Changing Vision by Julie E. Czerneda Page A

resultant spray of saliva my companions hastily mopped up with their towels.
    Feneden?
    An intelligent species
I
didn’t know?
    Something—
someone
—new in my universe? It had been seventy-four standard years, twenty-six days, and an irrelevant number of minutes since that had last happened, and the revelation had been contained in Ersh’s flesh as she shared that discovery, not bellowed in a restaurant by some arrogant Human female. I wasn’t sure if I was amazed or appalled.
The latter
, I decided numbly. One thing was clear, at least. The searching machines in my office had earned serious reprogramming.
    If this was true, the cube being toyed with in the Human’s slender fingers was the most significant thing to happen in my life in fifty years.
What should I do?
    As if in answer, the cube was captured by a larger hand. “Thanks, Janet,” Paul said smoothly. “As you can tell,” this with a quelling look at me emphasized by a unnecessarily solid kick under the table, “my partner is overwhelmed by your thoughtfulness.”
    I used both hands—one would have been too unsteady—to lift my jaw into position. A snap of my head relocked the joint into its more customary and comfortable position. As I did so, I found my ears twisting every which way on my head, creating an annoying and distracting variation in sound as one moment, I was deafened by the clatter of utensils from the kitchen, and the next, felt my stomachs lurch in time with some being’s enthusiastic slurping. This form had never been so much trouble before. I could only blink apologetically at my dampened tablemates. “Overwhelmed,” I managed to echo. “That’s it.”
    Janet’s sudden absorption in her pyati implied she felt much the same. Or perhaps, like me, she was having trouble relating to the other life-forms around her.
What, or rather who, were the Feneden?
Had she not said first contact, I might have assumed the word was a derivative of some lesser-used term or even slang. Such appeared with as much warning as the purple domes of the local fungi after it rained.
    Thankfully, my self-absorption had stopped Paul’s assault on my feet. He made a show of stowing the cube in a chest pocket. “Our thanks again, Janet,” he said with more charm than I thought required. “We’ll let you know what happens with this. An incredible opportunity indeed.” Then, as she nodded and closed the case, preparing to replace it under her seat and out of the way, my friend reached out again and took a firm grip on the handle. “I’ll make sure these are taken care of,” he added, taking it away before she could open her mouth to object.
    “Captain,” I interjected, having no idea what Paul was up to, but presuming he wanted me to help deflect Chase from the apparently vital catalogs and other mail, “has Port Authority contacted you about the Tly’s charges since you came insystem?”
    “No, Fem Ki.” Chase pressed her lips together for an instant, glancing from one of us to the other with an expression that was too carefully polite to be called a scowl.
So much for our moment of closeness
, I thought without much regret. “They fired off that copy of the charges when we dropped out of translight. I’d made an appointment to meet with Trin som Lyt once planetside. Port Authority doesn’t make any decisions without her okay; we go way back, as you know. But Paul—Hom Cameron—told me to cancel it, so we could meet first.”
    At the moment, I could care less about Port Authority’s petty bureaucracy, the Tly’s piracy, or Captain Chase’s reaction to what she obviously viewed as our collusion against her. All were true. All were trivial compared to the word rolling under everything else:
Feneden.
A new species. If it hadn’t been for Paul’s strange concern for the mail pouch and its contents, I would have left already, pleading the usual: an upset in one or the other stomach. Being the only one of a species had distinct advantages when