The Roach God

Sacha did not sleep that night, in whatever sense this body still had for it.

He had spent three months building a claim.

Everything he had done since the crawlspace — the spider, the duct, the deep ground, the border in the wet ground, four marks taught to sixty roaches in nine days — had been the deliberate, patient construction of exactly what this list said had killed every colony like his.

And the Mother’s emissary had told him the mechanism six days before he came down here, for free, because a competent neighbor was cheaper than a stupid one.

A claim is a shape. Any claim above the fourth echelon can read the shape of a claim below it.

The pale ones had not worked out something mystical.

They had worked out a fact of physics and then reorganized an entire species around it.

Do not claim ground.

Do not accumulate Faith.

Do not have a god.

Become, structurally, invisible to everything that hunts by reading claims — and pay for it by living in cracks forever, with two hundred bodies and no growth and a city upstairs that had emptied out slowly enough for somebody to keep sweeping the molts.

They didn’t survive, Sacha thought. They’re still dying. They’re just dying so slowly that they’ve had time to write it down.

He tried, somewhere in the small hours, to find the hole in it.

He was good at this.

Three months of finding the hole in his own plans before the world found it for him, and he applied all of it; for most of the night, he got nowhere.

They’re a sample of one. — But a sample of one that had lasted longer than every other data point on their wall.

They’re dying anyway. — Slowly. Over centuries. Compared to the entries on that list, which had ended.

They gave up growth. — And every colony that had not given it up was a block on a wall with a plug at the end of it.

The wall answered every objection he raised.

That was what kept him up.

He was not looking at a superstition.

He was looking at a research program with a longer run of evidence than anything he possessed, conducted by people whose entire civilization was the study of what happens to roaches, and its finding was that everything he had built since the crawlspace was a slow way to die.

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He put the obvious question to the pale one the next morning and got the answer he had already assembled.

You want mine to come down.

Yours are claimed.

Then what do you want?

Yours, the pale one marked, without you.

There it was, laid out in a grammar where want was a passage you were trying to open.

Two hundred pale roaches in worked stone, dying slowly of their own solution, and sixty-one healthy surface-bred bodies with four bloodlines and nine young—an entire viable population —and the single thing standing between it and the safety of the deep network was the god attached to it.

You are not asking me to bring them, Sacha marked, carefully. You are asking me to give them up.

Yes.

And Khrr?

Yours is not held. Yours has been shown this wall. The pale one’s antennae did something Sacha had not seen from it before. Yours reads better than you. Yours has been reading for nine days.

He found Khrr an hour later, in the chamber with the list, doing exactly what the pale one had said.

It was thinner.

One of the mid-legs had been damaged and had set badly.

It stood in front of a wall of entries about dead colonies in a language it had learned from scratch in nine days, and it did not turn around when Sacha came in because it had not finished the block it was reading.

Sacha waited.

He had thirteen days of things to say, no channel to say them through, and the wrong grammar for all of it.

When Khrr finally turned, it did not greet him.

It walked to a clear patch of floor and laid, in the drill-shorthand the two of them had built in a cellar three months and two thousand lengths west of here, a single line.

They are right and they are wrong and I cannot tell you which part in this language.

Sacha read it twice.

Then Khrr laid the second line, and it was longer, and it took a while, and the mid-leg made it slow.

I have been here thirteen days. I have read forty of the blocks. Every colony on that wall was small.

Every one.

They are not a list of colonies that died because they were claimed. They are a list of colonies that died because they were claimed and small.

Khrr stopped, and gathered itself, and laid the last of it.

Nobody down here has ever seen a big one. They do not know if it works. They have two hundred and a wall and they think it is a law.

Sacha stood in front of that.

It was the correct objection.

It was the one he had spent an entire night failing to find, and someone with a badly set leg had found it nine days earlier, having learned the language from nothing.

Every entry on that wall was a small colony.

Small colonies get taken — by the Ascension, by whatever the Ascension had been called before it, by anything above the fourth echelon that reads a claim’s shape and decides it is worth the trouble.

The pale ones had watched that happen dozens of times and drawn the only conclusion their evidence supported:

claiming kills you.

But their evidence contained no single colony that had ever been allowed to get large.

They had built two centuries of doctrine on a dataset with a hole in the middle of it, and the hole was the exact shape of the thing Sacha had spent three months trying to build.

It doesn’t prove I’m right, he thought, and made himself be precise about it, because being precise about this was going to matter more than anything else he did this year.

It proves they don’t know. That’s all. That’s not the same as a reason to bet sixty-one lives.

He looked at Khrr — thinner, damaged, standing in front of a wall of dead colonies in a language it had taught itself in nine days because it had worked out that this was the argument that mattered.

But it’s a crack, he thought. And going through cracks is the entire thing we’re for.