Pet Farm Part 2

For once Farrell's cubicle, soundproofed and comfortable, brought him only a fitful imitation of sleep, an intermittent dozing that wavered endlessly between nightmare and wakefulness. When he crawled out again, hours later, he found Xavier waiting for him alone with a thermo-bulb of hot coffee. Stryker and Gibson, the mechanical said blandly, had seen no need of waking him, and had gone out alone on a more extensive tour of investigation.

The hours dragged interminably. Farrell uncased his beloved accordion, but could not bear the sound of it; he tried his sketch-book, and could summon to mind no better subjects than drab miasmic bogs and steaming mudflats. He discarded the idea of chess with Xavier without even weighing it--he would not have lasted past the fourth move, and both he and the mechanical knew it.

He was reduced finally to limping about the s.h.i.+p on his bandaged foot, searching for some routine task left undone and finding nothing. He even went so far as to make a below-decks check on the s.h.i.+p's matter-synthesizer, an indispensable unit designed for the conversion of waste to any chemical compound, and gave it up in annoyance when he found that all such operational details were filed with infallible exactness in Xavier's plastoid head.

The return of Stryker and Gibson only aggravated his impatience. He had expected them to discover concealed approaches to the maze of bridging overhead, tunnelings in the cliff-face to hidden caverns complete with bloodstained altars and caches of sacrificial weapons, or at least some ominous sign of preparation among the natives. But there was nothing.

"No more than yesterday," Stryker said. Failure had cost him a share of his congenital good-humor, leaving him restless and uneasy. "There's nothing to find, Arthur. We've seen it all."

Surprisingly, Gibson disagreed.

"We'll know what we're after when darkness falls," he said. "But that's a good twelve hours away. In the meantime, there's a possibility that our missing key is _outside_ the crater, rather than here inside it."

They turned on him together, both baffled and apprehensive.

"What do you mean, outside?" Farrell demanded. "There's nothing there but gra.s.sland. We made sure of that at planetfall."

"We mapped four Hymenop domes on reconnaissance," Gibson reminded him.

"But we only examined three to satisfy ourselves that they were empty.

The fourth one--"

Farrell interrupted derisively. "That ancient bogey again? Gib, the domes are _always_ empty. The Bees pulled out a hundred years ago."

Gibson said nothing, but his black-browed regard made Farrell flush uncomfortably.

"Gib is right," Stryker intervened. "You're too young in Colonial Reclamations to appreciate the difficulty of recognizing an alien logic, Arthur, let alone the impossibility of outguessing it. I've knocked about these ecological madhouses for the better part of a century, and the more I see of Hymenop work, the more convinced I am that we'll never equate human and Hymenop ideologies. It's like trying to add quant.i.ties of dissimilar objects and expressing the result in a single symbol; it can't be done, because there's no possible common denominator for reducing the disparate elements to similarity."

When Farrell kept silent, he went on, "Our own reactions, and consequently our motivations, are based on broad attributes of love, hate, fear, greed and curiosity. We might empathize with another species that reacts as we do to those same stimuli--but what if that other species recognizes only one or two of them, or none at all? What if their motivations stem from a set of responses entirely different from any we know?"

"There aren't any," Farrell said promptly. "What do you think they would be?"

"There you have it," Stryker said triumphantly. He chuckled, his good-nature restored. "We can't imagine what those emotions would be like because we aren't equipped to understand. Could a race depending entirely on extra-sensory perception appreciate a Mozart quintet or a Botticelli altar piece or a performance of _Hamlet_? You know it couldn't--the esthetic nuances that make those works great would escape it completely, because the motives that inspired their creation are based on a set of values entirely foreign to its comprehension.

"There's a digger wasp on Earth whose female singles out a particular species of tarantula to feed her larvae--and the spider stands patiently by, held by some compulsion whose nature we can't even guess, while the wasp digs a grave, paralyzes the spider and shoves it into the hole with an egg attached. The spider could kill the wasp, and will kill one of any other species, but it submits to that particular kind without a flicker of protest. And if we can't understand the mechanics of such a relations.h.i.+p between reflexive species, then what chance have we of understanding the logic of an _intelligent_ race of aliens? The results of its activities can be a.s.sessed, but not the motivations behind those activities."

"All right," Farrell conceded. "You and Gib are right, as usual, and I'm wrong. We'll check that fourth dome."

"You'll stay here with Xav," Stryker said firmly, "while Gib and I check. You'd only punish yourself, using that foot."

After another eight-hour period of waiting, Farrell was nearing the end of his patience. He tried to rationalize his uneasiness and came finally to the conclusion that his failing hinged on a matter of conditioning.

He was too accustomed to the stable unity of their team to feel comfortable without Gibson and Stryker. Isolated from their perpetual bickering and the pleasant unspoken warmth of their regard, he was lonesome and tense.

It would have been different, he knew, if either of the others had been left behind. Stryker had his beloved Reclamations texts and his microfilm alb.u.ms of problems solved on other worlds; Gibson had his complicated galactic charts and his interminable chess bouts with Xavier....

Farrell gave it up and limped outside, to stand scowling unhappily at the dreary expanse of swampland. Far down under the reasoning levels of his consciousness a primal uneasiness nagged at him, whispering in wordless warning that there was more to his mounting restlessness than simple impatience. Something inside him was changing, burgeoning in strange and disturbing growth.

A pale suggestion of movement, wavering and uncertain in the eddying fog, caught his eye. A moment of puzzled watching told him that it was the bedraggled young woman they had seen earlier by the lake, and that she was approaching the s.h.i.+p timorously and under cover.

"But why?" he wondered aloud, recalling her bovine lack of curiosity.

"What the devil can she want here?"

A shadow fell across the valley. Farrell, startled, looked up sharply to see the last of the Falakian sun's magenta glare vanis.h.i.+ng below the crater's southern rim. A dusky forerunner of darkness settled like a tangible cloud, softening the drab outlines of bramble thickets and slime pools. The change that followed was not seen but felt, a swelling rush of glad arousal like the joy of a child opening its eyes from sleep.

To Farrell, the valley seemed to stir, waking in sympathy to his own restlessness and banis.h.i.+ng his unease.

The girl ran to him through the dusk on quick, light feet, timidity forgotten, and he saw with a pleasant shock of astonishment that she was no longer the filthy creature he had first seen by the lakeside. She was pretty and nubile, eyes and soft mouth smiling together in a childlike eagerness that made her at once infinitely desirable and untouchably innocent.

"Who are you?" he asked shakily.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Her hesitant voice was music, rousing in Farrell a warm and expectant euphoria that glowed like old wine in his veins.

"Koaele," she said. "Look--"

Behind her, the valley lay wrapped like a minor paradise in soft pearly mists and luminous shadows, murmurous with the far sound of running water and the faint chiming of voices that drifted up from the little blue lake to whisper back in cadenced echo from the fairy maze of bridging overhead. Over it all, like a deep, sustained cello note, rose the muted humming of great flame-winged moths dipping and swaying over bright tropical flowers.

"_Moths?_" he thought. And then, "_Of course._"

The chrysalids under the sod, their eclosion time completed, were coming into their own--bringing perfection with them. Born in gorgeous iridescent _imago_, they were beautiful in a way that hurt with the yearning pain of perfection, the sorrow that imperfection existed at all--the joy of finally experiencing flawlessness.

An imperative buzzing from the s.h.i.+p behind him made a rude intrusion. A familiar voice, polite but without inflection, called from an open port: "Captain Stryker in the scoutboat, requesting answer."

Farrell hesitated. To the girl, who followed him with puzzled, eager eyes, he begged, "Don't run away, _please_. I'll be back."

In the s.h.i.+p, Stryker's moon-face peered wryly at him from the main control screen.

"Drew another blank," it said. "You were right after all, Arthur--the fourth dome was empty. Gib and I are coming in now. We can't risk staying out longer if we're going to be on hand when the curtain rises on our little mystery."

"Mystery?" Farrell echoed blankly. Earlier discussions came back slowly, posing a forgotten problem so ridiculous that he laughed. "We were wrong about all that. It's wonderful here."

Stryker's face on the screen went long with astonishment. "Arthur, have you lost your mind? _What's wrong there?_"

"Nothing is wrong," Farrell said. "It's _right_." Memory prodded him again, disturbingly. "Wait--I remember now what it was we came here for.

But we're not going through with it."

He thought of the festival to come, of the young men and girls running lithe in the dusk, splas.h.i.+ng in the lake and calling joyously to each other across the pale sands. The joyous innocence of their play brought an appalling realization of what would happen if the fat outsider on the screen should have his way: