Mimoru considered all this as he sat, shaking, in the excuse for an infirmary.
He did not think Ushiwo had ever seen an execution. Not close up, at least. Not in anything other than a vid.
He felt ashamed of his fear. The Gods were good, weren’t they? You could kill a few people, if that was the law, and still be good. Maybe what he’d seen really did make him dangerous.
But he was afraid, and he wanted to run. Even if it meant running back to the Zora.
You don’t know what the angels will do to me, he thought in Ushiwo’s direction.
* * *
When the door swished open, it wasn’t angels or Mr. Haieray. It was Bûr-Nïb. She looked furtively from side to side and gestured for him to follow.
“It’s no use,” said Mimoru listlessly. “The angels will find us. When they get here, they’ll search the station top to bottom.”
“Which is why I’m getting tickets on the next transport out. To Glupe, Blackball, Eta Carinae, wherever. You’ll stick out, but human Gods can’t do as much with extradition orders as you’d think. We’ll figure something out.”
“They’ll find us first.”
“Not if we hurry.”
He shook his head. “I like you, Bûr-Nïb. I don’t want to make you an accessory to . . . to . . .”
To whatever this was. Not heresy, he thought, in spite of the Gods’ rules. More like—seeing what was inconvenient to see.
“Do you think I’m not?” said Bûr-Nïb. “Do you think I haven’t played that scene in the meeting room over a million times? I could have stopped it. Argued harder. Said more.”
“More about what?” Mimoru tilted his head, a new horror dawning. “Did . . . did you know what would happen?”
Bûr-Nïb turned, picked up Ushiwo’s diagnosis book, and abruptly tore it in half, throwing both halves to the ground.
“Humans!” she shouted, so loudly that Mimoru expected someone to come running. “Humans! Of course I knew! Everyone knows that you’re a homicidal theocratic cult! Everyone knows you’re crazy. I even told you the Zora were leaving for religious practices. I just didn’t—I couldn’t get enough words out in time, not ones Mr. Haieray would listen to. And I thought even Zora in full-on cult mode would have the presence of mind to lock their door.”
Mimoru’s skin rippled as he tried to digest this. “Ushiwo said nobody knew.”
“About Zora? I hope not. There are a million things nobody tells humans because we know that as soon as you find out, you’ll cut off contact with a whole species and execute any humans who met them. Humans!” She bit her lip, fighting for control, and took another heaving breath. Mimoru had never seen her this angry, not in the face of Mr. Haieray’s worst excesses. “And I wouldn’t even be telling you this much. I wouldn’t stick my neck out for a human, not even a friend. Except you’re not really one of them, are you? You’re not a human.”
“Vaurians are human,” Mimoru said. It was automatic, a phrase he’d repeated constantly since leaving Vaur.
“So?”
He wasn’t a very good human. And he wasn’t a very good Vaurian, either.
He didn’t want to die. He might be damned anyway, even if he escaped. The Gods would find his heretic soul, in the end, and visit upon it all the punishments he’d avoided in life. But until then . . .
What would he be leaving behind? Mr. Haieray. A vast array of worlds that didn’t want him. Vaur, which he had left behind anyway, for better or worse. A family that had already moved on.
He took a deep breath.
“Okay,” he said and followed her out the door.
* * *
Mimoru watched Hex Station spiral away through his tiny porthole as the Aikita transport launched. The station had not been destroyed yet. Maybe the Zora had carried on after his interruption and fixed it. He hoped he would never find out.
He remembered flying away like this from Vaur Station, his first year of college. Not knowing what awaited him.
Vaurians were an experiment. The experiment was ongoing. Mimoru’s part of it had failed—but, then, he’d known that long ago. Maybe it was time to stop judging by the standards of a species that didn’t want him and start judging by his own.
Bûr-Nïb shifted beside him, her gaze fixed on her nails. The violet glow of the warp drive flared out around the porthole, and the station disappeared from view.
Ada Hoffmann is a Canadian graduate student who is trying to teach computers to write poetry. She has published over 60 speculative short stories and poems, which were totally not written by computers. Her work has appeared in professional magazines such as Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and Uncanny, and in two year’s-best anthologies. She is a winner of the Friends of the Merrill Collection Short Story Contest and a two-time Rhysling Award nominee.
Ada was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome at the age of 13 and is passionate about autistic self-advocacy. Her Autistic Book Party review series is devoted to in-depth discussions of autism representation in speculative fiction. She is a former semi-professional soprano, a tabletop gaming enthusiast, and an active LARPer. She lives in southern Ontario with a very polite black cat.
You can find Ada online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/ or on Twitter at @xasymptote.
A Superordinate Set of Principles
Bogi Takács
Illustrated by Luke Spooner
I build you into an inconquerable fortress, a cavernous womb, shells upon shells protecting the small and wounded. I, Armor Maintenance Specialist Ishtirh-Dunan, shall serve you until my last, fading breath.
I hold onto the feeling as I bare my palm, place it upon the interior shipsurface—to maintain, to re-sanctify. Ever smaller tentacles curl upon themselves between the layers, the flowering fractal pattern straining against interior and exterior surfaces. Active defense: if the armor bursts, all the carefully prepared material will come gushing out at the attacker. Is it biomimesis if our engineering is biological at heart? My thoughts run along the coiled tendrils and stewing sacs of abrasive chemical soup—everything appears in order, everything checks out.
I bow my head in respect to the living ship, infinitely more complex than my fleeting sentience, and proceed to the next task, surveying the exterior. I am still sitting in the airlock, patiently growing vacuum-resistant skin over my limbs, when Head Surveyor Ebinhandar steps in and scratches at the newly grown chitinous patches over her cheeks.
“May you fill your niche,” she greets me, friendly but vaguely distracted.
“For the benefit of all,” I respond.
“I’ve been looking for you—figured if you weren’t responding, you must be working with the ship,” she says.
I nod wordlessly, still entangled in Presence. She goes on.
“The ship is sensing further sentients down planetside. Core-Steering wants you to grow the armor to level-three preparedness.”
I look up at her, really seeing her for the first time. The gray of her skin is pale and mottled with agitation. “Is something wrong?” I ask. “This sector should only have some traveling humans.”
She looks away. “They just have different allegiances is all.”
She leaves me to my work after a few pleasantries and declines to exit the airlock with me. I don’t understand why grow new skin, but I don’t want to bother her with the question. I focus on my task, going through the motions of cycling through the airlock with the outward appearance of measured calm, but inside me, an ever-rising sense of dread jangles my nerves.
What could conceivably be wrong with humans? Humans are quite similar to us in basic body shape if little else beyond that. They have limbs like us, heads like us. We have a human on the ship. She fills her niche very nicely, and I like her. As I plant growth-promoting nodules into the outer shipsurface, my thoughts wander. I should talk to her. I need to pause every now and then, waiting for a new nodule to solidify in my glands—I did not expect a need for level-three armor.
Calm is increasingly difficult as I
sense the consternation emanating from Core-Steering and moving its way along the ship in great, towering waves. I do not shield myself, but when I cough up the next nodule and it slips away from my trembling fingers, I begin to wonder if I should. But I do not want to isolate myself from the collective, even if it means sharing in the negative emotions as well as the positive. Instead, I pull myself closer to the outer surface and kiss it, the nodule hurtling up my throat as the next cough wracks me, striking the surface and embedding itself. I work it in with my tongue, make sure it’s attached properly.
My taste receptors don’t work in space, and I miss the familiar, coppery sensation.
* * *
I make my way across small, snaking tunnels, cavern-bubbles, storage sacs. On foot, slowly, with the justification that I am checking the interior systems—but they all check out well, and there’s no reason to investigate them further.
Navigation Specialist Anihemer is lying in her berth, and I crouch by the small zero-entry pool.
“Does the Navigation Specialist have a minute to spare for me?” I bow my head and ask.
She sends a yes and slowly turns upward, detaching from the ship connections, closing her gills. She sits up and grins at me. “Always glad to see you,” she says, and for a moment, I wonder why the informality. Then again, she’s a human with human customs, even if she went through the transformation to be more like us. She doesn’t spend much time going out and about in the ship. I have heard other humans are outgoing, so maybe, it’s just her—or maybe, it’s us. Is she uncomfortable?
“How do you feel?” I ask, trying to match her level of formality. I hope the casualness doesn’t come across as forced. “Are you all right on the ship?”
She tilts her head sideways and laughs.
“Where did this come from, Navigation Specialist?”
I offer her my thought processes; that’s the easiest. She turns serious. “I’m quite all right, thank you. I enjoy being here. I very much like navigation, and I have three friends.”
I’m ostensibly not one of her friends? Sometimes, it’s hard to understand what she’s implying, but she doesn’t offer me her thought processes. Still, she seems earnest. I bow my head. “I am glad you enjoy having joined. But you seem gloomy.”
“I’m worried about these people planetside, like you.” She pauses. “Ishtirh-Dunan, you are one of my friends! What troubles you troubles me, too.” She offers me her thought processes, and I accept.
We sit for a while, mulling over the situation. The Flowering has been in communication with the Interstellar Alliance, the largest organization of humans—but the humans claimed this system was uninhabited and devoid of organic life. Our ships do not want to take other people’s land, but it is budding season, and it would be preferable to be inside a planet’s gravity well. Yet this one seems taken by humans entirely unknown. The Alliance professes ignorance, and they claim to have no resources to investigate.
We are on our own.
We are strong. We are powerful. But we don’t want to cause harm. We only want to grow in peace.
Anihemer sighs, switches back to speech. “The ship asked me to go planetside with the investigation team. Do you think you can also reinforce my armor? I’m concerned.”
“I certainly can if you allow me,” I say with a measure of relief.
She gets out of the water. “The Assistant Navigator is also on duty and will be for most of the rest of the day. You have time to work on me.”
There is a medical pod close by for occurrences such as this one. We walk, and I support her on her feet—she’s still unsteady after the disconnection. She detaches her suit from her skin and allows it to be reabsorbed by a bulkhead. She lies down on a tray, and it molds around her body.
I cup my palms and disgorge the nodules that had generated in my body while I was making my way along half the length of the ship. This amount should be enough.
She lets me access her physiosystems, and I adjust the thalamic switchover. “You will not feel pain, just pressure,” I say. I gently rub the nodules into her skin with my long fingers, push them deeper to nestle among bundles of muscle. I work on people less often than I do on the ship, but the smaller scale can also be comforting.
She’s entirely relaxed but not asleep. I can feel her thinking, but I don’t know the content of her thoughts.
“Do you think you can also do something about my light-channels?” she asks.
My fingers halt in the folds of flesh. Blood wells up, is absorbed by my skin, and recirculated to her body. I don’t quite understand the question. “What would you have in mind?”
She is uneasy. “I’m afraid I might need to, um, rapidly externalize power . . . ?” Her voice trails off.
“I’m sure they will send people to do that should the need arise,” I say.
She insists. “What if I get separated?”
I know that fear. I have held it close in my own heart. I focus on my breathing to calm myself. Separation is hard for our people.
“I can set up a layer for that, but in order for it not to interfere with prediction for navigation, it needs to be rather . . . restrained,” I say.
“If I can just have enough power to hold people off for a bit, that should do,” she agrees. She is a good pathfinder, and I know she wouldn’t want her ability to be compromised.
Yet I cannot relax. She might need a good defense. A good, active defense. I know all too well that the best defense is sometimes offense.
I reach out to the ship with my mind, petition to be allowed planetside. There is acknowledgement but no immediate adjudication. I’ll have to wait.
I finish installing the nodules and close up her back, smoothing out the skin but not hardening it, yet. I direct her to the med-pool, and she sinks in, kneels on the bottom to look at me. Our faces are level—this pool is elevated. The fluid laps at her shoulders, and she looks interested, not frightened. She kept many of her human features, but she doesn’t look alien to me. Will those people—
I peel off thick strips from the bulkheads, hold them in two bundles. “This, this will hurt,” I say. “Not the installation as much as the synchronization. No matter how I adjust cortical inputs, it’s not possible to hide from the everglowing light.”
“That’s all right,” she says and—seeing that I need encouragement?—adds, “I went through a quite drastic transformation when I joined, remember?”
I cough nervously, swallow back a nodule that arose unbidden. “This is definitely not that radical.”
We begin. I share my thought processes with her just to explain the procedure, but I tell her not to reciprocate—it might be too distracting for me. I step up to the pool and hold her as she floats facedown, gills open. The strips form tubes, thinning out toward the front, that worm under her skin with their tips. Two to run parallel with the spine and some smaller auxiliaries. This goes easily. She turns, stands—shaking slightly, not from any pain but from the body reacting to the change. The pain will come later. I support her with an arm around her, leaning into the pool. The other strips are easier swallowed. I access her physiosystems, adjust her gag reflex. So much material is still hard to swallow. I hold her as she struggles with it, but the strips have enough autonomy to burrow forward. I can see the movement inside her abdomen, her chest cavity. She is shuddering strongly, but I hold her firm.
“This is good. This is good,” I repeat, “easy, easy now.”
“I’m all right,” she says, voice hoarse.
“Synchronization is easier in your usual berth,” I say, and she lets me carry her back to Navigation in my arms, ease her into that pool.
“Thank you,” she looks up to me and whispers, and I wish she wouldn’t thank me yet.
It is painful to readjust. I allow her to cope any way she can. The ship doesn’t want to cause her pain—not unless she wants that, and she doesn’t. But it is difficult to have these larger modifications.
She screams, she cries, she hugs herself int
o a ball entirely underwater. I wish I could say she doesn’t need this modification, and maybe she doesn’t, but there is a sizable chance she might.
She left her people, and they might not like that.
* * *
We’re going downside, planetside in a small landing pod, just three of us—Anihemer, me, and Defense Operative Mezvamar. The defense operative is rather unhappy with Anihemer’s latest transformation.
“I can protect us all,” Mezvamar says. “The Navigation Specialist might have better capability for self-defense, now, but without practice, there is no skill. Allow me to demonstrate.”
A globe of brilliant multifaceted light turns around inside the landing pod, inside our minds, inside the universe—it is filled to bursting with power, and I would strain away from it if it weren’t everywhere. After completing one rotation, it vanishes as fast as it appeared.
Mezvamar exhales. “This kind of control. This kind of skill.”
I look uneasily at Anihemer. Nothing we did was forbidden, but maybe it wasn’t necessary either. We didn’t want to inconvenience the defense operative, and especially not anger her, but she looks angry now.
“Our apologies to you,” Anihemer says. “I asked the Armor Specialist to do it.”
I want to protest, but the defense operative interrupts me. “If the need arises for you to employ your self-defense, we are better off aborting the mission. I can jump all three of us back shipside.”
She is right—though I suspect part of her wants to show off, to let us know she can jump while carrying two people besides herself.
“Let’s hope it won’t come to that,” Anihemer says.
But even before our pod touches down, burst fire hits its outer light-barrier.
* * *
We step outside with trepidation. The shots haven’t even managed to touch the armor, let alone weaken it; they were absorbed by the light-barrier strengthened by the defense operative. But the intent has been made clear.
Anihemer cringes when she sees the men—all men, in antiquated envirosuits painted with a crude pattern. I understand this because she opened her thought processes to me. The resemblance truly goes no further than the bare configuration of limbs. Beyond the men rises a set of . . . objects, and my mind struggles to interpret the sight until it is joined by Anihemer’s memories. These alien structures with their threateningly sharp edges are buildings.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 41