Watson, Ian - SSC (21 page)

 
          
There’s
a pool of arsenic-laced milk and a heap of arsenic-laced food, undigested, on
the floor in the same position where the bowl and saucer were yesterday. The
bait has been uneaten; undrunken. Can I say that, since it was originally drunk
and eaten? It had been de-eaten, de-drunk; earlier in the same moment of fairy
time as it was consumed in, later on in our own time.

 
          
On
we drift, 8,000 years away from Earth. Now, that really is a time-span to
conjure with! I’m thinking a lot about the time-spans now. Last night, for the
first time, I dreamed a dream backwards.

 
          
Backwards
dream a dreamed I.

 
          
When
we finally landed, through miles of hazy cloud, the Clayfolk (as we decided to
call them) seemed oblivious of the silver ship settling in their midst and went
about their business, plastering walls, molding pots, and gathering food. They
looked like upright, bifurcate slugs, with bodies that stretched and contracted
as they walked, producing a curious undulating pogostick effect. They could pop
out any number of pseudopod fingers at will from the ends of their arms, like
clusters of snails’ horns,
then
resorb them back into
the wrist stumps. Proof of their culture lay all around us: the huts, the
pottery,
the
cooking fires. Yet their blank
indifference bothered us. Was this really intelligent behavior?

 
          
As
soon as we left the ship, however, the sight of three aliens in sealed suits
galvanized them. They flowed about us, prodded us, patted up, and Rhoda was
able to record her first samples of the Clayfolk speech as they made noises at
us and about us.

 
          
Rhoda
was a lithe young Negress, Lobsang a middle-aged Tibetan male, and I, as you
can see, am a red-haired Celt, as speckled with freckles as any hen. Our
features showed through our face plates, but the basic impression our suits
gave was one of perfect triplet identity. It was this fact that disturbed the
Clayfolk. But we only cottoned on to that later ... (If indeed that was the
truth.)

 
          
Now
even
I
, a mere pilot, and no linguist or social
scientist, very soon realized that if the noises they were making were speech,
it was a very queer form of it. All the time, that same slobbery glutinous
bark; it never varied! After five minutes of it, Rhoda switched her squawk box
off in disgust. A language composed of one single word?
Preposterous.

 
          
Yet
as we wandered round their village, it was impossible to avoid the impression
of civilization. Cones and cupola clay huts formed a perfect double circle
around a central plaza dominated by a large hearth with a roasting spit. The
one break in this circle led out along a straight avenue lined by rows of
circular clay statues (seemingly of Clayfolk bending over to touch their toes)
disappearing into the mists. And the cooking spit itself—made from stalactites
bound together by strong fibers! I was amazed at how they’d managed to fashion
such a piece of equipment on this soft, wet world, in the absence of metals or
firm wood or even, apparently, of hard bones. No charred ribs or femurs lay
near the hearth, and their own floppy, rubbery bodies seemed to have nothing
stiffer than gristle in them. There was, too, their miraculous mastery of fire,
on a world visibly bereft of flints or striking stones, without two dry sticks
to rub together.

 
          
“If
I hear that word once more!” growled Rhoda, as the Clayfolk gestured at their
spit, their pots, the roots and fungi and giant snails cooking in them, and
named them all urgently for us, all with the same name . . .

 
          
“One
word contains all words,” remarked Lob- sang mystically. “All words dissolve
into one.” Naturally he was happy that we were going to have to rely on his
trance technique for a cultural pattern, rather than on Rhoda’s squawk box; that
is, her GCSU (General Culture Structures Unit)—which doesn’t translate anything
as such, but sets up algebraic maps based on whatever communication system
inhabitants use, whether sounds, or light patterns as with the Giant Squids of
the Sigma Draconis ocean-world, or gestures as with the Mutes of the thunderous
Aldebaran | planet.

 
          
“What’s
that mean?” she grumbled.

 
          
“Well,
if you repeat the same word over and over enough times, you start hearing
different words, don’t you? Maybe these folk actually hear a whole set of
different words? But there’s consensus on the meanings, because they’re linked
in some way, empathy, telepathy? It’s an idea.”

 
          
“A very foggy one!”

 
          
“Foggy
place,” retorted Lob.

 
          
“Their
gestures,” I suggested diplomatically. “Like Aldebaran, maybe? They’re
continually pointing and fingering.”

 
          
Rhoda
shook her head dismissively.

 
          
“They
point at the same object with any number of fingers—or none at all.
I’ve been watching, it’s all random.”

 
          
“Then
I shall prepare my mind for the trance,” Lob concluded gleefully. “My
privilege, "when your methods fail.
In my contract, no?
We don’t have long here. These beings shall become phantasms and projections
of my own mind. I shall become mad and incorporate them.”

 
          
Rhoda
had little time to feel chagrined, though, for it was just then that the
landscape began to change around us . . .

 
          
Well,
we weren’t exactly taken by surprise! In orbit, we’d spent long enough
surveying the respective motions of star, gasgiant, and moon, to forsee some
pretty weird days for the latter so far as “daylight” went.

 
          
The
gasgiant itself, a dazzling blue, had only failed by a few per cent mass to
become a second partner star to the bright orange primary. The giant moon was
perched precariously just a few thousand miles beyond the Roche
limit, that
should have broken it into a billion pieces and
spread it out like Saturn’s rings had it been any closer. Yet it was unbraked
by tidal forces. Every hundred years or so the furthest planet of this system
rushed in on a cometary ellipse that took it inside the gasgiant’s orbit and
out again— whipping the moon like a top, just enough to compensate for the
braking effect.

 
          
We
foresaw phases of orange sunlight, phases of blue planetlight, phases of bright
purple com- binedlight, and finally nights black as pitch whenever the moon
faced neither luminary. Phases could be prolonged, annulled, repeated, however,
in a quasi-random tic-tac-toe fashion, on account of the way the moon both
spun, and tumbled, at once. An overall pattern only really emerged in terms of
decades according to our computer’s calculations. That life had arisen, and
persisted, on such a world seemed fairly remarkable; that it was apparently
intelligent frankly astonished us. Yet slave-drones had sent back TV footage of
the Clayfolk village (easily spottable on infra-red from the heat of the
fires). We had to accept their existence, illogical as it was! Naturally, they
couldn’t have any real understanding of the true circumstances of their world,
astronomically, buried away beneath that persistent cloud veil. Things must
seem highly mutable to them. “Seasons” and “years” would be meaningless terms.
Even “days” must be highly flexible and unpredictable. Rhoda expected a novel
and interesting language to emerge to cope with this confusion (but never, poor
lady, a language of one word!).

 
          
So,
as I say, the landscape shifted.

 
          
From
the blue planetlight phase, to the bright purple of sun and gasgiant in the sky
together; and if you think of purple as a dark color, think again. It
positively
ached
at us, till we had
to lower the shades in our helmets.

 
          
This
light change wrought new shapes and contours in the landscape, and erased the
old. The blurred shadows we cast now were twin ones; yet each separate shadow seemed
to project a cone of light instead of deleting light. Red and blue splotches
accompanied us that seemed somehow more genuine than the prevalent violent
purple.

 
          
Vegetation
underwent a rapid change. Fungi wilted and dissolved. Ferns we hadn’t seen before
unfurled, fast as a time-lapse movie. Dragonflies hatched and took wing.
Worms
writhed out of the mud and leapt to catch
them in tiny piranha mouths.

 
          
The
Clayfolk speeded up too, to scoop these worms into pots, all the while
chattering animatedly our by now least favorite word.

 
          
“My
God,” groaned Rhoda, “it might as well be a different world now, just look at
it! And still they go on saying
“that’s”,
“
That’s
, “
that’s
” to it.” She mimicked the Clayfolk “word” venomously, giving
it an interpretation that it may (or may not) have had.

 
          
“In
sameness, is difference,” chuckled Lob- sang.

 
          
The
Clayfolk took no more interest in us right now. We might as well have been
invisible; though none of them actually collided with us, I noticed.

 
          
“Enough
for one day,” Rhoda said decisively. “Let’s look round the village separately,
then
get some sleep. Try your luck tomorrow, Lob.”

 
          
“
‘Day’?” chuckled Lob later, as we made our way back to the ship, together,
through worms and ferns and dragonflies, accompanied by our brighter, more real
double shadows, “or ‘season’?
Tomorrow, or next year?”

 
          
To
which, of course, Rhoda had no answer; since it was either, or neither, or
both.

 
          
When
we woke up eight hours later (by ship time) it was pitchblack night, and it
stayed that way for two of our days. While we waited for a new dawn, we
discussed that avenue of statues—and realized that none of us had actually
stepped outside the village to take a closer look at any of them. It was as
though the shape of the village was somehow self-sufficient, had penned us in
without our knowing it! We spoke of possible kinship patterns for the
Clayfolk—another way of getting inside their minds—and discovered that none of
us had unearthed the least evidence of how they bred even. Live births,
laying
of eggs, fission? Why hadn’t we thought to ask
ourselves why we hadn’t, till now? Maybe the constant undulations of their
bodies had hopelessly blurred age and sex distinctions to such an extent that
we actually found it difficult to think about them until we were back in our
neat, functional, logical ship again, with our suits off and our own
differences consequently obvious.

 
          
“Maybe
they melt in the dark to reform next daylight,” offered Lob ironically.

 
          
“Ah,
the dark!” snapped Rhoda. “Now, there’s one thing they must have a name for,
different from the light!”

 
          
“What
point is there in naming the dark, when you can’t see anything in it?”

 
          
“What
I mean, you obtuse Sherpa, is there’ll always be a spring or morning time
that’s quite distinct! I’m damned if I see how they ever civilized themselves,
with all the other confusions. Yet how did they develop a concept of
regularity—as witness that line of statues? The key must lie in the dawn!”

 
          
She
was right. It did indeed. But hardly in the
way she
expected!

 
          
Shortly
after we’d slept again and awoken to eat another breakfast in the dark, it
dawned—a bright ruddy orange dawn, from the Sun-alone. We watched from the
cabin window as the Clayfolk swarmed out of their huts towards that spit at the
heart of the village; and, in horror, the use they actually put that piece of
equipment to . . .

 
          
They
seized one of their own number out of the crowd, slung him over the cooking
spit and wrapped him round it flexibly, binding his feet and head together. One
dayman stuck long, thin clay pipes into the victims’ mouth, nostrils and
rectum. Another kindled a fire beneath the spit. A third began cranking the
handle to turn it. Others slapped wet clay onto the victim’s body.

 
          
“Those figures outside the village, along the road!
They’re
not statues at all,” cried Rhoda. “They’re them,
themselves
!”

 
          
“They
must breed rather rapidly,” observed Lobsang with equanimity. He was already
gearing his mind to regard all Clayfolk as equivalent to phantasms from the
Tibetan Book of the Dead-
purely
subjective demons of the mind, that couldn’t ever trap the man who realized
this.
“Quite an attrition rate for a little village to bear
... if they sacrifice to the dawn every day like this!”