Double Contact

CHAPTER 34

Prilicla wakened suddenly with the feeling that he had been caught up in a riot. Many strident, other-species word sounds and waves of angry emotional radiation were beating into his mind. Suddenly terrified and still befuddled with sleep, he wondered if the meteorite shield had failed and the spiders were overrunning the station. But then his slowly clearing mind and empathic faculty made him aware that the loudest sounds and strongest feelings were emanating from two principle sources, one of which was long-familiar to him, and both of them were in the adjoining recovery ward.

Not trusting his trembling wings to fly, he walked unsteadily into the other room to find out what was happening.

With the exception of the recently treated and still-unconscious spider pilot and Captain Fletcher, who was staring at the proceedings from the ward communicator screen, everyone in the ward was trying to talk at the same time, so much so that parts of the conversations were lost in the derisive beeping of the ward translator going into overload. Farther down the ward the Terragar casualties and Keet were arguing, heatedly but in tones low enough for them to hear the quiet voice of Jasam, who was postoperatively debilitated but recovering well, making a contribution. But most of the vocal and emotional noise was coming from the argument between Murchison and the glider pilot’s uninjured passenger.

The spider passenger was arguing…?

Surprised but not yet knowing if he should be pleased, he turned up the output volume of his own translator unit and, borrowing a phrase from his Earth-human mind partner that seemed appropriate in the circumstances, said, “Will everyone please shut the hell up?” When the arguments tapered off into silence, he added, “Except you, friend Murchison. The spider passenger’s words are being translated. We can talk to and understand each other now, and make peace before anyone else is hurt. This should be the best possible news, but instead it feels as if a war is starting. Explain.”

The pathologist inhaled and exhaled slowly as it strove to regain its customary emotional equilibrium before speaking; then it said, “As you know, I’d already learned a few words of their language when I was captured, and with the help of the captain’s first-contact material and a lot of sign language, we were able to make ourselves understood to the point where the translation computer could take over and finish the job. We can now talk to each other, and that includes talking with the other patients and staff, but we aren’t communicating. It won’t believe a damn thing I or anyone else says to it.” Murchison spread her arms out horizontally to full extension with the palms of its hands facing each other. “There’s a credibility gap this wide.”

“I understand,” said Prilicla. He began walking towards the disbelieving spider, slowly in case his appearance might frighten it, to stop beside its litter. It was capable of ambulation but was being firmly restrained by webbing for its own as well as for the other patients’ protection. Then spreading his wings he took off to maintain a stable hover close to the ceiling where he was sure of getting everyone’s attention.

“What the hell are you,” said the spider, its chittering speech serving as a background to the accurately translated words, “some kind of performing bloody pet?”

He ignored Naydrad’s agitated fur and the choking sounds Murchison was making and replied, “No, I am the entity in charge of the people here.” Because the members of his medical team already knew what was required, it was to the Trolanni and Earth-human patients that he went on. “Everyone, please be quiet and, so far as you are able, stop emoting for the next few minutes. I must be free of extraneous emotional interference if I am to obtain an accurate reading of this patient’s feelings and the reasons for the hostility the spiders show towards us…”

“I’m not a spider,” the patient broke in, “I am Irisik, a Crextic, and a free and intelligent member of the floating clan Sitikis, who will shortly join the other clans in wiping you off the face of our world. And if you don’t know the reason for our hostility, then in spite of the strange and wondrous magic you have used against us, you are very stupid.”

“Not stupid, just ignorant,” said Prilicla, trying to maintain his stable hover in spite of the gale of strong emotion blowing up at him; “but ignorance is a temporary condition that can be relieved by the acquisition of knowledge. You have feelings of fear, anger, intense hatred, and loathing towards us. If you will tell me why you feel this way, I will tell you why there is no reason for the Sitikis to have these feelings. A simple exchange of knowledge about ourselves will solve the problem.”

“Your problem, not ours,” said Irisik, looking towards the injured glider pilot. “You will satisfy your curiosity regarding your victims as well as your hunger. In the end we will be eaten with the rest of your catch.”

“I’ve told it over and over again that we don’t eat people. ” Murchison began angrily, then stopped as Prilicla made the Cinrusskin gesture for silence.

“Please,” he said. “I want to hear this patient speaking to me and no one else. Irisik, what makes you think that we eat people?”

Irisik inclined its head, the only part of its body free of the litter restraints, towards Murchison. “This other stupid one,” it said, “has beentelling me many things, including the lie that it wants us to go on living. That, a sane, adult, reasoning person cannot and will not believe. Don’t waste time telling me new and even more fantastic lies. You know the answer to your question, so don’t pretend that either one of us is stupid.”

Prilicla was silent for a moment. Considering the other’s emotional state, and in particular its behavior and verbal coherency in a situation that was unique in its experience and which it fully believed would have only a lethal outcome, he found Irisik’s behavior admirable. But not the feelings of solid self-certainty and disbelief that surrounded the creature’s mind like a stone wall.

Murchison, he knew, would already have given it a simplified version of the work of the Federation, the Monitor Corps, the hospital, and the special ambulance ship nearby and the duties its crew performed, clearly without success. He thought of explaining that he himself felt only sympathy for its fears which would in a short time be proved groundless. But he felt sure, and his feelings were rarely wrong, that the wall of certainty surrounding the other’s beliefs and disbeliefs was impervious to anything he could do or say.

Perhaps the wall could only be demolished from within.

“To the contrary,” he continued, “pretend that I and everyone else here is stupid. You are an intelligent, logical being who has good reasons for feeling and believing as you do, so share these reasons with us. Whether you believe what I am telling you now or not, we do not intend to do anything to anyone here, apart from feeding them, for the rest of the day. So if you were to talk about yourself, your world and your people and why you believe the things you do, the day or days will pass for us in an interesting manner. If what you tell us is particularly interesting, it may be that so much time will pass that…”

“Shades of Scheherazade,” said Murchison quietly.

No doubt it was an obscure reference from something in the pathologist’s Earth-human past, but this was not the time to go off on historical tangents. He went on. “. that your friends will be able to find a way of rescuing you. There is a saying among our people, Irisik, that while there is life there is hope.”

“We have a similar saying,” the other said.

“Then talk to us, Irisik,” said Prilicla. “Tell us the things you think we already know, and with them the many things that you know we don’t know. Is there anything we can do to make you feel more comfortable, apart from letting you go free, before you begin?”

“No,” said Irisik. “But how do you know I won’t tell you lies, or exaggerate the truth?”

“We won’t,” Prilicla replied, settling to the ground beside the other’s litter. “As strangers we might not be able to tell the difference, but the lies or exaggerated truth will be equally interesting to us. Please go on, and begin with the reason why you think we will eat you.”

Irisik was radiating fear, anger, and impatience, but it spent a few moments getting these feelings under control before it spoke.

“You will eat us,” it began, “because your actions from the start made it clear that that is why you are here. Piracy and food-gathering raids are well known to us, unfortunately, but they are by other sea clans who are too uncivilized, or too lazy, to fish or practice the arts of plant and animal husbandry and find it easier, like you, to steal rather than to cultivate. We don’t know where you came from except that it was somewhere in the sky, but from the first time you were observed by the Crextic who walk the clouds, your intentions were clear. As a precaution they maintained a height too great for them to view your activities in detail, or to see you take our growing food into your great white ship. In fact, many of us could not believe that you could be so shortsighted, stupid, and criminal as to take immature livestock that would rob us not only of the animals, but of the many generations of food beasts that would have followed, but we were shown to be wrong…”

… While the living food and fruit was still too immature and small to be seen by the cloud-walkers, Irisik went on to explain, the other strange animals that the strangers used for food had been clearly visible to them. They had observed how these creatures had been tethered to litters, how they had had their walking limbs removed to prevent them from escaping, how they had been exposed to sunlight and been periodically washed in the sea in order to remove wastes and harmful parasites and render them more fit for consumption.

While it had been speaking, Prilicla felt Murchison trying very hard to control its feelings of shock and abhorrence and its vain attempts to maintain silence. He didn’t try to stop it speaking because it was wanting to ask the questions that he badly wanted answered himself.

“Some of these are members of our own species,” Murchison said, gesturing towards the Terragar casualties. “Do you think we would eat them? Would Kritik — I mean Krititkukik — have eaten me?”

“Yes, to both questions,” Irisik replied without hesitation. “It is stupid to waste a supply of edible food, regardless of the emotional connections, if any, that one may have with the source. It is not pleasant for the immediate family or friends of the deceased, and many choose to eat only the smallest of morsels and pass the remainder to hungry or needy strangers who have no memories of or emotional ties with the meal. But it must be done if the essence of a beloved parent or siblings is to continue into the future. Plainly it is the same with you people.”

Murchison’s emotional radiation was so confused that it was unable to speak. Irisik went on. “Knowing your intentions and reason for being here, we spread the word about you and set about assembling all of the sea clans in this ocean. Some of them are little more than pirates and food robbers like you, and normally we would prefer to shoot our crossbows at them as sky-talk to their ships to ask for their cooperation, but everyone agreed to forget our differences for the present in order to kill the strangers.

“You may think me guilty of exaggeration,” it went on, “but I assure you that the Crextic ships already assembled around this island are only a small fraction of those which will arrive within the next few days. In spite of your fire throwers, your invisible weapons that hurl sand and water at us, and your magic shield, we will smother and crush you with our cloud-walkers and surface fighters. The cost to us will be extreme, but we must ensure that no more of your kind are tempted to raid our world.

“And I must correct your mistake,” it continued into the shocked silence. “Krititkukik is not a name, it is the title of the leader of our sea clan. It would have eaten your most desirable parts, as is its right, before sharing you with the rest of the crew. Being a sensitive person as well as one who was filled with scientific curiosity, and knowing that you were a strange but intelligent source of food with feelings, it would have concealed from you as long as possible the fact that you were to be eaten. Sometimes I think the Krititkukik lacks the quality of ruthlessness necessary to a leader.”

Prilicla caught a brief, complex burst of emotion whose meaning was unmistakable, composed as it was of the strange combination of yearning, tenderness, and a feeling of grief over the impending loss of someone with whom one was deeply and emotionally involved. They were the feelings, he felt sure, of and for a life-mate.

“Believe me,” said Prilicla, “you will be together again soon.”

“I don’t believe you,” said Irisik, “or anything else that you or the other meat gatherers say to me.”

“I understand,” said Prilicla, “so I shall instruct my meat gatherers, as you insist on calling them, not to speak to you at all. You and the other sources of meat may talk to each other if and when either of you wish. The charge nurse will continue to administer food, medication, and to periodically check on your condition and that of the others, but without speaking to you…”

“Good,” said Naydrad, rippling its fur. “I hate being called a liar, especially when my people don’t even know what a lie is.”

“… until, that is,” he ended, “you ask to speak to us. All other members of the medical staff including myself will leave you now.”

Irisik was radiating surprise, confusion, and uncertainty. It said, “I know you aren’t telling the truth, but your lies are interesting and I want to listen to more of them before I am killed. Please stay.”

“No,” said Prilicla firmly. “Until you believe that you are being told the truth, including the truth that we mean no harm to you, your people, or your world and the animal life here, we will not speak again. And remember, I know exactly how you are feeling about everything from moment to moment, and it is impossible to lie with the emotions. When I feel that you are ready to believeme, I shall speak with you again.”

He led Murchison and Danalta into the communications room where Fletcher, displaying the symptoms of Earth-human elevated blood pressure, was glaring at them from the viewscreen. His two assistants were bursting to speak, but the captain got its question in first.

“Doctor,” it said, “this is an unnecessary waste of time. I know the feelings of a person of your medical seniority and emotional sensitivity must be hurt at being treated as a liar. You wouldn’t be human — I’m sorry, I mean Cinrusskin — if you didn’t feel angry about that six-legged doubting Thomas. But I’m sure that with a little more patience and forbearance on your part you will be able to convince it that…”

“I know its present feelings, friend Fletcher,” Prilicla broke in, “well enough to know that I won’t be able to change them. It is a strong-minded, stubborn entity who considers itself to be one of the many victims around it who are shortly to be terminated and eaten. It won’t believe us, but hopefully our other so-called victims will be able to disabuse it and the other spider patients of that idea.”

“Very quickly, I hope,” Fletcher said, its features losing some of their high color. “If there is a sustained attack lasting more than thirty-six hours, the screen will go down. Before then we will have to make a main-drive takeoff and crisp a few hundred spiders. That is not the Federation’s idea of making friendly contact with another intelligent, if temporarily misguided, species. All our careers are on the line here, apart from the psychological trauma we’ll suffer if things go that badly wrong.”

“Yes, friend Fletcher,” said Prilicla, feeling the other’s tortured, emotional radiation all the way from the ship and trying to do something about it. “But there is a precedent. This is on a smaller, less bloody scale, but remember what happened when Sector General was caught in the middle of the Federation-Etlan War. Due to massive overcrowding the casualties from both sides were treated in the same ward. There is a close similarity to our present situation.”

“Is there,” said the captain, its mind obviously contemplating a future where all was desolation. Irritably it added, “I wasn’t there, Doctor, and it wasn’t a war. It was a large-scale police action.”

Prilicla well remembered that vicious and incredibly violent battle which had been waged around Sector General, when six of the Federation’s sector subfleets including three of its capital ships had opposed a much heavier force from the Etlan Empire, whose ruler had fed his people totally wrong information about the other side. He didn’t want to argue with the captain who, like the rest of its Monitor Corps colleagues, were touchy about the fact that their organization comprised the greatest assemblage of military might that the galaxy had ever known.

But Prilicla had been there and it had certainly felt like a war.