Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

Separated from her own body, her mind weakened. In time, she had no doubt that she would die. But the Fant, originally nothing more enduring than any other temporary nefshon construct, required both the Lutr’s mind and body to remain. Through the thread connecting them Lirlowil could feel her nemesis exhausting both. If Margda managed to hang on, walking around in the station as an Otter until such time as she wore out that body, then both minds would wink out of existence. But if she paused, relinquished control to rest her own mind even for a moment, Lirlowil believed she might have a faint chance to break free and at least co-habit her body again.

If she could just get out of this damn pantry!

Groping in the dark, she picked up another pot and hurled it against the floor where it shattered into many, many unseen pieces.

INthe instant the Sloth turned her back, Jorl’s trunk quested across the workbench and found the phial Arlo had described. Then he surveyed the room and studied what he had to work with. He wasn’t totally useless in a lab; before entering the academy he and Arlo had spent several seasons producing spirits for sale to older students. He’d mastered the basic tenets of cleanliness required for consistent fermentation and enough lab technique to distill those results into beverages that were potent without being poison.

The Brady had returned to her frozen stance in the outer room, a careful nonchalance that he assumed disguised vigilance. He was supposed to be hard at work re-creating a drug, so he did his best to put on a compelling show. He puttered, fiddling with this piece of apparatus, that work screen, moving back and forth in the transparent box of a room. While he dithered with his surroundings, Jorl’s mind raced. He agreed with Arlo’s assessment, he could not give the drug to the senator. If he did, and didn’t explain the outcome, assuming they’d recorded Arlo’s work and could re-create it, the backlash when the Alliance began to lose its Speakers would be terrible. But if he warned Bish, he wouldn’t be believed. The Yak would see it as a ploy and proceed ahead, perhaps more cautiously, but still Speakers would be lost.

But if he took the drug himself …

The aleph he bore would keep him safe from having his ability burnt out, Arlo had been certain about that. He’d been less confident about the range of other effects that his simulations suggested. Jorl could see that his friend had left something out, something he’d told Margda but which she in turn had only hinted at to him. Jorl feared how it would affect him, but he had to weigh that unknown against the collected certainties that awaited him. In that light, there did not seem much choice.

Arlo had requested a vast number of ingredients, obviously far more than he’d used. Jorl systematically sampled from one substance after the other, pouring them into various beakers and flasks, measuring and mixing them with no purpose, setting some to cook and placing others in a cooling tray. Eventually, his actions produced a reaction volatile enough to shatter one of the lab’s instruments and start a small fire. Ceiling nozzles he hadn’t noticed showered suppressing foam down onto everything in the box, causing at least one other piece of equipment to sputter, spark, and shut down.

Jorl slipped on some foam and crashed to the floor, bringing Arlo’s phial to his mouth in the process, hoping the confusion of the moment would mask his drinking its contents. He cast the empty container aside, shattering it against the base of the work bench where foam and other spilled chemicals contaminated the remains. Meanwhile, the Sloth had reached the door and flung it wide. She pointed at him.

“Move! Procedure requires me to purge the clean room’s atmosphere, and I can’t do that with you inside. Quickly now!”

A three-pronged metal claw embedded itself in the table above his head. Jorl reached up and pulled it free with his nubs, curling his trunk around its cable. Druz stepped back from the door, retracting the cable as she went, and he slid across the floor on a frictionless carpet of suppression foam. As soon as he reached the outer room, the clean room’s door slammed shut and a shudder vibrated through the glass box. Jorl turned as he stood, watching a cyclone appear where he’d been. The fires had gone out, replaced by a mixture of foam and wind and smoke. The wind gathered up everything that hadn’t been bolted to the floor, not just the sopping foam, but chemicals, hardware, glassware, and tools. The mix of them whirled around and around, picking up speed, and then abruptly and soundlessly vanished. A hatch in the ceiling had blown and the inner room been laid open to a conduit that led to the outside edge of the senator’s ship and the vacuum beyond.

Another pair — or possibly one or more of those he’d seen before, he really couldn’t tell — of the Ailuros guards arrived. The Brady didn’t look at him or utter a word but must have issued a directive somehow. The Panda pair latched on and escorted him back through the ship, out the boarding corridor to the station, returning to the cabin where he’d last seen the Matriarch’s Lutr. They left him there, locking the door on their way out.

Since taking Arlo’s drug, Jorl had felt nothing. No effect at all. Perhaps it didn’t work. The pharmer had never actually tested the thing. What if his simulations held some flaw that failed to capture the difference between theory and practice? He stood in the center of the room for a time, feeling younger and more foolish than he had ever felt in his youth, performing a mental inventory, searching for some sign of the drug he’d taken. Nothing.

He settled into a corner of the room, not bothering with either bench or bed, but choosing to curl up on the floor, his back cradled by the intersection of two walls. It had all been for nothing. Margda’s prophecies and resurrection. His aleph. The abduction and slaughter of the Dying Fant. Arlo’s death. He’d been struggling to give meaning to all of it, and failed. Just as he had with that artifact when he’d been in the Patrol. Useless all over again. With a sigh, he stopped fighting and accepted it.

He slumped in his corner, allowing his thoughts to jump randomly through a sequence of associations and half-remembered ideas that produced apparent non sequiturs but nothing worth lingering on. In his mind, he smelled spiralmint. It was a memory of olfaction, not actually sensed, existing only in his thoughts. It was enough though, so long associated in his experience with the use of koph and the beginnings of a Speaking state. His left ear tingled.

Jorl thought about sight and smiled, seeing himself afloat in a lightless void, and knowing he also still sat in a corner of the station cabin with his eyes fast shut. He’d taken no koph and yet he was manipulating nefshons. It intrigued him, but to what good?

He’d destroyed the lab, and likely prevented the senator from being able to re-create Arlo’s drug. Even if the entire process had been recorded, he hoped no one would be able to tell where the real work ended and his cacophony began. And he’d consumed the sample himself, with no real plan in mind other than to keep it out of Bish’s hands. Which put things back pretty much where they’d been before.

Margda had mirrored the Senator’s ruthlessness, one politician to another, but despite her machinations which had shaped his own life, in the end she’d had no solutions. Arlo had killed himself, following the cold logic of a researcher. He’d been temporarily moved by an emotional appeal, but in the end had only been able to put the problem squarely in Jorl’s hands. But Jorl was just a historian; what did his friend expect him to be able to do? He had no frame of reference, no precedent to draw upon. In all the thousands of years of Alliance history, nothing like this had ever happened. And yet … the nefshons danced before him now. He had to try something .