Editor's Note: This is the first science fiction story I ever finished. It's not perfect by any stretch, and someday I might change the ridiculous, unpronounceable title. I included it in the first issue of scifidimensions for my own personal satisfaction - and because there was nothing else to post! Enjoy!
Pol had been a young trooper during the early days on Enti’ilu. At first, the native Enti’ilusians (dubbed “whirling dervishes” because of their spinning, four-legged method of perambulation) had fought like banshees, throwing themselves by the thousands, recklessly, against humans entrenched with cutting beams and bugzappers.
The war on Enti’ilu had lasted less than a standard year. The humans had arrived and taken over despite fierce resistance; then, mysteriously, the dervishes had stopped fighting. It was never really a war, truth be told; the primitive, agrarian Enti’ilusians were no match for land-hungry humans armed with the latest in ultratech weaponry.
Nearly 20 years later, Pol still had nightmares, seeing the man-sized arthropods closing down on him, their lower torsos rotating on four shining insect legs; seeing them explode with a pop and hiss when their exoskeletons could no longer contain the fluids vaporizing inside. Late at night, Pol and his comrades had watched as the dervishes set aside their weapons, risking death out in the open, gathering their fallen warriors, placing them on great funeral pyres. But his most unsettling memory was of a night on patrol, in the low hills surrounding their encampment. He had failed to detect the dervish snare until it was too late. With a scream of agony, he had collapsed to the ground, his right shin crushed by the booby trap. His cutter had flown from his hand, and before he could locate it, the dervishes had appeared. Even in the black, moonless night they were iridescent, their salmon-pink carapaces glistening, their deep blue vision-plates reflecting the stars overhead. They quickly surrounded him, but not in a threatening manner, their cranial segments bobbing up and down slowly, inspecting him closely. Then one of them had reached forth, like someone approaching a strange animal. With its four mutually-opposing digits, it had briefly grasped the bare skin of his upper arm, feeling his pulse and warmth. Then it withdrew its hand, conferring briefly with its counterparts in their clicking, whispering language – and just as suddenly as they had appeared, they had reeled out of sight, taking his weapon with them. He’d spent three hours hobbling downhill in the darkness until the patrol found him.
The day after this incident the dervishes stopped attacking. No one actually made a connection between Pol’s encounter and the end of the “war” - except Pol, of course. He’d always wondered why they’d spared him. Why let him live, when his people were little by little taking over native farmland, little by little forcing them into the purple hills? After that, only occasionally, a band of three or four aliens would be spotted, always one carrying the body of a dead dervish, the others bearing bundles of native pink wood, which they used to build a funeral pyre, committing their deceased comrade to the rich soil. Once in a while, an intolerant settler would take potshots at a funeral party. The dervishes would scatter for cover, leaving the bodies until the next day, when more dervishes would arrive to help finish the work. Eventually the authorities stopped settler interference with the funerals, at the same time keeping a wary eye on the dervishes when they appeared. Month by month, year by year, the funeral parties became rarer, and smaller, until finally only single dervishes would be sighted, spinning slowly, bearing a body, which they would leave in the fields, making several return trips to gather enough pink wood for a proper fire. By that time, the dervishes had become a tourist attraction, thousands traveling to the farm country in hopes of spotting a poll-bearer. The police would always ensure that it was unmolested until its job was done; and the farmers would ensure that the remaining ashes were worked into the earth on the next run of the plow.
The few xenobiologists who took a serious interest in the dervishes were sorely disappointed in the amount of data they could gather. Seeing a dervish in the wild was almost as rare as seeing a bigfoot, and only a scant handful of bodies had been recovered. Very little was known of their language and customs; absolutely nothing was known about their reproductive habits.
Several years after the war, the end had come for the dervishes. There had been no sightings in three or four years. Their strange, pink crops had given way to the green of human crops – grains and vegetables and other useful plants. Then one day, some children were out playing in the fields, and they spotted it. A solitary dervish picked its way carefully out of the tree-covered hills. The children, frightened, ran to their respective homes, and soon the whole village was roused, gathering to watch from a safe distance. Pol was the Town Speaker by then. Upon arriving at the scene he consulted with a pair of cops, who were sitting on the hood of their flicker. One of them he instructed to call the university to get a xeno quick, the other he asked to accompany him.
The dervish had made its third trip from the forest, where it had apparently been hording dry wood. Much of the pyre was comprised of wood from invading species, trees the humans had brought with them. Mixed in, here and there, was native pink wood. Either the type of wood made no difference to the dervish, or it had little choice in what it collected.
The two men came within eight or nine meters of the dervish. “Stay here,” Pol told the officer, and approached the dervish slowly. It stopped rummaging in the pyre, its cranial segment swiveling in his direction. The blue vision-plate shined brightly in the sun, reflecting white clouds and green crops. It remained absolutely motionless as Pol came within three or four meters. He could see his image in the visor, hair blowing in the breeze; arms in the air, showing he was unarmed.
“Hello,” he said, feeling a bit foolish, but trying not to show it. “Can you understand me?” The dervish appraised him, still motionless, saying nothing.
“Can I help you? Is there something we can do?” As the warm afternoon air buffeted his clothes, he was suddenly filled with deep remorse. How many of this creature’s kind had he killed, dicing them with a cutter, or boiling them inside-out with a zapper? They had taken their land, pushed them out, with no attempt at coexistence. The xenos – the only ones with any serious interest in the indigenous species - had arrived too little, too late. There was nothing left to study when they got there. The native Enti’ilusians, scorned as primitive bugs, had become folk tales, laughing stocks. How many jokes had Pol heard, or told, about “the Illusions”? The planet was dotted with high school sports teams called the Whirling Dervishes, or the Anti-Illusions. On weekends, out on a flicker ride, he could see weather vanes on farm buildings, cut out in the silhouette of a dervish; four legs and two arms, one hand outstretched to point with the wind. How many flicker helmets had he seen, metallic pink, with a blue reflective visor? He looked at the ground, sick with regret. They had taken everything away from this species without learning a thing from them.
He looked back up. The dervish raised one arm, slowly, the four-fingered hand pointing at him. “You have changed,” it hissed, in heavily distorted Standard English. Pol was astonished. His mouth fell open, hands dropping to his sides.
Before he could reply, the dervish carefully removed something from the small woven pouch it was carrying. It climbed, with surprising agility, to the top of the pyre, and laid down. It reached beneath itself with one arm; the hand fiddled briefly, and a fire sprang into existence. Pol was aghast, briefly considering saving the creature, but he relented, backing away slowly as the fire quickly engulfed the mangle of gray and brown and pink wood. The dervish carefully folded itself, like a pocket knife, as the flames licked against its gleaming exoskeleton. Pol was vaguely aware of the shouts and shrieks and moans of the gathered townsfolk. He felt as if he would faint, but by then he had reached the police flicker, steadying himself on it.
The police busied themselves, herding the crowd back, encouraging them to disperse. Children cried. Parents consoled them, looking both alarmed and angry that this creature had immolated itself before their very eyes. The xenos arrived, late as usual, and there was a terrible argument as Pol tried to explain to them what had happened, why he had spoiled their last chance (perhaps) at capturing one alive. Finally Pol lost his temper, shouting a stream of expletives at one of the scientists as the cops held him back. The other xenos ran toward the burning pyre, which had reached its apex, and raised their arms in disgust. Nothing to salvage.
The next day Pol called the xenos to apologize; also to give them as much detail as he could recall about the creature’s behavior. He neglected to tell them what the dervish had said. Why had it spoken to him? What did it mean? Surely this could not be one of the group that had snared him years ago! There seemed to be no other explanation. Despite being the object of its reproach, he took secret pleasure knowing that he was the only human who had ever communicated with this beautiful, graceful, and now - most likely - extinct species.
You have changed.
“I have changed,” he thought. Once, he had been a young, ignorant grunt, perfectly happy to do his job for three squares a day, a pension, and a land grant from the conquered territories. So what if that job meant the dispossession of another sentient species? But, bit by bit, over time – too late perhaps – he had drifted, morphed, into a man with enough thoughtfulness to look back with regret.
The years passed. No more dervishes were spotted. The general consensus was that the native Enti’ilusians were truly extinct. The scientists timidly picked at the few frozen partial corpses in their possession, treating them like holy relics, doling out tissue samples by the fractional gram to various experts for analysis.
Then the Sickness came. In less than two weeks, virtually the entire population was seized with fever, nausea, tremors, paralysis, and finally - coma. Mercifully, and miraculously, there had been no deaths – but no recoveries either. As Town Speaker, Pol worked around the clock with panicked officials, trying to organize doctors and police in an effort to contain the plague and identify its cause. But before they could make any progress, they too were taken ill. Pol was barely able to drag himself into bed, next to his comatose wife; they had been forced to stay home due to the hospital crowding. In his delirium, he laughed bitterly, smitten by the irony that, like H. G. Wells’ Martians, they too had won the war, but lost the peace to an unknown and unknowable opponent. He lost consciousness.
#
He awoke. It was night. How much time had elapsed, he could not tell. Oddly, he remembered something his mind had dredged up during periods of half-remembered consciousness. Or perhaps a strange dream. Not the nightmares of years past, but a new dream – almost like a revelation. The scientists had been stumped by the lack of identifiable dervish genitalia, or any other clue as to their methods of procreation. But Pol remembered watching an ancient documentary, made centuries ago on Earth before the Diaspora. Primitive humans, living on remote islands, had practiced a form of ancestor worship. They had taken the bodies of their deceased loved ones, and after reducing them to ashes in a great funeral pyre, had mixed the ashes with something or other, then drank it down, thinking that this brought them together with the spirits of the dead. He couldn’t remember all the details, but it was something like that. Then his mind connected the dots. The dervishes always cremated their dead, and always in the lowlands near the rivers. Why? Perhaps because the crops they raised absorbed the essence of the dead. Reproduction by absorption? By osmosis? Each dead individual mixing into the soil, rejuvenating those who remained? And perhaps, from some of the remains, their young grew out of the ground like plants, emerging periodically, en masse, like the locusts of old Earth!
His mind returned to the other great puzzle. Why had the aliens stopped fighting, all those years ago? They had fought like cornered animals, then, without explanation, they had simply retreated to the hills. Abandoned their fields, the source of their rejuvenation. Abandoned their young, lying unborn deep beneath the soil. Why? With a shock the answer came to him. We are compatible!
Pol felt weak, but better. In the dark, feeling strange, he arose from bed and staggered to the bathroom, knocking over a small end table, scraping items off the dresser. He turned the light on, and looked in the mirror. A deep blue visor gleamed back at him; a four-fingered hand steadied him against the basin.
He reeled out into the street to join the celebration. His wife still slept in bed, folded like a pocket knife.
END
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