The Children Star

by Joan Slonczewski

  “Nearly.”

  “You must go for your checkup immediately. Take Qumum and T’kela, too; you’re all overdue.”

  Through the rotating connector, Rod held T’kela tight to convince the infant he was not falling into space. Qumum seemed unconcerned, crowing and solemnly examining his fingers. At the gate they met Khral, bearing Quark’s eyespeaker; the lightcraft had been running an experiment at Station, all the while during his trip to pick up the colonists. No wonder sentients made humans feel inadequate.

  “Look at the babies,” Khral exclaimed. “They’ve grown twice as big.” She gave Rod a quick hug, and her cheek brushed his. “You know, Three Crows is just dying to see them again.”

  “It’s a pleasure.” Rod hoped he did not look as confused as he felt.

  “I’m so sorry about—oh, everything.” Her eyelids fluttered beneath her simian brow. “Pushing you all off your own homestead—how could the Fold allow it?”

  “For better farmland,” he said bitterly. He took a deep breath and tried not to think how her arms had felt around him. “How is your project, Khral? Are the micros still growing?”

  “Which ones?”

  “The ones from Sarai. You mean, you have others?”

  “Oh, there are thousands of strains. Sarai’s strain is a completely new species, unlike those from the singing-tree pods. We even named the strain for her, Sarai phycozoöidensis. That smoothed her feathers a bit. I’m trying to get her up here for a seminar.”

  Rod smiled. “Good luck.”

  “They’re growing, all right. We were making such progress decoding them, until Station pulled me off the project to isolate that spaceship bug, the one Three Crows got sick on.”

  “‘Spacer’s spit-up,’ they call it,” chirped Quark at her shoulder.

  Khral wrinkled her brow at the eyespeaker. “That’s right, rub it in. Anyway—if you’ve got a moment, I’ll show you what we’ve learned so far.”

  They entered the laboratory. An oblong vessel of culture stood on a stand, amid several angular instruments. Khral tapped it gently; it shook like gelatin. “That’s our tumbleround soup in there—the stuff the microzoöids grow in, remember. They’re incredibly active chemically; they put out polymers to gel the whole thing, and excrete all kinds of fibers.”

  Rod’s scalp prickled. “Did you…chop up a tumbleround, or what?”

  “We snipped a bunch of vegetative root-limbs. You know, the ones the tumbleround extends forward and pulls up behind, as it travels. They break naturally anyhow; the tumbleround doesn’t seem to mind. The micros grow well in the stuff, but slowly, by microbial standards—about twenty-four hours to reproduce, a generation time of one day. Anyway, let’s magnify them.”

  She turned to the holostage and dimmed the light. In darkness appeared several blobs of color; Rod counted twelve. Qumum wiggled and stretched to be put down so he could scrabble over to check out something more interesting than his fingers.

  “That’s okay, he can’t hurt anything. Let’s get this in focus.” The colored blobs sharpened into ringlets, of perceptibly different hues. They seemed to be mainly blues and greens, with one yellow-orange. Darker tubes of fibers formed tunnels, connecting among the rings. “I’m going to slow down the time scale of the recording. Watch.”

  Rod stared until the little rings left afterglow in his eyes. Then the rings started pulsing. No longer continuous, their glow winked in and out so fast he could barely see; but soon the recording slowed.

  “You see, it will pulse several times very fast—then stop—then pulse again. Bursts of three, four, five; I’ve recorded up to twenty at a time. It’s their message from the tumbleround.”

  “Their message?” His pulse raced. “How do you know?”

  Khral paused. “I don’t know—because I can’t read it. It could even be they’ve given up their message, and what we’re getting now is random noise.” Her brow creased. “Early on, we got one brief message that was different. I’ll show you, but keep quiet about it.”

  A string of numbers floated through the air: 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…

  “A prime series,” Rod exclaimed.

  “Sh-sh.” Khral looked around furtively for watching snake eggs.

  The primes marched on, up till 103. “So that’s their message.”

  Khral shook her head. “It’s too simple. A string of primes—so what? Since then, all we get is smaller numbers, a lot of ones and twos, occasional sevens and eights.” She shook her head. “Whatever message their masters sent, we lack the key to decode it.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much. How could a microscopic cell ever store a real message?”

  “They’re large cells, about the size of an ameba. Your own body cells each store six billion ‘letters’ of DNA—and that’s just a linear molecule.” Khral turned to the holostage, and it filled with a lattice of molecules. The atoms stacked and connected at right angles in all directions. “Each microzoöid stores a sentient’s worth of molecular connections. The molecules can donate or pick up electrons, acting as AND gates or OR gates. Some are switched on by light. A single microzoöid can pack fifty trillion connections, about the number of synapses in a human brain.”

  A brain’s worth of data in a single cell. Rod felt his hair stand on end. “What about your fieldwork? Have you learned anything more about tumblerounds?”

  Quark said, “We learned why no one else studied them before.”

  Khral half smiled. “Tumblerounds congregate in the singing-tree forest, leaving trails of foul stuff behind—a touch of it got through my skinsuit, and the repairs cost twenty thousand credits. They do contain Sarai’s strain of microzoöids, about a billion each. Not a lot, by microbial standards. You yourself carry ten thousand times that many bacteria.”

  “That’s comforting. Especially if they keep them to themselves.”

  “We did learn one thing. The tumblerounds ‘transmit’ the microzoöids as messages—through the whirrs!”

  “I thought as much.” Rod felt sick. “But messages to whom? How do the tumblerounds do anything? How do they rule the weather?”

  Khral dismissed the holostage; the colored ringlets vanished. Qumum toddled over to see where they went. “The whirrs can carry microzoöids everywhere—even up to the stratosphere. We’ve done some sampling up there. They probably seed the clouds, or they absorb moisture, depending on how their masters want to direct the air mass. Heck, even on Valedon microbes seed most of the rainfall—blindly, of course.” She stepped back to the culture vessel and crossed her arms, staring thoughtfully. “If only I could isolate a pure culture of micros from the whirrs. I’ve tried, but they just die. They must produce some essential pheromone.”

  “Why do you need another culture? You have Sarai’s culture.”

  “Sarai’s culture was not pure. To study a microbe, you need a genetically pure population, grown from a single ancestor. Otherwise, you can have several different species, without realizing it,” Khral explained. “The only culture we can grow is the original one, from Sarai. We can passage that one, taking about a dozen cells at a time, but never a single cell. Perhaps her culture has aged; like clickflies after a few days, their message may have deteriorated by now. If we can’t culture microzoöids directly from the whirrs, how will we ever read their message?”

  “What if those whirrs try to ‘contact’ us—more directly?”

  Khral frowned thoughtfully. “We still haven’t found any micros alive inside a person. But they must be trying. You’d think they’d respond to the—” She shuddered.

  “If they are,” said Quark, “we sure have no evidence.”

  “But I have evidence,” said Rod.

  Khral’s eyes widened, and Quark’s eye trained on him.

  “The tumbleround—it tried to show me something in my head.”

  “Something in your head?” repeated Khral.

  He wished he could explain better. “It showed me a hand…with five fingers.”

  Quark�
��s eyeball rolled around. “A Spirit Caller’s visions don’t count as evidence.”

  “Oh, hush!” Khral gave her shoulder a fierce simian glare. “Have we done much better? Rod—”

  “Excuse me.” Feeling stung, Rod gathered up the toddler from the holostage. “We have to make our appointments at the clinic.”

  “Don’t mind Quark. Station will run nanos through your veins, just in case. You will be at supper, won’t you?”

  At the cafeteria, Khral sat with Qumum bouncing on her lap, enabling Rod to manage his food with one arm while T’kela dozed in the other, her arms sticking up straight as only young infants could manage. The tiny holostage played a skeptical report on Khral’s work, including some rather crude jokes about the habits of tumblerounds. It listed all the previous “hidden master” candidates over the years: megazoöids, helicoids, and Elk’s singing-trees. No wonder all the snake eggs laughed.

  “We’ve just got to break the code.” Khral spooned stirfry from her plate; like Rod, she invariably ended up with the same item of the table’s ten thousand offerings. “We have to convince the Fold the tumblerounds are sentient. I just can’t believe Station made me focus on spacer’s spit-up instead.”

  “Can’t the medics handle that?”

  “The medics gave up. They called in an epidemiologist from Elysium, but it will take him a week to get here. In the meantime, lacking better, it’s up to me.”

  Recalling Mother Artemis’s order to keep his weight up, Rod pressed his thumb to the table and called for a second order of shepherd’s pie. “I guess the sickness might be serious.”

  “Nobody’s been sick more than a few days; even Three Crows thinks it’s ridiculous. It affects only outbound travelers from Prokaryon, about one in ten, at the moment they try to board a starship. You just sweat and upchuck for a few days—sorry, this isn’t talk for suppertime.”

  “No matter.” Rod smiled. “I’ve known worse.” From upset stomachs to shoelaces tied to the table legs, suppertime at the colony could drive adults to the breaking point. Instead here was Khral; he imagined her in his arms again…What harm was there in good food and an attractive companion? “Have you made any progress on it?”

  Khral brightened visibly; any intellectual challenge seemed to turn her on like a switch. “Well, the medics ruled out all known pathogens. So it must be a toxin of some sort, reacting to who knows what. Change of pressure, perhaps?” She pushed the vegetables around in her plate. “And where does the toxin come from? Maybe from ingested micros.”

  Rod’s fork stopped in midair. “But you said they can’t grow in humans.”

  “They can’t grow, but they can pass through your stomach. Whatever food you eat, you ingest millions of microbes. Everybody does.”

  That was all he needed to hear. Brokenhearts were hard enough to swallow.

  “But Prokaryan microbes have no effect; you’re more poisonous to them than they are to you. All that acid in your stomach, and those bile salts in your colon.” Khral shuddered. “Enough to do in most of our own microbes, let alone Prokaryan bugs. Only a few last long enough to secret toxins; or maybe the toxins were there in the food already. Like botulin from Clostridium.”

  “So you think it’s botulism?”

  “Nothing that serious.”

  What if those whirrs had infected him with enough of the tumbleround’s microzoöids to make him hallucinate? “Could insects carry it?”

  “The epidemiology of ‘spacer’s spit-up’ does suggest an insect vector. There’ve really been too many whirrs about; even if they don’t feed on humans, their propellers could spread something. So we changed all the filters in the air system, to keep them out.” Khral gulped a forkful. “It didn’t help any. In fact, the average duration of symptoms increased from two days to five—probably a statistical fluke.”

  “But Khral—what if they’re trying to tell us something?”

  Khral did not look up. On her lap Qumum complained for attention, and she shifted him to her other arm. “I had kind of hoped it might turn out that way. But we’ve found no trace of microzoöids in any patient.” She sighed. “It’s probably for the best. Suppose ‘the masters’ really got fed up and sent us a deadly disease. You know what the Fold would do.”

  Boil off the planet, colonies and all. Every colonist had signed the release; Rod never thought much about it, but now he wondered how little it would take. “It’s always come to that, hasn’t it. Valedon…” Valedon had gone through it, millennia before, the searing of earth and sea, the recolonization. Corn and oak, gulls and skunk; all the living things so dear to his own childhood, lived in place of a lost biosphere. Why skunk? he wondered. Did the old terraformers have their sense of humor—or was it their sense of guilt?

  “Bronze Sky, too,” said Khral. “Centuries later, it’s still cooling down. But my parents came from Urulan to settle there, and I love Bronze Sky as it is now. I live for those speckled hawks, the ones that soar above the geysers.” Khral’s look softened, and for a moment Rod longed to feel her lips on his. Then her eyes widened to stare beyond him. “Is that—”

  He turned to see. Several headless octopods had entered quietly, limb over limb. Among them passed two Elysians, their trains doubled up behind. The banker, Rod recognized, the immaculate blond president of Bank Helicon. And the master of Proteus, Nibur Letheshon.

  The man looked smaller than he seemed on the holo, short of stature, even for an Elysian. He walked slowly, as if in procession, as Elysians generally did, as if to show they had all the time in the universe.

  It occurred to Rod, how little it would take for this small man to breathe his last, and put an end to his schemes. A thumb at the throat would do it. A blow to the temple would do it faster; the twist of a knife, more slowly.

  Rod gripped the table until his knuckles whitened. Then he sank his head in his hands. The colony had nearly lost its home, and what was he doing here? Desiring a woman, and wishing death to a man—how had he come to this? How far could he sink before he lost all sight of the Spirit?

  FOURTEEN

  Nibur kept his promise to Iras, to visit the Sharer lab and show her the high-diversity region of the continent. As his lightcraft from Proteus descended toward Mount Anaeon, nothing could mar his good humor, not even the unfamiliar skinsuit that constrained him. He caressed Banga behind the ears; the immortal retriever, too, was enclosed in a skinsuit, and took to it without biting or scratching.

  The Opening had gone splendidly, with favorable reviews throughout the Fold. Now all across the continent his earthborers were plunging deep into the crust. By the time the last of the humans had cleared out, and the native biota were duly sampled, the real cleansing could begin. Then the land would fill with lucrative lanthanide mines.

  On the slope below, Nibur spotted one of his species samplers. “Bring us over close,” he ordered. The sampler towered above the trees, where it had selected a choice specimen to transplant. Shuddering, the giant structure poured its nanoplast into the ground surrounding the chosen singing-tree. At last it scooped the tree up, roots and all, and hauled it off for transport.

  “Well done,” observed Iras. “Your salvage is most efficient.”

  “Only the best,” he agreed.

  “I trust you’ve sampled all thirty-six varieties? At least twenty specimens of each mating type?”

  “Twenty-five, in case of losses.”

  “Excellent.” Iras resumed murmuring to her internal nanoservos. Now that the Opening was done, her attention had moved on to her latest project, a new jump station for Solaris, the Fold’s most distant world.

  As the slope steepened, other samplers appeared, some with various tire-shaped creatures in nets, others full of helicoids. Only one had stalled in those pesky looproots. Nibur’s own nanoservos kept in touch with his brain, but his main interest now was the esthetic challenge: to immortalize Spirilla as an incarnation of the Proteus.

  They at last touched down on the path, as far as the large tr
ansport craft seemed safe. To the left rose sheer cliffs; to the right, the underbrush cascaded down to an echoing river. Nibur stepped outside, feeling oddly unclothed without his talar and train, but no matter. An insect alighted, but it could not penetrate the skinsuit. Nibur took a deep breath through his mouth plate. Few odors came through for him, but enough penetrated to interest Banga, who scampered ahead, sniffing here, there, and everywhere. The dog acted as if he had never smelled a scent before. There was little to smell within the Proteus.

  With Nibur came Iras, and a dozen specially trained octopods fanning out around them, to prevent accidents. From around the hill echoed the muffled crunching of the samplers.

  Nibur’s critical eye scanned the cliffs, which were bursting with unsightly looproots. Those would need to be tidied up in his virtual vision. Ahead of him stretched a gaping valley between Mount Anaeon and Mount Helicon, an arrangement too shameless for his taste. The mountains would be rearranged so as to appear shyly one by one, for “hide and reveal” experiences. The arching trees, too, would be placed artfully, none too close together, and, of course, none of the cluttered understory. A few hoopsnakes would be put in to drop from trees now and then, keeping visitors off guard.

  “Extraordinary,” exclaimed Iras, craning her neck upward, then down. “The trees—the rushing river—it’s enough to take your breath away.”

  The singing-trees gave way to bushes past their prime of bloom, their browning petals strewn down toward the river. In Nibur’s vision, the flowers would be ever-blooming, with no faded petals. He whispered detailed instructions to his servos recording the scene.

  Around the mountain, the waterfall came into view. Nibur stopped. Despite himself, he was impressed. Kilos upon kilos of water tumbling forever out of the mountains, thrusting their steam back upward toward the snow-covered peaks. This scene would be hard to improve.