“I’m hungry,” clicks Sarya the Human.
Shenya the Widow cannot help but twitch her mandibles in a Widow smile. Sarya the Destroyer indeed. “I believe a trip to the sanitation station is a more pressing need at present,” she says gently.
“No! I’m hungry.”
“You are dancing.”
“I’m not dancing!” cries the Human, attempting to still its tiny, fleshy feet. “I’m just—”
“What would you like me to do about this hunger?” interrupts Shenya the Widow.
“I want—I would like—a food bar,” says Sarya.
Shenya the Widow rattles approval at the correction. “That is easily done,” she says.
And then the small one drops both its gaze and its voice. “A red one,” she whispers.
Shenya the Widow has spent most of her life traveling near lightspeed, nearly frozen in time as the rest of the galaxy goes about its business. She has been aboard this ship for seven missions and nearly fifty years, and that is nearly half a Standard millennium back in the timeline of civilization. In all that time, she does not remember the last time she laughed. And yet! She feels laughter bubbling below her surface as she watches that mobile face and listens to that small voice. You dare to ask for a red one, do you? You do not accept my rules, small one? Oh, my dearest, that will get you in trouble someday.
“I believe a gray one would be healthier,” says Shenya the Widow, watching that face for a reaction.
Sarya pulls back violently, the corners of her mouth twitching a decent approximation of disgust. “Red,” she says.
And then the air fills with a long, rasping chitter, because Shenya the Widow can no longer hold back her laughter. The sight of that Widow expression, and on a Human face! Oh, this is a good laugh, a long and hearty laugh. At one time this sound would surely have sent the tiny one into a paroxysm of fear, but now she crouches and watches impassively. Ah, but that feels good too. It is good to be feared, but it is better to be loved. That is wisdom, motherly wisdom, and the fact that it makes sense to her is yet another sign of the growing bond between Mother and—
No! She will never be your Daughter.
Shenya the Widow sobers instantly. “You may have a gray one,” she says, perhaps a trifle too severely. Those are the ones synthesized, after surprisingly little convincing, by the Librarian. They contain every nutrient that can possibly be packed into a dry rectangle, and Shenya the Widow is sure that they taste awful. Still, they are Human food. More or less.
“But—”
“And.”
The Human waits, trying not to dance, watching the Widow’s mandibles for a crack in the stern façade.
“And you may have a single bite of mine,” finishes Shenya the Widow.
The little one actually leaps into the air, apparently unable to contain her joy. She begins prancing in a circle, breaking into the war chant of Sarya the Destroyer.
“A bite,” says Shenya the Widow, holding back another laugh when the little one boasts about what she is going to do to a helpless red one, a fearful red one, O! the weakest red one of them all! It is charming, hearing that gruesome lyric in such a small mouth. She rises, careful not to nick the tiny whirling Human with a blade. “I will get them,” she says.
[Why don’t you let her handle it?] says a sudden message in the back of her mind. [I think we should have a quick chat.]
[Of course], she answers silently. She is surprised. This is the first time her implant has spoken to her in days. “I have changed my mind,” she says to the Human, folding herself back up. “You may go fetch them.”
The little one stops her war dance so quickly she nearly falls over. “By myself?” she asks, seemingly unable to believe it.
“By yourself,” says Shenya the Widow, twitching her mandibles in a smile.
“Okay!” says Sarya, scrambling back toward the cargo hold.
“And go to your sanitation station!” calls Shenya the Widow before the hatch hisses shut.
And now she is alone.
Shenya the Widow’s blades tremble, their motion so subtle that she is sure not even her implant could detect it. How pitiful, that even this temporary separation has become painful. It is humiliating! But her inner self does not care. It does not know that the little one is…what she is. It is blissfully and single-mindedly unaware that this little one could never become a Daughter. The lower regions of her brain produce hormones because that is their function, because no amount of intellectual control can scale that back, because instinct always knows more than the consciousness that strives to control it.
[You appear to be quite attached], says Shokyu the Mighty in her mind.
Shenya the Widow waits a moment before responding, the better to bring her physiology under control. [Perhaps], she concedes. [She has become…like a Daughter to me.] She emphasizes the fact that this is a comparison, not reality, but even thinking the word is difficult.
Because she will never be your Daughter, says her mother’s voice.
[But she’s not a Daughter], says her implant. [Is she?]
Shenya the Widow does not answer, because she cannot. She would never admit to her implant the destruction its words sometimes leave in their wake. Goddess below, she would almost prefer a blade through the mouth to a confession to a sub-legal intelligence. Instead she catches its words, bundles them up, stores them with the ones that others have given her. She cannot hurl them from her mind, but she can use them. She can turn them into anger—yes, like that—and once again she is in control of herself.
[We go through this every mission], says her implant. [You always get attached to something.]
Still Shenya the Widow says nothing. But anger always seeks a target, and hers has found one. Is it not astonishing that her implant can know so much and yet so little? Yes, it knows that she is often lonely. Yes, it has watched her occasionally collect living things for use as company on these long voyages. But look at its conclusion! It betrays such a fundamental misunderstanding. Her implant thinks she is looking for a pet. It does not understand what happens to a Widow’s body and mind when it is time for her to become a Mother. It does not know the force of the instinct that now propels her, the extent to which her body betrays her. And it never will, because it can never experience these things itself.
Nor can the Human, says her mother’s voice. She cannot be a Daughter.
Shenya the Widow does not scream, but it is a near thing. She gazes at the closed cargo bay, wherein her tiny little one is surely murmuring her war song and carefully choosing the shiniest red bar. She can almost see her lifting one after another, rejecting this one for a bent corner and that one for being crinkled. It must be perfect. Her implant does not understand that Shenya the Widow would take this little one as a Daughter in eight heartbeats if she were not…what she is. It cannot understand! But then, Shenya the Widow owes an explanation to no one, least of all the sub-legal intelligence who happens to inhabit her Network implant.