NOVEL NEXT Learning Experience
The next time I regained consciousness, I was lying on my side in a delightfully soft and warm bed. The air was clear and just the right humidity and smelled of calming flowers or fruit. I hadn’t felt so good in weeks, and I just wanted to keep sleeping, even if it meant missing school or whatever. School was dumb, sleeping was much better.
Part of me noticed that I still had wings, and four arms, and antennae, which meant that I hadn’t dreamed being hundreds of light-years from school. Another part of me didn’t care and went back to sleep, pushing my face deeper into my pillow to shut out the light. Even if I was an insect now, so what? It wasn’t going to stop me from sleeping.
But there was something off. Not just the fact that I felt incredible; though that had me half-convinced this was all some kind of hallucination. I clicked my mandibles, trying to put my finger on what was different. With a long, awkward stretch, I turned from one side to the other. As my upper right hand brushed against the headboard of the bed, it finally hit me.
My eyes shot open and I sat up, throwing the blankets off of my torso. As I stared down at my arm, the truth finally hit me: my broken arm had finally healed! And then I remembered why I had felt so crappy before, and where I’d been going, and what the last thing I remembered was, and…
“Awake, then?”
There was someone standing over me. An Emissary. Speaking to me in Emissarine. Ze had a sort of ocean aesthetic going on with zir carapace, all blues and greens, including the face. The data pad held in zir upper arms like a clipboard cemented that this was probably someone important. Oddly, ze had the same fluff as Larheamra had, the ruff around the neck and extra tufts of white around the wrists and ankles.
“Speak in English?” I said. “Emissarine not good yet.”
Ze clicked zir mandibles, a sight I was still only just getting used to seeing in another person, and went to the edge of the room. As I followed zir, I paid attention to my surroundings for the first time. It was a pure white room, utterly clean, with a computer terminal on the wall, mounted alongside clusters of small boxes full of various useful gadgets. The doctor pulled two pairs of goggles out of one of the wall boxes, typed at the terminal for a moment, then returned, handing me one pair while putting on the other one zirself.
These were the first goggles I’d seen that were actually designed for an Emissary’s face. They hooked on to the antennae for security instead of the nonexistent ears, and contained multiple lenses so as to account for the eight eyes.
“Testing testing,” ze said in Emissarine. The familiar subtitles showed up on the glasses.
“It’s working,” I said. Ze seemed to understand. “Is this the Torn Memory?”
The doctor nodded. “The ship’s hospital, specifically. I’m assuming, then, that you remember everything that led up to this?”
I nodded. “You guys boarded our ship, nearly started a firefight. It’s a good thing I was there.”
“I assure you, our defense teams are in no way my ‘guys’,” ze said. “But I shouldn’t be grumbling. My name is Krtrallna Lar-Secant; the ‘Lar’ indicates that I’m a medical professional, in case you weren’t already aware.”
I wasn’t already aware. “Oh, okay. Catherine Sierra, my name is Catherine Sierra. How long was I out?”
“Eighteen hours,” ze said. “Though most of that was perfectly normal sleep.”
And for once, sleep had actually left me feeling rested. That was nice. My attention turned back to my upper right arm, the one that had spent weeks in a cast. I lifted it, moved it, even tried stretching it out a bit, until something caught in the elbow joint and the whole thing went numb with pain.
“We did what we could about your arm,” ze said solemnly. “But after remaining damaged for that long, some amount of permanent damage was basically inevitable. Our estimate is that, over time, you may regain upwards of 80% of full mobility in that limb.”
“That’s still pretty good. How did you repair the break?”
“A combination of new carapace force-grown from your own cells, a bit of harvested repair foam, and natural recovery,” ze said. “But that brings me around to the actual source of your sickness.”
My stomach sank. I sat up a bit more in the bed, preparing myself for the worst. “How bad is it?”
“Oh, we’ve already cured it, at least for the moment. The issue is, Catherine, you were suffering from a severe nutritional deficiency.”
I blinked. “What?”
“It seems that your diet was severely lacking in the critical compound carapine, causing your carapace to be unable to heal, as well as all of the other symptoms you experienced. We had you on an intrahematic drip for most of the night, and by morning you were just about good as new.”
Part of me wanted to absolutely lose my shit there and then. Everything I’d gone through, all of the pain and suffering, and it hadn’t even been anything serious. A fucking nutritional deficiency had nearly killed me. “What?”
“I assure you, it’s a very common ailment amongst those of us who are… raised apart from ourselves. Albeit your case was rather more severe than the usual.”
I had to sit with the thought a little while longer. A nutritional deficiency. All the science in the wide universe, all of the advanced tech, and I’d nearly died of the same shit that knocked out pirates in the Caribbean. “How was it worse?”
Dr. Secant paused, trilling softly in concentration. “Well, Catherine, our bodies normally are able to produce a low level of carapine passively. Supplementing that quantity through our diet is necessary for optimal health, but we can get by without it. But your carapine levels were far, far below the normal levels, almost as though something had been actively depleting them. Do you have any idea what might have caused that? Have you been molting with unusual frequency, generating excess repair foam, anything like that?”
I didn’t want to embarrass myself by asking what the hell “repair foam” was. And as for molting… I didn’t exactly know what was normal for that to begin with, so how was I supposed to know what was unusual? But then it hit me. I didn’t know the normal rate, because something had been causing me to molt a lot. I groaned, my face sinking into my ready hands.
“The falthrranta,” I said softly.
“What was that?”
“I said that I did the falthrranta. That probably uses up a lot, right?”
Dr. Secant paused, checking zir datapad. “That would certainly exacerbate the situation, but I don’t think it would use up enough to explain—”
“I did it twice,” I said. Noticing the look on zir face, I continued, “When I first pupated, I was female. I tried switching back to male, but that didn’t work out for me at all, so I figured out how to reverse it back to female. My sickness started getting bad at right about the time I reversed course.”
Ze stared at me, not a little dumbfounded. “You are aware that performing the falthrranta twice in quick succession is not recommended even for healthy Emissaries, yes?”
I might have read a passage that said something along those lines when I was first researching the reversibility of the falthrranta. At the time I was in such a frenzy of dysphoria and panic that I’d basically ignored the warning. But if what ze said was right, and I was already in a vulnerable position…
“I’m sorry…”
Dr. Secant’s antennae dipped piteously. “It’s alright, Catherine. I’m not going to judge you for doing what was necessary for your gender expression. So long as you make sure to consume adequate amounts of carapine in the future, you should be alright. And, if it becomes useful at a later time, it is generally recommended that you wait—”
“Six weeks, I know,” I said. Even with zir assurances, it was still pretty embarrassing to know that I’d brought this all on myself. “Is there anything else?” I asked.
“No,” ze said. “I’ve already had the conversation about Emissary dietary needs with your parents. Do you mind if I go to take care of my other business? I can stay here if it would make you feel better.”
I shook my head. “I’m sure some of them need it more than I do.”
And then, with nothing more than a nod and a few short words, ze was off. That gave me some time to really think about what had happened. Apparently, my desire to change myself back to being a man, despite the fact that I had next to no actual connection with that particular gender, had ended up draining my reserves dry and very nearly killing me. That particular cosmic joke actually made me laugh.
A few minutes after that I was bored, at which point I realized that my Ariel had been placed at my bedside table. The first order of business was to check my Emissarine dictionary, brush up on a few verb tenses and things like that. I’d thought that I was doing fairly well at learning the language, but my experience with every Emissary I’d actually spoken to was that I was woefully unprepared.
That didn’t go on for very long before I started feeling the exhaustion creep back in. Despite the fact that I was fully healthy, technically speaking, the sheer amount of healing I’d done in such a short time couldn’t help but tire me out. I managed maybe two hours of wakefulness, switching between learning and reading e-books, before I finally passed out again.
I woke up a few times over the next day and night, though never for very long. They were always hot, confusing, unreal bursts of consciousness, during which my mind was consumed by worries and fantasies and other things I wouldn’t remember when morning came.
Morning came quickly. One moment I was asleep; the next I felt ready to jump out of bed and go for, like, a jog or something. My plans were immediately interrupted by the fact that there was someone else in the room.
Said person was about the largest Emissary I’d ever seen, a solid three inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than me, with a carapace the yellows, oranges, and dark grays of a poison dart frog, all clad in heavy-duty synthetic fabric and festooned with pouches and pockets. There was also, very notably, a blaster pistol at the stranger’s hip.
“Uh. Hi.”
The new person, who had been leaning against the wall with their arms folded, stepped forward and narrowed their eyes at me. “Hi. I’m supposed to be your guide.”
So, brief aside: Emissarine is not a particularly gendered language, as you would expect for a language invented by a species that can change sex at-will. It’s a bit like English in that sense; none of the conjugations have anything to do with gender, different words don’t have an inherent gender, nothing like that. The exception is pronouns, both first- and third-person, which come in about fifty different gendered forms.
Each gendered pronoun encodes different information about the person being referred to, including both their current state of gendering and information about its overall context and degree of stability. There is, for instance, a pronoun indicating something like “strongly feminine, for the long-to-indefinite term” which is a different pronoun from “slightly feminine, for the long-to-indefinite term” which is a different pronoun from “strongly feminine, for the long term but I’ll probably change at some point” and so on and so forth. So, as you can probably guess, translating those into English is a bit of a nightmare.
For the Emissary who had apparently entered my room while I was asleep, I’m going to be approximating the Emissarine term with “he” and “him”. Anyway.
“Whaaat are you doing in my room?”
He glanced around. “This is a hospital room. But the docs said that you’d be ready to leave soon, so I wanted to check in.”
“Well, I think I feel alright to leave.” I took a peek under my covers. “Who are you? What… exactly are you doing again?”
“You’re new to all this, new to even being around other Emissaries. I’ve been there too, so I volunteered to be the one to show you around the ship. Name’s Remrion; Remrion Valcathin.”
I blinked at him. “Remrion like the book?”
He paused. “Yes,” he said, in a tone suggesting he’d heard it a thousand times. “Like the book.”
“Nice,” I said. “Do you mind stepping out so I can get changed and grab all of my things?”
His eyes, which had been firmly locked on an area just below my eyes up until then, suddenly turned to the wall. “Right. Of course. I’ll be right outside, Catherine.”
As I actually got out of bed, it very quickly became obvious that I felt better than I had in a very, very long time. The lack of mobility in my upper right arm was worrying, but just being able to move it at all made dressing myself an order of magnitude easier. My fatigue was gone, all of my other joints were healthy, I could breathe easily. Gathering together all of my things only took a few minutes.
With my Ariel clipped onto my arm and a backpack slung over my shoulder, I stepped out into the hospital hallway. Remrion was waiting for me, his back against the wall and arms folded.
“Follow me,” he said, starting down the hallway. “This ship’s just large enough that it could be genuinely problematic if you got lost.”
I followed a step and a half behind him, somewhat struggling to keep up with his longer strides. “The Torn Memory, right? How many Emissaries actually live here?”
For a few seconds, I didn’t think Remrion was going to respond as his attention was mostly on remembering the way through the hospital. “About nine thousand, last I heard? The exact number fluctuates, obviously. People have kids and die of old age and stuff, not to mention all the ones like you who move in…”
“Or people like Larheamra, who move out.”
He shrugged. “Sure. There aren’t many people who want to leave once they get here, though. I’m sure you’ll understand why once we actually get out of here.”
Remrion turned his attention right back to our surroundings. That was something I noticed about Remrion, even though I had yet to figure out how to decipher Emissary pheromones: he was a beetle of intense focus. He walked rigidly and quickly and was always keeping his eyes and antennae on a swivel. It took me a minute to realize where I’d seen that kind of carriage before.
“What do you do here, Remrion? Like what’s your job?”
“I’m in the defense force, fifth rank. I do boarding, breaching, and advance maneuvers, that kind of thing. Not to brag.”
Military, as I’d suspected. Then, as it sank in what his specialty meant, I groaned. “Please don’t tell me that you’re the one who had to catch me…”
Remrion chittered. “No, no. That was Telreprech. I was the one standing two Emissaries to their right.”
“So you only saw me collapse into the arms of your commanding officer. Wonderful.”
“Don’t worry, it’s far from the worst we’ve seen,” Remrion said with a click of his mandibles. “It was adorable, we were laughing about it for hours.”
“Oh, right, because that’s so much better,” I said. We finally reached the front desk of the hospital. I had to answer a short questionnaire before I could leave. As I put down the stylus, Remrion was already moving for the door.
“Now, I want you to prepare yourself. The main body of the ship can be rather awe-inspiring, and I don’t want you fainting on me. Again.”
“Jackass,” I said, pushing off with my wings to catapult myself right through the double-doors of the hospital.
Remrion was right. It was awe-inspiring. The interior of the Torn Memory wasn’t quite as open and airy as the autoplexes on New Malagasy, but it made up for it in the sheer density of artistic style: the interior looked for all the world like something that had been built, huge vertical stacks of cuboid or cylindrical structures interspersed with enormous shafts of clear air that stretched at least six hundred feet from top to bottom. Each part of the structure had been customized and modified over time with layers of smooth plastic, giving the whole thing an almost organic appearance. The walkways formed a web every fifteen feet or so, with cables wound up and down and across the columns, huge nets spread across the gaps to prevent any unpleasant falls. The main method of vertical transportation was big steel elevators that clung to the sides of the pillars like beetles, but all up and down the ship there were Emissaries ignoring the bridges and elevators and flitting across the gap or up and down levels on wing power alone.
And the Emissaries; I’d never seen so many of us at once. I hadn’t realized until then just how vast a variety of colors we came in, each person who passed me in the street having a different combination of vibrant colors splattered across their carapace in a totally unique pattern, like a tropical fish or jungle bird. The children running around, holding hands with their parents, didn’t look like Emissaries. I saw kids who looked human, kids who looked like the grey-shelled Embers, or white-scaled Architects, or tall and slender adolescents that looked like a cross between a UFO alien and some kind of bird. They scarcely paid me any mind, even as I stumbled out into the middle of a walkway with my mandibles hanging open. I ended up stumbling into the railing, nearly tipping over the edge. The only way I could steady myself was to hold the railing in all four arms and look up, gazing up at enormous gardens just over my head.
“Told you so.” Remrion strolled casually up to the railing, leaning across it.
“It’s so beautiful…”
“Yep,” Remrion said. “That’s how I felt when I first saw this place, too. The overwhelming desire to curl into the fetal position will fade with time, but it never quite stops looking incredible.”
“It’s like nothing I’ve ever… And it’s all a ship, one giant ship! There’s so many Emissaries.”
He chittered. “Take as much time as you need, Cathy. I could watch the look on your face all day.”
“And it’s all a closed system, isn’t it?” I said, not paying attention to anything he was saying. “Everything’s produced hydroponically… there must be polyfacs producing spare parts and medical supplies, all of the water and waste and everything else is recycled, right?”
“I’m not really much of an engineer…” he continued. “But I could bring you down there; I’m sure someone else would love to tell you about it.”
“Though I guess you would have to stop every so often for propellant, more fusion fuel, parts that you can’t manufacture yourselves. That must have been why they made those stops at New Ivehar and Kursh… I don’t imagine those are very frequent, and given what we know about Qalin, for good reason, I guess.”
“…you aren’t listening to anything I’m saying, are you?” Remrion asked.
I trailed off, leaning back against the railing and trying to catch my breath. The engineering of the Torn Memory wasn’t actually what fascinated me, of course; I’d seen more impressive things on Nahoroth and New Malagasy. But the fact that such a thing existed at all, despite everything that had happened to the Emissaries during the war… that was impressive, awe-inspiring, even inspiring. I guess there’s hope for me yet.
“I’m sorry, were you saying something?” I finally said.
Remrion sighed. “Follow me, Cathy. The tour’s only just started.”
If the ensuing tour were of literally any other town or spacecraft, it would have been absolutely nothing special. Here’s where to get food, here’s where you can sleep (pick an empty bunk), here’s the library, here’s the best way to get around without getting yourself killed, and so on and so forth. But it was an Emissary ship, and that made it all an absolute delight.
For one thing, the whole ship was built explicitly for olfactory communication. Air recycled far more rapidly than on most other ships to prevent unintentional lingering, and the air in each separate area was carefully curated to promote certain emotional states. The library even had special chemicals in the air designed to break pheromones down, preventing any unnecessary pheromone noise, like sound dampening for the antennae.
Of course, the fact that I couldn’t understand any of those pheromones was a bit of an issue. You’d think that it would be easier with your own species, but you would be wrong. Liberates, Architects, all the other species out there have relatively simple chemo-emotional states, big bright colors and clear tones. Emissaries are more complicated. We can consciously modulate our pheromones, express multiple emotional states at once, switch rapidly between pheromones for complex emotional confusion.
My lack of understanding wasn’t for lack of practice, either, because the other Emissaries absolutely loved me. Remrion explained it as a cultural difference, but whatever the cause, the moment it became clear to others that I was new to the Torn Memory, I would be drowning in friendly questions, comments on my appearance, and offers to help show me around. It was tolerable for about the first twenty minutes. Even after I started making it clear that I needed my space, there was still a consistent trickle of Emissaries wishing me welcome and generally acting like my overbearing aunt. An entire species of overbearing aunts; that’s the Emissaries.
I can’t say that I entirely disliked it, either. Part of me thought it would feel pretty nice if I had the time to settle down first.
And then there was Remrion. Just from looking at him, you could tell that he was different from the typical Emissary, but it went deeper than just the physical. He was… quieter, and part of me was convinced that he was purposefully putting on a deeper voice. That militaristic way of moving set him apart from the other Emissaries. There was also something up with his pheromone signature, with a single scent overpowering most of the complexity. Not that I could tell what that scent meant, beyond the vague impression of something earthy, basic, a deeply primordial feeling suffusing the very air around him.
After a couple of hours, the tour wound down. Remrion had shown me all of the important areas and started pointing out his own particular favorite haunts, just to keep it going. I decided that then was as good a time as any to try to figure out what his deal was. We were in the upper parts of the Torn Memory, on a walkway right outside of one of the few nooks on the ship where there wasn’t constant noise.
“So, uh. Remrion. You said you were in the defense force, yeah? Does that mean you’re, like, a cop?”
Remrion stopped, then shrugged. “I try not to be. I mean, it’s not like I can arrest people or anything, so… Really, I don’t do much at all except when the ship is in legit danger.”
“Well, that’s good, at least,” I said. “So you just sit around and do target practice all day?”
“Oh, I do more than that,” Remrion said with a grin. “I have to keep myself in peak athletic condition at all times, as well as honing my fighting technique to a monomolecular edge.” He flared his wings and extended his claws, in what I could only assume was the Emissary equivalent of a muscleman pose. He must have smelled how utterly unimpressed I was, because he quickly relaxed. “Also, you know, people come to me when they need to move furniture or if their pet got caught in one of the wires.”
“Oh, nice,” I said. I didn’t want to make it look like I was grilling him for information, so I waited a second before speaking again, strolling a couple of steps down the walkway. “You’re not from this ship, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, I caught you smiling just a minute ago. That’s not something you pick up from other Emissaries,” I said. “Also, you told me when we first met.”
“Oh, right,” Remrion said, folding his upper arms. “I don’t like talking about where I came from. I left there a couple of years after I metamorphosed, and I’ve been here ever since. The last four years are what really matters.”
I nodded along, wondering how I’d feel about my time on Earth in four years. Then something caught in my head. “Wait, how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Wait, what? You metamorphosed at fourteen??”
“How old were you?” Remrion said, quirking his head in confusion.
“I’m eighteen, and I’m pretty sure it’s been less than six weeks! I think.”
Remrion’s mandibles moved in a weird way, one I was only mostly sure was a cringe. “Wow, they weren’t joking when they said you were in bad condition. I guess that explains your—” He gestured towards his collarbone area.
I knew what he meant. Getting a look at so many other Emissaries had finally confirmed what I’d already suspected, that the insect fuzz around the joints and collar was normal, and I was the weird one for not having it. “Yeah…” I said, my antennae wilting as I looked down at my feet.
“Not that that means there’s anything wrong with you,” he said, suddenly sounding a little panicked. “I’m sure it’ll grow in now that you’re feeling better. I’m pretty sure you can shave the setae off if you really don’t like them. You know, as an aesthetic thing.”
That was weird. Like, really weird. I sighed; it was finally time to stop talking circles around it. “So, not to give into the worst of our species’ impulses, but are you okay? You’ve been acting weird, like, this whole time.”
Remrion froze, then instantly shed the nerves like a coat, cocking his hip to one side and making a half-grin. “I’m fine. But thanks for asking. It matters a lot that you care.”
I chalked up the weird phrasing to translation errors. “Are you sure? I’m still figuring out Emissary pheromones, but it smells to me like you’ve been going through something really intense for the last few hours.”
“What? I don’t know what you’re…” He suddenly froze, like he’d tripped over his own tongue. His pheromones shifted suddenly, the major thread fading as a new cocktail came into prominence. “It’s nothing. Nothing you have to worry about. I’m sorry.”
The response didn’t make me feel any less confused, but I took the hint. “So I guess this means the tour is over, huh? Do you know where the other people from my ship are? I want them to know that I’m—”
There was a sudden flutter of wings from a few feet down the walkway. “Remrion? What are you doing up here? Oh, and who is this?”
