Peripheral Visions: Animal Attraction

"Peripheral Visions: You sense them from the corner of your eye or in the soft blur of darkest shadows. But you won't see them coming... until it's too late."

Animal Attraction

The dead world was unsettling.

It wasn't that the planet was completely lifeless – there were some animals in the ocean depths, and a few plant species had held on in the waters and even in a few spots on the continents.

But clearly the planet had once sustained many more kinds of life, including the intelligent beings that had constructed great cities. Carver was walking through what was left of one such city now. Sand and debris covered the street in a thick layer; beneath that lay a hard layer of some sort of silicate and aluminium. The street stretched off into the distance, a straight line between towering walls of high buildings. All seemed orderly, geometrical, deliberate. There was little evidence of catastrophe.

And that, Carver thought, was the truly troubling thing - the incongruous element that made this planet so haunting. Whatever had happened to the beings that once had lived here had happened gradually, in stages. They had evidently simply let their fate unfold, calmly progressing into disaster until every last one of them perished. The thought put a chill in Carver's bones.

Whatever had happened to the beings that once had lived here had happened gradually, in stages. The city's tranquil state, so intact, told Carver that the end, when it came, was heralded with surrender rather than rage. Movies about the end of the world always depicted the aftermath with hallmark images of chaos: streets choked with abandoned vehicles, many of them overturned and twisted, others charred. Some depictions of cities left empty for years showed them overgrown, or featured crumbling skyscrapers, their facades tarnished and scored, metal skeletons reaching up above truncated skins of glass.

None of that was true here. Plants had taken root inside some of the buildings, where the sand had drifted into sheltered spaces, but aside from a couple species of vine they were scraggly and pale, diminutive survivors only barely clinging to existence.

"I don't understand why there's not more plant life," Carver said, his voice scratchy and alien in his own ears. He and Commander Dixon both wore full suits, including helmets, so radio was the easiest way to communicate. "Is it the atmosphere? Too much oxygen?"

"It's not the air," Dixon said. "We could breathe the air just fine. But we're wearing helmets, because...?"

Commander Dixon loved to test Carver, presenting him with puzzles to solve or requiring him to answer his own questions.

"Because of the level of solar radiation," Carver said.

"Which is why there are no plants growing out in the open, and almost no animals anywhere on dry land," Dixon said.

Carver was finding it difficult to put the pieces together. "But that doesn't make sense. There must have been agriculture. Huge cities like this requite agriculture. Or did their plants always only grow indoors?"

"Think about it," Commander Dixon said. "We know from our surveys there once were many forms of animal life, both on land and in the oceans. But now only a few species of animal life live on land and ocean life is concentrated in depths, near geothermal vents."

"They must have used up their planet," Carver said. "Or else choked off their own biosphere, building..." He swept an arm to indicate the city around them. Commander Dixon, walking ahead of him, didn't see the gesture.

"There's more to it than that," Commander Dixon said. "The life here was similar to life back home – carbon-based, evolved from single-cell organisms, incorporating processes in live soil into the bodily metabolisms of larger, more complex animals."

"Yes," Carver said.

"And yet, here we are... unable to walk around in daylight without wearing our suits."

"Because of the solar radiation," Carver said. "But if that's what killed them, how did they ever evolve in the first place?"

Dixon sighed, and Carver felt stupid. But he just didn't see the answer.

Dixon paused and turned toward him – and Carver's sluggish thoughts froze.

The face visible through the helmet's face plate wasn't that of Commander Dixon. It wasn't even human. It was a long face, golden in color, and narrow. Two dark eyes were set on either side of a bony ridge that bisected the face, and the planes of the face seemed to sweep back at sharp angles. It was as if Commander Dixon had suddenly sprouted a wedge-shaped head and his eyes had grown twice as large. Tufts of yellow hair fell down from the tight-fitting CCA cap that Dixon wore under his helmet. Dixon was blond – that much made sense – but his hair was kept trimmed to uniform code-specified buzz cut.

Carver stared, so shocked he forgot to breathe, as Dixon... or whatever was wearing Dixon's suit... began a long lecture. The words didn't even register as Carver stared at the strange face looking back at him and tried to make sense of it.

He was seeming some distortion due to the faceplate's transvidium, he thought. Or perhaps what he was seeing was a combination of the face inside the helmet overlaid with reflections from the dead city around them. Or else the problem lay with Carver himself – with his vision, or his brain.

Carver shut his eyes, willing them to work properly. Then he looked at Commander Dixon again.

Dixon looked exactly as he should: Like an ordinary human man. A handsome human man. Carver had been struck by Dixon's good looks the moment he first met him, and that impression of male beauty extended to Dixon's intelligence, his character, and his personality. Looking at him now, seeing him as he was supposed to look, Carver felt the same rush of attraction and admiration – and nerves – that Dixon always inspired in him.

Dixon had stopped talking. "Shipman? Did you understand that?"

Carver shrugged. "Sir, I... I apologize. I think my oxygen mix might be off or something. I'm having a hard time thinking, and for a moment there I... I think I might have blacked out a little, sir."

"You want to get that gear off?" Dixon asked.

Carver's heart jumped as, for a fraction of a second, he imagined Dixon was propositioning him. Then he took hold of himself with a flash of annoyance. What the hell was wrong with him? Dixon was concerned that if his atmospheric mix wasn't right he might need to take off his helmet. He was also probably worried about the suit's other environmental functions; Carver had complained earlier about feeling too hot, and too heavy. The planet's gravity was higher than he was used to, and the suit's automatic gravity diluter didn't seem to be compensating properly.

"No sir, I think I'm okay," Carver said.

"I don't like using this unfamiliar technology," Dixon said.

"Sir?" Carver strove to make sense of that. The suits were new, but they were essentially more modern versions of suits that had existed for docades.

Dixon sighed. "There's nothing to be done about it at this very minute. We need to get to the main administrative building and then back to the drop ship within the mission's operational window. Will you be able to manage?"

"Sir. Yes, sir," Carver said.

Dixon looked at him strangely, one of his eyes narrowed in a skeptical expression. Then he turned and commenced walking again. "Let me know if you can't keep up," he said.

"No sir, I'm fine," Carver said, willing his tired legs into motion.

The two men walked along the street, Dixon checking his arm-mounted scanner. Carver caught glimpses of the scanner map display. He figured they must be getting close to the building in question – a hub where, they hoped, they'd find a trove of records that could answer questions about this world and its vanished people.

Who were they? What had happened – or, perhaps a better question was, why had they allowed it to happen? Carver's thoughts were dimming and brightening like sunlight on a damp day hemmed in with scurrying clouds. For a moment he almost grasped some of what Dixon had been saying to him earlier, when he was making the explanation that Carver's hallucination had blocked out of his attention.

"Sir," Carver said. "Did you say something back there about atmospheric gases being the problem? A depletion of something in the air?"

"So you were listening," Commander Dixon said.

"Yes sir, but I didn't understand what you meant. You said something about oxygen, I think, but I was feeling... light-headed right then. And I'm still not understanding it. There's plenty of oxygen."

"Yes, but it's not ordinary oxygen that's the problem," the commander replied. "It's a variant of oxygen, a molecule of three atoms rather than two."

That clue jogged Carver's memory. "Oh, yes sir, ozone. But isn't ozone hazardous to one's health? Or maybe the people here were evolved to breathe it... was that it? They ran out of ozone and suffocated?"

Dixon sighed again, and once more Carver felt stupid.

"I know you understood this before," Dixon said. "I really am becoming concerned about you."

"Sir, I think I'm fine. I just need a little... a little prompting, that's all."

"The people here didn't breathe ozone. At least, we don't think they did. But that's not the problem. Ozone also exists in the upper reaches of the atmosphere – at least, back on our own planet it does. It filters out a lot of harmful solar light that would otherwise make life as we know it impossible on dry land. That's why the plants here can only grow inside the buildings, where they are sheltered from the sun's rays, and why almost all animal life remaining on the planet survives deep in the oceans."

"So, these people somehow depleted their ozone layer? And that allowed solar radiation to reach the surface?"

"Yes, that's part of what killed them," Commander Dixon said. "But that was only one of their mistakes. They also contaminated their water supply."

"Contaminated? With what? Some sort of chemical? Was it an industrial accident, like happened in... in..." Carver struggled to bring the facts into focus. He knew there had been a terrible mishap back home that had made a major water supply undrinkable for years.

"It was worse than that," Commander Dixon said, obviously knowing the historical event Carver was trying to recall. "The people here... well, I know it doesn't sound probable, because it's so insane, but they systematically poisoned all of their water supplies."

"Why? Because of war?"

"No. At least, our historical exo-anthropologists don't think so. They seem to have done it because of some sort of ideology or religious belief."

Carver was dumbfounded. "And this is also how they destroyed their ozone?"

"It would seem," Commander Dixon told him. "I studied the mission brief data for weeks before we launched. The officers and I discussed theories and investigative strategies at length during the transit. We studied the visual and instrumentational telemetry – we know what we'd be seeing when we got here, but still..." Commander Dixon fell silent. "Still," he said, after a moment, "the enormity of it... seeing it, when we got here, an entire planet ravaged by its own population..."

"How did they survive to the point of being able to destroy their own ecosystem?" Carver asked.

Dixon paused. "Their what?"

"Their ecosystem. Their planetary ecology."

Dixon turned to him. "I don't know that word," he said. "Are you trying to say..." He uttered a guttural cascade of sounds that Carver couldn't parse.

But Carver wasn't listening. As Dixon turned to him, that same strange face was visible once more through the faceplate of his helmet.

Carver stared at his commanding officer in deep apprehension. Obviously, what he was seeing wasn't real. Obviously, the problem was with his suit's environmental system. He was getting too little oxygen – or too much...

The moment passed. Dixon had turned away and resumed walking. Carver followed after him, trying to focus on what Commander Dixon was telling him.

"Life is innately competitive," Dixon was saying. "Intelligent life evolves as a means of enhancing that competition of individual against individual. Toolmaking and abstract thinking evolve, at least in some cases. Innovations like the use of fire and the creation of weapons give individuals a greater chance of survival and propagation. You do recall the theory that says beneficial changes to an organism's physiology or behavior can enhance the reproductive success of that organism? And the result of that is those changes are more successfully propagated to succeeding generations?"

"Yes sir," Carver said.

"For highly individualistic species – the ones without strong social bonding impulses – that's as far as toolmaking and intelligence progress: The ability to fashion basic weapons and other implements. The ability to defend one's territory, improve hunting, pursue elemental agriculture, build shelters, stay warm. That describes the majority of the intelligent species we have encountered – or, semi-intelligent species, anyway.

"But species like ours, with high technology, tend to be social animals. That tendency for cooperation allows us to pool resources, collaborate on technological innovation, build on one another's' insights. Eventually, cooperative species become capable of massive technological endeavors – large-scale engineering, higher mathematics, the use of physics in developing high technology. Are you following so far?"

"Yes sir, I think so," Carver said.

"But the drawback of higher technology is the ability to create more potent weapons, synthesize highly toxic chemicals, establish widespread industrial practices that erode the balance of nature. High technology has the consequence of poisoning a planet. It requires extra effort and extra cooperation to push that technology further – to develop safer industrial methods, and to repair the damage the results from early industry. But there's a small window of survivability once technology has reached such destructive levels. In order not to perish, a species has to evolve a more comprehensive understanding, and possess a cooperative instinct that is strong enough, to correct the problems before they become overwhelming. Not all species manage the trick.

"There's another, even more dangerous consequences," Dixon added after a moment of silence. "Species capable of limited cooperation remain highly competitive, and so they form groups that attack other groups. Individualistic species never progress past one man with a spear keeping another man off his territory. Species with a strong cooperative impulse usually manage to put their primitive competitive urges aside and achieve planetary consensus. But there's a middle path, and it engulfs most species with limited cooperative potential. Those species are cooperative enough to create devastating weapons and highly toxic industrialization, but not cooperative enough to refrain from using those weapons – or correct their planet-killing industrial endeavors."

"So they annihilate themselves," Carver said.

"Yes," Dixon said. "Because they are just smart enough to achieve the means, but not smart enough to understand how to use their technology in a sustainably beneficial way. Most species that achieve high technology end up like the people who once lived on this planet. The history of our own species has many dark and dangerous moments, when one wrong decision by one leader – one bad choice at a crucial moment, driven by primitive urges instead of rational decision making – would have destroyed us, just like these people were destroyed. All the other technological species we've encountered – the Srolta, the Thra'ss, the Genoa'a, even the Jaddek – possessed enough cooperation and reasoned intelligence... and luck... to avoid self-destruction. And, of course, that's why there are so few other civilizations with high technology... so few other space-faring species."

Dixon fell silent. Carver thought about his words. They seemed familiar, but also strange. The light-headed feeling had receded, but now was surging back. The dead city stretched all around them, its massive structures looming, black and decaying. Carver felt a building dread.

A flash in the corner of his eye drew Carver's attention. He turned his head and caught sight of a being – tall, graceful, bipedal, but with a gangly neck and a long-faced head, rather like that of a horse – walking along the street. Carver stopped in his tracks.

"Commander?" he said.

Dixon turned, saw Carver standing there apprehensively. "Shipman? Something? You all right?" Even through his suit, the commander's body language indicated concern.

"Did you see that, sir?"

"See what, Shipman?"

"That..." Carver looked toward the retreating figure. Suddenly, the street around them seemed to come to life. The drifts of sand receded. The daylight brightened, took on a different hue. The sky changed from iron-grey to a bright, painfully lovely blue. The silicate and aluminium street emerged, black and immaculate, reflecting the sky and the buildings. Vehicles shot past them, somehow not hitting them. The street had a margin or some sort on both sides reserved for pedestrians – that's where the horse-man had been walking, and that's where, suddenly, hundreds more horse-people were walking.

Horse-people, walking on their hind legs. Wearing clothing. Horse-people with long faces and dark eyes set to either side of a wedge-shaped face, with long hair spilling down their long foreheads – hair that continued down the backs of their necks like manes – blond, brown, black, white, grey...

Carver screamed and threw his arms over his faceplate, gripped suddenly with an unfathomable terror.

He felt Dixon's hand, pulling his arm away from his faceplate. "Shipman?"

"Sir?" Carver gasped. "Are you seeing this, or am I..."

But there was nothing to see. The street was empty, desolate, cluttered with drifts of deep sand. The vehicles and the horse-like people were gone.

Carver looked at his commanding officer. Dixon's face stared back at him from inside the commander's helmet. He looked completely normal.

"Sir?" Carver said. "Are we sure this planet really is lifeless?"

"That's what our scans say. There's no intelligent life here any more, anyway."

Carver shuddered. "Could they still be here in some way?"

"You mean as spirits?" Commander Dixon shook his head dismissively. "You're having trouble with your equipment, Carver. Or getting a bad air mix."

"But... but doesn't it make sense, sir? How can a whole race just vanish - and... and so peacefully?"

"Peacefully?"

"The city, sir. There was no war, there was no rioting – no panic, no stampede..."

"How can we ever know an alien's mind?" Commander Dixon said. Then he hesitated, seeming about to say something more.

Carver spoke first. "But so many living minds, so many living souls. How can they die out and not leave some impression... some trace, some permanent whisper in the air?"

Dixon sighed and this time Carver didn't feel stupid - he felt sympathy. Dixon rested a gloved hand on Carver's suit for a moment. "Those are questions for someone else," he said. "Someone other than a military officer."

Dixon stepped back, seemed to straighten in his suit, and told Carver, "Square up."

Carver did.

"That's the building just up ahead," the commander said, pointing to a black edifice that lay perhaps a hundred meters distant. "Let's get you inside."
Carver looked at his commanding officer. Dixon's face stared back at him from inside the commander's helmet. He looked completely normal.

"That's the building just up ahead," the commander said, pointing to a black edifice that lay perhaps a hundred meters distant. "Let's get you inside."

***

Once in the building, Commander Dixon instructed Carver to take his helmet off. "If there's something wrong with your breathing mix or if you have some kind of toxic gas leak, you're better off breathing the local air," he said. "And we can wait until night to walk back to the drop ship if we have to. Though it's going to be dark – very, very dark."

"Yes, sir," Carver said, releasing the seals and lifting his helmet off. He tucked the helmet under his arm and followed Commander Dixon past some sort of reception desk and toward the back of a large, dark lobby.

"As dark as this building, probably," muttered Commander Dixon. "We'll be well used to a lack of light by then."

Carver noticed a faint light and pointed it out. The two ventured farther into the building and then saw a corridor stretching away to both the left and right. The way ahead ended with a wall. The light was coming from their left, so they turned in that direction and followed it to a series of windows set into the wall and ceiling. A square garden was outside, open to the slate-blue sky.

Dixon spotted a door opposite the bank of windows. He gave it a slight push and the door, which was standing partly open, swung open the rest of the way.

They stepped into a room that looked like an office. No, it was an office, complete with... Carver squinted into the dim light from the windows across the hall.

"Well?" Commander Dixon said, his voice different in the alien air than it had been over the radio. "Can you make sense of the place?"

"I think so..." Carver looked around, still waiting for his eyes to adjust. He drew close to the desk and placed his helmet carefully on its surface. The desk was utterly clean – again, no sign of panic or wild disorder. Dixon tried to imagine a whole world going extinct without spasms of catastrophic violence.

Well, maybe those spasms had happened, he thought, but just not here.

"Carver? Can you do it? This is why you're here, after all," Dixon said.

"The place makes perfect sense to me, sir," Carver said. "I just can't see very well in this light. But there's a computer..." He pointed to a unit on the desk, sitting dark and quiet next to his helmet. "And filing cabinets..." He indicated a number of metal cabinets with square drawers.

"Whatever," Dixon said. "The thing I need to know is, can we gather any useful information?"

"I think I can locate the data drive to the computer..."

"Will they have such a thing? Is that how their technology works?"

"Trust me, sir, they do – or did. And obviously they were still using hard copies for at least part of their records keeping." Carver walked to one of the filing cabinets and tugged on a drawer. It didn't budge.

"We can cut it open," Commander Dixon said.

"No need, sir, it's just locked."

"What' that, again? I didn't hear you properly."

"I said it's locked, sir."

Dixon didn't reply, but watched, frowning, as Carver searched the desk. Opening a long, flat drawer located just under the desktop, he spotted a number of keys.

"Exactly," Carver said.

"So you feel familiar with this... technology?" Commander Dixon's frown was now directed at the keys in Carver's hand.

Carver held up one ring of keys, feeling merry. The native air was obviously agreeing with him better than the atmosphere in his suit. "I have the keys to the kingdom here, sir."

Dixon's frown lingered. Carver chuckled, not having expected his commander to be familiar with the phrase.

One by one, Carver fit keys to and then opened all of the filing cabinets.

"Can you read these?" Dixon asked.

Carver activated his suit's light array. He didn't know what he hadn't thought to do so earlier. The illumination made it easy to see as he pulled a folder out of the filing cabinet and flipped it open.

"The records are in excellent condition, sir," Carver reported.

"Good. But can you read them?"

Carver stared down at the hard copy in his hands and practiced the mental trick of focusing without getting in his own way. It was a trick he's found useful for all sorts of difficult mental tasks – seeing his way through complex equations. For instance, or cracking codes, or...

Or deciphering alien languages?

How was he doing this? And yet, he realized, he was reading the alien writing system, and he was understanding the document perfectly.

Carver turned toward Commander Dixon. "Yes sir, it's all become very clear – "

He stopped talking, and gasped in horror. Dixon, his helmet removed, looked even stranger than he had before, his long head and dark, widely-separated eyes and bony facial ridge even more detailed now that Carver wasn't seeing them through the faceplate. The yellow skin wasn't skin at all – it was fine fur. Who knew what color the creature's skin was beneath that fur?

And the mane – the blond mane that fell over Dixon's high forehead, locks of straight yellow hair licking over his eyes...

So handsome, Carver thought, even as a rival thought screamed that he was staring at one of the planet's monstrous horse-aliens – back from the dead? Lying in wait?

Dixon sighed and stepped toward Carver, who juked backwards into the filing cabinet. The metal clanged loudly.

"Stay still," Dixon ordered him.

Carver would have liked ot have obeyed his commander, but he wasn't sure that the creature in front of him really was his commander. In fact, he was starting to feel unsure of everything... himself, the world around him, existence itself – it was all feeling tenuous, distant...

Dixon reached toward him, and Carver shrieked despite himself.

"Hwoa'ihl," Dixon said sharply.

Carver instantly calmed down, hearing his own name.

His name?

But his name was Caver...

Dixon was ruffling his hair. Carver had a flash of memory – his father doing the same thing, when he was a boy. His father had been handsome, too, in the same rugged way Dixon was handsome, though his hair was black and his face followed very different contours.

Then Dixon was holding something up for Carver to see. "I've got it," he said. "I took it off you. You'll be fine."

Took it off him? Had he been being attacked? Was it some sort of hideous animal, or some sentient vine that grew in the building's dark recesses? Was that what this nightmare was about?

Then Carver registered what he was looking at. Commander Dixon..

No, Hwoa'ihl thought, Commander Ixtla'lj. The device in his hand was a memory recording device. As his thoughts cleared, Shipman Hwoa'ihl recalled identifying the device shortly after he and commander Ix Ixtla'lj had landed. The device was centuries old – like the city around them – but still in nearly immaculate condition. After some tinkering, Hwoa'ihl had the device operational, fully charged, and adjusted to that its playback was recalibrated to be roughly compatible with Ghen-gvii neurology. The fit had been tight – the device was designed for a hominid cranium, after all – but the clarity of the mental crosslink was astonishing. As the device and his brain began to interact, Hwoa'ihl had begun to understand facets of the alien architecture around them... and even to read the words still legible on the ruined street signs.

But then... then something had happened. He must have taxed his brain, pushed himself past some limit. He'd probably exhausted the readily-available glucose in his neural net, Hwoa'ihl thought, which had been a possibility he'd considered in the back of his mind before putting the device in and activating it.

Yes, that had been a possibility – obviously; it seemed to have happened – but there had been other potential problems as well. Some of them – falling into the identity of the person who had made the transcriptions encoded on the device, the cultural and language memory-base he'd accessed – had come to pass; others, such as madness and profound cognitive dissociation, he'd only approached or lightly brushed up against.

At least he hadn't suffered a cerebral haemorrhage, Hwoa'ihl thought to himself... in the language of the aliens.

He lowered his muzzle, stretched his neck, and felt a shiver travel the length of his spine. What confusion his mind had been in, mixing his own memories with those of the long-dead human that once had used this mind-device, this... this 'cerebrex,' as the humans had called them.