"Give me your attention," Rhodane said in Brumallian, though the subtext she signed went something like, "Consensus Speaker business—stop staring at the weird human." She continued out loud with, "I want ten worms—six of them overcooked."
Once the stallholder got over her surprise she pulled on gauntlets and began the dodgy task of pulling arm-thick worms from a nearby basket and threading them onto long steel skewers, before plunging them into a pot of boiling water.
"Why overcooked?" I asked.
"It weakens the acid content, which is more acceptable to me, and I presume would be more acceptable to you?"
"You presume right."
Six skewered worms squirmed and thrashed in the boiling water. The stallholder paused for a while before dropping in the remaining four, long enough only for them to stop thrashing about. I felt a surge of nostalgia for Spatterjay, where similar monsters met a similar end in similar pots. By this time the quofarl I had thrown into the water had turned up. I expected some display of anger or resentment, but he showed none I could identify.
"Grobbleworms—" he rubbed his meaty hands together.
"— good," his companion completed.
Meaty hands continued, "You weren't joking—"
"— about being hungry," the companion supplied.
Rhodane took the four minimally cooked worms from the stallholder and handed them to the two quofarl, who, holding the skewers in their right hands whilst pulling off shell with mandibles and left hand, began stuffing the gristly meat into their mouths. Observing them, I realised one did not really need mandibles, since these worms looked no more difficult to eat than say a lobster or a prill. When at last the six overcooked worms were ready, Rhodane took two for herself and handed the remaining four to me. I placed three of the loaded skewers down on the stall and impatiently started on the other, pulling the worm apart and stuffing chunks into my mouth and sometimes chewing up shell as well as flesh. It took the skin off the inside of my mouth, burned like jalapeño chillies and caused such an eructatious racket in my stomach that those passers-by who stopped to gaze at me hung around to listen to the symphony until Rhodane shooed them away. But my body's need took over, quickly regrowing damaged skin in my mouth and adjusting itself to this acidic nutriment. By the time I sucked the last piece of meat from the last piece of shell, the worms tasted like chilli-flavoured frog-whelk to me, and I was hooked.
"Less chance of you turning dangerous now?" Rhodane asked, eyeing the remnants of shell and the discarded skewers about my feet.
I glanced longingly at the pot, but the worms had taken the edge off my hunger so I decided not to push my luck. "That will sustain me for a little while," I conceded.
She handed a small black rod to the stallholder, who pressed it into some kind of reader before handing it back. Some transaction had obviously just taken place. I knew nothing about their economic system here, but supposed they must use some form of currency since few human societies ever have managed to survive without it. We moved on, stared at all the while. As I walked, feeling a little calmer and more able to assess my situation, I considered what I had seen back at the stall. The Brumallians didn't really need mandibles to handle their food, so were they a result of inefficient recombinant techniques, or had some bastard in their past saddled these people with mandibles to make some obscure ideological point? Again, one of those things I would probably never find out.
Yishna—on Corisanthe Main
The screen showed the distinct words:
HATE… SKIRL SAND… IMPACTED… FIRE
Keleon, the OCT who had heard those words in his mind, had told her in detail the sensations and thoughts accompanying them. He had experienced the usual fantasies, some violent, some sexual. He described to her how he imagined setting at each other's throats two OCTs he knew had had him thrown out of the Cognisants—yet another sect aboard this station—then went on to describe to her how he had vividly visualised buggering her over a console in a study unit. After this Keleon had taken the opportunity to suggest that this might be something they could try—strictly in the interests of research. Yishna had subsequently dismissed him and had used her consoles for more prosaic activities.
The workings of the human brain were intricate indeed, sometimes annoyingly illogical to Yishna when compared with computers; but thus far that lump of pinkish organic matter was the only instrument sensitive enough to detect bleed-over. In her first year aboard Corisanthe Main she had worked on developing ways of recording the workings of the brain. Delving into the research of others, she mapped its function and learnt how to interpret electrical and biochemical readings as thoughts. From this she managed to create audio recordings of bleed-over and listened with growing disappointment to the disconnected and sometimes half-formed words that seemed merely the product of random selection from some lexicon. Further studies revealed that these thoughts arose out of deeper functions of the brain; the words being merely the bubbles bursting at the surface of a pool, and therefore only an indication of deeper activity. She did, however, create complex linguistic programs in order to analyse these first recordings by comparing content with source. Some interesting connections arose, but never enough to understand the purpose of bleed-over, if it even possessed one.
Keleon had become the source of more information, for he was the first to volunteer for surgery and try out the new hardware. A year ago Yishna had designed both hardware capable of surviving in the hostile environment of the human body and the surgical techniques for installing it. She often went back to his file in search of inspiration, or in the hope of seeing something new. As she studied the cladograms of synaptic activity, applied comparative programs and mapped the course of thoughts through his brain, she mused and speculated. Perhaps bleed-over, weakened almost to non-existence outside Ozark Containment, was the actual cause of all the flourishing sects aboard this station? In fact she felt sure it was the cause of most of the strangeness aboard Corisanthe Main. Telepathic inductance, the OCTs called it. She did not believe that was what it was, but for her it was no longer the issue. The Worm affected humans who got close. She also felt certain that the definitely emotional elements of bleed-over indicated the Worm was self-aware—that was the issue.
Yishna closed the file, stood up and walked to the window of the study unit, to gaze down into Centre Cross Chamber. As always, there was much work in progress: old equipment in the containment cylinders being replaced, refurbished; new designs of scanner being brought in for trial; and as ever the perpetual checking of security. After watching for a little while, she returned to her touch-screens, keyed into the networks, and began checking on published research and looking for news of new developments.
Unlike others working here Yishna frequently published her research for, unlike those others, knowledge not status was her goal, and by publishing quickly she received much useful feedback. It did not concern her that other scientists frequently took her work and ran with it, that around her a whole network of R & D had sprung up, and that some of them awaited her publications with something approaching desperation. Only recently had she learned that both Fleet and Combine scientific teams were developing her hardware—surgically implanted inside the brain—for the purpose of controlling ship and satellite systems, for the fast analysis of information, for many operations that shortened and made more efficient the link between thought and action. She had watched with interest the trials of new surgically implanted communications hardware; how Fleet tacoms—ship's communications, logistics and tactical officers—became capable of comprehending multiple visual and audio inputs, and then acting on them with computer speed.