Heirs of Earth

by Sean Williams

  Sol shook her head. “I don’t know what that was.”

  “Do you think it means it worked, though?” asked Samson.

  “Already?” asked Inari in amazement.

  Sol shrugged, her attention returning to the screens. The Starfish fleet seemed to have been seized by a sudden rush of activity. Everything had begun to move simultaneously, as if at the bidding of some ftl signal.

  Energies whipped; strange shapes stirred. Sol sensed an increased blurring of the stars, as though space itself had become agitated. Alien vessels darted from quarter to quarter; many vanished and didn’t reappear, while others emerged from nowhere—although whether they were emerging from camouflage or unspace was impossible to tell.

  Another flash made her wince, but this time it came from outside the hole ship. The Source was flaring. Tremendous ribbons of energy detached from the equatorial ring and spun off into the vacuum, where they scintillated into nothing. The glowing streaks could have been weapons, vessels, bizarre forms of communication, even living beings. Sol felt like a savage trying to understand a jet airliner as it flew overhead, craning openmouthed at something utterly beyond her comprehension.

  “Something’s coming our way,” said Axford, pointing at a blip on one of the screens that was arcing to meet them.

  “We are receiving a hail from an outside source,” said Eledone.

  There were a few seconds of silence as Sol waited for a response, until she realized that this response needed to come from her. I’m in charge again, she thought wearily. Fuck it.

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” she said finally.

  A smooth, genderless voice spoke dispassionately in English: “Do not be alarmed.”

  Everyone in the cockpit looked at one another and frowned.

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes, Caryl,” Eledone replied.

  “Can we get a visual on that blip?” she said, alarmed despite the advice.

  A shaky blur appeared on another screen. What it showed looked like a ring seen hole-on, with a perfectly geometric web stretched across it. The strands were fuzzy-looking, but she couldn’t tell if that was an artifact of the long distance or representative of the object’s actual appearance. There were no signs of drive emissions or space-time wake.

  “The rate of acceleration is increasing,” said the hole ship. The image didn’t become any clearer as the object drew closer. “Estimated time of arrival is twenty seconds.”

  “How much is it going to miss us by?” asked Sol.

  “It’s not going to miss us at all,” replied the AI.

  “Don’t be alarmed, my ass,” she muttered irritably. “Eledone, try hailing them in return. Ask them what the hell they’re doing!”

  “There is no response, Caryl,” said Eledone. “Five seconds. Four—”

  The web in the middle began to glow a dull yellow when it was two seconds away. Sol sped her processors up to their maximum rate and watched in horrified amazement as the craft powered in to intercept them. Only at the last moment did she revise her impression of it from a web to a net.

  With barely a jolt, they were scooped up by the thing and propelled on their way at a rate of acceleration that she had hitherto thought impossible.

  I guess the waiting has ended, she thought, watching the blurring screens with more than a little trepidation.

  2.3.0

  UEH/ELLIL

  Someone was shaking him.

  “Ueh?”

  “Conjugator Ueh/Ellil?”

  “Is he dead?”

  Ueh wished the people around him would just go away and leave him alone. He was tired and in pain; he didn’t need this right now. But it was obvious that the clamor of voices wasn’t about to let up. He forced himself to move in an attempt to respond to them. It was difficult. The barest effort of raising his head was almost too much for him. His limbs felt distant, as if belonging to someone else. Nevertheless, his efforts were clearly noticed by those gathered around him.

  “He moves!” he heard one say.

  “Thank the Ambivalence!”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I am—” Both his windpipes were raw. He pushed probing hands away and blinked at the bright lights. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” he lied. The truth would only cause them more concern. He must have collapsed onto his side in his alcove and, judging by the way his limbs felt, lain there for some time. His skin felt inflamed from the slow soughing of dead pigment scales as he slept. His face felt rubbery, and his insides—

  He clutched at the massive wound that the Praxis’s remade reproductive organ had left in him. It was still incredibly tender but thoroughly sealed. He mentally probed at his abdominal cavities. They were thin-walled and wasted like the rest of him.

  Atonement was still inside him, quiescent but very much alive. It was perceptibly larger and seemed to be spreading. He sensed tendrils reaching up his spinal passage and down his thighs. They were stiff, like scars, only inside his body. What they were doing, he had no way of knowing.

  With the help of those attending him, he managed to get himself up into a more comfortable crouching position. He felt light-headed and strange, as though he had woken from a dream that had been almost—but only almost—identical to reality. The disorientation persisted when he managed to focus on the people crowding into his alcove. One was all smooth angles and subtle shades.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked Yu-qiang.

  “I came to see you,” said the android-embodied engram of Caryl/Hatzis. Her expression was one of concern. “I was worried about you. When you didn’t answer, I called for help.”

  “Why?” Her concern puzzled him. “Didn’t the Praxis talk to you?”

  She nodded. “He told me that you had interceded on our behalf—and for that we are extremely grateful, Ueh.”

  “Have you succeeded in finding the Spinner front?”

  “No, and that is becoming increasingly strange.”

  One of the other figures crowding the entrance to his niche spoke up in fluent Yuhl and edged Yu-qiang aside to tend to the conjugator. The tones of his native language were rich and complex to his ears but entirely too much for him to follow at the moment. He was used to seeing the world in superposition, just as all binocular creatures assembled single three- dimensional models from two flat retinal images. The Yuhl saw the world in every way from dual viewpoints. But he wasn’t Yuhl anymore—not solely Yuhl, anyway. And because of this, he found himself thinking linearly. Seen that way, the world was a disturbing place indeed, full of misleading perspectives and odd associations.

  He let himself be tended to but immediately regretted it. Strong hands eased him gently from the niche, forcing him to stand. Expressions flashed in bull’s-eye circles of surprise at the sight of his wound. Yu-qiang’s eyes, too, widened in shock.

  “What the fuck—?” She rounded angrily on the attendants.

  “I/we were unaware of his condition was not reported,” said one of the attendants in halting English. “I/we have not seen—”

  Yu-qiang turned away, leaned in closer to Ueh. “How did this happen? Who did this to you?”

  “The wound is of no consequence,” he said. “It is superficial.”

  “It looks infected.” She grabbed the attendant who had spoken and pointed. “Is that supposed to be that color?”

  Ueh waved her and the attendants to silence. “There is nothing wrong with me,” he insisted. “Please, I need to rest.”

  “You can’t expect us to leave you like this, Ueh,” said Yu-qiang. “Christ, you could die!”

  It was unlikely he would, but he could appreciate her concerns. The wound did look extremely nasty. Nevertheless, he didn’t have the energy to argue the point; he just wanted to be alone, so he repeated his request with more control, hiding the pain he was feeling behind a mask of calm.

  “I must ask you all to leave me in peace,” he said.

  The attendants had no choice but to obey his wishes, a
nd withdrew reluctantly, bowing in apology and respect as they retreated. Caryl/Hatzis, however, was not bound to obey his order and refused to go. She clearly felt she had a duty of care.

  “No way, Ueh,” she said. “Someone has to keep an eye on you.”

  “Very well,” he said after the attendants had gone. He rubbed his face and felt flakes of white and black shiver to dust under his fingers. “You alone may stay.”

  She helped him back into his alcove, then. “Are you sure you don’t want any treatment?”

  “My body is treating itself.”

  Yu-qiang could accept that, albeit reluctantly. The humans knew about the Yuhl’s extensive history of biomodification. She leaned against a wall, watching as he tried to find a more comfortable position, perching himself on his long-shinned legs. Once such a position would have been the most natural thing in the world to him, but now it just felt awkward.

  She waited him out, watching him with wary, suspicious eyes.

  “I am sorry,” he eventually said, realizing he hadn’t found out why she had come to his niche. “What are you doing here, Caryl/Hatzis?”

  “I came to thank you for talking to the Praxis on our behalf, that’s all.”

  He employed the human headshake to demonstrate that he didn’t believe her. “That is not the only reason. There is something else.”

  She looked like she might deny it for a moment, then capitulated. “Okay, I came because I thought you should know that we’re getting signals from Sagarsee. Not directly, we’re way out of contact now. But there are relays filling in the gaps, keeping us informed of anything they overhear.”

  “And what is it they hear?”

  “There’s activity in pi-1 Ursa Major. Something’s going on there, but we don’t know what yet. There was a transmission from Thor, though; she was trying to talk to the Starfish.” Yu-qiang shrugged. “There’s a chance she might have gotten through to them.”

  His image of her seemed to split in two, then came back together again. “I see,” he said, although he didn’t really. “And this is important?”

  “Is it important?” she echoed, incredulous. “Of course it is! If she managed to get through to them and convinced them to stop wiping out our colonies, then we should be able to go back!”

  “And why would we do that?” he asked, genuinely perplexed. “Why would you want to?”

  “Well, because—” She was clearly confused that she’d been asked the question in the first place. “Well, because it’s home, Ueh.”

  “Your home is gone,” he pointed out. “Earth was destroyed by your own people when—”

  “That’s not the point!” she interrupted. “It’s where we came from. We belong there! Wouldn’t you want to go back to your home if you could—the system where your people were born?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that question. Return to the home worlds? The possibility had never occurred to him before.

  He had been hatched, cocooned, and raised in the Mantissa; he’d never been anywhere else for longer than a partial cycle at a time.

  “The urge to do so is not strong in me,” he said. “In us.”

  “But the Species Dreamers—”

  “The Species Dreamers want a new world, Caryl/Hatzis, they don’t want the old one back.”

  “What about the Praxis?”

  He couldn’t help a flicker of complicated emotion showing on his face. “You would have to ask him what his thoughts were on such matters. It would not be appropriate for me to answer on his behalf.”

  “But would he—?” She hesitated, and Ueh sensed that at last he was getting to the real reason why she had come to see him. “Would he let us return, if we wished to do so?”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that, either. The request certainly sounded reasonable enough: if the Ambivalence could be halted, there was no reason to keep running; the humans could return to the systems they’d once inhabited. But they had cast their lot with the Praxis and the Yuhl/Goel, and their fates were now linked. If the Praxis chose to keep moving, whether the Ambivalence was present or not, he might not pause to let them remain behind. He might not want to lose the hole ships and other resources, especially if the Spinner front would no longer replenish such losses. Never before had the Praxis been faced with such a decision.

  “Again I would suggest you ask him yourself.”

  “I’ve tried,” she said. “But he won’t answer unless I agree to be eaten. This is something my original wouldn’t countenance.”

  “Then I don’t see how I can help you.” He shifted in his alcove restlessly. “I am tired, Caryl/Hatzis. I need to rest.”

  “That’s okay,” she said, offering a faint and disappointed smile. “I don’t mind waiting here with you. We can talk later, perhaps.”

  He frowned. “Why would you do that? There is no need.”

  “I don’t want anything happening to you in my absence,” she said. And although she did her best to avoid looking at it, he knew her concern stemmed from the wound she’d seen running the length of his abdomen.

  He started to protest but then thought better of it. If she wanted to stay, why not let her? He may well need the help later on. He didn’t know what the Praxis’s Atonement was doing to him, after all. It could kill him while he slept. He was sure it was keeping him alive only so long as he was useful. What happened after that period, though, he didn’t dare think.

  Yu-qiang waited as he settled himself down and prepared for sleep, still balanced awkwardly on his feet. He felt her stare upon him, assessing him, monitoring him for any adverse changes. But he didn’t mind. He was tired, and he needed to rest, and the silence that had settled around them in the alcove allowed him to do just that

  * * *

  He dreamed of the Praxis’s mutated reproductive organ. Whatever its original function had been, its purpose was plain. It gutted Ueh with all the precision and brutality of a primitive medical machine. His screams were ignored as tubes, blades, and clamps worked feverishly inside him, reorganizing him, restructuring not just his physical form but his hormonal balance as well, making his interior a suitable environment for the thing he had been chosen to carry.

  When the time came for it to be inserted, he was almost beyond noticing. He had vague memories of curved, slender arms emerging from the chamber walls, bearing something smooth and white in their embrace. Bean-shaped and half as large as Ueh’s head, it slotted neatly into the new place inside him. He remembered the soundless slicing and cauterizing as the reproductive organ worked to seal him up with the thing inside him. Weak, deep in shock, he had been expelled from the chamber, sliding down a chute slick with gore to a ramp deep in the heart of the Mantissa A. From there he made his own way back to his private niche.

  Ueh had never been part of a breeding trio. He knew how they worked, though. All Yuhl carried sperm and eggs, and all had wombs. When the time came to reproduce, sperm from one combined with the egg of another in the womb of a third. In order that the fertilized egg could be carried to term, the immune system of the bearer had to be suppressed by the donating parents. The process was invasive and painful, involving secretions from thorny organs under the wing sheaths. One donor held down the bearer while he was impaled by the other donor, then the donors swapped roles. Usually, afterward, the bearer was more often than not insensate, drugged by powerful hormones, his entire body ravaged by the demands of reliable procreation.

  Fortunately, pregnancy rarely lasted longer than a human month, during which time the bearer hovered in an almost comatose state. The donor parents worked in shifts around the clock to tend to the bearer’s every need and to maintain the hormone imbalance permitting the unchecked growth of the fertilized egg. Birth involved a relatively uncomplicated removal procedure, followed by the usual cycles of nonconscious larval growth and pupa. An emergent Yuhl adult had no memories of his birth yet maintained close contact with all three parents throughout his early life.

  Ueh knew that humans did i
t differently, and while their method seemed strange to him, he could accept it. Every sexual species he had encountered through his long life had had some element of parasitism in its mating procedures. From the outside, what looked normal could seem utterly shocking. But he had never encountered a successful, intelligent life-form that reproduced without regard for the one carrying its children. He suspected that there was a natural law preventing such amoral species from acquiring the cooperation necessary for true civilization.

  What the Praxis had done to him, then, wasn’t likely to be reproduction. The Praxis had told Ueh that he might well die from the procedure he had agreed to endure, but he hadn’t said anything about being the host for a malignant fetus. Nevertheless, Ueh still had his doubts. They manifested in the form of nightmares involving him giving birth in a violent and bloody fashion as humans did. And when there weren’t the dreams, there was always the Praxis whispering to him in his sleep.

  He wondered how it must feel to be the sole representative of one’s kind left in the known universe. Did the Praxis feel lonely, vulnerable, guilty? What, exactly, could the Praxis possibly have to atone for?

  When he woke—gently this time, to no harsh surprises—Yu-qiang was still there, watching him patiently via the alcove’s reduced light.

  “Sleep well?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, recognizing the question for what it was: a meaningless pleasantry.

  “Where are we?” he asked instead. “Have we moved?”

  “We’re in a system called Hipp66486,” she said. “K-type star—the sort you lot like—with a few planets. There are some G-types not far away that look almost homey.”

  “What sort of planets?” he asked, feeling curiosity regarding the outside world for the first time in cycles.

  “Two gas giants out deep, three regular balls close in. None inhabited.”

  “Habitable, though?”

  She shook her head. “One primordial, one freeze-dried, one rocky lump.”

  He shifted position in a disturbingly humanlike shrug. Atonement was everywhere inside him now. He could feel its tendrils in every part of his body, spreading and curling like roots, turning back only where they encountered skin.