Orphans of Earth (27 page)

“When you speak to her next, tell her from me that she is unlikely to fix the engrams by the methods she has chosen. They are clumsy and skirt the major design flaws. Attempting fundamental repairs without the awareness of the patient is, never going to work. She needs consent in order to succeed.”

“Consent?” The implications of what the Praxis was saying sent distant alarm bells ringing through Alander’s mind. “She’s been tinkering with the engrams? With
me
?”

“Ten minutes has elapsed,” the Praxis said. “Your friend will become anxious if you don’t call him soon.”

“Answer my question,” Alander demanded. “Has Caryl tampered with me?”

“You already know the answer to that,” said the Praxis calmly. “If I know it, then so, too, do you.”

No,
he wanted to say.
You can see my head from the outside, see how my mind operates, like taking an engine apart with a spanner.
But he knew that wasn’t what the Praxis meant. He had been feeling much more stable within himself since the arrival of the Starfish. He had presumed that stability had come from the need for decisive action—but it had also come with the arrival of Caryl Hatzis from Sol, who had once overwhelmed his mind with her own thoughts in order to knock him out.

He had warned her then that if she tried anything like that again—invaded him, compromised who he thought he was—he would kill her.

He could feel anger welling up inside him, railing against the calm that the alien creature generated. If the Praxis was right, he
should
be angry with his so-called ally. But if the alien was wrong, however, or just lying to manipulate him into being angry, then it would be a mistake to go off half cocked.

“Peter?” Axford’s voice spilled into the darkness once again. “Peter? Can you still hear me?”

“I’m still here,” he answered, feeling the anger slip away.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m talking with the Praxis,” he said, looking the immense creature up and down once more. “It seems to be the one running the show down here.”

“
Directing
,” interrupted the alien with a firm but friendly tone. “Not running, Peter. There’s a difference.”

“That’s the Praxis?” said Axford following a pause. “It doesn’t sound anything like the Yuhl we’ve spoken to so far.”

“That’s because it isn’t Yuhl,” he explained. “It’s—something else altogether, actually.”

“You’re kidding,” Axford muttered. “
Another
alien species?”

“Another alien species,” confirmed Alander.

“So, is this one prepared to come to the party?” Axford went on, his bluster returning. This was a new factor in the equation, one the ex-general hadn’t counted on.

“Too early to say,” said Alander. “But I think—”

“May I make a suggestion?” said the Praxis.

Neither Alander nor Axford spoke for a few seconds. Then, from the ex-general: “Go on.”

“This installation is not the appropriate place to conduct any sort of strategic meeting. We would be better served choosing another location.”

“Such as?” said Axford.

“The system you call Rana in Becvar.”

“That’s half a day away,” said Axford. “Are you sure you’re not trying to get rid of me while you get up to no good?”

“You have my word that Vega will not be approached.”

“You know about that, huh?” Axford sounded disapproving, as though he thought Alander had revealed everything to the aliens. “Well, if you want to relocate to Rana in Becvar, that’s fine, but I’m swinging by Vega on the way—
and
I’m taking my guest with me, too. That’s just my mistrusting nature, I’m afraid. I’m sure you understand.”

“Of course.” The Praxis’s voice expressed understanding and a willingness to cooperate. It
had
to be artificial, Alander knew, given the alien’s nonhuman origins. “We shall meet you there in your own time.”

“Wait,” Frank the Ax said suddenly. “What’s there, anyway? I mean, why the need to leave here?”

“That’s just
my
mistrusting nature,” said the Praxis. “I’m sure you understand.”

Axford laughed gently. “See you in ten hours.”

Alander sensed rather than heard the line to Axford close. A moment later, before he even had the chance to feel uneasy about being separated from the ex-general for so long, the alien’s face suddenly vanished. Then, abruptly, with a violent, sucking wrench, his mind was snuffed out like a match dropped into a whirlpool.

2.1.2

For a moment or two following the dream; Alander found
he couldn’t move. The dream of his mother held him suffocatingly close. It was strange; he hadn’t thought of her for years. She had died in a car accident when he was a child, along with his unborn sister. His original had spared him any memories of the accident and the nightmares that had followed, but just for an instant, among the blood and gore in the belly of the Yuhl vessel, he thought he had glimpsed his sister’s face. Her eyes had been shut, her lips slightly parted, as though reaching for that first breath that would never come.

He opened his eyes to find himself lying in a hollow like the crook of an elbow, half submerged in clear fluid. It was warm and slightly sticky.

A shudder of revulsion ran through him as he stood up and tried to wipe the slime from his skin. He was naked and found the substance sluiced easily away beneath his hands. Flicking the last droplets from his body, Alander stepped away from the pool he’d been lying in. There were no lights about the area, yet somehow he was able to see quite clearly. Given his surroundings, that in itself wasn’t necessarily a good thing. All around him—the walls, the floor, the ceiling—was the reddish pink hue of the monster’s flesh. Soft, wet, and veined with blue, it heaved rhythmically like the sides of some immense whale.

And the
smell
...

Two intestine-like tubes, one to his right, the other off to his left, led from the fleshy cradle in which he had woken. He stood between them for a moment, running his hand across his scalp as he considered his options. The veined, undulating surface around him pulsed as though he was caught in a gigantic bowel. Neither way looked particularly appealing.

He froze suddenly at the unfamiliar roughness under his fingers.
Hair?

He felt again to check. Sure enough, there was stubble on his head.

“My God,” he mumbled, slowly checking out the rest of his body: arms, legs, belly, face, groin...

It was real. It was
all
real. The vat-grown android shell was growing hair! His body was—he was...

“What is this?” he asked aloud.

“Are you not satisfied?”

The voice of the Praxis issued from all around him—or possibly from inside himself. He couldn’t tell which.

“It’s not that. I just...” He ran the flat of one hand along his upper arm, feeling the firmness of the muscles there. He seemed smaller but so much more substantial. “What have you done to me?”

“I have remade you,” said the alien. “I have remade you in your own image.”

He was touching skin that was precisely the right color and texture, not the olive smoothness he was used to. And with that came another realization.

“My I-suit?” he said, patting his body to confirm its absence. “What have you done with my I-suit?”

“Your personal effects are waiting for you outside,” said the Praxis. “They will be returned shortly. But first I want you to appreciate this moment of vulnerability for what it is. You are what you are made of, Peter. As a computer program dictated by rules of logic and grammar, no matter how much you dressed it up, you were never anything more than dead electrons. As creatures of flesh and tissue, however, you dance at the whim of biological uncertainty.” It paused long enough for the flesh around him to pulse half a dozen times. Then: “Welcome back to the real world, Peter.”

Alander continued to examine his body as best he could. It wasn’t the same as the one he had known on Earth, before engram activation. This body was in its healthy thirties and lacked none of the added extras the artificial body had enjoyed. He could feel implanted capacities lying dormant at the edge of his consciousness. There was no feeling of breathlessness or imbalance he might have expected from his alien environment. But most of all...

He took a deep breath.
Yes.
Most of all, there was still the disturbing feeling of fragility underlying everything, as though his mind was a house of cards the slightest of breezes might knock down. That feeling had ebbed in recent weeks—his anger at Caryl Hatzis flared briefly at that thought—but it was always there. And it was
still
there, despite his new home. Perhaps it would always be part of him: the new him, the one created by UNESSPRO and sent out to the stars.

Still, what the Praxis had done, if the alien was indeed telling the truth, was impressive. Not only had it ingested his old body and rebuilt his mind in a virtual world, but it had then rebuilt that body a different way and returned him to it.

I doubt even Vincula technology could
, have done that, he mused.

“In the long run,” said the Praxis, “I believe you will find this body more beneficial than the one you were using. New times call for new beginnings, after all.”

Alander nodded as he continued to look himself over—as though he were examining a new suit. “Thank you,” he said finally. “I think.”

“I trust you will see this act for what it is.”

Alander frowned (and noted that even the smallest expressions felt different with his new skin). “What do you mean?”

“I have provided this service freely,” explained the Praxis. “As a gesture of goodwill between our species.”

“And because you happen to have devoured my old body,” said Alander. “Let’s not forget
that
.”

The Praxis emitted another of its disturbingly humanlike chuckles. “If you walk some distance to your left,” it said, “you will find an exit.”

Alander did as he was told, his naked feet recoiling slightly from the moist and spongy surface. He forced himself not to be squeamish. This was, after all, probably nothing but the alien version of a bioreactor. His old body had slid in a shroud out of a machine the size of an old family sedan designed to build everything from paper plates to people. There was nothing organic about the process. At least this way the experience of rebirth had a genuinely visceral component.

He passed another of the fluid-filled hollows like the one in which he had awoken, and was surprised to see another body lying there. It was a Yuhl, curled up with its great, triangular thighs pressed hard against its chest. Its eyes were shut, and the lines on its yellow and black face were set in a mask of random asymmetry, but Alander thought he recognized it.

“Ueh?” he said incredulously.

The alien’s eyes snapped open, and it sprang upright in one lightning-fast motion. Both hands came out, pushing with all the strength of those mighty legs behind them, and shoved Alander away. Unbalanced by the low gravity, Alander let himself take the tumble, rolling as he did so.

“No, wait!” he called out, clambering to get to his feet again. The combination of the new body and the springy surface made it difficult, but he finally managed to get upright.

The Yuhl faced him squarely, eyes blinking black-white, black-white.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he insisted, trying to mollify the alien. Although its arms were dangling inoffensively at its side, Alander’s inability to read the alien’s expressions made it impossible to determine if Ueh was angry or not. “I don’t mean you any harm, I promise.”

The Yuhl’s head seemed to retreat on its neck, then it fluted a dissonant reply.

“He says that he is sorry, too,” said the Praxis. “He regrets having used force to fend you off.”

The alien ran both hands over its smooth, leathery scalp and blinked several times in quick succession. Naked, Alander could see every aspect of its anatomy in perfect relief; its musculature was ropy and clearly defined around its chest and limbs but hidden behind layers of fat around its torso. There were none of the strange flanges that adorned the conjugator’s body, but there were strips of darker discoloration across its skin, like primitive body paint or less-defined examples of the pigment on its face. Its genitals were mostly retracted, but he could clearly see the petal-like tips of its double penis between its legs. The Praxis had referred to Ueh as a male, but Alander still suspected that issue of gender among the Yuhl was more complicated than humans took for granted.

Alander wondered if Ueh was as curious about
his
body as he was about the alien’s. In their long travels, the Yuhl might have encountered many alien species, in many different forms, so their interest might have been long sated. Ueh seemed more interested in examining himself than Alander, touching his body in several places and staring at both sides of his hands for several seconds. He emitted several short phrases the Praxis didn’t translate.

“You ate him, too?” he asked the Praxis.

“It is my habit to keep a regular check on the mood of the people in my care,” it replied. “This way there can be no deceptions.”

Ueh seemed to have finished examining his body. Whether he was satisfied by what he found, Alander couldn’t tell. The Yuhl emitted a string of sounds like two flautists playing the same phrase a semitone apart, and pointing at the same time at Alander.

“He says that you should get moving,” supplied the Praxis. “As honored as he is to share this process with you, he knows that the conjugator will be waiting for you both out the other side.”

“What’s he so worried about?”

“Maintaining the proper display of obedience. The Yuhl belonged to a relatively primitive culture before the Ambivalence favored them and I tamed them. The more useful aspects of that culture remain today. The conjugators do my will primarily because that puts them in a position of dominance over their own kind.
Ueh/Ellil
is on the cusp of either advancement or further dishonor. The Yuhl have more in common with humans than you suspect.”

Alander smiled at the implication. “If you think for a moment that we would allow ourselves to be
tamed
—”