Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63580 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 318(@200wpm)___ 254(@250wpm)___ 212(@300wpm)
Freak is listening to me with patient interest. I feel as though every word I am saying matters to him. Odd that I haven’t had that experience more often in this life. When I think of how it felt to speak to people on my colony, I often had the experience of them listening to perhaps a third of what I was saying and then willfully disregarding the rest. My father used to listen to me properly. It is strange how much this absolute alien reminds me of him in some ways.
“So that ship was intended to be flung straight into the sun,” he says. “You were meant to perish.”
“Yeah. But I did something different.”
“It was always intended to be your coffin,” he says thoughtfully. “I wonder if that’s why the system flooded. If you didn’t go into the sun, they wanted to be sure you’d be removed from existence one way or another.”
“I guess,” I say, a chill running up my spine. I hadn’t thought of it that way, really. I guess I hadn’t thought properly at all, because he’s entirely accurate.
“But even after being rescued from what was intended to be your tomb, you tried to get back to it. You thought there were important things in there. But those things were always going to be destroyed with you. Their loss was inevitable. Yours was not.”
He’s musing out loud more than actually talking to me, I think.
I don’t like to think back to my departure. My friends were suspiciously absent. It was the elders who packed and provisioned the ship, and who allowed me to take some personal effects. I suppose Freak is right. Everything I took was something they were willing to part with.
“They could have programmed the ship to fly at the sun,” he says.
“They did,” I respond. “But, well. Once I took off, I thought, what if I didn’t go into the sun? What if I just went and found a water source to trade with? That’s what my father would have done. So I skirted as close as I could to the sun, so they’d think I’d been all burned up, and then I just kept going until I found the station. And that’s when the flooding started.”
“They were going to use water as their backup to end you, when water was what they were short of,” he muses. “Poetic? Or perhaps they didn’t see the irony?”
“Probably not,” I say. “They didn’t see much. The elders are set in their ways. They believed that the rains would return if the proper sacrifices were made. Some of the scholars tried to point out that it was more about heating and cooling patterns, but they were sent to work in the salt mines.”
Freak nods. “Of course,” he says. “Nothing is more threatening to a mad king than someone with a modicum of common sense. I am glad you decided to make your own way in the world, pet. It would have been a true tragedy if I had never had the chance to encounter you.”
“You saved me,” I say. “And thank you. But how? How did you know anything was wrong inside my ship? Was it dripping?”
“I could feel you,” he says. “You were loud, to me. To my mind,” he clarifies. “We were broadcasting on the same frequency, I suppose. Two beings trying to escape traps set for them.”
“I told you about my trap,” I say. “Won’t you tell me about yours?”
I watch his expression close up tight, and I know before he responds that I am not going to hear enough about it to really know anything. He might be an exotic, rare alien male. But I’ve seen that expression on enough men’s faces to know that it means he’s about to shut this topic of conversation right down.
* * *
Freak
I am not going to tell her about my captivity. I want to be the one to look after her. She does not need to know about the details of my incarceration, or the experiments that were run on me. But she does need to know a few things, and I do not want her to feel shut out of my world.
“My species is relatively rare,” I explain. “And most aliens do not see us in the same ways. What you see of me is not necessarily what the reality is, if that makes sense. Our appearances can be modified by the perception of the onlooker.”
“Sounds almost quantum,” she murmurs.
“It is, in a sense. Our minds and our bodies react differently to reality. That is why I was wanted for research.”
“I see you as being massive and blue and having lots of spikes and claws, and sharp teeth and all muscles,” she says. “Don’t you look like that?”
“I do,” I explain. “At the same time, I also appear to others in different ways. It’s all real. It’s just different kinds of real.”