Beholder's Eye (2 page)

The other two, Skalet and Lesy, stopped chanting my name, abruptly in web-form. They looked revoltingly cheerful.
As if none of the others had ever made mistakes,
I thought to myself, making sure the memory remained private.

The wind was damp and stank of sulfur. The Web met where Ersh decided; today’s decision did not bode well for me. I avoided the cliff edge, knowing from experience that its jagged plunge made me queasy. There wasn’t a scrap of vegetation in sight, not that Picco’s Moon was overly life-endowed; what there was huddled in the immense cracklike valleys girdling the equator. The rising bulge of Picco itself on the horizon was its usual eye-straining orange and purple. When fully exposed, the giant gas planet’s lurid reflection did truly nauseating things to the local landscape. The distant white sun gave up the struggle to produce color except during the occasional eclipse.

But the place was old with tradition. The footsteps, or whatever, of the Web had worn the path up to this rocky pinnacle smooth during the last millennia. It was remembered by all of us as “the peak where truth is shared.” There were other, nastier connotations, but I refused to remember them.

A soft thump and shuffle. Then a wheezing sound. The sequence repeated, growing louder. Louder to me, anyway, since I was the only one currently with ears. I watched the edge where the worn stone stairs led to the top.

First the knobby end of a stick appeared, thump, then the wispy gray-haired head of the very, very old Human female using it as a cane. Her breath wheezed in, fluttered as if stuck, then wheezed out again. Her feet shuffled along the rock as if reluctant to part from it.

There were reassuring gasps, twitters, and color changes around me.
Ersh, in Human form?
She hadn’t used it in at least three hundred years—certainly never in front of me. When I was very young, I used to wonder why. When Ersh judged me old enough to share her memory of Humans, I knew.

Ersh’s years didn’t translate well as a Human. Her steps were as labored as her breathing. She was naked despite the wind, her skin hanging like tatters of cloth on her bones as she made her slow way to the sixth and last place in the Web.

Her bright black eyes found and impaled me. I felt my ears go flat against my head and my tail slip between my legs; I panted as my body temperature soared, an instinctive dump of energy as I fought the urge to cycle. To lose form because of an emotional response would not impress Ersh.

Those eyes were anything but feeble, despite her form. And the other message about Ersh and the Human species was plain before us all, aimed at me, no doubt. Form-memory was unforgiving. Her thin right arm ended halfway above the elbow in a smooth blunt tip—a reminder that as a Human Ersh had sacrificed her flesh rather than cycle before aliens.

No, this wasn’t going well.
I straightened up. “I’m ready to share, Senior Assimilator,” I said as steadily as I could. I released my hold on the molecules of my body with relief, cycling back into my web-form, feeling echoing releases of energy warm the air as Ansky and Mixs did the same. I concentrated on maintaining my outline in the proper flawless teardrop.

No touch, no hearing, no sight, no sense of smell. Yet in my web-form I was exquisitely sensitive to other, rarer things: the complexities of chemical structure, the dizzying spin of stars and atoms, the pervading harmony of electromagnetism. The gravity of the planet was like a deep throbbing heart above me, the moon’s a soft counterpoint.

The wonder of it all usually took me a moment to grasp. Today, I almost ignored the change, busy interpreting information about my Web. Skalet and Lesy were struggling to keep their shape integrity, losing it once or twice. Typical—they were easily rattled by Ersh. Then Ersh herself, next to invisible to me as a Human, became clear in all the perfection of her web-form.

I tasted her message in the wind.
Share.

This was it. I shunted my private memories deeper within. There was no point taking chances with Ersh in this mood. Then I spread, elongating myself from teardrop to five reaching arms, offering one to each of the other web-forms, keeping central only the minimum mass I needed to maintain personal survival. I sensed their mouths form and open wide, tooth ridges sharp and uneven. They closed in and began to feed.

For an instant, I wondered what beings of other species would think if they could see us now, like this. Could those outside the Web possibly understand? We had no equivalents for words like agony or pleasure. In sharing, the giving of mass has more to do with endurance than pain, and certainly is more like duty than ecstasy. Even for us, being consumed is a fundamental threat to life, and the instinct to cycle and survive has to be fought. How could I explain that winning that battle, to offer life in trust, brings a wonderful joy, an intensity of belonging and acceptance? Without this understanding, all that would be seen was the horror of their feasting.

Why had I thought horror?
The urge to flee suddenly threatened to overwhelm me. I kept myself whole by remembering the joy and belonging from other times, holding it like a shield against each hungry bite, each slice of tooth through my flesh.

I’d never had so much to share. Their feeding seemed to go on for hours. So, by the end, there was very little of me left. For a time, I sensed extinction and wavered, wondering if this was Ersh’s judgment.

Then the command came.
Feed.
I found the strength to form a mouth of my own somehow, but not to move.
Feed.
Substance in my mouth. I bit down and ripped a piece free, chewed. Ersh-taste. Ersh-memory. I felt myself grow, enlarged my mouth, ate faster. Ansky-taste, now Skalet. One after another, my kin gave me their mass in exchange for mine, the transfer precise and totally satisfying.

 

At some point, they left me. I huddled, alone on the rock, to assimilate what I had been given. It takes a while to weave the threads of five other memories, to take living pieces of five other lives and work them into your own. I struggled to detach information from personality, to hold what was Esen intact and free of the influence of those others, respectfully shedding what I dared not keep as moisture to the air, each evaporating droplet a spark of cold on my surface. Ersh, as Senior Assimilator, had always fed from them first, then given all to me presorted. I supposed, having got myself into so much trouble, Ersh felt I’d grown beyond such pampering.

I wasn’t in a hurry anyway. I knew what the others were assimilating in turn. My memories of Kraos. And my adventures with the Humans.

KRAOS. My first mission. I had been so proud, so sure of myself. Too sure, as things turned out.

Ersh’s warnings, which I in my wisdom ignored, were all variations on the same theme: “It’s different on your own, Youngest.”
Different? Of course it would be,
I’d said to myself. I’d at last be free of their advice, their decisions, and, most importantly, their belief that as youngest, I was least.

Or did Ersh think I was a fool?
I knew how essential it would be to maintain shape on Kraos—to think and be what I appeared. Or did she (and the others) simply expect me to fail? Well, I was confident enough for all the Web. Especially when I learned the camouflage best suited to my mission was the canidlike Lanivarian, my birth shape. It would be no real test of my skill to cycle and hold shape, if that was all I had to be. I suspected Ersh had chosen my assignment in order to give me that advantage—implying I’d need all the help I could get.

Unfortunately, Ersh was right.
I hated that.

My rude awakening had come the instant the clouds overhead consumed the shuttle, leaving me alone on the Kraosian mountaintop. I’d panicked, releasing my shape integrity so quickly it was a wonder Skalet didn’t pick up the heat signature from orbit. I’d quivered and oozed in web-form, tasting the alien wind as it tried to coat me with dust.

My next coherent act was to lodge myself out of sight. Exposing web-form to alien eyes was forbidden. This wasn’t difficult, given Skalet’s choice of my drop-off site. There was a small, hard-to-find cave nearby for me to hide in, though Skalet had expected me to use it to hold any artifacts I decided to collect.

In the cave’s womblike darkness, I argued, pleaded, begged, and threatened myself—to no avail. Every few hours, I would gather my nerve, sacrifice mass into the needed energy, summon form-memory, and cycle into Lanivarian form. I’d set my paws on the path out of the cave, ready to take the road down to the city where the subjects of my work waited.

And I’d revert to web-form in a blaze of exothermic energy. The cave was soon black with soot.

I had nightmares about a curious Kraosian peering in at me. Forget the potential for disaster inherent in my virtually exploding at the beginning of any conversation; I had to worry about the result if the poor creature survived and witnessed my resulting cycle into web-form. Kraos was an untouched world, without even literature to hint at the possibility of extrakraosian life. I could start some.

But Skalet wouldn’t be back for another ten planet years. How long could I stay locked up by my own stage fright?

My Lanivarian form began to fray at the thought; I cycled back to web-form just in time to stave off another cataclysm.

I recalled Ersh’s advice when I had left her. If I couldn’t sustain my form, she’d said—the mere suggestion of which I’d found offensive at the time—go back to basics and retrain myself. Really going back wasn’t an option for the next ten solar orbits. I settled in my cave to relearn from my own memories.

The teardrop web-form is the original, root-shape of my kind. Changing shape—cycling—to match our molecular structure to that of our surroundings is an instinctive response to danger. Fortunately, this instinct is so far back in the Web’s past that it happens only rarely. As Youngest, I could testify that it is very humiliating to have one’s edges trying to match a curtain or floor under stress.

Harnessing this instinct to cycle from one form to another involves learning fine control. Acquiring this control, I’d found, has less to do with being taught than it has to do with being tormented by one’s peers. It is like humanoid children who taunt one another to see who can hold their breath longest.

I, of course, am not and have never been a child. I may be Recent, but then, that’s our way.

I had a mother. Sort of. When Ansky answered the howls of masculine nature on Lanivar, some five standard centuries ago, she was simply indulging her risky predilection for romance. Fortunately for the inhabitable planets of this galaxy, genetic combinations that result in offspring of Web stock occur perhaps once a millennium—if that. The rest of Ansky’s follies lived out normal ephemeral lives as perfectly normal specimens of their father’s species.

Ansky herself had the dubious pleasure of innumerable flings, far too many of which ended in a pregnancy which locked her in a steadily enlarging and uncomfortable form for its duration. Not a pretty picture. Still, Ansky enjoyed this vicarious lifestyle enough to succumb on a fairly regular schedule, with one such occasion leading to my arrival. Her surprise for Ersh. But that’s another tale.

Oh, yes. Breath holding. Well, imagine you have accepted the challenge and drawn in the biggest breath you can possibly hold. This is like the moment when a fragment of web-mass is converted to energy and spread throughout the web-form, deforming and altering molecular structure to match memory.

At first, the urge to laugh it all out immediately seems irresistible. But you hold on, feeling like you’ll burst well before your rival.

Then, as you begin to feel in control, your confidence rises. Nothing to it. You wink at your friends, pleased by the growing respect on their faces.

Seconds drag past, slowing as they go. You hold on. Your ears feel pressure. Nothing painful, but you have to consciously control the urge to breath out, to empty your heavy lungs, and fill them again. Your throat feels swollen, as if the air trying to escape has somehow concentrated itself there, at the gateway. This is how it feels when web-form struggles to release energy, to allow bent, twisted molecules to return to normal.

Still you hold. But it’s hard.

The difficulty passes. After a while, you wonder if you’ve forgotten how to breathe. Your thick head seems to have lightened. Things appear clear to your eyes, yet farther away. You could do this forever. Success is at hand.

Your friends are shaking you. You can’t hear their voices over your heart’s rhythm, an ocean in your ears. You realize that you are dying, killing yourself, yet the willpower to survive seems lost.

Somehow, a whimper of air slips through your nostrils. It signals the explosion as your abused lungs throw out the stale dead air. You can hardly finish breathing out before every muscle of your body strains to suck in life, fresh air pouring down your throat like a cool drink in summer. Web-form reestablishes itself, radiating energy in wavelengths perceived as relief.

Another, calmer breath, and you grin at your anxious friends. “No problem.”

Converting web-mass to energy is a pointless sacrifice unless harnessed to form-memory and used. Cycling is the easy part. Maintaining a different shape confines energy, like the air held in lungs. The pain of it is primal, but then so is the fear of failure. I grew up on stories of Recents exploding rather than losing form before granted leave to cycle.

Although totally accurate memory is my kind’s pride and curse, I had my doubts about exploding Recents. I’d never caused anything more traumatic to my surroundings than the odd thermal crater. The trick was to know your limits and push beyond them each time. My first shape change lasted mere seconds, just long enough to experience triumph. Relaxing back to web-form, I felt the loss of mass as an imbalance, a not-unpleasant hunger that proved what I was.