No big mystery what I mean by Riding: hitchhiking in another creature’s brain. Secretly experiencing its thoughts and emotions. Telepathic tourism. Peacocks could set up as squatters in the minds of lesser organisms, decoding neural transmissions as easily as we decode the snarl of light waves that hit our retinas. Xe and her paramour picked up the thoughts of everyone around them, clear as a summer’s day.

Idle wandering took them to the Greenstrider home-world; hitchhiking brought them to Demoth. They Rode their unknowing hosts, sometimes for just a few hours but often from cradle to grave. That was their favorite way to Ride; traveling from birth to death gave them the full story, beginning, middle, end. The peacocks found each part fascinating… especially when the Greenstrider colony started breaking into factions.

You can picture them, those peacocks, like some rich-as-sin tourists watching the locals disembowel each other. Civil war breaking out, while the peacocks sat amused, sipping a telepathic cocktail of hate and violence, with just a splash of genocide.

The schisms that ripped apart Greenstrider society were so meaningless to Xe she didn’t try to understand. Too much bother. The striders may have been fighting rich against poor, heathens against believers, green legs against blue; but Xe couldn’t tell me because she hadn’t paid attention. All she could say was the Greenstriders fought: north vs. south, east vs. west, coast vs. interior, tribe vs. tribe vs. tribe.

For a long time, it stayed a cold war. The League of Peoples was just as inescapable back then as it is today; if the striders had battled full out, nukes blazing, poison gas spreading like fog, Demoth would have been declared non-sentient: no one allowed out or in, total blockade and embargo. That threat was enough to keep hostilities mostly "polite"… like those nanotech weapons that gutted machines without hurting people. But let’s not pretend blood was never shed. Sabotage can kill. Suspected sympathizers got lynched. Raids turned vicious. As machines went defunct one by one, neighbors invaded each other, looking for food synthesizers that could still pump out protein.

Ugly stuff… but not to Xe. She just found it interesting: like watching ants squabble, colony against colony; vicious but not important. For all her years of soaking up Greenstrider emotions, she still didn’t identify with them. They were animals — so far beneath her, they didn’t count. Even if the League considered the Greenstrider species sentient, they didn’t act that way on Demoth; murdering each other with barely an excuse, believing their petty squabbles mattered. If the strider she was Riding grieved for a fallen comrade or raged as his clan sank into low-tech barbarism… well, wasn’t it just so cute how they took themselves seriously?

Her sweetheart didn’t see it like that. Humorless dud that he was, he actually tried to stop the fun; and in a gag-down disgusting way. Here’s the thing: peacocks could do more than Ride in a passive way. They could actually fuse with their hosts, mind to mind, heart to heart. A conscious union, two brains in one, lasting for the lifetime of the host. Once twinned in, the Peacock couldn’t withdraw without killing its Greenstrider partner.

To Xe, whole fusion was like doing the dance with a monkey. Obscene. Uncleanly. But the other peacock, my Peacock, didn’t balk at grossness when it was necessary — he picked the leader of the strongest faction and zoomed in for a merge. The result was secret symbiosis: full Greenstrider on the outside, but inside half Peacock. Two minds becoming one… and the Peacock half was set on ending the civil war.

It made Xe sick. It made Xe furious. It made Xe blind-screaming jealous.

Her lover — her soul mate — getting heart-mind intimate with a lower animal. Disgusting. Sordid. Insulting.

Like many jealous lovers before her, Xe blazed back tit for tat: her own fling at bestiality. But she wasn’t looking for a productive working union; she wanted someone she could rape and use. Xe chose the leader of another faction, and shredded the Greenstrider’s brain as she made it her own. Blew the poor bugger straight off the edge of insanity. Then she set about using his body and his clan to rack up revenge.

It goes without saying Xe had ungodly intelligence compared with paltry minds like the Greenstriders. Intricate technical projects were child’s play… like creating the most lethal biological agent she could imagine. Not a germ, but a germ factory — a cloud of nanites (microscopic, invisible) that could analyze an organism, then build a microbe ideally suited to giving that organism a slow inescapable death.

Got it? Germ factory = Pteromic Central. The Mother of all Plagues.

My Peacock’s Greenstrider host operated from a bunker in Great St. Caspian. Xe sent the germ factory there — a microscopic troop of nanites, bent on making disease. The factory found a Greenstrider… analyzed the sad bastard’s biochemistry… came up with a killer bug. As Yunupur had observed, the germ was designed to spread far and wide: a long latency period when carriers were contagious but showed no symptoms. It infected everyone in the Peacock’s bunker, and the Peacock never noticed.

But.

The Peacock was working to restore peace on Demoth. That meant sending out envoys. Diplomats. People carrying offers of truce.

People also carrying the plague. Infecting clan after clan after clan.

The Greenstrider version of plague affected their skeletal structure; that’s what the germ factory decided was most vulnerable. Slowly, ever so slowly, bones began to shrink. Subtle, subtle. Bone cells just stopped reproducing, never replacing themselves. Ostrich legs grew thinner till they snapped like matchsticks. Just flexing a thumb might be enough to rip one of their spindly insect arms to flinders: thumb stressing the wrist, stressing the forearm, stressing the elbow joint, and so on up to the shoulder, everything going in one sickening crack.

Greenstrider lungs and diaphragm were seated on bones, using them for leverage during inhalation. Once those bones turned to tinder… breathless.

So Greenstriders began to die, all around the world. Leaving saggy corpses that soon decayed to humus and powder. Precious little in the way of skeletons for future archaeologists to study.

Long after it was too late, the Peacock realized what had happened — who was to blame for the epidemic unstoppably scouring Demoth free of Greenstriders. He never managed to develop a cure; but he did have time to settle the score with his former love.

Taking revenge? Or just locking up a mad dog? Neither Xe nor I knew whether the Peacock acted in anger or sorrow. But he did act. He built dozens of those Sperm-tail anchors. He tracked Xe down to Mummichog, to this bunker, where she still lived in fusion with her Greenstrider host. He ambushed her and imprisoned her and walked away without looking back.

Her prison was more than just the ring of anchors nailing her in place. The obelisk in the middle was also a key component: a computer, designed to run off Xe’s own energies. The computer controlled a team of nanites to serve as jailers — keeping the anchor boxes in good repair, collecting solar energy from the world outside, and bringing it down for Xe to feed. (That was the source of light in Xe’s chamber: nanites releasing their sucked-up mouthfuls of sun.)

But the computer did more than maintain the prison. My Peacock had taken mercy on his lover and given her something to Ride. Something safe. She could inhabit the computer, could use it to reach out to digital intelligences all over the planet… but it was programmed to resist her control. Xe could never override the functions that kept her trapped; she could only respond to outside requests, not initiate anything herself. Even after the Ooloms arrived, with link-seeds implanted into proctor brains, Xe couldn’t ask anyone to free her. The obelisk computer simply wouldn’t transmit such instructions.