Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories. A. R. Morlan
caring neither where I went nor where I came from.
Still, those human habits of observation, the old, old ones we get from the monkeys, aren’t so easily banished. Now that I’d spotted the ten hash-marks on Penti’s arm, I began seeing them everywhere. Maybe I was blind to them before, or if the ’lopes had played dumb when we arrived, hiding their light under a bushel, as the ancient saying goes, but the sign was everywhere. Scratched in the dirt by buried dung. Incised on the trees using either their nails or some tool I hadn’t observed them using yet. Even the discarded peels of the husk-fruit were now arranged in a specific, ten-paired pattern on the crumbling soil.
And when I finally decided to pay a visit to some of the further-out graves, those of Huoy and Neil, I found the sign on their graves, laid out in neat, careful rows of speckled pebbles. Like the markers we’d neglected to give them. I cried when I saw that; would we have done the same for a ’lope? I didn’t even remember where we’d planted the dead ’lope; no one kept a record of it, and I hadn’t been along, I think I was off somewhere with Reba when Neil and Jimmie buried it—no, her. The ’loper was a female, a mater, perhaps....
Yet the ’lopes had honored the graves of my people.
I tried marking the outside of the ship; I scrawled the “pi” symbol, a model of Sol’s solar system, even “Kilroy Was Here,” but all the ’lopes did in return was repeat their set of ten paired lines, as if that was all they had to say. Or all they knew. But I did learn something interesting; they didn’t use their fingers to make the symbols. I saw Wildcat and Lucy apply the mud to the ship with a crude brush, made of stiffened, dried limp-vines lashed to a dried tuber-tree branch, which Wildcat dipped into a bowl, a crude one, made of sun-dried mud and limp-vine fibers, but a utensil nonetheless, held by Lucy in her cupped hands. No earth animal ever progressed to the point of using two self-made objects in tandem. I wished Reba could’ve seen the ’lopes, even though I knew she wouldn’t have been able to admit their accomplishments to herself....
My interest in the gene-splicing equipment faltered as I began to observe the ’lopes. I took to following them, when I wasn’t too sick to walk in the sunlight, and after the first week of that, I realized that my boots were a hindrance, not a help, when it came to switching to different terrains. Barefoot, I was less likely to slip in the mud my toes could dig in for purchase. And the mud contained more pebbles deeper down, which felt pleasant against my skin. Soon afterward, my uniform pants revealed themselves to be a hindrance, they flapped wetly against my calves when I waded out of ponds, so one morning I sliced them off. Using a regular scalpel, not a laser. I couldn’t look at those things yet....
Barefoot, almost bare-legged, I found that I blended in better in the surrounding foliage, allowing me to study the ’lopes as I never had before...or perhaps they found me fit to be nearer to them. Regardless of the reason for my newfound acceptability I took every advantage of it.
The ’lopes never let me follow them to where ever it was they slept; come sunset, they’d split up, scattering like blown chaff, so that trying to track them was futile, since I had no way of knowing who was heading to the real sleeping place, and who was a decoy. But I learned something more significant than the location of their main nest—I gradually realized that the ’lopes had a language. Not a simple one, either, like that of the whales or porpoises on earth: theirs was a subtle, yet complex system of communication. Aside from the grunts and half-mewls the crew and I had observed—and summarily discounted—the ’lopes communicated by touch, gesture and limited facial expression, with all the discrete forms combining in a language which had what I suspected to be grammar, syntax, the works. All the signs of Reba’s elusive sense of self.... They even had names for each other; certain combinations of sound/gesture/specialized touch in a specific spot which were repeated frequently enough in greeting/departure situations for me to recognize them after repeat witnessing. For example, Baby Boy’s “name” was a two-beat grunt, uttered simultaneously with a cupping of the listener’s chin with the left hand, and a gentle nudge with the right knee. What the name meant, I had no idea; there was no Rosetta Stone or its equivalent for me to use, for names are utterly unlike “words” for common things, and even then, the language of the ’lopes was marked with subtle nuances which differentiated words and meanings according to the time of the day, the size of things, the oldness or youngness of a thing, and so on to infinity.
It was like trying to partition a three-digit integer; the possible combinations were almost incalculable, yet finite. Every time I thought I had this or that “word” and all its permutations in the bag, I saw/heard another variant—and realized just how little I really understood the ’lopes. And what was maddening was how easy it was for the ’lopes to learn and understand their language—the mature females had had young not too long before, perhaps six or seven months before Jimmie killed Reba and I killed him, yet the baby ’lopes were already attempting crude speech....
But I understood just enough to get a taste of the ’loper language and/or “philosophy,” if one could call it that. This planet was everything to them—mother, father, friend, lover—as if they needed any more sexual activity. From what I could tell of the ones I recognized, they were always eager to make love, as if in a near-constant state of rut....
One drawback to running around sans shirt and long pants was that whenever I blacked out, I’d wind up with short grass burns on either my chest or back. Once, I spent a full day in unconsciousness, out in the open. My head began to spin, and I went down before I could get myself to cover. The sun was just past the “noon” mark then, and I awoke when the sun was again approaching the “noon” mark. One of my legs was asleep, twisted in an odd position under the other one. I think I dreamed of Reba, and not remembering then that she was dead, I found myself disappointed that she wasn’t standing next to me. I also woke up with burns that stung for hours....
After that day it became harder and harder to hold myself in this world. Mixed in with periods of outright blackouts, I began to have short periods where my mind simply went away. I kept moving, continued to act, but held no recollections of those times. I simply found myself in places far removed from where I remembered being. Shortly thereafter the mania for cloning returned and I had that episode with the crusher. Then came the spell before I began this log once again. Twenty-four days, gone without a trace.
The log is up to date. What can I do now to hold on to this conscious world?
Day 183:
I’ve been out eight days. I started to come to a couple days ago, but I really wasn’t all there yet. It was like I was; yet I wasn’t, that unthinking state I mentioned before. I knew I was, but I didn’t know why or how or what for. Anything more than a minimum level of consciousness just hurt too much. Is that to be my fate?
Time to download the recorder and see what I did.
I’m back. There was a little trouble getting things going. It seems like I can’t even remember how to do the simplest things these days. If they ever find me and put me back to work on physics, I doubt I’d be of much use.
What I saw was astonishing! I don’t know what it means yet. I’ll just have to put the tape in the archive and hope a better mind than mine can figure it all out....
Much of it was garbage, of course. There was one thirteen-hour section where my head didn’t move at all. I was just staring out onto the plain, fixed on, the same tree all day long. Maybe I was just unconscious. Then there were times when it was obvious I was sleeping, face down on the ground or face up along a tree trunk. Lots of those, but day or night, none of them were longer than two hours, so I really don’t think I was asleep during that long spell....
Thinking! It’s not only hard to do now, but I even wince at spelling it out on this log! I’m being conditioned, conditioned by pain, like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
The astonishing things were the episodes when I ran with the ’lopes. It seems like they really accept me now, at least, when I’m semi-sentient. We ran, we cavorted, we rolled in the flat-grass and dug for tubers. I sat around and played with the young ones while ’lopers all around me were having sex. It was their favorite activity. As I turn my head, the recorder turns with me, and I see that it’s the local