The Children Star Read Free Page A

the baby tighter in his arm. “Don’t spread rumors, Brother.” Such stories arose whenever a new world was settled, even on Valedon long after it was boiled and terraformed.
    Geode snaked an eyestalk toward him. “Can you explain how Prokaryon has all those rows of forest, one after another, all across the continent? Who tends the garden?”
    â€œThe Elysian scientists have been looking for years. They found no one, and the Fold certified the planet empty of intelligence. Do you want to get our colony evicted?”
    â€œThe truth is what I seek, Brother,” insisted Geode.
“You
explain how the weather stays the same all year, only raining at night, or a cloudburst to put out a fire.”
    Looking away, Rod placed the sleeping infant gently at the wall, where the nanoplast obligingly molded inward to cradle it.
    â€œHumans,” Geode added with bemusement. “Will humans ever know an ‘intelligent’ creature, if they find one? They took centuries just to recognize us sentients, out of their own factories.”

TWO

    F ed, scrubbed, clothed, and medicated, the six new Spirit children endured their week-long journey through the space folds to Prokaryon. Of course, none of them could yet set foot on their new home. Merely inhaling Prokaryan air would expose their unprepared lungs to poison; for the native life-forms had evolved all sorts of things that the ordinary human body was not designed to encounter, much less digest for food. Their triplex chromosomes were mutagenic, their “proteins” contained indigestible amino acids, and their membranes were full of arsenic. Prokaryan cells were not exactly good to eat—unless you were Prokaryan.
    So the children’s first stop was a satellite, the Fold Council Station for Xenobiotic Research and Engineering. “Station” was actually a giant sentient whose brain directed the investigation of Prokaryan life-forms, as well as the transport and lifeshaping of colonists. Station’s lifeshaperswould inject the new children with nanoservos, microscopic machines to put special genes into the cells of the liver and intestines. The special genes would teach their cells how to detoxify unfamiliar Prokaryan molecules, and to eat them as food, as easily as they ate the nutrients from their own world. For adults the lifeshaping was slow and inefficient; thus, most Prokaryan colonies depended heavily on sentients.
    Rod often wondered how the rest of the Fold’s worlds would ever have gotten settled, had they all tried to avoid terraforming. Valedon, and all but two of the other worlds, had been boiled off and reseeded with human-compatible life-forms. But today people called that “planetary ecocide.” Rod himself had been skeptical, until he came to Prokaryon and fell in love with its mysterious beauty. He could not imagine terraforming such a world.
    The cylindrical bulk of Station grew until it dwarfed the approaching ship. “All passengers prepare to disembark.” The voice of the great sentient vibrated throughout the ship, as she extended her docking tube.
    Rod always tensed at her greeting. Besides her gene clinic, Station directed scientists from all the worlds of the Fold who came to study Prokaryon’s biosphere and confirm its absence of intelligent natives, a legal requirement for exploitation. Above all, she governed Prokaryan settlement on behalf of the Fold. She set each colony’s immigration quota, and determined when each lifeshaped immigrant was ready to settle.
    Brother Geode crawled out on three of his furry limbs, carrying babies in his other three, while Rod carried two and ’jum gamely managed one. The tube rotated steadily, generating about half a unit of centrifugal force, enabling them to walk while keeping their baggage light. But thesense of weight loss alarmed the babies, for their stomachs told them they were falling, no matter how hard Rod clutched them in his