by Buzz Aldrin
“Look!” she said. Her fingers were stabbing frantically at the keys on the controls. “Let me play this part back. It’s from one of the roving probes, the last-wave ones …”
“What part of Setepos?”
“That big peninsula off the southwest corner of Big. Near where it joins to the Hook. It’s one of the list of a hundred possible base sites—nice weather, forests, mountains.” She popped up an inset screen and showed us the glowing spot, then turned back to relocating the short burst of moving picture that had excited her. “Here, now watch—”
We had gotten used to several of the basic groups of Seteposian animals, and we already knew there was one whole family that looked quite a bit like us—indeed, the ones I had named mejoxes looked like miniature Palathians with prehensile tails. There were big ones and little ones, some that lived in trees and some that lived on grasslands; the little bit of moving pictures that we had gotten of them seemed to indicate that they were unusually intelligent for animals.
This band of them that crossed in front of the camera looked much less like us than the mejoxes did. They were even more hairless than Shulathians, though shorter; they had small curved ears and flat faces like Palathians, and they were intermediate in build, with broader shoulders than a Shulathian but without the thick, heavy knot of back muscles of a Palathian.
“They’re walking upright,” I said, staring stupidly, feeling even as I said it that somehow I was missing everything important.
“Let me get image enhancement—” Priekahm said.
Otuz was making a strangled noise, and Priekahm added, “So you see it, too. Let’s just see if we’re both crazy—”
The brief section of moving picture, no longer in time than it takes to draw three breaths, ran backward, enlarged, clarified—and began to run forward again. We all bent to look—and then we were all shouting at once, louder than Priekahm had.
Clutched in the hands of most of the animals were sticks fitted with shaped-stone blades—unmistakably sickles. Each of them was wearing a long vest of animal skin over a shift of woven fabric. And the meadow in which they stood in a long, ragged line, was all of one kind of grass—tall stuff with bunches of seeds on slender stalks, like the retraphesis from which we made bread and porridge at home.
The other adults came running to see what the shouting was about, Kekox in the lead. It was at least a forty-eighth of a day before everyone stopped gabbling at once and we began to talk about it intelligibly. The first thing everyone actually heard was Poiparesis’s comment: “Well, if nothing else, this means that the mission is finally going to get some attention from the news services back home. Too bad we’ll have to wait to hear what they think until Wahkopem Zomos is already on its way back.”
“Fascinating,” Kekox said. “It’s like something out of the early pictures taken by Wahkopem, after he discovered the Leeward Islands.”
We all crowded still closer to the screen as the short clip of motion picture ran over and over again. “Think of what they’ll have to say to us,” Soikenn breathed. “How different they’ll be, how wonderfully different the world will look to them.”
As I looked at them, I found myself thinking that I had never seen any creatures quite so ugly before in my life; the humpbacked thing we had seen some time before was nothing compared to these hideous beings clad in crude rags. Their faces were flatter than any Palathian’s; their heads seemed to be nearly spherical underneath the wads of filthy matted fur that grew above, and in some cases down onto, the face; their bodies had neither a Palathian’s confident power nor a Shulathian’s grace, but something between the two that might be called sickly clumsiness. They looked like nothing so much as the unfortunate result of an illegal medical experiment.
I could tell Otuz was revolted, too. She leaned back against me, as she usually would, any time in the lab, and unconsciously, looking at these distressing creatures, we took each other’s hands.
Kekox was babbling on. “Unbelievable. A living world so close was a small miracle, but these are actual people; they must have poetry, and religion, and music, and—” He saw that Otuz and I were holding hands and touching, and for a moment I thought he might turn and strike me, but he swallowed hard and contented himself with glaring at me.
The sudden interruption had made everyone turn and look; I saw Soikenn and Osepok glance away, in some pain, and Poiparesis sigh. Otuz leaned back harder and I extended my arm further around her.
Mejox finally saw—he had been watching the screen more intently than any of us. His face set flat and hard; he glared back at Kekox. Priekahm slid into his arm, flashing a thin smile at us. There was an ugly set to Kekox’s eyes at that.
Poiparesis, too suddenly and too brightly, said, “Isn’t it amazing? We had thought the biggest thing this expedition would have to deal with would be octades of loneliness, and now we see that the problem is going to be an excess of company. Just think of what will happen when we start to talk with them!”
Kekox turned back to the screen. “Amazing,” he said. I could see him forcing himself to relax, making himself deal with what was on the screen and not with what was in the room. “The most wonderful thing we’ve seen so far.”
As he said that, Mejox, jockeying the image, got us an up-close look at one of the creatures; it was more hideous in detail than it had been in general.
We all spent a while longer looking at the pictures, but shortly we of the younger generation started to find ways to drift out, heading down to the common dining area. The adults were still burbling at the picture and I’m not sure they even noticed our going.
I was last to join the others; they were sitting at the table, untouched cups of warm drink in front of them, and it didn’t look like anyone had said anything in a long time.
“What do you think, Zahmekoses?” Priekahm asked, not looking at me.
“I think they’re thrilled out of their minds to find what’s probably a very dangerous kind of vermin all over one of the best colony sites—and they can’t wait to make friends with it—but if any of them saw a crossbred child, especially one they were related to, they would stomp it to death without compunction.”
“I think you’re right,” Mejox said. “Isn’t it funny that they’re all so thrilled with finding another intelligent species, they want to go cuddle right up to it, and just love the Creation out of every one of those smelly savages, but they can’t bring themselves to accept love between a Shulathian and a Palathian?”
“Unless the Shulathian is a whore-oh-sorry-I-mean-consort,” Priekahm added.
I sat down. Thoughts were whirling through my mind. “Well, be fair, Soikenn and Poiparesis are scientists. They just think this is remarkable. They haven’t thought about the implications yet and probably never will until someone makes them.”
Mejox groaned. “Yeah. Like, one beautiful planet down the drain. No chance to talk about just staying there and having kids. At least not unless we want our kids to grow up always having to watch out for a big, smart, dangerous animal like those. I guess we didn’t realize how lucky we were to live on a world where most of the dangerous animals were killed off long, long ago. Isn’t there one decently safe part of Setepos?”
Otuz shrugged. “Well, where’s your spirit of adventure? Didn’t you want to wander all over an untamed world?”
Mejox laughed ruefully. “I sure did. A nice, safe, tame, untamed world.”
I had finally pulled out a thought that might be useful. “Remember our vow, way back on Nisu?”
They all gestured assent.
“Well,” I said, “here’s the thing. We pledged to be united. We pledged to belong to each other first, Nisu next, and not at all to our individual races. And it seems to me the time has come to start thinking as a group of friends—and as Nisuans. What’s the biggest problem on our homeworld? Don’t answer the rhetorical question … just think about how Kekox just reacted, and that poor stupid old bastard is trying not to be a bigot. And why is the pr
ejudice so deep? Because the races are so different, right? Now right now we know nothing of these things on the planet’s surface—or almost nothing. But don’t we all agree they’re hideous? And clearly they’re crude and stupid … look at the way they live. And … well. Here’s my guess. As soon as we have a 256th of a day’s real acquaintance with them, we’ll hate them to the bone. So will the adults, for that matter. The Seteposians sure aren’t attractive, and if there’s anything that our own history teaches us, it’s that race hatred is natural and normal. They won’t like us either. So I say … if it’s going to be hatred, and it’s us or them, we should get the jump on them.”
Otuz gestured her agreement. “And think about this too. Before the Conquest, all the little principalities of Shulath, even though they had sworn allegiance to the same General Court in principle, were constantly at war with each other. There were traditional hatreds between different islands and cities and branches of Mother-Sea-Worship that went back too far for anyone to know how they’d started. But after the Conquest … well, all that disappeared in a hurry. Everybody who was tall, crestless, and long-eared learned that there was only one enemy worth hating—the one who had conquered them. In a couple of generations all Shulathians were brothers. Nowadays no one even knows which of the many original nations any one Shulathian is descended from.” She gestured at us all. “Well, compared to our differences with those intelligent Seteposian animals, we’re all identical twins.”
Priekahm was gesturing eager assent. “You’re right,” she said, “on both counts. First the difference it might make in our culture to find real aliens to hate, and secondly that we don’t really have any basis for calling the Seteposians people. There are pets on Nisu that could be taught to build a hut or even to till a garden. Until we know that they’re anything more than smart animals, we shouldn’t be calling them people.”
“I hope you’re not talking about us adults,” Poiparesis said, coming in. “There you all are. Well, as you might have guessed, we have a sudden emergency research project. Get a snack if you need one and meet me in the rear computer lab in a sixty-fourth of a day. I’ve got a long list of tasks for all of you; we have a meeting at the end of the eightday to decide what to do, and we’ll need to get every piece of information we can together by then.” He turned and went.
I guess I was still angry; I turned to the others and said, “Well, there you have it. As soon as anything important comes up they drop all this silly pretense about discussing with us as equals.” It came out in a nasty, sarcastic tone that I disliked as I said it, but perhaps only I heard the tone, for everyone else was gesturing assent.
“How about we hold a meeting of our own, real soon?” Mejox said. “Maybe after evening meal tonight?”
9
AT THE END OF the eightday, Wahkopem’s whole crew met in the common dining area. “Let’s begin by facing facts,” Osepok said. “The decision has to be entirely ours. No matter what we decide, a lot of Nisuans won’t like it. Right?”
We all gestured agreement. “All right, then,” she said. “It seems to me then that what we do is decide, plan what we’re going to do, and then radio back the plan with the news. That way we don’t give anyone back on Nisu a chance to argue about what we ought to do before they know what it is. At least they can’t get mad about being made irrelevant.”
Again everyone agreed.
“So much for the easy part,” she said. “Now what do we do? Let’s turn this over to Mejox, who operated the two mobile probes we used for looking into this.”
Mejox got up and dimmed the lights. “Here’s highlights from motion pictures taken by probe one, which I sent to a high hill that overlooks a settlement site.”
The first picture dashed any hope we might have had that the whole thing was somehow our misunderstanding. The village was surrounded by a wooden palisade with stones piled around its base, and fields around it were planted with grain and various other plants. “Let me bring up some details,” Mejox said. “If you look here, you’ll see what’s pretty clearly a crude irrigation system, and when we enlarged and enhanced this part, we found this gadget: the long lever raises the animal skin bag full of water out of the river, as you see, and then they swing it around to the trough and set it down. The bag empties into the trough, the trough spills into the ditch, and the ditch carries it out to the field.”
Poiparesis grunted. “And is that smoke?”
“Oh, yes,” Mejox said. “They have fire. The tools are stone, but some of the ornaments on their necks and wrists look like metal, maybe gold or copper, something easy to smelt in a cellulose fire.”
“Cellulose?”
“Yep. Amazing, isn’t it? Something we only know as a synthetic is basic to life here. Thanks to their habit of burning trees for fuel, we were able to get a spectroscope shot of the flames, and cellulose is what Seteposian trees are made out of. Which is why Seteposian forests grow a lot taller than ours, I suspect—Seteposian trees aren’t limited by the water pressure needed to hold them up. Probably the core of the tree is just deposited cellulose and isn’t even alive. I bet they don’t have to bake the wood before using it to build with. But anyway, it looks like a thousand of the animals probably live in that village. Now here’s the clip from probe two, which I sent in after the first probe disappeared.”
“Disappeared? You mean it stopped transmitting—” Osepok said.
“No, disappeared. A satellite overhead saw it on one pass and didn’t see it on the next. This made me suspect that the animals in the village had something to do with it. So I sent the next probe to a hilltop farther away, got the pictures, and told it to fly out into the desert when it was done. That drained the last of the batteries and it had to sit and soak up desert sunshine for two full days to get operational again. But it was definitely the way I had to do it—let me show you. Now in the earlier clip you noticed this big building I’m sure—” He popped a still picture onto the screen. “I thought it was a granary, or maybe the boss male’s den. But look here—”
They had pulled off large parts of one side of the building. Inside there was a statue, probably of stone, of one of their females sitting cross-legged; in front of it were the remains of the probe, solar panels torn off, sections missing from its wings, thrusters gone, instrument package ripped open. I looked closer. “Did it get covered with all that mud when—”
“That’s not mud,” Mejox said. “Watch.”
The clip changed. One of them, in a long robe, a strange mask over its face, raised a small struggling animal—not the same species, this one was covered with thick hair—over his head, then forced it down onto the flat upper surface of the probe’s right wing. With a gleaming stone knife, he cut its throat and let it bleed over the probe.
“Oh, no,” Poiparesis said. “No. This just keeps getting worse.”
“Exactly,” Osepok said. “I’d be pretty surprised if that’s anything other than what it looks like. A religious ritual. Not too different from the ones the sacrifice cults did when Wahkopem found their islands, assuming his description was accurate. Either they think the probe is a god, or they think it was sent by one, and they’re giving it gifts.”
“My guess is that they don’t think at all,” Mejox said. “They’re interesting animals, but let’s not get carried away.”
The next shot was a slow pan. Nearly half the crude log-and-mud buildings in the village had wing sections or chunks of solar panel over the door, and several close-ups of individuals showed that they were wearing thrusters or instruments on thongs around their necks.
“So far, not only are they there first, but they seem to be outwitting us,” Kekox commented.
“Otuz will have the next section, about the problem of the distribution of these things,” Mejox said.
She got up and brought up the lights. “I wish I had Mejox’s flair for the dramatic, but I don’t. So I’ll just say that I’ve got everything documented and I can show you the detail if you need more proof
. But here’s the gist of it: we used all the pictures we had of these animals to set up a program that processed through every satellite and probe picture we had, looking for evidence of them elsewhere on the planet. And the quick answer is that these animals are the kind of vermin that spreads everywhere. We found them on all the large land masses except the ice-covered one, in desert, grassland, mountains, swamps. Almost certainly they’re in the forest areas, too, but we can’t see them under the tree canopy. The biggest parts of the planet where there aren’t any, as far as we can tell, are some islands here and there. Some of the islands are quite decent places—these two southeast of Southland, this one by the Hook, and many of these small chains in mid-ocean, all have nice enough climates, but any island we picked might become infested with them before the colony got here, a few hundred years from now.” She scratched her ear fiercely, something she did when she had to tell you bad news. “It’s not clear that they’ve gotten anywhere by sea yet—they may have walked on land bridges ten thousand years ago when there was much more ice and the oceans were lower—but if you look at this satellite picture, it wouldn’t quite resolve, but it does look like a log raft traveling across this strait here. We’ll probably know more later, but for right now I’m not sure we can say any part of the planet is secure against them, except perhaps the ice continent.”
“So conflict is bound to come,” Mejox said.
“So, if we settle there, conflict is absolutely bound to come,” Soikenn agreed, emphatically. “They’re already living in towns, possibly doing some metalwork, and growing crops, and it looks like their population dispersal has been rapid and recent because they don’t differ physically nearly as much as Shulathian and Palathian—it looks like except for minor pigmentation differences they’re still all one race.”
Otuz agreed emphatically. “Right. We really can’t avoid these animals. Like it or not we’re going to be moving into their way.”
Poiparesis winced and said, “These ‘animals,’ as you call them, show every sign of being as bright as we are—”