When I finally spoke, it was a whisper. “Is Aleria dead, ship?”
“Affirmative. Captain Aleria is dead.” The voice was neutral. No feeling. Gray. And it was a huge relief to hear after Aleria’s honey-sweet Mother voice. I could go with gray for now.
Of course I didn’t take the ship’s word for it, not entirely. Like I said, the ship wasn’t the brightest brain in the universe. No, I left Aleria floating there for another light cycle. When I woke up from a tired, restless sleep, she hadn’t wiggled free. Hadn’t somehow come back to life. There she hung.
Aleria was dead. I made double sure of it by expelling her remains via the disposal unit.
“Space or recycle?” asked the ship.
You can guess the answer I gave.
I ate. The stuff the ship fed me through a food maker-bump was gray and didn’t taste like much, but it kept me alive.
It was time to have a serious talk with the ship.
I went to the bridge. There were still lots of gobs of water hanging around. I hadn’t managed to suck the place dry yet. Floating around there felt a little like walking in that misty stuff when Da took us on the hike up to that overlook one time. I couldn’t remember the name of the place. Mount Overlook or something like that, but I knew that couldn’t be the right name. Who would call a mountain Mount Overlook? I wished, like I always wished, that I had been paying better attention.
That’s okay. I was just a kid, I thought.
And then I realized I wasn’t anymore. Not now.
So I was all ready to have an argument with ship, for it to be a struggle. The truth was I was expecting to have to figure out some way to sabotage the vessel if I had to. There was no way we were going to the Meeb system. I’d blow us up first.
“Ship,” I said. “We need to talk.”
And the ship answered in its neutral, gray tone with maybe the sweetest words I’ve ever heard.
“Yes, Captain Aleria, how may I serve you?”
“But ship, you know Aleria is dead. You said she was dead yourself.”
“Speaker mech signal identifies as Captain Aleria,” the ship replied. “Previous reading has been discarded.”
I sighed, and felt the tightness and a little bit of the scared-ness and terrified-ness leak out of me.
And then, I think I started to cry. And I let myself. Just a little. My face was already wet, with all that mist in the air. When I first woke up in the crèche trap and then when Aleria took me on board her ship, I had cried a lot. But then I stopped, and I hadn’t for a long, long time. Maybe this was because tears are hard to deal with in zero g. They kind of stick to your eyes when you don’t wipe them and make little globs. They don’t run down your face and they don’t go away. In zero g, you have to do something about tears or they’ll just, you know, stay.
“Do you have a fix on the system we recently visited, ship? The one with the crèche trap in orbit around the planet called Earth?”
“Yes, captain.”
“If we turned around and started immediately, do we have enough fuel and supplies to make it back there?”
“Yes, captain.”
Was this really what I wanted? I was more than half a Meeb, or the ship wouldn’t have recognized me as captain. I was afraid to have the ship make a mirror. I was afraid to look myself in the face. My skin was gray and glinted a little from the mech. What would the rest of me look like?
But I was still me. Still Megan. I was just—different, now.
And I had to make sure that the next time a Meeb scout showed up to steal a human child, she got met by some very angry very dangerous moms and dads.
I wiped my tears. Oh, whatever. I was gray. Okay, maybe I was half-human, half-Meeb. This was the way things were. I had to deal with it. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was eleven. Practically a teenager.
“Take us to Earth, ship.”
Take me home.
Peter Phillips
Say you’re an intrepid space explorer and your ship happens to crash on an uncharted planet—but then you receive radio transmissions from someone outside who’s actually speaking your language. Your obvious reaction would be to take heart and await help. And the ones sending those transmissions are very eager to help, but unfortunately both you and they have not understood the grim realities of the situation . . .
Peter Phillips (1920-2012) was born in London, England. He made a big splash with his story, “Dreams are Sacred” in the September 1948 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. The story, in which the narrator’s psyche is sent into the mind of a patient who has withdrawn from reality, is now recognized as a classic, and was soon followed by another remarkable story, Manna, in the February 1949 issue of the same magazine. The two stories were noted for striking originality of concept and cheerfulness of outlook. The first quality is certainly true of the story which follows, but “Lost Memory” has an outlook which is anything but cheerful.
LOST MEMORY
Peter Phillips
I collapsed joints and hung up to talk with Dak-whirr. He blinked his eyes in some discomfort.
“What do you want, Palil?” he asked complainingly.
“As if you didn’t know.”
“I can’t give you permission to examine it. The thing is being saved for inspection by the board. What guarantee do I have that you won’t spoil it for them?”
I thrust confidentially at one of his body-plates. “You owe me a favor,” I said. “Remember?”
“That was a long time in the past.”
“Only two thousand revolutions and a reassembly ago. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be eroding in a pit. All I want is a quick look at its thinking part. I’ll vrull the consciousness without laying a single pair of pliers on it.”
He went into a feedback twitch, an indication of the conðflict between his debt to me and his self-conceived duty.
Finally he said, “Very well, but keep tuned to me. If I warn that a board member is coming, remove yourself quickly. Anyway how do you know it has consciousness? It may be mere primal metal.”
“In that form? Don’t be foolish. It’s obviously a manufacture. And I’m not conceited enough to believe that we are the only form of intelligent manufacture in the Universe.”
“Tautologous phrasing, Palil,” Dak-whirr said pedanticðally. “There could not conceivably be ‘unintelligent manufacture.’ There can be no consciousness without manufacture, and no manufacture without intelligence. Therefore there can be no consciousness without intelligence. Now if you should wish to dispute—”
I tuned off his frequency abruptly and hurried away. Dak-whirr is a fool and a bore. Everyone knows there’s a fault in his logic circuit, but he refuses to have it traced down and repaired. Very unintelligent of him.
The thing had been taken into one of the museum sheds by the carriers. I gazed at it in admiration for some moments. It was beautiful, having suffered only slight exterior damage, and was obviously no mere conglomeration of sky metal.
In fact, I immediately thought of it as “he” and endowed it with the attributes of self-knowing, although, of course, his consciousness could not be functioning or he would have attempted communication with us.
I fervently hoped that the board, after his careful disðassembly and study, could restore his awareness so that he could tell us himself which solar system he came from.
Imagine it! He had achieved our dream of many thousands of revolutions—space flight—only to be fused, or worse, in his moment of triumph.