Survival Read online

  “To keep them safe from the—” Brymn touched her mouth to stop what she would have said.

  “Please do not speak that name here, Lamisah,” he said as he took his hand away.

  Mac nodded, seeing the crèche from a new perspective—that of a vault protecting a living treasure. She tried to estimate how many such vaults would be required to house the new generations of an entire planet, the organization to feed and care for them, and gave up. But her imagination could encompass the desperation of a species that had to bury its helpless young to protect them.

  The Ro had a great deal more to answer for than the destruction of Base.

  “A sight to warm the hearts,” Brymn said softly, “but we haven’t time to waste, Mac. Come. It’s not far.”

  Mac turned to follow her guide, resisting the temptation to look back.

  “It is here. The answer to everything.”

  Given the conviction in Brymn’s voice, Mac sat on the nearest cratelike tube, pulled out a water bottle, and studiously broke off a piece of cereal bar to chew. They were, barring any more secret doors and chambers the Dhryn hadn’t revealed, sitting in a storeroom.

  A storeroom packed to its ceiling with tubes marked: Textile Archives. Some were dusty enough to have been down here since the Dhryn began burrowing.

  She watched Brymn dump his bags, then rush to one particular stack, running his hands greedily along the outside of the bottommost tubes as if they were treasure. “Help me, Lamisah,” he ordered, busy peering at labels. “We must find the oldest specimen. It will be marked the ‘year of beginning’ or some such thing.” He gave a dismissive gesture to the packed corridor they’d walked through to come here. “Anything outside this area is too recent. The curator was adamant.”

  “Why?” But she was already packing away her snack and coming to join him. “What are you looking for, Brymn?”

  “Proof. I know it’s here.”

  That was all the explanation he’d give her, perhaps assuming, correctly, that Mac was ready to desert him if she had the slightest idea how to get herself back to civilization. The labyrinth they’d traversed to reach the crèche had been nothing compared to what Brymn had taken her through to reach this . . . this . . . storeroom. Twists, turns, another small access door to break through . . .

  Implying, Mac suddenly realized, looking at the large storage tubes, that there must be another, more normal way in—something she could find and use herself.

  She set to work with greater will, part of her attention on the labels, and the rest looking for any sign of a door. It wasn’t going to be obvious, of course. Who’d worry about the inside of a storeroom, for one, plus shroud fabric lined these walls as well as those of all the accessways. The time and labor to shield nonessential areas had to have been staggering, a convincing display of the belief of the Dhryn in its effectiveness.

  Mac hoped they were right.

  The labels were straightforward enough, date of preservation—Mac thought it likely the tubes contained a controlled climate—and a code number that she came to realize was the order of preservation. The process had begun not that long ago, hence the relatively uniform nature of the tubes, and it appeared the curators had elected to preserve the older specimens first. Perhaps they valued the antiquities most.

  Or they’d been deteriorating fastest in the nearly constant rain on the surface. Mac chided herself as she climbed over a low stack to see what was behind it. She was growing too familiar with them, with Brymn, with the Dhryn as a whole. Drawing conclusions as if they were Earth-born and she understood what drove them, as if they were Human and foreign, not alien.

  “I’ve found it! Mac! Mac!”

  Obeying the summons and her own curiosity, Mac climbed back into the main area in time to see Brymn staggering into the middle of the open space, a tube taller than he was clutched in all three pairs of arms. Before he teetered forward again and dropped it, she added her arms to his and helped him put the heavy thing down.

  Mac read the label and blinked in awe. Without doing the conversion to standard union years, she didn’t know how long ago it had been preserved. But the code was a single digit. Dhryn for one. She had no idea how old the specimens inside might be, but they were doubtless the irreplaceable gems of the archives. Mac couldn’t believe Brymn, an archaeologist, had almost dropped the tube.

  “Quickly, quickly! We must open it. No. Wait!” Almost panting, Brymn bounced away to get one of his bags, then bounced back, ripping the bag open. “I must be ready to take the readings. Now open it.”

  “What? You can’t open it—there have to be preservatives inside. You know better than I do what could happen to the contents if they contact the air.” She was guarding the cultural heritage of a species from a mad being. “What readings? Brymn, what’s going on?”

  For a wonder, he stopped waving his arms and gave her his full attention, his expression both sad and solemn. “We both seek the truth, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor. Trust me. Help me. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Then will we go home? Up there? Out of here?”

  “I promise, Lamisah.”

  Mac threw up her hands in surrender. “Fine. What do you want me to do?”

  Her job, it turned out, was to crack the seal of the tube while Brymn stood ready. The hooklike device in his hand resembled that used by the Esteemed Academic on Mac’s food supplies. It didn’t look like any scanning tech Mac knew, but then these storage tubes were odd enough themselves. He had to show her how to unlock them first, a matter of sliding four sections of metal past one another in a specific order. Not a lock, but protection against doing accidentally what they were doing deliberately.

  Mac held her breath as she slid the final section and broke the seal.

  A cool mist formed along the edge within seconds, condensing along the tube itself. Brymn avoided it as he pushed his device inside the tube, the hook slipping in as if designed for that purpose.

  He read the display in silence. Not quite, Mac thought, feeling vibrations along the tube.

  “What is it?”

  His eyes didn’t leave the device. “Pull the lid wide open, Mac.”

  In for a penny . . . Mac didn’t bother with the rest of her dad’s saying, too busy struggling with hinges meant for Dhryn musculature. The lid lifted, then toppled over so she had to dodge smartly out of its way or risk her toes. It fell to the floor with a clang.

  As the metallic echoes died away, Mac came around to Brymn, peering over his shoulder. Three of his hands were busy inside the tube, pulling free pieces of fabric so fragile they crumpled in his fingers as he brought them close to his device, their bright dust sparkling as it drifted back into the tube.

  “Brymn.” Mac tugged one arm. “Stop it. You’re ruining the specimens!”

  He stopped, but not, Mac decided, at her urging. The Dhryn sank to a sitting position of his own accord, staring into the tiny display of his device as if trying to burn the image into his brain.

  “So it’s true,” he boomed slowly. “I believed. Yet at the same time, I couldn’t. But here is the proof.”

  “Of what?” Mac did her best to sound patient.

  “That what is Dhryn, on this world, in our history, began no more than three thousand standard years ago. We began, when so much else ended forever.”

  She sank down herself, using the end of the tube as a bench, despite its damp chill. “The Moment. This is why you’ve been trying to fix a date,” Mac said wonderingly. “You believe the Dhryn survived the devastation of the Chasm and came here, before the transects failed.” Mac paused, feeling the irony. “So Emily was working with one of the mythical ‘Survivors’ all along and didn’t realize it.” She frowned at Brymn. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

  A halfhearted hoot. “I’m thought crazy enough by my own kind—do you think I’d spread that to other species?”

  Mac patted the tube. “But you weren’t. You were right. But why? Why was this a secret?”


  “The Progenitors must have decided it was for our own good.”

  “Why? Surely it was a great triumph for your kind?”

  “Or so great a fear, so intense a trauma, that our ancestors chose not to think of it, in case thinking made it stay real. Without that fear, the Dhryn could rebuild, move outward, accept the gift of the transects when it was offered us.”

  “For the second time,” Mac mused.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have had the ability to travel between systems to arrive here, Brymn. The question becomes, did your species develop the transect technology in the first place, only to somehow lose it?”

  The Dhryn was embarrassed. She could read that by now. There was a shifting of his eyes from hers, a rising slant to his posture. “We Dhryn do not value innovation or change—the Progenitors prefer we adapt the technology we have, or use that of others, wherever possible. Having been to the worlds of other species, to Human worlds, I can say without any doubt, Mac, the Dhryn are fundamentally incapable of such a thing.”

  “Well, we didn’t invent it either,” she soothed. “So your entire species, as far as you know, abandoned its past when it fled here, to this world. Quite a feat.”

  “And one we must keep to ourselves, Mac,” with a worried look at her, “until I can prepare a full argument to present to the Progenitors. It is not our place to release such inflammatory information. Others, wiser than we, will know what to do with it.”

  “I won’t say that’s been my experience,” Mac warned him, but she nodded. “I promise, of course.”

  Brymn stood, scanner in hand. “Thank you, Lamisah. When the time is right, we’ll tell everyone. You do realize, this is more than confirmation the Dhryn came from the Chasm—it also provides the first clear dating of the Moment. It was at least three thousand five hundred and seven years ago, using the system of the Interspecies Union.”

  Since life was stripped from hundreds of worlds, leaving only ghosts, ghouls, and ruin. Mac didn’t need the shiver running down her spine to remind her. “I don’t care about the dating, Brymn. Do you realize this world might contain the truth about the Chasm? We could find out what happened—what’s starting to happen again!”

  “The Ro.” He wrapped his arms around his middle, tightly enough to crush the blue silks wrapping his torso. His nostrils oozed yellow mucus. Distress or anxiety? “Ah, Mac. I may be a fool, but you’re a dreamer. My ancestors must have decreed that everything from before our arrival here be destroyed. I’ve questioned other historians and archaeologists. They have no interest in anything earlier—because nothing earlier exists.”

  “There’s a way,” Mac pressed. “We need to find your place of origin. The world within the Chasm where the Dhryn began.”

  He looked puzzled. “Dhryn have always been.”

  Archaeologist, not biologist, Mac reminded herself. Fine. “Where the Dhryn lived before they came to Haven. That place could tell us what we need to know.”

  “Ah! Yes, I concur.” Then his little mouth formed an unhappy pout. “Even if we could find it, Mac, how would we get there?”

  “You’re asking me?” Mac snorted. “ I don’t know how to get to my apartment from here.”

  A definite hoot. “That I can do,” Brymn reassured her. “Through the main entrance will be a commuter tube. It will take us almost into your place of greeting!”

  Thinking of the past hours spent tunnel-skulking, Mac felt entitled to some exasperation: “We couldn’t have come that way?”

  Brymn spread six arms. “If we had, you would not have seen the oomlings.”

  And you would have been seen breaking in here, Mac added to herself, but didn’t question the Dhryn. She was all in favor of a more direct route home. Perhaps his culture was one in which you could be stopped from committing a crime, but weren’t punished once it was a fait accompli.

  Home. Wondering at how comfortably the word wrapped itself around a cockeyed apartment on an alien planet, Mac helped Brymn close the tube, hopefully protecting what he hadn’t irreparably damaged, then push it behind some others. Did she feel at home here? Or was this more evidence of the adaptability of the Human psyche, that she could satisfy her need for shelter and territory using whatever was offered?

  Even her? The self-proclaimed “Earth is quite enough” Mackenzie Connor?

  As she pondered, Brymn went to a section of seemingly ordinary wall, spreading his arms so all six hands could touch certain points at once. As it obediently revealed itself as a wide, slanted door, Mac realized why she hadn’t found the exit. Damn Dhryn don’t know how to make anything convenient for humanoids, she told herself, rather fondly.

  They did know how to intimidate humanoids.

  The door flashed open to reveal a bristling fence of weapons aimed in their direction. Mac lost count after thirty-six, implying more than half a dozen guards waited behind those ominous bores.

  To make matters worse, the floor began vibrating underfoot. Brymn wrapped himself into a silent knot, responding to what Mac couldn’t hear.

  Swallowing hard, and doing her best to imagine a staff meeting, Mac stamped her foot. “I am Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor,” she informed the host of round black muzzle tips, attempting to stretch a little taller.

  “We know.”

  21

  VISIT AND VIOLATION

  “THIS IS so exciting, Lamisah!”

  Mac, busy trying to maintain some dignity while walking quickly enough to keep her heels from being trampled by their escort, rolled her eyes at Brymn. He was beaming, insofar as his small mouth allowed. Those hands nearest her—the Dhryn was on her left—kept patting her shoulder or arm at random intervals. It was as if he had to reassure himself she was with him, a friend to witness this “so exciting” moment.

  They weren’t being arrested, or the Dhryn equivalent. Mac had figured that much out when none of the twenty-two Dhryn waiting in the wide corridor had bothered entering the Textile Archives nor waited to close the door. Instead, she and Brymn had been informed they were late.

  They were expected below.

  Below, Brymn had whispered to her, were the Progenitors.

  Their escort had ended further conversation by raising their weapons again. It hadn’t quelled Brymn, who’d almost danced beside her. She’d only hoped the big alien didn’t burst into ecstatic song and land them both in deeper trouble.

  “Below” was accurate enough. Within their cluster of armed Dhryn, each wearing individual colors but similar in that all had lost one or more limbs and so were of higher accomplishment than Brymn, they’d been taken into the heart of Haven. First had been a series of sloping ramps, each barred by a massive door better suited to being an air lock under the ocean in Mac’s estimation. Following the ramps had been a lift, which had carried all of them, in very tight proximity, down for a remarkably long time. Mac had leaned on Brymn after a while, grateful she’d never suffered from claustrophobia.

  Yet.

  Now they walked very quickly down another, much wider ramp. The soft-soled Dhryn feet were almost silent on any surface, but here lush carpeting underfoot muffled Mac’s boots as well. Without voices, they walked to their breathing alone, Brymn’s the loudest and most rapid.

  Well aware hers were the first Human eyes to see the Dhryn’s inner sanctum, Mac did her best to memorize everything she saw. The shroud material was everywhere, of course, but here spirals of silver began to overlay the black, illuminated so they appeared to be in motion. There were words picked out in silver as well, as if the spirals were the breath carrying the sound. Between the bodies of her escort, and Brymn, Mac couldn’t make out more than snatches of what was written. It seemed a combination of historical record, exhortations to enjoy life, and the occasional complaint about building standards.

  Then Mac remembered. Brymn had told her he’d recorded Emily’s name in the hall of his Progenitors. At the time, she’d taken it as metaphor. Obviously, she’d been wrong.
r />   Was her name here? If so, what did the other Dhryn think of it?

  Not that she’d have a chance to find out on this trip. Mac didn’t understand the urgency of their escort, but there was no slowing the pace. When she’d attempted to do so, they’d grabbed her as if to carry her along. Only a loud protest—and a well-aimed kick—had put her back on her feet.

  The spirals and their utterances grew denser and denser until the silver was almost blinding. The air grew as fresh as a summer’s day, though the scent of growing things was replaced by an unknown but pleasant spice. Mac belatedly thought to look for more mundane aspects such as lighting fixtures, ventilation grates, and doorways, but unsurprisingly the Dhryn technology eluded her. Well, security wasn’t hidden. Since leaving the archive, tiny round vidbots had hovered in every corner. Several had followed overhead, as if accompanying them. Mac had expected no less on the route leading to the Progenitors.

  She would have liked to ask questions, prime among them: why was she, an alien, being brought here? On the other hand, this way she couldn’t get into trouble by saying the wrong thing—until she stood in front of the leaders of the Dhryn.

  There, Mac would let Brymn do the talking.

  As if their escort had heard her thoughts, one came close to her on the opposite side from Brymn. “Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor. I am Parymn Ne Sa.”

  Two hands missing, two extra names. Hopefully coincidence, Mac thought. “Accomplished,” she said politely, doing her utmost not to pant. They hadn’t slowed during this consultation. “I take the name Parymn Ne Sa into my keeping.”

  “Gratified.” Parymn seemed older than the rest, grimmer somehow, although, like Brymn, he favored lime-green eye ridge paint with paired sequins. He was frowning. Not at her, Mac guessed, but as if worried by some task she represented. Sure enough, “There is a strict protocol which must be followed when intruding on the space of a Progenitor. Failure to do so will have—extreme consequences.”