Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds Read Free

developed in the ruling class of Qadar.
    The caves where the beasts live typically form clusters of interconnected hemispheres, each the size of a large sports stadium. During the day, the balaselis cling to stalactites at the tops of the domes. They usually have to go outside to hunt, at night, since few large creatures are stupid enough to wander into their lairs. Their normal prey are young and old strays from the herds of saurian egg-producers that accompany the Obelobelians on their seemingly random migrations around the planet’s one continent.
    The Obelobelians use the rite as part of a ruthless simple form of population control, sensible on such a barren planet. No one goes through the rite of passage until someone has died. The next night, a young native goes into the cave; he or she comes out sexually mature, and immediately mates with a predetermined partner. A female mates only once in her life, but always has multiple births. The number of offspring she will have, they say, depends on how many die in the rite of passage before one makes it through.
    The balaseli kill about half of the youngsters who go into the caves, but don’t bother the natives otherwise, though they sleep unprotected, not having invented the roof. The balaseli haven’t bothered the humans yet, either, a few dozen xenologists who perforce also sleep under the stars, though perhaps not as deeply as the Obelobelians.
    The three-week trip was uneventful. Raj Benhaden III was unusually reticent for a Qadarem. Their planet doesn’t have much commerce beyond the exchange of knowledge, and that exchange is normally quite vigorous. I spent a couple of months on Qadar once, helping set up a xoo there, and you couldn’t say one plus one equals two without getting some discussion. A world full of theologians and philosophers.
    But Raj was a throwback; he admitted as much in a rare spate of conversation. Most Qadarem are vegetarians, and hunting (as opposed to live collecting) is almost unheard of on the planet. He offered no explanation for his aberration. No, his father didn’t hunt. No, he had no philosophical justification for it. No, given a choice in the matter, he didn’t eat meat. Yes, he had killed men, in war.
    (This we had in common: we had both spent a year of our youth playing at mercenary, on the planet Hell. He did not elaborate, but I got the impression that he hadn’t enjoyed the experience much more than I had.)
    I couldn’t get him to argue about anything, so I pretty much retreated to my books, and he to his body. He had a training chair loaded with weights and springs and pulleys that he could use to isolate any particular muscle and torture it into prominence. A harmless enough compulsion under normal circumstances, but with an ominous aspect here: physical strength was probably going to be irrelevant, since the Obelobelians who went through the rite of passage were as weak as ten-year-old humans. With every bulging muscle, Raj was building up false self-confidence.
    When I pointed this out to him, he just nodded amiably and went on sweating.
    We came out of orbit to a cloudy spring day, indistinguishable from a cloudy summer-fall-winter day. The planet has a circular orbit and no axial tilt, so no seasons, and the sky is always a uniform thin mist, so no weather. Unless you count heavy dew every night as weather. A gray moldy planet in its large temperate zones, with a lot of caves and a breathable, but unpleasantly musty, atmosphere. The ground was a tangle of presumably inedible mushrooms. Our floater homed in on the silvery dome of the Confederación’s research headquarters; slid through the force field and landed.
    I hadn’t expected trouble with the local bureaucracy, since the planet had no humans other than the xenologists. As luck would have it, the woman in charge recognized my name.
    â€œâ€˜Gregorio Fuentes,’” she read off the first page of the grant. She dropped