Page 36 of Tempted by Celestial Bodies

He hardly knows how to answer her.I am many. I am one. I am eternal. An exile. Alone and yet legion.But he was not always alone. When he had a pilot, a mate, a companion, she had called him by many different names.Dear. Darling. Love. My everything.But there were others, too, the ones that came later.Parasite. Wretch. Bore. Destroyer. Brute. Life-ruiner. Tyrant.

Monster.

If this is what we’ve become,his love said, leaving him,if you refuse to change your ways, you will always be alone.

I never had a choice,he’d cried out, but she was too far gone by then to hear him.This is what I am. I can’t be anything else.

“You must have a name,” Kaitlyn says now, his tearstained mate, his only hope, his fate, his likely doom. “Even aliens need names.”

Of course, humans love names. They require them, a precursor to any intimacy. He should have thought of that.

He casts his seeking mind through databases, encyclopedias, still tasting her salt-sweet tang in the back of his avatar’s throat like a promise. Finds something that seems fitting, or close enough.

“You may call me Cassiel,” he says, choosing a name from a human mythos that resonates, a watchful entity of solitude and grief.Archangel.A curious sort of creature, one he can find no biological reference for, other than beings of their wide salt seas: angel fish, angel shark, sea angels, anglerfish…It seems oddly appropriate. Their oceans contain creatures not entirely unlike him. Besides, she wouldn’t findpolymorphic colonyas comforting.

“Cassiel.” She draws the sounds out on her tongue, hard and sibilant becoming almost musical at the end. Something shifts inside him, settles into place. Her head comes up, her eyes glazed and shining. “You haven’t told mewhy.If you are…what you say you are—why abduct me?”

“We—Ineeded you. If I could have done it differently—but I had no choice.”

“You needed me. For what? Am I…a research subject, or a hostage?” Fluid leaks from her glittering eyes, dampening the epidermal membrane beneath her. “Or am Iprey?”

The vessel’s membrane drinks up the droplet of her immediately. It’s a small gift and he’s hungry for whatever she offers him, anything to help him know her better, map a way forward.

For such a tiny sample, the lachrymal secretion offers a complex, distracting wealth of new information: saline, enzymes, limbic hormones, trace minerals, electrolytes, opioid peptides...Tears.The rich flavor races through his distributed awareness with intoxicating intensity, near-erotic in its force. For a moment he loses himself in it, chasing a dream or half-forgotten genetic memory of his species’ ancient prehistory, before they left the oceans of their Mother World and evolved to live among the stars.

She tastes like a home he’s never known, and he wants more of her. He wants to sample all of her, in every mood.

“No! Not like that.” His avatar stammers, off-balance in the tide of his desire. Sheisn’tprey, but there are more pleasurable ways to taste her, for them both. “I have no wish to harm you. Quite the opposite.”

“I don’t understand.”

How can she? It would break her even more.

“Please don’t cry,” he says, still kneeling before her. “Are you hungry? Thirsty? You must remain hydrated, and this—” He waves a hand at her face, glistening from the moisture running from her eyes and now her nose. “It can’t be helping.”

“Yes,” she hiccups. “No! Please just—leave mealone.” With that, her strength resurfaces. Relieved, he stands and backs away.

“I’ll leave you now,” he says, and walks away, faster than is strictly necessary. She makes no move to follow him.

He will always remember the taste of her tears, no matter what happens afterward.

* * *

She criesherself out on that strange warm floor, wrapped in the blanket he gave her. When she finally pulls herself together—scoured, empty, and as he predicted, terribly thirsty—more lights have appeared.

The hanging candelabras come up in a line, like an invitation, stillnot quite right, organic,alien.They lead to a perfect, ordinary, normal wooden door.

Distrustful, she lays a palm flat against it, then snatches her hand back with a sharp, in-drawn breath as it swings open under her touch. Beyond it waits a lushly furnished suite with a wide canopy bed, an oversized chair, and a standing wardrobe. The blue-black walls curve gently, concave between floor and ceiling, shimmering in the soft light with a faint iridescence.

“You had all this right here,” she mutters, “and you still woke me up on a lab table like some half-baked alien autopsy video? Here I thought E.T. would besmart.”

Shrugging off the inexplicable impression of unseen attention keenly focused on her, she steps cautiously inside. A crystal carafe waits on a bedside table, with a delicate, subtly asymmetrical glass beside it filled to the brim of blessedly cold water. She gulps down a glassful, then pours another from the jug, starting to feel a little more…human. Further exploration reveals another door, and behind it recognizable bathroom facilities with a huge, sunken tub set in the center of its floor, already full and steaming.

“Ok,” she mutters. “I could get used to this.”

She still doesn’t want to think about whatever unidentified gunk is drying stiff and tacky on her scalp. Now she can wash it off and hopefully never think of it again.

When she’s finally clean and pleasurably boneless, she emerges from the tub and wraps herself in a huge, plush towel, then stops short. She heard no one come in, noticed no movement, yet her discarded clothes somehow vanished from the floor.

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