Somehow Swelk maintained her composure long enough to complete the conversation with Rualf. She limped to her cabin, too attentive to her own thoughts to take notice of the crew's taunts.
The F'thk were distributing bugging devices, which Rualf implied were Krulchukor technology. Data from those devices were being exploited by the officers and other passengers of the Consensus. Conspirators, she decided was the correct and much shorter term. Either the conspirators were in league with the F'thk, or the conspirators were the F'thk. In either case, what could possibly be the purpose of the conspiracy?
Dropping wearily onto her sleep cushion, she could not decide which theory was the more unimaginable. Of all the group she now labeled conspirators, none but Rualf could for any length of time disguise his repugnance for her deformities. Their distaste was equally plain for the alien intelligences previously discovered by the Krulirim. How could they possibly be cooperating with the F'thk? Look at their attitude toward the humans. It all seemed so psychologically unlikely.
But the alternative was not physically possible. How could the F'thk be Krulirim?
And yet, how could the F'thk not be the Krulirim? The human media showed no other aliens.
A gurgling stomach reminded her that she had missed the last two meals. Swelk dug through a stockpile of prepackaged rations she kept in her room, her company in the galley of the Consensus seldom being appreciated by her shipmates. What a delightfully uncomplicated pleasure: to pick some food and eat it. So few of the concepts swirling through her mind were ever simple anymore. Certainly, none were pleasant.
The practicality of her task brought a fresh perspective. There was at least one variable that she could eliminate, with no subterfuge required. She called up the ship's library and located a picture of the ship in which she sat chewing.
Despite her suspicions, she almost choked at the hologram that appeared. Either the F'thk landing ship was the Consensus, or the F'thk had found its clone.
No clone: some of the broadcasts stored in the data banks of the lifeboat were real-time reports of F'thk landings. Timestamps for those recordings matched what Swelk knew to be landings of the Consensus. Even physical locations matched.
Everything was consistent . . . and everything inexplicable. And what, if anything could or should be done about it?
"You have got to help me, Rualf."
The entertainer peered dubiously at Swelk. She had just been quite useful in interpreting one of the odder broadcasts from Earth. "Help you with what? If you refer to your issues with the crew, sorry—I will not get in the middle of that."
A dip of her sensor stalks suggested, You can't blame me for trying. The shrug was a deception, something for Rualf to reject so that a lesser request might be granted in consolation. "I suppose not. I need distraction, is all. There is a great deal of nuance to Girillian dung, at least for someone with my level of expertise, but I have almost exhausted the possibilities."
"What did you have in mind?" His stance conveyed guardedness.
"You and your friends, your troupe. You make movies, correct?"
"Of course." The posture relaxed. He knew all about dealing with fans. All fans were odd—their strangeness was just not usually so visually evident.
"Well," she tipped toward him respectfully, "I've never actually known anyone in the entertainment field. I wondered if you had recordings of some of your troupe's films that I could borrow to view in my room."
"Wait here." He popped into his cabin, returning with a standard computer storage cube. "Enjoy."
"Oh, I'm sure that I will find your work very interesting." He did not seem to take note of the potential difference between interest and enjoyment.
The swampbeasts had come to trust Swelk, humphing in welcome when she arrived, hanging their heads sadly when she left. The show of affection deepened her guilt without altering her resolve—and caused her to shift the food tampering to another pair of creatures. So far those large limbless crawlers showed no signs of eliciting her sympathies.
She limped from cage to tank to stall, cleaning up the various messes. Despite her eagerness to see what new uncensored information awaited in the lifeboat, she took pleasure in her task. It was nice to be appreciated, even if only by a swampbeast. She stroked their fur carefully with a long-handled brush, bringing forth more contented humphs. Even the hold's smell was becoming familiar.
Or was it abating? That would be bad, stench being the main guarantor of her privacy. Steeped in shame, she synthesized fresh batches of nutritionally deficient animal fodder. For good measure, she spilled some feces near the hold's main door, to be sure to track some into the corridor later.
The lifeboat computer kept selecting more broadcast material than she had the time to review. She sampled and skimmed, without obtaining answers to what was, in her mind, the biggest question: why did the Consensus pretend to be what it was not?
Swelk whistled softly to herself in amusement: the beasts she tended were always themselves—and the only beings on board to enjoy her presence. If the humans did not destroy themselves, would she be allowed to establish a relationship with some of them?
A foolish notion, but it suggested another. The conspiracy she suspected, its form still obscure, its purpose unknown, seemed too much for her alone to uncover. There were, however, countless humans. Did any of them have doubts? If such could be found, could she and they somehow help each other?
She reconfigured the lifeboat's broadcast search to select information on anyone who had expressed skepticism about Earth's interstellar visitors, then returned to her duties in the hold.
Without enthusiasm, Swelk accessed the index on Rualf's data cube. It turned out to contain three-squared and three movies. Searching them for clues, to exactly what, she could not even guess, would take a while.
Sooner started, sooner finished. She told the computer to run through all the contents in storage order. Most of the actors she recognized from shipboard encounters, not only Rualf: the same group, as typical for Krulirim, had worked together for a long time. That did not mean that she could put names to them; many of the troupe ignored her.
She fell asleep to the quiet drone of the third film. Like the stories that had preceded it, this movie involved a perfect character who had lapsed into the slightest bit of individuality, becoming unhappy and stressed as a result. Even Krulirim were not as variety-free as these films suggested. Creativity and exploration require initiative, even if the common culture chose not to recognize it. What boring drivel . . .
Sleep was a vulnerable time for any Krul, slumber's sensory shutdown in such utter contrast to normal awareness in all directions at once. No one could sneak up on one of her kind—except in her dreams.
Krulchuk was a planet with active plate tectonics, its interior kept hot by the slow decay of an overabundance of thorium and uranium. Without that internal energy source, Krulchuk would have been inhospitable to life, as far as it was from its sun. Without the high background radiation, the evolution of its unlikely life would have been much different. And without the constant upwelling of magma, first driving the continental plates apart and then reuniting them in tremendous convulsions, and the attendant shifts in oceanic circulation, Krulchuk would not have experienced regular cycles of ice ages and warming.
Multicellular life arose soon after one such breakup of a temporarily unified mega-landmass. The continents that resulted drifted separately for eons, each a laboratory for evolution, before they next crashed together. The distant ancestors of the Krulirim were suddenly in a fight for survival with the offspring of a different path: bilaterally symmetric creatures. The trilateral ultimately prevailed; the bilateral disappeared without a trace until Krulchukor science discovered the fossils of the vanquished monsters.
A few scientists whispered that a random metabolic mutation within the trilateral phylum better suited them to Krulchuk's next ice age. Their theory, that trilateralism itself was not inherently superior, remained controversial.
Whatever had caused the great die-out of the bilats, their fossils were an immediate sensation, instantly recognized by some primitive underbrain survivor of that dawn-of-time struggle. The unnatural beings that sometimes appeared to Krulirim in their vulnerable dream states suddenly were of nature, and more frightening than ever.
Rualf's character howled dramatically in another overacted film. The emoting disturbed the dozing Swelk, who opened one eye in reflexive curiosity. She shrieked herself, suddenly alert. It took several deep breaths to slow her pounding hearts.
She had wakened during a dream sequence in which Rualf wrestled with a monster from his inner mind. A horned and fanged bilat, its talons and the corners of its mouth dripping gore, a creature to whom the term nightmarish truly applied.
Rualf vanquished his inner beast, enriched by the recognition that it symbolized his less than perfectly social ways. As the film ended, the actor sought out the communal embrace of his neighbors. Big surprise.
Credits rolled. There was a prominent credit for robotic effects. Her first reaction had been that the bilat was a computer-generated graphic. A robot made sense, though: the creature and Rualf had been so entangled in their fight.
A robot. Swelk rewound the film to the dream sequence. The monster seemed to be a cinematic amalgam, a composite of the scariest old fossil finds and the director's imagination. "Enough movies for now," she told the computer. "Does the ship's library have an encyclopedia?"
"Yes."
"Show me an overview of extinct Krulchukor bilats." Text and an image appeared instantly. "Scroll." Midway through the article she encountered a skeleton that her imagination easily fleshed out.
Add two pairs of eyes and it was a F'thk.