“That’s what I like to think people get from my books. They learn about real problems, and they learn how to deal with change in their lives in better and more effective ways. I’m not ashamed of what I write. I’m proud of it, and I’m delighted that people are willing to pay for it.”
George looked closely at her. Then he kissed her. “That’s wonderful,” he whispered.
Alice looked up from her lapstation, then saved the file she had been working on. This had been a long and trying twenty-four hours. Between eating, sleeping, and lovemaking, Alice had continued to work on her manuscript and now had a nearly completed first draft. She hadn’t slept much, and she felt tense and strung out.
Roger had retreated to a big chair in the corner, using his lapstation to go over the Snark data stream and to read one textbook holo-ROM after another. He read at an amazing pace, turning a page every few seconds.
At last George’s alarm watch beeped. “Showtime!” he announced. Alice followed the two men outside to the beach, feeling a rising excitement.
The bright summer day was cooled by a breeze from the ocean. Alice squinted into the light after the dimness of the cottage. There was a sharp salt smell in the air, and seagulls wheeled overhead. The tide was coming in, the gray-green waves lapping progressively higher on the beach. She could see children playing in the surf far down the beach, but no one was close by.
George led them to approximately the spot from which he had waded out into the surf and thrown the Egg, and they looked out to sea. In the far distance Alice could see an oil tanker moving past at a stately pace, probably heading for a refinery in Baytown or Texas City. They waited.
She thought she was the first to notice the disturbance in the water. There was a small turbulence almost directly in front of them, about forty meters out in the water. Then a blonde head broke the surface, moving in their direction.
Alice couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. The Botticelli-perfect young female face smiled at her, streaming water from nostrils and mouth but not seemingly bothered by this. White shoulders appeared.
George and Roger stood frozen, watching. A wave broke over the child’s head, but she came on unperturbed. The waterline was down to the chest now. Her form was subtly female, but there were no breasts, only small pink nipples. The golden blonde hair reached to her waist. A flat belly appeared, complete with a small belly button. Then the crotch, with a labial cleft but no sign of pubic hair. Definitely female. Finally her thighs and legs. Emerging from the water was a young prepubescent human female who looked perhaps ten years old.
The child waded toward them through the water and stopped on the beach. She paused to study them with arrestingly blue eyes, and without a word took Alice by one hand and George by the other. Alice could feel a subtle electricity in the child’s damp grip. They walked away from the ocean. Clearing her throat and ejecting some water, the child said distinctly in a low voice, “I am in need of shelter to provide temperature stability. Can we use the structure before us?”
42
ALICE GOT THE CHILD INTO THE HOUSE AND INTO A warm shower as quickly as possible. There was probably no question of catching a cold, but she decided not to take chances. She had shown the child how to wash away the saltwater, how to shampoo and condition her hair, how to dry it with the hair dryer. She was amazed that she had anything to teach the alien. She had given the child her robe to wear and combed her long blonde hair. Finally they emerged from the bathroom.
Roger and George were waiting quietly on the couch. They appeared to be somewhat dazed by what had happened. Alice and the child joined them. The child took the armchair next to Roger and moved about experimentally in it, apparently exploring her first sensations of sitting. Alice sat in the chair opposite.
“What shall we call you?” George began. “Tunnel Maker?”
The child smiled. It was like the sun coming out. “In a sense, Tunnel Maker was my father. I was him, but I am him no longer, although we are in communication. Since I am now separate from him, it would be appropriate for me to have a new name. I have studied your mythology. Perhaps you could call me Iris after the female messenger of your Greek gods. Would that be acceptable?”
“Yes,” said Alice, remembering that Iris was also the goddess of the rainbow, the bridge between Olympus and Earth.
“Of course,” said Roger, “but may I ask why you are a child and a female? Is Tunnel Maker also a young female?”
Iris laughed, a pleasant tinkling sound. “The concept of male and female is no longer appropriate for the Makers and has not been for over a thousand years, since we learned to Read and Write. The age of Tunnel Maker is half a gross of orbits, about seventy-two of your years. He is not particularly old, but neither is he young. You should understand that I could have emerged from your ocean in any form I chose: a goddess, a monster, a bird, a giant, a dragon. I could even, with minor modifications to accommodate the local environment, have emerged in the form of the real Tunnel Maker. However, if I had, all of you would have run screaming from the beach. I chose to be a young human female, in order to be as nonthreatening to your race as possible. You find humans most familiar, children less threatening than adults, and females less threatening than males.”
“You said that your race had learned to Read and Write,” Alice said. “Those words occurred occasionally in our conversations with Tunnel Maker, but he was evasive in explaining what they meant. It is clear, however, that they mean more in your world than simply learning symbolic language skills.”
Iris nodded. “One of the reasons I have come into your world is to teach you three, as representatives of your race, to Read and Write. These are skills that we learned through contact with another race, the Baltrons, who reside in another Bubble. In a way, Alice, it does involve learning some symbolic language skills. But the language is the genetic code, and one must Read and Write in the media you call DNA and RNA.”
“I don’t understand,” said Roger. “Surely DNA genetic coding is not a universal language that extends from one bubble universe to another, from one species to another that evolved separately. Surely the genetic patterns of your race have nothing to do with ours.”
“There is more similarity than you might think,” said Iris, “but you are partially correct. Your language of English differs greatly from Russian or Sanskrit, yet knowing one language makes it is easier to learn another. For carbon-based life-forms the proteins are much the same from one evolved species to another, and therefore the DNA that controls protein synthesis is also very similar. There is less variation in the separate carbon-based genetic codes than in human languages. The coding details may differ, but the basic underlying principles for carbon-based life-forms are always the same, from species to species, from Bubble to Bubble. We have found no violations of this principle.”
“But, in a sense, we are already Reading and Writing” said George. “Our molecular biologists over the past decade have extracted the coding of the human genome. It now resides in a huge computer database and is being intensively used to develop drugs and to combat genetic diseases. We can also do genetic modifications, using synthesized retroviruses. Isn’t that what you are talking about?”