During the first year of captivity, I accompanied Adille and her current patron, Bargom, to the pleasure quarter to meet some old friends. They stopped at various stalls, including one tiny one where Adille saw a kind of bib lying under a glass bell. Made of many tiny beads, it created pictures.
“Bargom!” Adille cried. “Look at this! Doesn’t that look like you?” As it did, the bead colors shifting suddenly to create the very likeness of Bargom when he was startled, side-eyes very wide and angry.
“Nonsense,” he said. “It looks like your mother.”
I stepped a little to one side and saw what he meant. It did resemble Adille’s female parent, who from time to time cohabited with Adille.
“How does it do that?” cried Adille. “Oh, Bargom, look at the tag. It’s only twenty mantrim. You promised me something fun to amuse me during my molting. Buy it for me.”
“Surely it’s only a trick,” he said.
“Not at all,” murmured the stall owner, who had appeared from behind a curtain as they stared. “It portrays memories, which it captures from the minds of those who confront it. Each owner helps it develop more complexity. Here on Cantardene, K’Famir images mostly, though on occasion it will portray events.”
I recognized him as a Thongal, a serpentine, periodically sexless race that was occasionally seen in the Cantardene markets. I had been told of this race at school. This particular Thongal had tattered ears and abraded hollows below his eyes where his heat sensors and rudimentary sex organs should have been, routine punishment on the home planet. It lifted the glass bell so Adille could see the necklace more closely while she stroked the shining surface of the minute beads.
“A strange thing to be so cheaply priced,” said Bargom, peering at it but coming no nearer.
“A strange thing is not always much desired,” the Thongal said, with a deprecating snarl. “K’famir prefer the familiar.”
“Is it a necklace?” cried Adille.
“It could be, if one wished to wear it, though I am told it may become too heavy to be worn comfortably.”
Adille reached forward and picked it up from the velvet pad, hefting it between her palps, laughing. “Not heavy at all! Oh, Bargom, do get it for me.”
I reached up to stroke the glowing beads, running the tip of one finger over them, looking up to catch the Thongal’s eyes fixed upon me.
“Pretty pet the lady has,” said the Thongal. “May one ask its name?”
“Ongamar,” said Adille, casually. “Though it had another one. What was it, human?”
“Margaret,” I murmured, catching a peculiar expression in the Thongal’s eyes. Amusement? Glee? Satisfaction?
“Margaret,” it purred. “From Earth, no doubt.”
Bargom had found a forty-mantrim note in his pouch, and the Thongal took it with a gloved hand, passing the necklace and the change back to Adille in those same gloved hands. Adille waited while I fastened the clasp around her neck, then we went on to the evening entertainment: dinner at a restaurant, where I stood beside Adille’s place to cut her food, meantime watching her necklace shifting and changing, sometimes somber, sometimes violent in color and action.
After the meal, Adille and Bargom had front-row seats at a pouch-howling concert, while I waited in the “servant races” section, just far enough off the lobby to be spared the worst of the cacophony. When we reached home, the necklace was taken off and laid upon the ledge of Adille’s grooming trough.
“You know,” said Adille, rubbing her throat pouch, “it really is heavier than it feels. My neck is quite weary from it.”
I stood beside the trough, examining the necklace without touching it, for when I had touched it before, I had felt a threatening emanation, tangible as a smell, as though something dangerous had wakened and looked at me with recognition. As the Thongal stall owner had done. As though he knew of me, which was an unpleasant thought.
“Great Lady,” I murmured, “perhaps it might be best not to wear it very often.”
“Nonsense, Ongamar,” said the K’Famira. “It’s just that we’ve had a long day, and I’m a bit tired.”
I was unconvinced. To all the regrets I had brought from Earth, I now added one more: a deep regret at having touched the thing at all. Somehow, though Adille had received the gift, I felt it had been intended for Margaret-by-any-name, as a trap intended for a particular victim might allow someone else to fall into it first. So Adille had been caught, but the trap was not dissatisfied, for it had caught me as well.
I Am Naumi/on Thairy
The ship bringing me from Earth landed on the colony world of Thairy. A door opened from the ship into a somewhere outside, a place full of mist, an impenetrable nothingness. Voices echoed, but they made no sense. Words were meaningless. I was moved here and there. I had a sense of motion but not a sense of being, as though it happened, had happened, was happening to someone else. I was aware, but not sensible of. I laughed quietly to myself, finding this all most amusing.
Then suddenly, not. Something reached inside me and pulled. It wasn’t pain, one couldn’t call it pain, but it was not something one wanted to happen, it was a strangeness one wanted desperately to stop happening. I cried out. There was an abrupt sound, as though someone spoke angrily in an unknown language, and a dark curtain came down.
When I, Naumi, wakened, I found myself in a narrow bed in a small, very clean room. Very clean, I thought, and empty, for it held only the bed, a stool beside the bed, and a few pegs with clothing hanging on them on the far wall. Above the pegs was a label: Naumi’s clothes. Below the peg, a shelf, a label: Naumi’s shoes. I read this with some concern. Who was Naumi?
The sound of feet outside somewhere, then a white door opened through a
