3
Perception
You can’t hurry love, no you’ll just have to wait.…” So sang the Supremes.
As humans we have been able to quantify a good many things. Love is not one of them. It remains as mysterious and fascinating as it ever was, likely since before the dawn of civilization.
Unfailingly, we all remember our first love. The tingle of attraction, the overwhelming desire to join with another, the temptations inherent in giving oneself wholly to another person. We also equally remember the first time we were in love and were rejected. The hurt, the pain, the feelings of worthlessness.
But in the latter instance, what does the rejector feel? Regret? Apology? Sympathy? Anything at all? In the coldness of adolescence, often nothing.
It is left to the rejected to feel.
(Note: “Perception” appears here in its original form for the first time.)
STEFAN DIDN’T WANT the assignment to Irelis. He didn’t want to work at the Outpost. He’d seen pictures of Irelis, and the Outpost, and the natives, and found all of them unpleasant in equal measure. But advancing up the company ladder meant climbing the rungs in order. Maybe skipping one now and then, if you were fortunate. For a young apprentice such as himself, Irelis was a rung that couldn’t be skipped.
So it was that he found himself installed at the Outpost, a self-contained subdivision of the larger Irelis station set in the middle of a swamp. It could as easily have been anywhere on Irelis except at the poles. Swamp or savanna, take your choice: they were what covered nearly all of Irelis except for the murky, algae-coated oceans. Of the two, the savannas offered the more pleasant prospect, with drier, cooler, weather. Unfortunately, humans weren’t the only ones who preferred the plains to the swamps. So did the several dozen species of ferocious biting arthropods that sucked body fluids without discriminating between planets of origin.
The Allawout got around the swamps on primitive flat rafts fashioned from fiberthrush and covango saplings fastened together with strong, red looporio vine. Ages ago, some Allawout Einstein had figured out that if you built the rafts with points at both ends, not only would they go faster through the tepid, turgid water, but you wouldn’t have to turn them around to reverse direction. That discovery represented the height of Allawout nautical technology. The idea of a sail was beyond them. Ignoring directives that forbade supplying indigenous aliens with advanced knowledge, visiting humans who observed the locals struggling with poles and paddles had taken pity on them and introduced the concept of the rudder, an innovation that the natives readily adopted and for which they were inordinately grateful.
To the Outpost they brought the pleasures and treasures of the Irelis hinterlands; unique organic gem material, seeds from which exotic spices were extracted, sustainable animal products, barks and resins and flowers from which were derived uniquely unsynthesizable pharmaceuticals, and their own fashionable primitive handicrafts. Widely scattered and hard to find, located in disagreeable, dangerous country, these diverse products of Irelis found their way into the insatiable current of interstellar trade through the good offices of the dirt (literally) poor natives. Everyone benefited, and the government was happy.
Stefan was not happy. He did not quite hate Irelis, but he disliked the place intensely. For someone his age, there was nothing in the way of entertainment. Worst of all was having to work with the locals. None of the Allawout stood taller than a meter in height—if you could call it standing. In the absence of anything resembling legs or feet, it was hard to tell. They sort of slimed their way along, their listless pace in perfect harmony with their sluggish metabolisms. A quartet of narrow but strong tentacles protruded from their cephalopodian upper bodies. These were covered in a fine, hairless, slick skin not unlike that of a frog or salamander. From the center of the upper bulge that was not quite a proper head, two large round eyes marked by crescent-shaped pupils took in the swamp that was their whole wide world. They had no external ears, no fur or horns, and wore no clothing. Not that there was much to cover. When they burbled at one another in their crude, vowel-rich language, bubbles frothed at the corners of their lipless mouths. They had no proper teeth and subsisted on a wide variety of soft plant life, supplementing this with the occasional fresh-water mollusk that did not require overmuch chewing. Soon after arriving, Stefan had the opportunity to observe them eating. It was not a pretty sight.
It did not take him long to learn from his three co-workers that the Allawout were as oblivious to human sarcasm as they were too much of the world around them. Making fun of the slow-moving, slow-thinking natives was one of the few spontaneous diversions available to the Outpost’s inhabitants. Except when a supervisor came visiting, it was a sport they indulged in shamelessly, taking care to do so only out of range of the station’s largely humorless scientific compliment. By the time Stefan’s tour of duty was half over, his own personal file of Allawout jokes had grown as fat as one of the natives.
Not that they were inherently unlikable, he mused as he lazed his way through his daily turn at the trading counter. On his right was a projector that could, magically as far as the Allawout were concerned, generate a three-dimensional, rotatable image of anything in the Outpost’s warehouse. Those visiting natives who made endless demands of the device simply for its entertainment value soon found themselves cut out of the trade loop. Once word spread among the local clans, this abuse stopped. The Outpost, they learned, was a place in which to conduct serious trade.
The tripartite clan that was now leaving carried between them several parcels sealed in the ubiquitous, biodegradable plastic wrap that was used to package all trade goods. As he watched them depart, Stefan directed the room’s air purifier to grade up a notch. Allawout body odor was no more pleasing than their appearance. In a few minutes the atmospheric scrubber would have removed the last lingering odiferous traces of the clan’s visit.
Pervasatha waited for the cheerful, noisily bubbling family to exit before coming in. Despite his special cooling gear, he was sweating profusely. A number of visiting supervisors and scientists felt that would have been a better name for the planet: Sweating Profusely. It was certainly more descriptive than Irelis IV.
“Got something for you, Stef.” Perv, as his friends and co-workers called him, leaned one elbow down on the counter. The corners of his mouth twitched. He seemed to be striving hard to repress a grin.
“Not another carved Ohrus tooth.” Stefan eyed the other young man warily. “They’re pretty, but we’ve already got a boxful.”
“Nope. Better than that.” The grin escaped its bounds. Perv pointed to the door. “Enter! Come inside.”
A native slid slowly inward on the familiar, disgusting trail of lubricating gunk. Behind it, the floor did its best to clean up after the visitor. Unfeeling mechanical though it was, Stefan still felt sorry for the autocleaner. Unlike the rest of them, it could never look forward to a day off. Not on Irelis.
Perv’s grin was wider than ever. “You remember that directive? Not last week’s—the one before. Page twelve. ‘All company Outposts must strive where possible to encourage local life forms to participate in the ongoing activities of a given station, with regard to maintaining and enhancing benign relations between the human and native populations.’”
“Yeah.” Stefan was immediately on guard. “I remember it. So what?” He slapped at his forehead, smashing something small, irritating, and resistant to the day’s cocktail of insecticides that he had liberally applied earlier.
Perv gestured grandly at the newcomer, who was gazing around at the interior of the station with eyes that were even wider than normal. “Meet your new native assistant!”
Stefan blanched, recovered when he thought it was a joke, eyed his friend in disbelief when it began to sink it that it was not. “Don’t try to be funny, Perv. It’s too hot today.”
“And it’ll be too hot tomorrow, and the day after that, and the one after that also. But this blob of gray goo is still your new assistant. Morey says so.”
“Screw Morey!” As if the native was not present, Stefan gestured in its direction. “We don’t have indigenous assistants. No local works inside the Outpost.”
“We do now,” Perv shot back. “They do now.”
The other man’s eyes narrowed. “Then where’s your assistant?”
“Regulations say that, at this point in the Outpost’s development, we only need one. She’s it. She’s yours.” His smile flattened. “Lack of seniority says so.”
“‘She?’” A dubious Stefan studied the lumpish native, who continued to ignore the two young humans as she gawked at the interior of the trading room. “I thought the biologists hadn’t figured out how to sex them yet.”
Perv stood away from the counter. “Far as I know, they haven’t. But that’s the classification I’ve been given.” He winked and turned to go. “I’ll leave you two alone now.”
The other man gestured wildly. “Hey, wait a minute! What am I supposed to do with this—with ‘her’?”
Perv kept walking. “Not my concern. Morey says she’s your new assistant. Get her to assist. Me, I’ve got work to do on the bromide concentrator or the delay’ll go down on my record.” He exited at a brisk clip, not looking back.
Stefan was once again alone in the room. Well, not quite.
Maybe if he ignored the native, it would go away. Sitting back down, he muttered the “unpause” command and resumed watching the word play he had been engrossed in prior to the trading clan’s arrival. Images danced in the air half a meter in front of his eyes. After a while, he became aware that he was not alone. As was often the case, it was the smell that tipped him off.
Advancing silently on its sheet of motive slime, the Allawout had sidled up as close behind him as it dared, and was dutifully gazing up at images whose origin, meaning, and purpose must be as alien to it as tooth gel.
Nostrils flexing in revulsion, he looked over his shoulder and down at the creature. Morey had declared it was his new assistant. Until he could make the notoriously gruff Outpost administrator who supervised all the young apprentices like himself see reason, Stefan realized with a sinking feeling that he was probably stuck with the creature. But fortunately, he told himself, not to it. If he abused it physically, there could be trouble. Members of the station’s scientific contingent, who infrequently mixed with the much younger and less experienced team of trader apprentices, would report him. His advancement up the company ladder would be questioned, and he might even be dropped down a rating or two. That could not be allowed to happen. Not after the horrid half year he had already been forced to put in on Irelis.
Swallowing his distaste, he asked in terranglo, “Do you have a name?”
The dumpy alien quivered revoltingly, as if trying to slough off its skin. Flesh-protecting mucus oozed from pores and slid down its sides. “I am chosen Uluk.”
At least it could talk a little, the apprentice reflected. Come to think of it, the staff would not have selected one to work inside the station, with humans, unless it had acquired at least some facility with the language of the visitors. Then something happened that completely broke his train of thought.
Raising a tentacle, the Allawout pointed at the hovering word play image and said, “Pretty—what means it?”
It was the first time in nearly six months that Stefan had heard a local ask a question not directly related to trading. Minimal fluency he had expected: intellectual curiosity, if such it could be called, was something new. Without pausing to wonder why he was bothering to reply, he struggled to explain something of the subtle nature of a word play.
She did not understand. That was not surprising. Had she comprehended even his childishly simple explanation, he would immediately have passed her along to the scientific staff as an exemplar of Allawout acumen. On the indigenous scale of intelligence she doubtless qualified as quite bright. About at the level of a human eight-year old, only without any book learning to draw upon. It was unlikely she would grow any smarter.
But as the months progressed, she did. Or at least, her vocabulary increased. Struggling with the most fundamental concepts, she did everything he asked of her, from laboriously dragging trade goods into the back chamber to be sorted, catalogued, pre-priced, and packaged for shipment off-world; to making suggestions to visiting locals about what goods the strange dry-skin folk preferred and would pay well for.
It was funny to see how the other natives deferred to her. Even mature males, muscular of tentacle and sharp of eye, seemed to shrink slightly in her presence. For a wild moment he thought she might be some kind of local equivalent of royalty, much as the notion of an Allawout princess seemed a contradiction in terms. Belleau Lormantz, one of the xenologists, assured him that could not be the case.
“In the nearly twenty years there has been a human presence on Irelis, no evidence has surfaced of any level of government above that of the extended family or clan. They haven’t even achieved the tribal level yet. They’re just starting to emerge from the hunter-gatherer stage.” Belleau had a nice voice, Stefan mused. About the nicest voice on Irelis. And unlike most of the scientists, she was nearly the same age as he was.
They were sitting together on one of the elevated walkways built atop balumina pilings that had been driven down through water and muck into the reluctant bedrock far below. Redder than that of his homeworld, Irelis’s sun was setting behind tall strands of red and yellow fiberthrush, the light peeking through the fronds to illuminate the station’s sealed, welded-together, prefabricated modules. Belleau was almost as reflective as the metal walls, he decided.
A voice sounded behind them, plaintive yet insistent. “Stef-han, what should I do with kaja bowls just buying today?”
He looked around irritably. “They go in the back, on the bottom shelves on the right-hand side. You know that, Uluk!”
Her tone did not change, and she had no expression to alter. “Yes, Stef-han. I will make it so.” It took her several minutes to slip-slide back inside.
He returned to contemplating the sunset, the violet underside of the evening cumulus filling his head with thoughts that did not belong in as unpleasant a place as the Outpost.
“I hear that you’re leaving the station.”
She nodded. “Sabbatical. On Rhenoull V. To consolidate my reports, put some into book form, give lectures—that sort of thing. I think I’ll be back, to start in on my advanced work. There’s a lot about these creatures we still don’t know.”
“Is there that much more to learn?” When she did not comment, he added, “How do I know you’re coming back, Belle?”
“Because I say so. Because my work is here.”
He peered deep into her eyes. Perspiration glistened like pale pearls on her forehead and cheeks. She was wet, tired, unkempt, and beautiful. “Is that the only reason?”
She turned away from him, seeking surcease in the sunset. “I’m not sure—yet,” she replied candidly. “I like you, Stefan. I like you a lot. But I’m so deep into my work that much of the time I feel like I’m drowning.”
“Drown in me,” he told her with more intensity than he intended.
Her hand slipped sideways to cover his. “Maybe when I come back,” she told him frankly. “When I have more confidence in my own future. Then, maybe—we’ll see. You’re a little young for me, Stefan.”
“I’m not that young.” When he reached for her, she leaned away, laughing affectionately. “No, not now. As sweaty as we are, if we hold each other too tightly, we’re liable to slip right past each other and into the water.”
He laughed too, and settled for squeezing her hand while waiting for the alien sun to finish its day’s work.
He sweated out another six months, her absence made all the more frustrating by his having to deal with Uluk. Just when it seemed she was acquiring some real skill, she would do something supremely stupid. He was forced to reprimand her, sigh in exasperation, and explain the procedure all over again. She would listen patiently, indicate understanding, go along fine for a while, and eventually repeat the same mistake. Something about the Allawout seemed to render them incapable of retaining any pattern of information for more than a few weeks at a time. It was as if the entire species was afflicted with attention span deficit disorder. To make matters worse, he had to endure the endless jokes and gags the rest of the staff enjoyed at his expense. His only compensation was the occasional reluctant, approving grunt from Administrator Morey, who recognized the strain his most junior underling was operating under. That, plus praise from the scientific staff. The behaviorists in particular would seek him out to query him interminably about his conversations with the Allawout.
“Look,” he would object in exasperation, “we don’t have ‘conversations.’ I give the thing orders, and she carries them out. Except when she forgets what to do, which is all the time, and I have to explain them all over again. Slowly and repeatedly, in the simplest terms possible.”
“But within those constraints,” a much older xenologist had pressed him, “the native in question is capable of performing the complex tasks she is assigned by you.”
“Sure,” he joked, “if you can call stacking carvings and sorting voull horns ‘complex.’ Anything that involves actually thinking I have to guide and help her with. Initiative doesn’t exist among the Allawout. Except where it concerns food and shelter, I personally don’t think they have any understanding of the concept.”
“But the other locals obviously respect her deeply.” The scientist had been persistent.
“Sure!” Stefan agreed. “She’s big stuff because she has a job in the House-of-Wonders-That-Stands-in-Water, and speaks freely to the visitors from the cloud rafts. I suppose,” he conceded, “that gives her some kind of rank, or status, that places her a notch above her fellow weed munchers.”
A few such carefully chosen comments were usually sufficient to send the behaviorists on their contemplative way, muttering to themselves. One nice thing about Stefan’s assistant, as far as Morey was concerned, was that the native never questioned her status. She accepted payment in trade goods, never asked for a change in the amount or kind of remuneration, worked silently and steadily, and was a real help in communicating the wants of the human traders to the indigenes who arrived to partake of the marvels to be had at the station. She slept in an old concentrate barrel Perv had welded to one of the balumina stilts, just above the waterline. Each morning she would ooze out, drop into the water to clean herself, and then slide up the ramp that had been erected to provide her kind with easy access to the station. With their strong tentacles they could easily climb a ladder, but that would not allow them to bring goods into or take them out of the Outpost. Stefan had despaired of ever seeing Belleau again. Then one day, slightly less than a month before his tour was up and he was due to be promoted off-world, suddenly she was there, having arrived without notice on the monthly shuttle. They did not exactly fall into one another’s arms—not with Customs officials and everyone else watching. But their glances met, spoke, and smiled. Certain decisions were arrived at without the use of words.
“I told you I’d come back,” she whispered to him later that morning.
“To finish your work?” He left the question hanging, too fearful to add the anxious corollary he was burning to ask.
“To do that, yes—and perhaps,” she added mischievously, “to attend to other matters.”
“I’m done here in a few weeks.” They were standing in the Outpost, its familiar overheated surroundings for once the equal and not the excess of what he was feeling inside. “The Company has offered me my choice of positions. On civilized worlds, at a higher salary. I have a lot of flexibility.”
“Hmm. That does open certain possibilities, doesn’t it? For example, I’ve taken a lectureship on Mathewson III.”
He managed to maintain an even tone. “There are two Company operations on Mathewson. Big ones.”
She nodded thoughtfully. Then she leaned forward, kissed him once, adequately, and almost ran from the room. He remained behind, dazed and relieved and overflowing with contentment.
Behind him, an odor preceded a query. “Stef-han is happy?”
His expression fell. The wondrous contentment rushed away like water through the bottom of a broken jar. Work called.
“Yes, Uluk. Stefan happy. Stefan go away soon.”
“Go away?” Crescent pupils swam within disc-like eyes. “Why Stefan go away?”
“It’s time to go,” he muttered irritably. “All sky folk eventually go from Irelis. Go back to home.” At her uncomprehending silence he added, “Back to own raft.”
She appeared to consider this. “Outpost not Stef-han’s raft?”
“No, dammit. Don’t you have something to do?”
“Yes. I forget.”
Lifting his eyes heavenward, he moved to check the duty scan for the day. But nothing, not even Allawout doltishness, could entirely mitigate the joy Belle’s arrival and greeting had engendered.
The next several weeks passed in a haze that was more a consequence of his re-establishing his relationship with Belleau than of the heavy atmosphere. They spoke of her science and his business, and how the two might complement one another on a world like Mathewson III. When it was clear that the positives outweighed the negatives, their delight was mutual. They were both very practical people.
When it was time to go, to finally leave behind Irelis and its miasmatic swamps and lugubrious atmosphere and multifarious stinks and smells, it was almost an anticlimax. Morey was there to see them both off and to wish them well, the taciturn old Company man unable to look his former employee in the face for fear of giving way to an actual smile. Pervasatha was long gone, having been promoted ahead of Stefan, but several others among the scientific and commercial community who had established friendships with the personable young trader on his way up turned out to see him and his lady off.
They were waiting for the skimmer that would ferry them out to the distant shuttle site, an artificial island built out in the middle of a voluminous lake, when it occurred to Stefan that something was missing. A certain stench.…
“Funny,” he mused aloud, “I thought she’d come to say good-bye.”
“‘She?’” Belleau’s querulous tone mimicked one he himself had used some time ago.
“My indigenous assistant. An Allawout nominated Uluk. You met her. Or at least, you encountered her.”
“Oh yes, of course. I only saw her a couple of times. She was usually working in the rear storeroom whenever I came into the Outpost.”
He found himself searching the station’s walkways, then the lethargic muck beneath. “I thought she’d be here.” He shrugged. “Oh well. No matter. She probably forgot.” Turning back to Belleau, he smiled lovingly. “After a year here I don’t know how I’ll cope with a normal, Earth-type climate.”
“I give you about two days to become fully acclimated,” she replied teasingly.
Henderson came huffing and puffing down the walkway. Reaching out, the panting behaviorist caught his breath as he shook first the trader’s hand, then Belleau’s. “Wanted to wish luck to you both. I’m sure you won’t need it.”
Stefan nodded his thanks. “Say, you haven’t by any chance seen Uluk around today?”
“Your indigene assistant?” Henderson’s expression fell. “Oh. I thought you knew. They found her yesterday, about half a kilometer from the station. On Islet Twelve. Dead. Self-inflicted killing wound, the biologists tell me. Sorry.”
Something very strange congealed in the trader’s gut. But it went away quickly. “That’s too bad. I wonder what happened.”
Henderson cast a quick glance in Belleau’s direction before replying. She was a fellow scientist, after all, and the incident was an interesting comment on indigenous behavioral patterns.
“You really didn’t know, did you? No, you wouldn’t, being always focused on commerce, and trade balances, and the like. The Allawout’s focus is on extended family groupings, or clans. Alpha males and females, Beta juniors, and so on. Didn’t you ever notice that Uluk was never seen interacting with a family grouping?”
Stefan shrugged indifferently. “You’re right. I never thought about it. She lived alone at the station. That was her choice. Morey, myself, everyone else—we all thought that was her choice.”
“Oh, it was, it was,” Henderson hastened to assure him. “I spoke to her several times, you know. My work.” He added almost apologetically. “You didn’t know that she was focused on you?”
The trader eyed the behaviorist uncertainly. “On me? Why would I ever notice something like that?”
Belleau’s response was more understanding. “Are you saying that this Uluk individual chose to imprint on Stefan in lieu of a normal Allawout extended family grouping?”
“The two of them worked together. Almost every day.” Henderson looked contrite. “I thought surely you would have sensed something, Stefan, or I would have mentioned something about it to you. It makes for a very interesting case history. In the absence of any other extended family members, it’s not uncommon for the Allawout to terminate themselves instead of attempting to impose themselves on another family or clan.”
“C’mon, Tom!” Even as he remonstrated with the behaviorist, Stefan found himself scanning the vegetation of the distant, fetid swampland. He remembered how Uluk had hovered about him, lingering in his vicinity even when work was done; watching him operate the projector and the viewers; asking questions to which he was sure she already knew the answers. How she was always there waiting for him in the mornings, and leaving reluctantly when it was time to retire to her barrel.
“It’s not unprecedented.” The behaviorist was eying his departing acquaintance regretfully. “The Allawout don’t show physical affection. It would hardly have been appropriate in this instance anyway.”
“You mean,” Belleau ventured, “what happened was akin to a dog pining away for its master?”
“Well, hardly.” Henderson drew himself up slightly. “The Allawout may be a little slow on the uptake, but they’re far from unaware.” He turned back to the now silent, staring trader. “It’s not your fault, you know. Happens all the time with these clans. Self-termination is a well-documented means of controlling the population and maintaining the available food supply.”
“Oh, I know.” Stefan seemed to shake himself. “It’s too bad. She was nice enough—except for the smell. I can’t help it if she was somehow attracted to one of the sky people. To me.” The oddest sensation was spreading through him. It made him angry, but try as he might, he found he could not suppress it.
“‘Attracted?’” Henderson peered at him a little harder. “You really didn’t notice anything, did you? Uluk wasn’t attracted to you. We spoke about many such things, and I remember quite clearly that she told me once she thought you were the ugliest living thing she had ever set eyes upon. That’s why she stayed at the Outpost so long, and close to you.” Wiping his eyes, the behaviorist blinked back the unforgiving rays of the setting violet sun.
“She felt sorry for you.”