The Fenris Device Read Free Page B

Gallacellans had been starfaring long before the human race had escaped its own system, and long before the Khor-monsa had begun to build their galactic society as well. Wherever we went, the Gallacellans had already been—at least to have a look. But they were a careful people. We found no trace of them, until we met them in the flesh. That was on Iniomi. Soon after, we met them on forty or fifty other worlds as well. Our civilizations overlapped slightly. But not much. What we called the heart of the galaxy, the Gallacellans figured almost as the rim. They came from the center. The humans and the Khor-monsa came from the outer reaches.
    Iniomi got into all the history books as the world where we met the Gallacellans. Once there, of course, it got more than its due share of attention. Leucifer’s inner worlds—II and III—attracted more people than they were worth on simple merit, and became thriving worlds despite the fact that life on both of them was tougher than it was most places we chose to settle. The Gallacellans retained only a small base on Iniomi, for no apparent reason. We opened a small base as well, for purposes of communication, but the Gallacellans weren’t very interested in communicating. They wouldn’t teach anyone their language, and only permitted a few low-caste members of their own society to learn a couple of ours. A few centuries’ conversation seemed to have done little for either race. A number of Gallacellan names had passed into human languages, but even that was via the interpreters, who provided human-sounding equivalents of Gallacellan clickings. People could click in a fair imitation of Gallacellan speech, but they couldn’t click intelligibly. Hence words like Mormyr and Iniomi were Gallacellan in origin, but sounded human because the interpreters had made them over into human sounds for us.
    The average Gallacellan is about seven feet tall, but he looks taller because he has big ears which stick upward from his head. At least, rumor has it they are ears. After several hundred years, we still don’t know for sure. He has a face which might be yellow or brown, sometimes striped or blotched, the texture of wax. He has eyes in the back of his head as well as the front, he also has a mouth in the back of his head, but somewhat modified so that it doesn’t look very much like the front one. One is for eating (the front one), the other is for talking. A Gallacellan usually turns his back on you to talk to you, but if you are another Gallacellan you have your back turned as well, so it doesn’t seem rude. Because Gallacellans don’t look at one another when they talk they have no need of facial expressions, but they sometimes use gestures to attract the attention of the hind-eyes, which habitually look at the sky or the ground. People have hypothesized that the Gallacellans have so many eyes and use them thus because on their home-world they were prey to a large number of natural enemies. This remains conjecture. The Gallacellan body looks humanoid, but is capable of movements which the humanoid is not. The Gallacellan’s limbs are of varying size and multi-jointed, and his body can coil like a spring over its full length. It is presumed that the Gallacellans are remarkable athletes. The females of the species are similar in all respects save that they tend to be somewhat plumper than the males and do not make use of the coiling facility, if they have it.
    Little is known about the Gallacellan character. They appear proud and xenophobic, but in no way hostile. They are simply incurious and unforthcoming. Charlot, of course, wanted the Gallacellans to participate in his project for integrating alien and human modes of thought (as the Khor-monsa were only too pleased to do), but they refused. No one could have been more surprised than Charlot when the Gallacellan named Stylaster offered cooperation in return for Charlot’s assistance in a little