Changing Vision (6 page)

“Es—” my name came suddenly as a soft, drawn-out breath. “Is this what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is, Paul-friend?” I asked reasonably, if unsteadily.

If my voice was prone to fluttering at the edges, I had all the response I could ask for in the suddenly husky tones of his: “You. You’ve shared…this is your mass in here…for me, isn’t it? As if I were…as if I were truly your web-kin.”

“Don’t eat it,” I cautioned him hastily. “You know web-mass is corrosive to your tissue.”

Paul smiled, but there was moisture leaking from his eyes. As he seemed to ignore the phenomenon, I didn’t mention it. “Is it alive?” he asked in wonder, supporting the medallion in the palm of one hand. The faint blue glow within the silver showed more clearly against his skin.

I considered the question, feeling the bond between that speck of mass and myself as the faintest of drawings; it would be vastly stronger if I were in web-form. “In a sense,” I said finally. “It could not survive for long outside the cryounit unless I assimilated it. Within the unit, it should last.”

“How long?”

“As long as you wish.” It was part of my gift as well, this power over some of me.

Paul quickly slipped the slim chain over his head. The medallion disappeared beneath his shirt.
It should
, I thought with pleasure,
nestle over his heart
, Human anatomy being what it was. “What do I do in return?” he asked, only now noticing the moisture from his eyes and wiping it away with one hand.

I hadn’t thought of that. A true sharing included a precise exchange of each individual’s mass. He’d been the only alien to witness sharing between my web-kin and me, although it hadn’t exactly been such, since Skalet had chewed away most of me before running off to fight her battle. Thinking about that moment, I grinned toothily. “I won’t ask you to donate the tip of a finger for tradition’s sake. I’ll settle for your gift.”

“Done,” Paul said. To his credit, there wasn’t a shred of relief in his voice. “You’ll have to sit—over there.”

Intrigued, I did as he commanded.

The large, flat package was replaced on my lap. This time I didn’t delay, ripping open the wrap. If this was his
portion of our sharing, I would give it the respect and attention Paul had granted mine.

Which would have been easier had I known what to make of the plain piece of wood the plas had disguised. I ransacked my memories, and those of my kin, searching for any hint about such a gift and its ceremonial meaning. Nothing. It was a well-polished piece, with rounded corners and a smooth finish. The wood itself was a pale yellow, a native species of hardwood, nothing extraordinary except for its ability to grow almost Human-waist high in the valleys of the southern hemisphere. I flared my nostrils. It smelled like—wood. At last, I gave up trying to guess its meaning and looked up in defeat.

“Place your hands on the outer edges, here and there,” Paul instructed, a smile hovering around his lips but not quite there, as though he were too anxious about my reaction to let it out. “Press firmly, then let it go.”

“Let it go?” I eyed the wood askance, wondering what to expect. But, because Paul had understood my gift, I trusted him with his, and pressed my blunt-clawed toes into what I could now feel were slight indentations in the sides. They felt like ident pads, the sort one used on a personal vault. Keyed to my Lanivarian hands? How had he—

I had no further time nor inclination to wonder about the how, for the wood was now glowing, lifting from my lap and free of my now-limp hands until the slab floated directly before my eyes. Slowly, it tilted in midair until the flat, broad surface faced me. As I took a breath of astonishment, the surface became a flickering screen.

A screen inhabited by a flashing sequence of thirteen thousand and forty-four images, some silent, many with sound. All were faces and forms of Humans, one hundred and ten individuals, differing in most of the ways that species could, yet many cohesive in the line of chin and cheek, mouth and eye, in the creation of smiles or laughter, even in the occasional tear. The voices made a mosaic of languages and tones, greetings, children’s serenades, speeches.

The parade slowed, ending with images of one face: toothless, toothed, gawky, graceful, uniformed, and a last
vision that merged with the present as the floating screen consumed itself, its particles falling as a golden dust on my knees and feet, letting me see Paul’s smile.

It had taken less than a minute.

I looked in awe at the quiet, slender being, this ephemeral who understood what I was so utterly, he had known the greatest gift he could give me.

I cycled into web-form, luxuriating in the freedom to do so in his presence, and lovingly sorted Paul’s living history into the most private memories of my flesh.

We had truly shared.

The Web of Esen held two.

“WE have to dump more of the records to inactive storage, Project Leader Kearn. There’s no room left in the system.” The officer stood carefully at attention but his gaze slid to the crewwoman at his side as if gathering support. “We’ve been telling you for weeks.”

Kearn ran his hand over his damp scalp, torn between glowering at the captain of the
Russell III
and groveling. “You’ve both also told me you can’t run the pattern analysis on stored data, Captain Lefebvre,” he said, settling for what he hoped was a masterful-sounding rebuttal. He felt at a disadvantage at the best of times: Lefebvre’s appearance—medium height and weight, though strongly built, medium brown hair, unremarkable features, in short, medium everything—had belied his abilities, which started with a brilliant tactical mind and, as Kearn woefully discovered over the years, seemed to include being on good terms with some being in almost every corner of the Commonwealth.

He’d hoped for a kindred spirit, or at least someone he could control. Like Kearn, Lefebvre hadn’t been promoted to larger, more important ships. Unlike Kearn, Lefebvre had never been heard to regret this, or to speak ill of anyone or anything: an obviously intentional effort to hide his thwarted ambitions Kearn rather envied. That didn’t mean he trusted Lefebvre. It hadn’t taken long for even Kearn to realize that Lefebvre followed his orders—in his own way—because their quest mattered to the Human and he believed in a disciplined ship.

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 the 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 translight 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.

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.