Orbit 17 Read online

  ORBIT 17

  Edited by Damon Knight

  HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

  New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London

  orbit 17. Copyright © 1975 by Damon Knight.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row. Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry 8c Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

  FIRST EDITION

  isbn: 0-06-012434-2

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 75-6371

  Designed by C. Linda Dingler

  Illustrations by Richard Wilhelm

  They Say

  When do I work? Optimally, at night—starting at midnight, and continuing until I have done my quota for that day, whereafter I read a little, eat something, listen to a little music and go to sleep, generally about sunrise. (My old friend, Cyril Kornbluth, used to say, “If God had meant man to be awake by day, He wouldn’t have given us the electric light.”) This makes problems when I interface with the real world. Publishers and university people in particular have a foul habit of trying to telephone me in the morning, when I am generally asleep. But I won’t change; from midnight to six there are no phone calls, the household is asleep, no one comes to the door and that is how I like it. I am all too easily distracted. Years ago I used to try to get my family to tell callers I was out in the morning. Now they just say I am asleep.

  Being a writer is difficult; you not only need the talent and technique to write, you also need the discipline to make yourself do it, and the critical judgment to know when you are done. If you are a bricklayer, say, people tell you what to do—“twelve courses of glazed yellow, ten yards long, staggered and faced with stone at the gate—” and when the wall is up you are through. If you are a writer you have to set yourself a task, make yourself do it, and evaluate the result when you are done, with little or no real help from anyone. To be sure people will try to tell you what you should do, and give you all the criticism you want, maybe more than you want, once it is irretrievably in print; but the only opinion that really matters is your own.

  —Frederik Pohl, in Hell's Cartographers (Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson, 1975)

  * * *

  Fairy tales are more concerned with situation than with character. They are the space fiction of the past.

  —Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press, 1974)

  * * *

  … But no amount of expert advice or money can make up for lack of imagination, as Harlan Ellison discovered when he tried to midwife a series called The Starlost, inspired by Heinlein’s “Universe” and various imitations thereof.

  Ellison is usually the mortal enemy of “hard” science fiction, but he had enough integrity to want to do The Starlost justice. Nobody else did, however.

  He had carefully worked up an outline based on the series heroes trying to locate the lost controls of the runaway starship they were on—and not finding them until the last episode.

  But before he knew it, the producers destroyed the integrity of the series by having the controls discovered in the second or third episode. Don’t worry, they told Ellison—they could keep up suspense with a search for the backup controls. On questioning them, he learned they thought backup controls were what would make the starship back up!

  —John J. Pierce, in Reason, January 1975

  * * *

  MR. FIEDLER: Well, let me tell you an experience which I lived through. Not this time at the National Book Awards but the time before I was one of the fiction judges. There was a book I very much wanted the fiction judges to consider for the prize—

  MR. BUCKLEY: ARE YOU AT LIBERTY TO SAY WHICH?

  MR. FIEDLER: Yes, it was a book by a young science fiction writer called Norman Spinrad. It’s called The Iron Dream. And the rest of my committee simply said, “That’s science fiction. It doesn’t enter into consideration as a novel. Someday we’ll have a prize for science fiction.” This is a kind of ghettoization of literature which is built into libraries even, right, public libraries.

  Children’s department, adult department. Real books, detective stories, westerns, science fiction, girls’ romances, whatever the distinctions are. And that also doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.

  —Interview with Leslie Fiedler on Firing Line, December 1, 1974

  * * *

  The vast mass of humanity is, alas, attracted by nonsense. To point out that it is nonsense is merely to reassure people. They will roll in the dung heap all the more merrily for knowing that it is the real thing. The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Man is a reasoning animal.” What evidence he had for that assertion no one knows; certainly none has surfaced in the 19 centuries since his time.

  To be sure, a few individual human beings are reasoning animals. You can tell who they are by the fact that they are denounced by everyone else every time they open their mouths.

  —Isaac Asimov, in a letter to Time, January 20, 1975

  THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

  Home for Robert was a place he had never seen—did it exist at all?

  Kathleen M. Sidney “Where are you going?” his sister asked.

  “Home.”

  He awoke, huddled among blue-grey bodies. For warmth? On a planet where no one was ever cold?

  He woke up with a question. If nothing else, he was an anthropologist.

  If nothing else.

  “Why are we huddled here?” he asked them aloud. No one so much as opened an eye. They were used to him. They had always been used to him. From the first day he had stepped into their circle, one E-year ago, not one of them had shown the slightest spark of curiosity concerning him. Or anything else. Was nothing new to them? And nothing old? Half his time was up, and he knew no more about them now than when he began.

  Gradually they woke up, stretching, an almost human gesture. And Robert spoke to them aloud, as a man lost in the wilderness for a year might speak to the trees. Pointless questions, to fill in the terrible quiet.

  “Where are you going?” his sister asked.

  “Out to play.”

  “They laughed at you.”

  “Mommy said that’s only because I’m so different. They’ll get used to me.”

  And they laughed at him. He was too young to know that it was fear. If he was ridiculed, then he was ridiculous. And gradually they did grow used to him. He had learned the secret of success. He became their pet, a puppy dog who could talk and do tricks for them. If there is one thing stronger than the need for self-respect, it is loneliness. But he was spared one agony: he made a poor scapegoat. They could not easily project their fears about their own human weaknesses onto a beast with three heads and nine legs.

  “Mommy, where did I come from?”

  His mother was a biologist, a scientist, impatient with lies.

  “Remember how I told you about the planets and the suns?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you came from another planet, called Epsilon Geminorum V. It’s far away from here. Across the stars.”

  Robert pictured the stars, and the darkness between them.

  “Your parents gave you to Earth. Along with two others. I think so that we could raise you as our own children and come to understand them better through you.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “You weren’t born yet, really, you were inside an egg.”

  The laughers had told him he was hatched from an egg. He had thought they were making it up.

  “Was Susie hatched, too?”

  “In a way. From an egg inside m
y stomach.”

  “Didn’t I come from a stomach, too?”

  “Yes. Your egg was inside a stomach, first, then it was outside. And then you were born.”

  “But why was I hatched outside?”

  “Because that’s the way people are born on your planet. It’s as good a way as any.”

  “Did they look like me?”

  “Who?”

  “My Mom and Dad.”

  “Yes. But we adopted you, and so we’re your parents.”

  “What happened to the other eggs?”

  “Those babies died, Robby. Because we didn’t understand that they needed love, just like human children. And they were raised in a sterile laboratory environment until it was too late.”

  “But I didn’t die.”

  “Because we had taken you home with us. Because we love you.”

  He hugged her tight. Afraid to let go. Afraid he would die. But she hugged him back, and after a while he relaxed.

  “You know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” Susie asked. “What?”

  “A scientist, like Mommy. Do you know what kind?”

  “A mad scientist.”

  They wrestled on the floor, laughing.

  “What are you going to be, Robby?”

  He was on his way out of the house with Susie when his mother called him back.

  “Robby, stay inside this morning. There’s someone coming to see you.”

  He knew what that phrase meant. “It’s another test,” he told his sister.

  “Mommy, can’t he come? We’re building a tree fort.”

  “Later, honey, this afternoon.”

  “Now, Mom, just for a little while?”

  “Susie,” their mother said warningly.

  “Well, he’s not a guinea pig.” And his sister made a hasty exit.

  With Susan gone, and his mother and father working in the cellar lab, Robert had the house to himself. He wandered into his parents’ bedroom and, on an impulse, closed the door behind him. He crouched in the center of his father’s bed. Who would come to test him today? Dr. Jamison again? Robert had once overheard the man say that tricephs might be less intelligent than human beings. And despite his parents’ indignant replies, Robert knew that it was true. He had no doubt that he was inferior to the human race.

  The closet door was open. He looked at his father’s suits, his mother’s dresses. He climbed up on the dresser, and looked at his own twelve-holed garment in the mirror. A “trunk suit,” his mother had called it. Yet she had told him that he was almost human biologically. He breathed the same air and ate most of the same foods. His skin was a little thicker than theirs, and heavily pigmented blue-grey, but his blood was red. Yet three heads rose, immobile, from a short stubby trunk. And each possessed one eye and one ear, placed so that he could see and hear in any direction without turning. One head had a functional nose and mouth; on the other two these were rudimentary. And nine legs were spread around him like a spider’s, and each possessed a three-pronged hand. Robert studied himself in the mirror, silently asking a question as old as the human race.

  “Robert, where are you?” his father called. “Rob, come on. Dr. Jamison will be here any minute.” He paused outside the bedroom, mumbling to himself, “Where is the little monster?” and left.

  Fifteen minutes later he returned, running toward the sound of objects breaking. The room was a shambles. And scattered in a circle, as if they had been caught up in and tossed from a fan, were all the suits from the closet. A hat was on one of Robert’s heads, and one of his long arms was stretched through a shirtsleeve.

  Robert saw his father standing quite still at the door, and he began a high-pitched whistling. It was as close as he could come to human crying. His father sat down on the bed and gathered him up in his lap. His mother came into the room, then left again. When she returned, she sat down beside them. The whistling gradually eased and stopped. But for a long time no one moved or spoke.

  Finally his father turned to his mother and asked, very softly, “Did you call Dr. Jamison?”

  His mother nodded. “He’ll put it off. Robby won’t have to answer any questions today.”

  When he was seventeen, he had to choose whether to join the expedition, or to go east with his family, where Susan would start college. She wanted him to join her. They had always been close, but their intimacy had grown during the teen years, when sibling rivalry gave way to very similar views on life, death, and the meaning of the universe. They had asked the same questions, and found the same tentative answers, until their thoughts were so intertwined, they found it impossible to remember which of them had first proposed an idea. But even if the college would consider accepting him as a student, he felt sure he would fail the entrance examinations.

  “Where are you going?” his sister asked.

  “Home.”

  “No. Not until you come back.”

  “To what? A freak show?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  Robert was reading in the ship’s lounge when the argument broke out between Dr. Johnson, an anthropologist, and Dr. Panzer, a biologist.

  “— you don’t seem to understand. We’re clay. Culture is our mold.”

  “Then how come we aren’t all alike?”

  “Because no two of us have precisely the same experiences. But almost all our experiences are within the bounds of our THE ANTHROPOLOGIST 9 culture. We learn to see the universe according to the preconceptions of our culture. And so we’re blind to the truly alien.”

  Robert looked at his hands in awe.

  Blind.

  “You’re going to what?” Dr. Layton was aghast.

  “I’m going to study anthropology.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “It will take us two years to reach Epsilon. The ship’s library is extensive on the subject, and I haven’t anything better to do with my time.”

  “Nothing better than to wreck the experiment?”

  “It won’t do any harm, it should help if I—”

  “What do you think we need, another damned scientist? There’s already twenty of us on board. And for thirty-two years the best of us have made next to no headway in understanding these creatures. What we need is a triceph who can bridge the gap subjectively. And you’re it.”

  It.

  Robert studied anthropology.

  He read the reports carefully for the hundredth time. When Layton had said that next to nothing was known about the tri-cephs, he hadn’t been exaggerating. At first, the planet had been rated A for settlement. It was an Eden, with no dangerous animals. All species were herbivores, and most had plenty to eat. Their birth rate was low. The temperature was mild over most of the planet’s surface. There was some evidence that conditions had once been harsher, and that the evolution of animal life had passed through a carnivorous stage.

  Exploration is a slow process under the best of conditions, and it wasn’t until the second year that the team had occasion to kill and dissect a triceph. They uncovered one large and two small brains, heavily interconnected with neural pathways. It appeared that they might have discovered the first sentient aliens. The problem was proving it.

  The tricephs were extremely shy of humans. Those captured died almost immediately of unknown causes. However, robosensors proved effective, and a close observation was maintained. The tricephs did not use tools. They wandered in packs of twenty to thirty, with no home base and apparently no territorial limits. They never fought. They had no visible or audible means of communication. Yet they were able to work together in building structures made of vines and grass. The purpose of these structures was a mystery. They were not used as shelters, nor for raising food. No two structures were exactly alike. Each took approximately six hours to build. Each pack built one structure a day and immediately abandoned it to rot. There were no pack leaders, and none of the members appeared to have any particular tasks that they habitually performed. Yet the building went smoothly and efficiently.
br />   It was noted that none of the tricephs seemed to use any one hand in preference to the other eight. Robert thought long about this. He himself had been taught to write with the hand to the right of his primary head. He was beginning to realize that the nature of intelligence was many-faceted and little understood. A seed of hope had been planted within him eight months before, in the ship’s lounge. And now it was taking root.

  The tricephs were hermaphroditic and mated once a year (approximately fourteen and a third Earth months). Each paired with only one other individual, and the pairing lasted little longer than a day. Only about ten percent of the matings resulted in offspring. Pregnancy lasted five months, resulting in one egg, which the parent carried in its pouch until it hatched six months later. It took seven months for the young triceph to graduate from the pouch, after which all the elders cared for all the young indiscriminately. Fifteen years later, it reached physical maturity. The life-span was as yet unknown, but there was some indication that it might average around seventy of our years. For all its observations, the team was unable to find absolute proof that triceph sentience existed. If it was proven that the tricephs were sentient, the government would forbid colonization of the planet.

  Almost fifteen years after the tricephs were discovered, three of their eggs appeared outside the main entrance to the base. Dr. Edward Simpson was the first to leave that morning, and it was he who discovered the eggs. They had been placed in a huddle directly in front of the entrance, and covered with grass. The eggs were warm, and could not have been there long. The land around the base was flat and had been cleared for half a mile. There was not a triceph in sight.

  Robert entered the elevator at C, and Dr. Layton at D. Coincidence had placed them alone together for the first time in a year. The silence was loud. A mutual hatred permeated the air, almost stifling them in the small compartment. As they stepped out into the lounge, Layton admitted to an awareness of Robert’s presence.