Murasaki, page 10
The last few reached Miyuki and she saw, in slow-motion surrealism, the flushed, heady expression on a troll that stumbled as it took a round in its massive right arm. It’s ecstatic, she thought.
But it would not be stopped by one shot. It staggered, looking for another enemy to take, and saw her. Red eyes filled with purple pupils widened. It swung its left arm, claws arcing out—and she ducked.
,
The swipe whistled over her ear, caught her with a thank in the scalp. It was more a sound, a booming, than a felt blow. She flew through the air, turning, suddenly and abstractly registering the pale-blue, cloud-quilted sky, and then she landed on her left shoulder and rolled. A quick rasping brrrrt cut through a strange hollow silence that had settled around her. She looked up into the sky, and the troll eclipsed this view like a red-brown thundercloud. It was not looking at her, but instead seemed to be gazing off into a world it could not comprehend. Then it felt the tug of mortality and orbited down into the acrid clouds of dust stirred by the battle, landing solidly beside her, not rolling, its sour breath coughing out for the last time.
5. I-Witnessing
They devoted three days to studying the fields and burying the bodies. A pall spread among them, the radio crackled with questions, and mission command wrung from each fact a symphony of meaning, of blame, of outrage_
Miyuki was doubly glad that she had—not sought a higher post in this exploration party. Koremasa had to feed the appetite of his superiors, safely orbiting Genji, with data, photos, transcripts, explanations, analysis. Luckily, two cameras had recorded most of the battle. Watching these images again and again, Miyuki felt a chill at the speed and intelligence of the troll assault. Her own head wound was nothing compared to the bloody cuts and goug-ings many others had received.
Koremasa would probably not be court-martialed—but Akihiro Saito, the crewman who had opened the cairn in a moment of excited curiosity, would have been tried and humiliated, had he survived.
It was something of a relief that Akihiro had died. They would have had to watch him, for signs of potential suicide, never leaving him alone or assigning him danger-ous tasks. No one could be squandered here, no matter how they violated the expedition’s standards.
No one ever said this, of course. Instead, they held a full, formal ceremony to mark the passing of their companions, including Akihiro. The meal was specially, synthe-sized on the mother ship and sent down in a drop package. The team sat in a precise formation, backs to the wild alien landscape outside the bubble, and within their circle Old Nippon lived still. The captain produced a bowl for each, in which reposed a sweetened smoked sardine, its spine curved to represent a fish in the water. It had been carefully placed against two slices of raw yellowtail, set off by a delicately preserved peeled plum and two berrylike ovals, one crisp and one soft, both dipped in an amber coating. A second bowl held a paper-thin slice of raw Spanish mack-erel, cut to catch the silver stripe down its back; under-pinned in turn by ‘a sliver of seaweed to quietly stress the stripe, all resting on molded rice. A small half-lobster, gar-nished with sweet preserved chestnuts, sent its aroma into the close, incense-scented air. Thin-sliced, curled onions came next, sharp and melting in the mouth. A rosette of red pickled onion heart came wrapped in a rosy cabbage leaf. Finally, tea.
And all this came from the processors aboard the mother ship. fashioned finally by the master chef who eve-ryone agreed—in the polite, formal conversation that fol-lowed around their circle—was the most important member of the entire expedition.
The beautiful meal and a day of contemplation did their silent work. Calamity reminded one to remain cen-tered, to rely on others, to remember that all humanity wit-nessed the events here. So as the numbness and anxiety left them they returned to their studies. Five crew kept watch at all times while the rest tried to comprehend why four humans and six trolls had died.
In the end, the simplest explanation seemed best: the trolls guarded the ancient, self-managing fields, and this task included the library cairn.
The biologists found rodentlike creatures that pruned and selected the grain plants, others that gathered them into bunches, and further species that stored them among the caved-in brick-brown buildings. Subtle forces worked the fields: ground cover that repelled weeds, fungoids that made otherwise defenseless leaves distasteful or poisonous to browsers, small burrowers that loosened the soil for roots. The trolls assisted these tasks and made sure that only passing bands of Chupchups ate the grain. They tended fruit-bearing trees in the next valley as well, where two more library cairns stood.
The cube from the cairn yielded nothing intelligible immediately, but would doubtless be studied in infinitesi-mal detail when they got it to the mother ship. The sciences were biased toward studying hard evidence, and the oddly marked stone cube was ideal for this. Miyuki doubted whether it could ever yield very much.
“It could be a religious talisman, after all,” she re-marked one evening as they gathered for a meager supper.
“Then it would probably be displayed in a shrine,” Koremasa said reasonably.
–They have no churches,” Miyuki answered.
“We think,” Tatsuhiko said sourly. “We have not searched enough yet to say.”
Miyuki said, “You believe the cities at the rim may tell us more?”
Tatsuhiko hesitated. He plainly felt besieged, having failed to anticipate well the danger here, a continuing hu-miliation to him. “There might be much less erosion at high altitudes,” he said warily.
Koremasa nodded. “Satellite recon shows that. High winds, but less air to work with.”
Miyuki smiled. Seen from above, planets seemed vastly simple. The yellowish flora and fauna of Chujo tricked the eyes, of even orbiting robot scanners. The mol-ecule that best harvested Mtirasalci’s wan glow was acti-vated by red-orange light, not by the skimpy greens that chlorophyll favored. That simple consequence of living be-side a lukewarm star muddied the resolution of their data-reduction programs.
“We had better leave such high sites for later work,” she ventured.
Koremasa’s eyebrows showed mild surprise, but he kept his mouth relaxed, quizzical. “You truly feel so?”
Though she did not wish to admit it, the thought of wearing the added pressure gear needed among, the raw mountains of Chujo’s rim grated upon her. She itched from dryness, her sleeping cycle veered in response to Chujo’s ninety-one-hour day, her sinuses clogged perpetually from constant colds—and everyone else suffered the same, largely without complaint. But she decided to keep her ob-jections professional. “Our error here suggests that we leave more difficult tasks to others.” There. Diffident but cutting.
Koremasa let a silence stretch, and no one else in the circle ventured into it. A cold wind moaned against the plastic of their pressure dome. Their incandescents’ blues and violets apparently irritated the local night-hunters and pests, keeping them at bay, one of the few favorable acci-dents they had found.
Still, she felt the strangeness of the dark outside pressing against them all.
She saw Koremasa’s talent as a leader, he simply sat, finally provoking Tatsuhiko to say, “I must object. We need to understand those who build the cities, for they plainly are not these Chupchups.
Then—”
‘Why is that so clear?” Miyuki cut in.
Tatsuhiko let a small trace of inner tension twist his mouth momentarily. “You saw the scavenging.
That is not the behavior of a dominant, intelligent race.”
“What’s intelligent is what survives,” she answered.
Tatsuhiko flared. “No, that is an utter misunderstand-ing of evolutionary theory. Intelligence is not always adap-tive—that is the terrible lesson we have learned here.”
“That is a hasty conclusion,” Miyuki said mildly.
“Hasty? We know far more than you may realize about these Chupchups. We have picked over their camp-sites, studied their mating through infra-distant imaging, picked apart their turds to study their diet. We patched to-gether their broken pots. Their few metal implements are probably stolen from the ruined cities and reworked down through many generations; they certainly look it.”
“It is difficult to read meaning in artifacts,” Koremasa said.
“Not so!” Tatsuhiko stood and began to pace, walk-ing jerkily around the outside of the circle. He made each of his points with the edge of his right hand, cutting the air in a karate chop. “The Chupchups wander perpetually. They cook in bark pots and leather bags using heated stones—stew with dumplings, usually. They like starchy sweets and swallow berries whole. They pick their teeth with a bristly fungus that they then eat a day later—”
“They must be civilized, then,” Miyuki broke in. “They floss!”
Tatsuhiko blinked, allowed himself a momentary smile in answer to the round of laughter. “Perhaps so, though I differ.” He gave her a quick significant glance, and she felt that somehow she had momentarily broken through to the man she knew.
Then he took a breath, lifted his narrow chin high, put his hands behind his back in a curiously schoolboyish pose, and went on doggedly. “You will have noticed that Chup-chup males and females look nearly alike. There are no signs of homosexual behavior—which is hard to under-stand. After all, humans have genetically selected for it through the shared-kinship mechanism and inclusive fit-ness, in which the homosexuals further the survival of genes they share with heterosexuals. They’re not perma-nently rutty, the way we are, and perhaps an explanation lies there—but how? The female does the courting, singing and dancing like Earthside birds. No musical instruments used. They do it more often than reproduction requires, though, just like us. Some, pair-bonding, maybe even mo-nogamy.
Approximate equality of the sexes in social mat-ters and labor, with perhaps some slight female dominance. They carry out some sex-separate rites, but we, don’t know what those mean.
Hunter-gatherer routines are—”
“Quite so,” Koremasa said softly. “We take your points.”
Somehow this ended the spontaneous lecture. Tatsu-hiko fell silent, his lips twitching, She felt sympathy for his frustration, mingling with his restless desire to fathom this world in terms he could understand.
Yet she could not let matters rest here. She set her face •resolutely. If he wished a professional contest, so be it.
“You read much into your observations,” Miyuki said. She looked around the circle to see if anyone nodded, but they were all impassive, letting her take the lead. “We must,” Tatsuhiko said testily.
“But surely we can no more portray a society by re-cording facts, filtered through our preconceptions, than a literary critic can get the essence of Murasaki’s great Genji Monogatari by summarizing the plot,” she said. “I think perhaps we are doing ‘I-witnessing’ here.”
Tatsuhiko smiled grimly. “You have a case of what we call in sociobiology ‘epistemological hypochondria’—the fear of interpretation.”
Koremasa let the wind speak to them all again, sigh-ing, muttering, rubbing at their monolayer defense against it.
“We appreciate your views, Tatsuhiko-san, but there are fresh facts before us now,” Koremasa said in calm, measured tones. “The satellites report that the Chupchup tribes are no longer wandering in a random pattern.”
Tatsuhiko brightened. “Oh? Where are they going?”
“They are all moving away from us.”
Surprise registered in a low, questioning mutter around their circle. “All of them?” the communications engineer asked.
Koremasa nodded. “They are moving toward the ridge-rim. Journeying from the moonside, to the starside, perhaps.” He stood, smiling at Tatsuhiko. “In a way, I suppose we have at last received a tribute from them. They have acknowledged our presence.”
Tatsuhiko blinked and then snorted derisively. Such a rude show would be remarkable, except that Miyuki un-derstood that the contempt was directed by Tatsuhiko at himself.
“And I suggest,” Koremasa continued with a quiet air of authority, “that we study this planetwide activity.”
“Of course,” Tatsuhiko said enthusiastically. “This could be a seasonal migration. Many animal species have elaborate—”
“These are not animals!” Miyuki surprised herself with the vehemence in her voice.
Miyuki opened her mouth to reply, but saw Captain
Koremasa raise one finger slightly. He said casually, “Enough theory. We must look—and quickly.
The first bands are already striving to cross the rim mountain ranges.”
6. Paradigm Lost
Chujo and Genji pulled at each other incessantly, working through their tides, and Mura-saki’s more distant stresses added to the geological tur-moil. This powered a zone of incessant mountain-building along the circumference of Chujo. Seen from Genji, this ring rimmed Chujo with a crust of peaks, sheer faults, and deep, shadowed gorges. Lakes and small, pale seas dotted Chujo’s lowlands, where the thin air already seemed chilly to humans, even in this. summer season. Matters worsened for fragile humans toward the highlands.
The muscled movement of great geologic forces lifted the rock, allowing water to carve its many-layered canyons. As they flew over the great stretching plains Miriki feasted on the passing panorama, insisting that their craft fly at the lowest safe altitude, though that cost fuel. She saw the promise of green summer, lagoons of bright water, grazing beasts with white hoofs stained with the juice of wildflowers.
This was a place of violent contrasts. In an hour they saw the land below parched by drought, beaten by hail, sogged by rain, burnt by grass fires. But soon, as their engines labored to suck in more, of the skimpy air, the plains became ceramic-gray, blistered, cracked. From orbit she, had seen the yellow splashes of erupting lava from myriad small peaks, and now they came marching from the girdling belt of the world. Black rock sliced across the buff colors of windblown sand. Glacial mo-raines cupped frozen lakes, fault blocks poked above eroded plains, valleys testified to the recent invasion of the great ice.
Yet this world-wracking had perhaps made life pos-sible here. Chujo was much like a fortunate Mars—small, cold, huddled beneath a scant scarf of sheltering gas. Mars had suffered swerves in its polar inclination and eccentric-ity, and this may have doomed the fossilized, fledgling spores humans had found there. But Genji-Chujo’s whirling waltz had much more angular momentum than a sole spin-ning planet could, and this had fended off the tilting per-turbations of Murasaki and the outer, gas giant planets. Thus, neither of the brothers had to endure wobbling poles, shifting seasons, the rasp of cruel change.
Small bushes clung to the escarpments of a marble mountain. Compressional scarps cut the mountain as though a great knife had tried to kill it. These were signs of internal cooling, she knew, Chujo shrinking as its core cooled, wrinkling with age, a world in retreat from its warmer eras. Twisted spires of pumice reared, light as air, splashed with stains of cobalt, putty, scarlet. Miyuki watched this brutal beauty unfold uneasily. Smoke hazed the snowcapped range ahead. The Genjians must have won-dered for ages, she thought, at the continual flame and black clouds of their brother’s perimeter. They probably did not realize that a similar wracked ridge girdled their own world. Perhaps the Genjians had seen the great Chujoan cities at their prime—it was optically possible, with the naked Gen-jian eye—but could legends of that, have survived the thousands of generations since? Did either intelligent race know of the other—and did they still? Certainly—she glanced up at the crescent of Genji, mottled and muggy, like a watercolor artwork tossed off by a hasty child—the present Chupchups could gain no hint from that sultry at-mosphere. Still,, there were hints, all the way down into the molecular chemistry, that the worlds were linked.
Koremasa rapped on the hard Plexiglas. “See? All that green?”
Miyuki peered ahead and saw on the flank of .a jutting mountain a smooth, tea-green growth.
“Summer—and we’re near the equator.”
Koremasa nodded. “This terrain looks too barren to support plants year-round.”
Tatsuhiko put in, over the low rumble of their flyer, “Seasonal migration. More evidence.”
“Of what?” Miyuki asked.
“Of their devolution. They’ve picked up the patterns of migrating fowl. Seasonal animals didn’t build those cities.”
Koremasa said, “That makes sense.”
Tatsuhiko pressed his point. “So you no longer be-lieve they are, fleeing from us?”
Koremasa smiled, and Miyuki saw that his announce-ment two days before had all been a subtle ruse. “It was a useful temporary hypothesis.”
Useful for what? she wanted to ask, but discipline and simple politeness restrained her Instead she said, “So they migrate to the mountain chain to—what? Eat that grass, or whatever it is?”
Tatsuhiko nodded enthusiastically. “Of course.”
She remarked dryly, “A long way to walk for such sparse stuff.”
“I mention it only as a working hypothesis,” Tatsu-hiko said stiffly.
“Did you ever see an animal wearing clothes?” Mi-yuki let a tinge of sarcasm slip into her voice.
“Simple crabs carry their shell homes on their backs.”
“Animals that cook? Carry weapons?”
“All that is immaterial.” Tatsuhiko regarded her with something like fondness for a long moment. Then his face returned to the cool, lean cast she had seen so much of these last few years. “I grant that the Chupchups have ves-tigial artifacts of their ancestors. Those mat-clothes of theirs—marvelous biological engineering, but plainly inherited. The Chupchups are plainly degenerated.”
“Because they won’t talk to us?”
“Because they have abandoned their cities, lost their birthright.”
“The Mayans did that well over a thousand years ago.”
Tatsuhiko shook his head, his amused smile telling the others that here an amateur was venturing into his territory. “They did not revert to Neanderthals.”
Miyuki asked with restrained venom, “You would prefer any explanation that made the Chupchups into de-generated pseudo-animals, wouldn’t you?”
