“Exactly,” said Ed, smiling broadly.
II
The ship carrying a delegation of civilized homaroids arrived on the 250th day following our landing.
In many ways the ship had parallels to the Roman triremes, with the high poop and armored prow. But instead of banks of oars lining the side, dozens of small creatures were securely lashed to the sideboards, their tails trailing in the water and providing the means of propulsion, A length of cord led from each creature’s single feeler back to the helmsman. Apparently steering was accomplished by tugging on the traces, much as our ancestors must have guided the horses of antiquity.
The ship grounded and three immense homaroids stepped onto the shore. Showing no evidence of fear they came slowly and deliberately toward our camp.
We had tumbled out of the dome only minutes before. As soon as the ship had been spotted we had begun to throw on our hard suits, anxious to examine this startling and unforeseen event at closer range. The aliens, it seemed, were taking the initiative we should have begun. This was akin to the Native Americans canoeing to Spain to meet Isabella.
As I poured myself into my own suit I wondered at the origins of these arrivals. How could there be civilized creatures on this planet? We had discovered no recognizable cities yet they had an advanced technology sufficient to build sea-going ships. How had we made such a serious mistake? More importantly, what meaning should we read into this turn of events?
We congregated six paces from the dome’s entrance and stared at the new arrivals. As soon as they neared the dome they stopped, as if awaiting our response. It was a tableau of opposing monstrosities, although who were the monsters depended upon your point of view; I supposed.
These creatures were quite different from those we had become so familiar with over the past months. All three were nearly two meters tall and each probably massed at a hundred kilograms, if not more. All were painted with stripes of brilliant hues and carried pouches over their backs. The one with the orange and black stripes down his side carried a long staff, adorned at the top with a golden sphere. A badge of office, I guess.
A smaller, unpainted homaroid, of a size and appearance equal to my Julius, trailed behind the trio at the end of a tether. The other end of the tether was held by an alien adorned with vivid green stripes.
With a quick tug of the tether the smaller homaroid was brought to the fore and was pushed into the space between the threesome and our band of hard-suited explorers. The alien with the orange and black stripes raised the staff in his strength claw and drove it into the ground with such force that it penetrated the soil to half of its length. A few turns of the tether about the stake and the smaller lobster was anchored in place. With that accomplished the three newcomers returned to their ship with not a glance behind them.
“Well, what do we do now?” Ed asked. “Is this one a gift?”
“Seems a healthy specimen. The shell looks new, as if he recently sloughed,” Ajita said as she approached the captive creature. “Don’t worry, I won’t harm you,” she said gently as she raised one hand toward the captive, as if she expected it to understand her.
The lobster immediately began burbling and babbling a string of flowing sounds, the like of which we had not heard before. When we did not respond the creature again repeated what appeared to be an identical stream of sound.
“Oh, my heaven,” Ajita, who had a better ear than most of us, remarked. “Could that be language we are hearing?”
Language it was, as we quickly discovered. Not surprisingly, these ship builders had the complex language so necessary for their civilization.
Ed promptly pronounced that these newcomers were the X-Homarus sapiens we had discussed. It seemed appropriate at the time. We all agreed with his decision.
Over the next week each of us took turns trying to teach the small captive the rudiments of our language and trying, without much success, to make sense of its own. Al rigged up a box that would reproduce those fluid, gurgling sounds that we could not imitate. That solved the audio problem for we could now approximate the sounds the captive made with some fidelity.
The grammar and structure became a major obstacle. From all we could reason out both verbs and nouns of the homaroids’ language were highly irregular. But how these were ordered was more than we could understand. There should have been a linguist in the party, but without evidence of civilization why should we have bothered?
The structure seemed aggregative, complex parts of speech being built up from smaller packets of sound, each of which probably represented a word or concept—we couldn’t tell which. Somehow a part of understanding their “tongue” must have been partially hard-wired, just as was our own.
We despaired of ever decoding it and, since I had such success in teaching Julius Italian, we began to use that tongue to speak to the tethered captive.
To its credit, and our embarrassment, the creature learned more quickly than we. As it did so I was assigned to spend more time with it, teaching Italian to a willing student.
Meanwhile Ed and Ajita had discovered another disturbing fact about the homaroids’ growth pattern. It appeared that the process of sloughing expended considerable energy, energy that came from the consumption of their own flesh—about half of the body weight was lost, much of it the precious brain cells. Memory, of course, went with that. Each homaroid awoke from the sloughing as a new creature, possessing only a fraction of its former memories.
“Twenty percent memory retention, at most,” Ajita remarked with some sadness. “What a loss of knowledge for them. What a loss,” she remarked with considerable feeling, looking toward the envoys’ ship.
The blockbuster discovery came a few days later. Ed had noticed that the homaroids that snacked on the guests at his dissection table appeared to gain some of the victim’s knowledge. He had Ajita test this with the smaller versions that she used to run the mazes.
“There seems to be a mechanism very much like we once thought some Planaria had,” Ed explained. “They incorporate the chemical from the brain cells directly into their own, without the interference of a destructive digestive process. It must be an evolutionary mechanism: the ones who survive the shedding must compensate for their loss of knowledge by consuming others. The better predators must gain the most, become more skilled and therefore survive the longest. Makes a great deal of sense.”
At first we thought the animals used to propel the boat were of another species which bore only superficial resemblance to our friendly homaroids, that is until I ventured close enough to examine them. With a sense of shock I realized that not only were they of the same species but each creature’s sensory apparatus had been cruelly amputated, leaving them blind to all but a rope tied to their one remaining feeler.
How could their masters be so cruel as to do this to their brothers? I wondered. Had they no pity, no empathy for the pain and suffering of their captives? What sort of civilization would allow such barbarities?
Then I recalled with shame the Roman slaves who had been chained to their oars in the Roman triremes: Was there a moral difference between us?
I noted that one of the “slaves” was slumped in his halter, as if he were extremely limber. The crew must have noticed this as well and were soon untying it from the thwarts and hauling it on board. Curious to see what would happen next I placed one foot on the prow and raised my head above deck level.