Chapter Text
In a panic he scrabbled back up the hill, dodging and weaving through the old ruins. Starfall had never hit the tower before, never within a hundred metres, and he'd calculated the trajectory on that assumption and waited down in the valley. He saw the smoke rising, blue and acrid, an unreal cloud in the darkness on the other side of the tower's stolid bulk, and his breath caught. If the tower got damaged, if it was shattered, he had no means --
The terror was such that he got within ten paces of the tower before he saw what was at the door.
The first time he had been staked out like a goat for starfall sat within him like a nightmare that replayed itself every time the night sky showed blue. It didn't matter that he'd walked to the stake himself, that he'd chosen this tower, when the moment came to die. That selfsame terror -- a double, triple, quadruple exposure of it -- returned every time, but he did his job. Hands shaking, soul off somewhere outside of his body and wrapped in cotton wool, but he did it.
In between starfalls, his impulse to interrogate the reasons for the phenomenon might be a fool's errand, but he was an inveterate fool. He couldn't help it; that there was sense to be laboriously distilled out of the universe was a truth he cradled in his bones. At present, the decanting of useful truths out of starfall had borne only small, bitter fruits.
His first time, he had run without meaning to. Instinct had taken over. The scar of that shattering pursuit still zigzagged the story through the landscape in the bright fresh green of a few years' regrowth. His second time, he had been determined not to let cowardice take his feet: he had curled up in a ball, covered his ears, closed his eyes, and felt only the searing crunch of his own bones and flesh before the explosion. The scar from that starfall had been different: it drew a gut-dropping straight line from the crater of his death towards the edge of the exclusion zone. Central, in one of their exceedingly rare communiques to the tower, had been harsh and beneath that harshness he had read strong alarm. Do better. Starfall almost breached. The town of Lundorebo approached near enough to see the ultrablue flaring of the beast.
It haunted him, the question of who else it had almost certainly killed. Illegal hunter after the untouched wildlife in the exclusion zone? Teens sneaking where they shouldn't for a tryst or a smoke? After that, he had always run. What logic there was to the chase he had yet to understand, but when he ran, it kept the disaster contained to himself.
It stood at the doorway to the tower, pawing at the door dumbly. The ultrablue flesh of it ate the light from the modest lamps set up at the tower's base, turning the star beast into an outline limned only just enough to give an indication of form. It was pinpricked by a double handful of cold blue brightnesses across its body, which did not seem to cast any light beyond its own outlines.
It turned, and he felt like he was looking at a hole in the world. There were eyes, and they were on him, and there was a mouth, and that mouth was opening opening -- how could he tell, the void on void? -- and then a sound, a scream or a babble, the grating, singing note of it tumbling into something like syllables.
He screamed in retort and stumbled backwards, for a moment twinning that horrid noise. One of the old cobbles of the ruins betrayed him and he went down on his ass, knocking the wind and the sound out of himself.
The starbeast's vocalization trailed off a moment later and that horrible blue mouth closed. It stood and watched him hyperventilate, impassive, its head cocked to one side. Its human-shaped, human-sized head, balanced over the drop and swoop of human shoulders, rounding downwards and carrying on as such all the way to stygian feet that met the dirt with exactly the weight and give that human toes would. The physicality of the starbeasts had never been in doubt -- physically was how they took their pound of flesh -- but the familiarity of its form made it horrible.
As it stood there, something else was creeping up his brainstem comorbid with the horror. It grew up through the fertile soil of confusion, and moved his mouth.
"You're impossible." His voice had been scraped by his scream, and he heard it rough from his throat, alien in its urgency.
He picked himself up, shaky, circling warily in a lateral creep towards the tower, keeping a radius away from it.
"But you're extant so you can't be impossible. I think." Reasoning it out loud helped in some fractional way. It was also very unlike his usual talking to himself, even if he wasn't sure the words were heard or understood by his uncanny audience, but then it had also been so long he barely remembered what talking to another thinking person felt like. His mind skipped and skidded through and between questions and ideas, not quite landing on any one of them for long enough to perch. "You're a -- is it the same as -- as your compatriots making fall as birds, as beasts?" He had reached the wall and now he pressed his hands to it, ready to sprint around the wide curve if he needed to, but the starbeast stood impassive except to put a hand on the stone near the door. "Just a -- a poetic metaphor?" He licked his lips, eyes wide, mouth dry. He swallowed, struggling to get ahold of himself though his lungs didn't seem to want to inflate and his intestines were snakes. "But you... didn't look like this... last time."
Virgo had fallen before, a century or two ago, said the journals. It had been a giant, man-formed only nominally in that it had been bipedal and had grasping hands. The report from the Watcher at the time had been dry, lacking details, as that Watcher tended to be, but it had been clear enough. A crushing death. "They would have said." Why was he still talking. "Someone would have made a note if you landed looking like this."
The vapour of the fall had ceased to rise, the air clearing on the other side of the tower as the low, steady wind shredded those strands into nothing.
The longer the moment stretched out, the more his body wanted to creep backwards. He shifted his feet, curled his own toes in the dirt, and shivered. The starfall still watched, head cocked, as his heart beat so hard it battered his ribs. The same thing that had moved his mouth, though, slithered down his spine and took control of the puppet-string nerves of his feet. He shuffled forward, one hand clinging to the tower's wall, the other held away from his body as if being ready to take a swing meant anything against starfall. That motivating energy sat at the back of his throat.
This was new. New meant different. Different could mean anything.
The starfall continued to stand placidly, watching him on the approach. It still mirrored his posture -- a detail he noticed and noted, that added an iota of fuel to the hot feeling in his chest -- he tested that by taking his hand off the tower, and watched as it did the same.
"Imitation," he said. "Is that... do you know you're doing that? Is it reflex?"
He was less than six paces away frow it now. He was rarely so close to starfall, and was reaching the point of highest risk. What if it got its hands on him and...
Well, and what then? He'd die?
He grimaced deeply, and watched as the starfall's mouth twitch and pull downwards. One of the stars, high on its slim neck and underneath one ear, cast an eerie uplight on that light-eating flesh such that the expression was deeply sinister, and it startled the look off of his own face. For a moment he was uncomfortably aware of himself, of how alien he must look to the alien creature in front of him, and the curiosity that had been poisoning his self-preservation blossomed.
"You don't understand me, do you?" He crossed that breach, trembling but not stopping. His breath caught in his chest as the faint charcoal-metallic waft of starfall caught him, but by then his hand was already half up in an open-handed offer of greeting, and momentum carried him the rest of the way. Virgo's mirroring met him halfway, and he felt the cold flesh of its fingers.
Softer than he was used to, yielding, hands without callus or hangnail or natural texture. Before he could think he was grasping that hand. An absurdity of an introduction followed, his own reflex of the moment. "I'm the Watcher here. I -- I know you, sort of. You're Virgo."
When it opened its mouth and vocalized again, he jerked his hand away, ready to clap both over his ears. What came forth, though, while still not words, didn't burn his hearing. It was babble, strange and wrong, but with a cadence and a timbre closer to a human voice.
It stopped. "Good gods," he breathed, wrapping his arms around himself. The implications were beginning to sink in, and as the urgency of thinking he was imminently going to die waned, what waxed in its place was a broad and wild confusion. "What do I do with you?"
He had always, always looked to the skies for awe. They had delivered knowledge alongside: first of the stories, and then of distance and scale, and then later of the intricate and delicate mechanics thereof. Quantifiable, comprehensible incomprehensibility; numbers too large to imagine except in the abstract, which became in turn keys to the comforting knowledge of living in an orderly universe that nevertheless would always contain new puzzles to solve. He'd thought, fancifully, that there was a reason that people imagined the patterns of the stars as sketching out gods long before the physicists had used them to begin to understand the equations that defined the universe. The gods could be found in the skies and they were much more expansive, and much more orderly, than humankind had imagined in its infancy.
Of course he had always meant it only in the sense of florid metaphor, and this thing was not a god.
It sat on one of the two chairs the tower quarters were furnished with, and he across from it. He hadn't wanted to bring it indoors, but he needed things from his quarters and when he had tried to edge past it, it had let him, but then followed a step behind on the stairs. No amount of explaining or gesturing or declaring had shaken it from his tail, and he was growing tired of standing mostly naked in the cold of the tower doorway. Finally for lack of other ideas he had herded it up the tower's long staircase, walking behind it rather than have it at his own back.
It was intrusive, beyond unwelcome, having starfall in his rooms. Fear held a tight knot in his solar plexus and a broad band across the back of his neck and shoulders, made his legs fizz with the readiness to run even while he was seated.
"I shouldn't have you here," he said. The outer wall of the core tower, which formed the inner wall of the quarters built around it, sat opposite the great glass windows looking over the exclusion zone. They were as close to the glass as he could seat them, as if it would make a dram of difference if something went wrong. He still didn't know what would happen if he died next to the tower, if the explosion would render it uninhabitable, and the risk made him prickle.
On the way up the stairs it had started burbling again, and he had almost bolted out of startlement. But it was a quiet sound that time, almost like a bird, nonsense syllables that came intermittently. Psychological hailstones: the sound of them grated at his ears more because of what the action implied than how it sounded.
Now, as it stared at him in the silence after he'd spoken, it opened its mouth and babbled again.
He hissed a breath out between his own teeth, unable to help but grope for meaning. Were those beginning to sound like more words? Was there a rhythm like speech? Was he hearing what he expected to hear, or what he feared to hear, or -- worse -- what he wanted to hear?
"Stop," he told it firmly.
It burped out a syllable back. Op.
"Are you going to kill me yet?" Why would he even ask?
"You," it said, uncomprehending.
He was shaking again, he realized. Overwrought. He dragged his fingers over the rough fabric of his pants, grounding. "I wish you'd get it over with."
When all it did was babble back, he almost cried. Then he sat in silence as it watched him until the moon rose, waiting for some reaction, some sign that never came.
Finally, he stood up and led it all the way back down the stairs. It followed, and he read an imaginary contrition in its obedience, and he felt insane for that, for all of this. With night deep above them he led it a fifteen minute walk from the tower before stopping and shrugging his coat back off, his shoes, the most indispensible parts of his outfit that he would prefer to be able to retrieve later. It watched him, brushing its own shoulders as if looking for a coat of its own, and then when he moved again it followed him into a rocky dip in the woods. Once they were at the bottom he turned and faced it, took its hands with both of his.
They were cool, and solid, smooth like too-perfect skin was smooth but nothing else. The cold did not burn him, nor did the touch pain him. If he closed his eyes he could imagine this was a human, which very much worse, so he opened them again while he lifted its hands to his throat. He closed those afterimage-blue fingers around the tender flesh there. He squeezed, instructively, and waited.
When it did nothing but stare at him, he dropped the grip -- so did it -- and he all but fell to a sit on the mossy slab of stone he'd brought them to, his strings all cut. He heard it thump to ground across from him, and he did not want to see it.
He pulled his knees up to his chest, pressed his forehead to them, and tried to figure out what the hell to do. The ghost-cold of Virgo's fingers lingered against his windpipe, gentle and horrifying, for a very long time.
Chapter Text
When dawn washed up on the shores of the mountains, milk-pale and slow as the tide, he finally looked up. He'd fallen into a kind of daze, trigger-switched by simple emotional overload. But the puzzle had not worked itself out in the meantime: across from him sat, in a posture that mirrored but no longer exactly imitated his own, a dark blue human-shaped thing.
Virgo was picking at the moss on a dead tree next to it, slowly dissecting the rotting husk, and had been doing this for some time judging from the pile of flakes and half-decomposed chunks.
He rubbed the heel of one hand over his eyes, shifted his legs, creaking out of the cold of a night in the foothills. Virgo's attention shifted from the wood to him, and he gripped tight to the calm that had come to him during his rest.
He stretched, gasping at the pull and settle of muscle and bone, and watched as Virgo extended its own hands above its head, arched its back experimentally.
"Do you have bones?" His voice took a moment to come back to life. "Your kin don't."
"Your kin don't," it said.
Whole words gave him a startle, but pedantry was his saviour: "Mine do."
"Mine do."
"I think we have to learn on your understanding of what language is intended to do."
He did not believe that the thing across from him wasn't going to kill him, but it seemed that it was not determined to do it as expiditiously as its kin. And so, he had reasoned very slowly in his stupor, he had a number of choices before him.
He did not think killing himself counted as fulfilling whatever unwritten pact kept the beasts within the exclusion zone; he had an uncomfortable memory of a suicide recorded in one of the older Watcher journals, and it had not spared them starfall. He was less certain that killing it would not solve the problem. There was the suggestion of precedent in the distant Eleventh tower's proclaimations that their Warden carried out starbeast executions with ease. Still, he had never seen it for himself and the Eleventh was not a wholly reliable source of information.
Still, as he had thought about trying to initiate physical combat himself, it clenched his stomach. He had pushed a bully once on the playground, and the way the other child had wailed and bled had made him miserable. This was different, but the idea of using a knife or his hands or his fire to kill -- well, he did not want to.
He could also send a message to the Coalition for Defense and Protection, the governing body that had purview over his orders and his resupply. There was no precedent for that, and he was quite certain it would result in someone coming to take Virgo back to their labs. And then Virgo would be someone else's problem, and he would have one blessed reprieve from his job until the next starfall.
It was an idea that he tucked into his back pocket. There was a lot that could be learned, theoretically, from a living starbeast. They did not tend to allow themselves to be examined. Virgo might not, either, but the chance to try was there. His scientific heart slavered at the promise of knowledge.
But -- and the but was vital -- it was just as likely that his own appetite would be denied, and Virgo would disappear into the governmental machine as if it had never been walking around on two feet and he would be told nothing more about it no matter what the science division divined. There, but for the grace of his own mother, went he, after all; it was an uncomfortable tension of the sort that lived forever in one's hindbrain and crept up on quiet nights when other mysteries had been solved. What was done, when one was disappeared because they were scientifically interesting? It was impossible to wholly look away from the corruptibility of man when faced with the other, and when he looked at Virgo he knew that if that was a sword that hung over his own head at a distance he could do his best to ignore, that Virgo would itself be fed directly onto the sacrificial block. Starbeasts killed: he knew that arguably better than anyone who had ever lived, but he was not certain that what the spooks back home would do wouldn't be significantly worse than a quick and frightening death. And what had led him to where he was moreso than the principle of mitigating harm in the most direct way that he could?
Virgo was his responsibility. That would have to be the whole of it. Starbeasts were dangerous: even putting to one side the theoretical and uncomfortable prospect of empathy for his eventual killer, it might well be fully unconscionable to knowingly send a starbeast into a populated area.
"I wonder if that was your gambit," he realized, and shivered. "It would be a clever one."
"Clever one."
He was cold, exhausted existentially, but couldn't help a bit of cheekiness. "Thank you."
"Thank you."
Virgo followed as he stood, and he observed it stumble; whether that was artifice or real he wasn't sure. Starbeasts weren't perfectly graceful: they moved with preternatural speed and deadly intention, but they still moved like creatures subject to physics. Was this one sore from sitting? Did they get sore?
The weird cuckoo imitation kept him from asking questions he knew he wouldn't get answers for as he led the thing back to the tower, and the timbre of the silence was a stranger thing with someone else there to contribute to it. He could still feel the echo of its soft, cold hands at his throat, refusing to close, and knew that he would for some time.
They were both babes in the woods, the days following. He didn't know what to do with this ghost made flesh, and for lack of better ideas he had pulled out a fresh journal and begun an accounting, of every strange thing that his visitor did.
It tried to follow him into the bath, and sat outside when he banished it from the bathroom. It followed his lead in the kitchen and tried to eat, first from his bowl, then from an empty bowl he set in front of it. When he wrote, it faked writing on the floor, for his workroom did not have a second chair or desk. He had to show it which end was the business end of the pen when curiosity got the better of him and he gave it pen and paper. It diligently hatched out orderly nothing-marks, apparently absorbed by the task.
Quickly -- inadvisably quickly, and he was aware of the character flaw implicit in that -- he was losing his horror of Virgo. If this was reconnaissance, which he was beginning to suspect, he was in turn learning.
After a few days it moved on from simple imitation, and he watched as it seemed to discover that it had a body: its own hands, startled, gliding over arms and legs, touching its own face, all in little moments. He spoke to it without concern for conversation, about things that he could not see the harm in describing. This is tea, it's consumed for enjoyment. I am washing my clothes, because I don't like dirt on them. The sky is a different colour in the day.
Virgo sat in the terraced tower greenhouse as he worked on the weeding and the watering. He had sat it down it amongst a patch of flowers near the beehive, a place where its growing impulse to take things apart wouldn't destroy his vegetables. It was peeling open a flower as the bees buzzed around it. The insects left a radius, a void space, as if making a point not to get within an arm's length of the starfall, and he had already begun to wonder if he could use it to help harvest the frames. The bees rarely gave him trouble, but rarely was still sometimes.
"Do you know what I'm doing?" Virgo had progressed from aping a handful of syllables to recalling and repeating whole conversations, one-sided as they were. Sometimes it jumbled the words like thrown bones. Right now it appeared to be speaking to its victim the flower. "I am cultivating these plants so that they will grow healthy enough to produce the fruits and vegetables that I eat to sustain myself. Do you know what a plant is?"
Sometimes it was almost cute; other times he inadvisably read meaning into the choice of words or phrases, and that could be chilling. Projecting, he reminded himself firmly, is a shackle that drags at the foot of understanding.
"A plant is a multicellular organism, like myself. Perhaps like yourself. I wish I had a microscope. Had a multicellular produce cirrus. I perhaps myself. Sustain, detain. Do you know what I'm doing? Cultivating healthy are I'm what. Choose. So the the moon."
Was it really all just imitation?
Virgo had started rubbing the flayed stem of the flower stalk against its cheek, leaving a faint trail of whitish pith and sap on the blue of its skin. The whole tableau was so unnerving that he plucked the blemished gourd he'd been examining and brought it over to the constellation.
Its humming became audible as he approached, and he realized he'd been humming too while he gardened.
"Here," he said instead, offering the rounded, blobby yellow vegetable up as sacrifice. "This ought to take you a little while to get through." Virgo dropped the multilated flower stem and took it without argument, its impossibly-coloured hands contrasting the cheerful rind. "It's a sunsquash."
"Here, it's a sunsquash," it repeated.
"Thank you for the confirmation."
"Thank sunsquash here." It started tapping on the thick outer of the vegetable, fingernails leaving little crescents.
"Mmmhm. It's got a hard rind, but the insides are edible."
Virgo did appear to eat; he'd discovered that when he'd been eating his breakfast and it had gone over to the pot of porridge and taken out a handful. Whether or not it ate for sustenance was uncertain, but it hadn't seemed to suffer indigestion. Maybe it didn't even suffer digestion. He'd tried to peek into its mouth and ascertain whether there was a throat back there with little luck, but the porridge had gone somewhere, so.
"Rind it." Virgo nodded.
"I mean, be my guest." He waffled, and then sat. The gardenwork was not done, but Virgo haunted him like a dream he couldn't understand and he found himself too diverted to focus on his tasks. "Maybe sunsquash is poisonous to your kind and the problem will solve itself."
Virgo had lost interest in speaking. Instead it was raking its nails over the rind, finding the smooth surface captivating or frustrating. He watched as it increased its efforts, its shoulders coming up in what was unmistakably growing annoyance. When had it seen him annoyed?
"Here." He couldn't help himself; he reached over and took Virgo's cool hand and turned it sideways, so that its nails dragged a unified cutting line, rather than a broad set of parallels. "You might make some headway that way."
"Here here here." It chewed its lip. "Cut headway."
"Cut, right. You're right, you're trying to cut it." It might be a fool's errand but at moments like this, when it stumbled into a word that was correct to the situation, he felt that flare of excitement and awful stymied curiosity all over again. What if, he whispered to himself, he could talk to a starbeast? The suggestion of answers haunted his periphery. "Cut. You cut the sunsquash."
The hard rind parted in shreddy little bits under the redoubled efforts of Virgo's slim hands. The subtle glisten of ichor in the trough of injury grew as Virgo worried the cut longer, arching over the golden belly. It stopped to lick the waxy pulp of the ruined rinds from under its nails, with every indication of pleasure.
"Cut," it said between the smacking of its lips, its fingertips wet with something like saliva.
The two places he would not allow Virgo to follow him was into the bathroom, and up to the observatory. Even putting aside the damage its dissective impulse could wreak on the blocky machines that lined the telescope platform, he felt a distinct and uncompromising aversion to letting it get to see the inner workings of how he tracked it and its compatriots. So he had dug up the key, dusty from disuse, and started locking the door against intrusion.
The side effect of this was that the observatory became his single place of refuge. Company, after so long, was a rich dish: he needed to catch his breath from simply having to be aware of another creature's existence all the time. The hum of the computing machines became a comforting purr, and he lingered at the telescope taking measurements for longer hours than strictly he needed to.
Too, he had moved a heavy stack of the historical Watcher journals, and -- with much huffing and puffing and straining -- the side table from his bedroom to serve as a makeshift desk, so he could continue his inventory-taking and collation of their contents in peace. One night, wrapping up and feeling very good about his progress -- he'd recorded the details from another report of a Cygnus fall two hundred years ago, and spent some time comparing it to the fall eighty years after that, which showed some interesting differences in both bauplan and approach -- he came to the vestibule that served as a landing between the observatory stairs and the living quarters to find it empty.
This was enough of a change to the status quo that it stopped him on the stairs. Suddenly Virgo was a venomous insect loose in his house, that he'd taken his eyes off of for a moment too long and lost track of.
"Virgo?" He was reasonably sure the constellation realized that was the word he used to call it, but at the very least he might trigger its persistent echolalia. He creaked open the door to the living quarters. "Virgo? Are you here?"
The lights were off. He moved carefully as his eyes adjusted, entering and letting the door swing closed behind him. The light from the moon angled slantwise in through the huge windows, sketching the edges of objects through the door to the kitchen, but nothing moving. He followed the slow curve of the living space, feeling the thudding of his pulse in this chest and arms. Nothing Virgo had said or done since arriving had set to rest the surety of his own eventual death, even if it had likewise offered him no specific violence; nonetheless creeping through his own home like it was the trees of the woods on a starfall night made him feel sick to his stomach, made his head fuzzy.
Virgo was nowhere. Not the entryway living room, cluttered with books and small tasks half-finished; not in the kitchen, with its galley counter and tiny eating table; not the workroom, wallpapered in maps and diagrams. He came to his bedroom at the end of the curve and pleaded with the unthinking universe that he was not going to open the door to his own ruin.
Instead, what met him was a black-on-black suggestion of a body curled up on his bed, vague in its shape but clear in its presence. The faint nimbus of Virgo's captive stars, invisible in the day, glowed gentle around the curve of its body.
He had never caught it sleeping, had in fact assumed that it didn't. But while he had been sure that when it first arrived it had not been breathing, its chest had begun since then to rise and fall in at least an effective imitation of breath. Standing in the door, he watched that same rise and fall from the center of its body, slow in the rhythm of slumber that was so very human. After the unexpected terror of the search, the weird and tender nostalgia of watching a familiar person sleep hit hard and deep behind his sternum.
He closed the door behind him, quiet as he could, and Virgo didn't stir. He told himself it was best not to interrupt or punish this new learning, and so for a while he sat on the floor beside the bed and tried to decide what to do. He listened to the constellation breathe in the silence, and tilted his head back to rest against the edge of the mattress.
How could he send this creature into the belly of Central's beast? This strange little cuckoo, whose impetus seemed so different from its fellows? When had a starbeast ever before learned what it meant to give in to the vulnerability of sleep?
He closed his eyes, and felt for the first time in a very, very long while, a kind of animal companionship. In the dim of his bedroom, he let the feeling blossom ill-advised and long-lost, a heat in his chest after a long cold, and wondered if the pain that came with it was the pain of warming after frostbite or a premonition of ill fate.
Putting paid to all of his fretting over meaning and intentionality, Virgo burst all at once from babble to questions.
"What is it?"
"A compass. Here, you use it like this." And he demonstrated the circle that could be drawn if the point was properly anchored.
Later, he'd wonder if that first one hadn't in fact been serendipitous word salad that it had begun to press like a button when it realized it got a reaction. But he had answered it without thinking, and all of a sudden "What is it?" infiltrated all of the hours of his day.
It made him feverishly excited. He started to write down each question it asked, uncertain why exactly but certain he'd figure it out later. He explained with eager detail every thing that Virgo questioned, and when the day started to dim and Virgo hadn't gotten tied of the game, he tried out reversing it.
"What is that?" he asked, pointing to one of Virgo's stars nestled in the subtle curve of its shoulder. It looked down, and then pointed at his shoulder in turn. "No, but you see, it's different -- I don't have one of those. You see? What is that?" he asked again, and circled the little light with his finger.
"What is that?" it repeated, more quietly than he had, and then looked up at the gloaming sky. "What is that?"
"No, you first."
"You first."
He sat back. They had not discussed the night sky; superstitiously, he had not wanted to open that tome lest some horrid learning come from the exercise. He had dodged when it had asked about his star charts, earlier. "I suppose it does provide a barrier to communication if I won't furnish you with words. But what good will your answers be if they're just my own parroted back at me?"
"What is that?"
He crossed his arms. "A conundrum."
"A conundrum." It was looking at him strangely, then, its eyes narrowing. Then Virgo lunged forward. It pulled the neck hem of his shirt down and away, bearing the skin of his shoulder.
His body froze in place, panic whiting him out, but it did nothing more than run a finger over the soft, pale skin where he would have had a star if he was a mirror to the constellation in front of him. It pressed with a nail and he flinched back, and suddenly he had his body under his control again.
He reached up and took Virgo by the shoulders, pressing it back and away from him firmly and trying not to let it feel him shake. "No," he said, like it was a dog.
"What is it?"
Spider-legs of fear were scraping at his organs, and he was suddenly very, very done with this. The sunset was too bright and Virgo moved too much, said too many words, had touched him with touches that felt too human. He pressed his hands to his forehead and stood up, turning and walking away towards his bedroom.
"No!" It called after him. "No!" He closed the bedroom door in its face.
The next morning, Virgo stood looking out the curved picture window in the kitchen like a sentinel. He was trying to ignore it while he went about his morning routine, but its stillness was unnerving enough that he kept shooting glances.
Finally, "What is it?"
"What is what?"
Virgo pointed insistently. "It."
Reluctantly, he came to peer out the window as well, keeping a distance between himself and the constellation. Squinting in the early-morning blue, he at first saw nothing, but after some moments of following Virgo's slowly moving finger he spotted a subtle glint in the woods, and then another, brighter light. It waxed for a moment, flashed, and waned back to nothing, and horror of a different sort flushed him.
The road from the nearest town wound along the foot of one of the mountains, rough switchbacks down unforgiving terrain. He remembered the ride out: the juddering, jolting traverse over cracked gravel, driven so infrequently that greenery slid like fingernails along the sides of the truck. He closed his eyes.
"Virgo. Stay here."
"What is it."
He didn't answer and he heard Virgo turn away from the window and sit down at the table, a thumping dissatisfaction, as he swept out of the living quarters and into the stairs up to the observatory.
The console through which he communicated with Central -- thin little missives, transferred through the airways a letter at a time -- sat rarely-used to the left of the observatory door. He rarely had incident to use it, and even less to check it, but when he hammered up the stairs and slammed into the observatory, there it was, blinking on the black strip.
QSD expedited. S.dv. to take readings, samples, recent landing sites. Facilitate.
Uneasiness like heartburn crawled further up his throat. The science division was months early, the supply delivery weeks. Coincidence seemed unlikely. Central couldn't tell he hadn't died as he usually did; how could they?
But what if they could tell Virgo hadn't been dealt with yet? Surely, they couldn't be certain, or it wouldn't be a single supply truck they were sending. There had to be some doubt. He could play this.
He could feel himself already up to his knees in the lie of it.
"It's danger," he told Virgo as he was shrugging on his coat, grabbing its wrist. A belated explanation, and one he was gambling would mean Virgo would follow his instructions. "It's something you had better hide from or it's going to hurt you. If you're obedient, I'll tell you all about it once it's gone." His insides squirmed at the carrot-and-stick of it all, the authoritative bribery, the implicit threat. But he needed Virgo to move, and it did, pulling along behind him on the stairs. He half-listened to it babble, falling back to its meaningless repetitions with a tone he couldn't help but read as startled, afraid. It was becoming muddy to him what was projection and what was Virgo mirroring him: he could feel an entwining, an enmeshing, that was happening. He did not want to hand the starbeast over. He did not want to go another five years without being able to speak to something that spoke back to him. He did not want to relinquish the strange warmth of having a companion that demanded little of him, and that saw him, in some way, in whatever uncanny way that Virgo saw him.
Virgo grabbed the back of his shirt, and he paused, but it just stopped when he did and looked at him with round dark eyes, waited like a forest creature caught in the glare of a spotlight.
"Okay," he said. Reluctantly, he let go of its wrist. It kept its grip on his shirt. "It will be okay. Just listen to me, alright? Do you understand?"
"Okay."
"Good. Good." It would take a couple of hours for the truck to arrive, which would have to be enough time.
He stopped in the storage shed that had been made of the lowest level of the stairwell, gathered a few supplies, and then led Virgo out of the tower and down the bluff on the trail to the lake. A plan was hatching in him, and he could not stop to think or he'd think the better of it.
Virgo followed, more obedient than usual, which set his gut to a guilty churning, but he reminded himself of the truck, the science division, the governmental labyrinth, the tests, the imaginary but all too possible tortures. The danger of a starbeast in an urban center. He had to keep reminding himself as he led Virgo down to the lakeshore and into the water, carrying his heavy burden as their twinned splashes stirred up lakeweed from the rocky bottom and frightened little silvery creatures into flight.
He led it out until they were up to their waists and the lake's deeper current was beginning to lap, frigid, at their feet. There had been a pier here once, a long, long time ago, and at the lakebottom there remained the metal structures that had shored up the piles.
"I'll come back," he was saying into the water-scented wind, "If you stay here I'll come back. A few days, at most. I'll be back, alright? Okay?" He brought Virgo close, close enough that he could loop the chain around its chest, over its shoulders, a makeshift harness that he locked in place with a hefty padlock. His arms followed those chains, and he held Virgo close. "Stay here. Please. I'll come back. I promise. I swear."
The cold of the lake shocked him as it closed around their heads, and he had to force himself to open his eyes.
The world was blue and hostile, his lungs pressed tight, his eyes burning with cold and grit, and the slow, stately movement in the embrace of the water seemed like a lie. But Virgo wasn't struggling: Virgo stared at him with those same round eyes, some thin stream of bubbles escaping its parted lips. Its hands held the chains delicately, feeling the links like it felt everything new to it.
He pushed the starbeast down, down, following it until they were flush with the bottom. The lock was a struggle in his numbing hands, but once he had it closed he pushed himself hard back to the surface, emerging gasping and streaming.
Like a sculpture, like the stillness of death, Virgo floated perhaps a foot above the rocky lakebed. Its eyes remained open, following him, and he watched as its fingers crept like a spider up and down the links of the chain.
"Oh," he moaned, and tore his eyes away from its still body. He turned, beginning to steam himself dry, and began to wade desperately for shore.