Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Two

Humans, everyone knew, didn’t belong on Anjiin.

How they’d gotten to the planet, why they’d come there, all of that was lost in the fog of time and history. A sect of Gallatians claimed that they’d arrived on a massive ship like Pishtah’s fabled ark, but one that traveled between stars. Serintist theologians said that God had opened a rift that let the faithful escape the death of an older universe where some terrible sin—opinions varied on its exact nature—had convinced the Deity that genocide was the lesser evil. Or, if you were open to a little more poetry, a giant bird had carried them from Erribi—the planet next closest to the sun—which had possibly been their homeworld until the sun grew angry and turned their fields to wastelands and boiled away their skies.

But the sciences could tell a story too, even if humanity’s faulty memory had smeared the details.

Life on Anjiin had begun billions of years before with a system of aperiodic quasicrystals of silicon, carbon, and iodine. That life had used the quasicrystals to pass on instructions to the next generation, with occasional mutations that made some organisms do a little better. Over long eons, a complex ecosystem grew in the Anjiin oceans and across its four vast continents.

And then three and a half thousand years before, and apparently out of nowhere, humans showed up in the fossil record with incredibly dense helical coils of lightly associated bases strung like beads on a necklace of phosphate. And not just humans. Dogs and cows and lettuce and wildflowers and crickets and bees. Viruses. Mushrooms. Squirrels. Snails. A whole biome unprecedented in the genetic history of the planet popped into being on an island just east of the Gulf of Daish. Then barely a century after that first appearance, something, no one was sure what, had turned most of that island into glass and black rock. And while whatever records those original settlers may have brought with them disappeared at that point, a few remnants of this new biome survived at the island’s edges and on the nearby continental coastline, and it had spread over the world like a fire.

These two trees of life covering the world of Anjiin usually ignored each other, apart from competing for sunlight and some minerals. Occasionally something would evolve a way to parasitize creatures from the other biochemical tradition for a few complex proteins, water, and salt. But the common wisdom was that the two biomes couldn’t be reconciled in any meaningful way. On a microscopic level, the oaks and alders that were cousins of humanity were just too different from the native akkae and brulam, no matter how similar they might look from a distance. Even where evolution had guided the shapes and colors and forms into similar solutions, at a fundamental level, the different life-forms of Anjiin could never really nourish each other.

Until Tonner Freis had found a way to translate between them, and changed everything.

“I simultaneously want more beer and also a little less beer than I’ve already had,” Jessyn said.

Irinna, sitting next to her, grinned. The Scholar’s Common rose up above them at the edge of the plaza. The lights cast up the building’s side shifted and pulsed and made the forest coral seem like it was waving in some vast current. Beyond it, the darkness of the sky and the bright of the stars.

Tonner and Else were at the Common, being the face of the celebrated team. Campar, Dafyd, and Rickar were… somewhere. There were only four of them at their little table. A casual passerby could have mistaken them for a family. Nöl as the craggy-faced, long-suffering father, Synnia as his gray-haired wife, Jessyn as the older daughter, and Irinna as the younger. It wasn’t true at all, except in the ways that it was.

“You’ve probably had enough, hm?” Nöl said. “No call to overdo it?”

Irinna slapped the table. “All call to overdo it. If not now, when?”

Nöl looked pained and cleared his throat, and Synnia took his arm. “They’re young, love. They bounce back faster than we do.”

“Fair point, fair point,” the old scholar-associate said.

Jessyn still remembered the first time she’d met the team. Tonner Freis, of course, and Else Yannin, who had just abandoned her own project to join his. Nöl had seemed imposing back then, crag-faced and laconic and faintly disapproving. She had expected him and his partner, Synnia, to harbor resentments at being only scholar-associates at their age. Instead, she’d found a kind of profound contentment in them despite their status in the medrey. Some days it made her question her own ambition.

“I’m going back home for a week at the end of break,” Irinna said. “Until then, I have nothing.”

“Nothing?” Synnia asked, but with a twinkle in her eye.

“Nothing,” Irinna said. “Nothing and no one. I’m not courting. I’m not finishing an extra run of datasets. I am, for once in my life, relaxing and taking time to recuperate.”

Jessyn grinned. “You say it now. But you know what’ll happen. Tonner is going to have an idea, and when he asks someone to look into it, you’re going to show up.”

“You’ll be there too,” Irinna said.

“I won’t have made a proclamation about not working over break, though.”

Irinna waved the point away like she was shooing gnats. “I’m drunk. Hypocrisy is the natural companion of beer.”

“Is it?” Nöl said. “I didn’t know.”

Jessyn liked Irinna because the junior researcher reminded her not so much of herself at a younger age, but of who she wished she’d been: smart, pretty, with the first green shoots of self-confidence starting to break through the soil of her insecurities. Jessyn liked Dafyd, wherever he was tonight, for his quiet utility. And Campar for his humor, and Rickar for his casual sense of fashion and his cheerful cynicism. And tonight, she loved all of them because they had won.

For months, they had worked together in their labs, spent more time there than at their homes. There was a sense of family that grew with exposure, a familiarity that was deeper than just work colleagues. It was the rhythm of intimacy. Without anyone ever making a point of it, Jessyn had come to know them all. She could predict when Rickar would want to recheck a protein assay and when he’d be willing to let a questionable data point stand. Which days Irinna would spend quiet and focused, and which she’d be garrulous and distracting. She knew from the taste of the coffee when Dafyd had made it and when it was Synnia.

When she wanted to, she could still remember the quiet in the room when the first uptake results had come through. A radioactive marker in a membrane protein that the native Anjiin biosphere used had shown up in a blade of grass. It was so small, it could have been invisible, and it was also the hinge on which the world swung.

Their strange, awkward, haphazard little group had translated one tree of life to the other. Two utterly incompatible methods of heritability had been coaxed into sitting beside one another, working together. That little blade of grass had been the product of a biochemical marriage thousands of years in the making. For an hour, maybe a little less, the nine of them had been the only people in the world who knew about it.

As much as their success promised, as many accolades as they’d won, part of Jessyn still treasured the magic of that hour. It was a small secret that they’d all shared. An experience they could only speak to each other about, because they were the only ones who really understood the combination of awe and satisfaction. Even when Jessyn told her brother about it—and she told him everything—he could only ever guess what she meant.

Across the little square, a band started playing. Two trumpets, weaving in and out of synchrony while a drummer did something that managed to be both propulsive and intricate. Irinna grabbed Jessyn’s hand, tugging her up. Despite her usual reticence, Jessyn let herself be pulled. They joined the dance. It was a simple one. They’d all learned the steps in childhood, so they could all recall them in drunken adulthood. Jessyn let the music and euphoria carry her. I am part of the most successful research team in the world. I am not too anxious to dance in public. My brain isn’t betraying me today. Today is good.

When the dance ended, Nöl and Synnia had already gone, heading back, Jessyn assumed, to the little house they shared on the edge of the medrey’s landhold. Irinna drank the last of her beer and made a face.

“Flat?” Jessyn asked.

“And warm. But still celebratory. Thank you, by the way.”

“Thank me?”

Irinna looked down at her feet, then up again. She was blushing a little. “You and the others were very kind letting me be part of this.”

“We really weren’t,” Jessyn said. “You carried your part of the project all the way through.”

“Still…” Irinna said, then darted forward to kiss Jessyn’s cheek. “Still thank you. This has been the best year I’ve ever had. I’m grateful.”

“I am too,” Jessyn said, and then, as if by mutual understanding, they parted ways. The end-of-year carnival played out in the streets and alleyways: music and laughter and the self-important, drunken debates of scholars eager to prove to each other that each of them was the cleverest person in the conversation. Jessyn walked through the night with her hands in her pockets and a sense of calm.

For a moment, she was apart from the medrey, even as she moved within it. In a demimonde built on status and intellectual prowess, her team was the apex. It wouldn’t be forever, but tonight, she had won. Tonight, she was good enough, and even the dark things in the back of her mind couldn’t pull down her mood.

The quarters she and her brother shared were in one of the older buildings. Not grown coral, but built from glass and stone. She liked it because it was old-fashioned and quiet. Jellit liked it because it was close to his lab and the noodle shop he frequented. Jellit wasn’t there. His workgroup was having their own celebration, no doubt. He’d be back by morning or he’d send her a message to let her know he was falling in bed with someone and not to expect him. He wouldn’t just vanish and leave her to worry.

She sat at their table, deciding whether she wanted food before she went to bed or just a tall glass of water. She found herself grinning. It was so rare to feel satisfied. It was so odd to know for certain that she’d done well. Tonner Freis and Else Yannin, Rickar, Campar, Irinna, Nöl, Synnia, and even in his way Dafyd Alkhor. The team that had cracked open the possibility of a new, integrated biology. Generations from now, the textbooks would talk about them and what they’d done.

Her system alerted. A message waiting for her. She expected it would be Jellit, but the flag was from Tonner Freis.

When his face appeared on the screen, Jessyn sobered. She’d seen his moods before enough to recognize rage.

“Jessyn, I need you to come to an emergency meeting tomorrow at the lab. And don’t mention it to anyone.”