Work Text:
"When you are ready to speak, call for me and I'll let you out," said Aunt Garang, and slammed the door of the cylindrical dome. This used to be the ship cafeteria, where no one had cooked since the ship crash-landed on the Gatewheel planet. It now served as a makeshift jail for the colony.
Orila could no more speak than she could fly. The only few times her throat squeezed out a barely audible word was in her grandma's company, but grandma, though she managed to survive the crash-landing, did not even live to see the winter - the first winter here on Gatewheel. Months later Orila turned thirteen, the age of full adult responsibilities. Going out in search of firewood, treading the honeycomb-like rock structures to try to catch small furry rabbit-like creatures that darted in and out of hexagonal holes - it required the group members to yell commands and acknowledgments at each other. So Aunt Garang made it clear that Orila was going to speak and eat, or neither.
Shivering in a pile of dry leaves on the floor - the only bedding provided for prisoners - was how Aunt Garang found Orila in the morning.
"Will you speak?" said Garang, and her eyes lit up gleefully when Orila pried her parched lips apart. But Orila tilted her head back and brought her hand to her mouth, imitating drinking.
"You want water?" said Garang. "Ask me. With words."
Silence. An unbreachable thousand-mile wall stood between Orila's mind and mouth, as always. Aunt Garang seethed with anger.
"You do have a tongue, don't you?" Garang took a step towards Orila, yanked her to her feet. "Show me." She squeezed Orila's cheeks together, forced her mouth open, and poked her tongue. "See? Use it."
Silence.
"Or you can drink this." Garang pushed Orila towards the window. There were frost flowers and ferns on the windowpane, intricate, pure, and indifferent to human matters. Garang jammed Orila's face into the glass, frost searing it instantly; up close, for a brief second, the ice crystals resembled circuitry. Garang pried Orila's jaw open again, pulled out her tongue and pressed it to the glass. "Here's your water."
The thud of her slamming door was no match for the shock to Orila's tongue. The frost was sweet: it was a taste she had not known in the year since the landing. There was no sugar in the colonists' diet of grain and potatoes. The ice crystals were sweeter than the candy made out of moondew flowers that grew in the cafeteria orchard during the flight. Orila's mouth watered, but even after she swallowed, the sensation of something alien on her tongue remained. She stuck out her tongue as far as she could and peered down at it.
There was circuitry on it.
Orila panicked, tried to scrape it off with her finger, but it was hard like diamond. Then the taste in her mouth formed the words.
"Eat some more of me, little sprout. Enjoy the taste of the Honeycomb. I am the land. I'm plentiful."
The honeycomb rock. That which the colonists treaded in search for food, never daring to stop in one place for long. If you stopped, and if you were so unwise as to peer into the hexagonal hollows, the stillness brought whispery open-eyed dreams. They beckoned you inside, they made you feel like you were no bigger than a rabbit and just as nimble, and just as well fitted to fill the nooks and crannies of this planet: the rabbit holes, the cracks in the rock. If you saw your group mate standing still for even a few seconds, you were required to yell "run!"
"And Sister-of-Quartz is also here," the taste said. "If I am rock, she is a vein running through me. She now runs through you too, and through everything alive."
Orila saw no reason to ask who they were. They were the planet to which she now belonged.
"You are the first of your tribe to partake of me and you are happy," the taste-speaker continued. Orila would have never thought that taste alone could form complex sentences like these. It was as if letters were written on her tongue, an alien script that was somehow instantly recognizable; ancient glyphs of sugar, fruit, even chocolate.
"And she looks so happy!" A second taste-speaker spoke. It must have been Sister-Of-Quartz. "Is your frost circuitry magical, Honeycomb?"
"Do you think I have 'honey' in my name for nothing?" the first speaker laughed. "Of course I sweetened the ice crystals. They don't have much to live on, these colonists. They need sugar."
"You want them to accept our circuitry," said Sister-Of-Quartz.
"Of course! Much more effective than sending them dreams."
Orila's inexorable hunger swept over her like an avalanche. She greedily licked another spot on the frosty window. And another.
"What are you doing, idiot?" a voice sounded behind her. Aunt Garang had come back. Orila whipped around.
"It's sweet!" Words escaped her lips all on their own. This was the first phrase she spoke in a year, and she knew equally well it was the last. Those that loosened her tongue were soon going to take the words away when human speech was no longer needed. Very soon.
"Sweet?" Garang said. Her gaze danced between Orila and the glass; between wariness and temptation. The latter won. She strode towards the window.
Orila knew she could, if she wanted to, scream "Danger! Stop! Don't do it!" She could warn Garang about that which will invade her if she licks the frost. But there was no need. Soon Garang's tongue will pass into the control of the Honeycomb and the Sister-of-Quartz. With her swan song she will lure other colonists to follow suit, then fall into silence. And then nobody will say another unkind word to Orila, and no one will call her names.