The Roach God

He undid it in one night, which was the only part of the whole business he would later be able to defend.

He walked the third chamber first, and then all four, and put the colony back the way it had been — not gradually, not with a face-saving justification, just visibly and completely reversed, because a leader who unwinds a bad decision slowly is a leader teaching everyone that the decision was defensible.

It took until dawn.

He did it physically, chamber by chamber, walking the reversal himself rather than laying it in scent and letting it propagate — sixty-one roaches, one at a time, in the order they had been split.

The Essaim lines had the colony running properly again inside a day and a half, which said something about them he filed away and did not have the energy to appreciate yet.

The third chamber took four days, and two of the forty-one never entirely came back to the way they had been before, and Sacha logged that without softening it:

whatever he had spent, some of it did not return when he stopped spending.

[Faith: stabilising.]

Stabilising. Not recovering. He read that word several times over.

Was there an informant, Thresh asked, on the second night.

I don’t know.

You will not know.

No. Sacha sat with it. That’s the part I got wrong. I built a test that could only come back positive. If someone was counting, I’d find them. If nobody was counting, I’d get silence — and silence was going to look exactly like a careful informant lying low. He turned it over one more time, the way he’d once turned over an order for a scan that couldn’t change the treatment either way. There was no result that told me to stand down. I designed a thing that had to keep running forever.

And so it ran until it broke something.

Yes.

My god did the opposite, Thresh sent, after a while. He was told a thing that should have frightened him and he decided it was flattery. Four hundred of us. Something moved in the sending that Sacha could not read. I have spent a season certain that the error was not looking. I am less certain tonight.

That’s not comfort.

No, Thresh agreed. It is company. They are different and you are not currently entitled to the first one.

What he could not do — and he tried, on the third night, for the better part of an hour — was work out what the correct alternative would have been.

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That was the genuinely uncomfortable part, and he made himself stay in it rather than tidy it away into a lesson.

A hostile power had demonstrated intimate knowledge of his nursery. Ignoring that would have been negligence.

Acting on it had cost him a young roach, six days of function, and a permanent notch in something the system had just told him was measurable.

There was no version where he came out clean.

There was a version where he came out cheaper, and it involved having done this on the first night as Thresh said, quietly, with two chambers instead of four, and a stopping condition written down before he started.

Not every problem is a scene, he thought, and disliked how long it had taken him to arrive at it. Some of them are weather. You don’t solve weather. You build for it and you keep going.

He wrote himself a rule that night, in the only place he had to write anything, which was his own memory:

before you start a thing, write down what result makes you stop.

It was such an obvious rule.

He had been taught it in the first month of the first job he had ever had, by a woman who used to say it about scans and had said it about him personally at least twice.

It had taken him two months as a god to need it again, and one dead eleven-day-old to remember it.

The other thing he did that week, and told nobody about, was go back through everything the emissary had said and check it against what a permanently-installed observer could actually have seen.

It took an evening.

The result was not comforting in the way he had hoped.

Sixty-one:

obtainable by anything that watched the foraging lines for a full cycle.

Nine under a season:

obtainable by anything that had once, on a single occasion, been present at a nursery rotation.

Four lineages:

obtainable by nothing he could think of that did not already know what a lineage was.

That last one was the whole problem.

His own bloodlines had been invisible to him until a bracketed notice pointed at them.

A watcher in the walls, however patient, sees roaches.

It does not see drift.

Which left the fourth possibility, the one he had disliked most on the first night and now disliked more: that a sufficiently senior Divine Creature could read a Sanctuary from outside it the way he read a claim through a wall — not the bodies, but the structure.

Not sixty-one roaches.

A claim of a certain size, at a certain rank, with four differentiating strands in it.

If that was true then there had never been an informant, he had cut his colony into quarters for nothing, and the eleven-day-old had died to test a hypothesis that a moment’s thought would have ruled out.

He could not verify it.

He was two ranks too low to verify anything about how the higher ranks saw.

Write down what makes you stop, he thought, bitterly, and put it on the list anyway, third from the top, where it would sit unresolved for a long time.

The other thing that happened that week was smaller, and he almost missed it.

On the fifth morning after the reversal, running the eastern approach himself because he could not stand another night in the deep ground, Sacha put an antenna into a draft coming down off the surface and read, in it, the specific mineral flatness of concrete dust.

Fresh concrete dust.

In quantity.

He went up further than he had gone in two months, up past the mark on the wall, up to where the crawlspace opened toward the loading side of the building, and he sat there for an hour in air that tasted wrong and listened to something enormous idling in the lot outside.

The date on the concrete had said Q3.

Nobody had told the machines about the date on the concrete.

[Territory: structural integrity — degrading.]

He came back down at speed, and for the first time since the second death he did not stop to analyse anything at all.

He went straight to the reporting crawl and started laying the evacuation grammar for a colony of sixty-one that had one route out, no confirmation that the route worked, and no way whatsoever to contact the eight people currently walking it.