would make their Human friends happy. They would go this way, very quickly, and then they would come back, very quickly, and when they came back, everyone would be very happy with Evangeline, because she would have done what she was supposed to do.
But they had gone this way before, many, many times. She remembered every time they’d gone. Why must they do it again?
Tug stung her again, for pain this time, but not much, no more than a reminder. She must take them this way because it was her duty. It was what was right, and harmonious. Didn’t she want things to be harmonious?
Of course she did. She had not meant to be disharmonious. She would not object again. She had been reminded, and would pay more attention from now on.
He sensed her repentance. Tug soothed her as best he could. There would be other asteroid belts to graze, and very soon. Of course this was a boring trip; they had been to this section before, five times before, but Tug would keep Evangeline entertained. As for mating, well, there would be time for that later. Besides, if she mated now, out here, there would be no safe place for her young’s net. They’d starve. And there were no Arthroplana out here to enter her young, so they would be empty and lonely inside while they starved. A horrible fate.
She was aghast.
But none of that would happen, because Evangeline always listened to Tug. Evangeline was good and wise to avoid such awful things by not mating at all. Everyone admired her wisdom. Such a good Beast.
She quieted quickly, her simple complaints forgotten in Tug’s reassurances. He rewarded her with a new entertainment. He showed her the winning and losing patterns of the Human game of tic-tac-toe that Raef had taught him the last time Tug had awakened him. The losing patterns distressed Evangeline, as Tug had known they would, so they switched to cooperatively creating winning patterns of X’s. Evangeline eventually saw that the easiest way for X to win was to eliminate all O’s from the pattern. Tug agreed this was best for maximum efficiency and least conflict, and helped her fill in the patterns with solid X’s. Cooperating with a higher mind soothed her as it always did. Tug showed her a universe of endless X’s with no conflict and she purred with contentment and all the games won themselves.
Raef liked the dreaming times. On his first trip out, the evacuation trip, he had been told that he would be aware of nothing, that he would go to sleep and wake up, perhaps decades later, and it would seem like no more than the passing of a single night. Maybe it would have, for someone else. But he had always been different; had always suffered because he was different. Maybe this, now, was finally his reward for all the suffering he had done for being different. To finally be rewarded for his differences, secretly.
His consciousness hovered. Not quite awake, but not asleep either. As a small child he’d been able to make it do that. He’d been able to get to a place between being asleep and awake, and stay there. Almost falling asleep, but not letting go of the thread of awareness, controlling his dreams. Lying on the couch after school, bored, with the television turned on to the afternoon soaps for company; those were his best dream times. Then he’d closed his eyes and practiced floating, making the voices of the soap characters into comfortable family background noise. His real mother wouldn’t be getting home for hours yet, and his dad not for days. Waitress and long-haul trucker. Latch-key kid. So he would close his eyes and hover between sleep and wakefulness as he went back over his day at school and fixed it. That’s what I should have said; that’s what I should have done. I should have punched him when he said that, and for once I would have been fast enough for the punch to land, so he wouldn’t just dodge away and laugh at me, wouldn’t join the circle of kids always laughing at me. Today I should have, would have won, if I’d only done that. So in the dream times, he did it, and the world was better. He fixed it until the bad feelings went away, and then dreamed new triumphs until the alarm clock went off and told him it was time to take his TV dinner out of the freezer and put it in the microwave.
This wasn’t much different. Except that he’d had lots of time to go over everything, from the very beginning, and make it the best it could have been, or try it a whole different way, a different life, a different Raef. And then he could dive deep into the dreams, and live all the lives, just as real as they should have been. He could be what he knew he really might have been, if they’d only just left him alone, so he could be it. He dove deep now, going down to just the way he wanted things to be. The nerve impulses for a smile tickled at numbed muscles, then ceased. Raef toyed with a new fantasy, dreamed on.
Prison cell. Walla Walla. That’s where he’d been when he’d first heard. Two years down and seven to go. Ugly green bunks, fastened down with bolts, and spread up with puke green blankets. Steel toilet and sink. Four men to a cell, and none of them liked Raef. None of them ever did, but they left him alone. Because he was big, bigger and stronger than any of them, and if they so much as touched him or his stuff, he’d knock the shit out of them. And they knew it. He was long and lean, with a scar on one cheek. What was he in for? Murder. A revenge thing. And it had been a big thing, a media circus when they’d caught him.
And in his dream, it was the time of the first evacuation, the first coming of the Arthroplana. Raef knew about it first of anybody in the cell block. First of anybody in the prison! He dreamed deeper, coloring in details. And he didn’t hear it on Skip’s lousy ghetto blaster with the blown speaker on one side. Instead, he’d been listening on his own personal AM/FM Stereo CD players. Black and silver, with the teeny little headphones so he’d been the only one in the cell listening on that first day when the alien signals finally came in clear.
He’d had to wait for a while. The signals were muddled and in Chinese, too. But he’d waited, while they did French and Spanish and a bunch of other languages, and then finally English. “Your planet is poisoned. The effects of the poisoning are irreversible. Within two hundred years, your species will not be able to survive on your planet. You must evacuate now, before the poisoning affects your genetics and depletes your gene pool. We are here to evacuate you. We are the Arthroplana.”
Short and simple. That would have been a better message, without all those long codes the Arthroplana had actually used when they first made contact. Raef had never understood that. Seemed to him that if you wanted to contact a whole world, you’d put your first messages into an easy form that anyone could understand, not some big mishmash that scientists talked about and argued about for years, and then put all their arguments in the newspapers so no one ever did know what the Arthroplana had really said. Later on it turned out the government guys had been hearing the message clear for a whole bunch of years, but hadn’t been telling anyone because they were too busy arguing about it.
So Raef had been the first in his cell, in the whole cell block, to know what the governments had known for months, maybe years, but had been keeping secret. There’d been rumors, kind of, in those supermarket papers. End of the world stuff. And there’d been stuff on TV, college professors and guys in ties saying like there wasn’t enough rain forest left, the ozone had holes in it, the Midwest water tables were dropping, fossil fuels were poisoning the world, all the rain was acid, and eating fish would make you have dead babies. All that stuff.
[Explain, please,] said his mother’s voice.
You know. All that stupid stuff. Rumors and arguments, government guys fighting with university guys. All the different schemes for fixing it all. All the irrigation canals they wanted to dig, all the animals and plants they evacuated and tried to reestablish elsewhere, all the laws about who could use a car or what laundry soap you could buy. The big desalinization plants, the cooling domes, the arctic preserve that turned out to be even more polluted than the rest of the world. All the delays, when they should have just listened and started building shuttles right away. All the big people with all the money, arguing and fighting instead of doing anything.
The real hysteria had come later, of course, during the so-called lash-back years. All the good stuff got taken away, unless you were rich or government or something. Cars were against the law. All these volunteer groups out trying to move forests and animals and bugs to areas where they might be able to live. Making it against the law to kill bugs, even if they bit you or stung you. Plastic stuff disappeared out of the stores, and when you went shopping, you had to take your own canvas sacks from