Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

Tinor shrugged and flipped the toy over. It worked exactly the same way from the other end. So far the atellans she’d met didn’t have a lot of empathy for others. That was strange because she knew that Rageth had had that trait, though that may have come from being connected to others in an anipraxic network. The experience of anipraxia alone might have taught that level of emotional intelligence.

  Something made her push a bit harder. Maybe it was the fact that she knew Ei’Brai was watching. “What if they are out there, alive? Untouched by the plague? Alone and stuck, drifting in various corners of the galaxy?”

  Tinor inhaled sharply, as though the question irritated ium. “That is terrible for them, I suppose.”

  “Isn’t it our duty to rescue them?”

  “Why should it be our duty? We didn’t put them there. Leastwise your duty, Qua’dux. You come from another world.”

  “True. But I know one. He’s very nice. He misses being with other people like himself.”

  “They are people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then maybe they need rescuing. I don’t know. Why can’t they help themselves?”

  Jane looked out at the rain again and inexplicably felt like crying. The Kubodera couldn’t help themselves because the Sectilius had made it impossible for them to. It was painful to hear this kind of offhand comment from a child.

  The outriders had moved closer to the carriage, probably because visibility had been reduced due to the rain. There was a suesupus and rider just a few feet outside the window. The massive beast kept its head down, occasionally sniffing the ground and then snorting loudly, its breath rising in a cloud of steam in the cold rain. Otherwise, the animals were relatively quiet.

  Jane stayed silent for a long time. She didn’t understand why, but she was stricken with a feeling of bitter disappointment. She hoped that the people at the Hator complex thought differently than this child had been raised to feel. Jane hoped that it was only an ethos of self-preservation because of the cultural setback, or the vagaries of youth, that brought on this thoughtless attitude.

  She’d come here seeking allies. So far, she hadn’t found any. It made her feel inexplicably lonely. She should have brought Ajaya with her, instead of leaving her behind to help Alan and Ron. Ajaya had wanted to come. She could have used her support.

  Jane was formulating another question to ask the child when the carriage stopped. Jane looked outside and saw a rider dismounting. There were shouts, muffled by the rain.

  Tinor opened the carriage door and peered out. Iad slipped back inside, hair glistening with raindrops. “We’re here!”

  Jane heard some dull mechanical sounds and thuds, and then the carriage lurched forward again and the patter of the rain on the roof stopped. Another moment passed and the carriage stopped again. Tinor leapt for the door and slid out before Jane could say a thing.

  Jane stood and carefully eased out. She looked around. They were in a dim, cavelike structure without windows. There were some artificial lights and some illumination to one side that looked as though it was transferred from the levels above, similar to what she’d seen at Sten’s compound. It was dimmer, but that would be from the dismal weather.

  The suesupus stomped and snorted. The atellans who had escorted them from Sten’s stronghold ignored her to tend to the beasts. Some were already escorting them away down a wide corridor. Tinor was nowhere in sight. Jane stayed near the carriage to keep out of the way. She didn’t want to be stepped on. She forced herself to remember that this was a different culture. Things were done differently. Better to stay put than to wander off.

  A willowy figure glided around the side of the carriage. Her crimped, flowing hair was full and barely held back from her slight, angular face in a semblance of a haphazard braid. She swept Jane with a gaze from head to toe, but remained impassive.

  Jane didn’t need to be told that this was one of Rageth’s descendants. She looked very much like her. Tinor bounced around behind the woman.

  “Scaluuti, Quasador Dux Jane Augusta Holloway. I am Gistraedor Dux Jaross Rageth Hator.”

  Jane returned the greeting. “I am honored. Thank you for admitting us to your home.”

  Jaross dipped her head and turned, saying, “Let us have some refreshment and your story, Qua’dux.”

  17

  The child’s words echoed from every quadrant of Ei’Brai’s multiple brains. They are people?

  His Qua’dux’s answer—so swift, so pure, so emphatic. “Yes.”

  He withdrew from the Qua’dux’s mind until only the most tenuous connection remained.

  He didn’t know what to do with himself. Sectilius was his home. These were his adopted people. Disbelief ate at him. His limbs felt heavy and lifeless. They’d forgotten about him and his kind. They cared not a whit what had happened to any of them.

  That…hurt him.

  He hadn’t felt anything like this level of pain in so long. Not since the unending grief during his years of banishment. It was so strong it manifested in his body. He ached. His muscles twitched with tension he couldn’t shed.

  Would his dead shipmates have mourned his loss if their roles had been reversed and the plague had killed the Kubodera instead? Or would they simply have been frustrated by their inability to jump using his mind?

  Was he just a tool? Was he a beast of burden like the suesupus that pulled Jane across that accursed moon?

  The questions stirred up feelings he didn’t like. He’d thought he knew the Sectilius. He’d thought he understood them, as a people.

  They are people?

  His limbs thrashed in his sterile, empty cage. This could have been his tomb, if it weren’t for a terran woman named Jane Augusta Holloway.

  He sucked in water, expanding his mantle to its fullest point, and shot himself to the other end of the ship. Instead of the exercise soothing him, it fueled his anger. He jetted himself again and again, grief blinding him until he slammed into the wall of his enclosure.

  He barely registered the physical pain. The existential dysphoria was too great. He remained there, his limp body flattened against the glass, trying to feel anything but anguish and weak enervation.

  They didn’t want him back.

  He wouldn’t ever again be left in their care and he was glad. What a nightmare it could have been if he and all his kind had been forgotten, then reclaimed, only to be discarded again as they salvaged all of the ships like the Speroancora to build some primitive structure.

  If Hator wanted the ship, he would mutiny. He would never serve another sectilian. He couldn’t accept that fate after this grievous insult. He’d rather die.

  Over the distance he felt Jane. He saw what she saw: water falling from a sky he’d never seen except in her mind and Rageth’s memory.

  He felt Jane’s sadness. She cared for him. The child’s words had upset her too.

  He drifted. His limbs hung weakly around him, slack with spent emotion.

  He took in his environment for what it was: a prison.

  And even as he recognized that, he calculated a course correction to avoid a collision with stray debris—Jane had left the ship’s computer with an order to give him that level of control—unlike the Sectilius, who, in death, had left him powerless and stranded for decades.

  He snarled at himself angrily. He’d actually thought they might reward him for coming home. He’d hoped to be renamed—to leave the middling Ei’ in his past and become Kai’Brai, earning his place in the most respected rank a kuboderan could hold.

  They are people?

  He rejected the Sectilius and all their trappings—their titles and their procedures and their confinement. He was not their chained beast. He was Jane’s companion, Jane’s friend. She treated him as an equal, as a colleague. He would willingly serve with her for the rest of his natural life.

  This trip to Sectilius had been a fool’s errand.

  He would never again be the same.

  18

  Alan surreptitiously ki
cked one of the tires while he waited for the atellans to show up. The tire was that same green as everything else originating in the Sectilius system, but it was a tire and it didn’t look much different than a tire would on Earth. The vehicle had sixteen of them, in fact, arranged in four rows of four. So, yay—the Sectilius had also invented the wheel.

  The conveyance actually strongly resembled an amphibious all-terrain vehicle he’d seen once from World War II—proof that form followed function no matter where you were in the galaxy. It was slung low to the ground like a rectangular barge on wheels, and the side-opening doors lifted up, like a DeLorean, which he admitted to himself, begrudgingly, was fucking cool. There was a hoist in the back. He hoped it would be able to manage the load.

  Pledor had agreed to let him, Ron, and Ajaya take a scavenging team out in this vehicle to retrieve the engines they’d dropped from the shuttle. Alan was eager to get his hands back on those, but he was also salivating to get a look at this vehicle’s innards.

  Ajaya might be curious about how human internal organs compared to their sectilian homologues, but he wanted to see how human machine guts compared to sectilian machine guts. He’d showed up early in the ground-level garage where they’d originally been brought in, dragging along Ron and Ajaya, mostly for translation purposes since his grasp on Mensententia was the worst of all of them. Now they were waiting for someone to come do some kind of maintenance check before they got under way.

  Which never happened.

  A couple of Sten’s people showed up, climbed in, and started the vehicle—which was insanely quiet, goddamn it. He wanted to see if there was just one electric motor in there or one for each axle…

  They were staring at him expectantly with those blank, hawklike faces. He sighed and climbed in the back, grumbling under his breath as he pulled the door down behind himself.

  Ajaya looked at him, her eyebrows raised, “I’m sorry?”

  He sighed. “Oh, nothing. I was just hoping to see the flux capacitor.”

  Ajaya looked skeptical. Ron chuckled.

  And they took off.

  It was a gloomy day, like most days seemed to be here. It was drizzling but there was light on the horizon. It might clear off. The atellans had the engine’s homing device up front. So he just sat there and stared out the window. He didn’t know what he’d expected from the Sectilius ahead of time, but this sure wasn’t it.

  It was supposed to be exciting meeting aliens, but so far these folks were pretty anticlimactic. They were so, sort of, disinterested in them.

  Well, except for the women who kept trying to get in his pants. But that was too damn weird to be erotic. They were so cold about it. No preamble, no coy invitation, just sneak attacks to feel up his junk. He could be walking down a corridor on a way to a meal and out of nowhere a hand would be clamped on him. It was fucking embarrassing.

  He found himself pushing these women away and looking around wildly to see if anyone had observed the insane interaction. Of course no one ever seemed to notice, and Ron said the same thing was happening to him.

  At first Alan had thought it was kinda funny, but it had happened so much that now he was just in a perpetually wary state, keeping his distance from everyone and carrying stuff around awkwardly to keep his privates armored against invasion at all times.

  He was now very sorry for every bra strap he’d ever flicked as a twelve-year-old boy. For every unnecessary brush against a woman’s breast. For every time he’d stared at a woman’s shapely ass as she walked away. Was this how women felt when that happened? Like a piece of produce being squeezed to see if it was ripe enough? Jesus. It was fucking nuts and their culture just ignored it.

  Jane and Ajaya hadn’t complained so he was guessing this was not a phenomenon that they were experiencing. He hoped to hell not. Ajaya stayed pretty close to Ron. Alan thought that she was probably fending off quite a few of these advances. Alan needed a female warrior coming to his defense too.

  He sighed out loud.

  Ajaya was scrunched in between him and Ron. She patted his knee and said, “Is it really that bad?”

  He flinched and then rolled his eyes. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He looked over and caught Ron’s gaze. Judging by the wry look on Ron’s face, Ron knew exactly what he was thinking about and didn’t find it funny anymore either.

  Alan’s stare drifted from Ron to the dirty window on the other side of the vehicle. He saw a flash of red and sat up.

  There was a pack of six or seven very large nepatrox racing at a right angle to the vehicle on that side. Alan turned and there was another group coming down out of the hills from the other side, clearly bent on attacking.

  “Fuck!” he yelled.

  One of the atellans turned around and sent him a waggle-eared quizzical look, then turned back to face front.

  Ajaya was talking to the atellans in Mensententia. He caught the gist of it. This happened all the time and they weren’t worried. They were certain the vehicle was well balanced and couldn’t be overturned. It had been engineered with the nepatrox in mind.

  One of the beasts leapt at a tire with its mouth open. The vehicle shuddered but kept moving forward at its unhurried pace. The nepatrox was twisted grotesquely and flung beneath the other wheels. The vehicle ground over it with a sickening lurch and a distinct crunching sound that made him frown in disgust.

  Another threw itself at the window next to Alan and then rolled away, leaving a muddy streak behind. The same was happening from all sides. It was very unsettling but the atellans were unconcerned. He guessed they were used to it.

  Ajaya asked them about that. She interpreted for Alan. The atellan driver basically said, “We are the most sentient form of life on this planet, but we are not the dominant form of life.”

  Atellans were pussies. These nepatrox were everywhere, eating anything that moved, and keeping these people living like rats in cages. The Sectilius weren’t aggressive or competitive enough to deal with the problem properly. It was a miracle they’d survived as a species, really.

  But that was why they’d come to Earth, wasn’t it? The Sectilius were looking for allies in an intergalactic war—for people with more balls to fight the big, bad insect monsters. They were hoping that humans would turn out to be all the things that they weren’t.

  There was one thing Alan was certain of. Humans would never put up with this shit. If this were his planet? He’d devote his entire life to making sure those fuckers went extinct.

  19

  Jane followed Gis’dux Jaross Hator up a curving ramp that seemed to be carved from bedrock. Jaross wasn’t in a hurry and for that Jane was grateful. Since she was still nursing residual joint pain, she was glad of a slower pace.

  Tinor was too excited to be contained. Jane was unsure of how to handle that. She’d seen that children were mostly humored at Sten’s compound except when it came to studying, so she didn’t intend to admonish ium unless Jaross took some offense. And having Tinor along was useful, because the child’s curiosity was met with openness, rather than reticence. Children were humored in this culture in a way adults were not. Education of youth was a general cultural goal that unified the Sectilius. That was helpful for Jane’s purpose.

  Tinor fingered the green-coated stone wall thoughtfully. “This is a very old place,” the youth said with reverence and then skipped ahead up the ramp out of sight.

  Jane hadn’t gotten a look at the outside of the compound because the carriage’s small windows never afforded a view, but she knew what it had looked like in Rageth’s memories. It was very different from Sten’s stronghold. This was an ancient building, built into the side of a mountain before the atellans had their technological revolution. It had been modernized centuries before, but many elements of the past remained.

  Rageth had loved that about this place. For her, the connection to the very foundation of the planet made her feel peaceful and at home. That same feeling resonated with Jane now, and the sensation seemed strange—this was not
her home, and yet it was very familiar.

  Jane’s memories had merged with Rageth’s in a disconcerting way. They were not comprehensive. They were sporadic in nature and seemed to fill in gaps haphazardly, only when something triggered them. Once triggered, they suffused her with feelings that she recognized, but did not own. It was very like deja vu in a way. It made her want to pause and try to explore the fleeting sensations.

  Jaross kept step with Jane, silently. But once Tinor had been out of sight for a few moments, Jaross asked, “Has the quarantine been lifted? I have not heard news of this. News travels very slowly here, as I’m certain you’ve gathered.”

  Jane grimaced. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about the quarantine aside from the warning buoys we encountered when we approached the planet.”

  Jaross’s ears pulled back slightly, though her overall expression remained unchanged. “You’ve not come as an envoy from the Unified Sentient Races?”

  “No…” The ramp opened into a grand atrium. Jane stopped and stared. One of Rageth’s three-dimensional clay paintings was displayed on the large wall opposite. It had to be at least twenty by twenty feet.

  It depicted Ei’Brai in a natural environment. The expression on his face had an intense look that Jane didn’t recognize, and yet his many arms twined around him gracefully in what Jane knew to be a relaxed demeanor. The wall behind him was bright with the blues and greens of a sea, adorned with flowing strands of kelp and colorful sea creatures.

  Suddenly Jane was struck with the feeling of painting it—she felt the scaffolding and the harness Rageth wore, the way she pushed herself to complete the piece throughout a brief leave from the ship during a resupply mission. Rageth painted until her arms trembled and ached, until she fell into bed each night and slept like the dead only to wake a few hours later, driven to paint more.

  Jaross came to Jane’s side. Her voice was warm in a way Jane had not yet heard from an atellan. The sound of it buoyed her. “I see you are enjoying my ancestor’s work. Her name was—”