“What is your obsession with me feeling the air?” I asked him. Them. The Vosth.
You would be safe, Vosth-Menley insisted.
I should have asked Endria if the Vosth could lie. I should have kept a running list of things I needed to ask. “Listen,” I said.
We would like to understand, Vosth-Menley said again.
I read a lot of Earth lit. I’d never seen a butterfly, but I knew the metaphor of kids who’d pull off their wings. Looking at Menley, I wondered if the Vosth were like children, oblivious to their own cruelty. “What would you do if someone could take you over?”
Our biology is not comparable to yours, Vosth-Menley said.
Bad hypothetical. “What would you do if someone tried to kill you?”
It is our perception of reality that species attempt to prolong their own existence, he said.
“Yeah.” I was having trouble following my own conversation. “Look, you’re a dominant species, and we’re supposed to have a reciprocal relationship, but you take people over and—look.” I’d gone past talking myself in circles and was talking myself in scatterplots.
The back of my neck itched, and I couldn’t ignore it.
“What if I do want to take off my suit?” I asked, and then scatterplotted, “Do you have any reason to lie to me?”
The Vosth considered. Yes.
Oh. Okay. Great.
Our present actions are concurrent with a different directive, he added. There is reason to establish honesty.
Nothing was stopping him from attacking. He could have torn off my suit or helmet by now. Even if it was a risk, and it was a risk, and even if I had a phobia the size of the meterorite the Vosth had ridden in…
I’d seen how many Vosth had swarmed over Menley’s whole body, and how long it had taken him to stop twitching. If it was just a few of them, I might be able to run back to the compound. Then, if the governors really had a cure, they could cure me. And I’d feel fine about tricking the Vosth into being test subjects if they’d tricked me into being a host. That’s what I told myself. I didn’t feel fine about anything.
I brought my gloves to the catch on my helmet.
Two minutes later I was still standing like that, with the catch still sealed, and Vosth-Menley was still staring.
“You could come back to the compound with me,” I said. “The governors would love to see you.”
We are curious as to the conditions of your constructed habitat, Vosth-Menley said.
Yeah, I thought, but are you coming back as a plague bearer or an experiment?
I squeezed my eyes shut, and pried my helmet off.
I’d lost way too many referents.
The outside air closed around my face with too many smells I couldn’t identify or describe, other than “nothing like sterile air” and “nothing like my room or my shower.” Every nerve on my head and neck screamed for broadcast time, registering the temperature of the air, the little breezes through the hairs on my nape, the warmth of direct sunlight. My heart was racing. I was breathing way too fast and even with my eyes shut I was overloaded on stimuli.
I waded my way through. It took time, but amidst the slog of what I was feeling, I eventually noticed something I wasn’t: Anything identifiable as Vosth infestation.
I opened my eyes.
Vosth-Menley was standing just where he had been, watching just as he had been. And I was breathing, with my skin touching the outside air.
Touching the air. That which touched the air belonged to the Vosth. I wasn’t belonging to the Vosth.
I looked toward the Ocean. Its silver underlayer was still there, calm beneath the surface.
I took a breath. I tasted the outside world, the gas balance, the smell of vegetation working its way from my nostrils to the back of my throat. This was a Vosth world, unless the governors made it a human world, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Looking back to Vosth-Menley, I didn’t know how he’d feel about it either.
“You came from beyond the shell of atmosphere,” I said. “Like we did, right?”
Vosth-Menley said, Our genetic predecessors came to this world on an meteorite.
“And you adapted, right?” I almost ran a hand over my helmet, but stopped before I touched my hair. I hadn’t sterilized my gloves. Never mind that my head wasn’t in a sterile environment anymore either. “Do you understand that we adapt?”
It is our perception of reality that living organisms adapt, he said.
That was a yes. Maybe. “Look, we don’t have to fight for dominance, do we?” I spread my hands. “Like, if you go off and re-invent technology now that you have hands to build things with, you don’t need to come back here and threaten us. We can have an equilibrium.”
His eyes were as dead as usual. I had no idea what understanding on a Vosth colonist would look like.
“We’d both be better.”
We are not averse to an equilibrium, Vosth-Menley said.
I swallowed. “Then you’ve gotta go now.” Then, when I thought he didn’t understand, “The governors are adapting a way to cure you. To kill you. Making us the dominant species. Look, I’m… telling you what will happen, and I’m giving you the option not to let us do it.”
Vosth-Menley watched me for a moment. Then he turned, and walked back toward the Ocean of Starve.
Interspecies incident, said a little voice at the corner of my mind. It sounded like Endria. Sterile or not, I sealed my helmet back onto my e-suit and walked back toward the colony at double-time.
That night I filed a report saying that I’d invited Vosth-Menley back, but he’d declined for reasons I couldn’t make sense of. Communications barrier. I thought of telling the Prime Governor that she should have sent a diplomatic auditor, but didn’t.
I didn’t hear anything until the next day when a survey buggy came back in, and its driver hopped down and said that something strange happened at the Ocean of Starve. Far from being its usual murky silver, it was perfectly clear and reflecting the sky. He said it to a governor, but news spread fast. It came to me via Endria as I was walking out of my lab.
“The only thing that would cause that would be a mass migration of the Vosth, but that’s not something we’ve seen in their behavior before now!” She glared at me like I might know something, which, of course, I did.
A diplomatic auditor came by later to take a complete transcript of my last interaction with Vosth-Menley. I left most of it out.
Survey buggies kept going out. People walked down to the Ocean shore. Auditors flashed radio signals out of the communications booth, but no one answered. The Vosth had vanished, and that was all anyone could tell.
I stopped wearing my envirosuit.
The first day, stepping out of my door, I felt lightbodied, lightheaded, not entirely there. I felt like I’d walked out of my shower without getting dressed. I had to force myself to go forward instead of back, back to grab my envirosuit, to make myself decent.
I walked into the hall where every moment was the sensory overload of air on my skin, where my arms and legs felt loose, where everyone could see the expressions on my face. That was as frightening as the Vosth. I’d just left behind the environmental advantage I’d had since I was ten.
But I was adapting.
MANEKI NEKO
by Bruce Sterling
“I can’t go on,” his brother said.