Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

The time had come to reveal the last piece, the other reason he had died, and as certain as he was of being recorded, he couldn’t simply leave him a note. He hoped he’d done the right thing. He needed one last conversation with Jorl, and he only knew one way to make that happen. He thought of Tolta, and while he knew she’d have understood his suicide if he could only have shared the details, a sorrow rose up in him that he had never bid her a proper goodbye. He glanced through the wall of the clean room to where his son lay sleeping, and gave thanks that he had gotten to see his boy one last time. Then he closed Jorl’s eyes and committed himself as he had that time before. He fancied he could hear the wind as it had shouted at him on the edge of the canopy. He pushed off, dying for the second time.

JORLopened his eyes and the weight of the world returned to him. The immolation of the Dying flickered across his thoughts again, tightening his chest and dragging his head down. He flexed his fingers, twitched his nubs, flicked first one ear and then the other, and shifted his attention to what the Matriarch had done to him.

In part it was almost like waking up, only he hadn’t been asleep. Rather, for half a day he had been outside himself, watching as Margda’s enslaved Otter had guided him through the station and onto the senator’s ship and to a laboratory. The Sloth had been there, and Pizlo as well. And then his body had stepped through a rush of air into a transparent box and gone to work with skills he didn’t possess.

Arlo’s skills.

And now he was back. He sniffed the air, recognized the aroma of spiralmint and tracked its source, a beaker, dark with tea, and a shade of color usually imparted by including koph. In that outside-looking-in sense, he recalled making the tea, adding the koph, but not drinking it. The meaning couldn’t have been clearer.

He dipped the end of his trunk into the beaker, filled it with tea and brought the tip to his mouth. He gulped it down, gasping at the extreme bitterness. Arlo had used far too much koph. Even before he had closed his eyes, Jorl sensed the swirl of his friend’s nefshons hanging all around him, residue of his recent possession. Automatically, his mind assembled a mental construct and when he shifted his awareness he was greeted by the familiar setting of his home.

Every other time when manipulating nefshons he had done so with a specific person in mind, concentrating on unique aspects of the individual in order to pull together the right nefshons for a conversation. But now, with the particles already present, he simply guided them together before they had begun to diffuse. His construct of Arlo instantly took form.

“Jorl, are you all right?” His friend’s expression looked surprised, almost frantic, nothing like the relaxed, almost bored poise he had affected at his many other summonings. Different even from how he had appeared earlier in the station’s cabin.

“I’m fine. A bit tired. Also confused. What happened? What did you do?”

“It was the Matriarch. After she vanished back in that station room, she somehow woke me up, inside you. Something about infusing the nefshons of my construct with your body.”

Jorl nodded. “She did it, just like she said she would, so you could do the work in the lab.”

“And I did. I re-created the drug. The reason I died. It’s in that phial on the table.” Arlo’s eyes moved to his right, landing on empty space to the side of Jorl’s writing desk at home. His trunk gestured vaguely. “You know what I mean.”

“I do. Thank you, Ar. It’s done now. I’ll give it to Senator Bish and maybe it will be enough to put an end to things.”

“Wait. Before you do, there’s something you need to know. It’s not just a koph agonist.”

“I know. You already told me about its effects on someone who has an aleph, or otherwise has that chemical in their system. We just have to hope that the senator never makes that connection.”

“No, there’s more. I … lied to the Matriarch.”

“What?”

“I left something out. A lie of omission. But you need to know. Now, so you can decide.”

“Decide what?”

“Whether or not to drink it yourself.”

“Why would I … What did you leave out?”

Arlo started to speak, stopped and swallowed in an effort to relax, and then began again.

“Okay, it’s not just like regular koph.”

“You told me this before, it keeps the effects of the koph from ever wearing off.”

“Right, but I didn’t explain how it works. I ran hundreds of simulations to be sure. The drug bonds to receptor sites in the Speaker’s brain, the ones involved with manipulating nefshons, just as normal koph does. But koph can’t stay on those sites; after a while those transmitters get washed away, taking away the perception and control of nefshons. My drug stays on those sites.”

“I’m a historian, I’m not so good with talk of things like transmitters and receptor sites.”

“Okay … think of a lock and key. The key fits the lock, turns the mechanism, and is withdrawn. Once unlocked, a door opens and the Speaker can handle nefshons. But only for a while, soon the door will close and lock again. That’s how it normally works.”

“Lock and key. I got that.”

“The agonist is like a key that sticks in the lock, in effect breaking the lock. And because the lock’s broken, the door can’t ever close again.”

“But that’s a good thing, right? It means a Speaker only needs to take a single dose. That’s what the senator would want. It will reduce the Alliance’s dependence on us, no more constantly supplying them with koph.”

“No, it only looks good in the short run. The solution is actually a lie. Those receptor sites, the ones responsible for handling nefshons, they can’t stop now. The door is flung wide and they keep going and going, day after day, season after season, until they eventually burn out, permanently destroying the Speaker’s ability.”

Jorl grabbed at his friend with both hands. “That’s obscene! And you want me to take this drug? Are you insane?”

Arlo nodded again, his trunk twitching. “Only because it won’t have that effect on you. The insect bacteria in the tattoo of your aleph is a harmless parasite. It feeds off of your body’s resources to generate its luminescence. In the process, it secretes chemicals, enzymes really, into your system. Some of those enzymes adhere to the new agonist when it bonds to those receptor sites, like a hand grabbing the key and pulling it back out again so it cannot jam and break the lock. Over and over, key in and key out, granting perpetual perception and control of nefshons but without burning out the mechanism.”

Jorl let go of his friend and sat back, the contours of his familiar chair vaguely comforting. When he’d performed his first summoning as a Speaker, he’d envisioned this same space, but it lacked verisimilitude. It was the idea of his chair, the concept of his writing desk, that had made it feel real. But as his perception and manipulation of nefshons had improved, he’d likewise grown more adept at painting in the sensory specifics of his imagined space. And not just when summoning. His attention had improved, and his memory for detail had become more focused. It showed in his interviewing of conversants, and in his writing. If he didn’t have the aleph, if something like Arlo’s drug caused him to lose his ability as a Speaker, would those subtler skills vanish, too? Were they the result of talent or learning or some combination of both? He hoped he’d never have to find out.

“Why didn’t you tell the Matriarch about this? This wasn’t simply a matter of worrying that the Alliance would learn of the connection between the bacteria in the tattoo ink and the increase in a Speaker’s ability under your drug.”