9: Bedroom Night
WITH the optimism central to my personal worldview, I’d looked forward fondly to my next sharing with Lesy and Skalet, envisioning us under the arching trees of the Garden, within the stones of our private place.
Not so much on the carpet in Paul’s old room.
Still, I’d managed—granted, in haste and probable disarray—to sort the memories Lesy tore from my flesh before she struck. If she assimilated something that caused her distress, well, she shouldn’t have told me to “play with my Human,” should she?
A thought I’d remember later.
While she huddled in a corner—predictably Human again—absorbing everything I’d fed her about Esolesy Ki and her time in the Library, I remained on the carpet, doing my best not to leave a permanent stain. Much of the web-flesh I’d snatched in return held smug and odd views of faces I knew, including my own. With unsettling extra versions, as if whatever caught Lesy’s eye—mostly faces, with occasional pots—were somehow modified by her attention.
More than unsettling, disturbing. When I came across Paul’s face amended to have a long white braided beard and plucked eyebrows, I hurriedly began excising everything weird. Hence the potential for water stains. I could afford to shed mass; Lesy had brought up plants—in pots—to the room, though I wasn’t convinced she’d done it so much to supply prudent emergency mass for herself and guests as for an excuse to decorate more pots.
I kept her side of the interaction with Lionel Kearn, Lesy, as usual, delighted by her own cleverness in bypassing Skalet’s security systems. No wonder our other web-kin fretted. At least Lesy’d baked Lionel a cake. Though by the look on his face?
The Human had been too terrified to eat it. We’d a problem, and while I hated adding more to Paul’s lengthy pre-departure list? A reassuring how to live with your Web-being talk with Lionel had to be on it.
Unless it should be me. I’d some useful tips. Starting with let Lesy shop, a guaranteed way to distract my web-kin, and the infallible Lesy likes tickles—
No, better it be Paul, I decided, feeling again that reluctance to betray my own. Ersh.
Before taking hold of my molecular structure and expending energy to force it back into a Lanivarian, similar in concept to winding a spring as tightly as possible, I indulged in a fleeting moment of being myself. A teardrop of blue wasn’t a responsible thing to be around anyone but Paul; even with my dearest first friend, as a Web-being my ability to communicate with a planet-evolved life-form consisted of jauntily waving a pseudopod or two.
And to expose our true form was forbidden.
Where had that—? Ah, Lesy-taste, with a nauseating undertone of Elder righteousness. Ersh’s Rules. Lesy would have received the same stern message every time she’d shared with Ersh. I certainly had. Meaning she’d received it, over and over, for millennia before I was born, permeating every part of her—except for the purely Esen bits.
I took comfort that my latest sharing had included a fair amount of stomachs’ upset and vomit, then oozed over to the nearest pot for some mass.
Time to convince my web-kin to be me.
In hindsight, I should have known that’d be the easy part.
“What a splendid game, Youngest!” Human Lesy clapped her hands and spun around. “I’ll trick them all, you’ll see.” She paused her celebration to fix me with a look. “There’ll be new clothes? You promise? Beautiful silks? I’ll need those. And a jeweled bag. With blue jewels. I must have blue.”
“You’ll have new clothes, Lesy, but you have to carry my bag. Everyone here has seen me with it. It’s nice,” I defended, all at once protective.
“That thing?” Her eyebrow lifted. “You kept it? Why?”
I gave in, partly because I stood to inherit whatever my fashion-conscious web-kin picked, Lesy typically done with anything she’d used once. “Fine, order a new bag, but you must make sure everyone sees you with mine first or they’ll guess you aren’t Esolesy. It’s important.”
She planted a kiss on my nose. “Fear not. My impersonation shall be flawless! Oh, this shall be such epic fun—and here I thought I was done on this little world.”
“Pardon?” I’d tasted restlessness, but that was Lesy’s normal and Our Plan—technically Paul’s, since he’d come up with it, but I wasn’t about to say that to my web-kin—point being, I’d told Lesy moments ago we were to say Lesley Delacora had slipped away in the night to recharge her artistic well in a remote mountain retreat.
And nowhere in Our Plan did it say Lesley wasn’t coming back. More significantly, that Lesy wasn’t.
“My art from today cannot be surpassed, even by me,” Lesy responded, eyes glittering with pride. “To continue to create, I must have new vistas to inspire me.” Her hand rose to the sky. “I’ve found the perfect place. Wait till you see the view.”
Her smile held that troubling hunger.
While potentially reassured “Esolesy Ki” wouldn’t be lumbering around artfully defacing property in my absence, this I had to nip in the bud. “But you must stay with our Web—” She’d only come back from the dead last fall.
“Silly Youngest.” Her other hand rose, as if to launch her Human-self. “Our Web meets on Picco’s Moon, with Ersh.”
I’d allowed her that fantasy, kept from her the end of Ersh’s Web because she’d pleaded with me to spare her from the truth. Had it been a mistake?
“I know what you’re going to say, Es.”
Good. I didn’t. I lifted my ears to indicate interest.
“You’re going to say I mustn’t leave and go anywhere fun without you.” Lesy touched my ear tip tenderly.
She was half right. I swallowed, glad to be sitting on my betraying tail, and ventured, “So you’ll be here when I get back.”
“Why? You don’t need to bother coming back either. Come where I’ve planned, or I’ll meet you wherever you say. Though if it’s boring, Youngest—” a tap on my nose, “—we simply won’t stay.”
Centuries we’d traveled together, those sporadic trips with Lesy highlights of my life, and for less than a beat of this me’s heart, I was willing. Despite the tidying up, fetching, carrying, and interminable Youngest, would you be a dear . . . , being with Lesy offered giggles and joy and freedom from responsibility, other than caring for her.
And nothing more. No watching for another destructive Web-being. No protecting the innocent from ignorance, theirs or others’. No Library. No chips from the pub or fudge from Henri. No mousel hunts around Duggs’ cabin on card nights.
No Paul.
I don’t know what she saw in my face, but Lesy took a step back, her eyes wide.
“It’s all right,” I said softly, rising to two feet. I held out my paws. “When I return, we’ll talk about this. I’ll understand if you don’t want to stay. I’ll come with you and help you make your life where you want but—this is my home, Lesy.”
“For how long?” she demanded, her voice thin and strained. “Until he dies? They do, you know. They all do. They fall like raindrops into an ocean.”
“I know.” I let the words fill the air between us, the way they occupied the space within the atoms of my flesh. Then, as calmly as if I were the Elder, I continued, “For now, this is where I belong. And right now?” Easing forward, I caught her hands in mine, squeezing gently. “I need you to stay, Lesy, to be me while I go hunting. There’s an unknown life-form out there. A potentially dangerous one. For years, it’s been leaving empty starships adrift along a path— What is it?”
Her lips were working as if trying to speak. All at once, a word dropped out. “Null.”
I stared at her. “What did you say?”
Lesy whimpered and tried to pull free, her face gone white. “The Null. The Null.”
She knew? Aghast, I held onto her. “What are you saying? What are the ‘Null’?”
“No, Esen. No. No. No. Null aren’t real. Ersh told me so. She promised. They’re just my dreams. Bad horrible dreams. Ersh told me not to think about them.” With a rising note of accusation, “You shouldn’t have made me think about them!”
There’d been nothing like this in her sharing with me but—I hadn’t assimilated all of Lesy. If I had, there’d be nothing left of her—and little of me.
Words would have to do. Releasing her hands, I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Tell me what you know!”
“If you hadn’t said . . . I’d almost forgotten . . . you shouldn’t have said . . . Ersh said to forget them . . . bad dreams . . . horrible—” Without warning Lesy began to thrash, hair whipping into my face, words spilling in a barely coherent flood. “Bad—Dream—Bad—Null hide behind their door—Null wait inside their hole—” A crescendo close to a scream, spittle hitting my face. “ARMS OF LIGHTNING FIRE—GRABBING—PULLING—STAY AWAY OR DIE—GET AWAY OR DIE—”
Lesy broke my grip but didn’t run. Wrapping her arms around herself, she sank to the floor. Hair obscured her face as she began to chant, over and over, in a chilling monotone. “Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream.”
Then why was I afraid?