Speculation abounds when weird things scurry into being.

"It has to be a metaphor for death, don't you think?" I said.

"Perhaps…" Mr. Himichi seemed skeptical. "Though, that seems like an overly simplistic interpretation. As you said, there was a feeling of isolation as well."

I nodded. "Yes, and if anything, it's only gotten stronger. But… how does that undermine my assertion?"

"It's not that I think you're wrong, Genneth, it's that I feel your explanation is only halfway there, if that. It might be more than just death. If these ships are some kind of hive mind, maybe these breaks represent a kind of literal separation."

As we walked, we passed another fork in the road. This time, however, we didn't get to choose which branch to take. All routes but one dead-ended in a bottomless abyss. The hallways' continuations receded from us, far on the other side of the dark.

I'll admit, so far, this adventure wasn't living up to my expectations. Yes, knowing that the ships might be bound together in a hive mind was useful, but it was a far cry from the kinds of concrete details I'd been hoping for.

While Mr. Himichi and I had been talking, Ileene had gone around the next bend. Her footsteps echoed through the hallway as she scampered back into view.

"Dr. Howle, come over here!" Her face was bright with excitement.

I followed her, and smiled heartily at what I saw.

Around the bend, the corridor opened into a big, circular space. Hallways branched out from the room in intervals along the walls. Many of these led to more big open rooms.

It was a cluster of the things!

But what really caught my eye were the holes. They dotted the walls of the circular room, evenly spaced, with one every other pane.

"Portholes!" I said.

"How do you know they are portholes?" Suisei asked.

"I don't! They look like portholes, so that's what I'm calling them." I walked toward the middle of the room.

Each of the portholes was about as big as my human hand with my fingers fully spread. Like the portal we'd passed earlier, it glowed brightly; unlike the portal, however, light flowed out of the portholes, rather than into them.

This was a good sign. It gave me confidence that I could get close to them and peer inside without too much fear of getting trapped someplace… unpleasant.

I turned to Ileene.

"See?" I grinned. "Look at that!" I pointed at one of the portholes. "This is exactly the kind of smaller-scale thing I was talking about! Baby steps, Ileene, it's all about those little baby steps." I pointed at my feet while miming making baby steps.

Ileene smirked. "I'll believe it when I see it."

"Alright, then watch this."

I picked one of the windows at random and walked up to it.

"What are you doing?" Mr. Himichi asked.

"Eavesdropping," I said. "I think."

Then I leaned against the wall and brought my eye up to the hole.

At first, all I saw was a not-very-interesting white light everywhere and everywhen, but that only lasted for a moment, after which things became very interesting.

I was an eye in the sky; a fly on the wall.

Well, in a wall.

I saw through an eye that perceived all the colors in the spectrum. I saw radio and ultraviolet, and everything beyond and in between. The knowledge to make sense of it just came to me, most likely a courtesy of the form I was inhabiting. For my sanity's sake, I immediately blocked out everything that wasn't ordinary light.

I was inside a strange dwelling, looking over the scene from the vantage point of a protrusion on one of the dwelling's walls. I didn't have appendages worthy of mention, nor eyelids for that matter. Happily, after just a wee bit of panicking, I discovered I could move around. It was kind of like swimming, only much more theoretical.

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With the "dis" removed from my disorientation, I could finally get a good look at the place. The first thing I noticed was the silver. The walls, the floor, the ceiling; they were all made from the same quasi-metallic material as the flower ships. A few of the furnishings—a solid, legless table; some sort of cabinets along the walls—grew out from the structure's interior much like the flower ship's features had, but the majority did not, such as the adjustable privacy screens on the far side of the room. These were free-standing, and of an appealing, mass-produced design.

There was a sizable hole in the middle of the room, large enough to fall through. It gave a view of a second room directly below this one. Curious to see what was behind the privacy screen, I swam through the ground, around the big hole, and emerged from the wall behind the privacy screens.

Huh: it was a sleeping area, strung up with hammocks. The sleeping quarters also had a monitor on the wall, as well as several more shelves.

My vision disappeared as I melded into the floor. This was followed by a brief sense of motion, and a moment later, I popped out from the ceiling of the room below.

By the Angel…

Unlike the unoccupied upper room, several hummingbird people sat around the lower room.

I could have watched them all day. It was uncanny and magical, like something you'd find on a weird TV channel two hours past midnight.

By the looks of it, they were a family of four. Two of them wore trousers and smocks with extremely wide sleeves, wide enough that the sleeves billowed whenever the hummingbirds moved their arms. The father—at least judging by his prominently displayed iridescent red gorget —wore silvery armor just like the hummingbird from the refueling station.

The two children sat on the fuzzy steps of a recessed area built into the middle of the wall-to-wall carpeted floor, while their mother stood between them and their father. The larger of the two children had pointed his head downward, so that his face was little more than a beak sticking out from the shadow of his hood, as if his clothes were about to swallow him up. The smallest of the four hummingbirds sat beside him, wearing a brown vest over a short-sleeved yellow shirt, in contrast to her older brother's smock.

As I watched, an idea popped into my head. Back on the ship, protrusions had ducked in and out of the ceiling and walls, much like what I was doing inside this building. I was willing to bet that, wherever I currently happened to be, I was now one of those protrusions.

Speaking of which: where was I, exactly? I couldn't have been on the flower ship. This "house" was far too big to have fit inside it, though, admittedly, if the aliens had found a way to make structures that were larger on the inside than they were on the outside, all bets were off.

Then, another thought occurred to me: hive mind.

We'd mentioned it earlier, but I hadn't really put the pieces together in my head.

A hive mind was a single consciousness that existed across many different bodies. In most of the science fiction that I'd read, creatures that were part of a hive mind were usually depicted as sharing some or all of their sensory input with one another. That way, if one drone saw a nice, vulnerable-looking victim, all the other drones—or at least, any who were nearby—would know it, and skitter over to join the hunt.

That set me thinking: might it be possible that I was seeing the visual feed from another part of the Vyx hive mind? If so, would looking through a different porthole give me access to a different visual feed? I didn't see why not, and, even better, as long as I wasn't stuck here, I could actually test that idea.

Suddenly, the hummingbirds started to speak, and, somehow, I was able to understand what they were saying!

I set my musings aside and paid attention.

"This is it," the father said. "It's the final battle. It's the culmination of all our dreams."

As soon as the hummingbirds started to speak, I realized that whatever hearing capabilities I had in this form (whatever it was) were as advanced as my visual ability. Much like with the impact of seeing too many frequencies of light at once, hearing the hummingbirds speak was similarly overwhelming, though figuring out which frequency ranges to focus on took a little more work than the visual case, because the hummingbirds' speech was far more high-pitched than any human language. Still, I managed to finish my adjustments about halfway through the littlest hummingbird's words.

"We're proud of you, Daddy!" she said.

My adjustments had done the trick; the sound was much improved. If I closed my eyes, I could almost pretend the four hummingbirds were human. The little one now sounded like a young girl.

"But I don't want you to go, Dad," the hooded boy said.

The mother's wings thrummed with agitation. "Why would you say that, hlU-ha-U? Do you want to dishonor us? You'll come of age soon, and you'll be expected to serve just like everyone else. Think of what the rest of the clanstead will say about you—about us," she gestured at herself, "—if you're still this belligerent the day you're called to serve?"

"Certainly nothing good," the boy replied.

Suddenly, a bare, silvery obelisk up against the far wall pulsed with light. Then, it spoke. "hlU-ha-U has been avoiding combat training at the academy. If his attitude does not improve, an Overseer will be brought to reeducate him."

"There's no reason to do anything so drastic," the father said, slicing his arm out horizontally. "Victory is near; I can taste it." He chirped confidently and flicked his tongue out of his beak. "Once the Blight is gone, we can finally stop fighting"

"It'll never be gone," hlU-ha-U said. The young bird stormed off, buzzing up through the hole in the ceiling to the floor above.

A moment later, I heard the privacy screens being rearranged.

"Don't trouble yourself over it, dear," the wife said. She looked up at the hole in the ceiling. "Not all of us have the good fortune to be as strong as you are."

The father nodded. "I'll have to muster enough strength for all of us."

"Hunt well, ehakUn," the wife said.

"I will."

Then he turned around and stepped out the door. Hoping to follow him, I raced up the wall, passing through several rooms. I emerged on the floor of one of the house's upper stories just in time to see him take flight

But how could I follow?

Darn it!

But then I had an idea.

In my current form, I could swim through walls. Well, then what was stopping me from swimming through the house's exterior wall?

Nothing but a want of creativity, that's what!

I swam out the wall, not knowing what to expect. I was floored by what I saw. My position on the building's exterior sank somewhat, just because of how shocked I was.

Oh my word…

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