Absorption: Ragnarok v. 1 (Ragnarock 1)

by John Meaney

  For the rest of the day she worked, taking no breaks, save for several quick trips behind the bushes to her latrine. Her progress was incredible, and by nightfall she had the beginnings of conversation in place.

  ‘Rekka,’ Whiff told her, his voice emanating from the biofact’s speakers. ‘Sit.’

  And she did, obeying the command.

  ‘Whiff? Stand.’

  So Whiff did as she asked, rising from his stool.

  Success.

  This was more than a day’s work, and she had yet to report on it. Her stomach growled. For hours she had been pushing herself; now it was time to eat. On Earth, sharing food with any animal builds trust; but her biochemistry was too different to allow her to share with Whiff.

  She went to her ration pack and extracted a container of vegetable masala, wondering if the mild curry might smell enticing to Whiff. After thumbing the pad, she waited five seconds, then peeled back the top. Steam rose as she detached the spoon, and the fragrance was—

  Whiff lurched to his feet.

  Shit. What’s wrong?

  Then he stumbled out of the camp, into the undergrowth and darkness.

  ‘Hell’s teeth.’

  She took a few seconds to direct some of her beeswarm to sweep the surroundings, looking for Whiff. As an explorer she might be a neo, but when it came to coding, she could practically make a biofact sit up and beg. Her bees were smart, and sure to find him.

  The masala smelled wonderful, so she tucked in.

  Later that night, she lay on the ground in her sleeping suit, watching an arc of small holos: viewlogs from her bees. In the images, Whiff was squatting, hunched as he chewed on raw vegetables, his body language furtive.

  Don’t anthropomorphise.

  But perhaps she was reading him correctly, and there was some imperative - cultural, medical, aesthetic - that made him eat alone.

  In the morning, he would be back. Somehow she knew.

  When she flicked the holos out of existence, only the vault of stars in black sky remained, the vastness of the universe cradling all its fragile creatures for the precious seconds of their lives. A feeling of awe carried her into sleep.

  Sharp remembered Bittersweet’s childish antics, making fun of poor untouchables eating their vegetables in the open. He’d been embarrassed by his little sister then. Now he realized there was a lesson in the memory - he should think of the fragile creature as intelligent but uneducated, aware but uncivilized.

  And so he returned to its - possibly to her - campsite. As for her name, it approximated to Sweetash, an internal contradiction that become more pleasing the longer he considered it.

  With the aid of the shining device, they tried to extend their range of linguistic understanding . . . and spent the whole day struggling. Finally, they made a leap in abstraction, moving beyond names, from Sweetash and Sharp to you and I.

  Two words in a day. It would take a long time to learn the art of conversation at that rate.

  Sweetash did not eat in front of him, perhaps understanding her mistake. When evening fell, he retreated to his own spot out in the undergrowth, and after eating, he curled up, trembling in the cold. His sleep was strange and disjointed.

  On the third night, he slept inside Sweetash’s camp, within the ring of protective devices, wrapped in a cloak that warmed from inside itself. Everything was strange, so different from his village where a thousand subtle scents told him, at any time of day, of others’ presence, of how he should behave.

  And there was another kind of onrushing pang inside him, triggered perhaps by the stress of being here.

  But the strangest thing of all was Sweetash’s conjuring box, the shining case that could do more than create intelligent insects and broadcast scents. For one thing, it could display disembodied pictures - moving pictures - hanging in the air. The colours were not quite right - perhaps to accommodate Sweetash’s small, unslitted eyes - but he knew what the images were: pictures from inside the little insects’ minds. He figured that from seeing himself and Sweetash, inside one of the pictures, from the viewpoint of an insect that was hovering overhead.

  She controlled them, did Sweetash, directing her insects to observe Sharp’s people as they lived their ordinary lives.

  But then they ventured further, and showed such sights!

  Some images came from parts of Mint City he had never seen - several sequences came from the Librarians’ Enclave, he was sure of it - and then from cities far away, places he could never hope to visit.

  Yet it was the ordinary domestic scenes that fascinated Sweetash most. And her reaction to seeing a mother teach her children - the young ones taking delicate nips, their faces smudged with maternal blood - was extraordinary: Sweetash stumbled away, crouched over, and spilled the contents of her stomach on the ground.

  Some kind of ritual of her own?

  Over the next few days, when they weren’t extending their vocabulary through the device, Sharp and Sweetash watched these scenes of life together, including several Sharings, the expressions of triumphant pain so different from Father’s awful experience. Then it was back among Librarians, watching them work with sand-frames, making little patterned marks Sharp did not understand. And then there was a Convocation, with Librarians from far away, such a mix of fur coloration that he could not understand how they could Share knowledge at all. Except that, in what looked like Sharing ceremonies, no blades were produced. Instead, sand-frames or patterned clay were passed around in lieu of flesh.

  Sharp grew bored and poked around the camp. But Sweetash remained fascinated, and finally the implications were obvious. Librarians’ writing was arcane, a thin approximation of knowledge, a faint taste of true learning’s richness - but it allowed communication between strangers whose flesh might be mutually unpalatable.

  He returned to the display and hunkered down beside Sweetash. Together, they continued to observe.

  All was blood and pain.

  Rekka found herself haunted by so many of the images she watched. Her own genetic mother had tried to kill her - there was so little she knew of India and the Changeling Plague, so much her adoptive parents would never tell - and at first the cruelty inside families here reminded her of childhood nightmares. But then she realized how much the parents suffered for the sake of love, and in that moment her view of Whiff and his people underwent a permanent change.

  Nevertheless, several of her watchful bees remained hovering overhead, laden with toxins deadly to any native form.

  For exercise, they took long rambles along the ridges and escarpments, sometimes venturing to village boundaries, never inside. Rekka trusted Whiff to keep them downwind, unnoticed.

  After a time, she amended her log. Now attuned to the subtleties of scent, she renamed her friend ‘Sharp’.

  Staying close to him on their excursions, she could appreciate the play of muscles beneath his dark fur that rippled in the wind. Sometimes she stroked his arm as they walked. And it seemed to her that two dark buds on his forehead were growing bigger by the day.

  Soon he would be sprouting antlers. For Sharp’s people, puberty looked to be a rapid procedure.

  Her beeswarm kept busy, observing the native people who knew written language, the bees’ femtoscopic spectrometers analysing airborne molecules on the scene, allowing her to cross-reference between scent and script.

  Few of her wilder speculations made it into the zipblips she transmitted at night. She received only short acknowledgements from Mary Stelanko, as team leader; there was no communication with the rest of the team. None of the others had made contact, but they had plenty of observational data, much of it downloaded into Rekka’s biofact.

  For practical purposes, she was alone with Sharp.

  It was fifty days into the project when, late on a warm afternoon, she found herself staring at Sharp’s strong body and flushing all over. Local male and female forms were astoundingly analogous to Earth’s, and her watching bees had long confirmed Sharp’s malenes
s. Perhaps some form of mutual gratification could be—

  No.

  Whimpering, pushing back her desire, she crawled into her padded sleeping-suit and pulled up the mask, sealing herself inside, insulated from the world. With longing eyes, she watched Sharp continue at his lessons - he was teaching himself to write script - but finally he wandered off to eat alone.

  She rolled over, stripping off the suit, and crawled on hands and knees to the biofact. It took her ages, struggling to concentrate, to fabricate a large pad of what looked like wild cotton, from which she took two small pinches, and inserted one inside each nostril.

  There. Now she could be in Sharp’s vicinity without her hormones going wild.

  One hundred and thirty days into the project, Sharp was seated on a carbon-fibre stool, allowing Rekka to rub soothing cream around the base of his antlers. They were spreading fractals, still itching, but already proclaiming his status: he was an adult now.

  ~That feels good.

  Around his neck he wore a circlet or torc given him by Sweetash, whose auditory name (as much he could decipher, at a volume that made her wince) was Rekka. The torc responded to his scent and to Rekka’s air-vibration language.

  Her reply, translated, rose from the torc:

  ~You’re done now, Sharp.

  She was picking up the brush for his fur, but he raised his hand, thumbs spread wide.

  ~No. Your turn for pleasure.

  Rekka made the facial expression of amusement.

  ~All right.

  They changed places. With Rekka on the stool, he began to knead her back.

  ~Soon, your travelling vessel will arrive, not so?

  ~That’s right.

  ~You’ll return home, to the smell of your parents.

  She moved beneath his grip, then relaxed.

  His intuition told him there was something here, in her memory of family and parents. But it would be complicated, and he only had a flavour of her culture - so much remained unknowable.

  And now, there was something he had to ask.

  ~Will you take me with you, Rekka?

  There was a long scentless interlude, then:

  ~Yes, my friend.

  He leaned forward, closing his teeth gently on her ear.

  Four nights before the pick-up, Sharp jogged slowly away from the camp. A handful of Rekka’s bees flew overhead, almost invisible.

  He jogged through the night, finally reaching farmland, and laid up in fragrant shrubbery until darkness. Finally, lungs burning, he reached the outskirts of the village he called home. Slowly, trying not to emit his exhaustion, he walked to his parents’ house.

  There was a small courtyard at the back. He stood for a while, seeing Father’s silhouette against the drapes. Father! He wanted to go in, but it was impossible.

  Then movement occurred at another window.

  ~Sharp?

  ~Bittersweet!

  His sister’s lithe form slipped over the windowsill. They hugged mightily.

  ~Mother and Father. How are they?

  Bittersweet tipped her face back, eyes widening at the sight of Sharp’s antlers. Then she looked down.

  ~Father . . . hasn’t worked much since you went away. We searched for so long . . .

  ~I can’t come back yet, little sister. But soon, when I know enough, they’ll never be able to cast us out.

  He stopped, then sniffed. There were strangers nearby.

  Bittersweet smelled them, too.

  ~Proctors, from the City Guard. There are stories of lights in the hills, strange creatures . . .

  Over the courtyard wall, bobbing outlines told of bannermen, armed with halberds.

  ~I’m sorry, dear Bittersweet. Be strong.

  Her reply was redolent with concern, but he was already moving, exiting alongside the house, on to the street, hidden from the bannermen. He began to jog, and after a while accelerated as an alarm scent floated behind him.

  All his hearts were thumping as he ran for cover.

  But finally he was into the wilderness, scratched by thorns as he went deep into the overpowering fragrance of sourscrub trees, masked from his pursuers.

  Midnight, two days later.

  Clasping hands, Rekka and Sharp stood in the centre of their former camp, biofact and equipment cases at their feet. Only a few bees remained to circle overhead.

  Her bracelet beeped just as Sharp sniffed.

  ‘Shit.’

  It was one of the few scents she could understand without translation.

  ‘Proctors?’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice came from the bracelet. ‘Many of them.’

  She could hear the bannermen now, heading this way.

  I don’t want to use the bees.

  But then a shuttle was descending from the sky, and a male Pilot’s voice came from Rekka’s bracelet.

  ‘So you’ve got company with you. You know there’s a hell of a lot more on the way.’

  He would be in his ship, controlling the shuttle from orbit.

  ‘My friend here is coming with me.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Beside Rekka, Sharp moved his shoulders in amusement.

  ‘We have a universal code.’

  But the shuttle was hovering, its hatch unopened.

  ‘Are you invoking Prime Contact protocols? Or do you want me to pretend this is a non-sentient specimen you’re taking back?’

  ‘Please . . .’

  It touched down, opening to reveal a small, blue-lit cabin, with no one inside.

  ‘Don’t worry. I could give a rat’s ass what the bureaucrats think. And those armed buggers are speeding up, so why don’t you hurry now?’

  Sharp slung the equipment inside, then Rekka got in and he followed. The hatch slid shut as they were rising. Rekka expected the clang of thrown spears or fired bolts, but there was nothing as the shuttle rose fast.

  Soon they were at high altitude.

  ‘Hold on to that handle, Sharp.’

  ‘All right.’ His big arm was around her. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something called freefall I forgot to mention.’

  Seconds later, they were experiencing just that.

  THIRTEEN

  FULGOR, 2603 AD

  Pulling herself back to awareness was hard. As Rashella opened her eyes, three of her house drones drew closer, then stopped. She looked at them.

  They whipped away in reverse, bolting back to their wall-caches.

  <>

  On Luculentus modalities, she received the house system’s communication.

  <>

  She checked inside herself for pain or injury.

  ‘I’m fine’ - she used ordinary speech - ‘so cancel, please.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ the house answered, ‘since they are already close, they can check—’

  ‘Tell them to go home.’

  ‘If you insist, ma’am. However—’

  Rashella frowned.

  <>

  From deep inside herself, she simulated biometric data - a false memory all the way down to the biochemical level - and transmitted the results via house surveillance to the incoming ambulance. Fake telemetry poured into the house sensors.

  ‘Emergency call-out cancelled, ma’am. My apologies for panicking.’

  The house memory now contained the fake data, indicating blood pressure anomalies, but nothing beyond either its own or Rashella’s abilities to fix.

  ‘You’ve done a fine job, House.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  At the far side of the atrium, a faint outline swirled, like autumn leaves in a twisting wind. An echo of Rashella2.

  ‘Have to . . . warn . . .’

  With a sneer and a gesture, Rashella dispersed the struggling code fragments, pulled them apart all the way down to raw trinary, and set every trit to mu, to neither-nor.

  ‘You saw nothing, House.’r />
  ‘Ma’am?’

  She wiped its caches for the last thirty seconds, substituting harmless extrapolations of the previous few minutes’ surveillance.