Classic PJ Farmer

by Philip José Farmer

  That was all very well, sighed Lane. But how did… ?

  Martia indicated that, once a day, the workers rolled, literally rolled the queen across the room to the cage. There they arranged her so that she presented her posterior some few inches from the bars and the enraged male. And the male, though he wanted to do nothing but get his beak into her flesh and tear her apart, was not master of himself. Nature took over; his will was betrayed by his nervous system.

  Lane nodded to show he understood. In his mind was a picture of the legger that had been butchered. It had had one sac at the internal end of the tongue. Probably the male had two, one to hold excretory matter, the other to hold seminal fluid.

  Suddenly Martia froze, her hands held out before her. She had laid the flashlight on the floor so she could act freely; the beam splashed on her paling skin.

  “What is it?” said Lane, stepping toward her.

  Martia retreated, holding out her hands before her. She looked horrified.

  “I’m not going to harm you,” he said. However, he stopped so she could see he didn’t mean to get any closer to her.

  What was bothering her? Nothing was stirring in the chamber itself besides the male, and he was behind her.

  Then she was pointing, first at him and then at the raging dekaped. Seeing this unmistakable signal of identification, he comprehended. She had perceived that he, like the thing in the cage, was male, and now she perceived structure and function in him.

  What he didn’t understand was why that should make her so frightened of him. Repelled, yes. Her body, its seeming lack of sex, had given him a feeling of distaste bordering on nausea. It was only natural that she should react similarly to his body. However, she had seemed to have gotten over her first shock.

  Why this unexpected change, this horror of him?

  Behind him, the beak of the male clicked as it lunged against the bars.

  The click echoed in his mind.

  Of course, the monsters lust to kill!

  Until she had met him, she had known only one male creature. That was the caged thing. Now, suddenly, she had equated him with the monster. A male was a killer.

  Desperately, because he was afraid that she was about to run in panic out of the room, he made signs that he was not like this monster; he shook his head no, no, no. He wasn’t, he wasn’t, he wasn’t!

  Martia, watching him intently, began to relax. Her skin re-gained its pinkish hue. Her eyes became their normal size. She even managed a strained smile.

  To get her mind off the subject, he indicated that he would like to know why the queen and her consort had digestive systems, though the workers did not. For answer, she reached up into the downhanging mouth of the worm suspended from the ceiling. Her hand, withdrawn, was covered with secretion. After smelling her fist, she gave it to him to sniff also. He took it, ignoring her slight and probably involuntary flinching when she felt his touch.

  The stuff had an odor such as you would expect from pre-digested food.

  Martia then went to another worm. The two light organs of this one were not colored red, like the others, but had a greenish tint. Martia tickled its tongue with her finger and held out her cupped hands. Liquid trickled into the cup.

  Lane smelled the stuff. No odor. When he drank the liquid, he discovered it to be a thick sugar water.

  Martia pantomimed that the glowworms acted as the digestive systems for the workers. They also stored food away for them. The workers derived part of their energy from the glucose excreted by the roots of the trees. The proteins and vegetable matter in their diet originated from the eggs and from the leaves of the umbrella plant. Strips of the tough membranous leaf were brought into the tubes by harvesting parties which ventured forth in the daytime. The worms partially digested the eggs, dead leggers, and leaves and gave it back in the form of a soup. The soup, like the glucose, was swallowed by the workers and passed through the walls of their throats or into the long straight sac which connected the throat to the larger blood vessels. The waste products were excreted through the skin or emptied through the canal in the tongue.

  Lane nodded and then walked out of the room. Seemingly relieved, Martia followed him. When they had crawled back into her quarters, she put the eggs in a refrigerator and poured two glasses of wine. She dipped her finger in both, then touched the finger to her lips and to his. Lightly, he touched the tip with his tongue. This, he gathered, was one more ritual, perhaps a bedtime one, which affirmed that they were at one and at peace. It might be that it had an even deeper meaning, but if so, it escaped him.

  Martia checked on the safety and comfort of the worm in the bowl. By now it had eaten all its food. She removed the worm, washed it, washed the bowl, half filled it with warm sugar water, placed it on the table by the bed, and put the creature back in. Then she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. She did not cover herself and apparently did not expect him to expect a cover.

  Lane, tired though he was, could not rest. Like a tiger in its cage, he paced back and forth. He could not keep out of his mind the enigma of Martia nor the problem of getting back to base and eventually to the orbital ship. Earth must know what had happened.

  After half an hour of this, Martia sat up. She looked steadily at him as if trying to discover the cause of his sleeplessness. Then, apparently sensing what was wrong, she rose and opened a cabinet hanging down from the wall. Inside were a number of books.

  Lane said, “Ah, maybe I’ll get some information now!” and he leafed through them all. Wild with eagerness, he chose three and piled them on the bed before sitting down to peruse them.

  Naturally he could not read the texts, but the three had many illustrations and photographs. The first volume seemed to be a child’s world history.

  Lane looked at the first few pictures. Then he said, hoarsely, “My God, you’re no more Martian than I am!”

  Martia, startled by the wonder and urgency in his voice, came over to his bed and sat down by him. She watched while he turned the pages over until he reached a certain photo. Unexpectedly, she buried her face in her hands, and her body shook with deep sobs.

  Lane was surprised. He wasn’t sure why she was in such grief. The photo was an aerial view of a city on her home planet—or some planet on which her people lived. Perhaps it was the city in which she had—somehow—been born.

  It wasn’t long, however, before her sorrow began to stir a response in him. Without any warning he, too, was weeping.

  Now he knew. It was loneliness, appalling loneliness, of the kind he had known when he had received no more word from the men in the tanks and he had believed himself the only human being on the face of this world.

  After a while, the tears dried. He felt better and wished she would also be relieved. Apparently she perceived his sympathy, for she smiled at him through her tears. And in an irresistible gust of rapport and affection she kissed his hand and then stuck two of his fingers in her mouth. This, he thought, must be her way of expressing friendship. Or perhaps it was gratitude for his presence. Or just sheer joy. In any event, he thought, her society must have a high oral orientation.

  “Poor Martia,” he murmured. “It must be a terrible thing to have to turn to one as alien and weird as I must seem. Especially to one who, a little while ago, you weren’t sure wasn’t going to eat you up.”

  He removed his fingers but, seeing her rejected look, he impulsively took hers in his mouth.

  Strangely, this caused another burst of weeping. However, he quickly saw that it was happy weeping. After it was over, she laughed softly, as if pleased.

  Lane took a towel and wiped her eyes and held it over her nose while she blew.

  Now, strengthened, she was able to point out certain illustrations and by signs give him clues to what they meant.

  This child’s book started with an account of the dawn of life on her planet. The planet revolved around a star that, according to a simplified map, was in the center of the Galaxy.

  Life had begun
there much as it had on Earth. It had developed in its early stages on somewhat the same lines. But there were some rather disturbing pictures of primitive fish life. Lane wasn’t sure of his interpretation, however, for these took much for granted.

  They did show plainly that evolution there had picked out biological mechanisms with which to advance different from those on Earth.

  Fascinated, he traced the passage from fish to amphibian to reptile to warm-blooded but non-mammalian creature to an upright ground-dwelling apelike creature to beings like Martia.

  Then the pictures depicted various aspects of this being’s prehistoric life. Later, the invention of agriculture, working of metals, and so on.

  The history of civilization was a series of pictures whose meaning he could seldom grasp. One thing was unlike Earths history. There was a relative absence of warfare. The Rameseses, Genghis Khans, Attilas, Caesars, Hitlers, seemed to be missing.

  But there was more, much more. Technology advanced much as it had on Earth, despite a lack of stimulation from war. Perhaps, he thought, it had started sooner than on his planet. He got the impression that Martias people had evolved to their present state much earlier than Homo sapiens.

  Whether that was true or not, they now surpassed man. They could travel almost as fast as light, perhaps faster, and had mastered interstellar travel.

  It was then that Martia pointed to a page which bore several photographs of Earth, obviously taken at various distances by a spaceship.

  Behind them an artist had drawn a shadowy figure, half-ape, half-dragon.

  “Earth means this to you?” Lane said. “Danger? Do not touch?”

  He looked for other photos of Earth. There were many pages dealing with other planets but only one of his home. That was enough.

  “Why are you keeping us under distant surveillance?” said Lane. “You’re so far ahead of us that, technologically speaking, we’re Australian aborigines. What’re you afraid of?”

  Martia stood up, facing him. Suddenly, viciously, she snarled and clicked her teeth and hooked her hands into claws.

  He felt a chill. This was the same pantomime she had used when demonstrating the mindless kill-craziness of the caged male legger.

  He bowed his head. “I can’t really blame you. You’re absolutely correct. If you contacted us, we’d steal your secrets. And then, look out! We’d infest all of space!”

  He paused, bit his lip, and said, “Yet we’re showing some signs of progress. There’s not been a war or a revolution for fifteen years; the UN has been settling problems that would once have resulted in a world war; Russia and the U.S. are still armed but are not nearly as close to conflict as they were when I was born. Perhaps… ?

  “Do you know, I bet you’ve never seen an Earthman in the flesh before. Perhaps you’ve never seen a picture of one, or if you did, they were clothed. There are no photos of Earth people in these books. Maybe you knew we were male and female, but that didn’t mean much until you saw me taking a shower. And the suddenly revealed parallel between the male dekaped and myself horrified you. And you realized that this was the only thing in the world that you had for companionship. Almost as if I’d been shipwrecked on an island and found the other inhabitant was a tiger.

  “But that doesn’t explain what you are doing here, alone, living in these tubes among the indigenous Martians. Oh, how I wish I could talk to you!

  “With thee conversing,” he said, remembering those lines he had read the last night in the base.

  She smiled at him, and he said, “Well, at least you’re getting over your scare. I’m not such a bad fellow, after all, heh?”

  She smiled again and went to a cabinet and from it took paper and pen. With them, she made one simple sketch after another. Watching her agile pen, he began to see what had happened.

  Her people had had a base for a long time—a long long time— on the side of the Moon the Terrestrials could not see. But when rockets from Earth had first penetrated into space, her people had obliterated all evidences of the base. A new one had been set up on Mars.

  Then, as it became apparent that a Terrestrial expedition would be sent to Mars, that base had been destroyed and another one set up on Ganymede.

  However, five scientists had remained behind in these simple quarters to complete their studies of the dekapeds. Though Martia’s people had studied these creatures for some time, they still had not found out how their bodies could endure the differences between tube pressure and that in the open air. The four believed that they were breathing hot on the neck of this secret and had gotten permission to stay until just before the Earthmen landed.

  Martia actually was a native, in the sense that she had been born and raised here. She had been seven years here, she indicated, showing a sketch of Mars in its orbit around the sun and then holding up seven fingers.

  That made her about fourteen Earth years old, Lane estimated. Perhaps these people reached maturity a little faster than his. That is, if she were mature. It was difficult to tell.

  Horror twisted her face and widened her eyes as she showed him what had happened the night before they were to leave for Ganymede.

  The sleeping party had been attacked by an uncaged male legger.

  It was rare that a male got loose. But he occasionally managed to escape. When he did, he destroyed the entire colony, all life in the tube wherever he went. He even ate the roots of the trees so that they died, and oxygen ceased to flow into that section of the tunnel.

  There was only one way a forewarned colony could fight a rogue male—a dangerous method. That was to release their own male. They selected the few who would stay behind and sacrifice their lives to dissolve the bars with an acid secretion from their bodies while the others fled. The queen, unable to move, also died. But enough of her eggs were taken to produce another queen and another consort elsewhere.

  Meanwhile, it was hoped that the males would kill each other or that the victor would be so crippled that he could be finished off by the soldiers.

  Lane nodded. The only natural enemy of the dekapeds was an escaped male. Left unchecked, they would soon crowd the tubes and exhaust food and air. Unkind as it seemed, the escape of a male now and then was the only thing that saved the Martians from starvation and perhaps extinction.

  However that might be, the rogue had been no blessing in disguise for Martia’s people. Three had been killed in their sleep before the other two awoke. One had thrown herself at the beast and shouted to Martia to escape.

  Almost insane with fear, Martia had nevertheless not allowed panic to send her running. Instead, she had dived for a cabinet to get a weapon.

  —A weapon, thought Lane. I’ll have to find out about that.

  Martia acted out what had happened. She had gotten the cabinet door open and reached in for the weapon when she felt the beak of the rogue fastening on her leg. Despite the shock, for the beak cut deeply into the blood vessels and muscles, she managed to press the end of the weapon against the males body. The weapon did its work, for the male dropped on the floor. Unfortunately, the beaks did not relax but held their terrible grip on her thigh, just above the knee.

  Here Lane tried to interrupt so he could get a description of what the weapon looked like and of the principle of its operation. Martia, however, ignored his request. Seemingly, she did not understand his question, but he was sure that she did not care to reply. He was not entirely trusted, which was understandable. How could he blame her? She would be a fool to be at ease with such an unknown quantity as himself. That is, if he were unknown. After all, though she did not know him well personally, she knew the kind of people from whom he came and what could be expected from them. It was surprising that she had not left him to die in the garden, and it was amazing that she had shared that communion of bread and wine with him.

  Perhaps, he thought, it is because she was so lonely and any company was better than nothing. Or it might be that he acted on a higher ethical plane than most Earthmen and she could n
ot endure the idea of leaving a fellow sentient being to die, even if she thought him a bloodthirsty savage.

  Or she might have other plans for him, such as taking him prisoner.

  Martia continued her story. She had fainted and some time later had awakened. The male was beginning to stir, so she had killed him this time.

  One more item of information, thought Lane. The weapon is capable of inflicting degrees of damage.

  Then, though she kept passing out, she had dragged herself to the medicine chest and treated herself. Within two days she was up and hobbling around, and the scars were beginning to fade.

  They must be far ahead of us in everything, he thought. According to her, some of her muscles had been cut. Yet they grew together in a day,

  Martia indicated that the repair of her body had required an enormous amount of food during the healing. Most of her time had been spent in eating and sleeping. Reconstruction, even if it took place at a normal accelerated rate, still required the same amount of energy.

  By then the bodies of the male and of her companions were stinking with decay. She had to force herself to cut them up and dispose of them in the garbage burner.

  Tears welled in her eyes as she recounted this, and she sobbed.

  Lane wanted to ask her why she had not buried them, but he reconsidered. Though it might not be the custom among her kind to bury the dead, it was more probable that she wanted to destroy all evidence of their existence before Earthmen came to Mars.

  Using signs, he asked her how the male had gotten into the room despite the gate across the tunnel. She indicated that the gate was ordinarily closed only when the dekapeds were awake or when her companions and she were sleeping. But it had been the turn of one of their number to collect eggs in the queen’s chamber. As she reconstructed it, the rogue had appeared at that time and killed the scientist there. Then, after ravening among the still-sleeping colony, it had gone down the tube and there had seen the light shining from the open tunnel. The rest of the story he knew.