Figment #9, Spring 1992

“I want to keep it,” said Moira, cuddling the creature. A

triangle of sunlight from an open roofpanel fell across her and the animal she held, making them the most vivid images in the dimness of the dome. Even here, in the center of my universe, she was the one Lokia’s sun shone on. The planet accepted her.

I loved my teenage daughter dearly, and I knew her well;

I never ventured out of our home dome if I could help it, but she came home for meals and sleep and education — I saw her every day. Our relationship was not as intimate as it would be

if we were on board a ship like the one I grew up on, where everyone lived in each other’s pockets, but it was the best I could manage when she spent so much time out under the open

sky, which was the barrier that kept me indoors. I didn’t like air that went on forever and ground that didn’t have a decent wall every few meters. It just wasn’t right.

I loved Moira, and I knew this was going to be a major argument, because the stray she’d brought home this time was even cuter than the one she found the previous week, and that

had been a twenty-minute discussion. With a mental sigh, I sat forward in my comfichair and started my lines again. “Moira, that thing probably hasn’t even been classified yet. Nobody by Nina Kiriki Hoffman knows what it does. Suppose it has venom in its teeth or claws?

What if its digestive enzymes work on furniture? What if it’s

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untrainable? Please, take it back outside before it bites us or “Let’s wait and ask him,” said Moira. She grinned. When makes a mess.”

I reached the wonder-what-your-father-will-say stage, she knew “Oh, Mom. It’s small. I’ll keep it in my room. Then if it I was inclining toward a yes. “Would you like to hold Susu?”

makes a mess, you’ll never know the difference.”

she asked.

“What if it’s carrying a disease?” I asked, but I could feel I sat back in my chair and held out my arms, hoping the myself weakening. The creature had large serene blue eyes, and creature wouldn’t wet on me. I hadn’t had a wet lap since Moira it was staring at me with a kindly expression.

was a baby. She set the creature in my lap. It was six-limbed, Moira tightened her arm around it. “Aw, Mom, you like most Lokia animal life-forms, and it had hand-like processes know we’re genetically incompatible with Lokia germs. Susu on its foremost limbs, delicate long fingers. Its back hair was couldn’t give me anything if she wanted to, could you, Susu?” long and silky, brown stippled with green, save for the creamy She scratched the creamy patch of fur under its chin. It blinked patch under its chin. It had a round head, small earflaps, large and made a low trilling sound, like a smoothly running round eyes set for binocular vision, and a dark muzzle with a appliance.

tiny nose and mouth.

“You don’t know what it eats.”

I stroked its fur, and it caught my hand in one of its own.

“I do too. I found her in a beetleberry bush. She was Its fingers were tipped with suction discs, except for the third on wolfing them down. I bet she could help you clear out the the left hand, which was longer than the other four by two backyard — she eats, you chop.”

joints, and had a specialized tip it kept curled closed. It held my “Ugh.” How could anything eat those noxious berries, hand long enough to inspect my wedding ring. It leaned which had a chitonous cell wall and smelled pungent and forward, and a thin, pointed red tongue darted out of its mouth unpleasant? “Maybe you’re right,” I said. Brad had been to touch my diamond before I could jerk away. And even when encouraging me to make a garden in back of the dome; I tried, a slightly delayed reaction, its grip was too strong to beetleberries and the open sky had been my two main obstacles. break. Brad had talked about myofilament arrangement in Lokia “What will your father say?”

life-forms, how their muscles were generally stronger and

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smaller than ours. I was just beginning to get alarmed when it was.

let go of my hand, turned around twice in my lap, and settled “What do you think, Mom?” asked Moira.

down, closing its eyes and trilling.

I watched my hand as it traveled along the creature’s fur.

Moira smiled at me. “See? Her digestive enzymes don’t Susu made a warm, lightly scented lapful. How could anything hurt. She tasted my hand, my fingernail, my cheek, and my that ate beetleberries smell like hyacinths? “I like it,” I said, hair, and she didn’t hurt me at all.”

surprising myself. On shipboard, we were always fighting I stroked the thing, mesmerized by its fur’s softness. stowaway planetary life-forms; if they weren’t some form of Brad and I had deliberated a lot before deciding we might as produce, they were a menace to our supplies. This was the first well let Moira run off into the bush. She would probably spend non-human planetary indigene I had ever felt attracted to.

the rest of her life on Lokia; she might as well get used to the “Maybe I can find another one, and we could each have planet. She was lonely. There wasn’t another child her age at one. I bet you never had a pet before, Mom.”

the base, only toddlers and babes in arms. Brad had gotten “No, I never did.”

special dispensation to bring her, since he was one of the best “I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” said Brad that xenobiologists available when Lokia needed a good one.

night. “How did you find this when all our exploratory people We knew we could lose Moira out there. Every new missed it, Moira? It looks like it has the cranial capacity of a planet could surprise you, though Lokia seemed more small child. I wish I could scan its brain, see if it has a complex benevolent than most, hosting no large predators and nothing cortex, though that wouldn’t necessarily tell us anything. Hey!”

yet identified as poisonous. Brad had trained Moira in self-Susu licked his watch.

defense, taught her how to aim and shoot a stunner, inoculated “It’s all right, Daddy. She’s safe.”

her against everything he could. He gave her a kit to take with “I don’t think she’s a she, honey. She’s the third sex.”

her which included a communicator, a compass, a distance “Well, nobody has a pronoun for that yet. I’ll call her she.

meter and a distress beeper. We knew if we kept her indoors Her name’s Susu.”

she would go crazy. She wasn’t bred to indoor living the way I “All right. Would you mind if I took her to the lab

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tomorrow?”

stirred.

“Yes! I don’t want you running tests on her. I don’t want Moira came home late for lunch the next day. Brad had

her to get a bad opinion of humans.”

not been able to find Susu to take her to the lab with him; later “I’ll be as kind to her as if she was my own child,” he she turned up in the laundry cubby, and Moira took her and said, grinning.

went out, leaving me, as usual, to my crafts. I was working on “I remember some of those experiments you performed on a video visualization — an abstract; I was trying to incorporate a me. That depth perception one where the floor dropped out three-dimensionality. If it turned out well, I would send it in to from under the glass? Not that one, and no injections, and no the Culture Club, and if they liked it, they’d transmit it to bright lights, okay? You want to be mean, you have to find your everyone on the local net and give me credits towards new own Susu. I’m going to find one for Mom.”

pletware.

When Moira came in, she had three Susus clinging to her “You think you can just walk outside and pick up another — one in her arms, one on each shoulder. Her own was the one one, huh?”

in her arms, easy to distinguish by color and by shape, plumper “Yep.”

and chunkier than Susu’s slender siblings. “This one’s Shisu —

That night I woke up when something warm and flower-she’s for you,” Moira said, presenting me with the animal on her scented cuddled up next to me. Despite her promise, Moira left shoulder, the smallest, with dark, steely gray fur aside from hadn’t kept Susu in her room. We had taught Susu how to the creamy patch under her chin. Her fur too was stippled with operate the toilet, and she seemed enthusiastic about using it. green, and her eyes were pale green. “This one’s for Daddy,”

Moira gave her a bath and both of them emerged radiant and said Moira. “Hisu. Now we have a matched set.”

unbitten. I touched Susu’s clean, soft fur, felt her warmth, Hisu was the largest, with the lightest fur, and dark blue smelled her scent, and heard the thinnest thread of her trill. I eyes. Shisu and Hisu came to me, touching tongues to my lifted the covers and she crept in next to me, curling up against diamond, the fabric of my coverall, my hair, my hands.

my back. Her trilling lulled me to sleep. Brad never even Shisu climbed up into my lap and settled there. I stroked

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her, feeling such a yearning for her, such a painful pleasure at Brad twinkled at her. “Have you had that how-humans-having her there. “Oh, Moira,” I said, leaning over and hugging make-babies lecture yet, honey?”

Shisu. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“Oh, Daddy, ages ago. Mom told me. I’d already found “Maybe she’ll make you feel more at home outside,” said info on it in the teacher, anyway.”

Moira. “When the sky looks too wide, you could hug her. Of “Oh. Hmm. In that case, I guess you’re old enough to course, she doesn’t smell as nice as Susu.”

hear about Lokia. We haven’t gotten all the details down, but it Shisu smelled like jasmine, one of my favorite scents. I looks like this: The male, or minus, like Hisu, and the female, laid my cheek against her back. Yes, she would need to go or plus, like Shisu, produce the gametes. Susu, the third sex.

outside to feed, and if I let her out without going with her, acts as a facilitator and incubator. She arranges the fertilization, maybe she’d never come back. I would have to face the open usually getting the group together. Then she ends up with the sky, and all the terrors of going suitless under it. I closed my zygote, the fertilized egg, inside her until it’s ready to be born.

eyes and savored Shisu’s scent. Brad had wanted me to get The courtship rituals and mating processes vary from species to psych adjustments for years. Maybe I could cure myself, with species, but the roles the sexes play seem to be consistent.

Shisu’s help.

Stimson thinks the incubator gives the zygote some genes, but “This is wonderful, Moira,” Brad said that evening. “I had they’re free-floating in the cytoplasm, not inside the nuclear people out scouting for these creatures all day, but we didn’t envelope. It isn’t a form of triploidy we understand yet; we find a single one, let alone a bonded set. Maybe the lab will don’t know the mechanism that determines sexual have to hire you as help. With any luck, this set will be making differentiation. Any questions?”

babies soon; that seems to be a traditional Lokia response to “Uh,” said Moira. “I think I need to expand my captivity and an unlimited food supply.” Hisu tugged at the vocabulary first. Thanks for trying, though, Dad.”

sticktite holding his shirt closed, and he laughed.

There was some debate among members of the colony, “How do they make babies with three sexes, anyway?” but I decided that the species Moira discovered possessed asked Moira.

enough sentience to be persons. Brad took Hisu to the

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laboratory and ran him through a lot of tests. I didn’t need to he refused and so did Hisu. Brad had a harness he strapped to test Shisu; sitting on my lap, she learned to build video displays his back, and Hisu rode it; they never left each other when Brad on the computer, and not simple ones either. She loved the was at work. On one level this did not make sense to Brad. He sensation of controlling something she was looking at. The was committed to the quest for knowledge, and he knew that images she created disturbed me, most of all because I felt I many of the other people he worked with could find out more almost understood them.

about Hisu than he could. On some other level he and Hisu All of Shisu’s computer-generated visuals had groups of were committed to each other, and that was stronger now.

three in them.

I suspected the Sus of thinking they understood us, the And if I almost understood her artwork, perhaps I almost way we thought we understood them.

understood her thinking. That meant that perhaps what I I suspected that was a dangerous assumption for anyone

suspected was true. It made sense in a Susu-Hisu-Shisu to make.

manner.

I suspected I made it myself, trying to imagine myself into I suspected them of being ambassadors from one people Susu’s mind when she first came to scout us out. What did she to another. I suspected them of coming to evaluate us, we, the see? Three people living together as a unit. Three people with intruders on their planet.

an unlimited food supply who were not doing their job of I suspected them of friendship true and deep, deep reproducing.

enough for them to think we were worthy of their help. Shisu I spent most of my life on board the Orion, one of the often looked to my comfort as well as her own. She went Family Trade Ships. I knew I was marked for exogamy, so I outdoors with me, and when I panicked, she covered my eyes spent a lot of time studying people other than those of the ship, with her warm hands, and trilled until my fear seeped away. and not so much time learning the important shipboard things.

When Moira was troubled, I heard her telling Susu about it, and I tried to remember if there was a kinship word for a daughter I heard a trilled response that comforted her. Brad told me that who gave birth to her own sister or brother, but if there was, it when someone else wanted to take Hisu away to run some tests, was one of the forbidden words, those given to a person of a

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certain age, and I left to be with Brad before I learned it.

Susu was incubating now. Moira missed a period, and she felt ill in the mornings.

I wondered if anyone had any information on whether the facilitators of one species ever helped the mating group of another. I wondered if Susu had committed the ultimate act of diplomacy.

If there was no word for what was happening to Moira, perhaps it was not such a bad thing. I thought of the one choice I could make for Moira that would ease the pain I saw ahead of us. I thought: what would life on Lokia be like if we rejected the first diplomatic offering we received from its sentient species?

I slept uneasily in this planetary gravity, and longed again for the undimmed stars of space.

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