by Larry Niven
A sudden rush of understanding.
A trail of burnt hydrogen!
“You may howl for the dead, and you may howl vengeance for our companions in the Hunt. But no heroes are to die in the mourning. And no death-duels till further notice. No station is to be uncrewed.”
Happy Gatherer
Paul van Barrow waited for the hubbub to die away, waving for quiet with a smile. His responsibilities as leader of the Happy Gatherer expedition tended to make him pompous and even stuffy at times, but he was as excited as any now. There were several projects running on the ship, and a score of impressively multi-skilled people on board. Happy Gatherer was a big ship, hired not purpose-built, but they made a crowd in the room.
“The gravity anomalies are still inexplicable. If they really are Outsiders, they may have some gravity control. There’s another thing.”—He pointed to a projected diagram, a wedge-ended ovoid—”that ship has a sort of streamlining, as if it can land and take off through an atmosphere from a planetary surface. And it’s big. I think that’s also evidence of gravity-control.”
Signals to trustees? The thought crossed several minds. An instruction transmitted now would reach the stock-market in about eight years’ time.
“We signed undertakings,” Paul reminded them, “About windfall profits from new knowledge.”
It had been one of the ways finance for the expedition had been raised.
“If we can understand this new knowledge,” said Henry Nakamura. There was a note of caution In his voice.
“People that intelligent should be good teachers.”
“Are you certain, Paul?” Rosalind Huang’s voice had an odd edge to it. Her eyes seemed somehow unnaturally large under her red-black pattern of hair. She needs reassurance, Rick Chew realized. What’s wrong? This is a great moment. He stepped in.
“If these are signals, we will translate them. It’s difficult, certainly, but that’s only to be expected.”
“A new bunch of careers when we get back,” said
Michael Patrick, “There will be a stream of PhDs rolling down conveyor belts.”
“Not only with the language. We’ve probably just set up a dozen new academic industries. Meanwhile, we should have identified some keys, but we haven’t.”
Michael laughed. He had an easy, infectious laugh in almost any situation. Although some thought he did not always take things quite seriously enough, the crew owed him a lot. He had shown a gift, during the long flight, for taking the sting out of almost every problem with some joke. “So we’ve underestimated the difficulties. We’ve plenty of time, and so, surely, have they.”
“Rick,” said Selina Guthlac, “Aren’t we making a questionable assumption?”
“We can’t expect the translating to be easy, but if their language has consistent rules—and surely it must— we will translate it in the end.” The Neuronetic lattices on and in the ship were Lambda Platform. Their cell-connections were beyond counting.
Selina worried Rick. The crew and their successful interaction were his responsibility, and Selina seemed at times to be what another age might have called a misfit. And he had met her brother. Scrawny owlishness in him was in her a hint of watchfulness which reminded one that owls were hunters. Arthur Guthlac’s undirected nervous energy was in her concentrated accomplishment. Like all in the Happy Gatherer she was a winner. Selina had won her way into Space with the sufferance sometimes accorded genius. Arthur had given up any idea of belonging. She could adopt protective coloration and be accepted by most of the crew, nearly all the time. But interdependence in such a situation was virtually total, and, as on Earth, too many eccentricities stacked up.
Now she spoke carefully, tasting the words and disliking them as she used them: “What if they do not want to communicate with us? What if they deliberately disguise their speech? Deliberately make it impossible for anyone else to translate it?”
No-one asked the obvious question: “Why?” But here and there expressions began to change.
“Selina!” Peter Brown laughed, “What have you been reading?”
She flinched for a second. Beneath its innocent surface, the question might have dangerous implications. Then she came back at them.
“Another thing: you said the alien ship is big. took at the scale. It’s not big, it’s gigantic! And the shape— that might not be for atmosphere entry, it might be to reduce surface area. Why do you think they would want to do that?”
No one answered for a long moment. Then Peter asked:
‘What about the Angel’s Pencil? Have there been any messages?”
“None we’ve heard.” The colony ship to Epsilon Eridani would have passed through this quadrant, but in the interstellar distances no-one had seriously expected to intercept messages from it. Its big comm-laser would be tight-beamed back to Earth or the Belt.
“I suggest we all assemble at the end of each watch for updates. The crew of the Happy Gatherer dispersed reluctantly, with many lingering glances at the screens. Peter called Rick and Paul aside.
Selina had comfortable quarters, decorated with a number of personal touches. In Space “personal space” was a necessity not a luxury. There was a transparent case of stimulated glass and wood on the shelf, a small grey-painted object within. The model recalled a shared life of the mind light-years away. A reminder too of the dangers the old sea-voyagers and traders of Earth had faced in primitive craft. A good-luck charm, perhaps? Something else? She looked at it as she had many times in the past, but HMS Nelson told her nothing more.
The door signaled a visitor. Rick entered.
“Why did you say that?” He asked her without preliminaries, ‘About alien messages being made untranslatable deliberately.”
“I hardly know.” She already regretted her previous words, and their inevitable implications. The intimacy of a long voyage could lull one into self-betrayal.
“Selina, I don’t agree with what Peter’s been saying...”
“Why, what has he been saying? Or can I guess?”
“I don’t want to be hypercritical, and I’m sure that’s not his intention either. Or anyone’s. Paul has always defended you, you know. And sometimes Peter says things a little before he’s thought them through, perhaps.
“I’m not suggesting you need conditioning or anything like that, but have you thought of having your psych profile redone, just as a precaution. It would be entirely voluntary”
“No.”
“Suppose there was some chemical imbalance.”
“The doc would notify me and correct it when I have my next check-up. In fact, and as you know, I would never have got past the selection board carrying anything like that. But Rick, both the selection board then and the doe now are of the opinion that I am sane.” His self-assurance was a goad to her. She realized she had never liked or respected this smug, complacent, always unsurprising, somehow herbivorous man. Like Paul, only worse, she thought. Well, it’s not surprising. There was always a chance we might meet Outsiders. The same board chose both of them as the best representatives of the human race... what an error it made when it also chose me!
“Are you sure you’re happy?” It was a weighty question as he asked it. This was a culture that took happiness and its pursuit more seriously than any in history.
“What’s it to you?”
He was hurt by her words. “We are a team. You know that.”
“Thank you, Rick. You’ve possibly seen my profile as you are in charge of crew records. Since one of my jobs is Space navigation, I have studied something of Space-flight. Since I am also, as you are doubtless also aware, particularly as we have discussed it a number of times, a natural scientist, I do know something about human body and brain chemistry.” She paused, measured him with her eyes and added, “And they may have gravity control.”
Part of Selina’s problem in socializing may have been connected to the fact that she lived in a culture most of whose members had little concept of sarcasm or irony. Thes
e people did not insult each other, and it took Rick Chew a little while to work out what she meant.
“I’m only thinking of you,” he told her at last. “Anyone who can’t get on with people shouldn’t be here.”
“Shall I get off and walk home, then?”
He flinched.
Something hurt her. She sensed that the atmosphere of conflict was not only alien to him, it was painful. She sought for words to calm the situation.
“I think you’re tense, Selina,” Rick said, “Perhaps a little current stimulation would help you relax.”
He backed away, raising his hands against the murderous rage blazing in her face. He distinctly saw the beginning of a striking motion before she checked it. She spoke as he had never heard anyone speak before.
“My father was a current addict. He cured himself. I was with him. I saw him cure himself. Have you any idea what that means? Do you know how many current addicts have ever cured themselves? Do you know the price they have to pay?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t know.” Rick was doubly distressed at giving and receiving pain now.
“Don’t you ever, ever, say that again, do you hear!” Selina had dropped into a half crouch. She glared into Rick’s face, now working with signs of consternation, for a long moment without speaking. It was a glare which a generation experienced in such things might have called murderous. Mumbling apologies, he shook his head in bewilderment and left.
How would he behave, how would any of them behave, her thought began to form, how would any of them look if... if at that moment...
A headache. Stress perhaps. The autodoc had outlets in each crew member’s rooms and Selina quickly inserted her fingers for chemical analysis.
Gutting Claw
I fell onto my forelimbs as I crossed the bridge. Zraar-Admiral would have to calculate how much more I could take. It was not my place to comment on this, but to report.
“Dominant One, the enemy know nothing of Tracker. They know a little of the Ancients, but of no other thinking life in Space. They have no clear aims except to gather data about anomalous radio and gravity events and other useless knowledge. But they are kz’eerkti.”
“What radio and gravity events?”
“Probably us.”
Monkey inquisitiveness. There were Simianoids on several planets in the Patriarchy, and it was an ecological niche which often led to rudimentary tool-using. Intelligent beings were generally somewhat alike and also generally edible. Slaver-students thought the Ancients had spread common primitive life-forms through much of the Galaxy. But this on the screens represented more than rudimentary tool-using.
“I believe the same type of apes killed Tracker. The drives are similar. Omnivores with five fingers like the print... The species has established itself in considerable numbers in one star-system apart from its original one, and in smaller colonies further away, using reaction drives. They have hibernation...” We Telepaths were expected to understand alien sciences, religious, societies, languages and technologies as well as alien thoughts.
But several inhabited worlds! A Vengeance-Hunt had become a promise of Conquest Glorious! The hunters’ minds were volcanic.
“They send messages to us. They call their ship the...” I had trouble translating. Successful Plant-Eater was how it came out.
But Tracker hung in every mind. Tracker and the great swathe of exhausted hydrogen which we had been following.
“What weapons do they have?”
“None, Feared Zraar-Admiral. These creatures have never fought. I find nothing of weapons, hardly a concept of war, save in one female mind. Even there it is vague.” I paused, then spoke again, all around knowing as I spoke that I repeated the words of dead Tracker’s Telepath: “They have only kitchen-knives.”
“Feared Zraar-Admiral,” said Alien Technologies, “how could such a race have evolved a theory of ballistics?”
“Ballistics or no, we see them in Space,” said Student of Particles. “There is a danger of weapons! I care not what the addict says.”
“There is also the Paradox,” said Zraar-Admiral, “Do not forget it ever.”
Zraar-Admiral had killed enemies in plenty on the ground as the Heroes’ battle-legions over-ran worlds, or fought each other, with claw, fang, W'tsai and occasionally with beam or fusion-bomb. Not all those battles had been easy, for a true Hero attacked—on the ground or anywhere else—without too much reckoning of the odds. On one planet with wide oceans the locals had had sea-ships hidden under water, armed with missiles with multiple warheads. Heroes died before our Students of Particles developed a heat-induction ray that boiled the seas. Tracker had had such a ray. And there were vague stories that came slowly from distant parts of a widespread Empire of other things... But Zraar-Admiral had never joined battle against aliens in Space.
Perhaps he never would. The war between the Slavers and their Tnuctipun slaves that wiped out intelligent life in the galaxy billions of years previously might be the only full-scale war of species that would ever be fought in the deeps between the stars, save for the far-distant, almost legendary, Time of Glory when the Jotok had been overthrown. The few races encountered in the Hunt that had interplanetary and poor weapons were hardly substitutes. There was a legend of a Feral Jotok Fleet which had escaped when the Kzin rose, but in centuries no trace of it had been found...
The fighting against other Kzin was controlled. Struggles of Kzinti Houses Noble produced exhilaration and bloodshed in plenty and the ambitions of young Heroes for names and territory made for a number of outlaws, rebels and pirates. There was always dueling. Zraar-Admiral had owed his first advancement to his dueling prowess and his trophy-hoard contained an impressive number of ears, but fights between Kzin, in the training arena, the hunting preserve, or even in full-scale military action, were not the Conquest Glorious or The Day. Gutting Claw’s destiny, he felt, was unfulfilled. Like the whole Navy’s. Like his own.
Some priests said Space-faring warrior aliens were a fantasy like intelligent females, a self-evidently heretical denial of the natural order of things. The Jotok alone had been created by the Fanged God to give Heroes access to gravity-motors and High-Tech weapons without shameful dilution of our own warrior culture. But for Zraar-Admiral life with no possibility of The Day, the Triumph Supreme, presented a prospect of doleful dullness. The Battle-Drum on the bridge showed the Navy’s view. It had never yet been struck, and for one thing only would Zraar-Admiral strike it.
Alien Technologies Officer suspected dimly the struggle between Priesthood and Military, between religious doctrine and the claims of honor which the Battle-Drum symbolized. I, whom he disdained to notice, knew more than he about the ideas that made him. But instincts less acute than mine would have told him how dangerous a path his thoughts and words might start down. A-T shifted to safer ground, keeping matters purely technical.
My report, Zraar-Admiral realized as I did, duplicated Tracker’s recorder. An alien enemy with no weapons or knowledge of weapons, and Tracker sliced by a claw of light. If the enemy deceived Telepaths there was real, and for Zraar-Admiral thrilling, danger. For me the prospect was less thrilling.
Happy Gatherer
“There was a signal coming from Earth,” said Paul, “but I’ve put it on record and left all channels clear for our friends. Whatever it is, it will have to wait on this.”
“think... ?” Anna left the words unfinished.
“Attempts at direct mind contact? It’s the kind of thing one might expect in advanced beings. If so, we’re not equipped to cope. I know telepathic ability was a factor in the selection of some of us, but we haven’t enough of it.”
“So what do we do?”
“I’m unhappy. What if they decide that we are too alien for them to communicate with and leave? We can’t follow. I don’t think we can just sit here and wait for them to make the next move. What a disaster if they decided we were a waste of time and vanished!”
"Would they, after all this effor
t?” Paul asked. “That ship is big. Really big. It must have cost them energy to bring it here to meet us.” He was instilling confidence. “Look, there are scientists on that ship, people with minds like ours, or better, who look at problems the same way. They’ll adjust to us. Perhaps they expected to recognize us. Now they don’t. Perhaps,” he added after a moment, “they’re frightened. I think we’ll have to pay them a visit. We’ll take a boat across.”
“I wonder,” said Rick, “if that would be entirely... diplomatic? We know we’re dealing with alien minds. What if they saw us as some sort of threat to them?” His confrontation with Selina had left him with food for thought.
“Threat? What do you mean?” Anna Nagle asked.
“Did you ever see an animal in a safari park? Go close too suddenly, and it’ll often run, though you mean it no harm. For all we know these outsiders might think the same way.”
“But,” Paul objected, “beings that get into Space must share certain common attributes of social order, cooperation... isn’t that what the whole history of civilization is about? How could they see us—fellow Space-farers—as a... threat. If it’s obvious to us they are not savage animals, surely it must be equally obvious to them that we are the same.”
“How do we know what they think? I’m sorry now we’ve no Belters with us. Even if they do tend to be paranoiac about Space, I need a different perspective on this...”
“I think we can do without any paranoia here.” Peter said. He may have been looking in the direction of Selina but it was impossible to be sure. “We are mature adults and I think we can arrive at sensible decisions.”
Peter is an ARM, Selina thought suddenly. Of course the technological police would have people aboard. He’s going to have ARM do a thorough job on my files when we get back to Earth, and this will be my last trip into space. What am I thinking of? This may well be the last trip for all of us anyway.
“As well as the boat, why don’t we send across a free party in suits?” Paul asked. “I will go first.” He was unsure why his position compelled him to say this, but some deeply-buried thing told him it was appropriate. “I take the point that they might be frightened of us. This should demonstrate that we mean no harm.