Alien Tongues (33 page)

Some fems do fall in love with croses, but it's not too common.  The attraction of marriage for a fem means security, and I don't always mean financial security.   Truckers like me make lots of money – I'm sure I earn much more than either Al or Jo.  But a reasonable-looking single fem is often seen as a threat to married fems, many of whom have no income.  The legal system in the Galaxy has now gotten so out of control that it's very easy to break some law somewhere.  Someone who doesn't like you can get hold of millions of records on you and find something to give some cop, putting you in jail.   It takes the status, knowledge and connections of a cros to get you out of there.   I've been told that about 80% of incarcerated humans are single fems.

But since I sit alone most of my life inside a Gold Wing, I stay out of trouble.  In theory, Al's wife might try to attack me but I get the impression she is not very bright.  He married her because she's unbelievably pretty, and he loves to own gorgeous things.  Anyway, she knows I constantly turn Al down.  She must know that, if she tried anything nasty, I could marry him just to get revenge.

Why do croses want wives?   To put it crudely, they want the womb.  A key measure of the success of a cros is the offspring he designs.  Yes, I do mean "designs."  To complete my picture of human society, I need to describe a third type of human – the ten percent of the population I left out.

I also need to explain that, technically, I was not sitting alone in the vast Gold Wing on that day, or in fact any previous day of that voyage.  I had the company of Ben, who is a mal.  I had purchased Ben as surplus from the Sperm Bank before my previous trip, and he himself had been a replacement for Ted, my earlier mal.  I've owned six mals at various times, but I'd never had one as fine as Ben.

After my calls with Al and Jo, I remember walking across the cabin to sit with Ben a while.  As always, he wore headphones to listen to music, and he was working on a sketch.  It was of me, sitting at my console, and was of a professional quality.  I congratulated him and stroked his hair, and he nodded briefly to acknowledge the compliment.

To me, Ben was a beautiful creature. He was about twice the size of a cros, and had a body perfect for athletics (inclusive of a tight little stomach) even though he would never know competitive sports.  His head wore a mane of dark-blond hair, and a similar colored hair provided a thin coat to large areas of his body.  His face was much heavier than a cros's, with deep-set blue eyes.  He had just become a full adult which meant that, after perhaps another three or four trips with me, he was almost certain to die of natural causes, peacefully in his sleep.

Like all mals, Ben could not communicate in language and very little in sign.  Also like all mals, he was not known to express any form of emotion or feeling.  You could never read on his face any happiness, sadness, anger or fear, nor would you hear noises from him that would give a hint of them.  But you could teach him to do some very cute stuff.  For example, I recall I gave him a hug at this moment, and he would sort of hug me back by giving my shoulders a squeeze with his enormous hands.  He did it just right and it would release a lot of tension in me.

I sat in a control chair opposite from where he was sitting on the floor.  That gave him a good view to complete the portrait, and he turned towards me, glancing up frequently as he sketched.  With his touch and now watching him in this serene pastime, I felt very relaxed.  I thought, I'm a very lucky fem, really.  I have a well-paid job I love, two sweet cros suitors, and a mal to die for.  For the next few trips while Ben was alive, my life would be almost perfect.  Content, I reclined the chair and dozed off.  I awoke to find that hell had broken loose.

The most obvious things were the background roar of engines and the number of warning sounds and flashing lights which were telling me of problems.  But it only took an extra second to sense the gradual acceleration that had started.  The force of it was clear as I jumped out of my chair and ran to the console.  And my experience told me that this acceleration was itself increasing, albeit very gradually.   There were three explanations for such an event.  Either the engines had started due to a malfunction, or we were flying too close to some star or cluster because of a mapping error, or because we had been caught in an unmapped quick-matter.  The last one was the worst, and I had a horrible feeling it was also the explanation now.

By the time you are able to read this book, I expect that various forms of artificial intelligence will have begun to dominate your lives.  You will know that, no matter how sophisticated you make your machines, they cannot think like humans.  Machines can only follow logical paths we have designed for them.  The human brain has many faults, but it can suddenly invent new and complex theories which fit reality and we have no idea where they come from.  That is why a human pilot sits on board a Gold Wing.  Perhaps 99.99% of the time my checking of the systems serves no purpose.  But it is the one in ten thousand that could either lose the ship or land it where it could cause unimaginable damage.  In such moments, any known procedures are useless, because the system already knows them and can execute them.  My job in an emergency is to provide sudden, out-of-the-box inspiration.  It may call upon all my experience and training, but it
must
call upon more than that.  We engineers call it the Brain Bang.

The screen was telling me quick-matter, a deep-galaxy pilot's ultimate fear, but we are taught from the beginning to be highly skeptical of such an analysis as unmapped quick-matter was assumed to be very rare.  Our rockets were firing and it was impossible to know by feel at that moment if the acceleration was coming from the rockets themselves or gravitational pull against which the rockets were fighting.  A billion checks were being made inside our software but the faulty one may have overridden the hundreds of millions of correct ones.  There was a simple test I could perform that would give me the right answer.  If I increased the power on the rockets currently employed, and there a feel of increased acceleration, then it was a malfunction.  If there were a feel of deceleration, on the other hand, then the rockets were pulling against gravity and losing the fight.  And then my only hope to avoid what could well be a slow and agonizing death was a Brain Bang.

Feeling sick with fear, I reached for the control that would increase rocket power.  The engine roar became even louder.  Deceleration!  Oh My Universe, we were heading for a slow crushing.   We had the power to lift us to a higher orbit, but that would just postpone the inevitable.   Without escape velocity, we were doomed.   Slowly but relentlessly, we would get pulled down into tighter and tighter orbits.  Pressure in the cabin would continue to increase without limit.   I'd been told that pain inside your head would increase unbearably, then finally through your whole body.  Blood vessels would pop, bones would break, finally flesh would start to tear.  Who knew when you mercifully lost consciousness?  I had a hand-gun to end it all, but when was the best time to use it?  Might it suddenly get too late to be able to pull the trigger?

I sat in the control chair, waiting for inspiration.  Some clever idea that no one who had programmed for such emergencies had ever considered.  Something  creative, imaginative, tricky, cutting edge, out-of-the-box, non-linear, lateral thinking. 
Brain Bang, Brain Bang!
  Energy, there had to be enough energy on board to get us out of here, but how to use it?  How long before the pressure would start to build up in the cabin?  How long before the point of no return?  Horrified, all I could find coming into my head were questions, as if the more I thought the less I was aware I knew.  No matter how much I told myself to disengage from the moment and try to see it all as some engineering exam question, I could not fight down a rising sense of panic.  I was failing, paralyzed by the fear of failure.

I was aware of Ben standing beside my chair, bracing himself against the returning acceleration.  The poor soul, I thought briefly, he has no clue we are hurtling towards a terrible death.  What was I saying?  He was the lucky one who would die without any fear or dread.  I looked at him.  I was being tortured by images of blood bursting out of my ears, and he was enjoying the winking lights on my dashboard.  Why hadn't I been born a dumb mal?  How wonderful to know only music and art, experience life only in your physical prime, and slip off this galaxy without even being aware of it?

Strange things happen to the mind at times like that.  Maybe I got angry with him to conquer my overwhelming sense of fear and despair.  Somehow, I felt a burning need to let him know how hard it was to be a fem, to take on huge responsibilities and have no sense of security at all, to try hard to be the best pilot possible and then because of some freak accident to pay the worst penalty imaginable.  I turned to him, grabbed the cloth of his shirt and shouted at him.  Why did I say such things?

"You stupid great ape! Can't you see that we're going to die and I have no idea what to do?"

Maybe it was his expression that set me off.  It was just the mildest level of curiosity, which barely changed when I screamed into his face.  On the one hand I told myself, of course he will look like this because he has no comprehension and no emotion.  But the human-animal in me said, how can anyone look like this in such an emergency?  Even a dog would show distress.  What is so wrong with these mals?  How did they get to be such freaks of nature?

These, of course, were not the appropriate questions to be asking myself at the time, but perhaps I had given up on saving my life and was trying to take my thoughts away from the agony of dying.  In my last moments, life was baring its existential nature to me and I was monstrously enthralled by its incongruity.  Maybe everything might seem so ludicrous, so absurd, that I could somehow detach myself from the forthcoming pain.  Who knows how best we defend ourselves against unknowable terrors?

Looking at my maniacal expression, Ben inclined his head slightly, then glanced at his sketch before returning to study me.  Oh Galaxy, I thought, he is deciding to change his picture now he sees my looks have changed.  The final, surreal, theater of insanity.  Then he unfastens my safety harness, lifts me by the waist and puts me over his shoulder.  He carries me to the control chair on the far side of the cabin while, hanging upside down, I beat uselessly on his back.

Still screaming at him, I cannot prevent him from fastening my harness in the other chair.  Somehow, I am vaguely aware that he is inserting the metal hook the wrong way round.  Using brute force, he nevertheless manages to ram it into the buckle, then stands back.  I immediately go to unfasten it, but it won't open.  The hook, curving the wrong way, has been jammed too tight into the clasp.  I am effectively locked into my chair. 

He walks back to the console, oblivious to the noise I am making.  He stares at the screens and dial pads as if it were some altar from which the God of Dumb Mals was going to give him instructions in some simple pantomime he can understand.  I realize I am spraying saliva with the ferocity of my bellowed insults to him.  Every nasty word I can think of to describe someone of below-average intelligence spews from my mouth.  Maybe extreme hate and contempt can increase the body's pain threshold.

Ben flips switches at both ends of his extended arms.  You can see that rockets on the side of the vast truck are activated.  He gives them full throttle and it's enough to start a gradual rotation.  I now fall silent, speechless as the Absurdity of Being.  Why not, I ask myself?  Why not have a dog-brained creature rotate this leviathan as a kind of silly dance while we plummet into Hell?  But then I see the next levers he wants to play with and I think, well, that makes a sort of sense.  He is detaching our cabin module from both the tractor and trailer, his arms again extended across the console like some mad orchestra conductor.  The enormous cargo of ore will precede us into the quick-matter and, who knows, turn so hot that we will fry before we get crushed.  That could well be a pleasanter experience.

There is a thundering, cracking sound as the trailer tears itself away.  Because we are rotating, the holding joints are sheared off and the huge chunks of twisted metal bang into our cabin.  One of the screens is now showing the trailer falling away from us.  It is rotating as before.  Because we are so much lighter and were flipped by the straining joints, we find ourselves now rotating in the opposite direction. The dance of death has now become more sophisticated as laws of motion are preserved in greater sets of equations.

As if imitating an excitement he could never feel, Ben rotates a cluster of dials to their maximum.  They are all the rockets on one side of the trailer.  I assumed nothing would happen because the trailer was already too far away to receive the signal, but I was wrong.  What look like solar flares during an eclipse exploded out of the trailer's side.  If Ben had wanted a fireworks display as his last entertainment, he could have done no better.  Even I had never seen such rocket-power unleashed into empty space.  Fuel worth several months of my very decent salary was being consumed in the blink of an eye.  Well done, Ben.  Let's go down with our guns blazing.

Maybe the sight was so mesmerizing that its consequences didn't occur to me until visually obvious.  The rotation of the trailer sent the rocket blasts first out of sight, then pointing in the opposite direction from where we had first seen them.  The next direction was therefore directly at us.  We were going to fry, after all, but this time it was almost upon us.   If we were lucky, we would be quickly incinerated.  I guessed that slow boiling might be no better than the glacial crushing we were otherwise destined for.  I tried to empty my mind, though I had no idea why that could help.  Then there was the strongest acceleration I had ever known, and which felt as painful as burning.  In fact it did feel like my skin was burning, but I saw no fire.  A deceleration, just as agonizing, a pause to feel the burning again, and then another intense acceleration, but not as vicious as the first.  Three more rounds of this hellish sequence, praying to die, just die.