Ansible: A Thousand Faces: (The Complete Omnibus of Seasons 1-3) (Stant Litore Omnibus Editions) by Litore Stant

Author:Litore, Stant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Westmarch Publishing
Published: 2020-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

Ansible:

Falling from the Sky

What Rasha Remembers

I am leaping on six legs through the red grass, my body swift and lovely—and not human. I am inside an alien hexapedal gazelle with four multi-chambered hearts, a body blazing with heat. As I run, my hooves rip up the ground in brief explosions of soil. Behind me, severed blades of grass whisk through the air, as though my sprint is making the air bleed. Omar the Monstruwacan, librarian, rescuer of refugees, runs to my right in another body like this one, though he lags behind me. —Come on! I psicast to him. Run! Run! Do you want to be eaten?

—Not by anything on this world, he casts back. By a lion on earth, perhaps, or a wolf. Where God can pluck me from its belly.

—Then you better run, Omar!

I should be terrified, but all I feel is exhilaration and speed. Grass blades, meters tall, flick wetly against my shoulders and flanks. My insides burn, and my body vents its heat through flaps of skin along the curve of my back. Running faster than any animal on earth—amazing what six legs can do! Above us the sky is filled with rings ablaze with reflected sunlight like the rings of Saturn, rings like a choirsong in the sky. My human mind is awed at them; beneath my thoughts, the gazelle’s mind shifts slowly like mud beneath my feet. That being, whose body this is, sleeps while I run.

Transparent lids protect my eyes, letting me keep them open, but beneath those rings in the sky there’s little to see. We don’t have a destination. We just have to get far enough ahead of the pneumavore’s pursuit to transfer back to our own planet without it leaping after us. Already the night beings roost like bats all around our last home, and we don’t need to pull in any more. Earth has plenty already.

I flick my eyes to check behind us, but our pursuer remains invisible, a presence like the menace you feel in your bed the instant after waking from a nightmare—near enough in the dark to threaten rape or obliteration, yet unseen. I have made other jumps like this one, into bodies on planets that are being devoured like our own—mostly with Sahira beside me, sometimes others. This is my first time with Omar alone. It doesn’t get easier.

Already I can imagine the predator’s insubstantial body falling over me, its cilia wrapping about me, entangling like the choking roots of water roses, capturing my mind inside this gazelle’s body for all time. There would be the shrieking dislocation as my mind shunts from reality into nightmare, into an eternity of phantasms and horrors I would endure, believing them real, while the pneumavore feeds on my fear, consuming me from the inside. My flanks steam, overheating; the mind slumbering beneath mine swells like a bubble toward waking, and I hope these exertions do not damage her. To calm us both, I fill both our minds with sweetness, with memories of my son, my baby, my child.

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