Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  John waited patiently. It still amazed Raef, how John sat and listened to him, as if he had the wisdom of the ages. Hell, maybe I do, he thought to himself, and then shook his head again. It was probably a lot simpler than that. He was older and he was male, and a Human, no matter how different he looked. Maybe that was it; he was Human enough for John to trust he would understand, and alien enough that John didn’t feel he betrayed himself. Maybe it was because he was dying, and all John’s secrets would go with him. It didn’t matter. It was good to be heard.

  “Listen. This friend I had, he was a big deal to me, because I’d never had a real friend before. In school, he was a wimp, always getting teased and beat up by other kids. For a long time I ignored it, I mean, he was older, like two grades ahead of me. But one day, I jumped in and defended him.” Raef laughed softly. “We both got the shit beat out of us. But from then on, we were friends. I had a friend. My dad didn’t like him much, because he was gay. My friend, not my dad.”

  “Gay?”

  Raef waved it aside with a small motion of his good hand. He was too tired to explain it all. “Uh, different style of living from what my dad approved.” He wasn’t going to try to explain how the sex side of it had never bothered him, how he’d been so much of an outcast that he never really expected to have any kind of sexual relationship with anyone. Too complicated. Too many words, too many deep breaths to push the words out.

  “You tired?” John asked, knowing he was. Raef was tired every moment he was awake.

  “Naw. It’s just … a long story. Anyway. And then one day he told me he loved me, and I was really shocked. I mean, I wasn’t like that. It made me mad that he would love me. I thought that if he loved me, we couldn’t be friends anymore, and I felt like that was about the worst thing that could happen to me. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that that was why I was mad. So I yelled at him and a bunch of stuff, and he just stood there and took it. And then he told me, he said, ‘Raef, one day when you’re older, you’ll find out that love occurs between Human beings, and it doesn’t much care about the rules. All the stuff you think matters, age and race and sex and good looks and manners and education—all that stuff just stops mattering. And love occurs. When you find out I’m right about that, you come back and tell me how it happened.’ And, well, a few weeks later I found out he was right, just thinking about it, and I went back to tell him. I wanted to tell him it was okay, that I could love him even if I wasn’t gay … wasn’t like him.”

  John waited. When Raef didn’t go on, he asked, “And then what happened? That sounds like only half a story.”

  Pain, or weariness, narrowed Raef’s eyes for an instant. He shifted in the lounger. “It’s less than half a story, really,” he admitted. “But it’s all you’re going to hear. Maybe it doesn’t even relate, maybe I’m just telling it because I never admitted it to anyone … to any other Human before. I loved him. It’s the stupidest thing in the world to do, to make people wait around to hear those words. And I’m … I’m just really tired, John.” He closed his eyes.

  John sat quietly on the floor until he was sure Raef was sleeping. John moved quietly away from the lounger, then glanced back at the sleeping man. His head lolled nearly off the neck cushion. His feet would have dangled, save that Connie had matter-of-factly destroyed the other lounger to create cushions to support them. He’d lost weight so rapidly, but his boniness only made him look bigger to John. The radio suddenly made him jump by spitting out a crackle of static. Then it was still again. Same old thing it had been doing for a week. John expected it meant it was in its final stages of decomposition.

  He moved quietly down the companionway. The door stood ajar to let fresh air into the fetid interior of the shuttle. They’d have to move out soon, had to head south soon, if they were going to try that. But Raef’s partial paralysis was going to make either move difficult. Dammit. Nothing was simple anymore.

  Connie was waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder. He paused before climbing down to her, just to look at her. Her back was to him as she stared off over the plain. She looked out at the night as the lizard looked out at the day. Full of stillness, full of awareness. There was no mistaking now that she was changing, in ways the light of the full orange moon touched and emphasized. It wasn’t just that her body was maturing suddenly; it was how very Earthly she had become. Earth’s gravity had settled her features, remuscled her body, that was true. But that was not what John saw. Her skin, always a warmer color than his, had darkened in this planet’s sun until she seemed made of the red dirt and the brown river water and the dark bark of the trees. Earth woman, he thought, and smiled. It seemed a very special beauty to John, something he had never seen in any other woman. She stood in the moonlight, unmoved by the chill of the night. Her feet were bare against the Earth; she was rooted in it. As he watched, she moved, turning only her head to some sound in the night.

  “Connie,” he said, very softly.

  She turned to him, silently, her face tilting up so he could look down into her eyes. The moonlight was a tricky thing. He knew that, from the top of the ladder, in the melting light, he could not see her eyes well enough to read them. But it seemed he could. She didn’t smile. She didn’t have to. Raef was right. She was waiting.

  He tried to think of something to say to her. Nothing came to mind. All the poetry he had ever known deserted him. He went down the ladder slowly and she waited for him.

  [/////]

  It made no sense. This was no bubble net. This was—she extended a sensory flagella toward it—something Humans had made. Precise angles. Symmetrical chambers. Like the gondola fastened leechlike to her body.

  [Hello,] she ventured and [/////] came the instant reply. Identical, she suddenly realized, to every utterance that had preceded it. Identical, as the rescue beacon on the shuttle beeped identically each time it sounded. No increasing pitch of interest, no variance for weariness or doubt. [Hello,] she tried again, and again [/////] the identical response.

  [What are you?] she demanded in rising frustration, and again received only [/////] in response. Her trailing flagella told her more. Energy was being taken in by it, energy from the closest star. It was responding to it, canting itself to receive as much as possible, and within it vibrations hinted of mechanisms similar to those employed in the Human’s gondola. An orifice suggested a docking port, but her [Request docking] signal went ignored, save for the cry of [/////] it elicited from it. It taunted her, this dead thing that cried to her like an infant, but sealed its secrets from her. The depth of her disappointment was a stunning thing. To have come all this way, to have left Raef for this. Its mystery mocked her. She was suddenly aware that every minute she spent here was time Raef was alone, endangered. Yet to leave this thing without understanding its function seemed unthinkable. She argued long with herself before giving in to necessity.

  [Parasite.]

  There was no reply, and she became aware he’d relinquished ganglial docking. Peculiar. She quested within herself, amazed at how much more self-aware she had become since fighting him for control of her body. Possibly as he weakened he was unable to maintain the nerve blocks that had kept her almost unaware of the gondola and its inhabitants for so long. She sensed it now, the vibrations of the automatic mechanisms that kept it in readiness for Human habitation, the energy that it drew from her, even how it was keyed to her own body for its maintenance.

  But more acute than the sensations from the interior of the gondola was her awareness of the womb chambers that had always been a physical part of her natural body. The ones adapted to Humans were very accessible, especially the sad loneliness of the one Raef had once occupied. Scar tissue stood thick between her and the Arthroplana’s chamber, but even that was not totally proof against her new awareness. She groped after sensations of the parasite. He was still alive, that she could ascertain, but very still. The thought of him inside her, crouched motionless, made her abruptly uneasy. She wished she could shake him from
his stillness, compel him to action as he had once compelled her, but he was beyond her, safely insulated within her own body from any revenge she might ever want to extract. In his own way, he was as inscrutable as this object she followed.

  [Parasite!] she tried again, despite how it angered her to speak to him at all. [I would have words with you concerning something I have found.]

  Still no response. [Then be silent,] she warned him angrily. [Be silent until the end of time, for you’ll get no more words from me.] And she left them, Tug in his silence and the object in its wordless cry, and turned back toward a blue-green planet and a friend.

  Dawns were colder now. Colder, but still well worth it. Her eyes had adjusted to the predawn dimness, and Connie walked well and surely eastward over the face of the plain. Already she knew this area, every dip and swell, the place where the ground suddenly became stonier, the patch of little dry-leaved bushes whose tiny twigs clawed at her legs as she walked through them. Her feet had become toughened, so that only the most determined thorn could get through her callused soles. She walked steadily, letting her body’s efforts warm her, heading toward the spot where she liked to meet the dawn.

  It was getting easier not to think all the time. After all those years spent worrying and thinking, chewing every moment of her existence in a desperate attempt to force it to make sense, she had learned how to stop thinking and just be. Finding peace just by being Human, by accepting the day-by-day aspect of her future. Nothing would be sure. But nothing would be impossible.

  At first the prospect of being awake the rest of her life had frightened her. It shortened her span so much. Without ever consciously planning it, she had made Waitsleep her clutch at immortality. What ancient women had once tried to do by having children, to assure that some part of themselves would continue into the future, she had tried to do by hyphenating her life, living it only in tiny miserly snatches that never gave her time to taste anything. Now that was taken from her, and she had found that the true way to extend her life was to simply be conscious of it, every passing moment, not by planning ahead or worrying about what came next, but simply by experiencing it.

  To what purpose? That had been her next panic attack. John had been so full of purposes that it daunted her. Gathering specimens, attempting to repair the shuttle, monitoring the screens and radios in case some message came from somewhere. And then Raef had come, to raise and dash all his hopes in one insane hour. Well, now he had Raef to talk to and care for. But when Raef was gone, what would he do?

  “He’ll have me. And I’ll have him.” She said the words aloud, tasted the inherent stillness and burden of them. And still she was glad he had come to her, that night, and every night since then. Still she was glad they could touch, could mate even if in the midst of their passions she could not forget that the act was devoid of any lasting significance, that the closeness they strained toward was momentary and would never be expressed in a child.

  She thought of what John had told her concerning Earth Affirmed’s secret colony attempts. Women there had actually conceived. She wondered how long they had lived without the growth suppressants and aging retardants before that had happened. She would have years ahead of her in which her body might reawaken to a more natural cycle. For a few moments she tempted herself to hope as she hiked along. Then her more pragmatic side reminded herself that any eggs her body might ever release were already well over a hundred years old due to her Waitsleep sojourns, as were the sperm John released into her. She forced herself to realize how minute the chance that such could join and produce a viable child, let alone that her body could bear one to full term. And if they did, then what would become of it? Would it outlive her and John, to wander the Earth alone, the very last Human of all?

  No. She was resigned to it now. The purpose of their mating was not to ensure the continuance of their species, but only for themselves. We come together, she thought, like the day and the night, merging briefly into one, but maintaining our separateness. The simplicity of it filled her with a sort of awe. This we do, not even because it is good and healthy for us, but for the joy of it. For the now of being one.

  It all came back to purpose. And she had none. None save living and being a part of it all. Taking and giving, without worrying if traces of her passage were left or not. She would never be able to measure the worth of her day in accomplished tasks again. All purpose was so artificial and tiny when balanced against being. Sometimes, when she stood still, she thought she could feel it pulsing through her with the blood that her heart pumped. She wanted to be able to express to John that current that joined her to the Earth, with the air that flowed into her lungs and the moisture that evaporated from her skin. Being part of it is enough, she wanted to tell him. When we are joined and are part of each other, that is enough.

  She let the thoughts fade out of her mind and kept walking. She moved up a slight grade. Soon she would come to where it softly peaked. It was no ridge, no more than a higher swell in the prairie’s constant undulation. But from the top, she would be able to look down to a distant horizon and watch the sun rise over it. Every dawn she came here for this.

  Myths and rituals. She was consciously aware of how she was leaning toward them, of how she imposed them on her days. She had decided it was good. It felt right to her, and anymore, that was as good a justification of any. So she would greet the sun each dawn, and visit the stream for water every day, and clasp maleness within her every night. She smiled into the predawn greyness, waiting for the sun.

  Raef came awake again. Again and again and again. He seemed he never really slept anymore. Maybe all the years inside Evangeline had robbed him of the trick of sleep, maybe he could no longer really do it. He felt like a cork on a heavy net, that bobs out of sight in the swell, but rises again to the surface when the wave is past. He dipped into unconsciousness and up again, and the unconsciousness might have been sleep, or something else.

  But now he was awake. Evangeline’s voice had awakened him, Evangeline, using Mother’s voice, but he knew it was her, calling out to him, “I’m coming, I’m coming,” so that he almost expected to hear foot treads on a carpeted staircase, smell the familiar smell of hair spray mixed with diner grease that was his mom’s smell when she came home from work.

  It didn’t come, and he opened his eyes. Shuttle. The walls were greening, moss or slime mold or something was gently greening the interior walls, fuzzing them here, slicking them there. The rotting rich smell of a greenhouse was around him, and he recognized that that was where the warmth inside the shuttle was coming from. He was as snug as a bug in a compost heap. He thought of just staying there in the lounger and dying, and rotting down right along with the rest of the shuttle. Make a greener spot on the plain’s brown face. Not a bad destiny.

  But no. Not with Evangeline’s voice still ringing in his ears.

  He sat up slowly, gripping the arms of the lounger to pull himself up. It must have taken him longer than he thought, because suddenly John was beside him, saying, “Need help, Raef?”

  “Nope.” He sat breathing a minute. The one arm was still almost useless, but his leg had almost come back. He could thud and drag along on it if he had to, and he had a feeling that he needed to now. “I’m going outside.” He swung his feet carefully over the side of the lounger.

  John didn’t argue. Just, “Why?”

  “Give me some water, will you? My cup’s around here somewhere.” And while John found the cup and filled it, he said, “When I was a kid, we lived for a while in a house in a bad neighborhood; it was right on the edge of the industrial district. Trains went through at night, just a few blocks from the place. Most of the people in the neighborhood only lived there because they had to, uh, it was the only place they could afford. Packs of kids gathered on the corner at night, and there was a crackhouse that had been busted and condemned, and one night the kids burned it down. Anyway. It was that kind of a place. No one there was much of anything.”

  John
gave him the water. Raef knew that he barely understood any of his reminiscences, but he always nodded and listened. Good kid. He drank, set the cup carefully down on the lounger arm.

  “Where’s Connie?” Raef asked suddenly.

  “Outside, probably. She likes dawn, even when it’s cold. Look, Raef, why don’t you lie back and take it easy for a while? I’ll help you go outside later in the day, when it’s warmer.”

  Raef shook his head and cleared his throat. “There was this real old black lady, lived next door to us. Real old. But sometimes in summers she’d still come outside and try to work in her garden. And every day, no matter what, rain or shine or snow, she’d get up real early and go out and look up at the sky. I asked her why, one time, and she told me she knew the end of the world was coming, and that when it came, Jesus was going to come out of the sky on a big white horse and carry her away.”

  Raef pushed out of the lounger. It was only a couple of inches to the floor. There. Take a deep breath and stand up. John made as if to help him but Raef waved him aside. “I’m gonna go outside and look for Jesus,” he said, and then laughed wildly at the consternation on John’s face.

  He set out down the companionway, going from grip to grip while John fluttered and clucked behind him. Briefly he wished for weightlessness, to be able to rung down this aisle and then fling himself out into space. Then he decided it was good, really, to die on Earth and be able to rot back into being a part of something.

  Here was the door, blowing brisk blue air in at him, and he stood in it, just breathing it, feeling the sweat chill on his body. The ladder down looked very long. He maneuvered his body around until his back was to the opening, and went down the ladder, first his good foot, then bad foot to the same step, then good foot down while his bad leg wobbled and he tried to hold most of his weight on his hand. He’d intended to count the steps, but found that anything more than eight might just as well be infinite. He went down them forever.