Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  “What’s the matter with the monitor bank?” he demanded, and when he got no reply, he raised his voice in sarcastic incredulity. “Is it biodegrading right before my very eyes?”

  Still no answer. Connie’s solution to any problem was to shut up and make herself small until someone else handled it. This was the deckhand’s second ship-out on Evangeline, and John still hadn’t figured out how to get her to react in a constructive way. In her own way, she was as frustrating to him as the dimming monitors. He didn’t understand it. Her papers were good, her scores for her ratings exemplary. Even John’s personal sources had given good reports of her. Or had they? He frowned, remembering Andrew’s words.

  “Quiet.” First Mate Andrew on the Beastship Trotter had characterized Connie when John had requested a very unauthorized personal opinion of Andrew’s former shipmate. “Not unfriendly, but quiet. I didn’t know her that well. But from what everyone says, she’s supposed to be very bright. Very competent. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in her. I know you like your privacy, John. Well, so does she. Should work out well, you two hermits rattling around in a scow that size. You can come out of Waitsleep, grunt at each other, and go back in without bothering each other at all.”

  So John had hired her, more on Andrew’s word than on her high ratings on the standardized tests. And found her not competent or bright, but only quiet. Very quiet. And passive to the point where it was driving him crazy. Needling her only seemed to make the crewwoman more reclusive, and yet there were times he could not resist doing it, just for the sake of getting some kind of reaction from her. She seemed to have all the personality and social skills of an algae vat. Thanks a lot, Andrew. I owe you one.

  As for Tug’s silence, well, the Arthroplana was playing at protocol again. Speak when spoken to. John hated it, but gave in and addressed him by name. “Tug. Can you boost the monitor screen from your side or something? Something’s got to be malfunctioning; nothing this fuzzy could have met standards. I don’t remember the monitor images being this bad last time we used them.” That, of course, had been a number of years and several Wakeups ago. Still, the ship’s equipment wasn’t supposed to biodegrade that fast.

  The picture improved minimally as Tug made whatever adjustments he could from his separate living quarters within Evangeline’s body. Tug’s synthetic voice thrummed softly through the command chamber. “My readings indicate that the picture is within the parameters for acceptable vision. It has, as you noted, biodegraded somewhat since our last use of the equipment. The bacterial action that triggers the luminors may be slowing. If you are so dissatisfied with it, I suggest you might have the unit recolonized while we’re docked at Delta. Still, according to all my references, the image is within safe and acceptable parameters.”

  “Safe and acceptable parameters? Tug, don’t try to tell me that this image is as good as the one we got on the old equipment that they made us turn in for this.”

  Tug considered a moment. “While the image may not be as sharp nor as adjustable, the equipment is much more harmonious with the environment. All components are completely recyclable with a waste factor of less than point two percent.”

  “Wonderful. We can’t see a damn thing on the screen, but we can be content knowing that the whole thing can be remanufactured into something even less useful with a minimum of waste.”

  Tug either couldn’t think of a reply or chose not to. John crossed his arms on his chest and settled back into his couch. Despite his resolutions, the true source of his frustration pushed itself to the front of his mind again. It had been the first message up on his screen when he’d come out of Waitsleep. Norwich Shipping thanked John, Tug, crew, and the Evangeline herself for their years of service, but were regretful to inform him that such services were no longer required. References would be furnished, of course. Brief and to the point. And totally maddening in that John could think of no reason why they would want to terminate their contract with the Evangeline. She was the only Beastship around that was still unmodified from the old Lifeboat days. No one else had their cargo capacity. They’d never missed a deadline or screwed up a delivery. It made no sense at all, and it promised to turn what should have been a relaxing shore time into a maze of negotiations as John hunted down new clients for the Evangeline. Dammit, it made no sense.

  He wanted to stew on Norwich Shipping’s sudden refusal to renew their contract, but was distracted by one monitor’s image. It was a station relay of Evangeline approaching the dock. Not even the fuzziness of the degrading biologics could totally obscure the beauty of the Beast that powered his ship. He ignored the functional cell-meld structure of the gondola fastened to Evangeline; that was but the container that housed the Human crew and provided cargo space. It had no intrinsic beauty, only functional practicality. No, it was Evangeline herself—the organic Beast portion of his Beastship—that captivated him. He realized abruptly that he had been staring silently at the screen for several minutes. After all these years, she could still entrance him like that. He snorted at his own sentiment, and shifted his gaze to another monitor.

  It showed him Delta Station. He’d grown up on Beta Station, which was identical to Delta and the other two dirty-tech stations that orbited Castor. It made for maximum efficiency in manufacturing components and maintaining the stations. Maximum boredom, too. He knew every seam and span in the construction of the stations from his days as a maintenance shuttle pilot. It had been thirty-seven years for the station dwellers since he had last been here, but it looked to him as if only his subjective three months had passed; if the Conservancy had made any changes in Delta, they weren’t readily apparent. Just looking at the unimaginative functionality of the station crumpled the moment of peace he’d felt in watching Evangeline’s organic opulence and renewed his earlier discontentment. The exterior of the station mirrored too accurately the blandly efficient interior of the station, of all the stations, even of his own ship.

  Well, in a short time he’d be plunged into that grindingly efficient and correct place. It had been bad enough when all that meant was off-loading a cargo and picking up a new consignment. At least then he’d been free to follow his own interests, which usually meant spending the bulk of his pay on information and entertainments for his library. But this time it meant work, and real work, lining up a new client for Evangeline’s services. Reflecting that this type of task was one of the major reasons a Human captain was required at all on Evangeline didn’t cheer him. Tug was too fond of reminding him, “You are the captain of the ship, John, but I control the Beast.”

  He glanced once more at the monitor that showed Evangeline’s approach. John fought it for an instant, then let his heart swell as it always did when confronted with the wonder of his ship. Dammit, she was his ship, just as much as Tug’s. She was more than that, she was his world. He’d spent the vast majority of his many years within her, and that, as much as anything, made her his. And he was glad. The Beastship Evangeline moved as lightly as he imagined thistledown had in Terra’s winds. He sometimes thought that perhaps his ship looked like thistledown, on a cosmic scale. The immensity of the cell-meld-constructed gondola fastened to her body was negated to insignificance by the delicacy of her lacy sails and fans and the angel-hair finery of her lines and filaments. The precise angles and functionality of the gondola that hugged Evangeline’s lower body and provided quarters for her Human crew was like a rectangular scar in that forest of delicacy. John jockeyed the monitor controls and shifted to a camera view that didn’t include the gondola. Now she was all Beast, all living creature moving herself easily toward the station. Evangeline was lifting and rotating her filaments and fans in the graceful lazing movement that all Beastships made, no matter what speed they were traveling at. Not for the first time, John stared at that seemingly idle shifting, at the play of the station’s reflected lights on her translucent body, and wondered how the hell the Beasts moved through space so effortlessly. One hank of filaments moved suddenly and coord
inatedly in what could have been a venting of gases, a steerage correction, or simply a stretching of tissue as Evangeline brought them closer to docking.

  “Tug,” he said softly, staring at the screen. “Tell her she’s beautiful.”

  “Tell whom, John?”

  He didn’t lift his gaze. “Evangeline. Tell her she’s beautiful.”

  “I can’t do that, John. For one thing, she wouldn’t understand it. For another, we have found that any kind of communication with Humans, however indirect, is most unsettling to a Beast. Your culture is still, unfortunately, much too disharmonious.”

  “Telling her she’s beautiful would upset her? What’s disharmonious about that?”

  Tug sighed audibly, purely for the benefit of the listening Humans. John was suddenly aware of how still Connie was, how tuned in she was to this old argument between Tug and him.

  “John, it is so simple. Think about it and even you will grasp it. Evangeline sees neither beauty nor ugliness, in herself or in anything else. She sees only things in their correct places, doing as they should. To speak of beauty to her would be to imply to her that this was a thing to strive for, somehow, at the expense of being harmonious with all around her. It would confuse her.”

  John was silent. Tug wasn’t going to give Evangeline the message, was never going to let John have any kind of communication with the Beast that powered his ship. No, Tug kept it all for himself, and John often felt little more than an errand boy.

  Sometimes, when he thought about it, it almost made him bitter. John Gen-93-Beta, captain of the Beastship Evangeline, sitting in his command lounge watching his ship rendezvous and dock with the station. And he didn’t lift a finger to control or assist it in any way, didn’t need to issue a single command, didn’t even really understand how any of it was done. The fact that the entire Human populations of Castor and Pollux and all four dirty-tech stations shared his ignorance did nothing to abate his frustration with it. The poor quality of the screen’s image only rubbed his nose in it. It didn’t matter what the Human captain saw, as long as the Arthroplana who owned her, and the Beastship herself, could perceive the correct docking coordinates. They were the ones doing all the real work. John had been more of a real captain when he had been operating one of the little scooters that performed duty maintenance on the exterior of the stations. On board the Evangeline, seated on the bridge, he was captain only of the gondola ship attached to Evangeline’s body. He did not navigate, he did not stand a watch. He was more of a social interface than anything else: a portable component of the ship that Tug could send forth to negotiate contracts, to make physical contact with Humans and other aliens, to supervise loading and unloading of any tangible cargoes they might carry. He thought of the years he had struggled to reach this position, the machinations he’d gone through, and felt his gut tighten. And yet he wouldn’t change what he had for anything else. Because it was as close as any Human could come to mastering an interstellar Beastship. As close as the Arthroplana would ever let a Human approach the freedom of the spaceways. He didn’t know any other Beastship captain who didn’t feel the same frustration with the biologically imposed ceiling on ambition. He’d reached the pinnacle of his career, but his fingertips would only brush mankind’s ambition to roam the stars.

  He spared a glance for Connie, the only other Human inhabitant on the Evangeline. She was the crew, as he was the captain. Tug was the owner, and Evangeline herself was no one knew what. According to Tug and the other Arthroplanas who owned them, the Beastships were alive and almost sentient. And horribly sensitive to being peeked and probed at, which was why despite their two-thousand-year acquaintanceship, no Humans had ever been allowed more than the most cursory of inspections of one. No Human understood the mechanisms by which a Beastship fed or communicated with another Beast or with the Arthroplana within its body, let alone how they achieved light speed. When questioned by Humans about the Beastships’ method of locomotion, the Arthroplanas either professed not to understand it either, or retreated into a semantic jungle of words that had no Human equivalent, interspersed with concepts that seemed more philosophical than physical. Their “explanations” served only to give those Humans who specialized in Arthroplana psychology more to argue about among themselves. Once, during one of their quarrels, John had accused Tug and the Arthroplana in general of dissembling with Humanity merely to keep their monopoly on interstellar travel. Tug had laughed, in his most annoying simulated giggle. For ten solid minutes.

  He reflected that as captain he still knew little more than the very first Humans who had boarded a Beastship “lifeboat” for the evacuation of Terra. He shifted restlessly, and tried to focus his mind on his more immediate problems.

  “Check back with the ship every twelve hours while we’re in port. I don’t think our layover here will be very long. Norwich Shipping has picked up their contract option the last dozen times we’ve been here; I expect they’ll do it again, if I go in and argue with them. If they do, I want to be ready to go. And if they don’t, I want you to be ready to go with whatever I do find for us. But Norwich will be my first effort. I wonder what the hell they want to renegotiate. Probably want to lower the risk bonus again. Same old damn thing. They think because we haven’t had any accidents, there isn’t any danger in these weird runs they find for us. I’d like to see them find someone else who’d be willing to take on one of their little errands.”

  John paused and waited for Connie to make some sort of response. He saw her eyes flicker in his direction, then fix on her screen again. Come on, kid, have an opinion about something, will you? He filled in the conversation himself.

  “The only reason we don’t have accidents is because we’re good. No one else could handle their business for them as smoothly as we do. They’ll find that out quickly enough. In any case, I want to keep our port time and expenses as small as possible until we know where our next contract’s coming from. If we do get something, I don’t want to be held up waiting for you to report. So check back in, uh, every six hours,” he amended, and watched her.

  She looked up from her own screen that was giving her an exciting view of Delta Station’s smelting and refining quadrant. Her brown eyes were huge. The stubble of hair on her scalp was dark and would possibly be curly if she were ever out of Waitsleep long enough to let it grow. John stared at it and wondered idly what she looked like with hair. She was still almost a stranger to him, for all that this was their second trip together. He wondered if she had deliberately set up her waking intervals so they wouldn’t coincide with his. Of course, that would have taken Tug’s collaboration, but he was sure she could get that with no difficulty. Tug routinely suborned crewmen almost as fast as John could hire them. Hell, Tug would probably have suggested it to her. Anything that needled John delighted the Arthroplana. And John reciprocated. He considered replacing Connie just to make Tug wonder why, then shrugged the thought away. It wouldn’t be fair. He’d hired her because Andrew had said she was quiet, competent, and would respect his privacy. Andrew knew that loud, overly friendly people drove him crazy. But Connie didn’t seem to want or need any social interaction at all. Even that he could live with, if he could ever get her to see what needed doing and just do it without waiting for a specific command from him for every separate task. Right now, she was still staring at him. “Every six hours, sir?” she asked uncertainly.

  “Yes, six hours,” he replied testily. “Do you have a problem with that?” He waited for her to object that Delta Station was on a standard Terra period of twenty-four hours and that she was technically only required to report to him once each period, but she didn’t She glanced away from him.

  “No problem, sir,” she said meekly, and that was that.

  John resisted the urge to needle her again. He stared at her deliberately, and watched her hunch herself deeper into her station screen. The standard shipboard smock she wore strained across her wide shoulders. She’d probably been hunching like that ever since she wa
s a child, in an effort to look smaller. It didn’t work. Even the loose uniform trousers were snug on her and too short. She was big, for a woman of her generation, but John would still be bigger than she was when they were both full-grown. After all, he was the ninety-third generation, and she was hundred and third. People had gotten a lot smaller in those ten generations.

  His eyes roved the command chamber’s Spartan walls, bare monitors, functional control panels, seeking something, anything, to hang his attention on. But in Conservancy-approved fashion, there was absolutely nothing within the chamber that wasn’t necessary. Every item had an indispensable purpose. He looked at Connie and wondered briefly if that was what irritated him about her: perhaps she had a Conservancy-approved mind, all functionality, all imagination pared away in the interests of efficiency and conservation of resources.

  “Connie!” he said, more sharply than he’d intended. She flinched again.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Keep an eye on things. I’m going down to my quarters.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She didn’t even dare to ask him what she should keep an eye on. Or maybe it never occurred to her to ask. For a moment he thought about asking her exactly what she would watch, but then decided he was too hungry to enjoy prodding at her anymore. If he got any extra time in port, and if the Beastship Trotter was in, too, and if Andrew had any extra time, maybe John could pry a little more out of him. For now, let it go. He had a few personal chores of his own to take care of before they docked. He unhooked from the harness on his lounge and swung clear on a transverse cleat. It felt good to stretch his muscles, and he flung himself out of the command chamber with more force than was necessary. Maybe he was growing, he thought as he made his way through the corridor that led to the gallery. Maybe he was even getting ready to go through the change.