Mary Caraker: Suffer the Children

In one more day they would leave hyperspace. Hogan’s small charge was in the galley with him, and Zed had taken his to inspect the engine room. Morgan and Regina watched Anna and Daisy put their rag dolls to sleep on one of the cots. Anna wore a short T-shirt top of Morgan’s that came down to her ankles. She kissed her doll good night and stepped back with her arms folded, the left cradled in the right, as Morgan so often did.

“Isn’t she a miniature version of yourself?” Regina said with a smile.

Morgan did not respond. Regina refused to be troubled by Anna’s and Daisy’s growing resemblances to their foster mothers, calling it perfectly natural. She was deluding herself, Morgan knew, but until now she had hesitated to bring her gnawing new anxiety into the open. It wasn’t surprising that Anna should imitate Morgan’s mannerisms—they were always together, and since she had come out of her catatonia the child had had no other model—but other similarities, physical ones, could not be so easily dismissed.

Daisy’s skin was no longer mottled, and it was growing darker every day. She was developing a square jaw, much like Regina’s, and her newly-grown hair was stiff and bristly and sprinkled with gray. Anna’s skin was pink, and her hair soft and brown.

“Come here, Anna,” Morgan said.

The child skipped over to the two women.

“Take a look at her arms.” Morgan bade Anna hold out her arms, and there was no mistake: the left one was noticeably shorter.

Anna climbed into Morgan’s lap. Morgan patted her a moment before she turned back to Regina. “What does it mean? Are they some kind of… chameleons?”

Regina shrugged. She was trying hard to appear unconcerned, but an unguarded, nervous glance at Daisy gave her away.

She recovered quickly. “Maybe they are. Or it could be an extreme example of bonding. Who knows? Or cares? As long as the girls are healthy and happy.”

“The Salassans might care.”

“Forget them!” Regina pointed indignantly to Daisy and Anna and then to the two gray figures huddled on the farthest cot. “Can they possibly say that we haven’t acted humanely?”

Morgan said no more, but she wasn’t convinced. They knew nothing about the Salassans; except for the children, not even their appearance. The Dutchman’s files contained Captain Haapala’s original report, but Morgan had learned little from it. The Finn explorer, with reclusive tendencies himself, had understood the Sa-lassans’s desire for privacy and done no snooping. The sketchy report concluded with the comment that the Salassans had adapted to a variety of living conditions that would have been unacceptably harsh to humans, but it gave no clues as to how this had been accomplished. Seeing the continuing and startling changes in Daisy and Anna, Morgan suspected that “adaptation” in regard to the Salassans comprised a considerably different process than it did in humans.

The report contained no photos. Regina had always claimed that the condition of the bodies she had found at the colony made any description impossible, but Morgan didn’t entirely believe her. When Daisy and Anna were napping, she opened the subject again. “I know there must have been decomposition, and the effects of the illness. But still… you must have gotten some idea of what they had looked like.”

Regina hesitated, clearly unwilling to answer. “I’ve told you before, I was only concerned with the children.”

“I understand that. But… you must have been curious. The dead ones… did they look like us?”

The doctor hesitated again.

“Well?” Morgan prompted.

“Not much,” Regina finally said.

Morgan perceived that she would have to pry out information. “Were they blank-faced, like them?” She gestured toward the far cot.

Regina sighed and made a wry face. “On the contrary, they seemed to have had rather pronounced features. And a variety of skin colors.”

“Then they looked like Anna and Daisy?”

“No, not at all. Anna and Daisy look like us. As you’ve pointed out, exactly like us. And as I’ve said, I don’t know what it means.” She shook her head, and this time her mask dropped completely. “Or what the Salassans will think about it.”

Zed and Hogan came in with their little boys. Hogan’s was already developing a pot belly, and the fuzz that was appearing on his bald head was growing in a single strip. Morgan pulled up the sleeves of Zed’s charge, and she wasn’t surprised to see on his arms the faint outlines of a snake and a dagger and a skull.

The Flying Dutchman was in orbit around Salassa, and in the bay Morgan and Regina fearfully awaited the arrival of a shuttle from the planet. Anna, sensing and responding to Morgan’s anxiety, refused to leave her foster mother’s arms.

Daisy, likewise, maintained a stranglehold on Regina’s neck. Zed and Hogan had had to leave their charges in order to attend to duties, and the two young males sat in woebegone stiffness beside their two unaltered companions. The change in the appearance of the two fostered boys, while not as great as that of Daisy and Anna, was nevertheless startlingly obvious. The Salassan helex channels hadn’t had visual, the Dutchman had reported only that the children were still alive, and as far as Morgan knew the Salassans were ignorant of what they would find.

“They’ve docked,” said Regina as a faint shudder shook the bay. Morgan gripped Anna more tightly. Whatever the Salassans said, she would fight to her last breath to keep her child. Anna, she was sure, would be irretrievably damaged by a separation. And as for herself, her tiny lookalike was twined so securely around her heart that she could no longer imagine a life without her.

They heard footsteps approaching, and Morgan stopped breathing. The Dutchman’s captain, in pressed khakis, with his hair and beard neatly trimmed, ushered in two robed and hooded figures.

“As you can see, we have delivered the children safely.” Captain Jaworski’s voder translated his carefully enunciated words into a cacophony of squawks and hisses. He bowed slightly to his guests. “We are, as you know, a trading ship. Whenever you are ready, I will be most happy to discuss a future business contract.”

The voder clacked away and the captain all but rubbed his hands in his eagerness, but the Salassans paid no attention to him. They stood motionless, studying the children, their brilliant eyes the only visible feature beneath their overhanging hoods. One finally spoke, and the voder translated: “It is bad. As we feared.”

They approached to observe Daisy and Anna more closely. The second Salassan spoke, in a softer tone than the first one, and with more sibilance. The voder translated: “A wrong, yes. A great sorrow.”

At least, Morgan thought, they didn’t appear angry. She breathed normally again, but maintained her fast grip on Anna.

“The children are well,” Regina said. “Better than when we found them.”

Regina’s own voder translated, and the first Salassan replied, pointing to the two unaltered children. “Those ones are well,” issued in staccato bursts from the machine. “The others must”—the voder stopped, whirring while it searched—“suffer reversion. We told. You should have listened.”

Regina clutched Daisy. “What do you mean, ‘suffer reversion’?”

“They must become”—again the pause—“hatchlings again. To be taken in.”

Morgan spoke her confusion. “ ‘Hatchlings.’ ‘Taken in.’ We don’t understand.”

The Salassans conferred privately. Then the softer-voiced one pointed to the two unaltered children and hissed a word. The voder whirred again. “Hatchlings.” After another spate of Salassan, and pointing to the four other children: “A family will take in hatchlings. Many are waiting. These must… revert.”