Escape was attained, the Nascent Empress fleeing south. Her Heart Brother was lost to her, broken by a madness born of cruelty and grief. In her sundered state, she sought the understanding of the golden father of the east, who had long made study of the human animal. In his twisting dementia he courted and wooed her, and she became mother.

  —Abalone Shell on the White Beach, A New History Of Theta Mars

  The scent of the wyrm lingered in the passage, dry, faintly reptilian. To DuCourt, despite her close association with the Triad, true wyrms, their scent was always his.

  James Haddock had returned from a private venture in the wilds scarred and skittish, but alive, which in itself seemed a small miracle. He had made no confidence in her, remaining silent, unknowable. This mania had not registered to her as anything more than an escalation of the scientific fervour he had always possessed. She had never been given audience by her, never thought that there was more to the bizarre musk of that strange man when he held her close in the thin hours before dawn that was more than the lingering effects of his study.

  When she passed the wyrm musk in the corridor of Divine Messenger, her first thought was to that madman turned stranger that she had left behind on Theta Mars. Her second thought was to his daughter.

  She followed the wyrm, found her and the woman in a nearby passageway, traveling the ship to no obvious end. The wyrm filled the passage, loomed even as it crawled, half crouching. DuCourt paused, breath catching, white not blue. Oh, how she missed her Tranquil teacher. Woman not man, oh, how she wished James would have spoken to her. The last time she saw him, grief and harsh purpose clouded his mind. She and her sorrows and her rage, kept at bay only so long as to give innocents a chance to flee. A chance they did not take.

  “Emissary,” she said, falling into a bow. A crouch, with her left leg stretched out behind her, foot laid along the flooring, arms outstretched to either side, head lowered.

  “Stand, Seeker,” hissed the emissary’s sharp voice. Not the woman, but the wyrm. DuCourt lifted her head, her body trembled as she rose, frail as only the planet born became in the listless grav of orbitals, stations, and ships. Burning eyes poured pitying heat over her. “We are not your teacher, our wisdom is untempered. We are young in knowing.”

  “Not much younger than the Triad was, when I was educated in their garden,” said DuCourt in the trilling cant of the wyrm. The acid burns in her throat stinging anew, as the glottal emphasis pulled at deep tissues.

  The emissaries watched her. The wyrm folded back on herself, sinuous body rubbing along the walls and ceiling where her wings and hips protruded. The woman stood straight backed and slight. Her hair had lost the luster and curl of the humid planet surface, and stuck to her robe and neck with static.

  A wave of longing for a time long past spilled through her, as DuCourt recalled the blue silk the Triad had dressed their students in, a robe much like the emissary’s white. The warm cave where they had slept in depressions of the stone. The mush the Triad had, bickering, prepared and perfected, food fit for infants and small children. She could imagine how the children would have been raised. Sitting for their lessons in a stone garden, taught, drop by burning drop, what it was to be a wyrm, what it was to Seek.

  “Did they teach you?” DuCourt whispered. “Tranquil, Aurora, Falling Star? Did you sit in their garden and hear their lessons?”

  “No,” said the emissary. “The Triad returned to their calling as Seekers after the Expulsion. They never sought to teach again.”

  DuCourt recoiled slightly as if struck. “Never?” Her hands worried together, thumb rubbing over the scarred punctures and burns.

  “It was not a purpose they had wanted, but a duty they undertook. We were our mother’s children and charge, not her Cohort’s,” the wyrm said.

  “Then…” DuCourt swallowed to stave off a surge of tears. “Your teacher was James.”

  “The Teeth of the Lion raised us at his Heart Sister’s side, but our education was our own. We are Seekers. Do you understand this, Madeline?”

  “Yes, I,” she drew a shaky breath to steady herself. “Yes, I understand.”

  The emissaries turned, and in silence, crept away, crawling—slinking, stalking—through the foreign arteries of the ship/beast Divine Messenger. “Would you walk with us, Journeywoman DuCourt?” asked the woman. “We are told there is a garden aboard, we wish to see it.”

  “Why did she call herself an Empress, do you suppose, Scholar Felsdam?” asked Sister Young. Her desk had been unfurled onto a table that dominated the front room of her suite. Recyc was piled in an orderly catalogue. A sheaf of new pulp, crisp and white was bound in red yarn, waiting to receive her pen and her official transcript of the mission.

  “I would guess because it was the highest position in human culture she could find in Haddock’s mind. She took a title for our sake, I believe. Among wyrms she had no need of it, she was already mother,” Felsdam replied. The chair he had been offered was too soft for comfort, and left him feeling vulnerable unless he perched on the edge of the seat—which made him look flightly—he supposed he was.

  “Mother?” asked Sister Young. Benign and vitriolic. He knew she had read the transcripts of his ‘trial’ and had chosen answers to every question she posed before she asked them.

  The Scholar did not like the monk of the Saint of Learning. His past experiences with other members of her order had not been pleasant. Leastly because all such discussions had occurred while he and Maddie were held in custody under suspicion of colluding with the Teeth of the Lion and his ‘trained wyrm army.’ There had also then been the sense that his testimony was all but outright dismissed on the grounds of him suffering delusions and insanity. Perhaps he had been.

  “Reproduction is a caste of sorts to them, a sacrifice of freedom and longevity to sustain their species’ future,” Felsdam explained. “Very few wyrms reproduce, the position is of the utmost gravity. When mother speaks, Theta Mars listens.”

  “You were taught this by the Triad?” The question was leaden. This was the attack Felsdam could not counter.

  “Yes.” He knew again that he had once more lost. The blood could not lie, and yet to every inquisition it betrayed him, made him fallible.

  The colony doctors coined the name Ichor Poisoning, to describe the phenomenon. They claimed that was the source of James Haddock’s madness. His belief in the personhood of wyrms was the product of the commingling between his education under the eccentric Master Denivou and the bizarre psychoactives in the blood of the wyrm. Of course, removed from the planet, and the wyrms themselves, Scholar Felsdam had no proof to refute the claims of those doctors, founded though they were with the backing of the colonial oligarchs. Who desired to be allowed to return to their holdings, reclaim their wealth and wreak bloody vengeance on their aggressors.

  “You confirm then that notions of rule originated with the Teeth of the Lion?” Sister Young asked, her graphite whispering against the rough, grey brown surface of her current page of recyc.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Not notions, simply names, titles. Ruling was never her design, only legitimacy in our eyes, that we might listen when she spoke,” Felsdam said, for what he imagined could be the thousandth time. He had given testimony again and again. Written reports as a scientist, a theologian, and a desperate man, but he could not reach the minds of those who did not listen.

  “What message did she wish us to hear?”

  “She asked that we leave Theta Mars of our own accord.”

  “Why was the colony to depart?”

  “She foresaw further violent acts committed against her People.”

  “Foresaw?”

  “She reasoned. As any good ruler does, given the evidence at her disposal.”

  “Evidence that resided in Haddock’s mind?”

  “Partly, yes.”

  “You confirm then, that Haddock seeded the notion that humanity was a dangerous animal, a threat to be eliminated?”

  Felsdam sighed, the rush of air sharply painful as it moved over his damaged teeth. The monk allowed his silence to stand, until her account caught up to their speech and she lifted her graphite away from the page.

  “Your mission has taken you to places where the doctrine of imperial law had been loosened, sometimes even outright abandoned, has it not?”

  “It has.”

  “Theta Mars was beyond empire, had been since the cannibalisation of the transport ships. Beyond the ship yards of the space port there was no rule but that of parliament and our Governor, born himself on the soil, as had been his predecessors back to the third to hold office. Of the colony’s one hundred and fifty-odd year existence, imperial oversight was maintained for little over a decade. Do you know what the official ruling made on the status of the wyrms was?”

  “That the carnivorous animal did not display communicative intelligence. No sign of tool use, infrastructure or cultural behaviour was observed, the wyrm is deemed proto-sapient, possibly to the level of the extinct bonobo of the mother world. Further observation ordered, non-intervention protocol engaged.”

  “They made that ruling in colonial year two, after the main launch rocket had been broken down into mining engines. Infants were born who had been conceived and carried to term in Theta Martian gravity. Cobalt ran in rivers through the mountains, the lignin in the red forests was hardwood and untouched. The opportunity to pack up and leave was past, not to come again until year ten when the cargo fleet arrived. But you know of course that it was a wealthy little rock, safe, for the wyrm was indifferent to all but the most determined trespasser in his domain. You understand, I hope, Sister Young, what they stood to lose, should the sapience ruling be disproven?”

  “Corruption is the purview of the Saint of Right Being, Scholar Felsdam. My concerns are for knowledge, and accurate accounts,” she replied flatly.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, a bitterness he could not suppress in his words. “Corruption has never contaminated history. To think that such a thing might occur shakes the very stellar lattice.”

  “Is there meaning in your repetition of known history, Scholar? I am here to listen, if you have ought to say that needs be heard.”

  “It is a dangerous thing to codify a People as lesser, Sister Young,” he said, rubbing his hand over the place where Maddie’s scar ached. “Atrocities are not remembered as atrocities, if the subjects are beasts and the motive is scientific learning. You know of the disaster at Gideon?”

  “Yes, a tragic loss of life.”

  “Who is responsible, in your accurate account?”

  “The risk was poorly calculated, by Joseph Capstone and his lead scientist, Journeyman Fredrick Malt, but it was the Inferno That Consumes All who enforced death as its end.”

  “A poorly calculated risk?” Felsdam whispered, a shiver of revulsion running through him. “They destroyed an entire generation, though I infer that your tragedy is the human loss?”

  “The men and women sent to gather information were innocent of malignant intent.”

  “I wonder if you would say the same if they had mutilated and murdered human children.”

  “I do not deal with hypotheticals.”

  “Niether does the Empress of Theta Mars.”

  “They are green,” stated the emissary, pausing a moment in the entrance to the ship’s garden.

  “Yes, mother world species, all very pure heritages,” DuCourt said, breathing deep the moist air and the smell of growing things. It lacked the fungal undertones of a planet’s greenhouse, but with her eyes on the growth medium, she could almost pretend.

  “As were the Theta Martian colonists, we understand,” said the emissary, her bare feet padding silently along a row, the wyrm walking one over, scales flashing through the shifting foliage.

  “Yes. It is easier to transplant from a similar environment. Starborn do not do well in planetary gravity, or breathe easily in atmosphere,” DuCourt explained, following two steps behind the woman, watching as she touched the leaves. She thought to herself, nor do the planet born thrive in stations and orbitals.

  “They brought green plants with them, we understand, and mulberry moths, sheep, and red-fleshed cattle.”

  “Their’s was a long journey that would have been very difficult to return from. They brought what they expected to need to survive. It was unclear exactly what they would find on the surface.” Gardener staff crept away from the wyrm, disappearing into passageways as unobtrusive phantoms. Soon they were alone.

  “Theta Mars provided more than enough of what their subsistence might require. Still they raised their red-blooded beasts and spliced and grew their green-leafed trees, even when they were proven sickly and unfit.” The statement was one of certainty, not question. She passed under the shadow of a tree perhaps older than the ship.

  “Homesickness that in time became habit, I believe,” DuCourt said.

  “We understand they held revulsion to consume black flesh, is this true?”

  “I had never eaten deir until James prepared it for me.”

  “The Teeth of the Lion can cook?”

  DuCourt chuckled, though it hurt in her heart, “yes, to some extent. His Master taught him.”

  The woman trilled and continued her careful examination of the trunk of the orange tree. DuCourt picked a ripe fruit and began to peel it for her.

  “Emissary? How is he? Is he well?”

  She sniffed at a piece of orange peel. “Time is not gentle with him,” she said, dipping her head as she received a segment of the fruit from DuCourt’s hand. She broke it in half, examined the pulp. “Our mother’s sorrow is heavy to bear, he worries ceaselessly for the future.” She held one half delicately to the wyrm’s lips, and they ate simultaneously.

  “That is what I expected,” DuCourt sighed. “I wish there had been a way to spare him this suffering.”

  “He does not.”

  “I know,” DuCourt smiled sadly, handing the woman two segments of fruit. “He always wanted to carry the world. Though I believe he hoped it would be a happier burden.”

  “Someday he will know peace. We work towards it, even now,” said the emissary as she and the wyrm again consumed the fruit, synched even to the movements of their jaws and throats as they swallowed. DuCourt did not doubt that if they allowed the ship’s doctor to check their pulse, that their hearts too would hold tempo, the woman’s four chambers beating six times to every one of the wyrm’s twinned eight.

  “How…” DuCourt asked, throat closing tight around a swell of fear. “How did you come to be?”

  The emissary’s eyes were so like James’, like being watched by god through some mortal proxy. So like Tranquil’s. “You worry we are an abomination.”

  “No…” whispered DuCourt, untruthfully.

  “You fear we are an inversion of Capstone’s desecration.”

  “I did not mean to imply—”

  “It is not a belief we condemn you for, Madeline DuCourt,” said the emissary. The sunlights through the leaves of the orange tree dappled her scales in shades of green, and shone brightly metallic in her hair. “Know that our mother, though wounded to her burning heart, is not a monster. We were raised with love and tenderness. Our union a choice made with mature minds in safety and at peace.”

  “But is she—” DuCourt pressed hard on her scarred hand. Lost for a cold moment in the unfurling dissolution that had nearly destroyed her. An accident that had nearly made her Tranquil. There was not a day she did not question if it should have been allowed to happen, that perhaps her sacrifice would have helped, somehow. That James should not have been the only one. “Did she remain—after—is the child alive?”

  The emissary undid the knot that held her robe and let it fall. “We bear no scars, Madeline. There was no undoing, no battle, and no victor,” she said, turning slowly that the Journeywoman could see that she was unmarked by ichor burns or fang punctures.

  “You are… Heart Sisters?” DuCourt asked, as she donned her robe.

  They spoke in unison. “No. We are what should have been, between our kinds, if the discovery of compatibility had been allowed exploration before it was, through violent accident, known. We are Abalone Shell on the White Beach.”