FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

It's perched on a bluff just low enough to taste a hint of sea spray. There's a clearing there. Pale grass sprouts in tufts from the seams of porous boulders and spreads like wheat in the soil. Cotton clouds, built and carried by the last of the sea breeze, peel away. The sky beneath them is deep, dim, and glassy.

"You're certain about this?"

Her bandanna, pressed and glossy that morning, hangs about her neck like an empty windsock. The stars in the fabric stare daggers from the folds.

"I'm certain."

Your tie tucks back behind the buttons of your dusty blazer. It had been a long hike. She had told you not to dress, but she had her symbols. Maybe she was different and here was different and this was different, but you're still the same. You need symbols too. You're sorry for the dirt and the wrinkles, but they don't bother her.

"Wrinkles are the point:" she says, "we're on a journey."

And she's certain, too?

The bandanna straightens with a shake and a swipe from a shady paw. Then there's her shoulder against your leg. Her fur in your palm. She turns.

"Certain."

It's an impressive building, but unpretentious. The dome is a pale, iron gray, and not as big as you imagined. It sits dormant at the highest point and casts a long, rigid shadow. Silence gathers on your shoulders. You're alone.

"That's the point:" she says, "us."

The doors slip open with a shoulder.

It's dim inside. Shadows of antique equipment play across the cream of her fur like zebra stripes, and her eyes shine bright in their brass.

She's sorry for the kitsch. You don't mind.

"It's rustic."

"Yeah? And what about when this stuff was new? You figure they charted their unions in stone circles and called it rustic?"

"Maybe."

"It just didn't seem right to use a spectrograph, you know?"

Her ears flick, embarrassed. You ruffle them back into place.

"It's perfect, Nim."

Another door, then the dome. The scope looms like a naval battery, its heft slung in clockwork cradles. Tired worms stir in your stomach.

Her? Really? That's right, or possible? 180 parsecs between you, and you hadn't even a shrew for a common ancestor. You hadn't meant for any of this. She'd only meant for part. That was enough to chart your stars together? God rolls fickle dice.

But watch the lamplight dance in her eyes. Feel her breath on your skin. Remember the long evenings when she'd flop into that peeling adirondack chair and let her tail spill out over the side. Remember how each time your eyes met something struck between you like the spark of a jacob's ladder, and how it pulled you together until nothing seemed close enough. Remember all the words that flew like gnats between you, and the shapes you drew in the heavens. Just the other night you'd drawn them. It was practice then and now it's real, but what's the difference? You've been drawing those shapes for a long time; it's just that this time you're writing them down.

Your eyes meet. The ladder strikes up again. The worms are quiet.

"After you."

Her shoulders tense and then loosen, and the fur slips like satin from your fingers. She steps into the lamplight.

There's a table in the halo. It's framed simply, but edged with brass at the corners, and carved from pale and knotted driftwood. You know that table. You've seen it in their paintings and movies and plays. You know the dark, stately boxes that rest on it, and know the sorts of things inside them. Their symbols. Their charts. Their families. But they're yours to exchange this time? Your fabric, and your stars to stitch? She nudges the first box open and turns to beckon. The ladder draws you after her.

Her tapestry rolls out on the table. White stars studded on deep blue weave. You've seen it once before, in the beginning:

It was the dawn of the third year. You'd just bought your first Skimmer and she was teaching you to drive it. But the lessons kept getting longer and the roads twistier, and one day in the late evening they spat you into a turnout perched on the rim of a massive, copper desert. You'd felt so many things that hour you couldn't make heads or tails of them, and as you leaned back to sort them out, she'd turned and leaned over you, and then suddenly you were kissing.

So when you got back she'd shown you the tapestry. All those other stars joined, and hers apart.

Wouldn't it be crazy if you joined her?

You open the second box. The second tapestry. The same deep blue, but one star. Toward the upper right. Alone. You remember that one, too: it was just under two "months" later. You had rented a sailboat. Your grandpa once taught you to sail and their boats weren't that different once you got a hang of the hydrofoils. She'd never been. Night fell and the rings came out, and then the stars. She showed you where Sol would be if you could see it, but it didn't look like much. And you didn't care; there wasn't a place in the universe you'd rather be.

But there was another star, hovering just over forecastle along the North Western horizon. Its light was soft, warm, and friendly. Hyr'Vekah, she called it. Suddenly you weren't Peter Tran anymore so much as you were Peter Hyr'Vekah, and now you had a tapestry.

Both of you stare at the fabric.

You lift hers and run the stitching through your fingers. She sets her paw on your lonely star. Your eyes lock. The ladder burns. Your heart aches. You want to grab her. To pull her to you and hold her tighter than you ever have anything.

But she doesn't move, and neither do you. The seconds creak, and then you remember. The third box. You pop the latch.

"Nim...."

Was there something you're supposed to do? To say? You don't remember. And was it right? Was it good enough? She told you not to worry, but you were.

You draw the instrument from the velvet: a nickel-barreled telescope on an awkward, leather bracer. You hold it out to her.

"My spyglass, your own."

Her eyes glitter. Your heart flutters. Then silence. She takes the gift in her jaw as if handling a kitten. It's strange. Cute. Almost funny. You smile, and then grin. She sets it beside her, whiskers twinkling as they catch the light. The worms die off.

Her box opens. She turns it under her paw to face you.

"My sextant, your own."

Your eyes break for a moment, then she's back with it in her teeth: a brazen sextant. It slips into your palm. The world freezes around you. She steps closer, and then closer still until your noses touch.

"Peter Hyr'Vekah, I trust you to find my bearings when I cannot. I resolve to stand fast beside you in the strongest gales, and to weather the sea when you are weak. Would you have me?"

Your breath leaks from your lungs. The words seize in your throat. You gasp, and spit them out.

"I would."

You scoop her forepaw from the table.

"Nimari Vivikah...."

Again you choke, but this time you're ready for it.

"I trust you to find my bearings when I cannot. I swear to stand fast beside you in the strongest gales, and to weather the sea when you are weak...."

One more breath, hauled up from the pit in your stomach:

"...would you have me?"

Her muzzle parts in a toothy grin.

"I would. Let's find our way."

Then she's in your arms.

Her heart beats with yours. Her breath spills across your shoulders. But then she's pulling free. She turns to beckon. The ladder strikes. A motor whirs in the middle distance, and the dome splits wide overhead.

The clouds are gone, and the pale, kite-flying blue. The sky's black as shoe polish, and the rings in shadow. The stars shine alone.

"Hold on a minute."

But she's already flopped on her back beside you.

"Anything for you," she smirks, eyes lost overhead, "so long as it's not another 'month to settle in'."

Somehow you wince and laugh at once.

You should spit something back, or you think you should. But there's the cry of a lonely seabird in the distance, and the rush of wind against the dome. Her steady, cyclic breathing, and the brush of her whiskers on your cheek. You hold your tongue.

"There," she says, "Just over the barrel of the telescope."

But you didn't need her to show you where to find Vivikah. Recognizing the star was like recognizing her. And that was the point, wasn't it?

She shuffles closer and rests her head on your shoulder.

"Yeah, yeah. I know you know."

Her muzzle presses under your chin. Your arm fishes its way around her flanks. Like the star, it's familiar:

That night on the couch, when you'd read to her from your old paper copy of Hitchhiker's. The afternoon at the holotheatre, watching the film with the name you couldn't pronounce. The evening on the boat, under those same stars and sky.

God, it felt good to hold her.

It felt like you belonged.

Like they were your people and your rings and your stars.

Like you'd never lived anywhere else.

Never been anyone else.

And like, while you held, you'd never know fear or helplessness.

"I love you, Nim."

You squeeze, and she presses harder. The worms don't fight. They never can.

But the telescope's waiting.

You don't want to let go.

"Then carry me."

She slips into your lap and then your arms, fur slick and smooth on your skin like the stroke of a feather duster. Then you're on your feet. She stares up at you, amber eyes wide and unblinking. She should be at least a little heavy, buy not tonight.

"Show me the way," she whispers.

You settle by the old, mechanical console.

"You could find Hyr'Vekah faster than I could."

"Right now, maybe. But when the storm is strong and my own star missing? When lost or lonely or frightened?"

You know the words, though, and, in truth, the purpose. A dial built for a paw slips under your palm. The motors lurch and ratchet. The dome turns, and a draft from the ocean pours in to lick at the folds of your suit.

You press your eye to the finderscope.

The night opens wide: deep magenta from the reaches behind the black. Stars that cut the dark like razor blades. The phosphorescent blanket of Milky Way, the last place you could point to and say was as much your home as it ever had been.

You always found Hyr'Vekah the same way, regressive as the method seemed tonight. But maybe how you found it was just as much a part of you as the star was. Maybe that was the point. You wind the dial again and listen to the clatter of the gears. The stars slew in the eyepiece, and you hunt down the cluster her people called Kei'Shavek.

It was a tight cluster: two white main sequences and a blue giant, separated only by a handful of light years. They hung together at the apex of a narrow, scalene triangle that traced the usual route between Here and Sol.

There was a station around that blue giant. A scrappy, frontier sort of place in the business of harvesting the peculiar sorts of matter that, when massaged just so, folded space like a damp beach towel. The vessel that brought you had stopped there. The more adventurous had gone ashore, but you, of course, were too chickenshit. Your cabin mate, whom you barely knew, brought you back a box of food, and a chrome model of the station as a souvenir.

"You'll have to get over it sooner or later," he'd said.

Guess he was right.

But for now you've got Kei'Shavek in your sights. For a moment you feel the same vertigo you always feel when you see it and remember that people live there, but you draw back from the finder and shift to the eyepiece.

The stars leap so close you swear you can see the curvature behind their gleaming, refracted crosses. So close you could almost see the silhouette of the station you know is there, even if the light in the lens is a century or two older than it. The sky and vertigo threaten to swallow you, but again you break free. Nimari sits up in your lap.

"The constellation Kei'Shavek, the half-way point of my first journey."

She leans in.

"I see it and know it."

"An arcminute in ascension, a half in declination."

The dials slide naturally under her paws. The motors whirr and click again.

"A star," she says, "yellow."

And of course she knows, and you know she's got it right, but you trade the eyepiece again anyway. The vertigo hits you all over as you pick out the smudge on the lens where your kind had lived, loved, and died for millennia. You trade back.

"Sol, where I first set out."

She tenses a little, weight shifting back in your lap.

"I see it and know it."

Just one more. The last star. Your star. Your chest tightens, and probably the grip you've got on her flank.

"Two arcminutes, twenty arcseconds ascension. One more declination."

"A star," she whispers, with a smile you can hear in her voice, "Red."

You pull her tight to your chest.

"Hyr'Vekah, the star by which I finally found my way again. Know her, so that you may follow her light should your own beacon fall below the horizon"

"I see her...,"

She turns back to you. The ladder strikes. She buries her muzzle against your mouth until you're just a little past her gums. Her breath is hot. Her tongue, eager. There's that feeling of tension you always get: pull her closer. Hold her tighter. But she braces a paw on your sternum and pushes you away.

"...and know her."

The words come easy this time.

"Then show me the way."

Another brush of whiskers she's back to the dials. The motors bark and lurch. The barrel settles out west, just over the mountains.

"Vek'shyn, which hung bright in my bedroom window the winter my closest friend was adopted and moved out to the colonies."

You lean in. A massive star, shining a rich, ocean blue.

"I see it, and know it."

Her muzzle presses up under your chin. Her tail wraps around you. You'd draw back to trade, but she tugs you forward.

"Five arcminutes ascension, three minutes twenty seconds declination.

You trace her foreleg to the dials and take hold.

"Star. Yellow."

"Qarxana, which hangs over Akira's tallest towers at the end of the rainy season, and beneath which I first found myself at home."

"I see it, and know it."

She tightens around you like some sort of constrictor snake, her warmth spreading through your jacket and into your bones. There's the closeness again, then, as her hindpaws dig into your lap, the tension.

"Fifty seconds ascension, ten declination."

Her breath comes short and measured.

But you know Vivikah when you see it. You press tight into the eyepiece and fight the ladder as it crackles. Her weight on your sternum. Her haunches in your lap. The brush of her whiskers. That.... That damn thing she keeps doing with her hindpaw. Is it on purpose? It's got to be. You need to be closer, damnit, but there's still words to say.

"Star. White."

As if you needed confirmation.

"Vivikah, by whose light I built my life anew."

The world snaps. You throw her off, and whirl. Her eyes flash quasar lamplight, pupils wide and hungry, and gravity bearing down.

"I see her, and know her."

God, she looks different. Wilder, somehow. Maybe it's the light, or the pressure as she claws into you. What does it matter? You can hardly think. You go to pull her in but she wriggles free, claws clattering on the floor tiles. You stumble to your feet, then she's turned to face you. Her emerald fur glistens like dragon scales. She steps forward.

"Then my voyage is your own," she barks, advancing.

"My star, your own.

"My sextant, your own."

She rears to her hind paws and plants her fore paws on your chest.

"And I mean to seek the horizon in your company."

The sizzle of the ladder. The weight of the tension. The lurch in your collar as she slips a claw inside and pops the first button.

"Nim, I...."

But then your brain comes rushing back, even as the second button slips free and then the third. Even as she throws her weight into you and you spill together back onto the platform where you'd laid before, and as she rips the star-sparse bandanna from your neck. You bury your face into her muzzle a moment and break free, burning the air with ozone longing.

"Nimari," you breathe, "My voyage is your own."

You grab hold of her and roll. Your fingers slip behind her own bandanna.

"My star, your own."

"My spyglass, your own."

One firm tug, and the knot gives way.

"And we shall find the horizon together."

And then the gravity's too strong.

It's not the first time, but god, does it feel like it. All the same hope and confusion; the little jolts of dopamine you get from throwing caution to the wind.... How is someone like you supposed to kiss someone like her? Is there a right way? A wrong way? A good way? Does she, like you, find the best part to be the wild leap of faith?

Her paw's hooked in the collar of your shirt and tugging. The buttons pop one by one, or maybe she's breaking them. Her claws scrape bluntly on your chest. Does she know what she was doing? Is it a lucky guess? Raw determination? It isn't the first time you've done this either, but you're pretty sure she's never handled a button before, and even you hadn't known how much you'd like it. But she was so good at that. All the food you hadn't thought you'd like. The places you didn't think you'd belong. The fears you'd thought you'd always be a slave to. It was like it came to her with the English language. Were you that clueless, or was it the gift of perspective that must come from all those light years? What had that taught you about her?

That the free hand you've got scratching at the back of her neck is driving her crazy. That she was as good at making friends and allies as she wanted to think, and so much better at being one than she feared she was. That she'd wanted someone to call family for a very long time, and that, somewhere in the last three years, she'd started wanting that person to be you.

Your jacket's free so you shoulder it off, and then your shirt just after. The floor tiles are icy under your back but you hardly notice for the fur and friction. Now it's your waistline she's after, but she can't quite find the leverage. There's that pressure from her paws, measured before but faster now; perhaps frustrated. Tug. Push. Tug. Push. Her voice is breathless.

"I can't quite--."

You finish the job with one arm and pull her back with the other. Her grappling had done much of the work whether she'd meant for it or not, but tonight wasn't one you cared to rush. You pull her tight in embrace and stomp again on the worms. No helplessness, no loneliness, no fear. This was it. Three years and so much wild happenstance somehow led you here, and the world wouldn't know until tomorrow, but in the eyes of the stars it would be done. Your hand wanders low until you feel the fur moisten, and your fingers a little further. In all that time you had at least a few things figured out.

"I love you, Nimari."

"No shit."

"This is it."

"I know."

"You're sure?"

Her moan lilts into a growl and she lurches away from you, then she's back on top. Her paws dig into your chest. Her breath spills hot on your face. Her tail switches, brushing surely right where she means it to.

"My Voyage, My Star, My Sextant."

Her teeth are bare; her eyes, wild. The ladder spits electric ozone. Tides tear into you as if to pull you apart.

Then you're all around her, and she around you as you fall in. Points whirling in orbit, spacelike sometimes, timelike others. There's her paws again, kneading at your pelvis and lower: the pads just soft enough, just rough enough to make you lurch and shiver. And there's something about the clumsiness of it, and the eagerness. Maybe someday you'll articulate, but there's also her muzzle clamped wide on your face and the scrape of her teeth on your tongue. The tickle of her whiskers on your thighs. The heat at the base of her tail. The strokes of your palm, the scratches of your fingers, the whimpers, the yips, the yops. All at once, and all in order, and in every order at once. By distance, by speed, by gravity.

God, you love her. The ways she makes you feel. The things she makes you see. The slick of her fur, the glint in her eyes, the chirp of her voice when she knows you're full of shit. And to think, if you hadn't been fired. If Gwennie hadn't dumped you. If you hadn't gotten on that goddamn ship....

And then something else.

The position's awkward, but it's worth it to see her eyes go wide, and for her to watch the same in your own. It comes on all at once, like the paws but so much stronger. And does she, like you, feel the X-ray flash as you cross the horizon? The jolt of electrons as terminals close?

You can see it in her eyes. In her whiskers. In the wild curve of her muzzle. She howls and so do you. The ozone vaporizes. Your arms wrap around and strap her to your chest. The tension's strong as ever. And it's not the first time, but god does it feel like it: the confusion. The guesswork. The thrill. Her fur runs soft and warm like water. Your hearts snap together like neodymium. Closer. Closer still. And apart, and again. She breaks free and rears above you, forepaws kicking the air and slamming again on your chest and knocking a gasp from your lungs. And it would hurt, probably, if you could feel it, but you whirl and pin her instead. Eyes alight. Muzzle wide. Tongue lolling, as if fresh from a sprint.

"I love you," she shudders.

"No shit!"

And the world freezes like that.

Her ears laid back against the floor and flush with blood. Fur astray. Whiskers scattered. Tail curled back in ecstasy. Your mind, blank. Your muscles clenched and burning. Love. Closeness. Wild abandon. Damn the light years and the biospheres and the space and the time.

This is where you belong. Who you belong with. And with the shiver up your spine and the thrash of her tail it's done. She falls limp beneath you, breath flashing to steam in the breeze through the window. You catch yourself on your elbows, eyes locked like tidal planets.

"My voyage...," you gasp, sliding an arm under her neck and collapsing onto the opposite shoulder.

"...My star. My spyglass."