Outsider

[Laowai]

Zarita awoke again. It was dark and she turned her head slightly to see her husband, Ben Laowai asleep, his back to her and oblivious to the world. She woke often, but if it were mere insomnia that a human chemical could correct she would take them. She had tried once, they had no effect.

But there were times when as she slept she felt as if she were awake and when she was awake, she felt as if she were asleep.


An object, however insignificant might take on some importance all out of proportion as she stared at it, she would become aware of its size, its shape, what it might be to envelope the object, be the object. Her body would tremble, the sensations in her limbs, in her chest would begin'€¦ she would shake herself; force her eyes to look elsewhere, her mind to stray.
Sometimes the object would shatter, sometimes it would react as if crushed in a vice, slowly and silently impacting on itself. Sometimes she would find it in her hand - or what she made to be her hand '€“ as if she had called it, and it had obeyed. Other times, it would do nothing; she would move away and ignore the moment where she had been, for a second, outside herself.

There was a noise; she had first heard it when she took control of this body. The sound would come and go, it was indefinable, like standing just outside a city on a hill overlooking the lights, the strange, ambient sound that hung over so many souls as they moved about, slept, fought, ate, loved and died. Other times it would be louder, like a breeze picking up speed and blowing past your ear as you walked outside. Sometimes the noise would begin to coalesce into something clearer, as it had in her dreams before, she would block her ears, tell it to be quiet, cover her head, tell it to go away, she would scream at it, scream when she was dreaming or sometimes, when she felt hands upon her shoulders, find she was screaming and awake.
One time she woke up downstairs in the great hangar, the cockpit of her Titan that her husband had restored for her open, her arm, still formed as an arm gripping the boarding rail on the outside of the fuselage, the rest of her, pressed against the hull on the top of a gangplank, her legs'€¦. They were not legs, not until she willed them to be again. She had begun to cry - she had no idea how she had gotten there. She had called out to him, sobbing and crying and he had found her. He carried her back upstairs to the bed; he had not heard her leave. Because she hadn'€™t left in a way he could have felt or heard'€¦. Nothing had been disturbed, no sheets turned, no door unlocked, and yet, left she had.

Moments of clarity, she found, like some form of sponge, she absorbed the impressions, words, sometimes emotions and even - she wasn'€™t sure - thoughts of people she encountered. She would recite things, know things, knowledge would come that she knew she did not know. At first it had just been that of her husband, the legacy of the powerful sharing and connection that they had formed with the alien technology, but as time wore on, it came from other sources, she did not know where. If it were new, if it were something she had read, forgotten and then spouted out again unknowingly.

And she read, she read everything, everything she could - it was like a hunger, like a need to eat or the powerful craving for nicotine that tobacco addicts faced, she needed input, her body seemed to crave something: books, text, data, conversations, news reels, streaming comm. traffic, declassified intelligence reports, her husband'€™s emotions, those of his pilots, the data readout of the hangars central processor'€¦. She would hold a conversation with Ben, or assist in ship repairs while simultaneously reading, scanning, watching one, two sometimes three other sources of information. Some of the younger pilots who would come to the Hangar for intelligence reports or payment after raids had taken to calling her 'La senora Libro' - the book lady.

Yet for all this there were moments where she could not recall the most basic of facts. Information that she knew she had read, knew was in her somewhere, KNEW it, like the proverbial word at the end of your tongue and it would not come out, she would close her eyes, or what she formed as eyes, squint, concentrate, try to almost physically dig it out but nothing would come. This would make her angry, frustrated, but quickly she learned that her anger could spiral out of control, like a floodgate once opened it did not easily close again. A number of times she had lost her temper and almost flown into a rage, screaming in frustrating and shattering anything breakable within a few feet of where she was sitting. The first time this had happened she had been outside the mountain cabin and it had only been windows, she hadn'€™t told her husband how it happened, the next time was in the study in the hangar and all the terminals had needed to be replaced, he knew then that something was up and she had told him. Since then, she concentrated hard on managing the anger that as time wore on seemed to be increasingly simmering beneath the surface waiting to come out'€¦.


She lay there and stared at the ceiling. Lifting her arm up above her it caught a moonbeam streaming through a crack in the curtain, she relaxed her arm and allowed it to loosen its shape slightly... the light caught the tissues of her arm as they moved, the blue lines that began to form under the surface of her "skin" began to dance up and down and around her arm, looking darker in the moonlight as her arm lost coherence and became semi-transparent.
The light looked pretty as it passed through her. She had done this before, tricks with moonbeams. This part of her form didn't frighten her so much when she felt she could control it. The light passed through her shifting forearm and she smiled. She remembered, years ago as a little girl the nights on Tangier. Cold nights where her father had taken her far from the colony and out into the forests. She had always stared up at the clouds in the night sky, silver and white when captured by the moonlight against the star scape... her shimmering, shifting arm reminded her somehow of those clouds.

"Oh father".... she thought... "I have wandered so far from home..."

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