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  When You Were My World

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  When You Were My World

  Zoe Cannon

  © 2022 Zoe Cannon

  http://www.zoecannon.com

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  When You Were My World

  I was the one who convinced you to stop for the stranded ship, and I will always carry the guilt for that. When you murmured silently to me through the walls that we weren’t alone, and placed the image of the ship in my mind, I shared the trepidation I felt thrumming through your body. Human ships didn’t know what to make of you when they saw you, and militaries from several worlds—not to mention the pirates who lurked between—had tried to make you their own.

  But something about that image made me send out a soft sense of hesitation, a request for you not to run until I had a chance to figure out what had caught my attention. It only took me a few seconds to see it. The ship wasn’t right for any military I knew. Although it had been quite some time since others of my species had concerned me, I still knew a civilian ship when I saw one. Not enough room for weapons, and not enough distinctiveness in its design. Military ships all have some feature that makes them stand out, because everyone needs to be able to tell friends apart from enemies at a glance. Every so often, some planet gets the idea to rely on generic ships and false signals, and invariably they learn it makes for a messy way to fight a war.

  Most everyone had learned that lesson by now, and dispensed with subtlety in their designs. But this ship wasn’t trying to communicate anything with its form, except that whoever had designed it had been born without an aesthetic sense. The front half was blocky, the back thin and sleek. The engines hung below like an alien growth that had been grafted on.

  And the ship was small, too small to be out this far between suns. And it wasn’t moving.

  I murmured my concern to you in my thoughts, and received confusion in answer. You didn’t know humans as well as I did, but if I said the ship was odd, you believed me. Still, you wondered, why was it our concern?

  But I had been stranded once, and would have died if you hadn’t stopped for me. Gently but insistently, I reminded you of that. I sent you you the image of the inside of my escape pod, the feeling of my lungs straining for air.

  In answer, you curled a wall around my arm, and sent a warm thrum through me. I smiled and leaned into you, although if your aim had been to make me forget my anxiety, it wasn’t working.

  Then the warmth turned to cold alarm. You shoved another image into my mind, harsh and urgent, with none of the gentleness you had learned to use with me over the years. Another ship had appeared. This one was military, from a world whose name escaped me—although in my other life I had spent a long and dull thirty-two hours waiting in a reserve ship that was never called in when my world had fought a brief war against them. When I looked closer though, the ship was subtly wrong. The markings were gone, the winglike embellishments that should have run along the sides sawed off. Pirates, then, in a captured ship.

  They advanced on the unmoving ship. The difference in size between the two reminded me of the day you had found my pod drifting in space. I doubted this ship’s intentions were as good as yours had been.

  I felt you start to turn. Not the motion itself, of course; I felt it as a shift in your intentions, which were always visible to me in the back of my mind. I still miss that. Without you there, it’s like a layer of my thoughts has gone quiet, as if a part of my brain has been cut away.

  Normally, I drifted along with you on that layer, and we acted as one mind. This time, I sent out a sharp negation.

  In answer, you sent me images of danger—of weapons that burned like fire, and gashes through the skin of your walls, and blood bubbling out into the cold of space. And I knew the danger. I understood. Did you resent me for asking you to intervene anyway?

  I sent back images of my own, the same images that filled my head as I watched the pirates move in on the small stranded ship. Images of my tiny pod spinning, the walls closing in on me as the oxygen levels dropped.

  Your intentions shifted. I felt it even before my vision changed to reflect yours—at least to the extent that I could process what your eyes saw. I never did learn the trick of seeing in more than one direction at once without getting sick. But you anticipated that, and only showed me one angle of vision—the two ships, growing larger in our sight as we drew in close.

  Your walls shuddered with the pain I shared through your senses as the pirates sent us a message. That was another reason you avoided human ships whenever possible—when they didn’t want to claim you or destroy you, they wanted to talk, to find out what you were and what planet you belonged to. Most human communication frequencies hurt you too badly to endure an entire conversation while you tried to explain that you came from no planet and belonged only to yourself.

  You didn’t bother with the laborious work of translating the message. It was clear enough, as the pirates turned their weapons on you, that it had been a warning.

  You didn’t heed the warning. You kept going, spurred on by my worried urging. You came in at an angle, keeping enough distance between you and the pirates to communicate that you weren’t looking for a fight. The floor under me shuddered as you readied your defenses. I hoped they would pay attention, and understand the threat you presented, and take the out you had offered them. But I doubted they would, since you had nothing they would recognize as weapons, not until it was too late.

  Then you gathered your energy, braced yourself for the pain of using a human frequency, and sent a message to the stranded ship. Rather, we did it together—you provided the medium, while I supplied the words. We are here to help. Ready yourself to board our ship. Be quick. It had been a long time since I had communicated in words. I hoped I was doing it right.

  Maybe I had gotten it wrong, because the ship didn’t answer. But I didn’t think that was the reason for their silence. They still weren’t moving. They weren’t trying to evade the pirates, even though they must have known the ship was there. They weren’t fleeing from you, either, even though I knew firsthand the fear the initial sight of you could evoke. If they weren’t running, it meant they couldn’t. Either they couldn’t answer us any more than they could flee, or no one was left alive to receive our message in the first place.

  The pirate ship blasted us with another warning. You tried to shield your scream from me, but we had been to open to each other for too long. There was very little you could keep from me. I would have said, at that point, that there was nothing you could hide. I would have been wrong.

  You sent me a wordless question. My mind translated it into choppy phrases. Probably no one left alive. Keep going? Or run while we can?

  I felt the fear undergirding your thoughts. But I also felt your memory of me drifting. You were concerned about the human now too, despite your apprehension. You were imagining the darkness of a universe without me. You were wondering if that ship held a light that shone as brightly as I did in your mind, and what the universe would look like with that unknown light snuffed out.

  I wasn’t thinking about who might be in there. I was only remembering my own fear, in what I had thought were my final hours. I told you to keep going.

  Forgive me.

  As you crossed the last distance between you and the ship, you reshaped yourself t
o form a docking tube. Your acids ate away at the metal as you formed a seal, until you and the stranded ship shared an atmosphere. The damage to their ship would be catastrophic—there would be no chance of getting it back to its origin point for repairs.

  I didn’t think its owners would care at this point. Through you, I tasted their air. It tasted like fear and death. Not enough oxygen. I drew in a frantic gasp, remembering. I felt the walls of the pod closing in.

  But I didn’t have time to get lost in memory. I ran.

  You reshaped your halls around me, giving me the quickest route possible. I ran up through the slender stalk that connected you to the ship, then tumbled down that same stalk, my head spinning as I adjusted to the ship’s gravity. It was tuned for a different planet than my former home, not like your interior, which you had carefully crafted to make me as comfortable as possible. In here, I felt almost weightless.

  It might have been a pleasant feeling, if the shifting atmosphere hadn’t hit me at the same moment. The oxygen situation was worse than I had thought. I sucked in what little air I could find, my fingers turning into panicked claws. I knew you were pumping extra oxygen in behind me as fast as you could. But the knowledge wasn’t enough to quiet the panic.

  I stepped out onto cold metal. Even as aware as I was of the urgency, I hesitated before taking another step and losing that last bit of contact with you. It had been years—I had long since lost track of exactly how many—since I hadn’t felt some part of me touching you. Every waking hour, my feet sank into your warmth. At night, you shaped yourself around me, and I curled into your embrace, and opened my mind to you so you could share my dreams. The floor of the stranded ship was cold. Dead.

  I took that second step. Behind me, I thought I heard you screaming.

  Once, I had understood the shape of human ships, the flat unmoving walls and precise right angles. Now I was disoriented, lost. Even though I had only taken those two steps away from the stalk, I could barely remember my way back to you, without you in my mind to show me.

  But the ship was small, and maybe he had come to see what was happening before the last of his consciousness left him. Less than ten steps in, I saw him. He was sprawled on the cold metal, his posture too untidy for sleep. A man, young enough for me to take note of his unlined face, but still well into adulthood. I gathered him into my arms. His body was limp, but when I placed my fingers to his neck, his pulse was steady and strong.

  I wanted to race back to you. My whole body ached for it. But I forced myself to check the rest of the ship. It was small enough that the search took no time at all. There was no one else here but him. The interior of the ship was as much of an ugly mismatch as the outside. It was too large for a single person, and far too small for the kind of travel it had been doing. There was a rudimentary living area, and a closet with a bed, and a cramped hallway of a control room with technology that had been out of date when I still lived among other humans. This ship should never have made it out of its planet’s atmosphere, let alone out this far.

  But I didn’t have time to wonder how it had gotten here, or why. I turned and ran to you, lungs burning. I didn’t know how much of the ache in my chest was the need for air, and how much was the need for you. When my feet touched your once again, my whole body melted with relief.

  But you had gone rigid. Your floor no longer yielded like soft soil under my feet.

  I sought out your mind, questing, questioning. I felt something I hadn’t felt since our earliest days together. Resistance. I didn’t understand.

  I tried again, and again you tried to push me out. But the habit of our sharing ran too deep. This time we connected, like a circuit joining. I was whole again.

  And then I was awash in acid and fire as your mind screamed with pain.

  You tried to soften it for me. But you couldn’t retreat fast enough. The last thing I heard, before I collapsed, was my own answering scream. Not with my voice—I was too out of practice for that—but with my mind, my anguish joining with yours until there was no difference between them. As my vision shrank to a single point, the last thing I felt was you gently curling your walls around me and the human to keep us from tumbling to your floor.

  * * *

  I woke with the sense that I had slept too long. You had artificially sustained my sleep before, a handful of times. First when my body had needed time to recover, after you had rescued me. Then, later, when my mind had needed the same. Once I had gained enough distance from the memories of that final battle to be able to see them clearly, the nightmares had begun waking me midway through my sleep and following me into waking life. The extra sleep, and the soothing dreams you sent me, had let me heal. But there was nothing I needed healing from this time.

  I reached for you. In your mind, I felt a faint hint of the pain that had knocked me unconscious, now reduced to a lingering ache. Are you all right?

  Better now. Your thoughts felt muted.

  What happened?

  The humans attacked, you answered. I destroyed their ship. Your thoughts hummed with regret.

  I’m sorry. I knew you didn’t like confrontations with humans, and liked being forced to take lives even less. Did they hurt you badly?

  It will pass. Your thoughts were still faint, like you were speaking to me through a locked door. I tried to reach deeper, with a pulse of silent inquiry. You shoved me back, gentle but unmistakable.

  I drew back, hurt. An unfamiliar feeling. I had never known what it was to be rejected by you before. This was the first time, since those first awkward days when we had each been learning who and what the other was, that you had closed me out.

  I sent you a query. I tried to hide the hurt, but I knew you could feel it.

  Still, you didn’t lower the wall between us. The pain is still considerable. You don’t need to feel the full extent of it.

  Pain is better faced together, I countered. Let me share it, and lend you my strength.

  A soft negation. You have the other human to attend to. You showed him to me, through a vantage point somewhere near the ceiling of the room you had created for him. Created for both of us, because I also saw my own body lying curled against the wall. I looked like I was still asleep, eyes closed, brow furrowed in a troubled frown. He was no more than two paces away from me, sitting in a simple seat you had built for him. Awake, and looking at me.

  I hadn’t realized he was that close. I had been so focused on you, I had forgotten to notice my own surroundings. I hadn’t even been aware my eyes were closed. I opened them, and saw him through my own vision.

  When our eyes met, he gave me a hesitant smile. “You’re the one who saved me?” He had a strong accent I couldn’t place, although it pinged something deep in my memory.

  I nodded. It took me a moment to remember how to use my voice. With you, I had never needed to. “Yes.” My voice didn’t sound like me. I didn’t know how much of that was the roughness of disuse, and how much was simply that I was used to hearing my inner voice, not the physical scraping of air over vocal cords.

  “Thank you.” He threaded his fingers together in a complicated gesture, and bowed his head over them. “I thought I was going to die out there.”

  I remembered that feeling. On the rare occasion I let myself think back to those two days, mostly what I remembered—aside from the feeling of slow suffocation—was trying to accept what was coming, and thinking I had succeeded until my aspirations of serene acceptance were interrupted by the panicked howls of my primate brain. “What were you doing out there?” I asked, pushing the memories back.

  The man’s lips turned up in a half-smile. It was strange, looking at someone’s face from the outside and trying to piece together what he was feeling from the clues his body was giving me. I didn’t know how I had ever seen that as ordinary. I was too accustomed to you, and the wide-open corridors of your thoughts that I could wander at will.

  “What was I doing?” he echoed. “Being an idiot, mostly. But first, I think intr
oductions are in order. I’m Davin. I’m pleased to meet you, and forever in your debt.” He held one hand up, palm out toward me, fingers slightly curled.

  It took me a moment to figure out what he expected. The fragment of an old briefing came back. It was a gesture of greeting on a handful of backwater worlds we’d had little occasion to bother with, at least most of the time. I had been sent there briefly as a military liaison when we had been trying to secure mining rights on the outermost of them. Oona, Ulla, something short and gooey-sounding. That was where I remembered the accent from, too. I raised my own hand and touched my fingertips to his.

  He dropped his hand, and his expression didn’t sour. I must have gotten it right. But he kept watching me, expectant, waiting for something. It took me far too long to realize he was waiting for me to give him my name.

  I needed another moment to remember what it had been. With us, you were just you, and I was just me. And even that distinction was blurred a lot of the time. “Serena.” It sounded like a stranger’s name.

  But he didn’t look like he had heard anything odd in it. “Thank you again for rescuing me. To be frank, I didn’t deserve it. It was my own fault I was out there.” He shook his head, and I got the feeling the gesture was directed at himself, not at me. “I had the wanderer bug, see. I wanted—needed—to get off world, see what there was to see. I couldn’t afford a place on a ship, so I built my own out of parts that were going for scrap.” His smile broadened, and turned self-deprecating. “That kind of thing always ends well in the stories. Not so much in real life.”

  I had learned at a younger age than him that life wasn’t a story, the first time I had gone into battle. Even so, I had sympathy for him, because I remembered the lure of myth and glory. The glow of promise the world had held before that realization, and the way everything had seemed slightly tarnished after.

  “There’s plenty of advice I can give you.” The words came a little more easily now. “Watch out for pirates, for example. There’s a reason most civilian ships get military escorts. But you won’t be needing any of what I could tell you, since your ship is gone. And anyway, my first piece of advice would be not to build the ship in the first place, let alone trust your life to it.” I tried for a smile of my own. I hoped I had gotten it right.