Content Warning: Mentions of suicide and cannibalism
A new status quo developed, albeit a much stranger one than anything I had experienced before. Two lives, two bodies, two worlds, one Emma Farrier; suffice to say it was strenuous at first. Fortunately I didn’t really have anything of much importance going on in either of my lives, so I could focus on finding out the limits of my new situation and bending them.
In one world, I was Emma Farrier, physics graduate student, newly-out trans woman, and owner of a severe neurological disability. Said disability had, conveniently, just worsened, requiring me to substantially increase my daily sleep allocation or else suffer further degradation. I was able to work out an agreement with the professor and with the school staff to do some extra spreadsheet work over the weekends, spreading the same overall workload out over more days. Even still, practical matters of commuting and logistics meant that I couldn’t afford to spend more than ten or eleven hours out of every day on Selene.
Getting that schedule to work consistently was another nightmare. Normal methods of controlling sleep didn’t account for the strange semi-coma that resulted from my mind being an entire dimension away from my body. In the end, I was able to combine melatonin with a jury-rigged electrical element that shocked me awake every morning to get into a regular schedule.
My life on Selene was even more boring, though with more to look forward to. Ikamja took the news that I’d be spending thirteen hours a day unconscious surprisingly well. I guess when you spend five months dead, people will believe that you’re only partly alive. Once that was out of the way, there was really nothing to do but wait.
It was incredible that so many thousands of stonewose, with no transportation but their own feet and an army of giant beetles, could move at all. That they could move as quickly as they did, almost twenty miles in one go on some days, was a miracle. A combination of factors allowed for that: part of it was the stonewose physiology, their huge, muscular frames having much more stamina and longer stride lengths for their age than would a human. But they were also just very good at it. Even the little girls had lots of experience with keeping up and remaining mostly uncomplaining during long hikes. There were complex systems at play for distributing exhaustion, shifting packs and taking turns on the carts, that even weeks of observation did not allow me to untangle.
And I did have weeks. Even a fast-moving caravan is still a caravan, and a journey of hundreds of miles was never going to be quick without the aid of railroads and heavy industry. And I had a lot of that free, given I was spending most of it in the carts.
By the time the caravans stopped in the evening, I was usually out cold and living my life on Earth, so the only way for me to eat food or get anything else done was to spend my time in the invalid carts. I got to know the oldest stonewose, the ones who clung to life in spite of disabling injuries, the best. They liked to tell stories of past raids, of romantic feuds, of how they had developed the philosophies that allowed them to stave off the final penance.
There were brief moments of activity, though. Midday stops weren’t particularly common, but they did happen every few days; there were also the unscheduled stops, where the caravan ran across some obstacle in the terrain and was forced to wait for scouting parties to return with a new and better path. Those moments were the best because they meant I could get on my feet again and, when Ikamja wasn’t busy, practice my combat skills.
My saber hadn’t been buried with me, you see. The only weapons I had access to were the ones that the stonewose used, which in turn meant I had no choice but to start familiarizing myself. After the first few rounds, I settled upon the karth-a-tenpar. Polearms, like Ikamja’s massive glaive, were nice in theory, but pole weapons built to be used by a seven-foot-tall stonewose were impossibly unwieldy for someone with a five-foot frame. My only chance—when I wasn’t cheating with something like my blood trick–was to use my great speed and agility to slip past the weapon’s point and hang close to my enemy. Karth-a-tempar was a somewhat common stonewose combination, consisting of a short blade, the tempar, in the left hand, and a hooked hammer, the karth, in the right. Ideally, the tempar plays the defensive role, parrying blows and jabbing at the opponent’s hand, while the karth smashes bones and pierces armor in extreme close-up.
That was the theory, anyways. We didn’t have enough time to really get into the technique at all, during the brief gaps in our journey. Sometimes I would jump off the cart and spend half an hour going through the forms, then catch up at a sprint, but that was no substitute for real training. If I ever had to use karth-a-tempar in a real fight, I would be relying more on my own innate speed than any kind of skill.
What I would have given for an actual fight. An actual duel. Anything at all. Living wasn’t very good during that period. It wasn’t just the boredom, I had grown more than familiar with that, and on an objective level my work in the lab was actually fairly interesting, it was just that I felt like I was living two half-lives, and two half-lives don’t make a whole. I could never fully sink into one thing before the other grabbed my attention. I couldn’t work in the lab to my fullest ability when every minute spent there was a minute I wasn’t getting to experience my better body and better life on Selene. Every minute I was on Selene, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that I could only stay awake ten or eleven hours out of the day because Earth would always drag me back.
Have you ever tried going from the bottom of a swimming pool to the surface as fast as you possibly can? It hurts. Your ears feel like they’re about to burst, and your nose stings as the acrid pool-water spills out of your nostrils. That was what my entire life became. See-sawing back and forth between two states, never staying in one or the other for long enough to stop hurting. Nothing ever satisfied, nothing soothed, nothing felt right or normal. I didn’t want to have to keep thinking about Earth, that shitty place where nothing ever happened and nobody knew me, but it just wouldn’t let me go.
Yasmin definitely noticed, not that I could let her in on even one part in a thousand of what was going on. I don’t think the stonewose did. They didn’t really care for me much, which made sense considering what our two species did to one another. Ikamja was a warrior through and through, not one to worry about the emotions of her allies. Feelings were for family, concubines, and blood-sisters, and considering she murdered and ate people for a living, I was perfectly okay with that.
There was no way to get around that unavoidable fact when you spent more than a day or two around the stonewose. It was their curse, that a stonewose who went more than a couple of months without eating the flesh of a freshly-slain sapient being (human, durkahn, another stonewose in an emergency) would lose herself to madness, then death. The stonewose who lived past childhood were those who had found a way to excuse the ten or so thinking, speaking creatures whose deaths would be needed to feed her over a lifetime. They were weirdly free in terms of how willing they were to talk about that central contradiction, life at the expense of others; every so often it would come up casually as a part of some other story, or someone would swear “by all the flesh that sustains me.” It was as if they didn’t know how horrible it really was, what they were doing. But then, how could they? It was all they’d ever known.
The one thing I could be thankful for, in that sense, was that I didn’t have to see any of it happening with my own two eyes. There were few human settlements in this part of the continent, especially once we headed inland, presumably for the exact reason that they’d be too vulnerable to attack by the stonewose. Ikamja’s people were, apparently, well-fed, having pulled off a successful raid not long before I’d woken up, so they could risk the long lunge without finding more of their macabre resupply.
I’m not sure how I would have reacted, had the stonewose taken captives while I was staying with them. Doing the moral thing, setting the captives free, would’ve just meant pissing off my only allies, and led to them taking more captives later, consuming more flesh. It’s a very, very good thing that I never had to make that decision.
Day by day, week by week, the environment through which the caravan was passing started to shift. It was slow at first, a gradual drying-out the further we were from the coastline. The trees grew more and more sparse without ever quite vanishing, new species of grass with yellowish-olive leaves took over the landscape. I started to feel a sense of nostalgia about the terrain, a warm feeling welling up just from looking out over the hills, one that was completely inexplicable until I realized that the world was looking more and more like the area around New Alderburg. The terrain was reminding me of Laura.
Then it shifted again, but much more quickly. What had taken hours the first time, in the back of a steam-powered vehicle called the Ogre, now took about two days, as once again I was shown a stark reminder of why this part of Imbrium was called the Great Desolation.
The name “Great Desolation” conjures images of craggy rocks and vast expanses of bleak sand, and at least for the former it was at least something you could find in the Desolation. But there was more to it than that. The land was barren and lifeless, dark rocks scrubbed bare of plant life, or else colonized by strange organisms that had no right to exist. The creatures who lived in that tainted place were bent and deformed, scrawny and with bulbous skulls. Laura had told me once that it was similar to a pollution or contamination, except by a contaminant that no science could detect in samples.
The stonewose, though, knew the Desolation well. Most of the members of the camp had never been there, but they were taught by those who had, and once the techniques spread they adapted with ease. Teams of stonewose slipped out of the camp at night to gather the most edible plants, feeding them to the bessels to supplement the meager grazing. Traps laid in cracks in the rock and sweetened with fresh water supplemented the diet. Water itself came from streams, shockingly clean and pure, though the methods by which the stonewose were able to find those streams verged on magic.
One evening, as I was watching the foraging parties go out into the Desolation, Ikamja happened to sidle up next to me.
“Are you trying to work out their secrets?” she said. “I am certain that they would be willing to reveal their secrets if you reminded them of our alliance.”
I shook my head. “I don’t really care about the specifics. I’m more just amazed that it’s possible at all, that anybody can do anything out here besides die of starvation. You said there are entire bands who live out here? All the time?”
“I have never seen them myself, but I have no reason to believe it is not true. Have you considered that this land’s inhospitability is merely a human weakness?”
My immediate reaction was to make some jibe about ethnic squabbling, but I held that thought back. Stonewose were, demonstrably, tougher and stronger than humans, possessed of a more limited form of my own regeneration. Maybe, on some level, this was meant to be their homeland.
“Just a shame that you can’t survive without a regular supply of humans to eat,” I said.
Ikamja curled her lip at me. “That is always the concern, isn’t it? Though considering there are many of my kind who never leave the Desolation’s embrace, perhaps they have found a way around that, too.”
I lost consciousness not long after that conversation, finding myself shoved back to Earth and my pathetic ongoing life there. Estrogen was just starting to take effect for real at that point, the earliest signs of soreness at my chest presaging my second body’s transformation into something tolerable. It was a bittersweet relief. Dressing, breakfast, work, all of those things went pretty much as expected, more work at the lab as we moved closer to the first round of experiments with our new set-up, the one I’d helped develop in between sleepless nights fucking around with the void machine. That day, I took one of the many instruments I’d borrowed and sneakily returned it to the supply closet.
Yet another interruption. I went home, I ate an early dinner, I fucked around online for a little bit, I had some meaningless conversation with Yasmin. On and on and on and on. And then when I went to sleep, I woke up in the middle of a four-bell emergency.
The first sign that something was wrong was that, even though I woke up late in the morning on Selene’s time, the caravan wasn’t moving. In fact, it hadn’t moved at all since the night previous, the exact same Desolation landmarks in the exact same positions. A few seconds after I’d figured that bit out, I heard the shouting, the barked orders in the stonewose language that signaled an obvious stress.
I emerged from the invalid wagon where they’d placed me and into a maelstrom of activity. Many of the stonewose had divided up into small squads, carrying spears and clubs and clockwork rifles, hurrying this way and that. The young and the elderly were shuffled away into hidden places, the bessels spurred into action in order to drag the wagons into a defensive perimeter, and half-awake stonewose had to be roused into well-oiled patrols. And rushing through the middle of this was me, a clumsy human who didn’t speak any language the beings around me would understand, and had only the faintest idea where she was going or what she was doing.
It was an awkward football game, rushing under the feet of the stonewose warriors, just for me to find my karth-a-tempar; it was obvious that whatever was going on was the sort of thing I’d like to be armed for. Next on the priority list was to find Ikamja and hope she could slow down for long enough to tell me what was going on. That meant going to the front.
Sure enough, Ikamja was there. Her full war regalia was even more elaborate than her typical uniform, the green coat and hat augmented by a series of cloth streamers suspended from her back and a brass collar protecting her throat. I slipped through her bodyguard, getting a few kicks from over-eager stonewose for my trouble, and up to her side.
“What did I miss?” Neither of us made eye contact; we were both scanning the horizon.
“We are not alone here,” Ikamja said.
“I’d guessed as much. Humans or your kind?”
“My kind,” said Ikamja. “We knew this was how it would have to be. My people, as a rule, do not take well to trespass.”
“What’s the plan, then?” I said. “Fight them off?”
“A show of force, and a promise that we mean them no harm. Make the cost to drive us away greater than the cost of allowing us through.”
The logic made sense, but even if it hadn’t, there was no more time for discussion. A cry went up from somewhere on the left, the sort of sound you didn’t need to know the language to realize meant “The enemy is here!” Ikamja started to move, gesturing with her sword-spear for her personal guard to follow, but we hadn’t made it more than a dozen steps before the cry came up again… from the opposite side.
Ikamja reacted immediately, shouting a few orders that signaled her guard to divide in half, one part going to the right and the other continuing leftward. Surrounded as I was by stonewose two feet taller than me, I could hardly see what was happening, but all the relevant information came through sound. More cries of alarm went off on both sides as well as directly behind us, even as a new, louder sound came to dominate over the voices. We were surrounded on all sides, and the enemy force arrived with the thunderous drumming of hundreds upon hundreds of beating hooves.