period. Never before had he seen an induced replacement. The normal process was for two brood minds to exchange plasm and form new team buds, then to exchange and nurture the buds. The buds were later cast free to swim as individual larvae. While the larvae often swam through the liquid and gas atmosphere of a Senexi world for thousands, even tens of thousands of kilometers, inevitably they returned to gather with the other buds of their team. Replacements were selected from a separately created pool of “generic” buds only if one or more originals had been destroyed during their wanderings. The destruction of a complete team meant reproductive failure.
In a mature team, only when a branch ind was destroyed did the brood mind induce a replacement. In essence, then, Aryz was already considered dead.
Yet he was still useful. That amused him, if the Senexi emotion could be called amusement. Restricting himself from his fellows was difficult, but he filled the time by immersing himself, through the interface, in the mandate.
The humans were also connected with the mandate through their surrogate parent, and in this manner they were quiescent.
He reported infrequently to the brood mind. Until he had established communication, there was little to report.
And throughout his turmoil, like the others he could sense a fight was coming. It could determine the success or failure of all their work in the nebula. In the grand scheme, failure here might not be crucial. But the Senexi had taken the long view too often in the past. Their age and experience—their calmness—were working against them. How else to explain the decision to communicate with human shapes? Where would such efforts lead? If he succeeded.
And he knew himself well enough to doubt he would fail.
He could feel an affinity for them already, peering at them through the thick glass wall in their isolated chamber, his skin paling at the thought of their heat, their poisonous chemistry. A diseased affinity. He hated himself for it. And reveled in it. It was what made him particularly useful to the team. If he was defective, and this was the only way he could serve, then so be it.
The other branch inds observed his passings from a distance, making no judgments. Aryz was dead, though he worked and moved. His sacrifice had been fearful. Yet he would not be a hero. His kind could never be emulated.
It was a horrible time, a horrible conflict.
She floated in language, learned it in a trice; there were no distractions. She floated in history and picked up as much as she could, for the source seemed inexhaustible. She tried to distinguish between eyes open—the barren, pale gray brown chamber with the thick green wall, beyond which floated a murky roundness—and eyes shut, when she dropped back into language and history with no fixed foundation.
Eyes open, she saw the Mam with its comforting limbs and its soft voice, its tubes and extrusions of food and its hissings and removal of waste. Through Mam’s wires she learned. Mam also tended another like herself, and another, and one more unlike any of them, more like the shape beyond the green wall.
She was very young, and it was all a mystery.
At least she knew her name. And what she was supposed to do. She took small comfort in that.
They fitted Prufrax with her gloves, and she went into the practice chamber, dragged by her gloves almost, for she hadn’t yet knitted her plug in nerves in the right index digit and her pace control was uncertain.
There, for six wakes straight, she flew with the other glovers back and forth across the dark spaces like elfstate comets. Constellations and nebula aspects flashed at random on the distant walls, and she oriented to them like a night flying bird. Her glovemates were Ornin, an especially slender male, and Ban, a red haired female, and the special projects sisters Ya, Trice, and Damu, new from the breeding division.
When she let the gloves have their way, she was
In a mature team, only when a branch ind was destroyed did the brood mind induce a replacement. In essence, then, Aryz was already considered dead.
Yet he was still useful. That amused him, if the Senexi emotion could be called amusement. Restricting himself from his fellows was difficult, but he filled the time by immersing himself, through the interface, in the mandate.
The humans were also connected with the mandate through their surrogate parent, and in this manner they were quiescent.
He reported infrequently to the brood mind. Until he had established communication, there was little to report.
And throughout his turmoil, like the others he could sense a fight was coming. It could determine the success or failure of all their work in the nebula. In the grand scheme, failure here might not be crucial. But the Senexi had taken the long view too often in the past. Their age and experience—their calmness—were working against them. How else to explain the decision to communicate with human shapes? Where would such efforts lead? If he succeeded.
And he knew himself well enough to doubt he would fail.
He could feel an affinity for them already, peering at them through the thick glass wall in their isolated chamber, his skin paling at the thought of their heat, their poisonous chemistry. A diseased affinity. He hated himself for it. And reveled in it. It was what made him particularly useful to the team. If he was defective, and this was the only way he could serve, then so be it.
The other branch inds observed his passings from a distance, making no judgments. Aryz was dead, though he worked and moved. His sacrifice had been fearful. Yet he would not be a hero. His kind could never be emulated.
It was a horrible time, a horrible conflict.
She floated in language, learned it in a trice; there were no distractions. She floated in history and picked up as much as she could, for the source seemed inexhaustible. She tried to distinguish between eyes open—the barren, pale gray brown chamber with the thick green wall, beyond which floated a murky roundness—and eyes shut, when she dropped back into language and history with no fixed foundation.
Eyes open, she saw the Mam with its comforting limbs and its soft voice, its tubes and extrusions of food and its hissings and removal of waste. Through Mam’s wires she learned. Mam also tended another like herself, and another, and one more unlike any of them, more like the shape beyond the green wall.
She was very young, and it was all a mystery.
At least she knew her name. And what she was supposed to do. She took small comfort in that.
They fitted Prufrax with her gloves, and she went into the practice chamber, dragged by her gloves almost, for she hadn’t yet knitted her plug in nerves in the right index digit and her pace control was uncertain.
There, for six wakes straight, she flew with the other glovers back and forth across the dark spaces like elfstate comets. Constellations and nebula aspects flashed at random on the distant walls, and she oriented to them like a night flying bird. Her glovemates were Ornin, an especially slender male, and Ban, a red haired female, and the special projects sisters Ya, Trice, and Damu, new from the breeding division.
When she let the gloves have their way, she was
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