Kearn's fingers drummed on the surface of his desk, a piece of furniture he found obscurely reassuring after the dismal results of his meetings with this sector's bureaucrats.
"We can't run it now," this from the harassed-looking comp-tech at Lefebvre's side, Mesa Timri. Kearn avoided meeting her stern look; something about tall, attractive women made his scalp itch, even if she was thirty years his senior and her rich chocolate skin wrinkled at eye and mouth. Of course, it didn't help that Timri had forgotten more about the operation of the vital research comps than anyone of Kearn's acquaintance had learned in the first place. Her skills were key to sieving valid clues from the background nonsense within the massive collection of rumor, legend, and so-called factual sightings clogging the ship's data banks. She was vital to his search for Esen.
But it was her search, too, Kearn reminded himself. She'd come to him. She needed him as much as he needed her. Timri had served on a Tly warship, part of the blockade on Inhaven attacked by the Esen Monster fifty years ago, ship after ship sent drifting into the dark, all life within consumed. She hadn't seen the creature directly; she hadn't needed to—the results had been enough to have her eager to transfer to the Russell III.
He wished she'd found him at the beginning, not twenty years into his search when his crew had shrunk to those too apathetic to request transfer. Before, Kearn had had some credibility, sufficient to gain him this ship and obtain, if not me blessing, at least a firm push on his way from his superiors in the Commonwealth. Oh, he'd heard what they said behind his back, knew what they thought. It would make his ultimate success even sweeter.
These two were crucial to that success and, unfortunately, knew it as well as Kearn. Rudy Lefebvre had come from a patrol background, with a record of relentless and successful pursuits. As a bonus, he'd unusually high ratings in interspecies communication and was fluent in three of the four most commonly used languages after comspeak. Timri had been climbing the academic ladder in a Tly research facility, blazing new trails with her work on pattern analysis within immense data streams until her clearance and persistence opened up the secured files on Kearn's mission. Once she learned of the Russell III, she'd insisted on this posting or nothing, despite the disapproval by just about everyone aware of her potential.
Since then, Kearn had struggled to keep ship and crew intact while continuing the chase. Even he admitted, only to himself, it had been a fruitless, frustrating chase. It was nothing to spend months negotiating for tantalizing pieces of a larger puzzle, only to come away with little more than a new curiosity to write for some Commonwealth academic journal. Nothing, to rush trans-light after a reported sighting, only to find beings who extorted payment for information of absolutely no use at all. No wonder, Kearn thought, he felt besieged on all sides.
Predictably, Lefebvre and Timri had descended on him the moment he'd arrived back with the bad news about their funding, as if they'd haunted the ship's external vids for their chance. "You have to let us narrow down some of the parameters, sir," Timri suggested. "There's simply no way the systems can do what you're demanding."
"And there's that other issue, sir." This from Lefebvre in a calm, dogged voice that forewarned Kearn he wouldn't stand a chance in this argument.
"What other issue? What are you talking about? I don't have time for guessing games."
"The crew needs shore leave, sir. With some of their pay in their pockets."
"We're days translight from any resort world. There's no time for—"
"With all due respect, sir, any world would be a resort. We've been cooped on the Russ' for seventeen months. Shall I quote regs?"
Kearn threw up his hands. His crew was against him, too. "Mutiny, Captain Lefebvre?"
The Human looked quite properly horrified. "No, sir. Of course not. But we can't keep this pace, not without losing some good people." Unstated, but loud in the cabin nonetheless, were the words "or we find something soon, so we know we aren't fools following one."
Kearn swallowed, throat dry. No, he couldn't lose any more crew. There had already been transfers and retirements—outright desertions, as he viewed them. Had no one else a sense of commitment to a cause?
"We'll find someplace on our route, Captain," he said almost fearfully. "But not for long—I won't delay for long."
He begrudged every moment stolen from their search, knowing it gave his personal demon that much more time to plot against him and the unsuspecting universe.
Chapter 4: Cliff's Edge Night; Shipcity Morning
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PAUL'S gift had given me a moment of pure ecstasy. I hadn't dreamed I'd know such sharing again, if only as this muted imitation. Unfortunately, once my mind cleared of euphoria, Paul's gift rang enough alarm bells to keep me tossing and turning in my grassy bed, completely unable to sleep despite a desperate longing to rest.
Sleep was an alien need, one unknown to my web-form. On the practical side, however, form-memory was absolute, meaning I neglected the requirements of a form I used to my own eventual discomfort. The Lishcyn, for example, expected a solid nine standard hours' snoring within layers of sweet, aromatic, albeit conveniently artificial, grasses—the entire mass kept tidily off the floor in a high-sided box. The bed suited my birth-form, the Lanivarian, as well. I'd grown quite fond of tunneling into a bottom corner, in winter piling so much of the fibrous mass over me, Paul sometimes thought I'd left for work when I was semihibernating.
Nothing so comfortable about tonight. My thoughts refused to let go of a wooden box of memories, keyed to my paws' touch. I gave up any attempt to sleep, accepting the consequence of a second groggy morning with a sigh, and got up, scattering the grasslike fibers to the four corners of my room in protest.
Moving quietly through the darkened house—from past experience I knew the Human would sleep through the hammering of the worst storm but could be startled awake by a footstep—I uprooted an armful of duras plants from my greenhouse, then forced open the side door and pushed my way outside.
Once there, slammed by the gale against a sturdy, rough-textured wall, I cycled rapidly, assimilating plant mass to increase my own.
The howling wind was a feather's touch to my new form, the hail and ricocheting shards of stone tickles to a hide enriched with filaments of graphite and studded with excreted gems. Other sensations were almost negligible, and my thought processes perceptibly slower, but otherwise the Wz'ip was an admirable choice to get a breath of fresh air on a typical Minas XII evening.
Well, to be technical, it was an inrush of wind through a row of bone-braced and nicely-angled exterior vents, but the intent was the same.
Paul's gift continued to exhilarate and trouble my thoughts. Deliberately? I considered the notion seriously, wary of underestimating him. The way it anchored him in time was a distinct comfort, my nature being reassured by the continuity and continuation represented by his genetic heritage. The Human species might not be in any immediate danger of extinction, but its isolated populations and their cultures flickered in and out of existence within the archives of my web-memory almost as swiftly as his family's faces had passed on the screen.
No, what kept me from the warm depths of my bed was where Paul had obtained those faces. I knew why the gift had been designed to destroy itself after the giving. I had no need for a permanent version; seeing it had been enough. Paul knew I stored everything I saw or otherwise experienced. From that point of view, I told myself, he'd paid me a compliment of sorts—entrusting his past solely to my memory.
What a shame I couldn't accept it as such.
It was the way of my kind to hide in plain sight, with the key word being hide. We shunned any possible exposure of our true nature to alien eyes. That had been the Rule which kept Ersh and her Web safe for millennia, until I'd managed to reveal myself within a day of meeting Paul, during ray first—and only—mission for my kind. Ersh, I remembered rather wistfully, hadn't been impressed.
She'd tasted friendship to the Humans in those
memories I'd been brave enough to share with the Web, understanding its significance before I had, warning me about further entanglements with ephemeral species.
Yet in the end, it had been my ageless web-kin who had died, and the fragile ephemeral who remained at my side as I fled the unwelcome attention of the Commonwealth and its alarmed Humans. I'd tried to stop Paul from accompanying me, to keep his life intact. He'd followed our friendship instead, a choice I, for one, had never regretted. If he had, on occasion, I'd never known.
We remained safe here because we were hidden, I as Esolesy Ki the Lishcyn trader, Paul Ragem as Paul Cameron, exporter. Hide. That Rule hadn't changed with the loss of the others; it had been driven deep into my soul, and I'd insisted Paul learn it.
The wind moved up a notch, ripping apart the clouds overhead to show a tattered-edged wall of stars. I focused my optic cluster on the dimmest of these, pushing my thought processes along, quite grateful to feel little or no emotion beyond a vague regret. If I were Lanivarian, I would have howled.
"What have you done, old friend?" I whistled to the storm, my voice arising from disks which turned within the flow of air moving in and out through the vents. It was a low whistle, easily missed, but I could tune it to a minor key, well-matched to my feelings.
To make my gift, had Paul made contact with his family? Once his mother died, we'd never discussed it again; before that, he'd rebuffed my every attempt to suggest it as too dangerous, an unhappy but absolutely necessary consequence of our life together. But how else could he have gathered so much information?
I sighed, rumbling like so much thunder in the storm's darkness, feeling a little darkness of my own. The gift had only revealed itself to my paw print. It had destroyed itself once received. These were wise precautions against discovery—against identification of the being who formed the apex of this genealogy—by anyone but me.
Would these protections be enough? Only, I acknowledged to the wind, the future would tell us. For if anyone suspected Paul Ragem lived, who might suspect I did as well?
Was his gift worth this risk to us both?
Dawn washed itself clear of the surrounding mountains, a brightening I noticed barely in time to cycle, dumping mass, and hurry back inside. Wz'ip were not known for their quick reactions.
Once inside, I sniffed in appreciation. Paul was cooking some egg dish or other. A shame it was a delicacy a Lishcyn literally couldn't stomach, but I was tied in that form by the business ahead as well as my growing interest in caution. Still, I remembered the smell as a favored meal of some other me.
"You could cycle and have some. I made enough," the Human offered.
I resisted the temptation to glower at him, something the Lishcyn did poorly anyway. The broad-lipped head with its rosettes of hair-trimmed scales wasn't good for much facial expression beyond flashing a tusk or two and a debonair wink. "No, thank you. It's this Esen you are taking to annoy Captain Chase this morning, remember?"
Paul scooped yellow fluff onto his plate, topping it with some seared bread and a dollop of spice before taking his seat at the table. This nook was our favorite spot of the house, especially when the storm blinds could be retracted and the three windowed walls offered their spectacular view, as now. The mounded surfaces of cloud might have been continuations of the white tile floor. Birds, or rather the Minascan insectoid equivalent, flew within insubstantial valleys. The sky above was so clear a blue as to bear a seductive hint of space black at its far edge.
In all, a view that scarcely hinted at the distance one would drop if careless enough to assume those mounds of white could support any weight at all.
A Lishcyn's multiple stomachs could do interesting things with heights, particularly when those stomachs were arguing about which deserved the first crack at some nourishment. It wasn't advisable to let all five become empty. I hurried to grab my favorite bowl from the counter and begin filling it up with whatever was nearest from the leftovers in the cold cupboard.
"For breakfast?" At Paul's skeptical question, I paid closer attention to what I was doling into the bowl.
"There's nothing wrong with prawlies," I asserted, inwardly wincing at the sight of the highly-spiced, many-legged delicacy I'd distractedly ladled over a pile of Meg Sirsey's Choco Surprise. Some foods required the consumption of alcohol before they were remotely palatable. "Plenty of—protein."
He raised one brow, but let the matter of my food choices go. I settled into the chair across from him and studied my breakfast the way a general might plan an attack: how to get at the chocolate and underlying vegetable matter without alerting the prawlies—or Paul—to my complete intention to avoid them.
Paul's own breakfast sat apparently forgotten as he gazed at me intently. "You think I've been a fool, don't you?" The question was too quiet, startling me. "That's what this is about, isn't it?"
"What what's about?" I said, inadvertently shoveling exactly what I'd tried to miss into my mouth. My salivary glands went into overtime trying to dilute the sudden burst of spice on my palate. I grabbed the very large and absorbent napkin from my lap to stem the outward flood before it dribbled between my stiff lips. Paul passed me the pitcher of water in response to my frantic gesture. I gulped down the liquid, succeeding in at least moving the burning sensation to my first, and largest, stomach, and asked innocently: "Didn't you sleep well?" An interrupted rest frequently made Humans irrational in the morning.
"No." Paul put his cup down, rattling the other dishes on the table. "And I wasn't the only one awake."
I almost asked him how he knew, then realized there was, of course, only one way. "You watched me on the vid." Our home was surrounded by surveillance equipment: essential warning for me to return to the Lishcyn form whenever guests or Paul's family arrived unannounced. We didn't use it to spy on one another—until now. I felt my scales swelling along their edges, the hairs on each itching unbearably as they began to retract out of sight, a sure sign my own temper was rising as my outer hide assumed its defensive configuration. Knowing it was already too late to cycle into a less revealing form, I tried glaring at Paul with honest outrage instead.
It didn't work. He merely returned my look, his gray eyes narrowing in what I belatedly recognized as the rousing of his own rare and formidable temper. "Yes, I watched you. Funny reaction to our celebration—and my gift. What kept you awake, Esen-alit-Quar?" The Human's voice developed an edge I'd never heard before. "Tell me it wasn't some worry I revealed myself as back from the dead just to grab a few holoimages. Tell me you know me better than that—tell me you know I would never risk exposing you even to see those I love—because, by now, you damn well should."
I swallowed twice: once to clear my mouth of drool and then again to move the sickening prawlies farther from any attempt to return to the bowl. My first stomach was notoriously quick to react. "Paul—" I began, then found my stomach completely settled and solitary. Again, I'd cycled involuntarily. I had to stop doing that.
"So you don't," the Human said flatly, putting his own interpretation to my change of form. He stood as if to leave, shaking his head at me in utter disgust. I spotted a glint of silver under the edge of his shirt collar. He wore my gift. And concealed it.
Paul noticed my attention and, hooking a finger under the chain, pulled the tiny medallion into the open. He didn't let it drop to hang freely, instead capturing the medallion within a tight fist he thrust toward me. "Do you want to talk about fools?" he said bitterly. "I know you, Es. Well enough to know how much this means as a gift—and appreciate it. And well enough to know you'd miss how dangerous this is for me to wear."
"There's no chance the web-mass will leak—" I began uncertainly.
"I don't mean of itself," he interrupted, planting both hands on the table so he could lean over it and glare down at me. His posture brought up the hackles on my neck, but I restrained my Lanivarian instincts with an effort. Biting Paul wasn't going to improve his temper.
He continued, from the stern l
ine of his eyebrows fully aware of my reaction and willing to dare it. "I warned you the Kraal didn't stop working on a scanner to detect web-mass. Or weren't you listening?"
Oh. That. I forgot all about biting, feeling my ears press flat against my skull and a whine try to slide up my throat. "Don't worry," Paul said, but not sympathetically. His fist opened, the palm flipping the medallion over. A device similar to one of the tiny scramblers we used on public com systems had been glued to the back. "This should suffice until I can do something better." Finally, his face softened from anger to something closer to disappointment. I wasn't sure it was an improvement. "I value your gift, Es. Honestly I do. But I wish you'd thought of all the risks you were taking with our secret, instead of mistrusting me. And it is our secret." With this last, a corner of his mouth twitched upward, bringing a sudden, familiar warmth to his face.
So I was forgiven. I couldn't say I enjoyed the feeling. I rose slowly from my chair, distracting myself with the problem of whether to return to the Lishcyn form or continue this conversation as I was. If I cycled, I'd have safely empty stomachs: inanimate matter wasn't retained in the form-memory, hence the puddle of water on the tiles beneath my paws. But I felt closer to understanding Paul in this arrangement of flesh.
"Esen," Paul continued as if he could read my thoughts, "we've misunderstood each other often enough over the years. I'll be fair: more times than not it's been my fault. You're very good at interpreting me; I can't always do the same with you." He paused, putting out one hand as if his Human nature needed touch, but thinking better of it. "This time, Es, you were wrong about me. Can't you admit it?"
I felt my lip trying to curl over a fang, not a caring expression in this form. "I admit I hadn't considered the Kraals' experiment—if it continues at all—or that they could somehow use my gift to find you. Anyway, it's all so unlikely as to be ridiculous. They'd need their scanner right on top of you."
Webshifters 2 - Changing Vision Page 5
