On the night of Déo's arrival planet-side, a flickering constellation of bonfires played havoc with the darkness. He'd seen them on approach, as the drop-shuttle banked through pockets of turbulence and set his teeth into a clench of jaw-cramping intensity. He'd never liked the keening, fiery breech of atmosphere and the sustained thunder of drag-deceleration. There were a million-and-one things that could go wrong, a million-and-one ways to die an incandescent and all-too-sudden death. He'd seen it before: some half-a-hairline flaw in ablative shielding that gave the daytime sky (of a world, more than 800 lights away) a gleaming mock-star at the head of an ash-white contrail. He could still hear those gasps of dismay. But that was long ago, and worlds away. He'd boarded the shuttle with five of Eolaat's other recruits: other spacers, like himself. . .from trade ships, research ships, and privateer craft that the Marlowe's crew could easily have seen as buccaneer rogues. “Why'd you say yes when they asked to take you?” The question had come from his side, in a low and sonorous voice, tinged with a Malanti accent. He tore his attention from the orange wisps of friction-plasma, streaming by the tempered viewport, and let his gaze settle on the narrow, angular, and dark features of his travel mate. The stranger wore his hair short, like a tight-knit cap. It was a shade of black like the hard vacuum between stars. His skin was the color of toasted mahogany, touched—oh so lightly—with a hint of something golden and translucent, something golden and tinged with a ruddy blush. He shrugged. “Ship's interest is what I told myself.” “Hauler?” “Yeah...the Marlowe. Terran registry.” The stranger smiled in an all-too-knowing way. “So you let yourself be traded, you let them put a worm into your back, so that your friends and shipmates could get a fatter carrying contract than they'd have gotten if you said no.” The words—as the stranger spoke them—held a strange note of ambiguity. Déo couldn't decide if his seat-mate had made an observation or voiced an inquiry. He shrugged. “That's what I told myself.” “It's what we all tell ourselves. We want to be altruists, we want to say that we're doing it all for the greater good, but it's never that, is it?” There were layers of pragmatic brutality in that statement, and the words—though gently spoken, with a hint of wry irony—chilled Déo, and he hugged himself against the subjective, wintery draft. “Why did you let them take you?” The stranger shrugged. “Same as you, probably. . .there's something more than hauling cargo from one star to another, something more than being human, and I want to know what that is. I want to feel it.” A half-truth, Déo thought, sensing a strange echo of Aiden's more embittered tones in this stranger's words. Everyone wonders why the Avaat take so many of us. Everyone says that they're up to something, that they're giving Humanity technological advancements in exchange for slaves, for food, for whatever. And it's tempting to think that the 'everyone' out there is right, that there is some understandable motive behind the Avaat need to hybridize humans with self-tailoring worms. But the truth is that we're just a whore-species. The Avaat whisper “profit” to us, and we sell ourselves. On a level it's the same. . .an island for a string of beads. . .thousands of men and women for better jump-drives, cures for the oldest and most stubborn of our diseases. . .you name it. And all they ask in return is that they be given the privilege of threading human spines with white, eyeless worms. Déo had spat anger at the pessimism embedded in Aiden's declaration; but, the words stayed with him. We're a whore species! And later, on board the Marlowe, somewhere between Terranuevô and Czesk, Aiden sat in Commons, with Déo and Konstantin, brooding over a bulb of kola-fizz. ”I keep thinking of how predatory they are. . .or at least were,” Aiden had said. They've beat out the competition on their homeworld, they've reached the stars, and have colonized over a hundred more worlds than Humans have ever dreamed. I'll bet balls and backside there are dozens of extinct races in their history, races just like us. . . whores.” And later: ”They don't need to conquer us. They don't need to wage war. They just give us the things they've discovered. Trinkets. Cures for diseases that never afflicted them. . .technologies that would have been magic to us, just four hundred years ago! They're eliminating us. They know us better than we know ourselves. . .they don't need to lift a clawed finger against us. They know that—in time—our own lust for power, our own lust for convenience will wipe us out, and the worlds and resources that we've claimed will fall right into their two-thumbed hands.” It was Konstantin who'd punched a hole in Aiden's melancholy rant. “But you like them. You speak like some pining lover who'll never get the chance to share a marriage bed with them.” Aiden fumed at that, redness creeping up his neck and over the crests of his ears. He raked through his dark, sandy buzz-cut with outstretched fingers and stole a generous nip of his fizz. He placed the bulb, square on the table, in precisely its original position. The control in his gesture spoke of torrential chagrin, and its punctuation came in the way he stepped to his feet—without a word—and stepped out of Commons. Now, in a controlled plunge towards the surface of Kethrin, Déo heard echoes of Aiden, somewhere between the words that the dark stranger had spoken so firmly. “My name is Chelas,” the stranger said. A soundless voice washed through Déo's consciousness. Laughing is a Human thing. I just learned how to do it, Déo. Do you want to hear?= “Yes,” Déo said. “But later, okay?” =Of course. Maybe your rememberances of Aiden will give me more practice.= * * * * Departure from the shuttle, when it came, washed Déo in unexpected sensations. Time slipped, and for a moment, he was back there and back then, on Minter, on the sandy cusp of Lake Haydn. For only a second, he heard the noise of singing and an accordion. He tasted beer and sausages and dark, dark bread. He felt sand between his toes, and smelled the light waft of perfume. But as quickly as the memory washed over him. It vanished before he could discern the faces of friends now unseen for half a decade. Kethrin's most local air was acrid with the smell of smoke, and in the distance, snips and strains of music touched the drifted together, weaving, just below the noise of shuttles arriving and departing. He couldn't hear accordions, but there were scores of other instruments, from at least a dozen Human-populated worlds. He heard the twang of banjos and guitars; he heard the mock-bird voice of recorders and flutes, and small, pudgy ocarinas. There was singing, something in Human voice, but there were Avaat voices as well: haunting and vaguely dissonant, punctuated with the staccato clap of head-shells opening and slamming shut in stunning, complicated rhythms. The music came from gaggles of performers somewhere beyond the range of the shuttle-pits. The music, all of it, was remote and indistinct, but Déo sensed it with unexpected (hallucinatory?) clarity. Eolaat remained on-Station, but dozens of other Avaat in flowing, purple robes greeted the new hybrid -rivals. They spoke complicated greetings in their own language, punctuating strange, emotional undercurrents, with soft claps of their head-shell hinges. They greeted the worms as well, explaining that the night was one of significant festivities. “We are Aoset'aa,” an apparently older Avaat said to Déo: older if the darker centers of his spots were any indication. Ground crew technicians swarmed around the shuttle, off-loading cargo and exchanging it for crates and stasis tubes splatter-patched with a lurid array of labels and tags. “You are Déo Malenti, and Chelas Havlein. We have shared transmissions with Eolaat. . .he shakes the wind, favorably in regard to you.” “I'm flattered,” Déo said, unable to think of anything else. “As are we,” Aoset'aa said, opening his head-shell and writhing his feathery tendrils into complex, lattice-like braids. This, Déo had learned from Eolaat, something close to a smile. “I am your mentor, and I look forward to a fruitful association with you.” Aoset'aa lead them from the shuttle-pad, into a vast, underground chamber. A maze— —an ant-hill nightmare— —an entire city— Déo knew the place by name. Ohas. And it was as much a hybrid as he. Humans lived here—spotted, worm-conjoined Humans. There were Avaat here as well; both lived, by the millions in chamber-apartments carved into the flanks of steeply vaulted tunnels, lit with an arcane array of bioluminescent globes and incandescents. “I don't think it was coincidence that we sat next to each other on the shuttle,” Chelas said, in the four room expanse of dwelling space in the colors of olavine and obsidian with accents of quartz, wood, and some strange translucence that felt like polymerized water. There was a strangely comforting elegance to the rooms, but Déo rankled when he found his neatly packed belongings, tucked in a corner by the irregular kidney shape of his bed. His ship-sack was there, emblazoned with the Marlowe's screaming hawk, with lightening bolts clenched in its beak. He didn't dare touch the sack, didn't dare contemplate it too closely. You made the choice to do this. . .you said 'yes' when it was just as easy not to. Live with it. Stop looking back. There was a pronounced chill within that thought. Guilt? He asked himself, though he knew that he'd give himself no answers tonight. Things were too subtly different now. . .too much more real in ways he hadn't anticipated. Station was up there in the hard vacuum of open space, but open vacuum was no longer his element. Departure from Station had given him that impression, and now, the smells of rock and moisture drove the point home. After an hour, and a change of clothes, the smell of smoke lodged in his nostrils. He stood with Aoset'aa and Chelas on the bank of the river Saei. Bonfires dotted the night as if mirroring the constellations above.,or perhaps mocking them. “The fires,” Aoset'aa explained, “are local tradition. Your hybrid kin find symbolic comfort in the immolation of wood.” A pause. “It is our hope that you will share in these comforts, and understand their deeper meanings, in time.” “We have a lot to learn,” Chelas said, as if hedging against the prospect of easy assimilation. “Yes,” Aoset'aa affirmed. “But Eolaat is an exquisite savant in his choice of inductees.” Déo could find nothing to say in response to that. Chelas was, likewise, silent. “Enjoy the fires. Meet others,” Aoset'aa prodded. “I am at your disposal. There. “ And he pointed to a curved tongue of sand, jutting into the river. Other Avaat were there, and a few hybrid-humans as well. They sat in apparent contemplation of a smaller fire. There was something atavistic and tribal in their collective half-lotus posture. A few of the Humans wore their hair in thick, ropy dreadlocks. The Avaat among them wore robes in what Déo took as an ashy, dun hue. Around the fires, dances twirled flaming batons and spun blazing maces in complex patterns: writing, it seemed to Déo, and as he wandered with Chelas, he sought patterns in the abstract motion. The music, for all of its improvised intensity, seemed little connected with what the fire-twirlers were doing. For reasons, Déo couldn't immediately pinpoint, he felt an intense, hypnotic pull towards the flames, and it wasn't until he'd stepped away from Chelas and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with grinning, spotted strangers, that he realized that it was his worm who felt the cloying sense of rapt interest. =It doesn't flash like lightening. But I like it; it is strange.= “I like it too,” Déo said, suddenly remembering those nights, worlds and a lifetime away. Thoughts of Lake Haydn arose, unbidden, and he tried to push them down. They were stubborn, however, and against his will, Déo found himself, searching the gathered crowd for familiar faces. One in particular. =Deo?= “Yes?” =Where is Lake Haydn?= “Far away. On another planet.” =It is where your friends live. Where the female one lives?= A lump caught in Déo's throat, and he exhaled past it. “No,” he said, after a long, long moment. “Not any more.” Me'hlu da'a haad. . .? he thought. What are we doing? The question had been an endless, repetitive loop during his days in the fever tank. It was the first question he'd learned to ask in Avaat'oe, and it sprang to his mind now. The answer was close; he knew it. He'd felt it since the moment he'd said yes to Eolaat and the others, outside of his room on Kethrin Station. He'd voiced nothing to himself, but down, deep down in his core, he'd said yes, for reasons as simple as they were selfish. Me'hlu da'a haad. . .? Chelas approached him, quietly. He held two thick mugs of some frothy brew. “What are we doing?” he asked, in a chilling moment of subjective telepathy. Déo forced a smile, grabbed a mug and threw back a generous swallow of a smoky, dark beer: Station brew. “We're drinking,” he said, thankful for the distraction, and at least the hand-held pretense of actually being a part of the night's exuberance. Chelas raised his mug in a rakish toast, and Déo repeated the gesture. Chelas smiled. “We're here,” he said. For better or for worse Déo thought. “Here's to being here,” Chelas said. * * * * ...to be continued... ...And as always, thank you for reading and commenting. I've gotten some pretty encouraging comments, which makes this a lot easier to write.