Homeward by Night

1.

Some hours later, Clay and Rachel were accelerating out of the Alpha Centauri system. Their data logs were already ahead of them en route to Bluehorse.

“So what were you talking about, last night?” Rachel asked, floating beside Clay naked in their joined fighters. “With Court? Was she coming on to you or something?”

“I don’t know,” said Clay. “No, really. I don’t know. If she was, it was a waste of time.”

“I would hope so.”

“And you and young Burton were getting on pretty well.”

“Oh, Clay Gilbert. You cannot just put two things next to each other and—!”

“Rachel,” said Clay. He pulled back everything he was about to say. He took a breath. “It’s just weird. The life we live is weird enough, I mean, she said, I really will never see her or any of them again. But then losing Earth. It makes you wonder if humanity has a chance. And obviously she wonders, I mean, the Centauri people all have to wonder, if they’re not going to get wiped out by the next alien who shows up. I don’t think people at Bluehorse are any more secure than these people really. It’s hard. It’s really hard being a small colony in a big galaxy.” She was staring him in the eye. He shook his head. “Now apply that thinking to the entire human species.”

“So the subject was how likely Humans are to survive?”

“Uh, no, I wouldn’t say that. Honestly, Rachel, I don’t know what she thought I was going to tell her. You’ll be fine, you’ll all live forever?” He sighed.

Rachel gazed at him, distantly at a range of five centimeters. Naked, their legs touching, she put a hand to his shoulder and squeezed. “Clay,” she said.

“So what,” he asked, “do you think our chances really are? What is the probability that Humans will be alive a thousand years from now?”

“Okay,” said Rachel. “Let me see. On the one hand, Humans are known survivors. On the other hand, oh, somewhere around, what is that, 1% of 1% of our entire species survived the attack on Earth. We had two hundred million, and even that was down from ten billion. But now we have, oh, forty thousand? Not counting what might be at Bluehorse. And we’re not exactly in a defensible mode. I mean, 18,000 here, 15,000 there, something at Tau Ceti, and maybe—maybe!—a million at Bluehorse. Let’s not pretend here. Bluehorse may have been destroyed. The Primoids might have, and the Ngugma might have, and someone we don’t even know about might have. The Solar System’s population is down to the 1300 at Mathilde, and apparently all our colonies, what, five colonies if you count something or other at Tau Ceti? All of them but Bluehorse, knock wood, are struggling. Still, I have to give us the nod. 99.99% is not good enough. Sorry, Ngugma. I used to weed my aunt and uncle’s garden when I was like five, eight. You get 99% of the weeds, they come back.”

“I did that too, as a kid,” said Clay. “You get 100% and they come back.”

“Well, they’re blowing in from outside the garden. Like we could blow back in from outside the Solar System. That’s really possible, right? I mean, get back to Earth after a hundred years, there’s already no chance of infection, by then it’ll all be washed clean. We could totally resettle.”

They flew along, side by side, Rachel’s naked right side against Clay’s naked left side, thinking their own thoughts. Presently Clay said, “Or, we could be the last two Humans.”

She smiled at him. “That’s kinda romantic.”

“I guess it is,” he said. He gave her leg a feel, then sighed. “It’s just, you know, I think of the platinum disk people, whatever they were. I mean, the mouthholes abide, right? But nothing else seems to. The Ngugma, the Primoids, they don’t seem any more permanent that we are.”

“Well, what matters is, we’re a going concern right now. We’re still breathing.”

“That’s something, anyway,” said Clay. “But don’t you wonder sometimes what the average life expectancy of a species is? A sentient, space-faring species? I give us ten thousand years at the upper end. Maybe five hundred at the lower end.”

“Oh, that’s not depressing,” said Rachel. “Our five hundred years are about up. Wait, what year is this supposedly? 2588 or something?”

“2586, when we were at Alpha C.”

“Yeah. We first space-fared about 1960, 1970.” She glared at the screen. “So, great. Thanks.”

“Look,” said Clay. “I admit I have no data. I admit it’s not the happiest subject ever. But I think it’s true, I think it’s really hard to last as a civilization. There’s just too many things.”

“But the mouthholes survive,” said Rachel. “Because they’re adaptable, simple, and just not all that caught up in how frickin’ brilliant they are. Unlike, say, us. What do you say about the Ngugma? Are they survivors?”

“I don’t know. They seem sturdy enough, they certainly think big. But doesn’t there seem something desperate about them? How they burn through all this metal? They’re very resource-intensive.”

They flew along for a while, accelerating by a further hundred or two hundred kilometers per second. “So Clay.”

“Yes, Rache?”

“I’m just curious. While you’re prognosticating.”

“Okay.”

“What do you think Alpha C’s chances are? Or Mathilde? Or 581?”

“Or Bluehorse?”

She got a look on her face, then said, “No, let’s leave them off the table for now.”

“Fair enough,” said Clay. “Rank them?”

“Yes. Rank them.”

“Oh, let’s say, Alpha C, then 581, then Mathilde. I think the Centaurians have it together. They had real problems from the start but they’ve made it work, and they have no, and I emphasize this because I think it’s a real advantage, they have no resource base in the system worth plundering.”

“Ha. Well,” said Rachel, “that’s actually very astute. Um, Clay. What did Commander Court exactly say to you? You seemed kind of—discombobulated. She didn’t, you know, kiss you or–?”

“No, she did not,” he said, which was true, though Clay wasn’t sure how close Court had gotten to—or what he would have done. He went ahead and sighed. “She was unburdening herself. Nothing happened. I wouldn’t, honestly.”

Rachel smiled. “Fair enough, hunkalicious.” She kissed him. “It’s just, I know how handsome and great you are.”

“I know how gorgeous and perfect you are, Rachel. I think about it all the time.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that.” He rolled his eyes. She said, “It’s ironic, all us colony projects, we all looked for places with lots of metals, lots of resources, and the Centaur Program was the only one that had no real choice where it was going, had to settle where it first went, and they’re the one we think most likely to make it. Granted, they have a cryo section full of 200-year-old corpses, but I guess they can regard it as historical or something. Alpha C still has a sort of gumption you don’t see elsewhere. I mean, I could argue for 581, they have some arable land even if they’re not capable of using it, but I didn’t think much of them.”

“No, me either. Though I do think they’re likely to make it. But sad to say, I just think Mathilde is in too much danger, there’s just too high a probability that they’ll get found and blasted. I think 581 can sort of muddle through.”

“If the Ngugma want to mine there,” said Rachel, “those feckless yahoos are toast, you know that. Anyway, I’m rooting for Mathilde to outlast the mining operation. Maybe they can then move back to Earth, like someone said.”

“Oh, I’m rooting for them too,” said Clay. “Totally. Do you think there’s anything we can do to help? Help the Mathildeans and the Centaurians to work together? Maybe even with the, uh, 581eans or whatever?”

“Well,” said Rachel, “considering it’ll be 160 years at the earliest before we’re back at good ol’ Mother Earth, I think the most we can hope for is that we encourage whoever we find at Gliese 667 to check them out. Maybe they can share patrols or something. Gosh knows they need to share technology.” They cruised along another two hundred thousand kilometers. She smiled at him and said, “But we’ll soon see what 667 is all about. Want to make a prediction?”

Clay laughed. “No, no,” he said, “considering that I have yet to see what I expected to see at any system we’ve ever arrived at. What do you predict?”

She turned to face him, and her look made him turn to face her. “I can’t predict what we’ll see when we get to 667,” she said, running the backs of her fingers down his chest. “I can totally predict what’s going to happen in the next hour or two inside these two fighters.”

And then in their joined fighters, Rachel and Clay accelerated to within a few zeros and a one of light speed. They played Set and chess, they simulated, they slept and made love and slept and talked and made love. And they dreamt. And whatever Rachel dreamt, she didn’t tell it to Clay, who only noticed her whimpering twice in sleep. And whatever Clay dreamt, one of his dreams was of riding some sort of horse with Rachel, riding over the hills. And then he dreamt of making love, but the woman who was undressing for him, undressing him, was Court.

And so their unpredictable dreams and their predictable light speed lives spun out, and a week and a half later, in their biological chronologies, they were lying in each other’s arms gazing at the unpredictable nature of the situation at Gliese 667.

2.

The first thing to know about Gliese 667 is that it has three stars, imaginatively named A, B and C. A and B orbit close to each other, between the distance of Jupiter from Sol and that of Neptune, performing a gentle waltz that allows them to separate a little, then approach an embrace, then separate again, a couple too romantically entangled to bother about planetary children. At a distance of 34 billion kilometers, around six times as far out as Pluto from Sol, the red dwarf Gliese 667C orbits the other two, a lonely single mom with three kids.

The outermost of these children was undiscovered by Earthlings until the Venture mission arrived, and its deep water ice and methane ice crust did not tempt the arriving colonists. The innermost, a smaller, much hotter Neptune, its moons stripped away by the closeness of its star, likewise held no promise. The middle of the three, the one Goldilocks might have found to be just right, alone had signs of habitation.

This planet, whose original Earthling name was Gliese 667Cc, was perhaps fifty percent wider than Earth. Even from the far distance, they could tell it was warm, a good deal warmer than Earth; on the hottest days, perhaps, water would boil at the equator. It was hidden in haze, but the cloud cover did not seem completely opaque; they thought they could pick out landforms, mountain ranges or lakes and streams or just differently colored deserts. The cloud cover seemed, even from the far distance, to be turbulent. Above all that, the planet’s orbital zone was not exactly bustling with life, but it was not empty.

“Wrecked orbital stations, two,” said Clay. “Functioning orbital stations, zero.”

“One of those is not Earth origin,” said Rachel.

“What?”

“It’s Primoid. I swear it is.”

“Huh.”

They coasted in, still joined. They played Set and chess, they simulated (their simulators now contained believably spidery Ngugma fighters and chunky Ngugma cruisers), they made love, they ate and drank and smoked and slept and made love some more, they watched old videos, they argued a little, played some more, ate some more, drank and smoked some more, made love some more. They analyzed the stations. These were different in recognizable ways but seemed like they had been on about the same scale, and were about the same age, both as stations and as wrecked stations. The one from Earth was unmistakable; the other was, indeed, clearly Primoid work. It was hard to say what it was about it—the Primoids were, stylistically, much like Earthlings, even if the Ngugma seemed a lot closer to Humans linguistically and ethically. But there was no doubt in either of their minds that the station was Primoid. It orbited over a pole of the planet, while the Earth station’s battered hulk orbited over the equator.

A day later, when they were down under 10% of light speed, Clay said, “You know what’s funny about those wrecked stations?”

“One is human, one Primoid?”

“No. Okay, that’s funny. But what else? They were not destroyed by mouthholes. They were not destroyed by Ngugma. They were not destroyed, that’s what’s funny. Someone went to just enough trouble to disable them, and left it at that. Some one. They, gosh, Rache, they were both disabled by the same kind of weapons.”

“Yeah. And I’d go on and say, Primoid weapons. Wouldn’t you?”

“I guess so,” said Clay. “Anyway, it’s the obvious conclusion. It’s not Ngugma work, the Ngugma would have had no difficulty grinding both stations to powder. The mouthholes would have—well, they would have left obvious mouthhole marks.” He shuddered.

“You’re thinking of that one,” said Rachel. “That one we came face to face with.”

“Yeah, I had the most interesting nightmares about that,” said Clay. “Now you know what else is interesting?”

“Yeah. That’s a Primoid station, and it was disabled by Primoids.”

“That’s interesting, isn’t it?” said Clay. “So what’s the plan?”

“Well,” said Rachel, “are you up for separating? Not immediately, but maybe in an hour or two? Go fly around and figure out what’s on the planet?”

“You think there may be someone or something on the planet?”

“I do, actually. Ask me why I think so.”

“Well,” said Clay, “would it be anything to do with the structures I’m picking out near the North Pole?”

“I’m glad you see them too,” said Rachel. “I was worried it was just me and my paranoia.” They coasted some more. “Frickin’ Primoids on the planet,” said Rachel. “No Humans, nope, nothing on that, of course, but we definitely have an extant Primoid colony here.”

3.

The distant beacons of 667 A and B gleamed like brighter versions of Venus in the indigo sky, and the much nearer red orb of C spread larger than the Sun from Earth, if dimmer. The two Ghosts, now separated by ten meters of vacuum, slowed into the neighborhood of C and took up the same orbit as the middle planet, the one that would have been preferred by a spacefaring Goldilocks. They began to examine it carefully.

“No water to speak of,” said Clay. “No life on the surface, well, not enough to see from up here. Well, no locally evolved life.”

“We couldn’t see the algae in Algaeville from space either,” said Rachel.

“No, we didn’t find the algae till we were standing on it. I remember I was evading your questions about my relationship with Vera, and I stuck my probe in and there it was.”

“You told me you weren’t evading my questions.”

“I wasn’t very successful,” said Clay.

“Well, of course not, you’re a guy and I’m a girl. So should we land and you let me needle you about the relationship you’re in now?”

“Oh, you can help me figure that one out. Sometimes I really wonder what’s going on in her pretty little head, but all she has to do is smile at me that way and I do what she says.”

“Then what’s to figure out?”

They kept on bantering, in among chess and Set, as they began to catch up to the planet in its private elliptical race course. “We’re up to three little moons,” said Clay.

“Well,” said Rachel, “they’re not very large. The largest is two kilometers long. It could almost fit inside the Canada. Anything interesting about them?”

“No,” said Clay. “They’re icy rock, and not much for metals. The whole system is low on metals, it must be a very old star system. It missed out on a generation or two of stellar death and rebirth. On the other hand, none of these have the same signatures as the planet, so I guess they’re captured asteroids.”

“Not surprising,” said Rachel. “Three stars makes for a lot of turbulence, the asteroids must get kicked around a good bit, there’d be lots of chances for asteroid capture.”

“Roger that,” said Clay. “I think there may be groundwater, by the way, at least at the north pole. So the Primoid colony probably has well access. No ice or anything, but I have a definite on water erosion patterns, I bet it’s gone from the surface but it’s still there on top of bedrock.”

“I get that. Check the spectra on the surface soil there, I’m looking at about 85 degrees north, that patch of open dunes. Got crystals, I think that’s aragonite, or something like it. Definitely was water on the surface once. Listen to us. Space jockeys.”

“Doesn’t it feel weird to you? That somehow we’re experts on star systems? I was Freight Shuttle Guy. I knew how to land on the Moon, which is not exactly challenging when you get down to it. What were you?”

“I tried med school,” said Rachel. “Didn’t I ever tell you? After I broke up with Draco Malfoy, I dropped out, and I thought I’d take the pilot tests to get into pilot school and do what you did.”

“You killed those tests, I bet.”

“Oh yeah. I got a call from Su Park herself. Ah, the days.”

“You realize, my dear Rachel, that you and I know more about space than anyone who is not part of Alpha or Beta or possibly Gamma Wings.”

“Or the Tasmania crew. Don’t underestimate ol’ Alfred Kalkar.” They flew on for a minute, the planet slowly growing into disk-ness before them. “So. Game of—?” She stopped.

“Yeah?”

“Clay. Do you pick anything up out, oh, heading 172, elevation 20 degrees?”

He checked. He checked again. “Oh man,” he said. “Oh, that would be yes.”

4.

Back there, almost directly behind them, ships were appearing: one, and another, and then a third. They seemed to come from the vicinity of the outer planet of 667C. The planet was co-orbital with a misty cloud of particles, which may or may not once have been a moon or a comet or another very small planet: possibly the cloud hid a very small planet, and possibly that was where the three ships came from. There wasn’t much doubt who was inside them.

“Frickin’ Primoids,” said Rachel.

“The question is, are they good Primoids or bad Primoids?” asked Clay.

“The question is, do they see us or not?” Rachel replied. “All things considered, we’re better off not being seen than being seen. I’m setting a course that should take us into the planet’s sunny side and then down, and we’ll pick a landing spot when we know more.”

Clay waited patiently, watching the Primoid cruisers—that was what they were, all right—and watching the planet grow before them. He was alternating attention between the little Primoid fleet and the little Primoid base near the North Pole: it wasn’t exactly hidden, but it certainly looked defensible. There were things like radar dishes, and there were a couple of big weapons. The general effect was like the Primoid rebel base in the Corsica system, but possibly larger. The new navigation came through, and he approved it without thinking about it. After a minute, he said, “Rachel.”

“Clay.”

“So I get that those cruisers or whatever they are might be friends or might be enemies, and either way we’re safe being out of sight. But what about the Primoids on the planet? How do we know they’re better than the ones in space? Are we going to hide from them both?”

“We don’t know who’s good or bad,” said Rachel, “but if they were the same, why would the ones on the ground be hunkered down like they are? And if they’re different, then which one would you guess are rebels, the ones hunkered down on the ground or the ones in space who suddenly appear when we’re in the system?”

“Okay. I’m with you. But you do remember that even the rebels shot at you back on Corsica.”

“Yes, Clay, I do remember that.”

“And you do notice a distinct lack of Humans on this planet.”

“I do notice that, yeah.”

“And you have a plan.”

“Yes, Clay, I have a plan. Would you mind watching those ships while I scope out the surface?”

So they continued to catch up on the planet, and presently the navigation was taking them to the left, to pass over the sunny side. The high deserts glowed orange in the light of the star, which was close but dim through a very patchy cloud cover. There wasn’t much for geological landmarks. There were no seas, volcanism seemed very muted, and the atmosphere seemed to be in constant motion, washing the sand and dust around and filling in any rifts or craters that the years in their billions might have accumulated. Toward the poles, the land appeared to rise in a series of rugged highlands lined with hundred-meter cliffs. Above sixty degrees north, groundwater appeared, in the form of short creeks and transient ponds.

“There,” said Clay so suddenly that even he was surprised.

“What?” Then they were both looking at it, and all she could say was, “Oh my goddess.”

5.

Ten minutes later, they had dropped below the cloud level and come up over a rutted highland at about seventy degrees north. Rachel’s nav program had run its course, and now she was following Clay’s lead. He took them left and they dropped into one of the rut-like cracks, a hundred meters deep and a hundred wide. The walls were rugged: the crust of the planet had cracked under pressure of expansion from below. The floor was dunes of sand.

They dropped speed till they were creeping along at a hundred meters per second. Clay led Rachel around a crooked curve, and then they pulled right, came to a stop, and dropped to the sandy floor. Their hatches popped and they hopped out and they stood before a ruin of human technology.

At first glance, it looked like a giants’ garbage pile, with a thin cover of sand.

“It’s just where Mathilde said it would be,” said Rachel. They walked forward. “Colony ships were here, three of them. Over there, the bubbles of the colony. Over here,” she said, and stopped talking as they kept walking. They stopped along the brink of a shallow canyon. It was not a natural feature.

“That would be their underground base,” said Clay. “They must have had quite the place, huh?”

“Guess what,” said Rachel. “Not underground anymore.”

For several hours, Rachel and Clay canvassed the ruins. The ships had been wrecked on the ground: there was no sign that anyone had attempted to launch them. There were plenty of bodies, hundreds of them, but they had deteriorated significantly in the hot, thick atmosphere and the eddying sandy winds. “It’s been years,” said Clay. “Hard to say how long, there’s not much biota here to judge by. But it’s clearly been years.”

“I’m going with decades,” said Rachel.

They wandered up what would have been the central hall of one of the ships, and then they were out in the open. There was some sort of destroyed gun emplacement, and there were five vac suited corpses, three of them with big defunct weapons of their own. And there was more.

“It’s a Primoid,” said Clay.

“It’s two,” said Rachel. “Three.” They stood among the dead, human and Primoid. They looked around and up at the sky. “Do you suppose these were part of the landing party?”

Clay thought a little. “You know,” he said, “I’m going to say these were not the attackers. Remember the Primoid rebels at Corsica? They buried their dead, even the ones who had come to attack them. We brought them the bodies and they buried them.”

They stood there looking at the remains. The Primoids had been wearing their partial vac suits, but these were ripped apart by beam weapon fire. The blobby orange bodies were deflated, and many of the stick limbs were broken. But they were Primoids.

“But they’re people,” he said. “They were our people.”

“What?”

“They were fighting side by side with our guys,” said Clay. “Look at the layout. None of these shot each other. They were all hit with the same kind of weapon, and it was fired from above, look at where they’re hit, and the rubble pattern around them. They were attacked from space. If they were attacked by Primoids, it was Primoids in space, and there were other Primoids on the ground who got killed. I suppose they didn’t have a chance, but they were here, they were trying to help.”

Rachel picked up one of the Primoids’ weapons. It was clearly an energy weapon of some sort, a phaser indeed, though it was also inoperably dirty and probably had a dead battery. She hefted it, aimed it, put it respectfully back among the arms of its putative owner, and picked up one of the Humans’ weapons. “Ha,” she said. “It’s a mech laser. Our guys were fighting with souped up mechanical lasers.”

“Just like us,” said Clay. “So what does it say that the attackers didn’t even take the defenders’ weapons? Look, there’s a revolver. Someone here had a frickin’ revolver.”

“To shoot at the spaceships with,” said Rachel. “Clay, the Primoids still have a base here. They didn’t lose that.”

“Nope. Either they lost and it was taken over by the invaders, or they held it, but in either case, at some point, they came out of their fortified base to help us defend our colony.”

“I tend to think,” said Rachel, “they’re like really cautious, really defensive. But they came out to fight. They did. They came out to fight for our people.”

They stood looking around. They found a few more Primoids, including three dead in a little group—with four Humans, all seven dead from a blast next to them, all seven with weapons.

Presently the two pilots moved on, over to the fallen cavern. Down there were more bodies, also desiccated and abraded almost beyond recognition as bodies. Those were all Humans, and their animals, and some of them were children. There were dogs, a cat. Clay and Rachel stood there for some time, their heads bowed. Finally Rachel took out her sensor and did a few scans. Clay did the same. They looked at each other.

“Want to go down there?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “that’s a no.” They looked out over it all. She said, “There’s no one alive. No one. God damn it.”

“Colony like this,” said Clay, “it’s so fragile. The N’s had to do something really clever to wipe out Humans on Earth. Here, the Primoids didn’t have to work that hard. I bet they didn’t even send down a landing party. Just death from space.”

They both looked up at the sky. Ochre clouds were flying by in the hot air. Beyond, they could see the white orb of a little low-flying moon.

“Let’s get airborne,” said Clay.

“Yeah, my thought exactly. Only,” she added, looking at him through their visors, “let’s not fly way up in space till we see what the situation is.”

“Are you thinking about the Primoid colony?”

“Yeah. I’m thinking about a lot of Primoid stuff.”

6.

The Primoid fleet was not in orbit, or was in a very, very high orbit. The three cruisers stood off around a million kilometers from the planet, a flight of three fighters circling them. Three more fighters were visible on patrol, one of them gingerly circling the planet at two hundred thousand kilometers.

More than that was beginning to be visible.

“Flippin’ great,” said Rachel, as they swept along over the highlands at an altitude of a few kilometers, looking up into a clear sky. “Hanging back, four more cruisers and another batch of fighters. And behind all that? Those cruisers have a mama.”

“It’s sort of one of those battlecruiser things,” said Clay. “It’s staying back a bit.”

“I bet it could bomb the shit out of the ground base.”

“Rachel,” said Clay. “It didn’t. I saw craters up around the pole, I have the pix right here, I think they did bomb the place, but it’s too well fortified. You know what that means?”

“The ground Primoids are safe from the space Primoids?”

“Yeah, and what else? The ground Primoids never got conquered. They came out and fought, and when the human colony was lost, they fell back and held their ground.”

“You sure? You sure enough to go land on their doorstep?”

“No,” said Clay. “Why don’t you send them some prime numbers?”

“I have a better one,” said Rachel. “Let’s get up there and send them a new puzzle.”

||. ||||||. ||||||||||||. 2, 6, 12, 20, 30. The message went on a line a micron wide, straight at the entry doors of the Primoid polar base. Rachel and Clay hung in space at the top of the atmosphere. “In exactly the way that bricks don’t,” Clay quoted. The Primoid scout fighter didn’t seem to pick them up just yet.

They had no response for five minutes. Then Rachel sent the same five strings of blips. After fifteen seconds, they started getting signals back: forty-two beeps. Then 56, 72, 90, 110.

“Forty-two,” said Clay. “This must be Thursday.”

“Hilarious,” said Rachel. “Huh. Who’d have thought Douglas Adams was an optimist? Well, I consider this an invitation. Wonder what they have for dinner.”

Rachel and Clay circled the North Pole, which was swathed in a swirl of cloud. The atmosphere of the planet Gliese 667Cc was hot and thick and active, but also lacking in moisture, so the clouds were a mix of a little water vapor, some methane and inert gas, and a floury paste of fine dust. The Primoid scout fighter got a look at their position, but did not move to interfere. The ground Primoids were studiously silent.

“I’m 99.9% sure they’re not going to open up on us,” said Rachel. “But I’m accepting suggestions on how to proceed.”

“Okay, commander babe,” said Clay, “let’s circle one more time and land a hundred meters from their satellite dish.”

“Sounds as good as anything,” said Rachel. “Sending a course.”

They bantered a little while circling, and Rachel, on a whim, sent a burst of 210 beeps. Just as the two fighters were coming around to land, the reply came in: a barely discernable buzz of sequential tones, which the fighter computers determined to be over two thousand beeps crammed into ten seconds. “2,310,” said Clay. “2,310 beeps. What’s 2,310?”

“Just what I wanted,” said Rachel, going into landing procedures. They settled to the sandy ground, popped hatches and climbed out. “The product of the first five prime numbers.”

“Ah,” said Clay.

“See, they know primes, and they multiply. Wonder if they use a Turing machine to do it?”

“But wouldn’t they have to know multiplication to know what a prime number is?”

“Clay,” said Rachel, “they would have to multiply to know how to build spaceships. This just tells me that they think like me. At least a little.”

“Or maybe,” said Clay, as they stood looking at the heavily fortified entrance to the underground installation, “it’s just light chit chat for number theorists.”

“Like I say,” Rachel replied. “Math major, med school, divorcee, fighter pilot, that’s me.” She stepped forward, then looked back. Clay took her hand and they went together. The ground was sand over flat rock. The wind was steady, throwing sand from the left. Given a few hours, it might do some damage to their vac suits. There were rocks, all very worn. Ahead, in a cliff formed by some sort of up-thrust or sink, steel double doors faced them, twice human height and wide enough for ten fighters to fly in side by side. As they got within ten meters, the left door swung open. Out came three Primoids.

They were in greyish-brown vac suits, and clear bubble helmets covered their sensitive head-tentacles, which numbered over a dozen; they had nothing else in the way of head. Their orange blobby bodies were completely inside their suits, but their stick arms and stick legs emerged uncovered: Primoid biology had never completely committed to having an exoskeleton. They were quite tall, maybe twice Rachel’s height: the effect was not especially menacing, more like being in a walking grove of fruit trees. Each one carried a beam weapon in one of its pincers, but they weren’t aiming them. The tentacles were waving like crazy, and some of them were lighting up and changing colors.

Clay and Rachel came to a stop two meters from the three Primoids. The five faced each other, at a loss. Rachel held up a hand, then bent and drew in the sand:

||

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Then she pointed at herself and Clay, then at the Primoids. They bent, a little, forward as if bowing, and then, in unison, left and right twice. Then forward and back a few times, as if they were laughing with gusto.

Rachel held out her hands and then spread them, in the universal human gesture of “So?” But the Primoids had no obvious gesture of welcome. Instead, after some dithering, the one in the middle, and then the others, turned and went back in through the door. The last one stopped in the door and aimed its tentacles—three of them were clearly optical—at Clay and Rachel. The Humans shrugged, smiled and followed.

7.

There ensued a most peculiar several days for Rachel Andros and Clay Gilbert.

The Primoids were excellent hosts, in a certain sense. They ate food that Clay and Rachel could eat: a bland dry wafer that appeared to meet their needs for the most part and suffered in comparison to the bland dry wafers their own vac suits produced, along with a water that was as pure as any water they had ever known. They let the Humans set up their fighters as a double bed in a side chamber off the central gallery, which ran for kilometers back into the highland from a sort of garage or vehicle hall just inside the airlock. The vehicles they could see were a dozen big Primoid fighters, four eight-wheeled all-terrain transports the size of school buses, and a couple of what seemed to be fork lifts.

The Primoids were silent, but they were not reticent. They had a lot to discuss with their guests: at this point, it seemed like both races’ entire histories ought to be exchanged in the name of forging a better alliance, something the local Primoids seemed very interested in. They wanted to hold meetings with the two Humans more or less nonstop, but they were sensitive to their guests’ need for sleep.

The Primoids could not talk. Their version of spontaneous communication involved the colors and lights at the end of some of the tentacles on top of their bodies. They were not made to gesture in any way like the way Humans could gesture; on the other hand, Primoids could gesture in all sorts of ways, with the fifteen assorted tentacles where their heads would have been, with the pincers on their arms, and by bowing and swaying. Of all the things the two species did to communicate directly, to express an idea symbolically in sound or action, the only one they seemed to have in common was that both species nodded to say yes, the Humans by moving just their heads, the Primoids by bowing their entire bodies.

Over the course of hours, Clay found himself every five or ten minutes waking up to the realization that he and Rachel were in fact surrounded by aliens. The Primoids were big, taller than a normal-height human, and wide around the middle. They clattered a bit when they walked, and their only sound signal was their habit of snapping their little pincers when they were excited. Clay kept thinking of the aliens of Lovecraft, especially the barrel-shaped ones with five-fold symmetry that had built a lovely metropolis in downtown Antarctica. “Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!” Or, er, people. Clay kept thinking of his cat back home in Bangor, whose ability to communicate with Humans had been about like that of the Primoids. They were like cats in another way: they didn’t smell like anything. The Primoids evidently had quite strong chemical senses, as cats do, and kept their own odors to a minimum.

Clay had absolutely no sense of gender around them. He and Rachel began to discern rank, and figured out the simple fact that about half the primoids had badges of rank right there where their belly buttons would be if they had those: one shiny silver bar, or two, or three, and the absolute top leaders, of whom there were several, had four. Clay had the vague impression that the Primoids didn’t take rank very seriously.

The big meeting, such as it was, began in a sort of conference room, hexagonal but otherwise recognizable to two people who had been in their share of meetings. The lighting was well below sunlight level, well below the level of the bright meetings aboard the Canada; in relative dimness, the glowing ends of Primoid tentacles shone bright. It was very pretty.

Rachel and Clay brought the Ghosts into the meeting room, because they held everything the fighter pilots owned. Rachel had a bash at writing, but that led nowhere even after half an hour of charades just getting the Primoids to supply something to write on. She could draw pictures, however, and eventually got the Primoids to recognize themselves as she drew them; in response, several Primoids used charcoal on a table to draw for Rachel just what she looked like to them. She looked like a tube that split into two tubes halfway down, with two fat arms and hands with lots of fingers, and with a round blob of head topped by a tangle of fine tentacle hair.

But as soon as Clay thought to project video on the wall, the whole affair took on a new feel. Conversation came in the form of an exchange of footage. When the conference room filled up with Primoids, the Primoids moved the whole bash out to the big entry hall, and there, while dozens of the aliens organized their video replies, hundreds gathered just to gawk with their optical tentacles at the pinkish aliens in their grey-black vac suits, and gesticulate to one another about what the visitors were showing them.

What Clay and Rachel showed them first were scenes from the Bluehorse colony; the Primoids replied with two dimensional video of one of their home planets, with big and little Primoids working or playing (hard to say which) under a lovely orange sun. Clay showed video of him and Rachel shooting mouthholes; the Primoids showed Primoids shooting mouthholes. Rachel showed scenes from the difficult development of the alliance with the Primoid rebels of Corsica, who had shot at Rachel and Natasha and later helped Alpha Wing defeat an incoming Primoid fleet. The orange blobby guys conferred, wagging their tentacles, and then showed what turned into over an hour of the attack from the sky on the human colony here on 667Cc.

What was emotional to the Primoids was also emotional to the Humans, but the emotions weren’t quite the same. They met as if each species was digging a tunnel from opposite sides of a mountain, not quite lined up and not quite the same gauge, but they met. First, there were three minutes on the Primoids arriving here, possibly hundreds or thousands of years ago, and building a small colony. Then, there was an attack from space, rather recently, fended off with some difficulty by those on the ground, who took prisoners or converted some of the attackers: Primoids from the central “empire” or whatever it was. The local Primoids built spacecraft, fighters and cruisers and a sort of armored freighter, and put that satellite in orbit.

Then, perhaps months, perhaps hundreds of years later, a sizeable flotilla arrived from another direction. They were three large colony ships, two escort spacecraft of medium size, and eight explorer pods, verily a sort of Ghost 101. It was the Venture Project, and this was, apparently, the true First Contact with the Primoids. And it went well. No one brought pumpkin pie or maize; in fact, the Primoids fired warning shots, but they were obviously just warning shots. Cautiously, incrementally, the two colonies made overtures, and presently they were helping each other as much as they could considering they had no idea how to communicate.

Contact continued, and contact occurred between the local Primoids and some from Away: a cruiser and nine fighters showed up, hailed the ground colony, and landed. Primoid hugs went around. Then the visitors left, off to continue the fight against the Empire. But the next Primoids to show up were the Empire.

They had essentially the same fleet that Clay and Rachel had helped defeat at Bluehorse all those years ago. Clay was as confused as one might expect about the chronology: had Venture on 667 lasted long enough to overlap Bluehorse? Considering it would take light something like half a century to travel from one to the other, could one even say? But at Gliese 667, this fleet met nothing capable of resisting. The Ghost 101s went down all too quickly; the local Primoids lost most of their fighters and all their cruisers, and dropped down to defend the planet. They hunkered. But the big battleship didn’t come for them. Instead, it placed itself hanging in the high airs directly over the human colony, and commenced to blast.

Then there were twenty minutes of the rebels’ video from the battle, and that was confusing but horrific. Aside from people (both pink and orange) dying and things blowing up, Clay and Rachel could discern that the Primoid locals were trying to help shore up the Humans’ ground defenses. It was no good. By the end, the Primoids were back in their own underground bunker, having left a dozen Primoids, and tens of thousands of Humans, dead in the demolished human colony. The Primoids in space commenced to pound the Primoids on the ground, but now the defenders had the advantage: their base was hardened as the Humans’ colony never had been. Guerilla attacks with unmanned rockets, and the occasional sortie by the fighters, stung the attackers again and again, and finally, when they tried to mount a landing attack, they were decisively turned back. The final scene showed local Primoids making video of the remains of hundreds of the invaders. A burial party followed the documentary film makers.

But they never buried the dead at the human colony. This could not be explained, as such, but Clay assumed they had a sort of religious feeling about the site, and never returned to it.

“Sister Shia Tang was wrong again,” said Clay to Rachel when the video ended abruptly.

“She was wrong about a lot of things,” said Rachel. “Guess what. Aliens in space. And it matters that you fortify.”

“And you can find friends,” said Clay. He looked at the Primoids nearest them. Clay and Rachel were leaning on a wall—no chairs in Primoid World. “Is it our turn?”

Several of the Primoids in front of them began bowing. Yes. It’s your turn.

Clay looked at Rachel. She leaned into her fighter and poked and slid, and on the wall opposite, there was video she had copied from the Mathilde memory banks of the Ngugma arriving at Earth the first time, and of the big furry brown poly-pods speaking words of peace in English. This time the Primoids interrupted. Before Rachel’s video went much further, the Primoids were projecting, on the wall next to it, news video from Earth.

There was no sound—the Primoids didn’t have much use for sound—but the scenery said it all. The strange shower from space. Mars base being neatly bombed to dust. People sickening and dying, including leaders appearing to call for calm, and news readers apparently there to broadcast the news that the disease was spreading. There were several minutes of just the dying and the dead in the streets of cities, in the lanes of the countryside. It seemed like hours.

Again, abruptly, the wall went blank. The pictures simply stopped, and everyone was looking at one another.

Then the Primoids, first the six in front facing Clay and Rachel, then the rest, began bowing. After some of that, Clay and Rachel bowed, deep, to the amusement of their hosts. Then Rachel held up her hands and waited for the attention of the Primoids. Then she turned to her fighter and got up one more video. It was the Primoid fleet up there in space: battlecruiser, seven cruisers, assorted fighters.

They watched them appear, assemble, and move into position just beyond orbit. They watched the scout fighters scouting. They took a good look at the battlecruiser, which surely held more fighters. The video ended, and they looked at each other again, probably all of them, Primoid and human, wondering how amazing it would be if they actually all understood each other, and how in heaven they were going to be able to come together and find a way to win this time against the same enemy that had, last time, destroyed the human colony on this planet.

8.

Clay and Rachel found another hour of non-talk completely exhausting, and not especially encouraging, though their hosts were as friendly as they could possibly be. Finally, Clay and Rachel were in their fighters, in the conference room, sealed up and eating what they could get from their fighters and conversing on their private channel.

“Two cruisers,” said Rachel. “Eight fighters. A day late and a dollar short, in Primoid terms, don’t you think?”

“Because they would want three and nine, or because they’re way outnumbered?”

“Both,” said Rachel. “Clay.”

“We need to show them how we beat that fleet at Bluehorse,” said Clay. “I mean, on the subject of the little guy beating the big guy.”

“Except that those same Primoids might have got an even bigger fleet to Bluehorse since we left,” said Rachel. “Except that the Ngugma have nice big fleets full of lovely big ships and they didn’t have any trouble at all with the little guy at Earth, did they?”

“Rachel.”

“Clay, this is getting to me. This is really getting to me. Gosh darn it. What is the frippin’ point? What is the frippin’ point?”

“Um.”

“Clay. Let me be the first to say. We’re all going to frickin’ die. Everyone is going to die. That’s not even news. Everyone dies, but the worst thing? The last ones to die will be the Ngugma.”

“Rache.”

“In the final round, the championship matchup, the Primoid Empire and the Ngugma. It won’t even be close. The crowd goes wild, except there’s no crowd. No one’s left but those big brown furry buttholes. Big cheer for the winners. Except maybe there’s someone even more buttholey than them. Butthole entropy, that’s what it is. Ergh! What is the point?”

“Rachel,” said Clay, but he didn’t have anything to add.

“Clay.”

“What,” said Clay, recognizing a change of tone.

“Did you make it with Court?”

“What?” asked Clay, imagining an orgy scene in the throne room of Queen Elizabeth I.

“Court. Simple question. Did you make it with Court? Back at Alpha C?”

“Court? Oh,” and Clay laughed out loud. “No, I did not.”

“Well, did you think about it?”

“Rachel, nothing happened. This isn’t happening, we aren’t having this conversation. What about you and Burt or whatever his name was?”

“Something was going on,” said Rachel. “And don’t you pretend my having a light and rather stupid conversation with some space lugger is in any way equivalent to—ergh!”

“Rachel,” he said. “Look. Court had some things she had to get off her chest.” Poor choice of words, thought Clay, but he got away with it. “I mean, really, we’ll never see her again and—!”

“And that means it doesn’t matter? You gave her a nice shoulder to cry on and now you’re off away leaving her behind and you don’t think about her at all and that makes it okay?”

“Rachel, you are asking the wrong person as to what happened. Nothing happened. I wasn’t aware, apparently, of all the little subplots, but nothing happened. Now can we get on with planning?”

Rachel took a breath. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, I’m sorry.”

“Screw it, let’s make up,” she said.

“I’m all for that.”

So they did, and an hour later Rachel was dozing off in his arms and Clay was still trying to figure out the details of what he’d done wrong and how he could do better.