Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  As the vesicle fused and their seats dissolved away, Blackbear tightened his grip on Sunflower’s plump little hand. How fortunate he was that his ancestors went to Bronze Sky.

  His grip was not tight enough to keep the toe-walking child from falling twice in the street, scraping his knee, then his elbow. But today Sunflower refused to be carried, having taken it into his head to imitate big sister. Thank goodness the “pavement” was so antiseptic, thought Blackbear. With relief he ascended the ramp to Science Park.

  The lobby display of Caenorhabditis writhed overhead as always, its transparent body tracing elegant curves. He paused, recalling Raincloud’s question about cultured ovaries. He ought to have answered better, he thought; he should know precisely why the aging treatment prevented adult cells from dedifferentiation into pseudo-germ cells. He had to finish reading those references.

  At the Fertility Lab Blackbear’s Eyeless gene had been transferred into simbrid embryos under Pirin’s direction. With luck, Tulle predicted, they would develop normally and make ovaries with something close to normal egg cells. The simian hybrids developed at the pace of human embryos, so it would take weeks or months to see the results. In the meantime, Onyx taught him to mutate Eyeless to several variants which ultimately might develop even better.

  Since the L’liite ship landed on Valedon, the mood in the lab was tense. Draeg now refused to speak to the Elysian students, whose disdainful looks betrayed a prejudice that disturbed Blackbear. Only Onyx and Blackbear managed to keep on good terms with everyone.

  During the simulator’s frequent downtimes, Draeg held forth at length about the crisis. “Do you know what it’s like to grow up in a cubic mile of metal without tap water?” he told Blackbear, who was trying to transfer tissue cultures while keeping an eye on Sunflower. “You drink from the sewer. My mother’s first three babies died of the runs. My two younger sisters were sold to a brothel to buy a dowry for the eldest. My brother and sister both have a permanent stoop from working the looms since age three—that same damned textile firm whose trade rep took Raincloud to dinner.”

  Blackbear swallowed and nodded. The nanoplastic tissue culture vessels, with their billion miniature intelligent circuits, came in and out of focus before his eyes.

  “What do you think will happen if our world accepts the austerity package Bank Helicon wants? Just what do you expect?” Draeg shouted in Blackbear’s ear.

  Screams emanated from the next room. “No, no,” wailed Sunflower.

  “Hawktalon, leave him alone,” Blackbear called out. “Finish those inoculations.”

  “It’s not me, Daddy,” her voice insisted. “The nanoplast is swallowing him.”

  Blackbear jumped up from his seat; a culture vessel fell and clattered on the floor. He raced out in time to see Sunflower engulfed in an amorphous shell of nanoplast, slowly folding up around him. Sunflower shrieked as his arm got stuck in the rising stuff.

  “No, don’t!” Onyx turned from her embryo scans and caught Blackbear’s arm. He twisted her off and reached for the child. He pulled at the nanoplast, but it molded to his fingers and caught him fast. He wrenched his hand out; the stuff pulled apart, and some blobs of nanoplast fell to the floor, oozing across. His hand reddened as the pressure of the stuff constricted his fingers.

  Onyx pointed a small oblong control unit at the nanoplast engulfing Sunflower. A red homing beam hit the stuff; it stiffened and stopped moving. “Now you can pry it off,” Onyx shouted above Sunflower’s howls. She aimed the control unit at Blackbear’s hand, then at the other blobs wandering across the floor.

  The nanoplast splintered with a sickening crunch as Blackbear pried it from his hand and pulled the shell apart from around Sunflower. Most of the other lab members had wandered in by now, intrigued by the sight of a child in a fullblown fit of screaming. Tulle’s capuchin scampered off to inspect a crawling blob of nanoplast that Onyx had missed.

  “I was just experimenting,” explained Hawktalon. “I pushed two culture vessels together real hard, and they stuck. They oozed together like soap bubbles. So then I stuck on another one, just one or maybe two. I told him not to sit on it.”

  BACK AT THE HOUSE BLACKBEAR AWOKE FROM A NAP, ALL too brief, when Raincloud got home from the Nucleus. His lingering sense of dread meant he must have dreamed of his lost brother again. He pulled himself up on the bed, tired and depressed. “Make us a creamed goat stew please,” he mumbled to the house. “With one dish of golden fritillaries.” The last was an Elysian concoction his goddess had grown partial to, a vague mixture of fruit and fish flavors that came shaped in orange butterfly wings.

  Raincloud kissed him on the forehead. He watched her rounded belly, thinking of the thumb-sized creature with its moon-like eyes that dwelt inside.

  “And how’s my big girl, and my little sweetie?” she asked, picking up Sunflower to kiss him on the head.

  “Hawk is in her room, adding fractions and reading colonial history.” At least the girl had been, under strict orders, the last he had looked. “Your ‘little sweetie’ nearly didn’t make it home.” He recounted Sunflower’s mishap with big sister.

  Raincloud listened gravely. “This is no place for a firstborn goddess. If we were home, I could send her ’cross clan for a week; her aunt Ashcloud would put the fear of the Dark One into her.”

  “Better yet, to the temple. Let her learn to kiss the snake.”

  “Hawktalon would make a good High Priestess,” said Raincloud thoughtfully. “It takes a knack for people, as well as a nerve for snakes. Another year or two, and she can apprentice—if she dares. Well, for now there’s one more option.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She said she wants to go to the shon.”

  “What? You can’t be serious.”

  “I’ve looked into it,” said Raincloud. “The generen says Hawk wouldn’t have to live there full time; she could go as a day student, as often as we like.”

  Blackbear slumped back on the bed; too tired to think anymore. A book slipped on the shelf; by now the bedroom walls overflowed with books that Raincloud had printed out to stock her own library. From the kitchen came warm odors, and the house announced, “Your dinner, Citizens.” He knew he would find the food on the table and the places set. The children would be spoiled wretched.

  “Pull my pants up, Daddy,” called Sunflower, having used the potty. There was still something a parent was good for.

  Raincloud added, as he rose to help Sunflower, “It’s either that or send her to the Sharers with Doggie.”

  He did not reply, as Hawktalon approached the dinner table.

  Raincloud sat at the table, admiring the exotic meal. “By the way, dear, you’ll never guess who met me for lunch today.”

  “Not Iras?” Giving Sunflower a pat on the bottom, he lifted the child way overhead to “fly like a spaceship.” Then he put him down and watched him run off on tiptoe to wash his hands.

  “No, for some reason Iras doesn’t answer. It was that logen of yours, Kal Anaeashon.”

  Blackbear stopped still. For a moment he felt as if an electric shock had passed through him. The memory of that strange encounter came back. Then he shook himself, puzzled.

  “Do sit down,” Raincloud insisted.

  “Kal Anaeashon? Whatever did he want?”

  “Why, he said you’d met his ‘mate,’ so he returned the compliment!” Raincloud grinned at him. “A good excuse as any. He’s not at all forward, I must say. Nor bad looking, with his silver hair. He’d make a good second consort,” she teased.

  Blackbear laughed. “Kal’s taste is for men.”

  “Really.” Raincloud thought this over. “That explains it, then. Most Elysians who want to meet me have one thing in mind.”

  Whatever was Kal up to, he wondered.

  “He asked after you,” she added, “and after Sunflower, and even Doggie. Can you imagine, an Elysian taking notice of a trainsweep?”

  “Doggie, Doggie!” chanted the two child
ren, banging their forks on the table. Hawktalon crowed, “We’re visiting Doggie tomorrow!”

  “Yes,” Raincloud assured her, “we’re visiting Doggie tomorrow. You’d better be on your best behavior, or the fleshborers will get you.”

  IN THE WAKE OF THE SEASWALLOWERS, THE OCEAN BELOW was blue after all, as sparkling blue as in the video brochure. The blue horizon was so sharp against the pale blue sky that it looked like a paper cutout. Blackbear had never seen such a clear horizon, in all his years on Bronze Sky.

  “Are we there yet?” demanded Sunflower for the fourth or fifth time, strapped into his seat in the shuttlecraft.

  Hawktalon held her video map up to her face; Blackbear hoped this was not a sign of nearsightedness, which would mean delicate surgery. “No, we just passed Loryu-el raft. Kshiri-el is the next one in this raft cluster. Sharer rafts always come in clusters of eight,” she added importantly.

  Raincloud looked intently out the window, while Draeg seemed lost in his thoughts. Raincloud had visited Draeg’s home before, but for Blackbear it would be the first time.

  “Prepare for landing on Kshiri-el, Citizens,” came the cheerful servo voice.

  The raft below looked like a cut-off tree trunk whose roots still radiated outward and stretched below the surface. The “surface,” though, was ocean, and the “roots” were branches dense with green foliage. The central area of the raft was covered with other sorts of plants, commensal or parasitic to some degree. Matted leaflets, like ground pine, squished underfoot. Fanwings circled above, emitting sighing cries; one of them swooped and snatched up a legfish from the raft.

  Blackbear welcomed the fresh air in his lungs and followed Draeg across the raft, holding firm onto Sunflower’s ankles as the child straddled his back; safer than the shoulders, as the child had grown. Hawktalon skipped along happily. “You’re sure the trainsweep’s all right?” he asked anxiously, dreading disappointment for them.

  “It’s had royal treatment,” Draeg assured him. “Sharers don’t often get fugitives to look after nowadays.”

  A silkhouse rose before them, its blue and green saddle-shaped panels fitted together into concave spires. At raft-level, one of the panels suddenly dilated, like a mouth opening in surprise. Two Sharers emerged, completely purple and hairless, and held out their webbed hands. Blackbear knew Sharers did not wear clothes, but the sight of these unclothed goddesses made him less uncomfortable than he expected.

  “Leresha the Coward, and her lovesharer Eerea the Lazy,” Raincloud whispered. Lovesharers could make daughters together, with the help of the lifeshaper to fuse the ova and provide the “paternal” methylation patterns.

  From out of the silkhouse “mouth” crept the cherished trainsweep.

  “Doggie!” Hawktalon got down and embraced her, the six legs flexing beneath her weight. Doggie seemed to have fared well enough in exile. The crayon drawings on her back had faded in the sun.

  “Down, Daddy!” insisted Sunflower. The child hurried off, then shrieked, having caught his toe in the matted greenery and fallen on his face. Raincloud picked him up, saying, “You’ve got to stop toe-walking, dear.”

  Leresha spoke with Draeg and Raincloud in a melodious voice, a language which seemed all vowels.

  “Did Doggie cause any trouble? Ask her, Raincloud,” said Blackbear.

  Raincloud spoke in the same melodious language. The Sharer gestured toward the trainsweep and the children. “Doggie’s no trouble, Leresha says,” Raincloud told him. “But Sunflower’s knee looks bad. We ought to fix it up.”

  Sunflower was bleeding profusely at the knee, for the scab had scraped open at the same place where he was hurt the day before. Alarmed, Blackbear hurried over to take a look. “Could we wash it off?” No servo medic was about to come, he realized. He reached for gauze and antiseptic from his own pack.

  “Leresha says we can take him below to the lifeshaper,” Raincloud explained.

  Leresha added, in Elysian, “He will fix his bruise by the lifeshaper.”

  Blackbear eyed the Sharer more closely; and for a moment, what he saw made him forget the bleeding child.

  Leresha’s skin was not smooth as amethyst, like that of her lovesharer. She was patterned all over with fibrous scars, crisscrossing her body, as if every patch of skin had been transplanted. What trauma could have happened to her that even the lifeshapers could not fix—or would not?

  “The lifeshaper will fix him,” Raincloud agreed with a firm look at Blackbear. “Come along, Doggie,” she added, knowing the child would not be parted from the trainsweep. Blackbear was less than eager to try out novel medical treatment on his own son. It was only a scrape, he told himself; still, he would watch that “lifeshaper” like a hawk. Reluctantly he followed Raincloud into the silkhouse.

  The interior was filled with an otherworldly bluish light, filtered from the upper panels of seasilk. The lower panels were covered with brilliant yellow swirls of moss or fungus, a non-Torran organism that combined fungal metabolism with mosslike leaves and rhizoids. Sharers “painted” their walls with it, in patterns of striking beauty.

  Leresha led everyone down a hole into the woody interior of the raft. The lifeshaper appeared, a smooth-skinned purple goddess introduced as Yshri the Foolish One. Blackbear sat Sunflower on his lap, and Doggie crept right up to his leg to get a better look. What an odd little machine.

  The lifeshaper bathed the child’s knee in a clear liquid. Then she applied a plant stem which twisted suddenly like a snake. Blackbear felt his hair stand on end, and he nearly snatched the child away.

  “It’s all right,” Raincloud whispered. “Who do you think taught the Elysians all they know?”

  From the twisting stem, a pink substance oozed out and worked its way smoothly into the scraped knee. “There, Daddy,” said Sunflower. “It’s all better now.”

  Anesthetic, he thought. But more—something odd was happening to the knee. Instead of clotting over, the edges of wound had merged seamlessly with the pink substance, as if already growing into new skin. He watched, hardly believing his eyes.

  “Thanks,” he told Yshri, imagining what marvels he could learn here. “I’d like to see your facilities some time.” Egg fusion, limb regeneration, eco-engineering—it was hard to imagine these things in such a seemingly primitive setting.

  “I would gladly share learning with you,” said the lifeshaper, “in another week’s time. Today my apprentices are all out celebrating.”

  Draeg added, “It’s the end of the swallower season. Just wait till tonight when the waterfire comes out!”

  “We have to catch the shuttle,” warned Raincloud.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll give you brothers a quick tour, anyhow,” Draeg insisted. “There’s the flying squid mating pool, and the shockwraith’s lair; and there’s even a war memorial, from the ‘Great Deathhastening’…”

  Draeg and the Windclans formed a ragged parade across the raft, Sunflower riding triumphantly atop the trainsweep. Blackbear groaned inwardly, foreseeing the squalls when it came time to depart. “If only we could just take the servo home,” he muttered to Raincloud.

  “Leresha asked me about that,” Raincloud told him. “She needs to know why Doggie is here, why the trainsweep was cast out.”

  “Well, if she finds out she can tell us.”

  Draeg paused. “Look out there,” he pointed toward the horizon. “See that little raft offshoot way out?”

  A small patch of gray-green could be seen, like a smudge on the horizon.

  “A raft branch dips underwater,” Draeg explained, “then comes up to sprout an offshoot raft, a kind of vegetative propagation. Now out there on that offshoot raft sits a Sharer unspoken; that’s the worst punishment a Sharer can get from the Gathering.”

  “What was her crime?” Blackbear asked.

  “She stole fish from another raft’s nets. She’s ‘sick,’ the others say. They bring her food, of course.”

  Raincloud observed, “It works the other wa
y, too. A Sharer can unspeak the whole Gathering.”

  “Of course; if you’re mad at your Gathering, you can go sit out there until they mend their ways. A queer lot, these Sharers.”

  Hawktalon pulled at the flare of her mother’s trousers. “Doggie’s trying to tell us something, Mother.”

  Raincloud stopped. “Really? How do you know?”

  “Listen.”

  Raincloud crouched down beside the trainsweep and listened. Blackbear drew nearer, but all he could hear was the murmuring ocean.

  “She squeaks,” Raincloud observed. “It’s a called ‘sonic byproduct.’”

  “Well,” said Hawktalon, “she does that whenever she wants something.”

  Blackbear regarded his daughter in puzzlement.

  “Come, Brothers,” Draeg called back to them. He turned, leading them inward away from the ocean, up a gentle rise to the rim of the central hollow. “The war memorial lies here.” His foot extended and scraped at an old slab of raftwood, which someone must have cut out and set here long ago. Its surface was scorched black. “It’s from Raia-el, a raft long dead. They don’t last more than a couple of hundred years. On this spot, during the Great Deathhastening, the Valan invaders burned six Sharers in whitetrance; literally burned them down.”

  Blackbear shook his head. “It’s hard to believe. The Valans are…so modern.”

  “They’ve had a thousand years to grow up. Every people is born in blood.”

  “The Clickers weren’t,” objected Blackbear. “Our founders drew together under the Dark One, but we hurt no one.”

  Draeg laughed. “What about your own planet—terraformed! How do you know what alien souls were lost?”

  “Nonsense,” said Blackbear uneasily. “They tested for sentient life.” Any finding of nonhuman sentient intelligence had to be reported to the Secretary of the Free Fold. None had ever been found.