Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (9 page)

That ruled out the danger angle, but since she’d brought up the subject of reproduction…“How do the animals here reproduce?”

She surprised me by grinning. “You will not believe how different it is. It’s very exciting. I haven’t had a chance to write this up yet, but I will before the next homelink. Just be sure to credit me with the discovery when you talk about it in your column.”

“Of course.” I leaned forward.

“Our initial examination showed that all the life here is asexual: There are no divisions between male and female.”

“I know what asexual means.” It meant
biologist
exciting, not
reader
exciting.

“We are isolated here, so it may not hold true for the whole planet, but for now it’s all we have. Some of the life here reproduces by budding, essentially splitting off a little clone of itself. However, that doesn’t account for the genetic diversity we’ve seen within species. And then we caught some of our lab specimens being naughty.”

“Naughty? I thought they didn’t have sex.”

“Not exactly. One of our furry slugs—we haven’t come up with a scientific name for it yet—ate another one. Swallowed it whole.”

“Cannibalism?” Maybe there was something here after all.

“Reproduction. After a few hours, that slug’s skin hardened into a sort of cocoon. Two days later the cocoon cracked, and out came four smaller furry slugs. And each of the four is genetically different, with two-thirds of the genetic material from one slug, one-third from the other. Two slugs died and four were born.”

It was good enough for one of those more-things-in-heaven-and-earth-than-are-dreamt-of-in-your-philosophy columns. I even got some footage of the new furry slugs for my CNN commentary.

I had the biologists to thank for the other highlight of that week. Coupled with the chemists’ analysis of the atmosphere, which showed there were no threatening toxins, the biologists’ report that there was no significant disease threat meant we were authorized to go outside without spacesuits, and breathe fresh air for the first time since we’d left Earth almost nine months before.

I jumped at the chance to be one of the first group to breathe the unfiltered air of another planet. The airlock door hissed open. I took a deep breath—and gagged on an aroma reminiscent of wet dirty socks.

That footage did not make it into my CNN commentary.

Perhaps the approval from UNSA would have come anyway, although I like to think my columns in favor of contact with the Aurorans had some effect. Our supplies limited us to only six months on the planet before we would have to begin the return journey to Earth, but we would be able to spend the last two of those months near an Auroran city.

We had refilled our fuel tanks by using electricity from our nuclear power plant to derive hydrogen and oxygen from sea-water, and we would need to do so again before leaving, so we selected a coastal city as our destination and began our suborbital flight toward first contact.

“How you think they look?” asked Gianni Cacciatore, our climatologist, a few minutes after we launched. “If they are gray humanoids with bulging heads, they greet you as an old friend,
ehi, paesano
?”

There was Italian ancestry on my mother’s side, so he’d taken to calling me
paesano,
countryman. At least it was better than Ambassador. I couldn’t avoid talking to him, since we were strapped into seats next to each other for the duration of the flight. “Look, that ambassador thing is getting about as old as someone asking you to go do something about the weather instead of just talking about it.”

He thought a moment, then laughed. “
Buffo
. But what you think? I want to say, you are the only that knows something of the research of everyone. You have the grand picture.”

It was a good question, actually. Our only pictures of the Auroran cities came from the Orbital Module, and its orbit was too high up to show individual Aurorans as anything more than a few pixels. In order to avoid any possible contamination, our initial landing site had intentionally been far from any sign of Auroran civilization. So none of us knew what an actual Auroran looked like. I’d discussed the issue with the biologists but hadn’t written it up because it was pure speculation.

“Well, based on the animals we’ve discovered so far, the Aurorans are probably bilaterally symmetrical, although it could be quadrilateral. Since they have a civilization, they must be tool users, which means they must have something like our arms and hands, though it could be tentacles with claws for all we really know. They must have a way of getting around, so legs are probable, but we can’t really know how many. Or maybe they move like snakes or snails.” I sighed. “What I’m basically trying to say is that there are so many possibilities that we haven’t got a really good idea of what they will look like, but they probably will not look as much like us as the stupid fake alien in that photo does.”

He nodded.
“Interessante.”

I shifted the conversation to some of the unusual things he had discovered about Aurora’s climate and thus kept myself occupied until our pilot, Zhao Xia, announced that we should prepare for a jolt when she activated the engines to slow us for landing.

The LM’s cabin was mostly silent as we watched the ground grow ever closer on our screens. When we touched down, there was some clapping and cheering, though not as much as there had been the first time we landed.

Commander Gutierrez’s firm voice came over the intercom. “I’m sure the Aurorans nearby must have seen us coming, and some of them will probably arrive soon. Those who were chosen for the first contact party, please prepare to exit the ship.”

I had demanded to be included in the party, and Gutierrez had refused. Although it seemed unlikely, there was no way to be sure the Aurorans would not react with xenophobic violence, so she had decided to send only two people: Singh, because of his xenobiological expertise, and Tinochika Murerwa, because prior to becoming an astrophysicist he had seen combat while serving in the UN Special Forces.

My arguments in favor of freedom of the press did not persuade her, but I made enough of a fuss that her superiors on Earth had ordered her to include me. I don’t know why they overrode her; I suspect the real reason had nothing to do with freedom of the press and everything to do with the fact that the United States shouldered 40 percent of the cost of this mission, and U.S. politicians wanted an American involved in the biggest news to come out of it. It didn’t matter why—I was in.

Singh, Murerwa, and I gathered our equipment and entered the airlock. As the pressure equalized, I said, “Good luck, Singh,” because he was the one in command of our little party.

“Thanks.”

We climbed down the ladder and started preparing for our hosts to arrive and greet their unexpected visitors.

Murerwa looked over his shoulder at the videocam I was setting up on a tripod. He let out a deep bass laugh. “Planning to get a picture of yourself shaking hands with a real alien?”

“Yes.” Somehow I felt that getting a real picture would be my compensation for all the grief I’d taken over the fake one.

After a very long five minutes, something came over a small ridge east of us. As it got closer, I began to make out details of its physiology. It looked like a scaly brown headless camel with four tentacles instead of a neck. As it got closer, I could see a wide opening between the top and bottom pairs of tentacles that I presumed to be its mouth.

It stopped about ten meters away from us. It wasn’t very large; although it certainly weighed more than me, the hump on its back only came up to about the middle of my chest. As if responding to that thought, the hump rose a few inches on a thick stalk, and the creature seemed to stare at us out of two glossy blue-black openings on the front of the hump.

Singh said something in Hindi that I didn’t understand.

“Is it one of the Aurorans or just an animal?” I asked.

“I think it’s sentient. It’s wearing something like a tool belt around one of its forelegs.”

Now that he pointed it out, I saw the belt, which appeared to be made of a thick woven fabric. And one of the tools was undoubtedly a hammer, even if I wasn’t sure what the rest were.

We stared at him while he stared at us. Now we knew what an Auroran looked like.

Or rather, we thought we did until more creatures began coming over the hill. Some came on four legs, some on two. I was fairly sure I saw one with eight. Some had tentacles; others had jointed arms with hand-like appendages. All had scaly skins, but some had patches of fur that appeared to be part of their bodies, not clothing, and all had heads similar to the hump on the first one, though it didn’t seem to be in the same place on the different anatomies. Some were bilaterally symmetrical, but some were not—I spotted one that had anemone-like tendrils on one side and a crab-like pincer on the other. And of the fifty or more arrivals, there didn’t appear to be more than a handful that looked like they belonged to the same species.

As the crowd grew, they began singing to each other. At least that’s what it sounded like to me—wordless tunes that harmonized rather than creating a cacophony.

Then one of them said some words, and the others silenced almost immediately.

“Did you catch what he said?” asked Singh.

“Sounded like ‘Alla Beeth’ to me,” I answered.

A voice in the crowd repeated it, and suddenly all of them were chanting, “Alla Beeth.”

They didn’t stop chanting until the soldiers showed up. Their civilization might be very different from ours, but a sword still looks like a sword, even if it is strapped to the waist of a tentacled reptilian centaur.

The soldiers sang to the crowd, and the crowd quieted down, parting in the middle to allow the half-dozen soldiers through.

Their leader trotted forward through the buffer zone the crowd had left around us and stopped about two meters away. His wide, expressionless eyes looked at each of the three of us in turn. Then he edged sideways until he was standing in front of me. Slowly he drew his sword.

I bravely stood my ground to show the aliens that humans were not intimidated. Or else I was frightened into immobility. Either way, the result was the same.

The leader bent one of his forelegs and sort of knelt on one knee. He placed his sword on the ground, looked at me, and said, “Alla Beeth.”

The crowd took up the chant once more.

Murerwa laughed again. “Looks like you’ve been chosen as the first ambassador to Aurora.”

Iqrit Khadil was the first to bring up religion. During a lull in mess-hall conversation as the crew ate dinner the night of first contact, he said, “I do not think it can be merely coincidence that one of the two words we have heard these aliens speak is ‘Allah.’”

“You can’t be serious!” Rachel said.

“Why not? These primitives obviously seemed to think Jensen was a god, or a messenger sent by a god. And though they seem to communicate among themselves by singing, they knew to speak words to us. And one of those words was ‘Allah.’”

Rachel’s knuckles tightened around her fork. “All right, O wise one, then what does ‘Beeth’ mean?”

Khadil shrugged. “Maybe it means messenger. ‘Allah Beeth,’ messenger of Allah.”

I almost said that if I was anyone’s messenger, I was the
Washington Post
’s, but several people began talking at once.

Rachel pounded the table with her fist until everyone turned to look at her. “First of all, we don’t know how the words are divided, or even that it’s more than one word, or even that it’s a word at all. Maybe the first word is ‘Al’, but they’re really just mispronouncing ‘El’, and so they’re actually referring to the God of the Jews, not the God of Islam.” She raised her voice over the beginnings of objections. “But coincidence is the most likely explanation. If we are going to speculate based on the idea that they spoke to us because they have seen humans before—which I find hard to believe—then there are other reasonable explanations. For example, they were trying to say the first two letters of the alphabet. Everyone here is familiar with the first two letters of the Greek alphabet:
alpha, beta.
In Hebrew, they are
aleph, bet
.” She turned to Khadil. “What are they in Arabic?”

“Alif, ba.”
He nodded. “I spoke too soon. I was just excited to hear what sounded like ‘Allah.’ But it is most likely a coincidence.”

During the rest of dinner I thought about what Khadil and Rachel had said. Coincidence. The possible meaning of the words didn’t really matter to me. But if the Aurorans communicated through song, why did they have words to use with us? And why only two words?

I tried to avoid wondering why their leader had chosen me to bow to, but I wasn’t very successful.