Quofum

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Sounds appetizing,” Tellenberg riposted. The image on the captain’s screen shifted as the scientist turned his own communit away from his face. “What do the rest of you think?”

  With Tellenberg’s vit pickup now pointed in their direction, Boylan could see the other members of the group scattered throughout the boat. From the seat at the control console, N’kosi responded with a rude gesture. Nearby, Valnadireb also responded with a gesture. The thranx utilized all four hands, rendering actions as complex as they were unintelligible.

  Sitting on the narrow bench that was an integral part of the hull and ran around the inside of the boat, Haviti just smiled. “I don’t mind eating a few specimens—after they’ve been catalogued. Or if we have duplicates. If the food prep’s analyzer says something is edible, I’m game to try it. Local forage is always a nice change from dehydrates and synthetics. You never know when you might bite into something exceptional.”

  “Like a new flavor,” commented N’kosi. “How often in one’s lifetime do you get to experience a new flavor?”

  Upon reaching the gate, Boylan completed his circuit of the camp’s interior safety perimeter. More than satisfied, he pivoted on his heel and headed back toward the domed, climate-controlled entry module.

  “A patentable discovery like that would repay all costs of expedition,” he pointed out via his communit.

  Tellenberg was apologetic. “I’m afraid all we have so far are hundreds of unprecedented discoveries and thousands of new species to be placed in an absurdly large number of Quofumspecific phyla. Alas, no new flavors.”

  Reaching the entrance to the outer lock, Boylan had to pause for a second while Security read his bioprofile. The door then slid aside to admit him. An invigorating blast of cool air greeted his arrival.

  “We must make do then with your pitiful vast scientific discoveries. When will I be able to see some of them for myself?” Waiting for a reply, he could clearly hear Tellenberg consulting with N’kosi and the others.

  “Even with occasional stops to collect, we should be back at the river landing sometime tomorrow morning,” the scientist told him. “Before lunch, certainly. Assuming the boat doesn’t give us any trouble.”

  “Boat is self-maintaining.” Boylan stepped through the inner doorway and into the module that had been fitted out as the expedition’s living quarters. “Not like camp, where I have to do so much work by myself with only personality-deprived half-mute technician to assist. See you tomorrow morning, then.”

  “Don’t eat anything we wouldn’t eat,” Tellenberg directed him by way of signing off.

  The captain clipped his communit back onto his service belt. He was pretty fortunate, he knew. On previous expeditions he had found himself forced to operate in the company of researchers whose notion of uncontrolled hilarity was to alter recordings of alien zygotes and pass the results off as genuine. All too many of them could consider humor only in the abstract. To Boylan, anyone who could not laugh when one of a team’s members slipped and fell in a pool of alien excrement was not worthy of the extra help and companionship that were so vital to an expedition’s success.

  Who said he had no sense of humor?

  Tellenberg slipped his communit back into its weatherproof holder. The device itself was also completely weatherproof, which meant that the holder was somewhat superfluous, but he was a firm believer in the efficacy of redundant systems—especially out in the field. He smiled to himself. Boylan’s attitude toward the science team bordered on the schizophrenic. On the one hand the captain professed little interest in the researchers so long as they did their jobs and did not violate accepted Commonwealth standards for carrying out fieldwork. On the other, he could be as solicitous as a brooding hen. He would never admit to such concern, of course. It would never square with the macho image he sought to project.

  Something bumped the underside of the boat. Hard. Hard enough to jolt his attention as well as his backside. Thoughts of the captain were abandoned as he turned to look back at N’kosi.

  Having nearly been knocked out of his seat by the unexpected impact, the other xenologist had grabbed the bar that ran around the control console. He hung on with one hand as he checked the instruments. Nearby, Haviti was picking herself up off the deck. She appeared unhurt. Valnadireb helped her up. The thranx had been standing on all six legs and had not fallen. None of the four scientists felt the need to say “What the hell?”

  An intent N’kosi was studying readouts. “Hull integrity intact,” he announced immediately. Tellenberg assumed he meant both hulls, since the boat had two. “Systems status unchanged. Minor course deviation corrected.” Glancing up, his gaze met Tellenberg’s. “What did we hit? Depth scanners indicate we still have ten meters of water under us.”

  Haviti was leaning over the port side. A strange expression had come over her face as she looked back at her colleagues. “You mean ‘who.’”

  It was truly amazing, Tellenberg marveled as he rushed to the side of the boat, how one small world could contain such a vast wealth of implications.

  There were two—no, three of the massive creatures. They lolled on their backs, or at least on their dorsal sides since it was impossible to truthfully identify a front or back, and lazily regarded the boat and its occupants. More than a little dazed, the four researchers gazed back at the beings who had come up under the boat. There was no way of telling if the contact had been intentional or accidental. None of the alien trio appeared to be injured. As the scientists looked on, the three rolled and dipped in the water, easily keeping pace with the boat.

  It occurred to the three humans that they ought to be operating their recorders. Fortunately, Valnadireb had never taken his off. It had been monitoring the encounter from the moment of collision.

  As he was fumbling to position his own ear-mounted unit, Tellenberg’s fingers dropped away from the device. He had been overcome by the sudden realization of what they were seeing. A moment fraught with implications as profound as they were unexpected. A glance would have shown that his companions had been equally affected. One by one they checked their individual documenting instrumentation.

  The nearest of the three aquatic organisms had disappeared, having submerged fully. The other two continued to loll on the surface. It was evident they were as interested in the exotic creatures on board the strange floating object as those terrestrial beings were in them.

  Formed of lustrous, glassy protoplasm, each of the alien pair was a good four meters long. Their central bulges were approximately the same in diameter. Both fore and aft ends tapered to a stub, at the end of which was an obvious eye. Two eyes, one at each end. Remarkable, Tellenberg found himself thinking. Not only could he and his colleagues not tell the creatures’ dorsal side from the ventral, they could not tell front from back. The organisms’ design was fantastic, absurd, outrageous. A biological joke. He did not rule out the possibility that each of them was actually two individuals joined tail to tail, perhaps for purposes of ongoing reproduction.

  But if that was the case, how to explain only one pair of waving appendages protruding from the central bulge? If each organism was comprised of two individuals joined together, would each separately be equipped with only one limb? And why not? he challenged himself. Each would have only one eye. One limb, one eye—but that was not what was most astonishing about the translucent shapes. Mere physiological aberrations were not what had him struck dumb.

  What mattered was not whether the creature he was looking at was controlled by a single brain or two. What rendered him speechless was the unmistakable fact that both sets of waving limbs were semaphoring an intricate series of gestures in the direction of the boat. When Valnadireb responded by attempting to mimic the pseudopodal signaling as best he could, the two aquatic beings promptly reacted by gesturing in kind.

  Standing at the railing, Haviti called forth a series of ancestral arm movements. Drawn from formal dance moves handed down through her family, they were languorous and
serpentine. The creatures in the water imitated them beautifully. They then proceeded to follow this display with a succession of simple twists and turns of their flexible limbs. Tellenberg joined his friends in trying his hand at mimicry. The alien gestures grew more complicated. When the humans’ and thranx’s attempts at imitation failed, the water slugs simplified their efforts and repeated them until those on board got the movements right.

  This gesticulating exchange continued until dusk. At that point the river-dwellers gestured their farewell and dove. N’kosi spotted all three of them swimming back upriver in the wake of the boat. As the interior of the vessel’s hull began to glow softly, providing illumination in response to the fading daylight, three of its passengers gathered near the stern. It being Haviti’s turn to handle the controls, she participated from where she sat behind the console.

  N’kosi spoke up first, voicing the conclusion they had all already reached independently.

  “No mouths. No visible or audible means of modulating air. Instruments found nothing unusual in the way of electrical discharge. No nonvocal vibrations of any kind were detected, subsonic or otherwise.” Using his right hand he brushed sweat from his forehead. “Communication was strictly via gestures.”

  “A certain minimal amount of body language may also be involved,” Haviti declared from her position behind the console. “We can’t say that all that twisting and rolling was not involved.”

  “Physical punctuation.” Tellenberg was shaking his head in disbelief. “I guess none of us ought to be surprised. We’d already agreed that the biology of this world was insane.”

  In the dim light Valnadireb’s feathery antennae bobbed forward. “So now we are faced with the reality of a fifth indigenous sentient race. As if intended to drive us mad, it bears even less evolutionary relationship to the four other intelligence species we have previously encountered than any of them do to one another.”

  “They could be related to the stick-jellies.” N’kosi’s halfhearted conjecture sounded feeble even to him. Whether comprised of possibly mating pairs or bizarrely designed individuals, the dexterously gesticulating water slugs were like nothing else the team had encountered so far.

  Tellenberg let out a quiet sigh. “I wonder what we’ll come across tomorrow. Artistic air bags? Literary forminifera? Intelligent rocks?”

  “Now you’re being silly,” Haviti chided him.

  He looked back sharply. “Am I? Am I the only one who thinks we’ve stumbled onto some vast cosmic joke?” Spreading his arms, he gestured at the nearest shore, sliding past in silhouette. The sounds that emanated from its trees and bushes and other as yet undefined growing things were epidemic with aural absurdities.

  “The more we learn about this world, the more unarguable it becomes that what we’re encountering here is not natural. Biology and evolution simply don’t work this way. The Commonwealth consists of dozens of habitable worlds whose biota have been studied, catalogued, and researched in depth, plus dozens of others that have at least been cursorily surveyed. Some of them are home to flora and fauna more outrageous than imaginable. But all of it, everywhere, regardless of whether it’s carbon-or silicon-based, regardless of whether it’s fueled by oxy-nitro or methane, liquid or dissolved sulfates, reactive organic hydroxides or reverse protein electrophoresis, follows certain laws.” Rising, he moved to starboard and leaned his hands on the rail as he stared at the dark, raucous, unfathomable Quofumian forest.

  “Mushrooms do not evolve from starfish. Gorillas do not arise from liverworts. Birds do not develop from sequoias.”

  “Thranx do not develop from tegath,” Valnadireb put in solemnly, to fully emphasize the point.

  Tellenberg turned back to his colleagues. “So what do we have here? External intervention for purposes of amusement, as was suggested earlier? A globular zoo whose keepers we have yet to contact? The hand of a deity, albeit a mighty capricious one? Or am I missing a conclusion that should be obvious?”

  “I hope so,” muttered Haviti. “Anarchy is bad for biology. It complicates the classifying of reports.”

  “Something unique is going on here.” Pulling a drink tube from a storage container, N’kosi popped the top, waited a few seconds for the contents to cool, and swallowed thirstily. Lightly smacking his lips, he turned to study the slowly passing forest. “Maybe we aren’t coming up with the right explanation because we simply don’t possess the proper reference points. If what we’re encountering lies outside the body of accepted biological knowledge, perhaps we have to find a way to step outside existing wisdom in order to explain it.”

  “A neat trick.” Taking the tube from his friend, Tellenberg chugged down the rest of the contents. “When you figure out how to do it, please let me know.”

  “You’ll be among the first.” N’kosi smiled.

  “We could all get drunk,” Haviti suggested. “My ancestors recommended kava. I think the camp’s synthesizer could manage the necessary molecular chains.”

  “Comforting, if not enlightening.” Tellenberg tried to imagine the brilliant and insightful Haviti stumbling around the camp dining area stone blotto. Half the vision was appealing, the other half oddly unsettling. Having no idea how he might cope with such a reality he put it resolutely out of his mind. Faced with an entire world of unreality, he really had no time for personal adjuncts.

  Other drink tubes were brought out and their contents sipped or chugged after first being heated or chilled, depending on individual thirst preferences. Food joined fluids in being consumed as the boat continued its way downstream. As they proceeded they were serenaded by flanking forest and star-filled sky and even gurgling, burbling river with a chorus of sounds as riotous and lunatic as the organisms that must be generating them. Others might have found the nocturnal refrain vaguely disturbing. To the quartet of slightly giddy researchers drunk on speculation it was an auditory carnival marred only by the lack of time available for study and their inability to identify the source of each and every shriek, scream, squeal, and screech.

  There had to be an explanation, Tellenberg mused furiously as he gnawed on his rehydrated food wrap. There had to be a conjoining link. It couldn’t all be random. Nature was diverse. She could be passionate, even wildly eccentric. But she was never, not ever, arbitrary. It was the same on every world humanxkind had ever explored. Until now. Until Quofum.

  Tilting back his head, he peered out from beneath the craft’s protective canopy. The stars were different from those viewable on the world of his birth. But they were still stars. The spaces between them were filled with a largely understood quotient of particles and energy. Natural laws were in place, even if some still remained to be discovered and quantified. The clock that was the universe ticked onward.

  Where, in that vast panoply of organized matter, was the key to the irrational world on which they had landed?

  7

  It was no slight to Araza that Boylan was unwilling to take his word for it that the condenser was once again in full working order. The captain no more trusted his own observations than he did those of his technician. For Boylan, proof of accomplishment resided in reality, not words.

  He had visited all three main modules plus checking on Irrigation and had spoken to dozens of separate spigots before he was satisfied that the camp’s water delivery system was functioning properly once again. A casual observer might have deemed such behavior obsessive. Boylan would not have bridled at the designation. Alone on an alien world parsecs from the nearest help, obsessiveness might prove detrimental to social interaction, but it might also save the lives of those who thought they were being treated with condescension.

  Better to have lots of running water, he felt, than a few cozy friendships.

  The afternoon wound down without incident. That is, if one discounted the attacks made by three entirely new and totally unrelated species of flying predators, the several efforts by terrestrial organisms of varying size and strength to frontally breach the charged perimeter,
and at least one attempt to burrow beneath it. The latter two did not escape the lethal effects of the fence. As for the aerial carnivores, their repeated and misguided efforts to penetrate the convex plexalloy and nanofiber roof of the compound gained them nothing more than broken teeth, split talons, and bruised egos. At its worst, the banging and scratching they caused was no more than distracting.

  Have to get together with Araza to rig up some kind of motion-activated fright lights or something, Boylan decided. It wouldn’t do to have large predators continuously slamming into and banging off the roofs. If nothing else, the constant clamor would disrupt work inside the lab module.

  A mist-laden evening was clothing the surrounding forest in gray gossamer when he finally found time to check the main storage bay for gear that might be used to improvise the crude equivalent of an alien scarecrow. Located at the rear of the lab module, the large chamber contained equipment and supplies that had been brought down via the shuttle but had yet to be sorted out and put in its proper place. There was no lock or security seal on the door. No one would steal supplies to which they already had legitimate access, and no natives could get in. So Boylan was more than a little surprised to find the small room a mess.

  Everything should have been sorted by department, individual researcher, predetermined experiment, and stacked neatly on the floor or placed on the integrated shelving that protruded from the module’s inner wall. What he found instead were opened cartons with their contents exposed to the air, smaller containers piled haphazardly in one corner, boxes of supplies that had been accessed but not resealed, a jumble of organic materials marked FRAGILE that ought not to have been stacked at all, and loose bits and pieces that should have been returned to their original packing instead of being left where they had been unpacked. There was no getting around it: the storage room was a disaster area. It had not been one when the science team had departed upriver. Therefore the scientists could not be responsible for the storeroom’s current intolerable condition. And since he himself had not visited it for days, the only possibility remaining was…