Alien Earth Read Free Page B

work, and real work, lining up a new client for Evangeline’s services. Reflecting that this type of task was one of the major reasons a Human captain was required at all on Evangeline didn’t cheer him. Tug was too fond of reminding him, “You are the captain of the ship, John, but I control the Beast.”
    He glanced once more at the monitor that showed Evangeline’s approach. John fought it for an instant, then let his heart swell as it always did when confronted with the wonder of his ship. Dammit, she was his ship, just as much as Tug’s. She was more than that, she was his world. He’d spent the vast majority of his many years within her, and that, as much as anything, made her his. And he was glad. The Beastship Evangeline moved as lightly as he imagined thistledown had in Terra’s winds. He sometimes thought that perhaps his ship looked like thistledown, on a cosmic scale. The immensity of the cell-meld-constructed gondola fastened to her body was negated to insignificance by the delicacy of her lacy sails and fans and the angel-hair finery of her lines and filaments. The precise angles and functionality of the gondolathat hugged Evangeline’s lower body and provided quarters for her Human crew was like a rectangular scar in that forest of delicacy. John jockeyed the monitor controls and shifted to a camera view that didn’t include the gondola. Now she was all Beast, all living creature moving herself easily toward the station. Evangeline was lifting and rotating her filaments and fans in the graceful lazing movement that all Beastships made, no matter what speed they were traveling at. Not for the first time, John stared at that seemingly idle shifting, at the play of the station’s reflected lights on her translucent body, and wondered how the hell the Beasts moved through space so effortlessly. One hank of filaments moved suddenly and coordinatedly in what could have been a venting of gases, a steerage correction, or simply a stretching of tissue as Evangeline brought them closer to docking.
    “Tug,” he said softly, staring at the screen. “Tell her she’s beautiful.”
    “Tell whom, John?”
    He didn’t lift his gaze. “Evangeline. Tell her she’s beautiful.”
    “I can’t do that, John. For one thing, she wouldn’t understand it. For another, we have found that any kind of communication with Humans, however indirect, is most unsettling to a Beast. Your culture is still, unfortunately, much too disharmonious.”
    “Telling her she’s beautiful would upset her? What’s disharmonious about that?”
    Tug sighed audibly, purely for the benefit of the listening Humans. John was suddenly aware of how still Connie was, how tuned in she was to this old argument between Tug and him.
    “John, it is so simple. Think about it and even you will grasp it. Evangeline sees neither beauty nor ugliness, in herself or in anything else. She sees only things in their correct places, doing as they should. To speak of beauty to her would be to imply to her that this was a thing to strive for, somehow, at the expense of being harmonious with all around her. It would confuse her.”
    John was silent. Tug wasn’t going to give Evangeline the message, was never going to let John have any kind of communication with the Beast that powered his ship. No, Tugkept it all for himself, and John often felt little more than an errand boy.
    Sometimes, when he thought about it, it almost made him bitter. John Gen-93-Beta, captain of the Beastship Evangeline, sitting in his command lounge watching his ship rendezvous and dock with the station. And he didn’t lift a finger to control or assist it in any way, didn’t need to issue a single command, didn’t even really understand how any of it was done. The fact that the entire Human populations of Castor and Pollux and all four dirty-tech stations shared his ignorance did nothing to abate his frustration with it. The poor quality of the screen’s image only rubbed his nose in