The Starry Rift

by James Tiptree Jr

  “You want us to come to your ship?”

  No answer but vague scratching.

  Asch draws a breath, turns to face the others. “I’m inclined to think something is wrong. But I could be fooled. I can’t risk all your lives.”

  “I vote we go help them,” Shara says.

  “Yeah,” says Dinger. “Better’n ramming, anyway.”

  “Oh, the hells.”, Torrane makes the motion of slapping a flipped coin, peeking under his hand. “Yes.”

  “Well... green, then,” says Asch. “Provided we carry weapons.”

  “Weapons—” Dinger paws into the stowage. “Where’d I put those stunners? Ah!”

  “And one more thing,” says Asch in his captain’s tone. “We have to realize these Ziello have only met Black World Humans. They know how Black Worlders operate. Maybe they’ve learned from them, maybe they have some cute tricks of their own. If this is a trap, we’re doing for free exactly what they looked to do with that tractor beam—walking right in. Now, what if they decide to get our further cooperation the easy way, by taking a hostage or two?”

  Grunts, as they think this over.

  “I don’t know about you, but I do not guarantee my continued resistance if they start mutilating one of you. Blinding, say...”

  “For once I’m ahead of you, Captain,” says Shara. “I thought I was a likely hostage. So I remembered our emergency stuff.” She pats her jaw. “It’s going to make eating a little tricky, though.”

  “You’ve already got that trick tooth in place?” Asch is surprised. “Well, good for you. May you never have to think about using it. All right—Torry, Dinger, that goes for us, too. You do have your drop-deads with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We put ’em in place now. Shara, take the controls a minim—and keep your ears open for any whisper from that ship. Let’s hope she doesn’t move.”

  They get up and make for their duffel compartments.

  When they return they are waggling their jaws experimentally around the little weapon of self-deliverance. “I feel like a hologrid star,” Dinger complains. “But I guess it’s the practical thing.”

  “It is,” Asch assures him. “And the gods are with us; that ship hasn’t accelerated. I guess they want us.” He starts the maneuver that will bring Rift-Runner alongside.

  “Their caller is still open,” Shara reports, “but I haven’t heard a thing except a set of uneven footsteps, fading away... Oh, wait—Somebody groaned, very faint.”

  “Artistic,” Asch comments dryly. “Look at the size of that port. I just hope our flanges coyer it.”

  The warship is gently rolling, or wallowing, on her course. It takes all Asch’s skill to match with her and grapple their smaller port flange into a tight dock.

  Just as they do so, there comes a clashing rattle through the linked hulls. Shara, suiting up by the view-port, sees one of the warship’s big missiles detach itself in a burst of silent fire. They all watch as it goes hurtling off on its course to nowhere.

  “Looks like somebody sick and crazy,” comments Asch. “Not to mention hostile... All right. Let’s open up and try to go on in. Take your safeties off when we get their port open.”

  But getting the big ship’s port open proves not so easy. The emergency handle that should permit ingress won’t engage.

  “Open your port! Open up!” Asch calls.

  “Shall we go EVA and look in a viewer?” Shara asks.

  But clickings are coming from the other side. The childish voice cries “I t’y! I t’y open.”

  And finally the port gives. They open it quietly and slip into a big, empty, silent lock. As they cross the threshold of the joined ships, they hit the jolt of almost full gravity.

  “Artificial gee,” Dinger whispers. “The lucky so-and-sos.”

  The inner port is ajar; oxygen-rich air is drifting out. Asch pushes it open, stunner ready. He looks right, looks left—and then stands staring at the sight before him. The others crowd in behind.

  The big bridge is almost empty. To their right and forward is the pilot’s well, with two Ziello figures slumped, half-off the couches. To their left is the front of a lighted herbarium—not a hydroponics set-up, among these water-shy people—which somehow looks wrong. Directly in front of them, on the floor, is a small creamy-furred alien which seems to be feebly trying to crawl toward the herbarium. It is visibly gasping for breath. Huge sleep-chests, with occupancy lights on, stand against the far side of the hull.

  “Hello!” says Asch. “We come help. What, ah, what bad thing here?”

  But the figure on the deck makes no response, only gasps harder.

  Dinger and Shara go to it. It’s an attractive little creature, rather like the antique toy called a teddy bear; but its pink mouth is open, its face screwed up as though strangling. To their questions it says nothing but only continues to try to crawl toward the shelves of plants.

  “Let us help you,” Shara says. They each put a gloved arm under the alien’s upper arms—it is shaped like a big Ziello, though only about half its height—and start to carry it toward the bank of plant trays. As they lift its head it makes a sound of protest, so they let it drag and merely pull it toward the trays.

  Once there, the creature suddenly writhes from their hands and rises up, thrusting its snout and head in among the lichenlike, reddish plants and breathing deeply.

  “Something’s wrong with their set-up—look, the stuff is almost all dead!” Dinger waves a hand over the stand of plants, and they suddenly crumble to powder in the wake of his moving arm. “They’re just dust, standing there!”

  “The trouble must be lack of whatever these put out. Look, they’ve rigged an emergency collector.” Asch ¡joints to a long air-scoop along the front of the bank, which feeds into a funnel-shaped duct. “That runs over to the pilot couches.”

  “What those things put out is CO two,” says Dinger. “Carbon dioxide. At least the ones I examined did. That makes sense, see, that fan is driving the stuff toward this front edge. It’s heavier than air, so it would flow down into this collector. They must need CO two in their air-mix. Something happened to their set-up and they’re dying without it.”

  “What has carbon dioxide in it?” asks Shara practically. “I know—our breaths!” Her faceplate is open. She stoops to the gasping little alien and gently exhales across its muzzle. The creature suddenly inhales greedily and lifts its face to almost touch her nose.

  Captain Asch and Torrane have been investigating the big aliens in the pilot well.

  “It’s Zilla and Krimheen,” Torrane tells them. “They’re semiconscious. Wearing nose-masks connected to that collector. Krimheen has a death-grip on some kind of gun.”

  “I don’t think those masks are doing them much good by now,” Dinger observes. “There’s only a few plants left alive in here. It’s CO two they’re short of. I’ll try disconnecting those hoses and you each breathe into one. Our exhaled breath has about four percent CO two; that must be pretty close to their atmosphere. If it’d been over five, we’d have felt it.”

  “Our analysis showed three point six,” Asch confirms him.

  Dinger has unscrewed Zilla’s hose from the central pipe. “Here, Torry.”

  Torrane takes the hose and blows into it. As his breath reaches Zilla, she gives a convulsive gasp, and another. In a minim her-eyes open, focus wonderingly on them. Her mouth is free to talk.

  -“Zhumanor!” she exclaims feebly. “No do bad thing!”

  “We Yoomans, no Zhumanor,” Asch tells her. “We no do bad things.”

  Dinger has the big alien captain’s hose free. He hands it to Asch. “Rank hath its privilege,” he quotes wryly. Asch takes it, and presently Krimheen stirs and wakes.

  His first move is to jerk loose the hose and point the weapon at Asch. “I catch you!”

  “Oh, mother,” says Dinger disgustedly. As Krimheen chokes, strangles, and slumps back into unconsciousness, Asch disengages the gun and lays it atop
the control board. Dinger gives the big alien measured breaths.

  “You’ll have to take him over, Captain,” he tells Asch. “I’ve got to go get a bunch of supplies—fire extinguishers, one of the CO two canisters for our hydroponics, plus anything I can think of. ”

  “I’ve thought of... something. But someone... will have to go EVA,” says Torrane between breaths. “That dry ice... around our vent. If... it’s in the shade.”

  Dinger runs to the alien’s big view-port. “By the gods, it is. It’ll keep till I get the easy stuff rigged. Torry, you’re a genius. I should have thought of that!”

  “Only at... times,” says Torrane. “The prospect of giving mouth-to-mouth... resuscitation for a couple of years... stimulated me.”

  There follows an awkward, hectic time of trying to arrange the aliens in some reasonable manner so that a conference can be had. It becomes soon apparent that Torrane’s vision of prolonged mouth-to-mouth revival is only for emergencies; the aliens’ noses are becoming painfully burned by the moisture in the Humans’ breaths. Zilla shows them this; Captain Krimheen remains scornfully stoic and silent, watching their every move. After Zilla has replenished her CO2 levels, she finds that she can be without it for brief periods and volunteers to go to their medical supplies for some salve, “good thing nose.”

  But when she rises to hurry across the deck, her usual fluid hopping gait has changed to a shuffling run. Moreover, her upper arms hang limp, and her tail flails about loosely.

  “Why me same you?” she demands. “Same Zhumanor? No arms! See—you same!” She points to Captain Krimheen, and they realize he has kept his normally active upper arms folded close to his body. Yes, he had held the weapon in one of his larger, rough-work lower hands, too, and his tail hangs limp.

  “They’re getting Human hallucinations!” Shara exclaims. “Remember?”

  “It certainly looks like it,” Asch admits.

  As Zilla roots her pot of salve out of a drawer in the aft wall, they try to explain to her their own reverse problem in this part of space. “We think we same you, on Zieltan.”

  Krimheen, silent, is following intently. “We make tails same, we think.” Something of the idea apparently gets across, but they have no common word for “feeling.”

  When Zilla, starting to gasp, stumbles back with her salve, her illusion is so strong that the image of a red-skinned girl running across the deck flickers in Torrane’s head. She snatches up their interconnecting hose and fairly sucks at his breath. Breath of my breath, he thinks, and for an instant feels an intense protectiveness. The little being is far from home, at the mercy of aliens for her very life. He beams at her; maybe this gets across a little, too. The idea of war between them looms behind Krimheen. An obscenity.

  Krimheen haughtily accepts the bum salve from Zilla, but when it comes to the idea that they should get their heads down lower, where C02 is accumulating, he is adamant. Zilla, however, is acquiescent and stretches out comfortably, hand-moving her tail, on a carpeted area of the well. “It’s a natural heavy gas-sink,” Dinger says. “Thank the lords they weren’t up high, or they’d be dead.”

  He is arranging fire-extinguisher foam in the gas-collector funnel. “There’s a slow fan in that duct,” he tells them. “It goes in by gravity, and then the fan pushes it to them. Nice. Try them on it now. Screw your ends into that central pipe. If it seems like they have enough, Shara, you can bring your patient over and hook it in, too. I saw an extra nose-piece down there.”

  They do this, and the arrangement seems to work well, provided some Human stands by to refill the C02 input.

  When Shara carries the strange little alien over, its big eye is oozing a bluish powder. “Pain from its muzzle, I think,” Shara says. “Its name is Tomlo.”

  Zilla swabs salve on its mouth bums from Shara’s breath. “Is Mumoo,” she tells them. “Mumoo for Ziello, eh, children. Is Ziello but no same. Good Muraoo,” she assures it. “Die soon.”

  “I ca’, I ta’k he’p,” the thing says feebly but proudly.

  “It saved your lives,” Shara says indignantly. “I mean, it help you no die.”

  “Yes, good Tomlo. Is old, die soon.”

  The mystery remains.

  As to what happened to the air-plant, this also is obscure. Zilla seems to be trying to say that the plants unexpectedly formed flowers and seed, and died at the end of that cycle, an apparently rare event. “Probably they expected to be in cold-sleep, or back at Zieltan,” Torrane says. “I think she’s saying that it’ll regrow; there do seem to be seedlings coming... This crisis may come to an end if the whole bank regenerates.”

  “And that reminds me!” Dinger slaps his head. “Brain, wake up!” He hastens out the big port and back into Rift-Runner while Torrane and Shara are getting Tomlo into a nose-piece and showing it how to draw from the central duct.

  Dinger returns with a big plastic wad, which proves to contain the plants he dug up at the spaceport.

  “Good for air? I put in there?” he asks the alien captain. Krimheen unbends enough to give the Ziello affirmative chin-jerk. Zilla is ecstatic. “Oh, good! Oh, good! Come more quick now!” She shuffle-hops over to help him bury the roots of the first one, then buries her nose in it. “Zieltan,” she says lovingly. “Beau-ti-ful Zieltan,” before she gasps and has to return to the well.

  “You talk Galactic more good,” Torrane tells her.

  “We learn, we work, learn,” she replies. “Before sleep.”

  “All right,” says Asch, who has been quietly and thoroughly examining the bridge and its workings. “Now is time we talk. I want talk. You listen, ah, you want hear me?” His question to Krimheen hangs in the air, finally getting a reluctant assent-nod from the alien. “Good.”

  But he notices that Krimheen has been glancing at the row of sleep-chests, in which presumably are the rest of the crew. Zilla has intimated that they went in when the plants first started to go bad. Two on the right end are dark; it is the lighted one next to these that Krimheen seems concerned with. Asch walks over and points to it. “Trouble?” he asks.

  Krimheen gives a curt “no” chin-point. But Zilla says, “Malloreen sick.” She puts her hand on her long chest and makes a fast, flapping movement, at the same time pantomiming a person gasping for air. “No go box quick e-nough.”

  Krimheen grunts disgustedly at these admissions to the enemy.

  Asch considers. A struggle with asphyxiation can mean trouble for a wonky heart—assuming these aliens have pumps for whatever flows in their veins, as most of them do.

  But... “Do we have enough CO two for one more Ziello?” he asks Dinger. “Can you estimate time?”

  Dinger looks sharply at the slowly sinking foam level in the collector and calculates their reserves.

  “I’d say... with four, two days. Forty-eight hours. But then something has to happen. Like, they all get in the chests.”

  Asch walks back and approaches Krimheen, holding up a sheet of plastic to protect the alien from the water vapor of his breath.

  “Captain Krimheen. We want help. No do bad thing. If sick people”—he repeats Zilla’s flapping-heart gesture—“sick people go in sleep-box, is no good. Bad. You know I say true?” Krimheen watches him grimly. “We have good air for four Ziello for two days, if this people come out. Four Ziellor, two days. Now: You think you number-two ship”—he points back at their course—“you fuel ship come in two days? Have more good air for you?”

  If Krimheen is surprised that they have guessed that he has reinforcements coming, he shows no sign but only remains staring hard at Asch with his great single eye above the nose-piece.

  “All right.” Asch sighs. “Try another way. Now you know how much air you have... You want we open box, help Malloreen?”

  “Captain,” says Dinger as the alien stirs, frowns, “I think he’s too uncomfortable, tied down to that nose-tube. Suppose I get them some dry ice in a bag, so they can move around?”

  “Good thought.”


  “I’ll go with you,” says Shara. “We’re almost suited up.” They had kept on the clumsy suits as the easiest way of avoiding moisture-burning the aliens.

  They go out through the big port so they can use Rift-Runner’s EVA exit. While they’re gone, Torrane tries to tell Zilla what they’re up to and teaches her the name “see-oh-two” by a series of gestures that has her giggling. He’s pleased to see she hasn’t lost the chortling laugh he remembers from Zieltan; finds himself thinking of her as a girl rather than an alien. Her work suit is an attractive silky stuff, nicer than theirs.

  Dinger and Shara return with four deep insulated tumblers and a bundle of dry-ice chips in a quilted bag.

  “We’ve got to move our ship in a couple of hours, or that vent will be in sunlight,” Dinger warns.

  Shara tries to explain that the stuff will turn to gas without making a liquid, but the concept of subliming is beyond their language capability. The aliens seem unfamiliar with frozen C02. “Well, they’re not chemists or engineers,” Torrane says. “How many of us have seen frozen oxygen?”

  They hand each alien a tumbler containing chips of dry ice, pantomime that they are to sniff it as needed. “Cold! Very cold! No touch!”

  But Zilla has already probed the mysterious stuff; a squeal, and she puts her finger in her mouth. Shara hugs her and goes for the salve. The finger is startlingly Human.

  “I do bad thing,” Zilla says. “Same children.” From Krimheen comes a faint snort. He now removes his nose-piece, picks up the tumbler cautiously, and shuffle-walks with as much dignity as he can over to the sleep-chest holding the supposedly sick Malloreen.

  As Dinger had guessed, the regained freedom to move has loosened his reserve. “Yes,” he says slowly. “O-pen.” And stands back, waiting for the Humans to obey.

  Asch steps back with him, thinking that his guess of Ziellan reinforcements is now a certainty. Within two days—possibly much sooner—they will be outnumbered, maybe outrun, and under fire. Not good.

  Zilla shows Torrane and Dinger how the big sleep-chest works and punches it onto waking-opening cycle. Apparently it doesn’t decant its occupant, as the Human ones do; when the cycle is over, the heavy outer lid lifts, revealing a light inner cover. Presumably it has injected or otherwise administered a hibernation-stasis breaker to Malloreen. But the inner cover heaves, falls back; Malloreen is too weak to throw it open. Dinger grabs it and flings it wide, revealing a reddish-colored Ziello twisting and starting to choke, Dinger whips a tumbler of dry ice under the alien’s nose and holds his head, while Zilla bends over him, speaking reassurances. As the C02 gets to him, Malloreen relaxes and lies back. They can see that he looks unhealthy; his brown velvet fur is staring and lusterless, his big eye is hollow and half-closed.