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Ch. 6 pt. II

Some show off captured projectile spitters and point back the way they came as if suggesting more await. Then a small group of Upu and Naht-do go out hoping to slow any attackers down long enough to let the main group escape. Sacrifices for the greater good. Some of them will go out and not come back. Wounds might come back so Rantira prepares to do double duty. Patching up the warriors when they return and cooking them food the next morning before they go out.

Amongst these numbers, there are no servants. No slavery. Just this needless battle where at the end they all hope the Elders will be toppled.

“Word is there are mounds of dead all over Majt. I wouldn’t go anywhere near the top levels of the bubble. Almost all fingers have been secured too. All we have are the caverns.”

Avoiding the top levels during his other task is easy.

Once a day, that’s how often he plies his trade. Once a day he prepares for this one task, cooking for all that come, by seeking the ingredients the old fashion way. It’s an arduous task with one hand, but he manages. With campfires burning at his back he enters the cold smog and picks up speed until he finds himself at a jog. The empty cavern echoes as he moves and enters the ancient forest of red moss trees. A place of many Upu memories. Unchanged since the creatures crawled their way free tens of thousands of glimpses before. Instead of a projectile slinger, he packs only his wits as a weapon. But because it’s not safe to be out alone, he puts a bit of hustle in his step. When the day starts he will need what the forest can provide and none of it will be openly available without a search. He is happy to do this chore, gather the morning’s ingredients- even with the battle so close that it stings his nose with rot and cordite. Soon enough he shoos a wild hen from her nest and finds a dozen eggs, then by a trickle of a stream, some wild garlic, and under a red-leafed bush, dug up by a wild sus, a few tubers. Supplied and happy he is able to open for business. Soon enough he is telling the Upu, children really, not meant to know anything more than how to pray and how to die, that he has mushroom omelets, and fresh-baked red-moss cakes available. They don’t know the difference or care and only want more and quickly he sells out.

Cleaning up he talks with one of the older Naht-do, a slave with an affirmatizer still stuck in his arm.

He gets up to go and makes eye contact, and says, “Got a feeling this is going to be goodbye. I feel like I should thank you.”

Rantira is unable to take thanks for his efforts. He simply fills gaps and tells this to the former slave.

“That’s what we all do. Going to be a big day, do or die, type day.”

Rantira nods because that’s life, isn’t it? Do or die. And he tells this to the Naht-do and gets a chuckle, “you say that now, but bettin’ at the pointy end of a beckoner your tune sounds different.

Rantira holds up his nub and offers what best can be described as a smile because sometimes that’s all a damn fool can do.

“Well either way tomorrow won’t be so busy.”

And he’s right, there almost is no tomorrow.

The fighting is as intense as Rantira’s efforts to keeping the dying still alive. And after the enemy comes in what the historians will call the last will of Soya’s patriots, some did and some did not. And the next glimpse he wakes to find himself still alive and not waiting to be hanged.

So he does what he is best at and feeds those around. He finds a small heel of stale bread carves out the crumb and using a few chutes of fresh garlic-grass and some lucked-out-to-find greens, growing almost within arms reach. He makes a small fire and over a few orange coals cooks his small meal, lamenting, “I wish I had a little fat.”

Suddenly a hand, “Here.” In the palm, creases packed with black soot and the dried blood of patriots, are a few old olives presented as if an ageless treasure. Bah smiles with a mouth filled with abused teeth.

Rantira takes the olives because they will do nicely and after a bit adds some water and cooks the mush down into four cakes. He gives two to his new friend. The scraps might be even harder to find, but if he survives to die on Nahtdo, it’ll be one meal at a time, because there is always something to cook.

Uncertainty is huddling in a deep sublayer that smells like the ancestral excrement that helped the Opu build up from their subterranean homes eating decent red moss cakes with a stranger. 300 refugees remain in what is called an ancient cavern home. Rantira leans back and sighs taking in a breath filled with the smells of red moss cooking. It’s tangy with alliums but also a tinge of mold. Mold is standard here. The air is moist and warm, perfect for rot, and that’s what they all do here rot.

Rantira looks up to find Bah staring at him.

“You’re quite a lucky creature,” he sneers around bites.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

The old Naht-do cook explains what most likely what will happen to him. “So Rantira is far from lucky. And very close to the end.”

“Rantira, you are far from innocent.”

“Many do not wish to judge a slave for doing what he was beckoned to do.”

“Many would though. Your life compared to a slave on Nahtdo cleaning up Soya’s mess. Cleaning the dead and rotting life as new life claims the old. The killing continues there. The mining and the killing. I served Soya also. I built her bombs. I was once a greasy wrench for her to twist. Do you believe me? Do you think I am being truthful?”

Rantira removes the remaining cake from his mouth. It suddenly tastes of ash. He never claimed to have a perfect memory, but he remembers Soya’s staff and doesn’t think Bah was there, if anything he looks like he climbed out of a hole. Anxiety floods his system like a torrent. He looks past Bah and sees a group nearby looking over. He would be interested in trading places them. He senses the path to survival he tread has been a trick after all.

“Regardless. If not for your historical value, I wouldn’t really give two squirts, but because you are who you are and still alive when many aren’t, I can’t overlook it..” Bah’s face crumbles into angry wrinkles. “The question is how can you grab a spoon and stir your concoction. Why does it not taste like the blood of all Soya’s victims? How do you not taste it now, that with each bite your existence takes away from someone who is meant to be alive?”

Bah wears dinge-colored coveralls spotted with blood splatter. His ears droop like they were snapped in half at some point and never treated. He chews on the red moss puck, Rantira prepared, before tossing it away. “Disgusting without neon gravy.”

Rantira agrees. Without the gravy, this particular variant of the Upu diet is the driest, nearly inedible version of the ingredient he can make. It’s only served when the red moss was farthest from its freshest. And because he had no other choice.

He looks dejected at the food as a child scurries to collect it from where Bah threw it.

“Is this all? Is this what Soya’s destruction on Naht-do gave us?”

“The Great Suffering...

“I am finding less and less every day that I can tolerate hearing another syllable about the Great Suffering.” The Nahtdo points at Rantaria and says, “Cruel that’s what this is. Not another blessing from The Great Suffering, but something to be fixed.”

He shrugs. Finding a hardness in his heart. He doesn’t care. “I just want to die on Nahtdo,” and serve food to the day’s collection of Lucky-to-be-alives but he keeps the second part to himself. Waiting for release, or death when either would be fine. Then he relieves Bah is right about one thing. Food is just a pathway to continued health and health meant continued work. And for the first time, he has no master to make proud. Only himself and he finds himself disappointed in his efforts.

“All launches have been suspended making that virtually impossible anyway, so maybe you are lucky in that your disappointment will be short-lived. Dying anonymously on Grotto might just be Soya’s final legacy to you.”

“Death is release,” he says. This brings him back around to his newest conundrum, does he even care anymore? Can Bah and his overt threats mean anything if he doesn’t let them? And if not what does he care about now anyway except where he dies. Like he ever had a choice, to begin with. He killed Soya and whatever he thought that death would cause, he did it, maybe that was freedom enough. A choice in fact.

Bah claims, “My first owner was an Aerosmith who died after an accident. Lost his arm in a failed medical experiment. Liquid bone poisoned the stump from growing. Liquid bone. Not your doing, but you helped. So when I was told you were here I was happy to come to take a look. Usually, you are right, a slave is forgiven for the dalliances of its master. You, though, are special. An effigy. And Effigies don’t warrant care because they have nil value. And being at war against The Elders changed your value to nil.”

“No,” Rantira answers, annoyed by the implication he is caught but hopefully suddenly also. Death is inevitable. Picking that death might just be the one fantasy a former slave can make real. “Eating alone has never an option for the camp famous resident or not. You know who I am? What do you think they will do when they find out. Save me? Kill me? You? They have fetishized Soya and are prepared to die to bring to bear what she sought. An effigy is a powerful thing on both sides of a conflict. I could be the curse that brings down the Elders. There is no winning. I killed Soya. The Elders should give me what I want.

“And what’s that?”

“I will go quietly and finish my life on Nahtdo.”

“Of course, and it’s only luck it was me, and not someone more easily swayed,” he winks and after a moment of confusion Rantira realizes what’s happening. It’s too late. Peace was both something he never expected, and freedom even too far for fantasy. Yet he his earned neither.

“When?”

“Any moment now. The Elders stopped at nothing when they were told where you were. They want the equation summed.”

“Sum?” and it’s then Rantira thinks about the math he helped Shuhp Yee edit. A version of Spatial Folding Shuhp gave to Soya as a gift on the eve of her final day of trial. How many glimpses ago? It doesn’t matter because he murdered Soya Yee and has been waiting for his death sentence ever since. Their equation breaks down what makes thought tangible, what makes personality a real construct. They built in a flexibility for the in and outs of the process of learning. At one time consciousness was inseparable from the brain and body. The thoughts and feelings and past of an individual were as much a part of a person’s makeup as the pigment of their fur. It was interesting, the math behind personality. The concepts were so exciting that Rantira offered something he never thought he would. A storage container. One built on the same tech as his atom-variator. The basis of liquid bone. He couldn’t help it.

Shuhp Yee called it Spatial Folding and the birth of more for them all. He claimed it was the most important work ever done. The Equation that was soon to be erased from existence. Good. If fully realized it could even be worse for life everywhere then liquid bone was on Nahtdo.

“I’m just a cook. My death is no more important than any slave’s.”

“It’s not personal, Rantira. All we want is to erase Soya from memory.

Rantira imagines the messy task, happy at least his part in it is at an end. Death sounds restive.

Then Bah smiles and as projectiles start flying with bangs and whistles. Screams of assaulting troops echo from the path leading out to the city and bah says, “good, they are here.”