He made a single, convulsive nod.
“For their war, the Antecessors needed numbers, so the Tachba birthrate is through the roof. They needed adaptable fighters, so they made the Tachba changeable. There is overwhelming evidence that Tachba skills and dispositions can be easily manipulated. For example, if the Tachba were sent to fight on a cold world, they would need a higher core body temperature—and today there is the warming song. Does this make sense so far?”
He nodded again.
“There is more,” she warned.
“There’s always more to the Pollution.”
“Yes, whenever we uncover something, it only generates more questions. We know Tachba can fight in the dark. We know Tachba can hear the quietest sounds in the middle of a barrage, thanks to an aural quirk called ‘ducking.’ The military has established that Tachba can survive extreme environments—freezing, burning, even radiation. I’m saying they, but I mean you. You Tachba.”
“‘Whatever pain is brought, we-having ways to feel it and then beg another portion.’ Which poppa-meh said ’em ere he-dying-geh.” Shanter clenched his jaw, and the next time he spoke the words came out more evenly. “Something my father said on his deathbed. My uncle accidentally stabbed him, you see.”
“I’m sorry, Shanter.”
“It was years ago; it hardly happened now.” He waved a hand. “Tell me, what’s the oddest thing we do, we unlucky Tacchies?”
Gee, where should I start? But Caulie already had a favorite side-project, one to which she could never devote enough time at the university. “There is evidence that you Tachba can fight in space, in zero-g, without special training. That’s nearly impossible when humans grow up planet-side in steady gravity, but the Tachba have a set of reflexes that only works for that purpose. And you know how anxious some Tacchies get near closed doors, especially when the doors are locked? And how you bang into things if you try to go through doorways together?”
“Only some of us,” Shanter said.
“We think it’s a built-in conditioning for airlocks—the special doors on ships and space stations. It’s twisted into the genes as a behavior that can be passed on through generations. All that mess with doorways and locks was useful once upon a time.”
“Do you think we could fight underwater?” he asked suddenly.
She puzzled a moment. “Probably. You would still need equipment because you can’t actually breathe underwater.”
“Equipment my brothers didn’t have,” he said. When Caulie turned to him, he added, “I had two older brothers, Sophalatic and his blood-fed Sopholic. During an overnight hunt in the forest, they fell asleep in the rain. When they woke, they were convinced they were choking on the air and could only breathe water. They ran to a pond before we could stop them and drowned themselves. I was the one who had to tell Momma.”
They passed by the main hall of the compound. The kitchen was loud with activity. Sophalatic, Sopholic. They had such strange, ornate names, these people who could drop into psychosis and disappear in a blink. Did the mothers hope all those syllables would somehow protect their boys? Sophalatic sounded like the name of a bearded poet, not a child who died young and confused.
“The Pollution has gone untended generation over generation,” she said. “We can only imagine it in peak condition and consistent across the entire race. Today, some people might see better in the dark, but others might have better hearing. We don’t know how a Tachba child might develop or what features may emerge. It’s so variable that, cumulatively, it can overwhelm human self-ideation, and Tachba individuals will disassociate from their bodies. Madness results.”
“I’ll say.”
Now for the hard part. Caulie gave herself a few more quiet steps before continuing. “Part of making a race of soldiers is being able to repair them when they break—when they’re wounded. Some Tachba can bounce back from appalling injuries, while others aren’t so robust. Some Tachba can close their wounds simply by pinching the edges together. For them, the same mechanism that clots the blood also provides glue-like properties.”
“It’s not an uncommon kind of magic,” Shanter allowed, “but it’s unnerving and not much commented.”
She continued, choosing her words. “Some Tachba, if they lose an arm, can pick a limb up off the ground and try to stick it on.”
Shanter shuddered.
“I believe most Tachba know this, but it’s also not much ‘commented.’”
“It’s humbling and more,” he said. “It’s like trying to talk to you about the latrine and the whole process that happens in there.”
Now it was Caulie who shuddered.
He looked at the industrious children sharpening their tiny spears. “How do those boys know how to sharpen their stickers? Hardening with fire and then scraping with stone: they weren’t taught that, you understand. They know how to do it simply because they know how to do it. It implies what we Tacchies really are, but we never discuss it among ourselves—also like you and the latrine. Now you share the news about attaching loose arms and legs off the ground . . . it all makes sense if you step back far enough to read the message, neh? Hints and questions everywhere if you let yourself fall into pondering. For example, I never gave a thought about what some of our simpletons do in the trenches. After an attack or a bad barrage, you can find collections of arms and legs in piles, left as if waiting for something.”
Caulie knew about the limb caches. Jephia had taken pictures during a research rotation on the front. The behaviors specific to warfare were Jephia’s particular interest. “In the fullness of time, with the Antecessors gone and different waves of alien races trying to colonize Grigory IV, other uses were found for these healing mechanisms.”
“They were used for more than simple healing?”
“Where something can be exploited, it will be.” Caulie shrugged. “Not by the Haphans. Always remember that we don’t do this. I am one of very few that know the truth, and I only know because of a powerful friend who made it possible for me to learn. This is not something Haphans do.”
“Which you are blameless, yes, I get it. What are you blameless for?”
“If you have a servitor with a mangled hand, just replace the hand.”
“So far, so good.” Shanter nodded expectantly.
She said, “If a servitor with two arms is insufficient, you cut his shoulder open and add another arm. You can splice and bind the arms and the body will adjust. The extended nervous system will register the new limb and route instructions to it. In my lab, I have a multiple shoulder joint that somebody dug up. Looking at it, you can’t tell which arm was the original and which came from someone else.”
“Could I have more than two arms?”
“Again, this isn’t everybody. It is only possible among people who still have that aspect of the original Twisting.”
“How does it work? Is it inefficient?” He was more curious than she’d expected, and certainly less repulsed.
“Shanter, I don’t know. Because remember, we Haphans don’t do it. For us, it is like latrine talk.”
“So these men who are repaired using other men, these are the ‘obtained men’? What other nightmares can be built?”
“Really, I don’t know. I haven’t seen much physical evidence because it is proscribed knowledge, and if you mention something in your research, the Gray House will snatch it for the Imperial Archive. My multiple shoulder joint is my worst secret. Was my worst secret. We mostly have pictures and texts, off the record, but . . .”
“But?”
“But there is evidence the old queens used rings of bodyguards when they walked in public. Groups of men joined at the knees and ankles.”
She had looped her hand through his arm—only to tether him for their walk, nothing more—and she felt his muscles tense. She peeked at his face. He wore a deep frown, and he shook his head. “Gods, Caulie. This is horribly, horribly . . . interesting.”
“I know!”
The
y shared a conspiring, guilty glance.
“And all of this leads back to the wizard?”
She nodded. “At first I was stunned that a wizard might be a real thing—a person who understands the Pollution well enough to manipulate it. That means this person studied it—not like I do, for scholarship, but to exploit it like an Antecessor. To find evidence of a wizard was shocking enough, but that turned out to be the least of it. I was utterly outmaneuvered during that last barrage, the one that turned the Forty-First Field Artillery mad. Whoever the wizard is, he was able to intuit too much, too quickly, and much too precisely. He was too good. Inhumanly good. I had to start thinking about obtained men.”
They navigated around the compound and back to the children. The little spears were complete and they were almost ready to begin their game, whatever it was. Several children already had child-size wounds in their stomachs and chests, dribbles of blood that quickly stanched.
“You believe the wizard has enhanced himself,” Shanter said. “How?”
“It’s actually the most common thing in the stories. In the old days in the South, where it was never a queen or a manleader running the show, it would be a brilliant and vicious man who rose to the top. There are stories about obtained men who attached the skulls of their enemies to their brain stems so they could have more “room for thought.” Women can’t snap together like men can, so this was a male advantage.” It was the first time she had spoken this specific suspicion aloud, and it was as unsettling as she imagined it would be.
“So, we are facing a multi-headed Southern monster who is a wizard.”
“He wouldn’t have multiple heads. The brains hang from the neck somehow.”
“And it helps him think more quickly?”
“I don’t know about more quickly, but they might help him think more. The human brain works through distributed processing; it is not fast, but very parallel. Sorry, I’m sure this sounds confusing.”
“It’s like we Tacchies are bird bears. We can gather together and use each other the same way.” Shanter’s eyes widened for a moment, and he grinned. “Do you think we could call a thousand boots together, slice them and bind them, and make a single, gigantic, angry Tachba out of them?”
“Ugh! Do you have to be revolting?”
“Says the girl who loves battle smear.” His smile faded. “You humble me, and horrify me a little, with everything you know.”
“I’m still just me.”
“Yes, I have to be impressed and unimpressed in equal measure. I swear, Caulie, you will drive me mad.” He regarded the family compound. It was alive with activity, a comfortable continuum of noise and movement that even Caulie found soothing. “Now that you have grown the enemy wizard into a right fairytale monster, tell me: are we running away or still fighting him?”
“I think we have to fight. He could tear down the eternal front and let the South into Ed-homse. After that, it wouldn’t be long before the empire itself collapsed. He’s too dangerous for us to flee.”
“The well-being of many people in balance, yes,” Shanter said dismissively. “The important thing is that this enemy, this obtained man, may be the rarest creature on the surface of the planet.”
“Yes. He’s too powerful. If there were others like him, we would have seen it elsewhere on the front or lost the war already.”
Oddly, this increased his cheer. “We only have to kill one thing to save the world!”
“When you put it that way, it sounds easy.”
“What could be easier?” He tried winking again, and it was still a disaster. His eyelid shook as it lowered, and his other eye squinted. He backed off and tried again. All the while, his eyes held hers and his face bore the most diligent, sincere expression. She couldn’t look away. After a moment, he gave up with a sigh, saying, “Maybe the Antecessors never found a way to make winking useful in combat.”
She tried not to think about how she’d just racked up easily twenty years of detention in the Gray House cellars for disseminating proscribed information to a servitor. Even worse, if her guesses about the enemy wizard became widely known, she had opened herself to a lifetime of derision from the academic community. Yet throughout the walk, Shanter had accepted each revelation as if her worst concoctions could only confirm suspicions he’d already held. Was she reaching him, or was the Pollution was merely displaying an abridged reaction to each unfolding horror?
“Caulie, you are staring directly at me,” he said, and she forced her eyes away. “Did I say something naïve?”
She shook her head. Strangely, she just wanted to see him try to wink again.
Chapter 30
That night, the Goldros kitchen swelled to capacity. Earlier, the extravagant sturdiness of the furniture had struck Caulie as a cultural indicator. Now she’d seen the families in full bloom, she realized it was a cultural inevitability; nothing fragile could survive that maelstrom of children.
There were more of them now, older boys covered in grime from working in the fields. They shoved each other and laughed at everything, spitting Tachbavim like snare drums. So much of their activity teetered on the brink of genuine violence that Caulie hid behind Shanter when he led her in. She needn’t have fretted at the clamor: the mob fell indivisibly silent when it saw her.
Uncle Goldros, the only older man in the entire compound, was being briefed by Momma Goldros. She still held that curved knife, which she pointed in Caulie’s direction as she spoke. Shanter’s uncle looked just like Shanter, only older and fatter, and with a pink-hued drunken wildness to his face. He turned and shouted, “Shanter, la! So you have brought even more ruin upon this house?”
He swept forward with his hands out as if to throttle him. Shanter didn’t flinch and the attack shifted suddenly into a hug and a rattle of slapped backs. “Your momma tells me you’ve brought an alien overlord to sit in judgment at our table. Always so nice, these reminders of our servitude, what? Where is the little bastard?”
Rather than be pointed out, Caulie waved her hand. “Mr. Goldros, your house is lovely. Very defensible.”
The man turned back and forth and finally saw her. “This is our overlord? It looks so feminine.”
“It is a young woman, uncle.”
He studied her. “Maybe she is. In which case, the boys will love her.”
She glanced over. The boys were packed on the far side of the table, staring at her with eyes at every level like a curious fish pod.
“Yes,” Uncle Goldros said, grabbing her by the waist. “Let’s make a bridge between our races.”
Oh, please don’t pick me up! But what he had in mind was even more mortifying. He stuffed her among the boys, where she would face him in his great chair in the middle of the table.
The boys made room for her but it didn’t amount to much. Up close, they smelled better than they looked, like cut grass and wind. Some of them were clearly old enough to notice female differences, and all of her particulars seem to trap their attention.
The conversation involved rowdy humiliation all around, not just for Caulie. The kitchen women and Uncle Goldros caught their share. Shanter smirked from a safe distance, smiling when Caulie would suddenly realize she was being addressed. Uncle Goldros was gesticulating wildly from across the table. The kitchen was so loud she hadn’t heard him say a single word.
When Uncle Goldros saw she couldn’t hear, he rattled off some Tachbavim over his shoulder and turned to Shanter.
“Lady Alexandrian,” he shouted finally, “I did not know you was a lady. I had come to terms with you being a woman, but now a lady too? You are fraught with change. Are you a very Haphan Lord?”
“Oh, no,” Caulie said. “No, no, no. I am just me. I mean, I’m a doctor, not a lord. And probably not that type of doctor either. I mean I’m a university researcher.”
“She is from Falling Mountain,” Shanter said.
The boys made appreciative noises.
Grampharic and the squaddies entered the kitchen an
d goggled when they saw Caulie. They manhandled another bench to the table and squeezed in beside Uncle Goldros on the adult side, informally close.
“Tell me,” Uncle Goldros said, “is it natural for researchers to fight on the eternal front?”
“No, sir. I was sent down here for a special purpose, Mr. Goldros.” When he raised an eyebrow, she quickly added, “But I can’t say why.”
“And now the Haphan inscrutability,” Uncle Goldros told the boys. “We’re getting the whole show, lads!”
“You think you’re joking, sir,” said Grampharic, “but she might save the war for us.”
Prodon added, “She’s simply the newest thing on the front.”
Uncle Goldros regarded her with disbelief. “This little snippet?”
“Which the men were calling her Caulie-ho. It’s a joke on her name. They called her Caulie-ho right up until they all died.”
Caulie cringed, but the rest of the table laughed.
“Surrounded by piles of dead, just like the real Queen Culleyho!” Uncle Goldros slapped the table like a gunshot. “So, overlord, do you let all your men call you Caulie?”
“It’s my name,” she said meekly.
“Setting up as a dashta, neh? All the queens of history were called by single names. Queen Fat Culleyho. Sessera’s Queen Baff.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. It’s only my name, the best way to catch my attention.” Caulie paused. “I have always wondered something, sir, and this seems the perfect time for my question.”
“If I can answer it, you must ask.”
“Why did they call her ‘Fat’ Culleyho?”
Uncle Goldros nodded sagely, as if her question had somehow parted the curtains of existence. He drank deeply from a mug that one of the women had placed in front of him. “That is a good question and you came to the right place. The answer is, we don’t know. The truth is lost in time. That is definitive; you heard it here.”
“Oh.”
“Supposedly she was a little snippet of a girl, something of a permanent waif. In one story, she said she grew up hungry, and though she was surrounded by food and everyone ate, she could not partake. She was explaining why she looked so full of bones and never had to worry about being a mother. When she did eat as a child, she said, it was only fish from the sea. We all know how fish disagree with digestion—like a bird bear with a contrary opinion.”
What the Thunder Said Page 25
