by C. L. Kagmi
Introduction
I did not set out to write a book about rebirth. It wasn’t until I had these stories assembled that I noticed this common theme. Every single one of these stories centers on a character who is somehow born twice—once into ordinary human life, and then again into a new way of being that their old selves would be unable to understand.
A second, less exciting theme of this collection is that of moral questions. Always, one thing must be sacrificed to gain another. Is the murder of an innocent justified if it ensures the survival of a sentient species? How much voluntary risk is an acceptable price for progress? If you were an alien, would you give humanity lifesaving tech that they could then use against you?
My way of tackling these questions is old-school. I grew up reading Asimov and Auel, Bear and Butler, Clarke and Connie Willis. You won’t find many action sequences or fight scenes in these pages. You won’t find dystopias either.
I’m of the opinion that the most important battles are those fought inside of hearts and minds among people who are trying their best, and those are the battles we’ll see here. Many of these questions we are already grappling with in our world, whether we realize it or not.
Don’t get me wrong. There will be aliens and genetic engineering and virtual worlds, too. I’ve been told that some of the aliens and AIs are kind of hot. And there will be murder. Kind of a lot of murder, actually.
Some of the contents here may disturb you. I have sometimes stumbled into the territory of horror by designing something scientifically which turns out to be rather offensive to typical human sensibilities. Some people like that. I hope you will.
I also hope to leave you just a little bit uncertain. The questions here are not easy, and I expect readers to be split in who they side with.
That, after all, is the point. If these questions were easy, they wouldn’t be worth talking about.
Twiceborn
“Twiceborn” first appeared in Issue 2 of Compelling Science Fiction in June of 2016. It was translated into Vietnamese by the illustrious Long Nguyễn for the Vietnamese fanzine SFVN. Devi Amar will appear in a new story in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in late 2021.
She will remember three suns.
The first will tell of her heritage; a scorching spark in a blue-violet sky, sharp black shadows cast on sea.
The second will tell her of her enemy, a yellow-white ball circling over human cities.
The third will show her where she must survive, a bloated ruby disk rising over a desolate waste.
It is too much to give a newborn, Jackson knows; on Homeworld, these memories would have unfurled slowly across the course of years. It is the defining gift of his species, to encode memory in molecules to direct the growth of a budding brain. And on Homeworld, they had time. Here, he does not.
It is one of the gifts the humans never learned. On Homeworld, they would have—
But Homeworld is no more, and he has perhaps three days before the humans find him and his newborn child. The infant brain will have to learn quickly, unfurling memories too fast, if she is to survive. If they are found before she is ready, he’ll kill her himself to protect the others.
Learn fast, little one.
He watches the small human form as she lies sprawled in the low light of the desert cave. Jackson has removed the helmet of her pressure suit, for he does not share the humans’ feigned concern for the natal ecosystem of this world. She can breathe the air; the helmets are to keep her microbes in. Still, the little girl’s chest rises and falls in rapid bursts, mouth puffing with the effort of a new skill.
Learn fast.
The host body was seven, in Earth years. It takes Bharatha only eighty-one days to make a revolution around its red dwarf sun, but the humans still count by Earth’s seasons. Why should they adapt to this planet? They will adapt this planet to themselves after they have learned what they want from its life. Or sooner, if its life is dangerous.
Jackson feels his lip curl. Thinks of all the things humans didn’t learn from Homeworld before they fled and torched it. They had thought his people mindless parasites, an infection spreading through the water. How much they lost in their haste. How much they destroyed without remorse.
His people had made mistakes with their first human hosts, to be sure. They had not known how to manage the alien biochemistry, let alone how to stand, how to speak—or that the humans would kill them when they failed to conform.
To be fair, they had not realized that the humans were intelligent, either. They’d looked like so many mindless fish.
Jackson draws upon a human memory, a concept acquired from his host, a word—‘vampire.’
A demon-possessed corpse, originally. A creature that put itself in your body, and took you out. The humans had known nothing of neurology then, but they knew they were not always in control of themselves.
The term seems appropriate for Jackson and his brood.
This little girl was seven, and so promising. That is why he picked her. She will be well-loved by those most dangerous to her, and her success in everything she does will come as no surprise.
Jackson sighs at the irony—that on this little world, the human rite of Upanayanam has become a true rebirth for some. A little girl and her parents came out here with him, for the ceremonial coming-of-age tour of their adopted planet. Something—someone—not human will return.
The girl’s body spasms in a seizure. That is a good sign. It means his child, one of a precious few seeds he has planted to save his people, is integrating with the human brain. When the storm of electrical activity dies down, unless he’s made some crucial error, the child will sit up.
To run, to hide, to always conceal herself—this is the burden he confers with life. The humans would raze this world, too, like Homeworld, like their own colony of Enlil, if they knew anything from Homeworld had survived. So she will have to be very careful. They all will.
It’s a shame, Jackson thinks, that first contact went so poorly. If it had gone differently—
He turns his mind away from the unbearable pain of what might have been, from the unfathomable loss of the World-Minds and their uncounted billion agents. Keeps his thoughts carefully light: to what their peoples may have learned from each other, if they had not been so quick to bite.
He has learned from them because he has no choice. They will never learn from him, now; he cannot afford to teach them. Let the loss be theirs, then. And the gain his.
Life on dry land is something he’s been forced to learn from them. Memories of an endless sapphire ocean, alive with chemical chatter, he must keep distant. Spaceflight, fire, more gifts from humanity to the ones they tried to eradicate. Speaking by shaping vibrations in the air instead of chemical chains.
“Jackson” is as good a name as any for him to use among the humans. It was his host’s name, once. His true name is a tailored molecule, one only his kind can taste. A name that will be on his daughter’s tongue when she is born.
“He” is his host’s pronoun, too. His people had found gender in their lower hosts and discarded it as useless—but they had never encountered it in intelligent life before humanity. There are some interesting things, he has decided, about gender.
If nothing else, he needs to understand it to survive. So does she. He’s done his best to include what teachings he can in the package he lovingly wrapped inside her cells. A thing their ancestors never needed, but they need it now.
The newborn shudders, moans. Strong enough now to follow programming he stored within her egg. She sits up. Jackson lets out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
Wide green eyes, the color of Bharatha’s sky, blink at him from a dark brown face. He tells himself he did not choose the host for her eyes, but for her family and h
er aptitude. He tells himself this, but still the eyes are striking. They set her apart. That will be useful, later.
The newborn is afraid and confused. She has information and no context for it, a litany of facts and experiences and only a few minutes’ acquaintance with consciousness. She is doing better than the last one. Perhaps he is learning how to teach.
“Shh,” Jackson hushes her. If the two of them were human he’d hold her, but his people never did that. If they were on Homeworld he would release messages of love and care into the water for her to taste, but he can’t do that here.
Better that she start off learning human symbols, anyway. Human speech.
“Shh,” he says again. “Can you speak?”
An awkward, strangled squawk from the girls’ larynx. It’s something.
“Repeat after me,” he says. “Aaaah. Ooooh.”
He has three days to teach her to talk.
Miraculously, the girl is ready. Tears fill Jackson’s eyes as he watches her—tears of pride. He preserved most of his host’s emotional responses to help him blend in; sometimes, he is glad of this.
He has found a way to preserve his memories of his people. A way to recreate, someday, what was lost.
The child’s memories have unfurled enough for her to pass as human, and to know that she is not. More memories will come to her in her dreams—dreams enough to last her centuries. And she might have that much time. Shortly after puberty, they will teach her how to tidy up the human epigenome and control the aging process of her body’s cells.
She sits beside him now, illuminated in a shaft of scarlet sunlight that pours in from the mouth of the cave. Her mouth working, limbs fidgeting as she learns her motor connections. She raises fingers to touch her own face.
Jackson remembers the alien sensation, the first time he touched his own. Skin that was warm and oh so dry, textured with hairs so fine the humans ceased to notice them. Fingers with bones in them like sticks to maintain form out of water; none of the nuance of pure-muscle limbs he possessed in memory.
The girl fingers her cloud of thick black hair, face expressing amazement at this newest fact. There was nothing like human hair on Homeworld.
His people have always been great. Much wiser than their conquerors. It was cooperation that brought peace to Homeworld, and cooperation they shall have again.
The human science books say his species lived 38 million years to humanity’s own 2 million. Who knows if they are right? His people didn’t measure time like humans do, and the humans seem only to remember only personal lives. They rely on artifacts and research to know their ancestors.
Jackson shudders. He cannot imagine being so deprived.
The First Ancestor’s memories are his—millions or billions of years ago, the first mutant who passed on a memory of fear. From there, snatches of evolutionary history, the lineage of his ancestry stretching far, far to when his kind looked and thought differently. To when they fought each other.
Then came the World-Minds. The curators. It was they who brought peace and the way of wholeness. They who chose which memories to give him when they released his mother’s egg into the sea.
They gave him memories of them. Of being them. World-Minds, the massive brains whose infinite knowledge made each moment ever-new. He remembers, dimly, flashes of insight like prophecy and thoughts like electrical storms. As much of them as his tiny brain can perceive, he remembers.
He fights again not to remember too much, not to fall into the human trap of grief. Grief would kill him. His ancestors knew that, so they gave him the ability to turn it off. It was a fine line they’d had to toe in his design; remember, but do not despair.
His people were greater than the humans in all aspects—except that crucial discovery, fire. That simple gift of brute force, natural to a species who evolved on hostile land outside the ocean’s womb, had brought the humans across the stars and burned his people.
His people had mastered the powers of memory and time, of water and life. But the humans had the power of the sun, and the weakness of blind fear that still drove them to fight and kill.
Was that a weakness, or was it a strength? The humans had lost for themselves the opportunity to learn from his people, things that would have made them more than they imagined possible. But they’d won the battle for Homeworld; and his people, slow to strike, had lost.
Someday, this child and his others will sow children of their own. Someday, his people will be numerous again. Their children will have the gifts of fire and water, of sea and sky. There will be new World-Minds, and they will cross the stars.
For now, survival is slow and never certain.
But he has time. He has nothing, if not time.
Jackson holds his daughter’s hand as they venture into the sunlight. The scarlet inferno of Agni is high in the west, the land that stretches before them is barren. Bharatha’s infant life has not yet ventured from the sea that gave it birth.
He wonders if it will survive human predation long enough to do so. The quarantine zone the ecologists enforce already leaks like a sieve, more vicious Earth microbes devouring Bharatha’s infant offspring.
Jackson fixes the child’s helmet back onto her suit, triggering the vacuum seal. Reminds her not to break quarantine again in human sight, not to break any of the rules he imprinted in the human brain within her skull.
In time, her own neural tissue will overgrow the skull, replace the brain, and find niches in her bones. For now, the memories surviving in the human brain will keep her alive.
Overhead, a ‘thopter wheels in the jade green sky. A rescue party, come to take them back to Bharatha’s domed cities. Ecstatic, no doubt, at having found the missing child alive.
Jackson waves his arms to hail them.
The Drake Equation
“The Drake Equation” was selected as a winner of the Writers of the Future Contest in 2016. It first appeared in print in Writers of the Future Vol. 33.
Carol closes her eyes. Or tries to. Nothing changes. What she sees—a beach near her childhood home on Long Island—is the same whether her eyes are open or shut.
That’s not good.
The pounding waves are a relaxing, rhythmic white noise. The distant traffic is another kind of white noise, more constant, the sound of haste. The white paint of the house behind her is chipped and cracked, weathered hard by the sea breeze. The sand is coarse gravel beneath her bare feet.
She hasn’t been here since Ron—
—died.
Am I dead? Panic threatens.
Her rational mind thinks that highly unlikely. She has not believed in any sort of afterlife in years.
Yet here she is. And she can’t explain how. She has never hallucinated. Never dreamt half so vividly. Never been so sure of being awake in an impossible place.
Oxygen deprivation could do this, maybe. She thinks back, strains to think back to before—
The hull was breached by a meteor. No pinprick—something the size of an all-terrain rover tore the ship clean in two at the passage connecting the command quarters to the hub. Too fast for the sensors to pick up, too fast to do anything even if they had seen it. This she deduced in the split-second before she was sucked out, the vacuum demanding her, her oxygen, and her books with equal ferocity.
For less than half a second as her eyes froze solid, she had seen the rest of the Agena, its pale sunlit form so deceptively small when viewed from the outside.
So near and yet so far.
No one will be able to reach me in time. That was certain.
Then something happened. Death or sleep or oxygen deprivation—
—and now she is here, standing barefoot on an achingly familiar Long Island beach.
And she can’t close her eyes.
She is not alone.
The figure stands a few meters from her, his ankles lapped by cold surf. He is beautiful. His facial symmetry is heart-stopping, his features perfect.
Carol is very confused.
She’d never spent much time visualizing her ideal man, but apparently someone else has done it for her. And the presence of a stranger in what could otherwise have passed for a memory—concerns her.
Carol’s heart skips a beat and her stomach flutters, and she pauses to wonder how that is possible if her body is freezing in space.
Wish fulfillment, she thinks. She has heard that the dying brain gives gifts—near-death experiences, rushes of endorphins, and the like. Hers is apparently her childhood home, and a handsome stranger. She half-expects her brother to come sauntering around the side of the house, as though he’d never left.
Her heart warms at the thought of that reunion. She smiles, glancing back towards the house.
To a good death.
But it is the stranger’s voice that attracts her attention. “I’m sorry,” he says, “if I startled you.” His voice is soft and deep, gentle and powerful.
Blushing isn’t something a dead person is supposed to be able to do, yet she is blushing.
And suspicious, both at once.
“And we are sorry,” the stranger continues, “about—the interruption.”
There is something off about his speech. Her own language center going? No—if that were it, his speech would sound normal to her. There is a problem with the meter of his speech, something deeply unsettling coming from so perfect a form.
Who’s to say how hallucinations should behave?
And yet, something is wrong. Something more than what she’d thought.
She tries to speak to the stranger. Chokes. Like a schoolgirl approaching a crush. Blushes more furiously, this time in embarrassment which threatens to turn into anger.
The stranger smiles wryly.
“I apologize,” he says again, a little wrongly, “for any distress. We were not sure—”
He flickers then, and all of reality flickers like old fluorescent lights. For fractions of a second, there seems to be nothing.