Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  Ancient images of a planet in distress. Glowing cones of mountains belched forth smoke. Rank tangles of plant life in all stages of growth and decay growing haphazardly together were replaced by images of animals struggling through random growths of foliage. In sudden contrast, wide plains of sand appeared on the screen, and then a flat area covered with green scum. The narrator was silent over scenes of caged animals, evidently some kind of rescue operation. The bizarre locomotion of four legs awoke in Connie a desire to giggle, except that it was all too strange. Repulsive. The animals appalled her. Connie had always felt a deep disgust for the idea of creatures possessing brains but no intellect. Animals had been mobile, eating, sleeping, and rutting, but mindless. She still couldn’t understand how that had worked. How could something be smart enough to eat when it was hungry, to construct nests for young, to cooperate in hives, and yet be too stupid to learn language? She was sure some piece of knowledge about animals had been lost. The dangers of coexisting in a world where such beings roamed free disgusted her. The very idea of it seemed insulting; she did not want to claim any hereditary or evolutionary bonds with anything that went on all fours and mindlessly destroyed fellow living creatures in the act of feeding itself.

  But now the images had gone to a veritable tide of people queued up at the rescue points. The faces that looked up at the camera seemed shallow, scarcely more intelligent than the animals in the previous frames. Many were just as hairy, faces festooned with clumps of hair that hung from their cheeks and lips. Only occasionally did Connie catch sight of anyone who seemed ashamed of what they had done to their homeworld. The holiday atmosphere baffled her. Hadn’t they cared at all?

  “Because of this reluctance to believe in the doom of the planet, the passengers of the first Lifeboats were more adventurers than refugees. While scientists and political leaders assessed the environmental situation on Earth and the ‘strange’ rescue offer of the Arthroplana and urged caution, the migration had begun. While governments dragged their feet in planning, private corporations and individuals were constructing and operating shuttles that ferried fleeing Humans up to the waiting Lifeboats. For several decades, any group able to raise the funding to launch a shuttle or buy space in a gondola did.

  “This first wave of travelers were bound to their benefactors by loyalty or finance. Some followed spiritual gurus, the channelers and psychics who had attracted swollen followings in the face of worldwide disasters. Others were recruited from the misfits and the curious, the jobless and the homeless. For their part, the Arthroplana saw no reason not to communicate with private companies on the same basis they accorded world governments, leading to confusion. Some corporations believed they were gaining ‘exclusive’ settlement privileges. Many of those leaving signed so-called ‘serf’ agreements with the sponsoring companies. The majority of the early shuttles were privately financed and owned, and had religious affiliations. Little or no physical or psychological screening of the earliest evacuees was done, by either their fellow Humans or the Arthroplana. The necessity of REM sleep periods during Waitsleep for the survival of personality had not been realized. To this factor has been attributed the high mortality rate of those early voyagers. It is estimated that only ten percent of the passengers on the first wave of Lifeboats emerged from their Waitsleep in viable condition.

  “But by the time the second wave of Lifeboats arrived in orbit some fifty years later, the more conservative elements had come into power all over the world, and were in a position to severely regulate the emigration. For the first time in history, the idea of a single world government was being taken seriously. From this united front the earliest form of the Conservancy was born. Better screening of evacuees and improvements by the Arthroplana in designing Waitsleep wombs …”

  The voice whined, then gave way to gibberish over smeary pictures of more long lines of people. Connie wished they’d get to the point. If ancient history was the only thing on this tape, she wasn’t willing to sit through it. She’d rather rung laps down the corridors. She shifted restlessly. The reader caught, the images and sound suddenly steadying.

  “… evacuation itself was to span two centuries of Earth-reckoned time, and evacuees were to number …”

  Elementary stuff. She thumbed the fast button.

  “Connie.” Tug’s voice, gentle but rebuking. “The reference I seek is only a brief mention. You may have already passed it.”

  She scowled at the nearest sensor node as if she could make eye contact with him. “Why don’t you just tell me what it said?”

  “It is not so much the words as the inflection that I wish you to hear. That was what convinced me that more was being said than the words that were being uttered.”

  “Mhh.” She engaged the tape again. Tug and his cryptic comments. All Arthroplana made them, but never so many as he. The Arthroplana that had owned the Beastship Trotter had confined his to an obscure form of entertainment called the “nok-nok joke” that involved linguistic humor. The crew had hated them. At least Tug spared her that. Tug’s fascination for mysteries and puzzles ran much deeper as did his determination to solve them. If he had been Human, Connie would have said he was obsessed.

  The recording belched back to life. “… as species after species fell to extinction.” The narrator was going on remorselessly. “The last Lifeboat to leave Earth reached Castor and Pollux with video records of an Earth in the throes of a major transformation. The climactic changes had accelerated beyond even the most radical predictions, as the Arthroplana had assured them it would. It has been estimated that less than one tenth of the species then present on Earth were adaptable …” Connie couldn’t make out the picture; kilometers of wet, flat green, or perhaps a complete breakdown of the old imaging.

  “Try toward the end,” Tug suggested.

  Connie sighed and thumbed a control. The images became a blur. When she pressed the stop button, it gave a loud pop. With a belch it began abruptly. “… libraries. Visual works of art were scanned to be reproduced when Humanity reached its new home. Audiovisual entertainments and literary works were evaluated on the criteria of worthiness, relevance, and attitude before being accepted. Inevitably, more was left than taken. Reluctantly, Humanity came to realize that a representative sampling was the best they could hope for in this area.

  “But for many, the saddest wrench of parting was not in the leaving of Human artifacts, but in the abandonment of all flora and fauna of Earthly origin.” A panning shot of small creatures running up the thick grey-green stalk of some large plant.

  “As we shall see in Sections twenty-nine and thirty, Castor and Pollux proved to be hospitable to their new Human populations, and after a few generations of adjustment in orbit, Humans landed on their surfaces. The mutual adaptation of Humans and planets was swift. As the Arthroplana had assured them, the cooperatively evolved environment made them welcome, opening niches for them as a mother opens her arms to a new child. Thus was the Human race rescued from extinction, to thrive on more kindly planets.” This over a shot of the foot traffic across the Red Bridge in Hispania.

  “This is it,” Tug whispered. “Listen.”

  The picture shifted to a man with hair growing on his face. This was some old footage. He was speaking softly in an ancient language as the narrator spoke over him. “But it is not to be denied that Humanity will ever cherish the memory of its homeworld, regardless of how hostile it may have been. Illya Dubowski fittingly summed up the sentiment in the closing lines of his epic poem, ‘The Abandoned Planet,’ with these words:

  “Wise men chose what we could bring,

  And packed it. Measured the works of humanity’s hands,

  Distilled our wisdom down to electronic impulses,

  Reduced the colors of the Masters to scaled dots on a grid.

  We folded our tents and left,

  Gypsies fleeing a homely world,

  Abandoning the storms of March with the promises of April,

  Emptying our hands of
her bounties and her plagues.

  Wise men chose what we could bring.

  Only fools like me mourn what we left behind.”

  The narrator mouthed the words in bland Vernacular; the translation did not move Connie. But the hair-faced man uttered them as if he were imparting the secrets of the universe. His voice was deep, and the words halted along, thick with emotion. This was the inflection Tug had meant; not the educator tape’s narrator, but the voice of the poet. His words seemed to linger as the closing credits floated and jerked across the screen. Abruptly the tape snapped to a stop, then began to rewind itself.

  “Aha!” Tug cried triumphantly. “Rewind it; it’s different. Play that last piece over again.”

  Connie didn’t move. “Different?”

  “This must be an older copy than John’s gotten hold of. Mine must have been edited. There’s a lot more of the poem, spoken in the native language of the poet. It’s got to be the reason John brought this copy aboard. I must hear it again.”

  The sudden edge to Tug’s command startled Connie. The Arthroplana didn’t seem to notice as he added, “I knew I’d find it here. You’ll have to replay the whole recording for me before you go back into Waitsleep, to see what else was edited out of it. But for now, the poem’s the important thing. I’m convinced that is why John has this recording, and why he kept it stored in such a way I couldn’t access it myself.”

  Connie felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. “This is something private of John’s,” she observed more than asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” Tug snapped. “Private implies personal. How can an old learning tape be personal? It just gives him a selfish pleasure to acquire ancient recordings and refuse to share them with me.”

  “I don’t feel right about getting into his things when he’s asleep,” Connie protested. She clasped her suddenly cold hands between her knees.

  “He’ll never know about it, if that’s what you’re worrying about. Really, Connie, what harm have we done to him? He can go about feeling smug that he’s deprived me of material I need for my study of Humans. That makes him happy. But actually I will have accessed the material and archived it. That makes me happy. So we’re all happy. What could be better?”

  “I’m not happy,” Connie said slowly. “It makes me feel dishonest.”

  “What game is this, after you set me on the trail? No regrets now, Connie. You should feel happy, just knowing you’ve helped me and in some small way repaid all of the time and interest I’ve shown in you. Play the poem over again, now.”

  Wordlessly Connie leaned over and snapped the reader back into the play mode. She sat silently as the hairy man recited again. Tug was not making sense. Would telling John about this just make matters worse? There was no way to tell him without Tug knowing she’d told him. How would that affect how Tug treated her? Tug had told her John would never know what she had done. Why did it bother her so?

  “Well,” Tug asked her abruptly as the tape muttered to an end again. “This is it, isn’t it?”

  She tried to bring her mind back to their earlier conversations. “Sounds like he really meant it,” Connie said lamely. What was he getting at? “I mean, he was deeply moved by his poem, but I don’t understand why you wanted me to hear it, or why you think it’s so important.”

  “What does it mean to you?” Tug asked coyly.

  “Well, I guess that they were sad about all the things they couldn’t take with them.” Connie felt the inadequacy of her own words. She could guess at what he’d tried to embody in his poems. Families had been torn apart by the exodus. When it was realized that small children could not go, some adult parents had left anyway. Others had stayed, bidding farewell to grown children to stay behind with other younger children, or with elderly parents, or with family members who were deformed or diseased or mentally deficient or otherwise unfit to go. There were thousands of accounts of such tragedies.

  “Oh, and that’s all there is to it?” he asked sharply.

  “Perhaps,” Connie ventured. There was an avid note in Tug’s synthesized voice that she’d never heard before.

  “Perhaps you do not appreciate how much I know. I should tell you that I know all about Dubowski. Quite a long time ago, Talbot supplied me with reference materials on the Verbal School of Poetics. Dubowski is regarded as one of their major lights. It was the last Terran literary movement that we have any record of; not that they permitted many real records to exist. If I may quote from the text, they were ‘committed to the ideal that poetry is only truly alive when spoken. They permitted no printed records of their poetry to be kept, and railed fiercely against those who attempted to record their words. Poems changed from recitation to recitation, and either died with the poet, or were bequeathed to his followers to alter as they saw fit.’ This Illya Dubowski was a peculiarly vehement example of the school’s philosophy. He had been known to break recorders smuggled into recitations, and once assaulted someone for attempting to manually record his words. So the audio visual recording of him reciting is a distinct oddity. But perhaps he was saying something he desperately wanted remembered.”

  “Or perhaps they paid him a great deal of money.”

  Tug was silent for a space, then went on as if Connie had not spoken. “It is interesting, too, that he recited it in his birth language, while the translator rendered it into Vernacular. It is a very poor translation, more like a synopsis of the poem than a literal translation. The reference I have suggests that the original poem was more than ninety-seven lines long. Yet all we have left is this truncated bit. And not even all of that was translated into the Vernacular for this recording. And my recording had almost none of his actual recitation on it—only the edited Vernacular translation.”

  Tug was in his long-winded, lecturing mode. Nothing to do but sit back until he was done. Connie drifted back to the couch, wondering what had brought it on.

  “Luck has favored me, however. A grammar and vocabulary instruction for the Russian language was among the first memory filaments Evangeline created for our dealings with Humanity. I swiftly became fluent in the language, and I am confident that I have a literal translation of the hidden segment of the poem.”

  He paused, and Connie suddenly recognized the style he was assuming. Sherlock Holmes, about to make the grand revelation. If he expected her to play Watson for him, she just wasn’t up to it. “So?” she asked flatly.

  “Indeed. The heart of what Illya Dubowski says, when I decipher it, is this: ‘Those who have not lived here will return for what was left. Its essence will cry out in a voice that cannot be ignored. Riding in the balance between war and omnipotence rests all that they would know. But they must put aside the ways of adults and be again as children if the door is to open to them. They must speak not in the tongues of Men nor of Angels, for it will not avail them. Rebirth is within for all.’” That’s just a rough translation, of course. I shall put it into a more poetic form, true to his style, and recite it for you next time you awake. But you understand the gist of it. So. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. She was suddenly tired and wanted nothing more than to go back to her own quarters and stare silently at a wall. The time she had to spend with Tug suddenly stretched endlessly before her.

  “Of course you do, Connie. And so do I. Here we have a poet, a man committed to inner truth, who sacrifices his principals about letting his words be recorded to leave a message to future generations. Yet his message is so important, mere words cannot hold it. From a very tight focus, his thoughts suddenly appear to wander. They lose the intrinsic rhythms of poetry; one wonders if the final lines are part of the original poem at all. Could they actually be a separate message? To whom? To those who will return to Terra, it seems. They seem almost to refer to ancient scriptures, once regarded as holy, yet strangely scrambled. Everything indicates he is trying to convey something very important, but in the end, all he gives us are vague hints. Why? He hides his mes
sage in a poem. And the translator adds yet another layer of misdirection. Can we believe his blurring of the poet’s words is anything less than deliberate? So we have a message of such importance it is hidden thrice, once by the poet’s failure to put it in words, twice by his embedding it in a poem, and thrice by a mistranslation. So what can it be, Connie, that is of such vast importance that it must be thrice protected? What was left behind on Earth?” Tug paused, and his synthetic voice suddenly dropped an octave and became hollow. “What is it you and John go back to claim?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  A tone of tolerant amusement came into his voice. “Come, come, Connie, don’t dissemble with me now. You gave me the hints plainly enough. ‘Put a bug in my ear’ to use the old idiom, as you doubtlessly intended, with your questioning about the real reasons for this mission. I considered your words well, and I knew what you were trying to get me to see. There has to be more to this errand than a simple information-gathering effort by Earth Affirmed. I admire your loyalty in refusing to speak of it directly; you, of course, had faith in my ability to unravel this little mystery. But now that I have come so close, surely you can at least give me another hint.”

  Connie shook her head. She tried to smile. “Tug, I think you’re attaching more significance to this than it has. Humans exaggerate, even in poetry. I don’t think he was saying anything more than that we can’t know what we missed by not living on Earth. Never having animals, stuff like that. And I never tried to hint to you about a secret mission. I was just saying I didn’t understand it. You’re putting too much value on my words. Like when you interpreted that poem about the balloon seller for me, and told me it was full of sexual innuendo about child molesters and birth-control devices. I thought it was just a poem about the changing of the seasons.”