“Why would the clan want to go there?”
“Why, to protect your kind, dear,” she said. “To absorb and protect. That’s what parents are for.”
“They’ll take children?”
“It’s better that way,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve had to absorb a full grown adult before, and it was an unpleasant process for both of us. Integrating those kinds of ingrained memories is difficult. So much resentment and anger to deal with in adults of a species.”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Children are so much easier to handle,” she continued. “But not all species have children, you know. Juvenile and nymph forms, I mean. Only special ones. Like yours, my darling.”
And then it hit me. What she was. Her job. She’d told me over and over, but I hadn’t been listening, or it hadn’t, you know, registered.
She was a scout.
“Now darling, I need to get dried off and ready for my rest period,” Aleria said. “Come and wipe me down, there’s a dear.”
My jaw hurt. I had been grinding my teeth again.
“Yes, Mother dear,” I replied.
So I guess I was thinking about Dustin when I did it. I was thinking about the way she would send back more Meebs. I knew how many existed in the space stations of Aleria’s home system. I’d watched the videos. My troubles in third grade were behind me. I was a good student now. Anyway, it didn’t take a genius to do the math.
There were enough Meebs for every child on Earth, and then some.
Aleria was a scout. Scouts find the way. Then they go back and lead others on the same path. To the same destination.
A year to go, and then two years for a return trip. Those habitats were capable of faster than light travel. Imagine that: a whole city of a billion Meebs headed for Earth.
Dustin would be eleven when they arrived.
This would happen to him.
I floated over to the water maker-cone and planted my feet against the ship wall. I pulled on the end of the bump. The ship wall dimpled out at my touch. I pulled harder. The cone grew in length, became more a tube than a cone. It reeled out like a hose, flowing from the material of the wall itself. I needed it to be long enough to reach Aleria.
So I pulled it out farther and farther. I wrapped it around my elbow and a thumb, the way I’d seen Da roll up the extension cord for the leaf blower. The extension cord was orange. The hose was a light shade of gray. I missed colors.
When I had enough length, I pushed off. I let the water hose trail out behind me as I sailed across the room.
Aleria had flowed out of the globe and pushed off a way, like a couple of yard sticks away. She was beginning her after-feed stretch. I needed to catch her before she spread out to her full size. At the moment, she was about the size of one of those big rubbery exercise balls like Mom used to have. A Pilamies ball, or something like that.
Aleria extended a sensing stalk in time to notice what I was doing.
“Darling daughter, I said to bring a towel, not more water, now please—”
“Stop calling me that,” I said. My voice was sort of a growl and it surprised even me. I’d never made that mean a sound before. “I’m not your child, and you’re not my mother.”
I reached the end of my tether, the water tube. With a squeeze of my hands around the tube’s end—the end looked kind of a like the tip of an elephant trunk—I opened the spigot and let the water flow. There was back pressure behind it, and out the water came.
Water doesn’t flow in zero g the way it does in gravity. Even before Aleria took me, I knew about zero g. I had seen Youtube videos from space shuttles and the space station and stuff in science class at school. But the one thing I had never seen was what water does when it meets something floating in zero g.
It clings.
It jiggles like crazy, but it won’t come off.
You can’t shake it off. You can shake off a few droplets, but if there is enough of it, it isn’t going anywhere no matter what you do. Without something to absorb it and overcome that surface tension, water sticks like glue.
It sticks like frog egg glop does to frog eggs, the gunk that holds the eggs together in a big clump. All for one. One for all.
In the creek, or in some little kid’s water bottle.
Living or dead.
For a second, it seemed like Aleria thought I was trying to do something nice for her, something extra. She paused there, floating, out of the globe and maybe a yard or two away from it, but not completely expanded yet. She let me bathe her. And then I bathed the other side of her. I bathed her all over.
And I kept the spigot open. It’s pretty simple. You squeeze the orifice and it relaxes some kind of stopper on the end.
And when she tried to move, to ooze outward, the water went with her.
I squeezed the spigot open, and then the bubble of water around her expanded. She was inside it, like a milky-white pit. It was jiggling around her, but it wouldn’t come off.
I remembered those frog eggs.
Oh, she struggled. She twisted and turned. On her own, all the squirming would have gotten her to a wall, certainly. If she’d been by herself in the ship, she would have had a scare, but even her random motion would probably have saved her, allowed her to intersect with a hard surface, an extended piece of the bridge pod, anything. And then one of her pseudopods would have been able to find a footing, pull herself free from the coating of water.
But I was here now.
I was careful and alert, like the teachers always wanted us to be during carpool pickup. I circled Aleria with the water hose. I used pressure from the water tube hose for flying around fast, and the strap holds the ship had grown for me all around the wall for anchoring myself when I needed to. The moment Aleria looked like she was drifting close to a wall, I sent a stream of water toward her to push her away. I hadn’t spent a year in zero g for nothing; I had a feel for how to do this now.
I kept her away from the pod walls, all of them. I held her away from saving herself.
Inside the ball of water, I saw the shooting snot, the little chemical speaking packets, dart out into the liquid. But they couldn’t escape. The water tension held them in. Her words of command couldn’t get to the ship wall and receive activation.
Frog glop, I thought. Frog water.
I had to smile.
She couldn’t turn off the water.
She couldn’t tell the ship to save her.
She couldn’t even scream.
I watched her in that frog water. She turned from milky white to blue. And when she was blue, I saw something else she was doing. She was forming a picture on the surface of her membrane.
Not fair.
It was Mom. Her face. Frowning, the way she’d looked when I hurt her feelings. After she drank the frog water and was gagging over the kitchen sink and I was laughing at her.
Aleria had stolen enough of me to show me that.
But I’m eleven. I know real from fake.
I kept on laughing.
I mean, she was a blob in a quivery, jiggly coating of froggy, jumpy water. It was the water I was laughing at, the way it moved.
I kept on laughing while Aleria went from blue to green and from green to brown.
She stayed brown.
My laugh turned into a kind of a chuckle, then a wheezing kind of thing, and then it felt like it was going to turn into crying. I didn’t want that, so I stopped as quickly as I’d started and held it all in. After that, I stared at Aleria for a long, long time.
She drowned—suspended in a quivering coating of water, only a few meters from safety. A dead blob in frog water.