M. G. Soikkeli
Markku SoikkeliKäännös/translation: Liisa Rantalaiho, 18.3.2003
The first local gene pool we started from was on the map briefly "Lake nr 6". The lakes preceding that were just as densely populated, according to radar, but the surrounding ground wasn't suitable for construction.
Rachel had her own interpretation, which she confided in me a little before her departure:
"Committee decision. Human patience in a new environment doesn't go farther than six alternatives. The sixth has to do."
Such were the laws of our nature we took with ourselves into alien worlds. Patience was counted in six alternatives, discipline in fifteen at the most. Any larger group of humans sent to perform the same task would have lead to fatal power struggles. Arguing from history, the optimum for a cooperative human group was somewhere between a team sport and a student team.
And even among the fifteen there would be at least one Judas, a human who'd be fed up with the unanimous enthusiasm of the rest of the group and would start doubting the grounds of making the voyage.
At least one. We had two of them.
* * * When Dworkin said she was crazy by the standards of both our own world and of Penumbra, I took her seriously. In principle, people can't prove themselves crazy any better that define themselves being asleep - both characteristics are determined from outside - but Dworkin was already drifting outside all principles. She might become crazy by just deciding to do so.
I told her as I saw it, that it was time for her to settle down and take seriously her life on Penumbra: it was time to decide whether she saw herself as a recluse of humankind or as an inhabitant of Penumbra.
"You mean as an outcast of humankind or as a freak of Penumbra?"
"You are not a freak. You are lonely", I corrected, and slipped the last wool moulding in its place. The next pile of wools was dimly visible somewhere ahead. I was considering how thick a pile of the mouldings we ought to fetch for the day's last section.
Dworkin threw her knife in the mud. I said nothing. We had proceeded from the lake to almost the fifth hoop and had exceeded the anticipated daily rate. We'd have no hurry until the others came back from the mapping expedition.
I picked the knife up from the mud. I put it in my belt and knocked on her helmet.
She turned towards me: the small pocked face that had been so determined and excited when she first opened her eyes in the grey light of Penumbra. Now her face was dark and shut-in like the yellowish cloud cover of the planet.
"Perhaps it's time for you to find a suitable partner", I suggested. "That's what I mean by settling down."
"You can't be serious."
"What do you mean? I know a Penumbran from the fourth hoop who's very interested in solids."
Her face twisted with distaste:
"Solids? Is that how they call us?"
I sighed. "The word is mine, the viewpoint theirs. Applies to all ectomorphic creatures living on Penumbra. From their perspective we are even more watery than they themselves, but our fluids are more…compartmentalized. We are not just solids but incommunicado."
A nasty grin flashed on her face: "And you think I ought to compartmentalize myself like these natives."
"Not at all", I defended myself. "Or maybe I said so, but I meant our manners at home. You know: home and hobbies, friends and dreams."
Dworkin's eyes bulged out as if the vacuum of space were sucking on them:
"And a mate! You aren't saying anything about a mate, but that's what you mean. That I should copulate with some damned hydroloid!"
The discussion had turned nasty. We both had an academic education in diplomacy; we wouldn't have needed to quarrel like two village hags by a well, but to consider our situation in its universal context. Cooperation with the inhabitants of Penumbra was the goal to be achieved by any means. Never mind by what name the former representatives of our species called the forms of cooperation.
I was reminded of the politicians of superpowers kissing each other, or the first space stations docking into each other's appendages. Nobody belittled the importance of such meetings or claimed to see merely copulating symbols in them. Why would our work among another humanoid species be any less important? A species docking with another species…
And our life here had actually started as if anew, grown from a grape hurled through space, from which we had awaken, one at a time, like ova maturing for their task. The Earth and humankind were for us nothing but memories from a former lifetime, we'd never be able to check their authenticity as we could the earth and sky of Penumbra, the dimensions where we worked as representatives of humankind, as diplomats trudging along in mud.
Dworkin tried to pull her helmet off from the boiler suit.
"First I'm dressed up in this fucking condom to build drains for them, and then I'm even supposed to marry one of them! That's enough now!"
"Yes, it is", I decided. Dworkin was my friend, not the humankind glimmering hundreds of light years away.
"What?"
"Let's take a lunch break."
* * *
Each sentient species considers itself a key species, just as every individual is a key for the interpretations it makes of the species. If termites were to be asked what kind of role they played in the great drama of nature, they'd want to be noted as a key species for the sake of their skills in construction, not for the sake of the methane they secret. But there's no help for it, the larger the frame we are placed in, the more decisive those characteristics where the smallest are alike the largest.
The success of evolution can neither be defined beforehand nor from the outside, especially not in a cosmic scale. Looking forward, the theories of evolution will only do for fantasies of an encounter between your own species and another one. Without fantasies, we wouldn't be representatives of our human species.
We talked about Dworkin, once. It happened a little before Rachel left with the others to map the next lakes.
"Dworkin's a good example", said Rachel. "Externally she's as far as possible from our ancestors. She's slender and slim as an angel, as a human released from the gene shackles of evolution. Not her brain, though. In a hundred thousand years the human brain hasn't evolved in any way. It's more of a burden than a benefit for us. It takes up only 2 % of the body mass, but uses a fifth of all the energy."
"And what do we learn from this?" I asked and meant it. Rachel would not have emphasized the statistics, unless she'd already reasoned out what she saw as the right answer to evolution.
"That brains are not decisive in evolution."
"Then what is?"
"Immunity. The larger the area to which a species spreads, the more it encounters new biotopes and their viruses and bacteria. It's a completely different situation if instead of galaxies, we talk about spreading out within just a planet. As you know, of the human civilizations the Europeans coped the best, since they had the most domestic animals and the microbes those carried in their immediate environment. Europeans could practice evolution at home. The galactic civilizations don't have the same advantage, since no one knows what kind of unique internal parasites we are going to meet on alien worlds. Therefore the immunologic adaptation characteristic for the species is decisive."
That sounded depressing, unpredictable. As if variable descent, the term Darwin used to emphasize the passivity and blindness of evolution, would in the cosmic scale be just a game of dice.
"What about individuals?" I suggested boldly, thinking about Dworkin. "No epidemic ever could kill off hundred percent of a population."
Rachel laughed: "An individual is only able to act according to its species and within the species. An individual is just a lift for genes."
* * *
It was the usual weather on Penumbra's northern hemisphere. The sky let fall acid snow in apathetic lumps that the north wind drizzled on the lighter turning ground as sleet burning the fur of rodents. The leafless forest kept sighing in the wind eddies, the leather-winged birds dived through the storm wind into dry rock crannies; the yellowish ground was covered with a slowly smelting, cold grey cloth.
We were walking towards the fourth hoop. Habitation had sprung up there as soon as the connection from the lake had been opened. The hollow pipe kept banging under our boots: this section would only be opened after it had been drawn up to the next hoop. It was easier to walk upon the pipe, especially when dressed up in a boiler suit, than to wade in the swampy ground, where the sulphurous bog hollows widened to pits several meters deep.
I heard Dworkin's question in my radio:
"However can those take it?"
Walking with the following wind, I could already from afar discern the beings she was indicating. They were thick-stemmed solids, with an armadillo-like armour covering their face and body. The eyes, protected by thick leather folds, glanced curiously at us.
"F'tus!" they greeted, not meaning either of us in particular. We waved a greeting. The communication with the armadillos was just as limited as with the hydroloids. We were able to agree on the tasks suitable for us, and to explain what we needed for eating, but that was all. We had no idea whether these beings looking like upright armadillos felt themselves any better at home than we humans did. They had lived on the same planet with the hydroloids perhaps millions of years without any competition for living space. Neither had the species any symbiotic relationships. On dry land the hydroloids were just as clumsy as we solids in water.
"They don't seem to take any lunch breaks?" Dworkin reflected.
"Haven't seen any", I admitted. The beings worked slowly when they handled the granite slabs weighing several hundred kilograms barehanded. The slabs were used to cover the part of the pipe that Dworkin and I already had lined with mineral wool. The wool kept the pipe warm and the slabs protected it from acid rain and wind.
"The time I woke up, those were doing nothing for their future. The hydroloids treated them like free roaming animals."
I was explaining this to my friend to make her remember that we were in the same camp, she and I. The Penumbrans were not our enemies, but neither were they our natural allies.
"Only when we started to build a network of pipes around the lake, did the Penumbrans find a use for them."
The division of labour had gone off without a hitch. The armadillos took care of the transportation tasks requiring strength, while the humans took care of the precision tasks. The pipe lengths and hoop sections the Penumbrans designed in the depths of the lake were transported to the proper place with a punctuality that would have made the trade unions on Earth disband themselves.
Dworkin considered it. "And when a species smarter than us arrives on the planet, they'll find something more intelligent for us to do, too."
"That's possible."
"Such as cleaning up their toilets, for instance."
I said nothing. I knew we'd come back to the subject.
I wiped sleet off my helmet visor. The globular constructions of the fourth hoop appeared from the whirling snow. The round stone houses seemed to subside as low as possible when the wind's rage whipped moss shreds off them; the doorframes were drooling green trickles.
"What's up, biddies?"
Applewhite rose up before us like a legendary yeti, bleached all over by the burning slush. The sealing tapes at the joining of helmet and suit had been embrittled to black lace.
"There's a working class hero for us". I nudged my friend. "The feller just lies here sleeping while others got to do all the work."
Applewhite's laughter guffawed in the helmet loudspeakers. "Your job's getting in the slow lane, sisters." He kicked the pipe that was already securely covered with granite slabs. "One of them came to ask when we are going to get the pipe up to the fifth hoop. It's got a house ready to be moved."
We looked at him, amazed. Until this, the Penumbrans had shown no sign of such modern concepts as "completed-to-schedule" or "transportable detached house". The Penumbran technology was thought to be on an Iron Age level.
"Are you saying the hydroloid told you all of that?"
"It wasn't that difficult", Applewhite insisted. "We had in our sight all the essentials to refer to: the pipe and houses and a hoop. We talked with what there is and where the water is flowing." Then he signed with his hands how the fiery lake water flowing in the pipe would look like when the sluices would be opened up to the fifth hoop.
"Are you quite sure the Penumbran understood that?" Dworkin stated. Her voice was threateningly lifeless again.
"It's an international hand sign!" the yeti howled and laughed to split his sides.
I helped him up from the hollow where he'd been lounging. I explained that the last pile of mineral wools had to be spread on to protect the pipe, before the material would become waterlogged and useless. Applewhite tried to plead that our co-workers proceeded so slowly laying the granite slabs that it would be no use anyway for humans to break their back working.
"And you'll get no promotion for it, even if you work your fingers to the bone. In Rome do as Romans do."
I told him to shut up, if his yarns were as ancient as the local technique. We continued clumping on and passed the pressure differential well that had given the protection for Applewhite's hollow to stay warmer than its environment. Then we came on the path that descended into the shelter dug beneath the hoop.
The entrance hall consisted of three shower rooms. The construction was so tight that the microbe strains peculiar to humans wouldn't spread out from our temporary base. Here we were safe and comfy. The major part of the shelter was low continuous space, where equipment in need of repair and stuff transported from the ship piled up. Among the junk there were a couple of long benches that could be spread out for beds. In the rear room were the spare parts cabinets and a small workshop with its tools.
With the help of the Penumbrans, we'd been able to fit out a shelter in each hoop crossing. The hydroloids dug at the rock of their planet with ease, formed shelters and globular dwellings from it. The acids secreted from their tentacles they used as proficiently as a human uses her fingers.
"Would you put the coffee on, please", I asked Dworkin.
After we'd become acquainted with the hydroloids, we'd given each member of our group an indexed name in the order of their waking up. When we spoke to each other, however, we still used the old names. Had I called Applewhite "FetusC" or Dworkin "FetusK", I'd just received long embarrassed smiles in answer.
We took off the helmets, but we were too tired out by the wind and rain to peel off the boiler suits. I heard Applewhite wonder that first we taught the Penumbrans the idea of living in houses and then we even built them their own suburbs, and yet they didn't treat us any better than bats or rats. His broad-jawed head swayed between the shoulders; he smiled when he mentioned bats and rats, like relatives left behind on the Earth. Applewhite, the biologist too tactful to study alien life forms.
I asked if he'd heard anything from the group on the mapping expedition.
"Nothing today", said Applewhite. "Surely they keep in their own shelter, while the weather's like this."
"Like this", mocked Dworkin. "The weather's been like this the last half-a-year."
Applewhite looked at my friend, laughing up his sleeve. He liked to scratch the back of his head, to hold the hollow of his hand upon his head, as if he'd imagined touching the thought where he touched himself.
"Local or Solar?" the man asked, friendly. When he raised his eyebrows, the whole scalp seemed to move.
"What do you mean, solar?" Dworkin demanded. "What solar are you talking about, when the sun hasn't been visible on this planet for thousands of years, I'm sure."
"Solar, my little friend," said Applewhite, "means the Solar period adapted to the Terran population, that is 365 point 242 days. On the other planets we use that as the parameter of nostalgia, if you don't happen to know that."
Dworkin looked at me: "Is the man serious?"
"In a way. It's our slang, when we talk about what we most miss from the Earth."
"The Sun?"
"That, too", I said. "But above all, a month that feels like a Lunar rotation and a year that feels like a Solar rotation. Natural constants, such things."
Dworkin wasn't satisfied with this, either. Only then did I understand the kind of distress that troubled her, and why I'd insisted on her as a partner in the insulation work of the fifth pipe. Not for friendship, but for a need to see whether she could become like me, later on. Whether she'd want to adapt just the way I thought I'd adapted.
"You've been here the longest", she said. "Does that mean that you've been here one half or a whole Solar year?"
There's the rub. When I'd been talking about settling down in a local manner, I'd meant her - so as not to think about myself, about the duty that wasn't ascribed to me in any regulations, but which was mine sort of … naturally. As the first of the humans, FetusA.
I shook my head: "There's no elliptic end to this journey, nowhere you could hope to see homewards. We have nothing but a one-way ticket."
Applewhite laughed through his beard: "We are nothing but one-way tickets. These local octopuses will leap a million years into the future, thanks to us. We are here, sunk on the bottom of a well, and soon all the other species will climb over us."
Dworkin shuffled from the cooker, the ceramic pot in her hand. The smell of synthetic mocha was like a waft from paradise.
"A million, eh? That a water-toilet would bring about an evolutionary jump of a million years? Hah! Shall I say what'd be a real jump? That the sun would shine through that cloud cover for once."
Applewhite tapped me on the shoulder: "Can you organise that for us, boss?"
I reached out my cup to Dworkin's coffee pot. I'd scraped the name label off the cup.
"First, I'm nobody's boss. Second, we ought to be happy about this statistic rarity, that there's a planet with even a tolerable atmosphere plus enough oxygen. Third: has any one remembered to make cream this morning?"
* * *
"Let's take an apple, for instance", said Rachel.
The fruit she was holding was more like a fig than a ripe apple. We had tested some seeds brought from Earth, speeding up their metabolism, but the trees and corn sprouts grown in the shelters looked desolate, not to speak about their taste.
"Why just an apple?" I asked. "I was talking about individuals."
"Don't let the size fool you. 95% of an apple is just water and 5% is person."
"You must mean essence."
"Whatever. But you know whom I mean."
"Applewhite."
Rachel nodded. "Both Applewhite and Dworkin are individuals in the strongest, solipsistic sense of the word. No rules of set-theory can be applied to them, not even in their presence. What can you do with them, whatever their genes? One's a biologist who tries to become stone to understand an alien life form, and the other a social scientist who can't stand socializing. How, then, should we take individuals as fellow specimens?"
I bit the apple from the opposite hemisphere. Some of the apple's essence stuck between my teeth.
"They complement each other. Not like a man and woman", I corrected, "But like fire and water."
"Alfa and omega", grinned Rachel. "But to come back to your question: what's the use of them for evolution? What we are constructed of as species makes us whole and enclosed. Whether we are going to adapt to Penumbra, or specifically to the Penumbran form of life, that will be decided by our species characteristics."
Only the taste was left of the apple. The species we'd experimented with were terminal: they did not seed a new generation.
"But it has to start somewhere. Adaptation."
"Exactly. Somebody must start it."
Oh Rachel, you who predict the history of our species: you only see characteristics in us, you do not see the faults.
* * *
The snowfall had eased up a little, but the cloud cover was so thick the colours of the landscape did not brighten, nor did the cold puddles covered by acid snow look any homelier. We scrambled up to the pipe and started walking along it, off from the inhabited hoop. Applewhite walked last of the group, dragging behind him a cart piled up with the wool mouldings we'd manufactured. The insulating substance was mineral wool, ends coated with polyuretane, burned and compressed to a U-shape, to fit as mouldings around the pipe. With a press constructed in the shelter workshop we could manufacture enough insulation to protect all the pipes laid out from the lake.
We stopped where the insulated section ended and the naked stone pipe projected towards the horizon like a longitude drawn on the ground. Dworkin and Applewhite stared gloomily at the pseudo-perspective created by the pipe. The work could go on into infinity. The Penumbrans could build more habitation circles, and their diameter would grow accordingly, the farther along we'd proceed from the lake centre.
But the humans standing by me did not see an image of a widening civilisation, instead, they saw a sewer system becoming denser. Perhaps there was more to study in the suspicion they showed towards the alien planet than in Penumbra's own population that was so at one with its environment.
I decided to change the division of labour.
"I'll cut the wools and then you'll place them. Let's get these set now while it's still light."
I bent down over the pipe and took the knife from my belt. Three quick slashes at the end of a wool moulding, a piece off it to match the side support, and adjust that on the side of the pipe as far as the support. "Fits." I passed the bit over to Applewhite. He swiped the un-melted snow off from the pipe, chucked the mineral wool moulding over his shoulder like a wrestling dummy and knotted a plastic string to tie the moulding in place. He had strength in his fists like a small hydraulic press.
Having tied the moulding in place, Applewhite stretched himself as if all the day's work were now done. He swayed his hips and began to sing loudly: "You say you want the evolution, well..."
I slashed the next moulding again to fit the supporting side plates of the pipe and passed that to Dworkin. She sighed and started to set the moulding in its place as if it were the missing piece in a mystery we'd found.
"..you can count me out..."
Noticing he was listened to and observed, the man stopped singing. He looked towards the north: "It's less than a kilometre from here to the next hoop. If we get there in time, we'll sure get bonuses from the mate who's got his building there already."
"What mate?" asked Dworkin.
"The one I was talking to today. He ought to treat us to a beer at least for getting running water to his digs."
"Oh, it's one of those matey things", Dworkin cackled over her work. "So you think you know which of them is a male?"
The man eased his back upon the pipe and gave a good stretch to his long-limbed body. The he got up and pointed at me: "Ask her. She's been in their houses, you know. Quite a plumber."
I waited to hear whether Applewhite would go on with his account. I passed the next wool moulding: "You ready now?"
"It's her who's dawdling", the man grated, but gripped the moulding anyway.
"Who?" Dworkin turned first her helmet visor and then her face towards Applewhite. "I?"
"You. Tortoise. Why don't you grow up a bit first under your helmet before you come on the site."
Dworkin laughed cruelly: "And you old hulk imagine I care anything about your opinions?"
"You got no choice, Dworkin. Dorkin. Dopey Dorkin? How's that sound? Dopey Dorkin! Now there's the tree you fell off."
"And what about you, you…. you applicate! There's a name for you, you god damn applicate!"
I sat down upon the moulding I'd just finished cutting. This wasn't the first or the last time when our own people started squabbling, irritated by the constant slushy weather. The stock of idle abuse had already been used up during the first weeks awake. I was the only one saved from the sneers. I, the first of the humans, the vanguard.
I glanced at the pipe's horizon. To adapt to Penumbra, we'd decided not to use first names so as to follow the local manners. The goal was more beautiful than the usage, for humans of course were not satisfied with the fetus-indices they got.
I thought about red-four - I knew no more of himmer than heesh knew of me, the mere index. Heesh was the reddest Penumbran living within the fourth hoop, and for some reason heesh had been friendlier to me than any other of the planet's inhabitants. Why just heesh?
On the other hand: why not? Proper names isolated human beings in imagined destinies, but perhaps the indexing helped the hydroloids to see neighbours and relatives in their friend, to recognize their partner as a place in the world. The interest red-four felt for me meant an interest felt by the whole fourth hoop. Not a personal one, but not random, either.
"Applicate?" I heard Applewhite shouting on the radio channel linking the helmets. "Whatever do you think that means? It doesn't even mean anything!"
And I knew it was time for me to settle down.
* * *
Long ago already the majority of humankind had stagnated as species. An individual has to make a commitment to something outside herself so as not to be empty inside, and the same applies to humanity: when it lost its conception of God it found no other orientation than interstellar search, a goal without a purpose.
My friend Dworkin was an exemplary human. She was an anthropologist of the space age, who in theory was ready to place herself in any alien environment and test with herself how a human could cope there. Cooperation with other humanoid species also was for her, in theory, challenging, because it returned a human into situations that our own species had not experienced for tens of thousands of years.
Actually, she wasn't my friend.
Seen from the perspective of anthropologists like Dworkin, we humans are programmed to react to everything new as if it were appropriate and meaningful activity. That's as far as they think about evolution. They willingly set out to an alien world since they are disappointed with humankind, but when they reach their destination, they get disappointed with themselves, too.
The disappointment of scientists like Dworkin easily infects the other members of the group, especially in such isolated circumstances as these. I congratulated myself for actually having one true friend, or at least a human whose thoughts made me feel at home. What else can you demand from a friend? I couldn't think of her as part of a series of awakened diplomats - for me she still was "Harrison", whenever we talked on a private radio line, or "Rachel", when I recalled her, alone inside my boiler suit.
"As a social animal, man has not evolved for thousands of years", Rachel insisted. "The denser the culture where humans live, the more they are conditioned to symbols that direct behaviour. Cultural evolution has only meant the development of symbols, not humans."
Rachel thought that in humans curiosity is just as built-in as in all the other more developed animals. Alas, culture has encouraged us to give up that healthy intuition. To maintain contact with beings like ourselves and with the purposes of humanity, we are willing to see in a gust of wind nothing but a change of low pressure, or to explain a peculiar branch formation as merely a phenotypical accident.
I believed her, especially when we discussed the differences between the Penumbrans and the humans. The local hydroloids did by no means live on any "Iron Age" stage, since their technology was completely different from the one familiar to us; the Penumbran culture had a social, not an instrumental character. Therefore they had no need to name each other or the places where they lived. Their way of recognizing each other was based on a variable order, where chemical secretions meant the journey each being made through the community.
"They live in their communication", Rachel had explained. "They are individuals in a way where they can say to each other 'you' but not 'I'."
When I asked what kind of possibilities we humans had for mutual understanding with beings like that, she stated that the cultural gap wasn't perhaps as wide as we imagined. "Don't we, too, live in our fashion and in our memories."
Though Rachel had been awakened later than I, she understood Penumbran life as if she'd spent there all her life. Her interest in Penumbra was something that irritated the human community of our ship, especially the men, more than Dworkin's impatience or Applewhite's philosophical loitering. Perhaps the irritation was partly caused by her looks. Rachel had exceptionally beautiful, regular features and a sweet countenance suitable for an actress - but she adored the shapeless Penumbran beings as if they were heavenly denizens.
"Today I visited the second-hoop bright-foot", she might say when we had a meeting to report on the construction of the hoop community. "Nothing in their technology is based on physics. For them, all technique is chemical."
Soon thereafter she'd taken me to meet the Penumbrans who expected to live in the third and fourth hoops. We didn't have much else to communicate besides of who'd build their house on which point of the hoop. We didn't know how to ask questions, nor did the hydroloids show any interest in asking. We could just point at the pictures on the computer screen and make clear, with simple hand signs, that when the armadillos would have rolled the boulders in place, the Penumbrans could choose whichever place they'd like to live in.
Why did the Penumbrans want to move from their natural habitat into artificial pools? What if we'd suggested to them some other way of grouping the buildings, would that have been just as interesting for them as concentric hoops?
Dworkin had a simple explanation for such questions.
"We chose a circular system since that is closest to nature's own order. Life proceeds in circles."
Rachel wasn't as trustful. The boulders had been scooped out beforehand and had no individualizing differences at all. Yet the Penumbrans had a clear idea of where in a hoop each one would settle. Though they'd lived thousands of years as a chaotic appearing cluster in the lake, it seemed to mean no special leap for them to move on ashore and settle down in boulders connected by hot water flowing in the hoop.
What then would happen by the next lakes? Would we get just as friendly a welcome talking with hydroloids who weren't yet aware of the four-limbed "solids" who'd arrived on their planet? Here, again, the opinions of my friends differed. Rachel took it for granted that the hydroloids in separate lakes communicated with each other exactly like the beings sharing a lake.
"They send messages even to distant populations by the moisture evaporating from the lake. The moisture accumulates in clouds and the wind moves them elsewhere, until the messages replicated in the molecules rain down, either on the ground or into the lakes. Half of the planet's surface is just one network of water messages."
The other members of our group were now off mapping the next construction sites, lakes we hadn't been bold enough to name, only to locate them in sequence - in the hydroloid manner. Mapping was easy work, though frustrating. After all, we didn't yet know in the long term whether the Penumbrans would stay in the system we'd constructed, and especially not whether living separately would further Penumbran culture. Our selfish objective was of course that the local culture would already in our lifetime progress to deeper communication and mutual support.
Since the division of labour between humans wasn't as easy as that between species, I'd demanded as helpers the ones of us who were the most difficult and asocial. Dworkin and Applewhite helping me, we kept on insulating the pipe that fed the buildings, so that the water inside would keep warm while it flowed from the lake up to the fifth hoop. The work was heavy, but we'd get to see the marks of our hands, meter by meter, to see human achievements on Penumbra's barren soil.
Above all, I got a chance to show Dworkin and Applewhite that I wasn't boss, though I was the first to be awakened, and that to understand this would be vital for their future years on Penumbra. To live on this planet, we had to change our ways of dividing labour and labour's fruits as early as possible. No bosses, no hierarchy.
"But what, then?" Rachel had asked, for she always wanted to know the alternatives, in spite of being characteristically attracted to hypotheses. "Mere communication is not enough, for we don't live of communication as the Penumbrans do. The utopias about communicative democracy sound beautiful on the lips of those who are capable of speaking the longest."
But what, then? I tried to start the change with myself. On purpose I called the most difficult colleagues my friends. On the other hand, I knew that even such a suggestion was only possible as long as, let's admit it, I felt a certain superiority to them.
What would be the alternative allowed by this world, a sustainable alternative for humankind?
That I could not know without making a kind of leap into the future. Not in time, but - in culture.
* * *
The name Applewhite called the hydroloids was close to the truth: they did indeed resemble octopuses. "The fourth-hoop-reddest", for instance, was a three-meter hydroloid consisting of some bunches of tentacles and a long shapeless trunk, with a mouth and one lidless eye on top. The functionally specialised bunches of tentacles, however, were not external limbs in the sense of human arms and legs, for the bunches kept plunging to new locations through the body, while some stayed within the body bag to function as internal organs.
The major part of a hydroloid's body bag was liquid. On the body surface one could discern finger-thick veins where, depending on the use, flowed oxygenated blood, acid spleen or nutritious phlegm. Some of the hydroloids looked particularly motley red, since they happened to have more veins close to surface; others instead had a darkish or muddy skin. The only evidence of the feasibility of the dwellings indeed was that inside them the colour of the hydroloids seemed to stabilize to the extent that at least we humans could give them practical names like "fourth-hoop reddest" or "second-hoop bright-foot".
Most of the time the hydroloids seemed to enjoy their dwellings, since they could communicate via the liquids washing the buildings inside the hoop. The farther the hoop where a hydroloid happened to live, the more information was transmitted to himmer of the life of the inner ones. The inhabitants of the perimeter hoop, however, could only send messages to the people on their own circle. When necessary, though, they could move all their veined tentacles on one side of the body and crawl to meet both neighbours and the relatives staying in the lake. Whether they had any need to comment on the rumours arriving to the end of the chain or perhaps to copulate with the lake residents, of that we had no observations yet during our short neighbourhood.
This much we had ascertained from the one dead hydroloid we'd been allowed to autopsy. Not even our chemists had been able to find out how the Penumbran metabolism worked in its natural environment. They didn't eat the surrounding water, instead the water drifted through them. In the hoops there drifted both new water flowing from the lake and liquid "filtered" by the hydroloids living in the blocks; that's why my friends called the hoops now pipes, now drains.
The liquids flowed into the buildings through the door opening. Inside, the dwelling was nothing but a roomy cave carved in a boulder. I was able to wade through the door: the steamy water reached up to my waist.
The hydroloid lay by the opposite wall. Above himmer grew a thick layer of moss from where black drops were dripping on the eye of the inhabitant: it was fusty dark there inside, but from the hydroloid's point of view, the space was quite brightly illuminated compared to life within the depths of the lake. Perhaps the dwelling meant for the hydroloid a kind of home theatre where heesh was able to limit the amount of quantity and quality of the messages pulsing around himmer, compared to that "sea of information" where hisser relatives were swimming. Or perhaps the dwelling was for himmer a womblike shelter where the fluid circulation was strictly regulated.
Many kinds of theories had been proposed. Applewhite thought it was simply the dawn of capitalism on the Penumbran planet. Whether the need for private dwelling was a biological or a cultural necessity, that much he refused to announce.
The hydroloid seemed, anyway, to enjoy living in hisser cave, though that was only partly covered by water. I interpreted hisser position expressly as "enjoy living in", since my arrival provoked no reaction to defend a territory. The dwelling, then, was for the hydroloid no territory but - and I thought again with the terminology of my friends - rather like a public toilet.
We looked at each other. I'd have wanted to say something like a greeting, to say that my workday was now over and I've come to see you, just you, "fourth-hoop reddest". My wish was just a social reflex; the hydroloid had no need for such matters.
Could a being that looked like a blood-red bunch of octopuses be a friend to a human? Not even kids believed just any fairy-tale creature was friendly unless the creature happened to have a domed forehead and two big eyes. On the other hand, when I talked with Rachel it didn't matter to me whether her presence was based on a body in the same room or on a quiet voice in the vhf-radio loudspeaker. I knew she was a friend, I even felt it, felt in what was happy, felt it in my body.
Almost no one defines herself by the sense of touch. But we recognize each other already from how close we allow the other body to approach. We feel and recognize, we tickle before we are tickled, we fall in love before we are caressed. We search for someone who would touch us in the moment of our thought, regardless of thought.
I waded closer to the hydroloid, Four-Red.
Human bodies are curious and friendly, even more curious than the minds shackled by culture. Life would not flourish in the universe unless the influence worked that way, mind following the deeds of body.
It's neither the most bold nor the most marginalized who fumble towards First Contact - no, such things can only happen when populations frozen by culture meet.
The ones fumbling towards First Contact are those who represent the most typical, even the most everyday in their own group, whether it's a population or a species. Here, I believe, is the explanation to the hydroloids' decision to migrate from the lakes into private dwellings: a space half watery, half solid, half collective and half private would be a proper meeting place as well for the hydroloids as for humans.
Four-Red's two tentacles have risen up behind me; I only feel them when they land on my shoulders. The big unblinking eye stares at me.
I take off my helmet and clothes. The pheromones of my skin dissolve in the scalding hot fluid and the steam rising up from it. The tentacles withdraw from my shoulders. Hydrogen sulphide on the skin always means the same fear, characteristic for the species. Whatever takes place in my mind doesn't change the smell and the taste. But so has it always been, through the history of evolution. We react as much to each other's fear as to our own.
"I become part of the flow", I whisper and spread my own hands, open my arms as a sign. I don't have to explain anything to Four-Red, just to myself. I know where I'm passing to and what will happen next. I've understood that when I've felt how much of the fluid flowing in myself comes from the beings preceding me.
The body bag in front of me starts to open.
I am not …a one-way ticket, I think; not a signal sent by apes.
I step the last meters and settle myself inside the hydroloid.
I begin to be read, my blood and spleen and phlegm.
I am a message from the sea.
Original title: "Ummikot" (Portti 3/2001)
"Local knowledge" published also in Portti #86, 2003.