Elder Race(5)

I disable the DCS and sip at my emotions, feeling a dizzying whirl of fondness, happy nostalgia, the onrush of memories that previously were just data and are now recalled experience. How we fought! How we rode together, where the fighting was thickest. I remember coordinating with the satellite to bring her word of her enemies’ movements. I remember dusting off the equipment locker and going into battle—into battle, me, the anthropologist!—at her side. I could have stayed. I almost stayed with her, and grew old and died. A woman of a primitive culture who could never have understood what I am, and yet magnificent, radiant. And I had been alone for so long by then.

With my DCS hat on, it’s clear that I suffered multiple lapses of professional judgment when I met her last. I should put that hat on again, to stop me suffering more of them, but I am just looking at her and remembering how good it was, to have company and not be alone for a while. Even company of a different culture, virtually a different species. It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.

But I stride forwards, feeling all these good things, and I remember the correct form of address.

“Astresse Regent, welcome again to my home!” No handshakes or clasped shoulders or physical contact, not yet, not casually, because I recall that as a cultural taboo—a people who save such things for when they have meaning. Just an open hand to signify peace, arms wide to signify trust.

And silence. Awkward silence. I stand there, with those wide arms, and the two women stare at me. I am again reminded how different I look from their kind: I am a head taller than either of them. And there are the horns.

I have a lot of complex instrumentation in them. They are useful augmentations to the natural human state. But I am anthropologist enough to know that Earth Resurgent adopted the modifications primarily as a display affectation, one which has in the past caused some alarm amongst the locals here.

That is not the sole reason for their being taken aback, however.

“Astresse,” says Astresse slowly. “Astresse Once Regent was my great-grandmother, Nyrgoth Elder.”

I stare at them. All those happy memories have lost their colour, all at once. I clutch for them, but they are like sand, gritty and abrasive. Sand under the eyelids. Sand in the mind. And of course she is dead. The outpost reported dates and times faithfully. If I had been thinking properly, I’d have been fortified against the revelation, not even have made the mistake in the first place. It has been well over a century, at least twenty-five of the locals’ long years, their “Storm-seasons,” as they call the dual-lunar cycle of climatic chaos that sweeps this world. Astresse, at whose side I rode to war in the most absurd and glorious venture of all my long years, has been dust for generations.

I force myself to re-establish the DCS, distancing me from the fresh wave of despair about to crash down on me. It is almost more than I can manage. Part of me just wants to give up, at that point. But seeing this girl, this stranger, gave me such hopes.

And now I am rational again, and all that nonsense is locked away, and I compose my face and look sternly at the pair of them, constructing my sentences in the local dialect, whose roots to old Earth languages I painstakingly dissected centuries before.

“Why are you here?” I ask, or at least that’s the sense I’m aiming at. The locals’ speech is ornate and filled with qualifiers and conditionals, so perhaps it comes out a little fancier than I intend.





Lynesse


“FOR WHAT PURPOSE do you disturb the Elder?”

Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning. His hands were long-fingered, long-nailed; his face was long, too: high-cheekboned, narrow-eyed, the chin and cheeks rough with dark stubble. His skin was the sallow of old paper. He had horns. In the old pictures, she’d thought they were a crown he wore, but there they were, twin twisted spires that arched from his brows, curving backwards along his high forehead and into his long, swept-back hair. She would have said he was more than half monster if she hadn’t known he was something half god. He was the last scion of the ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live.

And now she had been silent too long. Esha jogged her elbow and she burst out, “I call upon the ancient compact between the royal line of Lannesite and the Elder, where you bound yourself to aid the kingdom should foul magic rise against it. A new threat has arisen who wields terrible powers, as did Ulmoth in the time of Astresse Once Regent. Ulmoth whom you met sorcery with sorcery and cast down.”

The Elder’s look at her was haughty and dismissive. There had been a moment, when she told him of Astresse, that she had thought to read human responses in those arch features, but now she looked on him and could only see the distance between them.

“I am not troubled by such small matters,” he pronounced. “These disputes you must resolve yourself. It is not fit for me to intervene,” and he turned to go.