Alien Child

by Pamela Sargent

  “Kwalung Chun,” she read aloud. “Ferdinand Ibarra.” The tilted eyes of Kwalung and the brown ones of Ibarra gazed into the distance. What had happened to them? What had happened to the others who had worked here with them?

  They had founded the Institute. Others had labored here with them, had preserved embryos of their kind for some purpose. They had studied the workings of bodies, seeking ways to strengthen and heal them. They had wanted to prolong life and to bring new life into the world. Was that the work of cruel people?

  She walked on. Beyond the transparent doors, the sky was lightening. A flat surface stretched toward the dark mass of the forest that surrounded the Institute. She imagined a ship landing there and her own people stepping from it. Sven might be mistaken in saying that no one would return for them; perhaps he didn’t know as much as he claimed.

  If she could not reach out to Sven, she might be unable to reach out to others. Her people might not want her then. Sven was like her; she should be able to sympathize with him. If she had found out about him first, would she have approached him easily, or would she have been wary? If she had asked him to come here, would she have disappointed him somehow? He had believed himself to be alone here with their guardians; maybe he saw her as an intruder. Perhaps dreams about encounters with their people, thoughts of smiling faces, welcoming arms, and an instant empathy and joy, had not prepared either of them for an actual meeting.

  She would have to go to Sven or retreat to the east wing for good. She could not let their meeting end this way.

  She walked back to the lifts. One door opened as her authorization was scanned; she stepped inside uncertainly. The door slid shut; she waited.

  “To which floor do you wish to go?” a voice asked.

  “Fifteen.” She felt a brief moment of heaviness, then nothing, and wondered if the lift was moving. It might break down and trap her between floors; her mouth grew dry at the thought. Her life depended on the Institute’s artificial intelligence and the technology that served it, and the mind had begun to fail before. Someday the lights might not shine so readily; the cafeteria’s slots might not be filled with food by the synthesizer. She might have to leave the Institute then, and she had no idea of how to survive. Even Llipel and her ship might be of little help to her. That was another reason to reach out to the boy; she and Sven might have to depend on each other someday.

  The door opened. The lobby had disappeared; she gazed into a large room that seemed to be another cafeteria. A red carpet covered the floor; the glass- topped tables had silvery metal legs, while the chairs were covered with red cushioning. Slots lined the wall to her left.

  Sven was sitting at a table near the room’s wide windows. He lifted his head as she approached. “I didn’t think you’d follow me,” he said.

  “The lift scared me a little,” she admitted.

  “There’s a stairway, you know.” He looked away. “I was going to come down to the lobby, and then I was afraid you might have left.”

  She sat down across from him. “I didn’t mean to say what I did.”

  He kept his eyes lowered, refusing to look at her. “When I saw you,” he said, “all these feelings came to me. I was glad, but I was afraid, too. I thought—” He raised his head. “I wanted to say everything to you I could, all at once, and then I was afraid to say anything at all.”

  “I felt the same way.” She leaned back in her chair. “What I don’t understand is why Llipel and Llare didn’t tell us about each other.”

  Sven rubbed at the tabletop with one finger. “They don’t think the way we do. I notice that more now. You’d think they’d seem more familiar, but Llare seems stranger instead. They came here from somewhere else, they can’t eat our food, they don’t look like us, and they don’t see things the way we do.”

  “They might have thought it wasn’t a time for us to be together,” she said, “but they still could have told us. We could have spoken to each other over the screens, even if it wasn’t a time to meet.”

  He frowned. “I’ve been in the library. I know what our people were like. Llare knows—he can’t read, but he could listen and watch some of the visual records. I think he was afraid of what we might do if we met.”

  She thought of the time Beate had explained sex to her and to Llipel. Had their guardians feared that she and Sven might perform such acts, and that a child might result from them? But she could not have had a child before her body began to change, and the implants Beate had mentioned could prevent a pregnancy.

  Sven was a boy; could that get in the way of their becoming friends? She did not see how; surely they could still be companions. Whenever she had imagined meeting those of her own kind, she had seen faces and bodies as varied as the ones the screen showed, but it hadn’t seemed to matter whether they were women or men. They would, after all, be people. Sven was like her; he was probably as puzzled by their kind’s way of showing love as she was.

  Thinking of this was not making her any more comfortable in the boy’s presence. “It sounds strange to hear you call Llare a ‘he,’” she said quickly. “I always thought of Llipel and Llare as females.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because Llipel’s more like the female images than the male ones. Her voice is more like theirs.”

  “I think of Llare as a male,” he said, “but that’s probably because I’m one myself. I used to think that, when I was older, I’d be more like him. I told myself that we were both intelligent beings, so we should think the same way, but—” He was silent for a moment. “He’s always been kind, in his own way. I don’t think his people would have done the things ours did.”

  “Why do you keep saying those things about our kind?”

  He rested his arms on the table. “The library has records about some things our people did. Llare didn’t want me to see them, but he knew about them. I think I know why this Institute was started.”

  “But so do I,” she said. “To do research, to store embryos until—”

  “Why hasn’t anyone come back for them?” he asked.

  “Well, I used to think that they’d gone to another world, but that they were going to come back someday. Then I thought that they might have forgotten about us.” That possibility was disturbing to consider, but less painful than believing that they might remember and did not care.

  Sven shook his head. “They haven’t forgotten, and they won’t come back. I think they’re all dead, that we’re the only ones left.”

  His words shocked her. “But why?”

  “Are you sure you really want to know?”

  “You can tell me,” she forced herself to reply. “We don’t have to have secrets, Sven. It doesn’t have to be like—” Llipel had hidden too much from her; she had to have known about Sven. Now she wondered if she could trust Llipel again.

  “You’d find out, anyway, if you went to the library. But maybe it’ll be easier if I tell you. They had wars, Nita.” His eyes narrowed. “But you don’t know what a war is, do you?” He did not wait for a reply. “It’s when one group of people got together and tried to kill as many of another group as they could. They had lots of ways to do it, ways I don’t really understand, weapons that could destroy every living thing and make it impossible to survive on the land where they were used. Then they’d build other weapons, ones that could protect them against the ones they already had. Even when they weren’t fighting, they seemed to believe that another war would come sooner or later.”

  Her throat tightened; she could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Why would they do such things?”

  “Oh, they had reasons. One group had something another group wanted, or believed something another group didn’t agree with. Or they just hated each other.”

  “But how could they treat their own kind that way?”

  “They did,” Sven replied. “They’d fight, and then they’d stop fighting for a while and make agreements, but those agreements didn’t last. All of them knew that if they co
uldn’t control themselves, they might destroy everything, and sometimes they didn’t use all the weapons they had. They’d hold some back as a threat, hoping they’d never have to do anything with them. But in the end, I think they used them all.”

  She felt stunned, wanting to deny his words. “Look at this place,” she said desperately. “How could people like that have built it and worked here together? The ones who came here must have been able to get along.”

  “Oh, they could be cooperative,” Sven said. “They had to be to work together to make the weapons they did, to get a group together for a war.”

  He turned toward the window; his throat moved as he swallowed. “Llare told me about times for togetherness,” he continued, “and times for separateness. He said he didn’t know why he and Llipel were here, only that they seemed compelled to be. Our kind must have had times for peace and times for war. I don’t suppose they could have helped it any more than Llare can stop being what he is. He knew what our kind was—no wonder he and Llipel didn’t want us to meet. They probably thought our time for fighting would come.”

  It couldn’t be true; she refused to believe it. She thought of the times she had been angry; didn’t they always pass, and wasn’t she able to control them some of the time? Or would the violent feelings overtake her eventually, robbing her of her will?

  “I think I know why those embryos were stored,” Sven said. “Someone must have known that a war that could destroy everything might come, and wanted to be sure some people had a chance to survive. This Institute was made to last for a long time. They probably hoped survivors would come here, find the embryos, and start all over again. But there weren’t any survivors, and no one to come for us except Llare and Llipel. We shouldn’t have been revived at all. Maybe it’s a good thing no one will come for the others.”

  Nita bowed her head, horrified at her people’s deeds. She understood Sven’s moodiness now, and the shame and despair he must have felt when he first learned about what their people had done. She longed to reassure him, but what could she say?

  “Did the library tell you all of this?” she managed to ask.

  “It didn’t say that was why the Institute was built, but I could figure that out from the records, once I knew about wars. The mind doesn’t remember much about the last war, only that it came just before it lost contact with everything outside. Our people had a lot of reasons for their wars, reasons for making them seem necessary. They had fine-sounding reasons for the Institute, too—probably didn’t want to admit the real ones. They were like that—saying things they didn’t mean or that weren’t true, breaking promises, hiding their real feelings with talk.”

  The sky was growing lighter. She stood up and walked unsteadily to the windows. The Institute’s east and west wings stretched toward the windowless expanse that held the cold place; the garden was below. A forest surrounded the structure, which was bordered by a grassy space kept trimmed by the mowers and weeded by the gardeners. A wall surrounded a large courtyard next to the west wing; with its flowers and shrubs, the courtyard was another garden.

  In the moments before dawn, the forest seemed peaceful. The creatures that lived there were free of her kind now.

  She thought then of the first time Dusky had killed a bird in the garden. She had cried even after Ismail explained that cats had such instincts, could not act in any other way; the instincts ran too deep. Her kind had killed other animals for food, but Nita had assumed, from what Ismail told her, that material synthesizers such as the one in the cafeteria had freed them of that need.

  She could understand killing animals for food, cruel as it seemed, if there was no other way to survive. Even Llipel had speculated that her own kind might once have done so and that her sharp claws might be a relic of such a time. But wars could not have had such a purpose. Her people had feared death, yet had risked it to bring death to others.

  She made her way back to the table. “Why did they do it?” she said as she sank into her chair. “Why?”

  “Maybe they couldn’t help themselves. Wars meant a lot to them. They set down a lot of writings about wars. The library doesn’t have many of them, but some of the records listed others. They wrote about courage and bravery and winning and warriors—people who made wars—as if they were wonderful things. Sometimes they set down arguments against wars, but that was probably when it wasn’t their time for fighting.”

  “We mustn’t fight,” she said. “We can think, we can know what fighting brings. We don’t have to be like that.”

  “Maybe we won’t have any choice,” he responded. “That time might come when we’re older.”

  “No. I won’t let it.” She clung to that hope, however futile it was. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gone to the library. If we didn’t know this—”

  “It’s better to know. This way, we’ll know what’s happening to us if that time ever comes, and maybe we can do something about it.”

  “We could stay separated.” She nearly choked on the words. Had she found one of her people only to be separated from him again? “We couldn’t fight, then.”

  Sven raised his head. “I thought of that. I worried about whether I should talk to you at all, but then I convinced myself it was our time to meet. I told myself that you should know what I do, that it wasn’t right to keep it to myself, and that you might discover it for yourself, anyway, later. But now—” He brushed back his hair awkwardly with one hand. “You looked so happy in the lobby when you were saying we’d be friends, before you got angry with me. I wanted to feel the same way, the way I would have felt about meeting you if I hadn’t found out all these things. I don’t want to be like our people were. I keep telling myself that I’m not like them, and then I think of what they did.”

  “I used to think there was something wrong with me,” Nita said. “I thought it was only because I wasn’t more like Llipel. Sven, what can we do?”

  “I don’t know.” His cheeks reddened. “Whatever happens, I’d be sorry if I couldn’t see you again.”

  “So would I.” She reached across the table and took his hand. His fingers were longer, his palm broader, but his was a hand like her own, without fur and claws. Behind his eyes, there was a mind like hers. What their people had done, however horrible, was past; she would do everything in her power to see that their deeds did not touch her and the boy. “We can be friends, at least for now. We can, can’t we? I promise you I’ll be a friend. Please promise me that you won’t be so unhappy, that you’ll be glad we’re together, whatever comes.”

  He did not speak. The sorrowful look that had angered and hurt her before moved her now. She squeezed Sven’s hand; she had thought that touching one of her own kind would not be too different from touching Llipel, but she could feel a warmth rushing through her.

  Sven looked up and smiled. She seemed to feel his smile from the inside as she smiled back.

  He slipped his hand from hers. She wondered if she had been holding it too tightly. She would have to question Beate and Ismail about more of their customs; she did not know how to behave with one of her own kind.

  “I am glad I found out about you, Nita,” he said. “I’m not sorry about that, but you did scare me a little, shouting in the garden and then again in the lobby. I thought maybe it was your time for fighting.”

  She giggled. “It isn’t, really. I shout so much at Llipel sometimes—she’d tell you that it’s just the way I am. Maybe I wouldn’t do it so often if she’d show more of a reaction, but it never seems to affect her that much.”

  “I know what you mean. With Llare, I’d just get quiet and refuse to talk, but he’d decide then that maybe it was a time of silence, or something.”

  “One thing puzzles me,” she said. “I go into the garden a lot, and the west wing has windows facing it. You could have seen me there any number of times and I wouldn’t have known you were there. Why did it take you so long to find out about me?”

  “Llare didn’t let me into the rooms on tha
t side, except for the bathrooms, and later, the library, and they don’t have windows. He wouldn’t authorize me to enter the others, and I had the courtyard when I wanted to go outside. I knew about the garden, but he told me Llipel went there and that it wasn’t a time of togetherness for her.”

  “Then how did you finally find out?”

  “I took Llare’s authorization one night,” Sven said. “I knew more about how the mind functioned by then, so I gave it an order to allow me inside all the west wing’s rooms, even when I wasn’t authorized. Llare never found out, so he never overrode my command. I made sure I didn’t go into those rooms unless he was out by his ship. That’s how I first saw you, in the garden.”

  She was struck by his enterprise, and a little annoyed that she hadn’t thought of taking Llipel’s authorization earlier. She had berated her guardian and begged for more freedom instead of acting for herself.

  “What did you do then?” she asked.

  “I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how you’d react, and there was a chance you knew about me already and just didn’t want to meet me. I took Llare’s authorization three times after that, and sometimes I saw you in the garden when he was out by his ship, but Llipel was usually with you.”

  He had certainly seen her naked; she wore clothes only when the air in the garden was cool. She wondered what Sven looked like without his clothes; she knew his body would be different from hers. It was odd to think of garments as something to hide behind rather than as coverings to protect her from the cold.

  “I had to find out if it was a time for togetherness,” Sven continued. “I almost called out to you once, and then I heard you talking to Llipel in the garden about being alone, wanting a friend like yourself. I knew I’d have to meet you then.”

  Nita realized that she could not predict what the coming days would bring. Sven was something indeterminate, someone whose actions she could not foresee. She trembled slightly, feeling both anticipation and fear.