SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: FLOWERING SEASON

"Flowering Season" by Virginia Kidd  (first publishing in Orbit 1 (1966), edited by Damon Knight, under the title "Kangaroo Court"; reprinted in The Future Now:   Saving Tomorrow (1977), edited by Robert Hoskins, under the title "Flowering Season")

A future Earth, fifty years after the wars and the establishment of Pax Magna, which forbade humans from further space travel...

Tulliver Harms is the First Exec of the Middle Seaboard Armies  -- Earth's armies were ever in readiness but had not fought for the last half century of peace -- where sat the Communications Tower.  Recently a signal had now come to the Tower from outer space, indicating that a vessel was approaching Earth.  With a spaceship approaching, a computer selected Wystan Godwin to act as Liaison Agent to work directly and equally with Harms to contact the vessel once it landed.  Godwin, a by-the book liaison, had spent the previous six months out of contact and in retreat in a Buddhist temple in Tibet and had no inkling of the approaching ship.  Harms was determined that Godwin would be kept out of the loop once he arrived at Middle Seaboard because Harms intended to destroy the alien ship against all laws and protocol.  The ship, when it arrived, was massive.  Godwin waited for weeks to receive daily reports from the Liaison team assigned to meet the ship, but Harms kept all information away from him, allowing Harms time to stockpile enough bombs the destroy the ship.  (The ship was so large that Harms needed more bombs than he had originally planned for to destroy it.

After two weeks, and despite Harms's attempt to keep all information away from Godwin, the Liaison Agent managed to secure some reports.  He then went to the ship and found members of his liaison team hard at work trying to communicate with the aliens, who resembled large kangaroos.   The aliens, known as the Leloc, actually were kangaroos, of a sort.  Their home planet was at least 100 million light years away.  Their space ship was an experimental type, the first of its kind, and was wildly erratic, able to arrive at the present, the past, or the future with little control.  And some 100 million years or so ago, it had arrived at Earth and deposited a group (? colony? expedition force? possibly along with some native animals) on our planet; these Lelocs soon devolved and became our kangaroos and the animals devolved/evolved into various marsupials.  The ship left them here and, for some reason, decided to return after six months and pick them up...although what they thought was six months turned out to be at least 100 million years.  The Lelocs from the ship had no idea that so much time had passed; they earnestly thought they had dropped their companions off six months before.

The Lelocs were a peaceful race and had never known war.  Part of their communication was through body odor; another part was through movements of their tails.  (They each had a special chair for sitting which turned out to be an extraterrestrial bidet.)  Warned that Harms intended to bow them to bits, they refused to move because their society did not allow them to retreat from threats.  Godwin, whose training for this particular assignment was extremely inadequate, had to find a way to save the aliens and stop the maniacal Harms.

Put like this, the story may seem to be a bit silly, but the author does a stellar job creating a convincing, truly alien race, and a truly alien science of space travel.  Part anthropology, part diplomacy, part hard science, and part suspense, this tale also comes with an important philosophical message as explained by the author:  "Freedom is something that has to be learned and earned anew by every generation.

This tale is a winner.

Virginia Kidd (1921-2003) was a literary agent, editor, and science fiction author who was married to James Blish from 1947 to 1963.  He literary output was small, beginning in the 1950s, and "Kangaroo Court" was her first solo story.  She was the uncredited co-author of Blish's 1962 novel  The Night Shapes; her only book was a collection of poetry, Suburban Harvest (1952, as by Virginia Blish).  She edited five anthologies (two with Ursula Le Guin) and a collection of Judith Merril's best stories.  as an agent, many of her clients were women science fiction authors, including Le Guin, Carol Emshwiller, Josephine Saxon, and "James Tiptree, Jr."  (Alice Sheldon).  And, yes, she was an avowed feminist, and more power to her.