The Roach God

Sacha did not sleep that night, and spent most of it reading Khrr’s border.

It ran two hundred and eighty lengths, and it was good work — laid at the right heights, refreshed on the right cycle, following defensible ground rather than convenient ground. It enclosed the brick, the seep, and the near third of the rot.

And it was written in a grammar nobody in the world could read except him.

That was the thing he kept coming back to. A border says this is claimed to anyone who can read borders, and every power in this sector could read borders — the rats had marked one, the corridor was made of them.

But Khrr had not laid a colony-standard mark, because there was no colony standard; the only formal scent-grammar the Roach God’s people possessed was a drill shorthand invented by two individuals for talking to each other about foraging routes.

So what Khrr had actually written, in the eyes of anything that came past, was: there is something here, and it is using a language we have never seen.

Sacha stood in the dark doing an assessment he did not want to complete.

An unreadable border does not say stay out. It says unknown.

And in a sector where two powers had spent a decade cataloguing everything that moved, an unknown that had appeared overnight, forty lengths from the Mother’s markers, in a place that had been empty for nineteen years —

That was not a claim. That was an announcement.

It wasn’t taken because somebody stumbled over it, he thought. It was taken because it spent nine nights writing a sign, and somebody read the sign, and came to ask who had written it.

He went to Thresh with it before he did anything else, and laid the whole thing out, and asked the question straight.

Did it do something stupid.

Thresh took its time.

It did the thing you would have done, it sent. You would have called it establishing a defensible claim before your people arrived. You would have been proud of it, and you would have been right, and it would have been the same border in the same language.

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That’s not an answer.

It is the only one I have. The beetle shifted. Your lieutenant did a competent thing with an incompetent tool, because the tool is the only one you ever gave it. You have run a colony for three months without a public language. Everything your people know how to say, they can only say to you.

Sacha absorbed that.

It was, he realised slowly, the second time in a fortnight that a structural failure of his had cost somebody.

The quartering had cost an eleven-day-old because he had no way to explain an order.

This had cost Khrr because he had no way for his colony to speak to anyone but him.

I built a colony that can only be addressed by me, he thought. Efficient. Secure. And the second I’m not in the room, it can’t say a single word in its own defence.

He turned that over for the rest of the night and found the deeper version underneath it, which was worse.

He had not built it that way by accident, and he had not built it that way for security either.

He had built it that way because for three months the fastest, cleanest, most effective way to run a colony of sixty had been to be the only node it routed through.

Every decision came to him because he was better at deciding than anyone else in it.

That had been true.

It had also been true of every burnt-out senior he had ever worked under, right up to the shift where the thing went wrong while they were asleep.

I made myself the single point of failure and called it competence.

He made two decisions before dawn, and he made them in the order that told him something about himself later.

The first was that he was not going north after Khrr.

Not yet, not on four-day-old marks, not with sixty-one people freshly arrived on ground they did not know and no confirmed water beyond a single seep.

Khrr’s own standing order had been hold and do not follow, and overriding a correct order because the person who gave it was someone he could not stand to lose was exactly the failure mode Thresh had described about the Verge.

The second was that the colony was going to have a language. A real one — public, legible, laid to a standard, usable by any of his people to say a small number of true things to anything that came past.

He did not know how to build that.

He had built a drill shorthand with one exceptionally intelligent individual over months of daily contact, and he now needed something sixty ordinary roaches could write.

There was a third thing he did not decide, and he was aware of not deciding it.

Sending word north — to the cricket, to the rat, to anyone who might know what took a roach alive and carried it in a two-bearer configuration — meant admitting to somebody that his lieutenant was gone.

It meant, specifically, telling a power that had counted his colony to the individual that the colony was currently one competent body lighter than it had been.

He put it aside for the night and knew he was putting it aside rather than resolving it, which was at least an improvement on the version of himself that would have called the delay caution.

He put both decisions in front of Thresh at first light, and the beetle sent back something that took him a while to place as a joke.

The first one is correct and you will change your mind about it.

And the second?

The second is the first sensible thing a god has said to me in a season.