Bad Cow

by Andrew Hindle

  The question of who the Elevator did or did not take, of course, was endlessly debatable because the Elevator didn’t seem to take anybody these days. Her whereabouts, indeed, were unknown.

  “Probably not great planning on his part,” Moskin remarked.

  “No,” Soki agreed.

  “Hey,” Provenance barked. He wasn’t quite the purebred talking Gyrlei his cousin Boxbury was, but he could get a lot of meaning into a hey and a yeah, the other half of his vocabulary.

  Soki cut Provenance some more meat and tossed it a little further this time, making the lizard scuttle after it on his three spindly legs. He moved at his spidery walking gait rather than the faster lope he could shift into where he bounded on his rear legs and stabilised with his front; when they walked, Moskin always thought Gyrlei looked like they were spinning even though they weren’t. The way their three legs flicked forwards in sequence was more like a pirouette in motion than an ordinary stride.

  Soki leaned in towards Moskin across the table, affectionate and conspiratorial but not romantic. Moskin smiled again, breathing in her scent, strong fire-mint overlying the delicate musk of corpse. “Where do you think they went?” she asked.

  “The Lost Disciples, or the three Lost Realms?” Moskin raised his eyebrows. “Or the poor bastards who tried to catch the Elevator?”

  “Any of the above,” she replied, with just a hint of frustration. Moskin sympathised. He didn’t really talk about his own ideas. He just didn’t know if he could trust Soki yet. And, if he was being honest, part of him didn’t want to find out that she thought he was staring fixedly at her forehead as if directly addressing the part of her brain that was telling her to run away. Not so soon.

  For the most part, his restraint was fine. Soki talked enough about her own ideas for the both of them. It was a national obsession in Fade, and that was wonderful. Moskin had never been much for socialising and small-talk. In Fade, and particularly with Soki Thalaar, there was no need to talk about irrelevant little things. There was only the obsession.

  He shrugged easily. “I think the Lost Realms are still there, and so’s the rest of the staircase, somewhere between Fade and Rise,” he said, “just hidden from our view by the craft of the Infinites,” this was a majority view and rather dull, but Moskin didn’t really care how boring an answer was. “I think the people who went to find the Elevator either suffocated in the gulf, froze in the gulf, smashed to smithereens on the stairs below or the Castle below that, or were picked up by the Darkings and killed. As for the Lost Disciples…” he spread his hands. “No idea, I’m afraid.”

  Soki gave him a sceptical squint of her own, and looked about to either press him further or begin laying out her own intricate theory yet again, when two new arrivals interrupted them.

  The first was Boxbury, who came hopping out of the house with her yellow-green tail lashing, indignant over Provenance’s preferential meat-share. The Gyrlei crashed into her cousin and began kicking and nipping him. Barks of “hey! Hey! Hey hey!” and “my! Me meat! Meat meat! Meat my!” momentarily filled the pleasant sunlit space.

  “Settle down, you mad lizards,” Soki laughed, and took the knife from Moskin again. “There’s enough meat for everyone.”

  “Ooh, does that include me?”

  The second new arrival was Scad. Surprisingly quiet and inconspicuous in her articulated four-legged walking machine, their across-the-street neighbour trundled in and settled at the head of the table with a soft hiss of mechanical joints.

  “Help yourself,” Soki said with a grin, brandishing the knife with its gobbet of raw flesh. Scad grinned widely and waved a tentacle in polite refusal. Moskin knew she, like many of her kind, was a strict herbivore.

  “I’m not intruding, I hope?” Scad asked.

  “Not at all,” Soki sucked the piece of meat off the blade and carved off another piece for the two Gyrlei, who were waiting eagerly. “Help yourself to nackfruit.”

  “Much obliged,” Scad said, snaking out another thick brown tentacle and pulling a bell-shaped yellow fruit from the overhanging tree. “Moskin.”

  “Scad,” Moskin smiled with genuine pleasure.

  Scadmerion Bail was a Grób. She referred to herself as a Hargrondt, but that didn’t narrow it down much and Moskin had freely admitted ignorance as to the divisions and complexities of the superspecies beyond its five main subspecies-groups. There were few Gróbs on Barnalk Low, and none in Orbonyville. They were, however, massively populous and widespread throughout the worlds and indeed the universes beyond Barnalk Low – if not quite so much as Molren, then a close second in the Pinian domains at least.

  There were five main subspecies of Grób as far as Moskin’s education told him, or perhaps ‘species’ was the correct division when referring to breeds within a superspecies. His education was less helpful on that subject. He only knew that ‘Hargrondt’ wasn’t one of them. It was more a cultural, socio-economic, religious distinction than a genetic one. Hargrondts made up the majority of the Gróbi population of Fade.

  “We were just talking about that mad Panescan who swam off Uterña a few years ago,” Soki said.

  Scad chuckled deep and rich as only a Grób could, and bit into her nackfruit with her great square yellowish teeth. “Bay LaVaan,” she said, “a true student of the holy emergency exits.”

  Moskin laughed along with Soki and Scad, and Boxbury joined in with an eerie imitation of Soki’s voice. Scad, of course, couldn’t go to Uterña if she wanted to, because she’d sink right through the barely-there mass of blurred-out stone.

  Gróbs were big hemispherical amphibious gastropods, and even a relatively petite specimen like Scad effortlessly outweighed an Áea fourfold. And that was before you even factored in the machinery Gróbs used to move around in non-swamp terrain. Scad’s walking machine, and the tank of treated synthetic mud that formed its main body, was at least another four Elves’-worth of weight. The machine itself was just a set of legs and controllers built into a big bowl of mud, from which the glistening swell of Scad’s body emerged. The machine also kept the rest of her skin moist and cool, and for the most part she kept her collection of tentacles curled under her body in the walker’s soothing mud.

  The soggy, massively-muscled dome of Scad’s upper body was dominated by her face, or at least a pair of large, cheerful eyes and her enormous yellow-toothed mouth. She could have eaten the head-sized nackfruit in a single mouthful, but had instead bitten it in half – the Gróbi equivalent of polite nibbling.

  She wasn’t intruding – indeed, her query had been little more than formality. On most days, when she wasn’t at the local Gojok pit, Scad could be found in Soki’s house or Soki in Scad’s. If anything, Moskin was the newcomer in the triangle, the unwanted ingredient in the mix – although he was far from unwanted.

  Moskin was very much a newcomer to the neighbourhood. Soki’s parents, or at least one of them, had been born here but had moved away. She’d come back to Fade at an early age, making her technically a third-generation local despite the period she’d been away. She’d spent a hundred of her hundred and twenty years in Fade with her grandmother and their variable little nest of Gyrlei.

  Scad, too, had been born here some fifty years back, to parents that had been born here. She was third-generation even if in her case the generations had not been as long as the Áea lifetimes that had been invested in Fade.

  Grób, Áea, Gyrlei. It was something of a magic combination, a symbolic grouping steeped in psychosocial history and significance.

  It was said that, hundreds of millions of years ago, the Pinian Disciples had been punished by the Infinites for some transgression or other. Precisely what transgression depended on the book you happened to be reading or the political act you happened to be trying to justify at the time. But the Infinites – specifically Limbo, the one generally responsible for keeping the urverse in line – had reduced each of the three Disciples to a single-celled organism. The lesson had probably been ‘humil
ity’ or something like that. A rather extended lesson, and not one that had ultimately caught on, but that too had probably been the Infinites’ design.

  The single-celled organisms had divided, and developed, and millions of years had passed. There was some question about whether this had been condensed or accelerated, but the prevailing opinion was that it hadn’t literally happened in the first place. According to the myth, the three clusters of tiny life-forms had somehow remained Disciples, their souls and awarenesses diffused across countless organisms … and the First, Second and Third Disciples had evolved into Grób, Áea and Gyrlei respectively.

  The Gróbs had grown into a vast, highly successful superspecies widespread across the Corporation19 that comprised the known urverse, but were particularly concentrated along the great planet-chain known as the Yatrodd system, and Scad was a prime example of the race. The Áea-folk had grown into the proud and fierce Lowland Elves of which Moskin and Soki and her grandmother were examples, and the Gyrlei … well, they’d bounced back and forth across the sentience-line for millennia, and could currently be said to have reached a fairly low ebb. Boxbury and to a lesser degree Provenance were among the smartest Gyrlei Moskin had ever seen.

  And that was the last time the Pinians had disappeared from public view. Moskin found it absolutely staggering to think that he might be living through the opening act of a similar exile right at this very moment. Of course, this time it was happening differently, Disciples and worlds alike spirited away by some unknown means … and yet, who was to say it hadn’t been this way the last time? History had long since become mythology. Perhaps this was how the Infinites drove a clump of single-celled organisms from sludge to sentience.

  Of course, if this was anything similar to the last one, Moskin knew he was unlikely to live to see its end. But he had his visions. He had his cast-iron certainty that this time, there was something he was supposed to do. The Infinites did nothing without a reason and a design. If the Pinians had been turned into the Gróbi, Áea and Gyrlei species as part of their first exile, perhaps it was because those species of mortals were meant to help during this one.

  It was absolutely momentous, it was awe-inspiring beyond mortal comprehension … and only the couple of million fanatics living in Fade seemed to care that it was even happening.

  Whatever the actual truth behind the myth, the Gróbs and the Áea-folk had been devout followers of the Pinian faith for the duration of their existence. It was even said that when the Infinites decided the Pinians had learned their lesson, They distilled the three Disciples back out of the most devout members of each species, leaving the species behind as a sort of byproduct.

  The three species had always shared a very deep bond of kinship and cooperation as a result – they were the Pinians’ children – and whenever representatives of the three came together the grouping took on a special significance.

  Moskin wasn’t sure when he’d decided he was going to sacrifice them all, but for the past week or two he’d been certain of its necessity. He’d been planning the deed ever since.

  GRANNY GYRE

  Soki’s grandmother Gyre Thalaar was approaching her final years. Áea-folk lived to a grand old age of fifteen centuries, which Gyre had already achieved as far as Moskin was aware.

  She stepped out into the yard while the three were talking and feeding the Gyrlei. Ancient and papery, her jagged teeth plated in black platinum, she grinned at the Grób and the two younger Elves. Her hair was gone apart from a row of short, waxy blue-black spines along the top of her skull, and her ears were like dry, pale leaves jutting from her vein-mapped skull. She’d been living in Fade almost since the vanishing. She’d been a member of a very small community of Áea-folk who had lived in Heaven … or had been posted there … or had been living nearby on a cultural exchange. And that was sort of the problem. Gyre herself wasn’t even sure anymore.

  Of course, Moskin had questioned her when he’d moved in and learned about her near-first-hand experience of the disappearance and all the years that had followed. Many did, when they first arrived. Gyre held a few informal interviews each month, and earned a steady flow of goodwill and favours for the household in the community’s cooperative system. Moskin had been fortunate enough to move in right next door, and had met and made friends with Soki before even finding out about her grandmother.

  Sadly, she really didn’t remember much of her early life. She’d been no more than a child when she’d moved to Fade, and little she could tell them about life back then remained consistent between tellings. Moskin had concluded, as most newcomers did, that what had happened wasn’t as important as a general respect for history.

  Not all visitors to the Thalaar house were so gracious. A few weeks after Moskin’s arrival a pair of Áea-folk had come to speak to Gyre and left frustrated. One of them had stood in the front yard and shouted that they might as well have addressed their questions to Boxbury and Provenance for all the good it would have done them. That night – or what passed for night in Fade – Moskin, Soki and Scad had gone to the newcomers’ house and beaten them to within an inch of their lives for their disrespectful behaviour. Gyre now proudly wore a pair of the offenders’ serrated teeth on a thin chain around her wattled neck, and Moskin’s place in the little nuclear neighbourhood had been assured.

  “Grandmother,” Soki said, and extended her leg underneath the table to push out the chair opposite. “Won’t you join us?”

  “Damn fools?” Gyre said, and cackled as she produced a basket of pastries from behind her back. It was one of her favourite jokes. The pastries were spicy Áea-folk panashta, which sounded amusingly like the Gróbi word hanashta, which meant – yes – damn fools. The younger Elves and the Grób had been speaking together in the standard New Pinian language that was familiar to Moskin from his early life on Barnalk Low and was widespread here. Although Gyre tended to speak near-exclusively in an older pure-Áea language with a scattering of curses in various tongues, she made herself understood … and if there was a language the ferociously-intelligent Scad didn’t know and couldn’t learn within a month, Moskin wasn’t aware of it.

  “Gladly,” the Grób upheld her end of the conversational contract. “Eat fools, crap wisdom.”20

  Gyre sat down with an audible creak and a savouring hiss through her jagged black teeth. She put the basket on the table and Scad swept it up with a tentacle, plucked out one of the panashta and replaced the basket within reach of the two Elves. Moskin took one as well, and bit into it while the Grób popped the entire thing in her enormous maw.

  “Those flat-tops21 from the census bureau were here again this morning,” Gyre said in amusement. “I offered them some fresh-baked. I’ve got to admit, they took it very well. Lot of watering eyes and quivering head-flaps, but only one of them threw up and she had the decency to do it out in the street.”

  “A sorry waste of panashta,” Scad declared, although she too was suffering from the potency of the pastry’s filling. Moskin knew her well enough to read the physiological signs – the tightening of the heavy skin around her eyes, the mottling of the wet skin of her sides. She had, of course, known what to expect and so the effects were fleeting and moderate. She and Soki still merrily recounted the first time the Grób had eaten the products of Elven baking.

  “Some folks just can’t handle robust cuisine,” Gyre declared, and waved a skeletal hand. “Flat-tops,” she snorted. “A good spicy belch would send one sailing into the firmament.”

  Moskin joined in the good-natured laughter. Molren were delicate creatures. Oh, there was no denying they were a successful species and it was hardly fair to compare Molren and Gróbs to a species like the Áea-folk, but even so, they didn’t stand up well to punishment. They lived a long time – five thousand years to an Elf’s fifteen hundred – but as Soki liked to say, a fragile glass sculpture can also endure for centuries if you place it safely on a high shelf, or pack it carefully in wool and leave it in a box.

  “I ca
n’t believe they’re still trying to keep track of the population,” Soki shook her head. “People arrive almost daily, and others just walk off the edge. The general cultural level is best described as ‘barely managed anarchy’. It’s not unusual for entire neighbourhoods to start miniature holy wars, wipe themselves out in experimental re-enactments of the disappearance, or kill and eat each other in rituals they’ve found in some text so ancient it’s written on tanned Ogrehide.”

  “My father had a fragment of Rituals of War on Ogrehide,” Scad reminisced. “You had to keep it refrigerated, or it would go all slimy and the markings would run.”

  “My arse cheeks are made of Ogrehide,” Gyre opined gleefully. “If they’re not kept chilled, they get the local boys all flustered.”

  “Explains the hair,” Soki retorted, and Gyre cackled.

  “Is the arse cheeks the part I think it is?” Scad asked, reaching up and picking another nackfruit. Gyre’s cackles intensified.

  LIFE GOES ON

  Gyre Thalaar lived another eighty-four years, and for all that time Moskin lived next door to her and her granddaughter. He was actually rather surprised to learn about this – or, more accurately, was surprised every five or ten years to find that five or ten years had gone by without his really noticing.

  He was waiting for more information. He knew it would come to him, and he had enough faith to be patient. In the meantime, life went on. He watched, he waited, and he gathered data. He listened to stories, collected rumours and records, and studied the numbers. Amusingly enough, the Molran community with their silly censuses and demographics were a valuable resource as time went by. Frail they may be, but they were infinitely more patient than Áea-folk, and they had long memories.