In this version the Get prudently refrained from landing but after careful study of all radio and television transmissions elected to play a mother's arduous role from out in space. So they made a plan and ordered the world to carry it out. Six representatives of humankind were to present themselves, unarmed and tractable, in orbit: one each from China, the United States, Sweden, Rhodesia, Brazil, and the U.S.S.R.
The Get, here, too, had carefully studied all the EMF transmissions from Tokyo Tower and London's GPO and the American networks. The Get thought that most of them were very funny. Nevertheless they decoded them into aural and visual signals and analyzed them for meaning and implications.
Both Moolkri and Mawkri agreed that this complicatedly comic planet needed to be taken into the motherhood of Mawkri, and in this version they studied the means of manipulation nations and persons used upon each other. They were aware of the human custom of giving each other ultimatums: thus the commands from space. They were not as aware of certain other human habits. They were taken quite by surprise when, united in a common purpose at last, all six of the nations that had a nuclear missile capability conferred through their secret hot lines, set a time, and fired simultaneously upon the orbiting spaceship of Moolkri Mawkri and the Get.
Of the resulting swarm of missiles it happened to be a cold-launched American Minuteman III that destroyed the ship, the Get, Moolkri, and Mawkri herself, and ended the first contact between their people and ours.
There is, however, a warmer and more loving version.
In this version Moolkri spoke up:
"I do not think we can trust ourselves to these creatures, he said. "Neither do I think we should reveal ourselves to them, either for communication or to impose our helpful will on them. Let's cool it while we figure things.
There was some resistance to this, particularly from a forensicist and a KP pusher in the Get. That was right and proper. It was their function to do that. The forensicist was charged with debating all devil's-advocate positions that no one really cared to espouse, and she was very good at it. The KP pusher (who was not really called that, but none of their words are much like ours) was detailed to making things happen. He always urged action, so that nothing desirable would fail to be done simply because no one bothered to make it occur. Nevertheless, in this version Moolkri prevailed upon the rest of the Get to lie low in orbit, and so they did while drones and far-watchers made a saturation study of one small area of the planet. It was near Arcata, California.
Moolkri became aware, in this version, as he had never otherwise been made aware during his sheltered life in the Get cluster, that the universe was a diversity of things. Oh, they had seen other races. They had been journeying for many subjective years, while the Get spawned and grew and matured; they were near the end of their journey now, near the time when the Get would have to return to their home to disperse and mate. But these bipeds were unusual. Some of them were hairy, some were bald. Skeletally they were quite the same (bar the occasional malfunction or amputee), but in size and in weight they differed. Their fragrances, the drones reported, came in a wide variety of osmic frequencies, most of them not very nice.
It was in behavior, however, that the bipeds exhibited the most amazing diversity. It was not only that one biped differed from another. The same biped might behave in differing ways at differing times! They found and labeled one who was clearly a KP pusher; an hour later she was an empathizer!
Semantic analysis of their communications to each other was equally confusing. Some of the bipeds were aggressively mission-oriented within themselves:
"I'm a woman, not a doll. (Throwing a wastepaper basket at the male lying in the bed.) "I've got twenty-two years of rage inside me because of this mother trip you lay on me! (Slamming a door.)
Moolkri played that tape five times to make sure he had understood it, marveling, for only a few minutes before it had seemed this pair were preparing to procreate.
Some of the bipeds were role playing; that is, their mission was assigned from context:
"Now, gentlemen, please! (Big expression of the lips and corners of the eyes called "smile. ) "You know that under the American system my client is entitled to the presumption of innocence. (Eyes turned directly into a television camera.) "You gentlemen can try this case in your newspapers all you like-and I'm not saying you shouldn't; you have a right to freedom of expression; and I approve that right !-but the State of California Will decide my client's guilt or innocence, not you. (Decisive up and down movement of the chin and head.)
None of the Get understood any of this, and they stirred and muttered in their cluster. The forensicist proposed immediate annihilation of the planet. No one agreed, but still- But still, how could such persons live?
Among Moolkri Mawkri's people, person could not be separated from mission. They were the same thing. What a person was was what he did. It was the foreseen need for mission operators that determined how a person was nurtured; it was the nature of their aptitudes that decided which was chosen for what purpose. There was no such thing as a split personality in the Get. There was no one who was unhappy with his life. Moolkri could not play a role. He was always typecast. He could never attempt to change his image. He was his image.
The Get of Moolkri Mawkri came from a planet of the star Procyon, blue-white and burning. It was a deadly dangerous star, and it was only the dense, damp clouds in their atmosphere that kept the radiation from cremating every one of them at birth. Humans, of course, were physically repulsive to them. Humans did not have armored claws or vibrissae. Humans had only twelve senses, not nineteen, and two of the senses they did have ("pain and "heat ) seemed ridiculously unimportant to the Get. The Get clustered together, interlocking mouthhooks touching spirades, and murmured to each other reassuringly and lovingly. (They didn't know it was lovingly; they had no way to relate to each other that was anything but loving.) They shuddered in apprehension at the physical qualities of humans. Humans seemed so deformed.
Of course, even the Get sometimes fell short of physical perfection. Moolkri himself had a birth defect that damaged his second instar. Their wisest evaluator lacked a limb, and so he would never be a breeder. (Therefore, he would never want to.) But all of the Get had the power to change their shape when they wanted to. Humans did not seem to have that power. They were condemned to inhabit forever the bodies they were born to, except for such rude mechanical devices as they used to replace teeth or assist sight or the daubs of paint and odor-producing substances that some humans employed to enhance their natural appearance. This seemed a terrible punishment to the Get.
But they tried not to judge. They had seen other races and, compared to them, none seemed particularly attractive, and most were awful.
East of Arcata the road leaps rivers, looping through the foothills. There stands a long, low clapboard building with some of the windows replaced with plywood. It is more than a hundred years old. It wears its history in every scar. All day the logging trucks thunder down past it out of the Klamath Mountains, continuing their long-term systematic eradication of the redwood forests. Three of them have gone out of control and plunged through one corner of the building or another in the past thirty years.
No one wants to live in this house; it is like living next to the number one pin in a bowling alley. The porch stops short at the northwest corner. An eight-hundred-horsepower diesel tractor carried that piece of it away in 1968. The nine-foot log it was towing minced the driver's head; you can still see stains on the clapboard. The sign in front of the house now says: