8
ARIX
I slept, and when I slept I dreamed.
Karak did not have dreams. Nor sleep, for that matter. So it was profoundly shocking to close my eyes and surrender to exhaustion, and then experience several hours of vivid hallucinations.
I dreamed of Karak, though I still possessed my shifted human body on my home planet, a ridiculous juxtaposition that made no sense. I was running through the capital city, tall glass buildings on either side framing my route. I did not know what I was running from, but I knew if I was not fast enough something terrible would happen.
I woke on the couch covered in cold sweat, another unusual phenomenon of this new body.
I am becoming too human. Karak shifting did indeed result in consequences such as this, which is why shifting was typically not ideal for more than a few days at a time. I would need to take care to limit how long I possessed this fleshy vessel.
I felt my sexual organ underneath the blankets, stiff and demanding.
There was another dream, I realized. One before the one on Karak. Jo visiting me in the night, a silent shadow in the dark. She'd sat on the foot of the couch and ran a hand along my leg, fingernails caressing the lines of my muscles. And then she was removing her clothes, and sliding into the blankets with me, warmth spreading wherever our bodies touched.
I shivered. Too long in this body indeed.
I got off the couch and reached out with my mind. Jo was still sleeping, though only barely; her body was already stirring in preparation for her morning alarm, which would go off in four minutes.
Today needed to be more productive. And it would only be that way if I had some of my own solitude.
I pushed a trickle of emotion through the telepathic link with Jo--and stopped. I could sense her dreams, which were filling her with sexual lust.
Dream about me.
I felt a moment of joy, then paradoxical shame. Karak scouts were forbidden from any sort of sexual contact with a foreign species. Seeing my own human desires reflected back at me was a strange warning. That things had possibly gone too far.
I was a Karak scout, and I must not waver.
Being careful not to dip too deeply into her thoughts, I pushed a trickle of greater exhaustion through the link. Her body relaxed, her breaths coming slower. She would not wake for several hours, now.
I tip-toed (I was finally getting used to these human idioms) into the bedroom and disabled her alarm clock. Then I went back into the other room to grab my coat, but my hand froze before touching it.
Light from this planet's sun was just beginning to illuminate the landscape outside Jo's cabin, a painting of grey and white. But before I left, there was something I needed to do.
I closed my eyes--human eyes, mental eyes, deeper Karak eyes--and focused. I felt the particles in my body swirl and rotate, atoms rearranging in a uniform and controlled manner. The space around me brightened as my body's luminance filled the room.
I was Karak again.
I tried to take a deep breath to savor the familiarity, but of course that was a human response and I had no lungs in my photon form. Shaking my head--again, a human action, but the idea of it in my Karak mind--I slowly shifted back into my human form.
Shifting back should be done twice a day, I decided, pulling on my shoes. With the feeling of being Karak again still fresh in my mind, I set out into the forest.
*
The Karak have phenomenal senses of direction. It comes naturally to us based on the magnetic core of our home planet; it was no more difficult than a human pointing at earth's morning sun and saying, "That is east."
But in human form my sense of direction came with more difficulty.
I gleaned a significant amount of information from Jo's computer while she was in town the previous morning. Humans were technologically advanced indeed to already have a global information network, one of the few species we have experienced to possess such a luxury. Perhaps that is what caused them to advance so quickly in the past 50,000 years. The data gatherer in me wished to do more research into such a thing, but I didn't have the time right then.
Without Karak directional senses, figuring out where to go was difficult. I had been only partially conscious in my newly shifted human form when Jo brought me to her cabin; the twists and turns of the road were blurred in my memory.
But Karak scouts were thrifty and resourceful.
I followed the gravel driveway of Jo's property until it reached the paved road which had been our original meeting point. I remembered Jo turning left onto her property, so I turned and walked toward the right. How long had we been in the truck after she hit me? Only a few minutes, I thought, but that meant several miles of walking. Jo would likely wake before I returned, but that was not much of a concern.
So long as she does not call the police, I thought. She promised she wouldn't, and I believed her with a powerful trust. She will help me.
Afraid that I might get hit by another vehicle (which was an irrational human thought, since I could see them coming from a long distance on the straight road) I walked in the slushy snow on the shoulder of the road. Soon my boots were soaked from the effort of stomping through it, but it was better than striding through the foot-deep snow closer to the woods. And beyond the fear of physical injury, avoiding other humans was still the best plan. I did not wish to stray from that.
A cold wind blew down the road, like tiny needles pricking the skin of my face and arms. I realized I had forgotten my coat; I'd left it on the peg inside while I was shifting back into Karak form. Fortunately I would not be gone long; no more than an hour, surely. And if I needed to, I could run at any time to increase my internal temperature. Human bodies were remarkably robust. The scout in me was excited to experiment with such a mechanism.
I never saw any vehicles on the road. Jo was right; the town of Elijah, Wyoming was in the middle of nowhere. I counted myself lucky to have crash-landed here instead of somewhere more crowded; imagining landing in the middle of New York City or Dallas or any number of other populated city centers I'd researched on the internet made me shiver in a way completely unrelated to the cold.
The sun had risen above the treetops by the time I reached the place. Black skid marks in the road made it obvious, and then I was trekking into the forest in the direction of my craft.
As I stomped through the snow, I ran through everything in my mind. My craft was supposed to park in a high orbit above the planet. It could have crashed into something in space, or ran out of fuel for orbital deceleration. The latter was unlikely; most simulations I ran in my imagination ended with my craft sling-shotting around and away from the planet, not into it.
In case of an emergency, my craft would have sent distress signals back to Karak and to the nearest scouting craft. Even if my craft collided with something in orbit, that signal would have gotten away. The thought was reassuring.
Finding me on the planet's surface, however...
As I walked, my mind kept returning to Jo. The warmth of being cared for by a stranger, the way she smiled as if she was thinking of a joke nobody else had heard. And her body, thighs thick with muscle and a small waist begging to be gripped with both hands...
I shook off the thoughts and focused on my steps, which were growing colder as I walked. The snow was deeper here in the woods where nobody had cleared it away. I spotted straight lines of compacted snow and moved over there, which sped my journey and allowed me avoid getting snow in my boots.
The clearing appeared ahead.
Broken branches and splintered tree trunks marked where my craft had crashed. But the craft itself was gone, leaving only a circle of brown dirt where the snow had melted. I looked around frantically, feeling my pulse rising with panic.
My craft was here.
And now it was gone.
I returned to the trail of compacted snow and examined it with new eyes. They looked like tire tracks, leading from the clearing straight back to the road. I found two more additional tracks a short distance away. Two vehicles had come, and taken my craft home with them.
Somewhere, there were humans who knew what I was.
I groaned with deeper agony. A Karak scout's greatest directive was to not be discovered. Death was more ideal than that, as extreme as that was. It was impossible to accurately study a species if they knew you were watching.
For several minutes that failure overwhelmed me more than my selfish needs.
Finally my body began shaking from the cold. My craft wasn't here; there wasn't anything more I could do. Time to leave.
But first, I would shift back into my photon form, which was impervious to such temperature concerns. Yet as I focused, directing my Karak energy into organizing my atoms differently, I was unable to make the shift. I tried and tried again, each time running into an invisible wall.
My body is trembling too violently to shift back into Karak form.
I tried jogging to warm my body, but the snow made it difficult. I wrapped my arms around my chest and shivered all the way to the road. Then I started running, a strange sensation in a new body. I felt the blood pulsing through my veins and increasing my temperature slightly, but it wasn't enough. I was still trembling, and my fingers felt like they were being stabbed by knives. I held one hand out and looked at the tips, which were pale bordering on blue.
I tried shifting again, failed, and tried once more.
I began to worry.
If I died in my human form, that would be the end of that. Karak required consciousness to shift, and I would remain in this human form as my body rotted away. The thought of my atoms being given to this planet so far away from home was unnerving.
I jogged faster, though it didn't seen to help.
Soon I was nauseous from the cold, and had to slow again to a walk to avoid vomiting. Each breath pained my lungs, pulling precious warmth into the vapor I exhaled. The robust human biology no longer seemed so hardy after all.
I'm going to die.
The thought invaded my mind when I was still not even halfway home. I was going to die unless someone drove by and found me, an unlikely occurrence.
I'm going to die on a foreign planet.
Karak scouts knew the risks of their calling. Always on the outskirts of the Dominion's reach, venturing farther and into deeper unknown than anyone before them. It was a constant worry in the back of every scout's mind.
Yet I had never truly understood it. Not with the immediate, pulsing knowledge I had right then.
My feet were slowing. Each stride felt like I was moving through water, my legs unnaturally sluggish. I could barely keep my eyes open.
Jo, I tried reaching out, though she was too far away to touch. Jo, I need you.
Help me.
Please.
I took three more slow steps, fell to my knees, and collapsed.