Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds

  When I got back to the spaceport there was a Hartford courier waiting for me with a bright red Confederación envelope. It was a message from Dr. Avedon, the xenologist who had been so happy to see me and Raj when we showed up with our phony papers. She said that the Obelobelian tribe they were observing had refused to cooperate with anyone but me, since I was the only human who had undergone the rite of passage. Would I consider coming out to assist them for a regular consultant’s fee? She wasn’t enthusiastic about having any of her people go into those caves at night, for certification.

  I could just see her teeth grinding as she wrote a letter of supplication to Gregorio Fuentes, heartless poacher. She probably knew that the maximum pay she could offer was less than a tenth of my normal fee. I would refuse contemptuously and they would be stuck.

  Of course I did go back. I stayed on Obelobel for twenty-two years, and still return every three years for a tribal purification ceremony, which will kill me if I live long enough. That honestly is something that bothers me not at all. Not because I’m old or tired of life.

  We’ve learned a lot from the Obelobelians, including humility. The second surprise was telepathy, which we learned through my own initiation as a host-surrogate. The first surprise was from their biochemistry, a discovery that had been in the making when Raj and I arrived there: the Obelobelians came from another planet. Their body chemistry was as alien to Obelobel as ours was—and the balaseli found them just as poisonous. The ones who survived their rite of passage did exactly as I had. The creature’s flaying reflex is triggered by its prey’s struggling. If you remain motionless long enough for it to reject you, you may live.

  It seems cruel, by human standards, to subject the young to such an awful test. But to their way of thinking a male or female is not born until he or she comes back out of the cave; a child killed by the balaseli is a late miscarriage. To be allowed to reproduce you have to show absolute fearlessness. You have to show that you are grown.

  So where did they come from, and how, and why? They are not willing to answer such questions. Able, but not willing, and anyone with a grain of objectivity about human nature would have to agree with them.

  We thought it was a case of an advanced civilization dealing with childish savages who could think and communicate only at the most basic level. We were right.

  A !TANGLED WEB

  Your spaceport bars fall into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn’t feel like paying the prices that people who space for fun can afford. The Facilities Directory listed under “Food and Drink” four establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine’s, and Slim Joan’s Bar & Grill.

  I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better at arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar’s door was right at the drop-lift exit would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage don’t generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.

  It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rather than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite. Well, I hadn’t come for the scenery.

  The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being !tang, since this was Morocho III. I’ve got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tangish, I preferred to mix my drinking with some human tongue.

  “Speak English?” I asked Slim Joan.

  “Some,” he/she/it growled. “You would drink something?” I’d never heard a Russian-Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty booth.

  One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the lingo you can count your change.

  I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the !tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn’t stay useless, of course.

  Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as “Armpit,” and not many people take the local hop out to III (Armpit’s the stopover on the Earth-Sammler run). Starlodge, Limited, was hoping to change that situation.

  I couldn’t help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I’m not a snoop; it’s a side effect of the hypnotic-induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, and the other was full of useful advice. “He”—they have seven singular pronoun classes, depending on the individual’s age and estrous condition—was telling “her” never to make any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have told her not to breathe on anyone. One of the by-products of their metabolism is butyl nitrite, which smells like well-aged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.

  I’ve worked with !tangs a few times before, and they’re some of my favorite people. Very serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant’s trunk protruding. They have two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it’s impolite to take them out in public unless one is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologist with a magnifying glass to tell when.

  He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Their metabolism parts company with ours over proteins and fats, but they love our carbohydrates and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.

  A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank back into the booth. Too late.

  He strode over and stuck out his hand. “Dick Navarro!”

  “Hello, Pete.” I shook his hand once. “What brings you here? Hartford business?” Pete was also an interpreter.

  —Oh, no, he said in Arabic. —Only journeying.

  —Knock it off, I said in Serbo-Croatian. —Isn’t your native language English? I added in Greek.

  “Sure it is. Yours?”

  “English or Spanish. Have a seat.”

  I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. “To be eating you want?”

  “Nyet,” he said. “Vodka.” I told her I’d take another.

  “So what are you doing here?” Pete asked.

  “Business.”

  “Hartford?”

  “Nope.”

  “Secret.”

  “That’s right.” Actually, they hadn’t said anything about its being secret. But I knew Peter Lafitte. He wasn’t just passing through.

  We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he explained to her how to decide which public bathroom to use when. This was important to humans, he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.

  “How did that Spica business finally turn out?” he asked.

  “Badly.” Lafitte and I had worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV, with the Confederación actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. “I couldn’t get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn’t get the natives to believe that refining the minerals didn’t affect their spiritual status. It came to a show of force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn’t like to be there in twenty years, though.”

  “Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell them.” Arcturus wasn’t a regular stop any more, not since a ship landed and found every human artistically dismembered. “You’re just sightseeing?”

  “This has always been one of my favor
ite planets.”

  “Nothing to do.”

  “Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though.”

  Ah ha. “Ocean fishing?”

  “Best in the Confederación.”

  “I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?”

  He smiled and looked directly at me. “Little coastal village, Pa’an!al.”

  Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I’d be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the information into my ring.

  I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself, saying I was time-lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounced straight to the Hartford courier’s office.

  The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the pleasantries. “How long to get a message to Earth?”

  She studied the clocks on the wall. “You’re out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I’m not going to Armpit until tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I’ll miss the Earth run by half a day.

  “If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there can take it on the Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes’ beam time. You know what you want to say?”

  “Yeah. Set it up.” I sat down at the customers’ console.

  STARLODGE LIMITED

  642 EASTRIVER

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 100992

  ATTENTION: PATRICE DUVAL

  YOU MAY HAVE SOME COMPETITION HERE. NOTHING OPEN YET BUT A GUY WE CALL PETER RABBIT IS ON THE SCENE. CHECK INTERPRETERS GUILD AND SEE WHO’S PAYING PETER LAFITTE. CHANGE TERMS OF SALE? PLEASE REPLY NEXT SAMMLER RUN—RICARDO NAVARRO/RM 2048/MOROCHO HILTON

  I wasn’t sure what good the information would do me, unless they also found out how much he was offering and authorized me to outbid him. At any rate, I wouldn’t hear for three days, earliest. Sleep.

  Morocho III—its real name is !ka’al—rides a slow sweeping orbit around Morocho A, the brighter of the two suns that make up the Morocho system (Morocho A is a close double star itself, but its white dwarf companion hugs so close that it’s lost in the glare). At this time of day, Morocho B was visible low in the sky, a hard blue diamond too bright to stare at, and A was right overhead, a bloated golden ball. On the sandy beach below us the flyer cast two shadows, dark blue and faint yellow, which raced to come together as we landed.

  Pa’an!al is a fishing village thousands of years old, on a natural harbor formed where a broad jungle river flows into the sea. Here on the beach were only a few pole huts with thatched roofs, where the fishers who worked the surf and shallow pools lived. Pa’an!al proper was behind a high stone wall, which protected it on one side from the occasional hurricane and on the other from the interesting fauna of the jungle.

  I paid off my driver and told him to come back at second sundown. I took a deep breath and mounted the steps. There was an open-cage Otis elevator beside the stairs, but people didn’t use it, only fish.

  The !tang are compulsive about geometry. This wall was a precise 1:2 rectangle, and the stairs mounted from one corner to the opposite in a satisfyingly Euclidean 30 degrees. A guardrail would have spoiled the harmony. The stairs were just wide enough for two !tang to pass, and the rise of each step was a good half meter. By the time I got to the top I was both tired and slightly terrified.

  A spacefaring man shouldn’t be afraid of heights, and I’m not, so long as I’m in a vehicle. But when I attained the top of the wall and looked down the equally long and perilous flight of stairs to ground level, I almost swooned. Why couldn’t they simply have left a door in the wall?

  I sat there for a minute and looked down at the small city. The geometric regularity was pleasing. Each building was either a cube or a stack of cubes, and the rock from which the city was built had been carefully sorted, so that each building was a uniform shade. They went from white marble through sandy yellow and salmon to pearly gray and obsidian. The streets were a regular matrix of red brick. I walked down, hugging the wall.

  At the bottom of the steps a !tang sat on a low bench, watching the nonexistent traffic. —Greetings, I clicked and snorted at him. —It certainly is a pleasant day.

  —Not everywhere, he grunted and wheezed back. An unusually direct response.

  —Are you waiting for me?

  —Who can say? I am waiting. His trunk made a philosophical circle in the air. —If you had not come, who knows for what I would have been waiting?

  —Well, that’s true. He made a circle in the other direction, which I think meant What else? I stood there for a minute while he looked at me or the ground or the sky. You could never tell.

  —I hope this isn’t a rude question, he said. —Will you forgive me if this is a rude question?

  —I certainly will try.

  —Is your name !ica’o *va!o?

  That was admirably close. —It certainly is.

  —You could follow me. He got up. —Or enjoy the pleasant day.

  I followed him closely down the narrow street. If he got in a crowd I’d lose him for sure. I couldn’t tell an estrus-four female from a neuter, not having sonar (they tell each other apart by sensing body cavities, very romantic).

  We went through the center of town, where the well and the market square were. A few dozen !tang bargained over food, craft items, or abstractions. They were the most mercantile race on the planet, although they had sidestepped the idea of money in favor of labor equivalence: for those two ugly fish I will trade you an original sonnet about your daughter and three vile limericks for your next affinity-group meeting. Four limericks, tops.

  We went into a large white building that might have been City Hall. It was evidently guarded, at least symbolically, since two !tang stood by the door with their arms exposed.

  It was a single large room similar to a Terran mosque, with a regular pattern of square columns holding up the ceiling. The columns supported shelving in neat squares, up to about two meters; on the shelves were neat stacks of accordion-style books. Although the ceiling had inset squares of glass that gave adequate light, there was a strong smell of burnt fish oil, which meant the building was used at night. (We had introduced them to electricity, but they used it only for heavy machinery and toys.)

  The !tang led me to the farthest corner, where a large haystack was bent over a book, scribbling. They had to read or write with their heads a few centimeters from the book, since their light-eyes were only good for close work.

  —It has happened as you foretold, Uncle.

  Not too amazing a prophecy, as I’d sent a messenger over yesterday.

  Uncle waved his nose in my direction. —Are you the same one who came four days ago?

  —No. I have never been to this place. I am Ricardo Navarro, from the Starlodge tribe.

  —I grovel in embarrassment. Truly it is difficult to tell one human from another. To my poor eyes you look exactly like Peter Lafitte.

  (Peter Rabbit is bald and ugly, with terrible ears. I have long curly hair with only a trace of gray, and women have called me attractive.)—Please do not be embarrassed. This is often true when different peoples meet. Did my brother say what tribe he represented?

  —I die. O my hair falls out and my flesh rots and my bones are cracked by the hungry ta!a’an. He drops me behind him all around the forest and nothing will grow where his excrement from my marrow falls. As the years pass the forest dies from the poison of my remains. The soil washes into the sea and poisons the fish, and all die. O the embarrassment.

  —He didn’t say?

  —He did but said not to tell you.

  That was that. —Did he by some chance say he was interested in the small morsel of land I mentioned to you by courier long ago?

  —No, he was not interested in the land.

  —Can you tell me what he was interested in?

  —He was interested in buying the land.
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  Verbs. —May I ask a potentially embarrassing question?

  He exposed his arms. —We are businessmen.

  —What were the terms of his offer?

  —I die. I breathe in and breathe in and cannot exhale. I explode all over my friends. They forget my name and pretend it is dung. They wash off in the square and the well becomes polluted. All die. O the embarrassment.

  —He said not to tell me?

  —That’s right.

  —Did you agree to sell him the land?

  —That is a difficult question to answer.

  —Let me rephrase the question: is it possible that you might sell the land to my tribe?

  —It is possible, if you offer better terms. But only possible, in any case.

  —This is embarrassing. I, uh, die and, um, the last breath from my lungs is a terrible acid. It melts the seaward wall of the city and a hurricane comes and washes it away. All die. O the embarrassment.

  —You’re much better at that than he was.

  —Thank you. But may I ask you to amplify as to the possibility?

  —Certainly. Land is not a fish or an elevator. Land is something that keeps you from falling all the way down. It gives the sea a shore and makes the air stop. Do you understand?

  —So far. Please continue.

  —Land is time, but not in a mercantile sense. I can say “In return for the time it takes me to decide which one of you is the guilty party, you must give me such-and-so.” But how can I say “In return for the land I am standing on you must give me this-and-that”? Nobody can step off the time, you see, but I can step off the land, and then what is it? Does it even exist? In a mercantile sense? These questions and corollaries to them have been occupying some of our finest minds ever since your courier came long ago.

  —May I make a suggestion?

  —Please do. Anything might help.

  —Why not just sell it to the tribe that offers the most?