The Flavors of Other Worlds

by Alan Dean Foster

  That would have been the end of it, save for the ever audacious Sasmita. Crouching, she lightly gripped a strand and ran her hand slowly up the thick black filament. The higher her hand rose, the higher in pitch the moan the strand generated. Other filaments nearby began moaning in concert.

  “Too weird.” Cooper started retreating back the way they had come. “I don’t know what this room’s function is and I’m not sure I care to know, but I do know that I’m not going to try and push my way across it. Let’s go back.” This time not even Sasmita argued with her recommendation.

  Returning to the chamber of the ovoids, they selected another corridor and started down it. Glancing at his chronometer readout, Oldman figured that they could check out another chamber or two before they would have to stop for food and sleep. He would post a rotating watch. Just because nothing inimical had manifested itself did not mean that nothing ever would. As there was no precedent for their exploratory trek, he would have to make one up as they went along.

  On the second day, their soothing alien rugs still cuddled around them, they found a chamber filled with globs of floating golden oil that were in constant motion, another whose scalloped walls heaved disconcertingly like a giant bellows, and another in which a cluster of thousands of fist-sized devices constantly formed and re-formed machines that flared to life for a few moments before collapsing beneath the significance of their own exertions.

  Then they found the chamber whose contents intimidated Oldman, and put a damper even on Sasmita’s nonstop stream of jokes and sarcasm.

  Looming above them, tapering at one end but not to a point as it penetrated the far wall, the massive structure was wrapped in bands and tubes of dark metal interwoven with glistening bolts of metallic glass. A somber Bannerjee scanned the intimidating mass.

  “More strange alloys. A lot of beryllium.” His gaze rose from his scanner. “Not to anthropomorphize overmuch, but it looks like a gun.”

  “A really big gun,” added Sasmita, without the slightest suggestion of humor.

  They walked around it: a walk that took some time. There might have been places for several individuals to sit within the device, or they might simply have been odd-shaped depressions. Oldman didn’t wish to experiment by trying one out. The technology on display was far more multifaceted than anything they had encountered in any of the other chambers, and far more threatening in appearance. He struggled to stay positive.

  “It might not be a weapon. Based on what we’ve encountered and interacted with here so far, its purpose might be something else entirely. Something we can’t even imagine.”

  “Yeah,” Cooper muttered. “Like blowing up entire worlds.”

  “A civilized species wouldn’t go around blowing up habitable worlds.” Bannerjee spoke with the confidence of necessity. “They’re not that common.”

  “How do we know?” she shot back. The delight, even amusement, they had experienced in the course of their previous discoveries within the artifact now vanished in the face of this enormous implied threat. “We don’t know anything about what a sentience longer lived than ours might think, or want, or believe.” Her gaze rose upward, tracking the long, tapering, ominous-looking apparatus. “What if this isn’t the only one on this artifact? What if it is a gun and there are more?” Her eyes met Oldman’s as she voiced what everyone was now thinking. “What—if this is a warship?”

  He swallowed hard. “Whatever it is, except for the activation of automated entry and internal illumination, the artifact itself has been thoroughly quiescent.”

  “How can we be sure of that?” Bannerjee said quietly. “While we’re studying and learning about its contents, maybe it’s studying and learning about us.”

  Oldman chose to ignore a question he couldn’t answer. “We’ll finish up today’s twelve hours, sleep again, and start back. Maybe we’ll find some answers.”

  They didn’t find any answers. But they did find the crew.

  They were in the last chamber they had time to explore. Had Oldman opted for an earlier start back they would have missed them. But they had time to visit one more room. What they found stopped them cold.

  In the center of the weakly-lit chamber loomed a bulky, softly glowing cylinder. Dozens of conduits filled with light lines, intermittent cables that were half solid and half composed of pure, tightly focused light, and strands of solid material fanned out from its base like colorful tentacles. At the tip of each tentacle was a tear-drop shaped pod: the bottom half opaque, the top half transparent. Within each pod was an alien.

  They were neither ugly nor attractive as much as they were bizarre. Gazing at the nearest, Oldman could not decide if the lower half of the three-meter long being was reflective attire of some kind or part of the creature’s body. The upper portion was more straightforward. Five flexible limbs indicating a decidedly non-symmetrical body design lay flat against the creature’s rounded, rubbery-looking flanks. There was no neck. The body tapered slightly before expanding into a smooth, triangular skull marked by several dark depressions that might be ears. Several larger ones might be eyes, Bannerjee opined, though there was no suggestion of lids, irises, corneas, or anything resembling a human eye. The function of a trio of odd appendages that protruded from the crest of the triangle could not be ascertained.

  “Our first contact with a true higher intelligence,” Cooper whispered, “and they’re all asleep.”

  “For now.” Sasmita was studying the lower half of the pod. “What if we wake one of them up?”

  “Are you insane?” Cooper gaped at her, wide-eyed. “Why the hell would we want to do that?”

  “Because,” her colleague persisted, “it’s first contact. Forget the money to be made from exploiting what we’ve already discovered.” She gave the rug that covered her back a meaningful tug. “As first contactees we’d be famous beyond imagining. Rich and famous.” Her sarcasm returned. “Tell me that possibility doesn’t appeal to you.”

  “Of course it’s appealing.” Oldman’s attention remained riveted on the alien. “If not for the gun.”

  Sasmita pleaded. “We don’t know it’s a gun. For all we know it might be a device for manufacturing and distributing alien candy!”

  Bannerjee was shaking his head slowly. “It didn’t have the look of a candy machine.”

  “How the hell do you know what an alien candy manufacturing device might look like? We don’t know anything!”

  “That’s exactly right.” Oldman nodded in sober agreement. “We don’t know anything. The big question is: do we keep it that way?” He eyed each of them in turn. “We’re not contact specialists. We’re geologists. We should head straight home, report what we’ve seen, and let the experts take over. Money or no money.”

  “That’s a phrase that’ll never pass my lips.” Sasmita was in full combative mode now. A handwave took in their surroundings. “What if this relic moves, automatically or otherwise, before an expedition of exploration can return? Chances of encountering it again would likely be nil. No, I’m at least going to take a few things with me. This make-you-feel-good rug, for sure.”

  Oldman demurred. “No souvenirs. No matter how harmless they seem. Maybe the rugs are as benign as they appear. But maybe they’re dangerous, or the ozone-generator is dangerous, and the gun-edifice is the benevolent component of this ship. I do think we can call it a ship, now. As to its purpose, its true function, none of us can say. It might be a storage vessel, parked here until it needs recalling. It might be an uncomplicated transport in sleep mode. It might have a main function we can’t descry.” His attention fell on Bannerjee. “And yes, it might be a warship. One constructed and placed here for defense, against what we also cannot imagine. Or for offense, should the opportunity present itself.”

  It was silent for a long moment until Sasmita spoke again. “I still say we should wake up one of the crew and ask it.”

  Oldman smiled thinly. “If only it were that simple. Assuming we can find a way to rouse one of
the aliens, what’s to ensure that we don’t simultaneously awaken all the others? We can’t begin to imagine their response. They might be grateful. They might prove hostile. They might be utterly indifferent to our presence.”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t ask,” she replied impatiently.

  “And we’re not going to ask, even if we knew how to communicate with them.” He turned. “Back to the ship. Now. Touch nothing, take nothing.”

  Sasmita rushed to block his path. “Will, you can’t do this! It’s the discovery of the millennium, of the age! If it’s not here when a follow-up team comes looking for it and all we take back with us are recordings, we’ll be vilified!”

  “Not necessarily,” Bannerjee argued. “Many will agree with the commander’s point of view. Quite likely even the majority.”

  She whirled on him. “You don’t care? You’re willing to forgo this, all this, and return to the life of a paid flunky, scanning stratigraphy and boiling pebbles to see if they’re worth anything?”

  Bannerjee drew himself up. “I am content with my flunkiness, thank you, and more than willing to give up one very possible consequence.” His own gaze narrowed as he glared back at her. “That of being one of the quartet that revealed the existence of humankind to an advanced and hostile alien species.”

  “But we don’t know,” she insisted. “And if this artifact shifts its location after we leave, we’ll never know! The promise, the prospects, can’t simply be ignored in favor of …!” Whirling, she threw herself at the nearby pod, hands outstretched, reaching for a pair of grooves that ran along one side. Mere physical contact might be enough, and the grooves were the nearest thing to a visible control and …

  Oldman didn’t have time enough to yell “Stop her!” before Cooper made a flying tackle. Before Sasmita could break free, the two men had joined Cooper in restraining the smallest member of the crew. That didn’t keep Sasmita from continuing to struggle as they wrestled her out of the chamber and back up the nearest corridor. As they did so, her rug fluttered and twisted, clearly upset that it was unable to calm her.

  The rugs left them near the entrance to the chamber of the ozone-generating bubbles, dropping away one by one to flutter back in the direction of the ovoid room. When Oldman’s detached from his shoulders, he experienced a moment of nausea whose aftereffects lingered. Then he realized what he was feeling was not a consequence of the rug’s departure, but his normal state of being. The pang of regret at having to leave the benevolent rug behind was greatly multiplied by the realization that he likely would never experience such a feeling of general physical well-being ever again. He forced himself to march on, helping to control the still-objecting Sasmita.

  Once back on the ship she settled down, but she wouldn’t speak to any of them, wouldn’t even ladle epithets on Cooper, her favorite target. Sasmita slumped, and pouted, and finally gave in, returning to her station as soon as they made the jump. That programmed distortion of the cosmos added a thump of finality to Oldman’s decision. They were on their way home.

  Had he made the right choice? The uncertainty troubled him all the way through the jump. He knew it would haunt him for the rest of his life. What if Sasmita’s concerns were correct and the alien vessel moved before qualified explorers could return to deal with it? And if it was still there, what would be their own decisions? Surely they would weigh on them no less than they had on him. Would establishing contact with the aliens result in a flood of miraculous shared technology and social development … or the initiation of hostilities possibly ending in one species’ extinction?

  Waking the aliens might propagate paradise.

  Waking the aliens might result in war.

  He did not know about the aliens, could not begin to imagine their thought processes, but he knew that for a human, at least, the hardest thing to do was to confront a question and fear never being able to learn the answer.

  When it came to decisions of cosmic import, he knew, to questions of war and peace, deciding not to know was the toughest decision of all.

  12

  Ten and Ten

  The most common question writers get asked is, “Where do you get your ideas?”

  I was scuba diving with a dozen others on the north coast of Papua New Guinea. When I’m diving and the conditions are safe, I like to mosey off by myself. I was at about thirty feet on a bright sunny day, closely inspecting the coral for interesting small critters, when I happened to look up. Maybe five feet in front of me hovered a four-foot long giant Pacific cuttlefish, its lateral fins rippling balletically. It was staring at me, out of eyes as alien as anything in a Hal Clement story. So—I hovered and stared back. This went on for a good ten minutes, in dead silence except for my bubbles.

  After this passage of time I happened to glance up. A second cuttlefish was hovering higher up and nearly above us. A moment later two divers came swimming over the top of the reef. The cuttlefish near them immediately went entirely white, whiter than the paper you are reading this on. As it did so, the one in front of me, which until then had been a mottled gray, also went white. The two cephalopods were communicating. With color.

  So now you know how to say “danger,” or maybe “watch out!” or possibly “look at the funny bipeds” in cuttlefish. Just go white.

  It is also why to this day I can’t eat squid, or octopus, or color forbid, cuttlefish.

  * * *

  She had named him Vegas. As they continued to stare at one another, he reminded her why.

  Claire could think of no particular reason why he suddenly decided to begin flashing, replacing the normal russet-orange coloration of his cylindrical body with streaming bands of electric blue and gold in an effortless dazzling display that would have put the most expensive neon sign to shame. He was not doing so to try and hypnotize her the way he would a prospective meal. At five feet long but only twenty-five pounds, he was incapable of taking on a fully-grown human female. Nor was she his natural prey.

  After a minute or so the chromatophoric strobing ceased and he reverted to his much duller everyday hue. Had he been trying to say something? Had he been trying to communicate? She had spent six months and three university grants trying to answer that exact question. Not for the first time, she sighed into her face mask.

  Vegas was a giant Pacific cuttlefish and maddeningly unforthcoming.

  Below and around them the pristine coral reefs of Blupblup island carouseled with fish. The majority were common tropicals: purple anthias, striped angelfish, exquisitely-tinted parrotfish, jewel-like boxfish. In color and shade they outdid the magnificently painted corals themselves. The reef was a riot of shattered rainbow, fragments of living stained glass in constant motion, Nature’s palette at its most diverse and dramatic.

  It’s easy to get to Blupblup, she’d told the slack-jawed back home whenever they asked where she was working. Go to Karkar and turn left at Bagabag. The human population on this part of the north coast of Papua New Guinea was small and scattered, and there was no commercial fishing. A perfect location for the underwater research station. Support personnel excepted, all of whom were contracted for long hauls, the majority of the researchers came and went for one- or two-month stays. Now in her sixth month, she was considered obsessed by her peers. Though she preferred “passionate,” she did not deny their allegations.

  And to think it had all started with counting fingers.

  She had ten. A cuttlefish had ten. No one argued that cuttlefish, especially the larger species, carried out a form of basic communication via color and pattern changes in their remarkable skin. Could these cephalopods, representatives along with squid and octopi and the chambered nautilus, be taught to communicate using their flexible limbs? Ten and ten, she had repeated to herself hundreds of times as a grad student at university. A digital coincidence worth following up.

  So here she was, recipient of a reluctant third consecutive grant, trying to teach a giant Pacific cuttlefish named Vegas the most basic gestures of st
andardized American sign language. Who better than she? Who else boasted a degree in oceanography from Scripps and had been stone deaf until the age of twelve, when technology and surgery had combined to restore a little more than half her hearing?

  It was more than a bit ironic, she knew, that her subject could probably hear better than she could.

  She had counted it a success when Vegas continued to tolerate her, though that hardly constituted any kind of breakthrough. Cuttlefish were frequently territorial. He might well have continued to hang around this part of the reef no matter who came to visit. It was difficult not to anthropomorphize him a little. His kind were such curious creatures. As she maintained her body in horizontal position a yard or so above the reef, it troubled him not at all to hover a few feet in front of her mask, gazing back at her out of eyes that were as beautiful as they were complex. She would waggle her fingers at him, spending weeks striving to get him to recognize and reproduce the word for “hello.” Just “hello.” And when her dive computer eventually signaled that it was time for her to return to the research station, she would give him the sign for farewell.

  Those ten tentacles moved lazily in the water, but they never twisted into any kind of shape resembling the two words on which she focused.

  Time, she felt. All she needed was time. The grants might stop at any moment, especially if she could not report real progress. Complicating her efforts was that Sepia apama did not live longer than two years. It was immensely frustrating. You couldn’t expect a two-year old human to learn sign language. Yet here she was expecting more from one of the most bizarre-looking creatures in the sea.