of fruit. It felt cool sliding down my throat, cool and mild. Running my tongue over my teeth, I found that the fruit’s taste was piquant; a little like kiwi, yet smoother; all I could think to call it was red, that odd flavor peculiar to crimson gum drops or cheap jelly beans.
Wordlessly, I handed the husk to Neil Aaron, commander of the grounded Sagittarius IV. Solemnly he scooped out a dripping finger full of the pale orange pulp and deposited in his mouth, before passing the husk to Elizabeth. Jimmie finished the last of it, and after we’d all had a taste, we sat there, expectant, waiting for someone to keel over in agony—until the inherent ludicrousness of our situation made Reba giggle behind a hand pressed against her lips.
From their semi-hiding place in the tubers beyond our circle the ’lopes chittered, watching us with what seemed to be ’loper expectation.
Then Jimmie—clown prince of dieticians—rolled his eyes, stuck his tongue out until he could almost lick the cleft in his brown chin, and toppled over, laughing and drumming the flat grass with the heels of his booted feet. Even Elizabeth joined in the laughter, forgetting her Irish martyr act for a few minutes.
Our prolonged laughing fit scared the ’lopes; they took off en masse, kicking up billows of acrid dust with their powerful hind legs. By the time we looked in their direction, all we saw were upraised tails flailing madly, like a cat’s does when it tries to keep its balance. I recognized Penti, silly little thing, by the distinctive white daub on her tail.
Reba recognized her too. With a rare sardonic tone in her voice, she remarked, “That adolescent female’s been hanging around quite often...we must interest her.”
I knew what Reba meant by “We.” It wasn’t too long ago, just after we found our strength in the thin air of this new planet, that Reba and I had been playing Adam and Eve for real in the thicket. We’d been in there a long time, and when we finally looked around us, there was Penti watching us intently. No telling how long she’d been there. I thought it’d been funny, but Reba never saw the humor in that kind of thing.
Resting a hand on her waist, I said, “You must’ve been curious when you were a kid. Most of the ’lopes we see are young...Heidi, Baby Boy, Penti, Lucy, Mister...maybe the older ones know better, or just don’t care. Remember the autopsy you did on the one....”
“It was dead for who knows how long when Neil entered the thicket and saw it—”
“Next to the hole they’d dug for it?”
Reba’s cheeks colored deeply; I’d hit a nerve. She waited until the others drifted away from the circle, heading back for the ship, before saying, “We don’t know that they’d ‘dug’ a grave. They bury their excrement. No proof at all they’re capable of human-style burial. The size of their posterior fossa doesn’t bear it out. True, their cerebellum is fairly large, but their neuron count is way too low.” Reba’s eyes were glistening, and her breath was coming in short sharp gasps, as she concluded, “And the evidence of possible structural thought processes was minimal, at best...in other words, they can’t be intelligent enough to even want to bury their dead. Wanting would mean thinking—”
(Anger can make Reba so beautiful....)
Once more into the breech, into the breech again! Boredom led to the most pointless arguments, and boredom is something we have in ton lots. I chuckled, “What’s there to think about here? ’Sides, you’re using human physiological standards to judge alien mental abilities. I was there when you ran those samples through the ’scope. Neuron density seemed sufficient—”
“You just aren’t seeing it!” she replied with a sudden burst of fervor. “I’ve watched them, daily. They just-don’t-have-it. They haven’t displayed any skills beyond those of animals. You prove it to me that the ’lopes have even the slightest trace of intelligence!”
I love Reba when she gets flustered. “Let’s forget it,” I said, pulling her closer to me.
“Don’t patronize me, Scott Renay!” she shouted, then tore herself away from me and dashed off toward the ship. Sighing, I went over to the nearest husk-fruited tree and pulled off another brown pod, breaking it in half with a clean jerking motion (the dry rustling sound it made seemed startlingly loud) before sucking out the pulp, letting the sticky juices splatter my uniform front. When Jimmie and Elizabeth emerged from the ship, speaking aloud, I moved closer to the hidden place where the ’lopes had been grouped, staring at the deep ruts they’d left in their wake.
Behind me, Jimmie whispered, just loud enough for me to clearly hear, “Lovebirds have another fight?”
“Do ’lopes plow up dirt when they leap?” Elizabeth asked around a slurpy mouthful of fruit pulp. “Betcha I know who the fight was about—”
“What’s the matter? Never seen two redheads go head to head before?” the black-haired Irish doctor teased.
“Not ’less they’re both human.”
“Does he have any choice?”
“Well...Reba had a choice, when she asked him along,” Jimmie replied, as the two of them continued sucking pulp out of the husks the slurping sound somehow obscene; I barely heard Elizabeth’s reply over the sucking noises: “If he wasn’t here, the ’slop would’ve held out longer...not that this stuff isn’t good—”
It seems like she said something more to him, around her mouthful of food, but I just made out as if I hadn’t heard the conversation at all, as I watched the far horizon, looking for the ’lopes, and told myself, You two aren’t the only ones who wish I was somewhere else. But don’t blame me...ask the ship’s biologist why I’m here. If you even need to ask...you’re the readers, not me. You never had to say a word out loud.
Not when they were capable of thinking the entire conversation I’d just happened to overhear to each other....
No more right now, no more writing. I hear Reba knocking on the cabin door. Time to put this journal away. I think she wants to apologize....
Day 100:
It’s been long, so long; I hardly know how to use these words anymore. So long since I started this log. So much has gone on, so much. Have to pull myself out. Day 100...it’s an anniversary, isn’t it? Can’t forget...what was it?
Day 111:
I remember now.
“Ten months is just too long,” Reba had said to me, when we were still Earthside nearly seven months before the day our food ran out on the ’lope’s planet; wrapping her arms around me, she rubbed her forehead against my chest, murmuring, “Really, Scotty, I can’t face not seeing you, not being with you, for that long. The trip alone will take two months, with those jumps through hyperspace. I just don’t know how I’ll—”
“How you’ll stand it?” I asked, finishing Reba’s sentence for her, as if I were one of her kind, one of the new übermen, with a brain full of super-saturated neurons and sub-neurons, that tiny bit of extra structure that made her capable of esper communication. Angry, Reba walked away from me, and than threw herself onto the gold-flecked tweed couch near my apartment’s only decent-sized window, her freckled face strained, and her blue eyes darkened.
Reba knew why I was still wary of going; even for an esper such as her, traveling t-space was flat out terrifying. For a non-esper like me, it would be a nightmare. T-space didn’t care who you were, and it wasn’t about
