Hellspark (15 page)

“So all we have to do is prove to our mutual satisfaction that the sprookjes are sentient,” Buntec observed. She glanced about and, failing to find a spot to stow the parcel she carried, raised an interrogatory hand at Alfvaen. “

All

!” snorted Alfvaen, misunderstanding the query.

“What I’m getting at,” Buntec said, handing the Siveyn the parcel and turning again to Tocohl,

“is that perhaps we should assume all their artifacts will be biological. We haven’t found anything else, after all.”

Tocohl stopped in the act of stowing to give Buntec her full attention. “You think we should be looking for other biological artifacts?”

“Why not?”

“Why not, indeed,” Tocohl agreed. “Do you have anything particular in mind?”

“I came straight off the farm.” Buntec grinned and lifted a foot. “That’s not mud you see, honey.—We had our share of gene-tailored crops and animals. Now that’s a biological artifact right there, but it’s not one you could spot. But even with all the high-order stuff, we did the basics. Grafting is about as basic as you can get, aside from the simple switch from hunting-gathering to genuine agriculture.”

“The sprookjes appear not to have made that switch,” said a new voice.

“Neither did dolphins,” said Tocohl. She looked at Buntec questioningly.

Beckoning in the newcomer, Buntec said, “Timosie Megeve, Tocohl Susumo, and Tinling Alfvaen.”

Timosie Megeve was Maldeneantine, from the severe wind-red of his oversuit to his earpips, held as they were by a thread about the cap of each ear—Maldeneantine frowned on violation of the body. His

GalLing’ held a slight but distinct accent, as did his hands, held close to his body as he spoke, making his gestures tight and spare. “Please, go on. I hadn’t meant to interrupt—”

Buntec swung her hands wide, encompassing all three of them in the arc. “

You think of cultivation as nice neat rows and the same sort of plant in each row, but you can get much better results in some cases by mixing plants. Using a second crop to keep out weeds or pests, or to nitrogenate the soil. And why bother with nice neat rows?” She turned to Tocohl.

“Maybe the sprookjes don’t like nice neat rows.”

“Maybe not,” Tocohl agreed. “I admit that’s a possibility; one I hadn’t thought of.” Choosing a spot of rug, she crossed her legs and sat, to consider the problem. “Let’s find out what they do like. Do you think you could spot a graft?”

“Bet your ass I can spot a graft, if I can find one new enough! I plan to start immediately.”

Buntec hauled over a chair and sprawled her chunky body into it, immovable. As if on cue, rain roared against

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the roof in earnest.

Alfvaen, still stowing her belongings, glared up at the sound and said, “Immediately isn’t possible on

Flashfever, is it?” She brought her eyes down to bear on Tocohl, where the glare softened to resignation.

“I wish there were something we could do now

.”

“

Now

,” said Buntec, “Tocohl can tell me all about cosying up to Vyrnwy.” The pronouncement drew a startled look from Timosie Megeve. Buntec waved an arm at him: “Edge-of-Dark got decent.

If there’s anything I can do to keep her decent, I’m for doing it. Bet your ass it’s worth the trouble to me.”

“… Cameras on!” said Kejesli.

A blurring of motion as the camera swung upward, and a moment before the image focused.

Another voice said, “Don’t make any sudden moves; you’ll scare them.”

Three tall sprookjes filled the center of the frame, taller than the ones in camp by perhaps a foot, if the stand of tick-ticks was any guide. They craned their smooth flexible necks forward, and their cheek-feathers ruffled. No sound came from the humans off-screen, only the glasslike tinkling of frostwillows graced the tape.

Then one of the sprookjes took a step forward, its gold crest and multicolored yoke brilliant in the patch of sunlight. “Hello,” said van Zoveel’s voice; and the sprookje spread its hands (as van Zoveel had done) as if to show them empty of weapons.

The sprookje said nothing.

“Hello,” said van Zoveel again. “They have hands, Captain. They may have a language.”

Tocohl had the eerie feeling that the sprookje was speaking, or lip-synching to van Zoveel’s words.

This was the fifth time she’d watched the tape and hearing it through her implant didn’t give the location of the sounds.

Maggy abruptly cut off the tape, thrusting Tocohl back into a jolting here-and-now as a shattering clap of thunder reverberated through swift-Kalat’s room. The cup of winter-flame leapt in her hand and spilled across the table.

“My apologies, Ish shan,” said Om im from the doorway.

“Not your fault,” said Tocohl. “The thunder caught me by surprise, not you. I had hoped I’d grow accustomed to it after two days of continuous racket.” She grinned. “That’s not to say I don’t like it, but a week of unending high would wear anyone out.”

Om im Chadeayne bowed, dripping, and came to settle himself in the chair across from her. “I know.

I suspect that’s one reason we’ve had so much trouble with personnel on this survey.”

Tocohl wiped winter-flame from her stack of hard-copy and gave him a sidelong questioning look.

“Ionized air,” he explained. “It evidently has the same effect on Hellsparks as it does on Bluesippans.

I’ve seen a couple of studies that show it to be an activator of sorts: creative people get more creative, and nuts get nuttier.”

“Have you mentioned this to layli-layli calulan

?”

“Yes,” he said, “but she knew about it—there are certain advantages to shamanism. She says there’s really nothing she can do, short of tranquilizing everybody, and—”

“She wouldn’t advise that either,” Tocohl finished. She leaned forward, folded her arms on the
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table.

(Maggy, have you got anything on that?)

(Let me look,) Maggy said, much to Tocohl’s amusement, and then there was silence. The pause was clearly provided for esthetic reasons, leaving Tocohl to wonder how Maggy would time its duration… by the length of time it would take a human to access the information from her by keyboard, perhaps?

She focused again on Om im. “Sorry,” she said, for her moment of inattention.

“Don’t be. It’s worth consideration. Be aware that it might lead you into rash action.”

Maggy broke silence, but only to comment, (It already has.) (Swift-Kalat gave the sprookjes a chance. lonization or no ionization, it would have been worth taking him up on it. What’s done is done, Maggy; there’s no point in nagging me about it.) Aloud, Tocohl said to Om im, “You think this ionization effect is responsible for the disturbances among the survey team?”

“Only partially,” he admitted. “As you noticed, we were chamfered by a moron. But a number of us have worked together before, and I’m seeing edginess I’ve never seen. Take Kejesli: I’ve worked with him on two previous occasions. He’s not a great captain, but he’s a good one ordinarily. Now nobody wants to talk to him.”

He drew his knife, considered the blade thoughtfully. There was no menace in the action, it was simply one of those things a Bluesippan will do when he wants to think. Reflecting in a blade, they termed it.

“No, I’m wrong,” he said, tapping the flat across his palm, “nobody wants to talk to him unless he comes to them—or will meet them in the common room. I don’t know why, but there it is.”

“I can answer that one,” Tocohl said. “The lowered ceiling in his quarters makes most of you mildly claustrophobic.”

“Come now, Hellspark. You’re right that he’s lowered his ceiling—and that’s unusual now that I

think of it—but

I’m hardly likely to bump my head…!”

Tocohl chuckled. “That has nothing to do with it. The ceiling in your own cabin is a good three feet higher than the one in Kejesli’s. It’s a matter of what you’re comfortable with. Am I to understand that

Kejesli’s quarters on previous surveys have had higher ceilings?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. Are you seriously telling me that’s why nobody wants to visit the captain?”

“Yes, the low ceiling makes you all uncomfortable… even if you aren’t likely to bump your head. The point is, that low ceiling makes him comfortable, and if what you say is true this is the first survey he’s felt he needed that. Perhaps that’s his reaction to the ionization stress.”

“Perhaps. But I think the haft of the matter is more likely what happened on Inumaru—or more properly what happened after Inumaru.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes, for both.” He frowned. “A lot of people were plenty angry when he refused to back Alfvaen, when MGE canned her.”

“You?”

“No, not really. I agree with him that contracting Cana’s disease hardly seems serendipitous. It was the rest of us he was trying to protect, after all. But…” Again he gazed into the fine blued blade of his dagger. “But. Who knows, maybe there was a serendipitous reason that she caught it with everyone else”—he tilted the blade toward her—“you see my point.”

“I do. I also call your attention to the fact that she and I are both here now.”

“Your presence, Ish shan, is certainly worth the trouble,” he acknowledged. He spread his hands
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in offering. “What can I do for you today?”

“Today you can tell me about Oloitokitok, and about the sprookjes,” she said. “I’ve seen the tapes;

now I need some on-the-spot reports.”

Om im tilted his head slightly to the side and said slowly, “Now, the moment before the cameras went on, one of the sprookjes—the one that gestured at van Zoveel—was tearing up a thousand-day-blue.”

“

That wasn’t in any of the reports,” said Tocohl.

“That’s why I mention it: you said you wanted any information related to the sprookjes.—It probably wasn’t mentioned because sprookjes don’t eat thousand-day-blues.”

“They just tear them up?”

Om im grinned. “No. That’s what seemed worth mentioning. On that occasion, I found a recently pulled patch of earth and the shredded remnants of the blue, but since then I’ve seen perhaps a hundred sprookjes pass by an equal number of thousand-day-blues without paying them the slightest attention.

Which is a little hard to do. The tapes won’t give you an idea of the smell of a thousand-day-blue either—it’s raunchy

.”

“Interesting,” said Tocohl. “Not very enlightening, but filed and noted.” A flash of light crackled outside the membrane, and Tocohl waited out the thunder before speaking, then said,

“Go on.”

“The fact that the sprookjes have hands was what made van Zoveel so excited. You should have seen him!” Om im Chadeayne’s eyes sparkled. “Perhaps you did: that sprookje was like his reflection.

But, as you saw on the tape, those sprookjes didn’t say a word and when van Zoveel got close, the sprookje nipped him. Everybody overreacted and the sprookjes got frightened and disappeared into the flashwood. Nobody followed; we were all too concerned about van Zoveel.”

Shifting forward in his chair, the Bluesippan continued. “Van Zoveel came to no harm, except for the reaming out Kejesli gave him for ignoring safety rules. “Evidently the sprookje didn’t either, because the went on nipping everybody they came across.” He smiled. “After a while, the pinprick became

Flashfever’s badge of acceptance.”

“But that came later?” asked Tocohl.

“That came later, when the parrots had moved into camp.—I wasn’t around the second time van Zovee tried talking to the sprookjes, so you’ll need another eyewitness.”

Tocohl filled in from the tapes she’d seen: van Zoveel had used his vocoder and tried high frequency thinking perhaps that the sprookjes might be that one-in-a-thousand species that heard only in the upper ranges. The sprookjes had heard it, all right—heard and run!

“I

can tell you,” Om im raised his voice as a gust of wind outside brought a particularly heavy crash of rain against the north wall, “

why they ran. We’d made some tapes—including the high-frequency range—of general flashwood noises. That’s not as easy as you might think: we had to hang the tapers from poles or all they’d have picked up was tk-tk, tk-tk, tk-tk

.” He made the appropriate scolding face to accompany the sound of the paired tongue-clicks.

Tocohl grinned. “So that’s why they’re called tick ticks—you named them but no one else on the team can do the tongue-clicks.”

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“Yes,” said Om im, “I should have left well enough alone, but you’ve heard them yourself and you know they sound like a chiding parent…!”

He grinned back before taking up his tale once more: “We—Buntec and Megeve and I—were taking advantage of an hour’s sunlight. You’ll find everybody does that here, sits outside and spreads her feathers for drying. We were studying our tapes but outside in the middle of the compound.

“And all of a sudden, the ugliest thing you ever saw—and believe me, I’ve seen some ugly things in my life—I’ve fallen on Stuckfish!—swooped out of the sky and ate the taper.

“It sat for a moment—it didn’t turn bilious green because it already was a bilious green—but it gave two resounding belches and vomited up the taper. Then it flew away, cursing, or so I assumed from its tone. Timosie cursed just as much over the loss of his taper, but Buntec and I must have howled for twenty minutes. It was at least that long before we could tell the rest of the team what had happened.”

He leaned forward, his expression turning serious. “But tape-belchers, we later found out, are nothing to laugh about. Megeve got a nasty slice taken out of his side when he got too close to one’s nest. Even tape-belchers don’t like tape-belchers: they tear each other up constantly.”

Tocohl had seen hard-copy on that too. Evidently the tape-belchers were territorial and held that territory beak and claw, especially against other tape-belchers. According to swift-Kalat’s notes, the taper-eating incident had probably been sparked by a recorded challenge of another tape-belcher that the live belcher had taken for genuine.