Illustration by Rhett Pennell.
Commander Dianne Wiseman is dying. She is splayed out on the floor, gored, under a pile of her own entrails. She ought to attempt to hold them in, probably, but she can’t be bothered to raise her arms. She ought to be thinking about her kids; she isn’t. It’s a curious, drunken sensation. She wants to sleep.
“Do not sleep.” Someone else is holding in her guts for her. Sharp, spiny limbs try clumsily to fold them back into place. She can feel them poking around, numb pressure, tapping on the fishbowl of her interior, sending dull reverberations up her few intact nerves. “Dianne. You must not sleep.”
There’s a slight lag between the clicking of Kilithix’s mandibles and the sound of the words. The lag usually isn’t noticeable, but now time trickles and congeals. The words are less underwater than the rest of the world, at least, the blaring translator on Kilithix’s collar forcing her friend’s simulated voice beyond her clouded ears and right into the meat of her brain.
Another strange pressure. She glances down, regrets it. “Ah, ha, you trying to tie me in knots down there, huh?”
“I do not understand.” Two of Kilithix’s limbs press and squelch into her. The other six hold xem up above her, all twelve feet of feathery, chitinous bulk. She stares up into xer face because she has nothing else to stare at, sees her own bloodied mouth reflected in the hundred facets of xer eyes. “Dianne. Dianne. I do not understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
The sensile feathers on xer lower face tremble. “There is so much,” xe says. “Liquid and flesh - you are blood, bile, so much meat -”
“I’ll try not to take offense,” she rasps.
“You attempt humor at this time?”
“I don’t have much else to do,” she laughs, and regrets it.
If only humans could have their act together as much as their galactic partners. Surely there are more sentient species out there, surely someday there will be some great Other enemy to unite them all - but for now, it’s only them and the K’ilkixti. The K’ilkixti had the one war in the entirety of their existence over the discovery of humanity, killed millions of each other, destroyed half their solar system, cracked their hivemind (or however it works) in half, went through years of negotiations and debates and psychic whateverthehell, reunified, put the hivemind back together. And then finally made first contact.
Humans, on the other hand, didn’t get the memo that forcing their own intraspecies debates on their new counterparts would be rude. The alliance holds strong, but defectors are sure to make themselves known. This particular cell made itself known by detonating forty pounds of shrapnel in the faces of Wiseman’s team right after they set foot on what was meant to be a typical interplanetary taxi. The others are dead, probably. Kilithix, ever the diligent secretary, took the brunt of the shrapnel meant for Wiseman, letting it bounce impotently off xer armor plating… but xe didn’t catch this blasted piece, just the one, that shot between xer limbs and sliced through Wiseman’s softening waistline like a harpoon through water, leaving her fileted here on the cold shuttle floor.
Pressure - xe’s stirring things up again. “Hey, stop messing around in there. You can’t fix it. We just have to - to wait for help to get here. It’ll only be a few minutes.” She does not know that. But she has never seen Kilithix so upset - hardly seen xem upset at all.
“Okay,” xe says, shifting, still holding xer limbs over the gash but curling the rest of xer long body around her like a cocoon. “I will wait with you, Dianne,” xe says.
“You do that.”
“Do not sleep.”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Wiseman says, opening her eyes.
“I do not understand,” Kilithix says again.
“You’ve never seen a human die before?”
An explosive wave ripples over xer feathers. “You are not dying!”
“Okay, okay… But you’ve never seen it before, have you?”
“...No. I have not.” Another distressed ripple. “Dianne, I do not understand your death. You have no swarm-heart to house your unseated memories. You have no links to the others of your species through which they might mourn you. Even I, so close, cannot feel your pain. You have no other-self to die together with, and even in your final moments, your kinsmen will not eat you, and your mindsoul will not live on in them.” Xer agitated limbs tik-tik on the hard metal floor. “Dianne, your death is oblivion!”
Wiseman’s throat convulses around hot, bitter red. She chokes down some platitude about living on through her family, her work. “Here,” she says instead, when she can talk. “Put your hand in mine. I can’t move.” The pick of Kilithix’s forelimb finds her palm. Xer feathers dance and ebb like restless tides. There is an inhuman but profoundly childlike innocence in that hard, piercing touch. Wiseman feels warm. No pain anymore, just numbness. She smiles, says as much to Kilithix. “I’m warm.”
“Do not sleep.”
“I’m not sleeping.” She doesn’t open her eyes. “You and I have known each other for a long - a long time,” she gasps. “You’re closer to me than anyone. I wouldn’t have anyone else here with me. Not - not anyone.”
“Dianne…” The organic clicking and the automated translator together somehow manage to get across a whimper. Quietly: “Do not die.”
Guilt lances through her warm drifting. Guilt, imagine, when she’s the one dying - but the need to comfort Kilithix trumps her need for peace. “Hey, listen,” she forces out. “Listen, listen - you K’ilkixti, when you eat something, their mind, their soul, adds to your own - becomes you.”
“Yes.” Barely loud enough for the translator to pick up.
“And when you eat another person, with the same sentience as you, you share that soul - you become partners, they live on through you.”
“Yes. The other-self.”
“Well, listen, I’m about to - to go to sleep, for a bit,” she says. “But I’ll still be alive for a few minutes.” She doesn’t know that. “I’m not going to die, you’re right. I’ll be okay until the rest of the team gets here. Here, lean down. Closer.” Feathers from the underside of xer face ghost across her mouth. “You can feel my breath, can’t you? That’s a thing about humans. We keep breathing until we die. And take your hands out of my guts, put one here, here - do you feel that pulse? That’s my heart. You know enough anatomy. Listen, you keep track of those two things and even if I’m asleep, as long as you can still feel those rhythms going, I, I’m alive.”
“Alright, Dianne,” Kilithix whispers, mandibles clacking so close to her face she can feel the air shift.
“But in the event - the slim chance - those functions stop, and the team isn’t here yet,” Wiseman says, “in that event, see, you still don’t need to worry. Because you can bite off my head and keep me around.”
Kilithix pulls back an inch. “You would consent to this? To be my other-self?”
“I’d be dead anyway,” Wiseman rasps, trying to smile. “Don’t read into it all that… all that much…” With her face shrouded by Kilithix’s feathers, the world is a bright, lovely pink. She’s very warm - bordering on uncomfortable. Her body fills with fire, the welcoming hearth of nerve mass-death.
“I will monitor your heart, Dianne, other-self,” Kilithix says.
Wiseman would be content for this to be the last thing she hears.
…
But it isn’t.
Instead, shouting, clumping regulation boots on metal floors. Barked orders, get her on the gurney!...Adrenaline!...get back! A period of blank memory; discombobulated dreams. And then she’s blinking beneath bright fluorescents, pounding headache, crick in her neck, poked through with tubes, and her trusty secretary coiled a few feet from her hospital bed, staring out at the opposite wall.
She looks at xem for a moment. There’s something mythic in the alien shapes and vibrant brushstrokes of xer body, predatory and fur-softened like an ancient Chinese dragon.
“Well,” she rasps, having memorized xem, “we aren’t married and I’m not dead, so I suppose it all worked out just like I said it would.”
Xe ribbons toward her, a cascade of clicking noise, flamenco crackers: “Dianne!”
“Oof, careful -” Hovering above her, Kilithix twitches and ripples like a dog shaking itself dry, a jubilant trill reverberating from xer chestplate, a new sound neither she nor the translator know what to do with. “Calm down, calm down, there was nothing to worry about, didn’t I tell you?”
“I did not doubt you,” Kilithix clicks, still weaving in the air. “Not at all.”
“I should hope not. I still write your paychecks.”
“Paychecks, paychecks,” xe sings back. Wiseman watches bemusedly - she’s never seen Kilithix this expressive before. She’s grinning back; it catches like a cold.
“Aw, you really do care,” she says, reaching up awkwardly to pat xer chestplate. “Professionalism, now, professionalism… Get off, you beast. Let me up.”
“You should not stand,” xe says, dribbling back onto the floor. “You have not fully healed.”
“Eh, I’ve lived through worse,” Wiseman says, trying to sit up. Her head pitches so hard her spine goes to jelly, and she collapses back on the pillow. “Oh. Hm.”
“I will fetch you water,” Kilithix says, whirling toward the door. “I will fetch you nurses. And I will begin on your paperwork, your calendar - you have had many appointments pushed back!”
“Alright, you do that,” Wiseman says after xem.
She stares. She shifts. She pushes back the reddened memory of her own intestines.
This situation will likely represent a change in her working relationship with her secretary, won’t it.
(She kids herself - she imagines this new axis a cause and not an effect, as if it’s possible to have a fundamental shift, a bonding moment, with one’s own right hand - the thought of bonding implies an initial separation which must be bridged, and that… can that exist, between her and Kilithix, anymore? It ought to be a distance of light years, but it’s nothing at all).
She should make a report to that poor woman at Interspecies Resources. How to make a breakthrough with a K’ilkixti: bleed out all over xem and give xem permission to eat your brains.
Yeah, that will be a fun addition to the brochures.
When the integration initiative first brought Kilithix to her doorstep, of course, she experienced some… difficulties. She had been expecting an ambitious young communications prodigy from Prometheus to be her shiny new secretary. In the usual fashion of their bureaucratic machinations, her higher-ups did not feel the need to inform her of a last minute change in plans courtesy of the exchange program, and she opened her office door to find that her shiny new secretary was, in fact, a twelve-foot psychic centipede.
After those first few awkward weeks - when she had to explain to her secretary everything from telephones to birthdays to the very concept of speech - she found that she and Kilithix, actually, got on remarkably well. Kilithix was impulsive and alien, sure, but, in a sense, less so than a young Promethean upstart. Although Kilithix never quite developed the skills necessary for a secretary in the traditional sense, Wiseman quickly grew to appreciate the benefits, as Security Commander, of having an armor-plated insectoid posted at her back during any necessary altercation. And after she learned that she and Kilithix were around the same age, she relaxed far more - better to have a companion than a needy protegé.
She was surprised to hear that Kilithix was past forty by K’ilkixti equivalent - in comparison to the other eleven K’ilkixti on the Enkidu station, xe was small, bendy, and lacked the impressive teal mane that Wiseman had vaguely puzzled out to denote some kind of social status. That was when Kilithix explained the cannibalism thing - these K’ilkixti had eaten others and bound their selves together, while Kilithix had not.
“And do you… plan to do that anytime soon?” Wiseman struggled out.
“I am old for an unmarried K’ilkixti; I have waited longer than average to take an otherself,” Kilithix said, translator stuttering over married, “but I do not actively seek one. I have not -” xe ruffled xer feathers - “have not yet found an individual with whom I would be inclined to share my selfhood.”
Wiseman coughed, squared her shoulders, and gave xem a healthy pat on the shoulder. “Hang in there, friend. The right one will come along.” (Wiseman had been married twice and was, at that very moment, in the process of missing her eldest son’s birthday.)
As time passed, she came to view Kilithix as a friend, a companion, more than a secretary. At times she forgets Kilithix is anything other than that.
This has, of course, caused her some problems. She remembers a particularly disastrous day when Kilithix first accompanied her to New Boston and people kept stopping and jamming up the sidewalk to stare and she, fed up with the clogged foot-traffic, finally burst out, “What the hell are they looking at? What are they looking at?”
Kilithix, a twelve foot long, poison-stingered insectoid covered in bright maroon down, responded, “Definitely you, sir.”
On the station, at least, people are used to Kilithix, passing xem every day at the modified desk outside Wiseman’s office, hearing xer clacking speech over the phone whenever they schedule appointments, and waiting for coffee to brew in the lounge with xer body coiled around the warmth of the machine. Kilithix even joined the station basketball team - Wiseman goes to every game she can, just for sheer entertainment. There are twelve K’ilkixti aboard the station; it’s a point of pride that Enkidu is the most diverse interplanetary station in known society. Wiseman isn’t exactly sure why integration is still like pulling teeth more than forty years post- first contact. The K’ilkixti blend easily into the culture and show nothing but respect for their human counterparts. Most laypeople know relatively little about their species overall except that they exhibit a marked appreciation for a good morning cup o’ joe.
Kilithix sleeps on Wiseman’s floor. Xe has xer own quarters, but it’s been like this for over five years, since the first time Wiseman saw combat in Kilithix’s company, and Wiseman has never really minded, nor even really thought about it.
Now, torso bound in bandages, she stares out her transparent wall, into space, listening to Kilithix clatter around in the kitchen and utterly fail to make her tea. As Security Commander of the Enkidu Station, her living room possesses a luxurious window from which, at the right time, one can see the sunrise’s fireflash halo blinding into view over the curve of the great blue Earth or its cities shining like scattered diamonds in the dark. At the moment the station is not facing Earth, and there is no grand view but dimpled black and Wiseman’s own reflection.
She isn’t a depressed person, really, but she’s been prone to periods of melancholy and self-reflection from time to time. It’s gotten better lately, but she supposes holding one’s own guts in with a hand is enough to set anyone back a few years of mandatory psych sessions. See, last night Wiseman had that dream again, the one where she’s missing her right hand and turning the whole world upside down looking for it. She always wakes up from that dream thinking of her twin. She doesn’t remember her twin, of course - stillborn, unnamed - and has no reason at all to still think of him. But she’s had this grief, all her life, as inborn as her heart or her lungs, and she has no place to put it, no name to know it by.
It makes sense that Wiseman came to space, looking, like everyone else, to find something. She watched her colleagues when she was out in the field find that thing on far-off planets, in alien microbes, in primordial stars, in each other. She was meant to have found it years ago and settled down now close to home. Yet the dream recurs.
“Kilithix,” she asks, staring out into the black, “do you think we’re alone out here? Us - and the K’ilkixti?”
“I doubt it,” says Kilithix, winding up to her side. Their reflections blend. “If humans exist in solar systems so close by, there must be even stranger creatures out beyond the galaxy.”
“Hm,” Wiseman hums. “Say, did you figure out how to make a drink without the help of your beloved Keurig?”
“...You are well enough to make your own tea.”
Wiseman and Kilithix go out to their favorite restaurant on station to celebrate the one-week anniversary of Wiseman’s evisceration. Kilithix has haphazardly attached a striped bowtie to the translating apparatus on xer collar in honor of the occasion.
After she has finished ribbing Kilithix about the bowtie - both of them enjoy pretending that Kilithix is wholly ignorant about human fashion customs even after a decade aboard Enkidu - and pretending she’s going to order something other than her favorite steak from the menu, Wiseman notices that she and Kilithix have drawn some attention. Her extensive experience in security and espionage informs her of the other diners’ subtle but definite reactions. Also the fact that Kilithix says, “Your boss is here, and he is staring at us intensely.”
Wiseman cranes around to look and Captain Okiro takes it as a cue, crossing the floor with his wife to stand beside their table.
“Wiseman!” he crows. “Wiseman, Wiseman. I wondered when I’d see you. All stitched back together?”
“Yessir,” Wiseman says, trying not to blame Okiro for ordering her onto that taxi ship.
“Excellent. Excellent,” he says. “Say, Wiseman, did you get my message the other day?”
“Sorry, sir, I haven’t been checking my inbox,” she confesses. “I’ve been more focused on re-acquainting myself with my small intestine.”
“Of course, of course, you’re off duty, no harm done. Still, I’d encourage you to read it,” he says. Stands. Waits. “I really would encourage that.”
“...I can read it now,” Wiseman says, pulling out her handheld, and he beams, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. The message is right at the top. It’s a forward of a few articles and announcements. She scrolls.
The problem becomes clear quite quickly. Well, it isn’t really - a problem, per se - it’s just that, apparently, the security footage from the aftermath of the explosion has been released, and public relations has run with it as a shining example of the successes of the integration program.
“Look here, Kilithix, it seems the whole world’s found out you’re my palentine,” Wiseman snarks, passing it to xem. “Thanks for letting me know,” she tells Okiro. “It’s better to find out here that what I thought were my dying words have been broadcast all over the galaxy.”
“Hm,” Okiro says, as if there’s something she’s still not getting. “You two are quite close, aren’t you?”
Wiseman laughs. “I’d say we’re close, now that xe’s gotten up close and personal with my liver.”
“Thick as thieves,” Kilithix says, happily showing off a human colloquialism.
It takes a few more days for Wiseman to get the picture. Messages of admiration and support pour in from across the solar system, commending her for her diplomacy and tolerance and hard work on creating an inclusive environment on the Enkidu station. But on Enkidu, her friends leave early from their Saturday drinks. The new hires are even more twittery and nervous than normal. Captain Okiro throws her back into the deep end of work the day she comes back, sending her off chasing smuggling tips she wouldn’t personally have investigated even before she had her guts exploded. It’s weird.
On Friday she shuttles down to Earth to meet with Mirasol, her second ex-wife, who wants to get dinner. Mira was always far too busy to make anything work long-term, and Wiseman just didn’t care enough to, but they parted semi-amicably and still meet up when Mira remembers Wiseman exists. This most recent call must’ve been prompted by all the buzz about Wiseman’s apparently-groundbreaking friendship with a person she’s known for ten years.
After a decent dinner and a flimsy conversation, they sit at the bar and drink.
Wiseman tugs at the collar of her shirt. Mira trails a finger around the edge of her glass, pensive, and says, “You’re not going to come home with me tonight.”
“No,” Wiseman says, acknowledging it consciously for the first time. It’s a break from tradition. Aesthetically, she appreciates the plunging neckline and clinging material of Mira’s vivacious red dress, but over the years their casual flings have lost their appeal, and Wiseman remembered quite early on this time, deep into the conversation about Mira’s flourishing division, Mira’s awards, Mira’s newest projects, why she and Mira didn’t ultimately work out.
“Ah. I respect that, I do. I am curious. What changed? Has the business in the Oort Cloud aged me that much?”
“You’re beautiful, you’re always beautiful,” Wiseman sighs. “I just…” She spreads her hands. “I don’t know. I nearly died.”
“Oh, come now, you were never one to be traumatized,” Mira laughs, touching her arm. “Tell me honestly. Is there someone else?”
“What? No.” Wiseman blinks. “Look, I don’t know. Maybe I just got old.”
“You’re not telling me everything. You’ve been in the news - what about Kilithix?”
“Kilithix? I’m sure I’ve already mentioned Kilithix six times today.”
Mira tilts her head and squints at her. “Tell me honestly, Dianne,” she says, “are you fucking the bug?”
…
“Am I what?”
“Well, are you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Wiseman exclaims, and stares. “I - you - they don’t have sex. They eat each other. And why would I -”
“I’ve seen footage of you telling xem to eat you,” Mira says. “That seems, to me, like a proposition. And I’ve heard xe sleeps in your quarters - in your room - and that you’re… close.” She purses her lips. “The bug, really? That’s who you turn me down for?”
Wiseman deflates, taking a painful swallow of her whiskey. “I am not,” she enunciates, “fucking the bug. As xe will tell you constantly, human ideas of - of sex, romance, any kind of relationship, don’t map onto the K’ilkixti at all.” Her eyes widen. “Oh, hell. That’s what everyone thinks, isn’t it? That’s why…”
“Are you really not doing it? Hm. Good. I was wondering how -”
“Please for the love of God can we stop talking about this.”
Wiseman does not intend to bring this issue up with Kilithix and, in fact, intends never to address it until the day she dies. Naturally, it comes up in the first conversation they have.
“To clarify,” Kilithix says, “your… ‘ex-wife’ believes that we are engaging in… ‘sexual relations’... which means that we are physically attempting to reproduce, yet remain discrete individuals… and do not actually intend to reproduce, in this implication, but rather to receive some physical or emotional pleasure from the experience.”
Wiseman knows this is the one kind of confusion Kilithix does not fake. “Yes, that.”
“And this implication is troubling, because…”
“Because I don’t want people to think I’m having sex with you, Kilithix.”
“Because I am within your direct chain of command?”
“Because -! Because. I mean, look at yourself. It would be weird.”
“I agree that it would be weird, and also assert that no one should believe it would happen, given that the human ideas of sex, romance, and relationships do not map onto -”
“I know, I know.”
“Nonetheless, I do not understand why you are so upset. I am a sapient, adult being, and so no moral fault has been projected upon you beyond one fixable by changes in chain of command, and any who believe in this idea are merely proving their own ignorance with regards to the K’ilkixti lifecycle.”
“Sapience has nothing to do with it. Ignorance has nothing to do with it. I’m still bothered. Even if we cleared all this up, the concept itself upsets me. It would be like bestiality, or something.” She sighs. “Do you think we’re too close? Everyone else thinks it’s groundbreaking, that we’re friends. Should I think that too?”
Kilithix’s feathers puff, and xer kaleidoscope eyes glitter. “I do not appreciate the implication that I am like a beast.”
“Wh -? No, that’s not how I meant it.”
“I do not appreciate that you believe our ‘friendship’ would be improved if you viewed it as abnormal, or that you should view it as abnormal. I do not fully understand your ex-wife’s accusations, and I am glad that you do not experience sexual feelings toward me, as that would be weird, but I do not appreciate that the very notion of others thinking for a moment that you did feel attracted to my physical form disgusts and appals you.”
“What? Come on, that’s unreasonable - you’re mad that I want people not to think I want to have sex with a twelve foot maroon bug, because I don’t, and that would be gross, but it’s not even because you want me to want that? You’re mad at nothing.”
“Now you call me gross.”
“Gah! - Look, I didn’t mean to offend you. It’s just that all this is so -”
“I am offended,” says Kilithix, and clatters out of the room.
Ridiculous goddamned bugs.
Wiseman spends the next few days attempting to repair her social life, making sure to comment on her perpetual singleness and to gawk openly at human women where her colleagues can see her. The buzz dies quickly; she is welcomed back into the circle of middle aged bureaucrats who have been her support network ever since she accepted her position on Enkidu.
Kilithix stops sleeping on her living room rug.
Wiseman takes a moment to feel glad about the implications for her reputation. She makes herself dinner. Then she stands in her empty quarters and thinks about her upcoming minigolf plans with Okiro and becomes soul-rendingly, catastrophically miserable.
At night she has the dream again and this time she’s missing both her hands, just cauterized stumps, knocking around her room in search of a finger. In the morning she wakes up and stares out the window and wonders if there’s anybody out there in the black- besides the K’ilkixti.
“Nothing’s ever got me this bad,” she says aloud. Blinks. Sets about trying to remember where Kilithix’s actual quarters are so she can show up on the doorstep and grovel for an appropriate amount of time before they make up and get coffee. She believes Kilithix was being ridiculous, and that she personally is not in the wrong - she believes this - but apologizing is an acceptable price to pay. Kilithix will know she’s ingenuine - but will forgive her anyway, because xe’ll know Wiseman is making an offer. These are truths about them as people.
Wiseman opens her door, ready to track down a station map, to find her secretary looming.
“Oh, thank the stars,” Wiseman sighs. “I was about to make a fool of myself. Come inside - let’s talk this out. Some things were said -”
“Dianne,” Kilithix says, not coming in, the translator’s speaker somehow conveying even more stiffness than a simulated voice usually does. “I have come to invite you to my wedding.”
“Gh,” Wiseman says. “Your what?”
“I have been invited to compete for the right to consume the mind and body of Arch Swarmheart-keeper Thixikltzik due to my exemplary work in the human-K’ilkixti integration efforts. As conveyed to me.” Xer forelimbs clack. “I will compete against fifty other accomplished unmarried K’ilkixti for this honor. I would like you, as my closest friend, despite the fact that you find me in some aspects grotesque, to witness my triumph. I am confident that I will prevail - as secretary of the Head of Security on this station, I have had more cause than my peers to hone my physical strength.”
Wiseman stares. “You… I upset you, so now you’re going to go battle royale fifty people so you can eat a guy’s head? And get married - fuse your soul to someone else’s - permanently?”
“Yes,” Kilithix says. “Please do not attempt to talk me out of this. I have had a personal epiphany and request that you support me, even though this cultural practice may appear strange and barbarous to you.”
“...You really are good at this integration stuff,” Wiseman mutters, feeling like her organs are filled with tar.
“I have tried,” Kilithix says.
Wiseman and Kilithix take a week off to make the trip to X’iltik, the K’ilkixti homeworld, for the wedding. Ordinarily, this would be extravagant for someone as high-ranking as Wiseman - but Okiro signed off on the vacation with palpable relief.
For the first day of the journey they make coffee and talk about nothing. On the second day, Wiseman attempts to teach Kilithix gin rummy with a set of real playing cards, since the shuttle doesn’t have a holographic drive.
“So you’re going to - to eat this guy, huh?” Wiseman says, halfway through the game. “And he’s just alright with that?”
“Please continue to use the accepted xenopronoun in this instance,” Kilithix says. “K’ilkixti notions of gender -”
“ - don’t map onto human notions, I know, I know, I’m sorry.” Wiseman squints at her cards. “But xe’s fine with just - giving up xer body and living on in yours like some kind of ghost? Just to… to be married and fertilize your eggs, or something?”
“The archtender and I will share this body, and xer genetic material will be digested into my reproductive cells. Xe will have expected some form of this outcome since exiting infancy, and, in fact, welcomes it, as most do.” Kilithix fumbles xer precariously-held hand again and rips through a card with one of the barbs on xer forelimb. “I have impaled the ace of hearts.”
“It’s fine,” Wiseman says, reaching over to remove the card. “Will it be painful for xem?”
“I have heard that the moment of joining is a cascade of psychophysical ecstasy.”
“Oh. Good for you guys. Ha, you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you get hurt? You’re like a tank. I don’t even know what you have in there.”
“The K’ilkixti anatomy can be understood as a system of pneumatics -”
“I know. I know.” Wiseman leans her chin in her hand. “You were so surprised when I was bleeding out. Out of your depth. You didn’t have any idea what all of it was.”
“Your anatomy is very… wet.”
“Ha, don’t let anyone hear you say that. Say, did it disturb you? Can you look at me anymore without thinking about how I’m just a big bag of meat and blood?”
“I would prefer that we stop talking about this.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s just that I nearly died two weeks ago and nobody gives a solitary shit.”
“I do.”
“Sure. And my kids do, too. They sent me a card. A storebought card - they didn’t even take five minutes to scribble something on a piece of cardstock. And now you’re running off to get married halfway across the galaxy and the scabs still haven’t turned to scars. Can you imagine they didn’t send me a card? All they needed was a red crayon and a strong stomach -”
“Please can you stop talking about it.”
“Why should I!” Wiseman barks, slamming her hands on the table, scattering her cards. She slumps over again, running her hand through her hair. “Sorry. I don’t mean it.”
“...Life goes on.”
“Can you just tell me this isn’t because you got scared?” she sighs. “We’ve been friends for ten years. I know you aren’t doing this just because I said something stupid. I’ve said a lot of stupid things and messed up a lot and you never ran off to get married about it.”
Kilithix is silent for a minute, feathers shifting in the canned air cycling like a field of grass in spring. “Saying that my decision has nothing to do with you would be a lie,” xe says. “No, do not protest. Dianne…” Wiseman would know the clicking pattern of Kilithix saying her name even without the translator. Xer multifaceted eyes are black and rainbow-sheened. “Dianne, I saw you die, and I held your hand, and I felt that strangeness you call a heartbeat thrumming through my own flesh. In the moments between your loss of consciousness and the arrival of the medical team I held in my mind your offer to become my otherself and I realized that I had already thought of you as my otherself for… years, perhaps… the larger part of our acquaintance… and I was confronted in that instance with the terror that your heart would stop and the desire that your heart would stop, in equal portion, so that I might have you truly. I wanted that last resort you had offered me more than I have ever wanted anything. And it was… a betrayal of you. A betrayal of your very mode of personhood.”
Wiseman stares.
“Among my people I have been called… unsentimental. Cold. I had no desire for companionship in the way we define it. Yet… these years with you have proven to me that I, like any other person in this known universe, require it, if in a different form. When we first met, you explained to me the concept of a telephone - communication over distance, outside of the mind. You are not part of me but you communicate so perfectly even so far away. You have integrated yourself into the foundations of my being in a way I had never anticipated, and did so completely before I even realized there was space for you there. If I removed that support now, I would collapse, Dianne - without your friendship, I am unmade.” Xe turns, the bright artificial lights rippling across xer oilslick eyes, xer feathers stiff despite xer measured words. “But I realized there are things you need in life that I cannot provide, if I am to be your partner - physical things, which you may find elsewhere, but more importantly mental things. You will always want someone who offers affection I cannot understand, much less give, and I will always want… something which your vocabulary cannot hold, and which I would never ask for anyway.
“If you will excuse me now,” Kilithix says abruptly, rising, feathered mane scraping the cold shuttle roof, “I am going to make use of this ship’s meager recreation room and rip a training dummy to pieces until I am calm again.”
Mute, Wiseman nods.
She sits at the table with the scattered cards across it and further dishevels her shaggy gray curls, and she thinks about this bitch of a situation those renegades put her in, and thinks about the possibility that there’s some other species out there in the universe, besides humans and the K’ilkixti, that doesn’t know or care at all about her problems. And she runs her hands over each other, aware of every nerve in her fingertips, every point of impulse, and she thinks, what if we are alone in the universe, us and them on their red distant star, the only two peoples to ever exist, made twins in that profound solitude - what would we do then? What if we never find that nameless thing we’re missing?
From orbit X’iltik is a messy amalgam of red and gold. The largest piece of the moon Lkit’ki is almost half the size of the planet, a huge rocky apple with a chunk the size of the Pacific blasted out of the side. Fragments bleed slowly into space, coagulating into a red ring around the sulfurous bulk of X’iltik.
Lkit’ki was once almost as large as X’iltik, orbiting twins like Pluto and Charon. The blast that broke the moon and birthed this rusted ring ended the K’ilkixti civil war; in their fear of humanity, the K’ilkixti destroyed the partner of their planet, and its perpetual hemorrhage encircles the space around X’iltik in a cloud of slow red shards, as if consuming it whole.
Not long ago, Wiseman was confused when people stopped and stared at Kilithix on the streets of New Boston. Why was she confused? She keeps turning it over in her mind and all that comes up is she just. Forgot. She forgot that Kilithix was different, forgot that she was human and xe was K’ilkixti, that they weren’t the same, of one, of each other.
It was so natural, before all this. Like breathing, like orbiting, like flexing the fingers of her hand. Kilithix said xe thought of her as an otherself - this is one concept Wiseman never, out of all the miscommunications and cultural disconnects and accidental insults, misunderstood.
She compared Kilithix to an animal.
On Earth her children grow and learn and resent her. Two ex-wives consider her at best an unpleasant blip in their biographies. The bones of an unnamed baby, newspaper-wrapped in a wooden shoebox, have long since become the soil.
Dianne Wiseman is not and has never been suited to diplomacy, to people, to keeping. She is an unremarkable military woman, a deadbeat with some shiny medals to pass on, who gets Saturday drinks with the other venerable and stagnant old constants of command, who went to space and came back home and never found -
No, she thinks, she did find that thing. She did.
She just did to xem what she does to everything else. To kids, to wives, to self -
Earth is so far away from here, not even a dot in the expanse of space, hanging in the black alone and old and scarred. They managed to forget the distance for so long, she and Kilithix, and Wiseman wonders if there’s a chance in hell they could forget it again. And she thinks, maybe it’s for the best if they don’t. Maybe she’s not the person to reach across that distance, heat sink that she is, human atrophy; maybe, in her own characteristic idiocy, idiocy she recognizes now in all its cruel nature, she inadvertently set Kilithix free. Free from the apathetic death-march that is her life, the life she’s kidded herself could ever be fulfilled by wives, by kids, by somethings, at any point before the day she joins her paper-wrapped other half in the ground.
The shuttle lands in the desert of the swarm-heart. Great shards of pockmarked wax razor up into the flame-red sky from the sulfurous sands; Wiseman has always thought the landscape of X’iltik looks like shattered peanut brittle.
She is one of two humans in the crowd of K’ilkixti amassing in the arena, the other an ambassador with a slightly nauseated look. For the first time, it’s her the crowd parts around. She sweats in her adaptor suit at the edge of the ring beside Kilithix, who stands perfectly still, feathers shifting in the wind. A very small unmarried K’ilkixti in the center of the ring - the bridegroom? - clicks out some kind of ceremony, and periodically all the rest chime in in unison. Kilithix is the only one wearing a translator. Wiseman catches phrases: “rites of the mindsoul” “through the swarm-heart all is one.”
The ritual ends. Kilithix stoops down xer great body and offers xer neck to Wiseman to remove the translating collar. Wiseman’s hands stall over the strap.
“The thing is that I like you, Kilithix,” she says. “It would be easy if I just loved you, to let you go; I’m an old hand at that. But the thing is that I like you.”
“I have liked you very much, Dianne,” Kilithix says, and Wiseman pulls off the translator, and knows she will never understand the words of Kilithix as xe is again. Kilithix clicks at her in xer real voice, looking back, and goes to join the rest of the contestants in the ring. Xe is by far the largest unmarried K’ilkixti here, and Wiseman attempts to feel satisfaction at that, tries not to hope xe fails with a moderate-but-not-mortal wound, flashing xem a painful thumbs-up which she immediately aborts.
The trial begins.
The K’ilkixti no longer encourage death in these arenas, but that isn’t saying much. Kilithix, as xe xemself predicted, is a beast. Xe arches and wheels and rips through the field like a demon’s whip, bestial, snarling - mandibles crunch around carapaces, throats - the crowd clicks a cicada cacophony and Wiseman screams with them on the sidelines until her throat’s hoarse, harder than she’s ever screamed at the basketball games, at her exes, at herself, not even words, just noise, and she knows Kilithix can’t see or hear but she has to do it anyway - and finally, horribly, Kilithix stands in the center of the ring, surrounded by detached limbs and spilled guts and injured compatriots limping or hauled off the field, no worse for wear but for a single forelimb near snapped in half, and xe has won.
Throat raw and eyes wet, Wiseman watches Kilithix approach the small swarmheart-keeper where xe waits at the edge of the arena. And Wiseman is ready to let it all happen, to watch her friend be free of her forever, be changed - but then Kilithix looks back. Kilithix looks back, and it is - intolerable.
There is no conceivable way for Wiseman, a human, to read any emotion in those bowling-ball bugeyes, but though she sees nothing, hears nothing, she knows from a hundred yards away. “Oh, damn it all to hell,” she says, and vaults the barrier and runs out to her friend, tripping over her clunky suit, sweat slicking her hair to her forehead, knees not as young as they used to be. Kilithix waits for her, feathers ruffled and bile-slicked, still as space. Wiseman reaches up and grasps xer head and yanks it down to level with her, pressing her faceplate against the hard space between xer fathomless eyes.
“Damn it all to hell,” she says again. “You’d never ask for what you want, and I’d never offer - and I’m going gray and ruinous and I’ve got a lot of blood inside me, alright, and I can’t change that, and you’re a twelve-foot bug, one I far from deserve - but, listen, expectations aside, all the definitions and mistranslations and humanity of it aside - I’d like to cause a diplomatic incident and steal you away to sleep on my rug forever and play basketball and make bad coffee and be, all in all, the worst secretary I’ve ever had, and the best person I’ve ever known.”
Kilithix clicks at her and presses forward, knocking xer chin against the glass, obscuring all the world in a curtain of pink feathers. Wiseman laughs and waits a moment, listening to the rhythm of her friend’s real voice, before fastening the translator around xer neck.
“- never knew without you. Oh, you did not understand a word I said.”
“I got the gist.”
“In summary, I would gladly create a diplomatic incident with you, Dianne. You are… my telephone.”
“Stupid bug,” she laughs, kind of cries, and releases xer neck to take the hand-equivalent section of xer forelimb, the one that isn’t almost broken off. She looks up at xer strange, beautiful bug-dragon head, outlined black against the rusty sky. “You did good today. If you can forgive me now, maybe when I’m old and feeble we can revisit the decapitation question, and I can take a turn copiloting your tank alien body instead of decaying in mine.”
“I do not think you should reopen that line of conversation at this moment, given the issues it has historically -”
“Just stick around until I’m old and feeble, alright, and we can take it from there.”
Fantastic story. Congratulations on your Lunar Award. Well-deserved!
This story made me cry. In a good way. I love it. I love how queer it is. How strange and very familiar at the same time.