The One and the Many

by William Ledbetter

 

Opono formed a pseudopod and reached out to flip the spectrometer retraction lever, but for the first time since setting off in her little spacecraft, she couldn’t touch the instruments from her pilot’s cage. She paused, perplexed, then made several more attempts before giving up and forming an eye nodule. When pressed against her outer envelope from the inside, the eye enzymes made her skin translucent and let her see the dimly lit chamber. She could just make out the ropy appendage weaving around in the air. It was only half the length needed to reach the lever.

The pilot’s cage kept her centered in the control chamber during null gravity periods and she seldom left it. Within hours after launch, her body had learned the exact location of every instrument relative to her position in the cage and she had not needed eyes to find them in the many long decades since. Something was seriously wrong.

As she gathered musculature along that side of her body and forcefully extended the pseudopod far enough to engage the device, she finally realized what was happening. The resulting dismay rippled her skin hard enough to make her eye lose focus. Plasticity degradation was the first sign that the fission process had started.

She was dying.

Refusing to believe it could be true, she formed appendages in various lengths and thicknesses from different parts of her body, but even those originating near the moister absorption zones performed little better. The evidence left little doubt. Only fission onset could tighten her skin in such a way. The reproduction process had started too early.

She floated in the pilot’s cage, limp and listless for a long time, as implications solidified and choices faded. Her only viable option lay in returning home to let the process run its natural course among kin and peers. Death and rebirth should be a joyful experience, with her newly separated young distributed to nutrient rich pools with other budlings where they could stalk, pounce upon, and envelope each other. The joyous competition prompted rounds of betting and merriment as each victoriously recombined budling grew stronger and more intelligent until only one remained. Opono knew her young would do well, preserving her line and making her proud. She had to return home.

Opono strained and stretched to reach the controls needed to turn her ship, then paused before actually engaging the drive.

She had spent the entire first third of her life convincing peers and family that — against all evidence to the contrary –- there was sentient life in the cosmos and she could find it. They had finally believed her, financed her, and some had even contracted future offspring to combine with hers so their lineage would have memories of the momentous occasion. She had failed them all. After cataloging nearly two hundred star systems–which included nineteen living worlds — she had found no intelligent beings.

And pulling that lever to engage the drive meant she never would.

She couldn’t do it. Not quite yet.

To stall for time, she started the hibernation process instead. Her body wouldn’t divide while in hibernation — that evolutionary path had died out long ago — so it was her only hope to avoid fission until she got home. Once absorbed, the chemicals she injected into her nutrient net would mimic starvation in her body, tricking it into entering the natural hibernation cycle. The process was primitive and painful, seldom used in modern times, yet the only way to survive the deep space distances. Opono had endured it one hundred and twenty-nine times. They had warned her. Though empirical data was sparse, medical experts had theorized such repetition could adversely affect physiology and actually trigger early fission. If she survived the trip home she could give them the supporting proof they needed.

With the hibernation chemicals coursing through her body, time was running out, yet she still refused to engage the drive. In a feeble effort to prolong her mission by just a little, she scanned the barren trinary star system again.

This time there was… something.

Had it really been there? Was desperation forcing her to see phantoms? She adjusted instrument sensitivity and frequency bandwidth.

There. A very faint radio signal with a structure that couldn’t be natural. Her outer envelope expanded and fluttered with excitement — momentarily pushing back the inevitable hibernation — and she began collecting information.

The radio signals were fragmented and scattered, suggesting they had come a great distance and probably hadn’t originated in the local system. She kept moving, was able to get three more solid readings, and triangulated the origin to be quite close.

After the distance she’s come they were practically right in front of her, but the risk was so very great.

Her growing hibernation torpor made it hard to think. The logical decision would be to go home and let her descendants come back to check out the signal source, but that would mean missing the experience she had wanted her entire life, and her people might miss it as well.

One prevalent theory for why the galaxy wasn’t brimming with intelligent species proposed that if a race never developed interstellar travel, they burned out and died quickly. Home lay more than three hundred years away. By the time she got there and explorers could return — another three hundred years — this civilization might be gone.

That was rationalization enough for Opono. At the very least, she could give a possible fledgling civilization the gift of her gravity harmonics drive. Even if she died in the process.

Opono started to fade, but shook herself awake, sending a weak ripple through her skin. She couldn’t sleep yet. Still things to do, but she couldn’t remember what. The drones! She was too far from home to send a message, but after three attempts and rechecking her calculations twice, she had the candidate system’s coordinates, loaded the message into fast moving drone craft and launched them toward home. If she didn’t survive, at least someday her people would find this race, or their remains.

With her last dribble of energy she engaged the drive. Her ship would use gravitational energies from the system’s largest star to accelerate to seventy-one percent of light speed, then would coast until approaching her destination where it would reverse the process, but Opono would miss it all. She had already collapsed into sleep.

When close enough, Opono’s ship felt the yellow star’s pull and extended its own field. The gravities meshed, deceleration commenced, and Opono struggled to wake up. She expected thought and body sluggishness when recovering from hibernation, but this time nothing was as it should be. Her plasticity had further diminished, putting even more controls out of reach, and she now had to force clarity and order to her thoughts as well.

Awareness returned suddenly and with vigor when she remembered she might be in a system containing an intelligent species. Even with survival level decisions to make, all other thoughts were pushed aside. She had to leave the cage and pull her way around the walls in order to reach the needed levers and controls, but the ship slowly came back to life. She also adjusted the nutrient flow through her body netting to the minimum needed to ward off hibernation, yet hopefully not enough to allow fission.

Opono saved sensor deployment for last. Had she risked everything for nothing? Excitement and anticipation rippling through her skin made pulling levers even more difficult, but when the data started flowing in, she settled into her cage and marveled.

The system was surprisingly young and stable, circling a single star and teeming with activity. Radio traffic covered a wide frequency range and saturated local space even thicker than in her home system. She detected over two hundred moving spacecraft, mostly around the inner planets. They were also using fusion drives instead of gravity harmonics, which implied they were indeed a budling civilization.

She had done it!

The enormity of her discovery left Opono stunned, but she had little time. Returning to hibernation was the only way she could avoid fission and she had to hurry. Once the reproduction process actually started, her body could not enter the long sleep.

She considered not slowing further and instead turning toward home, but even with their limited technologies, Opono was sure they had already seen her. The ship’s constant high-velocity collision with interstellar hydrogen molecules and photons created a bow wave visible even with primitive equipment. Leaving without attempted contact could produce the wrong impression.

No, she had to make some kind of connection, but everything depended on timing, and as tremors swept through her, she wished she had more solid knowledge of what was to come. Was fission already starting? Death and birth were not memories that survived the transfer. She did know she had to act fast.

A simple plan. Zip through the system collecting as much information as possible, send the language primer and a quick greeting message with promises to return, then set her course for home and enter hibernation.

Before she could send anything the pain came.

Undulating waves tore through Opono, saturating every part with agony, rendering her unable to move until it passed, leaving her twitching, disoriented, and exhausted. Everything felt strange, and her numb skin provided almost no sensation. After several attempts, she finally pushed an eye nodule against her outer layer, but couldn’t make a stalk to support it.

She moved closer to the observation dome covering the control chamber’s upper half and studied her reflection in the polished plastic. Even with limited vision, what she saw horrified her. Behind the nutrient netting tubes, fissure lines were already visible on her skin. Some were even deep enough to weep fluid.

For several moments her thoughts flew off in every direction. She had to get home! She had to get into hibernation. There had to be some way to stop this! When she eventually calmed enough for focused thought, she knew it was over. Postponing the fission event was no longer possible.

With acceptance of her fate came a new clarity of thought. Grandiose as the gesture would be, letting her young die had never been an option. Among Opono’s people, losing the accumulated racial memories from hundreds of generations would be unforgivable. She had an obligation to her progenitors, but her only remaining option made her squirm with revulsion.

Opono would have to force her own budlings to recombine.

It was a dangerous and deplorable act. The cellular toxins triggering fission did not easily dissipate in recombined siblings and even though they maintained the same memories and personality traits as their parent, the process often produced unbalanced and possibly even violently insane individuals.

Still, it was her only hope. And she had very little time left to make it happen. Struggling at the controls, she plotted a course that would move the ship into a close trailing orbit behind the third planet, which was obviously their home world.

Next, she needed a fusion pool. Normally a natural avoidance instinct prevented sibling recombination, so if not constrained the siblings would run and hide all over the ship after Opono split. They would eventually succumb to starvation and hibernation. Without at least a trickle of water and nutrients, budling hibernation would end with death in less than a year. Budlings would only recombine if forced into close proximity, but she didn’t have time to make a zero-gee nutrient pool.

She pressed an eye nodule against her cloudy outer skin and looked around the control cabin. Faint tremors heralded an approaching episode. The process was already advanced enough that she probably wouldn’t survive the next episode.

The environment suit!

The suit was designed to maintain a constant temperature and pressure on her outer skin layer in a vacuum, yet was versatile enough to flow around pseudopod and eye stalk formation. And the translucent material was nearly puncture-proof. It would be perfect for emergency recombination.

With a feeble shove, she pushed across the cabin, and detached the suit from the wall. Then she paused. Opono could not control how her budlings would recombine, but she might be able to give certain traits an advantage. With clumsy movements she started modifying the suit, making it into a simple test.

The next wave came while she struggled to attach the life support generator to the suit. This time, instead of pain, a cold, numbing paralysis spread rapidly throughout her body. What was happening now? She had a sudden and overwhelming need to see her reflection in the glass again, but when she tried to form another eye nodule, nothing happened. Her body also didn’t respond when she tried moving back to the viewing dome. She was instead forced to watch — like an observer locked behind a glass wall — as her stubby appendages continued fumbling with the life support generator, independent of her conscious will.

At first she thought her errant pseudopods were functioning on echoed nerve impulses, stuck in a loop performing the same movements over and over, but with astonishment and horror, she realized they were actually working. On their own. Had her neural core dispersed that much already?

A growing sense of acceptance and detachment calmed her as rebellious body parts finished the assembly, stripped off her nutrient netting, switched on the life support, and sealed her into the suit. Then her eye retracted, leaving her to float in blackness as her body twitched, twisted, and changed around her.

Flee!

She had to hide, but no matter how she flailed about, she couldn’t find the ground or water. The damp air reeked with sibling scent and she couldn’t get away. Every movement pressed her against squirming competitors or some soft, unyielding, barrier.

She needed escape and food, but found neither. Her quest for food and information instinctually triggered eye formation and she pressed three of them outward against her skin until they stretched into stalks. The new senses revealed chaotic movement all around and increased her confusion until she limited her focus to one eye at a time. Then she saw that the barrier blocking her escape was translucent. Beyond that wall lay strange shapes and interesting shadows, providing plenty of places to hide if she could just get there.

Growing hunger made concentration even more difficult, but she could smell only her siblings. Someone succumbed to their need to eat, latched on and tried to envelope her, but she slipped free and crept further down the wall, stopping at a strange disk shaped section. Bringing an eye stalk close generated a niggling near memory. The disk was there for a reason. Unlike the rest of the barrier it didn’t warp when she pressed it. It was opaque with two round openings in an otherwise smooth surface. She pressed a pseudopod into one and felt a click, but nothing else. The second did the same.

She pressed a pseudopod into both openings simultaneously and was rewarded by a squirt of rich, thick food. With a sense of elation and relief, she sucked it in and formed smaller, stiffer digits that would allow more food to flow past them.

With energy and nutrients flooding through her, thought and senses sharpened. Snippets of what had been Opono returned. She remembered the quest and the sacrifice and…the aliens! They were out there waiting.

But she was surrounded by hungry monsters. A sibling wrapped around her in a stunningly fast attack. She struggled and thrashed, but her attacker was large, evidently the victor of at least two absorptions already and refusing to be shaken off. As tissue combined and neural networks linked, thoughts from the attacker seeped in and momentarily stunned her. This sibling was driven by a primitive and all-consuming rage.

Her thoughts were slowly being flattened and buried under the mindless anger, but she recoiled, desperately trying to save her own mind. She extended as much of her free skin as possible toward the wall, formed a large cup over the disk and forced the air out creating suction. Then she absorbed food as fast as she could.

Energy and strength raced through her, but the absorption process was too far along, and the nutrients were feeding her larger sibling as well. Angry thoughts from her foe washed over her. Why were they in such a situation? Why were they not in a nutrient pool with adults to help them? They had been left to fend for themselves against their own siblings and all for the sake of her mother’s life consuming desire to find aliens. Opono had betrayed her own offspring.

The exhausting and bitter fight finally ended when the last sibling was enveloped. The rapidity with which she had been forced to act hadn’t allowed sufficient time for each sibling to be properly subdued. They squirmed and twisted inside her, still fighting the absorption process. The voices filling her mind made rational thought nearly impossible, but she knew this was temporary.

She pushed them back and tried to focus on her physical form. Due to the almost constant stretching, her outer skin felt too tight and extremely sensitive. To avoid touching the walls she used all her strength to contract.

Someone should help her, yet no one would. She knew that. She remembered it? The anger flared again. This was Opono’s fault. And someone should be giving her a name — she needed a name to make this collection of minds into an individual. Two ancestral names in her memories carried power and prestige. She combined them and called herself Konopono.

The voices stilled slightly and she realized they had to get out of the imprisoning bag. The realization gave her even more focus.

She formed an eye nodule and pressed it against her outer skin. A clear envelope surrounded her. Beyond it lay walls covered with strange devices and a dome-shaped window. She knew the names and functions for some of them, and the more she looked the more she remembered. Then anger flared again. Opono’s driving obsession to find alien life had left them in this precarious situation.

Well, they had found the aliens, now they had to go home. She had to go home. All the voices agreed. With increasing control over her motor functions, she formed pseudopods and opened the environment suit. Without conscious thought she started flipping switches and activating systems. She worked quickly, appendages forming as needed and reaching out to the chamber’s far corners. An almost manic need to get underway drove actions she didn’t entirely understand.

While waiting for the drive to cycle up, she looked out through the large dome and was momentarily stunned. Objects and tiny lights moved around her ship. She disengaged from the pilot’s cage and floated up to the dome’s surface. Five alien ships were visible.

Most of the voices in Konopono’s mind grew oddly quiet, though some insisted she leave and others demanded she attack. She tightened her focus and continued to watch. Fascination with their forms, devices, technology, and methods overrode her thoughts. They were small and quick, at one point even triggering an instinctual prey pursuit response that made her bump into the dome, but the thinking part of her mind knew these were the aliens Opono had come to find.

An alien moved in close, just on the other side of the glass. It was roughly a third her size, with four uniform appendages that appeared fixed in length. As she had been, it was totally enclosed in a protective sheath. The roughly spherical protrusion turned towards her probably contained sensory organs.

The alien approached the dome and extended an oddly jointed appendage, touching the clear surface with five, wide-splayed stubby digits.

Multitudes of voices simultaneously flooded Konopono with fear, rage, uncertainty and wonder, but as she continued to stare at the strange being, the voices melded into one.

Opono was still inside her after all.

She formed a pseudopod into the same stubby, five digit configuration and pressed it against the glass.

 

–   END  –

 

“The One and the Many” © William Ledbetter
William Ledbetter is a writer with more than fifty speculative fiction stories and non-fiction articles published in markets such as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Baen.com, Writers of the Future, Escape Pod, Daily SF, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores and  the SFWA blog. He administers the Jim Baen Memorial Short Story Award contest for Baen Books and the National Space Society, is a member of SFWA, is the Science Track coordinator for the Fencon convention and is a consulting editor at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. He lives near Dallas with his wife and three spoiled cats. His website is at www.williamledbetter.com

 

Digital illustration Fran Eisemann, stock resources courtesy of NASA and pixabay.