2
The first thing she remembered was a voice.
"There, see, Doctor?" it said. "She's trying to talk."
She worked her lips, trying to shape a word, but they wouldn't cooperate. "Dottow?" she said.
"Doctor," said the voice, sweet and infinitely patient. An arm, hard under its soft padding, adjusted its grip as it cradled her small body. She squinted into the bright lights around her, unable to focus on anything in particular.
"Doctow," she repeated firmly.
"Extraordinary!" said another voice. "That's quite advanced for three months. Dr. Graber, are you getting this?"
"Yes, of course, the recording equipment is always on," said a third voice, this one a little like the first one except that it didn't sound very interested. "Bunni, hold the subject for me."
The arm around her tightened slightly, holding her still, and then something jabbed her in the arm. She started to cry as the pain increased, and then it went away.
"Shh, shh," said the sweet voice. The arm around her adjusted itself again, and she was looking at something hard and shiny. She stopped crying, fascinated. Something pulsed vaguely behind it, but her vision was not yet capable of resolving complex shapes. "My name is Bunni," said the first voice. "Can you say Bunni?"
"Bunni!" she said. It was easier than doctor.
The things she remembered after that mostly were not as clear. There was a lot of arguing between the two voices that called each other Doctor. There was frequent discomfort when one of them poked her with sharp things. She didn't like that, but crying was punishable by the laboratory lights being turned up if the higher voice was present, so she quickly learned to stay quiet.
Mostly there was Bunni. Bunni teaching her words, Bunni holding and rocking her, Bunni keeping her safe while the Doctors were away or busy. Bunni gave her shots when she had allergy attacks, brought her little toys to play with, and (she realized later) kept her from harming herself or the Lab's equipment when she started pulling herself upright at twelve months or so. She could say full sentences before she could walk. She could even say her name, although Human/Xenoorganic Hybrid #19 was long and hard to pronounce with her traitorous tongue and palate. Bunni called her Xen, and after a while the others began to call her that, too.
By the time she was toilet-trained at two years, she could pronounce real words and carry on a simple conversation with Bunni and Tori. She first knew Tori primarily as the fixer of her toys. She inevitably broke them with her long and awkward fingers, and then it needed Tori's specialized tiny grips to fix them again. Because she had never known anything else, it never occurred to her as odd that one of the four people in her world moved on treads and the other had four metal arms and hovered in the air. She was disappointed the first time she realized the pale, squishy thing reflected in Bunni's shining upper dome was herself, but she got used to that. After all, she could see Bunni's brain inside the dome, and it was squishy, too. She knew that was what it was, because she asked. It was a while longer before she knew what a brain was, but since she had no reason to believe this was not perfectly ordinary, it did not alarm her. Obviously some people's brains were visible and others' were not.
"She's doing so well, Doctor Montalban," she heard Bunni say one day while she was supposed to be asleep. She lay curled up on a cot in the darkest corner of the lab, listening. "She hasn't had an allergy attack in over a month now, and she's growing very quickly."
"Is that normal?" Dr. Montalban asked Dr. Graber.
"Its development is precocious," was the reply. "But there have been human cases like it. It could be due to the xenoorganic contribution, or it could be due to the genetic contribution of two unusually intelligent human beings. How old were you when you learned to read?"
"Four," said Dr. Montalban.
"So we'll keep it around that long and see if it can learn to read. Assuming it keeps gaining immune function, that is. But after that we'll really have to consider ending this phase. It could be dangerous."
"Dangerous to you and me?" said Dr. Montalban. "Surely not. Xen is physically smaller and weaker than a human child of the same age. And I've programmed Bunni never to let her – it - out of her sight. It'll never be unsupervised for an instant."
"But it's not a human child," said Dr. Graber sharply. "Try to remember that. It already has unusually advanced visual perception. It could become venomous. It could develop some sort of psychic abilities. We don't know."
"And we won't know, if you sacrifice it before we get a chance to find out," said Dr. Montalban patiently. "Isn't that why we started this project in the first place? To learn about them?"
"Well, all right," said Dr. Graber. "But after that we have to start another specimen. We need a larger sample size, and we don't have the resources to keep track of more than one at a time."
The next time she was alone with Bunni, Xen asked her what sacrifice meant.
"That's what happens to experimental subjects when the Doctors are finished with them, Xen," said Bunni. "They die. Before we moved here to the Lab, Dr. Graber sacrificed a lot of rats."
"What's a rat?" asked Xen.
"Come to the terminal, and I'll show you a picture," said Bunni. One of her long accordion-pleated arms snaked out to manipulate the keyboard. "There."
"How does it happen?" asked Xen, looking at the picture of a furry whiskered thing in a cage.
"An overdose of an anesthetic," said Bunni. "They just go to sleep and don't wake up again."
"Does it hurt?" asked Xen.
"No, Dear," said Bunni. "It doesn't hurt."
"I don't want them to do that to me," said Xen. Bunni draped her other long arm around Xen's two-year-old shoulders. Xen held the thinly padded metal manipulator at the end as tightly as she could.
"I don't, either. Let's hope they don't, Xen."
"What will happen to me afterwards?" asked Xen.
"You should show her the field stations," said Tori, bobbing up behind them. She rotated until she could stare down at Xen with one of the three sensors on her round central unit. "If we're gonna be teaching her eschatology."
"You are overprogrammed," said Bunni in her calm, flat voice. "I've always said so."
"Only 'cause you're jealous that my AI is so much better," said Tori. "Better hurry up. They'll be done in the main room in twenty minutes, and you don't want them to see you."
"What's eschatology?" said Xen, sliding off the chair. "And I want to see."
"Well, all right," said Bunni, with a readiness that would have quite startled Dr. Montalban. "But we'll have to hurry."
"All right, Bunni," said Xen. She followed Bunni out of the room with the Doctors' beds, the little kitchen and the computers and through a curtain into the adjoining one. It was stacked up with supplies and machines so that there was not an inch of free wall space. In the middle of the room was a row of round patches. Each one on the floor had a matching one on the ceiling, and both had little blue lights that Xen thought were very pretty (although the brightness hurt her eyes a little, even through her second lids).
Something hovered in the air between the first pair of round patches. A faint blue glow outlined the body of a wrinkled green creature. One of its eyes was swollen shut. The other was halfway open, and Xen saw the silvery iris swimming in the black.
"What's that?" she said.
"That's where good experimental subjects go when they die," said Tori, who had followed them. "In one of these, you can stay perfectly preserved forever, and they can get blood or tissue or whatever, whenever they want it. That's your other Daddy."
"My what?" said Xen.
"Your third genetic contributor," said Bunni, using words that Xen understood. "This is where the Xenoorganism part of your name comes from. But don't you listen to Tori. He was dead when we found him."
"And if I die, they'll put me in one of those," said Xen.
"Yes," said Bunni.
"What about you?" asked Xen, turning to the next most important being in her world.
"Oh, don't you worry about that, Dear," said Bunni. "I'm a robot. We don't die the way people do. Now come back and work on your flash cards, before the Doctors realize where we've gone."
Xen returned obediently to the cards, enjoying the feeling that they shared a secret.
By the time she was three and a half, she could read entire sentences. By dint of much stammering and stuttering, she managed to conceal this fact for some time. She already had a very good memory, and the word sacrifice kept recurring. Eventually, Dr. Montalban caught her reading an encyclopedia entry off the terminal. They looked at each other for a minute.
"You're reading that, aren't you?" he said.
"Yes," said Xen. She had learned that lying directly very seldom worked with Dr. Montalban.
"You've been fudging the tests we give you," said Dr. Montalban. "Why?"
"I don't want to die," said Xen.
Dr. Montalban knelt down abruptly beside her chair. "Who told you you were going to die?"
"I heard you and Dr. Graber talking about it," she said. She reached for Bunni's manipulator without thinking. The robot patted her with the other one.
Dr. Montalban stared at her for a minute. He and Dr. Graber had different eyes from Xen's, even from each other's. Her irises were blue, and his were dark, dark brown. "And you understand what that means?" he said.
"You stop working," she said. "And then you get put into a field station."
"My God," said Dr. Montalban. He ran his hands through his black hair. Then he looked around quickly, checking to see if Dr. Graber was in hearing range. She was still back in the main lab room. Xen heard her sharp footsteps as she moved from counter to table. "Well, don't worry, Xen. You're obviously fully sentient. Under the circumstances, we can't possibly sacrifice you. Bunni, recognize creator vocal override."
"Creator vocal override recognized," said Bunni.
"Don't let anyone kill Xen. I include myself and Dr. Graber in that statement, do you understand?"
"Understood," said Bunni. She patted Xen on the shoulder. "Thank you, Dr. Montalban."
"Tori," said Dr. Montalban, raising his voice. "Bring me a three-eighths Marion head."
"I always carry a .25, you know," said Tori from the next room.
"I know. Get me the three-eighths." The four-armed robot drifted in from the next room with the tool a moment later. The Doctor took it, but didn't do anything with it. "Tori, recognize creator vocal override."
"Creator vocal override recognized," said Tori. "What's this all about?"
"I want you to keep Xen alive," said Dr. Montalban. "This supersedes other instructions. Is that clear?"
"Hell, yeah," said Tori. "But you might be sorry."
Xen heard approaching footsteps. Dr. Montalban hit a couple of keys on the keyboard, bringing up Xen's alphabet tutorial, just before Dr. Graber pushed the door open and came into the room. "What's going on? Is something wrong with the computer?" She looked sharply at Xen. "Was it tampering with it?"
"You know Bunni wouldn't let her do that," said Dr. Montalban. "She was working on her letters. She said the machine was making a funny noise. Looks like it was just a loose screw in the case causing some noisy vibration." He hefted the tool demonstratively.
"Are you sure? I think it may need defragged again," said Dr. Graber.
"Do I argue with you about embryonic genetics?" said Dr. Montalban.
"You'd better not," said Dr. Graber, but she smiled for just a second. "All right, Doctor, the machines are your department. It's probably a good idea not to be alone with the subject, though. I'm still concerned about the possibility of it developing psionic abilities. It has some unusual forebrain characteristics on the last scan, and I'm not sure if the unusual ocular range accounts for them - "
They lapsed into further discussion of Xen, using words which she mostly didn't know yet.