Space

it. The mouth opened, showing flat grinding surfaces, and the little creature hissed, emitting a cloud of greenish gas. Then it ducked back into the hole, out of his sight.

The trunk didn’t feel like wood. He reached up and broke off a twig; it snapped reluctantly. The interior was springy, fibrous. The leaves, the tree trunk, were made of some kind of natural plastic — perhaps a form of polyvinyl chloride, PVC. If he could smell the blossom, it would surely stink like toxic waste.

It was like a grotesque model of a tree, a thing of plastic and industrial waste. And yet the breeze ruffled it convincingly, and sunlight dappled the green-black grass beneath.

In his ear, Cassiopeia, from orbit, began to lecture him about biochemistry. THE LIVING THINGS HERE ARE CONSTRUCTED OF CELLS — ANALOGOUS TO LIVING THINGS ON EARTH, TO YOU. THEIR METABOLISMS ARE NOT TOLERANT OF THE CHLORINE. BUT THEY HAVE EVOLVED SHIELDING AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL…

He interrupted. “There are trees here,” he said. “Grass. Flowers. Animals.” You see biochemistry. I see a flower, he thought.

There was a long silence.

It was the Gaijin way of seeing reality: from the equations of quantum mechanics, working up to a world. But that wasn’t the way Malenfant thought. Humans, it seemed, were better at broad comprehension than the Gaijin, quicker at abstracting simplicity from complexity. This object before Malenfant wasn’t a tree, because trees only grew on Earth. But it helped Malenfant to think in those terms, to seek patterns and map them back to what he knew.

The Gaijin, slowly, were learning to ape his thinking.

YES, came the reply. THERE ARE TREES.

“Cassiopeia. Why did you bring me here, to this chlorine-drenched waste dump?”

TO GATHER MORE DATA, MALENFANT.

Malenfant scowled at the sky.

The Gaijin seemed to be trying to educate him, for purposes of their own. They had shown him worlds, all of them very different, all of them bearing life. All of them scarred, in some way.

The Gaijin saw the universe as some immense computer program, he was coming to believe: an algorithm for generating life and, presumably, mind wherever and whenever it could.

The trouble was, the program had bugs.

He grunted. “All right. Where? How?”

WALK A KILOMETER, TOWARD THE SUN.

Muttering complaints, sipping cool water from a pipe inside his hood to dispel the swimming-pool taste of chlorine, he stalked on.

And, long before the kilometer was covered, he found people.

There was a crowd of them, a hundred or more, gathered around what appeared to be a pit in the ground. They moved in a kind of dance, chains of people weaving in and out to a murmur of noise, soft as a wind blowing.

Most of the dancers appeared to be somewhere near his own height. Few were taller, but several were a lot smaller — children? The elderly, withered by age?

Not humans, of course. But people, yes.

He glanced around, seeking cover. But Cassiopeia reassured him.

THERE IS A PERCEPTUAL DYSFUNCTION, MALENFANT. He translated to himself: They can’t see you.

“Why not?… Oh. Captain Cook.”

COMMUNICATION DYSFUNCTION.

There was a story — probably apocryphal — that on one of the islands visited by Cook, the natives had been unable even to see his great exploratory ships. They had never encountered such large floating artifacts before. It was only when Cook’s crew put out in landing boats that the natives were able to comprehend.

Thus, Malenfant was simply too strange an element in the dancers’ world for them to perceive.

“Never mind. Humans have limits like that too.”

Feeling a little bolder, he stepped forward, looking more closely.

He picked out one of the dancers. She — he decided the sex arbitrarily — stood upright. She had a clearly defined torso and head, sets of upper and lower limbs. But she had three of everything — three arms, three legs — and her limbs articulated back and forth in a complex, graceful way he found unnerving. She didn’t walk, exactly, shifting her weight from foot to stomping foot as he did. Rather, she spun around, whirling, letting one foot after another press lightly on the ground. It was high-speed and difficult to follow, like trying to figure out how a horse ran; but after he’d watched for a few seconds it seemed easy and natural.

Her head, positioned up at the top of her trunk, was about where his was. He saw three eyes, what appeared to be a mouth, other orifices that might be ears, nostrils. She seemed to be naked save for a belt slung over one of her three shoulders, like a sash. He could see tools dangling there: a lump of quartzlike rock that could have been a handheld hammer, what looked like a bow of the natural-plastic wood. Stone Age technology, he thought.

…Of course Stone Age. Most metals would just corrode here. Gold would survive, but try making a workable ax out of that. Even fire would be problematic; all that chlorine would inhibit flame. There could be no ceramics, for instance.

Because of an accident of biochemistry these people were stuck forever in the Stone Age. And since most rock would be corroded away, there wasn’t even much of that.

Maybe these people had a rich culture, an oral tradition, dance. But that was all they could ever have. He watched the woman-thing whirl, with admiration, with pity.

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE PATTERNLESS SOUNDS THEY MAKE?

“Patternless…” Malenfant smiled. “Perceptual incongruence, Cassiopeia. Transform your data. Look at the frequency content, the ratios between the tones… We’ve discussed this before.” The Gaijin analyzed sound digitally, not with analog microphonelike systems like the human ear. And so the patterns they judged as agreeable — valuable, anyhow — were complex numeric constructs, not the harmonies that pleased human ears.

A long silence. IT IS A FORM OF MUSIC, Cassiopeia stated.

“Yes. They’re singing, Cassiopeia. Singing, that’s all.”

Now the dancing reached a climax, the howl of voices more intense. One of the dancers spun out of the group, whirling in a decaying orbit toward that pit around which they all gyrated.

Then, with a fast shimmying movement, she got to her belly and slid gracefully into the hole.

The dancers continued, for thirty seconds, a minute, two, three, four. Malenfant just watched.

At last the potholer returned. Malenfant saw that trio of upper arms come flopping over the rim of the pit. She seemed to be in trouble. Dancers broke away, four or five of them hurrying to haul their partner out of the hole.

She lay on her back, shuddering, obviously distressed. But she held up something to the light. It was long, dark brown, pitted, and heavily corroded. It was a bone — bigger than any human bone, half Malenfant’s height, and with a strange protrusion at one end — but unmistakably a bone even so.

“Cassiopeia — what’s hurting her?”

CHLORINE POISONING. CHLORINE IS A HEAVY GAS. IT POOLS IN LOW PLACES.

“Like that hole in the ground.”

YES.

“And so, when she went down there to retrieve that bone…”

The dancer had been asphyxiated. She was tolerant of chlorine, but couldn’t breathe it.

The potholer passed the bone on to another. Malenfant saw that where her long, flipperlike hand had wrapped around the bone, it had been corroded. And when the dancer took hold of it, the bone surface sizzled and smoked to her touch. Carbonate, burning in the air.

That’s what would happen to my bones here, slowly but surely. That bone can’t have belonged to any creature now extant, here on this chlorine-drenched planet.

SHE SACRIFICED HER LIFE, Cassiopeia said.

“Why? What’s the point?”

Cassiopeia seemed to hesitate. WE WERE HOPING YOU COULD TELL US.

He turned his back on the whirling, singing dancers and trudged back to his lander.

He felt exhausted, depressed.

“This wasn’t always a chlorine dump. Was it, Cassiopeia?”

NO, she replied.

That bone pit was the key. That, and the sparse biosphere.

Once this had been a world very much like Earth, with the chlorine locked in the ocean. Then it had been… seeded. All it had taken was a single strain of chlorine-fixing microbes. The bugs found themselves in a friendly, bland atmosphere, with lots of chloride just floating around in the ocean, waiting to be used. And so it began.

It had happened a long time ago, a hundred million years or more. Time enough for life-forms to adapt. Some of them had evolved defenses against the spreading stain of chlorine. Others had learned to incorporate chlorine into their cells to make themselves unpalatable to anyone wanting to eat them. Some even used the chlorine as a gas attack against predators or prey, like the tree mouse that had spat in his face. And so on. Thus, a chlorine-resistant biosphere had arisen.

But the bone pit contained relics of the original native life, sent to extinction by the chlorine. The relics must have been trapped for megayears under a layer of limestone; but at last the limestone just dissolved, under rain like battery acid, exposing the bones.

The Gaijin believed the seeding of the planet with chlorine fixers had probably been deliberate.

WE HAVE FOUND MANY WAYS TO KILL A WORLD, MALENFANT. THIS IS ONE OF THE MORE SUBTLE.

Subtle and disguised; the chlorine fixers might have evolved naturally, and after such a length of time it would be hard to prove otherwise. But the Gaijin had come across this modus operandi before.

The thought shocked him more deeply than he had thought possible. This world wasn’t natural; it was like a corpse, strangled.

WE UNDERSTAND HOW TO KILL A WORLD, Cassiopeia said. WE EVEN UNDERSTAND WHY.

“Competition for resources?”

BUT WE DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY THAT DANCER KILLED HERSELF.

“It was ritual, Cassiopeia. As far as I could see. Religion, maybe.” The dancers couldn’t possibly understand the story of their world, the meaning of the ancient fossils. Maybe they thought they were the bones of the giants who had created their world.

But this was the most alien thing of all to the Gaijin.