Earthrise

by Craig Delancey

  Bria stretched, her twelve claws flexing wide over her head. “Yes,” she said. “You honor me, chief of the Yanomamo, great fierce people.”

  The women at the edge of the circle shouted in joy. The men dispersed, seeking their spears. Bria followed the Chief to the edge of the village, where a footpath led into the bush, a single narrow path of brown leading a green tunnel into darkness. In a moment Tarkos and Yeats were nearly alone on the platform. They watched as Bria followed the Chief into the forest, a crowd of men following. In seconds they were lost in shadow.

  “Oh!” Yeats shouted in surprise and fright.

  Tarkos turned. On the packed Earth before Yeats stood a coral pink being, as tall as one of the Yanomamo, but wider than any man. Radially symmetric, its three short legs kneaded the ground, as if it were uncertain of its footing. Its trunk body had three facets, each with a pale eye near the top, above a round toothy orifice. The Yanomamo adults seemed indifferent to its sudden appearance, although a group of small children seemed torn between staring at this alien or following after Bria as she disappeared into the darkening forest.

  A whistling came from the three mouths, forming strange broken harmonics that melded and clashed. Then from some hidden place on the organism, a translation program uttered, in very clear Galactic, “Greetings to you, unknown human and unknown human of the Harmonizer Corp.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Yeats said. She took a step back.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” Tarkos told her in English. “It’s a Thrumpit. The Thrumpit we heard of, no doubt.”

  He’d only seen a few, out in the Galaxy. They were a respected race, long lived and very unusual. There had been human scientists who before first contact had claimed that intelligence would require bilaterally symmetric bipedal organisms, and so such beings as the Thrumpit were deemed impossible. These theories were refuted, but almost confirmed in the breach: the Thrumpit were the only known land-walking radially symmetric intelligent beings.

  The Thrumpit whistled loudly. Then it made a coughing noise, and suddenly from all its mouths chorused three voices speaking clear Oxford English. “Ah! You speak English! This is such a delight that Wicklepick must ask that you excuse Wicklepick, please, and allow these beings to impose upon you, its newest acquaintances, with a request that you might be so kind as to permit Wicklepick to speak with you in your most noble tongue, English—hybrid beauty of Anglo-Saxon, French, Latin, High German, and Norse—so that our intercourse might both grace Wicklepick—undeserving humble beings that Wicklepick confesses to be—with beneficent edification via discourse with a native speaker, and which might also perhaps promote—if only in some small way, I humbly grant—the virtues of our mutual understanding and fellowship—a fellowship that reaches across species, across our worldly spheres, and appeals to our shared and—dare Wicklepick say it?—divine common personhood as sentient, self-aware and—as your great human philosopher Immanuel Kant so aptly described it—free and self-determining beings?”

  Tarkos stared at the huge starfish, mouth open, struggling to parse what he could remember of the endless sentence. Finally he thought he understood what the Thrumpit had said. Thrumpits, he knew, were famous for their strange sense of self. Their three-lobed brains could split functions, and each lobe could operate independently if needed. This seemed to explain their dislike for using the first person pronoun. It was also said they were linguistic geniuses, acquiring languages with trivial ease, and then often bending grammar till it nearly broke. The last Thrumpit Tarkos had met had spoken Galactic as such a Joycean mishmash that Tarkos understood nearly nothing it said. This Thrumpit, at least, used existing words.

  Tarkos hesitated. He really had to set up scanning equipment. But before he could produce any answer, Dr. Yeats burst out with, “Please. Please do speak English. I’m Dr. Yeats. I’m a bioinformaticist. This is Amir Tarkos. He’s a Predator.”

  “What a delight it is for Wicklepick to meet two such interesting instances of your extraordinary race, and I do hope that you forgive Wicklepick for having adopted a neologism of an English appellation in order to facilitate gentle communication between us as we endeavor to acquaint ourselves with each other, an appellation none other than Dr. Wicklepick—or, if you prefer and would indulge Wicklepick’s somewhat intrusive informality, in part expressed through Wicklepick’s shunning of titles both congenital and occupational, please favor Wicklepick by addressing Wicklepick simply as ‘Wicklepick’—which I hope you understand does not mean that Wicklepick does not intend you to shed your formal and earned and richly deserved titles of Doctor and Harmonizer.”

  Yeats took several steps in place, offered her hand and then withdrew it in uncertainty about Wicklepick’s appendages, and finally settled for saying, “Call me Yeats. Everyone does.”

  “Tarkos,” Tarkos echoed, unenthusiastically. “Everyone does.”

  “Excellent! Allow, dear Yeats and Tarkos, that Wicklepick should tell you of Wicklepick’s research here, as it might be most agreeable to you not to be expected to reveal yourselves to a stranger, introductions notwithstanding, but rather have that stranger revealed to you as....”

  Tarkos snuck a glance at the darkening forest trail. The last of the following Yanomamo hunters had already disappeared down the path. For the first time in his life, Tarkos wished someone had taken him hunting.

  Damn that Sussurat, he thought. She always gets out of the boring situations.

  “.... which concerns mycological phenomena that are unique to known Galactic science, although in many ways parallel to....” the Thrumpit continued.

  “Uh, huh,” Tarkos muttered reflexively.

  It was going to be a long afternoon.

  CHAPTER 9

  “If I am not mistaken—but one must be so cautious, so wisely indecisive in...” the Thrumpit droned on. It lectured Tarkos still on the marvels of Amazon fungi, though nearly two hours had passed since their introduction. Tarkos had lost most of the first hour nodding while the creature talked on, but then it dawned on him that, with three independent brain lobes, the Thrumpit would surely not be insulted if he started doing his work. It would just assume he was dedicating some third or other fraction of his thought to menial tasks, the way a human would barely notice if another human scratched during a conversation.

  So Tarkos started setting up camp outside the ship. The Thrumpit followed him, talking the whole time. Periodically, he would say to the Thrumpit, when it seemed to end one of its interminable sentences, “Fascinating!” Dr. Yeats seemed to be following the Thrumpit’s explanation a bit more closely, and had even asked a few questions about gene sequencing, but she took to Tarkos’s lead as he unloaded packages from the ship, and followed his whispered instructions, while the Thrumpit followed along, talking talking talking, seemingly unconcerned and undaunted even if they both talked to each other.

  Tarkos bent down and set the tent pack on the grass. It turned green, matching the background color. He pulled the cord and it began to inflate, unfolding.

  Tarkos whispered to Yeats, “We should sleep outside. That way, we let Bria sleep in the ship and set the atmosphere for a mix more natural for her.”

  “Sure.” But then she frowned. “Together? You mean?”

  Tarkos flushed. “No. Sorry. The tent allows dividers. We can make it two rooms.” He should have said that at first. Yeats did not seem to like him, and he felt perhaps he deserved it. He’d been in combat for almost a year. He had grown distrustful, and she seemed to sense and resent his distrust of humanity. It had started during their dinner in New York. While Bria tore huge bites out of a leg of Parma ham, he had looked at Yeats, meeting her eyes and meaning to shrug by way of apology, but her piercing gaze had instead frozen him in place. She was watching him as he looked around the restaurant, judging his fellow humans, anxious to be sure no one acted in a way that offended Bria.

  Tarkos said now, quickly, “But I think there is a second tent. I can put up two tents.”

  “No. It’s b
ig enough,” she said, gesturing at the now-inflated tent.

  Tarkos nodded. He looked up. The sky turned yellow with the approaching sunset, and now the loud cries of birds filled the surrounding forest.

  The Thrumpit waved a tentacle. “.... and most remarkable, I’m confident you’ll agree, is the unusual frequency of convergent evolution in the chitinous membranes of widely diverse fungal species, which, when measured against comparable cases from widely dispersed galactic organisms and ecosystems, demonstrates a true rarity so worthy of study that Wicklepick finds itselves wholly embarrassed with the riches of good fortune visited upon this fortuitous research opportunity, which—”

  Tarkos bent down to pull at the tab on the door zipper. He had the tent half open when he realized suddenly that the Thrumpit, for the first time since they met, had fallen silent. In the middle of a sentence.

  “Tarkos,” Yeats whispered, her voice intense.

  Tarkos straightened. Before them, a few paces away, a human woman stood. She looked to be of middle age, not tall, but thin and lean. She wore torn rags for clothes. In fact, Tarkos realized with surprise, the rags were the remnants of a suit liner—the kind of single-piece that one wore under a spacesuit. She was barefoot, her mud-covered feet pressing down the tall grasses. Dried blood streaked her legs. But most striking, she had no hair, and her naked skull was split open. From the raw cavity rough surgical grafts of black machinery rose, like dark metal fingers from her brain.

  She looked at them with bloodshot brown eyes.

  “Hello?” Tarkos said. This, he realized, must be the mad woman of which the Yanomamo had spoken. He had not imagined something so shocking. The grafts in her skull were savagely crude and cruel. Someone, likely someone not from Earth—he hoped and prayed someone not from Earth—had done terrible things to this woman. “Are you.... Can we help you?” Unconsciously, just from the shock of the sight, his hand drifted to the pistol on his belt. “You look very hurt. Please. Can we help you? There are medical facilities available in my ship.”

  She looked at each of them, mouth open. To Tarkos it seemed she did not even breathe. Then she spoke English in a furious, loud rush. “It is here, I hear it, it is here, I hear it, it is here, I hear it....”

  And suddenly, instantly, the loud calls of all the birds fell silent. The monkeys bit back their howls. Silence rang through the forest surrounding them.

  The mutilated woman looked to the trees. “I’ve followed it across stars and listened to it across space through space it hurt me it hurts me and now I let it know I am near, now I call it I shriek at it because you are here and you will bind it break it make it talk make it pay make it give me back mine mine my lost little my lost mine my lost love my little my—”

  “Please,” Tarkos interrupted. “I’m Amir Tarkos. I’m a member of the Harmonizer Corp. These are Doctor Yeats and Doctors Wicklepick. You seem to need help. We can help and protect you. Would you come in the ship? We have a autodoc.”

  But the woman continued, uninterrupted, her desperate cry. It rose to a shout, then a scream: “It comes it comes it comes furious evil evolution commando wicked coming furious coming now prepare Harmonizer prepare for it prepare!”

  A crash sounded in the forest behind them. Tarkos turned. Something was running through the brush. The snapping of sticks grew closer. Whatever approached must be large and heavy: some of the cracking branches sounded massive. Tarkos drew his pistol, staring at the dark forest, holding his breath and waiting to see what came out into the field.

  “Get into the ship,” he told Yeats and Wicklepick. But both of them froze in shock. Wicklepick waved his tentacles. Yeats started, open mouthed.

  Tarkos called to his implants. He sent a message to his armor in the ship. It began to assemble itself so that it could walk to him. Then he called to Bria.

  Commander, are you near?

  Yes.

  The human woman is here, the one the Yanomamo spoke of. And something is coming through the—

  A black shape exploded out of the forest, smashing a small tree at the field’s edge as it bounded out onto the open grass. It moved furiously fast, leaving a mixed blur on his retina. Yeats shouted in disbelief. Wicklepick began to whine a new interminable sentence. The strange, mutilated human woman shrieked a high, thin note.

  And, worst of all, Tarkos saw, in a glimpse, what came after them.

  He recognized it. He knew its kind. He was one of only a few Galactic Citizens still alive who had seen one of these creatures.

  A thing of legend ran at them, a thing that literally filled a billion nightmares. Its kind haunted the dreams of every creature that could dream in this vast galaxy.

  Razor edged black limbs scythed towards him. The rhinoceros-sized monster of dark chitin and spear-like teeth and black shining eyes and lightning-fast scorpion legs that rushed across the grass was an—

  “Ulltrian!” Yeats shouted.

  Tarkos fired. The pistol’s tracer bullets streaked yellow lines through the air. His aim was true, but the exploding shells of the bullets snapped angrily a meter away from the Ulltrian, smashing into some kind of field, or perhaps intercepted by some kind of defensive weapon. The explosions rang out and echoed, crackling toward the horizon. The Ulltrian came on unabated.

  In seconds it was nearly upon them. Yeats and Wicklepick finally moved. They both dove down into the grass below the ship. Tarkos stood his ground, firing his weapon.

  The Ulltrian leapt, a hoard of dagger pointed black legs scratching at the air. It slammed into the earth by the tent. In a single motion one of its black legs threw down, tackled, and snatched up the mutilated woman.

  Then it was gone, running away, leaving tossed clods of dirt. The punctured tent deflated in its wake.

  Tarkos could not wait for his armor. It would have to follow him. He ran after the Ulltrian, shouting over his shoulder to Yeats and Wicklepick, “Get clear of the ship!”

  “What horror, what ghastly and blasted vision is this that....” the Thrumpit shouted through all its mouths.

  Tarkos switched over to radio. The Thrumpit was talking on radio too, clogging up the airwaves, “...that shatters my three minds into three voices vying in a chaotic cacophony of fear, each crying that no, surely this uncertain appearance, which were my senses to be credited would auger ill not only for our afternoon picnicking....”

  Tarkos ran after the flashing black form, firing. Each bullet exploded an arm’s length behind the Ulltrian. Its defenses did not flag as it rampaged straight for the Yanomamo village. The mutilated human woman, held close to its body with a single sharply bent leg, shrieked a high, furious note.

  “Bria, you getting this?” Tarkos shouted, his implants radioing his words.

  “Yes,” the Commander called. “Hear you and Thrumpit, and see from ship.”

  The Thrumpit’s transmission continued unabated: “...but augurs terrible ill also for this glorious planet, its promising civilization, and even our vast Galactic Order—for this organism is naught less than a representative instance of that most dreaded—and, as the universal will supposed, long extinct —species, the uncompromisingly warlike terrors of the....”

  The scorpion form of the Ulltrian made it to the huts of the village. Tarkos’s armor caught up with him, running at his side, a hollow human form. But he could not stop to put it on now. He kept up his furious run.

  Then, out of the black forest burst Bria. She ran at her fastest pace, a thing that Tarkos had seen only a few times before. She ran straight for the Ulltrian. Involuntarily, Tarkos called out to her, “No!” It would be madness to attack the Ulltrian in her bare flesh. But he watched as the Ulltrian tossed something aside—the human woman, he realized, thrown like a doll across the tall grass. She rolled and tumbled violently, bouncing high into the air, limbs flailing. The Ulltrian turned to face Bria’s onrush, rearing its front legs in threat.

  “Yeats, can you check on her?” Tarkos radioed, hoping that the doctor had her implants tuned to re
ceive him. “On the woman? She’s down. Probably hurt bad.”

  Then Bria slammed into the Ulltrian. The Ulltrian was two times her size, a black scorpion with moire eyes. The Sussurat did not hesitate. Claws raised, head down so that she could drive forward with her shoulders, she collided with the black mass. They tumbled over in a rolling ball of fur and chitin, claws and palps, and slammed into one of the huts, exploding through the wall.

  If ever he were to put on his armor, Tarkos realized, now was the time. He skidded to a stop on the grass. He dropped his pistol. The armor circled around, running to come behind. He held out his arms. “Come on come on come on,” he hissed. He could hear the Thrumpit still talking, still working its way through a single sentence — “…where all the dark corners of space, star studded, no horror hides greater than this that....”

  Yeats ran past him, toward the woman in the grass.

  His armor cracked open as it walked up close behind him. He stepped back into it. As the helmet closed down over his face, the hut that Bria and the Ulltrian had fallen into now keeled to one side, and began to collapse, the photovoltaic panels on its roof collapsing inward towards them.

  The Ulltrian exploded out of the wreckage. Tarkos leapt. In two power-assisted bounds he landed beside the Ulltrian. Behind it was a stand of trees and then the river: Tarkos had a clean shot. He raised his arm and fired a laser into the blur of the Ulltrian’s six legs. It tumbled. In its wake, a pincer-tipped foot segment lay severed in the packed earth of the path, bleeding red and yellow bloods. All around them, Yanamamo women and children shouted, running away. The Ulltrian turned, a tight spider-like mass, and faced Tarkos, eyes above its mouth fixing him.

  “Surrender!” he called in Galactic. He raised his arm and the armor parted, revealing a small missile. He wouldn’t use it here, but he meant to make a point. The anti-matter tipped missile could destroy a small starship. If the Ulltrian had decent sensors it might understand the threat.