Ivan Cat - The Burning Heart of Night

A single large Feral appeared, its glowbuds half white and half blank.

Arrou drew a sharp breath beside Jenette. "Tlalok!"

Tlalok attacked Karr. Both Feral and Pilot tumbled out of sight in the fronds. Several anxious heartbeats later, they reappeared. Karr was unhurt. Tlalok backed off, shaking his muzzle violently. The large Feral suddenly flashed from half white and half blank to full, angry glowbud radiance across his entire four-legged frame. He then threw back his muzzle.

A horrified cry echoed across the battlefield.

PART SIX:

BURNING HEART

XLVII

Sometimes, hollow winds moan through his fugueship. Huffff, huffff. Always he wakes up to these uneven rhythms. Always he feels ill at ease. Huffff, huffff. Always he slips on a uniform over his ghimpsuit and shuffles through the nighttime, blue-lit worm-highways of the ship. He pads over ligaments and bone. Huffff, huffff. They make a jerky motion under his boots. Birth canal passages throb around him, but not in their normal, peaceful way.

His sleepy brain imagines that he is a fetus, seeded in the giant womb of his ship, fermenting, growing into something... other. He walks, walks. Huffff, huffff. What that other will be he does not know, but he knows that he has been enwombed before. He remembers, with memories born of touch and taste and hearing, memories kept in muscle and bone rather than in neurons and synapses. He remembers-feels his own mother slumbering around him when he was a real fetus, a creature of primordial fish eyes and translucent organs. He remembers a world of wet, snug love.

When she slept, he slept. When her blood ran fast, his blood ran fast.

And when she had nightmares, he had nightmares.

Huffff, huffff.

His mother had nightmares a lot.

Did she sense, even then, the one-in-a-billion abnormality gestating within her? Did she suspect, did she have premonitions, as some mothers do, that her unborn would not birth out the same as all infants?

His ship shudders. Apprehensions and dreads intrude upon his wet-snug. Nightmares in the womb. That was how they felt then. This is how they feel now.

But, how can this be, now?

He wonders, stepping into the brainroom's softly glowing vault. Pillows of pink cortex swell before him. The brain is vast compared to him, minuscule compared to the body it runs. Not enough thinking mass for intelligence. His wonderful, beloved ship is also a simple, dumb beast.

How can a beast of burden have nightmares?

The brain twitches. He remembers the closed-eye blinking of a childhood pet. The passage outside jerks like the inside of a snake. He remembers the pet's paws-in-quicksand dream running, jerking. That is how it looked then. This is how it looks now.

Stupid or not, idiot or not, his ship is dreaming. He knows it. Bad dreams. Long bad dreams.

His eight fuguetime hours versus its four realtime months.

What nightmares does a fugueship have, a half million living tons, alone on its pathways between stars, old enough to have seen human planetary civilizations rise and fall, but too unknowing and innocent to notice or care?

He remembers that innocence is not always bliss, childhood damp ultra-fears, who-loves-me-desperation monsters, abandonment dream-abominations. He does not analyze them this way ? that is too painful to remember ? that is just how the memories feel. Most of all he remembers the wanting to wake up, the striving to be free of the somnolent torments.

Huffff, huffff.

Make it stop, mommy.

But mommy and daddy sold you for a shiny new life, and you're not a part of it. These are the nightmares of an adult-child.

The adult-child goes to the beast-of-burden brain. He presses down on the moist suede cortex, smoothing, stroking, cooing in his mind, if not with his voice emulator.

There, there. It's going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right.

The jerking in the hall outside subsides. He spreads out, face down, maximum touching.

We're safe. We're okay.

The twitching of the cortex calms.

Together they weather their dreams.

Heat.

Pressure.

More than its great, dumb mind remembers, ever.

Crushing it in, from all around.

Heaviness.

No floating, no drifting,

No flying between diamonds of light.

Only weight and wet darkness.

And food, all around.

Gorging.

It wanted to come here, it feels.

But it is sick. Something is wrong.

Something missing.

The tiny good feeling.

So long the tiny good was with it,

So long the sickness was gone,

It felt only content.

But now the tiny good is gone, There is an empty feeling where it was.

And now sickness is back, escalating.

It feels itself swelling,

Parts of it twisting and stretching,

Buzzing, plating, growing, out of its control.

It is afraid. It wants the changing to stop.

It wants its tiny good back...

Only, it cannot call for help.

What, after all, is calling?

It can only want and hurt.

It can only fear.

XLVIII

My solution to the Feral problem? Nuke 'em till they glow, then shoot 'em in the dark. They already glow in the dark? Oh, yeah, I forgot.

? Rebecca "Liberty" Toland.

Drunken Reflections on Being.

a New Ascension Guard

Karr screamed and screamed and screamed. For three days. Most of his uniform was stripped away.

His limbs were stretched and bound in the egg-shaped cell with the glowing white walls. Tlalok attempted everything he could think of. He attempted beating. He attempted suffocating. He attempted peeling skin.

And more.

"Why don't you just kill me?" Karr groaned as the torment stretched on.

"Because Tlalok is bonded to the blank-one Karr!" Tlalok howled, so distressed that he did not even care that he was using foul blank-one words.

Karr screamed externally. Tlalok screamed internally.

It was unthinkable, unbearable, irredeemable. But it was true. Tlalok was once again bonded to a blank-one. All the awful memories of the time when Tlalok had been enslaved before came flooding back. It was as if all the intervening years of freedom had never existed, except as a fading daydream.

Tlalok could not kill Karr. Nor could Tlalok beat, temporarily suffocate, or peel Karr's skin. The instinctual injunction against harming one's bondmate was too strong.

"How? How?" Tlalok roared. "Tlalok has exchanged no Pact with Karr!"

"It's the fugue in my blood," Karr mumbled through battered, swollen lips. "It's related to your immune venom. It must have bound us together when we first met, when you tried to kill me and you tasted my blood."

Karr told Tlalok what Jenette had told him about the Burning Heart of Night, fugueships, Pact, and how she believed fugueships had brought immune venom to New Ascension.

Tlalok did not want to hear it.

Tlalok's needle teeth pierced pink skin and injected a large amount of immune venom to ensure the continuation of Karr's discomfort. Immune venom caused no pain when exchanged between Khafra, so there was no instinctual injunction against using it on a bondmate. But when injected into a blank-one it caused great amounts of pain. Tlalok knew this from first-hand experience of Sacrament. He also knew