The Hatchery.
The God was calling.
And Torq did not know what he could tell her.
He started to depress a switch with his tarsi and... the ship righted itself. What lights were still intact shimmered, grew brighter, dimmer, then settled at normal illumination. Most of the remaining black terminals came on again.
Most... but not all.
And overriding all was the unending whine of the klaxon, disquieting the numbers perhaps even more than the shipquake had.
Torq punched the button savagely, hoping against hope that nothing in his voice would betray his agitation.
“My God, I listen.”
The control room went quiet, except for the faint drip, drip, drip of ichor against metal. Two more numbers had curled. Several looked unsteady.
“Chaptain Torq.”
“My God, I am here.”
“What?”
Torq hesitated, then: “An... anomaly, my God. An atmospheric anomaly encountered when the ship entered...”
“Now?”
Torq glanced around the command deck. All seemed under control, except, of course, the dozen or so curlers. Lights were stable. Monitors flickered with messages and normal data. No fires. And the remaining numbers’ eyen were split as they should be, one eyes watching their duty station, the other—all compounds active—focused on Torq.
None of them spoke.
“My God, all is now as it should be.”
There was no answer, but the comm light blinked out. She had returned to her eternal round of creating new life. She was satisfied.
Torq was not.
There had been... something indefinable there. It had momentarily derailed the ship from its planet-fall course. The fact that the ship was now on course and apparently unharmed did nothing to placate him. His ventral plates quivered, not with pleasure this time but with apprehension.
What was going on?
***
The Crwth chittered, oblivious to the accompaniment of the clumsy trans-comm taking up a fair amount of the space just before the dais upon which it—she, Torq reminded himself—stood alone.
Even before her words rustled from the device, however, Torq recognized the short complex of whistles, breaths, and musical tones.
He should.
He had heard it often enough since that moment half-a-day (current planet-time) past when the lander had set down and he, followed by his minion of numbers, had set foot on the fourth world.
It had been an eerie experience. The first three times, the planets had been dead, either as they were originally, or as they became after the blasts from the ship. On the third world, everything had been black and twisted. And there had been the sounds... and the smells.
Here, nothing had been touched. Almost, almost, Torq found himself doubting the wisdom of trying to communicate with this alien, this sub-Koleic species.
The trans-comm began its own twittering, but Torq did not need to listen. He had heard that same complex of sounds often enough since he had arrived in this great, empty, drapery-hung hall to confront the single creature that awaited them.
“So be it.”
Torq sighed, feeling the fluttering movement of transpiration along his plates. His first and second hands each flexed, contracted, flexed again. He grimaced inwardly at his own unease.
The creature before him stood as pliantly as ever, as pliantly and acquiescent as melting wax. The two of them had long since dispensed with cool formalities. For the past while, Torq had been addressing the alien as conqueror to the conquered.
And she had simply replied with her unchanging, infernally undeviating chittering: “So be it.”
Torq stared with one eyen at the Crwth’s silhouette, then through one of the seven oppressively narrow windows in the huge heptagonal chamber. Beyond, he could see only cloudless skies, even though he knew that the ship hung, tiny but visible, somewhere above them.
He shivered. The angles in the room were wrong. He was used to angles, of course. The square, the triangle, even the hexagon. But the unnecessary asymmetry of this room bothered him.
He forced himself to ignore his unease and return to his duty.
“You understand our demands, then?”
Again the whirr of the trans-comm filled the room. As he finished speaking the translator broke out in a volley of inarticulate sounds, random sounds to Torq but apparently intelligible to the Crwth.
Crwth.
Even the name echoed abominably in Torq’s mind, almost rattling loose segments of his exoskeleton. Cwrth. An impossible collation of sounds equally impossible to speak or to understand. Still, it was good an approximation as any for the particular set of sounds that came through the trans-comm as “untranslatable.” It was what she had first called herself, but there was no cognate for it.
So. Cwrth.
Well, it would soon make little difference. The enclave would cease to exist as an independent community soon, and whatever names they chose to give themselves would become irrelevant.
But enough linguistics. Torq understood enough of the technicalities of translation to know that he didn’t know enough. And besides, a ten by any other name was still a ten.
Cwrth was sufficient.
Now, however, for the business at hand.
She was listening patiently—eternally patient, damnably patient. Her horrible dual eyes—compound-less, fixed in bony sockets and therefore unable to split and take in more than what stood directly before her—her eyes turned slightly away from him, as if she found his form unpleasant.
Her tall, fragile-looking, soft-fleshed body—naked in spite of its filmy covering of some sort of glistening cloth—towered over him. Folds of the scintillant white material as still as columns of opaque crystal fell to her feet.
Her feet.
Another abomination. She had only two hands, apparently firsts. Where the seconds should be, there was only smooth, vulnerable-looking tissue.
Then those two clumsy, flat appendages, altogether too broad and short for substantial support as they were, without dividing into even smaller, less efficient-seeming minor appendages at the ventral end.
He shuddered.
On her breast, a single faceted stone sparkled coldly.
He did not know what the stone was called. He did not care. But in the broad central facet, he could see himself in miniature: a compact, dark, impenetrable body, designed for gravitational forces many times that of this small clot of dirt. His image gleamed dully.
The trans-comm clattered into silence.
The Cwrth remained silent for a moment.
She was apparently considering what the trans-comm had just said.
Then, as she had done so often before, she repeated the incessant pattern that Torq had grown to despise.
“So be it.”
He moved. He paced slowly around the single visible bit of ornamentation in the room, a wooden pillar just over his height, polished until it shone, and surmounted by a piece of hideously carved stone of some sort.
Just glancing at the carving with a handful of his compounds made his blood heat. It was as loathsome as everything else here, even though it bore no resemblance at all to the tall, attenuated lines of the Cwrth. It was lumped, awkward, barely more than the suggestion of something that seemed implicitly ancient and terrible.
At least that was how it affected Torq.
In passing, he reached out one of his second hands and dug deeply, mercilessly into the wood, gouging up long splinters of red-grained wood.
The Cwrth flinched. Torq was pleased. That was the first sign of perturbation she had shown during their interchanges.
Just as a matter of principle, he flicked the pillar with a first hand, causing it to rock perceptibly. The carving seemed to slide a bit, then stop, as if there were come low barrier he couldn’t see that kept it from crashing to the stone floor.
This time she held herself in check. She was again unflappable, calm.
&nb
sp; He continued: “This is our final requirement. Before sunfall, you will surrender to us—that is to say, to me—all armaments and other implements that might be used against the Koleic. You will acknowledge us as overlords, without reservation, and you will accept your condition as tributary, permanently and without question. You will turn over such materials—metals and minerals—as we require, as well as any fuel elements adaptable to our needs.
“You—and here I include all of your people—will do these things without complaint or rebellion. Otherwise, and this I promise, I will destroy your world. Koleic do not threaten. They do. We destroy what we cannot subjugate.”
He paused. The trans-comm began its task of morphing his clear, precise words, his meticulous diction, into meaningless streams of unintelligible sounds. It whistled and screeched, enough to drive even a name mad... had he not been standing there to fulfill the commission of his God.
He allowed his eyen to gaze around the room. The Cwrth’s servants—no more than a dozen when he had arrived—had all withdrawn from the chamber, leaving it even emptier than it had been when he first strode in. His numbers had stationed themselves around the walls, standing a few tarsi-lengths from the ubiquitous drapery that obscured everything except the central window in each wall.
He twitched. The room still felt... wrong. Bad?
He wasn’t certain that he wanted to attach moral value to mere architectural curiosity—this was an alien world, after all, unused to the higher refinements and beauties of the Koleic.
The Cwrth straightened slightly, making her form look even more drawn, more vulnerable.
He liked that.
She opened her mouth to speak.
Would she?
She did.
“So be it.”
He started to respond, when she turned to face him directly.
He was shocked anew by the awfulness of those dual eyes—soft, colored, fluid-filled spheres without compounds, without the familiar flash of faceted black. Flaps of tissue dropped down over them from time to time, even though in battle, those ridiculous flaps would clearly provide no protection from blasts or thrusts.
And more.
Her already impossibly fragile body was especially marred by one grotesquery that the draped fabric half-hid when she was turned away but now opened slightly to reveal in all of its odious detail.
Just above the jointure of her lower limbs, her body was swollen. The body covering—that was the word the trans-comm devised for what was obviously not exoskeleton but somehow performed many of the same functions—the body covering was tight, taut, bulging enough to nearly double her girth and to throw the rest of her body out of symmetry.
He had never seen such an abomination before... and had been even more horrified, shocked almost beyond words, to discover early in their interchanges that she was... that is, the she would... that she was in the process of bearing young!
His tarsi clicked faintly, disapprovingly.
His God was one thing. She performed her function discretely, almost silently, and none were there to observe except the chosen tens... excepting, of course, that single emergency that had brought Torq before here.
And even then, he had seen nothing except her upper carapace; the rest of her long body had been covered, as tradition demanded, by sumptuous cloth.
There had been nothing to indicate, to suggest, that ....
Well, truthfully, there had been something:
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
But this, this public posturing.
It was bad enough to have to treat with an admitted female, but this was not even an egg-layer. No, she was bringing something alive from within her body.
He tried not to look at the shiny, stretched tissue, or notice that it occasionally rippled, almost heaved, as if something inside were struggling to escape its imprisonment.
And something was.
He had no idea what a Cwrth-grub would look like. And he had no interest in finding out. This creature, this... thing... had no business even appearing in public in such a state, let alone accepting the conditions that would permanently subjugate herself and everything like her on this world.
She should have long since retired to the sanctity and the privacy of a Hatchery.
Or whatever she called a place where she could...
The trans-comm interrupted his thoughts with a short burst—damnably familiar—then a slightly longer staccato of sounds.
“So be it.... Thus it is to call outward in, spew inward out.”
This was different.
The trans-comm faltered slightly on the final phrases, as if unsure of the translation. When it did repeat them in Koleic, there was still a hesitancy, along with a certain feeling of ritualism.
The tone itself grated on Torq. He crossed the room to stand before one of the seven windows and stared at meticulously tended fields fanning out between the convergence of two rivers.
In fact, the richness of the enclave—large as it was, expanding southward well beyond the limits of vision—had startled Torq when he had first arrived.
From space, the ship had transmitted crisp images of most of the planetary surface. Anomalous clouds had seemed to hover over a few specific areas, never moving, as far as the ship’s instruments had reported. They seemed lower than clouds should be, almost but not quite touching the land, and within them the instruments reported frequent flashes. Torq might have passed the phenomena off as lightning—or this planet’s equivalent—except that the instruments also indicated that the flashes consisted not only of light but of color. It some way the instruments could not define, it was physical color. Torq did not understand.
When Torq ordered several numbers to test further, he received even more anomalous responses:
Yes, there are definitely colors associated with the flashes.
But no, they do not fit into the spectrum of light as we understand it.
One of the numbers had allowed its carapace to curve slightly when Torq questioned further but had ultimately remained standing.
Still, there was something about those flashes that had startled, upset, and frightened—or terrified—the numbers.
In addition to the clouds there had been huge patches of grey spreading over whole quadrants of the surface, looking like the horrible fungoid growth that occasionally tormented the oldest and weakest of the Koleic. Tests had confirmed that these vast expanses were covered with dust, ash, something of that sort. But even there, there were suggestions of the indescribable color. Much of the planet was already afflicted by the devastation. From all indications, it was spreading.
And then, nestled among them, surrounded by an unbroken chain of mountains and glittering with colors that felt normal to Torq’s eyen, lay the enclave. In itself, it was huge, covering perhaps an eighth of the planet’s visible surface, but compared with the clouds and the dust bowls, it seemed fragile, vulnerable.
Torq turned slightly.
To his left, the squat outline of his lander shimmered in the late afternoon light. It seemed... wrong, he suddenly realized, out-of-place, alien.
He shifted his compounds, then focused back on the lander, and saw it as he had always seen it. For an instant, he decided, he had been so overwhelmed by the incongruous angles and surfaces of the enclave that he had almost perceived it as the Cwrth might have.
His ventral plates rippled.
The idea was absurd.
He stepped back two paces but spoke without turning to face the Cwrth.
“This place, this community, is rich. It is fertile. It has extensive reserves of minerals and elements that will be useful to use. Even the waste lands surrounding you are rich, although no longer capable of growing crops.”
He stopped and allowed the trans-comm to repeat what he had said.
The Cwrth did not respond. She did not even allow the eye-flaps to flutter down but stared at him disconcertingly with her dual orbs. They were, he noted, almost th
e same color as the sky outside the windows... blue but tinged with the fire of sunfall.
He waited a moment.
She did not speak.
He continued: “You have told me that you have no armies, no government. That you yourself are merely a... I have forgotten.”
He turned to the trans-comm and entered a search-memory command, then waited until it replied.
“Ah, yes. You are a ‘distal-appendage/female-that-has-not-yet-given-birth.’ You claim you hold no office other than Cwrth—‘talker’—yet it is with you that I must deal.
“Who governs you? To whom do you take conflicts? Who monitors wealth to ascertain that all have sufficient according to their station?”
Again he paused and waited for the trans-comm.
This time, when it had completed its litany of whistles, gurgles, wheezes, and crackles, the Cwrth began to speak.
And this time he did not hear the repetitious sounds that signified, “So be it.”
Line by line, the trans-comm iterated her alien thoughts in Torq’s own speech.
“We of the enclave are content. You are correct... and you are incorrect. We have no one to take our conflicts to because we have no conflicts. We have no armies because we have no one to fight. We have no riches because we all have what we need. We use our world as we require, not as we wish. We live well.”
The trans-comm fell silent.
“No conflicts? No enemies? And the Koleic are the first to come upon you?”
A moment later: “No. No, we have no conflicts. No, we have no enemies. And no, you”—here the term was not Koleic but something untranslatable, although the trans-comm indicated that at the base of the Cwrth word were undertones of disgust, revulsion, aversion, and dislike of something that scuttled upon the earth—“And no, you are not the first to come upon us. We have received visitors”—invaders, attackers—“before. We have received demands before. We have been warned, threatened, intimidated. But each time, the visitors have failed.
“We have been succored.”
Torq tensed as he heard her tone alter. Absolute certainty radiated from her even before her words filtered through the trans-comm. He dreaded what he would hear next. Sufficient reports had come back to the home world from earlier seeding missions for him to recognize the pattern, as little as he had expected it on this world. There had been none of the obvious signs, no panoply, no paraphernalia, no ceremonials. Yet her words were inevitable, invariable in sense if not in form. They had been heard by other Chaptains on other worlds—and the Koleic had invariably, systematically destroyed the unspoken hope implicit in them.
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