After the meeting, it was yet again time to wait. Per Ik’s word, the Elders would deliberate on what was discussed in the moot. Alicia wasn’t sure what level of deliberation would even be required, the facts of the situation seemed fairly straightforward. It couldn’t be helped though, even if Alicia had all the answers and just needed the Elders to rubber stamp her ideas, it did stand to reason that the process would take some time, even if it was, by all accounts an Everybody Wins-type scenario. Alicia found herself waiting by “her” resting cave, it seemed polite to be available but not stressing anyone out. Ironically, not stressing anyone else out was kind of getting on Alicia’s nerves.
“Brought you some food…” Lia said as she approached, holding a bowl of something steamy hot. There was a sullenness to Lia, Alicia thought, if it wasn’t just that she paid extremely close attention to not spilling the bowls content. “It’s… uh… it’s unique. A bit of a porridge, or a soup, perhaps?”
As she received the bowl, Alicia was pretty sure she understood the source of Lia’s hesitancy. The meal, whatever it may be called, seemed like some sort of goop. Alicia had no idea why she thought this, but she got the distinct impression that if she were to examine the fluid in detail, she’d find it non-newtonian, at least slightly so.
“What do they call this?” Alicia asked.
“Uh, the field seemed to struggle with it, but it eventually came down to Nourishing Broth. They brew it… cook it… make it I guess from this lichen and a type of berries that grow within the spheres. It’s where they get a lot of their fiber from what I understand.”
“I was wondering about that,” Alicia said. “They seem to be very animal protein-centered out here, which is a nice change from the lean times back h… back in thereafter, but I could see it become a bit too rich for my taste eventually.”
“I will not lie, I miss the bread we make in Thereafter. It’s harder to get than good wine but oh when you get it…”
“I’m not much of a bread person… but I’d like to try it one day.” Alicia found herself saying as she contemplated how one was supposed to eat the possibly non-newtonian soup. With no visible utensils, it seemed that sipping was the way, and while Alicia’s intuition told her pouring from the bowl would lead to spillage, she conceded that she had no idea how the low gravity and viscosity of the liquid would play into things. She decided that if there ever was a time to make a fool of herself in a low-impact way, now was surely it, and gave the soup a sip.
While not as effortlessly tasty as the meat and flatbread, the liquid wasn’t bad at all. A slightly earthy mouthfeel gave way to a brew that, somehow, tasted sweet and tart as well as slightly salt-tinged umami. It didn’t quite taste like barbecue sauce, not nearly sweet enough for that, but the idea was too readily available in her mind for Alicia to think much other than that. She certainly was thankful that the liquid was thinner than barbecue sauce, and overall went down smooth. As she finished her portion, Alicia became aware that Lia was observing her. It wasn’t an overwhelming thing, exactly, Lia had a capacity for subtlety that her occasionally brash demeanor at times hid, at times interfered with.

“I’m sorry for, uh, the loudness back there,” Lia said. “I didn’t intend to speak for you.”
“The… uh… Deep Song voice thing?” Alicia asked. “Don’t worry about it. It helped out a lot, and I don’t know how to do it so…”
“I see,” Lia said. There was hesitation to her voice, like she was carefully angling a bigger concern in a way that’d let her introduce it gently rather than having it spilling all over the place, like she was trying to pour a bag of coffee beans that had been opened in a stupid way, not that Alicia spoke from experience. “It’s just… I notice you, uh, bristle at some of my help, some times, and I do not want to overstep my boundaries.”
“Bristle… huh…” Alicia said. She needed a second to process that. This conversation felt like it was about more than what it was about, and while Alicia felt the stress from such layered talk, some sort of deep clean conversation was perhaps called for. It wasn’t just this latest alienation that needed sorting. There was a… something between them. A nascent relationship? Rivalry perhaps? Whatever it was, it was complicating things, and Alicia needed to know what it actually was. Well, she could do without, but that meant that the odds that she and Lia would kill each other in single combat rose quite considerably. There was also the other possibility as far as crystalizing emotion into action, but Alicia was really hoping to avoid thinking about that right now. “I guess I do get a little standoffish to what I percieve as criticism. It does feel like you’re ‘on my case’ as we say on earth, a lot.” Alicia felt like she was exploring the outer borders of the problem, clumsily prodding like the blind men trying to describe the elephant. It wasn’t the talk she wanted to have, but she hoped it was the one she needed, at least.
“On your case… yes I suppose that does fit,” Lia mused. “I am not very good at showing it, I think, but I tend to think of you as… someone I mentor, I suppose. It is a big thing to lay on you, but since I do believe you are the most worthy to be my successor… well I have to get it in there somehow.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Alicia’s brain did a 180 without slowing down, it was a physics-defying stunt that made her dizzy, even being metaphorical as it was. “You want me to be Deepspeaker? Me? Alicia Thorn? From Earth?”
“I’m not retiring anytime soon,” Lia chided her. “But eventually, yes, I think you are the most worthy candidate I am likely to see. Most of my kinfolk are good people, but they’re warriors, gatherers, craftsmen for the most parts. Not really attuned to the Deeper Subjects.”
“And I am?” Alicia couldn’t help but sound dismissive. She hated talking herself down, but it felt impossible to do anything else. Lia’s idea was absurd, and she needed to realize that. “I lived the last twenty years believing the Deep Song didn’t even exist. Telling myself that it didn’t exist. That it’s better that it doesn’t exist.”
“And yet,” Lia’s dry wit slipped out at this observation. “Here you are, only alive because you’ve been pulling enough of the deep song to shame an Arch Singer.”
“Come on,” Alicia felt herself getting angry. She didn’t like to be patronized, and what Lia said only made sense to her as that. “I got drunk on power and tried to punch out a space rock. That’s teenage shit, at BEST.” Alicia held up her wounded hand.
“Ambition gets the best of the best of us,” Lia said with a shrug. “And besides, you have been treating your hand and dulling the pain like you’re a pro since I showed you how.”

Alicia paused. Her mind briefly went blank, as if rebooting.
“Wait…” She said, her voice suddenly the kind of soft that she hated to be. Her hand didn’t hurt, it hadn’t for a while, though it still was very stiff. “You mean to tell me that hasn’t been you keeping it up?”
“I haven’t even offered it a thought since I helped you overcome that pain the first time.” Lia said, seemingly oblivious to how mind-altering the revelation had been to Alicia. “Other than being impressed you managed to use the Song while keeping the healing and pain prevention going. I can do that too, but I try not to for too long at a time. You pay for it afterwards.”
Alicia felt dizzy again. Some little slip of her mind must be keeping the Deep Song healing going, and now that she knew to look for it, she did notice something that could be that in the busy place that was her mind.

“This is… a lot.” Alicia found herself saying after the silence had dragged on a while. “I’m sorry this is… yeah.”
“Mhm,” Lia agreed. “I didn’t bring it up… I figured that if you were managing all this, it was a careful balance of effort, and that I shouldn’t upset it until the situation is a bit less dire.”
“You weren’t wrong about that,” Alicia chuckled lightly at the sheer understatement of the statement. “I guess I’m… used to multitasking. We do that a lot on Earth, too much probably.”
“Multitasking, hm, yes, like telling stories while weaving or sharpening weapons perhaps?”
“Basically yeah.”

The two fell silent again. Alicia didn’t quite know what to think. She still had her problems with Lia, but this whole Deep Song reveal had taken the wind out of her sails in a major way.
“I suppose I need to return this bowl,” Alicia said at last.
“Yes…” Lia said, before perking up. “Do you want to see the Beasts? Ik showed me where their spheres are, but I haven’t had the chance to actually go look at them yet.”
Recognizing the invitation as the gesture it was, as well as a chance to finally get a good look at these beasts that had done such an admirable job of feeding her, Alicia nodded in agreement.
“I’d like that yes, let’s go drop off this bowl first.”

The spheres containing the beasts were easily the biggest in Camp, the largest of them coming up on having a radius of 30 feet or so. Inside them, existed what Alicia could only describe as an inverse sphereworld, with a bright light in the center shining down on the moss, lichen and occasional grass that covered the inside, and the stocky goat-looking beasts with longer and stronger legs than any earth equivalent Alicia had seem. The beasts, for their part mostly busied themselves with grazing, as well as the occasional gravity-defying headbutts that took place if two of the beasts that were on some level hostile came too close to each other, or even found a good attack vector for a launched attack, narrowly missing the low-heat sun in the center as they propelled themselves like an ovine ICBM through the space of the sphere towards their unsuspecting target. From what Alicia could see, neither headbutter or headbuttee took any noticeable lasting damage from these assaults, so she had to assume that the low gravity really dampened the forces at play, or that the beasts were a damn lot more hardy than they looked.

Alicia and Lia found themselves sitting on the outside, feet dangling into the larger entry/exit hole of the sphere, observing the beasts in their peace and occasional clamor.
“You know,” Alicia said after a while “I was halfway expecting to see these things and discover that they had like… human faces and a cry that spoke about all of my sins or something like that.”
“That’s a… very specific thing to worry about.” Lia said, again slightly guarded like she wasn’t quite sure how much of what Alicia said was a joke and what was earnest.
“It is,” Alicia had to agree. “It think it was because just calling them ‘beasts’ set off the part of me that used to read horror novels as a teen. Being tricked into eating human meat or meat that is uncomfortably human-like is a re-occurring taboo that horror stories love getting into.”
“Odd,” Lia opined, a relatively honest reaction.
“I suppose. I think a lot of it comes from… the modern world. Food production being so alien to most folks. Part of it is probably anxiety around the inhumanity of factory farming practices, too… and the whole “made out of meat” thing of course.”
“Made… out of meat?”
“It’s a horror novel about, uh… aliens again, observing earth and being really disturbed that we’re all made out of meat.”
“As opposed to…?” Lia asked.
“I mean that’s the question isn’t it. We don’t know, and the aliens don’t get into it because it’s as natural to them to be made out of whatever they’re made of as it is for us to be made out of meat. Life being made out of organic material is the only way we humans can imagine because that’s how it works for us, but it’s also frightening. All this abstract thought and poetry and politics and philosophy and in the end it’s just… meat doing meat things. Well meat and bone and various lipids and nerves and hormones and… it’s a simplification that we’re ‘just meat’ of course, the human body is quite complicated, but calling it meat is a decent shorthand for This Quintessence of Dust.”
“Dust? Where did Dust come into the picture?”
“See,” Alicia found herself grinning. “I’ve been wondering about that myself. There’s religious language in my culture that speaks of how we came from dust and will return to dust after we die, but isn’t soil closer, what with decomposition and all that?”

“If you pardon me saying so,” Lia seemed more at ease when saying this. “But I’m starting to suspect this ‘modern world’ of yours is a bit of a mess.”
“You’ll hear no argument from me,” Alicia said. “Actually the Modern Age happened way before my time, so we’re arguably past that now.”
“And here I thought steppefolk politics was complicated for the sake of it.”
“I mean that can be true too can’t it?” Alicia asked as her eyes followed what she understood to be a relatively young beast with curly horns as it clearly plotted an acrobatic strike on some sort of rival. It could also, Alicia was realizing, be some sort of game, or even courting ritual. She hadn’t put a lot of time into trying to figure out how gender and reproduction worked for these creatures, but now that she’d had the thought, there certainly was an impishness to these attacks.
“It can,” Lia conceded. “I understand what you see in Thereafter now. It must be refreshing when your problems are more direct than… whatever the hell is going on back on Earth.”
“In a way it is,” Alicia conceded, the plotting Beast launched itself into a gracious strike aiming at the hind hips of its target. It was definitely an adolescence thing, Alicia had decided, the bigger beasts, which she assumed were older, didn’t jump at all. Alicia wasn’t sure if that was because they couldn’t or because they simply chose to not waste time and energy on it. “But Thereafter is also difficult, if you don’t mind me saying, in ways that I don’t think I’m very well-equipped to handle. I’ve been living under a very strong state all of my life, all of us have, so a lot of the ways we think of how things get done doesn’t really work with how we’ve come to do things in Thereafter.”

“No, I get that,” Lia agreed. “The Council aren’t exactly politicians if you haven’t noticed…”
This drew a soft chuckle from Alicia, but she didn’t say anything further.
“And part of me thinks that’s…. Probably fine? We can figure out a way to see to everyone’s needs one way or another. Part of it will definitely be letting people who are good at things just take care of those things. Like negotiating this trade deal that’s apparently happening.”
“Oh, yeah, you noticed me setting that up, did you?”
“I did,” Lia said. “It makes sense once I got to thinking about it. They’re thirsty out here and we’re hungry back home, it seems like we could help each other, and it’s not like fresh water is a challenge for us.”
“True,” Alicia agreed. “I’m just… unsure I guess, about how much I should share about how we have the water situation under control.”
“Oh, yes,” Lia agreed. “Eventually letting them know probably is both inevitable and right but… yes, I’d too hold that back unless they force the point. They seem friendly enough so far but if there’s warhawks or raiding enthusiasts among them, we having something they’d really like if they knew about it is somewhat of a perilous situation for us.”
“Like Enkh, you figure?”
Lia thought about it for a second. “Oh, I hope not,” She said after the thought was digested. “Raiding is one of those things we have a bit of a taboo against among the Steppefolk. It’s viewed as something we put behind us after the Brother Wars and the fall of the Dragon Thane, but… well I’d be lying if there weren’t some wars fought on spotty justification that ended up securing the victorious tribe considerable resources. I don’t think Enkh has been involved in anything of the sort before it all went bad, but it’s not like the idea is… unthinkable to him, I guess.”
“Our worlds have that in common,” Alicia sighed. “Anyway, I figure the sooner we get the trade set up the better, and in the process we’ll try to figure out if we can share the full story, or if we have to… prepare first I suppose.”
“If you want peace,” Lia mused
“Prepare for war.” Alicia finished the saying. “It all feels very cynical to me, but what else can I do?”
“For what it’s worth,” Lia smiled at her, “I think you’re doing great. You better make up your mind though, I saw Ik heading our way, and judging by her tempo, she has some sort of message for us.”
Alicia took a look down, or up it didn’t particularly matter, the sphere wall and indeed, there she saw Ik, flying toward them as some sort of herald. Alicia hoped the news were good, but try as she might, she couldn’t stop herself from preparing for disaster.

Author’s Note: To say this chapter grew somewhat in the process of writing it is an understatement. I was planning to mostly get some of the bad vibes that had started festering between Alicia and Lia straightened out, but then that idea that it kind of felt like I was building up to some sort of horrifying twist about these Beasts took root in me, and while I didn’t plan to pull the trigger on anything of the sort, it was fun enough to play with that the back half of this chapter emerged more or less organically from it. Alicia is also turning out to have a way nerdier childhood than I initially planned, but considering she already is a confirmed ex-fujoshi I figured an interest in horror and sci-fi that she eventually grew out of once she started realizing how white the genres could be, wasn’t that odd of a development. (To be clear, there are multiple talented black horror and scifi authors out there, peep Victor Lavalle for one. Taking into account the point in time in which this’d happen and how Discourse around it was at the time, though, I, for one, would not blame tween Alicia for deciding that maybe this genre stuff just wasn’t for her. Maybe she found herself drifting anime-wards after that, which is a lateral move of nerdiness I’ve definitely heard talked aobut a couple of times.) Catch you next time for more hidden nerdiness and transvoidal politics.

VSD