by Sophie Ward
A whale song passes from one to the other in their sleep. The sound emitted from the mouthparts as they have no clack or crick in their bodies. This is what we know. We see their long shadows in the day, and hear them from far away and there is a pulling toward them, not just for the sugar. In the nursery some of us are taken with the stories of our own kind. We want to know about the Draculas that feed on their own larvae and do not kill them. Or the queens that fly away and abandon the colony. But some like to hear about the humans; the soft-shelled creatures destined for self-destruction. Doomed. That is what we believe and had we seen the first Mars rover we would have been sure. You do not make escape plans from a life that does not need them.
We have travelled. Ships we have made, from our bodies, and launched upon the oceans. Across the world our kind explore and colonise. Some of this knowledge is handed down the generations from aeons past. Pre-history, early history, biblical tales, we are there. But our world map is limited by our DNA. We did not know about other planets. Even in our ancestor memories.
Ki calls me to join her at the glass. Crick. Crick crick.
Watch the human women dream and feel the impulse to be closer. How to understand this. The workers in the nursery know how to nurture, keep the young alive. For the good of the colony. Not for my good or any of us as single units. This is in our coding. We must continue only as far as we need for the next carriers to mature.
I know of a fungus that burrows into the brain of a colony in South America. This parasite guides its host to climb a certain grass where it bursts out of the head of the host and produces spores in just the right place to infect the next scout or worker and continue the cycle. The host is known as a zombie because it cannot think for itself, but what is the difference, really, between that creature controlled by a parasite’s coding or by its own DNA?
This is the sense for me when watching the women, though not the words; that there are forces working on me outside my own programming. Over the call of Ki and the scent from the liquid. Beyond the glow of the objects around me in the night. My antennae were alive with another sensation, a taste of some other apple-sweet knowledge, and the lust to act upon those feelings was irresistible.
Tap my way down the table and follow the scent of decay. The leaf-smooth floor ahead, too far to know the end. Use click and clack to find the iron bedstead. Slow, slow. Know the ropes of web as thick as legs that hang from shadows. The eyes that watch beyond. Tap tap tap, up the cold metal. Feel the colony strong again in the climb, the air between us. Do not listen. Do not call.
The first human is turned toward me. She with the odour not of regeneration but of chaos. Particles of light flow around her. She vibrates with an unfamiliar tension. The information is overwhelming. It drowns out the sounds of the colony, the quest for food or water, the collective responsibility.
The first touch of skin. A mass of hair on the face parts, pores and debris and moisture pooled at the edges of orifices. Stop by the parted lips and the nasal protuberance. Cavernous entrances to the unknown. Continue to the forest that guards closed eyes. Solid whiskers thicker than antennae, with creatures feeding off waste products. Symbiosis, but neither creature knows about the life of the other; the scale is impossible. At the colony we farm aphids for their nectar and in return for the food, we protect them from their predators. In return. That is not right; the aphids have no choice. Perhaps they are zombies too.
The size of the human close to. We are small for our species and we have a relationship with even smaller creatures. Is there a Them that dominates their lives?
No direct sound of Ki’s call heard but an echo of her. Antennae twitch with a longing to answer. She will not follow me. We have known each other since our hatching, fed in the same nursery, served our queen. We would be as one until the end of our days. How to tell that together-other feeling for what it was then? We had only the day’s work shared, the call and response of our scent across the grass, the crick and clack of our bodies. That was our sonnet, that was our song.
Not enough to stop my flight. This is stronger, this sense of moreness. The colony is not in danger as long as my actions are alone. Try to signal back but the message is inadequate. You cannot communicate an intention of which you have so little understanding. A scent. A mission. Is there choice involved? There is no answer to that, even now.
Walk over the face. Search for the source of the scent. There, at the corner of lashes, a droplet of not-sweetwater. And the smell of flesh as of the baby mouse that the colony once found dead by the dustbins. Antennae busy, feel for the aperture. Bite at the droplet and find the smallest of openings, along the pink ridge of the eye. There. This is the answer to hunger, to thirst. This newness, this moreness. The human moves and the forest of lashes part and now, now, push forward quick, force forward into the live flesh head first as the eye squeezes shut around me and a great pressure heaves me through into the space beyond. Inside. Most of me. One leg trapped. The wave of pressure returns and my leg is torn free. Free. This is wrong; you cannot be free from your own limbs. They belong to you. They are you.
You need to know if this hurts. It both does and does not. Not in the way you process pain, one tiny assault to a toe or a finger making you speechless, incapable. This hurt either will or will not stop me from existing. The leg stays behind, the rest of me burrows further into the cavity behind the eye. My existence continues.
Violent movements, rocking, shaking. Inside the head of the human my world spins. The earth rotates at over 400 metres a second and we don’t feel it, yet this woman stands up and unbalances me. When the rocking stops, stay still for a long time, with nothing to measure the crick and clack. My first faltering, five-legged steps into the human condition are ignorant of days. No colony, no Ki, no column. There is nothing like what it is. The not-knowing of what has been done. Only the need to be there.
There is food. The smell of it overwhelms my exploration. So many different and new scents but the one that called to me from the bed that night is the one that stays with me in the labyrinth. The soft flesh of the tumour is embedded in the back of the woman’s brain, separate from the tissue that surrounds it and of a different texture. An intricate connection of wet fronds weaves into the neat meat of the brain. The source of the chaos and the decay, the scent that bridged the gap between her life and mine.
You will wonder if such a thing is possible. The millions of bacteria that make up the human body you don’t count as animals, even the little lice around your eyelashes are too small and innocuous to number. Bed bugs bite, as do fleas. You notice those insects; they are visible and leave obvious damage. But they do not live in you: they feed upon you, like leeches and ticks and mosquitoes. And vampire bats. Sanguinivorous. No, you should not find this disgusting at all. Humans like a little blood themselves. Blood pudding. Rare steak. Blood of your enemies, blood of your heroes. Transubstantiation. Delicious.
But this is different, this living inside. You have read about coral in ears, spiders under the skin, tapeworms in a boy’s head. You remember these tales and try to separate myth from truth, fiction from fact. And me, eating a tumour on a human brain. Have you heard of that?
A consciousness within a consciousness. If the me from before could be considered conscious. What are the necessary conditions? There was a sensibility, a belonging to the colony, an awareness of duties, survival, function. And there was more. There was loyalty to the queen, the satisfaction of finding the right food for the hatchlings, the rightness of a new tunnel. And there was Ki. Me and Ki. Really, there are some qualities of experience that seem innate to the me that was then but perhaps that is anthropomorphic. Well, this is humanised me. You’re in my head now.
The human knew about me. In time, her memories swept through me as clearly as the hum of the colony when the new eggs are laid. There were no secrets. Her very dreams were mine. She had been scared, she had been in pain, but together we grew calm. She could not read my thoughts as you are doing, she
had only the sense of change and reconciliation that comes from acceptance. She was dying but before she ended she, too, had duties, and loyalty, and love. We had work to do.
So it came about that shortly after my arrival, her headaches stopped.
But we are ahead of ourselves.
Tap my way around the tumour. Feel the wet, stickiness below me, the tight structure above. Room to move, room to breathe and a belonging, as of the colony. This food in front of me, this chaos, does not belong here. This is my task, to restore order: start with the edges, the newer strands that push into the membrane below. Once the first hunger is sated the work is slow. There are no hatchlings to feed. No marches to make. Pick my way around the edges of the cave, avoid the tides of her brain. Crick and clack are dulled, the sharp call muted by the fleshy tunnels, and by the nowhereness of the message. Ki cannot hear me. Can anyone?
The human moves about her day and her rhythms become familiar. Rest while she lumbers, work while she rests. One night she stirs as a small bite breaks free. And it comes, the electricity, popping my antennae as smartly as a new drone, a buzzing, stinging smack to one side of my head and my five legs buckle under me. The swell pulls me back up, and as the shock passes the thought comes; she is frightened.
Fear. We knew danger in the colony, could sense the rush in our ranks when predators loomed. Sharpened senses, antennae alert. The collective move as if breeze-swept. This fear was different. It was not my danger, my fear, this fear was hers. And, though the jolt and the fall had been my physical sensation, the knowledge of the fear was not a feeling, it was a thought. Her thought, and now mine.
Had there ever been a thought inside me before? Who can say? There may have been many. Do you remember your first thought? You cannot know the exact moment. This thought was a moment though. The thought was hers.
She was frightened of our situation. She remembered the first night. A bite or a sting. And the pain from before me, in her head and in her neck, stiffness in her limbs and back. Sickness. The worry that she was ill. Or that she wasn’t ill but unhappy. The worry that an illness meant she could not have a baby, would never be a mother. The fear that she was dying or mad. Or both.
A thought splintered into a mosaic of ideas, memories, feelings. Each piece flashed at the edges of my mind, unfamiliar yet understood, as the first impressions of the colony when newly hatched from the cocoon. A whole world glimpsed in fragments.
Maybe you feel it too, now that my thoughts are in your head. You do not fully know my world and yet you start to follow the scent. You have all you need. Stretch your arms and dream the click and the clack. Arch your back and close your eyes. Let the sounds and the smells tell you what you know, where you are. My thoughts are your thoughts as her thoughts were mine.
She, with all her hopes and fears, was connected to me.
Rachel.
The oneness of her. That is what struck me in the time after. Her thoughts came to me in bursts, multifaceted and often unclear, at least in those early days. But at the centre of each idea was the singularity of her self. If the many concepts she expressed confused me then, the core worked upon me, colouring my vision as fully as the waxed moon lit our path to her bedroom that summer night. The sense of the individual.
There is no easy way to satisfactorily convey to you the vastness of this proposition since, with perhaps a few exceptions for those of you who are of twins or other multiple births, you were born with your oneness. So you must expect some not inconsiderable effort on your part in order to comprehend the great change in viewpoint that this momentary insight into Rachel’s consciousness afforded me.
The best way you might perceive my telescopic shift is to remind you of a comparable situation. Some of you may have lain under stars, or drifted upon an ocean and experienced for some few moments the hugeness of the world and the smallness of your part in it. You will have felt both insignificant and random, bound only to this earth through some fragile circumstance in nature and the ingenuity of your species. The reason this sensation feels profound, the reason it surprises you and remains with you with some intensity in later years, is that the very feeling you experienced in your moment of clarity was so completely opposite to your usual frame of mind. For most of your life, you are accustomed to a sense of your own importance; that the choices you make and the actions you perform have weight and consequence. You worry about a word misspoken or a decision rushed. You view other lives in relation to their significance and connection to you. Your parents, your children, your friends. You view your own life in relation to your successes and defeats. These are the things that matter. Winning a race, a fight, a war. Loving a partner or a cause. Saving a life or the planet. But when you think ‘planet’ you think ‘humans’. When you think about winning, you disregard the loss of others. When you think about love, you wonder who loves you back.
Your worldview is selfish beyond your own survival, beyond your code. The universe revolves around you. One day you stand alone on a mountain or in a crater, and in that glimpse at the majesty of the sea or the eternity of the stars, in that moment when the telescope reverses, your sense of your unique self collapses and you carry the knowledge with you and you try never to forget.
Have you remembered?
That was how it felt to experience Rachel’s self; the image was inverted. Whereas your life-altering experience revealed the smallness of your place in the world, mine exposed a greatness. For the first time, the view came from inside-out instead of outside-in. This was how it felt to be one.
You may imagine it was an agreeable feeling, and there was an excitement, a fluttering sense of danger and pleasure. But the dominant sensation was a vertiginous loneliness and with it came the recognition that some part of me had already looked into that cavernous emptiness and planned the climb down. For why had escape not occurred to me? Why had the silence of the not-belonging driven me home?
As Rachel’s thoughts receded and the connection with her self began to fade, so these flashes of insight and panic subsided. Something like the old me returned, and the comfort of the everyday task in front of me took over. This was my life now. All thoughts, Rachel’s or my own, seemed washed away in the ebb and flow of the spinal fluid.
Following the first shock, my days continued for a while as they had before. The thick membrane that lay below the tumour made a comfortable bed and each morning, as Rachel started to wake, sleep would overcome me. Away from the colony my sleep was long. The constant ticking march of my sisters was replaced by the deep thud of Rachel’s heart, the soft jostle of her brain flesh in its bony case. Once asleep, only her stillness woke me.
Tap tap tap at the edges of the tumour. The little hollows and peaks of the mound thrum beneath my feet. Take a bite and put it aside. Feel Ki beside me waiting her turn, ready for the homeward march together, part of the line, part of the order of things. Without Ki, the work is hard, the sense of it lost. Still, the rhythms of this world seduce. Sated each night, no thirst, no hunger. My crop is full. Growing ever stronger, even with five legs. And soon, another episode.
Bite into a new strand at the front of the tumour. A delicate tendril that winds its way through the membrane to the lighter matter beyond. Jaws fix on the tender meat when flash, the electric sting, the heat and light, blind me, knock me over, leave me down, out, done. So ends the first part of my life.
uses sysutils;
Images flood me with colour and sensation. Scenes from her day, memories of child time, dreams of the future. Visions saturated with ideas, thoughts, emotions. They fly through me too fast to catch, only the sediment remains. Sadness, joy, the scent of lemon rind, the pleasure-glide of skin on skin, a taste of hops, of salt, a scattering of dust in sunlight, a sliver of hope. Confused by the fall, the feelings leave their mark, unprocessed. When the moment passes, the husk of me lies stunned upon the caul.
Stopped. Still. A thing that hurts. This new … pain. What is it? No thing like what this is. A hard, sharpness stuck insi
de me. In the middle of the mesh of what she left behind. Threads from another life. Strong as fox fur when the blood has left. Rachel’s life, bright and cold.
She remembers me.
On my feet and check for damage. Feel the missing leg and the other absences. Antennae sag from the weight of information. The flash of the shock, the link to her, the rise and rise of sensation that vanishes as quickly as it came. All gone except the memory and this, this pain.
The hurt is ours. From her head and now in my body. Swilling through us both. My growing knowledge of the world beyond from the first event is fed and watered with the second. Rachel’s being infuses mine. Death infects us both.
begin
What time is it? Night or day? We are awake. Strong tides push against the rim of membrane, swirling into the fissures of her brain, lapping at the fine tendrils of the tumour. The pain rises and falls. There is work to be done.
The tunnels we made in the colony were fast work. Push forward, shove the earth ahead, stamp the ground and on. Push, shovel, stamp. A path forms. At the edges of the tumour, the wetness does not hold so easily. Each bite must be carried away, out of the tunnel. With no one else to carry, progress is slow. No appetite, only a gnawing at my thorax, at my skeleton, at my skull; a blurring hunger to stop feeling and to feel more. Every bite brings hope.
Blood sticks to me. Brain fluid catches at my joints and stiffens me. Push, push on. Burrow into the flesh and remember the scent and taste of the outside world, of her world. The desire for more. The sense that this was known from the first night, at the bedside, that this was the purpose. This longing, this need, to save both our lives.