Twelve O'Clock Tales

by Felice Picano

  Scroba was fascinated, naturally, and even Tony—without our inborn sympathetic senses—was able to gauge her intense personal interest in his person, yet I thought he did an excellent job of keeping both her interest and his own at the properly needed distance.

  She did, however, ask a bright question: Why had he been chosen to join us, besides the apparent qualities he clearly possessed.

  “I believe it’s because I don’t really remember Earth or in fact anything but one of the smaller Oort Cloud worldlets very far from the center of that system. And that I only recall a bit, as I left it quite early on for Ep. Eri. Five. It’s believed that I won’t have the same emotional reaction, although I’m not at all certain of that,” he said, and we admired him for the expressed doubt.

  He then asked if we expected trouble; was that why we’d asked for someone like himself.

  The Fast Mind answered, saying it had no idea what to expect, as no one had willfully entered this expanding sun-threatened system before. All of us on board should be able to take control/command if needed.

  It then offered him a cocktail that seemed to contain a sedative, as he was soon stretched out on his bed and surrounded by privacy screens.

  “Any comments?” I asked Scroba.

  “He seems fine. He’s barely primitive at all. Ship?”

  “This ship agrees. Should you both be incapacitated, I believe this human could aid this ship in returning all of us with safety.”

  “Then it’s agreed that we like him?” I asked. And they agreed.

  “Good!” I said, not a little saltily. “Because that’s the first thing we have all agreed on this trip so far!”

  *

  The next few hours were quiet as we headed toward the doomed system. The Fast Mind was busy, naturally enough, as we moved closer, and not merely checking the increased amounts of planetary detritus headed our way, so I was surprised when it contacted me on a closed channel to say, “We are picking up what appears to be an ancient form of distress signal. It’s barely binary.”

  “Can you tell from where?” I asked, quietly so as to not tip off Scroba, who was busy behind her air-screens—I had to suppose greedily looking up details of the human relational life of this early Sol-Terra system.

  “Somewhere close to the edge of the Oort Cloud. It appears to be from a vehicle in orbit about a planet.”

  “What planets are there close to that system’s Oort Cloud?”

  “According to what was downloaded from the Epsilon Eridani Gamma world mind files, there are three small rocky planets on long, elliptical orbits around that star. It could be any of them.”

  “Can you read the message?”

  “I’ve attempted to deconstruct it, but it’s fairly primitive and I’ve not found any kind of packets of data within the three repeating so-called ancient ‘Arabic’ letters.”

  “Let me know if it happens again.”

  “There is a string of the same signal, sent out on several pulses. Hopefully somewhere closer to the source…? The downloaded files available to this Fast say that it is a very ancient kind of signal, this S.O.S., and that those Arabic letters merely denote a vehicle in distress.”

  “So you don’t think its one of those commercial chem factories that our guest mentioned,” I asked.

  “Unlikely, as they would have direct connections with their people already.”

  “Keep monitoring it,” I instructed.

  Suddenly Scroba was gesticulating and so I opened up my privacy screen.

  “Their history is fascinating. Relegated to this backwater, partly by their own choice, and partly by advanced developments in the Center Worlds that arrived for them so slowly that it made them instantly obsolete, they underwent a social-political history of epicycles. Smaller recognizable cycles with larger cycles,” she explained the latter. “It’s how the Bella-Arths developed and to some extent also the Delphinids before contact with other species.”

  “It does explain their somewhat retarded development,” the Fast Mind said.

  “But it also means every new development is time-tested,” Scroba added.

  Quite suddenly we received a garbled message in recognizable speech. At first it was just sounds, then the sounds cohered. “…please know that we are at these coordinates, and that we have many women and children with us, in need of rescue.”

  “It’s at least digital,” the Fast Mind admitted. “And I’ve got a fix on its origin.”

  The tri-dimensional planetary system diagram was put back up onto our air-screens and a spot was pinpointed and flashing. The planetoid was identified as “Quaor” and appeared to be a rocky mantled M-Class on what seemed to be a decreasing apogee, which meant it was headed back on its orbit back to the ever-expanding sun.

  “Open up and answer them,” I instructed. “Can you make a link without time delay?”

  “This ship has located a small amount of Communication-grade Beryllium 18 inside their vehicle to connect with. So yes, we can speak back and forth in real time.”

  Scroba was hunched over her air-screen. “Who could they be?” she asked the obvious.

  There was an initial ten-minute delay and then we heard the voices again: “Hello! We have contacted you because your signature identifies you as Third Ib’r Republic. Is that true? Or are you Epsilon Eridani Gammans in a Republic vehicle?”

  “We are not from your solar system at all. We hail from the Central Worlds. I am from Narcissus Terce. We’re are here on a Scientific Mission.”

  “Thank God,” was the reply. “There are approximately sixteen thousand of us. We are on two Slp.G liners, with a few other faster, much smaller, ships. You have our position?”

  “We do. We are headed your way,” the Fast Mind communicated. “Please identify yourselves.”

  “You wouldn’t have any idea who we are.”

  “You don’t want the Gammans to know you are hailing us for rescue? Is that it?” Scroba asked. “Are you enemies?”

  “Not in so many words, no. In fact, they have no idea of our existence. We have lived for the past thirty-five centuries completely isolated from the rest of the Sol-Terran system.”

  “On that planet that you orbit?”

  “No. Quaor appears to have been evacuated a half decade ago. We were on Earth itself. We only arrived here a few weeks ago.”

  This was news indeed, and now our guest, young Tony van Jeffery, was awake and listening in.

  “How is that possible?” Scroba asked.

  “Earth is big and, well, there were special circumstances. You’ll see and understand when you arrive.”

  Tony said, “I have no idea who they can be. The Earth, all the planets and moons, in fact every asteroid, was digitally scanned and notarized preparatory for evacuation. They must not have even been on the grid.”

  I took over. “You have Slp.G liners and they have astral travel capacity. What’s the problem? Why can’t you just leave?”

  “These were old, much-used cruise liners and they appear to have been abandoned in Earth orbit for some years already when we boarded them. Our engineers checked them through quite thoroughly before we took them this far. They seem to have low levels of Beryllium-19 for interstellar voyages. But none of us have ever done star-to-star travel and we’re not certain if our vehicles are trip-worthy, or if we have enough fuel to make such a trip. We were hoping one of you might be able to do that.”

  “Hello. I am this Fast’s mind.” The ship took over.

  “Who are you?”

  “It’s the ship we are inside of speaking to you,” I explained.

  “O-kay!” Said very dubiously. “A mechanism?”

  “A sentient mechanism, yes.”

  The Fast Mind took over. “Newcomers, I will be able to check your travel Beryllium signatures from here. Once we arrive at your coordinates, I should be able to rather quickly diagnose the engines and their structural integrity also.”

  There was silence. Then, “That was your vehicle spea
king to us, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I’m a person.” I gave him my name and some of my doctorates.

  “Your ship itself is your engineer?” the survivor asked again.

  “And our navigator too, yes. It’s better at those tasks than we are. Our vehicle is very small,” I added. “It only holds three. But it is advanced.”

  Scroba butted in now, and added, “Our Fast is very nice. It’s courteous, and absolutely tolerant and non-judgmental, and it’s very smart. It will find a way to help your people.”

  “Scroba!” I chastised, off link. “Bad idea! What if it can’t?”

  “Thank God,” the survivor repeated. “We’ve gotten this far on our own. But that has taken most of our inner and outer resources. Frankly, we’re pretty exhausted now.”

  “We’re on our way,” I repeated. I hoped my sympathy was obvious.

  The Fast Mind gave the survivor an approximate time of arrival and then signed off so as to not waste more their small supply of Comm. Beryllium.

  We all looked at Tony, who said, “What if they’re not who they say they are?”

  “Who would they be?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Aliens?”

  Scroba laughed. “To all of you, we’re the aliens.”

  “Well, there must be some reason they don’t want the Gamma humans and Delphs to know,” he reasoned. “They could be luring us into some kind of trap.”

  “Toe-knee thinks well,” the Fast Mind said. “This ship will follow the most stringent protocols of approach and initial encountering.”

  “Fine. That’s fine.” Tony relaxed a bit. “That’s all I ask.”

  “We know all seven intelligent species that exist,” I said. “So there are no aliens.”

  “Seven? I thought there were only three,” Tony said.

  “Three currently in existence; actually one more, so four currently in existence. That fourth has left the Galaxy but contacted us shortly before doing so. It told us about those four early species that preceded ours in time, of which its tiny population was the last remainder. They were very helpful. They aided us in locating three more Beryllium 19–bearing dead-stars equal or greater than Hesperia.”

  “I’d love to know more about that,” Tony said.

  “I’ll send it over to your air-screen,” Scroba said, always helpful where this attractive young male was concerned.

  “I wonder who those survivors could be?” he mused aloud.

  *

  “Pan Troglodytes,” the Fast Mind explained. “That is the official scientific name given to this new group of primate survivors from your solar system by your own Gamman world mind.”

  “They’re Chimpanzees?” Tony van Jeffery asked. “It can’t be. There haven’t been any Chimps on Earth for four thousand years. And certainly none that spoke and used space ships!”

  “I think they’re perfectly adorable,” Scroba said.

  “They’re wild animals!” Tony said.

  “They look extremely domesticated,” I replied.

  Scroba and the Fast Mind agreed. We were being beamed Vids of the population of the two cruise liners. They were dining in restaurants, watching feature Vids in cinemas, strolling arm in arm along the viewing-decks, and children were playing in little parks and sand boxes.

  As we popped back into full non-stellar travel existence only a few hundred yards away from one of their liners, we could actually make out some of their members, suited up for space, working on the outside of one of the liners. They waved to us and we waved back. They all looked rather cheerful, in distinct contradiction to our guest, who was most put out.

  “This can’t be happening,” Tony moaned. “It’s impossible.”

  “Are these not creatures from your planet, Earth?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course they are, but—”

  “And they are conscious and intelligent and they are survivors and need to be rescued,” I said, continuing the inevitably logical statement.

  Meanwhile the Fast Mind was close enough to request the Chimp’s communications person to establish a link between their vessels and ours.

  Cecil, he said his name was, and then said, “We were beginning to get very frightened that no one else would ever come.”

  “We have an Epsilon Eridani Gamma survivor on board,” I told Cecil, “and the young human is quite amazed by your existence and by your presence. We still don’t fully understand why it is that you were not included in the general evacuation. It seems a terrible oversight.”

  “I’ll bet he’s amazed,” Cecil said and began laughing in a most genial manner, shaking his entire body. He regained his composure and it was now clear that he was speaking through some kind of vocal implement either attached at or placed around his throat. “What did he tell you? That we’re nothing but wild animals?”

  It was our turn to be amazed. “That’s precisely what he said.”

  “We were. Of course humans were too. But that was millions of years ago. We were so more recently than that.”

  “Four thousand years ago?” I asked.

  “Not quite. The truth was that we were evolving in the usual hit-and-miss manner of all Earth-born creatures, and then a large number of us were thrown into direct contact with humans. For a few hundred years our relationship was mostly abusive and we were exploited badly, exhibited, experimented on and with: all kinds of horrors. But then we came into contact with another group of humans who were intent on literally saving us, as we were being exterminated at our source of origin and in our original habitats.

  “At the beginning of the [here he used a time term we were not familiar with], one group of humans bought a good-sized piece of land in a relatively inaccessible area of the Earth. They gathered all of us who had been in CSC units scattered about the two continents involved in helping us.”

  “How were you chosen for this?” Scroba asked. “They must have chosen the most intelligent of your species.”

  “They actually chose the most abused and exploited of us,” Cecil responded. “Chimps who been in scientific programs, on display, or in chemical and pharmaceutical testing. They chose our ancestors out of compassion.”

  “CSC stands for?”

  “Chimpanzee Salvage Cooperative,” Cecil said. “Here’s Lucia, she’ll tell you the rest, I’ve got to work with your ship now.”

  Lucia was older, a bit grayer, and elegant.

  “We’re all been listening in to Cecil and your conversation. Please know that our gratitude is boundless,” Lucia said.

  “And we are delighted to make your acquaintance,” Scroba said for the two of us. “It’s a wonderful surprise. What can we do for you, once your liners are star travel–worthy?”

  “The children think we are on a long vacation trip. We’ve not told them we had to leave home forever.”

  “It’s very sad,” Scroba said. “And understandable. But if you can provide us with some Vids of the homeland you had to evacuate, I’m pretty sure the Quinx Relocation Committee will be able to find a planet or moon fit to your standards somewhere.”

  For once, I did not contradict her.

  “It’s very sad that even fairly evolved humans like our guest cannot accept you,” I told Lucia.

  “And yet you have no trouble at all?” Lucia said.

  “We think you’re marvelous. I think your major danger is that of becoming a media sensation in the Center Worlds once they hear about your existence.”

  “That’s a danger we can live with.” Lucia chuckled. “Has your guest told you anything about recent Earth history?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,”

  “Luckily we were well out of all the troubles,” she said. “And after a while, we closed down all possible communication links as the humans seemed to become so…barbaric! Our forebears feared for their lives. Cecil was basically correct, however. What he didn’t explain was that most of our ancestors were taught the rudiments of language in hand signs and they learned to understand hum
an spoken language to a quite complex degree. They were the top of the Chimpanzee heap, so to speak, to begin with because, ironically, of their human contact. So they were the best genetic material to begin with, which is always an evolutionary advantage.

  “When CSC began its first small programs, saving a few score or so of the Chimps at a time, we naturally lived with humans, although they kept at a proper distance from us, so we would build new communities. But when it was decided that the world had become too chaotic for our safety, we were all consolidated into one reservation of some two thousand individuals. Again the Chimps lived near an increasingly smaller set of humans and as those humans died out, members among the Chimps took on the various human leadership roles. In that way they were forced into a kind of hothouse evolution. Some of us became language experts and then teachers of other Chimps. Some became mechanics and then engineers. Some became naturalists and farmers, and eventually even scientists. Within about ten generations, Chimps had achieved basic standards of living equal to humans of the [another time frame unfamiliar to us] era; and it just kept growing from there. When news reached us by our renewed satellite siphoning that the outer world had stabilized, we took a vote, and decided to not let the humans know of our existence.

  “Groups of our own explorers located marine, land, and even flying vehicles, as well as loads of technical equipment that had been abandoned in several nearby towns and villages during the disorders, and after a while they were all brought back to the CSC. Our cleverer youngsters back-engineered and learned how to use them, and then figured out how to produce more. We advanced the limits of the CSC almost twofold in area, which went unnoticed in that depopulated part of the world, encompassing small factories, etc. Some of those youngsters also began to patrol our perimeter so that any inadvertent human explorers would be returned safely at a distance from us without any knowledge of us. The Chimps used blow guns, shooting from high branches in trees with sedative charges,” she explained, “which we’d ironically enough learned from humans who’d first done that in hunting us.