by Mark Leidner
Cutting short his mordant reverie, a random antenna jabbed Rxgr-14 in his compound eye. He felt its anonymous owner’s mind quantum leap through his—their fears paralleling exactly—then the other mind vanished, and the body its antenna had been connected to plunged on. But it had given Rxgr-14 an idea. He looked for another antenna. One twittered just out of reach. He wrenched his neck with all his might to clutch it with his mandibles, but it slipped through. If he bit someone’s antenna hard enough, the whole room would feel it. It might break the trance they were all in long enough for order to be restored. He’d surely be killed for doing it, but it might save Tzara-9. But antennae were so tensile—silken even—they were all but impossible to catch between one’s fore-pincers. Another tendon in his lower back snapped, and again he felt his body breaking apart. His exoskeleton detached, and he felt the cold air of the colony tickling his unguarded heart. He had a final, even darker idea, and he acted immediately. He whipped his own antenna down into his mandibles and severed it cleanly. A psychological shockwave blew the others away from him in every direction, and it felt like much of his mind went traveling with them.
SPLITTING PAIN IN HIS BRAIN drove Rxgr-14 awake. He was lying on his back and felt like a cave-in was occurring inside him. Every thought a rock plummeting through darkness, clobbering the thoughts below. His left antenna hung by only a fiber above his compound eyes. He could see it dangling, swinging back and forth. Bodies around him were still scrambling outward like the walls of an impact crater. But an avalanche of imagery in his mind overwhelmed anything unfolding in the world: rivers flowed, rivers slowed, rivers sloshed, rivers froze, rivers reversed, rivers ran under rock, rivers glimmered in the sun, rivers cut through the snow. Mudslides, rainstorms, fleets of leaves, others like him shrieking, riding rough currents away from loved ones, drowning, succumbing to the flood, surfing the rapids, mastering whirlpools. Narratives, characters, faces, settings, flung themselves before his inner eye: sunsets, entrails, incursions by termites with globular eyes, hordes of wasps darkening skies, epic battles with beetles with horns, rodents sneering with blood-streaked fur ridden by armies of fleas. He saw others like him feasting on the whites of dead squirrels’ eyes, biting the soft flesh in the inner ears of massacred rabbits, mass graves of aphids, silent invaders climbing vertical vines, devouring flowers, chased by spiders, suffocating in clouds of poisonous gas, dying of thirst mere moments before rain, digging out cave-ins, dancing drunkenly, flapping never-before-flown-with wings, washing ancient walls, shattering mandibles, clutching close familiar feelers, killing themselves, killing each other, dying alone, dying together, watching the light dim aperture-downward through the tunnels at the close of day, flying over landscapes he didn’t even have words for, plumbing chambers of uncanny colors, rooms shot through with otherworldly roots, grizzled voices, forgotten songs, crystalline corridors, malodorous nectars, infinite cemeteries, dens of such unfathomable volume they contradicted every principle of architecture, realms of ruins, rooms of runes, winged ghosts, husks of royals mulched with husks of workers, soldiers swimming in seas of sugar, mountains of sugar, valleys of sugar, sugar in water, death in sugar, dreams in science, art in war, fortresses of quartz, thrones of bedrock, oceans of fire, battlefields of silence, a whisper of souls—all these fragments, not quite remembered, not quite invented, overthrew Rxgr-14’s mind—and the world again went dark.
WHEN HE BLINKED BACK INTO consciousness a second time, he was lying on his side, and Tzara-9’s blood-streaked green exoskeleton lay dead on the ground in front of him. Rxgr-14 ignored the searing pain spreading to the ends of his body and dragged himself toward her. When he got close enough, he learned that it wasn’t her, but a stranger who happened to look like her from the side. With great effort, he turned his head toward the amassment of bodies, which had reformed in the far corner of the chamber. Rxgr-14 searched it for any sign of the real Tzara-9, but all he saw was the tower of gore churning around itself. Strangely, it seemed in no way spectacular. In fact, it looked quaint, almost meaningless, a puff of dust that hadn’t yet settled, a shadow on a wall, a passing feeling. He looked around for Lnzt-16, and his dangling antenna swung down in front of his eyes. Excruciation radiated to every nerve ending. On instinct, he swung the weakly attached nub into his mandibles and removed it with a twist of his neck. A new psychic wave threw him backward in agony. He twisted on the sand. The antenna tasted metallic, and he spat it out. Then, unexpectedly, he vomited so hard it rolled his body sideways three times. He thought he was dying again. Suddenly the chamber rumbled, and he forced his eyes open to watch from a low angle. In flashes of clashing exoskeleton, Lnzt-16 marauded through the tottering cyclone of whorling soldiers, middle feelers wide and wild, massive mandibles scything others’ limbs with impunity, and nothing seemed to touch him but the blood of those he mowed down.
Rxgr-14 wondered if his own self-immolation had somehow motivated Lnzt-16. He hoped it had, but his mind felt like it had a hole in it and was leaking, and even hope was hard to hold onto. He felt like he’d seen what lay below the hard rock that holds up the world, and emotions like hope or fear no longer made sense. Or rather, they did, but seemed more like choices, like up or down, or left or right, rather than unbidden energies that flooded one and drove one’s actions. He tried to get off his back but couldn’t. Then he realized he could use the wall to get up, so he rolled toward it. Arriving at the wall, he allowed his undamaged feelers to grapple and pull his body upright. He was so exhausted from this that he had to catch his breath. Then he limped to the divot around which he and his friends had been earlier. On his way, he heard a gargling cry. Glancing back, he saw the mass of bodies had mostly collapsed. Eybv-99 wobbled in front of its remnants, eyes wide, clutching his bulbed thorax, watching his own green heart slide out of his eviscerated body like he was dying while birthing a glowworm. Lnzt-16, having gutted him, was moving toward Rxgr-14, unblinking. It was then that Rxgr-14 saw Tzara-9 behind him, as if he’d cut her a path. As his two friends passed his own spat-out antenna fragment near the center of the chamber, Tzara-9 glanced at it like a religious relic, sacred and profane and terrifying.
Rxgr-14 closed his eyes to try to dull his headache only to succumb to a second deluge of alien memories. New terrains, vistas, fantastic events, and faces of his species that he’d never encountered all wheeled behind his compound eyes, and this time were accompanied by equally arresting ideas: What if one did run away from the colony? Did other colonies exist where workers subjugated soldiers? What if breeders were their slaves instead of their rulers? What if there were a society in which tunnel maintenance expertise trumped wing and mandible size in the competition for influence? Why shouldn’t there be? What if the engineering mind, unburdened with the endless rearrangement of the environment, were free to grapple with questions of a purely aesthetic nature? Was there value in the consideration of beauty for its own sake? Or goodness? What was goodness? What if there were truths beyond those which justified the routines upon which colony prosperity depended? Or supposedly depended? What if the queen’s will was incorrect? What if the colony itself was wrong, an aberration, an invasion, a blight, a sickness? What if the earth were alive and we merely its terrible parasites? What if I was a villain? What if we all were? What if there were protagonists in other tales to whom we were merely ‘bugs’? Rxgr-14 opened his eyes. Now it was everything in Avern-Y6 that looked alien. Even his friends looked fake. They looked like they could be blinked away at will as they walked toward him. What if the queen wasn’t even real? What if all the fermented proteins and dirt and the excrement and wings and feelers and even Tzara-9 and Lnzt-16 were just the outward, cosmetic features of a different kind of tunnel, a tunnel of dreams and madness, a tunnel of forms and desires, a narrative improvised by a consciousness too big for him to even imagine? What if that consciousness could be awoken into? Who would I be, Rxgr-14 thought, if I awoke into it? Would I wake from this dream only to discover I was dead? Or would I wake as a god?
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br /> Tzara-9 rushed around Lnzt-16 and arrived at Rxgr-14’s body. She was talking rapidly. Lnzt-16 arrived behind her. Behind them both, the survivors of the frenzy reluctantly decoupled, limped woozily back to their respective divots, cleansed themselves, murmured reactions and rationalizations, and glanced in Rxgr-14’s, Tzara-9’s, and Lnzt-16’s general direction. Rxgr-14 noticed how fast his heart was beating. The yellow fluid leaking out of his head had browned where it had dried against his exoskeleton, and the wound was redolent of the past. He looked into Tzara-9’s eyes while she was talking, and, without knowing why, he psychically understood precisely what had happened when he’d briefly left Avern-Y6. Tzara-9 had asked Lnzt-16 why he couldn’t admit he loved her, and after a long silence he’d said that he was afraid of the way in which she loved, which was reckless and thoughtless and furious and blind, and that he couldn’t have handled the responsibility it would require to sustainably reciprocate. But since it was too painful to confront her pain at his inability to give her that what she wanted, he said they should stop spending time together at all in order to move on. She called him a fool and said she would prefer death to such timidity in matters of love, even though she was afraid too. He asked her why she simply couldn’t be a more practical person. She told him she would never compromise herself. He asked why she even loved him, especially if she viewed him as some kind of inveterate compromiser. She told him because she knew him—she saw into him—and she was in love with who he could be so easily if only he chose to live—and love—without fear, with the same fearlessness with which he waged the queen’s wars and murdered her enemies. He interpreted this as an insult to his honor and insulted her in return, calling her a frivolous soul with no respect for the responsibilities of genuine soldiery. Sneering at this, Tzara-9 turned around and began taunting the soldiers who’d been taunting her, hoping to drive Lnzt-16 mad with envy by playing right into his criticism, but then the soldiers, egged on by Eybv-99, suddenly attacked her, and then others had used her imperilment as an excuse to fight them, which had escalated into what Rxgr-14’d seen upon returning to the Avern. All the while Lnzt-16 just drank, facedown, until all the divots around him were empty. As he perceived all this in an instant, Rxgr-14 wondered if Lnzt-16’s intention had been to get drunk in order to spite Tzara-9 in her moment of need, or in order to become so over-inebriated that he’d somehow insulate his subconscious against the hysteria, thereby enabling him to move through it and help her.
“Can you hear me?” said Tzara-9, her emerald eyes clicking above his. “Rxgr-14, are you okay?”
The tenderness in her voice caught him off-guard, and despite his detached perspective, it made him sad, and that brought him back to reality. His eyes clicked at her. He tried to nod but was unsure if he had, so he tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t easily form. Lnzt-16, glossed with blood, glanced at the place where Rxgr-14’s antenna was missing with solemn concern.
Rxgr-14 summoned the strength to smile, hoping to assuage his friend. As soon as he did, however, Rxgr-14 saw not Lnzt-16 standing over him, but the aperture at the top of the central shaft, four-point-six body-widths in diameter, but also impossibly tiny, because he was viewing it from above. Moving over it, the surrounding forest of grass a uniform green, almost like the surface of the water in the underground reservoir. Beyond the green sea was a strip of sand as thin as a feeler, and another forest, and another gray sea, and a place where there was brown, and a mountain of only straight lines, and a big black river that never moved but seemed to wobble in infernal heat. In the fringe of this montage, Rxgr-14 glimpsed the motion of broad wings that caught the light and broke it into different colors, gracefully lifting and lowering. He looked upward. Instead of the ceiling of Avern-Y6, he saw the tiny, useless mandibles of a pinched-faced breeder. It felt like a memory, only realer, and happening now. He looked back down at the world. He was flying, and he felt free. He even felt the wind entering his body through his petioles, and it blew against his heart, cool and invigorating, almost like he was a part of the sky he was moving through.
He blinked. Avern-Y6 was back. Lnzt-16 was still looking down at him, now even more concerned. Rxgr-14, however, relaxed in his thoughts and let Lnzt-16’s memories flow through him again. He saw again the face of Szafair-2. He was sure it was her. Her milky quartz eyes blazed like a ghost’s, and although she wasn’t smiling, she looked contented, and certain of her almost holy purpose.
“Is he conscious?” Tzara-9 said.
“Hey,” Lnzt-16 said. “Are you okay?”
Rxgr-14 blinked and managed to sputter, “I’m f… I’m… I’m f…”
Lnzt-16 nodded at Rxgr-14’s head and said to Tzara-9, “It’s gone.” Then he looked into Rxgr-14’s compound eyes. “You know it’s gone, right?”
Tzara-9 pushed Lnzt-16 out of the way. “Would you relax? He’ll be fine. I’m fine too, by the way.”
Despite her taking an attitude with Lnzt-16, she looked down at Rxgr-14 beatifically. He appreciated her attempt to maneuver the discussion away from the fact that, without an antenna, and given the mayhem that had just occurred, he was doomed. When he returned her kind glance, he was instantly in her den. He could see her brittle, corrugated walls and the messy nest she spent sleepless nights in. He could see the stolen, drained, deflated sacs of fermented unfertilized reproductive proteins scattered around her mound of unrecycled excrement, all six of her feelers hugging an unfinished sac she continued to drink from, even in sleep. He even felt her drunkenness and peered into her dreams. Most of all, he felt a deep sadness and longing which made his own previous feelings of infatuation seem comparatively one-dimensional, if not juvenile. He was her… and this was just last night… until his eyes clicked again Avern-Y6 rematerialized.
“What?” Tzara-9 said. “What is it?”
“Noth…” Rxgr-14 coughed. “Nothing. Sorry for staring.”
She smiled sadly. “I don’t care.”
Behind her, a blood-caked worker lugged two dead soldiers over divots toward the tunnel that led into the main shaft. Rxgr-14 was surprised to find that without counting he knew that exactly twenty-three soldiers and eleven workers were dead. Two other workers, who must have arrived recently because their carapaces were clean, labored to bowl Eybv-99’s enormous body forward with their heads, but Eybv-99’s body was stuck on another body that they couldn’t see. Then there was the rumble of distant marching, and the three friends looked at each other.
“Goon squad,” Tzara-9 said.
They glanced at the entrance of Avern-Y6 where the royal guard would soon pour in, flanked by soldiers who had not been drinking all night, whose loyalty to the queen was unquestioned, and whose judicial imaginations were undisposed to nuance.
“I won’t let them kill you,” Lnzt-16 said. “Not without a fight.”
Rxgr-14 looked at him like he was stupid.
“I’m down for that,” Tzara-9 added, nodding. She cracked her neck.
“No,” Rxgr-14 said. He looked at his friends. “You’ll be okay. Both of you.”
Lnzt-16 frowned. “What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me.” Rxgr-14 wanted to tell them more, but his mind was still a tumbler of exotic and incongruous visions, some Lnzt-16’s, some Tzara-9’s, some of others around them, and some that were older, and some that he knew could only be visions of the future. He had to concentrate in order to keep them at bay. If he looked at Lnzt-16, he saw flying and killing. If he looked at Tzara-9, he saw drinking and wallowing.
With great concentration, he turned to Tzara-9 and said, “I loved you.” Her eyes widened and she stopped moving completely. “I mean, I do love you,” he corrected himself. He was able to stay in the present when he remembered his feelings. “I should have told you long ago, but I was afraid. I don’t think it would have mattered, but I would have gotten past it, and we might’ve been realer friends, instead of the way I treated you, which was as a friend only so far as it might help me find a way to win you over. It wa
s a coward’s way to be a friend, and a dishonest one.” He looked at them both. “But I’m not a coward anymore, and the truth is all I have left, which is more than enough.” Tzara-9 glanced at Lnzt-16 with concern. “It’s okay,” Rxgr-14 soothed. He winced and coughed. He’d forgotten he’d lost a feeler, too, the middle right one, in the chaos. He crouched over the broken limb awkwardly and looked back at Lnzt-16.
“Promise me that you’ll—”
“Stop it!” Tzara-9 interjected. “Stop acting like this. You’re going to be…” She looked around. “Look, what you did was good. You saved lives when you…” She looked at the wound on his head and trailed off. “It was a frenzy. It got out of hand. But you slowed it down, you gave us all a chance to…” Dirt began to shake from the rotunda above as the rumble of the approaching royal guard got louder. “… To think,” she finished. Lnzt-16 looked back at Rxgr-14’s antenna fragment in the center of the room. The workers cleaning things up had made a wide berth around it, and the soldiers were all still whispering and staring.
“I did it,” Lnzt-16 offered. He nodded. “Accidentally.” He looked at Tzara-9. “I was trying to help her, and I just…” He motioned with his mandible, “clipped it. Accidents happen. They think I walk on water, remember? I’m a hero. They’ll believe me.”
