Damon Knight: Orbit 17

“I don’t remember that.”

“You weren’t bom yet, really, you were inside an egg.”

The laughers had told him he was hatched from an egg. He had thought they were making it up.

“Was Susie hatched, too?”

“In a way. From an egg inside my stomach.”

“Didn’t I come from a stomach, too?”

“Yes. Your egg was inside a stomach, first, then it was outside. And then you were born.”

“But why was I hatched outside?”

“Because that’s the way people are born on your planet. It’s as good a way as any.”

“Did they look like me?”

“Who?”

“My Mom and Dad.”

“Yes. But we adopted you, and so we’re your parents.”

“What happened to the other eggs?”

“Those babies died, Robby. Because we didn’t understand that they needed love, just like human children. And they were raised in a sterile laboratory environment until it was too late.”

“But I didn’t die.”

“Because we had taken you home with us. Because we love you.”

He hugged her tight. Afraid to let go. Afraid he would die. But she hugged him back, and after a while he relaxed.

“You know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” Susie asked. “What?”

“A scientist, like Mommy. Do you know what kind?”

“A mad scientist.”

They wrestled on the floor, laughing.

“What are you going to be, Robby?”

He was on his way out of the house with Susie when his mother called him back.

“Robby, stay inside this morning. There’s someone coming to see you.”

He knew what that phrase meant. “It’s another test,” he told his sister.

“Mommy, can’t he come? We’re building a tree fort.”

“Later, honey, this afternoon.”

“Now, Mom, just for a little while?”

“Susie,” their mother said warningly.

“Well, he’s not a guinea pig.” And his sister made a hasty exit.

With Susan gone, and his mother and father working in the cellar lab, Robert had the house to himself. He wandered into his parents’ bedroom and, on an impulse, closed the door behind him. He crouched in the center of his father’s bed. Who would come to test him today? Dr. Jamison again? Robert had once overheard the man say that tricephs might be less intelligent than human beings. And despite his parents’ indignant replies, Robert knew that it was true. He had no doubt that he was inferior to the human race.

The closet door was open. He looked at his father’s suits, his mother’s dresses. He climbed up on the dresser, and looked at his own twelve-holed garment in the mirror. A “trunk suit,” his mother had called it. Yet she had told him that he was almost human biologically. He breathed the same air and ate most of the same foods. His skin was a little thicker than theirs, and heavily pigmented blue-grey, but his blood was red. Yet three heads rose, immobile, from a short stubby trunk. And each possessed one eye and one ear, placed so that he could see and hear in any direction without turning. One head had a functional nose and mouth; on the other two these were rudimentary. And nine legs were spread around him like a spider’s, and each possessed a three-pronged hand. Robert studied himself in the mirror, silently asking a question as old as the human race.

“Robert, where are you?” his father called. “Rob, come on. Dr. Jamison will be here any minute.” He paused outside the bedroom, mumbling to himself, “Where is the little monster?” and left.

Fifteen minutes later he returned, running toward the sound of objects breaking. The room was a shambles. And scattered in a circle, as if they had been caught up in and tossed from a fan, were all the suits from the closet. A hat was on one of Robert’s heads, and one of his long arms was stretched through a shirtsleeve.

Robert saw his father standing quite still at the door, and he began a high-pitched whistling. It was as close as he could come to human crying. His father sat down on the bed and gathered him up in his lap. His mother came into the room, then left again. When she returned, she sat down beside them. The whistling gradually eased and stopped. But for a long time no one moved or spoke.

Finally his father turned to his mother and asked, very softly, “Did you call Dr. Jamison?”

His mother nodded. “He’ll put it off. Robby won’t have to answer any questions today.”

When he was seventeen, he had to choose whether to join the expedition, or to go east with his family, where Susan would start college. She wanted him to join her. They had always been close, but their intimacy had grown during the teen years, when sibling rivalry gave way to very similar views on life, death, and the meaning of the universe. They had asked the same questions, and found the same tentative answers, until their thoughts were so intertwined, they found it impossible to remember which of them had first proposed an idea. But even if the college would consider accepting him as a student, he felt sure he would fail the entrance examinations.

“Where are you going?” his sister asked.

“Home.”

“No. Not until you come back.”

“To what? A freak show?”

“I’ll be waiting.”

Robert was reading in the ship’s lounge when the argument broke out between Dr. Johnson, an anthropologist, and Dr. Panzer, a biologist.

.. you don’t seem to understand. We’re clay. Culture is our mold.”

“Then how come we aren’t all alike?”

“Because no two of us have precisely the same experiences. But almost all our experiences are within the bounds of our culture. We learn to see the universe according to the preconceptions of our culture. And so we’re blind to the truly alien.”

Robert looked at his hands in awe.

Blind.

“You’re going to what?” Dr. Layton was aghast.

“I’m going to study anthropology.”

“Are you joking?”

“It will take us two years to reach Epsilon. The ship’s library is extensive on the subject, and I haven’t anything better to do with my time.”

“Nothing better than to wreck the experiment?”

“It won’t do any harm, it should help if I—”

“What do you think we need, another damned scientist? There’s already twenty of us on board. And for thirty-two years the best of us have made next to no headway in understanding these creatures. What we need is a triceph who can bridge the gap subjectively. And you’re it.”

It.

Robert studied anthropology.

He read the reports carefully for the hundredth time. When Layton had said that next to nothing was known about the tricephs, he hadn’t been exaggerating. At first, the planet had been rated A for settlement. It was an Eden, with no dangerous animals. All species were herbivores, and most had plenty to eat. Their birth rate was low. The temperature was mild over most of the planet’s surface. There was some evidence that conditions had once been harsher, and that the evolution of animal life had passed through a carnivorous stage.

Exploration is a slow process under the best of conditions, and it wasn’t until the second year that the team had occasion to kill and dissect a triceph. They uncovered one large and two small brains, heavily interconnected with neural pathways. It appeared that they might have discovered the first sentient aliens. The problem was proving it.

The tricephs were extremely shy of humans. Those captured died almost immediately of unknown causes. However, robosensors proved effective, and a close observation was maintained. The tricephs did not use tools. They wandered in packs of twenty to thirty, with no home base and apparently no territorial limits. They never fought. They had no visible or audible means of communication. Yet they were able to work together in building structures made of vines and grass. The purpose of these structures was a mystery. They were not used as shelters, nor for raising food. No two structures were exactly alike. Each took approximately six hours to build. Each pack built one structure a day and immediately abandoned it to rot. There were no pack leaders, and none of the members appeared to have any particular tasks that they habitually performed. Yet the building went smoothly and efficiently.