Separate from the Herd
There are worst things than being alone, he mused… actually no, this is the worst thing that could to
happen to a Puppeteer – to a Puppeteer? – to a citizen. He had spent far too
much time living among humans; now he was thinking like one of them. He felt
shivers run down his necks. He surrendered to the urge to groom his mane. He
adjusted, tucked and readjusted but no matter what he did he could not get it
right. He tried curling up into a ball but regardless of where he put his heads
he was unable to find comfort. He was just too fidgety.
He was regarded as insane by members of his species. There
were few able to do what he had done: leave the herd but even an insane Citizen
needs a psychological fourth leg and his was gone. Despite how far away he was,
or how long the mission, there was always the thought that he would eventually
return to the Fleet, once again to be with his own species and to smell genuine
herd scent instead of the synthetic one aboard ship. Scientists assured him
that they were the exact same chemical compounds but he could smell the
difference.
He assessed his situation. The instrumentation was still
working, as far as he could tell, though far from optimal. Checking the
read-outs revealed that much of the cabling was sheered. The wireless back-up
systems were functional, where needed, but less efficient. All external scanners and sensors were
off-line, presumably destroyed: such was the peril of attaching them to
non-hull mountings. General Products hull integrity, status intact. Otherwise would
have been unexpected but even so it was still a relief. The rest of the ship
had not fared so well. The stasis capsule had saved his life but much of the
ship was wrecked. Life support was functional, but two layers of redundancy
were gone. He would eat, drink and breathe for the foreseeable future. The
power plant was still intact but there were some structural stresses. Now that
was a worry. It was designed to survive a high energy impact but even Citizen
technology had its limits. There was nothing he could do about it now; he moved
on…
Next, he assessed his surroundings to estimate the level of
threat. He had crashed on an airless ball of rock in orbit about a star that
humans classified as a yellow dwarf, despite the fact they appeared white to
human eyes. The threats? Radiation could be discounted, the hull would protect
him from any emitted by the star and also from cosmic rays. No, the threat was
from the vacuum of space. The first priority was to ensure that potential hull
breaches could be sealed off to keep the ship’s solitary occupant safe and
alive. Solitary, not a word used in polite society and the concept made his
legs quiver. No one wanted to be separate from the herd.
Momentarily, he considered going outside to assess the
damage but the risk was too great. His thoughts drifted back to the humans he
had studied; doubtless, a human pilot would have gone outside with barely a
second thought. Despite all of the years spent studying humans, and other
aliens, he had yet to gain an understanding of their attitude towards risk.
Their languages had words for risk-averse individuals and they were always derogatory. How a sentient being
could not only regard risk as acceptable but also to seek it out, to embrace
it, was something utterly alien and beyond rational comprehension.
Again, he checked the hull integrity. It was intact.
Atmospheric pressure had not dropped since last time he had checked it. His
fear subsided but was not dispelled. A certain sense safeness was beginning to
form, albeit fragile.
As his mind cleared, his training become hindmost in his
thoughts. First thing to do to prevent panic was to stand with fore-legs apart.
So that was what he did. His tutor had taught that this stance altered the
brain chemistry and changed blood flow. The hind leg got an extra boost of blood
in readiness to kick. His instructor had also told him that the kick of a
Citizen could kill or seriously maim a Kzin. He could not imagine himself
kicking a Kzin; some things were beyond even an insane Citizen. Whether or not
there was any truth to any of this, it seemed to be working. He now stood firm
and took control of the situation, at least, that was what he was telling
himself.
Feeling the most confident he had been since emerging from
stasis, he continued to follow the training. Herd scent: the calming and
soothing scent of the herd was proven to reduce stress and the levels of flight
hormones. Food and drink: for the brain to work efficiently it needed fuel and
to be properly hydrated. Make a plan: working out how he was going to get out
of this mess that was the difficult part.
# # #
“Separate from the Herd.” It was an expression that was used
freely by Citizens every day without a second thought. He guessed that its
original usage, way back in the mists of time, were literal rather than the
modern figurative, for example, being the only Experimentalist in a room of
Conservatives was considered to be “separate from the herd”. The literal
meaning of the expression was weighing on his mind rather too heavily as he
surveyed the hyperdrive. Verdict: it was now little more than a collection of
metal parts ready for recycling. He was about as separate from the herd as it
was possible to be.
He stood there, legs apart, assessing his situation. He was
beginning to think that standing in this position was nothing more than a pile
of half chewed grass because right now his legs felt like jelly and he believed
that if he were to kick with his back leg he would collapse in an undignified
heap.
Thankfully, the ship’s thrusters were still operational.
Thankfully? If he escaped from the planet where would he go? Yes, he could get
off this unnoticed and insignificant rock; he could never catch up to the Fleet
of Worlds on thruster power alone. He thought about where he might go where a
Puppeteer — he was thinking like a human again — where a Citizen would be safe
and wait for assistance. Safe, the key word was “safe”. Where could he go that
was safe? That question was hindmost in his mind. He would have to go into
stasis. It would take so long to get there that anything could happen during
his journey, especially now that the herd was fleeing and was not guiding the
other, more dangerous, species.
Various scenarios formed in his mind. He might be found by a
Pak ramscoop, or perhaps by a ship crewed by vengeful humans working for ARM,
or perhaps a ship of hungry Kzinti. His forelegs trembled. Maybe it would take
so long to be discovered that his kind
would have been forgotten or,worse still, he might continue until the wave of
lethal radiation caught up with him. The possibilities were endless. He tried
to think of a low-risk scenario that led to his safe rescue and a return to the
herd. For the first time in his life he was genuinely missing being with
humans: they were so much better at dealing with risk.
The strength in his left leg gave way. He tried to compensate
but it was no use. He found himself sprawled out on the floor.
# # #
His two heads emerged from under his torso. He was still in
the engine room in front of the hyperdrive. He had no memory of curling up and
entering a catatonic coma nor a sense of how long he had been out. He stood,
shaking out his mane. The time out must have done him good; he was feeling much
better and was ready to continue the task of assessing the damage to the ship.
It was but a tiny jump by stepping disc to check out the condition of the
thrusters.
They had survived remarkably well. In fact, he found it odd
that the thrusters should be operational and pretty much intact while the
hyperdrive was useless. The thrusters had not escaped unscathed from the crash
but there was no damage beyond the reach of a thorough service. The more he
thought about it, the odder it seemed.
There was nothing he could do here so it was a quick step
back to the hyperdrive. He tongued the controls and ran a full systems check.
Better to be thorough, better to make sure he had missed nothing. Structurally,
it was still intact; there was little in the way of physical damage and yet it
was completely inoperative. Granted, he was no expert when it came to
hyperdrive technology but the idea that the damage was inconsistent with what
might be expected from the crash refused to go away.
The engineers who had fitted the ship had told him not worry
about any of its systems. They had installed multiple layers of redundancy. So,
it was possible that one too few redundancy had been installed in the
hyperdrive or, more likely, something nefarious had happened.
He decided to go over the events that led to his crash. He
had been sat in the pilot’s seat watching the mass indicator when, without
warning, he found himself in normal space. He had panicked, as any Citizen
would. An unidentified fault in the hyperdrive had caused it to fail.
Hyperdrive shunts built by Citizens did not have unidentified faults. In fact,
faults unidentified or otherwise, were not a feature of any Citizen technology.
His sensors had revealed that he was near to the outskirts
of an unchartered system. It was a single star with a catalogue number and a
spectral analysis: such was the extent of Citizen knowledge in his ship’s
database database. He had set the autopilot to take the ship onto a course into
orbit around the star and then he had rolled up into a ball to quiver with
fear, as was only natural.
In retrospect, it was clear he had not been thinking
clearly. Fearing sabotage or, worse still, space piracy he had chosen to land
on a small planet, safely out of sight. Normally, he would have let the ship’s
automatic systems handle it but this time he got his mouths on the job and
landed the ship himself. He came down too steep and far too fast. The stupidity
of it stung as the memories resurfaced. If he had not gone into stasis he would
not been stood here to feel embarrassed about it. The one advantage of his
solitude was that there was no one to witness his shame.
Getting back to the here and now, he studied the results of
the damage assessment. Some circuits were burnt out caused by a current
overload. Current overload? There should be multiple systems in place to
prevent that from happening. He felt his right leg tremble. There were spare parts
aplenty in stores; he needed to get his mouths busy.
# # #
Five days later he had finished replacing the damaged parts;
he spent another day testing. While not particularly arduous work, he had found
it exhausting. There was only one way to found out if his repairs had worked:
pilot the ship to the edge of interstellar space and try it. The thought
terrified him.
However, he was exhausted. He did not trust the autopilot to
take him out of the system, at least not without him being awake to keep an eye
on it. No, it was better to rest, he decided and pilot the ship after he was
refreshed. There were no predators nearby.
He stepped into the recreational area and settled down onto
a three-legged stool. The environment controls were within easy reach and he
flooded the room with herd scent. He could not be with other members of his
species but having their, albeit artificial, scent in the air was not a bad
second best under the circumstances.
One of his heads turned towards the huge vid-screen that was
one of the walls of his rec-room. There were multiple cracks across it. He
wondered if he could fix it. An image of a herd of Citizens would be most
welcome right now but his brain and his lips protested: no more manual work!
Instead, he set to work straightening his mane. There was no
one here to judge his appearance but that did nothing to diminish the need to
groom. On reflection, he found grooming to be much better for his state of mind
than the legs apart stance. If he ever got back, he would have to give some
very stern feedback to the Citizen who had given that bad advice to him.
The blood flowed freely in his arteries and his rear leg
felt strong and ready to kick anything. Unfortunately, his front legs felt weak
and wobbly.
# # #
He awoke and realised with great disappointment that he had
been dreaming. He had been in a large and predator-free meadow with thousands
of his fellow Citizens. The herd galloped across it as one, a great stampede.
The wind had felt wonderful rushing through his mane but alas the tyranny of
the waking world had reasserted itself and here he was on his crash-landed
space ship, alone.
On the plus side, he was feeling refreshed and ready for
anything, well almost anything. “Ready for anything”, it was a human
expression, not something a Citizen would normally say. He was thinking like a
human again. The thought weighed heavily on his mind – how abhorrent but maybe
that was what he needed right now. At least his front legs had stopped shaking.
“Let’s do this.” He said the words out loud. In the humans’
language the words sounded right. They had a “ring”, as humans would say (he
did not really understand the expression: human voices were incapable of
reproducing a ringing sound and therefore it was not a feature of any human
language but it sounded good). In his native language it sounded ridiculous, at
least it did inside his brain.
He stepped to the bridge and settled onto the pilot’s stool.
The ship shook worryingly but he coped with it by repeatedly telling himself
that it was safer to leave than to remain behind. He just about managed to
believe it.
The ship’s external sensors were nothing more than a memory
but he could see the stars through the transparent hull and was therefore able
to point his ship in the right direction after escaping the gravity well of his
host planet. The journey was uneventful. It nearly always was through the vast
emptiness of normal space.
He was on his way now. He had made the first steps towards
facilitating his own rescue. The plain was predator free. He was hindmost of
his situation.
He left the bridge and stepped in to the observation deck.
Not even an insane Citizen would rely solely on external sensors. In here were
telescopes he could use to plot his position. Once he had that and he was far
enough out of the star’s gravity well he could send a hyperwave message to the
Fleet and await rescue. He was not looking forward to explaining how he had
managed to crashland but there were fates worse than humiliation. He considered
the possibility of being sentenced to a few years labour on one of the
agri-worlds. He found the prospect appealing.
The telescopes on the observation deck were only sensitive
to electro-magnetic waves of the visible portion of the spectrum, those
wavelengths that could penetrate a General Products hull. The remains of the
sensors for the rest of the spectrum were mounted on the outside of the hull.
In theory, it should be easy to find some familiar stars and plot his position
and bearing. In practice, he was not a skilled astronomer.
The first thing he had to do was plot his location on his
course through space. The calculation was simple. He knew how long he had spent
in hyperspace, he knew his velocity relative to normal space. Multiply the two
together and he had his result. Now he had his location in space he had to
match the pattern of stars he could see outside to the pattern of stars in the
ship’s star charts. Citizen astronomers had catalogued and plotted the orbits
of countless millions of stars in the Galaxy.
Someone had once told him that there were more Citizens
alive today than stars shining in the Galaxy. He wondered if it were true. As
he looked out at the countless points of light in the sky, he, somehow, doubted
it. He found this line of thought chilling, reinforcing his solitude. He forced
himself to concentrate on the matter at hand.
If he still had the external telescopes his task would have
been much simpler. Finding the positions of millisecond pulsars and X-ray
sources would have given him a much more manageable sample set of stars with
which to do his calculations.
The ship continued inexorably towards the outer system while
he studied the stars and compared them with his star maps. He extracted
spectral analyses from the data he obtained from the on board telescopes and
plotted the positions of blue supergiant stars. It took time but he eventually
managed to plot the local distribution in space to calculate his position. It
took many days for him to complete his work. It had not occurred to him that he
would be off course; if the ship was where it was supposed to have been, the
task would have been much simpler. He was in a little explored section of the
Galaxy; there were no known spacefaring aliens within easy reach.
The more he thought about it the more he came to one
inescapable conclusion: sabotage. Such a thing was beyond the capability of a
Conservative therefore it must have been planned and perpetrated by one of his
fellow Experimentalists. An alien would not have enough information to
accomplish such a feat unless it had obtained it from a Citizen. That seemed
unlikely; once sensitive information regarding Citizen technology was passed to
an alien, it was passed over permanently. The risk that that information could
be used against Citizens as a species was far too great. Not even an insane
Citizen would consider such a foolhardy action.
He had studied and worked with humans for a long time: they
would make excellent predators of his species, given the opportunity. He felt
more afraid of humans now than he had ever done while in their presence.
He let out a whine with clear harmonics denoting despair.
# # #
He was assaulted by the stench of his own waste when
consciousness returned. He let out a surprised yelp and fled to his personal
quarters. He immediately trotted into the shower; it felt good to be clean
again. Next, he visited the autodoc to check that he had not picked up an
infection. He clambered in and let the device work. Thankfully, he came up
clear.
He stepped back to the room where he had soiled himself. He
activated the automated housekeeping and ordered it to clean up the mess. He
returned to the stepping disc and went to the bridge. He checked the ship’s
course, which revealed he was well on his way towards the outer system. It was
here, as he stared at the chronometer, that he realised he had been out for
just over three days. It was now that his brain acknowledged his hunger pangs.
The ship had not deviated from its course therefore he felt safe enough to step
into the kitchen to eat.
The grass seemed sweeter than usual. He tongued the control
that increased the amount of herd hormone in the room. It was comforting but he
knew his situation had not improved.
His thoughts returned to his distant life back on the Fleet
of Worlds. The Hindmost himself had awarded him with the right to become a
parent. His insanity had ruled him out previously but the success of his
studies of and dealings with humans had overcome this obstacle or so he had
been told. He considered the reasons why this might be. Was it because the
Fleet needed more of the right kind of insane Citizen, able to leave the herd?
Maybe the Hindmost had not expected him to return? He wondered if he would ever
discover the truth and whether or not it was better not to find out…
With the satisfaction of a good graze and a full belly he
returned to the bridge. He felt restless with the need to occupy himself but
there was nothing to do. The ship followed its course inexorably without
requiring the intervention of a pilot so he kept himself busy by making another
complete check of the ship. As expected, he found no more faults. He ran the
diagnostic on the hyperdrive again: zero faults. He studied the holographic
readout wanting to believe it but that particularly crucial part of his ship
had failed before without reporting a fault. What was preventing it from
failing again? He was no engineer so there was no way he could do a thorough
investigation to discover why it had failed at least not without spending who
knows how long studying hyperdrive technology. There were many Citizens with
more of an engineering inclination than he who were unable to grasp the
concepts of the technology. He was only an alien liaison, he did not fancy his
chances. The more he thought on it the more he realised that using the
hyperdrive to get back to the Fleet of Worlds was dangerous, perhaps too
dangerous.
He had two possibilities: send a hyperwave message to the
Fleet requesting aid or attempt a rendezvous with it. The former seemed the obvious choice but he
had no idea who was responsible for sabotaging his ship. Would the culprits be
the ones crewing the rescue party? The thought of it was like a stalking
predator just out of sight. The alternative could hardly be described as safe
either.
# # #
It took him
five days to overcome the paralysis of indecision. During those five days he
had made his decision, unmade his decision and changed his mind more times than
he could possibly count before spending the final day curled up in a ball
wishing it would all go away.
The
decision was made: he would call for help. It was better to die at the mouths
of those who had put him in this predicament than to die alone in space, lost,
forgotten and separate from the herd. At least, he might have the satisfaction
of some answers.
He steadied
himself, assumed the legs apart stance and tongued the controls. Nothing
happened. The hyperwave had failed. The strength drain from both his necks and
his heads flopped onto the console. The urge to kick with his hind leg welled
up in his mind but this was vetoed by the strength draining from there too.
There was
only one course of action open to him. He allowed himself a short time to
despair. Then, he set to work,
The Fleet’s
destination was the Magellanic Clouds, as the humans called them, two dwarfs
that were making a close approach to the Galaxy. Gravity had distorted both and
would continue to do so in the future. In fact, it looked like the larger and
closer one was tearing apart the smaller. The primary target was the larger,
which was believed to be on a parabolic trajectory around the Galaxy, headed in
the direction of the Galaxy’s south pole. Such was what he learned from the
ship’s library.
Riding a
dwarf galaxy away from the predatorial aliens of the main Galaxy might be a
good idea but no one knew what species had evolved there. Some Experimentalists
had expressed the opinion it might be sterile due its low metallicity but how
could they be sure? He had heard the theory that the long term plan was for the
Fleet to return to the post-explosion core, by then sterilised and ripe for
re-colonisation. Unsurprisingly for a Citizen in contact with aliens, no one
had confided with him regarding the Fleet’s ultimate plans. Working out an
intercept course was more difficult than it seemed. The object appeared
stationary in the night sky but he knew it was moving at a high speed relative
to the Galaxy.
He called
up the course on which the Fleet traversed and plotted a parallel course
through the Galaxy. The Fleet would arrive ahead of him but that was not a bad
thing. The ship was now on its way.
Fatigue
weighed him down. Time for food, he reflected. As his hoof touched the stepping
disc, he felt a sense of inevitability but also of accomplishment. If it were
possible to overcome his current predicament, he believed he had done
everything he could have done to make it happen.
The
synthesised leaves tasted sweet. He tongued the herd scent up to maximum. He
closed his eyes and imagined himself to be in a pasture surrounded by the herd,
grazing as his ancestors did for millions of years but it was a short-lived
fantasy. His meal finished he set to grooming his mane.
Humans had
a tradition: a person condemned to death was given one last meal before
sentence was carried out. He wondered if he had just eaten his last meal. The
thought should have terrified him but he was strangely calm.
He stepped
back into the cockpit and checked his trajectory. All was fine. The thrusters
were working perfectly. He programmed the stasis field to switch off after he
reached the edge of the Galaxy. From there he could recalculate his trajectory
to his destination.
He had done
everything he could think of. The only thing left for him now was to active the
stasis field.
