Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  The shuddering became a wild rattling shake. Queasiness threatened the back of his throat. Ignore it. “Tug.” He suddenly found his voice. “If you won’t let me talk to John and Connie, at least let me talk to Evangeline. There has to be a way to do it.” The rattling steadied into a cacophonous vibration that gradually lessened and then stilled. What the hell was going on? “Please.”

  “No.”

  Raef lay back in the lounger, closed his eyes, and surrendered to whatever might come.

  So this was loneliness. Having a name for it didn’t make it any easier, or less frightening. She could feel Tug still there, still tapped into her. She could speak to him if she wanted; she could break this isolation. But she knew she wouldn’t. Anger, Raef would call this cold feeling, and he thought of it as hot. She knew better. Anger was empty and infinite, like the many times Tug had left her alone and she had longed for company. Perhaps he had left her alone and bleak so often as to make the few paltry scraps of attention he did give her seem of value. Few, paltry scraps. She’d borrowed that from somewhere, probably from one of the books Raef had heard read. He had let her borrow them all from his mind; so generous was Raef. And he had said there were thousands more books, ones he had never been able to read, but now he could, and he had promised that somehow he would find a way to get them to her. Raef. It was hard to be apart from him, hard. But it was necessary. They had a mission, and it was important to him. She’d do it.

  If she could.

  No, she’d just do it. Just as heroes did, just like The Lone Ranger and Tonto. It needed to be done, so she could do it.

  She had been so much younger the last time she had done this. So much smaller and more agile, and the atmosphere on the Arthroplana’s planet had been so much thinner. She experimented with her fans and sails, sleeking them back to make her body bullet-shaped, cautiously opening some for heat dispersion, some for stability, some for … no that was wrong, fold that back quickly, control, control, control, find the smoothness again, find the balances between heat and velocity and control.

  She felt the vibrations tearing at her again, felt the mad shuddering that threatened to tear the gondola loose from her body, and for all the times that vessel had irritated and impeded her, it was now the most important treasure in her universe.

  [Raef, my friend.] She communicated aloud, shaping the words in the Beast voice and sending them out, even though she knew he could not answer. Still, it comforted her [Raef, my friend], and she found the balance again, slipped through the atmosphere sleekly, even remembered how to begin the gas exchange that would neutralize her weight. It was more difficult in this soupy atmosphere, but possible. [Raef, my friend,] she called out to the universe at large.

  [/////]

  [Raef?] she questioned, knowing it could not be he. Not unless he had found some way to tap into communications channels she knew nothing of, and send his voice to her from a distance. [/////] And no, this was not his voice, calling her, though it was [/////] oddly familiar, if messageless.

  [/////] It called again, insistently. For a moment she lost her concentration, and the wild shuddering began again as the winds of entry tore at her. But she stabilized herself, surprised at how easy it was and how she could do it by herself. Without Tug or even Raef, she could figure this out. It was almost like when she was Tonto and rescued Mabel. No, it was exactly like that. She was being a hero, and she was figuring out how to do it herself.

  [I’m doing it myself, Tug!]

  She flung the comment at him carelessly, but refused any response he might have made. She was still not brave enough to face his scorn. Someday. But not just yet.

  16

  “IT’S GOING TO BE hot today.”

  “I know. Worse than yesterday.”

  “Are you coming in, then?”

  “In a while.”

  “Okay.”

  John glanced back at her once before climbing the shuttle ladder. She had put on the last set of ship’s tunic and trousers this morning. Already the trousers were torn out at both knees. Dark hair, very curly, fuzzed her head, and somehow made her neck seem longer. She had had less of the sun’s rays than he had, but already she was much darker, and her dark eyes were richer in her browned face. With her rounded shoulders and bowed head, she looked like some ancient drawing of a castaway sailor. John shook his head slowly. She’d been crouched there, watching the lizard, for a good hour; she showed no sign of tiring of it. Her face was very solemn as she studied it, as if she pored over a puzzle of the greatest significance.

  That day on the beach, she had opened up to him. All the way back, dragging their suits, they’d talked. Comparing childhoods, pointing out odd vegetation, signs of animal life to each other. She’d even slept beside him, in the crook of his arm. But by morning, she’d retreated into herself again. It left him lonely, but with the feeling that she was not excluding him so much as exploring an area within herself, one she could not as yet share with anyone. She exuded an indefinable aura of waiting. For what, he was not sure. Only that with each passing day, she seemed to become more a part of this world. He was almost afraid that she would merge with it totally, leaving him behind.

  She was changing rapidly, in so many ways. Not just growing hair and her skin browning. Not even the loss of weight from their diminished diet, nor the change in musculature that constant gravity was wreaking on her. He argued with himself that he was changing, too, that deprived of the growth inhibitors universally present in the food, water, and atmosphere inside Evangeline’s gondola, both of them would be growing and aging at a rate they hadn’t experienced in decades. He knew his own change was progressing far more rapidly than it had on board ship. And hers? He suspected, but he wasn’t sure. And yet even that wasn’t the change he sensed in her. It wasn’t a physical thing, at least not solely. There was a mysticism to it that left him feeling far more alone than any physical distance between them.

  He caught himself watching her, not as he had once watched her as Connie, but as a creature of this world. The brown of her skin against the red-brown earth, the curve of her spine that echoed the lizard’s sprawl, the line of her turned neck like the arched neck of a seabird, the shadowed darkness of her eyes when she caught him staring at her. Sometimes he thought she might disappear against this planet’s backdrop, merge motionless into the soil and the plants. He had told her she had a rightful place on this world; now he feared he might lose her to it.

  Yesterday, she had been the one to spot the grazing animals. John had been inside the shuttle, dozing as he did during the hottest part of the day. But of late Connie had grown to prefer the out-of-doors; even when the days seemed scorching to him, she would spread a blanket out on the dry earth and lie in the shade of the shuttle’s body. “Doing what?” he’d asked her, and “Listening. Breathing. Being,” she’d said. So he’d been inside when he’d heard her shout, and nearly broken his neck getting down to see what was the matter. Connie had been standing full in the sun, one hand lifted, finger pointing. All John had gotten to see were a lot of animals running away. Their feet made a distant thundering, and their tails appeared to change colors as they ran, flashing from dark to light and back again. He closed his eyes for a second, tried to see them again. They’d been large, though it was hard for him to estimate just how large from the distance he’d been from them. At least as high as his waist, he thought, and there’d been many of them, a whole herd—seven, nine, maybe even twelve. The sight of that many living, moving animals had left him speechless.

  Afterward he had exchanged a long, wordless glance with Connie. Then she had gone back under the shuttle and stretched out again, to lie motionless as a lizard, and he had gone back up inside the shuttle, to sit in the command lounger and stare at the monitors. Connie didn’t look at them anymore. It seemed she no longer cared about the monitors or the shuttle. That day at the beach she had said she would rather die than return to a place where they made you into something you weren’t, and he had agreed with
her. Now he wondered what each of them had meant.

  He came in from the brightness of the outdoors to the cool dimness of the shuttle’s interior. He manually rollered the door into place (only this morning had that ceased working) and stood for an instant with his eyes tight shut. When he opened them, the semidarkness seemed soothing and restful. He walked forward through the shuttle, his bare feet sure on the cool ribbed floor. He settled himself in the command lounge and stared at the monitors.

  They’d all gone crazy. One read out a constant stream of ever-changing numbers. Another screen featured a rippling of geometric shapes. The others were a random fluctuation of washes of greenish light. One, he now noticed, had gone totally dark and still. As he watched, another winked out. Some Earthly bacteria or fungus or mold or something was having a field day with the shuttle’s biologics. He wondered how they were interacting, the Castor- or Pollux-bred life-forms and the Earth ones. Would they simply destroy one another, and if so, which one would be victorious? Or would the ship’s biologics manage to mutate or find a niche to occupy here on Earth? In one dark moment, he had wondered if instead of the Earth’s life-forms destroying the shuttle, perhaps the foreign life-forms from Castor and Pollux would spread out and attack the Earth, and make of the plain a totally barren desert. He’d wanted to discuss that morbid idea with someone, but not Connie. No, Tug, it was the kind of thing that Tug would have enjoyed exploring down to the last possible repercussion.

  He leaned forward, idly spun adjustment knobs on the console. Nothing happened. He sighed heavily, then forced himself to try the radio. As far as he could tell, it was still working. At least there was a slight variation in the sound when he keyed the mike, not nearly as loud as it had originally been, but still there. So maybe it was still working. The computer had stopped replying to commands several days ago, so he had no way of testing it. He supposed he didn’t really want to know when that quit working, or when the emergency beacon went out. He went through the routine. “Shuttle Arcadia to Beastship Evangeline. Shuttle Arcadia calling Beastship Evangeline.” Then he listened to the steady white noise for a while before he keyed off the mike switch.

  He had decided that something had gone radically wrong not just in the shuttle, but on board Evangeline as well. If all were well with Tug, he’d have devised some method of locating them and contacting them by now. Oh, Tug had his moments of pettiness and his times of being obtuse, but John couldn’t imagine him carrying silence to this extremity. So something had happened to his ship, and he’d never know what. By the time they were missed, a lifetime, no several of his lifetimes, would have passed. By the time anyone ever even considered searching the Earth’s surface, the shuttle would have biodegraded to a greener smear on the plain’s rough surface. Not that John thought that there would be any sort of a search for them. The fate of the Beastship Evangeline would just become another minor mystery of the spaceways, an Epsilon Station, something for Mariners to chew over together when they were in port, or sitting around in their quarters during Wakeups.

  Wakeups. Waitsleep. John longed for those ideas to seem real to him again. He couldn’t remember when he had last stayed awake for this many consecutive days. Fifteen, he thought. Connie said seventeen. Not being sure didn’t bother him as much as it should have. Instead, it was the repetition of brief spates of rest followed by consciousness. It felt as if his problems were piling up in his head, stacking one atop another, until he could no longer consider each one rationally, or even see them all as pieces of the same puzzle. Instead, his worries jumped out at him, not just every time he sat down, but whenever he tried to sleep. Dreams came to him during natural sleep, and tormented him until he woke up, and then the same worries that had given him bad dreams picked at him mercilessly, keeping him from returning to even the shallow refreshment of natural sleep. If he were on the ship right now, he’d crawl into the womb after leaving a request for a maximum Waitsleep period. Maybe when he came out from it, he’d feel rested, maybe his muscles would no longer ache with fatigue and tension. But, no, first, before he went into the womb, he’d punch up a triple order of rations and eat them all….

  Stop that. He and Connie had split the last ration packet yesterday. They’d been going on half a ration packet each for three days now. He’d started to suggest to her that they parcel out this last one a stick at a time, to make it last longer, then discarded the idea. Why prolong the inevitable? They were both going to starve, and knew it without any need to discuss it with each other. Besides, they both suspected that the dark starry spots on the outside film of the ration package indicated some sort of biological taint to the food.

  John had already made what effort he could to find an alternative. He’d privately sampled a number of types of vegetation around the ship. But if any of it were edible, it had escaped his notice. Only one plant had actually made him gag. One other had tasted so pungent as to be repulsive. The others were dry and tasteless, or nearly so. He hadn’t thrown up the few leaves he’d chewed and swallowed, but neither had he received any sense of nourishment from them. Not that he was sure he would have recognized it. About all he could definitely say was that none of them had been toxic enough to kill him immediately. He had no idea as to what to do next. The Earth might have spawned mankind, and at one time been plentiful with edible vegetation, but it seemed such was no longer the case. Of the nineteen plants he had sampled, it seemed he should have found something his body would recognize as food. Intellectually he knew he should explore the possibilities of being carnivorous, but he suspected that he would die of starvation before being able to nerve himself to that. Besides, even if he wanted to kill an animal and eat it, he wouldn’t know how to start. With a lizard, he supposed. It was the only animal they’d seen so far that sat still long enough for him to catch one.

  No, in reality, he supposed he’d sit up here and watch the monitors die one by one, and Connie would lie on her blanket under the shuttle and contemplate whatever it was she was contemplating until they died. He’d never before experienced hunger except as a vague sensation that let him know he’d missed a meal by an hour or so. Death from starvation was one of the things the Human race had left behind on the Earth. Its absence on Castor and Pollux and the stations was often cited as proof of how well the carefully balanced Human-natural ecology equation was working. Starvation had become only an unpleasant memory. Odd, how the first people to return here would rediscover it so easily. Would acute hunger became pain, or only weakness? He wondered how long it took for starvation to result in death, and then how the ordeal would affect Connie.

  Connie. She slept beside him at night now, ever since the day she’d walked into the ocean and he’d pulled her back. They shared the command lounger, an area designed to be roomy for one but never intended for two. They didn’t care. Each night she lay against his back and put her arms around him, clinging tight until dawn freed them both from the restless dreams of natural sleep. Each night he wanted to turn toward her, but could find no way to make himself. It would be for the wrong reasons, he told himself. It would be like the together-together monkeys that Deckenson had described to him, months or decades ago on Delta. Holding on to each other, not in affection but in fear of everything else.

  Odd. He felt closer to her than he’d ever felt to any Human being, but they spoke very little now, and spent most of the day apart. She had her stillness and her thoughts, but he knew he held himself apart from her as well. He supposed part of it was his guilt. She depended on him, and he could offer her no hopes. Worse, he had brought her into this danger, supremely confident he could deliver her from it, and instead he would have to watch her die. Smaller and younger than he was, he had no doubt she would die before him. Every time he looked at her, he could almost see the skull behind her face. Easier to say nothing of what he felt and leave her to her own thoughts than to face that.

  Each morning they went together to fetch water, a daily task since the recycler had given out. The stream seemed to att
ract living things. John could not decide if the animals had become less shy of them since he and Connie had become regular visitors, or if he was simply getting better at seeing them. The latter, he supposed. There were so many of them. Any sudden movement still put larger creatures to flight and stilled smaller ones to invisibility. There had been birds there yesterday, floating at the river’s edge where it ran more slowly, in among the tall crisp-stalked vegetation. John had waded out to fill the containers with cleaner, colder water from the more rapid flow, and the birds had lifted their wings at him and made hoarse sounds among themselves. On the hike back to the shuttle, Connie had said suddenly, without preface, “They’re very like us, you know. More like us than the Rabby on Delta could ever be. Legs, eyes, mouths, drinking water, breathing this atmosphere. They lifted their wings at you, almost as a Human might lift its arms. It’s funny to think how alike we all are, and yet the first time I saw a bird, it seemed totally foreign to me.”

  He’d tried to think of some reply to that, but in the end had merely nodded and kept walking. She had nodded to herself then, a short sure nod, and later when he had gone outside the shuttle in the heat of the day and found her blanket empty, he hadn’t had to wonder where she was. Down watching the birds, enjoying her kinship with this world.

  While he sat in the dimness and watched the monitors, and dreamed of being rescued from this world he’d once idealized. A world he was coming to realize would devour both of them eventually. Not out of cruelty, but simply because, despite John’s declarations of belonging, they did not know how to become a part of it again.

  “You were right, Tug,” he said aloud, and imagined how insufferably delighted the Arthroplana would have been to hear him concede that. Well, it couldn’t help or hurt a thing now to admit that the alien had had a far better understanding of this world than John had ever had. He had found no beauty where he expected it. Instead all the beauty had teeth and claws, sharp edges and spots of rot on it. Beauty, though, nonetheless. Just as beauty had leaned upon Connie that day he’d pulled her from the sea, coated in sand and scraped raw, birthed salty and wet into his hands, a person who suddenly saw some value to being a Human. He snorted. A year ago he’d have broken that thought up into phrases and called it poetry. Now he understood that he’d understood poetry just as little as he had beauty. “And you were right about that, too, Tug,” he said aloud.