“Space or recycle?”
“Recycle,” I answered.
And that was all there was to it. The blister didn’t care; it just needed the answer to follow its programming. The ship might be an artificial intelligence of some sort, but it sure wasn’t any kind of genius.
I pushed off and went back to Aleria. She was conditioned now. All her pseudopods were retracted which I knew meant she was waiting expectantly. It was time.
I stuck my hands into the globe, into the main opening, and stuck them into her, pushing into her gooey flesh. The outside of her dimpled for a ways, like the plastic wrap on those cases of water bottles did, then it gave away completely, and my hands and arms were within the milky glop that floated inside Aleria, that was Aleria.
A stream of her speech-mucus twisted past me. It hit the walls and got absorbed and translated.
“Aaah,” the wall speaker sighed. “That’s it. Deeper, deeper.”
I plunged in up to my shoulders. I felt the goo of her surround my arms. And then I felt the prickles where she broke the skin and where parts of her slid inside me.
She wasn’t just feeding on me, she was changing me. Changing me into more of her. One day, when the nodules she left inside me reached maturity, I would be “ripe,” and she would be able to absorb me completely. We would be one.
“My youth will be restored, darling, and your youth will last forever.”
She never told me exactly how the process worked. “I’m not a biologist, dear. I’m a scout,” was her only reply when I asked. But I knew a lot more about Meebs now that I’d been on the ship for a year and seen the videos. At least I thought it was a year I’d been here. I figured I was about the size of an eleven-year-old, even though there were no mirrors, and if there had been, I would have avoided them. I hadn’t seen myself in a long time. I was kind of afraid to look, afraid to see what the mechs had done to my face. My skin was as gray as my pajamas. But at least, with the mechs in it, it was kind of shiny.
I pushed into Aleria as deep as I could, because I knew if I didn’t, she would demand it of me anyway.
“Is that good, Mother?”
“You have no idea, dear. Replenishment is the greatest pleasure in life, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”
Finally, after what seemed like hours and hours, but I knew was maybe thirty minutes—two Sponge Bob episodes, Da used to say, when I asked how long that was—a deep sigh came from the wall speakers.
“Perfect. That will be all dear,” Aleria said.
I pulled out my arms. They came out coated in her milky interior fluid. I had towels, the ship made them for me, but I knew not to rub my arms off just yet. My skin was blistered, and the skin mechs needed time to fix what they could of the damage before I went to dry myself. The mechs never really did a great job. I thought that, like a lot of the stuff on Aleria’s ship, they were kind of stale or something like that. I knew my arms would be red and hurt for at least a light cycle.
When I first got on the ship, I used to call a light cycle a day, but pretty soon I figured out that they were exactly the same length every time. The light came from everywhere in the ship, and then didn’t. Nearly ten Earth hours on. A little over four off. I asked once, and Aleria explained this was the Meeb active-rest cycle. And when the lights went off, it became so pitch black I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face in the ship’s bridge or the recreation room or the waste room, which was where both Aleria and I went to the bathroom. It got sort of sucked dry and cleaned after we left. This was done with mech crawlies that looked like baby spiders, maybe. They clumped together while you were going, then swarmed the place after you left and carried off whatever.
Anyway, there was one place where the faintest of light remained during lights-out. This was in the supply room. There were observation portals there. Each one was about as big as the windows used to be in my bedroom, but they were roundish, kind of egg-shaped. They were shaped to fit a Meeb optical stalk. There were four windows around the supply room, and I could always see the stars through them. We were traveling faster than light, but it was still slow enough so the stars didn’t look like they were moving. I usually slept floating near one of those portals. I pretended that I knew the one that was facing Earth, and I would look out and pretend I could see the sun, even if it was only a pinprick in the dark. I knew this wasn’t true, that I didn’t know which one was the sun, but I could sort of fake my way to sleep that way.
So I let the mech work, and then I patted my arms and hands dry with an absorption towel, and was careful not to take off too much of my tenderized skin. Even though I was going easy with the towel, it still felt like I was rubbing sandpaper against myself. The towels were the same gray color as my pajamas, by the way, and not pretty the way Mom’s always were, with flowers on them and stuff. Everything in the ship was gray like that, and even I was now.
This time when I dried off the milk, something felt different. My skin wasn’t just blistered; it was changing shape, too. It was kind of crunchy-lumpy. And it looked thinner. In fact, I touched it with a finger and it popped like a pear skin. Something oozed out, but it wasn’t red like blood. It was white and looked like puss.
I felt the swollen nodes under my chin, the nodes in my neck. They were big and as tight as little nuts, like pecans or those hard, dark brown ones you could barely break with the nutcracker. I never knew what those kinds of nuts were called, and now I didn’t have anyone to ask.
Aleria had said this would happen, that all my lymph nodes would swell up more and more. That would mean my body’s defenses were getting taken over, and would start to tag the biological elements she implanted in me as “friend” instead of “enemy.” That was what was happening, I supposed.
While I was drying off and feeling my nodes and all that, Aleria was babbling away, the way she often did after a replenishing. Talk, talk, talk. Snot flying everywhere. She got nostalgic, too—you know, talking about the old days and all that. She talked a lot about the Meeb home system. The Meebs didn’t live on planet surfaces, but in a bunch of big space stations spread around their star’s biological sweet spot. That’s where we were headed at the moment, to one of those habitats, even though the trip was going to take another Earth year. We were one year into it. Which was another reason I figured I was eleven.
I could tell that Aleria was particularly relaxed today. She had fed well. And I guess she could feel that my resistance was really starting to break down.
“The clan will be so happy to meet you, my darling daughter,” Aleria said. She was glowing white in the tank now, about to ooze her way out and back to her usual spot near the main ship interaction console. “And I think they’ll be very pleased with the bounty I bring them from this journey. Also for the information. We’ll get a fine reward.”
Here was something I hadn’t heard from her before.
“The information?” I asked. “I don’t understand, Mother. What do you mean?”
“The knowledge of where the system is, of course, and what to expect when they get there.”
“Get where?”
“The systems where the new children are to be found, dear,” she replied. The wall speakers made it sound like she was sleepy, dreamy, the way I felt when I was drifting off to sleep all safe and sound and tucked in. It had been a long way since I felt that way.