Murasaki, page 8
She wondered whether Koremasa had delicately im-plied that Tatsuhiko should follow her, mend fences. Per haps—but this perpetual wondering whether people truly spoke their minds, or merely what solidarity of effort re-quired—it provoked her! Still ... she took the space of a heartbeat to let the spurt of irritation evaporate into the chilly air.
She sighed and allowed herself only a sardonic “You merely seemed to differ?”
—I merely expressed the point of view of my profes-sion.” Tatsuhiko gave her a direct, professional smile.
Despite herself, Miyuki grinned. “You were an enthu-siastic advocate of sociobiology, weren’t you?”
“Still am.” His heavy-lidded eyes studied her. The age-old male gaze, straying casually away for a quite un-conscious study of what the contours of her work suit implied, a subtle tang of the matters between men and women that would never be settled ... not that anyone wished them to be.
She nodded briskly, suddenly wanting to keep their discussion businesslike. “I suppose we are all at the fore-front of our fields, simply by being here. Even though we haven’t kept up, with Earthside literature.”
Communicating with Earth had proved to be even more difficult than they had imagined. In flight the hot plasma exhaust tail had blurred and refracted transmissions. Further, the Doppler shift had reduced the bit rate from Earth by half. Few dry academic journals had made it through.
Tatsuhiko’s blunt jaw shifted slightly sidewise, which she knew promised a slightly patronizing remark. He said, “Of course, you are on firmer ground.”
“Oh? How?”
“Planetary geology cannot falsify so easily, I take it.”
“I don’t understand.” Or are we both sending mixed signals? Then, to shake him a little, she asked liltingly, “Would you like a drink?”
“I wished to walk the city a bit, as you were.”
“Oh, this is in the city. We don’t have to return to camp. Come.”
She deliberately took him through galleries of stone that seemed feather-light, suspended from thick walls by small wedges of pale rock; the sight was still unsettling, to one born to greater gravity. She padded quickly along pre-carious walkways teetering above brackish ponds, and then, with no time for eyes to adjust, through murky tunnels. A grove of spindly trees surrounded a round building of burnt-orange rock, breezes stirring from them a sound like fat sizzling on a stove. She stopped among them, looking for damp but firm sand. Without saying a word in answer to his puzzled expression, she dug with her hands a hole a palm wide and elbow-deep.
“Wet gravel,” she said, displaying a handful. He looked puzzled. Did he know that this made him boyish and vulnerable? She would not put that past him; he was an instinctive analyzer. Once he had tried with her all the positions made possible by the short period when the star-ship had glided under low deceleration—penetrating her in mechanical poses of cartoonish angles, making her laugh and then, in short order, come hard and swiftly against him. Where was that playful man now?
On alien ground, she knew. Preoccupied by the central moment of his life. And she could not reach out to touch him here, any more than she had the last few years on board.
The stand of pale-yellow reeds she had noticed the day before nearly blocked the building’s ample arched door-way. She broke off two, one fat and the other thin. Using the smaller as a ramrod, she punched the pith from the larger. Except for some sticking at the joints it worked, and she thanked her memory of this trick.
“A siphon,” she said, plunging the larger reed into the sand hole and formally offering it to Tatsuhiko.
A bit uncertainly Tatsuhiko sucked on this natural straw, his frown turning to surprised pleasure.
“It works. Ground water—not salty.”
“I tire of the processed taste in our water. I learned this on one of our desert classes.” Pre-expedition training had been a blizzard of facts, techniques, gadgets, lore—all predicated on the earliest data from the probes, most of it therefore only marginally relevant; planets proved to be even more complex systems than they had suspected.
He watched her carefully draw the cool, smelly, oddly pleasant water up and drink long and steadily.
The very air here robbed the skin of moisture, and their dry throats were feasting grounds for the head colds that circulated among the crew.
“This unfiltered water should be harmless, I sup-pose,” he said hesitantly, his face turning wary too late.
She laughed. “You’ve already got a bellyful of any microbe that can feast off us.”
“I thought there weren’t any such.”
,
“So it seems.”
Indeed, this was the most convincing proof that pan-spermia, the seeding of the galaxy by spores from a single planet, had never happened. Chujo and Genji shared a basic reproducing chain, helical like DNA but differing in ele-mental details. Somehow the two worlds had shared bio-logical information.
The most likely explanation lay in debris thrown out by meteorite bombardment through ge-ological time scales, which then peppered the other planet. She saw his familiar self-involved expression and added,
“But, of course, we’ve only covered a tiny fraction of Chujo yet.”
His look of dismay made her suppress another laugh. Specialization was so intense among them!
Tatsuhiko did not realize that biospheres were thoroughly mixed, and that the deep, underlying incompatibility of Chujoan microbes with Earthly biochemistry was a planetwide feature. “I’m just fooling, Tatsuhiko-san,” she said, putting stress on the more friendly form of address.
“Ah.” Abrupt nod of head, tight jaw, a few seconds to recover his sense of dignity. There had been a time when he reacted with amusement to her jibes. Or rolled her over and pinned her and made her confess to some imaginary slight, laughing.
They walked on, unspoken elements keeping them at a polite distance. She fetched forth a knife and cut a few notches in the soft length of the reed. As they walked she slipped the tip of the reed under her mask and blew through this crude recorder, making notes oddly reminiscent of the stern, plaintive call of the ancient Japanese country flute, the shakuhachi. She had played on such hastily made in-struments while a young, girl, and these bleak, thin-textured sounds took her back to a life that now seemed inconceivably, achingly remote—and was, of course. Prob-ably few of them would ever walk the soil of the Home Islands again. Perhaps none.
They wandered among the tumbled-down lofts and deeply cut alcoves, Miyuki’s music echoing from ruined walls. Here they passed through—streets—that were in fact pathways divided by thin partitions of gray-green stone, smoothed by wind and yet still showing the serpentine elab-oration of colors—maroon, rose, aqua—inlaid by hands over ten thousand years ago. The dating was very impre-cise, of course.
Weaker planetary magnetic shielding, a dif-ferent sun, an unknown climate history—all made the standard tables of carbon dating irrelevant.
Tatsuhiko raised his hand, and they stopped before a worn granite wall. Deeply carved into it was one of the few artworks remaining in the city, perhaps because it could not be carried away. She estimated it was at least a full Chu-joan’s height on each of its square sides.
She followed the immense curves of the dune tiger. Only twice had any human glimpsed this beast in the flesh. The single photograph they had showed a muscular; can-vas-colored, four-legged killing machine. Its head was squat, eyes enormous, mouth an efficient V design. Yet the beast had a long, sensuous tail thickly covered with gray-green scales. Intricate, barbed, its delicate scales almost seemed like feathers.
The ancient artist had taken this striking feature and stretched it to provide the frame and the substance of his work. The dune tiger’s tail flowed out of the beast—which glowered at the viewer, showing teeth—into a wraparound wreath that grew gnarled branches, sprouted ample flowers, and then twisted about itself to form the unmistakable pro-file of an alert Chujoan native.
The strange face also looked at the viewer, eyes even larger than the reality Miyuki had seen, mouth agape, head cocked at an angle. Miyuki would never know if this was a comic effect, but it certainly looked that way. And the sinuous tail, having made this head, wriggled around the design—to be eaten by the tiger itself.
“Writhing at the pain of biting itself?” she whispered.—That could be. But wouldn’t the whole tiger struggle, not just the tail?”
“Unless the tiger has just this instant bitten itself.” ‘Ummm, I hadn’t thought of that. A snapshot, an’
in-stant frozen in time.”
She fingered her reed. “But then why does its tail make that face?”
“Why indeed? I feel so empty before this work. We can bring so little to it!” He gestured angrily.
“The archaeologists, they must have some idea.”
“Oh, they suppose much. But they know little.”
She followed the tiger’s tail with her eyes, looking fruitlessly for some clue. “This city had so many things ours do.”
“But were they used the same way? The digging team hasn’t found a single grave. Most of what we know about ancient Earth comes from burial of the dead.”
She touched the stone, found its cool strength oddly reassuring. “This has outlasted the pyramids.”
“Maybe it was cut very deep?”
“No ... How long it has been buried we cannot tell. And Chujo’s lighter gravity should lead to less erosion, generally. But I would have expected the winds to rub this out.”
Tatsuhiko shrugged. “Our dating could be wrong, of course.”
“Not this far wrong.” Miyuki frowned. “I wonder if this place was more like an arrested Athens.”
He looked at her speculatively. “A city-state? Difficult to tell, from a ruin.”
“But the Chujoans still camp here—you found their old embers yourself.”
“Until we scared them away, I suppose.”
Miyuki studied the great wall. “You suspect they lin-ger here, to view the ruins of what they were?”
—“They may not be even the same species that built all this.” Tatsuhiko looked around, as if trying to imagine the streets populated, to envision what forms would have am-bled here.
She gestured at small circles that appeared above the carving. “What are these?”
Tatsuhiko frowned. “Symbols?”
“No, they look like a depiction of real objects. See, here’s one that’s a teardrop.”
He stooped to examine the wall. “Yes, the lowest of them is. And higher up, see. another teardrop, only not so pronounced.”
Miyuki tried to fathom some sense to the round gouges. If the piece had perspective, the circles could be of any true size. “Teardrop at the bottom ... and as they rise, they round out?”
Tatsuhiko shrugged. “Rain droplets form round in the air, I believe, then make teardrops as they fall.”
“Something the tiger gives off?”
“How?”
His questions were insightful, but there was something more here, she was sure of it. Her mother had once told her that art could touch secret places. She had described it in terms of simple events of childhood. When the summer rain had possi.d and the air was cool, when your affairs were few and your mind was at ease, you listened to the lingering notes of some neighbor’s flute chasing after the clear clouds and the receding rain, and every note seemed to drop and sink into your soul. That was how it was now, this moment, without explanations.
Miyuki let the moment pass. Tatsuhiko gave up in exasperation. “Come—let’s walk.”
She wanted to move through the city as though she had once been a citizen of it, to catch some fleeting fra-grance of lives once lived.
They walked on. She blew into her crude recorder again.
To her the atonal, clear, crude tones seemed to mirror the strangely solid feel of this place, not merely the veiled city of opaque purpose but as well the wind-carved desert wastes surrounding it. Motionless and emotionless, at one moment both agonised and deeply still.
“Perhaps that would be better to send back,” Tatsu-hiko said suddenly.
“What?”
“Better than our precious reports. Instead, transmit to Earth such music. It conveys more than our data, our meas-urements, our... speculations.”
She saw through his guarded expression—tight jaw-line, pensive lips, veiled eyes—how threatened Tatsuhiko felt. The long voyage out had not made every member of the 482 crew familiar to her, and she and Tatsuhiko had always worked in different chore details, but still she knew the character-indices of them all. Crew had to fit within the narrow avenue that had allowed them to withstand the grand, epic voyage, and not decay into the instabilities that the sociometricians had so tellingly predicted.
Tatsuhiko had lost great face in that abortive first en-counter, and three other attempts by his team to provoke even a flicker of recognition from the Chujoans had failed just as miserably.
Yet it would not do to address Tatsuhiko directly on this issue, to probe in obvious fashion his deepest insecur-ities. “You have illuminated a principal feature of their character, after all. That is data.”
He snorted derisively. “Feature? That they do not think us worth noticing?”
“But to take no notice—that is a recognition that says much.– •
Suspiciously: “What?”
“That they know our strangeness. Respect it.”
“Or hold it in contempt.”
“That is possible.”
His face suddenly opened, the tight lines around his eyes lightening. “I fear I have been bound in my own dis-cipline too much.”
“Sociobiology?”
“Yes. We attempt to explain social behavior as arising from a species’ genetic heritage. But here—the categories we ourselves bring are based on a narrowing of definitions, all accomplished by our own brains—wads of gray matter themselves naturally, selected for. We cannot use words like ‘respect’
or ‘contempt.’ They are illusions here.”
She frowned. “In principle, of course. But these na-tives, they are so like ourselves.... “
Tatsuhiko chuckled. “Oh? Come tomorrow, we’ll go into the field. I’ll show you the proud Chujoans.”
3. So-So Biology
They squatted in a blind, peer-ing through a gauzy, dim dawn.
Recently cut branches hid them from the roaming an-imals beyond. can’t see anything.” Miyuki shifted to get a better view of the plain. Scraggly gray trees dotted it and, low, powder-blue brush clung to the gullies.
Tatsuhiko gestured. “Look on the infra monitor.” He fiddled, sharpening the image.
She saw a diffuse glow about half a kilometer away. It was, near a snaky stream that had cut deeply into the broad, flat valley. “Something killed a kobold last night?”
Tatsuhiko nodded. “Probably a ripper. Our sensors gave us an audio signature. Picked it up on omni and then focused automatically with a directional mike.”
“Could it have been a dune tiger?”
“Don’t know.” He studied her face. “You’re still thinking about the carving.”
“It is beautiful,” she said quickly, embarrassed for reasons she could not fathom.
“Indeed.” His quick eyes gave nothing away. “The kobold kill is scenting in the air, and this breeze will carry it. We now wait to see what the Chupchups do.”
“They call each other Chupchups?”
“We have analyzed their voice patterns. No clear syn-tax yet, of course. We aren’t even sure of many words. We noticed that they make flamelike sounds—preess-chupcitup, for example—they always end in that phrase.”
“Perhaps it means ‘Mister.’ Or ‘Honorable.”‘
He shrugged. “Better than calling them ‘apes,’ as some crew have started to do.”
She sat back, thighs already aching from squatting, and breathed in the dry aroma of the hunting, ground. It was like Africa, she thought, with its U-shaped valleys cut by meandering rivers, the far ramparts of fault blocks being worn down by windblown sand. Only this world was far more bleak, cold, eerie in its shadows cast by the great sun now rising.
This star always made her uneasy when it ponderously rose or set, for the air’s refraction flattened it.
Filling four times as much of the sky as the sun she knew, it was none-theless a midget, with a third the mass of Sol. Though the astronomers persisted in calling Murasaki a red dwarf, it was no dull crimson ember.
In the exalted hierarchy of solar specialists, stars like this one, with surface temperature greater than a carbon-filament incandescent lamp, were nonetheless minor luke-warm bores. Had they been rare, astronomers might have studied them more before the discovery of life here. Though Murasaki sported sunspots and vibrant orange flares, its glow did not seem reddish to her, but rather yellow.
The difference from Sol became apparent as she squinted at the carrion awaiting the dawn’s attentions. De-tail faded in the distance, despite the thin air, because there was no more illumination than in a well-lit Earthly living room after dark. Only as this swollen sun rose did it steal some of the attention from Genji, which perched always directly above, splitting the sky with its sardonic half-moon grin.
“Here come the first,” Tatsuhiko whispered tensely. His eyes danced with anticipation. When she saw him like this it was as if his formal skin had dissolved, giving her the man she had known.
A fevered giggling came over the chilly plain. Distant forms scampered: small tricorns, running from a snake-hound. Their excited cries seemed nearly human. As they outdistanced, the snakehound, which had sprung from con-cealment too soon, they sounded as though they laughed in derision. A helibat flapped into view, drawn by the noise, and scooped up a burrowbunny that appeared to be just waking up as it stood at the entrance of its hole.
