Orphans of Earth

by Sean Williams

  “Wait,” Frank the Ax said suddenly. “What’s there, anyway? I mean, why the need to leave here?”

  “That’s just my mistrusting nature,” said the Praxis. “I’m sure you understand.”

  Axford laughed gently. “See you in ten hours.”

  Alander sensed rather than heard the line to Axford close. A moment later, before he even had the chance to feel uneasy about being separated from the ex-general for so long, the alien’s face suddenly vanished. Then, abruptly, with a violent, sucking wrench, his mind was snuffed out like a match dropped into a whirlpool.

  2.1.2

  For a moment or two following the dream; Alander found he couldn’t move. The dream of his mother held him suffocatingly close. It was strange; he hadn’t thought of her for years. She had died in a car accident when he was a child, along with his unborn sister. His original had spared him any memories of the accident and the nightmares that had followed, but just for an instant, among the blood and gore in the belly of the Yuhl vessel, he thought he had glimpsed his sister’s face. Her eyes had been shut, her lips slightly parted, as though reaching for that first breath that would never come.

  He opened his eyes to find himself lying in a hollow like the crook of an elbow, half submerged in clear fluid. It was warm and slightly sticky.

  A shudder of revulsion ran through him as he stood up and tried to wipe the slime from his skin. He was naked and found the substance sluiced easily away beneath his hands. Flicking the last droplets from his body, Alander stepped away from the pool he’d been lying in. There were no lights about the area, yet somehow he was able to see quite clearly. Given his surroundings, that in itself wasn’t necessarily a good thing. All around him—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—was the reddish pink hue of the monster’s flesh. Soft, wet, and veined with blue, it heaved rhythmically like the sides of some immense whale.

  And the smell...

  Two intestine-like tubes, one to his right, the other off to his left, led from the fleshy cradle in which he had woken. He stood between them for a moment, running his hand across his scalp as he considered his options. The veined, undulating surface around him pulsed as though he was caught in a gigantic bowel. Neither way looked particularly appealing.

  He froze suddenly at the unfamiliar roughness under his fingers. Hair?

  He felt again to check. Sure enough, there was stubble on his head.

  “My God,” he mumbled, slowly checking out the rest of his body: arms, legs, belly, face, groin...

  It was real. It was all real. The vat-grown android shell was growing hair! His body was—he was...

  “What is this?” he asked aloud.

  “Are you not satisfied?”

  The voice of the Praxis issued from all around him—or possibly from inside himself. He couldn’t tell which.

  “It’s not that. I just...” He ran the flat of one hand along his upper arm, feeling the firmness of the muscles there. He seemed smaller but so much more substantial. “What have you done to me?”

  “I have remade you,” said the alien. “I have remade you in your own image.”

  He was touching skin that was precisely the right color and texture, not the olive smoothness he was used to. And with that came another realization.

  “My I-suit?” he said, patting his body to confirm its absence. “What have you done with my I-suit?”

  “Your personal effects are waiting for you outside,” said the Praxis. “They will be returned shortly. But first I want you to appreciate this moment of vulnerability for what it is. You are what you are made of, Peter. As a computer program dictated by rules of logic and grammar, no matter how much you dressed it up, you were never anything more than dead electrons. As creatures of flesh and tissue, however, you dance at the whim of biological uncertainty.” It paused long enough for the flesh around him to pulse half a dozen times. Then: “Welcome back to the real world, Peter.”

  Alander continued to examine his body as best he could. It wasn’t the same as the one he had known on Earth, before engram activation. This body was in its healthy thirties and lacked none of the added extras the artificial body had enjoyed. He could feel implanted capacities lying dormant at the edge of his consciousness. There was no feeling of breathlessness or imbalance he might have expected from his alien environment. But most of all...

  He took a deep breath. Yes. Most of all, there was still the disturbing feeling of fragility underlying everything, as though his mind was a house of cards the slightest of breezes might knock down. That feeling had ebbed in recent weeks—his anger at Caryl Hatzis flared briefly at that thought—but it was always there. And it was still there, despite his new home. Perhaps it would always be part of him: the new him, the one created by UNESSPRO and sent out to the stars.

  Still, what the Praxis had done, if the alien was indeed telling the truth, was impressive. Not only had it ingested his old body and rebuilt his mind in a virtual world, but it had then rebuilt that body a different way and returned him to it.

  I doubt even Vincula technology could, have done that, he mused.

  “In the long run,” said the Praxis, “I believe you will find this body more beneficial than the one you were using. New times call for new beginnings, after all.”

  Alander nodded as he continued to look himself over—as though he were examining a new suit. “Thank you,” he said finally. “I think.”

  “I trust you will see this act for what it is.”

  Alander frowned (and noted that even the smallest expressions felt different with his new skin). “What do you mean?”

  “I have provided this service freely,” explained the Praxis. “As a gesture of goodwill between our species.”

  “And because you happen to have devoured my old body,” said Alander. “Let’s not forget that.”

  The Praxis emitted another of its disturbingly humanlike chuckles. “If you walk some distance to your left,” it said, “you will find an exit.”

  Alander did as he was told, his naked feet recoiling slightly from the moist and spongy surface. He forced himself not to be squeamish. This was, after all, probably nothing but the alien version of a bioreactor. His old body had slid in a shroud out of a machine the size of an old family sedan designed to build everything from paper plates to people. There was nothing organic about the process. At least this way the experience of rebirth had a genuinely visceral component.

  He passed another of the fluid-filled hollows like the one in which he had awoken, and was surprised to see another body lying there. It was a Yuhl, curled up with its great, triangular thighs pressed hard against its chest. Its eyes were shut, and the lines on its yellow and black face were set in a mask of random asymmetry, but Alander thought he recognized it.

  “Ueh?” he said incredulously.

  The alien’s eyes snapped open, and it sprang upright in one lightning-fast motion. Both hands came out, pushing with all the strength of those mighty legs behind them, and shoved Alander away. Unbalanced by the low gravity, Alander let himself take the tumble, rolling as he did so.

  “No, wait!” he called out, clambering to get to his feet again. The combination of the new body and the springy surface made it difficult, but he finally managed to get upright.

  The Yuhl faced him squarely, eyes blinking black-white, black-white.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he insisted, trying to mollify the alien. Although its arms were dangling inoffensively at its side, Alander’s inability to read the alien’s expressions made it impossible to determine if Ueh was angry or not. “I don’t mean you any harm, I promise.”

  The Yuhl’s head seemed to retreat on its neck, then it fluted a dissonant reply.

  “He says that he is sorry, too,” said the Praxis. “He regrets having used force to fend you off.”

  The alien ran both hands over its smooth, leathery scalp and blinked several times in quick succession. Naked, Alander could see every aspect of its anatomy in perfect relief; its musculat
ure was ropy and clearly defined around its chest and limbs but hidden behind layers of fat around its torso. There were none of the strange flanges that adorned the conjugator’s body, but there were strips of darker discoloration across its skin, like primitive body paint or less-defined examples of the pigment on its face. Its genitals were mostly retracted, but he could clearly see the petal-like tips of its double penis between its legs. The Praxis had referred to Ueh as a male, but Alander still suspected that issue of gender among the Yuhl was more complicated than humans took for granted.

  Alander wondered if Ueh was as curious about his body as he was about the alien’s. In their long travels, the Yuhl might have encountered many alien species, in many different forms, so their interest might have been long sated. Ueh seemed more interested in examining himself than Alander, touching his body in several places and staring at both sides of his hands for several seconds. He emitted several short phrases the Praxis didn’t translate.

  “You ate him, too?” he asked the Praxis.

  “It is my habit to keep a regular check on the mood of the people in my care,” it replied. “This way there can be no deceptions.”

  Ueh seemed to have finished examining his body. Whether he was satisfied by what he found, Alander couldn’t tell. The Yuhl emitted a string of sounds like two flautists playing the same phrase a semitone apart, and pointing at the same time at Alander.

  “He says that you should get moving,” supplied the Praxis. “As honored as he is to share this process with you, he knows that the conjugator will be waiting for you both out the other side.”

  “What’s he so worried about?”

  “Maintaining the proper display of obedience. The Yuhl belonged to a relatively primitive culture before the Ambivalence favored them and I tamed them. The more useful aspects of that culture remain today. The conjugators do my will primarily because that puts them in a position of dominance over their own kind. Ueh/Ellil is on the cusp of either advancement or further dishonor. The Yuhl have more in common with humans than you suspect.”

  Alander smiled at the implication. “If you think for a moment that we would allow ourselves to be tamed—”

  “I never said that was my intention,” the Praxis said.

  “No, you didn’t,” said Alander. “But is it your intention?”

  “Of course not.” There was almost a hint of indignation in the alien’s tone. “Now, I suggest you do as Ueh says before he becomes agitated.”

  Alander nodded and let the Yuhl guide him out of the insides of the Praxis. He wasn’t reassured by the alien’s assurance that humanity was safe from its manipulations. No deceptions, it had said. What was there, he thought, to keep it honest?

  * * *

  Getting out of the Praxis involved sliding feet-first through a series of well-lubricated sphincters and being messily deposited into a bath of acrid-smelling water. Attendants were on hand to clean them off. Alander gathered that this was a fairly regular procedure, one the Yuhl had become accustomed to over time. Certainly no one expressed surprise at Alander’s new appearance.

  Then it was to a dry antechamber where Alander found his belongings waiting for him, as promised. His shipsuit was bunched up on the floor, none the worse for wear after his old body’s ingestion. In the middle of it was the coiled-up chain from which hung Lucia’s disk. Bliss indeed, he thought. His I-suit rested beside them, collapsed into a translucent ball. When he touched it with his right hand, it spread up his arm and over his body with one liquid motion. Its presence was almost unnoticeable, but he was glad it was there. For all the Praxis’s rhetoric about coming to terms with the flesh of his new self, he felt much better knowing that he was safe again, even though the Spinner device hadn’t exactly protected him from the Praxis.

  He was also back in touch with the hole ship. The Praxis may have remade his old body, but it had, thankfully, left the implants he’d become used to in the android. While he didn’t know if the Yuhl had tried to merge AIs and take the data it contained, he supposed it didn’t make much difference, seeing that the Praxis had already picked through his brain and discovered everything there, anyway.

  He was looking forward to getting back to Silent Liquidity, where he could take a closer look at the new body he inhabited. But there was no way he was going to return to the others until he was absolutely certain he wasn’t carrying the seeds of their enslavement with him.

  “Has anyone tried to interfere with you?” he asked the ship’s AI. Even as he asked it, he knew that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to believe what it said in reply.

  “I have experienced no invasive attempts,” it said smoothly. “Overt or covert.”

  “And where are we?” He realized only then that he had no idea how long he had even been in the belly of the Praxis. “Are we still in transit?

  “We are in Beid system.”

  “Beid? I thought we were going to Rana in Becvar.”

  “We have already been there, Peter,” announced the Praxis, breaking into the link between him and the hole ship. “We stopped at Rana in Becvar long enough to drop a simple navigation buoy. Your friend will find the buoy when he arrives, and it will instruct him to come to Beid. If he is not here in six hours, then we will move on.”

  Alander sighed heavily. “This is going to make the man suspicious,” he said. “If you aren’t where you said you’d be, then he’s going to—”

  “We cannot take the risk of him surprising us,” the Praxis cut in softly.

  “Surprising you? How?”

  “He is an unknown quantity, Peter. I know from your memories that he has successfully attacked at least one of our scouts in his home system. And he is not above using the Ambivalence against us, should he deem it necessary.”

  “If he did, you could hardly complain,” said Alander. “He’d just be using your own tactics against you.”

  “You believe him uncritically, then,” the Praxis said evenly, “when he tells you it was us who destroyed your colonies, not him?”

  This caught Alander off guard. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that Axford might be lying. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. But even he could hear his own doubts creeping into his voice. “He has footage showing—”

  “Footage can be faked,” the Praxis pointed out.

  “But he has only the one hole ship,” he said with more conviction. “If he was raiding the gifts from our colonies and calling the Starfish to hide the evidence, where’s all the stuff he’s stolen?”

  The mighty alien paused meaningfully. “Where, indeed?”

  The conjugator entered the antechamber at that moment. It didn’t seem to concern him that Alander was still only half dressed. The hole ship translated his words into English while Alander picked at the disturbing thought the Praxis had planted in his head.

  “The Praxis has determined that you must meet with the Fit immediately,” said the conjugator, indicating the door through which he had entered. Alander hesitated, then walked through it. Ueh followed closely behind, with the conjugator bringing up the rear.

  “The Fit?” Alander asked, thinking: Now what? After his experience with the Praxis, he was wary of taking anything for granted. Once eaten, twice shy.

  “I have chosen that word from your language carefully,” said the Praxis. “It combines notions of connectedness as well as superior adaptation.”

  “The Fit are a sort of council, then,” he ventured. “The top Yuhl echelon?”

  “Crudely speaking, yes. Decisions that affect everyone should not be made in isolation, even by me,” said the Praxis sagely. “There has to be a chain of command, and that chain must be flexible. The Fit are the first link in that chain. The conjugators comprise another. The organic progression of information, misinformation, and disinformation enables Yuhl/Goel society to mimic a living system. I would not have it any other way. Totalitarianism reeks of those stale electrons, Peter.”

  Alander nodded: he could see that. “But why did we
have to come all this way to talk to them? Why couldn’t we have just stayed in Alsafi?”

  “Take a moment to look around you, Peter. It will explain many things.”

  Alander assumed the Praxis didn’t mean the empty, curving corridor through which they were walking. “Liquidity, give me an overview of the system we’re in.” A 3-D map appeared before him containing a complex mix of symbols. He probed deeper, ignoring the tug of disorientation as he walked. Beid was an F2II-III star with a rapid variability. Also called 38 omicron 1 Eridani, it wasn’t on the UNESSPRO lists because no oxygen or water signatures had been detected around it. Its solar system consisted of one medium-sized gas giant in a highly elliptical orbit, currently around the same distance as Mars was from Sol, plus two terrestrial worlds in the process of being knocked out of orbit by gravitational perturbations. The gas giant had no intact rings left, but there appeared to be an asteroid belt in close around the sun, where Silent Liquidity itself was stationed. The odd thing was that Alander wouldn’t have expected such a feature to remain in such a perturbed system—and asteroids didn’t normally move on their own.

  It was then that he realized what the Praxis had meant. The Mantissa was a planetoid-sized craft made of many thousands of individual hole ships. Orbiting Beid were, in turn, many thousands of such craft. What looked like an asteroid belt from a distance turned out, in fact, to be millions of hole ships in a chaotic yet contained swarm.

  “What is this?” he asked, awestruck. “The Yuhl migration fleet?”

  “This is the Mantissa.”

  “But—?”

  “The Mantissa is much more than the fragment that you encountered in Alsafi,” the Praxis explained. “Since the possible combinations of so many hole ships is almost infinite, the usual notions of independent vessels and the boundaries between them do not apply. The hole ships that comprised my bier this morning might by this evening be part of an exploratory mission to a far-flung system. The Mantissa as a whole is never entirely in one place.”