by Lauren Esker
And it was cold in here. In midsummer she loved coming into the mill to cool off, but at this time of year the icebox chill was much less welcome. She shoved her hands into the sleeves of her jacket, warming them against her opposite wrists, and sat on the sleeping bag. "Aren't you cold?" she asked Rei. "Your feet must be cold, at least."
Rei shook his head. "I'm fine. This doesn't feel unpleasant to me. As I told you, my world—"
"—is a cold world. I know." Sarah crossed her arms over her knees. "How cold are we talking, exactly? Like Hoth?" He looked blank. "I mean, ice and snow all the time."
"No, our winters were long and cold, but the summers were not so different from your world."
"This is actually fall. Our summers are a lot hotter."
"Oh." He smiled shyly and bent to pick up a voltmeter, examining its leads absently. "I don't know what else I can tell you. I left when I was nine."
"I know, but you must remember some things, right? I can't even imagine walking on an alien world. This is the only planet I've ever known—the only planet any human has ever known. What was your world like?"
"A lot like yours, really. There were trees and mountains. The colors of the trees were a little different. More green and blue, less red and yellow."
"Our trees aren't that color all the time. Just in the fall."
Rei tipped his head to the side. A distant look of wonder crossed his face. "That's right. Trees change the color of their leaves before winter. I had completely forgotten about that."
Sarah's heart clenched. He was, if anything, even more beautiful in the dim light inside the mill, lit up by a shaft of sunlight speckled with dust motes, a blue-skinned angel from an alien world.
Rei took a sudden deep breath and shook himself out of whatever world of memories he'd gone to. "Anyway," he said briskly, "I don't remember much after all these years."
"Can all your people turn into ..."
"Yes, most of us are jaegan—shapeshifters." His smile was quick and shy, infinitely human, endlessly beautiful. "Do you still want to see my jaegan shape? I'll have to take my clothes off."
Her mouth dry, Sarah said quietly, "I don't mind."
Without a word, he began to strip out of the borrowed shirt, the borrowed sweatpants. His body emerged, muscular and blue, glistening with the silver threads embedded in his skin.
"What are those?" Sarah asked.
Rei paused in the act of folding the shirt. "What are what?"
"Those metal things, on your arms and shoulders." And everywhere else. Glistening silver threads ran between his ribs, formed intricate patterns on his chest, curved around his knees.
"Oh. Those are surgical implants. They're where the nanites in my body live. And they do other things too." He tapped the silver bracelet around his left wrist. "They help me talk to the cuffs. They also power the cuffs, gathering up energy from my entire body. They make me stronger and faster than I would be without them."
"For fighting?"
"Yes," he said softly. "For fighting." He dropped his arm to his side, the silver cuff gleaming against the indigo skin of his hip. "Do you want to see my wolf now?"
Sarah nodded.
Rei leaned forward—and flowed.
There was no other word for it. He was like a blue and silver waterfall, his natural grace turned supernatural as his entire body ran forward like water and pooled into a new shape. Sarah had imagined there would be an element of the grotesque to it, but there wasn't, just a grace and elegance that took her breath away.
Rei ended his shift on all fours and turned his head to look at her.
He was a huge wolf, long-bodied and lean, like something out of the prehistoric past, run through a photographic filter to add colors never designed by nature on Earth. Had he been uniformly blue, he might have looked painted, but he wasn't; his fur was brindled and variegated, deep blue mixed with gray and black, with a darker saddle over his shoulders and back.
In the dark-masked wolf's face, his amber eyes gleamed as if lit from within. But they were still Rei's eyes, looking at her with intelligence and warmth.
"You're beautiful," she whispered.
The blue wolf paced toward her with a slow, rippling predator's grace, dark body moving in and out of the shafts of sunlight and patches of shadow. When he reached her, Rei sat on his haunches like an enormous dog, and then carefully, slowly, lay down at her feet.
Sarah reached out cautiously and brushed his fur with her fingertips. It was coarse at the tips, but when she sank her fingers into his thick ruff, the underfur was luxuriously soft. Adapted for cold weather, she thought.
Rei blinked his luminous eyes slowly, and then closed them as she dug her fingers into his pelt, scratching him like a huge dog. He laid his head on his paws, nestled between the silver bracelets gleaming through the fur on each wrist. Up close she could see that the iridescent gold-green patches on his face were replicated in his fur, a sweeping pattern of small patches like the eyes in a peacock's tail that curved away from under each eye to vanish into the thick ruff around his neck.
"How did a creature like you evolve?" she asked softly, unable to contain her curiosity.
Rei's body rippled and flowed—and he was Rei again, sitting up, naked and blue, while she jerked her hands back guiltily.
The spots on his face darkened to the color of his skin in a rippling blush. "My clothes are over there; I know your people—"
"It's okay," Sarah said. "I don't mind if you don't mind." She flipped back a corner of the unzipped sleeping bag. "Sit with me and use this to keep warm."
Rei hesitated, then settled crosslegged next to her, his knee touching her thigh, and flipped the corner of the sleeping bag over his lap. "The answer to your question is that we didn't evolve. We were made."
"By the Galateans?"
He shook his head. "No, by the Founders, a long time ago." When she looked at him blankly, he asked, "Don't your people have stories of the Founders? Or have you forgotten it, the way you forgot about other worlds? Some of my genetic material is a wolf's, but most of it is human, put together by the Founders long ago. They made you too, you know."
"Made," she repeated. "No, that's not possible. Maybe your people didn't evolve on your world, but we did. We have lots of evidence for it. Fossils. Do your people know what fossils are?"
"Of course we do," he said, smiling. "But that's the point. My people didn't evolve on Polara. Neither did the human inhabitants of any other world in the galaxy where humans live. Sometimes we were modified to fit the ecosystem of the world where the Founders put us, and sometimes they built a whole ecosystem around us, like on my world. But either way, we were put there a few tens of thousands of years ago."
"Ten thousand years?" She shook her head slowly. "No, Rei, we weren't put here by aliens, not that recently. I mean, maybe a few million years ago—but no, that doesn't fit either. This is our world. We've always been here."
"My people thought so too, until the Galateans attacked us. Now we know better, and we've met human cousins of ours from worlds across the galaxy. Before that, we thought we were alone. Like your people do."
"No, Rei, that doesn't work. Archaeology isn't my field, but I know we have an unbroken fossil record going back hundreds of millions of years into the past. And humans are too closely related to other species on the planet not to have come from here. We all have the same basic DNA and everything. We definitely evolved here. There's solid evidence for it."
"Then perhaps my suspicions are true." His eyes gleamed. "When I first woke up on your world and saw your people and your animals, I thought this might be Birthworld itself—the planet where humans originally came from. I've never seen so many Birthworld species all in one place. And your people look as close to base human stock as anyone I've seen anywhere."
"But—no—are you saying Earth was visited by aliens? And they took humans to other planets? That's impossible!"
"Is it?" he murmured. "Impossible as a Galatean battlepod land
ing in your lake?"
"We—I—but that means you're not an alien at all. Not really. If that's true, you're as human as I am." She reached out to touch the back of his hand lightly, shyly. "Okay, maybe with a few extras. Even after seeing you change shape, I can't believe you can do that. How does it work? Do you change genetically or just on the outside?"
"I have no idea," he said with a quick smile and a self-deprecating shrug. "I don't know much about the science of it. All I know for sure is that we don't change size, only shape."
"Oh, of course," she said, excited. "You can change your shape, but not your mass. That's just basic physics. The mass would have to go somewhere, or be released as energy, and then you couldn't get it back. So as a wolf, you must weigh the same as you do now, right?"
He nodded. "As far as I know."
"Are all your people wolves?"
"Most of my village was. Some people elsewhere on Polara can shift into other kinds of animals, such as—" and here he said several words the implant couldn't translate. Sarah wondered if those were animals that didn't exist on Earth, or if the translator simply hadn't learned the English words for tiger or meerkat or star-nosed mole yet.
"What does it feel like," she asked, "to change shape like that?"
"I don't know how to explain it. How would you explain breathing to someone who doesn't need air?" He spread his arms, and smiled suddenly, wide and dazzling with dimples in both cheeks. "It feels like freedom."
Sarah had to catch her breath. He was gorgeous like that, so bright and alive. She felt as if she'd just caught a glimpse of the person he might have been, if he hadn't spent most of his life as a prisoner in an alien war.
The look vanished as quickly as it had come, locked down beneath his usual surface calm, but his eyes still sparkled with exhilaration. He was happy, she thought, dazed. She wasn't sure if she'd seen him happy before.
"I still feel the same under the surface," he went on. "I can hear and smell better. Some jaegan can shift to forms that have gills or wings, so they can breathe underwater or fly. But I still get tired about as quickly, and I still have to breathe. Not like dragons. They aren't like us at all."
"Dragons?" she echoed in amazement.
"Yes, they're an intelligent species who can also change their shape, but they aren't from Birthworld stock, and they don't follow the same rules we do. They can change their mass as well as their shape, and they can survive in hard vacuum without having to breathe."
How many mythological creatures were actually real? she wondered. Maybe some human in the distant past had met actual dragons. Or maybe the translator had simply picked up on the closest word and he wasn't actually talking about dragons at all. "What are they like? Are they big lizards that breathe fire? Have you ever met one?"
"I'd rather not talk about dragons right now," he said quietly.
There was no emotion in his voice, but the pain that flashed in his eyes cut her to the quick. She wanted more of that bright joy from earlier, not this. Never this.
"No," she said, and moved a little closer to him on the sleeping bag. "No, we don't have to."
They sat in silence for a little while. The helicopter hadn't come back. It really was peaceful in here, with the rushing of the stream outside, the dust motes drifting in the sunlight shafting down from the mill's high windows.
Rei was close enough she could feel the warmth of his skin. If she moved over just a little, his bare leg would be pressing against hers.
So she did. Just that little bit, closing the gap between them, his skin electric against hers.
She was half afraid he'd pull away, but he didn't.
Sitting like this, their usual height difference—six or seven inches—all but disappeared. His eyes, she found, were even more fascinating up close, a hundred shades of gold and green and brown. The iridescent patches on his face fascinated her. At the moment they were a warm gold, close in tone to his eyes, glimmering with iridescent hues of blue and green when he tilted his head.
"Can I touch these?" she asked softly, lifting a hand to gesture to his spots.
"What, my tsinde? Go ahead. Just be careful; they're sensitive."
She touched the skin of his cheek very lightly, beside the spots rather than on top of them. His skin felt soft and human despite its indigo color. Up close, she could see the pores and the subtle darkening over his cheekbones, much too complex for the stage makeup it otherwise resembled. She realized suddenly that she had never seen him shave, and there was no stubble on his face. Instead his skin was very lightly fuzzy.
"Do your people grow beards?"
He gave his head a small shake, not enough to dislodge her hand. "Not in my part of Polara, anyway."
"That seems odd," she said, smiling. "Since you turn furry when you change, to have no hair on your face."
"I have some hair." He took her other hand and placed it lightly on his chest. "Here."
The coarser, curly hair on his chest felt very human. But of course, from what he said, he was human. A long-lost distant cousin of the humans on Earth.
With one hand on his chest, the other on his face, she leaned closer. The tsinde spots were almost reflective, but not quite. "How sensitive are they?" she asked softly.
"Very." His voice was a breathy whisper.
She brushed the juncture where the tsinde met regular skin and felt him give a little shiver. Darker color flushed the spots, occluding their gold with blue.
"But what are they?" she murmured, running her fingertip around the edge. There was no seam, as if they'd just grown there.
"Regular skin cells, I guess. Just flatter and shinier." His fingertips brushed her lower lip. "Why are your lips pinker than your face?"
"I don't know," she whispered. With every word, her lips moved against his fingertips. "They just are."
The tsinde spots were almost the color of his skin now, with faint green and purple overtones. "What does it mean?" she asked, daring to brush one of her fingertips directly across the one just below his eye, and felt him shiver again. "When they change colors?"
"The same thing it means when your skin changes colors."
"But that could mean a lot of things."
"So does this," he whispered.
She leaned closer—he moved his hand away from her mouth, threaded the fingers lightly through her hair instead—and touched her lips to the tsinde just above his jaw, near the corner of his mouth. It was slightly warmer than his skin. Her fingers couldn't feel the difference, but her sensitive lips could.
His breathing quickened as she explored the tsinde with her mouth, feeling the difference between the slick, firm color-changing skin and the softer skin around it. One by one, she traced the line of spots to the corner of his mouth—and kept going. His lips were incredibly soft on hers, and incredibly, perfectly human.
I guess kissing isn't just an Earth thing.
It was gentle and slow and a little awkward; they bumped teeth, making her laugh softly into his mouth. His hand was still in her hair, fingers laced through it; hers was cupped along the side of his face. She trailed her fingers through his hair and made an unexpected discovery.
"What?" he asked, when she pulled back in surprise.
"Your hair is ..." She trailed off, stroking her fingers up from beneath, through soft fluffy hair close to his scalp and into the layer of coarse guard hairs on the outside. No wonder his hair looked so thick. It was like the fluffy, two-layered coat of a Husky dog ... or a wolf. "It's layered. Like a cold-weather breed of dog. The same as you do when you're a wolf. You've got underfur."
"I told you, Polara is a cold planet."
"Yes, but—" She stopped before telling him that humans didn't have that kind of hair. Earth humans didn't, anyway. But Polarans did, and what did it matter if they'd been given the gene for it, or if they had evolved it naturally?
"It's nice," she said instead, running her fingers through it. "Different from what I'm used to."
His fingers stroked
lightly across her scalp, making her lean into the petting like a cat. "Your hair is very soft," he murmured.
"So is yours, on the underneath. Like you."
She kissed him again, combing her fingers through his hair. It wasn't like anyone's hair she'd ever touched before; it was wonderfully, uniquely Rei. She loved the contrast between the soft undercoat and the coarser hair on top.
A sense of unreality settled over her like a blanket. I'm making out with an alien in the old gristmill! How is this my life?
And then his lips closed over hers, and his tongue probed her mouth, and she didn't care. Not in the slightest.
They kissed and kissed. Rei kept stopping to look at her, stroking her face, touching her hair, gazing at her with soft amazement in his eyes as if she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
No one had ever looked at her like that before.
And he—he was beautiful, he was amazing, he was everything: the grace of his long blue body as he leaned into her, the strength in his hands as they cupped her face gently, so gently.
He broke their kiss again to fumble with the buttons on her shirt, breaking into a shy half-grin when his fingers kept slipping off. Sarah folded her hands over his and showed him how to undo them. He'd never actually buttoned the shirt he'd borrowed from her dad, she realized. He might not know how they worked.
She stripped the shirt off her shoulders and saw that wonder in his eyes again as he gazed at her torso, at her breasts spilling over the cups of her bra and the little rolls above the waistband of her jeans. Her nipples were erect, pushing against the cotton fabric of the bra.
