by P. K. Tyler
“That’s normal,” the doctor called across the room. “Increase the flow of sedatives.”
“Gemina,” Anone whispered from the bed next to mine. She turned her face, blue eyes sparking as she reached out. I cleared my throat and stretched a shaking hand back. My dark hand clasped her pale one and held tight.
That was the hardest part of this, or one of them. One day on the planet, I would fully awaken to my memories, and I would remember the mornings when I woke up with her next to me, her lips curved in a gentle smile, the scent of honeysuckle and cut grass in her tangled hair. I would remember…and she would not be there.
“It will be okay, love,” she said.
Would I be born female or male? Would I identify there as non-binary, did their culture even have a context for my gender?
Anone had called it a grand adventure. She had always loved adventure. I tried to rekindle the enthusiasm—her enthusiasm—about this mission. We were going to become another species, to live from birth to death as one of them—something few humans had ever done, and none on this world. It was the leading edge of science, unexplored territory in the extreme.
This was her second time, but my first. The hairs on my arms rose and my loins tightened in fear.
I loved her. I would follow her anywhere.
Would we meet again on the planet? We weren’t supposed to. But we would be there for each other when we woke again here on the research ship.
“Gemina, Anone,” the doctor said. “We have acquired the subjects for conception. We are ready.”
The holograms flickered off.
I turned from Anone to the gray ceiling.
One of us would make the transition before the other. The pattern imprint had to be made at the exact moment of conception. We would be born to that world, fully of that world, but we would not begin to awaken to our full selves until puberty. It was part of the experience.
I watched the doctor’s displays out of the corner of my eye. She tracked the gathering conception energy that would call a soul into being. My soul.
Cool sedatives flooded my veins, and I slept.
* * *
I was scything buds in the reef fields when the first memory of the other-dream appeared. Soft lips brushed against mine. Pale eyes flashed in a horribly round and pink face.
I stood rigid in the midday sun, water dripping from the razored backs of my forearms.
My family felt my distress through the mind-string of our bond. Two of my sisters came running, splashing shallow water in great gouts. They laughed and clicked their arms together when they saw my arousal. They sang caustic chants about the volatility of males in puberty.
That night in the family cave, I huddled in the burrow I had carved for myself away from my family. They had never understood my need for a space of my own. I quivered, my long carapace brushing tufts of silt from the walls of my burrow. I crossed my arms over my neck and my four legs over my underbelly, razor sides out in the protective X. I sank and let the warm water cover my waist. It was a comfort.
More memories came from the other-dream. Flashes of soft toes without chitin to protect them, curling into a sand that was harder than silt. Water of a sea, colorless under a colorless sky, except I knew it had a color called blue. The bitter taste of wrongly salted air.
I pressed my face into the silt and keened.
My mother came over to me. “Katchtan. Come, you are alone. Join the rest of your family.”
It was always her answer, to every difficulty. But the family bond had never offered me the comfort it had the others.
The next day, the visions interrupted me while I harvested the reef crops with my family. I felt the staccato rhythm of my four legs, and then the jarring overlay of two. And then my four again.
The word “spider” came to mind. Or “mantis.” I had never before felt revulsion at myself.
My aunts whispered it must be a phase, it would pass. My sisters taunted me that this was the form my mating-urge had taken, and warned I had best soon take a mate.
I could not tell them what I saw in my thoughts. I had tried to hide my wakening puberty for weeks now. I did not understand the mating attraction I felt around males more than females. I did not understand my desire to live as both sexes; making games and nonsense rhymes with my sisters, or gauging how far I could spit venom with my brothers. I could not tell them I saw dreams of another place. A corrupt member of the family would be cast off for the good of the whole.
* * *
Maybe my sisters were right.
In the reef fields, I ranged farther to brush my razored red forearms against the softer, browner arms of the females, to taste their scents. Some tasted of the wetness of rock, or the heat of a branch of sun-warmed coral. One liked my scent, and I followed her behind the rocks and we joined for my first time. It was an explosion of senses that my family felt and mocked and encouraged; and yet, it was not the same as the feeling from the other-dream. There was no inner wholeness. Joined to me, the female felt my disappointment and broke off, and she did not come to me again.
I retreated to my place in the silt.
* * *
The mid-harvest festival came and I determined not to let the other-dream ruin it. I hooked the extra razors of harvesting scythes to my forearms and whirled about the reefs with my brothers in great, arcing sprays of water. I danced the dance of the harvesters, and gulped cool air, and bellowed the harvest songs. Buds flew in all directions to hit the water, and younger children scurried to gather them up before the tide pulled the buds out to sea. It was forgetfulness.
I drifted from my brothers, needing to dance alone. I didn’t realize how far I’d strayed into other families’ fields until I brushed my razored leg against the razored leg of another.
I stopped, completely still.
So did he.
We swiveled our heads and appraised each other. His taste was familiar. Honeysuckle. And sunshine. And warm sheets.
I did not say it. I did not want to say it first.
“Gemina,” he said. The word came out gritty and wrong, but I understood it.
I remembered the gray-blue walls and the heart-rhythm of my soft body on a cool medical bed. In the other-dream, I turned to look at the one I had come to know in my visions as Anone. My ears rang with voices and the steady beep of medical monitors. Sterile tang sharpened the air. Above me hovered an image of a brown and red planet, streaked with blue.
The memories from the other-dream clicked into place in my reality. I was still myself. I had always been myself, Katchtan, though I’d feared I had been invaded by another in these last weeks. But I had been born here, a soul from the other-dream. And now the rest of me was awakening.
“Anone,” I said.
He nodded.
We stared at each other.
I felt my mind reaching to hers—his? And felt his reaching back. It was not something I could have stopped, or even tried to stop. The connection with my family faded, the sense of their heightened interest growing dim. Anone’s thoughts wrapped around mine and mine around his, a dizzying rush of colors and smells and memories, both real and from the other-dream. Both sides of one perspective.
I skittered sideways—and Anone echoed my steps—before we sorted our thoughts again. But the bond was there. It was much stronger than it had ever been with my family. I couldn’t look away from him.
I heard the calls of my brothers and sisters as they ran up behind me, wanting to see the female I had selected.
They slowed when they saw Anone, the male, and then stopped.
My heart beat in tandem with Anone’s. Our breaths moved in sync, and I tasted the iron of our fear. But we would not die from this. Not now, when we had first found each other again.
Anone edged to my side so we could stay in sight, and on that pivot, I turned to face my family.
“It will work,” I told them. “I will not die. It is a true and stable bond.”
My family swayed with their
pain and fear. They clicked their arms together in despair, and spite, but I didn’t feel it through the bond. The family bond was gone. One by one, my family turned and started back to their own fields.
Anone’s family came moments later, and it was much the same.
We were alone.
“I remember the other-dream,” I told him. “I want to be with you.” I could already feel the quickening in my body, the releasing of the chemicals that would strengthen me into full adulthood.
“We will not have children,” he said. “We will have no family of our own. No real family bond.” He eyed my body frankly, as a male eyes his chosen female.
I shrank. I wanted to soften the obviousness of my maleness, to show that I was not fully what I appeared to be. But I felt his approval, and pleasure. And soothing, through the bond. He understood.
I stopped shrinking and eyed him back. He was taller than me, his neck long and slim. His flat face shone iridescent red in the sunlight, his dark eyes glittering like rock gems. White stripes slashed like lightning down his neck to his gleaming red-black carapace. He was nimble and agile where I was broad and strong. He was beautiful.
“I have memories of a different sort of body,” he said, and shifted uncomfortably.
“I, too,” I said.
After a moment, he said, “It will work.” And that was that.
* * *
We left the coastal village and headed inland. The soil became rockier, with tufts of puffy grass and more rock scuttlers darting between the grasses than we had ever seen before. We ate wild from the buds growing in and around the river. At night, we dug our burrow by the red rocks that lined the banks and spat the circle of venom around us that would ward off inland predators. We had only heard stories of doing such things, and there were a few laughing tries before our circle looked like a circle. We joined at night and found a way past the physical awkwardness.
We both matured in those days, a long stretch of days, into fully fertile adults. We had nowhere to expend our seeds, and so the intensity of our bond grew painful with the unreleased pressure.
“Biology,” Anone said, and it made me snort. It was the sort of thing he would say.
We were chased out of the villages we tried to enter. We were defective, and all there knew we would soon die. Better we not contaminate the minds of their own.
The pressure in my mind and body grew worse.
“Maybe we should try to take other mates,” I said. “Maybe we should try to undo the bond and each make our own mating bonds, with females.” But I only suggested it because we knew that neither suggestion was possible. A mating bond could not be reversed.
We were walking beside another river, another purposeless trek but for the company of each other, when we came across an older male. His carapace was dusty and cracked in places. The edges of his mind were contained; he was mature but had matured without a mate, and so he was alone. We marveled that he had not gone completely insane.
“I am Osaske,” he said. “I walk the rivers.”
“Then join us,” I said. “Walk with us.”
Osaske resisted at first, the razors on his legs jutting out as if we were predators to ward against. But then he shivered a sigh.
“Fine,” he said. “If you are good company, for as long as you last. I can see you have little time.”
So he walked with us. Osaske told us of his childhood in an inland village, and of his many brothers and sisters. He had wanted to mate, but his chosen female had not chosen him. It happened sometimes. There was almost always another chance, but Osaske had chosen late, and in his desire for the mate who spurned him, he had begun to mature.
“And so I contemplate my bitter aloneness,” he said.
I spoke about the female I had joined with, but not mated. Anone recounted his handful of attempts to join, which had all ended in spectacular, embarrassing, failure. We rocked with laughter.
One day at sunset, the inland predators rushed us before we had spat our wards. Their low, black bodies whipped barbed tails and razored legs. They bared their fangs and screeched cries that made me want to curl down and protect myself. Anone and I spat venom at them and threw rocks, but it was Osaske who rushed out to fight them. He darted around, always just out of reach, then lashed out to cut the soft spots behind their heads with his razors.
“Practice,” he said when it was done. We looked at the cracks on his carapace with new understanding.
That night we celebrated, dancing to the song of thankfulness for life.
As the days passed, we began to feel Osaske’s mind with our own. We were walking beside the river when Anone first noticed it.
“Osaske,” he said. “Do you feel the family bond between us?”
Osaske stopped. I could taste, with Anone, the tremor of his hope, his pent up pain. I could taste it, without touching him. His attention spiked and he reached mind-strings toward us. His reaching strengthened our tenuous family bond. Osaske flooded with a joy that sent my own heart soaring.
“Family,” he said, his voice reverent. “But how? I am not your offspring. You cannot have offspring.”
“The pressure within myself to produce children has faded,” Anone said. “It is not gone, but it is growing more bearable.”
It was, I noticed, also lessened in myself, but not quite as unbearable as Anone said.
Anone glanced at me, sensing my reserve. “But it is less, Gemina. Family. I don’t know how, but maybe we can have family. Maybe we can live, we can all live. We can live and thrive on the living.”
His joy pierced my misgivings and from then on, we sought out the trails of those who walked alone.
* * *
We found more in the next two years—another male, and a female who had been badly injured by inland predators. We fought off the predators and spat on her carapace to seal the wounds. These new companions traveled with us long enough to begin to family bond.
And it was a family bond, though we did not know how it was possible. We could only think that we had never heard of defective adults travelling in a group before, and so maybe it was natural. The bond was as if Anone and I were parents, and the others, not mate-bonded themselves, were our children.
Anone moved with ease now, though I still moved stiffly. The pain from the pressure to expend seed did not occupy all of my thoughts, but it was far from gone. While our family talked and laughed and gathered bulbs to store in nets on our backs for the weeks of rain, Anone watched me. When we joined, it was with a ferocity of knowing. We had a family bond, but as we knew nothing of how it had come to be, we knew nothing of why it had cured Anone and not me. We did not know how to fix it. Our time together would not be much longer.
“Maybe you can mate with Ikara,” Anone said. He spoke of our time-adopted daughter.
I shuddered and hunched in on myself. “I am for you, Anone. I cannot even feel the joining rush when I think of another. Only with you.”
“Maybe you can pretend—”
“Enough, Anone.”
* * *
The next year, we added two more females to our family. Anone tried to persuade me to join with each, before they had bonded with us.
How could he think that I would join with another? I still had the memories of our other lives in the other-dream, but they were second to the immediacy of the moment. How could he not see that I loved him? Him, as he was.
I told him so.
“Of course you do, and it should not mean your death.”
I grew peeved and began to sway, clicking my arms in discordant rhythm.
“Gemina,” Anone pleaded. “I cannot live here if you die. There will be no more family.”
“You care too much about the family. You are more bonded to the others now than to me.”
Even so, I felt him as strongly as ever. In the balmy, inland nights, our joining was as intense as ever. We forgot ourselves in those moments of warmth and musk, the white flares of night insects rising from the bushes to
form a halo of moving stars. But the afterward had begun to seem hollow. There was less of us, and more of me and him.
One night, I lay exhausted from our joining, shaking from the pain of the pressure. It was always worse after the joining.
“I am sorry, Gemina,” Anone said. “I am sorry it brings you pain. But if you would just take a female for your mate—”
“Are you so eager to be rid of me?” I asked.
I felt his hurt and groaned as it echoed inside me.
“I love you, Gemina,” Anone said, “and that is why I ask. I want you to live, and be with me. I need you.”
In the other-dream, Anone had talked me into coming to this world. She had needed my passion for adventure to flow with hers. I could have just put myself into cold-sleep on the ship and waited for her to be done on this world. I should have done that.
We were close enough now in our anger and hurt that Anone sensed the thought, and my bitterness from it.
“Are you sorry we’ve come?” he asked. He tossed his head in a haughty motion. “You shouldn’t be. I am not. This is the experience of a lifetime, of many lifetimes. Look at this family we’ve built. Look at what we have discovered.”
“I am here, Anone,” I cried. “And I am not that person in the other-dream. Not here. And I hurt. And I cannot take a mate beyond you. I will die from this.”
* * *
Anone, at last, acknowledged my condition by saying we needed a permanent home. He found an unclaimed stretch of river with an abandoned dwelling cave nearby. The cave was not optimal, but I watched as the family carried rocks to build up the mouth and dug a communal burrow of silt from the seep of water inside.
In a corner where the light didn’t touch, I made a burrow of my own. It took me all of one day, as I could only dig a short time before I had to rest. I told Anone I needed my separate burrow because of the pain, that sometimes I trembled and did not want everyone to feel it. He knew it was a lie.
He watched me, hurt swaying his shoulders. The family, strangely bonded as we were, felt some of this hurt, but it was not quite the sharing of a normal family. They began to cluster tighter around Anone, and watched me with suspicious eyes.
