The Mother Trip - Frederik Pohl, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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THE MOTHER TRIP
By Frederik Pohl
Putting this collection together has made me realize that nearly every story in it was written, at least in
part, in some corner of the world far from my desk and typewriter. That's not too surprising in some
ways, because I have this habit of doing at least four pages worth of writing wherever I happen to be,
every day, and I do a lot of traveling. It is often easier to work on a short story than a novel under such
circumstances, if only because when you pack a couple of novel manuscripts into a suitcase you don't
have much room left for clean socks. This one, however, was written right at home. It's true that part of
its setting comes from a marvelous trip over theCascade Mountains and much of its incident from a
strange weekend I spent with an encounter group inNew Jersey , having my sensitivities elevated and my
inhibitions soaked away in the blood-temperature pool. It was an unsettling sort of experience, a dozen
total strangers opening to each other, but one I am glad I did not miss. Among other things it brought me
a couple of friendships I still treasure.., and, later on, filling up my daily pages in my office, this story.
It could have been just this way: That the get of Moolkri Mawkri could have landed in a faster-than-light
spaceship resembling an artichoke on the outskirts ofJackson,Mississippi .
In this version Mawkri gathers her Get-cluster around her broodingly, while Moolkri assumes the shape
of a man. The Get has studied all of the Earth's TV programs while they were in orbit, and they have
picked an average person for Moolkri to be, not too tall, not too symmetrical, not too
dvezhnizt
(a term
in their language which relates to the proportion between upper and middle circumferences). The Get is
satisfied with Moolkri's appearance, but all the same it is pretty funny-looking. They laugh as he exits the
spacecraft to explore.
Moolkri has well assimilated TV lore, and so he knows how to behave in a way appropriate to his body.
He hooks his "thumbs in his "belt, crosses a deserted bridge, and strides swaggeringly down the
light-saturated and totally uninhabited street.
It does not seem unusual to Moolkri that there should be no one gazing into the bright shop windows.
He does not have a very good grasp of what is usual or unusual for human beings. It is late at night, and
so a human being (or at least one from another city thanJackson ) might find it strange that everything was
so brightly lit. Contrariwise, a human might consider it odd that with every amenity turned on for
shoppers, there was not a single strolling person to he seen. Moolkri does not realize this is strange. He is
aware that sometimes streets are deserted and sometimes not; he is also aware that sometimes they are
bright and sometimes dark.; he is simply not aware that deserted is not really compatible with well-lit, but
then there is a lot he is not aware of about the Earth.
So Moolkri swings, gunman wide, his "chaps rustling against each other and his "bandanna bright against
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 his "neck. He slouches past the People's Cut Rate Pharmacy and Bette's New York Boutique and the
Yazoo-Jackson Consolidated All-Faith Ashram, looking in the windows. He reads a typed notice about
a lost Australian terrier. He inspects a naked black dummy with no hands, waiting for the window dresser
to return in the morning and give her hands and ball gown. It is all interesting to him, and back in the
spaceship Mawkri and her Get chatter excitedly among themselves, forgetting to be afraid as they receive
his impressions.
It is not only his sense of vision that is active, it is also his sense of hearing, although that input does not
produce much he considers worth noting. There are no voices, no footsteps. Overhead there is the sound
of a motor, which he identifies easily enough as a helicopter. It is too far away for him to care much. He
does not realize that it is quartering the city, alert for the sight of stray humans on the broad, bright street.
He does not hear the radio message that the helicopter pilot transmits to the ground. Back in the
spaceship the rest of the Get could have heard it, did in fact register the radio signal as an artifact
originating nearby, but they did not associate the message with Moolkri.
Then the black-and-white slides silently around the corner. There is only one policeman in it. They are
not expecting riots of mad killers, only the odd break-and-grab hoodlum or the hopeful would-be
mugger. Moolkri hears the prowl car. First he hears the faint purr of the motor and whisper of tires, then,
only in the last moment before it skids to a stop beside him, the quick bleat of its siren. He turns to look.
The young cop leaps out. "Hands against the wall! Spread your feet! Hold it right there! He does not say
it like that precisely, there is brushwood and bayou in his accent, but Moolkri is not attuned to regional
distinctions of dialect. Moolkri submits. It is unfortunate, but it is all right. He has been ready to submit to
human violence, in case it should develop, ever since he accepted the assignment to explore. Now it
appears that he will not return to the Get, but he does not mind that. The Get will continue. He does not
feel as though he were in danger. He only feels rage, and his rage races decisively, by means of his fourth
and seventh senses, across the world and into the heavens.
In the spacecraft Mawkri mourns. The Get moves fearfully around her. She had wished to extend her
motherhood to this planet, but it had rejected her. It was unfortunate since, among other things, it meant
the end of sexual intercourse for her for the rest of her life, but she does not protest, only regrets.
Moolkri opens all the tactile inputs he has bothered to connect in order to perceive the policeman fully.
He observes stimuli identified as pain, heat, body disorientation, and sex climax denied as the policeman's
hand invades his body spaces. (There turns out to be nothing in the "pockets, nothing at all, Moolkn had
never realized anything should be put there.)
Out of curiosity (he is overdeveloped in curiosity, that is why he is here), Moolkri increases his audio
perception and, translating easily from the peckerwood English, hears the policeman radio in to see if
there is a want on an unidentified white male pedestrian wearing a cowboy suit, about fifty, five feet
seven, white beard, bald, blue eyes, no visible scars.
Listening in this way is only curiosity on Moolkri's part. It can no longer affect the outcome, since
violence has already been done to him. He waits patiently, not very long. He hears headquarters report
that there is no want on the described individual. The policeman tells Moolkri he can go. Moolkri adds to
his file the datum that the violence has been withdrawn, but only out of neatness. The file is now
complete. No more will be added.
The policeman cautions him against walking alone in the city at night, mentioning the risk of being robbed
or harmed. He advises Moolkri to carry identification at all times. He gets back into his car, hesitates,
then says, with half a smile and a cursory salute, "Y'all enjoy your stay inJackson now, hear?
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 But it is too late.
The automatic orbiting guardians have already reacted to Moolkri's broadcast danger of violence, as
they were programmed to do. The spacecraft with Mawkri and the Get lifts and flees screaming into the
sky. And the first planet busters begin to drop.
Fusion infernos blossom and burst. Cities slide into the already boiling sea. Mawkri's motherhood has
punished the offense.
It is the end of the world of human beings, except as a blob of molten rock, and that is one way it could
have been.
Or it could have been like this, that all of Moolkri Mawkri's Get remained in orbit, thundering down
motherly orders to be obeyed:
Under pain of destruction!
Humans are commanded!
Alternative is the planet busters, and the end of your world!
In this version the Get prudently refrained from landing but after careful study of all radio and television
transmissions elected to play a mother's arduous role from out in space. So they made a plan and
ordered the world to carry it out. Six representatives of humankind were to present themselves, unarmed
and tractable, in orbit: one each fromChina , theUnited States ,Sweden ,Rhodesia ,Brazil , and the
U.S.S.R.
The Get, here, too, had carefully studied all the EMF transmissions fromTokyoTower andLondon 's
GPO and the American networks. The Get thought that most of them were very funny. Nevertheless they
decoded them into aural and visual signals and analyzed them for meaning and implications.
Both Moolkri and Mawkri agreed that this complicatedly comic planet needed to be taken into the
motherhood of Mawkri, and in this version they studied the means of manipulation nations and persons
used upon each other. They were aware of the human custom of giving each other ultimatums: thus the
commands from space. They were not as aware of certain other human habits. They were taken quite by
surprise when, united in a common purpose at last, all six of the nations that had a nuclear missile
capability conferred through their secret hot lines, set a time, and fired simultaneously upon the orbiting
spaceship of Moolkri Mawkri and the Get.
Of the resulting swarm of missiles it happened to be a cold-launched American Minuteman III that
destroyed the ship, the Get, Moolkri, and Mawkri herself, and ended the first contact between their
people and ours.
There is, however, a warmer and more loving version.
In this version Moolkri spoke up:
"I do not think we can trust ourselves to these creatures, he said. "Neither do I think we should reveal
ourselves to them, either for communication or to impose our helpful will on them. Let's cool it while we
figure things.
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 There was some resistance to this, particularly from a forensicist and a KP pusher in the Get. That was
right and proper. It was their function to do that. The forensicist was charged with debating all
devil's-advocate positions that no one really cared to espouse, and she was very good at it. The KP
pusher (who was not really called that, but none of their words are much like ours) was detailed to
making things happen. He
always
urged action, so that nothing desirable would fail to be done simply
because no one bothered to make it occur. Nevertheless, in this version Moolkri prevailed upon the rest
of the Get to lie low in orbit, and so they did while drones and far-watchers made a saturation study of
one small area of the planet. It was near Arcata, California.
Moolkri became aware, in this version, as he had never otherwise been made aware during his sheltered
life in the Get cluster, that the universe was a diversity of things. Oh, they had seen other races. They had
been journeying for many subjective years, while the Get spawned and grew and matured; they were
near the end of their journey now, near the time when the Get would have to return to their home to
disperse and mate. But these bipeds were unusual. Some of them were hairy, some were bald. Skeletally
they were quite the same (bar the occasional malfunction or amputee), but in size and in weight they
differed. Their fragrances, the drones reported, came in a wide variety of osmic frequencies, most of
them not very nice.
It was in behavior, however, that the bipeds exhibited the most amazing diversity. It was not only that
one biped differed from another. The same biped might behave in differing ways at differing times! They
found and labeled one who was clearly a KP pusher; an hour later she was an empathizer!
Semantic analysis of their communications to each other was equally confusing. Some of the bipeds were
aggressively mission-oriented within themselves:
"I'm a
woman,
not a
doll.
(Throwing a wastepaper basket at the male lying in the bed.) "I've got
twenty-two years of
rage
inside me because of this mother trip you lay on me! (Slamming a door.)
Moolkri played that tape five times to make sure he had understood it, marveling, for only a few minutes
before it had seemed this pair were preparing to procreate.
Some of the bipeds were role playing; that is, their mission was assigned from context:
"Now, gentlemen, please! (Big expression of the lips and corners of the eyes called "smile. )
"You
know
that under the American system my client is entitled to the presumption of innocence. (Eyes turned
directly into a television camera.) "You gentlemen can try this case in your newspapers all you like-and
I'm not saying you shouldn't; you have a right to freedom of expression; and I approve that right !-but the
State of California Will decide my client's guilt or innocence, not you. (Decisive up and down movement
of the chin and head.)
None of the Get understood any of this, and they stirred and muttered in their cluster. The forensicist
proposed immediate annihilation of the planet. No one agreed, but still- But still, how could such persons
live?
Among Moolkri Mawkri's people, person could not be separated from mission. They were the same
thing. What a person was was what he did. It was the foreseen need for mission operators that
determined how a person was nurtured; it was the nature of their aptitudes that decided which was
chosen for what purpose. There was no such thing as a split personality in the Get. There was no one
who was unhappy with his life. Moolkri could not play a role. He was always typecast. He could never
attempt to change his image. He
was
his image.
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 The Get of Moolkri Mawkri came from a planet of the star Procyon, blue-white and burning. It was a
deadly dangerous star, and it was only the dense, damp clouds in their atmosphere that kept the radiation
from cremating every one of them at birth. Humans, of course, were physically repulsive to them.
Humans did not have armored claws or vibrissae. Humans had only twelve senses, not nineteen, and two
of the senses they did have ("pain and "heat ) seemed ridiculously unimportant to the Get. The Get
clustered together, interlocking mouthhooks touching spirades, and murmured to each other reassuringly
and lovingly. (They didn't know it was lovingly; they had no way to relate to each other that was anything
but loving.) They shuddered in apprehension at the physical qualities of humans. Humans seemed so
deformed.
Of course, even the Get sometimes fell short of physical perfection. Moolkri himself had a birth defect
that damaged his second instar. Their wisest evaluator lacked a limb, and so he would never be a
breeder. (Therefore, he would never want to.) But all of the Get had the power to change their shape
when they wanted to. Humans did not seem to have that power. They were condemned to inhabit
forever the bodies they were born to, except for such rude mechanical devices as they used to replace
teeth or assist sight or the daubs of paint and odor-producing substances that some humans employed to
enhance their natural appearance. This seemed a terrible punishment to the Get.
But they tried not to judge. They had seen other races and, compared to them, none seemed particularly
attractive, and most were awful.
East of Arcata the road leaps rivers, looping through the foothills. There stands a long, low clapboard
building with some of the windows replaced with plywood. It is more than a hundred years old. It wears
its history in every scar. All day the logging trucks thunder down past it out of theKlamathMountains ,
continuing their long-term systematic eradication of the redwood forests. Three of them have gone out of
control and plunged through one corner of the building or another in the past thirty years.
No one wants to live in this house; it is like living next to the number one pin in a bowling alley. The
porch stops short at the northwest corner. An eight-hundred-horsepower diesel tractor carried that piece
of it away in 1968. The nine-foot log it was towing minced the driver's head; you can still see stains on
the clapboard. The sign in front of the house now says:
KlamathValleyCenter
for Development of
Human Potential
One of Moolkri's drones had buzzed all around it for more than seven days, cataloguing the human
creatures as well as the other fauna of the area (dragonflies, moths, rabbits, twenty-three kinds of birds,
forty relitiles and amphibia, microorganisms past counting). There were sixteen of the humans, and they
were playing a game.
The Get understood games. They enjoyed play. They even understood consciousness-raising games;
those were the only games they ever played, except for athletic ones like vibrissa trilling and obstacle
scuttling. They discovered the name of the human game was "Primal Weekend, which meant nothing to
them, but watching the game itself was a grand spectator sport. The cluster squirmed itself into such
position that all several score of them could see clearly into one monitor or another. They studied the
pictures the drone was transmitting with, for the first time since they had approached this messy little
G-type star, a certain empathy and joy.
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