Kindaichi of the Topaz Gull Clan, formerly 7th Dan of Washi San Academy, in disgrace, had never in her life been so exhausted. Resting against a blood and oil-smeared boulder, inside her mecha, she sobbed, but so dehydrated was she that no tears came. She no longer even had the energy to marvel at the depth of her new bond with her mecha. She could feel the stone she was leaning upon as though it were flesh and not metal which touched it. Hours ago that sensation had been magnificent. Now it was just another factor contributing to her exhaustion.
Eyeless hordes swarmed over the rise barreling her over with their numbers. Their tentacles latched onto her limbs trying to restrain her. In her weakened state, they might have succeeded, but some impossible reserve of determination made her bring her Mochi-Yari to bear. Lancing dead Cheldrun in half, she forced herself to rise out of the mass.
To her left and right other mecha labored, wading through tides of the Enemy, as exhausted as she, perhaps even more bereft of hope and yet they were carried by iron discipline, and absolute confidence in the rightness of their cause. Since this morning dozens of her colleagues had fallen. She watched as Ishikawa of the Jade Falcon Clan was liquefied by some horrible beam from Karaku Oni. The molten ring through the torso of his mecha glowed orange as he fell in a heap and was buried under the advancing army. He fired his bow twice more, annihilating several eyeless with each shot, before dying.
Kindaichi would give no less. At this very moment refugees were fleeing for safety. There was no hope of ultimate victory, but each second she bought would be one more second for the refugees to flee. She told herself this because she could see no redemption for herself in this situation. Every ounce of her body screamed in agony with each movement. Soon, she knew, nothing would keep her in motion and then she would be at the mercy of the eyeless... or she would pass out and her mecha would be dismissed... or an Oni would return... or all of the Oni...
An eyeless was flying through the air, toward her helmet. She recognized him, even without his eyes. It was a high-ranking Hei Shi named Arrow, one who had brought Goshi Directives to Washi San Academy upon occasion. Her Mochi-Yari took his head off in one blow.
Not yet. She would not die, yet.
***
At best the infirmary could be called an endless triage clinic. Nothing approaching actual medicine was being performed here any longer, the Surgeon lamented. It was impossible to even attempt it with the thousands of casualties being rushed through the doors every minute. The injured and dying spilled out of the walls into the fields beyond, laying on tarps and in the grass, not neatly, but piled up. Those who could pull themselves out of the pile to find a wall to lean against were probably those with the best chance of survival, Surgeon concentrated on them. The rest just moaned and wailed for relief, but there was none to give.
A young man, too young to have any right to be participating in the fighting, sat by himself in a rare clear spot on the ground. Both arms were gone from the shoulders. He rocked back and forth slightly, dizzy from blood loss. He would be dead in moments. The Surgeon laid him back on the ground, whispering in his ear though he doubted anything he said would penetrate the shock. Suddenly the man was quite lucid and he looked the Surgeon in the eyes as he spoke.
"They're coming. More are coming. It's not over."
The Surgeon thought he meant the Goshi army, but moments after he left the man's side to attend the next victim he noticed corpses twitching, going into paroxysms, their limbs quaking. It was happening everywhere. Terry the Canary, covered head to toe in viscera, came running toward him, shouting incomprehensibly through her sobs. The corpses were rising. Coming to their feet, without eyes in their heads, they began to consume the wounded and the dying.
Terry embraced him and he thought he heard her say "we tried," and "die together." He would have shaken her out of her hysteria in different circumstances, but he found he could do nothing but hold her tightly to himself and nod and weep. She was always a flighty little girl. Too fragile for times like these. Everyone is too fragile for times like these. Suffering like this was never meant to be inflicted on any man.
He barely realized it when a barbed tentacle burst through Terry's rib cage. She was quiet now, but he kept holding her. He whispered that it would be okay, though he knew it could never be.
He didn't see or feel the blow that felled him.
***
Perched on a branch, Sings-Like-Frog, looked out over the frozen surface of Stardown Lake at the stream of refugees running for their lives. In the distance the mountains were on fire. Smoke poured into the air making midday seem gray and dingy like dusk. Only the sun and the fire of the Wandering Star pierced the gloom above. The Star was almost at its peak and it filled the aging Zipsum's heart with forboding.
Below him, interspersed through the trees were the assembled choirs of the Prill. The greatest massed choir in generations. Even in the midst of the devastation it made him glow with pride to have spent his life among the fox-children. In his warbly croaking voice he sang along with a number of the songs which were familiar to him. No mystical power filled him when he did so. He could not so much as turn one drop of water to ice, but he felt as if he were part of something tremendous, something worth doing.
The terror of the refugees who were arriving on the south and eastern shores of the lake was palpable, but there was an undercurrent of gratitude as well. They were rushed under the canopy of the forest and away to safety where whole cities had been sung into existence for them. Most had no way of comprehending what was happening. They had never before seen a Prill or heard of their wonder-working powers. They stumbled, dumb-founded, between paralyzing fear and disbelief.
In time, they would remember this as the beginning of a lasting peace. That was Elder Moon's hope. Saving millions of Cheldrun from destruction would be the seeds of unity for Karians and Cheldrun. These refugee cities will last. They will flourish and they will remind the children of steel of the debt they owe. Sings-Like-Frog was no diplomat, but he believed her when she spoke about it. She was passionate, and convicted. She persuaded every Karian who heard her and they willingly lent their help to the cause. Something good must come from this travesty.
From where Sings-Like-Frog was perched he could count tens of millions of good things running across the ice.
***
Fighting alongside the Zipsum was good. Fighting with the strength of Karia was even better. Edana Griolsa ripped the tentacles off an eyeless before her and kicked it so hard the rib cage collapsed. Before it hit the ground two Zipsum warriors were on it, plunging poisoned knives over and over again into the flesh. Everywhere she turned her blows were followed by Zipsum knives and arrows. She set them up, and the Zipsum cut them down. It was beautiful to watch.
Overhead a tank whistled through the air. When it plowed into the ranks of the enemy it sent a shockwave of flesh rippling for dozens of meters in every direction. She charged up to it and ripped the cannon free from its moorings. She swung it around her in a great arc, clearing a circle of the dead, breaking backs, crushing skulls. One ducked under her swing and plowed into her at the waist trying to knock her off her feet. She neither braced herself nor avoided the attack. The eyeless merely bounced off her like a granite column. The Zipsum knives silenced him before he could get up.
Deep in her breast a proud Gogajin heart was beating. Decades of rage at the suffering of her people combined with the unbelievable hope that the unification of the clans provided made her and every other Gogajin unstoppable. They would neither tire, nor weaken. They would not surrender or retreat. They would hound the foe across every centimeter and kilometer of the continent if need be. They were Gogajin. Their enemies would die in despair, but they would die with a loud and raucous laugh.
***
Aimi could get used to this feeling - the feeling of rushing through the clouds at the helm of an airship. For most of her life she never questioned the Cheldrun prohibition against taking to the sky, but now that she knew how seductive it was she began to understand it better. Not as good as sex, but not completely dissimilar.
The one thing she did not like about flying the Sennin is how conspicuous it was. Used to arriving unannounced with a surprise knife to the back, it was against her nature to be so exposed to every eye as she whistled through the air. There was no longer any meaningful surface-to-air threat from the Goshi army... was it really Goshi anymore? But it kept her on edge every second. An Oni, she knew, could obliterate the Sennin without effort. She dare not relax her guard.
To make matters worse, Kiyoshi and Rei and friends were always insisting on being deposited as close to the damn Oni as possible. Not only did she object to exposing herself and the Sennin to such danger, she in no way approved of Kiyoshi's reckless behavior. She had a feeling that her approval meant about as much to him as the opinion of a rock. Then reflecting on the awe these people seemed to have of Karia - even believing that Karia was alive and influencing them by giving them their remarkable powers, she glumly noted that her opinion might matter less than that of a rock.
He'd better survive long enough for me to punish him, she thought to herself.
***
Zipporah felt something like butterfly wings fluttering in her uterus. Her eyes widened and she clutched her stomach. It was the first sensation of the life within her and she was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. There was a spark of joy, yes, but it seemed so fragile in comparison with the host of fears that pressed in around her. The meaning of this child was yet to be determined. Everything that it could be could so easily be destroyed by the war... by the enemy... if she lost Moses...
Over and over again lately she had forced herself to contemplate his death. It was the last thing she wanted, and yet every second it was a terrible possibility. Now it seemed a near certainty since the hopes of so many were depending on him... depending on his willingness to sacrifice himself.
He would do it, she knew. She couldn't be angry about it either. She would do the same in his place, but knowing this in no way reduced the enormity of her grief. Instead she was angry at the Dusk Sages. Angry at Karia. Angry at the All. It was not right, not fair, not in any sense good or just that so many should have to suffer for others to live. Perhaps, she reflected bitterly, the Question was nothing but a cosmic wager. A callous game of chance with the lives of, well everything, at stake.
Including the life in her uterus. That above all is why she knew she would lose Moses. If he could do something to ensure that life... anything. Could she bear to see this child grow and live, but never rest in Moses' embrace again?
***
This command center was really no such thing. It was a lost cause. His officers were dead or dying or rising as eyeless. His soldiers were fleeing or cowering or nonresponsive to his commands in any case. The few mecha he still had fighting were beyond his reach and there were no more tanks or artillery and even if there were they wouldn't be of much use. Daitokuji Ichirou, patriarch of the Silver Phoenix Clan and general of the Stardown Defense Force was grudgingly forced to admit that they had indeed arrived at the end of the road.
Despite the unbelievable efforts of the Heroes of Karia Vitalus, there was no stopping this swarm of eyeless which had enveloped them. He urged everyone to standfast, knowing it was pointless. Those who would fight would fight. The rest were already rushing after the refugees for the frozen lake. Dimly he hoped that his wife and child were safe among those escaping. There was nothing he could do about it either way.
Having given his final orders, and knowing there was nothing left that any general could do to reverse this tide, he calmly walked from the bunker into the open. Bullets ricocheted off the cement around him. He ignored their dangerous buzz, and turned to face the oncoming rush of the Enemy. Countless millions had been killed or destroyed, yet millions more were coming. Among them the cruel, but vibrant First Minds walked, propelling the demonic army by their twisted power. They had overcome every obstacle the SDF placed in their way. They were almost through the pass, to pour on the unprotected refugees below.
One obstacle still remained for them to overcome, however. Daitokuji Ichirou, 12th Dan of Washi San Academy, the greatest mecha pilot who ever lived. He crossed his arms in front of him and silver light rippled over the field.
***
Heaving tanks through the air is hard work. Even Balder had to admit that the Cheldrun know how to make some heavy shit. The heaviest thing in a Gogajin village is a slab of stone, or a plowshare. Nowhere near as heavy as a tank. Not that he was counting, but he was pretty sure he'd hurled about 43 of them so far, and now they were staying away from him or driving for the hills, or unoccupied and lifeless. That was the thing about tanks, without their crew they're just a hunk of metal.
There were less tanks about now, and less artillery, and less Cheldrun actually. The enemies he was wading through now were eyeless, every one of them. The living children of steel had turned on their own army, shooting the eyeless rather than running alongside them. It was one hell of a clusterfuck, because the Goshi soldiers didn't know which side they were on. They were shit-scared of the eyeless, but the Gogajin weren't their friends either. Balder decided to let them shoot first to see if they were an enemy. If they fired on him (to little effect since Karia was blessing him with her strength), then he gave them the tank treatment. If they screamed and ran he let them go.
Over the sounds of the battle he could hear little, but from time to time he heard a Gogajin clan crying their motto and regardless of which clan it was he would shout it along with them and charge with renewed vigor. They were united now, the Gogajin. And Grim, Grim of all fucking people was their leader! Their High-fucking-King! He was doing a good job making a show of it too. He had charged to the top of a rise, near the middle of the enemy army, and planted his standard, waving it for all to see. He taunted the foe to take the hill from him and for hours none had been able to displace him.
Balder made his way that direction, cutting through swaths of eyeless with a torn sheet of metal. From behind Grim he could see a small, unassuming man approaching. Balder recognized him as a First Mind, and he shouted to warn Grim, but his voice was drowned out by the roar of an artillery shell exploding nearby. Rainbow rays burst from the First Mind's fingertips obliterating several of the Gogajin in Grim's entourage. Grim turned around to face his new opponent and Balder could tell he didn't recognize the danger. Grim threw his arms wide, taunting the First Mind, exposing himself. The First Mind smirked and raised his hands...
Then Balder was on him. He had a hand in the First Mind's mouth, and an arm around his chest. Some dark energy tore at Balder, turning his flesh to spaghetti, unraveling him like a wool jumper. It hurt more than Balder cared to admit. He squeezed the First Mind with all of his might, but for his unassuming appearance he was unbelievable strong. The dark energy continued to shred Balder like so much confetti. He lost his balance and tumbled to the ground with the First Mind still in his grasp.
Balder's legs began dissolving. A metal plate burst free from his shoulder when the screws could no longer find purchase in bones quickly turning to gelatin. Balder screamed for Grim to run. Run for his fucking life, but he couldn't see or tell whether Grim had listened. The First Mind continued struggling in his grasp and Balder forced his hand further into its mouth as his vision became blurry, and the world started to fade.
The blackness claimed Balder, but not before he ripped the First Mind's skull, without the jaw, from its moorings and tossed it into the fray.
***
At the eye of the storm Jin Kalys labored, obsessively, over his newest equations. They made no sense, even to him. Frankly he had given up certainty some time ago. He understood the exigencies of the circumstances. He had no more time to make them right. No more time to be certain, and the math... his dreams weren't coming as they usually did when the equations were close. His subconscious assimilation of nine branch formal logic must not have been as thorough as he'd once imagined, because now... when he most need to be sure.
Some luxuries life does not afford us. This solution would have to do.
The new inertial dampener/difference engine combination artifact was bulky, intricate, and Jin would even venture, aesthetically pleasing. In other times he would have joyfully joined Sousauryoku in an thorough study of the device. It made him feel amateurish to be so hasty with his preparations, but at this very moment the Eyeless were pushing into the streets of Stardown and the Wandering Star was nearly at it's apex. In less than an hour the fate of life would be decided and in some small way he would take part in that decision. Of any debate he had ever waged he most hoped to earn a piercing for this one.
Sousauryoku leaned over his shoulder to read the last page of notation. For once he didn't make a snide comment, but merely gave a weary look that said "I hope you're right."
"There is no other choice," Jin Kalys assured him.
***
From her birth in fiery glory Karia had been a witness. Only in these last hours was she also an actor. It gave her indescribable pleasure, but also debilitating anxiety to at last be involved in the cosmic drama. For a child whose lifespan is measured in billions of revolutions the span of an hour is the blinking of an eye. She watched, unblinking, as that last hour unfolded and she admitted to herself at last, what she had denied for billions of years - that she was not neutral in this conflict, that her heart sang to her of the beauty of life and could not abide the thought of an eternity without the living. She watched, but not as an enraptured audience, she watched as one who stood much to lose. The living were making their choices. The meaning was being played out. The Question would at last be answered.
Life?
Showing posts with label Nine Branches. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nine Branches. Show all posts
Conversations with the Cold-Blooded
"No. Absolutely not. If I were to accept such a postulate, it would undermine the very foundational principles of nine-branch-formal logic." The lizard looks irritated again. I have that effect on him, and there's something vaguely satisfying about it.
"It still works," I say. "You just have to expand the parameters. It loses some of its predictive ability, but I think it will create a much more accurate representation of..."
-----------------
It's dark, and I'm sitting around a table with a handful of Biomade. Operatives, all of them.
... Well, former operatives. The old networks are shot to hell these days, and hardly anyone knows anything, but we're as close to the heart of Stardown's military intelligence as anyone's going to get.
I wish there was someone else to do this sort of thing, but our list of candidates is a bit on the slim side. There's me, me, and ... me.
Three men, three women, and me.
"What do you have for me?" I ask.
Lightning - one of the women, pulls out a notepad. A notepad. Once, this would have been projected for all of us on a holo-screen, but now, notepads will have to do. "Unfortunately, most of our personnel have maintained their ties with Goshi, and many of those who have not remain loyal to the Oversight Council in Marina, which makes them Goshi's by default." I know all that, but I nod anyways. It's comfortingly silent in here: nobody in the room is foolish enough to allow their thoughts to leak. She goes on. "All told, we've located a hundred and twenty eight former operatives who are willing to participate in our new program.
A hundred and twenty eight. That's not great, but it's not bad, either. A hundred and twenty eight people in the right place at the right time might be all we need.
"You've explained what we expect of them?" A man off to my left asks.
Lightning nods. "They understand that they may not return alive."
And so it goes. A hundred and twenty eight operatives. 'Operative.' That's the civilized term for what we are.
Spies. Assassins. Thieves and murderers. I feel guilt again, but I quash it ruthlessly. I'm not going to feel guilty here. It's funny. The bulk of our work actually goes towards preventing assassination attempts on Moses, Kiyoshi, and Ichiro. I almost giggle at the thought that we've already stopped twelve such attempts before they managed to get off the ground. For a would-be world dominator, Goshi is surprisingly sloppy.
Well, no. That's not really true. That's what they want us to think. Wheels within wheels is the way of this world. Each enemy operative that we capture allows us a view into, not what Goshi is actually planning, but what Goshi wants us to believe that they are planning. Most of their assassins are fed deliberate misinformation for the event of their capture, though their handlers are careful enough to never let them know that, or even to suspect it. How much is bluff and how much isn't, well, that's the game.
"Rei, what about the Ikari report?" another of them asks.
My heart sinks. That happens a lot around these people. "Has it been confirmed?" I ask. If what's in that report is true, then a hell of a lot of innocent people are going to die. We could do something about it, but if we did, a hell of a lot more innocent people would die later.
Lightning nods. "It's been confirmed. ... Ikari has successfully broken the Executor code."
We all let out a breath that none of us had realized we were holding. ... suddenly, things are infinitely more complicated. We've already got three devices on the table designed to nullify the effects of microphones and transmitters in a localized area, and two more designed to block telepathic signals, but I add another one just to be on the safe side.
"So they're going to hit the tunnels," I murmur. "Sick bastards." It's an ingenious plan, really. Specifically designed to undermine morale and spread terror in our population: nerve gas canisters smuggled into the refugee tunnels by a team of Goshi operatives.
"We definitely shouldn't tell Moses," Lightning says. "He'll stop the operatives, and they'll know that we cracked the code, and there's no guarantee that we'll be able to crack whatever they come up with to replace it. Not in a short enough time to matter."
I feel sick to my stomach, but it doesn't show on my face. The others aren't quite as good at hiding their reactions. Still, I say what has to be said. "When this is over, I want Rain's head on a pike."
The others all nod their agreement.
I produce a folder marked 'Ikari,' and pull a handful of papers out of it.
The plans for Goshi's first major assault.
A million people are going to die to make an effective response possible.
Karia, but it had better be worth it...
-------------
Jin-Kalys's dewlap flares, and I try very hard not to grin. "A stochastic reading of the Nine Branches is altogether unnecessary. It already accounts for individual choice as a function of the polyvalent..."
He goes on, and I don't quite grasp the entirety of his argument, but I don't show him that. I understand him well enough to get the general sense of what he means. "If you'd accounted for individual choice, you would not be making predictions about the future," I say. "Every choice affects every other. Every action nudges the whole model towards a different outcome. Freedom, Jin-Kalys."
"I will not revise the nine-branches to cater to your personal desire for greater autonomy in the universe, Rei," Jin-Kalys says, and his gaze is oddly piercing. "I had thought that you of all people would take some comfort in knowing that there really are very view possible choices at this juncture, considering what you are about to allow to happen."
Shock. Surprise. Anger. Fear. "... I don't know what you mean," I say.
He looks at me, silently, unblinkingly.
I sink into myself. "... do you think Karia will forgive me?" I ask.
"No." His voice is full of a terrible sense of finality, and I feel that cold, creeping dread again.
'But you don't want to be forgiven, do you, Onee-chan?' Amaterasu whispers in my thoughts. 'You don't want to be forgiven at all. You want to pay for your sins. You want to earn your redemption. I'm right, aren't I? If you give me mana, I can show you how to do it...'
"... There's no other choice," I murmur.
He looks me directly in the eye, then, his unblinking lizard-eyes peering right into mine. "Do you believe that?" he asks.
...
"It still works," I say. "You just have to expand the parameters. It loses some of its predictive ability, but I think it will create a much more accurate representation of..."
-----------------
It's dark, and I'm sitting around a table with a handful of Biomade. Operatives, all of them.
... Well, former operatives. The old networks are shot to hell these days, and hardly anyone knows anything, but we're as close to the heart of Stardown's military intelligence as anyone's going to get.
I wish there was someone else to do this sort of thing, but our list of candidates is a bit on the slim side. There's me, me, and ... me.
Three men, three women, and me.
"What do you have for me?" I ask.
Lightning - one of the women, pulls out a notepad. A notepad. Once, this would have been projected for all of us on a holo-screen, but now, notepads will have to do. "Unfortunately, most of our personnel have maintained their ties with Goshi, and many of those who have not remain loyal to the Oversight Council in Marina, which makes them Goshi's by default." I know all that, but I nod anyways. It's comfortingly silent in here: nobody in the room is foolish enough to allow their thoughts to leak. She goes on. "All told, we've located a hundred and twenty eight former operatives who are willing to participate in our new program.
A hundred and twenty eight. That's not great, but it's not bad, either. A hundred and twenty eight people in the right place at the right time might be all we need.
"You've explained what we expect of them?" A man off to my left asks.
Lightning nods. "They understand that they may not return alive."
And so it goes. A hundred and twenty eight operatives. 'Operative.' That's the civilized term for what we are.
Spies. Assassins. Thieves and murderers. I feel guilt again, but I quash it ruthlessly. I'm not going to feel guilty here. It's funny. The bulk of our work actually goes towards preventing assassination attempts on Moses, Kiyoshi, and Ichiro. I almost giggle at the thought that we've already stopped twelve such attempts before they managed to get off the ground. For a would-be world dominator, Goshi is surprisingly sloppy.
Well, no. That's not really true. That's what they want us to think. Wheels within wheels is the way of this world. Each enemy operative that we capture allows us a view into, not what Goshi is actually planning, but what Goshi wants us to believe that they are planning. Most of their assassins are fed deliberate misinformation for the event of their capture, though their handlers are careful enough to never let them know that, or even to suspect it. How much is bluff and how much isn't, well, that's the game.
"Rei, what about the Ikari report?" another of them asks.
My heart sinks. That happens a lot around these people. "Has it been confirmed?" I ask. If what's in that report is true, then a hell of a lot of innocent people are going to die. We could do something about it, but if we did, a hell of a lot more innocent people would die later.
Lightning nods. "It's been confirmed. ... Ikari has successfully broken the Executor code."
We all let out a breath that none of us had realized we were holding. ... suddenly, things are infinitely more complicated. We've already got three devices on the table designed to nullify the effects of microphones and transmitters in a localized area, and two more designed to block telepathic signals, but I add another one just to be on the safe side.
"So they're going to hit the tunnels," I murmur. "Sick bastards." It's an ingenious plan, really. Specifically designed to undermine morale and spread terror in our population: nerve gas canisters smuggled into the refugee tunnels by a team of Goshi operatives.
"We definitely shouldn't tell Moses," Lightning says. "He'll stop the operatives, and they'll know that we cracked the code, and there's no guarantee that we'll be able to crack whatever they come up with to replace it. Not in a short enough time to matter."
I feel sick to my stomach, but it doesn't show on my face. The others aren't quite as good at hiding their reactions. Still, I say what has to be said. "When this is over, I want Rain's head on a pike."
The others all nod their agreement.
I produce a folder marked 'Ikari,' and pull a handful of papers out of it.
The plans for Goshi's first major assault.
A million people are going to die to make an effective response possible.
Karia, but it had better be worth it...
-------------
Jin-Kalys's dewlap flares, and I try very hard not to grin. "A stochastic reading of the Nine Branches is altogether unnecessary. It already accounts for individual choice as a function of the polyvalent..."
He goes on, and I don't quite grasp the entirety of his argument, but I don't show him that. I understand him well enough to get the general sense of what he means. "If you'd accounted for individual choice, you would not be making predictions about the future," I say. "Every choice affects every other. Every action nudges the whole model towards a different outcome. Freedom, Jin-Kalys."
"I will not revise the nine-branches to cater to your personal desire for greater autonomy in the universe, Rei," Jin-Kalys says, and his gaze is oddly piercing. "I had thought that you of all people would take some comfort in knowing that there really are very view possible choices at this juncture, considering what you are about to allow to happen."
Shock. Surprise. Anger. Fear. "... I don't know what you mean," I say.
He looks at me, silently, unblinkingly.
I sink into myself. "... do you think Karia will forgive me?" I ask.
"No." His voice is full of a terrible sense of finality, and I feel that cold, creeping dread again.
'But you don't want to be forgiven, do you, Onee-chan?' Amaterasu whispers in my thoughts. 'You don't want to be forgiven at all. You want to pay for your sins. You want to earn your redemption. I'm right, aren't I? If you give me mana, I can show you how to do it...'
"... There's no other choice," I murmur.
He looks me directly in the eye, then, his unblinking lizard-eyes peering right into mine. "Do you believe that?" he asks.
...
An Impossible Situation
Night is a time to let the mind wander shaded paths, to slacken one's bright focus. Heavy-lidded, Jin-Kalys is curled around a low table in an out-of-the-way tea-house in Stardown. He has been given freedom to move throughout the city, and is learning to ignore the Cheldrun who are curious to see an Anakarix sitting a tea-house, or going to a public bath, or walking down the street, or buying food with the city vouchers he receives. In the press of refugees and others who have come to the city, it is impossible to hide or to move about surreptitiously. Engineers are busy constructing temporary shelters and buildings on the outskirts of the city. Some arrive with supplies in tow, but as many others do not. Wherever possible, refugees and freedom-fighters are conscripted to work building shelters, digging new drainage, laying new pipes and power cables and so on.
There is the sense that, though there is a great deal of work to do, it need not be of lasting quality.
This will be over all too soon. Word has reached the city (by Zipsum, if nothing else) that Goshi has retreated to Marina, and is organizing some kind of massive military offensive. The hammer is being drawn back, and will be brought down one last time, not flickering Hei-Shi but the whole remaining might of Goshi Mining Corporation, wounded, hemorrhaging money, but far from dead.
Jin is distantly aware of this. He has two tasks in mind as he lounges in the tea-house, relying on the warmth of the tea to help him concentrate. Working after dark is for mammals. The first task is the completion of a sizeable letter in tiny, even, angular script to be delivered to Sighing Web of Trees via well-paid Zipsum messenger. Fortunately, food-vouchers can be traded for candy. In the letter, Jin is primarily concerned with describing his various adaptations of Nine-Branches Formal Logic. Stories of world war are of secondary interest, mentioned only as illustrations. Anakarix can be fearsome opponents if they are defending their tree-villages and particularly the tombs of the sainted lizard sages, but they are hardly a people to trek hundreds of kilometers across the continent to help Cheldrun fight Cheldrun.
It is difficult, but possible, to translate rational argument into purely written form. Jin is relying on an archaic script which retains markings to represent posture and positioning, as if the speaker were physically present. Someday, when this is all over, Jin hopes to return to Sighing Web of Trees to personally defend his theses.
The second task is...difficult to describe. Before he left his village, what seems like years ago now, Jin had made a crucial argument for non-rational processing, ultimately earning his most recent dewlap piercing. He is finding, however, that speaking is easier than doing. To clear the mind, to silence it, to wait patiently for answers to arise - almost impossible.
The conclusion he's reached about the energy-nullifying field that is currently spreading in the center of the city can't possibly be correct. If it is, then the city is doomed until the energy feedback runs out and begins to revert to a static state...and it is very difficult to predict when this will be.
The problem is a simple one conceptually but an impossible one practically. The energy-field steals kinetic energy around it. The obvious result is the intense cold that surrounds the device. Of course, any Anakarix more than a few years out of the Ovumcreche knows that Sol burns because it moves. A poet would say that it dances, spinning recklessly, dizzyingly. The movement, coupled with its immense mass, radiates warmth to the whole solar system. Karia, moving far more slowly around Sol, is far cooler, so that instead of fire, there is warmth for life, arising from the planet and radiating out from Sol. Planets closer to Sol are faster, and therefore of course, hotter, while those more distant are far cooler, moving in far larger ellipses. Karia, at the perfect distance, is the sole world with life, or so the sages say.
Obviously, some kind of intelligent being will have to get close enough to the device to alter it sufficiently. This being will have to carry with it a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, because it will be immediately sapped when it enters the nullifying field. Based on measurements taken at the edge of the field and Jin's careful calculations, aided at many points by Sousauryoku and his various calculating devices, this creature would have to be traveling at a speed that is many times that of sound. This amount of kinetic energy would burn said creature alive, incinerating it even if there was some contrivance by which it could be brought up to that kind of velocity.
There is a second solution, also impossible. The creature could be somewhat slower in the approach, only perhaps as fast as the fastest Zipsum on Karia, but it would have to continuously accelerate once it entered the field. The force required would be tremendous - more like one of the Cheldrun bullets leaving the tube of one of their guns.
Either way, once it reached the device intact, it is...possible...that something could be done. A great deal of energy must be introduced into the system, in order to buy Stardown time and achieve the two ends of the operation: 1) maintain the shield so that Hei-Shi don't rain down on the city and 2) prevent the city from being doomed to a frigid stasis, killing everyone under that selfsame dome.
If this theoretical bullet-creature could reach the device, it would be actually laughably simple to impart tremendous energy into the system - but impossible for any such creature to survive the interaction. Once the energy was imparted to the device, the creature would be left there, frozen and trapped, if it was not obliterated by the impact.
Sousauryoku has another solution, which, on the current theoretical level, is fascinating. He is designing an engine to be placed in the device. The metaphysical problem, of course, is that the device is currently powered by sacrifice, for all intents and purposes. It is fueled by lost potential. But Sousauryoku seems unable to clearly perceive this fact. He wants to understand it in terms of a particular kind of energy as the Cheldrun narrowly perceive it.
The Cheldrun cannot see - their devices are powered by sacrifice. The artifacts that they attribute to their First Minds exact some kind of price. In many cases, they pay it intuitively, not understanding why it is that ritual observances sometimes activate the devices. Even in their mundane technologies - something is expended, lost, in order that something else is achieved. The Mechified burn Blackrock. The Allskins burn incense and chant and hold to ancient ways. It is the Biomade who sacrifice most, but who understand their sacrifice the least, because it is of a kind that even Jin must admit he cannot comprehend precisely. They sacrifice aspects of themselves. They think they are being perfected, but they are only being pared down. In carving a plank, much of the tree is lost. Is a plank better than a tree? The Biomade think so. Jin couldn't disagree more...but it isn't his place to point any of this out.
In the end, however, the rule is the same. It is no different from the ancient stories of the Karians - in the beginning, the Dusk Sages created, and as they did so, they diminished. It is the nature of things.
Jin sighs and puts down his pen, massaging one clawed hand with another, staring off into the night. What will have to be sacrificed, what will have to diminish, before this is over, for better or worse?
He shakes his head abruptly. I need more tea. There is still a lot of work to do.
There is the sense that, though there is a great deal of work to do, it need not be of lasting quality.
This will be over all too soon. Word has reached the city (by Zipsum, if nothing else) that Goshi has retreated to Marina, and is organizing some kind of massive military offensive. The hammer is being drawn back, and will be brought down one last time, not flickering Hei-Shi but the whole remaining might of Goshi Mining Corporation, wounded, hemorrhaging money, but far from dead.
Jin is distantly aware of this. He has two tasks in mind as he lounges in the tea-house, relying on the warmth of the tea to help him concentrate. Working after dark is for mammals. The first task is the completion of a sizeable letter in tiny, even, angular script to be delivered to Sighing Web of Trees via well-paid Zipsum messenger. Fortunately, food-vouchers can be traded for candy. In the letter, Jin is primarily concerned with describing his various adaptations of Nine-Branches Formal Logic. Stories of world war are of secondary interest, mentioned only as illustrations. Anakarix can be fearsome opponents if they are defending their tree-villages and particularly the tombs of the sainted lizard sages, but they are hardly a people to trek hundreds of kilometers across the continent to help Cheldrun fight Cheldrun.
It is difficult, but possible, to translate rational argument into purely written form. Jin is relying on an archaic script which retains markings to represent posture and positioning, as if the speaker were physically present. Someday, when this is all over, Jin hopes to return to Sighing Web of Trees to personally defend his theses.
The second task is...difficult to describe. Before he left his village, what seems like years ago now, Jin had made a crucial argument for non-rational processing, ultimately earning his most recent dewlap piercing. He is finding, however, that speaking is easier than doing. To clear the mind, to silence it, to wait patiently for answers to arise - almost impossible.
The conclusion he's reached about the energy-nullifying field that is currently spreading in the center of the city can't possibly be correct. If it is, then the city is doomed until the energy feedback runs out and begins to revert to a static state...and it is very difficult to predict when this will be.
The problem is a simple one conceptually but an impossible one practically. The energy-field steals kinetic energy around it. The obvious result is the intense cold that surrounds the device. Of course, any Anakarix more than a few years out of the Ovumcreche knows that Sol burns because it moves. A poet would say that it dances, spinning recklessly, dizzyingly. The movement, coupled with its immense mass, radiates warmth to the whole solar system. Karia, moving far more slowly around Sol, is far cooler, so that instead of fire, there is warmth for life, arising from the planet and radiating out from Sol. Planets closer to Sol are faster, and therefore of course, hotter, while those more distant are far cooler, moving in far larger ellipses. Karia, at the perfect distance, is the sole world with life, or so the sages say.
Obviously, some kind of intelligent being will have to get close enough to the device to alter it sufficiently. This being will have to carry with it a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, because it will be immediately sapped when it enters the nullifying field. Based on measurements taken at the edge of the field and Jin's careful calculations, aided at many points by Sousauryoku and his various calculating devices, this creature would have to be traveling at a speed that is many times that of sound. This amount of kinetic energy would burn said creature alive, incinerating it even if there was some contrivance by which it could be brought up to that kind of velocity.
There is a second solution, also impossible. The creature could be somewhat slower in the approach, only perhaps as fast as the fastest Zipsum on Karia, but it would have to continuously accelerate once it entered the field. The force required would be tremendous - more like one of the Cheldrun bullets leaving the tube of one of their guns.
Either way, once it reached the device intact, it is...possible...that something could be done. A great deal of energy must be introduced into the system, in order to buy Stardown time and achieve the two ends of the operation: 1) maintain the shield so that Hei-Shi don't rain down on the city and 2) prevent the city from being doomed to a frigid stasis, killing everyone under that selfsame dome.
If this theoretical bullet-creature could reach the device, it would be actually laughably simple to impart tremendous energy into the system - but impossible for any such creature to survive the interaction. Once the energy was imparted to the device, the creature would be left there, frozen and trapped, if it was not obliterated by the impact.
Sousauryoku has another solution, which, on the current theoretical level, is fascinating. He is designing an engine to be placed in the device. The metaphysical problem, of course, is that the device is currently powered by sacrifice, for all intents and purposes. It is fueled by lost potential. But Sousauryoku seems unable to clearly perceive this fact. He wants to understand it in terms of a particular kind of energy as the Cheldrun narrowly perceive it.
The Cheldrun cannot see - their devices are powered by sacrifice. The artifacts that they attribute to their First Minds exact some kind of price. In many cases, they pay it intuitively, not understanding why it is that ritual observances sometimes activate the devices. Even in their mundane technologies - something is expended, lost, in order that something else is achieved. The Mechified burn Blackrock. The Allskins burn incense and chant and hold to ancient ways. It is the Biomade who sacrifice most, but who understand their sacrifice the least, because it is of a kind that even Jin must admit he cannot comprehend precisely. They sacrifice aspects of themselves. They think they are being perfected, but they are only being pared down. In carving a plank, much of the tree is lost. Is a plank better than a tree? The Biomade think so. Jin couldn't disagree more...but it isn't his place to point any of this out.
In the end, however, the rule is the same. It is no different from the ancient stories of the Karians - in the beginning, the Dusk Sages created, and as they did so, they diminished. It is the nature of things.
Jin sighs and puts down his pen, massaging one clawed hand with another, staring off into the night. What will have to be sacrificed, what will have to diminish, before this is over, for better or worse?
He shakes his head abruptly. I need more tea. There is still a lot of work to do.
Under the Dome
A gnarly arthritic hand reaches up to stroke a long snowy white beard.
Sousauryoku considers the documents before him. They are on crinkled paper, bits of papyrus and other improvised material, but the carefully scrawled script is all the same - it is the meticulous foreign hand of the Anakarix sage Jin-Kalys. Reading it is like trying to decipher an alien mind, not unlike deciphering First Mind writing really, a process Sousauryoku is very familiar with. Frequently it is unclear whether it is all a bunch of worthless arcane drivel, but once in a while something disturbingly accurate creeps through the endless equations. It is enough to keep him searching.
A young Allskin boy brings him a steaming cup of tea and bows ceremonially three times on his way out the door.
Nuisance, that. Sousauryoku had grown accustomed to being something of a celebrated rebel before all this business started. He was either known as "the Allskin innovator" or "a traitor to tradition" depending on who you spoke with. He liked both epithets. He'd earned them by his unorthodox scientific opinion that First Mind Artifacts were really just an advanced form of Cheldrun technology that society had somehow lost the necessary knowledge to duplicate. Where most Allskins treated anything connected to the First Minds with something like religious fervor, praying to them, wafting incense over them, and hoping that they would magically start working, he thought it should be possible to dissect them and learn their fundamental mechanical nature in order to recreate it.
Advice to anyone who wants to be popular among Allskin traditionalists - don't start breaking their precious First Mind Artifacts in order to find out how they work.
Of course, he'd been right, well partially. He had to admit that he hadn't been able to conclusively demonstrate any of his theories, but from time to time he'd managed to get an artifact to do a new trick, or self-destruct in dramatic fashion. Proof, as far as he was concerned, that they could indeed be manipulated predictably. If you could predict some rather surprising results.
What made him even more of a controversial figure was his adamant attachment to all the usual outward expressions of Allskin tradition. He still wore a kimono. He kept his beard long, to show his age and status. He visited his parents shrine on a monthly basis, and so on. Maybe he was just cantankerous. Maybe he just liked the lifestyle. Regardless, he never changed his mind because of popular opinion.
However, his social role of rebel genius was seriously compromised, and against his will, when that Anakarix sent the dome roiling into the sky. Because the artifact had been his, and because people were fools, he'd somehow gotten part of the credit for that feat, and now with a full blown war on their hands the citizens of Stardown had elevated him to mythic-heroic status and he could no longer go anywhere without someone idiotically bowing and scraping their faces on the floor.
Nor did it help that he'd accepted the title of General, in the newly minted Stardown Defense Force. He'd had to. He had no military expertise, but there was no one else in this 2-second operation with an ounce of good sense. Well, except for that Daitokuji fellow. And the lizard. The lizard who might just know more about what the hell is going on than even Sousauryoku.
He tossed the papers down on the desk in frustration and acknowledged Jin-Kalys who had been sitting by the window soaking in the sunlight this whole time.
"Which piece is the bloody beginning?"
The Cheldrun language sounded strange rolling off of his reptilian tongue, "None of them. The Nine branches interweave, they do not evidence an artificial priority. The quintessential aptitude of the logician is residing in the whole rather than dissecting the parts."
"That sounds like a clever way of saying you've forgotten."
Normally that might have gotten a rise out of the sage, but he was too happy in the sun to let it bother him. "Not at all. If you wish I can arrange the pages according to a variety of sequences which may increase intelligibility for a mind unaccustomed to polyvalent temporal-symbolic mathematics. Would you prefer the order in which I penned the material, or the order of increasing complexity?"
It was at that moment that Head-Like-Steel, one of the Zipsum couriers the SDF was using lately, burst into the room.
"The machine thingy got worse again. Three people got frozed. We pulled them out, but we broke two steel poles doing it. Still no one can get near."
Sigh.
This was apparently a side-effect even Jin-Kalys hadn't counted on. Since the First Mind artifact was activated, the dome had been thrown up, yes, but so had an inertial dampening field in the vicinity of the artifact. Jin himself had barely escaped the field when it activated and now no one, literally no one, could get close to the bloody thing to figure out what was going on. Those that attempted were either rebuffed or else frozen solid. And this was no harmless cryogenic stasis either. The victims often died, or if they lived they lost digits and patches of skin to the frost. What was worse, is that the dome appeared to be growing day by day, and as the dome grew, so did the inertial dampening field. It had already completely claimed the old facilities of Stardown Technology and Research, Sousauryoku's company. It was starting to leak out beyond the walls of that facility now.
Sousauryoku stroked his beard a few times in silence before dismissing the Zipsum with a nod.
"Change of plans. We'll assume this isn't a load of rubbish, or at least that you can use the same skills you used to activate the device in the first place, in order to control it or shut it off..."
Jin-Kalys interrupted, "Deactivating the artifact at the present would be a catastrophe! We..."
"Well, then you'll want to find a way to control it, won't you."
"But no one can get to it at the moment. We'd need someone of miniscule stature and almost impossibly fast..."
"Are you telling me that the work of the sainted and eternal lizard sage, Asterakalys, the Helio-Synthesis model, as you have applied it through nine-branch formal logic is not up to the task?"
Silence.
With a jaw like iron Jin Kalys asked, "Did you retain the schematics of the artifact from your former facilities?"
"Of course." Sousauryoku couldn't help but give a satisfied smirk at that.
"Then let us get to work."
Sousauryoku considers the documents before him. They are on crinkled paper, bits of papyrus and other improvised material, but the carefully scrawled script is all the same - it is the meticulous foreign hand of the Anakarix sage Jin-Kalys. Reading it is like trying to decipher an alien mind, not unlike deciphering First Mind writing really, a process Sousauryoku is very familiar with. Frequently it is unclear whether it is all a bunch of worthless arcane drivel, but once in a while something disturbingly accurate creeps through the endless equations. It is enough to keep him searching.
A young Allskin boy brings him a steaming cup of tea and bows ceremonially three times on his way out the door.
Nuisance, that. Sousauryoku had grown accustomed to being something of a celebrated rebel before all this business started. He was either known as "the Allskin innovator" or "a traitor to tradition" depending on who you spoke with. He liked both epithets. He'd earned them by his unorthodox scientific opinion that First Mind Artifacts were really just an advanced form of Cheldrun technology that society had somehow lost the necessary knowledge to duplicate. Where most Allskins treated anything connected to the First Minds with something like religious fervor, praying to them, wafting incense over them, and hoping that they would magically start working, he thought it should be possible to dissect them and learn their fundamental mechanical nature in order to recreate it.
Advice to anyone who wants to be popular among Allskin traditionalists - don't start breaking their precious First Mind Artifacts in order to find out how they work.
Of course, he'd been right, well partially. He had to admit that he hadn't been able to conclusively demonstrate any of his theories, but from time to time he'd managed to get an artifact to do a new trick, or self-destruct in dramatic fashion. Proof, as far as he was concerned, that they could indeed be manipulated predictably. If you could predict some rather surprising results.
What made him even more of a controversial figure was his adamant attachment to all the usual outward expressions of Allskin tradition. He still wore a kimono. He kept his beard long, to show his age and status. He visited his parents shrine on a monthly basis, and so on. Maybe he was just cantankerous. Maybe he just liked the lifestyle. Regardless, he never changed his mind because of popular opinion.
However, his social role of rebel genius was seriously compromised, and against his will, when that Anakarix sent the dome roiling into the sky. Because the artifact had been his, and because people were fools, he'd somehow gotten part of the credit for that feat, and now with a full blown war on their hands the citizens of Stardown had elevated him to mythic-heroic status and he could no longer go anywhere without someone idiotically bowing and scraping their faces on the floor.
Nor did it help that he'd accepted the title of General, in the newly minted Stardown Defense Force. He'd had to. He had no military expertise, but there was no one else in this 2-second operation with an ounce of good sense. Well, except for that Daitokuji fellow. And the lizard. The lizard who might just know more about what the hell is going on than even Sousauryoku.
He tossed the papers down on the desk in frustration and acknowledged Jin-Kalys who had been sitting by the window soaking in the sunlight this whole time.
"Which piece is the bloody beginning?"
The Cheldrun language sounded strange rolling off of his reptilian tongue, "None of them. The Nine branches interweave, they do not evidence an artificial priority. The quintessential aptitude of the logician is residing in the whole rather than dissecting the parts."
"That sounds like a clever way of saying you've forgotten."
Normally that might have gotten a rise out of the sage, but he was too happy in the sun to let it bother him. "Not at all. If you wish I can arrange the pages according to a variety of sequences which may increase intelligibility for a mind unaccustomed to polyvalent temporal-symbolic mathematics. Would you prefer the order in which I penned the material, or the order of increasing complexity?"
It was at that moment that Head-Like-Steel, one of the Zipsum couriers the SDF was using lately, burst into the room.
"The machine thingy got worse again. Three people got frozed. We pulled them out, but we broke two steel poles doing it. Still no one can get near."
Sigh.
This was apparently a side-effect even Jin-Kalys hadn't counted on. Since the First Mind artifact was activated, the dome had been thrown up, yes, but so had an inertial dampening field in the vicinity of the artifact. Jin himself had barely escaped the field when it activated and now no one, literally no one, could get close to the bloody thing to figure out what was going on. Those that attempted were either rebuffed or else frozen solid. And this was no harmless cryogenic stasis either. The victims often died, or if they lived they lost digits and patches of skin to the frost. What was worse, is that the dome appeared to be growing day by day, and as the dome grew, so did the inertial dampening field. It had already completely claimed the old facilities of Stardown Technology and Research, Sousauryoku's company. It was starting to leak out beyond the walls of that facility now.
Sousauryoku stroked his beard a few times in silence before dismissing the Zipsum with a nod.
"Change of plans. We'll assume this isn't a load of rubbish, or at least that you can use the same skills you used to activate the device in the first place, in order to control it or shut it off..."
Jin-Kalys interrupted, "Deactivating the artifact at the present would be a catastrophe! We..."
"Well, then you'll want to find a way to control it, won't you."
"But no one can get to it at the moment. We'd need someone of miniscule stature and almost impossibly fast..."
"Are you telling me that the work of the sainted and eternal lizard sage, Asterakalys, the Helio-Synthesis model, as you have applied it through nine-branch formal logic is not up to the task?"
Silence.
With a jaw like iron Jin Kalys asked, "Did you retain the schematics of the artifact from your former facilities?"
"Of course." Sousauryoku couldn't help but give a satisfied smirk at that.
"Then let us get to work."
The Trial of Jin-Kalys
Jin is getting better at speaking to Cheldrun. It is an intriguing endeavor, and his accent is improving steadily. For example - a rise in volume is interpreted as passion. This adaptation to the unfortunate lack of dewlaps is understandable in retrospect. There is also nuance - a rise in pitch and volume is distinct from a rise in just one or the other. Lowering pitch can be accompanied even with a reduction in volume to lend psychological force to the words. When threatening, for example, or even, oddly, when seeking a mate to fertilize your eggs. No, not eggs. Bare embryos.
Jin has the opportunity to put his newfound knowledge to use. The Stardown Council, such as it is, has convened an impromptu trial for the purpose of dealing with Jin's humble self. The issue of certain injuries (and fatalities, he thinks, glancing at Varissa, restrained nearby) sustained by security officers at Stardown Technology and Research, as well as various instances of property damage, including the manipulation of a sacred First Mind artifact, need to be resolved legally.
Briefly stated: there are a large number of angry, confused Cheldrun who aren't sure whether to execute him or reward him. Drawn-out proceedings have not served to clarify the matter. (Oddly, Sousauryoku has remained silent throughout, watching Jin thoughtfully.) As the trial has dragged on, Jin's breathing techniques have enabled him to control the bubbling impatience swelling inside of him at the sight of so much addled and imprecise cogitation.
Jin has his thoughts on the matter of his execution, of course, and they are now expressed in a well-carrying, lowered voice, in order to impart intensity of feeling without the implication of desperation.
"Ladies and gentlemen. August personages of the Stardown Council. There are a plethora of reasons not to execute myself and my companions at this time. At your invitation, I will now endeavor to humbly present some of them before you, at which point you will of course deliberate and render your judgment in this matter.
"A large portion of our story has already been rendered to you, piecemeal, I believe you would say, so I will not belabor those points. What seems to be germane is my intent in coming here, and the extent to which my actions were commensurate with achieving that intent within the confines of the law.
"I am not versed in Cheldrun law, but I will offer the statement that I did not in fact kill or permanently injure any Cheldrun, and any of my companions'...indiscretions...can perhaps be attributed to the matter of expedience. That is to say, as you can see, it takes a long time to explain what it was we were attempting.
"In coming here, I was guided by a mathematical and philosophical model which is, among other things, a polyvalent heuristic discernment device." Nothing. "Hem. That is, the model enables me to take into account certain discrete data and to analyze and refine it for the purpose of perceiving interconnections and predicting future ones." Some blinking and open mouths. Am I speaking to fish!? "Rather...it enables me to...mathematically predict the future."
Now they understand, but they are quite unconvinced. The bailiff, who is monitoring Jin's allotted time, shouts for silence until he's finished. About half of the gathered mob is no longer really paying attention. Jin smooths a dewlap and remembers to count his breath.
"If you are seeking verification, you could of course turn your attention to the vast purple energy field which is currently protecting you from Hei-Shi attack. I was able to determine how to accomplish that feat, from a considerable distance in time and space, using this model. I was able to locate an underground research facility, and to utilize a seemingly unconnected resource, that is, the last Vorax egg on Karia, to charge the device in such a way as to accomplish my task." Sainted lizard sages! This is a fine feeling. No piercing for this, because these are hardly worthy adversaries, but they are listening now. The facial expressions might be deemed...grudging, but still.
"Feel free, if I may say so, to explain all of that however you like. It was not even my primary objective in coming here. I believe that you are now aware of the threat that is approaching. Has, in fact, already arrived. You call it the Enemy. I would call it a Probable Extinction Nexus. Regardless..." the bailiff is gesturing to Jin - his allotted time is running out in which to make his legal defense, though he has abandoned thoughts of legal defense at this point. They will hopefully perceive that legal considerations are indeed ancilliary to what is truly at stake.
"Regardless of our differences in nomenclature, we share an existential threat that will either exterminate everything...or it won't. That threat is connected to the Wandering Star. It is, of course, not a star at all. Whatever it is - and I am quite determined to discover this - whatever it is, the Probable Extinction Nexus is connected to it inextricably.
"And so, I propose...no, I intend - to tear it out of the sky, to bring it down in a holocaust of friction as it plummets through the upper layers of the air, to finally be rent apart and incinerated when it impacts the ground. It needs to impact the ground so that it does not cause a tsunami which will threaten coastal settlements. It will doubtless expel millions of cubic meters, in your measurement system - which is quite an elegant base-ten system by the way once one learns to utilize it - of particulate...but the Wandering Star will be gone. I have the entirety of my calculations in your notation if anyone is interested..." Jin eagerly proffers a stack of mottled, slightly burnt paper with tiny, precise handwritten numbers and symbols and diagrams covering both sides of each page, the painstaking work (especially since much of it was actually done while camping in the jungle with a Gogajin and a Jevumm) the result of months of meticulous effort.
Slowly, Sousauryoku's hand goes up, and Jin allows himself a smile. Sousauryoku merely stares enigmatically. Everyone else in the room is staring at Jin, but they express no interest in the fruits of his cognitive labors.
No one else in the room matters.
"I know how I can accomplish this. I created the field to prevent the Primary Dissolutionary Element - in this iteration, Goshi Corporation - from interfering. At this juncture, it is necessary that we...that we tip the balance in favor of not becoming extinct.
"I see my time is up. Thank you."
Sousauryoku stands up from the plaintiff's seat before anyone can rally any kind of response to that kind of barrage.
"August members of the Council, I hereby drop all civil charges, on the condition that this Anakarix and his two companions be remitted to my care for the duration of their stay in Stardown." He walks forward - the bailiff, somewhat flabbergasted, does nothing to intervene - and gently takes the stack of paper from Jin's clawed hand.
"If this is garbage, I'll know soon enough, and you will disappear." He has lowered his voice, and the intensity is no doubt intended to be interpreted as threat and confidence.
Slowly, Jin's dewlaps extend, displaying an arresting motley of crimson, violet and bright solar orange, immediately making him appear larger and more threatening in a cold, reptilian sense. His piercings, the marks of honor and of the victory of ideas, clink together musically. "If the work of the sainted and eternal lizard sage, Asterakalys, the Helio-Synthesis model, as I have applied it through nine-branch formal logic, is proven to be garbage, then you can do with me what you will."
Jin has the opportunity to put his newfound knowledge to use. The Stardown Council, such as it is, has convened an impromptu trial for the purpose of dealing with Jin's humble self. The issue of certain injuries (and fatalities, he thinks, glancing at Varissa, restrained nearby) sustained by security officers at Stardown Technology and Research, as well as various instances of property damage, including the manipulation of a sacred First Mind artifact, need to be resolved legally.
Briefly stated: there are a large number of angry, confused Cheldrun who aren't sure whether to execute him or reward him. Drawn-out proceedings have not served to clarify the matter. (Oddly, Sousauryoku has remained silent throughout, watching Jin thoughtfully.) As the trial has dragged on, Jin's breathing techniques have enabled him to control the bubbling impatience swelling inside of him at the sight of so much addled and imprecise cogitation.
Jin has his thoughts on the matter of his execution, of course, and they are now expressed in a well-carrying, lowered voice, in order to impart intensity of feeling without the implication of desperation.
"Ladies and gentlemen. August personages of the Stardown Council. There are a plethora of reasons not to execute myself and my companions at this time. At your invitation, I will now endeavor to humbly present some of them before you, at which point you will of course deliberate and render your judgment in this matter.
"A large portion of our story has already been rendered to you, piecemeal, I believe you would say, so I will not belabor those points. What seems to be germane is my intent in coming here, and the extent to which my actions were commensurate with achieving that intent within the confines of the law.
"I am not versed in Cheldrun law, but I will offer the statement that I did not in fact kill or permanently injure any Cheldrun, and any of my companions'...indiscretions...can perhaps be attributed to the matter of expedience. That is to say, as you can see, it takes a long time to explain what it was we were attempting.
"In coming here, I was guided by a mathematical and philosophical model which is, among other things, a polyvalent heuristic discernment device." Nothing. "Hem. That is, the model enables me to take into account certain discrete data and to analyze and refine it for the purpose of perceiving interconnections and predicting future ones." Some blinking and open mouths. Am I speaking to fish!? "Rather...it enables me to...mathematically predict the future."
Now they understand, but they are quite unconvinced. The bailiff, who is monitoring Jin's allotted time, shouts for silence until he's finished. About half of the gathered mob is no longer really paying attention. Jin smooths a dewlap and remembers to count his breath.
"If you are seeking verification, you could of course turn your attention to the vast purple energy field which is currently protecting you from Hei-Shi attack. I was able to determine how to accomplish that feat, from a considerable distance in time and space, using this model. I was able to locate an underground research facility, and to utilize a seemingly unconnected resource, that is, the last Vorax egg on Karia, to charge the device in such a way as to accomplish my task." Sainted lizard sages! This is a fine feeling. No piercing for this, because these are hardly worthy adversaries, but they are listening now. The facial expressions might be deemed...grudging, but still.
"Feel free, if I may say so, to explain all of that however you like. It was not even my primary objective in coming here. I believe that you are now aware of the threat that is approaching. Has, in fact, already arrived. You call it the Enemy. I would call it a Probable Extinction Nexus. Regardless..." the bailiff is gesturing to Jin - his allotted time is running out in which to make his legal defense, though he has abandoned thoughts of legal defense at this point. They will hopefully perceive that legal considerations are indeed ancilliary to what is truly at stake.
"Regardless of our differences in nomenclature, we share an existential threat that will either exterminate everything...or it won't. That threat is connected to the Wandering Star. It is, of course, not a star at all. Whatever it is - and I am quite determined to discover this - whatever it is, the Probable Extinction Nexus is connected to it inextricably.
"And so, I propose...no, I intend - to tear it out of the sky, to bring it down in a holocaust of friction as it plummets through the upper layers of the air, to finally be rent apart and incinerated when it impacts the ground. It needs to impact the ground so that it does not cause a tsunami which will threaten coastal settlements. It will doubtless expel millions of cubic meters, in your measurement system - which is quite an elegant base-ten system by the way once one learns to utilize it - of particulate...but the Wandering Star will be gone. I have the entirety of my calculations in your notation if anyone is interested..." Jin eagerly proffers a stack of mottled, slightly burnt paper with tiny, precise handwritten numbers and symbols and diagrams covering both sides of each page, the painstaking work (especially since much of it was actually done while camping in the jungle with a Gogajin and a Jevumm) the result of months of meticulous effort.
Slowly, Sousauryoku's hand goes up, and Jin allows himself a smile. Sousauryoku merely stares enigmatically. Everyone else in the room is staring at Jin, but they express no interest in the fruits of his cognitive labors.
No one else in the room matters.
"I know how I can accomplish this. I created the field to prevent the Primary Dissolutionary Element - in this iteration, Goshi Corporation - from interfering. At this juncture, it is necessary that we...that we tip the balance in favor of not becoming extinct.
"I see my time is up. Thank you."
Sousauryoku stands up from the plaintiff's seat before anyone can rally any kind of response to that kind of barrage.
"August members of the Council, I hereby drop all civil charges, on the condition that this Anakarix and his two companions be remitted to my care for the duration of their stay in Stardown." He walks forward - the bailiff, somewhat flabbergasted, does nothing to intervene - and gently takes the stack of paper from Jin's clawed hand.
"If this is garbage, I'll know soon enough, and you will disappear." He has lowered his voice, and the intensity is no doubt intended to be interpreted as threat and confidence.
Slowly, Jin's dewlaps extend, displaying an arresting motley of crimson, violet and bright solar orange, immediately making him appear larger and more threatening in a cold, reptilian sense. His piercings, the marks of honor and of the victory of ideas, clink together musically. "If the work of the sainted and eternal lizard sage, Asterakalys, the Helio-Synthesis model, as I have applied it through nine-branch formal logic, is proven to be garbage, then you can do with me what you will."
At a Loss for Words
All the noise makes reading very difficult. The irritation is like a itch that doesn't need scratching just yet, but you might pre-empt it with a lazy claw before it gets out of hand.
"Would you kindly quiet down? I need to concentrate."
Sloan grunts as he plants the blunt end of the haft he's holding into yet another security soldier's face, snapping his head backward and making his knees buckle. He flinches as a shower of stray bullets tears past him and hammers against the far wall.
"I swear by Ben Hamor that if these bloody ::grunt:: bastards ::crack:: ever get tired of gettin' knocked on their asses ::thud::, I'll bloody well kill you!"
Gogajin. So excitable! Amazing they have any semblance of society at all.
Varissa is out of feathered shafts and is behind Sloan, crouched, ready to hamstring any that get past with her wicked curved blades. She glares at Jin and shows her teeth to him.
Jevumm, of course, have not even a semblance of society, and not for the first time, Jin is happy that the blood covering her arms up to the shoulders is not his; yet at the same time regretful that he has been forced to endure such odd bedfellows (as the Gogajin say - something about mammals sleeping in groups).
But there are more important things to concern him now. Jin needs to activate this fantastic Cheldrun device, and he can't find any kind of instructions anywhere on it.
The device itself offers no hints as to how it functions, exactly. It does not draw on a visible power source (the Cheldrun use veins called cables to carry mechine-energy, Jin knows). It is simply a textured cyllindrical object, dull black, with six spokes rising up from the edges of it, a bit like metallic teeth. In the center on the top a small circular depression is visible. There are what appear to be written characters etched into the surface at regular intervals - not Cheldrun, even more alien.
Jin sighs, and for a moment notices that Sloan is on the floor grimacing in a small pool of blood. Varissa leaps through the air, shifting into a massive hunting cat in mid-air. She slams into the first soldier who tries to enter through the wrecked security door and disappears in a spray of gore. Jin blocks out the screaming from outside the room which is now echoing in the hallway. He notices a device he's always been curios about.
It is, he believes, a data port. Data, as in ontologies; port, as in the place where Cheldrun oceangoing vessels accumulate to disgorge their cargo. It appears to have two cables attaching it to a pair of orifices in the wall. He touches it gently with the tips of his claws, presses the button that bears the symbol the Cheldrun use for the transmission of energy into or out of a mechanical device. The data port lights up and he flinches back as a ghostly, pixellated image erupts out of the device.
He smiles a long smile, and begins manipulating the keys of the machine, assembling Cheldrun words in order to instruct the machine to reveal what it contains. He quickly finds the collections of information pertaining to the device in the room - the data port seems to have been used as supplemental memorization for whoever has been working with the device thus far. The notes are laborious to read, clearly written by a borderline imbecile who needs to record every detail of every activation method attempted.
Finally Jin finds what he wants, slows to read very carefully, unblinking.
Both Sloan and Varissa are outside the room now, shouting to each other. There is the percussive thudding of bodies against floors, walls...ceiling? A collective shout and Sloan is driven back through the door into the room, his feet sliding in the blood on the floor, grappling with four soldiers. A fifth soldier climbs through the wreckage, sees Jin near the wondrous device, and raises his weapon.
A small sign escapes before Jin's dewlaps erupt in a riot of bright colors. His mouth opens suddenly and with a coughing sound he sends a spray of acidic fluid into the face of the soldier. He falls back, wiping frantically at his face and then beginning to scream as he drives more burning fluid into his eyes. The other four soldiers have dragged Sloan down the floor and they are trying to beat him into submission. Jin hunches and leaps, catching one of their helmets in his claw as he passes over the mound of struggling mammals, jerking the soldier's neck and unbalancing him - Vorax-Snatches-Zipsum. Another tries to rise and Jin ducks down, whirling, his tail slamming into the soldier's shaky legs and sending him sprawling - Rising-Water-Trip. As he falls Jin snatches a truncheon from his belt and cracks the temple of a third soldier who has lost his helmet entirely.
The first soldier has righted his helmet and lunges at Jin. They fall in a tangle, but Jin quickly maneuvers out of his grasp, scuttles around to his back and grabs his limbs with clawed feet, left hand, and tail, immobilizing them with a Relentless-Clinging-Vine technique. With his free hand, Jin pulls off his helmet and beats his skull with it until he goes limp.
Sloan, covered entirely with blood, rises to his feet, gasping for air, looking at Jin with his mouth hanging open. "You -"
"Behind you."
He turns just in time to grapple with a fresh soldier. "Reinforcements!" Varissa shouts from out in the hall. Sloan grimaces. "This had better be worth it you bloody lizard." Jin just watches, unblinking.
He turns from the tumult to the device, bends down, and begins depressing areas around a specific series of "First Mind" runes (whatever Cheldrun fallacy that represents). With the last one, the device begins to shift and change. It comes alight, the runes shining out and projecting their images on the walls in bright purple light. As the device shifts and swells, the runes move in whirling patterns. Jin steps back, watching raptly, revealing its internal workings.
There is a chamber at the center through which its energy passes, from the Power Core to the Differential Layer. It is designed to hold a special substance in inertial suspension, altering the charge of the energy passing through before it is projected outward. But the machine has an immediate effect as well - the room quickly begins cooling as particles slow and vital energy dissipates. Jin feels a tremendous weight when he tries to move, and the hallway is suddenly quite quiet. He slowly, gruellingly reaches down into the padded satchel that he's been carrying for months now, reinforced by a careful geodesic latticework of reeds to protect the Vorax egg from being broken. Jin heaves it out of the satchel, already slowing down drastically, feeling an overwhelming need to go to sleep. His steps shuffle forward toward the device.
Clawlength by clawlength he heaves the egg outward and upward, bathed in flickering purple light, until it comes into contact with the stasis field at the center of the machine. Suddenly it slips into the field effortlessly. He watches, heavy-lidded, a distant part of him grinning in triumph, as the egg is burned, cracks, and is incinerated by the energy, rendered from sold and fluid to a colloid inside the chamber. The colloid has its effect, imparting its unique charge to the energy passing through the chamber.
There is a blinding flash of purple light that passes through Jin's body, through the walls of the chamber, outward until it passes through the streets of the city, outward and upward, a rising tide of shimmering purple light, First Mind runes crawling across the surface of the bubble of radiance that is quickly rising to cover the entirety of Stardown, stretching even further, kilometers in every direction, passing over villages and towns and farms, until it comes to rest at last, a vast purple dome.
At first there are screams, panic, scattering, shouting, alarms, and then the sounds die away, until the vast city of Stardown falls silent, watching the dome of light cover them until even the light of the sun takes on a faint purple tinge, seeing the ancient runes on its surface and feeling that they are somehow both alien and familiar, like a half-remembered dream.
Hei-Shi break from their stupor of suprise, their ear-pieces exploding with frantic traffic. They attempt to activate their Dis-Locators...and nothing happens. There is a faint sound of burning circuitry. Nothing.
About this time, Stardown rises up. Hei-Shi blood flows, broken blue armor is stuffed with straw and rags and burned in effigy. Goshi representatives sent to maintain the peace are chased through the streets and beaten by mobs. Goshi monitors are smashed and torn down by shouting revolutionaries. The city scrambles to find some way to respond.
They are suddenly at war.
"Would you kindly quiet down? I need to concentrate."
Sloan grunts as he plants the blunt end of the haft he's holding into yet another security soldier's face, snapping his head backward and making his knees buckle. He flinches as a shower of stray bullets tears past him and hammers against the far wall.
"I swear by Ben Hamor that if these bloody ::grunt:: bastards ::crack:: ever get tired of gettin' knocked on their asses ::thud::, I'll bloody well kill you!"
Gogajin. So excitable! Amazing they have any semblance of society at all.
Varissa is out of feathered shafts and is behind Sloan, crouched, ready to hamstring any that get past with her wicked curved blades. She glares at Jin and shows her teeth to him.
Jevumm, of course, have not even a semblance of society, and not for the first time, Jin is happy that the blood covering her arms up to the shoulders is not his; yet at the same time regretful that he has been forced to endure such odd bedfellows (as the Gogajin say - something about mammals sleeping in groups).
But there are more important things to concern him now. Jin needs to activate this fantastic Cheldrun device, and he can't find any kind of instructions anywhere on it.
The device itself offers no hints as to how it functions, exactly. It does not draw on a visible power source (the Cheldrun use veins called cables to carry mechine-energy, Jin knows). It is simply a textured cyllindrical object, dull black, with six spokes rising up from the edges of it, a bit like metallic teeth. In the center on the top a small circular depression is visible. There are what appear to be written characters etched into the surface at regular intervals - not Cheldrun, even more alien.
Jin sighs, and for a moment notices that Sloan is on the floor grimacing in a small pool of blood. Varissa leaps through the air, shifting into a massive hunting cat in mid-air. She slams into the first soldier who tries to enter through the wrecked security door and disappears in a spray of gore. Jin blocks out the screaming from outside the room which is now echoing in the hallway. He notices a device he's always been curios about.
It is, he believes, a data port. Data, as in ontologies; port, as in the place where Cheldrun oceangoing vessels accumulate to disgorge their cargo. It appears to have two cables attaching it to a pair of orifices in the wall. He touches it gently with the tips of his claws, presses the button that bears the symbol the Cheldrun use for the transmission of energy into or out of a mechanical device. The data port lights up and he flinches back as a ghostly, pixellated image erupts out of the device.
He smiles a long smile, and begins manipulating the keys of the machine, assembling Cheldrun words in order to instruct the machine to reveal what it contains. He quickly finds the collections of information pertaining to the device in the room - the data port seems to have been used as supplemental memorization for whoever has been working with the device thus far. The notes are laborious to read, clearly written by a borderline imbecile who needs to record every detail of every activation method attempted.
Finally Jin finds what he wants, slows to read very carefully, unblinking.
Both Sloan and Varissa are outside the room now, shouting to each other. There is the percussive thudding of bodies against floors, walls...ceiling? A collective shout and Sloan is driven back through the door into the room, his feet sliding in the blood on the floor, grappling with four soldiers. A fifth soldier climbs through the wreckage, sees Jin near the wondrous device, and raises his weapon.
A small sign escapes before Jin's dewlaps erupt in a riot of bright colors. His mouth opens suddenly and with a coughing sound he sends a spray of acidic fluid into the face of the soldier. He falls back, wiping frantically at his face and then beginning to scream as he drives more burning fluid into his eyes. The other four soldiers have dragged Sloan down the floor and they are trying to beat him into submission. Jin hunches and leaps, catching one of their helmets in his claw as he passes over the mound of struggling mammals, jerking the soldier's neck and unbalancing him - Vorax-Snatches-Zipsum. Another tries to rise and Jin ducks down, whirling, his tail slamming into the soldier's shaky legs and sending him sprawling - Rising-Water-Trip. As he falls Jin snatches a truncheon from his belt and cracks the temple of a third soldier who has lost his helmet entirely.
The first soldier has righted his helmet and lunges at Jin. They fall in a tangle, but Jin quickly maneuvers out of his grasp, scuttles around to his back and grabs his limbs with clawed feet, left hand, and tail, immobilizing them with a Relentless-Clinging-Vine technique. With his free hand, Jin pulls off his helmet and beats his skull with it until he goes limp.
Sloan, covered entirely with blood, rises to his feet, gasping for air, looking at Jin with his mouth hanging open. "You -"
"Behind you."
He turns just in time to grapple with a fresh soldier. "Reinforcements!" Varissa shouts from out in the hall. Sloan grimaces. "This had better be worth it you bloody lizard." Jin just watches, unblinking.
He turns from the tumult to the device, bends down, and begins depressing areas around a specific series of "First Mind" runes (whatever Cheldrun fallacy that represents). With the last one, the device begins to shift and change. It comes alight, the runes shining out and projecting their images on the walls in bright purple light. As the device shifts and swells, the runes move in whirling patterns. Jin steps back, watching raptly, revealing its internal workings.
There is a chamber at the center through which its energy passes, from the Power Core to the Differential Layer. It is designed to hold a special substance in inertial suspension, altering the charge of the energy passing through before it is projected outward. But the machine has an immediate effect as well - the room quickly begins cooling as particles slow and vital energy dissipates. Jin feels a tremendous weight when he tries to move, and the hallway is suddenly quite quiet. He slowly, gruellingly reaches down into the padded satchel that he's been carrying for months now, reinforced by a careful geodesic latticework of reeds to protect the Vorax egg from being broken. Jin heaves it out of the satchel, already slowing down drastically, feeling an overwhelming need to go to sleep. His steps shuffle forward toward the device.
Clawlength by clawlength he heaves the egg outward and upward, bathed in flickering purple light, until it comes into contact with the stasis field at the center of the machine. Suddenly it slips into the field effortlessly. He watches, heavy-lidded, a distant part of him grinning in triumph, as the egg is burned, cracks, and is incinerated by the energy, rendered from sold and fluid to a colloid inside the chamber. The colloid has its effect, imparting its unique charge to the energy passing through the chamber.
There is a blinding flash of purple light that passes through Jin's body, through the walls of the chamber, outward until it passes through the streets of the city, outward and upward, a rising tide of shimmering purple light, First Mind runes crawling across the surface of the bubble of radiance that is quickly rising to cover the entirety of Stardown, stretching even further, kilometers in every direction, passing over villages and towns and farms, until it comes to rest at last, a vast purple dome.
At first there are screams, panic, scattering, shouting, alarms, and then the sounds die away, until the vast city of Stardown falls silent, watching the dome of light cover them until even the light of the sun takes on a faint purple tinge, seeing the ancient runes on its surface and feeling that they are somehow both alien and familiar, like a half-remembered dream.
Hei-Shi break from their stupor of suprise, their ear-pieces exploding with frantic traffic. They attempt to activate their Dis-Locators...and nothing happens. There is a faint sound of burning circuitry. Nothing.
About this time, Stardown rises up. Hei-Shi blood flows, broken blue armor is stuffed with straw and rags and burned in effigy. Goshi representatives sent to maintain the peace are chased through the streets and beaten by mobs. Goshi monitors are smashed and torn down by shouting revolutionaries. The city scrambles to find some way to respond.
They are suddenly at war.
Accidental Freedom Fighter
Jin blinks slowly. He can see the glistening scratches curving evenly along the inside of the gun barrel - "rifling" is the Cheldrun word for that method of scoring the barrel. To impart a rotational force on the round when it is expelled, helping it maintain its trajectory for more of its swift parabolic arc. In the darkness, deep in that barrel, he knows there is a bullet, surrounded by a casing, seated on top of a charge of explosive powder. They make the powder in it from charcoal and urine, if such a thing can be believed. The barrel is shaking slightly, making it hard to see more of the mechanisms clearly. How are old casings expelled to make way for new ones? Perhaps the explosion itself provides the motive force...
"Just...stand right fucking there and don't fucking move!" The Stardown Technology and Research security soldier holding the weapon is already sweating, though the ambient temperature and humidity inside this building are carefully controlled. The machines are called "compressors" and Jin is anxious to see one in action. The soldier speaks into a box on his shoulder. "Captain, captain...we've got a...a fucking lizard up here, and...what the fuck? No one's supposed to be in here!"
"I am not a lizard, I am an Anakarix, which any reasonably educated -"
"Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Lizard." With the last explosive phonemes he jabs the end of the weapon into Jin's chest. He doesn't even ask how I can speak Cheldrun. I suppose only their leaders are ingenious, and use ones like this for menial tasks.
The Cheldrun grunt continues to mumble into the box on his shoulder - doubtless a distance-communicator of some sort - and Jin has time to reflect. He'd wished that his first close-up view of a gun would be at a time of more leisure.
***
When it came down to it, Jin was unable to convince the Griolsa to mar their sacred Blade, so it became necessary to travel up and over the roots of Ben Hamor to the ancient site where a star had fallen to earth long ago. The contours of a telltale impact crater were clearly visible, and using a lodestone floating in a bowl of water, Jin was able to locate a fragment of the superheated star-metal which had been used to forge the Blade. Taking this back to the village, Sloan had successfully, under Jin's direction, forged a sort of chisel, which was then mounted on a sturdy hardwood haft and reinforced with steel.
"This should suffice." The edge, laboriously sharpened to a brilliant keen line, caught the afternoon sun. Jin couldn't even lift the thing, but it was like a training-rod in Sloan's meaty fist.
"How d'you know?"
Jin pursed his lips and said "Heuristics of course." Which settled nothing, but the longer explanation helped not a whit.
***
When they encountered their fist logging camp, still many days from Stardown, Jin insisted on going to speak with them and see if they could find a way to negotiate safe passage. He was immediately accosted and tackled to the ground, then wrapped in a net by two impolite Mechified guards who handled him like a bundle of twigs - until a bloom of thick arterial blood blossomed in one of their throats, the shaft of Varissa's arrow buried almost to the fletching.
The second died similarly. That night, Varissa dined on all the raw Cheldrun she could eat, while Sloan and Jin exchanged queasy looks and shared the last of Sloan's mashed oats.
Jin never asked how many she killed, but she smiled for days.
***
It was surprisingly easy to enter Stardown. The city had descended into chaos as various groups attempted to resist the grip of Goshi. When challenged by a particular group - the Stardown Freedom League - Varissa was able to produce a pair of severed Hei-Shi heads, communicators still in their ears, wearing almost comical looks of surprise. One was missing an eye because she had replaced it with an arrow. Jin could still see the image of her languorously licking it clean after she removed it.
Predictably, the various resistance groups failed and were forced underground, or in less fortunate cases executed on closed-circuit viewing screens mounted throughout the city. Otherwise, the screens showed flashing Goshi commercials and news of Goshi victories as city after city was forced to surrender, either by the teleporting Hei-Shi or by Washi San mecha.
The message: The age of corrupt politics is at an end. Commercialism is the new world order, and the market shall rule forever after.
Roving death-squads made people view the claims of meritocracy with more than a little skepticism.
But none of this concerned Jin. He was busy reading - every leaflet, every scrolling news story, every broadsheet, ever official document, street signs, trade-'zines, everything. Sloan made the mistake of asking.
"The heuristic process begins with information-saturation. From this information is derived the salient question, and from it variables are also inferred. We then move to the algorithmic stage wherein mathematico-logical processes are utilized to eradicate the erroneous terms, leaving only the ontological relationship expressed in its most elegant form. This form, a system of mathematical relation, is then applied through the governing model, in this case a modified, shall we say nona-iterational -" he took a moment to savor the invented word, then continued "heliophilic formal logic, essentially nine-trees formal logic squared, differentiated and then reintegrated. The resulting schema will give you the two foci. The second focus is the mathematical representation of that which you have found. The answer."
After that, Jin found he had all the alone-time he needed to run the numbers. Once complete, the answer was clear. Obvious, really.
***
Stardown Technology and Research had been working on a final prototype of a revolutionary inertial dampner, a kind of fail-safe security system which would immobilize everyone within its field of effect, sapping the ambient kinetic energy away from them. Given enough time, it would in fact freeze them, but this would be sufficient to stop any kind of violence, incursion, and so on. The head of the project, an Allskin genius (Jin didn't use the term lightly) named Sousauryoku, was widely considered certifiably insane. He was famous for having invented an incredibly inefficient weapon which fired metal projectiles using only electromagnetic force, claiming it was based on lost First Mind technology.
What wasn't widely known was that he did in fact have a First Mind artifact, and had discerned how to activate and, to a degree, control it. It was designed to manipulate forces at a distance - hence the idea for the revolutionary defense system.
***
Which brings us to Jin, standing near a security door in the Stardown Technology and Research facility, staring down the barrel of an automatic rifle. (Sousauryoku's electromagnetic gun design was far too expensive to actually use to equip mere security personnel.) Until now, security had been quite light. The real difficulty was in finding the installation, deep beneath the city proper, built in an abandoned underground train-tunnel purchased from the government years ago. And of course, once the necessary conclusion became clear, Jin realized there was only one place it could be.
Suddenly, Jin throws his arms in front of his face (they can't stop bullets!) and collapses to the ground, just as the soldier's knees buckle and he collapses bonelessly to the concrete floor. Sloan is standing behind him, hefting a rifle he's using as a bludgeon for a second strike.
"I think" Jin says, standing slowly, "that will be sufficient. Just smash open that last security door, and we'll be there." Jin's clawed hand unconsciously slips down to rest on the thick, padded pouch hanging from one shoulder. It is thoroughly reinforced to resist impact and insulated against heat and cold, but it is a gesture of habit. Sloan drops the rifle and hefts the heavy chisel forged from the star-metal.
The first blow hammers deep into the metal of the door like an axe to balsa wood.
Jin wonders when Varissa will be finished and will rejoin them. If ever. In a few minutes, it will hardly matter.
"Just...stand right fucking there and don't fucking move!" The Stardown Technology and Research security soldier holding the weapon is already sweating, though the ambient temperature and humidity inside this building are carefully controlled. The machines are called "compressors" and Jin is anxious to see one in action. The soldier speaks into a box on his shoulder. "Captain, captain...we've got a...a fucking lizard up here, and...what the fuck? No one's supposed to be in here!"
"I am not a lizard, I am an Anakarix, which any reasonably educated -"
"Shut. The. Fuck. Up. Lizard." With the last explosive phonemes he jabs the end of the weapon into Jin's chest. He doesn't even ask how I can speak Cheldrun. I suppose only their leaders are ingenious, and use ones like this for menial tasks.
The Cheldrun grunt continues to mumble into the box on his shoulder - doubtless a distance-communicator of some sort - and Jin has time to reflect. He'd wished that his first close-up view of a gun would be at a time of more leisure.
***
When it came down to it, Jin was unable to convince the Griolsa to mar their sacred Blade, so it became necessary to travel up and over the roots of Ben Hamor to the ancient site where a star had fallen to earth long ago. The contours of a telltale impact crater were clearly visible, and using a lodestone floating in a bowl of water, Jin was able to locate a fragment of the superheated star-metal which had been used to forge the Blade. Taking this back to the village, Sloan had successfully, under Jin's direction, forged a sort of chisel, which was then mounted on a sturdy hardwood haft and reinforced with steel.
"This should suffice." The edge, laboriously sharpened to a brilliant keen line, caught the afternoon sun. Jin couldn't even lift the thing, but it was like a training-rod in Sloan's meaty fist.
"How d'you know?"
Jin pursed his lips and said "Heuristics of course." Which settled nothing, but the longer explanation helped not a whit.
***
When they encountered their fist logging camp, still many days from Stardown, Jin insisted on going to speak with them and see if they could find a way to negotiate safe passage. He was immediately accosted and tackled to the ground, then wrapped in a net by two impolite Mechified guards who handled him like a bundle of twigs - until a bloom of thick arterial blood blossomed in one of their throats, the shaft of Varissa's arrow buried almost to the fletching.
The second died similarly. That night, Varissa dined on all the raw Cheldrun she could eat, while Sloan and Jin exchanged queasy looks and shared the last of Sloan's mashed oats.
Jin never asked how many she killed, but she smiled for days.
***
It was surprisingly easy to enter Stardown. The city had descended into chaos as various groups attempted to resist the grip of Goshi. When challenged by a particular group - the Stardown Freedom League - Varissa was able to produce a pair of severed Hei-Shi heads, communicators still in their ears, wearing almost comical looks of surprise. One was missing an eye because she had replaced it with an arrow. Jin could still see the image of her languorously licking it clean after she removed it.
Predictably, the various resistance groups failed and were forced underground, or in less fortunate cases executed on closed-circuit viewing screens mounted throughout the city. Otherwise, the screens showed flashing Goshi commercials and news of Goshi victories as city after city was forced to surrender, either by the teleporting Hei-Shi or by Washi San mecha.
The message: The age of corrupt politics is at an end. Commercialism is the new world order, and the market shall rule forever after.
Roving death-squads made people view the claims of meritocracy with more than a little skepticism.
But none of this concerned Jin. He was busy reading - every leaflet, every scrolling news story, every broadsheet, ever official document, street signs, trade-'zines, everything. Sloan made the mistake of asking.
"The heuristic process begins with information-saturation. From this information is derived the salient question, and from it variables are also inferred. We then move to the algorithmic stage wherein mathematico-logical processes are utilized to eradicate the erroneous terms, leaving only the ontological relationship expressed in its most elegant form. This form, a system of mathematical relation, is then applied through the governing model, in this case a modified, shall we say nona-iterational -" he took a moment to savor the invented word, then continued "heliophilic formal logic, essentially nine-trees formal logic squared, differentiated and then reintegrated. The resulting schema will give you the two foci. The second focus is the mathematical representation of that which you have found. The answer."
After that, Jin found he had all the alone-time he needed to run the numbers. Once complete, the answer was clear. Obvious, really.
***
Stardown Technology and Research had been working on a final prototype of a revolutionary inertial dampner, a kind of fail-safe security system which would immobilize everyone within its field of effect, sapping the ambient kinetic energy away from them. Given enough time, it would in fact freeze them, but this would be sufficient to stop any kind of violence, incursion, and so on. The head of the project, an Allskin genius (Jin didn't use the term lightly) named Sousauryoku, was widely considered certifiably insane. He was famous for having invented an incredibly inefficient weapon which fired metal projectiles using only electromagnetic force, claiming it was based on lost First Mind technology.
What wasn't widely known was that he did in fact have a First Mind artifact, and had discerned how to activate and, to a degree, control it. It was designed to manipulate forces at a distance - hence the idea for the revolutionary defense system.
***
Which brings us to Jin, standing near a security door in the Stardown Technology and Research facility, staring down the barrel of an automatic rifle. (Sousauryoku's electromagnetic gun design was far too expensive to actually use to equip mere security personnel.) Until now, security had been quite light. The real difficulty was in finding the installation, deep beneath the city proper, built in an abandoned underground train-tunnel purchased from the government years ago. And of course, once the necessary conclusion became clear, Jin realized there was only one place it could be.
Suddenly, Jin throws his arms in front of his face (they can't stop bullets!) and collapses to the ground, just as the soldier's knees buckle and he collapses bonelessly to the concrete floor. Sloan is standing behind him, hefting a rifle he's using as a bludgeon for a second strike.
"I think" Jin says, standing slowly, "that will be sufficient. Just smash open that last security door, and we'll be there." Jin's clawed hand unconsciously slips down to rest on the thick, padded pouch hanging from one shoulder. It is thoroughly reinforced to resist impact and insulated against heat and cold, but it is a gesture of habit. Sloan drops the rifle and hefts the heavy chisel forged from the star-metal.
The first blow hammers deep into the metal of the door like an axe to balsa wood.
Jin wonders when Varissa will be finished and will rejoin them. If ever. In a few minutes, it will hardly matter.
...For Binding Things Together
(This is Part 2 of A Talent for Binding Things Together - Part 1 is the previous post)
Sloan is with Angus as usual. He's spent a lot of time with Angus as he recovers, slowly but surely, wounds healing and leaving scars, scars smoothing out. He's still marked; he will be marked forever, but Sloan is helping him pull himself back together. He's out working, was out soon after he came home, but now he pulls his weight, stands tall, is proud.
There is a soft knock and the sound of a throat being cleared. Its the noon rest-time, gleanings from the field still lying out in heaps, to be gathered when the air starts to cool.
Sloan gets the door, and standing outside is a lizard standing on its hind legs, swaying slightly, bright-eyed, carrying a chunk of slate in both hands like it can barely lift it. Its covered in some kind of scratchy scrawl and whorling lines intersecting each other.
It blinks. "You must be Sloan. I was told I could find you here."
"You were told right." Sloan flashes a grin, but there's a suspicious gleam in his eyes that doesn't leave. "You looking for me?"
It nods. Smiles uncomfortably. "Yes. I was. Am. We need to talk, you and I. I have a proposition for you."
"A - a what?"
Pause. "A quest."
Sloan's look smooths, says 'go on...'.
"It...it involves a Jevumm." He tenses. Jin quickly continues. "And the Griolsa Blade. And a great deal of mathematics, which - don't worry, that's my part - where was I? Yes. And a city called Star-Down. And saving the world."
Another pause. A laugh that threatens to swell out of control. "You too, eh? You missed your caravan, friend. All that's here is work and rest and mead, and every other good thing. I've got no notion of leaving."
"I have thought of that. Perhaps you are thinking that you are needed as a worker? In exchange for your help, I will help your village for years to come. I can design a barn from local materials which will reduce the amount of grain you lose to pests in the fall and winter dramatically. That means less hunger. No lean times, at least until your numbers swell healthily once again, and then you can build another barn like it. And the drainage of your fields encourages insects to lay their larvae in the standing water. You are all quite robust, but it would help not to get fevers every spring, yes? A few days of hard work and you won't have to worry about that."
"Look, lizard, I mean no offense, but -"
Surprisingly, Jin steps closer. Sloan can smell his breath, a slight burn in his nostrils. "Listen. I can't make you come with me. With us. All I can do is talk to you. Yes? So let's talk. You have some respite before you have to return to the fields. I will help your village either way, because I see that I can help you and not delay my mission significantly. A lot has happened recently, some of which you know, some of which I can only guess. But I can connect some things for you, bring some sense to it. There is...an elegant underlying symmetry, which is manifesting as we speak. It is elegant like an adder - if we do nothing, it is just as lethal. And you are part of it. Let me talk, and you just listen, for two hours. Then we will call your clan together and I will explain my plans for the barn and for the improved drainage. Then, if you wish, we will 'raise the barn', I believe the expression is, and dig the new channels. Then I will go, and I hope you will go with me. Yes?"
Sloan watches him for a moment, sips his mead, then sips it again, longer. "How did you learn Gogajin?"
Jin blinks. "That is another story."
"You want me to come with you, you say. But we just met."
"I can see patterns. I have someone with me who can seek things out. I need someone with a talent for binding things together. You may not know, but he" Jin points to Angus "will live a long, happy life because of you. You are capable of much more. Just two hours. Then we help your village. Then...then we will see."
Sloan nods slowly. "Alright. Talk, lizard, but I'm not going to stop drinking."
Jin's mouth quirks at the corners. "That is for the best. The alcohol will likely help. Now..." he enters the house, puts the slate down with a sigh and shakes his claws to get blood to return to them. He continues, "Now, imagine that you are the sun, standing in a flat elliptical field, surrounded by nine trees..."
It takes a lot longer than an hour.
Sloan is with Angus as usual. He's spent a lot of time with Angus as he recovers, slowly but surely, wounds healing and leaving scars, scars smoothing out. He's still marked; he will be marked forever, but Sloan is helping him pull himself back together. He's out working, was out soon after he came home, but now he pulls his weight, stands tall, is proud.
There is a soft knock and the sound of a throat being cleared. Its the noon rest-time, gleanings from the field still lying out in heaps, to be gathered when the air starts to cool.
Sloan gets the door, and standing outside is a lizard standing on its hind legs, swaying slightly, bright-eyed, carrying a chunk of slate in both hands like it can barely lift it. Its covered in some kind of scratchy scrawl and whorling lines intersecting each other.
It blinks. "You must be Sloan. I was told I could find you here."
"You were told right." Sloan flashes a grin, but there's a suspicious gleam in his eyes that doesn't leave. "You looking for me?"
It nods. Smiles uncomfortably. "Yes. I was. Am. We need to talk, you and I. I have a proposition for you."
"A - a what?"
Pause. "A quest."
Sloan's look smooths, says 'go on...'.
"It...it involves a Jevumm." He tenses. Jin quickly continues. "And the Griolsa Blade. And a great deal of mathematics, which - don't worry, that's my part - where was I? Yes. And a city called Star-Down. And saving the world."
Another pause. A laugh that threatens to swell out of control. "You too, eh? You missed your caravan, friend. All that's here is work and rest and mead, and every other good thing. I've got no notion of leaving."
"I have thought of that. Perhaps you are thinking that you are needed as a worker? In exchange for your help, I will help your village for years to come. I can design a barn from local materials which will reduce the amount of grain you lose to pests in the fall and winter dramatically. That means less hunger. No lean times, at least until your numbers swell healthily once again, and then you can build another barn like it. And the drainage of your fields encourages insects to lay their larvae in the standing water. You are all quite robust, but it would help not to get fevers every spring, yes? A few days of hard work and you won't have to worry about that."
"Look, lizard, I mean no offense, but -"
Surprisingly, Jin steps closer. Sloan can smell his breath, a slight burn in his nostrils. "Listen. I can't make you come with me. With us. All I can do is talk to you. Yes? So let's talk. You have some respite before you have to return to the fields. I will help your village either way, because I see that I can help you and not delay my mission significantly. A lot has happened recently, some of which you know, some of which I can only guess. But I can connect some things for you, bring some sense to it. There is...an elegant underlying symmetry, which is manifesting as we speak. It is elegant like an adder - if we do nothing, it is just as lethal. And you are part of it. Let me talk, and you just listen, for two hours. Then we will call your clan together and I will explain my plans for the barn and for the improved drainage. Then, if you wish, we will 'raise the barn', I believe the expression is, and dig the new channels. Then I will go, and I hope you will go with me. Yes?"
Sloan watches him for a moment, sips his mead, then sips it again, longer. "How did you learn Gogajin?"
Jin blinks. "That is another story."
"You want me to come with you, you say. But we just met."
"I can see patterns. I have someone with me who can seek things out. I need someone with a talent for binding things together. You may not know, but he" Jin points to Angus "will live a long, happy life because of you. You are capable of much more. Just two hours. Then we help your village. Then...then we will see."
Sloan nods slowly. "Alright. Talk, lizard, but I'm not going to stop drinking."
Jin's mouth quirks at the corners. "That is for the best. The alcohol will likely help. Now..." he enters the house, puts the slate down with a sigh and shakes his claws to get blood to return to them. He continues, "Now, imagine that you are the sun, standing in a flat elliptical field, surrounded by nine trees..."
It takes a lot longer than an hour.
A Talent...
(This is Part 1 of A Talent for Binding Things Together)
Gentle, cool rain falls off of Jin-Kalys' scales in rivulets. Spring in Griolsa territory.
But he doesn't notice the rain, except to note that it is making him sluggish. Sol is hidden behind glowering clouds, promising more precipitation. About thirty reaches ("meters", the Cheldrun measurement he's learned, rises unbidden to his mind) distant, a trio of massive Gogajin are huddled together, speaking softly, glancing at him periodically. Nearby there is a pile of stones.
Upon reflection, Jin is reassured that no one is trying to eat or maim him. Gogajin are vegetarians, of course, but perhaps he should amend the thought. No one has tried to main him yet.
Perhaps it is a compliment that Adana Griolsa herself is the one who hunches down and lifts one of the stones off the ground, over her head. She tenses, and heaves.
Jin feels his cloaca clench.
The off-white stone sails into the air, turning ponderously, making its way to him. Its motion appears to slow, the raindrops on his scales becoming a periodic typmany. Its arc is true, and it is heading straight for him.
No...no, the arc is off. Its parabolic path is bent, the exponent increasing erratically. Something is wrong. Gravity is constant. The mass of the stone must be constant. What is the variable?
The wind is at his back, pelting him with little drops of rain. The wind. Of course. Trust. The Gogajin are concerned with trust. If it were warmer, he would have seen it immediately.
Jin opens his arms wide to receive the stone, grinning to himself as it shatters on impact, showering him with moist globs of some kind of plaster, already falling apart in the incessant rain. The Gogajin cheer, and he wipes himself off assiduously. Trust indeed. How very quaint! If Jin were a mammal, he imagines that the feeling would warm his blood. As it is, he blinks sleepily as the Gogajin come stomping over, shouting.
The embraces will hurt far more than the stone did, but Jin accepts them quietly.
***
Varissa does not fare so well, and is relegated to the edges of the village. She is instructed to avoid contact with any roving adolescent Gogajin she might encounter. Its been a hard winter, and they'll be closer to the village than normal, hoping for occasional gifts of food from concerned family members. Left at a careful distance, of course. She spends the night up a tree, growling to herself.
***
Thanks to his breathing exercises and powers of concentration, Jin is able to make the room stop spinning. Briefly. Long enough to feel vaguely ill. And to ask "Could you repeat that, please?"
Adana grins, takes another drink of mead (how can they drink this?), and says in clear, unslurred Gogajin "As I told you, you're not the first uncommon visitor we've had of late. There were another couple of groups been by; one Cheldrun with a Zipsum guide - city Zipsum, mind - and the other the strangest we've ever seen. Three Cheldrun, three Karians, headed up to Ben Hamor to meet the gods."
"How many Cheldrun in the first group?"
"Three Cheldrun - and they brought back our Angus! - and there was the Zipsum. Now, one of the Cheldrun is dead, eaten by a Jevumm if you can believe it, then other when we were attacked. A second, big metal fellow, left on his own with the Zipsum, headed home I guess. The last one, Reeyoo No Sookay was his name as I recall" there are scattered nods at the strange sounding name "broke the hearth law, then disappeared."
Jin feels it is appropriate to touch the mead to his lips again, blinks at the way it makes his nose burn to smell it so close. "Broke the hearth law? How was that?"
"Stabbed another Cheldrun, up on this very roof, when the mad Zipsum attacked." Those gathered in the longhouse grow quieter now, looking down, thinking of the past. Jin waits what he thinks is an appropriate amount of time.
"Yes. You spoke of them, and there are still...marks which winter has left behind. The eyeless Zipsum." There is another long pause, as Jin touches the mead to his lips and then sneezes, spraying mead out of his horn. It is an incongruous moment.
"Ah, so...would you tell me more of the other...six visitors you had? The three Cheldrun and the three Karians?"
And she does, with eager additions from the others there. Some stand to drunkenly re-enact the battle; others have rendered parts of it into bawdy, roaring songs. Jin gleans a great deal from all that they offer, and a feeling grows in the pit of his stomach. It has been growing since he arrived, since he learned of the many strangers who have passed this way already, of the apparent visions of the gods on Ben Hamor. He learns about the blade, which explains a great deal that he sees no reason to try to explain now.
Why did they move on? What are they thinking? Where are they going now? Do they know who they are -
"...and that's when the eyeless Zipsum came at us, in waves!"
The answer is there. Wait for it. It is...something. Jin sees the branches breaking apart, settling, bending into new forms -
"...was huge! Like a great house of a machine-man, swinging his arm like a mattock..."
No. Not nine branches. Nine trees. Nine trees! Each tree stretching out, twisting in response to the pull of unpaired loci -
"...stabbed him on the roof, the bastard, but then the Vorax got him -" "...a Vorax! Still can't believe it..."
Nine trees stretching upwards from the eccliptic into the future, roots reaching downward into the past, branching potentiality, tendrils of causal precipitate-
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have to go. Do you have a piece of slate I can use? Very sorry. And some chalk? Mine us used up..." Caught up in the story, the Gogajin hardly notice that the audience has excused himself.
Hours later, he has an answer, a new algorithm, and shortly after, a name.
Gentle, cool rain falls off of Jin-Kalys' scales in rivulets. Spring in Griolsa territory.
But he doesn't notice the rain, except to note that it is making him sluggish. Sol is hidden behind glowering clouds, promising more precipitation. About thirty reaches ("meters", the Cheldrun measurement he's learned, rises unbidden to his mind) distant, a trio of massive Gogajin are huddled together, speaking softly, glancing at him periodically. Nearby there is a pile of stones.
Upon reflection, Jin is reassured that no one is trying to eat or maim him. Gogajin are vegetarians, of course, but perhaps he should amend the thought. No one has tried to main him yet.
Perhaps it is a compliment that Adana Griolsa herself is the one who hunches down and lifts one of the stones off the ground, over her head. She tenses, and heaves.
Jin feels his cloaca clench.
The off-white stone sails into the air, turning ponderously, making its way to him. Its motion appears to slow, the raindrops on his scales becoming a periodic typmany. Its arc is true, and it is heading straight for him.
No...no, the arc is off. Its parabolic path is bent, the exponent increasing erratically. Something is wrong. Gravity is constant. The mass of the stone must be constant. What is the variable?
The wind is at his back, pelting him with little drops of rain. The wind. Of course. Trust. The Gogajin are concerned with trust. If it were warmer, he would have seen it immediately.
Jin opens his arms wide to receive the stone, grinning to himself as it shatters on impact, showering him with moist globs of some kind of plaster, already falling apart in the incessant rain. The Gogajin cheer, and he wipes himself off assiduously. Trust indeed. How very quaint! If Jin were a mammal, he imagines that the feeling would warm his blood. As it is, he blinks sleepily as the Gogajin come stomping over, shouting.
The embraces will hurt far more than the stone did, but Jin accepts them quietly.
***
Varissa does not fare so well, and is relegated to the edges of the village. She is instructed to avoid contact with any roving adolescent Gogajin she might encounter. Its been a hard winter, and they'll be closer to the village than normal, hoping for occasional gifts of food from concerned family members. Left at a careful distance, of course. She spends the night up a tree, growling to herself.
***
Thanks to his breathing exercises and powers of concentration, Jin is able to make the room stop spinning. Briefly. Long enough to feel vaguely ill. And to ask "Could you repeat that, please?"
Adana grins, takes another drink of mead (how can they drink this?), and says in clear, unslurred Gogajin "As I told you, you're not the first uncommon visitor we've had of late. There were another couple of groups been by; one Cheldrun with a Zipsum guide - city Zipsum, mind - and the other the strangest we've ever seen. Three Cheldrun, three Karians, headed up to Ben Hamor to meet the gods."
"How many Cheldrun in the first group?"
"Three Cheldrun - and they brought back our Angus! - and there was the Zipsum. Now, one of the Cheldrun is dead, eaten by a Jevumm if you can believe it, then other when we were attacked. A second, big metal fellow, left on his own with the Zipsum, headed home I guess. The last one, Reeyoo No Sookay was his name as I recall" there are scattered nods at the strange sounding name "broke the hearth law, then disappeared."
Jin feels it is appropriate to touch the mead to his lips again, blinks at the way it makes his nose burn to smell it so close. "Broke the hearth law? How was that?"
"Stabbed another Cheldrun, up on this very roof, when the mad Zipsum attacked." Those gathered in the longhouse grow quieter now, looking down, thinking of the past. Jin waits what he thinks is an appropriate amount of time.
"Yes. You spoke of them, and there are still...marks which winter has left behind. The eyeless Zipsum." There is another long pause, as Jin touches the mead to his lips and then sneezes, spraying mead out of his horn. It is an incongruous moment.
"Ah, so...would you tell me more of the other...six visitors you had? The three Cheldrun and the three Karians?"
And she does, with eager additions from the others there. Some stand to drunkenly re-enact the battle; others have rendered parts of it into bawdy, roaring songs. Jin gleans a great deal from all that they offer, and a feeling grows in the pit of his stomach. It has been growing since he arrived, since he learned of the many strangers who have passed this way already, of the apparent visions of the gods on Ben Hamor. He learns about the blade, which explains a great deal that he sees no reason to try to explain now.
Why did they move on? What are they thinking? Where are they going now? Do they know who they are -
"...and that's when the eyeless Zipsum came at us, in waves!"
The answer is there. Wait for it. It is...something. Jin sees the branches breaking apart, settling, bending into new forms -
"...was huge! Like a great house of a machine-man, swinging his arm like a mattock..."
No. Not nine branches. Nine trees. Nine trees! Each tree stretching out, twisting in response to the pull of unpaired loci -
"...stabbed him on the roof, the bastard, but then the Vorax got him -" "...a Vorax! Still can't believe it..."
Nine trees stretching upwards from the eccliptic into the future, roots reaching downward into the past, branching potentiality, tendrils of causal precipitate-
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have to go. Do you have a piece of slate I can use? Very sorry. And some chalk? Mine us used up..." Caught up in the story, the Gogajin hardly notice that the audience has excused himself.
Hours later, he has an answer, a new algorithm, and shortly after, a name.
To Everything, A Purpose
At last the sharp talons release their steel grip, and Jin-Kalys impacts with the hard ground, rolling and sliding to an abrupt stop. He lays still for a moment, taking stock of his condition and coughing quietly in the dust. Up here the cold wind is whipping in from the coast, and he feels sluggish and heavy.
He slowly pulls himself together, realizing that they are all around him. He is surrounded by Vorax. They are tall and fierce and angular, feathers blowing in the sharp wind. And they are very, very angry.
He stands awkwardly, to appear as little like cowering prey as possible.
One of them, not the male who snatched him from a tree where he was resting but another male, older looking, sneers. "I wouldn't believe it until they showed me. An Anakarix. Your people were once wise. Perhaps they still are, but you are some kind of...pariah. But I never would have believed it. An Anakarix, hunting us." He spits on the ground in front of Jin-Kalys. "Sickening".
Jin blinks blearily, clenches his jaws to stifle a yawn brought on by the sunless weather.
"Ah. Now, you see...there has been a misunderstanding -" he begins, but just then a Vorax on the outside of the group yanks on a chain and Varissa comes into view, her eyes darting around and her muscles so tense that she is shaking slightly. "Ah."
The older male continues - no one has introduced themselves thus far. "A misunderstanding? Maybe we jumped to conclusions. From the look of it, you are helping this Jevumm hunt us. Following us from nest to nest like starving vermin. We could've easily evaded you, but I thought perhaps we should talk, before we kill you both."
As a matter of course, Jin-Kalys seems destined to be threatened with death on a regular basis. Gogajin threaten to pummel him if he won't 'shut up about tha bleedin' sun already!' Jevumm want to eat everyone, but can be placated with poetry. Zipsum are disappointed that he is unimpressed by their exploits, and as it turns out, they are also quite territorial. Prill...well, Prill have yet to threaten to kill him, which is quite nice. But these are not Prill. They are about five dozen glaring raptors, flexing claws, shining eyes and beaks.
Jin sighs. "Yes, we were hunting you." There are sounds of surprise and confirmation in the group, and a few produce weapons. Jin quickly continues "But! Not to eat you. I needed to find a Vorax - a particular Vorax - and Varissa was the most direct means by which this could be accomplished. She was...demonstrated to me. It doesn't mater. Now we've found you, or perhaps more accurately, you have found us."
They stare silently, a few coming closer with downright predatory looks. There's only one escape. Keep talking.
"I know what you are doing. What you intend." Surprise, suspicion, growing resolve to kill him. "I know, and it is a hideously terrible idea, and I know that I cannot stop you - I will not even try to do so. Rather, I simply wish to speak with one of you. To speak, briefly, and that is all. After that, I ask that you let me go, and continue with your...intentions."
A few of them exchange glances. They look to an elder Vorax, near the back of the group, who Jin can barely even see. There is a nod, or some other small movement. A new Vorax speaks to him.
"The taste of lizard is disgusting. And we're keeping the Jevumm, to deal with ourselves. But we'll let you go. We have nothing to say to you, but we'll let you go."
Jin swallows, winces slightly. Sighs. "I brought the Jevumm - Varissa - here. I found her, convinced he to help me find you. I cannot allow her..."no, change, bad idea "I cannot...leave her to be killed. Please. I just need to -."
One of the Vorax rushes forward to stand inches from Jin's face - only his long training in meditation keeps him from frantically diving backward. "You need to leave. Now. You've said enough." Then breathing silence. Wind. Distant sea-noises. Predatory silence.
Failure.
***
That night, Jin is surprised by two visitors. The first is a young, lovely, sad Vorax. She hands him a leather satchel, heavily insulated with feathers and fur, reverently. She looks into his eyes. "I knew you would come. Remember us. Tell of what you see tomorrow - our final flight. The last thing the Vorax will do in this world, until we fade and are lost forever." And then she is gone.
The second is Varissa, holding the broken wreckage of her heirloom bow, covered in cuts, scratches, and bruises, limping, furious, ferocious. She hurls the pieces of her bow into Jin's fire and looms over him.
"What could possibly have been worth that? No, don't answer. I'm going to gut you."
Jin doesn't answer, but reaches into the leather satchel and retrieves a single, fist-sized egg.
"Worth it? We'll see." Varissa stops, teeth bared, and slowly relaxes in surprise.
"Is that -"
"Yes. It is. And no, you may not eat it. We have a lot of work to do. If watching this world die doesn't interest you, you need to listen to me, and then we need to decide what to do next."
He slowly pulls himself together, realizing that they are all around him. He is surrounded by Vorax. They are tall and fierce and angular, feathers blowing in the sharp wind. And they are very, very angry.
He stands awkwardly, to appear as little like cowering prey as possible.
One of them, not the male who snatched him from a tree where he was resting but another male, older looking, sneers. "I wouldn't believe it until they showed me. An Anakarix. Your people were once wise. Perhaps they still are, but you are some kind of...pariah. But I never would have believed it. An Anakarix, hunting us." He spits on the ground in front of Jin-Kalys. "Sickening".
Jin blinks blearily, clenches his jaws to stifle a yawn brought on by the sunless weather.
"Ah. Now, you see...there has been a misunderstanding -" he begins, but just then a Vorax on the outside of the group yanks on a chain and Varissa comes into view, her eyes darting around and her muscles so tense that she is shaking slightly. "Ah."
The older male continues - no one has introduced themselves thus far. "A misunderstanding? Maybe we jumped to conclusions. From the look of it, you are helping this Jevumm hunt us. Following us from nest to nest like starving vermin. We could've easily evaded you, but I thought perhaps we should talk, before we kill you both."
As a matter of course, Jin-Kalys seems destined to be threatened with death on a regular basis. Gogajin threaten to pummel him if he won't 'shut up about tha bleedin' sun already!' Jevumm want to eat everyone, but can be placated with poetry. Zipsum are disappointed that he is unimpressed by their exploits, and as it turns out, they are also quite territorial. Prill...well, Prill have yet to threaten to kill him, which is quite nice. But these are not Prill. They are about five dozen glaring raptors, flexing claws, shining eyes and beaks.
Jin sighs. "Yes, we were hunting you." There are sounds of surprise and confirmation in the group, and a few produce weapons. Jin quickly continues "But! Not to eat you. I needed to find a Vorax - a particular Vorax - and Varissa was the most direct means by which this could be accomplished. She was...demonstrated to me. It doesn't mater. Now we've found you, or perhaps more accurately, you have found us."
They stare silently, a few coming closer with downright predatory looks. There's only one escape. Keep talking.
"I know what you are doing. What you intend." Surprise, suspicion, growing resolve to kill him. "I know, and it is a hideously terrible idea, and I know that I cannot stop you - I will not even try to do so. Rather, I simply wish to speak with one of you. To speak, briefly, and that is all. After that, I ask that you let me go, and continue with your...intentions."
A few of them exchange glances. They look to an elder Vorax, near the back of the group, who Jin can barely even see. There is a nod, or some other small movement. A new Vorax speaks to him.
"The taste of lizard is disgusting. And we're keeping the Jevumm, to deal with ourselves. But we'll let you go. We have nothing to say to you, but we'll let you go."
Jin swallows, winces slightly. Sighs. "I brought the Jevumm - Varissa - here. I found her, convinced he to help me find you. I cannot allow her..."no, change, bad idea "I cannot...leave her to be killed. Please. I just need to -."
One of the Vorax rushes forward to stand inches from Jin's face - only his long training in meditation keeps him from frantically diving backward. "You need to leave. Now. You've said enough." Then breathing silence. Wind. Distant sea-noises. Predatory silence.
Failure.
***
That night, Jin is surprised by two visitors. The first is a young, lovely, sad Vorax. She hands him a leather satchel, heavily insulated with feathers and fur, reverently. She looks into his eyes. "I knew you would come. Remember us. Tell of what you see tomorrow - our final flight. The last thing the Vorax will do in this world, until we fade and are lost forever." And then she is gone.
The second is Varissa, holding the broken wreckage of her heirloom bow, covered in cuts, scratches, and bruises, limping, furious, ferocious. She hurls the pieces of her bow into Jin's fire and looms over him.
"What could possibly have been worth that? No, don't answer. I'm going to gut you."
Jin doesn't answer, but reaches into the leather satchel and retrieves a single, fist-sized egg.
"Worth it? We'll see." Varissa stops, teeth bared, and slowly relaxes in surprise.
"Is that -"
"Yes. It is. And no, you may not eat it. We have a lot of work to do. If watching this world die doesn't interest you, you need to listen to me, and then we need to decide what to do next."
Chasing the Flight
The Vorax had grown rarer than Jin-Kalys imagined. Months of searching and hunting had yielded nothing, and yet his calculations could not be controverted. Varissa, the lean, feminine, terrifying Jevumm at his side was the one who would find them and so he stuck with her, despite her continual threats whenever boredom seemed about to overcome her hunger for Vorax flesh. She climbed in and out of Vorax nests, her nose full of their scent, driving her mad with hunger. She rushed from place to place across the continent of Karia, always certain that the next corner would reveal her prey, but they continually eluded her.
At night, when Jin-Kalys was slow, and his mind was more on a level with hers, he would share pieces of his knowledge. He explained nine-branch formal logic, and the catastrophic intersection of the branches at the apogee, an inexorable, and therefore predictable nexus. When in a good mood she seemed to regard his philosophy as a form of poetry. When in a bad mood it merely baited her appetite for cruelty. Jin-Kalys had several new fine white scars in his scaly neck.
During the days she wanted to sleep and thus he had plenty of time to continue his work. It was both alarming and reassuring that the signs continued to point toward global upheaval. Alarming because he was completely unequipped for the work which seemed to be left to him, being the only one adequately trained in reading solar equations according to the Asterakalys Helio-Synthesis model. Reassuring because it meant he was right, and when if he returned to Sighing Web of Trees he would be able to conclusively demonstrate it to the dismay of those presently adhering to the fashionable Celestial-Objectivity model.
Though he wasn't foolish enough to say so he did find the conflict between his rational-diurnal schedule and her predatory nocturnal schedule extremely aggravating. It meant that they could only make progress in the mornings and evenings. At day he worked. At night she hunted.
That is, until the morning that they saw the Flight. From the top of a Pericasymore tree he ought to have seen them first, but all credit to her hunter's instincts, he had to have them pointed out to him by his feline companion. She heard their song on the breeze and when he was able to bring his eyes into focus on the horizon his breath caught. A flight of Vorax! Dozens of them, maybe as many as 50 or 60 Vorax flying together and dancing on the wind.
Varissa was celebrating the nearness of her prey, but Jin-Kalys could only sputter. Something's wrong. This does not correspond to Monikostara's Law of Preservation. Surely this sudden and unforseen change of behaviors means that a revised estimate of the rate of apogee's approach is imperative. I could be off by months!
From that moment the odd couple had not rested normally, but had forced themselves to chase after the Flight as fast as Jin-Kalys' short legs could carry him. The first time they nearly caught up to the Flight what they saw caused even Varissa to hesitate in dismay. They were flying over an abandoned nest, performing the funereal dance. In the patterns in the sky Jin-Kalys saw the gravity of his miscalculation. An aberrant force had impinged on the perfect sequence of logical effects. The choices of the Vorax were no longer corresponding to the necessary impulse for perpetuation. They mean to commit suicide!
There was no way they could keep pace with creatures that fly hundreds of kilometers a day, but Jin-Kalys knew that they would not have to. Even unpredictable behavior follows patterns, thought they are unseen. By the nine-branches he could discern their route. With a map...
He marked the locations of all 20 major Vorax nests and by plot-centric prioritization assigned an order to them. It was a sequence - an illogical one, to be sure, but consistent with an intent for self-destruction driven by a troublesome unknown quantity, but in such a way that it still resolved with all Nine-Branches. It was the only possible outcome.
Speaking hastily to Varissa, he pointed to a spot on the map - a cliff overlooking the ocean on the far northwestern shore of the continent. It was deep in Cheldrun territory, something which made Varissa profoundly uneasy, but it was their only chance to catch the flight. It would be a race. If they were too late, the Vorax would already have acted, in a rather permanent fashion. Everything depended now on Varissa's speed and stealth, to get them safely to that far away shore.
Shrouded House of Bones
Jin-kalys stares, sputtering, into burning golden eyes framed in a face of bright orange and black. The creature lounging easily before him thrums with power barely withheld. It yawns, showing teeth shining like blades, then transfixes him once again.
"Tell us a poem." The voice vibrates the air and Jin feels it thrumming in his chest cavity like a Zipsum drum.
A poem. Oh gods.
A full season past, Jin-kalys departed Sighing Web of Trees, the village where he had lived his quiet life up to then, leaving the Academy where he had been carefully trained in the sophic arts and sciences at the feet of the Great Doctors of Arborealis Heliophilius, in the ways of curves and lines, of truth's vertices offered in sunlight's verity.
He has since wandered, seeking something he cannot comprehend, but which he knows is crucial. The calculations are...inerrant. Inexorable. The ineluctable Nexus drawing ever closer. It comes to him - nine branches. Each branch is necessary in its own way, providing the balance of angular measurements at the vertices he's found, meeting at the Apogee and Perigee and bending on their course through time, aligned to intersect with the Chronologic Ellipse. Instantaneous angle is approximately equivalent to the distance in time between each as they pass into the Eccliptic, at which point, they resolve as one would expect, intersecting at the Nexus. The key is the curvature -
"Lizard. Give us a poem, or give us your flesh."
Jin is wrenched back out of his reverie. "I. Ahem. Yes. A poem." He closes his eyes and lowers his tail and slows his breathing. The breathing of the Jevumm standing around him in a semicircle is utterly unnerving. He smells their predator stink and the musk of their terrible meeting-place, deep in the jungle.
It comes to him when he's finally calm. Saborakalys. Of course! The first poem he ever learned, in an ancient mode inherited from the Dusk Sages themselves (or so it is said). Jin clumsily renders it into his halting Jevumm, hoping the syllable patters translate -
Dawn burns, sets alight
Kindling the mind - molten gold
Mist is departing
Slowly morning stirs
Sluggish blood thaws and slips free
Murmuring gently
We inherit dawn
Speakers of the love of Sol
Loving speech of leaves
Incline inward, now
Sitting quiet breathing with
Sighing Web of Trees.
Bright golden eyes narrow. Isilo Govelara, his muzzle whitened to show his age, power undiminished, smirks, if such a thing is possible.
"You have brought no fire...yet neither do you bring offerings. You say you come here in peace - it hardly matters. You will be eaten regardless. But we are curious. Your poem has purchased some time for you. How do you wish to use it?"
Jin's vision swirls madly and a great fist clenches his heart as it hammers against his chest. Eaten. No! Not now! I've only begun! He looks around, eyes wide. They are all watching. A few draw closer silently, and he can almost feel their breath.
Behind Isilo's massive form, there is the Bone House, the ancient meeting-place of the Govelara Jevumm of this region. There is no broader Jevumm culture, only local cultures. Truly, somewhat like the Anakarix, though two races could hardly be more opposite.
The Bone House is constructed entirely of bone and sinew taken from the victims of the Jevumm for generations. At the base, filthy bones are yellowing and cracked. In places they have been replaced with gleaming bones, fresh from Jevumm jaws.
A low growl of impatience snaps him back to his awful present, out of reverie.
"I...Great one, lord of the G-Govelara, Isilio Who Sups On M-Marrow, I...I introduce my...h-humble self, Jin-kalys, student of Helio-...student of great m-masters of Sighing Web of Trees, far from this forest. I. Yes. I come in peace, of course. I come t-to...to speak to you, Great lord of hunters. And-and your people."
How can I say this? With a mathematical schema scratched in the moist dirt with my tail!? A detailed chain of argumentation drawing on rich sophic traditions they've never heard of!? Gods! That one licked her lips!
"Great lord. Karia is dying! If you will help me. If...if a particular one of you will help me, and if we can find others...we can save her."
The laughter of the gathered Jevumm is terrible to hear.
There is no sound when one of them slams into him, bearing him down, grinning, crushing him beneath its weight. She begins to laugh with the rest, mouth wider and wider, coming down to crunch out his life.
"Your name is Varissa! You have walked the earth for thirty-three journeys of the sun! You've taken a-a bullet, whatever that is - the wound lingers! And-" he can't go on. Her eyes are wide and her paw is lighter on his chest. The clearing has quieted.
"What is the meaning of this!?"
Varissa ignores him for a moment, pretending to be caught up in the kill, risking retribution despite the blood-hallowed ground. She leans close until her great head is all Jin can see.
"How do you know this?"
Despite himself, he leans forward a bit, painfully, struggling to breathe under her weight.
"I'm. Wisdom. Of Karia. I. Know. You. ::wheeze:: Hunt. Vorax."
She leaps back, snarling, looking around in alarm, but Jin was quiet, so only she would hear. He braces himself against a nearby tree and pulls his battered body upright. They are all watching now, intent. He has to be careful.
"Yes. I know. And I need you to find...to find one for me. No one else can. Then, we need to -"
"This is foolish. Stop playing with your food. Are you eating this lizard or not?"
Isilio is standing, now, larger than the others, some of whom melt back into the jungle before evening falls, no longer interested in what seems like abject foolishness which could become much worse, fast. They depart silently, with no goodbyes, for this is a rare meeting, and will not occur again for many seasons.
Varissa glances to him, but pins Jin with a glare of mingled hatred and shock. "No. I will not eat him. Yet."
"Then go. The kill you offered pleases the spirits, and its blood has fed the land, mingling with the others. Go and take that lizard with you, to do with as you wish."
She slowly changes to her two-legged form, and Jin is unmoved by her feline beauty. He sees only his mission, his vision, his very life, hanging by a whisker-thin thread. She says the ritual words to Isilio without taking her eyes off of Jin. "Feast on the marrow, and may the spirit-gift sleep within you until Karia claims you."
She shoves him ahead of her, still far stronger than he is, taller as well, radiating hatred and musk. Jin's tail is rigid with fear.
When they are a few dozen meters into the forest, out of sight, she grabs Jin by the dewlap and slams him into a nearby tree with bone-loosening force. Her grip moves to his throat and begins to squeeze. She hisses and growls in his ear.
"Now, lizard, explain yourself, and I might not tear you apart."
"Tell us a poem." The voice vibrates the air and Jin feels it thrumming in his chest cavity like a Zipsum drum.
A poem. Oh gods.
A full season past, Jin-kalys departed Sighing Web of Trees, the village where he had lived his quiet life up to then, leaving the Academy where he had been carefully trained in the sophic arts and sciences at the feet of the Great Doctors of Arborealis Heliophilius, in the ways of curves and lines, of truth's vertices offered in sunlight's verity.
He has since wandered, seeking something he cannot comprehend, but which he knows is crucial. The calculations are...inerrant. Inexorable. The ineluctable Nexus drawing ever closer. It comes to him - nine branches. Each branch is necessary in its own way, providing the balance of angular measurements at the vertices he's found, meeting at the Apogee and Perigee and bending on their course through time, aligned to intersect with the Chronologic Ellipse. Instantaneous angle is approximately equivalent to the distance in time between each as they pass into the Eccliptic, at which point, they resolve as one would expect, intersecting at the Nexus. The key is the curvature -
"Lizard. Give us a poem, or give us your flesh."
Jin is wrenched back out of his reverie. "I. Ahem. Yes. A poem." He closes his eyes and lowers his tail and slows his breathing. The breathing of the Jevumm standing around him in a semicircle is utterly unnerving. He smells their predator stink and the musk of their terrible meeting-place, deep in the jungle.
It comes to him when he's finally calm. Saborakalys. Of course! The first poem he ever learned, in an ancient mode inherited from the Dusk Sages themselves (or so it is said). Jin clumsily renders it into his halting Jevumm, hoping the syllable patters translate -
Dawn burns, sets alight
Kindling the mind - molten gold
Mist is departing
Slowly morning stirs
Sluggish blood thaws and slips free
Murmuring gently
We inherit dawn
Speakers of the love of Sol
Loving speech of leaves
Incline inward, now
Sitting quiet breathing with
Sighing Web of Trees.
Bright golden eyes narrow. Isilo Govelara, his muzzle whitened to show his age, power undiminished, smirks, if such a thing is possible.
"You have brought no fire...yet neither do you bring offerings. You say you come here in peace - it hardly matters. You will be eaten regardless. But we are curious. Your poem has purchased some time for you. How do you wish to use it?"
Jin's vision swirls madly and a great fist clenches his heart as it hammers against his chest. Eaten. No! Not now! I've only begun! He looks around, eyes wide. They are all watching. A few draw closer silently, and he can almost feel their breath.
Behind Isilo's massive form, there is the Bone House, the ancient meeting-place of the Govelara Jevumm of this region. There is no broader Jevumm culture, only local cultures. Truly, somewhat like the Anakarix, though two races could hardly be more opposite.
The Bone House is constructed entirely of bone and sinew taken from the victims of the Jevumm for generations. At the base, filthy bones are yellowing and cracked. In places they have been replaced with gleaming bones, fresh from Jevumm jaws.
A low growl of impatience snaps him back to his awful present, out of reverie.
"I...Great one, lord of the G-Govelara, Isilio Who Sups On M-Marrow, I...I introduce my...h-humble self, Jin-kalys, student of Helio-...student of great m-masters of Sighing Web of Trees, far from this forest. I. Yes. I come in peace, of course. I come t-to...to speak to you, Great lord of hunters. And-and your people."
How can I say this? With a mathematical schema scratched in the moist dirt with my tail!? A detailed chain of argumentation drawing on rich sophic traditions they've never heard of!? Gods! That one licked her lips!
"Great lord. Karia is dying! If you will help me. If...if a particular one of you will help me, and if we can find others...we can save her."
The laughter of the gathered Jevumm is terrible to hear.
There is no sound when one of them slams into him, bearing him down, grinning, crushing him beneath its weight. She begins to laugh with the rest, mouth wider and wider, coming down to crunch out his life.
"Your name is Varissa! You have walked the earth for thirty-three journeys of the sun! You've taken a-a bullet, whatever that is - the wound lingers! And-" he can't go on. Her eyes are wide and her paw is lighter on his chest. The clearing has quieted.
"What is the meaning of this!?"
Varissa ignores him for a moment, pretending to be caught up in the kill, risking retribution despite the blood-hallowed ground. She leans close until her great head is all Jin can see.
"How do you know this?"
Despite himself, he leans forward a bit, painfully, struggling to breathe under her weight.
"I'm. Wisdom. Of Karia. I. Know. You. ::wheeze:: Hunt. Vorax."
She leaps back, snarling, looking around in alarm, but Jin was quiet, so only she would hear. He braces himself against a nearby tree and pulls his battered body upright. They are all watching now, intent. He has to be careful.
"Yes. I know. And I need you to find...to find one for me. No one else can. Then, we need to -"
"This is foolish. Stop playing with your food. Are you eating this lizard or not?"
Isilio is standing, now, larger than the others, some of whom melt back into the jungle before evening falls, no longer interested in what seems like abject foolishness which could become much worse, fast. They depart silently, with no goodbyes, for this is a rare meeting, and will not occur again for many seasons.
Varissa glances to him, but pins Jin with a glare of mingled hatred and shock. "No. I will not eat him. Yet."
"Then go. The kill you offered pleases the spirits, and its blood has fed the land, mingling with the others. Go and take that lizard with you, to do with as you wish."
She slowly changes to her two-legged form, and Jin is unmoved by her feline beauty. He sees only his mission, his vision, his very life, hanging by a whisker-thin thread. She says the ritual words to Isilio without taking her eyes off of Jin. "Feast on the marrow, and may the spirit-gift sleep within you until Karia claims you."
She shoves him ahead of her, still far stronger than he is, taller as well, radiating hatred and musk. Jin's tail is rigid with fear.
When they are a few dozen meters into the forest, out of sight, she grabs Jin by the dewlap and slams him into a nearby tree with bone-loosening force. Her grip moves to his throat and begins to squeeze. She hisses and growls in his ear.
"Now, lizard, explain yourself, and I might not tear you apart."
Sighing Web of Trees
Some seasons past...
The Sygola groan like pale old lizards on a misty night. The storm has brought darkness early and sleep is deepening in Sighing Web of Trees - a sprawling settlement named by a legendary poet, Saborakalys, after a line in one of the poems she created near the end of her long life. The trees sigh and sway and groan; raindrops drum on thatched roofs and rush down the sides of the venerable Academy, Arborealis Heliophilius; wheezing snores can be heard escaping through rubbery lips and interlocking teeth -
but Jin-kalys is not sleeping. He scratches his dewlap absently, a claw briefly catching on one of his piercings - and immediately he is reminded of eight summers ago, lit by a fine sunset mingling gold and red and green through the high canopy, when he demonstrated the irreducibility of nine-branch formal logic as a representation of rational cognition.
The piercing next to it came five years later when he demonstrated the paucity of his own theory as it came from the lips of a favorite rival, Asterakon. Rather, it is clear that non-rational processing seems necessary to resolve certain radical dichotomies - a theory which some refer to as "post-meteotropic root-ism". It is still considered a radical theory, even though its germ can be traced as far back as the great sage Monikostara and -
There is a scratch at the door. Too low to be another Anakarix. Jin pulls the door open quickly and a Zipsum blurs her way into the small room. The fire brings out bluish highlights on her dark fur and glints in her bright green eyes. Poison-Frog-Kiss of the Lighteningstrike Tribe, the nearest tribe to Sighing Web of Trees. She deposits a heavy satchel on the floor unceremoniously.
"I dunno why me but I got all the stuff you were after and you wouldn't believe the trouble it was I've had to stay in this form because of the rain and this stupid bag is pretty heavy" there is an explosion of water as she sakes off at least a gallon of rain, spattering everything in the one-room domicile. Jin flinches, unnoticed "and so listen we need to talk about payment now we agreed to the same weight but considering that I had to carry it in my mouth in this form I think that a markup is..."
"Oh..."
"candy..."
Her huge bright eyes are inquisitive and acquisitive at the same time. Jin doubts she would appreciate the etymological deliciousness inherent in the look. He's holding out a pile of gourmet candy, stacked in a careful pyramid shape on a layer of anannu leaves which can also serve as wrapping.
'Indeed. This is yours, of course, and the rest is stored in the hollow tree as we discussed..." but the conversation has ended, as with a rapturous sigh Poison-Frog-Kiss begins cramming glistening candies in her mouth by the handful like a starveling. Jin goes on, distantly aware that he's talking only to himself but also quite nervous, now that its come to it, "I appreciate your discretion in this matter. It may seem odd that I don't simply requisition these accoutrements from supplies among my own people, but you see I have made a very important decision..."
Moans are now escaping Poison-Frog-Kiss. Her soft belly is visibly distended and her paws and face smeared with sweet dark cacao and the juice of the anannu-fruit. She is languorously licking each digit on each paw the the careful attention of a starstruck lover.
Ahem. "A decision which, I surmise, my colleagues will not appreciate. At the very least, not until it has borne some fruit, so to speak." Poison-Frog-Kills looks at him, blinking dully, with a clear expression of who are you again? written across her face. "We have spoken of the Cheldrun, and I have done some of my own research on the matter, in some cases at considerable personal risk - and I appreciate your help in those matters. You have...well, you have clarified..." she is looking at him and he can't finish the sentence. She gave him a raw barrage of information that could take weeks to untangle in his own methodical way.
"Yeah, I know what you're up to. And you're gonna die."
"I...I beg your pardon?"
"Look, its up to you. At least you're not talking and shooting out that purple thingy on your head like you did last time we talked -"
"I do apologize for that outburst, you see it is merely a vestigial-"
"And anyway its fine if you want to go get killed that's up to you I've got my candy delightful by the way and I'm happy as a punched Gogagin I just don't see the point of going to find some Cheldrun when they're busy chopping down all the trees they can get their hands and roasting the last Vorax from what I've heard I'm pretty sure that they'll just blast you or eat your brain like they do but hey its your life."
She opens the door, letting in a little more rain and grimacing at the force of it.
"Its..." Jin-kalys shakes his head, making his dewlap flap to express his lack of clarity. Its about the Nexus. Plot influences as lines on a two-dimensional representational Tree and it points to Apogee. Plot the same function over time and you can determine when it will happen. It is predictable, rooted in demonstrably reliable principles, and what is predictable can be addressed preventively before it cascades out of possible control. The function is geometric, and after the Nexus, the meeting of the influences, hope diminishes quickly for any kind of salvageable result.
"Its complicated".
The Zipsum is already gone, and the wind is blowing rain into Jin-kalys's home, sending rivulets along the carefully fitted boards.
"Its the end of Karia. Of everything. Unless we do something."
Nine-branch formal logic is still quite functional for known quantities. Nine races mean that the Arboreal Model's factors are accounted for (three kinds of Cheldrun, he did get that much from the Zipsum's barrage). The Dusk Sages? They could stand for the Perigee-Curve's intersection point. But the Apogee, when the nine-branch function is applied to an Asterakalys Helio-synthesis model, represents...what? What's the opposite of rationality, of connection, of life and vitality? What is the inverse of the Dusk Sages, the turning of wisdom and power for the good against itself...most distant from the Solar Source along the great Ellipse of cyclical time?
Whatever it was, Karia would be finding out soon, too soon.
Jin feels his tail straighten in anxiety and crouches down to meditate until it relaxes. He gathers up his satchel and adds a few oddments from his home. He leaves the fire in the tiny hearth to burn itself out so he won't be missed too soon, closes the door behind him, climbs along the tree to the next, and the next, slowly and groggily now that the fear has faded somewhat. He goes a long way before he realizes that he didn't say goodbye.
He pushes on through morning, and then moves with gathering speed. He feels the lines tightening, Apogee closing in. The thought comes unbidden, like it did in the dream.
I am the revelation of Karia.
The Sygola groan like pale old lizards on a misty night. The storm has brought darkness early and sleep is deepening in Sighing Web of Trees - a sprawling settlement named by a legendary poet, Saborakalys, after a line in one of the poems she created near the end of her long life. The trees sigh and sway and groan; raindrops drum on thatched roofs and rush down the sides of the venerable Academy, Arborealis Heliophilius; wheezing snores can be heard escaping through rubbery lips and interlocking teeth -
but Jin-kalys is not sleeping. He scratches his dewlap absently, a claw briefly catching on one of his piercings - and immediately he is reminded of eight summers ago, lit by a fine sunset mingling gold and red and green through the high canopy, when he demonstrated the irreducibility of nine-branch formal logic as a representation of rational cognition.
The piercing next to it came five years later when he demonstrated the paucity of his own theory as it came from the lips of a favorite rival, Asterakon. Rather, it is clear that non-rational processing seems necessary to resolve certain radical dichotomies - a theory which some refer to as "post-meteotropic root-ism". It is still considered a radical theory, even though its germ can be traced as far back as the great sage Monikostara and -
There is a scratch at the door. Too low to be another Anakarix. Jin pulls the door open quickly and a Zipsum blurs her way into the small room. The fire brings out bluish highlights on her dark fur and glints in her bright green eyes. Poison-Frog-Kiss of the Lighteningstrike Tribe, the nearest tribe to Sighing Web of Trees. She deposits a heavy satchel on the floor unceremoniously.
"I dunno why me but I got all the stuff you were after and you wouldn't believe the trouble it was I've had to stay in this form because of the rain and this stupid bag is pretty heavy" there is an explosion of water as she sakes off at least a gallon of rain, spattering everything in the one-room domicile. Jin flinches, unnoticed "and so listen we need to talk about payment now we agreed to the same weight but considering that I had to carry it in my mouth in this form I think that a markup is..."
"Oh..."
"candy..."
Her huge bright eyes are inquisitive and acquisitive at the same time. Jin doubts she would appreciate the etymological deliciousness inherent in the look. He's holding out a pile of gourmet candy, stacked in a careful pyramid shape on a layer of anannu leaves which can also serve as wrapping.
'Indeed. This is yours, of course, and the rest is stored in the hollow tree as we discussed..." but the conversation has ended, as with a rapturous sigh Poison-Frog-Kiss begins cramming glistening candies in her mouth by the handful like a starveling. Jin goes on, distantly aware that he's talking only to himself but also quite nervous, now that its come to it, "I appreciate your discretion in this matter. It may seem odd that I don't simply requisition these accoutrements from supplies among my own people, but you see I have made a very important decision..."
Moans are now escaping Poison-Frog-Kiss. Her soft belly is visibly distended and her paws and face smeared with sweet dark cacao and the juice of the anannu-fruit. She is languorously licking each digit on each paw the the careful attention of a starstruck lover.
Ahem. "A decision which, I surmise, my colleagues will not appreciate. At the very least, not until it has borne some fruit, so to speak." Poison-Frog-Kills looks at him, blinking dully, with a clear expression of who are you again? written across her face. "We have spoken of the Cheldrun, and I have done some of my own research on the matter, in some cases at considerable personal risk - and I appreciate your help in those matters. You have...well, you have clarified..." she is looking at him and he can't finish the sentence. She gave him a raw barrage of information that could take weeks to untangle in his own methodical way.
"Yeah, I know what you're up to. And you're gonna die."
"I...I beg your pardon?"
"Look, its up to you. At least you're not talking and shooting out that purple thingy on your head like you did last time we talked -"
"I do apologize for that outburst, you see it is merely a vestigial-"
"And anyway its fine if you want to go get killed that's up to you I've got my candy delightful by the way and I'm happy as a punched Gogagin I just don't see the point of going to find some Cheldrun when they're busy chopping down all the trees they can get their hands and roasting the last Vorax from what I've heard I'm pretty sure that they'll just blast you or eat your brain like they do but hey its your life."
She opens the door, letting in a little more rain and grimacing at the force of it.
"Its..." Jin-kalys shakes his head, making his dewlap flap to express his lack of clarity. Its about the Nexus. Plot influences as lines on a two-dimensional representational Tree and it points to Apogee. Plot the same function over time and you can determine when it will happen. It is predictable, rooted in demonstrably reliable principles, and what is predictable can be addressed preventively before it cascades out of possible control. The function is geometric, and after the Nexus, the meeting of the influences, hope diminishes quickly for any kind of salvageable result.
"Its complicated".
The Zipsum is already gone, and the wind is blowing rain into Jin-kalys's home, sending rivulets along the carefully fitted boards.
"Its the end of Karia. Of everything. Unless we do something."
Nine-branch formal logic is still quite functional for known quantities. Nine races mean that the Arboreal Model's factors are accounted for (three kinds of Cheldrun, he did get that much from the Zipsum's barrage). The Dusk Sages? They could stand for the Perigee-Curve's intersection point. But the Apogee, when the nine-branch function is applied to an Asterakalys Helio-synthesis model, represents...what? What's the opposite of rationality, of connection, of life and vitality? What is the inverse of the Dusk Sages, the turning of wisdom and power for the good against itself...most distant from the Solar Source along the great Ellipse of cyclical time?
Whatever it was, Karia would be finding out soon, too soon.
Jin feels his tail straighten in anxiety and crouches down to meditate until it relaxes. He gathers up his satchel and adds a few oddments from his home. He leaves the fire in the tiny hearth to burn itself out so he won't be missed too soon, closes the door behind him, climbs along the tree to the next, and the next, slowly and groggily now that the fear has faded somewhat. He goes a long way before he realizes that he didn't say goodbye.
He pushes on through morning, and then moves with gathering speed. He feels the lines tightening, Apogee closing in. The thought comes unbidden, like it did in the dream.
I am the revelation of Karia.
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