#galconfed universe

[alarawriting]

52 Project #28 / Writeober 2020 #8 Haunting: The Court of the Lion King

I returned to the apartment building where Daro and Anzali and I had lived before we went down to the sea. It had not changed in the way buildings change-- its paint was the same color, it seemed no more or less weatherbeaten than before.  The railing on the 3rd floor balcony still sagged.  But it had changed in the way homes change, because it wasn't home any more. Because different people lived there now, filling it with their strange scents, and because I had changed.  The scent of the sea was still in my nostrils. I would never smell the comforts of home again.

Renting the third floor apartment did not present difficulties.  I walked through the silence of the apartment, marveling at its emptiness.  The furniture was still there, the faded rug, the great sagging bed, the tired appliances. But all the personality was gone. Anzali's bright prints had been taken off the walls, which themselves had been whitewashed again to remove our cheery yellow paint.  White is a disturbing color, the color of bones and of drowned skin, pink human and green farla alike.  Even the humans of other colors became gray, in death by water. If I needed to be here long, the white walls would glare in my eyes and drive me mad.  

There was a knock at the door, startling me, and I almost fled.  But it wouldn't be the Lion King, not here, not yet.  He wouldn't know I was back.  I opened the door.

A human greeted me. "Hi there, new neighbor.  I'm Rachael from the second floor apartment. Just thought I'd come say hi. Need help moving in?"

Rachael was chubby – not just by farla standards, but by human – with short brown hair and a squeaky tenor voice. She had pale skin, which she covered with more makeup than most humans, and her chin and brow seemed unusually defined for a female human. "Hello,"  I said distantly.  "I'm Ashmi.  No, I don't need help moving in.  Thanks for asking."

"Oh.  Well, sorry to bother you.  You want to come downstairs for a cup of tea or something? I like to get to know my neighbors.  It cuts down on the insecurity, you know.  Living in a place like this-- well, this isn't the best of neighborhoods, you know?"

"I know,"  I said bitterly, and wondered if this androgynous human knew the Lion King.  I also wondered if I could still drink tea.  I was afraid of my bone-white apartment, and loneliness.  "I'll come downstairs if you want, but I don't know if I'll be able to take tea.  I tend to be allergic to nearly everything."

"Well, come on down. You don't have to have tea if you don't want it.  You're a farla, aren't you?"

I stepped out of my apartment and followed Rachael downstairs.  "You can't tell?"

"You're a bit pale, aren't you? I never saw a farla so white.  I thought you guys were all green.  Not that I think it looks bad, I think you look gorgeous.  At least, I don't know, by human standards or something, but maybe you don't feel good?"

"It's the color we turn when we're away from our Mother,"  I said.  "The Sun.  It is not a well color, and I thank you for your concern, but really, don't worry about me."

Rachael's apartment smelled like cats.  Unsurprisingly, three came to greet Rachael, and another one sat on a moth-eaten armchair and glowered at me.  The cats seemed unsure of me.  Farla generally get along well with cats, sometimes better than with the humans who brought them, and I had always liked them.  These, however, avoided me, and I avoided them.  Rachael noticed.  "Don't you like cats?"

There is one Cat that I despise.  But I wouldn't say so.  These cats were nothing of the Lion King.  "They're all right.  These don't seem to like me."

"That's funny.  Normally they're all over strangers.  What's wrong, guys? You being little bitches today?"  Rachael turned to me apologetically.  "They get like this sometimes."

"I don't blame them."  I took a deep breath of cat-scented air.  It was not quite enough to drown out the scent of the sea.  "Forgive me for my ignorance.  I'm not very experienced with humans, but...  you are a woman, aren’t you?”

Rachael laughed. "Already? That’s great!"

"I don’t understand."

"I’ve been trying."  The human went into the kitchen to put on tea.  "Just managed to get on hormones two weeks ago. This place, well. Not a lot of doctors, and the mail’s not too reliable."

"What do doctors and the mail have to do with your – no. This is none of my concern, I’m being very rude."

"From a farla, I’m okay with it,"  Rachael said, coming out with the tea. “I’m a woman, but I only figured it out for certain a year ago, and it’s taken me this long to get the hormones I need.”

“I didn’t know humans could have an ambiguous gender," I said.

“Yeah, sometimes we’re born with the wrong genitals and hormones, and it can be hard to figure out what we really ought to be. I’m thirty-five. I don’t know if farlae age like humans do, but that’s, like, more than a third of a human’s maximum average lifespan, more than half of how long we usually do live when we grow up in neighborhoods like this. I didn’t grow up here, though, but just a few cities over, not so close to the water, but other than that it’s just like this. So that’s a long time to not know, but I know it now. Gonna start growing my hair out now that I have my shots.”

I doubted the other city was really just like this. This city was different from any I had known. "I see,"  I said, though I didn't really understand most of what she was talking about.  I tried to smell the tea, but I could only smell salt water.

"Do you want something? Some water? I feel bad that you're allergic to tea and all."

What I needed, Rachael could not give me.  Or at the least, I would not take from her.  "That's fine.  I'm all right."  I had not been all right since we went to the sea.  I no longer even knew how many years it had been.  "How long have you been living here?"

"Oh, a year and a half or so.  It's a bad neighborhood, but it's cheap.  You know how it is.  Hard to get work nowadays."

I didn't know how it was, but I nodded politely.  "Yes."

"Now that I’m out, a lot of humans won’t hire me. This is the kind of neighborhood where they’ve got really old, traditional attitudes, you know? And I guess you've got it worse.  Not many farlae here."

"This was a farla neighborhood once,"  I said. "An artists' community.  It was poor, but it had a soul."

"Well, it hasn't got one now,"  Rachael said, with an edge of bitterness in her voice.  "That's just like us humans.  We wreck everything."

"You feel too much guilt.  This may be a human neighborhood now, but its soullessness is not human doing." Panic choked me like seaweed as I realized I'd said too much.  I had lost my old instincts-- I had no way to know if Rachael was the Lion's or not.

"You talk like you've been here before."

"I must go." I got up, hastily.  "I'm sorry."

"Uh, okay. Health problems or something? Or was it something I said?"

"Health problems," I lied.  "Perhaps we'll talk again.  I'm sorry."

***

I locked the door of my apartment behind me.  It wasn't necessary; what I feared could come through walls, and there were no mundane threats I did fear anymore.  But it would disturb me if Rachael came upstairs and came inside while I wasn't watching.  I wanted to be careful of what she might see.  

I thought she was a sweet, harmless soul, if a bit strange.  I would wish to befriend her, another time, perhaps, but not here.  Not where anything might warp under the paw of the Lion.  I could see the signs she'd spoken of now.  This place no longer had a soul.

Once Daro had argued that humans could be rendered soulless, could be enslaved, far more easily than the farlae.  Farlae, he argued, had been created as slaves, and would die free rather than live that way again.  Humans, freely evolved, knew no better.  Slavery was a sporadic thing in their history and was performed by groups of them on other groups, never something their race as a whole had suffered.  So they did not notice being enslaved.  They couldn't see the loss of their souls until after the precious stuff was gone.

At the time I had called Daro racist, but secretly suspected some part of his theory to be true.  Now I knew better.  Farlae had fled this neighborhood because they'd heard of our fate, I thought.  And humans moved in simply by the laws of diffusion, there being more of them on this world than us.  Unaware of the danger until it was too late.  Farlae would notice an absence of farlae, and stay away, feeling unwelcome. Humans, the majority, had no such warning system.

And farlae could be enslaved, stripped of will or soul.  Sometimes the choice was not between slavery or death.  Sometimes it was between two forms of slavery.

I thought I could sleep. But the bed would not touch me. When I closed my eyes and lay down, I felt myself in my ocean bed once more, curled like a child in the womb, the green water penetrating me and washing my thoughts away.  It didn't matter.  I didn't need sleep anyway.

I left my apartment and went to explore the neighborhood by night.  It had changed physically after all.  No one I'd known would have allowed their apartments to become so run-down, let so much trash collect in the streets, or left broken, melted vehicles like mountains of plastic on the sides of the roads.  Aside from me, no woman walked abroad, and I was invisible if I chose. Gangs of young male humans lounged about, predators waiting for prey.  Empty drug vials and used-up dermal patches littered the sidewalks and the paths between the buildings.  

The Lion King's place alone had grown in splendor.  His nightclub, Heaven, looked positively palatial, glittering with light and music. He sat in the center of the neighborhood, with a vast spiderweb thrown in the air about him of parking for aircars. There were no longer any grounded streets leading to his court, and all the buildings that used to stand around Heaven had been swallowed by the glittering fibers of the parking web. From the ground, only someone light as a wraith could climb the web to reach the cars, as I did; the human children down below could see fat, juicy prey overhead, but had no way to reach it. They were driven sullen, reminded of what they didn't have and could never get, made impotent by the Lion. And so in impotent fury they raged against those that had no more than they-- which was why no one walked alone on the night streets, and no women walked at all.

This was what I saw when the Lion King first arrived.  But then it was only a vision in a dream-clouded farla's mind.  I didn't truly know what the Lion King truly was until the day he summoned me to his court.  None of us knew.  I tried to tell myself that, to remind myself that Daro and Anzali's fate was not my fault. I didn't believe my own reassurances at all.

The club itself was the last place I went, that night.  Invisible to almost all, I wandered the two dance floors, peered in some of the upstairs bedrooms and slipped back out again.  Heaven had grown more openly decadent since last I was here, with more bedrooms for the transactions of perversion and vice.  They were no longer hidden away on the top floor, available only to members of the Lion's court.  I saw businessmen cavorting in swimming pools with women who were no more than animated shells, the vivacity that seemed to pour from them as artificial as the sunlamp light that glittered off the pool.  I saw humans and farlae both drugged out of their minds, performing obscene rituals of life and death for an appreciative audience of both races. I saw other humans and farlae voluntarily drinking down hells'brews, filling their bodies with a greater variety and concentration of drugs than even the poor victim-slaves had been poisoned with.  And none of them saw me.  I didn't expect humans to see me, but the fact that I was invisible even to farlae said that the farlae in this establishment were all spiritually dead.

None of this surprised me. It filled me with hate, but hate gave me strength.  I remembered what had been done to me, what had happened to my husband and wife, and why I was here.  I decided to risk finding the Lion King.

***

The topmost floor of Heaven was the Lion King's court.  One could not get in without an invitation, but in a sense the Lion had tendered me an invitation all those years ago.  In any case, only the Lion himself could have kept me out, and he didn't man his own doors.

I saw him on his throne, with four scantily-clad women serving him.  Two were human, one was farla, and one was as he was, part cat. The humans once manufactured other humans with the blood of animals mingled with their own.  Normally cat-humans manifested only with cat-shaped eyes and bodies far more graceful than a typical human body.  The Lion King himself was thought a mutant or a throwback, or else something entirely inhuman, with his features subtly shaped to seem more cat than human, and his curly golden hair almost a mane.  He was feeding from one of the human women as he held her in his lap.  The others were massaging him or stroking his hair, oblivious to the bloody fate of their companion.  Favored courtiers, men and unattractive women, competed for his attention, praising him and giving him information on his business.

He could not speak as he drank, but eventually he released the woman he was feeding from.  She dropped to the floor in a heap, and I shuddered.  In my time, his habits were not quite so open.  I turned and left as I heard his voice.  It was deep and mellifluous, no different than I remembered it, and I feared that my hate would choke me and I'd do something rash.  I hadn't come all this way to throw away my best chance.

***

In the morning, I went to visit Rachael.  My sight of the Lion King had fortified me, and I no longer cared if she was his creature or not.  I needed information.

"Hey, Ashmi!" she said cheerfully, answering my knock in a bathrobe.  "Want to come in and get some breakfast?"

"I'd like to come in, in any case,"  I said, "though I've already eaten."

"Oh.  Well, if you don't mind watching me eat, come on in. I was kind of hoping you'd come in."  She stared at me as I entered the cat-full apartment and seated myself.  "God, you're gorgeous.  I'd give anything to look like you."

"If you would give what I have given, you're a fool,"  I said softly.

"What?"

"Beauty is only a danger, in a place like this.  I need information, Rachael; about the Lion King.  What do you know?"

She swallowed. "Um.  I don't think it's safe to talk about him..."

"It's safe.  No one is listening, I am not an informant, and if you are I don't care.  Tell me what you know about the Lion King."

"I don't think--"

I stood up again, and stared into her eyes.  I let her see a small fraction of what I truly was.  "Tell me."

"Oh, God." She stared at me with fear, not envy, now.  "You're-- you're not--"

"I am not. Yes.  I won't hurt you, Rachael, not unless you keep information from me."

"No wonder you didn't want to eat."  She swallowed again.  "All right.  I don't know much-- I'm too ugly for the Lion and too poor to go to his club.  But I know what everyone in the neighborhood knows. He's not human, for starters.  I mean, more than the way you're-- uh, maybe the way you're not.  Um.  I mean, he isn't natural.  He isn't just a catperson, he's something else. Something else totally."

"Yes.  Something that can strip away a will, or a soul."

"And pretty girls have got to go to him, if he wants them.  He doesn't take them all.  And most of the ones he takes come back, though they don't remember much about what happened, and they're usually not so pretty anymore.  Some of them, though-- some of them don't come back at all."

"How do the girls go to him? How are they chosen?"

"Anytime someone new moves in, his people check to see if there's a pretty girl in with them. They'll probably come to take you tonight.  If there are any remotely pretty girls, they go with the Lion King's men, and they get presented to him in his court.  And if he likes them, they stay there."

"Yes.  It was not the same in my time, but it was similar." A fierce pain beat at me from within. "What of those who won't submit?"

"The Lion King's bullyboys don't give you a choice.  You have to go with them."

I smiled bitterly and looked hard at Rachael.  "You wanted to be my friend.  Yet you made no attempt to warn me-- though you thought I was beautiful, and that must have meant you knew the Lion King's men would come for me."

"I was scared," Rachael whispered, looking down. "If I'd warned you, and you'd run away...  and he found out..."

"You might find yourself walking to the ocean,"  I agreed.  "No, I suppose it doesn't matter."

"Ah--" Rachael looked up.  "Did it happen to you? Did you..."

"When the Lion King first came,"  I said, "I lived in the apartment I live in now, with my husband and my wife, Daro and Anzali."

"Your wife?" Rachael sounded startled, and then nodded.  "Oh, right.  Farlae live with two women and a man, don't they? I'd forgot."

"The Lion King summoned me.  He had less power in those days, but he was less well known as well.  I thought he would be a patron for my art, so I went willingly enough."  I lost myself in memory a moment.  

We had such bright happy lives then, and knew nothing of it.  We had problems with bills, lovers' quarrels, emotional intrigues with the rest of the farla community, and we thought those were troubles.  I was a naive innocent when I went to see the Lion King, thinking he had heard of my art.  But what he wanted was not what I had created.  What he wanted...  was what I was.

The demand was for my body. I knew it went deeper than that. Farlae tend to be more sensitive to such things than humans; it was my soul he wanted, and I knew it.  I refused.  He threatened to kill me, to kill my husband and wife.  I told him that all of us would rather die free than live as soulless slaves.

I looked up, shaking myself free of memory.  "I was a naive fool,"  I said harshly.  "But the Lion King has no more power over me."  I stood up.  "Rachael, I forgive you for not warning me.  But if you tell the Lion King of his danger, or give him or anyone else any information concerning me, I will kill you slowly.  Do you understand me?"

She nodded, shivering. She knew what I was capable of.

***

They came for me that night.

I feigned sleep, lying on the sagging mattress in the semblance of a nightgown, waiting for them. They unlocked my door and shook me, roughly, thinking they were waking me.  "Get up.  You've been summoned to the palace of the Lion King."

So even he called it a palace now.  I looked at them with dazed eyes.  "Do I have time to get into some clothes?"

One of them snickered. "Why bother? You'll just be taking them off again anyway."  They all laughed.

I went with them in my nightgown and my artfully disheveled hair, out to their aircar and from there to Heaven.  They brought me to the top floor, to the court of the Lion King.  And I stood before the creature who'd destroyed my life, and felt the hatred surging in me, giving me strength.  On the outside, I showed frightened, sleep-bewildered eyes, the face of a beautiful innocent.

"What is your name, girl?"  he asked me. His voice was beautiful, rich and deep as the sea.  

"Ashmi,"  I whispered, letting myself tremble.  I looked down at my feet, at the enamel floor, and forced myself to see a reflection.

"Ashmi,"  he said reflectively.  "I knew a farla named Ashmi once.  Years ago...  She looked much like you, but not as pale.  And she gave me trouble.  You won't give me trouble, girl, will you?"

"You should know what happens to those who resist the Lion King,"  one of his courtiers hissed.

"Disrobe," he ordered.

I stripped, letting the nightgown pool around my feet, and turned around for him like a bird on a spit as he ordered me to.  Finally he smiled, showing sharp teeth.  "She'll do.  Take her to my chambers and have her wait."

I scooped up the nightgown and slipped back into it.  Once I was in his chambers, alone, I let it disperse into mist.  I sat on his bed, naked, and remembered our journey to the sea.

He had demanded me, body and soul.  I'd refused, and he'd laughed.  "You have spirit, don't you,"  he said. "Go home then.  Go on back to your husband and wife.  I have no shortage of beautiful women, that I need to trouble myself with you."

And gods help me, I thought I was free.  I ran back to Daro and Anzali, to tell them what had happened, to seek their comfort. I ran up the stairs to the apartment, and into Daro's spotless kitchen, where the two of them had stayed up late, waiting for me.

But as I met their eyes, a compulsion struck, consuming the three of us.  I explained nothing-- I couldn't speak.  All I knew was that I had to go down to the sea and die, and that my loves felt the same way.

We left the apartment, holding hands, and began to walk.  We felt as if we were in a dream, inexplicably shared.  The empathic bond between us had twined around us all, dragging us down together.  Perhaps this was intended to be my private nightmare, and the bond I had with my loves, the linkage between our minds, pulled them down with me.  Or perhaps the Lion King had always intended to send us all. Throughout the night we walked, slowly, in a daze.  The sea was normally half an hour's journey by aircar.  On foot, holding hands and walking with dreamlike slowness, it took us all of the night and most of the next day.  We were exhausted, but there was never any question of stopping.  The sea pulled us with some strange gravity. Hydrotropic, we flowed down the path of least resistance, through the city and out, until we came to a cliff over the ocean.

I felt their love for me, and mine for them.  I felt an overwhelming despair and exhaustion, a hunger for the ocean's balm. We looked at each other and nodded. Then we released one another, and separately we leapt into the sea.

Daro and Anzali were dashed against the rocks at the bottom, immediately.  I fell into a deeper part, cushioned by water, and curled up in green darkness to sleep my despair away.

***

The Lion entered the room, awakening me from my reverie.  "Good.  You've got your clothes off."  He smiled at me ferally.  On him, it was more of a baring of teeth than a smile, and spoke of hunger.  "Lie down."

He removed his own clothes and came to touch me, to cover me with his lightly furred body.  "Gods of hell, you're cold, woman.  What have you been doing, standing on the balcony with your clothes off?"  

"It's a cold night,"  I whispered.

"I'll warm you, then."  His hands had articulated digits, but furred fingers and pads on his palms.  With these paws, he explored my body, finding no body heat anywhere.  Alarmed, he licked at my neck, and when he found the reassuring taste of salt there bit in, drinking what ran through my veins.

What he needed was blood. All I had was seawater.

The Lion King jerked away, spluttering, and stared down at me.  I smiled at him, the same baring of teeth he'd shown me.  

"You knew me," I said.  "Many years ago.  And I gave you trouble."

He tried to back away then. But I grabbed him and pulled him down to the bed, pinning him under my weight, the weight of the ocean.  I opened my jaws wide and let the semblance of normalcy fall from me, showing myself as I truly was-- a skeleton animated by seawater, a demon driven by hate.  He screamed. I dove upon his throat and tore at it, drinking his hot blood as my claws dug into other parts of his body, tearing flesh away.

The Lion's life force was strong, fed by the blood of innocence and whatever demons he served. But my hate was stronger.  He fought me, digging his teeth into my neck once more.  All he drank was seawater.  He tried to drink that, hoping to weaken me, but he might as well have tried to drink the ocean dry.  I drank his blood and it was finite, though fortified with the blood of many victims. I ate bits of his flesh, torn away. As his struggles weakened, I released his neck and burrowed my face into his belly, chewing through the flesh. Drenched in blood, I reached my bony hand into the opening I'd made and clawed through his liver and lungs. Finally I tore out his heart and showed it to him.  He died then.

The air was filled with a rustling noise.  The souls he had stolen from young women, from men, from the neighborhood itself, fled from the punctured hole in his body.  Some were partially consumed, and would never be strong again.  The sight renewed my hatred, though my enemy was dead and his soul bound to the darkness.

For this moment alone I had the power.  I had stolen the life force of the Lion King, and I had within me the strength of the sea and the energy of my hate.  I could have called a tidal wave to destroy Heaven and all the tormentors within. The tormented would die as well, but that would be only a blessing, I felt.  The neighborhood would be destroyed, but there was nothing in this blasted ruin of a hometown worth keeping anymore, was there? Destroy it all and let the survivors rebuild.  Yes.  I felt the charge build within me, and almost gave myself over to it.

But then Rachael would die as well.  And she was an innocent, who had kept her soul, though the paw of the Lion had undoubtedly started to warp her.  She had not warned me, but she'd tried to befriend me, as best she could with her fear of the Lion King.  If I killed her with a tidal wave, I was no better than the Lion King, killing as it suited me.

There would be no tidal wave.  I let the energy fade away.  Let someone else save the city; I had done my part.  I was so tired.

It was time to return to my ocean bed, and to my loves.  I faded away, and let myself turn into mist, carried back to the sea.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #15: The White-Haired Boy

They called him Alyn Ysmai, the White-Haired Boy.  In the village he came from, it was said he had fallen from the sky as a child, carried on a shooting star.  His skin was white as the clouds, and his hair as white as the Moon, and his eyes the golden color of wild animals.  From earliest days, it was said that the Lady of the Moon had marked him for her own, for his sight in the darkness was like that of the night beasts, while the sun blackened and blistered his moon-white skin. Later it became even more apparent that the Moon had favored him.

None could resist the charming spell of his words, his eyes.  Like the Moon, he mesmerized.  All the young women and not a few of the young men threw themselves into his arms, desperate for his love.  Not a few of these killed themselves afterward, too, when he abandoned them for a new lover or cruelly rejected them.

In the 25th year of his life, he still had the form and features of a boy, but a boy so beautiful none could take their eyes from him. To men who had never before considered another male attractive, he seemed almost a woman in his beauty, and they gave him anything he asked.  He was as precocious in mind as he seemed slowed in his growth; when 13, he completed his Passage to manhood by trickery, and since then had made three fortunes and become Captain of a vast Company, specializing in the acquisition and sale of information, as well as the dispatching of skilled assassins.  All the other Companies in the city of Tylar trembled in fear of Alyn Ysmai, and his every word was law.  Some grumbled, quietly, that Alyn Ysmai sought to make himself a Lord, as they had in some of the barbarous lands of Lysar.  But they grumbled this very quietly indeed, or they vanished, never to be seen again.

In truth, the charge had teeth.  Alyn Ysmai held a kind of court, where people seeking favors from him came to grovel and beg.  Sometimes it pleased the White-Haired Boy to grant their requests.  More often, it pleased him to shred their feelings, humiliate them, ruin them, or else steal their souls and make toys of them.  Few, few women dared go to him; ever since the Captain of a rival Company killed herself for love of Alyn Ysmai, none who sought men for their night's pleasure, male or female, went to the White-Haired Boy unless their need was very great.  The old and hardened, the men and women who loved only women, these were the only ones safe from loving him, and these faced other dangers of the soul instead.

There were those who said he was the son of the Lady of the Moon, one of the star angels fallen out of the night sky.  Others said he was a demon from beneath the ground, with his skin that could not bear the daylight.  It was people possessed of the former opinion that Alyn Ysmai surrounded himself with.

One day in his 25th year, as the White-Haired Boy held his "court", an old woman was brought to him.  She had the reputation of a seer, but none of the psychic Companies would take her, claiming she was a charlatan who prostituted whatever Gift she had.  Her only son had betrayed his Company and broken his bloodpaper, and so a deathpaper had been placed on him.  She had come to beg Alyn Ysmai to use his influence to save her son.

His gold eyes bored into her own, and it seemed to her he could see all she desired, and more; all her pains, her tragic memories, all her deficiencies and the weaknesses in her heart.  Almost, she cringed from his gaze-- she was not a very brave woman.  But though she was not brave, and though she might be called a trickster, still she loved her only son.  So she bowed deeply, instead.  "My lord of the white hair, my humble bones groan with the honor you place on my shoulders, agreeing to lower yourself to see me.  Words cannot describe my gratitude and humility..."

"Then don't waste them,"  Alyn Ysmai said, and his smile was as cold as ice. "I am not terribly fond of lowering myself to see gutter trash like you, old woman.  Apparently you convinced my assistants that you were worth my time; either you've got a treasure unheard-of hidden in those rags, or you've a silver tongue.  In which case, it would look very attractive if I melted it down and made a necklace out of it.  So which is it?"

The woman quailed at his vicious words, all the more terrible for the mild, somewhat bored tone they were spoken in. Trembling, she prostrated herself at his feet.  "O most noble lord, I have had a vision concerning your exalted self.  Poor as a seer though I might be, still it is said that the gods may choose base vessels for their lofty messages, and who can gainsay the will of the gods?"

"Oh, you have a vision.  Concerning me.  No doubt, something about how I will be successful in love, or achieve wealth, or something.  Since if you came with some doom­saying prophecy, you wouldn't expect a gift for it."  He yawned, ostentatiously.  "You have no way of knowing how tired I am of every halfwit who fancies herself a seer telling me things about my future anyone could have guessed from looking at my past.  If this is another of those tedious predictions, I don't want to hear it."

"No, no, nothing like that, noble one! My vision concerns your true nature, and your rightful position among the people of Tylar. Indeed, the people of all the land of Taldyr!"

"Oh, don't tell me.  I'm the chosen of the Lady of the Moon, right? I do get tired of this. Guards..."

"Wait! My lord, you don't know your true nature-- it's even greater than anyone had predicted!"

That had gotten his attention.  He leaned forward slightly, gesturing to the guards to hold their places.  "So tell me then, base vessel of lofty messages that you claim to be."

She dared not look at his eyes, or he would discern the truth of her message soon enough.  She had to make him believe it.  "My lord, as you know, four days ago was a night with no moon.  It was on that night that I dreamed.  I dreamed I went out into the street and looked up at the sky, and I could not see the Lady's face.  I called out, 'My lady Moon, don't leave us behind! Don't leave us in darkness!'

"Then the stars spoke to me.  They said, 'You fool! You call to the sky for the Lady, when she dwells on the same ground as you? Your brains are addled, old woman!'

"I asked, 'How can the Lady be on the same ground as me? Surely any ground I walk on must be too unworthy for her exalted self...'

"They replied, 'Do not overestimate your importance, gutter slime.  Your actions are so totally meaningless that they can have no bearing on the Lady's actions.'

"But then one of the stars said, 'Wait, brothers and sisters.  Feeble, old and unworthy this piece of human trash may be, but she may yet perform a valuable service for us.  After all, she is not the only human who does not know what magnificence walks among them.'

"'That is true,' said the other stars.  Then they said, 'Our Lady walks among your people, in the very streets of your city, trapped by her enemy the Sun and unaware of who she truly is.  We will give you a task worthy of far better than you, old woman, and no gods shall help you if you fail it.  You shall find the Lady and inform her of who she truly is, and ask her to take her position of worship.  For if, trapped on Talla in the body of a human, she does not receive the worship of her loyal servants, she will pine away, and the Moon, her visible manifestation, will fade forever from the sky.'

"'But she cannot be among the people of Tylar!' I protested.  'For her loyal worshipper and chosen servant, Alyn Ysmai, would surely have found her, seeing as he knows all that transpires in this city!'

"They laughed.  Then they said, 'Oh, yes, Alyn Ysmai knows everything-- except the secret of his birth.  Perhaps you have forgotten, old woman, that in other countries, the Moon is worshipped as a man.  As lord of desire and love, the god you call the Lady of the Moon is not bound to the shape of a woman-- she contains within her the essence of the masculine, as well. Go and tell Alyn Ysmai that he is no mere servant of the Lady of the Moon-- he is the Moon, trapped in the form of a white-haired boy on Talla, bound by his enemy, the Sun.  He must know himself for what he is and be worshipped, or he will never achieve the strength to break the bonds the Sun has placed on him and return to his rightful place in the heavens.  Tell him, old woman!'

"And then I awakened.  I feared to come to you at first, believing my dream only the foolish fancy of an old woman.  But then I remembered the legend, that the touch of the Sun corrodes your skin. There have been others favored of the Moon, but it is the birthright of all humans to touch the Sun and be warmed. If the Sun is inimical to your existence, my lord, then you cannot be human.  Your substance is of an entirely different nature, and the Sun is its ancient enemy.

"Is it true, my lord? Does the touch of the Sun truly burn your skin? Are you the Moon in human incarnation?"

Alyn Ysmai stared at the old woman, shocked to his core. Always had he believed he was touched by divinity, but never that he was divinity himself.  Could he believe that? Dared he believe that? If he was not the Moon, and claimed to be, would not she withdraw her protection from him, as punishment for his pride?

Yet-- if he was the Moon, it would explain a very great deal. It would explain his power to see into the hearts and sometimes the minds of others, knowing what they felt as if it showed on their faces even when they showed no sign, and sometimes knowing their thoughts as if they had spoken them, even when they had made no sign. That was no seer's power, no psychic's trick-- that was a far greater power than the humans of Talla had, and he had it.  Why? Why did the sun sear his skin? Why was he so pale, as if all the color had been drained from him, when even the babies never bronzed by the blue-white sun were born brown? All around him had black or red hair, curled tightly, loosely, or waving-- his was white and straight as moonlight.  All around him had eyes of black or brown-- his were tawny gold. The men of 25 years that he knew were muscular and tall-- he was yet small and slight, with the beauty but not the strength of a woman, as if he were yet a boy.  Why?

If he were the Moon, trapped here by the Sun-- oh, that would explain it all.  A deity in human form could not be expected to look human.  The Sun's substance would corrode the Moon's skin, naturally.  And he could not grow to full manhood as long as he remained ignorant of his true nature.

No wonder people loved him whenever he wished, if he was the god of desire and love.  No wonder people threw their reason away for him, lost their willpower to his, when will and reason were gifts of the Sun, if he was the Sun's ancestral enemy.  It all made beautiful, perfect sense.  He felt a sudden rush of warmth for this old woman, who had shown him the truth of what he was.

"Yes,"  he said. "Yes, it's all true.  Now that you tell it to me, it's so obvious I wonder how I could have failed to see it before.  I am the Lady of the Moon."  He stood, and graciously helped the old woman to her feet. "You've done me a great service, old woman,"  he said. "Is there any service I can do for you, as a token of my gratitude?"

"If you would, my exalted Lord,"  she whispered, her eyes cast at the ground. "My dear and only son, the delight of his mother's old age, has had a deathpaper placed on him by the Athysuvyras Company.  If you would only use your great powers to make them rescind the papers and let him join a new Company..."

"I'll do that,"  the White-Haired Boy, now revealed as the Lady of the Moon, told her. He took from her the details of the case, and dismissed her.  Then he dismissed all those who sought an audience with him.  Turning to his subordinates, he said, "You've heard what she said.  Do you believe it true? Will you accept me, not only as your Captain, but as your goddess?"

As one, all of them bowed deeply.  His second-in-command, a woman he had never found attractive enough to seduce but who loved him deeply, said, "We will follow you even to death, my Captain and Lady, my god.  Command us, and we will follow."

"Then we all go to the temple of the Moon-- to My temple, tonight.  There are a few matters I wish to discuss with My priests."  Already he had shifted into the dialect used only in myths and religious services, the speech used by the gods to mortals.

***

In the temple, the Lady's priests awakened as their goddess's manifestation first began to brighten in the sky.  They went about their duties as if this were a day like any other, until they heard a clamor outside.

One of the priests went to the door, and saw there the White-Haired Boy, followed by a hundred or more.  It was well-known that Alyn Ysmai was the favored of the Moon, and so the priest opened the gates.  "What brings you to the temple this fine night, sir?"  he asked.

Alyn Ysmai looked at him with an expression of cold fire, and the priest suddenly wanted to wilt into the ground beneath and die. "You will address Me with proper respect,"  the White-Haired Boy said.  "It has been revealed to Me today that I am your Goddess, taken flesh in the form of a human male.  I wish to address all of My priests.  Call them from their duties and have them assemble in the main courtyard."

Stunned, the priest managed to stammer, "Y-yes, my lor-- my Lady..."  He turned and ran, to bring the news to the other priests, his mind in turmoil.  How could it be that they had not divined the presence of the Lady in their midst? Something had gone terribly wrong.

The priests came out from the chambers where they worshipped the Lady with their bodies, men and women with disheveled hair and hastily-donned ceremonial clothing.  Hairbrushes and makeup flew about as they tried to restore themselves to the beautiful aspect they should present, before their goddess should arrive.

Then finally the White-Haired Boy strode into the room. He had dressed in the garment of a priest himself, and was made up to be unbearably beautiful.  None who looked at him could disbelieve that he held feminine essence in himself, nor could they disbe­lieve that he was Desire incarnate. His followers mingled with the priests and prostrated themselves in the courtyard, except for the bodyguards who stood behind him.  In his pale white beauty he seemed to glow like the moon itself, and this is what he said:

"Listen, priests of My temple! Today it has been revealed to Me that I am not merely the favored child of the Moon.  I am the Moon herself, taken flesh in My male aspect.  The Sun, my ancient enemy, has trapped Me here, giving Me a male shape in a place where I am worshipped in My female aspect. But look at Me! Can you not see in Me the duality of My nature?"  His voice became seductive, his whole body sensuality incarnate.  Every lover of women saw a woman in him, while every lover of men saw him as a man, and all adored him beyond belief.  "Is there anyone here who does not desire Me? Who does not think Me beautiful? Who would not die for Me, should I ask it?"

"No one, Lady, no one!"  the prostrated priests and followers chorused.

He beckoned to one of the followers.  "Stand up and be counted!"  he called to him, and the man stood.  "Do you not love Me?"

"Yes-- yes, my Lady! I will do anything for You!"

"Take your knife and plunge it into your breast for Me, then,"  Alyn Ysmai said.

Mesmerized by the burning gold eyes and the beauty, the man did so, and died with a cry of anguish and ecstasy as his own knife pierced his heart.

As the man fell dead, Alyn Ysmai said, "From this day forth, all of you will direct your worship to Me, to My fleshly aspect, as well as to My heavenly manifestation.  You will obey My every order without question, and serve the desires of the flesh I wear.  If I tell you to break all your bloodpapers, to murder your employers, to make the streets run with the blood of those who worship My enemy the Sun, you will do it. And I will reward you with My presence, and with fortune in love, so long as you please Me."

***

They built Alyn Ysmai a throne in the temple, and brought him the finest brocades to wear, the finest delicacies to eat.  He enslaved the hearts and minds of those who opposed him, or claimed he was no god.  If they hated him too much to be enslaved, his followers and priests would compete to devise new and interesting ways of putting them to painful death. People broke their bloodpapers and murdered their employers at his order, just as he had said, and when deathpapers were placed on those who had committed the crimes, his worshippers would rise up against that company and devastate it.  The streets ran with the blood of those who worshipped the Sun, or sometimes, any god but Alyn Ysmai.  Those who earned his gratitude had great rewards granted them, and led enviable lives. Those that disappointed him were required to abase or humiliate themselves, or sometimes to commit horrible suicides.

And through it all Alyn Ysmai grew very bored.

He showed no sign of aging, of developing a more manly body. Worship satiated him, but gave him no mystic strength to command the heavens, or any other of the great powers that should be his by right.  And his pleasures had to grow progressively more unusual to appeal to his jaded soul.

Finally, one night he had a dream.

In the dream he saw a woman, and she was mirror to himself, with long hair the color of moonlight, and eyes the color of night. Her body was perfection, and more than perfection, and he fell immediately in love with her, desperately and completely.

"Alyn Ysmai,"  she said, and her voice was the music of the night.  "I've heard a great deal about you."

"Have you?"  he asked, and his mouth was dry.

"You're very beautiful,"  she said.  "Truly, you are favored."  And she smiled at him with biting sharpness.  He could not tell if her smile was a mockery, or if she meant what she said.  For the first time, his gifts deserted him, and he could tell nothing about her, affect nothing of her.

"You are also very beautiful,"  he managed.

"Yes, I am, aren't I?"  she said, and stepped toward him.  

She drew him into her embrace, and it was like nothing he had ever experienced.  It was more real than any dream he had ever had-- more real, in fact, than reality had ever been.  And when she took him in love, there was more pleasure than he had ever imagined, more than he could easily comprehend.

Then she faded like smoke out of his arms, leaving him unfulfilled and despairing.  He called out to her...  and realized that he was awake.

Desperate with unfulfilled desire, he summoned one of his priests, a beautiful woman trained in all the arts of pleasure, to his bed.  But she was empty, hollow, after the woman of last night.  He felt dirtied by her touch, and experienced no enjoyment, only the release of a physical pressure.  His mind and soul were left as unfulfilled as before.  

For hours he lay in bed, throughout the burning day, trying to regain the dream he'd lost, but to no avail.  Finally, sick to the soul, he rose with the moon, dressed, and glanced out the window.

She was standing in the courtyard below.

Alyn Ysmai was down the stairs faster than anyone should be able to move.  But when he reached the courtyard, she was gone.  

"Did you see a woman here?"  he demanded of a priest passing by.  "A woman, with hair and skin as light as my own?" In his desperation, he forgot the terms of godly address, and spoke just as he had when he was thought an ordinary man.

"No-- no, my Lord,"  the man said.  "I saw no one."

"Did you see her?"  the White-Haired Boy demanded of other priests, searching the entire courtyard.  "Did you? Did you?"

Finally one said, "I think I saw a woman like that heading out the gates, my Lord."

Like a man possessed, Alyn Ysmai headed for the gates, searching for the woman.  Already he knew that he would never know pleasure, real pleasure again, never enjoy anything in life again, until he found her.  Without her, his life would be empty and meaningless.  And when he found her, she would become the reason for his existence.  He would worship her, as he himself was worshipped, and give her everything he had, and in return she would give him pleasure far beyond the domain of mortal men.

So he went into the city, and demanded of passersby that they tell him where she had gone.  He had none of his bodyguards, but the force of his need was such that even those who hated him answered him readily.  It did no good.  The fragments he learned indicated that she had somehow drifted out of the city, like a flower blown on the wind.  He turned and left the city, hiking out into the wilderness to seek her out.

In the day he sheltered from the sun under the rich brocades his worshippers had given him, and still he searched.  In the night, he drove himself without food, without sleep, crossing the wilderness alone, and still he searched.  And for days and nights he searched, until days turned to weeks, and then to months, and then to years.  And still he searched...  for his life would not be complete until he found her again.

In the city, his worshippers tried to follow him, but found that the moon was too dim to find him by-- it clouded their vision, somehow. And slowly they awoke, as if from a dream, and realized that their goddess in male cloak would not be returning to them.  So they resumed the old patterns of worship, and the life of the city returned to the way it had been, before the arrival of the White-Haired Boy.

***

In the heavens, the Lord of the Night, master of sleep and dreams, and his sibling the Lady of the Moon, stood in the palace of the sky and looked down.  Alyn Ysmai still continued his desperate quest for the woman who had stolen his soul-- she who was none other than the true Lady of the Moon, herself.

"I'm not sure I should have let you enter his dream,"  the Lord said.  "You've stolen his soul, sister, and doomed him to wander all Talla, searching for you."

"Surely you don't think the punishment was too extreme,"  the Lady of the Moon said, surprised at her brother.  "The White-Haired Boy brought chaos to the city he dwelt in. He toyed with the hearts and minds of others, and destroyed people for no better reason than his own pleasure, or to alleviate his boredom.  If anyone on all Talla could be called evil, it would be Alyn Ysmai.  Surely you must realize how much he deserved his fate, brother! I did nothing more to him than what he did to countless others."

"I know,"  the Lord said gravely.  "For what he did, the White-Haired Boy deserves a thousand punishments, and I don't grieve to see him tormented the way he tormented so many others.  But I question your motives, sibling."

"My motives? Why do you question--"

"When he won the hearts of all his family, so that they spoiled him and gave him all he desired, you smiled on him.  When he tricked people of their birthrights and of their bloodpapers, you clapped your hands in delight like a small child.  And when he played with the hearts and minds of others, enslaving people to his desires, robbing them of will, making them his toys, you laughed and beamed down on him.  He was your favored child, agent of your pleasures and your manipulations.  It wasn't until he grew arrogant enough to believe himself you, to steal your worshippers and rain blood in your name, that you grew angry enough to punish him."  The Lord of the Night gazed sternly at his sister.  "You destroyed him, not because he was evil-- for he was evil even before he took your temple, made so by the gifts you gave him.  No, you destroyed him for the sake of your own pride."

And the Lady of the Moon could make no reply, for it was true.

***

They say the White-Haired Boy lived a long, long time, and spent all that time searching for the Lady of the Moon, never finding the cruel goddess again, nor regaining her favor.  Some say that he wanders Talla still, calling her by the name "Beloved,"  calling to her as he searches.  If you cross his path, these say, he will doom you to a devastating and unrequited love, to make another share his anguish.  Others say he died a long time ago.  But even those turn aside when they see a pale form in the distance, on a moonlit night, or when they hear the wind crying a name.

***

Translator’s notes:

Aside from the Great Diaspora, when the people of Laon fled their original homeworld, and the world of Scamara, which according to their legends wasn’t settled by willing Laon’l, there is very, very little evidence of Laon’l space travel prior to being contacted by the Galactic Confederation. This is understandable; prior to the Diaspora, the Laon’l perceived space to be the realm of demons, while the chthonic realms of their planet’s depths were understood to be the realm of their afterlife, cradled in the peaceful bosom of their Mother. After the Diaspora, Laon’l saw space as the realm of their tormentor, the Daishenéon Emaroth (the title translates as either “Great Empress” or “Greatest of Demons”.)

However, it cannot be denied that on the new world of Laon, the technology for space travel existed, and the Laon’l leadership has always tended to be conservative and controlling – a combination that often leads free-thinkers, iconoclasts, and members of minority cultures to flee their homes. The Laon’l leadership is known to have suppressed any knowledge of individuals fleeing Laon, in the past, but archaeologists have found evidence of attempts to build spaceships. Until now, however, we’ve found no evidence on Laon’l presence on any world other than Laon and Scamara.

This particular legend comes from the continent of Taldyr on Talla, and has been understood by the Taldyrese to be fictional, or possibly to be based on the actual exploits of a charismatic leader with albinism. However, there are certain factors that suggest that this is not the case.

-          The White-Haired Boy is presented as unusually sensitive to Talla’s sun. The blue-white sun of Talla is in fact a serious problem for the rare Tallese albinos, and for humans of the “Caucasian” subgroup and Draigoili of the “anthela” subgroup, but only Laon’l are known to actually die of radiation poisoning from a full day of exposure to the Tallese sun (during summer, or near the equator, and on a cloudless day). The exaggerated sensitivity the White-Haired Boy supposedly had to sunlight in legend sounds significantly more like Laon’l sensitivity to the Tallese sun than to the sensitivity Tallese albinos exhibit.

-          The White-Haired Boy, if he existed, would almost certainly have had to be psionic to demonstrate the abilities he supposedly had. This might simply be a convention of fiction – on Earth, another low-psi world, legendary figures have abilities that in reality would require powerful psi, as a matter of routine. But Alyn Ysmai is actually the only Tallese legendary figure to demonstrate abilities that seem to fall in the range of telepathy, telempathy or expathy; most Tallese trickster figures or legendary heroes have abilities that cannot be explained by psionics, such as shapeshifting, flight, abnormally high strength, et cetera.

-          “Fallen from the sky as a child, carried on a shooting star” : any version of the Alyn Ysmai legend that covers his childhood at all makes reference to this part of the legend. The resemblance to a spaceship crash-landing is obvious.

-          “had the form and features of a boy”, references to the femininity of the White-Haired Boy – Laon’l are significantly more neotenous than other humanoid species, and typically have less sexual dimorphism. To a Tallese of a thousand years ago, a Laon’l of 25 Tallese years would look much more like a teenager, and would appear more androgynous than the average Tallese teenager.

-          Talla’s star is visible in the sky of Laon, often during the day. It’s one of about ten stars that writings of Laon’l who believed their species should return to space spoke of attempting to reach.

-          Laon’l and Tallese are not interfertile without modern genetic engineering, and some variants of the Alyn Ysmai legend make much of the fact that he fathered no children. No variants claim that he did have children. With the amount of coitus, the number of partners the legends suggest he would have had, and the social status he had, it’s implausible that he wouldn’t have had children if he were fertile at all.

Of course, all of this is circumstantial evidence; without access to Alyn Ysmai’s remains, we have no way of proving for certain his species. However, it’s fairly strong circumstantial evidence.

Given the value to identifying evidence of pre-GalConfed Laon’l space travel, we suggest that an archaeological expedition to Talla to attempt to determine whether the White-Haired Boy actually existed or not, and to potentially recover whatever may be left of his remains, should be funded within the next five years.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #9: The Timeless Tunnels of Crystal Station

Three people come down from the ships docked at Crystal Station. Hundreds of others do the same, but these are important. Focus on them--

Stepping down from a two-man ship, which is a shuttle from the starship Rhiannon, are the captain of Rhiannon and his best friend, Rhiannon's computer engineer. Matt Pison, human, terratype, Martian, is the captain. He is tall, blond, muscular from his life in the Martian colonies but pale from little sunlight, brown-eyed. Next to him is D'mir Colotho, draine, Bcoilica. He is short, corded muscle unusual for a draine, dark hair, dark eyes and brown draine skin. They are at Crystal Station, outside the boundaries of the Web of Eyes but still within the Alliance, to relax, refuel and restock. Nobody ever told them about Crystal Station.

Wardra knows. She comes down from her one-person cruise craft. Wardra Gyuunyushiligni, farla, Evstarb, with pale green skin, an upsweep of pink hair, lavender eyes. She is tall, thin, but more powerful-looking than the usual farla, with muscles in slender cords and the electric scent of power about her. Wardra knows the dangers of Crystal Station, but she has something to prove.

Crystal Station Central is a place bustling with people. It's a huge room, with milky crystal walls and twelve doorways leading from it. They all look identical, with opaque tracker fields hiding what they conceal behind, but for numbers over their doors. Eleven doorways lead to rest and recreation areas, stores, other such things. The things that people come to Crystal Station for, braving the dangers outside the Web because Crystal Station's prices are so much cheaper than anyone else's. One doorway leads to the mazes around Crystal Station, and that's why the prices are so cheap.

If the powerful ones in the Web of Eyes or the GalConfed knew of this link, Crystal Station would be destroyed. But they don't. No one listens to the mystic Evstarb farlae. And no one else who knows can speak.

***

Matt and D'mir head for a glowing information booth. Matt asks, "Information?"

"Yes," the booth answers.

"Where can I go to get my ship refueled?"

The correct answer is Doorway 12. Random numbers in the computer juggle. Not many have gone through Doorway 9 lately. Does this weigh the decision? No way to tell.

"Doorway 9," the Information Booth tells them. It has no face to keep straight. The faceless are the best liars.

Matt and D'mir go toward Doorway 9 with their fueling schedule as Wardra approaches another glowing information booth. She asks, "C'lianp?" She is about to ask the same thing as Matt. It's a different booth, but the same computer controls them all.

"Ad," the booth acknowledges.

"Hafar eszgi tram l'notla ofir?"

Random numbers in the computer juggle. Wardra is an Evstarb farla. Does this weigh the decision? No way to tell.

"Alfi 9," the C'lianp Inl tells her. It has no mind, and gives off no psionic telltales to be read by a mystic.

Wardra feels a tiny thrill of excitement. She has come here, despite the danger, to prove that she is not a coward. 1 chance out of 12, and if her gamble is successful she will get fuel cheap enough to see her into the Web-controlled territory, despite her limited funds. She will finally be free of Evstar, once and for all. But if her gamble fails... Shaking with excitement and more than a bit of fear, she heads for Doorway 9.

As she steps through the opaque tracker field that covers the door, an arrow of pain stabs through her mind, and she staggers and falls to her knees. Terror overwhelms her. Her gamble has failed.

Somebody pulls her to her feet. She looks up at Matt.

"Are you all right?" Matt asks. "What's wrong?"

He speaks GalConfed Standard. Though Evstar is outside the GalConfed, Wardra had always hoped to go to a world inside its domains, and so she learned Standard, though she speaks it with an accent. "I'm-- all right," she says, getting her balance. "I'm an Evstarb farla. That should explain it."

"I'm afraid it doesn't," Matt says, frowning. "I don't know much about farla, except for those in the GalConfed. D'mir?"

"Evstarb farlae are mystics," D'mir says. "They tend to have powerful psionic abilities. Most likely she sensed something unpleasant. What was it?" he asks her.

"You don't know?" Wardra asks. "That was the Barrier. Now that we've gone through the Barrier, we'll never be allowed to leave."

"What are you talking about?" Matt asks.

D'mir, being a draine, is quicker on the uptake. He presses a hand against the doorway. "It won't reopen," he says. His voice is calm, but then draine voices are almost always calm. "Does it block psionic transmission as well?"

"Yes." Wardra is shaking. On her homeworld they called her Jliga, coward, because she would not bear children. She left Evstar to prove she wasn't-- or to avoid the pressure to risk childbearing? Perhaps she is a coward after all?

"What are the two of you talking about?" Matt asks again.

"We can't get back," D'mir says. "The doorway is locked from this side."

"That's ridiculous! Why?"

Wardra takes a deep breath. "This place, Crystal Station, runs on the psionic output of-- things, creatures that feed on humanoids. They don't put out emanations if they're not well-fed. Crystal Station doesn't pay for fueling costs-- that's why everything is so cheap. Everyone who comes here pays in risk-- one out of every five hundred gets misdirected through this doorway. And those who get caught, like we did, pay in blood. There's a maze around Crystal Station, populated with these creatures. That's where we are."

"That-- they can't possibly get away with this," Matt says. "The Web of Eyes would‑‑"

"Crystal Station is outside the Web's range," D'mir reminds him.

"But-- we'd hear something. All those people disappearing--"

"People disappear from stations outside the Web all the time-- they're hotbeds for vice and crime. Unfortunately, if Crystal Station polices itself reasonably well, they can keep their disappearance rate under the average, even if one out of five hundred disappear." D'mir presses himself against the Barrier again. "There must be a way to bypass this," he murmurs.

"They get away with it because there's no proof. Nobody who disappears ever comes back out," Wardra says.

"So how did you know?"

"The Evstarb mystics can talk to the dead, sometimes."

"So why'd you come here? Why did you go through the doorway?"

"I didn't know what doorway it was, any more than you."

"Why don't the Evstarb mystics tell someone?"

Wardra smiles, bitterly. "Who believes farlae?"

"She's right, unfortunately," D'mir says. "All the other humanitypes, such as us draines, are genetically close enough to pure humaniform that we treat each other as if we're reasonably close to the same species. Farlae are usually treated as true aliens, and farlae from worlds like Evstar, that don't even make an attempt to fit in, are heavily stigmatized."

"Still, someone would listen," Matt says. "Did your people even try?"

"My people are narrow, short-sighted fools. And I am one of them. I didn't even think to warn anyone about Crystal Station."

There's not really anything Matt can say, in the face of her self-directed fury. "Well, there'll be investigations when D'mir and I don't come back. We're very important men-- I'm a starship captain, for god's sake. They'll have to investigate. My crew will tear this place apart looking for us."

"They won't find anything," Wardra says dully. "The computers are probably programmed to erase references to Doorway 9 from their banks."

"Then anyone I trained will wonder why no one ever goes through Doorway 9, and try to find out what it is," D'mir says.

"I'm sure they've thought of everything," Wardra says despondently.

"Hey! Don't give up hope so soon," Matt says, trying to cheer her. "D'mir, any luck with the door?"

"I could bypass it, but I don't have the tools."

"Can you jury-rig something?"

"I don't have the tools," D'mir repeats patiently.

"Is there any chance we can find the tools, somewhere in the maze?"

"I don't know what we're likely to find in the maze. I don't think it likely, but anything's possible."

"Well then. We've still got some hope. And we've both got weapons. We'll beat this yet. Come on."

"Come on where?" Wardra asks, fear in her face. "Where is there to go?"

"If we stand around like sitting ducks, something's sure to nail us sooner or later. We need to set up a secure base of operations, something we can defend, and start scoping out the place. I'm Captain Matt Pison of the starship Rhiannon. This is D'mir Colotho, our chief computer man, a draine from Bcoilo. And you?"

"Wardra Gyuunyushiligni. I have an independent cruiser-- I was trying to get into the GalConfed. That's why I came here, even though I knew about the risk-- I didn't have much money."

"Farlae outside the GalConfed aren't known for wanting to get in," D'mir says. "Why did you decide to leave Evstar and head for the GalConfed in the first place?"

"That, conv'ril, is a story too complicated and personal to discuss now."

Matt looks around. "I don't like being exposed like this. Let's go into the maze, see if we can find food, shelter, the works. They've got to feed us, or we'll die before we can feed their creatures."

And so they go. The halls are grayish-white in and of themselves, but the lights that shine on them are dim and faintly reddish, single bulbs poking out of the ceiling. Dust is everywhere, thick on the ground, turning the air musty and old. They pass alcoves with food dispensers, and Matt discovers that they can get packet rations-- tasteless chalky things, but nutritious-- from them. Finally they find a room with a lockable door, a water tap, and supplies all around, such as blankets and aged empty packets. There is a makeshift bed in the corner.

"This looks like someone made a shelter for themselves, left to get supplies, and never came back," D'mir pronounces, examining everything with sharp draine intellect. "Good."

"Good?" Wardra asks disbelievingly.

"There's no sign of a struggle in this room, and no filled packet rations. It looks like whoever it was was safe while they were here, and weren't attacked by the creatures until they left. I do have to say that I've seen no spoor-- no droppings or animal tracks."

"Maybe this isn't near where they live," Matt says hopefully.

"That doesn't make sense, unfortunately. This is near the doorway-- if the humanoids who come through that doorway are the only victims, and the only food, they'll have to forage out this far."

"Why couldn't we find a shelter nearer one of the food dispensers?" Wardra asks. "If it's dangerous to leave the shelter--"

"Did you see any rooms near the food dispenser?" Matt asks.

"No." Wardra shakes her head apologetically. "I'm sorry-- I don't mean to whine. It's the tension. How do we want to work this, then? Safety in numbers? Do we stick together when we go out?"

"Yes, at least for now," Matt says. "I can't think of a better way to do it."

***

They set up a makeshift camp, making three beds out of the spare blankets and depositing the food packets Matt had collected. Then they go out to explore, map out emergency routes, and try to find the tools D'mir will need.

As they pass by a food alcove, a thing screeches in. It is a flying beast, and yet it has no wings. It is like a huge black tube with rotating silver teeth. Set into its head is an eye, bright purple. Wardra drops to one knee, pulls out a gun, and blasts at it. The thing flips backwards, but keeps coming. It aims itself at D'mir. D'mir and Matt shoot lasers at it, but the thing keeps coming. Wardra's missiles hit it in its mouth and eye, repeatedly, and eventually it drops.

"That's an iver," D'mir says. "It's highly psionic, but slightly repelled by psi sources-- it prefers null-psi meals."

"Like you," Matt says.

"Yes. Like me." D'mir has gone gray and bloodless, but shows no other sign of the fear he must have felt. "Thank you, Wardra."

"What'd you hit it with?" Matt asks.

Wardra shows him her gun, an ancient projectile weapon. "Our technology isn't as advanced on Evstar," she says. "Does that mean you're psionic?"

"Not really," Matt says. "Most terratype humans have a slight psi rating, though, and draines typically don't have any. They're true nulls. Let me see that?"

He examines her gun, and hands it to D'mir. "What do you make of it?"

"The creature might be an energy-eater, capable of absorbing the lasers without damage. This would tear through its flesh."

"I also put push behind it," Wardra says.

"Push? What do you mean?"

"I-- called to it, mind to mind. I told it to die. I didn't put my full effort into it-- I didn't need to. But I think it helped."

"Told it to die?" Matt stares at her. "Could you have killed that thing with just your mind?"

"I don't think so-- and it'd cripple me to try, so I'm not going to unless it's an emergency."

"Do you have enough ammunition to kill another one without trying to kill it with your mind?"

Wardra examines her ammunition clip. "No." She puts it back. “I could kill it by feeding myself to it, but I think you’ll understand if I’d rather not.”

Matt laughs. “Of course not.”

“Farlae are poisonous to ivers?” D’mir asks.

“I didn’t know that was an iver until D’mir said so, but yes, that’s what we’re taught. It won’t save our lives – the things may be psionic, but they’re too stupid to know we’re poisonous. But if it makes a meal out of me, at least I’ll be avenged.”

“I’m not going to let it come to that,” Matt said. “We’re all in this together.”

***

The days pass without distinction, an endless river of unchanging time. Occasionally a scream is heard. There is nothing to focus on-- everything is the same.

They explore, sometimes, searching for weapons or tools. They find dead bodies, and plenty of energy weapons, and money and valuables, but no weapons they can use against the ivers, and no living people. Carefully they avoid running into the creatures, as best they can. When they're tired, they go to their room and talk.

Matt is convinced that the crew of the Rhiannon must be looking for him and D’mir, but how could they possibly guess the true nature of Crystal Station to even begin to look in the correct places? D’mir, bluntly, suggests that their crew probably think they are dead and spaced, or kidnapped and taken into slavery, somewhere far from the station.

They encounter another creature, not an iver. D’mir identifies this one as a neskelly. Imagine a crab, with octopus tentacles that it walks on, crab-like. Now imagine it the height of the average human. This one is more interested in Wardra than the human or the draine, and the venom in its tentacles disrupts her psi. Matt fires at it from a distance, but it seems to be bothered by that as little as the iver was. It ignores D’mir, so he is able to get in close enough to batter its head with the butt of his energy weapon, and when its mouth gapes open to bite him, he shoots it in the mouth. That actually works.

“Did we try shooting the iver in the mouth?” Matt asks.

“We hardly shot it anywhere else,” D’mir says dryly. “I suspected a thing like this would exist.”

“A giant crab-octopus thing?”

“A thing that would prey chiefly on beings with psi, rather than beings with none. If ivers were the only creatures in here, the Crystal Station algorithms would have never sent a farla in here.”

“I should have realized that,” Wardra says. “How many kinds of creatures do you think there are in here?”

“No way to guess,” D’mir says. “But we’ve seen a type that prefer psionic victims, and a type that prefer null-psi. I imagine there may be types that prefer low psi, like humans, or are completely indifferent to the level of psi their target has. A balanced ecosystem.” His voice doesn’t change, but a subtle shift in his face tells Matt, at least, that he is making the draine equivalent of a joke.

“We’ll have to be even more careful,” Matt says.

***

Time passes, and Wardra tells them finally of why she fled Evstar. When childbirth kills 1 out of 3 farla women, the remainder are pressured to bear all the more. It is her duty to her species to risk her life in childbirth. Wardra chose not to, and so they called her coward, and drove her from her homeworld.

Time passes, and Matt tells stories of his adventures, faring the spaceroutes of the galaxy, traveling amidst the GalConfed and the Zermiloni Demesne and the Ananranjan Net, all the worlds of the Orlon Alliance.

Time passes, and D'mir tells how he came to leave Bcoilo, where he would have had a promising career in the sciences, because he had a desire for adventure that the stolid, practical draines frowned on. And as the endless days and nights go past, it seems as if they have known each other eternities. As if they are soulmates, born to each other.

Then they find a dead engineer, with tools he obviously hadn't been able to use. As one, they recognize this as their chance. As one, they turn and run down the corridors, heading back for the Barrier.

***

As they approach closely, they begin to walk, unwilling to attract unnecessary attention. Before, they were in iver territory, and there it was necessary to move quickly. Here, those few marauding ivers still around will tune in on the sound of running feet more readily than in the deep areas of the maze, where more victims are to be found, searching hopelessly for a way out. They walk down the timeless tunnels of Crystal Station, tense and wary, watching for anything. There is hope in all their eyes, but fear as well-- because if this doesn't work, they are all doomed, sooner or later.

Wardra and Matt stand guard as D’Mir takes the wall apart, looking for anything that ties into the controls. “I wouldn’t expect to find the actual control board on this side of the barrier,” D’mir says. “They’d want it to be accessible to them, without risking being eaten, and they don’t want us to be able to access it.”

“So what are you going to do about that?” Wardra asks.

“The power conduits run through all the walls of the station, including these. The lights and the food dispensers wouldn’t work without them.” He locates a power conduit. “In addition, the engineers who need to perform maintenance over here would want to make absolutely certain they couldn’t accidentally be trapped, so there is a manual release for this barrier, somewhere. Controlled by a passcode, or perhaps even by removing a panel and completing a circuit, but wherever that is… either I’ll find a bundle of control wires passing through to the board on the outside, or it’s going to tap into the power conduits and provide a means of shutting the power down briefly.”

“Which way’s going to be faster to get the door open?” Matt asks.

“Whichever one I encounter sooner, which likely depends on exactly how they implemented it,” D’mir says.

“Well, take your time. No big rush,” Matt says, joking.

A third type of creature, which looks like a rolling ball with short spikes that flatten as they approach the ground and pop back up again as they roll off the floor and upward, attacks them. It’s not immune to energy weapons like the other two they’ve encountered, so Matt is able to make short work of it. Wardra saves what little ammunition is left in her clip in case another iver or neskelly or something else resistant to energy weapons comes.

The lights flicker and then turn off. “Now,” D’mir says, and Matt grabs Wardra’s hand and pulls her through the now nonexistent barrier, D’mir right behind him. The barrier flickers back on with the lights only seconds after they’re all through.

An alarm shrills.

“Let’s go!” Matt shouts, and runs, D’mir and Wardra right behind him, heading for the docking bay.

Crystal Station looks much like a wheel, from outside the station. There’s a circular central hub. 12 spokes come from this hub. Each, ostensibly, connects to the outer ring. Each also connects to a second hub-like layer, “above” the first in the orientation of the main gravity panels… though only one of the spokes uses that connection. From the central hub, there are staircases and elevators and person-movers and escalators leading “down”, below the hub’s floor, to the docking area, which sticks out of the base of the hub like the bottom of a muffin. So there are 12 doorways visitors can take when seeking the food, shops, hospitality and fuel sales kiosks in the outer ring – though one of those 12 will never reach that area. But the docking area is all one area, large and divided more by markings on the floor than anything more substantial. Matt and D’mir’s shuttle and Wardra’s single-person craft are both located there.

The fastest way to go is to take the escalator and run down it, but silver robots swarm all over the hub and cut them off from the escalator. These robots have wheels; they won’t be able to handle stairs, so Matt, Wardra and D’mir end up taking the stairs. It won’t save them from the robots in the long run; the robots can easily take the people-mover. But the goal is to get to their ships before the robots stop them.

D’mir stops at a computer terminal, removes an object from his pocket, and inserts it into a slot in the terminal. An image like a sphere appears, the color slowly draining from it as it spins.

Wardra’s ship has a fingerprint lock. She places her hand against the door. It does not open.

“Matt! D’mir! They may have overridden the locks on our ships!” she yells, and sees the robots come down off the people-movers.

“Of course,” Matt pants. “They can’t let us get away, knowing their secret.” He fires his energy weapon at one of the robots. It drops. There are people milling around, though, boarding or disembarking from docked ships, doing maintenance work, refueling ships, and Matt can’t get a clear shot at the other robots as they weave in and out of the crowd.

D’mir’s sphere has turned translucent and he’s typing frantically, the characters spelling out nothing that would make sense to anyone accustomed to the friendly interfaces of the computers. Bubbles appear all around him with additional information, and every so often he quickly glances at them and then returns to his typing.

Wardra can’t risk firing her gun when there’s so many people around, either. She bangs on her ship’s hatch. It still doesn’t open. Robots come rolling toward her, so she runs, knocking people in her way aside, but the bay is full of the robots and the outcome’s never really in doubt. She’s still got a wrench in her hand from the engineer’s tools D’mir used to take the wall apart, and she bashes one of the robots in its delicate light sensors, smashing its ability to see. But then the next one is behind her, wrapping long silver arms around her. She shrieks and curses and thrashes. None of this matters to the robot; it rolls into a faint green beam of light and follows the beam back to the people-mover, rolling back up toward the hub. Toward Doorway 9 and the monsters and the barrier.

The robots have now detected D’mir; presumably the fact that he wasn’t trying to get to a ship delayed them from recognizing him as one of their targets. He finishes typing, and the spinning sphere starts filling with color. Then he turns around, takes a step, and is immediately hugged by a silver robot. It, too, rolls toward the people-mover.

Matt manages to reach his ship, and shoots a couple of robots that get close enough to him that there’s no one in the way. He sees large docking clamps holding it in place, which hadn’t been there when he’d docked, and realizes – without D’mir to make the computer release the clamps, he won’t be able to get the ship to lift off even if he gets through the door. Still, if he can get inside, he can barricade the robots out and he can call Rhiannon for backup. There’s an emergency manual override for the lock, but as he flips the panel that hides it open, a robot grabs his arm and pulls him toward itself, wrapping the other arm around him as it does.

It rolls him upstairs on the people-mover, and toward Doorway 9. He shouts, the whole time. “Listen, all you people! Don’t take Doorway 9! Crystal Station is a trap! It’ll kill you! Tell the GalConfed, tell the Web of Eyes, somebody! Tell someone, it’s a trap! Don’t go beyond Doorway 9—”

Then it deposits him past the barrier, which flares blue, and now no one in the hub can hear him anymore.

The people who run Crystal Station are annoyed. It’s a good bit of work to mix up the doorways, and now they’ll have to do it again.

***

The three reconnoiter at the sanctuary they’d established. It looks no different than it did before their abortive escape. For D’mir, this is entirely expected, but for Matt and Wardra, it seems strange, as if they left far longer ago than this morning.

Wardra is angry at herself. “The Evstarbs were right all along. I am a coward.”

Matt blinks. “Exactly how do you figure that?”

“Did you hear how I screamed when that thing grabbed me?” Wardra complains. “Like a child. I should have shot it.”

“It was wise of you not to try,” D’mir said. “You would probably have hit one of the people, and at best you’d only have taken out one of the robots. There were too many for us to realistically fight. As for screaming… I’m a draine. I’ve been raised since infancy to be stoic and accept the things I cannot change. And I was tempted to scream when it grabbed me.”

“But you didn’t actually do it,” Wardra said.

“Wardra. Screaming because you’ve been attacked by a thing that might kill you, and does, in fact, take you back to a place where you have to face monsters to survive, is not cowardice by any stretch of the imagination,” Matt says. “It really doesn’t help you or anyone else to beat yourself up over something so trivial. You fought as hard as you could. That’s hardly cowardice.”

“It’s not particularly relevant in any case,” D’mir says. “What’s more important is that I believe I may have succeeded in convincing the computer systems to release our ships and the barrier in somewhere between 2 and 4 hours.”

“Really!” Matt says. “That’s excellent news!”

“Why not immediately?” Wardra asks.

“There is a power cycle,” D’mir explains. “I wasn’t able to determine exactly when the cycle should take place, but it’ll be somewhere between 2 to 4 hours from now. We’ll know exactly when it’s happening if the lights flicker. Power will fluctuate and weaken for five to ten minutes and then drop, because I believe I’ve delayed the cycle from beginning after the end of the previous one. We may have as long as fifteen minutes or as little as five to get through the barrier and get to our ships.”

“What about the robots?” Wardra is nervous. The robots plainly frighten her.

“If I can get to the computer before they get loose and intercept us, I can override the subroutine that sends out the robots. We’ll have to be ready to move the moment the barrier goes down.”

“Which means we’re going to have to be out there, in the open, waiting for the power outage,” Matt says solemnly. “Down between 2 and 4 hours from now means we’re going to be exposed for up to 2 hours, because we’re not going to have enough time if we’re here when it goes down.”

“It’s not ideal,” D’mir says.

“It’s actually awful!” Wardra says. “D’mir, I don’t have enough ammo to take down another iver.”

“That is a concern,” D’mir says, “but I wasn’t able to narrow down the window beyond 2.5 to 3.5 hours. So it’s actually only one hour, not two, that we’re going to be exposed.”

“But what do we do if an iver shows up?” Wardra asks.

“Whatever we can,” Matt says. “If D’mir is killed, he’s not going to be able to stop the robots.” He takes a deep breath. “We’ve been out for as long as an hour before without being attacked. We’re just going to have to hope luck is with us this time.”

***

They pass the time by telling stories about their lives, the same as they’ve done for the past – how long has it been? Two weeks? A month? Three months?

When it’s time, they head toward the barrier. They’re careful, never stepping around a corner until they’re sure it’s clear. They reach the barrier without problems, but now, they have to wait. Anytime within the next hour, the barrier might go down. Anytime within the next hour, they might be attacked by a creature.

It actually happens half an hour later.

An iver sails around the corner of the corridor, up ahead, cutting them off from any escape route. They’re up against the barrier and unless it goes down right now, the iver is going to reach them.

The barrier does not go down right now.

Both Matt and D’mir fire their energy weapons at the iver, knowing it’s not going to do a lot of good, but there’s not much else they can do. The shots affect it very little. Wardra empties her own gun into the iver, four shots. It bleeds and slows down, but it doesn’t stop. Cursing, Wardra runs toward the iver, holding her gun to use it as a blunt instrument, the way D’mir used his energy weapon against the neskelly.

The iver is much bigger than the neskelly was.

Matt runs at it with his own weapon, firing it directly into the thing’s mouth. “I’m going to try to hit the thing in the head with this!” he yells, brandishing the gun.

“Don’t be dumb, the iver’s much too big! My gun’s heavier!” Wardra reaches the back of the thing and tries to leap up on its back. The iver flicks its tail, smacking into her and throwing her into the wall.

D’mir manages to hit the iver in its eyes with the energy weapon. It blinks and cringes, but doesn’t seem to react beyond what an unpleasantly bright light would do.

Matt grabs one of the thing’s fin-like protrubances and pulls himself up, onto the iver. He bashes the back of its head with his gun, once, twice, three times. Then the iver flips upside down, dumping him on the ground, and then reverts to its previous orientation. Matt’s plainly stunned.

D’mir’s firing into the thing’s eyes over and over, but it doesn’t slow much. In another ten seconds he’ll be dead. Matt is trying to get to his feet but there’s no way he can get to D’mir in time.

Wardra’s had a chance to recover from being hit. She’s running toward D’mir and the iver, with farla speed, long legs covering the distance in moments. “You ne’harfda!” she screams at the iver. “Look at me!”

She flings her gun, and it hits the thing in the head. It turns, its mouth open wide, to face the threat it just detected, and she throws herself at its mouth.

D’mir rolls away. The iver crashes to the ground, its levitation gone, and it begins to convulse. It spits up a green broken thing covered with holes and white farla blood, a thing that used to be their friend.

It is obvious that nothing can be done to help Wardra. The logical, intelligent thing to do, the draine thing to do, would be to run from the convulsing creature, to ensure that Wardra’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. Instead, D’mir waits for his moment, when the creature’s violent spasms have turned its head away from Wardra’s body. He charges in, grabs her body and throws it over his shoulder.

Matt reaches him. It’s been seconds. “Can we save her?” he asks.

“If the field goes down right now. If we get back to the ship and get her to the medical ward within ten minutes.”

The field does not go down right now.

The iver finally dies, poisoned by the parts of Wardra’s flesh it managed to tear off and swallow. D’mir and Matt sit with her body. Matt tears off his clothing to bandage her. D’mir does not. He’s already done something supremely stupid by draine standards, out of hope rather than logic. From his perspective, there is no longer any hope.

Eventually the field does go down, and they run. Matt carries Wardra’s body, drawing stares from the passersby at Crystal Station. D’mir’s going to need his hands free.

The robots get loose just as D’mir spoofs the credentials he needs to get into the system. They’re within meters of D’mir and Matt when D’mir manages to shut down the routine that commands them, and they roll back to the alcoves they came from.

The lock on their shuttle is released. Matt and D’mir climb into the shuttle and do not file a flight plan. Wardra’s body is strapped into a chair as if she’s riding with them. Matt pilots, D’mir watching the instruments as a second line of warning if Matt misses anything, because he’s on full automatic with no clearance from the station.

The station actually fires on them. Matt expected that they would when he first got into the shuttle. He releases chaff to draw the fire as D’mir raises shields to maximum. GalConfed ships, and shuttles, are designed for defense in a hostile universe. Crystal Station is unable to stop them as they shoot outward, toward Rhiannon.

***

Rhiannon is where they left it. The crew hadn’t been willing to move on before they’d completed their investigation into the disappearance of their captain and chief technologist.

D’mir asks the doctor if she can keep Wardra’s body preserved and restore it cosmetically – stop the bleeding, seal the wounds. Matt informs the GalConfed about Crystal Station. Rhiannon does not refuel there; they proceed to another station, more expensive.

That night, Matt does not sleep. This morning, he was a prisoner on Crystal Station, desperately looking for a way to escape, and Wardra was alive. Three weeks ago, he didn’t even know Wardra. Amazing how quickly everything can change.

He’s been staring at the walls, the ceiling, the clock slowly changing, for hours. He doesn’t think he’s asleep yet, but Wardra is there, sitting on the edge of his bed.

“I’m dreaming, aren’t I?” he says, and then is angry with himself, because telling himself he’s dreaming seems likely to wake him up.

“Yes,” Wardra says, “but I’m actually here. You’re not psionic enough to see me as long as your mind is taking in inputs from the real world; I had to wait until you had just fallen asleep to make you see me.”

“How?” Matt asks.

“Farlae can leave our bodies,” she says. “You’re seeing my spirit. I can’t show myself to D’mir; he’s got no psi at all. I need you to talk to him.”

“About what?”

There are tears on her face. “I am a coward. I didn’t want to die. I still don’t want to be dead. But what he’s doing won’t work. He can’t save me.”

Matt sits up, staring at her. “First of all, you just gave your life to save a friend. That, by definition, makes you not a coward.”

“But I was so afraid,” she whispers.

“Of course you were. Who wouldn’t be? Being afraid just proves you had a sense of self-preservation, not cowardice. You let that iver eat you to save D’mir.”

“And he’s consumed with guilt about it.”

Matt shakes his head. “He’s a draine. He knows it’s not reasonable to feel guilt because of the choice you made. He didn’t ask you to do what you did.”

“He’s trying to save me,” Wardra says, “and he can’t. And I don’t want him to try, because I can’t read his mind and he keeps his feelings off his face but I know he’s doing this because he feels guilt. Because it’s burning him up that I died to save him. Tell him it was my choice, tell him he has to let me go.”

“What is he doing?” Matt asks, and then realizes he is awake, the sound of his own voice still ringing in his ears, and Wardra’s not there anymore.

He gets dressed and goes to find D’mir. ***

D’mir is in sickbay. Wardra’s body lies cold on a table, in a sterile field.

“What are you doing?” Matt asks.

D’mir turns. He’s calm, no sign of emotion on his face, but he’s a draine. Matt knows better than to look at his face to see his feelings. His hands on his tools are the stark pale color of tightly clenched muscles cutting the blood circulation to the skin. “I’m trying to repair Wardra’s body.”

“Repair?”

D’mir nods. “I did some research. Farlae can create a psionic construct to house their consciousness and memories – they describe this in somewhat fanciful terms, claiming their spirits can leave their bodies, but it’s a fairly concrete and documented fact.”

“Do you think you can bring her back to life?”

D’mir turns back to his work. “Well, the problem with a psionic construct is that after the brain that created it is destroyed, it has no means of replenishing its energy. It’ll fade. Farlae traditionally cast their ‘spirits’, for lack of a more precise term, out of their bodies at the moment of death if they feel they have something they need to accomplish before that energy runs out – very similar to the human legends of ghosts that continue after death because of unfinished business in life, but I’m not sure any human has sufficient psionic energy to create one of these constructs in the first place.”

“That’s not what I asked, D’mir.”

D’mir does not face him. “Assuming that she created such a construct, and that the construct followed us onto the ship, and that I can successfully get enough of her body repaired with cybernetics that I can restart her heart and lungs, repair any brain damage, and prepare the body for the psionic construct to return to it… yes. Yes, there’s a small but non-zero chance that I can save her life.”

“You can’t save something that’s gone. You’re not talking about saving her life, you’re talking about restoring it.”

“It’s hardly some sort of fictional necromancy,” D’mir says. “If she didn’t, in fact, create a psionic construct before she died, there’ll be nothing I can do.”

Matt takes a deep breath. “She did. She spoke to me, while I was asleep.”

Now D’mir looks at him, startled. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“Since she explained to me exactly what you just did… no, it wasn’t a dream. Apparently I’m just psionic enough that she can appear to me while I’m asleep. But she says that you won’t succeed at this, and that trying will just hurt you.”

“I cannot imagine a circumstance in which giving up on a friend causes less pain than trying to save them and failing,” D’mir says. “But if it’s possible, I’d like to know why she doesn’t think it will work.” He turns back to his work. “It’s the brain damage that needs to be repaired, primarily. A great deal of her body was damaged, but most of that can be replaced with cybernetics, and could even be replaced after she’s alive again. I’ve gotten her heart and lungs restarted; Dr. Pryhh can repair her gastrointestinal tract, and we can replace her damaged limbs easily enough. I’m optimistic about the restoration of her physical brain, and if her brain is restored and she still exists as a psionic construct… she should be able to return to her body and live. If she knows something about why that might not work…”

“I don’t know how to ask,” Matt says. “I can’t see her now; I was only able to see her because I was asleep. And while it’s still the middle of the night, I don’t think I’m getting to sleep anytime soon.”

“It’s theoretically possible that a state of meditation will allow Wardra to appear to you. The sensory data you’re getting from the world around you will drown out anything your rudimentary psi can show you, which is why she needed to wait until you were asleep. But if you were enter a state of deep relaxation and quiet your mind, she might be able to manifest to you.”

Matt does not know how to explain to D’mir that the vast majority of humans cannot possibly enter a state of deep relaxation and quiet mind if they’ve just been woken by the ghost of a dead friend, and have found out that their other friend is attempting to resurrect their dead friend as a cyborg. “I’m not sure I can do that right now,” he says diplomatically.

“Perhaps Dr. Pryhh can help.”

“It’s third shift, D’mir. Dr. Pryhh and everyone else on first shift is likely asleep.”

“Hmm. So it is. I hadn’t noticed.”

“D’mir, draines need sleep just like humans do.”

“True, but I can consciously choose to put off the need for another thirty hours if I need to. And what I’m doing is extremely time-sensitive. Even in the cold field, decay and apoptosis are continuing to do damage.”

Matt sighs. “I doubt I can stop you.” He could order D’mir to stop, but he doubts that would have any effect but to drive a wedge between him and his friend. Besides, what if D’mir can succeed?

***

When he sleeps again, Wardra appears.

“Why won’t it work?” he asks her, before she speaks.

“My body is dead,” Wardra says.

“I know, but he thinks he can resuscitate it. You.”

“You don’t understand. A dead body radiates no psionic field. I can’t just force myself into a body willy-nilly. The body has to have a psionic field for me to be able to merge with it.”

“He restarted your heart and lungs; can he restart your psionic field? I assume it doesn’t require that you be conscious and in control of your body, or it would disappear when you sleep, and that doesn’t sound healthy.”

“I don’t think he can.” She looks as if she’s crying, but there are no sounds. She doesn’t breathe, so there are no sobs. All there are, are the tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Can he at least try, Wardra? Or would that cause you suffering?”

She shakes her head. “It doesn’t hurt me, what he does to my body. It hurts to see him hoping, and trying, and I wish his plan would work, but I know it can’t.”

“Let him try, if you can,” Matt says. “He won’t forgive himself if he doesn’t try.”

“It won’t work,” Wardra says. “But he can try.”

***

In the morning D’mir is still working. “I believe I have most of the issues resolved,” he says. “Within the next hour, I’ll try running a low-level current through the brain to see if I can, in effect, restart it.”

“I spoke to Wardra again last night.”

“Did she clarify anything for you?”

Matt nods. “She says this can’t work because she needs the body to have a psionic field. Without starting up the body’s psionic field, she can’t merge herself with it, but she doesn’t think you can make her body produce a psionic field if she’s not in it.”

“That’s a complication,” D’mir says. “Captain. There are psionic enhancers. I don’t have any psi to enhance, but you do. If you were willing, we could set things so that you could speak to her while awake.”

“Do you think that will help?”

“If she can give me advice in real time, it might.”

And so they prevailed on Dr. Pryhh, who was awake now, to give Matt psionic enhancers. He could tell when they had taken effect, because he could see Wardra.

“I’m glad you can see me,” she says to Matt. “I won’t exist for very much longer. I’m sorry D’mir can’t see me.”

“Why won’t you exist for very much longer?” Matt asks. “Aren’t spirits eternal?”

“In your mythology, but farla spirits are real. We’re limited by thermodynamics just as everything else in this universe. There’s only so much psionic energy in this construct; without a body to anchor myself to, I’ll run out.”

D’mir had said something about that. “How long?”

“No more than a day, I think,” Wardra says.

He relays the information to D’mir. “I’ll know within a few minutes if this will work or not,” D’mir says.

He runs the current through the body. Nothing happens.

Another time. Nothing happens.

“It won’t work,” Wardra says. “A brain has to be alive to generate a psionic field.”

“Why do your people do this then?” Matt asks. “What’s the point of leaving your body when your body’s about to die, if there’s no way to return?”

“It’s not for living on after you’ve died; it’s for solving any problems that you were unable to resolve before you died.” She closes her eyes. “I shouldn’t have done it. I won’t exist long enough to see Crystal Station destroyed.”

“That’s what you wanted? To live on for?”

Wardra looks at him. “I’m a coward,” she whispers. “I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to end. I still don’t.”

“That doesn’t make you a coward. That’s normal. No one wants to die.” Matt reaches his hand out toward Wardra. “You don’t sound like someone who’s resigned to nonexistence. Tell me what we need to do to save you.”

“There isn’t—”

“A living mind produces a psionic field, right?”

“Some minds do. Farlae. Some humans. Draines don’t.”

In the real world, D’mir tries activating Wardra’s brain again. It still doesn’t work.

“You said you can’t enter your own body because it’s not generating a psionic field. But my mind is generating a psionic field.”

D’mir can hear Matt’s side of the conversation. He turns. “Captain, no.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Wardra says. “Your body is yours. Your brain is yours.”

“But you could. If you chose to.”

“I could enter your brain and merge this psionic construct with you, yes. And either I’d overwrite you, or I’d disappear into you, or we’d merge into a new being. There’s no way it could work to leave us both individual and safe.”

Matt shakes his head. “That’s probably true of farlae, but are you familiar with some of the strangeness of human brains? We can support multiple egos in the same brain. With access to different memories, different personalities, different skills. Some of us spontaneously create such egos, and live that way, multiple minds in the same body.”

D’mir says, “Wardra. If you can hear me, the captain is telling the truth, but that doesn’t mean what he’s suggesting will work.”

“D’mir. Stop,” Matt says. “This is my decision, and Wardra’s. Don’t try to talk her out of it.”

“I’m not going to do it!” Wardra cries. “I’m not going to be such a coward as to take your body and your life – even if we both could co-exist in your body, what kind of life would that be for the both of us?”

“Captain, if you sacrifice yourself—”

“D’mir.” Matt puts his hand on D’mir’s shoulder. “I know you want it to be you. I know you want to be the one to save her, because she died to save you. But you’re my friend, and so is she. If I could have sacrificed myself for you, I might have, but human flesh wouldn’t poison an iver.” He shakes his head. “But after everything we’ve all been through together…”

“Tell him I won’t do it. Don’t let him think I want to be this selfish,” Wardra says.

“She doesn’t want to do it because she thinks it’s selfish, and that she’s a coward,” Matt says to D’mir. “But she’s wrong.” He turns back to Wardra. “D’mir’s a draine. He can live with failing to save you, as long as he knows he tried. But humans are more emotional. I’m a starship captain; I should have had a better plan. I should have had some strategy for protecting us while we were waiting for the barrier to fall. I should have saved you.” He reaches toward her again. “If I know that now, I could save you, and I fail, again… how will I live with myself? You were afraid of D’mir destroying himself in trying to save you – but you’ve admitted that this could possibly work. You’re just more afraid of being thought of as selfish and cowardly than you are of dying.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says.

“I don’t think you will.” He comes closer to where her spirit stands.

“Have you thought this through, Captain?” D’mir says, and Matt hears emotion in his voice. Torn between saving the woman who died to save him, and protecting his captain, D’mir is starting to crack. “What if Wardra accepts, and the two of you do merge into one? Or her mind overrides yours? Or yours, hers? We don’t know what happens to a human brain when a farla psionic construct merges with it.”

“No, we don’t,” Matt says. “But I’m willing to take the risk.”

Wardra is crying. “Please stop. Please don’t offer me what I want if it’ll destroy you. I don’t want to be selfish.”

“You’re not,” he says. “You’re the most unselfish person I’ve met. I can only hope to achieve a tiny fraction of what you are.”

D’mir lowers his head. “Wardra, if you can hear me… he is correct. You are not selfish. You are not a coward. And if the captain is this determined to offer his body to you, so that you can live – refuse, if you wish, because you don’t want to live sharing a body with a human, or a man, or another person at all, perhaps. But don’t refuse because you think it would be selfish to accept.”

She squeezes her eyes closed, but it doesn’t stop the manifestation of tears. They aren’t real, after all. Imaginary eyelids cannot hold back imaginary tears.

“Please, Wardra,” Matt says, and she finally takes his hand.

***

Crystal Station still exists, but it’s been annexed into the Web of Eyes. Everyone who was previously employed there is gone, as are the creatures. The people who once ran Crystal Station may be in prison, or dead. Matt and Wardra don’t particularly care which.

They speak in different accents, they have different body language. D’mir has been able to tell the difference since the day Wardra took Matt’s hand. Other crew members found it hard to tell, at first. D’mir expresses amazement; how is it not obvious?

There are issues. Wardra finds it painful to be no longer farla. Having different genitalia and a different build doesn’t disturb her nearly as much as not being a farla. Her psionic senses are mostly gone; the drugs that let Matt be psionic enough to sense her are dangerous to humans if overused, so mostly she is limited to the very, very dull psionic ability of a human. She has never been comfortable around other people, and now her body is a starship captain’s, and she is surrounded by other people all the time, and she occupies a brain alongside another person.

Matt does not regret his decision, because it was the only way Wardra could live. But it bothers him as well, having to let another person who lives inside his head take control of his body sometimes.

It’s hard to live as one of two minds inside the same body, only able to interact with the world and be heard outside of one’s own head when the other permits. They try to be fair with each other. Wardra recognizes that she is a guest and defers to Matt; Matt doesn’t want to steal Wardra’s life from her after working so hard to give it back. But there is no denying that it is painful for both of them.

Wardra’s body is frozen in cold storage. D’mir hasn’t given up hope of getting the body working and somehow transferring her mind into it, someday. His friends are suffering and he wants to fix it, but there are things beyond the reach of anyone, draine, human or farla. He has brought up the possibility of talking to farlae – not Evstarb farlae, as Wardra would never tolerate asking them for help – but so far, she is uncomfortable with the idea and Matt won’t push her.

But there are those who lost loved ones to Crystal Station, who never knew what had happened, who have closure now. There are those who made the calculated decision to murder innocent people at random for the sake of greater wealth, and they have been brought to justice. And life is hard, but wasn’t it always? It’s harder now, but there are things to see and discover, people to help, acts to accomplish. Friends to talk to. It’s better than death and better than grieving and better than survivor’s guilt.

Space is dangerous and no one expects happy endings. The best anyone expects is the ending that lets you go on, after the story ends.