Two knots formed - simultaneously in the rising smoke trails. Second stage on. They rose very fast now.
"Rich Mann."
Mann flicked his transmitter on. "You'd live through anything."
"Not I. I can't feel anything below my shoulders.Listen, Rich Mann, I'll trade secrets with you. What happened?"
"The big towers are stage trees."
"Uh?" Half question, half an expression of agony.
"A stage tree has two life cycles. One is the bush, the other is the big multistage form." Mann talked fast, fearful of losing his audience. "The forms alternate. A stage tree seed lands on a planet and grows into a bush. Later there are lots of bushes. When a seed hits a particularly fertile spot, it grows into a multistage form. You still there?"
"Yuh."
"In the big form the living part is the tap root and the photosynthetic organs around the base. That way the rocket section doesn't have to carry so much weight. It grows straight up out of the living part, but it's as dead as the center of an oak except for the seed at the top. When it's ripe, the rocket takes off. Usually it'll reach terminal velocity for the system it's in. Kidd, I can't see your ship; I'll have to wait till the smoke--"
"Just keep talking."
"I'd like to help."
"Too late. Keep talking."
"I've tracked the stage trees across twenty light-years of space. God knows where they started. They're all through the systems around here. The seed pods spend hundreds of thousands of years in space; and when they enter a system, they explode. If there's a habitable world, one seed is bound to hit it. If there isn't, there's lots more pods where that one came from. It's immortality, Captain Kidd. This one plant has traveled farther than mankind, and it's much older. A billion and a-"
"Mann."
"Yah."
"Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nil. I don't know its name on the star charts. Shall I repeat that?"
Mann forgot the stage trees. "Better repeat it."
"Twenty-three point six, seventy point one, six point nothing. Hunt in that area till you find it. It's a red giant, undersized. Planet is small, dense, no moon."
"Got it."
"You're stupid if you use it. You'll have the same luck I did. That's why I told you."
"I'll use blackmail."
"They'll kill you. Otherwise I wouldn't have said. Why'd you kill me, Rich Mann?"
"I didn't like your remarks about my beard. Never insult a Wunderlander's asymmetric beard, Captain Kidd."
"I won't do it again."
"I'd like to help." Mann peered into the billowing smoke. Now it was a black pillar tinged at the edges by the twin sunlight. "Still can't see your ship."
"You will in a moment."
The pirate moaned . . . and Mann saw the ship. He managed to turn his head in time to save his eyes.
The Handicapped
I
We flew on skycycles over a red desert, under the soft red sun of Down. I let Jilson stay ahead. He was my guide, and I hadn't been flying a skycycle long. I'm a flatlander. I had spent most of my life in the cities of Earth, where any flying vehicle is illegal unless fully automated.
I liked flying. I wasn't good at it yet, but there was plenty of room for mistakes with the desert so far below.
"There," said Jilson, pointing.
"Where?"
"Down there. Follow me." His skycycle swung easily to the left and began to slow and drop. I followed more clumsily, overcorrecting and dropping behind. Eventually I spotted something.
"That little cone?"
"That's it."
From up here the desert looked lifeless. It wasn't, any more than the deserts of most inhabited worlds are lifeless. Down there, invisible at this height, were spiky dry plants with water stored in their cores; flowers that bloomed after a rain and left their seeds to wait a year or ten years for the next rainfall; insect-things with four legs, unjointed; skinny warm-blooded quadrupeds from the size of a fox on down, who were always hungry.
There was a five-foot hairy cone with a bald, rounded top. Only its shadow made it visible as we dropped toward it. Its lank hair was the exact color of the reddish sand.
We landed next to it and got off.
I was beginning to think I'd been played for a fool. The thing didn't look like an animal. It looked like a big cactus. Sometimes a cactus had hair just like that.
"We're behind it," said Jilson. He was dark and massive and taciturn. On Down there was no such animal as the professional guide. I'd talked Jilson into taking me out into the desert for a fair fee, but it hadn't bought his friendship. I think he was trying to make that clear. "Come around in front," he said.
We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair - the size and shape of a Great Dane's forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the corners. No eyes. The cone looked like some Stone Age carved idol or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk.
Jilson waited patiently for me to stop laughing. "It's funny," he admitted with reluctance. "But it's intelligent. There's a brain under that bald top, bigger than yours and mine combined."
"It's never tried to communicate with you?"
"Not with me nor with anyone else."
"Does it make tools?"
"With what? Look at its hands!" He regarded me with amusement. "This is what you wanted to see, wasn't it?"
"Yes. I came a long way for nothing."
"Anyway, now you've seen it."
I laughed again. Eyeless, motionless, my potential customer sat like a fat lap dog in begging position. "Come on," I said, "let's go back."
II
A fool's errand. I'd spent two weeks in hyperspace to get here. The fare would come out of business expenses, but ultimately I'd pay it; I'd own the business one day.
Jilson took his check without comment, folded it twice and stuck it in his lighter pocket. He said, "Buy you a drink?"
"Sure."
We left our rented skycycles at the Downtown city limit and boarded a pedwalk. Jilson led the way from crossing to crossing until we were sliding past a great silver cube with a wriggling blue sign: CZILLER'S HOUSE OF IRISH COFFEE. Inside, the place was still a cube, a one-story building forty meters high. Padded horseshoe-shaped sofas covered the entire floor, so close you could hardly squeeze between them, each with its little disk of a table nestling in the center. From the floor a tinsel abstraction rose like a great tree, spreading its wide, glittering arms protectively over the customers, rising forty meters to touch the ceiling. The bartending machinery was halfway up the tree.
"Interesting place," said Jilson. "These booths were built to float." He waited for me to express surprise. When I didn't, he went on: "It didn't work out. Lovely idea though. The chairs would swoop through the air; and if the people at two tables wanted to meet, they'd slide their booths together and lock them magnetically."
"Sounds like fun."
"It was fun. The guy who thought it up must have forgot that people come to a bar to get drunk. They'd crash the booths together like bumper cars. They'd go as high as they could and then pour out their drinks. The people underneath didn't like that, and maybe there'd be a fight. I remember seeing a guy get thrown out of a booth. He'd have been dead if that tinsel centerpiece hadn't caught him. I hear another guy did die; he missed the branches."
"So they grounded the booths."
"No. First they tried to make the course automatic. But you could still pour drinks on the people below, and there was more skill in it. It got to be a game. Then one nigh
t some idiot figured out how to short the autopilot, but he forgot the manual controls had been disconnected. His booth landed on another and injured three important people. Then they grounded the booths."
A floating tray served us two chilled glasses and a bottle of Blue Fire 2728. The bar was two-thirds empty this early, and quiet. When the freeze-distilled wine was half gone, I explained why they call Blue Fire the "Crashlander's Peacemaker": the shape of the flexible plastic bottle, narrow-necked with a flaring mouth, plus the weight of the fluid inside make it a dandy bludgeon.
Jilson was turning almost garrulous now that I was no longer his employer. I was talking a lot too. Not that I felt like it; it was just - well, hell, here I was, light-years from Earth and business and the good people I knew, way out at the edge of human space. Down: a former Kzinti world, mostly empty, with a few scattered dots of civilization and a few great scars of old war, a world where the farmers had to use ultraviolet lamps to grow crops because of that red dwarf sun. Here I was. I was going to enjoy it if it killed me.
I was enjoying it. Jilson was good company, and the Blue Fire didn't hurt at all. We ordered another bottle. The noise level rose as cocktail hour drew near.
"Something I've been wondering," said Jilson. "Mind if we talk business?"
"No. Whose business?"
"Yours."
"Not at all. Why ask?"
"It's traditional, to us. Some people don't like giving away their tricks of the trade. Others like to forget work completely after hours."
"That makes sense. What's the question?"
"Why do you pronounce Handicapped as though it had a capital H?"
"Oh. Well, if I said it with a small h, you'd think I meant humans, wouldn't you? Potential paranoids, albino crashlanders, boosterspice allergics, people with missing limbs and resistance to transplants - handicapped like that."
"Whereas what I deal with are sentient beings who evolved with minds but with nothing that would serve as hands."
"0-oh. Like dolphins?"
"Right. Are there dolphins on Down?"
"Hell yes. Who else would run our fishing industry?"
"You know those things you pay them off in? They look like a squirt-jet motorboat motor with two padded metal hands attached."
"The Dolphin's Hands. Sure. We sell 'em other stuff, tools and sonic things to move fish around, but the Dolphin's Hands are what they mainly need."
"I make them."
Jilson's eyes jerked up. Then ... I could feel him withdrawing, backing off as he realized that the man across from him could probably buy Down. Damn! But the best I could do now was ignore the fact.
"I should have said my father's company makes them. One day I'll direct Garvey Limited, but my great grandfather will have to die first. I doubt he ever will."
Jilson smiled, with little strain. "I know people like that."
"Yah. Some people seem to dry out as they get older. They get dryer and tougher instead of getting fat, until you think they'll never change again; and they seem to get more and more energetic, like there's a thermonuclear source inside them. Gee-Squared is like that. A great old man. I don't see enough of him."
"You sound proud of him. Why does he have to die?"
"It's like a custom. Dad's running the company now. If he gets in trouble, he can go to his father, who ran the company before him. If Gee-Prime can't handle it, they both go to Gee-Squared."
"Funny names."
"Not to me. That's like a tradition too."
"Sorry. What are you doing on Down?"
"We don't deal only with dolphins." The Blue Fire made me want to lecture. "Look, Jilson. We know of three sentient beings without hands. Right?"
"More than that. Puppeteers use their mouths. Outsiders-"
"But they build their own tools, dammit. I'm talking about beasts who can't even crack themselves a fist-ax or hold a lighter: dolphins, bandersnatchi, and that thing we saw today."
"The Grog. Well?"
"Well, don't you see that there must be Handicapped species all over the galaxy? Minds but no hands. I tell you, Jilson, it gives me the shivers. For as long as we expand to other stars, we're going to meet more and more handless, toolless, helpless civilizations. Sometimes we won't even recognize them. What are we going to do about them?"
"Build Dolphin's Hands for them."
"Well, yes, but we can't just give them away. Once one species starts depending on another, they become parasites."
"How about bandersnatchi? Do you build Hands for bandersnatchi?"
"Yes. Lots bigger, of course." A bandersnatch is twice the size of a brontosaur. Its skeleton is flexible but has no joints; the only breaks in its smooth white skin are the tufts of sensory bristles on either side of its tapering blank head. It moves on a rippling belly foot. Bandersnatchi live in the lowlands of Jinx, browsing off the gray yeast along the shorelines. You'd think they were the most helpless things in known space ... until you saw one bearing down on you like a charging mountain. Once I saw an ancient armored-car crushed flat across a lowlands rock, straddled by the broken bones of the beast that ran it down."
"Okay. How do they pay for their machines?"
"Hunting privileges."
Jilson looked horrified. "I don't believe you."
"I hardly believed it myself, but it's true." I hunched forward across the tiny table. "Here's how it works. The bandersnatchi have to control their population; there's only so much shoreline to feed on in the lowlands. They also have to control boredom. Can you imagine how bored they must have been before men came to Jinx? So what they've done is, they've made a treaty with the Jinx government. Now, say a man wants a bandersnatchi skeleton, he's going to build a trophy room under it. He goes to the Jinx government and gets a license. The license tells him what equipment he can take down to the lowlands, which is inhabited only by bandersnatchi because the atmospheric pressure is enough to crush a man's lungs and the temperature is enough to cook him. If he gets caught taking extra weapons, he goes to prison for a long time.
"Maybe he makes it back with a body; maybe he doesn't come back. His equipment gives him odds of about sixty-forty. But either way, the bandersnatchi get eighty percent of the license fee, which is a thousand stars flat. With that, they buy things."
"Like Hands."
"Right. Oh, one more thing. A dolphin can control his Hands with his tongue, but a bandersnatch can't. We have to build the control setup directly into the nerves, by surgery. It's not difficult."
Jilson shook his head and dialed for another bottle.
"They do other things," I said. "The Institute of Knowledge has instruments in the lowlands-laboratories and such. There are things the Institute wants to know about what happens under lowland pressures and temperatures. The bandersnatchi run all the experiments, using the Hands."
"So you came here for a new market."
"I was told there was a new sentient life-form on Down, one that doesn't use tools."
"You've changed your mind?"
"Just about. Jilson, what makes you think they're sentient?"
"The brains. They're huge."
"Nothing else?"
"No."
"Their brains might not work like ours. The nerve cells might be different."
"Look, we're about to get technical. Let's drop it for tonight." And with that, Jilson pushed the bottles and glasses to one side and stood up on the table. He peered around Cziller's House of Irish Coffee, swinging his head in a slow arc. "Hah! Garvey, I've spotted a cousin and one of her friends. Let's join 'em. It's almost dinnertime."
I thought we'd be taking them to dinner. Not at all. Sharon and Lois built our dinner, handmade, starting with raw materials we picked up in a special store. Seeing raw food for the first time, practically in the state in which it had emerged from the ground or been cut from a dead beast, made me a little queasy. I hope I didn't show it. But dinner tasted fine.
After dinner and some polite drinking and talk, back to the hotel. I wen
t to sleep planning to hop a ship the next morning.
I woke in total darkness around oh four hundred, staring at the invisible ceiling and seeing a round-topped cone with reddish lank hair and a faintly smiling mouth. Smiling at me in gentle derision. The cone had secrets. I'd come that close to guessing one this afternoon; I'd seen something without noticing it.
Don't ask me how I knew. With a crystalline certainty that I could not doubt, I knew.
But I couldn't remember what I'd seen.
I got up and dialed the kitchen for some hot chocolate and a tuna sandwich.
Why should they be intelligent? Why would sedentary cones evolve a brain?
I wondered how they reproduced. Not bisexually; they couldn't get to each other. Unless - but of course there must be a motile stage. Those leftover paws... What would they eat? They couldn't find food; they'd have to wait for it to come to them, like any sessile animal: clams, sea anemones, or the Gummidgy "orchid" I keep in my living room so I can shock hell out of guests.
They had a brain. Why? What did they do with it, sit and think about all they were missing? I needed data. Tomorrow I'd contact Jilson.
III
At eleven the next morning we were in the Downtown Zoo.
Behind a repulsor field something snapped and snarled at us: something like an idiot god's attempt to make a hairy bulldog. The animal had no nose, and its mouth was a flat, lipless slit hiding two serrated horseshoe-shaped cutting surfaces. Its long, coarse hair was the color of sand lit by red sunlight. The forepaws had four long, spreading toes, so that they looked like chicken feet.
"I recognize those feet."
"Yah," said Jilson. "It's a young Grog. In this stage they mate. Then the female finds a rock and settles down. When she's big enough, she starts having children. That's the theory, anyway. They won't do it in captivity."
"What about the males?"
"In the next cage."
The males, two of them, were the size of Chihuahuas, with about the same temperament. But they had the serrated horseshoe teeth and the coarse reddish hair.