Valence (Confluence Book 4)

by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  When Jane had once asked Gili about traveling overland, Gili had seemed aghast. “The foot has been making for Existence. Existence has been making for the foot. They are making for each other, in tandem.” At the time Jane hadn’t understood, but she thought she did now. Gili was saying that the Tree and the pligan people had evolved together. Even though most of the time pligans now walked over the smooth, transparent materials of their architectural structures instead of clinging to the bark of the tree as their ancestors must have, those materials were made by the tree, and therefore were an extension of it, and more natural to Gili than even the ground itself.

  Poor Ryliuk, over seven feet tall, was so uncomfortable inside many sections of the pligan habitat because it had not been constructed with his size in mind. Most pligans stood at just over four feet tall, and their structures were sized appropriately. He was forced to stoop almost everywhere they went inside. Even Jane had to duck sometimes because branches transversed the crystalline structures overhead.

  Just now, Ryliuk was wedged into a corner, trying to make himself as small as possible. She motioned him over to the elevator. There were open spaces above where he’d be more comfortable.

  Gili was waiting for them, awake this time, as the elevator opened. The pligans had evolved from amphibious creatures, and reminded Jane of tree frogs on Earth. Gili was mostly a shimmering bronze color with a pale, rosy-toned belly. His face came to a rounded point, marked with dark, wide stripes in a pattern that Jane had quickly come to recognize as his own personal identifying marks.

  His eyes, though, were what Jane had noticed about him first. Large and luminous, with horizontal pupils, when they caught the light they sometimes looked like molten metal. And then there were the triangular peaks of skin above his upper eyelids, marking the beginning of a small ridge on each side of his face, leading down to the nostrils on his blunt nose in a V shape. She thought for some reason that those little triangular brows made the pligans seem owlish or a bit professorial. Maybe they reminded her of the wildly unkempt hairy eyebrows of a few professors she’d known over the years.

  His personality added to that impression. He seemed part kindly teacher, part philosopher, part irascible old man who occasionally fell asleep if you didn’t keep things interesting enough to hold his attention. He was truly none of those things because those concepts meant little here. He was pligan and she liked his company a great deal.

  “Sleeping gave up, just in time,” Gili said. He was referring to the fact that he’d just woken from a nap. Pligans didn’t seem to have any kind of predictable biorhythms. Without the cycle of day and night, they slept whenever their bodies were tired, sometimes midconversation, if there was a lull. Their eyes would stare off into space then gradually close, and their limbs would pull up around them, making them more compact and less conspicuous, especially in darker, shadowy areas. They might sleep for an hour or three at any point around the clock. They normally returned to daily activity when they woke up, and drank sap whenever they felt hungry.

  Gili’s arms opened wide with palms out and fingers outstretched, displaying the large suckerlike protrusions at the end of each of four fingertips. It was his welcoming gesture.

  His fleshy throat jiggled a little with excitement when he noticed Ajaya. He drew closer to her, extending his hands to her in invitation, his pupils expanding and contracting rapidly as he took her in. She moved closer, just as inquisitive. “Bringing the ultimate. A dark one. Jane is light. Fewer light than dark here, this grouping.” He was always noticing things.

  Jane had no idea how the pligans perceived the light spectrum or if their eyes saw colors in even remotely the same way humans did. But he’d commented on this difference in skin tone between them several times. In fact, he lumped the sectilians in with Ron because there was enough UV light on Pliga to trigger the autonomic melanin response in their skin. Jane had described them as different species, and he found that interesting, inquiring about differences and similarities, but he still seemed to group them together. He found the differences between sectilian and human less compelling than the differences between his own species and the newcomers.

  It wasn’t as though the pligans as a species hadn’t been exposed to sectilians before. They’d had many alien visitors over the years, though they came with less frequency now and none recently. According to the ship’s database, pligans were a curiosity among the USR. People came and studied their biotechnology and even took cuttings of the Tree, freely given, to their home worlds to try to replicate the results. But the Tree was very particular about the conditions it preferred and always withered and died elsewhere without pligans to tend it. And while the pligan people were not xenophobic in any way, they had no interest in leaving their planet. When Jane had asked Gili about this, he’d muttered indignantly, “Why would anyone be wanting to be living a suboptimal life?”

  He frequently inquired about Jane’s own home and what it was like, though. He seemed consternated that she didn’t have a Tree, or something like it, of her own.

  “Walking and to the producing,” he said. He was already waddling away. Pligans walked something like springy penguins, though that wasn’t quite right. When they fully extended their legs to reach something, they towered over humans, but they didn’t do that often. Occasionally Jane saw one of them hop, usually a child, but that was rare. Mostly they kept the hinges of their knees bent, squatting comfortably whenever they stopped moving, and only elevating their bodies slightly on their elastic legs as they shuffled around with their knees bent at a forty-five-degree angle from center.

  Walking over the transparent material of the flooring, especially at such a great height, took some getting used to for all of them. Jane made it a habit to not look down. Ajaya had Ron’s arm in a death grip, but everyone else seemed fine. Jane quickly lost her sense of orientation as they moved through the maze of the pligan architectural structures, unsure which direction they had come from.

  They passed a pligan who seemed to be struggling to walk. Their legs were set farther apart at a nearly ninety-degree angle from center, and they were holding themselves up by grasping the wall and rocking side to side rather than bringing each foot forward. They were clearly laboring under great difficulty to get where they were going, and Jane suspected that their locomotion would improve a great deal if they were to just stretch their legs out to propel themselves forward.

  She bit her lip, but decided to ask about the individual once they were several turns away and she was certain they were out of earshot. She’d been struggling to think of ways to compensate the pligans for the work they were doing, and perhaps this was a way they could help. Gili so often spoke of how they lived an optimal life, but that person’s gait did not seem optimal to Jane. “Gili, the person we passed back there who was having trouble walking, are they elderly or injured? Do they have a medical problem that perhaps my medical master could help with?”

  Gili stopped walking and turned to look back. “That was Huna.” Gili looked thoughtful for a moment, his metallic eyes rolling around in their orbits. “With each generation we are seeking mutation, this being our most important goal for us as a species, for Existence: new possibilities. This is how we are becoming, Jane. This is how we are growing into something better, constructing an Existence more optimal—always, more optimal. There are times when mutations will be conferring desirable traits, and, at times, undesirable traits. In the wild, traits that are advantageous make survival to reproduction more likely. This is how populations are changing. This is natural. This is how evolution is working, yes?”

  Jane nodded. She followed him so far.

  “There are occasions when one mutation is giving rise to both desirable and undesirable traits in one individual. Among sentients, the undesirable must be tolerated so that the desirable trait may be thriving. In time, we hope to be minimizing the bad in order to be increasing the good. You are understanding this?”

  Jane contemplated what she’d lear
ned about the Swarm and how chance genetic mutations had saved that species from extinction time and again, allowing it to reinvent itself so many times that it no longer resembled its earliest form in any way. Each subsequent mutation had allowed it to occupy another biological niche until its survival as a species was certain and it became a plague on the galaxy—definitely a negative trait if one was not a Swarm beetle.

  She said, “So, Huna’s leg conformation is less desirable, but Huna has another trait that is very desirable, that makes the disability worthwhile?”

  Gili chirped softly. “You are understanding. We cannot always be knowing what will come of a mutation by looking only at the genes in a zygote. It is far too complicated. The genes must be expressing for us to be understanding. Huna is suffering a little, I am conceding, but is also expressing exceptional intelligence. He is among our brightest and most creative geneticists. Now he is understanding this concept better than anyone. He is not minding difficulty in walking because he is knowing his genes are making new children with more optimal lives. We are making manifest the Cunabula ideal. We are following them. They are giving us many gifts, many blessings, every day.”

  Gili stopped at a sap station, and it seemed their conversation about Huna had concluded. The station was built into an alcove that was up against a trunk, one of many places where bark was exposed. There were two irregularly bulging nodes in the trunk with spigots emerging from them. On the floor underneath there were two bins—one for clean, deep, wide bowls, neatly stacked, and one for used bowls, haphazardly dumped inside. Gili took a clean plastic bowl, filled it, and passed it to Jane. “Thirsting?” he said. She sniffed discreetly. It was sap. Jane explained to Ajaya that one spigot was sap and the other water.

  Jane took a small sip from the mottled, cream-colored bowl and then handed it back to Gili. He drank deeply, tipping the bowl up until it emptied. He gestured to everyone. “Favor to drinking if thirsting.” When he was satisfied that everyone had their fill, he waddled on.

  “This visit you’ll be seeing more of the community or seeing production alone?” Gili asked.

  Jane smiled. “We would love to see anything you want to show us, Gili,” she replied.

  “Displaying carnivore teeth! Trying, but not succeeding, to frighten me. Jane will not be eating me today.” Gili made a sound like a chortle.

  Jane was confused. Hadn’t she ever smiled for him before now? Maybe not with teeth. “Gili—no. This facial expression is a smile. It means I’m feeling happy.”

  His throat fluttered and he peered closely at her. She smiled again for him.

  “Smiling?” he asked. His mouth curved up in an approximation, though it looked unnatural. Then he took it a step farther by curling the edges of his mouth back comically to resemble lips and revealing thin, gummy ridges and a pale gray tongue. “Smiling is making me happy.” His laugh sounded like a champagne cork popping.

  Jane giggled. They were all smiling now, even the sectilians.

  A group of children who were all about the same size accompanied by one adult came down the hallway. They looked very orderly until one of the students lunged forward into a hop. The adult reacted lightning fast, stretching out their legs, grabbing the student by the arm, and yanking them back to resume their forward waddle. They were very small, and it was difficult to be sure, but she thought that perhaps these children’s legs looked more like Huna’s than Gili’s. Could these children be descendants of Huna?

  Then Jane noticed that there were six large lumps on the back of the adult who had accompanied the children. That meant she was female and the bulges were egg sacs. Pligans were marsupials. The eggs would develop and be nourished in their egg sacs until birth, when they would emerge, not as anything resembling tadpoles, but as small versions of adults.

  “Is this a teacher with students?” asked Schlewan.

  “Yes, teaching,” Gili said solemnly. Then he called down the hall. “Kula, what is the teaching today?”

  Kula did not reply until she was closer. “This brood is learning about the role of RNA in gene expression—and manners,” she said. She didn’t turn her head, but her large, expressive eyes settled on one of the children in a half-lidded stare. Jane assumed it was the child who had been trying to leap forward.

  Schlewan looked shocked. “So young?”

  Kula tilted her head one way and then the other. “I don’t understand the question.”

  “They seem young to learn such concepts,” Schlewan said.

  Kula’s throat trembled a little. “It may seem so to offworlders. We use integrated concepts from birth. We build upon the layers of knowledge as each brood is ready. This way, the lessons are well understood by transition time.”

  The children all looked up at the alien visitors and were very quiet. Jane wondered how old they actually were. So far Jane hadn’t met a pligan who marked time in any way. How could you note the passing of years when you didn’t have a night sky to mark the positions of the stars? Days and years had no meaning for them. Mentioning these concepts seemed to frazzle the pligans. Gili had just ignored the idea of being elderly in their conversation. There was so much of this culture she didn’t understand yet.

  They spoke of readiness often. One did something until one was ready to do something else. Time seemed to have little to do with it. From what she’d gathered so far, children were described by their growth and achievements, not by age.

  Jaross spoke up. “Is this brood yours? Are these your children?”

  Kula blinked and looked to Gili then back to Jaross. “These children are pligan.” She laid a hand on her back. “These will be pligan children. I do not own any of them.”

  Jaross said, “I misspoke. It is a cultural difference.” Jaross’s expression was bland, but Jane sensed her discomfiture. Because Brai wasn’t available, Jane had decided to maintain a light anipraxic link to her crew through Ryliuk, whose abilities as a mind master were nearly as strong as most kuboderan. She’d grown comfortable with the method. It helped her monitor her people. She was careful to avoid being intrusive. It was merely a method of gauging mood and emotional tone in order to avoid cultural misunderstandings.

  “We are like children ourselves,” Jane said, hoping to ease the awkwardness. “We are learning so much, so fast about your culture.”

  Kula leaned forward. Her stare was curious but also felt somewhat tainted with revulsion. “Do you own children?”

  Jane jumped in to reply before one of the sectilians might. They tended to be abrupt and she was afraid that as a group they were already giving offense. “Not really. Humans and sectilians tend to live in pairs or small cooperative groups. The offspring they produce lives in the same household as the pair or group and is normally the responsibility of the genetic parents. The genetic parents care for their children through to adulthood in most cases and we refer to those children as being ‘theirs.’ I think it must be different here.” Jane hoped her explanation made things better, rather than worse. She wasn’t sure what Kula had been inferring, but it seemed very negative in nature.

  Both Kula and Gili were pulsing their throats as they listened to this explanation. Gili said, “Knowing genetic parents is very strange. Broods are born—many mothers at once—and the raising is done together by those specializing in teaching and watching.”

  Kula looked down at her charges. “Groups like these are arranged by ability. They are constantly changing as the children learn and move to the next group.”

  Ajaya squatted down to eye level with the little ones and turned her palms out, mimicking what Gili had done when he’d greeted them at the elevator. “There are many ways to raise children successfully.”

  The little pligans took that as an invitation and edged forward to look at her more carefully. Kula didn’t seem to mind this. They touched Ajaya’s hands tentatively and then more boldly. One of them climbed on her back and plucked at her shiny black hair in its ponytail. Jane squatted down next to Ajaya, and then the little on
es seemed to be comparing the two of them.

  They didn’t speak Mensententia yet, so they hadn’t reached the age of puberty. Kula answered their questions in their own tongue, which was low and throaty, and didn’t translate anything to Mensententia. Jane wondered what the children were saying but hesitated to ask after the earlier misunderstanding. Perhaps it was safer to stay silent with regard to the youngsters.

  Soon everyone was crouching or kneeling on the floor, except Alan.

  Until one of the little ones pulled on his pants leg.

  “Oh, sheesh,” he grumbled, but he got down on all fours and let the child explore him.

  5

  ALAN WAS tolerant of the micropligans crawling all over him until one of them stuck him right in the eyeball. That wasn’t even so bad. It was the removal of the kid’s fingertip sucker that hurt—felt like his eye was being pulled straight out of his head. He actually found himself holding his eyeball in the socket while the kid pulled until he was free, for fuck’s sake.

  No one had taught him how to handle this kind of stuff during astronaut training.

  He let out a loud, “Yeowch!” just as the kid broke loose. The little guy hopped away to stand next to his teacher and just stared at him sullenly, making distressed chirping sounds.

  God only knew what kind of germs were left behind, crawling around inside his eye socket after that little encounter.

  He barely held himself back from cursing. Jane didn’t like him to curse around aliens. She said it could be too easily misconstrued even if it was in English. He always tried his best not to start an interplanetary incident, but sometimes it was just damn hard.