He remained perfectly still.
Musad advanced his viewpoint until the alien’s face dominated his screen. The face changed slowly. Thin folds of skin advanced across the huge black eyes, closing until only small circles remained. The mouth tube retracted and simultaneously opened wide in another circle, a great ‘Oh!’ of wonder and surprise. The face resembled nothing more than a child’s drawing of a happy clown.
Musad pulled back the view and saw that the ‘cape’ was now fully raised behind the head, like some vast Elizabethan jewelled collar, save that the leaf-veins shone bright yellow.
“He’s happy,” Musad said to anyone who might hear him. “He’s happy!”
He stepped slowly back from the hull, lowered an arm to one of the panels—and the dark hull was there again, lightless, impenetrable.
Musad could not, never did know that what he had seen was a rictusmask more deeply murderous than simple hatred could rouse and mould.
* * *
For Fernix recognition of the Red-Blood was more than a cataclysm; it was a trigger.
On the Home World, when the end came it was recognized.
An end was an end. Intellect lost overriding control and biological forces took over. Genetically dictated reactions awoke and the process of Final Change began.
Pollination, initiated in the peak years of adolescence and suspended until the Time of Flowering, was completed in a burst of inner activity. At the same time stimulant molecules invaded his cerebrum, clarifying and calming thought for the Last Actions. In the domed crown of his skull the bud stirred; the first lines of cleavage appeared faintly on the surface as the pressure of opening mounted. His people flowered once only in life—when, at the moment of leaving it, the pollen was gathered by exultant young partners while the dying one’s children were born.
There would be none to gather pollen from Fernix but his salute should be as royal as his lineage.
The initial burst of killing rage against the Red-Blood ebbed slowly. Had the projection been indeed a physical Red-Blood he would have been unable to master the urge to murder; he would have been out of the pod and in attack without conscious thought, obeying an impulse prehistorically ancient. The fading of the thing helped return him to reason.
It had shown him in the opening of its mouth, in what the things called a ‘smile’, that he was the helpless captive of enemy cruelty. The display of fangs had been the promise of the last insult to honourable extinction, the eating of his body before Final Change could translate him to Deity.
It did not seem to him irrational that he had so simply projected as fact his people’s conquest of space and the new worlds; his psychology carried no understanding other than that the vegetal races were naturally dominant in the intellectual universe. The Home World scientists found it difficult to account for the evolution of thinking Red-Bloods on the neighbour planet; such things, they reasoned, could only be sports, the occasional creations of a blind chance, having no destiny.
Fernix, orthodox because he had no training beyond orthodoxy, could only grasp that his people must have been totally destroyed in that long ago war, overwhelmed by unimaginable disaster. Not they had conquered interstellar space but the Red-Bloods. He, Fernix, was alone in a universe empty of his kind.
He knew, as he regained mental balance, that Final Change had begun. There was no fear of death in his people’s psychology, only an ineradicable instinct to perpetuate the species; Fernix felt already the changes in his lower limbs heralding the swift growth of embryonic offspring, motile units in one limb, rooted slave-kin in the other.
That they would be born only to die almost at once did not trouble him; he could not abort births governed by autonomic forces and he was not capable of useless railing against the inevitable. He had seen the terror of Red-Bloods as death came to them and been unable to comprehend the working of brains which in extremity rendered their possessors useless and demented. How could such creatures have mastered the great void?
He settled again into the pilot’s seat and with quick actions emptied the whole store of trace elements into the feeding bed and thrust his feet deep into the mulch.
With triumphant pleasure he opened the emergency carbon dioxide cock and drained the tank into the pod’s atmosphere. His death would be such a flowering of insult as few had ever offered the Red-Bloods. The burst of mocking blossom, in the colour of their own life fluid, would take his people out of history in a blaze of derisive laughter at their barbarian destroyers.
That was not all. One other gesture was possible—the winning of a last battle although the war was long over.
* * *
The alien had shut himself in. The shortwave team reported that he had resumed the pilot seat and as far as they could determine had moved little in several hours.
Anne Ryan blamed Musad and was careless who heard her. “It’s a vegetable form and he lulls it into euphoria with holograms of arboreal paradise, then confronts it with a bone-and-meat structure as far outside its experience as it is outside ours! It’s probably half-paralysed with shock. It needs time to assimilate the unthinkable. We need a brain here, not a bloody bureaucrat.”
Melanie’s contribution seemed more vicious for being delivered in a strong Breton accent. “The thing showed its teeth! The plant was terrified. It has no teeth, only a sucking tube! So you bare teeth at it and it runs to hide! Who would not?”
Musad thought the women had a point and that he had acted with more authority than prudence. But, what should be done on first contact with the unknowable? The only certainty had been that he must take some action; if he had ordered the scientists to leave the thing alone he would have had rebellion on his hands and eventually questions asked in political arenas; if he had given them their heads they would have mauled each other in battles for priority and he would have ended up cashiered for inefficient management of an undisciplined rabble.
Now, when he had no idea what to do, help came from his own S & R, from the shortwave investigation team. “Something’s going on inside, sir, but we don’t know what it means. In the first minutes after it closed off the vision we could see it—the shadow of it, that is—gesturing like an angry man. Then it went back to the seat and made motions like pressing little buttons or flicking small levers—maybe. We can’t be sure because with so much wood it’s hard to get even a shadow picture. At any rate it made some adjustments because the carbon dioxide component in its air went up to eight per cent. The water vapour content seems to have increased, too, and the temperature has risen from thirty-five degrees to forty-six.”
“Hothouse conditions!”
“Super-hothouse, sir.”
“What’s he up to? Forcing his growth?”
“We think more likely some other growth it carries in there. Maybe it has seeds in that thing like a tub at its feet. That’s if the things make seeds.”
Seeds or sprouts or tubers or buds … What do you do when you don’t know what you’re dealing with? How do you even think?
The diffident, careful tones of the radiographer said, “Sir, it doesn’t want any part of us.”
“Seems so.”
“If it won’t come to us, sir, shouldn’t we go to it?”
Musad had no false pride. “You have a suggestion, Sergeant?”
“We could put a duroplastic tent round its ship, sir, big enough to allow a bunch of scientists to work in space suits, and fill it with an atmosphere matching the alien’s.”
“Then?”
“Cut a hole in the hull, sir, and get it out. Cut the ship in half if necessary.”
That should at least keep everybody quiet until the next decision—except, perhaps, the alien—and anything he did would be marginably preferable to stalemate. And—oh, God!—he would have to decide who to allow into the tent and who must wait his or her turn.
He noted the Sergeant’s name; one man at least was thinking while the rest boiled and complained. Yet he hesitated to give a command which in itself
would be controversial.
He was still hesitating when the Analysis team gave an update: “It hasn’t moved from the chair in two hours. Now chest movement has ceased; it is no longer breathing. It is probably dead.”
That settled it. He ordered positioning of the tent and matching of atmospheres. That done, they must recover the body before serious deterioration set in.
* * *
Fernix was not dead. Not quite. The complex overlapping of birth and death made the passing of his kind a drawnout experience.
Fully aerated, he had ceased to breathe. The new ones in his lower limbs drew their nourishment from the mulch and no longer needed him, were in the process of detaching themselves. When they dropped free his life’s duty, life’s story, life’s meaning would be complete …
… save for the one thing more, planned and prepared.
Now he could only wait with tentacle/finger curled for tightening, remaining perfectly still, having no reason to move, conserving strength for the final action.
His quietly sinking senses told him dully of sounds outside the pod and a fading curiosity wondered what they did out there. He thought of activating hull vision but the thought slipped away.
A sword of white fire cut a section from the hull alongside the control panels a long armslength from him and he was aware, without reacting as alertness ebbed (only the last command holding strength for its moment) of a suited figure entering the pod, followed by another. And another.
Red-Bloods. He no longer hated or cared. They would be dealt with.
One knelt by his lower limbs and unintelligible sounds dribbled from the grille in its helmet. He could not tell what it did.
Came the Last Pain, the splitting of cleavage lines in his bud sheath as the death flower swelled and bloomed from his ruined head.
At the moment of brain death his body obeyed the command stored in its nervous system for this moment. The curled tentacle/finger retracted, giving the computer its last command.
* * *
Under the tent the science teams went at it with a will. A small piece of timber was carved, with unexpected difficulty, from the alien craft’s hull and rushed to a laboratory. The preliminary report came very quickly: “… a technique of molecular fusion—everything packed tight in cross-bonded grids. Not brittle but elastic beyond anything you’d believe. Take a real explosive wallop to do more than make it quiver and settle back.”
The ceramic jet lining seemed impervious to common cutting methods and nobody wanted to use force at this stage. Soft radiation told little and they agreed that hard radiation should not be risked until they had found a means of excising small samples.
Chemanalysis had managed to create a computer mockup of the contents of the fuel tank, derived from hazy shortwave and sonar pictures, and was excited by a vision of complex molecular structures which promised incredible power output but must remain illogical until their catalysts were derived.
Carbon Dating, on safer ground with a piece of timber more or less analysed, certified the ship eight thousand years old, give or take a hundred, which made no sense at all of the presence of a living thing within.
Well, it had been living, in some fashion, perhaps still was—in some fashion. But, centuries?
Then the section of hull was cut out and the first group went in. There was surprisingly little to see. The cabin was small because most of the vessel’s volume was fuel storage and the living space was parsimoniously uncluttered. There was a timber panel with wooden keys mid-mounted like tiny seesaws, which might be on-off controls, another console-type installation that could reasonably be a keyboard and clusters of incomprehensible recording instruments—some circular, some square and some like bent thermometers. There was also a sort of dashboard set with small levers, badly smashed.
Ecologist Anne Spriggs of Waterloo, Iowa, surveyed the alien with the despair of a preserver arrived too late. The creature was an unpleasant sight, its grey and green skin muted in death to patched and streaky brown, its slender body collapsed upon itself until it resembled nothing so much as a stick-figure doll. It had died with a tentacle resting loosely round one of the on-off seesaw controls.
A tiny movement, low down, brought her kneeling cumbersomely to scrutinize the container of mulch on the floor beneath the creature’s lower limbs. The limbs hung oddly above it, their exposed, footless termini lighter coloured than the body, as if only recently exposed. Broken off? Cut off? How and why?
Several brown sticks lay on the surface of the mulch. One of them wriggled. Despite an instant revulsion she reached a gloved hand to pick it up. It was a tuber of some kind, like a brown artichoke formed fortuitously with nubs for vestigial arms and legs and head, and spots for eyes.
Musad spoke in her helmet. “What have you there, Anne?”
“I think it’s an embryo alien. It’s like—” she shrugged and held it up.
He suggested, “A mandrake.”
That was a somehow nasty idea, smelling of small evil.
A rending crack from the dead creature itself startled the suited figures crowding into the hull and those who watched through screens.
They were offered a miracle. The excrescence on the thing’s skull opened flaps like huge sepals and a blood-red crimson bolt shot a metre’s length of unfolding bloom free of the body. It unfurled not a single flower but a clustered dozen packed in and on each other, each opening the flared trumpet of a monstrous lily.
The flowers expanded in a drunken ecstasy of growth, bending down and over the dead thing that fed them until it was wrapped in a shroud of blood. From the hearts of the trumpets rose green stamens like spears, each crowned with a golden magnet of pollen.
And not another, Anne thought, for such a flourish of procreation to attract and join.
In the surprised stillness someone, somewhere, whistled softly and another hissed an indrawn breath of wonder. Melanie’s voice spoke from her office deep in the moonlet, Breton roughness smoothed in awe; “I have never seen so lovely a thing.”
An unidentified voice said, “Like a salute from somewhere out there.”
And that, Musad thought, would be the line the media would fall on with crocodile tears: A Dying Salute From Infinity …
Then Anne Spriggs said with a touch of panic, “It moved!”
“What moved?”
“The body. It moved its hand. On the lever.”
“A natural contraction,” Musad said. “The whole external form appears to have shrunk.”
* * *
Fernix had placed a slight delay on the ignition. He wanted the Red-Bloods to see his derisive flowering but he also wanted to be decently dead before the fury struck.
When the fuel spark finally leapt the ignition gap his life was over; he had timed his going with dignity. Home World would have honoured him.
The jet roared, filling the scow’s hold with a sea of fire before the craft skidded across the floor to crash through the soft steel of the imprisoning hull.
Those outside the scow had a microsecond’s view of death in a blinding, incandescent torpedo that struck the rock wall of the Maintenance Cavern and disintegrated. The cloudburst of fuel from the shattered tank burgeoned in a twenty thousand degree ball of fire, engulfing and destroying the watchers in a hell-breath and licking its tongues of bellowing flame into the adjoining corridors and tunnels, a monstrous blast of heat driving death before it.
* * *
Thirty-seven scientists died and more than three hundred general personnel. Nearly a thousand others suffered serious burns.
The material damage ran to the total of a dozen national debts and the lawsuits of the private companies on Phobos made the fortunes of the lawyers on both sides.
Heads fell on the political chopping block, Musad’s first among the offerings to the smug virtue of scapegoating.
First contact between intelligent cultures had been made.
NONE SO BLIND
Joe Haldeman
Here’s a s
ly and fascinating little story that examines the personal cost of that high-tech competitive Edge we’d all like to have …
Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a BS degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year (although usually thought of primarily as a “hard-science” writer, Haldeman is, in fact, also an accomplished poet, and has sold poetry to most of the major professional markets in the genre), and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II) Worlds, Worlds Apart, Buying Time, and The Hemingway Hoax, the “techno-thriller” Tools of the Trade, the collections Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures, and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent books are the SF novel Worlds Enough and Time and a new collection, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds. Upcoming is a major new mainstream novel, 1968. He has had stories in our First, Third, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh Annual Collections. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife Gay make their home.
It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” Cletus was only thirteen at the time, but it was a good question, and he would work on it for fourteen more years, and then change the world forever.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 50