“I know you, my sister.

“When I arrived in this place, my first friend was a great captain. Washen welcomed me and explained her essential laws to me, and in payment for my passage, she took title to a dry little world that orbits our sun. Perhaps to be made into a new home someday. And with many thanks, she accepted the full, unabridged history of the Ooloo, including every account from that ancient time—that very brief period—while my species actively sought to plant their own colony worlds across the universe. About that time, I knew little. I know much more now. Washen visited me recently, asking about a grand mission to another watery world. A colony was to be established. And by all accounts, it was a successful colony. But we eventually lost interest in far-flung possessions, and our citizens returned home. It was during that long unhappy voyage that a baby was conceived and born. While the starship skimmed along the wispy edges of a young nebula, the baby died suddenly. His slightly older, possibly jealous sister was blamed. The records are thorough. Even today, the trial survives as a digital record, untouched by the millions of years. Washen explained how teams of AI scholars, working at the brink of lightspeed, had noticed similarities between that family’s genetics and your own. Certain coding sequences remain true today, woven into thousands of your oldest genes, including an odd and useless mutation in your cobalt blood, and what is certain is that the death of the youngster was either an accident or a malicious murder, and that the homebound citizens could accept nothing that smacked of leniency. They ordered the girl’s wings cut away—tiny wings barely half-grown—and in a ceremony honorable and cruel, they lashed the criminal into a suit of metal and threw her into the depths of the black nebula.

“Her survival was quite unlikely. But plainly, you did survive. Which cannot be explained, not by any record brought here by me. No. No, I can only assume that a parent, or perhaps both of your parents, stole supplies from the ship’s stores. A fusion battery, I imagine, plus enough recycling equipment to keep you alive for thousands of years. And that is why you could survive at all. The illegal and immoral charity of grieving parents saved a little girl—saved you—and then you were dropped into the blackness and made blind. Across the thousands of years, you forgot your past life, and I can only imagine how awful your existence must have been.

“You should know me, my sister.

“I have always tried to be the honorable Ooloo—a worthy emissary representing my tiny species—and in that vein, I must tell you this:

“If I could, I would strip away your wings a second time.

“Seeing what you are doing now, and knowing the awful thing that you are attempting, I would if I could happily chop off every last one of your wings and toss the miserable pieces of you not into any blackness, but into a blaze of fire. Not into a cold endless gloom, but into the kind of brilliance that burns, blinding you in that more perfect and eternal way …!”

Forty-one

The avian struck the black face of the water, its body splitting apart, organs tumbling loose, and all of its pieces dissolving in the next wild instant.

Mere was grabbed and nearly crushed. Fractured ribs were twisted and shattered again, cutting into spongy lungs and the soft wet muscle. But she refused to scream. Holding her mouth closed against the fantastic pressures, she felt herself suffocating. But her new flesh was too weak to endure more than a few moments without oxygen, and she wouldn’t let herself believe that even one breath waited outside her increasingly blue lips.

A monstrous force yanked her down and down.

Then despite all of her effort and focus, a single bubble emerged from her mouth, laced with carbon dioxide and other toxins, rising off her face and shattering into a thousand tiny bubbles that were lost instantly among the swirling waters.

Moments later, a second bubble escaped.

Through squinting eyes, she saw the precious air shoot out of her mouth, abandoning her with the most shameless panic. She saw her own arms dangling upward, their flesh pressed tight against the sketch work of bones, the weight of so much water and blood and meat and mind threatening to crush her.

A third bubble started to emerge.

And then, feeling the fire in her chest and too much exhaustion, Mere let the last of the air spring free, carrying with it a sad, long, sorrowful wail.

The air exploded upward, and stopped.

She was staring at a puddle of gas, silvery and buoyant and very beautiful. What had she ever seen that was so lovely? Nothing. As she dipped into unconsciousness, she was marveling at the beauty of a little woman’s final breath as it danced lightly just out of reach.

Her eyes closed.

The bubble expanded and reached down, covering her outstretched hands and the long frail arms, elbows emerging and then her hairless head and the quiet face and a small but always sturdy body with the tiny breasts and the long fat nipples meant for a much larger woman. That body slumped and fell. Obeying some final command, it refused to breathe. But a fingerlike object pushed through the wall of the chamber, poking her; and then it delivered a second poke, along with a burst of blue electricity.

Mere coughed.

She threw up water and blue, oxygen-starved blood.

Before she was completely conscious—even before she could remember where she was and why she was—a familiar voice said, “Listen.”

Again, she threw up.

“Do you hear me?”

A look of understanding swept across her face. First, Tilan-style, with the mouth pulled wide and the tongue displayed. And she gave a human nod, weary but relieved.

“Listen,” the voice said again.

“I am—”

“Nothing.”

“What?” She couldn’t hear what was being said. She had to swallow, purging the water from deep inside her ears, and even then there was a numbing buzz that swept away every other sound.

“I am tiny,” said the voice.

The creature was screaming at her, desperate to be heard.

“Tell them!”

“You’re tiny,” Mere whispered.

“And vast.”

She nodded, understanding exactly how those two statements could be equally true.

“What is tiny might believe,” the voice declared. “But what is vast will not listen to you or to them, and it will not accept what it hears.”

“Eventually—”

“No,” the polypond interrupted. “There is no time for things that are eventual.”

Mere dragged her bony knees to her chest, shivering. Outside the newly made chamber, water was roaring past at a spectacular speed, or she was diving deeper, and while she stared through the transparent wall, she glimpsed something that looked like a tall window behind which stood an assortment of people.

“It cannot be stopped,” the voice warned.

“You can’t end it?”

“Nothing can,” the polypond moaned.

Then with a mixture of deep regret and utter pride, she explained, “I foresaw everything that was possible. I knew you might trick me, or even that you might, in some small fashion, convince me I was wrong. And so what I did—what is vast about me, and all that is small—what I am has worked hard to fashion one good weapon that would survive every doubt.

“Tell them that the weapon cannot be stopped, and if you please, explain that a small piece of me feels remorse.

“Please, will you tell them, please … ?”

Forty-two

A single finger lifted into the gray light, and with an expression that seemed both curious and exhausted, Aasleen stared at the finger’s broad tip, saying, “No,” with a voice that was dry and undeniably old. Then a moment later she said, “Not yet,” with a palpable disappointment. Then after another brief pause, with a grim certainty, she said, “No.”