by C. L. Kagmi
Lily chews her lip and tries not to think about returning. Tries not to think about what useless, interchangeable task they’ll come up with for her next.
The black ship executes a smooth arc from vertical to horizontal until it’s skirting across the plains. Copper-colored grass ripples beneath it, touched as though by breeze.
The oblong settles with a sound like a sigh, and Lily waits. When the door opens, it is a patch of brightness. The ship’s carapace absorbs all light, seeming depthless; the interior is well-lit and white, from the glimpse that Lily sees. She expects an Eternal like the ones she’s holoconferenced with; tall, thin, ephemeral things.
What steps out is thin and ephemeral, but it is—
Lily’s mouth falls helplessly open.
It is a child.
The overs’ transmissions make more sense, now. The way they’d stressed the Eternal’s diet—that they would consume only their nutrient packets, had brought all they would need for the duration. That they had brought their own water filter, too, and that they were never to be left alone with the planet’s native life.
As though their emissary would need looking after, as though—
Dear gods. They’d sent a child, not more than twelve years old.
And the child, as they take their first uncertain steps down the shuttle’s gangplank, looks afraid.
Lily rushes out to meet them.
Why a child? It doesn’t matter. I will take good care of them.
The Reshaped habitation sticks out like a sunspot. From the pale flatness of the plain, a geodesic dome rises. It’s scarcely larger than Kit’s shuttle. More than large enough for the single alien sentinel on this world. The Reshaped who has called for Kit’s help.
Kit knows the Reshaped way. They’ll send one sentinel, and one sentinel only, until the world’s natives bid them leave or stay. Those who bid them stay will become partners in their exchange; if they are asked to leave, they’ll slink away instead with a million covertly gathered genetic samples for their archives. Raw materials for new life, new generations of Reshaped.
Usually, that’s all there is to it. But this is not a usual planet.
The figure that steps out of the dome’s airlock as the shuttle descends is even stranger than Kit would have imagined.
In proportion, it is much like an Eternal—two arms, two legs, five fingers on the hand it raises in greeting. But as they draw nearer, Kit realizes that the thing is horribly mismatched—a jagged line down the middle of the face and body marks the border between two drastically different skin textures, and the whole form is asymmetrical. The half of the scalp with smooth skin is marked by drifting waves of hydrangea-blue hair, while the other half is scaled and hairless. A pale cat’s eye regards her from one half of the face; a dark hawk’s eye from the other.
They’ve never seen a Reshaped that looked like this in the vids.
Intimidating as the strangeness outside might be, Kit is glad to be free of the shuttle. They stumble out, swaying wildly under their own weight in the gravity. This world’s rotation is different from that of her orbital creche, and her sense of vertigo still has not gone away.
The Reshaped strides forward, steady despite its odd design. Slows as it approaches Kit. Tentatively, offers Kit a hand to hold.
Kit is more glad of the assistance than they’d care to admit.
The Reshaped leads them—with unbearably obvious patience—toward the geodesic dome. Kit is looking forward to a familiarity of angles and line inside the habitation, but when the door opens, their body recoils in overwhelming reflex at what lays beyond.
Within the dome is a riot of plant life—a higher density, and more variety, than what’s out here on the plains. The chaos of it is enough to send Kit’s heart rate climbing again.
They are beginning to wonder if they will be perpetually on the edge of panic here; beginning to wonder how low the Reshaped have set their goals, that they can be happy amid such disorder.
Kit knows what a garden is; has seen the production facilities where necessary nutrients were produced and extracted. But theirs was a geometric beauty, a beauty of certainty, predictability, repetition. This is different. Vines strew as though wild, curling around the feet of the Reshaped woman who is—even stranger than Kit could have imagined.
The Reshaped is looking at them. Waiting. Pitying.
Kit leans away from the Reshaped, and vomits.
When their legs collapse under the weight of foreign gravity, the Reshaped picks them up and carries them inside.
The most unsettling thing about the child is their eyes. The Eternal overs Lily spoke to via holo had the same eyes—blank, crystalline spheres, tech in place of flesh, seeing things that Lily never could. The augmented senses were part of the reason her own overs called them.
But Lily’s brain tells her that those eyes should be blind, and the way the child moves only makes them more unsettling. This Eternal is nothing like the Reshaped children Lily grew up with. They are too still, too calm, and too accepting. But even those, Lily realizes, are the wrong words. It’s the blankness of Kit—the lack of emotion, once they were safely inside the walls of the little bungalow—that bothers Lily. An adult could be so disciplined, so emotionless, through years of long training; a child should not be.
How long do Eternals live? The answer is right there in their name; but Lily thought, thought she’d read, that their aging does not slow to a grinding halt until adulthood. Is this one stunted, for some reason? Are they special? A prodigy?
Lily is glad, secretly, that the child is still resting. Glad for the distraction of preparing dinner. A real, solid task for a surreal and disconnected day.
“What is this place for?” The voice is small, thin, flat.
Lily actually jumps. The knife she was using to chop root vegetables skitters across the cutting board.
“It’s a...kitchen,” she manages, turning to face the child.
The child, standing entirely too close, looks up at her with a frown of deep concentration.
“It’s a food preparation area.”
“Ah.”
That question answered, the child moves on. They remind Lily of the exploration drones she runs across the plains, turning their attention mechanically from one problem to the next.
Kit makes a beeline for the pots and pans, and Lily wonders if she should stop them.
“You prepare your own food,” the child murmurs as they examined the smooth metal surfaces. “From plants.”
“Yes. And fungi.”
Lily remembers the nutrient packs from the shuttle—liquids, as colorless as Kit’s eyes. Enough to feed the child for months, according to the labeling.
“May I watch?” Kit seems, suddenly, just a little bit human as they turn from their inspection.
“I—of course.”
And the child begins to look happy as they watch Lily chop herbs and roots from the garden.
Lily remembers the Eternals’ instructions not to vary Kit’s diet. They were afraid, Lily guessed, that she’d poison them. But the poor thing looks undernourished, and those nutrient packs are no kind of food.
“Could you eat like me,” Lily asks, hesitantly, “if you had to?”
The crystalline eyes make it difficult to be sure, but the child seems to gaze into the middle distance. “It looks that way. Unless your people have changed in the last few years, we should have all the same digestive enzymes.”
Lily stares, wondering, at this creature who couldn’t stomach the garden but could tell which digestive enzymes they possess.
For a moment she forgets that Kit’s crystalline eyes can see her, and are staring back.
The aromas that rise from the Reshaped’s pan are confusing—tantalizing and repulsive, both at once. Kit’s body seems at war with itself over what to do with this barrage of sensory information.
Kit fights for some more familiar mode of thinking. Focuses on visual information—on the Reshaped’s mismatched hands.
“Why did they make you—like you are?”
The Reshaped stops. Her scaled hand ceases to toss the pan over the—fascination of fascinations, open flame. Her smooth hand, wielding the implement called spatula, goes still.
She says softly: “They didn’t.”
Kit waits.
“I was supposed to be—two people.” The tossing of the pan resumes slowly. “We grew together in the womb. We weren’t even supposed to be in the same womb—it was an accident of contaminated instruments.”
The Reshaped quirks a smile that does not look at all happy. “Now ‘we’ are—‘me.’ I’ve never felt like two people, but that makes it easier to talk about. Even my brain—I’m told—the hemispheres don’t match.”
Kit absorbs this in silence. Tries to decide how to feel. The thought of a mistake in making a person is as fascinating and repulsive as the scent of the cooking food. It is not something their people do—their templates vary little, making an accident of that kind inconsequential even if it were to occur. Such accidents are unavoidable, they suppose, for people who tinker wildly with organic forms.
“Is that why you’re here?” Kit asks.
The smooth-skinned half of the Reshaped face becomes redder, suffusing with blood. Kit remembers the same happening to them after giving an incorrect answer in a class, and instantly regrets the question.
“I am best-suited,” the Reshaped says carefully, “for solo work. My talents and skills—do not mesh well into any team.”
“Neither do mine,” Kit offers, by way of reparation.
It’s true, but not the same. Eternals are designed to work alone. Reshaped are not.
Kit can see the Reshaped’s facial muscles working; can see her struggling not to speak. At last she flips her pan-fried vegetables one last time and slides them into a bowl. The stuff looks, to Kit, like something you’d find dead in a neglected garden. But its scent is all caramelized sugars and flavors she cannot name—flavors very different from those of rot.
“Would you like a taste?” The Reshaped asks.
Kit hesitates, and it’s with mixed horror and delight that they feel their head nodding.
The Reshaped holds out a pile of steaming vegetables on the end of a long metal stick. It takes Kit a moment to figure out what to do; at last, they lean forward and close their mouth around it.
The explosion of sensation makes their eyes water and their brain whirr. At first, it is wonderful—the nutrition is suboptimal, but the experience is something else.
And then the texture hits them. Dead things and slime.
Their body has rejected the gift before they can stop it, spewing bits and pieces across the Reshaped’s counter.
Thankfully—and puzzlingly—the Reshaped is laughing.
Putting the Eternal to bed is a surreal experience.
Kit peruses everything like an uneasy animal in a new environment. Which, Lily supposes, they are. They were too depleted to scrutinize the bedroom before, and the sunset, she supposes, gives it an ominous shade.
The fact that they will not be an animal for long occurs to Lily, and she tries not to shudder.
It takes Lily a moment to understand why Kit is staring at the bed in confusion.
“You sleep on this...all night?”
“Yes. Like you did earlier.”
“But I thought it was like a resting couch. You...why?”
Lily shakes her head, trying not to smile. “Because there isn’t any other choice. You can’t turn the gravity off here.”
Kit looks profoundly distressed by this.
Finally the child climbs onto the bed. They pull the blankets over themself—and begin to toss and turn restlessly. Lily wonders if she should stay and watch—if the child might need the reassurance of her presence, or if they’d feel oppressed by it. If she were to ask, she gets the sense they’d be too proud to be honest.
At last the slender form beneath the blankets stills, their breaths slowing into sleep. Lily watches—finds herself relieved. This eldritch creature had survived its first night under her care.
In the dark and quiet of the bedroom, Lily wonders about the motives for preparing a child for such a journey. Among the Reshaped, there would have been injections of hormones and nanites and genes. Things to strengthen the heart and other muscles before subjecting them to the stress of new gravity, to prepare the immune system or an alien biochemistry. It was not an altogether error-free process, and certainly not a comfortable one. To neglect such a regimen before sending an agent into alien territory would be worse.
So why subject a child to a mission like this?
Lily has spoken by feed to Eternal adults—tall and slender creatures as only microgravity can produce, crystalline eyes like Kit’s, who lectured her parentally about her guest-to-be’s needs and safety.
They had not, apparently, felt the need to warn her about their agents’ age. Had they assumed she’d know? Was this normal protocol for them? Or had they hidden it intentionally?
The child seems to be recovering from planetfall. Seems to have no ill effects from their one taste of real food. The caution with which they move even through the corridors of Lily’s home make her think Kit is unlikely to wander off into danger, or do anything similarly stupid. They’ll do their job—or fail—and return to her ship.
Can they do this job?
That’s an angle Lily hadn’t considered. Perhaps that’s why the Eternals sent a child—at twelve they’d be at the peak of neuroplasticity, ready to learn a new language at the drop of a hat. They’d be adventurous, and curious.
Perhaps, then, Kit really will learn to speak to the Ants.
This world, Inanna, is a rare host of oxygen-carbon life. The discovery of photosynthesis here excited the Reshaped and the other children of humanity. Even the Eternals took a mild interest, briefly tearing one of their God-computers from its incomprehensible sums to orbit the world and examine it.
Lily’s mission here is to discover if Inanna might surpass ‘rare’ and prove to be ‘vanishingly so’—if its native life might prove sentient. True companions for Earth’s children.
Thinking about the great, lumbering insects that carve complex patterns across the plains in Kit’s bedroom makes Lily inexplicably uncomfortable. She glances one last time around the room to ensure the child has everything they need, then slips down the darkened corridor toward the garden.
She will sleep herself soon, but not yet.
The Ants present Lily with a unique problem. She’d been stationed on Inanna for the purpose of learning about it—a paradise prison for a misfit. The planet’s thick and oxygen-rich atmosphere had allowed its eusocial insects to grow to an enormous size. Large enough to harbor a brain as big as a human’s and at least as complex. When Lily began to suspect sentience, she’d known it was her duty to report it—almost guaranteeing, in the process, that she’d be replaced by a more capable team.
But her overs wanted proof of sentience on Inanna. And she couldn’t find it.
How do you differentiate the intricate designs of a slime mold from those of a master architect? The efficiency of a dumb program from the work of a million minds? There were mathematical algorithms, but all of those were based on the assumption of individuality in behavior.
The Ants used tools; they farmed; they built cities, which displayed mindfulness toward specialized labor and complex social hierarchy. But they did not make decisions, as far as Lily could tell. Not as individuals.
They communicated through chemical signals. A language with potential for vast complexity, but devilishly difficult to interpret. How did one distinguish grammar or meaning from a chemical stew? The only thing Lily could positively do was correlate chemicals to the actions they prompted; and that was mechanistic behaviorism.
Most telling, the Ants reacted to Lily’s presence no more than an animal might to a bird or a flower. They did not appear to be curious.
Yet their hives made startlingly complex decisions.
The internal structures of abandoned hive caves contained what looked for all the world to be art, teardrops and spirals and waves of perfect symmetry, architecture with no purpose Lily could discern other than beauty. There were structures that spoke to her, not just of hierarchy, but of reverence.
And each year when the grasses ripened and turned golden, the same wave-and-spiral patterns would appear on the grass of Inanna’s plains. Worker Ants would spend days trekking through the tall grasses, cutting stalks and collecting seeds in fractal patterns large enough to be seen from space. It could be natural behavior, some survival advantage to cutting different swaths of grain while leaving others to propagate each year.
But it just didn’t look that way to Lily.
There was nothing in the Reshaped algorithms about making a judgement of sentience based solely on aesthetic designs. Still, the Reshaped had learned well to be cautious before treating other species as mere objects.
Were the Ants of Inanna a crop to be harvested, or partners to be respected and protected?
The Eternals, left to themselves, did not care. Lily was still a bit surprised that they had answered her overs’ call. But they did like complex problems, and maybe this was one that even their crystalline eyes saw as challenging.
The Reshaped sought communion with the living world. Sentience not of Earth was a particularly rare gem. The overs would never forgive themselves if they missed it here. But they’d hit a brick wall, so far, in their attempts to talk to the Ants.
There was one solution they had already thought of, entertained and then discarded. It was just possible that a hominid could communicate with an Ant if the Ant’s nervous systems were reproduced inside the hominid brain. If the right genes were expressed, the right neural wiring achieved, the hominid could experience what the Ants felt firsthand. Then they could know.
But the Ants’ arthropoid nervous systems were a tangled and inscrutable mess. They didn’t process information even close to the same way as a hominid brain. And the Reshaped overs wouldn’t put an arthropoid nervous system into a one of their own until they knew what it did. Mistakes of the sort that could create a damned offspring were to be avoided at all costs.