Apes and Angels Read online

  They weren’t exclusively vegetarians, he saw. Every few days Drrm, the village chief, would pick three or four of them to go out beyond the edge of their fields and hunt for small game, which went into the stewpots that night. Brad learned that the animals he had given them had become meals—after being ritually sacrificed and cooked.

  Once he returned to his shelter, Brad spent his evenings talking with Emcee, Kosoff, and Littlejohn, reviewing the day’s events, preparing for the next day’s observations. He spoke with Felicia every night, of course, before going to sleep. She told him the linguistics team was expanding their understanding of the Gammans’ language.

  “Thanks to you, dear,” Felicia said happily, her warmly smiling face filling his comm screen.

  “How are you?” he asked, stretched out alone on his bedroll.

  With obvious excitement, Felicia answered, “Steiner has assigned me to studying the octopods! She talked it over with Kosoff and he okayed my request. He even seemed happy about it, she told me.”

  Brad muttered, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

  “You’re jealous!”

  “Just looking out for your welfare,” he replied, feeling nettled. “You’re important to me.”

  “I miss you,” she answered. “It’s lonely here without you.”

  “Virtual reality’s not the same, is it?”

  “It’s better than nothing,” she said.

  Trying to put up a brave front, Brad said, “Well, I’ve got plenty of new friends down here.”

  Felicia’s expression went somber. “We’ll be moving to an orbit around Alpha in two days.”

  Even though he knew it was scheduled, her words jolted Brad. “Two days?”

  “That’s what Captain Desai told us.”

  Brad nodded, his spirits flagging.

  “We’ll only be three minutes away,” Felicia said quickly. “We can still talk together every night.”

  “Yes,” said Brad. “I know.”

  “It’s going to be a dangerous time for you, down there.”

  He tried to make light of it. “If the Gammans can get through it, I’ll get through it.”

  “Yes,” Felicia said. “That’s right.”

  But Brad thought she didn’t look at all sure about it. And neither was he, he realized.

  * * *

  The following evening, Brad saw Mnnx standing alone on the edge of the village, staring at the looming crescent of Beta, bigger and brighter than ever.

  “Death time coming closer,” said Mnnx, flatly, emotionlessly.

  Brad saw that he was carrying a freshly skinned lizard in one ropy hand. Without another word he trudged to the house he shared with four other Gammans.

  Brad watched him toss the animal into the cook pot, after swiftly chanting the proper prayer of sacrifice. Like prehistoric hunters on Earth, the Gammans believed the prey animal came to them willingly and allowed itself to be caught and killed. The prayer was one of atonement, and thanks for the creature’s sacrifice.

  Once the game was cooking in the bubbling pot Mnnx sat in the circle around the fire. Brad hunkered down beside him, still awkward in his biosuit.

  “Tell me about the death time,” Brad said.

  Mnnx’s eye slid upward, toward the starlit sky, then focused again on Brad.

  “Beta brings monsters.” He didn’t say “Beta,” of course. That was the computer’s translation for the low, humming sound that represented their name for the approaching planet.

  “Monsters?” Brad asked.

  “Terrible monsters. They kill.”

  “From Beta?”

  Mnnx bowed his domed head. “They bring death.”

  “What are they like?” Brad asked.

  “Big. Fast. Kill everyone.” The computer could not convey sadness or fear, of course, but Brad felt both emotions. Monsters that kill everyone. Monsters from Beta.

  “It must be part of their mythology,” said Littlejohn later that night as Brad told the anthropologist about his conversation with Mnnx.

  Shaking his head, Brad replied, “It sounded awfully real to me. Not some fairy tale.”

  Littlejohn smiled patiently. “Mythology is real to those who believe in it. My people believed that songs can guide you across the outback, for god’s sake.”

  Brad wondered if “for god’s sake” was Littlejohn’s idea of a pun.

  TIGER, TIGER

  “You’d better have a look at this,” said Olav Pedersen, the head of the planetology department.

  Kosoff leaned back in his desk chair and stared at Pedersen’s lean, pale face. He looks as if all the blood’s been drained out of him, Kosoff thought. Pasty as a ghost. Even his hair is thin, so blond it’s almost white.

  But Pedersen’s blue eyes were sharp as sapphires, glittering.

  “What is it?” Kosoff asked the planetologist.

  “Beta is waking up.”

  The office wall screen’s display lit up to show a fat crescent that Kosoff immediately recognized as planet Beta. The camera view zoomed in past scudding gray clouds to show the barren rocky surface of the planet.

  Something was stirring down there. Many somethings.

  “What in the name of creation is that?”

  Pedersen’s voice answered, “Native life.”

  Kosoff saw a clutch of the tiny rodentlike animals standing on their hind legs, frozen still, staring at what appeared to be a sizeable rock—which was splitting apart like an eggshell.

  A big, meaty paw pushed out of the shell, followed by a heavy head with a mouth full of fangs.

  “Good lord!” gasped Kosoff.

  The catlike creature cracked the rest of the shell open and stepped out languidly on six clawed legs. It glanced at the rodents, still standing less than ten meters away, then turned and stalked off in the other direction.

  The data bar at the bottom of the screen showed that the cat was not quite three meters long, without including its hairless, twitching tail.

  “Native…?” Kosoff gaped at the beast. “But we haven’t seen anything like this before.”

  “Neither did the Predecessors, apparently, when they did their surveillance of the Mithra system. Beta was near its apogee then, locked in deep winter. Every living thing on the planet must have been hibernating.”

  “And now they’re waking up,” said Kosoff, his eyes glued to the wall display. “Good lord, look at that brute!”

  “The satellite cameras have picked up eight of them, scattered across the planet.” Pedersen’s voice was quivering with excitement. “Apparently they’ve been dormant for some time. Now that the planet’s warming, they’ve awakened.”

  The camera followed the beast as it padded purposefully across the barren, rock-strewn ground.

  Pedersen repeated, “We’ve observed eight of them, so far. Some of the larger formations that we thought were boulders are actually some sort of eggs that have been incubating these beasts. Now they’re hatching. Maybe they’re not full grown yet.”

  Kosoff’s eyes went wider still as the camera view shifted to show what looked like another rock splitting apart, with one of the big cats clawing its way out of it.

  “Eggs,” Kosoff muttered.

  “The biologists will want to see this.”

  “I’ll call Steiner.”

  “We should put more satellites around Beta before we pull out for Alpha.”

  “Yes,” Kosoff agreed absently, his attention focused on the felines.

  Dr. Steiner’s reedy, nasal voice came from the desk’s phone console. “Yes, Professor?”

  “Come to my office right away, Ursula. Drop whatever you’re doing. Beta’s waking up!”

  * * *

  For the first time since leaving Earth, Kosoff was caught up in the excitement of making a truly unexpected discovery.

  The huge, ferocious-looking catlike animals were awakening on Beta after an incubation of nearly half a century. Staring at his office’s wall screen, he saw that the cats made Earthly
tigers look puny. Only a dozen of them had been spotted so far by the satellite cameras, scattered across Beta’s barren, rocky surface. But they seemed to be purposefully stalking across the desolate land, as if each of them had a goal in mind.

  Steiner stared too, open-mouthed, as she sat before Kosoff’s desk. The wall display was following one of the huge cats as it padded over the broken, stony ground.

  “It’s hunting,” she said.

  “Must be hungry,” said Pedersen.

  Steiner nodded. “It’s been inside that egglike thing for nearly four decades, at least.”

  “Hungry, all right,” Pedersen repeated.

  Kosoff shook his head. “But they go right past batches of those rodents without blinking at them.”

  “And the rodents don’t seem to be afraid of them.”

  “I would be afraid,” Pedersen said with some fervor. “Look at those fangs.”

  The desk phone announced, “Breaking orbit in six hours. Prepare for departure.”

  Kosoff wondered how long the surveillance satellites he had just ordered to be put in place around Beta could maintain their orbits when Beta and Gamma made their close approach to one another. Whatever, he told himself. We’ll put up more of them once the two planets have parted.

  But he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the display screen. Where is that damned beast going? he wondered. What’s it up to?

  “‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’” he recited in an awed whisper. “‘What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?’”

  COINCIDENCE

  Sitting before the cook fire in front of Mnnx’s hut, Brad realized that he didn’t know the Gamman words for “fun” or “entertainment.” Maybe there aren’t any, he thought. All they do is work, from sunup to sundown. They don’t even have sex.

  His own VR sessions with Felicia were at an end. The starship had left Gamma and established a safe haven orbiting Alpha, some thirty million kilometers away. He still spoke with Felicia every night, but it was a stuttering, cumbersome communication, disrupted by three-minute-long breaks. Less a conversation than an awkward pair of monologues.

  Now, as twilight darkened into night, Brad said to Mnnx, “You work all day long.”

  Mnnx answered in his low, buzzing words and the computer in Brad’s suit translated, “Death time coming.”

  “You are getting ready for the death time?”

  “Yes. We must.”

  The four other Gammans sitting around the fire seemed to be ignoring Brad and Mnnx, sitting quietly, somberly, while the cook pot bubbled and the night grew darker.

  “You don’t work this hard all the time?” Brad probed. “Only when death time is near?”

  “Yes,” said Mnnx. “When the year begins and we enter the world, there is time for…” The computer failed to translate the last few words.

  “You don’t work all the time then.”

  “Not needed. There is time for … and…”

  Singing and dancing? Brad mentally filled in the blanks. But he found it hard to picture these solemn, hard-working farmers singing or dancing. Then he remembered that even the dourest frontier settlers in the old American West made time for barn dances and hoedowns.

  Yes, but they were sexual creatures, he knew. How much of our attitudes about relaxation and enjoyment are based on the need to attract sexual partners?

  Brad fell silent for several long moments, knowing what he had to ask next, wondering how to phrase it.

  Finally he started, “Mnnx, are there any children in the village?”

  It was Mnnx’s turn to fall silent. At last he asked, “What are jhilldrrn?”

  Brad wondered if the translator had conveyed the word properly. He remembered from his history classes that the earliest attempts to create computerized translation programs had produced some spectacularly foolish results. Input, in twentieth-century English, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Computer translates into Mandarin, then translates the Mandarin words back into English. Output, “Invisible idiot.”

  Sweeping his arm to indicate the entire village, Brad explained, “All the Folk here are the same age.”

  Brad had learned that the villagers referred to themselves as the Folk. All others, including Brad, were Strangers.

  “Of course,” said Mnnx.

  “Aren’t there any Folk who are younger?” Or older, he added mentally.

  “Younger?”

  “You are all the same age?”

  “Of course.”

  “How can that be?”

  “We all came into the world in the same season.”

  “Came into the world?” Brad asked. “From where?”

  Mnnx pointed toward the farmland. “From the eggs our elders laid in the fields.”

  “Elders? Where are they?”

  “All gone. Death time.”

  “They all died?”

  “Of course. Killed by monsters from Beta.”

  Brad felt stunned. “All of them? Every one of them?”

  “That is what death time is. Everyone is killed, except for the Rememberer.”

  “The Rememberer?”

  “Drrm is our Rememberer. Drrm will teach the new Folk once they have come up from the ground.”

  “You mean you’re all going to be killed? All of you?”

  Perfectly calm, Mnnx responded like a teacher dealing with a backward child. “Everyone. Except for Drrm. That is what death time is. Monsters from Beta kill us all. Next season new Folk arise from the fields, after the monsters have gone.”

  No, Brad thought. It can’t be. The translator isn’t getting it right.

  He asked, “New Folk arise from the fields?” Pointing to the farmland beyond the edge of the village, Brad continued, “From there? From the farm?”

  Mnnx said, “Yes. From our seed.”

  * * *

  Brad shuddered through the Gammans’ evening meal, then hurried back to his shelter and called Littlejohn. The Aborigine was in Kosoff’s office, as usual.

  Knowing that the two of them had undoubtedly heard his conversation with Mnnx, Brad asked without preamble, “Do you believe it?”

  And then waited for his words to reach the starship orbiting Alpha, and their response to get back to him.

  Finally Kosoff said, “They all die? Every one of them?”

  “Except for their Rememberer. Drrm.”

  “That’s a lot to swallow.”

  “Killed by monsters from Beta,” Brad said.

  The three-minute interval between them seemed to hang for an hour. At last Littlejohn replied, “That’s mythology. It must be. They’re trying to frame an understanding of the catastrophic weather conditions that arise during the two planets’ conjunction. Trying to make sense out of conditions that are far beyond their comprehension.”

  But Kosoff swung his head negatively. “We’ve seen monsters on Beta.”

  And Brad’s screen suddenly showed one of the six-legged giant cats prowling across Beta’s hardscrabble surface.

  “My god!” Brad gasped.

  This time the three-minute gap was filled with views of the big cats. Brad gaped at them. Monsters, all right.

  Then Kosoff’s face filled the screen again. “It’s a coincidence. A sheer coincidence. Those animals don’t have spacecraft. They can’t cross from Beta to Gamma, even when the two planets are at their closest.”

  Littlejohn added, “All mythologies include monsters. You know that, Brad. Monsters and gods and heroes.”

  “I haven’t heard anything about gods or heroes,” Brad objected. “Only monsters.”

  As he waited for their response, Brad thought about Mnnx’s description of the death time: Monsters that kill them. It can’t be a coincidence.

  Then Kosoff said, “I know it’s bizarre, uncanny. But the only reasonable explanation is that it’s a coincidence. It has to be.”

  It isn’t, Brad insisted silently to himself. A coincidence is what you call a phenomenon when you don’t understand
its actual cause.

  Then he realized, And if it isn’t a coincidence, if those cats somehow get here to Gamma and kill everything in sight, they’ll kill me too!

  REVELATIONS

  Though he tried to hide his fears from Felicia, she immediately saw the danger Brad was in.

  “They’ll kill you too!”

  Attempting to ease her alarm, he said soothingly, “No, I think Kosoff is right. There’s no way that an oversized tiger can fly a hundred thousand klicks through the vacuum of space and get here to Gamma. The talk about monsters and death time is mythology, just a scary tale. Nothing to worry about.”

  Still, once he’d finished his nightly talk with her, Brad rummaged through his equipment case until he found the laser pistol—and the video chip that showed how to use it.

  He slept fitfully that night, awakened time and again by wild dreams that jumbled his memories of the deadly avalanche at Tithonium Chasma with new terrors of giant six-legged beasts tearing him apart with their fangs and claws.

  He awoke weary, emotionally drained, soaked with cold perspiration.

  As he scrubbed himself down with the antiseptic pads from the lavatory supplies, Brad decided to question Drrm more closely about the death time. After all, he reasoned, Drrm’s the closest thing these people have to a village chief. If anyone can shed more light on this situation, he’ll be the one.

  After popping his breakfast pills and pulling on his biosuit, Brad ducked out of his shelter and headed for the village.

  It was unusually windy, he realized. Flat gray clouds were scudding across the normally blue sky. Even inside his cumbersome helmet, Brad could hear the wind moaning and the trees sighing.

  Don’t let your nerves get the better of you, Brad told himself. Weather changes are normal. You’ve lived most of your life on Mars, where the air’s so thin that there’s hardly any weather to speak of. Well, yeah, there’s the dust storms now and then, but you get through them all right.

  Still, he looked up at the threatening sky and saw, through a gap in the ominous clouds, the curving bulk of Beta looming bigger than ever in the sky, like a baleful blood-red eye glaring down at him.

  * * *

  Drrm was standing at the entrance to the building Brad thought of as the village’s longhouse. The Gamman was alone, gazing off at the farm fields at the village’s edge. Everyone else seemed to be in the fields, working.