droplets, bathed Zer in silken sensations. In turn, Zer focused on crystal ice and melting snow swirling down mountains and feeding streams and lakes.
The fertility image calmed Vatta but fed the forbidden portrait lurking in Zer's mind: Exotica glided across land and transmuted atmospheric haze. Purple ions drenched her brain.
“Draw.” Vatta flipped open the magneto-pad they’d made and slid it under Zer's hands.
Zer resisted, yet the cool slate osmotically sucked and transferred purple-ion heat from her head to her palms and fingers. She let remembered smells of moldering trees and cloud-eating trees flow through her hands, the finger painting less satisfying but less problematic than an electrical picture excreted from her body and left to hang like a fruit in air.
Unacceptable, Leon said, telepathically. Sans electrical figments of feeling, he conveyed himself as a watchtower at midship, his eyes sweeping the work deck and tracking the crew who worked on blueprints or studied Earth and its cultures.
Zer admired the controlled warning. Leon distilled pure thought from sensation without leaving pictures in air, but then he had the golden eyes. He was the only pureblood aboard their pyrid, the only mate who had mastered the art of remaining solid without a need to pool, leak preforms, exo-paint, or reverse the polarity of images.
Quit stalking, work on your flight plan, Zer thought back at him. He feared that once they landed, the crew's pictorial exo-thoughts wafting about them and left in their wake would cause Earthlings to hallucinate, maybe evolve. Never mind the effect on the crew. Aliens weren't supposed to influence the Earthlings' evolution, if they ever landed.
Depends on you. Leon thanked her for making it easier to spy.
He would tease. At her suggestion, while awaiting the return to Earth, she and her crewmates worked naked, the better to see the results of trying to control exo-painting. Their pearly bodies contrasted with numerous paintings that hovered partially dissolved nearby.
For three Earth months, they’d exercised adequate control, but now, close to landing, their purple ions were erupting into exo-paintings again. Zer glanced at the day's collection, a gallery of obsessions. She had contributed a forest's worth of trees. “Spacefarers aren't called aberrant for nothing,” she muttered.
Preoccupied with radiation-transmuting trees, she practically considered herself one in disguise or at least encoded with tree genes. She had ended up a tree linguist because of her rapport with plants. Now thinking of them made it hard to maintain a dense body more than twelve hours.
Think of rooted trees, Leon suggested.
Zer silently chanted: roots in the ground, grounded. We ought to land, she thought, but Leon wasn't listening. In her mind’s inner space, she planted images of roots, thick roots, immobile roots. The vision provoked a stream of purple ions. Sighing, she let them have their way and relished the exo-rapture when an electrical counterpart of roots exuded from her, the conjoined ripples smoky against her skin.
She blew on the figure. The ripples wavered past the west quad and a pair of coworkers who blew on it, sending it round the bend. The root pattern circled all the way around the work deck, accompanied by claps and cheers, and reached her half dissolved.
In its wake, plumes of magenta-toned ions released from crewmates coiled around her and enticed her to pool. Her mates had grown tired of struggles with leaky thoughts, too. They loved to pool though their small one lacked a certain variety. Still, for all their quirks, they did make a Zenobian whole of sorts and savored the comfort. They had not prepared for the prolonged trip that had been precipitated by the plight of Earth and Earthlings.
Don't, Leon warned, mindstalking.
The crew ignored him, concerned with what lay ahead. They relived the moments after disasters struck Earth and caused explosions. They hoped ice sheets in the oceans had melted enough to warm the land. Haze from volcanic and other ejecta still hid the sun.
The crew shivered. They felt powerless remembering. They bore some responsibility for the disrupted atmosphere. They’d known of the Earthlings’ nuclear spacefaring explosions in the atmosphere, yet they’d traveled farther in space and added one-cell depth of influence that nudged the change in Mat’s orbit as it passed near Pluto and affected the asteroid belt.
Stop.
Heedlessly, Zer, Wyannie, and Xylona, a third of the crew, walked ‘round the deck, dubbed the hall of mirrors, following the semidissolved reflections of their pictorial brains. As if immersed in fog, they moved slowly through the jumble of ghostly, endlessly repainted scenes:
People in hooded bodysuits with breathing masks. Flaming skies. Fingers tapping blank computer screens. Quakes. Nuclear reactions. Stores looted for weapons and food. Runners on rooftops. Animals pacing cages. Whirling dust. Disoriented geese flying in circles.
They flopped on the floor with the others. Seven pair of eyes as radiant as full moons filled the corridor where they'd gathered, naked, their expanding, glowing bodies seemingly melted into one blob with many eyes shifting among the ghostly patterns suspended around them. One after another crewmate disappeared, turning fourth- or fifth-dimensional.
Zer, mesmerized by Exotica’s seed song and Earth’s woo-ing chanting in her mind, glided through the phantom forest into the biolab. She hesitated, but couldn’t stop herself. She couldn’t resist Earth’s call. Instinctively, she gathered supplies, as if watching herself from afar, and saw herself reach into the first bag of seed, choose three, and lightly press the trio into a moist matrix. She all but heard the scratchy stirrings of seed wiggling into soil matrix and later erupting into light. Tears splashed on her fingers and the trio’s earthy bed. She’d broken taboo.
She wondered, would she also stoop to betting that Earthlings would appreciate Exotica? She dropped the supplies into the drawer, slid the tray into the back of the cool storage unit, and stole away from the biolab without looking back.
At the same time, Leon ordered a retreat beyond the magnetosphere and asked the crew to meet in the conference cabin.
When Zer arrived, Leon, Vatta, Brea, Raya, and the others were already in the cabin, settled in the spongy, built-in seats. She slipped into the room and sat as far from Leon as possible.
The co-pilot acknowledged Zer, bowing from his seat. “Decision time.” Raya never quibbled.
“We're a threat, we disrupt too easily,” Vatta was saying.
“We're not in Earth gravity yet.” Brea was looking at Vatta, who’d been on Earth.
“Same as any first timer. After a few days, I had to visit the restoration chamber,” she said.
“We can adjust, can’t we?” Zer asked, “if we stay longer?”
Leon caught their attention with a rare smile that shone as bright as a flare bloom. “Some things you will learn yourselves. Just as you discovered the difficulty of not flowing.”
Fifty-faceted understatement, Zer thought. Only Leon could stop his flow of exo-paintings. They’d expected to evolve but—
“Zer, speak aloud.”
“Brain eruption is not the way. Why change our lifestyle? We like our ways.”
“We’ve been over that. Moot point. It will
