Earthchild

by Doris Piserchia

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

She called herself Reee and she was the last human being on Earth. This was the one thing she was sure of. Because Earth was not a dead planet, not by a long way. There were all manner of strange plants and bizarre animals, and there were the blue boys who insisted they were human - but she always set fire to them. There was however Indigo, the all-devouring protoplasmic ocean that was literally gobbling up everything in the world. And there was the enigmatic Emeroo to whom she owed her continued existence. There were also the so-called Martians - humans who had fled to Mars and only came back to Earth to scout for survivors and vent their futile furies on the inhospitable homeworld.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 204

Sample

In my brief mortal existence, food had never been delivered from heaven, so when we spied the melon hanging on an odd-looking vine I sensed adversity. I was four years old, my name was Reee and I was about to be orphaned.

I believed a monster of the plains had tied the melon on the vine, by what manner I had no idea, but I wished my mama wouldn’t drag her favorite and only girl child by the hair as she hurried across the thick moss toward a fruit that had no business being there.

The world stretched around us like a jungle gone mad and the big red sun tried to penetrate the tree branches and burn us raw. I stepped on a thorn bigger than my foot. Fortunately I wasn’t heavy enough to make it pierce me, but I howled anyway and my mama yanked my arm. She was hungry and in a cranky mood.

Where the forest ended, the moss plains began, an ocean of beautiful green curls that seemed to roll on forever. A few yards beyond the last row of trees, on the mere fringes of the plains, grew a single tree. The melon hung from one of its branches on a gray vine.

It would have been a tasty meal, that melon. Mama grabbed it, yanked on it and immediately a net fell from a tree limb directly above her and scooped her up like a handful of dirt. It missed me because as soon as she released my hair to grasp the melon I fell through a hole in the moss. Before it closed over my head I saw the net being taken into the sky. Somebody had stolen my mama and I was probably going to get killed sometime during the next few minutes. At the age of four I wasn’t much at math and believed it would take me only a little while to fall to wherever I was going, after which monsters would eat me. What I didn’t know was that the distance between the ground of Earth and the moss plains and jungles where people lived was approximately half a mile.

Bellowing plenty, I tumbled through darkness, felt soft things touch me, knew it when sharp objects raked me. I landed in a deep, soft mass that promptly sank onto me from every direction. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was green. Bellowing some more, I shoved at it with my hands and kicked it with my dirty feet. Mental impressions came to me quickly. Never having seen this cool green mass in my life, and though it was pitch-black everywhere around me, I knew what she looked like. I even knew that her name was Emeroo.

“No, no, no, not in a million years!” I yelled, aware of the thought of Emeroo. She considered devouring me, spreading the atoms of my being in a straight line on the dark ground, endowing them with light and then claiming them as part of herself.

“Why not?” she said gently and, I thought, with amusement.

“Because I’m more important than anybody!”

“I see you have a well-developed drive to survive.”

“Let me go, set me free!” I howled.

“To be consumed by the creatures of the night? I think not. I shall take you to myself for a little while. That way the methane and other evils will not spoil you. You are a curiosity.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I am interested in all types of phenomena.”

I squirmed as her soft body held me more closely. She was warm now and very green. “Do you like me?” I said.

“Is it important?”

“I think so.”

“I may even preserve you for greater things than mere study. You have a strange and interesting effect upon me.”

Emeroo created oxygen within herself and fed it to me. She found edible tidbits and transferred them to my mouth. She walked in such a way that my position inside her wasn’t disturbed. I didn’t exactly sleep, but neither did I remain fully awake. There was nowhere else for me to go. I was at the bottom of the world where humanity hadn’t lived for thousands of years. There were darkness, deadly gases, bottomless swamps and bug-eyed monsters that hated light and silently slid through the marshes and ate everything that moved. Without Emeroo I would have lasted only a few minutes.

She was my teacher, parent, provider and my companion. She gave me light in little sparkling bits that danced and hovered in my mind. Through a window in her body—a transparent thinness which she created—I occasionally viewed the bottom of the world and was instructed as to the origin and nature of the things I saw. I learned that it wasn’t all darkness there. Emeroo herself was a brilliant and glittering green. Other things gave off light, some yellow, or blue, or white or red.

In time I stopped grieving for my mama. She had been taken into the sky and I would never see her again. She would cry over my memory as I cried over hers. If she were still alive, she probably thought I was dead.

Emeroo was extremely intelligent and though she had been born in and lived at the bottom of the world, she possessed enormous knowledge of people, scarabs, scorpions, flatties and all the other monsters living in my part of the planet. The fact that she had access to a great deal of recorded information concerning Earth’s history and inhabitants remained unknown to me until later. She was totally versed about her own environment and during the next few years, four to be exact, she taught me something of what she knew.

Reality went on without me while I lay within the body of the gleaming green alien, warm and protected and tutored. For all those four years I shared the mind and personality of Emeroo and discovered that she, like I, was an infant. I was four, she was four million. I was human, she was elemental. There were times when we merged until not even we could differentiate between ourselves.

The incubator of her body was more comfortable than the cave of thistles in which I had been born. Nothing could match the feel of my mama’s arms, but Emeroo did what she could to make me feel content. It took her but a little while to know everything in my mind, and she was amused at my thoughts of the sun. Did I really find it that bright? Was the sky truly such an empty hole, and full of light? How could the sun be such a large red splotch? It was crimson like the apples growing in the sod mounds? Red like the blood dripping from the fangs of a flattie?

The concept of time was unknown to me while I dwelt in Emeroo. She was a world in which I ate, slept, thought, lived and grew. The darkness and dangers in the bottomlands couldn’t affect me because Emeroo had been born there, and there she ruled. Nothing could come into physical contact with her but what it experienced excruciating pain. I alone was invulnerable to her power, and that was because she willed it. We were together, we were often as one, never apart, never completely separated. We were Emeroo and Reee forever.

One day she ejected me. Just like that. Pfft. I was out.

“I allowed you to grow normally during the last few years,” she said, speaking so that the words could be heard only in my mind. “I could have arranged it so that you remained dormant, but I decided this was the better way.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said. “See how I stand here and shiver? The bottomlands are dark and scary, and breathing hurts my chest. I want to go home.”

“Find it in the world.”

“I’m only a little child. The monsters will eat me. What can an eight year old do?”

“Go and find out.”

How cruel she was, how hard, how very inhuman and oddly like my mama was this green thing that stood before me in the form of a woman. “I think your natural shape is a lump, like a slab of mud or a rotten fruit,” I said, attempting to inflict petty damage.

Immediately the beautiful figure of Emeroo deflated and became shapeless. “Do you like this better? What I look like makes no difference to me.”

“You surely don’t expect me to live down here by myself, so how do I get to the top layer of the world without being eaten?”

“I have prepared a tunnel for you.”

It was long and narrow and glistened like pale green quartz. Gradually sloping upward, it exited upon a moss plain. Having traversed the tunnel, I reluctantly stood on short curls of familiar green ground and wondered how long I would last. The sun hurt my eyes. It hunched at the sky’s edge like a whooping red mouth and seemed to beckon me as it prepared to dip behind the world. I began remembering things. After the sun went away, it would be dark and the giant bugs would come out of their lairs to hunt for food.

I let out a long, loud shriek of grief and fear. Life wasn’t at all like what I felt I deserved. My cry attracted a flattie in the sky. It headed straight for me and I had to run as fast as I could to reach a patch of trees. Disgruntled because its size prevented it from coming into the woods after me, the beast destroyed the tops of some trees before flying away.

By the time I found enough courage to emerge onto the plain again, the sun was gone and darkness was making a swift passage from its hiding place. I didn’t want them to do it, but my feet moved toward the tunnel leading down to Emeroo. I stood beside the entrance and listened to the creatures of the night. Wrapping my arms across my chest, I shivered and then snarled when I realized tears were sneaking from my eyes.

“I don’t need you!” I said angrily.

“Then why are you here?”

Startled and ashamed, I saw that I was indeed there. I wasn’t on the moss plain anymore. The bottomlands stretched around me in all their ugliness. At a fast trot I had left the upper layer of the world and returned to the only safety I knew. Something else surprised me. Emeroo had built a cavern of pale green crystal, and now she stood in its opening and regarded me with a wry little smile.

“I went up like you told me,” I said. “I know a part of you went with me, inside me, so you could look at everything, too. I didn’t see any people. I don’t think there are any left. They’ve all been taken away like my mama. It’s dark up there, and scary, and … I don’t know the word.”

“You’re too young. Come back to me for a little while. One day I’ll put you out again. There’s an enemy in the world and you can help resist her while I decide what is to be done with you.”

I didn’t care what she said as long as she stepped aside and let me into the cave. No matter how firmly she insisted otherwise, I had no home anywhere but with her, and I wasn’t likely to find one.

Instead of living inside her body, this time I dwelt in a niche in the cave wall, not that there was any essential difference since the cavern and everything in it was made of her substance. It was cold when I first fitted myself into the niche, but then a familiar warmth crept over me and I gave myself over to comfort, security and a weird kind of existence. With my thumb in my mouth.

I lay on green moss and dreamed. The red sun was majestic and warmed my back with its ferocious rays. The sky was dark blue while the air around me was thick, almost liquid. Occasionally waterdrops from a faraway rainstorm sailed through space and pelted me. I shuddered as they touched my hot skin. I was fourteen and strong, tanned and green of eye, and I was the only human on Earth.

Not quite. The Martian was up there in her little white metal contraption, and since the sky was part of Earth, I wasn’t alone. Later I learned that the white contraption was a flying machine called a pob. I learned a lot of things later. For instance, the Martian wasn’t a she. He wanted to capture me to find out how I managed to stay alive when everything about my environment was hostile. It was also his job to carry humanity from Earth to safety.

I lay on green moss and watched through slitted eyes as the pob hovered almost directly over me. Though I couldn’t see her clearly, I had a pretty good idea that the pilot was a person like me, and I wondered what she would do when the flattie arrived. It was a mile away and winging fast under the sun, its big eyes round and red and alert, its claws tucked under its belly and its body laid out in space like a huge, dirty plate. Its webbed and mighty carcass measured forty feet across.

The Martian had courage but I thought she was also stupid. Maybe she intended to hang from the end of the rope ladder dangling under her machine, grab hold of me and haul me up inside. Actually she was on the ladder taking photographs of me. My curiosity was eased by the arrival of the flattie which, with its customary whistle, flew high above the pob, descended like an open umbrella and spread itself over the vehicle. There was a sound of crunching metal, a human cry, and the Martian plummeted to the moss where I had been lying only moments before. I wasn’t there anymore because I had known what her weight would do to the insubstantial surface of the world’s top layer.

Two hours later I lay on another patch of moss, devouring an apple and enjoying the sun, when I heard scratching sounds several yards away. I sat up in surprise and watched as a hand appeared out of the ground. Crawling forward, I squatted and began parting the moss. The hand seemed to be frantic as it probed space. I touched it with a finger. It tried to grab me and I finally allowed it to close upon my wrist. The Martian didn’t want to die, but more than that, she didn’t want to do it alone.

With my free hand I continued to part the tough moss and at last there was room enough for her arm to come through. I would have continued to ease her up gradually but the ground began to shake. Evidently she had chosen to climb a hollow reed from the bottomlands and now it was getting ready to buckle. It might take other hidden plant life with it, and I wanted to be gone from there before the foundation under me suddenly vanished. Standing, I gave the arm a strong yank and the Martian scrambled up through tangled vines and curly moss. Immediately I let go of him, turned and walked away toward the forest. Obviously he wasn’t a woman at all. His climb up the reed had ripped off his clothes and I saw he was made like the blue boys the enemy manufactured in the sod mounds a quarter-mile below.

He followed me for a while but was too exhausted to keep up and fell short of the trees. I helped him to a sleeping branch, an arm of a tree that grew in a hollowed-out fashion, laid him in the cavity, squeezed some juice from a sap melon into his mouth and waited for him to regain his strength. While he rested, I looked him over. I had vague memories of how my father had looked, and the Martian bore a strong resemblance to him.

He talked but I couldn’t understand a word because he said everything aloud, with his voice, and I had forgotten my native language. Sometime during the morning he began carving pictures on the tree limb with his fingernail. It didn’t take me long to understand that he wanted me to lead him to the rolling white meadows. The only reason I agreed to do it was because the enemy had grown another blue boy who had to be destroyed and the meadows were just beyond the place where he grew.

My world teemed with life, most of it deadly to people. The Martian must have reasoned that since I managed to survive, it must be because I knew the world. In that he was correct. Many Earthly secrets were mine, taught to me by a genius. If the enemy hadn’t already known about human males, I would have hidden this one in the thistle mazes and never let him come out again. Indigo had a way of capitalizing on each and every new phenomena, and so it was to my benefit when I kept new experiences away from her. However, she already knew of the existence of men, so if she saw this Martian it wouldn’t be particularly significant. Of course I had to be careful that merely seeing him was all she managed to accomplish. It wouldn’t do for her to capture and consume him because then she would know everything about him, including his thoughts and memories.

Except in a few places, the half-mile-high growth on the world’s surface was clean-cut and not clearly discernible as anything other than an actual surface. There was no sea level apparent anywhere. Underneath the rolling white meadows lay an ocean that hadn’t been out in the open for millennia. It was covered with plant growths a thousand feet high. Often I walked on the white meadows and watched the ground sway all around me, felt the vibrations beneath my feet, sensed the movement of a great mass far below me. I sometimes teased the fat vembers that played there. They ate their way up from the ocean, creating large tunnels through which water vapor erupted. Their slippery white bodies blended into the landscape. Their claws were powerful enough for them to accomplish the long climb through the tunnels from water to open air. They spent their time basking in the sun until dusk at which time they raced for the tunnel openings and dived back into the sea.

The Martian and I walked across the moss plain and while I kept watch for flatties he gathered leaves and made himself an apron. He offered to make me one but I wasn’t interested. Occasionally he held my by the arms, looked into my eyes and spoke earnestly, but I had no idea what he said.

Two miles from where he had fallen from his pob, we came to a great crack in the moss. I stepped onto a branch of a giant tree growing out of it and motioned for my companion to keep his gaze straight ahead and not look down. He didn’t take my advice but glanced between the tree branches and discovered blue sky, clouds and empty space. Shoving him back onto the plain, I sat down and waited until he regained his ambition, and then I again stepped onto the tree branch and motioned for him to follow.

Usually I traveled in trees by simply dropping from one limb to another. The Martian climbed down inch by trembling inch, and it took him hours. After we reached the sod mounds he took me by the arms, gazed into my eyes and said something. I shrugged and shook my head. He was weary and perspiring and probably felt more than a little despairing. I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t look after him twenty-four hours a day, which meant he wouldn’t survive unless he found assistance from the tall gray machine parked on the rolling white meadows.

He patted my arm, smiled and began walking toward a large mound of what had once been thriving ivy but was now brown, porous dirt. Leaving him temporarily, I started hunting among the mounds to my left. In a few minutes I found the blue boy, fully grown and almost ripe. The vine attached to his belly was fat and ready to drop off. He was blue all over, about my height, and he looked real as he stood staring straight at me. The expression on his pretty face never changed. He even had blue teeth. I could see them through the slight gape of his mouth.

It took me a short while to find a hot bed in the rock mountain behind the mounds and then I scooped some glowing coals onto a thick leaf. The blue boy ripened completely while I was gone, the vine released him and he walked from his place of concealment. I arrived to find the Martian trying to talk to him.

Gathering some kindling from the ground beneath the tree, I spread it at the boy’s feet, held him fast by the arm and made a fire with the coals. The Martian objected and tried to stop me. Shoving him out of the way, I lit the wood and stood by as the blue boy roasted and finally burst open like a pod.

The Martian was gone when I looked around. Wondering if he thought I had murdered a living person, I went after him to bring him back and make him look at the corpse. The blue boy was only a plant fabricated by Indigo. He wasn’t a real human being. The curling husks on the ground, which were all that was left of him, wouldn’t have deceived anyone.

I didn’t think the Martian would be foolish enough to run out onto the meadows without first conducting a safety check. He must have been so outraged at me that he forgot to be cautious. Instead of tiptoeing onto the white ground, he ran and made noises that alerted the vembers. Maybe he didn’t know enough about them. Their hearing was so keen that they could swim in the underground ocean, where it must have been extremely noisy, and still locate the openings of the tunnels leading topside. If a person wanted to walk unmolested among the vembers, she had to do it softly.

Stranded astronauts used the signal station to alert master ships which then dispatched pobs to rescue them. Beside radio equipment, the station also had a weapon mounted on it and after swiftly. . .