Changing Vision

by Julie E. Czerneda

  As Ganthor, the stench of imminent death was almost more than I could bear. Worse was the overscent of abandonment. I rushed forward, ramming my snout roughly into the side of the soldier, using the bulk of my healthy body to shove at his with complete disregard for any physical pain. His eyes opened at the same time as fresh mucus bubbled joyously from his snout; it was stained pink with blood. My alarm and concern filled the air between us, broadcast without any need to will it so. Herd-friend, it sent. Not alone, it affirmed.

  A rapid series of clicks, comprehensible words, as though he knew time was running out. *The Herd is dead. The Matriarch was betrayed. Abandoned on the battlefield. No Herd.* This last with a scent of pure despair that tore at my soul.

  *Herd!!* I insisted, stamping one foot against the floor in emphasis. I wasn’t mature enough as a Ganthor to impress him as a Matriarch, the senior female and undisputed ruler of her Herd’s association of males, related and otherwise, and nonreproductive females, related or forcibly adopted. But I was here and all he had. *Join this Herd!!* I ordered him. *Join!!*

  I drove my shoulder and thigh against his again, inadvertently collapsing the cot beneath us both and doubtless gaining a bruise or two in the process. His body was mostly gristle and bone. He gave way, admitting his subordinate role within our Herd of two with a scent of pure relief. There was a rush of belonging, of identification blurring and melding into one. I couldn’t get close enough to him.

  “Es.” The sound meant nothing. I refused to open my eyes, clinging to a cooling comfort.

  *Es!!* The clickspeak was muffled, delivered by the rapping of a knuckle on metal and punctuated by a stamp part of me knew better than to ignore. *He’s gone.*

  I pulled myself away from what had been a member of my Herd, an effort agonizing beyond comprehension to a non-Ganthor, possible solely because I owed greater allegiance to the being standing anxiously to one side. Thankfully, Paul had known better than to try and touch me. Ganthor were foremost a physical species and my present form outmassed the Human’s by a significant and dangerous amount.

  I cycled, shedding the excess mass as drops of moisture clinging to my fur. To the senses of this form, the Ganthor was simply dead, the passionate responses of Herd and need merely an echo in memory.

  “Es. Are you all right?” Paul’s voice was soft and a bit anxious. When I looked over at him, I realized why.

  My vision was predator-keen, and my eyes met Paul’s down the length of an elegant, smoothly-shaved muzzle. Without meaning to, or wanting to, I’d cycled, not into the form I lived in on this world and in this place, but into the more comforting one of my birth. I didn’t need to dredge up memory to hear what Ersh would have said, doubtless something about my being Youngest and so prone to such emotional lapses in judgment.

  Right now, I didn’t care, feeling myself entitled to a little emotional lapse or two. “I need a few minutes,” I answered truthfully, letting my jaw hang in a sigh.

  My web-kin Skalet had made a hobby, more accurately an obsession, of military strategy. One of her favorite sayings, particularly when she felt I was being deliberately obtuse, had been: There is no such thing as coincidence.

  I stared at the lifeless soldier at our feet and wondered how this Ganthor had found his way to us.

  2: Office Afternoon

  IT was a curiosity that wouldn’t be resolved any time soon. It would have helped if Paul and I had started the next morning with anything other than an argument.

  “I can’t believe you are being so obstinate,” he said, not for the first time. “I’m talking about taking a vacation, Es. You’re making it sound like—like being sentenced to some penal colony!”

  I curled up a lip in a smile I didn’t mean. “I’m obstinate? Why can’t you accept I don’t want to go anywhere right now? You’re making the entire concept less appealing by the second, if that were possible.”

  “It’s supposed to be fun!” His voice lowered to the barest whisper. “They spent their bonuses on our tickets, damn it.”

  Paul’s temper was definitely fraying around the edges. This didn’t happen very often and I could see the staff leaning our way to be sure and catch the details. Even Meony-ro, who had to be nursing a significant penalty for last night’s indulgence, was glancing at us instead of answering his com.

  For some reason, their interest, usually amusing, seemed an intrusion. I hunched my shoulders in a scowl and stomped away from what was becoming a too-public debate.

  Of course, the flapping of my broad, semiwebbed feet on the tiled floor added no dignity whatsoever to what I admitted to myself was a full-fledged retreat.

  Paul headed to his own office with far more offended respectability in his rigid Human back than a Lishcyn could ever manage.

  I had a door, one I rarely closed. I closed it this time, wanting to make it perfectly clear I was not amused by his badgering. Vacation, I grumbled to myself. I’d only just started living on this world. Why would I want to leave it so soon? This was definitely one of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with ephemerals, their need to hurry life. I supposed it had a certain logic. Perhaps when I was older and wiser, I’d see it.

  What I refused to see, or even contemplate for more than an uneasy moment, was that the passing of time might have dimmed the importance of our mission here for my shorter-lived partner.

  It would never dim it for me.

  I walked to the wall farthest from the door. It was windowless and coated with drawings made by artists too young to understand why their earnest mistakes were so captivating to adults. The yellowing ones in the upper corners were from Paul’s children. Those toward the center were the latest offerings from the golden-haired daughter of our accountant, Normick Re: a series of detailed and truly horrific images of beheadings by snakelike beings. I’d been told this was in tribute to my own gloriously scaled hide and forked tongue.

  I wondered about Humans. Frequently.

  Today, I hardly saw the young ones’ gifts, reaching for the camouflaged control that transformed this oh-so-harmless wall into a wide doorway to quite another type of office.

  Machines hummed as if in greeting, although I imagined if they really were aware and saw me enter alone, they’d have huddled in corners. It wasn’t fair that the exhaustive technological knowledge from innumerable cultures—alive and dead—carried in my mass couldn’t translate itself into less clumsy hands. Clumsy wasn’t being fair to the Lishcyn, I thought distractedly, looking down at the two long-fingered members in question. These three-fingered hands were strong and steady, with a suppleness quite remarkable in something covered in heavy, overlapping fur-based scales. Unfortunately, the technology hidden in this room was necessarily Human, being easiest to obtain and best suited to our needs. A depressingly large number of controls were simply too fine for me to touch without using special tools. Fiddly, irritating tools.

  Deep down, I harbored a suspicion Paul liked it that way. Nothing overt, but there had been occasions I could have sworn he’d sighed with relief when I’d called him before making an adjustment or repair on my own. I could have been wrong. I knew I often reacted to him, the other member of my Web, with all the insecurity of a Youngest trying to impress the Eldest. As our relative ages translated, Paul was older than I—despite my added five centuries of existence. It shouldn’t have mattered, but he had an indefinable maturity I did my utmost to match. I was, after all, now the Eldest of my kind.

  Days like this, I thought glumly, I felt it without any problem at all.

  I went to the various scanners and checked their readings, not bothering to switch from code to the more easily-deciphered visuals. Practice let me make perfect sense of the dancing symbols. Nothing unusual had passed this system since I’d last looked. It never had. I went over to the more important section, the data storage and analysis comps. They were chattering away to themselves, sorting incoming information from sources so varied, we constantly had to upgrade the translation and slang prompts in orde
r to keep it comprehensible.

  This was the heart of it, I thought, running one fingertip over the cool surface of a small preoccupied machine, one of several dozen. If we were to find others of my kind, it would most likely be through the way these devices collected and digested what was sent them, a consolidation of knowledge similar to what I could do with my living mass—had I another of my kind to share with me.

  This knowledge should also give me warning of the type of kindred I would face. If a pattern of death and wanton destruction appeared, it might signal the arrival of a mindless, conscienceless web-being, like the one which had ripped through this region fifty years ago. The Humans had named it Death, though not the only species to suffer from its attack. Death had caused the loss of almost all of the Web of Ersh, leaving me the only one of my kind. It was my chosen purpose, and Paul’s, to watch for any more such monsters and destroy them before they could harm the otherwise defenseless intelligence inhabiting this part of space.

  A noble purpose? I felt a familiar bitterness, expressed in this form as a muscular tightness in my gullet anxious to move what remained of my breakfast to my second stomach, where it assuredly didn’t belong for at least another hour. As Youngest and Least in the Web of Ersh, I’d known my role in the greater scheme of things. The Rules and all of the teachings of my Web were based on our purpose as living, immortal repositories of the accomplishments of ephemeral intelligences. We learned and shared with one another everything about each species, from biology to culture, to be remembered in detail and nuance long after their bodies, cities, and legends were dust.

  We had proved alarmingly less than immortal. And our noble purpose had been nothing more than atonement for the sins against such life committed by Ersh herself, First of our Web and its founder. She had entered this galaxy as a scourge even more vile and devastating than Death. Her memories of that truth and her acts, vivid as if freshly experienced, were irrevocably part of my flesh after she had forced me and me alone to share them.

  At least the others had never known, I consoled myself, scant comfort for having outlasted all of my web-kin. My other, deeper, consolation was the purpose I had set for the future. The Web of Esen would protect what lived, not hoard the past to itself. My Web would guard this pathway from whatever distant space harbored more web-beings, should another try to hunt here.

  The Web of Esen, I thought with a rush of melancholy. Myself. Which wasn’t strictly true. I was a Web of one plus a friend. The only difference was that with the exception of my gift for Paul, there could be no sharing. I never confessed to Paul my hope for more than another enemy, that I had begun all this with a dream of finding others of my kind who were more than appetite, who might share my desire to protect other intelligences. It was an unlikely fantasy I returned to less and less as years went by.

  I shook off the past, focusing on what the machines had to say. The equipment here was worth more than the combined assets of Cameron & Ki Exports, with considerably greater wealth represented by the network of distant information gatherers—each hired and paid through separate names and accounts in a mazed economy along the scale of a small world. Or, I thought with a tusky grin, a large crime ring. Paul had helped me set this up over the last fifty years. It was self-sustaining now, to a large extent, with alarms set to notify us if anything remotely “weblike” appeared in this sector of space.

  “Which means I could take that vacation,” I sighed out loud, admitting it to the machinery, if not yet to Paul.

  I wasn’t sure why I felt almost alarmed at the thought of leaving Minas XII. Paul managed it well enough, although the Human maintained an annoying habit of keeping his schedule and plans to himself until the last minute. It had been hard in the early years to have him show up with a packed case and leave with little more than a quick wave; it was harder still waiting for his safe return. Over the years, I’d grown used to his frequent trips, which, as he informed me, consisted of exceedingly boring visits to our customers and little else.

  Not that I hadn’t urged caution each and every time. Although he avoided systems where Paul Ragem would be known, and it became clear the authorities had closed all of their files on a dead Human innocent of any crimes, I’d tried to have Paul change his appearance. But, as Paul explained with devastating logic, he’d arrived on Minas XII with the Largas family looking as he did, wooed and married one of their daughters looking as he did, and so when, he would ask me with that faint air of impatience, was there a time in our lives when a disguise would have done anything more than prove he had a secret past? Everyone did, out on the Fringe.

  I was, I decided, taking this vacation idea far too seriously. Perhaps Paul was right, and we both needed a change. In the meantime, it was approaching midday on this side of Minas XII and six traders had commed in with merchandise. Assessing the potential of goods from the surrounding Fringe systems—and farther—was, after all, my contribution to the business. I secured the hidden room and returned to my public desk, intending to call up the first entries. All the while, I made a deliberate attempt to calm myself, having long ago discovered the Lishcyn tendency to brood under emotional stress was linked to an occasionally disastrous tendency to gamble in business.

  Paul’s face smiled up at me from the area I’d cleared of clutter last night, that clutter now tidily collected into a box on my chair in mute reminder this space was shared by others. His gift. I pressed one hand over the beaded bag hanging from my neck, feeling the outline of the small box. Well, I supposed I’d been a bit distracted between the death of the poor Ganthor, the convoluted efforts required to discretely remove the corpse before the opening of the warehouse for business this morning, planning a proper and private funeral, and, to top it all, somehow being civil to those guests who either didn’t know us well enough to leave the party or who knew us well enough to linger until dawn. The arrival of daylight had meant very few of us had bothered to go home. I hoped, quite sincerely, there wouldn’t be any appointments in person today, or the reputation of Cameron & Ki would definitely suffer.

  A long night, and the presentation of the staff’s gift to Paul and me had been its only high point, I thought. Four beings worked right in the office; another fifteen in or around the warehouse. Half were Human—not surprising given that Minas XII, like her neighbors, was primarily a Human settlement—but varied widely in type, background, and temperament as that species was prone to do.

  The other half were a mixed and changing group of beings. The still uncontrolled environment of this planet, with its storms and temperature changes, suited some body types more than others. It was a common saying in numerous languages that only Humans could survive almost anywhere. Most of these sayings also mentioned rats, but in a reasonably good-natured way depending on relative trade-surpluses and the local economy.

  The staff’s gift had been a trip for two to the Panacia Hiveworld, D’Dsel. It wasn’t exactly known as a resort destination, but the Panacian system was the only one within affordable range which could boast a population evolved in place—and D’Dsel was that place. This gave it an exotic gloss of biological history to beings tired of the more cosmopolitan and temporary nature of a colony world such as Minas XII.

  I knew D’Dsel.

  It had been the first place I’d encountered Death.

  3: Cliff’s Edge Night

  BY unspoken agreement, the argument was left behind when Paul and I headed home that night, bringing with us food trays from the party as did everyone else. And, after a tasty, if eclectic, meal, we finally had the time and privacy to complete our personal celebration—although, as usual, the Human was being difficult.

  “You go first,” he insisted again, grinning.

  I’d changed my mind. Paul wasn’t growing more mature and Ersh-like over the decades. He was reverting to some early childhood. “This is silly, Human,” I pronounced with all of the dignity of an Eldest.

  “No, it’s not. You’re first.”

  “I don’t want
to be first.”

  “You should have thought of that before I flipped the coin.”

  I growled under my breath. “Fine. I’ll go first.”

  Paul’s face grew positively smug as he passed me his gift. Before I could open it, both of us jumped as the building shuddered to its foundations under yet another assault by the gale-force wind. Another normal night at Cliff’s Edge, the name of our home perfectly obvious to visitors who climbed nervously out of an aircar to find their limbs dangling over the sheer drop which began steps from the front door. Joel Largas referred to it as Over the Edge: a joke, Paul assured me.

  This building would outlast the rock beneath it, I knew, assured not by the guarantees fervently attested to by the best architect on this world—a distinction arrived at by being the only architect on this world when I arrived—but by my flesh-borne knowledge of how such structures reacted to stress. Most of the modifications I’d paid the confused but happy contractors to add were legacies from Mixs, my web-kin who had so delighted in this blend of art and utility.

  Knowing the roof would stay overhead and the walls upright did nothing to stop Paul and me from twitching with each unpredictable howl. Often, the wind would lift stones from the cliff’s upper rim, flinging them down like hail against the thick exterior with more than enough force to make conversation an effort. Then, there was the real thing: hailstones the local population boasted were the largest seen on a settled planet. What this said about those who would settle here made me shake my head regularly.

  One aspect I did like was that on nights like this, more common than not during the storm season itself but rather rare in the midst of what passed—quickly—for summer, we could count on no surprise arrivals. I wasn’t paranoid, but I did relax best when surrounded by a cyclone. What this said about me was something I preferred not to consider at all.