Symbiosis

by Nicky Drayden

  I bite my lip. “I have an idea where they’ve gone.”

  “I’m right behind you,” Baradonna says.

  “No,” I say, “I need to go alone. Stay here, watch over the researchers. In case something changes, and they need help.”

  “That’s seven,” she says as I make a move for the door. As soon as I pass the threshold, the mouths begin to settle back down.

  “Seven what?” I ask her from relative safety.

  “Times I’ve saved your life. Not that I’m counting.”

  I purse my lip, more than happy to endure her obvious gloating. And we both know that counting is what accountancy guards do best.

  Seske

  Of High Times and Low Tides

  I set a prayer candle on either side of Charrelle, then lay four cowrie shells at her feet, in tribute to the ancestors. Had I more time, I would have grabbed a more suitable sacrifice. My crude attempt at an altar is unworthy of a visit from the humblest of Mothers, but I cling to the hope that one will sense our desperation and come sit with us. I am already on edge, paranoid both about us being caught here, and about those other spirits who have haunted me here in our Zenzee’s womb.

  I check over my shoulder—for accountancy guards, for my will-mother, for anyone—but we are alone. Satisfied, I light the candles as the elevating properties begin to thin the veil between our world and that of the ancestors. I breathe in deeply. Charrelle does the same, sitting cross-legged in front of me, one hand on her non-existent baby bump.

  “Will they even know where to find us?” she asks. “We are so far from the Wall.”

  “They will find us,” I say confidently, though I possess no reasoning why I should believe such a thing.

  She can sense this, I’m sure. In these past few hours, I have yet to feel confident in anything I’ve done. And yet, I’m also here with Charrelle now, helping her, and that must count for something, as she doesn’t question my assertions.

  We wait.

  Several minutes pass. At first I wonder if the candles are potent enough, because I can’t sense anything, but then with a smack, my mind opens up, and I am fully ready to receive spirits. I can feel every hair on my skin. I can taste a meal on my tongue that I’d eaten last week. I can smell Doka between Charrelle’s legs.

  Charrelle stares at me, lids heavy, head tilting to one side. “Ha! What are you thinking now?” she asks me. “Your naxshi just brightened so brilliantly. Can I touch?” Her fingers press toward my face. I want to dodge. Though we are family, we do not share that sort of intimacy, but the candles have slowed my reaction time, and her clammy hand slaps against my cheek before I can object. “Your skin is so soft. Like the underside of a heart murmur.” Her hand slides sloppily down my face, over my lips, then drops back onto her lap like a dead fish. For a moment, it looks like it is a dead fish—scales, fins, the works—but then I shake my head and it’s a proper hand again.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have lit both candles,” I slur. I’d swiped them from our heart-wives’ room. Whatever kind of praying Minique, Jesphara, and Ida were doing to the ancestors was intense. I haven’t felt this out of it since Sisterkin left me for dead at the Ancestor’s Wall. The thought is almost enough to sober me.

  Sisterkin.

  I know I’ll never be high enough to entertain thoughts about her without descending into a sad, pitiful state. Her act of betrayal still cuts as sharply as it had all those years ago. She’s gone now. Banished and forgotten, but with the veil this thin, who knows who might cross over. I shake my head again. Charrelle needs me to be strong right now, and I need to fill the void my sister has left inside my heart with something else. Anything else.

  “Charrelle,” I say, looking deeply into her eyes. “Is Doka a good husband to you?”

  Okay, not that. But it is too late.

  She smiles. “Of course! He is gentle and kind and patient with me. And of course, he’s so handsome.” She leans in, her lip upon my ear, even though there’s no one around. “And he keeps things so moist . . . you know?”

  I clear my throat, wishing I could scrub away that mental image.

  “I still owe you so much for choosing me for him,” Charrelle says with a warm smile. She hasn’t noticed my discomfort. Discomfort or jealousy, I want to ask myself, but don’t.

  “You owe me nothing. You were the obvious choice to us all. The perfect fit for him,” I bumble out.

  “We do fit well together. When we kissed at our wedding, I sort of felt like there’d been this Doka-size hole in my life, and I hadn’t realized it until that very moment. It was magic, Seske. And now, we’ve made this . . .” She rubs her belly again. “I know what we’re supposed to do, but I can’t. This child is ours. All of ours. And she’ll be our pride and joy, no matter if the ancestors sit with her or not.”

  Something shifts in my gut, a gentle wave, then one of the candles starts to tip over, only it doesn’t fall. Just leans. I stare at it oddly, and then when I look back up at Charrelle, she’s hovering a few inches off the ground, cowrie shells floating next to her. As if gravity has decided not to be a thing anymore.

  “These candles, Seske! So potent. Are you seeing this?” She flails her arms and legs, like she’s swimming in a pond.

  My head clears, ever so slightly. As though I’m almost, almost able to put my thoughts in the right order, but they flitter away. “Sooo potent,” I say, watching as the candle flame goes from a pointy little thing to more of a gyrating blob. A tiny little sun. “I feel like I’m actually floating. Maybe, this is a sign from the ancestors. Maybe we were right to not give up on them. They will find us.”

  So we pray, mumbling out every favor we’ve ever done for anyone, hoping they will amount to enough for the ancestors to give us one in return. We sit in this meditative trance for hours it seems, and sometimes I drift off, only to be woken by Charrelle’s spontaneous outbursts.

  “Seske! Seske!” Charrelle is shaking my arm now, waking me again. I wonder what divine insight she has stumbled upon this time. Her conspiracy theory on the origin of humanity had sparked many thoughts in my mind—that the first family had been birthed from a string of cowrie shells on a necklace hanging around a turtle god’s neck. Then there had been her treatise on colors, in which she’d described, in detail, all 814 colors that were distinguishable by the human eye. We’d gotten into a horrid argument about the true value of fuchsia and what it tasted like before I’d dozed off again.

  “You smell like Doka,” I tell Charrelle as my head lolls against her chest.

  “Seske, wake up,” she says again.

  I rub my hand against her cheek, dragging my fingers through her beard stubble. “You talk like him, too. Like how he’s always saying my name as if he enjoys the way it tastes on his tongue. Say something else the way he does.”

  She snaps her fingers in front of my face, and it startles me, alert enough that I can look at the digits. I follow fingers to arm, to chest, then to face. Funny. She kind of looks like Doka, too. They say all family units start favoring one another after they’ve been together for a while.

  But this . . . this is something else, I think. I concentrate all my thoughts into really looking at her face, and finally realize that it’s not Charrelle at all. Doka now stares down at me, with something between compassion, frustration, and desperation on his face.

  “What? How?” is all I can manage.

  “Ses—” He clears his throat. “I need you to snap out of this!” He extinguishes both candles with a pinch, juicy wax slipping like a wave, forward and back in the null gravity, but never meandering away from the pool. “We’ve got an emergency situation. We’ve coupled our Zenzee with the Klang’s, but something’s gone wrong, and now all of the researchers, my guards, and Nandi are trapped inside the Zenzee’s salivatory orifices.”

  “That’s a bad, bad thing. Where’s Charrelle?” I slur, looking around, suddenly anxious.

  “I’ve sent her home. She’s safe.”

  “No!”
I scream. “She is not safe. They want the throttle fish to take our child!”

  Doka pulls me in close, his face nuzzled in the top of my hair. “She told me everything. Thank you for being there for her. I’ve instructed Kallum not to let a single person into our room until we get back. He will keep her safe.”

  I nod slightly. Kallum might not always be the kindest or gentlest person, but he loves harder than any of us and would do anything Doka asks of him. I know that Charrelle will be safe in his care.

  “I knew you had it in you, Seske,” Doka says to me. “That’s why I didn’t hesitate to ask you to be her midwife, despite what you’ve been through. You saved our child.”

  I take a few deep breaths, and my mind starts to clear ever so slightly. “I didn’t think I had it in me, to be someone’s hero again.” I look deeply into Doka’s eyes, realizing he’s come to me for a reason. I’ve spent time with the Zenzee, connected in those very same orifices. The memories were bittersweet, and a lot of the time, I pretend it hadn’t happened. But I’d had the experience, wanted or not. I know our Zenzee probably better than anyone else, and I may be the only one who can save those poor souls from suffering the same fate as Wheytt. I feel tears running down my cheeks as I remember searching and searching the orifice that had swallowed him whole, looking for traces, clues, some sort of explanation. I remember how it had wrecked me, and yet here I am now, ready to do it all again.

  “I’ll help,” I say to Doka. “However I can.”

  I drift naked in the center of the room, mouths ready to welcome me like an old friend. Our Zenzee and I, we have a connection. I’d carried her child for a brief but crucial moment, and my sacrifice had satisfied our Zenzee enough that she’s allowed us to stay with her. I guess I was foolish enough to believe a sacrifice that big would be enough to last a lifetime.

  I choose the orifice Wheytt had used. The one that had devoured him whole. I don’t know if this is an act of defiance, or simply a longing to be near him, or a secret wish I will endure the same fate. The mouth opens up as I near and accepts me eagerly. I bite my tongue as the tendrils enter me, then seconds later, I am one with our Zenzee and I feel everything.

  There is so much grief. So much pain, but I can’t bring myself to scream. Somehow, I know that giving it an outlet would only make things worse—releasing pressure only to be filled up again with something ten times more painful. Instead, I sit with it. Let it wash over me. And I realize it is not our Zenzee that aches so. These are the thoughts and remembrances of the Klang’s poor Zenzee.

  I sit in an ocean, wave after wave battering me, and in the distance, right over the horizon, a magenta sun brightens, then dulls, over and over, like a pulse. The whole of the ocean is angry and resentful, and yet only a small fraction of it affects me. For every ache and pain I experience, there are millions more. Then they roll back, receding into the dark waters beyond. I catch my breath, thinking that I have made it through the worst. I use this moment of clarity to communicate with our Zenzee . . . bidding for it to release its captives. I concentrate with every inch of my being to project these thoughts, knowing they will only register as a whisper of an echo inside the Zenzee’s mind. When diplomatic pleading has no effect, I scream and scream and scream until I realize I am sitting fully on the ocean’s sterile, sandy bottom, not a lick of water around me. When I look up, I see the giant wave has blotted out the sun and is about to crash down upon me.

  It is only then that I realize what this connection is.

  I tune back into my body, my actual body, and start to twist and squirm. One by one, the tendrils remove themselves. When enough of them are out, I press backward, kicking my heel against the inner lip of the mouth until it opens. I struggle out backward, and feel hands upon my ankles, helping to pull me free. I escape, caught by null gravity and Baradonna’s rigid embrace. Doka stands right behind her, eyes wide.

  “The Klang ship is dying,” I wheeze, throat raw from the tendrils ripping free.

  “We know that,” Doka says. “We’ve known that for months.”

  I shake my head. “No, I mean something more immediate. She’s transferring all her experiences to our Zenzee in some kind of death ritual. We need to get the Klang’s people over here right now!”

  Baradonna gives Doka a significant look I can’t quite make out.

  “Not now,” he mutters.

  I’m about to protest “Of course now!” but I see that he was talking to her. I don’t have time to wonder what he means.

  We leave the room in a rush, Baradonna and I helping Doka to navigate the null gravity. When we are back at tactical command, he explains the direness of the situation to the Senate officers. There is resistance, of course, and he wastes so much time trying to convince them of how imperative it is to take immediate action. I stand back, biting my tongue, feeling guilt well up inside of me. If I’d just stayed married to him properly, he’d still have the power to execute a direct mandate, and all of this convincing wouldn’t be necessary. However, Doka is astute enough to smooth over most of the officers’ concerns and barrels through the rest.

  Shuttles are readied even as communications are a frenzy between us and the Klang. I keep my wits about me, wondering how Doka can handle such a situation with dignity and grace. I should appreciate him more. Or maybe I shouldn’t. This isn’t the time for my feelings to get complicated. But it does weigh on me that I was nowhere near as prepared to deal with a crisis back when I was Matris. I’d been too young, too inexperienced, and had buckled under the pressure. Me giving up the Matriarchy was the best thing that I could have done for my people.

  I keep telling myself that.

  And for three years, I’d detached from nearly all responsibility. Adalla and I had had the perfect life, as perfect as it could get at least. I see now that it was merely a balm, a short reprieve to allow us to soothe over the wounds we’d suffered in order to prepare us for more. As soon as those shuttles come back, our people will be in crisis mode. Nothing will be the same. I’m not sure if our utopia will ever recover, but maybe that’s the problem: that we thought it a utopia in the first place. That’s an argument for another time, though—for philosophers and historians to consider centuries from now. For the moment, we need to get through the next few hours, the next few days, the next few years.

  And while we do, I will be there for Doka, for my people, and I will do my best to cling onto hope.

  I spring into action, ordering people around, and I’m surprised by how easily it all comes back to me—and how easily people listen to me. “Call in the medics. We don’t know what kind of condition these people will be in.”

  I catch Doka staring at me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You haven’t lost it, you know,” he says, stars in his eyes. “The ability to lead. You would have been an amazing Matris. If that’s what you’d wanted.”

  “You know it isn’t,” I say, starting to bristle.

  Doka gives me a disarming smile that turns my stomach into knots. I know he’s eager to be the best Matris he can be, but sometimes I get the feeling he’s just biding his time, waiting for me to reclaim the throne. And as much as the thought terrifies me to no end, there’s a tiny bit of a thrill lurking there, too.

  He knows that. And he knows that I know he knows. We hold eye contact a moment too long, then we both get back to work.

  With the evacuation schedule much more truncated than we could have imagined, there is not enough time to relocate everyone via shuttles, so we use the Zenzee’s intimate connection to create a safe passageway. The tentacles pull so tightly against one another, a seal forms against the harshness of space. A line of accountancy guards stands on either side of the path, ready to subdue any of the creatures that lurk in this delicate underflesh, though I suspect the guards are also here to subdue any of the Klang who step out of line. Their bags are all searched, and the guards are careful to weed out any weapons or contraband technology. There were rumors that the Klang had on
ce been accomplished scientists and inventors, but the plagues and failures they’d suffered through had driven them to desperation and barely clinging to life. Still, the precautions are necessary—if we let our empathy become complacency, we could endanger both peoples.

  The first wave of refugees step onto the path, ribbed flesh so soft and mushy that many people stumble until they get used to the odd texture. The vegetation has been cleared and the surrounding area has been sufficiently lit, though I still catch glints of inquisitive and hungry eyes lurking in the shadows beyond—too large, too bright, and too clustered to be human. I straighten up and put on my best smile and ignore the memories of the last time I was this close to a Zenzee’s ovispore.

  Some of the refugees are dark-skinned, but others have skin as light as bone. They are like walking skeletons, things out of children’s nightmares. Even the men aboard the Serrata hadn’t scared me as much . . . mostly covered in dark beards and furs, the whites of their skins were more of a curiosity. But these people, especially the women, wear it on display. Many have their hair in braids, but only one or two. I wonder what sort of histories could be stored in such a simple pattern. Did their Lines not run so deeply? Did their ancestors not require such a tribute? Perhaps they had other ways to honor them.

  As nervous and uncertain as I am about the nature of our guests, my curiosity draws me nearer. “Excuse me, can I help?” I offer to a mother carrying an infant slung around her chest as well as multiple heavy bags. She looks wary of me. “I am Seske Kaleigh, daughter of mothers—” Then I realize my Line and credentials mean nothing to her. “Just call me Seske. I am here to help.”

  She stops long enough to hand me one of her bundles, looking slightly relieved. She says words to me, words that don’t make sense to my ears. She probably hadn’t even understood me anyway. “Seske,” I say, placing my hand to my chest.

  “Vina,” she says, doing in kind. She places a hand on her fussy babe. “Widya.”