“Karlyn….”
“We never had a chance, did we? Did it mean anything to you? Did I?”
He spoke slowly. “It all means something to me.”
She kept to herself for a few weeks, taking time off from her duties. When she returned, six months later, she learned that he had been promoted. So what was she to him, then? Another one of his many partners, for sure. Most likely a stepping-stone, she had concluded. And he had left quite a footprint on her back.
And it had all gone downhill from there. And in her self-imposed social solitude, regressive feelings of anger and dejection, spawned from the depths of her wounded heart, began to bubble.
She frowns at the ceiling. “Where’s your dedication to the stock?”
“Whose stock? Theirs or ours?”
“Funny. I remember learning that there really isn’t much of a difference.”
He makes a guttural sound in his throat. “Huddling together in the slime like slugs.”
“Maybe mud dwellers like the sense of being grounded to something. Belonging.”
“Belonging to what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. To each other.”
“Let ’em. We’re the flowers of the wide open spaces, my dear.”
“Wrong analogy,” she corrects him, digging through her mess for the equipment, ignoring the weapon on the shelf. “Try bees. Going from stem to stem. No,” she says to herself aloud. “Bees have a deep communal system. Wind bursts. Carrying wild new seed to unknown grounds. That might be the type of prosaic, expressive crap you’re looking for.”
He sniffs. “You stay down there any longer and I might recommend you for psychological re-adaptation sessions.”
It wouldn’t be the first time. Farmers have the usual interview session after every ground assignment. The shock and discomfort of being grounded does involve variations of disorientation and discomfort when adapting to a harsh gravity well, discomfort that can inhibit the usual motor coordination in conjunction with the ability to concentrate, to find her core.
She fumbles getting to the control bubble. She can hear the leg brace machinations purring. The ice crystals melt away in the morning’s quick and heavy heat. The distant images wriggle in the melting frost and warp into their proper shapes.
Cruz is still chattering in the background, his voice grating on her ears.
“Yeah, well, thanks for the chit-chat,” she blurts.
“Sure, but remember to wash when you’re done.”
“I’m laughing,” she says, flatly.
“Glad I could lighten your day. See you on the uplift.” The speakers snap off.
She tries to clear her mind as she heads for the antechamber, a hand running absently over her thigh as the muscles work their strange power.
We interrupt this program….
Karlyn slashes her way through the foliage, her sonic blade perfectly slicing the stalks of thin young trees in half. The humidity hangs in the air like slowly moving vapor clouds. Her digivisor works to keep her faceplate clear as she hacks her way to the clearing and the organiform nodules. Following close behind, as expected, come a swarm of aboriginals, dodging through the thick growth with ease.
She stops, teasing them, and they all stop, holding frozen their positions as if suddenly encased in ice. She moves suddenly, then stops. They do the same. She plays this little game with them for some time.
The curious little hominids had shown up the morning after landing, touching the bug, caressing, as if feeling its every living millifiber. When they had first arrived, her initial survey failed to report on other land creatures other than Species One, the “gelatins” (small, soft squirming creatures less than twenty centimeters long that lived high up in the flower-trees, either lain in the flower buds or placed there after birth, seemingly unattended, evidently being fed by them). As the seasons changed, she discovered that Species One was in fact an infant stage of Species Two. After completing their gestation externally, they then venture down to the soil for good.
She had spent some time observing them. She had sat with them, followed them, examined as best she could their close-knit, communal relationships. They appeared non-progressive as there was nothing of unnatural construction around, their villages being close groupings of flower-trees and large-leafed bushes that hung in an umbrella shape and provided shelter, as if the vegetation grew to accommodate them. When they slept, she used a nano probe to examine their genetic history, the history of a species unaltered in a billion years. An evolutionary dead end; she had concluded that it was safe to proceed with the seeding.
She bounces over fallen trees, dodges bushes, stops, zig-zags through the growth. Her playful audience is not far behind, imitating, simulating, like a group of over-excited preschool children at playtime.
She makes the clearing and stops to catch her breath. The hominids freeze where they are, looking as if they could go on like this for an hour or so, unfazed.
She feels something’s wrong. She looks up.
“Shit on me!”
The Beta habitat, or something resembling it, has sprung up during the night like a wild grouping of jungle vines, twisted and interlocking. Filaments resembling veins wander out across the smooth areas of lattices and giant cylindrical leafy enclosures.
“Shit….on….me,” she whispers, and quickly switches channels over to Beta. Although it is mumbling incoherently the Platform’s biosystems check out five-by-five down the line.
Her interface chimes.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was standing at the habitat, hand outstretched, rubbing the smooth lattices and snaking branches. At the centre sit the nodules in their mouldings, undisturbed. The aboriginals follow close behind, but avoid getting too close to the structure. They seem content to sit off at the clearing’s edge and watch her.
Her interface clangs.
She has never seen anything like it. Although mutations do occur to a small degree (all dependent on the differences in each planet’s particular biology) the sequencers have fail-safe coding to prevent extensive mutations; coding that behaves like dominant genes, intent on preventing any large scale rewriting.
But something broke through. Suddenly she is overwhelmed with fear, the fear of failure. She needs to check the nodules.
Her interface rattles for her attention. She tries to ignore it. His voice from earlier in the day is still echoing in the back of her head. Irritation threatens to multiply with each rattle.
Not now!
She sends the call to her answering service.
She has been plugged into the drop-grid for no more than five minutes when the short, leathery skinned aboriginals suddenly come swarming over to her, poking their heads around at her, hands probing her body with their little, spidery fingers, pulling at her. One bangs on her helmet, another begins tugging at her breast pocket. She brushes the little mud crawlers aside and continues working. The “inside” of the grid looks a bit….well….intoxicated.
She picks up a nodule from the moulding and examines it for a second time. And for a second time an aboriginal who had been sitting nearby quietly reaches for her and grips her wrists, softly but firmly, while another takes the nodule from her and places it back in the mould. The hominid lets her go and turns away, again.
She watches this lone alien now as it returns to its rocky perch to sit and watch, a solemn look to its brown face. Its small black eyes search her face with a kind of questioning sadness.
What? she wants to ask it. You don’t want me to touch the nodule? Is that it? You don’t understand why I touch it? Or is it something else?