Work Text:
"It's always distressing," Jala said, not for the first time: a sign of how rattled this latest chrysalis incident (as Shade referred to them) had made her. The cap affixed to the back of her head—a permanent addition, rather than the item of haberdashery most supposed it to be—throbbed and pulsed in sympathy, releasing traces of anxiolytics and narcotics into her bloodstream. She had no fear of the chemical adjustment; after all, they were generated in accordance with her own formularies, her own painstaking calculations.
The wind blew hot and cold by turns, about the orange house—the abattoir temple—that Simon had inspired. The orange mobiles moved slowly, deliberately, in response to the directives that Shade provided. With better maintained mobiles, the cleanup would have passed in a whir of activity. But the orange mobiles had not enjoyed the benefits of nutritional supplementation, and Shade calculated that the job would be done most expeditiously if he conserved the mobiles' limited strength.
It is tiresome but necessary, was all that Shade said. The distress is not intended.
Jala shrugged, casting a practiced eye over the exiled orange mobiles while shielding her eyes from the grit, part chitin fragments, part erosion. They would be of limited use to the project, but like Shade, she believed in conscientious cleanup. Local authorities might prevent them from returning soon to this world; but Jala didn't imagine that local authorities had much longevity of memory.
She and Shade had run the numbers, agreed that the cost might be borne in the hopes of a greater result. This chrysalis incident had, indeed, borne fruit. Not what they'd hoped for, in terms of a varietal. Too feral, too uncontrolled. But the sculpting of sandking varietals required a certain acceptance of natural variation, like the penjing—more commonly known as bonsai, among humans—of Jala's distant ancestors. And the white varietal with its uniquely predatory psionic focus, once extracted and disassembled, might provide the foundation for future refinement.
Disposing of that wretch Simon—that had been simple enough, logistics so timeworn and familiar that Jala scarcely noticed them. The orange SandKings had made short work of his carcass, passable biomass for the next phase of their development, and enriched with the secretions of fear and adrenaline that certain varietals found so nourishing. The mature biomass that Shade had provided, with one dismembered limb, would provide a superior genetic template than that which had been available to the younglings under Simon's care.
The jigsaw disassembly of Simon bothered her not on account of the man. Jala, who did her homework in all first contact situations, including the one that led to her current partnership, ascertained ahead of time that Simon might be well-connected, a valuable trait in a brood feeder; but he was not well-liked. That combination was more common than one might wish for, if one cared for strictly human notions of altruism. As it stood, Jala saw herself as a necessary part of the ecosystem.
"Altruism," Shade said into her mind, flavored with the piquant acidic sting that signified its curiosity. Like all his kind, he took a keen interest in matters of assembly and disassembly. That fact had surprised other members of Jala's late unlamented first contact team, lulled into facile suppositions of "immature" and "advanced," "uncivilized" and "civilized."
True, the larval forms were driven by the primary urge of hunger and satiation, necessary for their maturation. But the mature forms, like Shade, were heirs to complex considerations of strategy, survival...ethics, after a fashion, albeit one with its own alien inflections. Jala learned after the fact that others of its kind deferred to Shade in matters of ethics.
The term that she translated in her head as "ethics," as a matter of human convenience, had its etymological roots in the word for "assembly" in Shade's native language. For that matter, the SandKings did not disambiguate between "assembly" and "disassembly," considering both to be part of the same overarching process. Jala never forgot that, unlike her late unlamented team members.
The resemblance to your expedition leader is notable, Shade added.
He must be as unsettled as she was, to broach the subject. Shade ordinarily skirted any topic Jala did not wish to address, lanced her anxieties like the finest needle when she indicated her readiness. Sandkings didn't experience discomfort in the same way she did, but they responded and to breaks in a pattern; adapted to them, lancing and mending, dissasembling and reassembling.
The orange mobiles had found the rhythm of their work, with Shade's encouragement, disassembling the orange house. They would march, without further direct guidance, to Jala's transport, and pack themselves obediently into the cargo hold, secrete a cushioning substance that would cocoon them against the stresses of interstellar travel. That was one of her innovations, and one that she was rightly proud of. Shade's quiet acknowledgment of her excellence in materials science and engineering, as filtered through sandking processes of biological extrusion, warmed her the way no one had ever warmed her, in this life or all the ones before.
Warmth: that came with a cluster of pheromonal responses, hers and Shade's, a human-derived adjustment. Sandkings, ever practical, assimilated useful adaptations; disassembled them, integrated them, assembled them back into the project.
"Are the white ones ready?" Jala asked. She did not need to speak with acoustic vibrations, never had. Shade, mature in its psionic powers well before their first meeting, understood her before she understood herself. But Shade professed itself pleased by the exercise of her native mode of communication—a flavor, across their partner-bond, of piquant imprecision.
They are ready, Shade said, and after a poignant pause, We are ready.
"Then let's proceed with the retrieval," Jala said, mouth curving with unsuppressed anticipation. "Special equipment," she'd told Simon, as she told everyone, simple operational security. No more equipment was needed than the transport. Shade could suppress the psionic activities of any of its kind; but best to keep that capability secret.
The sandkings Jala had met, many a world ago, had only a vestigial concept of imprecision—of deceptive communication. Jala, chafing at having her research stolen yet again by the predatory society of scholastics she had joined in a naive attempt to advance her understanding of xenomaterials, noted this before the rest of the expedition. Jala, sensing an opportunity, made the sandkings an offer.
Only one sandking had accepted her offer—but she only needed one.
The project had taken human generations, sandking generations. Shade renewed Jala as often as she desired it; would have disassembled and reassembled her on the hour, ever hour, if she desired it. But there was no need for that. Theirs was an entanglement written across all the Thousand Worlds the humans knew of, and more besides; written in the genetically altered metamaterials that she and Shade developed, in the increasing number of razor-keen specializations of varietals, and the slow carceral proliferation by which she and Shade would establish their dominance over the other sandkings and their clans.
We are ready, Shade had said—and so was she, the way they were always together, an unbroken unison in all matters of assembly and disassembly.