Entanglement Bound: An Epic Space Opera Series (Entangled Universe Book 1) Page 11

  "What about the Wisper on this Aether Gaia base?" Clarity asked.

  "What now?" Irohann said.

  Clarity leaned close to him and said, "There's another Wisper who's been helping breed these starwhal spaceships. She spoke to me when I was hooked up to Cassiopeia's brain."

  "Wait, what? Hooked up to her brain?"

  "Sure," Clarity said. "That's why Roscoe isn't... feeling well. He didn't want to have sucker disks attached to his face and skull, hooking his brain directly up to the starwhal's brain."

  Irohann looked aghast. His long muzzle pulled tight, stricken. "Apparently I missed a lot while I was helping Am-lei and Jeko with their cargo crate."

  "That reminds me of two questions," Clarity said, focusing again on Wisper. "One, can you turn off all the creepy surveillance cameras inside this ship? And two, what the hell is in the bio-matter crate? Jeko was ready to kill me over it while we were..." Her words were swallowed up in a sob as she tried to make herself say, "evacuating The Serendipity."

  "I have no idea what is in Am-lei's crate," Wisper said. "And I'm sure the surveillance cameras can be, well, if not entirely disabled, they can be stopped from displaying on the screens in Cassie's cockpit. I assume that's what's making you uncomfortable. But you'll have to talk to Cassie about it."

  There was a strange thought—explaining privacy to a giant space child who could sense everything going on inside of her. Clarity had always thought of The Serendipity as having a certain amount of personality; she'd thought of her ship, her home, as almost another person in her life. But The Serendipity was not a person, did not have opinions, and could not argue back.

  Clarity definitely had mixed feelings about the idea of a spaceship being alive. "Why in the hell were scientists developing living spaceships? Are they faster than normal ones? Or... stealthier?"

  "They're more robust and sustainable," Wisper said.

  "That's... surprising," Irohann said.

  "Not really," Wisper said. "Starwals evolved to live in the depths of space. Metal spaceships are an artificial construction, designed by planet-dwellers."

  Clarity pointed at the food synthesizer. "How is that not artificial?"

  "If the food synthesizer breaks down, there are other options aboard a starwal vessel." Wisper pointed with a metal claw, jarringly mechanical in this environment, at the bank of udders.

  Clarity shuddered again. "You're telling me that's natural?"

  "I'm telling you it's adapted from a biology and anatomy designed for deep space," Wisper said.

  "Okay," Irohann said. "What about the air we're breathing?"

  "One of Cassiopeia's internal organs has been laced with high-powered algae, developed at Wespirtech—"

  "Of course, Wespirtech," Clarity muttered.

  Wisper ignored her and continued. "—that recycles the air for any of her oxygen-breathing passengers."

  "Like us," Irohann said.

  "Like you," Wisper agreed, subtly reminding them she did not in fact breathe.

  "Does Cassiopeia know where we're flying to?" Clarity asked. "This Merlin pulsar?"

  "Not yet," Wisper said. "I can give you the coordinates when we return to the cockpit."

  "How far is it?" Clarity asked, the possible expanse of time and space stretching out in front of her. She had no idea how long of a mission she'd signed herself and Irohann up for.

  "Cassiopeia's top speed is not known," Wisper said. "Also, I don't know how often she'll have to stop to feed."

  "An estimate," Irohann prompted.

  "Two weeks," Wisper said.

  Her answer could have been worse. Her answer could also be a lie, an overly optimistic estimation, designed to keep Clarity and Irohann from revolting.

  Clarity didn't care. She had nowhere else to go right now. She'd just watched her home torn to shreds. Besides, she was in this to save the universe. "It's an adventure," she told Irohann, whose ears were still skewed. "Remember?"

  Irohann's ears straightened, and his tail swished against the dark purple flesh of the bench they were sitting on. The flesh of Cassie, the benevolent beast who was silently all around them.

  13 Flying Together

  Two and a half hours later, Roscoe had still not been found. As Irohann said, Cassie's innards were like a maze—twisty, fleshy passageways, filled with pockets of ventricles and vesicles. The bunny-man could be hiding anywhere from his starwhal paramour. Anywhere inside her, that is. The airlocks had not reopened since Clarity, Jeko, and the cargo crate had escaped from the depressurization of The Serendipity.

  During those two-and-a-half hours, Cassie had frolicked about the clearing in the asteroid field, saying goodbye to the other starwhals. Clarity knew this because Cassie eagerly babbled the images to her when they melded again. Cassie didn't seem aware that none of the other starwhals seemed sorry to see her go. It was odd to Clarity that she could already pick up on starwhal body language—the tilts, the barrel rolls, the tightened belly fins, the expanded tube organs—simply from sharing a mind space with Cassie, who still seemed blissfully ignorant of the complexity behind those physical gestures.

  Cassie could convey the straightforward knowledge of how the starwhals reacted to her goodbyes to Clarity; she didn't necessarily understand the undertones and complexity involved in social dynamics. The partial truths; the convenient lies of omission.

  Clarity supposed a clever starwhal like Cassie might have suffered from being a social outcast, even without the scientists wiring her up, making her the example for the others to strive toward. Even so, Clarity wasn't at all sure the scientists had done Cassie any favors, regardless of her fervent belief that she could not have lived a life without the knowledge of bunnies.

  After Cassie finished babbling her own recent experiences to Clarity, flooding her mind with imagery, the eager starwhal moved on to rifling through Clarity's own recent memories like a prize pig snuffling through dirt for truffles.

  Cassie pulled up visual memories of each of Clarity's favorite dolls—the ones she'd packed into her duffle bag a week ago to clear them out of the way for Jeko and Am-lei. An hour ago, she'd arranged each of those dolls carefully on the top of a cabinet in one of Cassie's ventricle rooms. Irohann had helped Clarity pick a room close to the cockpit—Cassie's brain, as Clarity thought of it.

  Cassie had watched her new pilot set out the tiny dolls with interest, but she could see them so much better now. Inside Clarity's memory the view of her beloved dolls was much clearer, closer and more intimate, than it had been through the security cameras installed everywhere inside of Cassie's body.

  "You need to turn those off," Clarity said through her mind connection to Cassie.

  Cassie didn't answer; she was still turning over Clarity's visual memories, examining each doll from every angle, remembering how it felt to hold their small, artificial bodies in her hands. Experiencing what it felt like to have hands.

  "Cassie," Clarity said, trying to wrest away the starwhal's attention. "Did you bond with any of the scientists like this? Don't you know what it's like to have hands from connecting to scientists from the Aether Gaia base?"

  "They don't bond," Cassie said simply. "Not directly." She shared an image of a team of scientists inside her cockpit, three of them, hooking her sucker disks up to an intermediary interface—some sort of specially designed computer simulating the biological signals her sucker disks looked for. But instead of connecting Cassie's mind to another mind, the computer had connected Cassie's mind to a computer program—a hollow experience in comparison.

  "Except for the bunnies," Cassie insisted, flooding Clarity's mind with memories of photographs and videos of adorable bunnies.

  There was so much to sort out and untangle inside of Cassie's mind, it was hard for Clarity to stay focused on a single, important directive. "We need to be ready to leave," she said. "As soon as the force field drops, we need to fly away from here."

  "I'm scared," Cassie said. She pictured the gap between those three aste
roids—the cracked one, the spherical one, the pale one—and she tried to picture what was on the other side, but Cassie had never been there. She'd never been outside of this bubble of a clearing in this asteroid field, and when she tried to imagine the outside universe, all she could picture was an overwhelming well of emptiness, blankness, static. The way a human-like species, born and bred on a planet, might picture outer space. Except, Cassie already lived in the vacuum of space.

  Clarity cast images from her own memories to Cassie, trying to fill in the deep well of uncertainty. She pictured the crowds of aliens inside Crossroads Station; the golden hillsides and singing trees of planet Da Vinci; a space station called Ob'glaung, run by an aquatic species and filled with water instead of air, where Clarity had had to wear a breathing helmet inside.

  Everything Clarity pictured was nonsense to Cassie—fascinating nonsense—but nonsense, nonetheless. She was picturing the insides of the places she'd been to; she needed to picture the outsides for them to make sense to Cassie.

  So, Clarity remembered watching Crossroads Station with Am-lei, the last time they'd flown away: those concentric rings of metal, spinning together, twinkling with diamond-like windows. She pictured the green and purple space dust outside of The Serendipity's windows when they'd flown through the Monsoon Nebula. She pictured this very asteroid belt, as it had looked during their approach: a long, wide band of rubble, mottling the darkness of space. She pictured the planet Da Vinci from above—gold and green continents set into an aquamarine ocean like gems, all of it under ice cream swirls of vanilla clouds.

  "These are the places you can fly, if we get out of here," Clarity said.

  "You'll take me?" Cassie asked.

  Clarity couldn't lie to this hopeful child. "I don't know if I'll take you, but I promise I'll make sure you have a good pilot."

  "Like Roscoe." Cassie sounded even more hopeful. No matter how she tried to suppress it, Clarity could hear the echoes of bunny, bunny, bunny chasing each other around Cassie's mind.

  "Maybe," Clarity offered. It was the best she could do.

  "He's in the cockpit," Cassie said, sounding breathless, no matter how little sense that made coming from a creature of vacuum.

  Clarity suddenly found herself looking at the cockpit from Cassie's angle—she saw herself, a smooth-skinned primate, slumped in the dimpled captain's chair with the sucker disks attached to her face and skull; her long green hair had fallen forward, blocking much of her view through her own eyes, but she'd been too busy communing with Cassie to notice. Beside her, Wisper stood, straight-backed, glassy eyes wide open, staring at the bank of computer screens, trying to discern what Clarity and Cassie were up to by the visual traces left there. But behind both of them, pressed up against the wall inside the mouth of one of the vein-like hallways, Roscoe crouched, leaning heavily on his walking stick.

  His nose twitched rapidly, and one of his ears kept flipping up and falling back to half mast. The fur on his paws and face looked soft and glossy, gray like an overcast sky on a snowy day, and his whiskers curved down from his face in a serious expression.

  Clarity was filled with the desire to give Roscoe a hug, stroke his flopped ear with her fingers and snuggle her face against the fluffy fur on his cheek. It wasn't her own desire. It was Cassie, trying to funnel her starwhal mind down into Clarity's body.

  "Why did they show you bunny pictures?" Clarity asked Cassie.

  "I like them," Cassie said, still fiercely imagining wrapping Roscoe up in a big bear hug with the arms that weren't actually hers.

  "Yes, but how did you know you liked them?" Clarity asked "I mean, what was the very first bunny picture or video you ever saw?"

  Cassie had so many images of bunnies in her mind that it took a moment to sort through all of them, all the way back to a video of an orange-and-white splotched rabbit, hopping slowly through a carpeted room, following a trail of kibble or cereal and stopping to munch each piece along the way. Examining the memory, Clarity discovered it was a video that had been playing on the computer the very first time the three scientists had hooked it up to commune indirectly with Cassie.

  It hadn't been an intentional introduction. One of the scientists had simply been watching cute animal videos and forgotten to turn them off before hooking up the computer.

  "Oh, Cassie," Clarity said.

  It really had been love at first sight for Cassie and the concept of bunnies—the twitchy noses, the puffy white tails, and the long, long ears. Cassie was dying to know if Roscoe had a puffy white tail hidden under his coarse brown jumpsuit. Although, she had enough decorum to be embarrassed when Clarity discovered the thought. In defense, Cassie shared a whole new category of bunny pictures from her memories: illustrations of handsome little rabbits wearing overalls, long coats, and fancy hats, probably pulled out of children's picture books. In every illustration, the rabbits' clothes left room for the adorable, little, puffy tails to poke out.

  "Roscoe isn't a rabbit," Clarity reminded Cassie.

  "He's a sentient lapine." Cassie pronounced the words carefully, like a child practicing spelling words. "I know."

  "And he—"

  The cultured, aristocratic voice of Wisper 2 broke into Clarity and Cassie's shared consciousness: "The force field will drop in fifty seconds. The longer I have to keep it down, the more likely it is your escape will be discovered before you've made it out of the Eridani 7 system."

  No well wishes this time, Clarity noticed. All business. She wondered what kind of chaos Wisper 2 was dealing with among her scientists. Who did they think had sent an automated vessel to attack them? And why? And what would they do about it...?

  These were not Clarity's problems. She was too busy with Wisper 1's problems to worry about Wisper 2's. Imagine that—having so many problems they had to be divided up between different instances of yourself.

  "Focus," Clarity told herself. "We need to fly out of here now." She felt outwards with her mind, trying to fill out every corner of Cassie's starwhal body in the way Cassie had tried to funnel herself into Clarity's human form.

  Clarity focused all of her attention on the gap between the three asteroids—broken, spherical, pale—and she felt her shared starwhal body respond. Her tube organs swelled, opening wide, and then constricting again to shoot out a blast of ionized particles. Like a jetpack, her tube organs boosted her across the empty vacuum. Her belly fin rippled as she sailed through the space. She had no idea why, but it was what Cassie's body wanted to do.

  "Don't fight," Cassie said.

  "Don't fight?" Clarity was confused.

  "Don't fight me," Cassie said. "I can fly."

  At the admonishment, Clarity realized she'd been doing the mental equivalent of balling her hands into fists, tensing her shoulders, and bracing her legs for a sudden sprint. She worked on relaxing, letting go, and she felt her belly fin slow to a laconic wave, then settle to stillness.

  Cassie had this. Cassie knew how to fly.

  "So, what am I here for?" Clarity asked.

  "Don't know," Cassie answered.

  And of course, that was the answer. There was no good reason for a human—or a sentient lapine, or any other planet-dweller—to muddle their brain up with a starwhal's, trying to backseat drive her like she was a vehicle. Cassie wasn't a vehicle, and she didn't need Clarity's help to fly.

  Doing her best to stay mentally out of Cassie's way, Clarity enjoyed the unearned privilege of swooping through space, naked to the vacuum against her dark purple skin. Cassie's long, spiraled horn pierced perfectly through the center point between the cracked, the spherical, and the pale asteroids. She shot through like a trained dolphin jumping through a hoop, twisting as she flew. As soon as Cassie passed through the invisible plane connecting those three asteroids, the force field flickered back on with a burst of blue light crisscrossing in geometric gridlines. Cassie jetted with her right tube organ, taking a steep turn to the left. She daisy-chained through the field of asteroids, slinging off thei
r minor gravity fields with an instinctual skill that had Clarity marveling.

  Cassie was an athlete, an artist, a dancer. Clarity's thoughts and feelings overflowed with superlatives. She'd never felt anything before like the freedom and grace she was experiencing through sharing Cassie's body.

  If a starwhal could blush, Cassie would have at Clarity's effusive thoughts. The young starwhal felt proud and happy to have impressed her pilot so much, and Clarity felt a twinge of shame at the idea of such a beautiful and clearly sentient creature ever thinking of her as "her pilot."

  "What have my people done..." Clarity whispered with her true mouth for Wisper, and Roscoe who was still hiding in the mouth of the vein-like hallway, to hear.

  But Cassie heard her too and answered, "They've given me you and bu—" The starwhal corrected herself before finishing the word. "Roscoe." Her answer was accompanied by a warm sense of love and home and the almost imperceptible echo of bunny, bunny, bunny.

  As soon as she emerged from the asteroid field, Cassie did a totally unnecessary but exhilarating barrel roll; it made Clarity feel a dizzy thrill of butterflies in her stomach, like a really good rollercoaster. Then Cassie latched her mind onto the coordinates Wisper had given Clarity for the pulsar Merlin, and her body twisted in a way that felt more than three-dimensional to Clarity. She slipped out of normal space like a dolphin submerging into deeper water, sliding from the warm, sun-baked surface of the ocean into an icy underwater current, flowing fast and cold.

  Time distorted and lost meaning as Clarity fell through a rip in space-time like Alice falling down the hole to Wonderland. Stars appeared at her side and flickered away; large and orange, small and blue, each of them a flash of heat that had to be an illusion.