing it for the first time. Jellit was propped between the centrifuge and the kitchen counter with Rickar and Synnia and Tonner, all so tightly packed in that it seemed like they’d crawl into each other’s laps. Jellit, with his bandaged leg, was sitting. The others looked like supplicants allowed to stand before the merry, delighted king. Jessyn herself was with Allstin and Else and Dafyd in the hall, pushed out of the main living space by the lab equipment and the press of three new bodies.

“So there I am, yeah?” Allstin said. “Stripped naked and dragged along by the beast’s leash like the world’s least plausible virgin sacrifice, trotting through the halls with all the demons the Gallantists could dream up looking at my cock like they were wondering if it was removable. I’m sick. I’m dizzy spun up. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen t’me. You all had something like it, yeah?”

“We kept our clothes,” Jessyn said.

Dafyd laughed. “Speak for yourself. I had clothes, sort of, but they weren’t mine.”

Allstin wagged a finger between himself and the younger man—you and me. “So it was that moment. And the great fucking beast hauls me into this room, four other people in it, and one of ’em is my department chair. Woman I’ve known for fifteen years. They’re all in the local uniform by then, so I’m the only one wearing my Pope’s robes, if you see what I mean. And the beast starts making introductions. And this woman—Merrol, her name is. You’ll meet her. Merrol starts blushing and she’s staring me in the eye so as to not look elsewhere. So I look back. We’ve locked eyes. And I don’t why, but Little Allstin starts taking the moment for something it ain’t.”

Else buried a little shriek in her hands, shaking her head with hilarity. “You didn’t. Oh, God. That’s not true.”

“You can ask anyone,” Allstin said. “They were all there. Not like there was any point trying to hide it. So the great fucking beast cuts me loose and I excuse myself, wash up because I was fair a wild man by then, and when I come back out, clothed now mind you, everyone’s formal and dour and pretending like I hadn’t just waved at ’em all with my hands tied.”

Dafyd choked, his shoulders trembling with mirth.

“Normal biological reaction,” Tonner shouted at them from the kitchen. “Humans have been getting horny in the face of death since the beginning of the species.”

“Don’t you hate it when some killjoy tries to explain away the joke?” Campar shouted back at him.

“So,” Allstin continued, as though no one else had spoken, “what could I do to break the ice now that I’d already shown everyone my best material?”

The sly smile after it was funnier than the punchline, and Jessyn had to lean against the wall and catch her breath. She’d known people like Allstin before. Natural performers who made themselves the center of every conversation. Usually, they grated on her nerves, but not now. Not today.

In the space by the kitchen, Jellit was holding the latest bright-colored not-turtle that they were meant to be feeding. The others had been used to make basic protein assays or had starved to death while the group’s attention had been elsewhere. This most recent one had a line of crimson along its jaw that might have meant something in a different evolutionary context. Here it was just decoration. Meaningless.

Tonner, to judge from the motions of his hands and the few words that Jessyn caught, was speeding Jellit through months of research and theorizing, and Jellit was doing his best to seem like he followed it all or cared. Very polite of him.

Jessyn felt soft. Relaxed. Like a pain she’d carried so long she’d stopped noticing it until it eased. Llaren turned away from the view, ambling toward the four of them with a vague, stunned expression. The months of their captivity hadn’t been kind to him. The last time Jessyn had seen the man, he’d been on a screen on Anjiin, talking about the objects he’d discovered and their mysterious approach. His skin was grayer now, and he had a patchy beard. He’d shed enough weight that his cheekbones had gone sharp. He looked ill, but maybe they all did. Certainly none of them were the people they had been.

“This place is beautiful,” Llaren Morse said. “These are the best quarters I’ve seen them give any of us.”

“It’s the window, isn’t it?” Else asked, giving Dafyd a conspiratorial wink.

“I don’t know how long it’s been since I saw an outside,” Llaren said. “I’ve been living in a prison cell.”

“We all have,” Else said. “Even with the view.”

Llaren’s smile was real, but thoughtful. There was something behind it that Jessyn couldn’t quite fathom.

Dafyd made a small sound and raised a hand like he was a child in a schoolroom. “The Carryx that took you to your workgroup. Do you know if it was the same librarian we have?”

The question was directed at Allstin, but Llaren answered. “How would we know? We didn’t spend a lot of time chatting. It hauled us all together, told us to apply the scanning protocols Morse here was using for his heliospheric work to their pet datasets, and vanished.”

“Did you ever try to find it again?”

Allstin chuckled and cuffed Dafyd’s shoulder. “We’ll want to arm up before we do that, yeah?”

In the main room, Tonner said something, and Rickar laughed. It was strange to see them getting along. Jellit scratched his head and asked them something she couldn’t quite make out. Tonner launched into an answer, his hands moving in a kind of pantomime that could have been protein structure or evolutionary pairing maps or maybe just Tonner needing to get out more information at once than a single channel of speech could carry.

Llaren Morse cleared his throat, catching the whole room’s attention, and said, “I don’t think we’re going to break Jellit’s family reunion up anytime soon, but Allstin and I should be getting back.”

“I’ll go with you,” Tonner said, maybe a little too quickly. “Jellit can take my room.” There was a flicker of something in Else’s expression—embarrassment or regret or guilt—at Tonner’s hunger to be away from her and her new lover.

“I’d like to see your place too,” Rickar said. “Can I tag along?”

“Ooh,” Campar said. “A sleepover, only without the booze and dancing.”

“Might be some dancing,” Allstin said. “One can never rule it out. I’ll take these three with. We’ve got room enough for them now.”

Llaren’s expression sobered, and Jessyn wondered how Jellit’s workgroup had come to have the extra space. At a guess, it would be a lot like how they had Irinna’s room open. Still, the darkness passed quickly. It wasn’t long before Tonner, Campar, and Rickar were heading out the wide door, following Allstin like he was the teacher and they were all heading to their first day at a new school. The night had fallen long before, and the dawn would be a long time coming. They moved the equipment and made a circle on the floor with cushions from the seats and pillows from the beds, sat and lounged and talked like they were all young again. Like the universe still had joy in it. And so, for a while, it did.

Jellit and Llaren Morse told their story. The broad strokes were all familiar, and it made the details matter more. The two of them had shared the passage, and so they took turns telling the stories of it: the man who’d tried to kill one of the other prisoners, the woman who’d started hallucinating spirits from beyond space and time, the group that had started a choir and spent their time in hell singing together. Then their placement in a room, and their version of the alcove, though this one was stocked with visualization arrays and single-photon diffraction slopes and banks of telescopic data that might have been real or simulated.

Dafyd and Synnia told about the attempted coup and the alien that had exploded and made everyone sick as dogs, and how that had led to Dafyd spending days in the ruins of a pink nightgown. If Jellit and Llaren Morse exchanged a glance at that one or seemed to already know the details of it, Jessyn didn’t notice at the time.

It should have been terrible, and it was, but telling the stories and singing the songs and laughing about it all let Jessyn feel like they had some power over the horror.

“And how did you wind up tracking us down?” Llaren Morse asked. “I’d given up on finding you.”

“I didn’t,” Jellit said.

“That’s true. Jellit would have kept looking until doomsday. He made contact with three other groups all on his own.”

“How many of us are there out there?” Jessyn asked.

“We’ve found a couple dozen groups,” Jellit said. “There are more out there. At least, I hope there are.”

“But but but,” Llaren Morse said with a laugh. “I still want the story. How did you find us?”

“That was Dafyd,” Else said, and touched his arm. The younger man had the good taste to blush. Jessyn retold the war with the Night Drinkers, and the peace offerings they’d made. Her brother and Llaren Morse listened like she was reciting a vast epic, and at the end, Llaren looked puzzled.

“But that wasn’t— No offense, but that wasn’t Dafyd here, was it?” Jellit said. “That sounds like you if it was anybody.”

“My part was after,” Dafyd said. “When we got the device, we could talk with the other inmates instead of just gawking at them as they passed.”

“Dafyd was the one who started asking them if they’d come across one of us that smelled like Jessyn,” Else said.

“Well,” the boy said, more defensive than he needed to be, “I figured since they were siblings, and a lot of animals on Anjiin—animals on both trees of life—were better at chemoreception, that it made sense to ask.”

“Does make you wonder if that’s why the red shower cleanser is changing our smell,” Jessyn said. “Maybe there’s something in the human odor spectrum that’s causing crossed signals with some other chemorecepting species.”

“Or the Carryx themselves,” Else agreed.

“And the Carryx already had the red goo waiting for us when we arrived, so they already knew what the problem would be,” Jessyn continued. “And the solution.”

“An interesting idea,” Else said.

“Stop sciencing all over my story,” Jellit said. “The fact is that it worked.”

But Llaren Morse looked grave. “It’s just… we’re all talking about home in past tense these days. Like it isn’t still out there.”

All of them grew sober. There were a few tries at getting the euphoria back, but the night had wilted on them, and before long Synnia declared she was going to get ready for sleep. They took Llaren to Tonner’s room as they broke up for the night. Else and Dafyd both went to her room, and no one said anything about it. This was how things were now. Things that would have been unthinkable were normal now.

Jessyn and Jellit stayed in the front room with the berries and the not-turtle and the messy dishes from their dinner. For a while, they were quiet, just doing simple domestic chores together. Jessyn ran warm water in the sink, washed the dishes, and handed them to her brother to dry. His eyes kept sliding to the window. The dark had turned it into a kind of half mirror. The two of them in the kitchen and also the distant ziggurats of the Carryx, glowing faintly. The superposition seemed like it meant something, like a dream that carried some significance.

“I was worried about you,” Jellit said.

“I was worried about me too,” she said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you again.”

“We got lucky.”

For a moment, he seemed like he was on the verge of saying something more, but instead he kissed her forehead.

Afterward, she lay in her bed and willed herself to sleep, but her nerves wouldn’t let it come. Now that the first bright candy coating of the day had washed off, her mind was taken up by what the joy and surprise had under them. It wasn’t as simple as the pleasure had been.

She shifted in the bed that her captors had given her, her pillow bunching at the base of her skull or flattening until it hardly felt like more than a fold of thick cloth. Images floated into her unquiet mind. The café she’d gone to at Dyan Academy. The music that used to filter down through the ceiling of her first rooms at Irvian, their upstairs neighbor’s chords resonating with the softly curving coral of the grown walls. The first boy she’d kissed. The first girl who’d kissed her. The taste of a cold beer on a hot summer afternoon.

Seeing Jellit’s face, hearing Llaren Morse’s voice, even meeting Allstin for the first time, all of it conspired to remind her of the life that was gone. And it made her present circumstances clear.

She remembered one of her therapists saying Anger is pain in a party mask. It had seemed wise at the time. She wasn’t sure she agreed with it anymore. Maybe anger was a scab over a wound, or maybe it was what happened when the universe spun you so hard that you lost everything. Or maybe it was just a thing that welled up in you when you found yourself lying sleepless in the dark of a prison work camp with no idea what your future might be or if your past mattered.

She didn’t remember opening her eyes, but they were open again. The ceiling was a darkness with just the thinnest spill of gray where the crack at the top of the door let the light in. She watched it shift as someone walked past in the hallway. She didn’t recognize the footsteps, so Llaren Morse. Everyone else was as familiar as a song heard for the thousandth time.

Jessyn levered herself up. Sleep wasn’t happening, and lying in the darkness wouldn’t change that. She could check on the latest run of changes to the berries’ internal farmland. Or sample the latest not-turtle for more data about what might sustain the one after. Or, if she was lucky, find someone in the main rooms who she could talk to until the version of herself she’d created to survive in prison slipped back into place. Something.

In the hallway, Synnia’s door stood open. Llaren Morse leaned against the frame, his head bowed, speaking low. Synnia was before him, her eyes on his mouth like she was reading lips. Jessyn paused when she saw the open hunger in the older woman’s eyes, and a little hit of adrenaline eased into her bloodstream.

She heard Synnia say Yes, tell him I’ll help before she noticed Jessyn watching and the more familiar look returned. Llaren Morse followed her glance, smiled at Jessyn, and gave her a nod before pushing off back down the hallway toward Tonner’s empty room.

“Everything all right?” Jessyn asked, feeling how idiotic the question was even as she asked it.

“Fine,” Synnia said. Her eyes were bright and hard. “Everything’s fine.”

Jessyn didn’t know then who Llaren Morse and Synnia had been talking about. But she’d have been very damned surprised if it turned out things were really fine.