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IN ALL THE CYCLES HE’D spent in the odd-smelling room the Folk called the Sanctuary, Dun had never gotten used to the fact that his friend Myrch, or what was left of him, was in the vat before him. So was Tali and so were so many others fallen in the war. He found himself running his hand across the plastic sheeting over the edge of the vat and trailing it over the various sizes of cables and pipes snaking in and out to the various systems in their world that the vat operated. Not even Myrch knew how old the vat was or how long it had been there, but he did know that the vat hadn’t called itself that, preferring OneLove. This had such a suitably religious ring to it that the Tinkralas, the sect that Padg belonged to, had adopted it, in preference to the more ponderous Ki. The new name stuck so well, that any number of chants and hymns featuring the name had sprung up. Dun was suspicious of the hastiness of the group’s growth, but Padg seemed to have made solid friends there and thus far it seemed to do no harm. Dun still referred to the vat as Padg, an assumption that neither of them seemed to mind. Unlike previous people who’d been laid to rest in the vat, Myrch’s consciousness still seemed to hold form in whatever strange world went on in the strange goop. Either the smell of the place bothered Dun less these days or the vat having a full-time caretaker in Nev had somehow altered the strange chemistry in its depths.
“Hello, old friend,” said OneLove. Recently, it seemed to speak to Dun through the speaker that Nev had rigged up, even though Dun was a shaman and could pick up thoughts transmitted by the network of aerials throughout the tunnels and caves. That was what had got him involved in the first place. Searching through the far reaches of every vein and artery of the Dark, chasing the ghost of his father. So long ago now. So long.
“Hello Myrch, what can we do for you?”
The vat chuckled, slightly distorted through the speaker. Dun had always thought it sounded sinister.
“My mother would have said, ‘Roll out the welcome mat!’” It was hard to imagine Myrch ever having a mother, even when he had a body.
Padg sucked air through his front teeth, “So it’s really true then? The progenitors are coming back, huh.”
“Well, my progenitors, certainly, if not yours.”
“How soon?” said Dun.
“I can’t tell yet. I’ve asked Nev to reconnect some new cables to something I found. If it turns out to be what I think it is, then I can give you a better answer.”
“Padg, I need you to do some negotiating. The cables in question are above the Grey Duchy’s main temple. They seem truculent in their negotiations.”
“Yeah, I’m going there next. I’ve spent a morning being summoned. It’d make me feel proper important if it weren’t a pain in the ass.”
“Good,” said OneLove, “Give my regards to Laly.”
“I think I might have to couch that as OneLove sends blessings.”
“Whatever,” said OneLove.
“You’re in a particularly flippant mood,” said Dun.
“Am I?” said OneLove, “Hmm—”
A bubbly rippling noise came from the top of the pool, followed by ripples hitting the plastic at the edge of the pond.
“I don’t mean to be funny—" said Padg.
“I find that hard to believe,” Dun’s interjection was met by a brief, pointed silence.
Padg went on, “But, since you’re all omnipotent and all controlling, can’t you just do something so we can get them to help us? It would be so much easier.”
“Easier now, yes,” said OneLove, “but I’m not a dictator. Remember, we just got rid of one of those.”
That phrase fell into the room like lead. They had all lost so much in the war. Tali had gone into the vat, but too late to save most of her, her memories and all her training as an alchemist had been kept mostly intact, so OneLove said, but her intrinsic ‘Tali-ness’, that had gone. Having to lose Tali twice, once on the battlefield and once again, when they’d thought they could save her, had dented something in both Dun and Padg’s spirit that would never come right. And the final kick in the teeth for both was Rowle, the leader of the Bureaucracy, the dictator in question, without whom, they’d never have been at war in the first place, had ended herself by jumping into the vat.
“Is she still in there?” said Dun.
“Rowle? Yes.”
“Is she... any trouble?” Dun couldn’t think of a better way to couch it.
OneLove laughed, Dun shivered. “She is mostly distracted, by the enormousness of what is here. It takes some—” they paused, although OneLove spoke with Myrch’s human voice as far as Dun was aware, because there were so many consciousnesses making up whatever the hells the vat was, Dun had always thought of OneLove as a they,” some people, time to adjust. She is mostly chasing fragments of other Cat-People she knew.”
Every discussion Dun had ever had about the vat felt uncomfortable. And then followed guilt that he as a shaman should be well-appraised of all kinds of feelings about death. He’d started his young life believing that his communications could have been with the dead or from the future or past, instead of the vast network of transmitters and receivers woven into the fabric of the Dark, the place they called home. He had changed the notion of shamanism for his people forever. Shamans were no less sought after. The idea of communicators with the vast network, including OneLove still made an impressive rare ability. One that their society, such as it was, was just getting to grips with the usefulness of. But the ideas brought about by the vat, Dun found disturbing. In many ways he found it easier to accept death than to acknowledge that fragments of people he once knew were preserved in some kind of consciousness soup. Bits of Tali, recipes and memories, like a shelf of scrolls, were in there, but not someone to talk to. Not someone to smell. Someone to hold. Dun rubbed his face.
There was a low key bong behind them. The Sanctuary, the room the vat inhabited, was treated with more reverence by some than others. OneLove, it seemed, had to keep up the habits each group expected of it. Dun thought that it must have been exhausting, but then checked himself. What was exhaustion even like for a being that might as well be immortal? Was it even the same part of its consciousness turned towards each interaction? Or was it like the ears of a cave spider that could hear someone coming from four different directions at once?
“Come!” said OneLove, in what Dun thought was a particularly ominous tone. The door opened with a hiss and the incense scent of the Tinkrala novice preceded them.
“Sorry to disturb,” she said. Such a young voice. “Laly requests the presence of Brother Padg at the conference with the Grey Duchy. We are at the new Moot Hall.”
“No rest for the wicked, eh?” said Padg with a chuckle. “Your turn to cook at rest span, Gods help us all.”
“Err, thanks?” said Dun embracing his friend, who left in a waft of incense.
Dun was still stood tracing the path of one of the pipes from the vat with his hand when the door hissed shut. The speaker crackled—not all that unusual, it made all kinds of strange noises, recorded things people weren’t expecting and played them back. Dun shrugged. “Are you still in there, Tali?” His voice carried into the background of tiny sounds the Sanctuary always had, then faded.
