Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

The Matriarch didn’t even flinch. “If you had a lab here on this station, if you had access to the full range of materials that we export, could you re-create your drug?”

“I could do it, yes, but it’s not something I can walk someone else through.” Arlo waved his arm taking in the room. “And none of this is real.”

“But if you were really here, alive on this station, could you do it? Would you do it?”

“That’s not—”

“Just answer me. Would you?”

“Yes, of course. To save my son.”

“Good. Then we’re back on track. All we have to do is bring you back to life.”

Arlo snorted. “Right. That’s all. I have no doubt that if you ever figured out a way to do that, you’d be walking Barsk right now, taking charge of things all over again.”

She smiled. “I’m right here, boy. Alive and well.”

He trumpeted into her face and she scrambled backwards on the bunk, slamming against the wall. “ None of this is real! You’re dead. I’m dead. You want me to re-create the drug I died to protect? I don’t just need a lab, I need to be back in my body in the real world, not capering around in some mental construct Jorl’s imagined out of particles I can’t even see.”

“You’re quite right. I’m long dead and none of this has any substance. And yet, when Jorl first met me during his interment, it was in the waking world and I had a body of flesh and blood.”

Arlo turned to Jorl. “What is she saying?”

“It’s true. Somehow she’s taken possession of another person’s body. An Otter. That’s the body that’s sitting in the real version of this room with me right now.”

“An Otter with a powerful telepathic talent. That’s what allowed me to put my nefshon construct in control of her body. And doing the same for you is the last piece of my final vision. If you both are willing.”

Arlo hesitated, but only for a moment. The look in Jorl’s eyes answered any question he might have asked, granted any permission he might have needed. It all seemed like madness, but was madness anything other than desperation blended with hope?

“Do what you need to do,” was all he said.

“Whenever I can,” said Margda, and disappeared.

“Where did she go?”

Jorl frowned at him. “I didn’t vanish her any more than I brought her here in the first place. She came on her own and probably left the same way. Give me a moment and I’ll check.” The pharmer watched his friend’s eyes unfocus for an instant. Arlo blinked, and everything went away.

* * *

HEremembered the time he and Jorl had traveled to Gerd, that last season before they started at the academy. The hostel had been so overcrowded they’d had to sleep on the roof, taking down a pair of clothes lines in the dark so they could string their hammocks. The next morning, waking up had been a slow and gradual thing. They hadn’t seen that the next roof over had been planted as a garden full of sartha. The morning breeze had washed the pair of them in the buds’ soporific scent and kept them asleep well into midday.

It was like that now and unlike any of the times Jorl had summoned him. His neck had gone stiff and his throat felt dry. He grappled with the distinction between groggy and disoriented, and realized that the preoccupation probably meant a bit of both. The growing sense of wrongness in his proprioception jerked him full awake and he found himself back in the station cabin where Jorl had summoned him before, seated on the sleeping platform much as his friend had been.

Arlo held up his hands and trunk in front of his face. They looked different. He stood and began flailing his arms to keep from falling, stumbling around the room in a body that felt shorter and thicker than his reflexes remembered. He understood what had happened even before he noticed the Lutr leaning by the door.

“You’ve put my soul in Jorl’s body!”

“Nothing quite so melodramatic,” said the Otter. The voice was higher, more melodic than the Matriarch’s, but it had her rhythm. “If nefshon amalgams are souls, I’ve never seen proof of it. No, I’ve simply taken Jorl’s construction of your particles and bonded them to his form, at least for a while.”

He put one foreign hand out to the wall to steady himself, agog that it moved to his will. Even so small a thing made him feel more … comfortable. It drove home a new understanding. Life had a quality that had been absent every time Jorl had Spoken to him, a quality that he had always possessed in life but hadn’t noticed the lack of, not once in all those many summonings. Until now. He was alive!

“We need to hurry,” said Margda, and he realized she wasn’t so much leaning as slumped against the wall. “Creating the bond has exhausted me. I cannot actively maintain the impression for long, and once I stop I don’t know how much time it will take Jorl’s mind to break through and wrest control of his body again.”

He nodded, the gesture feeling odd because it was Jorl’s gesture, not his own. “You said you could give me access to a lab?”

“And so I shall. This station is a minor maze, but the senator’s aide gave me directions to where his vessel is docked. The lab is aboard that vessel. One thing though, the Sloth will likely be there; don’t let her touch you.”

“Why?”

“Both she and the senator have some technology that shields them from telepathic probing. It didn’t exist when I was alive, or if it did I didn’t know about it. My point is, I don’t know what effect it might have on nefshon constructs in general, or the imprint on Jorl in particular. Now, come, we need to get you to that lab.”

Her fingers, long and slender, gripped his upper arm as much for support as control. She led him out of the room and down a series of ugly, sterile hallways and eventually to a boarding gate and airlock with more hallways that managed to be both different yet still ugly. In the end, they arrived at a set of double doors that opened to reveal a thoroughly modern laboratory with its own miniature, glassine cleanroom within it. He saw only a single occupant, a Brady, who glanced up from running some test at a workstation as they entered. She wore a dark kaftan interrupted by glimmering bits that he recognized as a cunning sensor array. She put her station in standby and came toward them, the urgency of her words contrasting with the leisure of her gait.

“Have one or the other of you learned to make the thing?”

The Matriarch’s grip tightened on his arm, a squeeze that meant … what?

“I can do it,” he said, and the Otter gave a slight nod. “I’m going to need some things, but nothing that shouldn’t be stocked somewhere on the station.”

“Excellent. I’ll show you how to access inventory control. Make a list and I’ll have whatever you require brought here. Will this facility be sufficient?” She pointed at the transparent chamber in one corner, a small emergency shower standing next to it.

“That’s fine.” He fanned himself with his ears as he surveyed the rest of the room. Small protuberances in the ceiling gleamed with lenses, enough to capture each section of the lab several times over. Whatever he did here would be reviewed from every angle.

At the other side of the lab were a pair of medical beds, the like of which he’d only ever seen in the University’s infirmary on Zlorka and nowhere else on Barsk. One of them held a small, white Lox. Pizlo, his hands wrapped in bundles of pale gauze. What had Jorl said? Had the monster already tortured his son?

Arlo cleared his throat. “What’s the status of the boy?”

“That one’s a puzzle. But all good news. He’ll have quite a bump on his head, but there’s no concussion and I’ve reset the injured shoulder. He made an impressive effort to ruin his hands — he insists he ‘rowed’ for more than a day, and even if what you said before about his not feeling pain is true, if I hadn’t seen the effect myself I wouldn’t believe he could have done it. The wounds had become infected but I believe I’ve caught it in time.”