The Verse:
When the forest burns with anger
Only Ash remains.
The Vision:
Ash and the Cantor have a confrontation which leads to Ash being ejected from the Convocation of the Forest. In all truth, this vision brought no new information – a fool could have seen it coming.
Commentary by Archbishop Co’oal Venesti:
The Lord works in mysterious ways. The Cantor’s anger simply served the greater purpose of His Holiness – and the announcement by the High Prophetess resulted in a surge of patriotism and anti-Terran sentiment.
Commentary by Elma, High Prophetess of Skarsia:
I knew what I was doing. Of course I did. I didn’t need Gyre to know that it would be a non-event. It was no surprise to any human in the Domha’vei that an aristo would protect his family, and AIs were hardly unfamiliar to the average citizen. When the whole thing about Lilith came out, Lord Hslek said, “I haven’t seen my son in two days. He’s in a dating sim. If we condemn Lilith as a heretic, we’ll have to arrest every fanboy in the Domha’vei.” The taboo among Skarsians is not against technology, using it, loving it, even. It’s against the violation of the natural human body.
I think it’s pretty clear that the real threat to the Cu’enashti is the Telepathic Corps.
Commentary by Archbishop Seth:
I have taken the unusual measure of engaging the Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh Ambassador Bllllllllllllllllllllrrrrrrrrrrrmm for the commentary as he is in the position to have unique access to certain pieces of information heretofore unknown. Also, when he was tanked to the gills, Wynne beat him at a game of crazy javamelon and exacted a promise to tell the full story.
Commentary by Ambassador Bllllllllllllllllllllrrrrrrrrrrrmm:
This is a funny story. All stories are funny stories if you look at them the right way. We Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh have made it the epitome of our civilization to find the humor in everything. Except when people mispronounce our names. We hate that.
This story is even funnier because it’s my fault. Ha ha ha!
Sea (that’s a Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh pun, hahaha!) sea, back in the day, when we were the new fish in the reef, the Combine assigned us to be guardians of humanity. For a million years or so, that was fine. They were just a bunch of crazy apes minding their own business. But then – poof! Interstellar travel. All of a sudden, we had to be on high alert in case they did anything dangerous. And the first group to leave was the whack jobs that would end up in the Domha’vei. Forty solar rotations in hyperspace because they hadn’t figured out how to make a proper map, and the minute they got out of the wormhole, they started fighting with each other. It’s stupider still: the males and the females started fighting with each other.
Which seemed like they weren’t really going to be a problem for us in that case.
And then, oooops! They found that pos-matter mine and those trees left over from the Flaxxshi Species 22. The SongLuminants really botched the cover up on that one. And it turned out that the trees had mutated and achieved sentience and spilled the seaweed to the monkeygirls.
Problemo.
So we watched and waited for a while, and then picked the faction of squabbling monkeys that looked the least like idiots: The Order of the Starless Sequester. Okay, maybe we were a little bit influenced by the unbelievably pompous name. It’s something a SongLuminant would come up with. The nau’gsh have a much better sense of humor. PLOT/Twist, now that’s funny!
So basically, we were laughing behind their tailfins at the silly cloak and dagger stuff. Wouldn’t a human wearing a cloak and carrying a dagger look pretty suspicious anyway? So basically we fed them all sorts of things about the Combine that they weren’t supposed to know to try to get them into trouble.
This was a different strategy than that used by Ashtara. He published all of it in a book called Eden Blues. And then he made a speech, “The Great Restoration Day Speech of 3611,” where he basically said, “Here’s a bunch of documentation that makes me look like a total idiot. And it’s absolute proof that I’m your God.” And he had almost total buy-in from the monkeygirls!
I love humanity, I do.
Not only did his own tribe of fangirls buy in, he scared the excrement out of the homeworld. CenGov hadn’t exactly been doing swimmingly in the war, if you get my drift. And Ashtara’s acceptance into the Combine left our faction high and dry. “High and dry,” now there’s a human expression I can relate to.
Of course, I had another little secret, one Ashtara didn’t publish about how he was attacked by an agent from Earth who nearly killed him. I know; I was there. What really sucked was that the Grand Opening party for Tom O’Bedlam’s didn’t happen. But then I did get an invite to that other one on Dolparessa, the ones with the mimes and the ice that wouldn’t melt. Best shindig I’ve been to in a century. Anyway, you could bet your dorsal fin that the SongLuminants wouldn’t have liked that. The assassination, I mean, not the party, although SongLuminants really aren’t too much fun at parties. So I kept it under my gills for a bit, then told Governor Tellick.
Oh, that was fun! He didn’t know what to do. I could see “Sink Ashtara” and “Maybe get the human race eradicated” running back and forth between his eyeballs like Hamlets* on a Möbius wheel.
You know, we Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh have struggled a lot with the human convention of adding two dots over one of the vowels in a name to indicate superior proficiency in math or physics, mainly because we don’t have any vowels in our names. It’s not like we don’t have physicists.
I’m winking at you with both eyelids.
Speaking of which, that was a really good design feature on those K’ntasari. Human eyes aren’t well protected. And I’m not even going to swim near the subject of how badly protected human male genitals are.
Back to the story: so after watching Tellick flail around for a while, I made the suggestion that he pass the information along to someone who could do his dirty work. Someone like the Cantor. I’d been following the politics of the situation, and she and Ashtara were spoiling for a showdown. The question was how the Combine would react if she kicked him out of the Convocation. Maybe they would see her as the legitimate head of the Nau’gsh. In that case, I thought she’d be easy for us to control, or, at least, easier than Ashtara. Every time you think you’ve got that guy figured out, he emanates someone new.
Or maybe the Combine would just disqualify the Nau’gsh since Ashtara was technically the only one of them who met the Advanced Sentient criteria. Either way, Tellick would win. That’s what I told him.
What was more likely to happen is that the Combine would completely ignore the local politics. They’d given Ashtara three galaxies, made him guardian over two species, and put him on the decorations committee. They weren’t too likely to recognize a new Nau’gsh nuncio – too much trouble.
Really, I just wanted to put the sharks in with the tourists, so to speak. Tellick had the sacred grove bugged to see what our little plot would come to.
What happened was this: The Cantor freaked. She called Lilith an abomination and demanded that her tree, Philosophia, be burned. Of course, Ashtara forbade it. Then the Matriarch said that anyone who attempted to harm Philosophia would be charged under the full extent of Skarsian law.
The Cantor argued that the Convocation didn’t recognize Lilith as a Cu’enashti, and the Matriarch said it didn’t matter: all sentients were protected by law, from the Arya to the Quicknodes to the Floatfish. While I appreciate the sentiment, I really wish humans would stop calling us Floatfish. Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh is so sonorous. Just try it. Brrrrrrrrrrrrvvbh. It rolls off the tongue.
And then the Cantor pulled out that part of Eden Blues where the High Prophetess said that Ashtara wasn’t even a Cu’enashti, but some kind of freak. She said it was proved by that obscene article on Nau’gsh genesis written by the Matriarch. It applied only to Ashtara, and to allege that any other Cu’endhari had its origin in the Prunus genus was an absurdity. “You’re not one of us,” she raged. “You’re an atavistic throwback!”
At the time, Ashtara was emanating Archon Aran. I think he knew what was coming. What am I saying? Of course he did; the Matriarch is a prophet, too. My thought is that Archon Ailann is a little soft under the gills, but Aran is a hammerhead.
Here’s what he said: “Thank you for the public acknowledgement of what Archonists have long known in their hearts. I am not Cu’enashti. I am unique. I am the Living God of the Domha’vei.” And he walked out, leaving everyone to look like they were trying to use their lungs for photosynthesis.
And then the K’ntasari woman said, “We are the creations of Davy and Ari; we are not of the forest,” and the whole K’ntasari delegation walked out.
And then Lady Claris said, “Another one of your cocked up ideas, like the Great Silence. Just how the hell do you think the Nau’gsh will survive without the backing of the Archon and the Matriarch? Not to mention that the last thing we need is for humans to turn against the Archon. Why make a big deal out of his stupid personal dramas?”
“Clearly, you don’t see the ramifications,” said the Cantor. “If those machines can take the place of our Chosen…”
“Ugh, I don’t even want to start on the stupid Chosen crap,” said Claris. “But really, is any one of you going to give up your precious darling for a flatscreen monitor? Or even a holovid? Come on. It only worked on Lilith because she was deceived into emanating by Esau St. John. If you had a brain hidden in your foliage somewhere, you’d realize that the real threat isn’t the Quicknodes at all, it’s human telepaths.”
“A human telepath is still a human. Sometimes, saplings make unfortunate choices. It’s tragic, but not an abomination.”
“You’re a holepunching** moron, do you know that?”
“Know your place, Cu’enmerengi! Without us, your kind never would have survived – your alchemy is too pitiful.”
“Maybe I missed something, but doesn’t the Archon handle the weather? First the Archon that was an Arya and now the one that’s a mutant nectarine? You can only afford to throw this hissy-fit because you know Ashtara will never pull the plug on Dolparessa. Even when you kick him out, you still rely on him.” And then Claris walked out. She didn’t actually quit – she left it an open question. I get the feeling she likes to see which direction the biggest school will swim in.
And then after she left, there was a lot of muttering amongst the remaining Cu’endhari. Finally, one of them spoke up and said, “We don’t feel comfortable with the way you spoke to His Holiness.”
“His Holiness? That’s a made up story for humans and all of us know it. He isn’t a god any more than I’m the Matriarch.”
“But…he created the K’ntasari. And I can’t leave Dolparessa like he can. And his Chosen is destined to rule the universe.”
“That last is propaganda,” the Cantor said, but she didn’t sound too confident. I found out later it’s because her Chosen, that weird High Prophetess, had seen it in a vision.
So the Convocation of the Forest broke into splinter groups. Get it? Splinter groups! Hahahaha. You really don’t know how hard it is to play on words in a foreign language.
So Tellick and I sat down to think about what we’d just seen happen – well, he sat down. I just relaxed my float-bladder a little. And then there was a report – special media push by GalMedi. The High Prophetess, Wyrd Elma, made a public announcement that Lilith was the Archon’s sapling, and that the government had given her a deal and put all the blame on Esau St. John for the Dalgherdia murders, and that he was a telepath who could hypnotize Cu’enashti, and that’s why Earth had to be destroyed. And that everything in Eden Blues was true, and if Earth didn’t surrender, Ashtara should call in the SongLuminants, but he was trying to suppress the whole incident because his daughter was a heretic in love with an AI, and it was an embarrassment.
“Well,” I said to Tellick. “Well, well, and a pond and a river, too. Water everywhere.”
He was silent for a moment. “We’d better surrender,” he said. “I know just the slimeweasel to do the dirty work.”
*A rather histrionic form of rodent brought in the gene banks from Earth – trans.
**Refers to holepunchers, slang for wormhole evocation drives. A “holepunching moron” is someone whose logic makes no sense given the laws of this universe – trans.