Terre des Autres
Sylvie Bérard
(Excerpt from Chapter 4, Les feux de l'ennemi, p. 59-69)
The sun beat down delightfully on the desert. It was at its zenith and the shadows were reduced to thin lines at the bottom of stones and under the rare shrubs. Very early in the morning, she had been deposited in the middle of that huge expanse and she had been walking since then. It must have been 50° in the shade and yet she felt the rays of the sun like a gentle caress on her thick skin. The claws of her feet bit effortlessly into the granular soil and, with her long, hard tail beating time, she advanced quickly towards the south. As her body warmed up, she felt new energy coursing through her. Her darting eyes, which detected the tiniest movement around her on the surface of the desert, made her feel a little giddy. In general, however, it could be said that she felt like she was in great shape. It was the first day of her mission, a mission on which the fate of her people depended in part, and she was ready to smash down mountains of sand and of rock!
When the molten sphere kissed the horizon, then disappeared, she had not had time to feel any fatigue at all. On her powerful legs, she was cutting across the desert at an exhilarating pace. The dusk, however, left her chilled. She hastily lit the little methane heater she carried in her bag - and which she would have to get rid of before encountering her first Darztl so as not to arouse suspicions - and wrapped herself in her reflective blanket. Then she remembered that that was not what she should do. So she stripped bare and lay down in the sand to take advantage of the warmth that had accumulated in the soil; she spread the metal blanket over herself so it would let through the comforting warmth of the small heater and lay still waiting for her improvised nest to warm up. She started chewing on some of her rations, the most effective way for her to warm her blood. She fell asleep trembling all over, thinking that she should soon capture her first sand squirrels - her first osfts - so she could feed on their raw flesh like any self-respecting Darztl.
She woke up early in the morning, chilled to the bone and weak. She had to doze a few hours in the sun before she could continue on her way, revived, once again marvelling at the astonishing recuperative abilities of the native species of Mars II.
Lecture by Chloé Guilimpert
Head of Strategic Operations
Defence and Security Department
Presented to the Mars II Provisional Council
The 5th day of Sixtember of the year 0040 T.M.
Distinguished members of the council gathered here this morning, you are well aware how important the decision we have made is. Since diplomatic relations were broken off with the Darztl government, we have been working relentlessly to set up a surveillance network that is effective and unobtrusive. Of course, we were not capable of and we are still not capable of a frontal attack: without adequate energy sources, our small group is no match for a whole country, even one less advanced technologically. No, our best weapons are patience and vigilance. Discretion, too, in order to avoid as much as possible being attacked by these barbarians. The enemy's inertia has so far been to our advantage. Let's hope time will do the rest.
We have to admit that our initiatives have met only with limited success so far. However, we have been working for several months now on developing a new strategy, which, while innovative and ambitious, is, we are convinced, realistic. The council's decision to approve the final phase of this project is essential in our opinion to the survival of this colony. However, before coming to the essence of our proposal, I would like to review with you a few key elements in the stages we have gone through to the present.
It began very shortly after the Darztls broke off all diplomatic relations with us.
We could have followed the model of the two cold wars on Earth and tried to subvert the enemy. It would not have been enough to kidnap a Darztl, make him offers until we reached his price and send him back as an obedient spy among his fellow Darztls? No indeed: there didn't seem to be any price for the defection of a Darztl, whatever they were offered. Moreover, if we left prisoners alone even for a minute, they would tend to imitate their predecessors and do themselves in, even though the species appears to us to be almost immortal. The ways of the Darztls will always be inscrutable to us...
No question either of repeating the stunt the Romans pulled by carrying off the Sabine women! First of all, we were not seeking any alliance with our enemy. Our goal was to play for time and discover if they were up to anything that could interfere with our long-term plans. And besides, even if it had not been a long-established rule that rape in war was a crime punishable by permanent exile, those extraterrestrial Sabines, of course, were far too incompatible with us.
So we decided that all we had to do was raise young Darztls as human beings. We didn't need their mothers for that! We would kidnap a few baby lizards or, better yet, we would produce them from embryos that had been used, previously, to isolate their genetic material, and then we would be all set. After, as long as we got hold of the baby monsters as soon as they came out of the vivarium, the rest would just be routine, a matter of time and patience. The mewling little thing would be entrusted to a normal family and we would let parental love do the rest, adding just a touch of conditioning outside, a dozen sessions at the most, nothing that could be called brainwashing.
So we gave it a try, opting for embryo culture, since kidnapping would have attracted too much attention. Let's call this initiative our Alpha project. It produced lovely miniature Darztls that screamed at the top of their lungs while threshing their little tails in the suffocating air of the nursery. So as not to put all our eggs in the same basket, if you'll excuse the pun, we did not limit ourselves to a single attempt. We wanted to experiment with various forms of education in order to increase our chances of success. For this, we called on the skills of our exopsychiatrist Joëlle Lamsong.
As some of you already know, we probably moved too fast: the experiment was a dismal failure. You can judge for yourselves if you read Doctor Lamsong's report. Or else the extraterrestrials are too repulsive to ordinary mortals to ever be considered, even at the very beginning of their lives, to be cute little creatures to be protected, or the humans were too mistrustful of their species. Again the results were abysmal.
Of course, we did not let the families simply go off into nature. They would have no doubt been lynched, the infants kidnapped, torn to pieces, trampled to death. And while the project did not remain secret, the results were kept quiet. No, the families were instead rehoused in a protected area, cleared for this purpose within the perimeter of the defence division, shielded from prying eyes. It's true the family units were hardly encouraged to behave quite normally, but that does not explain all the attacks, rejections and hardships the babies were subjected to. Did the torrid climate that was imposed on the families, in order to keep the babies healthy, contribute to the general irascibility of the small community? In any case, all the humans in the experiment behaved very badly and their actions caused the experiment to fail. We had wanted to raise a Darztl like a real little human to train it in the warmth of its primate hosts, and instead the ten little lizards were treated like animals - no, at least some animals are pampered by their masters, even the strange tortoises with hairy shells that some of our group have adopted on this planet - like prisoners that were only permitted the barest necessities.
And yet these families were hand-picked, among the top people in our various departments, well aware of what was at stake with the project. That did not prevent one little Darztl on average needed medical care every week, either for a suspicious wound, for malnutrition, or because of mutilations that were apparently self-inflicted. In the fourth year of a experiment that was supposed to last twenty, we discovered one that had been tortured to death between two buildings, the victim of attacks by the children of the community - the authorities had, in fact, opted for family units that included two or more children when the experiment was begun. The project limped along for a few more months. Then, one evening, the eight remaining young Darztls set up an ambush and attacked the human children of the community. A few of the children were seriously wounded and one was literally disembowelled bare-pawed by a four-year-old baby lizard. That was the final blow. We terminated the operation and eliminated the eight little Darztls, the ninth one having disappeared in the meantime in suspicious circumstances. And everyone returned to their former lives and very few shed any tears for those little creatures. What do you expect, not only did we not belong to the same species, but we are not even of the same genus, or even of the same order, barely even of the same branch and certainly not of the same world!***
She came across her first Darztl on the fourth morning, before she had time to get rid of her human artefacts. Her second and third nights spent in the desert had been less trying than the first, since she had had the foresight to consume preventively a few rations and to stop a little before nightfall in order to build herself a shelter on a hot stone which, both thanks to the heater and the survival blanket, had given off life-giving warmth all night long. That day, she set out again full of energy, even humming an old song from her childhood that her new vocal powers produced in a rather distorted version.
Her song was interrupted when she spotted the stranger, probably a male judging by his size, approaching in the distance, riding a large animal, no doubt a haavl. She would have to initiate Plan B, in which she played an amnesic who had escaped from her human captors. This plan was not as ideal as Plan A, in which she would be discovered only once in Darztl territory, which would give her time to hide her instruments so they could be recovered at the end of the mission. But it was the only other plan that she had, so it would have to do. She tried to look feeble, exhausted, and let the other lizard approach without ever taking her eyes off him.
"Are you okay?" asked the Darztl, jumping off his mount.
"I... I'm... I don't... I don't know," she stammered, looking haggard. She had used the first person singular, something rare and extremely personal for a Darztl, but fortunately, her transducer was programmed to convert by default her phrase into a more impersonal form, more standard in the native language.
The other Darztl stopped short and pulled an object from a sheath hanging on his haavl. In case it was a long-range weapon, she halted too. "What is the Darztl doing in the middle of the desert?" demanded the stranger.
She appeared to concentrate very hard, then she dropped to the ground, pretending to be very weak, hoping that Darztls show weakness this way. To her great relief, her action had the desired effect. The Darztl sheathed his weapon and rushed over to her. He knelt beside her and lifted her head very gently. "It doesn't matter. The Darztls will have all the time needed to become acquainted. The Darztl must regain her strength." He felt her body to look for wounds, and as planned, he discovered the very fresh scars of blows that were inflicted on her for more credibility. She closed her eyes, both relieved and repulsed by such intimacy. "Everything will be okay now, the Darztl will soon be home." She felt the male open her lips and tickle a bitter liquid into her mouth. All disgust dissipated and she was immersed in the pleasure of being laid out on the burning-hot ground under a torrid star. She must have dozed off, because when she opened her eyes again, the sun was already low in the sky.
The male was watching her. His dewlap was a blue with tints of violet. In a brief moment of distraction, or perhaps because she was still feeling the effects of the mysterious potion, she began finding this colour pretty, but the Darztl opened his mouth to speak and she glimpsed his long teeth and his dewlap quivered like a sticky jelly and she again found him repugnant. "Better?" The stranger's dewlap was again streaked with lines of colour. She must have looked dazed, because he continued: "This strange companion is as myopic as she is opaque..." She realized he was referring to the colouring of her own dewlap, which she had not yet been able to bring to life like a real Darztl, not knowing nothing, in any case, about this mode of nonverbal communication. All that the human archives said about it was that the dewlap of the natives that had been tortured turned a brownish colour when they were subjected to enormous suffering. But for the other colours, of course, they knew nothing. She played dumb: "I don't understand..." The Darztl leaped to his feet. Even though she knew she was bigger than him in her Darztl female body, she could not but be impressed by his powerful build and it wouldn't have taken much for her to get up and run away as fast as her legs could carry her. He misread her sudden movement. "No, no, you have to stay down. It's getting late. It would be better to spend the night here."
Lecture by Chloé Guilimpert (continued)
We could have repeated the experiment, modifying a few factors, but time was of the essence. We could not permit ourselves to wait another twenty local years for a new brood to grow to adulthood and be ready to act as spies for the humans. One of our geneticists, Dieter Sych, assembled the elements of a plan that led to a solution that was not as drawn-out as the previous one. Genetic engineering had until then only been used to treat hereditary diseases and to engineer fast-growing crops, but nothing excluded treating "humanness" (I am using doctor Sych's term here) as a congenital disease. Intervene not on the following generation, but on those who were already here raised more problems, but this was not without precedent: didn't we adopt when we had to adapt as quickly as possible the few farm animals that we brought out of hibernation when we landed on Mars II? The results were not permanent - while not being completely reversible - and partly faded as soon as consumption of medication stopped - often, however, causing the subject's death - but subcutaneous implants greatly facilitated the process. In addition, what genetic engineering was not capable of masking or generating, would be built from scratch using cosmetic surgery. You will tell us that we should have taken our time, make certain our project was viable, but as you know, every day counted! All we had to do was ignore certain rules of ethics.
In the case of our Beta project, we chose ten volunteers - someone in the defence division definitely had a fascination with the number 10 - among recent victims of hereditary diseases. It should be noted that these were invariably new mutations, caused by the new planetary environment, since, of course, as many of you are aware, no detectable congenital disease was allowed among the passengers of the mother ship that was launched towards Mars II! The volunteers were therefore all ill already, and, for reasons of hierarchy, ineligible for genetic therapy in the short or medium term. In exchange for treatment, we proposed to them nothing less than selling their souls to the devil. It goes without saying that few of them refused.
The experiment went smoothly. Soon the humans were transformed into ten authentic Darztls...
© 2004 Éditions Alire & Sylvie Bérard
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