by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Nexus Nine. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1 or return to the previous chapter.
In the morning, Grawf walked with Mazel to the medical bay, by way of Scharm’s Bar where they each had a bracing mug of hot jumaria nectar. Once Mazel felt good and jittery from the jumaria nectar, she figured she was ready to face Doctor Jardine — who probably didn’t need jumaria nectar to feel energetic.
When Mazel hesitated outside the doors of the medical bay, Grawf put a giant paw on the small cat’s shoulder. She didn’t say anything. They hadn’t talked about Mazel’s fear, uncertainty, and general quandary since their brief conversation aboard Star-Skipper 1 the night before. Sometimes, it helps more to spend time with someone and not talk about your problems. Just take a break from them.
Grawf didn’t need to say that she’d still see Mazel the same way, regardless of whether the calico went into the medical bay and let Doctor Jardine return the chip to her head.
Grawf didn’t know Mazel well enough yet to know the difference between Mazel Tabbith and Mazel Rheun. The differences weren’t obvious on the surface. They ran deep.
Grawf lifted her paw from Mazel’s shoulder and moved to leave.
“Wait,” Mazel said. Maybe she didn’t need to hear it — but she wanted to. “What if…”
“I don’t care what you choose to do,” Grawf rumbled. “But I’d like it if we could train together again. You gave me quite a workout, Little Cat.”
Mazel smiled, a warm and complete smile that lifted her whiskers, twinkled in her eyes, and made her ears stand up tall. She leaned forward, pointing her pink nose upward, and the bear leaned down until her large black nose gently bumped against Mazel’s small pink one. Grawf’s nose was leathery and dry. And nearly as big as one of Mazel’s paws. Her breath was warm and tickly in Mazel’s whiskers, and it smelled of fresh loam in a rainy forest. The little cat started purring again.
“Consider it a date,” Mazel said. She watched the bear walk away, and then she was alone in the corridor.
She could leave, go back to her jerry-rigged, ramshackle laboratory, and simply study the data they’d collected on Nexus Nine. She could put off the decision until later.
But she didn’t. She went inside, and the doctor rushed up to her, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and chittering a mile a minute. He wanted to hear everything about their mission through the nexus — apparently, Omoleura was still in zir chrysalis, and Neera had been tight-beaked as she kept a vigil steadfastly by the insect’s side. So, Doctor Jardine had heard next to nothing about the trip, although he had removed the Rheun chip from Omoleura.
“It was the only way to make the poor fellow stop seizing,” Jardine said as he scanned Mazel for the fifth time. “But you seem perfectly healthy, and we know that the Rheun chip agrees with your physiology!”
“Is that what happened?” Mazel asked, accepting a paper gown that the squirrel handed her. “The Rheun chip didn’t agree with Omoleura’s physiology?” She was a little worried that turning off the firewall had caused the insect’s seizures.
“Most certainly,” Jardine said, stepping behind a partition while Mazel changed carefully into the paper gown.
It was always challenging to not shred the delicate medical garments with her sharp claws, but she kept them carefully sheathed, in spite of the nerves that kept threatening to fluff out her fur, swish her tail, and extend the razor sharp crescents.
Jardine added, “I’m amazed that Omoleura and the Rheun chip functioned together successfully for that long. Zir brain isn’t at all compatible with it! Really, it’s a miracle that zhe didn’t go into seizures as soon as the chip was inserted. I suppose it’s a testament to the fellow’s physical adaptability.”
“Zhe made a true sacrifice then, in order to save the chip for me,” Mazel said, tying the gown carefully around herself. “Can… I see it? Before you put it back in?”
Mazel had never actually seen the chip that had become part of her brain before — it had been removed from Darius’ brain and put directly into hers while she’d been unconscious on a medical bed.
Doctor Jardine brought a shallow metal bowl to Mazel, carefully cradled in his delicate and perfectly manicured paws. In the middle of the bowl, she saw a lump of translucent jelly, approximately the size of a single one of her paw pads. Filaments of braided wires — silver, gold, and copper — extended from the jelly, looking a little like tentacles.
“It’s so small,” she said.
“It has to be small,” Jardine replied, cradling the shallow bowl closer to his narrow chest, as if he were protecting it from her criticism. “It goes in your brain. There’s not a lot of wasted space in brains.”
“I just mean… there’s so much stored in there.” Mazel lowered her nose, right to the edge of the bowl and sniffed. She smelled copper and fish oil. “It’s hard to believe. That’s all.”
Jardine smiled and his dark eyes twinkled. His bushy tail flipped behind him. “Are you ready to be rejoined then?”
Mazel took a deep breath and said, “Yes, please.”
Doctor Jardine had Mazel lie down on the medical bed. Several rows of scanning panels rose out of the sides of the bed and rotated around until she was enclosed under their bands of flashing lights and display screens that seemed to already be showing images of the inside of her body.
Several Avioran nurses joined the squirrel doctor, and then he asked the calico cat to begin counting backwards from one hundred. She didn’t feel like doing what she was told, so instead she tried to remember the words to a prayer Grawf had recited for her last night. It was a prayer that Ursine cubs made to the honey golem, asking for strength and fortitude… but Mazel only remembered the first few words.
“Grant me the fluidity, the flexibility, the ability to…”
That was all she knew.
But then the rest came to her.
“…flow like honey. Grant me the amber glow of happiness that sweet honey brings.” Her voice felt creaky and small, like she hadn’t used it in a long time, or maybe like it was supposed to vibrate through her whole body, instead of staying contained in a single point in her throat.
Another voice, deep and resonant, finished the prayer for Mazel: “And grant me the sticky, stucky, gummy, gluey resolve of honey in my enemy’s fur.” The voice laughed. “You always did love that Ursine prayer, Big Dog.”
Mazel opened her eyes and saw Shep’s wolfish face above her, smiling down, much like in the vision she’d had in the nexus.
Remembering the image of herself as a kitten, staring into a present filled with a river, suddenly called back a lot more memories. It almost felt like the river inside the present had flowed out to surround her, bathing her tentacles in cool, cool water. Except the water was memories. Or maybe space-time.
Mazel closed her eyes, concentrating, trying to conjure the memories into her conscious mind, much like trying to remember a dream. But all she could recall of Omoleura’s vision from the nexus that sent zim into a seizure was fragmentary snatches.
What she did remember, though, was vibrating zir wings to talk, bending zir many-jointed legs, and seeing the world through multi-faceted eyes. She remembered spitting chrysalis silk all over zirself, and she remembered the feeling of zir organs melting, reforming, and remaking zir body as she half-slept in a meditative trance.
She remembered being Omoleura.
And she remembered, during zir trance, that Shep had come to zir in a vision. Instead of telling zir, “You have a choice,” as the vision of Shep had told Mazel, this vision of Shep had said something different, something more.
The words came back to her: “You have lived a long life. If the young one chooses you, live on. If the young one leaves you behind… We will have your memories here.”
During the vision, Rheun had responded, speaking with a dog’s mouth, a Chrysaloid’s vibrating wings, and an octopus’s signing tentacles. “In the nexus? You will store my memories in the nexus?”
“We live in the nexus; we built the nexus.” The words were strange and incongruous coming from the German Shepherd’s mouth. “We transcended our physical, tentacled bodies long ago, and even the constraints of linear time. When you returned to us, we recognized you as our own. We selected the Apex from your past and future as the individual that you were most likely to listen to — the only being who could free your host from her burden. As we speak to you in this vision, we speak to her in another one: giving her the choice.”
Shep’s German Shepherd body came apart in strips that waved and roiled, becoming a sea of translucent tentacles. “We have downloaded your memories, copied them, so you cannot truly die. But you also cannot live unless the small cat chooses you.”
“She will choose me,” the bizarre chimera-self of Rheun had said. “She will choose me.”
But Rheun had not been sure.
And Mazel felt a wave of relief and gratitude roll over herself, washing her in the warmth of contentment. She had made the right choice — she was Mazel Rheun.
She was whole again.
The German Shepherd laid a gentle paw on the small cat’s forehead, as if checking her temperature. “Are you all right, Big Dog?” Shep asked.
“I’m better than I’ve been in a long time,” Mazel said. Her life was bigger and more full than it had ever been as a solitary kitten, so young that she’d only lived part of a single life, and she no longer felt driven by an inexorable force to seek an origin that had faded from her memories lifetimes ago. She had computer banks’ worth of data about the nexus to study, and she had a life to live here on Nexus Nine Base.
She planned to play Chanster’s Claws with Quincy and Doctor Jardine; she wanted to deepen her friendship with Neera and thank Omoleura; and she intended to best Grawf in any martial art the bear would teach her. And she would help Shep navigate the difficult waters of guiding a people who believed he had divine providence on his side — even if that divine providence was nothing more than an ancient, arcane race of octopuses living inside a space-time tunnel. She had a life to live here. And no matter how many lives she’d lived before, and no matter how many would come later, for now, she was going to focus on living this one. To its fullest.
Thank you for reading Nexus Nine! If you’d like to read more in the same universe, check out Tri-Galactic Trek. Or if you’d like to pick up an e-book version or paperback to share, learn more here.