Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

He rather sweated the response, but she said with a girl-smile: “No problem for me, you guys can retire when ready. And I won’t be bothering either of you.”

  Repressing his meld of disappointment and relief, Methuen returned, “Then we’d better all sack-out, tomorrow is a big day, the first two members of my task force are scheduled to check in. Oh, that reminds me. They won’t want to see Quarfar right away, they have to be briefed first, and we’ll want to go over the medical findings. So Quarfar may as well stay here with you, Dorita.”

  “Sure!”

  Methuen wet his lips. “I don’t think you should be alone here with him, however, so I’m detailing Saul to stay here with you.”

  Zorbin’s eyebrows went up, Dorita’s down. She demanded, “You don’t trust me alone with Quarfar?”

  It made Methuen grin. “Dorita, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you, but that isn’t the point. We just don’t know enough about Quarfar. He is the one I consider the more unreliable.”

  “I can take care of myself—”

  He drew on his patience. “Yes, Dorita. It isn’t rape that worries me, and I don’t read Quarfar as the murdering type. It’s—just an uneasy feeling about Quarfar. Put it this way: rather than have even Saul guard him alone, I’d want you to be here too.”

  She, mollified: “What are we supposed to watch for?”

  “I don’t know. But watch.”

  She nodded slowly, seeing it. Then she arose, went to Methuen, kissed his forehead, went to Zorbin, kissed his forehead, and struck a stance, pointing toward the men’s bedrooms.

  10

  After a few hours of sleep (all he ever needed), the mizdorf called Narfar awakened hungry at sunrise and went cruising to find his first food in fifty thousand years. He wasn’t unusually hungry, although he hadn’t eaten during two days awake. And in contrast to his sensual delights of last night, he found little to tempt his belly this morning: it was a city of skyscrapers and hard pavements, nothing at all like voluptuously sylvan Dora. A few people were about, but he wasn’t a people-eater. He cruised….

  Finally, Central Park offered promise. There were just a few people, mostly asleep; and there were trees in spate. He had forgotten about oaks and acorns, but the fruit looked interesting, and presently he spied a squirrel eating. Consciously following ancient ritual, he first gathered all the acorns off the tree and buried them in various places, eating one to propitiate the tree, although it wasn’t acorns that he was after. Burrowing underground then, he moled around the succulent tree roots in a double circle, chitter-singing praises to the tree spirit, imploring forgiveness for what he was about to do, assuring the spirit that her substance would be many times reproduced and meanwhile would be constructively expended in his own spirit.

  He then ate all the tree’s root-hairs—easily twenty kilograms of the precious tree parts that suck in water and nutrients from the soil. He knew that the tree would not fall immediately; she might survive by regenerating root-hairs; or else she would die standing, gradually returning her substance to the soil via the mediation of insect larvae; and all her acorns would make a large chunk of new forest.

  Having drowsed beneath the oak roots for an hour or so, Narfar the mizdorf came fully awake, sated but no longer lethargic and therefore in the best possible shape for reflection. He had a good brain, and the forebrain was well developed despite the sloping shallow forehead. However, his reflecting was limited by the fixation of his habits; or perhaps to some extent they were instincts, but one of his instincts was to learn habits, and so the distinction is difficult for us to arrive at; luckily it had never occurred to him to introspect the question. Just now, he was concerned to get himself oriented; and the more he labored at this, the more perplexing it be* came.

  Eventually, in this pleasant burrow redolent of soil-dank, he thought of recapitulating his recent memories. Well, there was the just-past root-nibbling, and before that he had hung himself to sleep, and before that a joyous orgy by night in this new city, and before that…. Eh….

  Clearly he remembered the chill in his heart and in his butt when—day before yesterday?—he had hunkered on a northern glacier seeking a decision as to what to do about the brother-enemy who from that earlier planet had come all the way to Dora and now clearly wished to slay his brother and take things over. Well, Narfar had decided to attack; and he had wing-risen high into the sky above the pole; but Narfar was the last of the mizdorfs, and they were able to stay vital without light or heat or air just as long as their spirits were high. Curious that Quarfar had been called his brother; for Quarfar had been a funny child, different from any mizdorf and far brighter and more daring; and yet they did seem to have owned the same parents, both long dead, both mizdorfs….

  Distantly now he had sensed Quarfar on the prowl for him. Narfar had hurled a challenge across supra-Dorian space: Quarfar, go away, you evil! Quarfar had responded: Narfar, both of us are good, in different ways, but you are no good to run a planet for people. When I sent you here, I warned you to do it my way, but you did not do so. You must go away and leave Dora to me; otherwise, now finally 1 will simply have to kill you. Narfar had mind-howled: I not go away. Instead I kill you!

  Now, in the weird, hard undiffuse light of the Dora-sun in outer space, they could distantly see each other as half-creatures, one half light and the other half nothing. Narfar could not see the right hand of Quarfar which was unlighted, but he surmised that the hand carried a stone-beaked spear; as for Narfar, he relied on his wings and fangs and talons, on his angry heart and brute strength. …

  Only, something happened. What it was, Narfar did not now remember; he only recalled being trapped and losing heart, awakening to find himself confronting spear-armed Quarfar, but both he and Quarfar were confined within invisible walls which neither could see, and many funny people who looked vaguely like Quarfar were watching them out of shadow.

  At that instant, Narfar now bitterly reflected, he had the power to pass through the invisible walls and come to grips with Quarfar. But no matter how much power you may have, it is useless unless you think to use it And Narfar had not thought of this; instead, again he had lost heart, and only yesterday had he remembered his power and escaped, Quarfar no longer being findable.

  Well, so now mysteriously he was in this place. It could not possibly be his planet Dora. Had he perhaps been returned to that earlier planet where he and Quarfar had first sought compromises between enmity and grudging mutual help? This unreal city of high buildings, all made of something that gleamed and that you could see through, was nothing at all like that earlier planet or Dora either; yet something about the taste of the tree’s root-hairs, something about the wild creatures who played beneath and in the tree, nostalgically reminded Narfar of that earlier planet. Perhaps he and Quarfar had cooperated and contended in some other part of this same planet. Perhaps what Narfar needed to do was to rove this planet, seeking the land from which Quarfar had dispatched him to Dora.

  But even if Narfar could find his original takeoff place, how could he get back to Dora without the help of Quarfar?

  Well did Narfar remember that night, uncountable human lifetimes before the two had met in conflict above Dora. Narfar had eye-fixed a constellation of stars which was his favorite because it looked like a mizdorf; and surrendering to the stem demand of Quarfar that he go to some other planet, he had picked the star which seemed to be the head of the mizdorf. Quarfar, pointing his stone-beaked spear, had shot a mind-trail through space to Dora, which just then had been on the hither side of the star. Narfar had embarked on the trail, smelling it richly; the smell was alive in him now. Instantly Narfar had found himself on Dora.

  Of all the smells in the multi-smell memory of Narfar, none was so peculiar, none so surely recognizable, as the smell of that space-trail.

  He had no notion whether the trail still began in the same place where Quarfar had projected it and Narfar had consummated it. The best of all possible ways to start seemed (although he di
dn’t clearly formulate it) to explore this planet and find that original starting point, to learn whether the trail was still there.

  Because, of course, there was no hope of getting the Quarfar-like funny humans of this planet to help him get back to Dora. Just no hope at all.

  11

  At the Science Center, Methuen confronted the first two members of his task force. The three had been inter-presented by Dr. Almagor; the Centralian, Dr. Olga Alexandrovna, was a stolid blonde Moskovite linguist in her forties; the blackhaired Cathayan, Dr. Chu Huang, a small yellow-brown anthropologist in his thirties.

  In a small conference room, they sat at table, giving primary attention to the medical and astronomical data which Almagor had handed them. Almagor had excused himself and departed; it was just these three. Alexandrovna and Chu silently studied the data, occasionally darting appraising glances at their chairman; the Centralian glances were hostile, the Cathayan glances noncommittal. In between inter-glancing, somehow they all absorbed the data.

  Methuen, having brought under his control the medical data, most of which he had seen yesterday, sat back and watched the other two while they worked back and forth between medical and astrophysical information. The new members, comprehending that their stranger-chairman was ready for discussion before they were, felt a certain whelming; they crowded this down, concentrating on the data, each privately resolved to show up the chairman before long.

  Methuen waited, knowing that he would be tested. But so would they.

  After much time, Alexandrovna the Centralian linguist raised her head. “Mr. Chairman, I think I am ready. I don’t know about my colleague from Cathay.”

  Chu acknowledged her remark with a polite, “So soon? Very good, but you must excuse me a few more minutes.“ He went back to the briefs. This rather concerned Alexandrovna, who wondered whether she might have missed something; and nervously she consulted her print-outs. Methuen waited, disciplining himself into steely calm, watching both scientists; they were going to challenge, just out of gamesmanship, and his problem would be to smooth out such challenges and get them both into a mood of cooperation.

  Presently Chu looked up; “I think I am ready now.” His voice was rather high and clipped, as contrasted with the ponderous contralto of Alexandrovna.

  Methuen said: “Then I will begin by formulating our task-force problems as charged by my chief. One: what sort of creatures are these? Two: an what planet or planets did they originate, and when? Three: how did they get themselves entangled in a comet clicking off three percent of light velocity, and without body-damage? Four: do the creatures represent any threat to our Erth?” (546!) “Five: the problem which is ancillary to all others: how do we analyze their language or languages so that we can get into communication with them for the sake of their experiential testimony? Undoubtedly related problems will emerge, and the chair will welcome any additional formulations now or later.”

  Chu beat Alexandrovna to the first punch. “As to problem one, I think these medical data take care of it, along with the narrative account of their first confrontation. As to that narrative account, clearly they are hostile to each other; and we note that the humanoid is advanced enough to carry a stone-beaked spear, while the winged creature appears to be a fang-and-claw savage. The medical data show that both creatures are strong and in the prime of their lives, their health seems excellent; although the winged one appears to prefer vegetation including tree-roots, and he has a sub-stomach for storing vegetation and breaking down the cell walls as an ungulate does. As to their intelligences, both have well-developed humanoid brains, although the encephalograph of the humanoid implies left-hemisphere symbolic dominance, while that of the batwing clearly shows right-hemisphere intuitive dominance. Another part of problem one, what sorts of creatures are these, will have to do with their respective cultures;

  I have a hypothesis or two, but I yield to my colleague from Centralia.”

  Olga Alexandrovna challenged Methuen, leading to it obliquely but without much delay. “I understand that at least one astronomer will join our task force within the next few days, and that is pertinent to problems two and three. So for now I believe we three can properly concentrate on problems one and five, which fall within our disciplines. Addressing myself immediately to problem five, I would ask Commander Methuen about his thoughts relative to analyzing the languages of the specimens.”

  The captain bypassed his downgrading, it was merely pardonable ignorance, his print-out hadn’t come and he would not assume captain’s insignia until it did. “We have made some degree of start on language,” he told them. “I have a telepath on our unofficial staff, and she has established communication with the humanoid, whose name is Quarfar. The batwing is Quarfar’s possible brother, Narfar. My telepath has already flaked some preliminary exchanges with Quarfar, together with translations; and this morning she is preparing a more detailed flake of further communication. It may make good sense to work first on these flakes.”

  Alexandrovna bristled, this being her territory. “Until we know the credentials of your telepath, we can give her report no credence.”

  “The only credentials I can give,” Methuen candidly admitted, “are that she correctly read my mind in an intensive test, and that she has been constellation-cleared to handle material of the lowest classification—which applies to these creatures and to this task force, pending disclosure of something which might upgrade the classification. Also, in a few instances where she gave me the meaning of a phrase by Quarfar, I was able to repeat the phrase, and Quarfar evidently understood; twice he obeyed my requests.”

  “If the woman is a true telepath,” snapped the linguist, “these may have tested her telepathy but they did not test her credibility. While you were speaking to this Quarfar, she could have been giving him your meanings. Commander, I am afraid there is no substitute for direct discourse between me and Quarfar, flaking it for linguistic analysis.”

  Said Methuen: “I could not agree more completely. I should add, though, with respect to problem two, that my telepath elicited from Quarfar, and was able to report to me, a description of the constellation which dominates the skies of the planet from which both creatures may well have come here, together with an account of the relative brightnesses, relative temperatures and physical compositions of nine stars and three nebulae in that constellation. I find this most intriguing, and I have reported it for expert analysis. Now, shall we go?”

  “Go where?” demanded Alexandrovna, upset.

  “Go to my apartment where my telepath and my lieutenant are guarding Quarfar. You said that you wanted to interview him directly.”

  “But Mr. Chairman—your apartment—do you consider that secure confinement?”

  Responded Methuen, arising, “It is humane confinement, and Quarfar is at least as human as we are, and there is some evidence that he should be accorded high-courtesy status. You may have been informed that the batwing creature, Nar-far, has already escaped from stringently secure confinement. If now we lose Quarfar, we would have lost him anyway.”

  An attendant interrupted: “Captain Methuen, another member of your task force has arrived. She is an astrophysicist from Senevendia.”

  “Send her in, by all means,” Methuen ordered.

  Alexandrovna uttered, “Captain Methuen?” It was only a one-rank difference; but correctly in her eyes, it was a sort of orbital jump.

  At the apartment, Quarfar was displaying acute interest in celestial geography. He and Dorita and Zorbin were gathered close around a card table on which the lieutenant had spread charts pulled out of an attache case which he regularly carried. For starters, he pointed to a star chart whose right ascensions ranged from zero to twelve o’clock, while the declinations ranged from ninety degrees to zero—a full half of the northern sky.

  “This,” he explained to Quarfar (with Dorita mind-translating and learning as she went), “is not a technical astrogation chart; that would be too confusing for a beginner at thi
s. You are looking at a chart of the stars and constellations in our sky, prepared for use by amateur and professional astronomers and other star-lovers who study the sky from our planet Erth.” He hand-swept the chart, which ranged from Cassiopeia to Ursa Major, from Pegasus to Leo Minor, all the way down to the near-equatorial constellations like Pisces and the top part of Orion and also Canis Minor and Cancer and Leo.

  Poring over the chart, with the spear across his lap, Quarfar mumbled, “It is very hard to understand. I see straight lines radiating out from a center at that star” (he indicated Polaris); “the lines have markings at the bottom ends” (they were numbered lh, 2h, and so on up to 12h); “and I also see curved lines crossing the radial lines, and the curved lines have markings at both ends” (80°, 70°, and so on down to 0°). “What wall this?”

  “Here,” said Zorbin on an inspiration, “I can do something which will help you.” Pulling a scissors out of his marvelous attache case, he clipped all the border material off the chart so it became the simple half-circle of the northern sky from east to west looking toward Camelopardalis and Lynx. He then bowed the chart inward so that it became half of a hemisphere with the stars on the inside, and he fastened it that way with a length of tape. Then, tape-fastening the half-hemisphere to the table so that it made half a bowl with Polaris down at its apex, he told Quarfar: “Look down upon that— and it will be rather as the sky would look if you were looking upward.”

  Peering down, Quarfar murmured, “I begin to see. It is like the sky of Dora, only different stars. Is your star on this chart?”

  “No, it can’t be. The chart shows how this quarter of the heavens looks to us, here on Erth; and we are too close to our sun for the sun to be shown. Let me demonstrate that.” Producing a stylus, Zorbin held it erect with its writing point on the celestial north pole, close to Polaris, and its rekamatic eraser end in the air about at the level of the celestial equator. “That,” he said, pointing to the eraser, “would be Erth—us—and our sun on this scale would be right next to it.”