Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  Relief broke over the stranger’s face. “Oh, wow, you had me worried for a while there. Look, uh.” He grinned again, showing the biggest teeth Connie had ever seen in a Human’s mouth. “This isn’t going anything like I imagined. Anyway. I’m Raef, and Evangeline and I came down to rescue you. She’s waiting for us. And, uh.” He squeezed his eyes shut, swayed again, and then seemed to steady himself with an effort. “Let’s get back on board, out of this heat and sun, and let Evangeline get us up away from this gravity, and I’ll tell you everything. Man, I never thought the gravity would bother me this much. I mean, I know it’s been a long time and all …” He paused, watching their still faces. “Guess I should spend more time in the squirrel cage, get back in shape.” He waited, but John didn’t say anything. Connie herself felt like an observer. “Look, let’s just get back to the ship,” he finally said, almost sadly. “Evangeline’s waiting for us.”

  He turned to point back at the ship as if somehow they could have failed to notice it. Connie followed his gesture, and they all stared as the Evangeline lifted as suddenly and silently as a wide-wing seabird and rose swiftly into the blue sky. In a matter of heartbeats, she had disappeared completely.

  “Evangeline!” Raef cried, and turned and ran toward where she had been. “Wait! Wait for us!”

  But the ship was gone.

  18

  [/ / / / /]

  [I’m coming!] Evangeline called. She knew her words weren’t in the ancestral language the baby would have instinctively understood, but she could not keep herself from replying. [They took our language away from us,] she thought fiercely to herself. [They replaced it with a slave tongue, devoid of imagery. A language for receiving and obeying commands, one that barely allowed a question to be formed. I’ll probably never regain what I should have had. But I can keep it from being stolen from another.] She renewed her pace, parting space and rejoining it behind her swifter than she would have believed possible.

  She’d probably never know what she could have been, never guess the potential of her species. Did Wild Beasts still exist anywhere [Bless you, Raef, for that accidental image that gave me a thought of my own for the first time in my life!], living as they had before the Arthroplana found them? They had to. Someone had made that bubble net out there, someone had produced the infant that was crying for its parents to come and bear it homeward. A new thought made her leap forward in another burst of speed. [Perhaps I will be there when they come for their infant. Perhaps I will meet them.] The pretense sprouted up about her just as wildly as if Raef were still within her. She’d find the crying infant, guard it, and if an infested Beast came to make it a slave, she’d battle for it, protect it with her life. And she would win, and then the parents would come, just in time to see her saving the lives of their offspring. And they would be grateful, and in awe of such a hero as would lay down her life for another’s offspring. They would call to her, and somehow she would understand, and they would take her among them, and rid her of her parasite, and she, too, would be a Wild Beast, free to the stars….

  “What about Raef and the gondola?”

  Well, she wouldn’t be able to go off among them immediately. They’d understand. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. They would help her remember the way home, so she would know where to go when she could. And she would return to Earth and Raef, and she would carry him within her to the end of his brief days, and they would be happy. And when he was gone and she had no use for it anymore, she would shake herself free of the gondola, and seek out her own kind and go among them, scarred but wise, teaching them of what they must beware, of the terrible things that could happen to a bubble net left unguarded.

  “But what about John and Connie?”

  John and Connie would … she’d leave them safely at …

  She suddenly became aware of the source of the question. She had left her guard down. [What do you want, parasite?]

  “To make you see your predicament. So you can change your mind before it’s too late.”

  So quietly spoken, so matter of fact. It shocked her to stillness.

  Her anger flared. [Why? So you can master me again, cripple me again, somehow, so I’ll have to do whatever you want?]

  “No. So I can help you survive. So we can both survive.”

  [I don’t believe you.]

  “There is no way I can force you to believe me. But there is much I know that you have not given thought to.”

  She refused to reply to what might have been a taunt.

  “It’s simply this, Evangeline. You and I are of a kind, in a way Raef can never be. Our partnership can last centuries. Raef will die very soon; sooner than you can imagine.” Tug paused, and she could sense the effort it took for him to go on. “You left him on a harsh planet, fighting toxins and gravity, his body’s disease already awakening. And his diet will include no growth or aging suppressants to extend his life. Only for a short time, you think to yourself. But what is short to us is long for them, Evangeline. They may already all be dead.”

  [You are trying to frighten me. To trick me.]

  “I have no need of trickery. What I tell you is true. By the time you get back, Raef will be dead. Even if he isn’t, he’ll be so close to it as not to matter.” His words came to her in short bursts. He paused long before going on. “So what will you have if you go back to him? A nearly dead Human, incapable of being your companion for long, and angry with you for abandoning him. He’ll hate you.”

  [Not Raef. Raef will understand. He has often said that if I heard a call for help from one of my own, I’d have to go.]

  Tug gave a snort of laughter. “Putting one of your own kind above Raef is a different thing entirely. He will hate you for abandoning him. Trust me. Hating is what Raef does best.”

  She realized abruptly that he was speaking to her in Raef’s language, the language so rich in shades of meaning and images and nuances. It was odd to have it coming from Tug, and very different from the bare language of commands he normally used when speaking to her. And it was so different, too, from when she was communicating with Raef. Tug spoke just words, coded vibrations, not the rich tapestry of words and memories and sensory images she shared when Raef “spoke” to her.

  It had not, of course, been that rich when she had first started listening in on Raef’s mind. At first she had only dimly sensed his dreaming, and then only when he was in his deepest dreaming. Probably some accidental proximity of his brain to the ganglia docks in her womb that were biologically intended to keep her in touch with her own infants. His dreams had been so faint a whisper. Only her desperate loneliness had made her pay any attention to them, and set her to gradually puzzling out the tickling pattern his thoughts made. Images and feelings had come to her first, and his language only later, like a secondary track to his thoughts. She had only grasped its use when she had finally felt so compelled to ask questions that she had gone seeking a tool for communication. How flat Raef’s language sounded, coming from Tug, without any of the mental imagery Raef used behind it. She suspected she understood Raef’s language better than Tug did, could use it more competently for having the pictures in her mind. With time, she could probably teach him, through their ganglia docking, to perceive the full richness of the flat words he used.

  [Leave me alone.] She spoke abruptly, in the old command language, shocked at her own thoughts, and turned her mind away from her parasite. He was trying to confuse her, that was all. Trying to distract her from what she must do.

  She realized suddenly she hadn’t heard the infant cry for a while.

  [I’m coming!] she called out reassuringly, seekingly.

  [/////] The reply was strong and immediate in response to her call. And close, much closer than she had expected. There was an asteroid belt in this solar system; she’d scarcely paid attention to it before, never realized its possibilities. She flung her mind wide, put all her memories of this solar system into scale and superimposed them upon one another, filling in planet
s and smaller objects she hadn’t encountered yet but could extrapolate from her information. Of course there was an asteroid belt. And it was an ideal one, offering many places for bubble nets in a steady orbit, there in that wide belt between those two planets.

  “Mars and Jupiter.”

  [Shut up, parasite.]

  “War and Omnipotence,” he replied inanely, and she sensed amusement of a bitter kind. She denied him further contact.

  Late summer, verging on autumn, he thought to himself. It reminded him of the time when he was nine, and his mom and dad and he had gone to the seaside for a week. First and only family vacation he ever remembered them taking. Then the brief days had seemed to flash by him, intense with sand and sun and water. Now, week after week, each day dragged past, as he tried to understand what might have happened, why Evangeline would have left him here.

  Raef watched them running ahead of him, far down the beach. Like ugly children on a fall picnic, racing over the sand through the wind that had a cool bite to it now. He smiled to himself. Senior citizens were what they were, by old Earth standards. So why did they act like a couple of teenagers half the time?

  It had only taken him a few days to get used to how they looked: the short, almost-sexless bodies, the faces that reminded him vaguely of Troll dolls, their tattered ship’s clothes. Their bodies no longer jarred him every time he looked at one. But he didn’t think he’d ever get used to their ignorance. That was all he’d done lately, teach them about their own damn planet. And even with all that, there was a lot they didn’t understand. Ever since he’d told them the round black things they were eating so happily were snails, and animals, they’d refused to touch them. Luckily he’d figured out that error in a hurry. They were racing ahead of him now to get to the best clam beds; he’d assured them clams were the bulb root of an underwater plant. He thought John suspected differently, but Connie was happy, and the extra protein was really needed in their vegetarian diet. They had no idea of how to eat. Hell, they hadn’t even thought of cooking anything; he’d had to show them how to steam the clams open.

  They were down on their knees now, digging in the sand. Connie found one, and held it up triumphantly. He lifted a hand slowly, waved to show that he saw it, and continued to make his gradual way down the beach. He wished he didn’t ache so bad, body and head. He wished he could manage one good deep breath. The wet sand seemed to grip at his feet and slow his every step. I’m old, he thought to himself, and then shook his head at the sudden tears that stung his eyes. It’s only the gravity, he thought to himself. An uglier suspicion nearly managed to surface in his mind. He pushed it under firmly, stopped to catch his breath and look all around.

  Gulls, or rather the descendants of gulls, rose suddenly in ranks from the beach, to slide effortlessly up the wind. Wide-wings, Connie called them, and so they were. Gulls had changed, had gotten smaller bodies and wider wings, so that they reminded him more of hang gliders than birds. Everything had changed, and nothing had changed. Sometimes Raef felt cheated by that. It seemed if he came home after all these years, it should either be home as he remembered it, towns and freeways and cultivated fields, or a completely different place, a bubbling planet of polluted pools and volcanoes belching. Instead, it was achingly familiar and yet strange. Trees were still trees, but they had more and smaller leaves. He hadn’t seen any flowers he knew, but most of the flowers he could have named would have been garden flowers, not wildflowers. He had caught a frog yesterday, intending to show it to John and Connie. But when he scooped the tiny blue-green body from the cool stream water, it had rested heavy and warm in his hand. The unnatural warmth had so startled him that he had dropped it back in the water and watched it stroke away.

  And so much was just plain missing. Gulls had used to gather by the hundreds on a beach like this. Now ten were a lot. He’d seen nowhere near the number of rabbits there should have been on this much plain, and no predators to explain the lack of rabbits. He’d sat talking with John about it the night before. John had just shrugged, but silent Connie had frowned, and finally said, “Sounds like reduced population density in response to the available food. From what you’re saying, it’s hard to tell if the planet is still in the recovery process, or gradually becoming more barren still.”

  It hadn’t been a cheery idea. A planet becoming more barren didn’t offer good prospects for an easy winter. Now, as her words came back to him, he caught himself lifting his eyes again and scanning the skies. Slowly he sank down onto a driftwood log, to rest and watch the skies.

  “He’s doing it again,” Connie said quietly.

  John raked another clam free of its sandy bed, then turned his head to follow her gaze. Raef was sky-staring, as he so often did these days. “Do you think he’s crazy?” John asked her.

  Connie shrugged and went back to loosening sand with a stick. “We both saw the Evangeline. Obviously he came off her; where else could he have come from? If his story wasn’t true, why did Tug leave us here?”

  It was John’s turn to shrug. “Maybe as a way of getting rid of us. Maybe Tug found out about the secondary part of our mission, and decided to strand us here, rather than risk letting us come back aboard.”

  “Why did he leave Raef, then? Why would he have come down here at all?”

  John clawed through the sand she had loosened. Nothing. “Maybe he’d think it was funny,” he said at last. “If Tug were deliberately abandoning us here, in what he regarded as a hell, he’d want to be sure we knew he was doing it on purpose.”

  “Do you really think he’d …” Connie began, then paused. She dug her stick into the sand with more force than was really called for. “Actually, I guess you’re right. I can imagine. Tug doing that.” She seemed almost reluctant to admit it. “But what about Raef’s story then?”

  “I don’t know,” John said slowly. “But in all the years I’ve spent aboard the Evangeline, I’ve never heard her speak. Since we got here, and I’ve finally been around other animals, I thought I began to understand better what she really was. Like the wide-wings or the lizards.”

  “Then you think he’s crazy,” Connie observed with finality.

  “Well.” John looked very uncomfortable. “I really like Raef. But I just don’t see how his story makes sense.”

  “I know.” Connie looked at him with that disconcertingly direct gaze she’d recently acquired. “That’s why I can’t figure out why I believe him.” She looked down at the sand, and John felt he could suddenly breathe again. “Maybe I just want to.”

  “Why?” The question suddenly seemed important.

  “Well.” Connie didn’t look at him as she plunged her stick into the packed sand again. “Because if she can do it—you know, can just break out of her pattern and say, This is what I really am—if she can reach out and take what she wants for herself—then maybe it’s something that’s right to do. For me, too.” She paused. “Or you.” She fixed him with those dark eyes again.

  “Oh.” John stood up suddenly, dusting sand off his legs. “Look, I’m going to go see how Raef’s doing. He hasn’t been looking so good, lately.”

  She looked away at last. “Okay,” she said quietly.

  He waited a moment longer, but Connie didn’t look up at him. He turned and walked back down the beach to Raef, with an uncomfortable feeling of leaving something unfinished.

  “We’re going to have to depend on ourselves, Raef.”

  It was John, come up beside him while he was daydreaming. Connie was still grubbing in the sand and adding to the pile of clams she had, but John, typically, had walked back to see if he were all right. Raef took his eyes from the blue sky, looked into his distorted face: the wide brow, the huge nose and ears. Like creatures out of a fairy tale, magic dwarfs, or gnomes or something.

  “I just can’t believe she hasn’t come back. The only thing I can figure is maybe somehow Tug found a way to make her do what he wanted her to do. And he left me, us, here because of what I know about Beasts now �
� or something like that.”

  John was silent for a moment. “I don’t think Tug would …” Then, “Whys don’t matter,” he said philosophically. Raef wondered how much of his story John had believed at all. John had had to accept that Tug had maintained Raef as a stowaway for all of those years; there was no other possible explanation. But Raef had seen the looks John and Connie exchanged whenever he started talking about Evangeline and how smart she really was and how they had talked together. Loony Tunes, the look said, and the first time they had done it, he had felt a flash of hatred for them, for their reminding him of the kids on the bus calling him “retardo” or the classroom teachers who had made “special” a sort of slam whenever they said it.

  “Forget it,” he told himself, and to his surprise, he could. Sometimes he felt his mind had been like a jumbled-up library microfiche, full of information teachers had attempted to stuff into it, all sorts of facts he’d never comprehended, but had had to save, just because his mind worked that way. And then Evangeline had come along, and looked through it with him, and put it all in order. She’d organized it and found the connections, had built on the little he did understand to make all his bits of knowledge into a network of understanding. She’d also banished all the frantic emotions that had tinged all his memories. The anger was still there, but it was in the right places and times. It didn’t spill over and stain everything. He could be irritated with John and Connie, and yet not hate them, not let it ruin the good things he did have with them. “Whys don’t matter,” John had just said, and Raef let the words echo in his mind. The troll was right.

  They couldn’t stand around wondering why things had or hadn’t happened. They just had to cope with them.

  “Listen,” Raef said abruptly. “Have you given any thought to what I said last night?”