Do Not Name It
a short story
“Turn off the surface feed,” said Ordu. “I can’t look at it anymore.”
No one did. The three of them sat in the observation shell, all staring straight ahead. Beneath them the planet turned slowly—blue, white, and green—so beautiful that their circulation regulators tightened.
“I have cataloged six hundred and forty worlds in my lifetime,” Veth said quietly. “Worlds where the beings were made of stone and a single thought took a thousand years. Worlds where the air itself burned. Worlds where there was nothing at all—only light falling from the sky onto an empty sea, and the sea learning something from it. I would not call any of them terrible. This is the first.”
“Don’t say it,” Ordu said.
“I will. That is why we’re here.”
The third, Sza, had said nothing so far. She was the youngest, and she had watched the longest. She was also keeping the record. Now she spoke.
“Tell it again. From the beginning. I have to write it down, and I don’t want to believe what I saw. If I don’t hear you say it aloud, I’ll tell myself the instrument was wrong.”
Veth drew a light—this was their expression for gathering strength: he admitted a measure of their star’s radiance through the wall of the shell and let it pass through his body.
“All right. From the beginning.”
I.
“This is a light-world,” Veth began. “That is what we expected. It has its own star at the proper distance, steady radiation, liquid water at the surface, a dense atmosphere. Every condition is present. And indeed, most of the surface is covered by beings that live on light. Green, dense, beautiful, as it should be. They remain in place, turn their surfaces toward the star, make the light part of themselves, as life does everywhere else. While that was all we saw, I was calm. One more world, I thought, where life had learned the proper way.”
“And then,” said Sza.
“And then we noticed that the light-beings were growing fewer.”
Ordu closed what came closest to an eye among his kind. Never mind. He closed it.
“They disappear a little at a time,” Veth continued. “Day after day. One day there is a green patch; the next it is smaller. At first we thought it was some kind of disease. Then we looked more closely.”
Silence.
“There are other kinds of beings down there,” Veth said at last. “They don’t remain in one place. They move. They don’t turn their surfaces toward the light, because they don’t live on light. They live on the light-beings. They go to them, tear off a piece, and make it part of themselves. The light-being remains where it is, maimed and wounded, trying to go on living.”
“That alone…” said Sza. “If I write this down, it will already be…”
“This is nothing yet,” Ordu said without opening what he had closed. “Go on, Veth. Tell her the second thing.”
II.
“The moving beings are not all alike,” Veth continued. His voice no longer trembled. It had frozen—hard and sharp. “Some are small. Some are larger. And the larger ones…”
“Say it.”
“The larger ones do not eat the light-beings. They eat the smaller moving beings.”
Sza set down the record.
“Each other?”
“Each other. Rarely their own kind—though we saw that too. But one moving being eats another: something with an inside of its own; something that moves, flees, and feels itself being taken apart. One catches the other, brings it down, makes it part of itself. And Sza—this is the point—it begins while the other is still moving.”
“That isn’t possible.”
“We watched. We watched for a long time. One of the larger beings had four supports and a yellow surface. It caught another whose surface was striped. Brought it down. And began. The striped one was still kicking. Still making sounds. Still there—and the yellow one was already eating. It didn’t wait. There was no interval, no rite, nothing… I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps that it would wait for the other to stop. It did not.”
“Does this happen all across the surface?” Sza asked, so quietly that Veth barely heard her.
“Everywhere. In the liquid part too. There the small are eaten by the large, and the large by larger still. In the air as well: some hover above, then strike. Every moving being is either eating someone, running from someone, or sleeping so it can do one or the other tomorrow. This whole world is a single, slow devouring of the living, and it needs the light only so there will be something to devour—and so they can see what they are devouring.”
III.
Ordu opened it at last.
“Tell me whether you understand what this means,” he said. “Because I do, and I would rather not understand it alone.”
“Say it,” said Veth.
“Six hundred and forty worlds. Not one where life fed on anything but light. Everywhere, the same: the star gives; the living take. They exist beside one another because none must live by consuming another. This is not a rule, Veth. It is a fact. Like the fact that light travels. And now here is this world, where long ago life turned the wrong way. Instead of taking what they needed from the star, its beings began taking it from one another. It became fixed in them. Everything here grew from that. Here, this is order.”
“We cannot know what happened at the beginning…”
“Look at how they are built! The moving ones have a separate organ for taking another being apart. Hard, pointed things at the front of their bodies, with a single purpose: to tear open another body. Millions of years shaped them for it. The body itself is the sin, if you understand me. Not what they do—the fact that they cannot do otherwise.”
Sza picked up the record. What we might call her hand was trembling.
“And if…” she began, then fell silent.
“Say it.”
“And what if there is one among them that knows? That understands what it is doing? That grasps that the other—the one it is taking apart—has an inside of its own, and feels, lives through, what is being done to it?”
A very long silence filled the shell.
“We did,” Veth said at last. “There is a species. It walks upright on two legs. It raises structures. Makes light for itself when its star goes down. Exchanges signals with others of its kind, complex ones, like ours. It thinks. There can be no doubt.”
“And?”
“And they are the worst. Not because they eat the most—though they eat a great deal—but because they have made a system of it. They do not pursue the other being. They confine it, breed it, keep it in one place, raise it. Then they take it apart and divide the pieces among themselves. Not in the moment of hunger. In advance. Deliberately. They have places where beings go in whole and come out in pieces. And the two-legged ones find this so ordinary that they converse pleasantly while it happens.”
Ordu rose. There was nowhere to go inside the shell; he rose anyway.
“This is the most terrible place in the universe,” he said.
No one argued with him.
IV.
“I have to write something,” said Sza. “It is not enough to record what we saw. I must also record what those who come after us are to do.”
“Write,” said Veth.
Sza wrote. Slowly, because she had to search for the words; they had no words for this world. When she had finished, she read it aloud.
“Final addendum to the record. Classification: complete prohibition of approach. Grounds: on this world, life is organized by the principle of devouring; beings construct themselves from the bodies of other beings, often before the other’s existence has ended. The phenomenon is not isolated. It is the world’s entire structure. The most advanced species is aware of this, yet has institutionalized it. It is unknown whether the pattern can spread. Until this is determined: landing, contact, teaching, and learning are prohibited. If they approach, withdraw. If they signal, do not answer. Do not name it. Once a thing has a name, someone will return to it.”
“Good,” said Ordu. “Add one more thing: we are not to pity them.”
Sza looked up.
“Why not?”
“Because pity is attention. Attention becomes curiosity; curiosity becomes proximity. This world must not be understood. It must be avoided. At any cost.”
Sza hesitated for a moment, then wrote it down.
Veth took the last of the light from the wall of the shell and turned the ship away. The blue-white-green globe slid slowly out of view. None of them looked back. Something in Ordu finally released, and for the first time since their arrival Sza felt nothing constricting inside her.
There was only one thought she could not set down. She did not enter it in the record because she did not know where it belonged.
The final magnified image had shown her the two-legged ones. They sat inside one of their structures around a flat surface, lifting dismantled pieces to the upper parts of their bodies as they looked at one another. Sza had not seen six hundred and forty worlds. Only this one. And for a moment she thought: they did not look unhappy.
And that was what frightened her most.