Calculated Risks

by Seanan McGuire

  “Do cuckoos sweat?” asked James.

  “Yes,” I said wearily. “We also lactate, probably due to whatever quirk of evolution caused us to wind up looking like mammals instead of giant bugs.”

  “More attractive that way,” said Artie.

  “Only to the other mammals,” I countered. “Can someone please untie me?”

  “I don’t like this,” said Annie. “If this is some kind of a trick, we’ll catch on, and we will kill you.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I said. “I know you don’t remember this, but I was there while you were being trained, and I know what you’ve been told to do in a situation like this one. I also know that when we get back to Portland, everyone who’s there will know exactly who I am, and my clergy will be happy to recite any liturgical truths you need to hear.”

  “How do I know you didn’t mess with the minds of the mice?” she asked.

  “It’s a valid question, but I can’t mess with the minds of the mice. They’re too small. They’re smart, due to an incredible density of neurons, but they don’t have as much empty space as a human mind. I didn’t mean to wipe your memories. I did it because the equation the cuckoos were trying to force me to complete—the one that would have destroyed the Earth if it had gone the way it was intended to—was massive. It needed additional processing capacity. And Artie—” I cut myself off guiltily before I could get too close to blaming him for my own actions.

  He might have been the one to suggest that I needed more processing space, but he hadn’t been the one to make the choice that deleted their memories. That was all on me.

  I looked down at my knees, as if being unable to see their faces would render me unable to hear their puzzled thoughts. I couldn’t be sure without pushing, but it felt like the channels between us were cleaner and wider than ever, as if the instar or the equation had propped certain doors open in a way that couldn’t be closed. The only question was whether it was only the people who’d been my storage buffers during the ritual, or whether it was everyone, and this was just how I experienced the world now.

  I was going to be one giant raw nerve and wind up living in a cave in the mountains somewhere like a modern telepathic prioress if this was the way everyone’s mind interacted with mine from now on. It was too much, like trying to drink from a fire hose. And that’s an excellent way to get flung across the room.

  “Talking mice,” said Mark, who felt as puzzled as he sounded. “You’re worshipped by talking mice. Jesus, you people are like a fucked-up Disney movie in more ways than one.”

  “Is she telling the truth?” asked Artie. “About how big their brains are?”

  “I’d have to push to find out,” said Mark. “I’m not a queen. Are you going to freak out and shoot me if I break your mouse?”

  There was a soft whooshing sound that I recognized as the air above Annie’s palm igniting. I spared a moment to be glad the mouse had already run for Annie’s hair and was no longer at risk. She’d never forgive herself if she accidentally Kentucky fried a member of her own clergy.

  Or anyone else’s, really. The family is very protective of the mice, for good reason. We’re all they have in the world.

  “Okay, I won’t break the mouse,” said Mark hurriedly. “Do you still want me to try?”

  “Only if Laverne is all right with it,” said Annie. “All right, Laverne, you willing to let Mark go digging around in your brain?”

  I glanced up. The mouse had emerged from her hair and was sitting on her shoulder, clutching its tail like a security blanket. The Aeslin mice have names, complicated things made of sound and gesture and scent. I can pick them up sometimes, when the mice are thinking of themselves or others as individuals and not part of the greater colony—something that happens more rarely with them than it does with most larger people. Their identities are so wrapped up in the colony and its religious practices that they have trouble thinking of themselves in isolation. It’s a strange evolutionary quirk, but it’s theirs, and it isn’t my place to judge.

  Because Aeslin names aren’t translatable into human speech, Annie developed the habit of giving them nicknames. Always with their permission and agreement. A surprising number of those nicknames can be traced back to her childhood fondness for old sitcoms on Nick at Nite. Just one more danger of allowing television to handle babysitting duties.

  “I . . . for the sake of the Calculating Priestess, I will agree,” said Laverne, clutching her tail more tightly as she glanced at me. “I have heard your Discussions, and I know you have somehow been forced to Forget her, although I could not say exactly How or Why. She needs her Family about her, even as I need my Colony about me, and so I will allow this thing to happen, much as I do not Wish it.”

  She was absolutely feeling unsure for her audible capital letters to be that infrequent. Aeslin mice emphasize their speech in a way that sounds unnatural to the modern human ear, but which is clearly comfortable for them, and anyone who spends a lot of time with them learns to hear the capitals. It’s strange, but it works, like so much else about our weird little family.

  “All right,” said Mark. He held his hand out toward the mouse, palm facing up. “This will be easier if I’m touching you,” he said, clearly trying to sound soothing. From the way the mouse was shaking, he was failing. She was terrified.

  She still stepped onto his palm. There is virtually nothing the Aeslin mice won’t do for the sake of their Priestesses. The Gods are also venerated, but not as seriously. When we were kids, Annie would rant and rave about how even the mice were determined to reinforce human gender roles. She stopped when Elsie asked the mice what they’d do if she told them there had been an error and she was actually a boy. The mice had begun planning a ritual to transition her catechisms on the spot, and it had taken most of the evening and Elsie asserting multiple times that she was definitely a girl to derail them from their plans to celebrate her ascension to Godhood. They had some antiquated and rigid ideas about how humans worked, but they were doing their best.

  Mark raised her slowly to the level of his face, eyes flashing white as he focused on her. No one knows exactly what the chemical reaction is that causes that to happen when we use our psychic powers. I’m glad it does. It means there’s something to betray the fact that we’re pushing against the world, and we’re dangerous enough without being entirely undetectable. Maybe it’s unkind of me to wish detection on the species that made me. I don’t care. Nothing says I have to be kind all the time.

  The mouse froze, staring into Mark’s white-out eyes, trembling whiskers betraying her anxiety. Her hind paws were touching his skin, which would make this infinitely easier for him. It was still almost a surprise when only a few seconds passed before he blinked, the blue coming back into his eyes, and said, “She’s telling the truth,” jerking his chin toward me to make it clear which “she” he was talking about.

  “What?” asked James.

  “What?” demanded Artie, with far more vehemence.

  “The mouse—thank you, mouse, for letting me into your head—has a very complex mind, but a very small one; it’s doing more with fewer neurons than a human would be. Structurally, I’m not entirely sure it’s possible, but since it clearly is, I’m not going to think about it any harder than I have to. Any changes made by someone my size would be like trying to touch up the paint on a Barbie Doll using a housepainter’s brush. They’d be massive and very obvious. There’s none of that here. Also, the mouse remembers all sorts of things involving a female cuckoo it truly believes was this one,” he jerked his chin toward me again, “and that’s without any alterations. I think she was really there.”

  “Because I was,” I said. “I’ve been there since we were kids. I’m your family, and you’re mine.” To my surprise and shame, tears sprang to my eyes—one of the many places where I’m biologically indistinguishable from human. I couldn’t wipe them aw
ay, and so they broke free as I blinked, making their slow way down my cheeks. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I swear I had permission before I went into your heads, but I had to do something, or the equation would have ended everything. And no, before you ask, I don’t know what I did. I offloaded as much of it as I could into the minds around me, and then I forced it not to kill us all even though it wanted to. It was supposed to kill me, or at least to wipe my mind clean, but it didn’t, and I don’t know why!” My voice peaked at the end, becoming a wail shrill enough to hurt my own ears.

  “Again, I think she’s telling the truth,” said Mark. “Ingrid—that was the leader of the hive I was with when we met—said the equation, once it was placed in the queen’s mind, would hatch and flower and devour her whole, but in the process, it would open the way for us to find a new world for the harvesting. She implied that the queen’s body might come with us into the new world, but not her mind.”

  “Why did she feel the need to tell you that?” I didn’t actually want to know, but I had to ask.

  Strictly biologically speaking, Ingrid had been my mother. She was the one who’d given birth to me and abandoned me with the McNallys, the human couple who were the first parents I could remember. And when they’d died, she hadn’t come to take me back, leaving me free to find Angela and Martin Baker—Mom and Dad. But Ingrid had tried to claim motherhood once it suited her, saying that because she was my biological mother, I owed her, and by extension our shared species, my service and loyalty. Bullshit. If I owed anyone, it was my actual family, and all they’d ever asked me to do was try not to die.

  Well, I could probably add “and don’t wipe our minds if you have any choice in the matter” to that list, but since they were still fundamentally themselves, they were probably going to forgive me eventually.

  Mark looked at me, radiating discomfort and mild disgust. “Because all three of the male cuckoos who’d already been in the swarm when Ingrid picked up on my mind and decided I was going to help them were your brothers,” he said. “We’re not very nice people by human standards, and our biology is weird as hell by Earth standards, but we don’t mate with full siblings. And if your body had survived the transition, they wanted to breed you, to preserve the genes that could create a successful queen. We’ve done it before, apparently, multiple times, and it’s considered a massive honor. She thought she was offering me something worth having.”

  “Ew,” said Annie.

  “Double-ew,” said James.

  “As the presumptive recipient of this honor, I’m going to go ahead, endorse both those ‘ews,’ and add a nice fresh ‘over my dead body,’” I said. I paused. “Ingrid. I remember shoving part of the equation into her before it completed, and she went down hard. She was pregnant. Did anyone see her? Or the baby?” I’m not very good with pregnant people. They’re two or more minds in one body, and that’s disconcerting, and until Alex’s fiancée got pregnant, I never had cause to spend a lot of time around somebody who was in the process of growing another person. And even if I had been around more pregnant people, they would mostly have been humans. So I couldn’t be sure of how pregnant Ingrid had been when I’d blasted a thousand years of hostile Johrlac math into her head and shredded her psyche past repairing. If it was possible for the baby to be saved, though, it was worth making the attempt.

  “There were cuckoos everywhere when we came to,” said Annie, moving around behind me. “Most of them weren’t moving. Mark was already awake, standing guard over our bodies to keep anything from coming out of the wreckage of the campus to hurt us, and he realized you were breathing and said you were the one who’d been doing the math and told us to bring you along. So we did.” There was a whispering scrape as she pulled a knife out of her clothing, no doubt one of many—out of everyone in our family, Annie was the one who had most passionately embraced the idea that to be unarmed was to be the next best thing to being stark-ass naked in the middle of Lowryland—and then I felt her tugging at the ropes that bound my wrists.

  They gave way easily, yielding before the edge of her blade. I sat up straighter, pulling my arms around in front of myself as soon as the motion became possible. My hands felt fine—my circulation is weird enough that they hadn’t suffered as a human’s hands would have—but my wrists ached. I rubbed them and waited for her to finish cutting me free.

  The mouse on Mark’s palm took a few steps back, enough to get a running start, and launched itself into the air with surprising strength, sailing across the distance between us while he was still looking on in shock. It landed on my knee and ran up the length of my body to perch on my collarbone, where it began groveling.

  Watching an Aeslin mouse grovel is an experience. They don’t have a defined human waist, so it’s not kneeling and prostrating themselves repeatedly, more a sort of full-body lift and drop that would be guaranteed to attract any local cats.

  “We have Failed You!” it wailed. “We have Allowed Doubt of your Divinity to infest the other members of the Pantheon!”

  “Shh, shh,” I said, letting go of my wrist in order to touch the mouse between the ears with one finger, trying to soothe it. “You haven’t failed me. I did this to myself.”

  Annie was still cutting away the ropes holding me to the chair. There were more of them than I’d realized, a sign of how competently I’d been tied down, as well as how distressed I’d been when I woke and realized what I’d done. There was a final snapping sound and the ropes holding my feet fell away, leaving me free to stand if I wanted to.

  I didn’t want to just yet. Standing would have meant looking where I was going, and that would have meant really looking at Artie. I was aware of him—I was always aware of him, have been aware of him pretty much since I was twelve years old and realized the things I felt when I was with him were the same as the things my mother felt when she was with my father; less sexual, certainly, but equally strong. I’d been in love with him for almost my entire life, and while he’d only recently said he loved me back, his friendship and care had been my bedrock.

  And now it was gone, and I was the reason. I’d destroyed the thing I loved most in the entire world. It didn’t really matter whether I’d done it on purpose or not; what’s done is done, and this was done.

  The mouse eventually calmed and tilted its head up to look at me, whiskers trembling in the mouse equivalent of a sniffle. I could pick easily up on its thoughts with it this close to me. It was worried I would blame my clergy for not being present, and the rest of the colony by extension. As with all the Aeslin mice, it was difficult to tell solely from its thoughts what pronouns I ought to be using; Annie had given it a female name, but it didn’t think of itself as particularly “male” or “female” in any way I could recognize.

  Sometimes I wonder whether telepaths who weren’t raised to be polite and considerate of the customs and cultural standards of others have this many headaches. I doubt it.

  “Are you truly not Angry?” it asked.

  I gave up my attempt to puzzle out the appropriate pronouns and nodded, saying, “I’m angry at myself, a little, for creating this situation in the first place, and I’m worried about where we are and what happened to all those other cuckoos, but I’m not mad at you, or at anyone in this room. It’s not your fault I ran into something too big for me to handle without hurting anyone. I’m so sorry.” I finally looked up, glancing at Mark and James before allowing myself to meet Artie’s eyes. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, and I’m genuinely sorry it has.”

  “Yeah, well, that and five dollars won’t quite buy you a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” said Annie, straightening up behind me and dropping her hand onto my chest for the mouse to step onto. She looked at me defiantly as she pulled her hand away again, and it took me an embarrassingly long time, given that I could literally read her mind, to realize she’d been daring me to try and influence her thoughts.

  I was so unaccusto
med to being on Annie’s list of enemies that I couldn’t fully recognize her hostility, and that was going to be a problem.

  “We have five mice with us,” I said. “Which clergies do they represent?”

  “Two are mine, two are Artie’s, and one’s Mom’s,” said Annie. “Mom’s fine, by the way.” She paused. “I’m not sure why I felt like I needed to tell you that.”

  “Your mother is technically my sister, since we have the same adoptive mom,” I said. “We were just never comfortable calling me your aunt. I’m the same age as Verity. It would have been too weird.”

  Mark made a snorting noise. I looked curiously over at him.

  “That’s what’s weird?” he asked. “You’re like a kitten raised by gorillas. You don’t know how to be a monkey. You don’t know how to be a cat. Your biological mother set up a situation that was supposed to end with you functionally brain-dead and being bred to a stranger who doesn’t want to be here, and you’re worried that calling someone your own age ‘niece’ would have somehow been past the horizon of weird. I don’t understand you at all.”

  I smiled at him. I may not know what that expression is supposed to look like, but I know what it feels like. I’ve had plenty of time to practice. “That’s good, since you’re a cuckoo,” I said. “I don’t feel that compelled to convince you to comprehend me. I’m happier knowing you don’t.”

  Mark nodded and turned away, leaving me to face my cousins. I wasn’t good at thinking of James that way yet, but since Annie had adopted him and considered him her brother, he fit the bill, and it was easier to have one label I could apply to the three of them. “Humans” didn’t work, since Artie wasn’t fully—and apparently neither was Annie. The answer to the vaunted Healy family luck had been out there this whole time, and only the fact that it was being kept by the cuckoos had kept us from discovering it.