D[R]YAD: An Odyssey

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. One of our eyespots watches the passage of time in the slapdash simulacrum of binary sunlight shifting over ill-suited living quarters; the other gazes listlessly at the miasma of light on the vidscreen, the speeding sundry stars streaked into opalescent fire. We may not be able to hear the sound waves of an exhalation as it escapes from the body and thins into void; but we see the twisting of the flesh and contorting of the form; we feel the panic of the creature as it faces annihilation; and, among those who share the art of Inspeak, we absorb the final thoughts of the dying.

All spacefaring beings know the avaricious silence of the interstellar abyss; and yet the Earthlings insist upon calling the creation of all things, the primeval birthing of everything from nothing, of cosmos from vacuum: “Big Bang.” Telling, we suppose, that the immaculate conjuring of the universe should be likened to as crude an instrument as a gun. Earthlings may indeed possess a mind too alien to fathom—even with our two minds working in tandem, we can only guess at the logic behind their actions, their motives.

The contrails of ersatz stars projected onto the vidscreen bring me back to a time long ago, a time on my homeworld of Knevu Zil, untold petameters away. As fortune—or misfortune—would have it, we first witnessed an Earthling with our own eyes on the very day of our Twainmeld. The waves which carried untold aqueous bodies gathered and splashed with pearly light on the black sand that day, an echo of the sister moons strewn along the dawn horizon. Our hydroid half oozed and pulsated from the tide where the sea met the crystalline mangroves; our phyton mate sat tranquilly amid the labyrinth of roots.

The elders formed a staggered ring amid the myriad roots and tortuous trunks, holding one pseudopod aloft toward the violet sky. As the hydroids made our shuffling approach, the elders remained still, save for the twinkling of green within their uplifted pods as the algal body within swirled, waxing and waning. The phyta beckoned us with pheromones, soliciting a primal, chemical response within us to approach; the old ones reached out to the juvenile hydroids with one of our first inklings of Inspeak, a simple urging so as not to bemuse our as-yet unformed minds: "Keep going."

And we did. Each of the hydroids threw pod after pod over the sand, the ground crumbling beneath us as we dragged ourselves toward something unknown yet familiar, like the name of a forgotten friend. Water had buoyed and held the amorphous, slippery bodies of the hydroids from the time we'd congealed into cytoplasm and life; meanwhile, the particles of sand fell as fluid, refusing to give purchase. Upon the indifference of land, through the fragility of air, the toil would be our own.

All the while, our phyton selves perched amid the tangle of trunks and stems, oblong balls of fuzzy blue-green scattered amid the formations of the mangroves like tiny clouds dragged to earth under the weight of their own lightning-made-solid. Over the last several weeks, the phyta, stationary until that point, had inched their painstaking way down from the shelter of the canopy as the hydroids had welled up from the meadow grass of the mid-thalassic ridge. By distance, the phyta had migrated a minuscule fraction of the kilometers traveled by the hydroids; by effort, we'd all flown to the moons and back.

Having exhausted nearly all energy in our descent—which is to say, our gradual downward growth—the clumps of flora rested on the roots, exuding the heady scent to which the hydroids drew steadily nearer. The masses of liquid flesh began to close the final few meters between them.

In space, no one can hear you struggle for breath; and so our watery bodies strove to absorb oxygen in the open air to which we'd never before been exposed.

“Keep going—almost,” came the shadow of a shadow of a thought as the elders reached out in Inspeak yet again. We went. We thrusted and heaved and strained and pulled until—

Contact.

Sperm meets egg becomes zygote grows into embryo, fetus; Earthling. This cycle has been explained to generation after generation of VenevZi’iz. After all, a variety of species on our own world follow the same pattern of reproduction; and in the basest sense, our ways do admittedly align. Comparison has been made to intercourse, to an epiphyte, to a yolk and shell, in the effort to present the Twainmeld in digestible fashion to the Earthling brain. (We ourselves favor the bond of fungi and algae which forms lichen.)

Each of these Earthling analogs contains an element of our phenomenon, it’s true; but we balk at the attempt to boil down to singularity what must remain multiple. The phyton body dissolves into shimmering particulate matter within the plasm of the hydroid, which infuses the xylem in turn with nutrients and vitality. The suffocating hydroid breathes in the exhalation of the phyton, and vice versa. After that first cyclical breath, we cannot—and need not—breathe any other air. Breath for breath, blood for blood, each biological rhythm synchronizes, disintegrates, and emerges as coupling.

As we settled into our new body, once-dim senses grew razor-edged. Smell, which had informed of food-not-food, foe-not-foe, refracted into a spectrum of fresh-to-rotten, diseased-to-immaculate. To the hydroids, the phyta had smelled intoxicatingly of sustenance; the phyta had likewise perceived a pollinator. In their merging, both halves intuited a melting away of the driving force which had compelled them entirely: hunger. In the wake of the liquefaction of that ravenous urge, more sensory overdrive percolated to the surface.

Vibration, the rippling shadow cast by movement, bent and recurved into the nuance of sound. Resistance and yield fluttered and shattered into the multifaceted texture of touch. Electrical signals in the air, radiation in our surroundings, temperature fluctuation, magnetic push-pull, all fizzled and popped into our delicate consciousness. We only grasped loosely what meaning these might hold, but we felt their presence all the same; and more sharply still, we knew that we felt them. The bubbling forth of a self-perceiving mind confounded us most.

“This way.”

Inspeak comes with only as many words as the Inspeaker, and VenevZi’iz communicated in concept, not in the abstraction of concept-as-sound. “This way”: odor of sea salt and silica; plasmic wave crashing over frond; tactile tapestry of scaly grit woven into supple gel; myriad other stimuli of the multiple made whole. “This way” gave direction to sense. “This way” we tumbled with unknown steadiness and vigor. “This way” we pushed on into light, into sight.

Vision ranked dead-least in our sensory race. Generation after generation of VenevZi’iz reports this phenomenon. Our culture obdurately refuses any formal analysis of our most sacrosanct rite; we plunge a biological process into the murky depths of the unexplained, the Twainmeld consecrated in obscurity. We ourselves can’t explain the reason for our delayed sight, not entirely, but the Earthling concept of a blink comes closest. Bright light or wind, pain and fear, will cause an Earthling to squeeze shut the membrane of the eye, blocking out light and diminishing the flood of data with which the necessarily limited brain must contend. Only intuition may guide us, and intuition tells us that every pair of us blinks simply to bear the hugeness of awakening.

Light flooded in. We had known this sensation in a dulled, stupefied fashion. We distinguished light from dark much as we discerned food-not-food, a binary of possibility to which we responded instinctively. Instinct drew light into the simple eyespots the hydroids had used in our previous lives; and where the previous process ended, a new mechanism ticked away. The shimmering bodies of the phyta danced among the eyespots and burst into rapidly extending tendrils; these relayed information at dizzying speed as images resolved slowly into focus. The perceived remained in monochrome, grainy, fuzzy-edged, yet dazzlingly more complex than anything hydroid or phyton could begin to describe.

Bulk of stone, web of root, seething surf, sister moon—these unfolded before the eyespots still gathering within us. And atop that bulk of stone, looming larger as we lumbered still nearer, sat translucent spheres shot through with a constellation of glittering stars. Where our hurtling bodies shifted in shape, bulging and collapsing as we thrust ourselves over the sand, those before us stood stock-still but for the scintillas swirling within.

“Hold.”

The gentle hum of calming nerves. Even in the absence of referent, we knew the creatures in the distance to be our ilk.

Through what we would come to know as Deep Inspeak—a flurry of layered images, soundscapes, olfaction, electrical pulses, and myriad other data— the eldest reached from their dual mind into ours, speaking with stirring tide pools, sulfuric gas within caverns, speeding of stars and sister moons. The meaning we couldn't always parse, yet we clung to every word.

“Welcome, new ones. Welcome to thought. Welcome to being, to transcendence. Welcome to the VenevZi’iz."