Alien Earth (21 page)

The door opened suddenly to her tug and she had to recover her balance before flinging herself off down the corridor. Her mind raced faster than her body as she followed the illumination. At last she gave up trying to figure out what she was going to do; she was tired of thinking, and trying to handle things. Let happen what would happen.

He was finishing
up his last lap as Connie came in. He glanced up as she entered. Tug had been at her. John recognized that weary, used look from his own face in the mirror some days. He gave himself an extra lap to allow her some time to settle herself; the way she looked now, he had a feeling that she’d burst into tears the first time he spoke to her. He could do without that. So he gave her a silent wave and continued with his exercise.

She looked around the chamber with a hesitant air that told John she hadn’t been using it regularly, despite his initial strong recommendation. Guess he’d have to make it an order. As he came alongside her again he slowed to a fast walk, and waved to her to join him. She attempted it, but he soon realized he’d have to cut his stride to a pace comfortable to both of them. He must be growing again. He made a mental note that this probably accounted for some of his irritability and that he should make allowances for it. “Count ten before reacting,” he counseled himself, and then tried not to snort at how foolish it sounded, even to himself.

“Pardon?” Connie asked faintly.

“Nothing.” He glanced across at her. She looked more than pale; “green as glass,” wasn’t that the old saying? A sheen of sweat already misted her face. She didn’t look to be in that poor of condition, but he abruptly decided there was no sense in pushing it. “Fuge off, Tug,” he ordered abruptly, and as quickly felt the almost-sickening lurch as the artificial gravity dropped. Connie all but stumbled and John caught
himself reaching out to take her arm. He started to pull back, but she had already caught at the proffered support.

“Touch of Wakesickness, maybe,” she muttered.

“More than a touch,” John replied sourly as all his suspicions seized on this new bit of evidence. His earlier plans to attempt to privately brief her on some of the more unusual aspects of the mission evaporated. It wouldn’t be worth all the effort it took to exclude Tug from a conversation within the ship; not if any confidences he entrusted to her would be immediately spilled.

“I’m thirsty,” he said abruptly, and left the fuge to head for the food dispenser at the other end of the gym. He moved awkwardly, for Connie did not relinquish her grip on his forearm. He all but pushed her into the first lounger they came to. He couldn’t say why her weakness irritated him so. He felt her eyes on him as, unencumbered by her, he swiftly runged the rest of the room.

As he punched in his food requests, he spoke over his shoulder to her. “I’m ordering up something for you to eat or drink. One of the quickest and most efficient ways to relieve Wakesickness is to eat something with sugar in it, preferably something liquid. I’m surprised your auto-training didn’t have that in it.”

“It did,” she said shakily. “I … just didn’t take time to finish drinking it. I thought you wanted me to report immediately.”

“I did. But Tug should have notified me that you were reacting poorly to Wakeup.” John stacked the trays the dispenser belched out and turned back to her. “Have you ever had problems with Wakeup before?”

“This is the first time,” she said, glancing aside as she spoke. “It’s not really that bad. I didn’t want Tug to alarm you.”

John folded his lips in disgust as she lied. Dammit, he didn’t need this. He tried to decide if she was lying out of loyalty to Tug, or if he already had some hold on her. Then he gave it up as a useless puzzle. Why bother? The simpler way to solve it was to prevent it getting any worse. Everything would be a little more difficult for him, knowing he could not trust Connie with any of the aspects of their real mission. Still, he thought he could manage it.

He reached her side, pushed her tray into her hands. “Drink and eat now. And not too fast, or you’ll just be sicker.”

“You ever have Wakesickness?” Connie asked as she peeled the cover off her tray and freed the straw in the drink.

“Once or twice. I still get it occasionally, when Tug is irritated with me.”

“I have never deliberately induced Wakesickness in you.” Tug’s voice was remote and cool.

“I wondered how long it would take you to chime in.” John paused, cleared his throat. “Tug, it will be entered into the ship’s log that I consider negligent your failure to immediately notify me that Crew Connie Gen-103-Castor-Horticol-six was suffering from Wakesickness.”

“Please, it wasn’t that serious,” Connie began but Tug’s voice boomed over hers.

“It shall be entered in my records that said incident did not seem grave, and that said crew recovered quickly with no ill effects.”

“Goody for you,” John said dryly.

“If the captain had not indicated he wished to see said Crew immediately, I would not have hastened the Wakeup process.”

John sighed out through his nose. “Tug, note into your records that I am now informing you that unless I specifically state there is an emergency that requires the crew to be mobilized as swiftly as possible, I do not, repeat, do not ever authorize any crew to be awakened in any less time than their metabolism records suggest as optimum. I should think that such a notice would be unnecessary, but now you have it, and I consider this incident closed.”

“Aye-aye, sir,” Tug opined snidely, but fell silent.

John turned his attention to Connie. “Connie!” he began, the name coming out more sharply than he meant it to. She started as if he had jabbed her with a needle, and then almost came to attention in her lounger.

“At ease, please. And go on eating while I talk to you. You look terrible.” She picked up a biscuit as if he had ordered her to, and obediently bit off the corner. John held in his annoyance. He supposed it was the best he could expect from her. Tug had made inroads on her much faster than he
had expected him to. A shame. She’d had potential, initially. He’d thought her desire for privacy would have helped her keep Tug out of her life. Evidently the Arthroplana had already found some sort of hold on her.

“I wanted to see you personally to initiate some changes in standing orders. Tug, are you attending this?”

“Of course.”

“Yes. As if there was ever anything said on this ship that you didn’t listen in on. For the duration of this mission, Connie’s Wakeups are to begin precisely seventy-two hours after my own. Without rushing the Wakeup process, I’ll add. They are to terminate at the same hours as my own Wakeup periods. Connie, upon awakening, you are to report to me within one hour. I trust that will allow you sufficient time to cleanse and refresh yourself. Unless I have other orders for you, you will then consult your duty screen and perform in order all tasks listed on it, incorporating standard breaks and rest periods into the schedule. Uh, I’ll be including with those tasks specific physical exercise times and specific activities I want you to practice during those periods. I am not currently satisfied with your physical condition.”

“Connie is under no responsibility to perform physical exercises other than the minimum requirements outlined in the Crew Rights Bill,” Tug broke in cheerily. “I’d be happy to display those minimums on screen for her, anytime she’d—”

“I don’t mind—” Connie began vaguely, but John overrode her.

“Review your regulations, Tug. I consider Connie’s Wakesickness a medical indication of a physical condition that renders her unfit for duty. She can either take the recommended steps to correct it, or face a daily monetary penalty until she corrects the condition on her own.”

Connie managed to make her voice audible. “I’ll follow the prescribed physical conditioning. I’m not used to these extended trips; I’ll take John’s advice about how to stay in shape for them.”

“Satisfactory.” John waited for Tug to insert some comment. When he was quiet, he decided to see if he could push things one step further. “I’ll also be recommending reading material and some sleep-prep lessons for you. I think they’d
be most helpful to you in performing your duties on this mission. Most of them have to do—”

“You can’t force Connie to read anything that she—”

“I believe I used the word ‘recommend,’” John said in a quiet voice that effectively cut through Tug’s outburst. “Just as I’m sure you’ve already been ‘recommending’ reading for her. The difference is the materials I’ll provide for her will actually be useful to her on this mission.” John paused. “And your interference between me and my crew will also be noted in the ship’s log, Tug.”

“With a description of your unreasonable orders, I would hope.”

“With a full detailing of all proceedings. Connie?” She jumped when he said her name. So they were back to that again. John sighed audibly. “You’re dismissed for now. You can take an hour of personal time. By then I should have your duties entered and you can consult your screen for them. See me just after your last rest break for the shift, and I’ll give you a list of ‘recommended’ study materials for this mission. Is everything clear, Crew?”

She managed not to flinch. “Perfectly clear, sir.”

John hesitated, then played a hunch. “Anything further you’d like to say to me?”

She took a breath, paused, then shook her head mutely. Long enough pause for him to conclude there were things she wanted to discuss with him, but not in front of Tug. Unfortunately, there was practically no place on shipboard that wasn’t in front of Tug. “No, sir,” she managed when he kept eye contact with her, waiting for a verbal reply.

He kept the eye contact a moment longer, considering the ways he could circumvent Tug’s constant surveillance. Then he decided he’d done as much as he should for now. Maybe it was actually better this way; give her some basic information and leave it at that for now. “Dismissed, then,” he told her curtly, and turned aside his gaze. She practically scuttled from the room. There’d be other Wakeups, he reminded himself. Plenty of time in which to decide how much of their real mission he could trust to her; or, more to the point, plenty of time for him to figure out just how strong and deep Tug’s hold on her was, and if she felt protected or threatened by the Arthroplana.

Connie could not have been too far up the corridor, for Tug’s voice was lowered, and had the flat tone it acquired when he spoke from only a single source. “Are you getting weary of being Evangeline’s captain?”

John rubbed at the beginning of stubble on his scalp. “Maybe,” he said, shrugging. He wondered idly if a threat could be invoked so many times that it lost its snarl. To where it would almost be a relief if the threat were carried out.

Tug seemed to consider his answer. John was suddenly aware of the sweat drying between his shoulder blades. He bent down and worked out a cramp in his calf.

“Maybe you’re tired of working on any ship, anywhere. Maybe it’s time someone advised the Conservancy to reexamine your records.”

John silently continued to work at the muscle in his leg. How much is he scaring me, he wondered, and couldn’t really find an answer.

“What would Connie think of you if she knew?” Tug asked him coldly.

John straightened up and rolled his shoulders. He tried not to show how hollow he felt inside. It sounded to him as if Tug were getting desperate to find a threat that would get him to react. “Maybe I should tell her myself and find out,” he challenged Tug.

“Ha!” Tug replied.

But he had waited a moment too long to respond, and his derision sounded uncertain. John didn’t reply, simply stretched once more and then runged off toward his quarters. He was halfway there before he realized he was grinning to himself.

“A
WAKE, SWEET PRINCE
.”
Saccharine sarcasm. Tug must have been practicing that one.

“Shut up, Tug,” John groaned. He forced his awareness to cross the line between sleep and wakefulness. It wasn’t easy. “If people could breathe sweat, it would taste just like the air in here,” he observed. He moved his tongue sluggishly in his mouth as he uncoupled the implant in his navel, then demanded that his muscles start functioning. He flexed his way out of the womb, sliding past the slick walls into the cooler air of the Waitsleep chamber. For a moment he was still, gripping the floor rung, trying to gather his thoughts. Actually, the challenge was to separate his own thoughts from all the clutter of information in his head. Deckenson’s lecturing voice still echoed through his mind. He hated sleep prep, but it was the only way he could assimilate all the information Earth Affirmed thought he should have. Since Tug had bitten on the ersatz poetry he’d left out for him, John had decided it might be safe to start processing it. Anything Tug managed to tap into, he’d have to doubt. John had set up all the information in his auto-player, and set it to trigger at regular intervals during his Waitsleep. He’d underestimated how much there had been on those records, and the mental demands of Earth Affirmed’s interactive instruction programs. Instead of a listing of useful facts and figures, the experience had been more like a cross between a debate and a seminar,
with good old Deckenson. And instead of awakening with all the necessary facts at his fingertips, he felt like a whole information cubicle had been crammed into his skull. He reached up and massaged his scalp. Give it an hour or so, and his thoughts would be his own again. For now, he shook his fingers and watched the scraps of shed skin from his scalp go drifting around the chamber. Time to clean up.

He passed the womb where Connie slept on. Her face was a pale blur through the membraneous hide of the womb. “Tug,” he asked as he runged up into the gondola. “You haven’t forgotten that Connie is to wake up seventy-two hours from now, have you?”

No answer. Momentary panic changed to annoyance. Of course. Tug was under a direct order to shut up. He’d once maintained a similar silence for three days before John had figured out what was wrong and rescinded the order. “Tug, talk to me.”

“Of course. Do you think I would so neglect my duties as to allow her to sleep through an ordered Wakeup?” The voice of the Arthroplana was blandly complacent.

“Huh.” John made his noncommittal noise. “Everything okay on the ship?”

“Of course.”

John reached his personal chamber and headed for the cleanser. Within the small cubicle he rubbed great peeling sheets of dead skin from his body and then applied the gel. It all had to come off. It took time and a soft-bristled brush to clear it from his scalp and from between his fingers and toes. He emerged feeling pink and skinned, the new skin stinging slightly in the cool air of his chamber. “Tug. Set up the fuge wheel for me. And report.”

“Centrifuge exerciser is already set to your specifications. Nothing to report.”

Nothing new, in the last thirty years. An incredible distance traversed, without incident. John mulled it briefly as he headed to the exerciser. Well, at least that part of his life was benignly boring. Nothing else seemed to be.

The slow spin of the centrifuge pressed him gently to the surface that gradually became a floor as Tug increased spin. He set off doggedly on his first lap, feeling his spine telescoping in the drag. He began sweating almost immediately.
He hated this, but every time he woke up he forced himself to do twice the prescribed regimen. After a great deal of deliberation, he’d suggested the same for Connie. He knew too many other Mariners who could barely handle station gravity anymore, and never went planetside at all. By the third day of his Wakeup, he’d be able to handle his laps easily, would even reset the fuge to a full G. He focused his determination and trudged on.

He took his mind off his aching feet and back by trying to organize his thoughts. Not too many more Wakeups before orbit. He reviewed his schedule according to his sleep prep. Within the gondola were four very expensive satellite surveyors, property of Earth Affirmed, that he was to deploy. They’d be gathering general climate and terrain information and doing a lot of photography. A dozen little landers were in the same bay, destined to take soil samples, seismic readings, water samples, and every other damn thing imaginable and relay the gathered information directly to sealed units on the satellites. The Evangeline was authorized to take three months worth of data. Then the Evangeline would pick up the sealed modules from the satellites and return to Delta with them.

That much was routine reconnaissance. All the landers and satellites were Conservancy-Approved. Guaranteed to break down internally and biodegrade without leaving a trace. It was also guaranteed that any unauthorized effort to open the sealed information modules would result in their immediate breakdown. Once back at Delta, John would deliver the sealed modules to a waiting representative of Earth Affirmed, who would hand them over to a Conservancy official for processing. Within one year, the Conservancy would deliver the interpreted data to Earth Affirmed.

So much for the Conservancy-approved mission.

But Satellite C would fail after only two days of observations. John and Crew would make a routine shuttle outing to attempt manual repair. Unfortunately, their nice new shuttle would then experience a malfunction that would necessitate a forced landing on the Earth’s surface. A landing that, if all went as Earth Affirmed had fantasized, would be near some kind of beacon or signal that indicated a sort of “time capsule” located nearby. If no beacon were readily apparent,
as John expected would be the case, he’d make a routine landing on the surface, at any suitable location.

“Tug! Readjust G.”

“Clarify command, please.”

“Dammit, I know you’ve turned it up. If this is a three-quarter G lap, then I’m a Mother.”

“The centrifuge is correctly set.”

John bit his lip to keep from arguing. No way he could prove Tug wasn’t playing games with him. The only way he could win was by refusing to let it bother him. He stepped off the treadmill, transferring to the climber. Upper-body strength was just as essential. He started runging his way around the hamster cage and felt new sweat sting his chest and belly.

The main question, of course, was how far he trusted Earth Affirmed. According to them, the Stewardship of the Conservancy had been playing jiggery-pokery with the numbers on Earth’s ecology from the very beginning. As Deckenson’s voice had whispered during the sleep prep, “From the beginning, ever since the evacuation, they’ve set up the parameters, and decided what’s normal and what’s excessive, what’s an okay level of toxin or radiation or, even, pollen, and what’s a dangerous level. They won’t allow us access to the raw data, and they’ve refused to evaluate different sections of a planet separately. If radiation is too high here, and heavy metals are too common there, why then, the whole damn planet is toxic. Think about this; every time a planet’s been considered for colonization, they’ve given it a rating. Welcoming, hospitable, neutral, inhospitable, hazardous, or hostile. Of all the damn planets we’ve ever surveyed, none has ever rated better than inhospitable. So they’ve turned down all our colonization requests. And what does the Earth, the place that spawned us, rate? Not only hostile, but with a hostility rating higher than any foreign planet we’ve ever surveyed. Does that make sense to you? Of course not.

“Why would the Conservancy lie to us, why would they say the Earth was hostile, dead, if she wasn’t? Because they love to keep us under control. Because if they admitted that the Earth had recovered at all, it would undermine their insistence that any alteration to an environment must be regarded as permanent damage. The total destruction of the Earth is the club they use to enforce their restrictions and
rules. Imagine what would happen to the Conservancy if the Earth was revealed as a habitable place, and Earth Affirmed offered to take colonist applications? Their control would be shattered. There’d be a major power shift. And Earth Affirmed would be in the catbird seat.” Deckenson had been so vehement. But somehow it just didn’t seem enough to John.

“Believe it,” Deckenson’s sleep-prep program had said when John’s subconscious registered doubt. “It doesn’t have to make sense to us; it does to them. It’s how they are. Their absolute control can continue only as long as they base their politics on absolute paranoia. They have to believe that everyone desires the same total dominion they have. It was their only reason for venting Epsilon. They saw us as a threat to their control; we were proving their ‘facts’ weren’t true. All we actually wanted to do was provide an alternative, a place where Humans could choose a life-style different from what the Conservancy dictated.”

Something in the program had detected John’s skepticism.

“No myth,” Deckenson had insisted wryly. “A legend, if you will. The basis for all you’ve heard is in hard fact. Epsilon existed. And it was ours. Earth Affirmed’s. It took us four generations to wrest control of it from the Conservancy, in a bloodless revolution. That’s how naive we were, how civilized. We thought that if we took it over without violence, that if we voluntarily kept our ideas and life-styles sequestered from the planets and the Conservancy’s stations, they would let us be. We were wrong.”

John frowned to himself as he slowed down his pace. He tried not to remember the tone of Deckenson’s voice, the anguished truth in the man’s voice.

“We reestablished Humans as functional mammals. Children were conceived and born naturally, with almost a forty-seven percent survival rate. We’d had a few birth defects, but that was to be expected, after all the tampering. The rate was nothing like what the Conservancy claimed. Between our births, and the people immigrating from the planets and the other stations, our population level was even growing slightly. We were considering establishing another station. The Conservancy found out about it.” The voice paused.

“There was no wild mutation, no disease, no rampant in
sanity. Nothing that merited the sabotage that vented the entire station to space. Only the Conservancy’s insane desire to retain complete control over every Human in existence. There were, at the time, darker rumors. That the Arthroplana had not only supported the Conservancy in Epsilon’s destruction, but encouraged, even demanded it. The rumors were unprovable, but not unfounded. There has always been evidence of a conspiracy between the Conservancy and the Arthroplana, an agreement by which the Arthroplana supports the Conservancy’s dictatorship as long as they support the Arthroplana’s complete suppression of any technology that would let Humanity be independent of them and their Beastships.”

“Damn fools,” John muttered.

“Repeat, please.”

“Wasn’t talking to you, Tug.”

“You were vocalizing, John. No one else on board is conscious.”

“I was subvocalizing. Muttering. Talking to myself.”

“Perhaps you should consider Readjustment. Talking to oneself is not acceptable for Humans.”

“Perhaps you should consider an Adjustment session yourself, Tug. Too great an interest in the mutterings of Humans is not an acceptable trait for Arthroplana.”

Silence followed, but John would have sworn that the drag on the climber increased minutely. It wasn’t the first time he’d stung Tug with that odd bit of knowledge. He’d gained it a long time ago, when he’d first begun to captain Evangeline. He’d been a young fool, exuberant in his first command. He remembered well the long Wakeups when he and Tug had babbled at each other in the relief of finally finding kindred spirits, quoting dead poets at each other, and speaking of all things long and learnedly. Every Wakeup had seen another soul baring, and John had dreaded each Wakesleep that took him away from such an attentive audience. They had encouraged each other’s attempts at poetry, and if Tug’s frankly Freudian analyses of John’s work were not always flattering, well, it was criticism, the backbone of any poet’s self-discipline. Sometimes Tug rewrote John’s poems and read them back, a process John found both infuriating and degrading. It led to arguments, sometimes bitter, in which John tried to explain why Tug’s “improvement” of
John’s work was not the same as a new creation, and why no Arthroplana, no matter how intelligent, could ever completely understand Human literature. It was during one of those sessions that Tug had revealed his interest in Humans was regarded by other Arthroplana as puerile. An enBeasted Arthroplana was supposed to spend his sacred time in a Great Study, a thorough digestion of one topic, for the future enlightenment of all Arthroplana. Tug’s was supposed to be an understanding of Human literature, specifically that portion referred to as The Mysteries. They were, he confided to John, the only achievement of Humans that struck the Arthroplana as either elegant or useful. For the first time, John had grasped Tug’s vision of the Human race as lesser, not just intellectually and culturally but in the grand scheme of the universe. Not only temporary, but ultimately disposable.

“The Elders were reluctant to grant my enBeastment at first,” Tug had confided in him. “They didn’t think my field of study offered enough benefits to the Arthroplana. Humanity offers knowledge specific to itself, but very little else. All your old technology was nonharmonious, all your sciences relating almost entirely to your own ecosystem. Xenophobic, I might say. All that Humanity has now, it received from us.”

“So how did you talk them into it?” John had been lazily grunting his way through some low-G acrobatics as they talked. Tug was synthesizing Vivaldi in the background. He was Human enough to feel miffed at Tug’s dismissal of all Human endeavor, but mature enough, he thought, to subtly change the subject.

“I pointed out it was a sensible precaution. Humans are a dangerous race, John. All your literature, but especially that branch that deals almost exclusively with the committing of antisocial acts and the methods of trying to avoid punishment for those acts, is the key to neutralizing that danger, in so far as it relates to the Arthroplana. I was accepted for enBeastment and its privileges on the basis that my studies might someday be the salvation of my race.”