Nebula Awards Showcase 54

by Nibedita Sen

  I smiled, thinking back on all the times she forced me to sit at that same table with a knife and a square of practice cloth during one of my mother’s visits, when all I wanted to be doing was playing outside with the local children.

  “I think that would make her very happy.”

  • • •

  Grandmother agreed to teach Foom, but would have none of his finger-melding knowledge transfer. She taught him as she’d been taught, as she’d taught my mother and tried to teach me, sitting at the same table with her, a knife in one hand, a small pot of liquid wax within easy reach, and a blank cloth on which to practice the most simple of designs. Foom was an apt pupil and I’m not sure who was more pleased.

  The next day the alien arrived at my grandmother’s house at first light, joined us for a simple breakfast, and then set to work which usually involved a brief lesson and hours of practicing what he’d learned. Maybe it was the extra thumbs, maybe the fact that its remarks hinted that it was several hundred years old with several times the experience any human being could amass. Maybe the alien was just a batik prodigy waiting to happen. Whatever the reason, after five days of learning basic techniques and simultaneously observing my Grandmother’s work, it seemed to be patterning its cloth with the confidence and speed of its teacher. The proof of it came at the end of that fifth day when its cloth was stained with dye and the wax boiled away leaving unmarked cloth where it had been.

  The result was breathtaking, a miniature tapestry of blinding white and brilliant blue, a set of panels that showed the solar system and Foom’s pearl home spiraling ever closer to the Earth.

  “This is good,” said my grandmother. “You possess a gift limited only by your dreams.”

  “My people do not dream,” said Foom.

  “Funny man, perhaps you just don’t remember them when you awaken?”

  It smiled. “That might be. Certainly I have thought about what it might be like to dream.”

  “That is a good start. Next time, draw your thoughts upon the cloth.”

  “The cloth?” I said. I’d been sitting at the same table with them, scribbling notes in a handmade notebook I’d bartered from one of the neighbors.

  “The patterns we make speak more clearly than words,” she replied. “If you were a better student you would understand that. The funny man does.”

  Foom bowed its head. I pushed back from the table to make tea for all, as that was about the extent of my contributions to the batik these past several days. After I’d poured their cups and sat back with my own, the alien looked up and placed his hand over my grandmother’s, not in the laced fingers way it had used with me and the children, but a simple and direct touch to add significance to the words that followed.

  “What knowledge may I offer you in turn, Grandmother?”

  “Knowledge? Pfah! I am an old woman. I live as my mother lived and her mother before her. The world has changed. As my daughter and grandson insist, but not so much here. There is no knowledge I need that I have not had since his mother was a little girl.”

  “But this is a great gift you have shared, which I will share with many others when I return home. Surely there is something I know how to do that you would like.”

  “I am content that you have learned so well so fast. My grandson hungers for new things. If you want to teach something, teach it to him.”

  The alien turned to me. It still hadn’t tasted its tea and I set my own cup down under the weight of its regard.

  “I have only learned this batik because you suggested it. It seems a reasonable solution to share knowledge with you, and when you visited my home you expressed an interest in how I had made it. Shall I teach you?”

  “Too much talk,” said my grandmother. “If you insist on yammering, do so beyond my hearing. Go. Away with you.”

  We left our tea and slipped out of her house, taking the path back toward the river.

  • • •

  “Everything I can do stems from a simple precept,” said Foom. “The mind shapes the body.”

  “I’m not sure I understand. That’s pretty broad.”

  “Do you still have the bead I gave you? You saw me create that. I could not always do so.”

  “Wait,” I said. “I thought that was just something your people can do. A biological ability.”

  “It is, but not innate to us. The mind shapes the body. We have learned new processes, taught ourselves to create what we need rather than suborn the environment to meet our needs. Thus we preserve the Rule of Three.”

  “You make . . . everything? But how?”

  “Think of beer, the miraculous chemical processes that transform water and grain and hops. You are aware that your body performs many processes of similar astonishment, from transforming the nutrients you ingest into the energy necessary to move you about, to encoding your sensations into memories that can be stored in complex networks and accessed in a myriad varieties.”

  “I . . . suppose. But those are all just biological processes. It’s all internal.”

  “Not always. Your females produce milk to nurture their young. It begins as an internal process but the result exists outside the body.”

  In that moment I thought my brain might explode. Was Foom suggesting that a lactating mother’s breast milk was on a par with its space craft? I thought again of bees making honey and wax. I thought of beer, from the perspective of the yeast converting the sugar. “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “So. What if you could teach your body a new process? To produce something you desired, within yourself rather than having to rely on your environment?”

  I laughed. “What, you’re saying I could train my body to brew beer?”

  “Why not? It already knows how to break down much more complex matter than grain. But that’s not what you want, you want to be able to create your own home like mine. Perhaps one day to travel beyond your world as I do.”

  “And that’s possible?”

  Foom laced its fingers with mine. “The universe is nothing but possibilities. But what you desire requires much practice. Let us hope you will be a better student of this than you were your grandmother’s batik.”

  • • •

  The next several days blurred together. This wasn’t like when Foom had shown the children how to manipulate blades of grass, how to change their nature. That had been rote memorization, revealing a simple truth, a fact. What it was teaching me was the underlying structures that would allow me to alter my own biology to achieve my desires, and to do so without conscious thought. The goal, in the end, was to make it as effortless as taking an evening stroll. That’s all well and good for an adult who’s been walking his entire life, but not so easy for an infant whose world has only been crawling. And yet, in time, all of us learn to walk and scarcely think about the how of it for the rest of our lives. Those first days were like taking my first stumbling baby steps again, certain that at any moment I would land on my face. Except this time I was mucking about blindly with my own biochemistry.

  On the third day, I had learned to sweat at will. By the fourth, I could control the process so that only my palms perspired. On the fifth day, I could alter my sweat glands to produce other substances and that’s when the real change happened. It wasn’t just what I was doing, it’s how it made me feel. Bliss. That’s the only word that can describe it. Using the Rule of Three internally, to create from my own body the thing I desired was . . . numinous. Like everything in the universe was right where it was supposed to be, and that my small actions were a contributing part. The sensation overwhelmed me at first, but quickly receded into the background, leaving me free to continue.

  I focused on the bead Foom had given me, probing it, trying to understand it in ways that I can no more describe than I can tell me how to play piano or ride a bicycle. I just did it. And on the sixth day, after an hour’s effort I could cup my hands together and produce a hollow bead of shining nacre that defied gravity and responded to my will. I’d l
ike to say that on the seventh day I rested, but it was more like a coma. I passed out on the grass by the river and Foom must have carried me back to my grandmother’s house. I awoke on the morning of the eighth day and saw her expression go from worry to a scowl. I knew I was fine.

  “This is difficult for you,” said Foom later that day, as we sat once more by the river. “There is no more complex substance on your world. It will take a year or more of practice before you can produce a vessel like mine, but the same principle applies to convincing your body to produce anything you like.”

  “You’re saying I could sweat beer?”

  It smiled that toothless grin. “Easily. And unlike the beer you’ve described from your homeland, the kind brewed in factories and transported vast distances to be sold in warehouses and then moved to stores and only then to the individuals who will drink it, your beer obeys the Rule of Three. It isn’t dark. Nor will its consumption contribute to the darkening of others.”

  “But I can only learn to make it if I have actual beer to work from, to teach my body the template.”

  “That is true of anything you produce. It must adhere to the Rule of Three or you will be unable to master it.”

  “And you’re the same way? With the things you make?”

  “I am.” It pressed the fingers on its left hand together, and as it pulled them apart drops of indigo dribbled free. “I have learned to make your grandmother’s dye. Prior to meeting her and being exposed to it I could not do this. But now that I know it, I can teach others. This is what my people do, why we travel the galaxy.”

  That was key. This ability I’d gained, it wasn’t just limited to me. Everything Foom had shown me, and everything I did with it going forward, I could share. “So, while it may take me a year to create a ship like yours, I could be showing others the same thing and with enough of us working on it, we’d have a fleet of ships. Enough vessels for humanity to join your people out among the stars!”

  “Oh. No, that’s never going to happen.”

  “What? Why not? You said I could do it. That it would just take time.”

  “And that is true, but you need to understand, most of your planet, most of your population, is dark. The most ‘advanced’ human beings are also those who are most distant from the Rule of Three. You are a blight and you are killing your world. That’s part of what drew me here—your efforts to leave your own gravity well, to travel to your moon and one day to the other worlds of your solar system. If you had been content to remain here, I probably would not have come to such a dark place, not even to complete my cataloging of this system. But you were not, and the risk of you using your technology, dark and unliving as it is, to spread into space, that is too great.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What are you going to do about it?”

  “What needs to be done. Better for your species to die out, even if that includes some members of humanity who do live by the Rule of Three. When you are all gone, when the only inhabitants remaining live by the Rule of Three, your world will heal itself of the dark. It will become a paradise again. In time a new sapient species will rise, and Earth will have another chance.”

  “But . . . human beings will have been eradicated?”

  “You understand me perfectly. That is my task while I’m here.”

  “I can’t let you do that!”

  Foom tilted its head, first right and then left. “You’ve already been a great help to me. Just as you’ve been learning from me, I’ve been learning about human bodies from you.”

  • • •

  With a sudden burst of energy it leapt to its feet and jumped into the river, waving for me to follow and calling out, only his head above the water. “Come with me. The thing I’ve been waiting to show you is ready. And I cannot advance things to their next stage until you see it.” Without waiting for me to follow it dove beneath the water, surfacing several meters away as it swam toward its home.

  “This isn’t happening,” I said to myself, maybe to the river. “I misheard or didn’t understand. It can’t seriously have a plan for exterminating the human race.”

  I hit the water and swam after Foom. I came up at the bottom of the giant pearl as I had before, and ascended the ramp in a slow spiral. Halfway up I found Foom waiting for me on a bench in one of the alcoves opening off the central ramp. A naked man sat with him, slumped as if asleep. I stared at them both and Foom grinned back at me. Moments passed before I found my voice. “That’s . . . me!”

  “Yes,” said Foom. “I made a clone. It was simple, really; your cells already contained their blueprint. I just nudged them forward to aid me in the next stage of my work. But first I require your assistance to quicken this body.”

  “Quicken it?” I averted my gaze from the clone. It was like seeing my own corpse.

  “The body lives, but isn’t alive. I’m sorry, the language I have from you lacks the nuance I need to explain.”

  “Try,” I said. I didn’t know where to look. “Try real hard.”

  “I accelerated its growth to bring it on a par with your own age, but it is not otherwise a reflection of you. To continue my work, I need you to connect with it, bring it in accord with yourself.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  “Everything in it is primed to recognize you. We need only give it a push to connect. Give me your hand.”

  It spread its fingers for me as it had before, all while lacing the fingers of its other hand with those of a hand of the sleeping clone. There was no tingling this time, rather a sense of falling. Not a flailing or tumbling kind of fall, more like a plummet, the personification of my lifelong relationship with gravity. I plunged into myself, nonsensical as that sounds, as if I had just dove into a pool of me, a lake, an ocean. I didn’t surface, I just kept falling ever deeper.

  When I came back to myself it was to discover I had laced my free hand with the clone’s. Foom had released both of us. I was staring at the clone, but also staring at myself from its eyes. And it was like looking upon the face of creation, like being fully aware at the moment of one’s own birth. The earlier sensation of bliss I’d experienced working the Rule of Three paled by comparison. I was suffused with a rapture beyond my own comprehension.

  I let my hand drop away from my doppelganger’s.

  “This is impossible,” I said, and heard two voices. The clone’s rasped a bit, speaking its first words. My words. My clone.

  The alien gave me one of its toothless grins. “I would suggest you forget that word. It will only hold you back.”

  In other circumstances that would probably have been encouraging. But even overflowing with the exponential joy coursing through me, I still wanted Foom’s creation of my clone to be impossible, because more than anything I needed its plan for extermination to be impossible. And if I admitted the reality of the one, what would hold back the other?

  “So . . . are you saying all things are possible with your Rule of Three?”

  “Ask yourself rather, how can you realize the concept of free will if you accept limits upon yourself?”

  I wanted limits. I desperately wanted to limit Foom’s ability to wipe out humanity. “And you’re going to teach me that? To transcend all limits?”

  “Nothing would please me more. I believe you have the potential, with sufficient practice. And the clone should be an aid in this. Meanwhile, I can continue my own research, with the help of you and your double.”

  I shook my head. “What research? Is that why you made a clone of me?”

  “Your duplicate will be the proving ground for my work, but before I can begin that piece of it I must first obtain a detailed understanding of the workings of the human male reproductive system. And I can’t do that without your help.”

  It was a day of casual threats of extinction, of feeling my consciousness centered in two separate bodies, of drowning in euphoria, but even still the non sequitur of Foom’s reply stopped me cold. Was I being propositioned by an
alien?

  “I don’t know how to respond to that.”

  From between the thumbs of one hand Foom conjured up a palm-sized nacre cup. “As soon as you provide the sample we can return to the riverside. Then you can resume your practice and soon realize there is no such thing as impossible.”

  “Sample?”

  “Yes, please. A sample of your ejaculate. I will analyze it and perfect my understanding. I cannot use your double’s; because of the accelerated growth I utilized, it would be unreliable.”

  It handed me the cup.

  • • •

  The less said about providing a sperm sample for a sexless alien, the better. Suffice it to say that I did what was necessary, with my clone miming my every movement, and then the three of us wound our way down the ramp and swam out of the pearl and back to the riverbank.

  Controlling the movement of two bodies at once is crazy difficult if you try to do both at once. I started swimming and then switched my attention, seeing the world through my clone’s eyes and started it swimming, too. Back and forth was odd but easy, and we made it to shore without incident.

  Foom busied itself with its analysis for the rest of the day, encouraging me to use the time to practice my new knowledge of generating floating nacre beads as a template for shedding my concept of impossibility. Somehow having two bodies at once was oddly synergistic, as if I was both watching another person doing it and adding my clone’s efforts to my own. More, the feeling of bliss that filled me while I worked helped to distract me from Foom’s ultimate goal. The result was that my clone and I both produced hollow beads twice as large as I’d managed only an hour before. My control over the beads also grew. I sent the pair of them—mine and my clone’s—soaring high into the sky, feeling a connection to them long after they were lost to sight. I must have remarked on this out loud because Foom looked up from its own wool gathering to say “Automaticity” and then went back to work.

  That first pair of larger beads had to have taken more than an hour—I’m not certain, I’d left my watch with all of my other dark items, back at my grandmother’s home. The next pair took less than half that time and were a third larger. The third set was fully four times the size of the first one I’d made, and accomplished in less than ten minutes. Automaticity, yeah.