by Tim Pratt
“I will help you.”
There was a long pause. “What, just like that? If you try to trick me, it won’t go well for you.”
“I come from a place where terrible creatures of great power made me do whatever they wished upon threat of torture and death. I have been in this situation before. I survived it. I wish to survive this, too.”
“That’s very… pragmatic. I’d assumed that anyone who spent so much time with our Zaxony must be just as much a hopeless dreamer as he is himself.”
“I do not dream much,” I said. “I adapt. Zax is gone. You are here. I deal with what is before me, in its proper season.”
“You don’t want revenge?”
“You did not kill Zax. You sent him out into the orchard of worlds, where he has been for a long time. There is no need for revenge.” There was a large and pressing need for revenge.
“I separated you, though, and took you from your friend. Surely you hate me for that?”
“I hate you for many reasons and causes, and that is one of the newest ones, yes. But I would hate to die even more, and I would hate also to be stranded here in the sky above the sky. This is not the place for a person like me.” I was being honest, but also not completely honest. I had to tell him the things that would get me out of this room, for the first thing, and then, I would do the next things. You must till the ground before you can plant.
“Hmm,” the Lector said. “Very well. I will remain on my guard, but if you really are as practical as you claim, this could work. You know I’m your only hope to touch dirt again. If you serve me well, I’ll give you some of my traveling serum, and you won’t have to live out your days in this metal canister whirling in circles around a cinder. Come to my lab.”
The hatch opened. I pulled myself through the passageway and floated down corridors. Little lights turned on and off on the walls to guide me and I followed them. I could smell organic compounds, ashes and soot from things flashed into carbon. There had once been a lot more life here, and it had been burned away, and I mourned for it. Any life at all in a place like this was precious.
When I entered the lab, the Lector floated by a table with his back to me. I knew this was a test. I had been tested in such ways before on the Farm. You might find an unattended radish, seemingly missed by the machines, but if you snatched it up to take home to add to your stores, you would be caught and punished. I knew that even though the Lector did not seem to be watching he must be watching. I still might have taken the opportunity to crash and tumble and hurt him, because I am faster than people think or know, but I did not do that, because I did not wish to be here in this dead place above that dead planet with only his dead body for company when there might be other ways.
“I am here,” I said.
“Marvelous.” He didn’t look up from the station where he worked. His feet were hooked into little loops on the floor to keep him steady and his tools had sticky stuff or magnets or some suchment to keep them in place. “Come look at this.”
I pushed myself over and hooked my feet into the loops near his. Being near him was like being near a tree full of boring beetles and rot and woodlice and fungal slime. He tilted himself to the side so I could see the thing squirming in a covered dish. It was the size of a peach pit and just as wrinkly, but with little tendrils waving from it in all directions. “Do you know what that is?”
I shook my head.
“I took a little cutting of my friend Polly, several worlds ago. She told me that her people can be regenerated from even a small piece, which is why their enemies tended to attack them with fire, to eradicate every trace of their bodies. That regeneration takes a long time, though – years for them to come back whole, if they’ve been reduced to something this small. Only I was thinking, those vines you left to trap us, the ones that grew so ferociously quickly… perhaps that same rapid growth could be used to bring Polly back to life faster?”
“Polly wants to kill all things,” I said. “She is not a good thing to bring back to life, fast or slow.”
“Ah, but there may be times when someone who wants to kill all things is useful to me, and there will certainly be times when someone capable of infiltration at a high level will enable me to bring a world under my control. I need Polly. You’re going to help me get her back. That’s your project, Minna, the way you’ll buy your way off this station: transforming this squirming ball of vegetation into my lieutenant again. You’re to take copious notes, so I can learn from your techniques.”
“I do not know ways of writing.” This was not true, but it was plausible.
“Mmm, yes, of course, you were an illiterate farmhand. Fine, the cameras will record your actions well enough, and you can simply answer any questions I have.”
I looked around. “I will need supplies.”
He waved a hand. “Take whatever you need. I’ll be busy multiplying my supply of Zaxony’s blood and pursuing my own studies. Where’s that talking ring? I want to take a look at it, too.”
“Zax took it from me so I think it must be with him.”
The Lector ground his teeth. “If you’re lying…”
“You have said what would happen if I did so I do not.”
“Fine. Without the ring to study, I’ll just focus on you that much more quickly. I’m going to take samples of your biological material soon. I’m sure you’re full of wonders.”
I did not answer, just began to gather the things I would need to do what he required me to do.
“Oh, and Minna, if you cause me the slightest inconvenience, or I sense that you’re failing to work to the very limits of your ability, I will vivisect you, and enjoy the process. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
That was how my servitude to the Lector began.
Cuttings • The Polyp • A Garden of a Million Flowers • Slaps, and Hits, and Kicks • A Resurrection • Alone in the Dark
I (Minna) set up a work space in another part of the station, one that did not have windows looking down on the burning world spinning below us. In my lab I had large glass boxes with manipulator arms inside that could be controlled from outside, and ports to introduce different substances to the interior, and I realized that the people on this station had been engaged in work not so different from mine: examining and experimenting and altering life. There were ample tools to do the terrible work I was forced to do.
Tending the Polly-polyp took most of my attention. I had to first understand her nature before I could hope to change it, and that first week I took tiny cuttings and examined them, combined them, studied them, even tasted them. There were many characteristics possessed by the life form that were interesting from a grafting perspective. I realized that I could subdivide the polyp and grow many versions of Polly and I did not mention that to the Lector because more than one Polly would be a terrible thing.
When not working I would try to find places to sit alone or eat or sleep, but the Lector watched me always, and his voice would come over the speakers and ask me questions about my world and about biological science. Even though he had called me a “biotech lab with feet,” he seemed to think that I had done my work on the Farm in a laboratory or workshop, and I did not explain to him that like all grafters, my body is my workshop. If I have access to the right materials, I can make anything I need with nothing but myself.
He called me into his lab often and strapped me onto a table and took biopsies. I made it seem as if this frightened and hurt me because looking weak and stupid was the best way to get what I needed to get for my own plans. He did not warn me about where he was going to plunge his collection tool but I was still fast enough at shifting my body to make sure he took out only the most prosaic pieces of flesh and blood and meat. He got nothing of value from me and I could tell he was frustrated and it made me glad.
After ten days the Polly-polyp was the size of a watermelon and the Lector hit me for the first time. He struck me across the face with the back of his hand and sent
me spinning across the station – he had anchored his feet in preparation for the blow so he did not spin away. “Too slow,” he said. “I am ahead of schedule, and you should be, too.”
I rubbed my face, though I had turned off the pain receptors before he struck me. I spat out a tooth – that brought bad memories – and began growing a new one. He snatched the tooth out of the air and grinned. “I’d been meaning to extract one of these. I bet there’s interesting genetic material in the dental pulp.”
There was not, but I did not say so.
“How long until Polly-Two can walk under her own power?”
I considered. “Twice the time I have had her, but even then she will be like a child, all totter and not coordinated.”
“Hmm. All right. Get to work.” He left, my tooth clutched in his fist.
He was angry that the tooth was an empty stone, and he hit me. He hit me most days after that. I considered poisoning him often then, but I had not yet gotten all the things I needed, so I did not. I know now it would have been better if I had.
In another six days, I opened the case and let the Polyp (which I was thinking of more and more like a name instead of a description) out. She looked like a mandrake root or a doll shaped of clay, with just a blob of head and squirmy arms and legs. Eyes opened in unusual places, and breathing slits, and mouths. Once there were mouths though, I could feed her more directly, and she grew faster. I tried to feel the feelings I had felt when I had children of my body, but the Polyp was never part of me, just a thing of hunger and biting and the urge to explore. She handled the microgravity perfectly, darting and spinning and twirling, and after ten days she began to change her shape, extending and elongating arms, making her eyes and nose and mouth appear where they did on me and the Lector. She did not speak in that time, only hissed.
The Polyp was two-thirds my size when she first made herself into a perfect scale model of me. “Hello,” she said. “Hello little Polyp hi, are you hungry, eat your mush and grow and be good this time.”
“That is very good,” I said. “Very good talking.” The Polyp was a pest and a weed and a bug and I wanted to uproot it and pluck it and squish it.
That is not fair, I thought. Be like Zax would be, I thought. Zax would say, the original Polly grew up in a place of war and dark and killing and being killed. She was nasty because she was grown nasty and not because she was born that way. This is a new creature and can be a new person of her own. Maybe, I thought, if I manage to escape as I wish to escape, I can take this Polyp with me to be my companion, and raise her free of the Lector, and she will no longer want to kill all things. Perhaps she can be a friend to us instead of to a monster. For this reason, I told her stories of the Farm, and of my adventures with Zax and Victory-Three, and of how the world is more beautiful when it is a garden of a million flowers all different, instead of a place of ashes all the same. I told her friends are better than servants and helpers are better than breakers and she drank it all in as she grew.
I thought it was strange that the Lector did not mind the way I was educating my Polyp, but he was very busy getting ready to replace all his blood.
One day my Polyp snuggled up against me and said, “Minna, can we leave this place? I want to see the trees and leaves and flowers you told me about. I want to go.”
“You will not always be here. You will someday get to see the sky instead of being in the sky.” I kissed her forehead and it felt a little bit how I felt with my sons, after all, and it made me happy and sad and scared all at once.
“I love you, Minna,” my Polyp said. I tried not to feel my heart swell because of course she loved me, I was one of only two people she had ever met, and the only one who was ever kind, and I was nothing but kind, at first because I hated her and didn’t want that to show, and later because I was fond and hopeful and concocting new plans about her, on top of my other original plans.
Then the Lector came and said, “Oh, pretty Polly, how I missed you. Do you want a little treat?” He held out in his hand a little mushroom cap of a thing.
“Wait, what is that?” I spun my body between them. “Her diet is very controlled to make her grow as you wish her to grow. What is that you want to feed her?”
“Something the original Polly gave me, for just this eventuality,” he said. “Now move out of the way.”
The Polyp would eat anything, so she ate the little thing, and then she changed colors and lost her eyes and curled up into an ellipsoid like a very large potato. “What have you done, is she dying?”
“She’s remembering,” the Lector said. “Polly’s people are capable of encoding their memories and experiences into a form that, when consumed by another, transfers those memories… and the original personality along with it, overwriting the new host’s mind. Goodbye, Minna’s simpering little Polyp. Hello, my razor-sharp Polly.” He chuckled. “That’s why I let you babble on about peace, love, and harmony, thinking you were her mother.”
“Oh.” I cried about the loss of my Polyp, and this time, I was not pretending to be weak and sad. I was truly weak and sad. (I had cuttings of my own of my Polyp of course, taken in secret, and later I grafted that ability to encode memory, without the parasitic mind-erasing parts, thinking that I could show all this to Zax someday, if someday ever came.)
After some hours Polly unfurled and took on her old familiar form, needle teeth and stringy hair and scowl. “I remember you,” she said. “Can I eat her, Lector?”
“Not yet,” the Lector said. “Not as long as she continues to be good. She nursed you back to life, Polly dear. You were terribly hurt on that crystal world–”
“You are not the real Polly,” I interrupted. “We left the real Polly back in a pit on a terrible place where she remains, unless she is dead, and if she is dead, she died alone and hungry.”
The Lector kicked me in the stomach. “I was going to break the reality of her situation to her gently,” he said. “Hold your tongue or I’ll remove it and see if you can grow yourself a new one.”
I gasped and choked, and it was not all just for show. I had been glaring at Polly so hard that the kick surprised me.
“All that doesn’t bother me,” Polly said. “I feel like myself. If there’s some other version of me somewhere, what do I care? That doesn’t have anything to do with me. That’s the problem with you, Minna, one of the million problems with you: you think too much. That’s why you never accomplish anything. Not like what we’re going to accomplish, the Lector and me.”
He reached out and put his hand on top of Polly’s head, and she looked up at him with nasty worship. “Now that I have you back, Polly, we can move on. I rebuilt my traveling case, and extracted all the other useful innovations available in this place.”
“Can I kill her?” Polly’s fingers stretched into pointed spikes.
“Do you remember the talk we had, Polly, about how death is an end to suffering?”
The spikes withdrew. Polly dragged me by my hair and shoved me into one of the glass boxes, sealing me inside. It was not quite big enough for me, and so I was curled and confined. I watched as Polly and the Lector gathered their supplies. He took every vial of Zax’s blood and every bit of the traveling serum he’d made. “You are supposed to leave a dose for me,” I said. “I was good and helpful and I am not to be left here in this terrible place alone.”
“Didn’t you hear the bit about suffering?” Polly said. “We’re letting you live just so we can leave you here. There’s plenty of food, and you can eat the sunlight, anyway, right? You could last here for a long, long time.” She drifted over and manipulated the controls on my glass box, poking me with the implements in a way that would have been painful if I had allowed myself to feel the pain. “The Lector didn’t explain the memory and personality transfer exactly right, Minna,” she told me. “It lets the old personality take control, sure, but it doesn’t erase the original one. That old consciousness is still there, underneath. I can still remember first opening my eyes, h
ow your face was the first thing this body ever saw, how you went from calling me ‘polyp’ in disgust to ‘my Polyp,’ all sweet. Do you want to know something, Minna?” She squashed her face up against the glass, getting as close as she could. “The Polyp never loved you or cared about you. The Polyp was just tricking you, and hoping you’d relax enough that she could eat you in your sleep.” Polly gnashed her mouthful of needles, getting spit all over the glass. “You were so stupid you believed it.”
“You are lying.” I did not know if she was lying. I had thought perhaps I might try to grow a new Polyp from the cuttings I had taken, if things worked out, but I knew then that I never would, because I would be too afraid. Truth or not truth, Polly had poisoned the soil in my heart.
“Why would I lie, when the truth hurts so much more?”
“Come now, Polly,” the Lector said. “A certain amount of gloating is enjoyable, and I don’t begrudge you, but we have worlds to win.” He took Polly in his arms and fed her a sedative. He took a sedative himself, and without even glancing at me in my glass cage, he closed his eyes, and they vanished.
Minna Alone • Grafting • A Spy • Treasures in the Ice • The Moveable Empire • He Brings the War
Then I (Minna) was the most alone I have ever been, the only living thing bigger than bacteria on a space station above a dead world. I made little tendrils from my fingertips to stretch through the cracks in the glass box and opened the door from the outside. Then I came tumbling out and tried to push away the panic, because I do not do well in places where there is no life. In places like that I feel like there is no air even when there is plenty of air. I no longer fall apart and cry like I did the first time I woke in a place with no trees, but it is not because I do not feel like falling apart and crying, it is because I have adapted as best I can.
