The Mother’s Keepers

I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD when the Krollians invaded for the first time.

We heard of the attack the way we Keepers heard of all doings on the surface: as rumours, running through the corridors of the Mother’s House like the rivulets of water that sometimes found their way through cracks in the walls despite our best efforts.

“Praella, did you hear? The Krollian monsters have attacked us,” my best friend, Melka, whispered to me as we waited to carry our blocks of biosugar into the refining chamber. Her headruff, normally erect with the vibrant force of her bubbly personality, lay flat against her narrow skull, and her normally iridescent pre-pubescent scales had shifted to near-black. “I heard it from Pillory, who heard it from Fanella, who heard it directly from Slivian, who is her comfortmate.”

I nodded. That made it authoritative indeed: Slivian was the Gatekeeper of the Public Courtyard, and she alone among all of us spoke regularly with the people on the surface.

“Do you think they will come here?” Melka said then, quieting her voice even more. Idle chatter was discouraged among all Keepers while on duty, but especially idle chatter that might undercut morale and hence reduce the efficiency of our service. “The Krollians? Into the Mother’s House?”

“No,” I said, and I said it with complete confidence, because I was twelve, and I had been born into the service of the Mother, and I believed in the sanctity of our mission and the wisdom of the Seniors absolutely and without reservation. “They will not.”

Then we heard a warning hiss behind us and twisted around to see Senior Santilla giving us a look as cold as the cryocreche, and we spoke no more of it.

My faith seemed justified: within a day whispers ran through the halls that the Krollians had been repelled, and that only a few dozens of our warriors had been killed and returned to the Mother, and life went on as before in the Mother’s House, as it had gone on for generations before my birth, and as I thought it would go on for my entire life and many generations more.

But I was only twelve.

I was nineteen years old during the Winter of Terror. The years since the Krollian invasion had seen an uneasy peace grow between their race and ours, and so a few Krollians had been permitted into our city. They were always under guard, peace or no peace, because they were so large and fearsome in appearance, and so bristling with natural weaponry, that had a single one run amok many lives might have been lost. Yet despite being closely watched, these tourists, we heard, had turned out to be terrorists, for in every public place which a Krollian had been permitted to visit, a bomb exploded. A thousand people died in the explosions and ensuing conflagrations, and the Mother herself lost several appendages, to the dismay and consternation of the Physicians, who rarely had to deal with extensive injury. We would have gone to war against the Krollians then and there if not for the fact that we had no means of doing so: our weapons had always been purely defensive, powerful at driving off invaders but stationary and useless for attack.

Or so I heard, again through rumours dribbling through our corridors, again finding their way to my ear through Melka, by then my comfortmate. We shared quarters just outside the waste treatment chamber on Level 6, where we were assigned. A nasty and smelly assignment it was, too, at least when the aging tubes failed and we had to clean up the Mother’s untreated feces, but all young Keepers did a turn in waste management and we did not complain...at least, not where a Senior could hear us.

“I heard the Krollians had requested an opportunity to visit the Public Courtyard of the Mother’s House,” Melka whispered to me as we cuddled in our sleep pod. Both of us had shed our final childskins a year before, and our adult scales, so much softer than the protective ones of our immaturity, made a pleasant slithering sound as she shifted position against me. “If that had been permitted...”

I nuzzled her neck. “No bomb could have been planted in the House without the Seniors finding it,” I murmured, very softly, for it was late and my mind was already drifting toward sleep. “You worry too much, Melka.”

“And you don’t worry enough, Praella,” I thought she said, but I may have dreamed it, for my consciousness was already slipping away.

I was twenty-five years old when we finally attacked the Krollians. The warrior males had spent the intervening years building new weapons, studying maps, planning the assault. By the time I heard of the attack, it was long over, the wounded and our dead streaming back into the cities, returning to the nurturing arms of the Mother. A great victory, the males said, or so the rumours ran in our halls, and I, still young and trusting, accepted that. Melka did not, and we argued. We were arguing a lot, by then.

Though I accepted the claim of victory, I knew how the number of dead and wounded must have distressed the Mother, as she provided nourishment for those in recovery and digested those who did not—or whom the Physicians deemed would not—recover. We were worked off our feet for months, and our stress was but a pale reflection of the Mother’s. How much that stress affected her I did not know, then, but I found out soon enough.

We all did.

I was thirty-three years old when the Mother became ill.

This time the news did not come to me through rippling rumour. By then Melka and I had had our inevitable final disagreement, and no longer shared sleeping quarters or anything else beyond cursory nods when our paths crossed in the corridors. Leaving Melka, some three years after the Winter of Terror, had helped me to focus on my work to the exclusion of all else, and now I was a Keeper of the First Tier, only one step below the Seniors, the youngest ever to achieve that rank. As a Keeper of the First Tier, I had the privilege of attending the Seniors’ Council, though of course I was forbidden to speak during the meetings or to speak of the meetings to anyone outside the Council afterward. Santilla, who had frightened me into silence more than twenty years before, was now Eldest, and therefore the only one of the Keepers to whom the Mother spoke directly, and then only in fragments that had to be carefully interpreted before any proclamation of the Mother’s will could be made.

But Santilla was unequivocal in this proclamation. ‘The Mother is unwell,” she told us. “The Physicians are examining her biological systems as we speak, but they have so far found nothing specifically wrong, nothing they can treat. They say she is suffering from a generalized stress disorder. Her tissues are deteriorating.”

The other five Seniors on the Council exchanged glances, their bedraggled ruffs, patchy with age, flat against their brown-spotted skulls. “But...she is the Mother,” one of them said at last. “She cannot be ill. What will become of our people if she is ill?”

“She is a living creature,” Santilla said, her voice as cold and implacable as the glare with which she had so often frightened me when I was a child. “All living creatures are subject to the ills of the flesh. All living creatures eventually die.”

“Die?” The whisper came from my right, not from the round table at the centre of the Council chamber, and I shot a horrified glance in that direction, at Astilla, the only other First Tier Keeper, some ten years my elder. Fortunately for her, the Seniors’ age-occluded hearing masked her outburst. I pretended I had not heard, either, but I understood her shock. Was the Mother dying? Could the Mother die?

Of course she could. Of course she would. As Santilla had just said, all living creatures eventually die and though the Mother’s House was filled with machines to support her vast, sprawling body, the Mother was still a living creature. But I had never imagined it could happen in my lifetime. The Mother had existed for centuries, and all of us Keepers were the fruit of her wombs, her parthenogenic offspring, born only to serve her needs, to care for her immense body and the support systems that aided its function, while on the surface, in the City that had grown around her House, her fruiting bodies and medical teats and a hundred other interfaces provided sustenance for the males and females who reproduced and lived and died in the ordinary way.

Without the Mother, the City would collapse. The population would have no choice but to flee, to set up some poor, scrabbling settlement like those our people had subsisted in for millennia before the creation of the Mother. And if the latest rumours were true, and the Krollians now surrounded us, there was nowhere to flee.

If the Mother died, if she even became too ill to provide for her surface children...then every one of our people might likewise die. Our race could cease to exist!

“What do we do?” asked Frenella, the youngest of the Seniors, only ascended to the council a half-year before. “Eldest? What would the Mother have us do?”

“The Mother has not spoken to me,” Santilla said. “I have prayed night and day for a word, a single word, but have heard nothing.” For the first time her façade of icy calm cracked a little, and with it her voice, as she added, “All we can do is our duty. All we can do is continue to care for the Mother, as we have been born to do.”

We shuffled from the Council chamber, lost in our own thoughts.

The next day, I learned that Astilla had fled the House during the night, vanishing into the city throngs. As the only other Keeper of the First Tier, I became first in line for the Council of the Seniors, as soon as there was an opening: as soon, in other words, as a Senior died.

I became a member of the Council of Seniors two years later, when I was thirty-five years old, the way opened for me by the death of Santilla, who failed quickly after the fateful meeting where she told us of the Mother’s illness, as though beneath her icy exterior her strength had melted away and poured out of her at having to deliver such devastating news.

The new Senior was named Quinla. The Mother did not speak to her, either.

I was fifty-seven years old when the last of the Keepers who were not on the Seniors’ Council abandoned their service.

The Mother’s condition had worsened, slowly but inexorably, in the years since Santilla first shocked us with her announcement. Whole levels shut down without warning. The appendages nourishing the City above withered and died and rotted. The smell of decay hung, a choking miasma, in our halls. We no longer heard much of anything from the world above, but more and more of our sisters fled there, fled the stench of rot and despair: Astilla had just been the first of many.

Among them: Melka. We had not spoken for years, but I still felt a pang, like an echo of an echo of an echo of loss, when I heard that she, too, had abandoned her sacred duties to try to save herself.

The departures became even more frequent as word trickled down to the Keepers that the Krollians had promised safe passage for anyone who wanted to flee the dying city. The tale now was that the Winter of Terror had in fact been engineered by a faction of warmongers among our own males as a pretext for a strike against the Krollians, whose wealth and resources they envied. With the defeat of our forces (for the “great victory” had been just the opposite), the truth had come out. Supposedly peace now reigned between our peoples, though some still wondered darkly if those who entered Krollian lands ever emerged beyond them.

Yet even those fears did little to convince our Keepers to stay with the Mother, and so we dwindled, and dwindled, and dwindled still.

Although, to be blunt, there was little enough for the few Keepers who remained during those final years to do. Duties unchanged for centuries simply ceased to matter: the careful trimming of tissue, the cleaning of conduits and cables, the oiling of exposed flesh. Dead tissue need not be trimmed, unused conduits need no longer be maintained, broken cables connecting two nodes that had both ceased to function need not be spliced, and wherever the Mother’s flesh lay exposed, it seemed, it glistened with the iridescent slime of unchecked bacterial growth, rotting away from the surface as well as from beneath.

Yet the Mother still lived, and we continued to look after her remaining hearts and, in the most sacred and central chamber of all, her massive brain, untouched by decay but increasingly cut off from the outside world. What thoughts still flickered within that table-sized mass of grey matter none of us could tell, for the Mother had spoken to no one for years. Fanella had ascended to the position of Eldest five years after Quinla, and she, too, had no response to her prayers and pleading.

One by one, the remaining few Keepers who were not on the Senior Council slipped away, to throw themselves on the mercy of the Krollians. Five of us remained: only five, where once there had been five hundred.

When I was seventy-one years old, I became Eldest.

There were only two of us left by then: Fanella and I. The other Seniors had died; in two cases, taken their own lives. Fanella had been so sunk in dementia for three years by then that she could not even feed or clean herself, and so I cared for her as I still cared for the Mother, though my duties had dwindled to preparing the nutrient mixture that kept her brain and her last still-beating heart functional.

Like the Mother, the House had fallen into decay, and I rarely ventured into its dark, dank halls: I couldn’t bear to see the corridors that once had thrummed with activity and life reduced to grim grey catacombs. I lived my life in a few central rooms, surviving on the same nutrients I gave the Mother and Fanella, mixed from the vast stocks that could have supplied our meagre needs for a hundred years.

One morning I went into Fanella’s cell and found her lifeless in her bed, her filmed eyes wide and staring, her scales already beginning to fall from her emaciated body. I placed her into the digestive tank, and so she became the last of the Keepers to feed the Mother, the final sacred duty of a lifetime of duty.

I wondered, as I watched her body bubble and twist as it sank into the dark green fluid, if even Fanella would have remained to the very end, had she still been capable of independent thought or action these last few years; or would she, too, seeing the object of her devotion and duty slowly slipping away, have decided to steal a final few years for herself, and leave the Mother to her inevitable decline?

I also wondered, as I turned from the bubbling pool, why I had remained.

I picked up a fresh bladder of nutrient and made my way, far more slowly than I used to, for arthritis had me firmly in its fiery grip, up the long stairs to the Mother’s brain chamber. Like so many others, I could have left years ago, while there were still people in the city above us. I doubted any now remained: I had had no word from the surface for years, but an exploration of the corridor leading to the Public Courtyard had ended a hundred yards shy of the exit when I encountered tons of rubble blocking my path, some of it clearly from the elaborately carved stones of the Courtyard walls.

I hoped that the Krollians had been true to their word and let my people pass safely through their lands. Perhaps the rubble choked the hall simply because, with my people gone, the Krollians had razed the city to build their own structures. Perhaps even now ten thousand Krollians lived their lives above me, unaware of my existence, or the Mother’s slow dying.

Perhaps. Or perhaps the Krollians had murdered everyone, destroyed the City, and salted the earth upon which it had stood.

There were other passages to the surface, of course, through the winding halls where the Mother’s appendages had once stretched their way, but I dared not risk the journey. If something happened to me, what would become of the Mother? I knew she was dying, knew there was nothing I could do to stop it, but I would not abandon her. I would not leave her to die alone. My life had been spent caring for her, and my life would end caring for her. To leave would have made my life a travesty; to stay gave it meaning.

I attached the nutrient bladder to the feeding tube, and sat silently, rubbing my aching knees, as slowly, so slowly, the Mother took the nutrients into what little of her remained.

My care of the Mother would not last much longer, I knew. Someday soon the Mother would finally die. Perhaps then I would make my way to the surface and see what was left of our world. But not before.

Not before.

It was clear the single nutrient bladder would last the Mother for hours yet. I made my slow, aching way back down the stairs to my hard, narrow cot.

When I was eighty-four years old, the Mother died.

I woke from troubled sleep. Someone had spoken to me.

I stared into the darkness. I now slept in the Mother’s brain chamber, making my agonizing descent to the nutrient chamber no more than once a week, for the Mother took almost no food now. Nor did I: my limbs were frail, my fingers like matchsticks. Every night when I lay down I wondered if I would awake, if, after all this, I would fail in my charge, and, by dying before the Mother, leave her to die alone after all.

But someone had spoken to me. Someone had spoken to me.

Praella, the voice in my head said again, and I barely recognized the word as my name, I had not heard it in so long.

My mind has gone, I thought.

No, said the voice. It has not. It sounded amused, but also very, very tired.

“Mother?” I whispered out loud, in sudden fear and hope. I was Eldest, the Mother only spoke to the Eldest, but I had never thought, especially not now, so near the end...

My time is done, the Mother said.

“No,” I protested, but it was a foolish thing to say, as if she did not understand the truth as well as I.

Are you trying to salve my feelings? the Mother’s amused voice replied within my head. There is no need. I have been dying for a very, very long time. It is a wearisome process, and I am glad to reach an end.

I sat up, slowly and painfully, as I did everything, and looked at the Mother’s brain. Her last heart still beat slowly, erratically, in the chamber beneath us, and I could see the vessels on the surface of the brain swell as each slow contraction drove blood through them. “Why have you not spoken to me until now?” I said out loud. I heard the peevishness in my own voice but did not try to soften it. “I have been caring for you, alone, for years. Alone.”

Why? the Mother asked then.

I started to speak, stopped, reconsidered.

Why? the Mother asked again.

I waited a moment longer, the answer growing within me until I was certain. “Because,” I finally said, my voice hoarse, for even this little bit of speaking had tired it after years of non-use, “that is who I am. A Keeper of the Mother. Born of you, to care for you. I could not abandon that charge and remain who I am. I would become something else, something I do not know how to be, something I do not want to be.

“I am a Keeper. I am the Eldest. I am the last.”

Then it is time, the Mother said within my head, and though I opened my mouth to ask, “Time for what?” I never uttered the words, for in that instant the Mother filled me: every corner of my mind, every corner of my body, a flood of knowledge and memory, power coursing through me such as I had never imagined. I could feel my body changing, feel my every cell being rewritten.

I gasped.

The Mother’s brain quivered, then stilled.

The veins upon its surface no longer pulsed.

The Mother was dead, but I still lived...

...and the Mother lived in me.

I rose from my bed. I no longer ached. My scales were as smooth and soft as when I used to share a bed with Melka, my joints renewed, my eyes clear, my hearing unmuffled.

I no longer feared for my people. The Mother knew, had always known, where all of her children had gone. The Krollians had been true to their word. My people now lived in a valley five hundred miles to the east, a valley that opened into the sea. They had become fishers and farmers. A new settlement was already beginning to take shape, but it would always be a primitive place compared to what they had lost...unless they had a Mother.

I will make my way there, the last to leave the old city. I will rejoin my people, the Mother’s children: my children, now. I will call the Keepers who still live, Melka and the rest, and though they once abandoned their charge, they will return to me. They will help build a new House for their new Mother using the knowledge I now carry within me, and once it is built, I will let the changes begin.

As the centuries slip past, I will grow to fill the House. I will feed and comfort the City and its inhabitants, and my offspring will care for me as I once cared for my Mother.

And someday, far into the future, I, too, will slip at last into the silent night of death...and a new Keeper will receive the ancient memories, and the cycle will begin again. I, Praella, will be just a memory of a memory by then...but not completely forgotten. Never completely forgotten.

There is no immortality. Everyone dies. But as long as our race survives, I will be remembered, by Mother, after Mother, after Mother: the Keeper who kept her promise, the caregiver faithful to her Mother to the end, and who in turn became the new Mother of a new world.