“Do you think it’s trying to communicate?” Mishill asked softly.
Three more creatures appeared in the metal hole, carrying metal sticks in their tentacles. The things made noises at each other.
“They are decidedly not human,” Cordovir said firmly. “The next question is, are they moral beings?” One of the things crawled down the metal side and stood on the ground. The rest pointed their metal sticks at the ground. It seemed to be some sort of religious ceremony.
“Could anything so hideous be moral?” Cordovir asked, his hide twitching with distaste. Upon closer inspection, the creatures were more horrible than could be dreamed. The bulbous object on their bodies just might be a head, Cordovir decided, even though it was unlike any head he had ever seen. But in the middle of that head instead of a smooth, characterful surface was a raised ridge. Two round indentures were on either side of it, and two more knobs on either side of that. And in the lower half of the head—if such it was —a pale, reddish slash ran across. Cordovir supposed this might be considered a mouth, with some stretching of the imagination.
Nor was this all, Cordovir observed. The things were so constructed as to show the presence of bone! When they moved their limbs, it wasn’t a smooth, flowing gesture, the fluid motion of human beings. Rather, it was the jerky snap of a tree limb.
“God above,” Gilrig, an intermediate-age male gasped.
“We should kill them and put them out of their misery!” Other men seemed to feel the same way, and the villagers flowed forward.
“Wait!” one of the youngsters shouted. “Let’s communicate with them, if such is possible. They might still be moral beings. The Outside is wide, remember, and anything is possible.”
Cordovir argued for immediate extermination, but the villagers stopped and discussed it among themselves. Hum, with characteristic bravado, flowed up to the thing on the ground.
“Hello,” Hum said.
The thing said something.
“I can’t understand it,” Hum said, and started to crawl back. The creature waved its jointed tentacles—if they were tentacles—and motioned at one of the suns. He made a sound.
“Yes, it is warm, isn’t it?” Hum said cheerfully.
The creature pointed at the ground, and made another sound.
“We haven’t had especially good crops this year,” Hum said conversationally.
The creature pointed at itself and made a sound.
“I agree,” Hum said. “You’re as ugly as sin.”
Presently the villagers grew hungry and crawled back to the village. Hum stayed and listened to the things making noises at him, and Cordovir waited nervously for Hum.
“You know,” Hum said, after he rejoined Cordovir, “I think they want to learn our language. Or want me to learn theirs.”
“Don’t do it,” Cordovir said, glimpsing the misty edge of a great evil.
“I believe I will,” Hum murmured. Together they climbed the cliffs back to the village.
That afternoon Cordovir went to the surplus female pen and formally asked a young woman if she would reign in his house for twenty-five days. Naturally, the woman accepted gratefully.
On the way home, Cordovir met Hum, going to the pen.
“Just killed my wife,” Hum said, superfluously, since why else would he be going to the surplus female stock?
“Are you going back to the creatures tomorrow?” Cordovir asked.
“I might,” Hum answered, “if nothing new presents itself.”
“The thing to find out is if they are moral beings or monsters.”
“Right,” Hum said, and slithered on.
There was a Gathering that evening, after supper. All the villagers agreed that the things were nonhuman. Cordovir argued strenuously that their very appearance belied any possibility of humanity. Nothing so hideous could have moral standards, a sense of right and wrong, and above all, a notion of truth.
The young men didn’t agree, probably because there had been a dearth of new things recently. They pointed out that the metal object was obviously a product of intelligence. Intelligence axiomatically means standards of differentiation. Differentiation implies right and wrong.
It was a delicious argument. Olgolel contradicted Arast and was killed by him. Mavrt, in an unusual fit of anger for so placid an individual, killed the three Holian brothers and was himself killed by Hum, who was feeling pettish. Even the surplus females could be heard arguing about it, in their pen in a corner of the village.
Weary and happy, the villagers went to sleep.
The next few weeks saw no end of the argument. Life went on much as usual, though. The women went out in the morning, gathered food, prepared it, and laid eggs. The eggs were taken to the surplus females to be hatched. As usual, about eight females were hatched to every male. On the twenty-fifth day of each marriage, or a little earlier, each man killed his woman and took another.
The males went down to the ship to listen to Hum learning the language; then, when that grew boring, they returned to their customary wandering through hills and forests, looking for new things.
The alien monsters stayed close to their ship, coming out only when Hum was there.
Twenty-four days after the arrival of the nonhumans, Hum announced that he could communicate with them, after a fashion.
“They say they come from far away,” Hum told the village that evening. “They say that they are bisexual, like us, and that they are humans, like us. They say there are reasons for their different appearance, but I couldn’t understand that part of it.”
“If we accept them as humans,” Mishill said, “then everything they say is true.”
The rest of the villagers shook in agreement.
“They say that they don’t want to disturb our life, but would be very interested in observing it. They want to come to the village and look around.”
“I see no reason why not,” one of the younger men said.
“No!” Cordovir shouted. “You are letting in evil. These monsters are insidious. I believe that they are capable of—telling an untruth!” The other elders agreed, but when pressed, Cordovir had no proof to back up this vicious accusation.
“After all,” Sil pointed out, “just because they look like monsters, you can’t take it for granted that they think like monsters as well.”
“I can,” Cordovir said, but he was outvoted.
Hum went on. “They have offered me—or us, I’m not sure which, various metal objects which they say will do various things. I ignored this breach of etiquette, since I considered they didn’t know any better.”
Cordovir nodded. The youngster was growing up. He was showing, at long last, that he had some manners. “They want to come to the village tomorrow.”
“No!” Cordovir shouted, but the vote was against him.
“Oh, by the way,” Hum said, as the meeting was breaking up. “They have several females among them. The ones with the very red mouths are females. It will be interesting to see how the males kill them. Tomorrow is the twenty-fifth day since they came.”
The next day the things came to the village, crawling slowly and laboriously over the cliffs. The villagers were able to observe the extreme brittleness of their limbs, the terrible awkwardness of their motions.
“No beauty whatsoever,” Cordovir muttered. “And they all look alike.”
In the village the things acted without any decency. They crawled into huts and out of huts. They jabbered at the surplus female pen. They picked up eggs and examined them. They peered at the villagers through black things and shiny things.
In midafternoon, Rantan, an elder, decided it was about time he killed his woman. So he pushed the thing who was examining his hut aside and smashed his female to death.
Instantly, two of the things started jabbering at each other, hurrying out of the hut.