[Oh, you’re a Mother now?] asks Shokyu the Mighty.
[Watch yourself], she says gently, a very clear warning in the attached emotions.
[I’ll never understand why you find this so appealing.]
Shenya the Widow lets a long moment pass before accepting this change of subject. [Of course you won’t], she says, the inebriant rocketing through her system nearly causing her to add little idiot to the end of the message. In fact, one moment as she reviews the transcript to see what she actually said. Let us see…the Mother comment, the warning…the subject change…and no, she did not. But no, little idiot, you do not criticize a Widow’s use of titles while you wear an unearned title yourself. Consider yourself fortunate you deal with Shenya the Widow and not her own mother, or you would have been shredded long ago for daring to—
And then a blade brushes the edge of the gravity field, and Shenya the Widow is extracted from her reverie with the screech of chitin on metal. She panics for only a split second before getting her other blades set for a mighty pull—and she is free! Weaving, she examines herself for damage. Her body is flawless as always, a shining testament to the prowess of Shenya the—
“Why, you little tyke!” she says unsteadily, staring at a notch in the end of her best blade. “We don’t eat Mother!”
[This is exactly what I’m talking about], says Shokyu the Mighty.
Well, perhaps there is something to the corporation-wide aversion to Librarians. Not everyone grows back, after all. Most of the other corporate explorers refuse to leave dock with a Librarian on board, let alone journey lightyears—but then they share the same handicap as her implant, don’t they? They are not Widow. They are of weaker peoples, and they prefer to return to corporate with holds full of trash. But Shenya the Widow knows that this is letting fears interfere with profits, and that is why she is the corporation’s sixth-most-profitable employee. Or she was, three years ago, when she left Networked space. That is…thirty years Standard? She cannot even do relativistic math when sober. Anyway, that is beside the point, which is this: why return with sixty tons of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on when one can simply store the patterns and discard the material itself? The size of one’s cargo hold makes no difference when one travels with a Librarian. Everything it consumes, from soil to minerals to living things, will be organized and stored in its mind. And if corporate truly wants a physical example of a particular item to study, why, they can ask it nicely and it will make them one.
She has lost count of the number of loads she has brought this Librarian in the last few days, but the feeding never loses its appeal. She always offers the silver globe one item at a time, working her way up in both size and novelty as if she’s serving it an elaborate multicourse meal. Today, she moves from leaves to complete plants, to a few crude tools she scavenged—which the Librarian loves, judging by the noise level—and finally the pièce de résistance. She lifts it up from the floor, where she’s kept it hidden as a surprise.
“Hello!” Shenya the Widow says in her singsong, supporting the severed head with two blades and moving the small jaw with a third. “My name is Observer, and I am extremely annoying.”
She can see the head’s reflection in the silver surface of the Librarian, its gold eyes half shut and its white hair stiff and brown with dried fluid. The ringing grows louder, and the reflection distorts as a small mound forms in the perfect sphere. She is always pleased when this happens. The Librarian is naturally quite fluid, but it takes great strength for it to shift its shape in the titanic grip of a ten-gravity field. When it reaches for her like this, Shenya knows that she has something good. Something novel. And in her business, novel means profitable.
Additional blades lift random body parts for feeding. “Please, enjoy my hideous skin-covered legs!” says the head in the voice of Shenya the Widow.
“I apologize,” the head continues when the legs are gone, Widow blades working the small jaw up and down. “Normally I have two arms, but your mother could only find one.”
“Uh-oh!” it says when the arm has sunk beneath the Librarian’s surface. “Who’s ready for my scrumptious torso? You are? Here it comes!”
The Librarian is nearly shaking the bulkheads with its call, clearly pleased with the meal. In fact, it has continued to reach for her even after it has absorbed the largest parts of Observer, a fact which would make her nervous if she wasn’t on her third—fourth?—inebriant bar. Instead, she is proud. Why, you could not have done that at the beginning of this voyage, little one! Mother has your gravity field nearly maxed, and yet you can move! Oh, little one, we must play a game!
Inspired, she lowers the head out of sight, then back, for a quick game of hunt-the-prey. She does this twice before realizing that something is wrong. The hump in the silver surface, the place where the Librarian is straining toward her—it has not moved. She glances at the notch in her blade and clicks uncertainly. But if the Librarian is not reaching for Observer’s head…does that mean it is reaching for her? She flicks an unsteady Widow smile toward her own reflection. “Why, little one!” she says. “Have you finally acquired a taste for Mother?”
[For the Network’s sake], says Shokyu the Mighty. [Just give it the head.]
But the head is not the problem, little idiot. In fact…it pains her to think, but is she the idiot? Is it possible that, this whole time, the Librarian was not yearning for her little treats, but for her? Does Shenya the Widow now find herself three and a half years into deep space, alone with a Librarian who has very nearly outgrown its containment and which now hungers for her own beautiful body?
Her appetite for entertainment now gone, she raises the head and allows the field to tear it from her grasp. She watches the flesh flatten and the golden eyes widen in the massive grip of the gravity field, but the joy is gone. The eyes stare at her as the whole hideous mess sinks, backward, into the singing metal.
And the hump does not disappear.
[If I could shudder], says Shokyu the Mighty, [I would.]
Shenya the Widow will never admit that she is repressing a shudder of her own. [I have never understood the revulsion at Librarians, personally], she says lightly, but she is troubled. She backs away one step, and the small distortion does not change. But still, says her intoxicated mind, there is a large difference between a slight shape change and an actual escape. [Librarians are quite useful], she continues, determined not to allow her implant to witness her discomfort. [Did you know the best surgeons in the sector are Librarians?]
[And yet I note you had me installed the old-fashioned way. Perhaps you don’t trust them quite enough to let one dissolve your head?]
The truth is, Shenya the Widow does not. In fact, during her early career one could say she was actively hostile to her Librarian—or at the very least, treated it no better than a sanitation station. But then something happened to change the mind of Shenya the Widow forever. She returned from a particularly long voyage to find an unfamiliar ship in dock at corporate. This was not unusual; when missions last a century, the odds of any two explorers being docked at the same time are low. It was the ship itself that was unusual—and its crew.