Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #217

by TTA Press Authors

  He turned his back and shuffled down the walkways to the birthing room. Tomeer followed. He watched from the doorway as his father began moving things about, shifting the precious machinery, the samplers, the crèches, like someone beginning a new project. Strilikan had reappeared and pattered along behind them. He began climbing up the birthing room's inside wall.

  "Are you thinking of replacing me?” Tomeer asked. “Have I disappointed you?” He knew his tone was bitter.

  "No one could replace you,” his father said. He stopped his movements and bowed his head. “When you began developing, I spent many hours here watching you, making sure there were no mistakes. You seemed so miraculous. How could that be, when you were a copy of me? My own father, he from whom I was copied, treated me with coldness. He never felt toward me as I felt toward you. I wondered if I was wrong to have those feelings. But I could not help them."

  Tomeer went and put his arms around his father. Then, releasing him, he said, “I want to do the right thing. I feel sorry for her. They suffered so much. To me, it does not seem a violation of the purpose to do this."

  His father paused a long time before answering. Then finally he said, “I must think. Tell the woman you will speak with her once we have considered the request. Then go and sleep. I will wake you when it is time to talk."

  * * * *

  Tomeer had never felt so close to his father as in that moment in the birthing room. They had never touched each other for so prolonged a period. It moved him.

  And not only him, it seemed. For the next morning, his father told him he would allow the woman to visit the station for a time.

  "It makes me unhappy to do this,” he said. “But it would make you more unhappy if I rejected her completely. I cannot promise to grant her request, but she may look through the Inward Watcher."

  "I will say that the other Guardians are unwilling to be seen by one of the Expelled, and you have all withdrawn to an inner chamber,” Tomeer said.

  "Agreed."

  He gave Tomeer one hour with her. When the translocator brought her to the station, she took her first steps as Tomeer had done upon entering her ship, with wonder and fear. But Tomeer—who, mindful of his father's ill health, had placed one of the protective membranes over her, since it would keep infection from leaving her as well as from reaching her—showed her little of it, leading her quickly down the empty off-white corridors from the preparation chamber to the Inward Watcher.

  "No human has ever been here?” she asked.

  "No human of the Expulsion, you mean,” Tomeer said.

  A spasm crossed her face.

  * * * *

  * * * *

  "The Guardians are not considered human by those of us who have wandered in space for uncounted years,” she said.

  Tomeer stopped at the entrance to the Watcher.

  "I assure you, we are human,” he said. “We always have been."

  She did not answer. He sat her in the chair and showed her how to zoom the lens in and out with her fingertips, how to move it from side to side. Then he stood next to her.

  She said nothing at all to him for that hour. She adjusted the lens again and again as this place or that one caught her attention. Still keeping Ainkia's ship with it, the station had drifted over the eastern part of the Great Asia continent. Tomeer had watched it many times, of course—the endless plains with their pale colors turning to green when the season changed and the sun shone more directly on the equator, the mountains with snow down to their feet. He could not imagine what seeing it for the first time must be like for her.

  Finally he touched her arm, and she sat back. He had expected her to weep, but her face was dry.

  Seeing his surprise, she said, “Tears would be a poor expression of what I feel."

  He bowed and led her out, then halted, alarmed. Strilikan waited in the corridor, dancing on his legs in little circles, as if he had known not to come into the Watcher and startle the visitor. Ainkia, too, stopped at the sight of him. Tomeer went to herd him away, but she put a hand out to say no. Then she slowly approached Strilikan, who rose up onto the tips of all his legs to greet her. As his pincers reached out, Tomeer felt a thrill of fear—what if Strilikan should harm her, not knowing her importance? Yet the hard, sharp edges merely whispered over the tips of her outreached fingers. Strilikan circled her, touching her gently here and there.

  "Where did he come from?” she said.

  "I made him,” Tomeer said.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Have you so little to do that you create new life?” she said. “But ... he is a wonder. How did you—we were not given animals in the ships. We were alone with each other."

  "I know,” Tomeer said. “I must send you back. I am sorry."

  Reluctantly she gave up gazing at Strilikan, even as Tomeer ushered him away and led her to the preparation chamber.

  "Wait,” said Ainkia, before he could work the controls. She stepped forward and put her hands on his cheeks, and came close to his face. He gave a little gasp—her smell this near, reaching him through the clear softness of the membrane, was sweet, like the flower she had given him. She placed her lips on his. His hands went to her shoulders, then her back. Finally she stepped away.

  "Thank you,” she said, “on behalf of all the Expelled, for a glimpse of what never should have been denied us."

  He was breathing quickly. “I will come to see you again later,” he said. “If you agree, of course."

  She smiled. “It will be my delight to sit with you again amid the flowers and the green,” she said.

  Then he pressed the controls, and she was gone.

  * * * *

  "At least explain your thinking,” Tomeer said.

  "There is nothing to explain,” his father said. All day he had sat in the chair and looked down through the Inward Watcher. Strilikan, like someone angry about something, ran in and out of the round room, flinging himself against the clear bubble of the floor almost as if he were trying to escape and fall down to the surface, then the next moment leaving, only to rush up and down the corridor.

  Tomeer's father shifted the lens again now with an inexperienced finger. An enormous body of water spread out below, its outlines easily visible through the clear floor. Tomeer thought it was the one called the Ocean of Peace.

  "I have considered the request of this woman,” his father continued, “and decided against granting it. She has seen the Earth with her own eyes. That is far more, incalculably more, than any of the Expelled were ever to be granted."

  "But, father, why—"

  His father pulled his head away from the lens and fixed his gaze on Tomeer. “Why do you wish to do her bidding?” he said. “You are not as you were before she came."

  Tomeer's face grew hot. “I am the same son who lives the purpose as you do,” he said. “I have not changed."

  "And would you argue as much for such a request to be granted if it were made by a man?"

  Tomeer stared at him. “You are jealous,” he said.

  "No."

  "You are afraid,” he said.

  "Yes.” His father turned back to the lens, pretending to look below again.

  "Afraid that I will bring her here to live,” Tomeer said, “and somehow find a way to have children with her, and bring humans back to Earth—something you could never do."

  "Tell me,” his father said without looking at him, “that you have not considered doing exactly that."

  Tomeer drew himself up. “You are not the only Guardian remaining,” he said.

  He turned to leave, but his father's voice stopped him.

  "Tomeer,” he said. “Always remember how much I love you. After three hundred years, that is what the Earth means to me. Love. What does it mean to you?"

  * * * *

  Ainkia was sitting next to her father's bed, as she had been when the ship first neared the station. Her long hair hung down. Her hands covered her face.

  Tomeer sank to his knees in front of he
r and took her hands and kissed them. Tears wet her cheeks. He stroked them away, then rose and looked at her father.

  He had never seen anyone who was dead, and he knew that his own father would look like this someday: a tensionless blank, a sleeper who would never wake. A wrinkled gray thing. It was what he himself would look like, hundreds of years from now.

  Ainkia touched his hand, and he knelt again, taking her into his arms and slowly stroking her hair.

  "I will bring you down to Earth,” he whispered. “Just a few hours, no more. We will bury him, sing with the birds, and then return. No other Guardian will know."

  She stiffened and sat up away from him. Her face, which was such a mystery to him, seemed to hold many expressions. Joy lit it, and astonishment, and anticipation. And something else, that he could not make out.

  "A few hours,” she said. “It is more than I hoped for."

  He was careful to make no sound when he returned to the station. He had already enveloped himself in a fresh membrane against infection for the trip to Ainkia's ship.

  When the translocator brought Ainkia to the station a few hours later, her father's body lay at her feet. She still wore the membrane Tomeer had placed over her on her first visit. He cast another over the body, in case it should bring some infectious agent to the Earth.

  Strilikan came into the preparation chamber and walked onto Ainkia's father's corpse and stood on its chest. She gasped, but Strilikan gently touched the dead man's face with his pincers, feeling his cheeks, his nose, his forehead. Then he went to Tomeer and to Ainkia, plucking at their clothing. Finally Tomeer pulled him into the corridor and closed the clear wall against him. Strilikan beat his legs against the impervious surface as if it were a drum.

  Ainkia had brought two tools, implements the people on her ship had used to work the soil under the plants in their central space. She would use one of the tools to dig a place in the ground for her father. And Tomeer had decided he would help.

  He had already moved the station where he wanted them to go, and set it to stay above them for several hours. It was all he dared. He hoped it would be enough.

  * * * *

  When the wave stopped, they stood absolutely still. Tomeer held his breath, then let Ainkia go, and took a few steps from her to stand by himself.

  A plain fell away before them, dotted with trees, until a river wandered across its path. In the far distance a great mountain rose up in a perfect cone shape, covering much of the horizon. Whiteness, which he knew to be snow, made the mountain almost melt into the white-blue of the atmosphere.

  It was morning. The sun, the filtered disk he had always seen in the black of space, hovered behind them in the sky, netted by pale blue. He could feel the air, and his own skin, being warmed by it. A smell came to him—it was just as he had expected, really, exactly the smell of moisture and uncounted living things that he thought the green of Africa would have.

  He turned. A forest rose behind them, the tips of the trees so high he could hardly make out their detail. And a clamor rose from it, a buzzing and a beating and a hiss of life.

  He thought of Strilikan, and of how far his many legs could take him here, pattering away on great journeys of exploration, off into the wild unknown.

  As he looked up into the exquisite blue, a swarm of birds flew out from the forest and over his head with a great flutter-flap of wings. He followed them with his gaze, turning, until they disappeared over the plain toward the mountain in the distance.

  He went back to Ainkia. She knelt by her father's body. The protective membrane softened her sunlit edges. The digging tool was in her hands, but she had done nothing. Her face was upturned, as Tomeer's had been.

  Then her eyes flickered to something behind Tomeer. She sprang to her feet. Tomeer whirled.

  His father stood there, watching them. He breathed hard, his face a mask of rage. “Did you not think I would know?” he said.

  A heavy, hot feeling swept over Tomeer: shame. “Father, no harm will come of our being here,” he said. “Is it not beautiful? Surely an hour or two—"

  "Violation! You have violated the purpose!” his father exclaimed. “You have betrayed us!” He strode forward and struck Tomeer to the grass. Tomeer's breath thumped out of him when he hit the ground. He gasped, and in his intake of breath, he smelled the green blades and the life that had pushed them up out of the soil.

  His father coughed, almost doubling over with the effort, then staggered toward Ainkia, ready to fire the weapon raised in both his hands.

  Tomeer scrabbled to his feet. He launched himself at his father, not quite knocking him over but shoving his aim aside so that the bolt of energy hit behind Ainkia. The harsh crack caused all three of them to jump. Tomeer jerked the weapon out of his father's hands.

  "No more killing, father,” he said. “No more. You are ill. You have no strength for this. And you did not cast a membrane over yourself. There is no filter between you and the Earth. It may take harm from you, and you from it. Why, why did you do this?"

  His father coughed again, swaying, but said nothing. He was ill, indeed, and not only in his body.

  "I am sending you back to the station,” Tomeer said. He made sure his father would stay upright, then used the controls on his own wristband. His father lifted his hands in protest, but it was too late. He was gone.

  "I must return to keep him there,” Tomeer told Ainkia, shaking. “We should not have come to the surface. You must return with me."

  She shook her head. “You did right to bring me here,” she said. “Regardless of what he thinks, this is where I belong. Let me stay, at least for a little. Let me bury my father."

  Tomeer looked at the green around them, at the sky, at a moving tree above. “Bury him,” he said. “I will tend to my own father. Then I will come down again for you."

  He pressed the controls and rode the wave.

  * * * *

  His father lay on the floor in the preparation room, not quite unconscious. Strilikan danced in agitation around him. Tomeer lifted him up and carried him to his bedroom.

  His father lay pale, somehow thinner, already less present, so quickly had the struggle on the surface sapped his ancient body. And perhaps some infection from Earth's air was already taking hold, or his blood vessels had betrayed him. Regardless. Death was coming, a power greater even than the Talienns. And it was coming soon. Tomeer had seen it in Strilikan's predecessors, and he could tell.

  Strilikan pattered up and down the walls, like someone pacing.

  "Father,” Tomeer said, stroking the milk-white hand. His father's eyes opened very wide and his head turned toward him, but it was as if he could not see Tomeer. His hand groped to Tomeer's face and moved over it.

  "Love is what I meant,” he murmured.

  He fell asleep, his breath wheezing.

  Tomeer brought the floating carts with monitors and medications and followed the instructions to press blue oblongs into his father's arm, where the oblongs suddenly passed through the skin and disappeared. But over the next few hours, there was little change.

  On the way back from the hospital spiral, where he had looked in vain for further help, he passed the control room. He looked in and stopped. Something was missing. He walked inside and stood there, surrounded by utter silence, looking up through the Outward Watcher at space, at the empty place where Ainkia's ship had been—and was no more. His father had destroyed it before translocating himself down to Earth's surface.

  Tomeer could not take it in. He felt nauseous. Something hard and heavy seemed to sit in his chest. He went back to his father's bedroom and collapsed in a chair. He stared at his father's face. His own face.

  Suddenly he woke with a horrible start. His father was still asleep. Strilikan clung to the wall halfway to the ceiling, pulsing gently off the surface every time he exhaled.

  Tomeer rushed to the Inward Watcher and looked down, knowing he must have slept for a long time, knowing what he would find. Darkness cloaked th
e Earth, and just visible were the outlines not of Africa, but of the Amerique Sud, its long tail snaking toward the southern pole.

  He pounded down the corridor to the control room. Strilikan had woken up, too; he skittered after Tomeer with a shrilling sound. Tomeer had only frozen the station's location for several hours, and it had finally resumed its random wandering on the Earth's protective membrane. He could speed up the rate at which the station traveled on the surface of the barrier, but still, it would be hours before they once again reached the place in orbit that put them over that same spot, her spot, so he could look down and see her. It would be night again, or perhaps another morning—he had not done the calculations—but she would be alone, and she had no weapon, and she dared not leave that place because she knew he would be coming for her. What of the great cats? What of the other dangers that might lurk there?

  He set up the pathway, using the records of his translocation with Ainkia. Then he went back to the bedroom. He parted the lids of one of his father's eyes with his fingers. The eyeball stared beyond his face. Tomeer let the lids come together again, like hands closing in prayer, and walked the halls. As the hours passed, the station moved closer to its goal, and finally the coast of Africa floated below the Inward Watcher, slowly, so slowly, the line that marked the sun's light pearling over it.

  They were close now. He zoomed the view down, down, down, moved the lens this way, that way. Trees, a rocky outcropping—was he in the wrong place?—no, there was the sloping plain flowing away from the forest, and Ainkia.

  Tomeer gasped.

  She had the digging tool in both hands and swung it to and fro, trying to keep the animals around her away from her, and from her father's body. A small dirt pile nearby showed the progress she had made in digging.

  Tomeer recognized the animals. He had seen them eat both other living creatures and carrion. They moved with a strange, hump-backed gait in shifting groups.

  He struck his head with his fist in agony. He could not leave his father. And she could not reach safety—he had not placed a marker on her or her father's body, so the translocators could not find them to lift them away.