A supercarrier slid into hard dock, and Déo sensed a shift in the ambient mood of the station. He'd nearly missed it, but when the awareness came over him, he thought of what others must have felt whenever the Marlowe slid into hard lock with one docking mast or another. For a month, Station Kethrin had been his home. He took meals in his quarters, though the Avaat siphoned a massive load of bank-currents into his account. He could afford splurges. But the thought of Human company in Human-dominant restaurants threw him into a fit of chills. Since his gentle abduction, he'd found it harder and harder to bear the company of those as Human as he'd once been. It was a matter of smells. A matter of sound. Once, he'd caught a whiff of a woman's perfume. It threw him into a fit of nostalgia and cold, cold dread. The wild zag of nervous tension raced through his fingers. The hairs at the nape of his neck stood at rigid attention. The entire station seemed to close in around him, and he'd had to flee the restaurant he'd chosen for that night's meal. He paid the bill and left before his food arrived. He'd gone home. He'd undressed for a shower, but couldn't make it as far as the cubicle. He simply collapsed into a wreck of sobs and muddled emotions he couldn't name. And it was the smell that did it. The dumb proximity of a woman who wore perfume he recognized. She was Lantenese, by that scent—and once, he'd had an affair with a woman who wore the same traditional scent. Now, with a worm, melded to the knotted sweep of his spine, No Lantenese woman was likely to touch him. Now, with strands of alien nerve tissue threaded through the mass of his flesh, he could no longer call himself the man he'd always though he was. When it was quiet, in every place but his own mind, he could see himself, pale and naked at the edge of a cliff, his toes, just over the lip of rock where the ground dropped away. He didn't know if this was a dream, or some strange trick of alien biochemistry warping his perceptions, but he always saw the same cliff, always saw the same yawning cavern, obscured by opalescent, gray mist. Always, in this vision, he peered through the neat, pale brackets of his naked feet, seeing the place where he'd plunge—with just one more step forward. Always his toes reached just over the jagged cutoff of rock, a breeze from below wafting upward, and chilling the spaces between them. The vision came to him—again—now. Where once emotion had lurked, he felt nothing. I should be afraid, Déo thought., staring at Kethrin, beyond the shielded transparency between himself and cold/open space. =Why?= It was not a voice in his head, but he sensed it as such; he'd felt it since the day he'd been hauled (in his harness) from the half-gelatinous muck of his fever tank. It was the worm. His companion, though s/he hadn't yet told him hir name. The worm had been a shy and retiring presence at first: now it acted in more overt and assertive ways. For weeks, he'd grown accustomed to it, sensing its subtle movements beneath his skin. There had been bouts of fever accompanied by the annoyance of a tingle in the valleys between his fingers, between his toes. His skin, normally pale, blushed along his flanks with a motley dapple of spots, like leaf-shadow and sunlight beneath the strangest possible tree. The spots were subtle—red at first, and now darker tan; they splattered his flesh in a meticulous, biological pattern. . .from each pinky toe to his armpits. Like an army of amoebas—some smaller than others—they defined only the flanks of his body. “You'll never really know who has a worm,” Aiden once observed, somewhere between Balder and Lesk. “And that's what used to scare me.” Konstantin cocked his left eyebrow, a smirk curling his upper lip. “You were afraid of hybrids?” Aiden shrugged. “I was a kid. It was before I knew what they were.” But no one really knew what they were. Déo thought of that, standing, one night, before the mirror in his quarters. You knew the hybrid bearers of worms, he realized, only if they stood naked before you. He'd felt the arrival of his telltale spots in a fiery itch that shattered his sleep. Worm-assimilation was nearly complete, and he'd cherished the idea of—once again—sleeping on his back. But the itches came and broke his dreams. And on the following night, he stood—naked. . . again—observing the subtle changes that had come over him. His face was the same, though he needed to shave; stubble itched along his jaw and cheeks, and stuck the eye like a dusting of ash and sand, when caught in a mirror. His hair—sandy blond—bore no radical alterations. He needed a haircut. He was pale—as always—like the belly of some deep-marine animal. But there were the spots, now: like the marks of a Terran leopard. They were faint. He had to strain to see them. But they were there, marking where—the night before—something like the itch of scabies burned his flesh, and drove him, half-whimpering, to the Avaat attendants who'd been assigned his care. “It is your word,” Eolaat informed him, examining his flanks with singular concentration. “In time, you will learn to speak it. When this happens. You. And. I. Will. Shake wind. Together. You will explain it's meaning.” This was a part of the contact-process no one spoke of: finding the metaphysical word embedded in the faint, flank-hugging definition of small leopard spots. =But we have to agree on what it means!= There was a hint of mocking laughter in the neurochemical voice bleeding through the meat of his brain. The worm's chemical chatter was becoming less and less of a shock. The swollen ridge centering his back had vanished. The worm—though still a new presence—was a part of him; its unneeded tissues dissolved as more vital flesh intermingled with Déo's own. There were nights (after the bout of itching) when he surfed the crests of very strange dreams; those phantoms of the mind were a muddle of alien sensations. Worm-dreams: of a life as vanished as his own unaltered humanity. They were terrifying and dark things. At first. . . . Now, he was learning to recognize what they were, and learning—as well—to take some comfort in them. Worm-dreams. They were rich in olfactory texture: a flood of taste and scent, and something like sight, only eyeless. Now, as he drifted in zero-gravity in Station Kethrin's dorsal observation dome, his thoughts were not on the worm or hir dreams, nor of his own absent fear. There was a storm on the planet. The station's orbit carried it past the day/night terminus, and Kethrin itself loomed, black and mysterious at the center of his vision. Sparks lit the planetary night, and he watched them, taking small comfort in the knowledge that for all that had changed (and stood to change,) rain continued to fall. Lightning still struck. =What does it feel like?= “What does what feel like?” =Those small lights. Blinking in irregular patterns. “It's called lightening. It's painful. It can kill, if it touches you. Those light are enormous discharges of electricity.” But you enjoy looking at them?= “They remind me of. . .things.” —Of the past: those nights spent on the shores of Lake Haydn. . .with Honza and Libor, Viktor, Jacob, and Séandra. There'd always been fires on the shore, and the pop of bonfire sap, touched by the advance of gorgeous immolation. On those lakeside nights, Honza played an accordion—his family's ancient treasure—and improvised songs in the lilting, sonorous language he shared with Libor. They never explained what their songs were about, but there was never any need. It was the mood that mattered, the vodka and the slivovice, the fish, and mostly, Séandra. It was Séandra who liked the storms. The ponderous roll of thunder and the flash of lightening always drew submerged passions from somewhere deep inside of her. =You will not see her again. It cannot be done.= He flinched at the chilled observation in that cloying, soundless worm-voice. “Thank you for reminding me.” You are welcome, Déo. It is a comfort to know that we are alike. I will not experience life with my creche-companions again. I can still hear/taste our conversations. And a small flash of worm-dream came upon him. There was darkness, and the endless press of limbless bodies against his own. Speech came, not as sound, but as a rich neurotransmitter broth, absorbed directly through the skin. A wave of dizziness overcame him, vanished, and melted easily into his more visceral awareness; his symbiont-worm was an eyeless creature, and only through neurological recombination had s/he learned sight. Déo found comfort in that. Light, he knew, terrified the worms, as much as their darker-than-black subterranean world terrified humans. It was a profoundly alien thing to them. Light. Like the Avaat, they were an enigma-species. Without sight, they'd developed a culture. . .without tool using appendages, they'd entered the hard vacuum of space and opened profitable trade with the Avaat—and, according to rumor—other races. Theirs was a culture built upon abstraction and strange talents of a biological nature. =I like the lightening, Déo.= There was a plaintive note in the chemical voice and it hardened a lump in Déo's throat. An involuntary flood of tears hung at the tips of his lashes, then broke into tiny, crystalline orbs, caught on a current of observation-dome air. He watched them, shedding more, as he fought to regain his composure. He always felt stupid when he cried, like some weak and spineless child, and he was crying now—so unexpectedly. . . so suddenly, and it left him cold. The words that decompressed in his mind were but a pale shadow of the information spoken through the neurotransmitter-broth flooding his synapses. There were compacted strata of regret in the non-spoken words, all centered on an inhuman and terrifying attempt to erase one simple statement: You will not see her again. It cannot be done. “It's okay.,” Déo said. “You didn't mean to hurt me.” (And in that moment, he questioned whether the tears were his own, or the worm's.) The speech chemicals ebbed. Only slightly. Silence. And then: =I will not make this mistake again.= Déo made an involuntary shrug. “It's okay. You may be curious about her; I can tell you about her, if you'd like.” =Yes. Later. Maybe. But I will not remind you of certain facts again.= Déo nodded, unable to speak. Other voices chattered in the rearward distance: Human voices, darting into bursts of laughter. Those, Déo recognized, were tourist voices. Human. No spacer would ever clog the air wish such noise. There was—after all—a constant, subliminal threat to all life set adrift in the hard vacuum of open space. You had to listen, you had to watch your surroundings. Constantly. No tourist would ever know that. None, he imagined, would be able to hear the whispered threat of a micro-breach, or the comforting hum of the station's rotation-stabilizing motors. Zero gravity was the thrill that they sought here, and perhaps a view of Kethrin itself. Little more. The subtle wash of environmental telltales was like a rare EM emission, far, far beyond the threshold of common, Human perception. Déo lost himself in thinking about these tourists: seven of them, by the voices he'd counted. And then, as they drifted near him--near enough for wafts of balms and perfumes to invade his nostrils—it struck him that he'd been away from the Marlowe long enough to consider himself station locked. Grounded. He knew more than these tourists. He was no mud-lubber, but he no longer wore ship-grays, with the marks of Environmental Engineering pinned to his collar, and cuffs. But, as he saw it, he had no chance of ever working as ship-crew again. =There is another life on Kethrin. You will not miss work on your ship.= “You're certain of that?” =Yes. You will see.= And that was why he came here now: to see open space for one last time—at least as far as he could tell. “Your future,” Eolaat had said, “is still open. On Kethrin, you will decide your direction. On Kethrin, you will learn your purpose.” --And on the day that followed Eolaat's declaration, Déo drifted, weightless, as lightning sparked across Kethrin's night-locked face. Tomorrow, he and the worm would leave the station. Tomorrow, Eolaat would begin his observation of new exchange candidates. There were ships, inbound. There would always be ships, if Station Kethrin kept to its orbit, and kept her holds filled with tech and rarities shot upward from the planet below. Tomorrow, Déo and the worm would meet others. Hybrids like themselves. Other Avaat. Tomorrow. . . . Tomorrow. . . . * * * * . . .to be continued. . . As always, thank you for reading, commenting, and—hopefully—enjoying. As is quite obvious, Déo's adventure will be posted shortly.