Krul came in only two kinds: perfect and mutants.
The race had had to advance from cave dwellers to a society rooted in science before radioactivity, the cause of most mutation, was discovered. They had had to develop interstellar travel to learn that the concentrations of radioactive elements in Krulchuk's core and crust were unusually high. By the time they knew enough to say "There but for the aim of an alpha particle go I," by the time medical advancements would have permitted prenatal correction of most mutations, selective infanticide had long been an unquestioned cultural imperative. Swelk was even sympathetic in the abstract to the custom, without which the Krulirim would never have cohered long enough as a species to have technology.
So abnormal newborns continued to be put out of their parents' misery. Swelk was doubly a freak, because, despite her flaws, she still lived. Swelk's father had been too resentful of Swelk's mother's death in childbirth to relinquish a living entity to blame. Once Father had sufficiently recovered from his loss to do the right thing, too much time had passed—the "civilized" fiction that Swelk had succumbed naturally to her birth defects was no longer credible.
Swelk seldom saw her father. Her nurse taught that when life gives you a kwelth, you make kwelthor stew with it. Swelk didn't care for stew, kwelthor or other, but she took the point.
So, she was a freak in an intensely conformist society, and nothing she could do would change that. Swelk picked her type of "stew": to be the objective outside observer of a society that lacked outsiders.
Over time, Swelk's personal journal overflowed with commentary about the society that, from her unique perspective, was closed and intolerant. Her restlessness grew with the volume of her private notes. Krulchuk became too confining: unwilling to offer her an opportunity, increasingly devoid of any even mildly interesting variety.
The more Krulchuk palled, the more the stars beckoned to her: new worlds, different societies, other intelligent species. Father gladly paid her fare—with luck the frontier or the rigors of travel would kill her off, or he himself might have passed on before the monstrosity's return. In the worst case, Swelk's return during Father's lifetime, her tour of Krulchukor colonies would still have spared him the embarrassment of her freakish presence for some three-cubes of years.
She realized after the first few planetfalls what only wishful thinking had kept her from extrapolating before leaving home. Krulirim brook no deviancy; ergo, transplanted communities differed little from the society of the ancestral world. If anything, the new societies were more orthodox, less accepting of differences, than the home world. On any worlds with the potential to support Krulchukor life, exotic biospheres were systematically weakened to make way for imported biota. Those sentients that had been discovered, none nearly so advanced as her own species, were quarantined and systematically looted of any worthwhile resources. Disdain and neglect combined in an unofficial policy of cultural destruction.
She cashed in her remaining tickets to buy passage on the first starship returning to Krulchuk. That vessel was the Consensus, a well-used cargo craft with a few cabins for passengers of limited means and corresponding expectations.
She knew no one aboard the Consensus, but that hardly mattered. Her nurse aside, and she had passed on, the Krulirim of Swelk's acquaintance mistreated her no less than did strangers. Few Krul ever encountered anyone as visually different as she; those exceptions lacked precedents for how to behave toward her. Deference to authority generally won out—her treatment generally depended on how authority figures treated her. Shipboard, the captain's impatience with and sometime ridicule of her were quickly adopted.
She gladly stayed in her room at first, organizing the extensive if disappointing notes from her travels. When her tiny cabin grew tiresome, she volunteered, notwithstanding her status as a passenger, to stand watches. Between stars, nothing ever happened on a watch, but someone was required on the bridge just in case. She expected no gratitude from officers spared the boring duty, nor did she receive any—she was content with a change of scenery and less confining surroundings in which to be shunned. And for the comparative peace . . . Captain Grelben did not tolerate harassment when Swelk was on watch.
And that was why Swelk was the one to detect the radio signals from Earth.
The unexpected signals were at first faint and erratic, and Swelk did not doubt that any of Captain Grelben's undisciplined staff would have simply ignored them. She persevered. Coping with her handicap, and with those who would torment her because of it, had taught her patience.
The radio-frequency anomalies had progressed slowly from arguably a figment of her imagination to formless certainty—the Consensus was not traveling toward the unexplained broadcasts; rather the signals themselves kept getting stronger. Taking on more and more extra shifts, she had slowly learned to assign various patterns to different languages. Her puzzled analyses grew more focused, if still unproductive.
She had yelped in surprise upon determining the modulation scheme that converted some of the radio waves streaming past the Consensus into moving pictures. A bit more tweaking had added a synchronized sound subchannel to the moving pictures. Now she began to adopt the software she had trained across visits to several worlds to learning and translating the unknowns' communications.
Even as Captain Grelben acknowledged Swelk's progress, the discovery brought renewed cruelty from the crew. "Trust the freak to find more freaks." And these beings were odd by Krul standards, with separate limb-types in pairs: a bottom set dedicated to locomotion and a top set to manipulation. Their bodies moved preferentially in one direction, like Swelk's; their sense organs favored that side. By reason of her handicap and the shunning of her own kind, Swelk sometimes felt closer to the humans than to her shipmates.
And then, amid the ever-swelling torrent of signals, Swelk encountered what must have been educational material for the youngest of the aliens. It was elemental: basic symbols and acting out of their meanings, fundamental concepts repeated in endless variations. While the big bird never made sense to her, she came to recognize numbers, the sounds that went with letters, whole words. Her vocabulary grew. In time, other Earth television programs made sense.
And the more she learned, the deeper became her sense of wonder.
Swelk's discovery had for a time transformed the trip from mundane disappointment to the wondrous adventure of which she had dreamed.
She was not the only passenger on the Consensus, although she did not know much about the others. Their cabins were in the better-tended parts of the ship, while she had been exiled to what she suspected was a former closet in the crew quarters. The other passengers were somehow involved in the entertainment industry, she gathered. Popular amusement had no appeal to Swelk, the unvarying perfection of the actors just one more personal rebuke.
She was astonished when Rualf, the leader of the other passengers, took Swelk's part in an argument with the captain.
Swelk had become forceful for only the second time in her life. The first time had been to negotiate the terms of what she and her father both saw, for quite different reasons, as a voyage of liberation. This time she was arguing with Captain Grelben to divert the Consensus to investigate Earth.
Pre-spaceflight philosophers on Krulchuk had accepted without qualm or question the silence of the cosmos. Surely the Krulirim, who alone had overcome the universal tendency of species to mutate into oblivion, were the ideal and only intelligent race. Starflight had necessitated a redefinition of that uniqueness: the planets of many stars fostered life, and intelligence, or at least the use of language and tools, arose almost as often. Krulchukor superiority and—of course—centrality survived those discoveries, because the Krulirim remained in one way unique: their mastery of technology. When other intelligences obtained technology, it mastered them. Two three-squares of worlds were known where the dominant species once aspired to technical greatness and the stars; they had achieved only self-destruction and ruin. The causes varied—overbreeding, environmental devastation, genetic-engineering disasters, and, most frequently, nuclear immolation—but the effects, collapse and regression, were constants. And so the superiority of the Krulirim, and the perfection of everything about them, was vindicated . . .
One more supposedly intelligent species, argued the captain, meant nothing. It was of little interest, and even less cause for diverting the Consensus. These humans would only destroy themselves, while he incurred huge penalties for late deliveries, and his debts continued to pile up. Relativity slowed many things, but not the accumulation of interest.
"But they are right at the crisis point," Swelk argued, "perhaps past the crisis, if only barely. They speak of reducing their nuclear weapons, remedying their ecological excesses. If I am right, the Krulirim could have a companion advanced species."
Grelben, unlike his suddenly assertive passenger, equally monitored all directions at once. Nothing in his stance indicated that he was seeing the recovered television pictures from Earth, appearing on several screens on the bridge. Swelk nonetheless knew he was; the shiver in the spacer's body declared that what Swelk suggested was anathema. One deformed adult Krul on board was almost too much to bear—could any sane person consider normal a technologically capable planet that teemed with such deviancy? "We will not change our course, you—"
"Captain Grelben, if I may." Rualf glided onto the bridge with a grace Swelk could only envy. His entrance had surely spared the cripple a devastating insult.
"Of course, sir." The quick transition to deference was astonishing.
"Captain, I've overheard in the corridors a little about this curious discovery." Rualf's sensor stalks wiggled in an understated display of worldly amusement. "Would it be possible to hear a bit about it directly?"
"You heard the man," snarled the captain.
Swelk needed no encouragement: here, finally, was someone interested in her amazing find. Rualf and his company were widely traveled; perhaps she had lost faith too soon. Perhaps somewhere among the worlds of the Krulirim there were people with the creativity and imagination to consider new ideas. Maybe even people to whom Swelk could sometime explain her concepts of group dynamics and social organization.
She launched into an ardent exposition on the challenges of technological development, the crises certain technologies caused societies, the failure of Krulchukor explorers to find any peer-level species. She waxed eloquent that this new species, whose presence had become clear from its radio broadcasts, could yet survive this crisis and become equals. Krulchukor philosophers had long postulated that a self-destructive drive was inherent in all other races; she marveled at the rebirth in thinking and worldview that would arise once such Krul-centered thinking was disproven.
Swelk was too enthusiastic, too rapt in futuristic visions, to take notice of the subtle interactions of gesture and posture between captain and honored passenger. All that registered of her audience's reaction—an audience! what an unaccustomed concept!—was Rualf's spoken response.
"Young woman, you have discovered something extraordinary. I find myself intrigued. Perhaps you will allow me to discuss the matter in private with our captain."
Giddy with the unexpected courtesy, even praise, Swelk stammered her concurrence and limped from the bridge.
Rualf had had influence that Swelk could only envy. The Consensus was redirected, with the full support of all passengers, to investigate Earth.