No. As usual, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. The vast majority of planets are in fact lethal environments for man. But on this account we normally pass them by, and so they do not obtrude very much on our awareness. Of those which possess free oxygen and liquid water, more than half are useless, or deadly, to us, for one reason or another. Yet evolution is not a random process. Natural selection, operating within the constraints of physical law, gives it a certain direction. Furthermore, so huge is the galaxy that the random variations which do occur closely duplicate each other on millions of worlds. Thus we have no lack of New Earths.
Likewise with the psychology of intelligent species. Most sophonts indeed possess basic instincts which diverge more or less from man's. With those of radically alien motivations we have little contact. Those we encounter on a regular basis are necessarily those whose bent is akin to ours; and again, given billions of planets, this bent is sure to be found among millions of races.
Of course, we should not be misled by superficial resemblances. The nonhuman remains nonhuman. He can only show us those facets of himself which we can understand. Thus he often seems to be a two-dimensional, even comic personality. But remember, we have the corresponding effect on him. It is just as well that the average human does not know on how many planets he is the standard subject of the bawdy joke.
Even so, most races have at least as much contrast between individuals—not to mention cultures—as Homo Sapiens does. Hence there is a degree of overlap. Often a man gets along better with some nonhuman being than he does with many of his fellowmen. "Sure," said a prospector on Quetzalcoatl, speaking of his partner, "he looks like a cross between a cabbage and a derrick. Sure, he belches H2S and sleeps in a mud wallow, and his idea of fun is to spend six straight hours discussin' the whichness of the wherefore. But I can trust him—hell, I'd even leave him alone with my wife!"
—Noah Arkwright
An Introduction to Sophontology
A SUN INVISIBLE
I
The invaders had posted their fleet in standard patrol orbits. Otherwise they did nothing to camouflage themselves. It bespoke a confidence that chilled David Falkayn.
As his speedster neared Vanessa, he picked up ship after ship on his instruments. One passed so close that his viewscreens needed little magnification to show details. She was a giant, of Nova class, with only subtle outward indications that the hands which built her were not human. Her guns thrust across blackness and crowding constellations; sunlight blazed off her flanks; she was beautiful, arrogant, and terrifying.
Falkayn told himself he was not duly terrified. Himself wondered how big a liar he was.
His receiver buzzed, a call on the universal band. He flipped to Accept. The dial on the Doppler compensator indicated that the battleship was rapidly matching vectors with him. The image which looked out of the screen was—no, scarcely that of a Vanessan, but a member of the same species. It gabbled.
"Sorry, no spikka da—" Falkayn braked. Conquerors were apt to be touchy, and yonder chap sat aboard a vessel which could eat a continent with nuclear weapons and use his boat afterward for a toothpick. "I regret my ignorance of your various languages."
The Kraok honked. Evidently he, she, or yx did not know Anglic. Well, the interspeech of the Polesotechnic League . . . "Loquerisne Latine?"
The being reached for a vocalizer. Without such help, humans and Kraoka garbled each other's sounds rather badly. Adjusting it, the officer asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
"Huh?" Falkayn's jaw hit his Adam's apple.
"Ich haben die deutsche Sprache ein wenig gelehrt," said the Kraok with more pride than grammar, "bei der grosse Kapitän."
Falkayn gripped tight to his pilot seat, and his sanity, and gaped.
Aside from being hostile, the creature was not an unpleasing sight. About two meters tall, the body resembled that of a slim tyrannosaur, if one can imagine tyrannosaurs with brown fur. From the back sprang a great, ribbed dorsal fin, partly folded but still shimmering iridescent. The arms were quite anthropoid, except for four-fingered hands where each digit had an extra joint. The head was round, with tufted ears, blunt muzzle, eyes smaller than a man's.
Clothing amounted to a brassard of authority, a pouch belt, and a sidearm. Falkayn could therefore search his memory and discover which of the three Kraokan sexes the officer belonged to: the so-called transmitter, which was fertilized by the male and in turn impregnated the female. I should've guessed, he thought, even if the library on Garstang's didn't have much information on them. The males are short and meek and raise the young. The females are the most creative and make most of the decisions. The transmitters are the most belligerent.
And right now are tracking me with guns. He felt altogether isolated. The throb and murmur of the boat, the odors of recycled air and his own sweat, his weight under the interior gee-field, were like an eggshell of life sensation around him. Outside lay starkness. The power of the League was distant by multiple parsecs, and these strangers had declared themselves its enemies.
"Antworten Sie!" demanded the Kraok.
Falkayn groped with half-forgotten bits of Yiddish that he had sometimes heard from Martin Schuster, during his apprenticeship. "Ikh . . . veyss . . . nit keyn . . . Deitch," he said, as slowly and clearly as possible. "Get me . . . ah mentsch . . . uh, zeit azay git." The other sat motionless. "Damn it, you've got humans with you," Falkayn said. "I know the name of one. Utah Horn. Understand? Utah Horn."
The Kraok switched him over to another, who squatted against a background of electronic apparatus. Unhuman tones whistled from an intercom. The new one turned to Falkayn.
"I know some Latin," yx said. In spite of a vocalizer, the accent was thick enough to spread on pumpernickel. "You identify."
Falkayn wet his lips. "I am the Polesotechnic League's factor on Garstang's," he said. "A messenger capsule brought me word about your, uh, advent. It said I had permission to come here."
"So." More whistles. "Indeed. One boat, unarmed, we allow to make landings at Elan-Trrl. You make trouble, we kill."
"Of course I won't," Falkayn promised, unless I get a chance. "I will proceed directly. Do you want my route plan?"
Yx did. The boat's pilot computer sent numbers to the battleship's. The track was approved. Maser beams flashed through space, alerting other vessels to keep an eye on the speedster. "You go," said the Kraok.
"But this Utah Horn—"
"Commander Horn see you when want to. Go." The screen blanked and Falkayn went. The acceleration strained his internal field compensators.
He gusted air from his lungs and stared outward. Hitherto, as he sped toward Thurman's Star, the view had been dominated by Beta Centauri, unwinking, almost intolerably brilliant across two-score light-years. But now the sun of Vanessa showed a visible disc. It wasn't that kind of type B supergiant: but nevertheless impressive, a white F7, seething with prominences, shimmering with corona. If his shield screens should fail, its radiation would strike through the hull and destroy him.
Well, he gulped, I wanted to be a dashing adventurer. So here I am, and mostly I want to dash.
He stretched, opposed muscles to each other, worked out some of his tension. Then he felt hungry and went aft to build a sandwich; and when he had eaten and lit his pipe, a certain ebullience returned. For he was a bare twenty years old.
When he got his journeyman's papers, he was one of the youngest humans ever to do so. In large part, that was thanks to his role in the trouble on Ivanhoe. To set a similar record for a Master Merchant's certificate, he needed another exploit or two. Beljagor's message had made him whoop for glee.
Now it turned out that he was up against something more formidable than he had imagined. But he remained a scion of a baronial house in the Grand Duchy of Hermes. Mustn't let the side down, eh, what?
At a minimum, if he did nothing but convey word to Sector HQ about what had happened, that would bring him to the notice of the higher-ups. Maybe old Nick
van Rijn himself would hear about this David Falkayn, who was so obviously being wasted in that dismal little outpost on Garstang's.
He practiced a reckless grin. It looked better than last year. While his face remained incurably snub-nosed, it had lost the chubbiness that used to distress him. And he was large and blond and rangy, he told himself, and had excellent taste in clothes and wine. Also women, he added, becoming more smug by the minute. If only he weren't the sole human on his assigned planet—Well, perhaps this mysterious Horn person had brought along some spare females. . . .
Vanessa grew in the vision ports, a reddish globe mottled with green and blue, sparked with reflections off the small seas. Falkayn wondered what the inhabitants called it. Being colonists themselves, whose civilization had not fallen apart during the long hiatus in Kraokan space travel as had happened on other settlements, they doubtless had a single language. Why hadn't Thurman done the usual thing in such cases, and put the native name of his discovery into the catalogues?
Quite probably because men couldn't wrap their larynxes around it. Or maybe he just felt like dubbing the planet "Vanessa." Judas, what a radium-plated opportunity an explorer had! What girl could possibly resist an offer to name a whole world for her?
Another warship in sentry orbit became discernible. Falkayn stopped dreaming.
II
In the lost great days of their expansion, the Kraoka had never founded a city. The concept of so small a unit having an identity of its own—and composed of still lesser individual subunits, each with its separateness—was too alien to them. However, they did give names to the interconnected warrens they built at various sites. Falkayn's bible (Terrestrial Pilot's Guide to the Beta Centauri Region) informed him that Elan-Trrl, in any of several possible spellings, could be found in the middle northern latitudes, and was marked by a League radio beacon.
So crowded a microreel could say little about the planet. The only important hazards mentioned were ozone and ultraviolet. He got into a hooded coverall and donned a filter mask with goggles. The tiny spaceport swooped up at him. He landed and debarked.
For a moment he stood orienting himself, getting accustomed to strangeness. The sky overhead was cloudless, very pale blue, the sun too dazzling for him to look near. Colors seemed washed out in that cruel illumination. Beyond the port, hills rolled down to a lake from which irrigation canals seamed a landscape densely cultivated in bluish-green shrubs. Gnarled, feathery-leaved trees grew along the canal banks and high-prowed motorboats glided on the water. The agricultural machines in the fields, and the occasional gravity craft that flitted overhead, must have been imported by League traders. On the horizon there bulked a dry brown mountain range.
Falkayn felt heavy, under the pull of one-point-two gees. A wind boomed around him, casting billows of heat. But in this parched air he wasn't grossly uncomfortable.
On the other side of the port, Elan-Trrl lifted bulbous towers. Their gray stone was blurred in outline, from millennia of weathering. He didn't see much traffic; mainly underground, he believed. His eyes went gratefully to the homelike steel-and-vitryl facades of the League compound at the edge of the space field. They wavered in the heat shimmers.
Two vessels rested near his. One was a stubby Holbert, evidently Beljagor's; the second, lean and armed, modeled after a Terrestrial chaser, must belong to the invaders. Several Kraoka stood guard in her shade. They must have been told to expect Falkayn, for they made no move toward him. Nor did they speak. As he walked to the compound, he felt their eyes bore at his back. His boots made a loud, lonely noise beneath the wind.
The door of the factor's quarters opened for him. The air in the lobby was no less hot and sere than outside, the light scarcely less harsh. But naturally the League would put someone from an F-type star here. Falkayn began to think more kindly about cool green Garstang's. And why hadn't this Beljagor unko come out to meet him?
An intercom said, "Down the hall to your right," in Latin and a gravelly bass.
Falkayn proceeded to the main office. Beljagor sat behind his desk, puffing a cigar. Above him hung the emblem of the Polesotechnic League, an early Caravel spaceship on a sunburst and the motto All the Traffic Will Bear. Computers, vocascribes, and other equipment were familiar, too. The boss was not. Falkayn had never met anyone from Jaleel before.
"So there you are," Beljagor said. "Took you long enough."
Falkayn stopped and looked at him. The factor was somewhat anthropoid. That is, his stocky form sported two legs, two arms, one head, and no tail. But he was little over a meter tall; his feet each had three thick toes, his hands three mutually opposed fingers; the kilt which was his solitary garment revealed gray scales and yellow abdomen. His nose could best be likened to a tapir's snout, his ears to a sort of bat wings. A bunch of carroty cilia sprouted from the top of his pate, a pair of fleshy chemosensor tendrils from above his eyes. Those eyes were as small as a Kraok's; animals which see a ways into the ultraviolet and don't use the red end of man's spectrum have no need for large orbs.
As if for comparison, a Vanessan squatted on yxs—no, her this time—tail before the desk. Beljagor gestured with his cigar. "This here is Quillipup, my chief liaison officer. And you are . . . what is your silly name, now?"
"David Falkayn!" The newcomer could do nothing but snap a bit, when he was a mere journeyman face to face with a Master.
"Well, sit. Have a beer? You Earthtypes dehydrate easy."
Falkayn decided Beljagor wasn't such a bad fellow after all. "Thank you, sir." He folded his lean frame into a lounger.
The Jaleelan ordered through his intercom. "Have any trouble on your way?" he asked.
"No."
"I didn't expect you would. You're not worth bothering with. Also, Horn wanted you to come, and he seems to rank high in their fleet." Beljagor shrugged. "Can't say I wanted you myself. An unlicked cub! If there'd been an experienced man anywhere nearby, we might have gotten something done."
Falkayn swallowed another chunk of pride. "Regrets, sir. But when the League has only been operating hereabouts for a few decades—I'm not sure what you have in mind. Your message just said the Thurmanian System had been invaded by a force of Kraoka who're ordering the League out of the whole Beta Centauri region."
"Well, somebody has to go warn HQ," Beljagor grunted, "and I won't myself. That is, I figure to stay here and stall, maybe even argue them into changing their minds. Your own post won't miss you." He fumed in silence for a while. "First, though, before you leave, I want you to try and make a few elementary observations. That's why I sent to Garstang's for help, instead of Roxlatl. Snarfen is probably ten times as able as you—he being a Master—but you are a human and there are humans in high positions among the Antoranites. Like Horn, who said he'd want to interview you, after I mentioned your origin. So maybe you can get a line on what's going on. Takes one member of your ridiculous race to understand another, I always say."
Falkayn stuck grimly to the point. "The Antoranites . . . sir?"
"The invaders call their base Antoran. They won't describe it beyond the name."
Falkayn glanced at Quillipup. "Don't you have some idea where they come from?" he asked.
"No," said the Kraok into her vocalizer. "It can be no world that the Race was known to have settled. But records are incomplete."
"I don't understand how—"
"I shall explain. Ages before your species or Master Beljagor's were aught but savages, our great ancestors on Kraokanan—"
"Yes, I know about them."
"Don't interrupt your superiors, cub," Beljagor growled. "Besides, I'm not sure you do know the history. And won't hurt you to hear it again, whether or not you've waded through a book or two." His nose twitched in disdain. "You're with Solar Spice & Liquors, right? They don't deal here. Nothing for them. As far as interstellar trade goes, Vanessa doesn't produce anything but drugs and fluorescents that aren't useful to your type of life. Me, I'm not only here as agent for General Motors of Jaleel, I
often represent other companies from similar planets. So I have to know the situation inside out. Go on, Quillipup."
"Now you are interrupting," sulked the Vanessan.
"When I speak, it's not an interruption, it's an enlightenment. Go on, I said. Make it short. None of your damned singing chronicles, you hear?"
"The majesty of the Race cannot well be conveyed without the Triumph Ballads."
"Stuff the majesty of the Race! Carry on."
"Oh, well, he probably could not appreciate the splendor anyway."
Falkayn gritted his teeth. Where the hell was that promised beer?
The Van Rijn Method Page 25