“One [second].” She held up a finger in a human gesture requesting a pause, then leaned in to speak with the attendant holding the cylinder in hushed tones. She touched the attendant’s shoulder and stroked it, perhaps for comfort, then took the cylinder with an outstretched hand before turning back to where Thuk stood next to his perennially perturbed dulac.
“[O.K./Affirmative].” Susan held out the silver tube with the strange markings. “This colony. [Consume/devour] … um…” She searched for a word, probably struggling with the same translation issues on her end of the conversation. It was entirely too easy to watch someone struggle with a language and syntax that wasn’t their own and assume they were stupid. Natural, even. But this one had already proven herself very clever indeed. Thuk was sure he sounded like a half-head to her ears as well.
“Rotting light!” Susan blurted out. “[Consume/devour] rotting light. Spread throughout. Soak up like [sponge]. Clean caverns and tunnels. Safe ground.”
“What’s a ‘sponge’?” Kivits asked.
“I’m going with something absorbent. Like a guju towel.” Susan pointed and nodded her head in affirmation. “There you go.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I think she’s saying they have a type of spore or fungal colony that eats rotting light.”
Susan shook her head in the negative. “Not fungus. Think of plants.” She held her gloved hand flat like a leaf and wiggled the fingers of her other hand down onto it like rain. No, like sunlight.
“Ah! No, it doesn’t eat it, it photosynthesizes it. That’s amazing.”
“That’s preposterous,” Kivits said.
“Why would it have to be? The mechanisms would be similar, just either evolved or built to handle the higher energy levels. They probably developed it to clean up rotting light corruption on their own vessels.”
“But how do we know it’s not a biological weapon?”
Susan snorted through the paired holes in her olfactory organ. “Need not come over to kill you. Press button, fire [laser], I take swim.”
Kivits reared up onto his hind legs. “Is that a threat?!” Several of the warriors, of both species, took note of the sudden tension and braced for action, their weapons brought to a ready position.
“Sit down, Dulac. It’s not a threat, it’s a statement of fact. Why go to the trouble of coming here and exposing her people to danger just to kill us slowly when she could do it at light-speed with the twist of a toggle?”
Slowly, Kivits accepted the logic of what had been said and stood down. The sudden pressure front lifted from the rest of the cavern as calm returned. “I’m sorry for jumping to an assumption. It was ungenerous. But what happens when all the corruption is gone?”
“Actually I’m curious about that as well,” Thuk said.
“It [Famine/starve],” Susan answered with a shrug of her shoulders. “Nothing to [consume/devour,] it dies. No fuss.”
“A moment,” Thuk said, then pulled Kivits aside for a short duet. “Well? What do you think?”
“I think we don’t know what they’re really doing here in the first place.”
“They’ve already sped up our repairs by more than a day. If this plant colony can do what she claims, we don’t have to cut out and replace the corrupted walls and tunnel segments. That saves us weeks of repairs and gets the affected caverns back in use. Besides, if we can isolate a sample, even after it’s dead, our own gene growers back in the Symphony might be able to replicate it. Think of a colony of that stuff in stasis on every ship in the Dark Ocean Fleet. Think of the lives saved over time.”
“So you’re going to risk it, regardless of my advice.”
“I’m singing with you, aren’t I?”
Kivits fluttered his thorax with annoyance. “Fine, we’ll risk it. But if this is a weapon—”
“Then you can lord it over me while we’re both dying in the infirmary. Fair enough?” The dulac looked away and said no more. Thuk returned to Susan. “We accept your gracious offer, Susan. Please, instruct your attendants to finish their work.”
Two more days passed. All told, three shuttles full of human attendants rotated through the Chusexx, working alongside Thuk’s own repair teams, sharing their expertise and bearing their load of the work. Susan had returned to the Ansari after the first day, but they’d kept in frequent contact to coordinate the effort. By the time source energy was restored, the humans and Xre had developed a grudging respect for one another. Even the spores of comradery had begun to sprout.
“The last shuttle of humans are departing the harbor now, Derstu.”
“Dulac, I’d say our new friends have earned a parting salute, would you agree?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“We are always free to make the wrong choice, Kivits.”
“Then yes, they certainly deserve a salute,” he said with only the slightest hint of mockery in his tone.
Thuk beamed with satisfaction. “Hurg, open a link to the Ansari and her shuttle, please. We’re singing the ‘Forked Path Lament.’”
“Link established, Derstu.”
“Hello, Derstu. How I [aid/assist] you?” came Susan’s now-familiar voice through the mouths of the mind cavern.
Instead of answering directly, Thuk lifted a claw and signaled the assembled harmony to begin. The “Forked Path Lament” started slowly, building over its course. It was an old song, one of the oldest. It was the first song larvae learned formally to mark the day their clutches were assigned to mounds and distributed. It was used anytime friends, family, or harmonies had to part ways. It was beautiful, haunting, and mournful all at once, an expression of the sadness one felt at being separated from those they’d grown to care for. But, in the song’s final measures, it turned and uplifted, clawing for altitude, laying the foundations of hope for a joyous reunion further down the path.
Thuk had probably sang it a thousand times by now. It was a simple song without the multiple layers of
