Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘Shhh! ’

  Dead silence, of the sort that treads on the heel of the truly toe-curling remark. No sound for quite some time, except for the soft murmur of the offending lemming apologising repeatedly.

  ‘Anyway,’ Fraud said, when the silence was threatening to solidify like week-old porridge in an old-fashioned enamel saucepan, ‘that’s why I’m here. I mean, I have come to, er, well . . .’

  Air of polite expectation. ‘Yes?’ prompted a voice somewhere at the back. Fraud breathed in deeply.

  ‘Friends,’ he said, squaring his shoulders, ‘we are standing on the edge of a new dawn, and I put it to you—’

  ‘Standing on a what?’

  Oh God. ‘What I meant to say was,’ Fraud said, as smoothly as he could, ‘we are poised on the brink of a new dawn, and the light at the end of the tunnel will shine not only on us and our children but our children’s children, if only we have the courage to—’

  ‘What’s he on about?’

  ‘Dunno,’ answered a low voice level with Fraud’s ear. ‘Making a speech, I think.’

  ‘A speech?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Quite,’ Fraud said, his voice suddenly brittle. ‘In fact, as I was just about to say a moment ago, friends, let us go forth together—’

  ‘Oh, that kind of speech.’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ a mournful voice to his left confirmed. ‘It’ll be the Great Leap of Faith bit next, you’ll see.’

  ‘It’s not that time already, is it?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem like five years,’ agreed the voice at the back. ‘Doesn’t time fly when you’re not jumping off a - oh shit. Sorry, everyone.’

  Fraud’s nostrils quivered. His finely honed orator’s senses could detect an opening here. ‘That,’ he said urgently, ‘is the whole point. That’s why I’m here. Friends, I have a dream. Let us not go boldly forth. Let us stay a very long way away from the edge of a new dawn. Let’s not take a great leap of faith. In fact—’

  ‘What about the small-step-for-a-lemming bit? You haven’t done that yet.’

  Fraud concentrated. This could be easy, or he could throw it all away. ‘Listen to me,’ he commanded. ‘You don’t have to do this.There is a better way.’ Keep it simple, he reminded himself. ‘Don’t jump,’ he concluded.

  Once again there was a deathly hush inside the oil drum. You could have heard a lemming drop.

  ‘Who is this prat?’ a voice eventually demanded. ‘Calls himself a leader and he’s saying don’t jump.’

  ‘It’s novel,’ objected the voice at the back.

  ‘Might be worth a try.’

  ‘Yes, but this is silly,’ the original objector retorted. ‘We don’t need a leader to tell us not to jump. We all know about not jumping. It’s getting us to jump that we need leaders for.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘He’s got a point there.’

  ‘I mean,’ the self-appointed leader of the opposition went on, ‘you don’t need a leader to tell you to do something sensible. Stands to reason, that does. It’s only the bloody stupid things that we’ve got to be persuaded to do. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘I want to hear the bit about the giant leap for lemmingkind. It’s supposed to be dead good, that bit. So I’ve heard.’

  A vague but disturbing feeling that the moment was slipping away seeped through into Fraud’s brain, and he resolved to go for broke. ‘You see,’ he said, raising his voice, ‘I know about these things. I’m not really a lemming, you see. That’s why—’

  ‘You just said you were.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘I heard him say it. And now he’s saying he isn’t.’

  ‘Cold’s addled his brain. Come on, you lot, get in closer. Poor sod’s so frozen he’s delirious.’

  ‘But—’ Fraud started to object, but his mouth was suddenly full of warm, cuddly fur, and the pressure of friendly bodies squeezed all the breath out of him. He tried to object, to ask them all to back off and let him breathe, but he couldn’t manage it. All he could do was squimper feebly, until darkness flooded behind his eyes on the crest of a fawn fur wave.

  ‘Eeek,’ he mumbled, and blacked out.

  A short while later, a lemming pointed out that the poor bugger’d gone to sleep. The furry clump drew back. A foraging party was sent off to gather something for him to eat, while a couple of volunteers draped themselves over him to keep him warm.

  ‘All that stuff about not jumping,’ yawned the voice at the back. ‘Out of his head, I reckon.’

  ‘Bit of sleep and a bite to eat’ll set him right,’ agreed another. ‘Even so, funny old thing to come out with. I mean to say, not jumping . . .’

  ‘True. It is round about that time, isn’t it?’

  ‘Now you come to mention it.’

  ‘S’pose we ought to be thinking about finding a leader, then.’

  ‘S’pose so. Unless . . . No.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No. Nothing. Forget I spoke.’

  ‘Go on. What were you going to say?’

  ‘No. It’s silly. Please, forget it.’

  ‘Come on, spit it out.’

  ‘Oh all right. It’s just - how’d it be if we—?’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Didn’t jump.’

  It wasn’t an altogether unprecedented moment. For example, there was that time when a man called Columbus said ‘How’d it be if we just kept on sailing and waited to see where we ended up?’ Earlier still, there must have been a moment when one caveman said to another ‘Well, if you were to take four of them and bung ’em on the corners of a wooden box, and then find some way of linking it up to a team of oxen or something . . .’ Whenever these crucial turning-points happen, there’s generally a moment of stunned, frozen silence when everybody allows themselves to think Yes, how about that? before some irritatingly practical soul explains precisely why it’s not going to work. In that brief interlude of silence, a tiny seed germinates and begins to grow; and so it was on this occasion, until . . .

  ‘Get real,’ someone said at the back of the group. ‘We’re lemmings.’

  ‘Well?’ Martha demanded. ‘You were on the phone a long time.’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘I said you were on the phone a long time.What did they say?’

  ‘She,’ Kevin replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She. It was a girl.’ Kevin looked away, frowning. ‘She said she’d call me back as soon as she’d found out what to do.’

  Martha was about to say something when an inflection in Kevin’s voice echoed off the back wall of her mind. It was the way he’d said she.

  ‘Kevin,’ she said.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Kevin, look at me when I’m talking to you. When you said it was a girl . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What kind of girl?’

  The brusqueness in Kevin’s manner struck her as being defensive, not to mention embarrassed. ‘Just a girl, I dunno. Don’t know all that much about girls, do I? Never had the chance . . . What does it matter what kind of girl, anyway? Can’t really see what that’s got to do with anything.’

  ‘And she’s going to ring you back?’

  ‘That’s right. Can we get on now, please? I thought you were supposed to be helping me sort out this mess, rather than standing there cross-examining me about girls.’

  It occurred to Martha that if her diagnosis was correct, the business with the computer was going to be the least of their worries when the Boss got back. On the other hand, pressing the point now didn’t seem to be quite the right thing to do. And besides, she reasoned, if the worst comes to the worst, there’s nothing that makes people forget their woes quite like a nice Royal wedding.

  ‘You go on up, then,’ she said soothingly. ‘I’ll be with you in a tick. Just going to get myself a nice cup of tea.’

  Now in Heaven there is nothing but Truth; and once Kevin had left the staff canteen Martha did indeed get herself a
cup of tea. Then she sat down by the telephone and dialled a number.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is that the Kawaguchiya Helpline? Oh, it’s busy. Yes, I’ll hold.’

  ‘Hello. I come in peace. Take me to your leader.’

  No reply. Patiently, Zxprxp tried again. And again. Either Homo sapiens doesn’t believe in speaking on the first date, or this wasn’t a Homo sapiens. It did look quite like the spy-camera pictures of humans he’d seen in the university library; mind you, since they’d been magnified over nine million times, the same could be said of quite a few things, including the ship he’d come in, the planet itself, and his grandmother.

  ‘Hello,’ he said once more. ‘I come in peace. I wish to learn more about you and your kind.’

  At this point, the cow he’d been talking to swished its tail, mooed gently and walked away, nearly treading on Zxprxp’s third left pseudopod in the process. Shrugging some of his nearside shoulders, he gave up and slithered away.

  Funny old planet, this; lots of apparently pointless open spaces between things. It took him three point seven four standard time units before he managed to slither his way across the empty green-carpeted bit to the black-carpeted bit where his tentacle-held sensor had detected rapid movement. He took up a position in the middle of the black strip, which was well over 1.925 xztvwqy wide and of an indefinite length, and waited to see what would happen.

  On the sensor’s dial, the needle flickered. Ah. Somebody coming.

  ‘Hello. I come in peace. Take me to your aaaaagh! ’

  The glancing blow from the edge of the fast-moving thing’s head deposited him in what appeared to be a long, narrow forest of thick-stemmed vegetation, which included lots of prickles. By the time he’d managed to haul himself out again, the fast-moving thing was hardly visible in the distance and moving fast. He hadn’t been in the optimum position to notice whether it had made any sort of reply to his message of friendship, but if its actions were anything to go by, he hoped very much it hadn’t been a human being, because if it was, they weren’t very friendly. Chances were, he rationalised, that it was some kind of vehicle, implying that the black strip was an area set aside exclusively for vehicular use. Neat idea, he mused, and one we could learn from.You see? Only been here a few STUs and already I’ve justified the trip.

  Having no concrete game plan in mind, he shuffled a few hundred xztvwqy along the side of the strip, keeping a dozen or so whiskers peeled for oncoming vehicles. As he did so, he recorded a little basic data. Ground surface generally solid and lukewarm, atmosphere breathable, plentiful supply of carbon dioxide and monoxide, strong readings of airborne particles of lead, chlorine and sulphur, almost adequate level of background radiation; pretty well everything you needed for a healthy life. Obviously Homo sapiens had got the problem of environmental pollution taped in a way that put his own species to shame. Indeed, when Zxprxp thought of the ecological shambles he’d come from - oceans of H2O with nothing in it but salt and the odd jellyfish, intact ozone layer, complete absence of beneficial greenhouse effect - he cringed for the follies of his race. Oh well; bang goes any chance of persuading them to agree to a mutual exchange of colonists. Who in their right mind would want to leave an idyllic, globally warmed paradise like this and go and live on a virtually untouched world like his own? You’d have to be crazy.

  Thoughts like these so prepossessed his mind that the life form was dead ahead of him before he noticed the bleeping of his sensor. Indeed, if the life form hadn’t screamed, he might easily have slithered on by and not even noticed it. Fortunately, he pulled himself together in time and cleared his throats politely.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I come in peace. Take me to your leader.’

  The life form seemed to be staring at him; that is to say, the two oblong slits in the top front of its roughly circular upper section were wide open. It was also making little faint gurgling noises which suggested unease, or even panic; and that, Zxprxp felt, was definitely an example of the t’krptz calling the skz’shrplt pink. It’s axiomatic in xenobiological circles that the one thing you must never, ever do on encountering an outlandish alien life form is to allow your instinctive disgust to show, and Zxprxp was doing his very best, even though the four-limbed, fibre-topped, dry-skinned thing was about as repulsive an object as he could possibly imagine. He was doing his bit for good manners and civilised behaviour; a pity that, out of the two of them, he was apparently the only one.

  Nevertheless. ‘I am aware,’ he said, as pleasantly as he could, ‘that you might find my appearance disconcerting, or even distasteful. Please be reassured that I mean you no harm. I am here simply in order to carry out some preliminary research into your species, in the interests of—’

  ‘Eeeeeek!’ replied the life form. ‘Eeek eeeek!’

  The situation was, Zxprxp felt, in grave danger of getting out of tentacle. Therefore, with infinite regret and many misgivings, he extended his mental probe for a brief telepathic contact. Not supposed to do this under any but the most extreme circumstances; and when he got home and his memory was played back, he was going to have to face some pretty hostile debriefing on this point. On the other hand, he was going to have to do something fairly drastic if this was the sort of reaction he could expect wherever he went.

  It’s all right, he transmitted, in a minor key of pink. I’m nice really.

  The life form stopped weebling and looked at him again, and he immediately disconnected the probe before it became obvious what he was doing. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I come in peace.’

  ‘Ah,’ replied the life form. ‘That’s all right, then. Only you read things in the papers.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ Zxprxp replied, as he scanned this apparently meaningless phrase with the IdiomCheck facility. ‘Stands to reason, really.’

  ‘I mean, you’re an alien, aren’t you?’ the life form continued. ‘Only you look like you’re more the sort that phones home than the ones that jump out of people’s tummies.’

  Zxprxp took a while to digest that one. It was, he reflected, a small consolation that his IdiomCheck was still under warranty, because if it was faulty and he complained when he got home, all he’d get would be a refund of the purchase price. ‘Rest assured,’ he said, hoping that that meant what he thought it did. ‘You can’t tell a book by its cover,’ he added, wishing that he knew what he was saying. ‘Anyhow,’ he went on, ‘would you please be kind enough to take me to your leader?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Your leader. If I could just trouble you to take me to him/her/it/them, that would be awfully sweet.’

  ‘I haven’t got a leader.’

  Zxprxp restrained his irritation a little. It was infuriating to have come all this way to establish first contact with a semi-legendary species, only to find out that he apparently knew more about them than they did. ‘I think you’re wrong there,’ he said. ‘With respect,’ he added. ‘Homo sapiens tends to congregate in basically hierarchical social units.’ He paused, scanned IdiomCheck again and tried a variant form.

  ‘I demand to see the manager,’ he said.

  ‘Huh?’

  What to do? A second telepathic contact would probably result in his being drummed out of the university for good and reassigned to a menial job in the plankton refinery. Saying the same thing again, only louder and more slowly, would apparently be in keeping with what Homo sapiens himself would do in this situation, but logic suggested that that was only because Homo sapiens wasn’t necessarily very bright. ‘The person who’s in charge of your social group,’ he said patiently. ‘I would very much like to meet him, if you could point me in the right direction.’

  There was a long silence, long enough for a lame glacier to take a leisurely stroll round the block. ‘You mean the Prime Minister?’ the life form hazarded.

  ‘Yes,’ Zxprxp said decisively, on the offchance that the life form had finally got the message. ‘Which way, please?’

  ‘Ten Downing Street.’

  ‘Sorr
y?’

  ‘Where the Prime Minister lives. Ten Downing Street, London.’ Pause. ‘It’s sort of over that way, about two hundred and seventy miles.’

  ‘Oh. Is that far?’

  ‘Dunno. Depends, really.’ The life form did something with the joints connecting its upper limbs to its middle section. ‘Sorry,’ it added.

  Suddenly Zxprxp felt that he’d had quite enough of this conversation. It hadn’t been the way he’d anticipated. What he’d had in mind was something a bit more formal and dignified, like sitting at opposite ends of a large valley flashing lights and playing bits of music at each other. This was somehow . . . ‘ That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ll find it. I expect I’ll just follow my nose, huh?’

  The life form looked at him, with particular reference to his whiskers and secondary gills, and shuddered. Maybe the effect of the telepathic contact was wearing off; at any rate, it made a shrill giggling noise, put one of its flippers over the lower slit in its upper section and ran away.

  Funny creature, Zxprxp reflected, floppeting back to his ship and programming the co-ordinates he’d been given into the AutoNav. Or maybe it was something I said.

  Just when he thought he was safe, Len sneezed.

  One tiny speck of dust - it could only have been one, because that damned robot had rounded up all the others - hidden away under the workbench, and he had to breathe it in, with the inevitable result that he would be found. Filthy rotten luck.

  ‘Oh there you are,’ warbled the robot, a moment or so later. ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  ‘No kidding.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ The robot looked at him; that is to say, its magnificently engineered sensory array located his body heat, ran a brief series of elimination tests to confirm that the subject was humanoid, cross-checked with data storage to correlate known characteristics of the humanoid Len with those of the subject (result ninety-nine point eight per cent positive), accessed logic centres to ascertain whether ninety-nine point eight was within approved tolerances to satisfy identification routines, received a positive answer, operated failsafe and backup identification procedures via the video link, olfactory analysis and voice pattern scan, and triumphantly presented its findings to the mainframe. The whole process took just under a thousandth of a second, causing the ongoing time-and-motion assessment systems to file an ‘adequate but could do better’ report with the automated self-maintenance circuits. ‘What’re you doing under the bench?’ it asked politely.