She said, “That’s not the way they look at it because they feel that crawling on one’s stomach is more ‘natural.’ They feel that experiencing crawling on the ground serves other ‘psychological,’ even spiritual purposes that are important to them. So they are stuck between an old way of moving about and a new way made possible by technology, with each way playing a role in the maintenance and natural evolution of self and community.
“Their solution is to allot time to both ways of moving about. Just as we have to think about organizing our free time, including striking the right balance between presence and absence, they have to strike the right balance between crawling and sitting upright. By scheduling two festivities evenly spaced during every one of their years which feature an ‘exchange,’ they feel they have succeeded in striking the right balance.”
“Amazing,” he said. “There problems are like ours. And their solutions not much different from our either.”
“I’ve learned a lot from them. My idea about the need to organize free time came while I was here. Maybe I owe the idea to them.”
“Amazing,” he repeated.
She added, “I’ve given you a very rough explanation of what goes on. Actually, the reality is somewhat more complicated. You see, while most of the creatures participate in the exchange twice during each of their years, not every creature participates. Those regarded as having special technical skills or as holding especially critical positions or as being too young to benefit from the exchange make exchanges less frequently than twice each year. All make exchanges eventually but different ones make exchanges according to different schedules.
“The teacher, for example, must participate in an exchange only once every five years and, even then, after spending a mere three hundred of their days crawling around on the ground, gets its motorized cart back just three hundred days later at the very next scheduled exchange and then, once it gets the cart back, it keeps it for another five years. And such an arrangement is accepted because the community generally agrees that the teacher has very rare skills and occupies a very critical place in the community; therefore, the creatures feel that the teacher must spend most (but not all) of its time inside of a motorized cart.
“Another exception is the creature you saw sitting on a throne atop the elevated platform in the large room. That creature is regarded by the community as a kind of king. Surrounded by feelings of awe and special reverence, it is able to govern the community. Even so, it is not allowed to spend all of its time atop its collection of motorized carts (or thrones). No, the feeling is that it too must spend time crawling around on its chest plate, but it is given eight years to sit upright and then must crawl around on its belly for only three hundred days.
“Some others are given extended rights to ride the motorized carts. While the teacher did not give me a complete rundown on this, the teacher did tell me that some musicians as well as the architects who plan and supervise the various excavations and constructions of corridors, hideaways, rooms, and doors are given extended rights. There are also sanitary engineers who are given extended rights. There are also experts in charge of sending and searching for signals in space. There are also biologists, botanists, astronomers, paleontologists, physicians, linguists, creatures highly skilled in the making of certain crafts, and others.”
“I wonder too where all these creature live,” Peter asked her. “The maze I wandered through seemed very extensive yet I never once saw any of these creatures. Nor did I see any unmistakable sign of their existence except, of course, for the very fact that the very corridors, rooms, and doors that surrounded me existed. Also the inscriptions existed.
“Wait. Come to think of it, I did get a few indications that living things existed here. While the rabbit and the owl might have been robots, other clues existed. I remember once hearing the noise of something scampering around in what I took to be an adjacent space. And I once heard odd sounds that I now know to be the sounds these creatures make when communicating. And I came once to a room where hot soup was waiting for me. So I naturally wondered if spaces parallel to the ones where I was allowed to wander existed and if that is where these creatures live.”
Sylvia said, “This asteroid is just riddled with rooms and corridors and tunnels of all kinds. The work is ongoing. The excavated soil is taken to the surface and packed down in such a way as to make the excavated soil look like a natural part of the surface. In that way, the asteroid is also reshaped. It is rounder now than it was when the creatures first arrived. Its circumference is also greater than it used to be.”
“But where do the creatures live? Have you ever seen where they live? Has the teacher shown you films about this or talked to you about this?”
Sylvia said, “You have to realize that, as many as the creatures are who live here, they don’t require a lot of space except when they are celebrating one of their holidays.
“While they do need to eat and sleep (they call it ‘going into quiescence’) during a certain part of each of their days, they can do this in surprisingly compact spaces because of all the surfaces they can occupy and also because they like to clump together in heaps.
When the time for quiescence arrives, everyone in possession of a motorized cart, including the teacher and the king, drives their motorized cart into a storage chamber set aside for that purpose. They then climb down off the motorized cart and crawl into fairly small low-ceilinged chambers where they dine on fungi they grow there and sleep piled up in heaps where they don’t take up much room.”
Peter asked, “Have you seen those chambers in person or on film?” She answered, “The teacher let me watch a film taken during a quiescent time. I saw the carapaces piled up, more than can be imagined and yet not quite filling up the space that was excavated for this purpose.”
“It is all so very incredible,” Peter said and added, “They must really like and trust you to tell you as much as they have. They must also have been impressed by the depth and range of your curiosity.”
Sylvia said, “I suppose they (or at least the teacher) was impressed. And I was guided by curiosity. But I was also guided by my sense of duty. Assuming I ever got back to Earth, I wanted to deliver as complete a report of what I found as possible. Just as the sense of duty partly motivated you to make copies of the inscriptions, my sense of duty motivated me, not only to copy inscriptions, but also to ask a lot of questions. I also used my nights to make and correct all of the meticulous notes I took whenever I had the time.”
“There is no doubt that your notes, unless classified, will be a best seller,” Peter said. She smiled at him and said, “Before long, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of notes to add to mine. If publishing our findings is permitted, we can collaborate on writing a book. That way, if a book comes out of it, it will be both of ours either to be proud of or ashamed of.” “In either case, I am sure it will be a best seller,” Peter mused.
Peter added, “I want to talk to your also about the rooms and corridors and inscriptions I found and the ramp you found. I wonder how old these are. For all I know, those might have been ancient relics created long ago by some long-vanished species and not by these creatures. The inscriptions too might have been ancient relics for all I know, written in a language different from theirs, a language they too might not understand. Sylvia, what do you know about the age of those structures and those inscriptions?”
“Well,” Sylvia said, these creatures have been here for a thousand years, after all. When archeologists on Earth find thousand-year-old ruins, they tend to think of those as ancient. If the same sensibilities were applied here and if the corridors, doors, inscriptions and so on turned out to have been created a thousand, nine hundred or eight hundred years ago, then thinking of them as ancient would make sense; yet, even so, it was all a product of their culture and they would know how to read the inscriptions and would probably respect whatever the messages were that were being communicated..
“Besides,” Sylvia added, “the
teacher told me that creatures from their planet visited this asteroid as part of a mapping exercise a couple of times before colonists were sent. I think the first such reconnaissance mission occurred five or even six thousand years ago. Maybe the work of excavating and message writing began way back then.”
“And maybe the ones that first came, even if it was five or six thousand years ago, found this asteroid already riddled with elaborately outfitted underground chambers and mysterious inscriptions,” Peter added.
“That too is possible,” Sylvia said. “I too thought of those possibilities and asked the teacher about them but, when I did, the teacher became increasingly nervous and evasive. It was obvious to me that, though the teacher was willing to tell me a lot, there were limits to what the teacher would tell me, which is not to suggest that I understood why the limits were drawn where they were drawn.”
The two of them had been talking for hours with no sense of how much time had passed, but both knew it was very late and began to worry that they might find it difficult to function the next day if they did not get a little more sleep than the little bit they got at the beginning of the night.
Sylvia brought the problem to Peter’s attention as soon as she came to the realization of how late in the night it had gotten to be. She said, “We still have a little time left for sleeping. I think we better take advantage of that.” And, having said that and without waiting for Peter to reply, she got up out of the chair she was sitting on, removed her robe and set it on the chair, and then slid into Peter’s bed.
She scooted next to him and rolled onto her side so that she was facing him. Very naturally, as if she had been doing this for months and years, she put her arms around his and lifted her leg and put her knee on his thigh. She kissed him a couple of times, yawned, and began the regular breathing that Peter knew to be a sign of someone’s sleeping.
He lay beside her, enveloped by her soft and warm body, for what he felt was a long time but was actually just a minute or two, enjoying the fact not only that this woman was beside him but also that she had begun to take it for granted that her place at night was beside him.
Peter reflected for a minute or two on the ironic fact that here he was inside of an asteroid so far away from Earth where life could be so threatening and ominous but that it instead, because of this one woman, life was beautiful. He had this thought: “This is like a tropical island to which I have arrived after surviving a horrible shipwreck. I have everything I want here. There are palm trees and other plants. The sea is all around, and it abounds in fish. There is an abundance of fire wood so that I can be warm even on the coldest of days. Food of all kinds abound. There is fresh water and a mild sun and the absence of enemies. Best of all and least likely to exist, I found here a best friend and lovely partner. Life is perfect for me now.”
He slid imperceptibly into sleep and began dreaming about a storm at sea and a sinking ship and the sight of a tropical island and another survivor, a woman, nearly drowning but he saves her and carries her to the island which they explore and find wonderful. His dream was interrupted by the ringing of bells. He wondered where those were. Did they dangle from the palm tree? Was a buoy outfitted with bells floating somewhere nearby?
Sylvia began shaking him. She said, “We have to get up and get dressed. The bells are ringing.”
“Let’s try to do less talking and more hugging and kissing tonight,” Peter said. “That’s a deal,” Sylvia said and she grabbed his hand and shook it as if sealing the deal. She winked at him too but he was too groggy to see that.
He rubbed his eyes, stretched his arms out (nearly hitting Sylvia with an elbow while doing that), and yawned. Then they quickly kissed. Sylvia said, “Good morning, darling,” words which to him were the equivalent of the massage he had offered to give her the night before.
Then, she got up, wrapped her robe around her luscious body, and headed for the door. Turning around briefly and seeing that he still lay on the bed and was about to fall back into sleep, she said, “Get up, sleepy head. We’ve got to get going.” Then she added, “I’ll meet you in the corridor in fifteen minutes,” she said.
“That’s a deal,” he replied, forcing himself to sit up in bed. When he saw that she was still looking at him, he winked at her and blew a kiss in her direction and said, “I’m awake now. Don’t worry about me. Get going.” “Bye, darling,” she said.
He watched her pull the door open and go out into the corridor and pull the door closed behind her. Then he too got up and went into his bathroom to brush his teeth, take a quick shower, and do his other morning oblations.
After exiting the room, Sheila was careful to look up and down the corridor to see if any of the creatures or any other unexpected visitors was around. Seeing no one, she went to her door and got ready for the events of the next day, now so much a part of a routine that she doubted if anything would happen to surprise her aside from the contents of what the teacher had to say or show her which always amazed her.
Book 4
Chapter 47: What They Learned
After the events just described, their days fell easily into the routine that had already begun for them. They’d go to the classroom in the morning, drink the drink (which Peter thought of as “the energy drink) provided for them, exchange a few words with the teacher, sat down in their chairs, got outfitted with the sticky nozzles (which Peter thought of as “electrodes”) and waited for the teacher to pull out the desk drawer containing the three-dimensional keyboard and begin playing on it just as if it was a piano and as if the teacher was universally regarded as a virtuoso on this particular instrument.
Soon they’d hear sounds and see pictures which, before much time had passed, resulted in Peter’s being able to communicate with the creatures on his own, crudely at first but before too many weeks had passed as facilely as Sylvia did.
Before too many days had passed this way, Sylvia told him that the lessons she was getting paired pictures of things with pictures of symbols. She was learning how to read. Eventually, his own learning exercises changed in the same way. He too was learning to read.
After a while, they were able to open their notebooks at night and actually make sense of some of the symbols that they had drawn while wandering around underground at a time that now seemed to them to be long ago.
Sometimes, their classes would be interrupted by the sound of a bell ringing, not three times as it did to mark other transitions of activity, but just once. This was a signal that a film was about to be shown. They’d look up at the screen mounted high up on the wall behind the teacher.
While the teacher continued operating its three-dimensional keyboard, they would see scenes of life as it existed on the creatures’ home planet, including the life of other species besides theirs that shared their planet.
There were flying creatures, like bats, with eight tiny legs. There were creatures like horses that were symmetrical, with head at either end and with legs that had the ability to bend in many directions. The creatures ran forwards, backwards, and sideways. There were creatures that lived in the one immense round sea that exist on their planet.
One kind of sea creature was a transparent cube that could open any one of its six sides and devour whatever smaller creature happened to be swimming towards it from any direction. Black speckles on six of that creatures’ sides gave them the appearance to Peter and Sylvia of dice made out of translucent plastic.
There were also creatures that looked like snakes or eels that had the ability to circle around and around themselves making spirals and then joining themselves together at their edges making ovals and spheres. When closed in on themselves, these creatures could produce a light at the center of the hollow spheres they made, giving them the appearance of Japanese lanterns.
Also, when shaped like ovals or spheres, the snake-like or eel-like creatures moved about by falling at an angle to a depth that served as a floor to them and then bouncing up at another angle and thus they moved about li
ke bouncing balls. When shaped like snakes or eels, they whirled about through space, sometimes attaching their front ends to the sides of a certain kind of rock which perhaps served them as a kind of food.
One time Peter and Sylvia watched a film that seemed to show the life cycle of the beetle-like or mite-like creatures like those they knew. Every phase of the life of the creatures was shown and displayed in columns and rows. There was a round egg that divided into two round eggs that separated completely and then joined together to make a kind of figure-eight-shaped object.
The figure-eight-shaped object was dark purple as was the single sphere and the pair of spheres that preceded the single sphere (though, when the two spheres existed, one was darker than the other). The next couple of illustrations showed the figure-eight-shaped object losing its color and becoming transparent except that dark fuzzy objects were contained inside of it.
The next illustrations showed the transformation of the dark fuzzy objects into the backs and bellies of the mite-like creatures, each part having four skinny black legs with tiny projections like hairs coming out of them and a single eye dangling out of one side of the point of a narrow octagon. The next illustrations showed the figure-eight-shaped object turning into a single sphere that exploded, leaving the two parts of the creatures dangling in space. The next illustrations showed the two parts coming together and becoming the creatures they knew.
The next illustrations showed the creature growing in size and gradually changing in color until they reached their full sizes. At this point, they were dull gray in color. Then the creatures seemed to flatten and turn white. Then the two halves peeled away from one another and became ever flatter until they were like dead leaves. They crumbled like dead leaves and ceased to exist.
They saw also films showing bands playing on the creatures’ home planet and creatures coming together from every direction and piling up on each other, making huge mounds like mountains. Other films showed creatures at work, digging tunnels, making bricks, hauling cargo, doctoring, looking into telescopes at the heavens, and staring at screens.
A Theory of Gravity Page 30