Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Thirty-Five

First, as your librarian, I congratulate you all on your success, not only for your kind, but in the project you were given. Your species possesses qualities, perspectives, and particular utilities that place you high among the ranks of beings useful to the Carryx. And you as individuals have gained specific attention. As your people are redistributed and reassigned within the moieties, your positions will be noted and your usefulness recorded.

In the time between now and the commencement of your new duties, you will remain in these quarters. When your duties change, you will be found here and the details of your new responsibilities will be presented to you. The duties you are given will be assigned by me and guided by those who direct me. My duty will be to lower myself by interacting with animals for the greater advantage of the Carryx. In this, I will give you advice and equipment as required for you to succeed and survive in your work.

Your assignments will not be uniform. You will not have a voice in what your place within the moieties will be. The stability and advancement of the Carryx is your only path to a pleasant day-to-day life. If, as a subject species, your use to the Carryx changes, your place within the moieties will also change. With greater usefulness, your access to resources will increase. With less, it will decrease. As your keeper-librarian, my position will vary with your own. In this way, we remain certain that your interests and mine are aligned.

Some of you will be put in danger. The danger that you face will be balanced against the utility that your duties provide. Other subject species have proven unwilling or unable to address their duties, and their places have been altered to better fit their essential natures. This will also be true for you. Some of you will remain here, others will travel to places within Carryx control. Regardless of your location, you will answer to me as your librarian, and I will stand in aid of you to the degree that is appropriate.

You will not approach or make requests of other members of the Carryx. Outside of your assigned duties, you are permitted other activity to the extent that it does not interfere with your work. You are permitted to reproduce and breed. If your circumstances allow you to do so, you will be informed.

It will be your responsibility to identify and maintain an optimal level of personal function. If you have requirements that you do not identify, this failing will affect your function and lead to a change in your position within the moieties. If you suffer developmental changes that affect your function, these changes will lead to a change in your position. If circumstances outside your function change the context and needs of the Carryx, these changes will lead to a change in your position.

I understand that it is comforting to you to believe your efforts have meaning, and that comfort improves your function. In that spirit, know that through your efforts, we have determined that the world from which you were taken is better preserved than unmade. The cities your kind built stand for the time being. The lineages that produced you continue to exist. The artifacts of your culture are permitted and will be incorporated into the moieties as they are found useful. In this way, you have achieved the possibility that your species will spread to thousands of worlds you would otherwise never have known and can flourish under the protection of the Carryx. Your people will be granted space to be fruitful and fecund as servants of the Carryx beyond anything they could have managed on their own. They will be given guidance and structure that will keep them safe from dangers that would have erased them from the universe had they stumbled into them.

The moieties of the Carryx are, among other things, a great protection. You have won your species a place of calm and safety in a malefic universe. In this, you are your people’s saviors. Continue.

What is, is.

“In this,” the new librarian said, “you are your people’s saviors. Continue.”

Its feeding arms plucked at each other, and its eyes moved from one to the other of them where they sat in the common room, among the cables and equipment and old, worn chairs and couches that had been new when they arrived. Outside, one thin layer of clouds passed among the ziggurats and another softened the sky above them. Dafyd waited. He didn’t have the energy for more than that.

“What is, is,” the translator box said.

It felt like a promise and a threat.

“You will be taken from here when your places are ready,” the librarian said, with a kind of finality.

“Will we stay together?” Jessyn asked.

The librarian paused, said, “That is unlikely,” then turned to Dafyd in particular. “The development of the human moiety is to change now. Your people were permitted to access their librarian before. That will end. You have presented yourself as the apt tool, and so you will be used according to your ability.”

“All right,” Dafyd said. And then, a moment later, “I don’t know what that means.”

“Beginning now, all communication from your moiety will reach me through you as your connection to the Carryx moves through me. Their needs are your charge, and their discipline is your duty. They will speak to you, and you will speak to me. In this way, my exposure to animals will be minimized. Those whose duties take them to the lesser worlds will also report to you, though their duties will require them to have other animals to whom they answer. Any humans who approach me without you will be killed.”

“I’ll be sure to pass that along,” Dafyd said, and was interrupted by his own small, choking laugh. In the deep sludge of his mind, objections and concerns began to bubble. It felt at the time like the first stirrings of wakefulness after a troubled and unrestful sleep. “I’ll need to know who they are. I don’t know where people are, or what their workgroups are. I don’t know anything.”

“That will be provided.”

“And what you expect of us.”

The librarian paused, as if this were a new thought for it. Dafyd didn’t understand what the hesitation meant.

“I will give directions to you,” it said. “You will arrange for them to be carried out.”

If Dafyd had had this position before, he could have stopped Ostencour’s rebellion without losing anyone. He could have found an argument for something besides open rebellion or total obedience. Fewer of his friends would be dead. Else would be alive. It was too late for her, for Synnia. It wasn’t too late for the rest of them. His mind began tripping forward, moving in subtle ways, like the sound of water under snow. If he did this, he was going to need to be very careful how it got presented to people. Everyone was raw, traumatized, as emptied as he was. If he could be the one who made all this make a little bit of sense…

“Can I ask…? The old librarian. The one who was killed. Why did that happen?”

“You,” the Carryx said.

“The rebellion? Ostencour’s plan to kill the Carryx got too far, and that was the punishment?”

“There was no punishment. There is no punishment. That one was given great honor, being touched by the Sovran. But it was saved by an animal. There is no place in the moieties for a Carryx that was saved by an animal. Do you understand?”

“I’m starting to,” he said.

“Good,” it said, then lumbered out of the room on its massive red-and-black forearms, its abdomen gliding along behind like a servant struggling to keep up. The wide door closed, and they were alone in what had been their home for a time. Their shared prison.

As the librarian had delivered its speech, they’d fallen almost unconsciously into a rough circle, like children at story time. Dafyd looked at them now as they sat in silence. Campar, with his broad shoulders and wide hands, always ready with jokes and laughter, and hollowed out now. Tonner Freis, who had been so arrogant and whose arrogance had been so justified. Humiliated now, and still brilliant. Still the one whose mind had completed the Carryx puzzle. Jessyn with her newfound violence, and Jellit at her side. Rickar and his rage. And Dafyd himself. What a strange, broken group they were.

And then there were the ghosts. Else and her spy. Irinna. Nöl and Synnia. The gaps in the line.

“The team scattered to the winds is a strange look for victory,” Campar said.

Dafyd sat forward, lacing his fingers together. The building around them ticked, and a thin wind muttered at the window. In the distance, something wide and dark rose from the top of a ziggurat. A Carryx warship stretching its wings, preparing for another battle, another Anjiin, another wave in the permanent war that had eaten them. A moment later, another rose. And then another one after that.

The endless violence of subjugation and conflict unfurled before Dafyd’s eyes. The resistance. The purge that followed. The death after death after death. It was a strange moment to discover peace, but there peace was. And more than peace, a clarity that seemed to reach deep into his mind and reorder him. The feeling that flowed through him was what he imagined the release was in the last breath of life. The moment when the end was obviously inevitable. How odd that it should come at the beginning of something too.

“There’s a war, you know,” he said.

“There is,” Jellit agreed.

“And if there’s a war, there’s an enemy. Something out there that wants the Carryx dead.”

“Excellent taste on their part,” Campar said. “If they have a charity, I’ll give them a percentage of my salary.”

“I’m starting to understand the Carryx,” Dafyd said. “To understand how they think. Not all of it, but some. Enough.”

Rickar snorted. “Not sure that’s something to brag about. They seem like a bunch of bloodthirsty monsters to me.”

“They aren’t, though. They’re something else. They have different assumptions and axioms. Different ways of understanding things like free will and what it means to be a person. Different blind spots. But some of it, I get. I’m like they are in some ways. Or I can be.”

“Again,” Rickar said. “Not something to brag on.”

Jellit leaned forward and touched his arm gently. Tonner chuckled, and then Jessyn. Dafyd felt the anger and the pain in the laughter, and also the warmth. They’d become like siblings who knew each other too well for terms like love and hate to apply anymore. They had become complicated. He felt Else’s presence as if she were still in the room and not only a memory.

“So,” Campar said. “Now we wait and see what they require us to do next?”

“No. I don’t know,” Dafyd said. “If we’re part of this grand mechanism of theirs, then maybe we can be the grit in its gears too.”

“You’re starting to sound like Ostencour,” Jellit said.

“More patient. I’m more patient. Ostencour wasn’t wrong, he was just too fast about it all. He wanted a final battle when it was still something he’d lose,” Dafyd said, thinking it through as he spoke. Finding words for the shape of his revelation.

“So we all get sent off to who knows where while you fight your patient war?” Rickar said. “Now you’re the high priest of the human race?”

Everyone was staring at him. Rickar was right. The Carryx had made him their high priest, the only voice between them and a vicious, capricious god. So, he needed a prophecy, then.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all,” Dafyd said. “But I just want to say while we’re still in the same place, while we’re here together, that I’m going to find a way to kill them.”

The faces in the circle were sober, filled with doubt, but yearning to believe.

“I’m going to learn everything about them. I’m going to figure out how to get in their heads. And I’m going to kill them all and burn their fucking towers to the ground. It’s my war now.”