Barsk

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  “Dad?”

  Arlo brought both of Jorl’s hands tightly down on the end of his trunk, forcing himself to smile through the sudden pain. Never once in his life had his son called him by anything but his name.

  “Shhh. You hit your head. It’s me, Jorl.”

  “Well, yeah, I know that. But does he know you’re in there, too?”

  “I have inventory access ready for you,” said the Brady from another workstation.

  “Right.” Arlo twined his trunk with Pizlo’s, one final time more than he knew he deserved. “I have to go. There’s something I have to do. I love you, Piz.”

  The boy grinned, a wide smile as full of innocence as the morning rain. “It’s all right. You’re going to make sure that Jorl can fill this whole room.”

  Arlo returned the smile. “You always were such a strange boy. Don’t ever let anyone take that away from you. And try to listen to your mother. She loves you, too.”

  Pizlo yawned, squeezed Arlo’s trunk with his own and then let it go limp as his eyes closed. “I will. I love you too, Dad.”

  A moment later, Arlo took a seat at the workstation; the Sloth hovered over his shoulder, offering assistance though he found the interface familiar enough. The orbital station contained seventeen warehouses; five had been emptied by recent transports but twelve more waited, bulging with thousands of cargo pods containing all the riches created in Barsk’s rain forests. The interface let Arlo sort by content rather than by warehouse or individual container contents. He began by compiling a list of the few components he needed, then added three times that amount of other unrelated and useless items, including some that even on a recording would be hard to distinguish from the necessary bits. To save his son, to save all of Barsk, he would give them the finished drug, but maybe he could also manage to keep them from learning how to create it for themselves.

  * * *

  TIME seemed to pass more slowly as he worked; it had always been so. Throughout all the years of his life with Tolta, Arlo had come home late for dinner seven out of every eight times. His wife hadn’t complained, instead finding it the secret to their successful cohabitation. Unlike most males, the urge to wander from home had never claimed him. His work kept him away enough. The time he spent as a pharmer ran differently than the rest of time, rewarding and engrossing and ever fresh.

  He’d moved into the clean room when his supplies arrived and gone immediately to work. Glancing up and through the wall, he studied the lab. The Brady sat at a workstation as though stone, one three-fingered hand curled in her lap, her eyes fixed upon the screen in front of her. His son lay on the med table, sleeping and healing. And yet Arlo did not doubt that a dozen eyes watched him. Watched and recorded.

  Margda had left, whispering to him while the Sloth had supervised a pair of arriving Ailuros in the placement of his supplies. The Matriarch needed to retreat and let her borrowed body rest. He hadn’t met an Otter before, but even he could see signs of exhaustion. She’d rested a hand on his arm, less to reassure and more to hide a tremor that she could not dismiss as easily as she had her host’s consciousness.

  Despite the awkward wrongness of Jorl’s body, Arlo’s years of practice in the lab proved to be as much a matter of experience as physicality; he managed his task adequately, owing in large part to the elaborate provisioning of the clean room. The senator had provided every conceivable bit of pharmaceutical apparatus, and not even Jorl’s untrained hands could counter such an advantage. Clearing his mind of thoughts about his son, about the fate of all Fant on Barsk, about the other thing he’d neglected to mention to the Matriarch, Arlo threw himself into the work and let the rest of the world fall away. That focus, more than any telepathic trick from Margda, kept him in Jorl’s body and allowed him to complete the work. Over the course of half a day, he re-created the taww derivative that had been his last great achievement in life.

  When he had finished, he held a single slim phial of the stuff. Margda would have him give it to Bish, and maybe it would resolve the threat hanging over Barsk, but only for a time. In the end, the drug would not be seen as a boon, but as a betrayal, and from what Jorl had said of the senator, Arlo knew his reaction would be brutal. He didn’t understand the scope of galactic politics nearly well enough to guess if the result would be the destruction of his people, or an increase in the Alliance’s dependence on Barsk. Either way, being dead, it wouldn’t touch him. And that was the point. Even with the threat to Pizlo, the choice wasn’t his to make; it would have to be Jorl’s.

  Now that he had finished, his concentration began to slip away. He could feel Jorl, like a pressure against the inside of his skull. Lightheaded, he sealed the phial before he inadvertently spilled it. The Brady still hadn’t moved, frozen like a statue, that one. All the same, he took a flask of water from a stand where moments earlier he had set it to heat and waved at her.

  “I need a quick break,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit dizzy. Would you like some tea? I find it very refreshing during labwork.”

  The Sloth’s head came up. In an instant she was staring right at him.

  “I’d wondered when I saw that among your supplies. Thank you for the offer. I have no need of refreshment, but I wish you enjoyment of yours.”

  Her focus returned to her work station and she returned to her stillness.

  Arlo simply shrugged. It had been a burst of inspiration to add the expensive tea leaves to his list when he saw it amidst the inventory of items. Fanning both ears, he added what he needed to the water, steeping it even as he moved a bench closer to the wall so he could sit and lean.

  The time had come to reveal the last piece, the other reason he had died, and as certain as he was of being recorded, he couldn’t simply leave him a note. He hoped he’d done the right thing. He needed one last conversation with Jorl, and he only knew one way to make that happen. He thought of Tolta, and while he knew she’d have understood his suicide if he could only have shared the details, a sorrow rose up in him that he had never bid her a proper goodbye. He glanced through the wall of the clean room to where his son lay sleeping, and gave thanks that he had gotten to see his boy one last time. Then he closed Jorl’s eyes and committed himself as he had that time before. He fancied he could hear the wind as it had shouted at him on the edge of the canopy. He pushed off, dying for the second time.

  THIRTY

  LOCK AND KEY

  JORL opened his eyes and the weight of the world returned to him. The immolation of the Dying flickered across his thoughts again, tightening his chest and dragging his head down. He flexed his fingers, twitched his nubs, flicked first one ear and then the other, and shifted his attention to what the Matriarch had done to him.

  In part it was almost like waking up, only he hadn’t been asleep. Rather, for half a day he had been outside himself, watching as Margda’s enslaved Otter had guided him through the station and onto the senator’s ship and to a laboratory. The Sloth had been there, and Pizlo as well. And then his body had stepped through a rush of air into a transparent box and gone to work with skills he didn’t possess.

  Arlo’s skills.

  And now he was back. He sniffed the air, recognized the aroma of spiralmint and tracked its source, a beaker, dark with tea, and a shade of color usually imparted by including koph. In that outside-looking-in sense, he recalled making the tea, adding the koph, but not drinking it. The meaning couldn’t have been clearer.

  He dipped the end of his trunk into the beaker, filled it with tea and brought the tip to his mouth. He gulped it down, gasping at the extreme bitterness. Arlo had used far too much koph. Even before he had closed his eyes, Jorl sensed the swirl of his friend’s nefshons hanging all around him, residue of his recent possession. Automatically, his mind assembled a mental construct and when he shifted his awareness he was greeted by the familiar setting of his home.

  Every other time when manipulating nefshons he had done so with a specific person in mind, concentrating on unique aspects of the i
ndividual in order to pull together the right nefshons for a conversation. But now, with the particles already present, he simply guided them together before they had begun to diffuse. His construct of Arlo instantly took form.

  “Jorl, are you all right?” His friend’s expression looked surprised, almost frantic, nothing like the relaxed, almost bored poise he had affected at his many other summonings. Different even from how he had appeared earlier in the station’s cabin.

  “I’m fine. A bit tired. Also confused. What happened? What did you do?”

  “It was the Matriarch. After she vanished back in that station room, she somehow woke me up, inside you. Something about infusing the nefshons of my construct with your body.”

  Jorl nodded. “She did it, just like she said she would, so you could do the work in the lab.”

  “And I did. I re-created the drug. The reason I died. It’s in that phial on the table.” Arlo’s eyes moved to his right, landing on empty space to the side of Jorl’s writing desk at home. His trunk gestured vaguely. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. Thank you, Ar. It’s done now. I’ll give it to Senator Bish and maybe it will be enough to put an end to things.”

  “Wait. Before you do, there’s something you need to know. It’s not just a koph agonist.”

  “I know. You already told me about its effects on someone who has an aleph, or otherwise has that chemical in their system. We just have to hope that the senator never makes that connection.”

  “No, there’s more. I … lied to the Matriarch.”

  “What?”

  “I left something out. A lie of omission. But you need to know. Now, so you can decide.”

  “Decide what?”

  “Whether or not to drink it yourself.”

  “Why would I … What did you leave out?”

  Arlo started to speak, stopped and swallowed in an effort to relax, and then began again.

  “Okay, it’s not just like regular koph.”

  “You told me this before, it keeps the effects of the koph from ever wearing off.”

  “Right, but I didn’t explain how it works. I ran hundreds of simulations to be sure. The drug bonds to receptor sites in the Speaker’s brain, the ones involved with manipulating nefshons, just as normal koph does. But koph can’t stay on those sites; after a while those transmitters get washed away, taking away the perception and control of nefshons. My drug stays on those sites.”

  “I’m a historian, I’m not so good with talk of things like transmitters and receptor sites.”

  “Okay … think of a lock and key. The key fits the lock, turns the mechanism, and is withdrawn. Once unlocked, a door opens and the Speaker can handle nefshons. But only for a while, soon the door will close and lock again. That’s how it normally works.”

  “Lock and key. I got that.”

  “The agonist is like a key that sticks in the lock, in effect breaking the lock. And because the lock’s broken, the door can’t ever close again.”

  “But that’s a good thing, right? It means a Speaker only needs to take a single dose. That’s what the senator would want. It will reduce the Alliance’s dependence on us, no more constantly supplying them with koph.”

  “No, it only looks good in the short run. The solution is actually a lie. Those receptor sites, the ones responsible for handling nefshons, they can’t stop now. The door is flung wide and they keep going and going, day after day, season after season, until they eventually burn out, permanently destroying the Speaker’s ability.”

  Jorl grabbed at his friend with both hands. “That’s obscene! And you want me to take this drug? Are you insane?”

  Arlo nodded again, his trunk twitching. “Only because it won’t have that effect on you. The insect bacteria in the tattoo of your aleph is a harmless parasite. It feeds off of your body’s resources to generate its luminescence. In the process, it secretes chemicals, enzymes really, into your system. Some of those enzymes adhere to the new agonist when it bonds to those receptor sites, like a hand grabbing the key and pulling it back out again so it cannot jam and break the lock. Over and over, key in and key out, granting perpetual perception and control of nefshons but without burning out the mechanism.”

  Jorl let go of his friend and sat back, the contours of his familiar chair vaguely comforting. When he’d performed his first summoning as a Speaker, he’d envisioned this same space, but it lacked verisimilitude. It was the idea of his chair, the concept of his writing desk, that had made it feel real. But as his perception and manipulation of nefshons had improved, he’d likewise grown more adept at painting in the sensory specifics of his imagined space. And not just when summoning. His attention had improved, and his memory for detail had become more focused. It showed in his interviewing of conversants, and in his writing. If he didn’t have the aleph, if something like Arlo’s drug caused him to lose his ability as a Speaker, would those subtler skills vanish, too? Were they the result of talent or learning or some combination of both? He hoped he’d never have to find out.

  “Why didn’t you tell the Matriarch about this? This wasn’t simply a matter of worrying that the Alliance would learn of the connection between the bacteria in the tattoo ink and the increase in a Speaker’s ability under your drug.”

  “No, though I meant that, too. The agonist enhances the Speaker’s abilities. The simulations were inconsistent as to the extent of the power, but the potential was too great. No one should be able to do what it would allow. The other thing, the burning out of the ability entirely, I didn’t say anything because I thought maybe, just maybe, this could end things. That your senator would take the drug back to the Alliance and spread it far and wide, happily believing he was freeing all of their Speakers from the chains of Barsk. And then, in a few seasons, at most a local year, one by one they’d go blind to the nefshons and stop being able to Speak. Back before I died, when I first realized what I’d created, I thought about that same prophecy of the Matriarch’s, the one that had you so bothered? ‘When the dead will not answer, the Silence is at hand, and the fate of all Barsk will soon hang in the balance.’ I thought maybe that’s what I’d stumbled on.”

  Jorl gasped. Arlo’s interpretation of that line of prophecy changed everything! “Maybe you did. Maybe that’s what the Silence is, and not a couple hundred Fant stolen away instead of Dying.”

  Arlo smiled. “Maybe. Prophecy is tricky stuff, I think. I wish I’d thought to ask her when I had the chance, but you know how it is when she’s talking. All other thoughts go right out of your head. Which reminds me, that Brady? She did a scan of Pizlo and said his brain shows the same patterns as Bish’s precogs.”

  “Huh. That might explain a lot, like how he knew where the Dying had gone, and how he got up here in the first place.”

  “The thing is, that’s what changed my mind, Jorl. I saw my son, helpless and hurt, and I heard that Brady suggest that he could end up working for the senator, and it all just came together. I knew that giving Bish the drug wouldn’t work. This is the same monster you said killed all the old Fant right in front of you.”

  Jorl bit his lip, the unwanted memory flooding in again. “Not exactly. He was in charge of the Urs-major who did that. I only saw him give the order to kill that Bear, but he did it so casually, not out of anger or with any emotion.”

  “Okay, but my reasoning still holds. Wiping out the Alliance’s Speakers wouldn’t defeat or cripple him, it would only enrage him. The Sloth’s comment about Pizlo’s abilities cleared it up for me. All of this is personal to him. What kind of man can contemplate torturing a child or just as easily save him because he’s a potentially valuable resource? Giving him the drug would be a horrible mistake in the long run.”

  “But you made it anyway.”

  “Because … I could be wrong. What if I’m blinded by my own fears? By the emotions that well up when I think of my son? What if the Matriarch is right?”

  “Ar, you know your drug and you’ve had more time to think a
bout its ramifications than anyone else. Do you think she’s right?”

  “No, I think she’s blind, too, that she’s the same kind of monster as Bish, and like him she rushes ahead believing everything she sees is all there is to see, and forcing reality to bend to her will. But here’s the thing. We’re not hypothesis testing. Maybe I’m right, or maybe Margda’s right. This isn’t just a simple thought experiment to play with in the lab. It’s real and will affect every living Fant. That’s not the kind of decision that should be left to two dead ones. I’m really, really sorry, Jorl, but I re-created the drug to put the choice in your hands. It’s your decision to make.”

  “I can’t—”

  “No, you’re the only one who can. You have the tools. You’re a Speaker, you’ve studied all of the Matriarch’s prophecies, you’ve researched other critical moments in history and seen how individual decisions have rippled to produce both intended and unexpected outcomes.”

  “I really think you’ve over—”

  Arlo vanished in an eyeblink, and Jorl’s home with it. He sat on a stool in the lab on senator Bish’s ship, his back against a transparent wall. The senator’s aide had a tight, three-fingered grip on his right ear. She had entered the clean room and stood over him, round face surprisingly close to his own.

  “—stated my abilities.”

  “What abilities are those?” said the Sloth.

  “I … never mind. It’s nothing. Sorry, I was lost in thought.”

  “You were asleep. Understandable, I’ve seen how diligently you’ve been working, and I know how taxing it must be. But the senator has already queried me twice, and while he can be mollified by my sharing how hard you labor, he will have no patience for napping. Are you finished?”

  “Finished? Um, no, not quite. Soon. I’m down to the last few steps of the process. You can tell him that I’ll be done very soon. But, uh, even so, he still needs to be patient. He’ll have to wait another day, for the drug to … set.”