Trident's Forge, page 19
He knew exactly where their assumptions had gone wrong. Every living human, except for the handful of infants who had been born on Gaia in the last three years, had lived their entire lives locked away in a fish bowl, fixated on the ultimate goal of preserving the last thin strand of humanity from oblivion. Eleven generations had lived in a permanent state of crisis. Every life was precious. Every child a miracle.
It was exactly that shared belief that had made Kimura’s attempted genocide and the loss of two fifths of the Ark’s population so unconscionable. Most of the survivors had never really dealt with the tragedy, not really. Instead, they made planetfall on Gaia, got off the Ark, and busied themselves with the work of building a new world, never looking back to think of the old one. There were exceptions, like the Returners who wanted nothing more than to go back to their comparatively leisurely lives in Avalon, lives that simply didn’t exist anymore no matter how much they yearned for them. But the majority of them hadn’t had any real ties to anyone in Shangri-La module. For most everyone else, the catastrophe was simply too big to risk thinking about in all but the most abstract, superficial terms.
For the Atlantians, life was not nearly so precious. Benson’s mind returned to the birthing ceremony and the culling of the… unworthy. As a people, they’d been groomed literally from birth to accept staggering casualties when necessary.
“Benson?”
Benson looked up to see Kexx staring at him. “Yes, sorry. I was just wool-gather… I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“How many trails have you found already?”
“Over two fullhands. They branch off and lead–”
“West, right? Towards all the other villages.”
Kexx made a non-committal gesture. “Roughly. We can’t be sure without tracking them individually.”
“But that’s obviously what we’re supposed to think, right?”
“Possibly.”
“OK, and if that’s true, why not frame just one other village? A village you have a feud with, for example? We chase down the false trail, your enemy gets the blame, you get away clean. So why wouldn’t you? Unless…”
“Unless the enemy wants suspicions to fall on every village equally. It would keep us busy longer if we had to eliminate each possibility. And it would keep them pointing fingers at each other, sowing mistrust.”
“Maybe.” Benson let the idea twirl around in his head for a few seconds. Something about it was nagging at him. “Or maybe they didn’t know enough about the villages to pull off the frame. You’re sure it couldn’t have been nomads?”
Kexx was adamant. “No, their feet were worn wrong to be plains walkers, and the one I spoke to sounded too refined.”
“And where is the leader, anyway? You said you put a spear through their leg.”
“I did. The other warriors must’ve carried zer off.”
“Without a blood trail? Without digging tracks in the dirt from dragging them on a litter?”
Kexx’s skin patterns only fluttered in the alien’s approximation of a shrug.
Benson rubbed his chin. “What did they sound like?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, where from, would you guess?”
“I don’t know. Each village has a slight accent, and I hadn’t met every village until this gathering. But the leader’s accent was very different. Almost as bad as, well, yours. Which brings me to a question of my own, Benson…”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to ask how you and the rest of your people learned our language so fast. Mei picked it up faster than any child I’ve ever seen, but it still took zer Varrs.”
“That’s because I didn’t really learn it. Our rover has been listening to you since you found it. Some very smart people onboard…” Benson stopped himself before talking about the Ark. He didn’t know how much Kexx already knew, nor, frankly, how much he could absorb all at once. “Smart people back at our village translated it. Then the translation was, ah… you probably don’t have a word for ‘downloaded’ do you?” Kexx shook his, zer, head. “Right. The translation is put into a, a tool in our brains where we can know it without having to learn it.”
Kexx’s face was skeptical, to say the least. “I’m not sure I understand how that works.”
Benson shrugged. “I’m not sure I do, to be honest. We call them ‘plants,’ but not like plants we eat. See?”
“No.”
“Right.” Benson glowered while he tried to come up with a better way to explain himself. “These plants communicate and store information. You have a way to write down information, numbers, words, yes?” Kexx nodded. “And you have the signaling tower that can move information around very quickly without speaking, yes?”
“But our signal towers use light.”
Benson perked up. “Yes, exactly. Our plants use a type of light too, except you can’t see it.” The look on Kexx’s face told Benson that the concept of “light you can’t see” was fighting for the label of oxymoron. “I know that probably doesn’t make much sense.”
“I’m trying,” Kexx admitted. “So, these… plants that aren’t plants use invisible light to think for you?”
“No.” Benson put up his hands. “Not at all. Well, kind of. They just… they store extra memories for us. But we still do all the thinking.”
“We are the sum of our memories, Benson. If your memories are not entirely your own, then you are not entirely yourself.”
Benson raised a finger to object, but realized he couldn’t. It wasn’t a question he’d ever really wrestled with. His plant had been there from the beginning. It had always been a part of him. And being out here, cut off from the real-time updates and database searches he’d taken for granted his entire life, there was no arguing with the Atlantian that he wasn’t entirely himself without it. The question was, did the plant make him less than he would have been without it, or more?
It was a question best left to philosophers and poets, neither of which Benson had ever made much time for.
“If what you’re saying is true,” Kexx continued, “then why didn’t Mei pick up our language as quickly as you did?”
“Because Mei and the rest of the humans living with you don’t have plants.”
“Why not?”
“Because they didn’t believe in them. They left to be independent from us.”
“But they were of your village.”
Benson wasn’t sure what Kexx meant by that. “We’re not a village, Kexx. We’re a race. We have disagreements, sometimes serious disagreements. I’m sure you have disagreements with the G’tel in other villages.”
“They are not G’tel.”
“They’re not? Then what are they?”
“They are of their village.”
“OK, yes, but what do you call your people then? All of the people in all of the villages?”
“I don’t understand.”
Benson furrowed his brow. He’d known the Atlantians were tribal, but this was at a level he’d never expected. How to explain the concept of a species? “No matter where we live, anyone like me calls themselves a human. What do your people call themselves?”
“G’tel. Other villages are not like us.”
“But… You all worship Xis and Cuut, right?”
“And Varr, of course. They are the gods of all creatures. It is only natural that all worship them.”
“Even humans?”
“Er…”
“What if I told you we worshiped different gods from Xis, Cuut, and Varr? That we’ve never heard of them before we came here. That we have different gods, even different gods among humans. Or that many of us worship no gods at all?”
He could see the line of questioning was beginning to fluster the Atlantian. Benson switched tracks. “People from other villages. They are more like you than say, uliks, yes?”
“...yes.”
“And uliks live in packs, just like you live in villages, but they’re all still uliks, right?”
Kexx contemplated the apparently new concept silently for a long moment, then decided to return to the topic of Benson’s plant. “What happens when the tool breaks? Will you be able to talk to me?”
“That’s very unlikely.” Benson said. “Plants are very stable, even self-repairing up to a point.”
“But if it did?”
Benson bobbed his head in surrender. “Then, no, I couldn’t access your language. I’m not really speaking it now. I think what I want to say in my language, and the plant tells me the translation. I sound it out, but the words don’t have any meaning to me yet.”
“So Mei’s way is better, because she is actually learning and remembering the words.”
Benson shrugged. “I’ll get there eventually too. When I was young, it took me a few years to learn Mandarin well enough to not need the plant anymore. It’ll sink in eventually. But in the meantime, we can still talk, so both ways have their advantages.”
“Mandarin?”
“Sorry. It’s a different human language from English, which is what I speak.”
The patterns on Kexx’s face and arms stopped and reversed abruptly, a physical manifestation of his mind coming to a halt and trying to back up. “Humans have more than one language?”
“Oh, yes.” Benson nodded. “There was a time we had hundreds, even thousands of spoken languages. We still have six or seven, but English is the dominant language. Mandarin used to be just as popular, but most of the people who spoke it, well, they…”
“They, what?”
“Died,” Benson said flatly, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain the circumstances of their deaths. “Hasn’t Mei told you any of this?”
“No, ze hasn’t. What’s the point of having so many? Language is supposed to make communicating clear and simple.”
“It wasn’t planned.” Benson thought for a moment how to keep a million years of human migration and linguistic development simple. “Humans used to be scattered all over, sometimes separated by great mountain ranges or oceans for very long periods. Each small group’s language changed until two different groups weren’t speaking the same one anymore.”
“On your world, you mean,” Kexx said. It wasn’t a question. Benson froze, unsure what to say. “Don’t be surprised, Benson. I am far from stupid, and Mei has already taught us much. You are unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Besides, I watched your stars appear in the sky. We all did. Then, we watched you travel down to our world on a beam of light.”
Benson glanced up at the faint glinting of the elevator tether, still visible in the morning light. “So we didn’t sneak in the back door, then?”
“Your arrival was hard to miss.”
“I can see that now.”
Kexx took a deep breath. “Benson, there is one other thing I need to ask you.”
Benson braced himself, fairly sure he knew the twist the conversation was about to take. “Sure, go ahead.”
“About the incident in the temple last night…”
“Yes, I know. It was inappropriate and I’m very–”
“No,” Kexx stopped him. “I don’t want an apology, I want to understand why. Mei trusts you, I trust Mei. So I trust that you didn’t suddenly lose your mind and decide to point your gun at our elder. You had a reason. What was it?”
“That’s a… complicated question, Kexx. But it comes down to the fact I didn’t understand the differences between us. Humans have one child at a time, sometimes two, but very rarely any more than that, and it takes many, many years to raise them into adults. For the last two hundred years, there have been so few of us left that every child is precious. Deliberately harming a child, well, there is no greater crime among our people. It’s an abomination.”
Kexx nodded along, encouraging Benson to continue.
“So when I saw your elder killing the babies, I… I thought something horrible was happening.”
“Because you saw them as you would see human babies,” Kexx said.
“Yes.”
“Even though they were not of your kind.”
“Yes.”
“And you wanted to protect them.”
Tears welled up in Benson’s eyes. “Yes.”
Kexx put a hand on Benson’s shoulder. “Then there is nothing to apologize for, Benson. You fought to protect our people in both our temples yesterday. I see now why Mei trusts you so completely. You are unafraid of doing what’s right, even if you’re not always right about what that is.” Then, the truth-digger stood back up. “Come, we’ve chased our shadows long enough out here.”
“Yes,” Benson rubbed his eyes clear. “Of course. Where to next?”
Kexx shrugged and fluttered his markings. “I’m open to suggestions.”
“Maybe back to the village and see what’s come in on the signal towers?”
“Could do.”
“It might help to be up high anyway, get a better perspective on everything. Too bad I don’t have any remote cameras to put on one of your birds, make my own little jerryrigged drone.”
“One of our birds?” Kexx said. “What do you mean?”
“You know, trained birds, like the ones Kuul sent after our aerial drone when we were walking in.”
Kexx stepped in front of Benson and glared down at him. “Why didn’t you mention this before?”
Benson, unsettled by the sudden intensity coming from the normally calm alien, put up his hands defensively. “Because I assumed you knew. I figured they were hunting birds.”
“We don’t use trained birds to hunt,” Kexx said evenly.
“You don’t?” Benson asked, before the full implications finally caught up with him. “Oh. You don’t.”
Kexx nodded. “Now you see. Take me there. Now.”
Nineteen
Theresa glanced at the plant clock in the periphery of her field of vision. 1547. The demonstrations had been going on for four hours already and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon. She tried to blink away the exhaustion eating away at her sleep-deprived focus, but it was a lost cause. An entire pot of English breakfast tea hadn’t made a dent yet.
In contrast to the sporadic, booze-fueled disturbances from the night before, the group picketing outside the Beehive was both larger and more organized. Theresa guesstimated it had grown to almost a thousand people over the last hour broken into splinter groups of Valmassoi’s supporters, isolationists, and Returners taking advantage of the opportunity for free publicity. It would probably swell again once the day shift let out. Valmassoi’s death had sparked far more passion, and revealed far deeper political divisions than she’d ever guessed existed in the population.
There had been some trouble early when a handful of demonstrators tired of throwing slogans and started throwing rocks. However, a judicious application of stun-sticks to the offenders and a firm explanation of protesting decorum put a swift end to the budding violence for the time being.
Theresa had already tagged the leaders’ IDs into her plant for later review, and a locator analysis would be able to identify everyone else. She had no doubt that the majority of them were here of their own accord, at the gentle nudging of their friends, or on the advice of the talking bobble-heads that passed for journalists on this rock, all of which were on hand at the “Rally for Justice” to cover what was undoubtedly the biggest story to come down the wire since Landing.
Ostensibly, this was all to protest the assassination of Administrator Valmassoi by parties yet unknown. A noble enough cause, Theresa thought, but suspicious in the face of the fact she couldn’t remember Valmassoi being nearly so popular prior to his untimely death. She tried to come up with a list of people who would’ve taken a bullet for the late Administrator (outside of his security detail, naturally) and couldn’t use up all the fingers on one hand. Still, for all his faults, he’d had all the appearance of cruising towards victory in next year’s elections. His death threw that calculation into chaos, forcing a special election to fill the vacancy and bringing old rivalries and new grievances boiling back up to the surface.
Korolev, animated by some unholy magic, stood on the opposite side of the platform, arms crossed over the assault rifle hanging menacingly on his chest from a sling. He’d been holding it in a relaxed ready position, but Theresa had said his aggressive stance was antagonizing the crowd. Somehow, this new arrangement wasn’t any better.
Unwanted images flooded Theresa’s mind. She tried to block them with limited success.
Theresa smirked at the cleverly worded response. Four hours, the bare minimum required by regulation between shifts. And while she was sure they were all spent in bed, she was equally sure based on the coy, blushing look she’d caught from the young bartender Korolev had walked home that they weren’t all spent in a restful slumber.
Korolev sent a mental shrug.
Theresa looked over the crowd, forcing herself to really look at the hastily constructed protest signs for the first time. They were of a kind with the sort of placards people used to make for Zero rivalry matches, but without any of the good-natured comradery that went along with it. There were crudely drawn cartoons of cuttlefish and frequent references to calamari, all of which left Theresa feeling more than a little queasy.
