Apes and Angels Read online

  The work was tedious, but at last Brad had all three little traps in place just outside the longhouse’s entrance. Then he hurried back up the hillside and started for his shelter, thankful that the controllers hadn’t paid any attention to what he was doing.

  Nobody up in the ship has thought of this, he realized. There’s nothing in the mission protocol about it. So what is not forbidden is allowed. I haven’t triggered any alarms from Emcee. Brad thought of the master computer as his partner in crime.

  Going to be a big day tomorrow, he thought as he trudged toward the shelter. With a grin, Brad wished he could see Kosoff’s face when the professor learned that he had made contact with the Gammans.

  CONFLICT

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  Brad snapped awake at the sound of Kosoff’s voice. For a moment he was disoriented, foggy. But then it all became clear. He was sprawled on the sleeping roll in his shelter, on planet Gamma, alone in the predawn dimness.

  And Kosoff’s face filled his comm screen, glowering at him.

  “Well?” the professor demanded.

  Knuckling his eyes as he sat up, Brad mumbled, “Good morning.”

  “You went into their village,” Kosoff accused.

  “Yessir, I did.”

  “I specifically told you not to make contact with the aliens.”

  “I haven’t made contact,” Brad said.

  His face red with anger, Kosoff started to reply, thought better of it, and snapped his mouth shut. Brad sat there looking at the comm display, fighting an urge to urinate.

  At last Kosoff said, his voice iron-hard, “Last night you went into the village three times and left three small animals that you had caught.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “That’s contact, which I specifically prohibited you from initiating.”

  “It’s not contact. They didn’t see me. They don’t know where the animals came from.”

  Kosoff’s glowering expression cooled a bit, but only a bit. “Don’t split hairs with me, young man.”

  Thinking quickly, Brad improvised, “What I did is an experiment. I want to see how the Gammans react to something unexpected.”

  “How they react,” Kosoff growled.

  “Surely they won’t think that those animals were left with them by a visitor from another world.”

  Kosoff said nothing.

  “If we’re going to make contact—eventually,” Brad went on, “I thought it would be a good idea to see how they react to the unexpected.”

  “React to the unexpected.”

  “That’s within the mission protocol, I think.”

  “You’d have to go through the rules with an atomic force microscope to find anything covering what you just did.”

  Glancing up at the brightening shell of his shelter, Brad said, “They’ll be waking up soon. We’ll be able to see how they react.”

  Still looking grim, Kosoff grumbled, “I’ll get Chang and her people to record everything they say.”

  “The linguistics computer should be able to understand at least some of it,” said Brad.

  “You’d better get up to the crest of the ridge and observe them.”

  “Yes. Right away.”

  Kosoff was clearly unhappy, but he added, “And don’t let them see you!”

  Suppressing a grin, Brad answered, “I’ll try not to.”

  * * *

  By the time he had done his morning ablutions (including relieving his bladder) and pulled on the biosuit, the bloodred sphere of Mithra had climbed above the distant mountains. It was full daylight when Brad cautiously looked down at the village from the crest of the wooded ridge. He stayed behind a row of bushes and focused his helmet’s telescopic lenses on the longhouse.

  A growing crowd of Gammans was clustered at the building’s door, talking rapidly and gesticulating with their ropy, tentacle-like arms.

  “… not me,” the linguistics computer translated.

  “Who did it?” demanded a voice. Brad thought it must have come from the Gamman standing in the doorway, with the three caged animals at his feet. The splotches of color on his body were several different shades of blue and purple, and he seemed to be the one asking questions, demanding answers.

  The village chief, Brad concluded.

  They kept on chattering and pointing at one another. Brad’s gift of the captured animals had clearly upset them. It was something different, something new in their lives, and they had no explanation for it. Very much like humans, what they didn’t understand, they feared.

  Brad noticed with some disappointment that their wide-splayed feet were obliterating the bootprints he had left in the packed earth.

  There goes one of my brilliant ideas, he thought.

  The computer’s translation was hit and miss. Mostly miss. It buzzed weakly when it came across a word or phrase it didn’t understand. But it kept spitting out the word “who.” None of the Gammans had an answer.

  At last the village chief raised his arm and pointed to the hills on the far side of their farmland.

  “… strangers … their village,” Brad heard in his helmet earphones. “… why? Who?”

  “… death time coming…”

  “… gift?”

  “Why?” the chief repeated.

  The villagers fell silent. Several of them turned to look toward the distant hills.

  Then one of them said, “Far village.”

  Brad grinned to himself. “Far village, indeed,” he muttered. “You have no idea how far.”

  CONTACT

  Brad slithered on his belly down below the ridgeline, then got to his feet and marched back to his shelter. Time for breakfast, he told himself. Two tablets of condensed proteins and vegetable products, plus a vitamin pill, washed down with my recycled piss.

  At least the meal didn’t take long. Brad listened to the computer’s translation of the Gammans’ talk, straining to make sense of it. There were still huge gaps in the translation, stretches where he heard nothing but its pitiful buzzing, like a tiny insect trapped in a bottle.

  But the computer understood one phrase that had been repeated several times: “Death time coming.”

  Could they know about the death wave? he asked himself. And answered, No. Impossible. They don’t even have telescopes, let alone modern astronomical equipment.

  Death time must refer to the coming flyby of planet Beta, he concluded. Death time.

  Suddenly the computer’s speaker erupted with the rumbling of several deep voices. Gammans. Excited. And not far away.

  He pulled on his helmet, fastened it to the neck ring of his biosuit, and ducked out the shelter’s air lock.

  And there were four Gammans, not more than fifty meters away, gaping at him. They all carried short, sharpened hunting sticks.

  Contact!

  Fighting the urge to go back inside the shelter and find his pistol, Brad instead took two full steps beyond the air lock and spread his arms, palms outward.

  “Hello,” he said, hoping that the computer’s low growl of translation was correct.

  Emcee’s voice came through the earphones inside Brad’s helmet. “I have notified Professor Kosoff of your contact.” Brad thought that even the computer sounded excited. You’re projecting your own emotions onto Emcee, he told himself.

  Still …

  The four aliens looked uneasily at one another, then the tallest of them rumbled like a lion’s deep-chested cough.

  The computer said in Brad’s earphones, “Who … you?”

  “I’m a visitor,” said Brad, taking another tentative step toward them. The computer made a grumbling translation, although Brad wondered if it knew the Gamman term for “visitor.”

  The Gammans backed away from Brad slightly, talking among themselves. No translation from the computer. All Brad heard was their deeply sonorous voices. It’s like listening to a Russian opera, he thought inanely. All bassos.

  Brad was accustomed to being the
tallest in any group, but every one of the Gammans towered over him by half a dozen centimeters. Brad told himself it didn’t matter, he was tall enough to seem like them, yet he found that he felt uneasy, self-conscious.

  He realized that they had turned slightly sideways to look at him. Those bulbous, oversized eyes on the sides of their bullet-shaped heads could not see directly ahead. They’re descended from grazers, he thought, not carnivores. I hope.

  Kosoff’s voice came through his earphones. “Don’t get any closer to them! If they attack, get back into the shelter. It’s strong enough to stop their hunting sticks.”

  “They’re the ones backing away,” Brad said, almost in a whisper.

  The leader of the aliens spoke up again, sounding like distant rumbling thunder. The computer picked up a few words: “… where … village.… why … here…”

  Brad stretched out one arm, pointing toward the distant mountains. “My village is far, far away.”

  Another of the Gammans took a step toward him, making a sound like a low-pitched buzz saw. He touched his chest with his free hand and repeated the sound several times.

  It sounded to Brad like “Mnnx.”

  His name? Brad wondered.

  “Mnnx.”

  Assuming that the alien was giving his name, Brad touched the chest of his biosuit and said, “Brad.”

  The aliens glanced at one another.

  Brad repeated, “Brad. My name is Brad.”

  The leader made a very humanlike shrug and rumbled, “Brrd.”

  Smiling inside his helmet, Brad said, “Close enough.” Then he pointed to the one who had introduced himself and tried to repeat the name he had given: “Mnnx.”

  “Mnnx!” the alien said, raising his stick aloft.

  Another one of them said, “Lnng.”

  All four of the aliens advanced toward Brad, then stopped a respectful few paces in front of him.

  “Village?” asked the leader.

  Again Brad pointed toward the mountains, shimmering blue in the hazy distance.

  “Far away,” he repeated.

  “Frr wy,” said Lnng. Their faces were incapable of expressions, but Brad got the feeling they were all satisfied.

  Lnng pointed uphill with his hunting stick. “Village,” he said, pointing with his free hand to himself and his companions. “Go … village.”

  Brad nodded inside his helmet, then realized that the aliens could not see the gesture, and even if they could, they wouldn’t understand it. So he pointed up to the ridgeline and said, “To your village.”

  Kosoff’s voice came through his earphones again. “Let’s hope they have a tradition of hospitality to strangers.”

  “Looks that way,” Brad whispered. Then he marveled to himself, I’ve done it! I’ve made contact with the aliens!

  FELICIA PORTMAN MACDANIELS

  Brad looks tired, Felicia thought as she studied his face in the holographic display of their bedroom. She was sitting on the bed, fully dressed, not wanting to stir him when they were so physically separated. And yet …

  “They just accepted me,” Brad was saying. “Asked a few questions about where I came from, but aside from that didn’t show much curiosity at all.”

  “And you’re making progress with them?” she asked.

  Brad was back in his shelter on Gamma. It looked like night had fallen out there: the shelter wall was dark. In the sharp light of the shelter’s solitary lamp, his face looked leaner than she had ever seen it before. There were shadows in the hollows of his cheeks and beneath his eyes.

  But he replied cheerfully enough. “Yep. It’s starting to get monotonous, though. Up with the sun, hike out to the village, talk with whoever’s not working in the fields.”

  “But you’re learning their language.”

  “And their ways. They don’t seem to have any fun at all. Just work all day, have a meal, then go to sleep. Hard way to live.”

  “There’s always someone in the village for you to talk with?”

  “Yes, but not the same person each time. They seem to rotate the field work and give everybody a day off now and then.”

  “Well,” Felicia said, “they’re aliens, after all. We shouldn’t expect them to behave exactly the way we do.”

  Brad let out a weary sigh. “Guess not.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m okay. At least the medics haven’t found anything to worry about.”

  “But?” she prompted.

  “I sure miss you.”

  “We’ll be moving to Alpha in another week.”

  “You’ll be even farther away.”

  “Only three minutes.”

  “Thirty-some million kilometers.”

  Felicia didn’t reply. She knew what she wanted to say, but wasn’t certain she had the nerve to say it.

  Brad asked, “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, I’m fine.”

  “Kosoff hasn’t come on to you?”

  “Not at all. Whenever we happen to meet, he’s polite and proper.”

  “He hasn’t asked you to dinner or anything like that?”

  “No,” said Felicia. “Nobody’s interested in me.”

  “I am.”

  She smiled. “And I’m interested in you. Only you.”

  “I miss you, Fil. Wish we were together.”

  She took a deep breath, then said, “We could be, you know.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  Felicia plunged ahead, “I’ve been thinking about a virtual reality session.”

  “VR sex?”

  “We could get Emcee to set up a VR link between us,” she said quickly, all in a rush. “We could share a session.”

  Brad’s face lit up for a flash of a second. Then he shook his head. “Too many ways for other people to peek in.”

  “Emcee could keep the link strictly private.”

  “You’ve talked with him about it?”

  Lowering her eyes, Felicia admitted, “Yes, I have.”

  Brad looked surprised. But then his expression eased into a smile. “Well, we’d better do it before the ship hauls off to Alpha. I won’t be able to deal with a three-minute wait for your responses.”

  Felicia laughed delightedly.

  * * *

  VR sex was a little strange, at first. Weird. Brad had to wear his biosuit, including its helmet. Fortunately the suit’s gloves had virtual reality circuitry built into them. Its urination relief tube served as a makeshift masturbation device.

  He was clumsy, at first, knowing that Felicia was in a full-body VR suit. But passion rose swiftly. After his third climax Brad lay on his bedroll, spent and sweaty. I’ll have to clean up the suit, he thought. But he was smiling hugely nonetheless.

  * * *

  “And no one tried to cut into our link?” Felicia asked Emcee.

  It was morning. She had slept blissfully—but not for long—after her VR session with Brad.

  “You had complete privacy,” the master computer’s avatar replied from the holographic display.

  Does that include you? Felicia wanted to ask. But she held herself back. She was afraid of the answer.

  Instead of making breakfast for herself, Felicia went to the cafeteria. She saw Dr. Steiner, head of the biology department, sitting alone, and went to her table. Ask her, she told herself. The worst she can do is say no.

  “May I join you?”

  Steiner looked up at Felicia and nodded. They made a study in contrasts: Steiner, tall, blond, regal; Felicia, petite, dark, elfin.

  Ursula Steiner had scant patience for idle chitchat, Felicia knew, so without preliminaries she said:

  “Dr. Steiner, for some time I’ve been thinking that I would like to study the octopods on Alpha full time.”

  Steiner’s pale brows rose a centimeter. “Full time? The whole department is concentrating on the Gammans. Professor Kosoff’s orders.”

  “I know. But surely you can spare one person to study the octopods. There’s s
o much about them that we don’t know.”

  “Yes,” Steiner replied slowly. “That’s true enough. But don’t you want to continue working with your husband?”

  “There’s not much I can do to help Brad in his work,” Felicia replied. “The octopods are a challenge that we’re ignoring, don’t you think?”

  Steiner was silent for several moments. At last she said, “I’ll talk to Kosoff about it.”

  “Thank you!”

  A rare smile inching across her lips, Steiner asked, “You want to make a niche for yourself?”

  “I suppose I do,” said Felicia.

  “Tired of standing in your husband’s shadow already?” Steiner asked.

  Surprised, almost shocked, Felicia replied, “It’s not that at all! I just want to make a real contribution to our work.”

  “Yes, I see,” Steiner said, her smile morphing almost into a smirk. “I was wondering how long the honeymoon would last.”

  LEARNING

  Slowly, painfully, Brad learned the Gammans’ language. And their ways. Some of their behaviors were almost human; others, utterly alien.

  They were sexless farmers who spent virtually all their waking hours tending the crops they grew. Every member of the village worked in the fields, even Drrm, the one Brad thought of as their chief.

  Brad spent his days with them, watching their unending toil along the rows of their farmland. He sat with them at their evening meal, when they gathered around fires cooking their usually meatless stews. He even grew accustomed, almost, to their mouths being in their midsections, fringed with wormlike appendages that turned Brad’s own stomach, no matter how many times he watched the aliens shoveling their food into their shiver-inducing maws.

  After the evening meal Brad would leave the village and walk back to his shelter for the night. The Gammans showed practically no curiosity about where Brad came from or why he had appeared among them.

  Strange, Brad thought. But then he reminded himself that these were alien creatures: intelligent, but the products of a different evolution on a different world. The traits that appeared almost human to him were coincidences, nothing more.