The Candle of Distant Earth

by Alan Dean Foster

  Occasionally when they were out strolling along the beach, they would encounter another K’eremu. Apprised of the return of the prodigal cephalopod Sequi’aranaqua’na’senemu and of the presence of visiting aliens in their midst, these locals would hurry to scurry away from oncoming human and dog. When surprised, or hailed, sometimes they would reply with a gruff hiss and an emitted bubble or two before vanishing along the nearest escape route.

  “They really don’t like company, do they?” George commented one afternoon when not one but two local residents utilized all ten limbs to the max to avoid having to confront him and his tall friend.

  Walker watched the second K’eremu disappear over a slight hillock fragrant with what looked like acres of rosebushes that had been stomped flat. “They don’t even like each other, remember? That’s why we’ve never seen more than two of them together at any one time.”

  The fur on his feet slick with seawater and bearing clumps of black sand, George trotted along easily beside his human. “Despite what Sque told us about how automated their society is, wouldn’t they have to congregate together to build things? Like a house, or a path, or maybe civilization?”

  Walker shrugged and tugged his shirt collar closer around him. An intermittent breeze was blowing in off the gunmetal gray sea, and he was cold. “I wouldn’t wager against anything the K’eremu try to do, or the way they choose to do it. I guess it’s easier for them to deal with automatons than with each other.”

  George paused to sniff something hard-shelled and dead, snorted, and resumed his walk. “It’s their innate sense of superiority. Individual as much as racial. Collectively, they’re convinced the K’eremu are the sharpest, smartest species around. And each K’eremu is sharper and smarter than its neighbor. It’s a wonder they’ve cooperated enough to advance as far as they have.”

  “Yeah, cooperated.”

  The dog frowned up at his friend. “You said that funny. What’re you thinking, biped?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing really.” He looked out to sea. A great bluish-green bulk was heaving itself slowly above the waves, as if the accumulated wastes of a million years had suddenly acquired sentience and decided to belch themselves surfaceward. The misshapen mass was festooned with scraggly lengths of scabrous brown growths that writhed and twitched with shocking, independent life. At a distance, it was impossible to tell if they were appendages, parasites, or something unidentifiable.

  “You’d think at least one or two of her old neighbors would’ve dropped by to congratulate Sque on surviving her abduction, and to welcome her home.”

  George grunted knowingly. “She wouldn’t have let them in. I’m telling you, Marc, it’s one thing to label somebody as antisocial; it’s another to see it applied to an entire species. When a strange dog wanders into your territory, you have to at least make initial contact before you can decide whether it’s friend or foe.” With his snout he indicated the widespread, artfully concealed dwellings that inhabited the coast they were passing. “There’s sure no equivalent of sociable butt-sniffing here.”

  “No butts, either.” Idly, Walker kicked at something half-buried in the sand, jumped back as it shot into the air, spun several times on its longitudinal axis while spraying water in all directions, and landed hard on the sand. Whereupon it promptly scurried on a dozen or more cilia down to the water’s edge. There it crouched, looking like an ambulatory rubber glove, and spat at them as it glared up out of a single flattened red eye.

  The clouds broke, revealing K’erem’s spectacular alien sky. The planet’s strange sun beamed down, warming Walker with its eerie violet glow while electrifying the normally dark and clammy landscape with shocking wine-colored highlights. As always, it had a profound effect on Walker, though much less so on the largely color-blind George.

  “This isn’t such a bad world,” the commodities trader observed. “At least, not when the sun is out.”

  “No, it’s not,” George agreed without hesitation.

  It was enough to halt Walker in his tracks. “What did you say?”

  The dog sat back on his haunches and stared out at the alien, lavender-tinted waves. “It’s not such a bad place. Reminds me of the city on a late autumn afternoon.”

  Walker knelt beside him. “Those are about the first kind words I’ve heard you say about any place we’ve been. What’s changed?”

  The light wind racing in off the ocean rippled the dog’s fur. He shrugged diffidently. “I dunno. Maybe I’m adapting. Maybe I’m resigned. Maybe I’m losing my mind. They say travel is broadening.”

  Grinning, Walker reached over to scratch his friend’s neck. “The first space-dog. Harbinger of a new species.”

  “Hairbinger, you mean.”

  They stayed like that for a long while, man and dog, the former with his horizons broadened, the latter with his intelligence elevated, contemplating a sheet of water that was farther from the familiar wavelets of Lake Michigan than either of them could have imagined as recently as four years ago. Then they rose and, each lost in his own thoughts, made their way back to the compact, lowceilinged home of their inherently irascible, intrinsically reluctant, many-limbed hostess.

  Sque was waiting for them when they returned. That is to say, she was in her domicile when they got back. As to whether or not she cared if they returned or if they happened to drown in the merlot-shaded sea was a matter for conjecture.

  They were greeted first by Braouk, who was sitting beneath his usual stony overhang letting the occasional burst of purple sunshine warm his fur. Noting their approach, he bestirred himself, rose up on all four supportive limbs, and lumbered toward them.

  “The charming Sque, I have been advised, has information. Of what nature she would not tell me, but insisted on waiting until you returned and all could hear it together.”

  Walker’s heart thumped. He glanced excitedly down at his companion. “Finally! Some news regarding the hunt for Earth, I bet.”

  “Some news, anyway,” conceded George, his reaction more guarded than that of his friend.

  Wanting all three of her companions and visitors to simultaneously learn the details of what she had to tell them, as Braouk had said, she exited her dwelling as soon as Walker and George alerted her to their return. She carried nothing with her, unless one counted the usual ribbons of personal adornment. Walker was unable to restrain himself from prompting her.

  “News of the search for our homeworld?” he asked eagerly.

  Metallic gray eyes turned to regard him. Having lived with her for so long, he had learned to recognize certain subtle movements. A swelling here, a tentacle twitch there. At the moment, she seemed ill at ease. That was unusual in and of itself. It did not bode well.

  He was right. “No news of the search for your homeworld, Marcus. And I am very much afraid there will not be any news of the search for your homeworld.” Her body expanded slightly, contracted more slowly as she punctuated her response with an exhalation signifying resignation. “Because there will not be any search for your homeworld.” Reaching up with one appendage, she used it to delicately clean one aural opening. “At least, none that involve the K’eremu.”

  Walker swallowed. He felt as if someone had kicked him in the throat. “I don’t understand, Sque. Why not? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing is ‘wrong,’ Marcus.” Though the tone of her voice did not change, the intensity of her feeling was underlined by the fact that she had used his personal name twice in as many responses. “The K’eremu are simply being the K’eremu.”

  “Slimy bastards.” George made no attempt to hide his bitterness.

  “I assure you that neither epidermal viscosity nor the composition of individual ancestry has anything to do with the decision.”

  Walker suddenly felt sorry for her. As much as was possible for one of her kind, she clearly felt disturbed at having to deliver such bad news. She was K’eremu, but she was also their friend.

  Putting aside his resentment and frustration,
he made himself inquire patiently, “Why won’t your people help us? What do you mean when you say that ‘the K’eremu are simply being the K’eremu’?”

  She gesticulated with three limbs, and this time it was a gesture whose meaning he could not divine. “There is no hostility involved, Marcus. Only characteristic indifference. If the average K’eremu, and those are two terms I assure you are not often used in tandem, is not concerned with his or her neighbor, how can they be expected to involve themselves in the far more alien and complex troubles of others? Especially those of insignificant non-K’eremu primitives?”

  “Is that what you told your authorities we are?” George snarled. It had been a long time since he had heard the dog growl like that, Walker reflected.

  Sque reacted immediately, and in a manner sufficiently unexpected to startle both man and dog. One flexible appendage whipped out and smacked the dog across his snout. So startled was George that he did not even respond with an instinctive bite. Instead, he was knocked back onto his haunches, where he sat, stunned, staring at their hostess.

  “Do you think so little of me, after all this time we have spent in one another’s company?” She swelled up so prodigiously Walker thought she might burst, the expression “bust a gut” having a more literal application among the K’eremu than any other species he had yet encountered. To his relief, the furious bloat rapidly subsided.

  “That may indeed be what you are,” she went on, having brought herself under control once more, “but it is not how I presented you and your case to the relevant segment of K’erem’s scientific establishment. Plainly, my account made no difference to those in a position to act upon it.”

  “What about our part in helping to rescue you,” Walker ventured, “in helping a K’eremu to return home? Did you mention that? You said it would be worth something.”

  “I did indeed allude at length to your humble and unassuming assistance,” she assured him. “It seems to have swayed no opinion. Without a compelling reason to do so, no astronomer of K’erem will expend the time or effort to assist your Niyyuuan and Iollth friends in their attempt to locate your homeworld. That if they wished they could do so I have no doubt. The problem is not execution, but motivation.” A pair of tentacles reached out to wrap around his right leg and squeeze gently. Apologetically, even.

  “I am sorry, Marcus Walker and George. There is nothing more I can do. Rare is the individual K’eremu who can persuade another.”

  “Because each one feels superior to every other one,” a disconsolate George muttered. “A standoff of superciliousness.” He looked up at Walker. “That means there’s no higher court we can appeal to, because none of these squids recognizes another of their kind as having a superior grasp of any situation. How do you convince a pod of conceited egotists to change their minds?”

  “I don’t know,” a dejected Walker muttered. Wind nipped at his ears. “I don’t know.”

  “I sorrow also, for my good friends, at this.” Braouk rested one massive upper tentacle across Walker’s shoulders, lightly stroking George’s back with another. “The K’eremu are not Tuuqalian.”

  “Observations of the obvious don’t help us much.” Shrugging off the caress, George jogged off toward the low alien scrub that dominated the landscape in the vicinity of Sque’s residence. Walker didn’t try to stop him. Let his friend and companion brood in privacy. They’d had little enough of that during these past years traveling.

  He looked back down at Sque. “Is there anything else we can do? Anything that might change the minds of the K’eremu who could help us?”

  Half a dozen appendages waved fluidly in a gesture of substantial import. “You can try putting your case to some of them directly; possibly one at a time, certainly not many, since as you know we are not especially fond of one another’s company.”

  Her suggestion wasn’t exactly encouraging, he decided, but it was a beginning. Certainly it was better than sitting around helplessly bemoaning the fate to which an unkind, uncaring universe had consigned them. From the time he had been introduced to the Vilenjji capture ship, he had taken a proactive role in his own survival. That was how he had conducted his trading of commodities; that was how he had conducted his life. He would not change that now, not even in the face of seemingly indomitable K’eremu obduracy.

  “All right then: we’ll start with one. Can you at least line up an initial interview with an appropriate entity? We’ll try putting our case to the scientific authorities that way, like you say. One at a time.”

  She hesitated, but only briefly. “It may take a little while to make the necessary arrangements, but I think it might be possible.”

  Bending down, he leaned so close to her that she could have touched his face with her speaking tube. “And will you continue to speak on our behalf?”

  “Having only recently returned to it, I dislike the idea of being away from my residence again so soon. But”—and she reached up with an appendage to flick him gently on one cheek—“if nothing else it may prove entertaining. A relief from the tedium of everyday existence is always welcome.”

  “Oh, it won’t be dull, I promise you that.” Straightening, he cupped both hands to his mouth and raised his voice. “George! Get back here! We’re going traveling—again.”

  The route they took several days later was as familiar as their intended destination. There being no facility on all of K’erem dedicated to the (according to the K’eremu way of thinking) unnatural and downright repulsive enterprise of mass assembly, it was decided to hold the meeting Sque had arranged as well as any subsequent ones at the port where they had first set down. The port, at least, was equipped with facilities for the handling and distribution not only of cargo, which was almost entirely dealt with by servicing automatons, but also the occasional odd guest. Such uncommon visitors had to be very odd indeed, Walker reflected as he and his companions disembarked from their transport and entered once more into the facility, given that the K’eremu were not exactly a warm, wildly welcoming folk.

  As he had during the course of his initial arrival at K’erem, he once more had the opportunity to admire and marvel at the smoothly supple bronzed and silvered shapes that comprised his surroundings. Devices and mechanisms extruded silently from or retracted almost sensuously into walls, ceilings, and floor, pulsing with oozing mechanical life. From time to time K’eremu automatons slid, scurried, or shushed past the travelers as they followed Sque deeper into the complex. Walker likened it to strolling through a set of alien internal organs that had been fashioned from several different consistencies and colors of liquid metal.

  Infrequently, they encountered another K’eremu. Espying the visitors, these locals would every so often offer a greeting to Sque. Just as frequently, they ignored her. Argent eyes flicked over human and dog and Tuuqalian. They did not precisely drip contempt. They did not have to. If you were not K’eremu, you barely qualified as sentient. And if you were K’eremu, regardless of profession or specialty or age or education, you were superior to everything and everyone else, including your neighbors. Recalling the arrogant attitudes of certain human teenagers he had met, Walker was thankful he had not been forced to deal with any juvenile K’eremu. Doubtless they raised the description “insufferable” to new heights. Or maybe, he thought, adolescence progressed differently among his hosts. When traveling among alien cultures, anthropomorphism was the first casualty.

  There were three K’eremu waiting for them in an immigration holding chamber just beyond the point where arrivals officially disembarked from or reboarded visiting ships. All three were bedecked with the kind of trashy, glittering individual bodily adornments Walker and his friends were familiar with from time spent in Sque’s similarly gaudy company: K’eremu bling. The slick, shiny skin of two of the aliens was the same yellow-mottled maroon hue as Sque’s, though the patterns differed. The third’s epidermis was a darker red, almost carmine, and marked with mildly eye-catching splotches of yellow that shaded to gold. Sexu
al dimorphism being readily recognizable among the K’eremu, and Walker having been enlightened as to the details by Sque, he duly noted that the trio waiting before them consisted of two females and one male.

  “You should feel honored,” Sque hissed softly up at him. “Rarely do more than two K’eremu come together in person for any purpose.”

  “Then why aren’t there only two?” Walker whispered back at her.

  “Two might never come to a decision. When K’eremu desire to reach a consensus, the number involved in the discussion must always be odd, never even.”

  The trio did not look happy. Dozens of tentacles writhed in annoyance. Introductions were perfunctory and delivered with the same kind of generic irritation Walker and his friends had been subjected to ever since they had made Sque’s acquaintance back on the Vilenjji ship. Accustomed to it, he was able to largely ignore it. Adhering to usual K’eremu practice, formalities were, well, brief.

  “Speak,” snapped the larger of the two females, whose name (greatly shortened like Sque’s for the convenience of inarticulate alien visitors) was Alet. “My time passes, and I can think of at least a hundred things that would be better done with it.”

  Walker looked down at George; George promptly settled his belly down on the shimmering bronzed floor and crossed his front legs. Walker looked at Braouk; the Tuuqalian giant squatted down on his four under-limbs, and Walker realized that yet again it was being left to him to make their case. Clearing his throat, which caused the male member of the impatiently waiting trio to wince visibly, he took a step forward. After a moment’s thought he crouched down, the better to put himself eye level to eye level with the three already visibly indifferent K’eremu.

  “I am—” he began. It was as far as he was allowed to get before he was brusquely interrupted by the female called Mhez.