Alien Earth. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ into himself to contemplate. Montemorossi. There was simply no record of him, anywhere in Tug’s library. Not even the most teasing reference. And yet John’s latest acquisitions had seventeen poems ascribed to him. More baffling still was that Tug’s extensive knowledge of linguistics couldn’t pin the poet’s work down to a particular time. Late nineteenth century, Earth-reckoned date, was his tentative decision, but then again, there were certain idioms used in the work that hadn’t come into common usage until the twenty-second century. It was totally baffling, and therefore totally delightful.

      Boredom was Tug’s greatest enemy. As an enBeasted Arthroplana his intellect should have developed beyond the point where mere solitude could bore him, yet he had welcomed this diversion that John had unwittingly provided during the first twenty-seven years of their trip out from Delta toward Terra. After John and Connie had secured their Human quarters and settled into Waitsleep, Tug had occupied his time well. First, there had been the relatively minor matter of deciphering the language-based lock John had placed on his personal library access reader. That done, he had plundered the latest collection of ancient poetry that John had stored in the reader’s immediate memory. And since then there had been the methodical storage, referencing, and cross-referencing of the new material into his library, along with lavish notations on possible interpretations of the works. It had been an enjoyable, if brief, entertainment. But now it was time he turned his attention to his Human charges. He reared up from his customary perch over the section of Evangeline’s nerve trunk that ran through his chamber, and moved to where he could monitor the Human’s Waitsleep. They should be in their dreaming cycles right now.

      Raef moved slightly in his womb, a shuddering, twitching movement that was a response to gentle electrical stimulus of his muscles. Raef was in the toning cycle. Heartbeat and respiration gradually accelerated, blood pressure came up to a carefully calculated level. The dormant body must be stimulated without being aged or stressed. Random eye movements reassured Tug that Raef was dreaming, the mind being allowed enough self-stimulation to prevent psychic damage from too long a period of disuse. Within his own chambers, the Arthroplana checked the reciprocal pulse points that let him monitor Raef’s womb. All was well. Evangeline controlled Raef’s dream cycle herself after all these years, but it was a thing he always monitored; there was something peculiar about it, but he had never been able to determined exactly what. Perhaps the great age of the specimen had something to do with it, or perhaps it was Raef’s own mental peculiarities showing up in a physical way. Whatever it was, Tug always watched it, and handled all of Raef’s Waitsleep time with solicitude. Tug’s greatest fear was that something would befall Raef and he would die before Tug could solve the mystery that the man represented to him. Tug had already planned that when his own enBeastment ended and he stood once again before the Elders of his race to present his findings on Humans, an analysis of Raef’s abnormalities would make an interesting sidebar to his research. “Dreams: the Wellsprings of Human Creativity” he was thinking of calling that dissertation.

      As always, Raef was intact, in superb condition, and actively dreaming. This longer journey they were presently embarked on would give Tug more opportunities for waking Raef and discoursing with him. Perhaps even enough opportunities for Tug to finish extracting his knowledge and memories of old Earth. Those factual accounts would provide a marvelous backdrop to his analysis of Human fictions regarding that time. He was sure that the final product would be a multifaceted presentation such as the Elders had never seen before, and a certain guarantee of a comfortable old age and many breeding cycles. Tug gave a gurgle of satisfaction.

      Captain and crew; John and Connie. It would be the longest cruise of John’s career, and Tug would have to be particularly careful of the Humans’ health during the longer Waitsleep intervals. It was time for more than a cursory check of their readings. Tug drifted across his chambers, rested feelers on two separate sets of pulses. Both Humans were fine. John’s temperature was half a degree cooler than Connie’s, but that seemed to be the norm for him. Tug carefully positioned two smaller feelers over each pulse point and stimulated Evangeline’s system, simulating her body’s reaction to a mild scare. Within a few moments the pulse nodules on his chamber walls quickened their pace as Evangeline’s body responded to his interference. The increase in stimulation was passed on to John and Connie through the tubes of their wombs. Both bodies responded as expected as they entered the toning and dreaming cycle. As Evangeline recovered, their metabolisms would gradually slow back to a dormant state.

      A separate bank of instruments, Human made and laboriously installed by Arthroplana centuries ago, let him monitor their Human quarters inside the gondola. All readings there were normal. All readings there had always been normal. Even after all this time, there were moments when the artificiality of the Human equipment, its geometric shapes of metals and plastics, struck him as bizarre. All of his own interfacing with the Beast was done biologically. He wondered how long Human evolution would have to be guided before their mechanical barriers between species were replaced with biological interfaces.

      For a moment Tug toyed with the idea of awakening Connie and talking with her. When she had returned to the ship with the tapes, he had sensed a subtle change in her attitude toward him. It should be explored; it was probably John’s doing. But the Beastship’s schedule didn’t call for her to be awakened for another five Human years, and he had no real justification for breaking schedule. Only his own curiosity, and John never considered that a valid reason. John was dry as old bones when it came to curiosity. He wasn’t fresh meat like Connie. Tug savored his simile and metaphor proudly. He was becoming certain that he had mastered the forms, regardless of John’s contempt for his efforts. John was old bones in that he and Tug had conversed so often that there was nothing new in his mind to nourish Tug’s curiosity. And Connie was fresh meat in that she was much newer to the crew, and offered much new information and anecdotes to nourish Tug’s curiosity, just as fresh meat had once nourished Humans when they were predatory carnivores. Yes, dry old bones and fresh meat. He almost awakened Connie just so he could try the simile and the metaphor out on her.

      She intrigued him. Her satisfaction at bringing him his recordings had astonished him. So much triumph to attach to the minor circumventing of a rule. He had tried to explain to her that what they had done was not wrong. The tapes would be biodegraded, in fact Evangeline’s physical system would break them down far more completely than the standard methods prescribed by the Conservancy. All she had really done was to postpone their processing until Tug could scan them, and make duplicates of the more interesting ones. But her elation had not faded with his explanation. Like Raef, there was much about her he could not understand. He sensed a reserve within her that would bear careful exploration. But this voyage would allow him the opportunities to break down her barriers, too.

      She was very young, and the Evangeline was only the second Beast she’d been within. When John was awake, she tried to be all business. And when she was alone, she always seemed surprised when Tug spoke to her. Still, he was convinced her reticence hid secrets rather than hostility like John’s. He would prise them out of her, but with patience and tact. His long-ago baiting of John had been an error. He had thought that in anger, John would reveal more of his true self. Instead, he had shut down communication with Tug almost completely. Tug expected it would take him another century before he could wear through John’s resentment and finish exploring the man.

      Connie’s records had been easy to access, compared to John’s. He’d learned that most of her education blocks had been devoted to the sciences rather than the classics. Mariner had been her first career choice, and Dirty-Tech Engineer her second. She had managed to get her first choice, even though it was not within the top ten options her aptitude tests had suggested. He should have found her boring. But the few conversations Tug had had with her led him to believe that she was more of a kindred spirit than John, despite the captain’s first option as a Poet. Perhaps with time Tug could educate her, make her a fitting companion for him on these longer voyages. She seemed the sort who could appreciate verbal playfulness, the niceties of a pun and the wilder pleasures of parody, perhaps even enter into the passion of dissecting a poem full of metaphor and simile and symbolism, layer by layer. Not like John who only became irritated when Tug tinkered СКАЧАТЬ