"At the end of this, I hope you'll be able to understand why I was willing to kill myself to force you to absorb me," Suisei told me. "After what I've been through, committing suicide to get my spirit uploaded into the safety of your mind was just another workday for me. Nothing—and I mean nothing—will ever be as strange to me as the weeks I spent living with the Erboss-Tor."

The only logical conclusion either of us could reach was that the aliens' initial, inexplicable behavior somehow laid the groundwork for a form of non-verbal communication with Suisei. It was clear that the creatures had come to understand some of what Suisei had to say, but whether that was because they had deciphered his spoken words or simply scanned the intended message directly from his temporal lobe, we couldn't tell, though both of us suspected that some kind of telepathy might have been involved, based on the pataphysics Suisei had seen and felt at work at the time.

Whatever the explanation behind it, the aliens had hobbled together a psychic pidgin, one that spoke through concepts, sentiment, and intention rather than words. As long as a concept had some physical analogue the creatures could point to—self, other, sky, life, stone, many, one—the creatures managed to understand what Suisei was trying to say. More detailed content, however, remained elusive. A lot of the heavy lifting came from both species' emotions, which furnished the inflection and context that abstract concepts would have otherwise lacked.

"Where did you think you were?" I asked. "How did you make sense of it?"

"At first," he said, "I thought I had somehow been transported some ridiculous distance—a million lightyears away."

"Light… years?"

"The distance light travels in a year," he said.

"And how far is that?" I asked.

"Approximately 5.9 trillion miles."

Talk about a big number!

"Why in the world would you ever need such a massive unit of length?"

"Genneth, in my world, the neighboring star closest to our Sun is almost five light-years away."

I stared and blinked.

"That's ridiculous," I said.

"The cosmos is a very big place."

I crossed my arms. "Clearly."

I'm not gonna lie, I was kind of resentful of how big his universe was. It made me feel like my world was some kind of hick-filled backwater.

"As I later learned," he added, "I hadn't just traveled through space. I'd moved into an entirely different universe altogether."

I stared in awe.

The aliens' architecture was paradoxical. It seemed more grown than built, and yet, at the same time, it was heavily adorned with delicate, almost baroque ornamentations. It was a community, a convent, and a cliffside, all melded into a sculpted whole, filled with windowless tunnels and sea-anemone towers and other dreamy shapes. There were no interior furnishings, at least none that Suisei could recognize. The only possible exceptions were the large, irregular-shaped polyhedra that he would find scattered about, almost haphazardly, in some of the tunnels and, especially, in the smaller rooms. Entrances and exits were simple archways in the middle of the tunnels, or built in a ring all the way around the base of grand domed chambers.

The creatures allowed Suisei to wander wherever he wished. Every doorway in their improbable city was open to him, and not just because none of their entrances had doors. The beings had little, if any, sense of private property. The city didn't even feel like living space; none of its rooms were homes. Many of the buildings had entrances in absurd locations—on the ceiling of the underside of an arch, or high up on a smooth, bent tower, like a mouth open to the air. Others had slits barely thicker than Suisei's finger. Some had no entrances at all. The creatures ambled about, stopping for some unfathomable reason, staying still as stone for hours at a time, only to walk away just as suddenly as if nothing had happened. Yet, always, the lights in their cores kept swirling around, roving and staring, like a curious eye.

If anything, it reminded Suisei of a museum, or an interactive art installation.

One by one, he familiarized himself with their daily lives. Two activities dominated their day.

The first was toolmaking. They had an endless supply of appliances they used for their daily needs, constructed through pataphysics on the fly, as need demanded, sculpting everything from tables and instruments to appliances and even foot itself directly out of their surroundings, both from the natural environment and from the building's tiled floors, and whenever a tool was no longer needed, they returned it to whence it came, dissolving it into its constituent components.

The second was… graffiti.

The walls and corridors of their city were alive with power. The light in the ubiquitous runes waxed and waned in enigmatic half-patterns, unfathomable in both meaning and purpose. Was it pataphysical work itself, technology the likes of which he could only dream, some combination of the two, or something else entirely?

He could only speculate.

Whatever it was, the creatures tended to it with great care. Individuals would spend hours at a time fiddling with the patterns on the walls: adding, subtracting, erasing, copy-pasting. He tried asking them what was on the walls, and what they were doing with it, but the answer wasn't very enlightening:

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Lifing, they said.

Not "life", nor "living", but a portmanteau of the two.

Apparently, they had a real fondness for portmanteaus.

"Their powers were like nothing I'd ever seen," Suisei told me.

I saw him gazing at the screenings on the walls of the calligraphy room. He pressed his hand against the stone. Through his senses, I discerned in that familiar, mind's-eye way, the panoply of pataphysics woven through the rock. Suisei perceived energies in layer upon layer, stacked in towers of infinitesimal thinness, and it was like that everywhere.

"It was as if the magic itself was alive, if that was even possible." He chuckled. "I'd only ever worked with a handful of layers at once, myself. To many people, that made me something of a virtuoso. But I couldn't hold a candle to the Erboss-Tor, even if I tried."

"How so?" I asked.

Because I lacked Suisei's contextual understanding of pataphysics and wasn't about to upload all that information directly into my mind, it was difficult, at first, for me to grasp just how extraordinary these beings were. To me, it was all magic. When you lived in a world where wizards were fiction, someone using magic to fly or start a fire was as impressive in its own way as someone tearing a hole in the fabric of space.

"Don't worry," he said, "you'll see."

"Also. Erboss-Tor?"

He nodded. "It was my best attempt to make sense of what they called themselves."

"What did you eat?" I asked.

"I don't know, and I pray to the Angel it stays that way."

Unfortunately, he was absolutely right.

The creatures succeeded in constructing nourishing meals for him. The meals tasted like they ought to have killed him, and Suisei was terribly disappointed that they didn't. The textures ranged from frayed rope to used toothbrush, and cold—always cold—and oleaginous. Though the marble plates and bowls they were served on were lovely, the food itself oozed like rancid bedsores, and turned into fuzzy, pinguid chunks if he waited too long to eat, chew, and swallow. The less said about the taste, the better, other than it was the kind that made you want to scour your tongue with soap-flavored sandpaper. The only saving grace was that, after the first meal had reduced him to an ugly pile of tears, the aliens had been kind enough to use their ability to stir Suisei's emotions to trigger memories of his favorite foods whenever he had to shove another meal down his throat. It didn't fully erase the nightmarish taste, and did very little to improve the texture, but it was better than nothing.

As for the creatures themselves, they seemed indifferent to their meals. They stabbed their grabby-claws into the glop-mounds and sucked them up through their clawtips, their fingers apparently functioning much like a spider's fangs. Suisei felt nothing from them as they ate, neither pleasure, nor discomfort or disgust. It was like a mechanical procedure, which made it seem all the more alien to him.

"What about, you know… a toilet?" I asked.

Suisei chuckled. "I know doctors say that squat toilets are, technically, healthier and more natural, but I've always been disgusted by them."

"That's right," I said, "squat toilets are still in use in parts of Mu, and in Arraka and Tchwang, where they're the norm." I looked him in the eyes. "Why'd you bring that up?"

"Because they made a squat toilet for me."

"I thought you didn't like those," I said.

"I don't, and the Erboss-Tor recognized that, though I soon discovered that the effort to explain to them how and why to shape that into a toilet simply wasn't worth the hassle."

"You have my condolences," I said.

I was about to let the memory play again, when another question occurred to me. "What about bathing? Or getting your clothes clean?"

"After my experience with their meals, I decided it just wasn't worth the risk," Suisei said.

I nodded. "A wise decision."

"Thankfully, as the days passed," he continued, "we had a better time understanding one another, though the improvements were mostly one-sided. They completely mastered the Munine language in a matter of days, writing notwithstanding."

"They managed to speak it?" I asked.

"No, but it was clear from their reactions that they understood nearly every word out of my mouth. I ended up talking myself hoarse on most days, just to give them more vocabulary to use, and they picked up all of it."

"That's incredible."

He raised his hands at his sides.

"What part of this wasn't?" He shrugged. "I felt like a poet at a mathematics convention. I couldn't begin to understand their society or culture. On occasion, in what seemed to be some kind of festivity, they gathered in clusters in their city and made their uncanny trumpeting sounds while standing like monoliths in a glen. I could hear them for miles, even in the depths of the wilderness." He shook his head. "I still don't have the slightest idea what it meant."

"Did you them ask?"

"Yes," he said, "though, as usual, their answer only left me with more questions."

"What did they say?"

"That they were being a manyness."

I blinked. "I see what you mean."

"For what it's worth," he said, "it was like they were trying to remember something, like a person muttering to themselves, keeping information at the tip of their tongue so that they wouldn't forget it. Sometimes," he added, "they would stand alone, perfectly still, for hours, even days at a time. It left me wondering if they were truly living things at all, or some kind of artificial beings."

"What about the Sword?" I asked.

"They were obsessed with it," he said, "perhaps even afraid of it…"

"Afraid? What does that look like?"

It was all too easy for me to forget that I was the one in control of all this.

Thankfully, Suisei's memories readily answered my query.

Apparently, excited obsession manifested as green swirls in their yolky nuclei, accompanied by motion rippling through their tendril limbs while they paced back and forth in a strafing motion.

"When it came to the Sword, they acted like children. They were endlessly curious about it, yet they never asked me about it directly, instead preferring to watch and stare."

"They can stare?" I asked.

"It certainly felt like they were staring."

"Why didn't you ask them about it?"

"There was a part of me that didn't trust them," he said.

I glared at him. "What? Why? They saved you. What else did they need to do to earn your trust?"

"Genneth," Suisei said, "you have to understand. In my line of work…" he sighed. "I had a colleague, Yukine—a wonderful woman. Loved to dance, and was good at it, too. For the better part of three years, we worked together on the occasional team assignment. Then we discovered that she was a Tchwangan spy, and they chose me to be her assassin."

I gawked at him. "Did you go through with it?"

He nodded. "Of course, and without the slightest bit of hesitation."

I leaned away from him a little. "That's… not what I was expecting."

"It was like that from the very beginning," Suisei said. "Anyone I ever met was only one handler-order away from being killed at my hand."

"Good grief. That's… awful…"

"Yes, but… that was my life. It was either adapt or perish, and I chose to adapt. I learned to be greedy with my trust. It was for my own safety. It kept others from getting any advantages over me, and it helped keep me numb if and when the time came for me to end their lives. I'm the first one to admit that adaptations like that are hard to undo, especially in a situation so far beyond my comfort zone like the one I was currently in. But, eventually, I managed to settle enough of my doubts—not all, but enough—and once I was confident that they understood me sufficiently well, I called some of them to the platform chamber that I'd awakened in, which I'd taken to using as a personal base."

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