Birth

She blinked furiously. The light grew stronger now, well past the point of discomfort. She blinked some more. She willed her eyes to focus, to articulate what she was seeing, but it kept swimming just beyond apprehension. She blinked some more.

A soft rushing sound began to build. Where it was exposed, her skin began to tingle. Her spine arched involuntarily. She smelled combustion products.

The rushing built faster now. It gained texture, a bassy thrum which rattled her ribs and melodious overtones which caught her ear. She had to keep her eyes closed, now. The gestalt was overwhelming.

A fantastic choral sigh released the sensory pressure all at once. She peeked under her eyelids. Unfurling before her, manifestly well-made, was an edifice which vaguely resembled a creeper. Glowing bulbs hung from its boughs and it furled around and inside itself.

She stepped forward and peered more closely. It enclosed something. That something was undertaking distinct efforts to unfetter itself.

It seemed to get the hang of co-ordination all at once. Two long slits appeared in the sides of the - was that an amniotic sac? - and a bundle of thin, sleekly curving legs thrust out of one of them. Several more of those legs gingerly pushed the deflated remains of its vessel off as it stepped neatly out to one side.

It resembled a spider in the same way a star resembles an egg. Its limbs looked almost like fur, impossibly fine and implausibly prehensile. She struggled to find its nexus, some point to which everything attached and received innervation and symmetry. There was clear structure to it, but like the light of its birth, the sense behind the structure swam beyond reach.

It approached her - "sidled" being the closest approximation she could think of to its movement - at an incredibly slow pace. She couldn't make out obvious sense organs; nevertheless, she had a strong sense that she was being examined with some intensity.

She extended a hand toward it, palm up, almost on reflex, before grinning at the effectiveness of the training programme. "Automatic", as advertised.

It seemed to split its focus, devoting most of it now to the extended limb. Jauntily protruding bristles enfolded her hand, but she couldn't feel its touch at all. Its bulk moved slightly closer. She couldn't see which limbs were holding it off the ground, but in aggregate, it moved like gravity affected it. Well, that's something.

It reached some conclusion about her hand. All at once, a thick bundle of limbs splayed itself into space, intricately surrounding a hand-shaped void. Hmm. They all retracted, making the void larger, then rearranged themselves around her hand and advanced again.

This should be interesting.

They all entered her skin at once. It was almost painless, a kind of dull pinch which came about as much by expectation as by sense. She kept her hand as still as possible. Then, an instant of wild furious feeling. She was briefly sensate in a way that was uncomfortably vivid. It passed as soon as it began.

Now her hand was in cool, running water. She glanced at it, testing the illusion - it held. She could feel the eddies tugging at her skin, the pockets of warmer water sighing past, the skin just above the surface exalting in the swells which washed over it.

She slipped into a bright memory of sand and seafoam and the overpowering smell of brine. She was holding her daughter's hand, smiling as she picked her way delicately around the shells and strands of seaweed. Voices rose and fell around her, calling to one another, playing games and clambering over rocks.

A gleam of prudence lifted one of her eyelids, but it was far too late. She was ensconced in a wide cradle, shaped like a bird-bath, thick ropes of dark hair snaking all around her, branching fractally to enter every exposed inch of skin, and snaking under her encounter suit, hungering for more. It looked, she thought, like an odd inversion of a central nervous system.

And that was the last she thought.