up and ready. If any humans come by this way in a late rescue attempt, they’ll find the Sagittarius IV and play back our logs. That is, if they come by in the next century or so. I’ve noticed that the Sagittarius is starting to settle into the ground just a bit. If it continues, she’ll eventually fade from view in the soft soil. I certainly won’t be here to maintain passage to the airlock....
But the ’lopes will be sure to keep the tunnel open to their fortress or ship or whatever. It seems like a religion to them. And maybe the rescuers will find the ’loper tunnel while ’loper pontiffs introduce the newcomers to their greatest Mysteries. They’ll play this log back and learn. The power supply should last indefinitely, if the ’lopes don’t play it too often. They really like watching.
I can’t help wondering what will happen if another unlucky crew finds itself stranded here. What if they’re not human?
If they’re lucky, they’ll metabolize left-handed sugars and starve.
If not, and if they’re slow to go insane, they may find this cavern, and they may just be able to get more clues to a cure.
Or they might not. They might become the ’lopers, creatures of low intelligence who were great, remembering what they once were by scratching that reminder on their own flesh, by wearing their past as their present selves.
“For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son....”
The words of my childhood religion, the ones I’d eschewed in favor of the hard sciences and Darwin, came back to me, before they devolved into a different, yet intrinsically similar message:
The ’lopes had so loved themselves, they gave up their sentience, their selves...they devolved or even aided in their own devolution. I’ve watched the ’loper commentator again on the big screen. There’s a lot more to that recording. Rapid jumbles of images, some squeezed onto vertically or horizontally split screens. A downed ship. ’Lopes studying the indigenous crushers. ’Lopes taking samples, running tests within the ship. The early ’lopes eating the husk-fruit—
—while they still had their own supply of food. For the shot of their mess table showed foodstuffs totally unfamiliar to me, resting on the same oblong, shallow bowl-plates as the foods native to this planet. There were young ones, too, infants and toddler-sized proto-’lopes, seated alongside their elders, all of whom were eating meals of mixed foodstuffs. The next images weren’t unexpected, ’lopes in obvious distress, holding their hands over their cheeks, their temples, mouths twisted in rictuses of pain not unlike the ones on the faces of my crewmates at the onset of prion infestation, eyes either closed or rolled up into their skulls.
The children crying hurt me the worst, I think.
The first piece fell into place for me. The screen was split horizontally, the top showing that familiar set of ten pairs of seemingly random-length lines...while the bottom showed a slightly blurred picture, taken through the lens of some powerful microscope.
Genetic material. Pairs of chromosomes. The basic units of life. If the ten-slash was the sign of their religion, the early ’lopes worshipped life itself, without apparent need for any intervening godhead. Their descendants continued the tradition, albeit devoid of meaning....
The images that followed showed ’lopers working complex equipment while the chromosomes on the other half of the split-screen broke, changed, rejoined. The ’loper infants shown after that were placid, happy little things, furrier and more active. None of the crying bouts that afflicted their older brothers and sisters bothered the new children. Pre-landfall images of schoolrooms showed children performing complex pattern-matching tasks. The other half of the screen showed these altered children tossing blocks back and forth....
In the face of almost un-faceable contingencies, the ’lopes lived on, despite the loss of their greater surface intellect, their mastery over incredibly advanced technology. I think it may have been worth it....
Day 276:
It’s going to be all right. Reba was with me today, walking along with Alf Jarry and me down a streamside path. I just wish she’d hang around until I was really awake, so we could talk....
Funny, how the ’lopes watch out for me. They still tend to avoid me when I’m conscious. But when my mind shuts down, blinded by the pain, they’re looking out for me. They always show up in the recordings, two or sometimes three ’lopes trailing along, watching over me when I sleep, pulling me out of danger. I don’t think I mean much to them, not for who I am. If they’re anything like their ancestors, they watch out for me only out of reverence for life, any life, whether intelligent or not. For God gave His only begotten Son to live amongst the foolish, the stupid, and the devolved, that He may keep them from all harm.
It is a good feeling, to worship and be worshipped. Just as it is a good feeling to see friendly faces, to hear the voices of my friends. And the sun feels good on my bare body, if I am lucky, maybe my skin will toughen like the soles of my feet have, to shield against the short-grass....
Nothing is truly given up without something else coming up to fill the void. It didn’t seem so hard for the ’lopes to lose their intelligence, not when happy survival was at stake. Not such a hard thing to lose when tenderness remains and grows to fill the gaps....
When I die, I sense that I will be missed by the ’lopers for just as long as it is proper, and forgotten when it is the right time to do so. ’Lopers are excellent philosophers on living if nothing else.
Day 312:
Whenever will my mind die? Flee intelligence, and leave my body in peace!
Afterword for “Contingencies and Penti-Lope-Lope”
Writing this novelette took several years, and selling it took even longer; initially it was a solo work, but I decided that my grasp of the science elements in this were too poor, so I let my long-time pen-pal, and sometimes co-writer, John S. Postovit (who does have a degree in physics/math, as well as an art degree), see the story, and add in whatever he felt was lacking—another aspect of the work which needed rewriting was the relationship between the narrator and his girlfriend Reba, something which John was able to fix up as well—so the piece soon bloomed into a very long novelette. As a rule, novelettes and novellas aren’t all that easy to sell, especially for mid- and low-list writers (why else did even Stephen King feel the need to put out collections of novellas, rather than get them printed in magazines?); they take up too much space in a magazine, and many publications don’t even use them. But this tale did need the extra wiggle room, and so it bounced around from ’zine to shining ’zine, until it seemed as if it had found a home at a short-lived digest-sized ’zine called LC-39 (which had already published a very long piece of mine called “Guardsmen Fed to the Tigers”—it isn’t here in this collection, though, due to the use of visual/graphic devices in the work which make it impossible to scan into an e-file), but then the editor pulled the plug on the ’zine a few issues in, right before the novelette was to appear. It languished for a while then I managed to get it into an e-zine called The Fifth Dimension in 2001, and was grateful to get it out to the public after so many years.
The character of Penti-Lope-Lope was based on one of my cats, Penny, who lived into her mid-teens (old age for a cat); she was a beautiful, smart and feisty little creature, a former stray kitten who grew into a sleek tiger-stripe cat. (In 1992, she thanked me for taking her in by batting my face when the house was filling up with carbon monoxide, startling me out of my stupor; luckily, none of my cats died in that incident!) She was a cool little critter, something like the female alien in Avatar, all lean muscle and big wide green eyes, just an exquisite little female.
I know the whole concept of sub-neurons is pretty much junk science, but then again, who really knows just how the brain actually works? Seems to me we’re still trying to work out all the nuances of human thought/brain function even in the age of CAT scans and what-not....
For me, the real meat of the story is the aspect of situational ethics—what the ’lopes choose to do in order to stay alive on their new planet may not appeal to human sensibilities, but it is a viable option. Their take of what a worthwhile life means