The Roach God

Building a language turned out to be an exercise in ruthless subtraction.

Sacha started with a list of everything a colony might need to say and got to forty items before recognising that he was doing the wrong task.

Sixty roaches were not going to hold forty marks.

They were going to hold four, maybe five, and every one of those had to be worth the space.

So he asked a better question: what does a stranger need to know about us, in the first three seconds, to not do the worst available thing?

That got him down fast.

One: this ground is held.

Not stay out — held, occupied, in use by something that is here on purpose. Every power in the sector could read that concept; it was the only universal thing the corridor had taught him.

Two: we are not the Sixth Ascension and we are not the Ninefold Mother.

He spent longest on this one and nearly cut it twice before understanding why it mattered most. A small unknown claim forty lengths from the Mother’s markers reads, by default, as an outpost of somebody. The single most dangerous assumption anything could make about his colony was that it belonged to a faction.

Three: we will talk.

A mark that says a claim has somebody in it capable of receiving a message. Thresh contributed the substance of this one: the Verge could not be spoken to. It had no way to receive anything. So nothing was ever sent to it, and one day something was simply done to it instead.

Four: we carry.

That one was Sacha’s, and he sat on it for two nights before including it, because it was not defensive information. It was an advertisement. It said we move things through ground to anything with the wit to want that, and it was the entire strategy he had worked out in a cellar three weeks and a lifetime ago, reduced to a single mark laid on a wall where anyone could find it.

It was also, he was uncomfortably aware, the same category of act as Khrr’s border:

writing a sign and waiting for somebody to come and ask about it.

The difference — and he made himself state it precisely, because if he could not state it precisely then he was simply doing the thing that had cost him his lieutenant — was that Khrr’s sign had said unknown and this one would say known, small, and useful.

Unknown things get investigated.

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Useful things get approached.

He included it.

He tested all four on Thresh before teaching any of them, which turned out to be the most useful hour of the whole design.

Read these as a stranger, he sent. Not as someone who lives here.

Thresh read them as a stranger, and cut one immediately.

The first draft of mark two had said we are not the Sixth Ascension and we are not the Ninefold Mother as two separate statements, and Thresh’s objection took Sacha a moment to absorb:

two denials are a list, and a list invites the question of what else is on it.

Say it once, the beetle sent. Say no faction. A stranger who reads two denials starts counting the third.

He rewrote it.

Then Thresh went after mark three, and this time Sacha argued, and lost.

We will talk had originally been drafted as we will talk if approached peacefully, which Sacha had considered a sensible qualification and which Thresh described, flatly, as a fence.

You have built a mark that says we are open, it sent, and then written a condition on it that says we are open to the kind of thing that reads conditions. That is not most of what will come past you.

So I invite everything.

You invite everything, and you keep your approaches narrow, and you find out what came. It shifted. The Verge qualified everything. We were the most careful colony in three sectors. It did not help.

The teaching was harder than the design.

He had three months of experience teaching one roach a private grammar through daily individual contact.

He now had sixty and no time, and the first three days produced almost nothing except a growing conviction that this was not going to work.

It was the Essaim lines that broke it open, and they did it in a way Sacha found humbling in a manner he was getting used to.

He had been teaching individuals.

The Essaim did not learn as individuals; that was the entire point of what they had become over three months of moving food in relays.

When he stopped presenting the marks to roaches one at a time and instead laid a mark at a junction and let a full block flow past it four hundred times in a working shift, the mark propagated in a day and a half.

They learn the way they work, he thought, standing over a junction watching sixty bodies pass a glyph they had all quietly absorbed. Of course they do. I have been teaching a species of relay runners as though they were medical students.

By the ninth day all four marks were in the colony, laid at nine points around Khrr’s border, refreshed on a rotation the Essaim built themselves.

[Sanctuary: re-anchoring.

Territory: provisional claim registered.

Divine Creature — Echelon 3 of 9, stabilised.]

Stabilised.

Not provisional.

He had ground again — thin, contested, forty lengths from a dynasty, and his.

He read the notice twice and did not feel what he had expected to feel, and worked out why on the third reading:

the last time he had anchored a Sanctuary he had done it by killing a spider.

This time he had done it by teaching sixty roaches to say four true things.

There was a fifth mark he did not include, and he came back to it more than once afterward.

It was the one that would have said our god is called the Roach God.

He had drafted it on the second night, laid it out, looked at it, and cut it — not out of modesty, but because of an old cricket on a ridge telling him that names travel faster than colonies and that saying one before you can survive being heard brings somebody to look at you.

He had sixty-one people and no allies and a lieutenant somewhere north.

This was not the hour.

But he noticed that he had drafted it before he had thought about whether to, and made a private note about that, in the same place he kept the eleven-day-old and the two soft Carapace and the exact number of days the cistern seep had taken to fill.