Quofum

by Alan Dean Foster

  Seeking clarification on her own, she ran toward the village. She was halfway through the town and panting hard as she raced up a familiar sloping street when an apparition came hurtling toward her out of a side alley. Had it not paused in its charge it surely would have crushed her skull with the blocky wooden war hammer it wielded. The sight of her, however, made it hesitate. Clearly, she was no villager.

  The being was as tall as N’kosi and twice as broad. From the thick, cylindrical torso protruded a trio of muscular arms that terminated in triple gripping digits. Thick strips of tanned and treated animal hide crisscrossed the body to form clumsy but effective armor. Sustaining the trisymmetrical body plan, the bulbous head sported three slightly oval eyes, a tripartite nostril, and a mouth that was oddly triangular in shape. The creature had no legs. It advanced by jerking its body across the ground on a single thick, muscular pseudopod. In place of fur or hair, the perfectly smooth skull secreted a kind of protective rose-hued jelly. In contrast to the seals it was aggressive in attitude and loathsome in appearance.

  She fried it.

  Holding her beamer out in front of her she advanced uphill and farther into the village. The battle had moved from the outskirts of town deeper into the community. There were several public fountains. Approaching the uppermost, she saw that the villagers had lured their hideous attackers into an ambush. Individually, a singlefoot, as she immediately dubbed the invaders, was markedly stronger and more powerful than any two seals. The villagers, however, made up for their physical disadvantages with better smarts. Caught out in the open square that centered on the fountain, the attackers were being picked off by the arrows and primitive guns wielded by seals concealed in the surrounding buildings.

  Another intelligent native species, a dazed and exhausted Haviti realized as she stood back and observed the carnage. One that she felt pretty certain was not responsible for the magnificent city in the sea. How many sentient species did that make now? She gave up trying to remember.

  Pinned down and caught without cover, the singlefoots tried to retreat, to no avail. The clever and alert villagers had blocked off all avenues of escape. One by one the brawny but slower-witted invaders were cut down. Looking on, Haviti saw a pair drop their weapons and spread their multiple arms. A dozen armed seals immediately surrounded the two who had capitulated.

  They proceeded to hack them to pieces, displaying a zeal and enthusiasm that turned her stomach.

  Backing up, she holstered her beamer. She had followed the sounds of combat intending not only to observe and record the conflict, but if necessary to assist her friends the seals. Patently, they did not need her help. Observing the slaughter, she found herself retreating in disgust. Intelligence, as ever, was a relative term—and on Quofum there were apparently no decent examples to relate to. The singlefoots might be unsightly, even repulsive in appearance. They were hostile and warlike. But they were intelligent beings still, and warranted being treated as such. They did not deserve to be butchered like the daily catch the villagers hauled up onto the beach every evening.

  To her surprise she found that she was crying silently. She had come to like the seals, to favor them above every other sentient species she and her colleagues had thus far encountered. The bloodthirsty enthusiasm with which they were dispatching every last one of the singlefoots filled her with a dismay that bordered on outright disgust. This was the world on which she had been abandoned. These were the beings among whom she was going to have to live. Was it all endless fighting and conflict? Was there no peace to be found anywhere? No common sense, no respite from brutal competition?

  Competition. The word, the meaning, the potential behind it triggered something in her mind. Multiple biologically unrelated primitive races fighting for dominance over one another. Advanced civilizations that had risen and fallen; not one, but two, and both within a geographically small area. Was it all nothing more than feverish evolution at work? Or was there something else? Something they were overlooking. Hadn’t N’kosi once proposed as much? It was a crazy idea. An insane notion.

  With the entire village occupied in massacring the rest of the attackers, no one noticed her as she made her way back to the beach. Secure and inviolate, the skimmer sat undisturbed where she had parked it upon arrival that first day weeks ago. Upon boarding and resealing the canopy, internal instrumentation responded as promptly and efficiently as if she had disembarked only yesterday.

  Her idyllic sojourn among the seals was over. Rudely interrupted, she made certain that the last of her recordings had been properly stored before directing the compact craft to lift, pivot, and accelerate southward.

  Behind her she left the village and its affable populace engaged in exterminating the last of the individually robust but collectively ill-prepared invaders. As was universally the case, strategy and intelligence had once again won out over sheer brawn. Did that mean anything on Quofum? She needed more information to be certain of anything. Somehow, in the absence of shuttle, ship, or satellite, she felt that she and her colleagues were going to have to greatly extend the reach of their knowledge if they were to find any answers.

  As the shuttle hummed its way southward along the coast she could not escape the feeling that things happened unnaturally fast on this world. Species evolved, developed, advanced, and then went extinct at a rate unknown anywhere else. The city in the jungle. The more sophisticated city in the sea. The seals fighting off the singlefoots. Stick-jellies and fuzzies battling spikers and hardshells. It was becoming clear that biological selection on Quofum did not proceed at a normal, measured pace: it sprinted and stumbled and spilled madly forward, as if driven by natural forces as yet unidentified.

  Or, she mused thoughtfully as sand and water and forest whipped past beneath the sleek little craft, by unnatural ones.

  13

  Valnadireb found it hard being alone. More so even than humans, thranx were social creatures.

  Like the rest of his kind, he was not particular as to the species whose company he kept, so long as it was mature enough to engage in intelligent discourse. But where thranx were concerned, variety in conversation was as important as content. Being restricted to repartee with just two companions, and nonthranx at that, was intellectually debilitating. With Haviti away on her north coast excursion, it left only N’kosi to chat with. While the human did his best to be sociable, he had his own research to concentrate on.

  It was never expected that the original six-member expedition would have to endure one another’s company for more than a month or two. Psychological profiling had taken that into consideration when the team was being assembled. With that number now cut in half and accorded permanent instead of temporary status, it became more and more difficult to find matters of commonality to discuss beyond those immediately germane to issues of survival.

  All of which was a roundabout way of realizing that N’kosi preferred to go his own way and Haviti to go hers. This found an increasingly introverted Valnadireb with little choice but to do likewise.

  With Haviti having elected to travel northward, N’kosi decided to begin fieldwork off to the south. Utilizing one of the camp’s rechargeable single-person scooters he would take off in that direction nearly every day, taking care to return well before sundown lest he find himself outside the perimeter after nightfall. The fact that the camp had not been attacked since it and its occupants had been abandoned by the Qwarm Araza was no reason for the three survivors to let down their guard.

  Finding themselves confronted by technology that must have seemed like magic to them, it was possible that the spikers had decided to give the camp and its deadly perimeter a wide berth. Alternately, the extended assault on the village of the fuzzies might have weakened them to a point where additional local depredations would have to await reinforcements, or perhaps another season. Whatever the reason, Valnadireb and N’kosi had been able to go about their work without interference. Not only had the camp not been attacked anew, in the course of pursuin
g their respective fieldwork neither thranx nor human had seen so much as a single spiker or hardshell. Similarly, on his scoots southward N’kosi saw nothing but simple flora and fauna.

  While studying the forest in the immediate vicinity of the camp, Valnadireb occasionally surprised a party of stick-jellies or wandering fuzzies. Despite his attempts to make contact, they invariably fled at the sight of him. He did not think it had much, if anything, to do with his appearance, which to the natives was no more outré than that of his human colleagues. More likely was the possibility that both groups had seen evidence of the camp’s deadly defenses and had decided he and his friends were best avoided.

  For the present, that suited Valnadireb just fine. Since he and his colleagues now had all the time in the world to pursue their individual interests, they could afford to lavish patience on the matter of indigenous contact. Let the local natives come to them if they wanted to try and communicate, he and N’kosi had decided in Haviti’s absence, certain that upon her return to camp she would agree with the course of action they had chosen. There was no hurry. Not anymore. They could sit down and break bread with the fuzzies and the stick-jellies in the natives’ own good time.

  Meanwhile, Valnadireb immersed himself in the study of the forest. As an area of research it was as frustrating as it was rewarding. He did not try to persuade N’kosi to join him in the fieldwork. By the same token the human refrained from asking Valnadireb to accompany him on his daily trips south. It was a perfectly sensible division of labor. To a thranx, hot and humid defined ideal working conditions. While he did not find the climate at the coast uncommonly unpleasant, unpredictable sea breezes could and often did carry a chill. The same temperate climatological conditions that N’kosi found bracing left Valnadireb feeling irritable and wont to gnaw on the tips of his antennae.

  They had settled into a routine. Every morning N’kosi would depart to study the oceanic shallows, narrow intertidal zone, and coastal biota to the south. Valnadireb would walk out of camp to explore the deep forest farther inland. In the afternoon the thranx xenologist would return to the camp’s lab module to analyze, record, catalog, and give names to each day’s new discoveries. N’kosi would invariably meander in later, his recorder stuffed full of precise notes and fantastic imagery, his collection containers brimming with new biological wonders.

  What was the hurry? Valnadireb began to ask himself. Why the need, much less the rush, to record and register and index? In all likelihood no one would read his scrupulous notes until after he was dead—if then. Why was he making the effort to maintain the fiction that his meticulous daily efforts were in any way worthwhile?

  As a consequence of such unavoidable thoughts something remarkable began to happen. The work of Valnadireb, knowledgeable and skilled thranx scientist and field researcher, began to slide. He continued to bring in specimens and recordings and discuss the findings of the day with his human counterpart. But while his outward enthusiasm was little diminished, the care with which he had always documented his discoveries started to show signs of indifference. N’kosi gave no indication that he saw anything amiss. Perhaps it was because he had become too wrapped up in his own work. Or possibly it was because he was experiencing some of the same symptoms of self-absorbed unconcern himself.

  Valnadireb’s fascination with the world on which they had been stranded grew with each new discovery even as he spent less and less time documenting them for posterity. What particularly held him in thrall was the seemingly endless parade of biological contradictions. So rich and diverse was the forest’s flora and fauna that after a while he gave up mapping them using the standard field recording grid and took to just wandering through the woods that surrounded the camp.

  “Not a good idea,” N’kosi told him one night as the two were finishing up an evening meal together. “You should be using a scooter, like me. Even for going short distances. A scooter can carry heavier weaponry than you can on your person, more specimen containers, more analytical equipment, and if you have to make a run from something you’ve got a lot better chance of getting away clean on a scooter than you do on foot.”

  Sliding off his bench the thranx began to clean his mandibles, utilizing a special device for the purpose. Sometimes he no longer bothered to search for the traditional tool and improvised the necessary hygiene using a human fork.

  “Though the scooter is comparatively quiet, it does make some noise,” he contended. “And its presence is disturbing to many creatures. I thank you for your concern, Mosi, but I prefer to walk. I have not been attacked, there has been no sign of hostile behavior on the part of the local natives, and I find that I am more comfortable without the vehicle. It is one less thing to worry about. One less thing to worry about,” he concluded, inclining his antennae in the human’s direction, “means that much more time I can devote to my work, irr!lk. Now tell me true: do you yourself always stay so close to your transport?”

  N’kosi shrugged and returned to his dessert. The main food preparation unit had become adept at devising dishes using locally gathered ingredients. The thick, cold paste the researcher was currently spooning into his mouth looked like blackberry pudding garnished with ground glass. The glistening crystalline seeds contributed crunch, and while they added nothing in the way of nutrition to the dessert, they dissolved harmlessly in the human digestive tract.

  “Unless you’re investigating or collecting macrolife, you really should move around more in order to get a proper sample.”

  “Exactly my point,” Valnadireb declared. “The scooter’s presence is restraining. I find it easier to focus on my surroundings in its absence.”

  N’kosi shook his head. “You’re distorting my point to justify your own rashness. I make sure that I’m never so far from the scooter that I can’t get back to it in a one-breath sprint.”

  Valnadireb gestured as he replied. “While thranx are not the sprinters that humans are, I assure you that I remain within an equivalently safe running distance from camp. So tell me then: which of us is safer out in the field? You, who make a daily journey down the coast of up to several kilometers? Or I, who stay within running distance of the camp itself?”

  Finishing the last of his dessert, N’kosi put down the spoon and gazed across the table at his insectoid counterpart. “I’m just concerned about your well-being, that’s all, Val. Because lately you don’t seem overly worried about it yourself. Records show you returning to camp after dark on more than one occasion. You know how dangerous that is.”

  Light glittered golden off the thranx’s compound eyes. “I know how important it is that we obtain samples and recordings of local nocturnal as well as diurnal life-forms.”

  N’kosi let out a bitter laugh. “Important? Important to who?”

  “To those who come after us,” the thranx replied quietly. “For those who will recover the records we will leave behind.”

  “If anyone comes after us!” N’kosi was on the verge of shouting. “If anyone can find this lunatic world ever again.”

  “Of course it will be found again. What makes you think it will not?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Rising from his seat, N’kosi was rambling wildly now, throwing his arms around as energetically as any thranx but with considerably less exactitude of meaning. “Maybe the fact that it’s often recorded as being located at different coordinates? That it possibly blinks in and out of normal space?” He halted, staring at his friend and colleague. “You stay out collecting and recording after dark. Have you taken a good look at the night sky lately? It’s not even just that some of the stars occupy different positions. They’re not even the same stars!”

  The thranx xenologist remained unruffled, his speech as calm as ever. It was one of the racial characteristics that had first induced humans to overlook his kind’s appearance. No matter the seriousness of the circumstances, thranx rarely lost control of their emotions. It was not that they had none. They simply managed them better than did their frequently ove
rwrought human allies. The inflexibility of their faces and concurrent inability to express feelings through facial expression contributed to the impression that they had complete mastery of sentiment. The only clue to a truly emotionally upset thranx was a frenetic waving of manipulative limbs.

  “Commonwealth Science Central was aware that Quofum is subject to peculiar astronomical distortions. It may be that these are magnified by atmospheric or localized stellar peculiarities. I have confidence that no matter what the manifold vagaries of local conditions, our work here will not pass unacknowledged. Otherwise, why continue with it?”

  Nodding vigorously, N’kosi lowered his arms and turned away from his colleague. His tone was grim. “That thought had occurred to me.”

  “If it has, and you hold to it with some degree of sincerity, then why do you continue with your work?” Antennae quivering like feathery tuning forks, Valnadireb folded both sets of forelimbs as he awaited his companion’s reply.

  Having given full vent to his frustration, N’kosi now responded with a weary shrug. “Simple. Because if it wasn’t for the work, I think I’d go insane.”

  It was Valnadireb’s turn to nod, a human gesture the thranx had long since adopted as one of their own. “An idle mind is like an unattended pupa. If ignored, it reverts to a vegetative state. In one way humans are fortunate. Though mental illness is not unknown among my kind, we tend not to go mad. When the illogicality of a situation becomes too overwhelming, we usually just kill ourselves.”

  Concerned and engaged once again, an alarmed N’kosi looked back at his fellow researcher. “Val, you’re not…?”

  “No, crriik. Do not mistake detachment for psychosis. Here lately it seems that I am simply preoccupied much of the time. With the very research we have been discussing, if not always with documenting it.”

  “Okay. Okay, then.” N’kosi began to sweep the dirty dishes and utensils into the gap in the center of the table where they would be received, cleaned, sterilized, and stacked on a bottom shelf for use again in the morning. “I just—I worry about you, that’s all. Just like I worry about Tiare. I wish we’d hear from her.”