Page 36 of Butterfly Effects

“Question stands. If the people here on Johrlar think they get to hold us to their legal standards after they exiled our ancestors, why are they not popping in and grabbing cuckoos every single day? Cuckoos killed my adoptive parents in order to kick off my development the way they wanted it to proceed. That’s murder.”

“Ah,” said Fetch. “A simple question: the judiciary does not interfere with cuckoo affairs when they do not break our laws.”

I looked at her flatly. “Meaning what? Murder is okay here?”

“Murder is only wrong when it involves killing actual people.”

I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that, and so I just stared at her, radiating shock and disappointment in her direction. She shrugged.

“I cannot change the entire cultural development of our species, Sarah, or I would have long since done so for other reasons. The individuals you live among may mimic intelligence, may present themselves as if they were worthy of your attention, but they are little better than the beasts of the field and forest. They are not truly sapient, nor can be without full connection. When cuckoos kill them, it is like children smashing companion creatures out of malicious curiosity. It would be better if they didn’t, but the crime that has been committed is destruction of property at most, not murder. ‘Murder’ is the word used when Johrlac kill Johrlac, or when cuckoos kill cuckoos. Murder outside of judiciary limits is forbidden, and will be punished accordingly.”

I took a deep breath. “All right. So these people, these Johrlac authorities, came to take me because I had committed crimes in their eyes—crimes bad enough to be worth punishing. Would it have done me any good to fight against them?”

“Only if you wished to enable the destruction of more of these almost-people you seem attached to.”

I frowned at Fetch. She looked politely back, not seeming to understand why she’d said anything wrong. I’d never realized how much I’d picked up the habit of emoting from the people I lived with; I’d been told dozens of times that if someone was wearing a telepathy blocker, I could come off as robotic, so flat of voice and affect that I seemed disengaged. Now that I was facing a Johrlac raised among and by her own species, I could not only understand but see how incredibly over-animated I was in comparison. She pushed emotions at me, but her face rarely moved to match them, never transmitted “smile” to match the feelings she was so fiercely having.

It was strange, and unsettling in the extreme.

“So I couldn’t fight back without making things worse,” I concluded. “Are they really planning to kill me? Isn’t that murder?”

“Murder is allowable for the judiciary when acting for the good of the collective,” said Fetch. “They will be killing you and thus removing a threat. A cuckoo queen is one of the great monsters of our kind, too feared and abhorred to be allowed to stand.”

“Why?”

“Because the cuckoos have been cast outside the collective, and they act for themselves, not for us.” Fetch pushed earnestness and sincerity at me. “They are individual. To be individual is to be uncontrolled, and the uncontrolled is dangerous.”

“So shouldn’t all cuckoos be considered a threat?”

“No.” She seemed genuinely surprised by the question—so surprised that I was momentarily taken aback, sure that I must have missed something. “A cuckoo is a small thing, easily swept aside. We encounter them rarely. They can’t travel on their own, can’t reset the self, can’t do anything of meaning. They are inconsequential. And they were made to be incapable of queening.”

“Excuse me?”

“The process of reaching a fully mature instar requires community support and the aid of the collective. Cuckoos have neither of these things. They should be unable to achieve a queen instar.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. I could only stare, overcome by how much even the people responsible for the cuckoos didn’t know about them. Finally, I caught my breath, and said, “I don’t know who told you that, but that’s not correct. Cuckoos are fully capable of reaching the queen stage. It’s how they move between dimensions.”

“What do you mean?”

“When they’ve exhausted a world—when they’ve eaten, spoiled, and destroyed as much of it as they possibly can, and yearn for new challenges—they force a queen to mature. And then they pump her head so full of math that she loses track of who she is. She falls into a white void of swirling infinity, so packed with arithmantic equations that she’s coming apart around the edges, that she’ll do anything to make the maelstrom stop. While they have her there, pinned like a butterfly under glass, they tell her it’s easy. They tell her the math can be resolved, and all she has to do is finish the equation. But what they don’t tell her is that if she does, she’ll blow a hole in the side of the dimension she’s currently in, a hole so big that it blows all the cuckoos right through and into a whole new world they can eat for breakfast.”

“But … no one could survive that. It would harm the queen,” said Fetch, sounding horrified. Oh, good. They could show animation.

“The queen’s not supposed to survive it.” I looked at her levelly. “Finishing the equation will make the storm stop, absolutely. It just wipes away the queen as it’s dying. She’s not supposed to survive. The cuckoos prime their queens like bombs and use them as escape hatches.”

“That’s terrible! They shouldn’t have been able to do that!”

I would have been so much happier if they couldn’t. If I’d just been allowed to go on as I had been, living and limited and so in love with Artie that sometimes I couldn’t see straight. Not perfect, not by a long shot, but … happy. I’d been happy, and I hadn’t been happy like that since they’d forced me through my final instar. The closest I could come was going to the middle of nowhere with Greg and letting the simplicity of his thoughts soothe me. And that couldn’t last. That could never last.

“They did it anyway.”

“They can’t…” said Fetch, sounding increasingly frantic. “They can’t have knowingly acted to harm a queen. It’s against everything we are! I could never.”

From the way she said it, she meant that literally. She sounded like even trying to harm a queen would destroy her.

She shook her head, hard, like she was trying to shake away something sticky and foul. “It’s not possible, they can’t— You’re here.” She sounded momentarily triumphant. “If the process of maturing destroyed the queen’s mind, you wouldn’t be able to be here.”

“I was able to create a distributed processing system to absorb the brunt of the equation before it could consume me. It still took pieces of my memory, but not as many as it could have without the extra processing power. It wiped out the minds of the people I used to process the numbers, but I lived. What does it say about your judiciary system that my crime wasn’t being forced into an instar I never wanted, but surviving the process?”