This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2017
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For my wife
Contents
Epigraph
Part 1: The Scholar
Message smuggled into the Imperial Residence
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
The Trench Wizard
From the desk of Lady Jephesandra, to Her Imperial Majesty
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
The Sorceress
To Her Imperial Majesty, from Lady Jephesandra
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
—T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
(Part V: What the Thunder Said)
Part 1: The Scholar
If a Tachba makes an official request for how they would like to die, simply write it down in their view and do not ask questions. It is not worth discussing.
“Orienting to the Front,” Haphan
Officer Manual
Message smuggled into the Imperial Residence
Your Imperial Majesty, I believe your staff thinks you are too delicate to see my name again. Nothing else could explain so much silence from your desk, for something that could keep the entire colony alive. Here: I have imposed on many friendships to have this delivered to your hand by your daughter. Don’t be cross, just add her to the list of people who might survive the coming years if you approve my simple request. —Jephia.
PETITION FOR ACCESS TO THE IMPERIAL ARCHIVES, submitted by Lady Jephesandra Liu Tawarna
It is now 141 years since Landing Day, when the Haphan Imperium arrived to subjugate Grigory IV. Preceding us were lesser attempts by lesser races, six known waves of colonization with archeological evidence of several others. Each colony enjoyed a degree of early success but none of them flourished and all of them failed—destroyed from within by the local human population of Tachba and their ancient Pollution.
Our information is most complete for the expansionist spacefaring race known as the Daggie Harmonium. We know that as their colony neared its end, the daggies committed their last resources to understanding the Pollution. That period was a bleak and chaotic dark age where city after city fell to implacable Tachba hordes and the most learned daggie scholars fled into remote wilderness. For their own safety, these scholars turned to power, carving out kingdoms from local Tachba populations. Thus was their considerable wealth of knowledge about the Pollution scattered across the planet.
Today, each notebook recovered from an archeological dig is immediately classified into the Imperial Archives and rated “Survival Concern.” The Colony Steering Plenum has settled a notional equivalent value of one Haphan city: this is the permissible cost to acquire or protect a single daggie notebook, should circumstances require it. Yet this price is not considered exorbitant. One of these notebooks will contain information that grows more crucial every year, information that may keep our enterprise on Grigory IV from sharing the fate of all the rest.
In this formal request for access to the Imperial Archive, I will demonstrate that I have uncovered the name of the daggie scholar who mastered the Pollution—too late to save her colony, but perhaps not too late to save ours. I will show that this scholar’s notebooks have been recovered and presently reside overlooked and unread in the Imperial Archives.
Finally, I will propose a young university researcher to lead this critical project. She has xeno-anthropology training, a distinguished publishing record, and a singular temperament—all of which uniquely qualify her to reconcile daggie thinking with Pollution science. I will make the case that she be issued security clearance to view the notebooks, even though she comes from a family of traitors. . . .
Chapter 1
From her desk in the archive chamber, Caulie Alexandrian watched the soldier edge through the door of her research lab. He was a Haphan, but there was nothing imperious in his bearing. He entered slowly, one shoulder first, his eyes darting through the space. She didn’t need the sash or its blood fringe to know what he was. It was in his caution, in the lean flesh that revealed every tendon in his neck. When he found Caulie’s main lab empty, he clenched his teeth, and the action played visibly across his temples.
“Some guy is here for you,” she whispered over her shoulder.
“Why do you think that?” Her friend Jephia didn’t look up from the glass book in her lap, but Caulie knew she’d already noticed and measured the man.
“Because he seems twitchy.”
“He’s fresh from the war,” Jephia said, turning a delicate page and running a finger over the glass. “Ed-homse province, to be specific—based on how he flips the collar of his coat.”
Now she was just showing off. Caulie turned back to her own glass notebook, which was much larger than Jephia’s. She had to keep it flat on the table to support its spine, so she couldn’t drape herself artfully across two chairs as her friend had. Not that she’d be able to pull it off anyways.
They were going through a collection of daggie memory glass that had finally arrived on loan from the Imperial Archive. Caulie’s notebook was a sheaf of ancient, paper-thin silicate that had once been a natural rock formation before its alien creator had peeled the stone apart and imprinted each layer with text and images. This notebook, along with three others, had been recovered from mountain caves several decades ago by archaeologists near Front East, but they were much older than that—older by nearly a thousand years. Reading and deciphering them was tricky; the memory glass had to adapt to the reader’s touch. Thus far, Caulie had managed to elicit a few snatches of daggie writing and only one moving image. For some reason, Jephia was much better at it.
Caulie couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the soldier again.
“He’s just standing there, Jeph. He knows you’re in here.”
“Ye gods
,” Jephia mumbled, “it’s like I have a homing beacon. Unless he’s carrying a fresh brain stem from Ed-homse province, I’m not interested.”
Caulie watched as the soldier went stiff and turned her direction.
The man was frontline, so he’d spent time among the Polluted—the Tachba. Some of their mannerisms seemed to have rubbed off on him. It was almost as if a part of him wasn’t present in the room at all—as if his body was something he’d sent ahead to check for danger. Was that missing piece still at the front, or maybe floating around like a Tachba “ancestor”? Caulie knew about detachment syndrome from other behaviorists in her program who studied battle trauma. What if, until this soldier reintegrated into Haphan society, some fragment of his mind would always be searching, sensing, remembering?
It was irritating. He posed a question that Caulie couldn’t resist trying to answer, but she had no data to work with. She was bad with people, new people especially: she couldn’t simply dissect them, but she also couldn’t ask direct questions in polite conversation. She was further annoyed by whatever buried, unscholarly sensibility was causing her to waste time wondering about a random soldier—a soldier so intrusive that he was now touching her favorite Tachba skull—instead of getting on with her work.
She forced herself back to her notebook. The memory glass disliked new people as much as she did, and it gave only anemic responses. Were her fingertips not warm enough? Were all her sheets broken? Jephia’s notebook seemed more forthcoming. Was there something wrong with Caulie herself?
Jephia spoke: “Now he’s talking to your boyfriends.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your pet nervous systems.”
Caulie looked up and he was! The fibrous nerve mats were spread on display panels in the walls. They were kept alive in baths of nutritional broth and stimulated with recordings from the eternal front—shouted orders, artillery barrages, repeater rifles, the whole ambience—in order to keep them alert and engaged. The nerve tissue had been stained to increase its visibility, and the larger clusters were painted with an expensive nano-agent from the medical department that glowed to show metabolic activity.
The soldier spoke again. Caulie couldn’t hear what he said, but the nervous system nearest him flickered in response.
“He’ll confuse them!” she exclaimed. She jumped to her feet and made for the door.
Jephia turned a glass page slowly, saying, “That’s it, Caulie. Go give him what for.”
* * *
“These are still alive,” the soldier announced as she strode up.
“Of course they are, and I’ll ask you to kindly—”
“Watch this.” He turned to the panel. “Stop!”
Light played through the raft of nerves. If they had still been in their original body, the Tachba owner would have hesitated. No intervention from the brain was required, the larger clusters could make certain decisions independently. Stop was a useful word when a Tachba did something inadvisable—and if the textbooks were to be believed, they were always doing something inadvisable.
“Once they’re stop-trained, the Pollution takes over,” Caulie explained, instantly regretting her helpful tone. “You’ll forgive my incredible rudeness, but I must ask you to please—”
“Now watch this: Schaxx!”
The nervous system lit like a flare. The Tachba ex-owner would have locked solid and immobile, like a cleaning bot with its power switched off.
“The young man speaks Tachbavim,” Caulie said.
The soldier grinned at her. She stepped back.
“Well, miss, I know how to say stop. Or more commonly, ‘Oh gods, for all love, please stop.’”
“Schaxx doesn’t translate to stop,” she informed him. “That’s a common error. It’s more like ‘be receptive’ than ‘stop.’ Like opening a command prompt on a computer. You must follow up with more directions or the subject will gather environmental cues instead, and that’s a bad idea. You never know what the Pollution might decide.”
“Interesting.” The soldier studied the nervous system. “Where’s his brain?”
“For me, the brain only gets in the way.” Caulie flushed when the soldier raised an eyebrow. “I mean, brains are complicated. Hard to study. You never get clear data, and you have to talk to them. The Pollution is distributed processing, though. Those big clusters are rudimentary brains, and they’re all over the place like logic gates. At the top, those two strands plug into an auditory receptor. That’s all I’m interested in.”
The soldier was suddenly solemn. “This is the Pollution?”
“Some of it. The easiest part, maybe. Now again, I must please insist that—”
“What was his name?” This soldier was awfully good at interrupting her.
“You mean the name of the sample?” Caulie glanced at the fibrous tangle.
“I mean the name of the Tachba who once felt these nerves,” the soldier said softly, as if he was correcting her.
She puzzled for a moment, then shook her head. “I guess I assumed there was a warehouse somewhere.”
He seemed disappointed. “This one was from Ed-homse province, a clapper-dancer, a descendent of Queen Culleyho’s people.”
How did he know that? Caulie said, “You wouldn’t know him.”
“Ah, miss,” the soldier said. “I would know him precisely.”
Silence bloomed between them. The soldier moved down the line of display panels, his boot heels clicking on the tile floor. He walked past the nervous systems as if he was at a memorial rather than looking at lab samples.
Caulie couldn’t help herself. “A person might wonder how you knew the sample came from Ed-homse.”
“An educated insight. He’s obviously a clapper-dancer, and the clappers are all from Ed-homse province. A fat lot of inbreds.”
It was exactly as she feared: no answer and more questions. “Now the person wonders the same thing about how you knew he was a ‘clapper-dancer.’”
The soldier returned to the first display panel. He raised his hands and beat out a soft rhythm, fingers against palm. The nerve tissue flickered.
“I saw it when I walked in. This fellow noticed my gait. The Tachba men in my unit—boots, we call them—told me about it. They told me how everyone has a signature stride, and that’s how they know when a Haphan overlord is approaching and they should make themselves presentable. With practice, I was able to change my gait and give them a few surprises. It was useful.” He shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe what the Tacchies get up to when they think they aren’t being supervised.”
Caulie already knew all this from her research. What was interesting was that the soldier knew it too. It was as if her hard-won insight was commonplace knowledge at the front. More questions, more and more, all of them proposing to steal time and attention she couldn’t spare. Caulie let her curiosity take hold. “I wonder what that rhythm was, which you just tapped out.”
“A mountain song. The Ed-homse Tachba are highly attuned to rhythm, all of them. Makes the feet move, the arms twitch. If you believe the folk tales, they don’t even have to be alive to make them dance. Their music up in those mountains is like nothing you’ve ever heard. When it gets them dancing for real”—his eyes flickered—“it’s a goddamn nightmare to see.”
The door to the archive chamber slammed open and Caulie jumped. The soldier, for all his earlier tension, swiveled smoothly toward the sound.
“Stop pestering those poor nervous systems,” Jephia snapped, striding forward. “The whole point is to isolate their inputs so she can study their response to stimuli.”
“Then turn off their audio receptors,” the soldier suggested.
“They need environmental exposure or they go wonky. You’re interrupting their playtime.” Jephia’s frown was replaced by a gleaming smile, but only for a moment. “Why are you here, soldier, and why don’t you have insignia on your coat? What are you trying to hide?”
“I’m not permitted to answer questions.�
�� The man let that hang a moment. “If I wore my insignia, I’d be deflecting questions all day.”
“So instead you chat with nerve clusters in the wall?”
The soldier tipped his head as he regarded Jephia. Caulie imagined what this man had been like before the eternal front. He was tall for the average Haphan, but still several inches shorter than Caulie. Cute in a ruffled way, one of those almost-handsome guys you see with eyes that are just slightly too round. With his unimposing presence and slim body, he would have mixed unremarkably into the university crowds, was it not for those eyes. On a student, they would give the impression of permanent exam-day anxiety. On this soldier, they seemed to see everything.
Caulie also noticed Jephia’s appearance going to work on the man. He studied her, then latched and didn’t turn away. Jephia was more than the university’s most important graduate assistant; she was also the acknowledged beauty of the campus. Her silver-blonde hair, the stylish outfits, the understated jewelry that a professor’s salary couldn’t buy, those cheekbones, that figure—all of it made for a captivating presence. It was as if her friend elicited a kind of benign Pollution in everyone she met. Her saving grace, in Caulie’s opinion, was how she quickly made others look past her beauty.
As she did now: “Stop leering at me and stop trying to impress my friend, you twitchy scarecrow. Your sash and your sob stories about the front will get you nowhere with us. Isn’t there a college bar nearby where you can impress some coeds?”
“I’m sure there is,” the soldier said, “but I’m here on business.”
Jephia looked him up and down. “You don’t seem to be festooned with body parts from the front. Unless you have a delivery for my friend to sign, I’ll kindly ask you to get the fuck out.”
To Caulie’s surprise, the soldier seemed indifferent to Jephia’s tirade. Her friend’s brand of talk was simply not heard in Haphan society, and certainly not with that aristocratic accent. She had cultivated a reputation for bluntness, though “cultivated” was the perhaps the wrong word.
What the Thunder Said Page 1
