by Robert Reed
Years ago, Perri had ridden with that filth, his body encased in a hyperfiber suit, both hidden inside a whale’s rotting carcass. The self-styled adventurer evaded every security system and survived the maelstrom, expecting to find great machines at work—filters and distillers and atom-cracking wonders older than vertebrates, and more durable.
But to his amazement, he found the Child instead, and with it one naked and enraged captain.
Breathing between his fingers, Pamir felt his throat swell and bleed. There was a thin and wobbly trail beneath him that he could feel more than see, and he avoided it, preferring the thin carpet of mock-fungi, gray and bristly, thriving on a diet of toxins. The sewer’s roar was vast, uncomplicated. Other fluids were moving underground, the air reverberating with thunderous swallowing sounds. Eventually the mists thinned and then vanished, leaving him on the shelf where he always stopped. He lowered his burned hands. The flesh was already healing. Eyes blinked and dripped for a few moments, reclaiming their superior vision, and he lifted his gaze, turning in a slow circle, absorbing his surroundings.
The ceiling was an inverted bowl, a peach-colored sun strung from the apex, both sun and ceiling obscured by banks of water-fat clouds. The floor was like a shattered plate—a ten thousand square kilometer plate—its shards loosely reassembled, every gap a canyon where a different sewer flowed. In the center was an ocean of sand—countless grains of scrap hyperfiber and catalytic metals—and on top of the sand lay a shallow lake being perpetually drained, its overflow bound for reservoirs that would slake millions of thirsts.
The old machines and every surface were built of hyperfiber, yet little of the wonderstuff was visible.
Life covered every surface.
Dense and vibrant.
Noisy.
Tireless.
Kilometer-long mock-vines. Mock-trees taller than starships. Mock-fungi wearing elegant shapes and vivid fluorescent colors. And all were linked, roots and fleshy tendrils locked together, a perfect biological embrace extending into the sewers, absorbing and lifting the tainted water, xylem pulling it through filtering gills and kidneys and more gills. Everything of value was harvested. Everything else—the filth of modern technology—was destroyed, if not on the first try then on the next, or the thousandth. However long the work took, it took; the Child was nothing if not tenacious, doing its job without failure or complaint.
As was the custom, Pamir whispered, “Hello.”
The reply was diffuse and immediate. Millions of mouths and other orifices exhaled as one, mangling the words, “Hello,” and “Captain,” and “Friend Pamir.”
The ground shook under the Child’s voice.
Pamir moved, head down, stepping wherever the vegetation looked soft and sturdy. His footprints didn’t linger. Every trace of him was erased. Bacterium and viral bodies, skin flakes and dislodged hairs were caught and digested. Everything but the captain became the Child, incorporated and annihilated, then refashioned to serve some critical task.
Several times each year, during off-duty time, Pamir visited the Child.
Their relationship was centuries old.
Yet even now he had to remind himself that here was one inhabitant, one organism—a multitude of forms but all linked, like the cells inside his own durable body.
Only better.
Mock-animals appeared, and mock-insects and mock-rodents and sharp little bodies that looked more like tools than organisms. A herd of mock-okapi grazed on poisoned foliage, shitting sweet treasures as they moved closer. Then a mock-angel arrived, shaped like a winged human female, gliding into a meadow of mock-grass, its umbilical linking with the grass and the Child, the gesture as automatic as breathing.
Neural bodies spoke through the angel. A feminine voice observed, “You are early, friend, and by a long measure.”
Pamir tried to speak and then stopped himself, unsure how to proceed.
Cloud-colored wings lashed at the air, causing the dew to leap from the gold-green blades—a clean chill rain in reverse—and with concern on its human face, the angel asked:
“What is wrong, friend Pamir?”
Pure, raw fear made him shiver and hold himself.
The Child tasted fear compounds boiling from him, and each body sobbed the same question from whatever passed for a mouth:
“What is wrong?”
Then again, in a thunderblast:
“WHAT IS WRONG?”
Pamir cupped his hands to his dampened face, legs buckling, knees diving into a mat of sweet-scented mushrooms. Beneath them was a solvent, gray and alien. Suddenly exposed to the air, its rank odor made him cough, tasting blood again. He wished he could fall unconscious but he didn’t. He had no choice but to say, “The Monster.” His voice was quick, almost soundless. “The Monster’s here, and I’m sorry. Sorry.”
But the Child had already guessed as much; what else could be so awful?
The mock-okapi came forward, placid herbivorous faces dropping, big cobalt tongues lapping at the solvent as the eyes gazed through him; and the angel spoke, a small pitiful voice asking, “Will you help me?”
Spores exploded into the air, tasting of cinnamon and things unnamed.
“Please, friend Pamir, will you help me?”
Even before he answered, Pamir wondered why the Child would have to ask. After everything he had risked, staking so much on the survival of this one organism…why did he still have to prove his devotion, and with something as thin as words…?
4
A minor captain had handled the initial interview, tabulating each discrepancy against the subject’s sketchy background. Then with an absence of spirit, he left the would-be immigrant waiting in the quarantine cell while he went to his superior. The second captain chastised him for doing nothing, and then she approached a still higher-ranked officer with a reputation for not giving a shit. But bureaucrats trained by millennia of ritual and small decisions needed the occasional blood-letting. Even a thousand years later, Pamir recalled the prolonged, deeply inspired dressing-down giving to both of his whimpering colleagues. Why, why, why should he get dragged into something as minuscule as one inappropriate passenger? Throw the idiot back into his ship, or kick him overboard. Then as the captains turned to run, he amended himself, saying, “No, I’ll do the throwing and kicking. Watch your nexuses, and learn.”
The immigrant had a fictional name and a dubious biography. Smaller than any human adult, he bore a glancing resemblance to a child, his fine features emphasizing the huge green eyes and a young boy’s oversized head. Yet he claimed to be an adult, both in words and under bioscans. His starship was a wooden-hulled, crude and profoundly unsafe vessel, and he had built it himself. His home was a tiny, little-known colony world. From a region without humans, Pamir knew, and he pressed the man-child on that subject, making him admit that the home was a lie, that his identity was fabricated, and his bioscan was exactly what it seemed to be: A collection of odd, even bizarre features scattered inside a glancingly human shell.
The body was camouflage, and it wasn’t especially good camouflage.
“You’re alien,” said Pamir. “Admit it. There’s no harm. We like aliens here. We don’t even know how many kinds are riding with us.” A lie. Each species was registered, regardless of intelligence or numbers. “Maybe you’re a criminal on your home world. These things happen. There’s no shame or embarrassment, or whatever you call your suffering. We are a human venture, and the grand crimes of your planet might not make us blink. How do you know? Until the truth shakes free, nobody knows.”
“I am not a criminal,” said the creature, tears running and the bottom lip pushing out in a shamelessly human gesture.
The eye-rich face was a calculation, Pamir knew, and these emotions arose from the same calculation.
And none of this would matter.
“I have done nothing wrong,” said a soft, resolute voice.
“Not a criminal, but a saint. Huh.” A pitiless gaze and hard laugh seemed
useful. “We can use saints. All we can find. But you see, the rules require me to ask: Saint or not, how do you intend to pay for your passage?”
The mouth closed tight and then opened slightly, words dribbling from it. “You can have my ship.”
“Your ship is trash,” the captain said. “How it’s held together this long, I don’t know.”
Now the green eyes were dry but infinitely fragile.
Pamir shook his head. Laugher was a weapon, and he attacked with it, battering the victim before asking another good question. “How did you learn so much about us?”
“I monitored your broadcasts.”
“And you’re alien. Just say, ‘Yes.’”
“Yes.”
“See? And here you sit, still safe and whole.”
The alien dipped its head, soft golden hairs breaking the light into tiny rainbows.
“What sort of beast are you?” Pamir pointed a thick finger at his victim, and he lied. “Give details and you won’t be punished. Honest details might even earn you rewards.”
“I like humans.”
“Which are words that mean so little,” said Pamir. “You’ve gone to the trouble of manufacturing a human carriage. Like me or not, the intent is to mislead my species, and sad to say, that in itself is a significant and punishable offense.”
“I will do no harm,” it said, trying tears again.
“What are you?”
“A refugee.”
Watching the tears, Pamir wondered if they were just a little genuine. “Son,” he said, “let me show you real honesty in action. Yes, we see quite a few refugees, but we are a commercial vessel on a pleasure cruise, every last passenger obliged to pay his way: In goods, or services, in any of several abstract monetary systems, or with rich gifts of knowledge.”
The alien nodded and began to stand.
“What are you doing?” Pamir asked.
“I don’t know,” it whispered.
“You saw our broadcasts. Weren’t you suitably warned?”
No response.
Through a nexus, Pamir started the eviction procedure. Then almost as an afterthought, he asked, “Are you certain that you don’t have some useful skill?”
“I have many skills.”
“Fine. Name one.”
The alien took several steps before finding the right direction. Then it asked Pamir, “May I retrieve something from my ship?”
“But I’ll be watching you,” he said. “Remember.”
That was another lie. Pamir concentrated on the legal essentials. He had no reason to watch a small tragedy unfold, which was why he mandated that an engineer would examine the wooden starship first, and if found unworthy, the alien would remain in captivity until a berth could be found on a willing transport.
He didn’t notice the Child’s return.
A weak breath was heard, and Pamir lifted his eyes. Nestled in the boyish hands was an open vial full of some thick black liquid. “Can you scan this, please?” asked the Child. Easily, in an instant, and the results showed a stew of aggressive toxins and carnivorous oxides. One drop on the skin would destroy a healthy man’s body. Pamir’s first thought was that the foolish organism was going to play the Let-me-stay-or-I-will-kill-you gambit.
A trio of defensive systems was awakened, added to the usual tools.
But there was no threat, verbal or implied. The Child simply lifted the vial to its mouth and drank it dry, and then with ungulate teeth grown in the last minutes, it chewed the crystal glass to slivers and swallowed them too.
Pamir’s laugh felt forced. “Okay, you are a tough little bug. You’re put together differently than me, and so what? It doesn’t matter. On my authority, I am expelling you from the Ship. Good luck to you, and good-bye.”
“I’ll clean this water,” the Child promised. Begged. “If you will wait a moment—”
“Toward what end?” Pamir interrupted. “What you’re doing is not special, much less spectacular. Not if your aim is shipboard entertainment. Not with hundreds of millennia waiting ahead of us, no.”
The Child approached him, its breath scalding.
“Before this, I drank your water,” it said.
“My water.”
“After I spoke to the first captain, I tasted what you drink.” A pinching of features; a visible pain. “Sour water.”
Pamir said nothing, waiting.
“Your recycling systems are ill, I think.”
That was a class-one secret. This district’s purification system was struggling with the pollutants of so many species. But the contamination was at such a low level that no organism, or even a bioscan, would be able to tease out the part-per-trillion impurities.
“I can help you.”
Pamir built a weak smile, swallowed and said, “Maybe you can clean up the occasional mouthful and liter, my friend. But multiply that by rivers of sewage, night and day, and what possible good are you?”
The Child had hoped to be accepted as human, and if that failed, as an ordinary alien. But with both prospects finished, it had no choice but honesty. Pamir couldn’t be trusted—how could it have faith in an organism so unlike itself—but it was out of choices, save death.
In a quiet, stolid fashion, it said, “I have more than this mouth.”
“Is that so?”
“I can be large,” it promised.
Pamir didn’t respond, gathering his belongings, ready to leave.
“Once,” said the Child, “I was vast.”
“As big as me?”
Realizing it was being mocked, and either out of anger or rage, the Child grabbed Pamir at the waist and lifted him from the ground. Then with its stinking, blistering breath, it told him, “I was once as large as a world.”
“A world?”
“If you had known me, you would describe me as…” A pause. “As being…” The face was changing, gaining color and a rock’s stillness, eyes shrinking to hot white points. “As being Gaian. I am, that.”
The captain kicked at the air, not believing the words but unable to discount them either.
Moments passed with that strange little organism holding the giant man far from the floor.
Then Pamir asked, “What are you?”
If he heard that impossible word again—“Gaian”—he could laugh out loud and then dismiss the creature and its nonsense out of hand. That’s what he believed before the Child suddenly dropped him.
“I am small,” it said.
Black tears streaking its changing face.
“I have become small, and weak, and I beg you, wondrous sir, will you allow me to stay here with you?”
5
The Monster had arrived, and after delivering the news, Pamir remained with the Child for several more days and nights. Old contingencies were resurrected. Various actions and defensive schemes were examined in detail. The Child was already altering its nature, still cleaning the incoming waters but pulling more and more flesh into fighting bodies unlike anything the captain had ever seen. Mock-okapi collapsed and died. Mock-rodents grew poisoned fangs and spurs. And the mock-angels ate corpses while transforming themselves into griffin-like creatures, hot-blooded and enormous, gills sucking in oxygen like ramjets as they learned to fly, great roaring flocks of them patrolling just beneath the clouds.
The furious activity comforted Pamir. The Monster was close, but it hadn’t yet found the Child. And even if it did, he couldn’t believe that a tiny organism without allies or resources could prevail. He said as much to his companion, and the Child responded with silence. The entire cavern paused, save for the rushing waters. Then a griffin landed nearby and said, “Perhaps you are right, friend Pamir.” But there was no confidence behind the words, and he wondered in which ways he had disappointed the creature.
Boarding the cap-car, Pamir started for home.
The long-ago interview felt new again, and he began doubting himself. A more ambitious captain would have worked the opportunity, dragging the Child befor
e a Submaster or perhaps the Master Captain herself. The Gaian would have been granted official asylum, responsibilities passing along the links of command; and today, the Monster would be facing the official resolve and pooled resources of the united Ship.
But doubts soon collapsed. Pamir’s superiors might not have understood the situation, evicting the Child out of fear and ignorance. Or more likely, the Submasters would have seen blessings wrapped inside the creature’s singular genetics, and they would have done any ugly thing to render a profit. And even if through some lack of judgment they acted honorably, granting asylum to the Child, security measures would have grown weak over time. Captains talked. Most of them were babblers who told passengers any astonished thing, just to impress. And with passengers coming and going, in short order this entire arm of the galaxy would have known about the Child, and the Monster would have arrived even sooner, wearing even better camouflage.
No, Pamir had picked the least-awful solution. There were regulations, and there were places never imagined by regulations; he used a vague directive allowing a captain to take a single entity into temporary protective care. That’s why he had faked the Child’s eviction. With the two other captains watching, he had said, “There are no Gaians, and you think that I’m an idiot.” He faked data that would explain the magic trick, and then to sell the lie, he had launched the wooden starship toward the nearest inhabitable world. Its engine was sabotaged but without reason, the reactor failing on its own. A few decades later, there was a flash of light against the stars, and the ship was gone, and Pamir comforted his subordinates by reminding them that rules had reasons and the blame was his to wear, not theirs, and just to keep this between the three of them, he would put the proper files where they couldn’t be found.
By then, Pamir had wrested control of a faltering sewage plant from another captain. The colleague went away thinking that she was the crafty one, getting out from under that onerous station. Nobody asked questions or thought to complain. Gradually, as the Child grew larger and more competent, Pamir put the ancient machines to sleep. Insoluble problems were gone. Effluents were absorbed and simplified, and water pure to the billion-trillion levels ran from every tap. And for nearly a thousand years, lies and the occasional bribe were able to deflect every official who showed the least little curiosity in trash.
