He paused for effect. “And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.”
“The War of the Worlds,” Charles said. “They made us read it in training.”
“Us too,” the Rhino said. “Although we found it a little disappointing. What does one do if confronted with a seemingly-unbeatable enemy? We used to come up with all sorts of alternate endings, ranging from eventually capturing and reverse-engineering their technology to simply carrying out an urban resistance against the bastards. The heat-rays are impressive, but they can only kill what they see, while the Black Smoke gas could be dispelled with water.”
“Sir,” the intelligence officer said, breaking into the discussion. “You need to see this.”
Charles looked back at the display and swore out loud. Aliens, hundreds of aliens, were swimming below the dolphins, never looking up towards the light. Below them, there were smaller aliens and some very strange creatures. Charles remembered one of the more pathetic explanations of the Birds and the Bees he’d had at school and had to fight down a laugh, then realised that they were looking at alien children. They were like tadpoles, he recalled, remembering the speculation he’d heard after their first return to Earth. The odd forms below the alien adults were children who had yet to grow into their full bodies.
“Tadpoles start out looking a little like sperm,” the Rhino said. Clearly, he’d been having similar thoughts. “They grow into frogs over several months. The aliens, it seems, follow the same basic idea.”
Charles shuddered, remembering some of the less pleasant speculation about how the alien society might have developed. Humanity’s ideal — one man, one woman, several children — was shaped by biological requirements. The man impregnated the woman, then fed her and defended her, while she had the children and then raised them. Human emotions were built around protecting one’s children first and foremost — and, less pleasantly, resisting cuckoos in the nest. So much about human society had been shaped by the mating urge — and the urge to keep children safe. But for the aliens it would be very different…
The alien men ejaculate millions of sperm, he thought, and the alien women launch countless eggs into the water. Their infant mortality rate must be terrifying — and I bet they don’t give a damn. Because they don’t have the emotional link between parents and children that we have…
He shuddered again, contemplating the possibilities. The aliens lived in a far from friendly environment, even though they were perfectly capable of living underwater indefinitely. It was easy to imagine creatures comparable to goldfish or even minnows snapping up alien sperm and eating it, perhaps even gobbling up fertilized eggs… he felt sick and swallowed hard, trying to think about something — anything — else. The whole concept was disgusting.
And what, he asked himself, would they make of us?
As a child, he’d firmly believed that girls were gross and sex, an act that involved parts of the body he associated with bodily wastes, disgusting beyond imagination. But, as a teenager, his opinions had changed radically, to the point where he’d spent most of his time plotting to commit the act he’d been so disgusted with, years earlier. And, even now, he knew he’d be tempted if someone offered him the chance to visit a brothel. Every damn deployment usually started with someone having to be rousted out of a whorehouse and then yelled at for several hours by the Sergeants for not having been ready to go on command. Or making a tearful farewell to his wife.
Humans couldn’t separate themselves from sex, not completely. There might be heterosexuals and homosexuals — and perversions that were banned even in Sin City — but they all involved sex. But, for the aliens, there would be no time being wasted on sexual matters. Nor would they have any of humanity’s complex and often useless regulations barring sexual contact. They simply never had sexual contact. It struck him, suddenly, that an alien king could have a child with a beggar girl and neither of them would ever know about it.
He snickered, suddenly. “They’re all bastards,” he said. “Quite literally. They’re all bastards.”
He watched as the dolphins swam past the alien children and down towards the alien city. It was a weird structure, reminding him more of coral reefs than anything else, surrounded by countless brightly-coloured fish. There were few signs of high technology of any sort, apart from a number of sealed boxes of uncertain origin. One building had an open roof; inside;, several dozen aliens drifted together, either asleep or stunned. Other aliens seemed to be sleeping wherever they chose, clinging to the reefs or hanging just inside rocky caves. It was hard to pick out anything that might be shops, government buildings or anything else that would be common in any human city.
“They don’t seem to have any shops,” he observed. “Or anything we would consider useful.”
“They might not have them,” the intelligence officer pointed out. “They eat fish, I assume, and there’s just too much fish around for them to try to have dedicated fishmongers. I think they’re actually more flexible than we are when it comes to eating — trying to sell food and drink here would be like trying to charge for oxygen or fresh water.”
“They do, on asteroid settlements,” Charles recalled. One of his earlier deployments had been to an asteroid where the ruling power had tried to do just that, only to have their settlers rise up in revolt. “And there were people who wanted to try it on Earth.”
“There’s a limited supply of oxygen or water on an asteroid,” the intelligence officer explained, “and they need scrubbers and recycling plants to keep the system operational, even with the best genetically-engineered grass carpets we can produce. It’s viable there to charge for oxygen. On Earth, there’s no point in even trying.”
He looked back at the latest set of images. “I’d bet good money that the first alien governments were actually communistic in nature,” he added. “Why not? There wouldn’t be any real advantages to either tribal or monarchical governments. Even capitalism would be of limited value in a world where everyone could get food and drink whenever they wanted.”
“If that is true,” the Rhino mused, “how did they ever develop intelligence?”
“They’re probably not naturally top of the food chain,” the intelligence officer said, after a moment. “Like us, they probably have problems fighting… well, a sabre-toothed shark one-on-one. So they develop basic weapons and tactics… and, somewhere along the line, those tactics become outright intelligence. And then they discovered they could climb out of the water and go on dry land. I’d bet good money that their intelligence was just sufficient at that point to allow them to take advantage without actually abandoning their roots.”
“But they have to know we wouldn’t be interested in the deep waters,” Charles said. “Why would they react so badly to us?”
“Maybe they fought a war with another alien race, one based on the land,” the intelligence officer said. “Or maybe they just suspected the worst when they first encountered humanity. Our history with other forms of life isn’t that good.”
Charles nodded, slowly. Humanity had saved the whales and dolphins after an extensive cloning program, as well as moving samples from Earth to several other worlds, but countless species had been wiped out entirely. No one had seen a dodo for hundreds of years and no one ever would, not outside VR productions or movies. But how would the aliens know what had happened? It wasn’t as if humanity had seen fit to advertise its crimes.