Read A Bug's Life for Free Online Page A

you?”
    “Why?” he asked, looking worried.
    “Because I’m going to shift into something
dangerous.”
    Roy shook his head and hugged me to him. “Why
did I know that’s what you were going to say?”
    “You’re smarter than the average
spacer.”
    “Yeah? I don’t think that can be proven by
anything that’s happened in the last couple of hours.”

    Roy and I both would have liked to have done
something more than just get me into a Polliskin, but time was
running out and we’d spent more than enough of it explaining what
was going on.
    Per Willy, Polliskins were like wetsuits from
Old Earth, only they were far more adaptable and also good
protection for anyone who wasn’t a Polliwog who was visiting
Polliworld. They were also incredibly hard to get into. Getting
more than one on was a challenge of major proportions. Whether the
effort would be worthwhile, based on what we wanted the suits to
do, was, currently, anyone’s guess.
    “Why are you willing to die for them?” Roy
asked me as we finally got the last suit on. “Because what you’re
going to do means you’re at as much risk as they are. More,
really.”
    I leaned against him. “Because they need
someone who loves them.”
    “That’s true of every being, babe.”
    “Yes, but the Pillar are different from
others, in many ways. And one of those ways is that they require
the love of others to survive. That’s part of why they create music
– to spread love.”
    “You got that from floating around in space
for a while?”
    “No. I got that from what the Pillar told me
emotionally, both while floating around in space and once we were
back here.”
    He sighed and hugged me tightly. “I need you,
too, you know. We all do. And not just because of what you can do.
But because of who you are, and who you are to us…to
me.”
    I buried my face in his chest. “I know. I feel
the same way about you, you know that. But…”
    He kissed the top of my head. “But you can
never truly have a Seraphin child. And we don’t know if we can have
children of our own. And there are a dozen children in my cargo
hold who need a mother who loves them. I get it, babe. But I don’t
see it as a long term solution.”
    I laughed. “Roy, when we met, you said taking
me with you was a short term solution. Trust me, we’ll manage. We
always do.”
    He kissed me. As always it was amazing, but
not as long as either one of us would have liked. Not smart to
spend too much time making out when our enemies could be back and
in greater numbers.
    We went back to the cargo hold. I put on a
Polliskin helmet and my spacesuit. Then I shifted.

    As a shifter, the form was the thing. You
could do whatever your form could, and could not do whatever your
form couldn’t. But the stronger the shifter, the more options you
had in terms of just what your form was going to be.
    The strongest beings in the galaxy were the
Troglodytes from Rockenroll, because they were literally beings
made out of stone. In Round Form a Pillar’s shell became like iron,
but only for as long as that form could hold out under the stress
of warp.
    However, a cross between a Troglodyte and a
Pillar could, in theory, survive an extended warp. Only there was
no such cross, because those two races did not interbreed with each
other.
    Until now.
    The beauty of being a shape shifter of my
strength and skill was that I had the ability to become anything I
wanted. The danger was that what I wanted might not be something
that could, in actual fact, survive existence, even for a short
period of time.
    I needed my outer shell to be made of
Troglodyte stone, the inner shell to be the iron hardness of the
Round Form, but the rest of my inside portion to be soft and filled
with the fifty little legs of a Pillar, so that I could hold the
Birthing Sac and keep it safe and steady. All of which needed to be
inside both the six Polliskins I had on and my spacesuit. And I
needed to be four times larger than the Pillar actually