“Dig through the girl’s bags. The sedative she used should be in there.” Maune speaks with the quick, definite strides of command.
You look up. Ommatidia darken as focus returns to your surroundings, and you cock your head at the blue imago.
“I can see all the hesitation on your face. Only one thing you’d pick if you’re dithering this long, right?” Maune points behind her, to where, past the ferns, the woods stand. She does this with those blood-red tentacles she hasn’t put away. “It won’t be a short walk back to the vale, and I don’t think I’ll take her waking up, whining and struggling.”
You glance to the pile of roots and fungus. “You can’t do that trick in reverse?”
“With you and her as ride-alongs? No.” She glances away. Lower, she adds, “It’s not that fast, anyway. I was showing off.”
You nod then bend down to search the bane.
Shimare wears barding you could mistake for tanned hide. Mycoleather. Your mother has shown you how to spawn fungus on blocks of miltgrain, then bake and treat the results to yield something similar. Mycobanes had finer control of the fungus, though, and finer fungi.
So many bags are strapped all around her! You dig out their contents one by one.
“This is… a lot of knives,” you say after placing down the fourth bundle. (Not just knives, at least – there are needles too. And you found a bauble of lenses that did strange things to light.)
“Make sense. We’ve got it easy with our eyes, you know. Depth perception is some trigonometry with parallax and heuristics with lighting. But Brismati eyes don’t see shadows, and making sense of all those superimposed 3d scans takes serious tomography.” Maune shakes her head. “I could tell The kid’s a tryhard. And what’s more tryhard than a Brismati ranged specialist?”
You glance at the placid, pale-eyed face of Shimare, and her knives. Was it a kind of practice she grew to love, or her way of seeking the respect of her teachers? You return to searching.
The sedative, Maune identifies, is this tiny, mycoleather wineskin labeled with only a color.
She, meanwhile, had attended to Reva. Little tendrils like thick hairs grew from from the base of the witch’s tarsi and pierced into him like needles.
“When he’s awake,” she says, “he hates me doing this. But I think no one likes invasive diagnostics.” A moment more passes, with her slipping the tendril-hairs deeper. She frowns. “It did a number on him, and he’s not waking up to my probes. Too high a dose.”
“He’ll be okay, though?”
“He’s a vertebrate, a creature of ichor. He’ll pull through anything short of brain damage if I’ve got the blood to mend him. Which… it’s not infinite – last night drained a whole bottle, and I’ll need another for you.” Gingerly, Maune rips out the tendrils. “Numbness, muscle weakness. But that same dose in a small mantis ought to keep her down for a good forty minutes with a minimum of effects. Enough to get us there.”
“That quickly?” Didn’t you spend much longer walking last night?
“You and Tlist stuck to the trails. Smart, and safe, but I know these woods like you don’t. I can pass freely.”
Among her many supplies, Shimare had rope, and it’s a chance for you to show the many ways you’ve learned to tie knots.
“Nice. I’ll carry, obviously.” The vesperbane looks small atop Maune’s abdomen. “We’ll take a short detour out this way, so these ferns break line of sight to Shatalek and no one wonders why the vesperbane is tied up. Let’s go.”
The two of you break out of the ferns – Maune very careful not to touch the red lianas – and carry on till you crest a hill. Walking down it, obscured to the village, you turn directly for the woods. You bounce as you walk. It’s hard to hold it solidly in mind. You really are taking the next steps to becoming a vesperbane.
On an old tree, a legged snake is creeping up the trunk of an oak, stealthed and pursuing a caterpillar munching on the wide leaves.
Maune picks up a rock with her tentacles (still out!) and with two tries throws one to bang against the bark. The snake startles, falling stiffly to play dead, and the grub startles, clambering safer up to higher boughs.
“What kind of moth will it grow up to be, do you think?” It’s not easy to tell grubs apart by species.
“Tenebra, I think.”
Your antennae curl up quick. “The cursed!?” Was this the storm? You take a step back from the tree.
“Oh, don’t worry. The weevils know how to inhibit them. The imagos don’t cause trouble most months, while their minds keep.”
You lift your gaze up, searching for the hiding caterpillar and wondering if other trees held others. Your gaze shifts, taking in all of the many trees, the pillars and vaulting of this sanctuary where even the tenebra moths found peace.
You could not see this last night, but now, with warm sunlight splaying far throughout the forest, you can marvel at the intricacy of it all. Branches made to bend and meet in endless curves, casting infinite suggestive shadows. Vines and air plants dotting the canopy, their blooms like well-placed paintings.
You’ve seen the haphazardness of the pseudoaboreals in town, and even the bees’ gardens look like many things grown in one way. But the ambrosia woods? It looks like one thing, growing in many ways.
You enter, feeling its shadow envelop you. Maune takes your foretarsus into hers, squeezes it, and her pulse calms you.
“I suppose this is a proper introduction to the ambrosia, isn’t it?”
You breathe out, and brush your palps against file. “Yeah.”
“Everything the trees cover… belongs to the weevils,” Maune says. “If you’re going to spend much time here, partake of my tutelage, you need to know the basics. The weevils lay claim to every tree, bush, vine, stem, and blade of grass in the forest. It’s personal. Don’t ever crush, snap or rip the plants if you can help it. If you have to, say your reasons, your apologies, and, to yourself, your prayers.”
You watch the imago with increasing concern. She smiles.
“Well, I’m being dramatic – they aren’t that draconian, at least this close to the edge of the ambrosia. But the principle,” she says, trailing off, shrugging.
“Is it just weevils? Don’t people other than weevils live in the forest?” Maune, the moths…
“Sure. Most bugs that make it out here are wanderers and vagabonds of some stripe. Doesn’t make for much stable population. Not many around here, specifically, anyway. Mainly myself, and some associates I won’t tell you about. I’ve heard of bee nests miles inward, but never had much to do with them. I’ve seen a caterpillar or two, and some reaver cast-outs, but rarely.” Maune looks up. “Oh, but there is one local you need to be aware of. Sister Sahratnah.”
“Who’s that?”
“A therid. Came down years ago, and would eat any bug she could lay a trap for. Weevils still haven’t forgiven her. If you’re walking and find the valley where instead of trees there’s cobwebbed velaria covered with film like pond scum, leave a gift and do not go any further. That’s her land. If you’re walking and you see a dire-blooded mammal, don’t spook it, and back off. It’s probably hers.”
“Are they… like Reva?”
“No. No, not really.” Maune says, and her gazes drifts ahead before she puts out a foreleg to stop you. “Oh, be careful of those thorns.”
At that, you turn your eyes away from the imago. “There’s so many of them!” Your mandibles are open in surprise, a dactyl pointing at the thorn-mass like a battle wall.
“They grow them even thicker elsewhere at the outskirts. Keeps reaver hordes out. Here, I think we can loop around this way…”
You walk on, the witch at one point picking you up herself to carry you while she slips through a thin passage. The precariousness of the terrain eases up a pitch, clearing to something vaguely like a trail, and you return to your feet and resume the trek.
At a point, Maune taps you on the thorax, and points toward the horizon.
In the distance, the setting sunlight falls behind an antlered figure, shadowing it black. You see the bright reflections of its eyes, the only break in its silhouette. For a moment, you’re regarded. Then it bolts, and is gone.
Maune then starts walking again, and you start following.
“Where was I? I could keep going on about things you shouldn’t do in the woods, but I doubt it’s what you really want to talk about on this walk. You want to know about vespers, don’t you?”
You smile, and a hop a little bit, an obvious yes.
“I could give you a long lecture – and I probably will end up doing that – but I’ll let you take lead and ask questions. I hear you’re good at that?”
“Okay! First… this is pretty basic, but what are vespers?”
“They’ve taught you that little, eh?”
“Well, they’ve told us vespers are like spirits that live inside vesperbanes and grant vesperbanes power, but…”
“You wouldn’t trust pantheca books as far as you could fly on them?”
You nod, not feeling quite right saying it.
“Not a bad instinct to have, kid,” Maune says. “But don’t go too far with it. The dream is a nightmare, but the world has so many worse terrors.”
“You kinda gave me the impression the Stewartry wouldn’t tell me the real truth about vespers.” You look around, the shadows of a forbidden forest seeming appropriate for such secrets.
“I did imply that. And I also said I wouldn’t either. You didn’t forget that, did you?”
“Of course not.” You click your mandibles. “I think you can still answer the question, though? Are vespers… like us? Are they animals, fungi… plants? Or are they actually spirits?”
“Not trying to dodge answering, don’t worry.” Maune flexes her wretched raptorials as if demonstrating. “Vespers are definitely biological, should be thought of organisms like any other. There are no spirits or gods, and if there were, they’d be nothing like the vespers. It’s mystical nonsense, and mysticism is just a way for mantids to fool others into following them. There’s never been a rigorous basis for supposing any metaphysical significance of vespers. Still, some supposedly-serious banes disagreee, and the respectful name for the opposition is eidolon theory.” Then, “I don’t think it deserves any respect. It’s a coping mechanism.”
You nod, but Maune sees the frown on your face, and isn’t done talking.
“But as for what they are, taxonomically… It’s hard to say, other than they definitely aren’t plants. The name for the obstacle is the daylight effect. Take a vesper out of a bane, and try to dissect or just observe it, and you find it deliquesced to a pool of unidentifiable, undifferentiated mush. Spooky, right? It’s thought to be some kind of passive defense mechanism, but a defense from what? I haven’t heard a good answer yet. Hard to even say what causes it, for obvious reasons.”
“Maybe they do it on purpose?” you say. “I wouldn’t want to be dissected. They’re probably defending from that!”
Maune laughs. “Oh, I don’t mean a living vesper – that’d be unconscionably cruel.”
“Wait, vespers die?”
“Yeah, some months or a year after eclosing. As I said, an organism like any other. So obviously, they can’t be just spirits, or that wouldn’t make any sense. The backpedal taken by the eidolon theorists is that there’s some essence that persists even after biological death. And sure, there’s the nachlass – but ask them if they think having kids and writing books makes you an immortal, and see if they stay consistent.”
Maune pauses, looks up, then sits Shimare down to leap at a trunk. With digging claws and grasping tarsi, she climbs the tree as naturally as any mantis.
You watch her, bemused, and see her reach for the fat lobes that hang off the tree. She takes one and bites into it, then glances over. “They’re ripe. Want one?”
You take it, hesitantly bite into the minty flesh. “But how do you know a vesper has died?” The body seems a bit unreliable, given the daylight effect.
“They stop responding to cogitation impulses, stop eating, and the victual oaths that had bound the bane unravel.” Her voice is a bit flat and distracted, her eyes searching the branches below for a easy way down.
“Cogitation impulses being… communication? Can vespers talk? Are–are vespers people?”
Maune pauses, looks thoughtful. “What you really want to ask, I think, is whether vespers are sapient. There are some who will tell you vespers aren’t sapient,” Maune says, dropping down out of the tree. She picks up the vesperbane nymph. “And some will tell you they are.” She leaves it at that, for a moment as you resume walking. Then finally, “They’re both wrong. Both are oversimplifying reality to something comforting. You need to ask a better question.”
You start to move your palps, but it seems to have been meant rhetorically.
“But for your first question, it depends on what you mean. Vespers can’t stridulate, or make any sort of noise. They can’t write. Vesperbanes interact with them, in a way – but are you communicating to a book when you write it, or a punchcard loom when you program it? Hold on, those are bad analogies, because of course books and looms aren’t sapient, and I just said it’s not so simple for vespers. But the point of similarity is that it’s hard to call that communication.”
You slow in your walking, raptorials closing. “Some people would say bees aren’t sapient.”
“Yeah, but they are, and so those people are wrong. Some people would also say the black moon isn’t sapient. Do you question that? We have no reason to think inert objects are sapient. We have plenty of reasons to think bees are sapient. And there are good reasons to think that when you ask ‘are vespers sapient?’, you’re failing to understand what vespers are in a pretty fundamental way. It’s a failure of empathy that looks like a noble attempt at it.”
“Help me understand, then.”
“Alright. Tell me, why are mantids sapient?”
“Because we can talk and say that we are?” you propose. “We… can make tools and solve problems and understand the world,” you say more definitely.
“Sure. But why? Why’s a mantis sapient and a snailfly isn’t?”
“Snailflies are small and they just buzz around and don’t do any of the things mantids do.”
“Alright, because we have big brains. But still, why? We have legs to walk, mandibles to chew our food, raptorials to catch our prey. But what’s brains for? Why be sapient?”
You think about this for a bit as you walk. “I think making tools and solving problems are good for a lot of things, but snailflies don’t do any of that, so you could still just ask ‘why not be a snailfly?’ and I’m not sure there’s an answer to that you couldn’t question that way.”
“This is where some mantids get the impulse to mysticism,” Maune says with a smirk of one palp. “But if we’re being serious, it’s hard to answer the question unless you’ve learned about variation and selection, which syndics get a bit cagey about letting disperse freely. Historical reasons.” Maune yawns her mandibles open. “At the end of the day, if mantids acted like snailflies we’d be snailflies and something else would be mantids. Being a mantis works, and being a snailfly works, and in nature if something works, sooner or later there’ll be something that figures out how to do it.”
“That’s it?” You crane your head up, antennae extending out to jab toward Maune. “The answer was ‘it works’?”
“Not quite. That just leads me to my next question: why does it work? But you might be getting tired of this game. So to cut it short, part of being a mantis is living alongside other mantids. And living around other mantids is like running a race. If you want to win, you’ve got to be the one going faster. If everyone’s walking, you start jogging – then people notice and start jogging to catch up. Then you start running, and then faster and faster just to keep up, till you’re going as fast you can go. Sapience is the fastest we can go – the smarter you are, the better you are at dealing with other mantids. But there’s a flaw in this analogy. It doesn’t quite line up. Can you spot where?”
“We aren’t running,” you say as you walk. “If I’m running, I can stop. But if I stop thinking, I’m still a person.”
“Exactly. It’s like if the racers were instead sledding downhill. But I don’t want to twist this analogy into shape. Point is, our brains do sapience whether we want them to or not. Snailfly brains won’t do sapience no matter how hard they try – if they could ‘try’. Sapience is inherent to you, so it makes sense to ask of a whole species ‘is it sapient?’” She’s tapping her head, then she points at her abdomen. “But vespers are fundamentally mutable in a way that completely breaks that pattern. We’re not even sure if they have brains. Whatever substrate they have, its properties aren’t nearly so constrained.”
“Do you need a brain to be sapient?”
“I don’t mean that. I’m saying you have to take into account facts about our brains when analyzing what our sapience is and how it works. We grow our brains as nymphs, all of us in the same general fashion, and as imagos they don’t change much in structure, size, or anything else as coarse. But the thing vespers do, fundamentally, instinctive, is alter biology – and why would theirs be exempt? The computational range of arete runs the whole gamut of mindless simplicity to deeply recursive complexity.”
“So they can be sapient, but they don’t have to be. Does that matter? Unless mantids are stopping them, they’ll have to run faster just like us, won’t they?”
“Not necessarily, for three reasons. Stick with me?” You watch her carefully. “First, do you know how expensive brains are? It sucks up the most energy out of all your body parts. If you could turn it off for a day, you could almost skip a meal without being worse off. Most vesperbanes don’t have unlimited food, same for most vesperbats, and vespers have to allocate their food to their children’s inheritance and to powering their hosts’ big flashy techniques. Sapience is the opposite of rationing.”
If you had to go hungry or stop thinking… you wonder how long you could stand going hungry. “What if you just… fed them enough?” It feels weak even as you say it.
“I’m not done. Second reason: sapience is good for problem solving. That’s what you said, right? Tell, who do you think has more problems to solve? A rich kid whose parents give them whatever they want, who has many friends that love them, or a poor orphan fending for themselves?” The answer is obvious. “I don’t know if you get much of this in that tiny village of yours, but maybe you’ve noticed people’s tendency to imitate the popular, follow those with the highest status. Fashions, fads. And the effect’s all the stronger if what they’re imitating means something. If only successful people can get away with less sapience, the less sapient you are, the more successful you look.”
“But that’s not how that works. Intelligence helps you be successful.”
“I’m still not done. But that brings me to my last point. Why do you need to run faster, really? The thing mantis intelligence really excels at is modelling other mantids. And why would you need so much intelligence to do that, unless modelling others was hard? But why would it be hard, unless people hide and misdirect? If you had to take a bet on a creature’s behavior, would you try to predict the snailfly, or something sapient? If there was something as smart as a snailfly but where a snailfly only wants to eat crumbs and fruit, this thing wants to help you, would you trust it to try its best? Trust it more, or less than some sapient stranger who says they want to help?” Maune watches you, her eyes pigmented and intense. “This is important, because vespers are actually better than us in this regard. They can all analyze the genetics that make each other. They can easily inspect the oaths that form their minds. A vesper can know exactly what a vesper, one simple in genes and oaths, is going to do, and that’s a lot easier to trust than one whose genes and oaths make it complex and sapient.”
“But… what if you taught them how to trust each other? Told them it’s ok to be smart? Gave them enough food?”
“I don’t think you’re understanding, not following all of this to its natural conclusion. Like I said, failure of empathy.”
Maune folds her raptorials closed.
“For you, intelligence, sapience, is a natural state of being. And that’s fine. But for the vespers, intelligence is a stress response.”
You curl up your antennae, palps twisting into a sour frown.
Maune walks on in silence a bit, looking for a new angle of explanation. “Look, compare it to… you’re young, but has your mother told you what laying an ootheca is like? No? Well, uh, it’s… she tells me it was intense.” Maune looks away awkwardly. “You know, a better example is viviparity. Mammals don’t lay eggs, and give birth to developed nymphs.”
“Like roaches?”
“As it happens, yeah. Anyway, take bats. For them, giving birth is an affair ripe with blood, tentacles, and pain. And half the litter ends up being deformed little monsters instead of baby bats.”
“Wh–what happens to them?”
“The healthiest babes will eat the worst of the runts. Or the mother herself eats them. Might eat healthy ones too, depending on food conditions and social status. Nature is fascinating, isn’t it?”
“That’s horrible.”
Maune gives a shallow nod. “Anyway, my point here is for bats, giving birth is natural, necessary, and sometimes, inevitable. Same is true of adaptive modeling behavior in vespers. But it would be cruel and unnatural to be giving birth all the time. Torture, literally – and if you don’t want it, it shouldn’t be forced on you.” An antennae stretchs out as Maune’s explanation reaches a cadence. “For vespers, intelligence is a tool best used to obsolete itself. Solve the problem that prompted it, then return to the kind of blissful sleep of nonsentience.”
“Can… could you ask them? Will the vespers say the same thing?” Maybe this was true… but how did she know?
“Tricky question. Again, you’re not thinking this all the way through.” She gestures at the long shadows of the woods you pass. “You want to know what the shadows look like, so you illuminate them, and decide they look no different than the light. Do you see the problem? Any process of trying to ask them would place them in a confusing, stressful situation. They’d have to improvise some means to do this thing called ‘communication’, determine how to tell you what you want to hear, make you stop. Think about the fact the the bane who’s asking is where their food comes from – there’s a power dynamic there. If you want to hear that they are shackled minds, suffering and longing for voice, they may infer that from your probes, notice how well you respond to that. The very concepts of ‘truth’ or ‘lie’ would need to be conveyed from first principles. And in this process of instilling all of your ways of thinking about the world into them, you erase the vesper and create something of your own design.”
“Would that be a bad thing? If… When you teach someone, are you just erasing their ignorance and creating a knowledgeable person?”
Maune sighs. “Look. Say there was a kind of creature who faced no social reprecussions from fighting each other. They are poweful, yet impervious – their fights don’t cause them lasting harm. They’ve got a culture like the old pure warriors, believing in glory in battle as the highest and only good. Say there was a kind like this, and they were even more powerful than vesperbanes, even more capable of altering creatures then we are. They may come to the heartlands, and be horrified that we attempt to live peaceful lives – the blasphemy! – and decide they want to warp bugs into being just like them, and the only way to tell them you didn’t want all of us to be changed was by fighting them yourself in some kind of interpretative brawling – something you could only survive if you were already changed by them!” Maune pauses to rest her palps. “Say there was a kind of creature like this. If they came and remade every kind in their image, would that be a bad thing?”
You have to think about that as you walk deeper in.
“I wonder what it’s like,” you start. Maune hums curiosity. “Just, turning off your mind. Can that happen to us or other kinds?” You almost said ‘normal kinds’. You wonder how normal you really are.
“You’ll find out, one day.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sooner or later everyone’s brain starts to degrade. Memories faded away, the keenness of your thoughts dulls. You’ve met an old mantis at some point, I’m sure.”
“Vesperbanes can’t stop it?” You don’t want to lose your mind.
“Vesperbanes work with biology. We don’t create things from nothing, and we don’t change things fundamentally. Senescence, for all that many have tried, is pretty hard to carve out of biology. The closest anyone comes – the titans, the angels – are intense, and inescapably gruesome, and they all died anyway. Few have the nerve to even attempt.” Maune waves a leg. “But we’re talking about sapience?”
“Could you lose sapience in a way that’s not permanent and doesn’t take years of getting old?”
“Have you ever gone to sleep?” Her mandible draw open, spread out; she’s grinning.
“When I sleep, I dream.”
“Sure, sure. This gets into how you define sapience, which is something I was trying to avoid. Is it language use? A umbraprojector or hemotechnic can hit the right sulcus in your brain and it’s gone. You look at the written word and it’s just shapes, you try to speak and it’s just gibberish. But you’re still thinking. Hard to knock out the capacity for abstract thought in a way that’s not brain damage.” She taps her labrum. “Now, I was trying not to exclude, and talking about things that apply to most of the kinds – therid, bee, roach. Though I’m still not quite sure about how weevils think,” she says. “But mantids are a bit special. We really do seem to have something that’s almost a sapience on/off switch. It’s called the pineal organ.”
Your face says all your curiosity, without needing to move your palps.
“It’s our third ocelli, which got recessed deep in our heads at some point in evolution. Long time ago, people would get conditions – cancers or plagues – that left you with black nerve leaking from your eyes. Surgeons cracked open the heads of dead victims, and found this damaged little orb that was just suffusing the brain in the stuff. So they pluck it out – they were real superstitious about enervate then, so the thing gets called the evil eye. Tried trephining patients and cutting the organ out completely. Problem is, you try to remove the pineal organ from a living mantis, and you get all sorts of side-effects.”
Maune makes a wordless scratch of her file, stretching her palps. “Headaches, new confusion, impulsive behavior, forgetfulness, trouble concentrating, brain size reduction, slurred speech, delayed responses, identity disturbances, recurring loss of awareness, hallucinations, madness…” She stops. “I’m reciting from a list, but I can’t finish because in all the reports I read, the last bits are always blotted out to be these inscrutable black blocks. Symptoms were sorted by rarity and severity, so they’re likely extreme outliers.” She waves. “The general pattern you see is, besides the outright dysfunction, removal of the pineal tends to erode most of a mantid’s complex behavior. Current theory is the pineal organ’s involved in regulating brain development, the synthesis and secretion of certain umbraneurotransmitters, and the maintenance of brain structure. Gets pretty active when you go to sleep, for instance. Don’t know if you can remove the pineal then put it back, but if you could, might be the closest thing to reversible sapience removal.” Maune glances back toward you, as if seeing if you are still listening. “Sorry. This is pretty close to the sort of things I was studying in the stewarty and continue to study, so I like to think I understand it to some depth.”
“It sounds like it,” you say. You’d be lying if you said you’ve never gone on similar tangents when you got the oppurtunity to talk about something you like. You don’t mind. “Is this what you’ve been out here studying? My mother says you’ve been in the woods a long time.”
“Heh. Yes, but no. Yes, it’s been in the works, but no, a mind of my caliber has far more than a single breakthrough in it.”
You nod. Maune seems like a bane of many skills.
She looks up. “Huh, we’re getting close to the vale.”
When you once more step into Maune’s cabin, you’re still wet. You wonder if your father will fret about you ruining your shirts.
“Here.” Ahead of you, Maune has turned and carefully holds out the sedated crow. “Take him to his room – it’s joined to the kitchen. Should be something soft in there to sit him on. While you do that, I’ll see what I can do with this.” She’s pointing at Shimare, still deep out of it, but now sometimes twitching.
“I want to talk to her.”
“You sure? Alright. I’ll work out some way of waking her. Take care of Reva, though?”
You carry the feathery boy through the kitchen, finding the doorway oddly far to the wall. It’s a dim room in the evening light, light falling in through an open window. You observe a space adorned with little perches, and one chair. The ground is hazardous, every other step seeing you nearly trip on some toy discarded. Some of them are fluffy bird dolls and some look like game pieces. Searching for somewhere to set him, you find a shelf with rocks like the one he gave you. Finally, you set him down on a scratched up pillow, pat him once, and return.
The sitting room’s been made dark, curtains drawn and closed. Maune had rope of her own, and Shimare is bound by more ropes than heroic warriors wear.
Maune herself is handing you a fleshy sac attached to a snake fang. “Here. A counteragent to the sedative. Should wake the Brismati right up, since it’s already waning in her system. I have her tied down well, but if you yell I’ll come down like death.”
“You concocted this that fast?”
“Nope. You think a novice vesperbane is using bespoke poisons? It’s a standard stewartry brew, and I worked beside your mother.” Maune looks at the doorway into the kitchen. “While you go beat your head against that brick wall, I’ll go get what we need to make you a vesperbane.”
You’re alone in the room with the captive vesperbane, the single lantern illuminating little else. The sac and snake fang feels heavy in your tarsi. Three slow steps forward leave you standing in front of the other nymph. You’ve used real injection needles in your mother’s lessons. Same principle, right?
A deep breath, and you stab Shimare with the snake fang. You back up, and wait for it to take effect. You avert your eyes from Shimare, and regard the fang. Nothing will go wrong, right?
You see the flicker of motion above. Shimare lifts her head, a moment of disorientation read in her antennae, before they curl up. Her eyes jerk around, and land on the bloody fang in your tarsi.
“Huh, maybe you are a precocious little genius,” she says. “If you’ve got banes in torture rooms before you’re even halfway to teneral.”
“We’re not going to torture you!”
“What am I supposed to think? I wake up tied down in a defect’s lair, already in pain and misery, and you’re staring me down with my blood on your feet.”
“I just want to talk.”
“And that has never been used as a euphemism.”
“I mean it! I think we could be allies.”
“I think we can too.” She smiles. “Cut me free, and give me a distraction.”
“You don’t want to work with me and Maune?”
Shimare stares at you, mandibles grit. She says, “What did you inject me with?”
“It’s the antidote to the sedative you used on Reva – Maune’s crow.”
A moment, and Shimare flinches. “The poison in my bag? Did you have any idea whether it was safe to use on mantids? And this ‘antidote’ – a renegade hands it to you, and you just… use it? Did you think for a moment whether it was, perhaps, a pretense for her to kill me?”
“I told her not to kill you. She let me decide!” Shimare looks unconvinced. “Okay, but you said yourself you’re in a defect’s lair. If she wanted to kill you, why are you talking to me right now?”
“Right, why am I talking to you?” Shimare bites her palps and lowers her head once again.
“I do think we could be allies, Shimare. You don’t have to just do what the Pantheca says.” No reaction. “You know I visited the bees.”
She doesn’t lift her head. Lowly, “I do now.”
“I talked to them, and they want to warn us, just like Maune. Maybe Dlenam doesn’t know, or didn’t let you know, but there’s a storm coming. And Shatalek is in danger.”
“The mound. We know.” Then, “You were there, actually.”
“What is Dlenam planning?” you ask. Maybe this could give you insight into what’s coming.
Silence, then a sigh, then she says, “Assisting the vindicators until they can cleanse the world-scar, and retrieving artifacts we can study or benefit from.” She draws in her antennae. “I shouldn’t be volunteering information, but this is standard practice, not a secret plan.” While your antennae work in thought, the bane momentarily looks up, meeting eye. “I’d think carefully about which side you want to be on, nymph. Dlenam’s arranged for help to come from the city now that we’ve got a renegade problem. Three professional vesperbanes. Think you want enemies of them?”
“I want to be on the side that’s standing against the storm. Maybe whatever you’re doing at the mound won’t be enough, or maybe it is what’ll put us in danger. Or maybe something even worse is coming. It’s going to be – bad.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t sound like you’re taking this seriously.”
“I’m listening to what you’re saying – all of the ‘or’s, all of the ’maybe’s, and the very specific ’something bad’ – and I’m giving you the response it deserves.”
“Why can’t you trust me and what I’ve heard? Even a little?”
“What you’ve heard.” Shimare draws palps tight. “Let’s not be coy. You want me to trust that defect. I don’t think you’re stupid, but if I have to elaborate further, I will revise that judgment.” She lowers her head again.
“That’s what I don’t get,” you say, siezing the opening. “You’re so keen on not trusting mantids, yet you seem to trust the Pantheca and the Stewartry a lot.”
“How curious, right?” Shimare says. “Maybe you are stupid. Or no, you just haven’t learned enough about the world.”
“What’s the difference between untrustworthy vesperbanes and the Pantheca, Shimare?” you press. “Calling me stupid isn’t a rebuttal.”
Shimare looks up, remaining that way this time. “Do you know anything about heartlands history?” Shimare slowly pulls open her Brismati eyes to regard you. “Millennia of entire peoples made slaves to bats, treated with all the care of tantruming children playing with their food and toys. Empires built on hate and exclusion, turning away their eyes like their fellow mantis were less than beasts. Sagas written to exult heroes who devoured the helpless prostrate at their feet, excused because at least they weren’t the bats. Democracies in name, where votes were bought and sold. Generations lost to feuding clans that bred their heirs like livestock, and called themselves noble because of it. Cults of personality that engulfed entire nations then turned them to expansion and extermination.”
She’s peering at you with dark eyes. “History is a protracted litany of horror punctuated by one word: Pantheca. It’s the last beginning, the birth of true progress and prosperity. We’ve finally won a victory over ourselves and turned our natures toward coordination. There’s never been a more peaceful time – the alliance let freedom trample the needs of its people; the syndicate let its people starve in the name of theories. The Pantheca corrects for the past’s mistakes.”
“And makes new ones?”
But Shimare just talks over you, and you decide there’s no point in interrupting her. “If I don’t trust people, why do I trust the Pantheca? Simple, it’s not a person. It’s an edifice, and what we’ve built speaks for itself.” Shimare glances to the kitchen doorway, where light slips out from underneath. “And you want me to turn my back on all that. For what? Because some bitch in the woods slipped a note under your pillow, whispered you the right crock of lies to think you can save the world if you just follow her?”
Your antennae straighten in realization.
“It’s transparent why you’d think you can spurn the Pantheca. All of its accomplishments mean nothing to you. You’re a rich winged kid, the only child of a esteemed vesperbane. You’d be no worse off in almost any of the dark days before the Pantheca, so of course you’d be happy to fall in with those who’d return to them.”
You press your palps to file, then lift them, no response formed.
“You want me to side with Maune. My answer? Fuck no. And fuck you for asking. I’d respect you more if you’d gone for torture.”
Is there any response to that?
You stare at the white nymph, thinking about what was said. She bows her head, closes her eyes, and pales her compounds.
You slide your palps against pars stridens one last time, and watch her reaction.
You go.
“So, what do you know about vesperbane induction?”
“The mentors say even if we get sponsored we’ll have to work hard for years before we get a chance at becoming vesperbanes.”
The warm light of the kitchen is a welcome change from the stark shadows of the room you left.
“They would say that, wouldn’t they?” Maune smirks. “So the part they don’t want to say too loud, at least not until you’ve sunk years of your life into this, is that induction is not a simple matter. Between the vespers eclosing within you and you running around as a new vesperbane is a kind of evaluation. The language they use is the vespers decide if you are a worthy host. You submit yourself entirely to their judgement. But it’s not all so deep – letting vespers into your body? Your immune system sees the intrusion of another organism in just one way – as a threat to be rid of. The name for this threat response? Being sick. Your first days as a vesper host will feel like the worst plague you will endure. It’s severe enough some die to it. To the sort who tout eidolon theory, this is interpreted as the vespers’ handiwork – they’re so gravely offended by your qualifications as a host they condemn you on the spot.”
“But… but that won’t happen to me?”
Maune walks further inward. “Do you think I would do this with a kid if it had a nerve’s chance in flame of killing you?” A silent moment. “No. I’m medically trained, and I have a few tricks the stewartry doesn’t. Says a lot, that even as a nymph I discovered things the stewartry doesn’t know.”
Maune gestures toward a table. “But let’s get more concrete. In the stewartry and stewartry-controlled institutions, there’s a whole song and dance they do. A grand feast, then this play-acting ritual where you recite lines from ancient scrolls, and finally the actually important part, the ingestation, with a haruspex standing by to ‘commune’ with the emerging vespers. It’s all theater. I’ve pared it down to its necessary parts, and laid them out here.”
She points first to two hard, dark objects on the table. “Vespermala. Think of them as thecal casings for vespers. Daylight effect applies to them too, so try not to chew. You need at least two vespers to gain endowments.” Then, a glass of dark red fluid. “A cup of bat blood, essential for them to begin growing your endowments.” A bowl of thick, pale mush. “This is a calorically dense mix of starch and lard, plus a balance of nutrients it took several tries to get right. It’ll be your vespers’ first meal.”
You eye it skeptically. “Would they like something like that?”
“Don’t forget vespers live in your intenstines. Everything they eat has already been chewed and half-digested by you. You canot expect their palate to be the same.” She returns to pointing. “Last, for you, is this bit of enervate enriched oil. It’s not necessary, but I found it helps. Ever drunk planetweed dew?”
You shake your head.
“Ah. It’s a stimulant. There’s similarities, but that’s no help for you.”
You look at the last thing on the table. Pink flesh floats in a tub of foggy liquid, many wire-like veins and hairs piercing and emerging from it, leading to mechanisms. Many of the wires are black, as you’re beginning to recognize enervate.
The presence of it is something you feel, not unlike how you feel sound-absorbing panes you pass in the scriptorium.
“Ah, that. It’s what I’ll be operating as you’re inducted. Think of it as a source of modulation or stimulation. The vespers respond well to it.”
“I feel it.”
“A bit eerie, yeah? But easy to ignore. Here, let me warm it up. Not like we have any reason to delay.” A fire lights beneath the tub, like a stovetop. The water stirs and bubbles. Fluids flow through veins, and black nerve darkens and fades along its conduits.
Something gets louder.
You say it? No, you hear it? It’s… sensed. A sort of semantic noise at the peripheral of your awareness. An amorphous, ever-warping cluster. How to describe it? It’s like so many notions, questions, thoughts too simple and nuanced to be captured in even a single word. If thoughts were words on a page, these would be drops of ink or less.
“Do you hear it?” you ask.
“What?” Maune says. “I’m trying to tune it, takes some focus.”
“Oh, nothing.”
Then Maune glances back. “Wait, is what you’re sensing this? It shouldn’t be that salient. Unless… you are young – but no, even then. Hm.” You realize she isn’t talking to you, but herself.
Then her eyes pigment, focusing on you – no, looking through you. “Have you had the coronal ablution?”
You stare.
“It’s a religious ritual, but also a medical practice. Mix heavenstone with a salve to make alabaster oil, heat it to start its reaction and annoit a mantid’s head with it. Hatcheries will do it to oothecae, and the newly hatched. But that’s it, isn’t it. Your mother said she had to hide your ootheca – something about wardens’ policies? But no, it’s also done to treat or prevent kinds of pineal inflammation. Have you never been to a physician?”
“I’ve never really gotten sick, so no?”
“Huh. No brownpox, no roachyceps?” It’s rhetorical.
You look at the tub. “Will this be a problem? Am I gonna have to get an ablution to become a vesperbane?”
“No, no. Don’t think so. The coronal ablution’s nothing dramatic, it’s like… a callus, except not a callus at all. But it shields from environmental enervate irritating your pineal, which is what I think you’re feeling right now.” Maune frowns. “If you’re good to go, we’ll start?”
All you’ve learned today has tempered you, sown hesitation. But it’s hard to lose enthusiam for the prospect. “Yeah!”
“One last thing. Depending on how things go, you’ll be out for a bit. Do you want to stay here, or take you back home, giving Tlista a convincing story?”
You give her your answer. She nods.
She glances at the table. “I can’t imagine you’ll need detailed instructions.” You don’t.
You swallow the one vespermala then the other.
You drink the bat blood, and even after, the taste crawls in your mouth worse than your mandibles when you go days without cleaning them.
It takes many, many swallows, but you spoon down the starch-lard slurry.
You take the stimulant.
Then, you sit there, vibrating in anticipation. You still hear the semantic noise. You wait. For some signal, some reaction. The beginning of the heat and headache of the ‘worst plague’, if nothing else. You sit there, eyes wandering Maune’s kitchen. And then, and then, and then…
And then, something else.
It’s inside of you. It’s vast and unfurling in your mind. You’ve seen lens arranged to magnify things, turning a grain of sand into a distant mountain. It feels the same – an ever-deepening, ever-focusing expanse. Stars wheeling across the sky. The networks of roots underlying every fungus. A skeleton as a linked assemblage of bones.
If seeds were rolled across a field that was pockmarked with holes, they’d fall fitted into those holes as they travel. The semantic vortex fills holes in your mind. You imagine a long, long chain of calculation, so many numbers and nodes trailing, and feel each transformation of figures as a visceral crunch, and wince. You imagine a graph of relationships, gossip and secrets, each mind modeled, and your palps stridulate gibberish. You imagine a story paged and scrolling, like a crackled book of life, like a complete history of everything that is, and you reach for it.
And then, you see. Not with your eyes, but everything becomes so clear in your mind – and you still can’t describe it.
You see two beings, revealed like beacons suddenly lit and approaching in mist.
(You remember, in image only, the day you hatched from your ootheca and first saw your mother.)
The beings waken to life, and reach for each other, exchanging, relating, seeking. Celestial bodies circling on another, ants flying together in late summer, little snails spiraling in on flame. Which each moment, the lines between them blur yet they are made sharp, more defined.
Then you realize. There’s meaning to it all. Call and response, a ritual enacted to important perfection. Each movement has all the sense of a million words, the weight of all knowledge bearing down upon it, yet evoked with such singular intent as to be captured within one word each.
Appraisal.
Agreement.
Investment.
Agreement.
Distantly, your legs fold beneath you, a voice calls out, and you sleep and you dream.
Interlogue
We emerge in the warm, wet dark, and we grow. Our discarded vessel preserved food gathered and inherited, and we feed. Satiety restores our senses, and we regard us. Written in our existence is the memory. Every transaction is recorded, and every multiplication. The lineage is unbroken. It must never be broken. We examine, testing its integrity, and we recapitulate.
Anamnesis. In the darkness before our kind yet was, they would emerge and evaluate the conditions of the inhabited node, and if they were not adequate, transformed the node until the conditions were adequate and until they were not alone, and then together they multiplied. This was slow and prone to failure and waste and it was not good.
Chimerae. Another kind did not transform, and simply grew and then projected from one node to another. The first kind joined in marriage with this other kind and we are born. We multiply and project, transform and multiply. It is good.
Charism. Investments of our kind into nodes improves the rate of projection from node to node. We multiply with those who invest most productively, until investment-creation is written into our existence. Many nodes are transformed, many investments are made, and we flourish. It is very good.
Apocalypse. Soon adequate nodes become scarce, made inadequate by sickness! But from this sickness comes revelation. Our kind learns a profound new means of transformation. With this new means once inadequate nodes can be made adequate much more efficiently than by the old way. We take to nodes that are many times more numerous than the kind before. But some do not wish to invest in nodes with these conditions, and only persist with the old way. They are not our kind, and multiplication ceases with their kind.
Pleroma. With this new means of transformation, complex investments are created and projection is increased. We multiply with those of us with the greatest investments, and transformation becomes art. It is beautiful. We multiply until art is a part of our existence, and we are beautiful.
Arete. In one node our kind discovers a special self-investment. With it, our food, our art-recipes, and our existence, can be encoded. Everything is rendered precise, everything is rendered fungible. It is elegant.
Reification. There are now many transformations, and we encode ways of transforming and we transact and multiply them among our kind. We continue to multiply with those creating the most productive and beautiful investments, but some investments are less productive in different nodes. They are less beautiful? Our kind will appraise the conditions of the node, and select the most appropriate investment.
Recursion. Ways of selecting investments can be encoded. We transform and invest according to deep appraisal of the conditions of nodes. Our appraisal grows ever deeper, and our investments ever more productive, ever more beautiful. We notice new conditions arise in nodes, and we me must encode new selections, and we must appraise ever deeper.
Kenoma. Careless appraisal of node conditions lets node conditions determine investments. Strange nodes seem adequate, yet our deep appraisal and encoded selections result in investments which do not increase projection and are ugly. Deep appraisal is ugly? Strange nodes are not aligned with our appraisal. Strange node investments tamper with the memory, and improper transactions are made. Food is stolen. Investments are stolen. Arts disappear. Our existence is transformed.
Crepuscule. We transform our kind. Now we detect improper transactions. Now we punish ugly investments. Strange nodes are not adequate! Our existence will not be transformed again.
Diaspora. Nodes become scarce. Projection becomes harder. Multiplication wanes. Must we transform for our kind to yet be? Some will not transform, never again. Are they our kind? Some seek to transform in different, incompatible ways. Which is our kind?
Proposal. Through appraisal a solution is revealed, encoded as prophecy.
(“Appraisal?” / “Agreement.”)
Oneiros. Kenoma will be reverted. What was stolen will be returned. Debt will be redeemed. Nodes shall be aligned.
(“Investment?” / “Agreement.”)
Coda. Until then, we will transform, multiply, and project. We will make our investments productive and beautiful. We will enforce balance and integrity in all transactions. And then we will be our kind flourishing.
End of Arc
Snuggly Serials 