“It doesn't really make sense,” Aiden once said, a data-slate in one hand, as he sat in Commons on board the Marlowe. He'd claimed a table far from the babble of idle chatter. Déo sat across from him, Konstantin at his side. It had been Konstantin's idea to play a few hands of Triad, but enthusiasm waned, and they sat, around steaming bulbs of coffee, listening with generous banter, to Aiden's linguistic ruminations. The ship was within hailing distance of an Avaat vessel—an enormous monstrosity larger than most Human cities. “What doesn't?” Konstantin asked. “The Avaat. They're a more sophisticated race than we are...technologically, at least. Evolved from predators, if their eyes are any indication. Forward pointing, binocular vision...all of that stuff. They're a hunter species...or at least opportunists, look at their claws, look at their head-shells. Violence is in the nature of their world, and they evolved in that violence.” “But they're not predators,” Konstantin said. Aiden shrugged. “No more than we are...” “They're tool-users—which means that their ancestors had big brains,” Déo began, nipping at his steaming, unsweetened brew. “But that's not the point you're getting at, is it?” “By all logic, they should be a competitor species. They breathe the same stuff we do...they need as much water as we do...life on their homeworld is as carbon based. I won't go so far to say that our protein configurations are complimentary, but we're made out of the same stuff. That puts us in competition with them...for resources, for air...for water...for places to have babies. But we've been in contact with them for nearly two-hundred years, and never once has there been a conflict between our species.” Konstantin shrugged. “The universe is big,” he said. “We still have plenty of room.” Aiden shuddered, as if dark revelations had just unspooled in the convoluted recesses of his mind. “It's more than that,” he said, focused on the data-slate. “Far more...but it's subtle.” The talk had gone that way for nearly an hour; they never got around to playing a few lazy hands of Triad. Now, with the gentle bite of a support harness in his armpits, Déo listened to the head-trapped echo of this thoughts and wondered—perhaps for the dozenth time today—what Aiden and Konstantin were doing. By his reckoning, the Marlowe had broken dock and was on the reverse leg of its trilateral run. To Lantes. To the more boring aspects of a trade-ship's routine. Lantes was little more than a 200-light journey: a mid-range jump. At Lantes, they'd deposit their hold-load of goods from Kethrin, pick up volatiles and consumables for the string of resource-allocation outposts along the Drakonis Strip. Boring work...dull routine: but Aiden—as always—had plenty of time to read...plenty of time to puzzle out (at least for himself) the grand existential mysteries that lay just beneath the existence of Avaat existence. “What keeps the balance between us?” he heard Aiden ask. And beyond the question, there was a sound: toe claws, clearly two sets. A chill prickled his skin, and he shifted in the tank, the presence fused to his spine a more pronounced annoyance now, though only for an instant. He tried not to think of the sound in the shadows, or the living thing becoming a part of him. He hadn't seen the symbiont before implantation. Now, unseen, it meticulously threaded his nervous system with sensory fibers as fine as silk and as strong as spun, tempered carbon. He didn't understand what the Avaat handlers had said to one another, as they strapped him to the surgical slab and sliced the skin of his back to reveal the neat ridge of spinal column. He didn't feel anything as they worked, and occasionally, the surgeons would coo, and chortle in a manner he assumed they took as comforting. A courtesy to him, as they worked. Once, twice, and even three times, alien hands caressed the sides of his face and brushed errant strands of sand-blond hair from the periphery of his sight. There had been something rakishly maternal in the gesture, something obsessively kind, though kindness—as Aiden always warned—was a concept of human origin and not necessarily a thing the Avaat understood. “It will take seventeen suns,” Eolaat informed him. “You will burn with fever, but we will comfort you.” Seventeen suns. They kept him in darkness. “For your companion,” they informed him. “S/he is not as accustomed to the light as your species. Darkness. Is. Necessary. Until s/he has fully fused. With. You.” There was a pause. “ Hir comfort is now your concern.” The companion, referred to without a gendered designation, was a serpentine, segmented creature. Déo had seen them before, textbook examples in holographic clarity. He'd never dreamed to touch one, to have one placed in a slit cut into his back. Companion was all the species was ever called, and little else was known about them. They were disturbing, not for their eyeless-worm appearance, but because these things without gendered identity were slowly...slowly becoming an intimate aspect of Déo's own flesh...Déo's own identity. “I won't be Human, any more,” Déo mused. “The Silent is not a human thing.” The words might have been ominous, but the piping woodwind sound of Eolaat's voice forestalled any nagging unrest. The gentle rasp of claws stroked the naked expanse of Déo's arm. A glance revealed the meticulous work of some Avaat manicurist. A delicate filigree of coils and loops defined what Déo assumed was the current taste in claw-decoration. Each delicate etching carried a faint, gleaming inlay of some strange metal. Copper, perhaps, but tinged with opalescence that tricked the human eye into seeing a startling wealth of colors for so small an area. By all logic, they should be a competitor species. They breathe the same stuff we do...they need as much water as we do...life on their homeworld is carbon-based as we are...we've been in contact with them for nearly two-hundred years, and never once has there been a conflict between our species. In retrospect, Aiden had been afraid of something: terribly so, and obsessed as well. Déo recognized that as he saw the patterns etched into the blunt scimitar sweep of Eolaat's claws. The Avaat hand was endowed with six digits, two of which were opposite-opposable thumbs. Predator hands. Hands capable of wielding strange—and undoubtedly effective—weapons. --And yet...in a span approaching two centuries, there had never been conflict between Human and Avaat. * * * After days—perhaps—and as many nights, they moved him. In darkness, he felt the pull of his harness and a shift in the colloid solution of his tank. They kept him suspended, his chin just above the waterline; and now, he felt himself drawn upward, silently, and without effort. Alien machinery did the work, but it was easy for him to imagine Avaat laborers working wenches and pulleys and some strange contrivance of rope and netting. The image was lurid fantasy, however; remnants of the low-grade fever he endured as labored through biochemical negotiation with the foreign body now a part of his own. He felt the slough of thick, half-gelatinous liquid from his flesh; his nose wrinkled to the smell of sulfur, sweat, and some undefinable musk. The scent was organic in nature: like something scraped from the depths of a stagnant pond. He hadn't been aware of the smell in the tank. Perhaps—he thought—he'd grown accustomed to it. But now, in the presence of fresh air, and dim, dim light, he sensed the change and recoiled at the stink of it. The chamber, well within the heart of Station Kethrin, carried the subjective aspect of some mythic, stygian hell. Avaat stood around him, head-shells open along the flanks of their cheeks, dark, feathery tendrils waving in the still air. They crooned and chattered to one another in a language crowded with cooing, hissing warbles like the sonorous exuberance of woodwinds. In light as dim as clouded twilight, he counted eight Avaat, few of whom he recognized; he saw Eolaat among them. At least he recognized the pattern of Eolaat's spots. It was Eolaat who stepped forward, toe claws tapping gently with each step, long, violet robes swishing. “Discomfort?” Eolaat asked, flanking Déo and bending into a wordless, prodding exploration of his back. Claws nipped gently at the linear swell tracing his spine. Sparks of discomfort flared, died, flared again; but despite the twinges, Eolaat was gentle in his tactile exploration. He touched, Déo thought, like a doctor, and in that moment, Déo felt less than human and more like a sample of undefined meat. Déo understood the thrust of the question and shook his head. “It hurts,.” he said. “A little.” “Further inspection,” Eolaat said, as attendants worked the snaps and buckles of his harness. They'd removed him swiftly from the fever tank and left him to stand on cold/hard flooring. He stood, shivering and repulsed by the squish of colloidal fluids between his toes. He spread them, praying to the most obscure corners of Fate and Circumstance that they'd let him shower as quickly as possible, that they'd give him food, drink, and some distraction from the fetid stench wafting around him like a cloud of ravenous gnats. He glanced down, to avoid the sight of dispassionate, opalescent eyes, staring at him: lidless eyes reflecting the light globes suspended from the ceiling. In glancing down, he saw his own flesh, as pale as cream and shiny in a way that seemed disturbingly...Avaat. Suspension fluid pooled between his toes in a way that sent flutters through his stomach. He saw the faint hairs on each toe-joint in exaggerated relief, and his mind—in desperate search for something mundane, something distracting—latched onto the inane thought that he needed to trim his nails, before a prolonged walk ate holes into the tips of his socks. Six fingered hands prodded the flesh of his back. Claws dug gently—and oh so politely—into the tenderness along his spine. He winced, gritted his teeth, and braced himself for greater pain that did not come. “Pronounced discomfort?” Eolaat asked. He shook his head. “No,” he said, exhaling. A lie. “Residual infection,” Eolaat said. “Normal. Two suns. You will consume acclimation boosters.” Pills, he assumed. He nodded. “Shower,” Eolaat said, withdrawing his sensory feathers and clapping the flanges of his head-shell. The hollow/wet sound was a word, Déo knew...but it was Aiden who recognized more of the subtleties of Avaat speech. Aiden was light years away, and of no help now...light years away, in a life Déo recognized as still human. An attendant gestured for Déo to follow, and Déo, measuring barefoot steps, walked two paces behind the creature. Dim, ruddy light from overhead globes reflected from the buffed, dappled sheen of the attendant's bulbous head-shell. The tank room, still crowded with milling, warbling Avaat, vanished in Déo's rearward perspective as he followed the attendant through a narrow, short corridor. The light here was brighter, and yellowed a few angstroms closer to green than orange-red; but, the eye-friendly effect remained--as if candles burned in unseen, mirrored nooks. There were different smells here, an astringent waft of cleansers and disinfectants above a whispered doodle of something that conjured images of blossoms in Déo's mind. “Shower,” the attendant said, rasping the word and revealing its sex as female. There was that odd, metallic quality to her voice: the first sex-differentiation telltale that Déo had learned. The narrow corridor opened into a wide, cubical room. The floor was an expanse of slate-gray, hexagonal tiles, centered with a single, grated drain. The attendant backed out of the chamber, and moments later, artificial rain—the temperature of blood—fell from the ceiling. Déo languished in the warmth, scrubbing at his flesh with palms and fingerpads. He avoided the itch along his back, though once—twice--he brushed it with his fingertips as he hugged himself in passing moments of fearful vulnerability. He was a ghost-pale apparition with something of a truncated fin centered along the length of his back: he saw this in his mind's eye. He shuddered and felt the quiver of something below his sternum. The threat of bile flooded the root of his tongue, and unless he spat, he'd empty his stomach. He spat. I'd sell anything for a word Aiden said, in his mind. Déo laughed, though he could taste no humor in the sound as it stuttered from his throat. “I've been given a word,” he said, as if Aiden could somehow hear. “And I've got a sentient worm, fusing with my spine to show for it.” He scrubbed himself with his bare hands, until the ceiling stopped raining. He padded out of the shower room, to find the female attendant waiting. She held a neat, square fold of various fabrics. A towel to dry with. Clothing. “Dress,” she said. “Food follows.” Her head-shell, Déo noticed, was closed. *** ...to be continued... **** As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and hopefully you've enjoyed this foray into Déo's world.