Emily C Skaftun - [BCS299 S04]

by Only the Messenger (html)

  All official inquiries lead to the same result—a form allowing one to place a request to purchase a system or to request technical support. Don’t call us; we’ll call you.

  By the time the shuttle is back on board, three more of the spheres have hatched. One looks like a kind of bat-winged bird, one looks like a miniature Quonka, and the third can’t seem to make up its mind, shifting between two legs and four and six, experimenting with skin and scales and fur.

  Peering into the net they’re incubating in, Ennesta’s arms twined with my tentacles, I can’t help but think of my own offspring, swimming the various seas of the Trango System. Each one was hatched from a clutch like this; each was the lone survivor of a brutal post-birth scrum. Ennesta assures me that these babies won’t start murdering and devouring each other, but I’m not sure how she knows that.

  Looking at them, each certainly possessed of a soul, I wonder for the first time about my offspring who didn’t make it through the melee. Roptralian wisdom holds that they have no souls, that only the survivor is imbued with one. But what if we’re wrong? What if each of them lived a brief, violent life? Born to die, never even named, mourned by none.

  All of Ennesta’s lives have been like that.

  I stretch my tentacles to pull her closer to me, and she purrs. She’s nothing like Zaraell, but we feel like new parents.

  None of the “children” the memory spheres have become know what their species should look like or where the home planet is. Yet they have memories—or at least fragments of memories—dating back almost a terasecond. Tens of thousands of Roptralian years. Further back than the first life I can remember. Messages mundane and critical have passed through them to all parts of the galaxy—for those who can afford InstaComm’s rates.

  Zaraell is not one of those. Zir messages come as holos, bound by the universe’s speed limits. One is here now, and the computer asks me if I want to view it now. Why not? The meat deal is done and the crew is back on board. The dinosaurs have stopped stomping and turned to their cargo, presumably. At any rate, they’re no longer my concern.

  Zaraell’s face appears much larger than life, and Ennesta momentarily starts, then goes back to chatting with the newly hatched message spheres and hovering over the younger ones, waiting.

  Zaraell sits in a peach-colored coral house I’ve never seen before, that opens behind zir to a stunning vista of clear water and lovingly sculptured kelp gardens and the rolling hills of Roptrango-A’s trendiest city. It’s rendered in 2D, of course, but I still feel the punch I know Zaraell intended—why else spend the extra to render the background at all?

  But despite the perfection of zir setting, the lines around zir beak betray worry. “I can’t imagine why you haven’t responded to my last message,” ze begins, and I quake thinking about the distance that separates us. I did respond, though there wasn’t much I could say about it, but we are just so far away that Zaraell won’t get that holo for another dozen lunar tides—most of zir solar year. Ze’s probably about to get one I sent five jobs back, before I ever heard ze wanted to split up, and I can’t imagine what ze’ll make of its sunny long-distance love platitudes now.

  “I decided not to wait, as you can see. I moved. I really like my new apartment—there’s even a sundeck on the top floor that’s dry at low tide. You can see the stars. I still look at them at night and wonder which direction you’re off in.”

  Zaraell’s image sighs, bubbling out tiny, pretty spheres that I feel I could almost touch. Ennesta sidles up to me, nuzzling. Her eyes are as wide as oceans.

  “Please message me back,” Zaraell says. “I want to see your face.” And the holo flickers off.

  I slump to the cabin floor. We’ve started burning away from the Tro’o on to the next adventure, and gravity is as high on the ship as it ever is, but that’s not what’s weighing me down. A heavy lump sits on my second heart, and it’s made of the distance from here to home.

  “That was your home system?” Ennesta asks, with surprising intensity. Her six legs are all dancing like she has to pee.

  I gesture yes with the roll of a couple tentacles.

  “What is it called?”

  “Trango,” I say, and Ennesta yelps, covering her mouth with her paws. “Zaraell lives on Roptrango-A, the first planet, but they all look pretty similar.”

  Ennesta squirms, looking anguished in a way that I’m pretty sure isn’t jealousy. I don’t know what it is, and that sinks me with worry.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Still, Ennesta stalls. “Is it really that beautiful there?”

  I laugh. “Can you breathe in water? You probably can. Yeah, it’s really that beautiful. But I’m biased, you know? It’s home.”

  Ennesta is quiet.

  “I guess you wouldn’t know. Sorry. We’ll find your homeworld someday.”

  There is a look dancing in her purple eyes that I cannot place.

  “Why are you asking about Trango? You wanna go? I’ll take you there, but it’s far...”

  “I can get there very fast,” Ennesta says sadly. “I have to tell you something. I have horrible news.”

  Research Vessel H6Alpha to Trango System defense.

  Disaster imminent! Misfired gravito-stellar beam on intercept course with Star Trango, ETA M141 K498 H122 S020. Trango System will be obliterated unless you build and deploy capture array by M133.4. Instructions for array follow.

  The message is so brief—before devolving into schematic instructions, that is—that I can barely understand it. It seems so clinical for something that will wipe out my entire solar system. I imagine a laser blast, shot into space, traveling forever at the speed of light. I imagine myself, behind it, trying to shield my family (because they are still family, Zaraell and the kids, despite everything) from something I can never get in front of, no matter how hard I try.

  How soon is M133.4? I’ve never been a natural with Universal Standard Time, so all I know is that it’s soon. Sooner than we can get there. Is it sooner than a holo can get there? Where’s that conversion chart?

  “Is there still time?” I ask, when I can think enough to form words. How long will it take to build the capture array?

  Ennesta shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m just the message.”

  I look at her, really look, deep into her sad purple eyes. “You’re a lot more than that.”

  She shakes her head vehemently, pulling away from me even as I reach for her. “Am I? All I’ve ever been is a message. From here to there, life after life. Never a person.”

  “You’re a person now. A person who I...”

  “Who you what?” Ennesta is so still, not even breathing.

  “Who I...” The words stick in my throat. “Am very glad to have met.”

  Ennesta sits, heavily, folding limbs in ways I suspect real toyopops can’t. “I think I’m lucky garbage at best. Or maybe not-so-lucky garbage. If I’d stayed a message, your home would be safe.”

  It’s true, isn’t it? True in a way that nothing else about Ennesta is: from her name to her gender, to—I fear—her affection for me, she’s making it all up as she goes along. So I find no reply I can make to comfort her.

  Worse, a part of me wants to ask the unthinkable from her: for her to deliver the message after all. But stars, what would that mean? She’d have to die, and when she was reborn, it would be back into unending slavery, countless cycles of life and death that would take her Gravity-knows-where in the universe—and away from me forever. Not only can I not ask it, I’m not even sure I want it, even with every other thing I’ve ever loved in the universe on the line.

  Ennesta doesn’t offer.

  M133.4 is only eight lunar tides from now. Less than half a Trango year. Not even a holo can get there that fast.

  Thoughts whirl in my mind like fish darting through tidal eddies. Can the doom beam be stopped any other way? Sometimes I convince myself that it’s no problem at all; surely the research station would have sent more than one message,
right? Right? Even Zaraell sent more than one message to break up with me. Although, the second message wasn’t sent until after going ahead and leaving me.

  So maybe it’s not safe to assume another message was sent.

  I keep circling around the thought that since only an InstaComm message can get there in time, only Ennesta can save the Trango System. But that’s not really true, is it? There are other former message spheres on board the ship, seven or ten or a dozen of them now, all matured out of their larval stage into whatever form struck their fancy. They’ve made themselves at home, filling the extra cabins and taking up almost all the computer’s time on the star charts searching for home. They’re piecing together their bits of knowledge, looking for a binary system, perhaps, or something with a nebula view. They’re also plotting something that they think I don’t know about: a plan to free the rest of their species from the evil machinations of InstaComm.

  But the point, the one I don’t want to admit, is that any of them could be used to send a message.

  Or maybe not. They don’t fit into the slot on the InstaComm anymore, so I’m not sure how we’d encode the message onto one of them, let alone the coordinates for rebirth. I’ve tried to get the information out of Ennesta, and all that her evasive answers seem to imply is that it could be done.

  Of course, it would mean murdering a sentient being. But just one. One little life, to save Zaraell and the kids. One little life to save all the beaches, all the coral homes, all the clear waters and the schools of colorful fish and the gardens. One murder to save all of it, the star and the planets and the tides that whisper songs of home...

  If it was only a murder, maybe I could do it. Death is not forever. One life ends and another begins. But the new life I would be sending that being into would be a life of slavery, again and again and again.

  I can’t do it, and not only because I don’t know how. There’s also Ennesta’s big eyes that light up when she sees me coming through the nursery hatch, and her eight furry limbs that intertwine with my tentacles like they were engineered to do it, and her soft rumbling purr when I wake with her nestled asleep under my beak. And something else: a feeling that though the shifty tides of the universe brought us together, I can’t let them pull us apart.

  The InstaComm pings. Ennesta and I both jump almost out of our skins, and Jorusz rolls his bulbous eyes and flashes a lizardy green. When the fresh message sphere pops out into the cockpit he tosses it toward Ennesta, saying, “Here’s another new friend for you.”

  Then he turns to the screen and fades a sicker shade of green. “Oh shitballs,” he says. “ISTO.”

  Intra-Stellar Trade Organization. This means evasive maneuvers, maybe boarding, maybe a fine, confiscation of our current cargo, which is probably illegal. I’ve lost track. I just scoot toward the engine room, anticipating trouble from whatever crazy shit Jorusz is about to ask the star drive to do.

  Ennesta follows, message sphere in one hand, and, despite the danger of ISTO and gravity suddenly slamming us both into the wall as Jorusz sends us hurtling through space, I have a thought. A terrible thought.

  A fresh message sphere. One I can still use.

  I know all the details of the message Ennesta carried. Sending it would be as simple as typing it into the InstaComm and pressing that blue button.

  And getting the new sphere (which I am trying hard to think of as a thing, a tool, definitely not a sentient being with a soul) away from Ennesta.

  And murdering zir—no, it—and returning it, and all its future reincarnations, to an eternity of slavery.

  I try to focus on wringing power out of the ship’s star drive so we can careen and duck through this system’s asteroid belt and shake ISTO off our tail.

  But during the cilia-raising escape, our scan detector sirens more than once, so even though we once again make it out with our lives (in time for dinner, even!), now ISTO knows exactly who and what we are. It’s only a matter of time before they find us again, surround and board us, and then the best we can hope for is that their memory wipe leaves us with some of the things we hold most dear. Zaraell, I think, twisting three tentacles into a wishing pose. Ennesta.

  Trango.

  After fixing the minor damage Jorusz’s evasive maneuvers did to my star drive, I climb into my hammock next to Ennesta—may as well call it our hammock by now—noting the small sphere maturing in a bit of netting beside us. It’s visibly bigger than earlier already. But I think it’ll still fit into the InstaComm’s slot. If I act soon.

  I wait until Ennesta’s asleep, purring heavily with six of her limbs wrapped around me. I peel them off one at a time, once again, and creep out into the night. No one is stirring, not even Jorusz, who should be on watch after an ISTO sighting. Not a single one of the former message spheres. Not the one wrapped in two of my tentacles. It feels for all the world like a rubber ball. Maybe slightly warm. Maybe with the slow, almost imperceptible beating of an alien heart.

  I get as far as the InstaComm console. I type in the message. I input the coordinates. I burble something like a prayer to the sphere cradled in one tentacle, pressing it up against the hole it’s just slightly too large to slide easily into. I tell myself it’s not much. Just a little push. Just a little more pressure. Then push the blue button. Then, ping! The death and eternal slavery of a sentient being. But just one. One little being for millions. Surely that’s good math?

  I have no idea how much time passes in that moment, in which all of my senses are directed inward, warring with myself. I’m so consumed that I don’t even hear Ennesta approach. I don’t notice her until a furry white hand comes into my view, delicately moving my tentacle away from the sphere stuck halfway into the slot. She pries it free, cupping it in a pair of hands, while other hands wrap around me. I turn into those arms, weeping without tears, a coughing, rasping wail that pulls up from the depths of my third heart only to be lost in Ennesta’s furry embrace.

  “There there, sweetie,” she says. “It’s okay. I knew you couldn’t go through with it.”

  I weep, shuddering in her many arms.

  “It’s okay,” she repeats. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  “I can’t,” I say, pulling away. “I may not be able to kill anyone, but I can’t live with letting Trango die either.”

  I guess I can’t live at all, then. The idea hits me like the jolt of an electric eel. I wrap my tentacles around Ennesta’s wrists, gripping hard.

  “Teach me,” I say. “I’ll deliver the message. Just teach me how.”

  Ennesta resists for days, as doom races toward Trango.

  “What if it can’t be taught? What if it only works for my species?”

  It’s a risk I’m willing to take. “Worst-case scenario, I end up reborn somewhere else. That’s what happens.”

  “Do your people mature fast enough for you to remember the message in time?”

  Honestly, no. Even if Roptralian lore is correct and only one offspring has a soul (and that would be me, right, by default?), it takes time to prevail against one’s soulless clutchmates. And that’s if I could even bring myself to devour them this time around, and if I didn’t have the hearts to go through with it, they’d surely make short work of me. And even if I did make it through the melee, it takes time to grow enough to understand the world and remember past lives, and even more time to be respected enough that the message might be heard.

  No, it won’t do at all to be reborn as a Roptralian. I’ll have to be born as whatever Ennesta is. But that means...

  Ennesta knows exactly what it means. “If you end up in the machine...”

  This is the true worst-case scenario, being caught in the life-death cycle of Ennesta’s enslaved people. And yet, it’s also the best-case scenario. It’s the only thing that will work.

  I run a tentacle lovingly down the side of her worried face, and she covers it with a paw. “Well, then it’s up to you, my love.”

  Ennesta nods sadly. Perhaps she would never have bec
ome a crusader on her own, but there are a dozen-some of her people, freed and angry, onboard the ship now. And they haven’t just been searching for the homeland so they can go back there and keep hiding. They won’t rest until they free every one of their kind. And if this works, that will include me. I think they can do it, too. It’s only a matter of time before they bring the whole InstaComm system crashing down.

  “Who knows how long it will take us, though,” she says. “Who knows how many lives you’ll go through, and where you’ll end up? What if I can’t ever find you again?”

  A tear falls from her eye, landing on one of my tentacles. I look at it, test it between two suckers, feel the silky saltiness of it, just like the real thing. Just like a drop in the oceans. How does a shapeshifter do that?

  Well, maybe I’ll find out.

  “You found me once,” I say. “Something tells me you can do it again.”

  “I will,” she says.

  It’s part biofeedback, I learn a little at a time from Ennesta over the next few days. You tune into your... she lacks the word... home center, you know, in the... the bluest part of your soul. Maybe it’s in your brain?

  I almost give up a thousand times, every time the logical, mechanistic part of my brain stops me from achieving clarity in what Ennesta assures me is a simple meditation. There is no manual for this process.

  On the third day, a breakthrough—she teaches me how to purr. Not faking it with janky breathing through my lungs or gills, but an honest-to-gravity vibration that originates from... I have no idea where. But I’m controlling it with my thoughts. Within hours I’ve got it down to an almost unconscious control, almost as natural as breathing.

  “Okay,” I say, resisting the urge to write up the process in a bulleted list. “You get your purr on, and then what?”

  Ennesta laughs, two fluffy paws held demurely in front of her mouth. “Oh no, purring is not part of the reincarnation control.”