Zoosemiotics
by AstroGirl
She had felt it dying for days.
It was nothing painful, nothing dramatic: just the tiny, comforting sense of connection she'd felt in the back of her mind ever since she first brought the moondisc on board becoming slowly fainter, hour by hour. Adjusting the light levels hadn't helped, and she'd reconciled herself to the fact that there was very little she could do.
But when the last tiny thread of contact finally flickered to nothing and was gone, somehow it still took her by surprise. She forced herself to ignore it and finish what she was doing before she returned to her quarters. When she did, of course, she found exactly what she expected. It was still. Cool to the touch. Dead.
She wondered what had killed it. Perhaps conditions on the ship simply weren't suited to sustain it in the long term, though she had sensed no discomfort from it, even at the end. Perhaps it had simply reached the end of its allotted span. Or perhaps it had never been meant to live without the touch of others of its kind and had faded away because there was nothing left to keep it alive.
She carefully fed the remains into the recycler, emptied the sandbox, packed away the lamp. Then she sat down on the bed, staring at nothing until the nothing become blurred with moisture.
How odd, she thought, after all the deaths she'd seen, to finally cry over a plant.
"What's wrong with Cally?" said Tarrant, leaning back on the flight deck couch and crossing his legs. "She seems, I don't know, depressed."
"I think she is depressed," said Vila. "Her moondisc died last night."
"What," said Tarrant, "that little plant thing of hers? Seems like an odd thing to be depressed about. I mean, not much of a pet, was it?"
"Apparently," said Avon, "it was telepathic. Which possibly makes it more sentient than certain members of this crew. Though, personally, telepathic or not, I have never understood the point of pets."
"You don't understand the point of people," said Vila.
"Well. True."
Dayna shook her head. "Poor Cally. We ought to do something nice for her."
"Like what?" said Vila. "Get her another pet?"
Dayna looked thoughtful. "You know, Vila, that might not be a bad idea."
Vila brightened. "It isn't?"
Tarrant shook his head. "I'm going to go and talk to her."
"What," said Vila, "offer her a pet Tarrant? She won't want one."
"I said talk. What she needs is a little human contact."
"Might work better," said Vila, "if she was human. Maybe what she needs is Auron contact." But Tarrant was already out the door.
"Thank you, Tarrant, but no. I do not want to talk."
Tarrant smiled in what was no doubt meant to be an inviting, appealing fashion. "You're sure? I just thought..."
"I am sure." She hesitated for a moment, struggling to voice a polite response. "Thank you." She might actually have welcomed a friend, a contact, a connection... But she truly did not wish to talk. It was a slow, ponderous, easily misunderstood form of communication, and it required more energy than she could manage at the moment. "I think I would like to be alone."
Tarrant nodded. "All right. Let me know if you change your mind." A moment later, he was gone.
Cally lay back down on her bed, closed her eyes, and tried to like being alone. It already felt like she'd been trying now for a very, very long time.
The next time they made planetfall, Dayna disappeared into the wilderness by herself, and returned with a hissing, spitting creature in a makeshift cage.
"There you are, Cally!" she said brightly. "Vila said you ought to have another pet, and this one's much more interesting than your little lump of jelly. You can have fun taming it. Maybe even teach it tricks. I'll help, if you like. I'm good with animals." She smiled. A predator's smile, all flashing teeth and satisfaction.
Cally stared at the creature as it swiped at the bars of its prison with ineffectual claws and howled out its frustration and fear, its trapped helplessness, its wrenching loss at being torn from its natural home. Her gut twisted, her breath caught, and the humans simply stood there and smiled.
She turned and fled, lest she give in to animal rage, herself, and lash out without physical bars to stop her.
Behind her, she heard Vila say, "See what you've done, Dayna? What were you thinking, giving her something all wild and dangerous?"
"I don't know why she's so upset," Dayna replied. "It couldn't have hurt her from inside the cage."
When they returned to the ship, Dayna's hands were empty. Cally didn't ask what had happened to the cage.
Two days later, Avon presented her with a set of plans for a device he'd designed to increase the sensitivity of Liberator's communications, saying he was too busy to build it himself and asking whether she could do it for him.
It was clearly make-work; Avon appeared no more busy than usual. But at least he was not attempting to "talk" to her, or capturing animals for her. Mercifully. She thought perhaps that, for Avon, complex circuitry played much the same role as a pet did for other humans. Perhaps a computer could fill his need for companionship. She could not say whether she found that thought cheering or sad.
Still, she was grateful to him. The work was intricate, and, since adapting anything at all to work with Liberator's alien circuits required considerable trial and error, rather challenging. It distracted her well. It made her feel useful.
When at last she was finished, Liberator's communications ability was better than it had ever been... And it was only then that Cally realized they had nothing other than silence to listen to.
She laid her head down on the console, feeling more alone than ever.
Poor Cally. Vila could tell she wasn't feeling any better, not really. And he wasn't surprised, given the others' ideas about what sorts of things might cheer someone up. What had Dayna been thinking, trying to give her that terrifying little wild thing? And Avon seemed to think throwing yourself into work would make you feel better, which to Vila seemed downright perverse.
No, what Cally needed to replace her little pet, clearly, was something, well, pleasant. Something small and friendly and cute. Sadly, she'd be as unlikely to accept the gift of a pet Vila as she had been of the much less endearing pet Tarrant, but that was all right. He had a different idea.
He'd first found the little creatures he called the "squeakers" when he'd been exploring -- well, all right, hiding from Blake, who'd wanted him to do something dull -- down in the very deepest sections of the ship, below the engines, where everything was extra alien and completely automated. They'd alarmed him at first, with their scurrying and their squeaking and their presence in a place where it didn't seem like anything ought to be alive, but Zen had reassured him that they were "a normal component of system function," whatever that meant. Avon'd suggested they might actually be part of the ship's workings, living on the waste products of Zen's semi-organic systems and excreting something useful, or at least more easily disposed of. Which conjured up some strange images Vila didn't like to think about much.
In any case, once he'd realized that they weren't down there eating the Liberator from the wires up, or likely to form into a carnivorous swarm and eat the Liberator's crew, Vila'd come to be quite fond of the little things. He liked to go and watch them sometimes, when he was feeling lonely or bored. And if watching them from a distance cheered him up, well, surely one of them at close quarters would do Cally a world of good. Right?
"He's perfectly tame and friendly, won't scratch or bite or anything! He'll be good company for you, Cally, you'll see."
Cally looked down at the furry creature, where it sat in a shallow box on a bed of shredded insulation. Unlike Dayna's captive, it seemed neither afraid nor angry. Only very small, and very out of place.
She looked up again at Vila, intending to explain to him, at last, that they had all misunderstood. That she had no desire for a pet, that Auronar did not even think of animals in that way. But as he looked back at her, his eyes shone with happy eagerness at the thought of pleasing her, and she found herself unable to say anything but, "Thank you, Vila."
He went away happy, and left Cally with the animal.
It looked up at her with bright, inscrutable eyes, and made a chittering sound. She wondered what it meant. Hunger? Nervousness? Was it calling to its friends, or seeking a mate who would not come? She could make the same sound back, but it would be empty, mindless mimicry. The thought made her unaccountably sad.
"You should not be here," she told it, aware that the noises she made were as meaningless to it as its were to her. "You should be among your own kind."
She picked up the box and headed for the depths of the ship. She would tell Vila that it had cheered her up, and then escaped.
The place was easy to find: she simply walked downward until she began to hear squeakings and scuttlings in the corridors.
Gently, she set the box down, lifted the tiny creature out, and released it on the deck. It simply stood there for a moment and looked about, nose twitching.
"Go on," she said. "Return to your home. You are free."
Another animal, watching carefully from the mouth of a ventilation grille, uttered a small, high-pitched squeal, and the newly liberated one dashed off to join it, sniffing at the other's fur in what Cally assumed was a greeting.
She began to stand, but she had hardly moved when the tiny rodent zipped back across the deck to stand in front of her again, looking up with shining, Vila-like eyes. It turned its head to stare at the box, then at her, then at the box.
"I don't understand. What..." She broke off, feeling foolish for speaking to this animal. Again. Then insight suddenly flashed across her mind. "Oh."
There was a small dish of food that Vila had left in the box. She retrieved it and set it down in front of the creature. It ate with small, delicate motions, glancing at her between bites. Aware of her. Acknowledging her. Understanding her role in its tiny, limited world, as she had understood its desire, without telepathy or words.
The food consumed, it rubbed its tiny face against her foot and ran off to rejoin its companions. She watched it go, something strange and difficult to name unfolding in her heart.
She returned the next day. She couldn't have said why; logically it was foolish, but nevertheless it seemed appropriate.
The creature came to meet her. Or perhaps it was another one -- they all had fairly similar markings -- but she didn't think so. She knelt and stretched out her hand. Again, understanding effortlessly, it came forward to nibble at the morsels of food she held between her fingers. Then it brushed her palm with its whiskers and ran off again to rejoin its own kind, equally at home with them and with this strange gigantic alien.
It was there again the next day. And so was she.
"So, how's the little squeaker? Is he a good friend? Has he made you feel better? I bet he has!"
"Yes, Vila," she said, relieved in the knowledge that she was telling him the truth. "He has."
"I knew it! I told Avon, I said..."
She raised a hand to his lips, cutting off the flow of words, and impulsively gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek.
He looked astonished. "What was that for?"
But she only smiled, holding the expression until he smiled in return, his face lighting up with friendly pleasure and warmth.
Cally sat back. She was finding she could enjoy a companionable silence.