by William Tenn
“I can see they keep you hopping,” Hogan Shlestertrap observed. “But how does a nzred get born if you aren’t in this chain thing?”
“A nzred is outside a chain, yet inside it as well. The six sexes which transmit gametes to each other directly form a chain; a chain plus a nzred equals a family. The nzred, in his personal reproductive functions, fits himself at any point in the chain which the exigencies of the situation seem to demand. He may receive the sextuple super-gamete from the tkan and transmit the original single gamete to the guur, he may be between the flin and blap, the blap and srob, whatever is required. For example, in the Season of Twelve Hurricanes, the tkan is unable to fly and pursue his reproductive relationship with the guur wherever it has rooted itself: the nzred fills what would be a gap in the chain. This is rather difficult to express in an unfamiliar language—the biologists of the first expedition found this process slightly more complicated than the mitoses of the fertilized Plookh cell, but—”
“Hold it,” Hogan commanded. “I have an ounce of sanity left, and I might want to use it to blow my brains out. I am no longer slightly interested in how a nzred weaves in and out of this crazy reproductive dance, and I certainly don’t want to hear about your mitosis. I have troubles of my own, and they grow nastier every second. Tell me this: how many offspring does a sex have each cycle?”
“That depends on all parents being alive throughout, on the amount of unhatched eggs due to over-variation in particular cases—”
“OK! At the end of a perfect cycle—when the smoke clears—how many baby plookhs do you have all told?”
“Plookhh. We have forty-nine young.”
He rested his head on the back of the chair. “Not very many, considering how fast you seem to go out of this world.”
“True. Dismally true. But a parent is unable to hatch more than seven eggs in the conditions under which we live, and completely unable to rear more than seven young so that all will get the full benefit of his survival-knowledge. This is for the best.”
“I guess so.” He removed a pointed instrument from his garment and a sheet of white material. After a while, I recognized his actions from nzred fanobrel’s description. “In just a moment,” he said, while writing, “I’m going to have you shown into the projection room where you’ll see a recent stereo employing human performers. Not too good a stereo: colossal in a very minor way; but it’ll give you an idea of what I’ll be doing for your people in the line of culture. While you see it, figure out ways to help me on a story. Now, is this Gogarty’s description of your chromosome pattern after the parent germ-cell has undergone meiosis?” He extended the sheet under my sensory tentacles:
“Quite correct,” I said, marveling at the superiority of these written symbols to those we are still forced to scratch in sand or mud.
“Good enough.” He wrote further upon the sheet. “Now, which of your sexes is male and which female? I notice you say ‘he’ and—”
I was forced to interrupt him. “I only use those designations because of the deficiencies or limitations of English. I understand what a wonderful speech it is and how, when you came to construct it, you saw no reason to consider the Plookhh. Nonetheless, you have no pronouns for tkan or guur or blap. We are all male in relation to each other, in the sense that we transmit the fertilizing gametes; we are also female, in the sense that we hatch the developed zygote. Then again—”
“Slow down, boy, slow down. I have to work a story out of this, and you’re not doing me any good at all. Here’s a picture of your family—right?” He held the sheet out once more.
“Yes. Only your picture of the nzred is not exactly—”
“Listen, Pierre,” he growled, “I’ll call it the way I see it. And that’s the way I see it. A love-story, now, let me think…”
I waited while he cerebrated upon this strange thing called a story which was essential to the making of a stereo, which, in turn, was essential to our beginning upon culture and civilization. Soon, soon, we would have dwellings like this powerful one in which I sat, we would have tubular weapons like that the robot had used when I entered—
“How would this be?” he asked suddenly. “Understand, this isn’t the finished product—I’m just working off the cuff, just trying it on for size. Srob meets mlenb, tkan loses guur, flin gets blap. How’s it sound? Only one I can’t fit in is the nzred.”
“I coordinate.”
“Yeah, you coordinate. That would make it, srob meets—Ah, shaddap! All you’re supposed to do is say ‘yes’ once in a while.” He murmured a few words to the robot who moved over to my chair. “Bronzo will take you to the projection room now. I’ll think some more.”
Tumbling painfully to the floor, I prepared to follow the robot.
“A love story is going to be tough,” Shlestertrap mused behind me. “I can see that right now. Like three-dimensional chess with all pawns wild and the queen operating in and out of hyperspace. Wonder if these potato sprouts have a religion. A nice, pious little stereo every once in a while—Hey! Got a religion?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What is it? I mean what do you believe in, generally speaking? Simple terms: we can save the philosophy for later.”
After the lapse of an interval which I felt I could approximate as a “while,” I said again, very cautiously: “Yes.”
“Huh? Cut the comedy on this lot, if you know what’s good for you. Just because I told you not to disagree with me when I’m thinking out loud—No sloppy gags when I ask you a direct question!”
I apologized and tried to explain my seeming impudence in terms of the simple conditions under which we Plookhh live. After all, when a tkan flies in frantically to warn a family that a pack of strinth are ravening in its direction, no one thinks to take the message in other than its most literal form. Communication, for us, is basically a means of passing along information essential to survival: it must be explicit and definitive.
Human speech, however, being the product of a civilized race, is a tree bearing many different fruits. And, as we have discovered to our sorrow, it is not always easy to find the one intended to be edible. For example, this mind-corroding intangible that they call a pun—
Shlestertrap waved my explanations back at me. “So you’re sorry and I forgive you. Meanwhile, what’s your belief about a life after death?”
“We don’t exactly have a belief,” I explained slowly, “since no Plookh has returned after death to assure us of the possibilities ahead. However, because of the difficulties we experience in the one life we know and its somewhat irritating shortness of duration—we like to think we have at least one additional existence. Thus, we have not so much a Belief as a Hope.”
“For an animal without lungs, you sure are long-winded. What’s your Hope, then?”
“That after death we emerge into a vast land of small seas, marshes and mountains. That throughout this land are the pink weeds we find so succulent. That, in every direction as far as an optical organ can see, there are nothing but Plookhh.”
“And?”
“Nothing else. That is our Hope: to arrive sometime, in this life or the next, in a land where there are nothing but Plookhh. Plookhh, you understand, are the only creatures who we are certain do not eat Plookhh. We feel we could be very happy alone.”
“Not enough there to make a one-shot quickie. If only you believed in a god who demanded living Plookhh sacrifices—but I guess your lives are complicated enough. Go and see the stereo. I’ll work out something.”
In the projection room, I twisted up into a chair the robot pushed forward and watched him and his mates insert shiny colored strips into five long, mlenb-shaped objects attached to the walls and ceiling. Naturally, I have learned since that the human terms are “film” and “projector,” respectively, but, at that time, everything was new and strange and wonderful; I was all optical tentacles and audal knobs.
The sheer quantity of things that humans possess! Their recording methods are
so plentiful and varied—books, stereos, pencil-paper, to name but a few—that I am convinced their memories are largely outgrown evolutionary characteristics which, already atrophying, will be supplanted shortly by some method of keying recording apparatus directly to the thinking process. They have no need of carrying Books of Numbers in their minds, of memorizing individually some nine thousand years of racial history, of continually revising the conclusions drawn from an ancient incident to conform with the exigencies of a current one. Contemplation of their magnificent potentialities almost dissolves my ego.
Abruptly, the room darkened and a tiny spot of white expanded into the full-color, full-sound, full-olfactory and slightly tactile projection we have come to know so well. For some reason, the humans who make these stereos neglect almost completely the senses of taste, brotch, pressure and griggo—although the olfactory appeal stimulates an approximation of taste and an alert individual may brotch satisfactorily during an emotional sequence. The full-color—yes: it should be obvious that humans use only three primaries instead of the existing nine because they consider it a civilized simplicity; the very drabness of the combinations of blue, red and yellow, I believe, is a self-imposed limitation instituted as a challenge to their technicians.
As the human figures came to seeming life before me, I began to understand what Hogan Shlestertrap had meant by a “story.” A story is the history of one or more individuals in a specific cultural matrix. I wondered then just how Shlestertrap would derive a story from the meager life of a Plookh; he had known so few of us. I did not know of the wonderful human sense of imagination.
This story, that I saw on that awesome first day of our civilization, was about their two sexes. One representative of each sex (a man, Louis Trescott—and a girl, Bettina Bramwell) figured as the protagonists of the film.
The story concerned the efforts of Bettina Bramwell and Louis Trescott to get together and lay an egg. Many and complex were the difficulties this pair faced, but, at last, having overcome every obstacle, they were united and ready to reproduce.
Through some oversight, the story ended before the actual egg-laying; there was definite assurance, however, that the process would be under way shortly.
Thus, the first stereo I had ever seen. The colors sharpened in company with the sound of this obscure business called music, then all faded and disappeared. The lights returned to the room and the robots attended to the projectors. I went back to Shlestertrap, quivering with new knowledge.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s good. It’s good enough, considering the budget. Now, look, I have an idea for a stereo. It’s got to jell and whatnot, but meanwhile it’s an idea. What’s the animal you bugs are most afraid of?”
“Well, in the Season of Twelve Hurricanes, the strinth and sucking ivy do a large amount of damage to our race. In the other hurricane seasons—which are the worst for us, after all—the tricephalops, brinosaurs or gridniks—”
“Don’t tell me all your troubles. Put it this way: which animal are you afraid of most right now?”
I considered lengthily. Ordinarily, the question would have given me thought material for two days; but The Great Civilizer was shifting from foot to foot and I griggoed his impatience. A decision was necessary; this may have been my mistake, my offspring, but remember we might never have received any of the benefits of civilization if I had taken more time to determine which creature was eating most of us at that season.
“The great spotted snakes. Of course, it is feared only by the nzredd, mlenbb, flinn and blapp. At this time, guurr are eaten principally by tricephalops, while srobb—”
“All right. Spotted snakes. Now let’s go to the observation corridor and you point one out to me.”
In the room where I had entered the dome, I extended my optical tentacles toward the transparent roof.
“There, almost directly above me. The animal which has half swallowed a dodle and is being attacked by gridniks and sucking ivy.”
Shlestertrap faced upwards and shivered. At the sight of us, the creatures scrabbled even more frantically on the dome’s structure, continuing to eat whatever they had been eating when we entered. The sucking ivy dragged the great spotted snake away.
“What a place,” Shlestertrap muttered. “A guy could make a fortune here with an anti-vacation resort. ‘Come to this home away from home and learn to giggle at your nightmares. All kinds of dishes served, including you. Be a guest of the best digestions. Everybody to his taste and a taste to fit everybody.’ ”
I waited, while his human mind explored concepts beyond my primeval grasp.
“OK. So that was a great spotted snake. I’ll send a crew of robots out to get some shots of one of those babies that we can process into the stereo. Meanwhile, what about the cast?”
“Cast?” I fumbled. “How—what kind of cast do you mean?”
“Actors. Characters. Course I understand that none of you have any experience, even in stock, but I’ll treat this like a De Mille documentary. I’ll need a representative of each one of your sexes—the best in its line. You should be able to dredge them up with beauty contests or whatever you use. Just so I get seven of you—all different.”
“These can be obtained through the chiefs of the various sexes. The nzred tinoslep will be the new nzred nzredd and a replacement for the mlenb mlenbb should have been chosen if enough mlenbb dared to congregate in the marshes. And this is all we need to do to take the first movement toward civilization?”
“Absolutely all. I’ll write the first story for you—it’s only mildly magnificent right now, but I’ll have plenty of time to work it up into something better.”
“Then I may leave.”
He called for a robot who entered and motioned me in front of a machine much like a stereo projector.
“Sorry I can’t send a robot to protect you down the mountain, but we’re only half unpacked and I’ll need all of them around for a day or two. All I have here are Government Standard Models, see; and you can’t get any high-speed work out of those babies. To think that I used to have eighteen Frictionless Frenzies just to clean up around the house! Oh well, a sick trance isn’t glorious Mondays.”
Admitting the justice of this obscure allusion, I tried to reassure him. “If I am eaten, there are at least three nzredd who can replace me. It is only necessary for me to get far enough down the mountain to meet a living Plookh and inform him of your—your character requirements.”
“Good,” he told me heartily. “And I’m pretty sure I can play ball with any of your people who speak English fairly well. That sews up that: I’d hate to leave my stuff lying around in crates any longer than I have to. Dentface, throw a little extra juice into that beam so the kid here can get a big head start. And, once you get him out, quick-quick turn the dome back on fast, or we’ll have half the empty stomachs on Venus inside trying to work us into their ulcers.”
The robot called Dentface depressed a lever on the beam projector. Just as I had turned wistfully toward it in the hope that my meager mentality could somehow preserve an impression of the mechanism that would enable us to adapt it to our pressing needs, I was carried swiftly through a suddenly opened section of the dome and deposited halfway down the mountain. The opening, I observed as I got to my tentacles and rolled away from a creeper of sucking ivy, was actually an area of the dome that had temporarily ceased to exist.
I was unable to reflect further upon this matter because of the various lunges, snaps and grabs that were made at me from several directions. As I twisted and scudded down the tenth highest mountain, I deeply regretted Hogan Shlestertrap’s need of the robots for unpacking purposes.
This, my children, was the occasion on which I lost my circular tentacle. A tricephalops, it was—or possibly a large dodle.
Near the marsh, I observed that my remaining pursuer, a green shata, had been caught by a swarm of gridniks. Accordingly, I rested in the shadow of a giant fern.
A scrabbling noise above me barely gave m
e time to stiffen my helical tentacle for a spring, when I recognized its source as the blap koreon. Peering from the lowest fan-leaf, he called softly: “The nzred shafalon has come from the dwelling of the human who was to give us many and mighty weapons, yet still I see him fleeing from empty bellies like the veriest morsel of a Plookh.”
“And soon you will see him mocking all the beasts of prey from the safety of a dome where he and his kind live in thoughtful comfort,” I replied with some importance. “I am to aid the human Shlestertrap of Hollywood California U.S.A. Earth in the making of a stereo for our race.”
The blap loosed his hold on the immense leaf and dropped to the ground beside me. “A stereo? Is it small or large? How many great spotted snakes can it destroy? Will we be able to make them ourselves?”
“We will be able to make them ourselves in time, but they will destroy no great spotted snakes for us. A stereo, my impatient wayfarer upon branches, is a cultural necessity without which, it seems, a race must wander forever in ignoble and fearful darkness. With stereos as models, we may progress irresistibly to that high control of our environment in which humanity exults on Earth. But enough of this munching the husk—our sex-chiefs must conduct Beauty Contests to select characters for the first Plookh stereo. Where is the blap blapp?”
