As he began to read aloud, something about sports scores, Mac stretched out on her side as best she could, finding it more comfortable if she laid one arm over his warm, rubbery shoulders.
Even as she listened to his deep bass rumble, she couldn’t help but wonder.
How close was Brymn to “Flowering?”
- Portent -
IN HER DREAMS, the world was hinged and could swing open like a door. She struggled with bar and latch, with lock and bolt, until only her hands held the world closed. Held the world safe.
In her dreams, green liquid, like pus from a wound, seeped under the door that was the world, leaked along its sides, dripped from its top until it burned her from toe to hand to face, until it ate from her skin and flesh and bone.
In her dreams, she had the choice. To turn away and run, letting the world take care of itself . . .
Or to hold the door against death as long as she had life . . .
“. . . We’re losing her.”
“There’s nothing left to lose—”
“Tell that to her family! Forget the legs—get more gel on her midsection. Damn it—I said more . . .”
“No use. It’s over.”
In her dreams, the world was hinged and could close softly, like the lid of night, shutting out pain and fear, letting her rest.
“Next.”
20
CAVERNS AND CURIOSITIES
MAC PRESSED her nose against the window. Another stop identical to the five before. “You could at least tell me where we’re going,” she complained, pulling back.
“No, no. I know Humans enjoy surprises.”
Mac nudged Brymn with her toe. “Some Humans. Others are happier knowing where they are going.”
“That is coaxing. I am able to resist.”
She grinned. “I’m impressed.”
Of course. He’d had Emily to teach him about humanity.
Mac pushed aside the thought, shunting it deep inside with the bitter disappointment of no message from Earth. Or none she could find. The reports from Sol System had consisted of racing results from Neptune’s rings and the announcement of discounts to species who brought their own ship engineers when accessing Earth’s repair and refit facilities. Brymn had reread them until they’d both memorized every word. Nothing sounded like code. Nothing hinted at a hidden meaning.
So there was nothing she could do, about Emily or Nik or Base. Mac had decided she owed herself—and Brymn-—a few hours without the troubles of the universe.
Brymn seemed to have less difficulty immersing himself in the moment. “It is the very next stop,” he proclaimed cheerfully, waving four arms about. One clutched the ever-present map; the other three, assorted bags. She assumed he’d brought snacks as well.
Mac had saved her cereal bars, but gave herself a carefully small drink of water. Given the rainfall, she hadn’t expected a shortage. Then again, she hadn’t expected Brymn would be taking her what felt like halfway across—or, more accurately, through—the planet. Rationing seemed prudent.
“Next stop, is it?” Mac tried to snatch the map, but his arm bent at an impossible angle to keep it out of her reach.
“You will see, Lamisah. Soon enough.”
“Soon enough” translated into the longest distance between two stops yet on their journey through the tube. Mac loosened and rebraided her hair uncounted times. Brymn’s bright blue eyelids closed and he let out tiny, quiet hoots, as though dreaming something amusing. Eventually, Mac found a way to scrunch herself into the luggage rack so she could almost nod off, if not quite. The train was making too many turns for her to trust any one position.
They were alone in the car. Fellow travelers—in three instances—had chosen to move elsewhere at their first opportunity. Nothing to do with her, Mac decided, though the presence of a Human must seem bizarre to home system Dhryn. It was Brymn the Tourist, who missed no opportunity to praise Haven and explain he was from the colonies, making his first trip back since Freshening and wasn’t the tube system a magnificent achievement involving a full century of effort and did they appreciate how many . . .
Mac could recite the spiel verbatim—in fact, it was hard to get the facts and figures to stop dancing around in her head hours later. She gave up and twisted upright again. Time for another walk.
On straightaways, like this, the train might have been standing at a station. There was no vibration underfoot she could detect. To avoid interfering with infrasound conversation? Intriguing concept. As Mac paced down the middle of the empty car, her fingers automatically tugged her braid from its knot and undid it, combing through the hip-length stuff.
Seung was always looking for quieter tech, quieter in terms of whale acoustics. She should arrange for a Dhryn engineer to work with the Preds at Base next season. You never knew where you’d get a breakthrough, Mac hummed to herself, splitting her hair into three and rebraiding as she paced. Or from whom.
Take the Dhryn technology to defend against the Ro. Judging from the tube system and the removal—Mac still found that incredible—of whatever else had orbited Haven’s sun, part of that defense relied on physical barriers. For a reason? Was the attack on the pods typical Ro behavior, when stealth failed them?
An idea—no, less than that—a combination of possibilities paused Mac’s busy hands, slowed her feet to a standstill. She adjusted to the slight tilt of the flooring without thinking, accustomed to more unstable surfaces than a polite train.
The Ro hadn’t made a single mistake in their attack on Base.
Minimum action for maximum result. The anatomy of a salmon modeled the concept. Power applied where the least amount of effort would push the streamlined body through the water—or air—with the greatest force.
No mistakes, minimal action implied advance planning. Advance planning meant a source of knowledge.
Mac tied her braid in a tight knot and shoved it inside the back of her shirt. Base wasn’t that sophisticated, she argued with herself, not to beings who could knock out power and evade sensors. The Ro didn’t need any help.
But she’d told Brymn: “I seek the truth. It has nothing to do with what I want.”
She’d better damn well mean it. Mac stared ahead and saw nothing but a face with its trademark smile, a touch lopsided for perfection, which made it so perfectly friendly.
Emily could have given the Ro the plans to Base. She could have told them how best to knock out the power. She could have . . .
. . . been responsible for the injury and death of how many innocents?
Forgive me.
Mac ground the heels of her fists into her eyes.
“Lamisah? Is something wrong?”
She dropped her hands to meet Brymn’s anxious gaze. “Too much thinking, my friend. That’s all.”
“Ah. Soon you will have new things to think about. Are you ready?”
Feeling the train slowing beneath her feet, Mac knew what he meant. “I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now where we’re going?” she asked one final time, going to the rack to pick up her bag.
“Where we will stand between one beginning and another.”
“Riddles, now?” She made the effort to smile as she turned to face him. No need to spoil Brymn’s pleasure.
He wasn’t smiling. She noticed the map was no longer in sight. His body was canted down, not as far as threat, but certainly lower than it had been for the role of Brymn the casual tourist.
This was Brymn with a mission.
Mac nodded to herself; somehow, she’d known. “This isn’t a tour, is it?”
“I wish it could be, Lamisah,” the Dhryn said. “But I have something to tell you, something I couldn’t mention above, where the air could have ears.”
“You’re so sure we’re safe here?” The train slowed to a stop. All Mac could see out the windows were walls on both sides, lit only by the lights from the train. It made her feel trapped behind bars.
“If this place isn’t safe, Mackenzie Winifred
Elizabeth Wright Connor, then it is too late for anything we might do to save ourselves.”
Not the most reassuring reason she’d heard lately.
Brymn led the way off the train. Once on the platform, Mac understood why he’d sounded so confident.
The walls were dark because they were lined with the same glistening black material as the shroud the Dhryn had tossed over her box on the way station, supposedly able to disrupt the Ro’s technology. She followed it with her eyes up to the ceiling, where it became part of the shadows stretching overhead and to either side. There was more underfoot. She wanted to lift her feet from it. Afraid of a carpet? Mac scolded herself.
The train pulled away—backward, not ahead as she’d expected.
So this was the end of the line.
“This way.” Brymn didn’t give her any choice, almost running down the platform in the opposite direction from the train. Mac swore under her breath but hurried after him.
The platform narrowed and became a ramp leading down to the tracks. There was a dim illumination in the distance. Mac squinted, trying to make out details of what looked like a large opening. She guessed the tracks continued into a cavern.
It wasn’t their destination. Before they reached the tracks, Brymn halted in front of a section of wall. After studying what appeared to Mac to be more of the same glistening fabric, he spat onto one hand, then pressed it against the wall above and to the right of his head.
Smoke began to appear between his three fingers as the fabric shrank away to reveal an illuminated plate. Finally, Mac thought, a civilized door control. She wrinkled her nose at an acrid smell. A being of unexpected resources, her Brymn.
Her mind flashed back to Pod Three and the Ro attack. She’d only a fuzzy recollection of their actual escape—being dumped into the ocean along with the gallery and kitchen tended to overshadow fine details. Not to mention fear, horror, and utter screaming confusion. Still, Mac had no trouble remembering one very unusual aspect.
Brymn had pushed them through a solid window.
Seeing how he’d cleared the fabric from the control, she also remembered how. He’d spat at the window wall; it had shattered when he rammed it.
Not typical behavior for the transparent, strong, yet flexible material. The Preds had been caught testing the ability of the pod window walls with harpoons. Needless to say the students had suffered more than the window.
Mac eyed the smoking, ruined edge of the shroud fabric wistfully. Never, she told herself, ever, travel without sample vials.
Meanwhile, in plain view of the dozen or more tiny vidbots stationed along the ceiling, Brymn was tapping what had to be an access code into the plate. “This is going to get us in trouble, isn’t it?” Mac asked with what she considered remarkable aplomb, considering she stood in the bowels of an alien world, a world she was visiting on the sufferance of its leaders.
With an individual whose sanity hadn’t been confirmed.
“Ah.” The fabric split along two lines that met overhead, the triangle thus formed moving away from them and to the side so Mac stared into a very unappealing and dark cavity. A cavity out of which rushed cooler, damper air.
She covered her nose with one hand. “What’s that smell?”
Brymn was already half inside, his stooped body posture fitting perfectly within the available space, although he had no room to spread out his arms. “Hurry, Mac.”
Couldn’t a Dhryn smell that? Mac swallowed hard and obeyed, breathing as little as possible through her fingers. It wasn’t so much sulfur, she decided, as rancid cream. With sulfur. And maybe the stomach contents of a five-days-dead seal.
Whatever it was, it diminished to a background misery after her first few steps. Either her sense of smell had overloaded and quit, or opening the door had released a pocket of collected fumes, rapidly diffusing into the tunnel.
Mac only hoped to avoid finding the source.
The cavity proved to be part of some kind of accessway, with a maze of branches to the left and right. They were free of ’bots, at least. There were lights, but they were little more than glows on the walls. Brymn moved confidently enough, so perhaps the lights were brighter in the nonvisible, to a Human, part of the spectrum.
Mac let her mind worry at Dhryn senses and experiments to test their differences. It was better than letting her mind think about the mass of planet mere centimeters above her head, or the way her imagination raced back to all the old horror films she’d watched with Emily, in which the heroes were inevitably lured into a dark, deadly basement.
She’d complained how unrealistic the scenario was. Who would do such a thing? Emily had argued that each basement was a test of courage. Until the heroes faced such a test, the audience couldn’t believe in their ability to ultimately defeat the monster.
Mac didn’t feel courageous. She felt trapped. And she didn’t feel capable of arguing with one exasperating Dhryn, let alone defeating a monster.
If this was a trap, and she never left here again, what was the range of the bioamplifiers accumulating in her liver and bones? Even if the rock overhead didn’t matter, what of the shroud lining every cavity down here? Was she as hidden from Human sensors as the Dhryn’s oomlings were from the Ro?
If so, she’d become a mystery that should annoy Nikolai Trojanowski for some time.
Thinking of another Human was the last straw. Mac stopped, hands carefully away from the walls leaning together over her head. “Brymn! Wait!”
If anything, her shouts spurred him to move faster. His voice trailed back to her, low and anxious. “No, no. This is no place for us, Lamisah. The Wasted could come to die here. Hurry.”
“Wonderful.” At the thought of rotting, mad Dhryn waiting to grab her from the more-than-abundant shadows—yet another horror staple Mac could do without—she scampered after the Dhryn, almost running into him from behind. “I hope you know the way out of here.”
“As do I.”
Luckily for Human-Dhryn relations, Mac had no time to formulate a suitable response. The very next bend in the accessway brought them to where it almost doubled in width and height. A welcoming brightness streamed across the floor from an entrance larger than those they’d been passing. As her eyes adjusted, Mac sniffed cautiously. The breeze lifting the wisps from her forehead was warm and sweet. She took a step toward that beckoning light.
“We aren’t going that way,” Brymn said. “Come, Mac.”
She paused. “Why? What’s there?”
“A crèche. Come. It’s only a bit farther.” He pointed down another of the dark, forbidding accessways.
“Oomlings?”
Mac was already moving, Brymn’s plaintive, “we’ve no time!” echoing in her ears.
The sight greeting her eyes made her forget the Ro, forget Emily, forget herself.
She wasn’t standing in an entrance. This must be the opening of a ventilation shaft of some kind, for beneath her feet the wall dropped at least thirty meters to the floor of the cavern in front of her.
Cavern? As well call Castle Inlet a rock cut, missing the glorious play of light, water, and life. This hidden place was nowhere as large, but it gave the same feeling of wonder. The far end of the crèche was so distant Mac couldn’t make out its shape, but its tiled, colorful side walls swung out and open like the arms of a mother. Golden rays of light from suspended clusters on the ceiling bathed the floor below, crisscrossing so even the shadows were faint and welcoming.
The light was only the beginning.
The floor, which rose and fell in wide steps, was covered with what Mac could only think of as immense playpens, each carpeted in some kind of soft green and bounded by woven silk panels in rainbow shades. Each held one or more adult Dhryn surrounded by a mass of miniature ones. Her first impression was of ceaseless movement and Mac eagerly searched for patterns. Sure enough, within a ’pen directly below her, the oomlings— for the tiny copies of Brymn could be nothing else—were sitting carefully on their rears, heads
oriented toward an adult who was gesturing with four arms, the way Brymn would do whenever enthused about a topic. In the adjacent ’pens, oomlings were milling around their adults, every so often hopping into the air with a random exuberance that brought a smile to Mac’s lips.
And the sounds. Low booming voices almost disappeared under what could only be called cooing. The oomlings? The hairs on her arms and neck reacted to something—more infrasound. From the adults, oomlings , or both? Mac wondered. In such a large space, the lower frequencies could be heard by all. Perhaps something being taught to all at once? Or was it as simple as a communal lullaby, for many of the ’pens held jumbles of smaller oomlings, arms and bodies wrapped around one another in peaceful confusion as they slept.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Mac thought, thoroughly enchanted, the oomlings weren’t blue or rubbery. From the tiniest to the ones almost the size of adults, they were white from head to footpad, and either wearing clothing like feathers, or their torsos were covered in down.
They might have six arms—she couldn’t see any with a seventh—but they called forth parental instincts even from a distance and even from an alien.
Brymn had come to sit beside her, his arms folded. “Our future,” he said warmly.
“Are those the Progenitors?” Mac nodded into the crèche to indicate the adult Dhryn.
“Of course not.” A subdued hoot. “Why would you think such a thing?”
Mac was tempted to retort: because you Dhryn keep your biology as secret from others as you to do from yourselves, but settled for: “If these were Humans, the parents—Progenitors—would be responsible for caring for their offspring—oomlings.” She couldn’t help but think of her dad.
And hope she’d be able to describe all this to him in person.
“Ah. Our Progenitors are responsible for the Dhryn. What you see below are—” he paused as if searching for the right word. “These are caregivers. They remain with the oomlings at all times. Just as the oomlings must remain here until they Freshen.”
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