by Joe Haldeman
The hermit population was suddenly reduced to three again—one of them, surprisingly, one of the beast’s vietims. “They obviously don’t have any taste for me,” he said, and moved his lean-to farther out. People sometimes saw him at first light, though, standing in a field bareheaded, with a knife in each hand.
The other victim, Mark Ollen, had more subtle but more serious psychological problems. He was one of the scientists in die primary group, an agronomist. For some weeks he was almost useless at work, unable to concentrate, dragging into the lab and falling asleep over his samples or his console. Every night he would wake up repeatedly with the same graphic unsettling nightmare: the creature drinking his brains. Doc Bishop gave him pills, but the dream was stronger than them. One night he took all of the remaining pills at once, left a short note, and swam out into the lake. The top half of his body washed ashore in the next tide.
The remains were frozen and sent to ’Home, where things were better set up for autopsy. The surgeons there found nothing wrong with Ollen’s brain itself. But there was one detail that Doc Bishop had missed: a hole about a third of a millimeter in diameter had been drilled through his scalp and skull, and there was a healed spot in the durum directly underneath.
Don’t jump to conclusions, they said. A man who was sick enough to eat a handful of tranquilizers and see how far he could swim might well have done the damage himself. An animal feeding wouldn’t have had any reason to be so delicate about it; besides, the spiders’ claws weren’t fine enough or strong enough to do the job.
They sent the other victim up to ’Home and, under the scab on his scalp, the surgeons found a similar hole. He agreed to stay there for observation. For the rest of his life, if need be. They also examined Kisti Seven, but evidently she had gotten rid of the thing before it had started drilling.
Nobody ventured outside at night without head protection and weapons; in fact most people spent the night at home or wherever they happened to be stuck when the sun went down. Warnings went out to all of the exploration teams.
The creatures weren’t hard to kill if you spotted them. Night was banished as a string of lights went up around the perimeters of both towns. Elevated guardhouses were staffed by sharpshooters with high-powered lasers. Extermination squads swept the countryside during the daytime.
O’Hara said it was overreactive xenophobia and counseled moderation. The things hadn’t actually killed anybody, though they’d had the chance; probably many chances. Before exterminating them, it would be smart to capture a few and observe what they do under controlled conditions.
2. THE HUNT
Age 57.31 [23 Galileo 431]—Raleigh let me go ahead with the idea of capturing one or two of the floating spiders (or brain-eaters, as some people are calling them) so long as I could muster enough volunteers to build a cage and go capture them.
Finding the volunteers was no problem. I’m not the only one who feels uneasy about a campaign of slaughtering the dominant form of life in the region. Charlee rounded up eleven people from Engineering and I got fourteen from Policy. We built the cage in four afternoons, basically a geodesic dome of thick reeds, the whole thing covered with tough plastic. A fan pulled cool air through hollow reeds in the top; a pair of cameras with night vision would keep our captive under surveillance.
Now the big problem is finding a captive to capture. The first day the sweep team went out, they killed thirty-four of them, using robot drones to home in on helium ponds. The second day they killed nine; the third day they killed two. Maybe the creatures are rare. It seems more likely to me that they’re able to communicate with one another, and smart enough to clear out. Jungle primates on Earth would probably do that. Even birds.
Raleigh’s letting us use the fast floater for one day, three days from now, so we can try a couple of hundred kilometers north of here. The drones show a concentration of them up there. Meanwhile, we’ll keep practicing our capture technique, throwing a weighted net and then pulling the trailing cords together fast. It works fine on a soccer ball.
Age 57.32 (27 Galileo 431)—It was almost too easy. There were two of them floating together on a helium pond only five kilometers away. They had somehow eluded the killing patrols, but didn’t detect us sneaking up behind them. We got both on one sweep of the net; they didn’t resist after an initial startled reaction. They didn’t eject all their ballast water in an attempt to fly away, which was the usual response. Maybe they understood the net’s function and saw that the tactic wouldn’t work.
The dome was in a cleared field well away from Lakeside. Its floor was weeds and water; we’d borrowed a watering trough from the goat ranch and sunk it level with the ground. Dan’s enthusiasm for the project was limited, but he helped us rig a pipe from a helium tank with a valve so we could bubble the gas up through the “pond” whenever we wanted.
We put the creatures in the cage and freed them from the net, then hastily retreated. Both of them did the same thing, one after the other: drain out just enough ballast water to rise slowly, then at the top of the dome, spin around once, and then let out just enough helium to slowly descend. Then they both spread out as flat as they could and, over the course of an hour, turned bluish-green. It was as if they had seen that they weren’t going anywhere, so might as well photosynthesize.
It was a transformation nobody had documented before, but the only times we had seen the creatures at rest were when they were floating on the helium ponds, presumably ready to flee at any sign of danger. Perhaps they were slower, or not mobile at all, while absorbing sunshine for energy.
Maybe this was their normal state. If so, they had to be a lot more common than we thought. Certainly they would be hard to spot from orbit; indeed, you could probably walk right by one and miss it, if it was resting on a bed of grass.
Samples taken hour by hour did show that photosynthesis was going on. By nightfall their jail had the most oxygen-rich atmosphere on the planet.
We left Katia Paz in charge overnight. She’s going to let the helium bubble for an hour or so; see whether they move over to it. See how they respond to light, and so forth.
I have an odd feeling about the creatures. This has all been too easy.
3. FINAL EXAM
PRIME
It is difficult to relate directly the events of that night and the changes they precipitated. O’Hara and I have gone over them time and again, she under deep hypnosis, myself working in parallel with machine intelligences more large, deep, subtle, and quick than I.
Even if you were a machine and I was telling you this story directly, you would only see a set of outlines of it—outlines not in the organization sense, but outlines as silhouettes, simulacra of truth. In the total sum of those simulacra, you would know what I know.
Telling the story to soft humans, it is not so much that words fail. In fact, words are appropriate quanta because of their multiplicity of meanings, their radiational and reflective powers: when I say “heat” to you, free of context, the small word carries associations of anger, thirst, passion, pain, drowsiness, as well as whatever host of personal connections the word releases from your own experience, your own ideolect. (To me, until some other context is indicated, “Heat” is a kind of energy transferred from regions of higher temperature to those of lower temperature.) It is not words that fail but rather the structures that we, machine as well as flesh, are constrained to put them into: structures defined and delimited by human consciousness.
Because something other than that is at work here.
Allow me to relate the incidents of that night and morning as if these were O’Hara’s words; in fact, they are the distillation of millions of words and trillions of associated somatic measurements.
Dan’s snoring woke me up in the middle of the night and I weighed the comfort of the warm blanket against the discomfort of holding back and decided to go pee. I put on a robe against the slight chill, breeze off the lake, but left the hat and knife on their pegs. The walkway to the toilet w
as covered now.
The thing was waiting in the rafters outside the toilet. It let me go inside and relieve myself. When I stepped back out, it fell and enveloped me.
There was a sharp pain on the top of my head, like being stuck by a pin. I tried to scream but couldn’t draw a breath; the membrane was fast against my mouth and nose.
It spoke to me: Don’t cry out. I will let you breathe, but you must be quiet. The order was clear and specific, though it was not in English, not in words. I nodded, and a hole opened in front of my mouth. When I had taken a couple of breaths without calling for help, the membrane that clasped me from head to knees slowly relaxed its grip.
Carry me down the ladder. The membrane parted in front of my eyes. I walked toward the ladder like a person wearing an elaborate top-heavy costume. I knew the thing was in my brain, but that didn’t bother me. I’m not sure whether it was controlling the chemistry of my brain in order to subvert panic, or it was communicating “trust me”—or I was in such a state of shock that I would do whatever I was told, no matter who or what requested it.
It felt like a kind of VR. But it was not a dream. It was happening.
I slid the ladder to the ground and carefully backed down it. Now walk into this hole.
I knew the hole wasn’t real. Between the road and our house there had appeared an artifact sort of like the antique “postmodern” subway entrances in Atlanta: an unornamented and well-lit plain ramp descending into the ground at a comfortable fifteen-degree angle. This was metal, though, not cement. It went about twenty meters and turned right, still descending. As I walked down, I could feel it closing up behind me.
Forming each word carefully in my mind, I asked Where are you taking me? It didn’t answer, but communicated a desire for me to be patient.
We passed through a sort of invisible wall, a soap bubble of resistance, and we were suddenly in an arctic waste. My bare feet burned and curled on the ice; my skin raised up in gooseflesh. An instant later I was warm again.
The creature slid off me with a slurping noise like a silly sex joke, taking my robe along with it, inside out over my head. It floated in front of me and dropped the sodden robe, which froze solid before it hit the ice. Are you comfortable?
I said I was and looked around. Epsilon squatted low on the horizon, a red ball that looked too large, the sky blue-violet, cloudless, three dim stars showing. There were fantastic ice mountains with ragged razor edges like primitive chipped flint tools. A constant wind keened at the upper limit of audibility and granules of hardened snow rattled along the ice. It smelled like metal.
Behind me, the collapsed remains of a small hut. A corroded machine stood next to it; atop a five-meter pole, a thing with eccentric vanes spun madly, clicking, squeaking. On the door to the hut was a faded stencil:
U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
WEDDELL SEA METEOROLOGICAL MONITOR #3
PLEASE REPORT DAMAGE
L. AMERICA
3924477 COLLECT
This is Earth? I asked.
Yes. I wanted someplace on Earth where you had never been, so you would know it was not taken from your memory; and a place where there were no people around to be confused by our sudden appearance.
You can travel to Earth? Anyplace on Earth?
Many planets. Step forward.
I took one step forward and popped through the bubble again, onto the metal ramp, and then another step into warmth and darkness. The creature was still in front of me, slightly luminescent. The darkness was silent. It smelled like we were in a forest. I asked whether this was Earth.
No, we are back home. Not far from where you live. Sit down.
I patted the spongy moss and nothing crawled. I sat down carefully, feeling helpless, anus clenching. I asked if this were telepathy.
There is no such thing, to my knowledge. We are physically joined. I reached up and touched a silken thread. Don’t pull on it. That would damage you.
I asked What’s going on? Are you going to hurt me?
Not yet. Then there was an overwhelmingly complex montage of thoughts, indecipherable, chilling. Sorry. There are many others listening. I will keep them from intruding.
I said that they didn’t sound friendly.
Why should they? You represent the alien species that has invaded this planet. They are tired of your actions and angry at having to deal with the moral complexity of the problem you have caused.
I said that we wouldn’t have killed his people—people?—if we had known them to be sentient.
Maybe you would not have. That was our decision; we assumed from first contact that some would die if we kept our nature secret. That’s not the problem.
The problem is whether to allow you to continue existing.
I felt the dimension of that “you.” I asked whether they would kill everybody.
On this planet and in the starship and on Earth and in orbit about the Earth, every person and every cell of preserved genetic material.
I said that that was genocide. Why kill the people on Earth?
Genocide, pest control, it depends on your point of view. If we didn’t destroy them, they would come again in time.
I was glad to know that there are people still alive in orbit about the Earth. I said that we thought they might have been destroyed.
More alive in orbit than on Earth or here. Whether they continue to live will be decided by us and by you.
I asked whether I had been chosen, or was it just chance?
We interrogated three people. All three identified you as best for our purposes.
I asked why.
It can’t be expressed exactly in ways that a human would understand. An obvious part of it is having been many places, known many people, done many things, compared to the others; giving what you would call a large database. Part of it is trust, or reliability, combined with egotism. This makes it easier for us to communicate with you.
I also sense that the stress of our liaison is not going to motivate you to destroy yourself as happened with one of the others, and may happen with the second male. Although it cannot be pleasant for you, knowing that I am inside you.
I said that it was very unpleasant. I supposed that it was equally unpleasant to be inside an alien’s brain.
Unspeakable. This union is normally used for times a human would call sacred. The specific word came through, echoing. You yourself would not employ that word.
I said that I would not use it in a religious sense; that gods were the inventions of men, sometimes women. I tried to communicate that I was nevertheless capable of appreciating transcendence, numinism.
Let me show you something godlike. Rise and follow.
I stood up and stepped into blinding light. Orange with ripples of yellow and red. We seemed suspended, no gravity.
You are seeing heat, not light. We are in the center of your planet Earth. If it were desirable, or necessary; I could open a passage from here to the surface. Within hours, the planet would be a dead ruin.
I asked What could cause you to do that?
You.
Though I personally wouldn’t have to do it. We were suddenly back in the forest’s humid darkness. Any of us could do it, as an expression of will, if you cause it to be necessary.
I told it that I did not want the responsibility.
It must be an individual. You may suggest another.
I thought about that and said No, as well me as anyone. If this is a test, I have some talent for that.
The first thing we want you to do is simple. Stop them from killing us. You have one day.
The tendril slid out of my head, trailing wetly on my brow for a moment. The creature disappeared, then reappeared with my robe and dropped it at my feet. It was stiff as cardstock, so cold it stuck to the skin of my fingers.
I would wait for it to thaw. There was a faint yellow light, three or four kilometers away, that I assumed was Hilltop, but I didn’t want to go crashing through the woods in the dark. Sunrise in
an hour or so, and I had some thinking to do. Some feelings to get under control. I touched the icy fabric again, to reassure myself that this had really happened.
When the gown was as warm as it was going to get, I put it on, despite the clamminess, for protection against thorny twigs and vines. I started walking as soon as I could see individual trees, while I could still barely follow the yellow light. It did turn out to be Hilltop—not some floating spider shopping mall—but I bypassed it and went straight to my house. On the way, I shucked the damp gown and rinsed off in the swimming pool. Alien mucus, how picturesque.
After living with him for thirty-four long years and two short ones, I knew better than to wake Dan immediately. I heated some water and put a cup of coffee on the table next to him. I sipped on mine while waiting for the smell of it to work through to his subconscious and ring a quiet bell.
He grunted, rose on one elbow, nibbed his eyes. “What the hell time is it?”
“Later than you think, dear.” I laughed. “I just came from a meeting.”
Raleigh Dennison was infuriating. He didn’t deny that I had been “attacked” by one of the creatures, not out loud, though he did wonder why, this time, it didn’t pull any hair out. Doc Bishop went over my scalp with a magnifying glass and did find a tiny dot, but he couldn’t be sure that’s what it was without using the axial tomography equipment in orbit. He pointed out that I was due to go on the next shuttle, two days hence, as part of my regular schedule. I could come back with real proof.
“That will be too late. I’m not going anywhere, anyhow, until we change our policy toward the natives.”
That amused Dennison. “Natives! Like your American Indians.”
“Sure. It would be just like the Europeans and the socalled Indians all over again—if the Indians had nova bombs and short tempers.”