“Yes, in a way,” Rogers offered from his dugout. “And then again, no.”
“What?” I beat the Lieutenant to it, this time.
BLAMMM!!
The ship shook from side to side as if hungry predators were tearing at her substance. “You guys sure have short attention-spans,” he continued, “I meant, yes, you’re the only space-traversing folks we’ve run into so far, but, looking at it another way, you’re not, exactly.”
“How informative,” the Lieutenant sneered. I paid attention to the praxeologist, rather than our impending doom. Hideous ripping-noises made it difficult. “What, in the name of everything authorized, do you mean?”
“Rog is a social scientist,” offered Williamson across the room. He should have been preoccupied, unable to hear our conversation. “It doesn’t have to mean anything!” Blinding light flared again. Another alien vanished in swarming wreckage. “Gotcha, you hyperthyroid ant-grunt!”
There was a short lull, as if between strokes of heat-lightning: “Owen’s referring to his pet Gunjj,” Couper sighed, “Nobody believes a word of it, understand, but—Bandits, Ev, two o’clock low!” The ship dipped, swerved; light again flared blindingly. “But he still burdens defenseless strangers with the story on occasion.” A low shudder ran through the fabric of Little Tom, threatening to shake my internal organs from their fastenings. Every centimeter of the vessel groaned—a pair of bristly-jointed alien limbs lashed briefly across the view-area.
Rogers said, “I actually meant these things—ouch! Take it easy, Ev, I’ve got a tender stomach!” For a moment, we lost our orientation. It seemed as if we were hanging from the floor, looking down at the ceiling.
“Not with your taste in clothing,” the pilot replied.
This was insane: five-sided bantering while fending off a deadly enemy. At least Lucille was keeping silent. “What are these things?” the Lieutenant contributed, “Or is that another of your precious secrets?”
“Not at all, Lieutenant,” Rogers told him. “They’re virus.”
“What?”
“As near as we can tell,” the praxeologist said, “they evolved in deep space, out of huge clouds of formaldehyde and interstellar—oh, boy!”
Miraculously retaining my stomach contents again, through yet another violent loop, I gulped bile. “Why do you call them—‘gunge’?”
The praxeologist wrinkled what I could see of his face, then tried to shake his head. Even at this angle, I could see the sweat beading on his somewhat greenish features. “We don’t call them ... I mean, these aren’t the Gunjj.” He spelled it out. “They’re an intelligent species.”
“Maidez, maidez!” the communicator crackled at the limit of intelligibility. Outside, a vessel struggled with six gigantic organisms worrying her like desert scavengers. “Tom Swift Maru to anybody listening! They’ve penetrated my hull! It’s filling up with—Oh, yech! I’ve set autodestruct. We’re bailing out. Stand by on pickup!”
Lucille spoke: “Gotcha, TSM, relaying. We’ll—Great spirit of Osceola!” Tom Swift Maru exploded in a blinding ball of flame. “At least they took six of the bastards with them!” Lucille said grimly. Our ship swerved suddenly, its batteries snarled, another super-virus vanished.
More insanity: “The truth is, Whitey, until recently, we—the Confederacy, that is—never had full contact with another sapient species—nobody counts the Gunjj. We call them that because, when we first began to explore, we kept running across their ‘calling-card’. Given a nice, clean, uninhabited planet, oxygen and greenery, sooner or later we’d find, carved into a tree, or painted on a rock, a characteristic inscription.” Rogers lifted an arm above the floor like some weird insect buried in the sand, used a rubber-coated finger to trace a sign in the carpet; the pile obligingly turned contrasting blue.
“Mind you, we never found it on any occupied planet. Just what it indicated, no one had the slightest idea. Sometimes the symbol appears ancient, weathered, only about half-legible. Others are fresh, as if the grafittist just left minutes ago. It’s associated with artifacts, empty plastic containers, other kinds of refuse, occasionally a broken tool.”
Groaning loudly again, the little ship wheeled, blasting, pivoting once more for another shot. The hull clanged! harshly. I wondered how Rogers could go on with this lecture of his so calmly, having watched a sister ship destroyed with her entire complement aboard. Then I saw his eyes roll at the noise. This was his way of keeping his nerve.
I listened for the same reason.
“Some of the inscriptions were tiny; they could hardly be read. Others, gouged across entire continents, were naked-eye visible from orbit. Each instance was exactly like this, cursive stylized emblems appearing to spell out the word ‘Gunjj’. Of course it had to mean something else in an alien language. Except for showing up on planet after planet, I suppose it might have implied no more intelligence than the dried-up slime-track of a snail—you do know what a snail is?”
There was a screeching, tearing noise. A section of the viewing dome went black. I said nothing about snails. The praxeologist would not have heard me anyway. The poor fellow’s voice rose half an octave, increased its pace by fifty words a minute, but went on. “It was as scientifically disreputable a mystery as the Loch Ness monster or the supposedly lost planet Lucifer. It might have gone on the same way, unsolved, if it hadn’t been for a near-disastrous adolescent practical joke.
“An individual Gunjj resembles a bunch of asparagus—no asparagus on Vespucci? All right, a bundle of semi-flexible tubes, bound in the middle by a bit of string. Only they’re twelve feet tall, a sickly pale gray, and the string supports a belt pouch for personal effects and weapons. They don’t stand their full double man-height, but droop the tops of their stalks over, like the tentacles on a sea-anemone—which I can see that you don’t know anything about, either.”
The missing viewscreen sector flickered fitfully to life again. It did not present a pretty picture. The enemy virus were much reduced in number, but so were Confederate ships. The ruins of a dozen littered the void, some with tiny figures managing to escape from them, some without. I looked at the Lieutenant. Either he was more courageous than I had believed, choosing to catch up on his sack-time, or he had fainted.
“There are a number of theories,” Rogers continued, cultivatedly oblivious to the awful scene before us, “concerning extraconfederate life-forms...” He seemed to lose his place for a moment—perhaps due to a catastrophic explosion on the rim of the mother-ship. Then he went on. “Some see evolution as convergent, every intelligent species we find should resemble humans, simians, or cetaceans, because they’ll inevitably occupy similar niches in the ecologies of their respective planets ... ”
Again Rogers tapered off. For a terrible moment I was afraid that he had fainted, too. I could not bear the thought of his joining the Lieutenant in peace, leaving me alone to face this nightmare. “Yes, praxeologist,” I imitated Sermander’s peremptory tone. “The opposing theory?”
“—Er, the other position ... holds that evolution is never that convergent, not enough to make up for an isolated beginning, billions of years of independent development, on an entirely different planet. By this reasoning, which has so far been confirmed by the few glimpses we’ve had, the lowliest Terran slime-mold colony is a vastly-closer relative to us than any outsystem organism, and resembles us more nearly.”
Terran? So I was a Terran, if Rogers had actually meant to include me in his “us”. I thought about the obviously alien organisms native to Vespucci. No mistaking them for anything our ancestors had brought along.
From Terra, it would appear.
“Most praxeologists will agree that intelligence can’t differ very much, from one species to another. The parameters for its existence are just too narrow. Consequently, we’ll be able to play chess, swap horses, even tell dirty jokes, in any civilization we ever encounter. Our semi-contact with the Gunjj seems to confirm both theories—of physical difference and psy
chological similarity. They look weird, but they’re no more alien in outlook than, say, the Japanese seem to North Americans. Lost you again, didn’t I? But it’s true. I know, I was there.”
“It was a dark and stormy night ... ” Williamson interrupted in a melodramatic voice. He was interrupted himself, when another small squadron of giant virus zoomed toward Little Tom, requiring rapid action. The attack appeared to be slacking off, but it was not over yet.
Rogers snorted: “Some people just don’t appreciate a good story when they hear one. It was aboard the old Tom Smothers Maru, a small scout, not unlike this one. The pilot was Koko Featherstone-Haugh, before she ascended to ... call it a higher plane of existence, and I was fresh out of school, myself. We were exploring the masked region between a pair of nebulae, not looking for anything in particular except a potential profit, when the long-distance rangefinders began squawking.
“Heavy metal ahead ... ”
-2-
Captain Koko Featherstone-Haugh (Rogers pronounced it “Fanshaw”) nodded, putting the helm hard over. “Not one of ours—see what magnification the traffic will bear, will you, Rog?” Koko was an imposing individual, nearly two meters tall, almost as wide, heavily muscled. Not human. She was in charge. For a young man with the ink still wet on his diploma—even wetter on his contract—it was enough.
He obliged. In the overhead viewscreen, an apparently empty sector of space ahead of them broadened suddenly, the dark spaces from star to star widening, more stars becoming visible between. To each side, vast clouds of gas blanked out the stars, leaving only impenetrable blackness.
A tiny point of light appeared, swelled into a pair of closely-associated points. Little more was visible; trailers of gas limited visibility. “Captain, Ma’am, any more and we’ll be looking at microbes clinging to the roof, instead of objects, er ... fifteen light-minutes away.”
Abruptly, the floor dilated around the odd, rising figure of a creature that was neither simian nor human. It stood—on all fours—approximately half a meter high at the shoulder. It was perhaps a meter in length. It sported a pair of sharply-pointed ears, a matching nose, a thickly-bushed tail. It answered to the name “G. Howell Nahuatl”.
Rather articulately.
“I say, fellow beings, why have my ablutions been interrupted? Aren’t you as distressed as I am that I actually found a flea upon my person after our last planetside outing?” The animal sat down on its haunches, began scratching at one of its prominent ears with a hind foot.
“It wasn’t a flea, Howell” answered Koko, “but some other form of bugoid—more like an isopod, I thought, and when it got a taste of your iron-based blood, it died a horrible death. Look what we’ve got here.”
Howell’s eyes were not particularly good, yet he had a quick, analytical intelligence his companions valued. “Could it be, at long last?”
Rogers nodded vigorously. “One for the books—a genuine alien spaceship.”
“Or just as likely, a pair of rogue asteroids, fused together,” replied Koko. Her simian heart was beating rapidly, hoping, hoping. But, after all, she was the captain—if only of a tiny scouting vessel.
“Whatever it is, it’s dead in the water,” Rogers observed. “No signs of powerplant emissions, life-support operations. With our luck, it’s been here for half a billion years, and everyone aboard is a mummy.”
“No jokes about motherhood, you two!” Koko warned, “A starship built by another sapient species. Mummies or not, it would still be fascinating.”
“For everybody but the mummies,” Howell replied blandly.
“Well, enough consultation. We’re never going to find out this way.” Koko took a determined hitch in her pistol belt. “We’re going in, gentlebeings. You two want to settle into the floor, just in case?”
“I’m going to meet my first alien civilization stuck up to my armpits in broadloom? You must be kidding.” Rogers readjusted his smartsuit to what he considered its cheeriest configuration. “That’s better!”
Even the colorblind coyote shuddered.
Nevertheless they approached the object with a degree of caution. Soon it became unmistakable. It was an artifact, two spheres fused together, their hull plates, their riveted seams plainly visible. There seemed to be no drive-tubes, no masts or shackles for photonic or tachyonic sails, no broad surfaces for the generation of propulsive particles of either kind, such as their own little ship employed. In short, the mysterious vessel must be powered in some manner completely unfamiliar to the Confederacy or the crew of the Tom Smothers Maru. Portholes followed a peculiarly skewed line about the equator of each globe.
There was light showing in them.
Koko halted her command a thousand kilometers away. A thin mist from the surrounding nebula concealed nothing, but it lent an eerie quality to the scene. At her order, Tom Smothers Maru began sending every customary form of energy ever used for communications in known space.
“Here it comes!” cried Rogers. He pointed to the bright image of the alien ship on the screen. Overlaying the picture—it was hard, sometimes, remembering that one was seeing what the computers were seeing—was a brilliant reddish aura, pulsing, dancing, pulsing, dancing.
“What I should like to know,” said the coyote, “is how we’re expected to make sense of this without any referents. And don’t give me any of that nonsense about counting up to ten—how do you ask for flashlight batteries, first aid kits, or frostberry sodas with mere numbers?”
Half an hour later, Howell’s question had been answered. The alien vessel repeatedly communicated: “529, 529, 279,841 ... 529, 529, 279,841 ... 529, 529, 279,841 ... ” Noticing that the third number was the square of the first two, it occurred to Koko this might mean they intended sending a picture, five hundred twenty-nine pixels high, by the same number wide. “A good thing,” she muttered to herself, “they don’t have triangular telecom screens—I’d never have figured it out!”
The Gunjj turned out to be harmless—as harmless as intelligent life ever gets. They, too had been worried—more so than the crew of Tom Smothers Maru, since it developed that they were marooned in what they considered the middle of nowhere. None of this became clear very quickly. Having pictures helped. So did actually traveling over to the alien ship for more direct communications. Slowly, a context was built up in which understanding, cybernetically assisted, became possible.
Becalmed might have been a better word than marooned. The best translation of their ship’s name would have been the Disgruntled. She was nominally a warship, long since decommissioned, presently being used as a training vessel for several hundred young Gunjj on the equivalent of a midshipman cruise, in the middle of their educational period.
The Gunjj breathed an oxygen-nitrogen about the same ratio as Terrans. It was fairly easy to tell the relative ages of Gunjj: when they were “born”, they were a single stalk or strand, fully as tall as their elders. In time, the stalk split—although not altogether away from the individual’s body—resplitting again until the adult, in its prime, resembled the collection of vegetables Rogers had referred to.
It was at this point that reproduction began occurring. The single stalks would complete their development, then separate from the parent to begin the life cycle all over again. The diameter of the original being began to shrink. In their old age, Gunjj adults resembled Gunjj babies, except for differences in color or texture, minor, cosmetic, which were not immediately apparent to Earthians. Then again, the Gunjj probably could not tell a human teenager from an octogenerian, either.
The practical joke?
Midshipmen will be midshipmen. The Gunjj used a peculiar system to “drive” starships faster than light: the mathematical/metaphysical principle of non-simultaneity. Over interstellar distances (in theory, over any distances at all) it is considered nonsense to speak of two events happening at the same time, without a way to synchronize their time-scales.