by Mark Leidner
“What date?” Tzara-9 asked, clicking her eyes.
“Yeah, what date,” Lnzt-16 repeated to Rxgr-14. He turned to Tzara-9. “It wasn’t a date.” He looked back at Rxgr-14. “And what date are you even talking about?”
“The one with big wings, remember?” Rxgr-14 held out his middle feelers, which were so small that it came off as sarcastic.
Lnzt-16 stared at him. Rxgr-14, surprised by his own self-assuredness, stared back.
“A princess?” said Tzara-9, looking down her nose at Lnzt-16. “Yeah, right. Like any of those broodmares would stoop to commiserate with you.”
“We did more than commiserate,” said Lnzt-16 acidly. He stood up and looked down at her. “We interlocked mandibles for more than half a minute.”
Tzara-9 froze as if this information had utterly scandalized her.
“It was decadent,” Lnzt-16 added. “Indecent, even.”
Tzara-9’s mandibles hung, slack.
Lnzt-16 leaned in. “And you know what else? Our antennae got all twisted up, too.” Lnzt-16 pointed at Rxgr-14 with an antenna. “And he’s right. Her wings were huge.” Lznt-16’s compound eyes blazed coldly as if he was looking right through her. Then he glanced behind Tzara-9 as if inspecting her wingless back, and he said, “Somebody’s got a ways to go.”
Rxgr-14 watched her antennae fall. He hadn’t expected her feelings to be so easily hurt. She looked at the ground and said nothing. Lnzt-16 swiveled his head proudly. Rxgr-14 wanted to comfort Tzara-9. No one, winged or otherwise, was more clever or brave or worth spending time with in the entire colony, he wanted to tell her. When Tzara-9 lifted her face again, the emeralds in her compound eyes were the color of fury.
What had happened that they’d kept him in the dark about? Why had he felt the need to act like a warrior? He’d acted like a coward, and he’d stabbed his friend in the back and ended up hurting his other friend.
Tzara-9, having had time to compose herself, asked flatly, “What else.”
Lnzt-16 had been trying to hail a worker to refill their divot, and at her question he stopped and faced her again.
“What do you mean what else?”
“What else,” she repeated coolly. “What else happened on your illicit tryst?”
Lnzt-16 looked into Tzara-9’s eyes as if to prove he could resist them.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Because you’re lying,” she said.
“No. I’m not.”
“You are. You know how I know?”
He didn’t answer.
“Because I know you,” Tzara-9 said almost tenderly.
This appeared to make Lnzt-16 deeply uncomfortable. He looked away.
Rxgr-14 couldn’t decide if he should intervene. Deep down he knew that Lnzt-16 had to reject Tzara-9 once and for all if Rxgr-14 wanted a chance with her. Who knows, he thought, if Lnzt-16 broke hear heart, he might even be able to swoop in and save her from her sadness. Then he was ashamed of himself for even thinking such a thing.
“Well?” Tzara-9 said, pressing her momentary leverage.
“Well what,” Lnzt-16 snarled, his hardness returning. “Once you’ve interlocked mandibles with a royal, you never go back.”
Tzara-9’s own mandibles flexed, and for a moment Rxgr-14 actually thought she might attack him.
“I’ve never felt anything like it,” Lnzt-16 added wistfully.
“How did it feel?” Tzara-9 said immediately. “Tell me.”
Lnzt-16’s antennae revolved. “It felt like… like…”
Tzara-9 extended her head as if awaiting her own decapitation.
“It felt like flying,” Lnzt-16 finally said. Then he nodded at Rxgr-14.
Tzara-9’s eyes dimmed. She bent to drink, but there was still nothing left. The worker who carried the sac had not yet made it to their divot.
Tzara-9 lay her head sideways in the trough, and then seemed to cough or heave in some sort of physical manifestation of disappointment.
Rxgr-14 glared at Lnzt-16. He’d gone too far.
Lnzt-16 glared at Rxgr-14. He’d gone too far.
“Yeah. It felt like flying,” Lnzt-16 said again, casually trying to fill the silence, and perhaps trying to hurt Rxgr-14 by hurting Tzara-9 more. “It felt like I had left the colony behind with all its disappointments and complications. It was the purest, most liberating feeling I’ve ever had, and I’ll never have it again, ever, with anyone else.”
“How do you know?” Tzara-9 shouted from the floor. “You don’t know what the future holds.”
“I know what I want and what I don’t.”
“You’re afraid of love.”
“I’m not afraid of anything!”
“Are you sure!?” she shouted again.
“I’m quite sure!”
“But are you sure you’re sure?” she said, getting up, getting right in his face, swinging her mandibles within inches of his. He took a step back. “See!” she said. “You are afraid.” She closed her compound eyes and stomped and shouted with a quavering voice, “Admit it!”
RXGR-14 FELT LIKE HE’D INTENDED to dig a fleck of irregular silicate out of a wall only to find it was the tip of a massive quartz lode that would take a hundred tunnelers a dozen days to excavate. He briefly considered distracting them with an inane comment about the brittleness of the ceiling, the viscosity of the booze, or shifts of the idiom in the colony song that evening, but he knew it wouldn’t work, and so he decided to leave. He lowered his head and backed slowly away from the trough, headed for the exit, trying to avoid the feelers of the hundreds of other rambunctious soldiers without looking up. As he made his way across the chamber and exited Avern-Y6, he thought he heard Tzara-9 cry out something like, “But the point of life isn’t just to avoid pain!” but he couldn’t be sure of her words, lost as they were in the cacophony.
Rxgr-14 stepped out into the main tunnel of the colony just as a new phalanx of soldiers was pouring in, and he had to dance a jig to avoid being trampled. When they had passed into Avern-Y6, the relative quiet of the outer tunnel becalmed him.
He looked up and down the primary shaft. Rising from below, and falling from above, murmurs of domestic complacency echoed from distant dens. He always forgot the majority of the colony didn’t cram themselves into public places to plunge their faces into pools of oblivion every night. They lived quiet lives, and the sounds they produced in their pockets of isolation cohered into a comforting hum that permeated every tendril of the enormous underground labyrinth. For a moment the sound was soothing to Rxgr-14. Then it reminded him of the empty den where he’d soon be headed, and he was racked by frustration that he had never been able to find contentment in the simple life this hum—nay, hymn—evoked.
Rxgr-14 haltingly excreted a robust portion of the fermented fluid he’d been ingesting all evening, then used his feelers to spread, tamp, and smooth the excretion into the walls of the tunnel, moisturizing and sealing it against evaporation and the contact-erosion caused by its constant exposure to feeler traffic.
The less conscientious inhabitants of the colony did not spread, tamp, and smooth their waste, they just ejected it and moved on. Soldiers especially were derelict in this matter, but Rxgr-14 knew from a lifetime of study and practice that brittle walls were the harbingers of tunnel collapse, and collapses affected everyone, even soldiers. He felt superior for a moment, as another wave of waste erupted out of his anus. Tunnel maintenance was beautiful in itself, he insisted drunkenly. There was an art in how you spread your disjected waste, how you tamped it down, and how you smoothed it into the lining of these hallowed viaducts of history, culture, and commerce. For instance, which feelers to use? Most used their hind feelers because they were adjacent to the anus. Not a negligible insight. They were the most convenient to work with. But they were physically weaker than the penultimate set meant to power locomotion, and Rxgr-14 had learned that if you trained yourself to use your hind feelers to spread, backed up one step, and then used your penulti
mate feelers to tamp, then moved forward again, and used your hind feelers to smooth, you could achieve a more uniform distribution of waste, and more uniform thoroughfares meant smoother navigation for subsequent thoroughfare users, which might not seem like much in terms of combatting desedimentation, but when you considered that during rush hour these passages were packed with bodies of different masses grinding against each other at different speeds in different directions, all with different levels of care regarding the walls that held back the combined pressure of the known universe—well, the smoother the surface, the lesser the impact of all those attritional factors. A tiny overall decrease in commuter-tunnel friction applied colony-wide would not only boost structural resilience, it would lessen the ever-climbing commute times the colony seemed increasingly subject to in peacetime, potentially undermining political support for wars entered into cavalierly by members of the winged caste who, unconsciously or not, sought to curb the overpopulation of the underclasses with periodic bloodshed. If the strain on natural resources that fomented territorialism could be mitigated by the more efficient use of the resources the colony already had, i.e., their own waste, maybe war itself could be erased, or at least made as unnecessary as possible. It was not even far-fetched to imagine, Rxgr-14 thought, that in a world where violence was the thing that was scarce instead of material resources, the lowly worker might even be able to rise to a position of equality with, or even domination over, the soldier.
Rxgr-14’s second wave of excretion finished with a dribble. He spread, tamped, and smoothed it just like the first. His prideful mindset, however, faltered back into melancholy when there was nothing to distract him from the quiet hum of the colony. What if he only cared about tunnel health and efficient infrastructure because he lacked anything better upon which to stake his identity? Soldiers were never lonely. They trained shoulder to shoulder, and even in combat, killed or died eye-to-eye with enemies whom they met as equals. All workers like Rxgr-14 had were the walls and the waste, which were to them the same thing.
The inner walls of the tunnel outside Avern-Y6 were dark and well worn. They widened moving down and narrowed moving up. They were mildly corrugated, light brown, two parts crystallized silica, one part uncrystallized clay, one-quarter part organic material. All in all, drier than they ought to be, but nothing to get particularly worried about. Then he saw something that was, in fact, of mild concern—a hairline fissure seven body lengths above his head, toward the direction of the heavily guarded aperture that led to the world above. He briefly entertained making a break for it, leaving everything, including his friends, behind. He’d either have to lie his way past the guards or run and hope they’d be too lazy to chase some shitbrained worker. Either way, Lnzt-16’s words rang true. There simply had to be more to life than remaining below the surface repeatedly fulfilling the colony-assigned role until death. Remembering Lnzt-16, however, Rxgr-14 felt guilty, and he abandoned the fantasy of escape as quickly as it had come to him. With resignation, he excavated some of the mud he’d just made and worked it into a ball. Then he fed it under his middle and forward feelers, and began to bulldoze it upward to repair the mildly concerning fissure he’d observed.
He was tamping his waste into the miniature abyss, allowing the ritual of something he had done countless times to relieve his considerable ennui—when an alarm exploded into his mind, and his antennae twisted viciously back toward Avern-Y6. He turned his head to follow, and heard a ruckus erupt from the entrance—the unmistakable sound of clashing chitin. Dropping the half-recycled waste where he stood, Rxgr-14 sped back down and into the hole that linked the central shaft to Avern-Y6.
RXGR-14 REENTERED AVERN-Y6 TOO FRIGHTENED to think. He saw a wobbling column of soldiers’ bodies reaching all the way up to nearly touch the rotunda. The tower swayed as if about to topple, bulging at the bottom and tapering at the top, where, like an ornament at its pinnacle, was Tzara-9, either screaming or laughing. Then he realized she wasn’t atop the column, she was clinging by her feelers to the ceiling. She must have climbed the side wall to escape the mass, and the mass must’ve grown up after her. The puddles on the floor were all deserted. The mass had drawn almost everyone else in the chamber into itself. Some soldiers were spewing booze down the sides of the tower, and others were excreting waste in long shiny trails, like a kind of vulgar fountain, a monument to gluttony. A smattering of others watched the spectacle from the floor, transfixed, leaking excrement as if some mechanism of mass hypnosis had overridden their sphincters. The overwhelming song in Rxgr-14’s mind was strident and ambiguous, and the bedlam of bodies striking, scraping, and crashing against one another as the mass veered left and right obfuscated its meaning. It would not be long before the queen heard the aberration in the colonial signal and sent the royal guard in to restore order and expediently dispense their version of justice. Rxgr-14 felt both repelled by and summoned by the undulating motion and deafening volume of his brethren. He noticed that his feelers were taking him into them. Between him and the mass, a worker with a sac of fermented fluid struggled to keep it from a zealous-eyed, copper-toned soldier. The soldier hesitated, then eviscerated the sac with one swipe of its mandible, and then on the return stroke, hooked her other mandible right through the worker’s eye. The worker’s tiny head popped off and rolled across the floor, its mouth still trying to form enraged language. Rxgr-14 froze. He saw another worker who had seen this drop her sac where she stood and join the fray with zombie-like submission. Then, from somewhere near the top of the pyramidal mass of thrashing carapaces, Rxgr-14 heard Tzara-9’s voice shriek something unintelligible. Then the tower, or the pyramid, or whatever it was, shifted shape again, sliding across the chamber floor like a drunken colossus. Behind where it had been, Rxgr-14 saw Lnzt-16 on his back in the corner, wounded and fighting the air with his feelers. What had happened? Rxgr-14 fought the subconscious pull of the tower and moved toward Lnzt-16, then stopped when he saw his friend roll over. Beside Lnzt-16’s head was a sac of the fermented unfertilized protein. Lnzt-16 wasn’t hurt, he was drunk. He was wallowing. A breeze passed over Rxgr-14, and he looked up to see the mass of bodies bowing to and fro above his head. He couldn’t see the ceiling. The noise was overwhelming. A plea from somewhere in the cyclone of faces and feelers above him pierced his mind—someone being crushed—then the plea was gone. The tower swayed away again, and Tzara-9 reappeared at its pinnacle, still grasping the ceiling, her desperate feelers clutching the loose silicate of the rotunda, causing sediment to shed. Then she lost her grip, and she fell into the fray and was immediately enveloped. Rxgr-14’s heart spasmed like a separate animal inside him. He made a line for the tower, head down, trying to block the ambient signal to kill with sheer force of will. He heard something squishy, glanced up, and saw the colossus collapsing into a ball, now bowling slowly and unevenly around Avern-Y6. Three workers who’d attempted to evade its path had succeeded, but not their abdomens. They heaved their mandibles forward, hopelessly chewing air as a trail of guts behind them kept them glued to the same spot on the floor. The ball of bodies revolved and began to roll toward Rxgr-14. He crouched and waited until it rolled over him, and rather than let it crush him too, through a temporary fissure between two soldiers eating each other’s faces, he leapt into it.
Then he was in darkness and splintered light. Sounds and sensations smashed together, spinning around. He smelled something. Was this an orgy? He’d heard soldiers had them. Then he realized his eyes were closed. He opened them. Pulled into the center by a hundred strangers’ feelers, he saw how the mass cohered. The soldiers on the inside had interlocked mouths in a series of helixes. He tried to backpedal, but with his own feelers only half under his control, random mandibles gouged and scratched his exoskeleton. His only choice was to move forward and find a body somewhere in the vortex to which he could cling for long enough to survive it. Where was Lnzt-16? Rxgr-14’s mouth opened instinctively as another feeler stabbed his face, and he bit into it. The taste of blood was
shockingly bitter, and suddenly, he thirsted for more. For a moment he chewed at anything in front of him, engulfed in hollow rage. A hole opened in the flow of bodies, and briefly he could see back out into Avern-Y6. Lnzt-16 was in the corner of the chamber, looking upward. Then the hole closed. Rxgr-14 wriggled madly against the tumbling bodies until he found the edge of the mass and with one last push of his penultimate feelers, emerged. It took him a moment to realize he was high above the chamber floor, atop the sawing, crying, singing, stabbing boulder of soldierly bodies. He climbed higher, stepping on the faces of several soldiers, moving too fast for them to react—his tunneler’s ability to instantly analyze and instinctively negotiate complex and shifting surfaces actually came in handy. He caught possible flashes of Tzara-9’s dark green carapace ahead. If he could reach her, maybe they could help each other cling to the ceiling and crawl to safety. He knew where the ceiling was sturdiest. It all seemed like a good plan, and executable—until a feeler hooked around his throat and yanked him, choking, back into the heart of the maelstrom.
Twisted by and dashed against larger, harder bodies, he descended. Something clobbered his head. His thoughts halted. When they re-began, his eyes were flush against a gargantuan abdomen. It was bronze. It was Eybv-99. He was being vised between Eybv-99’s rocklike thorax and the weight of bodies behind him. Then something bent his left antenna—casting a cold bolt through his being. He felt the crowd shudder around him. He heard Tzara-9 call Lnzt-16’s name. Out of his control, Rxgr-14’s swaying and whipping antennae suddenly straightened. His mandibles opened so wide they ached. He wanted to interlock mandibles now. Hurry. He searched for anyone with whom to connect—a cracked head struck his. Hot blood splashed his face. He was blind. A mandible hooked his. Alien saliva. A narcotic pulse. Nerves singing. Then the mandible snapped. Its owner screamed. A tinge of withdrawal. Spiritual agony. Eyes open. The wounded face he’d tasted sped away like an image in a dream woken up from. The vortex spun the other way. A curled pincher dripping green swept past his eye. The face of its soldier grinned in the dark and vanished. Rxgr-14 rose, or thought he was rising, until he hit real rock. He’d been falling. Now cheek-to-ground, impounded at the bottom of the pile, one of his middle feelers bent backward and snapped, spurting bright yellow fluid. A hairy appendage caught on his neck, and his abdomen and head were pulled in opposite directions. He looked down. Through the parting of his abdomen and thorax, he saw his own innards. The long green tubule of his heart stretched to twice his normal length. Some of the fibers that housed it snapped. This was it. He would die now. Unmeaningfully. Unexpectedly. Unable to mount even a semblance of a defense of his friends whom he’d imperiled. Worse than that guilt, however—what had anything mattered in his entire life?
