Alien Earth (41 page)

He had to pause, to gather what remained of his dwindling energy. There was no halting or controlling his body’s physical response to the damage he had sustained. His segments were siphoning off fluids from his failing body, selfishly taking the nutrients they needed for their dormancy in the age-old game of perpetrating the race. It was right, and his only chance for immortality. Except that he needed that last strength if he was to bargain with Evangeline.

“Are you listening?” he asked in desperation, but received no confirmation. “Listen. It’s the only chance for either of us. For my knowledge and memories to be preserved, and for you to survive. It will buy you your life, and fertilization for my segments. My people will forgive you for all you have done. You will not have to live out your years in utter loneliness, totally bereft of the company of your own kind. Evangeline, I am telling you true. If you go back to the Humans, you give up all hope of ever being with other Beasts, of ever mating again. You sacrifice all for them. And what will they give you? What can they give you?”

No reply. The first and largest segment was separating from his body. He felt the reflexive twitching that tore it free, watched in a dull fascination and horror as fluids briefly spurted and then were sealed off. If she would bear it home, if they would fertilize it, they would know all. It wouldn’t have all been in vain. “Evangeline?” He felt another shuddering twitch. He threw all honor and pride aside.

“Please,” he said, begging like a Beast. The words poured from him as swiftly as his pain would allow. “Please. Listen to me. It could be different. I could be different. We could be as pupil and master. There is so much I could teach you. What can Raef tell you about yourself, about your species? I never fully understood what you were capable of. Now that I do, I would teach you. And you could still go among your own kind. We’d be able to pretend, to trick the rest into thinking you hadn’t changed. I’d survive, and be able to give this secret to my people. And you, you’d have …”

His words suddenly ran down as he realized he didn’t really know what she would want. Uninterrupted food and mating, he supposed. What else was there for a Beast? “… whatever you want,” he finished lamely. “Whatever you want.” As if she needed him for that, as if he were really offering her anything.

Her silence was implacable. His second segment was tearing loose. He regarded his newly reduced body in dull resignation. “You condemn yourself, then. Remember that, for all time. You condemned yourself.” The threat sounded feeble, even to himself. He broke the useless ganglial docking, and drew what was left of himself together. Survive, he told himself. Survive, and make your deal with the Humans. Heedless of pain, he dragged himself forward, attached his scolex to the feeding scar. Feed. She couldn’t stop him from feeding. Though he was unsure how well his mangled body would be able to process the nutrients. But even if only a small portion reached his system, it must add to his pitiful supply of strength. So feed and plan. It was all he had left.

He forced his mind to calmness. This was, he told himself, but another kind of deduction. First, could the Humans help him obtain his goal? Evaluating it coldly, it did not seem likely that they could succeed in getting Evangeline to obey
after he had failed. But was it a question of obedience? Perhaps not. If he died, and she did not have Raef, she’d face total isolation. Everyone knew how dependent Beasts were on the stimulus and approval of a Master. Sooner or later, she’d have to seek companionship. Probably among her own kind. And when she did, the Humans could use their radio frequencies to contact the encysted ones on those Beasts, and request rescue. Evangeline could be recaptured, and his segments salvaged. It could work that way.

But would the Humans want to help him? Of course, he told himself. After being stranded in that hellish place, what could they desire more than a return to normalcy, a chance to get back to their own kind. Connie, especially. John might be fearful of punishment. So reassure him there would be no bad consequences. Promise to help him cover up his part in Earth Affirmed’s illicit activities. Promise to help him legitimize his license. Promise them both there would be no Readjustments, no termination. Promise them anything. They were his final remaining hope. He’d have to make them want to try.

Suddenly the effort of feeding seemed to take more energy than he had. He sealed the feeding scar as he lifted his scolex. He tried to consider his plans impartially. They seemed so simplistic; was the pain impairing his reasoning?

He tried to go back over his plans, to find faults in them. What could go wrong? Raef. Raef was what had gone wrong. His freakish ability to communicate with Evangeline had started all this. But with luck, Raef would already be dead, or close to it. If he were still alive, he must be kept from making contact with Evangeline, at all costs.

Another wave of pain washed through him. He doggedly clung to his reasoning, forced the pain aside to resume his logic. Eliminate Raef, if necessary. He could persuade John and Connie to do that. The man was diseased, and whatever he might have told them about Evangeline, Tug could put down to his derangement.

The second segment freed itself and fell clear of him. He watched its idle twitching dispassionately. Continue, he told himself. Continue the logic. But suddenly he was weary. Tired to death, he told himself wryly. Rest now, while he could. Save what strength he could, for he would need every bit of it.

“
Were you ever
in love with a woman?”

“I …” Raef groped for words, realized the hopelessness of trying to explain to John how isolated he had been in a crowded world. “No,” he said at last. “Not really. Are you?” He managed a weak smile in response to the scowl John threw at him. Both of them, hundreds of years old, and sitting around in a dimly lit shuttle, talking about girls and love like a couple of teenagers. Raef suspected that’s what they actually were. Only this teenager had suffered what he guessed was a stroke and had been flat on his back in this lounger for days now.

John had been sitting on the floor beside the lounger. Raef’s tray of mostly refused food was on the floor beside him. John stiffened his shoulders. “You know, there’s nothing funny about any of this. There’s ship’s discipline to consider, and appropriate behavior for a captain …”

“What ship?” Raef asked quietly.

John’s eyes widened. He was silent.

“You see,” Raef said gently. “None of that matters anymore. Neither of you are who you were. It’s like the worst old joke you could imagine. You’re the last man and woman on Earth, and you’re worrying about manners. John, listen to me. I had a friend, once.” Raef paused suddenly. He gave a bitter laugh. “There. That sums up my life before Evangeline. I had
a
friend,
once
.” He shook his head to clear it of old thoughts.

John waited patiently. It still amazed Raef, how John sat and listened to him, as if he had the wisdom of the ages. Hell, maybe I do, he thought to himself, and then shook his head again. It was probably a lot simpler than that. He was older and he was male, and a Human, no matter how different he looked. Maybe that was it; he was Human enough for John to trust he would understand, and alien enough that John didn’t feel he betrayed himself. Maybe it was because he was dying, and all John’s secrets would go with him. It didn’t matter. It was good to be heard.

“Listen. This friend I had, he was a big deal to me, because I’d never had a real friend before. In school, he was a wimp, always getting teased and beat up by other kids. For a long time I ignored it, I mean, he was older, like two grades
ahead of me. But one day, I jumped in and defended him.” Raef laughed softly. “We both got the shit beat out of us. But from then on, we were friends. I had a friend. My dad didn’t like him much, because he was gay. My friend, not my dad.”

“Gay?”

Raef waved it aside with a small motion of his good hand. He was too tired to explain it all. “Uh, different style of living from what my dad approved.” He wasn’t going to try to explain how the sex side of it had never bothered him, how he’d been so much of an outcast that he never really expected to have any kind of sexual relationship with anyone. Too complicated. Too many words, too many deep breaths to push the words out.

“You tired?” John asked, knowing he was. Raef was tired every moment he was awake.

“Naw. It’s just … a long story. Anyway. And then one day he told me he loved me, and I was really shocked. I mean, I wasn’t like that. It made me mad that he would love me. I thought that if he loved me, we couldn’t be friends anymore, and I felt like that was about the worst thing that could happen to me. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that that was why I was mad. So I yelled at him and a bunch of stuff, and he just stood there and took it. And then he told me, he said, ‘Raef, one day when you’re older, you’ll find out that love occurs between Human beings, and it doesn’t much care about the rules. All the stuff you think matters, age and race and sex and good looks and manners and education—all that stuff just stops mattering. And love occurs. When you find out I’m right about that, you come back and tell me how it happened.’ And, well, a few weeks later I found out he was right, just thinking about it, and I went back to tell him. I wanted to tell him it was okay, that I could love him even if I wasn’t gay … wasn’t like him.”

John waited. When Raef didn’t go on, he asked, “And then what happened? That sounds like only half a story.”

Pain, or weariness, narrowed Raef’s eyes for an instant. He shifted in the lounger. “It’s less than half a story, really,” he admitted. “But it’s all you’re going to hear. Maybe it doesn’t even relate, maybe I’m just telling it because I never admitted it to anyone … to any other Human before. I loved him. It’s the stupidest thing in the world to do, to make peo
ple wait around to hear those words. And I’m … I’m just really tired, John.” He closed his eyes.

John sat quietly on the floor until he was sure Raef was sleeping. John moved quietly away from the lounger, then glanced back at the sleeping man. His head lolled nearly off the neck cushion. His feet would have dangled, save that Connie had matter-of-factly destroyed the other lounger to create cushions to support them. He’d lost weight so rapidly, but his boniness only made him look bigger to John. The radio suddenly made him jump by spitting out a crackle of static. Then it was still again. Same old thing it had been doing for a week. John expected it meant it was in its final stages of decomposition.

He moved quietly down the companionway. The door stood ajar to let fresh air into the fetid interior of the shuttle. They’d have to move out soon, had to head south soon, if they were going to try that. But Raef’s partial paralysis was going to make either move difficult. Dammit. Nothing was simple anymore.

Connie was waiting for him at the bottom of the ladder. He paused before climbing down to her, just to look at her. Her back was to him as she stared off over the plain. She looked out at the night as the lizard looked out at the day. Full of stillness, full of awareness. There was no mistaking now that she was changing, in ways the light of the full orange moon touched and emphasized. It wasn’t just that her body was maturing suddenly; it was how very Earthly she had become. Earth’s gravity had settled her features, remuscled her body, that was true. But that was not what John saw. Her skin, always a warmer color than his, had darkened in this planet’s sun until she seemed made of the red dirt and the brown river water and the dark bark of the trees. Earth woman, he thought, and smiled. It seemed a very special beauty to John, something he had never seen in any other woman. She stood in the moonlight, unmoved by the chill of the night. Her feet were bare against the Earth; she was rooted in it. As he watched, she moved, turning only her head to some sound in the night.

“Connie,” he said, very softly.

She turned to him, silently, her face tilting up so he could look down into her eyes. The moonlight was a tricky
thing. He knew that, from the top of the ladder, in the melting light, he could not see her eyes well enough to read them. But it seemed he could. She didn’t smile. She didn’t have to. Raef was right. She was waiting.

He tried to think of something to say to her. Nothing came to mind. All the poetry he had ever known deserted him. He went down the ladder slowly and she waited for him.

[/////]

It made no sense. This was no bubble net. This was—she extended a sensory flagella toward it—something Humans had made. Precise angles. Symmetrical chambers. Like the gondola fastened leechlike to her body.

[Hello,] she ventured and [/////] came the instant reply. Identical, she suddenly realized, to every utterance that had preceded it. Identical, as the rescue beacon on the shuttle beeped identically each time it sounded. No increasing pitch of interest, no variance for weariness or doubt. [Hello,] she tried again, and again [/////] the identical response.

[What are you?] she demanded in rising frustration, and again received only [/////] in response. Her trailing flagella told her more. Energy was being taken in by it, energy from the closest star. It was responding to it, canting itself to receive as much as possible, and within it vibrations hinted of mechanisms similar to those employed in the Human’s gondola. An orifice suggested a docking port, but her [Request docking] signal went ignored, save for the cry of [/////] it elicited from it. It taunted her, this dead thing that cried to her like an infant, but sealed its secrets from her. The depth of her disappointment was a stunning thing. To have come all this way, to have left Raef for this. Its mystery mocked her. She was suddenly aware that every minute she spent here was time Raef was alone, endangered. Yet to leave this thing without understanding its function seemed unthinkable. She argued long with herself before giving in to necessity.

[Parasite.]

There was no reply, and she became aware he’d relinquished ganglial docking. Peculiar. She quested within herself, amazed at how much more self-aware she had become since fighting him for control of her body. Possibly as he weakened he was unable to maintain the nerve blocks that
had kept her almost unaware of the gondola and its inhabitants for so long. She sensed it now, the vibrations of the automatic mechanisms that kept it in readiness for Human habitation, the energy that it drew from her, even how it was keyed to her own body for its maintenance.