The Mother-Thing
He jerked his hand back as if burned. He hadn't meant to touch her.
He should never have come here. He had known how it would be. He gazed on her with involuntary adoration. She, a shapeless mass all but filling the control room, glowed phosphorus green in response. She knew his soul better than he knew it himself, yet she still radiated affection that warmed him to his depths. But, his depths were so very cold.
She had to know he had come to kill her.
He had only meant to stand by the door, quickly say goodbye, walk back out and then, from the airlock, send the command that would evacuate her ship. It was his job to kill her, kill the Mother-Thing, for the security of the human race, and the damnation of his soul. But, then, he had not had a soul for a very long time.
Instead, he had come closer, mesmerized by her particular beauty, enveloped in the warm breath of love, knowing that while his mind was an open library of facts entirely at her disposal, hers was equally open to him. He glanced over at Orton Kast, a permanent fixture at the Mother-Thing's side. Kast's simple face wore an expression that reflected the kind of contentment he could never have found in the exacting world of men. Humans were intolerant of imperfection. Kast intended to go with her on her journey, intended to never again leave her side. Would never again leave her side.
Another murder they'd left for Ryker Sly, but what is the life of a retarded man against the safety of the human race?
"You should never have come," he told her, knowing he didn't have to speak aloud.
Just as you know I had to come. My own imperative to protect my charges, to find others worth preserving. My ship could fly no more.
That was true, just like everything Clio said, Clio, the Mother-Thing.
Scouts had found her drifting perilously close to Galactic headquarters, which orbited around Rega 9, and brought her in. At first, they hadn't known what to make of her: living tissue, obviously, but no one understood if she were one creature or a conglomeration of organisms like coral.
Given that Galactic HQ was not only the center of the political universe, but also home of the greatest scientific minds in the galaxy, her discovery was greeted with great fanfare and anticipation. After all, in the three centuries since humans had conquered space, they had only once before come across alien life: the ill-fated Kudzels who graced many a gourmand's dinner table before anyone realized that Kudzels only reproduced once every hundred years. By the time the belated conservation blather began, it was too late.
This time, human beings were going to explore this new alien carefully and write any number of long boring papers extolling her characteristics. Or rather, they'd intended to, but she reacted to anyone coming within a few meters with blinding mental pain. Try to touch her, even through gloves or probes, and she would send the transgressor into a permanent vegetative state, as if their minds were wiped clean. Unwilling to admit to failure with their much-touted find, the scientists instead invited every official and celebrity within a three-system radius to come and admire their prize safely locked away behind a glass wall.
Sly stroked the back of his hand against her surface, marveling again at how wonderfully soft and warm it was, when it looks mushy and disagreeable. He knew she took samples of his cells as he did so. They wouldn't do her any good. He'd been sent there to kill her, Clio and the amazing race of creatures she carried the genetic signatures for within her bulky form.
If only Mahria Cronan, the child prodigy and precocious genius, had never crossed paths with Clio, perhaps no one would have ever known Clio's secret, and Sly would not have to kill her now.
He shook his head, and, with great reluctance, retrieved his hand. Someone else would have been Clio's chosen, of course, someone would have known. But not so quickly perhaps, and perhaps the powers that be wouldn't have been so scared if Cronan had not done so much to make Clio a threat.
Cronan had claimed to be able to speak to Clio when she had visited the exhibition with her father. After she was scoffed and laughed at by Clio's caretakers, she found a way to override the security system and was found the next day in the cell with Clio, touching and communicating quite easily.
Cronan's influence had given Orton Kast the opportunity to join Clio's side as her second chosen. Cronan's influence, and the clout of her politician father, had taken Clio off the zoo circuit and secured her a temporary home in a modified ship of Cronan's own design, ostensibly to be studied in Cronan's home facilities. But Sly knew it was an excuse to give Clio a ship and allow her to continue on her journey unmolested.
None of that, most likely, would have convinced his superiors that Clio had to be destroyed. Not until they discovered she was a threat.
And she was a threat.
Sly knew better than anyone. What everyone hadn't known when they were parading politicos and generals and scientists in front of her was that Clio was collecting and storing every single fact of every brain that came within range (about 3 AU). What everyone hadn't known was that she was neither a single organism nor a conglomeration like a coral, but an engineered creature specifically designed to carry the genetic seeds of the race that designed and created her, to learn so that she could educate them to the greatest extent possible, to protect them through any means necessary, and to continue on her journey until she found a home for the race. That race had died when their sun had gone supernova with some survivors fleeing one direction and Clio, the Mother-Thing, fleeing another.
No one but her chosen had known until Cronan, brilliant but, after all, only eleven years old, had let slip some of the story, then all of it under carefully moderated duress. No one was sure of the extents of Clio's powers but torturing Cronan might have forced Clio to demonstrate.
Clio could not be approached, her ship all but ready to launch, and she was loaded down with another race and nearly the entire knowledge base of this one. No getting around how dangerous that was, what a risk that was.
Sly had known all that, too, but twenty three years as Galactic's top hatchet man had taught him to be silent unless specifically asked. No sense causing trouble. No sense forcing them to make him kill someone else he loved. Cronan had ruined that, had spilled the beans and been rewarded by being kept under house arrest. At least her death was not to be added to his long-dead conscience.
He kept himself from stepping closer to Clio through sheer will, but his will was not enough to walk away, walk out to the airlock and do his duty, not when she stood there, pulsating with joy and love for him.
Even now, even feeling her love envelope him, he couldn't understand it. He could grasp the innocent appeal of Orton Kast and the intellectual charm of Mahria Cronan. What in the world did she see in his own blackened heart?
Why do you question your worth, Ryker Sly?
He didn't want to kill her. Perhaps that weighed somewhere to his merit, but against the years of heartless dealings, ruthless killings, the murder of the one he loved before as ordered, it could be no more than a feather.
He hadn't wanted to kill the woman he'd loved either, though then it was his loose tongue that condemned her. His report to his superiors without an appreciation for the consequences had convinced them that her innocent disdain for the corruption and decay of government, so closely allied to their trained killer, was a threat.
She had been so beautiful, those soulful eyes. The time he had loved her had been so short—so good. She was everything. She was his. And because she was his, her betrayal to the government could not be forgiven.
He could feel it now, needed only to close his eyes to see it again. He'd stood before her, gun pointed at the beautiful face he loved so well, hand squeezing a trigger he hadn't wanted to pull. He'd loved her as she stood, straight and tall, shattered by his betrayal, unashamed of what she believed in, unbroken, unbending . . . and still loving him.
You didn't kill her.
"She didn't think so either," he said, without opening his eyes. "I threw d
own the gun and she believed I had stood by her after all, but the gun went off and she was just as dead."
But, you didn't kill her. Clio was insistent but gentle, always gentle.
"I did! I'm too good for it to be an accident. Someone else would have killed her if I had failed. There was nothing I could do to save her . . . except let her believe I hadn't betrayed her."
Clio said nothing. She knew the whole truth, could see what happened written in his mind, could feel the emptiness inside what was left of his heart.
"I died then, too. You chose poorly when you chose me. I'm dead inside, and that just makes it easier to do what I have to do."
There was no visible sound, but there was a slight movement of air as if she had vented. It felt like a sigh. Your plans sorrow me greatly, as does their treatment of Mahria. Is there no other way?
"Cronan's too valuable for them to harm. I have no doubt it will end, as always, with her having the upper hand. As for my plans, I have no choice."
The console beeped. "Flight plan finalized and locked in. Launch in three minutes and counting," the voice said.
Come with us.
"I can't. You know I can't. They can't afford your escape."
Even though I nurture a race within me, one that could disappear forever if I'm destroyed?
"Because you do."
Time was up. Without touching her again, he forced himself to leave, to close the door behind him. They'd had no choice but to send him to take care of her. There was no one else who could get close enough, no one else she trusted.
He stared at the data station on the panel. The capability existed to evacuate her ship remotely while she was still docked to the station, the station where everyone of power waited for him to complete his task.
He sighed, but, in many ways, he wasn't really sorry. He put in the data card with the override and password, the virus Cronan had given him for just such a contingency, one that would disable every other ship and weapon on Galactic HQ.
Then he flipped the switch to evacuate as he felt the grappling hooks release and her ship depart, the switch to evacuate the airlock where he stood.
After all, only he could kill her.
This time, they couldn't make him do it.
After all, he loved her.