Motherworld (working title)
an excerpt

“You know, this might be one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen in… well, years.” When the two women who stood with her gave Winifred Nevada sidelong looks—one deeply suspicious, the other affronted—she grinned and leaned back against the console, propping one foot up on the chair seat. Winifred resumed peeling the orange in her hands. “Think about it.” She pointed with the paring knife’s blade at the three men across the old vessel’s bridge. “All of them are unquestionably used to leadership and to being obeyed. It’ll be a three-way free-for-all for command, before we get this rusty heap of junk space-worthy again, if that can even be accomplished.” Her sudden bark of laughter caused all three men to turn and look, but she shrugged at them and they returned their attention to the problem at hand. “Bets, ladies, on how long it takes them to try and tear each other apart?”
Her kinswoman Theadora and the willowy, ethereal native woman each glared. The former gritted her teeth and said with biting sarcasm, “We cannot allow them the luxury. We do not have time to coddle their collective egos.”
Winifred personally thought the same, but it fascinated her to watch these men: Theadora’s half-breed husband, the native woman’s man, and her own husband.
Indeed—she watched Loren the most, unable at times to take her eyes from him, unable to convince herself that this was real. Memory rose, as fresh as the morning she first saw him: her gaunt, long-comatose husband, standing on the long balcony outside their temporary quarters in the city, lit by the risen sun. Her joy had escaped all bounds; he answered with incandescent rage and barely spoke to her for days after. In the years since they met, she had never until that day seen him truly angry. Winifred understood his fury, and in time he understood why she had acted against his will. She suspected someone had finally spoken with him, given him perspective; perhaps even Robin Verdigris, who had—by all accounts—suffered a similar long-term separation from his own spouse.
She still almost believed it a dream, to find that he lived and had been given back his health, all by the most unlikely benefactor: the slight, red-haired native who now stood dwarfed between her husband and her kinswoman’s spouse. Her memories of him were vile; Winifred remembered him from the days after they first arrived on this world, when they were fighting to make it livable and to bring it kicking out of its barbaric, technologically bereft existence. The natives had disliked their intent and resented their presumption; they had therefore fought like devils. As the casualties mounted, the natives grew more creative and resorted to assassination. This very man—to whom she now owed Loren’s life—had murdered one of her sons with a dagger through the heart. Only the overwhelming gratitude she felt for her husband’s recovery stayed her hand from dealing him the same death.
Winifred smiled to herself. She had tried, before she understood. When she first saw him leaning over the stasis chamber, staring down at Loren, she had nearly gone insane with the need to prevent him doing her family further harm. And now she owed him for Loren’s miraculous recovery. That small, unassuming man had restored her husband to health and vigor with no more than the touch of his hands.
“I am a healer,” he said, as though he had heard her thought.
She saw Loren’s left brow lift in the old, familiar way and closed her eyes, thanking all the gods for their benevolence. Opening her eyes again, Winifred said mildly, “So you have mentioned before. Are you reading my mind?” Truly a disarming possibility, considering the hostility of her meandering thoughts.
He shrugged, the slight lift of one shoulder, and he did not look at her. She stared at his back, admiring the spill of red-blond hair. “I think you might perhaps be sensitive. You project.”
Her guts heaved, all in an instant. Sensitive. A psion? “I was tested as a child and again as an adolescent. Nothing ever showed.”
“You now have also spent how long in cryogenic stasis on a world that feeds and strengthens sensitives? People change. They become part of the aura of this place, infused by it. My people were particularly susceptible to it, but even those who show no gift in their youth, or even in their prime, change if they survive long enough for the power to seep into their being.” He continued to study the pilot’s console with strange fascination. Truly, it amazed her how quickly he acclimated to their language, their presence. She exchanged a look with Loren, who wore a thoughtful expression. He added, “I think that’s why they originally put us down here. They knew, somehow, that it would broaden some existing thing in our very beings.”
Galen caught the man’s arm and pulled him around. “I knew it! Your ancestors also were colonists.”
“So I was told by the most elder of our folk, some of whom were old enough to remember what their parents and grandparents told them.” He met Winifred’s gaze, the sharp, slightly accusative flash of bluish-green eyes. “Before they all were killed.”
“Did your ancestors not do the same?” she flared.
“They did not. They came and settled onto a primitive world and obeyed their prime directive. As it happens, we found no native peoples here. We spread and settled to our satisfaction, and then we evolved at a reasonable pace. We did not attempt to impose a technologically advanced society upon anyone. We had been here several thousand years when your folk arrived. You know what you found then.” His lips twisted. “And look at this place now, a mere fraction of those several thousand years later.”
As if to derail the conversation and avert the potential for violence, Theadora said brightly, “So. Anyone care to guess how old this thing is?” She slanted a look at Winifred. “Was it one of the vessels that came with you?”
Winifred shook her head. “No. I think it’s older than that.”
“It’s in remarkably good condition for something that is possibly over seven hundred years old,” Loren mused, running his fingertips over the apparent navigator’s console.”
Galen shrugged. “It’s a fairly isolated location and protected from the elements. Is it likely that it might have come with the original colonists? Could it possibly be that old?”
“The design is fairly antiquated. If it was protected from the elements and anything likely to cause deterioration, I suppose it’s possible.” Loren crouched, looking under the consoles. “If we could get power to its systems, we might be able to find out. If its computers have not corrupted, just imagine the history we might find.” He looked up at Robin Verdigris. “We might learn why your people left their home and colonized. We could perhaps find out where they originated.”
“I suspect they originated in the same place as the rest of us.” Galen’s statement moved them all to silence.
After a moment, Winifred said, “What makes you say that?”
“I’ve met more of the natives than you. The names. The similarities in language. The genetics. Consider me: my mother was one of them—” He gestured to Robin. “—and my father was one of them.” A gesture toward Winifred and Loren. “I think they had their origin on the same Mother-world as the rest of us.”
“That would be quite remarkable, truly.” Loren straightened to his feet, and Winifred had not seen him looking so enthused in it seemed like forever. “And it makes it all the more vital for us to find some way to mine this ship’s databanks for information, even if there is no way to get it flight-worthy.”
Wearing a thoughtful expression, Theadora looked at her husband. “You might want to get Max in here. Isn’t he your resident technological expert?”
Galen nodded, but Robin said quietly, “There is power here. It is dormant, needs to be awakened.” At their looks, he rolled his pretty eyes. “I am also elemental. I can feel it.” He paused, staring at the shielded view-screen. “This vessel is alive. Something lives in it.” Hands moved toward weapons; they all looked around. “Not that sort of something. Is it possible that some entity dwells within the ship itself? In its very structure? A spirit? A haunt?”
Watching the men, Winifred saw both Galen and Loren staring at the smaller man. The former finally suggested, “AI? Is it possible this ship was equipped with artificial intelligence? I know that experiments were done thousands of years ago, before the development of FTL and the deep-space ships, but it truly wasn’t refined until more recently.”
At the blank looks worn by both Robin and his wife, Loren offered a quiet explanation. “Artificial intelligence is essentially a machine that thinks like a person and evolves, develops. It gains more insight and grows with every contact it has with human beings and their problems.” He paused and shook his head a little. “Just to consider that makes me wonder. If you feel something—sense something present within the ship itself, it could very well be some manner of early AI.”
“Max is our resident expert. He has studied back as far as the available records go,” Galen said and smiled. “He really must have a look at this.
The man departed for a time, to get his highly praised crew member. While he was gone, the rest of them explored the ship. Signs of age existed everywhere, but not age enough to make her think it might actually be thousands of years old.
The sound of voices recalled them to the bridge in time to see Max—a small, dark haired man—nearly squeal with delight. As it turned out, he also identified the model as soon as he studied the ship a bit further.
Eventually, stroking a hand along an age-cracked seatback and grinning with glee, he said, “What in all the hells is this doing here? It’s an ancient model, and not a deep-space vessel, just a ground ship-to-ground hopper, ancillary, sent out to survey.” He met Galen’s eyes and then looked around. “They were loaded on the earliest Earth-built colonization ships.”
“And that answers that,” Galen murmured, and then added, “And did those ships have AI?”
Max chewed at a fingernail for a moment, staring at nothing in particular. “Perhaps. I’m not certain the old records said. When this ship was sent out, the technology was in its earliest reliable stages.”
“What is the likelihood that the AI in this vessel is still operational?” Theadora asked.
With a shrug, Max said, “I suppose it might be. These ships were made to sustain extraordinary hardship and designed for longevity, considering their ultimate purpose. I mean, what good would they have been if they fell apart before the colonization ship found its final stop? It might be a simple matter of restoring power to bring it all alive again, although if the computers have crashed, there is probably no way to bring it on-line now.”
As they talked, Winifred watched Robin Verdigris. He stood near the pilot’s console, staring at something with fixation enough to unsettle her. She moved over to his side and followed his gaze. There was a panel of glass inset into the console, scored with lines in the barest shape of a human hand. “What is it?” she asked.
He never removed his eyes from the glass. “The power focuses here. It is alive.” He reached out and trailed his fingertips across the glass, stirring a faint glimmer of blue light. Winifred almost thought she imagined it, but it was more prominent the second time.
“It needs something to activate it,” Max said. He and the others had joined them. Max laughed. “Probably a member of the deep-space ship’s crew.”
“If that’s true, then why is it reacting to him?” Loren reached over Robin’s shoulder and placed his open hand palm down on the glass. It went dark.
“He’s descended from the colonists that arrived with this ship. Perhaps that is why.”
“Maybe,” Max conceded,
“Easy enough solution to the mystery,” Winifred muttered, irritated. She reached out and caught Robin by his wrist. Merciless, she forced his hand palm-down onto the inset pane.
Blue light flared, illuminating Robin’s shocked face and making the others recoil, and around them the ship came alive.
“Oh, shit,” Max muttered, backed halfway to the door.
Galen caught him and dragged him back. “We need you.”
Instrumentation flickered to life, sluggish, and into the silence, the survey ship’s long-dormant computer system spoke. AI—just as they had thought: “Good morning, Dr. Verdelet.” Its voice proved a low, female alto with an odd accent.
“I am not—”
Winifred slapped a hand over his mouth and hissed in his ear, “Say ‘good morning.’”
She lifted her hand, and he managed, “Good morning?”