This is a little piece prompted by mon ami Lachlan Atcliffe. I’ve always liked Marybeth, and now I like her more.
Marybeth Delilah Potter loved the thunder, and she loved the rain. She loved it to every drone and cirrus, this wonder God wrought where clean, cool water fell from His sky, even onto the deserts of Arizona. Other kids at school pretended they were too old and too cool, but they secretly tilted their heads back when no one was looking to drink the rain that tasted like communion. Marybeth wasn’t too old to love the rain, and she knew it, but she waited until no one was looking anyway. Marybeth sometimes dropped her human seeming when she danced in the rain, when she threw her head back and drank her fill, and her drones shone purple-green in the lightning while her cirri writhed in the thunder-rich air.
That kind of thing could give the humans the wrong idea.
Besides, Mrs. Hutchinson wanted her foster daughter safe at home during thunderstorms, safe from flash floods and landslides, innocent that Marybeth could survive and even thrive out there. It was only a little naughty to sneak out into the rains to dance and drink and worship God, especially if she was back before morning so Mrs. Hutchinson wouldn’t know.
She was alone, up in the hills where no one would see. She felt no human presence, or dog, on her hive mind, nothing that drove shards into the Hum of psychic harmony she had brought with her from Home. But in the blackened rain, she felt something. Not the jagged shards of Earth minds, something …else.
Slowly, Marybeth Delilah Potter whirled back into humanoid shape, slipped her human face back into place, pink hands and pale cheeks. She stretched her awareness. There was nothing, nothing Earth-like in the rain, not even lizards or coyotes slinking away from God’s rain.
Could it be…?
At Home, the Hum had been her religion, and her foremothers before her. She had come to Earth alone, the only hive being in on this dry planet, the only being with the Hum inside her.
She felt something like the Hum out there, in the rain, in the darkness. A distributed mind, not all trapped and individual like humans. She Hummed in the rain, her thousand golden eyes closed to the darkness.
And Marybeth heard something she’d never heard before.
Marybeth felt dissonance in the Hum, and it nearly tore her soul apart.
She withdrew her awareness furtively, the thousand golden eyes snapping open. She saw nothing, heard nothing but the drumming of the rain and the roaring of the floods. Marybeth stood stock still as lightning tore the sky asunder, revealed nothing.
She’d read about demons and devils in her Bible, but Mrs. Hutchinson explained about metaphors and stories, explained to a frightened foster daughter that they weren’t real like the rain. Now Marybeth wasn’t so sure. God would never make a being that could sound a false note in the Hum, she was certain of that.
She reached out again with the one sense that had felt the …presence. Tentatively, with the psychic sense by which her drones shared sensation and thought, which made Marybeth Marybeth. Marybeth reached out with her soul.
She had to stretch to sense that…dissonance in the Hum now. Was it moving? Where was it moving to?
Her attention trailed down the darkness, down the slick hills, toward town and the school and an old farmhouse on Cuttle Creek Road where Mrs. Hutchinson nuzzled against Mr. Hutchinson as the rain pattered on the window.
She brought her attention back, reached out again. She felt that impossible dissonance again. It was definitely moving toward town, toward all those humans who had no idea what wrongness was coming. They could not feel the Hum, but Marybeth knew they could feel when it was wrong.
But she knew the Hum from Home, among her kin and all the creatures of the wide seas there. And she could make her memories and thoughts known through the Hum. This presence would hear her trumpet-blast.
As the rain splashed against her rubbery skin, Marybeth dropped her seaming. Her true face writhed. She would speak truth.
“Go.” She pushed out into the darkness, and it was all her memories and all her kin’s memories of flight, evacuation, separation. It rang in the Hum.
“I claim this planet. Mrs. Hutchinson is mine. Mr. Hutchinson is mine. The swim team are mine. This town and this place and this whole world is mine! I came from Home as last of my kin. They do not Hum but they have made me their kin anyway. I bear royal eggs and I will bear queens and my daughters and the sons and daughters of Man will share the bounty of God’s green and blue Earth in the days to come! They do not Hum, but they sing. And if you would harm even the least of them, you must go through me!”
The darkness did not answer. She reached out again.
A memory came to her, one of her own, one she shied away from into physical sensation of the rain on her flesh. A memory of salt in her wounds, when humans were cruel to her like they were cruel to each other, separated and alone.
She whimpered out loud, but stared up into the rain, a writhing mass of squidlike flesh in a modest green pinafore and no shoes. Marybeth drew from her great racial store of memory a fresh one, one which had happened to her, the one that hurt most.
“Leave! My! Planet!” Marybeth burst with the memory, the memory of leaving Home, crossing the Pane that separated Home from Earth, the Pane she could never cross again. Marybeth knew no stronger way to deliver her message, and doubted one existed.
The darkness trembled, but it could have been the rain. Marybeth waited in the darkness, praying psalms from her Book of Common Prayer as she slowly extended her awareness again.
Nothing out there but the jagged shards of Earth minds, separated and alone, and the quiet lonely Hum between her every drone.
She wondered if it had even ever been there, that unearthly dissonance in the Hum. If it was a trial of God’s to test her, or some strange madness covering her from too much pain and fear among the humans. Things like that had happened to her kin, and the suffering hives sadly eaten by their families.
Regardless, she was here, and it was not. She had left her planet and come here, among creatures that could not feel each other’s sensations nor hear each other’s thoughts. She’d left the Hum of her foremothers for the sound of the chorus singing hymns on Sunday.
Marybeth had come from Home, but Earth was her planet now. Her planet, her people, her God.
And soon, even the humans would know that.
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