by Zara Zenia
"It's a bit plain," he said apologetically as he fastened it at her neck. "But it's better if you don't attract attention right now."
"Why not?" Amber asked. "What exactly is going on?"
"I'll explain everything," Atropos said, urging her into the elevator. "Please be patient."
Amber bit her lip, fighting the urge to demand answers now. She was only barely holding it together. She wasn't sure if this creature, this alien acting like the man she'd had been falling for, was helping or making it worse. He followed her into the elevator and she held her breath as it began to descend. The front of the elevator was glass and she watched with undisguised awe as they descended through the maze of balconies.
The plant life that grew rampant across the structures was even more lush and strange than she'd first thought. The flowers that grew everywhere were beautiful and alien, the size of dinner plates and in colors and shapes she'd never even imagined. The only things more spectacular were the aliens that flew among them, a dozen times more vibrant and wonderful.
"The gravity switch may be a bit disorienting," Atropos warned her as they neared the center of the sphere. "Just hold onto the handles."
He gestured to a shape like a door lever projecting from the wall. She took hold of it with a nervous frown, not a minute too soon.
It wasn't as abrupt as she'd feared it would be, the elevator slowing to make it less jarring. But it was still startling to suddenly feel her feet leave the floor. The handle swung slowly under grip, turning her upside down in the suddenly absent gravity. She couldn't help a laugh of confused delight as her hair floated in front of her face. Atropos moved with natural grace and ease in the air, turning to face what had been the floor as gravity slowly began to reassert itself, pulling them down toward what had been the ceiling. Amber shook her head in confusion as up became down, stumbling as her feet landed on the new floor.
"Holy cow," she muttered, head spinning.
"It can take some adjustment," Atropos said kindly. "Take your time."
"I just never thought I'd ever get to feel zero gravity," she said, more than a little awed. Atropos smiled.
"Then I think you are really going to like what I am going to show you next."
The doors of the elevator opened onto a lush indoor garden. Amber followed Atropos, wide-eyed and mystified as they stepped out into what appeared to be the bottom of the sphere. Balconies still rose all around them, but the bottom sliver of the sphere had been flattened into a circular space where the greenery that filled the entire ship congregated around a massive fountain. Abstract sculptures in white marble were scattered among the massive flowers. As Atropos led her toward them, Amber realized the statues were engraved with elaborate scenes of alien life.
"My people are called Lepidopterix," he explained. "Our home world is very, very far away from here. I have seen it only once."
"Why?" Amber asked, startled by the thought of being so far and so disconnected from Earth. Atropos gestured to one of the reliefs carved into the statue, which depicted a large alien pointing ahead, a thousand ships going forward from his wings.
"We are not sure," he explained. "The knowledge is lost. But some disaster drove us from the shores of our home. So we went out into the universe to find new worlds and new knowledge. But there were . . . difficulties."
He gestured to another carving, where two aliens held one another, heads bowed in sadness. Beneath them, other aliens lifted what looked like a large caterpillar from the body of another creature, vaguely canine in appearance.
"Exposure to stellar radiation rendered many of the colonizing fleet infertile," Atropos explained. "They turned to other means of reproduction to keep their populations viable. They devised a way to host a Lepidopteran zygote in the womb of another compatible species. It was destructive and inefficient at first, but the colonists had precious little other option."
Amber paled, looking at the body of the canine alien and beginning to worry she knew where this was going. Atropos moved on to another statue. The carving this time depicted stars falling toward a planet. The grand figure from before lay covered by his wings.
"We were on the edge of extinction," Atropos went on. "Our methods were too dangerous for the host body, fatal more often than not, and we were running out of livestock too fast. And then we found Earth. Planets bearing complex life are incredibly rare, but yours was flush with it. This was around two million years ago, you understand."
"Two million . . ." Amber's head spun at the implications of that number. "You mean, you've been coming to earth since the birth of my species?"
"Your entire genus, actually," Atropos corrected her. "There were many varieties of homo sapiens in those days, before your species, homo sapiens sapiens, evolved. At that point, you were less intelligent than other species of ape still existent today. We had no idea what you would become."
"Did you . . ." Amber was holding her aching head, distracted entirely from her situation by the revelations Atropos was revealing about her species' past. "Are you saying you made us? You influenced our evolution into an intelligent civilization?"
"Of course not," Atropos said at once. "You were on your way to this regardless. And we made an effort to have as little impact as possible. Our early experiments may have contributed to the decline of a few convergent species of homo sapiens, but in general, we have had as little impact as possible."
"So, what, you kidnapped these early hominids," Amber asked, confused and overwhelmed, "and you, what? Laid your eggs in them?"
"Nothing so crude," Atropos said with a frown. "The early days were messy, yes, but we were always as humane as possible, even on that first encounter. The hosts were sedated upon retrieval and spent the entire incubation asleep. Those who survived were deposited back on Earth exactly where they'd been taken, healthy and unharmed and with no memory of the incident. And with our brood of healthy young, we returned to the home world."
He gestured again to the statue where the planet they had left was shown again, this time bare of any marking but a symbol like a wide, upside-down V.
"Whatever disaster had driven us from the home world had ended," he said. "But there was no life left there. We began the difficult process of rebuilding and soon found our population dwindling once more. We returned to Earth to birth a new generation. And soon, the migratory tradition began to take shape."
He indicated another carving, this one showing a group of triumphant aliens flying between two planets.
"The journey from Earth to our home world and back takes about seventy years," he went on. "Our technology has improved enough that we need only hold the host for a week, and the process is almost never fatal anymore. In many cases, we return the humans in better health than they were when we chose them. The young pupate and mature during the journey. By the time they reach home world, they are old enough to join the next flight out, to pass their genes on to the next generation."
"Wait," Amber said, breathing a little hard as she tried to process all of this. "But the infertility from the radiation should have only affected the first few generations. Why haven't you gone back to traditional procreation?"
Atropos looked slightly uncomfortable, looking away.
"We cannot," he replied. "It has been two million years. Almost 30,000 generations of my people. I cannot say why we did not return to the old way in the beginning. Perhaps we were afraid, or there were other complications. But by now, it has been too long. We have lost the ability to reproduce any other way."
"Lost?" Amber stared at him, baffled. "What do you mean you can't say? What are all these details you don't know? You have this ship, all this advanced technology, but you can't invent an artificial womb? Either you're lying to me or there is something seriously wrong here!"
Atropos looked away, troubled, and his wings fluttered in agitation.
"Let me show you something first," he said. "Please, it's just this way."
Amber, frustrated but not sure what else to do, f
ollowed him. She couldn't reconcile this massive creature, calmly—almost proudly!—explaining how his species had been using hers as unwilling surrogates for millions of years, with the kind and gentle man she'd known on Earth.
He led her toward the enormous fountain, and she realized there was a ramp sloping down underneath it. He led her down beneath the garden, and her eyes widened as the entered the bottom curve of the sphere which was, it appeared, entirely made of glass. Or something sturdier, maybe, and crystalline. It's edges were rough and thick, casting iridescent rainbows. And beyond them, space sprawled out, infinite and beautiful.
Below them, the Earth spun, glorious and impossible, a brighter blue than Amber felt she could describe, a marble swirling with streaks of white cloud and shards of green like gold flake on an overpriced dessert. She fell to her knees on the glass, staring down at her home planet spinning like a Christmas ornament below her. The edges of her vision darkened as her heart hammered, her breath coming too quickly.
"I know how much you always wished you could go to space," Atropos said gently. "I know this is not exactly how you imagined it happening, but I hope this might at least make things a little better."
"I think I'm going to throw up," Amber replied, and then fainted instead.
Chapter 4
When she woke, she kept her eyes shut tight at first in the sincere hope that it would prove to have all been a dream. But she realized fairly quickly that the silk sheets she was lying in were not her own. She could hear the persistent rustle of wings not far away. She was still on the ship.
She opened her eyes slowly to take in her surroundings. She was lying in a broad round bed covered in the softest and most comfortable sheets she'd ever touched. The bed stood in the center of the balcony she'd woken on, dark except for a sliver of white light visible through a gap in the curtains. In that dim light, she could just see Atropos, silhouetted against the opening, standing perfectly still.
Slowly, she slid out of the bed. He didn't react to the soft sound. Curious, she moved closer, taking the opportunity to examine him more thoroughly. He was larger than most of the other aliens she'd seen. Taller, and broader in the shoulders. As he'd been when he was human, he was built like a brute, top-heavy and powerful.
The pattern of his wings was decidedly menacing with its dramatic skull pattern as well. Long, feathered antennae swept gracefully back from his forehead. His features under the strange charcoal gray-black color of his skin were not so different from when he'd been human, aside from the eyes. As she moved slowly around him, he still didn't react.
He stared into the gap between the curtains, unmoving except for the occasional slow beat of his wings, which seemed to move with his breathing. She frowned in confusion and slowly raised a hand to wave it in front of his eyes. He blinked and looked down at her, mildly startled.
"Oh," he said. "You're awake."
"Were you asleep standing up?" she asked. "With your eyes open?"
"I do not sleep," he replied with a small smile. "When we are tired, or very cold, or we have just eaten too much, we may become quiescent, but it is not true sleep."
"Weird," Amber declared, taking a step back.
"Do you feel any better?" he asked. "You surprised me, falling like that in the observatory."
"I was pretty overwhelmed," she admitted. "God, I still am. I'm in space, talking to an alien! I don't know. I think I'm probably handling it pretty well."
She laughed a little, manic with confusion, then shook her head, not wanting to let herself freak out again.
"I am very sorry this happened to you," Atropos said, a concerned frown on his face. "It should never have been allowed."
"And why was it?" Amber asked.
"That is . . . complicated." Atropos looked away in a gesture Amber was beginning to recognize as a sign that he wanted to avoid answering that. "You must be hungry. Let me get you something to eat."
"I'd really rather hear why it's so complicated," Amber insisted, but Atropos was already turning away from her, issuing an order to the computer in such quick shorthand that, though she was fairly certain it was in English, Amber could barely understand it. Light bloomed above them, illuminating the dim balcony room. The bed melted away in a flicker of light and was replaced by a white table, a small round wrought-iron one like those seen outside Parisian cafes.
"French again," Amber murmured as she sat on one of the delicate white stools that had appeared beside it. "Did they get baroque from you?"
"The other way around, actually," Atropos explained, sitting across from her. "We've taken a lot of inspiration from various human cultures over the years. This period was particularly popular among the flight I was born to. I still favor it."
As he sat, the surface of the table shimmered iridescently and plates appeared before both of them. Amber frowned down at the food curiously, which looked like various sliced fruits and herbs in some kind of syrup.
"Is this safe for me to eat?" she asked.
"Of course," Atropos said at once, already nibbling at his own. "It's nothing you haven't eaten all your life."
Amber took a cautious bite and recognized the peach for what it was.
"Did you guys get peaches from us too?" she asked, baffled. There were peaches, pears, and pomegranate seeds on her plate. The syrup they were drenched in was almost painfully sweet.
"That one actually came from us," Atropos replied. "In the early days, there was discussion of colonizing your planet, and it was seeded with some of our native plants, including the ancestor of the modern peach. The plan was ultimately abandoned for various reasons, but it's one of the only lasting ways we've truly affected your planet. One of our experiments to test the habitability of the planet for us is responsible for the butterflies and moths across your planet today."
"So you didn't build the pyramids," Amber said, fascinated despite herself. "But you did invent peaches and butterflies."
"It would seem so," Atropos said with a small smile. "Although, the plants originally left on your planet aren't much like what you have now. Two million years of cultivation have changed and diversified them quite dramatically. But most are still edible for us, and in general, we actually prefer the Earth domesticated varieties. I don't think our species was ever particularly good at agriculture."
Amber’s mind raced with confusion and a kind of giddy delight at what she was learning. She took another bite of her breakfast, discovering that peach and basil were actually a pretty delicious combination. But that syrup was entirely too sweet for her.
"How do you speak English anyway?" she asked. Atropos looked vaguely uncomfortable again.
"I learned it as part of my mission," he explained. "But everyone here speaks some variety of Human. Mostly Mandarin."
"Why?" Amber pushed. "What's your native language like?"
Atropos shifted uncomfortably.
"I don't know," he said at last. "I don't know it. No one does."
Amber's eyes widened in confusion.
"I don't understand," she said. "How could you not know your own language?"
"It was lost," he said, looking away. "Along with many other things. It has been a long time since the migrations began."
Amber was silent for a moment, waiting for him to continue. He frowned down at his plate, uncomfortable, for a long moment.
"We do not understand most of our own technology anymore," he confessed. "We know how to operate it, but not how it works, how to fix it, how to advance it. Most everything is automated. There is talk of greater education on the home world once we have left the flight, and that our culture and technology persist there, but among the migration flight, we are as children. It became easier to learn Human than to hang on to the scraps of our own language."
Amber leaned back in her seat, baffled.
"I always kind of hoped I'd get to meet aliens one day," she said. "I never thought it would be like this."
"It is not the way I would have wanted it to happen," Atrop
os agreed.
"Okay." Amber sat up again and pushed away her plate. "You've dodged the question enough. Why am I here? Am I going to be used as a host?"
"No," Atropos said quickly. "No, absolutely not. You are here because . . ."
He fell silent for a moment, clearly searching for the right words, the way to explain.
"You are a gift," he said at last with a sigh. "No, you are a bribe. A trap to make me complicit in my brother's plans. I was sent to Earth, specifically to North America, to search for hosts. For . . . particularly high-quality hosts."
"High-quality?" Amber asked with a frown, concern growing.
"I told you we are influenced by human culture," Atropos went on, looking away shamefully. "There has always been something of a 'black market' for human artifacts. Films, music, clothing. Chocolate and spices. But recently, there have been more . . . extreme demands."
He licked his lips with a dark grey tongue. Amber, anxious, waited for him to continue.
"We are all flight-brothers on this ship," he said. "Hatched together. But we still have some concept of family, as humans do. My sire donated his genetics to two offspring, myself and my wing-brother, Actian. My sire was flight leader during his migration, destined to be king on the home world when he returned. He chose Actian as his heir, to become flight leader and one day, king. Actian is . . ."
He paused, looked away uncomfortably.
"Ambitious," he finished at last. "He is not satisfied with our ways."
"Please tell me he wants to stop using humans to reproduce," Amber said, hoping despite her better instincts.
"I am afraid not," Atropos replied. "But he despises our weakness, the loss of our culture and knowledge. He wishes to build us back up into the empire we once were. He is driven to it by the hopes and expectations of the entire flight. He intends to do this by means of alliance with other species."
"There are other aliens?" Amber sat up straighter, curiosity getting the better of her again.