I recorded a graph I thought they would want to see back on Nisu. “Actually I’d say it’s more that we just like each other. We always have. We’re interested in the same things, we do the same work, we were close for more than a decade before puberty. . . you could hardly expect it to be otherwise, could you? Of course, all of us younger generation are friends, but it’s not the same. Otuz and I are more like each other than either of them. So . . . well, it just seems very natural to me. I’m much more attracted to Otuz than I ever could be to Priekahm, and—”
“She feels the same way about you,” Kekox said, his voice flat and dull. “I already talked to her.” He groaned and rubbed his crisp, bushy top crest, now beginning to go gray. “I understand everything I guess except why sex has to get into it.”
“Well, you’ve had sex, or tried to, with every female on board except Otuz. You tell me why it has to get into it.”
From the way his back hair bristled I thought I was about to get a beating, but then he said, softly, “I wish I knew. My father used to say I must have Shulathian blood from somewhere. Seems like it’s been all my life that it was the most important thing there was, that it’s what I thought about whenever I wasn’t on a mission. Especially what I thought about tended to be the next one, who I was going to copulate with next. . . it’s hard to explain. We’ve been on this voyage for so long now, twenty years, and ... I’d literally kill for a chance at a new female. I never thought that could be an issue, but it is. I guess I can’t fault you or Mejox for being interested in sex, either . . . but still. When I was growing up, what you kids do in front of everyone was the kind of dirty joke that could get you into a fight. It’s just hard for me to . . .” He let the sentence trail off and sat, squirming uncomfortably, for a long time before he said, “Well, I guess I look like an idiot?”
“Well, not an idiot, maybe, but you know, none of what you’re saying is our problem. We’re on the ship. On the ship everyone is equal. So why shouldn’t we love who we love?”
Kekox sighed. “The strange thing is that there was a time when I would have agreed completely. I used to use my opinions to start brawls with guys I wanted to fight. But now I find . . . I’m not as big as my principles. Funny.” He looked over my shoulder at the screen. “Is that anything interesting?”
I took his invitation. “Oh, it looks like a few more stars may have dark companions than we thought,” I said. “And most stars have a lot more planets than we’d thought. If anyone back home was the least bit concerned with finding habitable worlds anymore, we would have a list of at least three hundred possibles for them—all the places with enough mass in their habitable zones. A few fast probes could settle the question and then we could scatter our people to a thousand worlds, instead of betting everything on the poor old Imperial Hope. If they ever finish her, that is.” I pointed to the comparison graphs. “See? We measure the microgravity at every fourth eightday—we’ve been doing that since we started—and then we do a mathematical decomposition to pinpoint the sources. Way down in the fine grain of the noise, we find things that have moved and resolve those into masses and positions.
“Gravity is a lot weaker signal than light is, but they don’t attenuate or block nearly as easily, so we can find the right places farther away. The biggest thing we needed to do this kind of astronomy is to be able to take measurements at points far enough apart—and we’ve certainly had the chance to do that across these past twenty years.”
Kekox asked me to show him how to do the basic solutions, and he and I worked together silently for the sixteenth of a day until bed. After that we were almost friends again, speaking to each other anyway, but now and then I would see him staring at me and Otuz and I would know it could never be entirely over. And though he didn’t try anything again, Priekahm was afraid of him till the day he died.
And so for three more years we decelerated into the Kousapex System. Kekox was civil but distant, Soikenn alternated between sullen silence and false heartiness, and except for her turns in the cockpit, the captain tended to stay in her chamber, listening to music, watching performances, and reading old books. The only adult that all of the younger generation were able to talk to was Poiparesis, and that was strange because he was the only one who spoke to us openly about the way we had paired off. He accepted that Mejox was being reasonably decent to Priekahm and did not seem likely to drop her abruptly, as Soikenn feared. He even conceded that the way we had arranged things was a better fit to our personalities.
But, he would add, always, love and marriage were two different things, both difficult enough, and he didn’t see why we had to make things so much harder by rebelling against the old ways. And now and then when Mejox and Priekahm would sit with arms draped around each other near him, or when Otuz and I might brush hands or whisper to each other, we would catch a glimpse of Poiparesis wincing.
Yet despite all that, we liked and trusted him, and we were all around Poiparesis a great deal for another reason: he was doing the most interesting work on the ship. We had many probes down on Setepos now, and a sizable number of orbiters, and Poiparesis was trying to process all the pictures and data into a single decision: where we would land and build our base.
It mattered a great deal: we children would live there for five years (or five and a half years of Setepos—we would have to get used to a new calendar). And the adults would live out their lives and finally die there, while doing the long-term research needed for the Imperial Hope’s millions of settlers.
“Always assuming they ever build the Imperial Hope,” Poiparesis said. Two days before we had gotten a news update: the design phase was not only to be stretched out, but to be stretched out seventeen rather than eleven additional years. “Sometimes I think that all the evolutionary advantages of being able to think about the future are canceled out by the ability to figure out how far away the future is. We don’t seem to be able to balance things out between understanding that we still have time to act, and that the future is always going to get here.”
“You’re being philosophic today,” Priekahm teased. “It’s what you get for watching the news.”
“It would make a philosopher out of you,” Otuz said, “or a suicide, depending on how seriously you took it. Didn’t you check it, Priekahm? Seventeen-year stretch-out now. At least they’re still letting us have the new power station on schedule, and the mirror is on its way. Hey, look at these pictures! Look at the size of those animals!”
We all bent around what Otuz had pulled up on the screen; she worked image enhancement on it and added a measuring stick.
“They’re at least twice a bodylength high at the shoulder,” Mejox breathed. “And look at those snouts—that is their nose, isn’t it?”
“I’d say so, but for all I know their spine folds around and that’s their tail,” Poiparesis said. “Can’t tell till we get there and cut one up. Or unless we move one of the moving-picture probes over to the eastern Hook, which is where we found this one—and we’ve pretty well ruled it out. Big predators, not enough water, no good river transport . . .”
“Oh, of course, I know,” Otuz said, “but aren’t they wonderful?”
“It’s an amazing planet, based on a sample of two,” Poiparesis agreed.
“You’re so lucky, Poiparesis,” Mejox said. “There will be time for you to explore a lot more—”
“If it were up to me,” he said quietly, “we’d all stay. I think there’s something crazy about sending you back.”
The room was perfectly still. We had never heard any adult voice a bought like that, not even privately to each other when they thought we weren’t listening.
He sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. Everyone seems to have strong opinions about what opinions I should have. But the only reason for you all to go back is to be living examples, symbols, people they can trot out to make the case for the Migration Project. We all know Mejox and Otuz are pretty much out of the running for emperor now; the empress
has had four children we know about, and I would bet that somewhere out there in space behind us there’re radio messages announcing two more. As celebrities you’d have a great deal of influence, but I’m sure that if you stayed here, there would be decades more of exploration and setup completed, and the colonists are going to need that data so much ... it seems so insane to spend all the time, money, so much of your lives to get you here, and then to send you back so you can shake hands and lead parades.” He looked around. “Am I depressing all of you?”
“I’m depressed enough as it is,” Mejox said. “It’s hard for me to remember that when I was little, I used to think the parades and ceremonies and so forth were the greatest things in life. I guess because I thought they were all for me, and I thought that they had something to do with being powerful and getting my way. Nowadays . . . well, even before I left I guess I had figured out that the one they hold the parade for might as well be a prisoner. All he can do is walk where he’s supposed to.”
I always liked to tease Mejox when he went into self-pity, so I said, “Of course, scientifically speaking, we’ll want to test that by holding parades for some prisoners, and then maybe imprisoning some celebrities—”
Mejox made a sour face. “All right, I’m exaggerating. I’m still not happy about—”
Priekahm cried out as if something had bitten her.
“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?”
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