Reclamation(85)
“All right,” Iyal went on, “your people are, obviously, from the same Evolution Point as mine. That should mean you have the same messengers in your cells, plus or minus three or four to allow for your native environment.
“As far as I can tell, your cells will react to twenty separate messengers that aren’t present in any other known Human variant. Then there’s your brain.” She shook her head. “The brain, as we know it, is a complicated, disorganized organ with three or four backups for every function. It stores information, but it stores it wherever there’s room and reacts according to a branch of chaos theory. That doesn’t even begin to cover how it decides whether the information gets stored as short-term, or long-term, or muscular memory.” She scowled at Arla. Arla didn’t flinch. She had learned fairly early on that Zur-Iyal’s scowls had nothing to do with her personally. The woman was annoyed with her cells, or her brain, or whatever it was that she couldn’t understand today. “Your brain, on the other hand, is more tightly organized than a Vitae datastore. I can predict, PREDICT, where a given piece of information is going to end up, down to the cell. Your short-term memory is ridiculously huge, and your long-term memory defies description, and you’ve got no backups.” She frowned even more deeply. “You should be a flipping genius, but you’re not. You should be totally impossible, but you’re not. Although for the life of me I don’t know why.” Again she shook her head. “I find it hard to believe that someone so carefully constructed has no idea of her function.” Zur-Iyal looked at her very hard, as if trying to pull the ideas out with her eyes.
“Would help if I could, Zur-Iyal,” Arla told her honestly. “But there’s too much I don’t understand.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Iyal had sighed and stumped out again.
I could tell her the apocrypha, but, Garismit’s Eyes, how would I make her understand it? Arla stared out the laboratory window. There were fifteen separate stories about the Nameless and the Servant that the Teachers had declared to be lies. One of them told about her family and her namestones.
The gardens’ flat, cultivated land spread out in front of her. The window frame gave it just enough shape to keep her leftover fears quiet. Silver drones bobbed between the long rows of plants, checking soil quality, watching for parasites and fungi, administering fertilizer or pesticides as necessary, or harvesting the mid-season crops. Not all of what they harvested would be used as it was. Even through the window, Arla could catch the faint green scent of the processing sheds, where the raw organic materials were augmented with artificially produced animal products and turned into a variety of unpronounceable things that had mechanical or medicinal uses.
The cleanliness and precision of the place was the most completely and utterly alien sight for Arla on the entire world.
She leaned her hip against the counter and watched the drone’s movements. She remembered the smell of animal pens where she spent what felt like half her life in the Realm. She remembered the ache in her shoulders as she dug out the manure and mud. Chilblains broke through her hands from spending hours up to her knees and elbows in water harvesting grain. She lived with the rain, the stink, the ache, and the Teachers coming once a month to her village to tell them all it was what the Nameless meant for them. And she had believed. From the time she could hear and understand, she’d believed because everyone around her did.
Then came her Marking Day. At the end of that day, she lay on her mat, her hands wrapped in bandages and throbbing from the pain. The leather belt her old grandmother had fastened around her chafed her waist and legs miserably. Outside, the night’s hail clattered against the roof. The wind rocked the house on its stilts. Its fingers found their way through the cracks in the walls and drew themselves across her. She stared into the darkness, hearing the sounds of her father and little sisters breathing and snoring all around her and wishing for sleep to come.
The floor had creaked from gentle steps and she smelled her mother’s musky breath.
“Get up, Arla, I’ve something to show you.”
She’d sat up, blinking. Mother had taken her by the arm right above the ragged bandages and led her out into the other room. The fire on the central hearthstone was nothing but red coals buried in ash. Mother poked them carefully with a stick until the tiniest flames flickered up. The dim orange light showed up her wrinkled, leathery face and Arla wondered why her mother was smiling. She never had before.
“Now that you’ve lived to be marked, Arla, I can start telling you about your name. Stone in the Wall. Arla Born of the Black Wall. What I say is true, daughter of my blood, but you must never, ever tell anyone. If someone comes who has need of you, they will already know. If anyone else hears, you’ll be killed for a Heretic. What I say is from the Nameless Powers to our family, do you understand?”