SHAPES TO COME
Originally published in Analog Science Fiction, November 1969.
He had painted on the picture window silhouettes of cats and of owls, hawks and other birds of prey. “Silhouette, gentille silhouette,” he had hummed as he painted. On Earth such kindly horrors had served, before soft glass, to stop songbirds from dashing themselves to death. This picture window was of hard glass. No songbirds flew, no songbirds fluted, outside.
“Outside” meant a sweep of crater rim on the Moon’s back side and, for the recent past, a Starbird on its launch pad three kilometers away. Occult Earth would be the size of a quarter; he had seen a quarter once in the display of Earth artifacts at Moon Center, he had seen Earth many times eyeball and more times on screen.
Once, then, in a camp mood he had imposed these creatures of Earth on the craterscape. “Silhouette, gentille silhouette.” His mood had shifted often since then but he had left the silhouettes in place. They relieved the starkness. They also represented, in reverse, the kind of thing he worked on here in his lab.
His lab and his home. Though he and his wife and their three-year-old daughter could never forget it was more lab than home. They lived in hermetic isolation in this cup under the dome of a force field. The force field sealed them less against meteorite fall than against the remote chance he and the chemputer would turn out a wild molecule.
He was Orim Ingram and he heard the chemputer page him and he seated himself at the console. The chemputer had finished making and testing its first run of the spores. As soon as he felt sure he would speak calmly, he called Moon Center.
The Moon Center computer double-checked, confirmed that there was no wild molecule in the batch, found him a meteorite-clear window of ten minutes. He piped the spores aboard the Starbird, then called Jeanne and Patti to watch this first epic launch.
“And my robot dolly, Daddy.”
“And your robot dolly, Patti.”
They came. They could have seen it on a monitor in the living quarters, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
Moon Center spoke.
“Station XY, your window begins…now.”
He smiled at Jeanne and Patti and the robot dolly, unconsciously held his breath, pressed the manual override on the force-field hold. The invisible bubble burst. He pressed the launch button. The Starbird lifted. Once beyond solar pull it would explode like a bird hitting hard glass. Millions of spores would scatter across a quadrant of the galaxy. He reactivated the force field.
He looked over to where Patti and her robot dolly were whispering. Patti had been explaining the spores to the robot dolly and now the robot dolly fed back, with new words to build Patti’s vocabulary.
“I think I have it now, Patti. Your father, the genetic engineer, makes memory molecules, ribbons of ribonucleic acid. RNA carries information for the synthesis of proteins, passing on the characteristics of the species and the parents to offspring. The particular memory transfer in the spores your father is seeding throughout the galaxy will link into any chain of life they encounter. The message that will pass on from generation to generation is that the human shape should evoke love and trust. Then, many many years from now, when men step out of their spaceships onto some green planet of some far star, the people there—indeed, all the animal and plant life—will greet them with love and trust. Is that right, Patti?”
“Yes. You’re a very good robot dolly.”
“And you’re a very good young female human, Patti.”
Orim and Jeanne looked at each other and smiled. Then Jeanne glanced again at Patti’s flushed face and gave her attention to the controls on her bracelet. Orim knew Jeanne was programming the robot dolly to damp down Patti’s launch-fever.
* * * *
Watching Jeanne, Orim felt a throb of sentiment, a rise of warmth. Even so, he could stand off from himself and eye his feelings analytically. If ever he partnered again, it would be with a girl of Jeanne’s type. It would have to be, to trigger what people called love. All other types left him cold. And yet to think of Jeanne as a type took nothing away from her uniqueness. And yet again he could coldly admit her uniqueness would leave some other man cold if that other man happened not to go for Jeanne’s type. It was all built-in.
Patti was following the robot dolly’s suggestion that they sit quietly and sketch airy-gramaries. He smiled, remembering how Patti when two months old would smile when she saw a human face—if the face wasn’t in profile but toward her and was moving. The movement could be Jeanne’s mouth opening in a smile, but two eyes and a nose were enough if Jeanne nodded. Given that stimulus, the response was always a loving and lovable smile.
He had tested a cutout of a human face on baby Patti and the cutout had got just as loving a smile. He had explained, much to Jeanne’s hurt and anger and quick forgetfulness, that all humans inherit that bit of complex instinctive behavior; that it was automatic; that there was nothing personal in it; that a baby’s loving and lovable smile had survival value.
No, Jeanne couldn’t swallow that. Baby Patti smiled, really smiled, only at baby Patti’s Mommy and Daddy. Mommy and Daddy were the only beings in the whole universe who inspired baby Patti’s love.
He looked now at the hawk silhouette on the picture window. Back on Earth—and no doubt on other planets if other planets hatched hawks and geese—the hawk-recognition instinct in goslings had survival value. A gosling froze, or hid, the first time it saw a hawk flying overhead, but had no fear of a goose. Experiment with cutouts had shown the gosling reacted with as much fear to a moving birdlike shape with short neck and long tail as to a real hawk—with as much saucy insouciance to one with long neck and short tail, as to a real goose.
He stared past the silhouette to where the Starbird streaked out of home field, picking up faster-than-light speed. Life was many but far between. The payload of spores would withstand the rigors of space and time. Microsensors would sniff out life-bearing planets, microjets would correct courses, and millions of spores would sooner or later enter millions of atmospheres.
For a moment he stood off from himself and with a tight smile, remembering human history, thought that from an alien point of view Project Love might seem a mother tumor seeding cancer cells into surrounding organs. Then he put that out of his mind. His not to reason the Ys and Xs of the moral and ethical problems Project Love raised. Besides, Jeanne was saying his name.
Jeanne had got Patti and the robot dolly to erase the frozen smoke of their airy-gramaries and was gently insisting:
“Time for lunch, Orim.”
With love, he swept Patti and her robot dolly athwart his shoulders, hooked his arm in Jeanne’s, and headed for the living quarters.
* * * *
Orim Ingram forgot the first run of spores in the busyness of turning out the second, except for one moment nine months later when telemetry confirmed that the payload had burst on schedule and the spores were spreading out through the first quadrant.
He was nearing readiness on the second run, another Starbird waiting on the pad, when the alarm rang.
Orim hurried Jeanne, Patti, and himself into spacesuits, and the robot dolly into its toy spacesuit at Patti’s scream of reminder. He nodded reassuringly at Jeanne and Patti, but he knew their spacesuits were just as make-believe, in effect, as the robot dolly’s. Anything that got through the force field would leave nothing in the particular volume of space the Ingrams took up.
Moon Center spoke.
“Station XY, Station XY. The object approaching you is no meteorite. Probability, an alien craft backtracking the first spore-bearing Starbird. Cut in all your power to maintain your force field till aliens make their intentions plain and help arrives.”
His own screen still picked up nothing, but Orim switched off environment and chemputer and threw the energy into the force-field circuit.
He looked from console to picture window, at the silhouettes of cats and of owls, hawks and other birds of prey. He gave an unreasoning shiver. Project Love had got underway too late. If beings were aboard the alien craft, they were not the latest of generations passing on built-in love for humans. Till help arrives. What help? And against what?
His screen began to answer. The approaching object quickly took shape.
It was a craft. But that it was a craft meant nothing. What mattered was its shape. He had never seen that shape, but he knew it.
The shape triggered a surge of deep emotion. And now he knew he had always known that shape. For generations he and his kind had been waiting for it.
He overrode the hold, burst the force-field bubble. The craft landed nearby. Orim, Jeanne, Patti, and the robot dolly waited with love for the form that would slither out.