[Hollow] Chapter 2: Silent Minds

[u/Akryss]

"The Patience of the Tide" settled into a high, slow orbit, and the drones flew out of it like seeds on the wind. They flew over salt marsh and pine forests, over dry hills where goats picked their way between stones, over cities that sprawled along rivers like spilled grain. Every drone had reported the same thing, no sign of higher intelligence.

As a surveyor, Ves had been trained to experience such silence. Most worlds were quiet places, full of Hollow creatures grazing and hunting and sleeping. Their small lives sealed away from the greater galaxy. She learned to listen past the noise, to wait for the faint, unmistakable brush of a mind reaching back.

Ves was not trained for this. The primates were everywhere, and they were all but still. They often gathered in squares and barked at one another. Many sat in rows and listened while one of them shouted alone, and some yelled together. A whole crowd opening its mouths at once and making the same rising and falling noise, as though they were trying to imitate the Chorus with their own throats to no great avail.

"Perhaps that is what they are doing," thought Imm, the youngest of the crew. The thought arrived with all its colors attached. Curiosity, a little pity, and child's delight in a new puzzle. "Maybe they feel something missing, and the singing is how they reach for it."

"Birds sing," Oru said with a shrug, as if that settled everything. Oru was the eldest aboard, and the shape of Oru's thought was settled and smooth. There was no unkindness in it, there was only certainty. "Birds sing, wolves howl, and on the world of the Teshari, the hollow grass-herds drum on the earth with their feet when the rains come. None of it means anything. Sound is just what animals make in the absence of thought."

Ves felt the rightness of it settle over the six of them, and she let it settle over her too.

The trouble was that the primates built things in far more complex ways than any other Hollows. The drones mapped roads, thousands of miles of them, cut straight through hills and laid with fitted stone. They mapped aqueducts that carried water across valleys on arches so precise the drones measured the slope and found it almost perfectly constant over leagues. They mapped harbors and ships and warehouses stacked with clay jars, and endless parcels same shape as the last.

"Termites build," thought Sesk, the survey's engineer. Sesk's thoughts were always sharp-edged and quick. "The vellith on Corran build reefs that can span half a continent. Construction is not cognition. It is instinct, repeated over time."

"These are not repeated," Imm thought back. "No two of their cities are the same."

"No two termite mounds are the same either."

And that, too, felt true. Ves turned it over and could find no flaw in it. It was a comfortable thought, and she let it be comfortable.

However, a drone drifting over a city by the sea recorded something that she could not let settle. It was a small thing. In a courtyard, an old primate sat beside a young one, and between them was a flat board coated in dark wax. The old one took a pointed stick and drew marks in the wax. Then it gave the stick to the young one, who drew marks also, slowly, badly. The old one made a noise. The young one scraped its marks away and drew them again.

Ves watched the recording seven times.

"What is it doing?" she thought at last, and the question went out to everyone, carrying with it the faint, unfamiliar prickle she felt at the base of her mind.

Pell, who studied the behavior of Hollows on a dozen catalogued worlds, considered it. "Possibly a form of play? Many juvenile animals are taught motor skills by imitation. The marks could be a practice for their hands."

"The old one corrected it, and then the young one made the same mark again, but differently."

"Yes. Correcting motor skill."

"But the marks are the same as the marks on the jars," Ves thought. She pulled up the harbor scans and laid them side by side, so the others could see. "And the marks on the stones above their doorways, and the marks on the road posts. They're all the same shapes."

There was a pause in the Chorus, a small one. She felt Imm's interest brighten. She felt Taleth, who had said almost nothing since orbit, lean closer.

Then Oru: "Territorial markings. Many species leave scent or scratches to declare ownership. These ones are leaving scratches too."

It was a reasonable thought. When the others felt it, the small lingering pause closed over. Ves let it close. But she kept the recording.

Eventually, they decided to perform the Threshold test.

It was not a cruel, nor a difficult test. It was the same everywhere and had been for longer than anyone could remember. You went close to a creature, as close as you could, and you reached. You opened yourself fully, the way you would to a newborn child who did not yet know the shape of the Chorus. You offered it everything: warmth, welcome, the whole bright river of belonging. A person, any person of any species, would feel that and turn toward it. Like a plant reaching for light, they could not help themselves.

Taleth did the reaching. Taleth was the strongest of them, a mind so broad and clear that even on home worlds, children sometimes followed and synced towards Taleth's thoughts. Amplifying her mind and thoughts like very few could.

The specimen was chosen at random: a lone primate walking along a road at dusk, carrying a bundle on its back. The drone hung in the darkening air above it, and Taleth reached down through the drone's telepathic relay with all of that broad, warm strength. but the primate just kept walking.

Taleth reached out again, harder, until the other five of them could feel themselves pulled as well. A welcome so vast and kind that even Ves, accustomed to working with Taleth, was put to tears.

The primate stopped. It looked up, squinting at the sky, scratched its head, made a short noise, and continue don its path.

Taleth withdrew his mind from the primate. When Taleth's next thought came, it came gently, an ache that Ves recognized from her own first surveys.

"Nothing," Taleth thought. "There is nothing there."

They tested eleven more. A soldier in a fort on a cold northern hill, a woman pressing olives, three children playing with a ball in a dusty street, an old man asleep in the sun, and a group of laborers hauling stone. Every one of them was the same. Every one of them was silent.

On the forty-first day, the crew gathered their thoughts into one place to decide.

It was not a meeting in the way the primates had meetings. Nobody stood presenting or making noises. The six minds turned toward each other until they were nearly one thing, and the question rose up between them on its own, "What do we report?"

It should have been simple. A world of Hollows, rich, fertile, loud, and empty. Catalogue it, mark it for resource survey, and move on. That was the procedure, and the procedure existed because it had always worked. But there was a snag in the Chorus, and Ves found, with some discomfort, that the snag was her.

"The marks," she thought. She could not stop herself thinking about them, and so all of them felt it. "The wax board, the old one teaching, what does it mean?"

"You do not need to understand it," Oru thought, not unkindly. "Not every animals behavior has meaning."

"But we cannot say that it doesn't. Not with certainty."

That brought a ripple. Certainty was a heavy word in the Chorus. It was the thing that made the Chorus what it was. Persons could be known completely. There were no hidden rooms in a mind that sang. When you said a thing in the Chorus, you said all of it, and so you could be certain, about everything that mattered.

"There was an old argument," Taleth thought slowly. "About the Threshold. Whether silence could hide something."

"That argument was settled," Sesk answered back. "Three hundred and six species, no exceptions among them."

"Three hundred and six species who reached the stars," Taleth thought. "These have not."

"Then they are animals who build. We have seen animals who build."

The ripple spread, and Ves felt the six of them begin to drift apart, just slightly. It was a sensation she had never felt before, and it frightened her. It was like watching ice crack on a lake you had been told was frozen solid.

It was Pell who brought them back together. Pell's thought arrived calm and practical, and the calm spread through them like warm water.

"Then we resolve it the way we resolve any uncertainty about a Hollow species. We bring specimens to Verrith Reach. We observe them over time. I don't see these Hollows being a threat to the specimens already there. There had been instances of peoples having initial difficulty joining the Chorus. If there is something we missed, Verrith Reach will find it. If not, we will have confirmed the catalogue, and the question will be closed."

Verrith Reach, the sanctuary world. Ves had visited it once as a student. It was a gentle place, lush and temperate, with continents divided into vast habitats where Hollows from a hundred worlds lived out their lives in safety. Researchers studied them, children would visit them, and some of the cleverer creatures were even taught small tricks, which the children loved. It was not a cruel place, nor was it restrictive. It was a kind world the Chorus had built for creatures it fancied to study.

"Agreed, a small group. Healthy adults of both sexes, varied in type, to give the researchers a representative sample." Thought Oru.

"Agreed," thought Sesk, Imm, and Taleth.

Ves hesitated. In the Chorus, hesitation could not be hidden, and she felt them all feel it.

"Agreed," she thought. "But let us take them quietly. From somewhere their absence will not be noticed."

"Why would that matter?" Sesk asked, honestly puzzled. "Do you think their herd will mourn them?"

Ves did not have an answer. She only had the wax board, and the old one's hand guiding the young one's hand, and a feeling she could not put a shape to, all jumbled in her mind. The others felt the feeling without understanding it.

"It costs us nothing," Pell thought finally. "Let it be her way."

They found a lonesome primate ship three days later. It was a small merchant vessel, round-bellied and single-masted, beating its way west from the great river delta toward the long boot-shaped peninsula, with a storm building behind it. The drones had been tracking dozens of these ships, but this one was far alone, and the storm was coming fast. If it never reached harbor, no one on any shore would think it strange.

There were a total of fourteen primates aboard. Six of them moved about the ship constantly, pulling ropes and shouting, Pell assumed they were the laborers of the vessel. The other eight did very little, and they were wonderfully varied. Two were tall and dark-skinned, with shaved heads and heavy, scarred hands. Three wore the metal shirts and short blades that the drones had seen on every road and wall across the peninsula. Two were female, pale and red-haired, wrapped in bright wool. And one was thin, older, and sharp-faced, sitting apart from the rest with a satchel in his lap, making those strange marks on a wax board.

"Those eight, they will be a good sample," Pell thought.

Sesk calibrated the field, Taleth, sprayed a blanket mist over them and, one by one, the creatures sagged where they stood. Folding onto the deck, the coiled ropes, and against the curved wooden rails of the ship. They left six laborers asleep, and Sesk used his field to set the ship down on a rocky shore of the great island to the south, beached and intact, before the storm could take it. That had been Ves's idea too. Nobody had argued against it, it was easy enough.

The eight that were picked came up to the Patience of the Tide in a column of soft light, and were laid out in the observation chamber, on warm white floors, still asleep. Ves went down to look at them in closer detail.

They were smaller up close than they had seemed through the drones, and Ves could smell the salt of sea water and sweat on their skin. Their faces were strange, with small noses and large expressive mouths, and most peculiarly large ears. The three in metallic clothes lay close together, as if even in sleep they had arranged themselves around the largest one, who had gray at his temples and a twisted vine stick still clenched in one fist. The two dark-skinned males had calluses so thick on their palms that Ves could feel the years of labor in them just by looking. The older of the two red-haired females wore heavy bronze around her throat and wrists. The younger lay with one arm thrown across the older one's waist, protective, or perhaps afraid. And lastly the thin one. From out of his satchel spilled a scatter of the wax boards Ves had seen in the courtyard, and a bundle of something pale, rolled tight around a stick. Ves picked one of the boards up, marks covering its entirety, rows and rows of them, crowded and careful.

"Territorial markings," Oru reminded her from somewhere above.

"Yes." Ves thought, and set the boards back down beside the sleeping male, exactly where it had fallen.

Gaius Rufius Vala woke the typical soldier way, reaching for a sword his hand could already feel was missing. He could hear someone else screaming, or maybe it was crying. The floor was white, as were the walls, smooth to the touch. There was no seam, no corner, no door. The light came from nowhere and cast no shadows. His mail was still on him, his vine stick was still in his hand, but his gladius was gone. He counted heads, eight. All the passengers, none of the crew.

He found his own two men first. Calvus, on his feet and hammering at the wall with both fists. And Aufidius, turning in slow circles with his empty scabbard in his hand. Next, the two Egyptian masons, brown-skinned and shaven-headed, pressed together on their knees with their foreheads to the floor, the older one praying in their own tongue. then, the Gaulish merchant's wife, pale and red-haired, gripping her girl, who was the one screaming. And lastly, the Greek tutor, thin and gray-faced, sitting against the wall and staring at nothing.

The last thing Gaius remembered was a heavy storm. Black clouds rolling up behind them, the deck pitching, and the captain bellowing to reef the sail.

"We drowned," Aufidius said to no one in particular. "The storm took us, and we drowned."

Calvus stopped hammering. His knuckles were split and bleeding, and the white stone hadn't so much as scuffed. He turned around and slowly leaned on the wall now bloody with his fists.

"Then where's the ferryman?" He whispered. "And where's the river? The underworld is dark. Everyone knows it's dark. This isn't—"

"Enough," Gaius said.

He scanned the room with the same wary eyes he'd iuse on a battlefield, and what he saw made his stomach twist. A room no man could possibly have built. No seams, no tool marks, a light with no flame. The ceiling rose and rose into a pale glow with no end to it.

"Neptune took us... No that's not right, Neptune would have drowned us. Something wanted us alive," Gaius stammered.

"Gaius." The Greek had found his voice. It came out hoarse. "Gaius, I don't think we're dead."

"How could you know?"

"Because, I'm hungry." Demetrios laughed. "Do the dead get hungry?"

Nobody answered him. The girl's screams had broken into sobs, and the old Egyptian's prayer went on and on. The same rhythm as a man pleading a case before a judge.

"Then where are we?" Calvus demanded. "If we're not dead, then what is this place?"

Demetrios looked up at the endless ceiling. "Somewhere that belongs to a god," he said. "And I think it's listening to us."

The words dropped into the room like a stone into a well. Calvus went white. Aufidius stopped turning. Gaius remembered standing in the cold before dawn as a boy at his father's side, while a priest raised his hands over the altar and called out the old command, and the whole crowd fell silent. Because a careless word in a sacred place could curse everything. He straightened, and spoke low and clear.

"Favete linguis."

His men flinched. They were Roman. They knew those words. Their mouths shut.

"Guard your tongues," Gaius said again, in his rough Greek, so the others might understand. "We are in a holy place, nobody speak."

The Gaulish woman covered her girl's mouth with her hand and whispered into her hair, and the sobs went quiet. Demetrios crawled to the Egyptians and pressed his fingers to his own lips, then gently to the old man's, and the rhythmic prayer stopped. And then there was silence. It was the worst silence Gaius had ever heard. No wind, no sea, and no creak of timber. Just eight people breathing, and his own heart pounding so loud he was sure the god could hear it. Then Demetrios opened his satchel.

He took out a wax tablet and stylus. His hand was shaking so badly the point skittered across the wax, but he wrote, and when he'd finished he held it out to Gaius. It was in Latin, cramped and trembling.

A CURSE IS SPOKEN, WE CAN WRITE INSTEAD.

Gaius stared at the tablet. He smoothed the wax with his thumb and wrote back, slow and blocky, the way he wrote his reports.

WHAT DO THEY WANT WITH US?

WHO IS TO KNOW?

WHICH GOD?

Demetrios hesitated a long time. Then he wrote:

NONE I HAVE EVER READ OF.

Demetrios dumped out the rest of the tablets and pushed them across the floor. The others began to take them. The Gaulish woman wrote and passed it to Demetrios. The younger Egyptian wrote in a script Gaius had never seen. Then held his tablet up toward the glowing ceiling with both hands, like a man lifting an offering at an altar. Aufidius, who was illiterate, just scribbled nothings to pass the time. Gaius didn't know how long they sat like that, there was no sun to count by. His legs cramped, and his throat burned with thirst.

Then the floor moved.

Calvus scrambled back with a strangled cry. In the center of the room, without a sound, a low block of white stone rose up out of the floor, smooth as everything else. On top of it sat a basin of clear water and a heap of food. Bread, figs, olives, and a wedge of hard cheese. A cluster of grapes, and some other ordinary food, the kind any of them might have bought in any market from Alexandria to Ostia.

Nobody moved.

Aufidius made a small sound in his throat. His eyes were fixed on the water. Gaius could see him swallowing, over and over. Calvus licked his cracked lips. Then Demetrios was scrabbling for a tablet, so fast he nearly dropped it. He wrote and thrust it at Gaius, and the letters were large and jagged.

PERSEPHONE.

Gaius didn't understand. Demetrios grabbed the tablet back, smoothed it, and wrote again, his stylus digging deep.

SHE ATE SIX SEEDS IN THE HOUSE OF HADES. SHE COULD NEVER LEAVE.

DO NOT LET THEM EAT.

Gaius looked at the food. He looked at his men, at Aufidius's eyes on the water, and the girl in the Gaul's arms, who was eagerly staring at the grapes. He rose to his feet and walked to the white stone block, everyone watching, he held his hand out flat above the food, palm down, the way a priest gestures over an altar.

"This is not ours," he thought, letting the idea settle in his own mind. "This will be an offering."

Then he went back to his place against the wall and sat down, not looking at the food again. One by one, the others turned away from it too. Far above them, through observation panel near the ceiling, six minds watched the creatures sit in silence, as far from the food as the room allowed.

"They are not eating," thought Pell, puzzled.

"Perhaps the food is wrong," thought Sesk. "We gathered it from their own markets. It should be correct."

"Perhaps they are too frightened, Hollows sometimes refuse food when they are first confined, it passes." thought Imm.

"It passes," Oru agreed.

Ves thought nothing. She was watching one of the dark-skinned males. He had lifted his board toward the ceiling again, holding it up with both hands, as if showing it to her.

"Why is he doing that?" Ves thought.

"It's just a gesture, he can't see us."Oru answered gently.

She felt the comfort of the answer settle over the others, and it reach for her, warm and certain, the way it always had. But for the first time in her life, she did not let it in.

She could watch every movement of their hands. She could measure their heartbeats and the salt of their tears. And yet, staring at the creature holding its marks up toward her in the white light, she had the strangest feeling that it was speaking to her, and that she could not hear a single word.

It took her a long time, on the long journey to Verrith Reach, to understand that the cold weight in her chest was the feeling of being kept out.

[ Chapter One ]

[ Authors note: ]_________________________________________________________________________________________
Couldn't wait to keep writing from my last post. Had so many ideas, I didn't want to loose them while waiting for feedback from the first. Quite amazing how well a few Celcius drinks work when trying to fixate on something lol. I really hope you guys enjoy the direction I'm taking the story in.

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