Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  9

  “AWAKE, SWEET PRINCE.” Saccharine sarcasm. Tug must have been practicing that one.

  “Shut up, Tug,” John groaned. He forced his awareness to cross the line between sleep and wakefulness. It wasn’t easy. “If people could breathe sweat, it would taste just like the air in here,” he observed. He moved his tongue sluggishly in his mouth as he uncoupled the implant in his navel, then demanded that his muscles start functioning. He flexed his way out of the womb, sliding past the slick walls into the cooler air of the Waitsleep chamber. For a moment he was still, gripping the floor rung, trying to gather his thoughts. Actually, the challenge was to separate his own thoughts from all the clutter of information in his head. Deckenson’s lecturing voice still echoed through his mind. He hated sleep prep, but it was the only way he could assimilate all the information Earth Affirmed thought he should have. Since Tug had bitten on the ersatz poetry he’d left out for him, John had decided it might be safe to start processing it. Anything Tug managed to tap into, he’d have to doubt. John had set up all the information in his auto-player, and set it to trigger at regular intervals during his Waitsleep. He’d underestimated how much there had been on those records, and the mental demands of Earth Affirmed’s interactive instruction programs. Instead of a listing of useful facts and figures, the experience had been more like a cross between a debate and a seminar, with good old Deckenson. And instead of awakening with all the necessary facts at his fingertips, he felt like a whole information cubicle had been crammed into his skull. He reached up and massaged his scalp. Give it an hour or so, and his thoughts would be his own again. For now, he shook his fingers and watched the scraps of shed skin from his scalp go drifting around the chamber. Time to clean up.

  He passed the womb where Connie slept on. Her face was a pale blur through the membraneous hide of the womb. “Tug,” he asked as he runged up into the gondola. “You haven’t forgotten that Connie is to wake up seventy-two hours from now, have you?”

  No answer. Momentary panic changed to annoyance. Of course. Tug was under a direct order to shut up. He’d once maintained a similar silence for three days before John had figured out what was wrong and rescinded the order. “Tug, talk to me.”

  “Of course. Do you think I would so neglect my duties as to allow her to sleep through an ordered Wakeup?” The voice of the Arthroplana was blandly complacent.

  “Huh.” John made his noncommittal noise. “Everything okay on the ship?”

  “Of course.”

  John reached his personal chamber and headed for the cleanser. Within the small cubicle he rubbed great peeling sheets of dead skin from his body and then applied the gel. It all had to come off. It took time and a soft-bristled brush to clear it from his scalp and from between his fingers and toes. He emerged feeling pink and skinned, the new skin stinging slightly in the cool air of his chamber. “Tug. Set up the fuge wheel for me. And report.”

  “Centrifuge exerciser is already set to your specifications. Nothing to report.”

  Nothing new, in the last thirty years. An incredible distance traversed, without incident. John mulled it briefly as he headed to the exerciser. Well, at least that part of his life was benignly boring. Nothing else seemed to be.

  The slow spin of the centrifuge pressed him gently to the surface that gradually became a floor as Tug increased spin. He set off doggedly on his first lap, feeling his spine telescoping in the drag. He began sweating almost immediately. He hated this, but every time he woke up he forced himself to do twice the prescribed regimen. After a great deal of deliberation, he’d suggested the same for Connie. He knew too many other Mariners who could barely handle station gravity anymore, and never went planetside at all. By the third day of his Wakeup, he’d be able to handle his laps easily, would even reset the fuge to a full G. He focused his determination and trudged on.

  He took his mind off his aching feet and back by trying to organize his thoughts. Not too many more Wakeups before orbit. He reviewed his schedule according to his sleep prep. Within the gondola were four very expensive satellite surveyors, property of Earth Affirmed, that he was to deploy. They’d be gathering general climate and terrain information and doing a lot of photography. A dozen little landers were in the same bay, destined to take soil samples, seismic readings, water samples, and every other damn thing imaginable and relay the gathered information directly to sealed units on the satellites. The Evangeline was authorized to take three months worth of data. Then the Evangeline would pick up the sealed modules from the satellites and return to Delta with them.

  That much was routine reconnaissance. All the landers and satellites were Conservancy-Approved. Guaranteed to break down internally and biodegrade without leaving a trace. It was also guaranteed that any unauthorized effort to open the sealed information modules would result in their immediate breakdown. Once back at Delta, John would deliver the sealed modules to a waiting representative of Earth Affirmed, who would hand them over to a Conservancy official for processing. Within one year, the Conservancy would deliver the interpreted data to Earth Affirmed.

  So much for the Conservancy-approved mission.

  But Satellite C would fail after only two days of observations. John and Crew would make a routine shuttle outing to attempt manual repair. Unfortunately, their nice new shuttle would then experience a malfunction that would necessitate a forced landing on the Earth’s surface. A landing that, if all went as Earth Affirmed had fantasized, would be near some kind of beacon or signal that indicated a sort of “time capsule” located nearby. If no beacon were readily apparent, as John expected would be the case, he’d make a routine landing on the surface, at any suitable location.

  “Tug! Readjust G.”

  “Clarify command, please.”

  “Dammit, I know you’ve turned it up. If this is a three-quarter G lap, then I’m a Mother.”

  “The centrifuge is correctly set.”

  John bit his lip to keep from arguing. No way he could prove Tug wasn’t playing games with him. The only way he could win was by refusing to let it bother him. He stepped off the treadmill, transferring to the climber. Upper-body strength was just as essential. He started runging his way around the hamster cage and felt new sweat sting his chest and belly.

  The main question, of course, was how far he trusted Earth Affirmed. According to them, the Stewardship of the Conservancy had been playing jiggery-pokery with the numbers on Earth’s ecology from the very beginning. As Deckenson’s voice had whispered during the sleep prep, “From the beginning, ever since the evacuation, they’ve set up the parameters, and decided what’s normal and what’s excessive, what’s an okay level of toxin or radiation or, even, pollen, and what’s a dangerous level. They won’t allow us access to the raw data, and they’ve refused to evaluate different sections of a planet separately. If radiation is too high here, and heavy metals are too common there, why then, the whole damn planet is toxic. Think about this; every time a planet’s been considered for colonization, they’ve given it a rating. Welcoming, hospitable, neutral, inhospitable, hazardous, or hostile. Of all the damn planets we’ve ever surveyed, none has ever rated better than inhospitable. So they’ve turned down all our colonization requests. And what does the Earth, the place that spawned us, rate? Not only hostile, but with a hostility rating higher than any foreign planet we’ve ever surveyed. Does that make sense to you? Of course not.

  “Why would the Conservancy lie to us, why would they say the Earth was hostile, dead, if she wasn’t? Because they love to keep us under control. Because if they admitted that the Earth had recovered at all, it would undermine their insistence that any alteration to an environment must be regarded as permanent damage. The total destruction of the Earth is the club they use to enforce their restrictions and rules. Imagine what would happen to the Conservancy if the Earth was revealed as a habitable place, and Earth Affirmed offered to take colonist applications? Their control would be shattered. There’d be a major power shift. And
Earth Affirmed would be in the catbird seat.” Deckenson had been so vehement. But somehow it just didn’t seem enough to John.

  “Believe it,” Deckenson’s sleep-prep program had said when John’s subconscious registered doubt. “It doesn’t have to make sense to us; it does to them. It’s how they are. Their absolute control can continue only as long as they base their politics on absolute paranoia. They have to believe that everyone desires the same total dominion they have. It was their only reason for venting Epsilon. They saw us as a threat to their control; we were proving their ‘facts’ weren’t true. All we actually wanted to do was provide an alternative, a place where Humans could choose a life-style different from what the Conservancy dictated.”

  Something in the program had detected John’s skepticism.

  “No myth,” Deckenson had insisted wryly. “A legend, if you will. The basis for all you’ve heard is in hard fact. Epsilon existed. And it was ours. Earth Affirmed’s. It took us four generations to wrest control of it from the Conservancy, in a bloodless revolution. That’s how naive we were, how civilized. We thought that if we took it over without violence, that if we voluntarily kept our ideas and life-styles sequestered from the planets and the Conservancy’s stations, they would let us be. We were wrong.”

  John frowned to himself as he slowed down his pace. He tried not to remember the tone of Deckenson’s voice, the anguished truth in the man’s voice.

  “We reestablished Humans as functional mammals. Children were conceived and born naturally, with almost a forty-seven percent survival rate. We’d had a few birth defects, but that was to be expected, after all the tampering. The rate was nothing like what the Conservancy claimed. Between our births, and the people immigrating from the planets and the other stations, our population level was even growing slightly. We were considering establishing another station. The Conservancy found out about it.” The voice paused.

  “There was no wild mutation, no disease, no rampant insanity. Nothing that merited the sabotage that vented the entire station to space. Only the Conservancy’s insane desire to retain complete control over every Human in existence. There were, at the time, darker rumors. That the Arthroplana had not only supported the Conservancy in Epsilon’s destruction, but encouraged, even demanded it. The rumors were unprovable, but not unfounded. There has always been evidence of a conspiracy between the Conservancy and the Arthroplana, an agreement by which the Arthroplana supports the Conservancy’s dictatorship as long as they support the Arthroplana’s complete suppression of any technology that would let Humanity be independent of them and their Beastships.”

  “Damn fools,” John muttered.

  “Repeat, please.”

  “Wasn’t talking to you, Tug.”

  “You were vocalizing, John. No one else on board is conscious.”

  “I was subvocalizing. Muttering. Talking to myself.”

  “Perhaps you should consider Readjustment. Talking to oneself is not acceptable for Humans.”

  “Perhaps you should consider an Adjustment session yourself, Tug. Too great an interest in the mutterings of Humans is not an acceptable trait for Arthroplana.”

  Silence followed, but John would have sworn that the drag on the climber increased minutely. It wasn’t the first time he’d stung Tug with that odd bit of knowledge. He’d gained it a long time ago, when he’d first begun to captain Evangeline. He’d been a young fool, exuberant in his first command. He remembered well the long Wakeups when he and Tug had babbled at each other in the relief of finally finding kindred spirits, quoting dead poets at each other, and speaking of all things long and learnedly. Every Wakeup had seen another soul baring, and John had dreaded each Wakesleep that took him away from such an attentive audience. They had encouraged each other’s attempts at poetry, and if Tug’s frankly Freudian analyses of John’s work were not always flattering, well, it was criticism, the backbone of any poet’s self-discipline. Sometimes Tug rewrote John’s poems and read them back, a process John found both infuriating and degrading. It led to arguments, sometimes bitter, in which John tried to explain why Tug’s “improvement” of John’s work was not the same as a new creation, and why no Arthroplana, no matter how intelligent, could ever completely understand Human literature. It was during one of those sessions that Tug had revealed his interest in Humans was regarded by other Arthroplana as puerile. An enBeasted Arthroplana was supposed to spend his sacred time in a Great Study, a thorough digestion of one topic, for the future enlightenment of all Arthroplana. Tug’s was supposed to be an understanding of Human literature, specifically that portion referred to as The Mysteries. They were, he confided to John, the only achievement of Humans that struck the Arthroplana as either elegant or useful. For the first time, John had grasped Tug’s vision of the Human race as lesser, not just intellectually and culturally but in the grand scheme of the universe. Not only temporary, but ultimately disposable.

  “The Elders were reluctant to grant my enBeastment at first,” Tug had confided in him. “They didn’t think my field of study offered enough benefits to the Arthroplana. Humanity offers knowledge specific to itself, but very little else. All your old technology was nonharmonious, all your sciences relating almost entirely to your own ecosystem. Xenophobic, I might say. All that Humanity has now, it received from us.”

  “So how did you talk them into it?” John had been lazily grunting his way through some low-G acrobatics as they talked. Tug was synthesizing Vivaldi in the background. He was Human enough to feel miffed at Tug’s dismissal of all Human endeavor, but mature enough, he thought, to subtly change the subject.

  “I pointed out it was a sensible precaution. Humans are a dangerous race, John. All your literature, but especially that branch that deals almost exclusively with the committing of antisocial acts and the methods of trying to avoid punishment for those acts, is the key to neutralizing that danger, in so far as it relates to the Arthroplana. I was accepted for enBeastment and its privileges on the basis that my studies might someday be the salvation of my race.”

  John had been building momentum for a flip. He let it fade, dropped softly back to the floor, and steadied himself against a horse there.

  “You believe we are a danger to you?” Their warm camaraderie had developed a sudden crack and an icy wind was blowing through.

  “Indubitably. You are even a danger to yourselves. Look at what you did, uncontrolled, to your world. Your aggressiveness and curiosity will not let you long remain at peace on Castor and Pollux. Eventually, you will find excuses to begin another cycle of self-destruction. Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it; so goes the old Human saying. Yet I believe that the heart of Humanity is to be read not in their history, but in their literature; that is, in their perceptions of themselves, their acts, and their cumulative meaning. Our guardianship of all the civilized races demands that we know you well enough to keep you contained and harmless.”

  “The same way ancient scientists used to isolate disease victims to keep the disease from spreading?”

  “Exactly. An excellent comparison. Might I borrow it for my opening remarks to my findings?”

  John had felt a sudden hollowness filling up his chest. “Is that why we’ve been having all these long discussions, Tug? To give you a better understanding of how to stamp us out if we begin to look virulent?”

  A flatly friendly note came into Tug’s synthesized voice that proclaimed his sudden wariness. “John, John, do you rebuke me for being interested in you? For selecting as my mentor a poet, yourself, to guide me through the maze of Human creations? For learning from watching your creation of poetry and analyzing the hidden meanings in it? For being fascinated with the rich cultural heritage of your race? For—”

  “Picking my brains as a way to understand our weaknesses and strengths? So you can keep us like plants in a vat?”

  Tug sounded incredulous. “John, even your own Conservancy has seen the need for Humanity to be kept in its proper place, as but a
part of the ecosystems of Castor and Pollux….”

  “We’ll never have the stars, will we? To roam as we please?” The plaintiveness of his own words sounded childish. But something tore inside him as he suddenly grasped not only his position in the greater scheme of things, but Humanity’s. There were no modern analogies for it; he had to reach deep back into his readings. Stepchildren fed in the kitchen; deformed ones confined to the closets; mental deficients kept from harming themselves by a benign tyranny. He had not known he had wanted so badly, until he saw the ultimate denial of that want.

  Tug’s condescending reply was salt in the wound. “The very archaicism of your phrasing betrays that Humanity would not know what to do with ‘the stars’ if they ‘had’ them. As if the distances of space can be possessed, as if stars can be owned. Your own language reveals the genetic limits of your vision.”

  The ensuing quarrel had never been mended. From violent arguments they had progressed to cold insults followed by colder silences. And, in their dissension, to indifference.

  And for John, almost total solitude.

  Sometimes John felt that he rattled inside Evangeline like a tiny hard stone, separated now from any intellectual contact with Humans or Arthroplana. Sometimes his total aloneness, his centuries of separation, frightened him. Sometimes his calm acceptance of his isolation frightened him even more.

  Like now. He thought of what he was planning to do. Manually land his shuttle on an untested landing area, and step out into an atmosphere that the officials of Earth Affirmed swore was probably breathable. Personally take samples of flora and fauna, air and water. Record his own sensory reactions to the planet. Try to recover their damn “time capsule.” And then take the shuttle off again, return to Evangeline with the smuggled samples, and take them back for Earth Affirmed. All the officially gathered data would be turned over to the Conservancy, but these personal samplings and impressions would be given to Earth Affirmed so they could draw their own conclusions.