This it so desired. And this it needed.
Kira shouted into the darkness as she strained against the Maw, strained against it with mind, body, and Seed. She pitted her own rage and hate against the monster, ravaging the flesh around her with the full force of her desperate desire, fighting like an animal trapped in the clamping jaw of its predator.
Her attempts accomplished nothing. Before the Maw, her anger was a candle compared to a volcano. Her hate was a scream lost in a battering tempest.
The incomprehensible might of the Maw confined her. Constrained her. Blinded her. Every effort it countered. Every strength it matched and overmatched. The Seed was melting around her, dissipating atom by atom as it joined with the Maw. And the harder she fought, the faster the xeno slipped away.
As the Maw neared bare skin—her actual skin, not that of the Seed—Kira realized she had run out of time. If she didn’t act, and now, everything she had done would have been for nothing.
In a frenzy of fresh panic, she felt for the controls of the Casaba-Howitzer with what was left of the Seed. There. The buttons were hard and square under the touch of the xeno’s tendrils.
Kira began to punch in the activation code.
And then … She lost the tendrils. They went slack and flowed like water into encroaching darkness. Flesh rejoining flesh, and with it her only hope of salvation.
She had failed. Totally and utterly. And she had handed their greatest enemy what might have been humanity’s only chance of victory.
Kira’s anger burned even brighter, but it was a futile, hopeless anger. Then the last few molecules of the xeno sublimed, and the substance of the Maw collapsed in on her, hot, bloody, and grasping.
5.
Kira screamed.
The fibers of the Maw were tearing her apart. Skin, muscles, organs, bones, all of it. Her body was being ripped away, shredded like an empty suit of clothes.
The Seed still permeated her, and it finally began to resist the Maw with serious intent, attempting to protect her while also melding with its long-lost flesh. They were contradictory urges, though, and even if the Seed had been solely focused on her defense, there was too little of it left to fend off the might of the Maw.
The helplessness that Kira felt was complete. So, too, was her sense of defeat. The all-consuming agony—both her own and the Maw’s—paled in comparison. She could have borne any imaginable pain if the cause were justified, but in defeat, the offense to her flesh was a thousandfold worse.
It was wrong. All of it wrong. Alan’s death and those of her other teammates, the attack on the Extenuating Circumstances and the creation of the Maw, the thousands upon thousands of sentient beings—human, Jelly, and nightmare alike—who had died in the ten and a half months of fighting. All that pain and suffering, and for what? Wrong. Worst of all, the pattern of the Seed would end up so twisted and perverted that its legacy—and by extension hers—would be one of death, destruction, and suffering.
Anger turned to sorrow. There was little of her left now; Kira didn’t know how much longer she would retain consciousness. A few seconds. Maybe less.
Her mind flashed to Falconi and their night together. The salted taste of his skin. The feel of his body pressed against her own. His warmth inside her. Those moments had been the last normal, intimate experience she would share with another person.
She saw the muscles of his back flexing beneath her hands, and behind him, sitting on the console desk, the gnarled bonsai tree—the only bit of living green left on the Wallfish. It hadn’t been there, though, had it?…
Green. The sight reminded her of the gardens of Weyland, so full of life, fragrant, fragile, precious beyond description.
Then, at the very end, Kira surrendered. She accepted her defeat and abandoned her anger. There was no longer any point in fighting. Besides, she understood the Maw’s pain and the reasons for its rage. They were, at their heart, not so different from her own.
If she could have wept, she would have. And in her extremis, at the very limits of her existence, a flush of warmth suffused Kira, calming, cleansing—transformative in its redemptive purity.
I forgive you, she said. And instead of rejecting the Maw, she embraced it, opening herself and welcoming it into her.
A shift.…
Where the fibers of the Maw touched her—disassembling her flesh with ruthless intent—there was a pause in motion. A cessation of activity. And then Kira felt the strangest thing: instead of the Seed flowing into the Maw, now the Maw began to flow into the Seed, joining with it, becoming it.
Kira accepted the influx of material, drawing it to herself like a child to her bosom. Her pain subsided, along with that of the tissue she had gained hold over. As her reach spread, her sense of self expanded, and with it came a breadth of newfound awareness, like a vista opening up before her.
The Maw’s anger doubled and redoubled. The abomination was aware of the change, and its fury knew no bounds. It struck at her with all the might and power contained within its malformed body: smashing her, squeezing her, twisting her, cutting her. But as the Maw’s fractal fibers closed around her, they relaxed into the Seed and fell under Kira’s sway.
The howl that emanated from the Maw’s tortured mind was apocalyptic in its strength, a nova of pure, unconstrained wrath exploding from within its center. The creature convulsed as if with a seizure, but all its maddening could not slow or stop Kira’s progress.
For she was not fighting the nightmare, not anymore; she was allowing it to be what it was, and she was acknowledging its existence and her role in creating it. And through that, she healed the Maw’s agonized flesh.
As her reach grew, Kira felt herself stretching thinner and thinner, fading into the accumulating mass of the Seed. This time, she didn’t hold back. Letting go was the only way she could counter the Maw, so let go she did, once and for all.
A singular clarity consumed Kira’s consciousness. She could not have said who she was nor how she came to be, but she could feel everything. The press of the Maw’s flesh, the sheen of the stars shining upon them, the layers of nearscent wafting about, and enveloping it all, bands of violet radiation that pulsed as if alive.
The mind of the Maw thrashed and struggled with ever-increasing frenzy as the Seed closed in on it, deep within the folds of bloody meat. The greater part of the mountain of flesh belonged to her now, and she devoted as much energy to soothing its many hurts as she did to locating and isolating its brain.
She could feel the nearness of Carr and Qwon’s corrupted consciousness. It was incoherent with frustration, and she knew that—given the chance—the cojoined insanity would spring forth anew and continue to spread suffering throughout the galaxy.
Neither she nor the Seed could allow that to happen.
There. Shards of bone, and a softer flesh between, unlike any other, a dense web of nerves emanating from the grey interior. There. Even at a remove, the force of the thoughts within was enough to make her (and the Seed) quail. She wished she could join herself with the mound of tissue, as she had with Gregorovich, and heal it, but the mind of the Maw was still too strong for her. She would risk losing control of the Seed again.
No. The only solution was a cutting blow.
She stiffened a blade of fibers, drew it back and—
A signal struck her from near one of the planets around the dim, blue-white star. It was a burst of electromagnetic waves, but she heard it as clearly as any voice: a shrill stutter-stop packed with layers of encrypted information.
Deep within her, a jolt of electricity coursed through the circuits of the Casaba-Howitzer. Then a piece of machinery shifted inside the missile with a heavy thud. And with dreadful certainty she knew:
Activation.
There was no time to escape. No time whatsoever.
Alan.
In the darkness, light blossomed.
PART SIX
QUIETUS
…
I’ve seen a greater share of won
ders, vast
And small, than most have done. My peace is made;
My breathing slows. I could not ask for more.
To reach beyond the stuff of day-to-day
Is worth this life of mine. Our kind is meant
To search and seek among the outer bounds,
And when we land upon a distant shore,
To seek another yet farther still. Enough.
The silence grows. My strength has fled, and Sol
Become a faded gleam, and now I wait,
A Viking laid to rest atop his ship.
Though fire won’t send me off, but cold and ice,
And forever shall I drift alone.
No king of old had such a stately bier,
Adorned with metals dark and grey, nor such
A hoard of gems to grace his somber tomb.
I check my straps; I cross my arms, prepare
Myself to once again venture into the
Unknown, content to face my end and pass
Beyond this mortal realm, content to hold
And wait and here to sleep—
To sleep in a sea of stars.
—THE FARTHEST SHORE 48–70
HARROW GLANTZER
CHAPTER I
RECOGNITION
1.
She was.
How, where, and what, she could not say … but she was. The lack of knowledge did not bother her. She existed, and existence was its own satisfaction.
Her awareness was a thin, trembling sensation, as if she were stretched over too much area. She felt insubstantial; a haze of recognition drifting across a darkling sea.
And for a time, that was enough.
Then she noticed the membrane of her self beginning to thicken, slowly at first, but with increasing speed. With it came the question that birthed all questions: Why?
As her flesh continued to solidify, her thoughts also grew stronger, more coherent. Still, confusion dominated. What was happening? Was she supposed to know? Where was she? Was where something real or something she had imagined?
The shock of connecting nerves caused her a stab of pain, sharp-edged as the light that shone upon her. For there was light now, from many sources: cold sparks set in black and a great blazing sphere that burned without end.
More shocks followed, and even thought failed before the barrage of pain. Throughout, she continued to increase in size. Gathering. Coalescing into being.
A memory returned to her, and with it, the memory of memories: Sitting in third-year anatomy class, listening to the damn pseudo-intelligence drone on about the internal structure of the pancreas. Looking at the glistening red hair of the undergraduate two rows ahead of him …
What did it mean? Wh—
More memories: Chasing Isthah through rows of tomato plants in the greenhouse behind their hab-dome … then diving past her co-forms toward the Abyssal Plain, swirling around the overgrown lamp lines with the gasping beaks … arguing with his uncle who didn’t want him to join the UMC, while she sat for entrance exams with the Lapsang Corp. and entered the Nest of Transference before assuming her new form and took the oath of fealty by light of Epsilon Indi on concertina racing forms howsmat double-shot clasp four-point verification nearscent heresy with the swirling exhaust of—
Had she/he/it a mouth, they would have screamed. All sense of identity vanished within the tsunami of images, smells, flavors, and feelings. None of it made sense, and every part of it felt like them, was them.
Fear choked her/him/it, and they flailed, lost.
Among the memories, one set was more lucid and organized than the rest—greenery mixed with love and loneliness and long nights spent working on alien planets—and she/he/it clung to it like a lifeline in a storm. From it, they attempted to construct a sense of self.
It wasn’t easy.
Then, from somewhere in the howling confusion, a single word surfaced, and she/he/it heard it spoken in a voice not their own: “Kira.”
… Kira. The name rang like a struck bell. She wrapped herself in it, using it as armor to defend her core, using it as a way to give her/him/it some sense of internal consistency.
Without that consistency, she was no one. Just a collection of disparate urges devoid of meaning or narrative. So she held to the name with a fierce grip, trying to maintain a semblance of individuality amid the ongoing madness. Who Kira might be wasn’t a question she could answer yet, but if nothing else, the name was a fixed point she could center herself on while she tried to figure out how exactly to define herself.
2.
Time progressed in strange fits and starts. She couldn’t tell if moments were passing or eons. Her flesh continued to expand, as if precipitating out of a cloud of vapor, building, bunching, becoming.
Limbs she felt, and organs too. Blistering heat and, in shadows sharp and stark, brittle cold. Her skin thickened in response, forming armor sufficient to protect even the most delicate of tissues.
Her gaze remained turned inward for most of the time. A chorus of competing voices continued to rage through her mind, each fragment struggling for dominance. Sometimes it seemed her name was actually Carr. Other times Qwon. But always her sense of self returned to Kira. That was the one voice loud enough to hold its own with the others—the one voice soothing enough to calm their frenzied howls and ease their distress.
Larger she grew, and then larger still, until at last there was no more material to add to her flesh. Her size was set, although she could change its arrangement at will. Whatever felt wrong or out of place was hers to move or mold as she wished.
Her mind began to settle, and the shape of things began to make more sense. She remembered something of her life on Weyland, long ago. She remembered working as a xenobiologist, and meeting Alan—dear Alan—and then, later, finding the Seed on Adrasteia. And yet, she also remembered being Carr. Julian Aldus Carr, doctor in the UMCN, son of two not-so-loving parents, and avid collector of carved beryl nuts. Likewise she remembered being the Wranaui Qwon, loyal servant of the Knot of Minds, member of the strike-shoal Hfarr, and ravenous eater of the delicious pfennic. But the memories from both Carr and Qwon were hazy, incomplete—overridden by the far more vivid recollections of their time spent joined together in hungry fashion as the Maw.
A shiver ran through her flesh. The Maw … With that thought, more information rushed into her mind, full of pain and anger and the torment of unfulfilled expectations.
How was it she and they were still alive?
3.
At long last, she turned her attention to her surroundings.
She hung in the void, seemingly without motion. No debris surrounded her, no gas or dust or other remnants. She was alone.
Her body was dark and crusted, like the surface of an asteroid. The fibers of the Seed bound her together, but she was more than just the fibers; she was flesh too, soft and vulnerable within.
The eyes she had now grown allowed her to see the bands of magnetic force throughout the system. Visible also was the shimmery haze of the solar wind. The sun that illuminated all was a dim blue-white that reminded her of … she didn’t know, but it felt familiar, nostalgic—though the nostalgia came not from her/Carr/Qwon but from the Seed itself.
She extended her gaze.
Scores of glittering ships populated the system. Some she seemed to recognize. Others were unfamiliar but of a familiar type: vessels belonging to graspers or else to two-forms … or else to the misplaced flesh of the Maw—which was her. She was responsible. And she saw how the flesh of her flesh had resumed attacking the other ships, spreading pain, death, and destruction throughout the system.
She did not understand the situation, not fully, but she knew that this was wrong. So she called to her wayward children, summoning them to her side that she might end the conflict.
Some obeyed. They flew toward her with great banners of flame streaming from their engines, and when they arrived, she clasped them close and healed their hurts, calmed their minds, retur
ned their flesh to whence it came. For she was their mother, and it was her duty to care for them.
Some rebelled. Those she sent parts of herself racing after, and so caught them and chastised them and carried them back to where she hung waiting. None escaped. She did not hate her children for misbehaving. No, rather she felt sorrow for them and sang to them as she eased their fears, their angers, and their many pains. Their agony was so great, she would have wept if she could.
As she corralled her unruly offspring, some of the graspers and the two-forms shot at her sendings with lasers, missiles, and solid projectiles. That would have incurred the wrath of the Maw, but not of her. The attacks bothered her little, for she knew the graspers and the two-forms did not understand. She had no fear of them. Their weapons could not harm what she had become.
Many of the beings’ ships followed as she drew in the leavings of her flesh. They formed a grid in front of her, at what they must have thought was a safe distance. It was not, but she kept that knowledge to herself.
Hundreds of signals emanated from the ships, aimed toward her. The electromagnetic beams were dazzling cones of prismatic energy flashing in her vision, and the sounds and information they carried were like the buzzing of so many mosquitoes.
The display was distracting, and it made thinking harder than it already was. Annoyed, she spoke a single word, using means that every species would understand:
“Wait.”
After that, the signals ceased, leaving her in blessed silence. Satisfied, Kira again turned her focus inward. There was much she still didn’t understand, much that she still needed to make sense of.
4.
Piece by piece, she worked to assemble a coherent picture of recent events. Again she lived the visit to Bughunt. Again the escape from Orsted Station and then the long trip to Cordova and the battle that followed.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Page 90
