by Mary E. Lowd
An excerpt from Voyage of the Wanderlust. If you’d prefer, you can start with Chapter 1, return to the previous chapter, or skip ahead.
Lys could hear the commotion around her. She heard the captain — the gruff cat with green eyes who she’d waited to meet for many years — get called away to consult on something in the engine room. She heard the kind squirrel man chittering to her about trees, branches, and roots. Something spiritual, something comforting. She could hear the sound and meaning, but the actual words had become muffled as her body tried to withdraw deeper inside itself, shedding the outer skin that was supposed to still be her, still be her for many more years. She could feel the filaments of the mushroom creature’s hands extending out, infiltrating the space under her skin, between the old self that was trying to die and the new self — crystalline and unfinished — getting ready to begin.
She could also hear Korvax, squeaking and moaning, lamenting and bemoaning, as if this were happening to him and not her. But she also felt his paws moving up and down her body, the same gentle paws that had cared for her so many times before, touching her suddenly forming wrinkles, trying to smooth them away, trying to hold her together while her own body tried to tear her apart.
Korvax might sound like he was making her sudden affliction all about himself to the others, but Lys knew better. She knew he was there for her, as he’d always been and always would be. His feelings might be loud, but that was only because they were big. He loved with a heart too large to fit inside his small, quilled body.
Right now, Lys felt too large to fit inside her own body. She felt herself expanding, stretching, falling through layers of other dimensions. And then, beneath it all — or maybe above, maybe laced in and out, through and through — she heard a voice.
“Where do you want to go, little one?”
Lys didn’t know what the voice could mean. What could it possibly mean?
“Open your eyes, little one,” the voice said, filling her entire existence with its words. “Not your old eyes, and not your new ones. Those aren’t ready yet. Your other eyes. You know the ones. You can find them.”
Lys’s old eyes were wrinkling and puckering, and they weren’t something she opened or closed anyway. They were patches of photo-sensitive skin, always on, always looking. Her new eyes would be multi-faceted gemstones. Again, always open, always seeing in every direction, all around.
There. There, she found them. The other eyes, the ones that needed to open. They weren’t really eyes, not in a physical sense. They were something quantum and hyperspatial, something neural and transcendent. A sense, more than an organ. And when she opened them, she saw so many paths, so many possible paths, branching and intertwining. They made her think of the branches and roots that the kind, gentle squirrel man kept chittering about.
Lys focused her inner eyes on a single thread and her understanding of it blossomed. She saw spaceships fighting, the Waykeeper being injured and limping away through space, leaving a trail of blood that the Zakonraptors would follow. It was a horrible future, and the longer she let her mind follow the thread, the more horrible it became. The Zakonraptors would invade the Waykeeper’s forests; they would drill through the Waykeeper’s shell, injuring the giant, gentle beast. The Ollallans would suffer, subjugated by the harsh lizard aliens, and none of the crew of The Wanderlust would ever get home.
Lys pulled her mind away from that thread and all the other similar threads tangled and twisted up with it. She didn’t want to move that way through time and space. She picked through the other threads, looking for a better cluster, threads that led to better possible futures.
“You can’t deliberate forever, little one, you must pick.”
The voice was so large; it washed over her, crashing like a wave, trying to sweep her up with an undercurrent and tangle her inextricably with one of the cords leading to the future forever. But Lys’s heart wasn’t ready. She knew she could find a better option.
As the caterpillar lay on the floor, prone and quivering, her skin still dry and cracking, the mushroom officer continued to tend to her, their mycelial threads insinuating between shriveling skin and the organs underneath, holding her together, mending her caterpillar parts and keeping them from disintegrating entirely. The mushroom’s ministrations kept Lys from fully entering metamorphosis, fending off her chrysalis state, and allowing her to stay in the strange in-between place where her mind could pick through the threads of possible futures, not yet committing to live in one, instead existing in a quantum fluctuation between them all.
As Ensign Mike tended to her, Commander Chestnut chittered prayers about branching trees to her, and Korvax cradled her head, gently stroking the side of her face with one paw and clutching her uppermost right hand with his other paw. The three of them kept her body safe as her mind explored the latent space that had opened up to her. She followed the threads and tangles, trying to untangle them, until she found the crisis point where so many of the threads diverged.
It was right here.
On this very ship.
Only moments from now.
The feline captain with the flowing fur and green eyes that Lys had been waiting for was in The Wanderlust’s engine room right now, talking to a canine officer. There were millions of subtly different ways their conversation could go. The cat could be short-tempered and dismissive. The canine could be stubborn and snappish. There were countless ways for them to argue, for them to let their petty differences get in the way of working together.
But there was a path — Lys could see it — where the canine listened to the cat with green eyes, really listened to her, and the cat believed in the canine, encouraging her, pushing her to think harder, become more creative, and happen upon a discovery that would change everything. The whole future. Lys could alter the course of everyone’s lives, just by picking the thread where the cat was patient, and the canine listened.
Lys selected that thread. She focused on it with her entire being, shoving all the other threads aside, and the Waykeeper’s gigantic voice rolled over her like a wave that has already finished crashing and now just stretches peacefully along the shore, playing over the sand, pushing its foamy edge as high as it can up the beach: “You will be lost to me, little one. The next time you enter this state, I will be too far away to help you. Be well my child. Our paths will not cross again.”
Continue on to Chapter 27…