“What must it be like to live without a ceiling?” Sayeed mused. The man who had once been BoyChild floated in front of the viewing screen and studied the land mass he believed had once been called Africa. There were scars on the land that might once have been cities, each ringed by settlements of shining salvage.
Sayeed’s two wives, their spare husband and his male companion studied the screens and oversaw the orbital alignment. “We can go down and see. After we’ve adjusted to Earth normal and screened for disease and toxins. And when MareeSelst has given birth, of course.” The former YoungLady was spreadeagled upside down, relative to the others. The freefall was her idea, to alleviate the discomfort she remembered from her last pregnancy.
“We’re getting messages at last. Translation is working on it, but it looks like equal numbers of threats and invitations.” SeelYa, previously GirlChild, announced.
“No open hostility? No weapons active?”
“Not that we can detect.”
“Let’s send in the clones.”
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