Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  Katie, Ingrid and Roxanna helped, judging that the smaller ones would feel more secure if they felt that the older ones of their own kind approved of what was happening. The line of human children when it snaked out the door was not nearly as sedate or as orderly as the line of the day before had been, but Katie was reasonably happy with it. No child was crying and no one was putting up a fight. The whispers and the giggling were all to the good.

  “Well, they’re gone now,” she said to the other two young women as the door turned into a wall behind the last child. “I suppose it’s reasonable to expect that they’ll be back tomorrow morning at about this time. Healthy and happy, hopefully.”

  “Not that we were in a position to stop their going even if we were afraid for them,” Roxanna muttered. “We can only hope for the best.”

  “It does look to me like all that is the matter with Murra’s boys is that they hadn’t eaten yet,” Ingrid commented, studying the youngsters about them curiously while they devoured their food.

  A few of them were answering questions from Murra between bites, but three of the boys had seated themselves close to the trio of young women, watching them avidly even as they ate. Katie smiled at them and received back answering grins.

  “They were supposed to get translating devices implanted behind an ear, right?” Roxanna asked of Katie. “What sort of a device, I wonder?”

  “It was to go beneath the ear, I believe. It cannot be a large thing, and, heaven knows, I haven’t the slightest idea how it works.”

  One of the three boys watching them got up from his seat, set aside his now-empty food packet, and came up to Katie. He asked in clear English:

  “Do you want to look and touch it? You may if you’d like to.”

  He turned his left ear towards her.

  Swallowing her surprise, Katie stooped down to examine the side of the boy’s face. A bit below the ear, in the groove behind the jawbone there was a small, healing cut. Under the cut was a lump, about the size of a cranberry. She reached out with her forefinger to very gently feel it. It moved in response to her touch.

  “It’s alive,“ she murmured.

  “Yes,” said the boy. “It’s alive.”

  Katie looked at the astonished faces of Ingrid and Roxanna. Roxanna recovered first.

  “Holy shit,” she said with feeling. “And it seems to be working already!”

  She stared at the boy in front of her. “Do you realize that you’re talking our language to us? You’re speaking English, for heavens’ sake!”

  The boy’s face broke into a pleased grin.

  “Yes,” he said. “I know. I am talking with you in your language which you call English—Roxanna!”

  “Oh my God!”

  Katie started laughing. She picked up the small boy into her arms and hugged him, both of them laughing delightedly. Whatever the lump in the boy’s neck was, she was going to be thrilled to get one of her own! It seemed to carry amazing promise within it.

  “Katie, did he finish his meal?” asked Ingrid, ever practical, beside her. “He needs his nourishment.”

  “I did finish my breakfast,” the boy protested, even as Katie set him on the floor.

  He turned to gaze at the blond teenager.

  “You’re Ingrid,“ he said softly. “And you’re beautiful, like a she-God.”

  Ingrid’s jaw dropped. Then she blushed. “Off you go, you little rascal! Flattery will get you nowhere!”

  “Yes, Ingrid. Yes Kati.” With a last glance and a grin he went to join his pals.

  *****

  Later, the three young women debated the pros and cons of this new development. Katie was all for it, since it seemed to offer them some control over their environment. It could not be a bad thing to be able to communicate with their captors, and possibly with those who might be able to help them return home, she insisted. Roxanna was openly skeptical of the possibility that they might go home again, and distrustful of the devices that their captors were implanting into them. Ingrid seemed to have adopted a wait-and-see approach; she did not reiterate Roxanna’s negative points, but neither did she seem as hopeful as Katie was. In fact she said little as the other two argued, and as she earlier had not been shy to state her opinion, Roxanna and Katie noticed her silence. Roxanna had, as a matter of fact, just snappishly reacted to Ingrid’s silence by sniping about blond she-gods, and Ingrid had stuck out her tongue in response, when the little boy, Jore, with whom they had conversed, came up to them.

  He approached Katie.

  “Do you think you could lead a sing-song for us, Kati?” he asked. “Now that we know your language we’d like to learn that song that you always sing at the beginning and end of the sing-alongs.”

  Katie got up immediately. “I sure can,” she said, smiling.

  Within seconds she was surrounded by small, grinning boys. She got them comfortable on the floor before her, and demonstrated, as she had done many times before, how to clap small hands in beat to the singing, and how to snap their fingers in time to the beat. Then she launched into “An Ode to the Mudball”, an environmental song which, with its catchy music and upbeat lyrics, had caught a wave of popularity in her part of the world a few years earlier. Both children and adults seemed to delight in it, and she had incorporated it into the children’s program that she had run at the Resort. On the space ship when she had introduced it into the sing-alongs, she had discovered that it was a favourite for both Ingrid and Roxanna. It had also quickly become the song the human children asked for the most often.

  “I run through an alpine meadow

  A million flowers at my feet,

  I’m sniffing the clear mountain air,

  And oh! It smells so sweet.

  “This is our mudball, our dear mudball,

  Our dear world, our home,

  Ours to care for, and to love and to cherish,

  And ours to roam.

  I promise I’ll try to look after our world,

  And I also do ask of you,

  That you’ll do the same, oh do the same,

  And please love it too.

  Please love it, too, you,

  Please love it too.

  ”I’m sailing across the blue ocean,

  I draw in my lungs the salty breeze,

  I watch the whales and the dolphins

  That play among the waves of the seas.

  Chorus.

  “I ride a camel ‘cross a desert,

  It’s hot, it’s tough, and I’m dry,

  But we reach the oasis by sunset,

  And by night watch the stars in the sky.

  Chorus.

  “I snowshoe across the frozen tundra

  All warm in my parka and boots.

  We get to the edge of the ice-pack,

  It calves bergs with creaks and hoots.

  Chorus.

  “I run along city sidewalks,

  Zipping by the kiosks and the shops,

  So happy I do a little dance

  At all the lights and the stops.

  Chorus.

  “I run through the trees of the forest,

  Amazon’s amazing in the rains,

  As are the north woods of pine and birch,

  And the rolling, grass-covered plains.

  Chorus.”

  The second time Katie sang the song Ingrid and Roxanna joined in. The third time, the boys began to sing as well, tentatively at first, but then with more confidence. The fourth time she got an accompaniment of a full chorus of childish voices, as well as those of the two young women. Only Murra sat silently behind the boys, but he had wide smile on his face.

  “Hey, how about we sing some other songs, too?” Roxanna cried at the end. She grinned impishly. “Like maybe ‘The Itsy Bitsy Spider’?”

  “Sure, why not?” said Katie screwing up her face at Roxanna. And she launched into “Itsy Bitsy Spider”. And after that into “The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly”. And then...well, she knew a lot of songs suitable for chil
dren’s sing-alongs and she taught many of them to Jore and the rest of Murra’s boys that day.

  When the final rendition of “An Ode to the Mudball” had died down, Katie realized that she was exhausted. Entertaining children was fun but it could get draining. She gratefully accepted the bulb of water that Murra proffered her, and sucked the liquid down a dry throat. She closed her eyes to concentrate on receiving the young Adept’s thoughts, glad that their communication happened on a level which did not require her to use her vocal chords.

  “You made a bunch of little ones very happy today,” Murra’s thought came to her.

  But one little boy promptly made a liar out of him. Katie heard a soft sobbing at her thigh and turned her attention away from Murra to a lad about Jake’s size who was looking up at her, his eyes filled with tears.

  “Oh, honey, what’s the matter?” she cried softly, drawing the boy into her arms.

  The boy curled up against her body.

  “That song,” he whispered, “about the Mudball. It made me homesick. I want to go home.”

  Katie winced. Yeah, it was a fun song, but she could well understand how it could make a child homesick, even if that child’s home was not on Earth. Presumably Lume’s world had deserts and oceans, forests and mountains, and icecaps, just as hers did.

  “Oh, my dear little friend,” she whispered, because what was there to say? “If it was in my power to take you home, I would take you home right now. But I’m not in charge here, and any promises I make mean nothing.”

  “I will find a way to get us out of this trap,” she vehemently communicated to Murra once little Lume had settled down and allowed the other children to distract him. “There has got to be a way out, at least, if no road back home.”

  She was suddenly terribly homesick herself. Would she ever see Jake again?

  CHAPTER TWO

  The next “morning” Katie had just arrived from the shower to meet the food cart, when one of the hidden doors burst open and the human children ran helter-skelter into the room, excited to show off their implants.

  Ally reached Katie before the others, and bounced up and down in front of her, thrilled to be the first to display the lump below her ear to the adult woman.

  “This is my node,” she explained proudly, fingering it.

  “It’s a translation node,” clarified the boy who had come to stand beside her. “I’m already picking up Spanish from Juan just by listening to him, and all of us were learning the Ship Captain’s language while he was talking to us.”

  “Jeremy’s learning faster than I am,” Ally conceded, unabashed. “He’s what they call a ‘quick adapter’. Me, I’m a little slower, but that doesn’t matter because I’ll be learning fast too, soon enough.”

  “Did anyone explain to you how the node works?” Katie asked.

  “They said that it’s alive, and as soon as it is in your body it comes awake and starts growing pathways to your nerves and brain.” Jeremy was a bright boy, and clearly he had paid attention to the explanation, and had also understood it. “Once those are in place it works with your brain, adding to the brain’s abilities. And it has lots to add.”

  “And something is supposed to happen to my left thumb,” added Ally, a little tentatively, turning the finger around and around.

  “A connector spot is supposed to grow from the inside on your thumb pad,” Jeremy explained. “I didn’t quite understand what it’ll connect to but I guess my node will help me figure it out once it’s there. It’s supposed to take a few days for it to show up.”

  Jeremy was a veritable well of information, but it seemed that Katie was not to be allowed to pump him further. The ship personnel who had brought the children back were now gesturing to the last four captives, to join them on their way out. Katie directed the human children to take advantage of the food supplies left on the cart, and then followed Ingrid, Roxanna, and Murra, who were already hurrying off.

  As the four of them followed their guides, it became clear to them that the room they had been confined in was only a small portion of a large vehicle. The corridor they were led along was long and seemed very empty after all the time they had spent in their crowded quarters. Katie wondered what was behind the walls of the hallway they were traversing; surely there were other hidden doors along its length, leading into other rooms, filled with—what? Or who?

  If she was serious about getting herself and her companions out of their prison, she was somehow going to have to figure out the answers to questions like that one. At the moment, that appeared a big order, but determined to not feel hopeless, she told herself that, surely, getting a translation node planted into her head would help with the task.

  After what seemed like a lengthy trudge the four were ushered into another room, approximately the size of the one in which they and the children had been kept since their arrival on shipboard. The room appeared to be an infirmary, with low beds arranged throughout one half of the room and what looked like an examination area, complete with five tables and several stools, at the other end. That end of the room was brightly lit whereas the part with the beds had only a few dim lamps; most of its lighting amounted to the spill-off from the other side of the room.

  There were three people in the room when the captives and their escort entered it. The man Katie thought of as the leader was there, rakishly perched on a stool. Beside him, looking ill-at-ease, stood a teenage boy with the same olive skin and wavy black hair as the man had. The two looked a lot alike, but there were also differences. The man’s face had strength in it, including a jutting chin, while the boy’s features looked weak, with a receding chin. The youth’s body, even allowing for lack of development, was frail in comparison to the man.

  “Daddy’s weakling boy,” muttered Roxanna under her breath, just barely loud enough for Katie beside her to hear.

  The third person in the room was also male, but strikingly different in appearance form the other two. He was tall, middle-aged, with a full head of flaming red hair and skin so pale it looked almost unnatural. He was dressed, like all the others apparently belonging to the crew, in a tan-coloured one-piece uniform, but his stance, as he stood beside a tray which had been set on one of the stools, was of one set apart. On the tray were a handful of instruments and two closed boxes; one small, the other considerably larger. This, Katie decided, was the medical man who would be performing the implantation surgeries.

  The two adult men broke off an animated discussion when Katie, Roxanna, Ingrid and Murra came in with their escort. Katie thought that there may have been a serious disagreement happening, assuming that she could judge the facial expressions. The leader’s face looked angry and demanding, while the doctor’s expression belied frustration. Meanwhile, the “weakling boy” merely looked uncomfortable.

  The leader got up from his stool to confront the newcomers. He spoke first to the crew members who had escorted the captives in, sending the two males out of the room. The lone woman he sent to sit at the end of one of the beds near the middle of the room. She looked bored. Her boss, meanwhile switched languages to address Murra. As the man spoke, Katie felt Murra reach for her mind, gently as he always did. She easily slipped into the familiar contact with him.

  “I let him know that you and I can communicate,” Murra informed Katie. “He wants us to do some translating: for me to pass on his words to you, and you then to speak them to your friends as accurately as you can. Do you think that it can be done?”

  Murra sounded doubtful, but suddenly Katie became aware that both her and Murra’s doubts were being erased; erased by a mental aura that had enveloped the two of them—just the two of them.

  “Do it,” someone or something was saying to them. “I will help you. Your talents make it possible. And those idiots can’t confine ME to a box!”

  Katie signalled her agreement to Murra, leaving this new element to be figured out later, and Murra spoke their consent to the leader. He launched into a spiel of what he wanted them to
know about the operations that they would undergo, and Murra passed the information into Katie’s mind. She found that she could speak the corresponding English words to Ingrid and Roxanna fluently.

  “You are going to be equipped with translator nodes which my doctor here is going to surgically attach to your necks, just below your left ears. You have no doubt already observed them in action on the children you are accompanying. However, as all of you are at least somewhat older than those children, we will have to anticipate problems that the little ones did not have. Small children have flexible nervous systems and not yet fully developed brains. The older a person is, the less flexible her nervous system. The brain reaches its full growth usually in the third decade of a person’s life.”

  That was how the words came out of Katie’s mouth; she assumed that they were a translation of what The Ship Captain had said. The process was weird!

  “Each of you can expect some discomfort after the node is implanted into you; how bad you will feel depends on your age and individual factors impossible to gauge beforehand. My guess would be that the boy, being still a preadolescent will have the easiest time. The young girls will likely have a moderate reaction to the nodes, and the grown woman will probably become quite ill. But none of that is for certain. The only thing certain is that my son, Joakim, will have no problems at all, since he is going to have a granda node inserted into his neck, and granda nodes prevent their hosts from suffering implantation sickness.”

  “That’s what he thinks! The arrogant idiot!” That aside came from their helper, whoever or whatever it was.

  “I suggest that each of you uses one of the washrooms which you see the door to, at the side of the room. Then you will give yourselves into the capable hands of Doctor Guzi who will perform the insertions, and afterwards care for you until your health is restored.”

  With an encouraging slap to Joakim’s back, the ship’s boss strode out of the room, leaving the rest of them to get on with it. The mental aura that had surrounded Katie and Murra disappeared.