Composite Creatures, Caroline Hardaker [best ebook reader for laptop txt] 📗

Her face.

My God, the first time I saw that face. For a moment I saw nothing else, just her nose, her eyes, the shape of her chin. It was a face broader than it was long, and the look it wore was so deeply familiar that for a moment I forgot what I was looking at. The back of my throat burned, and I suddenly felt very, very cold.

I hadn’t known it would be like this. She looked at me like she owned me.

Shit shit shit shit shit. Maybe I’d done the wrong thing? Maybe this was all wrong.

Art’s palms cupped his nose and mouth. “Isn’t she weirdly beautiful? She looks like you!”

“Stop it, Art.” Obviously she didn’t, but I didn’t tell him the truth. I didn’t want to say it out loud. “Is she a she?”

Art ducked his head to ground level, peering at the tiny gap between Nut’s paws. “They said she’d probably be a she. I can’t see anything to suggest she’s not.”

“Does she know she’s a she?”

“I think she’s just… what she is. I don’t think she knows she’s anything. She just feels the need to breathe, to eat. She wants to stay alive.”

“But do you think she knows what she is? Or how we’re different to her?”

Art looked away. “I don’t think she thinks about any of that stuff, Norah. She’s not human.”

He was right of course, Nut wasn’t human. But she was alive, wasn’t she, looking at me with bright blue eyes and all the whites showing. I tried to shake it off. “She’s a lot more petite than I’d expected, is this what you thought she’d look like? Do you think she’s… alright?”

Art tipped his head to the side. “Yeah. She’ll be fine. Remember that bit in the manual that each set has lots of different sizes and shapes? This one’s ours. I think she’ll grow quickly. She looks like a fighter.”

He tapped her on the head with a finger and she raised her moon-face to follow it. He wiggled it in the air then tickled her under the chin. She didn’t indicate that this was good attention, or bad attention, just continued to stare at his finger, and then at his eyes, watching him watch her watch him. I wasn’t sure whether all this touchy-feely stuff was a good idea. Didn’t the manual also say that we should stay back? She was so vulnerable and everything was so new, maybe Art would spread bacteria. I thought back to what I’d read in the car.

“Maybe we should give her some space. Turn the lights off, make it relaxing. I’ll bring up some food later.”

Art was busy rubbing Nut’s cheek.

“OK, I think that’s what they said to do anyway, didn’t they? Keep clear for a couple of days.” He looked at her for a few moments, and I could practically hear his gears grinding. “You know, I thought they were being dumb when they said it’d be difficult, but now I know what they meant.”

He extended his hand and stroked it slowly down her long, narrow back. She hardly moved, her face still peering up into his face. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to understand him or she was inspecting the roof above, perhaps already planning an escape. Art slid his hand along where Nut’s spine would be, under the haze of grey fur.

“She does seem a bit thin. I’ll bring her up some of that canned stuff now.”

He stood, stretching back like a feline, and offered me his hand. I let him pull me up, and as my head lifted the room started to tilt and wiggle, as if I stood surrounded by baking heat. I felt my hand be squeezed, and I was pulled towards the hatch. I didn’t look over my shoulder.

“I’ll reinforce these gates when I come back up. She’s so small, she could slink right through them.”

I closed my eyes, thankful that Art and I were still on the same wavelength. I had no idea if she could even think, never mind conspire to come downstairs and encroach on our lives. I’d done a lot more reading than Art had. He’d done everything required of him of course, and read the manual, looked up a few of the websites, even checked into a few online forums to see what other owners were talking about. But I’d gone further, delving deeper and deeper into the experiences people had made public.

Though none of the material strictly addressed self-awareness, it did seem to imply that Nut wouldn’t be sentient like you or me, but she would have needs, and therefore consciousness. Consciousness just at the level that keeps the brain from switching to dormant mode and letting the vital parts of the body die. But seeing Nut assess her environment, and then the panic in her eyes when I moved too swiftly showed that Nut wanted to live – just like we did. But even a tree will adapt to survive, won’t it? Spreading its leaves to gather in the light and fighting off rival roots where we can’t see.

When I’d been really young, keeping animals in the house had been more common, though you never knew more than one or two friends whose parents had time for it. I must have only been six or seven when I last visited a friend with a tame animal. In this case it was a bearded dragon, a dinosaur with skin made of stones and a head which would tilt on a pivot. I’d never seen anything like it in all my life, and Marcia’s dad kept it in a huge tank planted with plastic trees and shoots which stretched across the back of the living room. No one ever touched Jambo – his teeth were knives – but he didn’t seem to care about that and spent most of his time sitting facing the large lamp in the top corner.

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