Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

Molly laid back on the soft grass and looked up into the cloudless blue sky, dreaming.

Her imaginings were interrupted by the quaking ground. The meeting was over. Molly sat up and saw worry on Cole’s face as he stared at the grass, dragging a stick through the blades as if tracing various possibilities.

The large Glemot with the black fur approached them; Molly scrambled to her feet, but it hardly made a difference. The friendly-looking creature sank to his knees in front of her, which helped.

“Fair union, Molly Fyde. My designation is Franklin.” Molly could feel the words in her sternum. This guy could give her a back massage just by talking about it.

“Greetings.” Molly felt pressure to watch her vocabulary around these guys. After hearing some of the Council-talk, she knew they were already dumbing it down for her. Unfortunately, the middle-ground with these guys was still a stretch.

“The Campton Tribe of the Glemots accepts you both. Integration complete. The mechanical advantage of your positioning will be determined, and you will facilitate the engineering of Campton Tribe as it incorporates all of Glemot via rapid expansion and population controls. We highly anticipate determining your optimal positioning as a cog, which will gain purchase for the whole.”

He looked solemnly at her wounded arm. “Unfortunate. It will decrease your worth significantly in the short run, but the Council will recalculate as operation of that limb approaches normalcy. The pleasure achieved from this communication has been extreme from the perspective of this speaker. Between mastications we will resume in three point two Earth hours. Joyous afternoon, Molly Fyde.”

Franklin rumbled off after the rest, his back almost completely covered with ebony fur that seemed shiny to the point of wetness. She looked at Cole, expecting to find him laughing at the ridiculousness of the setting and speech.

But he just looked extremely upset, his eyes locked on something beyond the horizon.

“What’s wrong with you? Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked.

Cole shook his head, his eyes focusing back on her face. “This is some crazy stuff, Molly.” He glanced at her sling. “It’s a damn good thing you didn’t break both your arms.”

“Well, no nebula! It’s even better that I didn’t break both of my legs and have my head lopped off. Thanks for putting things into a cheery perspective.”

Cole didn’t laugh.

Molly knew all of his looks just from the shape of his lips. She’d spent hundreds of hours with him in the simulator as they went through every set of emotional states humanly possible. But she’d never seen this one. The closest she could remember was when she’d looked at him during the start of the Tchung Affair and they both realized, with absolute certainty, that they were about to die.

She asked him, her voice flat and full of trepidation, “Why am I lucky I didn’t break my other arm, Cole?”

The lips broke from a frozen purse. “Because they would’ve killed you.”

Molly suppressed a laugh. “These guys? They seem perfectly gentle! My gods, look at this place! It’s too fantastic for nonsense like that.”

“Keep your voice down.” He scanned their surroundings. “Let’s walk along the stream and talk. I’ve picked up quite a bit and filled in most of the blanks between. We’ve a little over three hours until we won’t have another chance to talk like this.”

Molly looked over her shoulder at the giant mounds of fur loping effortlessly up the hill. Activity was spreading out among the tents, the smoke from the cooking of various foods rising—solid white pillars holding up a windless sky. She was having a hard time feeling afraid.

“Walter may already be dead.” Cole said.

“What?!”

“Keep walking. I’m sorry to be abrupt, but I understand your euphoria; I felt it yesterday. Gods, I felt it as soon as I found you alive in the airlock. So I’m sorry to shatter your expectations, but I need to do it fast.”

“How’d he die?”

“I said he’s probably dead. It’s been determined by the council that he’s ‘without proper function.’ Also, the ship’s being dismantled as we speak. You already wouldn’t recognize it. These guys are big, but their claws are prehensile, it’s like each of them has a complete tool rig in both paws.”

“Without proper function?”

“Listen, this beautiful land is at war. Constant war. They have formulas for how to preserve the natural state of this planet, but tribes keep breaking off and establishing new ones as they argue over which formula is right and which is wrong. I can barely understand most of it, but they have genetics reduced to mathematics. They can tell what the average age in each population should be, and they maintain it.”

“Maintain it how?”

Cole steered her away from the edge of the woods, more in the open. “How do you think?” he whispered. “If the average gets too high, they kill a few of the elders. If it jumps up too fast, they kill their own young. There’s no hesitation, either. What they consider to be the ‘natural’ order must be maintained. That pursuit is so much higher than all else—it makes lesser ethical problems vanish in their eyes.”

“I don’t understand. I think I’m missing something or you skipped a step.” She reached down to pick up a stone, then tossed it into the stream in frustration.

“Okay. Quick history lesson. And keep in mind, some of this is from them and some is from the Navy reports we read, no telling how much I’m missing or getting wrong.” He cleared his throat and glanced around before beginning. “The Glemots were a race of warring tribes for thousands and thousands of years. Evolution, of course, rewarded some of the same nasty traits in their genome that we find everywhere else. But, instead of civilizing and overcoming these traits, they created a culture around them.

“Despite intellects that—well I’ll just say that what they did to control Parsona doesn’t amaze me in the least anymore. Despite this, they never got into technology. Not because their brains weren’t capable of seizing it, but because their lives were too brutal to invest in it. There was no foundation there. It was like us prior to organized agriculture, before some of us got bored and started tinkering.”

“And then the satellite,” Molly offered.

“Exactly. The satellite. The problem was, the Glemots thought they found another natural discovery. They saw this tech as something handed down from the gods. Or maybe something bubbling up from within the planet, who knows? So the tribe that found it, the Leefs, they went from smelting ore to seven-dimensional calculus in less than a year.”

“No way.”

“ Way . I’m serious, the intellect here is off the freakin’ charts. And they age more slowly than we do, so the amount they retain over an average lifetime is just crazy.”

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Cole headed her off. “Don’t interrupt, I’m getting to the important part. So, they had incredibly advanced tech within three years. The Leefs gained an advantage—and they guarded it closely. Nearby tribes were nearly hunted to extinction with their new weapons. I imagine the tribes on the other side of Glemot still have legends about what happened over here.

“Of course, they didn’t just build weapons. They also built the first complex devices common to all tech-savvy races. Radios, micro/telescopes, the sensors that augment our senses. That’s when they spot the ‘gods’ in the sky.”

“The Navy.”

“Right, the Navy. So they try and communicate with them using means that were actually beyond our ability, or maybe we weren’t listening. Either way, the legend is that they tried everything to hail our boys in black, but no response. So guess what they did—they built their first ship and flew up to say hello! Needless to say, they were pretty disappointed. They learned about the GU and the GN, and they came back and had a Council meeting, a famous one. They still talk about it all the time.”