“Not the box. Not the box. Us. The way we were.”
The words went spinning off into nothingness. Oh, the way we were. Silence greeted the words. Quick breaths, but no other sound. The way we were. Who would listen to a plea to put them back the way they were when they had prayed so long to be something else?
“Nela, stop crying!”
Nela’s eyes opened, almost against her will. “I’m changed,” she said. “Berty, we’re changed.”
“I thought you wanted to be,” cried Bertran. “You told me you did.”
“Did,” Nela moaned. “Did. Not like this. All of a sudden. No time. No time to get …”
“We wanted to be separated,” cried Bertran.
“But we wanted to be us! We didn’t not want to be us!”
“How do we know what we are,” shouted Bertran. “All you’re doing is howling!”
She caught her breath. There had been something of Sizzy in those words, something of old Sister Jean Luc saying calm down. Stop having hysterics. Look around!
Which she did, slowly, with many false starts. She wasn’t hideous, Bertran wasn’t hideous. Not themselves, but not awful. Not ugly. Not human, but not ugly. Better than the boxes. Some better. But … but they were freakish still. There would be no others like themselves. It took no time to realize this. They knew at once they were still oddities, still sideshow stuff, platform people. “See the seal-man, umpteenth wonder of the world, he dives, he floats, he eats raw fish. See the bird-woman….”
“It was all those dreams,” whispered Nela. “All those dreams of flying, Berty. Whatever did this read my dreams. I didn’t mean them for real, but it thought I did.”
Examining his webbed feet, Bertran knew she was right. He hadn’t meant it either. A fantasy, that was all. An indulgent fantasy, assiduously cultivated as one drifted off into sleep, a substitute for infantile thumb-sucking or adolescent masturbation. A fairy tale to while away a drowsy afternoon, this dream of floating, diving, plunging through emerald depths of liquid joy. Himself was what he really wanted. Himself as he might have been.
Still, it was better than the box.
He said so, and Nela caught her breath in a gasp of remembered horror. Oh, yes, better than the box.
Bertran sat up to run his webbed fingers down his sides, feeling them sleek and continuous from under the arms, across the ribs, down the flank, onto the hip, down the thigh. Continuous. Single. No longer joined.
Nela opened her wings and dragged them down, feeling the stiff slide of quill against quill, hearing a silken rattle of movement. Her feet left the ground. She reacted with panic and dismay. “My bones are hollow,” she whispered, terrified by her lightness. “Even my skull is hollow.” She ran her hands down her feathered breast, continuous and sleek. “Probably I can fly.”
“I can swim,” said the otter simultaneously, remembering his dream, letting the delights of that dream move him out and down into the shallows of the river, across the sandy bottom into the depths. He disappeared, erupting from the ripples moments later to come staggering and trembling back onto the sand, coughing water. “Cold,” he cried. “Cold and full of strange things.” It was not like the dream.
Nela, moved by a like impulse, had sprung into the air and circled upward. Suddenly she looked down, cried terror, and fell, wings thrashing, to tumble sobbing onto the sand nearby. “High,” she wept. “Oh, high, and all alone!”
They cried for a time, wondering, lost, their ignorance and confusion as frightening as their structure. They felt part terror, part curiosity, much loneliness. Their identities were true, but all else was conjecture.
Bertran squirmed on the pebbles, getting slowly to his feet. He could stand upright. Or he could walk on all fours. Either one. “It was that thing, the one Jory spoke of, the Arbai thing,” he said dully.
“The Arbai Device?” asked Nela. “The one she was talking about on the ship? Jory said that was a communication device.” This was mere conversation, for she knew that Bertran was right. The moment he said it, both of them recognized the rightness of it. Of course. They had been saved, transformed, by the Arbai Device.
Bertran touched her leg with one webbed hand. “It is a communication device. That’s what happened. We’ve communicated. All our fantasies, our dreams, they’ve been communicated. To … to something.”
“Oh, yes,” Nela commented as she staggered across the sand to sit beside him, fitting herself beneath his arm in her usual place. “Just like Mama used to read us stories. This time we told our own stories….”
Silence on the sandspit. Out of the sky a thing came at them suddenly, a tiny flying thing full of ugly danger. Bertran put up a quick paw and deflected it onto the sand where it lay groaning and screaming to itself. Writhing fibers lassoed it and joined instantaneously into a fibrous casing. The thing became a buzzing lump upon the sand. Then it was nothing at all.
“The monsters out there want to kill us,” Bertran said. “The gods. Those things. They hate us because we escaped.” He knew this was true, just as he knew other things.
“They can’t kill us here,” said Nela. “They might hurt us, but they can’t kill us.”
“But they can kill everyone else,” Bertran commented.
“All our friends!” cried Nela. “Oh, everyone we met, all dead.”
“The sailors on the Curward ship,” mourned Bertran. “The froggy people of Shallow. The music makers of Choire, and the Heron Folk of Salt Maresh. The Houm and the Murrey in Derbeck.”
“All of them,” wept Nela. “All of them.” Tears flowed from her human eyes and down onto bird feathers, making them soggy. She grieved, and her grief was noticed by the probing network that occupied her as it did the interstices in the sand. Her sorrow was real, a part of gray leaf and gray tree and gray wind rising. A part
