Requiem Dotan Dimet and Etgar Kerrett The World fell into a hole in space and came up elsewhere. I felt it in my sleep, a rattling in the bones, an inaudible wail in my ears. It woke me up. I looked up at the low ceiling of my coffin, saw I still had a full two hours before my wake-shift. I blinked a request for a sleep-aid, and the ceiling gave me the routine answer about a shortage of pharmaceuticals. So I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep on my own. It's hard this time. My head is filled with too many dead words. Mystery. Nixon. Ostrich. Ping-Pong. Strange sounds. Once, when I would go on dead word duty, I would merely okay whatever the computer wanted to dump from its memory. Then I started pronouncing the words and since then I can't get them out of my mind... ...Popcorn. Popeye. Popov. Poseidon... Sometimes a word surfaces so pretty and strange I have to look it up. It's usually a meaningless exercise. A dead man, a sort of food, two nonexistent entities. Popov would put paint on his face, Popcorn was eaten in the dark, Popeye and Poseidon both had something to do with water. The definitions are filled with other dead words, some of which have already been erased. I found out that Popcorn was made from the seeds of "maize", an extinct plant, but not what "clown" or "greek" meant. ...Postcard. Prokofiev. Psaltery... Postcard was a device for rapid, low-priority communication. Prokofiev was a "composer", a sort of software writer for a type of machine called a "musical instrument". A Psaltery was such an instrument, but had been phased out of common use by Prokofiev's time. ...Pudding. Punjab. Qatar. Quebec. ...And there are place names, which I erase without looking up further. No word is more dead than the name of a place no one goes to anymore. But the sounds... ...Ramadan. Republican. Requiem. The first two I did not understand, apparently will not be able to. But Requiem... The dead word to end all dead words. It came from a dead language, and even the people who used it barely knew what it meant. For them, it was "Words sung(?) for the dead". Apparently it is a form of "music", the sort of software Prokofiev wrote, except that it was performed also by people, not only machines. So what was this "music"? Software for machines? Instructions for people? And what did these machines and people do? What for? Why? These thoughts made it hard to return to sleep. But the sounds were pleasant, there was something relaxing about repeating them to myself. "Requiem." I whispered "Re-qui-em". There was the sense of deep rest in that sound. In my mind, I repeated it until sleep reclaimed me. There were things in my sleep. Usually there was just darkness, but there were things now, words I couldn't make out, which I tried to say but failed. I saw a man with a painted face. There were instruments, brown and brass instruments which I did not know how to use. An extinct animal of unfixed form floated down a passageway. I tried to follow it, but my coffin woke me. I opened my eyes, saw my schedule scroll across the ceiling. Planet inspection. I sighed as I pulled on the velcro-slippers and popped the hatch. Of all my duties, planet inspection was the worst. Along the corridor walls, hatches were popping everywhere. I pulled myself out of the coffin, whipped my legs around, pushed myself towards the walking-surface, took the route past the fluid quota dispenser to the operations room. A schematic holo of the planetary system filled the hollow in the vast room's center. Around it, the room seemed unusually still. Over half of the positions were deserted or manned with just the usual team of World-crew personnel. There wasn't a procurer or an exotech in sight. At the far pole, a screen displayed a planet, green and grainy. I had a sinking feeling. Another paperwork mine, I thought as I made my way around to the room's equator. The duty officer's console was flanked by two sleeping half-shifters, huddled in sleep-bags lashed to the wall. in front of the console, surrounded by a small cloud of drifting plastic snowflakes, hovered Lieutenant Gxauwe, a wrinkled pale brown man in an immaculately pressed World-Crew blue jumpsuit. He looked up as I reached his console and gave me his reflexive gap-toothed smile. There had been gold in that smile once, gold which was now part of some circuit-board. But there had never been any mirth. I smiled back. "What have we got?" I asked him. "Marginal waterworld", he shrugged, the smile dissipating. He pointed to the polar screen. Dark shadows swirled across the green and mottled yellow on the disc which filled it. "surface water, oxygen-rich atmosphere, both mostly poisoned by volcanic activity. Scan says there's photosynthetic life, multicellular organisms, but not much of it, not enough to warrant processing. No technological organisms, no significant extractable mineral or organic resources. Computer says probable exploitability is postdecimal." "So what's Command saying?" Under the uniform, frail World-crew shoulders rose in another shrug. "It's your baby, Fenby," he waved his head at the screen, "they're setting up a manhole on C-deck now. Word from Command is we drop out as soon as you okay the scan and we finish refueling." He reached out and snatched a small plastic datachit as it sailed across his face, handed it to me. "Here's the complete report," he said, than turned to look back down at his console. I pulled the chit from between his slender fingers, then turned and shuffled away along the walking strip. * * * The suit the techs had laid out for my planet-fall was labeled "LOW STRESS" with numerous bright yellow stickers, and it looked as if the stickers were what was holding it together. The original color of the suit had long ago been washed away by dust and radiation degradation, obscured by layers of black carbonization. The suit felt heavy and cumbersome in C deck's enhanced gravity, and its insides smelt strongly of disinfectant, with an undisguisable underlying odor of old vomit. On the far side of the deck, a small detachment of young Procurement cadets were practicing hand-to-hand combat in their clean gray suits. I envied them their agility, their ease of movement, their grace, their clean and properly air-conditioned suits, but not their ridiculous exercises. I had engaged in such exercises myself while I was still training in the Procurement corps. But the only time I ever found myself face-to-face with a hostile alien, it had nothing like hands. Or a face, for that matter. Once I slipped the datachit through the battered slot I also noticed that the suit's video display systems had a glitch, and snowflakes of interference decorated its screens. Still, they worked, and as the techs ran checks on the suit's seals, I checked out the report Gxauwe gave me. It was similar to others I had seen before, extensive beyond belief and crammed with arcane details. One thousand six hundred forty nine screens, not including graphics. I have yet to hear of anyone at Survey and Records who ever read through one of the computer's planetary scan reports. I used to glance through them once. They were very orderly, very authoritative, I felt. Not that I had any way of knowing for sure. The computer scrutinized planets with a thousand precision-engineered eyes from a hundred different angles, tasted microhole samples of their material with a molecule-discerning palate, ran complex simulations, cross- referenced every aspect of its report with millions of other entries within its overflowing databanks. The computer could tell you of a species half way across the galaxy which would be able to use a plant you found growing on a desolate world under an X- ray sun as a cure for cancer. It could look at the dominant species of a remote ocean world and tell you of a culture in the Pleiades which could use them as slaves, a civilization growing around Antares where they would be considered prized house-pets, a race of space-dwellers moving through the north of the Orion arm which would value them as an exotic delicacy. Things you could never find out by yourself. If there was anything valuable on a planet, the report would go straight to Procurement, who would go about procuring it. If there was nothing of value, the report was sent to Survey and Records, for verification. Whoever was on duty at the time would be sent down for the required inspection. We would go down, do the time regulations required on the planetary surface and approve the report. Across the deck the cadets were stalking each other with practice-knives gripped tightly in their hands. There are worse duties than planet inspection, I reminded myself. The technician slapped my shoulder and gave me a smile through his visor as he stepped back. Through a haze of alphanumerics I saw him move behind the control console, where his colleague was operating the switches. I looked down, saw a brilliant white dot appear on the dull grey deck between my feet. The display systems immediately responded by opaquing the dot. Then it began to grow, and the black opaquing of the visor followed it, until I found myself standing on a black disk haloed in light. And when the opaquing vanished, I was no longer standing on the deck. My feet stood on faded brown rock. Then I dropped. The deck and the technicians shot upwards and vanished, and there was a tremendous feeling of weight in my body, like in the exercise track only worse. I looked around. I was standing in a brown rock-strewn field, crossed by swathes of low green vegetation, interspaced with scummy pools of yellow sulphur, the sky above a dirty ocher, piled with grey clouds. I tried to take a step forward, lost my balance, fell to my knees hitting the ground, hard. I landed on a thin sheet of slimy green which did little to cushion the impact of the hard rock it covered, but smeared readily across my suit, obscuring part of my screen. A message flashed across my screens as I groaned back to my feet, wiping my visor as best I could with the clean part of my left sleeve: - Twenty minutes okay, Fenby? - Panting for breath, I took another look around, at the slimy and sulphurous field, the far hills, the oppressive open sky. "Give me ten," I said into the mike. There was a strong wind blowing, and I feared I would lose my footing again, so I decided to move behind a nearby outcropping of rock on the top of the nearby ridge, hoping to find some shelter from the wind. I grunted to the top of the ridge, paused for a moment's breath, looked down, and saw them. They had no hands, or for that matter limbs, and no face either. But they weren't too bad. They looked basically like small, green, partially deflated balloons, apparently grazing on the slimy vegetation. One of the creatures was less than fifty meters away from me, at the bottom of the gentle slope descending from the ridge on which I stood. There were two others in my field of vision, on the slopes of two nearby hills. One of them in particular caught my eye. It seemed to be moving across an intricate pattern, outlined in yellow on the green vegetation covering the hillside, throwing up olive dust. I invoked a close-up of the creature, and saw it had brushes of long, thick bristles running down its sides, which rippled as it moved. I saw it move its neck back and forth, as the tentacles fringing the tip swept under the thin green sheets of vegetation, detaching them from the sulphur-rich ground. Uprooted, the green flakes were picked up by the breeze and blown away. Occasionally, I saw a tentacle pick up a crumpled sheet of vegetation and stuff it into the tentacle-ringed orifice. I saw toothless lips close on the balled up green, swallow without chewing. But feeding was clearly not its principal intention. The two other creatures were tearing at the vegetation, but they weren't tracing any pattern. What was that all about? What function did the pattern serve? Was it some form of communication? I checked the report. There was no mention of designs executed in vegetation. No mention either of any form of communication practiced by these creatures, although the report did not rule out their possessing sufficient intelligence for pattern recognition. There was no functional reason for communication, however. They were asexual grazers, with no enemies and no form of social interaction. So what was the creature doing? I looked again at the lines cut in the vegetation. They were surprisingly straight and orderly, intersecting in what seemed to be quite precise angles, Forming... Triangles. I saw triangles, a ring of small triangles cut around a central spiral, with a corona of orderly and irregular lines radiating out beyond it. It made no sense. Why had the creature gone to all that trouble? What was the use of all this? My eyes on the pattern, I stumbled forward, and felt something slap against my calf. I glanced down, My suit's weapon- targeting system automatically superimposed on my visor screen, the pulse laser retracting spontaneously. A tentacle-ringed mouth was framed in my targeting cross- hairs. The nearby creature had shuffled towards me while I had been examining the distant pattern. I looked at it. It did not appear to pose a threat, I thought, as its tentacles delicately probed my leg. And then it lifted its mouth towards me. And it began to make sounds. At first it sounded like an intake of breath, long, shuddering. I saw structures ringing the neck below the tentacles flare up, filling with air. And then, a blast of noise, and another. There was something in that blast... And then there was a trilling sound, a trembling, fragile sound permeating the air, which was then joined by two more similar but distinct voices. The creature's three voices echoed resonantly across the field, strong, deep. One altered pitch, climbing high, like a wail, but never growing shrill, lingering, delicate, clear, clean. And below, another voice thickened, widened, and, as the tubes of skin along the creature's neck began undulating, its voice suddenly rippled with a luxuriant chain of agitated syllables, repeated over and over, melding with the other voices, emphasizing them, counterpointing them. They were syllables, I was sure, not just sounds, but syllables, like speech. And the higher voice now too began to form syllables, except that, this was nothing like speech. Each sound in each syllable stretched out, clear and long and echoing across the field, until it was no longer speech. As I listened, I felt something stir inside me. As if in response to the creature's sounds, a rare feeling resonated inside my chest. I thought of the first time I had come out of the World and had seen the black and the stars, all the stars... I remembered the planet of Kuthun, where, without suits, we walked across grass and breathed the musky air... I remembered a sunset on a frozen moon, which nameless creatures of shimmering blue called home in a language of color, not sound... I remembered the first thing I killed, its big hairy face punctured by a single red dot, a trickle of blood scarring its thick-set features, glaring at us with glassy eyes as we gathered its multicolored crystal eggs... I remembered a squad-mate's desperate cry as something tore at the bottom of his suit, his wailing disappearing behind us as we rushed back to the escape- hole. I thought of the humming of corridors and of the smell of people sleeping in their coffins and of Gxauwe hovering in a cloud of battered plastic datachits, each one crammed with a million words which no one will ever read... I looked at the creature, its neck raised high, its delicate voice-tubes trembling with... feelings... and I wanted to say something to it, to tell it how I felt, what it had called out from within me. I crouched down beside it, felt its tentacles licking green slime off my calf. I reached out towards it, and saw the neck come up. Then, it suddenly lunged at me, and I startled back, slipped, fell on my rear. The next moment it was crawling on top of me, faster than I expected, its tentacles extending towards my face... licking my visor. And through all this, its voices never faltered, but kept on filling the air with powerful and delicate and resonant sounds. Suddenly, a different voice cut in. - Ten seconds to hole -, my suit said. And everything hit me at once. The beautiful voices were still in my ears, but I wasn't listening anymore, I was thinking of Procurement, and what buyers they would find for a creature which could produce such remarkable sounds, and I was hearing voices, familiar voices: "... find a market for the lot... Twenty percent lost in transit but still a nice profit... Pack 'em in, ship 'em out...", I was seeing procurers stumbling through the slime rounding up small shambling creatures, herding them with prods towards the pick-up points, and it wasn't a memory. There was weight on my chest, crushing weight, I was trying to push the creature off, but it weighed too much, it was small but it was terribly heavy and my muscles had been weakened by too much time in freefall, my arms were weak, weak, and there was an entire planet of life and beauty leaning on me, tethering on my next breath, all the unheard voices, the untraced patterns, the unformed creations, and I saw in the upper corner of my visor- screen a count-down signal, and it was five seconds now, four, ticking away right under the creature's licking tentacles, its disinterested licking tentacles framed between the targeting cross-hairs in burning red... It's your baby, Fenby. The decision crystallized inside me like ice. The suit read the decision in my eyes, and made it fact, signed my verdict in a single pulse of light. The suit makes the gap between deciding and doing too small for hesitation. The creature wailed, it made the most terrible wail. It was the most extraordinary and pain-filled thing I heard in my life. It followed me as I fell down the hole. It followed me back to the World, it followed me ever since. When I got back to C-deck, the voice had died down to a whimper, and then, it was gone. A technician pulled the creature's corpse, now terribly light, off me, and they hauled it down to organic processing. they tugged it gently, and it floated easily beside them, trailing a stream of perfectly round green drops behind it, a deflated balloon. * * * And everything changed. My sleep cycle is the same, and I still fill the same position in Survey and Records. I explore barren planets for brief intervals, catch an occasional glimpse of an unexploitable lifeform, or mineral-formation, or sunset before dropping back into the World. My life is still a sequence of disjointed dead worlds strung on a grey continuity. I wear it like an old suit. But everything is different. Changed. Inside. Inside of me is something I can not name. Something of no functional use. A liability for a species which procures others to survive. But I can not ignore it. It is always there, and in the silent moments, when I sit before a console or stand before a cycling airlock or lie in my coffin waiting for sleep to take me, in these moments of dead time it comes out. I have only one voice and the range of tones it can produce is limited, but still it comes out. This sound, it comes from inside of me and it moves on down all the corridors of the World, where people live in coffins from birth to organic processing, all through the empty bowels of the surviving machine. It echoes unheard. T H E E N D