The Children Star by Joan Slonczewski

Author:Joan Slonczewski
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 1998-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

Through the rotating connector, Rod held T’kela tight to convince the infant he was not falling into space. Qumum seemed unconcerned, crowing and solemnly examining his fingers. At the gate they met Khral, bearing Quark’s eyespeaker; the lightcraft had been running an experiment at Station, all the while during his trip to pick up the colonists. No wonder sentients made humans feel inadequate.

“Look at the babies,” Khral exclaimed. “They’ve grown twice as big.” She gave Rod a quick hug, and her cheek brushed his. “You know, Three Crows is just dying to see them again.”

“It’s a pleasure.” Rod hoped he did not look as confused as he felt.

“I’m so sorry about—oh, everything.” Her eyelids fluttered beneath her simian brow. “Pushing you all off your own homestead—how could the Fold allow it?”

“For better farmland,” he said bitterly. He took a deep breath and tried not to think how her arms had felt around him. “How is your project, Khral? Are the micros still growing?”

“Which ones?”

“The ones from Sarai. You mean, you have others?”

“Oh, there are thousands of strains. Sarai’s strain is a completely new species, unlike those from the singing-tree pods. We even named the strain for her, Sarai phycozoöidensis. That smoothed her feathers a bit. I’m trying to get her up here for a seminar.”

Rod smiled. “Good luck.”

“They’re growing, all right. We were making such progress decoding them, until Station pulled me off the project to isolate that spaceship bug, the one Three Crows got sick on.”

“ ‘Spacer’s spit-up,’ they call it,” chirped Quark at her shoulder.

Khral wrinkled her brow at the eyespeaker. “That’s right, rub it in. Anyway—if you’ve got a moment, I’ll show you what we’ve learned so far.”

They entered the laboratory. An oblong vessel of culture stood on a stand, amid several angular instruments. Khral tapped it gently; it shook like gelatin. “That’s our tumbleround soup in there—the stuff the microzoöids grow in, remember. They’re incredibly active chemically; they put out polymers to gel the whole thing, and excrete all kinds of fibers.”

Rod’s scalp prickled. “Did you . . . chop up a tumbleround, or what?”

“We snipped a bunch of vegetative root-limbs. You know, the ones the tumbleround extends forward and pulls up behind, as it travels. They break naturally anyhow; the tumbleround doesn’t seem to mind. The micros grow well in the stuff, but slowly, by microbial standards—about twenty-four hours to reproduce, a generation time of one day. Anyway, let’s magnify them.”

She turned to the holostage and dimmed the light. In darkness appeared several blobs of color; Rod counted twelve. Qumum wiggled and stretched to be put down so he could scrabble over to check out something more interesting than his fingers.

“That’s okay, he can’t hurt anything. Let’s get this in focus.” The colored blobs sharpened into ringlets, of perceptibly different hues. They seemed to be mainly blues and greens, with one yellow-orange. Darker tubes of fibers formed tunnels, connecting among the rings. “I’m going to slow down the time scale of the recording. Watch.”

Rod stared until the little rings left afterglow in his eyes.

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