Terra (15 page)

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. . . and the sgth-k-shffs drifted away together, to be happy for the foreseeable future.

Terra put down her slate and looked at her classmates faces.

There was a surprisingly long silence.

Even more surprisingly, it wasn’t Fthfth who broke it.

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And none of this is real?
asked Pktk.
None of it actually happened?

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No,
said Terra.
I just thought of it and wrote it down.

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Where did you get it from?
asked Pktk, intensely interested.

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I just combined bits and pieces of ideas from all over the place, things I’d read, things I’d heard about and just mixed them all up into something that didn’t happen, but might have happened.

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Well, yes, except there’s no such race as Daktavarians and you can’t power spaceships with sgth-k-shff plasma,
muttered Fthfth.

Pktk turned towards her. -
Well, how do you know? If Terra’s invented a whole race of people called the Daktavarians, who’s to say that THEIR spaceships wouldn’t be powered by sgth-k-shff plasma? It’s kind of up to Terra, it’s her . . . it’s her . . .
There wasn’t a name for it. In the Fnrrn language there was no name for the thing that Terra had just created.

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Story,
said Bsht.

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What?
asked Terra.

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That’s what they call them on Rrth. Stories. I’ve been looking it up while you were talking, Terra. There’s a Ymn word, ‘story’. We’ve always thought it was just another word for ‘history’ – the two words are very similar, in fact they’re the same word in some Ymn languages. But looking at these translations of Ymn broadcasts,
she held up her slate and showed Terra the blocks of text,
I think it has a different meaning. ‘History’ is an account of events that actually happened, ‘stories’ are accounts of events which may or may not have happened. Some of them are true, some of them are just . . .

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Thought up? Like I just thought that one up?
asked Terra, her eyes wide.

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Indeed.
Bsht exhaled heavily and sat down. When you get a job as a Lyceum lector you don’t expect major discoveries in the fields of xeno-linguistics and xeno-sociology to happen while you’re teaching the novice class.

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I’d better tell the Preceptor about this. This changes . . . a lot of things.

Fthfth was still mulling something over. -
And sgth-k-shffs are NOT telepathic,
she grumbled.

P
ktk finished his evening meal and went to his room to do his homework, or so he told his parents. He’d explained about Terra’s dream, and told them about her story, and while his mother was still relieved that he hadn’t in fact spent last night drifting through space with his Ymn friend (although it took her a long time to believe that), she was obviously rather perturbed by the idea of things that weren’t real being talked about as if they were real. To her, such things seemed . . . distasteful.

Pktk sat down and looked at his slate. He accessed his favourite files, the files on military history. He read for a while; accounts of frontier skirmishes during the battle for control of the planet D’fng during the thirty-first era.

Pktk closed his eyes.

After a little while he opened them again. He smiled. He took up his slate, closed down the history files and opened up a new blank text file.

He wrote.

The Personal War Memoirs of Captain Vmk-sh-Gllg-sh-Fsst of the 12th Light Armoured Division, Last Survivor of the Battle of Chxx Ridge.

Pktk smiled. There had never been a Captain Vmk-sh-Gllg-sh-Fsst of the 12th Light Armoured Division, last survivor of the battle of Chxx Ridge. He had never existed.

But he did now.

T
he next few months were exciting times to live in Mlml.

The discovery, thanks to Terra’s Interface accident, that Ymns could access their imagination – either consciously or unconsciously – to create non-existent but still thrilling and moving scenarios, these ‘stories’ (or st’rss as it came out in Mlmln), and, more importantly, the realisation that not just Ymns but Fnrrns could do this too if they tried, opened up a whole new world of possibilities.

Up until this point, Fnrrn culture in general and Mlmln culture in particular had consisted more or less entirely of two things: science and sports. Science was considered to be the bedrock of Fnrrn civilisation, and rightfully so. The peoples of Fnrr owed their prosperity, their health, their security, their very lives to science. Scientific advancement was the cause towards which almost all activity on the planet was dedicated, and when you couldn’t take any more hypothesising or experimenting for one day, you could always go and thrash it all out of your system in the gshkth pit or on the dfsh field.

Even at home, one would relax by playing games. Games were important. They were fun, relaxing, and, crucially, they honed the mind and the powers of reason. All the better for when one returned to the important stuff: science.

Such broadcasts as people watched consisted of news (generally updates on the latest scientific discoveries), documentaries (generally histories of previous scientific discoveries) and coverage of sporting events. That was it, and up until now that had been perfectly sufficient for everyone.

Not any more.

Fnrr, and specifically Mlml, had gone literature crazy.

It had started modestly, with people writing short stories and publishing them on the Source, inviting critical appraisals and input. Most of them had been pretty awful, but the learning curve had been steep.

Novella-length stories had started to appear, along with, for the first time, full-length translations of Ymn stories and books, since Rrth was now renowned as the birthplace of
f’k-shnn
(another new word; if nothing else the story-craze was having a dramatic effect upon the vocabulary of the language of Mlml). Popular titles included
Which Sister Will Die?, Sad Orphan Becomes Happy
(there were a few of these, actually) and
Crazy Monoped Can’t Stop Chasing Sea Mammal
(Fnrrn story titles still tended to be rather literal rather than evocative, and the same applied to these translated works).

What no one knew was that Fnrr’s very first homegrown author was in fact Pktk. He had never shown
The Personal War Memoirs of Captain Vmk-sh-Gllg-sh-Fsst of the 12th Light Armoured Division, Last Survivor of the Battle of Chxx Ridge
to anyone, or indeed any of Captain Vmk-sh-Gllg-sh-Fsst’s other thrilling adventures (there were four in the series so far, taking Captain Fsst, or GENERAL Fsst as he now was, all the way to the end of the D’fng war and back to Fnrr where he was now fighting the G’grk at the battle of Gskkh-Sh’kkr). He saw the attention that successful authors were now getting. Pktk didn’t like attention. He was happy for it to be paid to other people.

In any event, Pktk didn’t think anyone would particularly enjoy reading stories about battling the G’grk in eras gone by when, for the first time in living memory, the G’grk were fighting battles in the here and now.

News had broken of a frontier dispute between the G’grk and Dskt, the nation which bordered the Central Plains on its landward side, and which faced Mlml across a narrow expanse of ocean on the other. As is always the case in such matters (not that anyone in Mlml was old enough to remember this) it was unclear who had started it, but within a few days of the crisis beginning, a small party of G’grk soldiers had been captured (on Dskt territory according to Dskt, on their own territory according to the G’grk High Command), a Dskt border station had been blown up (unprovoked, said Dskt; retaliation, said the G’grk) and things were suddenly very tense indeed. Not a time to put out a story about heroic wartime exploits, thought Pktk, showing more taste and restraint than anyone else in the entire history of publishing.

When the matter was discussed in Mlml at all, it was usually dismissed as the G’grk getting up to their old tricks, of causing trouble for the sake of it. Lbbp, for one, had his doubts about this. The G’grk were backward, superstitious and brutal, but they weren’t stupid. They wouldn’t go out of their way to provoke a war with a nation which was vastly technologically superior unless they wanted something. Or unless they knew something the Mlmlns and Dkstns didn’t. Lbbp would reflect that if the sudden literary explosion that Mlml was enjoying proved anything, it was that ‘primitiveness’ was a very relative concept.

That was the best aspect of the whole thing, as far as Lbbp was concerned. If the populace had genuinely harboured any sort of resentment towards Terra because of how badly the last FaZoon visit had gone, then all such feelings had been well and truly forgotten now. She was feted as the founder of a cultural revolution, the little girl from another world who had introduced all of Fnrr to another world right here. There were rumours (baseless, Lbbp hoped) that a competition would soon be inaugurated, a prize for the best original work of fiction, and named in Terra’s honour, and perhaps even with her being invited to judge the entries. No formal approaches had been made in that regard, but Lbbp was determined to turn them down if they ever materialised. Alien though she was, celebrity though she might be, she was still a little girl, his little girl and she had classwork to do.

There was another side to all this. Another factor which no one else had considered, perhaps because it was only really relevant in Lbbp’s case. A much bleaker, more chilling implication.

Lbbp was alone one night when it hit him.

He’d seen Terra off to sleep, and was now staying up trying to finish a bit of work before retiring himself (he was getting a bit behind at the Life Science Hub, what with one thing and another). He stared at his slate; he was tired, the text was starting to become a meaningless jumble of characters and punctuation. He rubbed his eyes and got up to make himself a bowl of zff.

He couldn’t resist looking in on Terra, to make sure she’d gone to sleep. It was an exciting time for her, he knew, and it was becoming a full-time occupation keeping her attention focused on the things that mattered.

She was fast asleep, rotating slowly in mid-air. Lbbp smiled. At least that business with the FaZoon had been forgotten. Ridiculous, pompous pretend demi-gods, he had no time for them. Maybe now they’d leave Fnrr alone. Maybe they’d go and check Rrth out, disrupt their lives for a change.

Lbbp’s memory drifted back to the conversation he’d had with Terra, that day in the Leisure Hub, about why the FaZoon had never been to Rrth. About how no one was supposed to go to Rrth, not officially. He remembered talking about how those aliens who had visited Rrth often met a sticky – occasionally a snotty – end, and how weirdly they only ever seemed to belong to races that no one had ever encountered, as if they only existed –

Lbbp froze. His jaw dropped. His insides turned to ice.

They didn’t exist.

The aliens who attacked Rrth in all those broadcasts he’d seen; they weren’t real. The broadcasts were stories. Enacted, visually realised stories.

That was why none of the races were familiar, the Ymns had made them up. All of them. The huge, city-blasting disc-ships, the three-legged death machines (now he thought about it, they were obviously made up; who builds a machine with three legs? It’d fall over whenever it took a step), the lizard people in Ymn suits, even the little friendly one who got left behind, they were all just stories.

They’ve never met any real aliens,
thought Lbbp.
They’ve never met any aliens at all. They tell all these stories about aliens but they’re just imaginary. They’re alone. As far as they know, they’re completely alone. How awful for them.

Lbbp felt a great wave of aching sympathy for the whole Ymn race. So alone, so desperate for contact with someone, anyone from beyond their own little blue-green world that they’ve invented a whole fictitious history full of encounters and invasions. They even fondly imagine themselves being conquered and decimated by beings from another world; it’s as if even that would be better than the terrible loneliness of being the only civilisation in the galaxy.

Had anyone else realised this? Should he bring it up? To whom? Had the time come to propose making official contact with the Ymns again? He was aware of at least two occasions on which that had been suggested, and rejected. Could it be done now? The prejudice against Ymns was still widespread and deep, and he himself had played a part in this, he recalled with a shiver of guilt. But now, surely, Terra’s presence and this new discovery of Ymn creativity had challenged that. Was it enough?

There was also the question of how the Ymns would react.
They’ve built up so many different expectations of what form alien contact might take,
Lbbp pondered, pacing the room,
both positive and negative, that how they would respond to one of us actually turning up is impossible to even guess at. They might be full of awe and wonder, they might take up their weapons and try to repel us before we’d even said hello, they might be gripped with fear and panic . . .

Lbbp’s knees weakened. He sat down heavily on his bench seat. There was a dreadful, churning feeling of guilt in his chest, where his stomach was.

They were scared.

That night, on the road, in the dark, when he’d appeared out of nowhere.

They’d been scared quite literally out of their minds.

Those two Ymn forms that he’d barely even glimpsed as they ran away into the night. They didn’t abandon their baby. They didn’t (as he’d occasionally considered) leave her behind as some sort of sacrifice to the alien sky-god to save their own skins. He’d scared them so much that they’d forgotten everything but the need to get away. Everything. Even what they’d left behind in the vehicle.

For the first time in the eight orbits since that night on Rrth, Lbbp understood the fear that the two Ymns felt. And suddenly, he knew with an absolute certainty that as soon as they’d realised their terrible mistake, they would have gone back for her. And he knew how they must have felt when they found her gone. Just how he’d feel.