Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  He suddenly realized his hands were still, perched on the edge of his board. He ran his eyes over the instrument panels. Meaningless. What one indicator told him, another contradicted. He was still breathing, but cabin pressure was zero, according to the board. None of it made sense. He suddenly realized there was nothing constructive he could do here. He was going to die, and not quickly. He was going to have plenty of time to think about it as he was doing it. Might as well do it correctly and by the book. He unstrapped his harness, oddly calm.

  “Connie, it’s time to get into our suits now,” he told her gently.

  12

  SUMMONED. He wanted her to … chocolate. Brown, thick, sweet bitter salt, texture chewy, teeth breaking it down, saliva encountering sugars … too much, too much. She couldn’t do both, she had to choose. She could say yes or no, she could make deals, she could choose. Choose Raef and the dream then, just shut off the other….

  Lemon. Yellow, thick, sticky, sweet, sour, smooth thick, tiny shreds of, oh, the peel, bitter tang, smelling the taste, tasting the smell, volatile oils they called them in chemistry class, oh, it all relates, that old memory of his to this pretense in the bake shop—“Shall we wrap those up for you?” Nice voice, deep timbre, man the color of chocolate, voice like chocolate, lemon girl at the cash register. “Yes, please,” Mom says and …

  Pain. Breaking it, disrupting the pattern like O’s defeating X’s in tic-tac-toe. Make it harmonize. Eliminate the O’s. Disregard pain. Block nerves, block input, just like blocking the ones that Tug said she must never move, never use as it might kill the Humans. Pain still there, but refuse to acknowledge it, refuse to respond to it. Could beg to make it stop, could say, “Please, Tug, make it stop, I’ll be good.” Then Tug would make it stop, but would scold. And no more chocolate, no more lemon, no more choices, no more deals. Don’t choose that. Choose pain instead, but keep dreams on top. Choose crunch of nuts, and maraschino cherry, fat red juicy, drips, makes a red spot on the whipped cream, eat it first or save it for last, choose, choose, choose.

  Death was on top of her, it had its hands pressed on her face, pushing hard, pushing the skin right off her bones as it pressed her back into her lounger. The vibration was a second assailant, shaking her mercilessly, like someone trying to shake her awake and out of this nightmare. Connie wanted to cry, but she couldn’t get enough breath.

  Everything was gone. John, the shuttle, and Tug, the whole damn universe was too far away. She was left alone inside her body. The suit that contained her, the lounge her body compressed against were distant things as well. Connie had shrunk to a tiny little spot inside her skull that screamed, a little place in her throat that clutched at breath. All alone.

  It wasn’t fair. She’d chosen this once, chosen death. In the hot, hot bathwater with her old pruning shears, she’d snipped at her own flesh, catching up the purple veins in the curved blades and squeezing the handles. Remember the pain? No, not really. Only the clouds of released blood as it tinged the hot bathwater and diffused through it. Letting her life out, she’d thought dreamily then. Let it out to join with the rest of life on Castor, stop keeping it all bottled up and separate and unclean inside her Human body. Let it out, to flow back into a recycling tank, to be cleansed and finally be at peace with the planet. No more having to be careful, to follow all the rules, to be ever vigilant against disrupting the natural life of the planet. Let it out.

  Then she’d wanted to die, and they hadn’t let her. They’d forced the life back into her, forced her back into this body, and made her continue. She’d come awake saying, “Please, please, let me go, I want to die.” But they hadn’t. They’d made her go on, and she had, and she found she could go on. And lately she’d almost liked it. But now they were spiraling down to the dirty planet where so many had died before them, and Death was squeezing her out of her body. And all she wanted to say was “Please, please, let me go, I want to live.” But she didn’t have the breath.

  Tug had never been so totally alone.

  Arthroplana were a colonial species. When the rare drone emerged who could tolerate separation, he was systematically prepared for parasitic encystment in a Beast. There, in isolation, he could focus on a subject considered worthy of his concentration. And at the end of his encystment, he could return to his colony, to share the fruits of his long studies with fetal candidates. If his studies were impressive, he might be honored with fertilization of his segments. If his Beastship accrued wealth for the home colony in the meantime, so much to the better.

  Such was Tug’s mission, and he had believed it was going well. Perhaps he had been a little overconfident, but he’d admit that freely if the Elders ever questioned him. Such interrogation could hardly be harsher than what he subjected himself to now. Had his rule bending, his cavalier attitude toward the regulations that governed an Arthroplana’s relationship with his Beast led to his present difficulty?

  It was odd. He had often considered Evangeline’s demands for attention as interruptions to his concentration. Her need for his companionship had been proof of the primitive nature of Beasts, of the simplicity of their intellects. A Beast could not even amuse itself. Left alone, it suffered. A Beast needed the Arthroplana encysted inside it for companionship. He had never considered that the reverse might also be true.

  Tug regarded the chamber Evangeline’s original occupant had carved out within her, and the alcoves he had added. One alcove held the Human-made monitoring equipment that let him contact the crew within the gondola without using Evangeline as a go-between. Another held his few personal artifacts, the third his artistic efforts, scarred into the living walls of the alcove. This was the extent of his mansion, and his prison.

  The equipment that let him speak to the Humans was useless now. Connie and John had left in the shuttle. The last words he’d had with them was just prior to their departure. When he’d attempted to ask them how the repairs were progressing, he’d discovered that Evangeline had shut down external communications. He suspected she’d shut down all the radio frequencies that were a Beast’s normal emanation, completely severing herself from communication with the shuttle and its passengers. And when he’d tried to contact her to explain this, she’d ignored him. No matter how he’d stung her, she’d refused to acknowledge him. The effort had exhausted him.

  And now he had time to consider his isolation. Time. It suddenly seemed a slippery thing. Whose time? The brief tickings of John’s and Connie’s lives, or the slow undulation of his own. What did time mean when you were alone? Perhaps this was Evangeline’s time he experienced now, the empty time that stretched forever until some other being saw fit to interrupt it.

  No. Foolishness. He was no beast to be dependent on some other being to entertain him, to give him a sense of self. No. He was Tug. He would face this and handle it. Besides, what were the worst possible consequences he could imagine from it?

  Only an eternity of this. Connie and John would die out there in the shuttle, unable to reenter without his cooperation. Raef would sink ever deeper into his dreams; he probably wouldn’t know when he died. And Tug would continue, blindly feeding inside Evangeline, as simple a parasite as his ancient ancestors had been. Only this Beast’s natural cycle had been broken by her training. She’d never migrate with her herd, never lay eggs, never return her young to a planet’s surface to rear them. He’d never have a chance to emerge from her body, to see his own kind again. Alone inside her, gradually growing, until his body reached optimum size and his reproduction segments were ready for sloughing. And then what? He didn’t know. He imagined the chamber full of himself, packed tightly with his swelling segments….

  No. That couldn’t happen. He refused the thought. She’d have to get lonely, she’d have to reach out for him long before that. That was what he had to be ready for. He had to have a definitive plan of action in mind, one that would leave her no doubts as to who was ultimately in charge. He had to decide now: forgive or punish? Comfort or condemn? He had to decide
what would be most effective. This was no time to give into senseless ditherings, to trembling what-ifs. Keep in mind who was master here. A pity about the Humans, and he would not enjoy answering for them. But what he learned from this about Beasts would be enough to ensure his immortality among Arthroplana. Focus on that, and continue as befitted one of his race.

  [More banana cream pie?]

  Raef felt vaguely queasy. Only imagination, he told himself grimly. Imaginary food, imaginary nausea. “No, thanks, Mom.”

  [She cuts another piece of banana cream pie. She lifts it out of the foil bakery pan and sets it on the plate. She picks up her fork and cuts a bite off the pointed end of it. She puts the bite in her mouth. She tastes it.]

  Raef dared to let his attention wander. She was good enough now to do it for herself. She’d been through the whole damn bakery at least twice now, plundering his oh-so-complete memory of the food there. She had it all, image, taste, smell, touch, even the sounds of doughnuts sizzling in the hot fat and the chatter of the counter girl, and the beeping of the register. And she had replayed them for him, insisting that he participate. Raef couldn’t help but wonder what her real life was like that she would be so enthused of such a simple scenario.

  Wondered, too, at what had suddenly changed her.

  He’d felt Tug trying to break into their pretense. Her attention had wavered, and he’d had a sense of distant pain. Very, very bad, but muted somehow. A peculiar sensation, and he had felt how she separated it from him and their pretense. How she protected him. He didn’t understand it, but wondered what it meant for the Human crew and their repair mission.

  She’d finished her banana cream pie. She wiped her mouth on her napkin, just as he’d taught her.

  [Would you like an eclair, Raef?]

  Time to take action.

  “No, thanks, Mom. I’m really full.” The boy pushed his chair back from the kitchen table, being careful not to knock over the stacked white paper boxes of bakery goods. “I think I’m going to go take a nap for a while. Okay?”

  [You are going to pretense a nap? Will this pretense be for me, also?]

  “Actually, Mom, I’m sort of tired of this pretense. Uh, how about you tell me what’s happening back at the shuttle and all?”

  A long pause. Overlong.

  [I do not know, therefore I cannot tell you.]

  “How can you not know?”

  A tickle of dread ran through him. Raef knew enough about the Beastships to know that they communicated constantly among themselves and with the electronic communicators aboard all spacecraft. He remembered hearing it compared to whale song: incomprehensible to the Human listener, and untranslatable, but fraught with meaning nonetheless. It was spoken of as a constant, all Beasts broadcasting and receiving simultaneously, with each Beast having its own distinct song and special variation of its “language.” Reception, it was said, was across a wide spectrum, from so great a variety of sources that it could no more be compared to hearing and seeing than a black and white photograph could be compared to the best sensory holograms. It was how the Beasts knew what planets supported life, and if that life was intelligent. Yet somehow all of that input could not compete with the simple human scenarios he pretended for her. He still couldn’t figure that out, but right now the fate of the shuttle and its Humans was most important.

  “How can you not know?” he demanded again.

  [I choose this. I can choose, so I choose the pretense. It is better. More entertaining, more interesting …]

  He sensed a fumbling for ideas and words.

  [Delicious. I have never had delicious before. Your sensing compares and relates. It puts things together. Like delicious touching with hands, tongues. I have no such hands and tongues. In pretense, I know yours, and it is better than … than the big outsideness.]

  For a moment Raef experienced space as a Beast did. It was a stark experience, of Emptiness, Sustenance, Obstacles, and Other Beasts. All input came in equally, was of equal importance. Like living in a laser show. Other Beasts were companionship, mating, play. But no other Beasts were near so there was only the great emptiness, sustenance she didn’t crave, and obstacles to avoid. That was all. She saw no beauty in the myriad stars, no wonders in the vast distances she traversed; not even the diversity of the planets and races she had encountered impressed her as interesting. It shook Raef, and filled him with as deep a sadness as when his biology teacher had insisted that his dog could only see in black and white. But at least Sheppie had had his sense of smell and keen hearing to bringing wondrous images of the world that Raef couldn’t share. These Beasts had nothing. No. They had everything, and nothing to compare it to. No feeling about any of it. Feelings they had to get elsewhere. From their Arthroplanas.

  Or from him.

  She wasn’t stupid. That electrified him. He’d been treating her like people used to treat him, as if she were simple or stupid, but she wasn’t. It was just all new to her. Not just pretending something, but the entirety of every human experience: tasting foods, loving someone, casual conversation, constructed dwellings, everything. Once he realized just how much she was absorbing to understand him at all, a new dread washed over him. She was damn intelligent, and learning fast. He didn’t know how many years she’d been listening in on his dreaming, but she’d reached a foundation of understanding now. There was no telling how fast she’d learn and change from now on.

  Or how fast she’d change him.

  He could feel that happening, too, when he thought about it. Two minds couldn’t be joined as intimately as theirs were and not affect each other. Raef couldn’t tell what she was doing to him, but the anger and frustration he had leaned on for years had lessened. All his life, he had depended on his anger and pride to get him through. And what did he have now?

  [Raef has Evangeline.]

  Great. He was going steady with a spaceship, one that could read his every thought when he wasn’t consciously guarding against it. Like now.

  The shuttle!

  For just those moments, he had forgotten it and the two Humans it carried. What had happened to it? Had equipment failed as John had expected? “The shuttle, Evangeline. You have to choose to know about it. They need you to get back.”

  [This is not of great interest to me. Chocolate cream is better.]

  All or nothing, he told himself, and opened wide to Evangeline, the whole spectrum of his feelings. Not just what he felt, the hungering for heroism, for Human companionship, but what he hoped she’d feel. “They’re depending on us, Mom.”

  It was like being turned inside out. He’d never appreciated before how much his mind operated from within his body until he was suddenly torn out of it and flung out to the stars. He was stretched wide over unimaginable vastness, felt like his individual cells were separated and swiftly scattered to an incomprehensible thinness of being, as if his cognizance were being evenly distributed throughout the universe. Then, just as the last shred of self was torn away, he snapped back into being.

  [There it is. We found it.]

  “What?”

  [The shuttle. It has entered the atmosphere. See it glow.]

  She focused him at it, made him almost unbearably aware of it, dimensions, speed, temperature, construction, radiation emanations…. Temperature!

  “Oh, God, they’ll burn up! Bring them back, Evange—Mom. Save them!”

  [They are not burning. The shielding glows as it disperses the heat. But I cannot bring them back. The mechanism to power them out of such a descent is impaired.]

  “Can’t you save them?”

  [Save?]

  “Keep them alive. Help them land somewhere safe.”

  There was an indefinable change in his sense of the shuttle. From an object he was regarding, it became an extension of self.

  [They have lost ability to manipulate their position. The links they use to command the mechanisms to alter the vehicle’s flight have failed. But I can command the mechanisms from here.]

  �
��You can do that?”

  Hesitation. [This is forbidden. A Beast must not do this unless a Master directs it. To do so brings swift punishment.]

  “But they’ll die if you don’t.”

  [This concerns you?]

  “Greatly. Evangeline. Mom. Please. I’m begging you.”

  [The pain will be great, but I will do it to please you.]

  Before he could consider her words, she had acted. So simply done. Like a child reaching out to set a foundering toy afloat again. A change in attitude. So easy, and then the shuttle was suddenly more pleasing to him, more harmonious. Raef felt the same relief he might feel at having an annoying light shaded from his eyes, or at turning off a fluorescent fixture that buzzed. A discordant detail had been set aright.

  [Where shall we put them?]

  There were choices and she showed them to him. A dry seabed, a windswept plain of glacial ice, a flat stone plateau several miles above sea level, a stretch of prairie, a riverbed miles wide, its waters dwindled to a trickle circumventing the delta it had once created on its way to the sea….

  “That one, that last one,” Raef decided. It was the best. Flat ground, fresh water, the ocean nearby for food. They should be able to survive there, unless …“Is it very toxic there?”

  [Toxic? All of Earth is toxic to something.]

  “No, not like that.” He saw his planet as she did. Ocean killed the river fish, river killed the ocean fish. Tropics killed the polar beasts, arctic froze the tropic birds. It was a patchwork of deadly zones, all inimitable to strangers. “Toxic to Humans,” Raef specified.

  [Certainly.]

  Raef sensed a vast chemical sounding, a catalog of all that might kill Humans within that zone.

  “No, not like that. I mean, can they survive there? Can they breathe the atmosphere and not die from it, can they drink the river water and not die of that, are there plants and animals they can safely eat in the area?”