“But—”
“The Full Council. Do it now. I … I was wrong. I wanted to believe we had common cause with Margda’s chosen, that Jorl understood and shared, no, that he embraced our goals to secure the safety of our people. But I see now that was just wishful thinking. He’s taught an abomination to Speak, to reach out to any of us at the most basic level. And for what? A whim? To see if he could?”
“Klarce—”
“No. You will not change my mind on this. You weren’t there. Here. Feel it for yourself. The horror. The violation.” With fading strength she isolated the recent experience in her own mind. The technique was much the same as disruption of a memory but instead of scattering the patterns during encoding she copied them and then spun that copy off into a small knot of nefshon threads. She shoved it at Sind through their connection.
“Summon the Full Council. Share that with them along with my contrition. I want their authorization to end this once and for all.”
“You want to shred the senator? They’ll never agree, and you need unanimity for that.”
“They will. You all will.”
“And how do you know it will even work? This senator was immune to our attempts to scramble a fresh memory and we still don’t know how that was possible. Even with eight councilors all working the shredding, he may be too strong.”
“Leave that to me. But for now, please, do as I ask. I … I do need to rest.”
She ended the conversation and called for Temmel.
* * *
SHE slept, a bit. Temmel had given her a cursory medical examination and supplied both an analgesic and the meds to keep her neuromuscular glitch at bay a while. She’d be fine, he assured her, provided she didn’t take any koph for at least a day. She smiled at him—hoping he was being facetious rather than naïve—and asked for a report on the field test of the devices invented by the physicist that had come up with them on the shuttle.
“Bernath tells me they were an unqualified success. The constructs of the conversants summoned remained coherent for the duration of the test. The two Speakers who participated reported some small degree of fatigue, but no different than one might expect from a prolonged summoning.”
“And how many did each manage?”
Temmel double-checked the report. “Ten, all told. Eight using the new technology.”
“How many of the devices did Bernath bring with them?”
“Sixteen.”
“Have them brought here. Give them whatever servicing they need to be in optimal condition first, but I want them set up and ready to use.”
“I don’t understand. If you need Speakers for some task, there’re far more than sixteen available to you here on Ulmazh. Why would you need to maintain constructs of any others?”
“Because other than myself, none of the Speakers here are now or have ever been members of the council.”
“Why does that matter?”
She waved him closer. He seemed so young. Or did she just feel old. “You already know that there are techniques of nefshon use that most Speakers—even those among the Caudex—don’t know about. The disruption of memories, the creation of memes. The maintenance of the index. All of these can be learned, but none of them are the sort of thing you’ll likely stumble across on your own. You’ve mastered them yourself.”
“Yes, but—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “I’ve told you, I expect you to replace me one day. When that happens, you’ll learn yet another technique, one that has only been used twice before in the entire history of the Caudex. One that is only known to councilors because it is too terrible.”
“And you mean to use this today?”
“If I’m not already too late.”
* * *
SIND had assembled the Full Council more quickly than she’d imagined he would, which meant his experience of her memory had shaken him as thoroughly as it had her. She’d taken as small a dose of koph as she dared, enough to participate in the council for a short while and no more. Despite her meds, she could already feel tremors in both hands. She had to keep this quick, had to keep them focused. The dread on the faces of the other councilors—both living and dead—when she arrived among them gave her hope that they would achieve a swift consensus. Until Nirl all but lunged for her.
“This is all your fault!”
She ignored the dead woman and looked to Marsh, opening with what she saw as a simple truth.
“I now believe my previous judgment was in error. Although Jorl ben Tral’s actions in seeking us out as he did would suggest he is not a thrall to the Alliance, I no longer believe his interests and actions will parallel those of the Caudex.”
“Agreed,” said Marsh.
Nirl slapped at the table with her trunk demanding attention. “How is this even possible? An abomination on the brink of adulthood? An abomination gaining access to koph, to Speaking, to the index? And on your watch, Klarce. How did you let it come to this?”
Klarce recalled Jorl’s assessment of Nirl, and despite the source drew calm from it. “Councilor Nirl,” she said, “all due respect to your greater powers of perception notwithstanding, you and the rest of the Full Council were privy to the same reports as myself. If I was blind to any warning signs, I regret that you did not bring them to my attention.”
“Damn you, I have the memory of that creature in me now.”
“As do we all,” said Kissel. “And we can choose to remove that soon enough. That’s not why we are here.”
“Agreed,” repeated Marsh. “And Klarce, while I find sharing your experience of the abomination deeply regrettable, I understand why you had Sind pass it to us. What you are asking has only been considered a handful of times, only performed twice.”
She bowed her head. “Do I have the council’s consensus that it is necessary in this instance? Will you name him rogue and commit yourselves to shredding his very being?”
“That he is rogue is beyond doubt,” said Soosh, nodding to Marsh as she took the floor. “No amount of rationalization or justification can excuse his decision to empower a creature that should never have lived with the ability to force itself on every Eleph and Lox—”
Melko, Sind, and Genz murmured approval of the assessment, interrupting and stopping Soosh. She let the pause linger and when none of the others felt the need to further amplify her words she continued. “But can we shred him? Just as we possess insights into nefshons that the Matriarch never imagined, it would appear that she taught him some few abilities that were never made public. How else did he resist the two teams that sought to prevent the memory of his summoning of Fisco, the event that precipitated all of this? And, too, we have his ludicrous explanation of why none among the Caudex have been able to summon Margda for years.”
Genz jumped in. “Soosh has the right of this. With respect to his abilities, we still don’t know what we don’t know.” He waved his trunk toward Klarce. “I assume this is why you asked for this extreme measure, rather than a reissuing of the physicality cascade meme.”
“It is,” she said.
“We are eight to his one,” said Kissel. “Surely he cannot stand against us all.”
“Perhaps,” said Marsh. “But I believe Soosh’s point is that we all have expressed the same certainty about disrupting his memory. We need to consider contingencies in the event that the eight of us are not sufficient.”
Klarce lifted her head and one by one captured the gaze of her fellow councilors. “As to that, I have a plan.”
* * *
TEMMEL hovered close at hand, insisting she hydrate, checking her blood pressure, and generally being a nuisance. But he’d done as she asked. The floor of her office had been littered with sixteen discs. Technology that was supposed to provide backup to Speakers serving sentry positions at the Caudex’s numerous portals would today be used to destroy a man. The misuse of such a breakthrough irked her, and it irked her that it irked her. Her thoughts on Jorl had been so volatile. His
smugness had annoyed her. His simple brilliance had charmed her. His earnest desire to be of service to the people had convinced her. But his enabling the abomination wiped all of that away. She would end him.
“You should rest longer before you attempt this,” said Temmel, as he ushered the last of the techs out of her office. “The combination of your meds and the koph creates an interactive effect that is more debilitating than just the sum of the two when taken separately. You’re going to burn yourself out if you don’t stop.”
“Waiting isn’t an option. I need to have sixteen past councilors here when I confront Jorl, which means I need them now. There won’t be time or will to summon them once the Full Council arrives and begins the shredding.”
He shook his head. “Then it’s not going to happen. At best, you can manage one more session of koph in the next day. Anything more and your body is just going to shut down. The physicist’s results are astounding, yes, but it still takes a full summoning to fill the discs. You can’t do that and Speak to Jorl.”
“Which is why I need you to not only summon the councilors for those discs, but to brief them as well.”
“Me? I don’t know what you’re intending to have them do. How can I brief them?”
“Do you need to know how to cook the meal to order it in a restaurant? Just tell them they’ve been called to lend their assistance in a shredding and to follow my lead when I appear to them.”
“Can you at least explain what’s going to happen?”
Klarce gave her assistant her most put-upon look, but he didn’t back down. Ill-timed, but good. The sooner he stopped backing down the sooner he’d be ready for a seat on the council. She sighed. “While someone is alive, they are surrounded by a coating of nefshons.”
Temmel nodded.
“The threads of it are woven tightly together. The members of the Full Council will descend upon Jorl’s nefshons and unravel that coating, thread by thread. It’s a slow process. Left to their own resources, a living being will automatically repair the nefshon coating, much like reconstituting a shattered hologram from a single piece. But disrupt enough of it, and the entire tapestry falls away.”
“But what will that do to the senator?”
“Physically, he’ll be unharmed, but his mind will be gone. His will, some would say, his soul. The essential part of him that drives his being and makes him a unique individual. He’ll possess the same knowledge he has now, but won’t be able to add to it. Nor initiate new thoughts or ideas. He’ll be a highly intelligent idiot, able to follow simple directions but little else.”
Temmel shuddered. His ears had fallen back and limp. The horror on his face was palpable. “No one deserves that.”
“Which is why it requires a unanimous decision of the Full Council to implement the process. They’ll join me when I reach out to Jorl. But they may not be enough. Jorl has caught us by surprise before. I need you to load up those sixteen discs with past councilors. I’ve prepared a list for you. Use the index and get to work.”
“But you—”
“Yes, Temmel, I’ll rest. I’m going to lie down right here, close my eyes, and attempt to nap. But only if you promise to wake me as soon as you’re done.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She moved to the couch and settled back. She even closed her eyes before waving her trunk one time more to get her assistant’s attention.
“None of us are proud to do what we’re doing today. But as we feel it needs to happen, let’s make sure we do it well.”
THIRTY
CLOUDLESS
PIZLO leapt from the airlock the instant Druz opened the outer door. He scrambled from the yacht and bounced across the airless surface of Ulmazh, careening wildly as he tumbled over the regolith. He’d been above Barsk before and gazed upon the naked stars, but that had been through the view port of a space station. It was something else again to have all the lights of the galaxy gleaming in the sky above him. So many of those stars warmed worlds not unlike Barsk, worlds overflowing with lives, both sapient and not. Worlds and lives that wanted to speak to him, to share their stories, to argue about insects and heroes and determinism and agency. For a terrifying moment he thought of just pushing off, flying free into the empty fullness of space, to embrace an endless moment of life and light and learning.
Then he remembered the true quest he was on, the threat to Jorl, and the moment passed.
The ship’s locker had offered gear for a wide variety of races. He’d opted for an environment suit designed for a Fant so he could use his trunk, but the one-size-fits-most design of the thing was intended for adults and he couldn’t help sliding around inside it. But no matter; though his progress lacked grace, he knew precisely where he was going. The moon itself had told him. Despite discouraging that part of himself that offered up visions disguised as conversations with his surroundings, he didn’t begrudge Ulmazh telling him where to find the hidden gate in the shadow of a crater. He’d have found it himself, eventually, either by walking every possible bit of surface or asking Druz to use the equipment onboard Jorl’s ship. He’d have found it; he still had agency, still exercised choice.
The gate hadn’t been locked, but it did require three hands close together to open, which no two people clad in bulky environment suits would be able to manage. But one person with two hands and a trunk could operate the mechanism with ease. The gate opened, revealing itself to be a small door built into a much larger one, providing access to a wide airlock. Pizlo entered, closed the gate behind him and studied the controls on the opposite wall. A few experimental taps later and the airlock filled with pressure and breathable air. The inner hatch opened. Pizlo stepped through, closed the door behind him, and climbed out of his suit. He left it in a corner by the door, the helmet stacked neatly on the rest of it, and glanced down the hallway that led away from this spot. He was inside the moon! He eased a packet of koph out of his bandolier and slipped it into his mouth.
Like the airlock’s gate, the hall was wider than it needed to be if only people came this way. It didn’t run long and stopped in front of a door with a button on the frame. It looked quite a bit like the entrance to the funicular on Keslo. Either that, or some kind of elevator. He pushed the button and entered the box revealed by the opening door. Moments later the door closed on its own and the whole thing began to drop straight down. An elevator then. Pizlo felt the koph starting to work and he reached for Klarce’s nefshons again.
In an instant he had a thread of her, holding it lightly with his trunk. He didn’t tug it, but sent his awareness running the length of it here in the physical world, tracing the distance between them until he knew her location as unerringly as any spot the world below had ever whispered to him. He let go of the thread, confident he could follow it back to its source, deeper into the moon. Klarce was here, in Ulmazh, and the elevator was taking him closer.
The door opened onto the sight of a middle-aged Eleph aiming something that was surely a weapon in his direction. It made sense of sorts. You wouldn’t have a super secret hidden base and not post a guard at the only entrance. But he still had to get to Klarce and he’d hoped for few delays.
“Don’t move. Keep your hands and trunk where I can see them. Who are you and what’s your business here? You’re not on my list, and there’s no one scheduled to be here.”
Pizlo pulled aside the strap of his bandolier to reveal his tattoos. He took a deep breath, hating himself for playing into his people’s twisted beliefs. The guard would have worked it out himself quickly enough, but he didn’t have time to waste. “I am Pizlo, Bearer of the Seven Moons, the Abomination of Keslo. You cannot see me, cannot impede me. I am the rain that goes unnoticed, the fallen leaf that is unseen. Stand aside as if it were your own idea and not something I suggested, because in truth you never heard me.”
The weapon slipped from the sentry’s hands, fell slowly to the floor and clattered as it bounced before laying still. He tumbled backward and nearly fell over the de
sk behind him. Shaking his head, Pizlo walked past toward another door and let himself through.
He found himself on a narrow walkway that ran straight a while and then rose up and turned in on itself as it struck off at a right angle, apparently running upside down. One hand on the railing, he set off and as he neared the upward curve his stomach lurched. He kept going, dizziness nearly causing him to stumble forward, both down and up. The negligible gravity of the moon was replaced by the normal pull of Barsk but from the opposite direction and then he was through and gazing back down at the path he’d walked and the door he’d entered through. Above him the platform branched into a series of endless gantries that rose up and connected massive boxes as far as he could see. He aimed for the nearest, climbed until he was level with its box and could peer in. He found dirt and stone, moss and mold, the whir of insects and smaller creatures, and all of it in service to the roots and bole of the meta-tree that rose up out of the box and launched itself up up up toward the core of the hollowed moon. Pizlo turned in place, and through the dimness could see that each of the surrounding gantries’ boxes held their own trees, a more precise arrangement than existed in nature but nonetheless all one would need to build a Shadow Dwell, of sorts. He clambered down into the box and made his way to the meta-tree at its center. Pizlo began to climb.
It made sense that if someone wanted to build a Civilized Wood then they’d have to start with meta-trees. The ones on the islands of Barsk had been there when the Fant arrived, but to create new ones why not grow them in pots like in a nursery? Big pots. Really big pots. Brought to the moon. How long did it take a meta-tree to grow? How long ago had they started all of this, not just bringing all the soil and pots and meta-saplings, but building the gate in the surface of Ulmazh and digging the corridor and the elevator shaft and hollowing out all the space to build a city, and where did they even put all the moon rock and stuff? The questions danced in his head as he pulled himself up through branches not noticeably different from those he’d known all his life in Keslo. There was a slight bounce and tug to his movements, as if the gravity wasn’t quite right, but otherwise once he’d lost sight of the potted Shadow Dwell he might as well have been back home. Ulmazh itself hadn’t answered any of the questions he’d been pondering but it did whisper suggestions and directions for the best route to take as he climbed ever higher.
The Moons of Barsk Page 31