Posleen War: Sidestories The Tuloriad (33 page)

When asked, “Acolyte, what would it look like, for us to be Posleen again?” Finba'anaga answered, “I do not know. I've never seen it, nor had the ship, Hope Bringer. But look inside yourself for what is in you that is also in the rest of us. That is what our own way would be like. So what do you think we should look like?”

When asked, “Finba'anaga, what would be the rules of such a civilization?” the acolyte answered, “I do not know. Whatever rules we once had were perverted by the tricks of the Demons. We shall have to reason our way through to their rediscovery. What do you think the rules and the laws should be?”

Faced with this, questions instead of answers, most of the kessentai gravitated away. Yet a small, hard core remained, and in the remaining, tried to answer the questions Finba'anaga asked.

“He asks some good questions, doesn't he, my ex-assistant?”

“Too good, Golo,” Tulo agreed. "And they're questions for which I have few answers. We have been one way for so long that none can remember any other way. Even the scrolls provide no answers for us. Nor even did that sentient ship he found, which, too, was the product of long eons of Demon-spawned perversion and exile.

“Don't you ever wonder, Golo, what we were like before the Aldenata found us?”

“Somehow I doubt we were pacifistic creatures, caught up in some natural idyll,” the Tinkerer answered with a cynical tone.

“No, probably not that,” Tulo agreed. “Though maybe more like that than the xenocides we've become.”

“The Hope Bringer told me,” Finba told his followers, “that there was a Posleen god from olden times, Metr'de, god of grain and the harvest. It said this god was one among many, and one of only two the memory of which had survived to its time.”

“What was the other, Acolyte?” his followers asked.

“Aga'orna, the god of war.”

The followers all nodded, for the most part happily. “So war was with us in our olden days? This is a good. Life would be too damned boring without the possibility of fighting, and would lose all its meaning without the chance of bravery.”

“War, yes, but not necessarily war as we have known it,” Finba corrected. “How the People fought in the olden day we know nothing of.”

“The problem,” Finba observed, “is that that is all we have. We have no holy writ. We have no parsed theology. We would need other gods, to be complete, and of those we have not even names. I, for one, refuse to follow the path of the demonic Aldenata and create false gods. Hope Bringer showed me where that path leads.”

Posleen Prime

The world was mostly sere, with many small creeks but few broad rivers and oceans that were, at best, large lakes. It was largely yellow-orange in color. The terrain was rough and, on the surface, at least, there was little sign it had ever been inhabited.

Beneath the surface there were traces of “cities,” though the largest of these was no more than five human kilometers in diameter, about the size of ancient Athens in its heyday. Most of the cities seemed built around some kind of mesa, or high hill. There were jumbles of ruins atop many of these, some more or less visible as piles of rubble, others so worn as to be practically invisible.

“It's funny,” Tulo said, looking out at the mesa centered on the largest of the cities they had sensed from space. “Somehow I thought that the world from which we came, the first world, would be even more pleasant than the last world we visited. Yet it is not so.”

Tulo spoke truth. The world previous had been park-like, perfect, a paradise of sorts. The one upon which he stood now? In every way it was wilder and rougher. About the only really good thing that could be said of it was that there were no abat or grat. Yet even now, Tulo was sure, the ones aboard his little C-Dec, the parasites that had infested every Posleen ship since time immemorial, could sense the gravity and were just itching to land and spread out.

“Is there any way to keep this place free of abat or grat?” he asked Goloswin.

“It's easy to keep it free of grat,” the Tinkerer answered. “Just make sure it has no abat. Keeping the abat out, however . . .”

They'd made some considerable effort, with the sole lander they'd taken down, to get rid of the abat, opening the thing to space for a ship's day, then guarding carefully to make sure no more migrated into the lander. Yet they could hardly open the entire C-Dec assembly to space at one time, and if they did not, there would be abat and grat still.

“Well, think about it,” Tulo said. “If anyone can find a way to keep those miserable pests out, you can.”

“I'll try,” Golo agreed. “Though I think the hope forlorn. We could leave the C-Dec in space, and just use the landers.”

“Maybe.”

“On the subject of things that breed like abat,” Goloswin asked, “what are you going to do about the normals overbreeding?”

Tulo sighed. “I don't know if this will work, Golo, but in the short term, why do we breed normals, or allow them to breed?”

“Rail gun and boma blade fodder,” the Tinkerer answered.

“Exactly, because the group that finds itself short of normals is obliterated by the group that breeds freely,” Tulo agreed. “We, however, are just one group, in competition with no one. We can afford to cull our normals ruthlessly. I am thinking of permitting for each kessentai who survives the breeding pens, only the five cosslain that average out, and for each cosslain, no more than four normals. Or perhaps not even one.”

“Twenty servants per kessentai? Or less? They'll bitch to no end.”

“Let them, and we'll add twenty-one carcasses to the larder for each complaint.”

“Here,” Finba told his followers, pointing at a spot on the ground to one side of where a broad path, carved into the rock, descended from atop the mesa.

“Is there any reason for us to dig here, Acolyte?” one of his disciples asked.

“Just . . . just a feeling that if I were one of the old ones, this is a place where I might put a temple,” Finba'anaga answered. “Here, perhaps, we may discover more of our gods, or more about the two we know about.”

Finba's followers, plus the hangers-on, willing to dig for a bit of their history, never numbered over three dozen, plus several times that in cosslain. They dug furiously, too furiously, in fact. Finba had to slow down the pace to allow the kessentai to separate out fragments that might, or might not, mean something.

Meanwhile, the rest of the C-Dec's crew, brought down by landers in shifts, along with their machinery and their stockpiles of thresh, began the difficult task of preparing the land for agriculture. At Finba's behest, Tulo mandated that they could do so only outside of what the ship's sensors indicated were the city's boundary walls.

The new grain picked up on the previous world took to this original Posleen homeworld easily. Soon there were fields stretching as far as the eye could see, waving with the amber grain.

This world had seasons, seasons severe enough to require shelter. With the grain ripening, but chill winds blowing, it was time to build homes. The builder normals and cosslain here proved their value, chopping trees, quarrying stone, even making mud-brick and tile for roofs.

Still, Finba's crew, sometimes more, sometimes fewer, dug. Still the piles of rubble and artifacts grew. And then, one day, with a freezing rain pouring down from the heavens, one of the excavation crew found a stone claw and forearm.

“If this is here,” Finba said, as he examined the finely carved piece, “it means that there is more, here. Let us continue to dig, but let us be more careful than ever. This may be the image of a god we are uncovering, my brothers.”

“That's another funny thing,” Tulo observed one evening to Goloswin, as the frozen rain poured and the fierce wind howled. “One would think that, whenever our ancestors left this place, or were taken from it, that at least a couple of them would have missed the boat. And yet we find absolutely nothing that even resembles us except for some arboreal lizards that are, at best, distant cousins.”

Goloswin answered, “Say whatever you will about them, Tulo, the Aldenata were advanced enough to be very thorough without even trying very hard.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they made sure none of us would be left behind to develop on our own.”

“You are thinking of a disease like the one we found on the first world we visited after our escape from Aradeen?” Golo asked.

“I don't know what I'm thinking of, old friend, except that this world seems too empty. Perhaps they had a way to call our ancestors to their ships for deportation.”

“Hmmm . . . maybe. Well, cheer up. We're filling it as fast as we can and, with the control measures for normals you've decreed, it will still be a long time before it's overfilled with us. And when it is, well perhaps we can expand onto some of the moons. And past that? Who knows; maybe that paradise world can take some of the overflow.”

“Or maybe the humans will find us and obliterate us,” Tulo countered, staring into the firelight of the small hut they shared. “How's that for a cheery thought?”

The shrieking wind whipped the tarp over the excavation. Beneath it, huddled with a follower, Finba'anaga shook his great crested head in frustration.

An arm here, a head there, a piece of a torso over there by that lump behind the other lump. Little by little, the statue is recovered.

“Except that it makes no sense,” said Finba to his follower, Borasmena. “We've got way too many claws and crests and legs and whatnot for this to be a statue of anything of ours.”

“Perhaps it's a statue of one of the demons,” offered Borasmena.

In answer, Finba lifted the most complete claw they'd found and held it out next to his own. “This is Posleen,” the acolyte said, “Posleen and nothing but. But it still makes no sense. We've never had five arms and seven legs and . . .”

“Finba,” called another kessentai from down in the pit they'd excavated. “Finba, come look at this.”

The voice sounded insistent, even urgent. The acolyte trotted down the ramp into the pit.

“Yes, what is it,” Finba'anaga asked.

The kessentai in the pit, with a cosslain on either side, pointed downward. “At first,” he said, “I thought this was just a covering over a trove or something.”

Finba looked and saw an irregular cloth covering. “And?”

The kessentai pulled the cloth away, revealing a partially uncovered stone platform. On the platform, a part of it, were two sets of four Posleen legs each, plus another part that appeared to be a rump with attached legs, dragging along the ground. The platform, itself, was carved to resemble rough ground, Finba thought.

“It's a group carving,” the acolyte pronounced. “And I'm an idiot for not seeing that it had to be.”

Spring was in the air, pollen flying, bird-cognates chirping, and the arboreal lizards calling out their mating cries, as Finba'anaga led Tulo'stenaloor and Goloswin along a well-worn path, through the small mounds that marked the city's ruins, to the pit he had had dug.

“It took forever to piece it together,” Finba said, “and we're still not one hundred percent sure we've gotten everything right. But . . . I think we've got a pretty good idea of where our ancestors were when the Demons came for them.”

“So show me, puppy,” Tulo said.

“Yes, Lord; this way.” Finba led the other two down into the pit, to where several of his own followers stood to either side of a cloth covering, hung across to cover something.

Finba took a deep breath, then nodded for Borasmena to drop the tarp. This the kessentai did, revealing a three figure statue, the cracks where the pieces had been joined just visible.

The immediate effect of the statue on Tulo and Golo was startlement. There, before them, an ancient Posleen stood, glaring defiance and brandishing a spear in their direction. That kessentai, front torso covered with what appeared to be a cuirass, his head champroned, also held in one arm a small target, a round shield, covering its neck. Behind this one, another Posleen, legs dragging limply behind it, was being helped by the third. Both of the latter two still had head and eyes turned to face in the same direction as the spear brandisher. The wounded one—agony writ in every line of its body—still appeared to be trying to force its helper to let it return to whatever fight the spear brandisher faced.

A human might not have found the statue group beautiful. Tulo and Golo thought it was the most beautiful thing they'd ever seen, cracks and the odd missing claw or not. It was the pain and defiance of The Dying Gaul, the inner sorrow of Michelangelo's Pieta, the physical magnificent of his David . . . all rolled into one.

“This our ancestors were capable of, before the Aldenata took them?” Tulo whispered. He looked up, as straight up as his neck would allow his muzzle to point, and shouted, “We were robbed!”

Qua'angu nachta'iyne zuru'uthanika'a wa zuru'athana . . .

(Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those . . . )

—The Lord's Prayer, High Posleen version

Anno Domini 2022

USS Salem

“I just can't stand it, Dan,” Sally said, again furiously pacing the confines of their quarters. “The reptilian bastard just sits in his quarters, building something and I can't tell what.”

Dwyer sighed, his normal reaction when his wife was raging about the elder Posleen. “Try asking Freddie,” he advised.

“I have. He's got no idea what his old . . . man is making. And my senses are useless to tell me anything but that there's a lot of metal, some of it highly conductive, and a lot of inert stuff I can't identify.”

“It has to be coming from somewhere. Did you ask the forge.”

Sally voice took on the intonation of a machine. 'I-am-sor-ry-ship-Sal-em-but-that-in-for-mat-ion-is-re-stric-ted.' Bastard fucking artificial sentience machine son of a bitch."

Dwyer cocked his head and raised one eyebrow, looking directly at his wife who, taken in her entirety, was one third machine intelligence as well.

“Oh, fuck you, Dan,” she said, when she had seen. “I could pick up the bastards voice but he never, ever says a word in his quarters about what he's working on.”

“You're worrying about nothing,” the priest insisted. “Look, it's just a few days until Christmas. Guano's been asked to make gifts by a lot of people. And he's had the forge working overtime on ornaments and garland. You've seen the manger and statuettes he's made.”