“It’s called a Gordie Howe hat trick,” Grant says. He’s getting the second canto under his fingers; talking while playing helps, he finds. “You get a goal, an assist, and a fight in the same game.”
Ipqen-mek-Taqa is holding up a sheaf of stapled pages translated from the Book of Journeying. Like every Eqtoran holy book, it’s in song. Grant’s spent a few hours getting used to Eqtoran notation, but it’s simple and intuitive, and he’s caught on quickly. It’s written for voices and not the guitar, but the wiry horizontal bars suppose such close and coherent harmony that transposition has been painless.
His living music stand turns the page and scratches her calf with her big blunt digits. “They named a prize for it and it involves breaking the rules?”
“It’s not really a prize,” Grant says. “Not a formal one, anyway. Hockey fans love a fight. The whole goon enforcer thing slowed down after ‘04. By the time I got into it you weren’t really guaranteed a fight every game. But my dad had these video collections of the craziest brawls. We wore the tape out on them.”
Ipqen chuckles. “You’re making me feel better about this Empire, a chaos creature like a Maekyonite making it.”
Grant hits a discordant sour note and backs up. “Do they not fight in Qang-kana?”
“Oh, they fight a ton in Qang-kana,” Ipqen says. “It just ain’t against the rules.”
“I think that’s part of the appeal for Maekyonites. That there’s an authority you’re pissing off.”
“Whoever left these notes in the margins is rather deranged.” Tymar looks over his shoulder from his seat before the partial translation of the Book of Renewal. There’s a square loupe in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other.
“That tracks.” Ipqen shakes her head. “Takes derangement to be a Tamuraqist these days.” She shakes her head again, like she’s trying to dislodge something from it, and glances at Grant. “Maybe we can change songs?” she asks. “I don’t really know the words anymore, but it still works on me. Gets me maudlin.”
Grant puts the guitar aside.
“Can I get your thoughts on this passage, Majesty?” Tymar gestures to Grant. “Musically speaking, I mean.”
Grant scoots his seat next to Tymar’s and peers over his shoulder. “Jeez. There’s a lot more complexity to this line. All the stuff in the Library Sacrosanct was a lot more chordal and straightforward.”
“Uh huh.” Ipqen shuffles the translated papers of the orthodox tomes back into order on her lap. “The Temple of the Renewal—that’s what they were called—they made it more difficult because they didn’t expect you to sing along to it. Their ecclesiasts led and you listened.” She tsks. “One vocal line? A lead? That’s not proper. Not at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Why you think?” Ipqen clicks her tongue. “Gotta be careful, when you’re making music. Especially sacred music. Centering the whole melody on one person, above and apart from the chorus, that was one of the Tamuraqists’ deviances. At the modern temple, you sing along with it all.”
“Everyone?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s gorgeous.” She grins. “There’s a tri-part harmony, one line for the fellas, one for the ladies, one for the keepers. A full congregation, full-voiced? You can shake the chandeliers And everyone knows the, uh.” She pauses.
Grant looks over. Ipqen has frozen, her eyes on the alien glyphs below her fingers. The ones she’s sabotaged her brain to understand.
“Everyone knows the words,” she mumbles.
She stands up like she sat on a tack. “Excuse me a sec.”
She strides from the room, muttering a curse as she ducks the too-low header into the hall. The door slams shut behind her.
“Oh, dear.” Tymar lowers his pen. “Poor woman.”
“I know the feeling,” Grant says. “That implant. It seems so cruel.”
Tymar nods. “You know what it started out as?”
“What’s that?”
“A weapon.” Tymar taps his temple. “Jam it into an enemy alien’s head so you can compel them. Interrogations and infiltrations and turning warriors against their comrades. The version we have now—the one that’s designed to repair as it breaks and keep the brain from bleeding to death—that’s only a few kilocycles old.”
“Jesus Christ,” Grant murmurs.
“I haven’t gotten to Him, yet,” Tymar says. “But if that’s a blasphemous statement of shock, I concur.”
Grant pushes his chair out. “I’ll go to her.”
Tymar squeezes his shoulder. “Good idea.”
Grant doesn’t have to go far. Ipqen is seated outside, a few doors down the listening post’s gravitational ring, her face buried between her knees.
“Hey,” he says.
She looks tearfully up through her fingers. “I’m sorry, man. Just gimme—just one minute, okay? Please.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” He sits across the dingy hall from her. “I’ve been where you are. I’m listening.”
“I fucked up,” she sobs. Her massive shoulders tremble. “I’m so lonely. I’m so fucking lonely.”
Grant rests his elbows on his knees and waits out the tears with her.
“I try to pray in this language and it comes out all wrong. The tune, the rhythm. It’s so weird and clumsy and it doesn’t work. They don’t understand me.” Inaqi hiccups and wipes her snout. “I think the gods don’t understand me.”
“Just sing them how you know them,” Grant says. “Sing them the way you love them.”
Inaqi peeks through her fingers. “The administrator—”
Grant glances down the hallway, both ways. “With all due respect to her and the crucial work she’s doing, fuck the administrator. I never lost my songs. Not even when I was all baked. I sang loads when I was first implanted. I think the words sit in a different part of your brain. A universal one, I guess.”
The words leave his mouth and he lapses into thought.
Ipqen’s reply jolts him out of his ridiculous imaginings. “Could you repeat that?” he asks.
“I said would you play with us?” Ipqen asks. “Your whatsit. Kitar.”
“My guitar?” He sits up. “Yeah. Sure. You want me to go get it now?”
“Not yet. There’s a service tonight. I usually go with my earplugs in, just to sit by and watch. But maybe I could take ‘em out for the music this time. And you could play along.” She tries to smile. “Sounding pretty good on that Book of Journeying lament, y’know. I could use a little catharsis.”
She wipes her nose on her sleeve.
“A lot I gotta mourn for,” she says.
***
“I’m not going to order you,” Grant says.
“Then I’m not going to eat it,” Ajax says.
“Are you nervous about showing me your face?”
Why would I be?” Ajax crosses his arms and leans back on his threadbare conference room office chair. “I’ve got a thing about meat. That’s all.”
“Meena told me that was just for lab-grown stuff.” Grant gestures with the Eqtoran mealhook he’s skewering his lunch with. A shingle full of gleaming, freshly seared fish sits before him, its tender flesh flaking and bright. “This is wild caught.”
Ajax snorts. “Meena ought to wave her own tail.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Means she shouldn’t be running around telling my boss about my hangups.”
“C’mon. Give it a try. It’s really good. Fresh. I have a theory.”
“Is that an order?”
“Fine.” Grant clatters the hook onto the shingle he’s eating off of. “I order you.”
“All right,” Ajax says. He pauses at the catch of his visor. “Don’t compel me.”
“I’ll show mercy.”
Ajax flips his visor up. There’s a softness to his light purple features that catches Grant offguard; an open, youthful quality. If his nose hadn’t clearly been broken and reset in the past, and if he didn’t have a scar sliding along his chin to the peak of his lower lip, you could almost call him a babyface. His eyes are upturned and golden.
He points to a stripy fishtail. “Pass that.” It’s odd to hear his voice without the helmet’s muffling modulation.
“Here we are.” Grant slides the shingle forward across the conference room table. “Skewer and scoop.”
Ajax stabs the hook into the fish and brings it to his mouth. He chews and furrows his brow. “Nope.” Sёarch* The NovelZone.fun website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.
“Not into it?”
“I’m picky.” Ajax slides the plate back to Grant. “Meen would like it, though. She’s carnivorous.”
Tymar peeks around the corner, the Book of Renewal and his ever-present notepad in his hands. “Is this the anticomps-off room?” He slips his up his forehead. His eyes are a lighter, more magenta shade of red. “Hello, gentlemen.”
“Hey, Brother.” Grant waves Tymar over. “A cleric, a marine, and a Prince. Any bars we could walk into on this station?”
Tymar takes up another spot at the conference table. “I’m afraid I may have sent the only alcohol present away with Sykora.”
“Tymar.” Grant holds a cut of salmon-tone fillet up. “You try this yet?”
“I have.” Tymar gently lifts a warding palm to the proffered hook. “Not for me, I’m afraid.”
“I’m putting together a theory that Taiikari don’t like fish,” Grant says.
“It’s, uh. Divisive, for sure. Slimy. And a rather strange flavor. We didn’t have them on Taiikar.”
“Me and the Eqtorans are going to have to correct this way of thinking.”
Tymar laughs. “One of many changes our new family will inflict on us, I’m sure.”
Grant leans forward across the tea-stained conference table. “I’m wondering something. How many subjects currently live in the Black Pike sector?”
“About 40 bil,” Ajax says. “Right?”
“Thereabouts, yes,” Tymar says.
“So once they’re annexed, a full fifth of the sector’s population is going to be Eqtoran,” Grant says.
“Correct,” Tymar says. “Well, at first. A subset will emigrate outward, I imagine.”
Grant looks out the conference room window to the Eqtoran Potemkin village below them. “So this is going to be a big change, right?”
“It certainly is,” Tymar says. “But a managed one. Sykora will enforce restrictions on their travel outside their own system. Starting strict, and gradually loosening as time goes by. Unleashing a full cavalcade of Eqtorans upon the unprepared sector isn’t a recipe for a smooth transition. Full integration will take a long, long time. Maybe our whole lives.”
“We’re going to have to extend a lot of doorways,” Ajax says. “His Majesty banged his head on one, once. And the fishfaces are even taller than the Maekyonites.”
Grant remembers what Count Tikani told him about the day the Countess came to take him away. The only thing that scared me more than saying yes was saying no. There aren’t many ways off of a vassal world.
“Sykora and I had a whole speech about the journeys they’d take,” he says. “I didn’t lie to them, did I?”
“Of course you didn’t,” Tymar says. “The firmament will open to them. Just… gradually. Much quicker than if they’d never been uplifted. We’re knocking a score of kilocycles off their timeline. They’ll have our repulsor lanes and membranes to keep them safe as they explore the Empire. And our longevity drugs to ensure they’re alive to see it.”
“Who decides the pace of these restrictions lifting? Is that Sykora’s call?”
“It is. She’ll steer most of this process, provided she’s able to secure a bloodless annexation.”
“All right, then.” Grant folds his hands. An unexpected acceptance relaxes his shoulders. If his wife is the one making these calls, he’ll abide by them. And influence them, a rebellious little corner of his brain reminds him.
“I’ll tell you what,” he concludes. “The Black Pike Sector is about to eat a lot more fish.”
“How many Maekyonites are there?” Tymar asks. “We’re adding you too, someday.”
“Eight billion, I think,” Grant says.
“On one planet?” Tymar whistles. “That’s core-world density. Impressive.”
Grant tries to find a way to smoothly transition into the troubling thought Tymar’s question has brewed in him. “Ajax joked about this earlier and it got me wondering.” That’s a good tactic, he hopes. “Has there ever been a male capable of compelling? Or… immune to it?”
“Uh,” Tymar says. He rubs his chin. “How to put this. The orthodox answer is—no. Because males are compelled.” He gives an apologetic smile. “This might be where the implant is complicating things for you. Putting aside the self-expressions of man or woman or boy or girl, the word for a person who can be compelled is male. That’s our convention.”
“Aren’t there intersex Taiikari?”
“There are,” Tymar says. “But the social classification doesn't care about that. Only these.” He points at his eye. “And these are invariably one or the other. Females compel. Males are compelled.”
“Nobody has ever been born who could do both? Or neither?”
“Both, no,” Tymar says. “Neither, sure. The Xuin are agendered and parthenogenetic, and they’ve escaped the net. Eqtoran keepers are immune, I gather. And dimorphic alien females, of course. A Maekyonite female would do neither, I assume.”
Grant’s stomach drops further. “But no Taiikari?”
Tymar shakes his head. “Quite a lot of effort has gone into giving maleborn a way out of the affliction. Nothing has let us switch it off. You are compelled, or you aren’t. Everything else is fungible.” He tugs one of his eyelids. “This isn’t. Spermatogenesis means you’re vulnerable. There is something fundamental and unfixable about it across every sexually reproductive lifeform.”
No, Grant thinks. There isn’t.
“No bioengineering produces a viable fetus,” Tymar continues. “No surgery fixes it without catastrophic, life-ending neurological damage. There are corneal anticomps now, or full synthetic ocular replacements, but they’re cumbersome and obvious, and they come with many complications and biases attached. And there’s the other problem: even if a perfect solution was found, a vast chunk of the most powerful people in the Empire would react with vicious consternation at any attempts to implement it, for fear of the civilizational changes it’d bring. It’s a sorry state, I know.” He shrugs in resignation. “But we’re stuck.”
Grant already understood this in the abstract, but it dawns on him the degree of shock he must have caused the command group. His species breaks a fundamental rule of their universe. He tries to keep his face neutral through the realization. He’s always thought of himself as fitting neatly into a comfortable, unquestioningly masculine box. For the first time in his life, he feels the queasy, ground-shifting feeling of an identity at odds with the one his society would give him.
From the Maekyonite perspective, he is male. From the Taiikari perspective, he is not; and what really throws him for a loop is that he’d never want to be. He’s fiercely proud of his Maekyonite immunity.
He tries to grapple with this, momentarily, and then gives up, because Ajax is offering him another half-eaten piece of fish, and he thinks his mouth might be hanging open. He chews pensively, and swallows his doubt along with his yellowtail, or whatever this is. He is male. He’s a manly male and he has a beautiful wife who’s obsessed with him, and a big badass voidship, and the royal title of Prince. And if the Empire wants to quibble with that, once they know the truth, they can fuck off.
“You know what I’d do if I could compel?” Ajax says. “I’d compel the medtechs to ease up on the teeth. You have an appointment yet, Majesty?”
“They did a 3d scan of my mouth and said to keep flossing and they’d figure out how Maekyonite orthodontia worked.”
“Brace yourself. They go at these things like they’re digging for neodymium. And when you complain, they shame your habits. I’d flash them and tell them to slow the fuck down.”
“Your mouth’d be full,” Tymar says.
Ajax scratches his chin. “Shit.”
“I’d compel people to forget my handshake failures,” Tymar says. “I never know whether to bump or grab or shake or what-have-you. And I remember any failed attempt for a tenday at minimum.”
“The making people forget thing. That is handy.” Ajax nods. “I have some COs I’d love to cuss out without consequences.”
“These are illegal uses of compulsion,” Grant says. “That you’re proposing in front of the Prince.”
Ajax bulges his eyes in a half-assed impression of compulsion. “Forget the last thirty seconds.”
“Majesty—ah.” Oorta’s head appears in the doorway, then jerks out of sight the moment she makes eye contact with him. Just as automatically, Ajax slaps his visor down across his face and Tymar slides his anticomps on, with practiced speed.
Grant fumbles his own goggles on. “Come in,” he calls.
“I didn’t realize you were, uh, eating in here, gentlemen. Forgive me. But there’s a, uh—” she glances at the marine and the cleric with near-frantic concern.
“They’re fine to hear, Administrator.” Grant gives the newly amber-tinted administrator as reassuring a smile as he can manage. “What’s the problem?”
“A ship, Majesty.” She wrings her little cyan hands. “It just swept in, a few klicks out from the boundary.”
Grant shoves his seat out. “An Eqtoran ship?”
“Yes, Majesty. With its scanners at full power. It’s hunting us.” Oorta’s eyes are wide and fearful. “And it’s getting closer.”
The Novel will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!