Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

The Lutr Speaker stood, head tilted as if listening to a voice in the room, trying to make sense of the words. Could the old woman really be trying to be nice? Had she reappeared just now as a kindness, despite the revulsion she evoked? None of it made any sense, and as she reached that conclusion, she knew Margda witnessed it as well.

“You really are a bright girl, even that fool of a Bear could see that. But you’re not terribly introspective and your motivations have never extended beyond your immediate plans.”

“What does any of that have to do with you?”

“Let’s go back to self-interest,” said the Fant. “Child, do you want to return home? Do you wish to go back to the vapid life you loved so well? To return to that enchanting realm of fresh water and crisp, clean air and quit this place for good? Then tolerate me a while longer. Your liberation will come as a side effect of the larger changes I’ll achieve.”

Margda dissolved again into nothingness, at least perceptually. But Lirlowil could feel her still in her mind. The Fant probed her somehow, desperate to turn the Lutr’s telepathy on herself. No, she had that wrong. The Matriarch hadn’t actually used Lirlowil’s telepathic abilities, she’d been poking at them, studying them. From inside, like the mental equivalent of picking up an unfamiliar object and rolling it around in your hands. Lirlowil gasped. The actions were reasonable in some ways, frighteningly intimate in others.

“Good. Calm yourself, that’s the way. Now, explain to me how our telepathy works. I will need it for what comes ahead, if either of us are ever to be really free again.”

Resigned, Lirlowil had barely begun repeating to herself the exercises from her first tutors in the powers of her mind, when the entrance to her suite opened to admit a black-clad Panda. She leaped to her feet and sailed out of her room and landed in the gravity of the reception area, none of her anxiety and fear apparent in the lithe grace of her movement.

“Save me, please! One of these despicable Fant has invaded my mind. You’re security, do something. Secure me!”

“None of your pretend madness. Your request was sent on to Urs-Major Krasnoi and he sees value in it. You’re to come with me immediately and take a shuttle downwell.”

“Request? I didn’t make any request.”

The Ailuros frowned at her. She waved one massive black and white hand at Lirlowil’s workstation. “You wrote it there, not two hours past. What are you playing at now?”

The Matriarch’s voice sounded as if it came from the sleeping chamber, though only the Lutr could hear it. “I knew I forgot to mention something. You wanted to get out of this prison, didn’t you? Well, while you were unconscious, I sent a note to your keeper worded to accomplish just that. You see? We don’t have to be at cross purposes, Child.”

Lirlowil shook her head. “The Major? He wants me planetside? But…” She paused. Ignoring the put-upon expression of the Ailuros, she stood taller, her mind racing already for some advantage. By habit she reached out with her mind to the security guard in front of her, eager to pull more information from her thoughts, explanations, interpretations, hunches. Anything at all, anything more than to depend upon the hideous creature in her mind. The power came at her call but ebbed before she could glean anything more than a sliver of hidden fear that she instilled in the security woman.

“Oh my, yes, that’s very interesting,” whispered Margda, in a voice that now hung just behind Lirlowil’s shoulder. “Let’s try that again.”

Her mind filled with the memory of the scent of fresh rain and the power surged through and poured out, clumsy and blunt. It struck the Ailuros, like a hammer pounding on the thin shell of a delicate nut, sending shards in all directions but miraculously sparing the tasty meat inside. The Panda screamed once and slumped unconscious to the floor, blood trickling from her nose and eyes and ears. The Otter dropped as well, onto her knees as both hands clutched at her temples.

“No! No! Not like that.”

The Lutr’s reaction elicited only petulance from Margda. “No? Then how?”

“Like … picking thistles with tweezers,” whined Lirlowil, as she braced for the storm the Matriarch had unleashed.

Old memories and new flooded through their shared awareness, what the guard had eaten for breakfast, what she’d sent home to a trio of cubs for their last birthday, the hope that assignment to this mission had originally brought and the subsequent realization that its clandestine nature would mean a blank in her record rather than promotion, the morning her gran had taken her fishing for the first time. And more, always more. A lifetime of detail, blurs of black and white fur, cultural references that made no sense and felt odd, if not outright wrong. Noise and noise and more noise with barely a hint of worthwhile signal. And somewhere under it all, her own thought, a faint worry that she’d incapacitated and possibly killed a member of the security detail assigned to her, and Krasnoi’s repercussions when he found out.

“Teach me, then,” insisted the Matriarch.

“I can’t,” hissed the Lutr, struggling back up on her feet, head bent and clutched in both delicate hands. “I can’t hold an idea of my own. You’ve filled me with a lifetime of this Panda’s thoughts. They’re crushing me. And on top of that, you’ve roused the major’s interest in me. Why?”

Her body moved on its own, awkwardly stomping across the room to pull out a chair and collapse at her workstation, like a broken puppet manipulated by a drunken puppeteer. Unintentionally, her fingers danced upon keys and the text of a recently sent message floated before her eyes:

I’M WASTING DAYS AND DAYS RESEARCHING FANT TO GAIN ENOUGH INFORMATION TO BE ABLE TO SPEAK TO THEM, AND THEN LEARNING NOTHING USEFUL. IF YOU HAVE LIVING RESOURCES, LET ME MEET THEM, SKIM THEM, AND EITHER FIND WHAT YOU WANT OR ELIMINATE THEM FROM CONSIDERATION.

She shoved the keyboard away, her gorge rising with disgust. “Oh no, no! I couldn’t bear to meet more of your kind. Not in the flesh. Please!”

“You little fool! You can reach into people’s minds, see them as they are and not as the flesh they wear, and still you let bigotry rule you.”

She took control of her movements again, but only to bang her head against the workstation. Memories full of visceral pain flooded her, triggered by the physical pain she’d barely begun to inflict. Complications during the birth of her cubs, corporal discipline administered upon her as a child by a stern grandfather, a friendly tavern fight that had gotten out of hand and gone from brawl to riot leaving seven dead and her with a torn ear and shattered collarbone. None of it her. None of it her.

Lirlowil screamed at the Fant, “Don’t lecture me. You don’t know how it is. Flesh shapes mind. Mind shapes flesh. It’s not so different than Speaking.”

“It should be. If you worked to make it so. But you’re weak. Lazy.”

Lazy? Her? She flashed on going through training, endless days of running obstacle courses, agility exercises, hand-to-hand combat. She could field-strip nine different weapons, survive in a desert with only a blade, make love nonstop for two days until her partner collapsed from exhaustion and dehydration. But no, she’d done none of that; that was someone else.

“I’d hoped you could be my partner in this, that we could both gain from such extraordinary circumstances.” The Matriarch’s tone dripped with contempt. “I dislike being wrong. You don’t have the discipline to seize the opportunity I offer you. You can’t even see how to dam this torrent of foreign recollections you’re drowning in.”