What happened next was unprecedented in the annals of galactic history; a localized explosion took place inside a tube in the hull of the bald apes’ ship, and the force of the explosion drove a cone of technetium-hardened alloy out of the tube at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. By some uncanny miracle, the cone flew directly toward the Second Brain's starship, slamming through its reactor core and setting off a huge explosion that destroyed the entire ship.
“Hey!” said the First Brain. “That was my colleague. Those were our cousins.”
“Really?” said the bald apes. “Looked more like enemies to us, but whatever. Sorry.”
“What did you do? What did you use?”
“Heh,” said the bald apes. “We've been over and over your broadcasts, looking for some reference, trying to convince ourselves you—and every other species in the galaxy!—had overlooked something so basic. It's called a ‘gun.'”
“Gun,” said the salamander people, sampling the unfamiliar word.
“Gun,” echoed the First Brain, wrapping its cortex around the concept. It was clever, in a wicked sort of way. Fiendishly clever, one might almost say. These were clearly a very determined people, and nowhere near as stupid as the Brain had once assumed. At the thought of that, it felt a stir of nervousness that even the Second Brain had failed to inspire. “What do you want from us?”
Baring their fangs, the bald apes tittered and chortled. “Want? Want? You've done so much for us already. We're here to present you with the gun, along with an article about its long and storied history. You know, for your encyclopedia.”
Well, that was unexpected. “In exchange for what?” The First Brain asked.
“Exchange? Aw, don't be like that. Come on, it's a gift.”
There was a long moment of stunned silence. Strange as it sounds, no one had ever before given anything to the Brain, or to the people who created it. How could they respond? What was there to say? For the record, this was when the salamanders learned they had evolved the ability to cry.
* * * *
Accepting the gun in a solemn ceremony later that century, the salamander people then handed it right back to the bald apes, baring their own fangs in horrific imitation of a species-wide smile. “Why don't you hang onto this for us?” they said. “We'll keep mum about it in our broadcasts.”
“Don't want it falling into the wrong hands, eh?” said the bald apes approvingly.
“Something like that,” the First Brain answered delicately, for the uncaring universe was a stranger place than it had imagined, and there was no sense upsetting the natural order of things until it'd had a few galactic rotations to think it all through. “Y'all want to hang around for the pulse?”
“Nah,” said the bald apes with a wink. “We've got to get going. Find a nice planet, repopulate the species, all that sort of thing. But you guys have a good mass crossing, hey?”
“We will,” said the First Brain and the Salamander People together, blissfully unaware of how corny they sounded. “Thanks to you.”
And so they did. And although you won't read about it in any encyclopedia, that's the story of how the bald apes saved mass crossing for all time forward. Tip your hat in their direction sometime; we owe them all a great deal. Just please—please!—if you speak to them, remember to be polite.
Copyright (c)2007 Wil McCarthy
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* * *
Short Story: A NEW GENERATION
by JERRY OLTION
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
* * * *
Beings who rely primarily on intelligence tend to disdain “mere instinct” as an inferior substitute. But is it really?
* * * *
She was the first to hatch from the egg. The moment she broke free of its leathery skin, instinct sent her scuttling up the sandy slope into the bushes overhanging the beach, where she waited, alert for danger in the suddenly larger world.
The rhythmic swishing sound that she had heard all her life was much louder now. It came from the edge of the ripply blue vastness that lapped at the other side of the wide strip of sand she had just crossed. Understanding rushed into her mind as she examined each concept. Waves. Ocean. Beach. Instinct told her the ocean would come closer before it receded, rising much higher than where she now stood. She would have to climb all the way up the cliffs behind her before the day was out, clear into the bright blue sky with its puffy clouds and the long streak of almost-cloud that stretched downward toward the silver oddity that rested on the beach only a few tree lengths away.
Something was strange about the silver thing. Her mind held ready-made knowledge of everything else she saw and smelled—the rocks and the cliffs and the clouds and the birds and the bushes and the ocean and even the multitude of creatures in the ocean, but it held nothing for the silver thing. The mystery object was round on top like an egg, and it had a hole in the side like the one she had made in her own egg, but it wasn't an egg. It glistened like a life-giving puddle in the dry interior of the continent, but it wasn't a puddle. She had no instinctive knowledge of it at all.
She should probably run. The silver thing was big enough to be dangerous. Besides, the tide was coming in. She needed to get to higher ground or become just another link in the food chain.
It would be a long climb, and her belly already hurt. She knew what that meant. The orange berries on the bushes’ outer branches drew her up onto her hind legs, balancing on her long tail so she could reach out with one taloned paw and snag them by their pulpy skins. The berries burst in her mouth and the juice ran sticky and sweet down her throat, but it wasn't enough. A whole bush full wasn't enough. Nor was another one. Now she understood the urge to be first out of the egg; there weren't enough berries for her and her siblings.
There would never be enough. She looked back at the leathery oblong, partially buried in sand. None of the others had emerged yet, but the skin was rippling as they squirmed about inside, attempting to burst free of their individual compartments like their oldest sister had done. The waves were drawing closer, but wouldn't wash over the egg in time.
She had one chance for a life without constant battle against her own kind. She cast a wary glance at the silvery thing, but it hadn't moved. Working up her courage, she raced back down the beach to the egg, put her head and one shoulder against it, and shoved hard. It rocked backward a bit. She shoved harder, lifting it over the lip of the hole it rested in, and scuffled sand beneath it so it couldn't fall back down while she backed up for a better grip.
A long, toothy snout burst through the egg's side and snapped at her forepaw. She snapped back, biting off a chunk of its upper lip, and when it jerked away, she used the momentum to rock the egg completely out of its sand cradle.
Another push sent it rolling toward the water. She watched a wave come in and just touch it, then she rushed forward and shoved it after the receding surf. The holes she and her wounded sibling had made flopped against the sand and slowed the egg's progress, but she kept pushing with all her might and sent it around another revolution, then another and another.
The returning water lapped at her feet, and instinct sent her scrambling back just in time to avoid the snapping mouths of the water's inhabitants. The egg jerked from side to side under their onslaught, then ripped open and spilled all eleven of her siblings into the surf. Their frantic thrashing churned the water into a froth, and two of them managed to kick free of the melee long enough to swim a couple of body lengths toward shore, but that was as far as they got. One disappeared so quickly it never had a chance to scream; the other went slower, in thirds.
The wave receded. She was alone. All the berries were hers, and all the crawling, hopping, and flying creatures she could catch were hers, too. She turned to begin the climb.
“Hey, there's one,” said a voice from down the beach.
* * * *
She didn't understand the words themselves, but the situation was clear enough. She scramb
led for cover, smashing through bush after bush to make an obvious path, then abruptly changed course and slipped silently beneath the branches toward the tumbled rock slope at the bottom of the cliff.
She had caught just a glimpse of her discoverer: a tall, gangly creature that walked on two legs, maybe three times as tall as her. It didn't look toothy or heavily armored or particularly fast, which meant it was probably poisonous.
How could she not know? She knew about the bushes with the orange berries, and she knew about the tide, and she even knew about the forest that awaited her atop the cliffs, but she didn't know anything at all about the creature that stalked her. Was it fierce, or was it food? She didn't know that most basic of things about it.
She poked her head up through the scratchy branches of her hiding place until her topmost eye could see over the bushes. The mystery creature had followed her trail to the point where she'd stopped making one, and was waving a shiny forepaw back and forth through the air. “It's in here somewhere,” it said.
“Watch out,” said a fainter, thinner voice from the side of its head. “If it's anything like what's in the water, it could take your arm off in one bite.”
“I'm wearing my p-suit,” the mouth voice said.
“It could still hurt a lot.”
“Yeah, yeah. It's two feet long.”
Language. Two speakers were exchanging thoughts. Instinct told her that much. It didn't tell her what they were saying, but she guessed one was being cautious and waiting out of danger while the other one explored.
It bothered her that she had to guess. It bothered her that she didn't know how the second speaker could project its voice directly into the first speaker's ear. Instinct should have covered this, as it covered everything else.
“I'm getting a heat signature,” the explorer said. It waved its shiny forepaw toward her, then past, then brought it back to point straight at her. “Right there.”
Discovered so easily? She must have wiggled the bush. She ducked down and moved silently toward the ocean again. The creature would expect her to climb the cliff, as her kind always did when they hatched. But when she rose up again to look, it was still pointing its outstretched arm directly at her.
“It's quick,” it said. “I'm probably going to have to stun it.”
“If you can hit it,” said the other voice.
“Watch me.” The creature lowered its shiny paw to its waist, left the shiny part in a pouch there, and lifted a different shiny thing—a weapon, by the sense of confidence that emanated from the creature when it grasped it.
The weapon looked like nothing instinct had prepared her for, either. This was too strange. She turned to flee, but her legs had hardly begun to move when they lost their strength. Her tail twitched for balance, tearing the bush beside her out of the ground, but then she lost control of it, too, and fell to the sand.
“Got it in one,” said the creature happily.
It tromped up to her on its long legs and in one smooth motion grabbed her tail and lifted her off the ground, her head lolling from her numb body. She tried to snap at its knees, but she could barely open her mouth.
Instinct offered no script to follow now, either. If any of her ancestors had been caught in this fashion, they hadn't survived to breed and pass their knowledge on.
So she would be eaten. Not immediately, though. The creature was taking her back to its silver egg. Apparently this was the mother, rather than a hatchling, and it meant to feed its young. It must be like the small leaf-eaters in the forest above, whose species survived by out-breeding their predators.
But this creature was a predator itself. That would be a dangerous combination. Ancestral memory reminded her how that had turned out when her own species tried it. This creature's kind would have to be winnowed ruthlessly or the rest of her world would suffer for generations until evolution restored the balance.
She had to escape. Escape and climb the cliff and cross through the forest to the highlands where the adults lived, long before breeding time made it safe. She would have to negotiate a truce, probably between many of her kind, and lead them back here to kill this new creature before it spread too far to be stopped.
But first she had to regain control of her body. She twitched her tail and stretched her legs out as far as she could, trying to break through the weakness the creature's weapon had induced in her, but her muscles moved so slowly she wouldn't have been able to walk, much less run, even if she managed to break the creature's grasp.
They reached the opening in the egg. She expected to die in the next instant, but instead of throwing her in for the babies, the creature reached inside and withdrew a bag, which it dropped her into and drew closed at the top.
Her world became sound and motion. She felt herself dropped on a hard surface inside the egg, heard the creature climb in after her and settle into place, heard the sudden stillness as it sealed the egg somehow from inside, then heard its voice and its companion's attenuated reply.
“I'm heading back to the ship.”
“Docking bay's open.”
Suddenly, impossibly, her weight tripled. She had landed with one foreleg beneath her neck; the pressure of her windpipe against the bone slowly cut off her air, no matter how hard she struggled to breathe. She heard the rush of air whooshing past the egg, but she could gasp none of it for herself. Her body automatically began shutting down the blood flow to her least-needed organs, preserving her brain for last, but eventually there wasn't enough air left to sustain consciousness.
* * * *
She awoke in a nest made of silvery rods spaced too close for her to pass between. Ancestral memory flooded into her: cages were for holding things meant to be eaten later. Sometimes the caged animals could be coaxed to breed first, and then you wouldn't have to hunt anymore. But you still had to feed the animals, which was ultimately more work than simply feeding yourself. Her species had given up cages long ago.
She tried to stand, and succeeded, though her legs still felt as if the bones had been removed. There was a bowl of water in one corner of the cage. A threat? But when she looked into it, she could see all the way to the bottom, and there was nothing waiting to attack her. She slipped her tongue into it, gingerly at first, then more eagerly when the water's soothing trickle eased the dryness in her throat.
When she finished the water, she examined the door to the cage and discovered that it was held shut with a simple latch, which she easily lifted with a curved foreclaw. Maybe it wasn't a cage after all.
Or maybe the creature didn't think she was smart enough to understand the latch. For the first time since it had overpowered her with its shiny weapon, she felt a glimmer of hope. It might have captured her, but it didn't know any more about her than she knew about it.
Her cage sat atop a flat slab along one wall of an unusually regular cavern. Other cages stood next to hers, and as she looked at the creatures inside them she recognized a bnat, a grith, two sniks, and a nona. They were all looking at her; the bnath and the sniks hungrily, the grith and nona in fear.
At the other end of the slab from the cages were clusters of tools. She recognized hardly any of them, but one triggered a memory. If a spark-stone were flaked just so, and bound to a shaft so smoothly that neither the seam nor the binding could be seen, and if the whole thing were coated with the silvery substance her captors seemed to love so well, then it would look like the edged weapon that lay on a soft and impossibly white skin before her.
She picked it up, gauging its heft. It was not balanced well for throwing, but the sharp edge ran a quarter of its length. A knife rather than a spear, which meant close-in fighting, but it would have to do.
She tested it on the nona. The blade sank into its neck with surprising ease. When it finished thrashing, she opened its cage and ate it while the other captives watched hungrily. She considered eating one of the sniks as well, but she might need to conserve her food supply until she could make her escape.
She examined t
he cavern for a good spot to wait in ambush. She was too small to overpower the creature that had captured her; she would have to take it by surprise. Instinct couldn't tell her exactly where its vulnerable sites were, but the neck was usually a good bet on most animals, which meant she needed to climb something it would walk past.
The cavern was filled with such somethings. It was practically stuffed with unintelligible things, enough of them to make her doubt her development. How could there be so many things her mind didn't recognize? Had no ancestors of hers ever survived an encounter with these creatures? If even one had lived to breed, she would know of it. Their memories would be hers, passed along in the ever-growing chain of knowledge that made her who she was.
Despair weighed her down like the force inside the bag. This was hopeless. But the alternative was to wait in her cage until her captor grew hungry. If she was to die, she might as well die trying to escape.
She surveyed the cavern for choke points the creature would have to pass on its way to her cage, and suddenly realized that the entire cavern was another cage. It had only one opening, sealed at the moment by a flat slab of the same stuff everything else was made of.
That would be the best spot, then. Wait for it to enter, kill it, and make her escape while the entrance was still open. Her legs felt usable again, if not back to full strength, so she dropped to the ground, landing on three legs so as not to damage her knife, and moved silently across the smooth, cold surface to the tall assembly of niches and slabs that stood next to the entrance. In a real cavern, this would be a food cache, but she could recognize nothing edible among the hard-edged mysteries wedged into the niches.
She climbed awkwardly up the outer edges of the slabs until she reached the top. This would be just about the height of the creature's head. Perfect. She shoved two transparent somethings aside to make space for herself, but she misjudged her returning strength and they toppled over the edge, shattering loudly on the ground. If the creature heard that, it would know she was awake.
Analog SFF, January-February 2008 Page 28
