Authors: James Gunn
“But not necessarily of community with meat creatures,” Asha said.
“True,” Tordor said. “But its record in the galactic community is clean, and no Aldebarani has been accused of eating sapients. They have their own protein supplies.”
“What about the Centauran?” Riley asked with a slight nod at the birdlike alien.
“If we recruit Xi we may have difficulty with—”
But before Tordor could finish, the room began to dissolve around them.
* * *
“Damn it!” Riley said as his feet sank into the floor and the passenger quarters began to fade into the terrifying nonexistence of Jump space. First the walls and ceiling became transparent and disappeared and he stared into the awful emptiness of nothing. He reached for Asha. She was still solid, an anchor in a sea of antireality waves. The other aliens, though, were distorted into caricatures like drawings in a horror show. They seemed to be killing each other. He heard Tordor say something. “What?” he asked. It emerged as a giant interrogation mark before it fell and shattered on the floor, which suddenly had hardened, imprisoning his feet, and he could feel his outthrust arms imprisoned in walls that had suddenly pressed in upon him.
An exclamation mark materialized from the monster that Tordor had become. It soared toward the overhead where it broke into pieces like the question mark on the floor. And then it was over, as suddenly as it had begun, and Tordor said, “This should not have happened!”
Riley looked where Tordor pointed. The Centauran was on the floor, or, more accurately, the parts that had once been the birdlike alien were on the floor—its beaked head detached from its body and lying a meter or so away, and blue-ish blood, or whatever fluid served as blood for the Centauran, pumping from its severed neck like the carcass of a chicken Riley’s mother used to kill on Mars for special occasions.
Riley looked at Xi; the alien’s knife was sheathed. “Now what?” he said. The words hung somewhere between Asha and Tordor, addressed to neither and to both.
Both Asha and Tordor were staring at the overhead display. The bright line had jumped toward them, and Riley thought he could almost distinguish individual stars. He turned to look behind him. The other pilgrims were standing immobile, gazing at the display and the evidence glowing upon it, not at the beheaded Centauran.
As he looked a tentacle lashed out and struck another alien, staggering it. The action might have been an accident, but it prompted retaliation and then general mayhem. Tordor moved quickly for his bulk and mowed his way through the battling aliens, using his strength and weight like a battering ram. The others scattered before him, some of them falling like game pins, and then Tordor returned, helping the fallen ones upright and slapping down arms and hands and tentacles.
When he returned to their side, he seemed just as placid and unmoved by the incident as he had been before. “Now this,” he said, as if in answer to Riley’s earlier question. “The time for cooperation is even closer than we thought.”
Before they could answer, the hatch had opened again and the captain came through with his two armed guards. This time he was angry. “Now you’ve gone too far!” he shouted.
“And who is it that has gone too far?” Tordor asked.
“Look at that!” the captain said, pointing at the Centauran on the floor. “Now you’re killing each other, and those who aren’t killing each other are trying to do so.”
“Isn’t that our business?” Tordor asked.
“Well,” the captain said. “Well—”
“Not well,” Asha said, “but perhaps inevitable.”
“As the captain, I can’t accept limits on my authority aboard this ship. The result would be chaos and, ultimately, catastrophe for all.”
“You have accepted limits, Ham,” Riley said gently. “You have a passenger list of alpha beings, and they will not be ruled. You will have to let us solve our own problems and punish our own crimes, and we won’t let anybody know.”
“We can’t have unannounced Jumps, either,” Tordor said. “That is against the galactic code.”
“The comm must have malfunctioned,” the captain said. “The important thing is that the Jump was made without incident.”
“Which means that we can go forward,” Asha said, “but we go back at our peril.”
“And yet we must go back.”
“Unless we find the Transcendental Machine,” Asha said, “and that will solve all our problems.”
“In what way?” the captain said. “I don’t recall anything about intergalactic travel.”
“Consult your pedia, Captain,” Asha said. “That’s part of the legend. But I was being ironic.”
“Irony is wasted on moments like this,” the captain said. “Ah,” he protested, “I can’t do anything with you. Clean up that mess!” He pointed out the body on the deck. “And clean up your own situation here, or by the transcendental itself, I’ll clean it up for you.”
He turned angrily toward the hatch.
“Calmly, Ham,” Riley said. “Calmly.”
The captain moved more slowly and deliberately toward the hatch and closed it gently behind him.
“Now what?” Riley repeated.
“Now we must put into effect the mutual defense group about which we spoke before all this happened,” Tordor said. “But first we must take care of this—” He indicated with his short trunk the body of the Centauran on the deck. Then he turned toward 4107. “Why?” he asked.
The flower child said something in the thin whispering of its species. Riley’s pedia did not attempt a translation.
“Ah,” Tordor said. He turned toward Riley and Asha. “It wants to tell us its story.”
“The flower child killed the Centauran?” Riley said.
“No other creature could have done it,” Tordor said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
4107’s Story
4107 said (translated by Tordor):
We are called the People, just as species throughout the galaxy call themselves the People. Whatever language we use—the movement of air through passages that restrict its flow in various distinguishable ways, the rubbing of mandibles, the gestures of tentacles, the release of pheromones, or, in our case, the disturbance of air by the movement of fronds—the translation is always the same. We are the People.
Our world is called Earth, as every world is called Earth in its own language. You might call it Flora, because we were a flower people, and for uncounted generations we lived our simple lives of seedlings springing from the soil, growing into maturity and sprouting flowers, enjoying fertilization, dropping our petals and then our seeds upon the soil, and depositing our decaying bodies to nourish the next generation. The generations were uncounted because every day was the same, and every year: we were born, we lived, we reproduced, and we died. Flora was a big world, drawn by its massive gravity into great plains and placid seas, and we thrived in peace and plenty amid mindless warmth and fertile soil. That is the time the People look back upon as paradise before we were expelled.
True, Flora had grazers, herbivores who lived among us and nourished themselves with our vegetable plenty, and predators who prevented the herbivores from destroying themselves by overgrazing and overpopulation, but the People responded with one of the great breakthroughs of Floran evolution: we made ourselves unpleasant fodder, and when the grazers evolved in response, we developed poisons. The grazers died off, and then the predators, and only weeds remained as competitors. We developed herbicides, and then we were truly supreme and supremely content in our mindless vegetable way. The process took many long cycles, but finally Flora was ours and we were Flora.
Then a passing astronomical body came into our ideal existence like divine punishment for our hubris, showering Flora with devastating radiation that nearly destroyed all life on the planet including the People, stirring Flora’s inner fires and releasing continents from their loving embrace. The paradise that Flora had been became the hell that Flora was: eruptions poisoned the air and lava flows covered the plains; the continents crashed together and pushed upward great mountain ranges. The people perished.
Centuries passed and long-buried seeds poked their ways through cracking lava. Among them was a single great Floran, now known as One. Before One, Florans had no awareness of separate existence. All contemporary Florans trace their origin from One. Through a process instigated by the destruction caused by the invading astronomical body, perhaps, or more likely by the radiation that showered the planet from the passing cosmic missile or was released with magma from Flora’s long-sheltered interior, One developed the ability to pull its roots from the soil, an ability it passed along to its descendants. With maneuverable roots, this great Floran no longer had to trust the uncertain breeze to distribute its seeds to suitable soils; it, and its descendants, moved meter by meter and year by year to sheltered valleys where Florans could deposit their seeds in soil prepared to receive them, with more than a hope that chance would allow them to grow and flower.
Each generation took as its designation an ascending number. I am the forty-one hundred and seventh generation since the great One. All the preceding generations have changed, generation by generation, to gain movement, intelligence, and understanding of the world that nurtured and then tried to destroy them, and the uncaring universe that destroys as blindly as it nurtures.
How can I describe the impact of intelligence? Every species represented here has experienced it, but none remembers. Florans remember. The history of our species is recorded in the seeds of their consciousness. At first it was only the memory of process, the irresistible bursting from the seed pod, the passionate thrusting upward toward the sun and downward toward moisture and food, the satisfying flow of nutrients through capillaries and their cellular transformation into substance, the delightful flowering, the ecstatic fertilizing, and the determined growth of seeds into which all past and future was poured, and the fading sere time that ends in death. But then awareness of environment entered, and from that all else flowed.
We learned that the universe was more than the sun, the soil, and water. The universe held many suns, the Earth held many soils, and the rivers, the lakes, and the seas held many waters, and some of these were nurturing and some were not. We learned that we could manipulate our environment, controlling the fertility of the soil and the rain that fell upon it, and then that we could manipulate ourselves, controlling the patterns of biological inheritance we passed along to our seeds. And we learned to limit our reproduction so as not to exhaust our resources and thus, having postponed our flowering and our going to seed, learned that we could postpone the dying that went with it.
Longevity beyond the season meant an acceleration of the learning process. We learned to develop special breeds, some for greater intelligence to provide more understanding of the universe, some for a new ability you call vision to perceive the world and the universe in new ways, some for manipulative skills to make us independent of our environment, and some for memory to store the wisdom gathered by the others. And finally we learned the terrible truth—that the passing cosmic body that had expelled us from paradise was not some chance interstellar visitor, not some cosmic joke by the cosmic jokester, but a relativistic missile flung across our path by uncaring aliens, envious of our world and eager to reap the benefits of a heavy planet and the mineral wealth that it might vomit from its depths.
We learned all this when the Alpha Centaurans landed in their sterile metal ships.
* * *
The shining vessels from a world far from Flora descended upon our world, glowing from their passage through an atmosphere thicker than any Centaurans had known but thinner for the passage of the invading missile many thousands of cycles before. They glowed with heat, these vessels, and slowly cooled before the Centaurans emerged like meat asserting its natural dominance over the vegetable world. They wasted no thought or pity on the Florans they had crushed or the paradise they had destroyed. Why should they? They were the gods of the universe.
So we also felt, at first. They had come from the sky like gods, and they came in machines unlike anything ever to touch the soil of Flora, or even imagined among those of us who dreamed of life beyond our Flora-bound reality. The vessels destroyed billions in their descents, and billions more as they sent machines to clear the plains, scything us down, trampling us beneath their treads, plowing us under, mindless of our screams and efforts to communicate, to worship their magnificence in our vegetable way. They put alien seeds in our sacred soil, dull, unresponsive cousins from other worlds. We tried to talk to them but they had nothing but primitive reactions to soil and sun; all awareness had been bred from them, if it ever existed. The Centaurans thought of us, if they thought of us at all, as alien vegetation to be adapted to their purposes or, if that was unsuccessful, eliminated. Finally we despaired and recalled old biological processes. Our herbicides almost succeeded in eliminating the alien vegetation, but the Centaurans responded with even greater destruction, clearing even the few Floran stragglers from their territories, protecting their seedlings with energy walls and developing herbicides of their own.
Finally we realized the terrible truth: they were not gods; they were invaders, and they would destroy the People if we did not find an effective way to resist. At first we developed sharp leaves stiffened with lignite to kill them when they came among us. You have seen them in action. They are dangerous even to ourselves in a gusty wind. But the Centaurans seldom came into the territories that yet were ours; they preferred to send their machines, against whose metallic hides our weapons slid harmlessly aside. So we developed missiles, poisoned darts that could be expelled by an explosion of stored gas. The Floran that launched such a missile died in the act, but went willingly, for we are all part of the whole. And yet that too failed when our enemies kept us at a distance. We could not use the poison that our ancestors developed to kill the herbivores, because the Centaurans did not eat us, being properly wary of alien evolution. We grew machines like theirs, only with rigid skins of vegetable matter, but they crumpled against the metal of our enemies.