Chapter 3

Chapter 3

My body aches from being in the same position too long. I try to roll over on the gurney, but even considering it feels awful. There’s something gurgling and sharp and newly wet on my backside, and it hurts . Only by concentrating do I manage to say something about it. “Oof” is that thing I manage to say.

Dad hovers before me, his face drawn. He’s here. Dad will make all this better. “You’re up, darling.”

“Yeah, I... oh wow, I just remembered what happened. Am I dead?”

“You’re going to be fine,” he says. “You lost a lot of blood, enough to pass out. But I took that opportunity to bandage you up without having to listen to you complaining every second of it. Well, I had help. Rover did most of the bandaging, if I’m being honest.”

Rover—OS’s mobile form, a sphere with various tools that can emerge from its diameter, some of which undoubtedly just saved my life—whirls about the chamber. A tireless nurse. “Your chances of infection are very low,” OS reports in a voice that I’ve been told is the chilled-out version of a long-dead pop star named Devon Mujaba. Dad had a bit of a crush on him back in the day, apparently.

“How long was I out?”

Dad taps his lips. “Overnight and into the next twilight. The wound isn’t so bad; the horn tore into the muscle of your abdomen but didn’t inflict any major organ damage. You’ll be lying here for a few days, but it shouldn’t be anything worse than that. Our main concern is preventing infection. You and Rover will be sharing a lot of quality time on that front.”

Dad has his gardening duds on, bioluminescent xenobacteria lighting up the seams of his clothing, rimming his dirty fingernails. We’re not in one of the printed greenhouses, though. We’re in the learning habitat, which doubles as the infirmary. I’ve been told I spent the first weeks of my life here, with Rover as wet nurse. Closest I got to a mother.

“Father...,” I say, my voice trailing off.

“... is very upset with you,” Dad finishes. He sighs. “I get why you want to push us. But you can’t put Father through the wringer like that. Or me. It’s not fair.”

I let out a long breath, wincing at the end when it laces with pain. “You don’t understand,” I say. “You don’t know what I found.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Dad says, gesturing at the desk built into the far wall. “Can I assume you’re referring to that?”

On the desk, where Yarrow and I have spent hours a day getting our lessons from OS, is a pathetic jumble of white bone fragments.

“They used to be in order,” I say. “Like they were connected. It was a skeleton . An alien skeleton. Not a malevor, either. Something else.”

“I can see how discovering something like that would have felt important,” Dad says.

His tone is weird. Maybe not, maybe I’m the weird one, because I’m in pain, and feeling thirsty and achy. I swipe my matted hair back from my forehead. Father used to comb it for me, using algal oils to get the tangles out. Even though I loved the feel of it I still made him stop last year... but I never started doing it myself, so now it’s a disaster. “You don’t sound surprised, Dad. Is that because you’re too worried about me to care about the skeleton?”

“No,” Dad says. He smiles wanly. “I mean, of course I’m worried about you. But I’m also not full of shock and awe over that skeleton.”

My eyes narrow. I blow a chunk of hair away from my face. “ Why aren’t you full of shock and awe?”

Dad goes to the entrance of the learning habitat, looks left and right, pulls down the translucent polycarb covering so we have relative privacy. He turns around. “That’s not an alien skeleton.”

“What’s all this secrecy for?” I ask. “Are you trying to keep this from Yarrow?” My brother is probably crying at the fence right now, mourning that slain malevor and pleading to the Sisters to bring it back to life.

“No, from Kodiak,” Dad says. “You know we have differing opinions on how much to tell you two about life back on Earth. Now that you found that skeleton, it’s time we told you the truth.”

“This creature came from Earth ?”

“Not this very one. But it’s an Earth animal. You’ve seen reels of ducks in your lessons? This was one of those.”

I try to sit up, which makes my back light up with pain. Ow! That was a bad idea. “So wait, Minerva had ducks on it when you arrived? I don’t understand.”

“No, it didn’t. We brought the ducks.” He starts to sit, and the moment he does, Rover positions itself below him to serve as a chair. It’s one of OS’s coolest tricks. “When we arrived, the resources we needed were behind a gray portal on the exterior of the Coordinated Endeavor . Neither we nor OS had access to it during the voyage. The first thing we discovered was the gestation device, and inside it were the zygotes, like yours and Yarrow’s and... your siblings’. But there was more in there, too. Zygotes of animals we could use to populate Minerva, to create a farm here. We had—what did we have... ducks, goats, pigs, and yaks.”

“Wow,” I say. “Earth animals.” They were here and now are not. I sigh. “What happened? Did they get sick?”

Dad nods. “We could produce feed for them from the algal farms, but the animals had the same problem that most of our children did, not thriving. Some of them survived, though the ducks still found it hard to fly in the different gravity here. The big problem, however, were the yaks.”

A horrible thought occurs to me. “The malevors.”

Dad gives a grim smile. “On Earth, yaks were peaceful and adaptable creatures. They produced milk we could drink. It made sense that Cusk selected them to send out to Minerva. But they’d overlooked something important. Just like a human child, a baby yak learns how to socialize and behave properly from the yaks around them. Lots of the other human orphans Father was raised with in isolation had severe mental problems from having lack of love and care when they were young.”

“It’s not like our Kodiak doesn’t have severe mental problems,” I grumble.

“Owl, that’s enough,” Dad says sharply. Sometimes he conspires with me against Father, other times he’s the stern parental partner. I’m never totally sure which Dad I’m going to get from one moment to the next.

He continues. “We raised them as best we could, but humans aren’t suitable parents for a baby yak. Because they had no culture, the new yaks didn’t behave like the ones on Earth did. They were... disturbed. We hadn’t built all our fencing and gunnery yet. They trampled out of their enclosure, escaping onto the countryside. Do you remember any of this? You and Yarrow were very little at the time.”

I shake my head. I have maybe a few murky early images of yaks around the settlement, but nothing like what my dad is describing. “Crane was alive then,” Dad says, “but her fever came shortly after. We paused gestation and stopped raising animals, fearing that somehow they were passing pathogens to you children. We slaughtered the other animals, but the malevors were too ferocious. They escaped our control and began living and mating on their own outside of the settlement.”

“Why didn’t you tell me and Yarrow all this?” I ask. “Why did you let us believe the malevors were some alien monsters?”

Dad cuts his eyes to the tarp over the entrance to the habitat—a sure sign he’s thought of Father, which means I’m about to get official parental messaging instead of the truth. “We knew it was inevitable that we’d introduce terrestrial microorganisms to Minerva, but a complex mammal like the yak, left to wreck native ecosystems on a pristine new planet—we felt like we had failed. Father took it especially hard. He’d already wanted us to sever as much connection to Earth and the Cusk Corporation as we could, and this only convinced him further. I agreed, and so since we couldn’t eliminate the yaks, we decided to present them to you as malevors. We didn’t want you to know about the animal zygotes, to start trying to introduce more Earth animals. Better not to know that was even an option, so you could concentrate on this new world here.”

“That’s stupid,” I say.

“Owl,” Dad warns.

I bite my lip. “What I mean is, I guess I get what you were thinking, but it’s still ridiculous. You should have told us the truth.”

Dad shrugs. I know he agrees with me.

“It makes me feel bad to be lied to,” I venture, taking the sort of diplomatic tack I know Dad will appreciate.

“I know,” he says.

“It’s only because I found that skeleton that you had to come clean,” I press. “Does Father know you’re telling me this?”

“Yes, we discussed it,” Dad says, with a glance at the polycarb curtain.

I let out a long sigh, exaggerating the wince at the end so Dad can know how very much I’m suffering. That he really should be treating his poor gored daughter better. “I thought I’d made an amazing discovery,” I say, in this mournful self-centered tone that I instantly hate myself for.

“And yet. It was just a duck,” he says. His tone is carefully neutral.

“A duck skeleton is still amazing to me ,” I grumble, wincing as my ribs grate. I hate it when I wallow, and yet here I go. “ I’ve never seen one.”

Dad busies himself untying and retying the straps of his shoes. His face is turned away from me, so I can’t see his expression, but I think... his shoulders are shaking? “Dad, are you laughing at me?” I ask. “Tell me that you’re not laughing at me right now.”

He doesn’t answer, just unties and reties his straps again.

“You’re laughing. At your precious daughter who’s been maimed by a yak ,” I continue.

His whole body is shaking now.

“Dad!” I say. “I can’t believe this. I nearly died out there, because you’ve kept a central reality of the world from me, just like your mother did to you , I might add, and my dad, my own dad , finds this state of affairs hilarious . Gah!” I started talking with my hands, and it makes my ribs flash in pain again. “Ow!”

“I for one do not find this situation humorous,” interrupts OS. “I know how fragile your physical body is. We have seen that children can be terminated forever as simply as tumbling in the wrong location.”

Dad’s face falls. He stares at his shoes.

“Thank you, OS,” I huff. “At least someone gets it. But that made Dad feel bad.”

When Dad looks up, his cheeks are red. He’s still laughing. Unbelievable. He’s an absolute monster.

He must see the fury on my face. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not sure exactly what’s funny. I’m just tense and ready to find relief anywhere, I guess. The truth is that the malevors are no joke. They’re way more aggressive than we’d ever have expected yaks to be. That’s why we had to print the perimeter fencing and the pneumatic guns. It’s why we haven’t been brave enough to risk hunting them. We’ve been lucky that the low-nutrition muck out there limits their health, otherwise they’d have spread more by now and would be a real problem.”

“Do you really think one of them gave Crane her fever?”

“It’s hard to imagine. But something made her sick.”

I try not to think about Crane, who had just turned two when we buried her. Yarrow got that fever, too, but he survived it.

The malevors aren’t aliens after all. Damn.

Dad strokes my hair. “I’ve been running isotope data in the lab—the processor has been overheating, and we need to keep all our precious metal in good shape, so I should get back to it. Rover will be here to take care of you. I’ll send Yarrow in to say hi, too. Just rest easy until dinner, okay? Shout if you need anything. I love you.”

He’s gone, and I’m left in the infirmary. With the pain in my lower back—I just want to scratch, scratch, scratch that wound, even though it would hurt, hurt, hurt—what I’d most like to do is start my rewatch of Pink Lagoon , season four. Anything to stop thinking about the charging malevors and the duck skeleton and how we’re alone in the universe after all. And how mad Father must be at me.

I look over at the skeleton, and feel something bigger and sweeter than disappointment. I don’t regret what I did. Even if a duck is an Earth creature, Yarrow and I have never seen one. We will never see one, unless the dads become willing to try to raise any more of them... or we do, after our parents are dead.

I touched the skeleton of a small, fragile winged creature that lived its short life on a planet tens of thousands of light-years from its home, before it failed to thrive and the dads killed it. Whose flesh was slowly eaten away by alien bacteria, after its zygote was transported across the galaxy in a spaceship. What an awful and brief and magnificent existence. The big mystery of our life on Minerva is how quickly it can turn from grimy to majestic and back.

The printed walls are translucent, which means we can’t ever fully block the outside light. It’s why I got OS to reschedule my free time away from the Scorch, because the intense midday light from the Sisters makes the Pink Lagoon reels harder to watch. But now the twilight is in its rapid finish, and the settlement walls have started to emit the solar energy they were storing all day. Since the light-processing cells are embedded in every permanent surface, the evening illumination doesn’t come from any one place; it’s part of everything.

A shadow passes the wall, pauses by the curtained doorway to the learning room, then moves on. The figure is tall and broad-shouldered. Father, unmistakably Father. Not willing to see me yet.

“You don’t get to be mad at me,” I mutter, wincing again. Of course ambition comes with risks. The fact that I got hurt this time doesn’t mean I had the wrong idea.

“I am not mad at you,” OS responds. “I’m not even remotely thinking of you through pathways that could be ascribed to anger.”

“Thanks, OS, but you’re not the one I was talking to,” I say. I know that the fact that I just spoke out loud to try to convince Father that he can’t be angry—when he’s not here—means I’m feeling guilty. Yarrow would say maybe I could be the one to start the conversation, just apologize, tell Father the story I’m telling myself about why he’s angry. That’s how he’d phrase it, and he’d say it all with that bland sweet smile on his face that makes me want to shove his nose into the nearest puddle of bioluminescent goop.

Worst part is that Yarrow’s right, of course. I’ll try out this “I’m sorry” thing. Even though I’m not sorry. Even if I am, I don’t need to be. I’m just choosing to be. They should be apologizing to me!

Hmm. Maybe I’m the problem.

I sit up, gritting my teeth against the pain in my lower back.

“I don’t advise sitting up right now,” OS says. “You heard what your father said.”

“Yes, and we both know that I’m not doing anything too dangerous,” I say. “I’m old enough that you should weigh my opinions equally alongside my fathers’. You don’t want to serve as referee around here, anyway. That’s no fun.”

Rover makes a little hop, tapping the hard earth expressively. “It is true, I would rather be a compatriot than an arbiter,” OS says.

“Amen,” I say.

“Amen?” OS asks. “Where did you pick up that vernacular?”

“ Pink Lagoon , OS. Obviously.”

“Ah yes, in season three alone it appears in seconds 391 and 1,208 of episode one, seconds 1,006 and 2,601 of episode two—”

By now I’m on my feet. I hobble to the doorway and throw open the polycarb curtain.

Sky Cat is up there, the constellation with her perky ears and twinkling eyes and five whiskers. With a face like that, I know she’d be just fine with my going on expeditions.

I look for Father, but I don’t see him anywhere. He’s probably in the room behind the gray portal, one of the few parts of the Endeavor that haven’t yet slipped into the muck.

Rover ticks behind me for a few moments, probably in case I fall, then buzzes away across the hard soil of the settlement, off to prep dinner.

Yarrow is near the southern gate. He’s kneeling in front of a large slumping corpse, the malevor’s remaining horn spiking into the starry sky. Yarrow places his hands on the dead creature’s bloody forehead, gives it a long stroke.

I hobble over to him. I can’t decide what to say. Luckily I have time to figure it out, since I’m not moving very fast at the moment.

Yarrow glances up at me as I approach. “Owl, you’re awake!”

I stop a meter shy of him. “Yeah, I guess I lost some blood. But now I’m alert and all sanitized and stitched up. I’ll be fine.”

Yarrow returns his attention to the dead malevor. His eyes aren’t sad, not exactly. More like he’s acknowledging some primal and basic unfairness that’s old news at this point. That the universe has always been sad and he’s made it his work to notice.

“I know. He wasn’t trying to kill me, just defend his young. I’m really sorry I got him killed,” I say.

This is when Yarrow is supposed to say it’s not my fault, but he misses his line. “He looks so peaceful,” he says.

I look at the dead malevor. Or yak. The pneumatic gun ripped his body right open, exposing a mass of gore in his abdomen. His eyes are dull. “He does look calm,” I say. “So... is Father mad?”

“Yes and no. Not really mad. More scared,” Yarrow says. “Even if you felt like it was your right to go venturing off on your own, he would have felt it was his fault if you’d died.”

“Well, that’s crazy,” I say. “I did this to myself. It wouldn’t have been his fault. Parents are nuts.”

Yarrow chuckles. “It’s more accurate to say our parents are nuts. We have a pretty small sample size. But, Owl... you can’t expect them not to get worked up about their kids being in danger. Not with the survival rate of children around here. Two out of seven. Tough odds.”

I gingerly sit on the earth next to Yarrow. “Ow, ow, ow. Crishet.”

“Want to go play in the Museum of Earth Civ?” Yarrow asks. “Would that make you feel better?”

“We’re not kids anymore,” I say. “Thanks, though.”

He runs his hand through his thick black hair. “Someday Father will let us look at actual reels of Earth, not just the science fiction reels on the ship. Then we’ll have more data for the ‘are our dads nuts’ project. And we can complete our Museum of Earth Civ. Make it into something actually special.”

Yarrow’s almost a year older than me, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it. “I don’t know that we’ll have time to work on that museum again. And there’s no chance Father would turn back from his whole ‘fresh start’ fixation.” I drop my voice. “Where is he, by the way?”

“That’s too bad about the museum. I made the reel for the dads’ arrival anniversary and it’s a perfect addition. And Father is off to get the saw. The malevor has to be butchered before too much time goes by. Apparently, he wants us to do it instead of Rover. In fact, he wants you to do it.”

I look at the mass of split flesh. A pellet from the pneumatic gun gleams between two rent-open muscles. “Whoa. We’re going to eat it? This creature ?”

Yarrow nods. He strokes the malevor’s forehead. “I understand the symbolism of it.”

“Eating flesh? As a symbol? I thought you were the sweet one.”

Yarrow goes quiet, his hand on the head of the malevor, as if soaking in the thoughts the animal once had. “This is an Earth creature, it turns out,” I say.

“Father told me while Dad was in there telling you. I’d sort of figured as much. You and I came up with that theory once, too.”

“One of hundreds we had. I guess I forgot. I hate that they kept the truth from us.”

“That’s the way they were raised, remember. The biggest truth about their existence was kept from them. Much as they might not want to do it, they’re repeating what they learned. We’re getting older. There’s probably more and more weird truths we’ll be learning. And we’ll do better for our kids, Owl.”

Our kids. Yikes. He just means co-parenting, but I’m also well aware that I’m the only person on this planet with a womb. I prefer not to think about that. I nod, not that Yarrow can see it. He’s still staring into the malevor’s wide and unseeing eyes. “I wonder what it tastes like,” I say.

“Probably disgusting,” Yarrow says.