Chapter 66: The Arithmetic Is Wrong

Her name was Isu, and Sacha learned it from Khrr the same evening he learned everything else the battle had cost, and he sat with the wrongness of that ordering for a while before he did anything about it.

I should have known it before she died, he sent to Thresh. Not after. She held a position in my colony for weeks and the first time her name reached me was in a casualty report.

You have sixty-odd of them, Thresh sent. You cannot hold sixty names in your head at the density you hold Khrr's and Vek's. Nobody could. That is not a failure of care. It is arithmetic.

Then the arithmetic is wrong, Sacha sent, and I'd rather fix the arithmetic than accept the result.

What came out of that conversation over the following week was not a policy so much as a practice, and Vek gave it shape once Sacha admitted he didn't know how to build it alone.

You name the ones you talk to, she marked, laying it out with the particular bluntness that had become, over the last several weeks, almost a signature. That is the actual rule, whether you meant to make it one or not. Khrr, because you talk to Khrr constantly. Me, because you needed someone to blame the border on.

A pause that Sacha had learned, by now, to read as her deciding whether the next thing was worth saying. So widen who you talk to. Not everyone. You cannot. But enough that the naming is not an accident of who happens to be standing closest to you when something goes wrong.

Sacha turned that over, found the flaw immediately, and found, underneath it, that she'd already accounted for it.

I don't have time to talk to sixty individuals.

You do not, Vek agreed. I do. So does Khrr. So will whoever comes after us.

Her antennae settled, level, and there was something in the delivery that was almost — Sacha had to read it twice to be sure — dry. You built a colony that routes everything through you and then discovered that was a mistake. Do not rebuild the same mistake around naming just because naming feels like it should be yours to do personally.

It took most of a season to build properly, and it started small:

A source check reveals an unapproved copy here; the author's chapter is on NovelPhoenix, where reading supports the writer.

Vek began learning everyone on her line's names, all of them, and used them in reports instead of positions.

Khrr did the same with the foraging blocks it still, out of old habit, checked on more than its own healing strictly required.

The names surfaced things Sacha hadn't expected.

A Cerci in Vek's line who'd been flagging patrol irregularities for two weeks and had simply had no channel that treated the observation as worth carrying upward — Vek found her, named her Ossa, and inside a day had a working theory about Ascension scouting patterns that Sacha would not have gotten from a report marked anomaly, unconfirmed.

A young Essaim worker, barely out of the nursery, who turned out to organize food relays with an instinct for bottlenecks that no one had thought to test for because no one had thought to ask a name a question.

This is what a society actually is, Sacha thought, standing at the reporting junction one evening watching three separate conversations happen without him in the middle of any of them. Not more bodies. More names that can be found.

He held a naming for Isu at the end of that week — the first thing Vek had ever called a ceremony, though neither of them had a grammar built for the word and had to invent the shape of it as they went.

The whole line she'd fought beside came, and Sacha laid her name once, publicly, in the grammar sixty-two subjects understood, and then laid nothing else, the way he had with her family at the edge of the healers' line.

What was different this time was that Vek laid her own marks after him, and then two of the Cerci who'd fought beside Isu, each in the halting, imperfect public grammar, each adding a fragment nobody had asked them to add — a route she'd scouted, a joke in scent nobody but roaches could have found funny, a habit of checking the water twice that had once seemed excessive and now, retroactively, seemed like exactly the carefulness that should be remembered.

Sacha stood at the edge of it and let it happen without him — a colony grieving somebody by committee instead of waiting for a single grieving god.

It was, he thought, more the measure of what he'd built than any border he'd held.

He caught himself, partway through, doing the thing he'd promised himself he'd stop doing — standing slightly apart, cataloging the ceremony the way he cataloged everything, when the actual invitation of the evening had been to simply stand in it.

He closed the distance, physically, and stood among the line rather than at its edge, and found that nobody treated the shift as remarkable.

They had, he realized, been waiting for him to notice he was allowed to.

You keep doing this, Khrr marked, finding him there. Deciding the god has to watch from outside the thing he built.

Old habit.

Old species, Khrr sent, dry in the way it had gotten drier. You told me, below, what you were before the wall — the one who goes toward the broken thing. You watched from outside everything, professionally, for eleven years, because the job needed you steady and steady meant separate. You are not that job anymore.

When did you get better at this than me?

Somewhere around the time you stopped noticing I was paying attention, Khrr sent.

It was, he thought, a fair trade for a name.