Lawrence Schoen: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

The Bear stepped forward, opening a small pouch on his belt and withdrawing a notary seal. “Her mark, now, if you please,” he said to the physician’s assistant who took Lirlowil’s hand, smeared a green gel over the pads of her fingers, and pressed them to a piece of cardstock. The Urs reviewed the impression and passed the card to the parson.

“I do place the seal of my office alongside your mark, confirming your change of status from Citizen to Resource.” The parson tucked the card away, waited for the PA to pack up her things, and then both departed, leaving Lirlowil alone with the Bear.

As her chemical panic subsided, Lirlowil asked “What … what just happened?”

“What had to happen. There is a need and only you can serve it. We’re leaving in ten minutes. You can use that time to pack whatever you can carry, or not. I don’t much care. I’ll give you another five minutes to take a shower. I won’t subject my crew to your odor.”

“Where are we going?”

“Your new home,” said the Bear. “Nine minutes and three quarters.”

Free of chemical enhancement for the first time in more than a year, Lirlowil took in the sprawl of toys and distractions that filled her home, including a handful of other Lutr playmates that had managed to sleep through her unwilling transformation. Ten minutes was ludicrous. She’d need twice that span even to find her essentials, and she had no illusions about being able to carry it all. She instead opted to take nothing and went straight to her bathing chamber where she indulged with a variety of shower massagers, perfumed soaps, and bath oils, for far longer than the Urs had permitted. In the end, he pulled her from her shower and marched her out of her home and to a waiting vehicle, water still streaming from her sleek pelt, naked except for a flimsy robe he had found and thrown at her.

Less than an hour later, Sharv was a dwindling blue-green marble in the view port of the Patrol vessel carrying her to the station above Barsk. Days later, a trio of Ailuros, the sheen of their slick, black security uniforms blending and contrasting against the black and white of their fur, took her from the ship and ensconced her in a suite remodeled from an unused warehouse. In the nearly one hundred days since, she hadn’t seen a living soul.

A sealed viewer had awaited her in the middle of her rooms. She broke the seal and skimmed the document for an explanation. Then she dropped the viewer and threw a fit. She screamed. She wailed. She beat her hands and feet against the walls and floors. Nothing and no one responded. Trembling with frustration Lirlowil retrieved the viewer, reset it to the beginning, and read it through more carefully. Urs-Major Krasnoi’s instructions were precise and absurd. He instructed that she use her talents to Speak to Fant — those disgustingly furless freaks — and telepathically probe them for any knowledge that involved koph, the Speaker’s drug. According to her briefing, Alliance scientists had spent years attempting to reverse engineer the drug, without success. Her assignment was part of a new direction to obtain answers. They wanted the details of its refining, the quantities and characteristics of its ingredients, the qualities of the flora that made up its parts, the growing cycle of those plants, any particular methodologies involved in harvesting them, and on and on. If it touched on koph and existed in the minds of any of the dead Fant she could summon, the Bear wanted a detailed report.

Lirlowil shuddered. Whoever had come up with the plan had been utterly clueless about Speakers. She couldn’t simply conjure up anyone from anywhere. The nefshons she manipulated were subatomic particles of personality that dispersed upon their creator’s death. But during the long course of a life, everyone transferred hundreds of particles with every touch. These in turn became the stuff of memory. It’s what made memory of people so vivid and different than memory of how to swim or the capitals of Sharv’s twenty-seven principalities.

Speaking required she already possess some of these particles. A Speaker needed enough sense of her conversant’s identity to separate that individual from every other person that ever existed. Trivially easy if she had personal experience of the conversant — nefshons of the person carried in her own mind. Lacking that, a summoning was still possible if enough objective information existed to create a clear picture. Unfortunately, exceedingly few dead, Barsk-born Fant had been sufficiently well documented to allow anyone to Speak to them.

Which was, Lirlowil realized, part of the reason they had wanted her. On Sharv she had developed a reputation for successfully Speaking to strangers. But it was a cheat. All those people whom she had never met were the friends or relatives or business associates of the clients that came to her. During interviews, while her petitioners unraveled anecdotes of the intended conversant, Lirlowil had slipped into their minds and gathered up richer impressions than their words could express, telepathically copying the nefshons the target had transferred in life. Armed with such intimate details, she succeeded where other Speakers would fail, all of which merely added to her prestige as a treasure of Sharv. But somewhere a bureaucrat had misunderstood the particulars of her technique, and here she was.

Her usual solution, having a tantrum, had failed to accomplish anything so she ramped things up. Assuming her suite was monitored — she’d already confirmed it was shielded to prevent her telepathic spying on anyone beyond its walls — she ranted and railed against the injustice of her situation. She made wild accusations. She threatened. She screamed the most lurid improprieties and colorful invective that had ever been heard on any Patrol station, let alone from the lips of a young woman raised in a privileged society. She broke every piece of furniture and every implement in her rooms that wasn’t bolted to floor or wall. Nothing produced the slightest response or even a hint that anyone aboard the station monitored her at all.

Only when she’d taken a broken shard of mirror to her own throat did the gravity field in her room suddenly increase, pinning her to the floor with ever-increasing weight until she passed out. She awoke some unknown span later to find everything restored. Not just the gravity but all the rooms’ furnishings had been returned to their earlier state. The viewer with her orders lay on the floor where she’d dropped it. Its content remained the same as well.

Bit by bit, over the course of several days, she adapted to her new situation. The crew of the station did not interact with her, which suited her fine. She sent off notes and reports from a unit built into her desk and received printed replies. Through trial and error she learned a few simple things. They wanted what they wanted, and as long as she attempted to provide, they would in turn tolerate her behaviors up to the point of physical harm, and try to honor any requests within the limited resources of the station and its crew.

The first proof of this was the gravity in one of her rooms. She’d asked for and received the plans detailing the electronics built into the walls that controlled her bedroom. Using the expertise she’d acquired from the mind of a thief she’d dallied with a year before, she removed various panels until she had access to the unit maintaining the room’s gravity and disabled it to see how the station crew would react. They didn’t.

After two days of floating in her sleep, Lirlowil restored the panel, though not the gravity. The null field of her room felt invitingly like floating in the comforting waters of her favorite stream back home. Wrapping herself in that small bit of comfort she finally went to work.