Deucalion (2 page)

PART ONE

COLONY

A man's memory is all that stands

between him and chaos.
AL Korsakoff

Art is a delayed echo.
George Santayana

1

CENTENNIAL

Neuenstadt

Central Desert (Western Fringes Sector)

1/1/100 Standard

CAEL

Peering through a gap in the underbrush, Cael watched the preparations. The wide Greenspace was filled with brightly coloured structures, which the offworlders had assembled by stretching what looked like huge, patterned sail-sheets tightly over light tube-metal frames, anchoring them with slender cables of their flimsy-looking but unbreakable microlite.

From a distance, the structures resembled the shelters the Ancestors had shaped from the supple stems of the Ocra, during the era of the Great Trek. He had seen them in the pictures on the sacred wall, before it was destroyed. Of course, having no access to offworld synthetics, the Ancestors had used only Yorum-skin to keep out the searing desert winds. The shelters they had built were a dull grey, with none of the brilliant patterns and hues that he now saw before him.

The day was hot; as Cael lay there, hidden and watching, he felt his thoughts drifting . . .

He remembered his mother's firstmate, Ielf, reach out a trembling arm to touch the images on the Wall. He remembered the light, filtering in through the Cave entrance, the way it made the fur gleam on the back of Ielf's long-fingered hand. But mostly, he remembered the Pictures themselves.

Young as he had been – no more than seven or eight cycles – he had known them for what they were. Old Magic. Small, coloured fragments of the Time before the Arrival; before the end of all Telling. And he had known what he must do as surely as if the spirit of the Ancestors had instructed him.

He had returned many times, following his own trek, marking his passage to selfhood by the visits he made to the Wall. Staring at the sacred paintings until they burned their patterns into his soul. Until the last time.

The offworlders had found the Sacred Cave, as in the end they found everything, no matter with what care it was hidden. They had entered its silent shadows with their lights and loud voices, and they had cut the pictures from the living rock. Saebi had watched from the cliff-top as they carried them, one by one, to the waiting flyer. Then they were gone, flying towards the sunrise, Saebi said, towards the tower-city they had built far away beyond the mountains, beside the deepwater.

Cael had returned home and told the news.

Rhae, his mother, listened without speaking a word. As usual, she kept her thoughts to herself, but Cael noticed that she left her meal untouched.

Toev, his mother's thirdmate, was speechless, too, but only because he was filling his mouth with food, as usual. He had no love for the Old Ways; their passing caused him no pain. During the cycles he had shared her house, Toev had been Rhae's greatest disappointment. Perhaps that was why she had mothered him no children.

Only Ielf had shown his sorrow, and his anger, wordspeaking
his curses on the offworlders, wishing them ill-luck and barren wombs. Cael had stared at him, shocked by the power of his feelings. Ielf had not fathered him, but as firstmate to his mother, he had accepted the fathering role when Kien, her secondmate and Cael's truefather, had not returned from the hunt. Ielf was gentle in his actions and his thoughts; the bitterness he now spoke sat strangely on him. But Cael, too, had felt the pain of the loss deeply, and understood.

‘Native artefacts' – that was what the offworlders had called them. Saebi had crept in close enough to hear them talking and laughing, as they took away the last of the pictures.

That word again. ‘Native'. What did it really mean,
native
?

In the books that told the meanings of the offworlder speechwords, ‘native' spoke of ‘belonging to a country or place'. Why then was the word spoken always like a curse? Why was the colour of the thought-tone that accompanied the word always one of such superiority and hate? And why, if it ‘belonged' to a place, was anything they called ‘native' always taken away from that place?

Toev said that it was ‘basic economics', ‘supply and demand'. The Pictures were rare, which gave them great value. He worked for the offworlders on the Ocra plantation, and he peppered his wordspeech with offworlder ideas. The Pictures were worth huge credits in the homeworld, he said. And why complain? The offworlders paid a royalty fee of three per cent for every piece exported, and that money helped pay for the food, clothing and shelter they supplied.

But did we not eat and clothe and shelter ourselves before the offworlders arrived? And did we not have the Pictures then, too?
The thought rose in Cael's mind, but he kept it to himself. Toev, for all his faults, was still his mother's thirdmate and must be shown respect.

Rhae, of course, felt bound by no such restrictions. She bespoke her thirdmate silently in mind-speech, and he stood up angrily, stalking from the room and slamming the door. Cael watched him through the window, striding away to spend his credits on offworlder liquor. He would not be back for a long time.

Later, when it was dark and they thought Cael was sleeping, he had caught a scrap of his mother's unShielded mind-speech from Ielf's bed-platform.

– . . .
I
told him I regretted ever mating with him. That I could as well have shared my bed with an . . . offworlder . . .

At that point Cael had stopped listening. Sometimes, when you caught unguarded thoughts, you learned things about people that shocked you. In the dark, he had closed his eyes, and traced the Pictures again, on the Wall of his mind . . .

There was a sudden flurry of activity outside one of the structures on the Greenspace, and Cael focused his wandering attention. The memories faded; he was watching the crowd of offworlders, as they filed into the wide entrance. Inside, someone was speaking, and there was the sound of offworlder music, but he was too far away to hear what was being said.

DARYL

Johannsen was making one of his usual election speeches. Not that it was supposed to be anything of the kind – this occasion was supposed to be a celebration, not a rally. The guy just couldn't help himself. Once a politician, always a politician, I guess.

I'd just as soon have been back in New Geneva, celebrating in comfort, but I'd drawn bodyguard on the work roster, and having blown a week's credits backing my ego in a game of mahjong against Tieu, I needed the job.

What the J-man was doing, speaking at a celebration in a hick mining centre like Neuenstadt, I'll never know. But then one thing I'll never be (up there with rich, popular and white) is a politician. The party numbers-men must have decided it would mean more votes for Johannsen to be seen on the tube, celebrating the Centennial somewhere on the ‘frontier'.

What a joke! The only thing remotely ‘frontier' about Neuenstadt is the fact that the Deucalion Mining Corporation is so tied up in ripping out as much profit as they can from under the mountains, for as little outlay as possible, that they haven't even bothered trying to reclaim the desert, except for the couple of hundred hectares of Greenspace they use for all the ‘community' stuff. Like Centennial celebrations, for example.

The Greenspace, and, of course, the Ocra plantation. Talk to most people who drink Ocra, and they won't even be able to tell you where it comes from. They just think it's some kind of pretty special – and expensive – tea. Actually, it's made from the leaves of the Ocra tree. The Ocra's a small evergreen, about three metres high, and the only place it grows is on the Fringes of the desert and, to a lesser extent, on the flatlands just east of the Ranges. Even a mature tree looks like a young sapling. They never grow very thick and they have the most incredibly flexible trunks. It's how they survive the winds that howl in across the desert in the evenings. I've seen them bent almost flat to the ground in a bad blow.

The Elokoi have used the Ocra tree for everything since just about the beginning of time, but one thing they never did was to turn it into a drink. I think it might have something to do with the fact that Ocra tea, while it might fetch fifty creds a kilo in New Geneva, and thirty times that amount back on Earth, just makes the Elokoi violently ill. Feed them enough of it and they'll probably die on you.

The Ocra plantation is one of the few places where the townspeople and the ‘natives' really come into close contact. They use Elokoi to work the plantations because they handle the heat so much better than humans – even black ones, like me. It can hit 50 degrees during peak periods in summer out here.

But that's about as far as the contact goes. You won't see Elokoi on the streets of Neuenstadt, any more than you will in New Geneva itself. Talk to most people, and they'll tell you the Elokoi are little more than intelligent animals, even if they can read each other's thoughts and produce interesting artefacts. After all, they've got
fur
.
How can anything with fur be really intelligent? They don't even have a written language, do they? And it's difficult as all hell to teach them to read and write ours, so why bother?

How many people do you know who've actually read Tolhurst's books on the Elokoi, on disk or in hard-copy? How many people do you know who read
anything
any more? It's much easier to get your news from the tube. And unfortunately the Elokoi just aren't news. Not in the tube sense. They don't cause trouble, they stay on their Reserves, and they take what's dished out to them.

Not that it helped them all that much a century ago, when the first Colony ships arrived. It was okay for the first couple of months. The Elokoi were all part of the charm of the place. Sort of exotic, I guess. And cute. Until people started noticing that they seemed to be able to tell each other an awful lot without actually saying very much. I guess it would have been scary – and a little annoying – to encounter telepathy on a strange planet, when all the work they'd been doing on it back home since the twentieth century had led to nothing. Not that it excused the killings. But perhaps it did explain them . . .

Anyway, I got bored with the J-man's speech. As usual. He was a pretty impressive speaker. Anyone will tell you that. It's just that I'd pulled more than my share of bodyguard shifts in lots of out-of-the-way places, and he used the same lines and the same jokes every time. He couldn't get away with it in the city, of course. He was too over-exposed. But out in the sticks, it was a different ball game.

So I stepped outside. And that was when I saw the young Elokoi. He didn't know I saw him. I was too far away. I was just doing a random sweep with my 'scope, and I picked up his body-heat on infra-red. He was lying in some bushes a couple of hundred metres away, watching the activity on the Greenspace.

Not that there was too much activity at that moment. Johannsen was just warming up; talking about ‘pride and purpose' and carving a new nation out of the wilderness of a hostile planet. The usual stuff. As planets go, I don't think Deucalion is particularly hostile, but it all sounded pretty impressive – especially during a Centennial celebration. And it kept the hicks of Neuenstadt entertained.

But it left the young Elokoi without very much to look at. I slipped behind one of the smaller tents, and switched the 'scope from infra- to true-light. One thing they don't skimp on in Security is the hardware. It had a magnification of about ×200, with full colour hi-resolution video. I could see the creature like he was lying right there at my feet. It was as if I was staring straight into his huge black eyes. Only he had no idea I was there. He was only young, an adolescent. His fur was still a mottled brown, with only a few small patches of the silver-grey it would turn when he was fully mature. But he had an unusual white marking over his right eye, that extended to just behind his little pointed ear and made it look like he was wearing a headband.

What really surprised me was that he was there at all. Most Elokoi stay well away from town, and they aren't normally noted for being particularly curious about how we spend our time. I looked at my chrono. The J-man had a good half-hour to go, and none of the audience was carrying any concealed weapons, so I figured it was a safe bet. I headed for the southern end of the Greenspace, keeping the tents between me and the Elokoi's line of sight, then I began to circle around behind him . . .

CAEL

–
Cael!

Suddenly, Saebi's mind-speech crashed into his thoughts.

–
Behind you. Offworlder!

For a moment, Cael froze indecisively. Then, close behind him, he caught a rustle in the underbrush. He turned his head and found himself looking up into the eyes of a male offworlder.

The young Elokoi did not move. There was no point; hanging from a ring on his belt, the human had a shooting-stick. Even at full speed, an Elokoi could not outrun death.

Cael could feel his pulse racing, and yet a part of him was surprised at how calm he felt. The stories told him just what an Elokoi might expect, caught alone outside the Reserve, spying on the activities of the offworlders. That was why Saebi did most of her spying from high on the clifftop. But something told him that this time, the stories were wrong.

Of course, he could not read the thoughts of such an alien mind, but the colour of the mind-tone emanating from this offworlder was different from the others he had tasted. As different as the colour of this one's skin. There was no hatred in his tone. Nor any superiority. As he stood there, looking down, he seemed merely curious. His stance was relaxed and he had made no move to reach for his weapon.

Carefully, Cael stood up, not taking his eyes from those of the offworlder for a moment. They were brown eyes; dark, not pale like the eyes of most of the offworlders he had seen. But it was his skin that set him apart: a darker brown, almost black, and shining as he sweated in the heat.

The offworlder wiped a hand across his forehead and spoke in the harsh tongue of his people. ‘Do you speak Standard?'