Murasaki, page 31
Dane didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “No. I don’t.”
“What was it that Chupchup said to the Japs?” John-son demanded. “The same multitiered concept the Ihrdizu have taken to spouting? ‘It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved*.’ No wonder they abandoned their damn cities without any sense they’d degenerated! The lab part of the process was over! They were ready for field experiments!”
Tatsumi grasped what he was saying. For a second she went still, awed by the sheer size of it. A design for justice taking eighty generations, saving a world by exiling the perpetrators/saviors for only the most practical of motives .. All genetically hard-wired. Justice that was genetic.
,
Justice? Or was it art?
Johnson said gleefully, “And we thought we on Earth understood the self-regulating nature of a biosphere! We don’t know shit!”
Tatsumi could not understand why that should fill him with such pleasure.
When the bioloons hit the atmosphere, they changed again. The robot camera’s telescopic lens showed a ripple over every centimeter of their surface, subtle and uniform, as if the snug were reorienting at a cellular level. The al-bedo increased dramatically, acting as a heat reflector and hence a heat shield.
At the same time, the shape of each ship changed again. As the gravity well took hold upon the Chujoan cargo in its pockets, the ship broadened, thinned, curved in proportion to the increasing air pressure. By the time the ships were fully in the atmosphere, they were no longer ships but enormous, aerodynamically stiffened parachutes.
“Here,” said the prerecorded voice of Miyuki, and even through her formal control, her listeners felt her relief, “is the last of the etchings in the Chujoan library box.”
The screen showed parachutes, uneven parachutes un-mistakably of snug, falling through the sky.
Stylized Chu-joan faces adorned each parachute. On the ground—so clearly Genji ground, the edge of the sea decorated with Genjian plants and a watching Ihrdizu—the sea surged. It was thronged with carpet whales, watching the sky. From each himatid, the artist had etched a faint line to a bioloon, a line made of flowers and plants no human had yet seen anywhere on Genji.
“Coming back,” Dane Jordan said. His voice had turned husky. “Returning to Genji. Like the myth of Szikwshawmi. Angels coming from the sky to confer bio-logical strength on female Ihrdizu.” Was that what had happened once long ago?
“Guided by the carpet whales,” Tatsumi said.
Johnson said nothing; he was updating his fuzzy-logic deduction program on the QED like a man possessed.
“But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Dane said.
Tatsumi said, with honest astonishment, “Only one?”
“If the carpet whales are to guide the Chujoans back to Genji with new bioengineered snug—if the whales are the masterminds—”
Johnson looked up, with scorn. “Masterminds! That’s all wrong. They’re genetically hard-wired for their role, too. None of the three races is any more in control than the others!”
“All right.” Dane drew a deep breath. “But if the signal or whatever comes from the himatids ... what hap-pened last time? Why did the Chujoans get into their bio-loons and start off into their atmosphere twenty-eight years ago, only to fall back and die? What went wrong?”
Johnson stopped typing. His forehead, sweaty with ex-ultation, furrowed.
Dane said, “If the carpet whales maybe started to give some kind of signal, and then the whole ...
‘mission’ aborted—why? Why wasn’t the signal what it was sup-posed to be?”
“Damn,” Johnson said. “I don’t know. Maybe the computer can come up with something.... “
Tatsumi saw it. Wavy lines appeared beneath her eye-lids, dizzying her, then righted. She said, “I know.”
The men turned to her. Johnson said, “You know why the carpet-whale signal failed last time?
Why?”
Again she saw Edward Philby, poor tormented justi-fied Philby dying of his cancers among the time artists. He stood in the field dome and repeated the last words Aaron Kammer had said, just before Kammer died:—‘They’re the ones! They’re the ones, and you’re killing them!”‘ The ones. The carpet whales.
She said, “The Ihrdizu killed too many. There were not enough left to make the right signals.”
Everybody’s right. Everybody’s wrong.
Cameras recorded frantically: on the south shore of Nighland, pointed at the sky; in fishing boats, as close to the himatids as the humans dared; in the sky itself, from out of flyer windows or on robot probes. No one had known what would happen, but they had known that something would„ and the humans, Dane thought, were ready. Weren’t they supposed to be? Why else had the Chujoans broken three decades of disdain to give humans the library etch-ings? Why else had the figure of Aaron Kammer appeared above a carpet whale in exudates and light? Why else, if not to invite the humans to watch this Murasaki System story. this wordless talking that dwarfed anything the hu-mans themselves had offered by way of petty Carnot tem-ples or small-scale offers to day-trip to the moon?
Dane turned to tell his thoughts to Suzy Tatsumi. But at that moment the screen in front of them, filled with sea spray from somebody’s misplaced camera, switched pic-tures. The images flowing into Okuma Base from the sea strait had been erratic for the last hour. Everyone at the strait was too busy recording to take time to route the best images to those unfortunates left behind at the base or at field camps. They, like the scientists on Chujo or the crew in the orbiting ship, didn’t count. Only the sea straits, glassy under the moon, counted. The off-site researchers took what the automatic transmitter sent, in the order the computer received it.
But now the image cleared. Johnson raced back from his QED terminal to stand with Dane and Tatsumi. None of them spoke.
The parachutes of snug hit a sudden gust in Genji’s treacherous, thick atmosphere. The affected bioloons wob-bled. Light, focused by millions of tiny reflectors embedded in the upturned ventral sides of carpet whales, flashed to-ward the parachutes. Immediately the parachutes adjusted shape, the snug expanding or contracting at the cellular level, until the chutes once more rode the wind.
,
The parachutes began to close at the bottom, meter by meter, until they once more became the shape of organic balloons. On each balloon, pockets bulged. Something within the pockets stirred faintly. The robot cameras, at extremely close range, showed the tops of the pockets begin to unseal.
“Thee gravity,” Dane said aloud. “So much greater than Chujo. Bones not developed for it, muscles
... Unless the landing of every one of those is perfect, the Chupchups won’t survive.... “
The image changed again, this time to the southern shore of Nighland, meters from the nearest carpet whale. Ihrdizu were wading into the water from the beach, hun-dreds of them. They submerged themselves to the tops of their tentacles. A few actually touched the edge of a carpet whale, which could bring its huge shape so close to land only because of its weird flatness. The Ihrdizu were laughing.
Light, reflected in exudates, danced and beamed from the carpet whales. A peculiar noise filled the air, louder than the laughing Ihrdizu or the lapping waves, a high-pitched rising and falling wail that might have been sonic signals. Might, have been keening. Might have been cheers.
As the bioloons came closer to land, most of them aimed at the sea, the carpet whales began to submerge. One-third, half, two-thirds of each hiniatid, the portions far-thest from the beach, sank under the water, leaving wide stretches of open sea between the remaining visible sections of whale. The light signals from these intensified. The noise rose in pitch. The first of the bioloons, splashed into the water.
And the himatids guided the rest of the Masters home.
Epilogue
Rilla stood near the birthing pool with Tmafekitch and her mate, a purplish male named Frikatim with a long snorkel and one extra toe. Rilla felt a little shy of Frikatim, whom, after all, she didn’t know very well—how could she? She and Daddy had only been in the village a few days. Tmafekitch had had months and months to get to know Frikatim, and she must like him, or she wouldn’t be having a baby with him, would she? Rilla didn’t know if she liked him or not. As long as he let her have these ten days with Tmafekitch, these ten, days Daddy had promised she could have, Rilla didn’t really care if Frikatirn was there or not. It wasn’t as if she were jealous of her friend’s mate. Much.
She knew why Daddy had let her have the ten days, moving his field camp;clear over by Tmafelcitch’s adopted village (after they found it). Rilla knew why. But she didn’t like to think about the reason.
Tmafekitch made a sudden noise, a high clear click that meant she was startled. She took a few steps into the birthing pool, then crowded closer to Frikatim. In the pool, the tough membrane of the egg sac began .to wobble.
Rilla said, “Is the baby coming?”
Tmafekitch answered, in their own private language, “Soon!” and waved her snorkel in circles.
“I’ll get the Master!” Rilla cried, glad to have some-thing to do.
The Master was staying in a sort of dome made of woven plants and daubed mud, since this village, unlike the one Tmafekitch had been born in, had no Carnot temple.
A curtain of snug hung down in front of the doorway. Rilla knocked on a li-plant stem—the Masters had seemed to understand without any trouble the human custom of knocking—and the snug pulled apart. The Master came out.
He carried a stick covered with crawling snug. Rilla looked at it furtively—would it grow a new kind of plant
Tmafekitch and her baby could eat? One Master had al-ready made a plant with bright red berries that Tmafekitch said were delicious, although of course Rilla couldn’t eat them. She kept her glance at the writhing stick very fast. She was never really comfortable with the Masters. Unlike the Ihrdizu, they seemed to have no interest whatsoever in a little girl.
She said to the unsmiling face, so much farther above her than Tmafekitch’s would have been,—Tmafekitch. Baby. Now.” That was how the Masters liked you to talk to them: the simplest Ihrdizu words, in the smallest number that would convey the information.
The Master didn’t say thank you—they never did, Rilla thought resentfully—and started toward the birthing pool. Rilla followed. The Master walked too fast for her to keep up, which was supposed to indicate something won-derful about their bodies. That the bones or muscles or heart or something were actually changing to adapt to the gravity. Rilla couldn’t have cared less. Even a Master should say thank you.
She had to admit, though, that the Masters had been good for Genji. She didn’t understand it all, but Daddy said that since the Chujoans returned, Genji was being trans-formed from the bottom ecological layer up, for greater stability and abundance. Well, Rilla didn’t know about that, but she did know it was prettier. There were thicker plants, and brighter flowers, and more food for the Ihrdizu, and the sea had more bits of colored plankton floating in it. Rilla even liked the patches of snug that crawled freely around the tidal pools, sometimes venturing onto paths, al-though they gave many humans the creeps.
Like Mommy.
She had to see Mommy this afternoon, because the new ship was leaving for Earth tomorrow and Rilla would never see her again. It was only right, Daddy said, that Rilla see her one last time. She hadn’t seen her much, because Mommy had never come down off the ship in orbit since the day the Masters had sailed out of the sky from Chujo. That old ship was too damaged by its trip to Genji to ever leave again, so it just stayed in orbit, and Mommy just orbited along with it. Everything Mommy knew about the Masters, she had watched on screens.
Rilla hated to admit to herself that she didn’t want to see Mommy.
So instead she hurried along the path to the birthing pool, and by the time she got there the baby was tearing at the inside of the egg sac with its tiny sharp claws. Tma-fekitch and Frikatim watched anxiously, their front legs in the pool up to their tentacles, not helping but making en-couraging bleats and clicks.
Everybody knew you mustn’t help a baby out of its egg sac. If you did, it might not be strong enough to live.
But the baby did get out. It tore the sac and stuck its snout through, and then its front claws, and then pulled its claws back in and stuck out its little tentacles. It kept strug-gling until its back claws were flee, and then it stood in the shallow of the birthing pool where Tmafekitch and Fri-katim had fed it for so long with bits of plants and secre-tions and their own shit, which Daddy said was good for eggs. The Master had pissed in the pool, too, every morn-ing. Now the Master picked up the baby and gently shoved a bit of special snug down its throat and another bit, a different color, under the flap of its tympanum. Then the Master handed the baby to Frikatim, who would care for it while Tmafekitch hunted and protected them.
Frikatim’s snorkel waved.proudly. He sat full up on his tail. Tmafekitch and even Rilla crowded close to stroke the back of the squealing baby. It was such a cute little-she! Rilla put a finger between the teeny flukes of its tail, and the baby flipped it in pleasure. Rilla stroked it again while the Master watched, inscrutable, and all of a sudden Rilla was crying at the little-she, at being with Tmafekitch again, at the beauty and excitement of a new life on Genji.
“Hello, Jane,– Daddy said.
Rilla tightened her grasp on his hand.
Mommy looked calm, which was more than she had looked the last time Rilla had visited her: She sat in a small room on the ship, a room even smaller than Rilla’s partitioned cubby in the field dome. Two walls of the room were painted to look like a place Rilla had never seen. The sky was the wrong color, a sort of garish blue, and the plants were too tall and thin, and very strange-looking. Rilla shrank closer to Daddy.
He said, “I’ve brought her.”
Mommy didn’t even look at Rilla. But Rilla knew she saw her. Mommy hurt, that was why she didn’t look at Rilla, and seeing Mommy again, remembering how Mommy had combed her hair and read her stories, Rilla hurt, too. So much she thought she couldn’t stand it.
But all Mommy said was, “I’ve been reading the orig-inal exploration teams’ journals, Bruce.”
—Oh? Why is that? I thought you read only things set on Earth.”
Mommy didn’t say why. read Toshio Tatsuhiko, Yukiko Arama, Emile Esperanza, Nicole Washington—even Aaron Kammer. The presnug Aaron Kammer. The human.”
Daddy’s mouth turned down.
“And you know what?” Mommy said. “They all re-flect the same concern. They all, cared so much about not causing ecological and cultural imbalance on Genji and Chujo. Were so fucking concerned about human contami-nation. And all the time we humans were completely, to-tally irrelevant. Don’t you think that’s funny?”
Daddy said, “I’m not sure it’s true.”
“Yes, you are. You know it. All the ecological bal-ances, all the cultural disasters, were caused by the Mura-sakians themselves. Not by us. And now they’re being corrected by the Murasakians themselves, and not all our science or religion or so-called ‘art’ or anything else has made the slightest difference to the whole weird process. Isn’t that true?”
Daddy was silent.
–How does it feel to be completely irrelevant, Bruce? How do you stand it?”
Daddy glanced down at Rilla. “That’s enough, Jane. Please don’t start again.... “
“And do you know why we’re irrelevant on Genji and Chujo? Because it’s not our system, Bruce.
We can’t even eat the food, breathe most of the air—we don’t belong here. Even our science doesn’t belong here. Science observes things in order to effect beneficial change, Bruce. You knew that once.
There is nothing we can ever change here. Nothing.”
Daddy said, his voice thick, “Not again, Jane. I brought Rilla here to say good-bye. Just that.”
“Just that. ‘Just that.’ A First Conciliator you bought and paid for decides who gets custody of my daughter and you—”
“That’s not true. Jane! Not even a word of it!”
Rilla saw a place to say something. Holding on to Daddy’s hand very tight, she said, “I wanted to stay on Genji, Mommy. I wanted to. I told Mr. Dane that.”
Mommy didn’t say anything. Suddenly she hugged Rilla so tight Rilla couldn’t breathe. “Mommy!
You’re hurting me!” ‘
Abruptly, Mommy let her go. Then she was pushing them out of the cabin, closing the door. “Go!
Go! Take her!”
Daddy picked up Rilla, who was too old to be picked up, and ran down the ship corridor. He didn’t stop until he got to the shuttle bay, where he set her down, knelt, and brought his face close to hers.
“Rilla—are you sure? There won’t be another ship from Earth for at least three years standard, you know. Are you sure?”
Rilla said, –I’m sure.”
“And I ... I know I’m not the best father for you, I get so caught up in my work “
Rilla hated it when he got like this. It was so much better when he just did the work, letting her do what she wanted to. She was all right, she had Tmafekitch and the other Ihrdizu.... When Daddy got like this, she almost de-spised him. That feeling frightened her. So she said coldly. “Don’t start again, Daddy.
Please.”
After that, Daddy got quiet. Rilla felt herself grow quieter, too.. But it wasn’t until they were in the shuttle, returning to Genji, that she spoke again.
“Daddy—I didn’t tell Mommy that Mr. Dane isn’t going to stay on Genji. I was going to, because I thought .she might want to know who else was going to make the trip with her, but then I didn’t. Was that right?”
Daddy brushed his face with his hand. “That was right, Rilla.”
“Daddy—are we unimportant to Genji, like Mommy said?”
Daddy sucked in his cheeks. “Yes.”
“Then ... then why are you staying? I mean, I know why I’m staying, because I was born here”—Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and me—“but why are you? If you’re completely unimportant to Genji?”
“What was it that Chupchup said to the Japs?” John-son demanded. “The same multitiered concept the Ihrdizu have taken to spouting? ‘It *is/will be* *time/an animal hunted/a problem solved*.’ No wonder they abandoned their damn cities without any sense they’d degenerated! The lab part of the process was over! They were ready for field experiments!”
Tatsumi grasped what he was saying. For a second she went still, awed by the sheer size of it. A design for justice taking eighty generations, saving a world by exiling the perpetrators/saviors for only the most practical of motives .. All genetically hard-wired. Justice that was genetic.
,
Justice? Or was it art?
Johnson said gleefully, “And we thought we on Earth understood the self-regulating nature of a biosphere! We don’t know shit!”
Tatsumi could not understand why that should fill him with such pleasure.
When the bioloons hit the atmosphere, they changed again. The robot camera’s telescopic lens showed a ripple over every centimeter of their surface, subtle and uniform, as if the snug were reorienting at a cellular level. The al-bedo increased dramatically, acting as a heat reflector and hence a heat shield.
At the same time, the shape of each ship changed again. As the gravity well took hold upon the Chujoan cargo in its pockets, the ship broadened, thinned, curved in proportion to the increasing air pressure. By the time the ships were fully in the atmosphere, they were no longer ships but enormous, aerodynamically stiffened parachutes.
“Here,” said the prerecorded voice of Miyuki, and even through her formal control, her listeners felt her relief, “is the last of the etchings in the Chujoan library box.”
The screen showed parachutes, uneven parachutes un-mistakably of snug, falling through the sky.
Stylized Chu-joan faces adorned each parachute. On the ground—so clearly Genji ground, the edge of the sea decorated with Genjian plants and a watching Ihrdizu—the sea surged. It was thronged with carpet whales, watching the sky. From each himatid, the artist had etched a faint line to a bioloon, a line made of flowers and plants no human had yet seen anywhere on Genji.
“Coming back,” Dane Jordan said. His voice had turned husky. “Returning to Genji. Like the myth of Szikwshawmi. Angels coming from the sky to confer bio-logical strength on female Ihrdizu.” Was that what had happened once long ago?
“Guided by the carpet whales,” Tatsumi said.
Johnson said nothing; he was updating his fuzzy-logic deduction program on the QED like a man possessed.
“But there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Dane said.
Tatsumi said, with honest astonishment, “Only one?”
“If the carpet whales are to guide the Chujoans back to Genji with new bioengineered snug—if the whales are the masterminds—”
Johnson looked up, with scorn. “Masterminds! That’s all wrong. They’re genetically hard-wired for their role, too. None of the three races is any more in control than the others!”
“All right.” Dane drew a deep breath. “But if the signal or whatever comes from the himatids ... what hap-pened last time? Why did the Chujoans get into their bio-loons and start off into their atmosphere twenty-eight years ago, only to fall back and die? What went wrong?”
Johnson stopped typing. His forehead, sweaty with ex-ultation, furrowed.
Dane said, “If the carpet whales maybe started to give some kind of signal, and then the whole ...
‘mission’ aborted—why? Why wasn’t the signal what it was sup-posed to be?”
“Damn,” Johnson said. “I don’t know. Maybe the computer can come up with something.... “
Tatsumi saw it. Wavy lines appeared beneath her eye-lids, dizzying her, then righted. She said, “I know.”
The men turned to her. Johnson said, “You know why the carpet-whale signal failed last time?
Why?”
Again she saw Edward Philby, poor tormented justi-fied Philby dying of his cancers among the time artists. He stood in the field dome and repeated the last words Aaron Kammer had said, just before Kammer died:—‘They’re the ones! They’re the ones, and you’re killing them!”‘ The ones. The carpet whales.
She said, “The Ihrdizu killed too many. There were not enough left to make the right signals.”
Everybody’s right. Everybody’s wrong.
Cameras recorded frantically: on the south shore of Nighland, pointed at the sky; in fishing boats, as close to the himatids as the humans dared; in the sky itself, from out of flyer windows or on robot probes. No one had known what would happen, but they had known that something would„ and the humans, Dane thought, were ready. Weren’t they supposed to be? Why else had the Chujoans broken three decades of disdain to give humans the library etch-ings? Why else had the figure of Aaron Kammer appeared above a carpet whale in exudates and light? Why else, if not to invite the humans to watch this Murasaki System story. this wordless talking that dwarfed anything the hu-mans themselves had offered by way of petty Carnot tem-ples or small-scale offers to day-trip to the moon?
Dane turned to tell his thoughts to Suzy Tatsumi. But at that moment the screen in front of them, filled with sea spray from somebody’s misplaced camera, switched pic-tures. The images flowing into Okuma Base from the sea strait had been erratic for the last hour. Everyone at the strait was too busy recording to take time to route the best images to those unfortunates left behind at the base or at field camps. They, like the scientists on Chujo or the crew in the orbiting ship, didn’t count. Only the sea straits, glassy under the moon, counted. The off-site researchers took what the automatic transmitter sent, in the order the computer received it.
But now the image cleared. Johnson raced back from his QED terminal to stand with Dane and Tatsumi. None of them spoke.
The parachutes of snug hit a sudden gust in Genji’s treacherous, thick atmosphere. The affected bioloons wob-bled. Light, focused by millions of tiny reflectors embedded in the upturned ventral sides of carpet whales, flashed to-ward the parachutes. Immediately the parachutes adjusted shape, the snug expanding or contracting at the cellular level, until the chutes once more rode the wind.
,
The parachutes began to close at the bottom, meter by meter, until they once more became the shape of organic balloons. On each balloon, pockets bulged. Something within the pockets stirred faintly. The robot cameras, at extremely close range, showed the tops of the pockets begin to unseal.
“Thee gravity,” Dane said aloud. “So much greater than Chujo. Bones not developed for it, muscles
... Unless the landing of every one of those is perfect, the Chupchups won’t survive.... “
The image changed again, this time to the southern shore of Nighland, meters from the nearest carpet whale. Ihrdizu were wading into the water from the beach, hun-dreds of them. They submerged themselves to the tops of their tentacles. A few actually touched the edge of a carpet whale, which could bring its huge shape so close to land only because of its weird flatness. The Ihrdizu were laughing.
Light, reflected in exudates, danced and beamed from the carpet whales. A peculiar noise filled the air, louder than the laughing Ihrdizu or the lapping waves, a high-pitched rising and falling wail that might have been sonic signals. Might, have been keening. Might have been cheers.
As the bioloons came closer to land, most of them aimed at the sea, the carpet whales began to submerge. One-third, half, two-thirds of each hiniatid, the portions far-thest from the beach, sank under the water, leaving wide stretches of open sea between the remaining visible sections of whale. The light signals from these intensified. The noise rose in pitch. The first of the bioloons, splashed into the water.
And the himatids guided the rest of the Masters home.
Epilogue
Rilla stood near the birthing pool with Tmafekitch and her mate, a purplish male named Frikatim with a long snorkel and one extra toe. Rilla felt a little shy of Frikatim, whom, after all, she didn’t know very well—how could she? She and Daddy had only been in the village a few days. Tmafekitch had had months and months to get to know Frikatim, and she must like him, or she wouldn’t be having a baby with him, would she? Rilla didn’t know if she liked him or not. As long as he let her have these ten days with Tmafekitch, these ten, days Daddy had promised she could have, Rilla didn’t really care if Frikatirn was there or not. It wasn’t as if she were jealous of her friend’s mate. Much.
She knew why Daddy had let her have the ten days, moving his field camp;clear over by Tmafelcitch’s adopted village (after they found it). Rilla knew why. But she didn’t like to think about the reason.
Tmafekitch made a sudden noise, a high clear click that meant she was startled. She took a few steps into the birthing pool, then crowded closer to Frikatim. In the pool, the tough membrane of the egg sac began .to wobble.
Rilla said, “Is the baby coming?”
Tmafekitch answered, in their own private language, “Soon!” and waved her snorkel in circles.
“I’ll get the Master!” Rilla cried, glad to have some-thing to do.
The Master was staying in a sort of dome made of woven plants and daubed mud, since this village, unlike the one Tmafekitch had been born in, had no Carnot temple.
A curtain of snug hung down in front of the doorway. Rilla knocked on a li-plant stem—the Masters had seemed to understand without any trouble the human custom of knocking—and the snug pulled apart. The Master came out.
He carried a stick covered with crawling snug. Rilla looked at it furtively—would it grow a new kind of plant
Tmafekitch and her baby could eat? One Master had al-ready made a plant with bright red berries that Tmafekitch said were delicious, although of course Rilla couldn’t eat them. She kept her glance at the writhing stick very fast. She was never really comfortable with the Masters. Unlike the Ihrdizu, they seemed to have no interest whatsoever in a little girl.
She said to the unsmiling face, so much farther above her than Tmafekitch’s would have been,—Tmafekitch. Baby. Now.” That was how the Masters liked you to talk to them: the simplest Ihrdizu words, in the smallest number that would convey the information.
The Master didn’t say thank you—they never did, Rilla thought resentfully—and started toward the birthing pool. Rilla followed. The Master walked too fast for her to keep up, which was supposed to indicate something won-derful about their bodies. That the bones or muscles or heart or something were actually changing to adapt to the gravity. Rilla couldn’t have cared less. Even a Master should say thank you.
She had to admit, though, that the Masters had been good for Genji. She didn’t understand it all, but Daddy said that since the Chujoans returned, Genji was being trans-formed from the bottom ecological layer up, for greater stability and abundance. Well, Rilla didn’t know about that, but she did know it was prettier. There were thicker plants, and brighter flowers, and more food for the Ihrdizu, and the sea had more bits of colored plankton floating in it. Rilla even liked the patches of snug that crawled freely around the tidal pools, sometimes venturing onto paths, al-though they gave many humans the creeps.
Like Mommy.
She had to see Mommy this afternoon, because the new ship was leaving for Earth tomorrow and Rilla would never see her again. It was only right, Daddy said, that Rilla see her one last time. She hadn’t seen her much, because Mommy had never come down off the ship in orbit since the day the Masters had sailed out of the sky from Chujo. That old ship was too damaged by its trip to Genji to ever leave again, so it just stayed in orbit, and Mommy just orbited along with it. Everything Mommy knew about the Masters, she had watched on screens.
Rilla hated to admit to herself that she didn’t want to see Mommy.
So instead she hurried along the path to the birthing pool, and by the time she got there the baby was tearing at the inside of the egg sac with its tiny sharp claws. Tma-fekitch and Frikatim watched anxiously, their front legs in the pool up to their tentacles, not helping but making en-couraging bleats and clicks.
Everybody knew you mustn’t help a baby out of its egg sac. If you did, it might not be strong enough to live.
But the baby did get out. It tore the sac and stuck its snout through, and then its front claws, and then pulled its claws back in and stuck out its little tentacles. It kept strug-gling until its back claws were flee, and then it stood in the shallow of the birthing pool where Tmafekitch and Fri-katim had fed it for so long with bits of plants and secre-tions and their own shit, which Daddy said was good for eggs. The Master had pissed in the pool, too, every morn-ing. Now the Master picked up the baby and gently shoved a bit of special snug down its throat and another bit, a different color, under the flap of its tympanum. Then the Master handed the baby to Frikatim, who would care for it while Tmafekitch hunted and protected them.
Frikatim’s snorkel waved.proudly. He sat full up on his tail. Tmafekitch and even Rilla crowded close to stroke the back of the squealing baby. It was such a cute little-she! Rilla put a finger between the teeny flukes of its tail, and the baby flipped it in pleasure. Rilla stroked it again while the Master watched, inscrutable, and all of a sudden Rilla was crying at the little-she, at being with Tmafekitch again, at the beauty and excitement of a new life on Genji.
“Hello, Jane,– Daddy said.
Rilla tightened her grasp on his hand.
Mommy looked calm, which was more than she had looked the last time Rilla had visited her: She sat in a small room on the ship, a room even smaller than Rilla’s partitioned cubby in the field dome. Two walls of the room were painted to look like a place Rilla had never seen. The sky was the wrong color, a sort of garish blue, and the plants were too tall and thin, and very strange-looking. Rilla shrank closer to Daddy.
He said, “I’ve brought her.”
Mommy didn’t even look at Rilla. But Rilla knew she saw her. Mommy hurt, that was why she didn’t look at Rilla, and seeing Mommy again, remembering how Mommy had combed her hair and read her stories, Rilla hurt, too. So much she thought she couldn’t stand it.
But all Mommy said was, “I’ve been reading the orig-inal exploration teams’ journals, Bruce.”
—Oh? Why is that? I thought you read only things set on Earth.”
Mommy didn’t say why. read Toshio Tatsuhiko, Yukiko Arama, Emile Esperanza, Nicole Washington—even Aaron Kammer. The presnug Aaron Kammer. The human.”
Daddy’s mouth turned down.
“And you know what?” Mommy said. “They all re-flect the same concern. They all, cared so much about not causing ecological and cultural imbalance on Genji and Chujo. Were so fucking concerned about human contami-nation. And all the time we humans were completely, to-tally irrelevant. Don’t you think that’s funny?”
Daddy said, “I’m not sure it’s true.”
“Yes, you are. You know it. All the ecological bal-ances, all the cultural disasters, were caused by the Mura-sakians themselves. Not by us. And now they’re being corrected by the Murasakians themselves, and not all our science or religion or so-called ‘art’ or anything else has made the slightest difference to the whole weird process. Isn’t that true?”
Daddy was silent.
–How does it feel to be completely irrelevant, Bruce? How do you stand it?”
Daddy glanced down at Rilla. “That’s enough, Jane. Please don’t start again.... “
“And do you know why we’re irrelevant on Genji and Chujo? Because it’s not our system, Bruce.
We can’t even eat the food, breathe most of the air—we don’t belong here. Even our science doesn’t belong here. Science observes things in order to effect beneficial change, Bruce. You knew that once.
There is nothing we can ever change here. Nothing.”
Daddy said, his voice thick, “Not again, Jane. I brought Rilla here to say good-bye. Just that.”
“Just that. ‘Just that.’ A First Conciliator you bought and paid for decides who gets custody of my daughter and you—”
“That’s not true. Jane! Not even a word of it!”
Rilla saw a place to say something. Holding on to Daddy’s hand very tight, she said, “I wanted to stay on Genji, Mommy. I wanted to. I told Mr. Dane that.”
Mommy didn’t say anything. Suddenly she hugged Rilla so tight Rilla couldn’t breathe. “Mommy!
You’re hurting me!” ‘
Abruptly, Mommy let her go. Then she was pushing them out of the cabin, closing the door. “Go!
Go! Take her!”
Daddy picked up Rilla, who was too old to be picked up, and ran down the ship corridor. He didn’t stop until he got to the shuttle bay, where he set her down, knelt, and brought his face close to hers.
“Rilla—are you sure? There won’t be another ship from Earth for at least three years standard, you know. Are you sure?”
Rilla said, –I’m sure.”
“And I ... I know I’m not the best father for you, I get so caught up in my work “
Rilla hated it when he got like this. It was so much better when he just did the work, letting her do what she wanted to. She was all right, she had Tmafekitch and the other Ihrdizu.... When Daddy got like this, she almost de-spised him. That feeling frightened her. So she said coldly. “Don’t start again, Daddy.
Please.”
After that, Daddy got quiet. Rilla felt herself grow quieter, too.. But it wasn’t until they were in the shuttle, returning to Genji, that she spoke again.
“Daddy—I didn’t tell Mommy that Mr. Dane isn’t going to stay on Genji. I was going to, because I thought .she might want to know who else was going to make the trip with her, but then I didn’t. Was that right?”
Daddy brushed his face with his hand. “That was right, Rilla.”
“Daddy—are we unimportant to Genji, like Mommy said?”
Daddy sucked in his cheeks. “Yes.”
“Then ... then why are you staying? I mean, I know why I’m staying, because I was born here”—Rita Byrne and Seigi Minoru and Cade Anson and me—“but why are you? If you’re completely unimportant to Genji?”
