In Extremis

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “What do you see?” she asked, nodding at the view with a jerk of her chin. “When you look out there.”

  The Emperor perched on the farthest arm of the couch and considered the vista. What did he see anymore, looking at the stars? Young Kauvauc had seen his future and its endless potential. The naval officer who’d fought his way up the ranks had seen adventure and the record of battles fought and won. The Emperor had seen his demesne, stretching for light years in every direction. Dainty, when he’d been allowed the sight of the night sky, had seen the freedom barred to him, and the decapitation of his life.

  What did this rescued self see, who was all these selves and all the selves to come?

  “I see,” he said at last, “a universe that will go on without me.”

  She twisted on the couch to stare at him.

  “That would be the necessary end of my journey,” the Emperor said. “The spiritual one as well as the physical. I have learned that the worlds do not revolve around one Emperor Kauvauc, called Dainty as well as Exalted, and that in my attempts to make them do so, I have left behind a great deal of wreckage. And for what?” He shook his human head, feeling the fringe of his hair brush his far more sensitive throat. “I suspect Andrea would tell me this is some god’s plan, but I find that idea unnerving.”

  “Why?” Laniis asked, her voice low.

  “It implies a far higher power is in control of everything.” The Emperor managed a smile. “Knowing me, do you think I should find that notion comfortable?”

  “No.” She bared her teeth and looked away.

  “Lieutenant Baker,” the Emperor said, quietly. “Are you done with me?”

  “No.” She rubbed her forehead. “Yes. No. I don’t know. How can I ever be done with you? I never want to see you again, but this…”

  When she didn’t continue, he prodded, “…this?”

  Laniis gestured toward the wall. “This matters to me. This war. What’s happening here. My year in your harem changed my life. It… it ruined me. But I rebuilt myself into something stronger and better, and that person wants to see the same thing happen to this part of space. I want… I want to destroy everything that hurt me and help build a healthy, shining thing to replace it. And that means I’m stuck here in this part of space, fighting this war… with you.”

  “We are on the same side,” the Emperor said, quiet.

  “So you say.” She scrubbed her hands through her hair. “So you say but how can I be sure? I changed for the better but damn it, I was already good. You were the worst scum of the universe. I’m supposed to believe now that you’re a saint?”

  “I am certainly no saint.”

  “Fine. But to go from ‘scum’ to ‘decent person’ is still a jump too far for most people.” She eyed him. “Wings or no wings. Did you think wearing that shape would make me hate you less?”

  “No,” he admitted. “As you seem to have no trouble hating me as an Eldritch. You have a strong will, Laniis Baker.”

  “You still think of me as Khaska.”

  “You are also Khaska. Just as I am also Dainty.”

  That made her flinch. He was glad to have her burning eyes turned from him, and was surprised to discover it was because he did not enjoy seeing her turmoil. “You were only Dainty for a few weeks,” she muttered.

  “Thankfully,” the Emperor said. “As I think suffering what you did for a year would have killed me. You survived something I could not have.”

  Was that shame? Her face was turned away from him, and he could see only part of one eye, one cheek, the edge of her mouth. “You might be surprised what you can survive if the choice is surviving or death.”

  “Maybe. But it’s a long way down from the Queen’s window, and there would have been no guards to stop me.”

  She shuddered. “Don’t. I don’t… I don’t want to imagine it.”

  “You never thought of suicide, Lieutenant,” the Emperor said, quiet. “And yet I contemplated it a day into captivity. Why? What kept you fighting? Breathing?”

  “I… I don’t know.” She slid a hand up one arm, staring at the receding stars. “At first it was because I was convinced I could escape somehow, and that I had to be ready for my opportunity. But I stopped believing I could ever escape, and at that point… I don’t know. Stubbornness? Or maybe I was just too used to living? They say you can get used to anything. Maybe I got used to slavery.”

  “Somehow I doubt someone resigned to slavery could have become the Ambassador’s accomplice so readily.”

  She snorted. “You found out about that, did you.”

  “He is my lover. We talk.”

  The Seersa shook her head. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you. Or even believe in your remorse. But I’m beginning to worry that I’m going to get obsessed with finding evidence of your hidden sociopathy to prove that…”

  “That what?”

  She finally looked at him. “To prove that I live in a world I understand. A predictable one, where things follow the patterns I expect. To prove that… that it’s all right for me to distrust you, and even hate you. That my feelings should always be more important than yours, because I hurt more.” She flushed and hung her head. “I guess I’m not as over this as I think I am.”

  “Perhaps you never will be,” the Emperor said. “I have not suffered as you have, Lieutenant, but I don’t know if I will ever ‘be over’ my scars.” He studied the starfield. “In the past, I had always thought of scars as proud things. Records of duels in which I’d won power and acclaim. I now have scars that shame me.”

  “Is that why you had the piercings stuck to your horn?” When he glanced at her, startled, she said, “Yes, I noticed them. Where do they go, when you change shape?”

  “On my scalp.” He shook his hair forward and felt up along his temple until he touched them. Parting the tresses, he said, “Here, on both my human and Eldritch shapes.”

  He heard the couch cushions crinkling as she slid closer, smelled the warm, furred scent of her body as she bent toward him. “Do you decide that? Where they end up?”

  “No. At least, not that I know of. Perhaps it is a subconscious decision.” The shadow of her hand fell over his face, stopped. “You may touch them, if you wish.”

  Her fingers trailed on his scalp, soft. “You could have thrown them away.”

  “I dare not forget the experience I had in the Worldlord’s harem.” He exhaled with a shudder. “What if you are correct?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What if you’re correct, and I am still the male I was, waiting only for the right stimulus to impel me to my previous acts? What if this is all temporary? Is evil stronger than good?” He looked at his palms. “Is habit stronger than the will to grow?”

  Laniis pulled her hand back as if burnt. “You’re not allowed to doubt your own change of heart.”

  “Why not? You do. You are not the first, nor will you be the last.”

  She swallowed. “Do you really fear it, though? Wouldn’t it be nice to have no conscience again?”

  “No.” It came out without meditation, without pause. “I would lose… I would lose so much. My Perfection, my Treasure, the few real friendships I have accrued, friendships I don’t even understand earning, or if I’ve earned them at all. I would lose this… this luminous sense of the universe as more complex and more interesting than anything I dreamed in my most frenzied imaginings of a world where I need never stop learning. The texture of my world has become unspeakably more rich.” He straightened and met her eyes. “I would lose the truth, and with it reality. What use living then? In a false world created by my own denial and desires? It wouldn’t be real.”

  “What are you?” she breathed.

  “I am…” He trailed off and managed a smile with his so-versatile human mouth, a complex one. “I am Chatcaavan. I hope. I am Who Changes.”

  “Who Changes,” she murmured.

  “It is how the Ambassador taught me,” the Emperor said. “That was
the key.”

  “All this time,” Laniis said to herself, frowning. “I’ve been giving you my memories. But memories are the past, aren’t they. If I really want to affect you, I have to shape your future.”

  “If… that is your aim,” the Emperor said, hesitant. “I had assumed your aim was not to affect me, but to punish me.”

  Her head twitched up.

  “Yes?” he said.

  Her lip curled but she straightened her shoulders and met his eyes without flinching. “Yes. But punishment… it’s not much good if it doesn’t prevent future bad behavior. Is it.”

  “I’m not sure if the aim of punishment is always amendment,” he said. “Punishment can serve other purposes. Issuing a warning. Setting an example. Removing an impediment. Pleasing the punisher. Appeasing the victims.”

  “And this is why I’m not police,” Laniis muttered. “I guess the question I have to ask myself is what do I want more. To punish you… or to make an attempt to secure the future of this quadrant. For the Alliance’s benefit.”

  “Forgive me for the presumption… but you have not seemed more whole, leaving our meetings.” At her skeptical look, he said, “And from your memories, you are committed to positive action, not negative. Am I wrong?”

  “I don’t want you to be. So I guess I should start acting that way.” She swallowed and thrust her hand at him. “There. Go. Take it.”

  “I… beg your pardon?”

  “My pattern,” she said, firm. “You don’t know Seersa yet, do you?”

  “N-no,” he said, eyes wide. “Nor did I assume you would ever share it.”

  “But sharing it would mean something, wouldn’t it?” she insisted. “It would put a piece of me in you. You said the Ambassador taught you with the Eldritch shape. And then Andrea gave you the human form, and while in it you learned something that way too. Maybe these shapes are your vector for new information about what it means to be a good person. And if that’s true… then I’m going to be one of those vectors.” She lifted her head, ears quivering. “That’s power. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, it is, Laniis Baker.”

  “Khaska,” she growled.

  “Also.”

  “So?” Her gaze was a challenge, and it made her beautiful. He wanted to laugh, but helplessly, because the Alliance’s aliens never ceased to amaze him. Had he thought the Chatcaava sufficient challenge? Enough to force him to keep learning? He’d had no idea. There was no growth without exposure to truly alien ideas… and here they were. To be Chatcaava was to Change.

  “Very well,” he said.

  She’d expected some dramatic moment: he would grasp her hand, gasp, have some epiphany maybe. Instead, the slim human on the arm of the sofa started stripping off the sweatshirt. She started to object but his head was already under the collar, so she waited until he’d shucked it off and by then he was already talking. “…you would? If I change with it on, it will foul my wings.”

  “I… uh… of course.” Laniis took the sweatshirt and folded it to give her nervous hands something to do. “I guess you can’t learn a pattern from a non-Chatcaavan form?”

  “If it can be done, I am not capable of it.” The Emperor folded his arms around his knees and bent his head to them. “You may wish to look away. Some find the Change disturbing to witness.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” she said, determined not to flinch.

  He took her word for it, which annoyed her. Why did people she liked doubt she was strong—even Fleet’s psychiatrists!—while this monster believed her when she said she could handle something? She steeled herself in preparation for the sight, but when the Emperor Changed it didn’t bother her. She’d expected him to look like he was melting, but ‘melt’ wasn’t the word that came to mind. ‘Erupt’, maybe. Or ‘pour.’ She was so intent on finding the right metaphor that she didn’t know how long the Emperor had been staring at her, waiting.

  “Ah, sorry.” She offered her hand again. “Now we do it, right?”

  “Yes.” He reached toward her and stopped with his palm hovering over hers. “Because of all the liberties I have taken with you before, I would ask explicit permission to touch you, over and above the permission you have given me to Touch you.”

  “Just… just stop it,” Laniis growled. “Stop being so civilized.”

  His brow ridges rose just enough to express… surprise? Incredulity? ‘Disapproval’ was surely her imagination, because he had no right to disapprove of her, even when she was insulting him.

  No, that was wrong. So wrong she wanted to reach into her own head and pull out whatever demon was riding her. “Excuse me. I’m having trouble with this, and it’s hard not to take it out on you.”

  “I understand. But may I?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  Despite her best effort, she twitched when his talons came to rest on her wrist. His palm didn’t bother her—how had she never noticed that it wasn’t scaled? But her memories of those talons were too vivid. He pretended not to notice, but he also waited for her to relax before closing his eyes to concentrate. It allowed her to stare at him with impunity and wrestle with the strangeness of her willingly sitting across from the Chatcaavan Emperor while he copied her… what, precisely? Her DNA? Her soul? How did this work? Did the Chatcaava even know? And how would she know when he’d finished? He looked so pacific. She didn’t want to know what serenity looked like on his hated face, and that it could almost make him bearable.

  The Emperor gasped, a tiny sound sucked in through his mouth, so small she knew he could have suppressed it and hadn’t. These choices were conscious, surely, to make her trust him, or to signal that he didn’t fear her… or maybe she was overthinking it. Maybe he trusted her. Maybe it was that simple.

  Of course, unlike him, she was trustworthy, so what did he have to lose?

  “Did it work?” she asked.

  “Yes. Shall I…?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded and slid off the couch to stand, hugging his bare chest. And then the process started again, except instead of scales sliding up the hairless body of a human, this was fur gliding over the scaled body of a dragon, and it was far more shocking because the fur was white.

  The Change drained away, leaving a Seersan male, a ridiculous one because he was petite and snowflake white with pitch points. His extravagantly soft fur bent in the air flowing from the overhead vents, like waves of grain rippling in a breeze. He looked enough like her to be a cousin and that made no sense either; the Knife hadn’t.

  His face was subtly pointed, and his eyes large, expressive. He wasn’t handsome, though. He was sweet. It surprised her that it could make her so angry, that he might look so open. Why had she expected anything else, when his human and Eldritch forms also had the same aura of vulnerability?

  He hadn’t moved yet. She wondered how long he would stand there, hugging himself. At last, his ears tilted, one outward, the other slowly forward. The Emperor opened one eye and breathed, hesitant, “Your hearing is… astonishing.”

  His voice had the same timbre, at least, though the pitch had risen a few notes. “I guess I should have thought of that,” she said. “You don’t know any other shapes with directional ears, do you.”

  “I… no.” He reached upward and touched one of them, and the awe on his face was… she should have found it comical. Instead, she felt a fierce rush of… something. She had done that. She had given him the Seersan experience. Had put this look of uncertainty and wonder in his yellow eyes. “They are so fragile! Do they tear?”

  “They can. I’m surprised you didn’t experiment on mine.”

  His flush colored those new ears so vibrant a pink that Laniis almost felt bad. Almost.

  “I can see now why shaving must have distressed you,” he said, his hand dropping to push the fur on his forearm against the grain. “You perceive information through the fur, by how the atmosphere pulls at it.”

  “Maybe,” Laniis said. “The shavi
ng offended me because it was my fur and you had no right to get rid of it.” She thought. “And it made me feel cold. And naked. Fur is like a Fleet slimsuit. It’s a layer between you and everything else, and you get used to having it.”

  “The skin-only shapes appear to be more sensitive to external stimuli,” the Emperor said slowly. “But this coat is… comforting.” He petted his abdomen. “Does it grow too warm?”

  “It can, yes. And it gets long, too, if you’re not careful, and then you need to trim it. Some people fluff out faster than others, though. I was never a quick-undercoater so maybe you’ll be spared.” She watched him, fascinated despite herself. “How much of me is in your pattern? I’m confused at your coloring. And your face.”

  “My face?” He touched his cheeks.

  “You look a lot more like me than the Knife does.”

  “I don’t know,” the Emperor admitted. “There is little modern documentation on the Change, and no science on it that I know of. Perhaps when we reach the Source we will find an expert.” He flexed his fingers and studied their tips. “How do you… ah, I see.” The claws peeped from his fingertips—unlike hers, his were black bone. Laniis thought it dramatic enough, black claws, black gloves, and the white arms, but not enough to merit the stare the Emperor was awarding his hands.

  “What is it? Does it hurt?”

  “No,” he said slowly. Another of those silences as he regarded the gleam of light off bone. “We have to cut our talons if we want to make significant use of tools. If we prefer to fight for power, we must keep them. How different we might have been had we had your hands instead… with which we could have chosen, moment by moment, whether we wanted to build or rend.”

  “I’m not going to feel any sympathy for you,” Laniis warned him. “You chose to keep your talons.”

  “Do you think I want your sympathy?”

  “Why else are you here?” she demanded. “Why would you put yourself through all this if you weren’t looking for forgiveness?”

  He was watching her with an expression she didn’t like. As if she’d walked into a trap. “Do you believe this?”