Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 (6 page)

Their comms crackled and a deep female voice said, “Hello, gentlemen, I am Wahgohi.”

The name sounded familiar, but Ignacio couldn’t place it.

“Hello, Wahgohi, this is Ojore and Ignacio Bahanti-Batista. I’ll give you all some privacy. If you need me, just call.” Dr. Nakamura gave them both a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “To speak to her, turn to channel nine, and remember: she’s evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating her. Good luck, boys.”

“Hello, Wahgohi, I’m Ignacio and this is my husband, Ojore. We’re so glad you could meet with us.”

The colossal thing hoisted itself up the ramp connecting the shallow man-made pool to the ineffable ocean that drowned the entire planet. The humans struggled to keep their heads above the surge.

“We must look so small and insignificant to her,” Ojore rasped, between coughs of thick green water. They faltered, physically and mentally, in the presence of this jewel-encrusted totem of some long-forgotten, tempestuous sea goddess.

The trio spoke for a while, mostly guarded chit-chat, but it served to put them all at ease. The trick was to focus on the sultry voice on the radio and imagine it was only tangentially associated to the ghastly creature before them. However, Ignacio was having a hard time ignoring the three glassy domes it had for eyes, each one absorbing his electromagnetic aura.

“Have you decided to father aquatic young or are you still exploring the possibility?”

The question caught Ignacio by surprise. He combed his hair back with his fingers, it was greasy with alien algae, and gave the question some serious thought. Intellectually, he was still unsure—still exploring—but in his heart he had already decided. In fact he was quite literally waist deep in it now. “We have decided,” he said sooner than he expected.

Ojore looked at him with a strange mixture of shock and joy and dread.
Where they really doing this?

Wahgohi’s spines flared and then settled back down on her broad, slick back and Ignacio wished he knew more about their body language. He knew, for instance, the pulsating scales—like ruffled hummingbird feathers—were its form of respiration. The Mokoani breathed directly through their skin, but he couldn’t tell if she was pleased or disappointed with his answer. Her hard, thick lips and yellow bulbous eyes remained inscrutable to him.

“What about you?” he asked.

He waited, not sure if the static on his comm was hesitation or the translator working, but eventually she said, “I still have some reservations.” The synthetic voice made her sound weary all of a sudden. This wasn’t a young creature. She maybe had a cycle or two left of fertility.

He knew, without turning, that Ojore’s face had dimmed slightly at her confession, but he appreciated her honesty so instead he focused on the large Piscean maw before him, desperately trying to discern her emotional state.
What kind of person would agree to incubate a little invader from space?

“You’re so different from us,” she continued. “Why would you have children so different from yourselves?”

Ah, she was wondering the same about them.
This reassured him somewhat. They had the same doubts, which meant they probably shared some basic values.

Ojore took one sloshing step closer to the native. “Look at us, being propped up in our little toy suits against this planet’s gravity, the sun and the sea spray irritating our eyes and skin. We weren’t made for this world, but we can’t leave it. Ours was a one way trip. And even if we could, I don’t think we would. I love this world. So the best we can do now it allow our children to live and thrive here.” He rapped a knuckle on the full-body brace he’d been forced to wear for more than a decade now.

Of course, there was no change in her expression, but something in her voice was slipping away like a half-remembered dream. “You do understand that it’ll be very difficult for you to be a part of your child’s life? The Mokoani live in large schools that roam this entire world. You can visit with your submersibles and you can dive with us when our migration routes take us close to the surface, but…” she didn’t finish, only slapped her great fluke against the surface of the water, the resulting waves unbalancing the two humans.

Ignacio steadied himself by grabbing hold of Ojore. When the water settled he said, “We’ve spoken to other human parents of aquatic children and they say it’s tough, but the joy they get during those visits eclipses all the time apart.” He hated that he sounded like one of the brochures—like Dr. Nakamura—so he shrugged and added, “Besides, we can’t seem to have children of our own on this planet.”

“Have you been a surrogate before?” Ojore asked, clearly trying to lift the scrutiny away from them.

“No.” She provided no further information.

It donned on Ignacio that there was no sign of this large school the marine creature had spoken of. There were no other towering spines on the horizon, no thrashing tails. Wahgohi was alone with these foreign primates. “Are you sure you want to carry something so different?” he asked, sympathetically.
After all, it was her body that would play host to aliens.
He wanted to shudder at the thought, but his exoskeleton held him tight. “Could you love something not entirely Mokoani?”

“I’m not sure anymore,” her voice broke like waves, like his heart. She started to shove the ramp with her short pelvic fins, awkwardly squirming her bulk back into the sea. “I’m sorry,” she offered.

“No wait!” Ojore fought the current her shifting immensity created and splashed toward her, reaching out to her cold, resplendent scales. “Let’s keep talking. We’re good people.”

Ignacio went after him. Ice seeped into his chest as he moved deeper. He seized the struts of his husband’s exoskeleton and pulled him back with all his strength just as the sentient fish vanished beneath the waves.

He held Ojore’s shivering frame. Another failure. More hopes dashed.
How much of this could their relationship take?
He knew the next few months were going to be hard. His eyes caught sight of the jeering protesters—the righteous childless—bobbing the distance and read, “This is unnatural selection!”

“Why did you have to ask her that?” Ojore yelled through clattering teeth. There was more anger in it than Ignacio could bear.

He closed his eyes. “I needed to know, all right? I need to know our child will be loved.”

“You didn’t have to hit her with the heavy stuff on our first meeting!”

“Look, she was right about one thing: we’re not going to be a huge part of our child’s life. If anything, we’re the surrogates here. I just want to make sure we pick the right mother, you know?”

They held each other in the frigid artificial pond on a crushing alien world. No one spoke. Neither wanted to contact Nakamura and admit defeat. There was nothing but static and surf all around.

Then a row of sapphire spines sliced though the gelatinous water.

#

Wahgohi was an ebony ghost floating in the darkness, swathed in a thousand pinpricks of bioluminescent microorganisms. Even though they were 2,900 meters under water, Ignacio couldn’t help but think of her as a gigantic starship moving through space, which was rather ironic given that at that moment he was more vessel than anything else.

“What is she doing?” asked Ojore over their private channel.

“Eating, I think.”

Wahgohi carefully herded a shoal of shiny slippers with spurts of electromagnetism into her gapping mouth. Yemaya flitted around her mother, zapping slippers with enthusiastic bursts of static, disrupting Wahgohi’s careful work, but managed to swallow one herself.

“I did it!” she broadcast her joy on all channels.

“Good job!” Ojore shouted and snapped his cybernetic fluke, launching himself toward their daughter. They wrestled and played in the jade gloom, scaring away the rest of their lunch. He tried to hug her, clumsy in his rig—it was half spacesuit and half torpedo—but she giggled and evaded with the grace of a dolphin.

“Do humans usually praise their fry for things that are expected or is this shortcoming specific to Ojore?” The translator was able to capture the exaggerated frustration in her voice, but insisted on referring to their child as
fry
.

“Oh, we’re going to spoil her rotten.” Ignacio coasted up to Wahgohi, hoping his visor hid his smile. “Hard to believe it’s been three months now; sometimes it feels longer—living in this suit is getting old—but she’s growing up much too fast.” They had taken six months of parental leave to swim with Wahgohi and Yemaya, from the Mokoani spawning ground to the marginally warmer waters of the southern hemisphere. After that, their suits’ life-support system and paid time-off would expire and they would have to be airlifted back to their island.

She expelled a blanket of tiny bubbles from beneath her scales, which meant she was laughing. “Full Mokoani young change a lot in their first few months, but then it all evens out. Don’t worry. You’re here for the formative period. How are you doing in that marvelous and hideous suit of yours?”

“It’s jacked to my nervous system, so physically it’s not too bad, like a dull second skin, but I’m tired of eating paste and smelling myself.” He didn’t mention that he was even sicker of relieving himself into tubes.

Yemaya zoomed into view and slammed into him, sending him rolling in the deep. Error alerts and safety alarms flashing in his vision. “Whoa, careful small fry, you’re almost bigger than I am in this getup.”

“I don’t want you to go!” Her voice was entirely human, a three-year-old girl, by his inexpert estimate.

His heart sank to the bottom of the trench and instantly popped with the pressure. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he saw a definite pout on her face. “We have to, Love, but we’re not leaving for a long time.” This is what Wahgohi had tried to warn them about on their first meeting. Biology and circumstance forced them to be part-time parents.

“I’m going to miss you, Papi.” She tried to wrap her arms around him, but of course she couldn’t, not with her pectoral fins.

“I’m going to miss you too, my little mermaid.” He gave her an inept hug.

His daughter expanded her iridescent spines and sped away to lovingly crash into Ojore. Apparently she drew endless joy from the mayday signal of a failing environmental suit. Ignacio regained his barring and caught up to Wahgohi, trying to cruise within her slipstream.

From a distance, Yemaya looked almost entirely Mokoani, but up close her face was more like a beluga whales’—he winced internally at the slur—but with definite traces of humanity. Compared to the flat alien features of her mother, her face beamed with expression and, if he squinted, he could see hints of Ojore’s large eyes and broad nose in it and the curve of his own mother’s lips.

“You were right, Wahgohi. It’s going to be very hard not to be a part of your lives.”

“It’s going to be hard for me as well. We Mokoani, like humans, are intensely social. I was…not very happy before our arrangement.”

A memory bubbled up of other Mokoani carefully avoiding them at the spawning ground, giving them the kind of space you gave a nuclear reactor. “Why were you alone? Where is your school?” He was afraid she would say that humans had slaughtered them in their initial conflict, but the question was already eddying between them.

A long time passed and, when their daughter was quite a distance away, she finally said, “They abandoned me.”

“Why?” The last three months had made him comfortable enough with her to ask such a personal question.

“I negotiated the treaty that allowed humans to stay on this world.” She rotated her fins in an exasperated shrug. “I understood you were here to stay. That you couldn’t leave, and, given your miraculous technology, that if we kept goading you, you would have annihilated us. I brokered a peace to save my school and they called me a traitor and chose to shun me.”

Her scales puffed up as she sucked in a great volume of water. “For a long time I drifted about in despair, slowly descending toward the abyss until my only companions were the dirty, boiling hydrothermal vents on the oppressive sea floor. When hunger became unbearable, I forced myself to eat a few of the hard, unsatisfying crawlers that taste of bitter brimstone. After almost a year, my respiratory scales were aflame from the thick, sizzling sulfides, but I refused to leave the toxic safety of the smokers.

“One day, when I was about ready to shove my head into the supercritical mouth of a crusty chimney and take a final scorching whiff of death, I caught a faint signal from a passing school decrying this new practice of hybridization. I floated up listlessly, weak but wanting to know more. It seemed impossible to me, but when reports of the first births began circulating the ocean, I thought,
Humans owe me!
They have gotten off too easy. I lost everything because of them and they have a responsibility to make this right!
”

“Do you resent us?”

“I did at first…but when I observed the demonstrators on their little boats when we first met, I understood that you too have given up a lot to be here, to give me a school.”

“It’s almost reassuring to know bigotry is universal. That no one species owns that particular trait.” Ignacio patted her side with a gloved hand and her scales rippled like a banner in the wind. He felt like a cleaner fish riding in the wake of a great white shark. They swam in silence for a while, both of them watching their child roughhousing with one of her fathers. Ojore loved to cavort with Yemaya and he took great pleasure in watching them play.

Ignacio, on the other hand, loved to hold her and sing to her. When Yemaya was only a day old and still slurping up the nutritious mucus-like secretions of her mother, Ignacio got the urge to stroke her head and sing to her in his sweetest baritone. Wahgohi said it calmed her so he continued to do it.

Ojore and Yemaya joined them and the four of them swam in their usual formation, a strange little school of non-fish. He reached out and took Ojore’s hand, trying to pull him along. He could hear the very human sound of panting over the comm. “Have fun?”