Despite almost constant togetherness, I still don’t know much about our new passenger. Though I’ve found myself telling her all about Zaraell and my journey out into the black, she won’t tell me where she came from, how she came to be floating in space, or how she survived floating in space. What she does do is listen, and purr, and on the rare occasion she speaks, it’s with a surprising depth.
When Ennesta’s not trying to weld herself to me—which I admit, I enjoy more and more—no one can find her.
I could find her, of course. I can feel and sort through every vibration on this ship when I wish. I don’t look for her at first because, well, I didn’t work as hard as I have for my whole damn career on politely ignoring my crewmates’ vibrations to violate Ennesta’s privacy.
Still. The computer logs Jorusz shows me are suspicious. Someone’s been scouring the star charts. For what? We can’t tell. But it’s happening during the times when Ennesta’s unaccounted for.
So okay, I listen for her. I pick up Quonka singing to herself in her cabin and KrunZo barking something to Jorusz, who’s climbing his way to the bridge, ignoring the ladder in favor of just suckering up the wall. With all those sounds accounted for, and the hum of the ship’s star drive, whatever’s left must be Ennesta. There isn’t anything left, not at first.
And then I hear a whispered voice command in one of the ship’s unused cabins: “One quadrant X-ward,” it says. “Systems with F2V stars.”
What is she looking for?
Ennesta is quiet, but I can be quieter still, even in the ship’s increasing gravity. I slink up to the cabin’s open door before she knows I’m there, and I see...
I’m not sure what I’m seeing. The creature using the computer terminal is clearly Ennesta—it’s all covered in white fur, and it still has eight limbs—but none of them are right. The topmost pair has dexterous six-fingered hands instead of paws, and the middle two pairs have shrunk to nubs, while the bottom have elongated into wobbly-looking legs that boost Ennesta high enough to see the computer’s screen.
A gasp escapes my beak.
Ennesta turns so fast her face looks blurry. She pulls her front hands off the controls even as they start morphing back into paws. She shrinks as her legs even out.
“What are you?”
Ennesta shakes her head.
“Well, you’re clearly not a toyopop. You lied to us,” I say, and it’s all I can do not to say You lied to me. The hurt I feel registers as an actual ache in my second heart. Figures, I think. You start to care about someone; you get hurt.
“No,” Ennesta says. She walks toward me on her hind legs, unsteadily, other limbs wiggling awkwardly, and it occurs to me that not only is this the first time I’ve seen her navigate in gravity, it also looks like the first time she’s ever tried it. Or at least the first time in her current form. “I just haven’t told you things.” All of her top six arms are held out placatingly.
“This whole body you’re in is a lie. What do you even look like, really?”
“I... can’t show you.” Ennesta’s face looks as sad as only a genetically engineered pet can look. Except there is real intelligence behind those eyes; intelligence and sorrow.
“Of course not,” I say, tentacles fluttering in frustration. “Look, Jorusz thinks you’re a spy for ISTO. I don’t want to believe him, but. What is it you’re looking for in our star charts? Why can’t you—or won’t you—tell us anything about yourself? Where you came from? What species you are? Anything?”
Ennesta is close enough to touch me, but she doesn’t. She turns over some of her paws and looks at them as if for the first time, then flings them out in a gesture of raw hopelessness. “I don’t know!”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Ennesta slumps onto the deck like a shipwreck hitting the ocean floor. “I don’t know, not any of the answers. I don’t know what I am or where I came from or what I’m supposed to look like. I’ve never seen one of me before—not after metamorphosis, anyway.”
“Okay...” I say. “So you’re a shapeshifter.”
She nods.
“But you don’t know what your natural form is.”
“I’ve never seen it. I’ve always just been—”
“Been what?”
And she hesitates, then sighs and starts again. “I haven’t ever lived long enough to find out what I am.”
No kidding, I think, somewhat bitterly. Who has?
“I’d seen these toyopop things in previous lives, and everyone treated them with kindness. It seemed like a good thing to be...” She shrugs two sets of her fluffy arms. “I didn’t realize they were pets.”
I laugh, despite it all. “And the star charts? What’s that about? Just what are you looking for?”
“Home.”
That little word hits me hard, echoing through an empty place inside me: a coral house with no one home. Gravity, who isn’t looking for a place to hang that word on?
“Okay,” I say. “It’ll be all right. Come on, let’s tell the others. I bet Quonka will even help you look.” I extend a tentacle to Ennesta, who places one paw in it and stands on two legs.
She takes a few wobbly steps, then lets go of me and drops to all eight legs. “Hold on,” she says. She makes a couple circles on all eight, tripping herself a few times. Finally she bends her spine in a way that doesn’t look anatomically possible and ambulates on six of the legs, leaving the top two to function as arms. “Oh, that’s much better,” she says.
It looks completely unnatural.
“How do real toyopops walk?” I ask.
“They use all eight,” she admits. “But I can’t get the hang of it, and since my cover is blown anyway...” She shrugs with the top two limbs.
“Do you need all of them? May as well drop the middle two pairs.”
“Do you need all of yours?” She elongates a finger to gently stroke one of my tentacles, and then I can’t speak, all I can do is wait for the electric thrill to pass through my whole body, from beak to cloaca. A shockingly erotic thrum lingers there, and in the sensitive inner curve of the tentacle where Ennesta’s paw still explores.
This is madness. Am I really attracted to this creature in this false and somewhat ridiculous body, about whom I still know almost nothing?
Yes, I am.
“I can certainly use them all in interesting ways, if that’s what you’re asking,” I say when my voice returns, only a little quaver in it. “But, see, I’m not a shapeshifter. Mine aren’t optional.”
Ennesta drops her finger, which is a true tragedy. She looks at her body, her limbs, as if for the first time, standing on the rear ones to hug herself around the middle with the second and third pairs. “I like them,” she finally says. “They aren’t very practical, but they feel like a part of me. Even if they do trip me up sometimes.” She wiggles them suggestively. “Of course, I could be something else if you wanted.”
Madness or not, I give in, standing on six tentacles to match limbs six for six with Ennesta’s in a slow embrace. “I like you just how you are,” I say, and we go from there, and before long neither of us can say how many limbs we have, only that we need all of them to properly explore and pleasure each other.
Afterward, Ennesta gets her limbs tangled on the ladder up to the bridge, and I can’t help but chuckle when one of them slips off and bonks me lightly in the head. I use a spare two tentacles to guide her paw back to the ladder, and she pushes off my head up into the bridge with a little more force than is strictly necessary—a gentle poke.
“Well, if it isn’t the stowaway,” Jorusz says, scales throbbing between red and purple. “What do you want?”
“Ennesta’s a shapeshifter,” I blurt out. “She isn’t sure what her species is supposed to look like. Tell them, Ennesta.”
The InstaComm pings, and Jorusz mutters at the screen.
“Ennesta?”
She’s left my side, running almost all the way up to Jorusz before seeming to remembe
r she’s afraid of him. Her eyes are wide and full of fear.
The InstaComm ejects a fresh message sphere, and Jorusz casually tosses it into a bag of them. Clearly the Tro’o are being their usual high-maintenance selves.
Ennesta’s eyes are glued to the bag of message spheres. Or maybe it’s the bag of flattened, used spheres she’s eyeing, in stunned horror. Jorusz touch-types something into the InstaComm, head swiveled to look away from the screen toward us.
“Stop,” Ennesta says. “Please!”
“Stop what?” KrunZo asks. He hits the blue button and the machine pings cheerily.
And Ennesta looks at him with such hurt and rage that I recoil from her.
The flattened message sphere pops out of the InstaComm console. Jorusz makes to toss it into the bag with the rest of them, but Ennesta holds out one trembling paw. Jorusz looks to KrunZo, who grunts a confused assent.
Ennesta takes the oblong disc in one paw, then holds it in both before her, reverently, as though it’s not just a bit of trash destined for the matter reclamator but something very precious. She holds it up to her face, looking closely, then sniffing, and after a moment during which none of us breathe, she takes a deep breath and releases it as a keening, piercing howl.
For a long while none of us move, shocked into inaction by Ennesta’s uncharacteristic, unrelenting loudness. KrunZo, as befits a captain, is the first to recover. “What in Gravity’s name are you doing?” he demands.
“She’s mourning, you idiot,” Quonka says mildly, climbing up into the cockpit. She kneels beside Ennesta, placing one hand on the place where Ennesta’s back bends unnaturally upright. “There there, sweetie,” she says. “You want to tell us why the message sphere makes you so sad?”
Ennesta quiets, nodding. “It’s dead,” she says. “Dead again and again and again.”
The machine births me, as usual. The ping, as usual, is the first thing I remember. And then the words of a message, as they’re squeezed from me. They slip away, leaving little behind. In larval stage, my senses are not sharp. I feel movement, textures against my exterior. I sense light, though I have no eyes.
Then a flash of cold, and nothing.
I wake back in the machine, again. Words are stabbed into me, a destination, the sharp-sweet-rotten smell, and then the crush, the pain. I expect the momentary nothing pause and then the ping of a new life. But the crushing goes only partway. I hear the ping, but it’s a different one than before, and my senses are alive like never before, alive with pain.
I am grabbed. I am in a hand, and the voice attached to the hand is weary and grumbling, and I tumble into a bag with other refuse. For I realize that’s what I am. They do not know I am alive. I am lucky garbage.
For a kilosecond or two I can’t move. I am too young, too wounded. But we grow fast. I consume the other refuse and by the time they throw us all into space I am a fat sphere again, lucky garbage of lazy ship.
In larval stage, I have no need for air. I float, I tumble like asteroid.
I am lucky a third time, because you shoot through my space. I have just enough strength to end larval stage and choose a form and hold onto your ship. And here I am.
We stare at her, waiting for the punchline. Ennesta lifts the flattened sphere of the most recent message sent in one paw.
“This is what I should have been. The machine should have killed me; sent my soul to the other end to be birthed with the message.”
After a moment of silence, Jorusz is the one to break it. “You’re trying to tell us you’re a damn message sphere?”
Ennesta shakes her head. “No. I’m trying to tell you that the message spheres are the same as me.”
Jorusz’s scales pulse brighter and brighter orange. “That’s impossible! It’s a damn machine. It doesn’t birth any larvae.”
“How do you know?” Quonka asks, still kneeling next to Ennesta.
In response, Jorusz only flashes a ripple of colors at her.
“It’s a fair question,” I say, the concrete puzzle of a mechanical question snapping my mind back into focus. “I’ve worked on just about every kind of machine there is, but never on an InstaComm. No one has. It’s common knowledge that you just can’t even think of opening one of those things up, but did you read the warning on the unit closely? Punishable by memory wipe. So for all we know it does birth larvae.”
“That would explain a few things,” Quonka says. “I’ve always wondered how the messages are transmitted so fast, faster than anything else in the known universe. If they do run on reincarnation...”
KrunZo, still as a mountain in his captain’s chair, does his best to steeple his stubby arms. “Well, sure. Reincarnation is instant. But it’s also random.”
Ennesta looks alarmed. “It is?”
“Isn’t it?” I ask.
“It isn’t for me. For my people. The machine controls it, and now that I am free from the machine I could control it.”
“Gronkshit,” Jorusz grumbles. “There is no such thing as a species that can control its reincarnation. We’d’ve heard about it!”
“That’s what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?” Quonka asks, ignoring Jorusz even though he’s strobing between black and orange.
Ennesta blushes her furry face somehow—she must be changing the color of her fur. “I was born into the machine. I don’t remember where home is.”
“And you want to find it so you can die and be reborn there?” Quonka asks.
Ennesta nods.
And my third heart sinks like a stone. Of course. She’s just waiting for the right current to swim away from me. Stupid of me to have thought otherwise, for even a nanosecond. “Now hold on,” I begin, but—
“This is nonsense!” Jorusz interjects. “First of all, you’re all listening to a wild yarn from a stowaway who’s probably an ISTO spy. And second, if it is true, then we’re probably all going to get disappeared for violating InstaComm’s terms. I can’t believe what a ship of fools I’m on.”
“I can prove it,” Ennesta says quietly, and it only takes following her gaze to the bag of fresh message spheres to figure out how. According to InstaComm, they must be put into stasis within four kiloseconds or one standard Galactic Hour. But what if they weren’t?
“Let them grow up,” she says.
“Astrill,” KrunZo asks, “what’s the penalty for that?”
It takes about another few days—as I reckon them—to reach the Tro’o rendezvous, a jungle moon of the system’s third planet. Needless to say, we send no more InstaComm messages. Luckily, we’re close enough by now that holos really will do just as well, even for the anxious Tro’o.
The gravity lovers—including KrunZo, who takes any opportunity he can to ambulate on flat land—shuttle the cargo down, while Ennesta and I tend to the brood of message spheres whose number increases with every transmission from the Tro’o. We’ve been feeding them table scraps and anything else otherwise headed for the matter reclamator that Ennesta deems suitable. It’s unnerving how they absorb the food into themselves. The spheres are getting big; the first ones we freed from stasis are almost half the size of Ennesta, who, now that I think of it, also seems to be growing. She’s about my size now, and I wonder if she’ll end up towering over me the way the other crew members do. I’m sure even she has no idea how big she’ll get.
Over the holo from down on the moon, the Tro’o are stomping around on their feathery hind legs, roaring at KrunZo and Jorusz and Quonka and waving their clawed hands. While most of the Tro’o take pride in their reasoning, the sect we most often deal with behaves like the monsters they resemble. It’s only a matter of time before they demand not just lab-grown meat but murdered meat, and then live animals to hunt. I’d bet any quantity of the finest Kranellian snapps on it.
I mute the holo display. How am I supposed to know if negotiations are about to turn south, when the Tro’o bellow like that to say hello? I enlarge a scanner screen tracking nearby ships. None of them squawk ISTO, but th
en they wouldn’t, would they? I scroll through the ships’ actual images one at a time.
In the unused cabin we’ve turned into a message sphere nursery, holographic dinosaurs stomp and spaceships fly. And a non-holographic sphere wobbles, cracking open like an egg with no shell, stretching and unfolding tentatively. I’m breathless to see what Ennesta’s species looks like, even more to see her finally see it too, but no. Limbs emerge (four of them); a head stretches into shape. A tail extrudes from what is now the creature’s posterior, and proportions adjust to account for it. After a long moment the newly born... whatever Ennesta’s species is called... claws zir way out of the bunk’s netting and opens zir toothy mouth to roar. Congratulations, it’s a Tro’o! Clearly this former sphere’s choice of form was influenced by the holo.
We’ve done our best to research Ennesta’s species, with no luck. There is no record in the libraries of either a shape-shifting species or one that can control its reincarnation—only legends of feats performed by acolytes of the Collective, none with provable results. My theory is that a species with that kind of control might never choose to leave their home system; perhaps none have ever been reborn as something else, somewhere else.
It sounds like paradise.
I’ve had more lives than anyone else on this crew, having bounced all over the universe since the days of the fifth Galactic Empire. I’ve ended up in regions so remote that there was no interstellar trade, even been planet-bound a couple of times. I’ve been mammalian, reptilian, avian, heptopod, and almost every other kind of thing there is, with no connecting thread that I can discern. Yeah, it’s exciting. Variety is the spice of lives, right?
It’s also lonely. I’ve never been reunited with any past loves. Or past friends. Or acquaintances. A person starts to feel like love is pointless at best, counterproductive even.
We’ve also been trying to research InstaComm. How was the miraculous technology developed? How does it work? All we’ve found are more legends and conspiracy theories. Was the Lost Generationship of the Pro’oco steered into a star because they knew too much? According to the lead-hat wearers, yes.
Emily C Skaftun - [BCS299 S04] Page 2
