Complete Short Fiction, page 300
The other three cried out together as Erni did a quick-stop. Then, donning a waldo, he deployed one of the smallest bugs and sent it back toward Candlegrease on the side toward the lake.
Nic, knowing his partner best and far more experienced with the equipment than the other couple, imitated Icewall’s action; but there was no way he could make his bug catch up with the one which had started first. Erni’s mechanical servant took hold of the still unsafetied relief valve which had destroyed the other patch so far back, in the natives’ grim experiment.
“Hold it, Erni! What do you think you’re up to?” The question came in three different voices, with the words slightly different in each, but was understood even at Nest.
“Don’t ask silly questions—or don’t you care about Maria?”
Nic’s lips tightened invisibly behind his breathing mask.
“I care a lot, and so will the kids when they hear. But that’s no answer.”
Pam was broadcasting deliberately as she cut in; she was uncertain how much the natives would understand, but it seemed worth trying. “You just want to kill a few thousand of these people to get even?”
“Don’t be stupid. I won’t be killing anyone. This isn’t a city, it’s one creature. I can punish it—hurt it—without killing it. I can teach it to be careful. You know that, don’t you, Nic?”
“I’m pretty sure of it, yes. I’m not sure releasing the paraffin up here won’t kill it completely. We’re at about the highest point in the valley, much of our juice is denser than the local air, and the wind is random as usual. If we do kill it, it may not be a lesson. We don’t know that there are any more of these beings on the planet. We certainly haven’t heard from any, and the satellites this one spotted and began talking to can be seen from anywhere on Halfbaked. Think that one over. All the intelligence of a world for two human lives?”
Erni was silent for several seconds, but his servo remained motionless. At last, “You don’t know that. You can’t be sure.”
“Of course I can’t. But it’s a plausible idea, like the one that this is a single being. Anything I can do to keep you from taking the chance, I’ll do. Think it over.”
Pam disapproved of what sounded to her like a threat.
“Why are you blaming these people, or this person, whichever it is, anyway? You don’t know what happened is their fault.”
“They weren’t careful enough! Look at that wrecked building there! That’s got to be where it happened—”
“And the dead-vegetation area downslope from it! Maybe they weren’t careful enough—how could they have been? What do they know about hydrogen compounds? What do we know about their behavior here, except what they found out and showed us a while ago, long after the girls were gone? What—”
“I don’t care what! All I can think about is Jessi! What she was like—what she was—and that I’ll never see her or feel her again. Someone’s got to learn!”
“You mean someone’s got to pay, don’t you?”
“All right, someone’s got to pay! And what do you think you can do to stop it, Dominic Wildbear Yucca, who is so disgustingly civilized he doesn’t care for the memory of the mother of his kids!”
“Who is so disgustingly civilized he doesn’t want to admit to his kids, and his friends, that he didn’t try to keep a good friend from—”
“Friend! How can you call yourself a—”
“You’ll see.”
“How?”
What Nic would have said in answer is still unknown; he refused to tell anyone later. Pam cut in again.
“Look! Isn’t it enough to scare them—scare it? Look what’s happening! Look at the city, or the creature, or whatever it is!”
Even Erni took his eyes from the screen of his servobug. For the first and only time since the native’s hydrocarbon experiment, they clearly saw the dandelion seeds. Hordes of them, rocketing up from every part of the overgrown area, catching the swirling, wandering winds, many falling back to the ground close to their launch points, but some being carried up and away in every direction.
The woman saw Erni’s distraction, and pressed home her argument. “They want to save what they can! Those things really are seeds. They scatter them when the parent is in danger, or knows it’s dying!”
“You—you don’t know that either.” Erni sounded almost subdued, and certainly far less frenzied than a few seconds earlier. Nic began to hope, and waited for Pam to go on.
Erni’s attention now was clearly on the scenery rather than his bug. Even though he still had his hands in the waldos, there was a very good chance that Dominic’s bug could knock the other away from the valve in time.
Nic took what seemed to him a better chance by passing up the opportunity. Pam was silent, so he finally spoke softly.
“I can forgive your cracks about my not caring, because I do care and know how you feel. But what you want to do is just the same sort of angry, thoughtless thing as those words, isn’t it?”
Erni’s answer seemed irrelevant.
“If it’s scared, why doesn’t it ask me to stop?”
“Using what words?” asked Pam softly.
“Me unclear.” The native utterance partly overlapped the woman’s, and proved the most effective sentence of the argument.
Slowly, Erni drew his hands from the waldo gloves, and gestured Akmet to take over the bug’s control.
“Better try to get ‘we’ across while you’re at it, Pam,” was all he said. He let himself drift away from controls and window.
“Me and we unclear. One at a time.”
Pam might have been smiling behind her mask. She did look hesitantly at her companions, especially Erni. Then she tried her explanation. Numbers, after all, had long been in the common vocabulary.
“Observe Annie closely. Me, one animal. We, more than one animal. Four animals in Annie.”
Erni made no objection, but added quietly, “No valve danger. Which way?”
“Right.” Erni, now thoroughly embarrassed, glanced around at the others as though asking whether they really trusted him to drive. The other men were concentrating on the bugs outside, the woman seemed to be watching the putative seeds. They were mostly settled back to the ground or blown out of sight by now. No more were being launched, apparently. Maybe the suggested explanation had been right, but even its proponent was skeptical. Maybe they were some sort of weapon . . .
It soon became obvious that Annie was being led to the other shedlike structure. This one was at the edge of the lake but somewhat down slope from the overgrown areas. There seemed a likely reason, though not the only possible one, for this: care. No one suggested this aloud to the driver. It seemed too obvious that Jellyseal had, during unloading, wrecked the first building and killed much of the being or population which formed the copse.
As they followed instructions along the edge of the overgrown area, bunch after bunch of tangled branches waved close past Annie’s windows. Looking in? None of them doubted it. Pam continued alternately reporting and teaching, describing their path and surroundings to Nest and reacting to observations through the window with remarks like “One animal driving. One animal talking. Two animals moving bugs.”
They were guided around the structure to the lower side. This was open, and Annie was directed to enter. The far side, toward Hotnorth, could be seen to be open also, and though there was much growth within, there was plenty of room for tug and tank. Erni dragged his charge within.
“Stop.” Since there was an opening in front, he obeyed, though he remained alert. The bugs operated by Akmet and Nic had come in too, and all four explorers watched, not without an occasional glance forward, as the doorway behind was plugged more and more tightly by growing branches and finally, as nearly as either bug could see, became airtight.
“Carbon hydride stop.” Reading between the words, the bug handlers detached Candlegrease. Erni eased Annie forward. Three things started to happen at once, all interesting for different reasons.
Flattened bladders appeared among the branches and were borne toward Candle grease’s valves. Apparently the paraffin was not to be exposed to local air this time.
A wall of tangled growth began to form between Annie and her tow, without waiting for the bugs to get back to the tug. Nic and Akmet, after a quick but silent look at each other, abandoned the machines; there were plenty more, and there seemed no objection to their being “observed” at leisure by the natives.
The doorway ahead began to fill with a similar block. This also caused human reaction. Erni sent the tug grinding firmly forward.
“Oxygen hydride stop.”
No attention was paid to this. In a few seconds Annie was outside, with a patch of torn and flattened vegetation behind where the growing wall had been.
“Water stop.”
Pam remained calm, and Erni did not stop until they were a hundred meters from the lab, as they all now thought of it. Pam explained.
“Water stop danger for animals.”
The native voice did not respond at once, and after some seconds Cloud’s voice reached them from Nest.
“Y’know, Pam dear, I think you’ve just faced your friend outside with the problem of what an individual is. Don’t be surprised if you have to restate that one.”
The woman answered promptly and professionally.
“You mean my friend or friends. You’re hypothesizing still. Let’s call this one Abby, and start looking around for Bill—”
“Water next time.”
“Water next time,” she agreed.
“All right, it’s—they’re—she’s civilized,” muttered Erni after a moment.
“Of course. So are you,” answered Dominic. All three looked at him sharply, but he ignored the couple.
“You wouldn’t really have turned that valve, would you?”
The younger man was silent for several seconds. “I don’t think so,” he said at last.
“We didn’t really talk you out of it, did we?”
“I guess not. That’s the funny part. Once I was where I could do it, I—I don’t know; I guess having the power, knowing I was in charge and no one could stop me—well, that was enough.” He paused. “I think. Then the arguments distracted me, and I realized you’d sneaked your bug close enough so you probably could have stopped me. And I didn’t care that you could.
“Nic, I’ll help you tell the kids, if you’ll tell me why getting even can seem so important.”
“We’d better tell them that, too. If we can figure it out. Y’know, I’m not sure I would’ve stopped you.”
The Treeferns listened sympathetically, and since they were also human not even Pam thought to ask why Jellyseal’s failure was the natives’ fault.
2000
Under
The newest Nebula Grand Master returns to one of the best-known exotic worlds in science fiction—and finds the Mesklinites confronting a new kind of danger.
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE
Mesklin is the single “planet” of 61 Cygni A, the brighter member of a binary system approximately eleven light years from Sol and Earth. While several times as massive as Jupiter, it is not a gas giant; like Earth, it lost nearly all its hydrogen during formation. Predictably, most of its mass is concentrated in a core of degenerate matter, and its total volume close to that of Uranus or Neptune.
It has attracted astrophysical attention since its first well-resolved images were obtained, for several reasons.
First, shape. It is close to rotational instability; with a day of less than eighteen minutes, its equatorial radius is more than twice the polar one. Inertia gives it an equatorial surface “gravity” only three times that of Earth; the polar regions, lacking centrifugal effects and far closer to the ultradense core, would flatten a human being under several hundred times his normal weight.
Second, physical nature. The original accretion heat has been lost completely enough to leave the surface temperature at roughly radiational equilibrium; the oceans are principally liquid methane, the atmosphere nearly all hydrogen with a surface pressure of about eight bars. It is not clear why settling of mantle mass has not increased its spin rate for the last few billion years so as to cause general breakup and forestall the development and normal evolution of life. (The planet has several rings, which might possibly have formed from such an event; but rings don’t ordinarily last for eons.)
Nevertheless, physicists rather than planetologists had most to say about its original detailed investigation. A remotely controlled spacecraft was landed at the south rotation pole to conduct experiments in the hitherto unattainably intense gravity field there. Much information was transmitted to the researchers at a base on the inner moon, Toory, and much more was expected to be obtained on physical records when the craft returned. Unfortunately, it failed to respond to the liftoff command, causing extreme consternation to researchers of some ten worlds whose people had contributed to the project.
However, a sop had fortunately been tossed to the planetary specialists and biologists in the form of a manned observing station near Mesklin’s equator, where human and similar beings could, with precautions, stand the gravity for a time. Citylike patterns had been observed, with some uncertainty, in the mid-latitudes; and while there was little reason to hope that beings evolved for such conditions would be found anywhere near the equator, efforts involving firework displays and extremely loud sound broadcasts had been made to attract their attention.
These had been surprisingly successful. Barlennan, a sailor-trader-explorer of Mesklin’s seas, had discovered the station. Charles Lackland, sole staff member of the outpost, had managed to make linguistic contact and, after much effort, teach some of his own language to Barlennan and learn some of the latter’s Stennish.
At the start of Mission Of Gravity, a bargain had been worked out. Barlennan’s crew would travel to the south polar regions, and try to salvage as much as possible of the information in the grounded rocket. They were physically able to stand even the extreme gravity of the planet’s poles; their fifteen-inch-long hemicylindrical bodies, supported on numerous stubby caterpillarlike legs, were tough. They were neither arthropods nor vertebrates; their flesh was resilient enough to need neither internal nor external skeletons. They did not breathe in any usual sense; their energy was derived from reducing highly unsaturated hydrocarbons and similar compounds with atmospheric hydrogen, and they were physically small enough for adequate supplies of this gas to reach their extremely small body cells by diffusion. Their ability to use oral speech stemmed not from modified breathing apparatus but from evolved organs originally corresponding to propulsion jets like those of terrestrial cephalopods.
The season was propitious; the deal was made near the end of the brief winter, and Mesklin’s southern hemisphere midsummer nearly coincided with the periapsis of its orbit, so much of the journey would enjoy daylight (Mesklin’syear is some eighteen hundred Earth days in length, and its orbit quite eccentric).
The Bree, Barlennan’s ship, was a mosaic of individual rafts equipped with sails and centerboards, and represented a fair example of his species’ technological status. The ability of Lackland and his fellows to travel through the air aroused several different emotions in the captain, largely acquisitive and envious ones. He was perfectly honest by his own standards, but hoped to pry large amounts of usable, and saleable, know-how from his customers while carrying out their wishes—knowledge which he at first took for granted the Flyers would never supply willingly, and certainly not freely.
The trip to the pole involved first a long overland journey to an ocean strange to the Bree’s crew. This was managed by towing the vessel behind a tanklike vehicle driven by Lackland. During this stage of the mission, the Bree personnel encountered a number of adventures which put serious strains on their normal conditioning to avoid either falling, becoming vulnerable to falls by climbing, or allowing anything to fall on them. Events even opened their minds to such concepts as throwing.
Having to climb to the top of the tank to escape rocks being rolled downhill on them, with essentially no time to debate the choice, was a typical experience. A more extreme one was provided when the tank’s progress was blocked at the top of a cliff extending indefinitely in both directions across its path, forcing Bree and crew to descend somehow. The sight and sound of a nearby waterfall did not help Mesklinite feelings.
By the time the ship and crew had been lowered by block and tackle, raft by raft, to the ground below, reassembled, and refloated on the river fed by the waterfall, none of the crew members was as he had been. Whether any of them, Barlennan and his first mate Dondragmer included, was still sane by Mesklinite standards was debatable.
But at least the river led to the right ocean—the Flyers could assure them of that—and all were willing to go on. Lackland had to turn back, since there was no way to get the tank down the escarpment, but he had provided the natives with a number of communication sets complete with cameras. These could be used to talk with the Flyers on Toorey, and allow the latter to give advice and to see what Barlennan and the others were encountering.
But even at sea, familiar as it should be, there were disturbing experiences. The sailors were used to storms, of course, and even knew why ships should stay well away from any land during them: ocean level, even in high-gravity latitudes, rose enormously in the extremely low-pressure centers of such disturbances, due to the tremendous Coriolis force. A ship could find itself stranded surprisingly far from liquid when things had quieted down. Avoiding land on an unknown ocean, however, was difficult even with help from above, and at one point while at the still-low seven-g latitude, the Bree found itself floating on a pond in a valley drained by what had once more become a narrow streamlet almost surrounded by low hills—low by Flyer standards—on a presumably not-too-large island.
The local inhabitants proved to be of their own species, but they flew. They used gliders, launched by elastic cables, kept aloft by their pilots’ knowledge of wind patterns. Here Barlennan began to realize that the Flyers were at least sometimes willing to supply him with knowledge if he needed it. They explained how the gliders worked, though using seagulls as an analogy proved ineffective, and helped with still more information when disagreement with the locals made an escape necessary. Dondragmer was able to grasp the concept of, and to build, a differential hoist to remove a group of deep-driven stakes barring the Bree’s course downstream to the sea.
