“We didn’t see the start.” Arucken said. “But I’d guess they set the flames. The rest...I don’t know. But the choice of weapon is telling.”
Ryla nodded, her voice breaking a fraction. “I don’t...I don’t see how we can take the body back. No-one would understand and it’s…”
Kerris nodded and the two women carried the body towards the edge of the dock where the waters were deeper. Arucken stared at them, his heart pounding. He wanted to say something, but the words did not come. They allowed it to slip into the calm salt waters, taken by the current.
Do we still wait? He asked Kerris, but her eyes were glued on the shore.
He followed her gaze and saw a group of tall creatures standing to one side, tiny waves lapping against their ankles. They made no effort to conceal themselves and faced the three of them like statues.
The route was clear and in range of their weapons. An easy shot to make. Even he could make it.
“It’s too early.” Ryla whispered, but it seemed that didn’t matter. The older woman’s eyes, so recently lined with tears were wide, her mouth in a thin line. She clutched at the sides of her plain shirt as if it could hide her. Arucken counted five of the creatures, tall and slender with pale skin. From this distance they almost looked human, although with much bigger, liquid eyes.
Ryla took a few deep breaths, and steeled herself. She drew herself up, shoulders back as she looked at them both. Only her smile was shaky. “So now you can show me, in person, just what it is messengers do!”
He couldn’t tell whether it was him or Kerris who had the thought first.
If they only let us speak!
There was a heartbeat of indecision. Arucken realised with a shock how outside Ryla must feel, how alone they were keeping her. None of his and Kerris’ communication could reach her, and Kerris kept her body and feelings in check. He had no idea how his own betrayed him, or even if a normal human could read it.
“They aren’t going to shoot.” Ryla said, her voice grim. Her hands clenched at her sides, and she’d said no further about Malik. The tone she’d used was odd, and he sensed curiosity from his partner. “This time.”
“No, not this time.” Kerris muttered, her voice shot through with bitterness. Though she was ever the professional, Arucken could not deny her that reaction. These creatures may not have started off aggressive, but it was plain they could be now.
The creatures made no move as the three of them walked to the beach side of the dock. Arucken wished he knew at what point they’d arrived. Had they seen the body slipping into the sea? Did they have any idea what it meant?
What would the meaning be to them? Did they see it as an offering?
“Show your hands.” Kerris prompted the older woman. “But slowly.”
So they walked, arms stretched out to each side. Any conflict would not start with them. Although, that should be obvious. They could not hope to reach their weapons first.
The creatures all stood taller than any of the three of them, long limbs held tight to the sides. Their heads were large, atop thick necks with long slits in either side. Gills, although they showed no distress as they stood in the open air.
Their pale blue skin was threaded with grey, pitted with small craters. Most of their bodies were covered by the tight, black suit, clinging to them like a second skin. Wavy lines ran across their elongated arms like ravines ending in webbed fingers. Their eyes were large, a deep liquid black, but not unnatural to him. They were rather like his own.
They loomed above him with broader shoulders, and their mouths were small on a smooth featureless face with just a trio of slits for a nose. They made no noise, not even the sound of any breathing. It was uncanny.
The five of them stood, in a row of two and then three. There was no distinction in dress or appearance between them. He could see signs of specialised equipment over the rest of their bodies and a thin tube ran from the neck of their suits and into their gills. Only their faces, exposing tiny mouths, were unadorned.
“We meant no harm.” Ryla spoke, the words bursting out of her before they even got close. Arucken winced, in tandem with his partner. So much for letting them do the speaking. “But then you shot one of us. Our leader, Serena. You killed her. Denied us even her body to mourn over. You stole the children. How did you expect us to react?”
Arucken touched Ryla’s arm as they grew closer, and the three of them halted, to a single line. It made him consider how the creatures would see that, when they held themselves in two.
He looked, anxiously, for signs of their weapons. They were not reacting. Yet.
“What did you do to them?” Ryla continued, after the silence grew cold and long. “Our children, what did you do?”
One of the creatures focused on her, large black eyes swirling with clouds of white and grey. The others mimicked it, seconds after.
The children, how are they?
The voice thundered through Arucken’s head, sending reverberations through his whole body. The sound was almost too large to grasp, the force of it sending him crashing to his knees. Kerris pulled him up, steadying him. Ryla stepped forward and through a haze of pain, Arucken put his palm up to halt her. She stared at him, confused.
Changed. Kerris recovered before he did. Her tense reply was as controlled as always. He loved her for that.
For the better. The voice answered. Why did you not listen to them? They were our network. Then you fired on us, and killed.
You took their young ones. They could no longer speak to us. They were scared and threat-
Our companion cannot talk like this! Arucken interjected. Ryla had taken a couple of steps back, her confusion painted across her face.
“We are talking.” he said aloud to Ryla, to ease her. “I’m sorry. I know this is new to you. We will relay it to you in a moment.”
In the night silence, he reiterated their conversation so far whilst the creatures stood in silence. They made no move to touch the energy weapons strapped to each hip, and he could see no sign they even breathed.
Ryla looked at them, trembling. She said aloud, her tone calm but defiant. “The children are ours and you hurt them. What is that, but an aggressive act?”
Our companion says -
We hear!
They fell silent then, in all ways. Even their bodies did not move. Ryla looked at them in query and Kerris shook her head, a tiny gesture but the five creatures shifted. A larger one near the back rested its eyes on Ryla. The attention made her uneasy, and Arucken could not blame her. She turned away, inhaling deep breaths.
We wanted to talk. We thought we had made it so the children would explain. This is our land. The creature said. Apart from the one fixated on Ryla, they were all turned towards himself and Kerris. Arucken realised with unease that he couldn’t tell to whom he was speaking.
You speak to all of us! The response came, and with it a ripple of laughter.
I do not like this. The thought escaped him before he could call it back, the enforced intimacy of himself and Kerris open to the strangers.
Nor I.
Although Kerris’ eyes were on him, Arucken could not tell if that was her response or theirs. He pulled his mind away, set up a distance he had not needed for years. He spoke again.
What did you do to the children?
We needed to talk to them.
Talk to us.
An explosion of thought followed. Too many thoughts and feelings, threads unravelling behind his eyes. He struggled to hold them, his invitation naively given. Kerris’ emotions had threatened to overwhelm them both, her grief behind so many barriers he’d stopped counting.
That was a pebble to the avalanche collapsing around them. It was stronger than he’d thought any mind capable of, in flashes too quick to grasp. The shock of emotion surged through their link, and out of their mind like sand through fingers. Kerris reached towards him, adding her strength as they shifted through it, trying to put labels to nameless things.
/> They held against the cascade, barely.
When it was over they stood, gasping in the night air alone but for Ryla. The sea washed the pebbled beach as if nothing had ever disturbed the surface.
The older woman stared at them, and he wondered how long she’d been standing there, waiting for them to return. Her voice trembled as she asked them, in a whisper.
“What the hell was all that silence about?”
***
They were not like normal memories of conversations, and they did not fade.
Kerris and Arucken looked at each other, in horror.
Ryla almost stamped her feet in frustration. The lines around her face were stark in the moonlight, her eyes afraid and not blinking.
“You stood there, all of you, unmoving, for ages!” Her voice was low, but urgent. Even in her distress, she did not lose the note of command. It was easy to see how she had become leader of the colonists.
“Then the five of them left, went back into the sea! They didn’t even turn to me as they walked away. Just walked straight past.”
Her mouth thinned into a line. “Now - tell - me - what - happened!”
Kerris shook, but steadied herself with a speed Arucken could only envy. Some of the concepts, too foreign, warred with his own uneasy alliance with human thinking.
“You were not the first to settle here. Not by a long way.” Kerris answered. Seeing her recite it like a performer on stage calmed him. “This part of the planet is crop rotation, left to go fallow as they move onto another site.”
“To another planet.” Arucken corrected. “It’s the minerals in the sea they are after. They take a long time to replenish. I’m not sure what they need them for. I didn’t get that part.”
Kerris frowned. “I didn’t understand the science either. It was...impressions Ryla, feelings and pictures and experiences. Few words we understood.”
Ryla grimaced, rubbing hands across her arms. The chill in the air was heavy. Her confusion reminded Arucken uncomfortably of rejected humans from their pairing, years ago. Not many had succeeded, the thoughts and culture too different. Both of his own, and human, rejects left struggling to understand. How do you describe a language, when it has none of the markers you take for granted?
“The children.” Ryla insisted, her voice flat.
“The creatures don’t produce audible sound anymore, so tried to use the children to communicate. But their process prevents the children understanding humans and the implanted memories fade.”
“Can they undo it?” Ryla asked. Arucken’s thoughts turned to Lyndon - fighting his parents over food. Thin, wasted bodies stuck in repetitive behaviours they could not control. Parents, finding at this advanced age a change so fundamentally different they no longer saw their own children inside. They hadn’t had the years to adapt, nor was it a part of those children.
He nodded. He hoped it could form part of the negotiations, he knew Ryla would react to a refusal as a threat.
The creatures had been shocked to find the colonists, to their minds the planet was marked as taken. The bioluminescent creatures were an introduced species, spelling out ownership. It hadn’t occurred to them that only they could read it.
It was not a species his own, or the human species, had ever encountered before. They did not even have a name to themselves - it was synaesthesia. A sensation, of colour and thought only. It was the flow of water, the lights sparkling across a tideline and the sky seen from underneath the sea.
Sea dwellers. Kerris said to him, feeling the shape of his thoughts. That’ll do for human tongue.
…. not exactly adequate.
What would be? She asked, in annoyance. We need to name them!
Ryla led them to the storehouse, where the flames had died down. Loose embers drifted by, but there wasn’t enough wind to feed them. What little he could see in the shadows did not look worth salvaging.
“So our own people, did this.” Ryla said quietly. “I don’t see how we can stay here now. Not even our own people will support us. We’ll have to move on.”
“The sea dwellers would let you stay.” Kerris answered, putting more certainty in her voice he knew she felt. “They’ve asked you to bring the children to the shore, tomorrow night. They’ll undo the process for them, but for the future they need a... conduit.”
Ryla’s indrawn breath was like a knife cutting through the night air. “They want to keep a child still affected? When it doesn’t even work?”
“An adult. They believe it would work for an adult.” Kerris said. Her soft voice made no excuses for the creatures, nor did her tone betray her. Under the surface Arucken sensed a deep disgust and horror that he could tell she was trying desperately to suppress.
He didn’t understand. The adult would be a volunteer that was plain. If an adult volunteered to be that link, what was there to find so abhorrent?
It was the enforced change to the children he found distasteful, an incomplete alteration leaving them trapped between both states. They could neither communicate with the sea dwellers, or be as they were with their own people. It wasn’t right for them and wasn’t who they were. The same would not be true for the adults.
Did you not hear what they hid? Kerris answered him. They tried already. With Serena. It worked, but only briefly, before she died.
Of her injuries? It sounds like they had no choice.
It sounds like they put an already dying person, alone and terrified, through a needless trauma!
Kerris cut him off, drawing a full shield around her thoughts. They spent the rest of the walk home in silence, both inward and out.
Lily: All the things are strange
When the travellers returned with Ryla, Lily was the only one still awake. The other children, exhausted from shouting and fighting, were in a small huddle to one corner.
It made Lily a little sad to see the bundles of them. They’d used to be her friends. Since the sea people had changed them, she hadn’t played with them much at all. They didn’t understand her anymore.
She wondered who would help her make a beacon to the moon now?
She’d heard about the moon. Ryla sometimes told stories from their first planet, the planet where humans had believed that only they existed. Before they’d explored further and found, and been found, by other things!
It was silly to think about. Lily had discovered recently that people were weird, and that not all of them could understand her. Some of what she did and thought, was not how they saw and did and thought.
That was okay. How other people saw and did and thought wasn’t how she did either, so if she was okay with it, then they should be okay with her!
It was hard to understand that there had been a time once when people thought they were the only ones. That was an odd thing.
Before the sea people had changed them, she’d had lots of friends. They liked her, because of all her great ideas for what to do. Sometimes the adults didn’t want to spend time with her. She didn’t understand why. She thought they were all lovely, and they had to all be her family now since she didn’t have a little one of her own like most of them.
She wasn’t a friend to the ones that shouted at her though, or those that had told their children to stay away from her. She wasn’t their friends, but she still liked them.
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