Alien Earth (23 page)

Then, from the back of the room, the same voice that had whispered “It died” announced in a quavering voice, “But no matter which planet, Connie didn’t get to grow, both times. Connie died, both times.” And then Sherry burst into tears. Connie remembered how she had cried and cried. Connie had just stood there, like stone, while Sherry cried and Daniel tried to comfort her. Finally they had to call the doctor, and he came and took Sherry away. She never came back. And after that, Daniel never ever made them act things out again.

“But it was too late,” Connie whimpered. She clenched her jaws. No place for Connie to grow. Not on Castor or Pollux. Not on Earth. There would be no place for her on Earth, and she would die, just as all those hundreds of extra seeds died. She shifted restlessly in her Waitsleep womb, and some part of her felt the comfortable give of the warm walls and was consoled by it. Only a dream. Only a dream, she thought
to herself, just as her Adjustment counselor had hypno-suggested. But it wasn’t a dream, it was a memory, and she knew she cheated herself.

“
Evangeline
.”
Tug warned her as soon as their ganglia engaged. “Are you seeking punishment?”

He felt her make the minute course correction, and knew he had not imagined her veering. Now he wondered uneasily if John had been right about a fluctuation in the fuge’s momentum. The nerves that controlled it were Evangeline’s, but centuries ago they had been diverted to her master’s use. Her motile tissues and nerves, biomelded into the gondola, monitored and maintained the life-support systems for the Humans, but Tug was the one who controlled them. Theoretically her training went so deep, she couldn’t activate any system connected to those nerves. Her memories of that part of her body should be suppressed, her control of it atrophied. If it hadn’t, if she was somehow attempting to usurp control of that part of herself again … Tug felt a deep uneasiness that he hastily concealed from her. Evangeline was a mature Beast, but not so old that her reliability should be failing. Usually it was only the very old Beasts that became intractable and had to be relieved of their Arthroplana. Tug was only her fourth owner. She should remain stable for at least another six encystations.

It couldn’t be happening. Still. The regulations were clear, and he should take action. He thought of reporting it, of having her Reach to another Beast and send the coded message for him, the nonsense words that would let the other enBeasted Arthroplana know that she was becoming less obedient and that he might require aid. He thought of it, and dismissed it as useless. Although her Reach might travel at a speed surpassing light, no Beast could. By the time aid could reach them, they’d all be dead anyway.

Besides, he was probably exaggerating it to himself. Dealing with John’s Wakeups always had that affect on him; John was so emotional and dramatic. Evangeline had always been a lively Beast. Wasn’t that why he had been so delighted to be assigned to Evangeline? He’d known she’d had these curious little quirks. Some said it was because she was from among the last feral Beasts ever harvested. Those raised do
mestically were much more tractable. But Tug had always thought it meant she was slightly smarter than the other Beasts. All he was seeing was Evangeline expressing a mild dissatisfaction with their current mission. That was all. He’d have to tell John that their next mission must be more to her liking, something that would give her a little pleasure. Perhaps her mating request had been more important to her than he’d realized. And best to talk to her about it now, so she’d have something to look forward to.

He engaged her more fully, and put sympathy into it. He knew she’d been distressed lately, that things had not pleased her, but soon it would be time for something nicer.

Well, but it wasn’t just Evangeline who didn’t like this. The female Human was restless. She was distressed, too. Would there be something nice for her, too?

Tug could almost not conceal the quiver of dread that went through him. Evangeline should never interrupt, not to change the subject. Nor could he recall her ever taking an interest in the crew. Something was amiss. But showing his upset could not better it. He composed himself.

Did she mean, Connie, the crew? Connie was in Waitsleep, so she couldn’t be upset.

She moved a lot, and made small sounds.

Why, she was probably only dreaming, a sort of amusement Humans did with their minds. Sometimes they might appear to be distressed by it, but it did them no harm. In fact, it was good for them. Not dreaming could cause a great deal more distress over a long period of time. Connie was fine.

Connie feared. Connie was distressed.

No. Only a dream, only a pretense. It couldn’t hurt her.

What was a pretense?

Wrong direction to go in, Tug decided. He evaded it.

Did she rest calmly now? he asked Evangeline.

Only because I calmed her. Tug, what is a pretense?

No avoiding it now. This was bad, worse than he’d worried. A Beast should not insist, a Beast should not take action regarding Humans on her own. He composed himself again.

Pretense is reacting to a not true thing as if it were true. Humans do it. We don’t. So Connie makes small movements and sounds in Waitsleep. But it does her no harm.

A long time while Evangeline digested this. Tug finally ventured a query. Were they still on a true heading for Terra.

Of course. Tug, what is a Wild Beast?

He was a long time evaluating that. Where had she heard that? From him? From a previously encysted Arthroplana? It didn’t seem likely, but she had no other sources.

There is no such thing as a Wild Beast, Evangeline.

A Wild Beast is a pretense?

Combining two separate ideas. It wasn’t supposed to be possible for her to do that. Tug’s recessive mandibles rattled against one another. Handle this.

A Wild Beast is a pretense, Evangeline. There is no such thing. No Beasts are wild. They are all just as you are, and happy and content.

A Wild Beast could do just as it pleased, and be happy.

He could think of no reply. He waited, feeling her become more and more uneasy with his silence. Finally, she ventured another comment.

But it would be, of course, just a pretense.

That’s right, Evangeline. Just a pretense. There are no such things as Wild Beasts. Only happy, partnered Beasts, just like you. Shall I show you a new entertainment?

Not just now. I think you have made an error, Tug. I think we can do this pretense act also. I have a pretense to dream.

She withdrew her ganglia, and Tug watched them go. He crouched, waiting, fearing, but it did not change. She did not veer from the heading. Physically, at least, she still followed the course he had set for her.

“S
O
,” T
UG FINISHED
,
“our point-by-point comparison demonstrates that Nero Wolfe is the intellectual if not the biological descendant of Sherlock Holmes. And there is a very interesting theory about a possible biological link.”

Connie pushed the spanners out of her way and miked her work. Right back to factory specs. She grinned smugly as she pushed the worn out cell-meld bearings down the trap into the solution that would start biodegrading them. “Tug, wait a moment. Aren’t they both just characters in fictional stories?”

“Simplistically speaking.”

“Then how could they be biologically related?”

The shrug was in his tone. “There are many clues that such was the literary intention of Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe. Cleverly hidden, of course. I would love to reveal them all to you, elegantly unfolding my proof, but engaged as you are in menial labor, you could not afford it the undivided attention it deserves. Have you considered mutiny?”

“What?”

“Mutiny. Actually, that is not the correct term to use, but the proper word escapes me just now. We are only six days from orbit. The time to act is now.”

“Oh.” Connie began packing up her tools. Preventing little encounters of this sort had been John’s purpose in ending her solitary Wakeups. But Tug still found times when she was
alone to introduce subjects she would sooner leave alone. Usually he slipped them into the middle of some innocuous discussion or “instruction” that he was presenting to her. Since Tug had awakened her six days ago, he had regaled her with stories and poetry, and insisted on instructing her in the various hidden meanings he had pondered out for them. Connie often suspected that the alien assigned hidden meanings to perfectly straightforward statements, and found arcane connections between pieces of literature that were totally unrelated. But she found his musings as entertaining as they were bewildering. Nothing had prepared her for how much she would enjoy those stories of an earlier world.

They had helped pass the long hours of “menial labor” as Tug referred to it. John seemed to be obsessed with maintenance; not that much on the ship ever needed maintenance. But he seemed to think she should know how to take everything apart and put it back together just in case it ever did. She hadn’t read so many manuals in all her career as she had on her last three Wakeups. Her training classes for Beastship crew had emphasized that the ships were virtually maintenance free other than periodic checking of components to be sure they hadn’t passed their biodegradable life expectancy. There had been one brief course on manual use and maintenance assembly. Even her instructor had regarded it as a nearly obsolete area of competence. As she had recalled, he had prefaced most of the modules with “Now, you’re probably never going to have to use this, but every crew should have some experience in this area.” Well, John had assigned her enough tasks that she now felt she could have instructed the instructor.

But it had not all been mechanic work and tales from Tug. Grueling physical workouts had become part of her daily routine. There had also been hours of runging through parts of the gondola previously unexplored by her. John tacitly encouraged her explorations of the ship. She found a morbid fascination with the sections of the ship that had been designed for her ancestors’ use during the Great Evacuation. When she had asked Tug why they had never been dismantled, he had replied, “Nonrecyclable. No way to break them down, except into smaller pieces of plastic. So they were left as they are, for whatever use might be found for them.” So
Connie had perched in their huge lounges, and fingered the slick plastics of their protective suits that loomed large on their racks, and studied the long disconnected instrumentation that had once served them. Her curiosity about their mission had been whetted. She found she was actually looking forward to her first sight of Terra.

Taken as a whole, the times had been pleasant since John had revised her orders. Save for moments like this, when out of the blue Tug would try to stir something up. Connie suspected Tug had taken her silence about pirating John’s recording as consent to conspiracy. Usually Tug’s remarks were limited to pointing out ways she could legally refuse some order of John’s on a rights technicality.

But the suggestion of mutiny, so calmly made, was a more serious thing. She didn’t answer him as she racked her tools. Instead she made a show of checking the time. “Nearly time to report to John. I’ll finish this up later.” She rolled her shoulders, surprised at how stiff she felt. As she stood, the lights at the far end of the bay dimmed, and then came back.

“Wait a minute on the lights, Tug. I’m not quite out of here yet,” she reminded him.

“Pardon?” he asked, surprise evident in his voice.

“The lights at the other end of the bay. You just dimmed them, and I thought you were getting ready to shut down the ones at this end, too.”

“Wait, please.” There was a momentary pause, then Tug’s voice came back. “Minor misadjustment. My apologies.”

“No problem,” Connie replied, wondering at the preoccupied note in his voice. He was silent as she left the maintenance bay. The light faded and died behind her. Whatever had been out of whack had been corrected. She runged efficiently now, smoothly and effortlessly, and took pleasure in it. There was a lot to be said for John’s tougher physical requirements. Between that and all her recent technical work, she didn’t think she’d ever felt more competent. More in control, she realized. Odd. It did feel good, yet her Adjustment counselor had often told her that her drive to be in control of her life was unhealthy, that it prevented her from accepting her correct place in society. She pushed the thought away.

In the command chamber, all the screens were still dead.
There would be little to do until they were actually entering orbit. Evangeline and Tug knew where they were going and would make sure they got there. Humans were unnecessary for the deep-space portions of a flight. The blank screens were a depressing reminder that her current tasks were little more than busywork to fill the long hours of the necessary Wakeup. On other ships, she would have passed them in socializing, games, entertainments, and sex. She was coming to find she preferred the busywork. Connie ran her fingers over the sensors anyway, lighting displays and calling up readouts just to make the room seem more alive. She studied the absolute predictability of the screens.

John would turn up any second now, looking rumpled and disorganized. He made a point of having her report to him several times a cycle, but she often suspected he saw her routine completion of ordinary tasks and the reporting thereof as mostly a disruption of his own schedule. She wasn’t sure what he was busy with, but it involved a lot of reading that somehow disgruntled Tug. Probably because John had found a way to exclude the Arthroplana from whatever he was screening. From John’s permanently distracted air, she suspected he was on sleep prep, incorporating it into his rest periods during Wakeups. She grimaced at the thought, and stepped to the server to punch up mugs of hot stim. It was only after the machine had chunked out two containers that she wondered at her own motivations. How would John react to her impulse? She considered trying to get rid of one of them, but they were both too hot to drink, and she was too deeply indoctrinated against waste to just dump one.

She could hear him coming, the deep reverberation of Tug’s voice and John’s muttered nastiness like a counterpoint. Tug would have John in a completely foul mood by the time he reached the command chamber. She wished there were some soundless way she could plead with him to leave John alone, to stop the needling. She tried not to tune into their conversation, but John was too close now and Tug’s voice too penetrating as his words kept pace with John through the corridors.

“‘Awake, for morning has tossed a rock into the bowl of night and scared all the stars away. And, look, the Eastern
killer is strangling the Sultan’s tower.’ So, what do you think of my freehand translation?”

“Abysmal. Leave me alone, and stop slaughtering the Rubaiyat.”

“Perhaps something more traditional. ‘A bird with a yellow bill …’ No? Ah, how about this, then, ‘Are you sleeping, are you sleeping, Brother John, Brother John? Morning bells are ringing …’”

“Tug!” Connie interceded, breaking through the boyish tenor he had adopted and backed up with jingling bells. “Tug, please!”

She saw her error in John’s face as he entered the chamber. The brief remark had betrayed how completely her relationship with Tug had changed during this mission. She tried to read John’s expression but couldn’t. His narrowed eyes and pursed mouth could have been betrayal, jealousy, or a bitter amusement at her expense. Maybe it was even a kind of concern, or pity. For a moment she quailed before that look. Then some perverse devil took control of her. Keeping her face carefully neutral, she extended the mug of stim to him, saying only, “Your stim, Captain. Awaiting your commands.”

The jolt of astonishment that briefly widened his eyes was worth the gamble. She kept her bland expression. He took the cup from her by reflex and then looked at it as if it were a foreign object. She turned aside to keep her amusement from showing. “All screens show normal readings, sir,” she managed. The fierceness of her triumph rocked her own perception of herself. Dammit, it was fun to push him off balance.

She darted a glance at him. He had recovered his aplomb and was peeling the lid off the stim. He took a thoughtful sip, and glanced around at the readouts as if he were comparing them to Connie’s report. “How did the tear-down go?” he asked quietly.

“Predictably,” she responded. “Worn bearings. I did a replace and recycle.”

“I see.” John took a lingering sip of the stim.

“I watched,” Tug interjected. “As that whole unit is due to be recycled two Wakeups from now, it seemed like a pointless exercise, just one more way for you to monopolize Connie’s time.”

“Does Connie object?” John asked quietly. Connie could hear a test in his voice, but she wasn’t sure what it was.

“No, sir,” she answered softly. “I’ve never done much work with my hands before, not like this, anyway. When I was growing up, I did a lot of agri work, of course, living in a horticolony, but not like this. I … I think I enjoy it, actually.” Her voice trailed off, and she waited for derision. She wasn’t quite sure where she expected it to come from, and in recognizing that, she put her finger on what so often sent anxiety ghosting through her: no matter what she did or said, she couldn’t please Tug and John at the same time. Anything she did put her at odds with one or the other. She constantly had to choose allegiance, and in the process surrendered any loyalty to herself. She felt a sudden spark of anger at the thought. “I enjoy it,” she said aloud, more firmly, daring either of them to find it amusing.

“I thought you might,” John said quietly. Tug was mercifully silent. John suddenly rubbed his hands briskly over his bared arms. “Tug, are you adjusting temperature in this chamber? And if so, is there a reason?”

“Temperature?” Tug’s voice sounded bland, but Connie suspected something lurked behind his tone.

“Yes, temperature. I’d say this room has been cooling down ever since I entered it.”

“Probably your metabolism changing, John. I’ve not been making any adjustments.”

“Of course not.” John was skeptical. He turned brusque. “Connie, carry on with your assignments. That will be all.”

He turned and ranged out of the chamber awkwardly. He seemed even more stiff and rumpled than usual. Maybe he’d been sitting still, reading, but it seemed more than that. He looked lanky and uncoordinated, all knees and elbows, wrists and ankles and long bony back. For the first time she realized that he habitually hunched his shoulders; if there had been any gravity, he’d stand slouched. And she’d never realized before how bony he was. His jaw seemed too wide for his skull, his chin too pronounced. Yet he looked more muscular than she remembered him. He’d definitely been growing.

Her skin suddenly stood up in bumps. “Tug, it is cooler in here,” she said accusingly.

“A minor misadjustment, perhaps.” He sounded annoyed that she’d mentioned it.

“No problem,” she said again, and hoped it wasn’t. If this was how Tug was going to express his annoyances with John, it definitely could be a problem and an uncomfortable one at that. But a moment later she felt the chamber warming. She started to comment on it, then changed her mind. “Maybe you’d like to show me that comparison now,” she offered mollifyingly to Tug.

“Perhaps later,” Tug replied, surprising her. Then, “You know, Connie, you’ve begun to sound different. More assertive at times, more self-confident. You’re changing.”

“I guess I am. I wasn’t really aware of it.”

“Well, now you are. And so is John. Very aware of it. Of course, he’s going through changes of his own.”

“How do you mean?”

“Don’t you think so? Of course, you don’t know him as well as I do. So perhaps you notice the changes less. They’ve been coming on for some time; started last trip, I’d say. But they’ve been much more rapid and evident during his Wakeups this trip. Of course, the body hair is still very slight. It will become more obvious as it goes on. I find it fascinating, as it’s a phenomenon I’ve never witnessed before. To you, I suppose it’s ordinary and to be expected.”

Connie had felt a gradual sinking within herself, almost as if she were on the fuge and Tug had suddenly set the grav higher. All her observations tumbled into a new and disconcerting form. Puberty. That was the change Tug was talking about. That was why John looked so peculiar. He was going through his growth spurt.

“Connie? You are silent. Is there a problem?”

“It’s just … it can mean so many changes. Uncomfortable changes. And even though I know all about it, it’s never happened to anyone I knew before. I mean, knew personally.”

“Surely your generation has gone through the change by now.”

“Probably. I mean, yes. It’s been so long since I saw any of them. You know the saying, ‘A Mariner has no generation.’ That’s what it means. That we have no peer group, except for other Mariners.”