Murasaki, page 12
During the ten-year journey out to Murasaki System, starship Yamato’s antimatter drives had been cranked up gradually to nearly one and a half gravities, so that all three hundred and five expedition members would have time to adapt in advance to conditions on Genji. Seldom mentioned during all that time had been the other motive for pushing the engines—to try to catch up with the Spacer expedition and make it to Murasaki first.
Yantato arrived just a few weeks too late. The upstarts from the asteroid colonies had already visited the twin hab-itable worlds of Genji and Chujo, taken samples of alien life, and usurped the privilege of first contact that should have been Japan’s. Then, as if shamed by their imperti-nence, the Spacers hadn’t even waited around to hold con-ference, but fled Earthward again on the flimsy excuse that their life-support systems were strained. Perhaps, in fact, they sensed it would not be wise to hang around and test the self-restraint of the larger, better-equipped crew.
The letdown after such a long chase told on Yamato’s complement. All that hurrying to get out here
... then not be the first to set foot, to plant a flag, or to gaze into strange eyes on a new world? Japan could still claim prior discov-ery, of course. Its robot probes had sent back first word on this magnificent double-planet system. But that wasn’t the same. Not the same at all.
Minoru stepped carefully along the blackened trail laid down by the lander when it alighted on this hilltop airstrip by the sea. Behind him, the flyer hissed as it cooled—touched by drifting fingers of sea fog.
The pilot continued unloading crates of supplies Minoru and his partner would need during the months ahead. That included, to Minoru’s resignation, many kilograms of nutritionally adequate but monotonous algae paste. One more reason to make friends with the natives, who were now spilling out of their hilltop hamlets to cross swampy farms on their way toward the landing field.
Minoru glanced up toward Genji’s sister world—dry, little To no Chujo—which filled an entire octant of the sky. Chujo was so close you could make out wispy cloud formations, the dun color of its dry uplands, and the glitter of its midget seas. Here on this part of Genji, where Chujo permanently hovered at the zenith, you could tell time by watching shadows move across its constant face as the paired planets spun around a com-mon center—their “day” a composite of their linked momenta. The glow given off by Murasaki might be pallid compared with Sol’s remembered flame, but it nurtured life on both of these worlds. And as night’s ter-minator flowed across Chujo’s scarred face it was easy to see one likely reason why the natives of Genji had never invented clocks.
A neat explanation, Minoru told himself. Except for the fact that fair days like today are the exception. It’s usually overcast this close to the sea. And Genjians live nowhere else.
Probably much of his life would consist, from now on, of coming up with interesting hypotheses only to find later evidence pointing elsewhere. On a new world it wouldn’t pay to grow too fond of one’s favorite theories. Yet another reason to cultivate balance.
He stopped at the edge of the landing field and laid down his bag of trade goods. Only then did Minoru turn around to make sure Emile was following him from the lander. Encumbered by his heavy pressure suit, Minoru swiveled a bit too fast in the fierce gravity. He had to tighten his abdominal muscles to compensate. The rapid jerk sent painful throbs ripping through stretched tendons, reminding him that, after a decade of subjective time aboard ship, he wasn’t the same youngster who once upon a time set forth so eagerly toward the stars.
The weight here isn’t so bad if you’re careful. You can’t ever forget, though. Not for a minute.
And there’s the paradox, of course. For who can promise to remember every minute of every day, for a lifetime?
Long-term effects of the planet’s pull could be seen in the thick trunks and low profiles of the nearby trees, forming slope-hugging forests just beyond the ragged dirt landing field. Gravity was also manifest in the squat, wide-limbed gait of the natives, who used paths made of wooden planks to cross paddies and fern-lined fens on their way to the landing site. No matter how vivid the holoscreen images were, nothing short of the real thing brought you face-to-face with the strangeness of an alien world. The tug of gravity, the cries of this planet’s myr-iad of flying creatures, the sluggish shove of heavy, mois-ture-laden air...
Minoru wished he could feel it against his skin, but full environment suits were mandatory until the bioassay was complete, and probably for a long time after that.
He suppressed a temptation to rebel, One of the foolish Spacers had ruined his lungs by exposing them to Genji’s intense sea-level pressure. And yet, Minoru half envied that act of defiance.
“Well, they look peaceful enough,” said Emile Es-peranza, his contact-team partner, who came up alongside Minoru to watch the Genjians waddle toward them. “I
guess the Spacers didn’t alienate the locals. Or infect them.”
Despite his name, Emile’s features were as pure-blooded Japanese as Minoru’s, and much more so than the twenty or so men and women in the token “international contingent” that had shipped out aboard Yamato. Emile’s grandparents had managed a Fuji Works plant in Paraguay, then retired there for the climate, elbow room, and lifestyle. Although his family kept faith with the Purity Rules, and so maintained Nihonese citizenship, they nevertheless had picked up many gaijin ways. For instance, Minoru saw with some envy that Emile had taken off his bulky gloves and armlets, sealing his suit above the elbows but leaving his hands and forearms free to feel the wind and air. I wish I had the nerve.
“We don’t know for sure cross-infection isn’t possi-ble. There are many similarities between Genjian life and ours.”
“And even more differences,” the other man an-swered, his voice rich with Latin accents. “Genji-life uses more amino acids than we could get away with on Earth, because there’s never been much ultraviolet in this sys-tem.” Emile gestured toward Murasaki’s Star, whose yel-lowish tinge was misleading. The eye adapted to reduced light levels, and so you forgot the poor dwarf put out only two percent of Sol’s luminosity.
“So?”
“So any of their pathogens who tried to eat human cells would probably starve of some necessary ingredient. And our bugs would be poisoned by some complex chem-ical never known on Earth.”
Minoru knew what that implied. If Earth germs could find nothing to eat here, what hope had human beings of doing so? He clung obstinately to hope, however. “There may be something here that’s edible.”
Emile shrugged, as if he was indifferent to the subject. Unlike many in the crew, he showed little outward frustra-tion at the limited range of ship-grown fare. Emile never speculated, as others did incessantly, what new delicacies might await discovery on this new world.
“Anyway, none of the Spacers came down with weird plagues. And apparently they didn’t loose any on the locals, either. Do you see natives rolling around in agony?”
Minoru did not. From the nearest hilltop hamlet, a kil-ometer away, the Genjians approached without apparent hurry, carrying only a couple of those trident-spear things the locals used as weapon-tools.
From orbital scans—and data grudgingly shared by the departing Spacers—Minoru knew the creatures could move a lot faster if they had to. But as nonhomeotherms—lacking the sort of heat-balancing system Earth mammals possessed—they would naturally avoid temperature swings whenever possible.
At first glance, the natives looked like fat salamanders, whose long front legs gave them a reared, semi-upright stance. Yet, even at a distance, Minoru felt a chill of alien-ness. For even a salamander has a face.
No, he stopped and chided himself. In all honesty, so do these creatures.
,
But such a face! Instead of bilateral symmetry—two eyes atop and mouth below—the Genjians had four bulging vision organs spaced at the corners of a square, centered on their impressive, gaping jaws.
Above all that, a waving snorkel tube gave vent to the amphibians’ excited cries, audible even in the distance since sound carries so well in dense air. Opposite the snorkel tube, hanging below each Genjian’s throat, were two slender, tentaclelike “hands” that served them for fine manipulation.
So strange. And yet, these clearly were intelligent be-ings. Here on this isolated mountain island, they lived a modest,—agrarian-and-fishing existence, tending algal mats and pens of captive, iridescent-finned ichthyoids. But else-where the expedition had catalogued from space several widespread cultures possessing metallurgy, and even electricity.
“Anyway,” Emile went on. “At least the Spacers had the sense to make their first contact on remote locales like this one, so any unforeseen infection would be self-limiting.”
“Such courtesy,” Minoru said acidly. But Emile seemed genuinely glad.
“Indeed. I’m grateful the Spacers jumped in ahead of us. Now the, karma of any harm done rests on their backs, not ours.”
Emile’s blithe attitude was rare among Yamato’ s crew, most of whom still seethed at the Spacers’
effrontery. Still, he had, a point. Cultural contamination by the asteroidists spared Minoru a degree of tension that would have other-wise thickly overlain the approaching meeting. Now he worried much less about perpetrating some irretrievable faux pas that might bring with it a death-bond of shame.
Hissing and rattling, the translator apparatus made a broad range of sounds as Emile, tested its sparse store of Genjian words, donated by the Spacers and augmented re-cently by two other Japanese contact teams already oper-ating along this archipelago. Theirs wasn’t even the primary group opening talks with Genjian settlements. That, too, lifted some tension off Minoru’s shoulders.
“Hey! Are you fellows okay now? Do you want me to hang around, just in case?”
Remembering just in time to move slowly, Minoru turned carefully to look back at the lander, where their pilot had finished unloading supplies for their extended stay. “I could help you fellows erect your shelter,” Don Byrne of-fered. As one of the few Occidentals on the expedition, his Japanese was thickly accented and much too formal. It made him the butt of jokes by some of the less tolerant crewfolk. Still.
he never seemed to mind, and the cheerful Australian had won Minoru’s undying gratitude during the seventh year of the voyage, by discovering three new rec-ipes for preparing the same old hydroponic ship-fare.
Minoru liked Don. Nevertheless, he wished this assignment had been drawn by a different pilot—Yiikiko Arama. There might have been a chance to get a moment alone with her....
Ah, karma. Maybe next time.
“It isn’t necessary,” Emile told the pilot. “We can manage. You should return to Okuma Base.”
Byrne shifted his weight. “Well ... I figure I’ll just hang around a few minutes, anyway.” He began opening containers to lay out the storage dome, but Minoru noticed Don never strayed far from the rifle he had lain by one leg of the lander. And he kept glancing toward the approaching natives.
He’s staying to watch over us, Minoru realized. And to his surprise he felt no resentment over this presumption. In fact, it came as something of a relief. Emile, on the other hand, sounded mildly irritated.
“All right. But stay out of the way. And give us warning when you’re about to take off! We don’t want to frighten the Genjians.”
Emile turned away again and spread a tarp on the ground. He began laying out objects to help identify the Genjian equivalent of nouns and adjectives, to establish a more orderly dictionary. Some of the objects would also be offered as gifts at the end of each session. Minoni opened his own satchel and started doing the same. Only, as he drew a hammer from the bag, its claw snagged on the ma-terial.
Caught off balance, he was forced to lean over to compensate.
Gravity seized the momentary lapse. Minoru flailed, and hit the tarp before he could even get his hands out. Impact was sudden and also harder than instinct led him to expect. The blow stung.
Fortunately, despite his brash, gaijin-influenced ways, Emile had the decency to neither laugh nor even seem to notice. Overcoming embarrassment, Minoru moved with careful deliberation to push back into sitting position.
Balance, Minoru thought. I may live the rest of my life on this planet. And it certainly isn’t going to change to adapt to me!
Starship Yamato Crew Database:
.
General News
With phases One and Two accomplished, the fol-lowing teams are now active—
Genji Expedition: Okuma Base on Genji-moonside established atop Mount Korobachi—
4,500 meters altitude—Senior Scientist Matsu-hiro Komatsu, commanding. Five domes. Three landers. Three power units. One compute facility. One hydrox fuel-processing unit. One hydropon-ics unit. All operational. * Two hydroponics units and four planetology laboratories nearing com-pletion. *
Preliminary survey parties detached to remote islands for early, minimum-contamination contact sessions.
* Total crew on Genji—eighty-five personnel. Nineteen additional, personnel designated for landing upon return of Yamato from belt mission.
TO no Chujo Expedition: Capt. Koremasa Ta-mura has decided to lead a small-scale expedition to the smaller world personally. In addition to ar-chaeological explorations, and attempts to make contact with the local inhabitants, this team shall determine feasibility of establishing a hydrogen-oxygen plant at the shore of one of Chujo’s small spas.
Infrastructure Team: Following Captain Ta-mura’s departure for Chujo, Senior Lieutenant Hideo Ishikawa will take the Yamato, plus two scout boats, on a brief survey of nearby space in search of candidate small bodies for use in infra-structure-manufacturing processes.
Casualty figures: Added to the twelve crew mulched or cryo-stored en route ... One death at Okuma Base due to a fall. Eight gravity-related injuries, all minor. Dr. Komatsu reminds all ex-pedition members to remember their drills and observe safety procedures at all times.
Minoru slogged through the boggy fields of Green Tower Village, taking samples and supervising as his native assistants labored on a treadmill linked to, a scaffold of mas-sive wooden gearing. That clanking, rattling assemblage, in turn, rotated a machine that projected a cylinder of force into the ground, digging ever deeper into the rich sedimen-tary layers below.
It had taken several days, working in conjunction with teams on other islands, to acquire enough of the local di-alect to get across the idea that humans wanted to “hire” the natives. But once they understood, the Genjians became eager helpers, not only with the coring but also scurrying through the shallows and across the hillsides to snare and bring back countless wriggling things of all shapes and col-ors—from underground burrowers to multilegged insec-toids to flyers with one, two, even three pairs of wings—the myriad of pieces Minoru needed to start putting together his own picture of this island’s ecosystem.
Minoru stank from hour after hour in his biosuit. He itched from low-level rashes as his immune system adapted to new allergic irritants. On two occasions, valuable instru-ments had broken down, with no way of knowing yet if craftsmen back at Okuma Base could repair the parts or if they might have to send “home” for replacements—then wait forty years for them to arrive.
And yet, he could hardly complain about lack of prog-ress. He had tools, and a good work force willing to labor long and hard for lumps of iron. Metal was precious on these remote islands, where Genji’s continental industrial revolution was still no more than a rumor. Despite temp-tation, Minoru was careful not to overpay his workers, which would only disrupt their local economy.
Anyway, deferred gratification was an important les-son. You learned it early in Japan. Failure to understand the importance of patience and hard work had brought down great powers that once towered over Minoru’s homeland.
The work was going so well, Minoru had even trained some of the small male Genjians to dissect and prepare animal specimens under recording cameras. The natives’ coordination with their tiny feeler-arms, and ability to bring their eyes exceptionally close, enabled them to parse minute details, a pastime they obviously found amusing. One, a venerable brood-father named Phs’n’kah, seemed fasci-nated and enthusiastic to learn more.
It was Phs’n’Icah who nudged Minoru out of a medi-tative state listening to the slow, steady drone of the tread mill. Minoru started at the sudden tug on his arm. With their broad peripheral vision, Genjians never seemed to grasp human entreaties “not to sneak up on us from behind.”
“1 have brought more samples for study,” the trans-lator announced primly. Minoru glanced down and saw that Phs’n’kah had laid out a reed mat across the mud, where-upon he arrayed several score tiny animals, all with their necks neatly wrung.
“These were gathered within a single patch, one meter on a side?” Minoru asked, incredulously.
Phs’n’kah made an assent gesture with his snorkel tube.
“Yes. The very *** you marked off I made sure to ***”
The last part dissolved in static as the translator tried guessing, then gave up. No matter. Minoru thought he got the gist.
This was a new phase. After taking samples randomly from all over the island, letting the natives bring in what-ever was easiest to catch, it was time to start studying in depth. But he and Emile were stretched so thinly that Mi-noru had begun delegating some jobs.
“You sealed off the area as I showed you?”
“As you showed me . I *** down to one meter depth. I am sure nothing *** escaped. Nothing that *** larger than the holes in your *** sieve screen.”
Minoru bent to peer at the samples. You could learn a lot just by seeing how the Genjian had sorted them. Not by size or color. Nor, apparently, by species relatedness. At first guess it seemed Phs’n’kah had put all the obligate carnivores together on one side, all leave-cutters in another corner, and so on.
You are what you eat, Minoru thought. I should report this to the Xeno-Psychology group.
He made a note to that effect, and his auto secretary beeped acknowledgment. One problem with accomplishing so much so fast was that you absolutely relied on the semisentient computer devices to outline and send (and read!) a great many memos.
