Julie E. Czerneda - Web Shifters - Prism

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PRISM

Julie E. Czerneda

IMAGINE being a student not for ten orbits of a sun,

or thirty, but over two hundred such journeys. Granted, I

spent the first few decades doing what any newborn

Lanivarian would do: eating, metabolizing, differentiating,

growing, eating, metabolizing, differentiating, growing ... I

remember it as a time of restlessness, of an awareness I

was more, but unable to express this other than to

whimper and chew.

The day did arrive when I opened my mouth and

something intelligible came out. I distinctly remember

this something— web-beings being possessed of perfect

memory—as a clear and succinct request for more jamble

grapes. My birth-mother, Ansky, remembers it as an

adorably incoherent babble that nonetheless signaled I

was ready for the next phase of my existence. So she took

me to Ersh, the Senior Assimilator and Eldest of our

Web, who promptly grabbed me by the scruff of the neck

and tossed me off her mountain.

While horrifying to any real Lanivarian mother—and

likely to any intelligent species with parental care—this

was Ersh being efficient. I was thus encouraged to cycle

into my web-self for the first time. It was that, or be

shattered on a rock seven hundred and thirteen meters

below. Instinct, as Ersh rather blithely assumed, won, and

I landed on the surface of Picco's Moon as a small,

intensely blue, blob of web-mass. A somewhat flattened

blob, but unharmed.

Unharmed, but I recalled being overwhelmed with

foreign sensations as my universe widened along every

imaginable axis. I floundered to make some sense of it all,

until, suddenly, everything became right. I knew without

being told this was my true self, that there was nothing

unusual in losing touch, sound, sight, and smell while

feeling the spin of stars and atoms, hearing harmony in

the competing gravities of Picco and her Moon, seeing the

structure of matter, and being perfectly able to distinguish

what was appetizing from what was not.

Appetite. I formed a mouth, small and with only one

sharp edge, then began scanning my new universe for

something to bite. There!

Not knowing what it was, I ripped a mouthful from the

edible mass so conveniently close.

Ersh-taste!

Ideas, not just nutrients, flooded my consciousness,

new and nauseatingly complex. Ersh-memory. Even as I

hastily oozed myself into the nearest dark and

safe-looking crevice, I gained a word for what was

happening to me. Assimilation. This was how

web-beings exchanged information—by exchanging the

memories stored within their flesh. Our flesh.

Exchange? I was mulling that over when a sharp,

unexpected pain let me know I'd paid my price for the

knowledge.

My studies had officially begun.

What followed were times of wonder and the

expansion of my horizons . . . Okay, what really followed

were centuries of always being the last to assimilate

anything and being convinced this was a plot to keep me

stuck with one of my Elders at all times. In retrospect, it

was probably more difficult for them. The ancient, wise

beings who formed the Web of Ersh had made plans for

their lives and research stretching over millennia and, as

they routinely assured me, I hadn't been so much as

imagined in any of them.

Maybe in Ansky's. Ansky's outstanding enthusiasm

about interacting with the locals meant I wasn't her first

offspring—just the first, and only, to taste of web-mass.

The rest grew up clutched to what I fondly imagined were

the loving teats, bosoms, or corresponding body parts of

their respective species.

I was tossed off a mountain to prove I belonged here,

with Ersh and whomever else of my Web happened to be

in attendance. While they could have cycled into more

nurturing species—the ability to manipulate our mass

into that of other intelligent species being a key survival

trait of my kind—I'm quite sure it didn't occur to any of

them. I was not only Ansky's first, I was a first for the

Web as well, having been born rather than split from

Ersh's own flesh. This was a distinction that made at least

some of my web-kin very uneasy. Mind you, they'd been

virtually untouched by change since the Human species

discovered feet, so my arrival came as something of a

shock. Ansky was firmly reminded to be more careful in

the future. Her Web, Ersh pronounced sternly, was large

enough.

We were six: Ersh, Ansky, Lesy, Mixs, Skalet, and me,

Esen-alit-Quar—Esen for short, Es in a hurry. Six who

shared flesh and memories. Six given a goal and purpose

in life by Ersh: to be a living repository of the biology and

culture of all other, tragically short-lived intelligent

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