The Sea is Full of Stars

ever work that kind of shit on the ’Dangers, we’d probably have another thousand years of peace.”

Somehow Ari doubted it.

Many of the other races had familiar parts, or were familiar either from ancient mythology or even from his uncle’s fabulous art collection. Half man, half horse—centaurs. Only these didn’t look as fierce or as noble as the paintings and sculptures. Satyrs, nymphs, minotaurs, man-sized bat things, angels like in the religious pictures only with no clothes on, little fire-breathing dinosaurs, lots of others. It seemed half the myths and legends of the dozens of races of the Realm were represented here.

One caught his eye. Absolutely drop dead gorgeous young woman with good breasts, long hair, and from the waist down scales and a fish tail. Mermaids. Somehow he thought Kalindans were the mermaids.

“Nope. Those are Umiau,” the sergeant informed him. “There’s a kinda similarity, but there are some elements of some of us in ninety percent of the rest of us, it seems. They say some of the lower-level gods of creation didn’t have such great imagination and did their stuff by stealing parts from the plants and animals and such from the ones already here or done. Could be. Depends on which race was first, I guess. That one’s a mammal, though; don’t let the scales fool you. Free breasts, real hair, no dorsal, much more similar to your old Type Forty-ones from the waist up and, if you look close, overall. Bear live young and nurse them. No intermediate pouch stage like ours. And no gills or similar stuff. They’re air breathers, period. They don’t even need to be wetted down much, but, of course, they’re not really any more built for land than we are. They only got one sex, too. They don’t change like us or have separate kinds like most others. They tend to hang around in shallows and even up in river mouths. They like fresh or brackish water best. They’re from way up in the northwest corner of the Overdark; the whole hex is a flooded delta.”

“You’ve been there? Or another sister got posted?”

The sergeant gave the Kalindan equivalent of a grin. “Naw, nothin’ like that. Foreigners from that part of the world, they sometimes confuse us with them. Hard to see why when you compare the two.”

The remark about Umiau hair being real was something he only recently learned about his own hair, and that of the rest of his new racial kindred. These translucent strands that could glow if he willed, or not if he didn’t, were actually tendrils that exuded a nasty and painful series of acidic stings when in contact with living flesh other than Kalindan flesh. It may have served an evolutionary function once, but now it was mainly useful because wild things in the sea, or those things likely to be encountered in Kalinda, knew to avoid it and thus tended to leave Kalindans alone unless really hard up for a meal. The tendrils could also be made to exude an odor that smelled quite nice, and was individually distinctive, to Kalindans, but considered by most other species, intelligent and not, as one of the most noxious odors imaginable. More insurance that when you took a little swim you would be able to pick and choose your own company.

It was one of those continuing self-discovery facts, like the transparent eyelids. He hadn’t noticed that in himself, but it became obvious once he was in company and in close quarters with others of his kind.

He was, however, beginning to feel as if he were abandoned and, if not forgotten, consigned to ward-of-the- state status and out of the swim of things. Too inconvenient for them, potential unknown, but at least he didn’t seem to be a Hadun.

They even let him go topside once, to see the island and tour the large facilities there. If you didn’t just materialize on the rocks, and if the weather was decent, they had little electric cars on nice little roads that were designed to carry Kalindans to and from the plant and exits to the sea, as well as in and around the plant and the rest of the island. Since crawling on your hands, dragging your body behind you, was the only alternative, it seemed very practical, once you got the hang of the semi-sidesaddle seat. The thing was, though, he was still basically a fixer and a kind of private detective completely out of his element no matter whether on land or sea.

What appeared to have doomed him from any better status was the very real reappearance of Ming Dawn Palavri.

She had always been there, sort of, and had surfaced for brief but confused periods when he’d daydreamed or sometimes in dreams or just when he woke up, but at the start this had all been new to him, and she’d had only those brief times. Now that this had dragged into weeks and months and the novelty was already well worn off, it would be Ari who went to sleep and Ming who woke up. There weren’t any physical changes as such; that would take weeks under Kalindan biology, maybe longer. But the moves were different, the voice was different to a degree, and it began to spook the detail around him. He wasn’t waking up during this period, either, and so had no idea what went on when she was dominant, a fact Ming discovered with some satisfaction.

At first they thought he was faking it or, worse, was really crazy, but after they decided that this was in fact a second personality, they called the experts back in, which meant that Inspector Shissik traveled once more from the capital to Mahakor and waited around until she appeared. When she did, they notified him and brought her to the interrogation room.

Shissik had been frustrated in any attempts to bring the two newcomers together or to free either one from their ward status so that they could take whatever place in society they could manage and contribute. The politicians were too nervous to do it; it wasn’t rational, but if you saw what appeared to be a well-organized and prepared nest of agent provocateurs show up and create revolution and war along a large area, you might well be excused, he knew, for not trusting anybody.

The female, though, was so very gentle, and so very different even from the male, that he felt certain there was no danger. He simply didn’t have the authority to grant them freedom.

Now what was either a unique psychological condition, to Kalindans, a new wrinkle in newly processed aliens, or something to back up that incredibly wild story his superiors refused to credit as truthful, was just beginning to come to light.

Shissik was a trained investigator and one of the best interrogators in all the Interior Ministry, and before a word was spoken he knew that, while the body was the same, somebody else was now inside.

“I am Inspector Shissik. And you are…?”

“I am called Ming Dawn Pa—Palavri. The last is my family name.” She seemed to be distressed that she had problems getting that name out.

“You know where you are and what this is all about?”

“I have a good idea by now,” she admitted.

“Do you remember any of my conversations with Ari Martinez?”

She shook her head. “No, not real ones. I saw this room and a guy like you over there like now, but it was like in a dream, and I could make out no words.”

“How much do you remember?”

“Not much at all. I see me shot. I see—Ari—shoot me. Then there is a time like a long, dark—” She paused, as if groping for words. “—bad dream where I can see things here and there but not as one, and then I just blank out.”

“Do you feel complete? Mentally, that is?”

She thought about it. “No. There are holes. All sorts of things. Little things. Not just from the bad dream time, but way before, when I was a cop, and even stuff from my real life. It is like some of it just is not there. Like it has been— wiped out—by a flat black-and-white line art that kind of says what was once there, but gives no sense of real. Some of it is all gone. I—I have been told what they did to me, but that is a blank. I am not even sure I would like to know what it was like. To be—owned. To be owned and love it.”

Shissik nodded to himself and jotted a few things down in his notes. “It is not unusual for someone who has been entirely subjected to another’s will for a period to lose those things. The old personal feelings, personal memories and values, things that meant a lot to you but were irrelevant to the ‘new’ you, as it were, were either overwritten or filed away in what the brain uses for dead storage. Sometimes that storage can be retrieved when there is sudden stimulus, but I suspect not in your case. I think the dead storage was left when you sort of united with that computer. I think it’s still back there.”

That frightened her. A part of her, some of the most personal parts, gone? “And I just seem—slower. Less intuitive. I feel like I’m talking slower and looking for the right words. That, too?”

“Some of that can be because Ari considered the link-up a total genius working at the fastest imaginable speed. Coming back to normal might seem grindingly slow.” He didn’t mention the possibility that her emerging as mistress of the right brain and Ari master of the left brain might be part of it. Like Terrans, Kalindans—and many