Chapter 39: The Reply

The reply came on the ninth day, and it came to mark three, which was the one that said we will talk.

Nothing was seen.

Nothing approached the brick.

A rotation went out at dusk to refresh the eastern marks. It came back with a Cerci carrying a scent-fragment on her own carapace, deliberately transferred, as if she wanted to be certain the transfer would survive the walk home.

The message was short, and it was not in his language.

It was in the corridor's — the flat, dense marking of things that mark borders professionally — and Sacha could parse it only because he had spent hours, months ago, learning to read the grammar the rat used on its own line.

WHOSE ARE THE FOUR MARKS

He read it seven times, and each reading gave him something the one before had not.

It was a question, not a demand.

It asked whose, not what — assuming an owner, which meant the reader had understood the marks as deliberate rather than incidental.

It did not name itself.

And it had been laid at mark three specifically, out of only four available marks, which was either courtesy or a demonstration of comprehension, and Sacha suspected both.

He read it, then read what was underneath it, which was the part that mattered: whoever had written this had gone to a mark that said we will talk and used it as intended.

They had not scrubbed it.

They had not walked past it.

They had not come and taken somebody in the night.

They had asked.

He took the fragment off her carapace himself, transferred it to clean substrate, and then sat with the physical fact of it for a while before doing anything analytical.

Somebody had walked up to his border in the dark, read a mark in a language invented three weeks ago by a paramedic and a cockroach, understood its function, and answered it correctly.

Whatever else was true about his neighbors, they were literate in a way that had nothing to do with sharing a language.

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They read intent, he thought. Not vocabulary. That's a skill you only develop if you've spent a long time next to things you can't talk to.

Then he spent a full day on the answer, and started six drafts before he understood the shape of the problem.

The honest answer was mine.

The strategic answer was nobody's.

The answer he wanted to give was a demand for Khrr back, and he cut that in the third draft, then put it back in the fifth, then cut it again and sat with why.

Because a demand tells them what he wants most.

And a colony that wants one thing most is a colony you can buy with it.

The fourth draft was the one he nearly sent, and it was four lines, and the fourth line asked for Khrr back by name.

He killed it on the fifth pass, and made himself write down why in plain terms so that he could not later pretend he had been clever rather than frightened:

a colony that names the one thing it wants most has told everybody its price.

The Ascension had spent nine years building an entire doctrine out of knowing what other people wanted badly.

Ask for the information, he thought. Not the person. The information is cheap to give and expensive to refuse, and it tells me the same thing.

In the end, he sent three lines, and Thresh read them over before they went and said nothing, which Sacha had learned to interpret.

THE FOUR MARKS ARE OURS. WE HOLD NO ONE'S GROUND BUT OUR OWN.

WE CAME FROM SECTOR FOUR THROUGH THE GROUND. WE DID NOT CROSS THE CORRIDOR.

ONE OF OURS WENT NORTH SIX NIGHTS AGO AND WAS CARRIED. WE HAVE NOT FOLLOWED. WE WOULD RATHER BE TOLD THAN GUESS.

He read the third line back a dozen times before releasing it.

It gave away that Khrr mattered.

It gave away that he knew about the carrying.

And in the last six words, it gave away a fairly complete description of what kind of neighbor he intended to be.

Too much, he thought.

Yes, Thresh agreed, when he said it aloud. And you are going to send it.

Why am I going to send it?

Because you have four marks and no reputation, and this is the cheapest hour you will ever have to decide what the fifth thing anyone knows about you is.

Sacha held on to that.

The Verge never sent anything, Thresh went on, unprompted. Not one line, in nine years, to either of them. My god believed that saying nothing was the same as being invisible. It settled its bad side. It is not. Saying nothing is a message. It says: this thing has no position, and can therefore be given one.

He released it that night, laid at mark three by two Essaim on a rotation that looked exactly like every other rotation, because the last thing he wanted was the reply delivered by a delegation.

Then he waited, and he was getting no better at it.

The waiting was different this time, and it took him two days to work out how.

When he had waited on the rat, he had been waiting to find out what he was worth. When he had waited under the fracture mouth, he had been waiting to find out whether a scout was alive.

This time he had put a position on a wall — a real one, three lines, in his own voice, describing what kind of thing he intended to be — and whatever came back would be a response to that, not to sixty-one bodies and a headcount.

He had never done that before.

In two lives, he wasn't sure he had ever declared a position and then stood next to it in the open, waiting to be answered.

He found he minded the waiting less than he expected.

He mentioned this to Thresh on the second evening and got back the shortest reply the beetle had ever sent him.

Yes. That is what having one feels like.