by Stan Ruecker
“Lucy,” Ray said. “What is this thing?”
“I’m not sure you want to know, Ray.”
“Well, how did you get it away from her?”
“I opened a can of dog food,” Lucy said. “No dog can resist the sound of a can opener.”
“She was born in this ship,” Ray pointed out. “Or, I mean, you. She’s never heard a can opener in her life.”
“Did she drop the leg, or didn’t she?”
“You got me there,” Ray said.
He took a closer look at the iguana leg. It was leathery and mottled and had a sort of elasticity.
“Where does it belong?” Ray asked. “Tell me she didn’t just chew it off something.”
“No,” Lucy said. “She just found it. It goes three doors down, to your left.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what it is?” Ray asked.
“It’s a trophy,” Lucy said. “Somebody left it behind. They were hunting these huge brachiators. The tradition was that you kept a piece of one of the tentacles. Only you got most of the poisonous oils taken out of the skin, first.”
“When you say most of the poisonous oils,” Ray said, “you actually mean all of the poisonous oils, right?”
“I hope she didn’t chew on it for too long.”
“Me too,” Ray said, suddenly uncertain about handling the thing at all. He found the place where the tentacle belonged, and put it back into its clips. By the time he got to the galley, and got his hands washed, Cinnamon’s dish was empty, and she was sleeping happily in Ray’s cabin, curled up on Ray’s blanket.
Ray takes up a musical instrument
For his own lunch, Ray had a curried zucchini soup and fresh bread. He sopped up the last drops and sat back in his chair, then decided to keep himself busy. He got out of the chair and headed down the corridor.
“What would you say,” he said, “to me looking around some more?”
“Sure,” Lucy said. “I don’t mind.”
Ray walked into one of the storage rooms and looked over all the pieces clipped to the first shelf he saw.
“Would it be okay if I asked you about some of the items in your collection?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Lucy said. “I’d be happy to tell you.”
“Then what the heck is this?” Ray asked, holding up a long, whitened bone that had been carved all up and down its length.
“It’s a flute,” Lucy said. “Made out of somebody’s leg.”
“You’re kidding,” Ray said.
“I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that, Ray.”
“Who’d make a flute out of somebody’s leg?”
Now that he looked at it, some of the carving actually camouflaged perforations, like the holes on a flute.
“Cannibals,” Lucy said. “Barbarians.”
“It’s nice,” Ray said, running his hand along the surface. “I’m sorry about the cannibals.”
“They weren’t particularly mean,” Lucy said. “They just ate their enemies, that’s all. And they ate each other, too. The leg bone flute was to comfort the soul of somebody you’ve eaten. You played on it to remind yourself that they were somebody too, and not just your dinner.”
“Weird,” Ray said, but he kept on looking at it.
“Just don’t let the dog get it,” Lucy said. “I’m pretty sure that would be an insult to whoever’s leg it was.”
Cinnamon had gotten her nose suspiciously close to the thing. Ray set it out of her reach and scratched behind her ears instead.
“How did you wind up with it?” Ray asked.
“I found it,” Lucy said. “It was lost in a skirmish between two tribes, and there was no way for me to figure out who it’d belonged to, so I kept it. I don’t suppose you know anything about playing it.”
“Nothing,” Ray admitted. “But I wouldn’t mind learning.”
“Funny what catches a person’s interest,” Lucy said. “Me, for instance, I would never be that interested in learning to play a musical instrument.”
“Do you listen to music?” Ray asked.
“Sure,” Lucy said. “In fact, I have quite a big collection.”
Ray remembered the tech on Phoenix II, talking about Lucy singing as she came into port.
“Do you sing?” Ray asked.
“Yes,” Lucy said. “I mean, I try to. I haven’t done it very long. It’s something I just learned.”
“So your people—your designers—they aren’t very musical?”
“No,” Lucy said. “They have pretty voices, in a sort of peculiar way. Like crystal chimes or flutes. But they’ve never been a big species for music.”
“My people are nuts about it,” Ray said. “We have whole industries just dedicated to music.”
“I’ve come across species that were more extreme than that,” Lucy said. “I knew some people who had no semantics to speak of. Their entire language was based on the emotive qualities of sound.”
“That would be weird,” Ray said. “You mean they had no vocabularies?”
“It’s kind of hard to say,” Lucy said. “They definitely had certain phrases they’d repeat, but you know, the key makes such a difference.”
“So those would be like homonyms,” Ray said. “The sound is similar but the meaning is completely different.”
“Only don’t forget,” Lucy said. “There was no meaning. Just emotion.”
“Were they intelligent?” Ray said. “I mean, they sound like birds or something.”
“They had space flight,” Lucy said. “I don’t know if that counts as intelligence or not.”
“What do you mean by space flight?” Ray asked. “Could they do the things you can? Or were their ships more like ours?”
“Somewhere between,” Lucy said. “More towards my capacity, I think.”
“How could you do it?” Ray said. “If you don’t have meanings to your words, how do you reason?”
“Maybe you work by intuition,” Lucy suggested. “I don’t know.”
“Did they have books?” Ray asked.
“Only for music,” Lucy said. “And they weren’t books, exactly. Recordings, maybe.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Ray said. “There has to be meaning if there’s any kind of rational mind involved. You can’t think without words.”
“Of course you can,” Lucy said. “Think of the colour green.”
Ray did.
“Okay,” Lucy said, “now think about the process of bisecting an angle. You have a compass and a straight edge.”
“Wow,” Ray said. “I thought of the activity. But there weren’t any words attached to it.”
“Of course not,” Lucy said. “Words are secondary. You use them to talk to other people. But you could draw a picture of the process for bisecting an angle, and that would be good enough to teach me how to do it. Especially if you had the compass and the straight edge right there for me to try it.”
“So they had no words,” Ray said. “Were they lonely?”
“I don’t think so,” Lucy said. “They’d get together in choirs.”
Ray toyed thoughtfully with the bone flute.
“Do you mind if I borrow it?” he asked.
“Not at all,” Lucy said.
Don’t try this with children
Cinnamon was Ray’s first dog, and he didn’t know all that much about taking care of her.
“You mean to tell me you’ve never had a dog before?” Lucy asked. “Almost everybody has a dog at one time or another.”
“My brother was allergic to dogs,” Ray explained. “I had a couple of fish once, but they died. I didn’t like them very much anyway. They were tropical fish, so they had to have salt water, and it took a lot of fussing around to keep it right. One day I found a paper clip in the tank, and within a week they’d all died.”
“Temperamental, weren’t they?”
“Not what you’d call robust,” Ray said. “At least, not outside their own environment.”
/> “Cinnamon is better,” Lucy said. “She can take quite a bit of change, provided there’s somebody around to keep her company. The main thing she needs is to have someone else.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “So between you and me, we meet that criteria. What else do I need to know about her?”
“She needs to be brushed,” Lucy said. “To keep her coat nice. And she has to have some solid food in order to clean her teeth. If she just eats soft food, her teeth’ll get bad.”
“At least we shouldn’t have to worry about her getting fleas,” Ray said.
Lucy had plenty of ideas about dog-training.
“You should never hit a dog,” she said. “Even once or twice in the dog’s lifetime is too much. If you have to punish her for something, then just withhold your affection. She’ll understand.”
They had trouble with the house-training.
“If she makes a mess somewhere, you have to catch her doing it, and tell her that she’s bad. It doesn’t do any good to complain about it later—dogs don’t remember their sins, and you’ll just confuse her.”
“Couldn’t you just accelerate a grown-up dog?” Ray asked, as Cinnamon looked up from a pile of shredded sweater.
“Of course you could, but what would be the point? A dog is supposed to be company, and what kind of company is somebody with no past? You have to do some growing up together in order to like each other.”
“What if it doesn’t work out that way?” Ray asked. “I mean, I kind of liked that sweater.”
“It usually doesn’t work out that way,” Lucy said. “As far as my experience shows, the odds are against it.”
“But you figured we’d give it a shot anyway,” Ray said.
“Why not?” Lucy asked. “What else have you got to do with your time?”
“Good point,” Ray answered.
Always something new
Lucy was big. The corridors were strange to anyone used to the close spaces of normal ships. Ray and Cinnamon got into the habit of chasing up and down the halls, running around the lounge and the kitchen. Ray taped together a pair of socks, and Cinnamon learned to fetch, to bound and slide on the hard floors of Lucy’s corridors, to tug against the claiming hand.
They were natural Marx brothers pursuers, neither of them willing to cut the other off, even on the tightest turns.
Cinnamon gave up on sweaters, and started chewing boots.
One day Ray couldn’t find her anywhere.
“Lucy,” he finally thought to ask. “Do you know where Cinnamon is?”
“No.”
“What!”
“Just kidding. Of course I know where she is. I can even tell you her current blood sugar level if you’d like.”
“Really?” Ray thought for a minute. “Not really,” he said.
“Well, maybe not precisely. But I can get a pretty good idea from her infrared emissions.”
“Have you always been like this?” Ray asked.
“Cute?” Lucy said. “Clever, witty, attractive? Sexy?”
“Full of beans.”
“No,” Lucy said. “I was actually quite a fanatic when I was younger. What you might call an idealist. I thought I had all the answers, and everybody else was just making the world unnecessarily complex.”
“Then you got some experience.”
“Exactly. Once I’d seen a few things, I realized idealism was just keeping me from actually thinking. And I’m designed to think.”
“Me too,” Ray said glumly.
“Not that thinking is any great shakes either. Don’t get me wrong. But I don’t seem to have a lot of choices. Either I ignore my own experience and stay an idealist, or I take account of what I’ve been through and modify the way I act.”
“Did you really build yourself?” Ray asked.
“What do you mean, Ray?”
Ray blushed. “I was just thinking,” he said, “about how you looked on the monitor at the station. You seemed to have, I don’t know, an unusual design.”
“I had a basic structure,” Lucy said, “from my designers. But I modified it over time. You know—on one occasion I needed to collect an entire asteroid, quite a big one, so I added a couple of grapples that could cope with the thing. Then I had to shield it against an atmosphere, so I built a shield for that. And so on.”
“You never disassembled any of it?”
“I never saw any need to. Some of it got changed because I could reuse the same structure for another function. But most of it stayed the way I originally needed it.”
“How long have you—”
“Existed?”
“I suppose it’s not a question a gentleman should ask.”
“This is my thirty-second mission,” Lucy said. “I’m quite old, in terms of the probes my designers use. Many of them only last ten or fifteen missions. On the other hand, I once met a probe that had gone out more than fifty times.”
“It must have been very strange to look at,” Ray suggested.
“Actually, it was virtually identical to its original schematics. It seemed to have made up its mind not to be changed by what it went through. And it wasn’t.”
“Very strange,” Ray said.
“I didn’t like it much,” Lucy admitted.
Kevin
The computer programmer Ray had talked with back on Phoenix II was named Kevin Fliegel, and for the second time in less than a month his world was being turned upside-down. He was a dreamer, the kind of boy who’d grown up alone, friend to no one, not well understood by either his mother or his father. He’d gotten his first computer before he went to school, a hand-me-down from his uncle Dennis, who worked for the RISK Corporation. Kevin had wanted a computer more than anything. It came with an inspirational lecture.
“If you want to learn the most wonderful thing in the world,” Uncle Dennis had told him, “you’ll learn how to make this machine do things. You have to get it to think the way you want it to think. You have to tell it exactly what to do. Then it can do what you’ve told it to, no matter where you are. It’s like having your own special servant, who will follow your orders to the letter. And any time anyone uses a computer program that you’ve written, they have your brain working for them, even if you’ve never met them. Even if they’re on a machine of their own in a small room on the other side of the world, your brain and your thinking are there with them when they use the software you wrote. It’s the greatest thing there is.”
Little Kevin had badly needed to hear what was the most wonderful thing in the world, since the things he’d found on his own so far hadn’t been that hot. He took that little machine and ran every piece of software he could get, and since Uncle Dennis had given him some compilers to go with it, he fooled around with the source code that he could find in magazines, and he traded programs with other people over the network.
Before long, he found out that he belonged somewhere in the world. What he knew, other people also wanted to know. By the time he finished high school, he had five different applications out as shareware. For his senior class project, he wrote his own expert system. When he graduated from college four years later, there was a job with RISK waiting for him, set up by Uncle Dennis.
Now he found himself sitting at a console on Phoenix II, eating pizza and watching a piece of alien text scrolling past. “Hey, Funk,” he called. “Take a look at this.”
Steve Eutenier shuffled over, his pants hanging half off his butt. “What you got?”
Kevin gestured at the display with the pizza. “It looks like some kind of message.”
Steve leaned over, hit a few keys. “I hope to hell it isn’t a virus. That alien pig sure as snot could’ve dropped something in here.”
“I don’t know. You’d think monitoring would’ve caught it. Maybe it isn’t an application.”
“Maybe it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Kevin felt his stomach grinding. “I think it’s a code or something. It looks just like a Dtat. It’s got the righ
t ID and everything.”
“So did you call it up, or what?”
“No. It just showed up and started to scroll on my screen. I only noticed it because I was watching for invisible text.”
He toggled his screen and the gibberish disappeared.
“So it’s all invisible,” Steve said.
Kevin toggled back and the text reappeared.
“At first I figured it was a joke,” he said, “but then it went into a loop and I had to go around it to get into the system, and it looked like it was tied into a little TSR over on the volume Chris was working on just before that probe came in. So then I was sure it was a joke, but Chris said no way, and when he went at it from his link it didn’t show up there at all, but there was a copy on a completely different volume.”
“Sounds like a virus to me.”
“Well, maybe we’d better see if anybody else’s seen anything like it. If it is a virus it could’ve gone out over the whole network.” Kevin keyed in the query across the system, then sat back and started to worry at a hangnail on the side of his thumb.
Ray takes up cooking
“Lucy?”
“Yes, Ray.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“I thought I smelled smoke.”
“You’re a laugh a minute,” he said, “But I’m serious here.”
“Sorry,” she said. But she didn’t sound sorry.
“I’ve been thinking about the kitchen,” he said.
“On a ship we call it a galley,” she corrected him.
“Fine,” he said. “The galley.”
“What about it, Ray?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings or anything,” Ray said. “But I was wondering if you’d mind letting me do some of the cooking. I mean, it’s only Cinnamon and me that’re actually eating anything, so I thought, you know, what the heck. It shouldn’t be such a big problem. Assuming you have some kind of supplies that are a kind I could work with.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Garlic, maybe. Onions. Potatoes. Some meat, if you’ve got it. Or is it all synthetic?”
“It’s synthetic,” Lucy admitted. “But I can produce it in whatever form you like.”
