Murasaki, page 7
Chujo’s thin, chilly air plucked at her. She wondered if it affected her eyes, because now she could see the aliens’ clothing—and it was moving.
They wore a kind of living skin that adjusted to each change in the cant of their arms, each step. The moving brown stuff tucked closely at neck and armpits and groin, where heat loss would be great, yet left free the long arms and muscled thighs. Could such primitives master biotech capable of this? Or had they domesticated. some carpetlike animal?
No time left for speculations. Her comm murmured with apprehension as the nearest alien stolidly advanced to within a hundred meters.
“Remember Kammer,” one of the crew observed laconically.
“Remember your duty!” Tatsuhiko countered sharply.
Miyuki’s vision sharpened to an unnatural edge. She had a rising intuition of something strange, something none of them had—
“Tatsuhiko,” she called. “Do not step in front of them.”
“What?” Tatsuhiko answered sharply as the leading alien bore down upon him. “Who said that? I—”
And the moment had arrived.
Tatsuhiko stood frozen.
The face of the truly alien. Crusty-skinned. Hairless. Scaly slabs of flesh showing age and wear. The alien turned its head as it made its long, loping way by Tatsuhiko. Its skin was fretted, suggesting feathers, with veins beneath the rough hide making a lacework of pink, as in the feet of some earthly birds. And the eyes—swollen pupils giving the impression of intense concentration, swiveling across the landscape in smooth unconcern.
The alien rotated its torso—a flickering of interest?—as it passed. Tatsuhiko raised a bare hand in a sign they had all agreed had the best chance of being read as a non-hostile greeting, Tatsuhiko smiled, careful to not reveal white teeth, in case that implied eating or anger among beings who shared a rich lore of lipped mouths.
To this simple but elaborately rehearsed greeting the alien gave Tatsuhiko a second’s further gaze—and then strode on, head turning to scan the ground beyond.
And so they all came on. No sounds, no trace of the talk the Japanese had recorded from directional mikes. The second alien drew abreast Captain Koremasa Tam-ura, the expedition leader. This one did not register Kore-masa with even the slightest hesitation in the regular, smooth pivot of its head.
So came the next. And the next.
The Chujoans pressed forward, nomads in search of their next meal. Miyuki remembered the videos taken from orbit of just this, remorseless sweeping hunt. Only the first of them had permitted its gaze to hesitate for even a moment.
“I ...I do not...” Tatsuhiko whispered over comm. The aliens swept by the humans, their eyes neither avoiding recognition nor acknowledging it.
“Do not move,” Koremasa ordered.
Even so, one woman named Akiko was standing nearly directly in front of an approaching’
Chujoan—and she lifted a palm in a gesture that might have meant greet-ing but Miyuki saw as simple confusion. It brushed the passing alien. Akiko clutched suddenly at the Chujoan hand, seeking plaintively.
The creature gave no notice, allowing its momentum to carry it forward, freeing its hand.
Koremasa sharply reprimanded Akiko, but Miyuki took little notice of that, or of the buzzing talk on her comm. She hugged herself against the growing chill, turned away from the cutting winds, and watched the aliens con-tinue on, unhurried. Hundreds of evenly spaced, oblivious hunters. Some carried heavy packs while others—thin, wiry, carrying both slings and lances—had little. But they all ignored the humans.
“Anyone registering eye contact?—Tatsuhiko asked ‘ tersely.
The replies trickled in reluctantly. No. No one. “How do they know?” Tatsuhiko asked savagely.
“The first, it looked at me. Then the rest, they just—just—” Faintly someone said, “They won’t even piss on us.” Another whisper answered, “Yes, the ultimate insult.” Chuckles echoed, weak and indecisive against the strong, unending alien wind.
The humans stood in place, automatically awaiting or-ders, as endless drill had fashioned them to do.
Dust devils played among them. A crusty-skinned thing the first ex-pedition had unaccountably named a snakehound on the basis of a few glimpses on their video records—though it showed no signs of liking the fat worms that resembled Earthly snakes—came bounding by, eluding the hunters.
Likewise, it took no apparent notice of the humans frozen in their carefully planned deployment of greeting, of con-tact, of the cusp, moment.
In their calm exit Miyuki saw her error, the mistake of the entire crew. These Chujoans had two hands, two feet, binocular eyes—piimatelike, city-builders, weapon-users. Too close to human, far too close.
For they were still alien. Not some pseudo-Navajos. Not more shambling near-apes who had meandered out of the forest, patching and adding to their cerebral architec-ture, climbing up the staircase of evolution toward a self-proclaimed, seemingly ordained success.
These beings shared no genes, nor assumptions, nor desires, with the seemingly similar humans. Their easy sway, their craftily designed slingshots and arrows—all came from unseen anvils of necessity that humans might not share at all.
She leaned back, smothering an impulse to laugh. The releasP of tension brought, a mad hilarity to her thoughts, but she immediately suppressed the urge to shout, to ges-ture, to stamp her boots into the dusty certainties of this bleak plain. After all, Tatsuhiko had not given the order to disperse the pattern—he was stiff with shock.
Perhaps this sky gave a clue. How different from Earth! Genji loomed, a great mottled ball fixed at the top of the sky.
How well she knew the stories of the Genji Mono-gatari, by the great Murasaki. Yet the imposition of a mil-lennium-old tale on these hard, huge places was perhaps another sign of their underlying arrogance.
The whirl of worlds, she thought. Spheres stuck at the ends of an invisible shaft, balls twin-spinning about each other. Tidal stresses forced them to eternal mutual regard, rapt, like estranged lovers unable to entertain the warmer affections of the swollen, brooding sun that even now sought to come onstage, brimming above the horizon, cast-ing slanting exaggerated shadows. The aliens headed into this ruddy dawnlight, leaving the humans without a back-ward glance.
2. Arrested Athens
They took refuge in the abandoned cities. Not for physical shelter, for eat was provided by the transparent, millimeter-thin, yet rugged bubbles they inflated among the ruins. They came here to gain some psychological consolation, for reasons no one could quite express.
Miyuki sat in one of the largest bubbles, sipping on aromatic Indian tea and cracking seeds between her teeth. So far these small, tough, oddly sweet kernels were the only bounty of this dry planet. Miyuki had been the first to mas-ter them, cracking them precisely and then separating the meat from the pungent shell with her tongue. Gathering them from the low, gnarled trees was simple. They hung in opulent, unpicked bunches; apparently the Chujoans did not like them. Still, it would be interesting to see if anyone without other food could eat the seeds quickly enough to avoid starvation.
The subject never came up, she realized, because no one liked to jest about real possibilities. The entire expe-dition was still living off the growing tanks on the mother ship. Every kilogram of protein and carbohydrate had to be brought down with many more kilos of liquid hydrogen fuel. That in turn had to be separated from water on Genji, where their main base sprawled beside a rough sea.
Such weighty practicalities suppressed humor. Not that this crew was necessarily a madcap bunch, of course. Mi-yuki spat her cheekful of shells into her hand, tossed them into the trash, and started listening to Tatsuhiko again. He had never been a mirthful man, and had not responded well to her suggestion that perhaps the Chujoans had played a sort of joke.
“—so I remain astonished by even the suggestion that their behavior was rooted in anything so obvious,” Tatsu-hiko concluded.
“As obvious as a joke?” Captain Koremasa asked blandly. He sat while the others stood, a remnant of ship-board discipline. The posture was probably unnecessary, for the captain was already the tallest and most physically com-manding figure in the expedition. Standard primate hierar-chy rules, Miyuki thought distantly. Koremasa had a broad forehead and strong features, a look of never being sur-prised.
All quite useful in instilling confidence.
“A joke requires context,” Tatsuhiko said, his mouth contracting into tight reserve. He was lean and angular, muscles bunching along his long jawline. She knew the energies that lurked there. She had had a brief, passionate affair with him and could still remember his flurries of anx-ious attention.
Partly out of mischief, she said, “They may have had enough ‘context’ for their purposes.–
Tatsuhiko’s severe mouth turned down in scorn. “That band knew nothing of prior contact—that was why we se-lected them!”
“How do you know?” Miyuki asked mildly.
Tatsuhiko crossed his arms, energies bundled in. “First contact was with a band over three thousand kilo-meters from here. We tracked them.”
Miyuki said, “Stories fly fast.”
“Across a mountain range?’
“In months, yes.”
“These are primitives, remember. No signs of writing, of metallurgy, of plowing. Thus, almost certainly no infor-mation technology. No semaphore stations, no roads, not even smoke signals.”
“Gossip is speedy,” Miyuki said. The incredible, ir-rational, and cowardly withdrawal of the first expedition had left Chujo for the Japanese, a slate virtually unblem-ished. But in the time since, the Chujoans might have turned that first contact into legend.
“We must go by what we know, not what we invent.” Tatsuhiko kept his tone civil, but the words did his work for him.
“And I am a geophysicist and you are the culture spe-cialist.” Miyuki looked at him squarely, an unusual act among a crew trained for decades to suppress dissension.
“I believe no one should proceed to theory without more experience,” Koremasa said evenly. His calm eyes seemed to look through them and out, into the reaches be-yond. She caught a sense of what it was like to have more responsibility than others, but to be just as puzzled. Kore-masa’s years of quiet, stolid leadership on the starship had not prepared him well for ambiguity.
Still, his sign of remote displeasure made both Miyuki and Tatsuhiko hesitate, their faces going blank.
After a mo-ment Tatsuhiko nodded abruptly and said, “Very much so.’
‘
They automatically shifted to routine matters to defuse any tensions. Familiar worries about food, air, illness, and fatigue surfaced, found at least partial solutions. Miyuki played her part as supplies officer, but she let her mind wander as Tatsuhiko and Koremasa got into a long discus-sion of problems with their pressure masks.
They had retreated into studying artifacts; after all, that is what archaeologists were trained to do, and artifacts could not ignore you. Two women had trailed the Chujoans for several kilometers, and found what appeared to be a discarded or forgotten garment, a frayed legging, The bi-ologists and Exo-Analysis people had fallen upon it with glad cries.
Quite quickly they showed that the snug-rug, as some called it, was in fact a sophisticated life-form that seemed bioengineered to parasitic perfection, for the sole purpose of helping the Chujoans fend off the elements. It lived on excrement and sweat—“biological exudates,” the special-ists’ jargon said. The mat was in fact a sort of biological corduroy, mutually dependent species like small grasses, moss, and algal filaments. They gave back to their host warmth and even a slow, steady massage. They even cleaned the skin they rode—“dermal scavenging,” the spe-cialists termed it. Useful traits—and better than any Earthly gadget.
The specialists in Low Genji Orbit had labored to duplicate the snug-rug in their laboratories. The expedition depended on powerful biotech resources, for everything from meals to machine repair. But the snug-rug proved a puzzle. The specialists were, of course, quite sure they could crack the secret... but it would require a bit of time. They seemed equally divided on the, issue of whether the snug-rug was a remnant from an earlier biotech civilization, or another example of evolution’s incredible diplomacy among species.
Appetites whetted by one artifact, the team turned to the province of archaeology. The abandoned cities that dot-ted Chujo were mostly rubble, but some like this—Miyuki glanced out through the transparent bubble wall—still soared, their creamy massive walls blurred by winds until they resembled partly melted ice-cream sculptures. Little metal had gone into them, apparently not needed because of the milder gravity. Perhaps that was why later ages had not plundered these canyonlike streets for all the threads of decorative tin and copper. Sand, frost, storm, invading de-sert brush—all had conspired to rub away most of the stone sheaths on the grander buildings, so little art remained. Ko-remasa and Tatsuhiko went on discussing matters, but Mi-yuki had heard the same debates before; one of the mild irritations of the expedition was that Koremasa still sought consensus, as though, they were still packed into a starship, mindful of every frown. No, here they needed daring; lead-ership, dash and verve.
At the right moment she conspicuously bowed, exag-gerating her leave-taking just enough for a slight ironic ef-fect, and slipped through the pressure lock.
She slipped her pressure mask on, checked seals, tasted the slightly :oily compressed air. This was the one huge freedom they had missed so much on the long voyage out: to slam the door on exasperation. There had been many elaborate ways to defuse stresses, such as playing smash-ball; the object was to keep the ball aloft as long as pos-sible, not to better your opponent. Long rallies, cooperation, learning to compensate for inability or momentary fault, deploring extravagant impulse and grandstanding—all good principles, when you are going lonely to the stars. They had similarly lasted through their predicted season of sexual cookbook athletics. The entire team was like an old married couple by now—wise and weathered.
The chilly bite of even noonday never failed to take her by surprise. She set off quickly, still enjoying the spring that low gravity gave to her step, and within minutes was deep among the maze of purple-gray colonnades. Orbital radar had deepscanned the sandy wastes and found this bur-ied city. Diggers and wind machines had revealed elegant, airy buildings preserved far better than the weathered hov-els found on the exposed surface. Had the city been delib-erately buried? The street-filling sands had been conspicuously uniform and free of pebbles, not the residue of eons of runoff from nearby hills. Buried for what?
The moody, shadowed paths gave abruptly into hex-agonal spaces of pink flagstones. Above, high-pitched roofs and soaring towers poked into a thin blue sky that sported small, quickly scudding clouds like strands of wool. To her eye the styles here, when they struck any human resonance at all, were deliberate blends, elements of artful slope and balanced mass that made the city seem like, an anthology of ages. Could this be the last great gathering place of the ancient natives, erected to pay tribute to their passing great-ness? Did they know that the ebbing currents of moisture and dusty ice storms were behind the ceaseless slow drying that was trimming their numbers, narrowing the pyramid of life upon which all large omnivores stood? They must have, she concluded.
In this brooding place of arched stone and airy reces-ses there came to her a silky sense of melancholy, of stately recessional. They had built this elaborately carved and fret-ted stonework on the edge of what must have then been a large lake. Now the diminished waters were briny, hemmed in by marshes prickly with bamboolike grasses. Satellites had found larger ruined cities among the slopes of the many mountain ranges, ones displaying large public areas, per-haps stadiums and theaters—but humans could not bear those altitudes without bulky pressure suits. She coughed, and remembered to turn up the burbling humidifier, in her air feed. There was enough oxygen here, five hundred meters above what passed for sea level on a world where the largest sea was smaller than many of Earth’s lakes. But the air stole moisture from sinuses and throat, making her skin prickly and raw.
Miyuki peered up, past the steepled roofs and their caved-in promise, at the perpetual presence of Genji. Ge-ometry told her that at noon the brother world should be dark, but the face of milky swirls and clumpy browns glowed, reflecting Chujo’s own radiance. Even the mot-tlings in the shadowed and strangely sinister face of Chu-jo’s brother seemed to have a shifting, elusive character as she watched.
Genji loomed twelve times larger than the moon she had known as a child in Kyoto, and at night it gave hundreds of times as much light, enough to read by, enough to pick out colors in the plains of Chujo.
Now high cirrus of glittery powdered ice momentarily veiled it in the purpling sky, but that somber face would never budge from its hovering point at the top of the sky. A moist, warm, murky sphere. How had that richness overhead affected the Chujoans, through the long millennia when they felt the thieving dryness creeping into their forests, their fields, their lives?
She turned down a rutted path beside a crumbled wall, oicking her way, and before her a shadowy form moved. She froze. They all wore the smell-dispersers that suppos-edly drove off even large predators, but this shape
“We should not be alone here,” Tatsuhiko said, his eyes hooded behind his pressure mask.
“You frightened me!”
“Perhaps a little fear would be wise.”
“Fear is disabling,” she said disdainfully.
“Fear kindles caution. This world is too Earthlike-it lulls us.”
“Lrulls? I have to fight for oxygen when I trot, we all scratch from the aridity, the cold seeps in—”
“It deceives us, still.”
“You were the one maintaining that the natives couldn’t possibly be joking with us, or—”
“I apologize for my seeming opposition.” Tatsuhiko bowed from the waist.
She started to reply, but his gesture reminded her sud-denly of moments long ago—times when the reserve be-tween them had broken in a sudden flood, when everything important had not seemed to require words at all, when hands and mouths and the simple slide of skin on welcom-ing skin had seemed to convey more meaning than all the categories and grammars of their alert, managerial minds. Times long gone.
