IGMS Issue 42 Read online

  The memories fade. I keep my senses open and alert, letting the past bleed into my conscious mind.

  Time passes like a message with no words, each unchanging moment streaming one into another. The farther I go, the more the hunger inside me lessens. Soon the ache is gone and all that is left is a formless void. And yet I feel just as compelled to carry on, to search, even if I cannot identify a purpose.

  Eventually, the ducts open with sporadic grates. Through them, the ship's interior lies exposed. To my left, a column of meats march down a wide and lengthy corridor. Below me, meats sit along the beeps, whirls and glow of wall spanning machines. And farther on, a room where meats twist, stretch and foam beneath water cascading from the underside of orbs and a fretwork of pipes that spirals toward the ceiling.

  Here, they've shed their outer skin, exposing plain the morphological variance of their species. While body size and height falls into a spectrum, an obvious disparity asserts itself. One stock tends to be smaller, higher pitched, dripping bulbous mounds of flesh from the center of their thorax. The other stock tends to be larger, lower pitched, bearing a drooping proboscis from their lower pelvis. My insides warm at the sight of them, an instinct which I cannot yet discern. But with my hunger gone there's no meaning to the sensation.

  I press on.

  After slinking down a vertical duct, and running a great distance, I spot a meat lying alone in a narrow hexagonal room. From its ample reserves of sustenance, I gather it's a member of the proboscis stock. It gently taps fingers against a metal board upon its lap, causing erratic images to appear on the board's inset glass surface. The void inside me finally takes a new shape, and I know I have to slack it and enter the shredded flesh that I may propagate.

  I slack the grate and fall to greet it, wiggling along the ground to display the luster of my scales. As I rise to my hind legs, we watch each other, unmoving. The meat doesn't shout or scream like I feared it would. It simply taps the board a few more times and then curls its fingers in a tight grip, as if intending to use the board as a weapon.

  This response is acceptable, although a useless gesture. For the courage it shows, I will make the slacking more precise, inducing less pain. Even if it hasn't earned the honor of having its eyes clacked up and swallowed.

  I slither, but do not leap. Because the door slides aside, revealing a multitude of meats standing in the corridor. Did they know I would be drawn here? Have they guessed I intend to propagate, the same as my predecessor before me? Or did this meat simply warn its kin stock somehow?

  It's pointless to speculate. If the answer is encoded somewhere inside me I haven't found it yet -- and there's no time to waste. With the grate so far above me now, a suitable plan must be made if I am to escape.

  The idea comes at once. One quick slack and my intended propagation-meat's stomach opens into strands. It screams as I enter through the gash, tucking my tail in after me. Just in case, I end its life by slacking its heart. While it deserves better, deserves merging, I cannot risk it crawling toward the hallway with me stuffed inside.

  The meats howl as one, an undulating chorus that's all but smothered by the roar of orange fire erupting from their weapons. The intended propagation-meat's moist innards keep me safe. I slack out my legs through the cover of its flesh, using it as a shield while I climb. The extra weight makes movement difficult, and anchoring my claws into the scale-thin alloy walls are all that keeps me from falling. When I reach the grate again, I disengage from my flesh-shell, exploding from the initial stomach wound into the duct beyond.

  Again, through the distance, their garble-noise drifts into a stalking quiet. I resume a slower pace, this time not by choice. My muscles seize and my heartbeat labors, forcing a dulling pain to course throughout my body. For a second, all I can do is slack the floor and hold on.

  The memories have already revealed the succinctness of my kind's lifespan, the flicker of time that separates a spawn from his predecessor and a predecessor from his spawn. But instead of despair, I feel peace. A life spent in darkness and shadows, and fleeing to survive is no life at all.

  I only hope my spawn will fare better. But before I can concern myself with him, I still need to find a suitable casing. A meat ripe with sustenance to ensure the cycle of rebirth repeats again.

  The meats are alerted to me; no one remains alone. They wait, armed and ready for my passing. A few of them fire into the ducts -- perhaps hoping to catch me by surprise. It works, to a degree. My skin warms from a few lucky bursts, but none are concentrated enough to pass damage to my dermis.

  It isn't long before I feel my bio-systems struggling to maintain, my strength draining away. Memories converge on me, like hunters on a helpless prey.

  I see the coming of the bipedal meats, the descent of their ship into a plain on our new world. They capture my immediate predecessor and a few of his kin, bringing them aboard a ship and stuffing them into cages. But the meats don't realize the strength of our clack or the power of our slacking.

  My predecessor and his kin escape into the ducts. The hunt begins anew -- this time not as a race for prey through plains and forests in the full embrace of sunlight, but stalking them from the cover of darkness. Except, they are greatly outnumbered and become the hunted instead. Each kin-line is cornered and killed, leaving my immediate predecessor alone.

  I sense his solitude, feel his grief. And then I hear the last of his words before his life force is snuffed completely, before he released his essence as well as the seed of my rebirth. When you rise, they will come for you. You must be strong. You must be ready.

  I arch my head; the pride wells up within me. Though my body weakens and my life force slips away, I will not give up. For the sake of my predecessor, for the sake of my spawn and the continuance of our line, somehow I will struggle on.

  In a room of humming machines and dim lights, I see another meat with absent outer skin, pacing before a hemispherical console. This one is different than the rest, having neither mounds of flesh nor limp proboscis. I slack and drop to the floor, wiggle up beside it and rise to my hind legs.

  Like with the first intended propagation-meat, this one doesn't scream. It considers me in silence, eyes wide and unblinking. It holds itself with elegant composure -- standing tall, shoulders and arms framing a clear pathway to its insides -- and opens its mouth into a perfect O. At once, a hollow sound emanates from several black boxes mounted to the corners of the walls.

  Though the meaning of their language continues to escape me, the supplicatory tone relates enough of its intentions: it means to send a warning to its kin stock to give us privacy until our merging is complete. This one truly understands its place, and for that profound perception I'll clack its eyes and savor the flavor on my tongue. No greater honor can I bestow.

  I gather my remaining strength and slither-leap for the last time. My teeth clack its eyes, even as my claws slack its stomach. Then I squeeze through the skin fragments to rest inside the comfort of its belly.

  But there's something off, something wrong. The eyes in my mouth have a hard metal core and, while the entrails around me are moist, the flesh is cool and its blood a bitter chemical concoction. It's only a machine with meat semblance alone.

  The time to choose another meat for merging has passed. My body has all but shut down. I have failed. My ascendency is worthless and my triumph unrealized. I beg forgiveness from my spawn and hope he will survive in the stasis of the seed until, by fate or chance, he's planted into a genuine, fertile host.

  Outside, the metallic grind of the door announces it has opened and stomps against the floor reveal the meats have entered in. I listen, trying to hold on as long as I can, encoding as much as possible so that -- if rebirth comes again -- my spawn will know his fate.

  I hear both proboscis stock and mound stock volley incoherent bellows back and forth and, for a moment, the roar of fire licks through the entrance to my resting place. A meat barks in fury and the fire dies, restoring coolness to my
flank. Then the meat-machine jolts and vibrates, as if it's moving, as if it's carrying me away. I can imagine the many corridors it marches down, prodded from behind by the taunting garble-noise of sustenance my spawn will never clack.

  Another door grinds apart and, soon, I feel the meat-machine dip before falling still upon its back. A hiss descends all around us, smothering us in silence. The air grows stale and I'm enveloped in a cloud of cold so sharp it penetrates and dulls my senses. It's hard to think. My limbs go stiff and, when my body locks in place, I know the end has come at last.

  If you ever rise, my spawn, the bipedal meats will have you outnumbered. Beware their meat machines, bearing an edifice of life, but possessing no sustenance. And always remember: the darkness is your strength. Make it your domain, your shelter so that you can survive and so that our line will endure through you.

  May you find triumph one day, absent merging, just as our ancient predecessors found on each new world that became our home.

  Release.

  Visitors, Chapter 1

  by Orson Scott Card

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  Copies

  The Place:

  From the surface of the planet Garden, it looks like a plateau surrounded by a steep cliff, with a mountain in the middle. But from space, it is plain that the plateau is a huge crater, and the mountain is its center point.

  Buried deep beneath that central mountain is a starship. It crashed into the planet Garden 11,203 years ago.

  Yet the starship was launched from near-Earth orbit only nineteen years ago. It journeyed seven years, then made the jump that was meant to create an anomaly in spacetime and appear near Garden instantaneously.

  It was as instantaneous to Ram Odin, the pilot of the starship -- the only living person awake on the starship.

  But compared to the surrounding universe, the ship arrived 11,191 years before it made the jump.

  In the process, it divided into nineteen ships, one for each of the onboard computers that calculated the jump. All those ships contained a duplicate of Ram Odin, along with all the other humans lying in stasis, waiting to arrive at the world they would colonize.

  All nineteen ships were deliberately crashed into the surface of the planet Garden. The simultaneous impact slowed the rotation of the planet, lengthening the day. Each impact formed a crater. Protected by anti-inertial and anti-collision fields, all the starships and their colonists survived.

  Nineteen colonies were created, each separated from the others by a psychoactive field called "the Wall."

  This starship is in the middle of the wallfold called Vadeshfold.

  The People:

  In the conetrol room of the starship, there are either four men, or three, or two, or one, depending on how you count them.

  One of them is the sole surviving Ram Odin. If you say that there is only one man in the control room, he is that man. He has survived all these centuries by rising out of stasis for only one day in each fifty years, or sometimes for one week after a hundred years -- whatever is needed in order to make the decisions that the ship's computers are not competent to make without him.

  Another of them looks like an adult man, and speaks like one, but he is really a machine, an expendable. He is called Vadeshex. All the humans in his colony were wiped out in terrible warfare more than ten thousand years before. In the years since then, he has devoted himself to creating a version of a native parasite that might be a suitable symbiotic partner for humans, if they ever came to Vadeshfold again.

  The two other men were born as a single human being named Rigg Sessamekesh, fifteen years before the present day. Arguably they are not men but boys.

  Both of them wear upon their heads, half-covering their faces, the symbiotic facemask created by Vadeshex. The facemask penetrates their brains and bodies, enhancing their senses, quickening their movements, strengthening their bodies, so that some might consider them no longer to be human at all, but rather some strange new hybrid, only half human at best.

  The Situation:

  A half hour ago, Ram Odin attempted to murder Rigg, but with his faster reflexes, Rigg avoided him. Then, using the time-shifting power he was born with, he went back half an hour in time and preventively killed Ram Odin. It was not just a matter of self-defense. Rigg believed that it was Ram Odin whose actions were destined to destroy the world.

  Then Rigg went forward two years and saw that eliminating Ram Odin had done nothing to prevent the complete destruction of the human race on Garden. Far from being the worst menace to the humans of Garden, Ram Odin was the only source of information Rigg would need to figure out how to save Garden. So he went back in time and prevented himself from killing Ram Odin, and Ram Odin from killing the earlier version of Rigg.

  The result was that now there were two copies of Rigg -- the one who had done the killing, then learned it had done no good and returned; and the one who had been prevented from doing the killing or being killed, who had not experienced the inevitable coming of the Destroyers, and who now called himself Noxon, recognizing that he could never be the same person as the other Rigg.

  Thus there are four men, by stature and general shape: Ram Odin, Rigg, Noxon, and Vadeshex.

  But Vadeshex is not a living organism, so there are only three men.

  Rigg and Noxon are really one person, divided into two separate beings half an hour ago. So there are only two genetically and biographically distinct men.

  The Riggs are only fifteen years old by calendar. Older than that by the number of days they have lived through, then repeated, but still they are only boys, not men.

  And the Riggs are both deeply and permanently connected to the alien facemask, making them by some reckonings only half human, and by other reckonings not human at all.

  So only Ram Odin, of all the four, is a pure man; yet he is weakest of them all.

  Far away, in another wallfold, Rigg's sister Param and Rigg's friend Umbo also have power over the flow of time, and are also working to save the world of Garden from the Destroyers. But it is these four in Vadeshfold who among them have control over a starship; it is these four who know that a version of Ram Odin is still alive; and it is these four who must now decide what each of them will do in order to save the human race on Garden.

  For the one thing that never changes is that, despite many attempts to reshape history by the manipulation of time, the Visitors come from Earth, see what the human race has become in the nineteen wallfolds of Garden, and then send the Destroyers to blast all nineteen civilizations into oblivion.

  The Conversation:

  "The biggest problem we have is ignorance," said Rigg Noxon. "We don't know what causes the people of Earth to decide to destroy our whole world." Though in fact the biggest problem he was having at the moment was the realization that he was capable of killing someone in cold blood.

  It was the other Rigg who had actually done the killing, but Rigg Noxon knew that they were the same person. If Rigg had not come back and prevented the killings, Noxon would certainly have done just what Rigg did. Only now, because he hadn't taken those actions, both Noxon and Rigg continued to exist as separate people with nearly identical pasts.

  Am I a killer, because I know I could and would commit murder? Or am I innocent, because something prevented me from doing it? After all, the person who prevented me was myself. A version of myself.

  The killer version.

  "Which is why your friends have to allow the mice from Odinfold to go back to Earth with the Visitors," said Ram Odin.

  "They're deciding whether to stop themselves from warning the Visitors about the stowaway mice," said Rigg-the-killer.

  Ram Odin shook his head. "Why is it up to them? You go back and prevent them from giving warning."

  "They had good reason for preventing the mice from getting aboard the Visitors' ship," said Rigg-the-killer. "The mice weren't going back to find out what happened. They were infected with a disease which was no doubt desig
ned to wipe out the human race on Earth."

  "When you say 'no doubt' it means that there is reason to doubt," said Ram Odin. "People only say 'no doubt' when they know they're making a judgment based on insufficient information."

  "They don't have facemasks," said Rigg Noxon. "They can't hear the mice or talk to them. They can't ask."

  "You can hear them," said Ram Odin. "You can ask."

  "We don't necessarily believe the mice," said Rigg-the-killer. "They already killed Param once. Our goal is to save the human race on Garden, not provide mousekind with a depopulated Earth for them to inherit."

  "There are too many players in this game," said Ram Odin.

  "The mice were planning to take several billion of them out of the game entirely," said Rigg-the-killer.

  "Not all the players are equal," said Ram Odin. "Make a decision and make it stick."

  "You've been alone with the expendables far too long," said Rigg Noxon. "You think because you can play God with other people's lives, you have a right to do it."

  "You think," added Rigg-the-killer, "that because you've been doing it for so long, you're fit to do it."

  "Power is power," said Ram Odin. "If you have it, then it's yours to use."

  "The sheer stupidity of that statement," said Rigg-the-killer, "makes me wonder how Garden struggled along for eleven thousand years with you in control."

  "A child lectures an eleven-thousand-year-old man," said Ram Odin.

  "There are thousands of examples in history," said Rigg-the-killer, "of people with power who used it in ways that ended up destroying their power and, usually, a whole lot of innocent people, too."

  Rigg Noxon listened to his other self and realized: Having killed Ram Odin changed him. Rigg Noxon would not have treated Ram that way -- as if his statements were worthless. Rigg Noxon would have tried to take them into account. Rigg Noxon would have spoken as youth to adult. But Rigg-the-killer must still be full of anger toward Ram Odin, who had, after all, tried to kill Rigg first.