by C. L. Kagmi
The hive grows warmer. The walls, this far in, are no longer natural. They are carved. Their texture is the gouge-marks of diamond-hard mandibles, softened only slightly by the weathering of untold centuries. Foreign smells permeate the air. Lily wonders if the pheromones are so dense here that even she can taste them, or if the scents are simple byproducts of decay.
Kit stops, so suddenly that Lily runs into their outstretched arm. A child’s arm—for a moment, she is struck by the absurdity of the scene.
And then she hears it. A clacking. The clacking of a thousand mandibles, not in synchrony, but in something like it. Rhythm. Then, the drumming of ten thousand legs. The ground begins to shake.
Kit takes Lily through an opening, and into total darkness.
The place is far too big for the light of Lily’s sphere. The light glances off curved thoraxes, antennae waving ghostly in the dark. The Ants are dense here, and still. Lily cannot see the edge of the crowd.
She hesitates. Pauses. Different origin of life be damned, she can sense the sacred here. It is the sense of thousands gathered, waiting.
How will the Ants react to a high-beam flashlight in a dark and sacred space?
She turns it on and sweeps it over the assembled sea of chitinous backs. Across Kit’s face, which wears something like ecstasy.
The silence! The frustrating silence! What Lily would not give to know what Kit, what the Ants, are experiencing.
As it reaches the center of the chamber, her beam sweeps across a—thing. A horrible, writhing organic mass like a maggot the size of Lily’s dome. Her stomach turns and she shrinks back involuntarily.
“Come,” Kit urges, seizing Lily’s hand with fingers too gentle to resist. She threads them through the crowd—ducking under legs, scooting perilously between massive, swaying abdomens; past enormous, unseeing eyes.
The Ants seem not to notice them, even as they approach the Holy of Holies.
The writhing mass, Lily understands now, is an enormous pupa. The fleshy covering is not the essential part here; through an opening at the front, a wet and shining Queen is being born to adulthood. She will be a new mother, a mother to ten thousand.
Meters from the platform, Lily stops and finds that she cannot go further.
Even to her, the emerging face of the Queen is beautiful.
There’s a beauty in its sleekly swooping lines, in the exotic angles of its eyes. Its mandibles resemble ceremonial swords more than cleavers, sharp in the way of a blade that has never been used. And there is something beautiful about the act of its emergence—this is alien, no squalling babe, but even Lily’s most primitive mind cannot miss the potential in the legs unfurling from the pupa.
Kit does not try to pull her further.
The Queen stands on trembling legs—a monarch and a newborn lamb at once. And something new and vast swoops in the space above her, creating air currents that even Lily feels.
She swings her flashlight to see wings. Wet, and glittering, razor-thin stained glass.
“Now,” Kit’s whisper comes in her ear, amplified by the earlinks they’re wearing in case of separation.
One of the servants around the Queen is extruding something. Lily tries not to retch at the act of reverse eating—reminds herself that stomachs are the standard storage unit, the pottery of this people.
The something is thick and, Lily has no doubt, sweet. The nectar of ten million flowers, or some much stranger harvest. It somehow holds the surface tension of a droplet, though it is large enough that Kit could swim inside.
“Now.” Kit shoves her forward with small arms.
Lily walks forward, trembling. Extends her arms over the enormous droplet. Feels like an uninvited participant in this alien sacrament.
At the droplet’s other end, the Queen has already begun to drink.
Lily opens her vial of clear water and DNA. The liquid splashes onto the larger droplet, merges with it, disappears.
A gift for a gift. The genetic wealth of humanity for the genetic wealth of this new world.
A stillness, a silence falls.
She watches the droplet shrink, shaking, and thinks now she understands the old Earth expression “fear of God.” This is fear, yes, of a thing who could cleave her in two with a second thought. But a thing, also, of incomprehensible beauty.
The shrinking stops. The Queen’s antennae quiver.
And then all hell breaks loose.
Afterwards, it takes Lily a long time to piece together what has happened.
The assembled insects seemed to move as one. Where or why they were moving, Lily could not know. There was no room for directional movement in this packed amphitheatre. There was only a sudden chaos.
It was their small size that saved them—Lily remembers, through a haze of adrenaline-panic, Kit’s small hand firmly dragging her between the agitated bodies. Remembers being buffeted by milling legs, dodging bobbing abdomens. At least once, a pair of mandibles started to close on her arm, but her arm was so slender that they could not close fast enough to catch her.
The ground shook, the chamber shook, the mountain shook, dislodging fragments of rock from the ceiling.
Too many fragments.
That must be how she came to be where she is now, panting in the dark. She is in a small space—a pocket created in the rockfall that separated her from the Ants.
She is alone.
“Kit?” she whispers, as though the Ants might hear her. Maybe they would, now. Maybe they would care now. What had gone so horribly wrong?
There is a faint, hissing static in her ear. That is very bad.
“Kit...can you…”
She tries to imagine something which would break the earlink without breaking the head it was attached to. Tries to imagine a way for the tiny, form-fitted device to fall off and be crushed underfoot, without crushing—
“Lily?” Is it the earlink or Kit’s voice that sounds wrong? “Lily I’m...here.”
Lily prays that it is fear, not pain, in the child’s voice.
“Where is ‘here?’” Lily asks, as though she had any point of reference from which to navigate.
“Near...an entrance. I can see light. I think...the same tunnel as you, but closer to the entrance, maybe.”
Lily had dropped both the lights before she lost hold of Kit’s hand. Now she feels, blindly, at the rough contours of the rocks that hem her in.
“The same tunnel?” she asks, because Kit seems to know everything. “Are you sure?”
“Unless you’ve moved since I last saw you.”
The child’s voice is growing weaker. It isn’t fear she’s hearing.
“Hold on. I’m going to try to come to you.”
“Lily?”
“Yes?”
“...I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. This is not your fault.”
Is that pained laughter? Or is it sobbing?
Lily digs her fingers into the spaces between the rocks.
The freshly fallen rocks are unstable. Lily is able to peel away small pebbles and roll a boulder far enough to create an opening through which fresh air pours in.
Fresh air. Fresh. The scent of the plains.
But by the time she squeezes herself through the opening, legs first, Kit has gone silent.
“Kit?” Lily’s feet touch the sweet mercy of smooth stone on the other side. She slithers into standing.
“Stay with me!”
“It was my fault.”
“What?”
“That they attacked us. I did that on purpose.”
Lily pauses. Cannot quite process what she’s hearing.
“I...what?”
“I wanted you to know, before…”
There is a skittering somewhere in the darkness, and then Lily is running in sheer terror, following the scent of open air.
She hits a wall and pinwheels wildly. Hits another. Finally calms herself enough to follow this wall, running fingers along the mandible-scarre
d rock, toward the source of the breeze.
“The good news is—” Kit is in pain, it’s clear now. Terrible pain. “I think the collapse cut them off from us.”
Small comforts. Lily still can’t see any light.
“Kit, stay with me. It doesn’t matter what you did.”
“I am going to have to ask you to do something you’ll hate.”
Daylight. Shards of bright daylight, like a spiderweb crack in the Void.
“Lily?” The voice is in both ears, now. Lily scrambles toward it, then slows her pace. She imagines tripping and falling onto the injured child. Imagines Kit screaming in her ear.
She shuffles carefully along the rock wall, until her toe encounters soft flesh.
“Kit?”
“Thank the gods, Lily.” The Eternal sounds near tears. Lily kneels and feels her way up Kit’s body—
—to where it stops, just above the waist.
She feels at the rock wall that has half-buried the child. Their arms, shoulders, and head are beneath it.
“I’m going to dig you out.”
“It was because my people—want this planet. We didn’t know, didn’t really understand. The raw materials, they told me it could grow billions of new brains for us—”
“Hush. Hush now.” Lily does not want to hear this while she’s trying to save the Eternal’s life.
“Lily, I’m so sorry. If you had died—” Kit cannot finish.
“Shh. Shh. I didn’t. And you’re not going to either.” The small stones come away easily from around Kit’s chest and shoulders, but there’s something larger, deeper down—
There is a boulder, too near where Kit’s head should be. Lily feels her way down it with careful fingers, looking for the place where stone stops and flesh begins.
She finds Kit’s hair, and freezes. The hair is slick. And the head beneath it…
Lily touches what can only be a skull fragment, and retches.
There is a smile in Kit’s voice as they say: “I’m Graduating a little early.”
Lily had no second soul. A similar blow to the head for her would have been final. And so, Kit explained, they could not, could not forgive themself for putting Lily in mortal danger. It could have been the end of her.
Lily is grateful for that. She is less grateful that the young Eternal keeps apologizing, all the way through the operation that simply feels like murder. Removing a warm, still-pulsing brain from a ruined skull is hard enough without the string of apologies that fade into silence.
She is as gentle as she can be. Kit assured her, before the end, that they felt no pain. No more than the rockfall had caused, and Lily could do nothing about that but end it. The brain itself has no pain receptors. It has no reason to. If something has penetrated the skull, it’s already too late to run or hide.
Lily extracts Kit’s second soul—a sheet of interconnected silicon chips embedded in the membrane over the brain—and leaves their body cooling. Cradles the silicon matrix like a precious artifact as she digs and kicks her way through the final wall of rubble.
She wonders, sometimes, what would have happened if the stone had hit the left side of Kit’s head instead of the right. The Eternal’s extra circuitry had left them with the ability to speak—but if their primary language center had been gone, if they could not talk Lily through the operation, what would have…?
Lily shakes her head at the thought of Kit’s second soul languishing for centuries on the floor of an alien colony that no humanoid will set foot inside again.
It makes sense, in retrospect. By adding her DNA to the Queen’s droplet, Lily added herself to the Ant’s chemical vocabulary. To the list of things that were important, relevant. But she did not paint herself as family. There was nothing familiar about her.
She painted herself as a disease.
Such foreign DNA on the Queen’s tongue meant one thing—infection. The carrier was to be destroyed, and anything chemically similar guarded against with savage force.
Kit had known this. Kit had known. They had led Lily out of Eden, considered her, for the span of a few hours, to be acceptable collateral damage.
But Kit had never seen anyone die before.
When the Ant turned on Lily, they realized the horror of their mistake. Grabbed Lily, ran with her toward the exit. They were close, so close, when…
“Thank the gods,” Kit had said with a smile in their voice, as Lily peeled back pieces of her fractured skull, “that both of us survived.”
“I will do something for you,” Kit had promised, at the end. “I will do something for you, in return. Of course. Of course.”
Lily hadn’t cared. She had wanted to drag the Eternal whole from the rubble, bring them home and feed them in the garden. But she knew by the feel, by what she could imagine of the look of them, that they were dead no matter what she did.
That their body was dead, anyway.
It was strange to think of the flexible silicon sheet she carried in her hands as a living being. Without a power supply, Kit was effectively sleeping. But she cradled the chips like an idol, like a friend, until the Eternal elders came and took them from her.
Then she made her report to the Reshaped, and she waited.
Would there be war over this? Over the first attempt by an Eternal to infringe on Reshaped space? To infringe, more importantly, on the territory of a pre-technological sentient species, a defenseless species—unless Kit had lied about that too.
Would the Eternals begin to eliminate the Reshaped with the same neat efficiency Kit had shown in altering, then shedding, their own living body? Would the Reshaped begin developing defenses, ways to sound out hidden Eternals and blow them out of the sky?
Would she be reassigned, this world now a combat zone? Repairing the relationship between Ants and Earth life would take decades of experimentation. Decades spent creating a new kind of Reshaped person who could speak to the Ants in more eloquent and nuanced tones.
How does a virus convince its host that it is friendly? By demonstrating benign intelligence, maybe. And how does one demonstrate intelligence to a hivemind? That would become the question for the new Reshaped to answer.
The news came, mere days after Lily handed the chips to a tight-lipped Eternal over. Her own overs, symmetrical and perfect, called to speak with her from an open room in a paradisal forest.
“The Eternals tell us,” they had said, “that you aided them in gaining invaluable insights about the Ants of the Inanna mountain range. Well done.”
Lily had blinked. What of her report of Kit’s subversion? What of the Eternal’s plot?
“It seems,” the over continued, “that the Eternal who aided you has also been given special recognition.”
Also?
“And they have used it to request jurisdiction over the Inanna system.”
A pause. Lily waited.
“The Eternal ‘Kit’ has chosen geosynchronous orbit over your outpost as their location. The Eternals will not further develop this world. Instead, they plan to use it as a source of information. Information from us. Which you will relay to them. They believe that new algorithms will be generated through the study of Inanna’s native life.”
‘I will do something for you…’
“We will be sending your first cohort of assistants within three standard months. I hope that twelve will be enough.”
Twelve...not replacements, but assistants?
“The Eternal Kit also states that they will be beaming instructions to your chemical synthesizers, and to our scientists. Instructions for an apology, and a formal introduction to the people of Inanna.”
‘People!’
“They believe that your collaboration will prove fruitful. So do we.”
Lily had shuddered to see Kit’s new “body”—a Voidlike blackness, a hole in the bright lights of their creche. Camouflage and safety, that body was—they would be able to pass millennia unnoticed, pass within centimeters of a Reshaped ship in safety, their senso
rs collecting data and solid-state processors grasping at the questions of Eternity.
Lily does not fully understand, even, what those questions are. Hers are the questions of flesh and bone and blood.
And her questions, Kit has told her through their earlink, are important also. Kit speaks rarely, now, becoming less animal and more Eternal with each passing day. But Lily uploads her team’s data faithfully, every night. She will for the rest of her life.
Lily still looks up and speaks to the stars at night.
But now she knows one of them is listening.
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In memory of Walter Dinjos. Author and friend.
In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Walter Dinjos
The late Walter Dinjos wrote truly remarkable science fiction and fantasy, steeped in Nigerian culture and musical poetry. We were once collaborators on plans to cross-advertise our short stories before his sudden and totally unexpected death.
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His writing career ended far too soon, but his works can still be read as Kindle singles through his Amazon author page (QR code below), or in the publications in which they originally appeared (listed below):
The Woodcutter’s Deity, Writers of the Future Vol. 33
The Mama Mmri, Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Vol. 8