by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Prodigy of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Glimmering shimmers of golden quantum energy tickled outward from Ensign Mike’s belly to the very tips of every mycelial strand of their bushy beard as they teleported from the Wanderlust to Spindle Reef.
Mike appeared on Spindle Reef, floating beside Vossie, Melbourne, and Lys in what seemed to be an out-of-the-way corner of a very large chamber with no artificial gravity. The space in front of them was woven through with a complex interleaving of what seemed to be silken ropes and wooden bars that the varied inhabitants used to swing about from one location to another, and the space stretched so far out into the distance that Mike couldn’t see the other side.
“Woah-hoh,” Ensign Melbourne meowed with amusement, twisting about in the zero gee ineffectually. The weightlessness seemed to be triggering his innate feline instinct for flipping over while falling in order to land on his feet… except there was no way down anymore, or maybe every way was down, so he just kept wobbling around as if he were trying to spin a hula-hoop around his waist. “Those sneaky gremlins! I can’t believe they all managed to keep it secret from us that this place is gravity-free!”
“That is surprising,” Lt. Cmdr. Vossie intoned, his long ears splaying. “Mostly because I have trouble picturing everyone else in the previous two groups all agreeing on something together.”
“It must have been Cmdr. Chestnut’s idea,” Mike said, mushily. Vossie generally underestimated the squirrel’s charismatic ability to lead, and Melbourne underestimated the squirrel’s sense of humor. But Mike knew Cmdr. Chestnut quite well from their counseling sessions and had a lot of respect for the golden-mantled squirrel.
“It seems unwise to keep tactical information like this from your crew,” Vossie grumbled, being a very grumpy-looking rabbit whose long hind feet suddenly had nowhere to land.
“Eh,” Ensign Melbourne meowed, equivocating but finally getting his gyrating under control. The white cat had managed to snag his claws on one of the nearest silken ropes, getting himself grounded. “Seems like a fun and harmless prank to me.”
“And that’s exactly what’s wrong with the current balance of the crew,” Vossie muttered, finally managing to snag his own hind foot on one of the ropes and wrangle himself into a good hold on it. “You’re originally a Tri-Galactic Union officer, Ensign Melbourne. You should know better than to fall into these lazy, lackadaisical, delinquent ways that have been brought to our crew by the Anti-Ra officers.”
“Hey,” Melbourne objected. “I was a delinquent before this mission. How did you think I ended up in that prison, waiting around for a crazy Norwegian Forest cat and her Morphican first officer to offer me a plea bargain that involved a suicide mission that landed us in the Tetra Galaxy?”
Vossie harrumphed but didn’t say anything more. Verbally sparring with a snarky cat wasn’t his idea of a good time. At least, not when the cat was Timothy Melbourne.
“I’ve never been in zero gravity before…” Lys said. The caterpillar had found no problem in twisting her squiggle of a body around to where she had hold of two different ropes, giving her several options about how to proceed. “It’s kind of relaxing, actually.”
Ensign Mike agreed with that assessment. There was something familiar about the sensation of floating… perhaps it was reminding them of how it had felt to be a computer component of an actual spaceship. The Wanderlust existed in zero gravity, so maybe, at a deep cellular level, Mike’s mycelial body was remembering that.
The four Wanderlust officers hung in their quiet corner of Spindle Reef, each clinging to a rope, as they watched how the other creatures in the space used the ropes and bars threaded through the space to move around.
Most of the aliens here seemed to be either reptilian or amphibious — Mike couldn’t tell which yet. The more Mike watched, the more convinced they became that both classes of creature were represented here. Some of the aliens had drier, more scaly-looking hides like chameleons or geckos, and others had smoother skin that glistened slightly like salamanders. Though, without knowing more about these particular aliens, it was hard to tell if these differences were more akin to the differences between breeds of uplifted Earth dogs or more like the difference between Earth dogs and the wolf-like Lupinians who had evolved on an entirely different planet in a wholly different sector of the Milky Way.
At any rate, Mike found it interesting to see a society that skewed so heavily toward such a different branch of the taxonomic tree of life than existed in most of the three galaxies that the Tri-Galactic Union stretched across. Certainly, there were reptiles and birds among the aliens in the Three Galaxies, but the uplifted mammals from Earth were the dominant force behind the Tri-Galactic Union, along with the rabbit-like Morphicans, bear-like Ursines, and wolf-like Lupinians. Even the Cetazoids — who were technically plants — looked like mammals if you didn’t realize their green fur could photosynthesize.
Altogether, that was a lot of mammals. Whereas here, Mike only spied a few fuzzy-looking creatures mixed in among the reptiles and amphibians, and unlike most of the Tri-Galactic Union mammals who had four limbs and heads with two eyes, these ones seemed to have eight limbs and whole clusters of eyes in their heads. Mike found that kind of comforting actually — the clusters of eyes were more similar to their own row of eye slits than the pairs of eyes that everyone else aboard the Wanderlust had. Hell, even Lys who had eye-spots rather than actual eyes had two of them positioned on her head in a way that felt familiar and comfortable to Earth mammals and their ilk.
Mike had considered re-absorbing some of their own eyes to look more normal… but… it was just so convenient to have a wider field of vision and put less stress on any individual eye. The balance between serving one’s own needs and bending to the preferences and standards of society is always a tricky one, but more so the more different you are. And cyborg toadstools are pretty different from mammals.
“So, what’s the plan here?” Ensign Melbourne meowed, looking ready to launch himself out into the thick of the activity. “Split up and meet back up when it’s time to go home? We don’t have any actual duties here, since the shifts before us did all the real heavy lifting. So, I’m going to see what kind of fun I can chase down… If anybody wants to join…?” The white cat’s blue eyes gleamed in a warm, friendly way, inviting the others to join in his adventures.
Lys’s green skin flushed a deeper shade of emerald, seemingly charmed by the cat’s offer, and she said with her wriggling circle of mouth-parts, “I’ve never been anywhere this crowded or alien–”
(A somewhat ironic statement, Mike noted internally, from a quasi-telepathic caterpillar who had grown up on the back of a giant turtle.)
“–so, I don’t really know how to start,” Lys concluded, “and would be very glad to have your guidance.”
Ensign Melbourne’s triangular ears stood up extra tall; the white cat did like setting himself up as the streetwise expert, leaning heavily on the stint he’d done serving time in a prison colony before this voyage to establish his jailbird cred. “Yeah,” he meowed. “I think I can find something fun for us here in this lizard den… Follow me, if you’re up for some excitement!”
Vossie rolled his eyes, long ears flat behind his back at this point, as they watched the white cat spring away from their quiet corner like an arrow shot from a bow. The green caterpillar followed him, and the two began wrangling their way from one rope or beam to the next, as if they were apes swinging through the trees.
“Should we go with them?” Ensign Mike asked, their voice plinging sweetly like raindrops on a lake. The toadstool wanted to see what kind of fun Ensign Melbourne could manage to scrape up, and they knew exactly how to manipulate Vossie into following the cat and caterpillar: “I mean, at the very least, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on them, you know, so they don’t get into any trouble. Don’t you think?”
One of Vossie’s long ears twitched upward, bent in the middle, giving the rabbit a lopsided, skeptical expression. “Yes, I suppose it is our responsibility to see that Ensign Melbourne doesn’t get Lys into any real trouble. The Ollallan is still young and naive. In fact, most likely, that is why the captain assigned us to this group after all.”
Ensign Mike had doubts about that theory. The toadstool thought it more likely that the captain had deemed the four members of this group as the least helpful for accomplishing any of her real goals for this visit, so they’d all been shunted off until last. The rejects. However, saying so didn’t seem helpful. Instead, Ensign Mike simply smiled — genuinely happy that Vossie was at least being persuadable — and said, “Then we’d better catch up with them.”
Vossie kicked off of the taut rope with his long hind feet, and Mike sailed after him. The geckos, chameleons, and salamanders all used their tails to help them in swinging from one guide rope to the next, but none of the four Wanderlust officers had tails that were helpful in that way — Vossie’s tail was a useless cotton puff; Melbourne’s was long enough, but cat tails aren’t made for gripping anything. And of course, neither Lys nor Mike had tails at all, but Mike did have a bushy mycelial beard…
At first, Mike felt self-conscious using the twisty, curly mycelial strands of their beard to grip the ropes as they passed by, but it gave the toadstool such an advantage that they soon got over the discomfiture. Besides, there were other beings in the crowds of aliens with non-traditional body shapes, using weird parts of themselves to navigate the gravity-free space — they were leafy and vaguely tumbleweed-shaped, far more obviously plant-based than the otter-like Cetazoids back in the Three Galaxies.
The white cat navigated between perfectly nice looking food stalls nestled at the intersections of various ropes and beams, continuing to move deeper and deeper into the large, complex space. The caterpillar, rabbit, and mushroom followed, increasingly confused about what the cat was looking for — the food stalls had intriguing smells, but there were also lots of clusters of activity and objects that were much less clear about what they were and seemed fascinating. Art displays? Social gatherings like poetry readings or performances?
Mike was fascinated by the strangeness of everything they were passing, but somehow, Melbourne just kept leading them through the central hub of activity until they were in an area with a subtly gritty tone. The reptiles here had missing scales, and the amphibians scars; the few plant-aliens had dried, crackling, browning leaves. And there were a lot more of the fuzzy, eight-limbed aliens. Perhaps that’s why Melbourne had found this direction appealing?
Though, now that Mike could see the fuzzy aliens close up, the toadstool realized they weren’t mammalian at all — these aliens were more like arachnids with stiff carapaces under their fuzzy brown fur. Some of them were even spinning hammock-like webs between the beams and guide ropes, causing Mike to wonder if all the guide ropes were actually made from these spiders’ silk.
Given the proliferation of reptiles and amphibians in the more central areas, Mike had assumed this station was run by one of those species. However, it would make sense that an arachnid race wouldn’t care about gravity. With their ability to spin webs, the fuzzy spiders wouldn’t be hindered by the zero gravity at all. Maybe this station actually belonged to the spiders, and the reptiles and amphibians were just visitors?
Ensign Melbourne finally came to a stop at a dark corner where a spider in a colorful outfit seemed to be serving drink bulbs to amphibians and reptiles lounging in hammocks. The white cat staked out a particularly large hammock and gestured for the other three Wanderlust officers to join him there.
The spider scrambled over and asked a question in a voice like the quiet screech of existential dread. The comm-pin on Ensign Mike’s breast translated the screech as, “What’s yer poison?”
Continue on to Chapter 4…