Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  [/ / / / /]

  Maybe the planet had become so inhospitable to Human life that they had all decided to stop breeding and let themselves the out. She thought about this, wondering if it was a thing Humans could decide to do. She would ask Raef. The urge to mate was strong in all species, at certain times at least, and in most intelligent species, there was a strong attachment to young. Yet Raef had never borne any young. Because he’d never had a mate.

  [/ / / / /]

  Could conditions become so bad that a species, an intelligent species, could say, “We will bear no more young, for they would be unhappy here.” Or would they …

  [/ / / / /]

  It was the crying of a child.

  Memories erupted, spilling out of a dark place in Evangeline’s mind, shaped somehow by Raef’s memories. Feelings she’d never been given words for, ideas she’d never been able to speak…. She was transfixed by a flood of realizations, and emerged centuries or seconds later feeling like a new creation, a whole being. How easy it had been to shape her, to shape all her species! Simply deny any feelings to them, save for the ones that suited the Masters. Deny fear, love, hatred, loneliness by refusing to give them names. Blot out whole sections of memory by refusing to ever discuss them, by not letting there be a way to put them in perspective.

  [I remember!] she thought savagely at Tug. [I remember it all, damn you all! And I know what it means!] She flooded him with the memories, savaged him with them, mercilessly. [Be there, as I was!] she commanded him, and made the pretense real for him.

  [Small Beasts we are, floating in the net. Only baby memories, only tiny sparks of knowing that we are alive. A dozen or so of us are there, in a crystalline mesh, a playpen for gargantuan infants. We don’t have a language to speak to each other, but our kinship warms us and reassures us. We cry out, and our siblings echo our cries, and we give voice again. And there is some knowledge, imprinted in our minds already, though we don’t know how. Perhaps it is only enough to keep sentient infants sane, alone together in space like this. Raef’s kind might call it racial memory, perhaps instinct. Our net bubble is in an asteroid belt, one of many such nesting sites. Here we have been since we were eggs, and here we have hatched, and grown a little, and now we make our first cries, calling across the spaces to our parents to come and take us into their wombs. There we will be nourished as we are carried along, until our parents bring us to our home planet, to birth us out into a wonderfully thick atmosphere, many times thicker than Earth’s. It is a wonderful place in our minds. There will be high, wild winds to play in, and the storms are thick with dust from which we will build our bodies. And not so far away is a still, cold place, thick with water ice and many minerals. No Beast could ask for a better place to grow! Other Beasts may tell us of their spawning planets, but surely ours is the finest. And the location of our home planet is burned into our memories, for though our herd may roam in many directions, still, at the migratory times, that planet is the one to which we bring our children, just as Raef’s salmon know the rivers of their hatching. It is the place to return to, that they may grow and flourish and select mates of their own for when they are ready to leave and begin their own wanderings. Our planet is far, far from the asteroid belt that hides our egg net-bubble, in a different solar system, but our little minds reach toward that wonderful planet as soon as they awaken from the egg-sleep, and we cry out to our parents to come and carry us away to our home. But instead, something very different happens; you know what happens, don’t you, Tug?]

  He struggled against the violence of her intrusion into his mind. He tried to break clear of her, but her ganglia were docked deep into his sockets, and she held him trapped. Tug fought suddenly, savagely, but she didn’t let him go, and she could suddenly sense how weak he’d become. He was in pain, great pain! Wonder of wonders, he could feel pain such as he gave her. He stung her again, furiously, trying to free himself from her, from the pain of the memories to come, but his venom lacked strength and she could ignore such physical pain for the sake of the old pain she would make him feel with her.

  [Pretense this with me, Tug. Be there as I was.]

  She held her parasite fast, and fed him not the sustenance of her body, but the stunting memories of ancient pain and horror, memories such as could stupefy any young mind, shock that would render any budding intelligence numb and tractable, unquestioning of anything that lets it avoid such pain again.

  [This is it, Tug. Be there with me. Here it comes, a shape against the stars, and we clamor wordlessly at the sight of it, greeting it, for surely it is one of our parents come to claim us and bear us home. We call out our wordless little cry, / / / / /, and wait for our parents to sing to us, the song we will know even if we cannot yet form it.

  [But it does not come. Instead the shape closes in on us, unsounding. It seizes our bubble net, and tears it open, and we tumble out, losing one another, crying wordlessly, / / / / /. Then it roars at us, but this is not a song of love and comfort, this is no lullabye. The rogue roars at us, terrifying us. Its womb portals open, its flagella beckon us commandingly. Some few of us cling to the torn network of our bubble, but most of us spill and scatter in terror. The only thing more terrifying than the gaping of those foreign womb portals is the absoluteness of the death our siblings have fled to; the three of us that remain awkwardly maneuver our scarcely fluked selves toward the portals, and then inside. Portals close, sealing us off, each from another, and alone each creeps forward into foreignness, a womb that is not either of my parents’ wombs. All is wrong with it, all scent, all touch, all sound, and yet still the secondary seal closes behind me, and there is warmth and moisture, and I stay there alone, in darkness and silence, my body nourished and growing, but my mind empty and full only of fear so sharp it is a pain. Remember this with me, Tug.]

  “Leave me alone. None of this was my doing, or my fault. It’s the way things have always been, Beast. Humans did worse to their animals.” She read a terrible effort in his voice. And something else, something she could not quite identify, but she didn’t take the time to wonder about it. “We cared for you. We kept you alive, and gave you purpose. Without us, what would you have had? Eating, mating, and dying. Beasts.”

  There was so much disgust and disdain in his voice, it almost covered the pain.

  [It becomes more and more interesting, this pretense, Tug. Live it again with me. Be held in darkness. What should I have had, at that stage of my life? I grope after it, and guided by such memories as Raef fed me, such memories as seemed so right, I think I know. I should have smelled and felt and heard all familiar and right. There should have been the voice of a parent, singing me ancient songs, telling me tales, lullabyes and lessons, Tug, to make a young mind grow. Why else would my mind have been so swayed to Raef’s dreaming? But instead, there was silence, broken at rare intervals by sounds that at first made no sense. Do you know what they were, Tug? They were the brief exchanges between a Master and a slave, and as they were the only language I heard, it was the language I finally learned. For the Beast that carried me was a slave, even as I would be, and obeyed the orders of a Master, as I would learn to. Poor dumb creature, it obeyed its Master’s voice, and believed that all it did was right and harmonious and good for the world.

  [And so I came to your world, Tug. Your thin atmosphere and paltry winds. And so I grew, stunted and trapped, allowed only to fly because your kind would have a use for that skill, and always guarded above by other slaves, lest our faded instincts draw us up and away and to our true home. And when I was of a size to be useful, Tug, I was inhabited. I was captured and held and a parasite entered my body. Do you know what it was like, Tug, that first time? Remember with me.]

  She seared him with it. All the fear and ignorance and confusion combined with the acid pain of another creature invading her body, penetrating the closed portals of a womb chamber and searing that chamber into uselessness, and then expanding it into a cyst within her body, a thick internal scar of a chamber t
hat usurped the ganglia and nourishment tubes that should have nurtured her offspring and instead made of the womb a cell for an internal dictator. She remembered it all in detail as she had never done before; as she could not have remembered it without Raef, without Raef’s words and ideas and pretenses. The door to her memory of it swung wide and she let it flood through her to Tug.

  Unbelievably, he spoke to her. “In every life there is pain.” He paused, and she began to sense there was something very wrong with him. “You yourself said, not so long ago, that pain can be endured, if there is a reason for it. There was a reason for what was done to you, a valid reason.”

  He paused, and this time the pause lasted so long that she wondered if he was going to continue. When he did, the effort seemed to cost him. “Everyone, everything has its place.” He hesitated, as if he were having trouble forming his thoughts into words. The sentences came haltingly. “Within a system that worked, I had my place and you had yours. I did nothing wrong. I was no crueler than any master. No harsher than I had to be with you. All was harmonious. All was right. Until Raef came along. If you wish to blame someone for your unhappiness and pain, blame Raef. Had he not interfered, you would have remained ignorant of such things.”

  It was long before Evangeline could formulate an answer. When she spoke to him, it was with dignity and control. [You would have remained ignorant, you mean. I would have remained a slave. There is a difference.] She groped for a better way to express it, and finally realized that while she could force pain on him, she could not force understanding. And somewhere, a child was crying.

  [/ / / / /]

  A young Beast. Somewhere, a young one was crying. Somewhere very close by. Crying out as she had once cried out, and waited for her parents to answer. But instead would come …

  [Raef!] she cried out desperately, but the tiny figure on the plain plowed doggedly on. She had no way to make him hear her, no way to make him turn and come back to her. She could not leave him here.

  [/ / / / /]

  And yet she had to. What had he said, when he explained why he must rescue John and Connie? That they were his own kind, and that was why he must go. So would he understand what she had to do now? She hoped so. She would not be gone long; only enough time to be sure that the young one’s parents came to its cries, and not a Beastship. She would explain it all to him when she got back. She did a final sensory inventory of him as he trudged away from her. [I’ll be back for you, Raef,] she promised, and reversed the efforts of her flukes, to accelerate the rapid rise of her body through Earth’s atmosphere.

  Connie waited for John at the bottom of the ladder. Her hand still felt warm where he had relinquished his grip for the climb down. She’d impulsively taken his hand; she couldn’t understand why she had suddenly felt so awkward when he’d maintained the touch as he followed her through the shuttle. She tried to put it out of her mind. She should be feeling good, not confused. She’d shown him food, food for them both. They had a chance at survival, now. Perhaps the rest would follow. She refused to think any further than that just now.

  Except, maybe, to worry about what kind of a storm was headed their way. The huge cloud on the horizon was like nothing she’d ever seen, on Earth or Castor or Pollux. It came on, smoothly and silently, and whiter than light on water. There was no greying of the sky, no distant rumbling of thunder, nor the peculiar heaviness and turbulence to the air that she had come to recognize as the thunderstorm’s precursors. Instead there was only the gleaming white cloud, so low on the horizon, and at once wispy and substantial. She felt John beside her, didn’t even have to turn to see him there as she asked, “What do you make of it? Think we’ll be safe inside the shuttle?”

  “Evangeline,” he replied softly.

  She turned to look at him in consternation. “What?”

  The look on his face amazed her. Tears stood in his eyes, and yet he grinned foolishly. “It’s the Evangeline. Don’t you see her, don’t you know her? It’s impossible, but there she is. They’re coming for us.”

  “John,” she cautioned him, and reached to touch his arm. It was rigid with tension. “It’s not the Evangeline. It couldn’t be. John, it’s just a big storm cloud coming. And we should go inside.”

  “No.” He shook his head, and the movement dislodged a tear. “It’s the Evangeline. Tug’s found us. Dammit, Connie, don’t you understand? We’re not going to die here because of some stupid thing I did; you’re not going to die.”

  She looked at him, marveling at the strength of emotion in his words. Since the day she had laid the blame on him and he had accepted it so calmly, they hadn’t spoken of whose fault it was they were here, or of John being responsible for both of them facing starvation. She’d long ceased blaming him, or even considering it a misfortune. Was this what had been bothering him? His evident relief shocked her; he’d been torturing himself with it all this time. And this wild self-delusion was the result of it.

  “John,” she began again, but “Look!” he interrupted her. “What is … who is that?”

  She looked, and couldn’t speak. It was a Human in the distance, walking toward them as if he had descended from the cloud, or come out of its shadow. Only now as she looked, the cloud was the Evangeline, impossibly swollen, but there beneath her was the geometrically regular shape of the gondola. Even at this distance, the unnaturally squared corners announced their Human manufacture. So the cloud was the Evangeline, come at last for them. The sudden dread she felt overwhelmed her.

  “It couldn’t be. It’s not,” Connie denied it. John had begun walking toward the stranger and she was half a step behind him. She reached to tug at his sleeve, to turn him back to her.

  He didn’t turn to look at her. “No. It’s the Evangeline. I’d know her anywhere. But look at him.” John’s pace suddenly slackened. “He’s … old.”

  John stopped and Connie stood still beside him. The sweat dried cold on her skin. John was right. Looking at that Human was like looking at one of Tug’s ancient videos. And yet, “It looks like he’s wearing a ship’s tunic and trousers,” she pointed out to John.

  The figure in the distance had spotted them. Like them, he halted, then he lifted an arm and waved it in greeting. After a moment John mimicked his gesture. They began walking toward him again. “Connie,” John said after a long silence. “I want to be careful.”

  He glanced over at her, and she nodded stiffly. She didn’t ask him of what, or why. The whole situation was like something out of a dream. For an instant she wondered if the plants they had eaten were poison and giving them hallucinations. It seemed as if everything were too clear; the blue sky above them, the air softly shimmering in heat waves between them and the stranger, the immense Beastship come down to planet as she had never heard of one doing, and the hulking size of the stranger as he got closer and closer to them.

  The day was hot and the plains were still; already the animals had taught John and Connie that this was the proper time of day to seek shelter and be still. Her mind registered small things: the sound of John’s breath, the scuff of his toughened feet on the baked earth between the scrubby plants, the flap of her tattered trousers around her knees. The whole planet seemed to be waiting for the three Humans to converge.

  She lifted her eyes, squinted them to study the stranger. He was long-legged and long-armed, and it made him seem thin, a rack of bones come to life and walking toward them. And he walked as bones might walk, awkwardly, with obvious effort, and slowly. He was very pale, and as they got closer, she could see his shaven skull and guess he was not long out of a womb.

  They were about six meters apart when John stopped. Without thinking, Connie took hold of his arm in an unconscious expression of unity. She kept her eyes fixed on the man. He took a few more steps, then stopped himself. He swayed slightly where he stood, and Connie could see that his ship’s clothes were much too tight on him, and were already drenched with sweat. His eyes moved over her and then John, and then came back, to linger on
her face. There was a sort of hunger in them, but it was so mixed with what she suspected were pity and shock that she did not fear him.

  He lifted a hand chest high, waved it back and forth in front of him. “Hello!” he croaked, his deep voice turning the word strangely. He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again his voice was just as deep and hoarse. “I come in peace,” he said, and then grinned foolishly. He swayed again. “I always wanted to say that,” he observed, nodding to himself. “Or maybe ‘Take me to your leader.’” The man grinned again, and his eyes moved from her face to John’s and back again, evidently expecting some response. John was silent, waiting.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” the man asked, suddenly puzzled. “Tug speaks English to me, so I assumed it would be your language? Habla Español? I got a little, what my mom used to call Sesame Street Spanish, plus a few street words, but I’ll try to understand you…. Shit, Evangeline, I can’t talk to them. Now what the hell do I do?” The man lifted a hand to his forehead, wiped sweat away.

  “We understand you,” John said quietly. “What I want to know is, who are you?”