I felt very alone, trying to find my way home. The trees loomed over me, threatening in the darkness. Creaks, snaps, and the sounds of animals skittering around in the darkness scared me.
Stumbling around in the night, I found a burrow in the space between a large root and the moist ground. Dirt caked my hands as I dug in for the night.
Overhead, streams of water cascaded down through large leaves and drooping limbs to soak me.
It would be a shivery night. My fur was only just starting to regrow after the anakoinosis.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was no advice, or past memories, to guide me on my path. It would be a shameful, lonely night, devoid of new learning.
When I was born, I broke free of my shell with my own hands. I picked the insides clean until I had a full stomach, and the brittle remains fell apart easily with a few punches and kicks.
I remembered this, as I remembered all things from long ago, and far away.
Many aerokratois stood around me when I broke free. They were pale and twice my height, with disgustingly smooth skin. The only visible fur grew on their heads.
Yet what fascinations they brought!
Until this point all the memories of my parents had swirled around through my body, mixing and intermingling, growing with me as I knit myself from egg.
So I understood what they said when they looked at me. Many of my parents understood their languages, though it had taken fifteen generations of anakoinosis to spread those memories all throughout.
None of my kind could absorb aerokratois memories, not the way our own foreparents’ memories were etched in each of us. The aerokratois defied true understanding because of their alienness. So we observed, watched, and learned to imitate the aerokratois ways.
Maybe, we thought, if we imitated them long enough, we could come to understand them without anakoinosis.
“Bob,” one of the aerokratois pointed at me. “This is your whiffet.”
“My what?”
“It will be your . . . assistant.”
Bob, I knew from the memories, looked upset.
“Assistant? I don’t want one of your little slaves, I want nothing to do with this.”
Another aerokratois stepped forward. “It is merely indentured servitude. Look, the leaders of the whiffets gave us their young willingly in exchange for the technology we gave them. It’s a fair trade.”
The memory of the aerokratois descending from the sky on a loud wind popped into my mind. They came with gifts: glittering objects, rare metals, strong spear-tips for better hunting, and diagrams for even more interesting machines.
“That doesn’t make it okay,” Bob shouted. “It’s wrong. You know it. Just because they were given to us doesn’t make using them right.”
The conversation, and my new master’s concern made me nervous. I walked forward and grabbed his hand. I formed words.
“I will serve you well, aerokrat. You will teach me all I can absorb.”
Bob’s mouth hung upon.
“How can it learn to speak so soon?”
The other aerokratois made laughter noises and shook themselves.
“They learn in the egg, we think.”
“You think?” Bob shouted. “Why haven’t we thawed out anthropologists yet? This needs to be studied. To be learned.”
I was excited. I would understand new things, things my foreparents had not known. Very few of the aerokratois seemed to care about learning. They had a desperate air about them, and only cared about one thing: the Great Repair.
But this aerokrat seemed different.
“We don’t have time,” the others told Bob. “The repairs must continue if we want to make the launch window. We have to fix the ship first, then we can study the whiffets with whatever time we have left. We can leave the scientists behind.” They made laughs again.
“That would be all right by me,” one of them said.
I stood and watched them all.
That was the day I was bonded to my aerokrat. The cycle of learning new things continued.
Huddled under the root of the tree in the steady rain by myself, I sorted through long buried, and a few recent, happy memories. They comforted me.
More of my fur had grown in by morning. I took a few moments to carefully groom myself with twigs, trying to comb over the few bare patches still left in my fur.
It was the fourth time I’d lost and regrown my fur. I was proud of the memories I imparted to each of my children with every new generation I sired.
The mud hadn’t dried, but it was walkable. Outside the treeline, bare ground stretched for miles and miles. Big yellow machines roved over the roads, driven by aerokratois inside.
The yellow machines shoveled and ate dirt. They burrowed into the ground sniffing for Metal. Then the Metal got taken back to the Hopper, which digested Metal in huge, fiery belches, and created Spare Parts for the Great Repair.
The bare ground of the aerokratois had spread outward quickly. When the first of us were taken over the ocean to work here, there were only trees and the Hopper.
Whiffets clung to the backs of the yellow machines, waiting for their orders. Others walked along the roadsides with picks, keeping the roads in good order.
More worked deep in the earth, their fur thick with dirt, pulling Metal from the ground.
I knew every inch of the land. From generations back, the memories swirled inside me. Sometimes I remembered the land across the sea my kind came from. It was very similar, but without wild animals, aerokratois, or big yellow machines.
Time to walk the many miles of road back toward my aerokrat’s home.
My aerokrat looked down at me. I stood on the steps to his small hut. His eyes looked puffy, and the fur on top of his head was unkept.
I extended my forearm to show him the numbers on it. NN-721. The fur didn’t grow around those markings.
Bob flinched. He recognized me now.
“Oh, god,” he said. “I helped you run away. I freed you. What are you doing here?” His voice sounded like an angry hiss. I flinched. “No, no,” Bob stepped back. “I won’t hurt you.”
“I am back.” I was happy to be back, and in the presence of aerokratois again.
“But why?” Bob shook his head. “Do you know what it took for me to get you out there?”
I give him the aerokratois gesture of understanding: I nodded.
“You,” and I recalled it exactly, “faked a pass to use a flier to drop me off far, so I could get far away from this hellhole of bondage.”
It had been an exciting adventure.
And now I was back.
Bob leaned toward the side of the doorway and repeatedly hit his head against it. I watched, trying to understand his actions.
I walked over next to him and did the same.
Some ritual of returning?
Bob stopped and looked around.
“Get inside,” he ordered.
He closed the door behind me quickly.
“Didn’t I drop you far enough away, so you could get away from all this?” Bob moved to the back of his hut and mixed different colored liquids together from elaborate jars into a glass. His face twisted when he lifted the glass and swallowed.
The liquids must not have tasted very good.
Bob drank things that didn’t taste very good often.
“Yes, you did drop me far enough away,” I said.
“Then why have you come back?”
“How can I leave my master? You guide me, teach me, and command me.” I would learn more new things, things not in my memory. The moment I came out of the egg I had become bound to him. This was our way.
Bob drank more liquids.
“We are missing each other, I think,” he said. “We don’t understand each other.”
I was excited.
“Yes, we must understand.”
He grabbed my hand.
“Come on, we’re going out.”
Bob took me to the graves. Tiny
white crosses spilled out over the hill like strange saplings.
“In just two years since we first came to this planet, look at all the whiffets worked to death.” He swept his arm at them.
I looked at the hill, thinking of all the foreparents there. Many of their memories swirled through me like a storm. They were not lost, their memories were all over the place, in other whiffets working for the aerokratios.
“They are remembered.” I looked up at Bob. “What is your complaint?”
“You are being exploited.” Bob walked around in circles. “It is bad.”
“Why?” I sat on the bare ground. “What else would you have us do now that we are here, an ocean away from our homeland?”
Bob’s lips moved, but nothing came out for several seconds.
“It’s not just you,” Bob said. “That is bad enough. But we are also destroying ourselves.” Bob crouched next to me and put his head in his hands. “Losing our self-sufficiency and innovation. You know, the other day one of the trucks broke, and instead of fixing it they chose to build a wagon pulled by whiffets . . . it’s easier and quicker than spending time trying to figure out how to fix the truck.” Bob looked at me. “It’ll keep going like that. First we used you to serve tired workers drinks and get into small areas we can’t. They said it was better to relocate the robots into dangerous areas, we needed more help than just the people we’d unfrozen. But soon they will use your labor to replace other things. We’ll be taking away the greenhouses and using whiffets out in the fields to grow crops. And then, when the robots break down, you’ll be doing that work, too.”
A thrill shot up my back. All these new things we would be doing!
“This is wonderful.” I stood up. “You came from the sky and blessed us with all these new things. And now you tell me you will give us more.”
Bob pushed his fingers through his hair.
“You make things worse thinking like that.” He pointed down at the direction of the Hopper. The great legs poked out. Smoke rose from its pipes. The maw gleamed with fire. “We were just passing by this system when our ship’s shield failed. We were moving so fast the interstellar dust just ripped through the hull. Half of the passengers died, and hardly anything of use survived. This was the best place they could find on short notice. The engineers dropped down plan-etside near the best resource-rich area they could find. They think the hopper can manufacture enough of the parts they need.” He pointed up at the sky where aerokratois came from. “They say we can, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to fix the damage. It’s been two years and we’re hardly any closer, and the hopper is beginning to show signs of failure.” Bob poked at the dirt. “They’re many more passengers in storage up there that they’re going to have bring down before more life support systems fail on the ship. That’s why they’re making the roads and buildings: temporary housing.”
More? More aerokratois?
I jumped up.
“This is marvelous!” I wanted to share this new information, to ask if I could leave again, but Bob heard sounds from the tiny machine on his hand and sighed.
“Time to work.”
Bob directed teams of whiffets. We built huts for the aerokratois. It was long, hard work. Others around me, their fur thick, clumping, and ready for anakoinosis, talked with me as we sawed wood and hammered the buildings into shape.
Even though I could talk to other whiffets while I worked, we all knew this did not bring true understanding. For us speech was just a shadow of the truth. Only through constant anakoinosis could we truly be a community, and know what lay in each others’ hearts through the shared memories of our foreparents.
Because we could not understand the aerokratois, we were happily there to work, observe, and struggle to understand them.
And Bob had told me interesting new things.
Bob kept me out of sight. He let me work with other whiffets, but then hid me in his hut at night. He was worried about other areokratois realizing I had returned.
“They might decide to do something to you,” Bob said. “Some of the men are worried that one day the whiffets will start running away.”
“Do not worry,” I said. “We will not leave your side.”
That did not make Bob relax, it made him drink more of his different colored liquids.
It took several days of work before Bob talked to me about leaving again. My fur had thickened considerably, and was full of healthy clumps. Bob and I sat at his table. He turned away my attempts to cook dinner for him, or mix his funny liquids.
I asked Bob if he would let me leave again.
“Won’t you just come back?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where are you going?” Bob stood up and looked out the window. “How long?”
I was excited.
“Anakoinosis! I will share what I have learned about your ships in the sky and your prediction of more of your kind coming to live among us.”
Bob’s voice sounded like it was cracking. “You will not try to escape, then?”
“I could not do that,” I told him.
He shook his head.
“What is this anakoinosis? The men told me you mean sex,” Bob said. I stared at him blankly. “Reproduction?” Bob continued.
I grabbed his hand.
“I will show you what it is.”
In all my memories, in the last two years, and so many generations of whiffets since the sky broke and aerokratois came among us, I don’t think any of the aerokratois had taken the time to understand what anakoinosis really was.
They were too busy worrying about the Great Repair and how to feed the Hopper with Metal.
Two years was not long to them.
Bob followed me out of his hut.
A small group met on the far side of a hill an hours’ walk away from the lights and buildings. They didn’t know what to think about Bob, but I talked to them gently until they agreed to let him stay.
Bob sat in the grass and watched.
One of the four whiffets still had patchy fur, but he was excited. He had learned how to operate one of the yellow machines by looking in through the windows at the aerokratois while they operated it.
It would have been better to wait until his fur was thick, but he was in a dangerous job. I chose him.
The other three faced each other, a triple act of anakoinosis. I turned away from them and grabbed the arms of the other.
His tattoo was NL-501.
I leaned forward and brushed my cheek against his, hugged him; and felt my skin stir. He smelled of machinery, aerokratois, and dirt.
I slowly began to molt as we held each other tight. The fur on my arms and chest intermingled with his. We rotated, pushing our backs against each other, then rubbed our legs together.
Fur sloughed off, responding to touch, and drifted into a compact ball on the ground. Naked, we both sat next to the new egg and watched it bind itself tight.
The loss of fur made me very hungry, and tired.
I let go of 501 and walked over to Bob, who sat very still.
“Explain this to me.” I could barely hear his voice as I sat next to him. We watched the trio standing over by their own egg.
“This child, when it matures will have both the memories and understandings of my insights with you, and the insights of learning how to operate the yellow machines,” I tell Bob. “That is anakoinosis; true understanding. The egg will be brought to our masters, and they will choose who to bind the children to, as that will let them learn more than I could ever teach them. They know everything that I have known.”
“But these are your children!” Bob was loud now. He got up and walked in slow circles again.
“They are us.” I followed him around in circles. “They will be bound. They will be paired with those who know different things. If you had been one of us, before you died, we would share anakoinosis, so your knowledge would not be lost, and the memories of those after us increase. Only after our masters die
are we free, and alone.”
Bob’s mouth hung open. He was trying hard to understand. It was the closest an aerokrat could get to anakoinosis.
“It must be a survival mechanism. You commingle to pass on all your knowledge. Your fur . .’.” He stopped and ran his hand over my bare skin. “It’s protein, right? The DNA must combine, they ... I don’t know . ..” He looked up into the sky. “I cannot believe they decided against unfreezing anyone to study you all. We need the scientists down here!” A new thought caught him, and he whirled on me. “What happens to you when there are no new masters with new memories, when you share all?”
I spread my arms.
“Those are happy times,” I said. I remembered generations of pleasant times in the woods. Times when you knew, from all your prior foreparents’ memories, which trees could produce fruit every year. How many could gather in a copse and not go hungry. The feel of the sun on bare skin by the coast. Communal ana-koinosis of hundreds together. Stasis for thousands and thousands of generations, with no new ideas to be found.
“These are not happy times,” Bob said.
“These are learning times.” I pointed at the Hopper. “We must learn everything you can teach us. And then, when there is nothing more to learn, we can have happy times. We will be just like you.”
Bob shook his head.
“It won’t work like that. It won’t.”
“But it will. It always has. In memory, there were other threats. Great predatory animals, others of my kind who knew very different things who came from different parts of the land we lived on before you took us away. We incorporate them, become them, reflect them, remember them, their thoughts, and their essence. We will do the same to you.”
Bob walked away from me. I ran to catch up with his long strides.
“There is never stasis with humans.” His feet hit the ground hard. “We always change.”
“Then we will learn this, and . . .”
“Not as long as you consider us different, or masters of any knowledge. You will always be bound. And since we have longer lifespans than you, you will be bound forever.”
I could barely keep up with him.
“Well, yes. Eventually your young will need to become bound to us if they are to learn new things.”
I, Alien Page 19
