She told herself the white giant beneath them would really crush the ships against Heaven above; but when the gap was almost closed, the Outpost stopped pushing and let the ships drift the rest of the way to Heaven’s surface. For a moment nothing happened but a gentle bump. Then, without hurry, gravity imposed itself: gravity from the Organism overhead, making the shuttle’s roof into a floor.
Verhooven had ample time to reorient herself. Across the cabin, she saw Shanta Mukerjhee cradling the prince’s body as the world reversed. The prince was breathing weakly.
Behind Verhooven’s back, the hatch to the outside world slid open. Adrenaline shot into her blood and she dragged in a huge breath, expecting the ship’s atmosphere to gust out into vacuum; but there was no wind, nor the sudden cold of space. A warm breeze blew in through the hatch, smelling as pleasant as a sunny hillside. She remembered the smell from the two weeks she and her father had spent at a mountain resort in the Rockies. They’d never done that again either.
Verhooven found she had tears in her eyes.
[Totem] Celeste Dumont was the first person to leave the shuttle. She walked slowly down the gangway, trying to memorize every sensation as she set foot on her totem’s skin. The eyes of its scales tracked her as she moved. She knelt and held her hand out close to the surface, the same way she would let a dog smell her when she met it for the first time. The eyes focused on her, drank in her body heat.
Behind her, other passengers came slowly out of the shuttle, and farther off, people emerged from the other ships that lay on the surface. Some talked excitedly; others seemed struck dumb. Celeste remained silent and tried to hear a deeper voice.
When the babble of humans became too distracting, she moved away from them, coming at last to a hatchway in the side of a large black bulge in the Organism’s skin. The hatch slid open at her touch, revealing an airlock. She went inside, closed the outer door, opened the inner.
Celeste found herself in a place of quiet greenery. A well-tended Japanese temple stood before her, and somewhere inside a flute was playing. As she followed the sound of the music, a wild joy filled her heart, tightening her chest, burning through her whole body: the taste of magic, the sensation of truly not knowing what might be abroad in the world, yet racing eagerly to meet it.
[Organism] The Envoy of the League of Peoples sat in a bamboo chair beside the temple’s altar, his heart filled with the same fierce excitement. He’d lost track of how many human lifetimes he’d waited for this moment…although he was human himself, very human. Could a being live centuries and still be truly human? Yes. Yes.
If he couldn’t calm himself by playing the flute, he felt as if his heart would batter its way out of his chest.
A woman entered the sanctuary, nearly running, her face shining. He lowered his flute and smiled self-consciously. He was sure she’d be disappointed to see a very ordinary man here; but there was no disappointment on her face.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” she answered, a bit out of breath. “Do you know anything about this…creature we’re standing on?”
“I’ve been watching it a long time. From the Outpost. The Outpost is the big white thing.” He laughed. “I’ve been watching everything a long time. Hello.”
“Yes. Hello.”
“The League of Peoples wrote me a speech to welcome humanity as new citizens of the universe,” he said, “but it’s very pompous. At the moment, I’d be embarrassed to deliver it. If you people invite me back to Earth, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of public speaking engagements. I can be pompous then. So…just hello.”
She smiled brilliantly, and his heart beat even harder. He’d never met another human. He couldn’t believe how magnificent humans could be. He wanted to see them all, touch them, embrace them, this woman, the others outside, a solar system full of them.
O wonder, he thought, how many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t.
An allusion to a human celebration text. His mentor would be proud.
“This creature…” the woman said to him, pointing downward. “Do you know its name?”
“I just call it the Organism.”
She nodded as if she found the name perfect. “It’s my totem,” she said. “I’ve finally found my totem.”
He smiled. “So have I.”
“The Young Person’s Guide to the Organism”: The title comes from Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra or Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Purcell. This is a musical work written in 1945, designed to introduce children to the various instruments in a symphony orchestra.
Structurally, the piece starts with the entire orchestra playing a simple tune composed by Henry Purcell in the 1600s. Then each different instrument plays a variation on the tune, demonstrating the sound of the instrument, the range, something about playing technique, and so on. When Britten has finished taking apart the entire orchestra, he puts it back together again in a fugue that has all the instruments taking the melody line in the order they were first presented. Finally, while the fugue continues in the background, the brass section soars in with the original Purcell tune playing over top of the rest of the orchestra (which is still belting out the fugue).
If that sounds complicated when described in words, it’s quite straightforward when you hear the music. You can probably find a recording of the piece at your local library—check it out and listen for yourself. Most recordings have narrators who explain what’s going on throughout the music, so you won’t have any trouble following the structure.
I followed the same structure in writing “The Young Person’s Guide to the Organism.” In my case, the initial “theme” was one of science fiction’s classics: First Contact. The story consists of a number of individual “voices” describing their moment of contact with an enigmatic alien organism that drifts slowly through the solar system. Each of these individuals imposes his or her own interpretation on what the organism is—the organism serves as a blank slate on which personal concerns are projected. At the end of the story, in the fugue section, the individuals are brought together again for a climax, and then the original theme of First Contact comes back for the grand finale.
It’s worth noting that “Organism” tells the story of First Contact between humans and the League of Peoples. That makes it the foundation for all of the novels I’ve published so far.