Star Rebels: Stories of Space Exploration, Alien Races, and Adventure

by Audrey Faye

  “Shhhhh … ” said Mom. “He’ll be fine.”

  One of the church leaders cleared his throat. Noa settled and bowed her head. There was no sound except for Hsissh’s and Ish’s claws on the wooden floor. Ish’s claws were much louder because his young body was hopping up and down.

  “Do you feel it? Do you feel their consciousness rising?” Ish said, spinning in a circle. Ish was older, wiser, and more prone to reflection and study than Hsissh—who was mostly prone to eating and sleeping—but the body Ish inhabited was young and vigorous. It made Hsissh tired just watching his excitement.

  Hsissh didn’t respond. The first few times Hsissh had come to church he’d been excited, too. He’d felt some of the congregation’s minds touch the wave and experienced the same elation he’d felt when his first blind hatchlings had cracked through their shells. But his hatchlings had soon opened their eyes; the humans never left their bodies.

  “No, they’re not,” Hsissh said. “They’ve been doing this for all of their recorded history.” He’d learned that through Noa’s history lessons.

  “Don’t be such a pessimist,” Ish said. He delicately touched his nose to Hsissh’s, but his hind legs continued to hop. “We’re witnessing evolution!”

  Hsissh didn’t agree. Noa had to become a pilot, so she could get off Hsissh’s world and live. He didn’t have Shissh’s worries about spreading black waters, or Ish’s scientific enthusiasm, Hsissh cared only about the human girl who had twice endangered her life trying to save him. He looked at her now, her eyes darting down the aisle to check on him as though he were the kit, not her, and he felt the same rush of feelings he’d felt for his blind hatchlings.

  “Does it matter that they can’t touch the wave?” Hsissh said to Ish. “They are telepathic in their own way.”

  Ish sniffed derisively. “If their satellites go down, or their time gates go offline, they are trapped in their own minds. Light beams, radio, and microwaves … they are as primitive as their speech. Their ethernet is a trap, distracting them from true oneness.”

  Hsissh thought of the minds across the galaxy Noa spoke to. She’d joined a Reserve Fleet Training Corps. It was a group for adolescents who dreamed of joining the Fleet; through them she’d found support for her ambitions and discovered that although her dreams weren’t average for a young girl, they weren’t weird, and she wasn’t a deviant.

  He bowed his head. She had confessed to her friends that the only thing she was worried about was leaving her “pet Fluffy.” His hearts beat painfully at the thought. “Does it matter though?” he whispered. “Maybe they aren’t wave aware, maybe they will never be … but they feel as much as we do.” Even though they’d evolved light years away from one another. Even though they weren’t wave-aware. Perhaps it was because they were creatures that had to raise helpless young communally, too?

  Ish lowered his head and narrowed his eyes at Hsissh, his hindquarters’ furious hopping abruptly coming to a stop. “Are you crazy, Hsissh? Rats have feelings, too … even lizzar do!”

  “But it’s not the same,” Hsissh said. “Rats don’t grieve their dead for decades.” Like I do, he almost said.

  Ish raised his head and put a paw through his whiskers. “Rats don’t live long enough, Hsissh.”

  Hsissh’s body hunched. “We could communicate with the humans if we wanted to, we could even discuss the wave with them; they see its existence—”

  “Through the primitive mirror of their mathematics,” said Ish. “Until they feel it, they can’t know it.”

  “They could still be useful!” Hsissh protested. “They have opposable thumbs and fighting machines!”

  Ish’s whiskers twitched. “Are you worried about Shissh’s dark waters?” He poked Hsissh’s chest with a sharp claw. “I can feel you are not, Hsissh. You’ve become too close to your humans, or that old body of yours has. We cannot announce ourselves to the humans. Announce ourselves, and we would, at least temporarily, lose the upper hand. It would be very inconvenient if they tried to wipe out our host species.”

  “We’re thinking of wiping them out,” Hsissh countered.

  Ish got very still. “Only on this planet, Hsissh. They will still have their sanctuaries on other worlds.” Ish’s eyes bored into Hsissh’s, and then his consciousness did as well. Probing Hsissh’s memories, Ish found the ones where Hsissh tried to talk telepathically to Noa—and succeeded—and then failed due to her mind’s rationalizations.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t succeed in that,” Ish said, the wave crackling with malevolence. “It would ruin my observations and their natural evolution—and you’d be ostracized, if not condemned to have your pattern dissolved.”

  Hsissh swished his tail. “I never tried to tell her I was sentient … I just tried to let her feel that she doesn’t have to worry about me.”

  Ish’s frame relaxed. “You’re young—well, not your body, you look terrible—and I see you didn’t successfully break any rules.” He put a claw through a whisker. “They’re your ‘pets,’” he said, using the human word. “And you’re worried. But don’t be. They’ll evolve; you’ll see.”

  Hsissh knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Ish, and if he pressed too much, The One might separate him from Noa. He’d lose his chance to see her escape this world. He sniffed, and changed the subject. “I smell fresh rat blood.”

  Ish’s hindquarters began hopping again. “This place is crawling with them! I killed three before the service—silly, really, I can only eat one at a time. Would you like to come finish off the rest with me?”

  If he had any poison, it would have pooled on his tongue. “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Hsissh replied, using an expression Dad used from time to time.

  “What?” said Ish, head drawing back.

  “Never mind,” said Hsissh. “Lead me to those rats.”

  “With pleasure,” said Ish. Pivoting on his forequarters, Ish darted for the back of the church. Hsissh followed, muscles and joints protesting all the way. He was vaguely aware of Jacob whispering as he slipped after Ish through a door just barely ajar.

  Hsissh followed his fellow werfle up a stairwell, and then another to the attic of the church. There were two dead rats laid out in a sunbeam, like a scene from a dream.

  An hour and a half later, after a delicious snack, the creaking of floorboards awoke Hsissh. Eyes blinking open to a blur, he heard Jacob say, “There you are, rat!”

  For a moment, Hsissh was confused. The rats were long gone; he and Ish had gorged themselves quite completely. But then he was caught in a crushing grip, he felt his ribs fracture, and the world went dark. It took him a moment of frantic sniffing to realize he’d been dumped in a burlap sack. His hearts’ beating increased in speed exponentially. “Let’s see what happens to Noa when you don’t come back!”

  Intellectually Hsissh knew he might be able to claw his way out, or gnaw a hole. But his werfle body couldn’t abide confinement and just … stopped. He didn’t have to concentrate to leave his shell; the patterns that made him himself scattered onto the waves almost too quickly. As he collected them, he felt Shissh’s consciousness. “It’s about time! Now you can leave that debilitating sentimentality behind.”

  And he had already. The deep emotional pull he felt to Noa and her family was gone, as was all the pain of his previous body. He saw Ish cowering in a corner as the boy lugged the sack across the room. Ish called out through the waves, “I’m sorry, Hsissh. My body’s calling for revenge, but this is the most perfect research opportunity.”

  “It’s fine,” Hsissh said, thought, and felt; they were all the same here.

  He hovered a bit. He saw Noa racing up the stairs. “Hey, I’ve got your werfle,” Jacob taunted. “What are you going—”

  Jacob was interrupted by a lightning fast kick to the stomach that sent him stumbling backward into the wall, dropping the sack in the process.

  Noa bolted toward the sack Hsissh’s old body was in. Falling to her knees, she gently
pulled out Hsissh’s body. “Fluffy?” she cried. And then she screamed, “Fluffy!” and fell to her knees, her entire body wracked with sobs.

  “Ha, ha, made you cry!” Jacob said. “You’ll never be a pilot!”

  And Hsissh had to leave. Not because he felt a pull to Noa, but because he didn’t.

  Luminous Creatures

  “It’s great to have you here.” Shissh opened and closed her pincers; they didn’t clack so much underwater. “You’ll get over Third in this form.”

  Hsissh’s pincers drooped. No mention of needing to forget Noa or her family.

  Waving her eye stalks, Shissh continued, “It’s too bad about the humans—I talked to Chisssh about tweaking their DNA to make them wave aware, but they reproduce too slowly … it would take ten hundred cycles at the least.” She pointed with a pincer down the reef. “The elders of these hosts meet every three cycles of the moon. I’ll see you then; we’ll ask them to tell us the stories of the dark waters. In the meantime—my side of the reef is over there.” She waved with her pincers and eye stalks. “Stay away.”

  On that cheery note, she crawled away. Not that Hsissh minded. This particular species wasn’t sociable.

  He skittered down his side of the reef, cracking open tiny mollusks and sucking them into his primary orifice. The waters weren’t dark, even though the sun was a distant dream, cut off from them by meters of ice. The seas of this moon were alive with bio-luminescent organisms that drew their life’s energy from the heat that poured through the vents to the moon’s raging magma core.

  Food was plentiful. Shissh had already taken care of all potential predators. Company was available if he wanted it. But he didn’t. It was the perfect place to explore, live, and not hurt.

  He lasted only three rotations of the moon.

  “You’re an idiot,” Shissh said.

  Hsissh flexed the claws of the new werfle hatchling’s body he’d acquired. “Probably,” he agreed. Shissh’s consciousness floated away. He didn’t say goodbye. Blinking awake from his nap, he got up and resumed tunneling through the underbrush. He was barely weaned from this body’s third. None of this body’s three parents had been host to a member of The One. They were sweet, kind, and boring. Hsissh would miss them, the third especially; but he remembered Noa kicking Jacob across the room, and then sobbing for a creature that wasn’t her species. He missed Noa more—the tightening in his hearts was unmistakable. As he hopped toward the Sato family, he felt elation in his sorrow. It felt so good to feel again.

  Hearts pumping, he increased his speed. Time on the crustacean moon had passed more slowly, due to a difference in gravity. Noa was several cycles older and would be taking exams soon. He had to reach her, and be there to sit on her shoulder and her lap while she studied to offer moral support. He had to snuggle with her at night so she wouldn’t be afraid of rats and could get enough sleep. He had to see her get off this planet before his kind unleashed the Fourth Plague—more and more humans were arriving every day, and many of The One were pushing to advance the date.

  Hsissh had chosen his hatchling’s body for its proximity to the Sato’s homestead. He was at the edge of the trees, dirt stained and exhausted, just past sunset. He came to an abrupt halt before he entered the garden. There were boys outside of Noa’s window. He felt venom pool on his tongue. Were they there because of some human “elopement” ritual?

  A voice rose among the boys—it sounded like Jacob’s, but deeper. “You’re not going to race your brother’s new antigrav bike?”

  Noa was silhouetted by light and he couldn’t read her facial expressions. But through the wave he felt her fury. “I’ve already beaten your ass twice, Jacob. Now I’ve got to study.”

  “Waste of time,” said Jacob.

  “If you’re only interested in being in the Luddeccean Guard, sure,” Noa hissed.

  “Nothing wrong with joining the Guard,” said another voice … again, familiar but deeper. Hsissh sniffed. It was Sergei! He’d grown since Hsissh had been gone. Noa’s silhouette turned to Sergei and Hsissh could feel the war within her. He rushed through the garden, all ten legs pumping.

  “She’s lost her edge,” said Jacob. “Let’s go.”

  The boys turned away.

  “Wait!” said Noa, her eyes on Sergei.

  Hsissh leaped into the ivy on the side of the house and began climbing the vines.

  “Noa?” Sergei said.

  “I heard something!” Noa said, and Hsissh could feel her concentration had left the boy.

  “A wild werfle!” Jacob cried, “Kill it!”

  Noa shouted, “Stay away from him or I’ll kill you!” Before Hsissh could blink or think, she was soaring through the window above his head and landing lightly on the ground.

  “It’s your funeral if he bites!” Jacob said.

  Dad’s voice roared through the night. “Who’s there!”

  Hsissh took the opportunity to sneak in the window and leap onto Noa’s bed. He heard Sergei say, “It’s her dad, run!”

  Inside the house, there was the sound of Mom’s footsteps running toward Noa’s room. Hsissh dived behind the pillows on Noa’s bed just before Mom burst in. Outside, he heard the boys’ retreating footsteps, Dad’s thunderous approach and booming voice. “Noa, what was going on?”

  “They wanted to go racing,” she said. “And then Jacob tried to attack a wild werfle.” He could hear her rifling through the ivy.

  Hsissh watched Mom go to the window, peer out, and then turn to shoo Masako and John from the room.

  In the garden, Dad said, “Go back inside.”

  “But the werfle …” Noa said.

  “Will be fine,” said Dad. “You go inside …”

  There was the sound of soft, quick steps and then a thump against the house. A moment later, Noa was climbing through the window, a few pieces of ivy clinging to her fingers.

  “That wasn’t what I meant!” Dad shouted.

  “I have to get back to studying!” Noa said, landing lightly on her feet and immediately going to her hologlobe. The device was larger than the one she used to have—this one was as large in diameter as two grown werfles. Hsissh felt her concentrate. The globe glowed and within it appeared a scene of Fleet ships below a time gate.

  Noa’s paws balled at her side. “The Guard won’t take me …” she muttered. Shaking her head, she focused ... and then her mind was alight with the thoughts of members of the Reserve Fleet Training Corp.

  “Hey, Noa, you’re back!” said a boy Hsissh didn’t recognize.

  “You weren’t kidnapped by crazy fundies and forced into marriage with a man five times your age,” said a girl who looked to be about Noa’s age.

  “Ha, ha, you’re hilarious,” Noa said aloud. The words were picked up by the nanos in her mind and sent across the galaxy to her friends. Noa punched the air. “Let’s get back to the Battle of Time Gate Five. What would we have done in Captain Malik’s position? I was thinking … ”

  Hsissh dropped from her consciousness. He was warm between the pillows, but an uncomfortable feeling was coming over him. Noa didn’t really need his help. She was going to leave. She had to, not because of any plague, but because she didn’t belong here. Maybe he didn’t, either.

  It wasn’t until she was putting on her pajamas that Hsissh slunk from his hiding place. Her back was to him, and he was pondering quietly leaving … but then she turned suddenly. Her eyes grew wide at the sight of him—and he reared on his hind legs at the sight of her. She’d grown in the time he was gone, and developed the secondary sexual characteristics of her kind, but she was still lean, her skin was still a beautiful rich brown, and her eyes that deep almost-black.

  “Fluffy?” Noa said, reaching out hesitantly. In the waves he heard her thoughts. It’s not really Fluffy, but so much like him, he’d stand just like that …

  With a strike of inspiration, Hsissh dived beneath the covers and did his circuit. Coming up for air, he gave the squeak of ‘all clear.’ He tugged
at the waves, and tried to reassure her, I won’t bite.

  Noa fell onto the bed and scooped him up into her arms. She scratched him behind the ears, the way he’d liked in his old body and still liked in this one. He purred unabashedly and she wept into his fur.

  Later, with a belly full of leftovers Noa had sneaked from the kitchen, he curled up with her under the covers. Noa didn’t need him to escape Luddeccea … and he didn’t need to love her. But life without love was like a rat that had been dead for a few days. You could eat it, but it wasn’t as delicious.

  Releasing Pets into the Wild

  Hsissh’s body was old again. If he moved, his joints would ache, and his fur was thinning. But he wasn’t moving, the chair beneath him was soft and comfortable, and he was warmed by a sunbeam.

  “Looks like you’ve stolen my seat, Sir,” said Tim. Hsissh blinked his eyes. Tim was Noa’s husband. His appearance was as striking as Noa’s. Instead of tan skin, his was as pale as a shaved werfle. His eyes were an eerie sky blue, and his hair was the color of dead grass.

  Hsissh raised his head. “Oh, don’t get up on my account,” Tim said, scratching Hsissh gingerly behind the ears.

  Not that Hsissh would dream of it, even though he liked Tim, despite his disturbing appearance. Tim was an engineer in the Fleet and served on the same “space ship” that Noa did. They were stationed light years from Luddeccea. Noa would be safe when the plague came; just as important …

  Noa’s voice echoed from the kitchen. “You’re moving back to Earth?”

  Dad answered, “Luddeccea is becoming too fundamentalist.”

  The turn in conversation drew Tim to the kitchen. Hsissh watched him go. As far as he understood these things, Tim was a fine specimen of the masculine gender of Noa’s species. Broad-shouldered and tall. But more important, Noa and Tim were happy when they were together—the waves buzzed with their feelings. Hsissh was pleased. Humans, from the werfles’ observation, were mostly polygamous in their youth, but then settled into monogamous relationships as they aged. It seemed to correspond with stability and happiness.