by Paul Lucas
Humans could be so dense sometimes. I guess there are things about Myotans that no human will ever fully understand, even Lerner.
I was so mad at him for saying such a stupid thing I wanted to strike him. Instead all I did was glare at him and went on helping the others with their injuries without a backward glance. I caught his eye an hour later, and I could tell I had hurt him.
He began to apologize when we got back to the apartment the next day. I ravished him as a way of saying he was forgiven. Windrider always told me that the trick to making a relationship work was to forgive each other at least one more time than you curse each other.
But then I ravished him again. And again the next morning. I could not help myself. My body cried out for him and would not be denied. I felt the lust-frenzy even more powerfully that night, after I had just spent a grueling day removing the wings of the dead for their Remembrance ceremonies in a few days’ time. Lerner was shocked at my wild intensity that night. I practically attacked him, scratching and biting and fighting off all his attempts at foreplay because I needed him in me right that minute!
Lying next to my Mate, hearing him snore softly, feeling his heat so close, was driving me to distraction. I rubbed my thighs together, trying to relieve the tension building down below.
I should not wake him up. I really should not. He could not possibly do it again so soon.
But I reached for him anyway. Maybe if I coaxed him in just the right way...
I stopped myself. Why was I acting like this? This was not me. I liked sex, yes. Very much. But this was excessive. Why was I so anxious to mate at every opportunity?
Lerner said I was compensating. But what if my lust was only a symptom of an even greater need? What if my body was crying out for something more, and that it instinctively proceeded to get it in the only way it knew how?
After all, what was mating for?
The answer calmed me down, tamped my lust just a bit. I could wait for that until morning. But now I had something even more urgent to share with my husband.
“Lerner?” I shook his shoulder. “Lerner?”
His eyes fluttered reluctantly open. “Huhrm?”
“Husband, we need to talk.”
His brows knitted, a little irritated. “Goss, can’t this wait?”
I shook my head. “No. Lerner, I want to have a child. Now.”
TWENTY-NINE
The only truly tragic death is the one that is remembered better than the life which preceeded it.
--from Myotan Oral Traditions
* * *
The last of the wings of the dead were hung in the Hall of Remembrance with the traditional chants of our Shaman and Chief.
The Hall of Remembrance was one of the largest chambers in the Tower, over forty meters square and half that tall. For reasons that remain unknown to us to this day, it is riven with many thousands of hooks and thumb-sized holes. Our ancestors took advantage of this to hang the preserved wings of the dead, so that those who loved them could visit and remember.
The process of preparing the dead for this day had fallen to Windrider and myself. As Shaman and apprentice Shaman, it was our duty. First, we had to carefully cut the wings from the dead bodies, an extremely unpleasant and emotionally tearing task, as the families of the deceased were present to lend their prayers for the departed spirits. Then the bodies were burned, and their ashes scattered into the winds at the top of the Tower. They no longer needed their wings to fly.
Then we set about preserving the wings with root extracts. If kept dry, they would last for generations. Then, those wings that were still untattooed--those of the children and unmarried adults--were given to their families so that they could put markers of remembrance on them. Usually, it was the person’s name combined with either art or poetry, depending on the family’s preference. They did not need to rush, of course. They could come back here at any time to perfect the tattoos of their departed loved ones. When my parents had died, they had both had full wing tattoos, but I came to the Hall of remembrance every night for a month to complete a small poem I had written for them on the corner of their wings. I would spend hours here, alone, exploring the wings of the dead. Many families had long poles on which hung the wings of many generations past. Always, as was our custom, one said a prayer to the departed spirit to whom the wings belonged before disengaging them from their hooks and examining them.
It was the first time I had felt truly connected to my people, not just as they are now but to all the generations we had dwelled at the Tower. Some wings were so old that their patterns were paling and flaking with age.
Some bore patterns, pictures, and calligraphy that were clearly meant purely as artistic works. Some were quite beautiful. But others told, either in words or pictographic form, stories and histories of the times in which they lived. Many told of the great plague that swept the community just several generations before, the one that whittled our numbers from nearly half a thousand to merely several hundred. Another told of a vast Skywrath storm that swept through our area a century and a half ago, one so powerful it annihilated everything for dozens of miles around. Only the Tower had withstood its onslaught. Still another recounted a great schism in the tribe, as a crafty and ambitious shaman tried to oust his chieftain from power, ultimately failing. Their feud ended with a duel, the Shaman using his spells and the chieftain using his hunter’s skills and weapons. The chieftain won, but only after an apparently epic battle.
Still, many of the wing tattoos told simpler stories, of births and deaths and Matings and celebrations. These were just as fascinating to me as the epic stories and I spent hours mulling over them.
Some depictions were just bewildering, however, as one couldn’t be sure exactly what the tattooist had in mind. One in particular always stood out in my mind. It was on one of the oldest set of wings, its tattoos fading into obscurity. I could just barely make it out. It was a pictographic story, and seemed to tell of our people’s original journey to the Tower. That was no surprise; it was common knowledge that we had come here from some distant, unknown land, guided by the Sky Spirit. But what puzzled me was that we seemed to come from some circle or globe with some strange markings. When I had asked Glider what it meant, she said that the circle was meant to be the sun. The sun was the Sky Spirit’s wife, after all, and it was she who probably birthed the first generation of Myotans. At the time I had accepted it.
I had not thought of that incident much in the past several years, especially since the humans came. But now that I was so forcefully reminded of it, I had a sudden realization. What if the circle on that set of wings had not been metaphoric? What if it represented a real object?
But what? The Eden Sphere, perhaps, before it was destroyed? Or could it have been one of the mythical planets that my husband told me of, the ones that had served as raw materials for the Sphere? Maybe even old Earth, where life and humanity had originated? I would have to ask Lerner of that later, when the ceremony had concluded.
But there were still so many wings in the Hall of remembrance I had yet to explore. And now twenty-three more were being added.
Our wings were the most sacred parts of ourselves. They are what distinguishes us as children of the Sky-Spirit, as Myotans. It is a comfort to many of us that this most magical part of ourselves will live on for us after we die.
Our human friends from the Niven’s Folly were also present at the Remembrance Ceremony, quietly observing from the back of the chamber. The only one missing was Dumas, who I was told had spent most of the past week in the newly-discovered open chamber, examining the Builder machines there. Lerner had joined him several times, but thought it inappropriate to spend too much time there so soon after so much tragedy.
Windrider began a long, slow process of saying a personalized prayer for each of the dead. The prayers ended almost exactly the same for each, an entreaty to the Sky Spirit to welcome them into his domain beyond the Shards.
There was Shardancer, an el
der with eight grandchildren. She had always been quiet and restrained, an eternal source for wisdom and--when the youngsters weren’t around--off-color jokes. No one knows why she did not heed the warning to flee.
Ripplefur and Skyeyes, a young couple who had been Mated just a year before. Ripplefur had been one of the males I had "experimented" with in the months before I met Lerner. Skyeyes had been heavy with his child. They had been slow fleeing their apartment and had been attacked by the Xique in their sleeping chamber.
Spiral, Feathervoice, Strongwing, Skyskimmer, Mist, and Warmbreeze, all sentinels on duty when the Xique attacked. Skydawn, Windracer, and Stripefur, who immediately joined the defenders as soon as they realized the danger. They had all given their lives so the rest of the community could flee.
Whisper, another sentry, who some said had fled his post when the attack came and was struck down by a Xique where he cowered in one of the remote chambers. Whether this was true or not, no one knew for sure. He was honored as a hero along with his fellows anyway, at Flier’s insistence. The dead deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Smoke, a father of four and the community’s best woodcarver. His family lived the farthest from the Great Entrance, and had been warned last. He sent his family ahead up to the upper levels while he grabbed his gun and tried to join the sentries trying to delay the Xique. Near as anyone could tell, he was quickly cut off by the invaders and made his way cautiously up the levels, fighting and evading the enemy the entire way. He had almost reached the safe haven on the thirteenth floor when he had been ambushed.
Yellowblossom, a shrew of a female who was always complaining of the imagined slights done to her by others. She had used the confusion of the evacuation to sneak into Coldwinds’ apartment to steal some human knives she always believed Coldwind had cheated her out of. Her greed cost her life.
Hawkfire, an old, stubborn male whose partial deafness had prevented him from hearing the warnings until too late.
Steelsky, Wind, and Cloudsinger, all children who got separated from their families during the panicked flight and fell into Xique claws.
Zephyr and Snowfall, two teen-agers who had been sweethearts for over half a year and whom many believed were destined to become Mates. We had found their bodies in one of the storage chambers away from the main cluster of apartments. It was a common place for young couples to sneak off to when they felt the need to “experiment.” They had died in each others’ arms, and the searchers had found them still clutching each other even in death. At their families’ request, Windrider joined the young lovers’ spirits as Mates posthumously.
I had known them all. I had prayed for each of them during the past week. I prayed for them silently now, alongside Windrider’s chants, as did the rest of the community. Even my husband, who did not believe as we did, joined in to honor the fallen.
The only sound to intrude on Windrider’s chanting was a soft snuffling. I looked up to see Louis, at the back of the chamber, messily wiping the tears streaming from his eyes on his sleeves.
A side of him I had not expected to see. Maybe there was something to Amethyst’s attraction to him after all.
The prayers ended, and with them, the ceremony. But the grieving of loved ones would go on for months and years, if not the rest of our lives.
Does one ever really recover from such a loss? Families and friends are with you all your life, no matter what separates you, be it distance or time or death. The grief we feel is not from their absence, but from their constant presence in our memories, knowing we can never again have more of them than that.
I just hoped this would be the last tragedy that the community would have to suffer through for at least a little while.
But I knew, somehow, that our woes were in truth just beginning.
THIRTY
They began calling it “the Laboratory.” Dumas had come up with the name, saying the room reminded him a little of a scene from an old Earth novel called Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. It caught on with the KN crew.
It was the first time I had entered the chamber since we first discovered it with the Xique. My husband and I had agreed to oversee some equipment Dumas had set up for overnight monitoring. He had maintenance duties he had to attend to on the helistat, duties he had neglected of late in light of the discovery.
The Lab was now a strange mishmash of Builder and Known Nations technology, the latter unloaded from the helistat and strewn about the room for various purposes. Sensors, tools, fuel cells, analytical computers, workbenches, and more.
Dumas had practically set up shop in the chamber, heaters arranged around the room to keep it at a temperature the Spider Swarm could work comfortably. Compared to the nearly-freezing temperature that greeted us with the Xique, the change was more than welcome. Even now he was busy on the far side of the chamber, his element-bodies crawling over one of the large, angled, liquid-filled tubes.
Actually, it was a bit of misnomer to call Dumas “him.” His element bodies were composed of both sexes and he had to mate with himself every so often to replace element bodies that wore out. I often wondered: was what the swarm did sex or masturbation? And worse, his element bodies had to mate with what were in essence their own brothers and sisters. There was a halfway decent chance that at any one time one of his female element-bodies would be carrying a small pod of eggs webbed to her abdomen. They became attuned to the mind-link while still within the egg, and after they hatched they devoured each other until only the strongest and hardiest individual was left to become a full-grown spider.
I shuddered at the thought. Dumas seemed more alien the more I learned of him. How could any creature exist whose basic instincts for survival included incest and cannibalism? His human-friendly veneer must have been a hard-won skill.
My husband went to confer with the Spider Swarm. I wandered around the chamber, inspecting this machine and that.
As I approached a mysterious stand of Builder machines, I noticed that the silver-black surface undulated ever so slightly, as if it were made of standing water responding ever so slightly to the air currents passing through the room. When Lerner rejoined me I asked him about it.
“There’s some debate as to what that could be,” he said. “It’s been observed at other artifacts sites too. We know the outer casing is some kind of flexible UTSite material, maybe microscopic interlocking links of some sort, held more or less rigid by precisely-shaped electromagnetic fields.”
“I think I see.” I read extensively about Known Nations technology and science whenever I could sandwich it between my Shaman apprenticeship, assisting my husband, and about a dozen other duties I had to do during the day. Over the years I had accumulated what I hoped was a basic understanding of their sciences. “But why does the surface ripple like that?”
“Well, that’s the question. I’m no Xenotech, but you know how our electronics use circuits that route electrical current from one component to another? Well, as best as anyone can tell, the Builders took that one step farther, and integrated the transfer of energy on a quantum level using other forces of nature as well, particularly gravity. To put it another way, their microcircuitry uses sub-atomic fields to enhance--and some say replace--the flow of electromagnetic potential through their machines with gravitons, mesons, and so on. Quantumtronics, or Q-tronics, its been called.
“Anyway, that’s the prevailing theory. The casing being UTSite means we can’t crack it, so we can’t know for sure. But we do know that the ripples you’re seeing are gravity waves being generated, merging, and fading out within the Q-tronic machines just behind the surface. In fact, the bulkhead was probably made specifically to be flexible so it could partially harmonize or maybe even focus and amplify the gravity waves.”
I nodded. Another astonishing wonder in a world of wonders. I pondered if there would ever come a time I would become so jaded by such things that I would lose my sense of awe. That would be a sad day indeed, if it ever happened.
“And
the sound this room was generating?” I asked. “Did it have something to do with these Q-tronics?”
“In a way,” came a soft voice right by my ear. I turned to a see a large, black, hairy spider hanging by a strand of webbing dangling from the ceiling an inch away from my muzzle. I yelped and jumped back. The creature swung back and forth a bit until it landed on the undulating bulkhead. “Hmm. Interesting,” it said. “Like being on a water bed, only vertical.”
My husband looked askew at the spider. “And when was the last time you were on a water bed, Dumas? I thought Spider Swarms don’t need sleep like humans.”
“We don’t, but we have to stay someplace at night in human lands, and that usually means human hotels. I had a waterbed at a hotel in Elysium, about a year ago. They’re so much fun! I meticulously unbolted the nightstand from the floor, hauled it onto the bed, and played out the ship scene from Twenty Years After. The particular element-body you’re talking to played Planchet, D’Artagnan’s somewhat buffoonish valet.”
“Water beds are fun in a different way for us mammals, you know.” My husband laughed and pinched me below the tail. “We should try one next time we go to the KN, Goss.”
“Lerner!” I snapped. “Not in front of...” My words trailed off. Not in front of the incestuous, cannibal tarantula? I suddenly realized we could mate right here on the floor and we’d have a better chance scandalizing the workbench and power tools. I turned back to Dumas. “So, you were saying something about the sound?”
While my husband and I had been momentarily distracted the spider had segued into a mock sword-fight with a densitometer on the work bench, using a tiny screwdriver for a blade. It was somehow incongruous to me that a creature like a Spider Swarm could feel playful, much less actually play. It continued on for several seconds after I asked my question and then--almost reluctantly-- it put the screwdriver down and faced me. “Yes,” it said. “As far as I can tell, there is a lot of Q-tronic machinery in this room, and it probably connects to other devices in other sealed rooms in the Tower. In fact, if you go over to where my other element body is waving the cloth--see it?--I can show you something.”
