The Seeds of Dissolution

by William C. Tracy

  “I am here,” she said. She was right next to him, sitting quietly.

  “How long was I asleep?” he asked.

  “A while. I slept a little.”

  There was no way to tell time in the dark. I should be nervous. I should be panicking. A small dark place was perfect, especially with his friend beside him. It couldn’t hit any of his buttons. I’m a coward, comfortable in the dark.

  The brightening light heralded Gaotha, calling for his “little birds.” Neither of them answered this time and the Sathssn went away, chuckling to himself.

  They ate the sludge in the bowl rapidly.

  “Why are they keeping us here?” Sam finally asked. “They’re just going to check us out and what? Let us go? It makes no sense.”

  “This cannot be all they intend.” She scooted closer, and Sam gravitated to her heat. “I’m scared. I should try—”

  “No,” Sam interrupted. “Don’t hurt yourself again—it will only be easier for them to find something wrong. We’ll wait until they let us out.”

  Enos leaned against him, and he realized she was shaking. I should be more scared.

  Later, Gaotha came again.

  “Little birds, there is more food.” The bowl pinged in the slot.

  Gaotha came back for the bowl when they finished. “The doctor majus, he will come soon to inspect Gaotha’s little birds, to make sure they are fit for the True Form. You will be honored.”

  Enos pulled Sam close, her grip like a vice. “Did he say—”

  Sam shushed her until Gaotha’s footsteps died away. “What is it?”

  “They have someone from the House of Healing. I thought it was a regular physician. He will examine us.” Her hands were shaking on him, and her voice cracked as she spoke. “They cannot. They cannot do that.” She was panting, an anxiety attack. Sam held her close, taking her shaking into him, absorbing it. He was used to the feeling. He could handle it. Sam remembered Enos’ reluctance to let Councilor Ayama touch her with her song.

  “It won’t be fun,” he said, “but I don’t think they’ll hurt us. They would have done that before.”

  “They are Sathssn.” Enos shook in his arms, her breathing tickling his ear, too fast. He tried to count, to calm her, but she didn’t seem to hear. “They are the Servants. The majus is House of Healing.”

  “They won’t hurt us,” Sam said again. Don’t know if that’s true, but if it helps—

  “You do not understand,” Enos said into his shoulder. “If we do not pass inspection, we will be unworthy of their idea of form.”

  “Which means?” Worry grew in Sam.

  “The souls of the unworthy must be sent back to receive a new form.”

  “They kill people who don’t live up to their standards?” Sam asked.

  “It is their way. For any deformity, or large injury, or major disease, they kill instead of treating the problem.” Enos sniffled, shifted in his arms. She was tightening into a little ball. “You will pass, Sam,” she whispered. “I will not.”

  “Why not? Do you have a disease?”

  Rather than answering, Enos struggled against him, and he let her go. She stood, and he stood with her. The air shifted around her, a change to her posture, her intention. She’s made a decision.

  “I am going to leave this room,” she said. “I will try to move the door from the outside, or at least turn off the System keeping us here.”

  Sam tried to answer, but no words came out. There’s something wrong. Something I haven’t realized.

  “How?” he managed to ask.

  “I will change my shape to squeeze through the slot,” Enos answered.

  Sam laughed, and heard the high-pitched panic in his voice. “Enos, I can’t fit my hand through that slot. How could you get through?” He heard her kneel, presumably feeling the slot’s dimension. “There’s no way anyone could fit through there.”

  “There is one way I could.”

  Sam frowned. “That’s impossible. They’re all dead.” He listened in the darkness, heard no response. “Right?”

  “Sam, I am Aridori.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  A Cold Trail, a Geometry of Actions

  -Besides translating, the Nether also aides in understanding across cultural barriers. Among the ten homeworlds, it is rare to find different species living together in large communities, but in the Nether, species freely mix with far less tension.

  A study on relations between the ten species, 856 A.A.W.

  Rilan stepped out of Ori’s portal into the remains of Dalhni. The profile of the city was a silhouette against the light of the early dawn, carved and restructured. How could such a deadly object simply disappear? Like a tornado, or a flood. Her hands clenched in folds of her heavy pants—ones her father had made by hand. They weren’t the first pair he made, but they were still old. I wore the first pair when Ori’s brother was killed. Now Ori’s beside me again, when we’re going to—

  “Come on,” she said, making sure her voice was steady. She led him into the city.

  Dalhni was sprawling, though it took much less time to get to the city center this time. They saw only five others as they walked, dark figures slinking through the broken city. There were surely others here, but the Council must still be restricting access.

  The city looked like it had been ground down with a giant ball. Buildings creaked and swayed. The center area wouldn’t be livable for cycles. What will happen to the families who lived here? Some had escaped, but they passed many bodies.

  Ori’s crest was spiking and waving as they walked. “This place will be stinking, before long. The cleanup alone will be massive. Such a catastrophe has not happened for as long as I am remembering.”

  Even to Ori, it was a catastrophe, something terrible to be fixed. Rilan realized tears were running down her face, and there was no way to stop them now. She knew many of those who lived here, knew their children, had shared feast and holy days with them. She stared at what used to be Mr. Andryanti’s grocery store, now the merest stub of a building, shorter than her. Did he get out in time, or was he stubborn too?

  She could see a man lying on his side in the alley next to the ruined store. She knew him—Kevayn Wilder—a local artist who had made daguerreotypes of families in Dalhni. Her father had one of them taken on her twentieth birthday hanging beside his front door. She could remember the jolly man setting up his equipment, positioning them just so, her father’s hands on her shoulder, her holding on to a smile for what seemed like forever, waiting for the plate to take down their image for eternity.

  “Ah—Mhalaro’s things,” Ori said, breaking into her reverie. Rilan gasped in a ragged breath, and he turned to her, his crest wild. “I—oh, I did not realize.” He had been watching the city, not her. “To see it, like this—” There were two more small still bodies, not far away.

  We can’t give all of them the respect they deserve. She shook her head, dashing at her eyes, then shivered. It was still cold. “No—that’s alright. Maybe we can give the equipment to Mhalaro. He may be able to get more information from them, though I doubt it.”

  “They are stacked.” Ori pointed to a small pile of glass plates and beakers. “I did not think Mhalaro left them in any order.”

  Rilan shrugged. She couldn’t raise an interest in the question.

  “Could it be meaning Sam came back here, afterward?” Ori asked. “It is a small thing, but we have little to start with.” He looked around the decimated city, as if their apprentices would spring out of the ground.

  We’re here for more than one thing. Rilan forced away memories of running through these streets as a child, visiting friends. One I can do something about. The other is a finality.

  She pulled in her awareness, listening for the scant melodies of life. Down to the very crawling things beneath the earth, their songs were silent measures. Plants were dead and wilted, with only a few tremolos left in the hardiest tree ro
ots, far underground. Strains of a rolling jig told her there were a few birds coming back, though there was almost nothing to eat. They wouldn’t stop long.

  She reached toward the lumps of cloth and flesh across the street from them, but there was no music. The bodies were nearly devoid of nutrients. It would take a long time for the ecology to rebuild.

  Death wasn’t the only reason she was here. She searched for vibrant life in the Symphony of Healing. It stood out, an old rhythm, but still there. Rilan turned in a circle, listening to the Symphony flow and ebb around her.

  “Anything?” Ori asked. She shushed him.

  There. “They came this way.” She pointed across the street, and moved to it, stepping over debris, and things that were not debris.

  At the edge of the void’s crater, the echoes of their apprentices’ paths were etched into the melody, a faint backbeat. Normally she would need an object to match the musical sequence of the past. Here, there was so little, the residue stood out as a duet, softly playing.

  “They stood here for a while,” she told Ori. “After the void left. They survived it somehow.” They were alive, and she had two less deaths to occupy her.

  She oriented on the music, hope fluttering in her chest. Ori kicked a rock, the toe of his boot disturbing his hideous robe. The one today was green and lavender striped.

  “It will take a minute,” she said. “This sort of thing isn’t easy to hear, so go stand somewhere else. Your melody is interfering.” He stilled his boot, and though there was a frown on his face, his crest lifted in amusement at her bossing. She felt a strange smile, like a sunrise at midnight. She would have thought her humor was gone. How did he survive without me? She was surprised something hadn’t eaten him because he wouldn’t take the time to get out of its way.

  She followed the faint duet Sam and Enos left, moving as they had. A few steps away from the center of the void, it got muddy. She went back to the path of song, tried again. The trail stopped again, abruptly.

  Rilan looked to Ori. “They disappeared,” she said.

  “Disappeared where?”

  “I don’t know. It cuts off like they—” She smacked her head. “Like they went through a portal, of course. Where? They can’t have created it themselves, because they’re not in the Imperium. We would have heard something.”

  Ori’s generous eyebrows creased together. “They could be in another city, or in the grainlands somewhere. Are you sensing anything else?”

  Rilan listened to the duet. “No, nothing else—wait.”

  “Yes?” Ori’s crest puffed.

  It was not just a duet. There was a small chorus behind it. “They weren’t alone. There were two, no three, other beings here, but arriving later.” She paced along the ground, following their paths, walking in circles. Two were over here, one there. She held her hands out, holding their positions in her mind. “They…talked to the apprentices?” Finding that meaning in the music was more art than certainty. “I can’t tell anything else, but Sam and Enos must have gone with the strangers. Maybe they rescued other survivors when they left through a portal.”

  “It is still leaving the question of where they went,” Ori said.

  Rilan nodded. “The song ends here, but perhaps the other direction may give us information.”

  The other end of trail led them to the street outside her family home.

  “I, I can’t hold it any longer.” As her chest tightened, the music escaped her, as it hadn’t since before she got her seat on the Council. There were too many thoughts pulling at her. Why did they come here?

  She didn’t look across her yard, but instead swiped a finger across an eye. They had to find the apprentices. There were important matters she had to take care of. There wasn’t time—

  Then Ori was close, holding her, and she realized she was leaning against the alley wall. Her hand hurt, and she looked at it to find scrapes all down one side. Did I punch the wall? It was a blur.

  “Why?” Slowly she sank down against the wall. Ori was there in an instant.

  “You must acknowledge it,” he said.

  “Acknowledge what?” she said.

  “Your father is dead.”

  “I know.”

  “You have lost your position on the Council. They took your power, your accomplishment away.”

  “I know that!” Rilan screamed back. Part of her was astonished at the lack of control. “Who’s the psychologist? Don’t you think I know?”

  Ori reached out a hand, then hesitated. When she didn’t flinch, he gently stroked her hair. He hadn’t even started when she shouted into his face. “You do not feel it. Being on the Council has sucked the emotion from you.” She wanted to push away from him, wanted to hug him close. “Your father was a strong man. This should be painful for you. You were the best one on the Council. It was taken away. How have you been so calm, so long?”

  Every word was a stab in her chest. She bent around the wounds, curling in, letting Ori support her. It was easy to do, though they had been separated for cycles.

  “We will not be finding the apprentices here,” he said. “Let them go, for now. Find yourself before you find them.”

  Then Rilan was crying, wailing, into Ori’s horrible robe. Maybe she would ruin it with her tears. It would be the only good to come out of this. She had to be strong.

  “You are not needing to be so hard,” Ori said, as if reading her thoughts. “Be soft today. Let it go. Later, we will find them.”

  Rilan stayed next to him for a long time, crying into his robe. He smelled like old leather—not a bad smell, but comfortable. He was a spur of rock, in the chaotic river that flowed around her.

  She had been happy when they traveled together, then given it all up for the power of the Council—the chance to make real changes. Then, while incompetent maji pulled the Council apart, she had lost her father. She could have visited him more. Could have done so many other things. She was crying again, hot tears cutting down her face.

  * * *

  They buried him afterward, arranging him in the grave behind the house. It was warming in the city, though gradually, as if the void left a part of its coldness behind. It was a relief, because it meant nothing had disturbed her father’s body.

  They buried the chickens too, little balls of limp fuzz. They had been part of her father’s livelihood, and Ori, shyly, suggested they might at least make use of them. Rilan checked the Symphony, and found the carcasses starved of nutrients, like the void had eaten them already and spit out the leftovers.

  They both said a few words over the new grave in the backyard of the house. Rilan’s mother had died long ago in the consuming plague, and Rilan had no other siblings. They were the only ones left to say anything. Those in the town who knew him would be too busy with their own problems.

  There was little danger of anyone claiming the house and property, at least anytime soon. Rilan would stake her claim to the land later, once people came back to Dalhni. Maybe she could rent the small yard out when the city was rebuilt. If the city was rebuilt.

  For now, she took only the silvered image of her and her father from its place by the door, both its creator and one of the subjects given back to the great wheel of life and death in the same disaster.

  As they trudged back to the edge of the city, Rilan squeezed Ori’s arm. “Thank you,” she said.

  “I have not been here for you,” he answered. “I have been out of reach and—selfish. I am here now.”

  It was a hard thing for him to admit. “I know,” she said. “I was far away from you, too.” She let the silence build, considering her next words. She thought they were right, but her decisions lately were all suspect.

  “I’ve been thinking about how things were, before I joined the Council.”

  “Really? What—things?” Ori’s eyebrows lifted, intrigued, and his feathery hair made that certain pattern it did when he was anticipating something. She hadn’t seen
that expression from him in a while. It pulled her face into a smile despite her mood.

  “Us, for one,” she said, turning her face to his. Maybe seeing those three apprentices together had biased her. She hadn’t been with anyone in a long time.

  Rilan brought her braid around and thoughtfully thumped the bell into her hand, chiming with every beat. “It’s just a thought.” But Ori knew her too well. He’d been thinking about it too. She could tell. His smile picked up even more, his pointy teeth showing. She remembered those teeth nibbling on her ear. They walked in time with each other for a few beats, her lengthening her stride, him taking short steps. “For now, let’s get back to the Nether. We need to find our apprentices.”

  * * *

  Origon puttered aimlessly through his apartment. Sam had cleaned at some point—it no longer looked like he had spent the last several cycles traveling. If the young man hadn’t done it, Origon might have even considered dusting. Anything to keep him from interrupting Rilan’s rest.

  He might test, over the next several days, how much she meant what she said in Dalhni, and how much was her grief talking. If she was serious. He forced his crest back to neutral. A man of his cycles should be able to control his emotions better. Yet Rilan’s smooth brown neck, her wiry, strong arms, kept forcing their way into his head, and he firmly put them out. She had required a little convincing to rest, but she needed the sleep, if only for her mind. They had both slept for a little—in separate rooms.

  With the time difference between Methiem and the Nether, they had been up most of the night, and the walls of the Nether were brightening into morning. Rilan might not want to be alone during the next few days. She was still so brittle, even after their trip to Dalhni. It would be the work of many months to help her through her grief. She didn’t show it well. Like others of the caring profession, physical or mental, she was always her own worst patient.

  Just then a knock sounded at his door. He frowned, and went to answer it. Caroom’s wide, placid face stared back.