“Look,” I glugged. “I know I’ve been patient a long time, but is this quite the moment.”
“Damn this zipper!” she said intently. “Give me a hand.” And she went on peeling.
I needed two sets of eyes. Through the camouflage-bushes I could see that I’d been all wrong about Laus’s use for the pebbles.
And him without even a slingshot.
The first stone smote the Giant in the forehead all right, but the rest of the sequence didn’t follow. All it did was to irritate the hell out of him. He lashed out with one backhand blow and Laus was stretched on the grass.
Then the Giant backed away in consternation. My God! another one! But he didn’t back fast, and Mavra’s light on her feet. There she was, curving against him, looking up at him with soft wide eyes. And as his face relented and the old grin came back, he reached out for her and she dropped lithely, rolled over, and contemplated that mirror up there.
In vague general design, I suppose, she wasn’t too different from his Giantess, but the size and the hair and the breasts would all be enough to keep any such thoughts out of his mind. Gently, soothingly, happily he stroked her, exactly as I was stroking Bast, who had just jumped into my lap with an ill-tempered remark about people who spend their time staring at unimportant things and neglect the comfort of cats.
It all seems obvious when you look back on it from the vantage of God knows how many years; and up till the day he died, some three here-years ago, Laus was always ready with a speech on why the BLAM boys should have foreseen it.
“The science fiction writers seemed to be a step ahead,” he’d say, “and the scientists followed their line. It seemed so logical. This was how to communicate with any intelligent being. But practically it meant ‘any intelligent being with a Copernican view of his own world and an understanding of the mathematical use of zero.’ In other words, nobody in the highest civilizations of our own Earth up until only a few hundred years ago. The noblest Roman of them all couldn’t have understood my planetary diagram. The finest Greek mind would have been confused by my system of numbers. From what we know now, the best men here would understand about pi and about the square of the hypotenuse; with such an architectural culture it’s inevitable. But what chance contact would? Even in our own contemporary Earth?”
And Mavra would always cut him off, eventually, by saying, “But isn’t it better this way? If you had made contact, we’d simply have been lost aliens, trapped in a civilization that could never help us home. As it is,” and she’d yawn and stretch gracefully, “we’ve conquered the planet.”
Which we have, of course. Like I said, I don’t know how long it’s been. At the rate my great-great-(I think)—grandchildren are growing up, I must be pushing a hundred, which is the expectancy the actuaries gave me when last heard from; but I feel good for maybe another fifty.
There are hundreds of us by now, and we’re beginning to spread into the other continents. Give us another generation or two, and there’ll be thousands. It isn’t hard to teach the kids something that combines duty and pleasure to such an extraordinary degree as multiplying. (Though I always doubt that Laus had his proper share of descendants; he took his crash-landing harder than I did mine.) And we teach them other things too, of course, all that we can remember of what all three of us knew.
(Funny: it still seems trine even with Laus gone . . . and by now even I know a fair amount of BLAM to pass on.)
And we teach them what Bast knew, and never meant to teach us. We still miss her. It’s sad that she had a much shorter lifespan and no mate. But then otherwise she and her tribe would have been competition—and pretty ruthless, considering how much their long training would make them better at it.
But we learned enough from her. We know how to make the Giants feel that it’s a pleasure to give pleasure to us, and a privilege to provide us with food and shelter. No clothes, since we saw they puzzled the one I still think of as Our Giant (Mavra still lives in his home). We don’t need them much in this climate (I wonder if we ever needed them as much as we thought we did on Earth?), and besides our genes seem to have learned something from Bast too. Our great-greats are hairier than the hairiest Earth man, even a white. (This was a blow to Laus; he never quite got over having to stop scraping his face.)
The Giants obey well, for a race new to the custom. (Oh, sure they had pets before, but the type of pets that obey them.) Their medical science isn’t bad; they’ve been training special doctors for us for some time, and this year they’re building a hospital. There are farmers making a good living out of foods which we like but which never had much market before. They’ve even started cultivating that weed I accidentally discovered which is so much like tobacco and makes such a fine chaw.
The camouflage-bushes have grown naturally (with a little irrigation and fertilization when there were no Giants around). They have no idea where we came from, and since they have no notion of evolution or the relation of species, they’ve decided it doesn’t matter. When they do reach that point, their paleontologists can undoubtedly knock up a few fossil reconstructions near enough to suffice as our ancestors.
And meanwhile we’re ready, whenever our people land, to hand over to them a ready-conquered planet.
But it’s been a long time. In all these years, wouldn’t a scoutship have . . . ?
Sometimes I can’t help wondering:
Have Bast’s people landed on
