Chapter 31: The Column

Sixty-one bodies moving as one thing through ground that fits two abreast is not a march. It is a queue, and Sacha spent the first night learning what a queue does under stress.

It stretched.

That was the whole problem, arriving in the first hour and never once going away.

A column that long could not see its own ends; the head reached a narrowing and slowed, and the slowing travelled backward down the line as a compression that reached the tail four minutes later as a full stop, by which point the head was moving again.

The column breathed.

Every breath cost distance.

By the third hour he had rebuilt it on the move, splitting the line into six blocks with fixed gaps between them and a marker roach at each junction whose entire job was to hold position and pass a pace-signal forward and back.

It was crude and it worked, and Sacha noted with the part of his mind that never stopped taking inventory that he had just invented, badly and under pressure, something the Essaim lines had been doing instinctively for weeks on the foraging routes.

They already knew, he thought. I've been running a colony for three months and I still don't ask them first.

So he tried it.

It felt absurd — a god stopping a column in unmapped ground to consult a foraging line about pace — and he did it anyway, because absurd was cheaper than wrong.

He put the question to the senior Essaim block in the only grammar available:

two marks for the gap between blocks, a query.

What came back was not an answer.

It was a correction.

The block re-marked his spacing, widened three of the six gaps and narrowed one, and then held position waiting to see whether the god had meant the question or had merely made the shape of one.

He adopted their spacing.

The column stopped breathing within the hour.

He thought about that for most of the rest of the night.

He had built a system in which sixty-one subjects did exactly what he told them, and had then spent three months mistaking that for the system working.

The nursery slowed everything.

That was expected and budgeted for and still turned out to be worse than the budget, because carrying was the one thing his species did not do well.

Roaches move.

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They do not haul.

Nine young that could not keep pace had to be moved in relays, four bearers to each, swapping every two hundred lengths, and the relay ate bodies out of the column's defensive positions at exactly the rate that made the column indefensible.

He did the arithmetic on the second night and did not like it:

at this pace, with these relays, the column would reach the first hold-point six hours later than planned and the second one a full day late.

Or, said the part of him that had spent eleven years learning to say the unsayable option out loud before dismissing it, you leave the nine.

He let the thought finish, because a thought you refuse to finish comes back at a worse hour. Nine subjects, none of them yet contributing, all of them costing four bearers each. Drop them and the column moves at full pace, arrives intact, holds ground.

Then he dismissed it, and did not spend a second on self-congratulation for having dismissed it, because he had noticed something more useful in the shape of the calculation.

The colony did not think of the nine as cargo. It had never occurred to a single roach in that column to question the relays — they had reorganised around the carrying without instruction, the way they reorganised around anything, and if he abandoned the nine now he would not be making a hard tactical choice.

He would be teaching sixty-one subjects, permanently and in one gesture, exactly what their god did with things that had stopped being useful.

And they'd know, he thought. Not immediately. But the Faith would know, because the Faith is just them, and it would come back down the channel into what they become.

He put four more bearers on the relay and took them out of his own escort.

It slowed the column by a further two hours a night.

He logged that honestly rather than pretending the decision had been free, because a commander who tells himself the right choice was also the cheap one will make the next one badly.

Thresh, walking the column's midsection on a bad leg and worse armour, noticed the reshuffle within a day.

You took them from your own body, it observed.

It was the position with the most slack in it.

That is true and it is not why you chose it.

No, Sacha agreed.

Thresh let that sit, and then sent something Sacha turned over for the next three nights: The Verge carried its young. All four hundred lengths of the corridor, in relays, exactly as you are doing. It was the last thing we did as a colony and it is the only thing I have never once wished we had done differently.

[Territory: none.

Sanctuary: unanchored.

Rank: Divine Creature — provisional.]

The notice arrived on the second night, six hours after the last of the column cleared the fracture mouth, and Sacha read it three times in the dark.

Provisional.

He had known this was coming — had accepted it, had told himself it was the price of the building — and there was still a specific hollowness to seeing it written.

Everything he had built since the crawlspace had been a claim on ground.

The ground was behind him, and above it a machine was idling in a lot, and whatever he was now was a thing with no floor under it.

Unanchored. Not fallen. Not stripped. Simply: in transit, and not counting.

He wondered, briefly and unproductively, what happened to a Divine Creature that stayed unanchored.

Whether there was a clock on it.

Whether the cricket knew.

Whether anyone did.

Provisional also meant something he liked considerably less on the third reading: it meant the system was still watching.

Not scoring him — tracking him.

Whatever mechanism had counted sixty-one and nine and four lineages from outside a wall was presumably still counting, and a claim in transit was a claim with no perimeter at all.

He had been so occupied with the fact of leaving that he had not properly considered the shape of what he had become in leaving: sixty-one bodies strung out in a line through ground nobody else could enter, carrying every young thing they owned, defended by nothing but the terrain.

The single most vulnerable configuration a colony could adopt.

Held together entirely by the assumption that nobody could see them.

Then a marker roach came back down the line with a pace-signal from the head, and he went to deal with it, because there was no one else to deal with it and there was not going to be.