The Roach God

The first thing Khrr learned in the gaps was that the god had been wrong about the water.

Not badly wrong.

The middle third was dry, as the map said, and the eight of them had been fed and watered to capacity before departure exactly as planned.

But the god had calculated the dry stretch from Thresh’s drawing, and Thresh’s drawing had been made by something that walked upright through open passages, and the gaps did not go where passages went.

The gaps went where cracks went.

Which meant up, and back, and around, and twice through a doubling that added most of a day to a stretch the map showed as straight.

By the end of the second day the dry third had become the dry half, and Khrr made a decision the god had not authorised and would not learn about for some time:

it cut the daily ration of movement, halved the pace, and put the two Increvable at the back to carry the two Cerci who were failing first.

It did not feel like disobedience.

It felt like the thing the god would have done if the god had been here, which Khrr had come to understand was the entire reason it was here instead.

Still, it noted the moment.

Not with words — Khrr had no words, and had stopped experiencing that as a lack somewhere around the second month.

It noted it the way a body notes a joint that has begun bearing weight differently:

something had shifted, and the shift was structural, and it would not shift back.

For two months every decision Khrr had made had been a decision inside a decision the god had already made.

Where to place a scout inside a perimeter the god had drawn.

How to route a convoy along ground the god had claimed.

This was the first one that was simply its own.

It did not enjoy it.

That surprised Khrr more than anything else on the route.

It had watched the god make these all along and had assumed, in whatever way it assumed things, that there was something in it — some quality of being the one who chose.

There was not.

There was only the weight, and the fact that it was the correct weight to be carrying, and the two Cerci on the backs of the two Increvable who would not have been on anyone’s back if Khrr had chosen differently at the doubling.

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The second thing Khrr learned was that the gaps were not empty.

It found the first sign on the third day:

a passage narrowing that had been cleared.

Not worn — cleared, debris pushed to one side and packed against the wall in a way that no water and no draft produced.

Its escort wanted to withdraw.

Khrr held them, and spent an hour reading the packing, and arrived at a conclusion it had no way to transmit to anyone and would have to carry alone until it got home:

the packing was old.

Seasons old.

And it had been done by something roughly the size of a roach.

They went on.

There was more.

A junction with three approaches, two of them blocked deliberately and the third left open.

A dry seep with a scrape at the bottom where something had dug for moisture and given up. And on the fifth day, in a chamber no larger than the old nest behind the water heater, a scent-marker.

Khrr knew a border when it read one.

This one was faded almost to nothing, laid so long ago that the substrate had begun to take it, and it was not rat, and it was not beetle, and it was not any of the four signatures the colony had catalogued.

It was small.

Whatever had written it had been small, and had lived down here in the gaps where nothing large could follow, and had bothered to mark a line — so it had once expected to be tested.

So it had once had neighbours.

There was nothing alive in the chamber.

There had not been for a long time.

Khrr held on that for most of an hour while the escort rested, and did the arithmetic that the god had taught it without ever knowing it was teaching:

something had used this route.

Something small enough to fit, organised enough to hold a border, patient enough to clear a passage.

And it was gone.

Which meant the gaps were survivable, because something had survived in them.

And it meant something down here had eventually stopped surviving.

Khrr made the escort carry two things out of that chamber.

The first was a fragment of the substrate carrying the old marker, wrapped in the cleanest scrap available — because a border-scent was information and information was the entire reason for this journey, and the god would be able to read things in it that Khrr could not.

The second was harder to justify and Khrr did not attempt to justify it.

In the corner of the chamber, half-buried, there was a small worked hollow in the floor:

smoothed, deliberate, the wrong shape to be natural and the right shape to hold water.

Somebody had built a cistern down here. It was empty and had been empty for a long time.

Khrr had one of the Cerci measure it, and memorised the measurement, and carried that home too.

It was not a threat, and it was not a resource, and it had no operational value whatsoever. It was simply proof that something small had once lived in the gaps and had not merely endured there — it had built there.

Khrr did not have a framework for why that mattered.

It only knew that the god would want it, and that wanting things like that was, as far as Khrr could tell, most of what made the god different from everything else it had met.

They came up on the seventh day, into wet air and the smell of rot in quantities that made the two failing Cerci go briefly and completely stupid with relief.

Thresh’s map had been right about the food.

It had been right about the water. It had been wrong about the distance to the Mother’s outermost markers, and the error was in the dangerous direction.

Khrr climbed a shelf of broken footing, put its antennae up into open air for the first time in seven days, and read the scent of a territory that began not two hundred lengths east.

It began forty.

And there was a shape on the ridge above it, sitting perfectly still, with one hind leg carried stiff — which had been sitting there, Khrr understood with total clarity, for some time.

It made no move to approach.

It simply watched the eight of them come up out of the ground, in a place where nothing was supposed to be able to come up out of the ground, and then it turned, unhurried, and went east to tell somebody.