And the Lion Said Shibboleth
Page 7
Waking up was a good news, bad news deal. I became aware of a throbbing pain in my head and the taste of vomit. I raised my hand to shield my eyes from the glare of lights above me. Only then did I realize that once again I was free to move. I was free of the confining resin: more than that I was out of my suit.
I sat up. I was lying on a couch in the shuttle: the one near the medical locker that folded all the way back and was the closest thing the shuttle had to an infirmary.
“Take it easy,” Mina said. “We nearly didn’t get you out of the suit in time.”
“Where are we?” I asked groggily. “Are we back on the Folly?” I could see Smith pottering around in the cockpit but Jura was nowhere in sight.
“’Fraid not. The Chirikti won’t let us leave. I had to compromise by leaving Jura out there. Don’t worry... It’s cool. I don’t know if it’s possible for a neuter to have a crush, but Jura seems to have taken a shine to the Chirikti."
“Why won’t they let us leave?” I asked.
“You’re the linguist. You go ask.”
Jura was sitting next to an armored Chirikti in one of the hydroponic fungal gardens.
“It’s okay,” Jura said as Mina and I approached. “It only stops me when I try to move towards the shuttle.”
The Chirikti would never anticipate that we could leave one of our party behind. They saw us as one meta-individual; holding one was as good as holding us all. Perhaps they weren’t far wrong about that.
I examined the Chirikti’s posture. “It likes you,” I said and only afterwards did I realize what that meant. This Chirikti was not an individual; it was part of a greater whole. If it liked Jura then--
“Why didn’t they kill us?” Jura asked. “What they did to those other bastards was just fucking glorious.”
“I’d say they have a history with those parasites: probably a stowaway from their home world. Maybe we’re not worth that kind of effort.”
I checked the readouts on my suit. The chemical sniffer in my chest plate had been damaged beyond its capacity for self-repair. I tried to read the color and posture of the Chirikti around us but without the chemical analysis it was like trying to lip-read every conversation in a crowded room. I could only get the jist of what they were saying. I spotted shades associated with novelty and a postural subtext of caution.
“They’re talking about us,” I said. “But my sniffer’s broken. I can’t tell what they’re saying.”
The colors on the Chirikti’s photo-reactive clothing started to synchronize into ripples of cyan that expanded outwards until the whole chamber pulsed with it.
They were chanting.
“What do you think, Morton?” Jura asked. It had finally used my proper name and it had only taken incarceration in an alien hive to do it. “Looks like they’re getting ready for a lynching.”
I read the Chirikti’s postural context. “I don’t think so.”
There was a disturbance in the pattern of ripples: a chevron shaped indentation of purposeful royal blue that moved towards us through a sea of bobbing Chirikti. As it moved closer I could see something at the apex of the chevron: a small black shape, the charred corpse of a limb-less Chirikti with the technological carapace of one of the parasites still embedded in it.
“Exhibit A for the prosecution,” Jura said and laughed.
The corpse was passed hand over hand above the crowd until it was set down next to the Chirikti at Jura’s side.
“What’s going on?” Mina asked.
I didn’t answer. I was too busy tracing the Chirikti’s limb glyphs and cross-referencing them to the torrent of data thrown up by the spectrograph. There were concepts of communication and reproduction, awakening and a brooding, ancient hatred. It was too much to take in: I only understood a fraction of what I was seeing, but the concepts were powerful. I tried to translate for the others but the best I could do was parrot a few lines from a half-remembered poem.
“Or the last trumpet of the Eternal Day, When dreaming with the night, shall pass away.”
“What?”
“We woke them up,” I said. “Our Plan-B, it trashed their system it forced them to completely rebuild their networks. It re-booted the vespiary and broke the parasites hold over them.”
The Chirikti pushed one pedipalp into the innards of the charred corpse. The speakers in my helmet hissed with the sound of an open communication channel, the same one the parasites had used.
“THANK YOU.”
The colors shifted around us. I saw the marbled greens of six protons, a staccato pattern of flashes like Morse code indicating shape: a pattern of tetrahedrons bonded into a cube. They could have been talking about tin or silicon, but I knew they weren’t.
I turned and walked back towards the shuttle. They didn’t need me anymore and I was tired. Mina and Jura could handle the rest. They were the brains and the muscle, I was just the mouth.
“You said it before...” I said to Mina as I walked away. “When we gave them a gift, they knew enough to accept it. Now it’s your turn...”
Another ripple of movement. Another chevron of advancing activity and another object passed between the thousand palps of the vespiary: a white crystal half as tall as Jura.
“You’re welcome.”
THE END
This Other Earth
In Apprehension How Like a God
THIS OTHER EARTH