Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She held the knife out, ready to swing it at the first thing to enter, and she didn't have to wait long. She heard footsteps, then the creature's voice. It paused at the entrance, then the slab that blocked the opening slid aside and the creature stepped inside.

  She was already lunging with the knife when she realized her mistake. This was the wrong creature. This one was shorter than the other one. The knife merely slid through the golden hair atop its head, slicing a wide swath of it loose, and the lack of resistance sent her tumbling off her perch.

  She grabbed at the short creature's head and managed to grip some of its remaining hair in her forepaw, and she swung there like a climber on a vine in a windstorm while the creature shrieked “Get it off, get it off!” and flailed with its arms and backed out of the cavern.

  The other creature was just outside, already reaching for its numbing weapon. There was no way she could kill this one in time to attack the other before it weakened her again. Instinct chose her next action: she wrapped her hindlegs around the smaller creature's neck, stuck the tip of the knife against a soft spot at the base of its skull, and snarled the short, blunt word that meant “Stop!” to every creature in the world.

  These two both froze. Then the big one said, “Holy shit, it's intelligent.”

  “I don't care what it is, get it off me!” said the other. It was the voice that had been speaking into the big one's ear before.

  “It's got a scalpel. Don't do anything sudden. You too, little guy. Relax. We're not going to hurt you.”

  It was speaking to her, that much was obvious, but its words were garbled. Both of these creatures spoke a language that wasn't in her ancestral memory. But that was impossible. Surely, sometime during the evolution of their language, someone would have learned it and escaped. Even if the language evolved further afterward, some of the words would be understandable.

  Its intent was clear enough. It meant to keep her from killing its mate until they could overpower her. She couldn't give them time enough to make a plan. She tightened her grip on the smaller one's neck and said, “Take me out of here,” jerking her head sideways to emphasize her words in case these new creatures couldn't understand her, either.

  “We're sorry,” the big one said. “We really didn't know.” Its voice sounded conciliatory, but she barked “Stop!” again and it shut up. It could be conspiring with the other one in their private language.

  “Move,” she said, jerking her head sideways again. She would have pointed, but she couldn't lower the knife, and she didn't want to risk letting go with her other paw, either. They had to know what she wanted anyway; what else could a former captive with a knife want?

  The big one backed away, and the small one moved after it, carrying her on its shoulders. They moved down a narrow passage, turned left at a fork, and started climbing a set of regularly spaced ledges. As they climbed, she realized that she was getting lighter. It felt as if she were slowly being immersed in water until she floated, but there was no water, and none of the hungry creatures that lived there.

  She dug into the smaller creature's loose skin with her claws and held the knife against its neck. At the top of the ledges, her weight was entirely gone, and the creatures floated into another cavern where finally a familiar sight greeted her. It was only recently familiar, but the silver egg resting in the center of the cavern was a relief after so many unknowns.

  The big creature pointed at the egg. “You've got to get back in there if we're going to take you home.”

  Perhaps to illustrate what it meant, it climbed inside and pushed itself downward until it sat in a close-fitting niche surrounded with blinking lights and various protrusions. It patted the artificial ground beside it, a clear invitation for her to join it.

  Should she do it? Could she do it? There was no room for the second creature inside the egg. She would have to let it go if she were to climb inside with the big one. She gauged the distance between them and prepared to leap, but in her momentary distraction she had forgotten that the creature she held hostage was not tied. While her attention was on the other one, it simply reached up and snatched the knife from her paw.

  She leaped before the little one could use the knife. The big one yelped and grabbed for its numbing weapon, but she bit its forepaw, crunching down until she felt bones break, and snatched up the weapon when it spun away from the creature's grasp.

  She had seen how the weapon worked. Grab it here, put a claw here, and squeeze. She aimed it at the lower half of the big creature and tried it, and was gratified to see its legs slacken.

  She clutched the big creature's shoulder and held the end of the weapon to the side of its head. “Take me home,” she said, but the creature was yowling and paying more attention to its broken forepaw than to her.

  The smaller one advanced with the knife, but she growled “Stop!” at it and it paused, its eyes shifting to her and then back to the other creature.

  The big creature bent forward to cradle its wounded paw against its belly. A normal enough response to injury, but it could easily have another weapon tucked away, too. She slapped its paw with her tail, and when it flailed outward in pain, she shot the paw with the numbing weapon.

  “There,” she said. “Now it doesn't hurt.”

  The big creature looked at its paw, then at her, then at its paw again. It let out a long breath and said, “This guy's scary fast, mentally as well as physically. We really don't want a bunch of them pissed off at us.”

  “You can't fly like that!” the smaller one said.

  “It's all right,” the big one replied. “The landing site's programmed in. I'll drop it off and be right back. Get the docbox ready for surgery.”

  She let them have their parting words, whatever they meant. It didn't matter now. She held the big creature's weapon. If either of them tried anything, she would weaken them both with it and eat one of them while the other watched.

  They seemed to understand the situation. The small one lowered the knife and floated back. The big one said, “Okay, little buddy, don't panic when the door closes,” and it reached slowly forward with its good paw to touch one of the raised bumps on the shelf before it.

  The egg sealed itself with a piece of shell that slid down from above. The interior grew darker, but light still streamed in through the clear part of the egg in front of the creature.

  “Are you out of the docking bay?” it said, and the smaller one's voice said in its ear, “Clear. Be careful.”

  It touched more of the bumps before it, and the wall of the cavern slid aside just beyond the egg. Outside was an arc of brilliant white cloud, swirled like foam in an eddy, with a sharp line dividing it from blackest black above.

  The egg lurched, then slid out of the cavern into the darkness. It tipped until more cloud was visible, cloud and sky and ocean and ground all mixed together.

  “Beautiful, isn't it?” the creature said. “That's your world.”

  She let it talk, even though she couldn't understand its words, or the sight beyond the egg. She kept her eyes on its paws, watching what it did with the bumps and the blinking lights before it.

  “Get ready for thrust,” it said, and when it pushed one of the bumps, she felt her weight return. She teetered on the creature's shoulder, but wrapped an arm around its neck and held on.

  The clouds and sky and ground grew nearer, and then the egg started to shudder. She heard the sound of wind rushing past, and not long after that the clouds and sky began to separate from the ground and the ocean, and she realized that she had been above them all, and was now descending through the sky to the ground. She had no knowledge of any creature that could fly that high.

  She watched this one's every move. Every time he pushed that bump, the egg veered left. The bump beside it made the egg veer right. Other bumps controlled up and down and forward and back. She committed them all to memory.

  The ground came up toward them, and she saw that they were dropping toward a bay, probably the bay
where she had hatched. After all this, the creature was going to lay the egg on the sand again, and make her climb the cliffs herself.

  “There,” she said, and this time she did risk pointing with the paw that didn't hold the weapon. “Go there.”

  “Yes, that's your home,” the creature said in its unintelligible language.

  “Go there,” she said again, pointing.

  If it understood her, it gave no sign of it. The egg fell onward, past the cliffs, slowing until it came to rest with a soft thump on the narrow strip of sand between ocean and cliff face. But the tide had risen. A wave came in and swirled around the base of the egg.

  “No!” she shouted. “Go up! Up!”

  “It's all right,” the creature said. “You're home.” It pushed another bump and the door slid upward. “Go for it, little guy,” it said.

  She slid off its shoulders, but not toward the door. She pushed herself as far away from it as she could, and put the creature between herself and the opening.

  “It's all right,” the creature said again. “I'm sorry I—”

  It had just time enough to register surprise when the scaly green tentacle reached in through the door and wrapped around its neck, but the tentacle yanked it out through the door so quickly that it never even had a chance to scream.

  She didn't wait for another tentacle. She leaped for the bump that controlled the door and banged her paw on it, then pushed hard on the one that made the egg go up.

  The egg went up. The same mysterious force that had crushed the air out of her last time tried to do it again, but she hit the down bump and it eased off. She looked out the clear side of the egg as the cliff face slid past. When she was well above it, she pushed one of the bumps that made the egg go sideways.

  She had intended to set it down at the top of the cliff, but as she drifted over the forest, she looked beyond the treetops to the mountains where the adults lived. She could bring it down there just as well as here and save herself the walk, and the egg would put her in a much better bargaining position when she got there. With it, she could enlist the adults’ aid in hunting down and killing the rest of these new creatures before they became the dominant species in her world.

  Her world. She remembered the view from above, seeing the whole thing at once. That could explain why she had no foreknowledge of the new creatures. If they actually lived beyond the sky, maybe they had never come here before.

  No matter. If they ever did again, she—or her progeny—would know just what to do.

  Copyright (c) 2007 Jerry Oltion

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  * * *

  Biolog: MIA MOLVRAY

  by Richard A. Lovett

  * * * *

  Mia Molvray is a biologist with an interest in aliens and alien cultures. “I just love world-building,” she says.

  It's an interest that stems from her own background. Born in Australia and educated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she grew up speaking Russian, not learning English until kindergarten. Stints living in Germany and Holland taught her four other languages: German, Dutch, French, and some Italian. Not to mention Latin, which she learned in high school, and Spanish, which she's now absorbing from her Southern California neighborhood.

  “The multi-cultural background I've got seeps in all over the place,” she says of her fiction. “It's sort of automatic.”

  She's also a scientist, who spent years studying the evolutionary biology of terrestrial orchids. Not that there's such a thing as alien orchids. “These live on the ground,” she says. “The others live in trees.”

  Like a lot of Analog writers, she loves the outdoors. “I think slogging through rain and mud is fun,” she says. “If they launched an interstellar probe and were looking for volunteers, I'd sign up in a minute.”

  Before she quit academia to become a full-time writer, her research taught her a great deal about what alien lifeforms might be like.

  For example, she says, some orchids have flowers that, to a male wasp, look remarkably like females. They bloom slightly before the real females appear, drawing “naive” males who spread pollen when they try to mate with the blooms.

  This complex mechanism has evolved at least six separate times on two continents. Its relevance to science fiction? “We're always talking about how, ‘Gee, aliens are going to be weird,'” she says. “But maybe there will be more similarities than we think. Convergent evolution happens all the time, even for very complicated things.”

  Like other biologists, Molvray wants to see more good, biological science fiction. “A lot of hard science fiction writers are physicists,” she says, “and their knowledge of biology is pretty basic.”

  She'd also like to see science fiction—particularly mass-market science fiction like movies and television—make more effort to get the science right. She doesn't buy the excuse that this interferes with the story. “It makes it more believable!” she says.

  “It's the Heinlein vision,” she adds, “that you can use science fiction to make people interested in science. Science fiction could play a tremendous role.”

  Copyright (c) Richard A. Lovett

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  * * *

  Short Story: LOW LIFE

  by MIA MOLVRAY

  Understanding observations always involves assumptions so deep that they may seem unconscious....

  * * * *

  They'll always need plumbers, Mike's dad said. He said it so often, sometimes it seemed like the only thing he'd ever said. When Mike talked about going to college, the answer was, “They'll always need plumbers.” When he went to college, it was the same. But he didn't listen. He wanted to travel, go places nobody had ever seen before. You couldn't do that by fixing toilets.

  College turned out to be too many books, and too few new worlds. He dropped out after two years. He'd barely stepped off the bus with no idea what to do next, when there it came again.

  “They'll always need plumbers.”

  So he gave up and became a plumber.

  “Good choice, son,” said his dad for a change. “Don’ matter where you are, Poughkeepsie or Pluto, you'll have a job.”

  Which was how it happened that when Mike shipped out for a moon of Jupiter, he went as a master plumber. He didn't go looking for new worlds. By that point, he just wanted to leave the old one behind. He almost didn't get the job because his psych profile said his wife had just left him. Personnel was worried about what they called his “stability.” They would have been a lot more worried if they'd known that he'd loved her enough to let her take everything the two of them had, and then she even took his dog. Why else would he be shipping out to Jupiter?

  But the biggest problem with being a plumber was that you had to deal with the same shit everywhere. His boss, for instance.

  “Mike,” she was saying, “ever since you've arrived, we've been having problems with contamination.”

  It didn't help that she had straight, floppy black hair, kind of like his wife—his ex-wife.

  “The Station hired a master plumber,” she continued, “precisely to avoid this kind of problem. We're trying to find native life here on Europa, not E. coli, you know.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “So what's the problem? Why can't you get a handle on this?”

  “I—”

  “I'm not a master plumber, but even I know that there has to be a leak in tertiary treatment somewhere, which is letting contamination through.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Look, are you taking this seriously enough?”

  “I—”

  “It's costing the Station thousands of dollars to sterilize every pint of waste so that we don't contaminate the whole damn moon. By next week, I want to hear that you've found the problem and dealt with it. I'm not having my department be the one hemorrhaging red ink every time the section heads meet.”

  “Ma'am, we should do a full genome scan—”

  “For a couple thousand more
dollars? For dead-common E. coli? Are you nuts?”

  “No, ma'am. It could be a dangerous mutant. It—”

  “Nobody's sick, so it can't be too awful. I am not spending thousands of dollars on a gold-plated study of sewage. And that's final.”

  “Yes, ma'am.”

  A pretty typical talk with a boss, as these things went. He said, “Yes, ma'am,” (or, “sir") and at the end he still had a job. They never seemed to want to know what he thought was wrong, which, given that he was the guy standing in the crap, might be worth knowing.

  Although, this particular time, the only thing he knew was that he didn't actually know anything. Sure, the test strips said it was E. coli. But test strips weren't known for their intelligence. They probed for a tiny segment of DNA, and that was all. They said nothing about how good the match was. They said nothing about all the rest of the DNA. And the rest was obviously very far from normal E. coli because the contamination was worst right after the sterilizer. On Europa, that was a clear-topped tank at the surface, which exposed the Station's water to the hard radiation up there. That killed everything. It even disintegrated the exposed equipment in a matter of months, so it had to be replaced. And yet that was where the test strips showed the contamination.

  Mike was so frustrated nobody wanted to find out what was really happening that he'd even tried looking at a sample under a microscope himself. That didn't cost anything, but it didn't help either. All he could see was that there were rod-shaped bacteria in there. They could be anything. You could never tell much about bacteria by looking at them.

  On the other hand, everybody who did know how to study the damn things, didn't. Nobody came all the way out to Europa to study E. coli, not even if it survived after every bolt and pipe was completely chlorine washed and steam cleaned. As far as everyone else was concerned—"everyone” being his boss—every time the test strips came up positive, all it meant was that Mike was a failure.

  It was lunchtime. He wasn't hungry after that little chat with the boss, but if he didn't eat, he might find himself talking to a counselor. The scientists could skip meals and work late, but plain workers were supposed to lead “balanced” lives or management wanted to know the reason why. His crew was all sitting together at one table in the canteen as usual, since doing anything else meant sitting at a table full of scientists or secretaries. Almost everyone was there. Blond, chubby Jessica; the craggy-faced old guy; and, of course, Artie Ahearn. The guy who'd assumed he was going to be foreman until Mike was hired over him. The one free chair would have to be next to him. He was a gangling, red-haired fellow with, at this point, ketchup all over one side of his mouth.