Dreamstorm

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “You can’t not come here,” said the female, Keridwyn, a delicate woman with limpid sky-blue eyes set in a face strikingly patterned like a lilac Siamese. The grayish-purple was especially noticeable on the long fox ears. “Everyone wants to come here!”

  “So far it’s been great,” her husband agreed. “We’ve been here a week and this is our last day. After this… where are we going again, honeyfangs?”

  “We’re off to the flagship location of TKI&I.” Keridwyn grinned at Vasiht’h. “I want to go shopping. Where else but one of the most famous boutiques in the Core?”

  “Even I’ve heard of TKI&I,” Vasiht’h said, dabbing one of his melon slices in the yogurt. “And I don’t wear clothes usually.” He glanced at the male, Bodken. “I have to ask, though. Honeyfangs?”

  Bodken snickered and bumped his shoulder against his wife’s. “Well. She’s sweet as honey, but with a little bite.”

  “No good being too meek,” Keridwyn said, sipping her chocolate-creamed-coffee. “I started out feisty, I’m going to go out feisty too.”

  The trip to the cetacean show was just over three hours, and involved at least two other boats that left the dock shortly after them. Vasiht’h spent most of the voyage chatting with Kristyl’s gang, and noticing how quickly the few passengers who’d booked the trip before she took it over were assimilated. It fascinated him that she should be so magnetic, when she was also so unapologetic about herself. Maybe that was part of the charm? She apologized cheerfully for missteps but never let them stop her, and there was something appealing about that unrelenting enthusiasm. It amused him to see the glimmer of intelligence in her eyes, or in her occasional comment; he wondered how many people assumed she was daffy.

  “Plenty of people,” Gladiolus told him later, when he was finally having that fruity drink with the weird red core. He was trying to preserve the separation by drinking the center first. “Underestimate her, I mean.” The Asanii put her chin in her palm, resting the elbow on the railing of the ship where they were standing near the prow. The chop was stronger now, and the wind refreshing. “That’s one of the reasons I think I want to be like her.”

  “Hopefully most of the time you’d rather be like you,” Vasiht’h said.

  “Oh, sure.” The Asanii laughed. “You have a… best friend? Partner? Do you ever wish you were more like him?”

  Vasiht’h considered that. “If I was more like him, I wouldn’t enjoy how much unlike me he was.”

  Gladiolus eyed him, brows up. “Deep.”

  “Not really. I just like the differences? I think… the magic happens when the little ways you aren’t alike line up. Like the bumpy parts of a key and the empty spaces in a lock.”

  The Asanii pursed her lips. “Still, you don’t want to be too unlike your friends. Otherwise, it’s too hard to stay close.”

  Was it? Vasiht’h thought of his own friendships, and his many clients. “It’s like everything in life. It depends.”

  She laughed. “Why do things have to be so complicated, right?”

  “Yes,” Vasiht’h said, rueful, and obliged the waiter who stopped by with a tray by plucking up a skewer of roasted fruits. He wasn’t sure how that worked, except that they’d been coated with some kind of glaze… honey, maybe? Pepper? And the glaze caramelized?

  “How do they even come up with these things?” Gladiolus said, staring at her own skewer.

  “I don’t know, but I’m glad they do!”

  They stood together at the rail, watching the waves jump and dance and the sunlight play off their surfaces. Vasiht’h thought it particularly lovely, the way the light was growing… sharper, somehow? More orange? Something. They spotted schools of fish darting beneath the boat, squinted ahead at the sky in search of their destination, played ‘what shape does that cloud look like to you.’ They were still at it when Kristyl arrived, sliding between them and looping an arm around the Asanii’s shoulders and another over Vasiht’h’s after shooting him a questioning look and accepting his nod.

  “Where are your adoring fans?” Gladiolus asked, brushing her nose against the other woman’s.

  “Inside, playing Truth or Dare.” Kristyl grinned. “Can you believe they didn’t know that game? It’s tailor-made for Harat-Shar.”

  The Asanii groaned. Laughed. “I bet they’re all naked already.”

  “They promised to be good. Mostly. Besides, at least half of them were already nude. What are you two up to?”

  “Enjoying the quiet,” Gladiolus said, just as a sea bird swooped past, screeching. She giggled. “The relative quiet!”

  “I get it,” Kristyl said. “Sometimes you don’t want a party. Sometimes even I don’t want a party.” She wrinkled her nose. “Actually, most of the time I don’t want a party, but parties happen around me.”

  “You should have been born Harat-Shar,” Vasiht’h said, amused.

  Kristyl tugged her hat brim down, only to have the wind push it back again. “I’m glad I was born human! But I wouldn’t mind living with Harat-Shar. For a while, anyway. Then I’d want to try something different.” She grinned, but her eyes were distant, and even as she finished speaking her gaze moved away, toward the horizon.

  “You see the platform?” Vasiht’h asked. “Gladdie and I have been trying to spot it for a while now. Maybe your eyes are better.”

  “No,” Kristyl said. “I just wonder about the clouds.” Her eyes dropped to the waves. “And that. That… I don’t want to say ‘shouldn’t be happening’, but it shouldn’t be happening.”

  “It’s just waves?” Gladiolus said, but her voice rose toward the end of the words.

  “Mmm.” Kristyl squeezed their shoulders. “You two keep an eye out. I’ve got a game to organize.”

  “Should we be participating?” Gladiolus asked, frowning.

  Kristyl beamed at her. “Don’t worry, you’ll win automatically.” To Vasiht’h, “You too. You’ll see.” Then she sailed off, leaving the two of them at the railing.

  “What do you think that was about?” Vasiht’h asked.

  “I don’t know,” Gladiolus admitted, looking down at the waves parting around the boat’s hull. “But I wish I did.”

  Kristyl’s game involved how long everyone could keep their life vests on—“If you make it all the way back to the hotel pier, I’ll buy you a night of drinks! And you Harat-Shar, maybe there will be sexytimes!”—and though Gladiolus and Vasiht’h were automatic winners, she still pressed the vests on them. “So that no one thinks you cheated your way to the prize. Gotta follow the rules.”

  The Friendly Mermaid’s crew watched the festivities with professional interest. Vasiht’h wondered if any of them were worried about the same mysterious things Kristyl was, but no one showed any signs of it. Except the captain, who wasn’t on deck at all. The first mate assured him he was down below, “coordinating with the trainers at the platform.” Which seemed reasonable. Vasiht’h squinted into the bright sky, wondering how a few puffy white clouds and some enthusiastic waves could be so troubling as to inspire Kristyl to talk everyone into safety equipment. He patted the top half of his vest. Not that he minded… the only other time he’d been sailing, on Heliocentrus, he’d been asked to don the safety vests the moment he stepped aboard, and had assumed that to be normal until the Mermaid.

  Whatever the case, the Harat-Shar took to the game with enthusiasm, and much groaning, as they preferred fewer clothes over their sun-warmed pelts. Kristyl placated them with fruity drinks, which Vasiht’h helped himself to as well. He sat with the Seersa couple again to listen to their account of the Truth or Dare session, and since they were wickedly incisive raconteurs he laughed his way through the entire thing and counted it fantastic entertainment. That got them, at last, to the sandbar’s docking platform, because the show’s complex was large enough to have one. Despite the photos, Vasiht’h had been expecting the place to seem more… rickety. But it felt remarkably stable, and large besides. There was a set of covered bleachers on a larg
e wooden stage—if you could call it a stage with a big hole in the middle leading into the ocean—and several satellite areas reached by boardwalks, selling food, drink, souvenirs, even “changes of clothing,” which sounded alarming. “Oh, don’t worry, alet,” the vendor there assured him as he peered at the shirts emblazoned with cavorting cartoon whales and seals. “It’s just that sometimes the critters like to splash the audience.”

  Vasiht’h wandered back from exploring to find Kristyl waving her arms at her Harat-Shar posse. “No, no, the deal is that you have to keep them on until we get to shore. Otherwise you can’t win!”

  “No breaks!”

  “No breaks,” Kristyl said serenely. “If you’d wanted easymode, you should have partied with some other girl.” She put a hand on her hip and waggled it. “You gotta work for the best things in life.”

  A chorus of groans and laughs. Vasiht’h padded up beside her as the Harat-Shar dispersed to shop or take their places on the bleachers. “Serious about the game, aren’t you?”

  “I am! So you’re not going to quit, are you?”

  Vasiht’h chuckled. “And miss out on the free drinks? I haven’t tried every flavor they make yet.”

  “You really haven’t! I saw a blue thing over here. Let’s go get you one.”

  He and Kristyl were strolling back from that booth when a large sea lion thumped past them, another human following. “That’s right, Romeo, round them all up and get them seated.” The sea lion stopped in front of them, lifted a black flipper, and waved it. “Exactly, get those two moving.”

  “Oh, wow!” Kristyl said. “That’s a real seal. Like a Terran seal!”

  “And he likes the ocean here just fine,” the trainer said with a grin. “Though we do have to give him vitamin supplements. The fish here aren’t quite right for our animals. But he’s a bona fide California quasi-sea lion.” She leaned over to rub his side. “Pretty far from home, aren’t you, Romeo?”

  The sea lion bent his head almost backwards and arrrred at her.

  “What’s a quasi-sea lion?” Vasiht’h asked.

  “It’s what happens when you breed super smart sea lions together for generations and they escape into the wild and keep getting smarter,” the trainer answered, offering the sea lion her palm and getting it smacked by a flipper. “Right, Romeo? You are smart as a very smart dog, aren’t you!”

  “Is it all right to say stuff like that?” Kristyl asked her with the appearance of guilelessness. By now, Vasiht’h wasn’t sure whether it was an act or not. “Some of the more canid-looking Pelted might find it offensive?”

  The trainer eyed her. “A dog is a dog. Pelted are people.” She nodded to them both and said to the sea lion. “Let’s get the rest of our guests in their seats and start the show.”

  “Well, that went well!” Kristyl said to Vasiht’h.

  “Humans tend to find you abrasive, don’t they.”

  Kristyl flashed him a grin. “Just the ones that haven’t internalized how many amazing things we’re responsible for.”

  Vasiht’h couldn’t help it… he laughed and followed her to a seat.

  The sea lion thumped to the center stage, where he leaped into the water, only to appear on the edge of one of the other platforms and bark at the people shopping there. Vasiht’h watched him shepherd all the visitors to the bleachers from his vantage at the end of the third row, close enough to see but out of the ‘splash section’ which had been cordoned off with signs with warning cartoons. When the trainer and her accomplice finished their labors, about a hundred people had taken their seats in the bleachers. Vasiht’h hadn’t noticed so many arriving, but craning his neck he could see the boats that had been following the Friendly Mermaid bobbing at the dock.

  “There we go,” the trainer said, her voice projecting to the back of the bleachers. “Looks like we’ve got them all, Romeo.”

  The sea lion jumped up alongside her and barked.

  “They really are a fine looking group, aren’t they?”

  Another bark.

  “Let’s get this show started, what do you say?”

  The sea lion leaned backwards and smacked his flippers together, an act for which he received a tossed fish. “Exactly. We’re all excited! Welcome to Tsera Nova’s best sea critter show! It’s also the only sea critter show, but sshhh, don’t tell anyone. Right, Romeo? Our secret?”

  “Arr arrrrrr!”

  “Exactly.”

  Terry the trainer was joined by two others, a Tam-illee named Rod and an Asanii named Serrafina. The show started in earnest with six leaping cetaceans, and only got better from there: everything from humorous skits to demonstrations of skill, interspersed with educational segments where the trainer talked about the mammals. None of them were “kept”… they lived in Tsera Nova’s ocean, and returned willingly to “play” with the bipeds and earn their treats. The imported animals had been carefully selected based on their impact on the local populations, and were tracked to ensure they didn’t overpopulate or destroy native habitats.

  It was all delightful… a kind of metaphor for the sort of interactions common to the Alliance. Weren’t they all constantly meeting on alien shores and seeing what wonders they found in the spaces between cultures, peoples? The fact that the sea lion chasing Terry the trainer across the stage willingly showed up to engage in the game with a creature so different from him was frankly miraculous. Vasiht’h glanced at Kristyl, who was sitting a few Harat-Shar down from him, cheering and waving her arms enthusiastically.

  Some people might have found Kristyl’s feelings about humanity creating the Pelted and deserving the credit for them offensive… but in the end, humans had made something amazing, for any number of complicated reasons, some noble, others sordid. But had they not had the audacity, Vasiht’h wouldn’t be watching whales splashing two rows of howling Harat-Shar and laughing. The Goddess moved in ways mysterious, and sometimes you caught glimpses of how She worked and it made you glad to be alive.

  “I want a plush whale!” Gladiolus said, when the show concluded.

  “That’s my line, usually,” Kristyl said, grinning.

  “Today it can be both our lines, and maybe they’ll give us a two-for-one discount,” the Asanii said, bouncing down the steps. Vasiht’h followed more sedately, reaching the stage at the same time a drop of water plunked against his nose. He thought at first it had come from the awning, but when he looked up, the sky had grown… strange. Not cloudy, completely, but the color and angle of the sunlight felt… off? As if it was scattering differently.

  But he didn’t feel a second drop, so he shrugged and followed the women back to the souvenir booth, where he begged off from buying any plush sea lions, t-shirts, or viseo recordings. Since he had no interest, he wandered outside, where he found the trainers huddled together with some of the crew from the boats. Curious, he edged closer, until he could hear their conversation.

  “…do they know there are supposed to be viseo opportunities?”

  “No one’s lining up, at least. It’s in the brochure, but maybe they’re not paying attention? Where are the animals, anyway?”

  “We’re not sure, they usually stay for a few hours after the performance, just to play.” One of the Pelted trainers. “It’s strange.”

  Terry, the human, said, “It’s almost as if they’re scared.” When they glanced at her, she shrugged. “Back home, they’d get skittish sometimes. It was usually the weather.”

  “It’s certainly not the weather here,” one of her colleagues replied with a snort.

  “Though it is a little blustery. Well, if anyone asks about the animals…”

  “Just tell them what we always say,” Terry replied. “We don’t force them to do anything. If they don’t stay, they don’t stay.”

  They dispersed to make nice with the guests, leaving Vasiht’h to frown and look for Kristyl. The woman was holding a stuffed whale the length of her torso under an arm and was gesticulating at her posse, some of whom had taken
off their life vests. “Oh, I’ll give you a second chance, but you really do have to keep it on all the way to shore.”

  Another drop bounced off Vasiht’h’s back.

  The break for lunch had never felt so welcome, for the final phase of the test had been grueling. Jahir escaped the lecture hall, where the tension of his fellows was so palpable it needed no psychic power out of legend to feel it, nor a touch either. He’d wondered if he’d been imagining that the questions were growing more difficult, but no, the talk outside the facility had corroborated his hypothesis. Or at least, proven that they were undergoing a group delusion… at this point, Jahir wouldn’t rule out such a diagnosis.

  He wanted to move more than he wanted to eat, so he spent his break doing just that, exploring the boundaries of the convention center. Wandering the path inward brought him to a terraced garden, themed austerely on narrow running streams, pebbles raked around stones, and trees, either groomed and pruned into miniatures, or narrow-limbed and blossoming. The garden’s culmination was a set of benches carved from red wood, set in a circle. Sitting there, Jahir thought he had rarely seen so harmonious a space, and he would have liked to enjoy it in a more natural setting… for there was no mistaking it for anything else. No planet he could walk on would have such a profusion of stars in its sky, nor so unblinking.

  Leaving the convention center in search of a small meal to sustain him through the test’s final phase, Jahir found the energy on the multi-level plazas… strange. People were clustering in places that two days of observation led him to find nonsensical. Passing these groups, he heard them murmuring something about ‘spectacular clouds.’

  Halting on one of the higher bridges, he looked down at the planet and found them correct. The pellucid cobalt blue of the seas was now interrupted by spirals of white. It delighted him, that he could see the shadows of those clouds on the sea beneath.

  When he began the trip back to the convention center, still holding a cone of roasted chestnuts, he thought the clouds looked denser… but that was surely impossible. Wasn’t it? He paused again on one of the bridges, watching, but couldn’t tell.