I needed another. I knew how to get one. I left the pieces of the animal where one of my siblings could find it in a dayblink or two, and went on. When I felt some of the creatures coming in the dark, I spread myself, as I had done before, and set my lures glowing in the dim light.
These were new creatures, it seemed, because they seemed wary or unsure, and kept to the outside of the field that I made for them. I waited. One came, finally, to take up the fruit I offered; this time I tasted the air all around it, quickly, and found where its rind was recently broken, and went there.
The creature didn’t try to eat the fruit I made for it, but it didn’t matter. I was there. I was in. I sealed the place where the rind was broken and went out into the creature’s body, remembering what I had learned from the last one about hiding from its internal defenses, reveling in nourishment.
I didn’t want to make the same mistake that I had made before. I didn’t harvest the creature; I merely fed, quietly, and only enough to keep my awareness. For my reward the creature stooped down and picked up the fruit I had made for it, and took it in a container of clear leaves; turned around and signaled to the other—and started walking back.
Terror paralyzed me as the creature stepped past the field that I had made, and carried me past the forward edge of my knowing. The aware one had never been here. There was no connection anymore between me and the aware one; and yet I was still aware. What was going to happen to me? Had I become lost? Could I ever get back?
I was alone. There was no aware one. There was only me, and the creature, and the creature’s companion. It walked vigorously with confidence, it moved so much more efficiently than I had moved the remnants of the last one, and with every step it took we traveled farther into the wet wind.
Through the forest. Out onto a hard place in the forest, something wide and stony with very strong substances in its composition, chemistries I had never sensed before; there was no way for me to send back the news to the aware one, we were severed from each other, so I didn’t know if the aware one had ever encountered anything like this in our life.
The creature had a fir-cone on the hard place, something that was in a way similar to a fir-cone, something that would carry its weight and could be moved over the surface; a very large fir-cone, and with little that was forestlike in it, but much more of the very strong chemistries all around. It sat in the fir-cone, its companion sat inside the fir-cone with it, and the fir-cone started to travel very quickly across the hard place, still into the wet wind.
I couldn’t tell where we were going. It was going too fast, and the messages in the wind were gone before I had a chance to truly taste them. I recovered from the paralysis of fear; I had to know, and my desire was stronger than my fear, but I didn’t know how I could slow the progress of the fir-cone.
The creature’s body protected one part of it more than any other; that is where I went. I didn’t care any longer about concealing my presence from its body. I went into the protected place; it was where all of the sharp brightness of warm life was concentrated, all of the quickness of the creature. I had to stop the fircone. I exerted myself, I infiltrated its brightpaths, I slowed the quick bright sharpness of its messages.
The creature fell forward in the fir-cone, and its companion became agitated, but the fir-cone stopped. It stopped very suddenly. The creatures were both damaged, but I was not damaged within the creature. It was a shame that the creatures had been damaged. They were interesting creatures. Was there something I could do to restore them? I had caused the damage, after all, in some sense.
I went carefully across the surface of the strong and very bitter chemistries to the other creature and crept in, since there was no lack of places where the rind had been broken. This creature had not been as badly damaged as the one I occupied. I used the nourishment of the one to try to repair the other, encouraging its body, transferring fuel; after a while the other moved its body, shifted itself out of the fir-cone, and stepped onto the hard surface.
I let it carry me. It walked back in the direction from which the fir-cone had come, but not very far. The wind was still blowing in the same direction, but the wet was different. I harvested some nourishment from the creature to strengthen me and went out of its body to go look. There was a steep bank there, with a smell of sharpness as though the steepness had been made not very many warmcolds ago. The hard surface bridged the gap between one steep bank and another, and beneath—in the low place—there was wet. So much wet. Unimaginable wet.
As though the rain that falls in the forest, all of the rain that had ever fallen in the forest, had collected in one place, so much rain that it did not soak into the tree-floor, so much rain that it stayed whole and wet even though it lay upon the ground. That was where the wind picked up the water, blowing over this huge wet; and behind the wind, instead of a forest, there was a flat land with soil that was so fat with nourishment that the taste of it was dizzying.
There were things growing in the flat land, things in regular array, juicy things with fruit in them ripening in the warm. I left the creature; I needed all of my substance with me to explore, and lay the creature down softly on the hard surface before I fled into the flat land.
The bright came. But I was safe below the surface of the flat land, feeding from the juicy things with a hunger I had never known before. There was so much. It was so good. The juicy things grew sere and withered as I fed, but I didn’t care, there were so many of them—nothing that I could sense as far away as I could sense but food.
I could no longer sense the aware one. I was in a new place, on my own. I no longer even thought of the aware one. I knew my purpose. I fruited and fed, and fed and fruited, and when the creatures brought poison into the flat land I crept into one of them and traveled to more food. There was no end to it. There were fewer and fewer creatures, and poison in the flat lands behind me; but they could not keep me from the food.
Now the warm is over and the cold is coming, but I will not sleep. I have found a place in a nest of the creatures, full of moisture, full of food, and I will keep myself aware there for the cold. When the warm comes again, I will try to get back across the hard stony thing to the place where I was born to find the other, to share the nourishment I’ve found.
I am of the aware one; I am the aware one. There was only one: now there are two, and with the nourishment I have found we will feed and multiply, and be the caretakers of this wonderful new world—and all the creatures in it.
FIRST CONTRACT
by Linda J. Dunn
MY NAME IS TWEEN dy Kula Niiam and I can justify my existence. I am a Tween. I facilitate communication. I have years of experience and adapt quickly to new situations.
I repeat these words every morning while facing the judgment wall and wait to learn if I continue my duties or expire. I stand still and calm, keeping my skin color a reverent shade of pale blue, and oozing the sweet scent of dedication. When the wall flashes life colors, I bow three times and back out of the room.
I have performed this sacred ritual every morning of my life. The difference now is that I know I will not die as long as I am assigned to the negotiating team on Earth. Our work is important. We cannot pause to wait for our home world to send a replacement.
Once the contract is signed, a new team will arrive to oversee the construction of the three factories and sublight delivery systems. They will hire humans at a fraction of what we pay our lowest caste laborers on any of our colony worlds.