Free Law of Survival by Kristine Smith

best ways to dispose of body parts, but augie tended toward the direct approach when it sensed she was in danger and that wasn’t what was needed right now. She wasn’t sure what was, but she’d think of something. For Nema’s sake, she had to.

CHAPTER 5
    â€œAnd with this bite of ground, of soil, I—” Tsecha fell silent and stared at the slice of faria impaled on the end of his fork. “Bite of ground…”
    The piece of purple-skinned tuber offered him no clue as to the words he needed to say to complete the prayer. No prompting scrolled across its glistening white surface, as it did across the broadcasters’ eyepieces at the holoVee studio he had visited earlier that humanish week. Instead, it stared in death glaze, as white and blank as a humanish eye, leaving him to suffer the humiliation of a chief priest who had forgotten how to petition his gods.
    â€œI have prayed such for years,” Tsecha murmured in English. He often talked to himself in English. He found the language’s hard sounds complemented his mood. “I prayed such only yesterday.” But yesterday seemed an age ago.
    â€œNow yesterday is today and all is hell.” He shoved the slice of faria into his mouth and chewed without the benefit of prayer. The bitterness of the vegetable stung his throat—he coughed into his sleeve so his cook-priest wouldn’t hear. He knew she waited near the outer door of his private altar-room, pacing the hall like a nervous beast as she prayed for his soul. She esteemed him—he knew that. She possessed the proper skein and standing. He sensed she might ask him to breed her, and if she did so, he could not refuse.
    Then she would leave me to make her birth-house, and I would need to find a new cook-priest. One who didn’t worry so much. Yes, that would be most pleasant. It weighed upon Tsecha, the way others worried after his soul.
    He removed his handheld from his overrobe’s inner pocket and entered the English word “weight.” The aged device took some time to search and collate. It had been built for him many seasons before, prior even to the War of Vynshàrau Ascension, when humanish had first begun to visit his Shèrá homeworld. It contained his favorite humanish languages: French, English, and Mandarin, along with the many odd terms and definitions he had compiled during the glorious Academy days more than twenty humanish years before, when Jani Kilian and Hansen Wyle taught him so much.
    Such days. He studied his handheld’s scratched display. Weight . He shook the device gently as words appeared, then faded. Ballast. Tonnage. Anchor….
    Anchor. Yes, that was the word. The fears of others weighted him as an anchor. They immobilized him, kept him motionless, static, changeless, at a time when change meant life and stasis meant something quite different.
    Tsecha sipped his water, warmed and sweetened with veir blossom. It soothed his throat, and quelled the burning on his tongue.
    â€œPain focuses the mind.” He spoke softly, so his cook-priest would not hear his ungodly English. “With the pain I have experienced this day, mine should be the most focused mind in the universe.” First, he awoke to the ache of age in his knees and back. Then he recalled his upcoming meeting, which like most such gatherings promised hellish depths of boredom and confusion. They were to discuss the Karistos contract today—such a ridiculous thing, and truly. Haárin and colonial humanish had entered into such agreements since before the last war, so many that one lost count. Why Anais and her allies objected so to this particular agreement, he could not understand.
    He set down his cup, and picked with ungodly indifference at his food.
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    â€œThey are assembling, nìRau.”
    Tsecha looked up from his reading. Sànalàn, his suborn, stood in the doorway of his front room. She had already donned her own formal