Apes and Angels Read online

  “Their social structure is based on their university experience,” Brad replied. “Committee hierarchies, competition to make new discoveries, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes,” Littlejohn agreed, unconsciously swiveling his desk chair back and forth. “But they’re beginning to face new situations, new problems.”

  Brad knew that the planetology team was striving to understand the mechanics of the Mithra system, and the cause of the disturbance that had thrown Gamma and Beta into such eccentric, elongated, unstable orbits.

  The biologists, on the other hand, were happily analyzing samples of soil and living organisms—vegetable and animal—brought up from Gamma’s surface by the teams they were sending down to the planet.

  The teams landed furtively at spots far from any of the aliens’ villages: high in the rugged hills, deep in the thick forests. They came down at night, spent a few hours collecting specimens, then quickly returned to Odysseus. So far they had been successful in collecting their samples without being seen by the humanoids.

  So far, Brad thought.

  Sitting in front of Littlejohn’s desk, Brad thought his department head looked almost like a child in his big padded swivel chair. The furniture’s too big for him, Brad realized. I wonder if that makes him uncomfortable? Makes him feel like a pygmy?

  Littlejohn seemed perfectly at ease, though. He was saying to Brad, “Sooner or later we’re going to make contact with the aliens. It’s inevitable. That’s when things will get really interesting.”

  Brad nodded his agreement. But he didn’t tell his department head that he was spending his evenings listening to the twitterings of planet Alpha’s octopods, trying to make some sense of their language.

  He kept his quest to himself—and Felicia.

  * * *

  “There!” Brad said. “See? It’s the same sound. Every time they come close to one of the probes they make the same sound.”

  Felicia was sitting next to him on the sofa in Brad’s snug little sitting room. The wall display showed a hazy view of a trio of octopods swimming alongside one of the teardrop-shaped probes he had sent into their ocean. Along the bottom of the display ran a crawling, spiky curve—an analysis of the sounds the octopods were making.

  “It’s the same sound,” Felicia agreed, pointing at the jittering curve.

  Looking down at the tablet on his lap, Brad called to the screen, “Show scene forty-seven.”

  The screen immediately cut to an image of two octopods swimming side by side, intertwining their tentacles with each other as they uttered a burst of chatter. The curves snaking across the bottom of the screen looked like the ones they had seen in the earlier imagery.

  “Compare data curves,” Brad commanded.

  The image of the octopods winked out and two sets of curves filled the screen.

  “They look almost identical,” Felicia said.

  “Overlay the curves,” Brad called out.

  “They are identical!”

  “To within a few percent,” said Brad.

  “Could it be their phrase for greeting?” Felicia wondered.

  With a nod, Brad replied, “That’s their word for ‘hello.’”

  “You think?”

  “Makes sense.”

  “So that gives us another word,” she said.

  “We’ve got ‘hello,’ ‘food,’ ‘warm,’ and ‘cold,’” said Brad. “On our own. If we had access to the linguists’ analyzer we could go much faster.”

  “Why don’t you ask them about it?” Felicia suggested.

  Brad hesitated. “Might cause trouble. They might resent our sticking our noses into their turf.”

  Felicia arched a brow at him. “You’d have to be subtle about it. Ask them how they’re getting along, what progress they’re making. That sort of thing.”

  “Get them to talk about themselves.”

  “That’s right.” Sitting up straighter and running a hand through her hair, she added, “I’ll bet I could get one of them to tell me what they’ve accomplished.”

  Brad slid an arm across her shoulders. “No you don’t, Delilah. You stay with me.”

  She grinned at him. “I could pump one of the women in their group. Women talk a lot more easily than men.”

  Brad shook his head. “No deal.”

  “Don’t be stubborn, Brad.”

  “I’m not stubborn. I’m just protecting you.”

  “Me? Or yourself?” But she was smiling as she challenged him.

  He got up from the sofa and extended his hand to her. “We can discuss this later.”

  “In bed,” Felicia said, rising to his side.

  Brad clasped her hand and wordlessly they headed for the bedroom.

  * * *

  “Brad! Wake up!”

  Felicia’s voice cut into his dream. He was standing out on the floor of Tithonium Chasma again as the landslide pounded the base into rubble. Standing there, helpless, stupid, safe, while his family died.

  “Wake up!”

  He opened his gummy eyes. Felicia was bending over him, shaking him. Even in the shadows of the darkened bedroom he could see that her eyes were wide, her face fearful.

  Blinking, shuddering, he sputtered, “Wha … they’re dead. Killed.”

  “You were moaning in your sleep again,” Felicia said. “You sounded awful. In pain.”

  He pulled himself up to a sitting position and rubbed his eyes. “The dream again.”

  “The same one?”

  “Pretty much.” He wrapped an arm across her bare back and pulled her to him. She felt warm, safe. “Sorry I woke you.”

  “Are you all right?” Felicia asked.

  Brad pulled in a deep, shuddering breath. “Yeah. I’m all right.” Then he swallowed hard. “But they’re all dead.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Felicia said soothingly. “There wasn’t anything you could do.”

  “I should have been with them. I should have gone back into our quarters and tried to help them.”

  “Then you would have been killed, too.”

  “Maybe. But I should have tried.”

  Felicia laid her head on his bare shoulder. “No,” she purred. “You’re alive and you should be glad of it. I am.”

  Brad said nothing. He kissed her lightly, then lay back on the bed silently. But he thought, I let them die. I should have been with them. I should have done something. I should have died with them.

  WORKING DAY

  The anthropology team—all twelve of them—were sitting around the circular table in one of the starship’s smaller conference rooms. It was their regular Wednesday meeting, where they exchanged notes on the work they were doing.

  Sitting almost directly across the table from Littlejohn, Brad realized that Kosoff had never attended one of their meetings. He sits in on all the other department meetings, but not ours. He doesn’t regard our work as real science. We’re not important to the mission, as far as he’s concerned.

  One by one the group members reported on their work. Littlejohn listened mostly in silence. The team was building a picture of how the other scientists aboard Odysseus were creating—mostly unconsciously—a social structure for themselves.

  “Their pecking order is pretty simple.” Larry Untermeyer was reporting on his study of the technology team’s engineers. “There’s Kosoff at the top of the heap, of course. Then comes Kosoff’s graduate students, then their grad students, and finally the poor slobs who come from other schools.”

  “No recognition of merit?” Littlejohn asked. “Accomplishment?”

  Untermeyer shook his head. “None of them has accomplished anything that would impress Kosoff. Not yet.”

  One of the women piped up, “It’s the same with the health and safety department. Kosoff and his former students are at the top of the heap.”

  “If you tried to draw an organization chart,” Brad pointed out, “it would look like a series of concentric circles. Kosoff in the middle, his former students in the n
ext circle, their graduates in the next, and so on.”

  Littlejohn made a tight little smile. “Seems to work. They’re productive.”

  “So far,” Untermeyer said before Brad could voice his own opinion.

  Once they had gone completely around the table, Littlejohn nodded smilingly and said, “Good work, all of you. If we keep this up, we’ll have a fine report to make back to the mission coordinators on Earth.”

  One of the women—blond, slim, sharp-featured—asked, “Have any of the other teams put out reports yet?”

  Littlejohn shook his head. “Too soon. We could issue an interim report in a few weeks, I think.”

  “The rest of the people on board don’t seem very happy about our work,” the woman said.

  Nods and murmurs of agreement went around the table.

  “They think we’re snooping on them.”

  “They don’t like it.”

  “They don’t like us.”

  Littlejohn shrugged. “That in itself is an important indicator of their attitudes, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But it doesn’t make it any easier for us, you know.”

  With a smile that looked downright fierce, Littlejohn said, “We’re not here to do an easy job. It’s important to understand how teams of people, isolated and far from home, build their social systems.”

  “Important for who?” asked the man sitting next to Brad.

  “Whom.”

  With a sour expression, the man growled, “All right, whom, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It’s important for our understanding of how human societies work,” said Littlejohn. “The human race is expanding out among the stars. Human social norms are going to change; they’ll have to if we’re to survive and flourish out here.”

  “We’re not going to spend the rest of our lives here,” the blonde snapped.

  “Perhaps not,” said Littlejohn. “But others will. Humankind is enlarging its habitat again. It’s something we’ve been doing since Homo ergaster started walking out of eastern Africa, nearly two million years ago. We’ve spread all across Earth and out through the solar system. Now we’re beginning to spread among the stars. You people”—he gestured to the team sitting around the table—“have the opportunity to study how our civilization changes in its new environments.”

  Dead silence fell on them.

  And Brad thought, He sees farther than we do. He’s looking ahead generations, centuries.

  Untermeyer finally wisecracked, “Here I thought we were just studying how Kosoff controls everything.”

  “That’s part of it,” Littlejohn admitted. “Maybe an important part. Will Kosoff found a dynasty among the stars?”

  “More likely he’ll proclaim himself a god,” Brad heard himself say.

  “He might at that,” Littlejohn agreed with a chuckle.

  * * *

  As the meeting broke up, Littlejohn called, “I want to talk to you, Brad.”

  Brad stepped out of the line heading for the conference room door. “Yes?”

  “Dr. Steiner is very happy with the work you did at Alpha.”

  Surprised, Brad blurted, “She is?”

  “You got excellent data. And the philology team is happily building up their understanding of the octopods’ language.”

  “It’s pretty primitive,” Brad said. “Barely a language by our standards.”

  “Yes, but they communicate,” said Littlejohn. “And even the astronomy team is impressed by the temperature profile you took of Alpha’s ocean. Dr. Abbott told me it’s very interesting.”

  Brad shrugged. “The sensors worked automatically. All I did was collate the data they took.” Before Littlejohn could react he added, “I had plenty of time on my hands with nothing much to do.”

  “I imagine you did. Well, anyway, Steiner is very pleased.”

  “I see Dr. Steiner almost every day,” Brad said. “She’s never indicated that she’s pleased with me.”

  Littlejohn reached up and placed a hand on Brad’s shoulder. “She can’t tell you directly. You’re still on Kosoff’s blacklist.”

  Brad grumbled, “He’s still sore at me.”

  “He’s an alpha ape. He’s got to keep you in your place if he wants to keep himself at the top of the tribe.”

  “I’m only a junior anthropologist,” Brad said. “I’m no threat to him.”

  “He thinks you are.”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  Cocking his head to one side, Littlejohn said, “Yes, I agree that it is. But Kosoff knows the game and he’s good at playing it. He can’t smile at you, that would loosen his status a little. And he can’t allow subordinates like Steiner to smile at you, either.”

  “But she told you that she appreciates my work.”

  Littlejohn nodded. “There’s more than one way to skin an alpha ape, my boy.”

  APES AND ANGELS

  His mind spinning with hopes and fears, Brad left the conference room and walked down the passageway with Littlejohn.

  People coming up the passageway from the other direction smiled and murmured hello. Brad realized that he and the Aborigine made an odd couple: the pygmy and the beanpole.

  As they approached Littlejohn’s office, Brad asked, “How long am I going to stay on Kosoff’s shit list?”

  Littlejohn looked up at him. “Until you make some gesture of subservience, I suppose. That’s the way tribal politics works, usually.”

  “He wants me to give up Felicia.”

  “I suppose he does.”

  “I’m not going to do it. I can’t. I won’t.”

  With a little shrug, Littlejohn said, “Every act has consequences, Brad. Every decision means alternative decisions have been discarded.”

  “I love her,” Brad said, surprising himself. And he immediately realized, It’s true. I love her. And she loves me. I think.

  “Love is a very big word,” said Littlejohn.

  They had reached his office door. Sliding it open, Littlejohn said, “Come in, Brad. Come in.”

  Instead of going to his desk, Littlejohn pulled out a chair from the tiny table in the opposite corner of the compartment, and gestured for Brad to take the other chair.

  As he sat, Brad said, “I’d like to work with the philologists. I’d like to help decipher the octopods’ language.”

  “Why?”

  “Why not? I spent three months out there recording the sounds they make. I’d like to be part of the team that decodes those sounds into their language.”

  For several long, silent moments Littlejohn stared at Brad from under his beetling brows. At last he said, “You want to make a contribution. That’s good. But what about your work here on the anthropology team?”

  Feeling less than comfortable, Brad replied, “That’s not as important as learning the language of an alien species.”

  This time Littlejohn steepled his fingers before saying, “You might be running down a blind alley, you know. Those octopods are very different from us. Hugely different. The sounds they make might not be a language at all.”

  “I think they are.”

  Strangly, Littlejohn smiled at Brad. “No scientific breakthrough was ever made by a man who didn’t think he was right and everybody else wrong.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Brad. “The whales and dolphins back on Earth communicate with each other. Some whale songs can be heard halfway around the world.”

  “Brad, you can’t call mating songs a language.”

  “But the whales’ songs change and evolve over time. Different species of whales learn them and—”

  “True enough,” Littlejohn interrupted, “but you can’t dignify them with the term ‘language.’”

  “Well, what about the leviathans on Jupiter? They communicate visually, flash pictures at each other. They’ve even communicated with us!”

  Littlejohn leaned forward and planted his elbows on the tabletop. “Do you realize what we’re up against? Do you und
erstand the enormous challenge we face?”

  “Making contact with an alien society,” Brad mumbled.

  “We’ve got to admit that we’ll never make meaningful contact with most of the aliens we meet.”

  “Never?”

  “Never,” Littlejohn insisted. “Take those octopods on Alpha. They’re so very different from us. What do we have in common? Where can we have a meeting of minds?”

  “That’s what we’ve got to find out, isn’t it?”

  “Look, Brad. There are probably all sorts of intelligent species scattered among the stars, but the only ones we’ll have any meaningful interchange with will be those that have something in common with us. Species like those octopods are too different. The aliens on planet Gamma, they’re more like us, at least superficially. We might be able to have meaningful intercourse with them, but not the octopods.”

  “How do we know if we don’t try?” Brad insisted. “They have a language, I’m convinced of it. It may be primitive, but it’s a language.”

  “You made a copy of the data you got at Alpha, didn’t you, and you’ve been trying to decipher it yourself.”

  Brad felt a shock of surprise buffet him. “How did you know?”

  Grinning, Littlejohn answered, “Because that’s what I would have done, in your place.”

  “I’ve identified a few words…”

  Littlejohn slumped back in his chair. “All right. All right. I’ll talk to the head of the philology team, see if she can take you into her group.”

  “You will? Thanks!”

  “Kosoff won’t like it. He’ll probably veto the move.”

  “Yeah,” Brad said, suddenly crestfallen. “Probably he will.”

  “I’ll talk with Kosoff, too.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to get on his bad side,” Brad said.

  “All in a day’s work, son.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But if I were you, I’d be more interested in the language of those people down on Gamma.”

  “They’re more like us,” Brad agreed.

  Littlejohn said, “Some of the alien species we encounter will be too far below us, developmentally, to have any meaningful interchange with us. Little more than apes, really. Others will be too far beyond us. Angels, so to speak.”