by C. L. Kagmi
Lily looks down at her own mismatched hands.
Mistakes.
She had been lucky, given the circumstances. Her two halves fused and read each others’ signals, working together to compensate for duplication. Where she could have had two heads, a single brain had formed; where organs could have been unevenly duplicated, placing fatal stress on the system, she was whole.
The cooperation of her two halves had been so seamless that no one had even noticed she was not developing as planned until her fourth month in her creche’s womb.
They could have terminated her. If she had lacked limbs or a healthy brain, they would have. But the fusion of her halves seemed to be producing something new; something unplanned and imperfect, but functional and just possibly exciting. The newness of her had been an asset, had almost, for a time, spawned talk of trying to do this sort of thing on purpose.
The Reshaped, after all, adore new things.
Her overs had watched with slow-growing disappointment as she failed, one by one, to excel at crucial skills. Her two halves had different bone structures; she would work twice as hard to attain any sort of physical grace or skill, would never be innately gifted in that realm. The two halves of her brain sometimes produced unique attitudes or insights as a result of their interplay, but failed to perform any kind of thought as quickly as her peers.
Her psyche, ultimately, was what shattered it. From infancy it had been impossible not to notice that she was different. And Reshaped adults did not believe in lying. Her frighteningly mismatched appearance had been eschewed by other creche children from the time they were old enough to talk. She’d been told, around the time she learned to ask, that she was different. Around the time she learned to read, in the gentlest possible terms, that she was a mistake.
Mistakes like her didn’t happen, so no one knew how to handle them. If something went wrong, usually, it was so bad that the fetus had to be destroyed.
So she had muddled through her studies and apprenticeships; always just good enough, never excellent. Always good enough to receive kindness; always slow enough to suspect that whatever kindness she received was out of pity.
This assignment had been given out of pity. A planet, maybe dangerous, that no one knew what to do with. Low enough priority to be non-urgent; a big enough game that she couldn’t possibly screw it up beyond repair.
Throw in the chimera, and see what she can do with it.
But she couldn’t solve it; could not make the least progress for her people. The natives she’d been sent to speak with paid her less attention than a blade of grass. Their brains and genes were as opaque to her as Kit’s inscrutable eyes.
The only thing she does seem to be good at is meditating. And that has taken her a long way. Lily sits amid the plants of her garden, and breathes her terror out into the earth.
Watching the Reshaped is fascinating.
The name Kit’s overs chose for them seems to be working; the Reshaped is engaging in classic parental behaviors. As they lie down and pretend to sleep, Kit slows their breath and waits to see how long the Reshaped will stand watching them. Tries to let their body rest; knows they need it.
But there is so much to learn here.
After the Reshaped has finally left, they creep from the flat little bed and into the corridor. Into the sweeping breeze pungent with strange plant scents.
And know immediately that something is wrong.
The air is so thick as to be stifling; the scents are not Earth scents, not food scents. The geodesic dome has developed a breach; a big one, if Kit’s senses are any guide.
They scamper through the corridor to find the Reshaped, and to help her.
The corridor opens onto the Reshaped garden. The mad tangle of vegetation is nothing like the gardens of home. Kit stubs their toe on an errant tree root. Drops into a crouch, waiting for the pain to pass. Stares, fascinated at the damage; red blood wells up from beneath torn skin.
And then Kit looks up.
The Reshaped’s dome has opened like a flower. Intentionally, Kit now understands. And above them are—
Stars. Stars like nothing they have ever seen.
Stars are almost all the landscape Kit knows. They are the landmarks by which Eternals navigate. The only landmarks in the Void. Kit has seen them through the viewports of their creche since birth. They’ve been Kit’s destination since they were old enough to know what they were meant for.
But these stars are different. They are set, not in the hard black emptiness of Void, but in the soft blue-black velvet of an atmosphere. Inanna’s gases overlay them like a veil, softening and scattering their light. These stars are sheathed in mystic auras like some ancient flame. They twinkle. The pictures they paint are no mere landmarks; they are majesty.
Kit’s stars are bright, hard objects; clean, cold facts. These are soft wraiths, mystery-shrouded spectres. They cycle through every spectral band and finds the tapestry equally beautiful in each.
Kit realizes that they have plunked themself down on the enclosure floor, all concern forgotten, when they hear a twig snap some meters away. An animal sense, older than time, fills them with that awful fear again. They freeze and stare into the darkness. Think, after an embarrassingly long pause, to switch to infrared.
The shape of Lily blazes into being in the darkness, crossed in places by the cold black limbs of trees. And the Reshaped is doing something odd.
She is standing beneath the stars, arms upraised, and she is speaking. Her lips move and her breath moves with them, though Kit can hear no sound. She is talking, quite clearly, to the stars.
To her overs?
No. Kit cycles through spectrums and sure enough; even looking right at Lily, this enclosure is radio-dark the way Kit’s ship never was. There is no signal. Lily is not transmitting anything that anyone could pick up.
Kit creeps closer—and jumps as their own foot snaps a twig. The Reshaped turns to stare in their direction, startled.
“What are you doing?” Kit asks innocently to cover their eavesdropping. Their voice sounds, to their own ears, like an invader in the silence.
“I was—looking at the stars.” Something almost like shame creeps into Lily’s voice.
Kit accepts this for the moment. Moves forward to stand beside Lily in the clearing, letting starlight fall on them for the Reshaped’s animal eyes.
“Why?” Kit asks.
“Because—it just feels like you should. Doesn’t it?”
Kit must admit that it does. This is a thing to be explored—the instructions must be ancient, ancestral, to be written in both their bones. Kit looks up, feeling anxious then. They want to do something and they can’t explain why. That is rare. No one ever talked about this in their classes.
“Isn’t it a quarantine violation,” Kit asks finally, “to open your dome like this?”
In the infrared, Lily’s shoulders heave. “We’ll do worse before we leave this place.”
Kit suppresses alarm; betrays nothing. In their haste for a change of subject, says: “You were talking to the sky.”
“Yes.” Something in Lily’s voice is defensive. “What’s wrong with that?”
“They can’t hear you.”
Lily stands from her half-crouch, looking up again. “I know.”
Kit waits for further explanation. It occurs to them that the Reshaped is stopping because she feels the need to put Kit back to bed, and that rankles something in them.
“Why do it, then? And why open the dome?”
“Our ancestors looked up at the stars,” Lily says, as though that explains everything. “They wanted to talk to them. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”
Kit is stunned to realize that that’s true. Feels, somehow, as though they’re on the defensive now: “They needed somewhere to expand after they had used up Earth.”
Lily shakes her head, as though Kit were an incorrigible child.
That is the wrong response.
“I know that you
Reshaped are atavists,” Kit says, a little more harshly than they need to. “But what good can these old rituals do you? What are they worth?”
Lily goes still and quiet. She’s beside Kit now, and reaching for their hand. Kit takes it, glad to play a role if it means an end to this ridiculousness. To their surprise, Lily pulls her not toward the house, but out into the center of the clearing.
“Try it,” she says.
Kit obeys reflexively. Larger people have always been their overs, and in this darkness the things that mark Lily as Reshaped are hidden. They crane their neck to look up, and find that they cannot look away.
Something about this feels odd. Dangerous.
What if they try these animal things, things of biochemistry and flesh, and discover that they like them?
It won’t matter. After Graduation, it won’t matter.
They find themself scanning the sky for moving stars. For neighbors, comings, goings. But the sky above Inanna is as empty as its continents. The only certain sentience on this world is found here in this garden.
Kit feels suddenly, plungingly, alone.
“Who do you think is up there?” Lily asks.
Kit reaches for an answer. “Other planets.” Tries to imagine other worlds as strange and thick with scents as Inanna; worlds with stars of other spectra, with vegetation varying in form.
“Why?” asks Lily.
“Because stars have planets.” Kit doesn’t know what else to say.
They hear the brush of hair as Lily shakes her head. “No. Why are there planets? Why are there stars?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Kit says, their voice low and cold.
Lily goes still and silent. Startled.
“You didn’t know that, did you? If you studied us with half the fervor you use to study these insects—with half the attention you use in cooking—you would have known. What do you think we need big brains for, or long lives?” Kit feels patience seeping into her bones, the stars lulling them to calm. “Questions of creation cannot be answered by animal brains. They’re simply not built for it. They’re built only to survive.”
Kit knows they’ve just insulted Lily—and her entire society—in the vilest possible way. They’ve invalidated their philosophy, said that their approach is useless. Kit wonders if the Reshaped will even take that as an insult, her priorities being so evidently different.
“That’s why we respect you,” Lily says softly.
Kit freezes. She didn’t understand the insult. Or—
“You do what we cannot imagine,” Lily continues. “You shed your skins. You do the higher maths. I knew that. I just thought that maybe—you could hear them too.”
Kit realizes they are still staring at the stars. They feel their blood beginning to race—why?
“...hear what?” Kit manages.
Is the Reshaped mad? Kit wonders. Or are they deprived of some mysterious sense as Lily is deprived of infrared vision?
“The—presence—” Lily manages. “It feels as though there’s something out there, doesn’t it? Someone.”
Kit resists the urge to turn and stare at the Reshaped. Starts cycling through spectrums instead, as though something in the sky might explain the statement.
“Our ancestors used to call them gods. And maybe—maybe they weren’t entirely wrong. We’ve proven that they correlate better to the hearer’s psychology than to any objective theology. But maybe that’s just bias in interpreting the perception of something real.”
“You’re theists,” Kit says, dismayed.
“No more than you are. Not by much, at any rate.”
Kit stands up. Feels anger, disappointment. Things they’ve rarely had cause to feel before. There was promise here. The promise of new things. But their overs were right; the Reshaped’s pursuit is nonsense, self-defeating.
“It’s good for us,” Lily tries, “to talk to ourselves. To talk to our perceptions of the Universe.”
“It’s the worst kind of mistake. Mistaking yourselves for gods.”
“We don’t—”
“It’s the kind of mistake that gets people killed.” Kit is stomping toward the compound, stories of holy wars unspooling in their head. It wasn’t just the wars, of course—it was the miscalculations, the over-optimisms, the failure to take proper precautions under the assumption of a caring Universe.
It was everything that almost killed their species in its infancy.
It’s the fact that if any of their people ever believed Lily right, they’d stop searching for the real answers. The right ones.
An uneasiness pierces the usual euphoria as Lily rises.
She feels the breezes from the open roof; tastes her Earth and Inanna both on the wind. But her body remembers something troubling.
Remembers Kit.
Lily sits up, groaning. She should never have introduced the Eternal to anything controversial; should never have deviated from the overs’ care plan for the child. She had been prepared, as the oblong descended, to confine her conversation to the polite. To avoid diplomatic incidents.
But she had been expecting an adult. A stiff and distant creature who would keep to their own quarters, who would guard the boundary of offense as vigilantly as she. Not a child who would inspire the teacher in her; not a curious seeker who would come creeping after her in the dark.
She passes the bedroom she’d set up for her guest. Finds the door open, the bed unmade, empty. Suppresses alarm; tries to imagine the child-thing doing something stupid.
Kit is sitting on the kitchen counter, silently sucking her nutrition mix from a pouch.
“Good morning.” Lily hears the chill in her own voice; wonders if she’ll hold a grudge against the child-thing.
“Morning.” Kit's voice is almost repentant. Lily glances up at its crystalline eyes, and softens. Remembers arguing with her own creche teacher at a similar age.
“What do you want to do today?” she asks the child, gently. A coded way to ask if she needs more time to recover from planetfall.
“I want to see the Ants,” Kit says immediately, sucking on her nutrient pouch. “As soon as possible.”
They’re in a hurry to be rid of me.
“Alright,” Lily grants. “After breakfast.”
In the hours after sunrise, the Ants begin to stream from their mountain caves.
Lily ferries Kit to within a half-kilometer of the cave, her all-terrain vehicle heaving and bumping over the almost entirely untraveled plains. Kit watches through magnifying lenses as huge, black forms clamber from an opening in the mountainside in comically impossible numbers.
“Yesterday,” Lily says, “they ran a herd of wildebeest off of a cliff. They brought many of the carcasses back, but there’s more work to do. They stop at night—I think their metabolisms suffer from the cold.”
Kit watches the parade of monsters vanishing into the tall grass without comment. Lily brings them in closer.
Though the Ants have never shown any interest in her, Lily still treats them as she would a perceptive—and potentially dangerous—creature. She gives the line a warning honk of the ATV’s horn as she draws near. The worst thing you can do is surprise a wild animal. When they don’t respond, she turns the car to parallel the lumbering workers, following the line back to the cave entrance.
“Put this on.” She hands Kit a spray bottle, which the child stares at dumbly.
“It’s a pheromone. A safety measure. It makes you smell like one of them.”
Kit narrows their eyes. “What happens if you go in without it?”
Lily shrugs. “Nothing. But still. Safety measure.”
The child relents and sprays themself, making a face as they do so.
The workers are a little smaller than Lily’s vehicle. Curled up, she could fit into one of them three times—one for each body segment. The sense-hairs on their legs stick out like thorns, and their heads look like pressure helmets with vicious vicegrips attached to the front.
&n
bsp; “Interesting,” Kit comments, leaning over Lily to get a closer look. Again, the child’s lack of emotion disturbs her.
No fear. Disgust at the sensation of the spray, but no fear of death.
Lily imagines the child’s broad-spectrum eyes analyzing, cataloguing, seeing everything there is to see about these creatures.
The Ants turn their heads in unison to follow the van as it grows nearer to the cave entrance. It is this that has Lily’s overs convinced that, for all their engineering marvels, these creatures can’t be sentient.
Each time she approaches, they regard her with this clockwork uniformity; every time they turn away, content, apparently, at the smell of her. The workers display no further curiosity; do not deviate from their tasks to investigate the alien arrival.
“Our best bet to talk to them,” Lily tells Kit, “is to go inside.”
The soldier Ants are worse than the workers. Their jaws are more sawblades than vices, their carapaces like tanks. Ten Lilies could fit inside a soldier, she has estimated. She cannot repress the urge to herd Kit behind her as she climbs out of the ATV, as though this were some protection.
Perhaps more significantly, Kit lets her do it.
She knows that the operation is safe, or she wouldn’t have brought the Eternal child. She’s done it dozens of times before—a dozen missions wandering the honeycombed halls of this hive, mapping them, seeing strange and terrible wonders. Wonders like something from Earth—from a beehive, or the brilliant engineering of a slime mold.
Or wonders like city streets, like architecture, like temples?
When the soldiers are past, Kit loses their momentary hesitation. They slip around Lily and take the lead through the passage which darkens with alarming speed. Lily withdraws a globe from her pocket and lights it up.
In the eerie yellow-green shadows that radiate from the globe, Kit turns to her. It occurs to Lily to wonder if those blank eyes could see before she lit up the sphere—to wonder what they can see in the dark.