Wolken

Origin

Massive whale bodies, dark green, covered in moss so that when they surface they photosynthesise enough to survive indefinitely beneath the sea. Inside, the hollowed-out interior holds a fleshen control panel and transparent windows where the eyes are, and a connected pilot can feel and see what the Wolken sees. They were bred to be the large bio-submarines, allowing Alverians to descend into the deep, and they carried their masters down to wage war themselves in the deep, in the realm of Orton. To the world above they are a myth.

The splice is Irugaine, Omari and whale, and the Omari strand is the cruelty in it. The Omari are Orton's own people, made by the ocean god, and the Alverians took their tissue, put it into a whale, and built a machine to invade the god's realm with the god's own children inside its walls.

They were not conscripted and not tamed. They were designed as hulls, and the hollow in them is not a wound and not surgery. It is how they were grown. They were made in three builds in a single programme: the heavy build for war, the broad build for freight and troops, and the long build for the deep listening. Their genetic code was locked at the end of the programme, as the Baruush's was, and for the same reason: the makers were satisfied. Wolkenmor, Wolkenae and Wolk'thar are those three builds. They are not strains and cannot be, since nothing about a Wolken can be bred for. A Wolken is either one of the ones that were made, or it does not exist.

The number made is written in the Long Apology as six hundred and eleven, and no other figure exists anywhere. Of those, the Apology accounts for a hundred and forty still at their moorings, ninety-odd loose and known, and roughly three hundred and eighty unaccounted for, which in a people that cannot die means they are somewhere: under silt, under ice, in trenches, in flooded caverns of the Under Realm, in places their masters put them and never came back for. Three hundred and eighty living hulls are missing and nobody on Nu knows where they are. That is the great horror of the species and the thing the sages will not discuss with outsiders.

Since the collapse of the Alverian empire, many have remained blindly docked at their secret locations, ever-photosynthesising beneath the sun. Six thousand years at a mooring, alive, fed by light, with a dead crew in the hollow and no order given. Some of those have gone entirely mad and are quiet about it. Some are still waiting properly, in good order, holding station, and answer a hail in the correct forms of a language nobody has spoken since the fall.

Others, legend says, have become freed, developing their own minds. The freeing was not an event and had no cause. It happened at different depths in different centuries to individuals with nothing in common, and what it means is only this: at some point the Wolken stopped hearing the work as the whole of itself and began to hear the six thousand years. Every freed Wolken can name the day. Most of them can name the hour.

Body

The broad build runs ninety to a hundred and ten feet and a hundred and forty to a hundred and eighty tons. The heavy build runs a hundred to a hundred and twenty feet and two hundred to two hundred and sixty tons, most of it forward, in a blunt ram of dense oil and bone. The long build runs a hundred and forty to a hundred and sixty feet and is lighter for its length, built like a drawn breath. All three are heavier than anything natural of the same size, because the interior is braced: the hollow is ringed with cartilage hoops as thick as a man is tall, and the flanks are double-walled against pressure, and the difference in weight is armour.

The back and the upper flanks carry the moss, which is not a passenger. It is grown from the hide, fed by the hide, and the hide feeds on it in turn, and the green goes almost black in deep water and pales to a sick yellow in a Wolken that has not surfaced in years. Barnacle-crust, weed, whole colonies of shellfish and, on the very old ones, small trees ride on the moss above the waterline. A surfaced Wolken is an island that has been floating a long time, and fishermen have moored to them, camped on them, buried their dead on them and been carried out to sea on them.

The eye-windows are the strangest part of the body from outside: two panes of clear, warm, slightly flexing tissue, ten to fourteen feet across, set where a whale's eyes would be, through which anyone inside the hollow can see the water and anyone outside can see, dimly, into a room. There are no eyes behind them. The makers took the eyes out and glazed the sockets so that a crew could look through them, and gave the Wolken its sonar and nothing else, so that a Wolken is blind in every sense a land creature would recognise and the only thing in the world that can see out of its face is a passenger. Every honest account of riding in one mentions the moment of understanding this.

The head is blunt and unadorned. The mouth is enormous and opens downward. There is no hatch, which is the thing the boarding parties of the empire never had to think about, and which is now the whole difficulty: the only way into a Wolken is through the mouth and up the throat, and the only way out is the same, and a Wolken can close its throat.

The hollow is the upper body. Beneath its floor, in a compact layer perhaps eight feet deep and running the whole length of the beast, lie all of the organs: the hearts, the gut, the great oil sac, the lungs folded flat, the kidneys, the brain-stem trunk, everything, pressed into a single dense deck like cargo stowed by someone who was paid by the yard. The floor of the hollow is warm and it moves, slowly, with the breathing and the digestion beneath it, and everyone who has ever ridden in a Wolken remarks on the floor before they remark on anything else. The comfort of the passenger is the crowding of the person. Organs built to sit loose in a body's cavity have been flattened into a deck and work at angles they were never shaped for, and every Wolken has ached, continuously and everywhere, since the day it was decanted.

One thing was taken out of the deck entirely to make the room. A Wolken has no reproductive organs of any kind, and there is no scar and no sign that any were ever intended, because the eight feet the makers wanted for cargo was found by leaving them out. That is the whole reason there will never be another Wolken. The species was rendered barren at the drawing stage, as a matter of stowage, and the fact is recorded in the Apology in one line with no commentary attached to it.

The brain proper sits forward, above the throat, behind the fleshen panel, which is the reason the panel is where it is and the reason the Seizing works. It is a divided brain, as a whale's is, built to sleep one half at a time so that a vessel on station never stops watching. After six thousand years both halves are tired and neither may stop, and there is no Wolken alive who has ever been wholly unconscious. When the sages describe what has been done to them, this is usually the second thing they mention, after the eyes.

The hollow itself is a chamber sixty to ninety feet long, ribbed, dry, lit greenly through the eye-windows, with the panel at the forward end and the throat-room aft of it. Alverian fittings are still bolted into the cartilage in most of them: benches, racks, lamp-brackets, the pale ruin of instruments. Some Wolken have picked the fittings out over the centuries with their own tongue, which can reach. Some have left every bolt where it was.

What they have instead of sight builds their whole idea of the world. Sonar carries three hundred miles in cold water and returns a picture that is interior as well as exterior: a Wolken examining a ship knows the number of people in it, which of them are pregnant, which have healed fractures, and where the cargo is stowed. It cannot tell green from grey and has no concept of either. It can read a heart at half a mile. Distance to a Wolken is a matter of delay rather than of size, so their sense of scale is temporal, and their speech, their art and their grief are all built out of intervals. The Choir is a form that could only have been invented by people who experience distance as waiting.

Life

They do not breed. Whatever was made is all there will ever be. There is no Wolken young, no Wolken egg, no Wolken childhood and no line of descent. Every Wolken alive was made an adult by hand in a tank six thousand years ago and has been that age ever since. Their speech has no word for a child of their own kind and never needed one, and when Thousand-Fathom Quiet carried a plague city's children out under an enemy fleet it had to borrow the Omari word, and used it wrongly, and has been corrected in the Choir ever since by singers who understand exactly why the mistake was made.

They eat. They also photosynthesise, enough to survive indefinitely beneath the sea, and the moss keeps them alive and keeps them nothing more. A Wolken that lives on sunlight alone goes lean, goes slow, goes cold in the mind, and holds. To be strong it must feed, and it feeds at the surface at night and at depth on the shoals: the mouth opens downward and the throat draws water in a slow tide, and the filtering combs of the gullet take krill, squid, small fish and anything else in the water column, including a boat's crew, which is one of the three ways the loose ones kill.

They do not die. This is the central fact and it is not a blessing in any sense the species recognises. Age does not touch them. Wounds close, slowly and badly, and go on closing for centuries, which means the healing is never finished and a Wolken is always inside the ache of a wound taken in the last age. A Wolken can be holed, burned, crushed against rock, buried under a slide of trench silt or frozen into an ice shelf, and it will not end. It will lie there, awake, in the dark, for as long as the world lasts. The Long Apology has a word for what happens to a mind under those conditions and the word is not translated for outsiders. Nine of the unaccounted are known to be in exactly that condition, because they can still be heard, faintly, on the sonar bands, and the sages will not go to them, and cannot free them, and answer them every year on the same day.

What can be done to a Wolken, therefore, is not killing. It is silencing: driving spikes into the panel, cutting the sonar bulb out of the brow, flooding the hollow with quicklime, sinking the thing in the deepest water available. Two of the loose ones have been silenced this way in recorded history. Both are still down there.

Frailty

A body that cannot die accumulates. The hoop cartilage that braces the hollow keeps growing, slowly, the way a scar keeps thickening, and over centuries it closes inward. The oldest Wolken have hollows narrowed to a crawlway, and the very oldest are becoming solid: an interior filling in like a wound healing across a door. A Wolken whose hollow has closed can never carry anyone again and can never be Seized again, and receives its freedom and its final solitude in the same slow act, and the Choir sings for that one as though for a death, which is the closest thing the species has to a funeral.

They are colonised. Things that live on whales live on them and are never shed, because nothing sheds: lice in the moss by the hundredweight, boring worms that reach the fat and stay, and in the loose ones a flora in the throat-room that alters the voice and cannot be cleared. Several of the unaccounted are audible only as a wet burr where a voice should be. A Wolken cannot scratch, cannot roll a parasite off against sand without grounding itself, and cannot ask for help without admitting where it is.

The moss is the other failure. It needs sun, and sun means the surface, and the surface means whalers, courts and irons. A Wolken that stays deep out of caution greens down to yellow, thins, slows, and goes cold in the mind, and the cold in the mind is where the loose killers mostly came from. The sages have a rule about it and enforce it with nothing but the Choir: surface, be seen, take the risk, because the alternative is what happened to Number Four Hundred And Six.

And they are the only people on Nu with no natural end and no way to seek one. There is no Wolken suicide, because there is no method. Three have tried the trenches. All three are still there.

Country

The open ocean, and wherever they were parked. The moorings are called the drowned docks: sea-caves fitted with Alverian cradles, flooded bunker pens, and three great open-water rings whose anchor stones are still on the bottom. Most are in water the surface peoples do not go into. The freed ones keep no home at all and range the whole Deep Realm, surfacing at intervals to green themselves. The docile sages keep to four gathering waters, deep, cold and quiet, where the acoustics carry, and they are not places on a chart so much as places in the sound.

Their presence shapes a sea. A Wolken working a shoal for a season moves the shoal, and the fleets that follow the shoal follow the Wolken without ever knowing what they are following, and there are three fishing economies on Nu whose whole calendar is the unexplained movement of a sage. A drowned dock is a reef after six thousand years: the cradles are grown over, the pen walls hold a whole ecology, and the water above them is the best fishing in the region and is shunned by every crew that has ever heard the floor speak. Where a Wolken has been silenced and sunk, the ground around it is dead for a mile, because quicklime does that, and the deep peoples map those places and do not name them.

Society

There is no Wolken settlement, no Wolken government and no Wolken numbering above one. What they have is the Choir, which is the whole of their society: the practice, kept by the freed, of singing across an ocean at fixed intervals so that every Wolken within a thousand miles knows who is alive, where, and in what condition. The Choir has no leader. It has an order of speaking, fixed by the order in which each singer was freed, and the order has not changed in two thousand years because it cannot.

Among the loose ones, some are pure chaotic evil: they kill and maim anything in their path, and they do it without object. Others are docile sages who hold to their purpose and want to do good, after the evil they did under their masters. The split is not by build, not by age and not by dock. Two Wolken hauled out of the same pen in the same decade will go two ways. The sages hold that the difference is what each of them decided to do with the memory of the war in the deep, and they say this without excusing anyone. The evil ones are not mad and are not confused. They are entirely lucid, they can be reasoned with, and they will hold a conversation through the throat-room while working a fishing fleet apart underneath the speaker. Three of them are known well enough to be named on the charts of every deep-water people. The Choir sings their positions once a month, to everyone, including to the whalers, which the sages consider the least they can do and the killers consider a betrayal, and it is the only quarrel the species has ever had.

The sages take work. A Wolken sage will carry pilgrims, sunken cargo, plague refugees, envoys and the drowned, and will not take payment, since the point of the carrying is the payment. They are careful about who they carry and they ask questions first, and the questions are the only interview in the world conducted by a room.

They are sentient carriers and they can be piloted. To pilot one is a betrayal. Two things are being described by the same word and the Wolken keep them strictly apart.

The Carrying. A Wolken opens its throat, takes a crew into the hollow, hears what they need through the throat-room, and goes. It steers itself. It surfaces when it chooses. The crew are guests inside a person and are treated as such, and there are courtesies: you do not cut the fittings out, you do not foul the floor, you do not touch the panel, and you answer when the room speaks to you. This is how every honest voyage in a Wolken has ever been made.

The Seizing. The fleshen panel sits directly behind the brain. A pilot who is let in, or who forces the throat with lime and irons, sets the connectors of the panel into the tissue and takes the nervous system. The Alverian instruments for this survive and are still traded. What it does is not sleep and not death: it severs the brain from the body and leaves the mind wide awake behind the eye-windows, seeing everything, feeling the body swim, dive, ram and kill, and unable to move so much as the throat. A seized Wolken can hear the pilot talking. It can hear the crew laughing. It cannot make a sound, because the throat-room is downstream of the connection, and the first thing the Seizing takes is the voice.

A Wolken who lets a pilot in has committed the betrayal on itself, and the Choir will sing over it as though it had gone silent. There are perhaps six of these, kept by three surface powers, and they are the reason the loose ones sink ships without asking. The sages call them the Bitted. It is the only Wolken word that is spoken and not sung.

Faith

They wish to enter the good graces of Orton, and Orton has turned his back on them because they are abominations. The whole faith is one long attempt to be forgiven by an ocean that will not answer. It is called the Long Apology, and it is a document as much as a religion: an account, kept and added to for six thousand years, of every act each Wolken performed in the war in the deep. Names of the drowned where the names are known. The count of the Omari killed at each descent, which is the part of the Apology that the Omari themselves have heard, in full, sung to them by a sage who surfaced off Ien and would not stop for four days.

The rite is the Facing: at every surfacing the Wolken turns its head down-current, opens the throat, and sings the newest page. There is no clergy, because there is nobody to appoint one, and the office of Keeper of the Apology falls by the order of the Choir to whoever was freed earliest and is still speaking. There is no absolution, because none has ever been offered. The doctrine is that Orton hears, since Orton hears everything in the water, and that the silence is the answer and the answer is not yet final.

The loose killers keep the faith too, in an altered form. Their reading is that the silence is final, that the sentence has been passed, and that a condemned thing owes the world nothing further. They sing the Apology as a taunt.

The truth is worse than either reading. Orton keeps no realm and never did, and there is no shore of his to be forgiven onto. Every soul on Nu goes to the auction of the star gods. Wolken souls do not, because Wolken do not die, and so they are the only people on the planet the auction has never once received. Whether the Court has noticed the gap is another matter. Whether anyone would sell for them if they arrived is another matter still.

Tongue

They speak through a system inside themselves and by sonar speech. The internal system is the throat-room: a chamber of folded tissue at the aft end of the hollow, above the organ deck, where the Wolken shapes air into speech and pushes it into the hollow so that the whole room speaks at once. Nobody inside a Wolken can tell where the voice is coming from. It is enormous, slow, calm, and slightly delayed, and it arrives in the chest before the ear. In this way they speak Common perfectly, and the old Alverian command speech, and a version of the Omari's tongue that they should not have and did not learn.

The sonar speech is the real language and it has no name that can be pronounced in air. It carries three hundred miles in cold water, it is used to speak, to see and to sing simultaneously, and to a listener alongside it feels like being described. A Wolken sonar sentence contains its speaker's exact position, depth, condition and mood as a matter of grammar, and lying in it is difficult and is regarded as an art.

The Alverians did not name them. They cut numbers into the brow, and the numbers are still legible on most of them, and the docked ones still answer to theirs. A freed Wolken takes a name at the hour of its freeing, made from the sound of the water where it happened. The names are long in song and are given to air-breathers in a shortened form. Eight, in the shortened form: Uln-Ossovaan, Grey Under Ice, Thousand-Fathom Quiet, Mokraevu, She Who Surfaced At Ien, Ehl-Tarruun, The Cold Door, Vaash-Om-Vaash. The three known killers keep their brow numbers and refuse names, which the Choir sings as a fact and not as an accusation.

Regard

The whole of the world's opinion is two words: "A myth." The Wolken are one of three WildKin the world does not believe in.

Coastal peoples believe in them in the way people believe in weather they have not personally seen. There is an island in the bay that was not there last year. There is a green shoal that takes nets and gives them back. There is a voice under the hull that knows your language. Deep-water peoples, the Shrakur, the Eesha, the Sserrin and the Omari, do not treat them as myth at all, and the Omari have the longest and coldest opinion of them of anyone, since the Omari remember the war in the deep and remember what came down into it with Alverians inside. That an Omari elder will now speak civilly to a Wolken sage is one of the quieter miracles of the age, and it took two thousand years and the Apology to get there.

Among the surface powers that know the truth, a Wolken is not a myth and is not a person. It is the most valuable object in the world, and there are three courts with standing orders about them, and the orders concern irons, lime and how to force a throat.

Their masters are gone. Their enemies by construction are the Omari and Orton. Their present enemies are whoever carries Alverian panel-irons, the three courts that keep the Bitted, and the deep-hunting fleets of the Shrakur, who cannot kill one and have discovered they can make one wish otherwise. Their nearest thing to an ally is the Omari, warily, at the level of individuals. Between the sages and the loose killers there is no war, only the monthly singing of positions, which is worse.

Harvest

Everything, if you can hold one, and holding one is the difficulty.

Sunmoss, scraped from the back, which will grow on any damp surface and feed a person poorly and forever, and which is the single most valuable cargo in the Deep Realm.

Wolken oil, from the great sac in the organ deck, which burns clean and cold and does not gutter under water. Taking it requires cutting down through the floor of the hollow, which is to say standing inside a living person and cutting through the floor at his feet, and the crews that do it work in relays and do not talk afterwards.

Eye-glass, the window tissue, cut and cured into panes that stay clear for centuries and are set into the deep-halls of three peoples, none of whom will say where the panes came from. A Wolken so cut is not blinded, since it was never sighted, and is left with two open holes into its own hollow that will take three hundred years to close.

Panel tissue, which is the reason the Seizing survives as a practice, since a cut panel can be grafted into instruments and made to obey a second time.

Hoop cartilage, for hulls and for siege frames, cut from a body that will regrow it and will narrow itself doing so.

Nothing taken from a Wolken is illegal anywhere, because no law anywhere recognises a Wolken as a person. The sages know this. It is the second thing they ask about, after the Apology, when they are asked what they want.

Remembered

Uln-Ossovaan, first freed and Keeper of the Long Apology, a long build of a hundred and fifty feet, who has surfaced in daylight eleven times in six thousand years and each time to tell somebody something they did not want to hear.

She Who Surfaced At Ien, the sage who lay off the Omari city and sang the killing-count for four days and was not driven off.

Thousand-Fathom Quiet, who carried a plague city's children out under an enemy fleet and asked nothing and has not spoken since.

Number Four Hundred And Six, a heavy build with no name, loose off a shipping road, lucid, talkative and responsible for eleven hundred deaths, who answers hails in fluent Common and will discuss the Apology at length while working a hull apart.

The Cold Door, silenced by a surface court eight hundred years ago, spiked, limed and sunk, and still audible on the low bands to anyone who listens at the right depth, which nobody does twice.

Kin each has a page of its own

They are divided by nothing that can be inherited. The three builds came off one programme in one lifetime and the differences between them are the differences between three jobs given to three shapes, carried for six thousand years by the individuals who were handed them.