The Children Star (2 page)

The lightcraft rose on its beam of microwaves, lifting Brother Rhodonite and the child toward the ship that would soon cross the space folds. His last child that year, Rod realized with a wrench in his heart. L'li had once been a beautiful world, but its forty billion humans had long ago tilled its last acre and filled its last air with haze. Only the “creeping” had finally reversed its growth and started a ghastly decline. Elsewhere, citizens of the other six worlds of the Free Fold either shrugged in despair, or felt secret relief that something at last would curb the L'liite population. Rod sketched a starsign and silently prayed the Spirit to heal them all.

The Sacred Order of the Spirit was the most ancient religious order in the Fold. Their roots reached back before the Free Fold, to Valedon, the gemstone world, in an age when world warred against world. Each Spirit Caller wore on his neck a Valan sapphire star. The star's three shafts of light spelled the threefold call of truth, grace, and spirit; and wherever these were needed, Spirit Callers went. Brother Rod had been called to L'li.

“Thanks for the smooth ride,” he told the lightcraft. Foreign money kept L'liite transport running for the tourists, but declined to cure her citizens.

“You're welcome, Citizen.” The lightcraft was an electronic sentient, no mere servo machine. Modern Valedon was known for both, and Rod knew better than to miss the difference. “I don't often take passengers from that hill; and if things keep getting worse, I'll quit the planet altogether. Do you return to Valedon, Brother Rhodonite?”

“No, Citizen. To Prokaryon.”

Prokaryon was a virginal frontier world, at a star two space folds away. With his fellow Callers, Rod collected
dying orphans from L'li to join a small colony on Prokaryon. The child he had just collected was pale with fear; Rod held her close, wishing he could explain the wonders her future held on a world full of food, free of “creeping.”

“Prokaryon!” exclaimed the lightcraft. “Are you human? I hope your cells have good arsenic pumps.”

Rod smiled. “They do.” Unlike Valedon, Prokaryon was not terraformed, for today the Fold forbade alien ecocide. But Prokaryon's alien ecology, full of arsenic and triplex DNA, poisoned human bodies. Unless, of course, they were lifeshaped, their genes modified to survive. Lifeshaping took best in young children.

Out the viewport, the boarding station loomed ahead, its hull displaying the vista of ancient L'liite temples. The lightcraft docked, and its round door fused to that of the station like two mouths kissing. An entrance opened through the fused doors and widened into a corridor.

Above the corridor, floating fingers pointed to Rod's feet. “Watch your step,” a voice whispered in six languages.

Rod caught the child's hand, remembering that she might never have seen such a place. He ignored the virtual newscaster announcing new jump holes through the space folds, and new Elysian bank deals to finance copper mines on Prokaryon. Virtual doorways juxtaposed Reyo City's nightlife with that of Elysium—the wealthiest world of the Fold, where people stayed young for a thousand years. Rod himself had toured the hot spots of Elysium, as a young Guardsman on leave. But he had left all that behind ten years ago, to follow the Spirit.

At his cabin, the door molded itself open. Rod sketched a starsign to his fellow traveler, Brother Geode.

“Back at last, Brother.” One of Geode's six limbs sketched the star in return. “What kept you so long?” Like the lightcraft, Brother Geode was a sentient. Self-aware machines
were called “sentients” ever since their revolt against their human creators two centuries before. Sentients were built of nanoplast, trillions of microscopic servos. Geode himself had a torso of nanoplast about the size and shape of a pillow, with his star sapphire nearly buried in blue fur. His nanoplastic limbs could extend and mold themselves to any length and thinness. His limbs sported fur in each of the primary colors, giving him the appearance of a giant multicolored tarantula.

At the moment, Brother Geode had one red furry limb cupped to cradle a tiny infant, while a yellow limb fed it cultured breast milk. Three other infants slept in nanoplastic nooks nearby; the entire ship itself was a sentient. Brother Rod had brought all four of the infants from an orphanage in Reyo. The orphanage had run out of formula months ago; the infants, just left there that day, would not have lasted the week.

“I found one more Spirit child.”

The girl flexed her toes in the carpet and stared wide-eyed at the sight of Geode.

From a nook in the wall, a baby several weeks old awoke with a cry and stretched his trembling arms. Rod went over and swaddled him, then tucked him under his arm, as a bottle slid out from the dispensary window. The bottle held breast milk as “real” as a mother's, including cultured lymphocytes. The infant soon settled against his chest, gazing upward into Rod's eyes. With barely more weight on him than the newborns, his limbs were wobbly sticks, but the milk would bring him round. How resilient infants were.

Geode's two eyestalks rose from his torso like periscopes and trained on the girl. “An
older
child?” He spoke in Elysian, the language sentients preferred; they, like
Elysians, were forever young. “An older child—not again. You've grown soft, Brother.”

“She looks barely two.”

“Malnourished. She's six if I'm a day. An older child,” Geode repeated. “You know what the Reverend Mother will say.”

The Reverend Mother Artemis had founded their colony on Prokaryon. It was she who first called Rod to the Spirit, in his final year at the Guard Academy. He still could not think of her except with a sense of awe.

“The Reverend Mother will say we cast our nets well,” Rod replied. “I climbed the hill and brought what I found. Not a child under five was left alive.”

“She'll spend a year in the gene clinic, vomiting half the time,” Geode added, “and we'll be the next ten years paying her off.” Infants up to eighteen months could be processed in a couple of weeks; older children took much longer, and adults might never make it. Rod himself had spent three years in treatment, yet he still could eat nothing grown on Prokaryon.

Was Geode right? he wondered. The child's eyes had arrested him, there on that hill; those eyes had clutched his heart against his reason. . . . But the Spirit within had called to him, saying, This is the one.

Rod adjusted the baby in his arms, holding up the tiny head. Then he turned to the girl. “See, child,” he told her in L'liite. “This will be your new brother on Prokaryon. You'll have thirty-nine brothers and sisters—think of it. You'll grow your own food, and even mine your own gemstones.”

Geode's eyestalks twisted quizzically. “She hasn't taken her eyes off me. What must she be thinking, to go off with such strangers?”

“What child was not born to strangers?”

Two of Geode's limbs began to mold themselves into probes to examine the girl's health.
“I
was never born. I was built—to precise specifications. I make fewer mistakes than one byte in a trillion trillions.”

Rod smiled. “You had to be taught to think.”

Ignoring this jest, Geode extended a long, slender tendril out of his furry limb toward the girl, who moved back a step. Brother Rod put his arm around her. “Let Geode treat you, child. He will help your stomach feel better. Then we'll have a good bath, and a good dinner.”

The tendril wound around the girl's arm, inserting a microscopic probe which she would not feel. The probe would sample her blood for her own DNA and proteins, as well those of any pathogens. “Her name is 'jum G'hana,” Geode announced, matching the gene sequence with his database.

The girl blinked at the sound of her name amidst the foreign gibberish. A sharp mind, Rod thought.

“She was first sampled at approximate age three, upon hiring full-time at Hyalite Nanotech. Father died of ‘creeping,' mother alive, age—”

“Her mother's dead,” Rod corrected. “Creeping” sickness was caused by prions, misfolded proteins that directed normal ones to mimic their structure and accumulate in the motor neurons. Paralysis crept out the limbs and inward. Other types of prion infection were contained in the nervous system, but the dreaded “creeping” prions leaked out in secretions and transmitted readily.

“She has lice and worms,” continued Geode. “And prions, though not yet irreversible.” So she did have the disease, as Rod suspected from her mottled legs. Even her relatives, had she any, would never claim her. The emigration forms would go straight through.

The cure for creeping was to inject millions of nanoservos, microscopic servo machines, into the bloodstream to methodically search and reshape the misfolded proteins. It was effective, but expensive. On Prokaryon, the Fold paid to cure colonists, to encourage human settlement.

“She wasn't badly nourished, her first three years.” Geode's infant had done feeding and was now bouncing in one coiled limb. “Maybe she's not even brain-damaged. Say, 'jum,” the sentient demanded in L'liite, “did you go to school? Can you read?”

'jum slowly shook her head.

“Can you count your factory wages?”

At that, 'jum did not answer but gave the sentient an intent look.

“What's one plus one?”

She frowned, as if this were a very difficult problem. “Not quite one and a half,” she said in a voice so low that Rod barely heard.

Geode twined his eyestalks disparagingly.

“What do you expect? She's never been to school. Is your workup done? She needs a bath.”

“Definitely,” the sentient agreed with emphasis. “I don't know, though. I wonder sometimes if we're not half-crazy, trying to settle a frontier with starving babies.”

“It's the cheapest way,” Rod said ironically, for that was the reason of the Fold.

“But—look, you know, it's not just any world, by Torr. It's
Prokaryon.”

Prokaryon was named for its unique “prokaryotic” life-forms. Animal or vegetable, all Prokaryan cells contained circular chromosomes, free of nuclear membranes—like bacteria,
prokaryotes
. But Prokaryan cells were ring-shaped as well. And the higher structure of all the multicellular organisms was toroid, from the photosynthetic “phycoids”
that grew tall as trees, to the tire-shaped “zoöids” that rolled over the fields they grazed—or preyed upon those that did.

“And I don't care what the Free Fold says,” Geode added. “There
are
intelligent aliens running Prokaryon, somewhere.”

Rod held the baby tighter in his arm. “Don't spread rumors, Brother.” Such stories arose whenever a new world was settled, even on Valedon long after it was boiled and terraformed.

Geode snaked an eyestalk toward him. “Can you explain how Prokaryon has all those rows of forest, one after another, all across the continent? Who tends the garden?”

“The Elysian scientists have been looking for years. They found no one, and the Fold certified the planet empty of intelligence. Do you want to get our colony evicted?”

“The truth is what I seek, Brother,” insisted Geode.
“You
explain how the weather stays the same all year, only raining at night, or a cloudburst to put out a fire.”

Looking away, Rod placed the sleeping infant gently at the wall, where the nanoplast obligingly molded inward to cradle it.

“Humans,” Geode added with bemusement. “Will humans ever know an ‘intelligent' creature, if they find one? They took centuries just to recognize us sentients, out of their own factories.”

F
ed, scrubbed, clothed, and medicated, the six new Spirit children endured their week-long journey through the space folds to Prokaryon. Of course, none of them could yet set foot on their new home. Merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their “proteins” contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic. Prokaryan cells were not exactly good to eat—unless you were Prokaryan.

So the children's first stop was a satellite, the Fold Council Station for Xenobiotic Research and Engineering. “Station” was actually a giant sentient whose brain directed the investigation of Prokaryan life-forms, as well as the transport and lifeshaping of colonists. Station's lifeshapers
would inject the new children with nanoservos, microscopic machines to put special genes into the cells of the liver and intestines. The special genes would teach their cells how to detoxify unfamiliar Prokaryan molecules, and to eat them as food, as easily as they ate the nutrients from their own world. For adults the lifeshaping was slow and inefficient; thus, most Prokaryan colonies depended heavily on sentients.