by Gordon Linzner
Lieutenant Janet Santiago’s initial landing on Petrov could have gone better.
Her single-person shuttle gouged a sixty-meter-long ditch through the open field before smashing into the low rock outcropping. The officer cursed but remained seated, safety straps digging into her shoulders, calming herself with deep breaths.
The shuttle’s internal computer, better secured than its human occupant, remained intact and operational, even if the ship itself wasn’t. A quick medical scan revealed no bones broken, no internal injuries beyond a few sore muscles. Her flight suit was undamaged. Santiago refused the computer’s offer of a mild analgesic, undid the safety harness, pulled herself erect, and cautiously slid open the airlock.
Moss-like vegetation gave way under her weight as Janet Santiago became the first human to set foot on the planet arbitrarily named Petrov.
A half-dozen of Petrov’s inhabitants gathered around the crash site. They were a mixed bag, indeed, seemingly placid, standing close together, softly clacking among themselves. They seemed to eye her more out of interest than fear. Those among them in possession of organs resembling eyes did, anyway.
Santiago’s earpiece crackled. “Mama Bear to Baby. Come in, Baby.”
“Baby Bear here,” she replied, rolling her eyes. She would never get used to these silly codenames. Who would eavesdrop on, let alone comprehend, an English language transmission hundreds of light years from Earth? How would fairy tale names give away less information than simply referring to each other as Martin Wu and Janet Santiago?
“State condition.” Captain Wu’s clipped manner was more annoying over a communicator than in person.
“A few bruises. Nothing more. My suit’s padding did its job, thank you. That’s more than I can say for the failed decelerator.”
“Shuttle condition?”
“Looks repairable, but not by me.”
“I’ll send a tech crew.”
“Hold off a bit. I’ve drawn a crowd.”
“Hostile?”
“More curious, I’d say. I might be able to start work immediately.”
“Which species is dominant?”
“I just got here, remember? How many distinct types did we monitor from orbit again?”
Wu paused. Santiago pictured him fumbling to pull up the report.
“Forty-one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-eight. No two the same.”
“That fits what I’m looking at, with much smaller representation. These Petrovians don’t seem as if they belong on the same planet, let alone in the same species. I see an orange eight-legger, a two-meter tall blue slug, a half-meter something-or-other that’s mostly eyestalks…”
“Save the details for your report. We’re already reading and recording audio and visual.”
“I’ll wager you can’t see how intelligent these guys look to me, though.”
“Maintain objectivity, Lieutenant.”
Lieutenant? What happened to Baby Bear?
She couldn’t blame her commander for his testy attitude. Captain Wu was tasked with finding an Earth-like world free of any life of Class Seven intelligence or higher, and therefore suitable for colonization. Santiago’s job was to confirm no life on Petrov above Class Six.
A soft beep drew Santiago’s attention to the electronic readout above her faceplate, confirming the data taken from orbit. Temperature twenty degrees Celsius, ultraviolet radiation minimal, atmosphere thin but breathable by Earth standards.
“I’m removing my helmet. I need to communicate with more than verbal cues. The translator needs to sample more of their language.”
“Assuming they have a language.”
“Objectivity, Captain?” Santiago whispered.
The six Petrovians inched closer. Santiago undid her helmet seals, paused to let the pressure equalize, then removed the bulky headgear The balmy breeze felt refreshing after that dry, metallic-smelling canned mix.
“There,” she announced to her non-human audience. “Now we can…”
With a series of high-pitched, unmistakably panicky squeals, the Petrovians scattered.
Santiago sulked, leaning an elbow against the shuttle’s battered hull. “You guys sure know how to boost a visitor’s self-esteem.”
She was still in that position twenty minutes later, helmet dangling from her left hand, when a lone yellow octopoid drew near. She did not recognize the newcomer as part of the original group.
The creature halted two meters from the shuttle, just out of reach, and clacked at her.
Santiago remained silent and, she hoped, unthreatening, for the brief time it would take her suit’s translator to absorb enough of the alien speech to reply. When her earpiece pinged in sync with a green light in the upper left corner of her face plate, she slowly smiled, then extended her right hand.
“A hand, er, appendage-shake?” Santiago offered through the thin, almost invisible, microphone attached to her chin. “It’s a type of greeting where I come from. You don’t have any taboos about touching, do you?”
She’d already guessed the answer, after observing how close together the first group had been, but the more communication she exchanged, the more material the translator had to work with. Judging by their vocabulary level, the Petrovians, this one anyway, appeared close to Class Six. They need only establish a working dialogue with the Earthers to get beyond that.
That was not the result Captain Wu hoped for, of course.
The translator crackled in her left ear. “Un-understand ‘taboos.’ Touching good.”
“Great.” Her smile widened. She pictured the more germophobic crew members turning pale as she peeled off her glove, even though the ship had scanned the environment for potentially dangerous microorganisms before she even boarded her shuttle. Something might still have been missed, but part of her job involved taking reasonable risks.
The octopoid’s reaction was more extreme than that of her own fellow hypothetical crew members. It leapt back a good four meters. Over the translator, Santiago heard “No change! No change!”
The creature skittered out of sight.
Nertz, Santiago thought sourly. Now I’m some kind of interstellar panhandler.
She glared at her exposed right hand, with its short square cuticles, faint blue veins, and a barely visible scar on the middle knuckle where she’d caught it in a doorjamb as a child. Nothing you’d want to stare at for hours, but neither was it something to run screaming from, considering the variety of lifeforms on Petrov. Had Santiago instead put down the helmet and offered her still-gloved left hand, she might have better understood the creature’s reaction. The two extremities looked as if they belonged to different beings.
Especially if you didn’t know what a glove was.
Or a helmet.
Of course!
Santiago’s fingers started racing along the seals of her flight suit, then stopped to look back at the damaged shuttlecraft. She decided to remove her outfit inside, out of sight of prying eye parts. Enough Petrovians had been traumatized for one day.
#
An hour passed, and more. Santiago didn’t know how long, exactly. Aside from the translator, now draped around her neck, she’d left her technology, and most of her clothing, in the damaged shuttle, then moved outside of its line of sight.
The brighter of Petrov’s two suns sank below the horizon. Santiago perched on a nearby rock, ignoring the feel of rough stone against her bare legs. The ambient temperature dropped a degree, maybe two, remaining in her comfort zone.
Had she reached her epiphany too late? Had word spread among the Petrovians to completely shun their visitor?
A deep, loud snuffle sounded behind her. Santiago slowly turned.
Three meters away a pink circular shape, not much larger than her shuttle seat, crinkled as it approached her across the loose soil.
She leaned forward, one hand reaching for her translator.
The newcomer suddenly seemed to grow wider, taller. Santiago caught her breath, amazed that any living thing could increase in size so much, so quickly. Then she realized what she saw was not physical growth, but a being emerging from its den, or lair, or whatever, somewhere beneath the surface.
The thick tube of pinkish flesh towered over her in minutes, throbbing, undulating, bending forward. A dark hole widened at one end, like opening a mouth, to reveal multiple rows of sharp, black teeth. There was no face, no eyes, no expression that could be read, only a threatening maw lunging forward, too quickly for her to evade it.
Apparently the Petrovians had settled on the best way to deal with the invading anomaly that was Janet Santiago.
Her eyes closed tight. Warm breath enveloped bare skin. The Lieutenant had no clothes, no weapons, not even a communicator.
After a long moment, still alive, Santiago looked again.
The pink tube shifted aside with what looked like a shrug.
#
“Now that I’ve been accepted,” Santiago radioed Wu, “I can see all sorts of aspects of their lives. We’re talking Class Nine here, maybe Ten. The Petrovians were very interested in my analyses of DNA samples, which indicate, by the way, that all forty-one thousand of them are indeed likely the same species. I’d love to hear the Evolutionary Geneticists explain that!” She affectionately scratched a blue juvenile mothlike creature under what seemed to be a chin.
“Yet they run around naked,” Wu responded, disgruntled.
She sympathized with his mood. Who wouldn’t feel that way after surveying fifteen, now sixteen, planets, only to determine that every one of them, so far, as per the Council’s standards, were to be considered off-limits for Earth colonization?
“Basically, yes. I didn’t realize they were all one at first because the Petrovians vary outwardly so much from each other. Using outer garments to tell them apart would be redundant, and standard patterns pointless. The climate here is temperate, year-round from what I could gather from them. They don’t need protection from the elements.”
“You’ve gone native?”
Santiago glanced down the length of her slim body, wriggled her bare toes. “Not completely. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t feel comfortable without at least my skivvies.”
“I can’t in good conscience instruct the team to run about in their underwear.”
“They’d be fine, Captain. The atmosphere’s quite comfortable, given the environment. The key is to never dress or undress in front of a Petrovian. At least, not until they get used to the concept of garb.”
The moth-cat clacked goodbye, then jumped off Santiago’s lap to playfully chase its sibling, a ten-legged ball of fur.
“I still don’t understand.”
“It’s obvious in hindsight. Young Petrovians look like small mature versions of themselves. There’s none of that big head, big eyes effect we find in most Earth species. They hatch from eggs in a communal nursery. No one knows whose progeny is whose, so everyone raises them.”
“You’re getting off subject, Lieutenant.”
“They don’t wear clothes. They don’t change appearance, except in size, as they mature. They considered my shuttle a clunky, oversized egg. When I removed my helmet and gloves, they thought I was peeling off parts of myself, physically changing shape. A concept alien to them.”
“And?”
“How would you feel if the puppy you were petting suddenly sprouted werewolf fangs?”
The empty crackle of static was confirmation enough that she could soon move on to the next world on their list.
~
Bio:
Gordon Linzner is founder / former editor Space and Time Magazine, author of five published novels and scores of short stories in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently Darrell’s Schweitzer’s anthology Dark Dreamlands. He is a full member of the Horror Writers Association and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.
Philosophy Notes:
The non-human concepts held by alien species always take a bit of digging. And sometimes they can’t be exactly followed by mere humans. Some of us, however, are a bit more keen than others.
