On Kethrin”—Eolaat had said—”you will decide your direction.” On Kethrin, time slipped—almost imperceptibly—from its slow, creeping, linear flow and as Déo recalled Eolaat's quiet words one night on station, he emerged from the thought, shocked that more than seven years had elapsed since he'd heard Eolaat utter that simple observation. Seven years! Where Déo felt the stun of that realization wasn't in the temporal component of that thought, but in the simple fact that the memory came to him in Eolaat's particular dialect of Avaat'oadzi. In the strange unspooling of time he'd spent on Kethrin, he'd absorbed three of the primary Avaat dialects. He spoke them fluently. =Yes,= said Déo's worm companion. =It is what happens during training. You have learned other things as well. But you do not yet need what you have learned.= “Our lives are one giant perceptual shift,” Chelas commented, during a quiet night in the common space between their rooms. The air was heavy with rock-scent: something of Kethrin's most intimate nature. “It's because we're Human, but we've learned a language that encompasses a reality outside of our perceptions.” He shrugged, but the expression sparked in the depths of his near-obsidian gaze, was one of rapt wonder. “This is a part of what the Avaat are giving us. A different way of perceiving.” And the implications there were layered and complex. —A different way of sensing. That, Déo realized, removed him farther from his old humanity than a chatty, anodyne worm threaded the length of his spine. They're preparing us for something, Déo thought. And it's nothing like anything a natural-born Human has ever imagined. He saw hints and glimmers of it: strange dream images that defied his attempts to draw them into more pronounced clarity. They haunted his sleep and wove themselves through the convoluted muddle of his conscious thoughts. He drifted—according to Chelas—into fugues of abstraction: sometimes during conversations, sometimes when no words hung in the air. He noticed that Chelas did the same. Other Human-hybrids expressed the same, quiet behavior. “It is an Avaat habit,” Eolaat said, during a down-world visit with three companions Déo had gotten to know on the station. “In learning Avaat think-speech, your flesh is changing as well. The worms assist.” And beneath the sound of that comment, the worm cast sensations into Déo's mind: an eyeless thing's equivalent of an image. Déo felt a profusion of synapses budded throughout his brain: strange constellations of them in his memory centers, in his somatosensory cortex. In the common—unmodified—human brain, synapse-density was substantially lower. Their brains are so smooth! Déo marveled, forgetting, for an instant, that he'd been as human as that. . .smooth brained. “Your future”—Eolaat had said—“is still open.” The words held brooding significance now, and foretold hints of a future far askew from any other thoughts he might have had. He'd seen himself—in some small way—fulfilling some element of Aiden's dream; working as an interpreter, speaking for the Avaat to Humans, and—likewise—translating Human speech into the sonorous melodics of Avaat-speech. He'd seen little more than that for himself, and it was enough. It was sufficient a shift, sufficient a distance between himself and the memories he coddled in his quiet depths. Now. . . Now. . . . . .something changed; and work as a translator, as something of a cultural bridge, felt paltry and dwarfed in comparison to the as-yet-unseen thing looming ahead. “I'd do anything to learn what they know,” Aiden had declared. There was aggression in his voice: proof that his sentiments ran opposite the noble desires of more common xenologist-aspirants. He'd claimed that the Avaat were a predatory species, not far removed from their primordial roots, and he'd sought to learn the directions of what aggression he perceived. But he'd never taken the chance. Furthermore, the Avaat never approached him with offers and half-spoken pleas to join the shrouded ranks of hybrids; they'd never opened their head-shells and waved the strange filigree of sensory tendrils in the subtle, implicative gestures of polite curiosity. None had ever offered transit rights into their territories for the Marlowe in exchange for him. He'd dreamed, perhaps, of saving humanity from Avaat predation, and the Avaat—for their own quiet reasons—had never taken an interest in him. Perhaps, Déo thought, they understood Aiden's motives and found distaste in them. He was sure that they'd never approach Aiden. Or Konstantin, for that matter, but Konstantin's interests were far more domestic. “I don't want much,” he'd said. “I just want to take care of my family.” He'd said that, more than seven years ago, on board the Marlowe. On board the Marlowe bound for Kethrin. It was one of the last things Déo had ever heard him say. And now, stepping quietly along a brick-worked path meandering between gnarled, ancient chime-trees, he thought of Aiden and Konstantin, and small regularities that ruled their lives. They were alien to him now. Wormless. With no real clue as to what the Avaat intended in their strange, worm-mediated relationship with Humanity. “Deo.” He turned at the sound of Chelas' voice, heels grinding into smooth cobbles, toes clenching at his sandals. Something twittered in the leaf-canopy above. A wisp, he thought, as another responded from some obscure, eastward distance. River-scent filled the air, foretelling the indolent advance of rain-season. “I thought I'd find you here.” Chelas wore a sand-fine growth of stubble along his jaw. “You were at study,” Déo said. “I didn't want to disturb you.” Chelas shrugged. “No worries. I've done as much as I can manage.” he crossed his arms over his chest and played a massage into his shoulders. “Aoset'aa broke today's study.” There was excitement in his voice, a hint of giddy emotion. “He says I've been accepted into apprenticeship with the Historian's Guild.” “Congratulations,” Déo said, unsure of the sudden pang he felt gnawing his throat behind the single utterance. “Congratulations to you too,” Chelas said. “You've been accepted, too. Aoset'aa will tell you himself, but I overheard him in conference with a couple of other big-rank mukkies. You should've seen the other two, Déo. . .officious and dour, with their claws etched in those ugly patterns everyone self-important seems to like wearing.” there were whole, compacted layers of meaning in Chelas' statement with skeins of gossip woven between them. * * * * “Your decision,” Aoset'aa said, quietly, “is an important one that must come in its own time. The Histories are our dominant concern, and your responsibilities will weigh heavily in value among all Avaat. This is no light task you would accept, and there is no dishonor in denying any acceptance the Guild has placed upon you.” Aoset'aa spoke the word dishonor with a strange, verbal cant. . .proof that such a concept was foreign to the Avaat. Their's was a world of endless pragmatism in so many respects. Honor and its antithesis were completely and utterly alien to them. =You know, already,”—said the nameless worm—” but history is a different thing to the Avaat. It is not relegated to the past. You will be the keeper of other things, a great repository. . .consider this carefully, Déo. There may be terrors in your work, if you accept it.= Though long-accustomed to the voiceless speech of his worm, he felt a chill at their wash through the convolutions of his conscious thoughts. There was something here, he reasoned, that even seven years of learning could not reveal. The worms knew of it, and spoke freely of such things, he thought, during mate-contact, on those nights when their human-symbionts sat, in ecstasy trance, the flesh of their naked backs open along seams assiduously sliced by worm-spikes, grown specifically for those quiet hours. In those quiet hours, they sat (as Déo had sat, seven times with Chelas) with the blood-red edges of their back-flaps merged seamlessly together—one to another as pleasure stimulants bled from one spine to another. Now, seated half-lotus on a river-reed cushion, like some meditating monk from Humanity's own half-obscured past. Déo considered the faint designs carved into his toenails, the fall of light on his skin, and the shadows clinging to the irregularities wrinkled into the deep, violet fabric of his sarong. Wisps called to one another in the trees surrounding this small cupola, and in the distance—far, far westward, traffic noise hissed from the shuttle port. “I will think carefully,” Déo said. Aoset'aa clapped his head-shell in approval and worked the complicated sphincter of his outer mouthparts an approximation of a Human smile. “Your decision will be the correct one.” “You are sure of that?” Déo tasted accidental challenge in his words and immediately regretted his tone. “You would not be here if there was any doubt.” Aoset'aa chilled him—in this moment—with the bland certainty embedded in his words. The Avaat, if they possessed doubts, took what actions were most appropriate to allay those doubts or erase their cause. Déo had seen it on countless occasions. . .had seen worms taken from the spines of the doubted, and the doubted themselves, sent back to Station for whatever fates they could find far beyond the borders of Avaat rejection. Silenced by the implications that played through his mind, Déo listened—for a beat, two, and then three—to the sounds around him. Aoset'aa shifted on his cushions and rose, soundlessly and with inhuman grace, to his feet, toe-claws biting into the slatted wood underfoot. “I will leave you to begin your contemplations,” he said. And as simply as that, Aoset'aa took his leave. “Their patience is glacial,” Aiden once said. “And you don't trust it. . . .” Konstantin said, a mocking lilt embedded in the depths of his accent. He cocked one eyebrow, half a smirk pulling at the upper left border of his lip. “I don't understand it,” Aiden said. “But I know that it's an artifact of both their physiology and their language. . .and yes. . .it scares me.” And yes, Aiden would be terrified now, if he sat with naked feet and flimsy purple garb, in the presence of an Avaat who'd just spoken of the trust he'd gained. Yes, Aiden would be afraid of the rich, filigree of designs etched—oh so subtly—into the keratin of his nails. He would be afraid, and as Déo thought of that, he wondered at his own absence of fear. Again. As was common, since his arrival down-world, since the cold/hard depths of space had been closed to him, since the Marlowe pulled out of hard-dock with one name less on the crew roster. =You accept more than him. This is why the Avaat chose you.= But even as the worm wordlessly spoke, Déo felt the flash of an unbidden thought. “I'm sorry, Déo,” Séandra said, on the last day that he'd seen her. Sunlight filtered through the blond-fillaments of her hair, endowing her with a honey-bright nimbus. He wanted to touch her, to run his fingers through the back-touching cascade, and to filter her locks through his fingers. He wanted to smell the scent of her perfumes and conditioners. Instead, he stood in dumb-animal silence, his gazed locked on the elfin lines of her face, the slim elegance of her neck. “I'm not saying no, Déo. . .but I need time to think.” “Time. . . ?” he asked. “How much?” He'd presented her with a band of silver to slip upon her finger. She pressed it back into his palm, a look of profound perplexity on her face. “I don't know,” she said. “Honestly. . .I don't know.” And one month later—still without not knowing if or how to say yes to his proposal—she died upon her return from Port Chandler. She'd gone there, to visit family, a sister, an aunt. . .and as her shuttle touched atmosphere, some hairline flaw in its ablative shielding allowed heat and re-entry plasmas to play their fatal havoc with the shuttle and its passengers, the shuttle and its crew. He never learned if she'd said yes or no. =This is why you accepted Eolaat's offer that night outside of your room?= Déo nodded, the salt of sudden tears on his cheeks. =Avaat Histories will help you to know what she would have said?= Déo felt himself shrug. “I don't know,” he whispered. The worm made no response. “I'm going to accept the Guild's offer,” Déo said. =For this reason?= “For many reasons. But yes. . .this is one of them.” =You think a lot of the one called Aiden,= the worm said. =But he would never make the choice you have made, for so honest a reason.= *** . . . to be continued. . . *** As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed this foray into Déo's world.