“Manywhere, Manyone, Manything” by NM Whitley

I. The torturers arrive, stocky and headless, clad only in loincloths.

Dark eyes scowl in their chests, noses protrude from their sternums. Their truculent sneers open like a slash across their bellies. At first, they ask no questions. They lash me to one of the long tables in the main cavity of the vessel-fish, they prod and poke and call me ‘old lizard woman’ and other cruel words that ring hollow, words I barely understand. Words that recall my erstwhile footman Erc.

When last I saw Erc, one sunny day a few short cycles ago, I’d hardly recognized him. His green face and yellow eyes had been framed by a sandy-brown wig, in the unkempt styling fashionable of late amongst the local youths. The effect was quite ludicrous as he squatted by the entrance flap of my dormant vessel-fish, awaiting my return from sundry errands. After the traditional exchange of salutation pheromones, he related the sad tale of his brother Duje’s long-ago death, crushed by a speeding vegetable cart whilst drunk on this planet’s native liquor, along with another anecdote explaining how the wig had come into his possession, including many humorous details I wish I could remember.

Given the present circumstances, here with my torturers, such flavors of memory are lost to me.

What I do recall are Erc’s parting words, which amused me far more than they should have, on account of that silly wig. 

“A lot of people talking,” he said, dipping into the local idiom. “They have your coordinates, Milady.”

But I was only the ageless hag of the promontory, what had I to hide? His admonition called to mind gossipy gawkers, foolhardy youths approaching the lizard-woman’s roost with some nebulous thing to prove.

Instead, here they are, wielding cymbals, preposterous lutes and zithers. But to my ears their music is not abrasive but soothing, and I sense my inquisitors are becoming impatient.

II. I know not what became of the other passengers. 

My two footmen abandoned me, as foreseen in a mist-induced vision. And who can blame them? Understand: a footman’s duties when brought aboard are twofold. To assist the captain in maintaining and governing the vessel-fish, and to engender in the captain a new generation of spawn. Regarding the latter, the fearsome magic of my royal cloaca had sent countless shockwaves through Erc and Duje’s sexual apparatuses; time and again it shattered, if temporarily, their will to separate from the cloacal kiss. But spawning, despite our best efforts, had proven impossible, and with our vessel shipwrecked and hibernating on this foreign planet, there was no further maintenance or governance to be done, no reason for Erc and Duje to stay. All of this, again, I had foreseen.

Alone I ventured forth in search of sustenance. Many cycles by this world’s reckoning elapsed before I could fully stomach the local flora. With time I mustered the courage to seek out a settlement where I might engage in barter, shunning the small villages in favor of larger urbs where the presence of strangers aroused less suspicion and loathing. There, they judge me as eccentric, as a halfwit, but they leave me be.

With the increasing frequency of our contacts, their habits of thought, the alien customs and syntax, have begun to persist in me by degrees; even my pheromone glands have had occasion to reprogram themselves to the demands of interspecies contact. I breathe and perceive via the atmosphere and wavelengths of their world now. Without the mists or the company of my footmen I find myself estranged from myself, from the memory of my captaincy, from the notion I was ever more than a hermit and an exile.

Many of the particulars of our final journey escape me. For instance, I shall never forget the day I met Antas the akephalos, but the name of the planet where he engaged passage, even if I could remember it, would be meaningless to me now.

The largest of Antas’s kinsmen, the chief inquisitor, approaches. In one hand he carries a bowl of scalding water, in the other a bowl of ice.

“Where is Antas?” he asks.

III. Early in our journey, Antas came to me, asking about the mists. 

As a rule, I tended to avoid the public society of the main cavity, but as we had taken on few paying customers this trip, I deigned to introduce myself (as others of my rank more gregarious than I are wont to do). The mist’s effects were still upon me, and as I looked at the seven infrared blobs arrayed around one of the long tables, I could foresee so many of their outcomes. Or rather, I saw a crystal grid stretching in every possible direction, every direction of possibility. I saw myriad Ercs and Dujes, captured in each facet of crystal. Of that multitude the vast majority would forsake me.

Around Antas I had no such insight. What he radiated was not clear crystal, but a cloud of indeterminacy. This anomaly inspired my curiosity, and some tenderness–a vague wish to safeguard this diminutive, nervous-looking figure against the perils of the unknown.

Afterwards, on the way back to my state-room, he approached me. His demeanor belied a need to talk to someone, anyone.

He was, by his own confession, scared. Intimidated by the brusque manner of Erc and Duje, by the slick grey of the vessel-fish’s fleshy walls, by the impression of regal detachment which in those days I strove to maintain. My duty that first evening was to reassure him, as best I could via gesture and pheromone and a smattering of the akephaloi tongue, that he and his cargo were safe. All he’d brought aboard was a sleek-lined case, roughly cubical, which barely fit beneath the webby tissue of his state-room’s narrow berth.

Antas was, as I came to understand, a learned man. A devotee. He argued passionately, in a tremulous voice, about many things. Linear thoughts which had beginnings and long middles and were nigh impossible to follow to their end. He employed a variety of paralinguistic idioms with admirable skill, but the concepts underpinning this akephaloi religion were hopelessly foreign, of little use for a vessel-fish captain. His ideas found scant purchase in my mind, and even then, only as fragments.

He spoke of matter, energy, spirit. Of the Orb–some ritual object, I surmised, contained within that case. Of his journey to retrieve this Orb, and the brethren he had lost. He spoke of faith and doubt. Of orthodoxy, apostasy, and heresy. He was a seeker, he said. But what he sought made no sense. 

“Tell me, captain,” he asked another evening at the long table, alone beneath the glowing buttresses of the vessel-fish’s bioluminescent ribcage, when the other passengers had retired and the footmen were occupied with their duties. “About this famous mist.”

She who breathes the mineral mist sees things, I explained. Visions which uniquely suit us to the exigencies of star-travel. We see all the different futures that might await, we make a choice, and our vessel moves us through that probability space at the speed of thought. Antas said nothing. The expression on his torso was blank, inscrutable.

“I must confess,” I continued (ill-advisedly, in retrospect), “my vision as regards the Orb was inconclusive. Can you tell me where is it going, then? Your ultimate destination?”

Antas’s eyes blinked to life, and he began to gesture. “That’s precisely the question. I don’t know myself. To rejoin my brethren in the Holy Wars? Elsewhere, somewhere beyond imagination?”

With that, he broke off, and we spoke no more on the matter.

I still recall overhearing Erc and Duje’s jealous mutterings and innuendos, the unseemly flapping of their forked tongues as they quipped and japed about the mechanics of coitus between our species and an akephalos. I was above such nonsense, of course. I had indeed spent more time with Antas than with any passenger before him, more hours of conversation in the main cavity, longer intervals of profound silence. Antas and I shared an unusual complicity and yes, a mutual curiosity, but this curiosity did not extend to the salacious lengths my footmen imagined. I had no need to explain, least of all to them; a captain may keep the company of manyone she chooses. And for a time, I chose to be alone, the silence in my state-room broken only by the occasional gurgle bubbling up like an ominous afterthought within some organ of the ship.

The vessel-fish continued its inexorable drift, an oblong projectile afloat in the ether. As we neared our destination, Erc and Duje prepared my ritual bath, and were pulling me from the vessel-fish’s warm, liquid-filled sac when, from elsewhere in the ship, we heard not gurgles but screams. Hastily, they wrapped me in my robes and we rushed to follow the screaming to its source. Outside Antas’s state-room, the other passengers stood awestruck. Antas knelt beside his hammock with the carrying case open before him. Inside was a glowing orb no larger than a human head. In his hands, held close to the still-screaming lips in his abdomen, was a vial.

Condensation frosted the vial’s interior, streaked with fallen droplets of clear liquid. Our vessel’s most righteous effluvium: the mineral mist.

“Fool!” I shouted, and sprayed, and gesticulated. “Fool, fool, fool!” With that Antas desisted in his screams. He offered no resistance as Erc and Duje took away the vial and I berated him in every idiom I knew. How dare he? These things were not for such as him! Did he think he could tread manywhere, and do manything and be manyone he pleased? But he seemed not to hear.

Antas was taken deep within the vessel-fish, encased in the spiny, bone-like structure that served in rare circumstances as the brig. I visited several times during his captivity, and peered at him, still perceiving the faint cloud of doubt he irradiated. Now it inspired not tenderness or curiosity, but rather profound unease.

IV. I do not blame Antas for the great trouble.

  Such trespass and thievery are inexcusable, yes, but our stores of the mist were plentiful enough that he had caused no danger in that regard. And yes, perhaps the shock of his transgression had a dulling effect on my faculties. Regardless, I alone am at fault for not having read the signs, for ignoring the vessel’s voice as it burbled at the limit of my senses. For neglecting the all-important bond between a captain and her vessel.

Ordinarily, at the final stage of our journey, we would have executed a series of maneuvers, aided by the mist, to guide us into the proper trajectory and then nudge the titanic space creature towards safe harbor. We very seldom missed calculations upon this point.

Unfortunately, we were offered no opportunity to make calculations of any sort. Our only warning was a groan from the ship’s bowels, long and low such as I never heard before or since. Thanks to some ingrained epigenetic memory, though, I instantly understood: our vessel-fish was falling into narcoleptic slumber.

This moment of recognition did not last long enough to think about. All we beheld was the sickening rush of our descent. Down we came, whirling and plunging. If Erc and Duje and I were able to find ourselves to the hammocks and tighten them around us, it was purely thanks to a freak of raw instinct.

The mineral sheath which safeguarded the ship’s innards from the cosmos fell to shreds upon re-entry, and we made impact, skidding to a halt near the edge of some lonely promontory amidst caves and ravines. Every muscle inside the vessel-fish relaxed. The footmen and I were dumped from our hammocks. The cage of bony spines that imprisoned Antas opened, and he ran gasping down the full length of the vessel-fish, arms dangling at his sides. With a farewell scream the akephalos pushed up the flap with the flat space between his shoulders and ran off. Off to wander this world and others, searching for something, or fleeing something, or both.

Only much later—only after Erc’s visit with his wig and his warning about my coordinates, only when I had long since resigned myself to life on this planet, to my eventual death on this planet—did Antas reappear on my horizon.

In all that time the vessel-fish had remained comatose, troubled only with the slow accretion of sediments to repair its mineral sheath. In retrospect, it can’t have been hard to find—laying in plain sight, the only ‘cave’ in the vicinity with a flap that opened and shut. And one morning, sure enough, the flap opened.

Before my eyes could adjust to the influx of sun, my visitor remained an infrared blob, draped in the smell of decay. I only recognized him by his voice, as tremulous as when he was much younger.

“You have something I need,” Antas said.

“I was expecting you,” I said in my halting, atrophied command of his language. “Please. One moment.”

Beneath my hammock, in the state-room furthest from the main flap, lay the carrying case. I had, in the early days, thought about tossing it off a cliff a hundred times, and a hundred times thought better of it. It had remained forgotten for so long that fine tendrils of webby tissue from the hammock had grown around it, making it hard to dislodge from the spot.

“I never asked for this, you know,” Antas called out after me. “This responsibility.”

As the parcel changed hands, I leaned closer, adjusting my eyesight to this spectrum. Antas stood before me, older and oddly grizzled. The frost of grey hair on his shoulders, the crows’ feet encroaching on his armpits. And in those large expressionless eyes set at chest level like a pair of dark mirrors I could divine my own reflection, my own aged reptilian face.

“You will permit me a question,” I said, with an intonation purposely pitched between request and declaration.

“Ask.”

“Why have you come here?”

“I am here,” he said, “because I have been running for far too long. From my pursuers, from the Orb and my duty towards it. Because my former brethren have become sick and dangerous in their zealotry and delusion. Because you and I, and every creature in this galaxy, will be safer if the Orb rests with me, and not with them.”

“Is that what you saw, Antas? When you stole the mists and looked into the Orb?”

Twice, very slowly, he blinked, and between one blink and the next I felt a pang, an echo of the tenderness I felt for him long ago, a yearning to hold and feel him against my scaly arms, and I was unable to prevent a whiff of that yearning from seeping through my skin. But Antas seemed not to notice, much less to understand.

“I saw akephaloi in their millions suffer and die in gruesome ways, by gruesome means. And if you will excuse me, I do not wish to think more on it.”

“You will permit me one last question?” It was plainly a request this time, and though he gave no immediate answer I read a measure of assent in his expression. “It is one I asked you once long ago.”

“My ultimate destination, no?” 

I nodded, but in response I received no gesture of acknowledgement, nor even a word of goodbye as he turned and left. I know now that he gave no answer because even all these years later, he still had none to give.

V. In vain, one of the torturers tries to pluck out my eyeballs.

His pincers are no match for the clear, scaly coverings. These akephaloi are clearly well-practiced in the torturer’s arts, but my mind and biology have proven inscrutable to their methods.

Still, I feel moved by a perverse desire to speak. I am not like you, I want to tell them. Antas is not like you. If he were, he would still be here among you, but he is not, and you will never find him. For years you have chased him and he has always eluded your grasp. On an ocean so vast as the stars he could be manywhere. But I know my silence will displease them even more, so I say nothing.

The chief inquisitor’s facial torso contorts with rage. “Where is it?” he shouts. “Where is the orb?”

With that he brandishes a red-hot iron, wrought in the shape of his cult’s ugly insignia.  The iron plunges deep into the scales of my abdomen. It hisses, then burns. I smell myself, burning, and scream.

From the depths, as if in response to my cry, comes a mournful blast of cold, aseptic flatulence. 

The chief inquisitor and his lackeys freeze in terror. Another blast, louder, more percussive. When I unscale my eyes, the inner walls of the vessel-fish are writhing, their contours glistening and alive. Spurred to sudden wakefulness by the pain of its captain, as sharply felt as a pain all its own. Time, patience, and perseverance have restored this magnificent creature, restored me, restored the bond which I had so fatefully neglected. I remember Antas now, his face both young and old, and though my belly still burns, I laugh. With the laughter, with the memory of Antas comes, perversely, a swelling in my loins. Something that has welled up and accumulated within me all these years of isolation, something that has awoken along with the vessel-fish, and is now changing form, and growing. It is not the simple old heat of estrus. It is not want—it is power. The power of a commander at the helm of a reborn vessel, queen of its own destiny. It is my fearsome magic, stronger than any ridiculous Orb, a thousand times stronger than ever.

The smell of my charred skin mingles with the tang of my pheromone cloud, multiplies its potency. I see desire overtake my torturers. Their want of me seizes them at a glandular level. A mind-altering cross-species lust. A lust so unknown to them, so unutterable it nullifies ego and soul. They untie me, obediently, without my even saying the word.

I can see the force of my will ripple through each of their faces, from a point between their eyes outward, the musculature of their chests stretching and contracting at my whim: their eyes, the lids and brows. Their mouths, their lips. I arrange them around me in a ring. A musk arises from them, the smell of fear mixed with adoration. With their torture implements still clutched in their hands, they beat their chests with their fists, and in the process black their own eyes, bloody their own noses. Then, at my unspoken command, they set to work the implements on themselves. They scald themselves with water, shove uncomfortably large ice cubes up their own orifices which stretch past the point of tearing and bleeding. They gouge out their own melon-sized eyes which fall, punctured and leaking fluid, like an offering at my feet. The chief inquisitor steps forward, reaches into his own belly-mouth with a pair of bronzen pliers and rips out a giant molar. He does not scream but rather gives a low, ecstatic moan. Another is wrenched free, and another, until he is toothless and bleeding freely from the mouth. He falls to his knees, whimpering, and his henchmen follow suit, a choir of mutilated, half-dead freaks. Without so much as a gesture, I dismiss them and they crawl away, like stricken penitents, to die.

I am still trembling when I hear Erc’s voice.

“Milady,” he says, pausing at the entrance flap to genuflect. “I came as soon as I heard.”

He has traded his wig for an equally ridiculous wide-brimmed hat with a giant feather. In all those crystal futures I had seen for Erc and Duje, all those facets where they had been absent, I had neglected to see this hat, this feather, this future.

The wave of his scent strikes me, a mating pheromone that asks, Have you need of me. 

No such need remains, I respond. Then, aloud: “You are free to refuse. Come only if you so choose.”

The vessel-fish flops and slithers to the edge of the promontory and flings itself in a stupendous arc over the precipice. I stagger, and Erc catches me, steadies me on my feet.

“Let us fetch the mists,” he says.

Erc fumbles open the vial, presents it to me hastily, without the pomp and ceremony of bygone days. But the mist stings as it enters my gullet the same as it ever did. I open my eyes to see myself a thousandfold–hags, hermits, exiles, seekers–receding through the crystal depths. And at the speed of thought, our vessel rises, undulating, to the heavens.