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Ohan scratched the fur on the back of his neck and considered. He took another bite. He weighed his response.
Dr. Chef leaned forward, his two uppermost handfeet clasped. Ohan could feel the politeness embedded in his friend’s silence: it wasn’t forced, but it was certainly pronounced.
He finished chewing the bread, swallowed, and contemplated the aftertaste. After another full minute, he said, “Still too salty.”
Dr. Chef’s whiskers drooped. “Oh, my. Ohan, I don’t know if I can subtract any more salt without severely affecting the gluten structure and altering the volume of the bread. The increased fermentation would probably result in a much more dense and bland loaf. Which you might well enjoy, certainly, but it would be less, well, bread-like.”
Though his facial expression remained grave, as usual, Ohan inwardly relaxed and felt himself enjoying the turn in the conversation. He always found it awkward to criticize Dr. Chef’s cooking, no matter how much the Grum encouraged and entreated him to do so. But he had discovered, since the loss of the Whisperer, that he greatly enjoyed learning about the exact—and exacting—science of cooking for a multispecies crew, and Dr. Chef was evidently overjoyed at having someone on the ship who genuinely wanted to listen to him expound on every last detail.
“It may be, Dr. Chef, that bread is simply not to be one of my preferred foods,” he said. Then, quickly, to prevent another crestfallen whisker droop: “However, the herb contained in the bread is most appetizing. I would not be displeased to taste it again in another food.”
Dr. Chef’s cheeks puffed rapidly and his whiskers stood straight out in deep satisfaction. “That’s a new favorite of mine. As it happens, Humans call it rosemary.”
Ohan raised one thick eyebrow. “Truly?”
“Definitely. Our Rosemary told me so within minutes of introducing herself. I can’t wait to try it in a soup. Or with potatoes!” He winked. Ohan always found it amusing to see such a Human gesture replicated by a Grum. Also, it was open knowledge that potatoes were his favorite among the solid foods he had tried so far.
“I stand ready to help you test such a combination if and when it occurs,” he said. He ran his tongue along teeth that had begun to lengthen and sharpen, making sure that no scraps of food remained, before stretching briefly, climbing off his stool, and dropping to all fours on the kitchen floor. “And now, shall we?”
Dr. Chef carefully wrapped the rest of the bread in a soft cloth and poured himself a cup of tea. “Yes, let’s go.”
******
Ohan could remember the precise moment they had died, in terrible pain, on their infirmary bed. And he recalled, just as clearly, the moment he had awakened to discover that, in a way, he had only just begun to live. In the months since he had been simultaneously killed and cured, his perceptions of the universe around him had undergone shift after change after alteration. Sometimes he feared his mind would never truly settle into its surroundings, that the ever-changing landscape of his senses would never, for the rest of his life—for what he knew might be a long, long life—allow him to fully get his bearings. There were still days when he couldn’t leave his room, and he had certainly not yet been off the ship, for fear that the sensory overload might inflict some horrific trauma that he would never recover from.
There was no use denying that the thought of going to Arun tempted him. His fellow broken Pairs at the Solitary colony would undoubtedly have provided comfort and guidance in grounding him in his familiar but entirely new surroundings, in the larger and smaller universe his mind now inhabited.
But Ohan knew, after asking Ashby and Kizzy to tell him everything they remembered about their visit to Arun, that the support to be found there was not what he needed. In fact, everything about it sounded like the exact opposite of what he sought. The colony leader, Mas, had made the Heretic way perfectly clear: they were not revolutionaries. Theirs was a life of rest and isolation. For them, there would be no more Navigating. Mas herself had said that she had become Solitary before Humans had joined the Galactic Commons. If not for an unlikely chance visit, she would never have met one. It was very probable that she would never see any of the other species the GC might encounter in the future.
The universe was lost to her. To all of them.
That could not be Ohan’s life. Whatever the Whisperer had done to him, done for him, he knew that his absorbing, overwhelming curiosity was his own. He needed to see as much of the cosmos as he could, and now he might have many, many standards left in which to see it. He was deeply unsettled to know that there were those of his kind, hundreds or thousands of them, who had lost the urge to explore or somehow never felt it themselves, who would willingly choose to cut themselves off from everything that was unknown and intoxicating in the stars just outside their door. The thought of it made him feel more claustrophobic than his own small quarters ever could.
He now had more in common with his crew than he did with his own entire species. He was, as far as he knew, unique in his choice of neither death by the Waning nor a long, comfortable life of exile. He had grown his fur in, letting the patterns he had shorn into it fade and disappear, so that he could start making new patterns, ones he had never seen in all his time with the Whisperer. Mas had been perfectly right about one thing: without the virus, he was new. Was he better? For now, that did not particularly signify. He was different, and his different eyes thrilled at everything they saw anew, even when it seemed hopelessly overwhelming.
Someday he would decide he could set foot on a planet or a station without overtaxing his mind beyond repair. Until then, he had his daily walk through the ship with Dr. Chef.
******
Every day, at Dr. Chef’s suggestion, they took a slightly different path through every corridor of the Wayfarer, but the start and end points remained the same. This time they moved from the Fishbowl down the corridor to the computer core, where Tycho was running a routine self-diagnostic program; over to the rec room to look in on Jenks and Kizzy’s virtual waterball match (so far they were evenly matched in scoring but not in volume: Kizzy hollered some especially choice words as she flailed and the ball got away from her); into the control room, where Sissix was slowly, patiently teaching Rosemary how to operate the controls (Ohan had been skeptical of learning to work with anyone besides Sissix at the helm, but he had warmed to the idea much faster than would have been possible with the Whisperer present); quietly past the crew quarters (Ashby had yet to emerge after he and a newly male Pei had turned in early the previous night); and finally to the algae bay. They could hear Corbin’s raised voice and Tycho’s even tones from a fair distance down the corridor.
“… can’t believe I’m arguing about such a stupid idea with a fresh-out-of-the-box helper system.”
“Now, Artis, there are plenty of Exodus Pals fans, most of them sapients, who can point to textual evidence, shown in many episodes, that Ambiheart and Litzi had a relationship.”
“Well, they’re every bit the idiots that you are, and they don’t even have an excuse: they have actual brains that they could be using if they chose.”
“Well, brains are highly overrated, judging from the quality of… well, perhaps we’d best table this for now. You have visitors.”
Corbin looked up as Ohan and Dr. Chef walked through the bay doors. “Ohan!” He smiled broadly.
Corbin’s smile had been a subject of controversy among the Wayfarer crew since its initial public appearance. Most of the crew found it strange and unnerving to see such an expression on his face. Ashby’s reaction had been the most openly positive, but he was already the one with the most genuine investment in encouraging Corbin to act like something resembling a congenial, sociable Human. Ohan could sympathize: his own smile, featuring his increasingly prominent teeth, still appeared to cause some discomfort of its own.
Corbin offered no greeting to Dr. Chef, who never seemed to take offense and, in fact, often openly enjoyed being companionably ignored. While the Grum took up a conversation with Tycho about adjusting stasie temperatures to keep fresh the fruit that had been obtained on the last run to Coriol, Ohan sat down in a chair that suited his contours—the only chair Corbin kept in the bay for anyone besides himself—and leaned forward to examine the algae sample on Corbin’s work table. It was a red algae, browning and crinkling slightly around the edges. “That cannot be good,” he said.
“No.” Corbin came over with a dropper full of a green liquid and squeezed a minute amount onto the algae. “And it’s not a temperature issue, for once. I hope it’s something as simple as altering the nutrient content, but…”
He went on. He would go on for hours. Ohan settled himself more comfortably in his chair and listened to the clicks and hums of the ship around him. In a way that had never been possible when the Whisperer was there with him, he knew he was home.