SOME NURTURING MACHINE

1563 4D

At last, Leil slept. Still cradling her, Andrew looked around and down through the grillwork of the andro farm. The dead worker’s datacard, lying on the level below, lay blinking at him. He eased Leil to a curled-up position on her side on the grillwork and stood up. She moved one hand under her cheek to cushion it, and then laid still. He decided to let her rest for a bit.

Locating a metal-frame ladder, he retrieved the datacard and returned to sit beside Leil. The card still worked, undamaged by its impacts; a long list of numbers and names unrolled, an occasional title changing above them as they passed through the display window. A voice crooned numbers and codes at him in a business-jargon shorthand.

In the card’s holo display background the matrix of tanks hung suspended, sketched with codes that seemed to correspond to those in the list. Looking for a higher-level view, Andrew pressed a scoping key; the display switched to a different list, with the holo now showing a City diagram. A glowing point showed his location now, embedded in a tight bundle of these vertical columns.

A heavy green line like a tree trunk rose out of the bundle, splitting into a branching spray of lines terminating mostly in the upcity part of the diagram. Maybe a delivery or a commitment pattern, thickness of lines showing number of individuals to be delivered to each destination. The list carried names of organizations, with a number the size of which detailed the thickness of the corresponding line.

The single green line ending in the spaceport isolation area hung nearly as thick as the main trunk, dwarfing all the others, and its number verified the disproportion. Most of the andros were destined for the alien spacecraft.

Andrew called, “Turiosten, I’ve got a question for you.”

Now we can exchange. You answer mine and I’ll answer yours.

“What do you mean? What’s yours?”

Didn’t you hear me before? I asked you what you were doing with the signs of a kharshfainh.

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

Your body shows evidence of something I haven’t seen in almost a quarter of a million years, and I just caught a glimpse of it before it hid from me. Well, you’re sort of carrying it, I mean, it’s near you, no that’s not— there’s no good way to say how it relates to you.

Andrew retorted, “Sounds to me like you just answered your own question better than I could. Now how about answering mine? Why would Arlen be shipping most of his andros to your friends at the spaceport?”

That’s easy. They’re probably for food and remodeling. We can do a lot with them, you know — no restrictions like the ones my kind imposes on use of humans. Your species does a fair job, but nothing like what we can do with a little tissue metabolism and some developmental clockers and adhesors.

“Food? You mean Arlen sells them as meat?” Andrew‘s stomach rose and turned itself around.

It looks that way. And as templates.

“Templates for what? What else can you things do with a little tissue besides eat it?” Andrew fumbled in his mind for uglier words.

They make them soldiers. After all, we don’t really have any form like you do. Form is your sess, your obsession, not ours, so we give you forms to look at.

“I’ve never seen any alien soldiers except the bugs. What do you have to do to these andros to make them alien soldiers? Why do you need them, when you’ve got your own?”

You’ve probably seen them, most likely dead. Bugboys, choppers, bug soldiers, and other names like that. A little anchitin, some steroids, a bit of mitochondrial engineering and metabolic acceleration, and they’ve got self-grown armor and a great urge to kill.

“You mean those are andros? Our andros?” The burned bodies of the three he had blown from the top of the lift in Babiar surfaced in his mind. It all kept reflecting onto him, everywhere he looked.

Killing bugs had seemed a good idea. Now here hung the blind innocent bodies, biocorded to some nurturing machine, waiting maybe to face him in some corridor, where they would cut his guts out before he could move, or explode with the beam blasts or bullets he’d aim at them. His throat tightened.

No. They aren’t yours, if they’re going to the ship. That makes them ours, well, not mine though. But a few for me would be nice.

“Do you ever think about any of this, how it feels for us?”

Thinking is something you do. You think one thing and do it, then you think the opposite and do that. We don’t change what happens. To us, thinking is like a beetle crawling across the face of a planet to try to change its orbit. It doesn’t mean anything.

“It’s all we’ve got to work with.” The andro couple hanging in the tank now intertwined so closely that they looked like a single body. “Maybe soon you can find somebody else to talk to, crawl around inside them, run their bodies whenever you like. I’d like to be alone in mine again.”

I’ll go back to Leil if you want.

“No! Away from me, away from her, away from all my family, just get away.”

I’ve been good to you, you know. Why do you want me to go away? I brought your wife back to you, I helped you both escape from Arlen. And, look, I fixed those cuts you had. One of them was deep, like a knife wound.

Andrew pressed his side. No pain. He ran a fingertip along where the edge of the wound should have been. Almost smooth, with no break in the skin. “Oh. Nice job.”

I’ll do more for you if you want. Turiosten‘s tone sounded aggrieved.

“What I want? All I wanted was to raise my family in the mountains, under the stars. But what do you want? What do you really want?” Andrew waited several breaths for the answer. If Turiosten wasn’t thinking, what was she doing?

I want what is. Just as it is. So I don’t ‘want’ in the meaning you use.

This made no sense. “You mean there’s nothing you look forward to?”

Of course there is. Qaqanhialh. We’re going to find someone for me to pair with. It will happen soon.

“You know this already?”

Knowing is part of thinking: a human act. For us, everything is present. You invent past and future for yourselves. They seem to comfort you.

“So you know what’s going to happen? The future? Can you tell me how Leil will be? How long we live? All that?” Andrew‘s heart beat faster.

Not exactly. If I tell you all about one event, another one becomes indistinct, uncertain. Then if I tell you about that second event, the first loses focus. Except for the big things, like planets — I can talk about planets and stars. They don’t fade, not usually. Neither does that kharshfainh you’ve got; it’s like a star. It won’t change no matter what anyone does, not until it wants to.

Disappointment lowered Andrew‘s voice. “Okay. Tell me about this… karshfain, or whatever you said. You’ve really been pushing me to tell you about it. I don’t know anything.” Leil‘s forehead wrinkled slightly in a dreaming frown, then smoothed back to the lustrous sheen of young skin he barely remembered as hers.

Turiosten paused. It’s a living thing. Somebody or something started making them a long time ago, several hundred million years, to carry stories through time and space. They breed and travel through what you call innerspace, and live there. They stay sometimes with creatures that live in your world, and sometimes with others. We are not supposed to touch them. I haven’t seen one in over two hundred thousand years. The last one sang us a long story about this world.

“Is this thing inside me, like you are?”

Not the way you mean ‘inside’. It stays near your worldline in innerspace, nestles with you, warms you, even protects you a little when you need healing. It responds to your warmth and life. If you could see innerspace like an andro, you could maybe bring it out of hiding, let yourself see it. It’s hiding from me right now.

“Why? Do you eat these too?” Somehow it always got back to that.

Oh, no. Absolutely not. If I made it food, my own kind would hunt me down. Then they would— but there’s no word for it in your language, no idea for it. I would continue, but not as I am. None of us takes such a path, except the first. She chose in order to show the rest of us. More such exhibits of fate are not needed, with one good example to look at. Turiosten paused. You sound so angry, sarcastic. I don’t understand.

“And I don’t understand you either. What am I supposed to do with this thing? Feed it, like I’ve been feeding you? Talk to it, listen to it? Why can’t I just let it go away?

It has chosen to be near you. Its stories are priceless. Arlen is aware of it. He heard it singing.

“Singing? It sings?” The time under Arlen‘s tortures returned to Andrew‘s mind, and then he remembered his boyhood, and a song that soothed him in the night after his father had beaten him. And a dark-blue stone… “I picked up a stone, and it vanished into my hand.”

Oh, yes. That is its sign. It is the Singer. There is no other like the Singer. And it abides with you.

“And Arlen knows I have this thing?” Andrew looked off along the row of vat columns, then scanned above and below the place he stood. Still all clear. So this creature, or device, or whatever, was what Arlen had been looking for. Nothing to do with him at all. For this, Arlen would crush him like an insect. But Arlen hadn’t done that.

No one knows this except you and me. Arlen was hunting for the kharshfainh when you bought your property. He has tools, huge machines, he uses to try to detect it. But it hides from him too. He thought you had dug it out and taken it with the core samples. He understands nothing of innerspace. It has infinite numbers of hiding places, involutions.

“So he thinks I know how to find it. What if he kills me?”

Then it will leave and find another place to stay.

Andrew rubbed his forehead. “As much as I don’t like it, I want you to stay with me and help me get away from Arlen with Leil. Later we can figure all this out.”

That is what we are doing. But there is one thing I still need.

“Not more food. Please.”

No. Qaqanhialh. I want to find a partner. It will make avoiding Arlen much easier.

Andrew looked around at his Leil, huddled on the floor, and at the vat columns glowing with somnolent andro life, and through one vat at the distorted image of the dead worker. “And just how in this crazy hell are we supposed to do that?” As if to answer him, a blast of sound hit him from above. An alarm horn.