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 July 2007
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Daughters of Prime Page 1 • Page 2
"SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, Sister." Alpha's voice rose from implants in Cara's ears, breaking her concentration as she finished calibrating the integration chamber. "We've got a problem." Cara turned, climbed from the chamber, and stepped out into the long shadows of cliff-side trees. The hatch closed behind her, hissing to an airtight seal. "Go ahead, Alpha." An implant in Cara's hyoid conveyed her voice to a transmitter in the back of her head. From there her words traveled straight up to the mission orbiter. "Break it to me gently." Despite the 35,000 kilometers that separated orbiter and base, the answer when it came sounded as close as Cara's own thoughts. "The surveillance flier's gone down." Cara winced as she turned toward a stand of trees that grew along the edge of her cliff-top base. "Tell me what happened." She eased toward the precipice. Below the ridge, a forest canopy extended unbroken toward a plowed field. Beyond the field stood a wall of woven wood and pointed stakes. The field lay empty and silent, shadows pooling in the furrows while villagers rested behind the wall. This was their communal hour, a time that Cara usually spent eavesdropping, watching the natives with the help of a tiny drone that could hover undetected above the settlement. But this evening the camp's integrator had required attention, forcing Cara to leave Alpha in charge of monitoring the flier. "I can't figure it," Alpha said. "It was functioning fine. Take a look." A window appeared in Cara's cyberoptic field, an ineye projection from corneal implants, powered by cybernetic neurons that ran from the back of her head to the interior of her eyes. The window displayed the drone's last few seconds of visuals: an aerial view of villagers lounging between huts of woven reeds. Everything appeared normal. But then, abruptly, the image pitched: the village slid from view, replaced by a green blur that rose to fill the digital frame. After that, the window vanished. "So the drone went down in the trees." Cara felt relieved that the flier's arc had carried it away from the village. "Yes," Alpha said. "It's in the forest. That's the good news." A new window opened, framing an orbital shot of the jungle canopy. Dimmed by distance and atmospheric distortion, the visual lacked the clarity of the flier's image. "It went down here." A circle appeared, highlighting the site. "Is the homing beacon operating?" "Yes. For now." Cara knew she had to retrieve the machine while the natives were at home. She turned, looking toward the integration chamber, newly calibrated and primed to receive the orbital beams that would transmute the packets of raw matter she had placed within the central kiln. Mission protocol required her to maintain the chamber in a state of readiness, thus allowing for short-notice transmissions of emergency equipment or, in the event that she became incapacitated, the teleportation of a new field observer. Alpha said. "If you leave now, you'll be back before dark." Cara checked the sky: deep blue at zenith, golden yellow beyond the village. "All right. I'm going." She walked through the clearing, continuing until she reached the geodesic tent that served as her home. From the front door, she saw the grave of her predecessor, the daughter of Prime who had piloted the lander on its one-way flight from the orbiter. "I'd better make a statement." "Go ahead. Recording." Following procedure, Cara stated her designation and position: "Cara Gamma. Durgan Outpost." She readied her excursion pack as she spoke, folding her portable rover, lashing it to her shoulder harness. "I'm going to the forest to retrieve a downed flier. Projected off-base time: sixty minutes." She donned the pack and tightened the straps. "Required safeguards are in place. Integrator is primed and calibrated. Alpha will transmit a replacement if I'm out of contact for more than twelve hours. End statement." Alpha said, "Want a playback?" "No. Send it. It's fine." "Sending now." The statement was a formality, a document for clerics who would one day manage the estate of Prime. Cara did not wait for a reply. The Ministry was over thirty parsecs away. Even if all went well, she would be dead before her words crossed the galactic arm. CARA DESCENDED the cliff's eastern face, keeping the crag between her and the village until she reached the forest floor. There, enveloped in long shadows and the drone of insects, she removed the rover from its harness and extended the control shaft. Nearby, a cloud of flies swarmed above the carcass of a large slug. The flies ignored her. They hunted by smell, and her scent lacked the chemical triggers that attracted them. Working in peace, she kicked down the rover's pedals, locking them into place on either side of a single gyro-balanced wheel. Then she climbed on, leaned forward, and took off—stirring the swarm with the wind of her passing. The rover cruised at forty klicks, its proprioception sensors maintaining stability as she leaned forward on the pedals. Gripping the control shaft, she bounded through the forest, over a carpet of brittle vegetation, and up onto the remnant of an ancient road that extended for nearly a kilometer before vanishing back into the forest loam. Surveys indicated that the road had once connected a string of settlements, all but one of which were now abandoned and overgrown. Together, the ruins presented a conundrum that she hoped to understand better before revealing herself to the island's remaining inhabitants. The jungle thinned as Cara reached a swift-moving stream. Spreading branches rose above her, framing a patch of clear sky as she dismounted at the water's edge. Then, with the rover once again folded against her back, she stepped across a makeshift bridge of stones and emerged onto the far bank. The flier was close, broadcasting its location from a tangled hollow. She hurried toward it, following the signal into the shadows of a brushwood cove. Then she stopped, recoiling as she saw what waited within. She wanted to run, but it was too late. A short figure stood before her, meeting her gaze with nictitating eyes. It was a villager. On his chest, swinging from a neckband of braided reeds, hung a twelve-centimeter disk of carbon fiber and molded plastic. She recognized the pendant. It was her fallen flier. For a moment, Cara and the creature stood eyeing each other through the shadows: the villager hunching his shoulders in a posture of respect, Cara leaning back, stunned by the realization that her days of detached observation were over. THIS TIME, it was Cara's turn to voice the alarm. To Alpha, she said: "Sister, we've got a problem." The creature opened his jaws, silencing her with a loud click. Other sounds followed, shrill warbles from spiracle nostrils, clicks and chirps from a triangular mouth. There was nothing like it in human speech, except perhaps the self-harmonies of Tibetan throat singers or the glottal clicking of the ancient Khoikhoins of South Africa. Nevertheless, after months of eavesdropping, Cara had become familiar with the sounds. Now, standing before the creature, she listened carefully, getting the gist of his words: "I am Long-Eyes," he said. "You are a X-ooh. Sent by X-ah." She knew the word X-ah, a throaty click followed by a low-vowel sigh, but its meaning could be tricky. Depending on inflection, it could mean either fate or spirit. The other word, X-ooh, was more mysterious. She had heard it before, spoken in reverent whispers. She had assumed it was a deity. Long-Eyes stared, waiting. Alpha said, "You need to answer him." Cara hesitated. Alpha sent a prompt, keying it directly into Cara's view. It was a simple greeting, augmented with symbols for alien phonemes: X for glottal click, Ñ for nasalized whistle. "Talk to him, Sister!" Cara gave it her best, wishing she had been endowed with forehead nostrils to fill in the higher sounds: "Greetings, Long-Eyes. I am Cara." Long-Eyes raised his hands, fingers clenched in amazement. "X-aha." He pronounced the C as a click, giving the name an intonation similar to X-ah. Alpha said, "I think you just told him you're a spirit." But Long-Eyes seemed more delighted than afraid. He lowered his head, clicking: "You are X-aha, the X-ooh from X-ah!" He bowed lower, removing the braided twine that held the flier to his chest. "Yours," he said, handing her the broken drone. She took it, wondering at his bland acceptance of the tiny machine. He could not have seen it before it fell, and yet he handled it as if he had known about it for some time. "They fell," he said, gesturing toward the drone. "I retrieved them." "Them?" She didn't understand. "You retrieved them?" He spoke again, repeating himself, and this time she discerned the subtle inflection that rendered the pronoun singular. This time, she understood. He had said it, not them: "It fell. I retrieved it. For you." All right. One question answered. But she was still confused. "How did you know?" She gestured, compensating for her uneven diction. "How did you know about me?" "Know?" He considered the question. "We have always known…for long times…ever since your sister came to the hills." He turned, facing the cliffs that stood beyond the wall of trees. "She came at night, flying quiet and dark. But we knew. I knew. Long-Eyes saw." Cara shivered. Quiet and dark was an apt description of the lander. It flew on ionic wind, without visible exhaust or guiding lights. Until now, she had never considered that the villagers might have seen it. Indeed, her months of eavesdropping had turned up no indication that the villagers knew they were being observed. Yet here was Long-Eyes telling her differently. "You knew?" she asked. "You knew about my predecessor?" "Yes. First about her. Then about you. When we heard the clear-sky thunder, we knew that you had come to take her place." Teleportation was far from silent. The power beams that accompanied orbit-to-ground transmission gave off thunderous roars that, loud as they were, should not have attracted attention on an island of frequent storms. But evidently they had. Long-Eyes said, "X-ah brought you here to help us. It put you on the cliff, and now it has brought you to me." "No. That's not the way it is. I'm—" He turned away as she struggled with the words. "We need to go now," he said. "X-ah promised to protect me until you came. But now that you are here — " He paused, cocking his head, listening to the forest. "We must hurry before it comes." "Before what comes?" He glanced at her. Softly, he muttered: "X-eeÑa." Cara covered her mouth, subvocing to Alpha: "What'd he say?" "No idea." "Check." "Doing it now." A pause, and then: "Not in our database. We're hearing the word for the first time." She played it back, letting Cara hear it again: X-eeÑa. To Long-Eyes, Cara said, "I don't know that word." "Yes. I understand. The X-ooh is as ignorant as it is powerful." "Ignorant?" He gestured toward her flier. "You studied our voices. You listened, but some things are best not spoken aloud." "But you're speaking them now." "Yes. Because you are asking." He turned, moving toward another remnant of forest road. She hurried after him. "I'm not — " she struggled for the words. "I'm not…what you think." He walked faster, his muscular feet slapping the hard-packed clay. She broke into a jog, keeping pace. "I'm not a X-ooh," she said. "Whatever a X-ooh is, I'm not—" He stopped walking, gesturing for silence. In the distance, beyond the forest brume, something stirred—a sound like the thumping of massive feet. Softly, Long-Eyes muttered: "It's coming." "It?" The sound changed course. She turned, following his gaze. To the south, beyond the point where distant trees merged to form a wall of trunks and shadows, the sound began moving away, heading toward the village. Long-Eyes gestured to her shoulder pack. "The running wheel," he said. "You need to hurry." Cara reached around, unhitching the rover from its stays. "You want me to use this?" "Yes!" His nostrils flared. "Hurry!" "Hurry where?" "To the village." She gripped the rover, swinging it by its handle to extend the control shaft. "But it can only carry me." "Yes! You go!" She kicked the pedals into place. "Go to the field," Long-Eyes said. "Use your power. Kill the X-eeÑa!" "Kill it?" "We will help. We will distract it. We will make it an easy target for your power. Then you will kill it." She turned from Long-Eyes, trying to remain calm as she called to Alpha. "What do I do?" She spoke aloud, no longer subvocing. "Tell me what to do!" Long-Eyes stared, apparently intrigued by the cadence of human speech. Alpha said, "Go to the field." "And do what?" "What you're there for. Observe. Record what happens." It was the advice of someone who had nothing to lose. If Cara were killed in action, the mission would continue with a fresh fieldworker, teleported from the orbiter's files, integrated within the chamber that Cara had primed and calibrated before leaving the base. The replacement would take possession of the outpost, review the records, and continue the study. Long-Eyes said, "You need to hurry. Go to the field. Use your power. Kill the X-eeÑa!" Cara leaped onto the rover, leaned forward, and accelerated toward the village. SHE VEERED WEST, cutting a beeline toward the field, not decelerating until the trees thinned and the ground angled upward. Straight ahead, coalescing through the ferns and hanging fungi, the village stood backlit by evening sun. She changed course, turning left, steering beneath a cover of low-hanging branches…. The gyros cut out as she hopped from the pedals. She dropped to her knees, coming to rest behind a clump of ferns. Before her, the field stretched toward the village wall. Above the gate, lookouts peered between fire-hardened stakes, listening as the approaching thumps grew louder, coming closer…. A flock of leather-winged slugs leapt from the trees, soaring over the field on jets of vented air, scattering into the dusky sky as a massive head emerged from the jungle. It hovered two meters from the ground, gliding outward on the end of a powerful neck. Alpha said, "I'm recording your visuals, but the Ministry's still going to want your impressions. Better start talking." Cara swallowed, watching the thing as it stepped onto the field, its profile so unnervingly alien that it seemed to shift before her—altering as her mind wrestled with the contours of its strangeness. "First impression?" She glanced at the misshapen head, shielding her eyes as it passed before the sun. "It's hideous!" The creature turned, cutting the sunlight into flaring rays. "Its head is as big as I am." It pivoted, surveying the field. "Its jaws are misaligned, with the mandible extending beyond the snout." She squinted, trying to comprehend. "It's got a face like a deep-sea predator…a viperfish…that's the closest—" The beast roared, rearing its head, opening its jaws. She saw it then. The lower jaw was not a jaw at all. Rather than swinging downward, it split vertically—cleaving at the chin, becoming a pair of muscular limbs, each anchored beneath the head and sporting fanglike claws. And now, with those limbs flexing wide, she saw the beast's true mouth—an orifice near the top of the throat, chinless as the maw of a shark. She saw it for a second, and then the monster turned again, staring at the wall. It seemed to be waiting. Cara studied its profile. "I'm trying to get a handle on the physiology, but I keep getting lost. It has avian hips, but it's wingless—no forward appendages other than the ones that cover its mouth. The head is counterbalanced by a gigantic tail. It's obviously warm-blooded, agile, swift. I'm going to need months to review these visuals, Alpha. This thing's like nothing I've—" A tremor moved through the village wall. The animal leaned forward, lowering its head as the palisade gate stuttered back along wooden runners, cracking open to form a gap barely wide enough for a villager to squeeze through. "Something's happening." She saw movement within the gap. A shadow emerged, coalescing into a village child. Another followed. Then another. They walked with halting steps, heads bowed, shoulders hunched—goslings with pear-shaped bodies. Their arms, folded like wings, shivered beneath capes of woven reeds. Then the gate skidded back, closing tight while the procession hurried across the field. The animal watched, its tail twitching like a sputtering cable. Cara muttered, "I don't believe what I'm seeing." The beast moved forward. "This looks like a sacrifice." The children gathered in a tight huddle, heads together, shoulders locked. Cara stiffened. "I can't watch this." Alpha said nothing. The scene's horror had taken her voice. The beast crouched, folding its long legs, lowering the arch of its hips until the mandible arms touched the ground. Cara tried turning away. But she couldn't. It was her duty to watch, record, understand. And when it was over, when the beast had lopped the pear-shaped bodies into its crescent mouth and lumbered back into the forest, when all that remained of the children was an oval depression in the furrowed ground, then she finally mustered the strength to turn away. And when she did, she found that she was no longer alone amid the ferns. Long-Eyes stood behind her, panting from his race through the forest. "You did not kill it!" He stood erect, shoulders stiff, hands clenched—an angry pose. "The beast stayed in place. We gave you an easy mark. But you did not kill it!" Wailing voices rose from the village. The gate opened, scraping back once more. Cara tried watching to see if more villagers were coming out, but Long-Eyes stepped in front of her, standing close, blocking her view. "You did not use your power," he said. "Power?" "You are a X-ooh." His faced darkened, turning sanguine near the spiracle ridge above his eyes. "The X-ah delivered you to help us. The X-ah provided and you did not—" "No!" she shouted back. "Not me. I'm—" She paused. How could she even begin to explain what she truly was? Long-Eyes spared her the effort. "Your version of who you are doesn't matter. For us you are a X-ooh." He reached out, grasping her shoulders, his hands hot with anger. She pulled away. To Alpha, she muttered, "What do I do?" "Return to base." "But he's asking for help." "Not your job, Sister. Return to base." Long-Eyes watched, cocking his head as Cara spoke to empty air. And then, feeling overwhelmed, Cara mounted her rover and whirred away, racing for the trees, not looking back, not even thinking about what she would do if she met the X-eeÑa in the forest. For the moment, all that mattered was getting back to the illusion of objective study, away from the problem that was not hers. The camp was as Cara had left it, but the setting sun had deepened its contours, bathing everything with low-angled light. Her shadow followed her, extending from her heels like an elongated skid, moving beside her as she turned toward her predecessor's grave— a cairn of rocks with a hand auger drill for a headstone. Her predecessor had used the drill to draw core samples from the forest floor. Now the tool tossed a cruciform silhouette across the grave. Cara looked left and doubleblinked, disengaging the streaming interface with the orbiter, opting for five minutes of privacy as she addressed the spirit of the woman within the cairn. "What should we do?" she asked, sitting by the grave, leaning back to search her own thoughts for an answer. Her mind calmed. She closed her eyes, recalling the life of another Cara—an athlete with an aptitude for language and science, a twenty-three-year-old protégé named Cara Randall…. As the inheritor of Randall's memories, Cara Gamma carried impressions of places that she herself had never been: the Ministry's cloistered lectoria, flight simulators, and exercise chambers. She recalled the joys of study, accessing the cybernetic wisdom of a hundred years of theoretical xenthropology. And when the call went out for volunteers to serve as fieldworkers on the Ministry's growing catalogue of unexplored worlds, she took the vows and passed through the one-way doors that led to the chamber of scanning and deconstruction. She remembered the hiss of the closing seal and the dim pause that preceded the blinding light. Randall's memories ended with that flash, but Cara Gamma did not need inherited recollections to know what happened next. The facts were all matters of procedure. The deconstructing flash transferred Randall's essence to a pair of identical crystals—one went into the Ministry vaults, the other into the AI system of an unwomanned vessel bound for a point of perturbation in the orbit of a fifth-magnitude star. Thus, the digitized Cara Randall became Cara Prime, the template for a series of lone observers who would study a planet no human had ever seen. The first reintegration of Prime occurred when the vessel drew close enough to verify the planet's existence. The shipboard computer activated the kiln, igniting the blocks of compacted matter that provided the substance for Cara Alpha—the first daughter of Prime. After climbing from the chamber, Alpha assumed the role of orbiting commander, and her first job, after checking herself for defects and wiggling into the piezoelectric unitard that powered her cybernetic system, was to verify the computer's assessment of the planet. What she found was a world inhabited by a sentient species that had migrated from its point of origin to occupy a vast triangular continent. Along the opposing shores of an inland sea, two protocities had settled into a state of protracted aggression. Likewise, in the hinterlands, warring tribes slaughtered each other for possession of fertile deltas and valleys. These were not good places to initiate ground-based observation, but looking elsewhere she found isolated settlements dotting the forests of coastal islands. It was on one of these islands that she found a village of docile agrarians who had moved beyond the study of war. They lived inland, away from beaches that would have left them vulnerable to attacks from the sea. There, Alpha began the study. After selecting the site, Alpha recalibrated the shipboard integrator and primed the kiln. Then she closed the hatch, activated the system, and gave life to Cara Beta. It was Beta's job to pilot the lander to the planet's surface. Once there, she set up camp and began the first phase of ground observation. Two days passed without incident, and then, suddenly, Beta awoke to find herself facedown in the center of camp. She had blacked out. A day later, it happened again, only this time when she regained her senses she found herself lying dangerously close to the edge of the cliff. The next day, she blacked out twice in the morning, then once again in the afternoon. Each time, Alpha's voice brought her back, calling to her in tones that grew more anxious with each recurrence. Beta tried attributing the seizures to defects in her cybernetic interfaces, but when checks of those systems revealed nothing unusual, she and Alpha had no choice but to contemplate the grim alternative. The process of deconstruction and integration had a failure rate of point-four percent. Sometimes there were errors in the scans. Other times, data became corrupted during imprinting. Beyond that, with each repeated integration, there was a chance that fluctuations in power or disruptions of the data stream could result in a defective copy—a functioning integration that soon lost its physiological integrity. Not wanting to jeopardize the mission, Cara Beta instructed Alpha to send a replacement. Then, with her interfaces disengaged, Beta self-administered a lethal injection of morphine sulfate, stretched back beneath the lander's shadow, and entered a final blackout. Within the hour, Cara Gamma arrived to bury the remains.
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