by Hugh Howey
That would have been a gift.
But the old visitors had not come again. And these new aliens were not there to share or learn, but to take.
* * *
Both Hain’s larynx and the small bellows-like structures on the sides of her neck were vestigial, all but superseded by the evolutionary development of other structures in her progenitors’ throats. She could understand Mensententia as well as any civilized person in the universe, but she was unable to speak it at anything above a whisper.
Among her many inventions was an implant that took in air through an opening she had incised into her neck and forced it through her rudimentary larynx. The device was crude but functional, and it was in place. She had thought it would undergo many more revisions, and that she would have many more practice sessions using it, before she would ever have the opportunity to use it among those with lungs. But it would have to do.
As she watched the newcomers casually enter and exit their vehicle, she felt something unusual stirring in her. She had long been planning to construct a ship of her own. She’d already explored every continent of this world, and she ached to leave it, to explore new ones, to learn new technologies, and to interact with others in the old ways that were common in the time before the Mother embraced transcendence.
She wasn’t supposed to want to leave. She was supposed to be content with her place on this world. But Hain wanted more.
The aliens’ ship was so much larger than anything she could hope to create. It represented hundreds, possibly thousands of years of work. Inside, there was sure to be technology on a scale not seen since the Mother’s most distant and watery memories were reality. To have that kind of functional technology at her fingertips, instead of spending her time endlessly repairing or painstakingly building anew—the very idea made her fingers curl.
At first she didn’t comprehend what she was feeling. She didn’t experience much in the way of emotion. And this was a strange mixture of longing and excitement, not unlike that which she felt in the days before she broke free from the Mother. Eventually she deduced what this uncomfortable feeling was. She coveted their vehicle.
She should make contact and ask them for… what? Passage? Where would she go? She had little knowledge of anything outside this sphere. Ask for some form of employment—did such paradigms still exist? Did she possess any knowledge or skill they might want or need? It seemed unlikely.
Perhaps she needn’t ask at all. The ship was huge. If she was very clever, she might be able to stow away undetected. That idea appealed to her more than it should have. After all, she wanted to continue to live in the old way, free. Leaving this world and exploring the stars would mean interacting with other individuals. It was perplexing. She didn’t understand her own reluctance any more than her wanderlust.
She had long thought that the radiation of the old sun might have altered her DNA, made her into a kind of seed to take their civilization to a safer place, a new world with a young sun, where her people could prosper again when this one was gone. The Mother couldn’t do such a thing. She was fixed in her place. But perhaps Hain could be a new Mother, if she could stop moving and put down roots. This was the way of the oldest knowledge, the kernel at the center of what they were.
In the distant past, greenwood nymphs had lived in great communities with other species. They had formed complex relationships, had worked together, had shared their lives and gone to the stars with them, taking the Mother to new worlds.
Why was Hain reluctant to attempt these kinds of social bonds now? This, too, elicited a new sensation she didn’t enjoy. After much introspection, she was able to name it: fear.
Hain did not like fear.
She had maintained homeostasis for a very long time, stored a good deal of starch over the years, achieved a mass that was unusually large for a nymph. She could manage on starch stores alone for a long time, but it would be far better if she had access to appropriate light spectra. It seemed prudent to plan ahead in case hardship should strike.
Were there others like her, out there, somewhere among the stars? Would her anatomy be familiar to the strangers, or a curiosity? Would they be capable of meeting her needs? Was it safe to leave her well-being to their mercy? She didn’t want to have planned and yearned for freedom this long, only to lose not only her life, but also any chance at a transcendent afterlife.
* * *
Hain had to know more. At dawn the next day she crouched in the undergrowth, a bag of tools slung over one shoulder, and watched the aliens set off. When they were well out of sight, she crept up to the ship’s portal. Her eyesight was optimal. She’d watched them come and go for days now, and had easily memorized the complex code they keyed into the panel next to the portal.
Her energy was very high. The early morning sunlight was weak due to the impending change of season, but she was warm despite the swirling rush of changing winds and nearly vibrating with excitement.
She slipped a fingertip into the slot and flipped the small door open, revealing the small compartment that contained the keypad. She stood there, staring at the symbols stamped onto the buttons. They were in Mensententia, so they weren’t unfamiliar. Her dual-chambered heart fluttered in her trunk, pumping fluid rapidly through the xylem and phloem of her body. She decisively punched in the code in the same way she’d observed the aliens entering it—in the same order and at the same rate of speed.
Her stomata pulsed, releasing ozone and some water vapor. Standing in full morning sun, she was cycling CO2 into O3 at a dizzying rate. The chemoreceptors in her skin detected the sharp spike of the gas that indicated her body was under stress, but she barely registered it. Her body knew the risks as well as her mind.
There was a loud click, then the portal bounced inward a few finger widths and came to rest. She hadn’t needed her tools after all.
Her eyes darted around the glade, which was still empty. All around its edge, the dark foliage of the Mother shielded her from the eyes of the aliens. She wondered what the Mother must be thinking as she pushed open the heavy door and slid inside, sideways, then allowed the door to shut behind her with a muffled clank. It was unlikely that the voices of the Mother were happy. The Mother wanted all her children to come to her, to root. But that thought was quickly gone. This new place was so foreign. Hain’s senses blazed with information.
She was in a small chamber, dimly lit—an airlock, she realized. Directly in front of her was another portal, standing open and leading to a larger interior room. Lights came on all around her. She blinked and her eyes adjusted. She slowly set down the bag of tools.
Dazzling technology surrounded her. Multi-colored lights blinked. Blank screens covered the walls. She trembled. This was brilliantly real, so unlike the Mother’s faded memories of places like it.
Hain stumbled forward in a daze. A screen lit up. She turned to it. It prompted her in the telescoping three-dimensional Mensententic symbol for “ready.”
She jabbed the side of her neck to trigger the air-flow device, then spoke, creaking out a command that should bring up a search prompt: “Qui-ssssssss-tohhhhh.”
The computer didn’t react. She tried again, poking the external elements of the device to turn up the air volume, forcing precision through unfamiliar lips. She got no response. Either it couldn’t hear her meager voice, or it only responded to authorized individuals.
She frowned and studied the controls, forgetting the air hissing through her parted lips. There should be more than one way to access information. She tentatively tapped the screen. Nothing happened. She tapped it again, a little harder, and this time a small portion of her flesh touched the screen, rather than the corky lichen that grew over the tops of her hands. The screen flashed and a menu came up. So, it was capacitive, rather than pressure-sensitive. With irritation, Hain silenced the air-flow device.
She took a few moments to absorb how the system was structured. She was relieved to see that the symbology of the language hadn’t changed d
ramatically since the Mother’s time and that the interface was fairly intuitive. Soon she was navigating with ease, bypassing information about who owned the ship, the crew, the cargo, their mission, and went straight to the details of structure and propulsion. She needed to know if there had been advancements in drive technology since the Mother withdrew from galactic society—and she needed to look at current star maps.
There was something strange here. All of the navigation controls were routed to a central station that wasn’t on the bridge. Hain backed out of the schematics and entered a search query, her fingers hovering over the screen and pecking at each symbol, one at a time. There was so much she wanted to know and so little time.
It was tempting to just take one of the screens. It was a lovely, compact piece of tech. Nothing like it had survived from the old times. She’d always wanted to recreate something like it, but there would be so many steps, and there was always something more pressing.
And these aliens had so many of them. Surely they didn’t need them all—with so many, there must be redundancies. So tempting. Hain eyed her bag of tools near the portal.
Ah! There. The answer. They still used wormhole technology as well as warp-drive ships, though the latter had fallen out of favor. It seemed there had been a new discovery: a sentient species that somehow enabled access to wormhole travel without the use of the costly, temperamental drives that had previously been necessary. A few individuals of this new species had been sold on the black market for breeding, and now nearly every space-faring vehicle had one, except for short-range transports.
Hain felt frustrated. She had no way of obtaining one of these creatures for her own ship, though it would be many years before the need would arise. If she continued on her own, she’d have to use the old technology. That was fine, of course, just not optimal. Hain liked for things to be optimal.
She knew that the urgency she felt was really only impatience. There were no limits on her time. She could do it on her own, without depending on strangers.
But an old worry came back—that she really didn’t have forever, that eventually it wouldn’t matter how long she lived. Not if her mind unraveled.
She squashed that thought and did some arithmetic. With the old-fashioned warp propulsion system she was building, the nearest inhabited system was two hundred and seven solar years away. With the use of one of these mysterious creatures, it would be a week away, at most. Possibly less. The difference was comical.
Another thought struck her. The entire universe was open to these aliens. What were they doing here? Her eyes unfocused as she thought about all of this, her brain buzzing with possibilities.
A tiny beeping sound caught her attention and jolted her back to the present. The screen she’d been using had gone blank, except for three words:
“Who are you?”
Hain froze. The sharp stink of ozone filled the air.
She had thought the ship was empty. She’d counted the individuals every time they’d left the ship. They were all accounted for… weren’t they? Was there someone who had stayed behind?
She stared at the screen, torn between answering and lunging for the portal. It wasn’t a hostile question, necessarily. She might not be in any danger.
Three more words popped up on the screen. “I am Do’Vela.”
Volunteering information… that wasn’t antagonistic, Hain thought.
Hain touched the screen to create her own message. “I am Hain.”
The response was immediate. “I can’t feel you.”
Hain didn’t know what that meant. The alien wasn’t in the same room with her, wasn’t touching her. Of course it couldn’t feel her. What was it after? She couldn’t think of anything to say in reply.
After a moment, the display changed to show a two-color schematic of the ship. A series of linked corridors and rooms were marked green. Hain didn’t understand. Was there something special about those rooms and corridors? Something the alien wanted her to see?
She retraced her steps and peered out through the crack that remained in the entrance portal. Wind whistled through the opening—a strange, mournful sound. No one was outside except the Mother and some noisy birds. It was mid-afternoon. She had been there longer than she had realized, but she would probably still be safe for some time. Each day the aliens had stayed away until nightfall was imminent.
When Hain returned to the screen, new words had appeared: “Come to me.” And there was a black dot on the schematic, tracing its way from Hain’s location, along the green-marked sequence of passages, to its terminus near the center of the ship. Suddenly, it dawned on her that the alien was asking her to walk the path it had laid out on the screen.
This time she didn’t hesitate. She was intensely curious. She knew it was a risk to go deeper into the ship. It was probably wiser to leave and come back the next day. That would give her time to think, to process it all. But she sensed that the aliens would probably move on soon. Her opportunities were dwindling. It was worth some risk.
She cautiously walked the route that she’d seen on the screen. The chemoreceptors in her skin were nearly overwhelmed by wave after wave of organic molecules of foreign origin. This corridor had been traversed by many species of people over a long period of time—that was clear.
She came to the end of the route and stepped into another large, empty chamber. As in the first one, there was technology everywhere she looked. And all of the screens were blank, except for one. When Hain stepped closer, she could see that it repeated the words she’d seen before: “I am Do’Vela.”
But where was Do’Vela? There wasn’t anyone here. The chamber stank of fetid, brackish water, reminiscent of a marsh.
Hain tapped into the screen: “Where is Do’Vela?”
She noticed a flicker of movement beside the screen. What she had assumed was part of a wall was actually a transparent material. Someone on the other side was wiping at it, ineffectually attempting to clean away a dark blotchy film from the partition. Hain could see movement through the haze, but little else.
The screen said, “Do’Vela is here. I am here.”
Hain was thoroughly confused. She reached out a hand to wipe at the glass from her side, but it was relatively clean. She couldn’t fathom why Do’Vela didn’t just open a door and come through. Was the alien imprisoned behind the glass?
Do’Vela stopped wiping.
Hain glanced at the screen. Now it said, “Pull the handle above, so that I may see you.”
Just above the screen, Hain could see a brightly colored handle, next to a symbol for “open.” Hain knew it was foolish. She was probably naïve—and definitely too inquisitive—but she reached up, grasped it, and pulled down with all her strength.
She jumped back with dismay. The entire chamber rumbled as the transparent wall moved forward on a track built into the floor with a groaning sound and ominous clacks. The mechanics were neither well constructed nor properly maintained. That made Hain uneasy. Could she trust anyone or anything that did not set the same standards of quality control that she set for herself?
Hain worried that the sound and vibration might carry outside. Perhaps she should leave. She felt a heavy feeling that she didn’t understand, holding her in the spot where she stood. Her heart beat very fast and she didn’t know why she felt so strange.
When the object stopped its forward motion, it proved to be a cube, slightly taller than she was. The top of it lifted slightly and flipped back upon itself, folding up and sliding back in pleats, water sheeting off the panels as they moved.
A droplet struck Hain in the face. She didn’t react. She just watched, dumbfounded. She’d never been so surprised.
A pale, slim arm came up over the top of what she now realized was a tank filled with water. The arm was flexible in all directions, it seemed, and was studded with small circular discs, very similar in design to some of the lichen she wore on her own body—each bearing a depressed central point with radiating lines. She didn�
�t think these were symbionts or ornamentation, but a part of the creature.
Another arm, then another, and another, emerged from the tank. Water splashed and ran over the sides. How many arms could it have? There was a beep from the screen. Hain turned. Now the screen said, “Come closer.”
As Hain moved closer she could see, just over her head, an immense eye, proportionally much larger than her own, dark and luminous, peeking over the top of the tank. The creature was pale white, almost translucent—Hain could see traces of Do’Vela’s inner workings through the thin skin. She glanced around the chamber for something to stand on, but there was nothing near to hand. One of the individual’s arms reached out to touch her, but the span was slightly too far.
Hain prodded her neck to turn on her crude device, struggled again to coax words from her frozen, inadequate throat.
The screen next to the tank beeped again. Now it said, “I don’t communicate that way. Touch me.”
Hain sidestepped to the flat display and entered, “You only communicate electronically?”
The reply was swift. “No. Touch me. I cannot feel you.”
Hain didn’t know what compelled her to move forward. Later, she would count herself lucky that Do’Vela hadn’t pulled her into the filthy tank and devoured her.
She stretched her hand out to meet the curling arm. Upon the first tentative contact, she felt something thrilling, like electricity, pass between them. Hain’s eyes widened. Do’Vela’s arm twined around hers, pulling Hain closer to the tank.
Hain staggered forward, not reluctant to get closer, but dumbstruck. Salt water ran down her arm. Her skin’s chemoreceptors registered an excess of toxic impurities and high concentrations of microorganisms. But she wasn’t consciously thinking about that, because, as the surface contact between Hain and Do’Vela grew, so, too, grew an awareness.
Hain’s mouth fell open, the air-stream from her forgotten implant twirling the fern fronds that fell forward from the top of her head.
Do’Vela was like the Mother.