“‘He sent them word I had not gone,’” she quotes a poem from one of our favorite stories. I taught it to her back at the training center, where our love began. “Will we ever know what that means?”
“It’s nonsense,” I say. “Always will be.”
“And you call yourself a teacher.” She lifts her hand and marks the air with the words of the poem.
“‘He sent them word I had not gone
(We know it to be true):
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?’”
On the log, in the quiet and the peace, I am the happiest I’ve ever been, the most contented, the most fulfilled. I am lost in admiration as well as love. We often play with poems and words, but I can’t play with what she does: life itself. As chief biologist, my partner will ensure that Earth lives on in Ship. I am proud of her. My job—our job—is part of the greatest endeavor in human history. We have visited cities and towns, forests and jungles and deserts. We have met with schoolchildren and farmers, scientists and celebrities. We are the chosen. We are famous.
“It still doesn’t make sense to you?” she chides.
“Sorry.”
She continues:
“‘I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.’”
I pick up with the next few lines.
“‘If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free
Exactly as we were.’”
“Good,” she says, wrapping her arm around me and hugging me close in the evening chill. “If we get lost out there, this is how we’ll know each other. Like a secret song.”
“We’re not going to get lost,” I say.
“No,” she says. “But still…
“‘My notion was that you had been
(Before she had this fit)
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves and it.
“‘Don’t let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.’”
“You forgot the first stanza,” I say.
“It’s not important,” she says. “These are all you need to know to find me.”
For some reason, I quote part of the original song from which Lewis Carroll’s enigmatic parody was drawn.
“‘She’s all my fancy painted her—
Ye Gods! She is divine.
But her heart it is another’s—
It never can be mine.’”
She makes a wry face. “Ye Gods,” she says. “You are so didactic.”
Ours has been called a great romance, perhaps the greatest romance ever—love that will fly out between the stars, love that will survive chill centuries to be warmed anew. Fulfillment and destiny and preparedness: The emotions are utterly warm and embracing and richly detailed.
I can’t pull up from the vision. I do not want to. We are ready to go. We are simply saying farewell to our world.
The forest watches. I can’t see the eyes of the animals who know we are here, but they are the eyes of the Earth, and soon we will move far away and will not be seen again, until we make this place anew, around another star, very far away.
At any cost.
Sitting beside me, weary after our hike, she looks young and vulnerable, with her short bobbed hair and square, frank eyes, deep blue, and her wide, slightly ironic smile. I have felt over and over the honor and the depth of her care, her attention to detail both scientific and emotional; her concern for my parents, saying good-bye forever to their only son. Her parents died years before, and this only makes her more eager to establish a chain of posterity.
All of Earth is her family.
It is here that she gives me a real book, small and beautiful—a paper diary bound in faux leather. The paper is creamy and beautiful. “Write it all down, Teacher,” she tells me. “When you figure out the poem, write it down, and let me know.”
At any cost.
Her body I am also aware of, picturing it beneath the winter coat, remembering the sheen on her thighs and shoulders as we swim almost naked in the warm waves off an atoll’s coral beach in the South Pacific. I remember our lovemaking, our murmured talk beneath soughing palms and warm breezes under a densely starry sky; talk about having children. She wants daughters. She believes daughters understand their mothers. She laughs at this, admits it’s silly, sons are wonderful, but she wants daughters.
My head spins at the extraordinary power put into this woman’s hands. When we arrive, she will be not just the shepherd but also the mother of another Earth. And I will be there with her, protecting her against danger, helping her succeed….
At any cost.
I am suddenly back in the hidden pages of the Catalog.
Others may be there. Aboriginal life-forms. We may be out of fuel, with no other place to go. They may not want us, when we arrive. They may try to kill us. Kill me. Kill Earth’s seed and memory. And what will we do then, lover?
MY EYES BLINK open and I groan. All of those emotions lie beneath my love, hidden like the monsters we’ve seen, only to be activated if the situation arises.
It has arisen.
Mother is watching me, brows arched, that ironic expression familiar and so clear.
I sneeze and rub my nose.
She turns to Kim.
Kim looks at her, then at me, his expression heavy-lidded. I don’t know what he’s thinking. I have no idea what more he’s recovered, rediscovered in himself, after looking into the mirror of Ship’s memory, and now, seeing Mother herself.
“Are we done yet?” he asks, stretching as far as the leafage allows. His eyes shift left and right, embarrassed. “Could you, like, cover up? I can’t focus.”
The girls who are awake murmur disapproval, but more of the bower grows to cover all but Mother’s shoulders and head.
“Do you know your reason?” Mother asks him.
Kim says, “I work with the Klados.”
“I am Klados,” Mother says, her eyes on mine. And for the last time, I see in the angle of her brow, in the sadness, that she also remembers something of what we would have had, if the times had been good, if our luck had held, if decisions had been made correctly. Part of her is still my Dreamtime partner.
Her long body slowly ripples.
Kim says, “There used to be a gene pool in each hull. Now there’s only one. But… you weren’t born here.”
Mother is silent for long seconds. “We came to be in the first hull, where we were attacked. Many died. We crossed to this hull. Once I arrived, I gave birth and raised daughters.”
“Ship was split into factions,” Kim says. “Ship Control broke down.”
“I am Ship Control,” she says, this time with some fire. “How do you think you came here, and why do you think Ship listened to you? Teacher, you are the other half, the one I cannot give birth to. You are prayed into existence. With the help of our daughters, you come to me and tell me what you have seen. You bring your books and read them to me after we lie together. And if you perish, my daughters collect the books… all of the books. They bring them here, and I grieve.”
I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more;
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.
My eyes fill with tears for what we’ve all lost. And why? What did this to us? How did we come to be this way?
The girls are still. They have never seen her like this.
“You don’t know how it happened, do you?” Kim asks. “You don’t know any more about the war than we do. You should look into Ship’s memory—you should look into the mirror.”
“I have,” Mother says. “I saw Klados. I am Klados. That is all
that I am.”
Suddenly, Kim seems to understand. “Someone wanted Ship to fail, to die. They locked away—maybe they even destroyed—the other gene pools. Why would they do that?”
His face darkens and pinches down with this awareness. This is Big Yellow when he loses all that remains of his innocence. “Just before the other gene pools were shut down, you were made, shaped into a reservoir, a movable backup for the Klados. But not all of it. Just selections. This hull was meant to be pristine. A final refuge. But you came here and took it over, then reconstructed your portion of the gene pool to continue Ship’s mission.”
“The early times are dim,” she says. “Many births, many deaths.”
“You came here. You grew…” He looks up, distressed. Something in the air, the company, has made him too blunt, too honest. He would prefer not to discuss these matters… not in front of his boss. But he can’t help himself. “That’s why it’s so large, so inefficient. It came out of you. Some of us are born biased, bent, distorted… grandiose. Your memory emphasizes the secret parts of the Catalog. Did you pray for the Killers?”
“Hurt. Burned. Dying,” Mother says. Her look at me is… what? Disappointed? What does she remember out of the Dreamtime? What ideal life does she dream of as she suckles all her daughters?
“What’s still not clear to me is who was in charge in the best of times,” Kim says.
“Destination Guidance,” I say. “They pick where we will go. Ship and all aboard are subservient to the goals of the mission, which have to be determined based on where we’re going, when we’re going to arrive… what the situation might be when we arrive. Everything depends upon decisions made by Destination Guidance.”
The girls do not like this at all. I am surprised as well by this blunt declaration. Mother’s expression does not change. I had hoped for a more indicative reaction to guide what I say next.
“They chose a world already inhabited. It wasn’t the best choice, was it? A desperate decision. That started the war. A war of conscience.”
Not at any cost.
Then… the love is gone. As if those memories had never been, I see Mother’s features glaze over, harden. I am a fraud. So is Kim. I am not the consort she needs. He is not the assistant she had hoped for. My fear would be intense if the bower’s perfume didn’t dull my responses.
“I have heard you,” Mother says. “I am not the first Mother. My daughters are not the first daughters.”
Four of the girls enter the bower, trailing cords on which many small gray bags are hooked like fish on a string. The bags twirl and bump and break branch and leaf, which another girl carefully gathers, crushes in her hands, and stuffs into a smaller bag at her waist.
“They have found these scattered in all the hulls. The testimony of many who did not live. I no longer have need of them. Perhaps they will serve you.”
The bags are cinched at the neck, looped together, and filled with small, square objects.
The end of the string is handed to me. I pull up one bag by a scruff of fabric, feeling the objects within. Books. A dozen or more per bag. Hundreds in all.
“Teacher, go back. Tell the other Teacher to come forward. Kim, you will stay here and tell me more of what you know about the Klados.”
Kim doesn’t look at all happy at this prospect. But as the girls surround us, it seems he relishes a fight even less. He’s the assistant. Mother would have been his boss. He has his own Dreamtime memories now.
Mother gives me one last, lingering look. She says,
“‘But her heart it is another’s—
It never can be mine.’”
I am not the one Mother needs. But she cannot bring herself to dispatch me.
The other must come forward, and until he does, she will hold Kim hostage.
TALES BETWEEN MY LEGS
Two of the girls accompany me. The book bags have been arranged more conveniently in a larger bundle. Still they are cumbersome. No doubt Mother has read them already, or they have been read to her by my others—all the reports of consorts and daughters, and the daughters of other Mothers before her, who died before their books could be delivered.
More histories of the war between Ship Control—represented or personified, perhaps, by Mother, taking all its memories and duties into her form—and Destination Guidance. The Ship became a charnel house long before this mother was made. A bad decision, possibly initiated by an accident between the stars—the supernova. Damage, confusion, and what else? Something more, surely. I’ve died; they’ve died; we’ve all died over and over… and I’m thinking it’s increasingly unlikely, almost down to zero chance, that any of us will survive much longer, much less fulfill our destiny.
I have to ask, as I pull the bundle along—as the two daughters travel without complaint and hardly any emotion, moving away from Mom again, no joy in that—
The answer to many questions lies in knowing what part of the Klados Mother fulfills. What planet was she designed to inhabit? What circumstance would favor her kind of society, her kind of progeny, rather than, say, those my Dreamtime partner and I would have produced?
Mother makes sense only in the context of a damaged Ship, Ship at war with itself. We are all expedients.
I’m not even a teacher, not really. The great Dreamtime story was ever and always a travesty, a trick.
“Faster,” the closest daughter tells me as we push down the striped tube, past signs that would guide factors to wherever they need to go, moving forward supposedly to deliver this bundle of histories to readers who might already be less than sympathetic, more dangerous to Mother, and who, by now, looking deeper into the mirror, have likely recovered and rediscovered even more than Kim and I. Nell was on a roll, after all. But how does that make sense?
Why give knowledge to those who will fight you?
As for my twin…
I feel utterly spent and useless.
And so it is with little surprise, and perhaps even a dark joy, that I hear one of the daughters say we have taken a wrong turn. They are concerned. We are not moving forward.
The other daughter approaches, her hand pushing the wall, her foot kicking back, echoing, her other hand hooked in the clasp of her overalls. Her face is serious. “This place is not the same.”
“Tunnels might have shifted. Is that it?” I ask with a touch of glee. Nell was made to talk to Ship. Is she redirecting Ship’s architecture—foiling Mother’s plans?
The girl gives me a look that strikes me straight to my heart, even after all we’ve been through, a look of childlike dismay that says, how could you be so mean?
“Okay,” I say, pulling back my Schadenfreude. Strange word, but I know what it means. Maybe I can be their teacher after all—an instructor in mean thoughts and gross ironies. “What now?”
“If we go back, we will be late,” one daughter says. “But we do not know how to go forward, or even how to find our way back….” She looks so lost, but I feel no sympathy.
They can’t take me where Mother wants me to go—to my death. The books will be destroyed, they’re useless anyhow—like me. How will they finish me?
Will there be one last Killer waiting at the end of the line?
They float before me, holding hands. I take a short breath, calm myself. I will send them home. That is the least I can do. “How good is your memory?” I ask.
“Pretty good,” the other daughter says.
“Remember what you saw when you went forward or aft in the hulls—can you see the symbols, the radiances, how they were oriented or how frequent the stripes were in a given stretch of corridor?”
The daughters look puzzled. Their mouths open, showing pink tongues and tiny, well-ordered teeth… milk teeth. They’re lost in deep recall.
“Maybe,” the girl on my left says.
“The corridors have a code,” I say. I had watched Kim examining the signs and ovals and striping, and suspected he was figuring out how factors—and perhaps even people—could learn where
they were, inside the hull, by reading the coded patches. It seems logical that as the hull adjusts, the signs will also adjust, but a lot has to rest on faith. “We can read the code—if we apply ourselves.”
They come to silent agreement, then return their eyes to me. The girl on the right says, “I remember better than she does.”
“I thought you were all alike,” I say.
“That would be silly,” they say together.
Despite everything, I have to laugh. One of the girls begins to crack what might be a smile, the first hint of humor, the first recognition of human individuality in all its absurdity, but the smile vanishes so quickly I wonder if I just imagined it. “Can you figure it out by yourselves?” I ask.
After a few seconds, the sharper daughter points behind us and says, “This way.”
We’re going to have to part company soon. If I want to get back to the bow and not join all my rejected, dead brothers.
I start to haul the books again, but the girls wave their arms. “Leave them,” they say. “We have to move quickly. We can come back for them.”
“Your sisters and others died for these books,” I say, surprised by my heat.
“Let’s not join them,” a daughter says.
I reluctantly untie the band and leave the bag drifting in the corridor. Despite everything, I’m curious about all those memories and experiences, recorded in so many childlike scrawls by so many little hands. And by my hands.