Evil Water and Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  After consummation the Tworf would split into two separate selves. It would give birth to a new self, a prismatic variation. Thus Tworfs reproduced.

  Were the articulate male and female animals actually a second and third sex of the Tworf species? Morphologically different from the first, neuter sex, and mentally inferior? My masters rejected this idea. The bodily differences were too gross. Besides, if Tworfs and silky animals were of the same species, what hope was there of a human man and woman playing the role of “beast with two backs” for the benefit of a randy neuter Tworf? A Tworf who would flood the human male with knowledge.

  My masters wouldn’t say how they had gained all this data about alien sex habits. No doubt security officers at the Earth mission of Tworfworld were the source.

  Apparently timegates also had some indirect connexion with this bizarre practice. That was why we ought to have a timegate in proximity to the great experiment. Earth only had control of a limited number of timegates. Each one was a vital part of a starship. Hence the choice of myself as Casanova. As pervert, and violator of the safety rules, and violator of a crew member. I only hoped that the crew member in question, whom I must needs involve in the Truth Moment, might happen to be the secret security officer.

  “Mid Velvet Fastskip?”

  “Yes, Captain Nevin?”

  “Do you have close friends back home?”

  “Several.”

  “What do close friends call you?”

  “By my name.”

  “By all of it? Or part? What name would a loving-animal know you by? What name would you whisper in his ear?”

  “Mid is a position. Velvet is a texture. Fastskip is a way of motion.”

  “I’m fascinated. May I invite you into my cabin to discuss such things?”

  “Honoured, but puzzled.”

  Let me describe Those Who Run Faster.

  They’re skinny bipeds who stand armpit-high to your average human male. Their feet are ostrich-claws which doubtless could eviscerate an enemy who tried to sneak up and leap on their backs. They have a tough, smooth, pearly hide. All down the front of the body tendrils peep from little follicle-holes, as if through a sieve. Excitement causes these tendrils to erect, and sprout forth. The tendrils are orange in colour so that the front of an excited Tworf would look like a rug stained with rusty blood. A Tworf’s back is smoothly, flexibly ceramic.

  A Tworf has two long, double-jointed arms, with four wormy digits apiece. In addition, two vestigial “clutching arms” spring from the sides of the chest, and are usually clasped together as if in prayer. For hands, these minimal arms have suckery little pads.

  A Tworf’s head is a porcelain ellipsoid with big, wide-set violet eyes lacking obvious pupils, twin breathing slits, and a lipless mouth which opens and shuts like a rubber sphincter, dilating and sealing again. Inside are double rows of tiny teeth, set vertically not horizontally.

  A Tworf breathes oxygen, and eats most foods.

  Mid Velvet Fastskip—so I’d been told—was a sibling of the ruling clade of the northern hemisphere of Tworfworld. Its fields of expertise were alien hermeneutics—a fancy way of referring to the fact that it had acted as an interpreter for the human mission on Tworfworld, and for the two other alien missions there—plus “time-dancing”, plus oceanography.

  Mid Velvet had travelled to Earth to study our oceans.

  What the hell was “time-dancing”? My masters back home—and their inheritors, their successors who would take over the reins of the Perpetual World State—dearly wished to know. “Time-dancing” sounded relevant; thus the selection of this particular Tworf as target for seduction.

  We shall disregard the other two intelligent, starfaring species, who were even more arcane than Those Who Run Faster. Both those exotic races ignored timegates. They could happily hibernate during the long decades of star travel. One of them dream-tranced; the other dissociated during a journey.

  As I escorted Mid Velvet along the already dusty corridor towards my cabin, Jocelyn Chantal came out of her own cabin, through the polarized haze of the privacy-sheet.

  Chantal: blond and tall and snub-nosed, sporting large frame spectacles which added a necessary extra dimension to her face, and gave her windows to peer at you through. Ship’s Doctor. Political officer, too?

  “Captain Nevin,” she said. A diagnosis rather than a greeting. “And Mid Velvet Fastskip, I believe. Both together. In close proximity.”

  On a starship one always kept a few paces away from other persons if possible.

  “I don’t suppose I’ll catch an alien disease,” I said.

  “Of course not!” She sounded offended.

  “If somebody falls sick, Chantal, you might need to touch them. Physically. In proximity.”

  “Perils of the profession, Captain. One takes precautions.”

  “So many precautions.”

  Her eyes widened, aspiring to the size of her glasses. “Every precaution is vital to safeguard a starship.”

  “Quite right. A starship’s rather similar to the Perpetual State, don’t you think, Chantal? Almost a mirror image! Nothing ever alters.”

  Why did I speak so rashly? Out of sheer nervous anger at the role I was compelled to act out? Or in order to uncover the actual political officer, to target her for parasitical alien rape?

  If I didn’t comply with our masters’ plan, I would be shot after long interrogation. The descendants of my blood would be expelled from citizenship.

  “Star travel demands political continuity, Captain. Our place in the cosmos, ruled by the speed of light, requires long-term stability.”

  “Hmm. So therefore all Earth’s billions bow their heads to a score of starships and a few far colonies. Cart before the horses? Baby and the bath-water?”

  “What do you mean? We can’t hibernate like our alien rivals.”

  “We hibernate politically instead.”

  “Political change means turmoil, which means war, which means eventual holocaust.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. Come along, Mid Velvet Fastskip!”

  I walked deliberately towards Jocelyn Chantal. She backed away from me, disappearing through her privacy-sheet. When I glanced back, she was looking out again, watching where we went.

  At the start of the wide, dusty corridor Helen Kaminski was also observing intently. Capriciously I waved to my dark, trim Exec. And political officer? Another possible candidate.

  Contemptuous, and deliberately provocative of public opinion—things could only go downhill from here on—I ushered the alien into the white mouth of the cabin with my own name, NEVIN, above the door.

  “Cap—!”

  The cry—from Chantal or Kaminski—was abruptly cut off as the privacy-sheet soaked up the sonics.

  Now that I was inside my cabin, I could of course see clearly through the film of polarized air. I could look out through a doorframe with no door. You wouldn’t wish to step out of your cabin blindly and risk colliding with somebody. I watched for a while. Kaminski walked into view slowly, keeping to the other side of the corridor. She loitered then strolled on. I drew the night-curtain briskly over the doorway.

  Mid Velvet was studying the three digital clocks on my wall …

  The first of these registered crew-time. The second showed ship-time—we were travelling at nearly the speed of light. The third clock gave “objective” time back home on Earth.

  Nine hours of objective time was equivalent to three hours of ship-time, approximately. Please tip your hat to Einstein and to the stardrive, product of human engineering.

  Three hours of ship-time was equivalent to one minute as experienced by the crew. Now let’s tip our hat to the timegate invented by the Tworfs, a secret which we drooled for.

  Thanks to the timegate our trip would last two weeks, for us. Twenty years would elapse on Earth. The ship itself would age by almost seven years.

  Before we met Those Who Run Faster, human crews used to be cooped up in starships for years on
end, for decades. Those were journeys of exile, madness, hell. Murder, tyranny, confinement. Not always; but all too often.

  Nowadays we traded sealed stardrives to the Tworfs. The Tworfs supplied us with enigmatic timegates. One for one.

  We aboard the Pegasus were outward bound two days from Solspace, crew-time, heading for our colony at Twinstar Two (which also boasted interesting oceans). Mid Velvet Fastskip would catch a Tworf vessel home from T-Two eventually. It had already been absent from its world for over a year, personal time. Long enough to become randy? Several others of its species had been present on Earth as visitors. However, Tworfs did not make love to other Tworfs; and their articulate animals lived in large herds, pining to death if isolated for very long. You couldn’t, wouldn’t, take a whole herd of cattle with you to another star system for the sake of an occasional pint of milk. Analogy.

  “Will you drink some wine, Mid Velvet Fastskip?”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  Would its tendrils thrust out of its mantle after a couple of glasses of Burgundy? Would its body flush with a ruddy hue? Would a glass too many increase the desire, but take away the performance?

  How could there be desire between a Mid Velvet Fastskip of the Tworfs and a Captain Sam Nevin?

  How could there be desire between a Tworf and an articulate animal with a silky, silvery fleece?

  My own hair was blond, almost white, and I had let a blond beard grow.

  “What is your most vivid memory of Earth’s oceans?” I asked convivially.

  “Turtles and gulls,” it replied.

  “Not whales? Not the Marianas Abyss? Not coral reefs? Not swordfish and sharks?”

  “Weeping turtles, never knowing their offspring, laying eggs ashore. New-hatched babies drawn by instinct, knowing no parent but Nature, scuttling over a desert to the cruel safety of the surf. Greedy gulls eating ninety out of every hundred.”

  His fluency, and mine, surprised me.

  “You are a poet, Mid Velvet Fastskip!”

  Was this alien creature the Rachel Carson, the Lewis Thomas of his own race?

  Why those particular images?

  “Will you pass that memory on to your own offspring when you divide in half?”

  “Terrible, beautiful memories,” it said, leaving me little the wiser.

  “Do the loving beasts of your world only reproduce themselves because you stimulate them?”

  “You are curious about us.”

  “I find myself attracted … to the notion of a third partner involved in the act of love. A partner of a different and superior order. As though a god were to assist in copulation—inspiring, frenzying. It must seem so to the beasts. Perhaps.”

  “You are a poet too, Captain Nevin. Poets tell lies by means of beauty.”

  “Lies? I only seek the truth.”

  “And they make those lies true.”

  “Mid … May I call you something briefer than Mid Velvet Fastskip. A shorter name? Without offending you! You can call me Sam. That’s my personal name.”

  “You can call me Skip.”

  “Skip. I will.”

  “I shall call you Cap, from Captain. Our names join.”

  Skip—short for Skipper, too! Skipper of a vessel. The pun existed in Harrang, the amalgam mediation language. I recalled how this alien was an interpreter.

  I raised my glass. “Here’s health to Cap and Skip.”

  Cap and Skip. Sharing names. Commencing our courtship rites. I felt as though I, a lifelong heterosexual, had gone to a gay bar as an intellectual exercise, determined to offer my blond self to a man. Only, this was much stranger.

  Skip and Cap: two buddies who would become intimate. Perhaps. And who would invite—chase, entrap, cajole—either Jocelyn Chantal or Helen Kaminski or engineer Sonya Wenzel to join in a lustful trio.

  I had a flash-vision—or precognition—of myself capering nakedly along the corridor, ecstatic, drunken, ridden by alien Skip as if by a demonic god, bursting through the privacy-sheet into one cabin or another, my penis a paralyzing, entrancing sting, almost an ovipositor; and perhaps after all it wouldn’t be a woman to whom Skip drove me. It might be one of the other men. Mark Bekker or Robert Hoffmann or Julian Takahashi.

  What violent hatreds might erupt! The results could be as dire as any ghastly event aboard a long-trip ship from the old days, before the timegate. I might need the political officer to reveal himself (or herself) to protect me, to nurse the shattered crew to journey’s end.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be in danger. Potential weapons of any sort were banned from Pegasus. We even ate with plastic spoons. We were strongly conditioned not to crowd each other, not to collide.

  My cabin wasn’t a particularly elegant boudoir in which to conduct an alien seduction. The walls were smooth and almost bare, with no irrelevant obtrusions. Entertainments were enclosed inside the walls; only a screen and speakers and the simplest of controls were visible. The whole floor was padded as a bed. Personal space must be kept extremely tidy. To encourage this, we possessed little to untidy a cabin with.

  Already my home pad was slightly dusty. We were two days out from Earth but Pegasus was hundreds of days older. Before we arrived in twelve days’ time, in eighteen years’ time, dust would lie thick about the ship. It would be as though we dwelled in an ancient tomb.

  How could so much dust collect out of thin air? Maybe the steady state theory of the universe was correct and matter was being created all the time, mostly in deep space, in the form of dust. Slowed in time as we were, dust seemed to gather with mysterious malevolence as though the ship’s walls were sloughing dead cells of skin which must eventually gather so deeply as to stifle us.

  In a sense dust was the main enemy. Dust alone visibly altered the anatomy of the ship. Nothing else about the ship could be allowed to change, to shift position.

  At journey’s end hoses would simply be attached to the snout of Pegasus, through the airlock at the front of Control. The whole vessel would be flooded like a sunken submarine, flushed clean, then dried and sterilized by blasts of burning air.

  “Have some more wine, Skip?”

  “Thank you.”

  Yes, a starship is an unchanging environment. It’s designed that way. No door ever opens or shuts in transit. As few objects as possible are movable: plastic spoons, cups, bowls. Clothes; we wear almost indestructible one-piece suits.

  In the old days when journeys took half a lifetime, ships were littered with enough playthings and paraphernalia to occupy a whole cageful of monkeys happily half way to forever.

  But any loose object can be misused, can cause an accident or be made into a weapon. And humans aren’t monkeys. The same rich variety of adult toys and amusements and decoration, constantly seen for ten or twenty years, becomes invisible. After a decade and a half all those things may as well not be there. The crew would no longer admire them, care about them, even notice them. The ship may as well be empty and immutable, as Pegasus is. Apart from the dust.

  Inner disciplines were more important than toys. Imaginative meditations. Indeed, what other kind of discipline could there be aboard a vessel exiled for fifteen or thirty years? Alas, those disciplines frequently degenerated; the crew became degenerates.

  Tip your hat to the timegate, ship-mates!

  One of the crew would need to become my mate, under Skip’s influence …

  I presumed that microphones and lenses the size of motes of dust recorded the monotony of daily life aboard Pegasus, though I doubted that the political officer herself (or himself) would have access to the electronic records; thus Earth could keep a check on her too (or him). Those records would be scanned by a high-speed computer programmed to take note of key words and tones of voice denoting hysteria, rage, pain. (Key words on this trip would include anything connected with timegates and Tworfs.) That was how the terrible tale of some of those early, cursed, multidecade voyages had been decoded, even though the ageing remnants of the crew were themselves inarticulat
e or deep in hallucinations. Back before the timegate cut subjective trip time to a few weeks.

  When nothing in the environment changes, it doesn’t matter how quickly or slowly the crew members move about the ship, so long as they all move about at the same speed relative to one another. (Though we never trusted to this!)

  Obviously we were utterly out of synch with mechanical systems for opening doors or emptying toilets or heating food. Before you could snatch a foil-pack of heated stew out of an oven the meal would have been cold for hours, ship-time. Cold nutritious slop was our chow.

  Oh for a juicy steak, a Madras curry, steaming broth. But we could easily wait a couple of weeks for a decent meal.

  At least I had some good vintage Burgundy to offer Skip. All our wine was vintage; once opened it had plenty of time to breathe.

  Day Three, and it was time for me and Exec Kaminski and Navigator Bekker to check and triple-check our course, analyse the starbow, make any minor corrections. Since yesterday Pegasus had flown onward a hundred and fifty or so light days. Back on Earth a year and a half had gone by. Cosmic dust, gravity of neighbouring stars, the rotation of the galaxy, minute irregularities in the output of the stardrive could conspire to nudge us slightly off course. A starship slightly off course is soon a long way off. To correct significant deviations soon becomes fuel-consumptive and stressful of the stardrive.

  The daily check was something of a ritual with definite superstitious aspects. For Bekker, Kaminski, and I would step through the timegate one after another and be accelerated to ship-time; otherwise we could never handle the job. Then we three would return through the gate into the main body of the ship, and be decelerated once again. The rest of the crew would wait and watch. In some ways the event was like a prayer to a mysterious deity, one which had always proved benevolent so far, yet whose ways were inexplicable.

  When I arrived in the bare dusty vestibule, Chantal, Takahashi, and Wenzel were already there. With backs to the curving wall, they kept their distance from one another.