10000 Light Years From Home Part 7

So that was how we came to be short of our extraterrestrial language expert when Alien No. 2 came along. (Or No. 3, if you count from the Capellans.) You know most of the story here. The new boys followed the same routine as the lizards: a couple of pa.s.ses over Luna, pause to inspect the ore-piles, and then into orbit and start to transmit There was a diversion when they spotted the two flying bombs. They quit transmitting and, while the world watched, they sneaked up behind one of the blips.

There was no laser probe. Instead, we saw some sort of fog drift out of the newcomer's s.h.i.+p and envelope the blip.

"They've melted it!" Harry yelled on the intercom. When the fog moved on, we could all see the blip was gone. The aliens were heading for the other.

"NEW ALIENS CLEAR BOMBS FROM SKY! MENACE FROM s.p.a.cE DESTROYED!".

Remember?

With the second bomb gone, our new pals resumed transmission. Tillie was our acting chief linguist.

"What'll I do, Max? George won't acknowledge his orders to return!"

"You can do it, girl. What's so hard about little stick figures? Read it like a comic strip."

"Did you ever try saying Who are you? or Where do you come from? in little stick figures?" she asked bitterly.But they did look humanoid and peaceful enough. One sketch they kept repeating showed a mixture of big and little figures dancing around a maypole affair.

"The little figures seem to be them, and the big ones are us," said Tillie.

"You hope. And this one means they want to land, right?"

You'll recall we let them come down in a burnt-over wilderness area in northern Quebec. No aloha-parties like we gave the Girls from Capella. No official grandstand. Just an empty plain, a sky full of contrails, and five different brands of overkill zeroed in on that big golden s.h.i.+p as it settled.

The airlock opened.

Everyone remembers what marched out into that empty plain-a band of little figures about four feet high and the color of the More Expensive Spread. They seemed to be wearing jointed yellow armor with funny little half-opened helmets on their heads. They were carrying what looked like cereal-box death-ray guns. Each one held his up and then gravely trooped over and dropped his weapon on a pile.

Then they joined hands and began to sing.

This was the world's first taste of what came to be known as the Sound from Cygnus. It wasn't really too different from a musical saw to me, but you know how it caught on. Oh my earm.u.f.fs, did it catch on! That's right, you had teen-aged kids. The thing hadn't been zingling through our office a minute before I saw La Peabody starting to twitch.

While we absorbed the Sound, a second band of little b.u.t.ter-boys marched out of the s.h.i.+p carrying a globe on a pole. The distant trigger-fingers tightened. But all they did was to set it up in the center like the maypole in their sketches, and sing harder. Then they shut up, bowed deeply and just stood there.

Waiting for someone to say h.e.l.lo.

It wasn't long before a reception committee crawled out of the bunkers and the second alien contact got underway.

Quite a relief after the previous hoopla. This one went more like grown up. No s.e.x, no fireworks.

Just a mob of decorous little yellow squirts earnestly interested in learning our languages and customs.

Their chief concern seemed to be to avoid getting poisoned by our food. Did you know they were vegetarians? They answered everything we asked as well as they could. Their home system was quickly identified as Cygnus 61. The death-ray pistols were lasers; they pa.s.sed out samples. They made no more objection to electronic surveillance than a herd of Guernseys, and they let us into the s.h.i.+p with anything we wanted to bring. Harry was in on that.

"Same general thing as the Capellans," he reported. "And fairly old. They seem to have bought it second-hand from somewhere. Two auxiliary flyers on board. No major weapons we can find aside from some small standard missiles and that particle-fog thing. That looks to be a catalyst effect."

"What makes you think they didn't build it?"

"Every time we ask a technical question they drag out a manual to look up the answer. They ended by giving us the whole set to copy. I brought back the lot. Where's George?"

"He won't answer. What's one language when he has hundreds? He's up there with his Rosetta stone, and I doubt he'll budge till his oxygen runs out."

"Funny thing," Harry mused. "They have this maypole thing all over the s.h.i.+p, in different sizes. One big room looks exactly like a chapel. I believe they're deeply religious."

Just in time, I recalled that Harry himself was deeply religious.

And that of course was the big news about our visitors. Until the religious angle came out, the Siggies threatened to be about as newsworthy as a trivet-makers' convention. When the official tours got started it was quickly realized that the Sound was hymns. You remember the pictures-circles of little yellow fellows setting up their maypoles at dawn, noon and sunset, wherever they happened to be, joining hands and singing and beckoning the bystanders to join in. With that Sound and their appealing appearance, they got a lot of takers, especially with young people.This seemed to delight them. "You comp? You comp?" they would call. "Good! You glike? Good?"

they asked, peering up into the human faces around them when the song was over. When people smiled back, the Siggies would grab their hands and squeeze. Their hands were cool and felt fragile. "Like a child's hands in paper gloves," one woman said.

"I do think they're sweet," Mrs. Peabody confessed. "Those little brown b.u.t.ton eyes peering out."

"Reminds me of Hobbits," said Tillie. "Meriadoc in armor."

"It's not armor, it's an exoskeleton," I told her. "It doesn't come off."

"I know-but listen, they're going to sing."

By now we knew that the object on top of the poles was not a globe. It was roughly egg-shaped, with interior creases.

"Like a bagel," said Mrs. Peabody.

"They call it something like the Pupa, or the Great Pupa," said Tillie. "It represents a Cygnian wrapped up in a coc.o.o.n. See the face?"

"Looks sad," said Harry.

There was a note of sadness in the songs, too-sadness and exaltation, which added immensely to the appeal. The recording companies knew a good thing when it fell on their heads and the Sound rapidly became a menace on the radio bands. Rapa had three kids and told me he had wrecked his set to stay sane. Well, you know all about it, those first weeks with the Siggies touring around and singing in front of churches and mosques and temples, and the Unitarian minister coming out to hold joint services in the open air, and the kids wearing maypole b.u.t.tons and Great Pupa b.u.t.tons and all the rest. Hands Across the Galaxy. Oekoumene!

What you don't know about is S'serrrop. (We spelled it that way to indicate a hard buzzing r-r-r.

The Cygnians were strong on stops and clicks, but had trouble with our nasals and semivowels-I quote from Tillie.) S'serrrop came to us when the West Hemisphere Cygnian party first went through D.C. We met him at the official ma.s.s reception-an indefinably tatty-looking Cygnian, somewhat pale in color. He was one of their many language students, and he and Tillie went into a fast huddle. We had our chief ask for him to stay behind when the tour moved on, and for a wonder we got him, after State had been practically in bed with the party for a week. The Siggies jumped at any chance to learn our languages. I guess they were surprised at the number.

The thing about S'serrrop was that he was different. A marginal Cygnian, if you like. We never found out why. How can you evaluate aberrant factors in an arthropod's childhood? Anyway, he gave us some new insights. The first was about Siggie emotion.

Remember how they always looked so sort of neat and merry? Well, S'serrrop disabused us of that the day he tried to join us eating meat. He was yellower than usual when George was ordering the salad for him at Rapa's.

"Gno!" clicked S'serrrop. "I eat samp as hew!"

His yellow color grew richer while he rejected our protests. When the meatb.a.l.l.s arrived, we saw the crisis. You know that crest of tiddly bits sticking out above the Cygnian visor was actually their chemoreceptors and part of their ears? At sight of the meat, S'serrrop's receptors began to retreat until his "helmet" was a smooth round sphere. He took a mouthful, chomped once, and looked wildly about.

The gesture was so human I was on my feet ready to help our visitor from s.p.a.ce to Rapa's can. But he had swallowed and sat there breathing hard. Stern stuff, S'serrrop. Tillie s.n.a.t.c.hed up his plate and subst.i.tuted greens, and after a while his crest came back out.

That gave us the clue. There was a Siggie songfest near the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City on the screen that night.

"Max!" Tillie gasped, "look at their heads!"Every one of them was as bare and round as a billiard ball. And they were glowing like hot b.u.t.ter.

"Intense fear, disgust, revulsion... funny emotions for a quiet party of s.p.a.ce-going sociologists."

"I'll ask S'serrrop."

"Very carefully. Very, very carefully."

Oddly enough, Harry had already done the job. We discovered he had been mixing quite a lot of religious discussion in with the particle physics. (Strange thing, I never can figure out where physicists keep their Almighty, but they seem to be among His chief defenders these days.) Anyway, Harry gave us the complete story of the Great Pupa.

"Well, you know the Cygnians are hatched from eggs, and they go through a metamorphosis later into the adult form we've met. Their religion is based on the belief that there is a further metamorphosis into a form with wings. Yes, wings. Beautiful, really. It has only happened once, when the Great Pupa achieved it. He was persecuted and tortured. They have-or had-a rather dreadful method of execution in which the victim is wrapped in acid-soaked cloth and his flesh eaten away alive. That's the figure on the pole-you do see the primitive parallel?" Harry interrupted himself.

We nodded silently, staring at a new and different Harry.

"Yes. Well, in his agony, the Great Pupa achieved the ultimate metamorphosis and appeared to his followers afterwards as a winged shape... profoundly amazing, isn't it? Over eleven light-years away-"

He told us that he had invited S'serrrop to attend church services with him that Sunday. Did we realize no Cygnian had actually entered a Terran house of wors.h.i.+p? We also soon realized how S'serrrop felt about it. Frightened and revolted, but resolute. When we met them after the service his crest was still half retracted.

Harry had been expounding Christian doctrine to him. The Cygnian was so excited that we could barely understand the barrage of clicks. "Abast! Abast!" he exclaimed. We took this as amazed-or perhaps abased?

He desired more information, and Tillie volunteered to find him a religious dictionary in which he could explore Moslem and Hindu, Greek, Roman and Hebrew doctrines as well as Harry's Ma.s.sachusetts Avenue rites. We saw Harry's face cloud; Tillie told me that he became deeply exercised over questions like the propriety of using candles.

Next morning, I went into Harry's office, feeling a fairly strong shade of yellow myself. He was doodling on his blackboard.

"First of all, Harry, congratulations. The array of talent around here never ceases to amaze me.

But-bear with me-there's one thing I'd like to get straight. Are you absolutely one hundred percent satisfied with the official estimate of the aggressive capabilities of that s.h.i.+p?"

He looked at me disdainfully from his galactic evangelical dream.

"You mean weapons?"

"Weapons. Blowpipes, atomic disintegrators, germ cultures-call me a paranoid b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Harry.

What could they do to us if they tried?"

"Really, Max." He sighed. "Well... they have that short-range laser, and they have about fifty tactical atomic missiles that probably came with the s.h.i.+p. The fusing is less advanced than ours. They're slow.

Their auxiliary craft can't go much over Mach I all out. Very vulnerable.

They have no laboratories or culture stores. A bare minimum of machining facilities. Their main drive certainly couldn't be used as a mobile torch in atmosphere. They haven't got the right guidance systems for s.p.a.ce attack. I think the estimate is quite correct; the most they could possibly do would be a few lucky hits on big targets before our defenses overtook them."

He XXd out a couple of equations, angrily.

"Harry, is there anything about that s.h.i.+p you don't understand?""No. If you mean, in general. Oh, maybe-"

"Maybe?"

"There are one or two large generators which seem to be beyond their power needs, that's all. Just generators. They may have been in the s.h.i.+p when the Siggies got it, perhaps for powering a ground installation. What's eating you, Max? Here we have one of the biggest-I'm not afraid to say it, one of the sweetest things possible to conceive of.... Probably you don't get it, Max. I feel sorry for you. I pity all atheists. But others do get it."

"I guess I don't get it, Harry, but I'll tell you what's wrong with me. I've read history. Earth history.

A big strange s.h.i.+p full of religious symbols-an alien race, fervently pious and revolted by the practices of the natives-doesn't that remind you of anything, Harry? No bell?"

"Sorry, it doesn't," he said. He erased the blackboard. Our comfy little shop had been invaded in more ways than one.

It got invaded some more next day when S'serrrop turned up after his session with Tillie's dictionary. We learned about another Cygnian emotion, but we weren't sure at the time what it was. At first we thought he was sick. He kept making a rustling, flittering noise which we saw were his exoskeletal joints snicking together. He said he wasn't sick, it was something else.

"Is bad," he kept repeating. "Bad! Sad! Hew-I caddot say-hew so simple! So be-hewtifut! Kch, too bad! KCHKCHCH!"

Convulsively his elbows began rubbing against his thorax in a blur of motion. A thin shriek rent the air.

Tillie grabbed one of his vibrating hands, and he grabbed back. Hand-holding seemed to be the same on Cygnus as it was on Terra. He stopped the cicada wail and looked gravely in our faces. Then he said something that rocked even Harry.

"So far-r-r! So bady he-yars of glight!" He spread his arms in what we had come to know as the Great Pupa wing symbol. "He is hee-yar too!" he exclaimed. The next minute he was striding down the hall in the general direction of Rock Creek Park, with his U.N. guard scrambling after.

Two hours later we discovered he had stampeded State into flying him back to his group, who were touring Mexico. He said he had something urgent to tell them.

In the turmoil, there arrived a covert signal from our man on the moon, namely, George. As predicted, Tillie's boss was shacked up with his explosive lexical treasure around the far side from Mersenius and playing doggo. He had found an old pal at Mersenius to pa.s.s down a message demanding data on the Cygnians. The signal ended, "Don't trust those polyunsaturated pygmies."

"Small men loathe each other," Tillie commented.

Of course you realize that the Cygnians had a written language in addition to the cartoon figures they used for first contact, but George hadn't seen it before he left. While Tillie a.s.sembled some Cygnese, I rooted out the negatives of the script-covered missile George was working on. They looked pretty bad.

Can you imagine a Chinese trying to decipher Ne pas se pencher en dehors in five European languages?

Well, there were about five hundred choice graffiti on each negative, some you wouldn't believe.

"Tillie girl, can you locate Cygnian script among any of these?"

"I don't know."

"What about those tech manuals they gave us, can't you compare scripts?"

"They were in the script of whoever built the s.h.i.+p. Diagrams and math."

"Well, don't we have any Cygnian samples?"

"Mostly their cursive."

Something was all wrong, she was as touchy as a lady porcupine. I pulled her around.

"So you think I'm a stinker. Give me a break. Remember it's just that old heathen Max who scareseasy."

"I think you're being unforgivable to Harry," she started. Then she squinted at me around her glossy hair. "Max, are you really scared?"

"You bet I am. Honey, I'm so scared I even think about it in bed."

"But what of, Max?"

"Oh, history, micro-macro parallelism-I don't know. That's the worst of it. See what you can get out of these, would you?"

She tried, but it was no go all Tuesday. And Wednesday you remember what happened.

The West Hemisphere group of Siggies were holding their evening sing-in on the plaza outside the Catadrale de la Dama de something-or-other in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Inside, a minor ma.s.s was about to be celebrated. Instead of their usual circle the Siggies formed a line across the front steps and the human wors.h.i.+ppers found themselves barred out A couple of clerics came out to protest. The Siggies stood firm, singing. The crowd milled. A padre laid hands on a Siggie, who yielded, but another took his place. The Sound mounted. The cathedral bells started tolling. Somebody called the police, who added sirens to the uproar. At the height of the confusion two Siggies-bright orange with emotion-marched into the nave and up to the altar, where they deposited a small object. Then they marched out again and rejoined the singing.