Jem (6 page)

It wasn't so much the planet's fault as Kung's itself; as a star, it was simply incompetent. If Son of Kung had been in orbit around Earth's Sol, it would have looked pretty fine. It had much the same makeup as Earth. What it didn't have was decent sunlight. Kung glowered, not much brighter than Earth's moon during a total lunar eclipse. The only light that fell on Son of Kung was bloody red, and what it looked like from orbit was an open wound.

It would have helped some if it had had a real terminator, but Kung's light was so dim that there was no clear division between "daylight" and "night" sides—only a blurry transition from dark to darkest. Krivitin had assured them that once they landed and their eyes dark-adjusted, they would be able to see reasonably well. But from space that seemed doubtful. And for this, thought Danny, I gave up a perfectly good job at Michigan State.

The Russian language yelling peaked to climax and abruptly stopped. Krivitin, smiling as composedly as though the screaming match had been no more than a friendly chat about the weather, pulled himself around the lashed-down and nested machinery in the center of the main cubicle and peered in at them. "Sara, dear," he said in his perfect English, "you're wanted up front. You better come too, Daniel."

"We're going to land?" Sparky demanded.

"Most certainly not! Gappy has finally understood the necessity for another orbit."

"Hell," said Sparky, even her indomitable desire to please crumbling at last. Dalehouse shared her feelings: another orbit was close enough to another day, with nothing for him to do except try to stay out of the way.

"Yes, I agree," said Krivitin, "but Alex wants you to try to tap the Peeps' signals again."

Harriet complained, but Dalehouse stopped listening. He shucked off his straps and reached wearily for the cassettes of data he had stored away for deceleration.

He plugged in, put the speaker in his ear, and touched the switch. There was a slight tape hiss, an occasional scratch or click, and a distant, somber wail. Those were the sounds from the wolftrap lander. Its primary mission was to secure biological samples and test them in its built-in laboratories; but its microphones had picked up sounds that did not come from itself. He had listened to them fifty times already. After a time he shrugged, stopped the tape, and put in a different cassette. This time the sounds were louder and clearer, with far more definition. The lander in this case had been a neutral-buoyancy floater with a small reserve of thrusting power and a locater for carbon dioxide. Like a female mosquito seeking a blood meal to fertilize its eggs, it was meant to drift until it found a trail of CO
₂
and follow it until it found prey. Then it simply floated nearby as long as there were sounds for it to hear and transmit. But what sounds! Sometimes they resembled a chorus of bagpipes, sometimes a gang of teenage boys in a crepitation contest. Dalehouse had graphed the frequencies—from well below human hearing range to higher than a bat's squeak—and identified at least twenty phonemes. These were no birdcalls; this was language, he was certain.

Heat smote his exposed skin, and he turned back to the port; Kung had drifted into view, looking like a thin-skinned Halloween pumpkin with the embers of Hades inside its mottled surface. He squinted and pulled a neutral-density blind over the porthole; it was not dangerous to glance at it, but there was the chance of burning out your cornea if you stared too long.

In the warmth he felt sleepy. Why not? he thought, snapping off the tape. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and was just drifting off when he heard his name called.

"Dalehouse! Krivitin! DiPaolo! Front and center, everybody."

He shook himself awake, wished for a cup of coffee, and pulled himself toward the workspace. Alex Woodring said, "You'd better all see this. The Peeps have filed another report, and Harriet's taped it for us."

Dalehouse wriggled closer for a better view of the video screen just as it blinked and lighted up. There was a plant on the screen, rust-red and fernlike, with raspberrylike fruits hanging from its fronds. "Roll the tape, Harriet," Woodring said impatiently. The images on the screen leaped and flickered, then stopped.

At first Dalehouse thought the picture was of another Klongan flower, possibly some desert succulent: red and yellow blobs oozing what he supposed was some sort of sap— Then it moved.

"Dear God," whispered somebody. Dalehouse felt something rise in his throat. "What is it?"

"I think it used to be a white mouse," said Morrissey, the biologist.

"What
happened?"

"That," said the biologist grimly, but with a trace of professional satisfaction, "is what I don't know yet. The Peeps are transmitting their voice reports in code."

"They're supposed to share information!" snapped Dalehouse.

"Well, maybe they will. I assume Heir-of-Mao will have his UNESCO delegation deliver a report. And when it's released in New York, Houston will no doubt send us a copy. But not very soon, I think. The picture was clear. When you come right down to it, that's all we need to know: Klong is not as hospitable as we would like. I—" He hesitated, then went on. "I don't think it's an infectious disease. It looks more like an allergic reaction. I can't really imagine an alien microorganism adapting that quickly to our body chemistry, anyway. I suspect we're as poisonous to them as they are to us, so for openers, we don't eat anything, we don't drink anything but our own sealed supplies and distilled water."

"You mean we're landing anyhow?" the Canadian electronicist said incredulously.

Captain Kappelyushnikov snarled,
"Da!"
He nodded vigorously, then muttered to the translator, who said smoothly:

"He says that that is why we came here. He says we will take all precautions. He says on the next orbit, we go."

Dalehouse played the strange songs from the mosquito probe a few times, but the equipment he needed to do any serious analysis had been stowed away and it made little sense to set it up again. Time to kill. Drowsily he peered out at the planet, and drifted off to sleep wondering what to call it. Kungson, Child of Kung, Son of Kung—"Klong, Son of Kung" was what one of the Americans had christened it—by any name, it was worrisome. When he woke he was given a tube of thick petroleum jelly to smear on himself—"Shuck your clothes and cover your whole body; maybe it will protect you from some kind of poison ivy or whatever that is until we get straightened out." Then he dressed again and waited. The electronicist had patched herself in to monitor any further ground transmissions and was pinpointing sources on a likris map of the sunward surface of Klong.

"There seem to be
two
stations broadcasting," Dalehouse commented.

"Yeah. Must be the base camp and, I suppose, somebody off on an expedition. There's the Peep base"—she touched a dot on the purplish sea, on one side of a hundred-kilometer bay—"and there's the other station." That was across the bay. "We know that's their base; we photographed it last time around. Nothing much. They aren't really set up yet, I'd say. That signal's pulse-coded, probably basic science data on its way to their orbiter for tachyon transmission back home."

"What's over on the other side of the bay?"

"Nothing much. There's a sort of nest of some of the arthropods there, but
they
don't have radio." She pulled the earpiece away from her temple and handed it to Dalehouse. "Listen to that signal."

Dalehouse put the phone in his ear. The sound was a staccato two-tone beep, plaintively repeated over and over.

"Sounds sad," he said.

The woman nodded. "I think it's a distress signal," she said, frowning. "Only they don't seem to be answering it."

WHAT CAN BE SAID about a being like Sharn-igon that will make him come clear and real? Perhaps it can be approached in a roundabout way. Like this.

Suppose there is a kind and jolly man, the sort of person who takes children fishing, dances the polka, reads Elizabethan verse, and knows why Tebaldi was the greatest Mimi who ever lived.

Is this Sharn-igon?

No. This is only an analogy. Suppose we then go on to ask you if you have ever met this man. You hesitate, riffling through the chance encounters of a life. No, you say, a finger against your nose, I don't think so. I never met anybody like that.

And suppose we then say to you, But you did! It was a week ago Thursday. He was driving the A-37 bus you took from the station to the Federal Building, and you were late for your appointment with the tax examiner because this man would not change a five-dollar bill.

What do you say then? Perhaps you say, Christ, fellow! I remember the incident well! But that was no amiable folk dancer. That was a bus driver!

That's how it would be with Sharn-igon. It's easy enough to imagine you meeting him (provided we don't worry about how you get there). Let's make the mind-experiment to see what would happen. Suppose you are standing outside of time and space somehow, like an H. G. Wells god looking down from a cloud. You poke your finger into the infinitesimal. You touch Sharn-igon's planet, and you uncover him. You look him over.

What do you see?

One might try to describe him to you by saying that Sharn-igon was politically conservative, deeply moral, and fundamentally honest. One might try to elicit your sympathy by saying that he (like who that you know?) was screaming inside with unhealed pain.

But would you see that?

Or would you glance and gasp and pull back your finger in loathing and say:

Christ, fellow! That's no person. It's an alien creature! It lives (lived? will live?) a thousand light-years away, on a planet that circles a star I have never even seen! And besides, it looks
creepy.
If I had to say what it looked like, giving it the best break I could, I would have to say that it looked like half of a partly squashed crab.

And, of course, you would be right. . . .

The way Sharn-igon looked to himself was something else again.

For one thing, he is not an instant invention for your eye to see. He is a person. He has relationships. He lives (will live?) in a society. He moves (moved?) around and through a dense web of laws and folkways. He wasn't like every other Krinpit (as his people called themselves), no matter how indistinguishable they might look to your eyes. He was Sharn-igon.

For example, although it was Ring-Greeting time, Sharn-igon hated Ring-Greeting. To him it was the loneliest and worst part of the cycle. He disliked the bustle, he resented the false and hypocritical sentiment. All the shops and brothels were busy as everyone tried to get gifts and to become pregnant, but it was an empty mockery in Sharn-igon's life, because he was alone.

If you had asked him, Sharn-igon would have told you that he had always hated Ring-Greeting, at least ever since his final molting. (When he was a young seed just beginning to wave on his male-mother's grate he loved it, naturally enough. All seeds did. Ring-Greeting was for kids.) That wasn t quite true. The cycle before, he and his he-wife, Cheee-pruitt, had had a very cheerful Greeting.

But Cheee-pruitt was gone. Sharn-igon signaled at his screen, almost stumbling over an Inedible Ghost that lay before it. There was no answer. He hesitated. Something—perhaps the ghost—seemed to be calling his name. But that was ridiculous. After a moment of indecision, he scuttled across the crowded run to the—call it a bar—to chew a couple of quick ones.

Look at Sharn-igon munching on strands of hallucinogenic fern among a crowd squeezed two or three deep around the Krinpit who was kneading and dispensing the stuff. He was a fine figure of a person. He was masculinely broad—easily two meters from rim to rim; and pleasingly slim—not more than forty centimeters to the tip of his carapace. In spite of his mood, unpaired males and females of all descriptions found him attractive. He was young, healthy, sexually potent, and successful in his chosen profession.

Well, that is not strictly true, because a paradox is involved. Sharn-igon's profession was a form of social work. The more successful he was in terms of his own personal ego needs, the worse his society was. It was only when Krinpit were in trouble that they turned to persons like Sharn-igon. The Krinpit were socially interdependent to a degree not usually associated with a technological culture on Earth.

Maybe one could find that sort of close-knit clan among the Eskimos or Bushmen, where every member of the community had to be able to rely on every other or they would all die. For that reason Sharn-igon was happiest when he was least wanted. Ring-Greeting was bringing its usual crop of damaged egos born of loneliness amid the holiday cheer. He was busier than he had ever been, and so less happy.

Stand on your cloud and look down on Sharn-igon. To you he surely looks strange, and maybe quite repulsive, true. His crescent carapace is sprinkled with what look like chitinous sails. Some are a few centimeters high, some much smaller; and around them race, clicking and scraping, what look like lice. Actually, they aren't. They are not even parasites, except in the sense that a fetus is a parasite on its mother; they are the young. Sharn-igon is not the only Krinpit in the bar carrying young. Of the hundred individuals in the bar, eight or ten are in the brood-male phase. Sometimes one of the scurrying little creatures drops off or inadvertently gets carried off on the shell of another Krinpit as they rub together. They are instantly aware of what has happened and go wild in the attempt to get back. If they fail, they die.

Each end of Sharn-igon's shell is pleated chitin jointed with cartilage. That part is always in motion, expanding with accordion folds, tilting, spreading like a fan. He slides along the packed dirt floor or the bodies of Krinpit under him (in the conviviality of the bar no one minds being crawled on) on a dozen double-boned legs.

After he had had three quick ones and was feeling better, he left the bar and sidled down the turfy run, not hurrying, with no particular destination in mind. On each side of the run are what you might think of as rather shabby Japanese screens. They are not decorated in any way, but they are jointed and folded, and they come in all sizes. They set off the homes and commercial places, some of which, like the bar, are filled with scores of Krinpit, some almost empty. The screens too are studded with the tiny saillike projections, but otherwise they are unadorned. What you would notice at once is that they are not colored. The Krinpit do not understand color, and in the light of Kung's Star, blood-red and dusky, you would not see much color at first either, even if it were there.