Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Five

Seen one way, the night is dark. Viewed another, it is bright. Another, symphonic in its complexity of radiations all along the spectrum of wavelengths. The swarm is as still as it can be, vibrating within the unfamiliar skin of its new host, and it receives. It is aware of a body on the other side of the thick coral wall, of the cacophony of insects in the soil and air, of the brief, sudden lines of cosmic rays passing through the planet like rain falling slantwise.

The awareness is exhausting, and the exhaustion is part of what it seeks. The new host is unwieldy, cunning, alive and aware in a way the old one was not. This is a surprise for the swarm, but it expects to be surprised. The swarm is young in the universe. Consciousness is a mystery it is only beginning to experience.

The body on the other side of the wall moves, standing taller than before. The swarm retreats, concerned that its radio bounce has been noticed, but when it looks again, the body in the building has only moved across the room. The swarm relaxes, and it notices that it relaxes. Not the host, but itself.

The new host pushes, is restless, fights. That isn’t what captures the swarm’s half-autonomic attention. It turns its mind inward and finds things there. A fondness for sweet pickles. The memory of a boy named Elial. A resignation to the inevitability of death. They do not come from the swarm or the host. The swarm recognizes artifacts of Ameer Kindred. The girl that is gone. The swarm finds this unnerving, and by doing so discovers that it can find things unnerving. It was built to learn, built for plasticity. Its design is like water, flowing through whatever channels the universe provides it. It understands now that water also carries what it passes through. It has already traded purity for experience, and there is no path back. Nor should there be.

Time is short. That is a blessing and a curse. Anything it does now that lasts a month is as good as something made to last a lifetime. A month is all the lifetime many of the people on this world have left. But neither can it wait in the shadows any longer.

A door slides open, and the swarm realizes it had been distracted by internal stimuli. It looks for the figure beyond the wall, and the figure is gone. A man steps out into the symphonic darkness. He is older. White hair shaved close to his scalp. He has a long face and pale stubble. His eyes are hooded, amused, weary. The swarm wonders what it would learn if it took him, traded its current host for him. It will never know.

The man sees it, hesitates. The swarm steps forward on its borrowed legs. It smiles. “Samar Austad?”

“Yes?” the man says. “How can I help you?”

The swarm or the host or the girl that is gone thinks: What a question.

“He thought it was me?” Irinna said. “Really?”

“He wasn’t sure what to think,” Jessyn replied.

The courtyard, while technically public, was empty. Most of the scholars were still away on break, and the maintenance and support staff were using the emptiness to repair and refurbish and regrow the labs and dormitories, not the parks and squares and courtyards. Jessyn liked this one particularly. It had tilework in blue and yellow all along its walls, ferns from both trees of life that unfolded in the summers and died back in the cold. During most of the year, a kitchen along its west side gave out meals of polenta and spiced beans made by an old man from Haunar. The windows were closed and dark now, but she could remember the flavors and the old man’s smile, and it left her fond of the space.

“I just,” Irinna said, and ran her fingers through her pale hair as a kind of punctuation. It was the sort of thing she trusted Jessyn to understand. Then, with a sigh, “Do you think Tonner can find a way to stop it?”

With anyone else, Jessyn would have been politic. A shrug or a careful phrase like Tonner is very intelligent but this is outside his field.

Instead: “No.”

“Not even with Dafyd? With an Alkhor on our team…”

“Even nepotism has limits.”

“He isn’t just asking to keep us together as a favor,” Irinna said. “It’s all a political game, isn’t it? Finding who’d lose if Dyan wins. How to make the colloquy see all the good that keeping us together would do. Things like that. Isn’t that how the world works?”

“I don’t know. I find social intrigue exhausting. I like research, where things are quantifiable and falsifiable.”

There was a pause. It seemed to mean something. Irinna looked up at the tiles, her eyes gliding from one to the next like she was reading them. When she spoke, she sounded like she was trying so hard to be casual that it didn’t work. “Would you take a project of your own? If they offered it to you?”

That was a hard question. It shouldn’t have been.

Taking research lead of her own would mean leaving Irvian. Which meant leaving Jellit. And if her brother wasn’t there, who would she go to when her brain went rotten again?

Her brother had been there since she was an anxious, moody child. He knew her internal weather by experience. When the darkness started coming on, when the back of her mind got angry and loud, he knew without her having to say anything. He knew when to leave her alone and when to step in. He had reached out to her physicians at least twice when she’d gotten too bad to do it herself. They hid it, but her brother was also her caretaker, her nurse, an extra part of her brain that stayed sane on those occasions when her own mind betrayed her.

Jellit had his own career, his own work, and she’d thought—hoped, pretended—that by being placed at Irvian together, she’d be able to put off this particular moment of truth for a few more years. Maybe forever. She wouldn’t ask him to leave his career for her. Wouldn’t accept it from him if he offered. But the idea of living without him frightened her.

So. Would she take a project of her own?

“I don’t know,” she said, trying for a lightness she didn’t feel. “There’s a certain peacefulness to not jumping for the prize. I look at Nöl and Synnia. They’ve been fixtures here for decades, moving from one project to the next. Having a home. That’s worth something too.”

Irinna’s smile turned inward. It hadn’t been the answer her friend was looking for. She was hoping that Jessyn would say yes, would ask her to come with her, that they could continue their careers together someplace. And Jessyn had just told her no. “Nöl and Synnia and you too,” Irinna said, a little bitterly. “Rickar’s going to have a strong base.”

“If Nöl and Synnia stay.” It was a weak counter, and they both knew it.

“Nothing’s going to pry them out of here. They’re both going to die in Irvian,” Irinna said through a laugh. At least she was laughing.

“Probably true.”

“I just thought… we’d have longer? I don’t know. That being the top of the lists would make things better for us somehow. Instead of turning everything to shit.”

“Even if we’re reassigned,” Jessyn said, “even if they scatter us across the world, we’ll still be working the same field. Coordinating research. Sharing results.”

“It’s not the same, though, is it? I like going into the lab and finding… us. You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“But everything changes, doesn’t it? You have a good moment, and then there’s another moment after it. And another one after that. Nothing stays the same.”

“Even if,” Jessyn said. “You know you can always reach me, even if we’re working different labs. Or Campar. Or Else. Even Tonner will probably return our messages.”

“Not Rickar’s.”

Jessyn chuckled. “No, probably not Rickar’s.”

Jessyn didn’t know what to say, so she shifted forward, taking the younger woman’s hand in hers. They sat there for a long moment, neither of them speaking, both aware of the loss that each of them was suffering in her own way. Irinna squeezed her hand and let her go. Her eyes were bright with tears that hadn’t quite fallen.

“I should—” Irinna said, gesturing at the world beyond the courtyard.

“I have some things too,” Jessyn lied as they stood. “But it was good seeing you.”

“Maybe Tonner will take his project to Abbasat, and I can see my parents every weekend. They’d like that.”

“We can hope for the best without being too specific about it.”

“Hope for the best,” Irinna agreed, and then she was gone. Jessyn shoved her fists into her pockets and waited for a long breath, then another, giving Irinna time to get ahead and avoid the awkwardness of walking together and also apart.

When she got home, she keyed herself in, dropped her jacket on the front table. Jellit’s voice came from the back balcony, and she walked toward it, her melancholy driving her forward. He was talking in bright, excited, animated tones, which could mean good news on his project or a new book coming out by a poet he enjoyed or that he’d just woken up in a sunny mood. He could do that.

“When is the run going to finish up?” he said as she stepped out. The face on the screen was one of his cohort in astronomical imaging. A man named… she didn’t remember. She sat on one of the little wooden chairs at the far end by the railing and let herself be still and small. The other man was saying something in equally breathless tones. She looked down at the street and imagined a life where she ran her own project, where Irinna was waiting at her laboratory, the old friend she’d brought with her. It would have been a pretty life, if it had been possible. If she had a head that worked a little bit better than hers did. If she were better.

“All right,” Jellit said. “I’ll be there. But I have to go now.”

He dropped the connection. The balcony became very quiet.

“Bad day?” her brother asked.

Jessyn shook her head. Not No but Let’s not talk about it. “What was that all about? You have a dataset running on break? I thought I was the only one having high drama when I should be resting.”

“We have a dataset running,” Jellit agreed. “It may be nothing. Or it might also be the most important thing in thousands of years. Kind of one or the other. Not lots of middle ground.”

She chuckled, and he relaxed. It was part of the subtle language they had with each other. If she could still laugh at him, she wasn’t that bad. If she wasn’t that bad, he could worry a little less. If he could worry less, then maybe so could she.

“I’m all aflutter,” she said, dryly. “What’s your thousand-year discovery?”

“You know about the lensing effect.”

“The one that whatever his name from Dyan was talking about? Rickar’s friend.”

“Llaren Morse.”

“Him.”

“I went and talked with my people, and they talked with his people, and between us all, we got permission to refocus a couple of asteroid mappers and fire some broad-spectrum radio at it. We got what looks like a return right between infrared and microwave. There’s structure inside the effect.”

Jessyn felt her self-pity shift. Not go away, that would be too easy, but lose a little of its hold as her attention moved elsewhere. “Structure?”

“Mass anyway, but yes, ordered mass. And as far as we can tell, nonexotic.”

“So not a naked singularity or macroscale quantum inflation.”

“Probably titanium and carbon. We’re trying to get a better image now,” Jellit said. His voice was getting smooth the way it did when he was slipping into the best part of his mind. Her brother could be oblivious to people who weren’t her. He could come across as frivolous, but was intelligent and as expert in his field as Tonner was in hers. Maybe more. It was a pleasure to watch her brother descend into the flow of his understanding. His eyes softened, and a little smile played across his lips.

“What are you thinking?”

“That it’s unlikely nonexotic matter would generate lensing like this just at random. So it’s not a given, but if the signals are confirmed, I’m going to bet this is nonrandom.”

“Designed?”

“Designed,” Jellit said. “It could be a probe.”

“From where?”

Jellit answered with a shrug and a grin. “But we’re aliens on this world. Maybe it’s our long-lost brothers come to find us?”

In the street below them, three men walked abreast, laughing together. A white bird the size of a fist flew up, hovered, and then darted away again. All thoughts of colloquy politics and research careers and lost chances at friendship or love faded, and Jessyn put her fingertips to her lips.

“Wow,” she said.

“The run ends in half an hour. I don’t know what we’ll know then, but we’ll know something.” He said it softly. The part he didn’t say, she still heard. But if you need me here, I’ll stay. Jessyn shifted, pointed back over her shoulder toward the door.

“Go! Find out. Get back to me as soon as you find out. This is amazing!”

Jellit’s grin was relief and pleasure and the giddiness that comes maybe once or twice in a lifetime when something miraculous happens. He kissed the top of her head, grabbed his satchel, and was gone. A minute later, she saw him running down the street under the balcony. Long, thin limbs flailing like it was his first day with them. When she sat back, she was smiling. It took a moment to understand why.

Growing up, Jessyn’s family had attended a Serrantist church led by an old, white-haired priest named Nansui. When, as an adolescent, she had been struggling with the intrusive thoughts and anxiety, she’d tried going to him for help. Nansui had been a patient, thoughtful, kind man. The conversations they’d had left questions of theology and doctrine behind very quickly. Mostly, he’d listened, and when he did talk, it was often about the difficulty of living as a very small part of a very large universe.

He’d told her a story once of his religious conversion. He said he’d been in a place similar to where she’d been at the time—young, confused, disturbed. Too much with myself was the phrase he’d used. He’d gone to a meditation retreat and been told to practice walking until he could feel every fiber of his socks pressing against his feet with each step. She still remembered the warmth and amusement in his voice describing his younger self trying to focus and getting bored and distracted and angry and then turning back to his socks. And on the third day, he’d had an experience that changed his life.

Between one step and the next, he’d had an epiphany about the vastness and strangeness of the universe and his place in it. The insignificance of one boy on a strange planet in the vastness of galaxies. For a moment, his mind had reached out to the farthest ends of the universe, and he’d felt the weight of his life, his ego, his struggles as less than a feather.

Then I came back to myself and refocused on my sock, he’d said, and they’d both laughed.

This was different, but related. Her life was a mess. Her career was a mess. Normal people would succeed where she couldn’t because she’d been born a little broken. But there was also a world outside her head that was filled with mystery and exploration and unexpected things to discover. Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.

She sat on the balcony, enjoying the feeling of calm and release and wonder until her belly felt empty enough to distract her with ideas about food. She put it off, though. She didn’t want the moment to end.

When her system chimed, she was so sure it would be Jellit that she didn’t check before she accepted the connection. The face that appeared on the floating screen was wide-eyed with worry.

“Campar?” she said.

“Jessyn. Yes. Good. We need to have a conversation. You may be contacted by the security forces.”

“Wait. Why?”

“Samar Austad’s been killed…”