Author Joseph Green has become something of a specialist in depicting human beings faced with utterly alien life forms. In this latest story he describes the adoption of a tiny Sun—who decides on the adopting is all part of the story.
* * * *
PINK-Beam-of-Terror: The Wild-Flames! Far out over the death-liquid, searching, from lost Hot-Home the Wild-Flames have followed us! Flee! Flee!
Blue-Beam-of-Courage: No! Hold, we cannot! Our built-up heat would slow us! We must discharge-by-creation first! Discharge! Create!
Pink-Beam: Time? Time? The young-flame to come, the savages behind us disrupting?
Blue-Beam: Time enough! The young-flame? The Aliens, the Aliens! Attach it, attach it! Their great powers protect! Must save our own Consciousness-of-Being!
Pink-Beam: Cruel, cruel! A young one, a new-flame!
Blue-Beam: We must, we must! Give me the White, the White!
White-Beam-of-Creation: In sore distress, in agony of mind, I give you White!
White-Beam-of-Creation: And I return, in feelings strained, the White! Heat, heat! The smallest alien approaches this place of birthstones! Create, create! our young-flame of trouble born!
* * * *
“Momme,” said little Dickie solemnly, “I saw two butterflies eat up a great big diamond and make a baby butterfly.”
“Did you dear?” asked Irma without looking up from the synthesizer. The contrary thing was mixing too many lipids with the amino acids again and at dinner Hammond would stare unhappily at the fat in his steak. “You didn’t bring more of those diamonds inside?”
“The two big ones’ wings got all dim, and the diamond went whoof! and there was another butterfly, just like the first two only not as bright,” Dickie rattled on, and when Irma glanced sternly at him he hung his head guiltily and extended a hand. She inspected the gem, and sighed.
“All right, dear, you may keep it. Now tell Daddy to clean up for dinner.”
He trotted off happily, short legs churning, and Irma shook her head in loving exasperation and returned to the synthesizer. Just like his father, a toy a minute . . . though of course Hammond did not consider his gadgets toys. But when marvellous science, with all its wonders, couldn’t design a simple little intra-uterine safety that would stay inside . . . she hummed as she took up the meat, secretly glad they hadn’t. This barren world of rock and water was the eighty-first planet on which they had landed. She and Ham had been in space over five years now, with another five scheduled. Dickie-bird had become a stronger interest-in-common than all the psycho-computers on Earth could have found when they were matched for this trip.
Both her men attacked the fat steaks, which had entered the scout as very nasty seaweed and slime three systems back, with admirable gusto. When Hammond finished he said, “I’ll rig the imprinter for Dickie’s next learning-set and we’ll lift. Are you going to deep-sleep?”
“Not for a one-week trip. I have mending to do.” Their clothes had been designed to last indefinitely, but the planners hadn’t anticipated a baby. The garments she had laboriously cut-down for Dickie kept coming apart on him.
She cleared the galley while Hammond went through his pre-lift checks, watching his broad back more than her work. She could usually manage the programmed-imprinted-analytical lug, but the fit he had pitched last night when she suggested they have a second child. . . . Dickie had been an easy birth, but the thought of delivering another baby sent Hammond into a virtual panic. Midwifery was not on his programme of skills and his fear of her becoming pregnant again had lowered their ratio of sexual synthesis for the past four years. But Dickie needed a baby sister. Growing up with an improvised imprinting machine and your parents was no life for a child.
Hammond fastened Dickie in his accel-decel couch and attached the cap. Irma turned away, to avoid seeing the child pass out, and got them an after-dinner cup of stim-caf.
Alpha Crucis Number Two was a virtual copy of One, the same lifeless bare rock and salt-free seas. The air was thin but breathable and Irma happily turned Dickie free outside. Her nerves needed a rest.
It was only a few minutes before the little fellow returned. Hammond had sent the detectors out immediately and was manually scanning with one. He looked up in mild surprise when Dickie said, “Momme, the baby butterfly followed us here. I think it’s ‘dopted me.”
Irma smiled and hastily bent to press her cheek against his fair head, one wary eye on his father. She saw Hammond put the machine on automatic scan and braced for trouble. Now he would pin the child down on his fantasy and there would be another lecture on reality and illusion, and how you must always distinguish between the physically real and the mentally unreal, Richard.
But a moment later Dickie was saying, “I’ll show you, Daddy,” and leading a reluctant Hammond towards the air-lock. Irma dropped her needle and thread and followed. Dickie was going to be needing her very shortly.
It hovered in the air by the outer door, so close the detectors had missed it, a head-sized core of opaque white light surrounded by multi-coloured streamers of fire that curled, dipped and moved like burning wings. It reminded her irresistibly of textbook illustrations of old Sol in a tantrum, with huge clouds of flaming hydrogen thrusting into space. It even gave off a gentle warmth.
Irma looked away from the too-bright ball. “What in the world is it, Hammond?”
He closed his eyes for two seconds, opened them and said, “It resembles nothing in my memory-banks. Logic indicates it might be some local form of coherent illuminated gas. Dickie says he saw others on Alpha Crucis One.”
“I saw this one, Daddy,” insisted Dickie shrilly. “I saw its momme an’ daddy, an’ it ‘dopted me.”
Hammond smiled briefly and reached to pat the small head, but Dickie darted away. He vanished behind a nearby rock outcropping. When Irma turned back towards the gas-cloud it had also disappeared.
Hammond shook his head in resigned patience and walked back to the scout. He was at the scanner again when Irma entered, lost in the useless and foolish task that had engaged Earthmen now for most of a hundred years, the search for another intelligent race. Another? Personally she wasn’t satisfied that their own should make the claim!
Dickie’s ship-finder brought him back unharmed except for a few bruises, which scarcely mattered where there were no bacteria. She sprayed skin on the damaged areas and got dinner. After the meal she put him to bed and relaxed for an hour with the impressor, but the sensory images had just become interesting when the detectors returned and Hammond decided to lift. Planet Number Three was in conjunction, or some-such and it would be a two-day trip at sub-light speed. No deep-sleep again. Dickie wouldn’t even have time to digest a new learning set.
They were barely clear of gravity and accelerating for the short hop when the main computer, the bio-brain, jelled its central bank again. Hammond glared at its bland glass face as though ready to give it a good swift illogical kick, then went after the imprint cap without a word. It had been a part of the brain’s emergency circuits until he removed it to build an imprinter for Dickie and had to be restored each time the bio-brain was to be bypassed.
When Hammond was ready Irma sat demurely in the co-pilot’s chair and let him attach the cap. He checked each minute detail with his usual machine-like thoroughness before throwing the switch. Despite long familiarity she stiffened when the current hit, then slowly grew accustomed to it and relaxed. It was nice to be able to do something with her brain that Hammond, with all his force-fed knowledge, could not do half as well. He had tried to explain once that her brain made a better emergency circuit-box than his simply because it hadn’t been imprinted with knowledge. Something about several billion of his available circuits being “tied down” by established synaptic connections, the neural paths used up by the immense amount of information crammed into his head, and so on.
It was true that Hammond’s brain had been used virtually to capacity. These small scouts had to be prepared for every possible emergency and only a man with an excellent grasp of dozens of basic sciences could keep the complicated machines going for the thousand years they would stay in space ... or was it ten? They would return twelve years after departure, since everyone came back on a schedule designed to let new knowledge be absorbed systematically, but they would have aged only ten. Hammond had carefully explained that exceeding the speed of light moved mass backward in time and they would spend so many days travelling at high speed and so many years at sub-light, to balance the book. It was when he said they would move through space for a thousand years but it would seem like only ten because most of the sub-light travel time would be spent in suspended animation that she began to wish she had declined this assignment.
Hammond had been programmed for exploration scout, ten years of dangerous work and all the world had to offer ever afterwards, by a doting mother. He had gone under the cap at the age of two. Irma’s father, an imprinted neurologist himself, had decided to raise his daughter the old-fashioned way. He had theories about heavy imprinting destroying certain desirable characteristics in the human personality, and stifling creativity. And perhaps he was right.
It was true that all the world’s original artists, writers and musicians were non-imprints. But in the technical world the immense task of mastering just one science, much less a dozen, made imprinting mandatory. They had reached the physical limit with people like Hammond . . . but she had heard dark rumours of idiot babies with oversized heads being born in labs ... if controlled mutation could increase the size of a baby’s brain, make even more circuits that could be imprinted with even more knowledge ... if one extra-large brain reached a sane maturity and they imprinted it to its new capacity with neurology and genetics and its owner set out to mutate an even larger brain in some child . . . she shuddered as she began to drift off into the lazy torpor that was her usual state when half her brain was loaned out
She was a very ignorant woman by today’s standards, but the psycho-matchers had selected her as a compatible mate to one of the world’s greatest brains . . . and they had been right. She and Hammond were going to convert their temporary marriage to a permanent one if they lived to reach home. But she didn’t want to wait that long for a second baby and she always got her way in the end. Einstein equals Motherhood times Children by a square Father, she thought sleepily.
There was life on the third planet, just microscopic stuff and a little jelly in the seas, but Hammond wouldn’t let Dickie out without a spacesuit. He was always worrying about bacteria. Dickie had to wear the improvised contraption his father had made out of spare parts.
They were sitting on a barren rock plain not far from a small lake. Irma worked in the galley and watched Dickie on the ship’s viewers, while Hammond monitored both detectors. She was the one who saw a butterfly descend out of the clear sky and hover over Dickie’s head.
“Hammond,” she said softly, and when he looked up, visibly annoyed, she pointed silently to the viewscreen.
Hammond reached for the radio mike immediately. Irma could see nothing particularly dangerous in the situation, but her brain had not been programmed and imprinted to capacity. Hammond frequently made decisions and took actions that seemed senseless to her and proved right in the end.
There was a short but intense argument with Dickie. The little fellow returned to the scout, hot rebellion in his eyes. When Irma glanced at the screen again the butterfly was hovering just outside.
Hammond informed Dickie that in the future he was to return to the scout immediately when a gascloud appeared and was told in turn that this was the same butterfly which had ‘dopted Dickie two planets back, that it was his personal friend, and not dangerous at all. In the end big tears were streaming down Dickie’s face in a most unprogrammed way. As he crawled into his couch to cry in privacy he lifted a wet face and got in the last word: “An’ it‘ll be on the next planet, too!”
And it was.
For the first time in five years Hammond asked Irma what she thought of the situation.
“The shining thing? Why I think it’s alive, just as Dickie tried to tell you. I mean, how do we know all life has to be based on protoplasm? Maybe it’s made out of living light.”
She saw his brief, forgiving smile, and felt her temper stir. “Look, third-unsatisfactory-husband, biology admitted it was lost when the first sampler returned from Mars! You-” She stopped, warned by the look on his face. Just because he’d been so darn busy having all that knowledge piped into the grey goop that this was his first marriage . . . jealousy with such a primitive character trait . . . but at least it proved they hadn’t programmed and imprinted all the natural responses out of Hammond.
The sullen look faded. “Irma, there are certain basic biological principles common to all life-chains, such as the synthesis of energy compounds in the presence of sunlight-” He stopped, and she knew he was afraid of losing her again.
“Why does synthesis have to take place? It looks just like a tiny sun. Maybe it gets energy directly from the big sun up there.”
Hammond could only shake his head. This was totally outside his imprinted experience, a situation unique in history. Since only solid objects could exceed the speed of light there was no possible way to contact Earth for further instructions. Irma watched him sweat helplessly for a while and then suggested he catch the thing in a specimen box and put it through the analyser.
Hammond looked so grateful for the obvious idea that she wondered what he would do if she came up with something brilliant one day.
She watched her husband approach the little sun—son of a sun?—through the viewscreen. It was hovering at head-height. Hammond walked directly to it, opened the box and brought it up underneath the creature, and slammed the magnetically-sealed lid. She saw the bright flames of an angry excrescence as it vanished inside.
Hammond started back to the scout, triumph in his walk. Tomorrow he would be referring to this as his idea.
A corner of the box turned red, rippled like water and melted into sludge. She heard Hammond’s surprised yell, saw him hurl the hot box violently away just as the butterfly emerged, its bright wings angrily swirling. She saw Hammond backing away as the beautiful flaming creature moved towards him and suddenly realized that he was very near death. She screamed once and then little Dickie was standing by her and screaming louder than she, but he had turned on the outside mike first. His amplified child’s voice rolled from the top of the scout into the shuddering air and it was an angry command not to hurt his daddy.
The miniature sun hesitated, its more violent colours fading. The flaming wings slowed, looked less like bearing pinions. After a moment it rose swiftly and in seconds had merged with the brighter sunlight in the cloudless sky.
“It’ll come back,” said Dickie placidly; he might never have screamed in his life. “It’s ‘dopted me.”
Hammond must have finally been convinced it had indeed adopted Dickie. During the three-day hop to the next planet he spent his free time building a gadget for which she could see no immediate use. When she tried to question him about it he gave her an angry look and refused to answer. He even ate the terrible chops she concocted from some old leaf-mould without a single comment.
This time it was no surprise when Dickie went out and the flaming butterfly shortly appeared and hovered above his young head. They were on another obviously dead world, all rock and diamonds, with very little air. Dickie wore his suit cheerfully, since there was no alternative and he and the butterfly were playing some odd game they had devised when she saw Hammond emerge from the workroom carrying his newest toy. It was a grey box with a large crystal rod mounted on top, similar to some very primitive lasers she had seen.
“What’s that?” she asked in some alarm. Hammond’s face had a grimly determined look she did not like.
“A light wave-form disruptor. I’m going to see if that thing out there can stand up to a little photon jarring.”
Irma wanted to cry out that he was being cruel, that the little white sun-child had done him no harm, but the words stuck in her throat. The attempt to capture it had been her idea. In a way she had been responsible for the blow to Hammond’s pride. And it was a dangerous little fire-pot. If it should get angry with Dickie in one of their games . . . She watched him approach it calmly, knowing that his device, whatever it was, would work. She saw him aim the crystal rod in its general direction and press a button. A beam of life leaped from one end and flew by the butterfly, burning its way into the sky. Hammond moved the box slightly and the beam shifted, engulfing the small central body. And it flared, grew, brightened intolerably in a soundless explosion of light . . . and died to a dim memory of glory on the edge of her retina. As it faded to nothingness she thought she saw a black lump of—was it coal?—fall to the ground at little Dickie’s feet.
“That takes care of that,” said Hammond’s voice on the radio. It sounded more defeated than satisfied. She saw him stoop to pick up the black lump.
It had happened so fast Dickie’s young mind was slow in grasping the fact that his friend and pet was dead. He had just started a rising wail of protest when Irma saw two circles of light appear at the top of the view-screen, falling fast. She felt a sudden dread clutch at her throat
Hammond saw them also. He lifted the disruptor in alarm, his finger stabbing the button. The killing beam lashed out just before the dropping small suns reached him. It cut the air by one of the flaming balls and before Hammond could shift it a similar beam shot from the body of the second butterfly and melted the box into shapeless slag. The disrupting light vanished.
The two creatures halted just above little Dickie’s head and Irma saw strong orange and delicate lavender beams flashing back and forth between them. She did not need Hammond to tell her they were communicating and her own intuition told her what it was about. In a near paralysis of terror she watched the weirdly beautiful judges weigh their decision of life or death and not for a moment did she doubt they were both judge, jury and executioner, and capable of all three tasks.
Dickie was staring at them with wide-eyed interest, apparently completely unafraid. Hammond’s face had turned pale. He edged slowly closer to Dickie, with some vain idea of protecting him if the decision went against them.
* * * *
Orange-Beam-of-Anger: He disrupted our young-flame! Our young-flame! They are powerful but cruel, cruel! Their bodies are jelly of death-liquid and death lives in their minds, minds! I kill!
Lavender-Beam-of-Restraint: No! No! He did not understand, understand! You caused us to attach away our young-flame when we fled here for safety! Ours no longer! Think, Think! The Wild-Flames have not discovered the birth-power locked in stone! They came not this far from Hot-Home! It is safe to make another young-flame, another! We have built our heat again, we can create, create!
Orange-Beam: It will weaken us, for purpose, what purpose?
Lavender-Beam: For the aliens, dull-flame! Attach it to the largest one, let it be his child!
Orange-Beam: To kill again, to kill again?
Lavender-Beam: They are not primitives! We must make ties, ties! Sense you not his regret? He thought to protect his young, as we, as we! We must make friends, get aid, fight savages! Their machines move between Hot-Homes and we cannot! Powerful friends, when we return to drive Barbarians from our Hot-Home! See Low-Burner, see Low-Burner?
Orange-Beam: We will see who Burns-Low! Give me your White, your White!
White-Beam-of-Creation: In joy of being, in love tender-yielding, I give you White!
White-Beam-of-Creation: And I return, in strength of love, in happiness conscious, the White, the White!
* * * *
The light beam colloquy abruptly stopped. Irma’s gaze shifted downward. Dickie was holding up a large diamond, its rough exterior glittering in the brightness of Alpha Cruris.
A new beam of brilliant white flashed between the butterflies, held, and they moved towards each other and the extended diamond. When they were quite close Dickie finally dropped it and withdrew his hand. The small suns followed the crystal to the ground, still connected by the beam of pure white light. Irma saw them almost merge when they reached opposite sides of the diamond. She knew the purpose of that beam of blended white and that Dickie had seen it once before. She felt like a Peeping Tom in the bedroom of Zeus and Hera and could not tear her eyes away.
The white light seemed to grow, to widen and deepen until it covered the central bodies of both butterflies, hiding the other colours and the frozen glitter of the diamond. Both Hammond and Dickie had backed away a few feet and were watching through slightly polarized face-plates. The rock in the immediate vicinity of the strange mating was charring. The whiteness grew more intense, almost unendurable in its brilliance. There was an abrupt flare in the centre of the merged lights, a tone of vivid orange, and then the parent butterflies moved apart, the beam broken, their sun-heats fading to a more normal temperature. Where the diamond had rested an orange flame burned, slowly brightening.
Some dim fragment of memory came to Irma, something about the intense pressure matrices inside a diamond, the immense forces necessary to heat and compress carbon until it reached that state of final beauty. If those matrices could be made to yield their imprisoned energy...
The parent butterflies lifted slowly, moved behind Hammond, gently urged him forward, until he was standing quite close to the burning orange. Their new-born child grew brighter and brighter. Hammond, apparently no longer afraid, waited in front of it and an older meaning of the word “imprint” dawned on Irma, the original psychological one. Some new-born creatures adopted the first living animal they saw as their mother, regardless of its shape or form.
Dickie had got the situation somewhat confused. The first butterfly had not adopted him. He had unknowingly adopted the butterfly!
The thought sent her into a burst of laughter and when she realized how near to hysteria it was she cut it off abruptly and stood there trembling in silent relief. When she looked again her husband and son were slowly approaching the scout. The new butterfly, now flying, hovered close by Hammond’s head.
* * * *
“Of course little Brightstar isn’t the protoplasmic type of intelligence we were looking for, but I think Earth will be too thrilled to care,” said Hammond cheerfully as he made the last adjustment on his current toy. He had assured Irma that when their second child learned to use it properly he could activate any of its thirty-six cells by a light-beam and produce one of the basic sounds of speech in its attached radio. With the intelligence little Brightstar displayed it should be a short step from there to true speech.
“I’m happy just to get home five years early.” Irma really couldn’t have cared less about the type of intelligence her adopted child had. Dickie-bird needed a brother and now he had one. She glanced at the chronometer. About time for another meal for Brightstar, and for Dickie’s nap. It had been very pleasant, watching the two of them tumble about outside the ship during the last feeding, but Brightstar would have to eat alone this time. She called Dickie and asked Hammond to drop to sub-light and pull in close to the next star.
When both children were attended to she asked, “Is the search really over, Hammond? Will this satisfy the people who insist there just has to be more intelligence in the universe?”
He turned from the controls in mild surprise. “Why, no, of course not. The search must go on. Baby suns aren’t all the answer. But we’ll leave the new trips to others. Except . . .” he hesitated, and Irma made her face cloud up and prepare to rain. Not again!
He saw her look, and grinned. “Oh no, not another major trip. Just a little expedition to home base, so to speak. To Sol. It occurs to me that Bright and his kind may not be as rare as we thought. They were obviously born in some star originally. We may have intelligence a darn sight closer to home than we’ve ever dreamed.”
Irma sighed in relief. Why of course! And a good thing too. The way children grew up before your eyes, they had to be thinking about Brightstar’s future. No child of her’s was going to grow up a bachelor!
She smiled reflectively, already seeing her grandchildren burning before her eyes.