Ascending - James Alan Gardner [135]
I stopped. Festina was looking at me keenly. “Your race is secretive, isn’t it? And you all live in hidden enclaves like that underground city.”
“Are you suggesting I am a Shaddill? That is very most rude of you, Festina. I may speak their language, but I am not such a creature as burrows…or has small four-fingered hands…and I bend in the middle with perfect ease, thereby allowing me to sit wherever I choose.”
“I’m not saying you’re a Shaddill lookalike,” Festina replied, “but your planet Melaquin was the earliest known settlement established by the Shaddill after Las Fuentes disappeared. The Shaddill may have created you as an artificial race who looked human enough to please people taken from Earth, but who had Shaddill-ish characteristics too. The secretiveness, the instinct to hide. They built you concealed towns and villages all over the planet; and they made you transparent, so you’d be damned hard to see, even when you ventured out into the open. If the Shaddill are, uhh, reclusive space gophers, they constructed you to follow in their footsteps.”
“And they taught you their language,” Aarhus put in. “They didn’t do that with any other race they uplifted.”
“The other uplifted races were scientifically advanced,” Festina said. “At least advanced enough to have launched a few rockets and satellites. But Oar’s people got picked up when they were still trying to get the hang of smelting bronze.” She puckered her brow. “Makes you wonder why the difference. What did the Shaddill want with…”
“Children!” Lajoolie blurted out. “The Shaddill wanted children.”
We all turned to look at her. I noticed Uclod turned faster than the rest of us—the little man’s head fairly snapped like a whip. Perhaps a man has especially rapid reflexes for responding when his wife broaches the subject of offspring.
Childlike, Most Childlike
“Uhh,” said Lajoolie, wilting under our collective gaze. “It’s just…well…maybe the Shaddill wanted children. To watch growing up…and…playing…and…things. Because maybe they’d done something to change themselves from burrowing creatures into blobs of jelly, and maybe the blobs of jelly couldn’t have babies, or anyway not normal ones, so the Shaddill…Las Fuentes…were nostalgic for children. They created an artificial race that was sort of like what they used to be—secretive, you know, and hard to notice—but the kids would always be, uhh, childlike throughout their entire lives.”
She looked at me with her big brown eyes. “Yes, childlike. And maybe the Shaddill couldn’t take care of the children one hundred percent of the time, so they brought in bronze-age humans to be, uhh, nannies. At least for the first generation. The Shaddill made the children look and act like humans, so the Earthlings would feel more comfortable tending them, but inside, the kids had attitudes that would make the Shaddill find them…lovable.”
There was a silence; for some reason, everyone was now looking at me instead of Lajoolie. “But that is not how it was,” I told them. “My people have stories and records. Flesh-and-blood Earthlings were brought to Melaquin, and the Shaddill asked, ‘Do you want your children to live forever?’ The Earthlings said yes, that is what they wanted…and the Shaddill changed the humans inside, so their off-spring would be made of glass. My ancestors were not baby-sitters; they were loving parents who cared so much for their children, they desired us to be perfect.”
Festina put her hand on my shoulder. “Oar—you shouldn’t put faith in your written records. The humans on Melaquin came from 2000 B.C. Almost no one on Earth could write back then…and if any of the settlers were literate, they’d write in their own language, not yours.” She took a breath. “It must have been the Shaddill who wrote your history books.”
I stared at her, feeling a tear trickle down my cheek.
“It might not have been a total lie,” she said. “The Shad-dill may have altered the humans physically to become…surrogates. The women could have served as hosts for implanted