It took Obie a lot of juggling to find the old records Lysander wanted, but when they appeared on the screen even the other members of the cohort gave up their game to cluster around. That wasn’t particularly welcome to Sandy. What he was seeing was a personal matter; most of the times he watched it he did so in private, because he didn’t want anyone else intruding on the yearning he always felt.
It was the record of the discovery of the lost Earth spaceship, half a century before. It showed the detection of the artifact, in orbit around the planet Mars, and the growing images of it as the interstellar ship drew close to investigate.
There wasn’t any need to launch a lander for it; the Hakh’hli had simply sent out an unmanned probe. The cameras on the probe showed the ship growing large, filling the screen. As the probe cautiously circled, the shape of the thing was clear: a torpedo with a great chemical-fuel nozzle at one end, a transparent cone at the other. And behind the transparency of the cone—
Behind the transparency were two figures in spacesuits. They did not move. Their half-silvered visors showed nothing inside.
“Which one is your mother?” Obie asked sympathetically.
“Now, how the hell do I know?” Sandy snarled. But actually he thought he did. The one on the right was smaller than the other, and its spacesuit had a golden sunburst emblazoned on the breast. Earth females, Sandy knew, were more inclined toward personal adornment than the men.
On the screen a sudden red streak of fire lanced out from the probe to the Earthly spaceship. A tiny explosion of white and gold erupted from the ship’s surface.
Sandy winced, even though he knew that it wasn’t an attack but only the routine precaution of lasering a little crater on the hull so that the watching Hakh’hli could analyze its composition before they brought it closer to the big ship itself. The glow darkened and died almost as soon as it flared. It left only a tiny pit in the metal.
Then the probe began its cautious circling of the ship again, stem to stern and roundabout. As it shifted views there were, from time to time, quick glimpses of stars, of part of the rusty disk of Mars far below, even a glint of sunlight reflected from the Hakh’hli interstellar ship itself, hovering many miles away. Sandy saw the probe launch its magnetic grapple, the cable snaking behind as it attached itself to the hull of the Earth derelict.
Then the screen went dark.
“That’s all?” Tanya sniffed. “We don’t see the inside of the Earthie ship?”
“Not in this file,” Obie said. “There’s another file, though. I can get it for you if you like, Sandy.”
Sandy shook his head. “Don’t bother,” he said. It wasn’t the bother that he minded, it was having people staring over his shoulder as he watched the recording of the ship being carefully examined and disassembled by suited Hakh’hli. The tape showed the spacesuited figures that were his parents being handled like time-fused bombs. He did not enjoy that. True, it showed nothing of the people inside the spacesuits; it showed them being carefully transported to the Genetics laboratories, where they would be kept quarantined while investigations were made, but once those doors closed the file ended. He did not care to have an audience as he watched that, and anyway the simulator had stopped moving and the door was opening. “Polly’s through,” he announced. “Who’s next?”
But when Polly came out she was in no good mood, and the instructor didn’t help it any. “When you launched from that magnetic grapple you were slow and not at all fast,” he told her. “This is waste of energy, so you must do better and not worse.”
“It was fast enough,” she grumbled. “But if you think I am bad and not sufficiently good, let’s try someone else. Obie! You take next turn and show him what one bad pilot is really like!”
Unfortunately for Obie, he performed almost as badly as Polly said. When he got out of the flight simulator his tail was dragging. “Very bad and not at all good,” the instructor pronounced. “You crashed this ship. You do not at all bring credit to your cohort.” And while Bottom, the next in turn, was getting into the still-warm kneeling seat and buckling himself in, Obie had to stand silently through a lengthy criticism of the way he had failed to deploy his trash deflectors, missed his angle of approach over Earth’s pole, and decelerated too rapidly on landing.
As soon as it was over he growled to Sandy, “Let’s get out of here.”
Sandy had no objection. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” Obie said sulkily. “Listen. We’re outside our quarters, aren’t we?”
“Well, of course we are.”
“So why don’t we do something about it? As long as we’re out we can look around.”
“Look around where?” Sandy asked eagerly, already convinced.
“Anywhere we haven’t been lately,” Obie said, meaning anywhere they weren’t authorized to be going.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to do that,” Sandy said thoughtfully. It wasn’t an objection, just a matter of putting all the evidence on the table, and Obie regarded it as such. He didn’t answer. He just led the way out of the simulator chamber, and they stood for a moment in the corridor, looking around.
Sandy proposed, “We could go see some of the things they’re making us to take to Earth.”
“No, wait a minute!” Obie cried. “Listen, we can do that later, but maybe they’ve got some funny new freaks in Genetics! Let’s go see!”
It wasn’t what Sandy had had in mind. Genetics was a place of stews and stinks, and he didn’t usually like to go there for personal reasons. But when he tried to explain that to Obie they were already on the way there, and anyway Obie was puzzled. “Tell me again what you don’t like, Sandy?”
“I told you. They’ve got my mother there.”
“Oh, Sandy,” Obie said sorrowfully, twitching his thumbs in disagreement. “It isn’t really your mother, you know.” And actually Sandy did know. What the Hakh’hli had taken from his mother’s body after her death was no more than a few microorganisms and cell samples. If they kept them alive as cultures, that was just science.
But Sandy couldn’t see it that way. To him they weren’t cultures, they were his mother—not alive, but not exactly dead, either. “Really, Sandy. The samples they’ve got in there aren’t her. They’re just cultures. All the rest of her fed the titch’hik long ago.”
Sandy flinched. He disliked the thought of his mother’s body being eaten even more than the thought of parts of it being preserved. It wasn’t that Hakh’hli burial customs bothered him particularly. All his life he had been aware that the ultimate fate of every living being on the ship was to be tossed into the tank of the things, more like a limbless starfish than anything else on Earth, called titch’hik; the titch’hik swiftly consumed all the flesh from the bones; then the titch’hik were harvested and fed to the food animals, the hoo’hik, as a valuable protein source; the bones themselves, ground up, went into the nutrients for the plants and to the hoo’hik as a calcium supplement—nothing was wasted. But when it was your own mother you were talking about it was different. Especially when you knew quite well that somewhere in Genetics there were flasks of cultures from her very own maternal body, kept on hand for experiments in gene-splicing.
Obie stopped halfway up the spiral ramp to the Genetics level. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes. I’m serious.”
“But it’s silly! They’ve got a lot of my own ancestors in there, too, you know.”
“They can’t have, or you wouldn’t be here,” Sandy pointed out sullenly.
“Well, I mean, at least from the same batch of eggs in the freezers. And I’ve certainly got children there, you know. Not even counting the ones with the Fourth Major Senior,” he finished with a touch of offhanded pride.
“It’s not the same.”
“It is the same,” said Obie, getting irritated. “Are you coming or not?”
Sandy shrugged and followed, still reluctant. But as it turned out he was spared. They were met at the Genetics doorway by a Senior who told them severely, first, that certainly there were no new organisms created by Genetics at that time—didn’t they know that all of Genetics was preparing for the influx of new creatures from Earth to study and add to their gene pools? So how could they manage to breed funnier-looking or more efficient plants and hoo’hik and titch’hik at such a time? And, second, he pointed out, they had no business there in any case, did they?
They retreated hastily. “Ah, well,” Obie sighed. “You didn’t really want to anyway. I know! Let’s go see what they’re making for us!”