Daughters of Earth and Other Stories

by Judith Merril

  Leah Tarbell was not the only baby conceived that night.

  VIII

  THEY WOKE up to brilliant sunlight, chill still air, and a hubbub of human activity. The big project now was exploration. The observations made by the landing crew indicated that the near-equatorial spot where they had landed was probably the most favourable location for a settlement. But we wanted closer ground observation before any further effort was made to establish the colony on a permanent basis.

  Conditions over the surface of the planet varied widely—wildly would be a better word, from the point of view of a solar meteorologist. This was the first human contact with a planet whose axis of rotation lay in the plane of its orbit of revolution. All the solar planets have axes more or less perpendicular to their orbits. On Earth, for instance, there is a short winter-night and corresponding summer-day at either pole : but only at the poles. It took a good deal of readjustment in thinking habits to calculate Uller conditions with any degree of realistic accuracy.

  The most obvious activity that day was the beginning of the construction of light aircraft for exploratory trips. Ken, of course, stayed on construction work, salvaging parts from the bowels of the big ship to build the smaller ones.

  Meantime, scouting parties were being briefed and trained for their work, absorbing new information about what they were likely to find just as fast as it came out of the labs, still operating in ship around the clock. And everyone not directly concerned with the big project, or working in the labs, was assigned to one of the local scouting groups or specimen-collecting squads. Em found herself safety-monitoring a batch of wide-eyed collectors under the direction of a botanist, Eric Karga.

  There were seven of them in the party, the others loaded down with sample cases and preservatives, Emma with a battery of micro-instruments strapped about her waist, a radiphone suspended in front of her face; and a kit of testing tongs and chemical reactors flapping against her leg. Nothing was to be touched bare-handed, smelled, or sampled, until the monitor's instruments had analysed it, and a verbal report on procedure had been made to the ship. With these provisions, it became evident almost as soon as they entered the forest that there were too many collectors, and not enough instruments. Karga himself would have thrown all discretion to the winds ... if there had been any wind, that is.

  That was the first thing Emma became aware of, when they were out of range of the bustling activity of the settlement: the literally unearthly silence. Emma had grown up in this kind of background-silence, under domes. Later, she'd lived in a TAP open-air city filled with `natural' noises: leaves rustling in a made-breeze; birds singing; small animals squeaking and creeping; an uninterrupted and infinitely inventive symphony of sound, behind and around the machines and voices and activities of men.

  Here, in a natural open-air world, there was nothing to hear but the excited busy-ness of the small group of people: Karga rushing recklessly from horny-tipped plants to opalescent trees; the monitor-instruments clicking off their messages; the steady murmur of my own voice into the radiphone; and the awed exclamation of the collectors as novelty after unexpected novelty was uncovered in the fairyland fantasy of a forest.

  The first two-hour period went by almost before they realized it. None of them wanted to go back, and the prearranged return for a complete checkup in medicentre seemed foolish even to Em, considering how careful on-the-spot precautions had been. But they really needed another monitor, or at least, another phone. And even more to the point: the rule had been established; therefore it must be obeyed. Regularity and conformity are the materials of which caution is formed, and caution was the order of the day.

  Five hundred people seemed like a lot when they were all crowded into the tender that took them up to the Newhope orbit around Pluto; or when they were being processed through defrost, the first two days on Uller; or when shelter had to be provided, and fast, for all of them. Now, looking outward from a double row of thin metal-walled huts at an unknown planet, five hundred humans seemed very few indeed. One death would leave a hole that could not be filled.

  They griped about unnecessary precautions all the way back but back they went, and through the careful psychophysical that Jose Cabrini and Basil Dooley had worked out together.

  Over a quick cup of coffee, they picked up some fresh data on the morning's discoveries. Evidence so far showed no signs of a dominant civilized, or even intelligent, natural species. Some small carapaced insect-like creatures had been found, one or two varieties in abundance. And the river from which they had drawn and purified their water was teeming with microscopic life. But nothing larger than a healthy Earth-type cockroach had turned up yet, and nothing any more dangerous either.

  The small fauna, like the plant life, appeared to be almost entirely constructed along the lines of the silicate exoskeleton, cat-bon metabolism variety. Some of the smallest amoebae lacked the skeleton, but everything larger had it, and it seemed doubtful, therefore, that any larger form of mobile life would exist. The beautiful brittle tree-trunks had rigidity against the weather, but little flexibility. The arrangement would hardly be suitable for a large-size animal of any kind. Jose still seemed to be determinedly hopeful of finding intelligent life—but in the total absence of any such indications emphasis was being placed temporarily on the investigation of plant life.

  When they came back from the second shift, they found tables and benches set up in the street between the huts, with a defrosting selector at one end. Emma hurried through her checkup, and went out to look for Ken. He wasn't at any of the tables, or anywhere in sight. Finally she picked out a lunch, and walked down the row of tables to where a group of medics were gathered. Most of them had been out on monitor duty that morning; all of them were engaged in eager debate; and Cabrini and Dooley seemed to be the opposing centres.

  Jose was talking as she sat down. 'Lab says all the fauna so far are vulnerable to vibration. Those quartz shells are brittle,' he expounded earnestly. 'So suppose there was an intelligent species? Wouldn't it stay the hell away from a spot where a rocket came down?'

  'And then all the building and tramping around,' someone else put in thoughtfully.

  It fitted with the silence of the forest. 'It's hard to imagine a civilization without any noise,' she put in. 'I know it could happen, but it just doesn't fit my conditioning about what constitutes intelligence.' She grinned, and waved an arm pointedly around the table. 'What good is it if you can't have three people talking at once?'

  'They're too small, anyhow,' Basil Dooley insisted. 'They'd shake themselves to pieces if they got big enough to do anything.'

  'You can have intelligence without artifacts,' Jo said stubbornly, 'and without noise, too. Even without vocal noise.' He gulped at some coffee, and went on before anyone else could get fairly started: 'Or suppose they're so small we just haven't noticed? Why do they have to be big? Maybe something we think is a plant is really a termite-tower, like the ones on Earth? Or a hill out there somewhere is full of things the size of ants that are just smart enough not to want to show their faces? On a planet this size, a small species could have a completely material civilization, if that's what you're looking for—they could even make noise, by their own standards—and we'd have a hell of a time finding out about it.'

  'Well, they'd have some kind of effect on the ecology of the planet, wouldn't they?'

  'We wouldn't know that yet, either,' Emma said slowly. She was excited now, turning over the possibilities Jo was suggesting, but she knew better than to display her excitement in the discussion. People always seemed to mistrust enthusiasm. 'TAP is honest ecology,' she pointed out. 'An alien coming to Pluto would have a rough time finding out that the open-air cities are all artificial.'

  Intelligent life! Non-human, non-solar intelligent life! And it was possible! This world had every prerequisite for it.

  'Well, if they're that small, you're going to have some trouble talking to them.'

  'Might never find out,' someone el
se suggested, 'if they didn't find some way to communicate with humans. That's your real problem, Jo. Suppose you find these critters? How are you going to talk to them? And turn it around: if they live in what looks like natural circumstances to us, how will we know which ones to try and talk to?'

  'Which sums up neatly,' Jo answered him, 'the problems to which I shall probably devote the rest of my life.'

  There was an intensity in his tone that silenced the table for a moment.

  'Then whatever they are, let's hope you don't find 'em. We can't afford to lose your services, Jo.' It was Ken. He slid his long legs over the bench next to Emma, and squeezed her hand. 'What goes on?'

  Everybody began talking at once again; everyone except Emma, who was surprised at the irritation she felt. He had no business stepping on Jo that way, she thought; and she didn't want to talk about it any more. 'Aren't you eating?' she asked.

  'Ate before; they said you were getting a checkup, so I had lunch and left my coffee to have with you.'

  He smiled at her, and reached for her hand again, and the irritation vanished. Even when the argument resumed, and she found that the two of them were tending to opposite extremes of attitude, she wasn't annoyed any more. They didn't have to agree about everything, after all. They had disagreed before. But this was such an important thing—the way you'd feel about an alien creature.

  Still, she could understand it better in Ken than in Basil. Ken was a constructions man. His work was in materials; in parts and pieces to fit together. He didn't think in terms of the living organism, or the subtle and marvellous interplay of functions between organs, organism, individuals, species. Basil was a medic, and a good one; he should have understood.

  Karga was at her shoulder, politely restraining himself from urging her, but too anxious to keep himself from a silent display of impatience. She stood up, and threw off the whole foolish mood. Ken would understand when they had more time to talk. And there would be plenty of time later...

  IX

  IT MIGHT HAVE been a segment of petrified log. But it had legs, and the tapered bulbous end was a head. It might have been a cross between a pig and a dachshund, painted in streaky silver, and speckled with sequins. But it had six legs, and the head was too shapeless; there was no visible mouth and there were no ears at all.

  And when you looked more closely, it wasn't actually walking. It was skating; six-legged tandem skating, with the sharp-runnered feet never lifting out of the ground, leaving an even double row of lines incised in the granular ground behind it. And the squat barrel body glided forward with unexpected grace.

  It moved into the street of huts, its head set rigidly right in front of its body, while the bulging dull black eyes darted and danced in all directions.

  The first man who saw it shouted, and it froze in mid-glide. Then the man's comrade silenced him, and the creature started forward again. A crowd began to gather and after the manner of a crowd, a murmuring noise grew from it. The creature froze once more, and veered off in another direction.

  Someone in the crowd had a gun. He raised it, and took careful aim, but someone else reached out to lower the barrel before the fool could shoot.

  'It hasn't hurt anything!'

  'Why wait till it does?'

  'How do you know...?'

  'Here's Jose.'

  'Hey, Jo, here's your native. Look smart to you?'

  Laughter. Comments and wonder and more and more uncontrollable laughter, while the creature skated directly away from the crowd and edged up against an alumalloy hut.

  'Think we can catch it?'

  'The projector ... are they getting it?'

  Jose sent a whisper running back, and it only increased the volume of the sound. Better one noise than the hubbub, he thought, and spoke sharply above the crowd.

  'Quiet!' Then in the momentary silence spoke more softly. 'I don't think it likes noise.'

  After that, he left the group, and stepped forward steadily, slowly, towards the shadow of the hut where the creature stood.

  He tried to curb his own eagerness, and make his advance without hurry and without menace. He tried, too, to ignore the slowly swelling hum of the crowd behind him. All his thoughts were on the animal, all his attention focused.

  If it had intelligence, there had to be a way, some way, to make contact with it.

  He was close enough now to touch it if he would, but he held back. It was looking at him, and from that moment on, he never once doubted that the animal was rational, impressionable, capable of communication. It was there in the eyes, in the way the eyes studied him, in something he felt in his own mind, hazily and without comprehension, examination-and-greeting was exchanged between them.

  The creature turned to the hut, and there was a questioning feeling in Jose's mind. He did not want to speak aloud. Telepathy? Something of the sort. He thought the idea of a dwelling place, a shelter; all animals understood the concept. He thought it hard as he could, and knew he had failed, because the animal's next act was one of deliberate destruction.

  Jose was the only one close enough to see exactly what was happening, but by that time they had cameras running from three different angles. Everybody saw the details, blown up, later: the people in the crowd, and those who, like Ken, were in ship, or like Em, out of the settlement.

  It glided forward smoothly once again, edging towards the house, and gradually its body tilted sideways at an angle to the ground, without bending except at a concealed joint between the barrel-trunk and the right-hand set of legs.

  The left-hand set described a perfect clean curve up the side of the building and down to the ground again. Then it reversed, and moving backwards, once more standing upright, edged the left-hand front runner slightly sideways and sheared a neat chord out of the wall.

  The crowd saw the piece of metal fall away, and gasped, in unison, and then, for the first time, fell completely silent. What had just happened was virtually impossible. Alumalloy was tough. An oxy torch would cut it ... in a matter of hours. This creature had sliced it like a piece of meat.

  The man with the gun took aim again, and nobody stopped him, but he couldn't fire. Jose was too close to the beast.

  'Jo!' he called, and then a woman's voice said loudly, 'Shhh!' as the animal froze again. Jose looked around and smiled and waved another silencing motion at them.

  He looked back just in time to see the tuskongs coming out. Two parallel needle-edged blades, curved like a set of parentheses, they descended slowly from underneath the head, and went through the metal like tongues of fire through straw. The creature glided forward, and a long thin strip was sliced from the centre of the chord. The blades were hinged, somehow, and they seemed to be sticky inside. The needle edges met under the strip of metal, and the strip was carried up inside the tusks—or tones—as they retracted slowly into whatever opening (a mouth?) they came from.

  'Jo, get outa there! I'm gonna shoot!'

  There was no doubting that tone of voice. Jose held up a pleading hand, and stepping softly, walked backwards towards the crowd. Until he turned around, he knew, the man would hold fire. He waited till he was too close for his turned back to matter any more, then asked quietly, with all the command he could put into a low tone. 'Wait.'

  'Why?' The man whispered in reply; then he would wait to shoot.

  'We might as well see what it's going to do.'

  'Ruined a wall already. Why wait for more?'

  The words were passed back through the crowd, and the murmuring swelled again. The creature seemed to have adjusted to the noise. Calmly, it sliced another strip of the virtually impregnable alloy, and drew the metal into its interior.

  Then, while they watched, it turned again to the wall, and, folding its front legs under it, slanted forward to edge its snub-ended snout inside.

  The gun came up once more, and Jose knew he couldn't stop it: the beast had poked its head inside a sacrosanct human habitation. But: 'Higher!' he whispered piercingly, 'Over its head!' The bar
rel jerked upward imperceptibly just as the gun fired.

  It couldn't have hit; Jose was sure of that. But a sunburst of cracks appeared on the surface of the animal's hide, for all the world like the impact of a projectile on bullet-proof glass. And at the same instant a jagged lightning-streak arced from the centre of the 'wound' to the side of the hut.

  The gunner drew his breath in sharply. 'It's a goddam walkin' dynamo!'

  And the crowd-talk started up once more.

  'Quartz ... crystals ... piezo-electric … generates!'

  It's scared, Jose thought—but now the animal had shown what power it had, so was the man. The gun came up again.

  'Stop!' Jose shouted. 'Can't you see it's scared?'

  It worked: not on the man, but as Jose had hoped, on the beast, and the man hesitated. The creature backed away from the wall, and started forward past the hut, away from the crowd and the street. It was leaning to one side, the good side, and lurching a little, going very slowly. Now its trail was a deep indentation on one side, and a barely marked line on the other, and in between a greyish ooze of something that didn't seem to be coming from the injured side. Perhaps from the 'mouth' or whatever those tusks went into? It was hard to tell.

  The gunner still stood with his weapon half-raised.

  'The field projector,' Jose whispered to him, and the man handed his gun to his neighbour, and ran for the rocket.

  The Ullern animal had progressed perhaps fifty metres when he came out of the airlock again, a dozen others tumbling after him, with bulky pieces of equipment that took rapid shape on the ground.

  There was grim speed in the way they worked. Jose, watching them, understood their fear, and could not share it; felt the pain of the hurt animal and grieved for it; fervently hoped the creature's piezo-electric properties would not make it unduly vulnerable to the projector.

  There was a crackling, blinding flash of electricity as the field hit it.

  Ken Tarbell answered the alarm bell reflexively, absorbed the data, and fell into drilled pattern responses with the projector team, getting it out of the airlock, setting it up, aiming, firing.