“How thrilled I am that you’re alive.”
A set of broad windows looked across a slice of forest that hadn’t fallen yet. The air was teeming with screeching homeless birds. Commuter blimps and private airships were coming from far-flung parts of the District, wanting to help or at least hoping to measure the catastrophe. A much larger airship maneuvered in the distance—an elegant long machine woven around a skeleton of corona bones, made silver from the many corona scales fixed to its hull.
Father kept talking. “That’s what your mother would want,” he said. “First in her mind would be your survival.”
Diamond looked at the chair and the left-behind impressions again.
“Mother isn’t gone,” he said.
“Maybe not,” Father said. “It’s early. Ships and refugees are scattered. We can’t say anything for certain.”
Diamond meant something else, but he did a poor job saying so.
Suddenly, with both hands, someone struck the closed door.
The boy jumped, but not Father.
“Yes,” Merit said without turning. “What is it?”
Tar`ro looked in. “The Happenstance is ready.”
“All right.”
“We can climb on board whenever we’re ready.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
The guard nodded, watching both faces. Then he said, “It looks like a very short day. The sun’s dimming fast.”
A lot of trees had fallen and burned, and the coronas’ realm always thrived when that fierce air was seasoned with ash.
“We won’t be much longer,” Father said.
Tar`ro nodded, left.
The military airship had dropped from view. Diamond watched the birds, except he wasn’t seeing them. His eyes were open yet in some odd fashion blind. He closed his eyes and rubbed them, softly and then hard, and opening them again, he found his father sitting in the Archon’s tall chair, hiding every trace of the little woman.
“I was counting on them putting us inside somebody’s office,” Father said.
Diamond looked at the walls. Each was adorned with pictures and plaques and certificates full of words that he didn’t have the patience to read.
“They’d leave me with a working call-line,” the man added.
Prima enjoyed five working lines to the world, which was a huge number. Maybe only the Archon of Archons had more. Father lifted the receiver and touched several glowing buttons. A ring ended with a buzzing voice, and when the voice quit, Father said, “This is Merit. Now I want you to listen to me.”
Older children had always helped care for the youngsters.
That was the human way.
Adults weren’t suited to the demands of little ones. Somebody needed to feed the creatures, and they had to be bathed and clothed. Small transgressions demanded punishment. Someone needed to act as a diplomat when young friendships were tested. But there was a subtle, far greater blessing in this tedium. The caretakers had no choice but talk to these tiny, uncivilized beings. Every day, instructions and clear warnings had to be given, moral laws invoked, and the same laws had to be defended from evil and doubt and lazy blood. Old stories were recited from memory, and even if the little ones were filthy loud brats with the attention spans of roaches, old stories had a habit of coming alive for the speakers. Suddenly these weren’t strings of memorized words, but they were Truth and Authority, and this was why noses were wiped and asses were spanked every day: the partly grown caretakers were making themselves human.
Papio children had always helped raise the Eight.
At first local boys and girls were gathered up and sworn to secrecy. They helped feed the odd mouths and clean up the nasty messes while the doctor and various experts failed to make contact with the Eight.
But one caretaker made it his mission to stand before the swollen, helpless monster. Day after day, he would hold up a simple object or body part, showing it to whatever looked most like an eye. He named the object, repeating the word a thousand times, and then he listened to the best mouth, ignoring the mutters and groans, waiting for that clumsy first word.
“Hand,” was what the Eight said first.
“Hand hand hand hand . . . hand hand . . . ”
One word grew into a toddler’s vocabulary, and the Eight begged for more children to help it learn and grow.
The papio searched their world for bright patient youngsters. A secret village was built underground, and to help maintain security, none of the helpers were allowed to return home again.
Soon the Eight grew one mouth and four clumsy limbs, and each mind learned to speak. Names were given to the Eight. The doctor had her favorite, and every child had his or hers. Hundreds of busy days passed; nothing substantial changed. The Eight remained divided and chaotic. The Eight spoke in riddles and nonsense, although the children were adept at guessing moods, and better than any adult, they could separate their favorite’s words from the mayhem.
The oldest children became adults. They were thanked and replaced, and with nervous anticipation, they began to dress in adult lives. But the old rules remained in force. Each had to remain in the vicinity, working where they could, and in one case marrying one another. It seemed inevitable that their future children would eventually take up this great work, and their grandchildren.
But then Diamond came to the reef, and King, both running wild among the furious, horrified papio.
After that, nothing was the same. King went back to the middle of the world, living inside his father’s giant house of wood and sap. The strange human child was sleeping in his old room, pretending to be a happy normal tree-walker rich with friends, school, and peace. And there were whispers about some magical beast with no shape and no weight, living free in the wilderness between the two human worlds.
Suddenly the Eight seemed like the weakest child. Powerful voices regretted their patience, and meanwhile, the old doctor who had studied them and protected them returned home, and as promised, she and her cancer died.
New doctors assembled in a distant city, making plans.
Throughout those troubles, the children kept vigil, bringing food and drink, news and rumors. And sometimes one of the Eight would take charge of the mouth, speaking to a favorite child with a clear voice, or washing all of them with bent little riddles.
King and Diamond had been home for forty days. The oldest child—the same young boy who taught the monster to talk—was now a young soldier serving in the local militia. One afternoon he left his post to run up into the reef’s shadows, nothing in his hands but still full of news. The doctors had arrived, bringing tools and odd machines. They wouldn’t discuss their plans, but it was obvious what was coming, perhaps as early as the day after tomorrow.
One voice took the mouth long enough to say, “I want a basher nut. Bring me one basher nut.”
Moments later, the Eight collapsed on the favorite dash-and-ash mat, eyes blind and the mouth wide.
Each entity was at war with its siblings.
King and Diamond had strong little bodies. But the Eight was a giant, divided and useless so long as each of them ruled just a few pieces. War was inevitable, and silent. Blood was the weapon of necessity, and their blood came in eight distinct shades. Three were red: smoky red or bright pink or red like a man. Two forms were violet, while one was black and another a cold blue. And the final blood was a scalding, flame-worthy orange. Each had its taste and temperature, its consistency and limits. Each carried cells that might have once fought diseases but now battled foreign organs. Some were strongest in the day, others at night. The bloods flowed where they could, and when every course was blocked, they would pool inside friendly hearts and livers, gathering energy, waiting to attack whatever new weakness was revealed.
Blood could change its color, pretended to be another.
On occasions the blood scattered until it was too thin to notice. What was invisible slipped past barriers, attacking like poison, like cancer, killing the enemy from within.