Deep Roots

by Ruthanna Emrys

  We drifted closer. We passed through brick and plaster; I might have imagined the moments of pressure against my skin. A maid gathered towels strewn in mad profusion beside a bath; I turned my head away from three people twined naked on a broad bed. They took no notice.

  “Is this it?” asked Clara.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” I said with relief. The room was unoccupied, but piled with books and files. Diagrams still covered their floor slate, now pushed to the edge of the carpet.

  “Very good.” Nnnnnn-gt-vvv flapped its wings hard, braking, and the scent of rotting fungus overwhelmed everything. We broke from the wind’s grip into the ordinary warmth of summer. I felt as if I could breathe again, as though whatever passed for air in that strange between-space hadn’t filled my lungs.

  “Whew,” said Clara. “Your friends have nice digs. Are we gonna get dirt on the carpet?”

  Limbs folded back to release me at last, and I stretched cramped muscles. “They need room for their work.”

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv turned slowly, stretching as well. I tried again to count its limbs. The effort was irresistible; I felt as though, if only I could nail down this one detail, I’d be able to understand it as well as any human stranger.

  You needn’t pretend—just ask who you’re talking to. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt had told me that, but it was still sensible. “I hope it’s not rude to ask, but how many limbs do you have?”

  Clara snickered, and Nnnnnn-gt-vvv’s buzzing stuttered a little. Laughter? Anger? Sympathy? “It’s not rude, but it’s not a question I could answer without a great deal of theoretical physics. Have you studied the field?”

  “Never mind.” Maybe I could get Trumbull to ask, later.

  “They’ve got terrible pictures of you. Look at this.” Clara had found the Outer One file, still lying on the table.

  I was tempted to explore, myself. It would be good to know more about their current obsessions. “Leave that alone. It’ll be hard enough, when they arrive, to convince them we haven’t been ransacking their files.” It only now occurred to me how displeased they’d be to find us here. There was no help for it; we could hardly wait in the lobby. And my stomach rebelled at the thought of hovering outside reality for hours.

  Grumbling, Clara consented to join me on the couch. Nnnnnn-gt-vvv folded low on the rug in front of us, trying to look slightly less intimidating. This is the longest day of the year. After it gets dark, we can tell the elders. They’ll know how to handle this.

  Minutes passed. The room was nearly silent. Only a faint blur of machinery, traffic, and distant conversation made it through the walls.

  “Last night,” I told them, “Acolyte Chulzh’th and I walked the dreamland near Coney Island. We found some of your … mushrooms? The things you make your wards from—growing there. Is that normal? Do they grow wherever you go?” I didn’t mention Glabri; it didn’t seem necessary and the ghoul would probably prefer discretion.

  “No, that isn’t normal.” Wings shifted and furled. “How far had they spread?”

  “All along part of a cliff face. Perhaps a few dozen feet.”

  “That must have been deliberate—and the spores must have been planted a day or two beforehand. They could provide the seed of a new mine, or a safe place to hide if the old one needed to be evacuated. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt must have been planning for the interventionists’ exile, if they failed to take the mine.”

  It didn’t surprise me to hear that the interventionists had so carefully considered contingencies. But it did make me more worried about trying to move against them. It would be a challenge to come up with a strategy they hadn’t prepared against.

  * * *

  When I wasn’t mulling Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s possible plans, I tried to recover the shreds of the solstice. I tested the strands that bound the confluence, plucking at the echoes of Charlie, Audrey, Caleb, Deedee. They remained fainter than they should be, and vaguer—and still more than I had of Neko. My anger at Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt burned in my chest, low and steady.

  The lock rattled. I started to stand, then sat down again. The knob turned. George Barlow stepped inside. He saw us, inhaled sharply, and drew his gun.

  “We’ve got company,” he said. He stepped aside, keeping his aim steady. Virgil Peters and Mary Harris followed, their own pistols drawn. I’d expected them to be angry at finding us here, but I hadn’t expected this. I tried to remember what I’d wanted to say. I tried to remember to breathe.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” said Mary. “I’m not even sure I want to hear your explanation.”

  “I do,” said Peters. “I’m pretty sure that’s the dissident Kevin was talking about. What’s he doing here? And who’s his pet?” Clara bared her teeth but had the sense not to respond.

  “Let’s take it easy,” said Barlow. His aim didn’t waver. “Kevin didn’t tell us anything about these guys that we shouldn’t have guessed earlier.”

  Aware of every shifting expression, I saw Mary swallow and blink hard. She’s more upset than the rest of them.

  “You tell me.” Mary looked directly at me now. “You tell me how you could stand there and ask for my help, and act sympathetic, and imply it was my fault for writing a bad equation, when all along you knew exactly what Catherine’s friend did to me. You tell me, and then you tell me why I should believe you now.”

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv’s tendrils spread wide. Its ubiquitous buzz filled the room and made my teeth ache. I tried to focus, to pull together an answer that would have been hard even without the image of my father’s broken body interrupting every thought. She deserves to know. It was probably impossible to say anything she’d accept; raw honesty was the best I could manage.

  “I was terrified of what you’d do if you knew about the Yith,” I said. “They don’t like people getting in the way of their studies. And they can travel through time. If they thought your government, our civilization, our species, was a threat to their archives, we wouldn’t have a chance. By the time we saw you again, it had fled home and left Professor Trumbull to deal with the outsider you’d raised. She was still trying to understand what had been in her head and why. I’m sorry. I wish I could have trusted you with the knowledge. I still don’t—what are you going to do, besides threaten to kill me for not telling you?” My voice was rising, breaking; I stopped before it broke entirely.

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv spoke for the first time. “And just as important, what did Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt actually tell you? I wouldn’t assume it was the pure truth either. We came here to warn you that it wants to infiltrate your government—starting with you. It sounds like it’s well on its way.”

  Peters barked a laugh. “You thought that if you didn’t break into our hotel room, we might decide to trust someone who looks like a crab glued to a squid? Don’t worry about it.”

  “Nnnnnn-gt-vvv,” I said warningly. I’d seen it react precipitously when provoked; I didn’t want to see its temper pitted against Mary’s.

  “We do, don’t we?” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv. “You look like someone tried to re-sculpt a melted vbbrllt’zaa. People worth talking with can look like anything. Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt doesn’t need to win your trust, only to get you alone. As I told Miss Marsh, we have many arts to control the mind and body, fine weapons if you don’t worry about the ethics.”

  “These guys jump bodies too?” demanded Barlow. “How many damn monsters are wandering around passing for human?”

  It was a question I could answer, at least. I was sick with the weight of further secrets that would destroy all chance of cooperation between us. Part of me ached to release it, and to tell them now that Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt’s interest in them was my fault. “As far as I know the Outer Ones don’t jump bodies.” I glanced at Nnnnnn-gt-vvv.

  “We don’t,” it said. “Body-theft is a Yithian perversion.”

  “But they do,” I continued, “mimic them very well. Far better than the masks they lent the elders. They can mold their servants to pass as anyone they like. And they can bind people to th
em, make people think more like they do, the same way they prepare them for travel. Miss Harris, the trapezohedron that made you so ill was one such art. The single time you used it shouldn’t do too much harm, but you probably don’t want to try a second ritual even if they can avoid triggering your seizures.”

  “Charming,” she said. She kept her aim steady. “I’m tired of people treating my mind like their playground. What was her name?”

  “Beg pardon?” I said.

  “The creature that did this to me. What did it call itself?”

  “Oh. It called itself Catherine Trumbull. Professor Trumbull—the real one, I mean—knows its name, but not how to pronounce it with a human tongue.”

  “Figures.” She waved her gun, and I flinched. “George, unless you need these jerks for something, I want them out of our suite. I’ve had a long day. I want to be alone with people I trust.”

  “You heard the lady,” said Barlow. “Oh, and to answer your question, I’m going to do what I need to maintain American security with all the powers we find ourselves surrounded by, however many there turn out to be. And I’m going to do it without your help. Whichever of these guys is telling the truth—and I’ve no reason to believe either of them more than the other—no one gets to lie to me more than once.” With his own gun he gestured toward the door.

  “I’d rather leave the way we came in, but I don’t want to startle you,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv.

  “As long as you don’t attack us, I don’t care whether you take the elevator or slide down to the street on a rainbow. You’re leaving now.”

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv stood, and took hold of me and Clara.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” said Clara. She grinned without humor.

  The Outer One spread its wings—slower than before, I thought—and we fell back until the hotel room looked like a tissue paper dollhouse, glowing invitingly with warm bodies.

  * * *

  I looked out Clara’s window at the sky, still stubbornly bright. Behind high and fraying clouds, a translucent glow told of a sun still far from setting. I wished the rune on my arm could pass messages more complicated than my location and continued existence.

  I wished I had some way to contact the others, not only Grandfather, before evening. After Neko, it was Spector who worried me the most. Why hadn’t he come back to the hotel with the other agents? Did they know that he knew about the Yith? That would be enough to cost him his job—and discredit anyone who believed, as he did, that my people were worth cooperating with. He was, as far as I knew, the fiercest advocate among his fellows for treating Aeonists with respect.

  I should never have risked bringing Barlow to New York.

  Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt, at least, didn’t know that Spector had met Trumbull’s guest. If Spector kept his head and lied as well as he usually did, he’d be fine. I had to believe he’d be fine. I sent pulses of my worry out through the fragile connections of the confluence: careful, careful, careful, coded in breath and blood.

  “Well, that could have gone better, couldn’t it?” Clara sifted through her record collection. She pulled something out. “You know Alberta Hunter’s stuff?”

  I shook my head; Caleb had picked up a phonograph and Deedee was “educating” him on the past two decades of popular music, but I hadn’t joined those lessons—the books seemed far more important. Clara slid the engraved disk from its sleeve and laid it on the turntable. She kept the sound quiet: a woman’s voice, low and rich and soothing.

  “I’ve heard about the Yith,” she said. “They sound like nasty work. What happened back there?”

  In spite of my frustrations, my first instincts were still to defend them. “They can be nasty. I’ve met one, and I’ve seen that firsthand. But they also make sure that nothing we do is forgotten. That legacy means a lot to us—more to me now. When my mother was young she met a Yith and had a conversation about … the sorts of things a kid would ask if they met someone who could answer any question. The state killed my mother in the camp, but that portion of her life is recorded in the Archives, and will be read when Earth is a cinder.” I sighed and turned from the window. “Mary Harris put together a summoning spell to call one of everything within reach, without any safety precautions. One of those things was … you know what an outsider is?”

  “Zzzzmmm’vvv-rrrt,” said Nnnnnn-gt-vvv.

  “Oh,” said Clara. “Those things. In this dimension?”

  “Not for long. The Yith who was wearing Professor Trumbull’s body banished it. In her fury she cursed Miss Harris—she can’t read now, or use any symbols at all—so that she wouldn’t do it again. I was there. Miss Harris and her colleagues don’t remember. The Yith said their minds were ‘scabbing over,’ but she helped that along, too.”

  “You try and stop her?”

  “I don’t think I could have, but no. I was terrified and angry. The summoning had grabbed me up, too, and held me there while that thing tried to sink its claws in me—” Cold, so cold, and no air in my lungs, praying to be remembered— “And just before it showed up, they’d been explaining that the summoning caught me because I wasn’t really human. At that moment, I wouldn’t have minded if she’d shredded their minds to scraps. Even after the Yith had gone home and Miss Harris helped us banish the piece of outsider that they’d missed, and we got to know her better—I didn’t trust Barlow with the knowledge. So I kept quiet.”

  “Huh. And they just found out.”

  “Kvv-vzht-mmmm-vvt figured it out when the trapezohedron made Miss Harris sick. It confronted me, and I told it why she didn’t know. Now it’s using that to keep them from listening to me … how did it know I’d be in a position to warn them?”

  Nnnnnn-gt-vvv hummed. “I doubt that was its main concern. More likely it was trying to gain their trust by telling them a secret. It thinks it can control their reactions.”

  “Everyone always thinks that.” Shelean’s mad singsong held an edge of fear, or bitterness. “Everyone’s wrong.”

  Clara was running her hands over a row of paperbacks. She pulled out a ragged Doc Smith with a bubble-helmeted man on the cover, thumbed the pages without looking at them. I understood wanting these symbols of civilization close when danger threatened. Songs and written words.

  I sat on the couch, breath suddenly dammed in my throat. I tried to swallow past it.

  “You okay?” asked Clara.

  “Yes. I just … noticed something. That I’d missed. Mary and—my people, in 1929, there was a raid on Innsmouth, and they brought all the landbound to a camp in the desert.”

  “A camp. Like Germany? Or like here, with the Japanese?”

  “Japanese Americans. Nikkei,” I said automatically. But I was surprised—I hadn’t met many people outside the Nihonmachi who would have made the connection. “I shouldn’t like to compare it with either—though they brought some of the Nikkei to our camp, toward the end. It was convenient. The camp was already there, and it was … mostly empty, by that point. A lot of bad things happened there, but one of them—” I paused, trying to collect disordered thoughts. “The soldiers had some vague idea that we could do magic. There had been libelous rumors that we sacrificed children, and consorted with demons. They knew that whatever we did required books, writing. So they forbade us even a scrap of paper or a stub of lead. They beat us for drawing in the dirt. It’s not the same thing the Yith did to Mary: she has people who can read to her, we could still hold letters in our minds. But…”

  Clara sat beside me, and handed me the Lensman novel. My breath loosened in the perfume of dusty ink. She nodded. “Seems like a lot of people want to keep that power to themselves, when they’re in charge. My grandma, she came up from Maryland in the ’50s. She meant to go all the way to Canada, but there was a little town of freedmen in Vermont and she met my Gramp there. He taught her how to read.”

  We drifted into less consequential topics: favorite genres, favored authors, the reassuring rhythm of readers everywhere. We might have been at Day Bo
oks’s old quarters in San Francisco, warm and dry, mist drifting in with every chime of the doorbell.

  Clara was fond of the pulp science fiction series, like the volume she held. “They’re absurd,” she explained. “But I always liked to read them, knowing I’d get to see the real universe. And that there’d be humans out in space, and they wouldn’t be these square-jawed white guys at all, and no one would be able to tell anyway. The universes in these books are too well-controlled. The real thing is wild and beautiful and untamed, even for Nnnnnn-gt-vvv’s people.”

  I wasn’t as enamored of the genre—so many of those authors pulled resonance from stray bits of misunderstood myth. Tripping over fragments of Aeonism distorted by Greek or Aztec cosmology always put a bitter taint on my reading. I preferred Westerns, where problems were always unnaturally simple, and spy novels, where problems were always unnaturally complicated, and the sort of ornate “realistic” novels that gave seemingly intimate glimpses into the ordinary exotic lives of men of the air. Clara hated the first, enjoyed the second, and recommended a few of the third that I’d never heard of.

  To my surprise, Nnnnnn-gt-vvv had opinions as well. I wasn’t clear on whether it saw in the right frequencies to read a book directly, but apparently Clara had read aloud to it from a young age, sharing whatever held her fancy at the moment. The Outer One particularly enjoyed human poetry, without distinction between Ogden Nash and Keats. “I like the way you describe emotions,” it said. I managed to dredge from memory most of the elegy for the Hydra’s Third Daughter, lost at sea in 1633, and a couple of pieces by Yone Noguchi that Anna was forever quoting.

  The sun arced low.

  CHAPTER 20

  From the vantage of the outskirts, Coney Island was an eldritch tangle of tracks and gears and levers, generators and engines, layers of wood and cloth and metal darted through with living lights. We watched those lights trickle out to cars and subway. After long minutes, the last stragglers left the knotwork infrastructure dark and still. The ocean lapped gently against the shore, untouched by the wind howling outside the world. Miniature waves shimmered under starlight.