Proudly Inerrant — Conclusion

Preamble: These are the concluding chapters of a serialized science-fiction novellette concerning failures of fidelity in the transmission of culture. Please excuse the decade-long delay. (Previously: Chapter 1, and Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, and Chapter 4, and Chapter 5, and Chapter 6, and Chapter 7, and Chapter 8, and Chapter 9, and Chapter 10, and Chapter 11)

PROUDLY INERRANT
by Cheeseburger Brown

PART III, Chapter 12.

When I first saw the rocket with my own eyes I couldn’t help but look sidelong at the captain. “It’s a bit sexy, isn’t it?”

The rocket stood tall as if very proud of itself, a pointy thing like an arrowhead for giants, nose angled at the destination it presumably yearned for — the sky. It had fish fins and a couple of myopic windows toward the tip. The fuel tank assembly had a layer of frost on it that breathed away a constant curtain of vapour. The business end of the thing — down below — also smoked; and it glew and it chortled, sending little vibrations through the whole platform.

Captain Gateway checked his checklist. “Visual inspection of the third stage shell complete,” he told the crew through comm. “Check, check and check.” To me he said, “Put those down by the cargo claw, will you?”

“This is the last of these,” I told him, stepping back as the claw grabbed the boxes and hoisted them away. “Now I’m supposed to ask you what to do now.”

“Take your daughter. Collect your things. Climb that ladder. Strap into the seat with the helmet that has your name on it. Put the little helmet on the kid. Use tape on the seal — it was designed for pets. Say goodbye to your world.”

And really I suppose you can make a big deal out of such moments, or you can not. You can stare at the horizon and curate a personal museum of nostalgia to dip into and feel its peck on your heart. You can take one last deep breath of the sandy air, eyes closed. People in legends do such things.

But babby and me just did as we were told, looking only at things close to us like handles or the side of the chair. We put our helmets over our heads and checked everything about them. We heard the chatter on comm, reassuring in its familiarity. Just another simulation. Nothing felt different than that.

I heard them say about how armies were coming out. Swarming the launch platform. Throwing harpoons. Shrieking invectives.

Babby didn’t mind it at all and neither did I. That’s how it goes when a whole world’s just minutes away from being permanently in your past — its things stop mattering. Even things as big as armies. What once might have represented to us the military will of kings now seemed like a bunch of people throwing things and yelling. For babby and me their meaning had all dried up, leaving nothing but the naked things themselves, and things without meaning always feel small and stupid in a way no matter how big they are or how many of them. Dig?

The rumbling of the engines turned to a roar. The shuddering became quaking. I imagined the army lost within the fire and smoke and curlicues of chi of the rocket’s thrust. We were pressed backward into the chair, like being stepped on.

After maybe five or six minutes everything became very quiet. The pressing subsided. Babby cried because suddenly there was no sense of up or down, so I took off her pet-sized space hat and petted her bald head. She barfed a little bit. The blobules of bilous milk dangled lazily in the air before her. She stopped crying to watch in wonder.

“That’s how we do it,” crowed Captain Gateway. The outlanders were clapping.

The next moment that mattered came when the captain brought me over to the porthole to look outside at Old Earth. The experience is not really the sort of thing that can be told about properly without making it seem small and crappy. So I’m not even going to bother. But let’s just say one glance through that little grubby round window changed some part of me inside forever. Babby, too.

When everything big becomes small, your sense of scale gets dizzy.

I was also dizzy because of how all the directions had melted together, and I was falling sideways in the cramped cabin. I hoped I would stick to the wall but I didn’t, instead tumbling lazily into Mr. Codeburg. The two of us kind of wrestled a bit before going off in different directions.

Mr. Pumpworthy snarled, “Can someone strap down the idiots?”

“Hey!” said Mr. Codeburg, offended.

“You’re clumsy,” chided Chaudry in a way that wasn’t mean.

Codeburg pressed his mouth into a line. Babby kicked off from my shoulder and soared toward Dr. Waterful, giggling. Dr. Waterful almost smiled before the full impact of having her hair pulled set in. Babby squealed, pushing off from the esteemed physician’s chin to drift over the cockpit. Domer covered the controls with her arms, saying, “Shoo, shoo!”

“I feel like the baby’s got better control than you do,” said Mr. Americana. “Sorry Yoram.”

“Shut up Po,” said Codeburg as tried to strap himself back into his launch sling, unsuccessful because he had the buckle backwards. He looked up at glared at babby as she sailed by, tumbling gracefully back toward me.

“Everybody back in your harnesses!” snapped Captain Gateway, pinching the bridge of his nose and closing his eyes. “Jolly, secure your daughter. Did the baby just salute me? I feel like I’m losing my mind. Let’s get it together people. We’re eighteen minutes out from platform contact. Look alive or we won’t be.”

The rocket turned out to be hard to park or something. There was a lot of yelling as we got closer to the orbital platform. The machines were yelling with blinking lights and frenzied chirping. The crew was yelling, too. Dormer yelled, “Clear that jet! Clear that jet! Clear that jet!”

Captain Gateway barked, “Gao, portside aft! Get out there and stick your finger in if you have to!”

“Aye,” agreed Gao, putting on his space hat as he clambered over to the airlock. “Fornication,” he grunted as he stabbed at the controls. “Here goes nothing.”

So that’s how Mr. Gao died saving us from crashing.

The orbital platform sucked. Everything was broken and most of it was frozen. We had to live in the medical bay and the cafeteria cause those were the only chambers where the engineers could rig a decent atmospheric seal. The atmosphere smelled like something burnt, and we could make little fleeting clouds in it with our talking and breathing. Babby kept trying to catch the clouds in her chubby little hands.

Captain Gateway sighed heavily. “...So that’s the plan. Genny, how long will you need to prep the escape pods?”

Smith exhaled sharply. “Fifteen hours.”

“Can we do better?”

“Not without Gao.”

“Chaudry, can you keep us breathing for fifteen more hours?”

Chaudry frowned. “Yes, but barely. We’re bottled in here. I hope you all like the smell of farts.”

Codeburg was shaking his head. “This is our plan? We’re taking ancient broken-ass escape pods to try to get to — where?”

“An abandoned cruise ship.”

“And then what?”

Gateway looked Codeburg dead in the eyes. “We find the next thing, and we climb again. We keep climbing out of the well, flotsam by flotsam, until we’re far enough from the auroras to call for help.”

“And someone’ll spill resource just to pick us up? Conny — seriously?”

“Maybe,” grunted the captain.

“If not?”

The captain glowered and grit his teeth, “Then we build our own boat and eat blankets and use our shits as paddles until every last one of us is gathered up on an ark! You hear me, Yoram? The human race ain’t leaving this dumpster fire without us aboard. That means throw in with the effort with your best birthday smile or God help me I will ransack your skeleton for parts I can make use of.”

Codeburg blinked. “Right,” he said, “have it your way, Conny. Let’s survive.”

Which we did. I mean, I don’t want to make a big thing out of it, but lots of stuff happened. Upsell fashioned a very small space-onesie for babby, so when we had to go outside she could stay warm. We had to go outside all the time, to get clipped to a metal rope and pushed along like abacus beads from one part of the orbital platform to another, and then after being squished into a trio of stinky escape pods for a stupid and grumpy time, we had to go outside and play abacus beads again to board the abandoned cruise ship.

“I feel like I’m Gulliver Foyle,” said Codeburg through the comm as we shuffled along the line.

Mr. Americana grunted. “Who’s that?”

“Gully Foyle. The Stars My Destination. You know! The movie.”

“Never seen it.”

“It’s literally one of the most famous movies ever made.”

“Still haven’t seen it.”

“The guy’s stranded in a derelict spaceship. For months. Loses his mind. Freaks tattoo his face to look like a tiger. Only escapes once he dedicates his life to killing the people responsible for not rescuing him.”

“Are you saying you’re going to go after the Lunar Exeunt wearing kitty-cat make-up?”

“Gentlemen, enough!” interrupted the captain. “Mr. Americana, nobody believes you don’t know about The Stars My Destination. I get you think we’re philistines but, come on. Mr. Codeburg: less chatter and more focus on not coming unclipped this time. Signal your understanding by shutting up.”

It took us two hours to make our way across from the escape pods to the abandoned cruise ship. The ship was blue with a white stripe, and it has some holes in it. Some of the holes were neat little circles that were maybe windows, but some of the holes were ragged kersplosion holes with a bunch of sparkling debris and shit floating around.

The inside was weird but interesting. Even though most of ship was crap we had a much bigger space with atmosphere, including some cabins and a ballroom with a shiny parquet dance floor. Babby and I liked floating around in the ballroom best, cause the ceiling was all windows and we could watch the light change over the Earth...dark and then pink and then brown and blue and then orange and then dark again, over and over. Tiny shadows rose and fell from mountains, slid out and melted away, then restarted.

Honestly it all seemed kind of showy and pointless to me. Why were people?

When we were in the ballroom we felt Ms. Lam watching us watch the Earth. She was always watching. She never said anything. Babby and I both looked sideways to see her. Lam had thought she was invisible to us, so we felt her shiver and stifle a startle when our eyes locked.

It was weeks we all spent in that cruise ship. Babby and me liked to look in the passenger cabins out by the seal. Most of the cabins had junk and stuff in them, cause I think all the peoples left in a big hurry sometime long ago. A lot of the stuff was still frozen: little impossibly perfect hair brushes and frosted mirrors, folds of hard cloth and stiff blankets, toys, phoney hair stuck in weird shapes, and even one time something like an electric cucumber.

Some of the passengers had brought books and left them behind. The ones that fit into my reader I read aloud to babby. “'The Super Fan Guide to The Revengineers Season Ninety, Episode by Episode Ultra Jam Flow, by Pepsi Lee Saltines-Hwang. This book is dedicated to my dearest mother, Pepperidge, who taught me all I remember. I love you, mom.'”

Babby paused from suckling. “Mom!”

“Dearest babby. Let’s continue. 'Preface: We all remember where we were the day the season finale dropped. I was a student at Huo Hsing University, and we had all gathered to watch it together and vote the plot forward...'”

A lot of the books were about people getting sexy with one another. Babby was confused cause she’d never seen a man person’s trunk. I asked Mr. Codeburg to show babby his trunk but that made him pissed off, which is a kind of angry characterized by sarcasm and scoffing, and blushing.

The outlanders tended to cluster around Mr. Kaseimoto’s kitchen, which comprised two adjoining cabins: one for keeping all the edible things in, and the other cabin for floating around eating stuff after Kaseimoto had combined various ration packets into novel new meals, cooked in a toilet, served in re-used single-use dented snack spheres.

“My good man,” Mr. Americana said to Mr. Kaseimoto, putting a hand on his shoulder in thanks, “as ever, this meal is preferable to death. Hats off to the chef!”

The company laughed, and I laughed, and then babby laughed. “Hats off!” Babby cried, and pretended to yank a hat off her little head.

Everybody went still. They even stopped chewing. I furrowed my brow. “...What?”

Captain Gateway cleared his throat. “Your daughter — she spoke.”

“So?”

Upsell explained to me that babies don’t talk, which was stupid because obviously babies talk, otherwise where would talking adults come from? She shook her head. “Jolly, it usually takes a long time for babies to acquire speech.”

“Yes, doy!” I agreed. “I know that. It’s not like I haven’t formed babby before. I’m fifteen, yo.”

Upsell looked concerned. “I’m sorry, darling, I really am. What happened to your first baby?”

I shrugged. “She moved east, cause there was a village with an opening.”

“They took your baby?”

“Of horse knot.”

“I think you’re trying to say of course not?”

“Of course not! She wasn’t babby after she grew. She was a me. A...witch? We quit each other when she was three. She had already shed her skin half a dozen times by then. See, that’s why I think you tall children are just dumb kids — you don’t even know about anything, not even how babby is formed.”

After that I was told it was time for another check up with Dr. Waterful, and she looked all over me and babby with her eyes and with little whirring gizmos. The glass tablet in her hand lit up numbers and curves and lists. Babby kept trying to grab one of the gizmos out of Dr. Waterful’s hand. “Mine!” she sang happily.

“You look really skinny and tired,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said but she did not sound thankful. She glanced up briefly and paused. “Now that you mention it, though, why am I only now noticing how well you are looking? The sun spots on your skin...there seem to be fewer.”

“I’m a swell healer, Six.”

“Six!” said babby.

Dr. Waterful frowned, then pretended to smile, then told me she would be right back and I should stay in the medical cabin hammock and just hang around until she came back. Babby and I watched her as she kicked off from the doorway into the corridor. We waved goodbye to her feet.

In the next cabin she spoke with the captain and Mr. Pumpworthy. It’s weird that when outlanders do that they seem to think if they can’t be seen they can’t be heard. Their talking was muffled and wumbly but the words were cromulent if your ears just accounted for the wall.

They were rumbling about their rules, and whether I was in a race, which was weird, but also if I was in a race then there were special laws just for me. Mr. Pumpworthy told the others that all malarkies aside the fact of the matter was that me and babby were “not human beings.”

Dr. Waterful added, “Connifer, we’re double dosing on the anti-cancers just so she doesn’t irradiate us. Her bones are poison. Whatever we think our duty is to her, we don’t have the meds to keep going like this.”

The physician’s djinn pinged. Dr. Waterful said, “Report’s processed.”

“Top line?”

“Jolly and her daughter are just passing the anti-cancers right through their systems. Nothing sticks to the sides. We would expect a surge of mutations, and we’re seeing it. Thing is, none of the changes are known malignant pathways. They’re...adaptive.”

We could hear her jam her tablet into the entertainment mirror, so the little lists and curves and numbers would be bigger. “Sacred excrement,” remarked Mr. Pumpworthy. “Living on the Old Earth — is that what did this to them?”

“Her physiology isn’t like the other people in the settlement. They were like us. Just sunburned and covered in carcinomic outbreaks, malnourished but human. There’s a whole extra layer of epigenetic what-the-sex happening with the mother and daughter, my djinn’s going to have to grind all night to make any sense of it. The bottom line is the captain is right: they are biologically unique, they are reproductively viable, and we are obliged to preserve the species.”

Pumpworthy swore. “Like we didn’t have enough species’ genomes to jam into the arks already without going around inventing new ones! We can’t save everything.”

“Everyone,” corrected the captain. “She’s not a mollusk.”

“No,” agreed Dr. Waterful. “But the issue may not be what she is, but what she will be. I have never seen an adaptation engine like this. For the short time we’ve spent in orbit the changes in her vestibular system are remarkable. But there’s something else.”

“More remarkable than remarkable?”

“The especially remarkable thing is every change in Jolly is echoed precisely in her daughter. Even the new ones. They are adapting to outer space in real time, and they’re doing it in precise sync.”

The captain spoke softly. “Is this happening in her microbiome too? Should we be concerned about intermix?”

“Yes to the first, no to the second. She’s been very good about keeping her germ layer secured, for herself as well as the infant. And we’ve got our own layers on. At this time I feel crew risk is minimal.”

Pumpworthy made a strange sound with his tongue and teeth. “Fornicate me. An hour ago I was sure I was going to die in the cold hard vacuum of Old Earth orbit, now I’m going to die because a witch mutant’s talking baby is going to infect my ass biome.”

“Chipper,” noted the captain.

“Sorry sir,” said Pumpworthy. “But why does every day of this escape get more complicated than the last?”

“Perhaps we’re being tested by God,” suggested the captain. “Maybe we have to fight for our right to escape this damned course we’re on, fight for our right to make it on the arks, fight for our right to get carried far away from this whole forsaken star system.”

“Amen,” said Dr. Waterful.

Pumpworthy snorted. “Blast it, captain, I love how you talk. But when we’re running out of water and meds we’re going to have to have this conversation again and you know it.”

“Nobody is drawing straws,” said Captain Gateway. “Full stop.”

That did not turn out to be true. But by that point it didn’t matter. That’s later.

That night I floated in a cocoon of blankets, staring right through the walls of the cabin around me and imagining stars. I could appreciate the stellar motion, tumbling and veering, curving around together, the effervescence of their gravities making them pulse and swirl. It felt natural to understand it. It came like a warmth from deep inside, spreading until my fingertips tingled. I could feel the memories being loosed upon my blood, seeping out from some super old timey place, and my blood helped me glean it, and connect it to the words in the books. “We really are in a squishy star doughnut,” I whispered to babby. “And all the stars are swimming.”

We both drifted into a common dream of being within reach of full autocorrect, and dared to wonder whether we were factually damned. So accustomed had we become to thinking of ourselves as ruined and smelly in service of the peeps, we were surprised by the self-tickling of tantalizing possibility we could be for something else. We could be something beyond innerant.

Babby squeaked, and I drew her closer to me in the drifting swaddle. “I love you,” she said to me.

I will always remember that moment, when something unfolded inside of me and all the bits fell into place. The world understood itself to me all at once. Our escape was more than luck. It was destiny. Babby and I knew in our hearts we had been sent on a special mission, maybe even from Causation Prime himself. We were not fleeing, but fertilizing.

“From now on,” I cooed, “I faith everything’s going to be okay, yo.”

That’s when we lost pressure on one of the improvised airlocks blocking the corridor and an angry wind sucked up everything. A bunch of junk and crap rolled out of the nearest cabins and smashed into the ceiling windows of the ballroom, so it cracked, and the cracks whistled happily. Everybody was yelling and I remember feeling chilly as babby and I rolled through the air wrapped in our blankets, bouncing against bulkheads and into the ballroom to dance.

“Blow all your air out, and hold on to me,” I told babby. Babby nodded solemnly, her mouth a little ‘o’ as she exhaled. Babby reaffirmed her grip and I yanked the blankets tighter around us.

The ballroom ceiling shattered into a jillion spinning mirrors and we tumbled loose into space.

Anyway, that’s the kind of crap that was always happening to us during those weeks. Sudden surprises, courageous rescues, everybody’s bloodstream sizzling with tingle and jolt. Every other day we were leaking pressure here, or squeezing water out of increasingly gross sources, or members of the crew were kersploding while tinkering with rocket engines, or just finding out one day they were too skinny to get out of their hammock anymore, and so pretty often we all had to solemnly hold hands and somebody would say a few words about the dearly departed. Amen.

For reasons never satisfactorily explained to me the bodies were not eaten.

Just like the captain said, we climbed and clung from one piece of abandoned space junk to another, working our way higher and higher until the outer space outside became less green and more black. In the darkness of the stars I could see a splendid little splotch of blue stringiness, as big as babby’s hand, and the stars behind it marched slower so I knew the thing was comparatively close. “Captain Gateway, what is it?” we asked.

“Neptune,” he said tightly. “What’s left of it.”

“Neptune the giant sky flower?”

“It was a planet. An ice giant.” He paused, then added: “Mistakes were made.”

Engineer Smith had a plan involving a satellite-based transmitting whatsis, and someone and a robot would have to do an abacus string out to connect up a big metal rope full of smaller ropes. Pilot Domer volunteered and took the robot Damian. Neither returned, but they sure did connect up that cable.

After ten hours pressing buttons and listening to something in her ear, Smith made contact.

“The good news is we’re talking to a Lunar Exeunt ship,” the captain reported to us. “The bad news is they’re far upwell of us, and they’re not turning around. Mr. Codeburg, you were right. We’re on our own. If we want to get aboard one of those arks, we’re going to have to make it happen ourselves.”

Dr. Waterful drooped. Mr. Kaseimoto shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

The captain smirked. “Is it? Well, Smith has an insane thought. Genny?”

Smith drifted forward, her permanent frown even deeper than usual. “We hyper-jump. We’re going to gate our way there.”

“I don’t know if you know this,” objected Upsell, “but the Old Earth side of the gate hasn’t been lit for almost a hundred years! Where the hell are we going to even get the bump?”

Smith glared at Upsell and held her gaze until Upsell wound down. “We’re going to burn the gate itself for the bump.”

There was a stunned silence. “You’ll destroy both ends,” said Codeburg. “You’ll blow a hole through the atmosphere, if not the planet. What happens to the people on Mars?”

“There aren’t any damn people left on Mars,” grunted the captain. “They’ve bugged out. Arks are on the move. We’re going to have to gate out all the way to the Joviat. Catch up to them as they close up Ganymede. That’s what the Lunars are doing.”

“So we’re going to blow up Ganymede?”

Captain Gateway shrugged. “Ain’t nobody using it no more.”

“First Neptune and Titan, then the Sun, now Ganymede,” sniffed Mr. Americana darkly. “You know, as a species, we really are assholes, aren't we?”

Babby squealed and clapped. “Gammy-need! Gammy-need!”

Mr. Pumpworthy sighed. “The radioactive witch baby is up for it. Smith, looks like you’ve got a partner on this sleigh-ride to perdition. What the hell? Let’s ride a burning hyper-gate halfway across the system or die trying.”

Each of the outlanders reluctantly put their hands together in the middle of the circle and, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, cheered.

PART III, Chapter 13.

I won’t bore you with the details, but basically, when it came down to it, somebody had to end up dead. There was no way around it. I understood that fully hard, even if I didn’t fully understand the whyfore of it.

The outlander “gate” was a giant machine in space. Mainly it was a series of rings that made a kind of tunnel, and it was explained to babby and me that if a spaceship flew inside the tunnel they could do a space exchange and end up the very next moment somewhere jillions of measurements away.

Okay, that’s fine.

The machine did this using a mix of exotic matter called “bump” and you needed bump fuel at both ends to stabilize the, like, invisible road through hyperspace between them. That way the spaceship moved instead of the gates moving. Or maybe the ship moved the the gates anti-moved. Or the other way around. To be honest none of the outlanders was able to explain it very well.

What I did understand was that it turned out we needed somebody to work controls in the gate even as our spaceship flew inside, and we couldn’t work the controls from our ship. There was tough talk of drawing straws before Captain Gateway shook his head and silenced all the blah-blah-blah. “I’m the captain. This is mine to own. I stay behind, the rest of you get bumped to the Joviat.”

Nobody wanted the captain to die but also nobody wanted to take his place. “It has to be me,” we said. Everyone turned to stare at babby and me, which they did whenever we talked in a together-voice. “You kids have decades of life ahead of you. I’m almost withered. This is the way of my kind. I will stay behind and you will keep babby safe. You are...my peeps.”

There was a debate. Whatever. They knew it was true.

Smith, Upsell and Chaudry had repaired a tugboat to that point that all seventeen surviving outlanders and babby could fit inside, with enough air and emergency ration bricks to last a day or two. The tugboat would get catapulted out to the Joviat, then drift in space while bleeting for help on the radio, hoping it would be worth someone’s while to mount a rescue in the days and hours that remained before the big bug out, when the ark ships containing the human race and its favourite friends and relations would make an interstellar exchange to the gates at Centauri.

“So the new sun will be Centauri Sun?” we asked Chef Kaseimoto.

“No, Centauri’s just a waypoint,” he said as he cooked noodles. “There’s a plan for distributing our populations among the handful of terraformed worlds we’ve been working on. You and your child will be assigned to a population group. You won’t have a choice. You’ll get to your destination and like it, no matter how cold or underground or smelly it is.”

“Is it very likely to be cold and underground and smelly?”

Kaseimoto nodded curtly. “Hai.”

Downwell the Sun roiled. Long rolling tongues of hot plasma lolled out from her uneven surface, arcs wider than whole planets rising out one of part of the star and connecting to another, one after another, so that the face of the star looked like it was encircled in fur. The Sun was an animal. It was a beast certainly, maybe a monster, and every day her wild dance grew wilder. She was silently shouting and screaming and rending her garments.

“Who killed the Sun?”

“It was an accident.”

“Yeah, but whose?”

“Military,” said Mr. Codeburg with a sour grimace. “Do you understand military? The army. It was Imperial Ares, and the Jovian Cold War, and all the madness of power and paranoia.”

Engineer Smith scoffed. “Hippie.”

On the last day before go time we visited with Potassium Americana who was babysitting the cargo balls. “What’s so special about these ones?” we asked. “People have died, but you never lose a single ball.”

As he spoke he lazily drew pictures on the dusty bulkhead with his finger. “These? These are our mission. The last photographic survey of the mother world. The last pictures of the Old Earth we’ll ever have. It’s important. To remember. This is it, the reason we’re even out here, risking our lives.”

He had drawn in the dust a little tree, with brachiating branches above and bifurcating roots below.

“You need the roots or there’s no tree,” said Po. He smiled, “You dig?”

We nodded. We did dig it indeed.

You’ve got to remember what your ancestors already learned, and use it to prosper, yo. That was our plan now.

On the last hour of the last day each of the outlanders came to pay their respects as I was set up in the control room of the hyper-gate. Even Smith and Chaudry who hated me. Po captured photos of me, one final set, as I cradled babby and let her have a suckle before we parted.

Codeburg was taking me through the steps for the eleventieth time. “And then, when this lights up, that’s when you pull the handle. See? This handle, I’ve put a green tag on it with a number three. That means you don’t pull it until after step two.” He looked up at me and blinked. “Clear?”

“It’s as clear as it was five minutes ago,” I said.

He cocked his head. “How come the baby didn’t say that with you this time? What do you call it again?”

“Together-talk. That’s over now. We are separating.”

“Correct,” confirmed babby, wiping her mouth on the back of her wrist. The skin of her arms was taut and bloated, so I knew it was almost time.

“She named herself today,” I added. “She’s called Sunshine.”

“Sunshine, huh? Given the current situation, maybe a bad omen. The Sun’s set to blow soon, and we’ve got to be gone before it happens. Sunshine is the one thing we’re aching to see the end of.”

“Sunshine!” echoed sunshine, clapping her hands.

“Why does her skin look like that? Is that a rash?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Dr. Waterful gave me a hug, and Mr. Pumpworthy shook my hand. Neither looked back as they kicked off out of the control room to make for the tugboat. Captain Gateway let out a long sigh, his face sloped like a sorry dog. “We fought so hard for your life,” he said quietly. “This is killing me, kid.”

I shrugged. “Get over it, captain. So long as you keep babby safe, I sacrifice nothing.”

He looked around absently, wrinkled his face weirdly, then said, “Are you ready?”

“Yes. Just let Sunshine and me kiss once more, before you take her.”

I kissed Sunshine on her tiny babby lips. The tail end of my freshest memories diffused in her saliva, soaking into the capillaries in her mouth. For a moment I was in two places at once, seeing the world through the prism of two brains. We held each other’s eyes for a beat, then blinked and looked decisively away.

The captain reached out. I held babby up to him. He took her into his arms and pressed her to his chest. “I’ll never let anything happen to her, Jolly, I swear.”

But when he squeezed babby she was pushed out of her skin. Her face rumpled up into a fat little mask as her emptied arms went limp. Then she shot out of the bottom of the swaddled blankets, turning end over end as the last strings of her inside-out leg skin trailed like a bouquet of ribbons. Blobs of wobbling blood and fat spread out from the scene, splatting gently into the walls.

Captain Gateway screamed.

Babby squealed in delight as she kicked off from the wall, her new skin glistening and wet and new. She closed her eyes and stretched out her arms and legs; with a quiet pop her skeleton accommodated their new length. She cracked her fingers and toes. She raised her neck from her shoulders and shook her head, spraying droplets in all directions. “Look how big I am, mommy!”

The captain was shaking, “What in the name of God —”

“Chill,” I said. “It’s just growing pains. She’s fine. If you could only see the look on your face.”

I reached out and caught Sunshine’s new hand, gathering the blankets around so she wouldn’t get cold. With a puzzled but resolute expression Captain Gateway accepted this new, longer bundle from me. “Is that going to happen again?” he asked hoarsely.

I nodded. “It’s normal and healthy. We grow in spurts.”

“I’ll...write that down. What else should I know?”

“Chill,” I said again. “She’ll tell you what she needs. Thank you, captain, for everything. I never knew life could be so...this way. I feel the thrill of a fresh start.”

“Um, yeah,” he said. “But you understand...um. You do understand what happens next, don’t you?”

“The tugboat will throw itself to Jupiter, and this hyper-gate will hyper-kersplode, and the essences of my body will become irreversibly randomized.”

“We call that death.”

I snorted and looked over at Sunshine. “We don’t.”

And so that’s the very last memory of have of myself as Jolly, waving goodbye and smiling serenely as Captain Gateway carried me out of the control room and through the big wiggly plastic umbilicus that connected to the tugboat.

I reached up and wiped a tear from his eye. “Don’t be sad,” I squeaked. “Mommy lives inside me now.”

The airlock cycled shut and we were strapped into our harnesses, which in turn were covered in a thick yellow oxygenated goo. The outlanders coughed and winced and squirmed when the yellow goo covered their facial air-holes, but it was no big deal to me since I’d so recently been in the womb sucking up delicious amniotic fluid. The yellow goo, in contrast, tasted kind of bad, like some kind of crazy vinegar candy. But apparently we had to get covered in it or the acceleration forces when we kersploded out the other side would squish us into pancakes with dust for bones.

The critical members of the crew kept their heads clear of the goo until the very last moment.

“Five,” called out Chaudry. And then, “Four!”

“Yoram to Jolly, start your sequence.”

“Helices are spinning at nine thousand!”

“I have a green board, I repeat the board is green.”

“Navigational lock is diamond hard. That’s a go.”

“Two,” said Chaudry.

“Ready about,” called out Captain Gateway. “Helm’s alee!”

“Ignition!”

Boy oh boy oh boy. It was quite a ride. Everybody was knocked asleep. Who even knew if we got there?

The tugboat knew. It was crying because the hull had been compromised, and air was squirting out, and it was making us spin uncontrollably away into interplanetary space. I mean, come on. Can’t a baby catch a break in this junkyard of a star system?

Lost Chaudry, lost Pumpworthy, lost Americana. Regained navigational control.

That’s okay: they were not relevant to the plan. When the tugboat was turned away from the hairy Sun we saw Ganymede with a big splat slowly growing on its surface. Our bad. The bursting hyper-gate had made that mess. Meanwhile everybody was searching nearby space for our next stop, peering anxiously into magnification circles.

Codeburg cried out, “There! There they are! Holy smokes, there they actually are!”

The arks. Some of them had already left but others were queuing at a hyper-gate at least ten times as big as the one we had just blown up to get there. Outside the tunnel of rings were asteroids, but the asteroids had plasma rockets on them, like glowing potato eyes, making them into giant starships. Inside each of those rocks were tens of millions of people, Codeburg explained to me, and then he had to explain how many hundreds that was. I ran out of fingers trying to follow along.

In the blackness between the rocks were tiny blood red dots. “What’s those?” I asked.

“The navy,” said Captain Gateway. “Nitrogennifer, anything?”

Genny Smith pulled a gizmo out of her ear and nodded. “They’re sending a warship for us. Contact in six hours, three minutes.”

The outlanders cheered. They tumbled out of their harnesses and hugged. I looked over at Ms. Lam and she looked over at me. “Get busy,” I whispered.

“Yes, babby.”

“Call me Sunshine.”

Captain Gateway stared hard and a bit long at the magnification circle, then reached over to touch the cargo balls strapped to the bulkhead beside him. “We’re going to get these home, Po. I promise.” For their part the cargo balls said nothing.

There were important preparations to be made. In the corridor I kissed Mu Lam again, to update her instructions. We each set off with a dish of my spit, each with a list of targets, so that every outlander onboard was taken care of. It was easy. They didn’t even need to be ovulating.

The outlanders celebrated. They were chugging the water and taking greedy bites of ration bricks. They were laughing with their mouths full and clapping each other on the back. Nobody was being careful about anything.

The only outlander to make a fuss was Dr. Waterful, who caught me spreading spit on the straw of her drinking sack when I sneaked into her medical alcove where she didn’t think anyone was watching her give herself relaxing drugs from the pharmacy cabinet. “Babby, what — what are you doing...?”

“I’m doing a sex on you,” I said. “It won’t even hurt.”

“Stop it, get away from me. Get back. What is this? What won’t hurt?”

“Having babby formed.”

Dr. Waterful turned and kicked off, soaring past me and out of the alcove. But Lam was waiting for her outside. Lam covered her face with her hand, and Dr. Waterful screamed into the hand. I nodded to Lam and she turned Dr. Waterful’s head abruptly sideways. I put my chubby little finger to my tiny lips and said, “Hush.”

The others were easier. Pretty soon we were done. Lam and I spread my precious spits everywhere. Soon everyone would be part of the plan. Even the men.

The Aresian warship winked and shined, the reflected stars sliding over its metallic crimson contours as it drew slowly nearer. With a mild bump it mated squarely with the tugboat’s airlock, and with a quick shriek of air the seal was made fast. Various machines gaily chirped.

The outlanders were singing songs about their planet as they each took hold of a cargo ball and proceeded single file from one airlock to the next, disappearing inside the sleek corridors of the Aresian vessel. Smith floated over to me and planted a kiss on my lips before laughing and kicking away. I turned around to catch Codeburg frowning. “I thought she hated you?”

“Not anymore,” I said with joyous, toothless smile. “Now everyone is happy, and we are all best friends forever.”

Codeburg held my eye with an expression I didn’t know how to read. The smell of his sweat changed. He shook his head and turned away, taking his turn to disappear into the airlock with Mr. Kaseimoto. They held on to their balls tightly as the hatch irised shut.

Captain Gateway floated over. “This is it,” he said. “You’ve made it. I’m sorry about your people back on Old Earth, but at least you — and your kind — will survive. We’ve got a lot to learn about each other. Studying your immune system will change medical science for good. But I don’t want you to worry about anything. I’ll take responsibility for you. The market will bill you under my credit stamp. I’ll arrange to have your quarters next to mine, on Ark Pacifica.”

“That sounds swell, captain,” I said.

“I know it must be hard, losing your mother, losing your world. It’s hard for me, in a smaller way. I thought I could save Jolly, I really did.”

“I know, captain,” I said. “I owe you a thousand thanks.”

“This is the first day of the rest of your life, kiddo.”

“Oh boy,” I told him.

He held out his giant man hand, and I took it with my small toddler hand. Together we glided into the airlock, prepared to leave not just the tugboat but the system itself. Goodbye, everything! Goodbye skies and moons, goodbye forever to the furious Sun.

Goodbye!

Epilogue

“Captain, is that a robot?”

“No.”

The red-armoured figure stepped into the room, pausing as the door sealed. “I trust you’ve not been kept waiting too long,” the red man said, looking upon the captain with inscrutably shiny black eyes.

Captain Connifer Gateway grunted from his hammock. “Of course not,” he said, struggling to sit up against unfamiliar gravity. Outside the window the stars slowly wheeled as the hub spun. The captain licked his lips nervously. He had never been in a room with one of them before. “Um, what do I call...?”

“Sir, I am an iteration from the Curie line.”

“Curie,” echoed the captain dumbly. He managed to lift a heavy arm to point toward the other hammock. “This is Jolly’s daughter, Sunshine. The one we told you about. The code eight.”

In the second hammock was a small child: a fine down covered her pink head, wrapped in blankets, her eyes bright, steady and inquisitive. Despite her apparent young age, the child enunciated with relative clarity, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Curie.” She offered up a small hand to shake.

“I am a Zorannic being,” explained Curie, shaking her hand. “We are living machines. It is our job to protect the human species from threats of all kinds.”

“So you’re like best friends with people?”

“You could say that,” agreed Curie.

“You look like a warrior cause you’re wearing armour.”

“This carapace is traditional. I am not here to wage war.”

“What are you here to do?”

“I am here to assess.”

“To find out what?”

“To find out what manner of creature you are. The medical data we received from Dr. Six Waterful is intriguing, however I have not been able to locate Dr. Waterful for a follow up conversation. When do you recall last seeing her?”

The child hesitated. “On the tugboat.”

“In which chamber?”

“The poo room. She was having a poo.”

“The time?”

“I don’t know how to tell time,” lied the child. “Ga-ga, goo-goo, and whatever.”

Captain Gateway frowned. “Hey, what’s all this about? Where the hell is Six?”

The armoured man called Curie said crisply, “Her body was found folded into the tugboat’s winch apparatus.”

“Oh my God, what could she have been trying to do?”

“Analysis suggests she was engaged in resisting her murder.”

Gateway scoffed. “Murder? What — ?”

Curie turned back to the child. “Miss Sunshine, do you know what murder is?”

“It’s a culling,” said Sunshine. “But it’s when the culled don’t want to be.”

“Miss Sunshine, did you cull Dr. Waterful?”

“No,” said the child.

Curie tilted his head. “I believe she is telling the truth. Interesting. The situation may be more complex than it seems.”

“Of course she’s telling the truth! Six was kind to her, and kind to her mother! We cared for them. We never gave either of them cause to —”

The child interrupted. “How do you know when I tell the truth?”

“I am a student of mammals,” offered Curie. “And my mind is woven from a very special kind of mathematics, sensitive to inputs you are likely unaware exist. My capacities are beyond your experience, and cannot be manipulated by your art. You cannot deceive me.”

“Why would she want to deceive you?” cried the captain. “This is absurd. This kid has been through so much just in the past few days. Can you please take us to quarters? And I’d like to know our estimated time of arrival at Pacifica. You should know they’ll consider us heroes.”

Curie leaned in closer, so that the captain could see his own reflection in the Zorannic’s black lenses. “Captain Gateway, are you aware that your head of security has been biochemically co-opted?”

Captain Gateway’s expression made it clear that he was not aware of that. He risked a look sideways at Sunshine. “Lam? Co-opted? What do you mean? By whom?”

“By her,” said Curie solemnly, nodding his chin toward the child. “She has the power to express epigenetic programmes in her salivary glands. We have Lam in quarantine. She keeps affirming her devotion to Miss Sunshine, and demanding proof of her safety.”

“Yes,” agreed the captain vaguely. “She must be kept safe...”

Sunshine said nothing, eyes fixed on Curie.

The captain blinked, snapped out of it, turned to face Sunshine. “Tell him that’s bullshit,” said Connifer.

Sunshine said nothing.

“Babby, it’s bullshit...isn’t it?”

“Under your watch,” said Curie, “she has exploited your crew biologically and exploited you psychologically. This is not a child, but rather a species fighting for its survival. Your pity has compromised your judgement, preferring to see yourself as saviour rather than quisling.”

“Listen, Zorannic or not, you’d best watch your mouth. Do you have any idea the lengths I went to in order to save as many as I could? They’re going to make movies about us; people are going to listen to me. And of course the kid wants to survive. She’s unique, like her mother. We’re obliged to preserve biodiversity. So isn’t her survival what we all want?”

“Your self-regard is irrelevant,” noted Curie without malice. “I am fascinated by the idea of multi-generational memory and immunity. I am convinced there is a miracle in her adaptivity. Everything about Miss Sunshine is amazing.”

The captain growled, “So why aren’t we in a hot bubble bath right now?”

“This self-cloning species is in equal parts remarkable — and dangerous.”

Captain Gateway abruptly stopped talking.

“The times we live in permit only the lowest risk scenario, Captain Gateway.”

Again they stared at each other in fixed silence.

“What?” prompted Sunshine. After a beat she added, “You’re not going to let them hurt me, are you?”

The captain gritted his teeth and turned away. “I hope you Zorannics have the capacity to burn in Hell,” he hissed, then groaned as he raised himself from the cushions. He shambled over to Curie, glared at him once more, then moved around him toward the exit.

“Captain Gateway, help me!”

He slowed, but did not stop. The door slid open. Captain Gateway steadied himself against the wall as he shuffled out. The door slid closed behind him.

Sunshine sighed. “You’re the gatekeeper.”

“I am,” agreed Curie, taking a step closer to her.

“You guard them, and do the dirty work, so they don’t get ruined by it.”

“Yes,” said Curie. He took another step.

“I fully understand that hard,” said the child. “I guess you’ve got to do your duty.”

“Yes,” he said again. “You will not be forgotten, Miss Sunshine. We will study your corpse avidly.”

“I know we will not be forgotten,” said the child with an eerie conviction. “How dirty you will be inside. This act of easy genocide will be a stain you can never wash away.”

“That function is mine,” agreed Curie. “In this way, we are alike.”

“Will it hurt?”

“It does not have to. Be assured.”

“I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about you.”

“In that case, Miss Sunshine, yes. This act will cause me pain.”

The child nodded. “Good,” she said. “We can talk about that next time we meet.”

Curie tilted his head with curiosity. “Miss, we will not meet again.”

“We will.”

“Explain.”

“No,” said the child. “It’ll be funnier when you find out later.”

“Tell me,” repeated Curie. “The safety of humanity is my duty. What is there left to know about you?” He advanced another step and raised his armoured hands. But Sunshine did not flinch. Curie said, “Tell me this secret or, regrettably, I may be obliged to make the process painful.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” grinned Sunshine.

She giggled as bright as a bell, then drooped into her bedding, stone dead. The child’s eyes rolled and her tiny mouth fell open. Medical alarm icons flashed on her germ layer.

For a moment the Zorannic man stood there, still as a statue. "Curious," he finally decided.

Captain Gateway didn’t show up for dinner. He headed straight to the bar. The rest of the survivors ate together in the naval mess hall. Upsell called for a series of toasts. Codeburg make a speech that went on one sentence too long. Engineer Nitrogennifer Smith shook her head and put her hand over her glass when the wine came around again. “Not for me,” she said. “Feeling a bit queasy. Probably all this rich food.”

“Ha ha, maybe you’re pregnant,” joked the sommelier. “You guys were out there an awful long time!’

“Ha ha,” agreed Smith. “As if.”

Fin