Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“You worry too much, Doc.”

Then you don’t worry enough .

“Funny,” Nagel commented, still half in his deep thought mode.

“Yes? What?”

“I mean funny odd, not funny ha ha. I was just thinking of all these damned aliens we seem to be running into. Not the worm—if they’d run into that in the old days they wouldn’t have told anybody because of the possible paranoia it would cause. Here. Alien races on Balshazzar, alien races up to the armpits here, probably alien races somewhere on or under Kaspar, and what is our past? The old Earth System Combine sent out hundreds of cybernetic scouts, hundreds more robotic ones, found and settled a ton of worlds so we could all breed like cockroaches, and not once, not once, did it run into another thinking race. Not even remnants of that race. Oh, alien animals, alien plants, all that, but not a thinking race. Not a creator, a builder race. All that time, all that effort, and never once did we meet anybody. The Holy Joes took that as proof that God of the gods created us as unique. Now here we are and we’re up to our fuckin’ armpits in other races. Not that we’ve actually seen one yet in the flesh, but, still…”

“Well, you can see one now,” the captain told him.

She had taken the probe out over the ocean and made a slow turn up the coast, and now there was sure and certain sign that humanity not only wasn’t alone in the universe, it never had been.

The very design of the town was alien. No human being would ever have carved out of rock the twisted cones and bizarre geometrical forms that now filled their view. These creatures were certainly air-breathers, though, and had emerged under a biochemistry not alien at all, and so there were certain things that they had in common with people in this kind of environment.

They made and sailed boats, for example.

The boats themselves were exotic looking, and the complex setting of a lot of small sails would never be done by humans the way they were done below, but the hull was still practically shaped for reasons of pure physics; masts and sails were still the best way to work under these conditions, and it didn’t take Nagel more than a couple of minutes to realize that, with a few modifications, he could probably sail those boats providing he had a crew who could carry out commands.

The boats were not, however, designed for your average weekend sail on quiet waters near your university.

“Good God! Are they ugly!” Lucky Cross exclaimed.

Randi had an instinctive and instant fearful dislike of them because they looked somewhat like worms or at least snakes, with long, slender black legless bodies, but they were more than that. They had slender forearms with long, spidery fingers and they appeared to be able to slither and stick to just about anything anywhere, and even a small area would suffice. But the most repulsive thing about them as they oozed and swarmed over the boats and rigging was that they all looked like they’d had their heads chopped off.

Where the head would be expected to start there was a flat area, and a series of concentric, oscillating rings of pulpy flesh surrounding a central hole that appeared to be ringed with more sharp pointed teeth than could be counted. When idle, they appeared to put this flat top section face into a bulkhead or even the side of the ship itself and stick there.

“Good lord! How do they see? ” Jerry Nagel exclaimed, open mouthed.

“How do they do much of anything, let alone build ships and towns like that?” Randi Queson added.

“I’ll bet they’re the universe’s greatest kissers, though,” An Li put in.

They ignored her. “I’m not sure I want to try contact with them, at least by anything other than radio,” Lucky Cross said, echoing their sentiments. She sighed. “Well, now that I’ve seen these guys, I think maybe I was happier the other way.”

“Take the probe out and down the coast a ways,” Nagel instructed. “I think we want to find out if these characters are typical or if there’s a better group somewhere further on.”

“I agree, at least at this point,” the captain told him. “I certainly would classify them as probable carnivores.”

Nagel nodded. “Still, the ship was kind of outfitted like a trawler of some sort. I didn’t see any catch on the deck, but it’s probably below being butchered and processed or already stored for unloading. There’s something in the seas, maybe not anything we’d like or could use, maybe or maybe not anything even remotely fish or reptilelike, but something in their ecological niche that those characters have discovered can feed them. I’ve got to admit, though, I never would have thought of creatures like that as town builders or sailors, let alone intelligences capable of interstellar flight.”

“None of us would,” Randi Queson agreed. “And that’s the problem, I suspect. I always used to wonder if it wasn’t that we never discovered other civilizations but maybe that other civilizations discovered us and decided not to let us know. You saw those things! We’d have been in some kind of war with them almost instantly, just because of their looks.”

“Could be,” Nagel responded. “First time I saw those things, I’d figure some race got overrun and eaten by those carnivorous worms and started blasting away. Still, they had hands, fingers, arms. They’re builders, all right. I wonder what they’d think if they met us?”

“Let’s not find out,” Randi suggested. “Let’s let the next group here do that. On the other hand, I’d pay money to see old Normie show up down there and demand they all sign contracts or be evicted.”

“Well, I’d love to see the deal-making handshake,” An Li agreed.

“Here’s the next settlement. Definitely not the same family,” the captain told them.

“On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to walk in and say ‘Hello’ just yet there, either,” Nagel responded.

The best word you could use to describe this group was that they were bugs. Not insects—they seemed to have only four limbs, like humans—but they also had chitinous exoskeletons that gleamed with a sort of reddish-brown metallic reflection in the light, and their oversize heads were a mess of proboscises, eyelike pads, mandibles, and cilia put together in the same, but not to the onlookers any rational order. Three fingers and a sort of oversized opposing thumb appeared tipped with large yellow suckers, and the exoskeletal armor on their arms and legs looked as sharp as sword edges. The feet were oversized versions of the hands, with the even larger suckers being far more prominent.

While the average one was probably a meter or more tall, they certainly had no problem getting around, walking straight up cliffs and having no apparent stairs or climbing aids on their gumdrop-shaped houses, all of which appeared to be made out of some kind of secretion and then hardened, possibly by heat.

“Well, they’re not dumb,” Randi noted. “They’re distilling salt from seawater in a big way in that squared-off area over there, with a kind of roof of tree fronds or something of the sort that’s retractable. When you get the sun bearing down on that, I bet it dries up nicely. They’ve got fire, and they’ve got it contained. Those poles look to be permanent torches, and there are several smoldering fire pits around with good protective drainage and covers on the pits that can be used if they get a downpour.”

The captain saw something else, being able to see all ranges at once. “Back up on that hilly area about a kilometer back and raised a bit over the village appears to be the remnants of an interplanetary ship,” she pointed out. “There is sufficient power from a single engine source for it, and the signature is surprisingly close to what ours gives off.”