Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  “That’s . . . interesting,” Kitty said, moving toward the sculptures. “Are those the Evermother’s executives?” A group of ancient Kokkalns, even larger and more encrusted than Guardian, lounged beneath the nearest sculpture.

  “Yes. They await your approach.”

  As if by unspoken signal, Kitty’s oxygen bubble flashed and expanded outward. The other bubbles followed suit, merging into a dome nearly thirty meters wide: large enough for Kahihatan’s entire entourage as well as for the Blind Queen’s executives.

  “Speak in the language of the eldest,” Guardian advised. “Among our people, the younger speak always after the manner of the elder.”

  Kitty took a breath and stepped toward the executives, adjusting the dials on her translator to the oldest possible setting. “I thank you for your courtesy,” she said, hoping she was using the right phrasing. “My name is—”

  “The Evermother will hear your petition for spawning,” the largest of the Kokkalns said briskly. The clicks emanating from his carapace were so breathy that the translator clearly had trouble deciphering them. “Be warned. She has never received an offworld petitioner before. She will likely deny your request.”

  “If she does, would we be permitted to try again later?”

  “If she denies your request, you will be dead. The Evermother devours the head and central organs of any who summon her unnecessarily. You should have known this.”

  Kitty cast a sour glance at Kahihatan. “Apparently someone forgot to do adequate research before beginning this project.”

  Kahihatan opened his mouth to object, but the Blind Queen’s executive was still speaking. “We understand that you desire speech prior to assimilation. The Everqueen rises. Voice your questions.”

  “Right. Well, mostly, we require information as to the nature of assimilation.”

  “You must assimilate the shadows before you may speak with the Evermother.”

  “Can you explain the function of the shadows?”

  “Speech with the Evermother is impossible until the shadows have been assimilated.”

  Kitty rubbed her forehead. “Right. Okay, let’s try a different tack. Who created these sculptures?”

  “Our artisans built them when the Evermother devoured the last of her molt-mates. Your inquiries are senseless. The Everqueen rises. Assimilate the shadows.”

  “One more question!” The dispersing Kokkalns paused. Kitty looked around desperately. Surely there was a clue somewhere. There was always a clue. “What are those first-molts doing?” She pointed. Immature Kokkalns crawled along the surface of each statue, brushing abstract contours with their mouths.

  “They are artisans. They adjust the shadows each generation, so that our connection with the Blind Queen may continue. It is a task only the young may perform.”

  “Only the young.” Kitty trailed off thoughtfully. Guardian had said something similar when they’d met in the upper tunnels. He’d claimed that Kitty’s youth made her well-suited to assimilation.

  What did she know about first-molt Kokkalns? They were smaller than their seniors. They were better able to tolerate surface conditions. They had sophisticated mathematical skills and excellent spatial perceptions, and—

  Their linguistic pathways hadn’t calcified.

  Kitty’s heart skipped a beat.

  “It’s a language map!” she shouted, far more loudly than she’d intended. She whirled to face Kahihatan’s entourage. “The Kokkaln language permutes with each generation. Typically young Kokkalns learn the language from their elders, but the Blind Queen is older than any other Kokkaln alive, and she almost never interacts with her subjects. So how would the younger generations learn her language?”

  “By speaking with older Kokkalns who already understand it?” Johansen hazarded.

  “That might work for a generation or two, but over time the phonetics would degrade. A non-native speaker tends to pronounce sounds differently. If you learn a language from a non-native, then teach it to someone else, who in turn tries to pass it on to a fourth student—”

  “It all ends up garbled.”

  “Exactly.” Kitty’s eyes flitted to the sculptures, jumping from contour to contour. “These statues contain a mathematical map describing exactly how the phonemes have shifted over time.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Johnson objected. “Phonemes don’t always morph in the same direction, and new words are being added all the time.”

  “That might be true for human languages. But I’d bet my next three dig sites that Kokkaln speech evolves differently. Check your translation algorithms. I expect you’ll find direct polynomial functions describing the progression of the language from each generation to the next.”

  Johansen frowned and dug into the records on his wrist-com.

  Eighth-minister Kahihatan drew near. “So when the Kokkalns said we could not speak with the Blind Queen until we’d assimilated the shadows—”

  “They literally meant that speech was impossible. If you don’t understand the permutations in the language map, there’s no way to communicate with a Kokkaln that old.” Kitty’s heart was racing. She felt like an archeologist on the verge of a giant discovery, almost as though she was back at the dig. All of the pieces were here. She just had to put them in the right order.

  “Well?” Kahihatan demanded, brushing a speck of dust from his sleeve. “What are you waiting for? Run the permutations and recode the translators to speak the Blind Queen’s language.”

  “It’s not that easy. The algorithms are encoded within the statues, I’m sure of it. But there are hundreds of phonemes in the Kokkaln language, and only three dimensions in each statue. The answer must have something to do with the shadows, but I can’t—”

  “Miss Kittyhawk, we’re in a rather urgent situation.”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

  “The Everqueen has risen,” the executive said. The Blind Queen’s aides dispersed, passing through the edge of the oxygen bubble. They joined the eerie mass of aliens drifting overhead, utterly motionless. Silence fell across the water. The entire world seemed to hold its breath. Kitty moved toward edge of the oxygen bubble, peering toward the depths.

  Something massive moved in the darkness. Currents struck the oxygen bubble, rippling the boundary. Mud rose in swirling clouds. One segment at a time, a gargantuan Kokkaln lifted itself from the deeper caverns. Truck-sized foreclaws pulled the creature forward. Eyes larger than space shuttles gleamed through the murk—scarred and pitted, obviously sightless. The creature struggled upward, filling the cavern. Several of the giant glowing sculptures were displaced by its bulk.

  Sonorous clicks vibrated the stone, but of course Kitty’s translator was unable to decipher them. Kitty sighed and wished for her quiet excavation dig. Mentally, she reviewed the list of things dead aliens did not do. Dead aliens did not misinterpret your intentions. Dead aliens did not bite your head off if you woke them unnecessarily. Dead aliens did not—

  “Miss Kittyhawk!”

  Eighth-minister Kahihatan was clutching her sleeve. She shook him off and concentrated on the sculptures.

  Assimilate the shadows . . .

  She understood the purpose of assimilation now. She was supposed to internalize the message of the sculptures and use it to communicate with the Blind Queen. But what about the shadows? Which shadows? In this murky dimness, lit by their own internal glow, the sculptures cast no shadows.

  “Watch out!” Kahihatan’s aide darted forward, trying to impose himself between Kitty and the creature now looming over them. The antennules near its mouth rippled, testing the water. The beast arced its spine and, almost casually, snatched one of the drifting Kokkalns out of the water. Its head and upper thorax vanished with a crunch.

  Kitty gripped Johansen’s shoulders and moved him to the side so that he was no longer blocking her view.

  Thirty-five statues. But what did they mean? How would the Kokkalns, a species with excellent spatial c
ognition, encode phonetic drift? She ran a couple of trial calculations, but came up empty. The phonetic landscape was too complex.

  The Blind Queen snatched another of her subjects from the water. Her body, like the statues, was a three-dimensional structure, but it contours were determined by dozens of variables: the arch of her spine, the angle of her joints, even the amount of food in her stomach.

  Assimilate the shadows . . .

  Of course.

  “The sculptures don’t cast shadows,” Kitty said, glancing at Kahihatan. “The sculptures are shadows. They’re three-dimensional projections of a multi-dimensional space.”

  Kahihatan’s response was neither coherent nor, Kitty suspected, appropriate for polite company.

  Johansen was more concise. “Mother of demons. You mean the Kokkalns exist in multiple dimensions?”

  “Of course not. I’m talking about a mathematical space. Each sculpture is a compression along a different axis. That’s why they all seem like pieces of the same whole.”

  Kitty pulled up the models on her datapad, briskly tapping at keys. “Kokkalns can envision up to fourteen dimensions, right? But of course they can’t build a fourteen-dimensional statue. They have to use lower-order representations.”

  “But that makes no sense!” Kahihatan said, cringing as the Blind Queen drew nearer.

  “Doesn’t it? Humans use the technique all the time. Paintings, road signage, data screens, you name it. We create a 2D image to convey a three-dimensional concept.”

  The Blind Queen lurched forward, feelers piercing the oxygen bubble. Kitty dropped to one knee, hardly aware of the chaos around her. Humans screamed and scrambled backward. One of Kahihatan’s aides backed straight through the edge of the bubble and had to be retrieved from the scalding water.

  The models on Kitty’s datapad came to life, converging into a tangle of lines and cross-sections, a multi-dimensional structure her mind had no chance of comprehending. She opened a database of Kokkaln dialects, keying commands that would map recent phoneme shifts onto the contours of the wireframe structure. In moments, the pad’s AI found a pattern match.

  “Dr. Kittyhawk!”

  The Everqueen loomed overhead, forelegs extended. Kitty synced the datapad to her translation unit, hijacking its input/output streams. It was almost like rerouting the communications relay on her jumpship. Except without the giant head-crushing alien.

  “Evermother!” Kitty cried, waving to draw the beast’s attention. “Evermother, can you hear me?”

  She waited, heart pounding, while the pad converted her translator’s output into a series of resonant whistles. The humongous creature paused. The head lowered. Kitty tensed, ready to leap aside to avoid decapitation, but the outer mandibles did not extend.

  Deafening clicks ensued, quaking the stone beneath Kitty’s boots. Echoes bounced off the edge the cavern. “Who speaks? You are not one of my executives.”

  “I am a visitor to your world. I’ve come to petition for spawning rights.”

  “Why should a visitor wish to spawn?”

  “Ah . . .” Kitty floundered. Should she explain Kahihatan’s financial motivations? She doubted that projected fiscal returns would matter to a creature that ate its subjects and lived in underground caverns. “Perhaps it is best if you speak with eighth-minister Kahihatan. He is the leader of this group, and the initiator of the petition.”

  Kitty grabbed the eighth-minister’s shirt, ignoring his frantic objections, and dragged him into position beneath the Evermother’s gaping maw. He glared at her, but wet his lips and began speaking.

  “Oh, wise and glorious Evermother, I come to you with a request which shall benefit both our peoples. The surface of this planet, as you most surely know, is a barren wasteland. But for creatures such as myself, there is much of value to be gleaned there. I wish to propose a joint-habitation arrangement of mutual benefit to . . .”

  The speech droned on, and eventually Kitty stopped listening. She opened a side-screen on her datapad and flipped to the latest data dump from the Ll’tanii rehydration chambers.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” Kahihatan said several hours later, as they walked toward the surface tunnels.

  “Why?” Kitty asked, barely looking up from her datapad.

  “Weren’t you paying attention? I’ll have to resign as part of the colonization agreement. The Everqueen expects me to direct the colonization efforts personally.”

  “Ah. Well, at least you’ll have your crystal exports.”

  Kahihatan huffed. Translation: the whole point of those exports was to secure my re-election next quarter. Now I’ve exiled myself to a rustic colony site. This is not the way I planned things at all.

  Kitty smiled and kept walking.

  “He’ll get over it,” a voice said at her elbow. Ministerial Aide Johansen was walking beside her, voice lowered to a conspiratorial tone. “To be honest, I think he’ll do better as a colonial supervisor than as a planetary minister.”

  “Hm.”

  “So . . . would you like to grab a cup of coffee once this is all over?”

  Kitty thought of her rehydration chambers. The energy outputs would be spiking soon. If she hurried, she might catch the final readouts in real time. “I really ought to get back to the dig.”

  “Some other time, then? When you . . . come into town for supplies? Or something?”

  “I doubt I’ll be on the planet for much longer.” Kitty tapped the screen, noticing a couple of unusual readings. Now that was odd.

  “Oh. Sure, ok. No problem.”

  Kahihatan’s aide wandered away. Kitty glanced up as he left, noting for the first time the slump of his shoulders, the obvious disappointment in his expression. Blast. She probably ought to have phrased her rejection more diplomatically. Although, to be honest, she wasn’t entirely sure what she could have changed. She sighed and thumped her head against the datapad.

  Dead things. She was always so much better with dead things.

  The Road Not Taken

  Sandra Tayler

  Caraline sat at the spaceport cafe table and watched herself walk in. As always, it was a strange experience. The woman paused in the doorway until she spotted Caraline. Then she wove through the tables toward her. The other woman had gained some weight, softened. Caraline straightened in her seat, suddenly conscious of her slender frame and stylish pantsuit. Perhaps she should have dressed down more, to match the other woman’s comfortable jeans and sweater.

  “Hello Caraline.”

  “Hello Cara.”

  Prior to the accident she had been both Cara and Caraline depending on the situation. Now she was just Caraline. It was a simple way to distinguish, to declare some semblance of separateness.

  A waitress appeared to take drink orders, then left them alone. Caraline flinched away from the eerily familiar eyes. Instead she studied their hands on the table. Her own were smooth with painted fingernails. Cara’s were chapped with blunt tips. Cara’s hands curled up as if they noticed the scrutiny and wished to hide. Caraline slid her own hands into her lap.

  “So, I saw that you’re having a showing next month,” Cara ventured.

  Caraline seized the proposed topic for conversation: “Yes. It’s very exciting. I’ve lined up all the girls and the runway. Now I’m frantically finishing the clothing. The designs are all done, of course, but I keep seeing small things I want to change. This could really be my big break.”

  Cara smiled, encouraging and yet wistful. “Are you going to use that swirling dress I doodled during history?” Cara blushed. “We doodled.”

  Caraline remembered the dress. She remembered drawing it out of boredom. That had been back when she was singular instead of plural. Now two women remembered drawing the dress.

  “Yes, I’m using the dress. I found the most heavenly blue Rigelian Spidersilk. It looks like the ocean.”

  Cara’s sigh was full of longing. “I wish I could come to the show.”

  Caraline did not respo
nd. She did not want Cara at the show. It would be . . . awkward. It would also violate their agreement to stay out of each other’s lives. Cara knew this. Cara would not come even if the show had been on the planet where Cara lived rather than half a galaxy away.

  The waitress returned with two identical drinks. “Here you go sweetie.” The waitress set the drink on the table and paused a moment when identical faces looked up at her. “Are you two twins?”

  Cara opened her mouth, but no words came out. They were not twins; they were a person divided. Caraline still remembered the nauseating lurch of the wormhole jump unlike any other she’d taken before. Only later had she learned it was caused by a bizarre accident which no one could yet explain. Instead of a single ship emerging from the wormhole, there had been two identical ones.

  Caraline smiled her polite-but-busy smile and firmly said “Yes, we’re twins.” She really didn’t want to go through all the questions the waitress would have. The accident had been net-wide news. The whole galaxy was fascinated by the resultant pairs of duplicated people. Most of the duplicates continued to live in a swirl of media attention. She and a few others had chosen differently. The waitress smiled and went away.

  Caraline turned back to Cara, studying her face openly now. That could be me. She faced the thought. Cara was thinking it too.

  Caraline sipped her drink. “How is Ryan?” Ryan of the deep brown eyes and curly hair that her fingers itched to touch. The three years since the accident had surely not changed his broad smile and cheerful laugh. Caraline’s eyes stung and she blinked a couple of times to prevent tearing. She could not cry here.

  Cara’s expression softened, “Ryan’s doing well. He’s a partner in Baxter Woodworks now. That means he doesn’t have as much time for carving as he used to.”

  That was a shame. Caraline had always loved to watch Ryan’s hands as he worked with wood. But owning the company was his dream.

  “I’m glad.” Caraline was glad. A tear rolled down her cheek. She met Cara’s sympathetic gaze.