Except Burble. Burble didn’t flit away. All the other faeries he’d seen had two legs and two arms, in a vaguely bipedal shape. And that leaf faerie was small enough to fit in his palm, its metal shell painted a natural-looking green.
But given all the things that existed in the Crucible, Taryx really shouldn’t be surprised that the Architects made at least one very unusual faerie. The sky was lightening. “Come on. We should hurry now.”
Hurry they did, but it wasn’t far. Taryx made it to the open top of the hill just as the sun crested the horizon. Below them spread Cobweb Grove, with webs from all kinds of spiders hanging between the trees. This time of day, dew ornamented those silken ropes. When the sun hit them, they shone like living æmber.
Taryx had seen it hundreds of times, but it never failed to move him. The spiders hadn’t been creating art. Neither had the dew. Or the sun. And yet there it was – a symphony of colors that was ephemeral and permanent, lasting only a few moments a day, but recreated day after day after day.
Jani had loved this moment, too – always noticing the clouds and the different hues of the sky.
“I wanted to bring you here,” Taryx said, but his voice was tight.
He hadn’t been here since Jani left. He thought coming with Burble would only mean a new, happy memory. But he still felt like his insides were made of weak, knotty wood. Jani would have had a way to describe the colors of this sunrise that would make it even lovelier, even more real.
Taryx tried, but he couldn’t come up with such sentiments on his own. His shoulders sagged. He was a gardener and a healer. Not a poet. Not a child of the sky. He could imagine Jani smiling, Jani laughing, Jani saying something profound, but he couldn’t actually recreate the words, the laughter, the feeling of being next to someone who was comfortably familiar, yet unpredictably spontaneous, whimsical and wise all at once. Memories and imagination were no substitute for the real, living Jani.
Not for the first time, Taryx wished he could simply stop thinking about Jani altogether – that he could burn his grief away as easily as Burble burned back cobalt mushrooms. Taryx ought to be enjoying this moment for what it was instead of mourning what it was missing.
“I’m sorry. I’ll go down first. I… I forgot to do something at home.”
Burble raised his feathered tentacle toward Taryx, but he shook his head and brushed it away. “I’m fine. I promise.”
Burble’s tentacles all twitched. In agitation, Taryx thought. Faeries probably didn’t like being lied to any more than anyone else. But missing Jani didn’t seem fair to Burble, especially when Burble was right there. Taryx wasn’t lonely any more. He wasn’t.
But his wounds hadn’t scabbed over as much as he thought they had, either.
Two days later, Minerva flew in. The teakettle beeped that she was near, so Taryx was waiting for her in the clearing outside his front door. She swooped down in a flash of bronze-gold wings. They gave off a soft glow, as if the metal itself had been infused with æmber. Taryx had never asked; even if Minerva wanted to explain the technicalities of how she’d augmented herself, Taryx didn’t have the expertise to follow such talk. A lattice of wires of that same gold-bronze color covered both her exposed arms, contrasting sharply with her steely gray hair.
She grinned fiercely at him. “Taryx! You’re looking much more yourself since the last time I saw you.”
She’d come only three days after Jani left. Taryx had been standing out in the rain, toes rooted to the earth, pretending to actually be a tree. He wished he could make her unsee that. He could hardly have looked worse.
“I’m doing just fine. And you?”
Minerva frowned and rubbed her shoulder. “It’s just not right, Taryx. I should be able to formulate something to ease this joint pain instead of relying on your remedies, but nothing I’ve tried works. And I’ve tried a lot. I even worked on growing your sky cap mushrooms in my lab.”
“Do you need help getting them to flourish? Indoor cultivation can be tricky, but sky caps grown that way should be just as effective as the ones I harvest here.”
“Ah. I meant I tried synthesizing the mushrooms properly in a petri dish, nicely monitored and standardized. Not like this,” she waved her hand at the woodchip beds and fallen logs. “It’s so messy. So many variables.”
“But it works.”
She sighed. “Yes, it does. A frustrating bit of data. If any of my compatriots ever make their way to you, don’t tell them you know me. I’d be a laughing stock for this.”
“You’re the only Logotarian scientist who’s crash-landed here, I promise,” Taryx said. It had been quite the shock to him – he’d expected a roc, or an æmberdrake, or really anything other than a half-mechanical woman that day, ten years ago, when he woke to a booming thud outside his house. Minerva had still been perfecting her wings. She’d had to stay two weeks before she was able to fly out again.
During that time, Taryx had liberally covered her wrenched shoulders in a liniment of honey and sky cap mushrooms. Now and again her shoulders still troubled her, and she came to get more medicine.
“Are you sure it’s not something more than soreness?” Taryx asked. “If you’ve already gone through the jar I made for you last time, you’ve been in pain every day.”
“Well, I thought it would be good to have some extra on hand, if you don’t mind,” Minerva said innocently.
She hadn’t come for the liniment. She’d come to check on him. “Minerva. You saw the worst of it. I’m better now.”
“Gaalm snuck into your house two days ago and called me on the kettle. Said something about you going mad and keeping an abomination as a pet.”
Sneaky little elf. “And you believed him?”
Minerva snorted. “Of course not. But it did interrupt my work, and that made me realize I should have dropped by some time ago.”
“I’m fine.” He’d even shaved this morning – not a trace of lichen or moss on his face anywhere.
“Jani was like a brother to you and he left barely a month ago. It’d be downright strange if you were fine. If you let me put stress-monitoring nanites in you, I could prove it with numbers.”
Jani hadn’t been like a brother. Brothers and sisters all drifted far apart from each other, claiming their own bit of sunlight to grow in. At least in Taryx’s species, family didn’t remain close. Aspen-kin or birch-kin treewalkers might cluster together in communities, but juniper-kin treewalkers like himself lived apart. Some of his kind formed close bonds with members of other species, but more often than not they lived alone, often choosing remote and difficult-to-access places to build their homes.
For decades, Taryx had comfortably enjoyed both his work and his solitude when there were no patients to treat. He never thought he might prefer to live otherwise.
And then Jani had stayed with him for over two years. He’d told Taryx about forests all over the Crucible, from the Valley of Jewels to the forest around the World Tree.
Taryx had never had someone next to him day in and day out before. He’d told Jani how unfurling mushrooms were so beautiful, it sometimes made him weep. How he was afraid of heights. And how compost made him philosophical. One foggy afternoon, he’d even laid out his fears of what would happen to his garden when he, too, rejoined the earth.
Jani had been his friend.
But in Minerva’s culture, everyone accepted the loss of friendship as normal. Friendships lasted months, perhaps years, but rarely lifetimes – everyone seemed to expect that changes in common interests or proximity would cause friendships to fade as inevitably as summer gives way to autumn. Friendships were generally less permanent and less important than family, in Minerva’s world. He shouldn’t have been surprised that Jani felt the same way.
“No nanites. I don’t need to be monitored.”
She frowned. “Well. If you don’t want nanites, my offer on the infrared implant for your eyes still stands too. You ought to have some bit of technology to help you out here in
the wilds.”
Taryx sighed. “Minerva, you promised.”
“Fine, fine. I won’t bring up eye implants again.”
“Or?” he demanded.
Her shoulders slumped in defeat and she mumbled, “Or install some while you’re asleep.”
“Thank you.” Taryx opened the door to his home. Minerva might not be fond of organic environments, but even she smiled at all those cheerful æmberflowers thatching together to make his roof.
Taryx glanced around his shelves and drying racks, and under the cots. “Burble must have gone out. It loves flying zig-zags between the trees – like the whole forest is one giant obstacle course.”
“So Gaalm wasn’t lying about you adopting a pet?”
“Well, I think it adopted me. But it’s not an abomination.”
She smiled, brushing her fingers along the petals of an æmberflower. “A pet. I actually think that’s a marvelous idea. There have been over four hundred and twenty research papers showing that pets can–”
“Please don’t quote research at me.”
“Research is useful, Taryx. What kind of animal is it?”
He pulled his jar of dried sky cap mushrooms from a shelf and began grinding a few down in his mortar and pestle. If he told her that Burble was probably a faerie made by the Architects just for him, she’d think he was becoming delusional. “Ah. I’m not sure. It’s got a lot of cybernetic parts. Maybe it’s even a lost Logotarian probe of some sort.” That could be true, if his theory about the Architects was wrong. “Do the Logos ever make exploration probes with social tendencies?”
“The Logos rarely generate scientists with social tendencies. At least, not at my research facility.”
Taryx drummed a dozen fingers on the table. “Hmm. Well, Burble’s very friendly. It doesn’t want to leave. It follows me around like a puppy.”
“I, for one, am simply glad you’re not all alone. Maybe a faerie nudged it here. Sometimes the Crucible takes care of its own.” She stretched her shoulder again. “I, unfortunately, need your mushroom liniment to take care of me. I think I should put some on sooner rather than later. It’s a good flight from here to the research facility.”
She always called it the research facility, as if no other Logos labs outside of Macro-Research Facility 47μ really counted.
“Of course.” Taryx turned to grab the mortar and finish his work. When he turned back, Burble was floating in through the ceiling. “Ah. There you are. Minerva, this is Burble. Burble, Minerva.”
Minerva turned. Her eyes flickered as they searched some unseen database. Her polite smile shifted into horror. “Taryx! That thing was made by demons. I hate to say that Gaalm was right about anything, but your ‘Burble’ is dangerous.”
Taryx had, of course, heard rumors about the soul-eating demons who lived somewhere beneath the crust of the Crucible. But Burble hardly looked nefarious, flying there with its hat askew. “Really?” Taryx chuckled uncertainly, like Minerva had just made a bad joke. “Aren’t demons supposed to have spikes all over and wear scary iron masks?”
“It’s an imp. A servant to a demon. They send them to the surface to collect the pain and suffering of creatures, so they can feast on them down below.” She’d stepped back toward the door. She was actually nervous about being in the same room with Burble.
“I thought demons were supposed to eat souls.”
“Do you really want to quibble over semantics right now? Whether you want to say it eats souls, or eats the suffering of souls, or uses psycho-reactive æmber to capture emotional energy to later digest, the conclusion is the same: that thing is dangerous. Has it been feeding off you?”
“Of course not. Burble’s harmless. It’s been helping me in my work.”
“Taryx!” She turned to him. “You can’t let that thing near your patients!”
While she wasn’t looking, Burble shot out its two longest tentacles, the ones with the feathery ends. It laid them on either side of her face.
She opened her mouth as if to scream – but then she relaxed instead. Taryx thought Minerva might even faint. He reached out to catch her, but she caught herself on a rib of the doorframe.
Burble released her and politely flew back into the shadows of the house.
Minerva rubbed the side of her face, like she’d just woken up and didn’t quite know where she was. “The pain… it’s gone. My shoulder doesn’t hurt. That thing. It ate up my suffering.”
Taryx glanced between the two of them. Was that actually how Burble had been helping his patients? “That’s amazing!”
Minerva frowned. “No. It’s not.”
“Why? Because you have some notion that it’s evil? Burble took your unwanted emotional waste product – agony – and turned it into food for himself. He’s like one of the birds that eats gnats off the back of a sabertooth tiger, or the bugs that clean the forest floor. People often think of scavengers, decomposers and the like, as loathsome and disgusting, but every living thing has a role to play in the ecosystem of the Crucible.”
Minerva rubbed the side of her face, her frown lines deepening. “But it’s not a natural, living thing. It’s… I know it’s bad.” She blinked, like she was trying to clear sleep from her eyes. “I was so frightened for you a moment ago. And now I’m having a hard time remembering why. Can you make it leave?”
It wasn’t like Minerva to overreact like this. Usually if she got upset or excited about something, her reaction was to study it – not push it away. But he supposed stories about demons could bring out superstition even in a Logotarian scientist.
“Burble, will you make sure the log we inoculated the other day isn’t drying out? It might need a bucket of water.”
Burble obediently wandered off through the skylight in the roof. Taryx had no idea if it would actually do as he’d asked, but with it out of sight, Minerva relaxed somewhat.
“Demons are bad news, Taryx,” she said. “Even the servant of a demon. They eat emotions.”
“That one just anaesthetized you very nicely. You came to me for a liniment. I don’t see how it’s different.”
“The liniment actually heals.”
“Well, now you’re pain-free and can apply the liniment without complaint. Do you have any idea how useful that kind of numbing is when you’re trying to set a broken bone? Burble’s eased a lot of suffering around here. My mushrooms are amazing, but they can only do so much. I wish Burble had already been here when I had to relocate your shoulder.”
Minerva shuddered. “That, I can remember with perfect clarity.”
“And wouldn’t it have been nice not to feel it? I can’t believe I’m trying to get you to be more rational.”
“I am being rational. That thing isn’t a medical tool.” Her eyes flickered, searching her unseen data network again. “If this is accurate, your pet is an ember imp. It’s a dangerous parasite.”
Some of his best mushrooms were parasites. Sure, people liked the decomposers better, and everyone loved the mycorrhizal mushrooms that interlaced with the roots of trees, benefiting both organisms. Those fungi cleaned the forest and promoted tree health – but the parasites were useful, too, thinning out weak specimens of plants and allowing healthier ones to grow. “Parasites aren’t evil.”
“Well this one is. Ember imps can shoot fire, Taryx.”
“Actually, the fire comes in quite handy when I need to keep the cobalt mushrooms in check.”
Minerva groaned. She really didn’t look well, her golden wires shifting to a blanched silver.
“I’m being a bad host. You should lie down.”
“No. I don’t want to stay. Not here. Not where it is. I know that much. But I’m worried about you. At least, I was very worried a moment ago. You can’t keep an ember imp as a pet.”
“Not very long ago, you said it was sent here by the Crucible for my own good.”
Minerva shook her head, then rummaged in one of her pockets. She pulled out a thin coil of bronze wire. “You put it
over your finger. When you make a fist, it’ll activate.”
“What is it?”
“A circuit disruptor. If you activate that within five feet of the imp, it should go limp. Not dead, mind you – just offline.”
“Minerva, I don’t need this.” He wasn’t about to do anything that might hurt Burble. He tried to hand it back, but Minerva closed his hands around her gift.
“I hope you won’t need it. But I’m leaving it with you anyway.”
Watching Minerva fly away never used to be hard. Now it reminded him of Jani disappearing into that same blue sky.
Jani’s tribe had only left him behind because they thought he was dead. He’d broken his wrist radio – along with his arm, his leg, and four ribs. Minerva was able to fix the radio, of course, and Taryx saw to the bones. When his tribe’s airship came in range of the signal again two years later, Jani hadn’t even hesitated. Elves tended to put their tribe above all else.
Jani wouldn’t stay. And Taryx couldn’t survive on an airship, away from the earth.
When he thought about Jani, he still felt all knotted up inside, his bark papery and too tight. But there was no wood-cracking pain running through him. The sharp edge of his heartbreak had dulled a little. He hadn’t composted his grief yet, but it was not new, either.
Having Burble around was certainly helping. Demonic monster, indeed. People were so eager to slap scary names on things they didn’t understand.
Burble came bobbing back toward the house, its flight still a little uneven. It was a shame Minerva had spooked so badly; she could have used one of her fancy scanners or something to check Burble’s interior wiring. It swooped up to Taryx and tilted to one side, as if curious. Or concerned? Perhaps he was reading too much into Burble’s actions.
“I’m a little sad. That’s all.” He glanced up at the sky in time to see Minerva’s golden wings disappear behind the trees. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Tales From the Crucible Page 17