seemed ready to plague Streaker’s company with one more surprise. Another unexpected calamity, or miraculous escape. But Kaa had always felt an affinity with the informal patron deity of spacers. There might be better pilots than himself in the Terragens Survey Service, but none with a deeper respect for fortuity. Hadn’t his own nickname been “Lucky”?
Until recently, that is.
From below, he heard the grumble of clamshell doors reopening. Soon Tsh’t and others would join him in this first examination of Jijo’s surface — a world they heretofore saw only briefly from orbit, then from the deepest, coldest pit in all its seas. Soon, his companions would arrive, but for a few moments more he had it to himself — silken water, tidal rhythms, fragrant air, the sky and clouds. …
His tail swished, lifting him higher as he peered. Those aren’t normal clouds, he realized, staring at a great mountain dominating the eastern horizon, whose peak wore shrouds of billowing white. The lens implanted in his right eye dialed through a spectral scan, sending readings to his optic nerve — revealing steam, carbon oxides, and a flicker of molten heat.
A volcano, Kaa realized, and the reminder sent his ebullience down a notch. This was a busy part of the planet, geologically speaking. The same forces that made it a useful hiding place also kept it dangerous.
That must be where the groaning comes from, he pondered. Seismic activity. An interaction of miniquakes and crustal gas discharges with the thin overlaying film of sea.
Another flicker caught his notice, in roughly the same direction, but much closer — a pale swelling that might also have been a cloud, except for the way it moved, flapping like a bird’s wing, then bulging with eagerness to race the wind.
A sail, he discerned. Kaa watched it jibe across the stiffening breeze — a two-masted schooner, graceful in motion, achingly familiar from the Caribbean seas of home.
Its bow split the water, spreading a wake that any dolphin might love to ride.
The zoom lens clarified, magnified, until he made out fuzzy bipedal forms, hauling ropes and bustling around on deck, like any gang of human sailors.
… Only these weren’t human beings. Kaa glimpsed scaly backs, culminating in a backbone of sharp spines. Swathes of white fur covered the legs, and froglike membranes pulsated below broad chins as the ship’s company sang a low, rumbling work chant that Kaa could dimly make out, even from here.
He felt a chill of unhappy recognition.
Hoons! What in all Five Galaxies are they doing here?
Kaa heard a rustle of fluke strokes — Tsh’t and others rising to join him. Now he must report that enemies of Earth dwelled here.
Kaa realized grimly — this news wasn’t going to help him win back his nickname anytime soon.
She came to mind again, the capricious goddess of uncertain destiny. And Kaa’s own Trinary phrase came back to him, as if reflected and reconverged by the surrounding alien waters.
The Stranger
EXISTENCE SEEMS LIKE WANDERING THROUGH A vast chaotic house. One that has been torn by quakes and fire, and is now filled with bitter, inexplicable fog. Whenever he manages to pry open a door, exposing some small corner of the past, each revelation comes at the price of sharp waves of agony.
In time, he learns not to be swayed by the pain. Rather, each ache and sting serves as a marker, a signpost, confirming that he must be on the right path.
His arrival on this world — plummeting through a scorched sky — should have ended with merciful blankness. What luck instead hurled his blazing body from the pyre to quench in a fetid swamp?
Peculiar luck.
Since then, he has grown intimate with all kinds of suffering, from crass pangs to subtle stings. In cataloging them, he grows learned in the many ways there are to hurt.
Those earliest agonies, right after the crash, had screeched coarsely from wounds and scalding burns — a gale of such fierce torment that he barely noticed when a motley crew of local savages rowed out to him in a makeshift boat, like sinners dragging a fallen angel out of the boggy fen. Saving him from drowning, only to face more damnations.
Beings who insisted that he fight for his broken life, when it would have been so much easier just to let go.
Later, as his more blatant injuries healed or scarred, other types of anguish took up the symphony of pain.
Afflictions of the mind.
Holes gape across his life, vast blank zones, lightless and empty, where missing memories must once have spanned megaparsecs and life years. Each gap feels chilled beyond numbness — a raw vacancy more frustrating than an itch that can’t be scratched.
Ever since he began wandering this singular world, he has probed the darkness within. Optimistically, he clutches a few small trophies from the struggle.
Jijo is one of them.
He rolls the word in his mind — the name of this planet where six castaway races band together in feral truce, a mixed culture unlike any other beneath the myriad stars.
A second word comes more easily with repeated use—Sara. She who nursed him from near death in her tree house overlooking a rustic water mill … who calmed the fluxing panic when he first woke to see pincers, claws, and mucusy ring stacks — the physiques of hoons, traekis, qheuens, and others sharing this rude outcast existence.
He knows more words, such as Kurt and Prity … friends he now trusts almost as much as Sara. It feels good to think their names, the slick way all words used to come, in the days before his mangling.
One recent prize he is especially proud of.
Emerson …
It is his own name, for so long beyond reach. Violent shocks had jarred it free, less than a day ago — shortly after he provoked a band of human rebels to betray their urrish allies in a slashing knife fight that made a space battle seem antiseptic by comparison. That bloody frenzy ended with an explosive blast, shattering the grubby caravan tent, spearing light past Emerson’s closed lids, overwhelming the guardians of reason.
And then, amid the dazzling rays, he had briefly glimpsed … his captain!
Creideiki …
The blinding glow became a luminous foam, whipped by thrashing flukes. Out of that froth emerged a long gray form whose bottle snout bared glittering teeth. The sleek head grinned, despite bearing an awful wound behind its left eye … much like the hurt that robbed Emerson of speech.
Utterance shapes formed out of scalloped bubbles, in a language like none spoken by Jijo’s natives, or by any great Galactic clan.
