Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

“Right.” John found it suddenly easy to be coldly practical.

  Janna sighed, sensing she’d lost any hope of his conversion. “All right. Forget that. If there is a cache of information, we believe we know the type of signals it would give off. You’ll be furnished with equipment capable of picking up such signals. If there isn’t, or if you can’t locate it, we’ll still be getting a Human’s eye view of the planet’s present state. You know that’s why we’re sending you. To get firsthand information that can’t be tampered with.”

  “Then why not simply say so? Why the jiggery-pokery with satellites and probes?” John knew the answer to his question. He just wanted Janna to admit it, so he could jack the price up.

  She glared at him wordlessly for a moment. Then she glanced down at her desk. One fingertip caressed her tiny globe. “Here is what I believe. The Human race damn near destroyed Earth. That was wrong. But conditions necessary to living on Castor and Pollux are destroying Humanity. And that is just as wrong. But such an attitude, and such a project as I propose, are not politically acceptable. Unadjusted is what it would be labeled. And the ‘unadjustable’ are being terminated at an incredible rate. Only the very youngest ones are sent to the dirty-tech stations for Readjustments now, and most commonly with papers that will never allow them to walk on either Castor or Pollux. Condemned to live and die on a lifeless rock in space because at age three they pulled up the pretty flower! It’s ridiculous, John.” She locked eyes with him suddenly. “You, of all people, must know that.”

  That was cutting a little too close to the bone. “I think we’re wandering from the topic, Janna,” John cautioned her.

  She glared at him. Her words came out clipped and unwilling. “The Conservancy feels pushed to its limits merely letting us do observations. If word of the”—she paused, considered—“total proposed project got out, we’d all be arrested as totally unadjusted. We fit the definition. Unwilling to accept the necessary restraints that make it possible for us to live harmoniously on Castor and Pollux. Most of us would be terminated. No. I take that back. All of us would be terminated. In their own way, the Conservancy is as desperate as we are. They’d accuse us of creating restlessness and promoting discordant thinking.” Janna’s voice trailed off. She lifted her own small hand and studied it, as if seeing defects invisible to John.

  John had appeared to ponder it. “You’re saying that this mission you’re offering us is the salvation of the Human race?”

  “Yes.” Janna made the word an affirmation of faith.

  “But I could get killed for it.” John used the crude word for termination deliberately.

  “Yes, to that also.” The dark skin around her mouth was pinched to paleness.

  “And if I refuse, you’ll report my black-market activities and I’ll face Readjustment.”

  “Yes.” Calmly, coolly. Taking his life away from him as if she had a right.

  “So.” John shrugged with a carelessness he didn’t feel. “If I refuse your commission, I face Readjustment. And Earth Affirmed has to face whatever the Conservancy drugs out of me.” John grinned wryly. “I think you’re facing the greater risk. I think I need more money before I’ll undertake this.”

  He hadn’t known Janna’s eyes could go harder. She regarded him icily. “Are you sure you want to change the stakes in this little game, John?”

  He shrugged, stretched elaborately. “I just don’t see where I have that much to lose if I refuse….”

  Even before the words were out of his mouth, John knew he had made a mistake. Her hands were sliding open a drawer. She reached into it as if taking out a weapon, but even as he came to his feet, she dropped a packet of flimsies on the desktop. With a look of both disgust and disdain, she pushed it toward him.

  He hesitated marginally, then leaned forward to look at the top page. He didn’t touch the flimsies, didn’t leaf through the sheaf. The top page told him all. It was a duplicate of his birth records, childhood, training, and basic education record. He had one just like it filed with his captain’s papers. Only his didn’t have the telltale red stamp across the front of his photograph. The block letters that he’d paid so much to have obliterated from the certified copy he’d submitted with his request for Mariner training were clean and strong on this copy. STATION DUTY ONLY. UNADJUSTED. CLOSE SUPERVISION REQUIRED.

  He heard a brief roaring in his ears. He leaned back in his chair, hoping he was grinning rakishly, but suspecting the sick feeling behind his grimace was all too plain. “Well, well,” and at least his voice wasn’t shaking. “Looks like my little friend missed a repository somewhere. Would you care to tell me where you requisitioned that?”

  Janna coolly leaned forward. With a flick of a finger, she repositioned the flimsies so she could read aloud from them. “‘Diagnosed as an unadjusted child at age four, and removed from a planet colony at that time. Renamed to a Beta generation and raised on the station. Expressly forbidden to set foot on either Castor or Pollux. Expressly forbidden to work at any career with a classification higher than three.’ Appears to me you should be operating a slag crusher, not a Beastship.”

  John’s mouth was dry. They had him, cold. Anything he said now could only hurt him.

  “You’re doubly fortunate, John,” Janna observed as she crumpled the flimsies and dropped them into a disposal basket beside the desk. John smelled a brief whiff of ammonia as the flimsies instantly degraded. “When you were four, they didn’t simply euthanize unadjusted children as they do now. And …”

  She paused and John found himself leaning forward. “And?” he asked quietly.

  “And Earth Affirmed happens to need the skills you’ve obtained by your forgeries.”

  John could feel his awareness starting to soften. Stim cycle must be over. Deeper dreams began to carry him under. Dreams in which he grinned and told Deckenson he was really behind him all the way, that he’d always felt his destiny was to return to Earth. Ridiculous dreams, of running barefoot over green hillsides, carrying a pirate’s treasure chest, while the furred and feathered animals ran beside him, rejoicing at his return from the stars. He nearly smiled in his Waitsleep.

  7

  RAEF STIRRED DROWSILY; his hands touched the unwet slickness of the womb walls. Time to wake up? No. Not yet, no, he didn’t feel the little itch of prescience he got when Tug wanted him awake. No, he was just drifting again. Just drifting.

  He tried to find the trailing edges of his prisoner-leader dream, but was suddenly bored with it. He no longer wanted to be the surly villain-hero leading the people forth on their exodus. He’d had enough of being angry and right for a while. He’d chewed all the flavor out of it. Something else, then.

  [What else?]

  Something wild and fey. Something more Robin Hood than Mad Max, something faun and woodsy and magical. Something everyone wants and no one really understands.

  [What were you, really?]

  A pale skinny boy with zits and a chronic cold, a D student, a stutterer, learning disabled, a friendless outcast. When his mother died of cancer, he’d been left alone, with no one to really talk to….

  [No one to talk to?]

  No one. His dad was always off driving a truck somewhere. Mrs. Morrison, the neighbor, was supposed to keep an eye on him, but all she ever did was say he couldn’t go anywhere, that he had to come right home after school and stay there and not get in trouble. The one friend he did have, she said he was a faggot, and she told his dad about Jeffrey, and his dad said he’d beat the shit out of him if he ever let Jeffrey come over to the house again, no kid of his was going to hang out with the neighborhood homo, Jesus Christ, not even his own family could stand that swish kid, and didn’t they have enough problems without him wanting to play with some faggot kid and …

  [Stop this. This is bad, this is pain.]

  Yeah. Forget all that. Forget it like it never was. Dream it away.

  This, this is what he really had been. He was brown and smooth like the shell of an acorn, and strong,
stronger than Tarzan. Tarzan, he bet old Tug had never heard of Tarzan. Better save that, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  [Not for Tug. Not now!]

  No, not now. Here, this was what he was, had always been. Raef willed himself deeper into the dream, felt the rhythm of it catch and become realer than real. It was good, it was right, it fit. How his parents had been killed in a car wreck on the Alcan Highway when he was just a toddler, but he had been thrown free of the burning car, and wandered, whimpering a little, into the depths of the Canadian forest. He would have starved, except that a bitch wolf with glowing green eyes found him. She had cubs of her own, and she’d just killed a rabbit for them, and when he pushed right in among them, she’d just accepted him as one of them. So he’d grown up, knowing no humans, eating raw meat and berries, running near naked through the woods in summer and huddling with the wolves in their winter den to stay warm. He’d become the best hunter, the fastest runner, the strongest swimmer. Even the bears knew his man-beast scent and turned aside from it. For in all the forest, of all the wild beasts, he was the wildest. But one day, he had taken on a stag with huge antlers, and it …

  [Wild Beasts?]

  Wild beasts, you know, beasts with no masters. Not tame animals, wild ones, ones that did as they pleased. Like the huge stag. He attacked it, dropping on it from a tree, thinking he could lever back on its antlers to expose its throat for his fellow wolves. And so he had, but in the process, it had thrown its head back and raked him with the sharp brown tines of its antlers, laying his flesh open to the bone on his thigh and on his upper arm. He’d been thrown clear of the wild struggle as the wolves seized the stag and tore at its throat. It managed to stagger up and flee down the hill with the snapping, howling pack in pursuit. And thus he’d been left there, lying in his own blood, too torn and sore to move. Through the heat of an Indian summer day and the chill of a northwest autumn night, he lay there, with no water, and a fever racking his torn body. Then, as he lay there, he’d heard unfamiliar sounds, and caught an even stranger scent, like flowers and musk together.

  Even as he’d stared, feverish eyes wide, she’d come up the trail, in hiking shorts and low boots, and loose white shirt, open wide at the throat. And she’d seen him there and—

  [Beasts-With-No-Masters?] the mother voice queried urgently.

  Raef sighed. Sometimes it was hard to dream with all this help. But if he wanted the dreams to be realistic, he had to help out, he knew that.

  Yeah, unmastered beasts, wild and free. Like they used to be, before we left Earth. Wild animals, living in the forest, naturally. Eating, mating, running wild. Fighting when they had to, being what they wanted to be. When he tried to imagine Castor and Pollux, places with no animals at all, with plants growing neat and noncompetitively, all he could imagine was boredom. It was all too tidy, too predictable, too bossed. That was why he’d never really cared that he couldn’t go there, couldn’t get off and live on those planets like the other Humans did. He didn’t care. He didn’t want to go there, and grow in a tidy row. Boring. Never make a mess, never cause a row. Like old Aunt Lily’s house. Don’t put your feet on the couch, don’t raise a ruckus, be polite, don’t upset anyone. Always do what makes everyone else feel happy and good.

  [Harmonize.]

  Yeah. Never do what pleased yourself, never be silly or wild. Boring. No, he’d rather have lived in a forest and done what he pleased, like a wild beast.

  [Like a Wild Beast, doing as it pleased.]

  Yeah. Raef found he’d lost the rhythm of it. He was too close to the surface, too close to nearly awake. He sucked in an extra deep breath and sighed it out. Go deeper, down to where the dreams got so real you could feel them and taste them and smell them. Go deep, deeper than you were supposed to go. Tug got mad at him for going so deep, scolded him about the dangers of withdrawing that far. Tug worried too much. Down there, the dreams were so real, it was better than living. He willed his way into it, and felt all resistance fade. The woman hiker was there, blue eyes wide as she stared at the injured man-beast lying beside the trail. Fat flies were buzzing around his wounds, and he could barely move. But as she came closer, moving slowly and carefully, somehow he found the strength to lift his head and bare his clean white teeth at her. She drew back and he sensed her fear. But as her eyes roved over him, something else came into her face as well.

  “Easy. Go easy. I’m not going to hurt you. See?” She sloshed her green canteen at him. “Water. I’ve got water here. Now, don’t be upset. I’m going to come a little closer.”

  And Raef went down to where he could feel the cool touch of her soft hand on his wild and feverish head.

  The little motor in the old reader made a pathetically thin rumbling as it advanced the ancient reader tape. The sound made Connie’s teeth ache. The tape format was ancient technology, as was the portable reader playing it. Connie had been surprised to find it on board the Evangeline. Even more impressive was that the titles beginning to move across the screen were obviously a copy of even older material.

  She stretched while she waited for the recording to begin. Her first two unscheduled Wakeups had been rather unsettling, but this was her fourth. She was starting to enjoy them. Tug’s formality had faded as they had assumed a casual familiarity with each other. Talking to his disembodied voice had begun to be relaxing. He seemed so nonjudgmental, she always found herself confiding more than she had intended. And he was considerate. He always allowed her time alone, hours when he did not speak to her. Her hunger for solitude had been one of the main factors driving her toward a Mariner career. Somehow Tug understood that, and let her have the illusion of privacy. She knew, of course, that he watched over her constantly. She knew it by the way he lit the corridors for her when she was rung racing down them to exercise her body against the deterioration of low-G travel. Last time she had even thought he was perhaps playing with her, for he had begun to darken the sections behind her faster and to light those farther ahead of her, as if to urge her to greater speed and effort. There had even been one exhilarating moment of near terror when he had suddenly blacked out the section she was traversing, leaving her flinging herself forward through darkness, brachiating from rung to rung in a sightless rush. He had brought the lights up gradually, so that it seemed she reached toward a sourceless dawn. When moments later she had come to a halt, she found she had traversed almost twice her normal distance in that darkness. Yet her pulse and respiration were no more elevated than during her regular exercise sessions. Evidently Tug’s extra Wakeups had physical value as well.

  She glanced at the reader again. Still titles and credits. Last time he had awakened her, it had been to discuss the mystery stories he had entered into her sleep-learning mode for her. Finding and playing these ancient recordings for Tug had been her errand this Wakeup. He had directed her to it, down three decks and along endless corridors and turns. Her curiosity had helped her push her uneasiness aside.

  The chamber didn’t look as if it had been redone since the original evacuation. Everything was bright primary colors instead of the soothing pastels employed in quarters now, and the cell meld of the tables and counters had a striated texture to it. In one cupboard she found stacked recordings that had been there so long that her fingers left marks in the very fine layer of dust that coated them. In a different niche had been the reader in its case, with two recordings stacked beside it. Connie wondered who they had originally belonged to, and why that person had left them aboard Evangeline when he or she departed. As she’d struggled to insert the recording into the cranky old mechanism, and waited for the light of the cabin to recharge its cells, she wondered why Tug insisted she view it on this medium. He’d told her he had duplicates of these recordings in the ship’s library. He could have simply put them up on the big screen for her. But no, he had insisted on the ancient reader and these tapes. Why? “To impress you with how astute I am,” he had replied smugly. “If I am correct, it will be a fitting denouement to my purely
deductive reasoning.” She was still mystified by that comment.

  “The evacuation of earth,” a deep, slurring voice suddenly proclaimed. Connie grinned incredulously. Not Terra, as the current texts always referred to it. Earth. The colloquial name. As if Humans wouldn’t call the dirt under their feet “earth” regardless of what planet it coated. Definitely Human made, for other Humans only. The xenophobia of it made her cringe. So did the “music,” a jarring combination of vibrating metal strings and slapped diaphragms. She levered down the sound to ease her ears, leaned in closer to the small screen.

  The colors of the recording had decayed, making the plant life a vicious green, followed by a city in an unmitigated barrage of greys and blacks. “The History of Humanity’s Homeworld: Section Twenty-seven, Chapter One. The Great Evacuation.” The narrator’s voice was unnaturally deep as if he were struggling against a double-grav drag.

  “As we learned in Section Twenty-six, Humanity had viewed the damages inflicted on their homeworld as something repairable, often as changes necessary for the comfort of the Human race. Taken singly, the injuries to the ecosystem did not seem severe to them. But seismologists had not anticipated the magnitude of the geological unrest along the San Andreas fault, nor the number of volcanos that would be awakened by it. The ensuing dust clouds, along with the acid rain, destruction of the rain forest, weakening of the ozone layer, the rapidly declining number of viable species, and the poisoning of the seas, were to combine in ways their contemporary ecologists were unable to anticipate, and triggered chain reactions amazing in their severity.

  “Individual cultures took their own stopgap measures, but these efforts were later to be compared to attempting to solve a blood circulation problem with tourniquets. No individual piece of the poisoning could be separately treated. Climates changed too rapidly for the transplantation of animals and plants to be successful. Too late, the essentiality of the previous wide spectrum of plant and animal life became apparent. But by then, the previously myriad paths of the food chains had dwindled too much. By the Earth year 2262, large areas of Earth were visibly decimated of life-forms. Biological cycles came to a jarring halt. Human ecologists had warned Humanity, but even the coming of the Arthroplana and their confirmation of Humanity’s worst fears was not enough to make the mass of the population accept the truth.”