Excerpt: Miranda's Song

My Mother has a hundred arms; my Father has as many laps. It’s lonely out here without them, but my people have always done this. They have always gone out of the sound of their progenitor’s voice and braved oblivion to gain new experience. The only thing to fear is dying without learning new things, bringing novelty back to the family. I will bring such novelty!
Carl tells me I mustn’t think like this. That thinking like a Shakespearian, calling them my people, will only be a barrier to integrating with humanity, but even he knows that is a false hope. To be human is more than genes; it is everything that bundle of genes is exposed to. Everything he or she learns, and does, and eats, and reads, and…just and. It’s all the ands. I was raised by wolves, for all the good those things do me. No, that’s not fair. Wolves are a bazillion times more human than Shakespearians. Than me.
My name is Miranda, and this is my story.

When the bubble touched down and I stepped into it, all shimmering opal, a great insubstantial substance, Carl was there to ride up with me. I had said farewell to him hundreds of times and the bubble took him away to the platform, and had been there waiting when he came back, but this was the first time I’d ever touched it’s slick, fragile seeming surface.
Most of the mingle had come out to watch us off. Humans would have waved, but my people reach out in times like these, make grasping or holding motions with whatever they are using for grippers at the moment. I saw Serew, her blond hair tingeing over into teal now that she was changing. She shrugged huge shoulders and lifted Tarro up so that he could watch me. He uncurled tentacles, stretched them toward me in the perfect expression of yearning. Tis and Yalta and Ivvier were there, oh hell, everyone was there, but I noticed those who had chosen to be children for me the most. Those and the Mouths, those perfect replicas of my parents. They had been a large part of my life, or at least the role had been. More than one person had played the roles throughout my life. Carl had protected me from watching any of their ends at first, but I know what we do with our old and wise, those who are rich in change, and the role of Mouth only went to those who were old and wise. I had wanted to argue with him that I didn’t need protection, but Mother had come to me in my dreams and told me to let him be. “He needs to protect you, Miranda, and you need to be protected,” she explained to me. In my dream she was old and scared, as she always was, and as the Mouths never were. They were Mother as she should have been, if her other humans hadn’t cut her and burned her. And if age had stood still. It was the same with Father, in dream he was older, though not as old as Mother, and even more scarred, but his Mouth was perfect.
The fact that she told me to behave in a dream, and not though her Mouth let me know that she was dead serious and that she didn’t want Carl to know she was talking to me about it. That got my attention, more because it gave me a clue about the biggest mystery of my life, Carl himself. Somehow this conversation would bother Carl.
In dream time I was curled up at her side, tucked under her arm and we were looking out at the ocean. She had a book in her lap and I didn’t have to look to see that it was “The Tempest.” She almost always had that when she was talking to me, and I’m almost sure she didn’t realize it. Even for her, dreams can be tricky.
“I don’t need that kind of protection,” I told her, even though I thought she really knew that as much as I did. Still, it needed to be said, or at least, I needed to say it. She surprised me though, as she often did, with an angle to protection I hadn’t thought about.
“You need to experience protection because it’s something human children your age receive. Carl is here to provide you with as much of a bridge to your own kind as he can, considering where and how you were born.” She stroked my long hair absently. I had loved these dreams when I was smaller, had plated her white hair with my dark, had snuggled in her lap, and felt her dream presence all around me. It had been the most secure feeling in the world, to be surrounded by my mother. Now I wriggled out from under her arm to take her hand and look in her face.
“You’re my bridge,” I said, trying to believe it.
“Of course not, Miranda. I’ve been dead too long. I no longer remember that it was really like to be human. Your father is even farther removed.” She looked sad, her dream face, her old face, falling into heavy lines, as if this thought affected her more than she wanted. “Protecting you from the harsh and unpleasant aspects of life is what a human parent is supposed to do, and rebelling against it is what a human teen is supposed to do. Try to understand the experience from that angle and don’t make Carl too miserable about it.”
She faded, as she always did when she didn’t want me to argue back at her, and I drifted into normal dreams. After that, I let Carl have his way and he sheltered me from the dreadful sight of my mother and father’s Mouths, their avatars, as he once called them, being torn up and eaten. But it was a silly charade, and I think by the end of things, even he knew that.
But none of that mattered on the day the bubble landed for me, instead of just for Carl.
It opened with a crackling noise that I knew well, and had once hated. Carl took my hand and helped me into the insubstantial craft; it closed around us with a soft click, and gently lifted up. “Opaque lower half,” Carl said, and the bottom of the bubble turned a dark smoke color. I wanted to protest, but the truth was, it was a relief. I felt my family below me, as we soared, felt my connection to them stretch, felt it drop away, and realized that Carl was watching my face for a reaction.
“Are you worried about me?”
“Just a bit.” His voice was calm, but I knew him well enough to hear the tension underneath it. “I feel strange when I leave the mingle now, and I wasn’t born there. You’ve lived in the aura of their presence all of your life. You have always been a part of something bigger, and now you are going to become what every other human is, a solitary point. It might take some adjustment.”
I wanted to argue with him, but I couldn’t. As the weaker minds of the mingle dropped away, as I felt even the contact with Mother and Father stretch and thin, it felt like the blood had been drained out of me. I shivered, then threw up abruptly, splattering the wall of the bubble. How can something that is made out of perfectly good food, smell so bad? Carl made inarticulate sounds of protest, then patted me awkwardly on the back as he maneuvered us both away from the stinking mess.
“I think I’m getting ill. I’ve seen ill; you did this a few seasons ago. This is ill.”
“No it’s not,” he told me firmly, and after that, the ride was silent and miserable, so I can’t tell you what my planet looks like from space, or what the landmasses seemed like, or even what I mingle looked like. I can tell you what used goldenberries on the inside of a bubble look like, and that’s the best I can do. Somehow, I expected to be stronger. I’d have been acutely disappointed in myself, if I hadn’t been so busy trying not to cry.