Starbound: Eleven Tales of Interstellar Adventure

by SM Reine

  Hsissh's whiskers twitched. In point of fact the werfles had males, females, and females that had matured to Thirds, nursing adults who passed on genetic information through their milk. “Him” and “her” worked well enough for members of the species not in a breeding triad.

  “I’m not calling him an ‘it,’” Noa said, increasing the intensity of the ear scratching. The Newcomers had curiously ineffectual claws; they were short, stubby, and thin. However, Hsissh was discovering they were perfect for grooming without the worry of shedding blood.

  “And he needs a name,” she continued, lowering her head so Hsissh was able to look into her dark eyes. Maybe he was becoming fond of this Newcomer because he didn’t find her general furlessness disturbing. Or maybe it was the color of her skin. It didn’t look as though her fur had sloughed off from illness. It was the same rich brown as the bark of a healthy red nut tree, and twice as smooth.

  “A name,” Noa whispered. “He has to have one.”

  And he did. It was against the rules of The One to communicate with the Newcomers, lest they know they were being scrutinized. Like sub-atomic particles whose behavior changed when observed, research subjects behaved differently when they knew they were being watched. But suddenly he wanted her to know. He concentrated and tugged at the waves that coursed between Noa, Kenji, and himself. “Hsissh,” he sent along the wave. “Hsissh, I am Hsissh.”

  “Hsissccchhh!” said Kenji, the sound erupting not just from his mouth but also his nose.

  Hsissh squeaked in joy and wonder. He’d been told that the Newcomers were incapable of wave riding, but Ish had hypothesized that they were on the verge of it—and Ish was right! The Newcomers were truly an intelligent species!

  “God bless you,” Noa said, eyes set on Hsissh. She nodded. “Fluffy, I think I’ll name him Fluffy.”

  Kenji wiped his nose with a forelimb and touched Hsissh’s fur gingerly with the other. “That is a good name; he’s very soft.”

  Or maybe they weren’t quite so bright.

  The Gathering Place

  In the dark, cavernous space that was the human attic, Hsissh sighed with pleasure. His stomach was filled with fresh rat, and his mouth was still flavored with its blood. Exalting in the feeling of all being right with the world, he rolled onto his back … and all was not right anymore. The attic was made of wood slats that were hard and had splinters that poked through his fur. Rolling back over, he scanned the room. A “box” in the corner caught his eye. The box was filled with faux fur humans used for colder temperatures. Rats enjoyed nesting in it; perhaps he would, too?

  Trundling over, he slid inside, kneaded the soft material with his claws, and curled into a ball. It was very comfortable and, as a plus, smelled like his favorite prey. He closed his eyes. Rain was pattering on the roof and the single attic window. Downstairs, he could hear the family eating, their “silverware” clinking on their “plates.” He still didn’t understand why they used “dinnerware,” but the clinks were pleasant. The sounds, his full belly, and the warmth of the “fur” lulled him into a doze almost immediately. As sometimes happened, his mind slipped slightly from his body and he felt the rain, the cold air outside, and the children and their parents in the dining room below.

  A loud clacking almost woke him. And then he realized the clacking was coming from the wave. More specifically, from an aquatic organism not as tall as Hsissh’s shoulder, ovoid, with a brilliant green, luminescent exoskeleton to protect it from the pressure of the ice-crusted oceans of the moon it evolved on seventeen billion light years away. It was Shissh, snapping two pincers at the front of her carapace, sending her consciousness to interrupt his nap and heckle him for not slipping out of his body. He almost woke up just to spite her; but seeing her, even in this new form, caused his body to release a flood of bonding hormones. He purred with familial love. Did she still feel the bond in that hard, cold shell? Did she still think of Third—the only member of their three parents whose werfle body had been inhabited by The One?

  Shissh spoke into his mind. “Are you coming to The Gathering … Fluffy?”

  Betrayed by familial love. He never should have told her that name. “No, of course not. Go away and let me sleep.” He tried to burrow deeper into the furs.

  Shissh clicked her pincers and waved her eye stalks. “If you want to keep your warm human nest, you’d better come now. Misch is pushing for a fourth plague and—”

  A vision of Noa’s eyes dulled by death permeated Hsissh’s dream. Hsissh sent his thoughts into The Gathering before Shissh had finished.

  Shissh’s crustacean dream-self emerged beside him, eye stalks pointed in his direction. “Mighty fast entrance, Hsissh.”

  “I’ve got a good thing going,” Hsissh grumbled, looking out at The Gathering. It was held in a cavern with an opening directly above that let in the sparkle of the stars—but not the glow of the time gate or human satellites. The cavern had been destroyed thousands of cycles ago, and this was only the memory of a memory that The One all shared. It was crowded with dream versions of The One. Most were in the form of werfles, but there were exotic creatures from several dozen worlds scattered among them.

  “I’ve been to Earth!” one of The One’s consciousnesses roared. It was Misch. He wore the form of a “cat,” one of the few species on the human home world that was a compatible host and could tolerate living in close quarters with humans. The One had tried to inhabit humans; it didn’t work. Human bodies rebelled and were inevitably drugged for “schizophrenia” and often “institutionalized.” But cats were easy enough to possess. Pacing on his four feet, Misch said, “The humans have no fur, no claws, no speed, and no natural armor. They can’t see in the dark, and they are more ignorant of the waves than a cat … and I can tell you, cats are short on brains.”

  Hsissh’s whiskers twitched. His host species, the werfle, weren’t particularly “long on brains” either, but The One outsourced their big thinking to the collective consciousness of the waves.

  Swishing his feline tail, Misch declared, “They have stripped and poisoned their home world of natural resources to make up for their inadequacies. Introduce the Fourth Plague before it happens here!”

  Hsissh had seen the results of the Third Plague in holos with Noa. He had seen orphaned human children too weak to defend themselves from rats feasting on their flesh. Hsissh’s two hearts beat faster as he stretched his mind out to all who were in The Gathering. “But they are wave aware!”

  He felt the focus of the room shift to him.

  “Impossible!”

  Misch sat down and swished his tail. “Hsissh, what are you doing here?”

  Someone else said, “Shouldn’t you be napping?”

  A member of The One, wearing the same species host as Hsissh, stood up on her hind legs. “We know the humans don’t use waves.”

  Ish, wearing a werfle body, said, “They do.”

  There were hisses and grumbles among The One.

  Hopping up and down with the excitement of his own recent epiphany, Hsissh explained. “The circular metal devices affixed to the sides of their skulls enable humans to talk mind-to-mind. Every human with the metal implant has nanos—tiny machines—in their brains. They are awakened in later adolescence.” Noa was too young, but her “data port” and “neural interface” had been checked by a “physician” at her yearly “checkup.” She’d taken Hsissh to the visit as a “security blanket.” A bit of the memory of the enclosed doctor’s exam room slipped into the wave and some of the werfles hissed in fear. Hsissh rushed on. “The nanos turn their thoughts to waves, and allow them to interface mind-to-mind via light beams, radio, and microwaves—they call it ‘the ethernet.’”

  Misch’s mind hissed, “Primitive and barbaric! Even a lizzar can hear and see, and a “nano interface” is not much better!”

  Hsissh’s chest tightened, and he couldn’t help thinking of rats feasting on Noa’s flesh.

  “But they are wave aware!” Ish said.
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br />   At Ish’s opening, Hsissh said, “Yes, yes! They know that all matter is made of waves.” Hsissh shared the memory of a lesson he’d studied with Noa, a history of physics from Isaac Newton to the current ethernet age. Humans were aware of the subatomic world, but they couldn’t feel it and barely used it; they hadn’t found a way to do so practically. “But they are on the verge!” Hsissh said, as his memory of the holo documentary ended. “Lizzars aren’t wave aware! Nor were the creatures we eradicated at the end of the last Epoch.”

  Shissh clacked, “Interesting … ” very slowly, the way she did when Hsissh had said something stupid.

  There was a collective silence from The One.

  And then a thought, so soft he almost missed it, entered his consciousness. “Hsissh’s Third died the true death ten cycles ago, it’s left him addled.”

  From the collective consciousness rose an unmistakable feeling of pity. In Noa’s attic, his physical body shivered … he’d failed.

  Ish stood on his back four hind limbs and waved his paws. “The humans, as they call themselves, are wave aware—in the truest sense of the word!”

  Thoughts rose in The Gathering like swirling mist.

  Misch swished his tail. “I know nothing of this!”

  “Because you haven’t been to their places of worship,” Ish said. “It is my understanding that on their home world the practice is all but forgotten; it was one of the reasons we have humans on our planet. The ones here were seeking enlightenment and to escape the material, non-wave focused cultures of Earth.”

  “Worship?” the question rose from Hsissh and all in attendance.

  Ish clasped his top two claw pairs behind his back and strode through the Gathering Place on his back four legs. His middle pair of paws waved. “They enter states of profound meditation in group settings.”

  Misch hissed. “They don’t feel the waves!”

  Ish bowed his head, and said, “They feel closer to ‘God’ in their meditative state, a being they believe is responsible for all creation and is all powerful. That is the waves from which all matter is derived, obviously.” Stopping his pacing, he raised his head and faced the crowd. “They have a concept of the oneness of everything.”

  There were soft noises of awe from around the cavern.

  “Humans brought the rats,” someone else thought. “They’re everywhere.”

  Nearly everyone in attendance licked their lips; even Misch’s feline form did. “We should reward them for that,” said another werfle.

  Clacking her pincers, Shissh drew the audience’s attention. “If they could join the waves, they could become useful allies.”

  “Allies against whom?” Misch cried.

  “You know it is only a matter of time!” Shissh snapped.

  Misch’s cat form’s fur rose.

  A member of The Gathering wearing a werfle host said, “In all probability, we will discover an enemy—or they will discover us. The universe is predator and prey.”

  “And symbiosis!” Shissh declared.

  “Humans—the Newcomers—believe in symbiosis,” Hsissh said, hopping up onto his back two pairs of paws. “They don’t eat all the species they meet or even the ones they keep!”

  Misch’s cat-eyes narrowed to slits and he hissed. “But they do neuter them—”

  Before Hsissh could inquire of the meaning of “neuter,” the crowd erupted, and for a moment his mind was a whirl with so many thoughts he could scarcely hear his own.

  At last, the tide began to subside, and a chorus rose in the cavern. “We will give the Newcomers one hundred cycles to join The One in the waves.”

  Hsissh felt his physical body relax and uncoil from the knot he’d tied himself in. The One were of one mind after the chorus … One hundred cycles around the sun … certainly in that time humans would evolve to feel waves, if they were already on the verge?

  One by one, all the consciousnesses began slipping away into other dreams, and Hsissh found himself alone with Ish, Misch, and Shissh.

  Licking a paw, Misch said, “They haven’t found a way to ride the waves in the last four million years. They won’t figure it out in a hundred years more.”

  “What has you in a snit?” said Shissh.

  “Hmpf,” said Ish, “You only say that because you’ve studied the ones on Earth. They are debauched and lazy.”

  Flattening his ears and hissing, Misch faded from view. Ish turned to Hsissh. “Next time, let me do the talking,” the scholar said, and then he disappeared, too. Only Hsissh and his luminescent, crustacean once-kin were left. He felt a lump in his stomach; at the same time, he felt a warmth in his hearts. Shissh had chosen the crustacean form because it was not social, and did not mourn the departure of others of its kind. Still, because she had stayed, Hsissh felt that she must still care about him.

  Combing his whiskers with his claws, Hsissh asked, “Do you really think we might become prey to something else?” It was difficult to imagine the “else.” The One could mutate the genomes of viruses, bacteria, and fungi by exciting the waves within them. Whenever they had a species that became too problematic, it was easy enough to cull or eradicate them with a specially mutated pathogen. They’d culled the humans—and debated whether or not to cull the rats—but their primary hosts preferred to keep the rats plentiful, fat, and delicious.

  Shissh’s eye stalks swept toward him. “The species I inhabit now—they are like the cats of Earth—they can play host to wave riding beings, but they haven’t learned to leave their bodies … not yet.”

  Hsissh smoothed his whiskers meditatively. Shissh had told him this much before.

  Shissh continued, “There are rumors among this species ... stories of dark waters spreading on distant moons, wiping out all the creatures in the oceans and the land. Since the species I inhabit does not travel, I think there may have been other wave riding species that have brought their stories with them.”

  Hsissh’s thoughts drifted to Noa. She dreamed aloud of traveling to distant moons when she snuggled with Hsissh at night … He looked through the opening in the ceiling. It was close to her bedtime now.

  Shissh clicked softly, “I believe the humans might make a good ally, Hsissh … but I worry about you living among them. You should have left your body and its grief over Third’s death. Living with humans, you’re just setting yourself up for more pain.” Her pincers clicked so fast they became a song. “You’re much too sentimental to become attached to creatures that die.”

  Hsissh felt his frame tighten. “I just stay with them for their beds,” he replied.

  “Liar,” said Shissh.

  Hsissh’s consciousness snapped back into his body. He found himself shivering despite the faux furs and bolted from the box. Shissh was right, he was too attached to Noa and her family. He had originally stayed for the rats in the attic, the beds, and out of curiosity; but he liked them, and they would die. His consciousness was over a thousand years old … Noa might live to be three hundred; but if a Fourth Plague came, even the humans’ nanos and antibiotics wouldn’t save them.

  The sound of rain on the roof became louder, as though it were a command, “Run, Hsissh, run …” Hsissh obeyed. Instead of darting down the trapdoor that led to the hallway, he skittered over to the window. He wasn’t strong enough by the laws of Newtonian physics to move the latch, but he focused the waves inside his body to give his muscles more power. The latch gave, the window opened, and he slithered out into the rainy night. Sliding down the slope of the roof, he swung over the edge and jumped into the ivy that grew up the side of the house. He was halfway down when he heard a creak of a window opening. Noa’s voice rose above the raindrops. “Fluffy!”

  Hsissh hesitated, but then, shaking himself, leaped down into the garden. He slunk into the low, alien vegetation around the home that was lit by electric spotlights. Noa’s voice rose in pitch. “Fluffy!”

  He drew to a halt, his two hearts constricting, his claws sinking into the mud. He heard Mom say, “N
oa, it’s time for bed,” and Noa respond, “But Mom—”

  Mom said, “No buts!” and then Hsissh heard the window bang shut. Bowing his head, Hsissh wove through the plants toward the forest beyond. He’d gone only a few hundred body lengths when he heard the window creak and then bang closed. He increased his speed. He’d just traded the spotlights for the shade of the forest when he heard Noa’s voice again, this time as soft as her paws in his fur. “Fluffy?”

  He stopped. The bipedal steps hesitated. “Fluffy, are you lost?” From the sound of her voice, he could tell she was not ten body lengths behind. He heard a sound like branches clacking and realized it was Noa’s teeth snapping together. The cold mud beneath him seemed to wrap around his claws and hold him immobilized. An enormous drop of frigid water fell from a tree and landed squarely on his nose. The rest of him was well protected, but Noa ...

  “Fluffy?” Noa cried.

  Hsissh turned around and slid through the underbrush. He found Noa at the trees’ edge in a pair of “slippers” and thin “pajamas.” Soaked and shivering, she was hugging her body. She should have gone home, but instead she was crying his name.

  Noa was trying to save him—again. It was foolish. She could suffer hypothermia, or get lost and injured. Her parents might not even be aware she’d gone missing until dawn; then, it might be too late. He crawled out of the undergrowth. Noa’s eyes widened at the sight of him, and she smiled as he hopped forward. Scooping him up, she touched her nose to his. “Fluffy, I found you!” Clutching him to her chest, she dashed back toward the house. “I climbed out the window, but it’s too high to get back in,” she whispered. Instead, she went through the front door, into the foyer, and then into the front room where her parents were reading.

  Dad’s voice boomed through the house with such force that the floorboards reverberated. “Noa Sato, were you outside?”