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CONTINGENCIES AND PENTI-LOPE-LOPE

with John S. Postovit

Day 93:

The ’lopes watched us from their self-imposed distance as the six of us gathered in a circle on the flat-grass around the box holding the last of the spacer ’slop. I could see them craning their necks, oddly wide and flat heads jerking, flared ears twitching, as they scrutinized our movements. And Penti-Lope-Lope’s canted amber-orange eyes were focused on my hands, my face, as I tore open my last dinner packet and pretended to enjoy it. At the best of times, the ’slop was a poor replacement for real food. This sure wasn’t the best of times. Even if I hadn’t been preoccupied, I still wouldn’t have enjoyed it. My sinus medication had long ago run out, and without my pills, I had little sense of taste.

And Nutraform (’slop’s official moniker) wasn’t much to brag about even when I could taste it. It was nothing more than a flavor-enhanced, textureless, gloppy substance with the consistency of adipocere flesh; a nutritious, amino-acid, vitamin, mineral, carbohydrate, and damn me I can’t recall what else that was just bulky enough to provide proper elimination, neutral enough not to cause heartburn, indigestion, or allergic reactions after ingestion.

Spacer swill; compatible with any and all human digestive systems, made palatable by loads of flavoring designed to fool the taste buds into thinking it was getting something real. If I ever got back to Earth, I’d start a campaign to impeach the politician who got the stuff on the official provisions list. Him and the moronic food-processing company that makes the stuff. Probably owned by the politician’s second cousin.

Well, he’s safe from me. I don’t expect I’ll ever make it back to start that campaign....

The others half closed their eyes as they moved the ’slop around in their mouths, oblivious to the watching ’lopes, savoring whatever packet they’d saved for their last meal. Their last real meal, before descending into that lonely abyss that yawned before us. I lowered my eyelids, pretending to enjoy ’slop I found as appetizing as nose drippings.

The ’lopes bunched closer, shifting from thickly muscled feet to half-squat in place, elongated torsos supported by their extended tails. They patted each other with their great hairy hands, all the while making those rumbling grunts and semi-mewls. But they came no closer to our meager supper circle. The Last Supper, as it was. If only Christ was here, to change water into wine, and those pole-fruit into bread. Made from safe, Earth-grown wheat....

Finally, Jimmie opened his eyes, and said, “We can’t avoid it, not now. That’s the last of the reserves—”

Huoy gulped down her utterly fake, perfectly bland Cambodian pork then snapped, “Not as long as the vitamins hold out. The water’s safe, so there’s no need to—”

(Beside me, Reba—paying no attention to the spoken words of her fellow esper—kept glancing at the surrounding ’lopes, an unreadable expression on her lightly freckled face. And for their part, the ’lopes likewise remained unreadable, or—at least to us incomprehensible....)

“Ever see a heart after starvation sets in?” Elizabeth asked in that mild, dreamy brogue of hers, face pale beneath burning-brown eyes. Huoy was suddenly engrossed in the crumbling soil and in the brown-to-tan-ombre spotted pebbles resting near her lotus-positioned feet, as the doctor continued, “It becomes like leather, brown leather. Not red. Not soft. Not very big.”

Elizabeth held up her fisted right hand, the skin red-gold from the light of the too-small sun above us. “The body eats itself, attacking the muscle once the fat is depleted. The heart grows hard—”

Huoy stopped shifting the dirt particles between her stubby fingers. “So?” For a second I thought she was going to throw the dirt at Elizabeth. “Either way, we’re dead. Matter of time. We know the anatomy of death by starvation.

“But once we eat this”—soil-stained fingers pointed at the fleshy tubers and foliage around us—“who knows?”

Jimmie crushed the remains of his packet against his chest, sighed deeply then replied, “Ecology here is certainly carbon-based. Right-handed sugars. Digestible at any rate. No toxins showed up in the tests I ran, least so far. Not many of the aminos we need but I can cob up whatever else is missing. At least we didn’t run up against any left-handed sugars or—”

“None of the animals have died,” Neil added, scooping up pebbles and rattling them, gourd-like, between cupped palms.

Huoy’s head whipped around so quickly I heard one of her vertebrae pop softly. “‘None of the animals have died’? My, my...oh brilliant, dear Mr. Aaron. How utterly perceptive of you.... Wait a minute, Mr. Aaron, perhaps I’ll clap for you. Now, do you remember how rats can grow immune to almost any poisons? Or cockroaches? Remember, Neil? Their physiology is not like ours.” Then Huoy’s conversation went silent, her voice taut with unvoiced argument; the others leaned slightly forward, in the unconscious way of espers, and once again I felt like a child—too young and too stupid to be included in the conversation.

Reba suddenly dropped out of silent argument and gave me a little look of sympathy. Poor esp-mute, little boy lost! She leaned closer against me, chin level with my shoulder, and gestured. “That tree over there. Me Eve, you Adam, ’kay, Scott?” She rose to her feet with a graceful motion that made my heart jump. Damn, she was beautiful!

Padding over to one of the two-meter high plants we dubbed “trees” for lack of anything else tall and tree-like on the horizon, Reba reached up and pulled one of the brownish, stick-shaped fruits off of the tree, before carrying it back to our “circle” of two.

The fruit’s peel was husk-dry, faintly pebbled with bumps a shade darker than the rest of the dappled surface. Like ’lope fur, I thought, as Reba dug into the peel with a blunt thumb. The interior was meaty, seed-laced pulp, stringy, yet glistening with juices. It smelled wonderful; a heady, musky, tart pungent aroma which made it past my painfully blocked sinuses, as if it were a sign of virtue. Scooping out some pulp with her index and middle fingers, Reba handed the rest of the fruit to me, her freckled face aglow with an impish smile. Before awareness of our absence had time to register on our crewmates, Reba softly said, “Look the other way, God,” before taking her first dripping taste.

“No, Reba!” Huoy screamed, flat face furrowing as she dashed to where we stood. Jimmie called after her, “Come back, Huoy, what other choice do we have—” but Huoy already had her hands on Reba’s cheeks, shouting; “Spit it out! Spit-it-out-now!” As Huoy tried to force open Reba’s lips, I leaned over and yanked the geologist’s forearm away, warning, “Leave her alone. You know that a biologist like her knows the risks better than anyone—unless biology is also your specialty now—”

Then Reba swallowed, stuck her tongue out at the other woman and spat, “And it’s good, Huoy. Not processed sludge in a damned pouch. It’s good. And I know the ’lopes eat it—they haven’t keeled over yet.”

Huoy stood up, hands fisted against her sides, and snapped, “Since when did you grow a tail and a spotted pelt?” before turning on her heel and running back to the ship. Watching her leave, I raised my eyes to the heavens and took my first taste of fruit. It felt cool sliding down my throat, cool and mild. Running my tongue over my teeth, I found that the fruit’s taste was piquant; a little like kiwi, yet smoother; all I could think to call it was red, that odd flavor peculiar to crimson gum drops or cheap jelly beans.

Wordlessly, I handed the husk to Neil Aaron, commander of the grounded Sagittarius IV. Solemnly he scooped out a dripping finger full of the pale orange pulp and deposited in his mouth, before passing the husk to Elizabeth. Jimmie finished the last of it, and after we’d all had a taste, we sat there, expectant, waiting for someone to keel over in agony—until the inherent ludicrousness of our situation made Reba giggle behind a hand pressed against her lips.

From their semi-hiding place in the tubers beyond our circle the ’lopes chittered, watching us with what seemed to be ’loper expectation.

Then Jimmie—clown prince of dieticians—rolled his eyes, stuck his tongue out until he could almost lick the cleft in his brown chin, and toppled over, laughing and drumming the flat grass with the heels of his booted feet. Even Elizabeth joined in the laughter, forgetting her Irish martyr act for a few minutes.

Our prolonged laughing fit scared the ’lopes; they took off en masse, kicking up billows of acrid dust with their powerful hind legs. By the time we looked in their direction, all we saw were upraised tails flailing madly, like a cat’s does when it tries to keep its balance. I recognized Penti, silly little thing, by the distinctive white daub on her tail.

Reba recognized her too. With a rare sardonic tone in her voice, she remarked, “That adolescent female’s been hanging around quite often...we must interest her.”

I knew what Reba meant by “We.” It wasn’t too long ago, just after we found our strength in the thin air of this new planet, that Reba and I had been playing Adam and Eve for real in the thicket. We’d been in there a long time, and when we finally looked around us, there was Penti watching us intently. No telling how long she’d been there. I thought it’d been funny, but Reba never saw the humor in that kind of thing.

Resting a hand on her waist, I said, “You must’ve been curious when you were a kid. Most of the ’lopes we see are young...Heidi, Baby Boy, Penti, Lucy, Mister...maybe the older ones know better, or just don’t care. Remember the autopsy you did on the one....”

“It was dead for who knows how long when Neil entered the thicket and saw it—”

“Next to the hole they’d dug for it?”

Reba’s cheeks colored deeply; I’d hit a nerve. She waited until the others drifted away from the circle, heading back for the ship, before saying, “We don’t know that they’d ‘dug’ a grave. They bury their excrement. No proof at all they’re capable of human-style burial. The size of their posterior fossa doesn’t bear it out. True, their cerebellum is fairly large, but their neuron count is way too low.” Reba’s eyes were glistening, and her breath was coming in short sharp gasps, as she concluded, “And the evidence of possible structural thought processes was minimal, at best...in other words, they can’t be intelligent enough to even want to bury their dead. Wanting would mean thinking—”

(Anger can make Reba so beautiful....)

Once more into the breech, into the breech again! Boredom led to the most pointless arguments, and boredom is something we have in ton lots. I chuckled, “What’s there to think about here? ’Sides, you’re using human physiological standards to judge alien mental abilities. I was there when you ran those samples through the ’scope. Neuron density seemed sufficient—”

“You just aren’t seeing it!” she replied with a sudden burst of fervor. “I’ve watched them, daily. They just-don’t-have-it. They haven’t displayed any skills beyond those of animals. You prove it to me that the ’lopes have even the slightest trace of intelligence!”

I love Reba when she gets flustered. “Let’s forget it,” I said, pulling her closer to me.

“Don’t patronize me, Scott Renay!” she shouted, then tore herself away from me and dashed off toward the ship. Sighing, I went over to the nearest husk-fruited tree and pulled off another brown pod, breaking it in half with a clean jerking motion (the dry rustling sound it made seemed startlingly loud) before sucking out the pulp, letting the sticky juices splatter my uniform front. When Jimmie and Elizabeth emerged from the ship, speaking aloud, I moved closer to the hidden place where the ’lopes had been grouped, staring at the deep ruts they’d left in their wake.

Behind me, Jimmie whispered, just loud enough for me to clearly hear, “Lovebirds have another fight?”

“Do ’lopes plow up dirt when they leap?” Elizabeth asked around a slurpy mouthful of fruit pulp. “Betcha I know who the fight was about—”

“What’s the matter? Never seen two redheads go head to head before?” the black-haired Irish doctor teased.

“Not ’less they’re both human.”

“Does he have any choice?”

“Well...Reba had a choice, when she asked him along,” Jimmie replied, as the two of them continued sucking pulp out of the husks the slurping sound somehow obscene; I barely heard Elizabeth’s reply over the sucking noises: “If he wasn’t here, the ’slop would’ve held out longer...not that this stuff isn’t good—”

It seems like she said something more to him, around her mouthful of food, but I just made out as if I hadn’t heard the conversation at all, as I watched the far horizon, looking for the ’lopes, and told myself, You two aren’t the only ones who wish I was somewhere else. But don’t blame me...ask the ship’s biologist why I’m here. If you even need to ask...you’re the readers, not me. You never had to say a word out loud.

Not when they were capable of thinking the entire conversation I’d just happened to overhear to each other....

No more right now, no more writing. I hear Reba knocking on the cabin door. Time to put this journal away. I think she wants to apologize....

Day 100:

It’s been long, so long; I hardly know how to use these words anymore. So long since I started this log. So much has gone on, so much. Have to pull myself out. Day 100...it’s an anniversary, isn’t it? Can’t forget...what was it?

Day 111:

I remember now.

“Ten months is just too long,” Reba had said to me, when we were still Earthside nearly seven months before the day our food ran out on the ’lope’s planet; wrapping her arms around me, she rubbed her forehead against my chest, murmuring, “Really, Scotty, I can’t face not seeing you, not being with you, for that long. The trip alone will take two months, with those jumps through hyperspace. I just don’t know how I’ll—”

“How you’ll stand it?” I asked, finishing Reba’s sentence for her, as if I were one of her kind, one of the new übermen, with a brain full of super-saturated neurons and sub-neurons, that tiny bit of extra structure that made her capable of esper communication. Angry, Reba walked away from me, and than threw herself onto the gold-flecked tweed couch near my apartment’s only decent-sized window, her freckled face strained, and her blue eyes darkened.

Reba knew why I was still wary of going; even for an esper such as her, traveling t-space was flat out terrifying. For a non-esper like me, it would be a nightmare. T-space didn’t care who you were, and it wasn’t about to change to suit the psychology of a few human travelers. It was simply a universe none of us ever grew up in. Perceptions were shifted in a subtle, disturbing way. The first travelers weren’t aware of what was happening as they spent solid months in t-space—they just didn’t know. When they came back, their minds were gone, lost in a maze of schizophrenic misperception. Then, for ever-after, they saw blues that were not blue, heard conversations that only happened in their heads, saw into places only they could see.

Espers gained a certain immunity to the effects when they had other espers along to back them—a strength in numbers, as it were, a cushion against madness. They became the explorers of this new realm. The rest of us non-espers had to be content to follow the trails they blazed in great ships where a drugged sleep hid our minds from the dangers of consciousness.

It didn’t help me that I was an astrophysicist. Not only did I have madness to fear; I knew what was waiting for me out there in t-space. Does this sound crazy now? I thought so then, and so I kept those petty fears buried. What’s the point now, what’s the point in hiding these things from myself? It’s not like anyone will ever be able to hold this diary against me.

But just to think...quantum gravity, eleven-dimensional space, black holes...these were only curious theories back in the days when man considered interstellar voyages wistful thinking. Then those same curious theories became reality, thanks to a lot of hard work and foresighted thinking; new words for mankind’s travel vocabulary came into common use—four dimensional space, graviton drives, time and space similarities, and those ubiquitous wormholes. Not that many travelers understand the inherent dangers—did frequent flyers truly understand the never-to-be-quite-overcome dangers of jet flight? Even the Challenger screw-up only put a temporary damper on NASA...

And who cared what happened to the drone crews of the test ships that made those first ship-sized incongruities caused by their engines-and flipped into a virtual void? Astrophysicists like me—I was one of the people who helped turn the theory of interstellar travel via wormholes into a reality, as part of my dissertation, in fact—cared, but we were relatively few in number, and the bulk of our work was not known to the public. All that mattered was that mankind was able to finally use wormholes as a means of getting from here to there with almost as much punctuality and accuracy (depending largely on angular velocity and correct alignment of gravitational vectors) as the airplane travel of my grandparent’s generation.

Only, in their time, the aftermath of an air disaster was something easily discovered, and dealt with, no matter how horrible the remains of the aircraft, no matter how much time it might take to discover the cause of the crash. There was pain, and suffering, but there was also the promise of healing, afterwards.

The shortsighted fools, with their secret drone ships, and “acceptable margin of loss.” If only they had known about the madness waiting for them out there.

Day 113:

Our new home had no name, and, as if in denial of the fact that it was in all probability to be our permanent home, no one bothered to suggest a name for it. Bad enough that the air was thin, high, high altitude thin, and took nearly a month to get used to. Nearly a month wasted while our bodies acclimated enough for us to venture more than ten yards away from the ship without feeling like our lungs were being crushed from within. Well, perhaps the first month wasn’t a total waste; we dug up samples of the soil, picked the available flora, and tested the water. The soil was crumbly and acidic, too much so to support earth plant life without the addition of alkaline fertilizers which just weren’t available to us. But the plant life was carbon based; right-handed sugars, and it didn’t kill the lab rats or reptiles. With boiling, the water was drinkable.

And in that first month, we saw the ’lopes. Jimmie named them; he was the crewmember who initially found them, or was found by them, whichever one chooses to believe.

“Out...out there, in...the trees...dozens...maybe, maybe more,” Jimmie had panted, as we led him into the ship after finding him lying in a gasping, sprawled heap near the hatch. The others clustered around Jimmie, heads bent toward him, shutting me out completely.

He had always struck me as over-excitable, ever since I met him. So, what if there were animals out there? Anyone with guts would have taken the time for a good observation. Disgruntled, I left the ship, walking slowly toward the dense cluster of “trees” twenty meters distant. They never noticed me leaving the ship; damned espers all wrapped up in their own heads. I walked along cautiously, hating Jimmie and Reba and all the other damned espers, feeling like the ultimate rejected too-big-to-be-graceful kid on the playground, the kid too big to even trick or treat anymore, the one shut out of every game, confidence, or clique. I approached the trees, my vision uncertain in the hazy sunset light of the bright umber Class K star which served as our new “sun.”

But ruddy light or not, after a couple of minutes it became apparent that something was moving, just beyond the outcropping of short, meaty-fleshed trees. I made out long shapes, upright forms with thinner, lashing body parts. Tails. Beasts. Skin or short fur dappled in shades of brown, dull orange, and pale tan. Smallish heads, with huge, vaguely feline ears. Light shone through the tips of those ears, turning the skin radiant. Large slanted eyes, with the hint of vertical pupils. Short arms, in proportion to the slender elongated torsos. Thick legs, short femur, with near-human knees, merging into narrow fibula-tibia sections, which met elongated tarsals. Or whatever kind of bones they actually had; that they had bones was apparent, muscles, too. Strong, thick muscles. As I stepped closer, my chest growing tight with nervous tension, I saw the ripple of muscles under their finely furred skin.

The creatures reminded me of begging cats, dancing on their stubby metatarsals. No, meercats, stretching their spindly bodies to catch every ray from the rising sun in the cold desert dawn.

Still, they lacked feline whiskers, and the shape of the arm wasn’t quite cat-like—and they had hands, not paws. Hands! Long metacarpals between carpals and the fingers—and their opposing thumbs were unmistakable.

Not animals then...but not people as I knew them, either. Their lack of clothing may have been intentional, but there was something about these creatures which suggested that even the thought of clothing was alien to them. The things seemed nervous, but only about my presence, not their own light-furred nakedness. I could see the rounded furry sex of the ones I figured to be males, and as I edged closer, peering through the trees, I made out a distinct furlessness and flatness on what had to be the females.

I think it was then that I noticed Penti, the one with the white patch on her tail. Not that she was Penti then, Jimmie didn’t get around to bestowing names on the most distinctive of them until a week or so later—two names for each, an everyday name and a fancy name, plus the name only they knew—he’d read his T. S. Eliot! In retrospect, I suppose it was strange of me to dub the white-patched female and her kind beautiful, considering that I’d just laid eyes upon them only moments earlier, and knew of no standard by which to judge their appearance. But they had an appealing grace, all of them: Pentilope (she of the white daub tail) with her fancy name of Penti-Lope-Lope, little Heidi (known to Eliot and herself as Schmighty-Heidi), and Lucy (Lucy-Goosie). The oldest of the young males became Pere (Pere Ubu). Then there was Alfy (Alf-Alfred Jarry), Mister (Mister-fister), Baby Boy, Wildcat, and Slim....

The creatures’ eyes were canted, with an almost Oriental tilt to them, spaced rather wide apart. Their irises ran from a muddy blend of greenish-tan to more orange hues. Their pupils were small in relation to their eyes; they seemed to float in bright pools of color, not unlike human eyes. That seemed the most shocking part of them, those too-human eyes as a part of a very alien species.

Then I realized that they were looking at me, their stares intense yet somehow blank, unreadable. By that time all of them were becoming agitated, leaning in to rub heads or bump long, flattened noses, all the while making a rumbling, grunting sound, talking could it be? I only half noticed them; my eyes were focused on the small daub-tailed female, as were hers on mine, like a cat and its prey, or a mongoose and a cobra. When her pack took off in a simultaneous powerful leap up and forward, she held her stare. Just long enough for me to realize that I, too, had been closely scrutinized that afternoon, as if being studied.

“I think that one likes you, the spot-tailed one—”

I hadn’t heard the others come up behind me. When Huoy spoke, I nearly screamed aloud. I think my cheek jumped; at any rate, Reba came up beside me and took my hand, saying “Sorry, Scott...didn’t realize we scared you. Jimmie calls them ’lopes. After jackalopes, something he swears really existed—” Her voice ended on a teasing note, but Jimmie cut in from behind me, “Just because they’re extinct doesn’t mean they weren’t—”

“Sure, Jimmie, tell us another—”

“No, no, it’s true—” and then they were all laughing, sharing their private joke, and after a while, I laughed too, as I watched the horizon for long loping bodies....

Day 114:

The writing is getting easier now. This is the second lucid day I’ve had in a row. Don’t know how long it will last. I’ve got to get as much written before the end comes. Before the end of consciousness drops like a heavy velvet curtain between my body and my mind....

The Sagittarius IV was a Class Five star transport/exploration craft, with a crew capacity of up to nine people, plus lab animals, soil and plant samples, the works. And there was no law against carrying one-way passengers for a single segment of a ship’s total round trip passage. Reba wasn’t even required to obtain formal permission for me to join the crew. And with Reba being Reba, she didn’t bother to tell her crewmates that I was coming along for the first part of the ride until the crew assembled for takeoff.

Oh, true, none of them openly objected to my unexpected presence, but I wasn’t blind; I saw the reflexive tensing of their neck tendons, and the quick darting eye movements which were a give away to esper communication. The commander, Neil Aaron, did feel compelled to let me in on a small fraction of the conversation; pulling me aside while the others (Reba Griffith, Elizabeth Hewson, Jimmie Beecham, and Huoy Veng) silently argued, he smiled as he told me, “We can’t stop you, Mr. Renay, but the others are only thinking of the contingencies...should something happen during the voyage. We only have long-term provisions for five—”

Reba heard him; turning on one heel, she snapped, “Oh Neil, if that’s the problem he can bring his own supply of extra ’slop. But he’s coming whether you like it or not. My guest,” she finished, in a tone of voice which brooked no further argument—verbal or esper.

Day 127:

Reba crossed her arms—

Wait, where was I? Wait, look, I need to...my God. Thirteen days have gone since I last wrote; where ever did they go?

Running through the polefruit trees, ’lopes scattering every which way, tumbling on the grass when fatigue came. ’Lopes gathering around while I slept, conserving warmth and scattering like cottonseed when I stirred. I’m here in the ship now and all that seems so far away, like someone else’s life. Got to get my bearings. Back then I wanted to run. Right now I want to write. Back to the beginning. It’s easier to remember emotions right now. I don’t think I ever finished the story of that early morning, when Reba asked me to come along on the Sagittarius....

Reba crossed her arms; while she stared at the spindly towers of Bismark beyond my fifteenth story window, she coaxed, “I could help you through it. I could lend you my strength in t-space and the drugs could do the rest...and it’s not as if you weren’t trained. You’ve jumped before—”

“Only on a two-week voyage—”

“But we won’t be in hyperspace the whole time...it’s those times in-between that will make the whole trip worth it,” she finished in a pleading voice; the sound of her voice brought the memory of her voice, her touch, her smell, to my mind, my fingertips, to my tongue. Shyly, she turned her head my way, adding, “And you’ll have to make the trip anyhow, Scotty...I checked your assignment before I came here. Your new job is within the same solar system; you’ll be taking the same route as the Sagittarius for a month. Through hyperspace.

Reba had me there; no doubt she’d already learned that I had to report to my job at the Escondido Linear Accelerator on Harcourt’s planet within six months; if I accepted her invitation to ride along on the Sagittarius, I’d shave a few weeks off my Earthside time, but also finish my workshop on elementary particles and their interactions a couple of weeks early. Which meant I’d have plenty of time on my hands, extra time to do the job at my pace, not that of my boss....

But even before I could tell Reba my answer, she began crooking her right index finger at me, inviting me to sit with her, while unfastening her tunic top with the other hand....

Day 129:

I think I’m doing better. I only lost one day this spell, and I was still dimly aware. The blackouts seem to go in cycles, a converging series of alternate mad and lucid spells. I think the convergence is the most reassuring thing of all. Yesterday’s spell of madness was nothing like the fifty-seven days that passed without knowing between that day we ran out of food, and the day I began this log a second time.

As it turned out, I did go along, as Reba’s guest, but I never did get around to faxing an order for a month’s supply of Nurtaform to my bosses at the Escondido Linear Accelerator; not that there wasn’t the time to do so, but Reba insisted on hurrying me onto the ship before the others settled in, as if my long-term presence prior to lift-off would assure me future acceptance during my ride on the government-sponsored trip. At least that’s what I thought, initially; but after we’d been through the first of our hyperjumps; I got to wondering if Reba didn’t want me along for the thrill of it. She could stay in esper contact with her crewmates; mentally holding everyone’s hand—while she had me wrapped up in her, surrounded by her enveloping soft body. Like doing something dirty under the table during a formal, tablecloths and best-china luncheon. A typical Reba trick, but God help me, I loved it. Even though I had to rely on my training to prevent my mind from crumbling under the weight of the crushing claustrophobia that ensued during a nightmare run through a wormhole, everything shifting from blue to red as we thumbed our noses at Einstein and his contemporaries.

And when we weren’t making jumps (too many of them spaced too close together put a strain on the ship), Reba spent every available free moment with me, telling me about the mission—the ship would stop off at five different planets, in a total of three systems, studying each of the test planets (all close to earth-type, with similar geophysical make-up) to determine how best to adapt earth-type plants and animals to them, with an eye toward future human colonization. “Something like Johnny Appleseed,” Reba had gushed on the morning of the day that everything went wrong, “only instead of apple seeds we’ll be leaving seedlings of dozens of kinds of foodstuffs, and also leave behind pairs of small animals—”

“We don’t qualify?” I asked her with a straight face; Reba and I were both under five foot five, and redheaded, with freckles. One of our professors at the university used to call us the Bobbsey Twins, whoever they were. (The professor was old; he remembered a childhood when television was almost non-existent....)

Reba started to punch me lightly on the forearm, saying, “You non-espers are all alike—” when the ship shuddered, and the pseudo-gravity a shade over half that of earth’s under the best of conditions became non-gravity. Luckily, Reba and I were still dressed; we lurched out of my cabin and into the circular hallway, alternately grabbing and releasing the flap-like hand-holds positioned around the walls for times of weightlessness—a few times I almost missed grabbing the next hand-hold, and almost went spinning off into the air.

The others were likewise making their way to the centrally located navigation hub, launching with their hands to keep from hitting the walls, bypassing the flaps all together, in their haste to discover the source of the problem.

What was so eerie for me was that no one spoke; all I saw were wrinkled brows and darting eyes. I asked Reba what was wrong; she only shook her head as she propelled herself into the control area. After a few seconds, as I watched Neil and his navigator Jimmie (he was a double-duty crewman) frantically—albeit silently—trying to regain manual control of the engines, I noticed something so obvious apparently no one had seen it, something very wrong—the engine console was dark. Then, the first sound I’d heard since the ship lost gravity:

“I think...we came too close to something.” That was Neil, his voice tight and strained. Immediately, Jimmie countered from behind his controls, “No way...structure probably gave way enough for the engines to disconnect, ’sides, the alarms didn’t go off—”

“I believe Neil may be right....” Elizabeth’s voice trailed off ominously, her brogue a lilting whisper of doom as she keyed up the rear viewer. “Alarm or no alarms, there’s the evidence.” We floated toward her, hair and arms waving gently in the non-gravity, as we took a look at what she’d keyed up: The strangely enveloping blackness of hyperspace was gone. And in its place, the normality of a sky filled with a thick dusting of stars—and the startling strangeness of a rapidly receding, dangerous pure black spot blotting out the stars to the rear.

“What is it, Elizabeth?” Reba whispered.

“Look in the viewer,” she replied, her lips brushing against the dark hair swimming slowly in front of her face, “The gravitational vectors....” I now realized what she was implying, but it was almost inconceivable, so slight was the possibility of coming so close to the gravitational field of a super-dense star. I spoke through lips almost glued shut with fear, “Our vectors must’ve grazed a black hole, knocking us into normal space-time.” All of us must’ve realized that the collision avoidance system didn’t have the range to avoid those freak fields—the simplest of classical mechanics made it so. The gravitational pull increased only as the mass of the star, but its strength fell off as the square of the distance. The result was a gravitational vector that shot up frighteningly fast. By the time the system had time to react, vectors had already collapsed our field.

My legs were shaking in mid-float. If only we’d passed a little closer to the black hole, if only we’d lost a little more velocity, it would’ve already swallowed us, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“It’s impossible,” Huoy frowned, “The chances of passing something like that in all this emptiness....”

“You fool!” Elizabeth hissed, “Look at the screen, woman! Improbable doesn’t mean ‘impossible’—there it is.”

“Look, let’s check out what we can, all right?” I asked, hoping to avoid one of those eye-bulging, throat-straining esper fights; apparently, the others were anxious to avoid one too, for we broke into teams, and began looking for every possible reason for the engines to have failed, starting with the in-ship circuits, and finally finishing with my offer to suit up and help Jimmie check the engines from outside the ship.

But what we found out there made me immediately regret my efforts to prevent Huoy and Elizabeth from engaging in another esper-argument...and for once, I didn’t mind being the odd-man out when Jimmie opted not to say anything as we neared the ship’s engine...and saw that the field antennae, the gravitation generators, conversion units and the radioactive ports were gone. Sliced clean off the ship, as if God himself had just reached out and snatched them off, leaving a void in the ship’s warp drive nacelles.

The only sound I could hear over the two-way radio connecting Jimmie and myself was his sob-like breathing, each breath coming in a painful hitch, only to be expelled in a mournful rush of air....

And because Jimmie’s esper abilities linked him with his fellow crewmen, he felt no need to speak to me, either...as it was, I had to humble myself and ask Neil what he thought might have happened once Jimmie and I re-entered the ship...not that I hadn’t had the time to consider the options myself. But actually hearing them from Neil’s lips did give me some small measure of cold comfort:

“I think in-homogeneities in the collapsing graviton field took our engines, or most of ’em, I guess. The theory predicted it could happen, but it’s never been done, as far as I know. But then, I suppose the test engineers didn’t have enough black holes nearby to test those particular conditions, did they?” I appreciated his slight attempt at humor, even if some of the others frowned. He went on, “In normal gravitational gradients, fields have always dropped evenly when the power was cut...but as far as we’re concerned, at least we have considerable normal velocity left in the sub-light engines from the hole encounter. Jimmie—” he turned to look over at the still-shaken navigator, “Is there any way to determine where we are?”

Biting his lower lip, until the pinkish flesh turned almost red, Jimmie shook his head, before answering, “No way, Neil...can’t even raise a signal on the network. Could be anywhere or anywhen...with no way to find out for sure. Nothing looks familiar on the star-charts and considering that we’ve lost most of the engines, there’s no way we can try getting our bearings by changing course...might as well let ’er stay on this course, see what we drift into—”

The navigator said more, to both Neil and the others, but it was a silent conversation...and even Reba was too distracted to fill me in on things.

And even after tasks were delegated, distress signals sent out, stock taken of our remaining rations, and the like, Reba still found herself unable to share the mutual horror she and her fellow espers had experienced after the accident—thus leaving me to wallow in my own unexpressed fear.

Day 136:

Been a long time, where have I been? Can’t think straight, like gun-cotton stuffed in my head ready to explode if I think. What am I supposed to be doing here? Writing, yeah, I’m doing that. But writing what?

All I can remember now are the last days—how many? It hurts to think. Wandering in the rain, yeah, looking for shelter. Many images, feelings, just emotions. Scared I wouldn’t find a safe place to rest. Wandering along looking for something, anything alive. I found and I lost the ’lopes, or they lost me. I don’t know if they like me....

I remember finding a ’loper nest, empty, but the signs of habitation were unmistakable...as was their scent. During the lucid (or what passed for lucid) times, when I wasn’t smelling phantom odors which originated in my brain, I realized that the ’lopes, especially the females—had a piquant, musky odor not unlike the husk fruits on which they constantly dined.

I’d previously dismissed the slight rises in the ground, tiny hillocks, as simply part of the environment, until I was walking past one and simultaneously saw and smelled something. There was a hole leading into the hillock, shored up with stones placed so artfully, in so ostensibly a careless pattern, that a casual glance might not reveal anything but a tumbling of stones near a dark spot on a hillock. But I saw how light shone partway into the hole, revealing depth. And the smell of the female ’lopes was strong, almost cloying in its richness. No wonder I never found a sleeping ’lope. They never slept above ground.

Curious, not wanting to simply barge in should there be some trap set—the ’lopes had reason to fear me, since some of my kind stole their dead—I climbed the hillock, searching for an air-hole. That, too, was artfully constructed as to appear unconstructed. Just an irregular hole in the Earth, shadowed by a tuber tree and artless tumbles of loose pebbles. But it was a deliberate hole, nonetheless. I stretched prone, my ear to the hole. No sound. I looked in, but there was no light visible...not until the sun set a little more, sending a narrow beam into the hole at the base of the hillock. There. Packed dirt, and a barely visible rough bed of dried and matted-down limp-grass.

My desperation got the best of my fears and I crawled inside the dry, debris-lined chamber and fell asleep on the soft floor. I woke up once or twice; thinking Reba was in there with me, warming herself at my side, her wet clothes strewn about us. I don’t think she really was. I seem to remember, Reba’s dead....

Day 139:

Things are going better today! The headache is nearly gone! Well, not gone, but at least subsided to the point that I can ignore it. I’m still getting those extra twinges I think. But I’d better take advantage of this time to think of the harder, intellectual things I still need to get down....

By the end of our third month on the planet of the burnt-umber sun and the pulp-fruit trees, we were all more active; our lungs now used to the thin air. And our potbellies vanished, as we explored our new, albeit reluctant, home. Aside from some cooler areas to the north, where the dull tan-green flat-grass grew stubby and coarse, and the tuber trees were stunted, and a slightly warmer band along the middle that Neil guessed was the equator, the ’lope’s planet was remarkably uniform. Irregular ponds—home of the only other native life-form we found—creatures we dubbed “crushers,” which were easily as big as ancient double-decker busses, and vaguely resembled earth rhinos—and a few languid rivulets...but no oceans. Just lots of arid land, and pulpy trees that drew deeply on the hidden groundwater. Occasional warm rains and weak winds. And every damned seed or sprouting plant Reba and Huoy planted withered and drooped, finally curling into themselves in dry spirals of death.

It didn’t help to mix fertilizers (including human waste) with the plant’s soil; it simply couldn’t sustain the samples which were brought along on the ship, right-handed sugars or not. And as every sample died, a little bit of hope died in each of us. Reba said that she and the espers felt it worst; the pain of one was the pain of all. It didn’t faze her that my anguish was un-shareable, private. The only bright spot was that none of the lab animals died when they were fed little bits of the indigenous plant life. I don’t know if it was in the back of the minds of the others, but I know that I often thought about the inevitable—what will we do when our food is gone?

I suppose it might’ve been magical thinking on the part of the others: If we don’t make ourselves too much at home, this will never be home. Surely the loss of the ship had been noticed. I certainly didn’t show up on Harcourt’s Planet on time. And even though radio messages had been sent out, there was no guarantee that they’d be received in time to save us—if whoever received them could find us at all. It’s a damned big universe....

But even though Reba and her crewmates were trained scientists, it was pathetic how they whimpered like children when we found ourselves opening up the last box of spacer ’slop. Perhaps their distress was sensed by the ’lopers, and that was why they massed in the trees that afternoon. To watch us, and maybe wonder at us. Not much else brought them all so close to us, in such numbers; in all the months we’d been here, none of us had found the places where they slept. No ’loper villages, no ’loper buildings. Just buried ’lope dung, and discarded husks close to the trunks of the fruit trees.

Once we started eating their food, though, the ’lopers made themselves less scarce; seeing one or two of them each hour wasn’t uncommon. As always, they kept a screen of foliage between themselves and us, not enough to actually hide behind, but something there, nonetheless. For Reba, the ’lopes weren’t hidden enough.

A few days after we began eating husk-fruit, and the bulbous, pale yellow things that resembled apples but tasted more like a blend of carob and mushrooms (morels, to be precise), with a hint of bitter coffee thrown in, Reba and I were walking down the gentle slope that led away from the ship down to the pond. When we arrived, Reba edged into the scummy water; her feet and legs were submerged to the middle of her calves. I moved closer, my feet sucking mud with each labored step. I almost had my hand on her arm when she began moaning, and dropped to her knees in the tangle of limp-vines and mucky water. Her face crumpled, the freckles darkening and clumping together, and her eyes were scrunched tight, as if even this diffuse light hurt them.

And when I came closer, I could see the trigeminal artery in her left temple throbbing, a delicate pulsing under the fine skin. Migraine, I thought, bending over and almost losing my footing in the muddy waters as I scooped her up and carried her away from the pond. But before I turned around, and faced away from the pond, I caught a glimpse of Heidi and Baby Boy—they were watching us intently, no longer moving and grunting, as if what I was doing was terribly important—

Or Reba’s illness was.

Reba vomited on me as I carried her back to the ship; the sight, and the sickly-sweet odor sickened me, made me dizzy, but I kept on walking. The others were waiting for us, and I noticed that Huoy was holding her head, eyes half shut, and her skin even paler than usual. None of them looked very good. When Jimmie came forward to take Reba from me, I noticed that his hands were icy. Migraines, classic ones...and when I entered the ship, the dull white lights made my eyes burn and throb, but the pain was still bearable....

For once, the esper crew of the Sagittarius IV was too sick to indulge in esper-speak; I heard their stories of sudden pain and blinding insensitivity to sounds and light first hand:

“It came so fast...then I sicked up on everything, right on the scope—”

“Something...anything...please cut my head off, anything—”

“Just want to crawl where it’s dark—”

“Scott, what happened? All of a sudden I felt so...oh not again—”

“Oh, jeezus, what’s that smell! I—I can see it—”

Elizabeth was having olfactory hallucinations; Neil held onto her while she tried to savagely paw at her face with her long-nailed fingers. Huoy had her fingers on either side of her head, covering the branches of her trigeminal nerves, as she gasped, “Classic migraine. Need...vasoconstrictors...now. Hurry, Scott...make...useful....” right before she collapsed, her left arm and leg twitching spasmodically. Neil fell after that, a heap of limp flesh, then Jimmie, and Reba, and finally Elizabeth, and I remember heading for the storeroom where the unneeded medical supplies were kept, but I don’t remember falling down on the floor, even though that’s where I woke up hours later....

I came to experiencing simultaneous hunger pangs and dizziness; by my watch, it took me a good five minutes to get to my feet and stand upright, for the hallway kept looping and un-looping, now curled tightly, now infinitely straight. And sometimes the voices of the crew were loud, clear, while other times they’d fade into echoing dimness. But I made it to where I’d left them. The others hadn’t had the strength to make it out of the entry dock; they lay next to puddles of their own pulpy vomit, unable to crawl away from the mess and the stink. Reba opened her eyes first, and tried to reach for my leg, but kept missing, as if I had a third, invisible leg that stood next to my left one. Hallucinations, persistent ones, for when I bent down to grasp her cold hand in mine, Reba’s eyes widened and she ducked her head, as if unable to look at me.

Pulling her to her feet, then looping her vomit-encrusted uniform arm around my shoulder, I led her to the supply room, where I lay her down on a plastiform case, and began pawing through the color-coded boxes, looking for codeine, steroids, vasoconstrictors, even plain old aspirin, anything to ease her pain. Reba kept moaning, and her entire body shook with fine tremors, as I began to look for some pneumatic syringes to inject the codeine I’d just found.

“Scotty...so sick...so siiick—”

“Not in here, okay?” I asked weakly, as the lights haloed around the box I was looking in (damn those multipurpose storage containers and their hard-to-differentiate colors!), creating rings of rainbows around the pastel plastic. Reba slumped forward, feet first, until she almost slid off the plastiform case onto the floor, making gagging sounds deep in her throat. I caught her by the armpits before she landed on the floor, and dragged her up into a sitting position again. Tearing off her uniform sleeve at the shoulder, I fed the codeine insert into the syringe, and worked the handle of the syringe against her arm.

It took another five minutes, but Reba was finally able to sit up unassisted, and within ten minutes, I was able to walk her down the curving hallway, codeine inserts and pneumosyringe in hand, to where the others lay incapacitated....

Day 168:

It’s been a long time—

Just like before, the last long blackout. Thinking hurts so much now—bombs going off in my head. But I have to write. Helps me focus. Helps me—

Day 169:

Write about emotions. I can do that at least. Emotions. Write about the last days before the blackout. I can remember parts of those days, dimly glowing patterns of a campfire, like I remember instincts, like the way your eye holds the after-image of a campfire.

I remember the woods. No, further back. I remember loneliness, wishing, crying out for someone, anyone. Huoy. Jimmie. Reba!

Our lab held a collection of cobbled together genetic engineering equipment, from those days so long ago when Reba was trying so hard to find out what was hurting us. I began the tests again in those days of lucidity, searching madly for something, anything that would kill off the virus. Something that would stop the pain, stop the blackouts, anything. What happened next? The transition is hard to recall, like in a dream. You’re walking down the street one night in a dream when suddenly you realize the street is a river. It was like that. The next I recall, I was engaged in some project to create my own companion.

Somehow I was going to try and alter the chromosomes of my own tissue, changing my XY chromosomes, but I didn’t really know how. Could I split the chromosome into its autosomes and duplicate just the x-half? I didn’t know how.

In this dream of mine I thought, no, knew that I only had to get other chromosome samples. Would it matter that they weren’t human? Still hard to think, I’m not sure. Well, Jimmie and Reba had killed off the lab animals, so I had nothing with which to test out my theory. Catching a ’lope was beyond me; I never knew when a blackout would overtake me. But if I could somehow manage to get a hold of a sample of crusher flesh, just a tiny piece...

It was pure madness on my part to think that I could saunter up to a crusher and casually slice off a sample of living tissue; but living day after day with an A-bomb going off and off again in one’s skull doesn’t make for a healthy state of mind, or rational, coherent thinking. Hell, maybe I was trying to impress the ’lopes, show them who was the superior specimen on this planet. But I didn’t really need them, I’d make my own society...all I clearly remember is that the sun was looking like a moldy hard-boiled egg in the sky, all soft and mossy-green and luminescent, as the scummy pond waters scintillated underfoot, divided into sparkling waves by the limp-vines, and the crusher wasn’t all that big or awful-looking, why its horns were just tiny needles—

The sharp splash of something fast-thrown and heavy hitting the water brought me back to a semblance of painful reality. I’d waded out into the middle of the pond, up to my armpits, with my extended toes barely touching the muddy bottom—and there was a crusher no more than a foot away from me, head down, twin horns aimed for my skinny, pale-skinned chest, only when the second splash occurred, the crusher turned its head away from me, to stare at the ripples in the murky water.

Before the third splash, I heard a keening mewl, one I’d never heard a ’lope utter before, with the sound coming from behind me. I turned my head and upper body to look in that direction...and saw Penti, standing there on the limp-vines, making a gesture I’d seen before, in a slightly different social context:

Get over here, or near as dammit...

I went, dog-paddling through the turgid water, until her brown-toed feet were within arm’s reach, while she kept throwing stones into the water, until the crusher forgot about me and glided over to the opposite side of the pond, ripping up great mouthfuls of limp-vines with thunderous churnings of water.

Pulling myself weakly through the mud, I crawled to Penti’s feet. Without thinking, I wrapped my right arm around her ankles and slumped into the mud.

Grunting, I got to my feet and began shambling. I walked aimlessly, without thought, like a masterless puppet. The crazed notion of remaking the human race for my own benefit was gone. I don’t know how long I went, before my consciousness raised itself again, and I found myself on the ship. I looked around myself to get my bearings. Behind me stood Penti, in the hatch none of her kind had breached before, even when left open in invitation. I turned away, and she followed.

Penti let out a yelp when a dangling handgrip smacked her in the head (I avoided them almost unconsciously), but remained silent as I led her on a tour of the ship, jabbering all the while. I don’t recall what I said, and I rarely looked back to see if she still followed.

I do remember a feeling of foolish futility registering in my aching brain. Why was I talking to this animal, this alien who had no way of understanding my words? I stopped talking. And when I turned around, Penti-Lope-Lope had gone.

Day 171:

Yesterday I kept my consciousness, but I didn’t write. I didn’t think, I didn’t analyze, I didn’t plan. I simply was—a conscious was, like in battle or stress, where you simply do what you need to and you don’t know what you’re doing or know what you’re feeling. But you make no choices. But today I need to work; I must write while I can.

Yeah, I left off after the first attack, just about two weeks after we started eating the native food. The remembrance hurts. Oh, it hurts! Reba! As I think of the past, my head begins to ache again, like before. Wait a minute....

It’s beginning to recede. The vasoconstrictors I took are kicking in now. There aren’t many pills left these days. Where was I?

We were scrambling madly, to find what disease suddenly ailed us. Reba could only work the ’scope if she held her hand over her right eye, the one which hurt her the most, but I helped her prep the sample for the electron ’scope in the ship’s lab. I was the only person lucid enough to kill one of the lab rats, without trying to end the life of a phantom rat standing off to one side....

I half-suspected what Reba was looking for, but I didn’t ask her any questions; I simply did as she asked, following her terse, pain-punctuated orders:

“Tubers...husk fruits...fat fruits...sam-samples...flat-grass...limp-vines...’lope if you can find one...no, no, forget it...dirt, bring dirt. Anything...and samples. Of the crew...blood. Everyone, blood—”

I almost blacked out near the pond—one of the ’lopes, I was too sick to tell who it was, was watching me in my agonies—but I found Reba’s samples. And I stood behind her, exposing the sample slides to ever-increasing magnification in millimeters, until:

“Finally...thought it was a virus...wrong...so stupid,” and she tried to pull her reddish curls in anger before I stayed her trembling icy hand.

It was a prion. Pleated, sticky sheets of deviant protein that had managed to change the proteins of every damn thing on the planet-foodstuffs, dirt, water. Almost invulnerable to enzymes, unlike normal proteins. And, inevitably fatal to whatever cells it invaded.

When our lab animals were exposed to foodstuffs contaminated by the prions, they initially showed no symptoms, but their autopsies revealed the damage wrought by the invading prions. These prions acted much like the Earth ones that contributed to the 1990s mad cow epidemic in Britain—once they were introduced via foodstuffs, the host animal was infected—with a slight difference: These rogue proteins, aberrations of a harmless protein usually found on the surface of mammalian cells (including brain cells), replicated at a somewhat slower pace than Earth-prions. Which meant, in turn, that we’d been unknowingly ingesting more and more prions, while they slowly migrated to our temporal arteries...and then began their work.

It took Reba over a week to learn all of this; a week of drinking only water, a week spent dizzy and cold-handed (even biofeedback, using temperature sensors attached to her fingertips didn’t help)...a week in which she obtained her first human for dissection.

I was the one who found Huoy. She’d broken into Elizabeth’s previous collection of antique surgical instruments, the ones Elizabeth couldn’t bear to leave behind, for fear of theft or mishandling back Earthside. Her great-great-great-grandfather had been a brain surgeon; those instruments had been purchased by him when the first wave of truly sophisticated lasers came into widespread use, and they’d been passed down from surgeon father to gynecologist daughter to osteopath son to....

And Huoy had used them to kill herself. She left a note, little more than a polite memo. She blamed herself for not preventing this, seeing that she’d predicted that the food was bad. I don’t know how she did it without anesthesia, but she’d tried to laser out the pain, the pain she’d somehow perceived as being inside her brain. Perhaps burning through her cheeks with the hand-held laser, until her face was as richly veined as a budding leaf had not dulled her pain, or the agony had entered her mind by then. Once she’d eliminated the trigeminal nerves and sections of the temporal artery, she’d picked up Elizabeth’s ancient but effective Smith-Peterson power drill, once used to drill burr holes in bone, and...and then she’d picked up the CO2 laser once more, somehow managed to rig the power supply to up the wattage, set the impact zone to wide dispersion, and then pointed that pair of carbon dioxide and helium lasers into her exposed brain....

The autopsy showed Huoy’s neurons clogged with prions. By that time, Reba was a wraith; deprived of even infected food, her stores of fat went quickly, faster than even I’d dreamed possible. And when she discovered, with my help when it came to reading the ’scope—her vision was filled with hallucinations she haltingly referred to as “exploding floaters”—that the alien prions bound up neurotransmitters (an enzyme) that only intelligent beings have. So, while the prions infected all living things that ingested them via foodstuffs, non-intelligent beings were least affected.

And, as the neurotransmitters were affected in each of us, we developed the crippling headaches...and the espers lost their ability to communicate. Which equaled the loss of self, an esper removed from esper contact was suddenly less than half a person, a more-than-emotional cripple. Cut off from their wordless communication, they lost their souls. And as the disease progressed in the others, and they lost esper contact with their fellows—which had apparently happened to Huoy, since no one knew what she was planning—it was worse for them than enduring the head pains. I had the migraines, too, which meant it was a shared thing, but losing their advantage over me was unthinkable, even for Reba....

Within the next week or so—by then, my blackouts came more frequently, and I lost track of time, since black-out prone Reba was no help when it came to figuring out how long I’d been out—we had another subject for the laser-scalpel. Elizabeth, having had her most obvious method of suicide deprived her by Huoy, chose an end worthy of Sir Walter Scott, or Shakespeare’s mad Ophelia. Jimmie and Neil discovered her floating in the same pond where Reba first took sick; that they hadn’t sensed what she was about to do pained both of them most.

I think that’s what made Neil pack it in, impaled himself on that crusher’s horns. None of us knew whether he’d thrown himself at the crusher, or it had charged him. It didn’t matter....

And Jimmie never smiled anymore; never tried to move past his own agony to brighten our days anymore, as he’d attempted to do in the previous few weeks. He helped Reba and me in the lab, and backed me up in convincing Reba that trying to capture a crusher, and killing it was no good, that it was impossible to try. The thing’s hide was too thick, its horns too deadly.

I remember him telling Reba, his voice distorted by the mixture of steroids and codeine he’d injected himself with on his own. “What good is it, Reba? They eat limp-vines; the limp-vines are full of prions. It’s a given—”

“’Lopes,” Reba slurred, her head lolling in an aimless pattern, “Why not...the ’lopes?”

“Killing them would only be cruel,” I began, but Reba tried to shake her head, mumbling, “’ozen brain...dead ’lope—”

“We did slides on what was left—remember the prions in there? You’d missed it earlier, but—”

Reba shook her head again; for the first time, I noticed that her eyes looked like dry spheres of discolored bone, set in nets of wrinkled mesh, and I remembered Elizabeth’s comment about the brown leathery heart—

“Noooo...why not the pain! Their brain...like ours. Nerves...the ’lope had...something like trigeminal nerve...why not this pain?”

The look on Reba’s face told me that admitting that the ’lopes she hated were like us, intelligent beings who might have been our near equals, was too much for her overstressed mind to handle. I was able to calm her more than I could’ve hoped for, stroking her matted hair and repeating the joke I made when she first lost her esper ability, saying, “Now we’re alike, babe...no more brain-juice getting in the way.”

She smiled weakly. “Now we’re going to be like the ’lopers, aren’t we?” She slumped over from the effort of talking so much.

The way I felt then, it wouldn’t have been so bad to be a ’lope, not so bad at all. No pain, anguish or jealousy, just primitive animal thoughts and a simple animal life. ’Lopes consumed husk-fruit and the yellow bitter-fruit without the slightest evidence of discomfort even though creatures with such brain capacity should’ve had headaches. The three of us doubted that the ’lopes had simply learned to live with the pain; after however many weeks we’d been ill, we’d yet to accustom ourselves to the cold hands, the tremors, the hypersensitivity to sound, light and odors, and never mind the pain—nor were they plagued with the hallucinations which affected our own ability to function (watching walls melt into writhing puddles, or seeing the sky flame with rotating patterns that defied geometry, symmetry, or logic...).

Reba stirred then, and asked to be carried to our room. After I’d laid her gently on the bed, I asked if she was all right, and volunteered to stay. She smiled again, and said no, she’d be fine.

Reba was lying, and how could I be so stupid not to see? I woke three hours later in the corridor nearby, and I remembered a particularly bad attack, my leg and arm growing numb on the left side, suddenly collapsing in a senseless heap.

Reba...Reba had ended it all. Put the CO2 laser to use again, bypassing the temporal artery, which hadn’t stopped throbbing on her temple for weeks, and going straight for the jugular—Better not to write of this, to let my poor Reba keep as much dignity as she could have. Oh, it hurts! The thinking is so easy for these strong emotions, but oh, Reba....

When I stumbled into the lab an hour later, the flood level of my grief subsided from a hurricane-shipped frenzy to a churning flood. I saw...I saw her blood, lacework on the walls, the floor, even on the ceiling of the lab, dried to a black-red starchy stiffness, like a bloody mantilla. I never learned when she did it, or even if she’d done it alone or with Jimmie’s help; he was too engaged in his work over her when I came to and dragged myself into the lab. He’d already shorn off most of her limp red curls, and had her skull open, exposed to the grey cerebellum and the cranial nerves, five through twelve...the ones which controlled facial sensation, eye movement, taste, balance, hearing, swallowing, involuntary muscles of the heart, stomach, chest and intestines—as he proudly began to explain in that steroid-thickened voice, as I swayed in place next to the table, with her glistening brain exposed, naked, in front of me, until I noticed that her scalp had bled freely where he’d sliced it open....

I wondered when she’d grabbed the laser from him, how she’d slit her own throat with most of her head opened like that, before I placed my hand on the laser console and surreptitiously upped the wattage from one to eighty...before I snatched the small hand-held laser from Jimmie and—

His blood slid down his brown skin like sap pouring down rough bark. He didn’t fight me; whether he knew he’d done wrong or not was immaterial. Death by his own hand may’ve been too abhorrent a prospect—better to whip me into a frenzy, let me do it.

When a CO2 laser slices through flesh, it leaves a delicate smoking line...a most scientific way to describe something that resembles the devil’s own handwriting. And, God help me, I wrote every word of fury I knew on his body, not stopping until the wounds quit bleeding freely when drawn on his skin....

Spent, panting, my head feeling as if it was cracking from within from rage, not just pain, I dropped the laser wand, and—it crushed easily under my booted foot—

I...no more of this. No more.

Day 172:

Here I am once again. Two days of clarity now. I must finish this soon. Soon....

Jimmie was dead. Reba was dead. Huoy, Elizabeth, Neil. Everyone except me. And all I felt was a rage, a hot rage quickly turning into frosty anger that felt as though it would always be with me.

Jimmie had killed Reba. Sure, it looked as though she’d done it to herself; maybe she had made that final jugular swipe with the laser, but it couldn’t be. Reba wouldn’t initiate anything like that, no matter what pain she had to endure. No, it was Jimmie. It had to be him. Please, it had to be him....

I kicked pieces of the smashed laser away then knelt down at Jimmie’s side, when my attention was caught by a set of curious, semi-healed scars on one of his forearms, intentional-seeming marks which ran from wrist to just above the elbow. The last of my rage cooled to whiteness, and I looked closer for a moment.

As I traced the pale scars against his dark flesh, I remembered how Jimmie had blacked out once when he was outside of the ship; he hadn’t come back for over a day. Reba had been alive then, but not the others. In fact, Jimmie had been outside in order to bury Neil. (Despite Neil’s loss of weight, his body was still too big for me to handle...) It had been long enough ago for the scars to just about heal, though. I wondered if Jimmie had fallen against something, raked his flesh that way, but none of the plants were spiny, and no one could fall on the flat-grass in such a way that it would pierce skin. But the ’lopes...their hands and feet ended in nails—nails perhaps sharp enough to rake skin.

But the ’lopes were peaceful, ostensibly harmless...yet, if they weren’t, now I would be fair game, especially in my dazed condition. I never knew when the numbness in my limbs would strike, nor could I predict the severity of my headaches, but I had to go outside. My food, blighted and tainted as it was, was out there. Plus my water, and sunlight. And the soil to bury my companions in.

I dragged Jimmie to the hatch first, left him in a red-scored heap, then went back to get Reba. I scooped up what shorn hair I could find and taped it to her head, wrapping the sticky whiteness around her skull like a headband. But I didn’t open her torso to see if her heart was brown or not. She was lucky if she weighed fifty pounds.

If that. But realizing that brought back my anger and rage, and I began to mutter, “No,” my voice hollow in the viscera-latticed lab. “Nuts....Jimmie was nuts...loco...clawed himself...like coke bugs...tried to get them out...killed Reba...dug up his own skin...yes...crazy black bastard, Reba, why? Should’ve said no, leave you alone...sorry, Reeb, let you down...nuts, left you with a crazy...my fault...oh jeezus, Reba, didn’t you know?”

I folded her bloodied form in my arms and staggered out of the lab, down the corridor toward the open spaces, the open spaces where I could bury her. My head spun from the effort, but I pressed onwards....

After returning to the hatch, I kicked Jimmie’s body out until my boots were red-sticky. He rolled with a flat, peculiar motion, a flip and then nothing until I kicked him again. Heaving him out of the ship occupied most of my attention; I didn’t realize that the ship was surrounded by ’lopes until I heard them kicking off, and smelled the acrid dust left in their wake. But when I was outside the ship, far enough away to see the exposed hull, I realized that the ’lopes had been busy indeed...and that they’d been the ones who scarred Jimmie. For in marks a foot high, reddish mud daubs—identical to the small ones on Jimmie’s arm—read:

The ’lopes respected my mourning period. I didn’t see them for a week, maybe more—damn blackouts—during the time after I buried Jimmie and Reba, and when they did make themselves visible, it was at a distance tempered by respect, or so I chose to think.

I needed to think of the ’lopes as being capable of respect, consideration...anything to dispel the thought that I was the last thinking being left on this planet. Only then did I realize why Huoy and Elizabeth and (maybe) Neil had done what they did to themselves. Having been born a non-esper, never having known the deep communication of the esper community, the closeness Reba could only describe it to me second-hand by saying, “It’s like...the glove being part of the hand, not just protecting it, but being it, but shit, Scotty, that’s only the surface of it....”

I hadn’t realized it, but Reba, Huoy, Neil, Jimmie, and Elizabeth were the fingers of my glove. We weren’t all that close but they still protected me from this place, shielded me from having to think too much about my situation, our situation. Lost. Stranded. For good. No other people. No hope, no God­damned frigging hope at all. And the food made us, made me sick.

But I had no choice; it was either eat the food and be sick, or not eat the food and be sick and devouring myself muscle by muscle. I thought about the brown heart a lot, and Reba’s pitiful bare, bloody scalp. With the curls pasted on, with gummy drying blood and surgical tape. One of the last things I remember her telling me, before I blacked out for that fatal time, was, “Don’t blame the...others. Don’t know...can’t em-empathize, Scotty—”

And the ironic thing was, I couldn’t blame the others anymore, even though they’d stranded me more thoroughly than I’d been stranded, in all my isolated-by-virtue-by-birth time here. I mean, I’d been alone all along here in a sense, by virtue of being a non-esper, by lacking those killer sub-neurons, but that was a different aloneness. I was alone, with company.

But once I found myself truly, utterly alone, with no one to hate or envy or love, I realized what had driven Huoy to drill those holes in her skull, or what had compelled Elizabeth to dive into the scummy depths, never to surface alive. To be a sudden captive in one’s own mind, without the succor of one’s fellow espers, had to have been as profound a shock as my reluctant monopoly of the planet was later on. But yet...they’d had me, at least. And to know that my presence wasn’t enough to cut it against the loss of their precious, elitist esper capabilities, even though I could at least try and share their anguish, their aloneness...well, once I got over the initial shock and hurt over their deaths, I got to thinking, You selfish, childish boors...for people who supposedly shared so much, you couldn’t share the fact that I needed you too.

Around that time, I stopped visiting their graves each day, quit laying symbolic bunches of dried-out limp-vines on Reba’s mound next to the fruit-bearing tuber trees whose fruit she’d sampled first. Damn you all, my mind pouted, between throbs of limb-twitching pain. They didn’t need me, I didn’t need them. Tit for tat, all that childish nonsense we repeat when the hurt runs too deep for adult rationalization.

I scoured the lab and the storage compartments, looking for the gene-splicing equipment Reba had once told me was secreted somewhere on the ship, the equipment no one had had reason to use after the crash. For when I wasn’t gripped by migraines, in those times between the pain when my body dared to relax, to hope, before being assaulted once again, I’d hatched a plan. Reba said there was simple cloning equipment, suitable for small-scale flora and fauna projects. But if I cobbled here and jury-rigged there, there was a chance I could make it work with my own tissue, to grow my own company. I didn’t even care if they grew up mutated, or deformed. I needed company, beings like myself, to talk to, rant at, rule and hurt like I’d been hurt...and what better whipping boy than one’s own self?—

Once I found the equipment, plus the odds and ends I’d need to adapt the splicer and other things to fill my needs, I decided to lay in a store of food, so I could work non-stop until the equipment had been modified. The husk-fruit in particular didn’t spoil once picked, not for days....

A light rain had washed off most of the odd symbols the ’lopes had painted on the ship; symbols that matched the ones that scarred Jimmie’s arm. As I gathered fruit into an empty storage container, I cursed myself for not encouraging the ’lopes to write again. Should’ve written something of my own, tried to establish a rapport. Something. Anything. Encourage the fuzzy buggers. Jimmie had been too sick to notice what they’d done to him, as he lay comatose outdoors, and I’d been too wrapped up in self-pity to bother with them....

Setting my nearly full container of husk-fruit on the almost bare ground, I decided to gather a handful of pond mud, try my hand at communication. Not that they’d understand, but they’d see that I, too, could manipulate symbols, that we were at least trying to move in the same direction. I made it down to the pond all right, minimal dizziness, only mild haloes of wavering multi-hued light danced around the sun-dappled limp-vines, so when I awoke covered in cold mud, I wasn’t just shocked—I was furious; at the prions, at myself for trying to do something as silly as communicating with long-tailed creatures, at the planet itself—

Turning my head gingerly, slightly, against the stabbing pain, I saw a pair of wet-furred feet next to my head. Looking up, I saw Penti-Lope-Lope staring down at me, her oval black pupils narrowed and small against slanted amber-orange backgrounds. She was scrutinizing me, her softly furred face unreadable. I’d never been this close to a breathing ’lope before. I now saw that what we’d all called fur was actually a thick, even covering of body hair, not too unlike my own. Downy hair, less than a quarter of an inch in length, with variations in color much like the differences in human hair color—

As I struggled to rise, my hand brushed Penti’s leg. She started, but held her ground. Instead of running, she hunkered down—her spine curved in a huge “C” as she bent her head my way—and patted my face with one hairy hand. Or at least the upper surface of her hand was hairy; the palm was smooth and slippery, the flesh dry and warm. I froze, not wanting to frighten her away. I felt her breath, warm and puffing evenly, as she got down on her knees and peered into my nose, my eyes, as if seeking something. I thought of the old, old films about the great apes preening each other, looking for tasty lice. But Penti’s actions were more specific, methodical....

First my nose, looking into the nostrils, then each eye was scrutinized. After that, she shifted my head, looking in each ear. Examining me, as if she was worried that I’d been injured. At that point, I realized that I’d been dragged to a place of higher ground, away from the lapping water that tugged on the limp-vines like a shower spray streaming through wet hair. I’d been standing knee-deep in the water, searching for mud—

And Penti had been watching me, hidden somewhere close enough to yank me out of the water when I keeled over, before I drowned. That realization made me too bold; I reached up and grasped her downy wrist, and she let out a grunt before getting to her feet and leaping away. I was splattered with a muddy mist as her powerful feet left the soggy ground. Weakly, I propped myself up on one elbow, my fingers still tingling from the surface of her skin.

And something else connected in my mind just then. Penti’s arm. It was scarred. Tiny pairs of oddly-canted short lines, like Jimmie, like our worthless ship....

Day 173:

This clear spell can’t go on much longer, I just know it. One day soon, I’ll black out and only come back, the next day or the next week or the next year. The time will be gone, I’ll be older, and be no closer to a solution to the puzzle that keeps me going now. The puzzle of the ’lopers. What drives them? Do they think? Do they write? Do they dream?

I went down to the electronics lab today, looking for something that could help. I need a way of recording the events through which I drift unknowingly in blackout. It’s the only way I’ll ever know.

The place was a shambles. Neil had ransacked it in his last days, trying to fill his days with a purpose that could hold him through the spasms of pain. That purpose was building a hyperspace radio. No matter that the best physicists on earth hadn’t made that discovery, Neil tried....He left instruments all over the floor, radio parts on the benches and crushed underfoot. I dug through the heaps he left for an intact lab recorder. Nearly passed out twice...my head hurts more and more as the day goes on. But I found one, a little coin-sized button meant for remote observation in confined areas. They were good for 500 hours of vid and sound recording before their superconducting squid memories had to be downloaded. I taped it carefully to my forehead like a third eye and turned it on. I was set. The question I avoided asking myself was whether I really wanted to solve the puzzle of the ’lopes. My plans for cloning my own company were revealed as Fairy dust. Did I want to lose the question which took their place?

Day 174:

I’m almost it for this log. The chronometer says this is the 174th day on this planet. My head hurts more today. I think this might be the last before I black out again

I left off after the time Penti came up to me, passed out in the mud, to see who or what I was. Sometime between the sixtieth and hundredth day, I’m not sure right now. How should I be? After I woke up in the mud while I was trying to collect enough food, I was in a daze. In the days after passing out, I came lucid from time to time, wandering aimlessly. The fevered idea of the splicer was barred for the moment, or any kind of thinking for that matter. I found my head hurt much less if I didn’t think. So I wandered, 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 pack I’m running with. There’s Penti, now Baby Boy, Slim, Heidi, and Mister. Plus the younger pups, and a whole crew of older ’lopers I’d never seen before. The tribe was big—there must’ve been close to a hundred. Many of those nightly encampments occurred in a dark grove we’d never found, shelters piled against trees in spots. It was obviously permanent; many of the shelters centered around a neatly maintained cave entrance marked with the ten-slash symbol.

I wandered off with a few chittering pups in tow, one time when the ’lopers were all occupied with each other. Wandered off down the cave. I wasn’t exactly exploring, not in the normal sense of having direction and a goal. What I did was wander in and out of the cave entrance with no obvious purpose. Then it started raining—splashes all over the recorder lens—and I wandered deeper into the cave.

What the recorder caught was amazing. The light level fluttered as we went deeper in, until the recorder reached its limits. Must have been really dark, because I piled into the wall a few times, and the picture went dim. Then as I went down, things brightened as though we were nearing some source of light. Baby ’lopes cavorted happily around me. Cute little things, really.

The “cavern”—it was now apparent that the tunnel was dug by hand—widened out to abut a crusted metal wall relieved with a single open door. I wandered into a maze of narrow, round-walled metal corridors. They were all nearly clean of dirt and debris, as if some messy housekeeper lived here, but a housekeeper nonetheless. The technology I saw before me was baroque, surreal, with instrumentation set into the walls, and hanging down every where from the curved ceiling. The interior of this metal cavern reminded me of a spaceship’s gangways, but one which made our own seem ludicrously simple. Corridors meandered off in bizarre angles, totally unlike anything on-board the Sagittarius IV or any earth ship. But the alien design pleased me in ways I could never describe, leaving me full of a sense of wonder, for only creatures with a consistent and thorough aesthetic vision could’ve created this ship, with all of its mysteries intact.

Was it a buried ship or an old, very, very old building? If it was a building, then why hadn’t any other traces of civilization been found? There were the hillocks, but those were little more than hollowed earthen mounds, artificial caves. This was much more....

I remembered Reba going on about the “degeneration” of the ’lopers brain structure. Were they the builders of this ship, or fortress, or whatever it was? Or were they merely squatters?

I ran around touching everything and pressing keypads, until the little ’lopes dragged on my arms and legs, apparently to stop me. They seemed deadly serious for baby ’lopes. Even the ones not attached to my limbs were standing motionless. Then when I dropped my arms and backed away, they let go to begin playing again. There was something about this place that spooked them. Not a “child” among them went anywhere near the instrumentation, as though it were something...holy.

I wandered a while longer, sitting against a column. The room must’ve begun darkening then, because I caught the telltale flutter of the exposure control on the recording. New sounds began, rhythmic sounds, sounds other than the chittering of the children. Then the sounds changed, to become something like ’lope-speak, yet faster....

There was a screen up there on the wall. Not that I watched it much. I seemed no more aware of it than anything else, looking that way for a moment, and turning the next. But something was going on up there. The color was washed out, sometimes wavering hazy rainbow splotches, sometimes bleeding into black and white. Pictures of creatures like ’lopes facing out from the screen like news commentators, but with sharper eyes and none of the ’lopes’ fidgety habits. Different enough as to almost seem a different species, its image fuzzy, divided into crude horizontal lines like the earliest television images broadcast back in the first half of the twentieth century, a hundred lines or less, with only minimal definition.

The recorder tape doesn’t really carry many views of the screen. Like I say, I wasn’t paying attention. I had none to give to the screen. But I did look that way often enough that I can get the picture now. The creatures on the screen were similar in ways to the ’lopers, but smoother, with less hairy skin on the exposed face and gesturing hands. Large eyes, a sort of muddy green-tan, with the distinctive oval ’loper pupils. Longer hair on the head, like Homo sapiens, but much finer and flatter than my own. A more defined nose and lips on the mouth, thin lips, but not the furry slit of the current ’lopes. Teeth much more like these ’lopes, the canines even more pronounced, perhaps....A narrow, shallow-ribbed torso, a longer neck, and a bigger jaw-line.

For maybe five minutes the thing spoke into whatever device was used to record the footage. Then it was over.

What did it all mean? How long had all this been here?

Day 184:

Just what is there to do on this planet? I’m totally alone when I’m conscious. The ’lopes seem to know when I’m conscious, and they avoid me. All except Penti, who came up within a few meters yesterday while I was resting under a tree, nursing an agonizing headache and trying not to think.

Do the headaches come when I’m out and roaming? If they do, I don’t know about it, so it doesn’t matter, does it?

There’s none coming to save me....

Day 198:

It’s been a long spell this time. I came out two days ago, and I’ve been fast-forwarding through the recorder tapes ever since. Do you know, I think the ’lopes have been looking out for me, like a pet or a feeble child?

The last thing I remember back on the 184th day was sitting out under my favorite tree when suddenly the darkness reached out for me like oil gushing from a well. I dug until I found that spot on the tape. Suddenly the ground rushed up to meet the recorder, well, that was it. Forty minutes passed until I roused. The recorder flashed past Penti and another ’lope, each patiently looking my way. I don’t think I was aware of them even in the blackout state, because the recorder didn’t linger. They were still there, the next time I looked up.

What in the world did I mean to the ’lopers? I wasn’t one of them. Yet...they trusted me. And that time I was in danger of doing myself in, Penti saved me. Was life that sacred to them, like some kind of religion without the subtle rules? Was the ten-slash some kind of symbol of faith? Not that they could tell me.

Didn’t I see the ten-slash on the recording in the subterranean chamber? Quickly as I could, I scanned back to my last set of recordings. Yes! There it was, on the wall behind the ’loper gesturing on the screen. I’m going to call him a ’lope, if only because he almost looks like one.

I scanned back to the last recent set of recordings. There Penti stood, chittering softly to the other ’lope, stroking his arm. Her arm bore the sign as well. The same set of symbols one of them had once incised upon Jimmie’s arm....

Day 212:

I saw Reba today! It’s been so long! I woke up out in the Open an hour ago. My head was nearly splitting, but in my joy I hardly noticed. She stood there resplendent in a green dress, her red hair floating in the still air, a slight glow surrounding her whole body. I think the glow might’ve been just an illusion of tired eyes, though.

She was acting kind of odd; every time the ’lopes standing beside her moved, Reba would move the same way. When she opened her mouth to speak, she spoke to me in ’lope-speak, I wonder when she had the time to learn ’lope-speak? Maybe it was something espers could learn. I sure didn’t understand it....

I passed out for a few minutes more, and when I woke up, both Reba and the ’lopes were gone.

Day 245:

This is my third lucid day in a row. I’ve finished moving a record/playback system into the ’loper cavern. Oddly, the ’lopes don’t seem to mind—in fact, it really seemed like they were trying to help in their clumsy way. Every time I turned my back, a ’loper rushed in to mark the equipment with a ten-slash.

This is a landmark time, really. After I decided to do it, I retraced the old recording to find the cavern. When I burst in on the clearing suddenly, the ’lopes panicked. But they made some tentative attempts to retake their clearing soon enough. The place must be really important to them, for them to overcome their fear. They’re still skittish, but they seem to accept me again.

Anyhow, the equipment is set up and ready. If any humans come by this way in a late rescue attempt, they’ll find the Sagittarius IV and play back our logs. That is, if they come by in the next century or so. I’ve noticed that the Sagittarius is starting to settle into the ground just a bit. If it continues, she’ll eventually fade from view in the soft soil. I certainly won’t be here to maintain passage to the airlock....

But the ’lopes will be sure to keep the tunnel open to their fortress or ship or whatever. It seems like a religion to them. And maybe the rescuers will find the ’loper tunnel while ’loper pontiffs introduce the newcomers to their greatest Mysteries. They’ll play this log back and learn. The power supply should last indefinitely, if the ’lopes don’t play it too often. They really like watching.

I can’t help wondering what will happen if another unlucky crew finds itself stranded here. What if they’re not human?

If they’re lucky, they’ll metabolize left-handed sugars and starve.

If not, and if they’re slow to go insane, they may find this cavern, and they may just be able to get more clues to a cure.

Or they might not. They might become the ’lopers, creatures of low intelligence who were great, remembering what they once were by scratching that reminder on their own flesh, by wearing their past as their present selves.

“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son....”

The words of my childhood religion, the ones I’d eschewed in favor of the hard sciences and Darwin, came back to me, before they devolved into a different, yet intrinsically similar message:

The ’lopes had so loved themselves, they gave up their sentience, their selves...they devolved or even aided in their own devolution. I’ve watched the ’loper commentator again on the big screen. There’s a lot more to that recording. Rapid jumbles of images, some squeezed onto vertically or horizontally split screens. A downed ship. ’Lopes studying the indigenous crushers. ’Lopes taking samples, running tests within the ship. The early ’lopes eating the husk-fruit—

—while they still had their own supply of food. For the shot of their mess table showed foodstuffs totally unfamiliar to me, resting on the same oblong, shallow bowl-plates as the foods native to this planet. There were young ones, too, infants and toddler-sized proto-’lopes, seated alongside their elders, all of whom were eating meals of mixed foodstuffs. The next images weren’t unexpected, ’lopes in obvious distress, holding their hands over their cheeks, their temples, mouths twisted in rictuses of pain not unlike the ones on the faces of my crewmates at the onset of prion infestation, eyes either closed or rolled up into their skulls.

The children crying hurt me the worst, I think.

The first piece fell into place for me. The screen was split horizontally, the top showing that familiar set of ten pairs of seemingly random-length lines...while the bottom showed a slightly blurred picture, taken through the lens of some powerful microscope.

Genetic material. Pairs of chromosomes. The basic units of life. If the ten-slash was the sign of their religion, the early ’lopes worshipped life itself, without apparent need for any intervening godhead. Their descendants continued the tradition, albeit devoid of meaning....

The images that followed showed ’lopers working complex equipment while the chromosomes on the other half of the split-screen broke, changed, rejoined. The ’loper infants shown after that were placid, happy little things, furrier and more active. None of the crying bouts that afflicted their older brothers and sisters bothered the new children. Pre-landfall images of schoolrooms showed children performing complex pattern-matching tasks. The other half of the screen showed these altered children tossing blocks back and forth....

In the face of almost un-faceable contingencies, the ’lopes lived on, despite the loss of their greater surface intellect, their mastery over incredibly advanced technology. I think it may have been worth it....

Day 276:

It’s going to be all right. Reba was with me today, walking along with Alf Jarry and me down a streamside path. I just wish she’d hang around until I was really awake, so we could talk....

Funny, how the ’lopes watch out for me. They still tend to avoid me when I’m conscious. But when my mind shuts down, blinded by the pain, they’re looking out for me. They always show up in the recordings, two or sometimes three ’lopes trailing along, watching over me when I sleep, pulling me out of danger. I don’t think I mean much to them, not for who I am. If they’re anything like their ancestors, they watch out for me only out of reverence for life, any life, whether intelligent or not. For God gave His only begotten Son to live amongst the foolish, the stupid, and the devolved, that He may keep them from all harm.

It is a good feeling, to worship and be worshipped. Just as it is a good feeling to see friendly faces, to hear the voices of my friends. And the sun feels good on my bare body, if I am lucky, maybe my skin will toughen like the soles of my feet have, to shield against the short-grass....

Nothing is truly given up without something else coming up to fill the void. It didn’t seem so hard for the ’lopes to lose their intelligence, not when happy survival was at stake. Not such a hard thing to lose when tenderness remains and grows to fill the gaps....

When I die, I sense that I will be missed by the ’lopers for just as long as it is proper, and forgotten when it is the right time to do so. ’Lopers are excellent philosophers on living if nothing else.

Day 312:

Whenever will my mind die? Flee intelligence, and leave my body in peace!

Afterword for “Contingencies and Penti-Lope-Lope”

Writing this novelette took several years, and selling it took even longer; initially it was a solo work, but I decided that my grasp of the science elements in this were too poor, so I let my long-time pen-pal, and sometimes co-writer, John S. Postovit (who does have a degree in physics/math, as well as an art degree), see the story, and add in whatever he felt was lacking—another aspect of the work which needed rewriting was the relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend Reba, something which John was able to fix up as well—so the piece soon bloomed into a very long novelette. As a rule, novelettes and novellas aren’t all that easy to sell, especially for mid- and low-list writers (why else did even Stephen King feel the need to put out collections of novellas, rather than get them printed in magazines?); they take up too much space in a magazine, and many publications don’t even use them. But this tale did need the extra wiggle room, and so it bounced around from ’zine to shining ’zine, until it seemed as if it had found a home at a short-lived digest-sized ’zine called LC-39 (which had already published a very long piece of mine called “Guardsmen Fed to the Tigers”—it isn’t here in this collection, though, due to the use of visual/graphic devices in the work which make it impossible to scan into an e-file), but then the editor pulled the plug on the ’zine a few issues in, right before the novelette was to appear. It languished for a while then I managed to get it into an e-zine called The Fifth Dimension in 2001, and was grateful to get it out to the public after so many years.

The character of Penti-Lope-Lope was based on one of my cats, Penny, who lived into her mid-teens (old age for a cat); she was a beautiful, smart and feisty little creature, a former stray kitten who grew into a sleek tiger-stripe cat. (In 1992, she thanked me for taking her in by batting my face when the house was filling up with carbon monoxide, startling me out of my stupor; luckily, none of my cats died in that incident!) She was a cool little critter, something like the female alien in Avatar, all lean muscle and big wide green eyes, just an exquisite little female.

I know the whole concept of sub-neurons is pretty much junk science, but then again, who really knows just how the brain actually works? Seems to me we’re still trying to work out all the nuances of human thought/brain function even in the age of CAT scans and what-not....

For me, the real meat of the story is the aspect of situational ethics—what the ’lopes choose to do in order to stay alive on their new planet may not appeal to human sensibilities, but it is a viable option. Their take of what a worthwhile life means might not be what humans would consider a life worth living, but it’s an option, nonetheless. At any rate, I am fond of this novelette, if only because it keeps my memories of Penny, aka Penny-Lope-Lope, alive....