We All Died at Breakaway Station (10 page)

Apparently some ancestor of the Jillies and their biological cousins had found an advantage in being able to eject its stomach and intestines when threatened, and then escaping. It seemed like a hell of a defense, but weirder things had happened, Bracer supposed.

As pre-Jillie evolution progressed on that hot, heavy world in the Sagittarius arm, the gastrointestinal system became more highly evolved for detachment, became a unit that could be released at will, left behind to appease the hunger of some bright-eyed predator, and lightening the proto-Jillies, increasing the speed of his escape, leaving him to live and then regrow the missing organs from the heavy ridges of fat that lay along the back of his ribs.

Then some bright and enterprising proto-Jillie, finding that he had given up a good portion of himself in error, made the attempt to replace the expelled organs. Perhaps it had not worked the first time, maybe it took a million years to work, but eventually it did, and eventually the ancestors of the Jillies developed to a point where they could take back the wet sack of organs, reintegrate them with the rest of the body, and go on about their business as if the event had never happened.

Since the proto-Jillie became more and more likely to remove his g-i sack during times of danger and stress, the
Mother Nature
of Jillieworld found it necessary to make provision for the survival of the living cells in the separated portion. After attempting a dozen methods,
she
finally hit upon a rather simple solution: evolve the nerves of the g-i sack a little, make them a rudimentary brain, modify this flap of muscle into a crude heart, that cavity into a lung, cover the whole thing with a protective leathery skin; now we have an organism. Since the mouth in the proto-Jillie’s head was often detached from the stomach in the g-i sack, evolution produced a second mouth, an eating mouth in the g-i sack. The original head-mouth soon lost its teeth, salivary glands, esophagus, and became a breathing-talking mouth for the main body. About that time, through a set of incredible geological/climatic circumstances matched only by the ravages of Earth’s Pleistocene, the proto-Jillies were forced to evolve intelligence or die‌—‌Jillie was born.

What could mankind have in common with a creature so oddly constructed? Bracer asked himself. Well, intelligence, for one thing. A hunger for knowledge. A desire to conquer everything outside himself. A mind capable of coming to some understanding of the workings of the universe. And what else? Very little. Very damned little!

It’s like this. Man
is
a social creature. True. But not a social creature to the extent of, say, an ant or a bee. Jillie was. Man lives in families of a more or less natural form, though the form of the family can vary widely‌—‌witness pre-space flight western Earth and the multifamilies of Carstairs and all the ranges in between‌—‌and from these families he evolves clans, tribes, nations, worlds. Jillie did not know family, as such, only
clan
or
hive,
as some would call it. Man tends to think in terms of the individual, the “me.” Jillie thought in terms of the “clan,” the “us.”

Stop for a minute. Let’s take that term that men translate as “clan.” A very poor translation it is. There are no human words to convey the Jillie meaning. Very, very roughly it might be translated as “stomach brothers”. Within the clan the g-i sacks were common property, that is, Jillies of sufficiently close blood relationship could interchange g-i sacks. This constituted the basic unit of Jillie society, the basic concept of Jillie thought.

Okay, you’re thinking that sounds a lot like the multifamilies of Carstairs I mentioned earlier. It’s not. Take the multifamilies. All the brothers of one multifamily‌—‌and this could be as many as fifteen or twenty males‌—‌take in common all the sisters of another family. So when forming a new family unit, maybe thirty or more individuals are involved. All the men are the “husbands” of all the women, and all the women are the “wives” of all the men. All children are considered to be the children of all. That’s how it is on Carstairs, but that’s a hell of a long way from being the oddest thing mankind has ever tried. Ever heard how they do it on Graccus? Now that’s an
odd 
one.

But, to get back to Carstairs: in theory, maybe, everyone in a multifamily belongs to everyone else. That’s an ideal those people try to live up to, but, hell, they’re human beings and they don’t make it. A woman’s own biological child is maybe just a little bit dearer to her than someone else’s offspring, though she’ll do her damnedest to deny it. John may say that he loves Mary and Susan just as much as he does Alice, but you’ll see Alice in his bed a lot more often than Mary and Susan. They’re people and by the nature of being people some things are more dear to them
as individuals
than other things. It wasn’t the same with the Jillies.

Since the Jillies were bisexual, biologically any Jillie could mate with any other Jillie when the time came for reproduction, though, of course, there were certain social conventions even in Jillie society, and few Jillies would mate out of their clan and their social status. Not that the Jillies cared very much about mating anyway. To them it was a biological necessity, not an event of pleasure. Like going to the bathroom, they did it when they had to and only then.

It was the clan that mattered to a Jillie. The individual was almost nothing. The clan was all. Clans formed superclans of more distant blood kin, superclans formed nations, nations formed the race of Jillies.

How could a man understand the psychology of a Jillie equipped with both a functional penis-testicle triad hanging above a vagina-ovary system, and with a stomach that could be taken out, given to a “brother” for his use or stored on a shelf? Biologically we could never really imitate the Jillies even if we wanted to, despite the theories of Ladislas Rusko. Could we do any better psychologically? It seemed rather hopeless. Men didn’t even know why they were at war with the Jillies.

Take this for example: men think in terms of objects and events. Agreed, there are exceptions to this, both individually and culturally, but by and large men think in these terms. Jillies‌—‌they thought in terms of interrelationships of events. Objects, well, they were acted upon by those interrelationships of events, but had little or no importance in and of themselves. Men tend to think in terms of the discrete; Aristotelian
A
is
A.
Jillies thought in terms of “bridges,” and I can’t think of a single human philosopher who ever thought quite the way the Jillies did.

Consider their language. Unlike mankind, by the age of interstellar flight they had achieved a single language, no less complex than Anglo-western, more so, in fact, running in excess of a million concepts‌—‌note,
concepts,
not words, for words as men know them did not exist in the language of the Jillies, only interrelationships of sounds and symbols.

Though the Jillies had no formal religious concepts as men understand them‌—‌they considered “God” to be the conglomerate of all Jillie thought‌—‌certain values were, well, sacred to them. The value forty-four, for example. So, there were forty-four sound symbols in the Jillie language. These symbols, spoken or written, comprised the totality of sounds available, symbols to write, for their written language, their numerals, their punctuation, if these human terms can be applied to Jillie language. But does this sound like an alphabet? It’s not. Not the way we understand an alphabet. Not one of these symbols had any fixed meaning. “A” in Anglo-western has a fixed meaning, several fixed meanings, in fact, but still something fairly standard, something relatively unchanging. The Jillie symbol that looked something like
0
could mean any number of things depending upon its interrelationship with other symbols. Since nothing had any fixed meaning, nothing approximating a human dictionary was ever devised by a Jillie Noah Webster. This may speak highly of the Jillie capacity of memory, but it also speaks of their alienness to mankind.

Perhaps all of this is beside the point, but it did pass through the mind of Absolom Bracer as he half slept while the shuttles bringing reaction mass and cold-sleepers from Breakaway docked and unloaded, and then returned to the barren world below. He also thought of two incidents that brought about war between mankind and the beings called Jillies. Both had involved human stellar colonies.

Fifty years before, when Absolom Bracer was still a very young man, a recently explored planet in the “Gulf” between the Orion and Sagittarius galactic arms was colonized by Terrans. A shipload of disaffected Asians left the Great Singapore spaceport for Esmerelda, where they would, as their public relations brochures said, “begin a new way of life on a clean and uncluttered world.”

Approximately a standard year and a half after the landing of the colonial ship, four Jillie warships came out of star drive a few light-hours from Esmerelda, and without communications of any sort proceeded to the human colony, shields up and weapons firing. After a short and bloody battle between the Jillie invaders and the poorly armed colonists, fully half of the survivors, mostly young adults and older children, were kidnapped by the aliens.

When the Colonial Authority of the newly formed Galean League on Earth learned of the attack and abduction, a very strongly worded message was dispatched to the nearest large Jillie settlement, demanding the immediate return of the captured humans. The Jillies complied at once, apologizing profusely, saying that they were sorry, they had not known that these people were of value to the “clansmen” of Earth. When the alien ship returning the abducted humans landed on Adrianopolis of the Paladine, war very nearly began. The aliens had been vivisecting the colonists‌—‌only thirteen were still alive, and they were begging to die.

War did not occur. Tempers gradually cooled. The Jillies paid a large indemnity in heavy metals and swore that such an occurrence would never, never take place again. The high councils of the Galean League did not understand the psychology of the Jillies, but they accepted their word. They had little choice, short of interstellar war with a largely unknown foe.

So there was peace, for a while.

Nearly thirty years passed. Another planet between the major galactic arms was settled, Transtock, dozens of light-years to the galactic west of ill-fated Esmerelda. Ten standard months after the establishment of the first permanent settlement on Transtock, a Jillie war fleet spiraled into the system, fell into orbit, bombarded the colonial planet with thermonuclear weapons until it was a smoldering ball of rubble, and then quietly returned to its home base, wherever that was.

Shortly thereafter a Jillie courier ship arrived on Earth, landing at the Geneva Spaceport with all the pomp that surrounded such matters of state, even in that enlightened age. Its single occupant, a gray-skinned, battle-scarred old Jillie military officer of the leading clan of the Jillie Establishment, asked to be taken at once to the Chairman of the Galean League. Before the Chairman, the Jillie courier, in the croaking, wheezing speech that Jillies used to imitate men, said, “Insulting is enough. Stomach brothers endure no more. War is here. Dying!” The Jillie’s g-i sack had been replaced by a bomb that destroyed half of Geneva.

So the war began.

Why? Because we infringed upon some area of space that the Jillies held to be their own? They never said so. Because we violated some taboo? They never told us. Because they just didn’t like us? Maybe. But no one ever knew for sure.

These again are some of the things that Absolom Bracer thought about while he half slept, while the reaction mass was being loaded aboard his three starships.

“Dammit, general, I’d do it if I could,” Fleet Admiral Paolo Ommart said, flushing angrily, “but right now there’s not a thing I can do.” The admiral rocked back in his chair, away from the desk, plucking a cigarette from a box that sat open on his desk and nearly jamming it into his mouth.

“There must be something you can do, admiral,” said the man dressed in the elaborate uniform of a lieutenant general of the Communications Corps, who had something that looked very much like pleading in his eyes.

“There is nothing
I
can do, General Hamen, nothing at all,” Ommart said slowly, carefully holding his anger in check. “I thought I made myself clear on that point.”

“I can’t accept that,” said the general. “You must know the importance of Breakaway Station to the FTL link.”

“I am aware of the importance of maintaining communications with Earth,” Ommart said, having finally puffed the cigarette to life. “I am also aware, general, even if you aren’t, of the importance of defending the Paladine. If the Jillies overrun us here, there’ll be little point in having an FTL link to Earth, unless the Jillies want to use it to ask for our unconditional surrender.”

“Aren’t you exaggerating the situation slightly?” Hamen asked, his voice almost tremulous at calling such a man as Ommart a liar.

“The hell I am!” Ommart yelled, rising from his chair and gesturing toward a three dimensional star chart of the Paladine. “Look, Hamen, we damned near lost Cynthia the other day. Space around here is still crawling with Jillies. We’re just barely holding our own there as it is. If I draw off one ship, just one, general, then Cynthia has had it. Do you want to exchange Cynthia for Breakaway?”

“No, but…”

“But suppose I pulled a ship away from Constantine,” Ommart interrupted. “Is that what you’re going to say? They haven’t attacked Constantine this week. But they sure as hell would if I weakened it, it or any other planet in the Paladine. General, can’t you understand‌—‌I don’t have the forces I need to defend what I’ve got adequately. I can’t‌—‌I by God can’t take on the defense of another world, and one as far away as Breakaway. That’s Earth’s job. They can spare a ship or two. I can’t.”

Hamen sat silently, cowed by Ommart’s tongue, staring blankly at the star chart, defeat in his eyes, though Ommart did not stop there.

“No, look at it, Hamen,” Ommart went on, his voice calmer now, turning his back on the Communications Corps general and looking out the window at the huge expanse of Valforth Garrison, Adrianopolis’ greatest spaceport. “I want you to understand. You know that the
Iwo Jima
, the
Pharsalus
and the
Cragstone
are at Breakaway now, don’t you?”