Alien Earth (44 page)

“She’s going to try to be careful, to keep the stresses as low as she can. But she thinks she’ll be able to sustain Raef through it now, and that in weightlessness his body will make better progress at repairing itself.”

“You’ll never go home again!” Tug threatened wildly. “Not if you let me die.”

“Tug.” Connie’s voice was almost gentle. “Tug, we’ve been home.” She paused, then spoke with painful honesty. “And I don’t think there’s any way we can prevent your death.”

They both received the sensation at the same moment. “Hurry,” John said, even as Connie turned to him and said, “Hurry.”

He followed her from the womb chamber and into the lift. Tug’s voice accompanied them, a ghastly cacophony of threats and pleas, demands and whimpers. On the womb levels they were oddly easy to ignore, but as they disembarked from the lift into the gondola, the horror of what they were hearing seized them both.

“Owe me … will always owe me … terrible mistake. One you’ll always regret … betraying your race, your values, your planet … Murderers and fools …” His voice was distorting so badly, whether from pain or fury, that Connie could scarcely follow his words. Bereft of Evangeline’s cushioning wall of emotion, the overwhelming sense of righteousness and confidence that Connie had been feeling receded. The corridors seemed cold and dimmer as they followed the lights to the command chamber. Connie felt ill. Tug was ranting like a madman now. “John?” she asked questioningly.

“There’s nothing we can do,” he said, and for the first time she noticed the whiteness around his mouth and the set of his jaws. Reflexively he was turning on monitors and activating data reports on the ship. “There was never anything we could do. Tug was desperate, deceiving himself.” He used the past tense, regardless of the low voice that now cursed, now pleaded with them. John paused, faced her squarely. “Get strapped in. This isn’t going to be a pleasant experience.” Almost without pause, he added softly, “After everything Raef told us about Evangeline, I doubt that she’d ever allow herself to be recaptured. She’d fly into a star first.” His eyes lost their focus. “Inside the womb, there. I could really feel what she felt toward Tug. All of it. And what Raef was to her. It’s like …” He looked directly at her, and his words trickled away. He tried again. “Once you’ve had a real friend, a companion who genuinely cares …”

He shook his head abruptly, disgusted with the poorness of words. Instead, as if it were routine, he checked Connie’s
harness, found it secure. He leaned down to her, kissed her suddenly in a way he never had before, as if sealing something between them. Transfixed, Connie could only watch as he moved to his own lounger, buckled in, and leaned back. Their eyes met once more. Then he gripped the armrests and closed his eyes.

It took Evangeline seventeen minutes and thirty-seven seconds to achieve orbit. Tug stopped screaming long before that, but Connie heard the silence that followed forever.

S
HE HAD LEFT
R
AEF ALONE
,
with his own thoughts. It was still a difficult thing for her to do, but she had recognized two things: one, that even her gentle presence was tiring to him right now, and secondly that Raef would always need, from time to time, privacy within his own mind. “If I’m never going to be awake again,” he had told her bluntly, “my private time is going to get really important to me.”

[Your body will heal,] she had tried to comfort him. [It is only for now that I am necessary to sustain it.]

“Evangeline,” he’d told her gently. “I felt it happen to me; parts of me just shut down. That damn Tug. He knew exactly what he was doing. If he had managed to stall them just a few minutes more, I’d have been a dead man.”

[He’s dead.]

“I know. Evangeline. You didn’t do it on purpose. Maybe if he’d been a little more open, told us right out that he couldn’t hack any gravity without months of preparation, without growing a shell, we’d have found a way. Hell, he could have stopped us at any time, just by letting us talk to John and Connie. It was his own fault, he brought it on himself.”

[You mistake me. He is dead, and I do not care. I feel nothing.]

“Evangeline. Your nose will grow if you tell lies.”

[That is from the pretense
Pinnochio
. It does not apply to me.]

“It applies to when people say one thing, but feel something else.”

[I am not a “people.”]

“Couldn’t prove it by me. Look. We won’t talk about it just now. Maybe it is something you need privacy about in your own mind.”

That had been a new idea, and it had taken some moments for her to absorb it. [It is strange that you know things about me that I do not know myself.]

“It’s called being friends. But even friends need private times from each other.”

[I understand this now. But you will have time away from me, when you wake up. Your body will not be as it was, but …]

“Maybe I’d be able to wake up. Maybe eventually I’ll want to, just to talk face-to-face with John and Connie. But I know how much I aged back there on Earth, and I can guess at how much motor control I lost when my heart acted up. Call me a coward, but I’d rather run in my dreams than crawl when I’m awake.”

“Give it time,” she’d suggested.

“Time.” Raef had laughed, not bitterly, but resignedly. “And how much of that do I have left? Look, I’ll tell you what. You let me have a little time on my own now, to rest up and to work on a pretense I’ve got in mind. And no peeking. This is going to be something special. A surprise for you. You go work on our communications problem. I have a feeling that space station thing is something John’s been looking for. If they’re going to hear about it anytime soon, it’s going to have to be from you.”

And so she had left him, and as she did so, she tried valiantly not to pick up on the tendrils of thoughts that would have given her a hint as to his new pretense. A surprise. She didn’t want to spoil it.

Diligently, she bent her mind to other tasks. A part of her always had to strive to be aware of John and Connie, to be sure that they had consistent temperature, atmosphere, and other life support. She was able to light the corridors for them now without giving much thought to it. But speaking
to them was what she needed most desperately. Resolutely she turned her thoughts inward upon herself. Raef had spoken of feeling like parts of his body were being shut down. Her problem was the opposite. She was trying to rediscover nerve circuits she had been conditioned since infancy to ignore. She retraced acts mentally. This was how I spoke to Tug. This was how he spoke to me. Here, with this, I am aware of their living quarters, of how warm or cold they are. This for their atmosphere, this for light …

“Hello?” the alto voice
asked hesitantly. “Hello, can you hear me?”

The sound reminded John of a pebble dropped into a quiet pool. The echoes of it seemed to spread throughout the ship. He turned to Connie with a sensation of awakening, though neither of them had slept in the two days since they’d achieved orbit. They had cleansed themselves, and eaten, surprised at how bland the food tasted, how flat the water, but they had not slept. Of Tug, they had spoken little.

“It’s a little like being trapped inside his dead body,” John had observed at one point. Connie had merely looked at him, and then runged out of the room, into a corridor that obediently brightened at her approach. He’d let her go. He suspected her feelings were as mixed as his own. Relief. Guilt. Loss. Peace. Every time he realized anew that Tug was gone, it stirred a different emotion. “Sometimes I miss him,” he admitted to himself. “But never enough to wish him back.” He thought again of the segments Tug had spoken of. Now there was a different sort of time capsule. He tried to imagine a reason to want to take them Home, to see them fertilized and Tug’s memories revived. He couldn’t find one. Not even for the time capsule’s location? No. Not even for that. Besides, he was sure that last bit had been Tug’s final bluff. Next he’d have to start taking Epsilon stories seriously. He turned his thoughts away from it.

There was, of course, the small matter of the future to consider. Sooner or later, they’d have to face that. They were alone in a Beastship, adrift for all practical considerations. Should they enter Waitsleep? It would pass time, and let them, perhaps, communicate with Evangeline. Unless, as Tug had insisted, once she had Raef, she’d be disinterested in any
one else. Would they be able to ask her to return them to Earth? Would she communicate with them at all? He had no answers, and didn’t have the courage to enter Waitsleep to find them. What if Evangeline paid no attention to them at all, left them both in Waitsleep forever? Once such a thing wouldn’t have sounded so bad. Now it was the prospect of being not only alone in his dreams, but, worse, alone without Connie. Unthinkable. He suddenly arose and went looking for her.

He found Connie, later, soaked with sweat but still walking on the treadmill that she’d set to full G. He’d gone to her and held her. “We can’t let it get to us,” he’d told her.

“It’s not the deadness around us that scares me,” she’d said into his shoulder. “It’s the deadness inside me. I don’t feel anything about it at all, John. It reminds me of Readjustment, how they tried to take away all my feelings about my memories, and kept telling me that things in the past couldn’t hurt me anymore. It always seemed like a threat to me, that they were going to take away whatever I’d learned from things that had happened to me. So I fought it. And they never quite made it come true; that was what I held on to. But this, now …” She’d let her words trail off. “Tug’s dead. And all I can think about it is, so what?”

“I think it takes time,” he’d offered her, not really believing it himself. They hadn’t spoken of it since then.

“Hello?” the voice said again, an edge of worry in it.

“Evangeline,” John said, making it a greeting rather than a question.

“Yes. Of course. It took me some time to discover how this system is triggered. Of all my parasite had usurped to himself, this he kept most hidden. It is most complicated, involving not only my nervous system, but interfacing with Human technology. But at last I may speak with you. And I hear you, too. But just words, flat words. I do not feel you say them….” The voice trailed off, considering, then came back suddenly. “This voice, it is acceptable to you? It is a synthesis of the voice of Raef’s mother, a very comfortable voice for him.”

“It’s fine, just fine,” John said quickly.

In the silence that followed his response, Connie abruptly asked, “Is Raef going to be all right?”

An even longer quiet followed. When the voice did return, it spoke gently. “He refers to his damaging experience as a stroke. Were he conscious and independent of me, his control of his arms and legs would be limited. But he is in no danger of dying, at this time. I am sustaining him.” Another long pause. “We are glad to be together again. I wish I could think of a way to allow him to speak directly to you. Perhaps in time such a circuit could be devised?”

“Perhaps in time,” Connie said cautiously. “You’d have to show me what, ah, access exists, and how I could hook into it,” she began. A few seconds later a dizzying array of graphics flashed briefly over a monitor’s screen. Connie stared at it, her eyes scarcely able to focus before one image gave way to another.

“No,” the voice broke in disgustedly. “This is inadequate. The information can be more efficiently passed to you next time you are in Waitsleep.” Evangeline paused. “If you don’t mind. Raef indicates to me that all Humans require time in privacy, whether with other Humans, or alone in their minds.”

“Uh, that would be fine,” Connie replied. With every sentence, the voice was becoming more Human sounding, the use of words more vernacular. “You sound very Human,” she commented impulsively.

The response was still slow, but very pleased. “Thank you. The interface system allows me recourse to a much wider vocabulary than Raef had introduced me to. But selection of the most accurate word available can lead to rather stilted conversation. Do you agree?”

“Stilted,” John agreed, smiling broadly.

“Then I shall revert to colloquialism, if that is more comfy for you. Raef insists I tell you about what called me away after I had dropped him off. He seems to think you’ll find it very interesting. You see, I had scarcely landed on your planet before I heard what sounded like one of our infants crying, so I immediately … Um, this may take a while to explain. Shall I have the machines fix you a snack while you’re listening? Milk and cookies, perhaps?”

It wasn’t anything
like John had expected. More like a small space station than anything else. Evidently it had been
manned for a short time each year, so that as new information and techniques became available, the equipment in the time capsule could be upgraded or replaced. Those who had left it had assumed that the surface of Earth would be completely devoid of life. So the contents had been organized into ecosystems, with zygotes for each creature held in stasis. The organization was what fascinated John. Each ecosystem was designed to be activated in a preset order aboard the capsule, and with each component taken to Earth and established in its own time, to be gradually enriched by the addition of other species.

He leaned back again, saw it all in his mind. The docking had gone perfectly, once they’d figured the trick of getting the lock to open. He’d felt like a child when he’d entered the space station. And it wasn’t just the wonder of it all, it was the physical dimensions of the rooms and work stations. He’d kept expecting to turn a corner and find someone Raef’s size confronting him. He’d wished Raef could see it all for himself, but Evangeline had promised to relay it to him from her memory storage. It would have to do.

“You know,” he said to Connie, “there’s also the question of how the preexisting life-forms that did survive on Earth would be affected by us reintroducing all this stuff. We’re going to have to consider that, too. That’s sturdy biological stock down there. Do we have the right to supplant it with stuff that didn’t meet the evolutionary challenge?”

Connie sat at a console, punching up information, and comparing readouts from Evangeline’s computers with the capsule’s computers. Her brow was furrowed, and she sat round-shouldered as she considered it all. He went quietly to brace against the back of her chair and look over her shoulder. He looked down at her black curly hair and then touched it softly, to feel its mossy springiness against his hand. He felt her grow still under his touch.

“Well?” he asked her.

She leaned back against him, tilted her head up to look at him upside down. “As Raef would say, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. It’s a little hard to discuss right and wrong, when we don’t know if any of it’s feasible. They assumed we would have a much larger labor force, and that we would be able to carry it on over a two-hundred-year
period. Not only would we need more people if we were going to attempt it, we’d have to be able to guarantee a work force of between fifty and one hundred people over the next two hundred years.” She raised her brows at him. “I don’t see how we could do it.”

“Go back to Delta, and pretend nothing changed. Give our data on Earth to Earth Affirmed, who’d pass it on to the Conservancy. Then, report the whole thing quietly to Earth Affirmed and have them begin recruiting …”

“They’d kill us.” Connie’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “We couldn’t pull it off. Even if Evangeline wanted to go along with it and pretend to be what she once was, you and I have changed too much. They’d catch on to us, and destroy us all.” Connie considered a moment. “What if we didn’t go all the way back to Delta? What if we just haunted the trade routes and recruited that way? From people who you know would be sympathetic to what we want to do?”

“You’re insinuating that I’m familiar with a certain rebellious element in society?” John asked archly. Connie snorted.

“It might work, if Evangeline helped us. I could probably come up with, oh, ten or fifteen people that way. It’s more than a little unusual for crew to trade contracts en route, though. And sooner or later, word would get back to Earth Affirmed and they’d wonder why we hadn’t finished our contracted work for them. It might take a little longer, but we’d end up with the authorities after us again. For piracy.”

“I’d like to be a pirate.” John felt Connie give a slight jump as the new voice entered the conversation. Neither of them were used to Evangeline speaking just yet; and it was often difficult for them to know just how to react to her.

“Space pirates,” she was going on. “But not other Beastships. That’s too complicated, for now. Let’s raid asteroid mining stations instead. They’re isolated. We could take all the Humans and then destroy the stations. The Conservancy might put it down to some kind of an accident.”

“That’s crazy.” John laughed quietly. “You’ve been accessing
Treasure Island
, through my sleep-prep line, haven’t you?” But Connie looked thoughtful.