Otherness

by David Brin

  Now all he could conjure in his mind was one face. One person. He wished his job didn't force him to spend so much time exploring sterile cliffs, when what he really needed to impress Yukiko might be waiting right now in some nearby meadow, some underground burrow, or some tidal shoal.

  Well, at least Phs'n'kah is out there looking on my behalf. He knows the local flora and fauna better than I do. I'm sure he'll come up with something.

  Minoru brought his attention back to business at hand. What grew in the computer display was a slice-by-thin-slice representation of the cliff. Each horizontal lamina layer had been laid down along this ancient coast long ago, when the vagaries of this slowly shifting archipelago pushed lapping tidal waters over the place where he now stood. Amid the slowly growing image in his holo screen lay speckles of bright color where the device found fossil outlines . . . remains of creatures that had settled into the mud long ago.

  Playing with the controls, Minoru zoomed among these discoveries, linking and correlating each one with his database of currently living animal types. Tentative identifications were made in real time, by phylum, family, genus . . . sometimes even by species. What emerged was a picture that would eventually tell the story of life on Genji.

  As on Earth, the epic had begun at sea. Quite early some Genjian life-form discovered a chemical similar to chlorophyll, which it used with sunlight to split water, manufacturing its own carbohydrates and proteins, spilling a corrosive waste product, oxygen, into the atmosphere. Soon, as on Earth, Genji's early citizens had to adapt to changing conditions or die.

  They not only adapted, but learned to thrive on the stuff. Higher-energy chemistry enabled faster, more complex modes of living. Over the course of time, some single-celled animals fell on the knack of combining and sharing roles, just as the eukaryotes had on Earth, about seven hundred million years before Minoru was born.

  Amazing similarities. Amazing differences. As the cliff face slowly dissolved, micron by micron—by a total thickness amounting to no more than the erosion of a typical rainy season—Minoru fell into a Zenlike work trance, absorbed by the story unfolding before his eyes. His hands flew across the controls, eyes darting from discovery to discovery.

  In his youth he had pictured exploring alien worlds as a matter of striding forth, ray gun in hand, to rescue (and be rewarded by) alien maidens. He had seen himself the bold hero of space battles, planting flags and beating off hordes of drooling monsters to uphold the right.

  This was a better way. The fantasies of childhood were vivid, barbaric. Minoru recalled them with affection. But all in all, he much preferred being grown-up.

  More transients had arrived to set up camp in the shantytown, over by the funnel-weed swamp. They were young adult females mostly, just past First Blush and into their wandering, home-finding phase. They had been drifting in for weeks from distant parts of the island, and even nearby isles, attracted by a sudden wealth of circulating metal. The newcomers' shelters were rude, makeshift affairs, built on high stilts to keep just above the average daily tides.

  The hovels lay in the shadow of finely carved and dressed hilltop farmsteads. Established villagers glared down, sharpening "decorative" wooden stakes in close rows around their family compounds. Guards were posted to prevent pilfering from the Terran domes when Minoru and Emile were away. Recently there had been incidents between locals and newcomers in the village common areas—scrapes and jostlings for the few jobs on Minoru's work crews, for instance. Tail blows were exchanged as young females preened and competed for the attention of bewildered local bachelors.

  Yesterday, at Minoru's urging, Emile took a break from interviewing his coterie of "wise women" and began questioning the transients instead. On his return the young linguist expressed dismay. "We've disrupted the economy of the entire island! Everything is in an uproar, and it's all because of us."

  Minoru hadn't been surprised. "That's one reason contact teams were spread out—to lessen the impact. Anyway, what you're seeing is just an exaggeration of what went on all the time, even before we came."

  "But the fighting! The violence!"

  "You've been listening to Dr. Sato's romantic notions about our Peaceful Irdizu Friends, who don't even know the meaning of war. Well, that's true up to a point, but don't you ever listen to the folktales you record? How about the story of Rish'ong'nu and the Town That Refused?"

  "I remember. It's a morality tale about the importance of hospitality—"

  Minoru interrupted, laughing. "Oh, it's much simpler than that. Rish'ong'nu really existed, did you know that? And the village she conquered did not burn once, but at least forty times, over centuries both before and after her adventure."

  Emile blinked. "How do you know?"

  "Simple archaeology. I've taken cores of the site where Rish'ong'nu supposedly lived, and found carbon layers that give very specific dates for each rise and fall. Anyway, it makes perfect sense. These beings exercise female-mobile exogamy and polyandry based on male-intensive nesting. It's not like anything seen among mammals on Earth, but the pattern's pretty familiar among some types of birds and amphibians. Young females must set out and win a place in the world—and find one or more husbands to take primary care of offspring. She does this either by wooing a mate from a strong, well-established line, or by pioneering new territory, or by taking a place from someone else."

  "You make it sound so savage."

  Minoru shook his head. "It's right and proper to admire nature, Emile, but never to idealize it. The process is a competitive one. Always has been, in every species known.

  "For instance, it didn't take long to confirm that the most basic rule of biology applies just as universally here on Genji. It was known even before Darwin, and it goes like this—in all species, the average breeding pair tries to have more offspring than needed to replace themselves."

  Emile frowned. "But then, what keeps animals from overpopulating?"

  "Good question. The answer is—natural controls. Predation by carnivores higher on the food chain. Or competition for limited food and shelter. I know it doesn't sound nice. It's just nature's way."

  "But humans . . ."

  "Yes, we're an exception. We learned to control our numbers voluntarily. But after how long a struggle? At what price? I assure you, no other Earthly species even makes the effort.

  "So it's only natural I was curious about the sentient creatures we found here," Minoru went on. "I don't know about the Chujo natives yet—"

  "Who does?"

  "—but on Genji I set out to learn, did the rule hold here as well? That's why I asked you to inquire about their use of birth control."

  "They do have some means," Emile said eagerly.

  "Yes, but practiced sporadically. So the question remains: what else controls the Irdizu population?"

  Emile looked at Minoru glumly. "I suppose you're going to tell me."

  Minoru shrugged. "It seems a little of everything is involved. Some deliberate birth control, to be sure. Some predation by sea carnivores, when they forage too far. There is definitely some loss attributable to internecine fighting over the better fens, farmlands, and housing sites. At intervals there has been starvation. Finally, there's the environment."

  "How do you mean?" Emile asked.

  "Have you noticed the way Irdizu houses are shaped like boats, even though they're built mostly on hilltops?"

  "Of course. It's a holdover from their ancestor-legends, when they were seafaring . . ." Emile trailed off when Minoru shook his head. "No?"

  "I'm afraid they build them that way for much less romantic, more pragmatic reasons. Because every once in a while the tides sweep that high."

  Emile gasped at the mental image, but Minoru went on. "That's why the shantytown looks out of place. On Earth, slums played long-lasting roles in community life. Here such areas are at best temporary. For the newcomers it's win a place on high ground, or die."

  Emile simultaneously muttered a Buddhist prayer and crossed hi
mself in the Latin manner. "No wonder the level of tension is rising so!"

  "No wonder. Obviously, you and I must leave soon."

  "But—you said this sort of thing was going on anyway, even without our presence."

  "But we're setting off a local intensification," Minoru said. "I don't want the consequences on my karma. Besides, conditions here are no longer natural. We must try to finish soon, before there's nothing here to learn anymore."

  A picture was starting to form. From surveying sediments, the island's flora and fauna, and the natives' own legends, Minoru was beginning to see an outline of Genji's recent past.

  He hadn't told even Emile about what happened when the ancestors of Ta'azsh'da and Phs'n'kah arrived on this isle, eighty or so Irdizu generations ago. The paleontological record was clear, though. Within four of those generations, half of the species native to this isolated ecosphere had gone extinct or were driven across the waters. This was no intentional genocide. Human migrants had done the same thing just as inadvertently, back on ancient Earth—as on Hawaii, where countless bird species vanished soon after men and women arrived by Polynesian canoe. More harm was done by creatures arriving with men—rats and dogs and pigs.

  On Genji the history of die-offs was clear in layers of soil and rock. Phs'n'kah and other bright Irdizu had been astonished when Minoru gave them lessons on how to read that record. A long list of animals and plants that weren't around anymore.

  But that wasn't the biggest surprise. Not by far.

  STARSHIP YAMATO CREW DATABASE:

  GENJI EXPEDITION: One of the most curious things about our discovery of Genji is the incredible temporal coincidence—that we should have happened upon this world at the very time when mainland cultures are amid their burgeoning industrial revolution, spreading both physically and in their confident grasp of their technology.

  What a fluke of timing! Consider. Had we on Earth been slower, and the Irdizu faster by a millennium—a mere flicker as time goes by in this vast galaxy—it might have been they who discovered us.

  Let this realization teach us humility as we seek to learn from our new neighbors.

  She stepped down the lander's ramp with a grace much like the way she flew machines across the sky, somehow both demure and erotic at the same time. Minoru's heart was pounding; nevertheless, he kept his greeting properly reserved. They exchanged bows. To his delight he saw she carried an overnight bag.

  "So what is this surprise you promised me?" Yukiko asked. Did something in her voice imply possibilities?

  Ah, but what are possibilities? To become real, they must be earned.

  "You'll see," he told her, and gestured toward the village, where smoke curled up from smoldering cook fires. "This way. Unless you want to freshen up first?"

  She laughed. "Wriggling out of this suit so soon after I put it on? No, I 'freshened' in the lander. Come on, I'm hungry."

  So, she's guessed what this is about. Minoru was only slightly disappointed. After all, her insight showed an aspect of compatibility. They thought alike.

  Or at least we share one obsession.

  It hardly seemed intimate, walking slowly side by side in clunking, ground-hugging steps, carefully maintaining balance on the sloping path. Gravity was like a treacherous octopus, always waiting to grab you. Swaddled inside their suits—even with their arms and lower legs now free by decree of Okuma Base doctors—it felt as if they were performing a long, slow promenade.

  "Where is Emile?" she asked as they approached the plateau where the village center lay.

  "He's observing an Irdizu folk moot, over in the civic arena." Minoru gestured toward where several close hills formed a bowl, from which the low hum of several hundred voices could be heard, rising and falling in a moaning melody. Minoru had witnessed moots before, though none this large. They struck him as somewhat like a Greek play—with chorus, actors, and all—crossed with Nõ theater, and interrupted at odd moments by bouts of activity reminiscent of sumo wrestling.

  "Emile persuaded the Village Mothers to hold a special event for the transients, to relieve tensions and maybe give them a stake in the community."

  "Sounds pretty daring, an alien making suggestions like that."

  Minoru shrugged. "Well, we had to try something. The poor kid was racked with guilt, even though the situation isn't really our fault. Anyway, it seems to be working. I'd have been expected to attend also, as an honored guest, only I'm one of the cooks for the feast afterward, so I'm excused."

  "Ah, so." She said it calmly. But had he picked up just a trace of excitement in her voice?

  Phs'n'kah had been tending to the preliminaries for Minoru, carefully removing the external carapaces of thirty recently snared, inch-long zu'unutsus, and one by one laying the nude insectoids on a wooden cutting board near the cooking fire. Before being cut up, the zu'unutsus looked like Earth caterpillars and fit a similar niche in this ecosystem, though nowadays they were very rare.

  "Thank you," he told his assistant, then explained to Yukiko, "In my routine bio assay I finally struck it rich. Two plants and this insectoid, all of whom practice chemical segregation of just the kind we need."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means that in all three cases, every chemical that might be toxic to humans happens to be segregated—isolated—to specific parts or organs. A lot better than those berries the Purple Cliffs team fed you—"

  Yukiko frowned. "I was ill for a week."

  "—which were considered 'edible' only because the poison levels were 'tolerable.' In this case all you have to do is carefully remove the bad parts. . . ." With a dissecting scalpel he deftly excised portions that served functions similar to kidneys and livers for the zu'unutsus, flicking them in high arcs to sizzle on the coals. "You might say it's like preparing fugu back home—"

  "Really?" She gasped, grabbing his arm tightly through the suit fabric. "You devil, you!" Yukiko seemed impressed, thrilled, when he compared his delicacy to Oriental blowfish, considered one of Japan's paramount delicacies. Fugu chefs were respected more than surgeons, although mistakes still killed scores of customers each year. Indeed, risk seemed to be part of the excitement. Minoru had been about to assure her with his precautions, but Yukiko's expression stopped him. From the look in her eyes, either she had great faith in him, or this was a girl who relished a thrill. Both, I hope.

  Even after all of his careful chemical examinations and the joyful discovery of something edible out of the countless field samples, it had still taken considerable trial and error to reach this point. The recipe had come about after many trials, of which the last involved both himself and Emile as guinea pigs. Nevertheless, the culmination had been saved for tonight. It was to be the first complete, all-Genjian meal ever served for humans. That is, if all went as planned.

  Carefully he slit open several yer'tari roots and slipped the flayed filets of zu'unutsus inside, along with chopped qui'n'mathi.

  They should bake for an hour," he said, wrapping each combination in funnel-weed fronds and putting them directly on the coals. "Why don't we go for a walk in the meantime?"

  The other cooks, most of them males with infants riding on their tails, hissed amiably as Minoru led Yukiko through the press toward a steep embankment overlooking the tidal basins. There the two humans sat down, dangling their legs over a stone wall, looking up as clouds parted to show the desert-brown face of Chujo. It was eerie to realize that up there, right now, some of their crewmates were attempting to make contact with aliens even more enigmatic than the Irdizu.

  "You know, your latest report almost got you recalled to Okuma Base," she told him as she watched sparse clouds lay shadows across the sister world.

  "I know. How is Dr. Sato taking it?"

  "He's hopping mad. And Dr. O'Leary feels hurt you made these revelations without consulting him first."

  "That might have gotten my report buried in the database. This is something that must be known by all, before we decide how we are going t
o make our homes on this world."

  "Our principal purpose is study."

  "Indeed. But we'll also live as men and women. Have homes. Perhaps children. We should know the implications and not take steps unconsidered, like animals."

  She looked at him, obviously feeling his intensity. Minoru sensed somehow that she approved. "Tell me about the cycles, then," she asked.

  Minoru sighed. He had gone through it all so many times, first over and over in his head and in the database, then in his report, and finally in interviews for the Team Yamato News. But this audience could be refused nothing.