A backup computer waited, ready to take over in the event of malfunction, and a human operator waited with finger on override, prepared to assume manual control at an unpredictable, unprogrammable happening. This was a first in the history of the human race and almost anything, including the inconceivable, might occur.
Nothing did.
The computer took the scow evenly through the second lock, closed it, moved the vessel sideways through the Repair and Maintenance Cavern to the largest dock and set it smoothly belly-down on the floor. Then, because nobody had thought to tell it otherwise, it followed normal procedure and switched on one-eighth g in the floor area covered by the vessel, sufficient to ensure cargo stability.
Watching in his office screen, Musad cursed somebody’s thoughtlessness—his own, where the buck stopped—and opened his mouth for a countermanding order. Then he thought that any damage was already done. Anyway, why should there be damage? No world with an eighth g would have produced a life form requiring an atmosphere, and the probe had certainly reported an atmosphere of sorts. Whatever lived inside the … lifeboat?… should be comfortable enough.
He shut his mouth and called Analysis. “Full scan, inside and out. There is a living being inside; take care.”
Analysis knew more than he about taking care and had prepared accordingly. The first necessity was to establish the precise position of the thing inside—being, entity, e-t, what you would—and ascertain that it was or was not alone. So: a very delicate selection of penetrating radiation in irreducibly small doses, just enough to get a readable shadow and keep it in view.
Analysis had far better instrumentation than the comparatively crude probe and established at once that the thing was alive and moving its … limbs?… while remaining in seated position facing the nose of the vessel. Able now to work safely round the thing, visitor, whatever, Analysis unleashed its full battery of probe, camera, resolution and dissection.
The results were interesting, exciting, even breathtaking, but no scrap of evidence suggested where the little ship might have come from.
* * *
Musad was an administrator, not a scientist; Analysis gave him a very condensed version of its immensely detailed preliminary report—blocked out, scripted, eviscerated, rendered down and printed for him in under three hours—highlighting the facts he had called for most urgently:
The living entity in the captive vessel would be, when it stood, approximately one and a half metres tall. It showed the basic pentagonal structure—head and four limbs—which might well represent an evolutionary optimum design for surface dwellers in a low-g Terrene range. There was a rudimentary skeletal structure, more in the nature of supportive surface plates than armatures of bone, and the limbs appeared tentacular rather than jointed. This raised problems of push-pull capability with no answers immediately available.
Spectroscopic reading was complicated by the chemical structure of the vessel’s hull, but chlorophyll was definitely present in the entity as well as in the hull, and the bulky ‘cape’ on its shoulders showed the visual characteristics of a huge leaf. It was certainly a carbon-based form and seemed to be about ninety per cent water; there was no sign of haemoglobin or any related molecule.
The atmosphere was some forty per cent denser than Terrene air at sea level, a little light in oxygen but heavy with water vapour and carbon dioxide.
Tentative description: Highly intelligent, highly evolved, motile plant species.
We always wondered about aliens and now we’ve got one. What does he eat? Fertilizer? Or does that snout work like a Venus fly trap?
The small amounts of iron in the vessel—tank linings and a few hand tools—argued a metal-poor environment, ruling out any Sol-system planet as a world of origin.
As if they needed ruling out!
The ceramic lining of the jet would require longer evaluation but appeared to be of an unfamiliar crystalline macro-structure. All the other parts of the vessel, including the hull, were timber. There was nothing unusual about the composition of the various woods but a great deal unusual about the treatments they had undergone, presumably for hardening and strengthening; no description of these could be hazarded without closer examination. (There followed a dissertation on the possible technology of a timber based culture. Musad skipped over it.)
Dating procedures were at best tentative on materials whose isotopic balance might not match Terrene counterparts, but guesstimates gave a pro tem figure of between seven and ten thousand Terrene years. The signatories declined to draw any conclusions as to the age of the vegetal pilot or where he might have originated.
And all it does is sit there, sit there, sit there, occasionally moving a tentacle in some unguessable activity. So: What next?
He was taken by an idea so absurd that it would not go away, an idea which might, just might stir the creature into some action. It was a sort of ‘welcome home’ idea—rather, an introduction …
He called the Projection Library.
* * *
Fernix slept and woke while the deceleration held him comfortably in his seat. He slept again and woke, nerves alert, when deceleration ceased.
He opened a tiny vision hole but saw only his prison still closed around him.
Shortly there was a perceptible forward motion and the slightest of centrifugal effects as the direction changed several times. Then his captor ship settled, gently for so large a transport. His pod shook momentarily and was still.
Suddenly there was gravity, not much of it but enough to aid balance and movement.
Not that he had any intention of moving; he could not afford movement. He needed energy. Food alone was not enough; his thousands of chloroplasts needed sunlight for the miracle of conversion to maintain body temperature, muscle tone, even the capacity to think effectively. There was a spectrum lamp aboard but its batteries would operate for only a limited time; a pod was not intended for pan-galactic voyaging.
Yet full alertness could be demanded of him at any moment; he must pump his body resources to a reasonable ability for sustained effort. He used a third of the lamp’s reserve, switched it off and continued at rest in the pilot seat.
There was little assessment he could make of his position. His captors had demonstrated no technological expertise (beyond a squandering of metal) which could not have been duplicated on the Home World, nor had they attempted to harm him. So they were civilized beings, reasonably of a cultural status with which he could relate.
On the panel, radiation detectors flickered at low power. He was, he guessed, being investigated. So, this race was able to operate its instruments through the metal hull outside. That proved little; a race evolving on a metal rich world would naturally develop along different lines of scientific interest from one grown from the forests of Home. Different need not mean better.
It was an exciting thought, that on another world a people had emerged from the nurturing trees to conquer the void of space.
The thought was followed by another, more like a dream, in which his people had traversed the unimaginable distance between stars to colonize this faraway system, facing and overcoming the challenges of worlds utterly variant from their own, inventing whole new sciences to maintain their foothold on the universe.
The open-minded intelligence can contemplate the unfamiliar, the never-conceived, and adapt it to new modes of survival.
He had arrived by freakish accident; could not his people have made the crossing during the eons while he crept through space in free fall? The idea of using Transformation for survival while a ship traversed the years and miles had been mooted often.
His reverie was broken by a squealing hiss from outside the pod.
Outside. They were supplying his prison with an atmosphere.
* * *
Chemist Megan Ryan was the first to curse Musad for mishandling the approach to the alien ship. Suited up and ready to examine the hull, she heard someone at the closed-circuit screen ask, “What the hell’s go
ing on? They’ve let air into the scow.”
She clawed the man out of the way and punched Musad’s number to scream at him, “What do you think you’re bloody well doing?”
“And who do you think you’re talking to, Captain-Specialist?”
She took a deep, furious breath. “To you … sir. Who ordered air into the scow?”
“I did.” His tone said that if she objected, her reason had better be foolproof.
“But why, why, why?” She was close to stuttering with rage.
His administrative mind groped uneasily at the likelihood of an error of unscientific judgment and decided that this was not a moment for discipline. “To provide air and temperature for the investigating teams to work in. What else?”
She swallowed, conscious of a red face and tears of frustration. “Sir, that ship has been in space for God only knows how long, in the interstellar deep. Its timber hull will have collected impact evidence of space-borne elements and zero-temperature molecules. That evidence will by now have been negated by temperature change and highly reactive gases. Knowledge has been destroyed.”
She was right and he would hear about it later from higher echelons; he simply had not thought from a laboratory standpoint. “I’m sorry, Meg, but my first priority for investigation is the traveller rather than the ship. He represents more urgent science than a little basic chemistry.”
The wriggling was shameful and he knew it; he had forgotten everything outside the focus of his own excitement, the alien.
She was glaring still as he cut her off.
He spoke to the Library: “Have you got much?”
“A good representative selection, sir. Vegetable environments from different climates. As you requested, no human beings.”
“Good. I don’t want humans presented to him in stances and occupations he—it—won’t understand. Get a computer mockup ready—a naked man, good physique, in a space suit. Set it up so that the suit can be dissolved from around him. I want a laboratory effect, emotionally distancing, to reduce any ‘monster’ reaction.”
“Yes, sir,” the screen murmured.
“He’s put out a probe of some sort,” said another screen. “Sampling the air maybe.”
Musad turned to screen 3 and the alien ship. The temperature in the hold had risen to minus thirty Celsius and vapour was clearing rapidly from the warming air. Visibility was already good.
* * *
When the air reached normal temperature and pressure for their planet, Fernix reasoned, they would come for him.
They did not come, though temperature and pressure levelled off. He was disappointed but accepted that there would be circumstances which he could not at present comprehend.
He extended a hull probe for atmosphere analysis, to find the outside pressure very low while the water vapour content hovered at the ‘dry’ end of the scale and the carbon dioxide reading was disturbingly light. He could exist in such an atmosphere only with difficulty and constant re-energizing. Acclimatization would take time.
Through the generations, he reasoned, his people would have made adaptation, for the vegetal germ was capable of swift genetic change. There would be visible differences by now—of skin, of stature, of breathing areas—but essentially they would be his people still …
He saw a flash of coloured movement outside his spyhole and leaned forward to observe.
In the prison space, a bare armslength from the pod’s nose, a silver-green tree flickered into existence, took colour and solidity to become a dark, slender trunk rising high before spreading into radiating fronds. His narrow field of vision took in others like it on both sides and beyond, ranged at roughly equal distances. Beyond them again, a broad river. The palmate forms were familiar (mutations, perhaps, of ancestral seeds carried across the void?) as was the formal arrangement on a river bank, the traditional files of the rituals of Deity.
As he watched, the scene changed to a vista of rolling highlands thickly covered with conical trees of the deep green of polar growths, and in the foreground a meadow brilliant with some manner of green cover where four-legged, white beasts grazed. Their shape was unfamiliar, but his people had used grazing beasts throughout historical time; children loved them and petted them and wept when they were slaughtered. Only the anthropoid monsters from the sister world could terrify the young and rouse the adults to protective fury.
As the picture faded he wondered had the man-beasts been utterly destroyed. Some would have been preserved for study … mated in zoos … exhibited …
A new view faded in and the hologram placed him at the edge of a great pond on whose surface floated green pads three or four strides across their diameter. He recognized water-dwelling tubers though the evolved details were strange, as were the flitting things that darted on and above them. Forms analogous to insects, he guessed, thinking that some such line was an almost inevitable product of similar environment.
Cautiously he opened the vision slit wider and saw that the huge picture extended away and above as though no walls set limits to it. He looked upwards to an outrageously blue, cloudless sky that hurt his eyes. This world, without cloud cover, would be different indeed.
He realized with a burst of emotion, of enormous pride and fulfilment, that he was being shown the local planet of his people, accentuating the similarities that he would recognize, welcoming him Home as best they could.
The picture changed again and this time he wept.
His pod lay now in the heart of a jungle clearing, brilliant-hued with flowers and fungi that stirred memory though none were truly familiar. Tall, damp trunks lifted to the light, up to the tight leaf cover where the branching giants competed for the light filtered down through cloud cover. For there was cloud cover here, familiarly grey, pressing down and loosing its continuous drizzle to collect on the leaves and slide groundwards in silver-liquid tendrils. Bright insect-things darted, and larger things that flapped extensions like flattened arms to stay aloft in surprisingly effective fashion. These were strange indeed as were the four-legged, furry things that leapt and scurried on the ground, chewing leaves and grubbing for roots.
The whole area could have been a corner of his ancestral estate, transformed yet strangely and truly belonging. He had been welcomed to a various but beautiful world.
With the drunken recklessness of love and recognition he activated the enzyme control and cleared the entire hull of the pod for vision. It was as though he stood in the heart of a Home playground, amid surroundings he already loved.
Soon, soon his people of these new, triumphant years must show themselves …
… and as though the desire had triggered the revelation, the jungle faded away and a single figure formed beyond the nose of the pod, floating in darkness as only a hologram could, hugely bulky in its pressure suit, face hidden behind the filtering helmet plate but wholly human in its outward structure of head and arms and motor limbs.
He left the seat to lean, yearning, against his transparent hull, face pressed to the invisible surface, arms spread in unrestrained blessing.
The figure spread its arms in a similar gesture, the ancient gesture of welcome and peace, unchanged across the void and down the centuries.
The outlines of the pressure suit commenced to blur, to fade, revealing the creature within.
The naked body was white, stiff-limbed, fang-mouthed, bright-eyed with recognition of its helpless, immemorial foe.
It floated, arms outstretched, in mockery of the ritual of peace.
The Red-Blood.
The enemy.
* * *
When the first hologram appeared—the Nile-bank scene of the planting program for binding the loosening soil—Musad watched for reaction from the ship but there was none.
The Swedish panorama, its forest of firs contrasted with the feeding sheep, pleased him better. On any habitable world there must be some environment roughly correlating with this, some scene of bucolic peace.
Then came the Victori
a lilies and their pond life—A screen voice said, “It’s opened the vision slit a little bit. It’s interested.”
It? Too clinical. Musad would settle for he. Could be she, of course, or some exotic gender yet unclassified.
The fourth scene, the jungle display, brought a dramatic result. The entire hull of the ship became cloudy, then translucent and—vanished. The interior was revealed from nose to jet.
Musad did not bother scanning the internal fittings; a dozen cameras would be doing that from every angle. He concentrated on the alien.
It—he rose swiftly out of his chair, head thrust forward in the fashion of a pointing hound and stepped close to the invisible inner hull. He was not very tall, Musad thought, nor heavily muscled but very limber, as though jointless. (But how could a jointless being stand erect or exert pressure? His basically engineering mind thought vaguely of a compartmentalized hydrostatic system, nerve-operated. Practical but slow in reaction time.) He lifted his tentacular arms, spreading the great ‘cape’ like a leaf to sunlight, and raised them over his head in a movement redolent of ecstasy.
Could jungle, or something like it be the preferred habitat? He was plainly enthralled.
The jungle scene faded and the hold was in darkness save for the low-level radiance of the little ship’s interior lighting.
The computer’s creation, man-in-space-suit, appeared forward of the ship, floating a metre above the floor. He leaned, in unmistakable fascination, close against the inner hull. He pressed his face against the invisible timber like a child at a sweetshop window and slowly spread his arms. His ‘hands’ were bunches of grey-green hoses until the fingers separated and stiffened. Musad could see that the tubular members straightened and swelled slightly; he could detect no muscle but they had plainly hardened as they pressed against the wood. It seemed to Musad that he stood in a posture of unrestrained, longing welcome.
The Library operator must have caught the same impression and in a moment of inspiration had the space-suited figure duplicate the outspread stance of friendship. Then he began to fade the armour, baring the symbolic man within.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 49
