Nor Crystal Tears

Nor Crystal Tears

Humanx Commonwealth

Alan Dean Foster

For the tiger with the little-girl voice and the velvet claws,

My agent, Virginia Kidd, with thanks for

Ten years of encouraging purrs and constructive scratches.

I

It’s hard to be a larva. At first there’s nothing. Very gradually a dim, uncertain consciousness coalesces from nothingness. Awareness of the world arrives not as a shock, but as a gray inevitability. The larva cannot move, cannot speak. But it can think.

His first memories, naturally, were of the Nursery: a cool, dimly lit tubular chamber of controlled commotion and considerable noise. Beneath the gently arched ceiling, adults conversed with his fellow larvae. With awareness of his surroundings came recognition of self and of body: a lumpish, meter-and-a-half-long cylindrical mass of mottled white flesh.

Through simple, incomplete larval eyes he hungrily absorbed the limited world. Adults, equipment, walls and ceiling and floor, his companions, the cradle he lay in, all were white and black and in-between shades of gray. They were all he could perceive. Color was a mysterious, unimaginable realm to which only adults had access. Of all the unknowns of existence, he most pondered what was blue, what was yellow—the taste of the withheld spectrum.

The adults who managed the Nursery and attended the young were experienced in that service. They’d heard generations of youngsters ask the same questions in the same order over and over, yet they were ever patient and polite. So, they tried their best to explain color to him. The words had no meaning because there were no possible reference points, no mental landmarks to which a larva could relate. It was like trying to describe the sun that warmed the surface high, high above the subterranean Nursery. He came to think of the sun as a brightly blazing something that produced an intense absence of dark.

As he grew the attendants let him move about in his crude humping, wormlike fashion. Nurses bustled through the Nursery, busy adults gifted with real mobility. Teaching machines murmured their endless litany to the studious. Other adults occasionally came to visit, including a pair who identified themselves as his own parents.

He compared them with his companions, like himself squirming white masses ending in dull black eyes and thin mouth-slits. How he envied the adults their clean lines and mature bodies, the four strong legs, the footarms above serving either as hands or as a third pair of legs, the delicate truhands above them.

They had real eyes, adults did. Great multifaceted compound orbs that shone like a cluster of bright jewels (light gray to him, though he knew they were orange and red and gold, whatever those were). These were set to the sides of the shining valentine-shaped heads, from which a pair of feathery antennae sprouted, honestly white. He was fascinated by the antennae, as all his companions were. The adults would explain that two senses were held there, the sense of smell and the sense of faz.