Chapter Twelve: The Blessed Curse — Part 1

Morning came with no response from Nikkei. She had slept deeply through the night, Yap watching over her, until dawn brought Orchid back to consciousness. Orchid touched Nikkei’s shoulder gently, trying to nudge her awake. Yap shooed off Orchid’s hand, urging her away.

“Honey is still recovering.” Yap insisted. “She’ll be awake when she’s ready to be awake.”

Orchid paced furiously, not wishing Nikkei’s personal ability on anybody. While she waited, Nikkei experienced Pearl’s existence.

The Second Core Subtext, Memory Transference. Part 1 . . .

Many centuries before Chen’s decision to conquer Zon, one just like Chen lay dormant. She lay in a cyst, waiting to be eaten by something so she could devour its body and wake from her slumber. Rather than floating, however, this cyst sunk to the bottom. Her shell was thicker than Chen’s, having encased itself against the constant onslaught of Chen’s devouring instincts, having been dormant within Chen’s own body for over five millennia. Her memories were scattered and lost with time, her identity shaved off by the ravages of history. Not even Chen could remember her name. In place of her own memories, the cyst had stored a mirror of some of Chen’s knowledge. For all appearances, this cyst was a duplicate of the first cyst — though anybody with a DNA scanner would know that the cyst shared no relationship — beyond species — to Chen. The cyst in question settled in shallow fishing waters, near a bed of oysters, brought from Earth by the hume settlers. The pearlescent cyst lay for many years on the ocean bottom, gaining more polish in its surface, more gemlike qualities, and hardening to the point where no fish could hope to eat her. She kept her mirror knowledge, experiencing that knowledge as instinct. This cyst’s central memories, the core that gave her a viable personality, had long been erased. Her personality, therefore, would only be able to reexpress itself when she had a body and experiences with which to shape it.

She might have remained untouched by any living thing for many thousands of years to come if a fisherman had not found her while pulling up oysters, and mistaken her for an impossibly large pearl. His wife was so happy with the gift that the two had quite the hard romp. The sex that night resulted in the conception of a child: Something the couple had experienced considerable difficulty in accomplishing previously.

Being superstitious folk, they attributed the cyst for their fortune — only to them, it was a pearl and now a sacred object. His wife took to polishing the pearl with lotion and oil. She did so whenever it looked the slightest bit dull, out of respect for what she determined was an object of spiritual greatness. There would be no buyers for a pearl so large, and the gem was too beautiful to cut down into smaller pieces, so the Fisherman’s wife instead offered the cyst up to the family deity, placing it as the centerpiece of the altar of Bacas, Goddess of fishing, fertility, and peace.

The cyst lay dormant for nearly two centuries, passed from mother to daughter, cherished as a family treasure, absorbing the life patterns of the family that cared for it. For those two centuries, nobody neglected to polish the pearl with lotion when it became dull. The lotion had enough organic materials to absorb into and sustain the cyst’s slow growth and development, not enough to trigger the cyst’s birth cycle and cause it to be reborn. Even as a dense cluster of cells, the creature within the cyst took on the shape of a hume infant, and as the cyst retained its bright pearly sheen, this seeming twin of Chen could see into her structured home, into the world she had been listening to for so many years. In that time she became cognizant of her own existence, and her personality, a product of heredity and experience, began to bloom. The slowly forming consciousness grew to love her family, as a wolf cub might love its pack.

One morning, the emotional distress of her family brought her fully awake, brought her into her full power, her already developed mind shifted out of dormancy, and the external stress of her evironment activated her Sight. Pulling from reserves long stored away, she built up her mind and consciousness, cell by cell, until she could interface with her family as a conscious being. She knew their language, burned into her memory as she had developed within the cyst. This at first astonished her, as she had no memory of anything before her awakening that morning, and could not know why she had an entire language at her command — especially since she had no real memories to go with the language in question.