The Hunt
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Table Of Contents
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The HuntCover
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Illyrion and Talith
The hunter waits in the grass at the lip of the hollow, motionless. Reddish slit eyes flick behind the screen of red grass, seeking. Below, the prey bites and tears at the grass. The hunter has followed them silently for four days in a meandering path -- unclothed against the bitter wind, unfed and unsleeping, as prescribed in the Rules of the Mover.
On the second day... with disturbing vacancy, the hunter's vision had blurred and it was seized between one step and the next with weakness; a next foot forward seemed too heavy to move in any accustomed counterstroke, somehow embedded in ice. Despite a shock of pain that seemed to be splitting its mind, its imperative to movement did not weaken. It strove for motion, even extending its hands and clenching the tall grasses in an effort to pull itself forward by strength of arms. When a trickle of red blood ran sparking in the cold across its wrist, it paused; standing, swaying, staring at the redly weeping slits that the fronds had slashed into its sharply articulated palms. But even as it watched the blood, pain did not come, and it knew it had travelled beyond pain and grief to silence. They had promised, and now it was real. Until now, it clung to a childish belief in the hunt, the weapon, the stroke - as the symbol that summed the ritual; now it saw silent blood trickling slowly across its skin and knew the intent.
But the sensation of gravity renewed the hunter's movement, and it staggered forward onto the huge, red-shagged plain, footsteps rolling in the soft, moist earth. Each step was easier than the one before with gained momentum and balance; then it ran on until night, following its chosen herd, frozen in thought impaled on the silence of the steppe...
On the third day... dawn had brought clusters of dismal clouds. The prey huddled uncomfortable and restless under the red foliage of their chosen isolated tree, occasionally grunting softly in shallow sleep. By then, the hunter's limbs were stiff in the aftermath of sustained effort, and its skull is thick with sand. Rain fell sparsely, colliding with glistening skin in tiny spots of cold.
It clings to its spear, hands raw from sweat, salts stinging the waxy skin. Cold breeze wipes the liquids of exertion in a great fern pattern of sensation across its back. Soon it will be able (released) to kill, and then it will feast; (remembering the cuts) it will rip the damned grass out of the earth and pile it to burn and (remembering the cuts) let the burning fat of the cooking prey drip on the ashes of the grass in an ironic indignity -- that would be a fine revenge. A revenge that it must not think of, lest the Mover see and know.
Talbot, in the cool corridor of the transport, checking his descent suit, procrastinating. For the third time he checks -- sockets, crash armor, chronometer/navigator, check pad, life support thinpak. All secure, all correct, all incapable of putting of the moment any longer.
"Hey, Talbot... it's time." Atrenn calls.
He looks up to glare at the small alien face thrust past the corner where the shuttle bay joins into the transport. Judiciously he restrains his immediate response.
"Talbot?" The alien's quizzical expression borders on mockery, exaggerated by the compression of its face into the lower part of its head. "If you take much longer, the aperture will pass and we'll have to wait again." A pause ensues, during which Talbot avoids an embarrassing memory, and somehow keeps his gaze steady on the alien as it minces into the corridor in all its grotesquerie. "Talbot, come on -- please?"
Talbot turns away from it to face the wall, running a hand up and down a strap. He sees simulated stone, softly modulated lighting - a necessary illusion to the crew; a saving one for him, since it gives him the strength to reply calmly, "All right."
Then, "All right," he says more loudly, "I'm coming. Get back inside, will you?" He turns to face the alien again. "I said, I'm coming." He returns his attention to the fittings of his suit.
"You're not very nice, Talbot." The lips crossing Atrenn's shrunken little face crook in a strange smile, and it walks slowly back into the bufferway. Talbot slips shut a final catch and follows slowly, distastefully. It is, he thinks, unfortunate that the alien has developed such a command of the human idiom.
On the dorsal screens, the complexity of the transport Illyrion dwindles against the multitude of crisp stars; it vanishes and there is only the Hercules cluster, its diffuse edge blazing.
Talbot is enmeshed in dimness, surrounded by machines, cased in his slick blue plastic suit. His helmet hangs on a rack beside the control seat, close to his hand. A clipboard rests on his thigh, glowing white checkfilm obscured for a moment by his finger as he checks a system, watching the results mount up to his satisfaction.
Only a few minutes more, and he is done and ready to go. He blanks and dims the checkfilm, settling back into the capacious seat, waiting. The stars drift slowly past the viewports. His mind wanders across various thoughts. After ten more minutes, his patience evaporates.
He initiates the firing sequencer, styling a moderate nose-high position for entry. Though the thrust is imperceptibly gentle, within a few minutes he sees early plasma flaring at the edge of the hull. After a moment's study of the heat distribution display, he alters the angle of descent by a few degrees.
The door at his back slips open with its pneumatic hiss. Amel, the paleontologist, thrusts its head into the chamber, stopping only with difficulty. It peers with painful effort into the dimness.
"Talbot?" it asks.
The pilot feels a faint crawling sensation; there are those dark, glassy eyes that reflect the indicators and displays, focused on him from within the soft furry face. He increases the panel light until there is a vaguely red luminosity in the air of the room.
"Ehhh... attentn." Amel's translator reflects its lisping accent faithfully. "Ch-hek completed. Wee r rdy."
"Yeah. Sure. Anything else?"
Amel feels something similar to confusion. Though it emits Cospuk to the translator with an accent, it is sensitive to the nuances of expression that are peculiar to humans. From Talbot's terse sentences, it assumes Talbot's indifference, almost as if Talbot had known what they were doing. But how could that be? Talbot hadn't even asked why their report had been so delayed; he couldn't know about their heroic success in improvising restraints for the wayward microphotometer. Unless... could he have been eavesdropping?
Instead of asking, Amel continues with the matter at hand. "Wll we dessend shrtly?"
An idiot, Talbot thinks. But it's only a fuzzbear, after all.
"Yeah... we're just starting - listen, I really have to stay on top of this. Why don't you go back and wait with the others?" He lets some of his impatience seep into voice and face, hoping the fuzzbear will notice.
As usual, there is a total lack of response. Under the sharpest criticism, sarcasm, even outright hostility, the response is always missing. It unnerves him, like leaning against a wall only to find no support.
"Yuh, OK." Amel's sibilant realvoice slides through the upper registers, well above the standard frequency of the translator. Talbot winces at an especially piercing tone, but Amel has already begun to back away.
The door hisses shut behind it, leaving Talbot to himself.
The passenger lifesystem comprises about forty percent of the internal volume of the shuttle. Splitting its center, a raised walkway divides the space into two parts; on either side of this division, both fore and aft of the passenger seating, geometric plastic containers are racked in metal to form replicate arrays.
The passenger seating, at about the center of the lifesystem, is ranged two to each side of the walkway, each seat facing its mate on the same side. Conversation across the walkway, at least considered as face to face contact, is uncomfortable.
The conversation (x*Rkar and Schacther on one side, Atrenn across the walkway) continues, despite the difficulties. Direct-translation sibilants mimic the accents of the speakers at a standard frequency, filling the space like whispers. The three beings transmit Cospuk - a mercantile common speech that has had currency across the Geodesic, in one dialect or another, for over three centuries, now used as the common ground for the translators when the speakers share no particular mode of communication.
Suddenly, the door at the head of the walkway splits, emitting Amel. Amel's fur, ochre and white in the cold luminosity of the overheads, is bristled, signalling anger grown from pique.
Silence, broken only by the induced hiss of x*Rkar's radar carrier wave, falls in the face of Amel's anger.
Atrenn, who had turned back to a color strip from Schacther, looks up.
"Amel, you look cooked. Or is that fired up? So, did the forgetful flyer chastise you for entering the inner sanctum so late?"
"At-trennn, y mst yu alwaiss be not understandable to me? Sometimz ey thnk yu thnk u r hooman."
"Violation of nest pride." x*Rkar diagnoses, correctly, using its own equivalents.
"Yu tu..." Amel whines, dropping on the walkway, entirely forgetful of pelt-dignity.
"Oh, all right, you tell us, then," Atrenn insists.
"eahhh.. that shaved just-below-sentient-life-form - equivalent - uup --" The shuttle lurches briefly in a slight pocket of turbulence. Amel rolls involuntarily on its hind, catching itself with its arms. Without another word, it slides over the edge and hurries the two steps to its seat. Atrenn watches with what seems to be a very human grin.
"Yu felt tht... egh? Wll we r entry, fluffy Atrenn. We have snce before my rpt. Hope may be caut in fiir."
Atrenn's grin is gone. "One more time, Amel, omitting the curses." While speaking, it drags harness over its shoulders, joined by x*Rkar and Schacther.
"Simple wan, he hass started dsnt, not waiting fur rpt. Wee cld haff bn klld with turbulence equip rnd." It glances at Schacther for support. On Schacther's trunkfish face, just above the eye, a green splotch of consolation forms, travelling down to vanish at the neck. Its face and lips remain passive as the translator whispers "...forget..." Amel drums its fingers in appreciation as it slumps, displaying greater confidence. Its fur settles to its normal ochre, angry white now concealed.
"Post what event just passed, Amel, you should not sit there with nothing clinging you to your seat." x*Rkar's pouting scaly mouth points its upper lip in sardonic wit.
Amel looks up, startled, gestures, and pulls the straps down to lock.
"IT'S AGAINST THE EXPEDITION CUSTOM STRICTURES!" Schacther's translator screams in a monotone, echoing its skin turning an entirely dull black blazoned with flashing white symbols. Its feeding orifice trembles with effort.
"Schac, don't strain yourself, I see your pattern," Atrenn says gently.
And indeed, the message is written on its body.
"But what should we do? All right, some bouncing, unlikely to harm; it was contrary, but humans don't consider custom as inviolable as we might. Maybe he became impatient. We did take a long time, and not even telling him what we were doing, after all."
"Soa, wht duss he tlll uss? Whn wee r pending here all last day, duss he tll us frm where he wass hiding to wrn of impnding pstponemnt?"
"I think you are scanning something too rough, Amel. You should tune longer if it is irritating you too much."
"Your radar metaphors are really getting good, x," Atrenn compliments it. X*Rkar emits a seventy cycle hum of pleasure. "Amel, do you really want to report it to Reed, or the Board? I'll back you, if you do, but remember, we might lose. He might be angry."
"We cld bee reassnged anywy. It wld bee bttr thn ths constnt resistnce."
But Amel sounds sulky, so that Atrenn knows it will be able to resolve the issue quietly - eventually.
A wind stirs the clouds to the north, swirling them slowly open on a current of warm air. Beyond is the green of the true sky and the light of the hidden sun fuming across the border of cloud.
The hunter stands immobile at the crest of a gentle swelling of land, looking away toward where the red grass fades into the greenish haze of the sky. It feels a breeze, the end of a long chain of molecular collisions, caressing its face with an immaterial hand. The prey is beginning to wander away to the north, following the light. Lacking decision, the hunter waits, watching them pursue their irregular course to the horizon; standing, a node of difference in the infinite repetition of the grassplain. When its crop tightens with another of the many hunger contractions of the past few days, it reminds the hunter vaguely of the goal and it starts after them once again.
Roots from the base of the grass noose its long toes as it hurries; the crimson grass blades strike and slip under its chin, across its chest, past its arms, flailing weakly across the back of its knee joints.
Altitude 10km
Through the panes of the now open floor ports, Talbot watches the clouds unfold in patterns much like the palm of the human hand. As usual, he is mystified by the processes that can generate such shapes, so unlike their source, the roiling masses of moist air. Can they be the same as clouds seen from the ground? They slide below, no two shapes alike.
Not random, he reminds himself, yet not purposive; caused, but not by the visible.
The shuttle strikes a region of turbulence. He communicates with the stabilizer systems, upgrading their alertness.
Outside the front windshield, the sky is still a deep forest green.
Altitude 5km
Through the gentle obscuration of the atmosphere, the surface has become clearer and more definite. It is, as he has noticed many times before, more of a difficulty in focusing than a physical discontinuity that forms the boundary between the upper and lower atmosphere. The intricate patterns of the landscape below seem shrouded under shadow, but all of the details, down nearly to individual trees, are visible with some effort.
Every planetary feature partakes of the reservoir of red phosphorus that is the basis of the soil of this world. With decreased altitude, he sees each leaf of the forest below reflecting the maroon of human blood.
(He shrugs off the momentary morbidity)
The sonic compression cone trailed by the spacecraft inscribes a widening wake on the remains of the cloud layer below. Talbot scans the displays and the floor ports, seeking a level, unforested topography for landing. As yet, nothing but wildly humping hills encrusted with trees are visible.
Altitude 1km
The metal sensor gives off a graded alarm. The sound is loud enough to provoke his curiosity; he punches up a survey map of the location.
Not found.
No map?
Nothing.
He wheels the shuttle in a loose arc, turning more directly to planetary south. Passing directly above the spot, metal sensor bleeping gently, for a moment he thinks to see an elongated glint through the forest canopy. A certain disturbing thought leaps into his mind. In accordance with his training and experience, he resists his involuntary attempt to shunt it away, and considers...
A building? A ship?
They were going in because automated probes were not necessarily a guide to the habitability of a world. Colonization or exploitation required that all species with work rights test the world for suitability. Formerly, hundreds or thousands of beings might be lost, billions of gold points squandered. Now no more than ten at a time were risked.
He thinks of Govault, but that passes his threshold of resistance and he shunts it away. No natives. No ship. Just an outcropping of ore, reflecting the dawn sunlight. Something mildly interesting, at best.
He opens a scan, writing the image to the tank with a special tag, tying it to the sensor recording, and putting a high priority for post-landing consideration.
Altitude 500m
Ah, there, ahead; visible through the torn remnants of cloud that still persist so close below him and off to the horizon, a vast plain of red, phosphorus-laden grass shining in the sunlight, beginning as the forest ends. Perfect.
He extends the belly engine and activates it. The shuttle vibrates distantly as the engine interferes with the aerodynamics and then fires up. A faint whine slips into the pilot compartment. Talbot steers the shuttle in a wide semicircle back toward the bush veldt and pops out the drogues to lose some extra speed. The orientometer precesses toward the north as brilliant sun streams through the front windows, sluicing across the panels. His hands and legs warm under the impinging energy, but he ignores this, holding fast to duty.
A sound like thunder resonates from the distance and the clear sky, passing the hunter, heading south. Above, the clouds surge slightly, their dispersion hastened by the atmospheric perturbation. A dim rumbling fades up from behind the sound of concussion. The hunter follows its passage with sensitive ears, puzzled by the continuation of a normally short-lived natural sound.
Then, looking up to the sky, scrutinizing the scattered low-level clouds and the airspace between them and the nearly solid cloud deck above, it sees a dark speck moving with deliberation through the air. The speck swings in a wide arc, returning to a northerly heading. The sound seems to increase in volume, and shortly the hunter can discern two dots of color following the other, darker speck. Its eyes blur with hunger, but it rubs them with a six appendaged fist until they clear.
It must be its sign.
The hunter watches the specks as they float north. It seems that they suddenly pass into light, the largest speck changing from darkness to brilliance, reflecting the true sun. The trailing, colored objects seem to lag, then float south, back among the drifting clouds...
When it has stood there for a while, stupefied by its vision, it suddenly realizes that the prey has outpaced it, and it runs faster than ever to catch up. After all, it was fine for a nascent adult to stand adoring its sign, and, perhaps, a sign for all the tribe, but if it missed the opportunity signalled, it could be counted as meat of the Mover at the next Fire.
Altitude 200m
The shuttle rushes under the rumpled sky.
Talbot releases the braking chutes -- arm dump sequencer, unlock, set for pack ejection, sequence start.
Since Talbot has retained the drogues long past their effective velocity range, there is no lurch. For the past several minutes it has been the belly engines that rumble under the floor, holding them on a hand of flame upraised. On the rear screens he sees the chutes snatched away. He turns his attention to the displays and the floor ports, watching the now visibly uneven ground slide below, searching for the best place to land.
A sudden depression, five hundred meters or more in diameter, rears up on the forward displays. It is nearly circular, and though muted by grass and geologic time, it is obviously a former impact crater, perfect for the purpose of their base.
Talbot reenables the manual controls. With his hands unseen, like a musician caressing an instrument known as a lover, responding to the scene at hand, he manuvers through a gentle approach turn (don't mess the passengers, or the equipment), and tracks the crater through the arc until it lies once again directly ahead.
The prey hesitates on the verge of a sharp rise, silhouetted. The hunter halts in its turn, but for what is, perhaps, another reason. The speck has become a stone, drifting giddily through the air, terrifying with the strength of its animal roar.
The stone, last of all, hesitates beyond the ridge, and at this, the prey ceases to wait, but they bolt, running past the hunter with all possible speed, rolling their blue and white eyes at him in radiant fear as they pass.
Though its reactions are hazed by hunger and the din, it seizes its chance with the reflex of long practice. The spear leaps out, seemingly of its own volition, still bound to its wrist by the dependable skin thong. The pounded metal blade sinks deep into the reddish fur, behind the head, into a place left vulnerable by the absence of fleshy armor. A squall of death erupts from the pointy muzzle, revealing the prey's filthy square teeth. The hunter leaps on the prey with all the ferocity it can muster, still clutching the shaft of the spear, driving it deeper and twisting it mightily. Its thin lips curl, revealing the long, canine teeth, and it screams with the joy of being released into adulthood.
A blast of sound rings its ears, bringing its head up as if it had been struck.
In the few moments it has taken to bring down the prey, the thing has come closer, and is sinking to the ground behind the ridge.
Ensuring with a touch and a glance that the herbivore is dead, the hunter wrests its spear from the rigid flesh. It stops to give itself a name -- Stone -- as is its right. Then a scramble up the slope, to witness.
Blunt, triangular, the sign looks as much like a spearhead as a stone. Its surface is a strange, scarred color, and it is covered with strange markings. Fire erupts from its belly, then the brush in the hollow below flames with a light whiter than the sun, responding to the touch of the new fire. This first frightening sheet of flame, a deadly brush fire, is followed and then overtaken by a huge puff of thick white smoke that rolls from the underbelly of the thing, to snuff the dancing flames. In its shock, Stone feels its legs give way, and it drops to the ground, flat, clutching the spear to its chest like a child.
A watery sunlight fills the ports; there is no dust suspended in it to punctuate its limpid clarity. System reports blink, colors blotted by the brightness. Boards switch automatically to quiescent, lights changing to neutral blue automatically. Talbot stretches, the kink across his shoulders loosening under the strain.
He presses a final switch to power down the main sequencer, and the entire board goes blank. A twinge of anxiety rolls through his mind, as usual. An emergency might occur; pre-launch checkout would take a ten minutes in any event. But this world would be just like the others. There would be new things, mysteries, even problems, but as in the past, they would not be serious.
His left hand moves up to release the harness.
At the rear of the lifesystem, behind the last rack of storage modules, Amel, x*Rkar, Atrenn, and Schacther gather at the now opened portal, each unwilling to be the first to step into the world; held in suspension by feelings different for each, but, in general, resembling awe for this complex new place.
The pressure difference, not yet fully resolved, wafts unfamiliar scents through the opening to the varied olfactory sensors of the waiting beings. Outside, the grass can be seen, lush and red; above, the sky shows vivid lime through broken clouds. Sounds -- peepings, chitterings, and a deep hum -- pervade. All strike each differently, yet each in some way senses discontinuity with its home... gradually, the strangeness of the new links with the gestalts of their origins and the many worlds they each have seen, casting a cloak of strangeness across the familiar and making the strange seem normal.
Amel mutters a litany under its breath.
Talbot, walking from the pilot compartment, hears only the sound of the fans driving away the stink of smoke and extinguisher.
The waiting group parts before him; he steps to the airlock lip, unhampered by awe. First right, then across to the left, he scans the landscape as if looking for something. Then, with deliberation, he looks to the ground below, catches hold of the doorframe, and leaps to the ashen soil. Flakes and dust billow up from his feet, puffing into a cloud around him. He sneezes, bending almost double. "Damn!" Some of the ash lightens his dark skin, and powders his fringe of wooly hair.
He coughs, clearing his throat.
Air from the fans tugs his coverall out against his legs; the breeze of the planet pushes them to the right. He grins hugely under an unnameable impulse and waves the others out to join him.
Stone peers over the rise, watching the strange activity. Once the cloud of irritating gas had dispersed, leaving it coughing helplessly, it thought of withdrawing and taking its prey with it. But the legends of the Mover, the tales of demons, force it to stay.
A hole opens in the side of the thing, and it realizes that the stone is hollow, like a house -- surely like a house, since someone, much like itself in form, though not in color or dress, leaps from the opening to the charred ground.
The apparition has skin the color of soot. Stone looks at its own hand, its pale, faintly bluish skin, and at the appendage the strange being waves. The hair... not the proud red mane of an adult, or even the pale shock of the aged, but a thin strip of black fur around the back of its head. It is a strange reversal, like every color changed to its opposite; surely it means something. Was it? ... it had to be evil.
The first being, strange, but reflecting normality, is followed by creatures out of nightmare: a hideous, scaled thing, with no eyes; a shrunken man with golden skin, engorged skull and collapsed face; another creature with colors moving, blooming, and dissolving its skin and a face like a chitinoid. There is even a hairy, prey-like creature with dark blots for eyes. They are all dressed like priests, in a single garment wrapped to their forms, as if their skins are so delicate that they need to protect themselves against even the grass and wind.
These had to be the demons, warned of by the Mover.
Its kill forgotten in sudden and abject fear, Stone runs from the sight, crashing away through the tall grass with imperious but furtive motion, away toward the forest, its home.
Stiff tree barrels form runes against the glow of the exterior night and its millions of brilliant stars. Elaborating the runes, vines stretch from the forest floor to gather tightly about the limbs, binding them into the network of the canopy.
Hardly a sound is caused by their footsteps; they do not disturb the incessant activities of the countless creatures striving, living, and dying around them. Stone moves with them, watching its feet, stepping cautiously where they do; it is the novice, though each move this night is of its instigation.
Fear permeates their movement, their every conscious thought.
Its companions are all much older; perhaps for this reason they are more aware and more deeply afraid of the change that this consultation is about to wreak in their lives. In this manner, they experience the paradox of those who have a truly living god.
Beneath their feet the fluttering chitinoids try, and mostly fail, to escape the insouciant foot that crushes out their unconscious lives.
There is a clearing, rimmed with rotted, fallen trees lying at all angles. Some are crushed under the weight of their outer shell, the water-logged skin cracked and peeled back from the shrunken pith. Cluster light shines down in a shaft on the grass and brush at the center, gleaming on the stone remains of structures so old that the very form of people has changed since they were built. That even ragged foundations remain is a testimony to the power of the Mover.
They step over a log into the clearing. Stone feels its crop tighten with anticipation; for the first time, it has the responsibility for the reading of the Dance. It tries to hold every element of everything taught about the Dance in mind at once, and fails, increasing the despair mixed into its anticipation. Stone tries again and again as they walk across the grass and brush to the crumbling stone remains. They step over the fallen blocks and then the wall itself. Inside is a square of closely fitted stones with a deep square well marking its center. Stone has never been here before, but an aura of unnameable tension seems to thicken the air. The priests, cloaking garments stark shadowed in the cluster light, shudder perceptibly under the impact of this sensation. One motions Stone to a place at the center of a wall, another pushes Stone to sit. Then the four disperse to the corners, there dropping to wait with bowed heads. Stone stares out through the V-shaped opening in the wall across, identity consumed with stillness.
Four voices hum a minor chord. The sound echoes through the dark stands of trees, seeming to flow in waves. There begins a distant response.
The sound increases and soon it is like trees being destroyed in a winter storm; but there is no wind. It is like the tread of enormous spidery legs crashing across the plant-strewn forest floor, knocking trees aside in a destructive indifference.
It is the sound of the Steps of the Mover.
Silence falls, the priests avert their eyes.
And across the clearing, directly in Stone's view, the trees wave madly as if dancing to an unfelt wind. They part under the force of a huge black shape; one falls splintering to the ground. Stone feels a scream that never passes its throat. The god, the oracle, dances buoyantly into the cluster light. It is an appallingly featureless black ellipsoid, ringed with flexing legs. It reels and leaps and bounds in the light, like a fragment of space brought to earth, unlimited by gravity. A shadow, it gyrates, describing a pattern that is not a pattern, it tentacles flicking like whips, shadows cast by their motion on the fallen leaves flickering in sympathy. There is a message, and Stone finds that it does not even need to think or remember to understand:
The message is death.
The grass is wet with dew, splattering onto its skin as it pushes forward across the plain. Wet red slaps its chest, its shoulder.
A rack of spears is slung across its back, like the penalty for a shameful act, the abrogation of the ritual in fear. It uses an extra spear, the hunting spear, a spear that had brought down uneaten prey, as a ward against the moist grasses; it is not very effective.
Ahead, the rise that conceals the demon house. A catalyst, the sight and its implication banishes the threads of conscience, as the Mover had known it would. He is the instrument of its vengeance, of the dim and obscure purpose that the Mover serves, or, perhaps, creates. Stone crouches, fingers digging into the soil, scrambling under the weight of its weaponry to the top of the rise, to the sight of the target.
Talbot wakes in a pool of light. For a moment after he raises his head, his surroundings are blued and blurred. Slowly the normal tones of metal and plastic come back to him.
The lifesystem is empty.
The airlocks are open, dawn light spilling on the catwalk. Sounds and smells fill the lifesystem, and among them are the familiar smells of the mixed alien and human cuisine preferred by most shipdwellers. The only signs of his companions are in the rumpled bedding beside the catwalk.
In the washroom at the stern of the lifesystem, he throws water on his face, staring at the image in the mirror for a moment as if it belongs to a stranger. Looking past the door, he sees an awning outside. The maroon grasses are translucent in the morning sun.
When Talbot steps from the ramp, he finds yesterday's ash glued into a rough but serviceable floor. The containers they had spent most of the day shifting are now stacked outside at the stern, multicolored plastic glistening in the sun. He looks toward the bow and finds Amel, standing at the grill, watching him with what looks like suspicion. The others, seated in a semicircle of chairs by the edge of an awning, had been looking at data spread on the table before them. He feels pinned by the intensity of their combined gaze. Gradually, the attention diffuses, leaving him private. His sensation of acute discomfort, however, does not pass.
"Talbot." Amel acknowledges finally with a barely perceptible voice. The whispering sound reacts against his mood, striking him to anger, carefully suppressed. The alien's eyes, black-glass eggs, reflect the scene back on itself. He watches his image grow in them as he approaches.
"Good morning," he says, mustering pleasantness from behind his unease. "I gather you're cook this morning..." He notices, from the edge of his vision, that the others have returned to their scrutiny of the data displayed on the table. Occasionally, they point at something, their mingled realspeech and Cospuk a low muttering against the backdrop of natural grassland sounds; yet somehow he feels they are watching.
"yess..." Amel replies, a falsetto rise at the end of the slur. "Wht wld yu like?"
"Oh, just some eggs, if you don't mind."
"Perhapps some burrned bread, az wll?" it suggests; though its body is bent as it stoops to retrieve something from a shelf, its eyes are solidly upon him.
A light breeze flaps the canvas of the awning, ending the motion with a snapping retort.
"Toast?" Talbot says.
"Two span," the alien seems to bite out the words, its attention turns down to the grill. No vegetarian, Amel.
On every world, burning meat has its advantage -- it is sure death to parasites.
Atrenn looks up from the table, a digit resting on a spot in a window on the table. "Talbot," it says, "won't you sit down?" Its face, seen in this light, is even more seriously a caricature of the human; features shrunken, the crooked grin seams the golden skin with lines, pushes up the diminutive nose; the brow line, spiky eyebrows, the thin frizz of violet-tinged black that resembles hair - all seem slightly human but are not.
x*Rkar turns its eyeless head toward Talbot. Talbot hears the hum of radar in his brain.
"Sit please, Talbot, do, yes." it asks vocally.
Talbot looks over at Schacther. Its color remains stable, meaning, so Talbot has been told, that it is having no special reaction to his presence. He shrugs mentally, sits, and waits for them to speak: he has nothing particular to say. x*Rkar continues...
"Talbot, Atrenn broadcasts of the ship you mentioned to his yesterday-self."
"Well, now," he interrupts, warningly, "I didn't come to any conclusions. It might have been a ship. I didn't have a good size for it -- it was too far away for reliable measurement." He glances at Atrenn for the nod of confirmation he would expect from any human, but, of course, the little fellow just sits there, bland, but attentive. x*Rkar elevates a grey scaled appendage, caricature of a professor about to launch into a point.
"Talbot. I from tank have explicitly retrieved images-visual and data sourced from metal sensors. EMF resonances give mass; example 256000 (lutic), a nice even number for us."
Talbot gives up looking where its eyes should be. These creatures have lived in caves for their entire evolution, and their eyes had long since fled. The radar remains, a very precise sense, and, with others of their kind, even a direct visual communication medium.
"Are you making an official determination?" he asks. There will be reports to enter.
"Yes."
"Yes," Atrenn breaks in, "because who knows what it means to us, after all. Whose ship?"
It taps the table and an image, enlarged, contrast enhanced, flips across the table to beneath Atrenn's outstretched digit. Atrenn spins it toward Talbot, who enlarges it still further.
"Not ours," Talbot replies, intrigued.
"No," Atrenn acknowledges. "Nor ours. I have searched the full range of patterns, and nothing similar to the pre-crash profile is even a remote match. It is an alien."
"It's also old." Talbot looks up. "There's a lot of old growth. Look." He dials up the infrared profiles, and zooms a section until the canopy outlines can be seen.
"The discoloration on the metal are diamir corrosion," Schacther's calm, whispery translator voice says quietly. "Available light spectra confirm the diffusion profiles."
"So?" Talbot grunts, falling back into the chair's embrace. "It's been there a long time. Why diamir? Didn't we develop that only a few years ago?"
Colors chase themselves across Schacther's skin, occasionally clustering into repeating patterns; its coveralls translate them with their fiber computers, assembling his voice, as perfectly translated as concepts would allow.
"We have had it for longer," Schacther says. "Much longer. But not long enough for any diamir objects to become corroded in this way. And the synthesis of diamir is not so simple that we use it for hulls. Though we would prefer it."
Talbot looks away, out over the grass, giddy with fascination and disgust.
Amel peers over Talbot's shoulder. "Wee dont nd Govalt, nt recurrnce."
Talbot looks at it sharply.
"Eggz rdy," it tells Talbot.
"So, you know about that?"
"Wuz trained." Amel replies sullenly. "Yu kno. Self kno. Yu were evn thr."
"Look, surveys fail. I know. That's our reason for being here. But their team was large, the native life form was... well, look, events got beyond them. Not their fault."
"So we withdrew," Atrenn replies. "Wisely avoiding genocide, though there are those I have heard argue otherwise."
Talbot says nothing, but his eyes are downcast and his fingers tap on the armrest.
"Yes, well, that's the story."
Amel screeches suddenly, a sound like a throat tearing; it falls, an enormous shaft thrust through its body; from nowhere, black blood floods across the congealed ash. The others leap up; while Talbot stands astounded, Schacther whips its laser from a strap, searching for a target. Another spear shoots up out of the grass, carving a clear arc against the sky. Schacther sees it, but seems too busy to consider its destination. It fires, the green bolt striking through the grass in a veil of white flame. Talbot shouts, intending to warn, but the sound is inarticulate and useless. The spear smashes through the awning, ripping a hole and striking Schacther's laser just before its sweep reaches the source of the attack. The weapon explodes with a deceptively mild pop, blowing the remains of Schacther's hand across the ground. Its whole body turns lavender instantly and falls to the ground without a sound.
Atrenn has its laser out and is falling back toward the shuttle, scanning the landscape. x*Rkar crouches beside the table, gesturing toward the grassland. Another spear falls, glancing off the table surface and spinning across the ground. Just as Atrenn fires at the source, x*Rkar dives for the spear, rolling in an incredible gymnast's feat, simultaneously casting it at the spot burning under Atrenn's laser beam. Suddenly, it falls to the ground, pinned through the narrow skull by a beaten metal point.
"Talbot! Talbot!" Atrenn shouts. "Get out of here!" A wild scream answers another lancing beam from the laser. x*Rkar thrashes on the ground; Atrenn rushes forward to help. But Talbot runs toward the fallen Amel, the hooting agony of x*Rkar sounding suddenly in his ear.
There is a weapon on the ash beside Amel.
Amel lies face down in the plasticked dust, contorted and stiff, a huge pool of gleaming dark (it doesn't look like blood... it couldn't be blood, there is too much of it...) spread from beneath it. Its fur is wet with the stuff -- Talbot tries not to see.
Instead, he snatches the laser from under the edge of the grill, and, still crouched, swivels it, firing, across the grass in a vicious impulse. White fire blooms where it touches, sending heat beating back toward him. Atrenn is dragging x*Rkar toward the lock. The spear is gone from its head, and Talbot wonders momentarily if x*Rkar can survive, when a spear flashes down, striking Atrenn and pinning it against the ground. It yammers helplessly, thrashing about, trying to drag the spear from its body, x*Rkar tossed aside, forgotten in agony. Talbot throws down his weapon and runs, ducking under the ship, past the fan vents and the motors, up the other side to the far lock. He scrambles within, yes, still breathing, still whole, blood pounding in his ears and swirling in his head, not draining to the ground; he levers his barely mobile body onto the lip of the opening; inside, the emergency seal, arm and release, then crawling to the other side to do the same, to shut out the screaming, the pain, the blood........
Talbot cries, feels the nails in the skin of his cheeks, clinging. He takes his hands away from his face and stares at them in dulled horror. "Why," he whispers, "was I doing that?" He watches the blood pound in the netted veins of his hands. Minutes pass without a thought dropped into the silence; no sensation except sight and suspension.
What can I do now? he wonders, all referents, all context stripped from his syntax.
He looks up. The walkway stretches away from him, ends in a door, so far away, so small, leading to the pilot's cabin. The metal racks stand naked and empty, gleaming in the bluish light. He turns his face toward the ceiling, seeing the serene glow of the tubes, haloed against the dark metal. Only then can he allow thought to creep into his mind, delicately, like a man testing a wound for mortality, ready to recoil from a familiar path.
So he remembers:
He had come upcurve with a bunch of pers from Bonavent, having landed work as a shuttle pilot on the run from BeeVee station to the Sistral encampment on Govault. The room was comfortable, not opulent, but it was fully inboard. He had ridden all the way over from Optator in the third seat from the ports and he had wanted to see stars.
He pulled up a listing of all the perimeter restaurants and lounges from the registrar. An item caught his attention -- Chal's, over on the northeast rim of the station. It reminded him of an old friend from flight training, Chalsome Bannar, and, yes, the place was a druggar, just like Chal's father used to run in Clotinius, near Arsia, on Mars. Why not? He could use a buzz before eating, and, especially, a view.
After wandering through interminable colored hallways, losing himself and then finally having to ask directions from the wall registry, he arrived. The sign flared across a thirty meter stretch of wall, repeated across the surface in man-sized letters that marched along the wall through their own echoes. He entered, and dimness leapt to enclose him.
Floor to ceiling windows were lit with the spectacle of the galactic spiral. Rugs and cushions spotted the floor, and the wall let into private alcoves.
Business was slow at this hour: the place was empty -- no, not quite, an alcove to the right of the door was occupied by something holding a murky drink up to the stellar light in a tightly coiled tentacle.
Behind the bar, a tall, thin fellow with darkly ochre skin stood patiently, polishing a glass house pipe with a soft rag. His dark hair was long and tied asymmetrically over his left ear. His mouth was concealed by drooping moustaches that hung almost to his shoulders. It was.. yes, it was Chal! But somewhere inside, a barrier was thrown up, controlling his step, crushing the eagerness from his face. Yes, Chal, but... taller than he remembered, thinner too, perhaps. Chal watched indifferently until Talbot was standing at the bar, then his flat brow furrowed with the effort of memory, his face lit with surprise...
"Tully, what you doing here, man? Hahn't seen you for years. What you smoking now? I'm sure we got it." His asymmetric ponytail wagged with the fluid motion of his head, signalling greeting. The expansive and satisfied tone jarred Talbot.
"Yeah, its been a long time, Chal. This your place?"
"Oh, ya bet, Tully. Best on the station, best in the sector. Only druggar on the station, but we've got liquor. Mank over there," he gestured at the other angle of the bar," is your woman for that. But if you're smokin or snortin, I got what you like. So name your choice. If we don't have it, it can't be got."
"Well, then, how about some Jamaican gange, Chal? You have any of that?" It felt strange, flaunting the credit like that, but, why not? He hadn't had any since Mars. Not, in fact, since that time he and Chal had smoked behind the ventilator stacks, just before graduation.
Chal frowned with the effort of recollection, then relaxed. He leaned forward, glancing down, swayed back with a strip of brown paper in his hand. "Oh, yeah. Sure, man. Like I say, I've got a little of everything, a lot of some." He grinned, laving the paper in the teewater, rolling it with swift rushes of his ochre fingers into a perfect cone, edges spiralling evenly from apex to opening. With the other hand, he leaned to the right, dipping down below the bar and coming back up with a thick pinch, all the while talking in his thick, reedy voice. "This stuff is quite scarce lately -- I mean the real stuff, not the crap they usually sell under the same name. I mean, like the mutation rate is something fierce. But I got some in from a runner heading upcurve with some crystals. Good and fresh, man, you'll like it." He stuffed the pinch into the cone and tamped it down. "Here you go, Tully, a good clean spliff." He passed it under the drying light and handed it to Talbot.
A display under the bar lit the bottom of Chal's face. He studied it for a second, dipped into another bin and loaded a house pipe, holding it ready as the waiter arrived to take it. She thanked him with a glance, and headed out onto the floor.
"So, what you been doing, Tully? You on SG for this Sistral run? Everybody's been coming in for a decasyke, but I haven't seen many pilots."
Talbot delayed answering, tilting his head and sucking flame into the spliff. He held the smoke, feeling the hit expand into his lungs. Then it rushed out of his nostrils, billowing briefly across the bar.
"Chal, come on, I'm not doing starships. I'm running shuttle still." The lift hit his head, and he rode it angrily, stomping on the frustration that had erupted. "What about you?" he asked, tilting back for another hit.
"Well, let's see," Chal said, leaning forward on the bar, "I bought this place in... fifteen eighty, wasn't it? with some insurance credit; it wasn't doing too good just then, and the old owner wanted out. He was running a chic trade, Terran liquors only, which were hot for, like, what? three years? but, when the flick dropped off in seventy three, there was nothing left -- " The display lit again, but Chal transferred it, calling over to the blond woman who was sitting, smoking, and reading a fac behind the other leg of the bar. "That's liquor for you Mank." The other nodded, ash dripping from the tip of a tobacco cigarette, hesitated to finish a sentence, then leapt up in silent, frantic motion to fill the order before the waiter arrived. "So... anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. So, you know, my old man used to run a druggar in Clotinius; remember, after practice flights?"
"Yeah," Talbot said through the exhalation of another hit.
"So, I knew the substance and all that. I figured I could make a go. Hahn't been bad, you know?"
The display flashed, just as Talbot asked (too quietly to really want an answer) "But why'd you stop flying?" Chal, of course, didn't hear, didn't answer, too busy snapping and laying out sticks of brilliant red arotnish on a tray. Talbot turned and saw two Tereniades settling to carpets in the middle of the floor. One of them was Atrenn, though they hadn't met at the time. (His real self recoils from this image out of memory.)
When Chal came back, the sight of the aliens had brought him resentment, so he had the question ready. "So, Chal, how come you're not flying any more?"
"Oh," Chal said, voice falling, "You didn't know? No, I guess not, man. Well, there was sort of an accident. I was running freight on contract to Rennald Norris, three times a decasyke, Bonavent to Rilkestraport. You know the spec, you come in, snatching all the speed you can on every decent gravity well on the way, and if you're hot, you ride a pressor orbit for ten-eleven, just to keep avail for your entry corridor. Then I get a message from DCA telling me to fling out about twenty clicks for a hospital runner coming in from an inbound liner. So, I figure that's clearance, they know the twenty click swing's clear, I mean, they are supposed to be in control. So I'm out about ten clicks into this, not really checking the scope cause the altitude control's the tough part, and then I get a bite on the localizer, and DCA screaming on the com. The runner clips me on the stern, and me without even time to shut down the jets for a sling out." His hand hung in the air, aborted in mid-gesture. "So there I am, spinning off toward Mockva, venting air out the stern, me pinned in the seat by the wreckage, and the whole lifesystem a piece of shit, but it's still got some integrity...anyway, it took them three decisykes to get out there and unpin me, by which time, I was pretty shot. When I come to, the DCA's got recordings saying three clicks in, though one of my buddies in orbit says fakes, cause he heard twenty, out on the channel, but look, after three decis out there, I wasn't in any shape to fly again, anyway. So, I bought the place, and here I am, as you see."
Talbot was coughing on a hit, and the words of consolation couldn't force their way past his spasming throat. Chal gestured, and Mank brought a beer. "Here, bro, this'll help." The bar display flashed again, as a new party took rugs over to the window. Talbot wiped his eyes, wheezing. Chal was down at the right end of the bar, assembling various components on a chromium tray.
Then he returned, and asked, "But, now you got to tell me, Tully, what keeps a bright guy like you in shuttle. Sure fire you were clocked for SG in less than a few years, I thought."
There it was, undiluted, as Chal used to put it. Talbot wanted to pay, leave, run, anything but answer. How could he, though? Instead, he spoke with a hint of mockery, "Hey Chal, you know, like the creatchies have it all tied up with SG; one bunch makes the boards, another designs the languages, but not for us. The Geodesic doesn't mean they love us, you know? There aren't more than a few humans in SG because, who can follow their thought patterns? You go for starships and they tell you, hey, you're too slow, buddy, you slide when it comes to these concepts, yeah. And they tell you this and that until you start thinking you're really good for nothing... but of course they're so nice and polite. Oh yeah." He dropped into a moody silence that Chal was wise enough not to try to break. Chal looked at his friend with a silent tension of concern and pity that was palpable. Talbot didn't want to see it. "Shit," Talbot muttered unsteadily, feeling like he was swimming in null-g. He sucked down a hit and the fire broke through in an orange oval on the side of the spliff. "I better go... go crash," he muttered, crushing the spliff into embers. "How much, Chal?"
"Hey, on the house, Tully." Chal said, trying to keep his voice light. "Like, good to see you, man."
Talbot thought he heard a tiny sarcasm there.
"Chal," he said, warning.
"Tully, I'll see you again, man; on your way back in, or some such thing. Have a good run, you know?" And that was the sound of strain.
"Chal, how much?"
"Tully, come on, take it easy, huh. Hey, Halin," he called over Talbot's shoulder, "yeah, would you help Talbot here," he gestured, "to a rail, heh. Yeah, that probably would be best. Tully, you got your cards with you?" Then, strong hands gripped Talbot's shoulders, and Chal rolled away down the bar, his chassis gleaming in the dimness...
He lets it fade. Now he remembers. It had been reason enough for not caring. He is going to leave.
Talbot stumbles into the pilot compartment, ducking under the doorframe. He slides into his seat with the rustle of its material sinking under him, unheard. A touch to the main sequencer powers up the system; signals appear, displays run their test sequences. Like an automaton, he brings out the checkpad, runs through the checks. The minutes pass and his hands tremble less and less. He yanks the straps down over his shoulders, snapping them into place; then he reaches overhead to the com controls.
Static -- an open channel picking up interference from a nearby storm. He checks the plot to see if a laser can be used, but the transport's laser relay is below the horizon for three hours yet.
"Talbot here. Acknowledge, please." To his disgust, his voice is hoarse and unsteady; he holds up a hand -- it is shaking again, stained with alien blood.
Hastily, he puts it aside from view.
No answer.
"Acknowledge, please."
Still no answer. More static. The weather display shows a storm system advancing rapidly. Less than an hour remains before the onset of unacceptable turbulence.
"Shit." He switches off the com.
From the south and west, water vapor rebounds from a stable cold front, and, reacting to the barrier, begins to shed thin cold rain on the steppe.
Talbot watches the wall of clouds sliding above him; but the engines have finished their startup procedure, and it is time. The startup clearance warning sounds outside.
The sky shatters with light, and there is a momentary pause of silence -- then the thunder ripples across the landscape in echoic majesty.
The sky erupting,
The hunter caught between....
The stone screaming
... Stone runs.
cast like a moist seed between pressing fingers,
fumbled,
hastening to the wood, a peninsula of trees, racing across the plain, past the shrieking demon house and over the rise beyond. Breath roaring in its vents.
Rain sweeps down, flooding the viewport and all of the dorsal lenses. When the foremost wave is past, the port clears and Talbot restores his grip on the throttle to full strength; then, for a moment, he sees... a figure, running past in the rain, slapping through grasses and gone.
Talbot's hand, released.
...human? Denial. But close; skin, legs, hands, muscles, hair...
A guilt is merely latent -- his hand, stained with Amel's blood. A silly voice, stilled. His anger at the other's presence, striking, because it was defenseless, increasing, because they were indifferent. Moment piles on moment, the shuttle whines impatience.
"Talbot! Talbot!" Atrenn shouts. "Get out of here!"
Anger, still anger, he slaps the systems down. His hand shakes so badly that he cannot control it.
Talbot leaps from the lock, landing on the scarred earth. He scrambles quickly into the concealment of the still moist grasses, finally crouching on the soft earth. He checks the plugs where the black cords link into the extra power supply. He checks the weapon that lies silent in his hands, waiting to bark light in a directed stream, ready to kill. Breath sounds a light pant in his ears, braced on the silence of the frightened world.
Then he is up again and running, searching for the rutted track.
It is harder to find than he expects; the grasses are resilient and most of the trace has been obscured by the passing minutes.
Rain falls in a shower across kilometers, pauses, begins again.
Stone sits huddled on the forest floor, like a spire rising from the tessellation of white and red leaves. The spear lies on the detritus at Stone's side.
Here, the trees are thick, bordering the bush veldt. Through the screen of barren undergrowth that delimits the forest, Stone can look back to see the gently rolling landscape from which it has come.
It regards its wound ruefully. The surprise: that light could hurt; that the sun has been tamed and under their control is almost worse than the pain itself. But, puzzled, it stares at the wound, sealed, unbleeding... evil? If it had been caught in the sweep of the beam more fully, it could have been cut in two...both halves... living? For a while... It thrusts the thought away.
Stone holds the knife, hand resting on its double knee, absently rubbing a digit on the flat of the blade where it thrusts from the binding of the hilt. When the self anger fades, it slides the knife back into the sheath at its waist. It looks up and out across the grass beyond the netted branches.
There is a disturbance imposed on the surging movements of the grass; not a whorl of the wind, or a gust in the rain, but the passage of something of bulk.
Stone knows: it is the last of the demons, searching. For Stone.
Talbot stumbles on the uneven ground, impeded by the miles of corridors that line his past, progress inconclusive. A kilometer ahead, trees rise to a canopy a hundred meters high, looking higher in the vague, clouded light. But somewhere in the bloody dimness ahead is the alien, the nemesis, waiting to be killed.
He stumbles in a drainage channel and falls. The laser smacks against a rock with a sound like his heart stopping. Instantly his head comes up, searching, knowing that he is watched, that he could be killed at any moment.
He stares at the laser dangling from his grip, dented and stained with mud and red plant. Impetuously, angrily, he fires at the grass, a swath of light that raises an instance of flame. Then he looks at the trees, seeing only the faint silhouette of a running biped who passed his ship in the rain.
At the sight of that brief blaze, Stone rolls to its inverted knees, snagging the spear. On hands and one leg, with one leg dragged behind, it scrambles to the bole of a nearby tree and installs itself behind it. It waits, crouched, watching the demon's blundering progress. Its pulse pounds behind the line of its strange, linear jaw.
Talbot pushes his way through the wiry undergrowth, shoving it away from his face, forced to duck and push. He bursts through into the clearing, eyes locked on the disturbed leaves. He reaches out with the laser, scanning suspiciously.
No one in sight.
The temptation is too great; Talbot strides over to the mussed area and squats down to look it over in detail, laser resting negligently on mud-soaked knee.
Stone thrusts its head out past the bole of the tree, a fierce, unconscious expression like a feral human smile tugging skin back from its mandibles. Its spear rests ready in its hand.
Two strong steps and Stone casts the spear through the sparse cage of trees, aiming with all its wit for the human who crouches a mere ten meters away. That one cast, calculated with all of the resources at its command, is the only one it has.
The spear writhes through the air, and then is tragically deflected by the muscular trunk of a tree, whacking into the ground with an audible thrum a meter short of where Talbot stares, shocked by the advent of death. Talbot leaps to his feet and whips the laser up to firing position... but Stone is already running.
The laser flickers and dies. Frustrated, Talbot slaps the recalcitrant weapon, but it refuses to function.
Nothing.
The hunter waits, standing insolently not thirty meters distant, on the verge of the undergrowth that rises up under the crowns of the real forest.
Talbot screams, wrenching the cables and throwing the useless laser to the ground. His eyes fall on the spear, protruding from the soil only a few meters distant. Wrenching it from the ground, he rears back and heaves it at the alien, the hunter, anger blinding him to futility. Naturally the cast falls short by a huge distance.
The hunter, an intelligent being, hesitates only a moment before rushing forward and snatching up the spear. For a moment it stares at Talbot, and Talbot might have sworn it was wondering at his magnanimity.
"Go on," he shouts. "Ask me. I'm an idiot. But I'm going to kill you!"
Stone whirls and disappears in a rush of blood-red foliage.
Talbot examines his makeshift spear. Its tip gleams wetly with transparent sap where he has shaped it with his blade. While it is too irregular to be thrown, at least it allows more distance than the knife. But he is too afraid to admit that it is unlikely to save his life, that this time, he has gone too far.
The sun is casting slices of light that shift slowly upward and waver with the oncoming late afternoon breeze. Talbot races after Stone, pushing aside the branches. The leaves rise up in ranks along the twisting path, choking off the light until it becomes a tunnel of hushed maroon dimness. Ahead he sees the flailing legs of his prey, a momentary flicker, as the path winds straight, and then turns again.
He runs harder... no more energy than he ever spent on a playground, and yet he is exhausted, and each step seems longer than the last. He is more and more afraid; the path is now a tunnel leading to a fiery clearing -- is it getting hotter?
He stumbles slightly as he stops on the verge, staring at the sudden ridge of tarnished metal rising under the canopy, at the breaks and contours of vents and legs, ports and broken doors. It is a moment before he sees that it is a space vehicle - a derelict.
Stone peers from the undergrowth, trembling. This was the wrong place to have brought the enemy.
Talbot cannot release his wariness, and he sidles toward the ship, eyes restless, makeshift spear waving as if to block any motion. Where is the native? What does it have to do with this derelict? Did it lead him here as a trap?
A ramp leads up to the shadows, littered with junk, cloaked in wafts of leaves. One huge door is twisted against the side of the ramp. The other, if it ever existed, cannot be seen. He scuffs the leaves, looking around, suddenly peering up into the dimness. His curiosity is pulled more than on any other mission, but here, it is worth his life to be distracted.
There are intriguing symbols embossed on the metal, signs of a culture... He whirls at a rustle from the forest. He hears a sudden rush through the leaves... yes, heading away. The hunter has fled, and the now Talbot is the alien, alone, with the sun rushing toward the edge of the world. The light has become dusky, and the red slanting beams are fewer and more lengthy.
Talbot is confused, ready to run, to fight; fearful of traps, of hiding places and the game of lie and feint. He wants to leave, to go back to the Illyrion, his familiar cabin and pictures, to his desk volume littered with windows. But even more, he wants everything to be safe. He wants to be free, like a tourist, to explore.
His pant is echoing from the walls beside and the curved roof above. The ramp beckons. Probably the second most dangerous place in the world right now.
The leaves on the ramp appear undisturbed. The native must have fled. But it is getting late, and the way back to the shuttle is impossible in the half light. Can this ship shelter him? Or should he...
"All right!"
He stalks up the ramp, a roar of leaves being crushed.
The arcuate splits in the west wall admit the sun to the interior volume -- a wreck, canted sharply, debris piled on the floor. A huge loading door, buckled and curled upward as if struck from below, tops the ramp. Beyond are mountings, now empty, and a large raised dais that might have been the control area. The control panels are ruined, like crippled altars, and there are huge windows, now dulled and broken, ranged across the wall above.
A strange technology, but not inhuman.
The rusty light from beyond the wall fades. Remarkably, the interior does not seem to dim. As the sunset proceeds, Talbot watches the ship's light fade in. There are patches where it is darkened forever, but those are like the shadows of...foliage; the light has no source, but the walls and surfaces are dimly illuminated by the faint appearance of cold moonlight.
As he walks through the loading door, there is a sudden crunch from beneath his feet. Talbot looks down, to see a cracked hollow sphere -- a skull. He drops to his knees, scraping away the litter. The skull is not human.
It is bilateral, and a mouth and jaw must have existed. But what to make of the elliptical brain case and the juts to either side of smallish eyepits?
If only he had his recorder.
It is cooler already. There is a spatter of twilight rain on the hull; it reaches through the rents to the floor.
He kicks at the leaves, shivering with disgust at the thought of the dead. He clears a place by the wall, where he can watch the ramp. The rain is even stronger now, a crazy rattle on the hull, a steady drip through the cracks.
But nothing happens.
Now, cold, huddled against a truly alien wall, Talbot tries to understand his motives. I must have gone crazy.
Why the attack? What about the occupants of this ship? Are the natives their descendants? What happened to their civilization? Is it dangerous to us? Is this what we sensed during entry, or is it something else?
He knows he will probably never fly again. His failure to report: a temporary insanity. They'd have to understand that. They'd know he wasn't to blame, not after seeing his friends --
No, not friends. Where'd you get that word?
passengers
killed. Who would think properly after that? There can be no training for terror.
But allowances can not be made. Absolute reliability is required. He has to stay awake. And his stomach hurts with emptiness.
There will be no food or water tonight.
Absolute reliability. He steadies the spear on his knee.
No allowances.
He leans his head up against the wall for just a moment.
Stone huddles miserably amidst the wet leaves, rain trickling from above, leaking through hair, and dripping with occasional harshness on the leaves below. It aches with wounds and exertion; Its emotions are turbulent.
It had led the alien to the Home of the Mover -- to certain death. It should be ecstatic. Yet the ease with which the alien had approached the Home... Almost as if it felt the Home to be safer than the forest. Even the priests felt breath pulse stronger in their spiracles at the thought of the Home. As for itself, the sight of it had been pure terror, when he realized his accident. Fear for the Mover had followed, but first the fear for himself had risen, and with it he had fled.
Now it is dark, and there is only the rustling of rain in the forest.
Talbot wakes with a start, hands scraping on the dimly lit walls in a sudden spasm, quickly controlled. It is a moment before he realizes he is not back on the Illyrion. He remembers the dream of the moment before waking -- a dream, so real, of the ship, of a fight with Atrenn, a good drinking bout, then sleep...
The derelict is utterly silent -- outside, it is the depth of the night, the few hours during which all of the creatures of the forest are asleep at once. But the faint light of the walls does not yield. Talbot stirs and the rush of the leaves echoes in the hull. Somewhere in the distance is the sound that awakened him, and he stops at the tread of it, straining to hear it over the echoes of his body.
There it is again... the tread of... something very large. Coming closer. He moves quickly to the large crack in the wall, peering out into the night. Below, a fan of cool shiplight streaks the forest floor dimly, streaming from a hidden doorway on the hull below. Trees in the distance are rustling with authority, as if a wind were on its way. From below, he hears other sounds, like old machinery spinning up.
In a moment, the tread becomes a roar as the brush is pushed aside; a dark creature, smoothly ovoid, with flickering tentacles, sweeps past below. Talbot presses back against the edge of the crack, but the creature is already gone. He peers out again; the light remains, the door is still open.
The ship people, or their descendants, are still alive, and in full command of their technology.
At once, he feels the danger and the attraction. To see; to watch the creature at its work. To consider a contact. He peers out and down. The surface of the ship is tangled with vegetation and torn metal. But so hard to see. He considers the light.
He whirls, looking toward the ramp, but it seems so far, and the tread of his step on the leaves and metal so loud. Then, delicately, he turns back and steps out through the crack, clinging frighteningly tight to the rough bole of the tree beyond, fingers woven among the vines that wrap it, heartbeat hard on the wood pressed to his chest. He tries to slide slowly, quietly down, but the sounds of his movements are still loud in his ears. Then his feet are on a surface: a shard of the derelict. It is too smooth, and he slips, falling to his hands with a thud. He lies still, frozen, waiting. But there is only the sound of machinery and the shifting of light through the door as the creature moves about on its errands.
The vague forms of the trees are outlined against the first light, but soon that is hidden by the light of the interior. He watches the being in motion. It stands in place, tentacles lashing, cables running from it to machines. Is it programming? Communicating? Being entertained? Or engaging in some activity with no human correspondence?
From the surface of the metal behind the creature, a form extrudes, slowly at first, pale, thin, and tall, but not as tall as the restless black ovoid. Talbot leans forward, too fascinated to be afraid. He watches as the form stabilizes, becoming an image of the native, shaded by the light as if it were real. What kind of technology is this?
There is something wrong with the shape of the tentacled creature. It becomes slimmer, as if it is actually losing mass. He can hardly take his eyes from it, even as he steps forward. He nearly loses his balance on the edge of a ramp, hidden by the glare of the interior; he stumbles and clings to the edge of the door. In that moment when he looks up, he is confused. The black ovoid is gone -- instead, there are two natives staring at each other. The closer one turns. For a moment, slit pupiled eye meets human eye, Talbot stands transfixed, as the native darkens, slipping from one shape to another, from native to...him!
Talbot runs.
There is a crashing in the brush that attracts Stone's attention. It comes to its feet in time to see what appears to be the alien, fleeing as if for its life, yet behind it, emerging from the Home, is a creature that seems identical. Stone glances away to follow with sound the flight of the first alien. Then it makes the decision and follows.
Talbot pushes blindly through the soaked grass, sparing frequent glances for his wrist navigator. In his mind, it is difficult to separate himself from the image that follows him. Perfect copies. Fear in that concept, the idea of being replaced, of being identical to something that could one moment be one thing, the next himself.
The sun levers itself slowly above the horizon, and the sky colors shift through lemon.
Three hundred meters to go. The rise is barely visible above the fronds of grass. His breath starts again in his chest, and he stops, hanging. Then he walks slowly up the rim of the crater. As he stands on the rim, looking down at the shuttle waiting for him, shadow stretched long in the dawn, he feels a dizzy ecstasy. Then he remembers the bodies.
They still have to be returned home.
He trudges down the slope toward them. They wait for him, sprawled across the ground, contorted and dry. To interrupt them... he feels it is impossible to know how to deal with them. Instead, he steps to the lock on the near side, his escape.
He scrambles up on the lock edge, perches in the alcove, and hearing the sound of his hands on metal, enclosed, he suddenly knows he is free. But he can't cry, it is choked inside.
But no, there are no natives. there are only the people of the ship. Or, as now seems possible, the castaway of the ship, alone.
A castaway of unknown danger. He retreats into the ship to find another weapon.
Talbot swings down from the lock, bags for the bodies clenched tightly under one arm; the only remaining weapon, a neural polarizer, is gripped firmly in his other hand. He scans the scene, in time to see the image-native profiled on the horizon, and in a fraction of a second, decide to fire. The creature drops silently. At last a luck to his advantage. The native, its nervous system based on electrical activity, will be still for hours, unless it has unusual properties. Perhaps he will be able to imprison it for study. He hurries back into the shuttle, returning to the exit with a cargo net in hand. He leaps down and races up the hill on the line where he last saw the native. Frantically he runs back and forth, scanning the grass for compressed areas.
There.
He throws the cargo net over the pale being. He watches, but it does not move. Carefully he approaches from the foot end of the creature, alert to any potential motion, ready to leap back. He bends forward and pushes it over to enmesh it in the net. It is flexible, but in odd places. Its torso is smooth and bluish, taut-structured in a way different from a human being. But is has a smooth head, an elongated face, hands with many fingers, feet with vestigial digits, and backward knees.
Then, gripping the net, he tugs. The movement is surprisingly easy, as if the creature, like a bird, has hollow bones. He hurries down the slope, glancing behind with almost any step, but his prey is unmoving.
At the lock, he confronts the unconscious being again, searching for any movement, any awareness, finding none. The face seems to be more and more cryptic in structure the longer he looks at it. Then he struggles to lift it up to the lock, shoving in enough for balance. He climbs to the lock and drags the creature down the walkway to an open crate. He seals it in, with a seizure of release against the surface of the dodecahedron. He leans forward and closes his eyes, surprised when he feels the tears on his cheek.
Well, my hand is shaking again.
He has forgotten what it is like to feel safe. To not think -- There will be a pursuer. Is a pursuer. He wonders idly whether he will be glancing around him with the eyes of an animal for the rest of his life.
Slowly, he straightens. With unfamiliar movements, he goes downside again. Completing his duty.
He stands above Amel, present in the staring eyes of the dead. The blood has been washed away by the rain, but the presence has not. He opens the bag, and rolls the corpse onto it. The hands that move it revulse at the stiffened flesh and fur. They are all like that. Their faces seem more human in death, perhaps more comprehensible in their stillness.
His hands are on the controls. He runs through the checklists, listening as the pumps spool up, watching as the displays run the self tests, and the surfaces wink to blue. The shuttle shivers as it returns to normal. Suddenly the chatter of a space link breaks the silence. His hand lashes out to the link button on the armrest.
"This is Talbot, Link SR154432. Please localize on 432."
More static and garble. Probably a repeater from the ship. The link display indicates the Illyrion is once again on the other side of the planet, and the comsat is below the forest canopy, but will come over the horizon in fifteen minutes.
"This is Talbot, Link SR154432. Please localize on 432."
The repeater hooks in.
"This is Talbot, Link SR154432. Please localize on 432."
...
"This is Talbot, Link SR154432. Please localize on 432."
...Finally...
"Connect SR154432. Talbot, you've missed five reporting periods. Reed wants to know what's going on. Please report."
He sits, at a loss. He has no words, he is unready to respond, because he has given the meaning of contact no thought.
"Connect, SR154432."
"SR154432 connected. Uh, we've had a bad situation here."
"Go on."
"There was a native attack. I have a specimen and... dead," he coughs, to keep from crying. Then he grips the armrest firmly. "Request you download your current vectors for next orbit rendezvous," he states formally.
"Vectors on the link. Do you need medical?"
A brief shower of rain spatters the windows. There is no sound on the open link; the control room is filled with the tones of the vector receipt and the motors spooling up.
"It's too late for that."
He can't see his body hunched, exhausted. But he pushes his head up when the vector receipt finishes, honestly unable to say he had thought about anything in the interval.
"I'll talk about it when I get there," he says, but no one is listening.
The lift engine pushes the seat up into his back; he suspends the shuttle over the crater for a moment. All he feels is a faint sadness at leaving. Nothing is finished, nothing can be taken back, nothing redone. He tilts the shuttle forward and opens the throttle.
500 meters
For a moment, he thinks he sees the shape of another native racing from the trees toward the crater, but in a moment, it is too small to see, and there is no time for magnification. An illusion. A flashback. But it sets his mind to thinking. Thinking about the reason for the murders, about the reason for the hostility. It is not enough, he realizes, to call them alien, to dismiss this catastrophe as due to nothing more than a different world view. There has to be a reason. He needs a reason for the reasonless.
5 kilometers
The clouds swirl below in an ancient pattern, wisps moving slowly in the hemispheric wind. Talbot watches, fixated, exhausted. He knows that rendezvous is coming, but somehow, he is unable to focus on anything but his speculations. Defense of mineral resources: perhaps a reaction like that of an asteroid miner to a thief? Or, a military being, from a lost war, incapable of ending the fight? But why change shape? Camoflage? Convenience? A battle suit?
50 kilometers
Near orbit. His stomach is cramping with emptiness, his eyelids are drooping, and his sight is defocused. I'll just let the loose feeling take me for a while. I'll just get a bit of relaxation before the rendezvous.
500 kilometers
The ship looms in the plates and on the windows. Talbot stirs himself and activates the rangers. He rubs his eyes, and tries to force his focus.
"Talbot ready for docking." he reports.
"Downloading the dock parameters," the Illyrion replies.
He switches in the automatics. No manual today. Why blow the docking just to prove I can handle it when I'm half bagged?
Because I'm obstinate. He switches out the auto systems; gently guiding the shuttle into the embrace of the bay. He feels the clamps take hold of the hull, the docking collar lock into place, and then a rush of cooling air. He nods.
"Made it."
He wishes he could sleep.
The conference room is a haven of normality. For a moment, the events of the past days receed, and he might be waiting for a mission briefing -- the mission planner at the head of the table, as she is now, the chief pilot at her side, taking notes for the navigators and the communicators.
He sinks into a chair near the door. As yet, he has had no sleep for thirty-five hours.
The mission planner, Gillian Reed, looks up from the table, businesslike, but sympathetic.
"Raoul. Sorry to keep you up like this. I know you must be exhausted. However, the Director must be informed as to whether the ship may be in danger. Before we start, I'd like you to meet her." She indicates the Tereniade to her left. "Tranis, this is Raoul Talbot."
"Honored," Talbot acknowledges, hoarsely. He has never been near the Director before.
The Director smiles. "Talbot."
Reed continues: "First, are we in any danger?"
Talbot strains to keep his mind on track, to think clearly. "Well... there's no evidence, is there? That they have space travel now, I mean."
The Director leans forward. "What did you find?"
Talbot is silent, confused. Finally he addresses Reed. "Have the logs been uploaded yet?"
"I'll check." She glances down at the table. "That's being done now. Ten minutes and it should be in central. Should we wait?"
"Never mind."
He looks very small, huddled at the end of the table like a beggar. His voice is quiet, the tones are formal, but disjoint.
"At about a thousand meters, there was a return, which I tagged. A derelict vehicle. Unusual age and material. Atrenn, that is... or was it x*Rkar? thought it was tens of thousands of years old. I forget the material he mentioned, but it's in the recording, I'm sure.
"We were talking ... we were attacked with spears" - it feels like a newsplay - "from an unknown number of ... beings. Natives? maybe. I... was able to escape... Honestly, I, I couldn't have, I couldn't... help." He finds himself crying again, helplessly. Finally, he regains control, trying not to see their sympathy. He knows that he is simply delineating his cowardice. "I was going to leave. I should have, but, I saw... maybe it was a native, someone who might have been involved in the attack. I followed it into the forest, but we came to a derelict. I don't know if it was by accident or not. I could have been there by accident, because the native tried to...
"Oh, but I forgot, you need to know. I have it in a packing crate on the shuttle."
Reed looks up in alarm. "The native? On my ship?"
The Director holds up a hand. "Precautions, Talbot?"
"Don't let it out...no, listen, you've got to hear the rest, first. The shuttle's sealed. I don't think even it could... You've got to listen, anyway, and believe me. I came to this thing in the clearing. The native, it ran off; maybe it was trying to lead me out, I don't know. It was getting late, but I thought this thing, it was a ship -- that it was safer, more important. I went in. It was nearly dark... oh, yeah, I said that." His eyes are confused, as if the onrush of memory is too much to stop or to cope with. "I slept there. The lights were still functioning, but that ship had been there for a long time. A long, long time. It looked like a wreck. There was dirt forming inside from the leaves." He sighs, and his eyes tear briefly. He rubs at them to clear them.
"I fell asleep. Later I woke up to this sound... like something coming from the forest. The ship power came on, and there were lights from below. I was watching as this huge thing with tentacles lashing all over the place came running out of the woods and disappeared into the ship below me."
"Any records?" Reed asks.
His head comes up and his eyes focus on her as he emerges from his memory world. "What do you think I was doing? An investigation? I was trying to kill that... that native. I would have if I could have. I didn't bring the damned recorder with me."
"Go on," the Director prompts. "What happened next?"
"I crawled down a tree... to get a look at the inside. It was new. Shiny. And the thing was in there. It stared in a mirror, but the mirror showed a native, and so the thing... gradually, it became... one. I made a noise, and it turned to look at me. It, well, look, you might not believe this, but it seemed to start changing again, into me."
"And then?"
"I ran! I mean, what if it got back here, mimicked the crew. I..."
Reed stands sharply. "But you brought it back here. We can't tell if you're you or it, and you brought it back here!"
He moans slightly. "If I were this thing, would I be telling you this? Look, after I got back to the shuttle, I was lucky. I got a shot at it with a neuralizer. I took a chance, I admit. But it was electrically based, and I knocked it out. I put it in a box and sealed it in. There's nothing but air passing through containment filters."
Reed speaks to the table.
"Update the contingent on Talbot's shuttle. I want it emergency undocked, and I want vacuum all around it. Don't let it go, though, except at my order. The contingent should be armed, and should prevent anything from leaving that shuttle." She looked at Talbot again. "You're either a hero or an idiot."
He grins wryly, thought the remnants of tears streak his skin, but it looks like a grimace to the others. "Hero, of course. I was enough of an idiot on the surface for the rest of my life."
"Well," Reed says, turning to the Director, "with your permission, I'll order an investigation."
"Of course."
"On the shuttle." Talbot interjects.
They turn to him.
"The bodies," he continues. "The team. I wanted... I brought them back too."
The Director suddenly seems very solemn. He looks to Reed. "Take care of that, also, please."
"Of course."
The Director turns to Talbot. "You must be very tired. Please, go rest, eat, or whatever you feel you need. We'll get the next stage underway, and when you're refreshed, come see me, and we'll have a talk."
The corridors are strange, but safe. Talbot looks around in bewilderment, searching their surfaces. His face is shadowed with beard, dust, and terror; his clothes with the sap of plant and the blood of creatures. His period of rationality in the briefing room has taken him far from the events of the immediate past.
Now he stands at the door to his room. It is decorated with an image he has always loved: Dali's Battle of Tetuan. For a moment, he wonders at the chaos of it, at whether he can accept it any longer, now that chaos seems to have become so firm a part of his life.
It slips aside, and he enters. Lights come up with his presence. Wearily, he sheds his clothes on the social room floor, and heads to the cleanroom to run a shower. The water blasts hot on his flesh, beating against his strained muscles. He suddenly realizes his exhaustion, as an irresistable impulse causes him to rest his forehead on the wall, eyes closed; an irresistable sadness wells up, forcing the cool moisture of tears past his eyelids.
He lies on his bed, cradled gently in its flexibility as he slips away. For a time, he is quiet, hidden in the blackness. Then the dream takes form from the metamorphosis of sleep...
The corridors are dark, and he is running, in an excess of fear. The walls are lined with darkened displays that come to light as he passes, signaling the red of system failure. It is his magnified imagining of the bridge of a starship; but where the pursuer, from where the fear?
He stops, whirls, but the corridor is empty. The blood pants in his ears. There is no pursuer. He remembers his flight through the forest. Somehow, the red light is the same. The displays continue to display their dreaded message of rage. There is an urgency, still, but now it does not lead him to run, it leads him to look.
He turns to the wall, but all he sees is his face reflected in the displays, and his fear is the greater, every time he does so.
He hears a voice. "Talbot, you're going to be late again."
He turns to look, and there is Atrenn, again, smiling its crooked smile.
"What are you afraid of?" It asks.
"Why, the .. the system failure. I've, I've got to stop it. Shutdown clean, before it spreads into everything."
"Where do you see that?"
"Look!" he insists, gesturing. Then, he realizes that the light has changed. The walls of the corridor are marble, free of marking. The light is cool and the menace has vanished.
"You set your own course." Atrenn said. "Don't hate me for what you missed. Are we going to Govault? Tell me about Govault."
The scream tears across the hallway, almost drowned in the shuddering steps of the hundreds running for the shuttle.
"Get back!" he shouts, as they push up the ramp toward him. "Full load! Look, there's another shuttle coming in any minute. Please!"
But the faces are corded with terror. Any moment, he knows they will run him down. Where is Lucarry?
"The natives killed everyone."
"Talbot, we've got to go, now. Seal the door."
"No, I have to wait for Lu. He's helping the science team." He is unable to take his eyes off the crowd.
Atrenn pulls him back, and slaps the door controls. It glares at Talbot. Is that unreasoning fear on its face, that wild-eyed smile?
Its voice is strained, inhuman. "You're going up to that flight deck and preparing to lift. Lu's going to have to catch the next one. Do you understand? We've got to get out of here, now!"
What about Lu? He's my copilot. I can't leave him. But it's the only safe thing. Why did you keep me from waiting?"
"You died then, didn't you?"
"What? Where?"
"Never mind that. Wake up and listen to what you're saying."
"But..." everything darkens, and Talbot awakens to himself alone in the night of the ship, sitting shocked, straight up.
Reed paces the darkened end of her social room. Stops. Looks over at Talbot, who sits poised uncomfortably on the lounge.
"Honestly, Raoul, I don't know." Her young, freckled face reflects the tension of one more decision, one more complex evaluation of an unknown situation, at the end of a particularly difficult day. She sighs, and walks over to a bucket chair across from him, laying her hands on its back and leaning toward him.
"There was tension on your team. You know I don't interfere. Teams handle their own business unless they can't. I pick the people, but they make the relationship. Atrenn picked you - and now you tell me this."
"Please, I couldn't even have understood it yesterday."
She continues, dismissing his comment, not as irrelevant, but as something whose relevance she can not yet determine.
"Look, as far as I can see, there's nothing special here. The native is real enough, but there's nothing particularly strange about it. It has to be native, or from a world so similar as to have no problems on Talith. The metabolism is standard Active, with reaction suppressors in place of enzymes because of the phosphoric metabolism. There's nothing strange about that. We know at least a few flourine and phosphorus based intelligent species in the Geodesic, and you'd expect a chemistry like that on Talith given the flora and fauna analysis.
"There's no extra genetic baggage to allow a transformation like you described. Which implies a technology. True, there was a survey error. True, the original mission is probably over, now. Well, maybe our priorities or direction will change. Not up to me."
She steps around the chair and stares moodily at the wall, hands on her hips.
"So, what I've got to ask is, what did you see? The transformation. Was it just instability from your experience? Hallucination? But you've been through the tests, and we don't see the signs." Her hands drop. She takes the seat and leans back into it. Her fingers drum on the armrest. "I checked into the rumors. We've had our share of people cracking up under the stress of missions. We've had occasion where people with stronger records than yours ended up killing team members. But we checked the death wounds, and they are from primitive weapons. The outdoor logs confirm the events, as do the lock logs."
"Of course they do." But he is cold at the thought they she could have suspected him.
She shakes her head. "Now... this. I've never known anyone on a proving team who had prejudice. Oh, psychologically, theoretically, I know the causes -- mixed signals between alien life forms, conflicting values; even within species it's a problem for every intelligence we've met. Sometimes it's rational. Sometimes not. But irrationality doesn't usually survive the screening."
He knows he is pleading, and he hates it; not with her... but he has to continue... as she paces.
"You know, I wanted out of Shuttle crew, years ago. I was flying for two years, had a few tough missions. But I failed Starship Guidance, and I heard it was just the way things were, that humans never made it. It's not true - I've met human SG pilots, and I learned enough to do the basics from simulators and spare time. You know, it turns out I was the one who thought I'd never make it. And there's Atrenn with that expression of his, all the Tereniades look like they're laughing at some private joke. I thought it was one more humiliation when he said - 'Oh, you'll do', when he brought me in, talking about my being their shuttle pilot. After Govault, after all. I think... He was really trying to make me feel better, maybe - he was really saying, 'We're glad you're staying with us.' I'll never know, now. I never got past the surface. I was suspicious of every expression, every word."
She was skeptical. "I don't understand your deep motivations. You don't either. And if you don't, how are you going to master them? You're telling me part of it, but there's something - maybe even you don't know."
Against her initial intuition, she has decided to accept his word; but she will watch him carefully, no matter her feelings.
She leans back into the chair, head against the rest, eyes still on him. "Well, you're right about this: I am putting together a team to go down to the derelict. We may instrument the native and release it, but I don't like that much. We need to avoid interference. Bad enough, whatever's going on. We don't want our role misinterpreted.
"So, anyway, you have a bid, with your ideas on what we might find, your experience downside.
"But my team members have to be compatible, and after what you've told me, I don't know. I have to have a multispecies team. I can't suit things to your prejudice."
Talbot despairs. She doesn't have to take him. She doesn't want him. They are going to find the answer without him. "I can help. I want to help. I don't hate Atrenn and the others any more. I want to know why this native seems not to be an alien. I want to know if they're all descended from the ship people. I have to know why that creature killed my team. There has to be a reason for it. And I don't want to just sit here and read about it in the journals."
It is the way he says my team that makes her even consider it.
"All right, Raoul. I'll think about what you've said. I'll decide within a half hour, and get back to you."
It is the best he could hope for; he would desist, and wait. And learn everything he could. As he leaves, he remembers the image of Atrenn saying, "You'll be late, Talbot."
Not this time, friend.
The Director sits in the dimness of its room, smiling faintly into the empty darkness, thinking. It has reviewed the logs, the testimony. It wonders if any of this can be believed.
Atrenn, dead. Known, witnessed, easily displayable if desired -- but not, in any way, desired. The failure to meet a commitment would not be diffused by seeming lack of responsibility. It was responsibility to know of team stresses, to diffuse them through cautious speech, knowing that all stresses should be deflected. But it has failed to do this. It left that action to Atrenn, and Atrenn is dead.
In a while, it knows it must transmit home. The sadness at the creche would be hard on everyone. But first, it hopes Talbot will come to speak. That a completed record could be set, and the method of death would close the circle, to show the life complete.
Its smile becomes wider with the tension.
Talbot stalks the hall, shadow indecisive, advancing and receeding under the light bands in this region of the ship's corridors. To go to the Director might appear to challenge Reed's authority. More, for the Director to take any action could damage Talbot's standing with a future team. Talbot is not sure he has the strength to wait for Reed's answer. To not request an intervention.
But the Director asked. And rumor was that he and Atrenn were connected in some way -- some way like family. Talbot's rootlessness conspires against him, and he considers what his distant memory of his parents means.
Talbot stops at the door the map had indicated. It is blazoned in a fanciful abstract. Or, perhaps, it is something else. Perhaps it means as much in the Director's life as the Battle of Tetuan has meant in his. He wonders if the Director has joined him in agonizing over the relation of the design on its door to its life.
The Director looks up at the door signal.
"Please come in," it says.
Talbot pauses uncertainly in the doorway. There is a flickering reddish light that licks the walls, almost like flame. The Director looks up from its thought, smile ludicrous in the context.
"Excuse me," it says, quietly, pulling its mouth under control. "I don't mean to appear to be amused. To smile with tension is a reflex with my species. Perhaps you didn't know that."
"No."
"Most authorities believe it is due to a far removed predatory past. Of course, we are omnivores, as are humans. And perfectly safe." It laughs.
Talbot cannot help it. He is not awed by the strength and character of this creature -- he is warmed and amused. He joins in the laugh, his first since the terror on the surface. It feels raw and new, and he does not dare let it run on for long.
"Thank you," he replies.
"I asked you to come here. Please sit down. Do you desire refreshment?"
"No thank you." He is relaxed, but not ready to become comfortable. Not yet. The furniture is tiny. He senses the strange smell, the odd articulation of the alien face, its strange proportions, the weary flickering light. He rubs the side of his face, calmed by the sensation of hand on skin.
The Director shrugs. Its fingers wriggle briefly. "I want to know what you think of the situation. I have some difficult decisions to make."
Talbot is halted with surprise. Then curiosity. "How do you do that?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Act like us. I mean, so human. Atrenn wasn't like that."
The Tereniade, a creature, not a person, shakes its head in a human gesture. "You surprise me, Raoul. Atrenn had some hope for you. Can it be that you justify it? No, don't retreat: you had a question that you should ask. Ah, but the answer? Well, I practice. I have practiced, and I continue to practice. Daily. I could not be Director without the skill of knowing how to communicate across tens of species. With humans, I immerse myself in your programs, your drama, your literature, and I watch you. I watch myself in mirrors and recordings. I am an actor, but a sincere one."
It leans back, face composed, now. "I learned how to shrug properly -- context, motion, and emotion -- three years ago. When I was a young student, I thought it was a strange muscular spasm, reflecting a disorganized nervous system." Talbot laughs briefly, in sympathy, and at himself. "I learned better." It draws a tube up from the table and sips at it for a moment. "Now, you must give me your thoughts on the subject at hand. Your speculations. I value the word of the fieldbeing more than that of all my scientists. You must advise me, and I will listen."
It is hard at first. Talbot's thoughts are not so organized. "I guess what bothers me most is that transformation. It frightens me to think of it as a weapon. That creature could be here, now, and we would have no idea of its intentions. Except... I'm sure that it must still be on the surface. It must be. The one I brought back seems to have to be a native. Unrelated. Well... maybe. We can't know that yet. Put it to the side.
"There's a ship on the surface. It's been there for... thousands of years. Longer, maybe. When I was in it, I was sure it had crashed. But the systems are still intact. Why hasn't this species rebuilt its technological civilization from the ship's capabilities in all that time? You know what I mean?"
"Yes. I think so. The general tendency is for castaways to lose civilization, but that is usually after the depletion of their artifacts and systems. Datastores can prevent that, now. There is too much knowledge around, in too many robust forms, for us to lose it all, even in a shipwreck, unless everyone dies, or there are no tools."
"Right. So there's the transformation -- what's its function? And the ship, operating, but no civilization, even after a millenium or more." Talbot frowns. The light sketches Talbot's thoughtful face with shadow, and the Director sees a quality in him that Talbot himself would not have recognized. Organized thought. How beautiful to watch, in all of its manifestations.
Talbot stands on the verge of the doorway, about to leave, hall light spilling past him, as he turns to ask: "What was your relation to Atrenn?"
The Director seems lost in throught. It looks up, its face in a strange, meaningless configuration. Its mouth shifts... then it speaks.
"In your terms? I was Atrenn's mother."
Talbot frowns at the intrusion he has made.
"I'm sorry," he says. He steps out, and the door slips shut behind him.
The team room is a quiet babel of the translator frequency, interspersed with the whispering whistles and hums of the underlying speech. The ten beings in the room -- Tereniade, Human, furry Pangalin, metallic scaled D*Azar , chameleon Istriu; the blood soft Riznak humanoid; the Lipu molluscan, its iridescent foot pooled across its section of the table.
Gillian Reed smiles as she enters the room. The flux of voices and vapors that surrounds the central table is a welcome relief from the endless plans, analyses, and simulations. Out into the field. How I envy them. I will be their guidance, their backup. They will have most of the fun. But this is my turn, the beginning of the culmination of my effort. She takes a breath.
"Hi, folks." Those that can, turn to look at her, and the conversations wind into silence, broken only by the occasional soft sound as a being shifts its position slightly.
Their greetings are as varied as they, and the greetings include silence. She knows them all. She smiles, bows, gestures, each to the appropriate friend as she takes her seat at the table. Talbot follows her in, uncomfortable, to stand just inside the door, as if ready to escape, if the need arises.
She begins. "Welcome to the pre-drop. As you know, our mission is in some doubt. During the last several hours, we have discovered that the world we came to examine for colonization is, in fact, populated. This means that the Company must abandon plans for colonization and exploration. It does not mean we are abandoning our investigation. Yet. This will be your mission, which you will carry out under the safety of a security team, led by Histak m'Ilu Ram." She indicates the Riznak humanoid.
Whispers of the acceptance.
"The role of the drop teams is to experience the planet to its fullest, to determine whether subtle dangers to the colonizing species exist. Atrenn's team did not survive this test. But their pilot, Raoul Talbot, did, and he has returned startling data."
Now she has their attention. This is what they want to know more about. The data has been on the net for hours, but they know she has had it since the day before. They want her evaluation.
She turns to Talbot. "Raoul."
He steps forward. No time to be nervous. A red-haired young man drags over a seat for him, and the others move aside to let him into their circle. He sits down carefully, then leans across to the table. "There is a derelict ship on the surface. Analysis shows it to be made of diamir. Diamir corroded to a noticable degree. Those who know tell me this indicates an age of a thousand years or more. Obviously, this artifact is older than anything we are capable of making. Even the Tereniades have had diamir for only five hundred years."
"We were attacked, and my companions were... killed.
"I followed what I believed to be a native. This creature led me to the derelict, maybe inadvertently, but it didn't stay. It was getting dark, and I took shelter.
"After nightfall, another creature arrived. Large, dark in color, ovoid. Stumpy legs, tentacles all over the place. The derelict opened up for it."
Some of the beings stir to bring up the survey data and the simulated images on their pads. Others peer over at their comrades' data, some using translator lenses to observe in their comfort frequencies.
There is a murmur around the table, and some exchange glances of astonishment, or perplexity.
"Ring any bells?" Talbot asked.
There is silence for a moment. Then the red Rizniak, mIlu Ram, leans forward. "Bells?" it asks. The whole front of its face splits into three as it speaks, eyes retreating to the side of its head. Talbot wants to look away, but he does not allow it. He realizes he has made a mistake.
"I mean, does anyone recognize that description as anything they know of?"
There is silence.
"I guess not.
"Well, anyway. the creature seemed to call up an image of the native I had been chasing. Then, as if that were some kind of template, this three meter tall thing turned into what it was looking at. A humanoid with less than a third of its mass and height. I.. made some kind of noise, and it turned around to look. When it saw me, it transformed again, this time into an image of me, like it was unstable, ready to transform into whatever was around. I, uh, ran." Some chuckles of ... sympathy? from the humans. He tries to smile. "Later, from the shuttle, I saw what might have been a third creature -- like the first one; the one that attacked us, that I thought was a native. I made the mistake of thinking it was the thing from the derelict, transformed, I stunned it, and brought it back."
Reed interjects: "Our analysis indicates that the being is probably a native of the planet, with a standard Active metabolism using phosphorus as the major agent. There is no evidence of any transformative capability inherent to the creature. We are retaining it stunned until we develop a disposition for it. I'll want your suggestions, especially as we have no prior evidence of intelligent native life.
"We've done additional, detailed surveys, since the first report. These indicate the presence of what may be several primitive settlements, total population estimated twenty-five thousand, world-wide, very widely diffused, hidden in the forests. There are no indications of other derelicts or any technology. We now are beginning to process detailed scans of the derelict, which will be available before your descent to the planet's surface."
She glances to Talbot, and then finishes. "Our questions, I think, are obvious. Where is the derelict from? Is there a native intelligent species, or are the apparent natives actually descendants of the beings that flew the derelict? What is the role of the transformation? Was the transformed creature made the same as the native, or was the transformation some kind of camoflage, or some kind of side effect of some other process, maybe even an entertainment? I don't know. I hope you can find out."
Reed looks out across the team. "It's going to be your job to answer these questions. Raoul is going to be on-site coordinator. He'll have the final word on activities."
Now everyone really looks him over. He tries not to cringe. Finding courage in his voice, he says: "I'll depend on you for advice and ideas. Questions?"
There are many.
She had said: "The Director wants you in charge on-site."
He had been instantly wary. He hadn't asked for this. Didn't think he was capable, even. Would she know that?
"I don't think I have the qualifications. I'm just a pilot, Jill."
Just a pilot. He can't feel like a pilot now, sitting in the lifesystem as the team pilot drives, as he thinks of the transport slipping away toward the stars above, as he waits while the shuttle drops toward the planet. His mind is stuffed, exhausted, overloaded with data and method. Reed had refused to let him go unprepared. That meant nearly a hour without sleep as she tried to crash course him the basics of drop team management. At first, he had thought she resented him. She would look up to glare at him after presenting yet another scenario, as he froze in bewilderment. But after a while, it had started to make sense; she was showing him how to project ideas of what an unknown situation would be like, for practice. He had felt his early training stir slightly, and he had reacted a little better on the next one.
"Confidence," she had insisted. "They have to have confidence in you. The problem is, they all know something about the situation in your old team. They may not think you trust them. If you don't trust them, they won't trust you. But neither of you are going to give your trust blindly. And you, in particular, can't. If they can get something past you, you're not going to make it with them."
And, if I try to put something past them, it's the same -- in reverse.
"The Director thinks you have the extra insight it will take to solve this one. And you're not going to be able to exert that insight without authority. Myself, I don't know how much difference you can make. If you can pull this off, it might mean a permanent planner slot for you... who knows? But if you don't, it could be more than just your career. You, and everyone with you could be dead. And don't think they don't know it."
They also know you've never done this before. You'd better hit the ground running or they'll flatten you.
He looks around at the team. They were the reason he was here, and not up front. He had protested at first.
"What do you mean, don't fly?"
"You have more important things to do," she insisted. "You have to be back with the team. You can't have them think you're insular. You have to talk to them, join them, enlist them."
He had shaken his head with weary denial. "I can't do all this. Jill. I wasn't good at it before. How am I going to be good at it now?"
"You're going to be good at it now because I've taught you, and because you either have to, or you don't go down."
He had watched her, remembering the Director's words: "I immerse myself in your programs, your drama, your literature, and I watch you." He had tried to see why Reed was successful with her teams. He had never noticed her that way before. Now, after he had watched her at the meeting, he had understood some of it. Her assumption of command. Her ability to carry it. If she didn't know, she took input.
I don't know anything. Again, I'm inferior. Except in one thing. I know what's down there in a way none of them can. I know what I want to find out. They may have some abstract idea of it, but that's not the same.
But he couldn't help but worry what would happen if they decided they didn't need him. They didn't have to listen to him. Who could blame them if they didn't?
mIlu Ram watches Talbot out of the side of its face. It plots and plans. There are security schedules, weapons lists, sensor profiles; all a constellation of thought, coalescing. And there is the new commander. It is in the nature of security to analyse strengths and weaknesses. In Talbot it knows of weakness. Prejudice is a weakness. It blinds one to the capabilities of the opponent. But despite this, it senses a strength. There are no records of Talbot's flight through the forest. There is no discussion on the net of his motivation to pursue. But mIlu Ram is a professional who has dealt with tactics in the face of the unknown before. Therefore, it speculates, drawing on considerable xenopsychological knowledge. No answers are suggested. It is frustrated by its failure. It shares this failure with the failure to understand the attack profile. Except for the lack of followup, the Rizniak would assume primitive banditry. Except...
Its face parts slightly, trembling with frustration and loneliness.
Technical team leader R*Zanaril leans over toward Talbot. Its hum stirs him from introverted silence.
"Coordinator?"
"I'm sorry," Talbot apologizes for his abstraction. "What can I do?"
"Please explain the structural decomposition again with me. Necessity is for minimum time in derelict. Again may help to optimize the technical team strategy."
What Talbot really wants is a light conversation with someone. Something to break the tension. R*Zanaril reminds him too much of x*Rkar. Suddenly he is overtaken by an older conversation...
"Talbot. I from tank have explicitly retrieved images-visual and data sourced from metal sensors. EMF resonances give mass; example 256000 (lutic), a nice even number for us."
"Tell me," he asks, "how we are to attempt to determine motivations and culture from an artifact like this?"
The metallic-scaled being leans back, as if to better interpret its ranging of Talbot's face. Would it understand the seeming non-sequitur?
"You request training in elements of my craft?" it asks.
Talbot frowns. "The basics. I... look, I really don't know how you do what you do. I need to know more, to get the most out of the data. Maybe then I can give you better data, as well."
The whining in his head changes pitch, inducing a momentary headache. On no particular evidence, Talbot realizes that this is an expression of some unknown emotion.
"I will help you," R*Zanaril replies.
There is a pause. Perhaps it is gathering its thoughts. For a moment, Talbot sees the delicate shading of the scales of its snout shift in another unknown expression; he recalls that the brain is in the creature's torso, not its narrow head. Suddenly, noting his attempts to attribute human thought to this strange being, here beside him in intimate quarters, descending through miles of vastly heated air, he marvels at the idea that it might even be possible for them to communicate.
"The difficulty is to understand the first things. Context non-existent, indicates no organization. Later, completed first steps simpify the addition of knowledge. Case at hand, requires minimal intrusion, per our discussion, and mission planner Reed's specification. Thus, procedure must be recordings, on-site catalogues, EM sensor probes for mechanism maps. No activation attempts. You suggest entry to lower compartment, to understand transformation?"
"Umn? Oh yes... yeah, we'll need that. We need to know the limits of the process, perhaps a detection method."
"Explain?"
"Explain? Oh... detection method. I mean, if this creature can use a technology to change its shape, and we know how that technology works, maybe we can figure out when we see something, if it is that creature, or not." Is that a better explanation? What alternative do I have other than to explain in as many different ways as it seems I need, until I run out of ways, it understands, or it gives up?
"To identify. Yes, tale of my larval. Like human... chameleon, but self-type hostile. You call tale-type... fantasy?"
"I wish."
"Creature of such type from tale shown very fearsome. Dangerous. Identification required. You assume same need?"
"Oh, yes. Wouldn't you?"
"Agreed."
Was it his imagination, or was there some emotion similar to the relief generated by understanding expressed in the tones of the translator?
"Then help me understand how you can learn about strange machines."
R*Zanaril leans back, as if regarding him.
"I'll need the advanced mode on the translator. I hope it won't put in too much of a processor lag," it says, in a well-cadenced, deep, urbane voice that startles Talbot.
"Look at it this way: Early machines can be seen easily. Seldom are there choices in lever, wheel, or even the application of electricity. But the structure of circuits, fiber optics, all of increased complexity, leads to more choices, more differences. Comprehending and deciphering storage media -- this is extremely hard. Data must be stored in a format. A format that hides in magnetic particles or optical pits, or polarization schemas. Rotation rates -- unknown. Scanning frequencies, unknown."
Talbot was starting to get the idea. "Codes. That's the problem."
"Mmmm... yes. Codes require extensive experience, experiment, and we prefer to have a reader system available. Symbologies, programming, and instructions are harder still. This is because there are so many choices available to designers at this level. More experience and experiment is required of us to understand these. Unlikely we are to get so far this trip."
Talbot felt disappointment creeping up his neck like the heat of embarrassment. He had expected too much. They would not be able to read the records of the derelict.
The priests whisper among themselves. The disappearance of Stone, and the agitation of the Mover are their topics. Above their fire-lit conclave, the stars of the Hercules cluster glitter amidst the leaves.
Talbot's wrist navigator replay leads them among the trees. It is the first flush of dawn, and the security team is spread out around them, watching carefully, weapons ready.
Talbot feels compelled to run, though he keeps his pace and expression under control. It is like being in a dream, again. The unreality of the crimson light strikes him with each sunbeam that sets him apart. Angrily, he glares about, standing stock still in the new light, and the team stops, wondering, for the second before he regains his composure.
He feels as if he is still running.
mIlu Ram raises an oddly-formed spyglass system whose output is routed to its translator contacts, magnifying the path ahead, seeking any sign of movement. Their success depends on secrecy. They were hoping that the creature was nocturnal, and that it had left already. mIlu Ram hopes they will not be on its departure path.
R*Zanaril can think of nothing other than the scans it had taken on descent. The configurations were startling, but did not indicate a radical technology. It feels the shape of a fact, hidden in the obscuration of millions of others. Some special fact. Something it had once seen. Something related. Something very old.
In a cold room, far above the world, Stone lies under pitiless lights and monitors. It stirs