IV. Turned to Stone

Two events had changed Kat's life over the years. The first had happened while the initial blush of freedom was still on her, and the monstrous Janites still held a fearful fascination.

Their language was not difficult to pick up. It was more like birdsong than words—the music of raw instinct and life, more than the dry rhythm of logical information. Soon she found herself carried along for hours at a time when choruses of beasts would sing their long epics. These legends held her in their grip even in her dreams.

She'd always considered herself a reasonable person, not given to flights of fancy or belief in fairy tales. But the stories! How the Elders, those venerable beasts who had lived long enough to gain a sense of self separate from the hive mind, would sometimes set their minds loose to wander outside their bodies. How some wandered so far they never found their way back and eventually became entombed in stone; how, if you investigated some of the cavern rocks closely enough, you would find imprints of their bones, and know their spirits still wandered loose. And how the very oldest of them, the very first Elder—whose remains, it was said, could still be found by the impious or curious—would someday return from its far travels to bring a great gift to all the Hives.

And so Kat went out looking, hunting for the fossils that had given birth to these legends, captivated by the unwritten history the songs might hold.

Not so long after she started these long rambles, the Janites began joking that she was an Elder in training, wandering bodily now in practice for the centuries-long forays her mind (they naively thought) would embark on in the far-distant future. She told them again and again that most humans were lucky if they saw more than one century, but they never did believe her.

One day she came to a long-unused tunnel. A pile of stones had been placed at its mouth, a small cairn in the pattern that meant a cave-in had happened inside. But none had that she could tell. Curiosity prickling, she stepped carefully over the stones and entered.

At the very far end, there had indeed been a cave-in. Some of the massive boulders even bore the evidence of fossilized bones—Elders, Kat thought with a smile, who had wandered too far. For a long moment, she let herself imagine their ancient spirits, clustered around her as she explored.

The digging had apparently recommenced, swinging the corridor abruptly to the right. Feeling as though the legends were coming to life around her, Kat crept through the tunnel extension into a huge cavern.

Her gasp echoed like a gunshot.

There it was, impossibly huge, mummified by unimaginable eons. It had to have been ancient—she even thought she saw the shadows of long-atrophied eyes, perhaps the last evolutionary step before full blindness. The smell of dust made her sneeze, and as the rasping echoed through the chamber she almost thought she saw the great beast move.

Impossible, of course. It was too long dead to come back, wasn't it? But it looked so… perfect. As if it might come back to life at any moment, perhaps bearing its untold treasure. Or as if a spark might return to those tiny eyes, as if it would turn to gaze full on this puny creature intruding its eternal rest.

Kat turned and ran. And from that day forward, she believed.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The second event happened perhaps a week later.

There were three exits from Moshe Ibrahim's office. One led back into the human level, where Kat had come from, full of light and noise and the hustle and bustle of people. One led through a winding corridor out into the landing crater where occasional ships came and went. And one led deep into the earth, where the only light was the pale phosphorescence of the walls, shadowed by the shrieking, chirring masters of the hive.

A year before, almost to the day, Kat had found herself in this same stone office, at this same stone desk, meeting a man who was all too much flesh and blood. On that day, he had taken her collar off. Today, he was offering her a new one.

Strong, he called her. Pure. And beautiful—as if the feline spots bred into her and the feline grace trained into her were any substitute for real beauty. And then he showed his true colors.

Marriage. He wanted to have children with her. Children, that was the thing. Lots of children. He was a doctor, he could make sure she never fell ill from childbearing, never suffered a single birth pain, as long as she would submit to carrying his seed.

Moshe Ibrahim, the medical genius who had created the slave races—for colonization, he claimed, never for slavery—the man who had used his own genetic code in that creation, wanted to continue his grand experiment. Oh, he made it sound so noble, this man the slaves called "Moses." They could find a new planet, build a new civilization. Just imagine, a race of slaves earning the right to Primacy!

His race. His planet. His people. He never said a word about what those former slaves might want for themselves. About what she might want.

Kat didn't leave the way she had come in. She thought that she had stumbled into the left-hand entrance, the one that would lead her deep into the hive, where she might be safe among the knifelike teeth and eerie song. Instead, she found herself running headlong out into the huge crater. And when she reached the lip of the crater, she kept running.

A long time later, when the tears finally cleared from her eyes, Kat realized she had no idea where she was. Her legs brushed through long, reedy fungus, every step producing a small explosion of spores. Helpless in a sudden coughing fit, she fell into a nest of fire.

On a planet where the dominant species was allergic to light, what seemed the most helpless prey was far from it. Tiny furless mammals huddled in fragile nests—but they had a defense that made them the terror of predators: light.

Fluorescing veins in the rodents' skin seared open. White burned through Kat's eyelids, through the pinpricks of her pupils, ate away the retinal lining like acid.

She never was sure who had found her, or how. Only that the jokes had been right, in a way—after all that practice to be an Elder, she had wandered too far and had turned to stone.