Women of War Read online

  How was this possible? The question would prompt Lesy to giggle. Solitary Skalet would scowl and confer in anxious scents or other means with the like-minded Mixs. Ansky herself would smile and say it took practice.

  The subject of my origin was one I knew not to bring up around Ersh.

  There was no one left for me to ask, for we six were unique and alone among all other forms of life. Only we were Web beings, able to manipulate matter and energy—more specifically, our matter and our energy—in order to disguise ourselves.

  And to hold information. Our Web’s noble purpose was to gather and retain the accomplishments of other, ephemeral intelligences within our almost immortal flesh, shared only with Ersh, to be assimilated by her and then passed, in the amount and content she saw fit, to each of us.

  The least of that bounty to me. Which didn’t help quench my curiosity, leading me very early to seek my own answers. Why? was my favorite conversation starter, perhaps because it made my elders flinch.

  Now when Ersh deigned to offer the answer to a question, one had no choice but to live with the consequences. But my curiosity was so vast—or, more accurately, my ability at that age to imagine such consequences so limited—that I would continue to push Ersh for answers long after any other of my kin would wisely back away. It didn’t help that those answers were most often doled out to me, in typical Ersh fashion, not when I first asked, but rather when she felt knowing them would educate me even more than in their substance.

  So it was with war.

  War wasn’t a new concept to me. I’d assimilated the cultures, histories, and biologies of thousands of intelligent species from Ersh. I was familiar, if never comfortable, with war as a fact of life for some, the inevitable end of life for others.

  What was new was the warfare lately shared by Skalet. Even filtered through Ersh, her memories of the Kraal’s battle for Arendi Prime and its aftermath were like a stain, affecting my every thought. How had a Web-being, sworn to preserve ephemeral culture, become so very good at waging its wars?

  Not that I thought the question through in quite those terms. With what Ersh would doubtless consider a selfish fixation on my own life, I wanted to avoid learning any more than I had to about war and destruction. In particular, I didn’t want any more lessons on the subject from Skalet.

  Skalet probably felt the same. Certainly she made it abundantly clear our sessions together were a waste of her talents in tactics and strategy. When Ersh wasn’t in range, that is. Otherwise, as well argue with the orbit of Picco’s Moon as one of Ersh’s decisions about my education.

  Still, there had to be a way. Rather than grumble to myself, I decided to go to Ansky. However, it is the way of our kind that we literally have no secrets from Ersh. Something which hadn’t actually occurred to me when I decided it was safer to approach my birth mother than the center of our six-person universe.

  My chance came during Ansky’s turn to make supper, a tradition at those times when our odd family gathered in the same place, in this case, Picco’s Moon.

  Carved, like the rest of Ersh’s home, from rock almost as old as she, the kitchen was a sparse, practical room, able to accommodate a variety of cooking skills while safely housing a maturing Web-being prone to explode without notice. When it was just Ersh and I, food came out of the replicator and the counters became cluttered with what had her attention at the time, from greenhouse cuttings to bits of machinery. When Lesy played chef, gleaming porcelain of unusual shapes appeared, and woe betide any who disturbed her delicate—and often unidentifable—concoctions. I was definitely forbidden entrance.

  Ansky, being more competent and Esen-tolerant, greeted my arrival with a friendly, if absentminded, wave of welcome.

  “I can help,” I offered, grabbing the largest knife available and curling lip over fang in mock threat. Assorted vegetables were already cowering on the countertop.

  For some reason, Ansky rescued the knife from my paw with a deft slip of an upper tentacle. She liked to cook as a Dokecian, the five-limbed form possessing sufficient coordination to stir the contents of pots, dice vegetables, and carve meat all at once. I watched her wistfully—my own ability with the form still limited to pulling myself around and under furniture, at constant risk of forgetting which handhold to release before tugging at the next. A regrettable incident involving a tableful of crystals and a coat rack had led Ersh to forbid me this form indoors.

  “I’d ask you to do the dishes, but ...” her voice trailed away meanfully.

  My current self, my Lanivarian birth-form, abhorred water, something Ansky knew from experience. “I’ve gloves,” I assured her, my tongue slopping free between my half-gaping jaws. I resisted my tail’s urge to swing from side to side. Smiling was fine, but Ansky wouldn’t approve a lapse of good manners.

  We settled in, shoulder to shoulders, working in companionable silence. If my washing technique lacked finesse, at least the clean dishes arrived intact on the counter. I wasn’t the only one who measured my growth by such things.

  But I hadn’t come to Ersh’s steamy, fragrant kitchen—which had perfectly functional servos, so the physical effort to produce both steam and fragrance was unnecessary, but no one asked me—to be helpful. I’d come with a problem.

  Of course, Ansky knew it as well. “So. What is it this time, Esen?” she asked after a few moments.

  I almost lost my grip on one of Ersh’s favorite platters. “It?” I repeated, keeping my ears up. All innocence.

  My birth-mother wasn’t fooled. “Let me guess. Skalet’s latest enterprise.”

  My tail slid between my legs as I scrubbed a nonexistent spot. Confronted by the very subject I’d hoped to discuss, I found myself unable to say another word.

  “She’s become such a nasty morsel.”

  I couldn’t help but stare up at her. Each of her three eyes were the size of my clenched paws. Two looked down at me, their darkness glistening with emotion. “Did you think this sharing was welcomed by any of us? The taste of her memories, even first assimilated by Ersh, were—unpleasant.”

  I remembered Ersh-taste exploding in my mouth, the exhilarating flood of new memories filling my body. Remembered too much. Skalet hadn’t merely observed the Kraal’s latest war—she’d helped orchestrate it.

  That conflict and her cleverness would be my next lesson. There would be lists and details beyond what Ersh had filtered for me during assimilation. Worst of all, there would be Skalet’s unconcealed pride in her work. How could she?

  I wouldn’t put up with it. I’d hide until she left again. I’d—I’d undoubtably be found, reprimanded, and have my lesson anyway.

  To hide the shaking of my gloved paws, I shoved them deep in the suds-filled sink to rescue drowning utensils. “I don’t understand her,” I said finally, unable to keep a hint of a growl from the words. “She acts as they do. Why?” With great daring, I clarified: “Why does Ersh permit it?”

  “You’ll have to ask Ersh.”

  The noise I made wasn’t polite, but Ansky refrained from comment. “When she’s ready, I’m sure you’ll find out.” Then she said something strange, something I would come to understand only later. “The forms we take are ourselves, Esen-alit-Quar. We are no more immune to our individual pasts than any civilization is immune to its history. Never fall into the trap of believing yourself other than the flesh you wear, no matter its structure. Skalet—” A tentacle nudged the pot I was holding in the air. “Enough gossip. I need that one next.”

  Much later, having done Ansky’s cooking justice, I was doing my utmost to appear attentive and awake, my posture as impeccably straight as a form evolved from four-on-the-floor could manage. My involuntary yawns, however stifled, likely ruined the effect. “Was there anything else, Ersh?” I asked, before I could yawn again. It had been a longer day than most, given my now-departed Webkin had left disarray and laundry sprawled over their rooms. Being least and latest made any mess my responsibility.

  The tall mound of cr
ystal that was Ersh in her preferred form gave an ominous chime. “Should I not ask you, Youngest?”

  One of those “examine your soul for spots” questions. I was suddenly alert, if incapable of figuring out a safe answer.

  Before I needed to do so, Ersh continued. “You would know more about Skalet’s fascination with war.”

  How? I didn’t quite gnash my teeth. I should have realized Ersh would have shared with each before they left her again. I couldn’t blame Ansky. All Ersh had to do was take a nibble and she’d know all we’d done and experienced.

  On the bright side, while I couldn’t deny my question, she might answer it. “Yes, Ersh,” I said hopefully.

  Ersh leaned forward and I eased back, careful of my toes should she decide to tumble. A graceful and powerful mode of locomotion, but one I judged safer observed from a distance. “You wonder why I tolerate it?”

  This being a far less comfortable question, I did my best to shrink in place without appearing defensive. It was a posture I’d yet to master, but the effort sometimes mollified Ersh. At least it made me feel a smaller target. Then, as usual, my inconvenient curiosity overwhelmed my sense of self-preservation. “You let her do terrible things,” I whispered. “Why?”

  “I let her be her form’s self, Youngest,” a correction, but mild. “The consequences are as they are.”

  “Beings suffer and die.”

  “Skalet engages in war, Youngest.” As if this was an answer.

  I tilted my head, wary but wanting more. “What of the Prime Laws? She ends sentience before its time.”

  “The Kraal are a violent species.”

  “Their species is Human,” I corrected automatically.

  Ersh’s chime grew a shade testy. “A technicality. The Kraal refuse to mingle their genetic material with others of that heritage. It will not be long—as we measure time—before this is a matter of inability, not social preference. You would be wise to pay attention to this process. It is not uncommon among ephemeral cultures.”

  The ploy was familiar. Distract the youngest and she’ll follow along. “Why—” I said stubbornly, “do you let Skalet participate so fully in this culture?”

  Ersh settled herself with a slide of crystal over crystal. Reflected light ran over the floor, walls, and ceiling, making me squint. “You know the beginnings of that answer, Youngest.” There was no doubt in her voice. “You were there, when Ansky and I discussed Skalet’s first mission with the Kraal. From that, everything else has followed.”

  I’d been there? Before I could open my mouth to dispute this, however poor a decision that might have been, memory rearranged itself. To be more exact, memory reared up and shook me in sickening fashion from head to paw, recollections of that time before I had words of my own to use abruptly gaining coherance. With the perfect memory of my kind, it seemed I had recorded much I knew Skalet herself would have wished to know—

  Or not.

  Pressure mattered. Little else. Time. I knew the passage of days, marked them by movement conveyed by waves pressing against me.

  Me. Me. Me. I knew me, that I existed, if then I had had no language in which to express that knowledge.

  But the memory of a Web-being is perfect in every detail. So it was that when Ersh challenged me to consider such things as beginnings, I recalled my own—and by so doing, I applied what I’d learned since to the experiences so precisely recalled. The result was—interesting.

  The waves of pressure which so entertained my proto-self had been generated by three sources. The inner workings of Ansky’s body—the pulse of heart and lungs, the rush of blood through arteries, the gurgling of her digestive tract—all of these transferred through the ammniotic fluid in which I rested as a symphony of pressures against the cells of my exquisitely sensitive skin. I’d hum along.

  Then, there was the impact of large muscle movement. Oh, be sure I noticed when Ansky dropped to all fours, or stood on two legs, or bent over, or laughed.

  Last, and most intriguing to recall, sound. I’d registered everything I’d heard through the walls and fluid of my living cradle through ears disposed to greater range than most sentient beings possessed.

  Especially when those around me were, well, shouting.

  I ignored innumerable heated discussions about Ansky’s lamentable condition, cuing my memories to one word: Skalet. Sure enough, they’d argued about her as well.

  “Skalet? She’s incapable! A coward! I tell you I’ll be fine. Send me. You know I’m better at learning culture, at blending in with other species. Let our Web-kin skulk somewhere else.”

  Skalet? Even as I tried to wrap my brain around what Ansky was saying, very loudly and with enough passion to shake my surroundings, Ersh replied, “Thanks to your blending, you can’t travel until this latest creation of yours is uncorked and given to its father. I intend to monitor this emerging kind of Human closely. Skalet will go and she will learn them for us.” The unspoken “or else” penetrated Ansky’s abdomen; either that, or I was influenced by my subsequent wealth of experience with that tone.

  My world shifted and jiggled, then a tidal wave hinted that Ansky had moved to another chair and dropped in it without care for me. Parental she wasn’t. “It won’t be long.” This with certainty. Warmth implied a paw pressed over me. I kicked at it. “She’s impatient.”

  Really, I wasn’t. Especially in hindsight.

  “She?” Ersh’s chime was nicely ominous. “Don’t become attached.”

  Perhaps my presence—or her preoccupation with its inconvenience—gave Ansky a little more spine than usual. “Becoming attached is my skill, Ersh. Who else brings back the interpersonal details we need about a sentient species? Who learns what it is to be that form? Skalet?” The growl under the word brought an instinctive echo from me, albeit consisting of a pathetic, soundless tensing of a breathing system that had no air in it yet. “Skalet spends her time in other forms—which is as little as possible—hiding in bushes. She uses gadgets to record from a distance, then presumes to tell us she’s gathered information firsthand. But she’ll have no convenient hiding places at this Kraal outpost. As befits a culture almost constantly in conflict, they’re more fanatical than she is about surveillance. Her devices will be useless.”

  “Yes.” Ersh somehow made the word smug.

  I blinked free of memory, for an instant finding it odd to have air against my eyes. “You threw Skalet off a cliff,” I concluded, doing my best to restrain a likely regrettable amount of triumph at the thought. Ersh had tossed me from her mountain to encourage my first cycle into Web-form. Skalet’s plunge had been no less perilous for lack of rock at the bottom. For I knew the Kraal.

  Not personally, being too young in Ersh’s estimation to leave her Moon, but the assimilated memories of my Webkin were clear enough. Kraal society had evolved an elaborate structure in which every individual had an allegiance to one or more of the ruling Houses through birth or action. Moreover, those allegiances, called affiliations, were permanently tattooed on each adult Kraal’s face. While they allowed no images of themselves until death, to ensure only final affiliations were recorded for posterity, their gates were guarded by those who remembered faces exceedingly well. Only those who had been introduced by a known and trusted individual would be admitted, given that advancement through Kraal nobility typically involved assassination of rivals by as clever a means as possible.

  Not a group to overlook a stranger.

  “Why?” My favorite question. I stared at Ersh, a mountain of crystal shaped in hardness and edge.

  Her voice could be as warm and soft as any flesh. “Why did I put her at risk? Because Skalet resisted being other than herself. The idea of a different form influencing who she was terrified her. She would be crippled by that fear, useless to our Web, unless forced to live it.”

  “Why the Kraal?” I whispered.

  “A act of charity, Youngest.” I must have looked confused, because Ersh clicked her digits together with an impati
ent ring. “Like Skalet, Kraal do not welcome physical contact, unless in practice drills. Like Skalet, they do not welcome personal questions. They share an obsession with intellect and games. And respect authority.”

  I ignored the last, most likely aimed at me. “What happened?”

  As Ersh winked into the blue teardrop of her Web-form, I realized my curiosity was once more taking me where I’d doubtless regret going.

  Not that fear could stop instinct. I released my hold on this form, cycling into my true self, and formed a mouth for Ersh’s offering of the past.

  Gloves froze and stiffened; coat fabric froze and crinkled. The slight whoof of air that escaped the face mask with each breath added its moisture to the rim of ice searing both cheeks and chin, that flesh rapidly losing all feeling anyway. Another being might have feared the cold, the darkness, and the howl of a wind that ripped unchallenged across this plain of floating ice from an empty ocean six hundred kilometers away.

  Then again, another being wouldn’t have preferred chipping frost from the antenna array, a duty that entailed far more than finding and climbing a ladder in the dark, over company and warmth. But Skalet craved these moments of solitude, no matter how punishing to her Humanself.

  For the Kraal outpost was as close to a hell as any Human legend remembered by the Web. At the southern pole of an uninhabited world known only by a number, those assigned to it faced two seasons: a summer of sharp blinding ice crystals, in air that struggled up to minus twenty degrees Celsius under an unsetting sun; or a winter of utter darkness, where ceaselessly drifting snow erased the tracks of any who dared move outside at temperatures that solidified oil, let alone flesh.

  Not that either season made hiding easier. In the summer, movement could only be concealed within tunnels through the snow, joining each of the domes. In the winter, radiation leaked by suit or building would betray them. For this was an outpost of that deadly kind: a spy set in place for a war that might come their way, at best an expendable asset, at worst, a prized target.