He wondered what aliens ate. What they breathed. He wondered if he could teach them Language.
Every time he looked up, the Mothergraves’ great keel was lower. Finally, her tendrils encompassed his horizons and when he craned his eyes back, he could make out the double row of Mates fused to and dependent from her bellies like so many additional, vestigial tendrils. There were dozens. The oldest had lost all trace of their origins, and were merely smooth nubs sealed to the Mothergraves’ flesh. The newest were still identifiable as the individuals they had been.
Many of the lesser Mothers among her escort dangled Mates from their bellies as well, but none had half so many as the Mothergraves… and none were so much as two-thirds of her size.
In frustration, Stormchases squinched himself against the interior of his carapace. So close. He had been so close. And now all he had to show for it was a wrecked skiff and a bleating alien. Now he would have to start over—
He could ask the Mothergraves to release his groom-price to a lesser Mother. He had provided well enough for any of her sisters or daughters to consider him.
But none of them were she.
He only hoped his sacrifice of resources in order to rescue the alien had not angered her. That would be too much to bear—although if she decided to reclaim the loss from his corpse, he supposed at the very least he would die fulfilled… if briefly.
The talker squawked again. The alien sounds seemed more familiar; he must be getting used to them.
A few of the Mothergraves’ tendrils touched him, as he had so long anticipated. It was bitterest irony now, but the pleasure of the caress almost made it worthwhile. He braced himself for pain and paralysis… but she withheld her sting, and the only pain were the bruises left by his restraints and by impact with the bulkheads of the tumbling skiff.
Now her voice came to him directly, rather than by way of the talker. It filled the air around him and vibrated in the hollows of his body like soft thunder. To his shock and disbelief, she said words of ritual to him; words he had hoped and then despaired to hear.
She said, “For the wealth of the whole, what have you brought us, Stormchases?”
Before he could answer, the talker bleated again. This time, in something like Language—bent, barely comprehensible, accented more oddly than any Language Stormchases had ever heard.
It said, “Hello? You us comprehend?”
“I hear you,” the Mothergraves said. “What do you want?”
A long silence before the answer came. “This we fix. Trade science. Go. Place you give us for repairs?”
The aliens—the object was a skiff, of sorts, and it had as many crew members as Stormchases had eyes—had a machine that translated their bleaty words into Language, given a wise enough sample of it. As the revolutions went by, the machine became more and more proficient, and Stormchases spent more and more time talking to A’lees, their crew member in charge of talking. Their names were just nonsense sounds, not words, which made him wonder how any of them ever knew who he was. And they divided labour up in strange ways, with roles determined not by instar and inheritance but by individual life-courses. They told him a great deal about themselves and their peculiar biology; he reciprocated with the more mundane details of his own. A’lees seemed particularly interested that he would soon Mate, and wished to know as much about the process as he could tell.
The aliens sealed themselves in small flexible habitats—pressure carapaces—to leave their skiff, and for good reason. They were made mostly of water, and they oozed water from their bodies, and the pressure and temperature of the world’s atmosphere would destroy them as surely as the deeps of the sky would crush Stormchases. The atmosphere they breathed was made of inert gases and explosive oxygen, and once their skiff was beached on an open patch of the Mothergraves’ back for repairs, just the leakage of oxygen and water vapour from its airlocks soon poisoned a swath of vegetation for a bodylength in any direction.
Stormchases stayed well back from the alien skiff while he had these conversations.
Talking to the aliens was a joy and a burden. The Mothergraves insisted he should be the one to serve as an intermediary. He had experience with them, and the aliens valued that kind of experience—and when he was Mated, that experience would be assimilated into the Mothergraves’ collective mind. It would become a part of her, and a part of all their progeny to follow.
The Mothergraves had told him—in the ritual words—that knowledge and discovery were great offerings, unique offerings. That the opportunity to interact with beings from another world was of greater import to her and her brood than organics, or metals, or substances that she could machine within her great body into the stuff of skiffs and sails and other technology. That she accepted his suit, and honoured the courage with which he had pressed it.
And that was why the duty was a burden. Because to be available for the aliens while they made the repairs—to play liaison (their word)—meant putting off the moment of joyous union again. And again. To have been so close, and then so far, and then so close again—
The agony of anticipation, and the fear that it would be snatched from him again, was a form of torture.
A’lees came outside of the alien skiff in her pressure carapace and sat in its water-poisoned circle with her forelimbs wrapped around her drawn-up knees, talking comfortably to Stormchases. She said she was a female, a Mother. But that Mothers of her kind were not so physically different from the males, and that even after they Mated, males continued to go about in the world as independent entities.
“But how do they pass their experiences on to their offspring?” Stormchases asked.
A’lees paused for a long time.
“We teach them,” she said. “Your children inherit your memories?”
“Not memories,” he said. “Experiences.”
She hesitated again. “So you become a part of the Mother. A kind of… symbiote. And your offspring with her will have all of her experiences, and yours? But… not the memories? How does that work?”
“Is knowledge a memory?” he asked.
“No,” she said confidently. “Memories can be destroyed while skills remain… Oh. I think… I understand.”
They talked for a little while of the structure of the nets and the Mothers’ canopies, but Stormchases could tell A’lees was not finished thinking about memories. Finally she made a little deflating hiss sound and brought the subject up again.
“I am sad,” A’lees said, “that when we have fixed our sampler and had time to arrange a new mission and come back, you will not be here to talk with us.”
“I will be here,” said Stormchases, puzzled. “I will be mated to the Mothergraves.”
“But it won’t be”—whatever A’lees had been about to say, the translator stammered on it; she continued—“the same. You won’t remember us.”
“The Mothergraves will,” Stormchases assured her.
She drew herself in a little smaller. “It will be a long time before we return.”
Stormchases patted toward the edge of the burn zone. He did not let his manipulators cross it, though. Though he would soon enough lose the use of his manipulators to atrophy, he didn’t feel the need to burn them off prematurely. “It’s all right, A’lees,” he said. “We will remember you by the scar.”
Whatever the sound she made next meant, the translator could not manage it.
DIVING INTO THE WRECK
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH