by Hank Davis
Anyway, I kept the balloon pinched off and then sloshed around the water and enzyme goop solution inside, mixing it. After a while, it started to make a solution with no lumps. That was the way Aleria liked it. Absolutely no lumps. I kicked off from the wall and floated over to Aleria’s globe. She was packed in there pretty good, but a couple of pseudopods were sticking out, drifting kind of lazily around. There was a holding strap attached to the globe especially for me, so I hooked in with a foot and kind of bent myself around the globe. I’d gotten really good at swimming in zero g. If there was zero g soccer, I was sure I’d be good enough to score goals.
I squeezed the conditioning solution into the top of the tank. It hung onto Aleria’s outer membrane the same way water clung to my skin. I spread it around. A little stream of snot-talk shot out from her and right by my face. I heard it splat, soft-like, into the ship wall.
“Wonderful,” said the wall speaker. “That’s it. Rub it in. Get me soft, dear.”
I remembered getting hugged by Mom. The hug I used the most was the big one she gave me when I was finally starting to get okay grades on my language art quizzes. I was kind of slow learning to read—I was still on second grade books when I was already in third grade—but then one day in fourth grade, it just seemed a lot easier. And Mom was this big reader—she always had a book around—and she wanted us to share that, liking books and all. We never really got a chance.
I used that hug a lot, though.
I spread on the rest of the conditioner. I reached into the tank and kind of kneaded her like a giant ball of Play-doh. She could squeeze up real tight, about the size of a basketball, when she wanted to.
“Careful, careful, child,” said the wall. “Not too much on the underside. I’ll turn blue.”
Aleria was kind of a clear color, but not see-through. She looked like gloppy Elmer’s glue if it had dark chunks floating around in it like Aleria’s organs and nodules and stuff did.
“Why will you turn blue, Aleria?” I asked,
“I do wish you’d call me Mother, as we discussed.”
“Why will you turn blue, Mother?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I never was much of a chemist. My specialty is scouting, as you know. But you humans and we Meebs do need oxygen in about the same amounts. That’s why I picked you out at the crèche, of course. You and I can share the same atmosphere.”
The crèche, I thought with a shudder. It was a collection station, staffed by Meeb robots. I only found that out later.
One day I went to sleep in my room. Mine was the one over the garage. It was farther from Mom and Da’s bedroom that Dustin’s was, but it was a little bigger than his. Mom and I painted it up with peace signs and flowers and stuff.
I dreamed about a bright light.
And when I woke up, I wasn’t in my room anymore. I was in a cage.
There were other people in there with me from all different parts of the world, like India and Australia and China and like that. Some were kids, some were adults. It was like this white room we couldn’t see the walls of, but we couldn’t get out of. I was the youngest.
What none of us knew what that we were in a Pet Mart. I mean, an alien Pet Mart.
I used to love going to Pet Mart. I really liked watching those cuddly looking chinchillas, and the cute little mice running around and around to nowhere in those wheels of theirs. I liked it when they grabbed the wheels and took a ride around and around for a few turns. It made you think that they weren’t completely stupid, and kind of knew what they were doing.
Or no. The crèche was not like the pet store. It was lots worse. Because I knew now what it meant to be picked out at the crèche. To be the one who gets selected by that floating glob outside the cage window.
Kind of like a pet store crossed with a grocery store. That was maybe the closest way of looking at it. Kind of, but not really.
The ones Aleria didn’t pick out of her trap got recycled, of course. Aleria was very big on a recycling.
I emptied the rest of the balloon then kicked over to the disposal. I stuck my hand into the blister orifice and let it suck away the used balloon skin. The reason the disposal blister didn’t suck me away was because of the mechs in my skin. They got pinged and identified me, my body, as “keep.” The disposal unit then asked the question it always asked.
“Space or recycle?”
“Recycle,” I answered.
And that was all there was to it. The blister didn’t care; it just needed the answer to follow its programming. The ship might be an artificial intelligence of some sort, but it sure wasn’t any kind of genius.
I pushed off and went back to Aleria. She was conditioned now. All her pseudopods were retracted which I knew meant she was waiting expectantly. It was time.
I stuck my hands into the globe, into the main opening, and stuck them into her, pushing into her gooey flesh. The outside of her dimpled for a ways, like the plastic wrap on those cases of water bottles did, then it gave away completely, and my hands and arms were within the milky glop that floated inside Aleria, that was Aleria.
A stream of her speech-mucus twisted past me. It hit the walls and got absorbed and translated.
“Aaah,” the wall speaker sighed. “That’s it. Deeper, deeper.”
I plunged in up to my shoulders. I felt the goo of her surround my arms. And then I felt the prickles where she broke the skin and where parts of her slid inside me.
She wasn’t just feeding on me, she was changing me. Changing me into more of her. One day, when the nodules she left inside me reached maturity, I would be “ripe,” and she would be able to absorb me completely. We would be one.
“My youth will be restored, darling, and your youth will last forever.”
She never told me exactly how the process worked. “I’m not a biologist, dear. I’m a scout,” was her only reply when I asked. But I knew a lot more about Meebs now that I’d been on the ship for a year and seen the videos. At least I thought it was a year I’d been here. I figured I was about the size of an eleven-year-old, even though there were no mirrors, and if there had been, I would have avoided them. I hadn’t seen myself in a long time. I was kind of afraid to look, afraid to see what the mechs had done to my face. My skin was as gray as my pajamas. But at least, with the mechs in it, it was kind of shiny.
I pushed into Aleria as deep as I could, because I knew if I didn’t, she would demand it of me anyway.
“Is that good, Mother?”
“You have no idea, dear. Replenishment is the greatest pleasure in life, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours, but I knew was maybe thirty minutes—two Sponge Bob episodes, Da used to say, when I asked how long that was—a deep sigh came from the wall speakers.
“Perfect. That will be all dear,” Aleria said.
I pulled out my arms. They came out coated in her milky interior fluid. I had towels, the ship made them for me, but I knew not to rub my arms off just yet. My skin was blistered, and the skin mechs needed time to fix what they could of the damage before I went to dry myself. The mechs never really did a great job. I thought that, like a lot of the stuff on Aleria’s ship, they were kind of stale or something like that. I knew my arms would be red and hurt for at least a light cycle.
When I first got on the ship, I used to call a light cycle a day, but pretty soon I figured out that they were exactly the same length every time. The light came from everywhere in the ship, and then didn’t. Nearly ten Earth hours on. A little over four off. I asked once, and Aleria explained this was the Meeb active-rest cycle. And when the lights went off, it became so pitch black I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face in the ship’s bridge or the recreation room or the waste room, which was where both Aleria and I went to the bathroom. It got sort of sucked dry and cleaned after we left. This was done with mech crawlies that looked like baby spiders, maybe. They clumped together while you were going, then swarmed the pla
ce after you left and carried off whatever.
Anyway, there was one place where the faintest of light remained during lights-out. This was in the supply room. There were observation portals there. Each one was about as big as the windows used to be in my bedroom, but they were roundish, kind of egg-shaped. They were shaped to fit a Meeb optical stalk. There were four windows around the supply room, and I could always see the stars through them. We were traveling faster than light, but it was still slow enough so the stars didn’t look like they were moving. I usually slept floating near one of those portals. I pretended that I knew the one that was facing Earth, and I would look out and pretend I could see the sun, even if it was only a pinprick in the dark. I knew this wasn’t true, that I didn’t know which one was the sun, but I could sort of fake my way to sleep that way.
So I let the mech work, and then I patted my arms and hands dry with an absorption towel, and was careful not to take off too much of my tenderized skin. Even though I was going easy with the towel, it still felt like I was rubbing sandpaper against myself. The towels were the same gray color as my pajamas, by the way, and not pretty the way Mom’s always were, with flowers on them and stuff. Everything in the ship was gray like that, and even I was now.
This time when I dried off the milk, something felt different. My skin wasn’t just blistered; it was changing shape, too. It was kind of crunchy-lumpy. And it looked thinner. In fact, I touched it with a finger and it popped like a pear skin. Something oozed out, but it wasn’t red like blood. It was white and looked like puss.
I felt the swollen nodes under my chin, the nodes in my neck. They were big and as tight as little nuts, like pecans or those hard, dark brown ones you could barely break with the nutcracker. I never knew what those kinds of nuts were called, and now I didn’t have anyone to ask.
Aleria had said this would happen, that all my lymph nodes would swell up more and more. That would mean my body’s defenses were getting taken over, and would start to tag the biological elements she implanted in me as “friend” instead of “enemy.” That was what was happening, I supposed.
While I was drying off and feeling my nodes and all that, Aleria was babbling away, the way she often did after a replenishing. Talk, talk, talk. Snot flying everywhere. She got nostalgic, too—you know, talking about the old days and all that. She talked a lot about the Meeb home system. The Meebs didn’t live on planet surfaces, but in a bunch of big space stations spread around their star’s biological sweet spot. That’s where we were headed at the moment, to one of those habitats, even though the trip was going to take another Earth year. We were one year into it. Which was another reason I figured I was eleven.
I could tell that Aleria was particularly relaxed today. She had fed well. And I guess she could feel that my resistance was really starting to break down.
“The clan will be so happy to meet you, my darling daughter,” Aleria said. She was glowing white in the tank now, about to ooze her way out and back to her usual spot near the main ship interaction console. “And I think they’ll be very pleased with the bounty I bring them from this journey. Also for the information. We’ll get a fine reward.”
Here was something I hadn’t heard from her before.
“The information?” I asked. “I don’t understand, Mother. What do you mean?”
“The knowledge of where the system is, of course, and what to expect when they get there.”
“Get where?”
“The systems where the new children are to be found, dear,” she replied. The wall speakers made it sound like she was sleepy, dreamy, the way I felt when I was drifting off to sleep all safe and sound and tucked in. It had been a long way since I felt that way.
“Why would the clan want to go there?”
“Why, to protect your kind, dear,” she said. “To absorb and protect. That’s what parents are for.”
“They’ll take children?”
“It’s better that way,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve had to absorb a full grown adult before, and it was an unpleasant process for both of us. Integrating those kinds of ingrained memories is difficult. So much resentment and anger to deal with in adults of a species.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Children are so much easier to handle,” she continued. “But not all species have children, you know. Juvenile and nymph forms, I mean. Only special ones. Like yours, my darling.”
And then it hit me. What she was. Her job. She’d told me over and over, but I hadn’t been listening, or it hadn’t, you know, registered.
She was a scout.
“Now darling, I need to get dried off and ready for my rest period,” Aleria said. “Come and wipe me down, there’s a dear.”
My jaw hurt. I had been grinding my teeth again.
“Yes, Mother dear,” I replied.
So I guess I was thinking about Dustin when I did it. I was thinking about the way she would send back more Meebs. I knew how many existed in the space stations of Aleria’s home system. I’d watched the videos. My troubles in third grade were behind me. I was a good student now. Anyway, it didn’t take a genius to do the math.
There were enough Meebs for every child on Earth, and then some.
Aleria was a scout. Scouts find the way. Then they go back and lead others on the same path. To the same destination.
A year to go, and then two years for a return trip. Those habitats were capable of faster than light travel. Imagine that: a whole city of a billion Meebs headed for Earth.
Dustin would be eleven when they arrived.
This would happen to him.
I floated over to the water maker-cone and planted my feet against the ship wall. I pulled on the end of the bump. The ship wall dimpled out at my touch. I pulled harder. The cone grew in length, became more a tube than a cone. It reeled out like a hose, flowing from the material of the wall itself. I needed it to be long enough to reach Aleria.
So I pulled it out farther and farther. I wrapped it around my elbow and a thumb, the way I’d seen Da roll up the extension cord for the leaf blower. The extension cord was orange. The hose was a light shade of gray. I missed colors.
When I had enough length, I pushed off. I let the water hose trail out behind me as I sailed across the room.
Aleria had flowed out of the globe and pushed off a way, like a couple of yard sticks away. She was beginning her after-feed stretch. I needed to catch her before she spread out to her full size. At the moment, she was about the size of one of those big rubbery exercise balls like Mom used to have. A Pilamies ball, or something like that.
Aleria extended a sensing stalk in time to notice what I was doing.
“Darling daughter, I said to bring a towel, not more water, now please—”
“Stop calling me that,” I said. My voice was sort of a growl and it surprised even me. I’d never made that mean a sound before. “I’m not your child, and you’re not my mother.”
I reached the end of my tether, the water tube. With a squeeze of my hands around the tube’s end—the end looked kind of a like the tip of an elephant trunk—I opened the spigot and let the water flow. There was back pressure behind it, and out the water came.
Water doesn’t flow in zero g the way it does in gravity. Even before Aleria took me, I knew about zero g. I had seen Youtube videos from space shuttles and the space station and stuff in science class at school. But the one thing I had never seen was what water does when it meets something floating in zero g.
It clings.
It jiggles like crazy, but it won’t come off.
You can’t shake it off. You can shake off a few droplets, but if there is enough of it, it isn’t going anywhere no matter what you do. Without something to absorb it and overcome that surface tension, water sticks like glue.
It sticks like frog egg glop does to frog eggs, the gunk that holds the eggs together in a big clump. All for one. One for all.
In the creek, or in some little kid’s water bottle.
> Living or dead.
For a second, it seemed like Aleria thought I was trying to do something nice for her, something extra. She paused there, floating, out of the globe and maybe a yard or two away from it, but not completely expanded yet. She let me bathe her. And then I bathed the other side of her. I bathed her all over.
And I kept the spigot open. It’s pretty simple. You squeeze the orifice and it relaxes some kind of stopper on the end.
And when she tried to move, to ooze outward, the water went with her.
I squeezed the spigot open, and then the bubble of water around her expanded. She was inside it, like a milky-white pit. It was jiggling around her, but it wouldn’t come off.
I remembered those frog eggs.
Oh, she struggled. She twisted and turned. On her own, all the squirming would have gotten her to a wall, certainly. If she’d been by herself in the ship, she would have had a scare, but even her random motion would probably have saved her, allowed her to intersect with a hard surface, an extended piece of the bridge pod, anything. And then one of her pseudopods would have been able to find a footing, pull herself free from the coating of water.
But I was here now.
I was careful and alert, like the teachers always wanted us to be during carpool pickup. I circled Aleria with the water hose. I used pressure from the water tube hose for flying around fast, and the strap holds the ship had grown for me all around the wall for anchoring myself when I needed to. The moment Aleria looked like she was drifting close to a wall, I sent a stream of water toward her to push her away. I hadn’t spent a year in zero g for nothing; I had a feel for how to do this now.
I kept her away from the pod walls, all of them. I held her away from saving herself.
Inside the ball of water, I saw the shooting snot, the little chemical speaking packets, dart out into the liquid. But they couldn’t escape. The water tension held them in. Her words of command couldn’t get to the ship wall and receive activation.