Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  “That’s right. They opened up and then they all quivered. What did we notice when they quivered?”

  “They were pretty, like dancers?” Marta whispered her answer. It was wrong. Marta was almost always wrong, but she still had to be given her chance to answer. And Daniel always tried to make it seem like she was kind of right. He was that kind of teacher.

  “Of course, Marta. They were beautiful, like dancers, and they smelled pretty, too. And that pretty smell was how the giraffe plants say to each other, ‘I’m still alive and fine. Don’t send a seed over here!’”

  Even Connie had to giggle at the funny voice Daniel used when he tried to be a giraffe plant talking.

  “But,” he said, suddenly serious. “One giraffe plant couldn’t send that message.” He spoke quickly now, to get past the bad part. “It was dead. A seed was needed there. And when Angelo’s plant didn’t find any pretty smell coming from its direction, it turned toward the no-smell place. Now”—and Daniel’s voice suddenly got cheery again—“this is what will happen. Angelo’s plant will send the seed over there on a long stalk. We’ll all have to be very careful for a time, whenever we walk past Angelo’s kifa patch, to make sure we don’t step on that stalk or hurt it in any way. Soon the seed will get to where the old giraffe plant was, and the stalk will push it down into the dirt. Then a new giraffe plant will grow and that kifa moss will come back into balance again and be all healthy.”

  Daniel looked at each child in turn. “Did you all notice that all the plants opened their flowers at once? That’s so they all have the same chance to spread a seed. But of course the chance always goes to the plant most likely to succeed.”

  “Daniel?”

  Everyone turned to look at Sherry. It was her turn to answer, but Daniel hadn’t asked a question. Still, it was her right to speak, but she could have waited until Daniel asked if anyone had any questions. Connie didn’t like it when people did things not quite right. It made her stomach feel funny.

  “Do you have a question, Sherry?” Daniel asked, almost making it okay.

  “What would happen if two giraffe plants sent seeds?”

  “That doesn’t happen, Sherry,” Daniel said gently but firmly. “The sweet smell lets all the plants know where the next one is, and how big the cooperative patch is. The closest giraffe plant reseeds the missing place. And the outside plants don’t send seeds outward because the patches are always five plants by five plants.”

  “Why?”

  It wasn’t even Sherry’s turn anymore. Connie held her mouth tight, waiting for Daniel to get angry. Instead, he just sighed.

  “Sherry, you should know why by now. The kifa moss patches are all part of Castor’s ecology. Too many kifa patches or too big of a patch would not be good for Castor. What do we say, always?”

  “One planet, one ecosystem, one life,” the children chorused.

  Sherry was going to open her mouth again, but Daniel said quickly, “Now, let’s all share with our kifa patches, and then we’ll go over to our weaving.” He immediately set an example, turning aside to urinate at the base of the pitcher plant that was at the northeast corner of an unoccupied kifa patch. All the children followed his example, sharing with their patches the fluids of their own lives. When all were finished, Daniel nodded, and they stepped out together, walking in their rows behind him as he led them off to the weaving shelter.

  Of stars and the voids I sing, and of a kinless race,

  Who suckled their Mother Earth dry, and wept not

  At her barrenness, but abandoned her to death.

  New worlds they found, and set aside their wolf’s teeth

  To don the fleeces of sheep. But even sheep will overgraze

  The grass. Their brown dung will spot the glorious green hillsides

  In piles too large for the soil to kindly absorb….

  John twitched in his sleep. No good, no good. Didn’t scan, and he wasn’t sure if sheep dung had been brown. Wouldn’t it be greenish, from their diet of grass?

  “Write what you know!” the poetry master bellowed, and snatched John’s poem from his desk. The words flew loose, to scatter on the floor. “I don’t want to read about sheep or grass! Anyone can write some pastoral trash modeled on the old poets! Your task is to the poets of your own generation and time. Your poetry must be who you are and when you are and what you are, or it’s worthless!”

  Dr. Crandall was panting with the strength of his emotions. John rose silently from his seat to gather the scattered words of his thoughts. What if I don’t want to be from this time, he wanted to shout. What if I want to know how my ancestors felt and thought and smelt? What if the only way we can really understand their poetry is to pretend to be them for a while? But he didn’t shout the words, not even in this dream.

  Dream. Yeah, he was dreaming again, Tug must have him on the stimulus cycle. “This is all a dream,” John announced to the class. He stood up and Dr. Crandall disappeared. “I’m on a ship going somewhere and you all are dead and gone hundreds of years ago.” Obediently the other student poets crumbled into dust. A wind blew them away. “I’m alive, and I’m still doing and being. And my poems are my own damn business, and I’ll make them how I please, and keep them as long as I want. And I don’t care if no one ever remembers a damn poem I made, because I’ll live the hyphenated life of the Beastship Mariner, and live so long that I’ll remember myself. Yes. That’s better, that’s me, that’s what I know so I’ll write it.

  Beastship Mariner am I, sailor of space and times. My life

  Spans a hundred of yours. I see you, life to life to life.

  You never change. You wear new faces when you greet me

  When I return. But you haven’t changed, no matter how long

  I’ve been gone….

  Needs more imagery, more symbolism, but I’m onto something here, I’ll write a poem yet, but the dream was fading, sinking, something was spiraling him back into the dormant cycle. Dammit, Tug, I think I was close to finding something there for a minute. If only I’d had a few more minutes, if only I had time, I could write a hell of a poem.

  5

  “TOOK ONE A PIECE and left three in it.” He wondered briefly if perhaps it had referred to numbering other than by the Human base ten system, then discarded the idea. No. He was sure he was going at it wrong. Sometimes these older puzzle poems were the most difficult to understand. He would discard all his preconceptions and start over again. “Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and …” and Evangeline was veering from the course again. Tug felt it as an uneven pressure in the anterior of his metasection. He gurgled in annoyance, and sent a pulse that turned off the recording he had been scanning. He disentangled himself from the filaments that linked him to the scanner in the gondola and scuttled across his chamber to engage ganglia with Evangeline. Exactly what was she doing? Had she forgotten where they were supposed to be going?

  Well, no, but she couldn’t hear any other Beasts calling from that direction, and she did so want a mating. Couldn’t she go back, find another Beast, do a mating, and then return to that hostile little planet that they had been to so many, many times?

  No, he instructed her firmly. They had schedules to keep. What seemed a short time to her was several generations to the Humans whose couriers they were for this trip. Did she want to gather information and take it back to Delta only to find there was no market for it? He pictured conflict and disappointment for her, and got a shuddered response. She came quickly back to course and Tug disengaged from her.

  Problem solved. Which left Tug bored. He could not face the puzzle of the girls and the eggs again. Not just yet. He cast about for something new to occupy his attention. Something new, and yet worthy of an encysted Arthroplana. After all, this time was supposed to be spent in meditation and study. That was the whole function of enBeastment. Supposedly.

  If only Humans weren’t so short-lived, he could have awakened Connie and kept her awake, just for the conversation. But if he awakened her an
d kept her awake, she wouldn’t even last out this journey, let alone any others. No, conversation with the Humans had to be kept brief, no matter how diverting he might find it. He faced again the problem of not only having limited diversions, but having to carefully ration those diversions out to himself, lest he use them up too quickly.

  He drifted across the chamber to where he kept his few personal things and took down a puzzle cube that an Evadorian had given him a long time ago. A very long time ago, Tug reflected. Evadorians no longer existed. Like Humans, they had poisoned their planet of origin. Like Humans, the Evadorians had been rescued and deposited on a harmonized planet capable of allowing them into its ecosystem. The Evadorians had been gently modified to harmonize, and resettled. But unlike the Humans, they had been unable to resist their own competitive natures. Within only twenty-two of their generations, they had reverted. The planet and the Evadorians had destroyed one another. The Arthroplana had let them perish. They’d had their second chance.

  A pity. Tug had enjoyed the Evadorians he’d transported, and even kept one for a time. Its longer life span had allowed it to be much more of a companion to him than his present Human crew. ss’SFistes had been its name, and it had made the puzzle cube for Tug and contrived a way to get it into Tug’s chambers. Tug had suspected then that the Evadorians would not adapt. So few of the puzzle making and solving races did. They were always looking for a way to get around things, a way to divert disaster for just a few more generations. Always a fatal error. The only path to endless survival was to constantly repeat the patterns that worked. The Arthroplana themselves were proof of that.

  Tug shifted the cube through his feelers, and reviewed the solution rules ss’SFistes had given him. On each side was an engraving, and each engraving was supposed to suggest an Evadorian proverb. A key word from each of the six proverbs yielded a seventh proverb. Often the final proverb was humorous rather than philosophical. So far, Tug had come up with nine possible solutions. Only one of them could be completely correct. The Evadorian had told him that when he had an answer, Tug should break open the cube and check the engraving inside it to see if it matched. Tug toyed with the notion of breaking the cube and checking his solution, then rejected it. No, he’d keep the cube and puzzle out yet another possible final proverb. Of what pleasure was a mystery solved? Just another dull fact, grounded in reality and devoid of all teasing possibilities.

  He returned the cube to the cicatrice that acted as a shelf and considered his latest batch of contraband. Connie had methodically loaded them all into the scanner for him, and he’d transferred them all to the filaments Evangeline had secreted for him. He had now experienced each of the tapes three hundred and seventy-two times. In addition to the elegant selection of mysteries he’d requested (Christies, MacDonald, Ferradson, and Doyles, mostly), there had been other material, most notably A Brief History of the Abomination of Epsilon. It troubled him.

  He remembered Epsilon. Vividly. The Conservancy had given no warning of their intent; there had been no time to prepare the Beasts. He and Evangeline had been well within the psychic range of such a thing. When Tug had regained consciousness, they had been a quarter of a light-year from their last reckoned position. The Human crew had been too long in Waitsleep; none of them survived. And Evangeline herself had been nearly ruined by the experience of such strong externally generated emotions. He still could not make her understand what had happened; how the deadliness of the disease the Humans had unleashed there had had to be combated fiercely and ruthlessly. The Conservancy had belatedly issued an apology to all Beastships that had received the emotional shock wave. The explanation they had offered had been plausible. But A Brief History of the Abomination of Epsilon mentioned other, more disturbing factors. Unsettling. He turned his mind aside from the unpleasantness of it.

  His new mysteries beckoned. Tug combed the sheaf of filaments through his feelers one more time, letting the titles slip teasingly past his sensory tips. Despite how many times he’d already scanned through them, he was determined to treat each as an individual piece of work to be dissected and savored. By the end of this trip, he would endeavor to understand completely every one of his new recordings. But he would fail. That was the wonderful thing about Human literature. Much of it was so impenetrable that one could muse over it for years and still not completely understand it. And this latest collection—he teased them over his sensory feelers again—intriguing. And more intriguing each time he savored the words and the images accompanying them.

  Save the Epsilon tape, all were of the Human literary genre called mysteries. Universally regarded by the Arthroplana as the Humans’ highest cultural achievement, mysteries posed carefully constructed puzzles, usually involving an untimely death or disappearance. The best mysteries were spiced with deliberate deceptions by the designer of the puzzle, intended to distract the reader from solving it. As mysteries were set in a variety of Human times and locations, each demanded a thorough study of the contemporary culture and language before an Arthroplana could begin the delightful task of unraveling one. Tug prided himself on the variety of mysteries he had solved. Nancy Drew would have been proud of him, and the Hardy boys would have welcomed him to their company, he was sure.

  Several of the mysteries on these recordings had been created by the master puzzle designer Rex Stout. One was by a designer he was less familiar with: a John D. MacDonald. He was already immersed in the study of marine architecture, seacoast development, and Human card games that his first scannings had suggested would be necessary for him to enjoy the puzzle. There were other classic mysteries on the tapes and Tug knew he should devote his time to these. He would not be encysted forever.

  But with a tingle of guilty pleasure, he redirected his attention to other filaments. Bootlegged ones. That was the term. Copied while John was in Waitsleep, from the tapes that John had carelessly left loaded in his library scanner. Had cracking John’s security code been easier this time? It seemed so to Tug. Usually John was more cautious, and more adept at keeping his private pleasures private. Especially the ones he knew Tug would enjoy.

  Tug dismissed the ease with which he’d broken into John’s cache. It could probably be attributed to his deeper knowledge of John and his increased experience at deciphering his codes. At any rate, he’d found a treasure this time. The poet Montemorossi was such a delightful puzzle. Who had he been? A significant poet, Tug knew, or John wouldn’t have bothered with him. He knew John would consider it rude, no, almost criminal if he knew Tug was sharing his entertainments. But there was no reason for John to find out. Besides, he could not turn aside from them. Poetry, more than any mystery, offered puzzles with no clear solutions, questions without answers, answers without questions. Perhaps such trivia were not worth the attention of scholars, let alone the meditations of an enBeasted one, but Tug did love them so. He selected one, wrapped himself firmly in the filaments that would convey it to him.

  Prior to settling himself with it, he once more docked ganglia with Evangeline. She was on course, but bored again. Why did they have to go back to the hostile little planet? He knew how much it distressed her. Why was he making her go there?

  He soothed her as best he could, and repeated the mission outline from John’s report. They were going because some Humans on Castor and Pollux had combined their resources and offered them a commission to go. They were disputing the Conservancy’s assertion that Terra was a dead planet, one that was, furthermore, incapable of being revived. Of course, it was sad, but she must understand that the Humans had a sentimental attachment to the planet. Although the Conservancy had proven with models that nothing would have survived the cataclysmic climate changes on Terra, still Humans persisted in hoping, and organizations such as Earth Affirmed cruelly stimulated those hopes with its disharmonious assertions that the Conservancy was lying.

  She did not understand.

  Had Tug been a Human, he would have sighed. But Arthroplanas had learned long ago the limits of a Beas
t’s intellect. Any but the simplest ideas were ungraspable for them, and efforts to educate them or raise their intellectual levels only resulted in Beasts so distraught and unpredictable that they became unmanageable and dangerous. Sometimes he wondered if he didn’t explain too much to Evangeline, if his efforts with her only caused her more unhappiness than her simple mind could bear. Did he dare try to explain “lie” to her? Perhaps not. Put it in terms she could more easily accept.

  Earth Affirmed wanted to be sure Terra was dead. So the Conservancy had given them permission to collect more data. Evangeline and Tug would take John and Connie there, and they would launch the probes and satellites that would gather the data. For a short time they would all circle Terra and study it. Then they would take the data, and go back to Delta. Then the Conservancy scientists would evaluate it for Earth Affirmed, and prove that Terra was dead as they had always said. Then Earth Affirmed would give all its funds to the programs for more efficient recycling efforts, and all its members would attempt to be more harmonious and no longer say anything to upset any of the other already-harmonious Humans. Did she understand now?

  She would obey.

  Tug could sense Evangeline becoming unsettled at talk of the hostile planet. He reminded her that her reward would be all the rich slag of the dirty-tech station that she wanted, enough slag to sustain her through many matings. This calmed her somewhat, but then she asked, Could we not go back and have the slag and the matings first, and then go see the ugly planet? No, they could not, he reminded her, and when she became petulant, he showed her a geometry game the Humans had devised long ago, a method for dividing a line segment, any line segment into two equal parts. Then he showed her that she could divide each line segment again, and again she would get two equal parts. And again. And again. And the two equal parts would keep getting smaller and smaller, but there would always be two of them and they would always be perfectly equal. Always, forever and forever. It was just the type of diversion the Beasts loved, and Evangeline was delighted with it. Gently he disengaged ganglia from her and left her alone with the new game.