“It may be a defensive reaction.”
“True,” Pilch said. “But it must be considered in conjunction with what else we know. The three Siren worlds appear sufficient evidence that the goal of the species is to take over all available space for itself. It has high mobility as a species, and evidently can cover any territory that becomes available to it with startling speed. As it spreads, all other life forms present are converted to harmless parasites. This again, whether it’s an instinctive process or a deliberate one, suggests the Siren is a being which tolerates only its own kind. Its apparent hospitality is a trap. It isn’t a predator; it makes no detectable use of other forms of life. But it interrupts their evolutionary development and, in effect, eliminates them from the environment.”
Trigger nodded slowly. “It’s not a good picture.”
“It’s a damning picture,” said Pilch. “Translated to human terms, this is, by every evaluation, a totally selfish, paranoid, treacherous, indiscriminately destructive species, a deadly danger to any other species it encounters. What real argument for its preservation can be made?”
Trigger gave her a brief smile.
“I’ll argue that the picture is wrong!” she said. “Or, anyway, it’s incomplete. If the Sirens, or their instincts, simply wanted to eliminate other creatures, there’d be no need for that very complicated process of turning them into parasites. One good chromosomal error for each new species they came across, and there’d be no next generation of that species around to annoy them!”
“Yes,” Pilch said. “That’s one reason, perhaps the only substantial reason so far, for not being too hasty about the Sirens.” She paused. “Have you been getting any encouraging reports on the physical side of the investigation?”
Trigger shook her head. “Not recently. The fact is, the labs are licked—though some of them won’t admit it yet.”
“What we’ve learned about the specimen,” said Pilch, “indicates they’ll be forced to admit it eventually. If it weren’t basically a psi problem, all the talent you’ve rounded up and put to work should have defanged the Sirens before this. The problem presumably will have to be solved on the psi level, if it’s to be solved at all.”
“It does seem so,” Trigger agreed. She hesitated. “I’m trying to keep the labs plugging away a while longer mainly to gain time. If it’s official that they’ve given up, the push to sterilize the Siren worlds will start again.”
“It may be necessary to resort to that eventually,” said Pilch. “They can’t be left at large as they are. Even if the closest watch is maintained on those three worlds, something might go wrong.”
“Yes, I know. It still would be a mistake though,” Trigger said. “Exterminating them might seem necessary because we hadn’t been able to think of a good solution. But it would be a mistake, and wrong.”
“You’re convinced of it?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
Trigger shook her head. “I don’t know. Since I became unaddicted, I haven’t even liked the Sirens much. It’s not that I dislike them—I simply feel they’re completely alien to me.”
“How do you react now to the euphoria effect?” Pilch asked. Trigger shrugged.
“It’s an agreeable feeling. But I know it’s an effect, and that makes it an agreeable feeling I’d sooner not have. It doesn’t exactly bother me, but I certainly don’t miss it when it’s not there.”
Pilch nodded. “There’ve been a few other occasions,” she remarked, “when you’ve acted in a way that might have appeared dead wrong to any other rational human being. It turned out you were right.”
“I know. You think I’m right about this?”
“I’m not saying that. But I feel your conviction is another reason for not coming to overly hurried conclusions about the Sirens.” Pilch indicated the container. “What plans do you have for the specimen now?”
“I’m beginning to run a little short of plans,” Trigger admitted. “But I’ll try the Old Galactics next. They’re a kind of psi creature themselves, and they’re good at working with living things. So I’ll take the specimen to them.”
Pilch considered. “Not a bad idea. They’re still on Maccadon?”
“Very probably. They were there six months ago, the last time I visited Mantelish’s garden. They weren’t planning to move.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Next ship out. Some time this afternoon.”
Pilch nodded. “I’ll be passing by Maccadon four days from now. I’ll drop in then and contact you. And don’t look so glum. We’re not at the end of our rope. If it seems the Old Galactics can’t handle the Sirens, I’ll still have a few suggestions to make.”
“Very glad to hear it!”
“And while we’re on Maccadon,” Pilch continued, “I’ll have you equipped with a mind shield. “A mind shield?” Trigger looked dubious. “I know they’re all using them in the labs, but . . . well, I had to wear one for a while last year. I didn’t like it much.”
“This will be a special design,” Pilch told her. “It won’t inconvenience you. If you’re going to start escorting the specimen around again, you should have a good solid shield, just in case. We know that now.”
III
In the rolling green highlands south of the city of Ceyce on Maccadon, Trigger’s friend Professor Mantelish maintained a private botanical garden. It was his favorite retreat when he wanted to relax, though he didn’t manage to get there often. Trigger herself would drop in now and then and stay for a week or two, sleeping in the room reserved for her use in the big white house which stood near the center of the garden.
The garden was where the Old Galactics lived. Only Trigger and Pilch knew they were there. Mantelish might have suspected it, though he’d never said so. Very few other people knew even of their existence. They’d had a great culture once, but it had been destroyed in a vast war which was fought and over with in the Milky Way before men learned how to dig mammoth pits. Not many Old Galactics survived that period, and they’d been widely scattered and out of contact, so that they had only recently begun to gather again. The garden appeared to be their reassembly area, and a whole little colony of them was there by now, arriving by mostly mysterious methods from various regions of the galaxy. That any at all of the fierce race which had attacked their culture still existed was improbable. The Old Galactics had formidable powers; and when they finally decided something needed to be eliminated, they were very thorough and patient about it.
Communication between them and humans was at best a laborious process. Trigger had done them a service some time before, and had learned how to conduct a conversation with Old Galactics on that occasion. They seemed to live on a different time scale. When you wanted to talk to them, you didn’t try to hurry it.
So when she arrived at the garden with the Siren, she went first to her room in the house, steered the container on its gravity float to a table, settled it down on the tabletop and switched off the float. Then she unpacked, taking her time and putting everything away, arranging books she’d brought along on the shelves beside others she’d left here on her last visit. Afterwards, Mantelish’s housekeeper brought a lunch to the room, and Trigger ate that slowly and thoughtfully. Finally she selected a book and sat down with it.
All this time, she’d been letting the Old Galactic with whom she was best acquainted know she was here, and that she had a problem. She didn’t push it, but simply brought the idea up now and then and let it, so to speak, drift around for a moment. Shortly after she’d settled down with the book, she got an acknowledgment.
The form it took was the image of one of the big trees in the garden, which came floating up in her mind. It wasn’t the tree the Old Galactic had been occupying when she was here last, but they changed quarters now and then. She sent him a greeting, slipped the book into her jacket pocket, and left the room, towing the Siren container behind her.
By then, it was well into the spring afternoon. T
hree Tainequa gardeners were working near the great tree as she approached, small brown-skinned men, members of a little clan Mantelish had coaxed into leaving its terraced valley on Tainequa and settling on Maccadon to look after his collection. Trigger smiled and said hello to them; and they smiled back and then stood watching thoughtfully as she went on toward the tree, selected a place where she could sit comfortably among its roots, grounded the container, and took the book from her pocket.
When she looked up, the three Tainequas were walking quietly off along the path she’d come, carrying their tools, and in a moment they’d disappeared behind some shrubbery. Trigger wasn’t surprised. The Tainequa valley people were marvelously skilled and versatile gardeners—entirely too good at their craft, in fact, not to understand very well that Mantelish’s botanical specimens flourished to an extent even their talented efforts didn’t begin to explain. And while they knew nothing about Old Galactics, they did believe in spirits, good and evil.
If they’d thought the local spirits were evil, the outrageous salary Mantelish was obliged to pay the clan couldn’t have kept it on Maccadon another hour. Benevolent spirits, however, are also best treated with respect by mortal man. The Tainequas worked diligently elsewhere in the garden, but they kept their distance from the great trees which obviously needed no care from them anyway. And when Trigger sat familiarly down beside one, any Tainequa in sight went elsewhere. She wasn’t quite sure what they thought her relationship with the spirits was, but she knew they were in some awe of her.
Under the circumstances, that was convenient. She didn’t want anyone around to distract her. Actually, the Old Galactics did almost all the real work of carrying on the conversation, but she made it easier by remaining simultaneously relaxed and attentive and not letting her thoughts stray. So while she was looking down at the book on her knees, she wasn’t reading. Her eyes, unfocused, blinked occasionally at nothing. She’d been invited to come; she’d come, and was waiting.
She waited, without impatience. Until presently:
Describe the problem.
She didn’t sense it as words but as meaning, and sensed at the same time that there was more than one of them nearby, her old acquaintance among them. They liked the great trees of the garden as dwellings, their substance dispersed through the substance of the tree, flowing slowly through it like sap. They had their own natural solid shape when they chose to have it. And sometimes they took on other shapes for various purposes. Now a number of them had gathered near the base of the tree, still out of sight within it, to hear what she wanted.
She began thinking about the Sirens. The small one here in its container, and its giant relatives, mysterious and beautiful organisms, spread about three worlds in towering forests. She thought of how humans had encountered the Sirens and discovered how dangerous they were to other life, so dangerous that their complete extermination was beginning to look like the only logical way of dealing with them, and of her feeling that this would be totally wrong even if it seemed in the end to be inevitable. She didn’t try to organize her thinking too much: what would get through to the Old Galactics were general impressions. They’d form their own concepts from that.
What do you want done?
She thought of the possibility that the Sirens had intelligence, and of reaching that intelligence and coming to an understanding with them so they would stop being uselessly destructive. Or, if they were creatures capable only of acting out of instinct, then ways might be found to modify them until they were no longer dangerous. The Old Galactics were great scientists in their own manner, which wasn’t too similar to the human manner; and perhaps, Trigger’s thoughts suggested, they would be able to succeed with the Sirens where humans so far had failed. She thought about the difficulties Pilch’s xenotelepaths had encountered in trying to contact her specimen on the mental level, and of the fact that most humans had to be protected by psi blocks or mind shields against Siren euphoria.
There was stillness for a while then. She knew she’d presented the matter sufficiently, so she simply waited again. About an hour and a half had passed since she first sat down under the tree, which meant that from the Old Galactics’ point of view they’d been having a very brisk conversational exchange.
By and by, something was told her.
Trigger nodded. “All right,” she said aloud. She switched on the container’s gravity float, moved it so that it stood next to the base of the big tree, and there grounded it again. Then she shut off the psi block, turned the front side transparent, opened the top, and sat down on a root nearby from where she could watch the Siren.
The euphoric effect became noticeable in a few seconds, strengthened gradually, then remained at the same level, it was always pleasurable, though everybody seemed to experience it in an individual manner. For Trigger it usually had been a light, agreeable feeling, which seemed a perfectly natural way to feel when she had it—a sense of well-being and contentment, an awareness that it came from being around Sirens, and a corresponding feeling of liking for them. In the course of time, that had been quite enough to produce emotional addiction in her; and other people had been much more directly and strongly affected. “That’s it,” she said now, for the Old Galactics’ benefit.
There was no response from them; and time passed again, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes. Then something began to emerge from the bark of the big tree above the container.
Trigger watched it. In its solid form, an Old Galactic looked something like a discolored sausage; and this was what now appeared to be moving out from the interior of the tree. It was a very slow process. It took a minute or two before Trigger could make out that this wasn’t her acquaintance, who was sizable for his kind, but a much smaller Old Galactic, probably not weighing more than half a pound. It got clear of the tree at last, moved down a few inches until it was level with the top of the container, curved over to it, and started gliding down inside. Eventually then the sausage shape reached the base of the Siren, touched it, began melting into it.
Something else was said to Trigger. She hesitated questioningly a moment, then placed her wrist against the side of the root on which she was sitting and left it there. A minute or two afterwards, a coolness touched the inside of her wrist. She couldn’t see what caused it, but she knew. She also knew from experience that it harmed a human body no more than it harmed a tree to have an Old Galactic’s substance dispersed through it; they were unnoticeable, and if there was anything wrong with the body when they entered, they would take care of it before they left, precisely as they tended to the botanical specimens in Mantelish’s garden.
In this case, they weren’t concerned about Trigger’s health, which was excellent. But they evidently felt, as had Pilch, that if she was going to be involved with a Siren, she should have the protection of a mind shield; and an Old Galactic specialist was now to begin providing her with their equivalent of one. He should be finished with the job in a few days. Trigger asked some questions about it, was given explanations, and presently agreed then to let the specialist go ahead.
The rest of the afternoon passed uneventfully, as far as she was concerned. They’d told her after a while to restore the psi block and close the container. She was glad to do it. It was unlikely that a Tainequa would approach this section of the garden again today and get within range of the euphoria effect, but one never knew just what might happen if an area was ex posed to the effect for any extended period of time. After that, the Old Galactics ignored her. She read a while, stretched out in the grass near the tree for a nap, read some more. Eventually it was getting near evening, and there still had been no indication that the Old Galactics intended to interrupt whatever they were doing. Trigger went to the garden house, came back with her supper, a sleeping bag, and a few more books. She ate, read until dark, got into the bag, and fell asleep.
She dreamed presently that she was back in a great Siren forest on a faraway world, swimming in the euphoria experience, but now frightened by it bec
ause she was aware she was becoming addicted. She made a violent effort to escape, and the effort brought her awake.
She knew where she was immediately then. A cloud bank covered the sky, with the starblaze gleaming through here and there; the garden lay quiet and shadowy around her. But the sense of Siren euphoria hadn’t faded with the dream.
Trigger turned over, slipped partly out of the sleeping bag, and sat up. She couldn’t make out the Siren container too well in the shade of the great tree, but she could see that it had been opened; and the psi block obviously was switched off. She had a moment of alarm. Then Old Galactic thought brushed slowly past her.
They weren’t addressing her, and she couldn’t make out any meaning. But she saw now that several dark sausage shapes of varying sizes were on the container. A vague thought pulse touched her mind again. It was ridiculous to think of Old Galactics becoming excited about anything; but Trigger had the impression that the little group on the container was as close to excitement as it could get. One of them evidently touched the psi block control then because the euphoria effect went out.
She sat there a while longer watching them and wondering what they were doing; but nothing much happened and she had no more thought impressions. Presently they began to move back to the big tree and into it. The last one shifted the control that closed the container before turning to follow his companions. Trigger got down into the bag again and went back to sleep. When she woke up next, it was cool dawn in the garden, everything looking pale and hazy. And the Old Galactics were speaking to her.
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 213