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.

She leans her head back, half-closes her eyes. "If -- you were an embian, what
color would you be?"

"Hmmm...." She can almost hear the slow smile spreading across Mae's face.
"Silver, I think, like moonlight on the ocean. What about you?"

No moon rides these Stygian skies, one of the things Shayna misses most. Arms
braced behind her head, she stares up at the ice-bright stars. "The hottest
shade of vermilion I could find."

Jade.

Darkness.

"So, what do you think -- two males, two females, or a mixed pair?" Mae asks. "I
can check the infra-red tomorrow when I review the tape and see who's right."

Burst of cobalt. Explosion of red-violet. Fades....

Darkness.

Glimmering pool of pine-green. Expands. Shower of cadmium-orange.

Darkness.

"Two females," Shayna says.

Mae leans toward her, redolent with jasmine. "Why?"

"Because they're coming together so fast, no games at all, just inquiry and
prompt resolution."

Aqua.

Sea-blue.

Darkness.

There is a momentary flash as Mae checks her watch to mark the time. "Okay, I'll
let you know tomorrow."

Azure so intense the eye must look away.

Darkness...darkness...darkness.

Shayna tries to sleep, but colors flow like rivers behind her eyelids,
unadulterated greens melting into raging, violent blues, oranges that erupt into
an energetic sea of yellow-white. What is it the embians say out there in the
darkness? What do they promise each other with each new pattern?

She tosses, presses her hands over hot dry eyes, tries to blank her mind,
compose herself for the balm of sleep, but the colors intensify until she can
taste them on the back of her tongue, hear them ringing in her ears. They mean
something. She slips out of her bunk and sits on the edge, pushing her
fingertips against her temples. Red throbs along her optic nerves, seeps deep
into her brain. Amber melds with her unconscious. Violet sings.

Finally, she turns on the light and searches the stores. Somewhere in the
station she has seen sets of colored bulbs for the lanterns, used as lures in
the earliest studies when others besides herself had postulated the lighting
displays possessed meaning. The embians never responded to static decoys,
though, and, after dozens of unsuccessful trials, the bulbs had been abandoned
in favor of the more traditional forms of observation.

Two hours before dawn, she finds a set of four: red, yellow, blue, and green, a
severely truncated vocabulary, but perhaps enough to begin. She takes four extra
lanterns and eases outside into the sticky, hot night air, leaving Mae soundly
asleep. Sweat immediately trickles down her temples and pools between her
breasts as she follows the well marked path to the blind, but then hikes beyond
it into the virgin forest to hunch at the bottom of a great, fleshy tree oozing
vinegar-scented sap.

The air has the consistency of heated sludge, down where the night breeze cannot
reach. Her lungs labor to inhale, exhale. She kneels between protruding roots as
knobby as knees, and, by the bland light of the white bulb, changes out the
other four. She turns on the green and waits. Mating displays usually start just
after dusk and intensify until midnight, tapering off after that, but a few
embians roam until dawn, searching for something -- she wishes she knew what.

The sodden heat of the night coils inside her, like a snake about to strike. She
swings the lantern over her head, then turns it off, trying to approximate their
initializing rhythm. Green, she thinks hard at the embians.

Whir of insects. Creak of trees shifting in the breeze. Rustle of mouse-small
feet.

Ochre.

Darkness.

Her heart thumps. They never make the same response twice in a row. Her hands
shake as she selects red this time, holds the lantern aloft for ten counted
seconds before turning it off.

Darkness.

The night presses in as she tries to be patient. Out of sight, the ocean
whispers against the sand. Her back itches and she tastes salt on her lips. She
wishes for a moon, something, anything to lessen the unbroken power of the
night.

Auburn. Streaked with ruby. Transmutes to shimmering jade.

Darkness.

She selects yellow, then hesitates. What if she unknowingly says the wrong thing
and drives it away? Reaching for calmness, she begins with yellow, adds the
blue, then turns off the yellow and waits a few seconds before she extinguishes
the blue.

Darkness...darkness...darkness.

Mint-green crowned with violet spangles. Brightens... brightens.

Darkness.

The display brings tears to her eyes; it's exquisite. She can never match its
eloquence, never reply properly. She's so limited, so --primitive. She raises
green and red together, holds them up until her muscles shake with fatigue
poisons.

Darkness.

Something weaves through the trees now, close enough to hear the whisper of
flesh against foliage. She massages her aching shoulder and huddles against the
enormous root, staring into unrelieved obsidian.

Mulberry. Fades to rust. To silver. Fades....

Darkness.

It's so close now, no more than a hundred feet away, and she panics. This is the
most important meeting of her life; she cannot bear to fail. She turns on all
four, saying redblueyellowgreen.

Darkness...darkness....

The soft leaves rustle inches from her face. Something slim, blacker than the
night itself, regards her through the darkness. It exhales the same subtle alien
spice as the trees and the mud. Amber. Pale green. A female, taller and more
slender than the males, with characteristic blue stripes on her throat.

Darkness.

Trembling, Shayna raises yellow.

Pale-daffodil.

Darkness.

This is obviously a conversation, if only she knew what they were saying to one
another. She switches the yellow off. A dry hand caresses her face. Smooth as
silk, more solid than human flesh, it slides along her cheek, trails across her
lips, down her throat. Icy heat rushes through her. She is lost, drowned in
red-gold, tasting cinnamon, musk, and something else, something alien and yet
almost familiar. The night whirls and she is somewhere else, not here anymore,
not in her body.

Metallic gold, brighter than the sun.

Gold, she thinks, yes, gold! She embraces it, folds herself about its

icy-hot center, consumed by its richness, giving all she has until there is
nothing left. Gold, yes, gold.

"Shayna!"

The sharp, worried word winds through the trees, penetrates the protective wall
in her mind. She starts, finds herself curled about a cool firm shape, the way
one spoon fits another. The embian female stirs within her embrace, gazes up at
her with enigmatic ebony eyes. The deflated light-organ lies mute on her chest.

Shayna's heart races as she tries to remember. Gold, there had been gold, rich
as melted butter, and then something more, she can't say what, only that it was
immense and cold and fiery, all at the same time. She pulls the embian closer,
thinking gold.

"Shayna, answer me! Are you hurt?" Mae's breathless voice is closer now as she
crashes through the brush.

The embian frees herself gently from Shayna's hands, then slips away, gray-green
hide blending instantaneously with the trackless riot of tree and bush. Shayna
folds empty arms over her breasts and rocks there on her knees, suddenly,
terribly alone.

"My God!" Mae fights her way through a hanging vine and then stops, looming over
her. "Are you all right?"

The muted sunlight, filtered through layer upon layer of vegetation, catches her
fair hair and transmutes it to spun gold. Shayna squints up at her. Gold, she
thinks and reaches up to touch the gleaming strands. Mae backs out of reach, her
face both angry and afraid.

Shayna drops her empty hand.

"What were you doing out there in the bush? It took me two hours to find you,
even with the transponder, once I realized you weren't down at the cliffs."
Mae's voice vibrates with anger. "Pull yourself together, dammit." She fits
Shayna's trembling hands around a mug of coffee. "We have four weeks left on
this grant and I have no intention of leaving early."

Shayna stares into the cup. Deep brown, swirled with lighter streaks of creamer.
What does it mean?

"Drink that, then take a hot shower." Mae paces the kitchenette. "I'll manage
both the audio and the visual recordings myself for a few nights while you get
some extra rest."

She tastes the steaming coffee, but it's only hot, not icy at all. It should be
both.

"It's getting dark." Mae pours herself a cup of coffee, then blows on it. "I
have to get out to the blind. Are you going to be okay?"

The table is unpainted aluminum, burnished to a high sheen. Shayna spreads her
fingers across it, studies the puzzling contrast of pink flesh on gray metal.

"I have to go!"

"Yes," Shayna manages, her eyes still on her hand. "I'll -- be fine. Don't --
don't worry."

Mae shoulders the night-cam, but Shayna doesn't look up. Words are shallow, like
water poured across pavement, one molecule deep and ten yards wide. Because
words can mean almost anything, depending on context and inflection, she
realizes now that in reality they mean nothing.

Once the outer door closes, she waits a few minutes, then collects the four
lanterns with colored bulbs. She studies each in turn, touching them with
wondering fingertips, red, blue, green, yellow. Grateful for their purity, she
pulls the transponder bracelet off her wrist and leaves it on the table.

Outside, it is raining and a thousand scents vie, wet mud, astringent sap,
rotting leaves, a dank musky fungus that has eaten into the nearest flesh-tree
beside their bungalow. After only a few steps she abandons the trail and battles
her way into the dripping darkness, using momentary flashes of the white bulb as
her guide. It will not be the same tonight, somehow she is sure of that. What
embians have to say is a symphony, rather than a droning one-note song. It would
take a hundred lifetimes to perform all the parts.

Her rain-soaked shirt catches on the branches and she tears it loose. Finally,
she stumbles across a hollow with a crooked stream at its heart which feels
right somehow. She stops, lights a color at random. It gleams blue, strong and
true. She counts the seconds, then turns it off.

Darkness... darkness...darkness ....

Sky-blue slashed with pink. Softens. Starburst of burgundy.

Darkness.

The display was so far away, she could barely distinguish the pink qualifiers.
She lights green and yellow, swinging them overhead, one in each hand.

Darkness.

Off to her left, between the original display and herself, another answers.
Chartreuse. Flash of blue-white. Black afterimage.

Darkness.

Two responses, herself and another. How do they choose in such a situation? Do
they go to the closest, or pick the more interesting of the two conversations?
She hugs her knees, waiting.

Closer. Opalescent white. Tarnishes to pewter. Fades.

Darkness. Her hands shake as she rushes to answer before the other can, crying
out red!

Even closer, almost at the same second. Mauve banded with copper.

Darkness.

Closer still. Ivory. Dissolves into rose.

Darkness... darkness.., darkness ....

It's obvious she cannot compete with the second embian's stylish complexity, but
the dark silence drags on and so she finally raises yellow and red together.

Pale gray. So near she can make out the black outline of the torso behind it.

Darkness.

Alabaster the second answers and she hears the swish of bare feet through mud.

Darkness.

So pale tonight, she thinks, and then selects white without much hope. They
complement each other, while she is alien, less than nothing to them, babbling
like an infant without understanding.

A squat embian emerges from the wet leaves, a red-banded male, his eyes black
holes in his head. His muscles swell in sleek bands beneath his skin. His hands
are short and powerful. They regard each other by the light of the lantern.

Marble-white.

Cream. A second male, more slender, his neck-bands only a faint scattering of
red, slips up from her right, more hesitant, less sure of himself. He coils
around the flesh-tree, his movements graceful as an anaconda. Rain patters down
from above in a sudden flurry.

They have come for each other, she thinks, not for her, and extinguishes the
white bulb. She picks up the other four, slides her hand over the wet shapes of
the trees behind her in order to back away and leave them to make what they can
of this night.

Two pairs of smooth hands touch her face, her neck, her arms, her breasts. Lean,
hard bodies press against her, one on each side. She is drowned in a sudden
burst of white, brighter than ermine, more pure than ivory or marble, sweeter
than alabaster, white which burns down into the secret part of her that is self,
sings along every nerve, fire and ice blended into one glorious rush that leaves
her unable to breathe.

White is the center of the universe, she thinks, a bridge of light into a realm
she's never dreamed existed. White, all along and forever without knowing she
has been white.

SHE WAKES to the tangible presence of darkness, which inhabits the forest like a
prowling black beast. The sultry breeze is its breath, stirring the leaves over
her head, whispering. The muddy hollow where she has lain with the embians still
bears the shape of their bodies, but they have slipped away.

White sizzles behind her eyes, on the threshold of meaning. She sags back
against the unseen vegetation, warm rain dripping down her forehead, and traces
the hurricane of colors in her mind...coral...flashes of amethyst...long winding
streamers of sapphire that twine through her thoughts, giving her glimpses of an
inaccessible country deep within, occasionally felt but never known, always
heretofore a dark and secret place.

Embian minds are not organized as a human's; they have communicated that much to
her now. They think, but not in human ways, not in cause-and-effect strings,
stimulus and response, logical progressions, but in great rivers of sensation
and memory and association that combine in unexpected, synergistic ways and
cannot be learned in coherent segments, only experienced.

She brushes the worst of the mud off and heads for the bungalow by the light of
the white lantern. Without a path, she wanders for a time, her soaked clothes
clinging to her thighs and shoulders, lost in the maze of towering flesh-trees,
until she changes lanterns for some reason she cannot name. The blue bulb
reaches back into her mind, remembers the feel of the bungalow, the exact amount
of pull it exerts, how it lessens when she turns away from it, increases when
she turns back. She half-closes her eyes and feels the way, not stopping to
think or analyze, just following the blind sense of home.

Mae is waiting, fuming, blonde hair plastered to her skull by the rain. She
clenches the discarded transponder in her fist. Mud coats her bare legs up to
the knees.

Shayna stands in the open door with the blue lantern in her hand, the remaining
four cradled like children against her breasts.

The other woman wilts into the nearest chair. "I've made allowances for your age
and lack of experience up until now, but I won't put up with this irresponsible
behavior anymore." Her voice is choked.

Shayna sets the lanterns aside in the corner, well out of harm's way. Each one
is precious beyond measure.

"Why are you wandering that hellacious forest alone--at night, by God? Do you
really want to die?" Mae runs spread fingers back through her wet hair.

"I'm only beginning to understand." Shayna perches on the arm of Mae's chair.
"But it is a language, just like I thought."

"This is serious, goddammit!" Mae jerks to her feet. "What could those animals
possibly have to say out there in the bloody darkness that's worth risking your
life?" Her blue eyes brim, bright with unshed tears.

Shayna wants to tell her about the wonders she's experienced, gold which melts
your heart and makes the sun sing, white bridging the way to Heaven itself, but
there are no words for such things between humans. "What about your
dissertation?" She grasps Mae's hand. She feels brown, with a touch of violet.
Yes. She tightens her fingers and works to phrase this in brown so she will
understand. "Solving this puzzle could make your career."

Mae stares at her trapped hand as anger and curiosity vie in her eyes, feeding
upon each other. "All right," she says finally. "I'll give you one chance to
convince me, but you have to promise that you'll give up this asinine wandering
by yourself after tonight, if I don't agree."

Shayna nods, then gives the white lantern to Mae, carrying the other four
herself. The minute they step outside, aqua brims behind her eyes, brightened
with sparkles of lime. Interesting, if she only knew what it meant, but it is
too soon. She's still growing, changing, learning.

At first Mae leads, but then she stops beneath the blind at the end of the path.
"How -- much farther?" she asks hesitantly.

The dark presses in, warm and thick, scented with sap. Shayna feels in auburn
squiggles how close Mae is to bolting. "This is far enough." She extinguishes
the white lantern, then fumbles in the darkness to select another at random. It
shines out red and she is content. Red hints at deep considerations boiling just
below the surface, an admirable opening.

Darkness.

After waiting ten minutes for a response, she tries again. Yellow.

Darkness.

"This is stupid." Mae hunches over her ribs, closed and disbelieving, as always.
"They never answer static lures.

Far out in the forest, almost hidden. Violet. Flare of indigo, so deep, it's
almost black. Fades.

Darkness.

"Now what?" Mae asks. Shayna displays red and yellow.

Darkness.

Periwinkle, banded with blue. Bursts of white.

Darkness.

"Christ, that was a lot closer!" Mae rises. "That's enough."

"No," she says. "You need proof." Periwinkle...Shayna reaches down into that
part of her that knows without logic, understands without reasons, and feels for
an answer. Without conscious thought, her hand selects white and red.

Darkness.

"I said I've had enough!" Mae wrenches at her arm.

Dusty rose brightening to salmon.

Darkness.

"That one was almost on top of us!" Mae's voice rises. "Stop it!"

White, Shayna answers.

Darkness.

"All right, stay here! Let it tear your head off when it finds out you can't
satisfy its needs, or maybe it will screw you anyway. Have you even considered
that?"

Umber. Shot through with pale yellow.

Darkness.

She feels the embian's approach like a bath of red-violet. "If you leave," she
says evenly, "you'll never understand." She displays whiteyellowred. A massive
shape, much larger than any embian she has ever seen, is silhouetted black
against a patch of stars through a gap in the trees. Topaz.

His skin is cool silk. Topaz swells like a nova, enveloping them in the now
familiar ice-fire and beyond that, showing them an opening of some sort, egress
from the stultifying boundary of conscious self...emergence, freedom. Mae cries
out wordlessly as searing topaz binds them to each other and the male and the
rain forest and the ocean and the wind, alters the pathways in their brains so
they will never be alone again, never apart, always and forever touching. Topaz.

Shayna awakes curled against the male's chest. Mae's ragged breathing rasps in
her ear. The pale-gray dawn filters down through the trees, illuminating Mae's
pallid, unconscious face. The male blinks at her. Shayna sees azure behind his
black eyes, mauve in the set of his head. Moving delicately, he eases away and
disappears into the trees.

Mae groans, drags a hand across her forehead. She seems olive to Shayna, mixed
with a bit of plum. She touches her face.

The other woman bolts up and her eyes are terrified. She crosses her arms over
her breasts, struggles for breath. "Where -- wh --" She is trembling so hard
that she cannot make the sounds.

Shayna cradles Mae's head. "Gone," she says, "but there will be others, and
their gifts will be just as wonderful."

"No," Mae forces between chattering teeth. "It's l-like -- being shattered, then
jammed b-back together with the pieces all in the w-wrong places."

She helps Mae back to the cool, dry air of the bungalow, bathes her, then puts
her to bed with a cup of hot broth. Mae shakes so badly that she has to be fed,
spoonful by spoonful. Her trembling lessens until finally her eyelids sag, but
minutes later she wakes, crying out, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Orange?"
She buries her face in her hands. "Please, God, not orange!"

Shayna sits on the bed and cradles her again, her skin tingling where Mae's lean
body touches her. Orange is not so bad, she thinks. Orange explodes warm on the
tongue, cools the back of the throat, fire and ice, like all other colors, an
invitation to abandon restrictions of flesh and soar in other dimensions of the
soul.

"Shhh," she whispers. "Think of cinnamon instead." She pictures cinnamon, heavy
and quiet, full of backwaters and still ponds, like late afternoon on a
sweltering summer day.

Mae's body heaves with her efforts to stop sobbing. Her face presses against
Shayna's shoulder. Shayna feels cinnamon seeping into her thoughts, tingeing the
river of her grief. They have both lost something in the process of growing,
like shedding an outgrown skin, and this is harder on Mae because her thoughts
have always been so rigid, locked into logic and order. Letting go of such
crutches must be as painful as being born. When the ship returns in four weeks,
she and Mae will take home the knowledge they have gained here, and perhaps
teach a few selected others the colors of the soul as they are meant to be
experienced, not at a distance through the ratified isolation of the conscious
self, but through immersion in those secret places shrouded in darkness until
now, that part of the mind where the embians have always lived. She leans
against Mae and the other woman gradually quiets. When they had known only their
surface selves, they were too different, she, with her fear of rejection, and
Mae's avoidance of intimacy. But now they have been set free to find that place
deep inside where what they wanted from each other and from life was always the
same, where it is possible for them to be together.

Shayna nestles close, fitting against Mae's side perfectly, just as she had
always known she would. They are one flesh now, one mind. Emerald, she thinks,
feeling the surge of greenness under her skin, behind her heart, beneath her
fingernails, acceptance of otherness, settling into place.

Mae exhales and rests her flushed cheek against Shayna's neck. Her slim fingers
twine through Shayna's. "Emerald," she agrees in a sleep-fogged voice and closes
her eyes.