Alien Earth

Voyager

The table was cold and hard under his back. Metal. Shiny stainless steel. And he was naked, save for a blue-paper hospital gown that came but halfway down his thighs. A mocking little cushion of papery tissue under his head pretended to be a pillow for his comfort. The temporary curtain-walls of the examining cubicle were made of the same papery stuff. He wanted to sit up to try to wrap the inadequate garment around him, but he didn’t dare. He was afraid it would be the wrong thing to do, that somehow it would disqualify him. All he had to do now was wait. Surely he could wait a little longer. The physical examination of his external body had gone well. All that remained now was for the lab to okay his blood and urine and stool specimens. All that remained was for the lab to find him free of drug residues, alcohol, internal and external parasites, contagious diseases, genetically carried diseases or tendencies to diseases, fungi and harmful bacteria, and anything else the Conservancy for Humankind deemed undesirable. Somehow it seemed that if he lay very still on the cold steel table, it would make it easier for them to find him pure and whole, and suitable to be a colonist. Then he could disembark from the Beastship Evangeline, and enter Station Alpha, the first step in becoming acculturated to the new ecology. He reminded himself that he had passed just such a battery of tests before being allowed to join those evacuating from Earth. This was probably just a formality, a
confirmation of what the Earth team had found so many years ago. Raef pressed himself against the cold table and tried to breathe
.

“Not real.” Raef tried desperately to make his lips move, to force out sounds he could hear, that would wake himself. “This isn’t real. This isn’t here, this isn’t now. Here and now, I am dreaming in a Waitsleep womb inside the Beastship Evangeline, as I have been for hundreds of years and as I will for hundreds of years to come. This isn’t real. It isn’t happening and it can’t hurt me now.”

Usually he could control the dreams. Usually he could dream what he wanted, when he wanted. The best was when he could just let himself go and sink deeper and deeper, down to where the dreams were realer than real. And better than real, too, because he could make them come out the way he wanted them to. But sometimes, once in a great while, this happened, and he got stuck. Tug gave some command to Evangeline, and in turn the great Beast adjusted Raef’s metabolism, and he got caught like this, in between, dreaming uncontrollably, and all the dreams his worst old memories.

The room was chilly, too. His bare feet were cold. He lifted his head and stared at them. How pale and uncallused they had become through the long years of existing in Waitsleep inside a womb. They reminded him of a baby’s feet, pink and wrinkled and unused. The long periods of Waitsleep did that; it could slow down an organism’s functioning, but not stop it entirely. Growth and the replacement of cells, skin cells for instance, continued. During the brief Wakeups on the ship, he had crawled from the womb, endured a cursory physical inspection by a medical team that had themselves only been awake a few hours longer than their wards. Then with the other awakened colonists, he had oiled his body and rubbed away the peeling dead skin from his hide to expose his new pink skin, had eaten a simple meal, and run in a hamster wheel to try to exercise his body against the lassitude of weightlessness. For a week or so, there had been the idle talk of other people to endure, endless speculation on what the new planets, Castor and Pollux, would be like. Interspersed with that would be the boredom of the required ecology lectures and indoctrinations into the ideals of the Conservancy, all canned stuff on video. And sometimes, whis
pered conversation about the Arthroplana and their strange Beastships, and why they had come to rescue the Humans from the dying Earth. And for Raef alone, when he could no longer stand the jostling companionship of the many others who shared his Wakeup times, or when the canned lectures became too didactic, there had been the exhilaration of sneaking away from the carefully orchestrated group activities and exploring the ship’s labyrinthine structure
.

But not too often, for such free-spirited violations of the rules were not regarded lightly. It would be a damn shame to come this far, and then become regarded as a rebel, a maverick, someone who couldn’t be a team player. He’d seen it happen to a few; they refused the discipline of the organized Wakeup times, or challenged the information and philosophy of the lectures. They probably thought it made them look smarter than people like Raef who agreed with everything and always acted just like everyone else. Fools. Really smart people stayed away from them
.

Raef remembered one man well because of his trembling paranoia. James, his name had been. And they had sat at a table during the recreation hour, aimlessly playing at checkers on a magnetic board. Raef had beaten him the last six times in a row. During the last Wakeup, Raef had beaten him every time they played. It was a new experience for Raef, who had seldom won at games before. He had just decided that it was boring when James skittered a checker across two squares and then declared hoarsely, “Know what, kid? I don’t think we’re ever going to get there.”

“What?” Raef had said, jarred out of both game and boredom
.

“I don’t think we’re really going anywhere. I mean, think about it. These Arthroplana things, they come to Earth in their Beastships, but they never land. They tell us Earth is going to hell in a handcart, no one’s gonna survive, and we only have two, maybe three hundred years to get off the planet. If any Humans are gonna survive, we gotta start leaving now. But no one ever gets to see an Arthroplana, and no one knows where the hell these two planets are they’re offering to take us to. But they go, in our grandparents’ time, and in our parents’ childhood. And then they’re back for another load, and this time we, you and I, we get on. But how do we know
they ever got there, the ones that went ahead of us? How do we know they aren’t just taking us out in space and dumping us, killing us off so they can have our planet for themselves? How do we know that?”

People at other tables had turned to look at them. They had listened to James rave with faces either full of pity or disbelief. Perhaps a few showed signs of alarm, but surely it was only at James’s distress, not at a sudden suspicion his words might be true. Now the gazes shifted to Raef at James’s questions, waited for his answer, as if he knew something, as if he were supposed to speak for all those who had faith in the evacuation, who believed that a tomorrow awaited them on distant twin planets spinning around a different sun
.

“Well,” he had said, and faltered, wondering. How did they know? Maybe the Arthroplana had picked out the best and strongest to take into space and kill, leaving the weak and sick and elderly to die out on their own on a planet that no longer cherished life. “Well,” he had groped, “there’s the videos we have to watch. About living harmoniously with our new ecology. Someone had to make those. And, well, if they were going to kill us, why aren’t we already dead? Why bring us so far before doing it?”

“So far?” James laughed again, a laugh that cracked suddenly. “How do you know we’re far at all? No one can see out. We’re in the belly of the Beast. How do you know it’s been so long? They say we’ve slept for years, for decades. Maybe it’s only been a single night of drugged sleep. How can we tell anything for ourselves?” James lowered his voice suddenly, and those not already clustered around the table drew closer to hear. “How do we know we aren’t dead already? How do we know this isn’t hell?”

“Well … because …” Raef groped, and then the omnipresent voice of Tug, the Arthroplana that controlled their Beastship and announced all their hours for them, proclaimed, “Wakeup Period Twenty-seven is now drawing to a close. Please void your bladders and empty your bowels before returning to your wombs. If assistance is needed with your umbilical coupler, inform the monitor in your womb chamber. Thank you.”

Raef was glad to unclip his safety harness and kick free of the table, leaving James to put the checkers and board
away. He followed the stream of people leaving the rec chamber, to merge in the hallway with other people en route to the lavatories and then on to their womb chambers, to crawl inside and couple up to their life-support tubes and then to drift back into sleep. Now that Raef considered it, he didn’t remember ever seeing James at any of the subsequent Wakeups. What had ever happened to James?

“Get out of there. Get out of there. Get out of there.” Raef ground out the words, trying to feel his teeth grit, his lips move as he begged his dream self to escape from the examining room. It was like an out-of-body experience as he looked down on himself, naked and vulnerable on the table, and yet was himself, waiting anxiously for the screening team’s return.

He had to use a bathroom. After all the urine samples and blood he’d given to them, it seemed incredible that there were any liquids left in his body, but he had to piss soon or he was going to explode. The more he tried to lie still and ignore it, the more threatening the pressure in his bladder became. Had to go. Well, maybe if he was quick about it, he could be back in the examination cubicle before they came back
.

He rolled off the table, caught at a rung to still himself, and then tried to grip his paper gown closed behind him. It turned out he had a choice; holding the gown closed, or coping with low-G movement
.

“Get out of there, damn it all, get out of there,” Raef whimpered in his sleep. The small comfort of telling himself it was just a dream-remembrance was fast slipping away. If he was caught, it was all over.

He knew the layout of the ship well from his unauthorized explorations. Lavatory was just three chambers from here, once he left the row of curtained alcoves they’d set up in the rec chamber for these final screenings. He was just leaving the chamber when he heard the screening team returning by the other entrance. He would never know what made him pause instead of immediately hastening back to his table, nor what trick of the acoustics carried the incredulous whisper to his ears
.

“You’re shitting me! Cancer? How the hell could they have missed that at boarding?”

“Very small tumor, I guess. But it’s been growing while he was in Waitsleep. Big enough to detect now. Shut the hell up.”

“Okay, okay. Which one was it?”

“Raefferty, Terrence. He’s …”

But Raef was moving down the corridor, running breathlessly along before even they could finish speaking his name. He felt shock, not at hearing it, but at finding that he was not surprised by it. There had been a chance, he had always known there had been a chance. His mom had died of it, and his grandfather. He hadn’t told them that at the preboarding exam. He’d know they’d say it constituted a genetic tendency toward the disease. They’d have refused him
.

It wasn’t fair, it was never fair to him. This shit was always happening to him, and he never deserved any of it. But he’d be punished for it just the same, just as always. Someday he’d make them all see how unfair it was, how none of it had been his fault
.

But for now, he fled, mindlessly, brachiating down the corridor rungs faster than Tarzan of the Apes could have gone. His paper gown fluttered in the wind of his passage, marking him as strange, and he deliberately took every turning that would carry him away from the normally trafficked areas of the ship. There would be a search, he knew. Eventually, they’d find him. So why not stop now, go back, get it over with?

Because
.

It was all too familiar, this sensation of fleeing, and the hasty reconstruction of himself as someone else, as Tarzan or Peter Pan or Mega Man or Long John Silver. It used to be the big boys on the playground, chasing him with ready fists and boots. Now it was a lab team in white coats. It was all the same. If he was caught, they would hurt him. And there’d be no one to make them stop
.

He fled on, leaving the bright corridors for dimmer ones that branched out into areas of the ship already emptied of sleeping passengers. Womb chamber after womb chamber he passed, until their multitude almost dizzied him. And then ahead of him, the unused corridors were dark, and he fled into them, relying on the consistent spacing of the rungs to let him proceed. On he fled, heart hammering and his mouth so
dry he thought his throat would crack. On, until a sudden cramp in his side made him miss his grip and sent him flying into the resilient corridor wall. He rebounded into dark emptiness and settled very slowly to the floor. Raef lay still, half stunned, clutching at the cramp in his side. Little by little the pain receded and even his breathing steadied. He caught his breath, swallowed in a dry throat, and sat up cautiously. He looked back the way he thought he had come. Blackness. Ahead was the same
.

He tried to keep calm, tried to assess his situation. What would they do? He wasn’t sure. But he knew what they wouldn’t do. They wouldn’t let him leave the Beastship and become a colonists on a new planet. It didn’t seem likely to him that they’d send him back to Earth. A stray phrase from the Conservancy lectures came back to him. “Pity for the deformed and diseased swiftly devolves into a form of cruelty. Extending the lives of the unfit is not a worthwhile pursuit for Humanity. The strengthening of our species is.” The lecture had been explaining the need for rigorous controls on breeding once the planets were reached, but he didn’t doubt that the same policy would extend to him
.

Raef gathered himself to this feet. For a few moments he felt about in the darkness for a rung, before his arm muscles cramped and he realized he couldn’t rung any farther. He stood a moment longer, darkness and silence pressing him as heavily as the knowledge of his disease, the imperfection that would let them kill him
.