On the Plurality of Evening

After the lecture, Myla climbs down from her place among a row of perches. She wades pass a crowd of mantids in silver headbands, the blue light of Ngini’s mix glinting off them as the doors open to a sweltering evening.

In her bag, there’s a flakey book with a cord of mycelia looped around a certain page. She’s memorized the contents, but having a backup never hurts.

Pushing past a taller pupil — was that one almost teneral? what are they doing here? — she glimpses the departing back of the sovran lecturer. Her wading now becomes a determined trot, shoving more mantids out of her way. One of them is exclaiming, but she’s almost there — and the sovran is almost out of the room.

“Mister Gallabrood! Wait!”

The mantis in silken robes — was that therid woven? — pauses after one more stride, arching an antennae and only turning his head fractionally.

“Well? What is it?”

Myla is as winded as any laymant would be after that minute of aerobics, but it doesn’t stop her palps. “I had a question, if you have the time? Maybe you could point me in the right direction, if you don’t know outright? I know your field of study is harumnestics, but—”

“Spare me the qualifications. The question, please.”

“What do you know about Vesperis ingrata?”

That gets more than a fractional turn. Gallabrood spins around, neck craning as his foveae scan the hall behind them. The crowd had flowed enough to empty most of the room — no one, that they could say, had been around to overhear.

The tone of response is minor, but firm. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I’m planning an essay on historical progression of crep—”

“Qualifications,” he says. “The answer, please.”

Myla is reaching into her bag, for faded book cover with a cord of mycelia wrapped around it. “An 1657 edition compilation of world scars. I couldn’t find the main entry, but there’s an index where it’s listed near Vesperis vesperis percipere and Atercordyc—”

He seizes the old book, and says, “Follow me.”

Gallabrood, being teneral, had longer legs, and there were enough twists and turns in this department (adjoined to the pharmacium, the stewartry shared its caves) that Myla nearly lost him multiple times. He didn’t slow, and she wondered if her failing to keep up would be just as well in his eyes.

In his office — Myla assumed that’s what this was, with broken harusigns and preserved mala lining the shelves between books and a flat table dominating the center. A section of the wall is dedicated to a bit of parchment that must be euvespid in origin, but Myla stares at it without ever deciding if the swirls are an abstract map or diagram, or a true seal.

Immediately Gallabrood is behind the desk, fishing through a drawer, pulling out a honeycomb, a unminted bat’s bone, and a letter opener, none of which seem to be what he’s looking for. Then he finds it: a gnarled mass of fungal rhizomorph, black and chilling. Myla imagined a world where trees made portrait sculptures distorted as grotesques. Its lines and angles frustrated her cursory attempts to follow. Gallabrood makes a few quick signs, pours enervate from hairs on his tarsus into the rhizomorph. Myla hasn’t been a vesperbane for long (practically no time compared to him), but she feels that.

“What did you do?”

“Trivial bit of privacy, the kind that does more harm instilling illusions of safety than actual protection — but I have other things I’d like to do today, and you are more of a security risk than any of my wards could fix.” Gallabrood waves a foreleg, and Myla realizes it’s an indication. “The air at a certain radius is stilled. Do let me know if you find yourself short of breathe.”

“With this much cloak and dagger I’m stating to wonder if I tripped over stronghold secrets. Am I going to have gray masks standing over me when I sleep tonight?” Myla was trying to play the suggestion as a joke, but her voice is wavering by the end.

“Calm down. You’ll only be in danger if I tell you too much — and then as would I. But I know your type. Down the path you’re going, there’s a few places it ends and none of them I would recommend — even the one that leads where I am now. You’ve a dangerous curiosity, and the sooner it’s tempered with recognition of what this world is like, the better.”

“I didn’t think some vesper subspecies was worth getting k​-​killed over. Couldn’t you have just told me it was an old, invalid taxon or something? I would have forgotten about it.”

“I doubt that. I didn’t become a teacher to lie to those that come seeking knowledge. Even if I leave you ignorant about Vesperis ingrata — and make no mistake: I intend to — that doesn’t negate that there’s a specific fault in your approach that should be noted.”

“Fine. What’s the fault are going to save me from?”

“Do you understand — really understand — that things can (and in so many cases, are) forgotten for a reason? There are matters you’re happier not thinking about. There are matters, dangerous matters, that we’re all safer without defects’ having knowledge of. The matter of Vesperis ingrata is both of those things.”

Myla frowned. It didn’t make sense — it was just a sister species, wasn’t it? — and for all that she’d suggested he just lie to her, she didn’t know if she could stand this puzzle remaining unsolved.

“And that doesn’t deter you,” he says with a sigh. “Fair enough. It takes a strong scholar to read even a book with thorns. Perhaps I’ll give you a you few facts — an outline, and leave the truth to the imagination. It may be enough to satiate you. Or it won’t. Then perhaps I’m only hastening the inevitable.”

Myla tries to smile. Tries not to stutter when she says, “Qualifications.” She don’t have the confidence to finish the mimicry, demand an answer.

“Suppose your father went out on the city without a bit of cloth on him, naked as the day he hatched. Is this quite acceptable?”

Myla has a second to frown in confusion at the non sequitur, then grimace. “No! Why would you make me imagine that? No, it wouldn’t be acceptable.”

“Why not?”

“Bugs would… see things. They shouldn’t see, shouldn’t want to. And maybe someone would — if it was the wrong city — why are you making me imagine this.”

“So, you say it presents an intolerable vulnerability, an inappropriate intrusion.” He nods. “Right, I suppose I appreciate you humoring an old tiercel’s silly questions. I believe we were discussing something unrelated, yes?”

“I thought you were going to say something — anything — about whatever ‘Vesperis ingrata’ means.”

“Ah yes.” He smiles. “Vespers, as I hope has been explained to you at this point, are a natural creature like any other, a product of the flourishing of the most persistent traits. No creature is a singular product, like a craftsman might set out to create. Each has many descendents, and they in turn have descendants, and this is mirrored above them, by species, by genus.

“Before there were vespers, there was… something. Something that related to the bats in some prototypical instance of pharmacial union. This relation must have been iterated on, mutating and shifting throughout the generations. Vespers, that is, Vesperis vesperis, can’t be the only way their symbiosis could manifest.

“It’s a very complex thing, with so many interlocking parts. Nature… to say it abhors waste would be incorrect, but simplicity easily replicates. And what possibilities for simpler vespers might exist? One can imagine a kind of vesper with no fungal symbiont at all, perhaps, and thus could not be subject to the daylight effect.

“And if such a specimen were to persist to the present day, what a research opportunity it would be. What insights might be gained, to study the true anatomy and form of a vesper. The Stewartry, or an older incarnation thereof, certainly wouldn’t hesitate to learn all they could.

“But we’re talking about Vesperis ingrata, aren’t we? I’m afraid on that matter, I can’t say much. Even for someone privileged to read noturnal records, even for a sovran, information is scarce, I assure you. Though, in some other course of study, you’ll learn about those wild, unconstrained early days before the Stewartry, when perhaps even a quarter of outstanding crepuscular exclusions was eager research gone awry. Then we sobered up, built an institution with policies for moratoria and classified information. Vesperis ingrata…suffice it to say, we, at present, can only identified one species of Vesperis still living. Any others that might once have been, well, I suppose, like so many others, they were outcompeted by their betters.”

(Myla faints not long after, lack of air getting to her, and Gallabrood caries her out, her eyes pale and dreaming. Gallabrood’s auricles have grown dull with age, and he misses the wispery brush of sleep talk, murmured words. She dreams of the her pharmakon rites, or something like it, and she can almost remember the words.)