Phylogenesis

by Alan Dean Foster

  Consciousness and sight fading in tandem, he looked up to see a pair of homicidally alert eyes staring down at him. Then the piece of sky that framed the eyes shifted and he was able to discern the smooth outline of the skull, clad in camouflage suiting that was struggling to simulate a cloud. A second pair of eyes hovered nearby, glaring at him from behind a fluid mask of falsified brush. Words passed between the two figures. No linguist, Wor understood none of what they were saying in their clipped, sharp tones. He kept trying to reach his rifle with his foothand alone.

  “What do we do now?” the smaller of the two assassins wondered aloud. “Take it in?”

  “Of what use is a corpse?” Removing her foot from the thranx’s crushed truhand, the scout nudged the gaping, bleeding abdominal wound with the tip of her weapon. The helpless researcher cried out softly beneath her. “The shot was a lethal one.” Moving the muzzle forward, she placed it against the side of the blue-green, valentine-shaped head. Her expression did not change as she pulled the trigger. The skull jerked once, twin antennae twitched violently, and then the body lay still. As the two scouts deliberated how best to proceed, the bands of red and gold that shone from the compound eyes of their victim gradually began to take on the blank brown tint of lifelessness.

  The scouts were stolid but apprehensive when they were called before the tripartite board of inquiry. Following the conclusion of the usual terse formalities, questions were put to the female pair by their superiors, to which answers were unhesitatingly given.

  “We felt we had no choice,” the senior scout explained yet again. “The thranx was about to depart.”

  “We had to act,” added her comrade by way of support.

  The senior officer present scratched at an itch behind his head. His neck scales were dulled with age, and he was long overdue to shed and replace his skin. But his eyes were still bright, his mind sharp.

  “You did the only thing you could.” He emphasized his conclusion with a gesture indicative of second-degree conviction. “If the field researcher had returned to his settlement with the information he had gathered, our solitude would immediately have been compromised. That revelation must be prevented until our presence here is militarily secure.”

  “Then we were correct in our assumptions about his activities?” the senior scout inquired.

  A junior officer gesticulated assent. “The information contained in the alien field instrumentation you recovered was extracted. It was substantially as damaging as you feared.”

  “The situation is to be regretted,” added the third presiding officer, “but had you not acted as you did it would be much worse. That was quick thinking of you to place the body in the aircar, program it to retrace its course, and self-destruct after it had traveled a specified distance.” He looked at his colleagues. “With luck, the locals will make the assumption that their researcher died as the result of a mechanical failure on the part of his equipment.”

  The senior officer gestured affirmatively. “These thranx are simple settlers. They are not sophisticated visitors from Hivehom. Our report will reflect these considerations.” Slitted eyes met those of the two scouts who continued to stand stiffly at attention, their tails held motionless and straight out behind them. “It is fortunate you were in a position to effect this nullification. Appropriate commendations will be forthcoming.”

  The two scouts, who had entered the inquiry desiring simply to avoid condemnation for having precipitated the fatal confrontation, were silently overjoyed.

  The hopes of their superiors, however, and of their superiors’ superiors, were not to be fulfilled. Contrary to their overly sanguine predictions, the local thranx proved not to be as unresponsive as would have been wished. Puzzled by the circumstances in which the competent, well-liked hydrologist had perished, a pair of auditors was sent out from Paszex with orders to retrace the path of the deceased. When they failed to return, a larger search party was empowered. Following its equally inexplicable disappearance, the settlers requested and not long thereafter received an official commission of inquiry from the long-established northern government.

  Covering the same conspicuously murderous ground as the thranx who had gone before them, they rediscovered what the by now long-demised Worvendapur had threatened to expose. In the ensuing violent confrontation, most of the heavily armed force was wiped out. But this time, the AAnn could not kill them all. Their retreat and flight covered by their rapidly falling comrades, a small contingent of thranx succeeded in reaching the settlement to report not only what they had found, but what had taken place subsequent to their discovery.

  With serious escalation now appearing to be the only choice left to them, the AAnn proceeded to track the survivors in hopes of taking them out before they could file a formal report with the authorities in the northern hemisphere. Though the AAnn moved quickly, efficiently, and in strength, the thranx managed to hold Paszex and slip revelation of their situation past their assailants’ attempts to impose a communications blackout on the settlement. At the same time, the AAnn noble in command was compelled to request that his position be bolstered by reinforcements from offworld.

  Paszex was nearly taken by the time the first military transport arrived from the north. Startled by the strength of the attacking AAnn, the relieving thranx promptly called for reinforcements of their own. Analysis of sounding data revealed the presence of not merely an outpost, but an entire complex of AAnn settlements located beneath the innocent surface of the extensive lake. Excavating, quarrying, building, the AAnn had made a comprehensive and expensive effort to establish a permanent presence on Willow-Wane before the thranx became aware of their intent. The subsurface lines the late, lamented Worvendapur had detected and recorded on his instrumentation had been tunnels, not geologic faults.

  Eventually, the AAnn were driven out of and away from Paszex. But their underground installation proved too extensive and well fortified to be taken. Diplomatic, if not military, attrition led to the AAnn being granted a portion of their claim to Willow-Wane, allowing them to maintain and expand the settlement in an area not seriously coveted by the thranx but forbidding them to establish any others. This compact was wildly unpopular on Willow-Wane itself, but larger factors were at work. Better to concede the existence of a single settlement, however far-ranging and illegal, than to risk war over a world already extensively settled and developed.

  So the intruding AAnn were tolerated, the least of their specious claims accepted. Such are the workings of broad-scale diplomacy, in which assorted small murders are ingenuously subsumed into what professional diplomats euphemistically refer to as the “overall picture.” In its inert and hypocritical shadow, the pain of those who have lost friends and relations is conveniently overlooked.

  Revenge was not a prominent passion among the thranx, but there were more than a few feelings of loss and betrayal among the survivors of Paszex. Among these were what remained of the family Ven. Comprising a sizable portion of the settlement’s population, they had nearly been wiped out in the first assault. The survivors struggled to carry on the family name, but ever thereafter not many were to be found who could boast of the patronymic Ven among the hive Da and the clan Pur. Acutely conscious of their loss and their responsibility to keep the family line from dying out, these few became more insular than was normal among their kind. Their offspring were inevitably inculcated in these same aberrant traits, and in turn passed them on to the next generation.

  To one in particular.

  It had been a long day, and the members of the Grand Council had retired, as was their custom, to the hot, steamy quiet of the contemplation burrow deep beneath the council chamber, there to relax and relieve the stress of governance. Solitude was not sought, and conversation turned to more pleasant, less weighty matters.

  Except among two. Though aged by any standard, they were among the youngest members of the council. Together they discussed two recent events of import that appeared to have no connection. It was
in fact a connection they were drawing.

  “The AAnn grow bolder than usual.”

  “Yes,” declared the male. “A terrible shame about Paszex.” As he spoke he inhaled perfumed steam from the herbal wrap that covered half his breathing spicules. “Nothing to be done about it. You cannot bring back the dead, nor can one in good conscience vote to embark on an all-out war in memory of the already deceased.”

  “The AAnn always count upon us to be reasonable and logical in such matters. May their scales rot and their eggs shrivel.”

  “Sirri!!ch, why not? We always are. But you are right. The incursion onto Willow-Wane was unprecedented for its size. But we can do nothing about it.”

  “I know,” agreed the senior female. Her ovipositors lay flat against the back of her abdomen, no longer capable of laying eggs. “I am concerned about preventing a recurrence elsewhere in the future. We must strengthen ourselves.”

  The male tri-eint gestured second-degree ambivalence. “What more can we do than what we have done? The AAnn dare not make a blatant attack. They know it would invite an overwhelming response.”

  “Today that is true. Tomorrow…” Her antennae fluttered significantly. “Every day the AAnn work to strengthen and enlarge their forces. What is needed is something to keep them off guard, to divert them.” Amid the steam, her gleaming compound eyes glittered softly. “Something perhaps not as predictable as the thranx.”

  The male was intrigued. He shifted his position on the resting bench. “You are not hypothesizing. You have something specific in mind.”

  “You know of the alien outpost on the high plateau?”

  “The bipeds? The hu’mans?”

  “Humans,” she replied, correcting his pronunciation. Human words had no bite and were difficult to enunciate. Their speech was soft, like their fleshy exteriors. “I have just read a report. Progress there is good. So good that preparations are being made to take the next step in deepening and developing relations.”

  “With the humans?” The tone in the tri-eint’s voice was palpable and was accompanied by suitable gestures of disgust. “Why would we want to enhance relations with such unpleasant creatures?”

  “You do not deny their intelligence?” The female was challenging him.

  “Their morality and manners, perhaps, but their intelligence, no—not based on the secret reports I have seen.” Sliding off the bench, he reached back to remove the herbal wrap.

  “They have a conspicuous military capability.”

  “Which they are hardly about to put at the service of such as ourselves.” Antennae twitched. “I have seen those reports as well. The great majority of the human population finds our appearance abhorrent. I must say that the feeling is mutual. Mutual dislike is a shaky pedestal on which to raise an alliance.”

  “Such things take time,” she chided him as she used a foothand to rub scented polish across her exoskeleton. Combined with the steam that permeated the chamber, it imparted to the purplish blue chitin a semimetallic sheen. “And education.”

  The male councilor barked his antipathy. “You cannot educate without contact. Admittedly, from what little is released to us the project here goes well enough. But it is modest in size and scope, and does nothing to deal with the revulsion most humans seem to experience in our presence.”

  “That is so.” Nictitating membranes flushed condensation from individual lenses. “But there is another project, larger in scope and more pointed.”

  Her counterpart looked up, uncertain. “I have not heard of another.”

  “It is being kept quiet until it has matured sufficiently for mutual revelation. Only a few know of it. A very few. It is considered absolutely crucial to the development of relations between our two species. Above all, the AAnn must not learn of it. As it is, they consider the humans a threat to their expansionist intentions. The thought of a human-thranx axis might drive them to do something…ill considered.”

  “What human-thranx axis? We hardly have relations with the bipeds.”

  “There is work afoot to change that,” she assured him.

  The male chirped skeptically. “Proper, formal relations between our two species I can envision. But a permanent alliance?” He executed the strongest possible gesture of negativity. “It will never happen. Neither side wants it.”

  “There are visionaries, admittedly few in number for now, who believe otherwise. Hence this second, most secret project.” Her declaration of seriousness was leavened with just the barest hint of amusement. “You will never believe where it is.” Moving close so that the other eints in the relaxation chamber could not possibly overhear, she touched antennae with him while whispering into the hearing organs on his b-thorax.

  She was right. He didn’t.

  2

  The thranx do not bury their dead: the deceased are lovingly recycled. Like so many components of thranx culture, this was a tradition that reached back to their primitive origins, when hives were ruled by pretech, egg-laying queens, and anything edible was deemed worthy of consumption, including the remains of a demised fellow citizen. Protein was protein, while nourishment and survival continued to take precedence over emerging notions of culture and civilization. The manner in which the traditional recycling was carried out was more decorous now, but the underlying canon remained the same.

  Farewell giving was far more elaborate and formalized than it had been in the times before talking, however, though the one whose praises were presently being sung would doubtless have dubbed them overwrought. For a poet famous on not just Willow-Wane but all the thranx worlds, Wuuzelansem had been even more than conventionally modest.

  Desvendapur remembered the last time he had sat with the master. Wuuzelansem’s color had deepened from the healthy aquamarine of the young beyond the blue-green of maturity until in old age his exoskeleton had turned almost indigo. His head had swayed uncontrollably from side to side, the result of a nonfatal but incurable disease of the nervous system, and he but rarely rose up on only four legs, needing all six all the time to keep him from falling. But though they might flash less frequently with the fires of inspiration, the eyes still gleamed like burnished gold.

  They had gone out into the rain forest, the great poet and his master class, to sit beneath a yellow-boled cim!bu tree that was a favorite of the teacher’s. Possessed of its own broad, dense canopy of yellow-gold, pink-striped leaves, this was the time of year of the cim!bu’s flowering. Nectar-rich blossoms of enormous length saturated the air with their perfume, their dangling chimelike stamens thick with pollen. No insects hummed busily about those blooms; no flying creatures lapped at the dripping nectar. Attendants looked after the pollination of the cim!bu. They had to. It was an alien, a foreigner, an exotic outsider that was native to Hivehom, not Willow-Wane. A decorative transplant propagated by settlers. It thrived in the depths of the native forest, even though surrounded by strangers.

  Beneath the cim!bu and the rest of the dense vegetation, Yeyll throve. The third-largest city on Willow-Wane, it was a hive of homes, factories, training institutes, recreational facilities, and larvae-nurturing chambers. Technologically advanced they had become, but when possible the thranx still preferred to dwell underground. Yeyll wore the preserved rain forest in which Wuuzelansem and his students strolled on its crown, like a hat. Though it exuded the scent of wildness, in reality it had been as thoroughly domesticated as any park.

  There were benches beneath the cim!bu. Several of the students took advantage of them as they listened to the poet declaim on the sensuousness of certain lubricious pentameters, resting their bodies lengthwise along one of the narrow, rustic wooden platforms and taking the weight off their legs. Des preferred to remain standing, absorbing the lesson with one part of his mind while the other contemplated the lushness of the forest. The morning had dawned hot and humid: perfect weather. As he scanned the surface of a nearby tree, his antennae probed the bark, searching out the tiny vibrations of the creatures that lived both on and
beneath its surface. Some were native insects, ancient relatives of his kind. They paid no attention to the declamations of the revered Wuuzelansem or the responses of his students, being interested only in eating and procreating and not in poetry.

  “What do you think, Desvendapur?”

  “What?” Dimly, it registered on his brain that his name had been invoked, together with the attached verbal baggage of a question. Turning from the tree, he saw that everyone was looking at him—including the master. Another student might have been caught off guard, or left at a loss for words. Not Des. He was never at a loss for words. He was simply sparing with them. Contrary to what others might believe, he had been listening.

  “I think that much of what passes for poetry these days is offal that rarely, if ever, rises to the exalted level of tendentious mediocrity.” Warming to the subject, he raised his voice, emphasizing his words with rapid, overexpansive movements of his truhands. “Instead of composing we have composting. Competitions are won by facile reciters of rote who may be craftsmen but are not artists. It’s not all their fault. The world is too relaxed, life too predictable. Great poetry is born of crisis and calamity, not long hours whiled away in front of popular entertainments or the convivial company of friends.” And just in case his audience felt that he was utilizing the opportunity to answer the query in order to grandstand before the master, he concluded with a choice, especially coarse, expletive.

  No one spoke, and fixed thranx countenances were capable of little in the way of facial expression, but rapid hand movements showed that his response had elicited reactions ranging from resentment to resignation. Desvendapur was known to be habitually outrageous, a quality that would have been more readily tolerated had he been a better poet. His lack of demonstrated accomplishment mitigated against acceptance by his peers.

  Oh, there were occasional bursts of rhetorical brilliance, but they were as scattered as the quereequi puff-lions in the trees. They manifested themselves just often enough to keep him from being kicked out of the master classes. In many ways he was the despair of the senior instructors, who saw in him a promising, even singular talent that never quite managed to rise above an all-consuming and very unthranx-like preoccupation with morbid hopelessness. Still, he flashed just enough ability just often enough to keep him in the program.