K. D. Wentworth - Embians.pdf

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K.D. WENTWORTH
THE EMBIANS
AFTER SETTING THE AUDIO recorder for the night, Shayna wraps her fingers through
the wires of the treetop blind and stares into the heavy darkness, straining to
catch the next mating display the instant it flares. Just beyond the ragged edge
of the rain forest, the unseen ocean hisses against the shore and salt hangs in
the sultry air. Somewhere out in the sweltering sea of black, a small animal
squalls and dies in the jaws of some nameless predator.
Flash of electric-green with orange diagonals. Melds into the yellow of fresh
lemons. Softens...fades....
Darkness.
Cerulean blue. Swirls of carmine that suffuse with purple, brightening as though
they will explode.
Darkness...darkness.
Shayna sighs. "They're so incredibly complex, so varied. If I could just sort
the nuances into a key, I know I could make my thesis work."
Her expedition partner, Mae, dutifully records the mating displays on the
night-cam in every wave-length from ultra-violet to infra-red for later
analysis. She is eight years older than Shayna, working on her doctoral
dissertation, rather than a mere master's thesis. Her movements are careful and
methodical, everything always labeled, thought out, planned. Shayna understands
herself to be more intuitive, knowing when an answer is ready, it will surface
from the depths of her mind like an offering. Until then, she must wait, absorb
data, allow her subconscious to analyze and correlate.
Mae shifts on the camp stool, so close in the narrow blind, Shayna can feel the
heat of her skin, while out in the hot, tangled night of a world that has never
known a moon, or tide, or the chill embrace of snow, the serpentlike embians
slip through soft-fleshed trees and serenade each other with light. In the
daylight, they appear vaguely humanoid, with similar number and placement of
limbs, but their flesh is so dense, their bones are only cartilage, and they are
as sinuous as eels. Their skin is a mottled gray-green and they rarely attain
five feet in height. They produce no intelligible sounds.
"You might as well pick a different thesis and be done with it. Those displays
are no more a language than wolves back on Earth howling at the moon. They're
just mating lures." Mae jerks. "Over there!"
Acid-red. Sharpens to actinic violet that hurts the eyes. Flash...flash. White
afterimage.
 
Darkness.
Shayna lifts sweat-soaked hair off her neck, impatient for the next display. "I
think they're arguing. He's ready for her, has been for hours, but she's playing
coy."
"How do you know it's mixed pair?" Mae asks, calmly sensible as always. "Other
teams have documented male to male pairings, as well as female to female." From
the first moment they met at the university funding this study, Mae reminded
Shayna of a redwood that has stood for a thousand years and is no longer capable
of surprise or wonder. "They're acting on instinct," Mae says. "When the time is
right, they'll come together."
Come together. Such a pale expression for the incandescent union of embian or
human. Shayna's fingers tighten until the blind's wires cut into her skin.
Impossible blue-black hovering on the edge of ultra-violet. Shot through with
sparkles of green. Expands...expands. Flash of red.
Darkness...darkness...darkness.
Shayna's pulse leaps, settles into the alien rhythm of the lights. She turns to
Mae. "He's dying for her, and she's laughing, climbing just out of reach."
"Quit projecting." Mae's voice is curt, impatient. She leans away from the damp,
sweaty touch of Shayna's thigh.
Muted green. Swirls of magenta.
Pale rose. Pool of lavender.
Darkness.
Compromise, thought Shayna. One relents, so the other bides his time. In the
end, they will find a way to understand each other.
Olive.
Lime.
Darkness.
Red, Shayna thinks, fountains of orange-gold. White so hot it would burn you to
ashes.
Glimmering pure green.
Darkness... darkness...darkness.
 
The minutes pass, stretch into tens. Night hangs over the rain forest like a
suffocating black shroud. After an hour, Mae exhales and clicks off the
night-cam. "I think that's it for now. We might as well pack it in."
"Wait!" Shayna feels on the edge of understanding something vast and complex.
She senses unseen colors lurking out there, waiting to be discovered,
interpreted, felt. There are worlds within those colors, epiphanies too large
for the conscious mind to enfold. Her hands knot together. "There might be a few
more."
"Look, the only pair within range found each other." Mae's voice is exasperated.
"What more do you want?"
What she wants, with a fierceness that frightens her, is something of her own,
something not observed and written down in neat piles of notebooks, or
catalogued on a computer screen, or stored as a visual record. She wants Mae's
hand tracing the contours of her bare shoulder, craves Mae's perspiring body
sleeked against her side in the loneliness of the night while outside the rain
patters down and, inside, recycled air whirs. From the beginning, though, Mae
has made it quite clear she does not waste her time on petty matters of the
flesh with anyone, man or woman. Mae is all business, inviolate to everything
but concerns of the mind, and her first rejection of Shayna's overtures was so
painful, Shayna cannot bear to risk a second.
Her face hot, Shayna switches the lantern on, and then; by its pristine white
glow, pulls up the trap door and climbs down to the dark tangle of the forest
floor alone.
SHAYNA SLEEPS restlessly in the confines of her own bunk until noon, Aelta's
noon, that is. The days are longer here, like the steamy, languid nights, and
few creatures of any real mass stir under the blazing cauldron of the
yellow-white sun. Inside the small research bungalow on the forest floor,
though, the conditioned air is blissfully cool, allowing sleep or activity,
whatever the hour.
Mae wakens even later and emerges from her room, rumpled and blinking. Her short
ash-gold hair is plastered to her forehead. She is all muscles and planes, sense
and organization. She stretches and smiles wanly. "We got some good footage last
night."
Sitting at the metal kitchenette counter, Shayna nods over unsweetened coffee.
"I want to go to the cliffs and film the burrows again," Mae says. "My last
tapes were too dark."
Shayna finds herself reluctant to return there, although it is safe to walk the
jungle in the daylight. Embians are nocturnal and the local insect population
disdains the alien taste of human skin and blood, but the sight of the sleepers
curled into tight fetal balls, the light-generating organs on their chests pale
and lifeless, disturbs her. When she looks at them so vulnerable, she feels
 
guilty for spying on their love-making night after night.
"I have some transcriptions to make." Her hands tremble as she picks up her cup.
"I'll meet you in the blind later."
The displays begin early, while the air still is suffused with light the shade
of dark honey and the embians are barely visible.
Plum. Starburst of amber. Ochre.
Darkness.
Watching the embians is the only time she feels real anymore. Shayna rakes her
fingers back through sweat-sheened hair. If only they could install fans or
air-conditioning in the blind, she would stay here all night, every night, but
the embians have preternaturally sharp hearing. Conversation does not bother
them, but the least mechanical sound drives them to perform their dazzling
mating rituals elsewhere in the rain forest's steamy privacy. The night-cam and
audio recorder, small as they are, have to be heavily shielded. Shielding the
entire blind would be inordinately expensive, and the university that funded
them subscribes to the long tradition that fieldwork should be difficult and
uncomfortable.
She clicks on the sound recorder and sets it on the floor between her booted
feet. The other camp stool remains empty. She envisions her partner with a
broken leg, or perhaps a concussion, lying helpless and in pain among the trees'
exposed, pulsating roots so that Shayna would be forced to trace her by the
signal of her personal transponder. She sighs. Mae wouldn't be so distant, so
self-sufficient then. The wire screen creaks as she leans back and wonders what
it would be like if people spent half as much time learning about each other as
they do trying to understand the embians.
Aquamarine.
Darkness.
A trill pierces the silence, full of loss and longing. What do they seek from
each other, she wonders. A lifetime of commitment, or only a moment of ecstatic
union? Do they raise their young together, or abandon them to survive on their
own? Why do the males seek each other out at times, and then court females at
others? So little is known of them except these dazzling displays of light.
Flash of peach. Intensifies to orange. Shot through with yellow lines that bleed
into each other.
Darkness...darkness.
Mae pulls herself up the ladder, closes the trap door and drops, panting, onto
her stool. "Sorry I'm late." She clicks off the lantern. She smells faintly of
sweat, overlaid by a heavy floral soap, jasmine. "I was so filthy that I
 
showered when I got back, but now I'm wringing wet again." She laughs ruefully.
Indigo. Mottled with gray. Fades....
Darkness.
Shayna stares hard out into the liquid blackness, feeling the heat radiating
from the woman at her side. Her own skin burns with its nearness. "I was getting
worried."
"Look, I said I was sorry!" Mae's tone is stiff. She scrapes the camp stool
toward the far corner.
Cinnamon. Saturated with blood-red.
Darkness.
Blue-violet. Brightens....
Darkness...Darkness.
"Never mind." Shayna remembers touching the damp curve of Mae's cheek, and how
Mae recoiled that one, terrible time she dared that minor intimacy.
Red-violet.
Lilac.
Darkness.
Purple, strong and true, piercing the night like a beacon.
Darkness...darkness...darkness ....
"I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the universe." Shayna stretches
languidly. "It's like being on the edge of a wonderful secret, something no one
else shares."
Mae exhales. "Your first assignment is usually like that, but then the newness
wears off. And sometimes it can be just bloody miserable. On my last trip out,
there was this asshole, William, who wouldn't take no for an answer. He was
always after me, you know, rubbing up against me, touching me, and I hate to be
pawed like that. It was so damn humiliating."
Shayna's gaze is drawn to a different quadrant of the rain forest as another
display begins.
Sapphire.
Darkness.
 

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