Interlude
Her parent had to help the new Q’riln and her cube—she being young and weak, both, and the silvery, crystalline cube brand new, hence with little power—to establish her own portal, through the web, to her own planet. The mechanism of the opening of gates was the cube, descendent or clone of the missionary cubes that had arrived some thousands of years before. They were allegedly grown in various places around the planet. The process was very secret; even her parent knew nothing of the inner workings.
It was the cubes, too, them and the other shapes in which they appeared, which synthesized the ambrosia, the juice, that made life, for a Q’riln, truly worth living.
The cube interacted directly with the Q’riln’s nervous system—indeed, it was partially organic, itself—apparently drawing energy from the body to perform its various functions. The newly weened Q’riln lacked that energy. This is what required the mother to also touch the cube, adding enough of her power to it to activate the gate. Upon the touching, the mother felt power flow from her own cube to her daughter’s.
Mother, herself, would be heading back to her own foraging ground as soon as her daughter had departed the home world.
There was an inviolable rule, no more than a single Q’riln—the word meant “huntress and gatherer” in their own language—per planet except for home. Rather, it was one of two inviolable rules, the other being that the Q’riln must return to her own planet to breed, because, in the first place, this was where all the semi-sentient males were and, in the second, no one would want to be so much as seen with a male outside of breeding time.
The gate appeared in the air, an initially shimmering oval of about seven feet in height, and perhaps a bit over three across, the bottom hanging a few inches above the ground. The mother mentally worked with the daughter’s cube to clear the shimmer so as to see the vestibule, and then to move the gate on the other side of that vestibule, the net’s nexus, to a likely looking spot.
The spot chosen for the far side of the gate was at an area by a small ocean that fed into a larger one, which fed into the planet’s world sea. Her mother chose this spot for her because of the extremely powerful waves of anguish that came from that general area, a sure sign of incessant warfare or some other mass suffering, plague, perhaps, or slave raids on an unusually large scale. There would be more than enough psychic anguish for the cube to harvest for the young Q’riln to feast on, without having to try too hard, while she built her powers and her cube’s.
The natural shape of the Q’riln was vaguely insectlike, an oval body, hairy, with five equally hairy jointed legs and three shorter arms, each ending in a different kind of grasping member. The five lower limbs came in two classes, one of which could do double duty as a tail for balance while running. Her three eyes rode atop stalks, which were evenly spaced about her tripartite mouth, at the juncture of the lips. They were capable of seeing in darkness that no unaugmented human could hope to see in.
The gate itself, and its vestibule, served four main functions. In the first place, until fixed in place it could be moved around a bit to get the lay of the land as well as the shape of the prey. Secondly, it served to transport the physical Q’riln to the planet. Thirdly, using the shape of the prey as model, it modified the shape of the Q’riln to fit in nicely with the dominant species. It could also do very specific changes on demand. The Q’riln could choose to obtain the appearance of a male or a female, for example, and could set its age and apparent level of physical fitness. The process of shape shifting was, however, extremely unpleasant, and the more so as the shape varied from the natural shape of the Q’riln.
The vestibule demanded power as its payment.
Finally, when there was enough power in the cube, multiple gates could be opened to ease foraging by cutting travel time.
Once it had enough juice, the Q’riln’s cube could also do what the gate did, shape-shifting-wise.
“This one is going to be very bad,” advised the mother. “I’d tell you not to take it, to petition the Congregation”—the assembly that passed for a government among the hyper-individualistic Q’riln—“for a different planet, except that the feeding on this one will be very rich, indeed.”
“I can handle it, Mother,” the young one said. “I shall make you and the Congregation proud.”
“I am sure you will, child. Now take the cube and go to your new grazing and hunting ground.”
The change had been, indeed, agonizing, with three of her legs and one of her arms having to be absorbed into the new body, a changeover from fur-covered chitin to soft skin and hair, realignment of organs to produce two ridiculous lumps on her chest, and warping of her exoskeleton into internal bones, among myriad other, lesser changes.
The Q’riln had screamed and screamed throughout the process.
The spot her mother had picked for her to begin her independent life was only a few hours’ walk from a major river. She consulted her cube and was informed that the river was called the “Dambovita” in the local tongue. Moreover, the town from which she was receiving already so much energy was called “Targoviste.” The cube further suggested that she get closer to the town.
It never occurred to ask the cube how it knew all this. Cubes just knew a lot; it was common knowledge.
She followed the cube’s advice. With each step closer to the town, she received even more ambrosia than from the previous step, each jolt carefully refined by the cube into something that made her steps as light as the tufts that grew from a food plant on her home world, picked up and carried on the wind. And then she saw it, a rising forest of . . . no, not trees. What were they, she asked the cube.
“Mistress, they call them, locally, ‘stakes,’” answered the cube. “They are a fairly frequent method of execution in this part of this world, as well as some other parts.”
Oh, it was wonderful! She watched, enthralled and enriched, as a short and plump female of the local species had a stake driven up her reproductive organs, then out one side of her right shoulder. Even better, one of the infants, likely the woman’s own, was then forced onto the stake. She screamed as the baby screamed, then both screamed still more as the stake was lifted to the vertical and placed into a hole in the ground. The female slid down the rough bark to a cross piece, and the baby to her mother’s shoulder. Both screamed and suffered gloriously. A team of the locals then proceeded to fill the hole with rocks, dirt, and wedges of the local wood to hold the stake upright.
It was better than wonderful, unlike insects pinned for display, in this case the local species . . .
“They are called ‘humans,’” said the cube. It vibrated even more vigorously than it had when they’d given the Q’riln’s father the death of a thousand cuts.
. . . continued to wriggle and wave their arms and cry out for an aid that never came. Indeed, the only aid they got was in the form of ‘misery loves company,’ as still more men and women and children and babies went up on stakes.
In all, there were thousands, so many thousands of foodcreatures writhing in wondrous anguish.
“And they’ll be suffering for days,” said the cube. “I shall eat my fill for us both.”