Resurrection
by Bud Sparhawk
“Non posso… ” the lobster-like alien beside me whispered in perfect Italian as we pushed our way through the marshy vegetation, a forest on this excessively wet and gloomy world. I could not continue onward either.
“Si, signore Ttch*lok,” I responded in the same tongue, nearly choking on the liquid glide in the middle of his name. In response to his request I looked for some place of refuge below the thick canopy. Some place where we could safely hide.
Ttch*lok was my first and only convert on this ungodly miserable planet. Six months it had taken for me to find one of these semi-intelligent, hard-shelled beings who had responded to the Word and I was not about to lose him.
I was not worried for myself, for whatever punishment my shipmates could bestow on me would be insignificant in comparison to what my convert would suffer. My friend would be entirely consumed if we were discovered.
I could not let him be eaten by those cannibals.
I
Our mother ship’s initial pass around the planet had revealed no cities, no centers of habitation, nor any of the other usual signs of civilization. To every inquiring sense the planet appeared Earth-like, as these distant places go, and therefore a ripe candidate for exploitation—another victim in humanity’s insatiable cry for living space.
Ten of us were deposited on the planet to verify these preliminary findings and discover more about the life that filled this place that was so distant from Earth.
After our team had been dropped from orbit, our mother ship departed to examine the next system’s prospects. It would be two years before she returned. In that brief time our team had to assess this planet’s treasures and dangers. We had to ensure that she was ripe for settlement.
I was the team’s botanist. Since botany is not a field that can keep one productively employed during the long silences between the stars, I had spent much of my copious spare time assisting the ship’s chaplains.
The Jesuits on Earth had trained me to be one of their own, so I was familiar with all forms of religion around the world and off it.
The botany and biology courses I had taken as an avocation, discovering a facility with the subject that led to no little expertise and, eventually, to a role as professor. When I began my ministry I little suspected that teaching would be a way of supplementing the pittance that supported my woefully small congregation, a post I had abandoned when I secured a post on Hercules’s outward voyage of discovery.
I helped the ship’s chaplains as they attended to the ships’ weak religious needs. This took no great art on my part, for most of the crew were of lukewarm faith. They followed the religious rituals while their minds were, no doubt, preoccupied with temporal thoughts. Form, not substance, was the watchword.
On different days and occasions I assisted the priests, rabbis, mullahs, lamas, brahmins, and the lone archimandrite. Each chaplain praised me for my faithful rendition of their rites, sometimes remarking on some fine point of ritualistic precision and faithfulness where I had done well. There were no complaints.
Yet I wondered if any of these religious people sensed the black hole in my soul; the absence of that core of faith that was the center of the religious experience. I was a sham. Yet, helping them and observing the rituals helped to pass the time.
It made me feel useful.
Our survey party had selected a dry peninsula within the temperate region for our base camp. We’d had to build pads under the ship to keep it from sinking into the soft, moist soil.
Our chosen site was surrounded with low-growing plant life. I immediately noted that some of the brush appeared littoral in aspect, as if it had evolved from living ever on the barrier between dry and wet. What periodic flooding could give rise to this characteristic was something I promised to research when I had time. All evidence suggested that the nearby placid sea was not always at its current level.
Hidden among the alien plants was an amazing collection of animate life. Every ecological niche seemed so loaded with competing species that scarcely a square meter of the terrain lacked its own teeming population of flora and fauna.
The curious thing about most of the motile life was its dependence upon armor. The most extravagant array of plate, shell, horn, and scale was employed by every animalcule or in-sectoid to protect all their vulnerable parts.The local life had no reluctance to try to see if we were as edible as their local prey. To protect ourselves against their sharp array of pincers, claws, teeth, and proboscises we erected a dome about the ship and carefully sterilized every square centimeter within it to create a cordon sanitaire. In this limited area we could squish about in relative security. Walking unencumbered on the muddy soils inside the dome was a welcome relief after spending a week cramped either two to the bunk in our small lander or encased in our hard suits when outside.
Only after we were certain that our dome was secure against the sharp biting, cutting, and tearing appendages of the local pests did we set up our instruments and begin to work in earnest.
I remarked upon the excess of the indigenous life’s protective strategies on one of our first outings as I snipped leaves and stems from some promising specimens of X-Gramen secundus, following the conventional genera naming with the necessary “X,” for extraterrestrial.
“The Earth had a similar proliferation of armor during the late Cambrian period,” Ed replied as he gleefully swept the nearby brush with a vacuum pump and gathered a collection jar full of angry specimens. “Shows the principle of parallel evolution— similar problems lead to similar solutions.”
“But why didn’t that persist?” Els-beth asked as she scooped dollops of lime-green mud into her own sample tray.
Ed chuckled. “Ought to study your biology instead of geology. Most of Earth’s armored forms disappeared in the first Great Extinction, the one long before the dinosaurs arose. We only know about them because of the evidence in Earth’s fossil record, and the horseshoe crab—one of the last survivors. If it wasn’t for that extinction, all of Earth’s creatures would probably be wearing a natural coat of armor instead of soft and”—he added with a grinning leer at Elsbeth—“their sometimes very appealing skins.” Elsbeth blushed and quickly glanced away. I wondered at her reaction; everyone knew about the two of them.
The lobster-like creatures started showing up a few days after we completed the dome. We dubbed them lobsters only because of their huge strength claws and the array of feelers, eyes, and other sensory apparatuses projecting from the front end of their long bodies.
There the resemblance to Earth’s lobsters ended. The aliens’ bodies more closely resembled an armor-plated dog, who just happened to have six legs and a wide, flat tail. The front end of the creatures rose above the rest of the body and provided the perch for a cluster of sensory organs that stuck out in all directions.
The largest of the first group was hardly a meter high and weighed under ten kilos, according to Ed’s careful measurements. The smallest was half that size.
Despite their frightening appearance, they did not appear to be menacing, or even express an interest in us as a possible food source. Instead they followed us everywhere, like curious monkeys encountering explorers for the first time. Ed Corson, head of the biology crew, modestly bestowed the onerous name of X-Crustacea Decopeda Homarus corsonni upon them, adapting our initial nickname and appending his own. We simply called them homaroids, tor they rapidly became a pain in the you-know-where.