Free Mindworlds by Phyllis Gotlieb

motionless beside the cabinet. The Lyhhrt had disappeared into some corner of it.
    The food tasted as it should, and the mild stink of the briny air did not spoil it. During a day of sweat-popping fright Ned had forgotten hunger and weariness. But the tension of keeping the Lyhhrt right-side-up had stiffened his neck, the fright had not left him and was very near panic— Goodbye Zel and kiddos, this crazy business got me killed!— yet his eyelids began to close as soon as he ate the last scrap; and he fell into a half-waking dream in which he watched the Lyhhrt opening a folded shelf into a table, touching a place in his neck to open little doors in his silver abdomen, a miniature cabinet.
    Ned pulled himself up and staggered to the back of the cave where he found the same kind of sturdy canvas hammock he had slept in on several other worlds, dinged the oxylator, climbed in and …
    Lyhhrt reached in for the transparent globe that held his naked self in its liquid, one and a half kilos of brain that looked like a giant cowrie shell with pseudopods holding almost invisible remotes; its thin and glistening skin was mottled in mauve and rose.
    Lyhhrt was dreaming in his marshy world with its sundogs but no moon and its multiple millions of our/selves, while he directed his workshell to set the globe on its table, unplug it and add fresh nutrients from squeeze-droppers and vials of powder.
    Ned dreamed with him … .
    â€”what to do then? We wanted to be left alone to live as One and we were attacked by Ix, we begged for help from Galactic Federation and were ignored, Zamos gave us back our lives but made us become slaves and create more slaves for them—
    â€”you say it would have been better to die and be forgotten—
    â€”be One with the Cosmic Spirit—
    â€”you think so! The Cosmic Spirit is life, we are part of life, and life battles to exist … the Ix attacked us to save their own lives when they could have asked—begged and pleaded as we did—for help … and who knows whether they did and were refused as we were by some other Federation of worlds … now Zamos is gone and if not completely destroyed its head has been smashed and nothing is left but flailing limbs—
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    Ned, dreaming, asked himself if there was a congregation of Lyhhrt in this cave or if he had been transported to their world, and realized, dreaming, that there was one Lyhhrt with generations of teeming minds in one brain telling each other the story of one people … .
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    â€”we were supposedly saved from Zamos, but the work we did for him we do still and the difference is, we are paid for it … but are we saved? We dream impossible machines and clothe ourselves in them and create ships and weapons for flesh-covered souls to destroy each other—what kind of freedom is that? We go out alone and isolated in metal casings and spy for others and make ourselves insane—and if we refuse, stop selling, stop destroying, want to live in peace, in One, on our own world, they say—
    :Wake up! : the Lyhhrt said. : They are coming.:
    Ned’s eyelids were stuck together and he had no time to
rub them apart before a tongue of flame darted into the mouth of the cavern. His first thought, oxylator! —no, the Lyhhrt had turned it off, the flamer’s whip of fire curled back on itself against the Lyhhrt’s force-field with a hiss as it drowned in the pool at the cave’s mouth. One tick after that a gun’s barking shot sent its missile tearing through the field, it caromed off the corner of the Lyhhrt’s cabinet, cut the strings of Ned’s hammock—
    Ned was halfway to the floor by then anyway and the bullet exploded in the ceiling and sent splinters into his neck and shoulder, no, his collar and sleeve.
    Then there was quiet.
    Ned understood, was made to understand in the chaos, that the attack-suits of their assailants had been programmed to fire as soon as