The Waters Above

Reptilian aliens tamper with the DNA of early man. But to what end?

¹
“You yourself are a government. Over the trillions of tiny organisms which comprise your body” the instructor explained. “When a group of your cells stops working for you, and instead begins to pursue its own goals, we call it cancer.”

I remember Spistl and I had that political theory class together. The only time during the yom that I got to spend with her. Perhaps time has sweetened the memory for me but the way I recall her, there has never been a more beautiful Drakis.

“Now, can there be any good war between one group of your cells and another?” the instructor queried. Everyone angling for a perfect metric in the course set about busily comporting their answers. I got a 56 in the end. But then, she didn’t love me for my brains.

“Of course not. It may sometimes be necessary to arrest the ambitions of cancerous growths, but something had to go terribly wrong in the first place for your body to be at war with itself. This is an adequate simplification of the philosophy which led Grestik Rinsel Krestiful of the Blue Mountains of Lesnar to unify our peoples, some 84,915 yamim ago.”

Mercifully, he did not sing Grestik’s family history. It’s considered a formal necessity given his importance but that particular instructor was fairly relaxed and pragmatic. Adding six hours to the class just to fit the entire song in wouldn’t have meaningfully improved our understanding of Organic Consolidationism.

It’d been my last chance before my completion ceremony to confess my feelings to Spistl. Aside from the fact that her family intended for her to continue at a different educational center, she was nearly at the end of her gender cycle and would be male just a week or so later.

I never worked up the nerve. The prospect of humiliation deterred me. That was when I knew that in my hearts, I’m a coward. Or was. I like to think I’ve become more daring since then. It wasn’t my only poor choice from that stage of my life, though. Neglecting my studies lost me a seat on the desert reclamation council.

The prestige would have guaranteed an income sufficient to handsomely compensate my brood mother. Not to mention lengthening my family’s history song considerably. But because I’d excelled only in the care and cultivation of animals, with an above average score in engineering as well, I was assigned by the Grand Ovum to a position offworld.

“Self pity won’t reverse the chronometer”. Am I that transparent? I do dwell on it more than I should. Elohim Yehova Eiyam of the Tallest Mountain, Lover of Asherah. Project director and highest local authority at this outpost. He never misses a chance to admonish me. Says he pushes me to extract my very best, though I suspect a less noble motivation.

“Atlantes”, The habitat I was tasked with designing resembles a very oblate spheroid. The upper hemisphere is transparent, molecularly engineered hostrem. Only material of sufficient strength that would admit light. The rest of the pressure hull is conventional brisbek. It’s supported up off the seabed by a ring of cylindrical hydraulic legs which automatically adjust to the terrain, even if an undersea geological event should shift its footing.

I am not wrong to feel pride in the design. It is in many ways more difficult than engineering for space. My holistic knowledge of the habitat systems also makes me indispensible to El, and gives me some small leverage over him.

The upper dome is perhaps 3,520 cubits in diameter. About a third as tall. The dropship emplaced the structure shallow enough that some natural light makes it down from above, but not much. Anticipating this, and wanting the subjects to transition as smoothly as possible to the surface following conclusion of our work, I designed an illusory cosmos projected onto the dome.

So it is that each morning the sun appears to rise from the edge of the dome, travel in an arc overhead, then set at the opposite edge in a perfect imitation of what the subjects would see on the surface. There’s also a sprinkler system to simulate rain, and air jets for wind. El, impatient to begin, imported the initial subjects from the surface before the projector was set up. It took me an additional yom to get it working.

I tell him this may confuse them, but he underestimates how aware these animals are. They are ungainly beasts, and, to be fair, simply to look at them you would never guess their potential. Missing a joint in the leg, too many fingers, covered with stretchy, polymer like skin where scales should be, round pupils and a tailbone but no tail. No tail! Somehow they manage.

It was fulfilling to see the fuzzy fellows exploring their new home. New world I should say. The landscape inside an improbably lush, diverse temperate forest of fruiting trees with numerous breathtaking meadows. For their meat intake, there are animals of all kinds, periodically replenished from surface populations. Undoubtedly a paradise for creatures as simple as this.

El was the first to argue before the Grand Ovum for their cultivation. Stereoscopic vision, prehensile digits, upright posture. All the prerequisites to become a technological, space faring species of fully matured conscious moralizers.

Yet despite thinking enough of them to make them a target for our genetic elevation program, he routinely declines to recognize signs of their progress. Worse still he continues to impose strict behavioral rules on them which he claims are to “prime them for rudimentary moralization” but which I suspect were simply intended to make them easier to manage.

Just a single breeding pair were brought down, initially. Sedated for the trip, memories wiped so they might confuse their new surroundings for the surface we’d taken them from. That’s El’s reasoning, again making them out to be dimwits who would never so much as think to explore the habitat all the way to the edge.

“Look at this!” I once told him. He took the etching from me and studied it. “What am I looking at exactly?” It was a crude but recognizable diagram of the habitat. “One of them drew this with a bit of charcoal. They know they aren’t on the surface. They know it’s an artificial structure.” He snorted.

“They do not even know to cover their dangling inseminators. A lucky guess at best, and even then many of these details are wrong. They cannot comprehend our technology and you’re wasting both our time by crediting them with a level of comprehension they’re simply not capable of.”

After the first two reproduced, we introduced others taken from the surface as new mates in order to set about building a viable breeding pool. As our own living space was on a floating platform up on the surface, whenever we had to intervene in any way, it was through drones.

Designed to resemble them but with highly idealized features, each contained a micro traction drive, enabling it to levitate out of danger should they descend into a rage and attack it. A drone with these capabilities is expensive, and we’re already over budget.

Protocol forbids that we should appear to them directly, as knowledge of life outside their own world is not considered necessary or appropriate at their present stage of maturation. Many times I felt tempted to violate this rule. Despite their repulsive anatomy, they quickly grew on me. There is genuine feeling in them, evident when you look in their eyes.

When the first killing occurred, El held it over me as proof that they were less developed than I believe. “To spill each others’ blood, like beasts of the field! And you make them out to be our equals!” I objected to the hyperbole. “All the more reason to accelerate their socialization.” He scratched his scaly snout, harrumphed, but finally approved. “Take care of the body first.”

The simulated natural space of the habitat is named Eedin. But there’s also seven lower decks, Shiol. Mostly space for the life support machinery and backups. But also storage, recycling, drone hangars and so forth. It gets quite hot down there, mostly on account of the machinery.

I sent a drone in to remove the body as the poor little apes looked on in fear, then dragged it down into the open hatch. Which then shut, merging seamlessly with the grassy terrain. It broke my hearts that one of them would do this. Making a fool out of me in front of El, after I’d stood up for them so many times.

If only I could stick around to see them mature. Flourishing due to my guidance at the outset, brains swollen from our genetic tampering, the fundamental rules for functional societies passed down from us as stories told around the fire. As it had been for Drakis.

As I operated the drone, I overheard El reporting the killing to the department of exobiological cultivation. I really should be the one to do that. He’s so blunt and unforgiving. They can do better, I’m certain of it. “In light of this setback I’m recommending that the project be shut down, the habitat removed, and our presence withdrawn from this planet.”