“Tethered” was published in Interzone. Set on the shores of Titan’s methane lakes, it is a story about very strange alien biology, a female coming-of-age story in which the transition between girlhood and womanhood is further complicated by the relationship between humans and a subservient alien race that is biologically compelled to try to make humans happy.
On the shore of Ontario Lacus on Southern Titan, Cara molded castles from the windblown sediment that served as sand. Her parents stood at the threshold of their shelter in the distance, chatting with their sponsor, the Wergen responsible for transporting her family from Earth. Cara lay on her stomach while the methane waves lapped against the shore, tickling her bare feet.
She held up her hand against the smoggy orange sky and studied the barely visible blue tint that covered her skin. Her mother had described it as a special ‘coat’ that protected them from the cold weather. The Wergen force field over Ontario Lacus shielded them from radiation and modulated the gravity, but they still needed the ‘coat’ to protect them from the temperatures. It sure didn’t feel cold, Cara thought. It didn’t even look chilly, although Cara’s mother had told her that Titan was colder than the coldest place on Earth.
A young Wergen, their sponsor’s daughter, tentatively stooped down next to her. “Soy Beatrix,” she said. The alien girl was squat and scaled and spoke with a slight accent so she must have just learned Spanish. It took Wergens about a day or so to speak a language fluently. “My brother and I were wondering … What are you doing?”
A fat, gray-scaled Wergen boy with round eyes peeked at them from behind a red boulder about fifty feet away.
“Why is he hiding?”
“He doesn’t like the way humans make him feel.”
“Really? I’ve never heard that before.”
“You make him feel too good.”
Cara shrugged. Of course the boy felt good around humans. He was Wergen. She was amused by the fact that the girl wore a red, skintight swimming cap over her flat head. Every Wergen she had ever seen wore green, leafy wreath-hats. “I’m building a sandcastle.”
“What’s a castle?” Beatrix said.
Cara giggled. “A house where a king lives.”
The Wergen stared at her and didn’t respond. Cara wondered whether the alien girl knew what a king was.
“Can I help?” Beatrix said.
Every Wergen Cara had ever met asked her parents this same question: “Can I help? Can I help?” Her mother and father were sick of the question. But it was the first time a Wergen had asked her and it made her feel grown up and important. Normally, her parents sternly said ‘no’ and the aliens would slink away with their heads down and their shoulders slumped. But Cara didn’t want to make the alien girl unhappy. “Yes, you can help.” She showed Beatrix how to pack the sediment and mold it into towers for the castle she was building. After a while, bored with this activity, Cara said, “I know something even more fun. Let’s go for a swim and catch perpuffers!”
“What are those?”
Cara displayed her left forearm, which was covered with furry bracelets. “They’re pretty, aren’t they? I have all the colors except purple. Purple perpuffers are the hardest to find.” She shuffled to the edge of the lake.
Beatrix stood up and looked out at the thick, pink waters that sloshed back and forth in slow motion. “I … don’t … I mean …” She stared silently.
“Follow me,” Cara said.
Six bots skittered around Beatrix’s feet. They were as large as cats, only Cara thought they looked more like praying mantises in the way they crouched on their spindly rear legs. Three of them stood in front of the Wergen girl, blocking her path, and red lights glowed at the end of their six appendages. Beatrix clapped her hands and they scattered to one side allowing her to walk past them.
As they waded into the lake, Beatrix pulled off her robes and tossed them to the bots. Cara didn’t know what she expected to see beneath the alien’s clothes but the Wergen girl simply stood there naked, unashamed. She had smooth white skin speckled with silver scales that sparkled when they caught the light at certain angles. Cara considered taking off her own bathing suit but then remembered the Wergen boy spying on them from behind the rock.
They dove into the water together, their blue bodyfields bright in the red murk of the lake. They were less buoyant in this liquid than in water and its ruddy color made it hard to see. Cara forced herself to go deeper, reaching out blindly and hoping to latch onto one of the furry perpuffers that filled the lake.
Cara heard a muffled scream.
She barely made out the Wergen girl’s blue bodyfield far below. Beatrix waved her arms over her head, sinking deeper. Cara dove closer, hooked her arm around the Wergen’s waist and kicked hard until they broke the surface. “Don’t struggle!” Cara gasped. “Don’t struggle!” She shouted for help but no one on the shore seemed to hear her. “You’re okay, I’ve got you.”
After a few panicked seconds Beatrix relaxed in her arms and they floundered back to shore. Cara’s screams had alerted the medbots, which immediately scoured over Beatrix’s face and chest. Cara’s parents and their Wergen patron came running and stood watch until the medbots eventually blinked yellow, signaling that Beatrix was unhurt.
The adult Wergen, who Cara believed to be Beatrix’s father, said, “You need to be more careful,” before quickly turning his attention back to Cara’s parents. “Are you sure I can’t help you with anything?” he said to them. “Perhaps I can assist with the interior decoration of your shelter?” Her parents turned away without answering and the Wergen followed close behind them.
Once the adults had left, Cara sat silently beside Beatrix for several minutes, burrowing her toes beneath the pasty sediment. There was no longer any sign of the Wergen boy. He hadn’t approached even when the medbots had examined his sister.
Cara finally broke the silence. “We can’t drown, you know,” she said, pointing to the blue tint that coated their bodies.
Beatrix paused, staring out at the pink waters. “Then why didn’t you just leave me?”
“I wasn’t going to swim back to shore while you were out there all alone and afraid.”
At this, the Wergen girl turned to face Cara. She tilted her head to the left and nodded, smiling warmly.
“Don’t you know how to swim?” Cara said.
Beatrix shook her head.
“Then why did you go in with me?”
“You said it was fun,” Beatrix said. “And … I wanted to make you happy.”
“Oh.”
The steady wind blew and neither of them spoke for a long time.
“Can I see your hand?” Cara said. She removed a red perpuffer from her left arm and placed it around the Wergen girl’s wrist. “Here. This is for you. A gift.”
The Wergen girl’s eyes brightened. “That tickles,” she said.
“Sometimes the perpuffers expand and contract a little bit when they’re fresh out of the lake.”
“No,” she said. “I meant your hand. When you touched me.”
Later that evening when Cara snuggled in bed she couldn’t get the words of the Wergen girl out of her head, the Wergen girl who so wanted to be her friend that she would risk her own life to make her happy.
ENCRYPTED Medical Journal Entry No. 223 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbarón: The Wergen headtail, or ‘tether’ as it is referred to in common parlance, originates at the base of the secondary spine. As the subject matures, the headtail extends, lining both the secondary and tertiary spines, and ultimately coiling into the hollow cavity of the cranium. (Note: Wergen physiology has no analog to the human brain. All neural activity is centered in a swath of cells that surround their upper and lower jawbones. See Med. Journal Entry No. 124.)
Every day after VR school, Cara met Beatrix at the lake. They waded up to their waists and jumped up and down in sync with the slow, swooshing waves. The winds never stopped on Titan. After what happened at the lake, Beatrix’s father programm
ed bots to swim alongside them at all times and ensure their safety. Like all Wergens, Beatrix only had one parent, but to Cara he seemed awfully distant, spending most of his time with humans instead of with Beatrix or her brother.
Over time, Beatrix became less afraid of the waters and Cara taught her to swim and to hunt for perpuffers. It didn’t take Beatrix long to get the hang of it. In fact, she became so skilled at perpuffer-hunting that she and Cara would often leave the lake with their arms and legs draped with the furry creatures. When they weren’t swimming together they would spend hours sculpting intricate castles and spacecraft in the pasty orange sands. Or Beatrix would try to teach Cara how to sing like a Wergen, which Cara found challenging given the chirping and rumbling noises that Beatrix could make with her throat.
Even during the rainy season when the waves were too choppy to swim, she and Beatrix would play outdoor VR games. As the settlement by Ontario Lacus expanded, more human children took to the lakeshore and joined them.
Cara pointed out the human boys she found cutest and what she liked most about them, their swaggering walk or broad shoulders or dimpled smiles. Beatrix found this fascinating—as she did everything about human beings. She mentioned how beautiful she thought the other adolescents were—girls and boys alike—and became animated whenever they huddled together and shared their secrets. As they spent more and more time together, Cara found herself forgetting that Beatrix was a Wergen—except for those occasions when she stared at Cara intensely and mentioned the bright rainbow-like auras that she saw around all humans, how her upper heart fluttered at the mere sight of them, how she spent every waking hour thinking about what she could do to make them happy. Cara didn’t like to hear this. It made her feel less special.
“What about Wergen boys?” Cara asked her one day while they treaded water far from shore. “Which ones do you like?”
There were few Wergens present on Titan because of a treaty between their peoples that restricted their numbers. But Wergen children occasionally gathered at the shore to watch the humans.
“It’s different for us, Cara,” she said. “We don’t think about things that way.”
“Well, how do you think about them?”
The waves washed over them as they bobbed in the lake.
“I can’t explain …”
“Try.”
“I don’t like them in the same way that you like human boys. At least not right now. But when I reach a certain age my body will change …”
“Change?” Cara said.
Beatrix hesitated as if struggling to find the right words.
“Is it like having your period?” Cara said. She had explained menstruation and making babies and every aspect of human reproduction to Beatrix in excruciating detail, and she, of course, had found it utterly captivating. Was there anything about humans that didn’t enthrall her?
“No. My cranial opening will expand. And my cord will release. It will connect with the cord of a perfect genetic match. And then I’ll be tethered.”
Cara stared at the red swimmer’s cap on Beatrix’s flat head.
“After years of tethering, the cord retracts and the mated couple …” Beatrix looked around to make sure that only bots swam near them. “We become one,” she whispered. “Our bodies … merge.”
“You mean you have sex?”
“Not like your people, Cara. Real sex. The merge is … permanent.”
“What do you mean ‘permanent’? How can that be?”
“The passive partner is absorbed. The dominant partner then becomes pregnant with a brood of children.”
Cara stared at her in horror. “So … if you have a baby, you die?”
“It depends on whether my genes are passive or dominant. But I don’t think about it in terms of dying. It’s the best part of being alive, Cara. I can’t wait to be tethered.”
“Okay,” Cara said, trying not to think about it. She decided to change the subject. “What’s your home world like, Bea?”
“I’ve never been there, but I hear that the white skies and the black-sand deserts are so beautiful that the mere sight of them can make a grown Wergen cry.”
“I wish I could see it,” Cara said. “I wish I could travel to all the amazing planets in our galaxy.” She wanted more than anything to be an explorer like her parents, working in tandem with the Wergens to colonize the universe. So many other worlds had been opened up to them thanks to Wergen fieldtech. Colonization efforts were already underway on Triton and Enceladus as well as incredible alien worlds hundreds of light years away, such as Langalana and Verdantium.
A wave splashed over them.
“What do you want to be when you grow up, Bea?”
Beatrix looked up into the orange sky. “I hadn’t thought about it before, but being an explorer sounds wonderful, Cara.” She tilted her head to the left in that familiar manner and nodded, smiling warmly. “Especially if I can explore the cosmos with you.”
“Beatrix!” A voice shouted from the shore. Her brother Ambus called for her to return to her hearth as he always did when dusk approached. Cara knew that by the time they made it back to shore he would be gone. She had yet to see Beatrix’s brother up close.
“Let’s race!” Cara said. And she stroked furiously, leaving Beatrix behind in her wake.
A moment later Beatrix jetted past her, propelled by the bots, a huge grin plastered on her face.
ENCRYPTED Medical Journal Entry No. 224 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbarón: A contractile sheath gives the tether a pronounced elasticity as it emerges through the cranial canal. The tail-end is laced with thousands of microscopic nerve fibers and pore receptors. Muscle spindles allow the tether to unfurl and undulate toward the Wergen mate. When two tethers come into contact, the fibers bore into the receptors of the Wergen with the passive genotype. This signals the commencement of macromeiosis.
One day Cara agreed to meet Beatrix by the lake, but a mile farther north where fewer ice boulders dotted the shore and ten-foot orange dunes draped the surface. Perpuffers were said to be even more plentiful in this area.
As she approached, Cara heard someone shout her name from behind a red dune. She recognized the voice immediately. “Ambus?”
“Stay where you are so I can’t see you.”
“What do you—?”
“And don’t speak! Your voice is too … sweet. I don’t want to give in to it. Like my sister. And my father. Just listen. If you respect my sister, you’ll stay away from her.”
Cara fought the urge to answer him.
“She doesn’t have the will to resist you. How can she choose her own path with you around? How can she be her own person? If you really consider yourself her friend, just leave her alone!”
Cara couldn’t stay quiet anymore. “Bea can pick her own friends. Why should you decide for her?” She scaled the dune to confront Ambus but when she reached the top he was no longer there. His footprints receded into the distance, snaking behind the sand drifts in the horizon.
ENCRYPTED Note for future study: the evolutionary purpose of Wergen gender remains a mystery as it appears to play no role in their procreative processes. The prevailing theory posits that a diverse alien gene pool results in the Wergens’ varying physical characteristics and that it is human perception that assigns those attributes what we consider to be a gender.
Cara rode on a disk-shaped buzzer that sped three feet off the ground, clutching the handlebars tightly. She had made arrangements to meet Beatrix in the Aaru region at the viewing post at the foot of Tortola Facula, an active cryovolcano outside the colony’s force field. Normally she might have visited Beatrix at her hearth, but she didn’t want to run into Ambus. Even after all these years, he still made it a point to avoid contact with humans, believing that they fogged his mind and skewed his perception of reality, Beatrix had explained. He’d even taken to wearing special earplugs and visors that he hoped might protect him.
When Cara arrived she found Beatrix waiting for her on a
bench at the overlook, staring raptly at some newly landed seedships. The colonists stood near the yellow hash marks that signaled the force field’s perimeter, and viewed the volcano shooting spumes of hydrocarbon-rich materials miles into the atmosphere. It would later rain down onto the surface as liquid methane, feeding the thousands of lakes and tributaries in the region.
Beatrix approached when she saw her step off the buzzer. “You let your hair down! You look more beautiful than ever, Cara.”
“Come on, I bet you say that to all the humans.” She paused. “No, really.”
They laughed and hugged.
“I’m so glad you suggested getting together,” Beatrix said. “It’s been too long.”
While they spoke every few days, it had been several weeks since they’d seen each other. Ever since Cara had graduated and her parents had relocated to Axelis Colony on Titan, she’d been working with the Colonization Enterprise—thanks to some strings her parents had pulled before departing—helping to plan the next great human-Wergen expedition. The target world was a rogue planet that had escaped Cancrii 55’s orbit and now roamed freely through space.
“What did you want to tell me, Cara?” Beatrix asked. “It sounded important.”
“I think I’m in love, Bea.”
Beatrix stopped in her tracks. “Oh?”
“His name is Juan Carlos. We’ve only gone out a few times, but we seemed to have made that instant connection, do you know what I mean?”
“Yes, yes I do.”
She hesitated to see if Beatrix was joking, then continued. “He’s a doctor who works with Biotech at CE. He’s got a reputation for being quite opinionated, uncompromising to a fault—except with me. With me he’s just a big softy.”
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