Chapter 34: Somebody Planning for a Great-Grandchild

Past the fold the gaps changed, and it took Sacha half a night to work out why: they got easier.

Not wider.

Easier.

Turns that should have been blind had sightlines.

Junctions that should have needed a scout could be read from the approach.

Twice the column moved through a doubling that would have cost hours in the western gaps and instead ran nearly straight, and on the third occurrence Sacha stopped the head and went and put his antennae on the wall of the doubling and found what he had by then expected to find.

Tool-marks.

A corner taken down.

Old, silted, deliberate.

He walked the column's route backward for two hundred lengths that night, checking, and the marks were everywhere once he knew to read them.

Not a tunnel system.

A maintained one.

Somebody had spent generations quietly making the fracture network passable — not digging it, the cracks were natural, but shaving a corner here, dropping a lip there, wearing a track into a floor by walking it ten thousand times.

Sixty-one roaches were currently travelling east at nearly twice the pace they had managed in the west, and the entire reason was work done by strangers who had never known they would exist.

He tried, that night, to work out what it would take.

Two thousand lengths of passage. A corner shaved here, a lip dropped there — each one perhaps four days of labour for two workers who could not be doing anything else while they did it. Multiply that by however many corners lay between here and the fold and the number stopped being a number and became a description of a society:

one that could afford to put bodies on infrastructure instead of on food or defence, for generations, on the assumption that there would be generations.

That was not survival.

Survival is what he had been doing since the water heater.

This was somebody planning for a great-grandchild.

How large, Thresh asked, and Sacha appreciated that it was the right question and that he could not answer it.

Large enough to maintain two thousand lengths of passage. For long enough that the marks have silted. That's all I can say.

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The Verge never knew they were here.

Nobody knew they were here. Sacha turned it over. That's the thing I keep arriving at. The rat has held that border for three years and told me the gaps were sealed. The cricket watched that ground for nineteen years and told me it was sealed. Both of them were wrong about the same thing in the same way.

Because whatever lived here did not come up, Thresh sent.

Ever. Not once, in however many generations it takes to wear a track like that.

He sat with the implication and did not enjoy it.

A colony that never surfaced was a colony that had decided, at some point and presumably for a reason, that the surface was not survivable.

And it had been right for long enough to build a civilisation on the assumption.

Then it had stopped.

They found the end of it on the ninth day past the fold, and it was not a battlefield.

The chamber was large — the largest space they had encountered underground, high enough that Sacha could not read its ceiling — and it had been a settlement.

That much was obvious within a minute. Cisterns, four of them, cut into the low side.

Tracks worn into the floor in a radiating pattern from a central low point.

Chambers off the sides in numbers that suggested a population Sacha could not credibly estimate and did not want to.

There was no damage. No collapse, no flood-line, no scorch, no sign of any struggle at all.

And there was nothing dead in it.

Not one shell.

Not one fragment.

In a settlement that size, occupied for generations, there should have been an accumulated midden of the ordinary dead — the ones who die of being old, in their own beds, in numbers, over centuries.

Sacha walked it for six hours looking for a single body and did not find one.

What he found instead, on the far wall, was writing.

Not human writing.

Not the drill-grammar he and Khrr had built.

Scent-marks, laid so long ago that they had passed almost entirely into the substrate, arranged in a dense band that ran the length of the wall at a height a standing roach could reach.

He could not read it.

There was too little of it left, and the grammar was not his, and three months of inventing a shorthand with a lieutenant had taught him exactly enough to know that another species' — another culture's — writing was not something he was going to crack by staring at it.

But he could read the shape of it.

It was long.

It was organised in blocks.

And the last block, the one nearest the chamber's eastern exit, had been laid in a hurry — the marks cruder, wider spaced, made by somebody who had not had the time the rest of the wall had been given.

Sacha stood in a dead city built by his own species, in front of a message he would never be able to read, and did the only thing available:

he had four of the Cerci memorise every mark on that wall, precisely, in order.

We can't read it now, he thought. We might be able to read it in a year. And there won't be a wall in a year — there'll be a building on top of it, or a flood, or nothing at all.

It cost him a full day of a schedule he did not have.

He spent it anyway.

Thresh found him at the wall near the end of it, and stayed a while before saying anything.

You are going to tell me this was worth a day, it sent eventually.

No. I don't know that it was.

Then why.

Sacha looked at the last block of marks, the hurried ones, laid by somebody who had run out of time in a room that had then been emptied of everything including its dead.

Because they wrote it down, he sent. Whatever happened to them, the last thing they did was try to leave a record for whoever came next. And I'm whoever came next. If I walk past that because I'm on a schedule, then the next thing that walks through here walks past me too.

The beetle considered that.

My colony left nothing, it sent.

Not a mark. Four hundred of us and I am the entire record, and I have one antenna and a bad memory and I will not last.

It turned toward the eastern exit.

Take the day.

Take two if you need them.