Alien Earth (40 page)

“
We’re going to have
to depend on ourselves, Raef.”

It was John, come up beside him while he was daydreaming. Connie was still grubbing in the sand and adding to the pile of clams she had, but John, typically, had walked back to see if he were all right. Raef took his eyes from the blue sky, looked into his distorted face: the wide brow, the huge nose and ears. Like creatures out of a fairy tale, magic dwarfs, or gnomes or something.

“I just can’t believe she hasn’t come back. The only thing I can figure is maybe somehow Tug found a way to make her do what he wanted her to do. And he left me, us, here because of what I know about Beasts now … or something like that.”

John was silent for a moment. “I don’t think Tug would …” Then, “Whys don’t matter,” he said philosophically. Raef wondered how much of his story John had believed at all. John had had to accept that Tug had maintained Raef as a stowaway for all of those years; there was no other possible explanation. But Raef had seen the looks John and Connie exchanged whenever he started talking about Evangeline and how smart she really was and how they had talked together. Loony Tunes, the look said, and the first time they had done it, he had felt a flash of hatred for them, for their reminding him of the kids on the bus calling him “retardo” or the classroom teachers who had made “special” a sort of slam whenever they said it.

“Forget it,” he told himself, and to his surprise, he could. Sometimes he felt his mind had been like a jumbled-up library microfiche, full of information teachers had attempted to stuff into it, all sorts of facts he’d never comprehended, but had had to save, just because his mind worked that way. And then Evangeline had come along, and looked through it with him, and put it all in order. She’d organized it and found the connections, had built on the little he did understand to make all his bits of knowledge into a network of understanding.
She’d also banished all the frantic emotions that had tinged all his memories. The anger was still there, but it was in the right places and times. It didn’t spill over and stain everything. He could be irritated with John and Connie, and yet not hate them, not let it ruin the good things he did have with them. “Whys don’t matter,” John had just said, and Raef let the words echo in his mind. The troll was right.

They couldn’t stand around wondering why things had or hadn’t happened. They just had to cope with them.

“Listen,” Raef said abruptly. “Have you given any thought to what I said last night?”

“That we have to move out of the shuttle? Connie and I discussed it. We don’t think we have to face that decision just yet.”

“Oh, come on. The whole place stinks now. If you don’t know what mold and mildew smell like, I do. And there’s something else in there that smells, too, smells really bad to me, like something dead.”

“I think your olfactory sense might be keener than ours.” John reached up to touch his oversize nose, and Raef tried not to laugh. Instead he took a breath and tried reason.

“John, winter’s coming on. You have to be able to feel it in the air. It’s rained every night for the past week. Look around you, look how stuff is changing. I don’t think it’s going to get real cold around here, but I could be wrong. I do think it’s going to get real wet, lots of rain. The middle of winter is no time to be trying to build a shelter after that shuttle turns into a heap of slime around us. We should be starting now. There’s trees, up and down the riverbank. We need a way to cut them and make ourselves some sort of shelter. And I think it might be a good idea if we tried to build up a backlog of food. Not plant food: it looks like winter is going to mean a lot more plant life—there’s new stuff sprouting everywhere. But I think we should make some spears or something and go after fish at least. It can be dried over a fire, and that way …”

Raef let his voice run down. John had started shaking his head as soon as he mentioned cutting trees, and hadn’t stopped. “Now what’s the matter?” he demanded of John.

“Raef, you’re looking at it wrong.”

“What?”

“It’s not your fault. It was how you were brought up. It’s the lesson of the whole evacuation, and that sort of passed you by. We have to live, with this planet, and on it, not in spite of it. Otherwise we’re just starting the whole thing up again.”

“So what do we do? Wait for winter to come and freeze our asses off?”

“No.” John ignored his sarcasm. “We do what you say the animals used to do. We trek south, looking for warmer weather. It’s more harmonious than building a shelter and struggling against the weather. And we’ll get to see more of the world.”

“We can’t. If we leave the shuttle, Evangeline will never be able to find us. We have to stay here, where we can be located. Besides, building a shelter isn’t any different from, say, digging a den, and a lot of animals did that. All this ‘harmonious’ garbage … don’t you get it yet, John? Us cutting trees for a shelter is no damn different from beavers cutting them to build a dam.”

John sidestepped the argument. “Even if we stay here, we won’t be found, Raef. The signal beacon isn’t working anymore,” John pointed out gently.

“That’s just my point. The only way she’s going to find us is by remembering where we were, and …”

John was shaking his head again. “Raef, Raef,” he said softly, sounding almost like a parent. “She’s not coming back. At least, we can’t count on it. Not if she and Tug aren’t, uh, getting along. She probably intends to, but, Raef, she’s only a Beast. You can’t count on her to remember even that she left you, let alone where she left you. And if she did remember and come for us, it might be hundreds of years from now. Besides.” John paused and looked at Raef earnestly. “Would you really want to go with her, if she did come back?”

“Damn.” Suddenly Raef had no more breath. He swayed, almost passing out, and then crossed his arms over his chest and the heaviness that seemed to swell there. The pain seemed almost physical. It was so much like the first time his dad had talked to him about Jeffrey. So understanding at first, he’d been. He’d told Raef all about how Jeffrey was just too different to be his friend. He’d even said it probably wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault, that he was just sick or had some
thing wrong with his glands or something. And that even though Jeffrey acted like Raef’s friend, he was only after One Thing, and that would ruin Raef’s life forever. That he couldn’t count on Jeffrey, fags were just like that. So forget your friend and go on. John sounded just like that, so patient and reasoning. And all the time, both times, Raef knew that no one had heard a thing he had said. John no more believed that Evangeline was smart and cared about him than Raef’s dad had believed that Jeffrey was really his friend. He took a breath, tried one more time.

“Why do you think I won’t want to go with her, when she comes back?”

John looked genuinely perplexed. “Why would you want to? I mean, it’s not as if we ever really belonged inside a Beastship. This planet, this is what it’s all about, Raef. This is the proper place for Humans, maybe the only place in the universe where we truly belong. I think I finally understand that old poem. ‘Here he lies where he longs to be; home is the sailor, home to the sea, and the hunter come home to the hills.’ This is what we were always looking for when we said we wanted the stars, this sense of belonging, of oneness.”

“John, that’s really fucked.” The words came out harsher than Raef meant them to. And the profanity was wasted, because John plainly didn’t understand it. It was hard to breathe, shit, maybe it was physical pain. “It’s so stupid,” Raef managed to say. “If we belong on the earth, we belong in the universe. Just as much as anything does. And that poem … you messed that up, too. It’s about dying. And it’s home from the sea, from the hills … when you’re all done roving … I’m not done.” Heaviness squeezed his chest.

John put a hand on his shoulder, crouched to be on eye level. “Raef, what’s wrong?”

“I hurt.” He had a feeling lying down would only hurt worse, so he curled forward, holding his chest. “I’m sick. Diseased. That’s why they wouldn’t let me off … Evangeline. So long ago. Gonna die from cancer. Or maybe I’m just too old. Chest hurts. Heart attack?”

“Oh.” John looked at Raef as if he had just sprouted an extra head. He patted him, a helpless fluttering of his small hands against Raef’s shoulder. Was there a reluctance to touch him there, or was Raef just imagining it? “Just sit
still,” John told him needlessly. “Uh, try not to, uh, hurt yourself.” He stood up abruptly, and raced off down the beach, calling for Connie. She looked up, and even at this distance, Raef could see the puzzlement in her glance. It took forever for John to reach her, and then Raef watched his hands gesture wildly as he tried to explain. It seemed to take a very long time. Everything was taking a very long time. Why did it matter? He didn’t think they could do anything, anyway. All they would want to do was ask him questions, and talking took so much effort. And even then they didn’t understand. He missed Evangeline with a sudden desperation. She always understood, she listened and he didn’t even have to try to talk. But she’d had to leave him, and now he might die before she ever came back. With a sudden clarity he knew that he loved her, and he’d never even told her that. And now he was going to die, before he ever got to be with her again. The thought was a pain that made his chest squeeze again.

He felt something strike his thigh. He looked down to see his right fist resting on his leg. Very slowly he reached down with his left hand and picked it up. Like picking up a stick of wood. He dropped it again, felt the impact only on his leg. Weird. Someone was turning him off, a bit at a time, like you’d shut down a factory. Odd to think about.

“Raef. Raef, can you hear me?”

Of course he could. John was practically shouting in his face. He looked up slowly, and tried to answer the question. “But it was the only place I ever belonged. Inside her. With her.” Voice dragging like an old tape. He didn’t think they understood him. Didn’t matter. Evangeline understood.

It was the richest
irony Tug had ever encountered. Better than any Human story had ever offered him. He assembled the pieces one more time in his mind. They still fit perfectly. He recited softly to himself. “Those who have not lived here will return for what was left. Its essence will cry out in a voice that cannot be ignored. Riding in the balance between war and omnipotence rests all that they would know. But they must put aside the ways of adults and be again as children if the door is to open to them. They must not speak in the tongues of men nor of angels, for it will not avail them. Re
birth is within for all.” Lousy poetry, but acceptable as a secret message.

It would have made such an elegant mystery novel.
Tug’s Last Case
he might have called it, or
The Adventure of the Alien Linguist
. And it would have been unfolded step by step, leading the reader inexorably deeper into the maze, until he was hopelessly confused, only to be rescued in the last chapter by Tug’s concise analysis of the clues, putting each hint into place until the final, complete picture was revealed.

He imagined himself ensconced in Nero Wolfe’s chair, or in Holmes’s study, tapping tobacco loose from the toe of the Persian slipper and unfolding his proof, as Connie and John and even Raef stood openmouthed in astonishment. A sudden cramp melted his image and he shifted his bulk uncomfortably. The beauty of the painstakingly deduced conclusions crumpled, and he was back in his chamber, in his ruined body, deep inside a Beast that refused to either listen or answer anymore. Isolated. Dying. And his final monumental work, his classic of deduction, would die with him.

The crushing gravity of the Earth and then the increased G’s of Evangeline’s departure had ruptured things inside him. The leakage of fluids was like an insidious cold spreading throughout his body. And his posterior segments were developing the leathery cases that would protect his segments in a dormancy that they would likely never be roused from. The immortality of his fertilized segments carrying on his memories and knowledge was no more than a fantasy now. Even if he could be returned to his homeworld right now, this mangled body would be treated with disdain and ridicule: an encysted one who had lost control of his Beast to a Human, a scholar who’d become the gullible dupe of an inferior race. Worse, one who had left Humans in a position to reach out and be free of their planet-bound status, who had endangered all of Arthroplania. Shame pressed him as heavily as his damaged body. He wouldn’t even live to give warning to his race. He wondered if Evangeline knew the half of what she had done; not just killing him, but what she was racing toward.

It was becoming harder to focus his thoughts. It seemed to him there was a way to buy life for his segments, an equation he could work that would persuade Evangeline to at least return his body segments to his home that they might be sal
vaged. It came to him in glimpsed bits, and he wasn’t sure if any of it would work. But trying it could not harm him now. The whole plan rested on him remaining alive as long as possible. And the factors he could not control appalled him. If Evangeline did not return to Terra for the Humans, or if, as he had predicted, they were all dead, then his plan would have to change. Dealing with the Humans would be simplest, but if they were dead, if Evangeline faced intellectual isolation again, then perhaps she might become reasonable. Perhaps even now. Desperately he locked ganglia with her again.

“Evangeline?” He tried to sound casual. There was no reply. But she might be listening. He gathered his strength. “Listen to me, Evangeline. This is important, to both of us.”

Only silence. Forget pain, he counseled himself. Speak well and persuasively.

“I know a secret, Evangeline. One that would be of great value to all my people. One they would richly reward you for bringing to them. All you would have to do is alter your course. Be gentle with me, and take me home. Return me to them, and all will be forgiven you, and you will be rewarded, and long remembered among them. Would not that be a better fate than to be alone and a pariah to the end of your days?”