different species. “Of course you’re glad to see me. Who else knows what you like? Who else brings you treats?”
[Oh, you’re a Mother now?] asks Shokyu the Mighty.
[Watch yourself], she says gently, a very clear warning in the attached emotions.
[I’ll never understand why you find this so appealing.]
Shenya the Widow lets a long moment pass before accepting this change of subject. [Of course you won’t], she says, the inebriant rocketing through her system nearly causing her to add little idiot to the end of the message. In fact, one moment as she reviews the transcript to see what she actually said. Let us see…the Mother comment, the warning…the subject change…and no, she did not. But no, little idiot, you do not criticize a Widow’s use of titles while you wear an unearned title yourself. Consider yourself fortunate you deal with Shenya the Widow and not her own mother, or you would have been shredded long ago for daring to—
And then a blade brushes the edge of the gravity field, and Shenya the Widow is extracted from her reverie with the screech of chitin on metal. She panics for only a split second before getting her other blades set for a mighty pull—and she is free! Weaving, she examines herself for damage. Her body is flawless as always, a shining testament to the prowess of Shenya the—
“Why, you little tyke!” she says unsteadily, staring at a notch in the end of her best blade. “We don’t eat Mother!”
[This is exactly what I’m talking about], says Shokyu the Mighty.
Well, perhaps there is something to the corporation-wide aversion to Librarians. Not everyone grows back, after all. Most of the other corporate explorers refuse to leave dock with a Librarian on board, let alone journey lightyears—but then they share the same handicap as her implant, don’t they? They are not Widow. They are of weaker peoples, and they prefer to return to corporate with holds full of trash. But Shenya the Widow knows that this is letting fears interfere with profits, and that is why she is the corporation’s sixth-most-profitable employee. Or she was, three years ago, when she left Networked space. That is…thirty years Standard? She cannot even do relativistic math when sober. Anyway, that is beside the point, which is this: why return with sixty tons of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on when one can simply store the patterns and discard the material itself? The size of one’s cargo hold makes no difference when one travels with a Librarian. Everything it consumes, from soil to minerals to living things, will be organized and stored in its mind. And if corporate truly wants a physical example of a particular item to study, why, they can ask it nicely and it will make them one.
She has lost count of the number of loads she has brought this Librarian in the last few days, but the feeding never loses its appeal. She always offers the silver globe one item at a time, working her way up in both size and novelty as if she’s serving it an elaborate multicourse meal. Today, she moves from leaves to complete plants, to a few crude tools she scavenged—which the Librarian loves, judging by the noise level—and finally the pièce de résistance. She lifts it up from the floor, where she’s kept it hidden as a surprise.
“Hello!” Shenya the Widow says in her singsong, supporting the severed head with two blades and moving the small jaw with a third. “My name is Observer, and I am extremely annoying.”
She can see the head’s reflection in the silver surface of the Librarian, its gold eyes half shut and its white hair stiff and brown with dried fluid. The ringing grows louder, and the reflection distorts as a small mound forms in the perfect sphere. She is always pleased when this happens. The Librarian is naturally quite fluid, but it takes great strength for it to shift its shape in the titanic grip of a ten-gravity field. When it reaches for her like this, Shenya knows that she has something good. Something novel. And in her business, novel means profitable.
Additional blades lift random body parts for feeding. “Please, enjoy my hideous skin-covered legs!” says the head in the voice of Shenya the Widow.
“I apologize,” the head continues when the legs are gone, Widow blades working the small jaw up and down. “Normally I have two arms, but your mother could only find one.”