Living Memory, page 14
On the final night, Prey sat on his perch in the empty analysis room for the last time. Nearly everyone from Ocean Roost had gone. The telescope had disbanded, but it hardly mattered; they didn’t need it anymore.
He looked around at the wooden walls, the delicate organic machines, the living lungs that pumped air through the ductwork. By the next day, all of it would be gone. Even if it withstood the earthquakes and the tsunamis didn’t reach this far, it would eventually rot away. A hundred years from now, there would be no trace whatsoever of the technological society that had ruled this corner of the globe. All of their accomplishments, gone.
What might they have become, if allowed to continue? Would they have filled the Earth with billions of their kind? Would they have cured disease, conquered death, visited the stars?
He hopped down from his perch. These thoughts were pointless. There was still a chance for their species to survive. As long as there was hope, he had work to do.
◆◆◆
Impact day. The orderly retreat into the caves collapsed into chaos. The asteroid was visible now even in the daylight, a glowing orb hanging over the western mountains, prompting mass panic.
Prey and Meat worked around the outskirts, finding those too small or weak to brave the melee and telling them they had another option. They kept their distance from the narrow cave entrance, where females snarled and snapped, hurling others away to get inside. They had to be careful. If the mob at large realized that the modification pits held a chance at salvation, they would be overrun, their machinery crushed, their hard work demolished. At the same time, they still had empty nests, and the more they could save, the better the chance for their species as a whole.
The asteroid flared suddenly bright as it reached the atmosphere and then disappeared over the horizon. They watched it for a moment, shocked into stillness, and then everyone ran for the cave at once. Growls and screams rang out, and the air filled with the stink of blood and terror. Prey watched in horror, unable to tear away.
Meat tugged at him. “No more time. Let’s go, right now!”
Prey turned his back, knowing that everyone he was leaving behind would die. Why couldn’t he have saved more? He should have worked harder to convince the leaders, to make them listen. They could have done so much more if they had all worked together!
He increased his strides, bounding after Meat, but paused when he smelled more blood and heard a whimper from a ditch. He stopped and looked down. Distinguished leader Lush Warmth of Ocean Thermals after Rain lay prone, blood staining her feathers.
“What are you doing here?” Prey asked.
Lush Warmth’s reply was weak, barely detectable above the sharp scent of her blood. “Tried...to keep order. Make them stay in line.”
“And they attacked you?”
Meat reappeared at his side. “Leave her! There’s no time.”
Prey knew he was right, but something snapped in his mind. He wasn’t going to leave one more behind if he could help it, no matter who it was. He climbed over Lush Warmth and took up a position on one side of her body. “Help me!”
“We can’t lift her,” Meat objected. “She’s too heavy. We’ll never make it. She’ll never survive anyway.”
“I’m not going without her.”
Meat growled, but he took the other side. Together, they heaved her to her feet. She couldn’t walk on her own, but she could partially support her weight. They stumbled toward the modification pits as the asteroid fell toward the planet.
They didn’t make it.
◆◆◆
The flaming ball fell unseen behind the horizon. For a time, there was nothing, as if it had simply ceased to exist. Then the shockwave hit.
The ground bucked like an angry beast, and a sound like all the trees in the world breaking ripped through the clearing. Prey, Meat, and Lush Warmth were tossed into the air like stones, only to crash to the ground again a dozen strides away. Wind screamed past, tearing at their feathers, whipping away any smell. Prey felt dazed and blind, stunned by the power of it. They were on the opposite side of the world! What must it have been like closer to the impact?
They helped Lush Warmth up again and staggered on. The wind now brought the reek of smoke with it. Dirt and debris whipped against their faces. The earth heaved again, knocking them off their feet. Prey knew that would keep happening, like ripples in a pond. The air was already growing unbearably hot. That would continue, too, as the searing heat from the impact expanded around the world toward them. Lethally hot, and then, once the heat dissipated, lethally cold.
They pressed on and finally reached the nearest modification pit, where they found another scene of chaos. Wooden cranes stood along the edge of the pit, holding cages to lower them down, but half of them had fallen. Males and females alike fought each other for the remaining positions.
The pit was still filled with the dark liquid, fortunately not broken open by the earthquakes. If the liquid had run out, they would all have been doomed. The cranes were meant to lower open cages into the liquid. Each wooden cage contained six nests. All the operational cranes were already in use, with their nests full and others fighting to be next.
Prey felt like his skin was on fire. He looked up into the sky, which was already darkening with swirling dust and ash. This was the end.
There was no way to communicate through scent. The wind whipped away their own smells, which were dominated anyway by the burning reek. “Over here!” Meat verbalized in the low-caste male language, as loudly as he could over the roar of the wind. A still-standing crane held a cage of empty nests. The fact that no one was fighting over it meant something was wrong, but perhaps they could fix it.
Prey examined it quickly and realized that the friction winch, designed to lower them gently without intervention once the nests were filled and closed, had jammed. He could break it, but then the cage would simply fall into the liquid without him on board.
“Go!” Lush Warmth called, surprising Prey by using the males’ verbal language. “I’ll release it once you’re in place.”
“But you’ll die!” Prey said.
The distinguished leader bobbed her head sadly. “Even if I were to make it through, I would not survive. We should have listened to you. Go, and live for all of us.”
Prey didn’t wait to be asked twice. He and Meat scrambled up to the hanging cage. They slipped into capsules and sealed themselves in. As the next quake rumbled under their feet, Lush Warmth wrenched the winch free, and they fell with a splash into the liquid below.
Prey panicked as he sank, the cold liquid soaking his feathers. The world above him was dying. How could he possibly think this hastily-constructed effort would be able to save them? Instead of his salvation, this could very well be his tomb.
He willed himself to relax. The liquid that now reached his neck was the most sophisticated technology his people had ever invented. He trusted Fear Stink and Distant Rain, and all the others who had devoted the best of their minds and labors to this project since the asteroid had been discovered. There was nothing left to do but let it run its course, for good or for ill.
Prey gave himself over to the liquid, letting it fill his mouth, and slipped away into darkness.
Chapter 15
The deeper Kit and his students dug at the site, the more green liquid he and Arinya were able to extract back at Sirindhorn. Sometimes smelling it would prompt long sequences of visions; sometimes it would prompt none at all. Each vision began with the image of a single maniraptor, and they theorized that each was tagged by the raptor whose memory it belonged to. They began to catalog the visions they experienced, trying to put together a fuller picture of their civilization and what had happened to it.
The maniraptor society was dominated by the females and marked by dramatic sexual dimorphism, with the females substantially larger than the males. It was also a technological society, though their technology didn’t look like anything human. The maniraptors hadn’t learned how to work metals or harness electricity, but their ability to manipulate organic chemistry and genetics far surpassed anything humans could do. They created machines out of living creatures, fueling their industries with plant matter rather than fossil fuels. Their primary communication was chemical, through their sense of smell, which allowed them to share detailed and precise data. They even had a form of computing, using individuals as nodes in a network.
Kit finally figured out that the maniraptors standing in a hexagonal pattern on the hill in the first vision he saw was a form of telescope. They were performing astronomical interferometry, communicating the sky views from each male as scent data and combining it mathematically into a single, high-magnification image. Humans did the same thing with multiple telescopes to simulate an aperture larger than what could actually be built with a lens. It took computers and complicated mathematics to make it work. The maniraptors seemed to be able to do it simply by combining their mental efforts and scent data, using the eyes and brains of a hundred individuals working together.
“They actually changed the focal length by tightening the pattern of where they were standing,” Arinya said. They were both beyond exhausted, but giddy with the excitement of discovery upon discovery. They could almost forget they were being forced into it by men with guns. Almost.
Finally, the painstaking work at the dig site started to uncover the next maniraptor of the twenty-seven skeletons discovered by Samira’s ground-penetrating radar. The bones were encrusted with a hardened layer of the green liquid and the skeleton, actually faintly visible through the translucent material, seemed incredibly well-preserved. It would take a month to pull it out with the care it deserved, but Kit knew they couldn’t rely on having that much time. The colonel wasn’t a patient man.
Kit and Arinya spent every moment working. Even when they stopped to eat, they talked about what they were learning and had yet to learn. Arinya had even managed to identify which part of the giant organic molecule delivered the initial image of a maniraptor and which comprised the rest of the message.
“How is it that it works for us at all?” Kit asked. “How can memory liquid meant for ancient maniraptor brains have the same effect on ours?”
Arinya lifted an arm behind her head and pulled on it with the other hand, stretching tight muscles. “We test psychiatric drugs on animals all the time. Mostly mammals, of course, but if drugs to treat human depression or psychosis can be adequately tested on rats, it seems reasonable that hallucinogens that worked on ancient birds might work on us, too.”
Kit thought about that. “Maybe scent communication is more universal than voice communication,” he said. “It’s more fundamental to animal behavior patterns, and it directly affects neurochemistry. It’s tied to emotion, social hierarchy, and memory in thousands of species, through direct chemical experience. Voice communication doesn’t come close.”
“For many animals, it’s their primary sense,” she agreed.
“Do you think this is what the Red Wa have been using to control people?” Kit asked.
She took a step closer, looking at him oddly. It made him feel nervous.
“Arinya?”
She didn’t say anything, just took another step with that same expression, as if she were waiting for him to react. His sense of anxiety increased.
When one more step caused a brief surge of fear, he figured it out. “Wait. Are you wearing...?”
“How do you like my new perfume?” she asked, grinning.
“You put some of it on yourself?”
“Just a tiny sample on my shirt collar,” she said. “I wanted to see what the effect would be on you.” She raised her voice. “Now bow down and worship me!”
Kit just looked at her. “Um…”
She looked disappointed. “Maybe I didn’t put enough on.”
“If I can smell it, why am I not seeing a vision?” Kit asked.
She gave him a smug smile. “I isolated the key molecule and extracted it. Terror and dominance, but no vision.”
“Seriously? But that’s what the colonel wants, isn’t it? That’s what the Red Wa are using. Are you going to tell him?”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to work. Let me try again.” She handed him an empty test tube. “Drop that,” she said.
“No.”
She tried again more imperiously: “Drop that right now!”
He shook his head. “Nope. I don’t even want to a little bit.”
She retreated to one of the lab tables, where she’d organized rows of spray bottles. “I’ve sorted them by strength. The one I used was a pretty low-hierarchy individual, and I didn’t use very much. Maybe if I—”
“Wait,” Kit said. “You think these memories communicate hierarchy as well?”
“They aren’t just memories.” Arinya fiddled with the sample cases while she talked. “This is how they communicated. I think their whole civilization revolved around this stuff. It doesn’t just capture a memory in chemical form. It expresses the will of the individual doing the communicating.”
Kit sat down on a lab stool. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. “Sorry, you’re losing me.”
“Lots of animals have pecking orders,” she said. “Birds certainly do—hence the name. Most mammals have social hierarchies, with an alpha male getting first shot at food and sex. Those at the top exert their will on the others. How do they do it? Some of it is through fighting and fierce display, but a lot of it is through smell. Most animals have scent glands they can use to mark territory, claim females or offspring as their own, or warn off a rival.
“These maniraptors took it a step further. We already know they communicated primarily through scent, not voice, right? That bit at the beginning where you see an image of the maniraptor—I think it’s more than just identification. I think it’s that individual expressing dominance—establishing their rank, if you will. It’s why it universally evokes terror in us. They all rank higher than we do. To a maniraptor, however, whose whole social standing is based on who can dominate whom, it tells you who they are and how important they are in society.
“In person, of course, they could just exude scent. Across distance and generations, though, scent doesn’t last. I think they also use these chemicals like a written language. These aren’t just memories. They’re recordings of the scent chemicals they used to speak to each other. That’s why they put so much of it in their hibernation chambers. It’s their library.”
◆◆◆
Kit couldn’t sleep that night. He had lied to Arinya. The truth was, he had wanted to drop the test tube. It had taken all his willpower to keep his grip. She had used a tiny sample of a low-ranking individual, and it had nearly dismantled his will entirely.
It was a horrible feeling. As if a switch had flipped in his brain, slaving his will to hers. Holding on to the test tube had seemed almost unimaginable, like something he could wish for but never achieve. It might have been muscle reflex more than anything else that had given him the power to hang on. If she had tried again, it would have fallen for certain.
He’d successfully distracted her from a second attempt, but he doubted he could hold her off for long. And then what? If they told the colonel, he would force them to give him the secret, and then he would have the same power.
As much as he wanted to support the Thai military, Kit wasn’t sure he trusted the colonel that far. There had been signs that he might not be everything he claimed to be. Snide comments about the Thai royalty, inappropriate for a high-ranking Thai officer. A phone call conducted in Mandarin. If the Red Wa had this power, he supposed it made sense for his government to have it too. But he didn’t want to hand it over to the Chinese.
He needed help. Someone he could trust to be loyal to Thailand, with contacts and influence at the highest level.
On the wall of the laboratory were two photographs, side by side. The first was a black-and-white shot of the older Princess Sirindhorn, the woman the museum had been named after. The second was of the younger Princess Sirindhorn, speaking at a microphone, her impassioned expression urging her listeners to action. The princess’s fiery condemnation of police corruption, drugs, mistreatment of the hill tribes, and especially the selling of young women as sex workers, was legendary. The royal family in Thailand was barred from participating in politics—Princess Ubolratana had caused a huge backlash years before when she tried to put her name in as a candidate for prime minister—but Sirindhorn had found a middle ground as an activist.
And just like that, Kit knew who to ask for help.
Arinya snored gently in her cot across the room. Kit climbed carefully to his feet and collected the vial he needed. The soldiers were accustomed to him leaving early in the morning to go to the dig site, and given his willingness and obsessive work habits, no longer accompanied him. This time, however, he had another destination in mind.
He navigated the parking lot by moonlight and made his way to the pickup truck he used to get to and from the site. It was one of the same two trucks he had acquired for the American team to use, and contained a lot of the same equipment. He eased behind the driver’s seat, his heart pounding. So far, he wasn’t doing anything he hadn’t done on other mornings, but he felt terrified of being caught anyway.
He shut the door and started the truck. A sharp rap on the window right next to his ear caused him to jump and bleat in surprise. Arinya peered at him through the window. Trying to still his breathing, he lowered the window.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “I saw you take that vial. Where are you going?”
He sighed. “You might as well climb in.”
◆◆◆
He explained on the way. “She’s rich, she has all kinds of contacts in government, and she’s passionate about human rights. Even better, she’s not part of the government herself, and she’s absolutely loyal to Thailand. If anybody can help, she can.”
