Trident's Forge (19 page)

“But nothing of the size of yesterday?”

“It's not just the size, it's the coordination and goals. They steal food to survive, they don't come into our villages to make war. Besides, I actually spoke to their commander in the forest. Ze spoke much too well to be a nomad.”

“You actually spoke to him?”

“Zer,” Kexx corrected. It was a strange affectation. Mei had shared it in the beginning and took many days to break zerself of the habit.

“Sorry, zer,” Benson said. “Could you tell where they were from?”

“No, I didn't recognize the accent.”

Ze returned to the body and rubbed off some of the black coating the invader had used to cover zer skinglow, tasting it on zer fingers. It was smoky and bitter.

“Charcoal pigment, mixed with plant sap as a binder.”

“Do you recognize the plant?” Benson asked.

Kexx rubbed the pigment on zer tongue to try and refine the flavor, but shook zer head and spat it out. “No, I don't. Very bitter, I doubt it's edible.” Kexx moved down the rest of the body. There was very little to see. The invader wore no necklaces or bracelets that could give away any clues to zer village of origin, probably by design. Ze reached the end of the table and inspected the returning's feet.

“Ah, that settles it.”

Benson perked up. “Settles what?”

Kexx picked up the foot and bent the leg forward so Benson could get a good look at the bottom of the returning's toes. Oddly, the human covered zer mouth and shut zer eyes. Ze almost looked sick.

“What's wrong?”

“Sorry,” Benson said. “It's just when a human leg bends like that, something went very badly.”

“What, like this?” Kexx rotated the knee joint around its full range until Benson turned away.

“Hilarious. Do you mind?”

“Sorry.” Kexx gripped the lower leg and squeezed hard, pulling on the tendons and splaying open the foot's four toes. “If you look closely, you can see a pattern of wear and calluses on the skin.”

“I'll take your word for it. What does it mean?”

“That our intruder here spent a lot of time walking on bare rock.” Kexx lifted zer own foot to illustrate the similar pattern. “It's common among those who spend time on the road system or walking around on mudstone floors.”

“And the nomads don't use your roads as trails?”

Kexx shook zer head. “No, they think the roads are unnatural, cursed.”

Benson stroked zer chin. “So villagers, then. That narrows it down to, what, two dozen different places?”

“Minus one. We can be sure they weren't from our village, after all.”

“Not a huge help, in the end. Is there anything else you can tell me about the body?”

Kexx stood back and tried to take in the entire scene, searching out anything ze might have missed from being too close, but failed.

“No. They went to some effort to frustrate any truth-diggers.”

Benson leaned against the wall and crossed zer arms. “We should line everyone from the other villages up and ask them if they recognize any of the invaders' bodies.”

“It's already been done,” Kexx said. “Without result.”

“You think someone is lying?”

“I try not to dwell on what I can't know,” Kexx said with a forced serenity.

The human seemed sympathetic. “So, where do we go next?”

Kexx took zer own spot leaning against the wall and considered their options. “I think once the light comes up, we go to the spot in the forest where I found them. From there, we can pick up their trail and see how far we can follow it.”

Benson crossed his arms and smiled. “Outstanding. Do we have time for breakfast?”

T
he trail ended less
than a kilometer outside the village's halo trees. Or, more precisely, scattered like leaves thrown into a strong wind, branching off in a hundred seemingly random directions. Benson stood back and watched quietly as his Atlantian partner tried in vain to follow each new trail, tasting the air and ground with his outstretched fingers. But with each dead end and double-back, it became apparent even to Benson's untrained eye that Kexx's body language grew frustrated.

“I don't understand,” Kexx said. “If this was their escape route, it would make sense. But these are the tracks they used to come
in
. It's like broken pottery shards all jumped up off the floor and made a pot.”

“That's an impressive level of coordination,” Benson said. “For all of them to arrive from different places at the same spot at the same time, that's no easy feat. Have you seen anything like this before?”

Kexx sat down heavily among the rows of yulka stalks before answering. “Among hunting parties converging on prey, but not on this scale.”

Benson sat next to him and crossed his legs. “What about the warriors who hid among our guests and attacked us from inside the village? Someone must have noticed them sneak in.”

“I already thought of that. They were there the whole time. They came in with the rest of the envoys. No one recognized them, but everyone just assumed they were from one of the other villages.”

Benson laughed an angry little laugh. It was exactly what he'd warned Valmassoi about. Too many bodies and no way to run backgrounds on anybody. It wasn't like the Atlantians had an extensive ID database to work with. It was a nightmare scenario from a security and crowd control standpoint, yet they'd walked straight into it, whistling in the wind without a care in the world.

He'd opposed the presence of Atwood's people initially because he believed an armed escort, especially one with firepower beyond even the understanding of their hosts, sent entirely the wrong message for what was supposed to be a diplomatic expedition. But now he had to admit the truth; not only had Atwood's detachment been the only thing that prevented the entire village from being sacked, but not even their crushing technological superiority had been enough to prevent a complete massacre.

They'd all been overconfident. The image of Atwood's ravaged throat would remain a potent reminder for him personally. She'd been tough, a competitor. She was smart and aggressive and knew how to use her small size to its greatest advantage. If Madison Atwood could be brought down, anyone could.

Benson absently stroked the top of his rifle, knowing full well that it held the power to take dozens of lives with the ammunition he had, but that it was a price the enemy they faced was only too eager to pay. If even a handful of warriors remained standing when his gun ran dry, nothing would save him.

He knew exactly where their assumptions had gone wrong. Every living human, except for the handful of infants who had been born on Gaia in the last three years, had lived their entire lives locked away in a fish bowl, fixated on the ultimate goal of preserving the last thin strand of humanity from oblivion. Eleven generations had lived in a permanent state of crisis. Every life was precious. Every child a miracle.

It was exactly that shared belief that had made Kimura's attempted genocide and the loss of two fifths of the Ark's population so unconscionable. Most of the survivors had never really dealt with the tragedy, not really. Instead, they made planetfall on Gaia, got off the Ark, and busied themselves with the work of building a new world, never looking back to think of the old one. There were exceptions, like the Returners who wanted nothing more than to go back to their comparatively leisurely lives in Avalon, lives that simply didn't exist anymore no matter how much they yearned for them. But the majority of them hadn't had any real ties to anyone in Shangri-La module. For most everyone else, the catastrophe was simply too big to risk thinking about in all but the most abstract, superficial terms.

For the Atlantians, life was not nearly so precious. Benson's mind returned to the birthing ceremony and the culling of the… unworthy. As a people, they'd been groomed literally from birth to accept staggering casualties when necessary.

“Benson?”

Benson looked up to see Kexx staring at him. “Yes, sorry. I was just wool-gather… I was just thinking.”

“About?”

“How many trails have you found already?”

“Over two fullhands. They branch off and lead–”

“West, right? Towards all the other villages.”

Kexx made a non-committal gesture. “Roughly. We can't be sure without tracking them individually.”

“But that's obviously what we're supposed to think, right?”

“Possibly.”

“OK, and if that's true, why not frame just one other village? A village you have a feud with, for example? We chase down the false trail, your enemy gets the blame, you get away clean. So why wouldn't you? Unless…”

“Unless the enemy wants suspicions to fall on every village equally. It would keep us busy longer if we had to eliminate each possibility. And it would keep them pointing fingers at each other, sowing mistrust.”

“Maybe.” Benson let the idea twirl around in his head for a few seconds. Something about it was nagging at him. “Or maybe they didn't know enough about the villages to pull off the frame. You're sure it couldn't have been nomads?”

Kexx was adamant. “No, their feet were worn wrong to be plains walkers, and the one I spoke to sounded too refined.”

“And where is the leader, anyway? You said you put a spear through their leg.”

“I did. The other warriors must've carried zer off.”

“Without a blood trail? Without digging tracks in the dirt from dragging them on a litter?”

Kexx's skin patterns only fluttered in the alien's approximation of a shrug.

Benson rubbed his chin. “What
did
they sound like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, where from, would you guess?”

“I don't know. Each village has a slight accent, and I hadn't met every village until this gathering. But the leader's accent was
very
different. Almost as bad as, well, yours. Which brings me to a question of my own, Benson…”

“Yes?”

“I wanted to ask how you and the rest of your people learned our language so fast. Mei picked it up faster than any child I've ever seen, but it still took zer Varrs.”

“That's because I didn't really learn it. Our rover has been listening to you since you found it. Some very smart people onboard…” Benson stopped himself before talking about the Ark. He didn't know how much Kexx already knew, nor, frankly, how much he could absorb all at once. “Smart people back at our village translated it. Then the translation was, ah… you probably don't have a word for ‘downloaded' do you?” Kexx shook his,
zer
, head. “Right. The translation is put into a, a tool in our brains where we can know it without having to learn it.”

Kexx's face was skeptical, to say the least. “I'm not sure I understand how that works.”

Benson shrugged. “I'm not sure I do, to be honest. We call them ‘plants,' but not like plants we eat. See?”

“No.”

“Right.” Benson glowered while he tried to come up with a better way to explain himself. “These plants communicate and store information. You have a way to write down information, numbers, words, yes?” Kexx nodded. “And you have the signaling tower that can move information around very quickly without speaking, yes?”

“But our signal towers use light.”

Benson perked up. “Yes, exactly. Our plants use a type of light too, except you can't see it.” The look on Kexx's face told Benson that the concept of “light you can't see” was fighting for the label of oxymoron. “I know that probably doesn't make much sense.”

“I'm trying,” Kexx admitted. “So, these… plants that aren't plants use invisible light to think for you?”

“No.” Benson put up his hands. “Not at all. Well, kind of. They just… they store extra memories for us. But we still do all the thinking.”

“We are the sum of our memories, Benson. If your memories are not entirely your own, then you are not entirely yourself.”

Benson raised a finger to object, but realized he couldn't. It wasn't a question he'd ever really wrestled with. His plant had been there from the beginning. It had always been a part of him. And being out here, cut off from the real-time updates and database searches he'd taken for granted his entire life, there was no arguing with the Atlantian that he wasn't entirely himself without it. The question was, did the plant make him less than he would have been without it, or more?

It was a question best left to philosophers and poets, neither of which Benson had ever made much time for.

“If what you're saying is true,” Kexx continued, “then why didn't Mei pick up our language as quickly as you did?”

“Because Mei and the rest of the humans living with you don't have plants.”

“Why not?”

“Because they didn't believe in them. They left to be independent from us.”

“But they were of your village.”

Benson wasn't sure what Kexx meant by that. “We're not a village, Kexx. We're a race. We have disagreements, sometimes serious disagreements. I'm sure you have disagreements with the G'tel in other villages.”

“They are not G'tel.”

“They're not? Then what are they?”

“They are of their village.”

“OK, yes, but what do you call your people then? All of the people in all of the villages?”

“I don't understand.”

Benson furrowed his brow. He'd known the Atlantians were tribal, but this was at a level he'd never expected. How to explain the concept of a species? “No matter where we live, anyone like me calls themselves a human. What do your people call themselves?”

“G'tel. Other villages are not like us.”

“But… You all worship Xis and Cuut, right?”

“And Varr, of course. They are the gods of all creatures. It is only natural that all worship them.”

“Even humans?”

“Er…”

“What if I told you we worshiped different gods from Xis, Cuut, and Varr? That we've never heard of them before we came here. That we have different gods, even different gods among humans. Or that many of us worship no gods at all?”

He could see the line of questioning was beginning to fluster the Atlantian. Benson switched tracks. “People from other villages. They are more like you than say, uliks, yes?”

“...yes.”

“And uliks live in packs, just like you live in villages, but they're all still uliks, right?”

Kexx contemplated the apparently new concept silently for a long moment, then decided to return to the topic of Benson's plant. “What happens when the tool breaks? Will you be able to talk to me?”

“That's very unlikely.” Benson said. “Plants are very stable, even self-repairing up to a point.”

“But if it did?”

Benson bobbed his head in surrender. “Then, no, I couldn't access your language. I'm not really speaking it now. I think what I want to say in my language, and the plant tells me the translation. I sound it out, but the words don't have any meaning to me yet.”

“So Mei's way is better, because she is actually learning and remembering the words.”

Benson shrugged. “I'll get there eventually too. When I was young, it took me a few years to learn Mandarin well enough to not need the plant anymore. It'll sink in eventually. But in the meantime, we can still talk, so both ways have their advantages.”

“Mandarin?”

“Sorry. It's a different human language from English, which is what I speak.”

The patterns on Kexx's face and arms stopped and reversed abruptly, a physical manifestation of his mind coming to a halt and trying to back up. “Humans have more than one language?”

“Oh, yes.” Benson nodded. “There was a time we had hundreds, even thousands of spoken languages. We still have six or seven, but English is the dominant language. Mandarin used to be just as popular, but most of the people who spoke it, well, they…”

“They, what?”

“Died,” Benson said flatly, hoping he wouldn't have to explain the circumstances of their deaths. “Hasn't Mei told you any of this?”

“No, ze hasn't. What's the point of having so many? Language is supposed to make communicating clear and simple.”

“It wasn't planned.” Benson thought for a moment how to keep a million years of human migration and linguistic development simple. “Humans used to be scattered all over, sometimes separated by great mountain ranges or oceans for very long periods. Each small group's language changed until two different groups weren't speaking the same one anymore.”

“On your world, you mean,” Kexx said. It wasn't a question. Benson froze, unsure what to say. “Don't be surprised, Benson. I am far from stupid, and Mei has already taught us much. You are unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Besides, I watched your stars appear in the sky. We all did. Then, we watched you travel down to our world on a beam of light.”

Benson glanced up at the faint glinting of the elevator tether, still visible in the morning light. “So we didn't sneak in the back door, then?”

“Your arrival was hard to miss.”

“I can see that now.”

Kexx took a deep breath. “Benson, there is one other thing I need to ask you.”

Benson braced himself, fairly sure he knew the twist the conversation was about to take. “Sure, go ahead.”

“About the incident in the temple last night…”

“Yes, I know. It was inappropriate and I'm very–”