Elder Race(6)

Lyn had a whole speech prepared—literally memorised by heart—in which she recited the Lineage of Queens, elucidated the deeds of her great-grandmother and the legends of Nyrgoth Elder and made a formal plea, diplomat to great power, for the honouring of bargains. There was an expected language to these things, just as though one were telling a tale, conventions to abide by. One did not just charge into the tower of a sorcerer and take liberties.

And yet he was already going away, without any of her elaborate charade enacted, and she just lunged forwards and tugged his sleeve, as though she were a peddler and he was departing without paying.

The robe punished her. There was a crackle and a feeling as though it had bitten her fingers. Then she was sitting on the floor, hand ringing with pain and tears in her eyes. Esha had grabbed her shoulders and was trying to haul her back, gabbling apologies to the Elder, begging him to forgive the princess’s temerity. Nyrgoth just stood there, looking down at her, seemingly as surprised as she was by the development.

At last, he said, “Forgive me. The things of this tower are jealous of me, and careful in my defence.” And then, after unnamed things came and went in his eyes, “Astresse did the same, when she came to me and I told her I would not intervene.”

“And you did intervene,” Lyn reminded him. “Elder, there is a new power arisen in the Ordwood that men say is a demon who steals minds, whom the strongest cannot face with a blade. The forest kingdoms are falling already. Lannesite’s roads are heavy with those fleeing their homes.” And my mother will do nothing, she thought but did not say. No gain in telling the Elder that she was not exactly here with royal sanction.

“Please,” she said, all those fancy words she’d learnt condensed down to that one. “I invoke the compact between us,” she went on, but quietly, an entreaty and not a demand. “You promised my family, long ago. Are the vows of a sorcerer nothing?”





Nyr


MY PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENT IS that I let myself behave in a remarkably unprofessional manner some time ago and here it is, back to bite me. True, there is a loophole in the non-contamination procedures where advanced technology is concerned. Not a terribly well-reasoned loophole, given that the tech that the warlord Ulm had got hold of wasn’t ours at all, but a holdover from the colonial days. I would have been within my rights to decide that whatever he did with it was just part of the natural development of the society here, and hence that anything I did would just have been unconscionable meddling.

And yet whoever worded the contamination regs for the Corps was less than exacting, meaning that I could, if I wished, interpret them to mean that I could go and take down Ulmoth and restore the proper post-tech balance that I was supposed to be studying.

My rationalistic assessment, with Dissociative Cognition System engaged, is that I made the incorrect decision back then, and would only compound matters now. In fact, DCS on, I literally cannot understand why I weighed in to help Astresse. I can recall our first meeting word for word, and yet the decision I made makes no sense to me. On this basis, I feel I cannot make a final decision now, because I feel I lack some nebulous information I obviously possessed then.

I put a hand out to help this new woman to her feet and she flinches back. “I have tagged you as safe for my systems here,” I assure her. I have already apologised for the efficiency of the outpost’s defences, which interpreted her movement as an attack. Thankfully I had them set only to warn in the first instance, or the cleaners would be sweeping up her ashes.

Looking at her expression, I suspect that my grasp of the language remains imperfect, or at least lacks nuance. On the one hand, I could write you a dissertation on the linguistic roots of their various tongues in Old Earth stock and how they have developed since this colony became cut off from the wider human diaspora. On the other, I suspect that there is a whole level of subtext hidden amongst their suffixes and registers, cases and inflections where every word has a dozen different variants depending on precisely who’s talking to whom about what. I’ve wondered if, early on in the colony’s development, the colonists sat down and decided that they really, really needed to be clear about exactly what everyone meant, and now the language is a tangled thicket I have to hack through with a machete.

All of which is getting me nowhere nearer to making a decision. I should just go back into suspension and have the outpost wake me when . . .

When?

And at last I identify the gap in my perfect tower of logic. DCS-mode is intended to let me make rational decisions without the short-termism of undue emotion. After all, even if things hadn’t gone horribly silent back home, this was always going to be a centuries-long posting as we watched the native culture develop; long-term thinking requires a clarity the natural human mind is not good at. Except long-term thinking also requires a goal to plan towards, and that is where I find the frayed end of my tether. I have no guarantee that there will ever be word from home. Three centuries of silence says there won’t be, and that I am a remnant of a culture whose second flowering into space, that seemed unstoppable and glorious, was actually just brief and doomed. I am more a relic worthy of study than those I was placed to observe.

My visitor, who so resembles Astresse, she has a goal. She was sent to petition me for aid against some warlord who’s found and activated an old excavation machine or flier or neural pacifier or some such nonsense, and is using his toy to carve out a kingdom. And I shouldn’t care, and I shouldn’t interfere, but there is a great vacant void where I would normally keep all the things I should do. There is only one driving purpose in the room and it is not mine.