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 become 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.”
And I almost strangle her. But she talks me down by continuing on, showing me that it’s a similar type of control. In another day I think I’ve located my “home center” and know how to program in the coordinates for Trango.
Ennesta and the other grown spheres have synthesized a chemical compound to help adapt my Roptralian physiology to the process, and now she hands me the syringe, big eyes wet with something like tears. “You are as ready as you can be,” she says.
I guess that will have to be good enough. I take the syringe. It’s so light! Another small thing that will change everything. “You don’t have to watch,” I tell her.
“Please don’t leave me,” she whispers in reply.
Then she shakes her head, nuzzles me, reassures me. “I don’t mean that. I know you have to go and I won’t ask you not to just for little me. But... I don’t want you to leave.”
Someone’s always leaving, I think, chiding myself for staying bitter to the bitter end. At least this time it’s me doing the leaving.
I kiss Ennesta, then inject myself.
The wave of vertigo is somehow still a shock. I swoon into Ennesta’s many arms, and she catches me like she was made to do it. I want to tell her that, that and other things. There are words I’m finally ready to say. I open my mouth, but speech is already beyond me, and only a croak leaves my beak.
My brain tastes like paprika spilled on a long-forgotten tidepool. I focus on that, on water, on tides, on Trango.
I remember to breathe, and, even though it’s not part of the process, I start to purr. I focus on the mantra of numbers running through my mind as they merge, programming my soul, Gravity willing.
Vision fades, sounds grow echoey and strange, and my purr degenerates into spasms, but I can still feel the soft fur of my lover’s arms and the silky tears as they splash onto my face like ocean water. Home, I think. This is home.
I want to tell her, but it’s too late.
Maybe in my next life.
***Published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, March 2020
Story notes:
This is the second story I’ve written in this universe. I liked Astrill too much to let zir go!
The promise of afterlives like Heaven is that we are reunited with our loved ones. Usually the idea of reincarnation does not include that promise, because though people may go on, they do so with a blank slate in a new life.
It seems to me that the losses sustained in one life are enough, and it would be a mercy to either reclaim those lost or to forget them. One of the downsides of remembering dozens of past lives in this gigantic universe would be remembering all the loved ones you would have statistically no chance of ever seeing again.
I hold out hope that Astrill and Ennesta will meet again.
The Thing with the Helmets
You couldn’t talk about the Helmets, which looked pretty ordinary displayed in a glass case in the lobby of the Smash Pad, the converted mattress warehouse where we practiced. They sparkled in all the colors of the rainbow, embossed with punny names and covered in glitter like any well-loved derby helmet, and the only hint of the eldritch Thing that happened (which no one would speak of) was a serious dent in the spider-web-patterned one on the bottom row. Well, that and the heavy-duty iron cage welded around the glass of the display case.
When the Thing happened, I was already skating at the Smash Pad basically all the time on the juniors team, and even a self-obsessed high schooler is going to notice when fifteen members of the league all “move away” or get injured or quit derby in the same month (spoiler alert: they died). The Smash Brats lost a lot of good coaches to the Thing with the Helmets.
Still, it was nothing like the rollerbugs.
Let me back up:
#
When I was eight years old my dad looked me up and down and declared that I was getting pudgy and needed a sport to keep me trim. Thanks, Dad, for the eating disorder.
But he’s dead now, so whatever. I guess I have the rollerbugs to thank for that.
First we tried basketball, but I couldn’t catch a ball to save my pathetic life. The same was true for soccer—who’d-a thought catching a ball with your feet wouldn’t be easier than with your hands? I did like kicking the fuck out of the ball, but there was no place for such a one-hit wonder on a team.
I always liked rollerskating, so Mom thought I’d make a great figure-skater. The failure of that one was entirely my own stubbornness—I hated the cold and threw epic tantrums to get out of those classes. As part of my bargain with her I agreed to try ballet. I sort of liked it, but Dad said ballet was for sissies, and as much as I hate to admit it now, at that point I still cared about his opinion. I did my very best impersonation of a bull in a china shop, tripping the other girls whenever I could, stepping on their toes, and even kicking them with my purposely out of control pirouettes. Besides, ballet class was doing nothing good for my budding body dysmorphia. You think ni
ne years old is too young for bulimia? Then you’ve never been to a ballet class.
The ballet studio asked me to leave. Mom wasn’t mad. She was just disappointed. Although (sigh), she wasn’t really that surprised that I’d managed to screw up again.
Finally, like a dream come true, came roller derby. Despite the tights, it was definitely not for sissies. And it was rollerskating, which I was pretty good at. And, though kicking and tripping were against the rules, sending another girl flying across the track with my “pudgy” hips was encouraged. I was in heaven.
#
Eleven years, two broken ankles, and about a million failed diets later, I was a proud blocker for the Smash Sisters. Mom no longer made comments about my weight because my blue hair, tattoo (happy 18th birthday to myself!), and facial piercings bothered her a lot more than the extra seventy pounds of fat and muscle I carried around under them. Dad concern-trolled me all the time, “warning” me about becoming diabetic like Aunt Peg and scowling when I ate cookies or ice cream. When he was home, that is. Which wasn’t much.
It’s funny how you can lose sight of the wider world sometimes. Inside Roll-a-Way rink we were in our own microcosm; music blaring and fans cheering and the yells of players and coaches echoing and whistles screeching and the bark and chatter of wheels on the wood floor were all deafening. A nuclear bomb could have gone off down in the city, and we would have missed it.
As it turns out that’s kind of what happened.
The rollerbugs didn’t set off a nuclear bomb. After all, they intended to live on this shiny blue planet they’d found. But they did not intend to share it with us.
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