Orphans of Earth (28 page)

“I never said that was my intention,” the Praxis said.

“No, you didn’t,” said Alander. “But
is
it your intention?”

“Of course not.” There was almost a hint of indignation in the alien’s tone. “Now, I suggest you do as Ueh says before he becomes agitated.”

Alander nodded and let the Yuhl guide him out of the insides of the Praxis. He wasn’t reassured by the alien’s assurance that humanity was safe from its manipulations.
No deceptions,
it had said. What was there, he thought, to keep it honest?

* * *

Getting out of the Praxis involved sliding feet-first through a
series of well-lubricated sphincters and being messily deposited into a bath of acrid-smelling water. Attendants were on hand to clean them off. Alander gathered that this was a fairly regular procedure, one the Yuhl had become accustomed to over time. Certainly no one expressed surprise at Alander’s new appearance.

Then it was to a dry antechamber where Alander found his belongings waiting for him, as promised. His shipsuit was bunched up on the floor, none the worse for wear after his old body’s ingestion. In the middle of it was the coiled-up chain from which hung Lucia’s disk.
Bliss indeed,
he thought. His I-suit rested beside them, collapsed into a translucent ball. When he touched it with his right hand, it spread up his arm and over his body with one liquid motion. Its presence was almost unnoticeable, but he was glad it was there. For all the Praxis’s rhetoric about coming to terms with the flesh of his new self, he felt much better knowing that he was safe again, even though the Spinner device hadn’t exactly protected him from the Praxis.

He was also back in touch with the hole ship. The Praxis may have remade his old body, but it had, thankfully, left the implants he’d become used to in the android. While he didn’t know if the Yuhl had tried to merge AIs and take the data it contained, he supposed it didn’t make much difference, seeing that the Praxis had already picked through his brain and discovered everything there, anyway.

He was looking forward to getting back to
Silent Liquidity,
where he could take a closer look at the new body he inhabited. But there was no way he was going to return to the others until he was absolutely certain he wasn’t carrying the seeds of their enslavement with him.

“Has anyone tried to interfere with you?” he asked the ship’s AI. Even as he asked it, he knew that he wouldn’t necessarily be able to believe what it said in reply.

“I have experienced no invasive attempts,” it said smoothly. “Overt or covert.”

“And where are we?” He realized only then that he had no idea how long he had even been in the belly of the Praxis. “Are we still in transit?

“We are in Beid system.”

“
Beid?
I thought we were going to Rana in Becvar.”

“We have already been there, Peter,” announced the Praxis, breaking into the link between him and the hole ship. “We stopped at Rana in Becvar long enough to drop a simple navigation buoy. Your friend will find the buoy when he arrives, and it will instruct him to come to Beid. If he is not here in six hours, then we will move on.”

Alander sighed heavily. “This is going to make the man suspicious,” he said. “If you aren’t where you said you’d be, then he’s going to—”

“We cannot take the risk of him surprising us,” the Praxis cut in softly.

“Surprising you? How?”

“He is an unknown quantity, Peter. I know from your memories that he has successfully attacked at least one of our scouts in his home system. And he is not above using the Ambivalence against us, should he deem it necessary.”

“If he did, you could hardly complain,” said Alander. “He’d just be using your own tactics against you.”

“You believe him uncritically, then,” the Praxis said evenly, “when he tells you it was us who destroyed your colonies, not him?”

This caught Alander off guard. He hadn’t even considered the possibility that Axford might be lying. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. But even he could hear his own doubts creeping into his voice. “He has footage showing—”

“Footage can be faked,” the Praxis pointed out.

“But he has only the one hole ship,” he said with more conviction. “If he
was
raiding the gifts from our colonies and calling the Starfish to hide the evidence, where’s all the stuff he’s stolen?”

The mighty alien paused meaningfully. “Where, indeed?”

The conjugator entered the antechamber at that moment. It didn’t seem to concern him that Alander was still only half dressed. The hole ship translated his words into English while Alander picked at the disturbing thought the Praxis had planted in his head.

“The Praxis has determined that you must meet with the Fit immediately,” said the conjugator, indicating the door through which he had entered. Alander hesitated, then walked through it. Ueh followed closely behind, with the conjugator bringing up the rear.

“The Fit?” Alander asked, thinking:
Now what?
After his experience with the Praxis, he was wary of taking anything for granted. Once eaten, twice shy.

“I have chosen that word from your language carefully,” said the Praxis. “It combines notions of connectedness as well as superior adaptation.”

“The Fit are a sort of council, then,” he ventured. “The top Yuhl echelon?”

“Crudely speaking, yes. Decisions that affect everyone should not be made in isolation, even by me,” said the Praxis sagely. “There has to be a chain of command, and that chain must be flexible. The Fit are the first link in that chain. The conjugators comprise another. The organic progression of information, misinformation, and disinformation enables
Yuhl/Goel
society to mimic a living system. I would not have it any other way. Totalitarianism reeks of those stale electrons, Peter.”

Alander nodded: he could see that. “But why did we have to come all this way to talk to them? Why couldn’t we have just stayed in Alsafi?”

“Take a moment to look around you, Peter. It will explain many things.”

Alander assumed the Praxis didn’t mean the empty, curving corridor through which they were walking. “
Liquidity,
give me an overview of the system we’re in.” A 3-D map appeared before him containing a complex mix of symbols. He probed deeper, ignoring the tug of disorientation as he walked. Beid was an F2II-III star with a rapid variability. Also called 38 omicron 1 Eridani, it wasn’t on the UNESSPRO lists because no oxygen or water signatures had been detected around it. Its solar system consisted of one medium-sized gas giant in a highly elliptical orbit, currently around the same distance as Mars was from Sol, plus two terrestrial worlds in the process of being knocked out of orbit by gravitational perturbations. The gas giant had no intact rings left, but there appeared to be an asteroid belt in close around the sun, where
Silent Liquidity
itself was stationed. The odd thing was that Alander wouldn’t have expected such a feature to remain in such a perturbed system—and asteroids didn’t normally move on their own.

It was then that he realized what the Praxis had meant. The
Mantissa
was a planetoid-sized craft made of many thousands of individual hole ships. Orbiting Beid were, in turn, many thousands of such craft. What looked like an asteroid belt from a distance turned out, in fact, to be millions of hole ships in a chaotic yet contained swarm.

“What is this?” he asked, awestruck. “The Yuhl migration fleet?”

“This is the Mantissa.”

“But—?”

“The
Mantissa
is much more than the fragment that you encountered in Alsafi,” the Praxis explained. “Since the possible combinations of so many hole ships is almost infinite, the usual notions of independent vessels and the boundaries between them do not apply. The hole ships that comprised my bier this morning might by this evening be part of an exploratory mission to a far-flung system. The
Mantissa
as a whole is never entirely in one place.”

Hence the name, I guess,
mused Alander, still stunned by the vast number of hole ships present in the system.

“There are always pieces coming and going,” the Praxis was saying. “It is a dynamic process that is very difficult to control.”

“And organic, again.”

“You are grasping the essential difference between my species and yours. While you seek to transcend the flesh in which you evolved, I embrace it wholeheartedly. The Yuhl are my protégés. The arrangement serves us both quite well.”

What if it didn’t?
Alander wanted to ask.
And what if it doesn’t serve humanity?
He imagined the
Mantissa
swarming through space at the cusp between the Spinner/Starfish migrations, seizing what resources they could: both physical, in terms of the gifts and other valuable materials, and mental, in the form of new species happened across along the way.
Will we be eaten, too, if we can’t see eye to eye?

“The Fit are
waiting/ready
,” said the conjugator impatiently.

Alander wrenched himself from the hole ship’s feed and back into the long, curving corridor.

“Everything you need to know will be explained to you in due course,” the Praxis assured him.

Alander glanced at Ueh, who still stood by him and whose alien body language suggested patient subservience. A full head taller than Alander, the situation was ludicrous, and it highlighted just how little he knew about any of the species currently impacting on his life. Just because he could exchange words with the Yuhl and the Praxis didn’t necessarily mean he understood them any better than the Spinners or the Starfish.

But there was no reason not to try, he knew, even if the risk of making mistakes was high. He owed it to the surviving humans, if not to himself. After being eaten, he supposed, he could deal with anything.

He took a deep and steadying breath. “Let’s get it over with, then.”

Encased in his bubble of Earth-like air, he continued along the corridor to where the Fit waited.

* * *

He had imagined the Fit gathering in a tiered amphitheater,
all shouting at once, but only the latter part turned out to be the case. The Fit as a whole didn’t gather physically, although they did congregate in one place when possible. Alander was shown to a room partitioned into many small areas, not dissimilar to the intestinal corridor along which he had been led to meet the Praxis. Among the increasingly familiar tangle of ornamental and functional installations—he was still unable to tell which was which—he saw many spine-encrusted Yuhl sitting at low desks, bent forward with their heads encased in fleshy helmets.

Conjugator Yaise led him to an empty cubicle and gestured that he should sit.

“Once more into the breach?” he said, his stomach sinking.

“This is not like conSense,” said the Praxis.

“What is it like, then?”

“You’ll see.”

Alander suppressed his misgivings and sat down in front of the desk. The helmet hung before him, and he felt as eager to slip his head into it as he would a crocodile’s mouth. Its interior wasn’t fleshy and veined like the interior of the Praxis but lined instead with millions of slender cilia that stirred in strange, geometric patterns. There was no obvious way for air to get in or out, which only exacerbated his apprehensions.

He ran a hand nervously across his newly stubbled scalp. He felt Ueh come up behind him as though to protect his back, and he felt the stare of the conjugator watching him.

Damn it,
he thought. Then, without allowing himself the opportunity for second thoughts, he closed his eyes and thrust his head firmly into the helmet. He almost gagged as the cilia enfolded him, squirming against his skin like a flesh-eating anemone. It was much colder than he expected, and he flinched and tried to pull away as something pressed against his mouth and nose. But there was no way he could pull out of the helmet. A fleshy sphincter had closed around his neck, trapping him inside the squelching darkness. When the breath he held could sustain him no more, he opened his mouth to gasp for air, but found instead a torrent pouring down his throat. He wanted to scream out at the disgusting violation, but he was no more able to do that than he was able to wriggle free. He could feel alien hands on his back and arms, restraining his flailing body.

He choked and spasmed for what seemed like an eternity, until, abruptly, everything cleared. The cilia were gone; the helmet seemed to have vanished. The pressure on his back and arms and neck and throat had simply evaporated, and he felt instead as though he was floating face-forward in free fall, his eyes closed and arms outstretched.

“I am moderating this experience to a certain extent, including translation,” the Praxis’s voice intruded easily into the illusion. “But I assure you I’m not interfering with it in any way.”

“
What
experience?” Alander asked. His voice sounded strangely muted and lonely. “There’s nothing here.”

“I was just giving you a moment to adjust,” said the Praxis. “But if you are ready—”

“I’m ready,” said Alander. He wanted to sound confident, but even he could detect his repressed panic in his words. “I guess.”

It started, oddly, as an odor: a combination of many smells, both sweet and caustic. At first he put it down to the aroma from the helmet his head was encased in, but then he heard a faint noise in the distance, as though he was standing outside a theater in which a large number of people were shouting to drown out a conceit. The noise became louder, and he began to identify different strands within it, individual voices that stood apart from the rest by virtue of their volume or their eloquence. When the combined cacophony became louder still, he focused on one of those strands and realized as he did that he could discern words within it. Gradually it became clear that what he was hearing was the babble of the Fit, their linked minds all shouting simultaneously at one another.

At first the rousing rabble frightened him, being as it was a new and, indeed, completely alien experience. He felt for a moment that he would drown in the flood of voices but was thankful, at least, that the Praxis was keeping the translations free of any double vocal streams, which would have only added confusion to the already overwhelming event.