Damon Knight: Orbit 21

But this time they have refused the bananas. (What we offer them is never quite right.) Okay. The final offering (they have one more chance): these glass beads that look like jade; a set of fine, imported cookware; a self-help book, “How to Overcome Shyness with the Opposite Sex”; and (especially) we offer ourselves for their delight as sons, fathers or lovers (their choice).

The psychoanalyst says they’re entitled to their own opinions, but we wonder how independent should they be allowed to be?

One of us has said it was just a bear we saw at the top of that hill. He said he remembered that it humped down on all fours after standing on one leg, but they might do that.

The psychoanalyst has had a dream. Afterwards he told us never to be afraid of the snapping vagina (figuratively speaking) but to come on down to them (though we are climbing up, actually) and throw fish to the wombs (nothing but the best filet of sole, figuratively speaking).

This is the diagram the psychoanalyst has laid out for further study:

Well, if I had one I’d wash its feet (literally) and the back. Venture the front, too. Let the water flow over both of us. Let their hair hang down. I’d take some time out now and then, even from important work, to do some little things like this of hardly any meaning, and listen, sometimes, to its idle chatter or, at least, seem to. But as to Grace, it must be something else I have in mind, though I’m not sure what.

We are telling all the old tales about them around our campfires in the late evenings, but it’s not the same kind of frightening that it used to be when we were young and telling the tales in similar circumstances because now we know they may actually be lurking out there in the shadows, and what’s scary is that we have really no idea of their size! We’re not sure what to believe. On the one hand, whether they are twice our size or, as the Commander insists, whether almost all of them are quite a bit smaller and definitely weaker. The more mythically oriented among us have said that they are large enough to swallow us up into their stomachs (from below) and to ejaculate us out again months later, weak and helpless. The anthropologically oriented say they may be the missing link we have searched for so long and stand, as they believe, somewhere between the gorilla and us (though probably quite a bit higher on the scale than pithecanthropus erectus) and that they are, therefore, (logically) distinctly smaller and somewhat bent over, but may not necessarily be weaker. The sexually obsessed among us wonder, among other things, if their orgasm is as specific a reaction as ours is. The romantics among us think they will be cute and loveable creatures even when they’re angry and regardless of size and strength. Others think the opposite. Opinions also vary as to how to console them for the facts of their lives and whether it is possible to do so at all since 72 percent of them perceive themselves as inferior, 65 percent perceive themselves to be in a fragile mental balance, only 33 1/3 percent are without deep feelings of humiliation simply for being what they are. How will it be possible, then, to penetrate their lines of self-defense and their lines of defensiveness? Altercations are inevitable, that’s clear. (Eighty-five percent return to rehash old arguments.) We dislike unpleasant emotional confrontations, try to avoid such things at all costs, but we also realize that playing the role of dominant partner in intimate interaction won’t always be easy. How nice, even so, to have a group of beings, one of these days (almost invisible, too) whose main job would be to tidy up!

Pedestals have already been set out for them.

Even if (or especially if) they are not quite up to our standards, they will, in any case, remind us of the animal in all of us, of our beastliness . . . our ebb and flow . . . of life-forces we barely know exist . . . maybe some we never suspected.

But now we have had a strange and disturbing message from the Commander telling us that some very important political appointees have said that these stories of sightings are exactly that, stories . . . hoaxes, and it’s been proven that the photographs have been doctored, in one case a gorilla superimposed on a snowy mountain, in another case a man in drag. (Only two pictures still unexplained.) Several people have confessed. Some have never even been in the area at all. Whatever we have seen must have been a trick of light and shadow or, more likely, one of the bears in this vicinity and (they’re sure of it) we have a hoaxer among us, stealing the bananas himself and making footprints with an old shoe on the end of a long stick. Besides, think if we should discover that they do, in fact, exist. We would only be adding to our present problems. Committees would have to be set up to find alternatives to boredom once their dishwashing years were over. Cures would have to be discovered for cancers in peculiar places, for strange flows, for vaginismus and other spasms. A huge group of dilettantes (Sunday poets and painters) would be added to society, which society can well do without, according to the Commander. And why should we come searching them, as though they were Mount Everest (and as important), simply because they’re there? Anyway, the funding for our search has run out. The Commander even doubts if we can afford any more phone calls.

We are all very depressed by this news, though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Some of us feel sure, or fairly sure, that there is something out there...just out of sight...just out of earshot. Some of us seem to see, sometimes, a flash of color out of the corners of our eyes, as though the essentially invisible had been made almost visible for a few seconds. Makes one think, too (and some of us do), how socks and underwear might someday return, magically, from under beds to be found clean and folded in the drawer, as if cups of coffee could appear out of nowhere just when most needed, as if the refrigerator never ran out of milk or butter . . . But we are at the service of our schedule and our budget. We must return to the seats of power, to the service of civilization . . . politics . . . We turn back.

For a while I think seriously of going on by myself. I think perhaps if I crept back alone, sat quietly, maybe dressed to blend in more. Maybe if I sat still long enough (and stopped telling, out loud, those old, scary stories about them), if I made no proud gestures . . . shoulders not so stiff. . . maybe then they’d get used to me, even eat bananas out of my hand, and come, in time, to recognize an authoritarian figure by the subtle reality of it, and perhaps learn a few simple commands. But I have to stick to my orders. It’s too bad, though I do want to pick up my pay, my medals, and get on with the next project. Still, I want to make one more move toward these creatures, if only a symbolic one. I sneak back along the trail and leave a message where it can’t be missed, surrounded by bananas. I leave something they’ll be sure to understand: the simple drawing of a naked man; a crescent that can’t help but stand for moon; a heart shape (anatomically correct) for love; a clock face with the time of the message; the outline of a footprint of my own next to an outline of one of theirs (looks like a question mark next to an exclamation point). “To Grace” at the top. I sit there for a while, then, and listen for sighs and think I hear some . . . think I see something vaguely white on white in the clarity of snow. Invisible on purpose , that’s for sure (if there at all), so if we can’t see them, it’s not our fault.