by Jerry
None of the Get understood any of this, and they stirred and muttered in their cluster. The forensicist proposed immediate annihilation of the planet. No one agreed, but still—But still, how could such persons live?
Among Moolkri Mawkri’s people, person could not be separated from mission. They were the same thing. What a person was was what he did. It was the foreseen need for mission operators that determined how a person was nurtured; it was the nature of their aptitudes that decided which was chosen for what purpose. There was no such thing as a split personality in the Get. There was no one who was unhappy with his life. Moolkri could not play a role. He was always typecast. He could never attempt to change his image. He was his image.
The Get of Moolkri Mawkri came from a planet of the star Procyon, blue-white and burning. It was a deadly dangerous star, and it was only the dense, damp clouds in their atmosphere that kept the radiation from cremating every one of them at birth. Humans, of course, were physically repulsive to them. Humans did not have armored claws or vibrissae. Humans had only twelve senses, not nineteen, and two of the senses they did have (“pain and “heat ) seemed ridiculously unimportant to the Get. The Get clustered together, interlocking mouthhooks touching spirades, and murmured to each other reassuringly and lovingly. (They didn’t know it was lovingly; they had no way to relate to each other that was anything but loving.) They shuddered in apprehension at the physical qualities of humans. Humans seemed so deformed.
Of course, even the Get sometimes fell short of physical perfection. Moolkri himself had a birth defect that damaged his second instar. Their wisest evaluator lacked a limb, and so he would never be a breeder. (Therefore, he would never want to.) But all of the Get had the power to change their shape when they wanted to. Humans did not seem to have that power. They were condemned to inhabit forever the bodies they were born to, except for such rude mechanical devices as they used to replace teeth or assist sight or the daubs of paint and odor-producing substances that some humans employed to enhance their natural appearance. This seemed a terrible punishment to the Get.
But they tried not to judge. They had seen other races and, compared to them, none seemed particularly attractive, and most were awful.
East of Arcata the road leaps rivers, looping through the foothills. There stands a long, low clapboard building with some of the windows replaced with plywood. It is more than a hundred years old. It wears its history in every scar. All day the logging trucks thunder down past it out of the Klamath Mountains, continuing their long-term systematic eradication of the redwood forests. Three of them have gone out of control and plunged through one corner of the building or another in the past thirty years.
No one wants to live in this house; it is like living next to the number one pin in a bowling alley. The porch stops short at the northwest corner. An eight-hundred-horsepower diesel tractor carried that piece of it away in 1968. The nine-foot log it was towing minced the driver’s head; you can still see stains on the clapboard. The sign in front of the house now says:
Klamath Valley Center
for Development of
Human Potential
One of Moolkri’s drones had buzzed all around it for more than seven days, cataloguing the human creatures as well as the other fauna of the area (dragonflies, moths, rabbits, twenty-three kinds of birds, forty relitiles and amphibia, microorganisms past counting). There were sixteen of the humans, and they were playing a game.
The Get understood games. They enjoyed play. They even understood consciousness-raising games; those were the only games they ever played, except for athletic ones like vibrissa trilling and obstacle scuttling. They discovered the name of the human game was “Primal Weekend, which meant nothing to them, but watching the game itself was a grand spectator sport. The cluster squirmed itself into such position that all several score of them could see clearly into one monitor or another. They studied the pictures the drone was transmitting with, for the first time since they had approached this messy little G-type star, a certain empathy and joy.
Some of the aspects of the game were peculiarly ludicrous to them. Not threatening. Just funny, and they laughed and laughed, in their way. (They did not know that some of the aspects would have been ludicrous to most humans, too.. . not necessarily the same aspects.) For instance, there was a game in which fifteen of the players locked arms and braced hips in a tight ring, while the sixteenth, sobbing and fighting, struggled to get into the group. How funny they thought the notion that any group might try to keep a member out! Another game involved a forty-one-year-old male player who rinsed out a pair of his underdrawers in a bucket while all the others squatted in a circle around him, calling out words of encouragement and love. (He had soiled himself in a passion of weeping and writhing a few minutes before.) The symbolism of this game was perfectly apparent to the Get, and they responded not with laughter but with understanding and joy.
But other games troubled the Get immensely.
The weekenders played the game called Psychodrama a lot. In one of the episodes two humans squatted facing each other, again in the circle of the ring. “I’m your wife, said one cheerfully. “I castrate you. Her voice grew more threatening. “You’re not a real man! She spat the words. “If you were half a man you’d beat me black and blue!
“1 want to, I want to, sobbed the male player. “I can’t, I can’t.
“Then I’m going to leave you, shrilled the female one, and, “You mustn’t, you mustn’t, wept the male.
The Get revolved uneasily, changing grips and communicating fearfully. They could not take their eyes off the monitors. They felt ill and damaged, in ways they had never felt before. They listened with sick fascination to the translations of the audio track: “Kill her, Ben! shouted the players in the ring. “Walk out on her! Kick her ass off! Hey, Ben, slap her with the plastic bat!
Walk out on her?
The Get shivered. They could find no empathy whatever in the situation. Even their empathizers merely shook in fear. A mated couple planning to split? How could that be?
Among Moolkri and Mawkri’s people, you see, such a thing is impossible. It is not statute or custom. It is natural law. When a seed planter like Moolkri intromits an egg ripener like Mawkri, the fertilization takes the form of a sort of allergic reaction. The Get that result are, in a sense, only hives.
Intromission plays more than a merely reproductive function with them, as screwing does with us. But the biology of it is ironclad. At first sexual encounter each partner builds up specific antigens. They cannot produce offspring without them. They can never have sexual intercourse with any other. The antigens produced from any other mating, or from intercourse with an unmated person, would kill them immediately in great, bloated, pustulant pain.
There is therefore no question of sexual morality among the Get or their planet-gotten. It is a boy-meets-girl world, a Cinderella planet on which when the prince discovers that She Is The One, they do indeed live happily together ever after, or else they do not live happily (or at all). They do not have the option of promiscuity. They have only one source of sexual pleasure. One partner for life.
And of course they only produce a Get once-subsequent intromisstons are sterile, though a lot of fun—but as there are up to five hundred individuals in each get (more than half dying in the first half hour), the race goes on and grows.
So the Get were shocked and terrified, and some of them even made physically ill, by this inexplicable vice their specimens displayed. Their medical members were kept furiously busy, scuttling around the cluster to tend the damaged ones, when they were not too damaged to function themselves.
Moolkri and Mawkri’s people are no better than human beings. Their first reaction was total revulsion and a wish to destroy, like the stamp of a four-year-old foot on a spider. Their collective claws were trembling near the clasps for the planet busters, when one of the smallest of the Get, and usually one of the quietest, piped up, sobbing:
“But they can’
t help it.
Through a warped window both sides look strange to each other. Humans looked strange to Moolkri Mawkri’s Get. Now consider how strange the Get look to us:
“They can’t help it is a concept none of them had ever heard before.
They chattered wonderingly for a while, and as they talked, the claws withdrew from the buster clasps. They cant help it. It was so strange a thought that it seemed to excuse almost any perversion, even promiscuity. And then an observer, restlessly examining the environment, cried, “Look what they’re doing! And they all quieted and stared at the monitors, still faithfully conveying what was happening at the Klamath Valley Center for the Development of Human Potential, and there they found an empathy they had not expected.
One corner of the building was an add-on shed of tar-paper and sheet metal, extending over a concrete pool.
A century and more before, some hungry and hopeful men had channeled a creek into a sluice in order to pick flakes of gold out of the water. They hadn’t found much, but they had kept trying, relays of them for a couple of decades, and each one had deepened and widened the channel and the pool.
Now the gold was all gone, geologists having tracked the stream to its source and ripped out the auriferous rock that had given its flakes to the stream, but the pool was still there. The Center had cemented its bottom and covered its top and put in a heater. Now it was kept at hot blood temperature (the Get liked that, it reminded them of home), and in it all sixteen of the humans (their coverings gone, only their hides still enclosing them) were knotted and seething together in the amniotic waters (the Get liked that too, it reminded them of their own cluster). The name of the game the people played in the water was float. Naked and touching, they formed a chain. “Pass er down, cried the ones at the lower end, and at the top two humans picked up a third and slid her passively, relaxedly, half floating and half supported, touched and soothed and caressed, from hand to hand through the warm pool.
The Get chittered among themselves. It was almost like a Get cluster, the touching and the support. It was almost inviting enough to join; and perhaps it was not the fault of the humans that they did not have mouthhooks or spiracles so that they could join together properly.
“They can’t be all bad, mused the little Get-sibling aloud. And he spoke for all of them.
“I think, said Moolkri, reaching over to glance at Mawkri for concurrence, “that we should study these people more. I do not know what to do, he added.
“We cannot stay very long, warned a rememberer. They all knew it was true. They had been a long time traveling. The Get was ripening, it was time to return home and seek partners.
And still they could not leave yet, they had to learn more. The drones were busy, busy, and the far-watchers turned their electronic sensors onto the world of human society (Washington, Moscow, Peking) and human science (Arecibo, Tyuratam-baikonur, and the Moon) and human relations (bedroom, bathroom, bus). Many things happened while they watched. A war broke out. It was in a part of the planet that none of the Get would really have thought worth fighting over, except that it held some large reserves of liquid hydrocarbon. (“But so easy to carry it somewhere else, marveled a commenter.) Nevertheless tens of thousands of humans died. Millions were hurt, or frightened, or impaired in some way. This part of the event amused the Get. It was so silly. (“But I wonder if they think it’s funny, queried the little one, laughing.) Drought and famine struck large patches of three continents. The Get observed this mass death with curiosity, but their emotions were not involved. After all, they were used to half their siblings dying before the rest of any get were old enough to preen themselves.
And then they turned off the far-watchers and recalled the drones, and they clustered and thought before they spoke.
“Human beings, said the Get member in charge of summarizing, “are clearly self-destructive. It is what their psychology’ calls a “death wish.” Unchecked, they will wipe themselves out.
“Talk sense, begged the little sibling. (Moolkri gave him a playful, partly disciplinary bite.) “No, I mean it, the little one went on. “They act as if they’re going to destroy themselves. But, you know? They never have.
Ajudger responded: “That is true. A theorizer added, “What is causality for us may not be for them.
This concept caused consternation among the Get, but it seemed to fit the facts. “What then shall we do? asked Moolkri. “We don’t have very much time. Mawkri has stopped accepting intromission. She is near the time of her death, and I cannot be far.
“We’ll miss you, said several of the Get together, sorrowful not for their parents but for themselves. “Let us then decide.
A proposer stated: “We have several choices. We can exterminate them. Instant contractile movements from all, signifying no. “We can help them to be more like us—but how? I have no proposal for this. Quivering movements from the cluster, signifying inability to respond, a request to go on. “Or, he said, “we can leave them alone.
“Stale, stale, murmured the Get. But the judger piped up:
“I think not. Let us hear more.
“We can go away without any further intervention at all, went on the proposer. “W’e can leave one of our drones in orbit, programmed for Home. Then if one of their craft should someday find it, and if they wish, they can come to us. If not-not.
Mawkri cried feebly: “But a mother must care for all!
“Mawkri, said the proposer, trembling, “your care has given us life. But the humans are not like us. They must make their mistakes if they will. It is how they learn.
And the judger confirmed wonderingly, “It is how they learn. We can do nothing to help. We can only wish them well.., and wait.
And so the ship shaped like an artichoke turned on its axis, swallowed all its satellites but one, and retreated toward the constellation Canis Minor. And not an eye, not an interferometer, not a Schmidt ever saw it go.
There is still another version, in which Moolkri Mawkri’s Get never reach Earth at all. In fact, they never leave their home planet. None of their people do. All the proliferating gets stay locked and squirming in their dense, damp viny nests until they ripen and seek partners. Technology? Yes, they build technology. They learn the workings of their own cellular biology and the devising of medicines. They learn to keep alive that half of every get which would otherwise die. They learn to tame the tangle vines, and finally to live without them, for there is then not enough space on their world for any kind of life at all, except their own. They learn to tunnel the planet’s crust for living space and to harness the scattered heat of Procyon to drive engines to make new nests. They devise a sort of plastic-made from their excrement, their bodies once they have died, and the simple elements of the rocks-and they create new living spaces from it. They never reach out into space. They never taste the stars. They never got to Earth. They live forever (or until this version runs out of program) locked into their one small world; and nothing that happens anywhere else has anything to do with them. They do not kill, or spare, or help, or trust. And they do not receive any of those things from others.
But what is the use of a life that never reaches out to touch another? Never to hurt or help? Never to feel or even to see? No, it is not a very interesting version. We never play that one anymore.
“. . . FOR A SINGLE YESTERDAY”
George R.R. Martin
Keith was our culture, what little we had left. He was our poet and our troubadour, and his voice and his guitar were our bridges to the past. He was a time-tripper too, but no one minded that much until Winters came along.
Keith was our memory. But he was also my friend.
He played for us every evening after supper. Just beyond sight of the common house, there was a small clearing and a rock he liked to sit on. He’d wander there at dusk, with his guitar, and sit down facing west. Always west; the cities had been east of us. Far east, true, but Keith didn’t like to look that way. Neither did the rest of us, to tell
the truth.
Not everybody came to the evening concerts, but there was always a good crowd, say three-fourths of the people in the commune. We’d gather around in a rough circle, sitting on the ground or lying in the grass by ones and twos. And Keith, our living hi-fi in denim and leather, would stroke his beard in vague amusement and begin to play.
He was good, too. Back in the old days, before the Blast, he’d been well on his way to making a name for himself. He’d come to the commune four years ago for a rest, to check up on old friends and get away from the musical rat race for a summer. But he’d figured on returning.
Then came the Blast. And Keith had stayed. There was nothing left to go back to. His cities were graveyards full of dead and dying, their towers melted tombstones that glowed at night. And the rats—human and animal—were everywhere else.
In Keith, those cities still lived. His songs were all of the old days, bittersweet things full of lost dreams and loneliness. And he sang them with love and longing. Keith would play requests, but mostly he stuck to his kind of music. A lot of folk, a lot of folk-rock, and a few straight rock things and show tunes. Lightfoot and Kristofferson and Woody Guthrie were particular favorites. And once in a while he’d play his own com-positions, written in the days before the Blast. But not often.
Two songs, though, he played every night. He always started with “They Call the Wind Maria” and ended with “Me and Bobby McGee.” A few of us got tired of the ritual, but no one ever objected. Keith seemed to think the songs fit us, somehow, and nobody wanted to argue with him.
Until Winters came along, that is. Which was in a late-fall evening in the fourth year after the Blast.
His first name was Robert, but no one ever used it, although the rest of us were all on a first name basis. He’d introduced himself as Lieutenant Robert Winters the evening he arrived, driving up in a jeep with two other men. But his Army didn’t exist anymore, and he was looking for refuge and help.