Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (6 page)

Or how did they know to move? Did they turn on and off their own switches? That seemed impossible.

It stayed inert, at least. He gained his feet, moving with what stealth he could, uphill, encountering, at least, no other eyes in the grass.

He settled into a nook higher on the hill, there to tuck up among the yet unravaged rocks, to catch his breath and regain his composure.

The aiji, he told himself, should have sent one of his assassins, not a speaker—should have sent some one of his guard accustomed to hazardous actions, who would know how to move silently and how to judge the hazards of this situation.

And perhaps having seen clearly that it was a matter outside his judgment, his wisest course would be to withdraw with what he had seen, and to advise the aiji and the hasdrawad to send someone with the skill to penetrate this devastation. He saw no safe approach.

Yet had any machine attacked him? Had the machines harmed the children, or could the Tachi prove such wandering machines had killed any of their herds?

He had to admit fear had swayed his judgment a moment ago. The clockwork machines had wreaked havoc
on the land, but not, though given opportunity, attacked people or livestock. The children that had reported machines had escaped unharmed, and nothing had tracked them to their village. The herdsmen that had spied on the landing places of the petal-sails had escaped, alive and well, without the machines of the moon-folk following them.

So perhaps the machines were deaf and even witless things, and he had been foolish to run, just now.

He was certainly glad no one was here to witness his dilemma, huddled in a hole in the dark, shivering, and not with the cold.

Was that the story he wanted to tell the aiji and his court, how he had fled, without any closer observation? He had confidence in his skills as an observer and as a negotiator. And could he fail to gather at least an assessment of numbers and position, which would be useful as the hasdrawad debated and the aiji arranged another, more aggressive, mission?

He dared not carry back a mistaken report, or ask for assassins, and perhaps, in an assassin’s too-quick reaction to threat, push the whole situation to hostilities that might not be anyone’s intention. He had come here plainly to ask the moon-folk what they were doing, and to have an answer from them for the aiji. He had always realized the chance of dying by error or by hostile action. It was a risk he had been willing to run, when the aiji asked him the question in the safety of the aiji’s apartments.

Could he retreat now, claiming the machines had threatened him—his only excuse but cowardice—knowing that report would be taken as a reasoned conclusion, and that it would loose irremediable consequences?

No. He could not. He could not remotely justify it. The aiji had seen applicability in his skills to make him the aiji’s considered choice for this mission.

He hoped the aiji had also seen intelligence, and judgment, and resourcefulness, not alone for the honor of the aiji’s opinion, but because his personal resources seemed
very scant just now, and the night was very cold, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

T
he morning came as milky pale as the first morning Ian had wakened on the planet, with a scattering of improbably pink clouds. Pink … and gold, and pearl white, with a little mist in the low places. Condensation due to the air being saturated with moisture and the ambient temperature reaching the critical point: weather. The moisture came from previous precipitation and from evaporation from the ground and from respiration from the plants. One could generate the same effect in the herbarium, up on the station, by a combination of natural and mechanical processes.

It was a pretty effect there. But they’d never thought of pink clouds. A shame, Ian thought. They should put gels on the spots and arrange tours. See the planetary effects.

It’s pretty, Julio had said from the barracks door. —It’s pretty, it’s cold, have fun.

Estevez with his regulated temperatures and filtered air: a life systems engineer with an allergy to the environment was not a happy experimental specimen for the medics.

Estevez flinched from the day sky. And Estevez admit to his fear? Retreat from it? Not if he had to go back in and throw up, after his glance at the weather. Allergies, Estevez said.

And it was funny, but it wasn’t, since Estevez couldn’t leave this world. Steroids weren’t the long-term answer, and they hadn’t had an immune response problem in a hundred years and more on-station. Gene-patching wasn’t an option for their little earth-sciences/chemistry lab
down on the planet, they couldn’t send specimens Upstairs, they hadn’t anybody trained to run the equipment if they could get it down here, they weren’t a hundred percent sure a gene-patch was what they ought to try under exotic circumstances, anyway, and, meanwhile, Archive had come up with an older, simpler idea: find the substance. Try desensitization.

Fine, Estevez said, sleepless with steroids, stuck with needles, patched with tape, experimented on by botanists and zoologists. He’d try anything. Meanwhile Estevez stayed under filtration and stayed comfortable and maintained his sense of humor—except it was scary to react to something after two months down here. The medics thought it should take longer. They weren’t sure. There’d never been a hundred-fifty-year-old genetically isolated, radiation-stressed human population exposed to an alien world. Not in their records.

Wonderful, said Estevez.

Meanwhile all of them who went out on Survey, laying down their little grids of tape and counting grass species, took careful specimens of anything new, bushes, grasses, seeding and sporing plants and fungi and the like. The medics waved a part of that sample past Estevez’ nose and taped other samples to his skin. They hung simple adhesive strips in the wind, and counted what impacted them, and analyzed snips of the filters, figuring at first that whatever Estevez was reacting to had to be airborne. But they were working on a new theory now, and analyzed samples of soil and dead grasses, looking for molds.

So they added the soil punch to the regular test, and extended the grid of samples beyond the sterilized ground. Ian took a soil sample every hundred meters, a punch of a plastic tube down past the root-line, and left his blue plastic tube inserts in a row down the hillside, to pick up on the way back. The old hands down here could walk briskly. He ambled, stopped often, lungs aching, on the long easterly climb uphill, into the rising sun.

He’d spotted different color on the east hill yesterday. It looked like a blooming plant, and if it did bloom, in the economy of nature, one could guess it did that to put forth genetic material for sexual combination to produce seed, as the grasses did, a likely and advantageous system according to their own Earthly prejudice.

That indicated, then, that it was shedding something into the air, and if it was shedding something, one might well argue it was pollen. The committee was still arguing the matter—quasi-pollen or quasi-spores from quasi-flowers, but ask Estevez if
he
cared. The reproduction of the broadleaf grasses might need debate, and possibly a new nomenclature, but those looked to him like flowers of the sort they grew in the herbarium from Earth seed, red-violet, specifically, different than anything they had yet seen in the landscape.

And sweet-smelling, deliciously sweet, once he’d climbed far enough up the hill to catch the scent, and to take his whole-plant sample.

Stowing that, with best hopes for Estevez, he drew his square, pegging one-meter lines on a plastic grid, took up his handheld recorder, and began counting ordinary grasses—there was a type, Lawton argued, that, with 136 grains per ear on average, showed evidence of artificial selection, probably had drifted from cultivated fields, and that that might let them, at safe distance, gather information on the edibility for humans of what the natives cultivated.

Which would tell them—

A siren blasted out abruptly, down among the base buildings. Ian froze, sitting as he was, looked downhill and looked about him, thinking some surveyor across the valley must have misjudged his position and triggered the perimeter alarm.

Grass near him whispered out of time with the breeze.

Startled, he spun on one knee and found himself staring at a pair of brown, dusty boots, and the hem of a brown,
knee-length, many-buttoned coat, and the tall perspective of an ebon-skinned giant.

He couldn’t move. He heard the alarm sounding in the distance, and realized in shock that he was the emergency, and this was the cause of it, this …
man
, this creature that had picked his approach and his moment and chosen
him
…

The native beckoned to him, once, twice, unmistakably, to get up. Impossible not to recognize the intelligence, the purpose, the civilized nature of the native, who was black as night, with a face not by any remotest kinship human, but sternly handsome in its planes and angles.

A third time it beckoned. He saw no imminent threat as he rose. It was imposingly tall—more than a head taller—and broad-shouldered. He saw no weapons about its person—in which thought he suddenly realized that it might take some of his equipment for weaponlike. He was afraid to reach even for the probe he’d used, afraid to make a move in any direction, recalling all Earth’s history of war-making mistakes and missed chances for reason.

But he moved a cautious hand to his breast pocket, thumbed the switch on the pocket radio to the open position, all the while watching for the least alarmed reaction.

He said quietly, “Base, I’ve made contact,” and watched the native’s face. “Base.” He kept his voice low, his eyes constantly on the intruder, as if he were speaking to him. “Base, this is Ian. I’ve made contact. I’ve got company out here.”

The native still offered no objection, but in sudden fear of an imprudent answer from Base blasting out, he thumbed the volume control in the direction he devoutly hoped was down.

“Nil li sat-ha,” the intruder said to him—it sounded like that, at least, a low and, thank God, reasonable-sounding voice. He indicated the downward course toward the base, making his own invitation.

It motioned again up the hill.

“Base,” he said, trying not to let his voice shake, “that
was him talking. I think it’s a he. It looks to be. Tall fellow. Well-dressed. No weapons. Don’t come up here. He seems civilized. I’m going to do what he wants, I’m going out of perimeter, I don’t want to alarm him. Stay back. And don’t talk to me.”

A hard, strong grip closed on his arm. He looked around in startlement at the intruder—no one in his life had ever laid hands on him with that intimation of force and strength. But the situation was suddenly sliding into confusion: a glance downhill showed him his friends running upslope toward them, the intruder was clearly alarmed—and their lives and everything they had worked for were at risk if someone miscalculated now.

Come, the intruder wanted. And a part of him wanted more than anything to run back to safety, back to things he knew, things he could deal with on his own terms.

But the hand that pulled at his arm was too strong to fight to any advantage, and he went where it wanted, still trying to think what to do—he left the communications switch open, hoping no one would chase them or corner the alien,—panted, “Base, it’s all right, I’m safe, it’s wanting to talk, for God’s sake, base, tell them pull back. …”

But he had no idea why they were coming headlong after him, whether they knew something he didn’t or whether base was talking at all. They couldn’t fight. They had a handful of weapons against the chance of animal intrusions, but they were a very few humans on a world they knew wasn’t theirs, they couldn’t get off the planet, nobody could get down to them, not even the Guild, until the lander was built, and there was no way they could hold out against a native population that decided to attack them.

Someone downslope shouted, he didn’t know what, but the intruder began to run and he found himself compelled by a grip on his arm that hauled him along at a breathless, stumbling pace.

“Stay back!” he said to whoever was listening. “Dammit, he’s not hurting me, don’t chase him!”

Breath failed him. He wasn’t acclimated to the air, he couldn’t run and talk, he struggled to keep his feet under him as the intruder dodged around brush and rocks and pulled him along.

Then his ankles did go, and pitched him onto his knees on the stony hill, the intruder still holding his arm with a grip that cut off the blood to his hand.

He looked up at the native, then, scared, trying to get his breath, trying to get up, and it snatched him up, wrenching his arm as it looked back the way they had come, as afraid as he was, he thought, despite the pain.

“I’m all right,” he said for the radio. “I’ve turned the volume off. I can’t hear you. I don’t want to scare the man, don’t come after me!”

The native jerked him along, and he cooperated at the best pace he could manage, his lungs burning, his breath coming on a knife’s edge. His head spun, then, and he had the intruder half-carrying him, while he gasped after air and saw the world in shades of gray.

At last it dragged him into a dark place and smothered him with its body and his coat. He made no protest, except to try to breathe, and, getting his face clear, lay in the shelter of the native’s panting body, wanting only to stay alive, and not to provoke any craziness out of anyone.

“L
eft with the creature,” Patton Bretano said, with a sinking heart, and Pardino, down on the surface, went on about how they’d gotten radio transmission, they
were still getting it, and they wanted a decision from the station.

Patton Bretano sat with the receiver in his hand, listening to it, asking himself why it was
his
son, and what kind of craziness had sent Ian out by himself, or why Ian hadn’t run for the base instead of away from it, but he feared he knew that answer already.