Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  “Come quickly!” I say to him as I swim past his perch—a little running joke he rewards with the usual frown. “There’s someone at the airlock,” I continue.

  “Funny,” he says. But his tone suggests he doesn’t think it’s funny.

  “Permission to let zir aboard?”

  “Of course,” KrunZo says with a barely perceptible wave of a forelimb. “It’s bad luck to ignore impossible things that cannot be happening.”

  I choose to perceive only the permission and ignore the sarcasm. The airlock cycles, and in floats... something. It’s small for a sapient, a little smaller than me and maybe a third the size of the other crew members. It looks like a mammal, one of those fluffy little pets from Earth that are all the rage? A kitty? Except. It’s been a while since I was near Earth, but I’m pretty sure kitties don’t have eight legs. And I also suspect they can’t survive in vacuum. And their eyes aren’t vast purple oceans of intelligence and love.

  Those eyes spark something in me I haven’t felt in lifetimes. Something I’ve been missing.

  “What are you?” I blurt out, like some kind of mollusk who’s never left the shell. “And how are you? I mean, how did you get here?”

  The ship AI’s security and medical protocols finish scanning the airlock’s contents, the various scanner beams and decontamination flashers cause a rippling blue-green light show to dance across white fur and ocean-gray walls, almost like a sunset back home. Then the inner airlock door hisses open.

  The octo-cat doesn’t say a word, just rams zir head right into me and nuzzles, purring softly. I feel like I could almost understand the purring, if the frequencies ze used were just slightly more... cerulean? But I don’t need to understand it because I feel soothed by it, rocked in a gentle current that’s almost like the warm waters of...

  Without meaning to I reach one tentacle up to just stroke the creature’s fur.

  It’s still cold.

  “Now hold on a second,” I say, pulling back and vibrating myself into a more alert state just as Quonka’s shiny horn pops into view.

  Technically Quonka is the ship’s doctor, but her species’ calming pheromone secretions make her a useful asset in brokering deals. She also tries to be around when we get boarded by ISTO, which is more and more frequently.

  The creature visibly relaxes as Quonka enters. “Who is your new friend, Astrill?” she asks. Anyone else on the ship would be mocking, but Quonka sounds sincere.

  “I am...” the kitty thing says, looking around as if searching for the answer. “...just a traveler.”

  “Um, no,” Quonka says, horn glinting and hair tumbling as she shakes her pretty head. “One does not just bump into random travelers in the vastness of space. Especially not travelers without space suits or supplies. The odds are, well, astronomical. And if we had just bumped into you somehow, at these speeds, the impact would have turned you into a splat on the hull—or into shards of meaty ice, since you ought to be frozen solid.”

  The kitty thing backpedals in the air, all eight legs working, until zir tail touches the bulkhead and wraps itself around a handhold there. Prehensile tail. Do cats have those? The tail almost seems to lengthen as it grabs.

  “At least tell us your name,” I say.

  But again the thing looks around like this is a really hard question, zir violet eyes flicking back and forth. “Call me... Ennesta,” ze finally says.

  “Okay, Ennesta,” Quonka says, reaching one three-fingered hand out in greeting. “That is a start.”

  But Ennesta doesn’t seem to like that gesture. Ze launches off the hatch and into my tentacles, sending us both spinning.

  As we spin, I see another new visitor in the area outside the airlock room. Jorusz is here, and as always he brings his aura of cold-blooded menace. Jorusz is like an anti-chameleon; he always uses his metachrosis to clash as much as possible, and therefore right now he’s an angry bright orange-red.

  “Let me question it,” says Jorusz. “It’s probably from ISTO.”

  “Ennesta does not look like an Intra-Stellar Trade Organization agent,” Quonka says, head tilted.

  “And Ennesta isn’t an ‘it,’” I add, trying to prize Ennesta far enough away from me to look at zir. “Hey, are you—” Ennesta looks up, huge eyes wielded like a weapon. “Does your species have gender?”

  Ennesta looks around at the three sapients in the small space like choosing from a menu. “Female?” she answers, but it sounds like a guess.

  “That was convincing,” Jorusz hisses, rolling one eye while keeping the other fixed on Ennesta.

  In the end, the matter is settled by KrunZo, who apparently found the commotion interesting enough to leave the bridge. He comes barreling in and almost crushes me and Ennesta (by now three of her four pairs of limbs are wrapped around me), but Quonka catches one of KrunZo’s forelimbs and swings him into a relatively stationary position.

  “Are you a spy?” KrunZo demands.

  Ennesta manages to squeak out a ‘no’.

  “Then welcome aboard,” the captain says. “And Jorusz? Pull yourself together. You really getting bent out of shape over this slip of fluff?”

  Jorusz flushes an even more glaring orange, and for a moment I fear he’s about to challenge the captain. But a moment later he skitters off, muttering so low that only I can hear him. “Slip of fluff that can live in space. That shit ain’t right.”

  He’s right, of course. So says my brain, at least, despite—or even because of—how the newcomer’s purring tugs at the rest of me like a syzygetic tide.

  #

  Ennesta stays. The ship has empty cabins, but she commandeers mine, climbing into my hammock and leaving me to choose whether or not to join. I’m torn, so torn.

  Her presence on the ship is suspicious. And it feels disloyal to Zaraell...

  But the sting of Zaraell’s last message and the stingless absence of her tentacles are wounds that Ennesta’s eight furry limbs staunch to a surprising degree. I give in, and, wrapped in her desperate embrace, I sleep better than I have in many lunar tides.

  But Jorusz does not pull himself together. Well before my next shift, his vibrations cut through Ennesta’s purring like a klaxon. Astrill, report to the bridge, Jorusz whispers. Don’t bring the hairball.

  Jorusz is a deceptively mellow mottled teal shade when I get there, strapped in to the comms chair rather than his normal pilot’s station. He points to the screen as I arrive, then switches the display to holo. A life-sized Ennesta springs into the air, slowly rotating like a showroom model. “I found it,” he says, slapping one hand through the holo image for emphasis.

  “Found what?” I croak. It’s too early for riddles.

  “I found Ennesta’s species. If that is her real name. She’s a toyopop.” He says it like a dirty word.

  “So?”

  “So,” Jorusz says, rolling his bulbous eyes, “it took me forever to find this out, and it’s a miracle I did at all, and you know why? Toyopops aren’t sentients. They can’t even talk. They’re pets engineered by the Argotenkers for their deep space workers.”

  That wakes me up. A tingling chill rolls from my beak to my suckers like the ghost of a purr. “Wait, so...?”

  “So she’s not what she appears.”

  And then, of course, because we are talking about her, there she is, a silent presence that we nonetheless notice right away. “Oh, hi,” I say, waving a couple of tentacles feebly. I feel tossed like flotsam in a storm. All I really know about Ennesta is how comforting I find her. What if she really is a spy? What will Jorusz do to her if she is? What will he do to her to find out whether she is?

  “I missed you,” she says, but her eyes are glued to the larger-than-life holographic version of herself as it rotates slowly in the silence. Its ears are different than hers, longer and thinner, and its paws look different too, less fingery.

  Ennesta—the real Ennesta—looks from the holo to me with a question in her eyes that borders on accusation.


  The InstaComm chooses that moment to ding, a message from the Tro’o scrolling onto the screen. Ennesta screams for about a millisecond before turning it into a yelp, while something like a shudder roils down her long body, making her look for a moment less than fully solid, like a thing about to explode.

  A fresh message sphere plops out into the net.

  “We’ll finish this conversation later,” Jorusz hisses, turning to the screen. He grabs the sphere and spins it to me. “Make yourself useful and take this to stasis.”

  Ennesta is looking around the space in a sort of panic. One of her hands darts out toward the sphere as if to intercept it before it gets to me, but she pulls back.

  “Aye-aye, captain,” I say sarcastically—Jorusz, as pilot, does not outrank me—but I wrap a tentacle around the sphere anyway, grateful for any excuse to get out of there.

  Ennesta’s eyes burn into me as I grab the sphere, and her mouth opens as if to say something. I wait for a beat, but her words don’t come, and the terror in her eyes mutates into something more like despair. “You got something to say to me?” I ask, harsher than I mean to.

  Ennesta dips her furry chin.

  Her big sad eyes follow me all the way down to the stasis chamber, and if I go back to my hammock they’ll just follow me there, too. And then we’ll have to talk, and after talking is when folks usually start leaving. And I’m not ready to be left, not so soon.

  So I take the fresh sphere to the ship’s smallest stasis chamber, open the door, and slot it into the new racks we installed in there, next to the scant half-dozen others we were able to buy. Then I head to the engine room to get an early start on the cycle’s routine maintenance.

  I see Ennesta lingering in front of the stasis chamber, her eyes darting shiftily between the chamber and myself.

  #

  We start burning to slow our way to the Tro’o rendezvous, so gravity returns to the ship. Jorusz and Quonka are relieved, and they start the usual chatter about stretching their bones—I don’t really understand bones, but I guess gravity is good for them. KrunZo has bones and an exoskeleton, because evolution wasn’t messing around on his home planet, but though he loves planetary gravity, he hates the ship’s gravity more than anyone. I can hear his complaining loud and clear even over the roar of the decelerating star drive.

  According to the info on toyopops that Jorusz dug up, Ennesta, as a standard-issue mammal, has bones too. But I have my doubts. Sometimes the way she curls up in my hammock makes her seem more sinuous than should be possible for something with a spine.

  Despite almost constant togetherness, I still don’t know much about our new passenger. Though I’ve found myself telling her all about Zaraell and my journey out into the black, she won’t tell me where she came from, how she came to be floating in space, or how she survived floating in space. What she does do is listen, and purr, and on the rare occasion she speaks, it’s with a surprising depth.

  When Ennesta’s not trying to weld herself to me—which I admit, I enjoy more and more—no one can find her.

  I could find her, of course. I can feel and sort through every vibration on this ship when I wish. I don’t look for her at first because, well, I didn’t work as hard as I have for my whole damn career on politely ignoring my crewmates’ vibrations to violate Ennesta’s privacy.

  Still. The computer logs Jorusz shows me are suspicious. Someone’s been scouring the star charts. For what? We can’t tell. But it’s happening during the times when Ennesta’s unaccounted for.

  So okay, I listen for her. I pick up Quonka singing to herself in her cabin and KrunZo barking something to Jorusz, who’s climbing his way to the bridge, ignoring the ladder in favor of just suckering up the wall. With all those sounds accounted for, and the hum of the ship’s star drive, whatever’s left must be Ennesta. There isn’t anything left, not at first.

  And then I hear a whispered voice command in one of the ship’s unused cabins: “One quadrant X-ward,” it says. “Systems with F2V stars.”

  What is she looking for?

  Ennesta is quiet, but I can be quieter still, even in the ship’s increasing gravity. I slink up to the cabin’s open door before she knows I’m there, and I see...

  I’m not sure what I’m seeing. The creature using the computer terminal is clearly Ennesta—it’s all covered in white fur, and it still has eight limbs—but none of them are right. The topmost pair has dexterous six-fingered hands instead of paws, and the middle two pairs have shrunk to nubs, while the bottom have elongated into wobbly-looking legs that boost Ennesta high enough to see the computer’s screen.

  A gasp escapes my beak.

  Ennesta turns so fast her face looks blurry. She pulls her front hands off the controls even as they start morphing back into paws. She shrinks as her legs even out.

  “What are you?”

  Ennesta shakes her head.

  “Well, you’re clearly not a toyopop. You lied to us,” I say, and it’s all I can do not to say You lied to me. The hurt I feel registers as an actual ache in my second heart. Figures, I think. You start to care about someone; you get hurt.

  “No,” Ennesta says. She walks toward me on her hind legs, unsteadily, other limbs wiggling awkwardly, and it occurs to me that not only is this the first time I’ve seen her navigate in gravity, it also looks like the first time she’s ever tried it. Or at least the first time in her current form. “I just haven’t told you things.” All of her top six arms are held out placatingly.

  “This whole body you’re in is a lie. What do you even look like, really?”

  “I... can’t show you.” Ennesta’s face looks as sad as only a genetically engineered pet can look. Except there is real intelligence behind those eyes; intelligence and sorrow.

  “Of course not,” I say, tentacles fluttering in frustration. “Look, Jorusz thinks you’re a spy for ISTO. I don’t want to believe him, but. What is it you’re looking for in our star charts? Why can’t you—or won’t you—tell us anything about yourself? Where you came from? What species you are? Anything?”

  Ennesta is close enough to touch me, but she doesn’t. She turns over some of her paws and looks at them as if for the first time, then flings them out in a gesture of raw hopelessness. “I don’t know!”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Ennesta slumps onto the deck like a shipwreck hitting the ocean floor. “I don’t know, not any of the answers. I don’t know what I am or where I came from or what I’m supposed to look like. I’ve never seen one of me before—not after metamorphosis, anyway.”

  “Okay...” I say. “So you’re a shapeshifter.”

  She nods.

  “But you don’t know what your natural form is.”

  “I’ve never seen it. I’ve always just been—”

  “Been what?”

  And she hesitates, then sighs and starts again. “I haven’t ever lived long enough to find out what I am.”

  No kidding, I think, somewhat bitterly. Who has?

  “I’d seen these toyopop things in previous lives, and everyone treated them with kindness. It seemed like a good thing to be...” She shrugs two sets of her fluffy arms. “I didn’t realize they were pets.”

  I laugh, despite it all. “And the star charts? What’s that about? Just what are you looking for?”

  “Home.”

  That little word hits me hard, echoing through an empty place inside me: a coral house with no one home. Gravity, who isn’t looking for a place to hang that word on?

  “Okay,” I say. “It’ll be all right. Come on, let’s tell the others. I bet Quonka will even help you look.” I extend a tentacle to Ennesta, who places one paw in it and stands on two legs.

  She takes a few wobbly steps, then lets go of me and drops to all eight legs. “Hold on,” she says. She makes a couple circles on all eight, tripping herself a few times. Finally she bends her spine in a way that doesn’t look anatomically possible and ambulates on six of the legs, leaving the top
two to function as arms. “Oh, that’s much better,” she says.

  It looks completely unnatural.

  “How do real toyopops walk?” I ask.

  “They use all eight,” she admits. “But I can’t get the hang of it, and since my cover is blown anyway...” She shrugs with the top two limbs.

  “Do you need all of them? May as well drop the middle two pairs.”

  “Do you need all of yours?” She elongates a finger to gently stroke one of my tentacles, and then I can’t speak, all I can do is wait for the electric thrill to pass through my whole body, from beak to cloaca. A shockingly erotic thrum lingers there, and in the sensitive inner curve of the tentacle where Ennesta’s paw still explores.

  This is madness. Am I really attracted to this creature in this false and somewhat ridiculous body, about whom I still know almost nothing?

  Yes, I am.

  “I can certainly use them all in interesting ways, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say when my voice returns, only a little quaver in it. “But, see, I’m not a shapeshifter. Mine aren’t optional.”

  Ennesta drops her finger, which is a true tragedy. She looks at her body, her limbs, as if for the first time, standing on the rear ones to hug herself around the middle with the second and third pairs. “I like them,” she finally says. “They aren’t very practical, but they feel like a part of me. Even if they do trip me up sometimes.” She wiggles them suggestively. “Of course, I could be something else if you wanted.”

  Madness or not, I give in, standing on six tentacles to match limbs six for six with Ennesta’s in a slow embrace. “I like you just how you are,” I say, and we go from there, and before long neither of us can say how many limbs we have, only that we need all of them to properly explore and pleasure each other.