Alien Earth (13 page)

John twitched in his sleep. No good, no good. Didn’t scan, and he wasn’t sure if sheep dung had been brown. Wouldn’t it be greenish, from their diet of grass?

“Write what you know!” the poetry master bellowed, and snatched John’s poem from his desk. The words flew loose, to scatter on the floor. “I don’t want to read about sheep or grass! Anyone can write some pastoral trash modeled on the old poets! Your task is to the poets of your own generation and time. Your poetry must be who you are and when you are and what you are, or it’s worthless!”

Dr. Crandall was panting with the strength of his emotions. John rose silently from his seat to gather the scattered words of his thoughts. What if I don’t want to be from this time, he wanted to shout. What if I want to know how my ancestors felt and thought and smelt? What if the only way we can really understand their poetry is to pretend to be them for a while? But he didn’t shout the words, not even in this dream.

Dream. Yeah, he was dreaming again, Tug must have him on the stimulus cycle. “This is all a dream,” John announced to the class. He stood up and Dr. Crandall disappeared. “I’m on a ship going somewhere and you all are dead and gone hundreds of years ago.” Obediently the other student poets crumbled into dust. A wind blew them away. “I’m alive, and I’m still doing and being. And my poems are my own damn business, and I’ll make them how I please, and keep them as long as I want. And I don’t care if no one ever remembers a damn poem I made, because I’ll live the hyphenated life of the Beastship Mariner, and live so long that
I’ll remember myself. Yes. That’s better, that’s me, that’s what I know so I’ll write it.

Needs more imagery, more symbolism, but I’m onto something here, I’ll write a poem yet, but the dream was fading, sinking, something was spiraling him back into the dormant cycle. Dammit, Tug, I think I was close to finding something there for a minute. If only I’d had a few more minutes, if only I had time, I could write a hell of a poem.

“T
OOK ONE A PIECE
and left three in it.” He wondered briefly if perhaps it had referred to numbering other than by the Human base ten system, then discarded the idea. No. He was sure he was going at it wrong. Sometimes these older puzzle poems were the most difficult to understand. He would discard all his preconceptions and start over again. “Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and …” and Evangeline was veering from the course again. Tug felt it as an uneven pressure in the anterior of his metasection. He gurgled in annoyance, and sent a pulse that turned off the recording he had been scanning. He disentangled himself from the filaments that linked him to the scanner in the gondola and scuttled across his chamber to engage ganglia with Evangeline. Exactly what was she doing? Had she forgotten where they were supposed to be going?

Well, no, but she couldn’t hear any other Beasts calling from that direction, and she did so want a mating. Couldn’t she go back, find another Beast, do a mating, and then return to that hostile little planet that they had been to so many, many times?

No, he instructed her firmly. They had schedules to keep. What seemed a short time to her was several generations to the Humans whose couriers they were for this trip. Did she want to gather information and take it back to Delta only to find there was no market for it? He pictured conflict and disappointment for her, and got a shuddered response.
She came quickly back to course and Tug disengaged from her.

Problem solved. Which left Tug bored. He could not face the puzzle of the girls and the eggs again. Not just yet. He cast about for something new to occupy his attention. Something new, and yet worthy of an encysted Arthroplana. After all, this time was supposed to be spent in meditation and study. That was the whole function of enBeastment. Supposedly.

If only Humans weren’t so short-lived, he could have awakened Connie and kept her awake, just for the conversation. But if he awakened her and kept her awake, she wouldn’t even last out this journey, let alone any others. No, conversation with the Humans had to be kept brief, no matter how diverting he might find it. He faced again the problem of not only having limited diversions, but having to carefully ration those diversions out to himself, lest he use them up too quickly.

He drifted across the chamber to where he kept his few personal things and took down a puzzle cube that an Evadorian had given him a long time ago. A very long time ago, Tug reflected. Evadorians no longer existed. Like Humans, they had poisoned their planet of origin. Like Humans, the Evadorians had been rescued and deposited on a harmonized planet capable of allowing them into its ecosystem. The Evadorians had been gently modified to harmonize, and resettled. But unlike the Humans, they had been unable to resist their own competitive natures. Within only twenty-two of their generations, they had reverted. The planet and the Evadorians had destroyed one another. The Arthroplana had let them perish. They’d had their second chance.

A pity. Tug had enjoyed the Evadorians he’d transported, and even kept one for a time. Its longer life span had allowed it to be much more of a companion to him than his present Human crew. ss’SFistes had been its name, and it had made the puzzle cube for Tug and contrived a way to get it into Tug’s chambers. Tug had suspected then that the Evadorians would not adapt. So few of the puzzle making and solving races did. They were always looking for a way to get around things, a way to divert disaster for just a few more generations. Always a fatal error. The only path to endless
survival was to constantly repeat the patterns that worked. The Arthroplana themselves were proof of that.

Tug shifted the cube through his feelers, and reviewed the solution rules ss’SFistes had given him. On each side was an engraving, and each engraving was supposed to suggest an Evadorian proverb. A key word from each of the six proverbs yielded a seventh proverb. Often the final proverb was humorous rather than philosophical. So far, Tug had come up with nine possible solutions. Only one of them could be completely correct. The Evadorian had told him that when he had an answer, Tug should break open the cube and check the engraving inside it to see if it matched. Tug toyed with the notion of breaking the cube and checking his solution, then rejected it. No, he’d keep the cube and puzzle out yet another possible final proverb. Of what pleasure was a mystery solved? Just another dull fact, grounded in reality and devoid of all teasing possibilities.

He returned the cube to the cicatrice that acted as a shelf and considered his latest batch of contraband. Connie had methodically loaded them all into the scanner for him, and he’d transferred them all to the filaments Evangeline had secreted for him. He had now experienced each of the tapes three hundred and seventy-two times. In addition to the elegant selection of mysteries he’d requested (Christies, MacDonald, Ferradson, and Doyles, mostly), there had been other material, most notably
A Brief History of the Abomination of Epsilon
. It troubled him.

He remembered Epsilon. Vividly. The Conservancy had given no warning of their intent; there had been no time to prepare the Beasts. He and Evangeline had been well within the psychic range of such a thing. When Tug had regained consciousness, they had been a quarter of a light-year from their last reckoned position. The Human crew had been too long in Waitsleep; none of them survived. And Evangeline herself had been nearly ruined by the experience of such strong externally generated emotions. He still could not make her understand what had happened; how the deadliness of the disease the Humans had unleashed there had had to be combated fiercely and ruthlessly. The Conservancy had belatedly issued an apology to all Beastships that had received the emotional shock wave. The explanation they had offered had
been plausible. But
A Brief History of the Abomination of Epsilon
mentioned other, more disturbing factors. Unsettling. He turned his mind aside from the unpleasantness of it.

His new mysteries beckoned. Tug combed the sheaf of filaments through his feelers one more time, letting the titles slip teasingly past his sensory tips. Despite how many times he’d already scanned through them, he was determined to treat each as an individual piece of work to be dissected and savored. By the end of this trip, he would endeavor to understand completely every one of his new recordings. But he would fail. That was the wonderful thing about Human literature. Much of it was so impenetrable that one could muse over it for years and still not completely understand it. And this latest collection—he teased them over his sensory feelers again—intriguing. And more intriguing each time he savored the words and the images accompanying them.

Save the
Epsilon
tape, all were of the Human literary genre called mysteries. Universally regarded by the Arthroplana as the Humans’ highest cultural achievement, mysteries posed carefully constructed puzzles, usually involving an untimely death or disappearance. The best mysteries were spiced with deliberate deceptions by the designer of the puzzle, intended to distract the reader from solving it. As mysteries were set in a variety of Human times and locations, each demanded a thorough study of the contemporary culture and language before an Arthroplana could begin the delightful task of unraveling one. Tug prided himself on the variety of mysteries he had solved. Nancy Drew would have been proud of him, and the Hardy boys would have welcomed him to their company, he was sure.

Several of the mysteries on these recordings had been created by the master puzzle designer Rex Stout. One was by a designer he was less familiar with: a John D. MacDonald. He was already immersed in the study of marine architecture, seacoast development, and Human card games that his first scannings had suggested would be necessary for him to enjoy the puzzle. There were other classic mysteries on the tapes and Tug knew he should devote his time to these. He would not be encysted forever.

But with a tingle of guilty pleasure, he redirected his attention to other filaments. Bootlegged ones. That was the
term. Copied while John was in Waitsleep, from the tapes that John had carelessly left loaded in his library scanner. Had cracking John’s security code been easier this time? It seemed so to Tug. Usually John was more cautious, and more adept at keeping his private pleasures private. Especially the ones he knew Tug would enjoy.

Tug dismissed the ease with which he’d broken into John’s cache. It could probably be attributed to his deeper knowledge of John and his increased experience at deciphering his codes. At any rate, he’d found a treasure this time. The poet Montemorossi was such a delightful puzzle. Who had he been? A significant poet, Tug knew, or John wouldn’t have bothered with him. He knew John would consider it rude, no, almost criminal if he knew Tug was sharing his entertainments. But there was no reason for John to find out. Besides, he could not turn aside from them. Poetry, more than any mystery, offered puzzles with no clear solutions, questions without answers, answers without questions. Perhaps such trivia were not worth the attention of scholars, let alone the meditations of an enBeasted one, but Tug did love them so. He selected one, wrapped himself firmly in the filaments that would convey it to him.

Prior to settling himself with it, he once more docked ganglia with Evangeline. She was on course, but bored again. Why did they have to go back to the hostile little planet? He knew how much it distressed her. Why was he making her go there?

He soothed her as best he could, and repeated the mission outline from John’s report. They were going because some Humans on Castor and Pollux had combined their resources and offered them a commission to go. They were disputing the Conservancy’s assertion that Terra was a dead planet, one that was, furthermore, incapable of being revived. Of course, it was sad, but she must understand that the Humans had a sentimental attachment to the planet. Although the Conservancy had proven with models that nothing would have survived the cataclysmic climate changes on Terra, still Humans persisted in hoping, and organizations such as Earth Affirmed cruelly stimulated those hopes with its disharmonious assertions that the Conservancy was lying.

She did not understand.

Had Tug been a Human, he would have sighed. But Arthroplanas had learned long ago the limits of a Beast’s intellect. Any but the simplest ideas were ungraspable for them, and efforts to educate them or raise their intellectual levels only resulted in Beasts so distraught and unpredictable that they became unmanageable and dangerous. Sometimes he wondered if he didn’t explain too much to Evangeline, if his efforts with her only caused her more unhappiness than her simple mind could bear. Did he dare try to explain “lie” to her? Perhaps not. Put it in terms she could more easily accept.

Earth Affirmed wanted to be sure Terra was dead. So the Conservancy had given them permission to collect more data. Evangeline and Tug would take John and Connie there, and they would launch the probes and satellites that would gather the data. For a short time they would all circle Terra and study it. Then they would take the data, and go back to Delta. Then the Conservancy scientists would evaluate it for Earth Affirmed, and prove that Terra was dead as they had always said. Then Earth Affirmed would give all its funds to the programs for more efficient recycling efforts, and all its members would attempt to be more harmonious and no longer say anything to upset any of the other already-harmonious Humans. Did she understand now?

She would obey.

Tug could sense Evangeline becoming unsettled at talk of the hostile planet. He reminded her that her reward would be all the rich slag of the dirty-tech station that she wanted, enough slag to sustain her through many matings. This calmed her somewhat, but then she asked, Could we not go back and have the slag and the matings first, and then go see the ugly planet? No, they could not, he reminded her, and when she became petulant, he showed her a geometry game the Humans had devised long ago, a method for dividing a line segment, any line segment into two equal parts. Then he showed her that she could divide each line segment again, and again she would get two equal parts. And again. And again. And the two equal parts would keep getting smaller and smaller, but there would always be two of them and they would always be perfectly equal. Always, forever and forever. It was just the type of diversion the Beasts loved, and
Evangeline was delighted with it. Gently he disengaged ganglia from her and left her alone with the new game.

In Raef’s fantasy
, he wasn’t just one of the many faceless Humans who had trudged or biked or jetted to the evacuation points. He didn’t stand in line for hours, only to be turned away like all the others who had prison records or diseases or genetically passed defects. He hadn’t watched all those young people with their perfect bodies and high school and probably even college diplomas go on past the roped-off gates into an inner building. No. Forget that shit.

No, he’d been singled out at once. The Arthroplana had seen him immediately for what he was, had called him forward and told him in front of all the others, “This is the kind of man we’re looking for to be your leader. This is the man who has the determination to bring you from this dying planet and deliver you, alive, to a new world.” He played the scene a thousand ways, a thousand times. Sometimes he was on a pinnacle before the massed emigrants and the twang of the Arthroplanas’ synthetic voices rang out from loudspeakers. Sometimes he stood before a long table where the president and the chiefs of staff looked at him in amazement while a videotape played on a big-screen television, telling them that he was the one they needed.

[But you were not even alive then, for the first evacuation,] queried his mother’s voice. So puzzled, so distressed.

Only dreams, Mom. They’re just my dreams. Of how it should have been. He should have been there, at the very beginning. Those dreams had amused him through a thousand stimulation cycles, for however many years. A part of him knew that he dreamed of achieving glory in the eyes of people who were generations dead. But another part of him took a special satisfaction in that. For the truth was, they hadn’t recognized him; they hadn’t even wanted him. Well, his mom had, maybe, but no one else. They’d always shuffled him aside and ignored him. They’d always found ways to say he wasn’t as good as the others. Oh, they tried to put polite labels on it: Dyslexic, Learning Disabled, Socially Underskilled. “A remarkable memory, but unable to integrate gained information into day-to-day living.” “Fails to respond to normal social stimuli in socially acceptable ways.” “Test
results contradictory.” “Test results inconclusive.” “Further testing recommended.” “Counseling recommended.” “Unable to develop full potential.” They always acted like they paid lots of attention to him because they really cared. But it only meant they could put him in a different classroom, could test him over and over, could always blame him for the fights he got into, could punish him for being teased or beat up. Act like he was too stupid to bother with. He’d gotten out of school with a certificate, got a job. He’d signed up with one of the Low Income Equal Opportunity Emigration Centers. And he’d made it, he’d passed their physicals. That was what they had cared about most, that he had a good healthy body. A whole new world had waited for him.