Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  But Moodri was certain. What had stricken the children was not nensi fever. They had simply been given a small dose of minced-up ceel root with their vegrowth. The ceel root made them sleepy and triggered a harmless rash that appeared to be the same as that caused by nensi fever, though any trained physician would see the difference at once. In a handful of shifts the podlings would reawaken, the rash would fade, and the isolation room would no longer be necessary. And no outbreak of spartiary gland infection would arise until the next time the Elders needed a secure and private place to meet and talk without fearing the approach of the Overseers. Thus, as the podlings slept in their swings and oscillators this shift, the Elders met in safety.

  Vondmac was the eldest of the three who had assembled. Her spots were myriad—hundreds of tiny near-circles evenly spaced across her scalp. According to an old husbands’ tale, children born with such a distribution were destined for the life of science, and though it annoyed her no end to give any sort of support to such superstitious nonsense, Vondmac was proof of the legend.

  This shift, however, instead of wearing the narrow, shawl-like tippet of a scientist, Vondmac wore her Ionian robes in honor of the goddess, as did Moodri and the youngest of the three, Melgil. Should any Overseer risk infection by intruding on this meeting, ancient star charts and ceremonial divining crystals were unrolled and scattered at the Elders’ feet, giving weight to their well-practiced story that this was yet another of the endless rounds of religious debates that consumed most of the Elders’ time and attention. Fortunately, none of the Overseers ever seemed to recall that on Tencton religious debates had been exceedingly rare, given the strong current of tolerance to which most Tenctonese faiths adhered.

  But it was not religion being debated in the isolation room, it was the survival of the three hundred thousand Tenctonese aboard this ship. And Vondmac did not talk of the dual nature of the serdos or how the seasonal festivals of the goddess could be reconciled with the passage of relativistic time, but of planetary chemistry and distant atmospheric readings. On the home world she had been a biochemist and thus was the first to whom the stolen readings from the bridge were always given.

  “In terms of distance to the primary, it is the second planet of this system that is better situated,” Vondmac reported. “But initial scans show it to be completely cloud-covered and far too hot to support life as we know it. I suspect that it does not even support life as we don’t know it.”

  Moddri and Melgil waited patiently, a trait honed by spending more than a century aboard the ship and in slave camps on distant worlds. Vondmac would say what she had to say and in as much detail as she felt necessary. It was the way of things, and they were content.

  “But the third planet is possessed of minimal cloud cover. And an oxygen atmosphere,” Vondmac said. She paused then, a subtle smile at play on her lips.

  Melgil sat forward in his chair. His withered right arm was momentarily exposed by the wide sleeves of his robes. Melgil was a binnaum, and his spots were few but exceedingly large. “What is the planet’s mass?” he asked.

  “Point eight seven of one Tencton mass,” Vondmac said.

  Moodri asked the next question he was certain she was expecting. “And the percentage concentration of oxygen is . . .”

  “At this distance and velocity, the spectrograph shows twenty percent,” Vondmac said, “with a plus or minus error factor of two.”

  Moodri and Melgil exchanged a glance of hope, and of concern. With such a small mass the third planet could not be expected to maintain such a sizable portion of oxygen in its atmosphere as the result of purely mechanical and chemical means. The only explanation that would therefore account for that oxygen’s presence was for the third planet to have an established biosphere of carbon-based life—a biosphere that might be capable of supporting Tenctonese life.

  Their concern was for the hard decisions that would have to be made if, in fact, the third planet was the long-hoped-for refuge the Elders had suspected it might be.

  For the moment, though, Melgil concentrated on the facts at hand. “Then the old charts are correct,” he said. “This is a habitable system.”

  But Vondmac did not immediately confirm the old binnaum’s conclusion. Moodri was afraid to guess why.

  “The third planet is possessed of an organic biosphere,” she said. “But that is not all.”

  Moodri was surprised by the force of the disappointment he felt. For almost fifteen years the Elders had had it in their power to disable the ship under certain conditions. Throughout that time, during each translation into normal space for a course-correction swing around a star, the Elders had searched for a world that could provide safe harbor for the wretched slaves on board.

  So many stars they had swung about in that time, and fewer than one in three had met the combined conditions of emitting the proper range of light required for Tenctonese health and having planets the proper distance from their sun. Of those appropriate solar systems, almost nine in ten had supported some form of life on planets that were near the right size and temperature. But fewer than half of those had been planets on which the biosphere was organic—its life chemistry based on the carbon ring, as was the home world biosphere in which the Tenctonese had evolved.

  Of the handful of planets that orbited a sun that produced the right light, were the right size, had the right temperature, and were home to carbon-based life, half again were already in the service of the ships—home to slave camps, mines, ocean farms, and energy converters constructed on a planetary scale, slowly transforming entire worlds into planetesimal debris.

  Which left the Elders with fewer than six chances out of every hundred translations to find a world that might offer hope to their people. And of those six chances, how many had been lost to them because the atmosphere seethed with ancient radiation from a long-ago war? How many had been lost to biospheres corrupted by the sudden introduction of artificial life forms for which no ecological checks and balances had ever evolved? How many were cloaked by ice, devoid of free water, or poisoned by planetary oceans brimming with unimaginable concentrations of sodium chloride?

  Too many, Moodri knew, for the dream of freedom to have remained alive in the younger among them—those who were the firstborn on the ship and thus the next to take over as Elders when the last generation of the home-born died.

  And now it seemed that Vondmac was about to tell them that this world, too, was unsuitable for them.

  “What else is this world possessed by?” Moodri asked.

  “According to the spectrographic readings, fully two thirds of the surface is covered by oceans polluted by sodium chloride,” Vondmac said.

  Moodri sighed. They might just as well be oceans of sulfuric acid. But still, that meant that one third of the planet might be free of the poisonous liquid. And even at point eight seven the mass of Tencton, a planet was still a large place.

  “Are the oceans alone enough reason for us to pass by this world?” Moodri asked.

  “Alone?” Vondmac said. “No, not by themselves. They would add hazard and health problems to any resettlement, but I would assume there would be deserts enough to suit us.”

  “Then what else is there on this world?” Melgil asked. Moodri could hear in the binnaum the same sense of despair that he himself felt.

  Vondmac stared at a podling in the gently rocking swing beside her. The small one made a fist and sleepily tried to shove it into his toothless and flangeless mouth. Vondmac smiled and brushed a gentle knuckle across the podling’s spots. “At this distance, at this velocity,” the scientist said, “the world is radiating strongly in the electromagnetic spectrum from three meters to three centimeters.”

  Moodri understood. “The world is home to a race of intelligent tool users,” he said. Life was everywhere throughout the stars, but intelligent self-awareness was rarer than a threefold lunar eclipse.

  Melgil bowed his head. The Elders had discussed this possibility often. The only moral and
ethical decision that could be made would be to pass the world by completely.

  But Moodri was puzzled. The sun they were approaching was a regular course-correction star for the ships. It had been used dozens if not hundreds of times in the past. Moodri himself knew he had passed it before, almost a century earlier.

  “Is this world not already in service to the ships?” Moodri asked.

  Vondmac shook her head, acknowledging his quick appreciation of the conundrum they faced. “No, it is not,” she said. She held up a slender hand. “And before you ask, this star has been on the ship’s charts since we left Tencton, as has the third planet’s orbit. In fact, were I to judge from the drift error between the star’s projected position according to the charts and its actual position as established upon translation, I would estimate that the ship’s builders originally charted this star more than ten thousand years ago.”

  “Ten thousand years,” Moodri said softly. He wondered if in that time the message of the goddess might have reached this world, or even if Celine and Andarko might have left their touch upon it.

  “I don’t understand,” Melgil suddenly said.

  Moodri nodded. “How true. None of us understands the slightest iota of the universe around us.”

  But Melgil waved his sleeves at Moodri. “I am speaking literally, Moodri, not spiritually.” To Vondmac he said, “If this world has been known to the ships so long, and if it does have intelligent tool users upon it, then why is it not in the service of the ships?”

  Vondmac raised her empty hands to Ionia. “Why not, indeed? It is a very good question, and I have no answers for you.”

  Moodri didn’t believe that for a second. “Come, come, scientist,” he said. “We have a simple set of starting conditions here. A suitable theory to account for them should not be too difficult to formulate.”

  Vondmac gestured to Moodri. “I bow to your greater knowledge, scientist.”

  Moodri sighed again. More than a century in captivity, and Vondmac still knew how to play games. He decided he should admire her resilience and not be annoyed by her stubborness.

  “Very well,” Moodri began. “We set out the following conditions. So far, all other worlds that have an indigenous race of intelligent tool users are in service to the ships.”

  “All other worlds of which we have knowledge,” Vondmac qualified.

  “Surely, that is a given,” Moodri said. “If we know a world to have indigenous intelligent tool users, then it follows that we have knowledge of that world.”

  But Vondmac raised a finger. “Not if you—”

  “Colleagues!” Melgil said loudly.

  Moodri and Vondmac turned to look at him. The podlings stirred, disturbed by Melgil’s sudden outburst.

  “This is not a classroom, nor is it the hidden council,” Melgil said testily. “Perhaps we should dispense with the debating tactics and get to the hearts of the matter.”

  Moodri and Vondmac regarded each other’s eyes for long moments until both understood that a truce was in order.

  “I shall begin again,” Moodri said. “So far, of all the worlds of which we have knowledge, we have noted that each world with indigenous, intelligent tool users is in service to the ships. The third planet of this world is home to such tool users, yet it is not in service. Therefore our pattern of knowledge has been broken, and we need to add new conditions to our initial statement.”

  There was a lengthy pause, finally broken by Melgil. “And what might those new conditions be, Moodri?”

  Certain that Vondmac would not interrupt, Moodri continued.

  “One, the electromagnetic emissions from the planet are the result of heretofore unknown natural phenomena, and the planet is not inhabited by intelligent creatures.”

  “Unlikely,” Vondmac said.

  “Conceded,” Moodri agreed. “Two, the planet is like Korullus V.”

  Melgil nodded to indicate it was a reasonable assumption to him. Korullus V was a planet once inhabited by a species of intelligent tool users, and which was now inhabited only by the species’ intelligent tools. The world had become little more than a landscape of mechanical contrivances similar to the ship’s maintenance hull crawlers, moving from place to place, occasionally doing battle so that the loser’s spare parts could be incorporated into the winner’s configuration. The planet radiated powerful deep-space microwave beacons as if the mechanical thinking devices on the planet sought their creators and enticed them to return home, apparently with no knowledge that it was the thinking devices that had caused the creators to become extinct in the first place.

  “Perhaps,” Vondmac said thoughtfully. “But the devices of Korullus V are powered by fusion and conversion technologies. The atmospheric scans of the third planet indicate a great deal of biomass combustion is providing that world’s energy needs. That type of energy production is not generally found to be concurrent with the advanced mechanical technologies that give rise to self-motivated machines capable of reproduction on a planetary scale.”

  Moodri accepted that. “Just a thought,” he said.

  “Have you no others?” Melgil asked.

  “Two,” Moodri said, though he did not wish to state either.

  “Two should do it,” Vondmac said, to let him know that she had already arrived at the conclusions he had.

  “The third possible explanation for what we see is that the last time this ship—or any of its fleet—executed a course correction around this sun, the third planet was not radiating in the microwave frequencies.”

  Melgil’s face wrinkled up in thought. “But did we ourselves not pass by this star just less than a century ago?”

  “A great deal can happen in a century,” Moodri said.

  Melgil rocked back in his chair and waved his good hand, dismissing the theory. “If you’re suggesting that the third planet’s intelligent species developed radio technology in the precise span of time elapsed between our last passage of its star and this passage, you’re ready for the vats, my friend.”

  Vondmac snickered. “The level of coincidence is extreme,” she said.

  “What level of coincidence?” Moodri asked. “The ship has known of this star for ten thousand years. If intelligence has grown on one of its planets, is it coincidence that it should do so in the ten thousand years of the ship’s existence? Think, of all the life we have seen and know of in this galaxy. Intelligence must have arisen millions of years ago in thousands of places. The goddess willing, it will arise again and again millions of years hence in thousands more. To ask why it is that in our passage in one ship of a fleet of perhaps thousands, over a span of years that might very well approach a million, one small planet should achieve a pinnacle of technological development now, is like asking how it came to be that any one of us was born where and when we were. Goddess! There are so many stars, so many planets, so much life”—Moodri dropped his voice to an angry whisper, so unlike him—“and so many ships that what we see is something that was inevitably to happen at some time. The only coincidence is that we are the individuals who are here to see it. And that is not coincidence, colleagues, that is fate.”

  One podling snuffled. Other than that, there was silence in the isolation room. Until Vondmac said, “Conceded.”

  Melgil cleared his throat. “And what of the fourth possibility?” he asked Moodri. “You said you had two more, did you not? So another possibility remains.”

  Moodri adjusted the prayer beads at his neck. “It is not a pleasant prospect, old friend.”

  Melgil’s face clouded.

  “If there is intelligence on this planet, intelligence that is not in service to the ships, then perhaps the reason is that . . . the ships are in service to this planet.”

  Moodri felt his spots pucker at their edges at even the thought of what he dared suggest.

  Melgil reacted the same way and brought a hand to his scalp, rubbing his spots to relax them. He flexed his feet up and down as well, trying to relieve the pain of tensi
on that must have cut through them.

  “Are you serious?” the old binnaum whispered. “That this could be the world of Those Who Made the Ships?”

  A podling who was too attuned to the emotional state of those around him began to cry at the sudden increase in anxiety that filled the room. Moodri got up and went to the child to comfort him. The hem of his robes brushed lightly against the textured metal of the floor. “A possibility only,” he said as he lifted the babe. “A condition that might account for matters as we view them.” He whispered to the podling, filling it with his love, for even here, even now, the goddess provided.

  Melgil’s eyes blazed with horror. “We must . . . we must tell the others,” he said breathlessly.

  But Vondmac raised a hand to calm him. “The power of science is such that those who have shared in the examination of the initial conditions will have arrived at the same range of possible conclusions,” she said. “Most of the hidden council will know what we face by the end of shift.”

  “What we face?” Melgil said. “What we face? We face nothing! There can be no decision to be made this time.” He stood up and hugged his withered arm tightly to his chest as he paced through the room. “We have already said that we will not inflict ourselves upon any world’s indigenous culture, especially if our presence might then bring other ships to reclaim us and endanger the inhabitants of that new world.” He stopped and wheeled to stare at Moodri, who softly cooed to the podling snuggled safely in his arms. “And to attempt to land on a world that is the home of Those Who Made the Ships . . . that’s insane! Utter madness! Every last one of us will be recycled like . . . like that!” He made a frictive click with his tongue where a human would have snapped fingers.

  Moodri said nothing, simply rubbed his knuckles against the tiny temples of the child. “We thank Ionia for this day,” he whispered to the child, “and each day ever after.”