The Roach God

He gave them his answer on the tenth day, and he did not give it as a refusal, because a refusal was the one answer that ended the conversation.

I will not give you mine, he laid, in their grammar, slowly, with Khrr beside him to correct the places where his topology went wrong. That passage is closed. It was closed before I came down and nothing you have shown me has opened it.

The pale one received that without any reaction Sacha could read.

Then you will be a block on the wall.

Probably. He had thought about how to say the next part for four days. But you do not know that. You have never known it. You have a wall of small colonies and no large one, and you have called that a law for two hundred years because it was the only shape your evidence could take.

Something moved through the settlement then — not visibly, nothing so crude, but Sacha felt the attention of the chamber change in a way he recognized from rooms full of people being told something about themselves.

Ours read your wall in nine days, he went on, and found the hole in it. Not because ours is cleverer than yours. Because ours came from outside and did not already know the answer.

Ours came up out of a wall three months ago knowing nothing, he laid, and made himself keep going, because this was the part that would either work or end the conversation. And ours has been wrong about almost everything since. I quartered my own colony to catch an informant who did not exist and a young one died of it. I read a dead city and decided it was empty because I was in a hurry. I have been wrong so consistently that being wrong is most of what I have learned.

Then why should we weigh you.

Because I know I am wrong, Sacha laid. You have not been able to be wrong for two hundred years. There is nobody down here who can be. Everything that would have proved you wrong is a closed block on that wall.

He let that sit for a full day before he made the offer, because it only worked if they had spent a day angry about the first part.

Thresh, who had waited seven days at the top of a shaft and had come down on the eighth to see the settlement for itself, put the objection to him that night in the side chamber.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

You are about to promise two hundred strangers that you will let them watch your colony die.

I’m about to promise them a result either way.

That is the same sentence, Thresh sent, said by somebody who intends to win. Its antennae moved. The Verge was never offered anything by anyone. I am not warning you off it. I am telling you that I have never once seen a god offer to be measured, and I do not know what it does.

You want a large claimed colony, he laid, on the eleventh morning. Not to save. To watch. You have wanted one for two hundred years and there has never been one, because everything that got large got taken before you found it.

Yes.

I am about to be one. He kept the grammar flat and structural, the way theirs did everything. I have sixty-one and four strands and nine young and ground with water on it, and I intend to grow, and I intend to be seen doing it, and I have two powers already reading my shape from a distance.

Then you will end.

Then you will know, Sacha laid. That is the offer. I am not asking you to save my colony and I am not giving you my colony. I am telling you that the experiment you have never been able to run is about to run itself two hundred lengths above your heads, and you can either watch it from down here through three checkpoints on a seasonal cycle —

He stopped, and made the next mark carefully, because it was the whole thing.

— or you can help it, and find out what happens when the answer is not decided by how small we were.

The pale one did not answer for two days.

When it did, it did not answer in the settlement. It walked him back to the chamber with the list, two hundred lengths of worked passage in silence, and stopped in front of the wall of ended colonies, and laid one mark at the bottom of it.

An open block. The closing convention absent.

What is this.

You, the pale one marked. An entry that is not closed. There has not been one on this wall since it was begun.

Sacha looked at a blank space at the bottom of a wall of dead colonies, and understood that he had just been given something considerably heavier than an agreement.

How long do I have before you close it?

We do not close them, the pale one marked, and there was something in the construction Sacha had not seen it use before — a widening, the grammar’s word for a passage opening rather than shutting.

They close.

Sacha read the empty space beneath sixty-one closed blocks and found that he minded it less than he had expected, and worked out why on the walk back: it was the first time since the crawlspace that anything in this world had written him down as a question rather than a quantity.

The Ascension had counted him.

The Mother had priced him.

Two hundred pale strangers who wanted his colony and were not going to get it had put him on a wall as an entry that was not finished yet.

They think I’m going to die, he thought. And they’ve left the mark open anyway, because they’d rather find out than be right.

He decided, somewhere along those two hundred lengths, that whatever else these people were, he’d be very careful never to lie to them.