One Giant Leap

by Heather Kaczynski

  Instead of words, I felt its intentions, as wholesome and pure and true as if they were my own. Her intent was to help and be helped. She was tired of endless war, of waging it alone and gaining nothing. Tired of hating and being hated.

  Her emotions came across to me in a strange, floating sea, slowly at first: Fear. Curiosity. Anger directed outward, not at me. Distrust of Luka and confusion over his intentions. Hope, and despair. I knew without words that she was revealing herself to me on purpose, and that she read similar emotions in me.

  God-Mother was tired. God-Mother was dying. Too many budding cycles, too far from her home star. She was afraid for her people. Her children, in fact. All the vrag that were left, all the creatures I had seen, had all budded from her considerable body as the tiny firefly polyps had grown into the indescribably bizarre and beautiful creatures that flew through stone trees. I felt and somehow saw without seeing, like my mind flashing on a dozen security screens at once, multiple caverns like the one I had left: room after room of this ship, repurposed, filled to the brim with stone trees and thousands of vrag floating among them. I felt God-Mother’s knowledge and awareness of each one, how she knew the status and location of all her children within range.

  They each were a separate, individual entity, and yet also all part of one whole, and that whole was God-Mother.

  She had carried them, the last of them, across the oceans of stars. But they did not live as long as she. Generations had lived and died in this ship, cycles upon cycles, until even the memory of their home trees and stars had faded, and she was the last one alive who remembered.

  I saw how she stopped telling her children the truth, because it was too sad to teach the young ones again and again what they had lost, what they would never understand and would never achieve again. Her children didn’t live as long as she did. Cycles lived and died, lived and died, and she let history be forgotten.

  She let them live shadowy lives aboard their stolen spacecraft, happy in ignorance, stealing a half life that she alone knew was a sad replica of what had once been and that she knew could not last indefinitely.

  God-Mother’s intentions turned dark, sad; black and gray like smoke. In my mind, memories that were not my own unfolded like opening flowers. A sense of peace came over me, butter yellow tinged with brown. She showed me the planet on which she was born: the home trees that from her small view seemed to pierce the hazy stars, which to her eyes were twinkling stones always out of reach.

  There was light, and wind, and food to be found in plenty in the trunks of the stone trees that the polyps built over their many generations. These trees were bright and colorful, swatches painted like abstract masterpieces, the evidence of many years of the contributions of the pupae.

  God-Mother’s children inhabited the trees around her, living in peace, spending their days searching out the grubs that grew in the thick bark.

  The young polyps, her newly budded children, ate the fungi and deposited layers of energy-laden substrate onto the trees as they grew, strengthening them as the grubs ate them from within. The polyps fed the trees, the grubs ate the trees, the juveniles and adults ate the grubs. It was a circle of life-giving that was in balance, and God-Mother was well and innocent and content with her new family and their place in their world.

  I felt God-Mother’s own body as though I had lived in it, the world awash in the joyful and carefree colors of her budded-off children growing and flying around her, in eyes that could see little but swatches of color. Like a watercolor painting, animated in slow motion. She had no desires but a continual existence. She had no ambitions of conquest. Her children knew only what she told them, and she told them the sun is bright, the trees are full of grubs, be at peace.

  The vrag clung to the trees using their talon-tipped arms, glided from branch to branch with their air valves and long, strong arms. Even though God-Mother was too big and slow and remained suspended in her branches, high in the shelter of the treetops, she—and I—felt the lightness of them all, the low gravity giving little resistance.

  The vrag communicated with each other through light and color on their skin, occasionally connecting specific messages through direct neural links with the trailing ends of neurons that floated like cat’s whiskers, well past their bodies. And when necessary, God-Mother could call them all together, warn them of danger, or pass along commands with her special ability to send shortwave radio signals. She was the transmitter; they were the receivers. When needed, God-Mother could call to the other leaders like herself, such as during breeding cycles. But she never got the chance.

  Each memory was like a snapshot; an image contained with feeling and emotion and understanding. The next came without warning, blending seamlessly and jumping ahead in time. God-Mother was showing me what she wanted me to know.

  The vrag did not have eyes like humans. I saw through her visual memory only smears of the bright colors of her home and her people. So when the Others arrived, I knew them only as she had known them: as upright columns of black, moving over the land in jerky, solid movements, lacking grace. The Others were strange in their lack of color. To God-Mother, who survived by her sense of color, they had no faces and no voices. Emotionless, inscrutable. Terrifying.

  God-Mother tried communicating with them, but their colors did not change. She tried reaching out with her neural tails, but her tails bounced off their rubbery skin and smooth heads.

  In the part of my mind that was still just my own, I had a sinking feeling as I realized what had happened. I had an even darker feeling about what I was about to see.

  The next memories were not images; her world was now ink black. She was in the dark for a very long time. But because she was God-Mother, and all her children had once been a part of her body, she could still sense their energy while they were nearby. She had the many neural sensor cells in her body directed outward, searching, hoping, listening so hard. Some of her children were nearby. She was lost in the dark, and so were they, and they were full of confusion and pain and hurt and hopelessness, and they cried out to her. She tried sending messages of comfort, but received no response.

  God-Mother knew it was the fault of the Others. The Others had done this. They had trapped her and enough of her family that she could feel them around her. She sensed the ones who had escaped capture like missing limbs and mourned for them. They would soon die without her, cut off like severed fingers, unable to function alone.

  The Others kept her cut off, too, lost and blind in the dark. For her, it was complete sensory deprivation. They did not touch her much after the beginning, perhaps sensing her ability to manipulate energy. All she could do for a very long time was listen to the wailing cries of her children, unable to help them.

  Until the cries stopped.

  The silence, she realized, was worse.

  Now she was even more alone.

  Was she the only one left?

  Her body was trying to replace the lost ones. But she repressed the reflex. There should be no young born into this place of death and darkness.

  Until They came back. They gave her light. They gave her food.

  She did not want either, but her body craved both.

  They made her give them more of her children.

  In my mind, in her memories, God-Mother railed and moaned without voice, bright red and fiery purple like lightning, her sorrow and helpless fury so palpable and heartrending that I heard myself cry out. Giving voice to her pain where she could not. Letting her use my mouth. Sharing her pain.

  This memory lasted long. God-Mother did not know how long she was held captive. How many children were taken from her. She stopped hearing their cries; they were taken too far away, out of range. She didn’t know what happened to them.

  Not until much later.

  She was not the only God-Mother of her people. No, of course, there were many. She had come from one herself. But the Mothers rarely ever met. Each family had its own territory. That was best, or else there wer
e fights over the best trees and the most space. There had been wars, occasionally, but she had been young then and her family small.

  God-Mother languished alone, in a place lacking all color. She was desperate for some response from her children.

  She waited and hoped to die.

  All at once, her darkness was split with blinding light. There was chaos—rumblings so loud she could feel them vibrating from one arm, all the way through to the next. Suddenly, color! An explosion of color so loud God-Mother was stunned by it. She almost did not remember how to reflect her own colors. Her body had been sickly beige and lifeless for so long.

  She was freed by children not her own. A fellow God-Mother, one whom she had never met, had not even sensed, had broken her people free. For the first time in so long, God-Mother felt the touch of another of her people, her neurons crackling with the electricity of community, blazing to life again, sharing the story of their liberation.

  For the first time in their communal memory, the Mothers joined forces. They directed their children to fight back.

  God-Mother shared only the vaguest notions of these memories. The fighting. The killing. The endless and growing war. How she had more children—many more—born into death, sent to fight as soon as they grew large enough. She birthed legions.

  They were not a warlike species. Their talons were for gripping, their poison for hunting, their scaly hides tough and specially designed to protect from the intense radiation of their star and thin atmosphere.

  They were, accidentally, the perfect soldiers. They could survive nuclear bombs. Their boneless bodies could fit into spaces no megobari would expect, their skin changing colors to conceal them. The Mothers could bud thousands of children in weeks, their fast life cycles allowing juveniles to mature quickly. They could communicate instantly and silently with their children, their language in radio waves, directing them with machinelike perfection.

  War was against their nature, but God-Mother’s nature had been forever changed. Now she knew hate. Now she wanted revenge.

  Their poison, she quickly learned, killed many megobari. Their bladed arms cut them down with ease. The vrag were ideally suited killing machines, each family a self-regenerating guerrilla unit, acting independently of each other, unpredictable and destructive.

  Sensing the depth of my understanding, God-Mother brought her story to a close. How the megobari home world—where the vrag had been taken en masse for experimentation and harvesting of the parts of their bodies considered valuable—was destroyed in one moment.

  God-Mother had sensed something terrible was going to happen. Both sides had escalated to monstrosity, the megobari striking back hard and fast, her people doing the same, learning quickly, out of necessity, how to turn the megobari’s weapons against them. She got off-world with her kin on a stolen warship, with the aim to escape back to her own world.

  But her own world was no more. And soon, neither was the megobari’s.

  An eye for an eye. A planet for a planet.

  This God-Mother was clever. She knew when to stop fighting and when to run. The other Mothers had tasted blood and wanted more; they could not see beyond their vengeance. They died when the megobari world fell.

  She hid out the aftermath of the war in the shadow of the ruined world of her birth. When she found it safe to venture out, somehow, this God-Mother found herself the last surviving Mother. The scattered vrag that existed in space or on other worlds would wither and die without close and constant contact with their Mother.

  Only her family was left intact, as whole as it would ever be again.

  They were as orphaned as the megobari, refugees. Their stolen starship, all black inside, might as well have been a tomb. It did not speak to them. God-Mother found a way to connect her neural tails to the computer and direct it with her mind.

  God-Mother felt and watched me gasp with curiosity. Yes, she seemed to say with her intentions. Just as you speak with your computer. It is the same.

  This was technology that the megobari had been studying. Stolen from the vrag, forcefully, at the expense of their bodies and lives. They found a way to use it, twist it, for their own aims. But it belonged first to the vrag.

  She found that the megobari had harvested and used their food grub for cheap sources of light, and directed her ship to the outposts of the megobari bases to find food for her people. They farmed the grubs and grew their trees anew in their stolen ship, and it became their entire world.

  God-Mother was releasing me slowly from her memories, easing me back into awareness of my own body, which was now hunched over on the ground. I opened my eyes with some difficulty, taking in the reality of the massive God-Mother hanging in the rafters above and in front of me.

  Luka, as soon as he came back to himself, forcefully pulled away from me and fell to his knees. Head in his hands, fingers scrubbing against his scalp, as though to physically remove all traces of God-Mother from his mind.

  I reached out to touch him and stopped short.

  “You mean us no harm?” I knew she couldn’t hear me. But my voice, my thought, traveled to her through our connection.

  I felt her lack of desire to hurt me. Luka, she was prepared to defend herself against, if necessary. Somehow she knew the reality of who he was.

  As though to refute her intent, I shared a memory of my own: the image of the vrag ship Exodus burning in an alien sky. Luka and I holding each other in grief, helpless and stranded.

  I felt the rise of smug victory in God-Mother before she tamped it down. Yes, I felt her rumble with emphasis. Yes, I did this and it was right.

  I felt her knowledge of Luka, her initial hatred of him, her wanting to kill him, another of the oppressors. She didn’t have eyes to see him, but she knew what he was, recognized the way his electricity echoed like static from his body. But after chasing us across space, she sensed our youth, our fear, and my humanity.

  She was curious about me. She found me particularly susceptible to her external neural sensors. She was able to read me like a book despite the vast distances between our ships. She had never felt the mental presence of another sentient creature who was not one of her children.

  She had wished for this moment, our physical connection, ever since. Just as I had wanted answers, so had she. She longed for answers. Why were the oppressors here at this planet? Why had they communicated with humans, and why did they return to the scene of their crime? And most important: Where were the rest of them?

  Once here, she had found our internet—and thus her answers. All of our cultures, our languages, ready and cataloged for the taking. She’d consumed our cultures in a few short weeks. By now she had been linked to the computer for so long that they were basically symbiotic; her neural network was enmeshed in the computer and she had the ability to learn and retain vast amounts of knowledge near instantly.

  After I’d returned to Earth, God-Mother was easily able to track my movements. I had been traveling along the path she had made for me. All along, it was supposed to lead here, to this, by her design.

  “You’ve brought your war to us,” I told her, voice pleading. “This has nothing to do with my planet. We don’t have the ability to fight back. Please leave us alone.”

  At this, Luka’s head jerked back up. I reached out to him, cautiously. With God-Mother still touching me, I was not sure he wanted my touch.

  But he glanced at my hand, swallowed hard, and took it.

  Her people had been brought into a war not of their making, she told me.

  Luka jerked softly. “Can you understand her?” I asked.

  The light of understanding, of fear, flickered in his expression and then went dark and slack as he began the same sensory overload. Filtered through me, maybe it wasn’t such an onslaught of memory and intention.

  Her answer came in solemn tones: they had not wanted war, either. But war came, and they had to fight back or be destroyed.

  “Please,” I told her again. “Please. Humans have
no other colonies. No other planets in this system are habitable. My people have no ability to survive what you did to the megobari home world. I want to help you end your war against the megobari. Please, let me help you. Have mercy, and spare us.”

  Her response was surprise. What we did? Her emotions were deep navy and violet, like the murky depths of the ocean. No, Human-Cassandra, we did not kill the megobari world. The megobari burned their own world.

  Thirty-One

  NO, I THOUGHT. That’s not true.

  We had turned the tide of the war, God-Mother continued, unabated. Until we overran them on their own planet. Thus, their leaders declared it a lost cause, and instead of deploying their weapon on our world, unleashed it instead upon their own—the only way they saw to kill us all at once.

  I rocked backward at the same time Luka jerked his hand out of mine.

  No. She was lying. What kind of species would do that? Cutting off their nose to spite their face? Destroying an entire planet’s worth of life? Not the reasonable, patient people I’d seen in Luka’s family. So cautious. So diligent.

  Like dawn breaking over a bloody battlefield, I saw the horror of it all clearly.

  “Luka,” I rasped, my voice shredded. “Skyfall. Your people used it on their own planet.”

  I wanted to be wrong. Why would the megobari have done this, knowing they were killing themselves? Who would do that willingly? Burn down their own house just to get rid of their enemy? It was beyond scorched earth, beyond a last resort. It was stupidity.

  It was evil.

  “They must have been truly desperate,” he murmured, still in shock. “Perhaps they didn’t know the extent of the damage they would do.”

  He had a point. Humans had first used the atom bomb in order to end what they thought would be a terrible and bloody war, albeit against civilians. We had been lucky, as a species, to survive the Cold War. Perhaps they had walked a similar path, and their luck edged the other way.