Confluence 2: Remanence

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  Suesupus, the giant hornless rhino of Atielle. What a stupid name. Not easy to say like rhino or hippo. He could shorten it to sues or pus but that just sounded dumb. Really, if it came down to names he was just going to call them “big fella,” and hope for the best.

  He stepped out in front of the boulder. He was really sweating now. He wished he had a canteen.

  A suesupus nearby pawed at the ground restlessly. Alan froze and watched the thing out of the corner of his eye. No eye contact. That could be seen as a challenge. The animal closed its eyes again and Alan breathed a sigh of relief.

  He took a step and then another. No big movements. Nice and slow. Nobody needed to get riled up. Just keep moving. Nothing to see here, boys and girls.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when he walked by a rather large one and it grunted. It was really more than a grunt. A grunt was mild in comparison to the sound that thing made, but he didn’t know what else to call it. It was similar to a snort, only several octaves lower than any animal he could imagine snorting. He felt the vibration of the deep tone rattle the ribs in his chest. Along with the grunt the beast’s breath blew across him—a hot, sour, vegetal wind, stirring the dust at his feet.

  He might or might not have hyperventilated for a moment.

  Then the tickle in his throat came back full force.

  He couldn’t stop himself from glancing at the animal. Its only visible eye glared at him with a lazy annoyance, but it wasn’t making a move to rise.

  He held his breath and took a few more steps. Nothing happened.

  He took a shallow breath and oh my fucking God he was going to cough. It was like a spark burning through his throat. Every breath just fanned the flame. His eyes welled with tears until he could barely see. He gasped and dry heaved and staggered forward, swallowing convulsively though he had no saliva left to wet his throat.

  He was sure he looked like a cat coughing up a hairball.

  He hated cats.

  This had happened to him once on a date. Not even copious gulps of water had quelled it, so he’d fled to the men’s room, where he’d coughed so hard his face turned beet red and he nearly vomited.

  Of course he’d still gotten lucky that night.

  He reached the engine and clung to a brace, trying to breathe without disturbing the animals surrounding him that would be measured in metric tons, not kilograms.

  Then he lost the battle. He let out a strangled cough.

  Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He hacked and coughed until he was doubled over, gooey saliva dripping from his open mouth.

  He’d thought a grunt from one giant hornless rhino had been disconcerting. Now he was faced with a rumble. The ground shook as dozens of suesupus staggered to their feet and started milling around, snorting and pawing.

  He watched in wide-eyed disbelief as they swung their massive heads from side to side, trying to see him better. Dust swirled around them. Their ears cocked, trying to triangulate the sound that was disturbing them.

  But he couldn’t stop coughing.

  23

  A red light flashed in the data oculus implanted in Ei’Brai’s right eye, but he barely registered it. His blood sugar was dangerously low. He hadn’t eaten for days. His glucose stores were gone. Wasting through muscle catabolism had begun.

  The health-monitoring device was urging him to eat.

  The thought of eating the food the Sectilius had left for him had become abhorrent. He was a caged animal that they had coddled, and that disgusted him.

  He couldn’t even remember the taste of wild food from his infancy—natural food, the food his ancestors had thrived on. All he knew was the nutritionally balanced, fish-flavored vegetable-protein-based food cube, manufactured on demand when he pressed a button.

  Every beakfull was the same. The same flavor. The same texture. It sustained him but it didn’t nourish him.

  He didn’t want it anymore.

  He drifted around the interior of his enclosure on the artificial currents, heedless to the ship’s status or to the needs of his human companions on the moon below. He heard their calls, but faintly, as though from far away. They didn’t ensnare his attention. Recursive thoughts tumbled over and over in his mind.

  He was in agony. Every one of his appendages was cramping. His hearts palpitated out of sync. His nervous system throbbed when it wasn’t shot through with stabbing pain. He couldn’t segment it away. It was part of the suffering and couldn’t be stopped.

  He’d been left to die and no one had given him a second thought. He and his kind had been cut loose the second the Sectilius had a problem. If the plague had been incomplete—if a percentage of sectilians had survived in a disabled ship—would those survivors have been forgotten along with him in the darkest corners of space?

  The Sectilius were taking care of their own kind. Many had been lost. They were rebuilding a broken society. These things he comprehended and did not fault.

  What he abhorred was that they had worked so hard to convince him from infancy that he was one of them. He’d bought into it. The culture, the mindset, the reward system for honor and valor.

  The Kubodera had been taken in, adopted, treated like treasured family members, then abandoned.

  But was there a fallacy in that statement? Had they been taken in, or kidnapped?

  Jane had asked him that once. If he was a slave. He had responded to that question as though it were ridiculous. But was it? Or had her keen intuition been correct as usual?

  The sectilian child with Jane had asked if kuboderans were people. Just a few decades after the plague, kuboderans were not even studied in schoolrooms? Not even as a part of sectilian history? What about zoological studies? Astronomical studies? Engineering? Psychology?

  Had the Kubodera ever been equals? Or had they been a commodity to exploit as long as conditions were favorable?

  All the people he had known over the centuries of his long life…he had felt such affection for so many of them. Had that devotion been genuinely returned or was that part of the lie to keep the beast of burden appeased?

  The warmth, the humor, the sharing of memories. He’d been in their heads. He should have been able to spot deception like that. Had he been deceiving himself too?

  Not with Quasador Dux Rageth Elia Hator.

  Rageth.

  She was the only sectilian who’d allowed—no, encouraged—him to use her informal name. It had been such a break of protocol that he indulged in that intimacy only during rare, deeply moving moments.

  Her love for him had been genuine. He was certain of that.

  She’d taken special care with him, more so than anyone else ever had. She kept him closer, gave him greater access, relied on him and his wisdom.

  She believed him a worthy friend. She respected him. She shared her life with him.

  He’d always been so eager to dig deeper with her predecessors, but so few could bear that. They found it too uncomfortable, too familiar. It was enough to use him to communicate with ship and crew. They kept him out, held him at the surface. They shared only the memories required of them as part of the ancient contract between their peoples.

  In exchange for a kuboderan’s professional expertise, one had to be compensated adequately for the trial of confinement. To that end, they were allowed to accompany scientists, mentally riding in their minds, when on site during observation and experimentation. In addition, there was an expectation that there would be an allocation of older memories, allowing a kuboderan to explore the universe inside the minds of sectilians in ways their own physical bodies would never be allowed to.

  Rageth had told him once that sharing her memories with him in the ritualistic way they indulged in allowed her to live her life anew. She said that he uncovered details, sensations, and sentiments from moments long past that took her breath away.

  It all came from her mind, but to her it felt fresh and made the memories more meaningful. He could see how sunlight had given her environment a ros
eate glow, when she had only seen that it had been a clear day. He would notice the way the air tasted or how the wind had swirled around her skin. Her mind had recorded so many details, but she did not know how to access them in the way that he could.

  She often said he gave her back her youth—this time to enjoy it.

  They both enjoyed it.

  It didn’t matter.

  It shouldn’t matter. Not anymore.

  All of his people were gone. He couldn’t turn to them for reassurance now. He couldn’t inquire, and he would have been too proud to inquire then, regardless.

  He felt a small measure of optimism. He thought perhaps…perhaps he had been a good influence on their lives even if they had not recognized it themselves.

  When new crewmembers came up from the colonies or Sectilius who had never been aboard a ship before, they tended to not be well liked at first. They were often seen as selfish. Living on a ship was very different from living on a planet, station, or outpost. It was always an adjustment, and some adapted better than others.

  But time in anipraxia had a way of changing people—most of them, anyway. Everyone who lived in ship communities knew about this phenomenon. It was like a second coming of age. A chance for the mind to grow and be opened to new points of view, to cultivate compassion and empathy. Many Quasador Duci left ship life to become leaders on their home worlds when it came time to retire, to lead their people with a newfound skill.

  Perhaps he had helped to change them. Their time on the ship improved them as individuals. He felt almost sure that those crewmates would have given their lives to save him, if they’d been faced with that choice, as he had fought to preserve them.

  And he knew that despite the callous indifference toward him and his kind among this generation of sectilians who had never known ship life, his life was still…perhaps…better than it would have been without them. Despite his confinement he had lived long and seen much, even if it was through the eyes of others. He had certainly lived longer than any of his wild brothers and sisters on the world whose name he did not know.

  That life, the life of his progenitors, was a feral existence. Feast and famine. Struggle and unceasing danger. Once mated, he would be condemned to death. His counterpart would oversee the growth of the offspring until hatching and then she, too, would die. Neither of them would ever see their progeny grow to adulthood as sectilian and human parents did. Their children would become food for hundreds of predators until only one or two remained. He was spared the pain of watching that.

  He was also spared the harsher confinement that nonsectilian races sometimes subjected the Kubodera to, illegally. Tanks smaller than the arm span of an individual. Primitive filtration equipment that didn’t adequately scrub the water of unsanitary contaminants. The choice between suboptimal food or being hungry. He’d heard stories of his kind going mad under these pitiful conditions. Without the yoke that the Sectilius used to maintain strict control of the kuboderan navigators, some had committed suicide, taking ships of people with them, flying into a star or black hole, venting the atmosphere, charting a catastrophic collision course.

  It had been a blow to hear those words from the child, Tinor. But it could be worse. His tank was sparkling clean. He was safe. He had an excellent commanding officer. He had never been forced to hunt or kill sentient creatures to survive.

  He shuddered with a spasm of pain. He was unwell.

  Perhaps… Perhaps it was time to consider eating again.

  24

  Alan kept trying to strangle the cough, but the dust was swirling around him and it was about more than the tickle in his throat now. He’d taken some of that dust deep into his lungs and his lungs didn’t appreciate that at all.

  He pressed himself against the engine and watched with increasing dismay as the animals began to stagger around. One of them lowered its enormous head and pushed the engine. It scooted a few feet. Alan was pulled stumbling along with it as he stubbornly held onto an exhaust collar.

  His bleary eyes abruptly focused on another suesupus bearing down on him. Shit got real—real fast. There was nowhere to hide from the charging beast.

  He scrambled up on top of the engine, dimly noting melted and crushed components as he did so. The fire had done a lot of damage, and being pushed around by mammoth animals had not been optimal. This engine would take months, maybe years, to repair under the primitive manufacturing conditions currently prevalent on Atielle.

  The suesupus slammed into the engine, sending it sliding in the dust until it stopped suddenly as it met a patch of uneven ground. Alan’s body wasn’t anchored in any way—just his hands, which were wrapped around a coolant manifold—so he flipped like a hinge, landing on his back with his arms extended, hands still gripping the pipe.

  The air whoofed out of him. He saw stars.

  He ended up arched over something that was damn hot from the sun beating down on it. It took a moment to feel the heat. His cybernetic leg locked up as it began to run a diagnostic, which it was supposed to do when he was in an accident. He hoped to hell it hadn’t been knocked loose again. He was in too much pain to tell.

  He managed to roll over onto his stomach, rotate his hands, and lock his good ankle into a crevice just before another suesupus nudged the engine again. He continued to cough and wheeze and generally just try to breathe and hold on as the peevish beasts took turns pushing the source of their consternation across the dusty valley floor in quick, violent bursts, kicking up thick clouds of dust each time.

  They were playing Atielle’s version of air hockey with him as the disk in play.

  Then he felt the sickening lurch as a suesupus stuck some portion of its head anatomy into some element of the defunct engine and lifted one side. He hovered upside down in the air for a second before the engine came crashing back to the ground so hard his teeth rattled.

  That was when he heard Ajaya and Ron. They were up on the ridgeline, whooping and hollering and waving their arms while the two atellans stood nearby silently. For a long moment he waited, holding his breath as long as he could, gasping for air only when absolutely necessary.

  The engine remained still. He dared to open his eyes and saw that the beasts had redirected their attention to the ridgeline.

  Mentally he cursed and wished they would shut up. Eventually the beasts would have gotten bored and left him alone. He could have quietly limped away. But Ajaya and Ron were stirring up more trouble. He didn’t want to be responsible for the damage that might cause. The last thing he needed was for his friends to get hurt because of his own stupidity.

  Through slit eyes, he watched one of the closest suesupus nodding its head vigorously. It scraped one of its three-toed front feet in the dust before loping toward the steep slope trumpeting a sound that felt like it could break his eardrums. Several others followed in the moments after that. Soon the entire group was heading for the ridge. The vibration caused by the stampede and the suesupus vocalizations transmitted through the engine into Alan’s body.

  Alan blinked grit from his eyes. Ron, Ajaya, and the atellans piled back into the ATV and took off. He wearily lowered himself off the engine and set his good foot on the ground gingerly, grimacing when the cybernetic leg made contact, pain shooting straight up his spine into his skull. That leg was still locked up. He closed his eyes for a second to let himself acclimate, then tried to figure out which way would be the best direction for hobbling to safety.

  He was freaking the fuck out—the bum leg might not let him climb the hill.

  The ATV zoomed around the perimeter of the ridge then went out of sight, the suesupus hot on its tail. Alan cursed. He knew they wouldn’t leave him there, but he also didn’t know what their plan was.

  He reluctantly attempted to make contact with the Squid, but felt only dead air where normally there would be an effusive response. So much for help from that quarter. What the hell was the Squid doing up there, anyway?

  Alan gimped to the boulder he had originally hi
dden behind. It felt like a touchstone. He’d been safe there before. From there he considered the possibilities. How long would the suesupus be distracted? Would they wander back the way they came? Would they still be in stampede mode? Would the sight of him enrage them again?

  The bad leg was nothing more than a peg at the moment. Climbing the steep slope wasn’t a possibility, but he could try clambering up one of the gentler sloping areas as a tripod, dragging the bad leg behind him.

  He had just picked a spot and started for it when he came face to face with an immature suesupus. It couldn’t be very old. It was the size of a draft horse. It snorted and tilted its head like a curious dog. Alan hadn’t even heard it coming. He’d assumed they were all up chasing the all-terrain vehicle.

  Alan sighed. The suesupus backed up a few steps, then slowly, almost daintily, came forward again.

  Alan decided to ignore it. What else could he do? He wasn’t going to get out of the valley unless he moved.

  He edged around the creature toward his goal.

  The suesupus grunted, low and throaty, and began to sniff the air around Alan.

  Alan kept gimping.

  The baby suesupus followed. It moved in closer until it was touching Alan’s body, snuffling in his hair, nudging his arm to get its nose up in his armpit.

  Alan froze. In his peripheral vision he saw the atellan vehicle sweep over the crest of a hill and into the valley. It was barreling across the dusty plain straight toward him.

  Alan turned and started moving in the direction of the car.

  The suesupus grunted again, louder this time, and nudged Alan so hard he stumbled forward onto his good knee.

  He barely suppressed screaming a string of curses.

  The car was racing closer.

  The suesupus stuck its nose up in Alan’s junk. He’d had just about enough of that business.

  Without thinking, Alan whirled around, arms swinging wide, with an instinct to do violence. But then he just looked at the damn thing. It was cute as all hell. He couldn’t actually hurt it.