from Princeps, from the thing that was my father, changes. And I hear the regret and resolve in it as he replaces the helmet and speaks one more time.
A word.
A whisper.
“Cat.”
34
Cat
I’m everything.
I’m nothing.
I’m me.
I’m …
“Cat.”
I’m a baby wrapped in clean white and I’m resting against my mum’s chest and I’m cold and I’m frightened and this is the first voice I’ve ever really heard and somehow it’s all right because I know it’s someone who loves me
“Catherine, but I’ll call her Cat.”
I’m a little girl on the first day of kindergarten and a boy shoves me in my back and I turn and I see blond hair and a dimpled smile and I pick up a chair and smash it over his head and somehow it’s all right because I know one day he’ll love me
“Ow, Cat!”
I’m fifteen years old sitting in front of the vid screen and I can see the death in mum’s eyes and even though she’s sixty thousand light-years away and this is the last time I’ll ever speak to her it’s somehow all right because I know she loves me
“I’m so proud of you, Cat.”
We’re eighteen years old and the empty glasses are stacked in front of us and the tattoos are new on our skin and we know exactly where we’re heading and it’s somehow all right because deep down I know you love me
“Oh, Cat …”
And I’m lying there the morning after and even though he left ten minutes ago I can still taste him on my lips and smell him on my skin and even though everything he said made an awful kind of sense I can’t stop crying because
because
he
doesn’t
love
me
I can see so far. I am one thousand eyes. The eyes inside the skull I was born with, the flesh slowly succumbing to the poison
corruption
infection
salvation
in my blood.
But more than that, I can see through them. The fronds that wend and twist around the building my body lies corroding inside. The seedlings that dance in eddies of iridescent blue in the air around us. The shells it inhabits, wrapped in the shape of simple primates or GIA uniforms or colonist skins.
Everything it’s touched.
Absorbed.
Embraced.
I’m everything.
I’m nothing.
I’m me.
I’m …
… we.
“Cat.”
I hear the Ra’haam’s voice through the threads it winds inside my body. I feel how big it is. How impossibly old. A vast consciousness, stretching across countless stars. A legion of one and billions, growing with each mind it enfolded.
Encircled.
Invited.
“Why are you fighting us, Cat?” it says, inside my head.
“Because I’m frightened,” I reply. “Because I don’t want to lose myself.”
“There is no loss through this communion. Only gain. You will become so much more inside us. You will never be unwanted or unloved. You will be us. We will be you. Always.”
“But the others … Scarlett and …”
“He will join us. One day, we will encompass all this. Everything.”
“Encompass?” I shake my head. “You mean devour.”
“We are not destroyers. We are deliverers. From the prison of self, into the liberty of union. We are acceptance. We are love.”
It’s the same voice I heard when I was new and cold and frightened, staring out at the world for the first time from the bastion of my mother’s breast.
But I don’t feel cold or frightened now.
I feel warm.
I feel welcome.
Annihilate.
Assimilate.
And I’m lying there on the floor of the reactor in some forgotten colony in some nowhere sector and I’m losing everything I was and ever will be and somehow it’s okay because I know
I know
I KNOW
it
loves
me.
•••••
We stand. In the skin that was Cat.
She is ours and we are hers.
Once we encompassed whole worlds. Communed with entire systems. But there is so little of us left now. An impoverished network, barely remembering the grandeur that came before. We have slumbered for countless eons. There is so little of us awake—just enough to weave small tendrils through the tiny skins that stumbled upon this cradle centuries ago. Sending them out to protect us while we slept a few hundred years more.
But soon, we spawn. Begin anew.
Bloom and burst.
We gaze out through the Cat-skin’s eyes. The skin named Scarlett looks back at us. A tiny, frightened thing, locked in a prison of its own flesh and bone.
“… Cat?”
We ignore her. Staring instead at the other.
The enemy.
“Aurora,” we say.
We sense the imprint of our old foe on her genes. Her mind. The last Eshvaren died a million years ago. But we knew they would find a way to strike at us from beyond their well-deserved graves. Some long-dormant device hidden