Chapter 41: The Standing Order

He did not go down for six days, and each day he made the same decision again in the morning.

The standing order was Khrr's:

hold and do not follow.

It had been correct when it was given, and Sacha had spent six days telling himself it was still correct; on the second morning after the delegation, he sat down and worked out honestly what had changed.

Two things had.

The order had been written for a colony that had not yet arrived, by somebody who assumed the danger was north and unknown.

Both halves of that were now wrong.

And the second:

Khrr had given the order to protect an arrival.

The arrival had happened.

Sixty-one people were under brick with water, food, a border, and four marks already answered by a dynasty.

The order expired, he thought. It expired the day we came up and I have been using it as a place to hide.

That was the honest version.

He wrote it down in himself and then made himself write the other one too, because a decision you examine only from the flattering side is not a decision.

And I want to go, and wanting to go is not a reason, and if I am wrong about the order expiring then I am about to take my colony's god into unmapped ground after one individual, which is the exact thing I refused to do six days ago when it was harder.

He put it to Thresh on the third morning, framed as a question rather than a conclusion, and got the answer he had half-expected since the beetle had made the joke about it.

I told you that you would change your mind.

You did. Was that a prediction or a warning.

Both. It is usually both. Thresh settled. You should know that I do not think you are wrong. I think you are doing the right thing for a reason you have not fully separated from the wrong one, and that this is the ordinary condition of everyone who has ever had to decide anything.

Its antennae moved once. My god never went after anyone. Not once. He was very consistent and we were all extremely dead.

Sacha turned that over for the rest of the day and found that it did not resolve anything, which he was slowly learning was what most real advice did.

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He built it as a working problem rather than a rescue, because the moment it became a rescue he would start making rescue decisions.

Six going down.

Not more — the gaps punished numbers, and sixty-one people had to remain functional above ground for however long this took.

Two Cerci from the sharpened generation, one Increvable, one of the six who had held the brick and knew the surface, and Thresh, who could not fit through the fold and did not need to, because they were not going past the fold.

They were going to the city.

He told the colony what he was doing, which was new, and which took most of an evening in a grammar built for foraging routes.

He had considered not telling them.

The argument for silence was decent:

sixty-one subjects who know their god has gone into a hole are sixty-one subjects with nothing to do but wait, and the third chamber had taught him precisely what waiting without explanation did to a colony's Faith.

He told them anyway, and this time he told them why, and the difference between this and the quartering was the entire lesson of the last six weeks compressed into one evening's work.

[Sanctuary: internal cohesion — stable.]

He read that after the last block had dispersed to its rotation, and sat with it a while.

The same colony, the same god, the same order to accept something frightening on his word alone.

The only variable he had changed was that this time he had said why.

Three months, he thought. One dead eleven-day-old. That's what that line cost me.

Ask the ground you came through, the Mother had said, and Sacha had spent six days deciding whether that was a direction or a taunt and had concluded it was neither.

It was an instruction from something that could read a claim's shape from a distance, delivered to somebody who had walked through a dead settlement without understanding what he was standing in.

The sixth place he gave to one of the four Cerci who had memorized the wall.

Command went to Vek.

He thought about that choice for most of a night and gave it to her anyway, over two more experienced candidates, for one reason he could state precisely:

She was the only member of the colony who had ever visibly declined to agree with him.

He also, on the morning he decided it, finally used the name — laid it in scent, once, at the reporting junction, in front of her.

She did not react in any way he could read.

But she came to that junction every morning afterward, which she had not done before, and Sacha understood that he had just discovered something about his own species that three months of running it had not taught him:

they had never had names because nobody had ever offered them one.

If I do not come back, he laid out for her, slowly, in the four-mark public grammar plus everything the drill shorthand could carry, hold the border. Do not go north. Do not go into the ground. Talk to anything that comes and talks first.

She read it. Then she did something that had not happened once in three months: she marked a question back at him.

And if you do not come back and something comes that does not talk first?

Sacha stood in front of that for a while.

Three months ago, nobody in this colony could form that sentence.

Two months ago there had been exactly one, and it was currently somewhere under two thousand lengths of stone.

Then you decide, he marked. Not what I would decide. What you decide.

He used the name again at the end.

It cost nothing, and it was the only thing he had left to give her.

She held still, and Sacha could not tell whether he was reading resolve or fear in her posture, and he understood that the inability to tell was the entire cost of what he had just done.

He had spent three months building a colony that routed everything through him.

Now, six days before walking into a hole in the world, he was trying to unbuild it in a single conversation with one Cerci who had never been asked to hold an opinion before.

It was not enough.

He knew it was not enough.

It was what he had time for.