Murasaki, page 26
He stared at his feet. “True. I ... preferred no wit-nesses. All I meant to do was escort Solomon, keep it safe till it had joined its fellows, and... and possibly start mak-ing friends at last. But if ‘I had to fire a shot or two for that, well—
–You were ready to kill sapients—you did, it turned out—for the benefit of what?”
He looked up, almost bewildered. –Why, other sap-ients. I told you. The carpet whales.”
–Whose intelligence is even less proven than the calves’. If they’re smart, why don’t they protect themselves against the hunters?”
“I can’t say for sure. I can guess. Given their size, they aren’t able to go far below the surface.
Cross-currents would ripple them out of control, and pressure derange the whole thin body. Also, they can’t swim as fast as a ship can sail with a fair wind. And they’re naive. They’re gentle philosophers who haven’t realized the world is full of pred-ators. The calves know it is, but the adults forget. They have no natural enemies any more, and they have their con-templation to do.”
“Ha! I thought you despised mysticism.”
Holden bridled. “I didn’t call them mystics. I said the carpet whales spend their long, peaceful lives thinking. Compared to their’oldest and wisest, those Chupchups that everybody slavers over nowadays are morons or-Aargh!” His mouth contorted.
–So you believe,” Byrne said. “Can you prove it?”
The response was bleak as his dwelling. “Of course not. Can you prove to me that you have consciousness? It’s the hypothesis that best fits the facts. Give me a chance to learn more.”
“What about the hypothesis that the whales gradually lose whatever intelligence they may have had as calves?” There passed through the back of Byrne’s mind: An inter-esting moral question. How human is a brain-decayed Homo sapiens? What rights has he? Why shouldn’t an alert animal have the same?
The unkempt head shook. “Doesn’t make sense. The whales beget the young. How could the species stay sapient if there weren’t selection for sapience among the breeders? Nature puts no more pressure on them, as big as they are. The selection must be internal to the species, sexual, what-ever. The poets, musicians, storytellers, philosophers get the mates. Look, Australopithecus or Homo erectus. on Earth were already pretty successful. They had no serious natural enemies left. What do you suppose pushed their brains onward?”
She had seen the argument among his reports. She had never before heard it uttered. The force of it rang.
Yet—“You took the law into your own hands, on the basis of your pet theory,” Byrne said. “Whaling has gone on for centuries. You hated it, but this was the first time you actually did anything about it.
Why?” She raised a hand as lips parted in the beard. “Yes, you were escorting Solomon. The Gashers wouldn’t have come near you, would they? They must have known how you felt and what weapons you commanded. There was no threat to Solomon.”
“There was,” Holden declared. “My fuel was limited. I’d soon have to turn back, unless one or more of the whales stopped to ... have an exchange with me. That would not happen if the rest were being pursued.”
“Which they often were, when their migration took them by.” Byrne leaned forward. “The only difference this time was that you companioned a single calf, some-thing you might very well do again in the future when conditions were more favorable. How, then—since you have not proved the carpet whales, or even the calves, are sapient,”—have souls? gibed a childhood half-memory-“how do you justify attacking those poor sailors?”
He rose. His shadow fell huge between her and the light. The gray mane was a cloud around a half-seen face. “Joseph,” he said.
She must needs also rise. They stood confronted. “Joseph?”
“What I called it in its calfhood. A distinctive mark-ing on the back identifies it. Solomon led me straight there. Scent? Suddenly, here were two of them I knew. And Joseph remembered. It curled its front end over my deck and made the old music we’d worked out together. I had my opening, my foothold I’d always hoped for. But yonder came the Gasher ships and commenced their butchery.
“I had to stop it. Fuel wouldn’t let me follow the second ship far, but the crew wouldn’t know that. I lay out till the pod must be well past their fjord. With luck, the hunters will accept that this stretch of coast is interdicted to them; and Solomon and Joseph and I can meet again. Otherwise I’ll do whatever is necessary, as often as nec-essary, till the sanctuary is established. If your damned smug politicians and bureaucrats will allow.”
Byrne’s throat tightened until she could barely get out, “That, for the sake of research?”
“For the sake of humanity,” he growled.
She blinked. “What?”
A rusty clang of defiance: “Or philosophy, or the next stage of civilization, or whatever you choose to call it. Grandiose? Well, ask yourself what kind of megalo-maniac it would take to seriously claim our species is in no need of improvement. But for that we’ll have to un-derstand ourselves, and we never will till we can get out-side ourselves.
“What are we, besides animals? Our language. Sym-bols, arts, sciences, hopes, fears, everything that makes us human is in language. And it isn’t a set of arbitrary con-ventions. The basis of it is biological.
“Gliders theorem. Nothing can completely describe or account for itself. We can’t reason about the basis of language except in a metalanguage. For that, we’ve first got to compare at least one other language totally different from ours, different right down in the genes, and see what our own built-in premises are. Between us and the himatids—”
Holden’s fist struck the table. The sound went small through stillness. “Oh, hell,” he said. She heard how he could no longer fight off the weariness. “Let my advocate make the fine speeches in court.”
Seeking her eyes: “But could we spend a while together before then, you and me, while I try to show yott what I mean? Maybe you’ll put in a good word afterward. Maybe they’ll let me continue here. Or else somebody new.”
For a space she heard only, remotely, the wind and the sea. At last he muttered, “You look puzzled.
Well, I guess I didn’t make myself clear.”
Byrne shook herself. The chill that had gathered while he talked still stirred beneath her skin. It wasn’t from fear or shock or even pity. She had felt it before, a few times, when a bugle blew at sunset in memoriam, when under-standing of the cosmological equation opened up to her, when “No, I think I followed you,” she breathed. “And yes, I think I will argue for... for leniency. You did wrong today, but your cause is... tremendous.”
The dulled voice and drained countenance became ear-nest. “Do you really see, already?” he asked.
“You agree I couldn’t abandon it?”
The deaths came back to crowd the future out of her. “We can’t,” she corrected him. “We humans, that is. You were too impatient. We’ve got generations ahead of us to pursue this.”
“You won’t, unless I nail your attention fast to it,” he replied. “And I will, whatever the cost.”
She wondered how sane he in truth was. She wondered what sanity was.
He went to the computer on the desk. A big, knuckly hand worked its keyboard. Byrne saw just his back, like a stooping darkness. He accessed a visual. The woman had been plain, middle-aged, but she kept a young smile.
“This was her idea,” Holden said. “What she lived for.”
He switched off, turned around, and spoke curtly of practical matters.
Birthing Pool
by Nancy Kress
Mommy said they had been here too long.
How long was too long? The question didn’t make much sense to Rilla. She had been on Genji her whole life. Did that mean her life had been too long? She was not quite ten standard.
“Less than a year till we go home to Earth,” Mommy said, dumping mush from the food processor into a bowl and reaching for her precious spice safe. She said this often, as if she didn’t want Rilla to forget it.
“I am home,” Rilla said, but Mommy’s QED chimed softly and in a flash she had left the food machine and run to the console in the corner of the field dome, where new figures and pictures scrolled across the screen.
“I’m only the fourth human born on Genji,” Rilla said loudly, in case Mommy could be distracted from the QED. “Rita Byrne, Seigi Minoru, Cade Anson, and me.”
But all Mommy said was. “Call your father, Rilla! He’s down at the village! Tell him to come see this!”
Nobody listened to a ten-year-old. Nobody.
Still, it was all right to be sent down to the village. Tmafekitch might even be there. Rilla put on her suit, checked the tanks and translator and safety devices, cycled through the air lock, and started across the plateau toward the loose collection of Ihrdizu farms and pools and greens.
She found her father taking water samples from a birthing pool with two Ihrdizu grown-ups. Even Rilla knew that her father, or any other scientist on Genji, couldn’t possibly need any more water samples from any more birth-ing pools. For nearly thirty years teams had collected thousands of samples from pools in Nighland, Southland, even in Farland, on the other side of the world where it was always moonless and Rilla had never been. The QED had analyzed all the sample data and then analyzed it again and again, and not even Daddy could think there was any-thing left to learn from the algae growing in an empty birth-ing pool. No, Daddy just wanted a way to talk to the two Ihrdizu grown-ups, one of whom had only just arrived in the village and mated with Tshifel, an unmarried male, a little while ago. Daddy always liked to talk to females who had just finished their mating journey, especially if they had traveled a long way to find a mate.
Rilla sometimes considered that the only mate her age in the entire Murasaki System was Seigi Minoru. He was on Chujo with his parents. That would be a long mating journey.
“Rilla;” Daddy said. “What are you doing here?”
“Mommy says to come right away. There’s something interesting on the QED.”
It was hard to see Daddy’s expression through his hel-met, but it seemed to Rilla that he didn’t really want to leave. Why not? Nothing interesting could be going on here. But then Daddy said his good-byes—without the translator, as what he and Mommy called a gesture of cour-tesy, and Rilla couldn’t help noticing that his accent was terrible—and reached for her hand.
“Come on, Ril
But Rilla caught sight of Trnafekitch, coming around the corner of the Carnot temple. “I’ll stay here, Daddy. There’s Tmafekitchf’
“Be careful,– he said automatically, and hurried to-ward the dome.
“Tmafekitch!” Rilla yelled. Tmafekitch saw her and ambled over. “What were you doing?”
“Listening to the talker in the Carnot temple,” her friend said. She spoke a combination of English, Ihrdizu, and the private language she and Rilla had spoken to each other all Rilla’s life. All Tmafekitch’s, too. With Tmafek-itch, Rilla hardly used her translator at all.
“There was a talker in the temple and you didn’t come tell me?” Rilla said, outraged. “What story was she talking?”
“Szikwshawmi.”
“That’s the best one!’
In Ihrdizu, this came out “the best one to eat,” since stories for the Ihrdizu were listened to with devouring attention. Daddy had explained this to Rilla, and ordinarily she got the giggles every time she thought of stories coming out of Mommy’s food machine. But this time she was too disappointed. The story of Szikwshawmi was great, with angels appearing out of the sky to strike female Ihrdizu and give them greater strength to be warriors. Rilla and Tmafekitch had acted it out lots of times, changing parts so that each got to pounce out of the sky and each got to be given great strength and fierce-ness. And it was even better told inside the Camot temple, which a man named Robert Carnot had built for the Ihrdizu to be religious in a long time ago, because if the talker sat in the right place there were thrilling echoes.
“Come, do not die on the starside,” Tmafekitch said, which meant that Rilla was not supposed to be so negative. “I have something to tell you.”
“What?” Rilla said sulkily. “Look at that she over there—the new one—why is she watching us so hard?”
“She has never seen a human until she carne here.–
So that was why Daddy had been so eager to talk to the new female. She came from a village where no scien-tists had been. She must have had a very long mating jour-ney. Mommy and Daddy’s field camp, after all, wasn’t on Farland. It was only an hour’s fly from Okuma Base, where there were plenty of humans.
“I Tmafekitch said, and walked away, flipping her tail. Tmafekitch was angry; Rilla realized it was because she hadn’t asked what the something was that Tma-fekitch had offered to tell her—what Mommy would call “a serious breach of manners.”
“1 am low,” she said hastily to Tmafekitch’s retreat-ing back. “Cut off my tail. May I never rise to Chujo.”
Tnaafekitch turned around and nodded, accepting the apology. She never held a grudge. Unlike me, thought Rilla, who was currently holding several grudges against several people. But not against Tmafekitch. Never against Tmafekitch.
“I have something to tell you,” Tmafekitch said, just as if the little anger hadn’t happened.
“Oh, what?”
“Last dark I had a heat flush. The first.”
Rilla stared at the Ihrdizu. A heat flush! “But that means you won’t be a little-she any more! You’ll be a gniwn-up! And you’ll go off on a mating journey!”
“Yes. So,” Tmafekitch said.
“And leave me here!”
“You will soon go off on your own mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, but Rilla heard in her clicks and words and grunts and pitch—the grunts that she and Tmafekitch had invented together!—that Tmafekitch was sad about the part-ing, too. Well, so what! Sadness didn’t help! Tmafekitch would go off to find some male, and it would have to be pretty far off because look how far the new she;had had to come to find anybody to—mate with, and then Rilla would never see Tmafelcitch again. Never. And in less than a year Mommy and Daddy would take her back to Earth that they were so Chujo about, and Rilla would have nothing left. Nothing. Nothing.
She turned and left Tmafekitch standing there without even, a good-bye courtesy, running away from the village, away from the dome, her strong Genji-bred legs standing against the gravity better than her parents ever could, not even the bulky suit much slowing her flight under the thick, gray sky.
“Let me see it again,” Bruce Johnson said.
His wife Jane hit Replay, and the QED in the corner of the small dome, half research station and half home, started the incredible sequence of data again.
The QED—Quantum-Effect Device—was on receiv-ing mode, which meant that at the moment it was doing no thinking of its own but merely acting as a terminal to re-ceive data from the main computer at Okuma Base, atop Mount Korabachi. The QED in the field dome was capable of thinking, very smart thinking, due to fuzzy programs that could make reasonable deductions from incomplete evi-dence.
Bruce Johnson, xenobiologist, had thought often over the last ten years that this was a good thing because on Genji all you got was incomplete knowledge. This didn’t bother him. A huge ex-Texan who found it hard to sit still, either physically or mentally, he was pleased rather than not that Murasaki System still held so many facts that re-fused to fit together. It made for interesting theories. And now, looking at the data coming in on receiver mode, here was room for one more.
The carpet whales, those huge sluggish maybe-sentient himatids that spent their unguessably long lives in the polar waters of Genji’s starside, were all swimming toward moonside.
All of them.
They were doing it very, very slowly, at even less than the two knots that were characteristic of their budding jour-neys. Measurement of their speed and direction came from Malachiel Holden, the half-crazy hermit researcher who fa-natically studied the carpet whales from a research outpost on Farland. Well, not “hermit” any more, not since he had married Rita Byrne, the Genji-born girl young enough to be his daughter. That had fascinated and appalled Jane, who had taken to giving worried glances at Rilla and then dou-bled her insistence that Bruce and she and Rilla secure places on the ship arriving from and returning to Earth next year. Bruce didn’t much care that Rita Byrne had married Malachiel Holden. People didn’t interest him as much as Ihrdizu or himatids.
Except for Jane and Rilla, of course.
“Look at that,” he said to Jane. “All of those damn carpet whales. All moving toward moonside, where they never go.”
“‘Holden has done a beautiful job of tracking their movements. He must spend every minute of every day ei-ther at sea or running QED projections.”
“Not practical,” Bruce said. “But he’s good, all right. Cautious, though. This is all data and images—he’s not even offering a tentative hypothesis.”
“Just an expense request,” Jane said dryly. The al-location of resources to carpet-whale study had always been a sore point among the researchers of the Ihrdizu: the Ihr-clizu at least cooperated with being researched. In their own eccentric way. “He wants a station set up at the probable point of convergence of all the whales. As soon as he can ‘figure out what it is.”
“Well, of, course,” Bruce said. Jane glanced at her husband. Abruptly she moved into his line of sight, not directly between him and the screen but clearly in his pe-ripheral vision.
‘Truce—we’re leaving in, less than a year right? We are leaving?”
“Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”
At Olcuma Base, Jordan Dane, First Conciliator, stared at another set of data, this set from the moon.
“Are they sure of this?” he asked his scientific liaison, Suzy Tatsumi, a middle-aged woman of soft-spoken tact and penetrating intelligence.
“Yes, First Conciliator. They are sure.”
He glanced at her, half smiling. How did she get so many delicate shades of meaning into six words?
