“So this New Law is the source of the Earth-humans’ wild and unreasonable dislike of alien life?”
“Well, it turns out it’s not all that unreasonable, from a certain perspective. You see, the New Law had its origins way back before humans knew there was life anywhere but Earth. Back then, some fringe groups were making claims about alien abductions. Gruesome experiments. People being probed by alien creatures. These people were called UFOers. They were also called nuts, because no one believed their stories.”
“Were their stories true?”
“Only in one or two rare cases. The point is, after Earth’s ‘First Contact’ with an alien civilization, the UFOers crowed that they’d been right all along. They claimed they had some secret knowledge that aliens were out there all along. By the time of the Orinoco Event, the UFOers had organized into the New Law faction. And then they said aliens were not only real, but a threat to humanity. A lot of people were ready to believe them. By then, the Authority needed the New Law to help them keep control of things. So when the New Law insisted that Earth cut all contact with other worlds, the Rift was born.”
“But Mars continues on, as does our cloister, despite this Rift?” asked Hamish.
“Well, there are a few big, commercial mining companies making a go of it on Mars, some ag co-ops and half a dozen private groups like the Ciscans. But the Rift has just about strangled the life out of the smaller farms and colonies still hanging on in the valleys. It’s only trade with the planets of the Accord that’s kept Mars alive. Just barely, but alive. And now there are rumors that the Authority might be ready to start up trade again with Mars. That’s what the boys were talking about.”
“But will that New Law segment not object at ending the Rift, if there are aliens on Mars?”
“Like you? And our patients at the cloister?” Zenn said. “Yes. They’d object, alright. But we don’t get much real news from Earth, so we don’t really know what the balance of power is like right now. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
A low, distant rumble could be heard then, echoing off the cliffs from the direction of the cloister.
“Sounds like Otha’s on his way,” Zenn said. She went to the boulder where she’d left the shotgun and picked it up. “Good thing I was armed. Those kids could’ve stolen our whalehound.”
“But why would…” Hamish said. “Ah. You jest with me.”
“Yes. Just kidding,” Zenn said. But she thought then of what might have happened if adult towners, and not those boys, had discovered her and the helpless hound. She hefted the gun in her hands and decided not to pursue that line of thought.
FIVE
Early the next morning Zenn woke to the sound of voices echoing up the stairwell outside her dormitory room. She rose and draped her robe around her shoulders. Katie, curled up in her usual sleeping spot at the head of the bed, looked up and blinked at Zenn.
Zenn made sure the little rikkaset was watching her, then raised her hands and made the sign for “Good morning, Katie.” The rikkaset responded with a luxurious stretch and a yawn that showed off a set of needle-sharp teeth. Then, she sat up on her haunches and, dexterously using her long-fingered, raccoon-like front paws, signed “Katie hungry. Hungry Katie eat?”
Zenn signed back “Yes. Come on,” and Katie hopped down from the bed and followed her out into the hall.
Eleven other doors lined the hallway on this floor, all closed, all the rooms empty, except for Hild’s and Hamish’s. The ground floor held another twelve identical rooms – rooms that once housed paying students.
Hamish’s door opened, and he ambled into view, ducking through the doorway before standing up to his full height. He came down the hall, adjusting his chainmail vest with two claws while grooming one of his antennae with the specially adapted claw on his upper left arm. His straw hat hung down on his back, its leather chinstrap looped around what passed for his neck. Otha had only recently convinced the coleopt to vacate the sleeping burrow he’d dug into the hillside next to the cloister’s physic garden. Her uncle had made it clear to Hamish that he needed to move into the dorm, explaining it simply wasn’t proper for the cloister sexton to live in a hole in the ground. Coleopts only required two to three hours of sleep at night. In order to wake up when everyone else did, Hamish had adjusted his sleep periods so that he went to bed around four in the morning. This let him synchronize his schedule with the waking hours of the cloister’s human residents.
“Good morning, novice Zenn,” he said, his hard hind claws scraping on the floorboards. “Hello, mammal-rikkaset.” He leaned down to pet Katie, but then straightened back up immediately.
“I would stroke the animal. Do I have your approval for this act?”
“Yes, of course,” Zenn smiled up at him. He bent down again, but the rikkaset shied away, hiding behind Zenn’s legs.
“She doesn’t quite know what to make of you.”
“I’m still peculiar and outlandish to her.”
“Here,” Zenn said, picking Katie up and setting her down again between her and the towering insect. “We’ll show you what she’s learned to do. She likes to show off.” Zenn signed, and also spoke the words aloud so Hamish could follow: “Katie, sit.”
Katie sat.
“Very impressive,” Hamish said. “Good mammal.”
“No, no,” Zenn said. “That’s not the trick. Watch.”
She signed and spoke: “Katie?”
The rikkaset’s golden eyes followed Zenn’s hands, keen for whatever was coming. “Katieeee… blend.”
The rikkaset instantly crouched low, froze in position, and stared straight ahead. Then, her violet-and-cream fur began to move. For a second or two, the fur rose and fell in ripples from head to tail, then the rikkaset’s entire body seemed to blur. This slightly out-of-focus Katie-outline now took on the brownish tint of the synthwood flooring beneath her. A second after that, she disappeared.
Hamish started to say something, but Zenn wasn’t finished.
“Katieee… un-blend.”
A spot on the floor before them quivered, the brownish, indistinct shape of a rikkaset reappeared, turned to a vibrating swirl of violet and cream, and then Katie was there again. Her ringed tail whipped back and forth with excitement as Zenn praised her.
“Good Katie. Good girl,” Zenn said. “We’ve been working on blending and appearing again on command. I think she’s got it.”
“I have heard such animals are capable of this. But I have never seen it. How is it accomplished?”
“It’s her fur. It’s refractive.” Hamish shook his big head, not understanding. “That means each hair can re-direct light that hits it, kind of like a bunch of tiny prisms. It’s a defense mechanism, rikkasets evolved it for hiding from predators. There are a couple species of lightshifters, but Smithson’s rikkasets do it best.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Hamish leaned down again to pet Katie. This time she let him draw his grooming-claw through the fur on her back. Then she sat down at Zenn’s feet. “And you have taught her hand-language. She must have an excellent brain.”
Zenn laughed. “Yes, quite the brain. Rikkasets have the mental ability of an Earther chimpanzee.”
Hamish continued stroking Katie, and the rikkaset trilled her pleasure at him.
“We had considerable excitement yesterday, did we not? With the mammal-hound,” he said. “Is the animal alright?”
“He lost a little skin under his chin. Probably scraped it when he went down, after I darted him. Nothing serious.”
“Your wielding of the tranquilizing bow was admirable. This must give you some pleasure.”
“Well… actually,” she said. “It might have been my fault he got out in the first place.”
“Your fault?” He tilted his antennae toward her. “How is this so?”
Good question, Zenn thought.
“I don’t really know,” she said. “It’s possible I… forgot to reactivate the energy fence.” The admission irked her,
intensely. It was bad enough having Otha reprimand her about the fence. And she couldn’t defend herself from his accusation. In the aftermath of the weird feeling she’d had while treating the hound, she’d been disoriented, her mind fogged. The truth was, she couldn’t say positively whether she’d reactivated the fence or not.
“You left the fence inactivated?” Hamish said. “Have you done such a thing before?”
“No. That’s just it. I always turn fences back on. Close the gates. Make sure everything’s secure. But this time… Well, I’ve been a little off, lately.”
“Off… off of what?”
“It means: not my usual self.”
“This sounds as if it makes you regretful.”
“Well, let’s just say I sunk my chances of getting a perfect score on my end of terms.”
“Ah, your testing scores. Can this damage not be remedied?”
“Sure. If I score high enough on the next two rounds.”
“And what is the next round?”
“In-soma insertion. In a swamp sloo.”
“Yes. The in-soma pod device. I must say that this seems hazardous. Is it? A hazardous device?”
“Not really. Not if you know the procedures.”
“But you enter this device, and then it is taken into the body of an organism many times your size. This is not a thing I would do voluntarily. Are you forced to do this?”
“No,” Zenn laughed. “I can’t wait, actually.”
“And what happens, when you are in some vast and monumental animal’s body?”
“Well, you navigate your way through the digestive system.”
“This has the sound of being highly unpleasant.”
“No. It’s fascinating. Really. And you’re doing it to help the animal. To diagnose and treat things that are wrong. Let’s say your swamp sloo has a duodenal ulcer. You navigate through the stomach and into the intestinal tract. Then, you stop the pod and activate the manipulator arms to extend. If the ulcer is small, you could apply some medicine and close it up with protein stitching. If it’s big, you lay on a derma-plast patch.”
“And then how does one… exit?”
“You’ve got two options. You could lightly irritate the stomach lining and have the animal regurgitate you.”
“You are vomited out?”
“Right. Or, you keep going forward through the small and large intestines and into the sloo’s cloaca.”
“What then?”
“You just let nature take its course and… plop!”
“So, the animal…”
“Yeah, you get pooped out.”
“I repeat. I would not volunteer for such a journey. I will acknowledge your enthusiasm, although I fail to understand your eagerness.”
“I’m eager because I’ve been looking forward to it forever. Plus, I know I can do it. I’ve screened every v-film on in-soma insertions that we have in the scriptorium library. And I’ve re-run them till I see the control panel in my sleep. A high score will help make up for the whalehound.”
Hamish was quiet for a few seconds.
“Novice Zenn, I haven’t been in-cloister long, but to forget a fence-switch, to allow an animal to escape. That doesn’t seem like your usual standard of behavior, if I may say so.”
Until the last few weeks, Zenn would have agreed.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I guess we all make mistakes.” Whatever happened, she wasn’t eager to dwell on it. “So, how are you settling in so far?”
“Oh, settling well. Although there is much to do. I’m learning that a cloister sexton has a multitude of demanding chores and tasks. Cleaning of pen and corral spaces, repairing items, feeding of the animals, more cleaning, running here and there.”
“It’s not what you expected?”
“Not entirely. Especially the chanting.”
“Chanting?”
“There is no chanting. Or wearing of brown cloth robes with hoods. I was under the impression there was considerable group vocal chanting at a cloister such as this. And robes. But there is not. This was disappointing.”
“Hamish,” Zenn said. “Did you look at the message shard we sent you, before you came to Mars? The information packet about the cloister?”
“I did not.” He admitted this with no apparent embarrassment.
“Well, the shard would have told you all about life here, the responsibilities of a sexton, the lack of chanting, things like that.”
“I understand. You are saying my knowledge of the cloister was deficient and if I had viewed the shard I might have decided cloister living was not to my liking.”
“Yes, Hamish, that’s what I’m saying.”
“But the Queen Spawn-Mother selected me from among all my sibling hatch-mates to come to Mars as sexton. I would therefore be sent despite any prior knowledge I might or might not have, if you see my situation.”
“Oh. I knew things on your world were… highly structured. But I didn’t know that’s how things worked.”
“That is its working. But still, I cannot help but feel it’s unfortunate there are not more students in attendance here. To help with the many tasks.”
“I’ve noticed Liam helping you out,” Zenn said.
“Yes, the person Liam Tucker. He is quite willing to assist me. He is very friendly, and curious, for a local human. Very curious, to know about the animals.”
“That’s great, though, isn’t it? A towner taking an interest. Maybe there’s hope for those people after all.”
“Hope? Are they otherwise hopeless?”
“Well, like those two boys and the whalehound. People can be afraid of things they don’t know anything about. Maybe Liam will tell others what it’s like here. That the animals aren’t just huge, dangerous alien things. He might tell them how… interesting they are. And that we’re just trying to help them.”
“He might well do this. And that might have instructive value,” Hamish said, then he looked down at the line of closed doors. “Novice Zenn, do you recall the time when there were more students at the cloister school? Helping with tasks?”
“Not really,” Zenn said. “The Rift with Earth had already started when I was born. So, it’s basically been this way for my whole life.”
His question prompted her to imagine, not for the first time, what it was like when the entire dorm had been buzzing with activity. Did students talk and joke with each other as they hustled out of their rooms every morning? Were they all good friends with each other, sharing their excitement about the animals they would work on or learn about that day? And did her mother join in the banter, when she was Zenn’s age and going through her novice year?
“Were you not lonely,” Hamish asked, “growing up in the absence of others in your hatchling group?”
“No, actually, I’m used to being the only… hatchling around here,” she told him.
“And what of your friends in the surrounding environment? With the townfolk in Arsia indisposed toward alien animals and those of us who deal with them, do you in fact have friendships or associations with others?”
“Um, no,” Zenn said. “I don’t… associate all that much.” The truth was, even if she was inclined to ignore the Rule about making friends, kids in Arsia City and the valley didn’t stay around. They grew older and left. They moved to Zubrin, or went to find work in one of the other larger settlements.
Friends leave. Everyone… leaves.
Talking about it, thinking about it was making her feel testy.
“Besides, it would be weird to have lots of others here,” she said. “All those bodies and voices, all those faces, swarming around all the time. I’m not really sure I’d like it.” But even as she said it aloud, she could feel the tug of curiosity. What would it be like? Other bodies, other faces, other personalities all around, every day, day in and day out? The strange mix of emotions this train of thought provoked made the whole idea almost overwhelming. No, she decided. It was better as it was. Less confusing. Safer.
“Zenn?” It was Sister Hild, calling up from downstairs. Zenn walked to the banister and looked down. The Sister was in the entryway of the calefactory hall. Next to her, Otha was pulling on his heavy work chaps.
“So, the princess awakens,” her uncle said, glancing up. “Good. You can assist. Get dressed and meet me in the courtyard. Did I hear our new sexton up there?” Zenn turned to see the big coleopt attempting to move quietly back to his room.
“He’s here,” Zenn said, then immediately felt guilty. “Sorry,” she whispered as he came to join her on the landing.
“Yes, director-abbot,” Hamish said, only half-concealing his disappointment at being discovered. “I am here.”
“Did you give Griselda that dose of mineral supplement with this morning’s feeding?” Griselda was a crypto-plasmodial seepdemon being treated for membrane parasites at the clinic.
“I haven’t fed her yet, director-abbot. I was about to attend to it. Right after breakfast.” His mouthparts quivered at the mention of food, the crescent-shaped mandibles rubbing together with a sound like sharpening knives. “Do I have your approval for…?”
“You haven’t had your breakfast yet?” Otha cut him off. “Early to wake, sooner to work, sexton Hamish.” It was a saying Zenn had heard many times. She got an uncharitable amount of pleasure hearing it quoted to someone else. Hamish’s antennae drooped, and he gave her what she imagined was a coleopt’s version of a long-suffering look as he went by, descended the stairs, and started off for the kitchen.
“Sexton,” Otha said, stopping him. “Patients eat first. Remember?”
“Yes, director-abbot,” Hamish said, turning reluctantly toward the door leading to the cloister yard.
“Did we get a shard?” Zenn called to her uncle. It was the same question she asked almost every morning.
“No, Zenn,” Otha said, kneeling to check the contents of his veterinary field kit. “Still no message from Warra. You’ll be the first to know, I promise. Hamish?”
Zenn Scarlett Page 6