In which there’s a finale. (See chapter 4.)

25.

“Oh dude,” I said. “That would be awesome. I don’t know how to test the water, or if the soil will support earth seeds–”

“I can teach you,” the baby said. “I have knowledge that was supposed to be accessible to you.”

Someone on my comm yelled, “All that shit’s in the wiki, Jenny! Ask him what he is!”

I turned down my comm speakers. “So, giant alien baby. What are you? And why do you look like a giant human baby?”

“I didn’t know that these were many dead individuals. I thought it was one dead individual and asked it how to be an infant. This is what they showed me. I’ve never seen many dead individuals.”

“Whenever you encounter dead individual, you ask it how to be a baby?”

“Yes, and then we’re a baby, and we grow up, and we die. Until someone else asks us how to be a baby!” Giant baby was overwhelmed with happiness by this and clapped his hands.

We talked for an hour, and then I took pity on everyone else and set up a board and read their questions from it, and the giant baby answered them, and the visit spawned about seventeen Martianbaby wikis as he talked. He was really good at telling us the human knowledge he had absorbed, but was maddeningly vague about himself.

Before I left the dome, he let me take a sample of him. I approached with a sample collection pack he had located for me, and touched his fat knee with a swab I then sealed into a tube. I also made a couple of slides. He wasn’t smooth; he was dusty and pink. His skin looked more like something you’d find in your shop-vac than anything else, and I had the impression that he’d blow away in a strong wind.

“Would you blow away in a strong wind?” I asked him.

“Um, yeah. No? We’re not sure. We’re very big!” He clapped again, but he didn’t disintegrate, so maybe not.

“Well, when the dust storm comes, you’ll have to wait it out in here,” I said.

26.

I thought he wouldn’t fit through the airlock because he was so big, but after I overrode it and opened both doors, he flowed out like a cute little pink tornado.

My comm was going nuts but I had it turned down enough that I could think. The first thing we did once he was outside was give him his own radio so he could ignore the net chatter too.

I showed him the ship, the supplies, and my restaurant. He loved the forklift so we built him one. It didn’t take very long because he was huge and could lift things for me.

We drove out to the settlement and then to my homestead. I slaved his forklift to mine, and he sat precariously on top of his, giggling and gurgling and clapping. It wouldn’t have worked if he’d weighed as much as he looked like he did. He answered some questions from the marswork, ignored others, turned his radio off and on at random intervals.

When we got halfway back to town, he threw himself off of his forklift and rolled around in the rocks, making the kinds of noises you’d expect from a horse that was scratching its back.

Then he disappeared.

One moment he was there, a giant pink baby, and the next moment there was settling dust.

And then he was back. I blinked rapidly while my heart rate settled. “Jesus, baby,” I intoned.

“Okay!” he said, “all clean!” he said, and sat back down on his forklift. I drove us back to the dome, shaking my head inside my suit.

“Tomorrow, we can do the mass spectrometer,” he gurgled, “and the well. Thanks, Jenny!” And with that, he tornadoed back into his creche and spent the night on the net talking to people, even earthlings.

27.

For the next few months I spent half my time with the baby, assembling the other domes and learning the things that had been trapped in my fellow colonists’ heads, and the other half performing upon the baby’s samples experiments I didn’t really understand dictated to me by scientists of various kinds.

He was some kind of spore. There was a really disturbing experiment with some of him and piece of chicken meat from one of my rations, but no one who saw the footage of it ever really talked about it.

My water and ration pallets were safe in a proper dome in no time, and not long after that 1541 had a working well.

The baby tornadoed a few thousand klicks to the nearest settlement and met the people there. Someone had recently died, so they asked him for some spores. He hugged the corpse and came home.

A month later there was a spore baby who knew everything the dead guy had known. He let himself into the dead guy’s shelter – out of habit, the baby said – and dissipated. They vacuumed the shelter but the spores were dead.

“No earth atmophere for me!” the baby said. We discussed his exposure to it when he was still just dust on our suits.

“But you vented the air,” he said.

“Not until after all the people were dead,” I said. “Some of you were in air for upwards of two days.”

“But I was sleeping.”

He showed me where he’d been when we landed: spread over the ground we’d all walked over, between the ship and the first dome.

28.

After a couple of years, I had a working settlement. One of the big domes was a massive hydroponic garden and greenhouse and I was growing rice and chickpeas and raspberries. I ran around in there naked sometimes.

The baby was now known as Moral (no one knows why; he chose the name himself) and had visited all the landing sites. All last wills and directives had spore or no-spore clauses; some people asked for Moral’s spores and went out onto the regolith or stayed near the settlements after they died.

He wasn’t baby-shaped anymore, either. He’d grown into a teenager, but he wasn’t any bigger. He hung out in his dome sometimes, or went out onto the plains sometimes. When the dust storms came, he stayed inside, not sure if he’d blow away or not. He used most of 1541’s bandwidth, and did experiments on himself when he liked someone and they asked nicely enough. Most of the medical and scientific equipment was in his dome with him.

29.

Over the years, about a dozen people came to live at 1541. I always got a kick out of the fact that I’d only set up twelve shelters.

Moral brought them back with him, in twos and threes. They’d service their suits, bring extra air, jam their personals into their backpacks, and he’d tornado them home with him. Apparently the journey really, really sucked and no one ever spoke of leaving the same way they’d arrived.

All were people I’d befriended over the marswork, except for one guy who just tagged along at the last minute – he was the gruffy voice from my first net transmission – and fit in perfectly. He lived in the homestead with me.

Everybody, including Moral, called me mom. I still worked 40 hour weeks, but I didn’t have to. I did what I wanted. I made booze, I grew food, I learned how to dry and preserve produce, and I drove my little forklift all over the damn place.

The whole solar system now referred to IMM-1541 as “Mom’s Commune.”

30.

When Moral called me mom in a certain tone of voice, I assumed he’d broken something.

He hadn’t. He was dying.

He sent me links to his most recent tests, and even without reading the scientist’s comments I could see that his individual spores were darker and pitted and less mobile.

“Oh, Moral. What does this mean?”

“The next big storm, I’m going to be blown all over the world, as has always been,” he said. “But I wanted to know if I should sleep here, too. For you.”

Moral gave me a large vial of himself, and I kept it on the surface next to my homestead, under a small clear dome so it wouldn’t blow away, and added a spore clause to my last will and testament along with instructions to be placed under the little dome.

During the next giant dust storm, Moral, who was more red than pink and who was beginning to go senile, left his creche and was torn and scattered to the four corners of the planet.

Everyone at the commune got drunk on sugar booze and we all did tests on ourselves the way Moral had, looking at our blood cells under microscopes and generally making a mess of the health lab.

When I crawled into my shelf that night, I surprized myself by weeping for hours. I’d thought I managed to get too drunk to cry, but Moral, my one and only baby, was gone. Forever.

~+~+~+~++~+~+~+the+end+~+~+~+~++~+~+~+