The Floating Cradle

Twenty-Five

 "Why have you come here? | Why did you ever come here?"

The major flexes her scales in agitation. She should not be taking this meeting; if the general knew she was indulging a personal call during this time of crisis—the Geiger counters outpaced only by the death toll, an evacuation to coordinate amid a thousand shifting variables—she might relieve her from duty. But the major could not refuse an old friend.

"My son is missing. | I came so that I might remember what it is to be born."

The major hears the door slide shut as her attaché bows out of the room. She turns from her window (which looks out onto the speckled blackness, not toward Earth) and faces her visitor.

The mother stands slightly stooped in the middle of the small office, haggard but not as disheveled as the major would have expected one who had spent two days hunkered down on the smoldering Earth to be. Then again, she has no point of comparison, having avoided the evacuees jam-packed in the Whelk's cargo bays awaiting emergency passage back to Cognata.

"Many sons and daughters are missing. And the more you waste my time, the more there are that will never be found. Exodus cannot commence until all Earth-bound tanta are classified—he will be recovered in due time. | What's that supposed to mean? There's nothing to remember about being born. Memories are made in life. A life you have squandered by coming to this God-forsaken planet. I shed half my scales when I learned my commission was sending me to the Whelk, and that was long before this mess started!"

"I know he's still alive, but time is of the essence. I haven't heard from him in the four days since Zero Hour. He was not in a protected zone like me, but I know where you can find him. He's partnered with a human woman—they went to her family's farm in Arkansas for the High Holiday. | I don't mean being born literally—not really. I know nothing of the ancient act. I mean it in the way that birth is the mother of memory. It is a bridge over the biggest gulf you cannot see. I wanted to remember the passage."

The major jerks her elbows outward in question.

"What makes you so sure he's still alive? | How, after all these years, are you still the strangest tantum on any given planet?"

The mother whistles a dry laugh. She walks up to the window and stands beside the major, turns her dark, gold-seamed eyes upon space.

"I know he's alive because I'm his mother. Take it or leave it, I have no other proof. I can give you his partner's name—that should be enough to locate the farm. You're a smart thing—I know you could scramble a shuttle, pad the margins to hide all record. | I would rather be the strangest thing on Earth than another cog on Cognata."

The major blows hot air out her upper nostrils, her scales prickling. She glares at her old friend.

"You do realize you ask a lot, don't you?" she steams. "Not just of me, but of this entire effort? To reroute precious resources toward an uncertain rescue mission is, in the gentlest of terms, irresponsible! Open your eyes! After what has happened, how can you still be so entitled? | You are insane. The Earth is a wasted rock. Your son is dead and for what—because you chased something old, something that doesn't belong to you or me or any of us anymore, and good riddance! It is time to go home, though you do not deserve it. You do not deserve Cognata."

Both tanta's scales are extended, their burnished surfaces reflecting the starlight. The mother reaches out and slices a finger on the major's spiky mane, maroon blood running down her hand in a viscous droplet. Too shocked to react, the major watches as she drags the finger across the window, painting it with foreign characters.

"L-O-V-E-L-L," the mother says in English before walking out the door. "Her name is Allison Lovell."