Pete Manison: The Shadow Captain

Gregor sighs. Such is the fate of a Captain. Always to discover the new and the alien, never to be given time to learn what strange truths pulse beneath the glistening exteriors of the lifeforms and the artifacts that pass so fleetingly through his hands.

At the ceremony, he meets a Hur’klee named Tur’taya. This is a male, Gregor observes, and somewhat larger than the norm. Tur’taya has been a dark presence lurking in the background through much of Gregor’s visit. Others of the Hur’klee avoid him. They seem to fear him, and whenever he draws near, their minds close up and Gregor’s translator goes offline.

Now a large school of them has encircled Gregor and Tur’taya. Tur’taya extends his tentacles out in every direction until he’s like a starburst filling the ocean , and even through the probe’s windows it is a sight that makes Gregor think of hot gasses rushing into some primordial sun that’s about to ignite. He holds the probe steady, drifting with Tur’taya. It’s only when he feels the gentle wind blowing through his mind that he remembers the dreams.

Someone calling, someone searching, someone cast adrift among the stars. And here, others crying out, their voices not quite so strong, probing among the waves for rocks and predators and dangers that lay hidden behind the veils of the sea. But some, the strong ones, projecting themselves farther, searching along other kinds of horizons.

Now Tur’taya fills Gregor’s being with his alien thoughts—flashes of color and flavor and other things too hot and fast for Gregor to understand. He can feel Tur’taya’s mind encircling his own, but that mind is strangely vacant. Gregor twists in the Mindtouch. Ripples sweep out through the medium that connects them.

[Listen,] a voice seems to say.

And then he hears them. Six, nearby—voices on the waves. And through them, thirty-six others, slightly fainter but in solid contact. And beyond, by multiples of six, until the whole superpod floats there in Gregor’s mind, each a tiny part of this web of their collected minds.

And Gregor senses it at once: hunger. The Hur’klee have spun a vast mental framework—so vast that even all they have learnedfills only a tiny fraction of it. It is a mind that needs more than it can reach, one that has grown twisted and dark as it has been forced to feed on itself.

And loneliness. Nowhere else is there a mind to match its own.

The images stop. Blackness engulfs Gregor’s mind, but then he feels it return, the grasping pressure of the Mindtouch feeling somehow different this time. He understands at once that it is just Tur’taya now, his mind alone, and that there is something he desperately wants.

Mindtouch.

Tur’taya wants to enter Gregor’s mind. He wants to probe for himself this new curiosity that has drifted into the range of his senses.

Gregor feels his body lay back in Farprobe’ s command chair, senses that he is breathing through his mouth as if in a deep sleep. But he’s awake, and Tur’taya is here, experiencing the sensations of this body, of this mind, and then moving on to deeper places that Gregor is scarcely aware exist within him.

Tur’taya finds Cara.

Here she is, a living entity in Gregor’s mind. More than a hologram, more than a memory, there is an entire universe encoded here through the eyes of the Captain’s love for the woman who waits for him even now on some lonely shore far from these waters. She’s lovely, swimming and running in the surf, her chest swelling and shrinking under the exertion. And then he’s tackling her, the two of them rolling at the edge of the waves. Tur’taya pushes the contact deeper, until it isn’t about people any longer but about two candles flickering in the darkness, clutching each other close for a time and then parting. Always stronger when they are joined.

Tur’taya experiences all of this, which is so much of Gregor that he cries out against having it glimpsed by another mind.

And then Tur’taya cries out as well, his bellowing wail thundering through Gregor’s mind and bringing the Captain to the edge of madness. He feels Tur’taya’s body, for an agonizing moment, as if it is his own. And then he understands. Within the alien’s mind, splintered into shining fragments spread throughout his own darkness, hang other minds as well—others of the Hur’klee and of the lesser related species that swim these waters.

That, he learns, is how a Hur’klee male loves. It loves through consumption, by making the object of its love a part of itself. And he sees through the eyes of the beast, sees the long and lonely search for something new. Tur’taya is ancient. He has absorbed every mind and soul he has found, yet his hunger remains, his desire unsatisfied. Nothing is new; nothing is different.

Until now. Through Tur’taya’s mind, Gregor sees himself—so strange, his frail and tiny body. Yet so beautiful and new. This one is male, he feels Tur’taya think. Then there’s a tentative tug at his soul, a hungry clutching, then the blessed release of rejection.

No, a male will never do.

But in this tiny mind, Tur’taya has glimpsed another.

Now Tur’taya’s mind slowly withdraws from his own, and the Mindtouch fades to only a remembered tingle. Gregor takes the probe’s controls in his hands and jerks them savagely. The probe begins an emergency ascent.

But Gregor knows that it is already far too late.

“Forgive me,” he said, stroking back a lock of hair that had Men across her cheek. “I felt that thing fall in love with you, Cara. It happened in a heartbeat, faster than that. The same way it did for me. The same way.” His voice trailed off again, and he stared into space as he had before. Cara trembled in his arms until he rubbed warmth back into her.

“It was a survival mechanism,” Rafael said. “The jellyfish that can leave its body to spot approaching danger has that much more chance of living long enough to procreate. And it can find food the same way. Soon the jellyfish that can’t project are starved into extinction. And the ability just keeps developing, spiraling higher, until the range is almost limitless. Until it can reach out into space and touch the stars.”

Cara stiffened. “You mean it can… leave its world?” Something in his eyes gleamed cold and terrifying now, and if he didn’t speak she felt she would go mad.

“Not in its body, no. But it can Mindtouch. And Cara, it loves you. As deeply and completely as I do. It found your perfect image in my heart, and its hunger was too great for its mind to control. You may have been alien to it, but you were beautiful, different and new. It wants you. It needs you. And its love is something too terrible to contemplate.”

She was sitting up now, watching his face for the tiniest indication that he knew. The dreams—she hadn’t wanted to mention them to him, hadn’t wanted to even think of them.

“He’s coming for you, Cara. Tlir’taya followed me into space, his mind chasing my ship and searching for the signature I had carried inside me, the signature of your soul glistening like a pearl inside his sickly shining head. All he can think of now is having you, of consuming you, of swallowing all the bits of you until they are nothing but bright spots scattered inside his greater darkness.”

She was sitting now, her legs curled underneath her. Somehow, she still felt safe, as long as he was here. But now she felt something cold, too, something that searched for her through the stars, its mind sharp and untiring while its body drifted in alien seas and dreamed the stolen dreams of their love.