by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Collie Commander, November 2024
The social heart of the Tri-Galactic Union starship Initiative was a wide room with windows all along one side that looked out on the yawning void of space, sprinkled with the bright points of the distant stars. Tables were scattered around at a comfortable density, and a synthesizer bar worked by an uplifted rabbit named Galen stretched along the opposite wall.
Galen was a mysterious figure who loved listening to the woes and travails of the mostly canine and feline officers of the Initiative when they came to her bar, which she called the Constellation Club, but she rarely opened up about herself or how she’d come to be the only rabbit on a ship full of dogs, cats, and the rare exchange officer from another world.
Commander Bill Wilker, the collie first commander of the ship, had a long history of flirtatiously trying to coax Galen into talking about herself, and for just as long, the rabbit had been coyly redirecting his attentions to anyone else at the bar who looked like they needed someone to talk to. It was a dynamic that worked well for both of them. Galen saw it as part of her job as a bartender to look after everyone in the Constellation Club, and Cmdr. Wilker carried a similar sense of responsibility both as the ship’s first officer and as a gregarious, friendly, outgoing herd dog.
Today, the person in the Constellation Club who looked most in need of some tender care was Consul Eliana Tor, the photosynthetic green otteroid exchange officer. Consul Tor was as much plant as otter, but she was shaped like an otter, simply covered with thick, verdant, emerald green fur much like the grass in a lush meadow. However, a meadow would spend half of its time soaking in full spectrum sunlight. Consul Tor’s fur, exposed by the aesthetically placed gaps in her purple sundress, bathed only in the thin artificial light shining down from the ceiling of the Constellation Club right now. The stars outside the windows were much too far away for her to taste their pinpoint light with her fur. Though she sat by one of the windows gazing at the faraway stars anyway, wondering what wonderful flavors their light might hold and pensively sipping on a mineral water that Galen had served her earlier.
Like a good collie dog, Cmdr. Wilker looked over the entire room as soon as he entered the Constellation Club that evening, checking to see that everyone was in their places, everyone seemed okay and happy. Mostly they did. Even Consul Tor’s behavior, pensively sipping a drink, wasn’t unusual, but his eyes lingered on her longer than anyone else anyway. He’d had a bit of a crush on the otteroid ever since they met. She had an energy — a vivacious, lively, spirited quality — that drew him to her. But he also knew she had some limited telepathic abilities and could sense his feelings. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable or behave inappropriately, so he looked away quickly as soon as he caught himself gazing at her.
Cmdr. Wilker approached the bar, ready for his ritualistic quipping with Galen, sporting a wide, wolfish grin. The rabbit’s long ears folded over in a faux-demureness that she liked to play at with Cmdr. Wilker, though she was overall a very forthright, straightforward character who always said exactly what she thought when she wasn’t being playfully coy.
“Has the big bad wolf come back to the watering hole to scare all the little forest animals away?” Galen simpered.
“That’s me,” Cmdr. Wilker agreed. “Big and scary, claiming my territory.” He sat down on one of the bar stools, fluffy tail swishing happily behind him. It was fun to pretend to be scary when absolutely no one was afraid of him. Sure, he had a wolfish grin — because collies are shaped similarly to wolves — but there wasn’t anyone warmer and more caring aboard the entire starship.
“Your usual?” Galen asked, already holding a glass.
Cmdr. Wilker nodded and said, “Any trouble in your forest tonight?”
Galen filled the glass with ice, and then began mixing synthetic bacon-infused bourbon, a dash of lemon juice, and a touch of maple syrup into a shaker. Once properly mixed, she poured the rich mahogany-colored drink into the glass over the ice and garnished it with bits of crumbled bacon. “One bacon sour on the rocks,” she said, shoving the drink across the bar to Cmdr. Wilker. “And I’d say, most of the inhabitants of the forest are doing great today.”
Cmdr. Wilker took a sip of the drink and sighed. He loved the taste of bacon.
Galen tilted her head conspiratorially toward Cmdr. Wilker and added, “However, some of the trees seem a little sad.” Her eyes darted pointedly away from the collie, and when he followed the direction of her gaze, he found himself looking at the beautiful green otteroid again.
“Sad trees, eh?” Cmdr. Wilker woofed softly. “Well, we can’t have that.”
The gregarious collie dog wasn’t sure what he could do to cheer up an otherworldly, self-sufficient-seeming being like Consul Tor, but if Galen thought he should give it a try, then he’d certainly do his best. Cmdr. Wilker took his drink and strode across the Constellation Club, tail swishing behind him, to where the green otteroid sat, staring out at the stars.
“May I join you?” Cmdr. Wilker asked, always polite, always respectful. He more than halfway expected Consul Tor to send him away, but without looking away from the view in front of them, she gestured at an empty seat beside her.
“Be my guest,” Consul Tor said in a voice as lyrical as a babbling brook. The musical quality of her words made Cmdr. Wilker’s own husky bark sound coarse and rude in his own ears, which flicked back at the thought. “Actually, I think of your voice as earthy and strong,” Consul Tor observed. Now she did turn to look at him, and her lilac eyes looked as deep as oceans. “Does it bother you that I can sense what you’re thinking?”
It did discomfit Cmdr. Wilker that Consul Tor could seemingly see right through him. At least, a little. How could it not? But also, she had asked him with words, and almost automatically, his long muzzle split into a wide grin, and he answered, “Not at all.” The answer was partly reflexive — what he would have said to anyone in that moment — but it was also a way to even the field. She might know he was troubled, but he didn’t have to say so. He didn’t have to give into his feelings and let them control his choices. She already knew what he was feeling, so it wasn’t like he was lying, not exactly. It was up to him to choose what he was going to say.
The green otteroid’s own shorter muzzle twisted into a more complicated smile, one that displayed an entire rainbow of emotions, more different emotions than Cmdr. Wilker could read. “You’ve come over here to find out why I’m sad,” she said.
“I guess I have,” Cmdr. Wilker woofed. “If that’s what will cheer you up, anyway. You know, talking about it. If you’d rather be distracted–” His grin widened. “–I am an expert at a wide range of distractions from watching vintage scramball games in the lumo-bay to rounding up enough officers to play some high stakes poker.”
“High stakes?” Consul Tor asked, amused by the collie’s bravado and confidence. He was already cheering her up, simply by refusing to fit into the framework she’d expected of him.
“Well, currency is largely irrelevant in the Tri-Galactic Union, since all our basic needs are met,” Cmdr. Wilker barked, “but there can still be entertaining ways to spice up an otherwise dry game of poker. For instance, you could gamble for who has to write an original song and perform it for everyone who happens to be in the Constellation Club, or maybe who has to audition for the next play Dr. Keller decides to put on. Nothing dangerous. Just fun. Always fun.”
Cmdr. Wilker’s smile was infectious. There’s nothing quite like a collie dog’s smile. Their faces are so long and serious when they look pensive, but they can light up an entire solar system when they smile. But Consul Tor didn’t just see his smile; she could feel it like sun shining on her.
“You are a good distraction,” Consul Tor quipped, smiling back. Her expression echoed his. But then her smile faltered. “But I think I do need to talk. If I were on my own world, everyone around me would know exactly what I was feeling and why. It’s still strange to me that here I have to tell you what I’m feeling if I want you to know, and I even have the choice of you not knowing at all.”
“Is that what you’re sad about?” Cmdr. Wilker asked, interested. He wondered why Cetazoids bothered developing a spoken language at all if they were so interconnected by telepathy. Then he wondered if Consul Tor was sensing what he was wondering. But rather than get caught in recursive loops of thought, he chose to bark his way right through them and say his thoughts out loud. He thought Consul Tor would like that better.
Consul Tor laughed at the flood of words the gregarious collie barked at her, explaining his chain of thoughts, but then she smiled again — a smile that made her lilac eyes sparkle like sunlight hitting a fountain — and said, “I haven’t studied the evolutionary biology of my people, so I don’t know why we developed spoken speech. However, I think it may have been the case that we developed spoken language before telepathy. And no, I couldn’t tell exactly what you were wondering — my abilities are relatively weak, and canine minds are still foreign to me, even after all the months I’ve been here. Though, I might have been able to guess. And yes, I do like that you’re willing to just talk to me and say what you think without getting caught up in eddies and whirlpools of worries.”
Consul Tor drew a deep breath and then took a sip of her effervescent mineral water. Cmdr. Wilker waited while she did, more interested in what she might say next than in anything he could add to the conversation.
“Coming back to your first question though,” Consul Tor said, setting her drink back on the table but keeping her green paws wrapped tightly around it, “maybe the feeling of disconnect that comes from having to talk instead of just being instantly understood is part of why I’m sad, but it’s more complicated than that. And I’m not used to having to describe complicated feelings out loud with words.”
“Neither am I,” Cmdr. Wilker woofed. “Complicated feelings have never really been my thing. But I’m always up for trying something new.” He took the glass of bacon sour in his paws and clinked it against Consul Tor’s glass of mineral water, still held firmly in her green paws. “To trying something new.”
The green otteroid stared at Cmdr. Wilker for a long moment, long enough for his thoughts to start chasing themselves in circles again like puppies chasing their tails, but this time, he didn’t let them. The collie simply sat and waited, entirely hanging on Consul Tor’s every movement and filled with anticipation for her next words. He could happily spend all his time with her. There was something so peaceful to him about her presence.
“You like surprises,” Consul Tor finally stated. It wasn’t a question, not the way she said it, even though she wasn’t entirely sure of its truth until she saw Cmdr. Wilker’s reaction.
The collie dog’s triangular ears with their folded over tips perked up, and he sat straighter in his chair, the speed of his tail wags increasing behind him.
Consul Tor laughed. She’d been right. She wasn’t surprised. But Cmdr. Wilker clearly had been surprised by her statement, not expecting the connection she’d made between surprises and trying new things.
“Come with me to Cetazed,” Consul Tor urged, reaching out a green paw to touch one of the collie’s white ones. “My mother is having a Grafting Ceremony in a few days, and I haven’t been able to decide if I should ask the captain for shore leave to go home for it. I haven’t been entirely sure if I wanted to go at all. But…”
“If I came with you, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, eh?” Cmdr. Wilker might not be able to read Consul Tor’s mind, but he was still a clever dog who had a knack for gracefully handling social situations. And he loved the idea of a party, even if it was some sort of party he’d never heard about before. In fact, that kind of made it all the better. He really did love trying new things. And surprises. Well, the good kind anyway.
“So… will you?” Consul Tor asked, as if she needed to.
Cmdr. Wilker didn’t have to think about his answer at all. He’d only been to Cetazed once before, and it had been a much briefer visit than he would have liked. Cetazed was exactly the kind of planet he wanted to visit again. With a wide grin, Cmdr. Wilker answered: “I’ll arrange shore leave for both of us with the captain, and I can fly us there in my favorite shuttlecraft, The Little Bo-Peep.”
Across the room, the uplifted rabbit pouring drinks behind the bar smiled. Even from the far side of the Constellation Club, Galen could read in the collie dog and otteroid’s postures that she’d made the right choice sending him over there. And she was always happier when her patrons were also happy.
* * *
The flight from the Initiative’s current position to Cetazed was long enough for Consul Tor to muddle her way through telling Cmdr. Wilker her entire life story as he handled the shuttlecraft’s controls. She found herself struggling to remember to fill in emotional details using words for him. If she’d been talking to another Cetazoid, they would have picked up those aspects of her story automatically, her words fleshed out by a rich tapestry of emotional colors that they could read telepathically. For her, it felt a little like she was offering Cmdr. Wilker a colorfully illustrated graphic novel, but he could only read the actual words, missing every detail in the pictures and fonts.
For his part, Cmdr. Wilker was entranced by learning about the differences between her upbringing and his — being a Cetazoid sounded both so much warmer and colder than being an uplifted mammal. Everyone could feel everyone else’s emotions all the time, and that brought them closer to each other in some ways… But almost paradoxically, it also caused a divide, because they weren’t used to having to work at understanding each other. So, someone like Eliana Tor — who had weaker telepathy than most other Cetazoids — had a way of being left out and forgotten. No wonder she had gravitated towards becoming an exchange officer with the Tri-Galactic Union when the opportunity had presented itself.
“Well, don’t you worry,” Cmdr. Wilker woofed when Cetazed finally came into view on the shuttle’s main viewscreen. “No matter how lost and overwhelmed you feel, compared to me, you’ll be completely enmeshed in this great ocean of telepathy shared by your people. You’ll be an absolute expert, and if you need someone else to look and feel like a fool for you, I am happy to take on that role.”
Consul Tor’s green muzzle quirked into a small, uneven smile. There was something sweet about the collie’s confidence being so strong that he didn’t mind playing the part of a fool. Before she could say anything though, The Little Bo-Peep received an incoming signal from the beautiful blue-green world ahead of them, and when Cmdr. Wilker answered the call, another Cetazoid face appeared on the viewscreen, replacing the image of the planet.
“Little Sprout!” the Cetazoid woman on the screen exclaimed in a particularly exuberant way. Like Eliana, this woman wore a revealing sundress that left large patches of her thick green fur exposed, so she could be properly nourished by the light. Unlike Eliana, those patches of green fur varied in exact hue and texture in a patchwork way, and much of her grasslike fur was dotted with tiny flowers in a whole rainbow of colors. Also, she had an extra arm on her left side.
The woman’s sundress was made from a shimmering, shining golden fabric, while Eliana generally wore much more muted fabrics in shades of purple or blue. The final difference was that her three arms were decorated with gold, silver, and bronze bangles, and her small round ears each pierced by several similarly shiny metal hoops while Eliana went unadorned, undecorated, nothing marring her simple, natural beauty.
“Cmdr. Wilker,” Consul Tor said drily, “may I introduce my mother, Allexia Tor. And mother, this is my crew mate, Commander Bill Wilker.”
“Oh, how delightful!” Allexia announced. “You’ve brought a little friend with you to attend my grafting ceremony! Won’t that be nice? Now, what’s going on with the other vessel that just entered the system? Is it here for my grafting ceremony too?”
“Other vessel?” Consul Tor asked blankly. She wasn’t even within range of her mother’s telepathic abilities yet, and she was already feeling overwhelmed and flustered by the overbearing presence of her mother’s personality. It was hard to get any sunlight under the wide-reaching branches of a much older, taller, more established tree. At least, that’s what Eliana always found herself thinking when her mother called her “Little Sprout,” even though she hadn’t been a little sprout in a very, very long time.
Allexia’s bearing shifted, and she suddenly seemed very serious… or at least, as serious as someone like her could ever seem. “As the Guardian of the Verdant Groves, Holder of the Eternal Dewdrops, and Heir to the Sunlit Canopies, I’ve been charged with asking you about the other vessel approaching our planet.” Her demeanor shifted again, this time to uncertainty and confusion. “They don’t seem to be responding to any of our signals.”
Cmdr. Wilker scanned the system and found the ship Allexia was asking about. It seemed to be a Kallendrian vessel. The collie had had dealings with their people before — they were a species much like decorator crabs. Looking up at the screen, he said, “Madame Allexia, may I say, it is an absolute honor to make your acquaintance, and while I see the vessel you’re querying about, I know nothing of their presence here. Your daughter and I are here only to celebrate you and your grafting ceremony.”
Allexia Tor looked mollified by the collie’s expressively polite, deferential language, and Eliana Tor found herself extremely pleased with her choice to bring Cmdr. Wilker along. He would definitely make surviving her mother an easier ordeal. Maybe this trip could actually be fun after all.
“Well, then,” Allexia said, “I will send information to you about where your darling little vessel can land, and as soon as my Little Sprout is here with me again, we can let the festivities begin!”
“Wonderful,” Cmdr. Wilker agreed brightly.
“Yes, wonderful,” Consul Tor echoed less enthusiastically but with a hopeful edge to her tone.
* * *
Cmdr. Wilker piloted the Little Bo-Peep smoothly down through Cetazed’s lacy white clouds and crystal clear skies to land on a bare, square patch of metal hovering on a metal column above an ocean so blue that it looked like it should be poured over shave ice to make a tasty blue-raspberry flavored treat.
Once they’d landed, Cmdr. Wilker woofed, “These are the coordinates your mother sent to me… but I don’t see anything near here. Last time, I was here, we landed in the mountains, and there were buildings and waterfalls all around.”
“Just power down the shuttle and wait,” Consul Tor said. “Also, this might be a good time to change into your quick-dry clothing.”
Cmdr. Wilker was here for surprises, so he didn’t object. Moments after the shuttle’s engines quieted, a mechanical thrumming began all around them, and the landing pad they were parked on began descending toward the ocean.
“This ship is not designed to operate underwater,” Cmdr. Wilker woofed from the back of the shuttle where he was changing from his uniform into the quick-dry outfit he’d brought, trying not to sound too alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” Consul Tor said in a soothing, lyrical tone from where she was still sitting up front. “The bright blue water here means that we’re only dealing with the Upper Ocean right now which has a very low density and high surface tension, so a very secure bubble of air will form around us protecting the ship from the water.”
After a few moments to let those words sink in, Cmdr. Wilker woofed, “Upper… ocean?” He sounded more intrigued than concerned at this point. Also, he had finished changing his clothes, so he stowed his Tri-Galactic Navy uniform out of the way and came back up to the front of the shuttle. He sat back down in his pilot’s seat, beside Consul Tor in the support officer’s seat.
“Yes,” Consul Tor agreed. “This is the Upper Ocean.” By now, they could see the bubble she’d described outside the shuttle’s windows holding back the bright blue water which closed around the platform, completely surrounding them without touching them. Sunlight filtered through the edges of the bubble in a mesmerizing dance. “Cetazed has two oceans with different densities, so one lies on top of the other one,” Consul Tor explained. “This elevator platform will take us down to the surface of the Lower Ocean. A lot of our civilization exists in bubbles we maintain at the interface between the two oceans.”
Cmdr. Wilker watched the deep blue ocean pass before the windows of the shuttle filled with streaming beams of sunlights that filtered down from above. It was beautiful, but he also found it kind of bewildering. “Why?” he asked. “The surface of your world is so beautiful — so many waterfalls and crystal clear lakes. And I know that you do breathe air, even if your people are not as immediately dependent on it as I am–” He’d seen Consul Tor rely on her grass-like fur filtering the limited air out of a liquid atmosphere before, and he knew she could get by for quite a while that way. Even so, there’s generally more air above an ocean than underneath it. “–so why would your people have much of their civilization underneath an ocean?”
“Because it’s fun!” Consul Tor exclaimed, her green otter-like face brightening seemingly in response to the collie’s bewilderment. She was enjoying his confusion. Just as he’d suggested, she could feel like an expert in comparison to him and his complete unfamiliarity with the ways of her world, and that did make her feel good. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
Cmdr. Wilker was flabbergasted, but he also couldn’t stop grinning. He liked being flabbergasted. It meant interesting and surprising things were happening. It meant he was learning about other ways of life and other ways of being, and he loved all of those things. “I guess, it is,” he woofed. “So tell me, how exactly is it fun?”
Consul Tor’s expression grew mysterious. “You’ll just have to wait and see.”
Cmdr. Wilker felt his tail start wagging. This was going to be fun, and he didn’t know exactly how… and that made it even more fun!
As the elevator platform continued to descend, the light outside diminished, taking on a magical, thick quality. Then bright points of light began to appear in the deep blue. The bright points flitted about, almost like fairies would in a magical forest in a fantasy movie. Cmdr. Wilker couldn’t make out what they were, but they definitely added to the feeling that he was descending into a mysterious, magical realm.
“You’re wondering about the prismals,” Consul Tor stated.
“Are those the bright points of light?” Cmdr. Wilker asked.
The otteroid nodded.
“Then yes,” the collie agreed. “What are they?”
“Crystalline lifeforms. They’re delicious to us. In every way.”
Cmdr. Wilker hadn’t thought to worry about bringing his own food for this trip. He couldn’t subsist on sunlight though, and surely, Consul Tor knew that about him by now. He had seen her eat more normal foods though, surely? Hadn’t he? “Will… uh… will I be able to eat the prismals?” he asked uncertainly.
“Actually, yes,” Consul Tor answered. She went on to explain that while Cetazoids subsisted mostly on the energy they collected through photosynthesis and sunlight, they also enjoyed eating many of the marine creatures on their world that he’d likely find similar to shrimp, clams, fish, and other seafood, and that the research she’d done before they left suggested he could safely eat all of it. “If you do catch a prismal to eat, I’ll be very curious to hear what you think of it.”
“If I catch one?” Cmdr. Wilker asked, sensing the challenge in her words.
“They’re highly prized and difficult to catch,” Consul Tor said archly. “And etiquette says that anyone who eats one, must catch their own.”
“What about small children? Or elders who can’t move quickly anymore?” Cmdr. Wilker barked.
“Are you a small child?”
Cmdr. Wilker shook his head.
“Elderly?”
“No, clearly, but surely there’s an exception for those who simply can’t hunt very well?”
“Possibly,” Consul Tor admitted. “But if I were to give one to you, I’d essentially be announcing to the entire gathering that you’re my betrothed.”
“Ah, well, we wouldn’t want that, now would we?” Cmdr. Wilker barked cheekily. “I think your mother would be jealous.”
Before Consul Tor could respond with further quips and good natured teasing, the air bubble around their shuttle craft blorped outward, stretching and skewing the view of the ocean surrounding them as it combined with a much larger air bubble below. For a moment, Cmdr. Wilker was genuinely rattled, afraid that something had gone wrong with their protective bubble and the ocean would come rushing in to crush the Little Bo-Peep. But his fear only lasted a fraction of a second — just long enough for Consul Tor to sense it like a sudden spike on her internal seismograph measuring the collie’s feelings.
“We’re inside one of the bubbles of the city now,” Consul Tor said soothingly.
“That’s a neat trick,” Cmdr. Wilker woofed, still feeling on alert after the sudden surprise.
The view changed rapidly now as the elevator shaft descended through the city. The bubble they were inside of was oblong — long and narrow like the kind of balloon a clown might use to fold up into animals. But outside of it, Cmdr. Wilker could see many more bubbles of highly varied sizes and somewhat varied shapes. Though, seeing as they were bubbles, they were mostly all spheres or other ellipsoids. One particularly notable bubble seemed to be a long tube that circled around the rest of the other bubbles almost like a freeway, except that the Cetazoids who Cmdr. Wilker saw inside it all seemed to be resting or lounging about, not traveling quickly. So, almost like the opposite of a freeway?
Cmdr. Wilker wasn’t entirely sure he understood the city he was looking at. Though, it did seem to be a city. Many of the bubbles had open buildings inside them, kind of like gazebos or the Parthenon in Ancient Greece, and those buildings were constructed on the top of what seemed to be gigantic mushrooms, their caps so large and covered in some sort of fuzzy green moss that they served as gentle, rolling hillsides.
The stalks of the giant mushrooms rose up out of a roiling, frothing ocean beneath with water as dark and rich as wine. The lower ocean’s purple waves lapped lightly at the edges of some of the mushroom caps, splashed entirely over the tops of others, and sometimes pulled apart beneath a cap leaving a yawning space of blue water from the upper ocean in their place.
The interface between the bubblegum blue water of the upper ocean and the wine-dark purple water of the lower ocean was chaotic and wild, but the city seemed to have been carefully arranged so that the air bubbles in the blue water of the upper ocean stayed structurally sound in spite of the splashing chaos just beneath them and sometimes all around them.
The entire city glowed in the bright light of an incredibly powerful sunbeam that cut through the bubblegum blue water like the light from a window.
“Where is the light coming from?” Cmdr. Wilker asked as he stepped out of the shuttle, now that they seemed to have reached their final depth.
Consul Tor followed him out, and the shuttle closed up tightly behind them. “Mirrors,” she said, simply, as if that answered everything.
“Mirrors?” Cmdr. Wilker echoed in bewilderment.
“Yes, we have satellite mirrors in orbit, carefully controlled to aim sunbeams down at our cities under the upper ocean.”
As Cmdr. Wilker tried to absorb this information, several Cetazoids came swimming past the side of the oblong bubble, including the woman who he recognized as Allexia Tor, the Consul’s mother. Allexia emerged from the water like a goddess stepping through the veil between worlds. The strong surface tension of the water allowed her to press her way through, breaking through the bubble, and then the edge of the bubble reformed — smooth and glassy — behind her. Two more Cetazoids followed behind her.
“Oh, Little Sprout!” Allexia cried, holding her three arms wide. “Let me embrace you!”
Consul Tor caught her collie companion’s eye, and her expression was filled with long-suffering forbearance, even though they’d just arrived. Nonetheless, Eliana stepped forward and allowed her mother to wrap all three arms — two left and one right — tightly around her. The embrace didn’t last long, and as Allexia pulled away, she looked her daughter up and down, examining her closely.
“Your fur is faded, Little Sprout, are you not getting enough sun? Come! Bask with me before the ceremony!”
“But what about–” Consul Tor began to gesture at Cmdr. Wilker, but before she could actually get out any more words, Allexia brushed her concerns away.
“Oh, don’t worry about the handsome collie commander,” Allexia said with a wave of her second left paw. “My attendants will look after him, and besides, I can read plainly in his lascivious mind that he wants to explore our world and experience all the new exciting things available to him! He’ll be fine. And you’ll be better off if you worry about him less.”
Consul Tor found herself as flabbergasted and tongue-tied by her mother’s forceful nature as she always seemed to, but then, this was Allexia’s day. Consul Tor had come here to participate in celebrating her mother’s newest grafting, and if this was how her mother wanted to celebrate, then the least she could do was play along.
“Play along,” Allexia said in a mocking tone, echoing the words that had just crossed her daughter’s mind. “Don’t be so dramatic, Little Sprout. I’m just asking you to come bask with me!”
Consul Tor looked to Cmdr. Wilker again, hoping for rescue, but he nodded and grinned. As her mother had said, he’d be fine, and while Cmdr. Wilker was here to support Consul Tor, there’s only so much one can do in the face of someone like Allexia Tor, Guardian of the Verdant Groves, Holder of the Eternal Dewdrops, and Heir to the Sunlit Canopies. So, Eliana let her mother sweep her away, and Cmdr. Wilker allowed himself to be put in the capable paws of Allexia’s attendants — two more Cetazoids, one with spiky blue-green fur and the other with particularly long, soft, feathery, yellow-green fur.
* * *
While Eliana and her mother basked in the sunlight on one of the mushroom cap hills, Cmdr. Wilker caroused his way through the city, swimming from one ocean into the other and back again, feeling the density of the water change around him, chasing the local fish-like creatures and prismals, enjoying a guided tour from Allexia’s attendants of all the best sights. He found that he loved the sensation of emerging through the sides of the air bubbles that surrounded the buildings and then turning tail and pressing his way right back out into the bubble-gum blue water of the ocean. He loved pushing his way down into the thickness of the wine-dark purple water and feeling it press close all around him, and he loved even more the feeling of buoyant lightness he felt when he let the thick fluid push him back up into the bubblegum blue waters to float with his back on the bobbing, splashing purple waves.
Everything about this underwater city, right at the border between two oceans, was absolutely wonderful, and Cmdr. Wilker found himself fascinated by the way that the city depended on a sunbeam controlled by a satellite — meaning everything about the city was fundamentally profoundly high tech, impossible before the Cetazoids reached the level of a spacefaring society — but the actual fabric of life in the city seemed to be almost pastoral.
Cetazoids swam and splashed, chasing each other and the prismals through the water, basking on hillsides, and gathering on open pavilions to talk, lounge, and picnic. It was life lived in slow motion compared to charging through the stars in a spaceship, seeking out new worlds and undiscovered wonders of the universe. And yet, the city wouldn’t even exist without those same kinds of advanced technologies that allowed the starship Initiative to chew its way across space at faster than light speed.
It was as if the Cetazoids had found a way to flirt with the line between a high tech future and a low tech past in the same way as they flirted with the line between the purple ocean below and the blue ocean above. A delightful paradox. Living in a liminal space.
As the time of the grafting ceremony neared, an audience of Cetazoids began gathering on the slopes of a particularly idyllic mushroom cap hillside that had an especially ornate, columnated pavilion in the middle. Leafy vines twisted around the columns sporting butter-yellow trumpet-like flowers, and the mossy hillside was dotted with tiny white star-shaped flowers. The audience lounged on the soft moss, all turned toward the pavilion, ready for the spectacle to come.
The attendants brought Cmdr. Wilker to join the crowd, and he selected a nice empty patch of moss to stretch out on close up to the pavilion. He figured that Consul Tor would want to join him when she arrived and that, being the daughter of central figure for the upcoming ceremony, she’d want to be close to the front of the crowd. He was half right. When Consul Tor arrived, she immediately came to join him and was relieved to see him, but she wished he’d picked a less central location. She’d already had more than enough of her mother and was having trouble properly managing her emotions, knowing that everyone around her could pick them right out of her mind. She felt on display, like everyone was looking at her, even though the crowd of lounging Cetazoids around Cmdr. Wilker were all pointedly not looking at her. They could tell she didn’t want to be looked at. Somehow, that just made it worse.
“This city is a marvel!” Cmdr. Wilker barked.
Consul Tor cringed at how loud his voice sounded, especially with everyone keeping their conversations politely unvoiced. She could hear the murmurs of the surrounding crowd’s feelings encroaching all around her, and she knew that if she focused really hard, she’d be able to make out many of their specific thoughts. It would give her a headache later though. And she didn’t really want to hear the specifics of them praising her mother, gossiping about her, and puzzling over Cmdr. Wilker. She could make out the tone well enough without focusing.
Being only empathic among a society of full telepaths was a little like being nearsighted. She could read thoughts and emotions if they were close enough to her, but with any real distance, everything got kind of fuzzy. Everyone else could read all the words — metaphorically speaking — on the signs all around, but to Eliana they were just squiggles unless she squinted hard enough to make her eyes water from the strain. Again, metaphorically speaking.
Eliana tried to rise above the situation and let her feelings be her own, unbothered by everyone else around her being able to taste them. “I take it that you had a good time on your tour,” Consul Tor said to the eager collie who was laid out on the mossy slope, letting his fur and clothes dry. The bright, warm sunlight filtering through the leagues of blue ocean above meant that even though Cmdr. Wilker had been dancing in and out of two different types of water all morning, his clothes were already dry and his fur was only damp.
“I had a wonderful time,” Cmdr. Wilker agreed. He reached a white-furred paw up and began pointing out various mushroom caps in the distance and describing the various monuments he’d been taken to see.
Consul Tor found his descriptions restful. They didn’t carry any undercurrent of complicated emotional meaning. He was just telling her about his day. And he’d had a good day.
“How about you?” Cmdr. Wilker woofed, when he’d finished with his tale of visiting local sights and attractions that Consul Tor already knew all about. Though, she had enjoyed hearing about them and how they looked through a fresh set of eyes. “Did you have a good time basking with your mother?”
Consul Tor felt a wave of emotions swell up inside her in response to the collie’s question. She knew that everyone else lounging on the hillside, waiting for her mother’s grafting ceremony to begin, already knew the answer to his questions, very precisely and exactly, based solely on sensing the wave of emotions inside her. Everyone except the person who had asked the question. Everyone except the one person she actually wanted to know the answer. With him, she had to find a way to put it into words.
“Not exactly,” Consul Tor said in a carefully measured kind of way.
Cmdr. Wilker nodded solemnly, as if those words were enough. As if she had answered him, even though the answer she’d given was woefully incomplete. But it was enough. He accepted it, and he was okay with moving on. And actually, that was kind of a relief. She didn’t have to pick apart every aspect of the complex way she felt. It was alright to summarize it vaguely and move on. Consul Tor smiled. There was something so simple about being understood… less completely. She liked it.
Before they could talk further, a gentle murmuring arose from the crowd around them as Cetazoids began noticing that Allexia Tor, in all her natural glory, had stepped onto the raised pavilion between the columns decorated with flowers. She no longer wore the shiny gold sundress, bangles, or earrings. Her patchwork of green fur was completely unblemished by clothing or decoration, except for the completely natural flowers that grew from her own body. She raised her three arms high and the volume of the murmurs from the crowd rose in response as members of the audience voiced words of greeting.
Cmdr. Wilker looked around in surprise. He was used to crowds that quieted down when someone stepped onto a stage they were all watching. But with telepaths, when the person on the stage was ready for silence, the members of the audience would all pick up on the feeling, and so Cetazoid performances began with an almost ceremonial chatter from the crowd directed fondly at the person in the center of their attention.
Joining in, Cmdr. Wilker grinned and barked, “Happy grafting, Mama Tor!” Then his expression wavered, and he turned to Consul Tor to ask uncertainly, “What exactly is a grafting ceremony?”
Several of the Cetazoids in the crowd around Consul Tor and Cmdr. Wilker laughed, but they all pointedly didn’t look at the collie who was suddenly picturing horrific things that could potentially happen on the pavilion in front of them. Things that involved death or dismemberment. Possibly lots of screaming and pain. He didn’t know what grafting meant on Cetazed, but he suddenly wondered if apple trees screamed inside when their branches were cut off.
“Nothing like any of that,” Consul Tor said with a tone that was somewhere between soothing and impatient. The images in Cmdr. Wilker’s head were so vivid, even she could see them. So, the soothing tone in her voice was for the suddenly worried collie. The impatience was for the members of her own species in the crowd laughing at him. Even if he didn’t know that was why they were laughing, she did, and she didn’t appreciate it. She also didn’t appreciate the follow-on wave of Cetazoids around her thinking about how prickly she could be.
Trying to ignore the crowd, Consul Tor said, “My mother has had countless grafting ceremonies before this one. They’re not painful. Well, maybe a little. But less than the tattoos that Captain Jacques was telling me ancient Earth’s legendary humans sometimes got.”
The captain of the starship Initiative was a Sphynx cat, so he had bare skin instead of fur. Cmdr. Wilker had also heard him talk about tattoos. Sometimes, Captain Jacques seemed to actually be considering getting one on his pink skin. The design he discussed most often was a representation of the solar system, so he could carry a piece of his ancestral home everywhere with him among the stars.
Our homes — the ones where we grow up — keep a strong hold on us, all our lives, whether we want them to or not. That’s why Consul Tor had needed to return to Cetazed for her mother’s grafting ceremony. She missed her home, even while she didn’t miss it. The warmth and safety of feeling all the minds around her telepathically bumping up against hers warred with the prickly friction of feeling too crowded, too judged, too small.
It was easier to feel large — to experience the great, vast expanse of self inside her own mind — when it wasn’t constantly tossed about like a tiny boat on an overwhelming ocean. She loved the peacefulness of the comparatively quiet mental waters on the starship Initiative. But she also felt cold and alone when she was there.
Either too much or too little. Those seemed to be the options available in life.
As these musings flitted through Consul Tor’s mind, overly examined by everyone in the crowd around her, she tried to focus on watching her mother on the pavilion. She must have done a good enough job of keeping up her facade of equanimity — at least to the mind-blind collie — for Cmdr. Wilker only glanced at her occasionally, and when he did, his expression was one of shared enjoyment, delight at what they were watching, and not the kind of concern she could read from the other Cetazoids.
The other Cetazoids — including Allexia Tor, who was now dancing like a swaying reed in a tumbling breeze — all pointedly didn’t look at Eliana with their eyes or faces at all, but that didn’t stop her from feeling their minds watching her.
On the pavilion stage, Allexia’s swaying dance was accompanied by a quartet of Cetazoids — two playing woodwind instruments that looked similar to panpipes, one playing an instrument that may as well have been a harp, and another playing a configuration of bells that reminded Cmdr. Wilker of a drum set.
The four green otteroids, dressed in simple white toga-like robes, looked quite charming with their instruments, and the overall effect of the music was rather like wind chimes. Chiming, tinkly, and arhythmic but with an underlying complexity that tickled at Cmdr. Wilker’s mind, leaving him always expecting a resolution that never seemed to come. The melody wandered randomly, but became oddly catchy after a while as it circled around refrains that seemed almost to rhyme, drawing listeners in with expectations that it stolidly refused to fulfill.
When the music ended, the four musicians set their instruments aside, circled around Allexia Tor, knelt down, and bowed their heads to her. She put a paw on each of their heads in turn, and in turn, each of them got up, cleared their instrument away, and left the pavilion.
The audience grew extremely quiet watching this, and Cmdr. Wilker suspected he was seeing some kind of ceremonial action — like an actor taking a bow at the end of a performance — that made perfect sense to the crowd around him, but to him, seemed a little off-kilter and surprising. Although, the next part of the ceremony surprised him even more.
An elderly-looking otteroid with long fur that turned autumnal and dry at the tips joined Allexia Tor on the pavilion. He carried with him a large, oblong box and a very sharp knife. The blade of the knife caught the sunlight and gleamed. Silver and deadly. The autumnal otteroid placed the box on a columnated pedestal, and then he took the knife up to Allexia who lifted her right arm. The singular arm. The one without a second, extra arm beneath it.
The autumnal otteroid took the knife and with a single, sudden cut, he sliced away a patch of fur under her arm. Cmdr. Wilker gasped, even though he’d been picturing much worse things only a bit ago, he was still startled by such an abrupt piece of violence.
No one else in the crowd, however, was surprised at all. They could read Allexia’s mind and the mind of the curator. There was no need for speeches here. No long-winded explanations. In fact, no explanations at all. Even if any Cetazoids in the crowd had never been to a grafting ceremony before, none of them were in the dark about what to expect, because Allexia and her curator broadcast their intentions quite plainly to anyone who could read them.
Eliana held one of her green paws out to Cmdr. Wilker, and looking surprisingly bashful, the collie took her paw in his. He couldn’t read her mind, but he could read her intention with the motion well enough — she meant to comfort him, ground him, and remind him that he wasn’t alone here, even if he was the only one who didn’t know what was happening. He might be deaf to the telepathic voices singing to each other — like a choir constantly tuning their instruments that Eliana could never quite tune out, even if she couldn’t always make sense of it — but he wasn’t forgotten. She wouldn’t forget him.
On the pavilion, the autumnal otteroid with his shaggy orange-tipped fur opened the box and drew out another arm — bright emerald green. It looked brand new. Freshly grown from an ancestral cutting, expertly preserved in the archival orchard. The curator affixed the arm to Allexia’s side, beneath her other right arm, and bound it in place with a silken sling, which was now the only strip of clothing she wore.
No longer entirely naked, Allexia stood upon the pavilion, positively glowing, with her four arms wrapped tightly around her middle.
Then the crowd arose and approached her like the sea swirling in to fill a tidepool as a wave washes by. From Cmdr. Wilker’s perspective, this happened suddenly and without warning. Consul Tor felt the telepathic calling for the crowd to come to her mother and congratulate her, but she didn’t join in. She stayed beside her guest.
* * *
“That was remarkable!” Cmdr. Wilker barked, once there was another scattered conversation among the crowd for his words to not ring out like a thunderclap, breaking the previous silence. “Can she actually use that new arm already? How long does it take to heal? Where did it come from? Why don’t I see any other Cetazoids with additional arms? I have so many questions! But I guess, most pressingly, should I go up and congratulate her too? Everyone else seems to be…”
“We’ll go up in a minute,” Consul Tor said, continuing to lounge on the mossy hillside beside the eager collie, still holding his paw. “When the crowd clears a little. As for your questions, yes, as soon as the arm is grafted into place, it becomes part of her. Though, the grafting location will grow stronger over the next few days, so it’s better if she doesn’t put too much strain on it at first. I was a still a child when she got her third arm, and I was terrified that I’d accidentally pull it off of her. So, I wouldn’t hold that hand for months and months after the ceremony.”
Cmdr. Wilker tightened his hold on Consul Tor’s paw, returning some of the comforting reassurance she’d offered him right back to her. There was something so simple, so pure about communicating with paws in that way — just a squeeze, no words. It meant both so much less and so much more than being able to share their feelings and thoughts directly through their minds.
“All of my mother’s grafts — because she has many, not just the additional arms, but also all those patches of fur that are slightly different colors or that grow different kinds of flowers — are from an archival orchard of cuttings taken from important historical figures. My mother has had to earn each of them through devoted study and scholarship, proving herself worthy to carry pieces of them with her. Most Cetazoids never devote the time necessary to earn themselves a Grafting… even a simple patch of fur, let alone an entire limb.”
Cmdr. Wilker could hear the complicated mix of emotions in Consul Tor’s voice — the admiration for her mother mixed with a bitterness, perhaps a sense of loss. He could only guess at the reasons for what he heard, but he could hear the feelings all twisted up in her tone.
“Does your mother have other children?” Cmdr. Wilker asked. “I guess, I’m asking, are there siblings of yours rattling around here that I should meet?” The collie twisted his head about, seemingly searching the crowd for any green otteroids who looked notably more like Eliana and Allexia Tor than any of the other green otteroids covering the hillside. He couldn’t tell. They all looked like green otters to him. However, he was surprised to see a Kallendrian scrabbling up the far side of the hill with its armored legs and highly decorated shell.
“Ah, no,” Eliana said. “I think I was too much of a disappointment to her. You know, with my limited telepathy. And so she decided to focus more on scholarship than reproduction. So while she often lets her fur go to seed and become covered in those embarrassing, inappropriate blossoms–” If an otteroid could blush through their thick green fur, Eliana would have been blushing. “–my mother has never produced any other sproutlings.”
“Is that unusual?” Cmdr. Wilker asked, trying not to become too distracted by watching the Kallendrian scuttle its way through the crowd of green otters. He wondered what it was doing here. It had to be from the ship they’d scanned earlier on their way in, but Allexia Tor hadn’t seemed to know anything about it. So, the shelled visitor was unlikely to be a guest of hers. Unless it was a surprise guest? But then, he couldn’t imagine why a Kallendrian would want to surprise Allexia Tor at her Grafting Ceremony. As far as he knew, there were no direct dealings between Kallendria and Cetazoid.
Was it possible, Cmdr. Wilker wondered, that the Kallendrian was somehow here for him?
As Cmdr. Wilker’s thoughts meandered away from the conversational question he’d asked Consul Tor, she was able to watch the journey happening in his mind. Even if she couldn’t read his exact thoughts, she could feel his attention drifting to the shelled alien as easily as a dog could watch a tennis ball soar through the sky, even though he gave absolutely no outward physical signs of distraction.
Before Consul Tor could choose whether to answer the question Cmdr. Wilker had asked or the one he was thinking about, her mother’s voice rang out telepathically in both her and the collie’s mind, as clear as if she’d been standing beside them and spoken out loud: “Of course the funny shellfish is here for you, silly mammal! I haven’t managed to crack my way into its mind enough to see why yet, but that much is perfectly clear. And with a little more time, I could tell you why it’s here more clearly than it could tell you that itself.”
“Could everyone hear that?” Cmdr. Wilker asked Consul Tor, and the otteroid couldn’t give him a better answer than a shrug.
Eliana was always unsure when her mother spoke into her mind telepathically whether the words were broadcast widely or narrowly. It was one of the things she struggled with in her home society. Other otteroids could tell instantly how narrow or wide a telepathic voice was, but she simply didn’t know how. Was it in the tone of the telepathic communication, and she simply wasn’t paying enough attention? Or was there some sort of signifier that her brain simply didn’t pick up on at all? Eliana didn’t know, and it had made her feel very foolish through much of her childhood. She’d learned not to be embarrassed about it anymore, but doing so had required her heart to harden against the opinions of those around her. A journey that had taken many years.
A path through the crowd began to clear away as the otteroids around heard Allexia Tor’s focus shift to her daughter, the collie visitor, and the enigmatic alien with a shell decorated gaudily with gears and gemstones scuttling toward them. Whether the rest of the crowd had heard Allexia’s telepathic communication or not, they could easily pick up on the tightness of focus tying these figure together, and none of them wanted to stand between Allexia and the visitors from other worlds.
Allexia descended from the pavilion and began approaching the scuttling Kallendrian with its gleaming mother-of-pearl shell. Due to the angle of the Kallendrian’s approach, Allexia managed to cut it off before it reached Cmdr. Wilker or her daughter, and she made a definite point of standing in front of them, blocking the Kallendrian from reaching them.
“Welcome to my world and more specifically the reception for my sixteenth Grafting Ceremony,” Allexia said in a grandiose tone, accompanied by a flamboyant wave of her three paws that weren’t resting in the silk sling. “I can understand why you would want to crash such an exceptional and important party, but as the Guardian of the Verdant Groves, Holder of the Eternal Dewdrops, and Heir to the Sunlit Canopies, I must point out that you were most decidedly not on the guest list. Now, do you have some sort of business with my guests?” For all of her effusiveness, there was a very pointed quality to Allexia’s question and the usual overflowing warmth in her voice turned quite chilly.
* * *
One by one, almost subtly at first, the crowd of otteroids began dispersing, backing away toward the edge of the mushroom cap island they were on and then — as they reached the perimeter of the air bubble surrounding them — pushing through into the blue waters of the Upper Ocean and swimming away as fast as they could. Watching this happen, Cmdr. Wilker began to feel quite alarmed about what they all might be reading in the Kallendrian’s mind.
“I am here for the Tri-Galactic vermin known as Commander Bill Wilker,” the Kallendrian snarled with its wriggling, cilia-like mouth tentacles. “No one else needs to come to harm if you stay out of my way.” The Kallendrian raised its foremost jointed legs that ended in jagged claws and clacked them menacingly. Though, the real threat came from a device held in one of its lesser claws which was covered in wires and blinking lights. As soon as Cmdr. Wilker saw it, he recognized the device as a bomb, even without the advantage of being able to read the Kallendrian’s mind. From the looks of it, the bomb would take out the entire hillside if it went off.
“If you set that bomb off,” Cmdr. Wilker said coolly, keeping an even keel in the face of this new threat, “then you’ll die as well. Even if you have a ship ready to beam you out, I guarantee I’ll get that device disarmed if you give me even the barest sliver of time alone with it.”
“I have no intention of leaving here alive,” the Kallendrian snarled. “You and your ideological deviance present such a profound threat to my society that I will happily die to protect my world from your effects upon it.”
Cmdr. Wilker was taken aback by the Kallendrian’s words. As far as he knew, he’d done very little to affect Kallendrian society. He’d helped rescue a lost ship which had turned out to be less ‘lost’ than hiding, and he’d wanted to help the Kallendrian he’d worked most closely with — an individual named Sydo — escape to the same place as the supposedly ‘lost’ ship had been running to… But he hadn’t. It would have involved interfering in their society, and Tri-Galactic Union officers weren’t supposed to do that. He’d been a good officer and kept his muzzle shut.
By this time, the only Cetazoids left on the hillside with Cmdr. Wilker and the crazed Kallendrian were Consul Tor and her mother. The two green otteroid’s looked at each other, and their minds mingled in a complicated dance, sharing knowledge and formulating interpretations of what they could read about the situation like trying to build a sand castle together as the waves kept rolling over it.
Allexia Tor had the stronger telepathy, but Eliana Tor had attended a party with Cmdr. Wilker on Kallendria. So she had a slight edge on cracking through the differently shaped folds of the alien decorator crab’s mind and immediately recognized the figure who this Kallendrian was focused on — this crazed suicide bomber, named Craxtel, had been in love with Sydo, who she had met at the party. And apparently, after she and Cmdr. Wilker had left their world, Sydo had defected to the colony of the Unshelled, just like the collie had hoped he would, consequently breaking Craxtel’s heart.
As soon as Consul Tor made sense of the roiling mix of love and hate all twisted up like a tangled braid in Craxtel’s heart, her mother was able to read it as well, aided by her daughter’s understanding. It peeved Eliana that she could never understand anything better than her mother did, because her own understandings would always be scooped up by Allexia’s telepathy and become smaller, subset parts of her own. Eliana always felt small and unimportant when her mother was around, and ironically, she always felt misunderstood, because the moment her mother understood her, she would change in rebellion, unable to settle on a single way of being whilst constantly being observed.
But those were petty thoughts for another day when they weren’t standing on a hillside with a mad decorator crab threatening to murder Cmdr. Wilker and anyone else who wouldn’t step aside.
Eliana had no intention of stepping aside, and she resented her mother’s telepathic tugging, trying to persuade her to run from the hillside and swim away to safety.
Consul Tor trusted Cmdr. Wilker completely, and she wanted her mother to use the strength of her telepathy to silently communicate everything they had learned to him. If he knew why Craxtel was here, then he would find a way to manipulate the crazed crab into relenting. She was sure of it.
Allexia didn’t understand how her daughter could wholly trust someone who was essentially senseless when it came to the meeting of minds. And Eliana didn’t understand how her mother could be so judgmental of a different species for communicating differently — in fact, communicating in a way that was arguably more comfortable for Eliana.
Even when two minds can wash over each other like oceans mingling, they can still fail to resolve into a single point of view.
With a deep, long-suffering sigh, Allexia Tor said, “Well, I can see I’m going to have to handle this situation myself. First off–” The four-armed green otter turned toward her two-armed daughter. “–what do you want me to say, Little Sprout? Poor Seedling, it must be so hard for you, not having as strong a sense of telepathy as the rest of us!”
Those actually were words that Eliana desperately wanted to hear, but the way her mother said them, twisted with mockery, felt more like a slap in the face than the gentle comfort she so longed to receive. And what made it worse was: surely, Allexia knew that Eliana longed for exactly that sort of gentle comfort, and instead of offering it sincerely, her mother mocked her for it.
“Toughen up, Little Sprout,” Allexia continued, hearing everything about her daughter’s internal reactions instantly as they happened. “I’ve had to handle plenty of disappointments in my life. Surely, you can manage to grow in the soil life has rooted you in.”
Consul Tor drew in a breath sharply, trying to harden her skin fast enough to stop the pain of her mother’s callousness to sink in, instead trying to make it glance off of her as if she were made of stone. There were more important things to deal with right now.
“There you go,” Allexia said brightly, disgustingly pleased with her daughter’s abrupt emotional hardening, as if Eliana’s flower-like heart had tightened into an unopened bud. “I knew you could rise to the sunlight if you needed to, Little Sprout.”
Eliana burned with fury, but she pushed it down deep inside her tightened heart. All she said was, “This isn’t the time, Mother.”
“No, indeed,” Allexia agreed. “This isn’t the time for any of this nonsense — there should be dancing and revelry happening right now! But instead, here we are.”
All of Craxtel’s eyes blinked at the ends of their stalks, and for a moment, the decorator crab shared a look of bewilderment with the collie it had come here to kill. Neither of them could quite believe how lightly Allexia Tor was taking the entire situation.
“Oh, I’m not taking this situation lightly all, my dear bejeweled one,” Allexia said to Craxtel, directly addressing what the decorator crab had been thinking. “Believe me, I fully intend to have words with your world’s leaders about how they manage their people and why they’re letting a broken-hearted fascist like yourself gallivant around and indelicately interrupt important ceremonies for your little grudge match with my daughter’s guest. And really! Coming here because you don’t like your beloved Sydo going around naked? I can’t think of anything more silly. Those shells look terribly heavy and awkward, and they don’t protect you nearly as much as you think they do. I can see right through that shell, straight into the shriveled little heart beating inside. You think you love Sydo? Love isn’t about control.”
Craxtel found itself speechless — the wispy alien plant knew the name of its beloved? Knew about the secret love it had harbored, nursed, and hidden deep inside? She was a weed! A poisonous weed!
“Of course I know about Sydo and the feeling you insist on calling ‘love,’ even though it’s clearly not love,” Allexia pronounced tiredly. “For all that you cling so desperately to the importance of your shell, decorating it with those hideous, gaudy baubles–” She waved a paw dismissively at Craxtel’s gleaming mother-of-pearl shell with all its rainbow-colored gemstones and ornate metalwork encrusting it. “–it might as well have the words insecure control-freak who’d rather lock everyone into boxes than ever risk sharing a single genuine emotion written all over it. Maybe that works among your people, but it’s not going to fly when you get out into the broader universe and start dealing with other, more enlightened cultures like this one.”
Craxtel’s heart — shriveled or otherwise — clenched and quaked at the idea of Allexia and other poisonous weeds like her spreading to Kallendria and indecently tearing down the walls of civilized society. Her telepathy was a cancer that could corrode everything beautiful, everything worth caring about. Craxtel couldn’t let that happen…
“Ah, but see, my quaking fool of a shellfish,” Allexia said superciliously, “if you set off a bomb on my planet, then my people will want to know what happened. There will be an entire investigation. A whole fleet of Cetazoids descending on Kallendria, staring right through all those ridiculous shells you wear…”
As she kept babbling away at the decorator crab, twisting the knife of her words as excruciatingly as she could manage, Allexia’s voice also appeared telepathically in Cmdr. Wilker’s mind, tauntingly saying, “What are you waiting for, dear mammal? If you’re worth half what my daughter thinks of you, you’ll take this opportunity I’m giving you before it’s too late.”
As an uplifted collie dog, Cmdr. Wilker stood a good head and shoulders taller than Consul Tor, her mother, and most of the other Cetazoids he’d seen. However, he wasn’t armed, and he was about the same size as a Kallendrian without its shell. And with the shell… Well, Craxtel was literally wearing a suit of armor. Inside the shell, Craxtel might look like a soft, squishy sheep-like sea bunny, but wearing a shell, they had a thick, hard carapace and serrated vice-like claws. Cmdr. Wilker didn’t want to fight a shelled Kallendrian, even if there weren’t an armed bomb and seemingly a death wish involved.
All that said, Cmdr. Wilker had limited options, and he did have combat training. He both had the standard Tri-Galactic Union academy training, and he’d lately been practicing Ursine martial arts with Grawf, the Initiative’s bear-like exchange officer. And on top of that, the collie simply had to trust that Allexia Tor — with her arcane mind-reading abilities — could sense that he truly did have an opening here, that Craxtel truly was too distracted by her taunting to properly fight off an attack.
It was either leap or wait for the ground he was standing on to crumble. So Cmdr. Wilker leapt.
As the collie soared through the air toward the giant decorator crab, Allexia Tor filled Craxtel’s mind with overwhelming images of Kallendria becoming flooded with curious Cetazoid tourists. The images didn’t make a whole lot of sense — why would a Cetazoid want to waste their time slumming around Kallendria? But Craxtel believed their own world to be so beautiful, so superior to anything else in the universe, that they completely fell for it and became consumed by horror at how the tourist would wander around, seeing right through everyone’s shells, as if everyone were naked right down to their hearts all the time, and the uncouth otter-shaped weeds would laugh and mock them, sharing their deepest secrets — which ought to be hidden pearls! only to be pried out of their shell by the most profound, intimate connections — as if they were nothing more than common gossip, worthless gravel.
It was an image so perfectly designed to prey on Craxtel’s fears that the crab utterly failed to raise a claw against Cmdr. Wilker when the collie slammed into them, grabbed at the bomb, and wrestled it free of their control.
Cmdr. Wilker quickly defused the bomb — in addition to martial arts, he’d also had a great deal of training in recognizing and handling bombs in the academy. It was a recommend course for all students hoping to one day become high ranking officers on prestigious exploration vessels. You never know what you’ll run into on alien worlds in the depths of space, and it’s important to be prepared.
Once the bomb was defused, Cmdr. Wilker tossed it to Consul Tor, and the otteroid stepped deftly away from the brawl in front of her. With Craxtel disarmed and consumed by nightmare visions, Cmdr. Wilker made quick work of twisting their two most dangerous arms — the ones that ended in viselike claws — around into a position that essentially immobilized the mad crab.
* * *
Cmdr. Wilker restrained the quaking, quivering decorator crab until the Cetazoid authorities arrived and were able to properly detain the terrorist with bands that held its dangerous claws tightly shut and a neural suppressor chip that was mostly unnecessary on a criminal without any telepathic abilities. However, the neural suppressor — affixed to the soft skin between several of Craxtel’s eyestalks — had the side effect of protecting the Kallendrian from further torment by Allexia Tor who seemed to have a bit of a cruel streak in her. Although, given Craxtel’s murderous plans, Cmdr. Wilker couldn’t exactly blame her for taking a little bit of revenge.
According to her own thoughts — which she inserted right into Cmdr. Wilker’s mind — she saw the continuing visions that she’d been tormenting Craxtel with as less of a revenge and more of a lesson. She wanted the decorator crab and any of its ilk to know better than to mess with Cetazed again, no matter how peaceful it seemed.
To Craxtel’s great relief, it was decided that while the Cetazed authorities would hold the Kallendrian for now, Cmdr. Wilker and Consul Tor would take the prisoner with them when they went and deliver it into the paws of the Tri-Galactic Union.
Cetazed wanted nothing to do with managing the punishment of a Kallendrian criminal.
Once the excitement of the attempted terrorist attack had all been handled, Allexia’s guests began returning to the hillside, and the original party continued as had been planned. There was dancing, feasting, and much celebration. Cetazoids praised Cmdr. Wilker for his bravery, and Consul Tor refrained from telling him how much of their praise was motivated more by the desire to rile him up and make him overflow with amusing feelings for them to sip at like emotional vampires than by actual admiration or anything like respect. He was a pet to them, a mere plaything.
And yet, every droplet of enjoyment that Consul Tor managed to squeeze out of the rest of their trip came from doing much the same: experiencing her homeworld vicariously through the collie’s eyes. Was she any better than the rest of them?
The flight back to the Initiative was quieter than the flight to Cetazed had been. Instead of hours-long heart-to-heart conversations, Cmdr. Wilker and Consul Tor mostly shared a companionable silence, only minorly impinged upon by the prisoner Craxtel’s intermittent pleading that the Tri-Galactic Union protect Kallendria from the dangers of Cetazed.
Part of Consul Tor longed to discuss and deconstruct everything that had happened on Cetazed with Cmdr. Wilker, but another part of her reveled in the fact that… she didn’t have to. If she didn’t want to discuss her feelings in front of a Kallendrian prisoner, she could wait until the decorator crab was offloaded to the Initiative’s brig. If she didn’t want to discuss her feelings with Cmdr. Wilker ever… she could simply choose not to.
There was something profoundly freeing about having the right and the ability to keep her feelings to herself, and oddly, Consul Tor found herself sympathizing with the mad decorator crab, driven to extremes by a desire to stay hidden inside a protective shell, which then caused her feelings to loop back around — checking themselves — because it’s never a good sign when you find yourself sympathizing with a terrorist.
In the end, Consul Tor let her feelings chase themselves around in circles like a puppy chasing its tail, never quite getting anywhere, but still enjoying the process, all the way back from Cetazed to the Initiative. She knew that’s Cmdr. Wilker’s feelings were much simpler: he was happy. He’d enjoyed the trip. He enjoyed the companionable silence they shared. And while he was worried about what would become of Craxtel, he had absolute faith that the decorator crab would face some form of justice, and since it wasn’t his responsibility to choose exactly what form that justice would take, he was able to let go and not worry about it.
The collie’s mind was like a tide pool, isolated away from the ocean. Capable of stillness because of its isolation. And now that Consul Tor was away from her own people and their telepathy that washed over each other, swelling together into great waves, constantly disturbing every individual tide pool with their back and forth swaying… she became capable of stillness as well.
* * *
There were a lot of bureaucratic loose ends to tie up when Cmdr. Wilker and Consul Tor got back to the Initiative. Each of them had to give reports to the captain about what had happened and file those reports in the starship’s formal logs. In the end, Craxtel was handed right back to Kallendria, along with strong rebukes from the Tri-Galactic Union and insistence that the crab’s acts of terrorism be properly punished. Kallendria responded with appropriate seriousness.
Once the entire issue was resolved, Cmdr. Wilker found himself back in the Constellation Club, reveling in the attention he got from telling stories about Cetazed and his brave exploits there over drinks with his fellow officers. In spite of Craxtel’s intrusion, he’d truly had a marvelous time accompanying Consul Tor to her mother’s Grafting Ceremony, learning about her world, and getting to know her better. For even if he couldn’t read her mind, he could read her body language, her tone, and simply extrapolate from the few words she did choose to say. She wasn’t the most talkative of his fellow officers, but he didn’t think that was because she didn’t have anything to say. He’d started to think that it was more because she wasn’t use to having anyone really listen to her.
So, when Consul Tor walked into the long room with its tall windows all along one side, looking out at the great expanse of space around them, he waved her over to join him and the other officers who’d gathered around to hear his tales.
Consul Tor sat down primly at the table where they were gathered, and Cmdr. Wilker immediately said, “I’ve been telling our friends about your mother’s Grafting Ceremony, but I know you could tell the story so much better. Would you?”
“Yes,” an orange tabby wearing techno-focal goggles meowed. “Please, tell us. How did it feel to go home again after being here?”
Consul Tor sat for a moment with the question, letting herself bask in the sensation of holding her feelings close to herself, secret and unknown by those around her. Something desired. Something that only she could give. She smiled, a coy, enigmatic expression and said, “It felt like being forced back into a pot that my roots have grown too large to fit inside.”
Consul Tor felt her words sink into the minds of all the cats and dogs listening to her like a gentle rain on thirsty soil. She enjoyed their fascination and anticipation, waiting eagerly for her next words. She found, she didn’t want to disappoint them. She wanted to share her feelings, as long as she could do it at her own pace, in her own way. “I think,” she said, waving a paw at the glittering expanse beyond the wide windows. “I belong among the stars now.”
Cmdr. Wilker grinned with that wide, beaming smile of his that could light up a room… or even the inside of a photosynthetic otter’s heart. “You know,” he said, “I never did get to taste a prismal. Tell me, what do they taste like?”
“Distant, mysterious starlight,” Consul Tor said, clearly delighting in the expressions of wonder she elicited from the cats and dogs around her. None of them knew what starlight tasted like against their fur.
Not too far away, at the bar, Galen overheard Consul Tor’s words with her tall, rabbity ears and said, “Cetazoid prismals? I can synthesize a cocktail that mimics their flavor quite closely. Although, obviously, not quite as rich and complicated as the real thing. Would you all like a round for the table?”
Cmdr. Wilker’s fluffy tail started wagging behind him, and after catching Consul Tor’s eye to make sure it would be okay, he barked to Galen, “Yes, please!” Turning back to the circle of officers at the table — and especially Consul Tor — he woofed, “Let’s all taste some starlight and hear about what it was like to have that delightfully overbearing mother of yours inside your mind once again. If you don’t mind? I know I found it overwhelming, but I can’t even imagine what it was like for you with all your history together.”
Consul Tor laughed as she felt the differing images of her mother that Cmdr. Wilker’s words conjured in all their fellow officers’ minds. None of the images were quite right, but all of them captured some piece of the truth. And it was okay that none of them were quite perfect. They didn’t need to be. These cats and dogs didn’t know her mother.
“My mother can be quite a lot,” the green otteroid admitted, finding she was very much enjoying being able to control exactly how much she wanted to share about her feelings. And how much to leave unsaid. Maybe she’d been more reserved when socializing on the Initiative than she needed to be, perhaps scarred by the oversharing enforced by widespread telepathy that she’d experienced throughout her life on Cetazed.
Cmdr. Wilker didn’t need to be able to see directly inside Consul Tor’s heart to know he’d somehow helped her to feel more at ease aboard the Initiative and to see that the two of them had grown much closer together than they’d been before. She could be such a private person sometimes, but now, she began spilling words from her heart like dandelion seeds scattering on a sudden summer wind. Cmdr. Wilker had every intention of valuing those seeds properly and giving them somewhere to land, somewhere to grow. So he leaned back and listened to her version of the story.
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