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originalfiction2009-11-22 11:50 pm
mrcreek) wrote in originalfiction2009-11-22 11:50 pm
The Pioneer
Title: The Pioneer
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: PG for non-explicit references to reproductive biology, mild violence
Summary: A young hominid growing up on an alien world finds her peaceful life disrupted by shipwrecked space travelers.
Notes: The sequel to The Gardener. Contains spoilers for The Gardener, obviously. Approximately 9,000 words. Five chapters and an epilogue.
Chapter 1
Shebbin was a twelve-year old pioneer girl living on a frontier prairie farm with her parents. Unlike most other settler children in history, Shebbin had a prehensile tail, her parents were different species, and the frontier was a planet that had been devoid of life a generation ago.
Millions of years ago, a single human species had departed Earth in the diaspora. Different populations of humans had proceeded to evolve in unique ways. Shebbin's father, Yorel, still resembled the ancient humans. Her mother, Labinu, walked about on her knuckles instead of her tiny withered legs. Shebbin's heels were elevated off the ground like a backwards second pair of knees, and she leaned forward when she walked, balanced by her tail. Here skin was covered in pigment cells that she could change at will to display pictures. Before she had learned to consciously control the color of her skin, it had sometimes betrayed her. Once when she was little, her mother had asked her where the last honey tuber had gone. She had denied knowing, but an image of tiny Shebbin stuffing the sugary root in her mouth had flashed across her forehead.
Shebbin loved to help her father in the garden, where he showed her how to grow whatever food they wanted by fertilizing with the right chemical mixture. She loved to help her mother scan for radio signals from other worlds and translate them if necessary, to keep up with the galaxial news. Shebbin understood the four most common languages well, and she wondered if she would ever master hundreds, like her mother. Secretly, she had also taught herself the language of Yorel's people, which her parents spoke when they wanted to have what they thought was a private conversation.
Above all else, Shebbin loved to explore the teeming wildlands surrounding the farm. The meadows full of black herbs and shovel-nosed burrowers. The streams with their slimy spermatoids and copper-colored rock-huggers. The thickets where the great scalehounds hid and the branch sweepers sung melodically. Almost daily, Shebbin ran over the hills and valleys wearing fibrous sandals and a silken apron-like garment that left her tail, back, and forearms bare. She collected edible stalks, fruits, eggs, and small creatures and stuffed them in the large apron pocket on her chest. She also added interesting rocks, shells, or anything else that caught her eye. There was always something new to find. Closer to home, she liked to stroke the aging fanged vulture on its tattered wings that could no longer fly, and watch the comical antics of the land ray pups that Yorel was raising in memory of his late pets. All she lacked was a playmate with whom she could swap stories and confide secrets.
One crisp evening, Shebbin was helping her father to burn a large pile of inky ribbed fronds. They would use the ash to coax savory lobster lichen to sprout. The sweet smoke billowed into the twilight of the sky, the indigo color of which Shebbin was choosing to mimic on her skin.
"Hey Shades, what's happening in that fire, chemically?" quizzed Yorel, invoking the nickname that referenced her polychromatism.
An easy question. "Oxygen from the air and carbohydrates in the fronds are reacting to form water, carbon dioxide, and energy," replied Shebbin as if by rote, flashing the chemical equation on her forehead.
"Fascinating. And is that the only place this reaction is happening?" asked Yorel.
Shebin rolled her eyes. "No, Pa, obviously it's happening inside our bodies too, and in those onion bushes, and in that crinklebug laying eggs on that reed over there." She pointed with her tail.
Yorel continued to play dumb. "But in the fire, the reaction requires a high temperature. Now that bug might think she's one hot mama, but I disagree, so how can the same thing be happening..."
"Pa, you've taught me all of this a hundred times," exaggerated Shebbin exasperatedly. "The answer is enzymes. Enzymes can bring two other molecules close together so they can react without the high activation energy they would normally need. Enzymes make life without inferno possible. Check it out." She turned around and displayed a detailed diagram of the entire glycolysis pathway on her bare back.
"Shades! I didn't know you'd memorized all that! Good for you," praised Yorel.
Shebbin smiled proudly. Ostentatiously, she shrank the image, zooming outward through pictures of cells and tissues until an enormous crinklebug was ovipositing on her back. She looked over toward the real bug. "Look at all those eggs... " She paused. "Pa," she asked, hesitantly, "Am I ever going to..." She dropped the end of the question and looked at him expectantly.
He put a hand on her shoulder. "I know I've taught you about that, too. But maybe it's time for another talk, now that your a little older. What's that bug up to, anyway?"
"The bug is laying eggs that each contain a spore. The spore will sense the conditions in its environment and grow into whatever form would best survive under those circumstances. It could be another bug, or a tree, or even another me."
"Not another you, there's only one of you. But it could grow into your twin."
"But nothing ever grows into my twin. I'm the only one!" she said, with a hint of loneliness.
"Well, there are two kinds of spores, and only one kind can grow into a child. We don't know how common each kind is around here. And we also don't know the conditions that favor your form. We were just lucky to get you."
"And I make spores, too?"
"You do too, or you'll start soon. I don't really know how it will happen; you might notice it or you might not. Just remember, your mother and I are here to help you if your body ever does anything you don't understand."
"You and Ma don't make spores, though. You don't know what it's like."
"No, we don't make spores. Well, we kind of do, but it happens differently. Sort of like we make half-spores. I can make the boy half and she can make the girl half."
"I can only make whole spores. So does that mean I'm not really a girl?"
Yorel turned the smoldering leaves with his pitchfork. "Shades, that's a complicated question, and I'm not entirely sure I understand the answer, but I think you're old enough to try and understand it with me. See, your ancestors were a people that everyone called the buccaneers. I don't know what they called themselves, or what they thought of the word 'buccaneer,' and I guess you'll have to decide for yourself someday whether that's a term you want to embrace for yourself. There were boy buccaneers and girl buccaneers, just like your mother and me. Then one day they inserted their DNA into one of the spores. You are descended from that spore, Shades. Now, we've always called you our daughter, because you look like the girl buccaneers looked, as far as we know, but I think you could ask whether that decision has enough biological justification."
"Because I can't make a girl half-spores? Is that what it means to be a girl?"
"Well, basically, although there's a little more to it than that. Needing to have a partner to reproduce makes things a lot more complicated than it is for any spore form."
"But I'm the only person form you know. My needs my be different."
"It's true, Shades. This is all new for me, too. I really don't know what changes might in store as you transition into an adult; we'll have to wait and see. But in the end, it will really be up to you whether you want to keep thinking of yourself as a girl."
"I don't like not knowing what I am or what my body is going to do. I wish I were like you and Ma."
"Your mother and I don't know everything our bodies are going to do, either," chuckled her father. "For one thing, we don't know if our half-spores are compatible with each other, or, if they are, what kind of baby they'd make. There's no record of a man of my people marrying a woman of your mother's people, not for millions of years. We just keep trying, but it hasn't happened yet."
"At least you've got me, Pa."
"Hey, there's no 'at least,' Shades. You mean everything to us, you know that." He hugged her. They looked up at the sky, which was gradually filling with stars. While they gazed, a shooting star zipped over their heads.
"Look, Pa, a meteor! Maybe we'll get a whole shower tonight."
But it wasn't a meteor. It was a ship. Their peaceful life was about to change.
Chapter 2
Several days later, a man approached the farm atop some sort of dumpy-looking beast of burden. Shebbin, having never seen a hominid outside of her family, hid behind the well and peered out at him. His steed was making a honking sound loudly. The man was talking to himself at equal volume.
"I doubt these colonials have enough pure molybdenum to meet our needs. In fact, if they do, I'll pay them in silver. I have enough right here with me. The molybdenum does have to be pure. I don't want any more deaths. It was because if the molybdenum! There was plenty of extract..." As the man talked, he gestured energetically with all six of his arms.
Yorel and Labinu looked at each other as he approached. "We'd better make him feel welcome," muttered Yorel in his native tongue.
The rider arrived at their doorstep and halted. His steed was a female tapir, or rather, was descended from the tapirs of Earth. Her trunk had evolved to be long like an elephant's, her neck was graced with a mane of flowing locks like a mare's, and her skin was droopy like a basset hound's. The man had four legs, in addition to his six arms. The arms ended in hands of different shapes with varying numbers of nailed or clawed fingers. He wore a stark grey uniform which matched the tapir's barding.
"Welcome to our home, and to your new home world," greeted Labinu warmly in the language the traveler had been using. "I am Labinu, and this is my husband Yorel. Can I offer you any food or drink?"
"If you happen to want any molybdenum, we have plenty in our shed," piped in Yorel, gesturing at the storehouse. "No payment necessary; it's a gift."
"Lieutenant Muge," announced the rider, throwing open all three pairs of arms in a gesture of non-confrontation. "And I would love a drink."
The tapir extended her trunk and expelled a long series of loud honks: "Puhduhmuhmuhduhmbuh, yuhmkuhptunfruhmbuh, kuhduhtruhbuhyuhfuhpuhsuhfroot!"
"Captain?" asked Labinu. "So you're the ranking officer. Welcome. And that would be no trouble at all. Shebbin! Go fetch some cinnamon berries for the captain!"
Shebbin was puzzled. Had the tapir just said something in a language her mother spoke? She parsed the honks in her head, and realized the beast had said "Pardon me, madam, but I am Captain Froomba, and could I trouble you for a piece of fruit?" Remembering the task she was assigned, Shebbin ran to find the berries and adopted a pretty mottled pastel pattern in order to look her best.
When Shebbin offered the berry bunch to the tapir, the captain picked them up with her trunk and inserted them into her mouth. Shebbin understood her clearly when she honked, "Thank you, young primate."
Lieutenant Muge eyed Shebbin with a grim expression. "A buccaneer," he spat with disgust. Shebbin recoiled. She didn't like the way he looked at her, and up close, Muge's appearance would have been rather terrifying no matter where he was looking. His many muscular limbs didn't quite match each other or his thin torso, giving him a lopsided chimeric appearance. His facial features were sickly and skeletal. Most horrific of all, his olive skin was covered with thousands of millimeter-long white roundworms, just barely visible to the naked eye. They constantly crawled over his hands and face and swarmed in and out of his nostrils, mouth, ears, and tear ducts.
"This is our daughter, Shebbin," announced Yorel defiantly.
"Sir, are you ill?" asked Shebbin.
"I'm not ill, child," he growled, leering at her. "These are not parasites, but my closest companions. Like all members of my race, my shriveled and useless limbs were amputated at birth. I was grafted to these new limbs: longer limbs, stronger limbs, and most importantly, more limbs! My people have been grafting for thousands of generations, and it has served us well in battle. We used to lose a lot of good men to the buccaneers, but we beat those bloodthirsty pirates back, and they learned not to mess with us." He did not take his eyes off Shebbin. "At least I hope you've all learned that... Now, at first, we had to suppress our immune systems to make the grafts work, but gradually we lost our immune systems entirely, which was much more convenient. But that means I need an artificial immune system: my worm friends. They crawl through every inch of me, into every orifice, hunting and eating any germ they find."
"Pardon me, if you don't mind," interrupted Captain Froomba. "We are seeking laboratory-grade molybdenum to make repairs to our ship. You mentioned that you are in possession of some. We would be most grateful for it. As soon as we replace the molybdenum, we can leave you alone on this planet again. Thank you for your kindness."
"You're welcome," replied Yorel, "but I'm afraid you aren't going anywhere. This planet is quarantined, for it harbors a life form which, under conditions found elsewhere but fortunately not here, can cause a disease that has killed countless people on numerous worlds. Once here, you are not permitted to leave."
Lieutenant Muge looked shocked. "Never leave? Impossible. We cannot simply stay here."
"We're truly sorry," said Labinu. "But these aren't our rules. This settlement is probationary. If we allow any spore to travel into space, even if does no harm, the people of my homeworld will come and destroy this planet. We could send for a rescue vessel with a sterilization mechanism, but it would take several years to arrive."
"I'm sure you are familiar with the laws of relativity," said Yorel. "I'm sad to say your loved ones have probably passed on already. There's nothing to go back to. Rest assured that this planet provides everything necessary for a comfortable and fulfilling life." He mentally ticked off the many luxuries and social benefits that were conspicuously absent, but he had to at least try to sound cheerful.
"I'm sure this is all rather sudden news," said Labinu. "Come share a meal with us and stay the night. Things will seem less dire in the morning. And we've just begun to get to know each other. Captain, I've never met a sentient non-hominid. Tell me about your ancestry."
"My condolences, madam, that your first encounter is with such a humble specimen as myself," replied Froomba. "Long ago, a colony of geneticists discovered that the upregulation of a few key genes in the brain explains the intelligence difference between primates and other mammals, between humans and other primates, and, I suspect, madam, between yourself and my lieutenant." Labinu's head was much larger than the other hominids', permitting her extraordinary linguistic abilities. "They opened the taps on these genes in a large number of other species, leading to brainy rats, brainy seals, even brainy cattle. Of course, none of them had vocal chords, but they could communicate in other ways. My lineage has evolved on its own since then, and in particular I have gained the ability to mimic human speech with my nose."
"Yes, yes, it's all very interesting," groaned Muge, mildly insulted but accustomed to such slights. "But I'm afraid we are on a very important mission. Surely an exception can be made."
"I'm afraid we'll have to accept our situation," replied Froomba, "and remain."
"Need I remind you how urgent our mission is?" insisted Muge.
"Need I remind you who crashed our ship?" replied Froomba, and they began to argue. Shebbin realized that they had been similarly arguing when they arrived, but she had only understood Muge's half of the conversation.
The visitors stayed in the barn that night. Shebbin slept poorly, as she was troubled by many thoughts. Was it true what Muge had said, that the buccaneers were bloodthirsty? Her parents had never told her that. Was it her nature to be similarly violent, and her destiny to be despised by people across the universe? On the other hand, real buccaneers had real genders. She was something new. What was she, anyway? As an unrelated matter, she couldn't decided what she wanted the visitors to do. Instinctually, she wished for Muge to go as far away as possible, but she knew that would actually put them in even more danger. She endured nightmares in which Muge spread the disease to distant stars, told everyone to blame the freak genderless buccaneer child who had wrongly been permitted life and liberty, and roused an army of ships that came to obliterate her.
In the morning, the visitors had disappeared. Suspicious, Shebbin ran to the shed. All of the molybdenum, nearly two kilograms, was gone. They were still planning to repair their ship.
Shebbin's parents, however, seemed unconcerned. "We have to give them their breathing room and some time to make sense of their situation," said Labinu. "We can't keep a constant watch on them, or they'll definitely feel the need to leave. And I'm sure they know the penalties for transporting off of a quarantined planet. The captain seemed committed to obeying the rules."
"No, they're going to leave!" insisted Shebbin. "They took the molybdenum."
"They have to turn the wreckage of their ship into a home, now," explained Yorel. "Whatever they needed the molybdenum for, it's probably still useful. Maybe for converting the engine into a generator."
"I don't trust them," said Shebbin. "He said I was bloodthirsty."
"Shades," said Yorel, "we were waiting to tell you this when you were older, but it's true that the buccaneers were a fearsome people. When I was a young man, they nearly drove my whole planet's population extinct. And they have a long history of raids against your mother's ancestors. The only other buccaneer I've ever met - your twin - attacked us and we killed her."
Shebbin was hysterical. "What? How can that be true? How could you keep this from me?"
"We want you to understand..." began Labinu.
"Oh, I understand," she retorted. "And I don't want to talk about it anymore." In tears, she ran back out to the shed to be alone. Upset with her parents and needing to do something to fix the situation, she secretly resolved to follow the travelers back to their ship. She slid some tools into her apron pocket and strolled into the fields as if she were off on a typical carefree morning walk.
Before Shebbin's spore had differentiated into her, Yorel and Labinu had seeded the barren planet, then traveled off into deep space escorted by a ship from Labinu's homeworld. When they returned, the laws of relativity had allowed centuries to pass on the planet's surface, such that it was now habitable. Black vegetation had spread everywhere and filled the air with plenty of oxygen. No other hominids had made the journey. As a result, most of the planet was covered with wild and unexplored ecosystems. Shebbin now tromped boldly into this untamed wilderness.
Chapter 3
The travelers were easy to track. Captain Froomba had left deep footprints in the soft ground, had broken twigs and blades of grass with her bulk, and appeared to have devoured every fruit in her path. It was a warm, sunny day, and the chattering green globfoots were hopping about with gusto, easily locating any spoor left by tapir or man and making a show of carting it away to their underground burrows. Shebbin followed the trail through the familiar prairie hills and valleys until, by midafternoon, the terrain was no longer familiar. Soon she found herself navigating through a dense forest.
Pushing aside a leafy branch, Shebbin startled a gargantuan tuskmoose browsing amidst the shrubbery, and it crashed away through the woods on its bristly tentacles. Shebbin noticed that it had stripped most of the ebony leaves in the area, but it had ignored a tangle of unfamiliar thorny vines. She looked closer. The vines were populated with spherical-shell-dwellers the size of pinheads. They glided up and down among the thorns and short spiky hairs of the tendrils, expelling any other mesofauna they encountered. Shebbin inferred that the vines and the pinhead-shells had some sort of symbiotic relationship. But what kept the tuskmoose away? She grabbed a vine and flinched as the section in her had rapidly compressed to a tenth of its original length with a hissing sound, concentrating the thorns to discourage any large herbivore. She pinched a section further along the vine, and the same thing happened there. She stepped back and watched the pinhead-shells swarm over the compressed vine, which, section by section, reinflated itself with air. She touched it again with glee and watched it shrink. After a few more experiments, she uncovered the secret: the pinhead-shells never touched the thorns. Poking a thorn made the vine shrink, but brushing only the spiky hairs, which was very tricky for a large beast to do, coaxed a shrunken vine to grow. She used her knife to slice off a piece several meters long and was delighted to discover that the trick still worked when the vine was detached from the mother creeper. She shrunk the vine, rolled it up, and stuffed it in her apron pocket.
By midday, she realized she would have to sleep for a few hours. She was accustomed to such siestas, as the planet's rotation was too slow for continuous diurnal wakefulness. She rested briefly, then proceeded apace, picking her way between wide bloodwillows and over sculptured igneous boulders. Rounding a bend, she found herself on the edge of a small forest clearing. The underbrush was gone, but the bare ground was still shaded by overhead branches dripping with creepers and lichens. There, in the center of the clearing, were Froomba and Muge. Froomba's back right foot was caught on something and she was struggling to free herself while Muge, atop her, barked unhelpful instructions. Shebbin realized that she had formed no clear plan beyond locating the travelers. She decided to turn herself black for camouflage among the flora and she hid behind a velvet oak to spy on them. Froomba's right front foot, as well as her back, now both appeared to be sinking into the mud. Froomba grunted and pushed down with her left feet, pulling the stuck feet out of the mud with a loud sucking sound but submerging the left ones. She leaned to her right to free those feet and re-buried her right limbs deep enough to soil her barding.
"Why can't you just pull yourself out?" grumbled Muge.
"Forgive me, I don't know," the captain replied. "I'm feeling oddly sluggish. As if my feet are asleep."
"I thought your ancestors' favorite pastime was wallowing in the mud."
"I thought your ancestors' favorite pastime was swinging from the trees."
"You know, you're right," said the Lieutenant brightly. He stood up on her back and unclipped a grey clam-shaped device from his hip. Using the device, he shot a brilliant ray of light into the treetops. The ray severed a vine, which fell down to where he could reach it. He jumped straight up and clenched it with one of his hands. Deftly using his many limbs, he scrambled up the vine and on into the branches. Although Froomba was now free of his weight, his leap had pushed her down father and now only half of her was sticking out of the mud.
"What was that for?" asked Froomba.
"At the rate things were going, I was going to end up as dirty as you," he said. "Now at least I'm safe."
Shebbin suddenly realized that she had lost feeling in both her feet, which had started to sink into the mud. Trying to remain silent, she shuffled her legs to free herself but only sunk deeper. She was unable to wiggle her toes or move her feet below the ankles at all. She leaned over to manually wipe the mud away. Brushing off a thin layer of brown gunk, she found that it wasn't mud at all underneath but a pink viscous substance gradually engulfing her legs. It was a subterranean living creature of some kind, as large as the clearing, slowly swallowing the girl and the tapir. Her fingers began to tingle where she had touched it. It clearly produced some sort of numbing secretion.
"Come down here and help me out, you sorry excuse for a quadruped. That's an order," honked Froomba, now buried up to her head.
"If I free you, will you agree to leave this planet?" asked Muge.
"What?" she trumpeted. "We obey the quarantine. I'm the captain; I make the decisions."
"It seems to me that I make the decisions now," he mused. "I suppose that makes me the captain. And every captain needs to be with his ship." Without another word he began to climb away through the vines, easily grasping them with his numerous hands.
"Muge! Muge, you come back now, you maggoty patchwork hyposmic! Muge!" Froomba's honking became less enunciated as her trunk began to go numb.
The numbness had spread up Shebbin's legs and down her arms. She was now nearly paralyzed, although she wasn't sinking as quickly as the heavy tapir. Then she heard a terrifying whiny buzz she recognized all too well. A scarlet falcon wasp the size of a starling flew into the clearing and began to orbit her head. It's syringe-like stinger could inject a potent neurotoxin that would kill a hominid in minutes. Not only could Shebbin not run away, she could barely dodge it if it decided to attack her. She stood in place, terrified. Even without the falcon wasp's toxin freezing her nerves, she would be completely paralyzed by the mud monster in a few minutes and effectively dead at that point anyway. Her tail, the only appendage she could still move, twitched in despair between the dueling threats to her nervous system.
Suddenly, inspiration struck. Dueling threats, she thought. The falcon wasp venom blocked the sodium channels in the nerve cells, preventing them from firing. But that was unusual; most toxic spore creatures employed a different venom that forced the sodium channels to always stay open, also causing paralysis. Chances are, that's what the mud monster was secreting. If so, the two toxins could cancel out each others' effects. If not, adding them together would make her die twice as fast. However, she didn't see any other solution and she was running out of time.
With a quick swish, she snatched the falcon wasp out of the air with her tail. Using it like a hypodermic needle, she jabbed the stinger into the middle of each of her legs and arms. She waited. A toe wiggled. Then another. With a pair of violent kicks, she leaped into the air and was free of the oozing predator.
Only the tip of Froomba's trunk was visible in the center of the clearing. Shebbin hesitated. With the falcon wasp buzzing angrily but still held firmly at the end of her tail, she decided she had enough antidote left to justify treading on the mud monster. With a few giant steps, she reached Froomba's fleshy snorkel and jabbed it again and again until the falcon wasp was clearly spent. Before she could sink again, Shebbin scurried to the other side of the clearing, threw the exhausted falcon wasp into the leaf litter, and waited.
Several minutes passed. Then the ground shuddered. With a mighty splash of mud and pink goo, Captain Froomba exploded out of the ground and galloped to Shebbin's side. The mud monster acknowledged its defeat and sank deep into the earth, leaving a gaping pit where the clearing had been.
"Thank you, young primate," said the captain.
"I'm sorry I was spying on you," said Shebbin. "I wanted to make sure you didn't break the quarantine."
"That is now my primary objective as well," replied the captain. "And I am in need of a new lieutenant. Would you be so kind as to hop on?"
"Gladly," Shebbin replied. She climbed on to Froomba's back and held onto a flap of the tapir's loose skin. They trotted off through the underbrush, which Froomba, descended from jungle-dwellers, could traverse with surprising speed.
Chapter 4
"Why is Muge so intent on leaving?" asked Shebbin as featherbushes brushed past her face.
"It has to do," honked the tapir, "with the nature of our cargo: the fusion duck."
"The what?"
"If you don't mind, I shall explain. Are you familiar with nuclear fusion?"
"Sure, that's how stars work. Protons fuse together, releasing lots of energy."
"If it's so energetically favorable, if you don't mind my asking, why doesn't it happen everywhere?" asked Froomba, sounding a bit like Yorel when he was feeling pedagogical. "Why only in stars?"
"Protons are positively charged so they repel each other," replied Shebbin, rolling her eyes out of habit. "It takes a lot of energy to push them together, but if it happens, you get all of that energy back and more."
"Precisely. Now, are you familiar with second-class levers?"
"I think so. Like a nutcracker, right?" She wiped the mud from her hand and held in down in front of Froomba's face so the tapir could see the tool Shebbin was projecting onto her palm. It consisted of two wooden sticks joined by a hinge. Just before the hinge, one stick had a concave cup and the other had a protruding knob that fit snugly into the cup. You placed a nut in the cup and squeezed the sticks together to crush it.
"Beautiful example, I must say. Even if you can't crush the nut with your bare hands, you can use leverage to do it. Now suppose you still didn't have enough strength to crush the nut in a single squeeze, but you could move the sticks together a little bit. What would you do?"
"I suppose I could add a ratchet of some sort. Some kind of locking mechanism that would let the sticks get closer together but not snap back. Then I could keep squeezing, and each time they would get a little closer together and stay that way." She added a mechanism with jagged teeth to the diagram on her palm.
"Yes, yes, you are truly the brightest primate I have encountered in some time. Now, suppose you didn't want to crush a nut, you wanted to fuse two atomic nuclei. You'd need a tiny nutcracker, the size of a molecule. An enzyme. With such a molecular machine, you could eventually push two protons together, even without the high heat energy found inside a star."
"And you have such an enzyme?"
"It has evolved only one, in a creature descended from the ducks of Earth and left on a planet nearly devoid of food. The ducks need to eat only a few trace minerals; they receive all of their calories from a specialized tissue in their livers, full of this enzyme, which captures the fusion energy and stores it as fat."
"But that means a renewable source of cold fusion... you could use it to power anything..."
"Yes, safely, conveniently, and immensely more powerful than any type of combustion. Our ship runs on it. And all of the known living specimens of this duck are aboard. The control of such an energy source would give any race, or indeed any sentient being, enormous economic, political, and military power. We are shuttling the ducks to safety."
"You said the ducks need minerals. Molybdenum?"
"Exactly. The enzyme needs a molybdenum cofactor to function. A few grams of molybdenum is all that our ship needs to leave this world. And Muge has it. With his guard worms, I worry he does not fear the disease, and might even look forward to controlling it."
They reached the edge of a large gorge and stared down between the buttermelon bushes at a boxlike tan spacecraft on the canyon floor. The sky was overcast, and the ship was shrouded in a gloomy mist. "Here we are," announced Froomba, casually devouring a buttermelon. "Our ship faltered when the engine ran out of duck extract. Muge regularly samples a small amount of tissue from one of the ducks, you see, and adds it to our fuel tank. Normally this procedure doesn't harm the duck. But for some reason, the most recent extraction killed both the duck and our engine. Muge claims the molybdenum was impure, but I'm not so sure. I think the duck had a shrunken liver for some reason, and we took all the enzyme it had left, which still wasn't enough for the ship. But I couldn't say what had harmed the duck's liver in the first place."
"Do you think Muge beat us here?"
"I couldn't say, young primate. But I do think that you will have an easier time than I climbing down the walls of this gorge. There's a less steep path to the south of here, but that route will take me a while. Why don't you creep down to the ship alone and see what you find?"
"Captain Froomba? How do I... how do you know I'll do the right thing?"
The captain raised her trunk and drew back her upper lip into a grotesque flehmen position that Shebbin assumed was the tapir's best impression of a hominid smile. "Unlike my former lieutenant, young primate, I believe you can learn more about someone by spending half an afternoon with them than by listening to stories about their dead relatives. I smell before me a plucky, compassionate, and intelligent mammal whose judgment I trust. Now hurry, if you would please."
Shebbin scrambled down the cliff, frequently steadying herself by holding on with her tail. She reached the bottom and slunk over through the fog to the ship. She found a hatch which slid open automatically when she touched it, and she entered into a dark corridor. She felt her way along the wall until she reached another hatch, which also opened on its own when nudged. She peered into a cavernous, well-lit room: the aviary.
The aviary was filled with thousands of fusion ducks. Like most animals, their appearance was different from their terrestrial ancestors. They were covered with a sparse, wispy down which did not conceal their blue-grey skin. Their wings were reduced to vestigial stumps, and they were all comically obese. Great rolls of fat flowed over their feet, completely obscured their necks, and even threatened to swallow their entire heads. The ducks covered the floor and squatted on roosts that were attached to the walls as parallel shelves up to the ceiling, several stories above Shebbin's head. Since the ducks couldn't fly, a system of ramps and suspended walkways sprawled throughout the center of the room, allowing the ducks to slowly waddle up to the highest perches. In the corners, the ducks simply piled on top of each other in gigantic heaps taller than Shebbin. She marveled that the ducks at the bottom of these piles were not flattened, but the seemed to have no qualm with the weight on top of them. Unable to swivel their heads, hundreds of ducks shifted their bodies awkwardly to look at Shebbin standing in the doorway.
"Mot?" one of them called. "Mot mot?"
The ducks closest the Shebbin waddled up to her and looked at her with their big black eyes. "Mot mot mot?" they all quacked expectantly. She felt like she should throw them some bread crumbs, but of course these ducks didn't eat bread crumbs. Shebbin wondered what this room would look like in zero gravity, with all of the plump birds floating and gently bumping each other. She stepped through the doorway and the hatch slammed behind her. She turned and touched it again, but it would not reopen.
Not knowing what else to do, Shebbin waded through the sea of ducks to the other side of the room, looking for an exit. The white-painted room was fairly clean, as the ducks produced virtually no excrement. She found several locked doors in the far wall, so she started to slide her hands along the doors and the surrounding wall, hoping to trigger one of them to open. As she did so, one of the panels in the back right corner jiggled. It was loose. She pulled a pry bar out of her apron pocket, forced off the panel, and looked through the window she had just made.
Staring back at her with beady eyes was an adolescent boy. He was short and stocky, like a dwarf. Prominent tufts of umber hair grew on his shirtless shoulders. He wore ragged trousers and had a bandage across his abdomen. His most extraordinary feature was his immense ursine snout, which comprised nearly a quarter of the volume of his head. She greeted him in every language she knew, but he did not respond. Finally, he spoke in a tongue she did not recognize. They would not be able to communicate verbally.
"Shebbin," said Shebbin, gesturing to herself.
The boy smiled in understanding. "N'Lock," he said, making a similar gesture. Shebbin ducked her head into the window. It looked as if the boy had been sealed into this small, dark, almost bare cell with nothing but a jug of water and some scattered grain.
N'Lock pulled himself through the opening with his large, mole-like hands. He blinked the in bright light of the aviary. "Mot?" quacked a duck.
Just then they heard a sound from the door on the other side of the room, where Shebbin had entered. Reacting quickly, Shebbin dove into a warm clump of ducks along the lefthand wall and turned herself blue-grey for crypsis among the fat fowls. N'Lock was not as fast, and he remained exposed as Muge marched into the aviary.
Chapter 5
Muge was clearly angered by the sight of N'Lock standing outside of his cell. He stormed up to the boy and cursed at him in an unrecognizable tongue. N'Lock argued back, but whatever he said did not reveal the location of Shebbin's hiding place.
Shebbin noticed that if Muge took a few steps to the left, he would be standing under one of the many catwalks. She had an idea, but it would require N'Lock's cooperation. Confident that Muge was not looking her way, Shebbin flashed bright red and yellow to catch N'Lock's attention. As she had hoped, N'Lock shot her a subtle glance that Muge didn't seem to notice. Shebbin turned around, exposing her bare back, and projected an image of a ten-limbed man bound by rope. She then showed the man standing directly beneath a bridge.
As Muge continued to berate him, N'Lock causally shuffled toward the left wall. Without thinking about it, Muge followed him to maintain an appropriately aggressive distance between himself and the boy, ending directly beneath the catwalk. Perfect. As quietly as possible, Shebbin slithered up a ramp and along the catwalk until she reached the point over Muge. She removed the thorny vine from her apron pocket and gently stroked the stiff hairs to inflate it, taking care not to touch the thorns. She tied the ends of the vine to rungs on the catwalk. The knotting necessarily deflated the end sections, and Shebbin cringed when Muge looked up at the strange hissing noise. She had kept the vine and her body from sticking over the edge of the catwalk, though, so Muge saw nothing and assumed the noise had been a duck.
Shebbin's plan wouldn't work as long as Muge had his clam-shaped ray gun, which was still clipped to his hip. On her forehead, she displayed a picture of a mole-like hand swiping the device. As soon as N'Lock noticed, she streaked a red line across the image, to indicate that he shouldn't do it yet. Silently, she made a loop in the vine and dangled down it over the edge of the catwalk like a lowercase gamma. It hung motionless for a moment. With a focused flick, she looped the vine over Muge's head. At once, she erased the red line from her forehead picture. N'Lock reacted spectacularly. With Muge distracted by the strange vegetable rope around his neck, N'Lock ran up and seized the clam gun. Muge tried to throw the noose back over his head, but as soon as he touched it, he found himself being strangled by the ever-tightening vine. He managed to get three of his hands between the vine and his neck, which kept him from being choked, but the sharp thorns bit into his fingers and throat, drawing drips of blood. The harder he pushed out with his hands, the more the vine tightened. He reached up with one of his free hands to grip a section of vine above his head, but of course that shrank and began to lift him off his feet. His toes barely touching the floor, he thrashed about, breathing heavily, then paused. He relaxed and the vine stopped shrinking. Muge was still able to breath, but he was trapped, and he understood that further manipulation of the vine would only make things worse. He looked up to see who had snuck up on him.
"What a true buccaneer you are," he sneered at Shebbin. "Invading a ship, attacking the crew, probably with intent to kill and make off with the loot. Your kind are all the same."
Muge's words stung Shebbin unexpectedly. What was she doing here, anyway? Was she really about to hang a man? Perhaps she could not escape her buccaneer nature. "I'm not a pirate," she asserted finally. "I'm here to stop your sinister plans."
Muge laughed. "Sinister plans? You don't understand anything that's going on here. You just come barging in and assume you know."
"I'm not as ignorant as you think. Captain Froomba told me all about the fusion ducks. I saw you leave her to die. And you were keeping N'Lock imprisoned in that cell." As soon as she said this, she began to doubt herself. Maybe there was a good reason for Muge's actions. Maybe N'Lock was a criminal, and she had just let him have the gun. Maybe she was in over her head.
"N'Lock is my research partner. We are trying to graft a bit of duck liver into a hominid. Imagine the power of fusion inside of a man."
"Then why did he just cooperate with me? Was he your partner or was he your lab animal that you were testing your procedure on before you tried it yourself? And why did you steal our molybdenum, unless you intend to break the quarantine?"
"For your information, what I intend is to seal myself inside this ship and let my worms scour it and eat every last spore. Then I can blast off without spreading the disease. And your father offered us the molybdenum; we didn't steal it. Although why a family of farmers needs any pure molybdenum is beyond me."
"We use it to entice the spore to grow into..." She paused, realizing something. Finally she continued, in a less defensive tone. "I'm not a buccaneer. I'm something different. So, I'm not going to kill you, I'm going to offer you a choice. If you are confident that your worms can sterilize this ship, you may go ahead with that plan. But the ducks stay on the planet."
"Not a buccaneer, yet keeping the treasure?" he snorted.
"It's the only way to keep them safe. You may be confident of your worms' abilities, but I am not. And in the presence of molybdenum, with no other spore creatures about, the spore will grow into a mildew that releases a poisonous gas. Out in the open it's not so dangerous and we use it to get rid of pests, but within the confines of a ship it would surely kill you along with all of the ducks. But if no mildew appears, then, yes, I'll believe the ship to be sterilized and will gladly see you go."
"And what's the other choice you so generously offer?"
"You stay here, of course. You can continue your research on the ducks, but grounded here you will have few opportunities to gain undue influence over other people by controlling the fusion technology. The ducks will be safe, and we can even send out the sequence of the enzyme, or maybe the entire duck genome, via radio to other worlds, so it can be cloned by those who need it."
Muge hesitated, gasping slightly from within his noose. "No. I won't stay on this desolate outpost. My worms can eliminate the spore."
Shebbin was a little disappointed that she had been unable to frighten him into changing his plan, but her test had worked. She now knew that he wasn't lying when he said his worms could clean the ship. "Then hand over the molybdenum. You can have it back once we move all of the ducks out."
Grumbling, Muge reached into a pouch on his back with one of his free arms and retrieved a chunk of shiny metal. Wordlessly, he tossed it to Shebbin. She flashed N'Lock a picture of a light ray breaking the vine. He aimed and squeezed the clam gun. The vine snapped in half where the shot hit it, and Muge crumpled to the ground. Shebbin slid down a ramp, walked up to Muge, and gently brushed the fine hairs on his noose until it loosened enough for him to escape.
"What is happening on my ship?" honked a voice in the doorway.
"Captain Froomba!" yelled Shebbin. She grabbed N'Lock's hand and ran with him over to the tapir. "Muge has given up the molybdenum!" She proudly held up the lump of metal.
Froomba sniffed the molybdenum, looked up at the fusion ducks nestled peacefully on their shelves, and sniffed the metal again. "This is not molybdenum," she announced.
"Fool!" yelled Muge from across the room. "Did you really think I would accept your meager terms? I make my own choices! For I have the power!" He pulled another lump of metal, the real molybdenum, from his pouch and held it aloft in triumph.
A duck sniffed the air. "Mot?" it quacked. "Mot!"
The room erupted into a deafening din as every duck began to quack, "Mot! Mot! Mot!" Like a tsunami, the sea of ducks on the floor swelled into a wave and broke over the many-limbed man holding the mineral. Then the walls appeared to crumble and fall inward. But it wasn't the walls, it was all of the ducks rolling and oozing off the shelves, bouncing down the ramps, and sliding over the piles of other ducks that were struggling to reach the man, quacking all the while. Muge tried to fend off the anatine tide but it just kept coming. Within minutes, Muge was buried in blue-grey fat rolls. The ducks that had managed to reach the molybdenum fought over it but were unable to break it into bite-sized pieces. The metal fell among the ducks to the bottom of the pile, and the ravenous birds were all trying to push each other out of the way to reach it.
"He'll never make it out of there alive," honked the captain nonchalantly. "I must not have told him never to bring that much molybdenum directly into the aviary. It sparks a feeding frenzy. Although I see he did pay you in silver for it, as he vowed." She waved her trunk in the direction of the metal lump in Shebbin's hand. "By the way, who are you?" Froomba asked, turning to N'Lock.
N'Lock said something to Froomba, who nodded. "I see," she said. "Before he tells me who he is and what he's doing on my ship, he wants me to tell you that he thinks your pigments are very pretty."
For the first time since she was very young, Shebbin changed color without consciously choosing to, blushing bright pink.
Epilogue
Yorel and Labinu were overcome with relief to see Shebbin and a strange boy ride up to the farm atop Captain Froomba. After many hugs and tears, and a few scoldings, Shebbin told her parents the story of her trek and introduced N'Lock. N'Lock had already explained to Froomba how Muge had kidnapped him and kept his presence on the ship a secret from her. Yorel added an ointment to N'Lock's wound where Muge had tried unsuccessfully to transplant a section of duck liver, leaving too little tissue left for either the duck or the engine. Although Froomba and Labinu both spoke N'Lock's language, he spent most of his time with Shebbin, letting her talk to him pictorially. It wasn't long before the two youth had learned enough of each others' tongues to hold long conversations and swap inside jokes that baffled the adults.
The ducks thrived on their new planet. Froomba decided that a world no one would suspect, and few would dare visit, was an ideal place to keep the flock hidden from those who would exploit it into extinction or use it to prop up an oligarchy. Yorel helped her to study the ducks, and Labinu helped her to disseminate encrypted radio messages about their genetics and biochemistry such that biofusion technology could be duplicated democratically on numerous worlds, without anyone knowing where to find the original specimens. There was plenty of molybdenum for the birds; despite Shebbin's bluff about the mythical gassy mildew, the only horticultural use for the metal was to prepare the ground for wart gourds, which no one wanted to eat very often anyway.
Not long after Shebbin's return, Labinu announced that she was pregnant. Shebbin was excited by the thought of a new baby sibling, and wondered again about her own future offspring. She found herself fantasizing about the notion that N'Lock might help her to reproduce some day. She knew it was a meaningless dream; she had already begun to shed spores monthly, as the buccaneer women had once shed their half-spores, and she needed no genetic contributions from anyone else. However, unlike the other forms of her species, she was still expressing genes suited to the pre-spore way of life that had so recently been a part of her lineage. She realized that she retained the innate drive to find and care for a partner, even though there was no longer any adaptive reason for it. She decided she didn't care what was adaptive. She was something new, a hominid-spore hybrid, and she was free to choose what that meant and how to live in her body. Shebbin was not a buccaneer but a pioneer, learning to survive on uncharted frontiers. Not just in the literal sense on the planet's surface, but in the very essence of her existence as a new type of organism. She looked into her unknown future with delighted anticipation. There was so much to explore.
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: PG for non-explicit references to reproductive biology, mild violence
Summary: A young hominid growing up on an alien world finds her peaceful life disrupted by shipwrecked space travelers.
Notes: The sequel to The Gardener. Contains spoilers for The Gardener, obviously. Approximately 9,000 words. Five chapters and an epilogue.
Chapter 1
Shebbin was a twelve-year old pioneer girl living on a frontier prairie farm with her parents. Unlike most other settler children in history, Shebbin had a prehensile tail, her parents were different species, and the frontier was a planet that had been devoid of life a generation ago.
Millions of years ago, a single human species had departed Earth in the diaspora. Different populations of humans had proceeded to evolve in unique ways. Shebbin's father, Yorel, still resembled the ancient humans. Her mother, Labinu, walked about on her knuckles instead of her tiny withered legs. Shebbin's heels were elevated off the ground like a backwards second pair of knees, and she leaned forward when she walked, balanced by her tail. Here skin was covered in pigment cells that she could change at will to display pictures. Before she had learned to consciously control the color of her skin, it had sometimes betrayed her. Once when she was little, her mother had asked her where the last honey tuber had gone. She had denied knowing, but an image of tiny Shebbin stuffing the sugary root in her mouth had flashed across her forehead.
Shebbin loved to help her father in the garden, where he showed her how to grow whatever food they wanted by fertilizing with the right chemical mixture. She loved to help her mother scan for radio signals from other worlds and translate them if necessary, to keep up with the galaxial news. Shebbin understood the four most common languages well, and she wondered if she would ever master hundreds, like her mother. Secretly, she had also taught herself the language of Yorel's people, which her parents spoke when they wanted to have what they thought was a private conversation.
Above all else, Shebbin loved to explore the teeming wildlands surrounding the farm. The meadows full of black herbs and shovel-nosed burrowers. The streams with their slimy spermatoids and copper-colored rock-huggers. The thickets where the great scalehounds hid and the branch sweepers sung melodically. Almost daily, Shebbin ran over the hills and valleys wearing fibrous sandals and a silken apron-like garment that left her tail, back, and forearms bare. She collected edible stalks, fruits, eggs, and small creatures and stuffed them in the large apron pocket on her chest. She also added interesting rocks, shells, or anything else that caught her eye. There was always something new to find. Closer to home, she liked to stroke the aging fanged vulture on its tattered wings that could no longer fly, and watch the comical antics of the land ray pups that Yorel was raising in memory of his late pets. All she lacked was a playmate with whom she could swap stories and confide secrets.
One crisp evening, Shebbin was helping her father to burn a large pile of inky ribbed fronds. They would use the ash to coax savory lobster lichen to sprout. The sweet smoke billowed into the twilight of the sky, the indigo color of which Shebbin was choosing to mimic on her skin.
"Hey Shades, what's happening in that fire, chemically?" quizzed Yorel, invoking the nickname that referenced her polychromatism.
An easy question. "Oxygen from the air and carbohydrates in the fronds are reacting to form water, carbon dioxide, and energy," replied Shebbin as if by rote, flashing the chemical equation on her forehead.
"Fascinating. And is that the only place this reaction is happening?" asked Yorel.
Shebin rolled her eyes. "No, Pa, obviously it's happening inside our bodies too, and in those onion bushes, and in that crinklebug laying eggs on that reed over there." She pointed with her tail.
Yorel continued to play dumb. "But in the fire, the reaction requires a high temperature. Now that bug might think she's one hot mama, but I disagree, so how can the same thing be happening..."
"Pa, you've taught me all of this a hundred times," exaggerated Shebbin exasperatedly. "The answer is enzymes. Enzymes can bring two other molecules close together so they can react without the high activation energy they would normally need. Enzymes make life without inferno possible. Check it out." She turned around and displayed a detailed diagram of the entire glycolysis pathway on her bare back.
"Shades! I didn't know you'd memorized all that! Good for you," praised Yorel.
Shebbin smiled proudly. Ostentatiously, she shrank the image, zooming outward through pictures of cells and tissues until an enormous crinklebug was ovipositing on her back. She looked over toward the real bug. "Look at all those eggs... " She paused. "Pa," she asked, hesitantly, "Am I ever going to..." She dropped the end of the question and looked at him expectantly.
He put a hand on her shoulder. "I know I've taught you about that, too. But maybe it's time for another talk, now that your a little older. What's that bug up to, anyway?"
"The bug is laying eggs that each contain a spore. The spore will sense the conditions in its environment and grow into whatever form would best survive under those circumstances. It could be another bug, or a tree, or even another me."
"Not another you, there's only one of you. But it could grow into your twin."
"But nothing ever grows into my twin. I'm the only one!" she said, with a hint of loneliness.
"Well, there are two kinds of spores, and only one kind can grow into a child. We don't know how common each kind is around here. And we also don't know the conditions that favor your form. We were just lucky to get you."
"And I make spores, too?"
"You do too, or you'll start soon. I don't really know how it will happen; you might notice it or you might not. Just remember, your mother and I are here to help you if your body ever does anything you don't understand."
"You and Ma don't make spores, though. You don't know what it's like."
"No, we don't make spores. Well, we kind of do, but it happens differently. Sort of like we make half-spores. I can make the boy half and she can make the girl half."
"I can only make whole spores. So does that mean I'm not really a girl?"
Yorel turned the smoldering leaves with his pitchfork. "Shades, that's a complicated question, and I'm not entirely sure I understand the answer, but I think you're old enough to try and understand it with me. See, your ancestors were a people that everyone called the buccaneers. I don't know what they called themselves, or what they thought of the word 'buccaneer,' and I guess you'll have to decide for yourself someday whether that's a term you want to embrace for yourself. There were boy buccaneers and girl buccaneers, just like your mother and me. Then one day they inserted their DNA into one of the spores. You are descended from that spore, Shades. Now, we've always called you our daughter, because you look like the girl buccaneers looked, as far as we know, but I think you could ask whether that decision has enough biological justification."
"Because I can't make a girl half-spores? Is that what it means to be a girl?"
"Well, basically, although there's a little more to it than that. Needing to have a partner to reproduce makes things a lot more complicated than it is for any spore form."
"But I'm the only person form you know. My needs my be different."
"It's true, Shades. This is all new for me, too. I really don't know what changes might in store as you transition into an adult; we'll have to wait and see. But in the end, it will really be up to you whether you want to keep thinking of yourself as a girl."
"I don't like not knowing what I am or what my body is going to do. I wish I were like you and Ma."
"Your mother and I don't know everything our bodies are going to do, either," chuckled her father. "For one thing, we don't know if our half-spores are compatible with each other, or, if they are, what kind of baby they'd make. There's no record of a man of my people marrying a woman of your mother's people, not for millions of years. We just keep trying, but it hasn't happened yet."
"At least you've got me, Pa."
"Hey, there's no 'at least,' Shades. You mean everything to us, you know that." He hugged her. They looked up at the sky, which was gradually filling with stars. While they gazed, a shooting star zipped over their heads.
"Look, Pa, a meteor! Maybe we'll get a whole shower tonight."
But it wasn't a meteor. It was a ship. Their peaceful life was about to change.
Chapter 2
Several days later, a man approached the farm atop some sort of dumpy-looking beast of burden. Shebbin, having never seen a hominid outside of her family, hid behind the well and peered out at him. His steed was making a honking sound loudly. The man was talking to himself at equal volume.
"I doubt these colonials have enough pure molybdenum to meet our needs. In fact, if they do, I'll pay them in silver. I have enough right here with me. The molybdenum does have to be pure. I don't want any more deaths. It was because if the molybdenum! There was plenty of extract..." As the man talked, he gestured energetically with all six of his arms.
Yorel and Labinu looked at each other as he approached. "We'd better make him feel welcome," muttered Yorel in his native tongue.
The rider arrived at their doorstep and halted. His steed was a female tapir, or rather, was descended from the tapirs of Earth. Her trunk had evolved to be long like an elephant's, her neck was graced with a mane of flowing locks like a mare's, and her skin was droopy like a basset hound's. The man had four legs, in addition to his six arms. The arms ended in hands of different shapes with varying numbers of nailed or clawed fingers. He wore a stark grey uniform which matched the tapir's barding.
"Welcome to our home, and to your new home world," greeted Labinu warmly in the language the traveler had been using. "I am Labinu, and this is my husband Yorel. Can I offer you any food or drink?"
"If you happen to want any molybdenum, we have plenty in our shed," piped in Yorel, gesturing at the storehouse. "No payment necessary; it's a gift."
"Lieutenant Muge," announced the rider, throwing open all three pairs of arms in a gesture of non-confrontation. "And I would love a drink."
The tapir extended her trunk and expelled a long series of loud honks: "Puhduhmuhmuhduhmbuh, yuhmkuhptunfruhmbuh, kuhduhtruhbuhyuhfuhpuhsuhfroot!"
"Captain?" asked Labinu. "So you're the ranking officer. Welcome. And that would be no trouble at all. Shebbin! Go fetch some cinnamon berries for the captain!"
Shebbin was puzzled. Had the tapir just said something in a language her mother spoke? She parsed the honks in her head, and realized the beast had said "Pardon me, madam, but I am Captain Froomba, and could I trouble you for a piece of fruit?" Remembering the task she was assigned, Shebbin ran to find the berries and adopted a pretty mottled pastel pattern in order to look her best.
When Shebbin offered the berry bunch to the tapir, the captain picked them up with her trunk and inserted them into her mouth. Shebbin understood her clearly when she honked, "Thank you, young primate."
Lieutenant Muge eyed Shebbin with a grim expression. "A buccaneer," he spat with disgust. Shebbin recoiled. She didn't like the way he looked at her, and up close, Muge's appearance would have been rather terrifying no matter where he was looking. His many muscular limbs didn't quite match each other or his thin torso, giving him a lopsided chimeric appearance. His facial features were sickly and skeletal. Most horrific of all, his olive skin was covered with thousands of millimeter-long white roundworms, just barely visible to the naked eye. They constantly crawled over his hands and face and swarmed in and out of his nostrils, mouth, ears, and tear ducts.
"This is our daughter, Shebbin," announced Yorel defiantly.
"Sir, are you ill?" asked Shebbin.
"I'm not ill, child," he growled, leering at her. "These are not parasites, but my closest companions. Like all members of my race, my shriveled and useless limbs were amputated at birth. I was grafted to these new limbs: longer limbs, stronger limbs, and most importantly, more limbs! My people have been grafting for thousands of generations, and it has served us well in battle. We used to lose a lot of good men to the buccaneers, but we beat those bloodthirsty pirates back, and they learned not to mess with us." He did not take his eyes off Shebbin. "At least I hope you've all learned that... Now, at first, we had to suppress our immune systems to make the grafts work, but gradually we lost our immune systems entirely, which was much more convenient. But that means I need an artificial immune system: my worm friends. They crawl through every inch of me, into every orifice, hunting and eating any germ they find."
"Pardon me, if you don't mind," interrupted Captain Froomba. "We are seeking laboratory-grade molybdenum to make repairs to our ship. You mentioned that you are in possession of some. We would be most grateful for it. As soon as we replace the molybdenum, we can leave you alone on this planet again. Thank you for your kindness."
"You're welcome," replied Yorel, "but I'm afraid you aren't going anywhere. This planet is quarantined, for it harbors a life form which, under conditions found elsewhere but fortunately not here, can cause a disease that has killed countless people on numerous worlds. Once here, you are not permitted to leave."
Lieutenant Muge looked shocked. "Never leave? Impossible. We cannot simply stay here."
"We're truly sorry," said Labinu. "But these aren't our rules. This settlement is probationary. If we allow any spore to travel into space, even if does no harm, the people of my homeworld will come and destroy this planet. We could send for a rescue vessel with a sterilization mechanism, but it would take several years to arrive."
"I'm sure you are familiar with the laws of relativity," said Yorel. "I'm sad to say your loved ones have probably passed on already. There's nothing to go back to. Rest assured that this planet provides everything necessary for a comfortable and fulfilling life." He mentally ticked off the many luxuries and social benefits that were conspicuously absent, but he had to at least try to sound cheerful.
"I'm sure this is all rather sudden news," said Labinu. "Come share a meal with us and stay the night. Things will seem less dire in the morning. And we've just begun to get to know each other. Captain, I've never met a sentient non-hominid. Tell me about your ancestry."
"My condolences, madam, that your first encounter is with such a humble specimen as myself," replied Froomba. "Long ago, a colony of geneticists discovered that the upregulation of a few key genes in the brain explains the intelligence difference between primates and other mammals, between humans and other primates, and, I suspect, madam, between yourself and my lieutenant." Labinu's head was much larger than the other hominids', permitting her extraordinary linguistic abilities. "They opened the taps on these genes in a large number of other species, leading to brainy rats, brainy seals, even brainy cattle. Of course, none of them had vocal chords, but they could communicate in other ways. My lineage has evolved on its own since then, and in particular I have gained the ability to mimic human speech with my nose."
"Yes, yes, it's all very interesting," groaned Muge, mildly insulted but accustomed to such slights. "But I'm afraid we are on a very important mission. Surely an exception can be made."
"I'm afraid we'll have to accept our situation," replied Froomba, "and remain."
"Need I remind you how urgent our mission is?" insisted Muge.
"Need I remind you who crashed our ship?" replied Froomba, and they began to argue. Shebbin realized that they had been similarly arguing when they arrived, but she had only understood Muge's half of the conversation.
The visitors stayed in the barn that night. Shebbin slept poorly, as she was troubled by many thoughts. Was it true what Muge had said, that the buccaneers were bloodthirsty? Her parents had never told her that. Was it her nature to be similarly violent, and her destiny to be despised by people across the universe? On the other hand, real buccaneers had real genders. She was something new. What was she, anyway? As an unrelated matter, she couldn't decided what she wanted the visitors to do. Instinctually, she wished for Muge to go as far away as possible, but she knew that would actually put them in even more danger. She endured nightmares in which Muge spread the disease to distant stars, told everyone to blame the freak genderless buccaneer child who had wrongly been permitted life and liberty, and roused an army of ships that came to obliterate her.
In the morning, the visitors had disappeared. Suspicious, Shebbin ran to the shed. All of the molybdenum, nearly two kilograms, was gone. They were still planning to repair their ship.
Shebbin's parents, however, seemed unconcerned. "We have to give them their breathing room and some time to make sense of their situation," said Labinu. "We can't keep a constant watch on them, or they'll definitely feel the need to leave. And I'm sure they know the penalties for transporting off of a quarantined planet. The captain seemed committed to obeying the rules."
"No, they're going to leave!" insisted Shebbin. "They took the molybdenum."
"They have to turn the wreckage of their ship into a home, now," explained Yorel. "Whatever they needed the molybdenum for, it's probably still useful. Maybe for converting the engine into a generator."
"I don't trust them," said Shebbin. "He said I was bloodthirsty."
"Shades," said Yorel, "we were waiting to tell you this when you were older, but it's true that the buccaneers were a fearsome people. When I was a young man, they nearly drove my whole planet's population extinct. And they have a long history of raids against your mother's ancestors. The only other buccaneer I've ever met - your twin - attacked us and we killed her."
Shebbin was hysterical. "What? How can that be true? How could you keep this from me?"
"We want you to understand..." began Labinu.
"Oh, I understand," she retorted. "And I don't want to talk about it anymore." In tears, she ran back out to the shed to be alone. Upset with her parents and needing to do something to fix the situation, she secretly resolved to follow the travelers back to their ship. She slid some tools into her apron pocket and strolled into the fields as if she were off on a typical carefree morning walk.
Before Shebbin's spore had differentiated into her, Yorel and Labinu had seeded the barren planet, then traveled off into deep space escorted by a ship from Labinu's homeworld. When they returned, the laws of relativity had allowed centuries to pass on the planet's surface, such that it was now habitable. Black vegetation had spread everywhere and filled the air with plenty of oxygen. No other hominids had made the journey. As a result, most of the planet was covered with wild and unexplored ecosystems. Shebbin now tromped boldly into this untamed wilderness.
Chapter 3
The travelers were easy to track. Captain Froomba had left deep footprints in the soft ground, had broken twigs and blades of grass with her bulk, and appeared to have devoured every fruit in her path. It was a warm, sunny day, and the chattering green globfoots were hopping about with gusto, easily locating any spoor left by tapir or man and making a show of carting it away to their underground burrows. Shebbin followed the trail through the familiar prairie hills and valleys until, by midafternoon, the terrain was no longer familiar. Soon she found herself navigating through a dense forest.
Pushing aside a leafy branch, Shebbin startled a gargantuan tuskmoose browsing amidst the shrubbery, and it crashed away through the woods on its bristly tentacles. Shebbin noticed that it had stripped most of the ebony leaves in the area, but it had ignored a tangle of unfamiliar thorny vines. She looked closer. The vines were populated with spherical-shell-dwellers the size of pinheads. They glided up and down among the thorns and short spiky hairs of the tendrils, expelling any other mesofauna they encountered. Shebbin inferred that the vines and the pinhead-shells had some sort of symbiotic relationship. But what kept the tuskmoose away? She grabbed a vine and flinched as the section in her had rapidly compressed to a tenth of its original length with a hissing sound, concentrating the thorns to discourage any large herbivore. She pinched a section further along the vine, and the same thing happened there. She stepped back and watched the pinhead-shells swarm over the compressed vine, which, section by section, reinflated itself with air. She touched it again with glee and watched it shrink. After a few more experiments, she uncovered the secret: the pinhead-shells never touched the thorns. Poking a thorn made the vine shrink, but brushing only the spiky hairs, which was very tricky for a large beast to do, coaxed a shrunken vine to grow. She used her knife to slice off a piece several meters long and was delighted to discover that the trick still worked when the vine was detached from the mother creeper. She shrunk the vine, rolled it up, and stuffed it in her apron pocket.
By midday, she realized she would have to sleep for a few hours. She was accustomed to such siestas, as the planet's rotation was too slow for continuous diurnal wakefulness. She rested briefly, then proceeded apace, picking her way between wide bloodwillows and over sculptured igneous boulders. Rounding a bend, she found herself on the edge of a small forest clearing. The underbrush was gone, but the bare ground was still shaded by overhead branches dripping with creepers and lichens. There, in the center of the clearing, were Froomba and Muge. Froomba's back right foot was caught on something and she was struggling to free herself while Muge, atop her, barked unhelpful instructions. Shebbin realized that she had formed no clear plan beyond locating the travelers. She decided to turn herself black for camouflage among the flora and she hid behind a velvet oak to spy on them. Froomba's right front foot, as well as her back, now both appeared to be sinking into the mud. Froomba grunted and pushed down with her left feet, pulling the stuck feet out of the mud with a loud sucking sound but submerging the left ones. She leaned to her right to free those feet and re-buried her right limbs deep enough to soil her barding.
"Why can't you just pull yourself out?" grumbled Muge.
"Forgive me, I don't know," the captain replied. "I'm feeling oddly sluggish. As if my feet are asleep."
"I thought your ancestors' favorite pastime was wallowing in the mud."
"I thought your ancestors' favorite pastime was swinging from the trees."
"You know, you're right," said the Lieutenant brightly. He stood up on her back and unclipped a grey clam-shaped device from his hip. Using the device, he shot a brilliant ray of light into the treetops. The ray severed a vine, which fell down to where he could reach it. He jumped straight up and clenched it with one of his hands. Deftly using his many limbs, he scrambled up the vine and on into the branches. Although Froomba was now free of his weight, his leap had pushed her down father and now only half of her was sticking out of the mud.
"What was that for?" asked Froomba.
"At the rate things were going, I was going to end up as dirty as you," he said. "Now at least I'm safe."
Shebbin suddenly realized that she had lost feeling in both her feet, which had started to sink into the mud. Trying to remain silent, she shuffled her legs to free herself but only sunk deeper. She was unable to wiggle her toes or move her feet below the ankles at all. She leaned over to manually wipe the mud away. Brushing off a thin layer of brown gunk, she found that it wasn't mud at all underneath but a pink viscous substance gradually engulfing her legs. It was a subterranean living creature of some kind, as large as the clearing, slowly swallowing the girl and the tapir. Her fingers began to tingle where she had touched it. It clearly produced some sort of numbing secretion.
"Come down here and help me out, you sorry excuse for a quadruped. That's an order," honked Froomba, now buried up to her head.
"If I free you, will you agree to leave this planet?" asked Muge.
"What?" she trumpeted. "We obey the quarantine. I'm the captain; I make the decisions."
"It seems to me that I make the decisions now," he mused. "I suppose that makes me the captain. And every captain needs to be with his ship." Without another word he began to climb away through the vines, easily grasping them with his numerous hands.
"Muge! Muge, you come back now, you maggoty patchwork hyposmic! Muge!" Froomba's honking became less enunciated as her trunk began to go numb.
The numbness had spread up Shebbin's legs and down her arms. She was now nearly paralyzed, although she wasn't sinking as quickly as the heavy tapir. Then she heard a terrifying whiny buzz she recognized all too well. A scarlet falcon wasp the size of a starling flew into the clearing and began to orbit her head. It's syringe-like stinger could inject a potent neurotoxin that would kill a hominid in minutes. Not only could Shebbin not run away, she could barely dodge it if it decided to attack her. She stood in place, terrified. Even without the falcon wasp's toxin freezing her nerves, she would be completely paralyzed by the mud monster in a few minutes and effectively dead at that point anyway. Her tail, the only appendage she could still move, twitched in despair between the dueling threats to her nervous system.
Suddenly, inspiration struck. Dueling threats, she thought. The falcon wasp venom blocked the sodium channels in the nerve cells, preventing them from firing. But that was unusual; most toxic spore creatures employed a different venom that forced the sodium channels to always stay open, also causing paralysis. Chances are, that's what the mud monster was secreting. If so, the two toxins could cancel out each others' effects. If not, adding them together would make her die twice as fast. However, she didn't see any other solution and she was running out of time.
With a quick swish, she snatched the falcon wasp out of the air with her tail. Using it like a hypodermic needle, she jabbed the stinger into the middle of each of her legs and arms. She waited. A toe wiggled. Then another. With a pair of violent kicks, she leaped into the air and was free of the oozing predator.
Only the tip of Froomba's trunk was visible in the center of the clearing. Shebbin hesitated. With the falcon wasp buzzing angrily but still held firmly at the end of her tail, she decided she had enough antidote left to justify treading on the mud monster. With a few giant steps, she reached Froomba's fleshy snorkel and jabbed it again and again until the falcon wasp was clearly spent. Before she could sink again, Shebbin scurried to the other side of the clearing, threw the exhausted falcon wasp into the leaf litter, and waited.
Several minutes passed. Then the ground shuddered. With a mighty splash of mud and pink goo, Captain Froomba exploded out of the ground and galloped to Shebbin's side. The mud monster acknowledged its defeat and sank deep into the earth, leaving a gaping pit where the clearing had been.
"Thank you, young primate," said the captain.
"I'm sorry I was spying on you," said Shebbin. "I wanted to make sure you didn't break the quarantine."
"That is now my primary objective as well," replied the captain. "And I am in need of a new lieutenant. Would you be so kind as to hop on?"
"Gladly," Shebbin replied. She climbed on to Froomba's back and held onto a flap of the tapir's loose skin. They trotted off through the underbrush, which Froomba, descended from jungle-dwellers, could traverse with surprising speed.
Chapter 4
"Why is Muge so intent on leaving?" asked Shebbin as featherbushes brushed past her face.
"It has to do," honked the tapir, "with the nature of our cargo: the fusion duck."
"The what?"
"If you don't mind, I shall explain. Are you familiar with nuclear fusion?"
"Sure, that's how stars work. Protons fuse together, releasing lots of energy."
"If it's so energetically favorable, if you don't mind my asking, why doesn't it happen everywhere?" asked Froomba, sounding a bit like Yorel when he was feeling pedagogical. "Why only in stars?"
"Protons are positively charged so they repel each other," replied Shebbin, rolling her eyes out of habit. "It takes a lot of energy to push them together, but if it happens, you get all of that energy back and more."
"Precisely. Now, are you familiar with second-class levers?"
"I think so. Like a nutcracker, right?" She wiped the mud from her hand and held in down in front of Froomba's face so the tapir could see the tool Shebbin was projecting onto her palm. It consisted of two wooden sticks joined by a hinge. Just before the hinge, one stick had a concave cup and the other had a protruding knob that fit snugly into the cup. You placed a nut in the cup and squeezed the sticks together to crush it.
"Beautiful example, I must say. Even if you can't crush the nut with your bare hands, you can use leverage to do it. Now suppose you still didn't have enough strength to crush the nut in a single squeeze, but you could move the sticks together a little bit. What would you do?"
"I suppose I could add a ratchet of some sort. Some kind of locking mechanism that would let the sticks get closer together but not snap back. Then I could keep squeezing, and each time they would get a little closer together and stay that way." She added a mechanism with jagged teeth to the diagram on her palm.
"Yes, yes, you are truly the brightest primate I have encountered in some time. Now, suppose you didn't want to crush a nut, you wanted to fuse two atomic nuclei. You'd need a tiny nutcracker, the size of a molecule. An enzyme. With such a molecular machine, you could eventually push two protons together, even without the high heat energy found inside a star."
"And you have such an enzyme?"
"It has evolved only one, in a creature descended from the ducks of Earth and left on a planet nearly devoid of food. The ducks need to eat only a few trace minerals; they receive all of their calories from a specialized tissue in their livers, full of this enzyme, which captures the fusion energy and stores it as fat."
"But that means a renewable source of cold fusion... you could use it to power anything..."
"Yes, safely, conveniently, and immensely more powerful than any type of combustion. Our ship runs on it. And all of the known living specimens of this duck are aboard. The control of such an energy source would give any race, or indeed any sentient being, enormous economic, political, and military power. We are shuttling the ducks to safety."
"You said the ducks need minerals. Molybdenum?"
"Exactly. The enzyme needs a molybdenum cofactor to function. A few grams of molybdenum is all that our ship needs to leave this world. And Muge has it. With his guard worms, I worry he does not fear the disease, and might even look forward to controlling it."
They reached the edge of a large gorge and stared down between the buttermelon bushes at a boxlike tan spacecraft on the canyon floor. The sky was overcast, and the ship was shrouded in a gloomy mist. "Here we are," announced Froomba, casually devouring a buttermelon. "Our ship faltered when the engine ran out of duck extract. Muge regularly samples a small amount of tissue from one of the ducks, you see, and adds it to our fuel tank. Normally this procedure doesn't harm the duck. But for some reason, the most recent extraction killed both the duck and our engine. Muge claims the molybdenum was impure, but I'm not so sure. I think the duck had a shrunken liver for some reason, and we took all the enzyme it had left, which still wasn't enough for the ship. But I couldn't say what had harmed the duck's liver in the first place."
"Do you think Muge beat us here?"
"I couldn't say, young primate. But I do think that you will have an easier time than I climbing down the walls of this gorge. There's a less steep path to the south of here, but that route will take me a while. Why don't you creep down to the ship alone and see what you find?"
"Captain Froomba? How do I... how do you know I'll do the right thing?"
The captain raised her trunk and drew back her upper lip into a grotesque flehmen position that Shebbin assumed was the tapir's best impression of a hominid smile. "Unlike my former lieutenant, young primate, I believe you can learn more about someone by spending half an afternoon with them than by listening to stories about their dead relatives. I smell before me a plucky, compassionate, and intelligent mammal whose judgment I trust. Now hurry, if you would please."
Shebbin scrambled down the cliff, frequently steadying herself by holding on with her tail. She reached the bottom and slunk over through the fog to the ship. She found a hatch which slid open automatically when she touched it, and she entered into a dark corridor. She felt her way along the wall until she reached another hatch, which also opened on its own when nudged. She peered into a cavernous, well-lit room: the aviary.
The aviary was filled with thousands of fusion ducks. Like most animals, their appearance was different from their terrestrial ancestors. They were covered with a sparse, wispy down which did not conceal their blue-grey skin. Their wings were reduced to vestigial stumps, and they were all comically obese. Great rolls of fat flowed over their feet, completely obscured their necks, and even threatened to swallow their entire heads. The ducks covered the floor and squatted on roosts that were attached to the walls as parallel shelves up to the ceiling, several stories above Shebbin's head. Since the ducks couldn't fly, a system of ramps and suspended walkways sprawled throughout the center of the room, allowing the ducks to slowly waddle up to the highest perches. In the corners, the ducks simply piled on top of each other in gigantic heaps taller than Shebbin. She marveled that the ducks at the bottom of these piles were not flattened, but the seemed to have no qualm with the weight on top of them. Unable to swivel their heads, hundreds of ducks shifted their bodies awkwardly to look at Shebbin standing in the doorway.
"Mot?" one of them called. "Mot mot?"
The ducks closest the Shebbin waddled up to her and looked at her with their big black eyes. "Mot mot mot?" they all quacked expectantly. She felt like she should throw them some bread crumbs, but of course these ducks didn't eat bread crumbs. Shebbin wondered what this room would look like in zero gravity, with all of the plump birds floating and gently bumping each other. She stepped through the doorway and the hatch slammed behind her. She turned and touched it again, but it would not reopen.
Not knowing what else to do, Shebbin waded through the sea of ducks to the other side of the room, looking for an exit. The white-painted room was fairly clean, as the ducks produced virtually no excrement. She found several locked doors in the far wall, so she started to slide her hands along the doors and the surrounding wall, hoping to trigger one of them to open. As she did so, one of the panels in the back right corner jiggled. It was loose. She pulled a pry bar out of her apron pocket, forced off the panel, and looked through the window she had just made.
Staring back at her with beady eyes was an adolescent boy. He was short and stocky, like a dwarf. Prominent tufts of umber hair grew on his shirtless shoulders. He wore ragged trousers and had a bandage across his abdomen. His most extraordinary feature was his immense ursine snout, which comprised nearly a quarter of the volume of his head. She greeted him in every language she knew, but he did not respond. Finally, he spoke in a tongue she did not recognize. They would not be able to communicate verbally.
"Shebbin," said Shebbin, gesturing to herself.
The boy smiled in understanding. "N'Lock," he said, making a similar gesture. Shebbin ducked her head into the window. It looked as if the boy had been sealed into this small, dark, almost bare cell with nothing but a jug of water and some scattered grain.
N'Lock pulled himself through the opening with his large, mole-like hands. He blinked the in bright light of the aviary. "Mot?" quacked a duck.
Just then they heard a sound from the door on the other side of the room, where Shebbin had entered. Reacting quickly, Shebbin dove into a warm clump of ducks along the lefthand wall and turned herself blue-grey for crypsis among the fat fowls. N'Lock was not as fast, and he remained exposed as Muge marched into the aviary.
Chapter 5
Muge was clearly angered by the sight of N'Lock standing outside of his cell. He stormed up to the boy and cursed at him in an unrecognizable tongue. N'Lock argued back, but whatever he said did not reveal the location of Shebbin's hiding place.
Shebbin noticed that if Muge took a few steps to the left, he would be standing under one of the many catwalks. She had an idea, but it would require N'Lock's cooperation. Confident that Muge was not looking her way, Shebbin flashed bright red and yellow to catch N'Lock's attention. As she had hoped, N'Lock shot her a subtle glance that Muge didn't seem to notice. Shebbin turned around, exposing her bare back, and projected an image of a ten-limbed man bound by rope. She then showed the man standing directly beneath a bridge.
As Muge continued to berate him, N'Lock causally shuffled toward the left wall. Without thinking about it, Muge followed him to maintain an appropriately aggressive distance between himself and the boy, ending directly beneath the catwalk. Perfect. As quietly as possible, Shebbin slithered up a ramp and along the catwalk until she reached the point over Muge. She removed the thorny vine from her apron pocket and gently stroked the stiff hairs to inflate it, taking care not to touch the thorns. She tied the ends of the vine to rungs on the catwalk. The knotting necessarily deflated the end sections, and Shebbin cringed when Muge looked up at the strange hissing noise. She had kept the vine and her body from sticking over the edge of the catwalk, though, so Muge saw nothing and assumed the noise had been a duck.
Shebbin's plan wouldn't work as long as Muge had his clam-shaped ray gun, which was still clipped to his hip. On her forehead, she displayed a picture of a mole-like hand swiping the device. As soon as N'Lock noticed, she streaked a red line across the image, to indicate that he shouldn't do it yet. Silently, she made a loop in the vine and dangled down it over the edge of the catwalk like a lowercase gamma. It hung motionless for a moment. With a focused flick, she looped the vine over Muge's head. At once, she erased the red line from her forehead picture. N'Lock reacted spectacularly. With Muge distracted by the strange vegetable rope around his neck, N'Lock ran up and seized the clam gun. Muge tried to throw the noose back over his head, but as soon as he touched it, he found himself being strangled by the ever-tightening vine. He managed to get three of his hands between the vine and his neck, which kept him from being choked, but the sharp thorns bit into his fingers and throat, drawing drips of blood. The harder he pushed out with his hands, the more the vine tightened. He reached up with one of his free hands to grip a section of vine above his head, but of course that shrank and began to lift him off his feet. His toes barely touching the floor, he thrashed about, breathing heavily, then paused. He relaxed and the vine stopped shrinking. Muge was still able to breath, but he was trapped, and he understood that further manipulation of the vine would only make things worse. He looked up to see who had snuck up on him.
"What a true buccaneer you are," he sneered at Shebbin. "Invading a ship, attacking the crew, probably with intent to kill and make off with the loot. Your kind are all the same."
Muge's words stung Shebbin unexpectedly. What was she doing here, anyway? Was she really about to hang a man? Perhaps she could not escape her buccaneer nature. "I'm not a pirate," she asserted finally. "I'm here to stop your sinister plans."
Muge laughed. "Sinister plans? You don't understand anything that's going on here. You just come barging in and assume you know."
"I'm not as ignorant as you think. Captain Froomba told me all about the fusion ducks. I saw you leave her to die. And you were keeping N'Lock imprisoned in that cell." As soon as she said this, she began to doubt herself. Maybe there was a good reason for Muge's actions. Maybe N'Lock was a criminal, and she had just let him have the gun. Maybe she was in over her head.
"N'Lock is my research partner. We are trying to graft a bit of duck liver into a hominid. Imagine the power of fusion inside of a man."
"Then why did he just cooperate with me? Was he your partner or was he your lab animal that you were testing your procedure on before you tried it yourself? And why did you steal our molybdenum, unless you intend to break the quarantine?"
"For your information, what I intend is to seal myself inside this ship and let my worms scour it and eat every last spore. Then I can blast off without spreading the disease. And your father offered us the molybdenum; we didn't steal it. Although why a family of farmers needs any pure molybdenum is beyond me."
"We use it to entice the spore to grow into..." She paused, realizing something. Finally she continued, in a less defensive tone. "I'm not a buccaneer. I'm something different. So, I'm not going to kill you, I'm going to offer you a choice. If you are confident that your worms can sterilize this ship, you may go ahead with that plan. But the ducks stay on the planet."
"Not a buccaneer, yet keeping the treasure?" he snorted.
"It's the only way to keep them safe. You may be confident of your worms' abilities, but I am not. And in the presence of molybdenum, with no other spore creatures about, the spore will grow into a mildew that releases a poisonous gas. Out in the open it's not so dangerous and we use it to get rid of pests, but within the confines of a ship it would surely kill you along with all of the ducks. But if no mildew appears, then, yes, I'll believe the ship to be sterilized and will gladly see you go."
"And what's the other choice you so generously offer?"
"You stay here, of course. You can continue your research on the ducks, but grounded here you will have few opportunities to gain undue influence over other people by controlling the fusion technology. The ducks will be safe, and we can even send out the sequence of the enzyme, or maybe the entire duck genome, via radio to other worlds, so it can be cloned by those who need it."
Muge hesitated, gasping slightly from within his noose. "No. I won't stay on this desolate outpost. My worms can eliminate the spore."
Shebbin was a little disappointed that she had been unable to frighten him into changing his plan, but her test had worked. She now knew that he wasn't lying when he said his worms could clean the ship. "Then hand over the molybdenum. You can have it back once we move all of the ducks out."
Grumbling, Muge reached into a pouch on his back with one of his free arms and retrieved a chunk of shiny metal. Wordlessly, he tossed it to Shebbin. She flashed N'Lock a picture of a light ray breaking the vine. He aimed and squeezed the clam gun. The vine snapped in half where the shot hit it, and Muge crumpled to the ground. Shebbin slid down a ramp, walked up to Muge, and gently brushed the fine hairs on his noose until it loosened enough for him to escape.
"What is happening on my ship?" honked a voice in the doorway.
"Captain Froomba!" yelled Shebbin. She grabbed N'Lock's hand and ran with him over to the tapir. "Muge has given up the molybdenum!" She proudly held up the lump of metal.
Froomba sniffed the molybdenum, looked up at the fusion ducks nestled peacefully on their shelves, and sniffed the metal again. "This is not molybdenum," she announced.
"Fool!" yelled Muge from across the room. "Did you really think I would accept your meager terms? I make my own choices! For I have the power!" He pulled another lump of metal, the real molybdenum, from his pouch and held it aloft in triumph.
A duck sniffed the air. "Mot?" it quacked. "Mot!"
The room erupted into a deafening din as every duck began to quack, "Mot! Mot! Mot!" Like a tsunami, the sea of ducks on the floor swelled into a wave and broke over the many-limbed man holding the mineral. Then the walls appeared to crumble and fall inward. But it wasn't the walls, it was all of the ducks rolling and oozing off the shelves, bouncing down the ramps, and sliding over the piles of other ducks that were struggling to reach the man, quacking all the while. Muge tried to fend off the anatine tide but it just kept coming. Within minutes, Muge was buried in blue-grey fat rolls. The ducks that had managed to reach the molybdenum fought over it but were unable to break it into bite-sized pieces. The metal fell among the ducks to the bottom of the pile, and the ravenous birds were all trying to push each other out of the way to reach it.
"He'll never make it out of there alive," honked the captain nonchalantly. "I must not have told him never to bring that much molybdenum directly into the aviary. It sparks a feeding frenzy. Although I see he did pay you in silver for it, as he vowed." She waved her trunk in the direction of the metal lump in Shebbin's hand. "By the way, who are you?" Froomba asked, turning to N'Lock.
N'Lock said something to Froomba, who nodded. "I see," she said. "Before he tells me who he is and what he's doing on my ship, he wants me to tell you that he thinks your pigments are very pretty."
For the first time since she was very young, Shebbin changed color without consciously choosing to, blushing bright pink.
Epilogue
Yorel and Labinu were overcome with relief to see Shebbin and a strange boy ride up to the farm atop Captain Froomba. After many hugs and tears, and a few scoldings, Shebbin told her parents the story of her trek and introduced N'Lock. N'Lock had already explained to Froomba how Muge had kidnapped him and kept his presence on the ship a secret from her. Yorel added an ointment to N'Lock's wound where Muge had tried unsuccessfully to transplant a section of duck liver, leaving too little tissue left for either the duck or the engine. Although Froomba and Labinu both spoke N'Lock's language, he spent most of his time with Shebbin, letting her talk to him pictorially. It wasn't long before the two youth had learned enough of each others' tongues to hold long conversations and swap inside jokes that baffled the adults.
The ducks thrived on their new planet. Froomba decided that a world no one would suspect, and few would dare visit, was an ideal place to keep the flock hidden from those who would exploit it into extinction or use it to prop up an oligarchy. Yorel helped her to study the ducks, and Labinu helped her to disseminate encrypted radio messages about their genetics and biochemistry such that biofusion technology could be duplicated democratically on numerous worlds, without anyone knowing where to find the original specimens. There was plenty of molybdenum for the birds; despite Shebbin's bluff about the mythical gassy mildew, the only horticultural use for the metal was to prepare the ground for wart gourds, which no one wanted to eat very often anyway.
Not long after Shebbin's return, Labinu announced that she was pregnant. Shebbin was excited by the thought of a new baby sibling, and wondered again about her own future offspring. She found herself fantasizing about the notion that N'Lock might help her to reproduce some day. She knew it was a meaningless dream; she had already begun to shed spores monthly, as the buccaneer women had once shed their half-spores, and she needed no genetic contributions from anyone else. However, unlike the other forms of her species, she was still expressing genes suited to the pre-spore way of life that had so recently been a part of her lineage. She realized that she retained the innate drive to find and care for a partner, even though there was no longer any adaptive reason for it. She decided she didn't care what was adaptive. She was something new, a hominid-spore hybrid, and she was free to choose what that meant and how to live in her body. Shebbin was not a buccaneer but a pioneer, learning to survive on uncharted frontiers. Not just in the literal sense on the planet's surface, but in the very essence of her existence as a new type of organism. She looked into her unknown future with delighted anticipation. There was so much to explore.