Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

The alien’s lips were delicate, a dark shade of blue. Kafis’s teeth, though white, weren’t really so much teeth as upper and lower semicircular serrated blades fitted along his gums like a mouth guard. Below his mouth was a delicate, pointed chin, impossibly small considering the size of the rest of his head.

As for his body, it was about the size of a Vietnamese man’s, smallish and agile-looking.

And his hands… interesting… six digits—like those cats with six toes.

These particular Tarsalans spoke English. Physiologically, their tongues, mouth cavities, and larynxes were equipped for verbal language.

Kafis spoke English best of all—those summers at Marblehill with the Thorndike family had taught him well. And because he had learned most of his English from Neil, Gerry occasionally heard Neil’s phrases in the alien’s voice.

“It’s a wisdom your negotiators should embrace,” he was telling Hulke, who was halfway to getting drunk and arguing for the sake of arguing. “Think of it. As a species, you’ve been confined to this one system ever since you evolved from apes. What if something were to happen to this system? And something eventually will, of course. Your sun will, in a few billion years, go into its red-giant phase, and that will be the end of you. We’ve already talked to at least ten worlds, and they would be willing to welcome you as émigrés.”

“I don’t think you’ll get many takers,” said Hulke. “You may get a few screwballs.”

“But then you might at least have a handful of humans on other worlds. The future of your race would be assured. And that’s all we want as well. To plant some of our people on Earth. There’s plenty of room on Earth, and my colleagues and I are at a loss to explain your intransigence.”

“It’s not my intransigence, Kafis. As far as intransigence goes, you’ll have to talk to Earth.”

“We would prefer you talk to Earth for us. It’s been more than apparent these last nine years that our own negotiators aren’t getting anywhere with them.”

“Uh… Kafis… it’s their ball of wax, not ours.”

Kafis stared at the mayor as if he hadn’t understood a word. Then he rubbed his long, delicate, six-fingered hands together, and glanced at his five silent colleagues.

Kafis turned back to the mayor, and stared at Hulke for a long time, his eyes inscrutable. It really was hard to tell what he was thinking because it was like staring into the eyes of a cat or fish, especially because, characteristically, there wasn’t much play of muscle around his eyes. But at last the alien seemed to dismiss the mayor. He focused on Gerry instead. Some of the muscles around the alien’s small mouth twitched.

“Why do you attack us?”

Here it was, what Gerry had seen so often at Marblehill, the human mind confronting the alien mind, unable to traverse the gulf between.

Kafis continued.

“Why do you allow millions of your own people to die daily? We never meant this. Why do you set fire to your own house…then lock the door and stay inside? We came as your benefactors. We tried to teach you the way of things. But at last you made us force you to kneel, as we make our children kneel, even though it was the last thing we wanted. This you must understand: When the knee is on the floor, it’s time to acknowledge that the lesson is learned. And this is the lesson we have tried to teach you. Life is worth living no matter what the cost. We mean to be your friends and help you any way we can. But you are like the bluntwog, who fights for the sake of fighting. The bluntwog doesn’t understand the ways of harmony, or how the resolution of conflict should best be treated like a ceremony, something that must be performed so all sides can save face. We understand the nature of pride. But the true mark of a civilized being is humility. You show none. Instead of acknowledging our wisdom, you attack us. You force us to use the violence we abhor.”

Gerry sat back and shook his head, feeling the gulf more than ever. “Earth has offered compromise after compromise, Kafis. In case you didn’t know, compromise is a form of wisdom.”

“But you attack us. You kill us. We have suffered ten thousand casualties.”

There it was again, the unbridgeable chasm… and a certain inflexibility to the way Kafis thought about things, as if his way of thinking was too evolved, too hardwired, and too insufferably condescending. Put the phytosphere around the Earth and surely the humans will come to their senses and follow not human cultural norms, but Tarsalan cultural norms. Surely the humans will get down with humility on bended knee and acknowledge that the Tarsalans aren’t their enemies but simply their teachers, wise ones who want only to welcome them into the Commonwealth of Worlds, to disperse the human race so that it can survive when the sun’s red-giant phase at last comes. And if passive protest in the form of the phytosphere is needed as a teaching tool—a cinerthax —then surely the humans won’t lock themselves in their own house and burn it down.

Kafis looked perplexed by the whole situation.

“Let me teach you a fundamental lesson about human beings, Kafis,” said Gerry. “Push us, and we push back. No one’s going to tell us what to do.”

“Yes, but why push against reason and common sense? Do you not value your lives?”

“Of course we do. But we value freedom more.”

“And we offer freedom. Freedom to live wherever you want on any of the habitable worlds. Wouldn’t you like to see the Sungeely Falls on the planet Yravo from their two-mile summit? Wouldn’t you like to see the ringed gas giants Osa and Meta so close in the sky of Hita that you can nearly touch them? And what about the diamond caves of Farostatar, where whole cities are built out of the precious gems?

These are the wonders we offer. These are the freedoms that can be yours. Any of these planets would welcome you. And on any of these planets you would see a mix of races, species, and genera hailing from all parts of the local Milky Way. We offer you the galaxy, and in return, you fire your weapons at us so that we are forced to convert our peaceful shuttles into birds of prey, and shoot down your pilots like pesky insects. We now understand that the mothership is your next objective.” Kafis sat back and his pupils twitched open to their fullest size. “And in that regard we have something we wish you to convey to your United Nations for us. We’ve tried to convey it to them ourselves, but so far they haven’t acknowledged our overtures.”

“Kafis… we’ve been told by Earth that they’ve abandoned any and all diplomatic initiatives.” He thought

of the most recent Earth drop, and how Earth planned to board the TMS and abscond with the phytosphere control device. “They’re not even going to try with you anymore. They’re going bluntwog on you.”

Kafis continued right along, ignoring Gerry’s interjection. “Please convey to them that should they actually succeed in damaging the mothership to the point where its life-support systems no longer function, we will then unilaterally claim as places of refuge those areas marked in the most recent U.N.

counterproposal. Namely, the Kanem Region of Chad, the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory of Australia, and the Chattahoochee National Forest in America’s state of Georgia. We will secure these areas with military force and use their hinterlands as regions of supply, regardless of the cost to human life.”

Gerry’s face sank, and Kafis must have noticed it because his pupils shrank. In one of those brainstorms Gerry sometimes had, he realized he had made a breakthrough. He no longer wondered why Neil had such an easy time communicating with Kafis, and was pissed off at Neil for not telling him of this discovery sooner. If Gerry had discovered on his own that the whole key to understanding Tarsalans lay in the movement of their pupils, it would have been one of the first things he would have shared with his brother.