the Dark Light Years by Brian W. Aldiss Page B

a knee-high dock. The mechanism stopped. He and the ETA's were now face to face, although a button by Pasztor's right hand ensured that he could withdraw himself immediately, should danger threaten.
    The ETA's made thin whistles and huddled together.
    Their smell, while far from being as repugnant as might have been expected, was certainly very noticeable. Mihaly wrinkled his nose.
    "To our way of thought," he said, "civilization is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.”
    One of the ETA's extended a limb and scratched itself.
    "We have no civilizations on Earth that are not firmly founded on an alphabet. Even the aborigine sketches his fears and hopes on the rocks. But do you have fears and hopes?”
    The limb, having scratched, retracted, leaving the palm of the hand merely as a six-pointed pattern in the flesh.
    "It is impossible to imagine a creature larger than a flea without fears and hopes, or some such equivalent structure based on pain stimuli. Good feelings and bad feelings: they get us through life, they are our experiences of the external world. Yet if I understand the report on the autopsy of one of your late friends, you experience no pain. How radically that must modify your experience of the external world.”
    One of the lizard creatures appeared. It scuttled along its host's back and applied its little twinkling nose to a fold of skin. It became motionless, and all but invisible.
    "And indeed, what is the external world? Since we can only know it through our senses, we can never know it un-diluted; we can only know it as external-world-plus-senses. What is a street? To a small boy, a whole world of mystery. To a military strategist, a series of strong points and exposed positions: to a lover, his beloved's dwelling place; to a prostitute, her place of business; to an urban historian, a series of watermarks in time; to an architect, a treaty drawn between art and necessity; to a painter, an adventure in perspective and tone; to a traveler , the location of drink and a warm bed; to the oldest inhabitant, a monument to his past follies, hopes, and hearts; to the motorist - "How then do our external worlds, yours and mine, my enigmatic kind , clash or chine? Are we not going to find that somewhat difficult to discover until we have succeeded in speaking to each other beyond a list of nouns and needs? Or do you, with our Master Explorer, prefer the proposition reversed: do we have to grasp the nature of at least your external environment before we can parley?
    "And have I not suddenly deviated into sense, sows? For might it not be that you two forlorn creatures are merely hostages to the larger question. Perhaps we shall never communicate with either of the pair of you. But you are a sign that somewhere - perhaps not too many light years from Clementina - is a planet full of your kind. If we went there, if we caught you in your natural haunts, then we would understand so much more about you, would see far more precisely what we should be trying to parley about. We not only need linguists here; we need a couple of starships searching the worlds near Clementina. I must make the point to Lattimore.”
    The ETA's did nothing.
    "I warn you, man is a very persistent creature. If the external world won't come to him, he will go to the external world. If you have vocabularies to shed, prepare to shed them now.”
    Their eyes had closed.
    "Have you lapsed into unconsciousness or prayer? The latter would be wiser, now that you are in the hands of man.”
    Philosophizing was not all that went on that first night that Mariestopes rested her terrigenous bulk on Earth; there was also house-breaking.
    Not that Rodney Walthamstone could help it, as his defense explained when the case came up. It was a compulsion of a not unusual sort in these modern days, when every other month saw the return of ships which had probed into the very depths of the cosmos. Ordinary mortals sailed on those terrible