Extremis (33 page)

But she landed poorly on the second foot and stumbled, breaking her fall with both arms. Propped up above the
maatkah
mat in her own quarters, she let the sweat run off her body as she thought:
I’m getting better. I couldn’t have completed Wave Curls Under two months ago. But better isn’t good enough. If I fall like that in a real match…

She shook the image of discarnation from her head—not because she feared that outcome, but because she and her people could not afford it. If she died answering a
maatkah
challenge, then the militants would surely break up her research cluster and, in place of striving to communicate with the humans, might elect to exterminate them. She had felt that solution simmering at the
selnarmic
edge of too many minds that had embraced the
Destoshaz’ai
-as-
sulhaji
caste-cult.

She had felt those suppressed genocidal reflexes most frequently when she used the
maatkah
training circles in central Punt. There she had also felt passing
Destoshaz
notice her, do double-takes, devote sudden close attention to her practice regimen and moves, and quickly withdraw their
selnarm
: furtive, yet sly and pleased, like one of the humans’ dogs, eager to run back to its master with a bone of particular interest.

Eager, in this case, to run back to Torhok with a report on her training. It was quite clear that Torhok had begun soliciting reports. Nothing obvious, she was sure. Just the faintest intimations that he had a passing interest in the doings of his fellow Councilors. And so, when she practiced her
maatkahshak
publicly, they spied on her.

Just as she had intended. Firstly, knowing that she was training regularly and ambitiously might give Torhok—or anyone else—some additional pause before challenging her. But it would also lead them to assess her favorite moves, her skills, her weaknesses: having seen her practice, they might believe they knew how she would fight. And she wanted—needed—them to believe just that.

What they did not know was that part of her training involved not merely
maatkahshak
—training in the particular schools of different
maatkah
styles—but regular immersions into deep, almost trancelike states of
shaxzhutok
—the reclamation and reliving of past lives. While all Arduans had some measure of this skill, it was strongest in the
shaxzhu
—those who, like her, practiced it as their primary contribution to the community. In recent generations, this skill had become particularly weak among the
Destoshaz
. It was murmured that even Senior Admiral Torhok himself had no memories of past wars or commands held.

But whatever Torhok’s deficit in past-life experience might be, he had vast reserves of power and skill that he had acquired in the
maatkah
ring during the course of this life. He—and many of his devotees—were known to be formidable opponents, and Ankaht did not delude herself in assessing her unaugmented chance of defeating the great majority of them: her odds were, at best, unpromising.

But she had something they did not—past lives—and she planned on using those experiences and skills as well. But today, as she tried to settle into recalling a particularly early life—one in which she had been a warrior in a Pre-Enlightenment island city-state—Ankaht found herself repeatedly distracted by a curiosity that had been provoked by discovering Jennifer’s rudimentary
selnarm
, and the following discussion of her being a possible reversion. Ankaht had begun to wonder:
How did Arduans exist in the Pre-Enlightenment “warring states” period? If
selnarm
has always been so uniform, how is it that we Arduans did not have better understandings of each other, that our early progenitors were almost as warlike and contentious as the humans are now? How were we not more aware of each others’ true needs, feelings? The only logical conclusion is that, at one time, we were once more akin to the humans: that there was a period in our prehistory when there were great differences of
selnarmic
skill and awareness not only between different groups, but within the same group. Nothing else would explain the lack of unity and fellow-feeling that must have caused the frequent and wanton violence of those days.

Ankaht pushed with her arms, away from the floor, and rocked back to her knees. She had not often invoked her lives from the early Pre-Enlightenment: they were unpleasant, perplexing, savage. But now she had too many reasons to go back even before the Pre-Enlightenment, to explore past lives—particularly of her earliest
Destoshaz
existences—in order to better understand the humans, as well as to prepare for her own defense. And there was little rationalization for not doing so: it only required a small increase in effort and time to sample from her many lives, which were strung like dim pearls along the timeline of Arduan social evolution. From a short glimpse into each, she could build a mosaic that might show the larger patterns of how her race had changed not merely in the millennia immediately prior to the Dispersal of Sekamahnt, but in the Star Wandering generations since.

And so she exhaled, inhaled, exhaled more deeply, curled forward—

—and was flitting through the past, picking up pieces of a life here, an existence there, all the while building a picture of a time that few of the Children of Illudor had investigated since boarding their generation ships.

She found that the Pre-Enlightenment was a riot of diversity, with each small island its own state and culture, and the larger islands gerrymandered into even more, and smaller, polities. The innumerable castes and class stratifications had accreted into a ponderous labyrinth of contending etiquettes, prerogatives, and priorities.

The beginning of Arduan social freedom—which, due to the communalizing tendencies of mature
selnarm
linkages—intruded slowly, rising along with an increased need for the society to perform a greater diversity of tasks. As this Enlightenment edged slowly into existence, it was also comparatively bloodless. Widespread depersonalization was simply not possible when
selnarms
fused to create a truly harmonious
narmata
that linked every rank and caste of society.

New relationships were the lifeblood of the flowering of the new era. Just as Ardu was circumnavigated, charted, and new trade routes sprang up, the rules governing interpersonal association—across class, caste, rank, and clan—became more easily navigated, more relaxed. The polarizing wars between colonizing empires that shaped the course of human history for almost four centuries were not possible on Ardu because of the empathies that flowed naturally, unstoppably, along the links of
selnarm
. Consequently, Earth’s religious wars were also unknown. Rather, as cultures contacted and blended into each other, the Face of Illudor was deemed accessible to all of them, but each one was thought to possess a unique perspective upon a particular feature of that godhead, thereby making an indispensable contribution to the complete picture.

It was toward the end of this period that the numbers of
Destoshaz
began to drop. Warfare was a rare, and highly specialized, undertaking.
Most
Destoshaz
were consequently diverted into emergency and rescue services.

At the same time, the
shaxzhu
became both more important and more numerous. Their numbers had always been attributed to the direct influence of Illudor, since a powerful ability for
shaxzhutok
could not be learned, nor bred for: its appearance had always been both rare and arbitrary. However, the Enlightenment’s increased social complexity and emphasis upon communication and education put a premium on the
shaxzhu
, who quickly became the dominant intelligentsia of modern Ardu. The increase in their numbers was deemed the hand of Illudor at work, providing for the new needs of his Children.

Then came the discovery of Sekamahnt’s instability. Nations had folded together into vast, monomaniacal instruments of racial survival. There was a sharp increase in centralization and autocracy as Ardu strove to launch as many waves of the Children into space prior to the calamity that was sure to befall it. This, in turn, led to greater militancy, authoritarianism, dogmatism; the principles of toleration, consensus, and the old philosophical whispers of what the
’kri
called
assed’ai
withered. Nuance was as absent as the realization that such absolutism was, in fact, a recidivistic devolution, a return to social primitivisms abandoned millennia earlier—back when Arduans had much more in common with humans. Indeed, many of the developmental parallels were striking—

Ankaht stopped in mid-thought with a self-rebuke: there were obvious limits to how far she could presume similarities between the evolution of two such disparate species. For instance, human histories depicted a crisis of faith arising along with technology. The Children of Illudor had demonstrated a completely opposite reaction: as technology grew, Arduan cultural uniformity—vested in their
selnarm
and concomitant
narmata
—also grew, further enabled by machinery that shrank distance between peoples and places. They had no crisis of faith; rather, they had an increased surety of it. So it seemed that the parallels between Arduans and other intelligences could not be reliably projected.

Unless,
Ankaht heard her inner voice whispering,
unless, of course, the human crisis of faith was not really linked to technology
per se
. Perhaps that kind of crisis is occasioned by the emergence of
any
paradigm that problematizes a culture’s early beliefs in the theological wholism of its universe. For my people, technology did not present us with such a challenge: we were still linked by our
selnarm
and felt the will of Illudor and the permanence of our souls in
shaxzhutok
. No, for us, the challenge to our belief in an orderly universe occurred when we first contacted the humans. Because if the humans are truly sentient and yet also lack
selnarm
, rebirth, and knowledge of Illudor, then our cosmology is finally being confronted with a paradigmatic challenge that it cannot answer.

Suddenly frightened by where her thoughts were leading, Ankaht leaned forward until her short forehead rested against the
maatkah
mats and thought:
Illudor’s love, where shall this all end?

12

A Mixture of Madness

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
—Aristotle

Arduan SDH
Shem’pter’ai
, Expeditionary Fleet of the
Anaht’doh Kainat
, Ajax System

Narrok closed his eyes. But he could still see what the holoplot and the viewscreens had shown him when his flagship, the
Shem’pter’ai,
had emerged from the warp point just ten minutes ago. He saw it as clearly as if all three of his eyes were still staring at it.

The plot was choked with the ochre
-
colored icons of his dead ships. Here and there, the sigil denoting a vanquished human hull broke the harrowing monotony of the otherwise uniform mass of devastation. The devastation of his fleet. Again. When the day had begun, he’d hoped it would end differently—

* * *

Having gone over the order of the coming battle with his entire staff, Narrok had narrowed his
selnarm
link to share the final strategic assessment and intelligence exclusively with Sarhan and Fleet Second Esh’hid. “
This time we know who our adversary is: a human female named Krishmahnta. She is not a legendary leader among the ranks of the human admirals, merely the most senior among those who have been cut off from their main bases when we arrived at Bellerophon. However, for a middle-ranked admiral whose name does not figure prominently in the humans’ pre-war dispatches, she has acquitted herself quite well. Questions?”

There were none. So Narrok gave the order to commence the preparatory operations: clearing the human minefields with
Urret-fah’ah
minesweepers. But it seemed less effective, this time: evidently, the humans had not had enough mines to thickly seed the area immediately surrounding the warp point. Or so Narrok’s staff insisted.

Narrok was not convinced, and did not race through with the van of his fleet. Instead, he stuck to the attack plan—and thus allowed the humans to, predictably, decimate wave after alternating wave of recon drones, ever followed by SBMHAWKs. Happily, the latter systems did find and savage several large targets—or so it seemed. Certainly, there were more dead human hulls being detected by each successive wave of RDs.

Consequently, when Narrok felt a strident excitement and urgency underlying Esh’hid’s next
selnarm
send, he knew what she was going to request before she pulsed it across the light-seconds to him: immediate attack. Narrok resisted, but chose not to expressly prohibit, that initiative.

Esh’hid, evidently sensing the significance of her admiral’s indefinite response, pressed further. “Admiral, this could be the opportunity we have been waiting for—an opportunity to push through a warp point before the humans are fully prepared for us.”

“Yes, but it could also be a trap.”

“My instincts tell me it is not, Admiral.”

Narrok elected not to point out that he had more years and experience with which to refine his instincts. Instead, he eventually consented to Fleet Second Esh’hid’s almost piteous pleadings to be given the signal honor of leading an unplanned fast attack against the apparently incomplete human defenses in the Ajax system. With little delay, Esh’hid transferred to the bridge of the largest SDH of the advance assault group and promptly led them through the warp point into Ajax.

Where, drones reported, they were promptly and handily destroyed. The apparent human losses to the SBMHAWKs had been a canny deception: the victims were large, empty bulk-freighters, stripped of everything but their outdated drives and a few electronic suites—just enough to fool the SBMHAWKs into believing them to be valid targets. The RDs had been unable to distinguish the decoys from genuine capital ships: doing so would have required a much closer scanning pass—and the RDs had been unable to get close enough to retrieve that level of detail and still survive to report. Indeed, the few RDs that had returned from each wave spent less than ten seconds on the Ajax side of the warp point.