Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds Read online

  (This we had in common: we had both spent a year of our youth playing at mercenary, on the planet Hell. He did not elaborate, but I got the impression that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience much more than I had.)

  I couldn’t get him to argue about anything, so I pretty much retreated to my books, and he to his body. He had a training chair loaded with weights and springs and pulleys that he could use to isolate any particular muscle and torture it into prominence. A harmless enough compulsion under normal circumstances, but with an ominous aspect here: physical strength was probably going to be irrelevant, since the Obelobelians who went through the rite of passage were as weak as ten-year-old humans. With every bulging muscle, Raj was building up false self-confidence.

  When I pointed this out to him, he just nodded amiably and went on sweating.

  We came out of orbit to a cloudy spring day, indistinguishable from a cloudy summer-fall-winter day. The planet has a circular orbit and no axial tilt, so no seasons, and the sky is always a uniform thin mist, so no weather. Unless you count heavy dew every night as weather. A gray moldy planet in its large temperate zones, with a lot of caves and a breathable, but unpleasantly musty, atmosphere. The ground was a tangle of presumably inedible mushrooms. Our floater homed in on the silvery dome of the Confederación’s research headquarters; slid through the force field and landed.

  I hadn’t expected trouble with the local bureaucracy, since the planet had no humans other than the xenologists. As luck would have it, the woman in charge recognized my name.

  “‘Gregorio Fuentes,’” she read off the first page of the grant. She dropped it on the small folding table and stood up. She looked like she wanted to pace, but the tent wasn’t really big enough. So she contented herself with adjusting the heat under the teapot. With her back to us, she said one word: “Poacher.”

  “Come on, now,” I said. “You can’t poach where there’s nothing to hunt.”

  “Oh, just in spirit.” She turned and looked at us tiredly. “I assume you’re interested in the balaselis.”

  I tapped the folder. “It’s all in here.”

  “Marvelous creature,” Raj said.

  “Any xoo would pay a fortune for one,” she said, her expression not changing. “But you can’t have one.”

  “Nothing could be further from our minds.”

  “I’m sure.” She poured three plastic cups of bitterroot and served us. “I mean you really, physically, can’t. You’re ten or twelve years too early. No individual can be culled until we have a population estimate. And there’s no way in hell you can sneak one up to orbit; they’re just too big.”

  Bitterroot is a special taste I have never acquired. I sipped the nasty stuff and tried to keep my voice pleasant. “The grant is quite clear on that. I’ll be collecting some common smaller species that may eventually wind up on display. No balaselis.”

  “We merely wish to observe them in situ,” Raj said quietly. She stared at him and then at me. “I see. Thrillseekers.”

  “Not at all.” I picked up the folder and offered it to her. “Our credentials are in order.”

  She ignored it. “I’m sure they always are. There’s never any shortage of hungry universities. Or bored rich people.”

  Raj smiled at her. “I have never been bored in my life.”

  “Then you’ve never been a scientist forced to push government papers around.” She snatched the grant and riffled through it. “I’ll go over this in detail tonight. If you’ve dotted all the t’s and crossed all the i’s, you can leave the dome in the morning. You understand the quarantine procedure?”

  “Of course.”

  “We’ll be watching you every moment. No human artifacts. You go out there completely naked. One wristwatch, one pencil, and I’ll have you confined until the next Confederación inspection team arrives. That will be a long time. Understand?”

  “Yeah. But why not cooperate with us?” I said. “The sooner we…complete our research goals, the sooner we’ll be a memory.”

  “Your research could be a disaster,” she said, her voice starting to shake. “The Obelobelians are the most primitive alien culture we’ve ever encountered. Perhaps the most primitive that ever will be encountered. We have to proceed with extreme caution. Just the fact that we have to communicate with the Obelobelians contaminates the very data we seek. And we are highly trained, dedicated, and careful researchers. Anyone else who comes in contact with them is a wild card.”

  “We won’t try to sell them any trinkets,” I said.

  “If they had any money, I suspect you would.” She stood up. “I’ll contact you in the morning.”

  I thought the quarantine restrictions were ridiculously tough and also hypocritical: the Confederación’s presence was marked by a shimmering silver force dome over a hundred meters in diameter, with floaters almost daily dropping out of orbit and returning. The natives might notice.

  Dr. Avedon was not happy with our knives, but couldn’t confiscate them. They were both genuine Obelobelian artifacts, razor-keen chipped crystal, “on loan” from Selva’s Museo Arqueológico. I needed mine to make cages. Raj needed his to make a spear.

  I was going into the cave with him, but not as a combatant. The balaselis supposedly would ignore you if you kept your back to the wall, and that was exactly what I intended to do. Unless Raj got into trouble. Then I would help him—if it looked like it would do any good—but my fee would be quadrupled. Raj agreed to this with the easy confidence of a man who lacks the imagination to picture his own death, or who simply holds death in contempt. I never got to know him well enough to figure out which.

  Even after we were allowed out of the dome, we had to spend a day in preparation. I had to weave the equivalent of rucksack and canteen out of local materials. A xenologist on Selva had showed me how—but it’s one thing to duplicate a primitive craft under controlled conditions, with the help of an experienced tutor, and quite another to go outside and hack down the materials and try to do it from memory. The first half-dozen canteens I wove would have made decent colanders.

  I gave up trying to work outdoors. The cold didn’t bother Raj—Qadar is no tropical paradise—but it made my fingers numb and clumsy. Finally I pieced together two rucksacks and four liter-sized canteens. We rested and set out at first light.

  The map I’d memorized didn’t do much good. No compass and no sun, just uniform dull gray from horizon to horizon. Fortunately, it was easy to follow the trail the scientists had made, a conspicuous path of crushed fungi.

  It was certainly the most depressing world I’d ever seen. The scenery was like the magnified surface of a diseased organ. The dominant form of fungus was a sort of mushroom with an inverted cap, like a bowl, always full of scummy evil-smelling water. Pasty white with streaks of brown and gray. The only green in the landscape was an occasional stand of bamboo-like grass, which had provided the material for my weaving and Raj’s spear shaft. It was a sickly mottled chartreuse of a green.

  Also slightly green was the fungus that began to grow on us after about an hour, a slick powdery fungus that crawled out of armpits and navels and the moist crease between scrotum and thigh. It looked bad enough on my olive skin, but on Raj, whose skin was so black as to be almost blue, it was spectacularly ugly.

  (It’s very strange for an alien life form to find humans amenable as hosts, or food. Because of divergent evolutionary patterns, we’re usually incompatible at the level of DNA. We’d discussed the possibility that the balaselis would turn up their noses, if they had noses, at Raj. In that unhappy case, I would get a “no-kill fee,” equal to one third of the standard guide’s fee.)

  I’d made my rucksack twice as large as Raj’s; it was actually a double-compartmented cage with carrying straps. We both kept our eyes sharp for specimens, and we couldn’t have missed much. Anything that twitched on that moldy mausoleum of a landscape would have stood out like a live bug in a plate of cold spaghetti. We went all day without seeing anything, though, which
was boring but not surprising. Most of the loathsome creatures who crabbed or slithered through the toadstools were nocturnal. I was sure there would be plenty of them around when we were trying to sleep.

  We didn’t talk much during the trek. I tried to start conversation a few times but Raj damped it with monosyllables. So I was sort of relieved, looking for some human contact, when we came over a small rise and saw the archaeologists’ encampment. It was a well-tramped circle a couple of hundred meters from an Obelobelian “village,” which was just a scatter of belongings and shared fires. About a dozen of the skinny pale horse-sized dinosaurs that the Obelobelians followed around, the tytistu, grazed mushrooms or slept standing up. A thin man with a white beard walked up the path to meet us.

  He didn’t look happy. Before I could introduce us, he said, “You’re the adventurers. Fuentes and Benhaden.”

  “You’re in touch with Dr. Avedon?” I said.

  He opened his mouth and pointed to a molar. “Radio. She says your accreditation is in order and we are not to hinder you. Nor cooperate, you might as well know.”

  “Which is stupid,” I said, regretting it but forging on: “Your own project’s funding can only benefit from our visit here. There will be publicity.”

  “Publicity to bring more thrill seekers. We’re trying to do science here, Fuentes; it’s not a freak show.” He turned and walked away. That was the last word we heard from any scientist, until they came up the hill to help me with Raj.

  We made our “camp”—putting down our rucksacks and kicking away enough of the disgusting undergrowth to make sitting space—just downstream from the scientists’ and Obelobelians’ camps. The river, wide and shallow, barely moved. The water was gray and smelled like stale cheese. We followed the xenologists’ lead and gathered our water upstream from the Obelobelians. We weren’t likely to catch any disease from alien pollution, but it did sometimes happen, usually with fatal results.

  Raj settled in to make a few backup spears while I went off in search of a good cave. I didn’t want to antagonize the scientists by spending too much time talking to the Obelobelians, contaminating their precious data, so rather than ask directions I just followed a conspicuous path that led toward likely-looking hills.

  The hills were rocky, inhospitable to the mushrooms; the only vegetation was lichen of muted earth hues. I did find animal life, though, kicking over rocks. Small invertebrates that resembled Terran millipedes, mainly. Not worth collecting and possibly biters.

  There were plenty of caves, but it was some time before I found one large enough. All of them probably led to the balaseli domes, but I wanted to be able to exit standing up and moving fast.

  When I found a large enough entrance, I shed the rucksack and went in with just the knife. Like Raj’s, my knife was a slight violation of technological quarantine. It truly did come from Obelobel, but had made a couple of stops on the way back. I gave the handle a sharp twist and the end of it popped open, exposing a small powerful flashlight.

  The balaselis supposedly slept during the day, but my experience with large dangerous animals had led me not to put too much trust in established behavior patterns. Besides, the cave could harbor smaller perils. Its Terran counterparts might be havens during the daytime for rattlesnakes or scorpions or vampire bats. So I entered very tentatively, literally one step at a time, my eyes fixed on the darkness, knife ready and light beaming forward. It was easy to visualize what I must look like to any cave dweller: a dangerous hulking silhouette with one gleaming eye. Most animals confronted with the unknown will either run away, seek refuge in shelter or camouflage, or attack. I wanted to give everybody plenty of time to exercise the first two options.

  The cave entrance took a sharp turn to the left and began angling down. I waited at the corner, light off, for several minutes while my eyes became better adapted to the dark. There was a constant tattoo of dripping condensation echoing from the chamber ahead, and the downhill path I stood on was dangerously slick. The fungus odor of the air outside was mixed now with a surprising earthlike cave smell of wet rock along with an acrid metallic tang I couldn’t place. It was cold.

  I turned on the light, careful not to look directly at it. The downward path continued on for some fifty meters, widening all the way, ending in a ragged square of blackness that I assumed was the entrance to one of the domes.

  I have never liked cave work, but Raj was paying well for me to overcome my aversion. Keeping my naked back pressed cold against the wall, I worked slowly down toward the deeper darkness.

  The domed cavern was too large for my light to reach to the other side. In the center was a black lake, evidently shallow, since ghostly fingers of stalagmites broke the surface here and there. The surface was constantly in motion with the widening, intersecting circles of ripples from the water that dripped from above. I suppose it was pretty.

  Using the trick of averted vision, I could just make out some details of the cave ceiling. What I saw turned my blood colder than my freezing skin. Nestled among a matrix of stalactites of various sizes were dozens of black shrouds, balaselis in repose. They shifted and flapped languidly in their sleep, perhaps reacting to the intruder below. An imperative buried deep in my reptile brain was trying to persuade me to evacuate my bowels and run. I forced myself to study the scene for a minute or so, trying to visualize Raj standing there with his torch and spears. It looked very bad. If several of them took an interest in you, it was hard to see how you could survive. But every native did go through this, and enough lived to perpetuate the species.

  I backed out very slowly, my own fear-smell sharp in my nostrils. I doubted that any animal on this planet would interpret the odor correctly; it might even signal to them that I was poison or at least not food. Raj might have that in his favor, if he was human enough to sweat fear.

  I was still somewhat shaken by the time I returned to camp. I almost tried to talk Raj out of it, even though the no-kill fee wouldn’t cover my time and expenses.

  “They are only animals,” Raj said. “We were given dominion over them.”

  “Don’t feed me religion. We’re animals too—animals with sharp sticks, granted—but there are dozens of them, and only two of us.”

  “One of us. I don’t expect you to interfere.” He nodded toward the Obelobelian camp. “What they can do, I can do.”

  “We don’t know that. Maybe they have some magic word that turns the beasts into obedient puppies.”

  “That may be.” He laughed politely and returned to his chores, spearmaking and fire-maintaining. He had borrowed, or taken, some fire from the Obelobelians, and was feeding it the way they did. A circle of uprooted fungi surrounded the flame; once dry, it burned about as well as dried animal manure, but smelled worse. Fires were started with kumali, a morel-shaped fungus that was a staple of the native diet. They were so saturated with vegetable oil that, skewered, they could be used as torches. He had collected several.

  He was making backup spears out of the bamboo-like stalks. Sharpen the green wood and then blacken it in the fire; anneal it by quenching it in the wet ground; resharpen and start over. After a few iterations you had a black splinter that might spit a balaseli. Or might just annoy it, if you didn’t hit it just right.

  “Plan to aim for the heart?” He grunted uninformatively. “Or the brain—the brain would be good, if it’s not behind too much—”

  “Enough subtlety. I understand.”

  “Well, just how do you plan to kill a large animal with a spear, not knowing where any vital organs are?”

  “I don’t have just a spear.” He hefted his heaviest spear, the one with his knife lashed on the end. “This should stun the creature no matter where I hit it. Long enough for me to pierce it with several others.”

  “And hope one of them—”

  “Yes, hope.”

  “And hope none of the other beasts—”

  “Yes, hope!” He turned his back to me and resumed work. I watched him for a couple of s
ilent minutes.

  “I feel as if I’ve been hired to preside over an elaborate suicide ritual.”

  “The first part, you have right. You have been hired.” He turned around and looked at me, scowling. “And you don’t say that to a Qadarem. A man may give his life. But not take it.”

  I knew that. “It is suicide. If I have any instinct about animals.”

  “That may be your problem, Fuentes. Too much instinct about animals, and not enough about humans.” He stood up and gathered a few spears. “But you are a good guide. Please guide me now to see these monsters.”

  Since I didn’t have to search for the place, we got there in a brisk twenty minutes. I led the way inside. Raj followed my instructions, making slow progress for dark adaptation as well as caution, but his impatience was palpable.

  When we got to the dome we both stood against the wall for several silent minutes, studying. With the extra flashlight, I could see that my estimate of a few dozen creatures was far too small. Hundreds of them crowded the high ceiling. With the extra light I could also make out considerable variation in size and color. Most of the large ones had glossy black shrouds, but the smaller ones—some small as a human infant—were mottled or even striped in what seemed to be subtle shades of red and brown. Of course colors are elusive at low light levels.

  “Still want to go through with it?” I whispered. “There’s enough up there to take care of that whole tribe and go away hungry.”

  “They must not eat often,” he said, “for this barren area to support so many.”

  “Maybe that’s why it’s so barren. They killed everything bigger than a mouse.”

  He snorted. “You don’t believe that. There must be ecological balance.”

  “Not in the short run, there doesn’t. Not even in the long run, if we’re witnessing a basic evolutionary—”

  “I know what it is. Burst metabolism. Large reptiles on my planet have that. They lie dormant for days, or even weeks, until something large enough to be worth eating comes close enough to catch. Then they move with great speed, for a few seconds.”