Partnership (29 page)

"If you people would just listen" said Blaize, ex-asperated, "there wouldn't be any need for a trial. Didn't you hear what I said about the Loosies being intelligent?"

Micaya shook her head. "You've been here too long if you've started to cherish that illusion. Face the facts.

On the way here I downloaded the survey reports off the Net. The native species don't exhibit any of the key signs of intelligence — no language, no clothing, no agriculture, no political organization."

"They've always had language," Blaize insisted.

"They've got clothing and agriculture now. As for a political organization, just think about PTA for a minute and then ask yourself if that's any proof of intelligence."

Micaya laughed in spite of herself. "You have a point. But we didn't come here to argue ISS certifica-tion standards—"

"Maybe not," said Blaize, "but since you are here, and — " He looked suspicious for a moment "You're not working with Harmon, are you?"

"Who?"

Micaya must have looked surprised enough to convince Blaize.

"My predecessor here — my supervisor now.

Crooked enough to hide behind a spiral staircase,"

Blaize explained briefly. "He's the reason — well, one of the reasons — I had to do things in this way. Although even an honest PTA supervisor probably wouldn't have approved. I have bent a few regulations," he admitted. "But just do me the favor of taking a brief tour of the settlement. 1 think you'll understand a lot better after I show you a few things."

Micaya looked at Forister and shrugged. "I don't see any harm in it"

"I suppose if we don't go along, you'll apply for a mistrial on the grounds that you weren't allowed to show evidence in your defense?" Forister inquired.

Blaize's face turned almost as red as his hair. "Look.

You're in contact with your brainship via that button.

If it's inactivated, or if she sees anything she doesn't like, the full recording can go over the Net to Central at once. What will it cost you to listen to me for once in your life, Uncle Forister? God knows nobody else in our family ever bothered," he added, "but I used to think you were different"

Forister sighed. "I'm listening. I'm listening."

"Good! Just come this way, please." Blaize pushed between Forister and Micaya and flung the door of the hut open. Sunlight and gaudy flowers and a thousand shades of green danced before them, all the brighter for the contrast with the shabby interior of the hut Blaize started down the path, talking a mile a minute over his shoulder as the other two followed him. Nancia activated the failsafe double recording system that would transmit every word and image direcdy to Vega Base as well as to her own storage centers.

"The Loosies never developed spoken language because they're telepaths," Blaize explained. "I know, I 228

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know, that's hard to prove directly, but just wait till you watch them work together! When the CenDip team gets here, they should bring some top Psych staff.

Open-minded ones, who'll arrange tests without assuming from the start that I'm lying. Mind you, it took me a while to figure out myself," he babbled cheerfully, turning from the main path to a secondary one that wound through head-high reeds, "especially at the beginning, when they all looked alike to me. I was so damn bored, and those croaking noises they make got on my nerves, so I started trying to teach a couple of them ASL."

"What?" Micaya interrupted.

"It's an antique hand-speech, used for the incurably deaf back before we learned how to direct-install auditory synapses on metachip and hook them into the appropriate brain centers," Forister told her. "Blaize always did have strange hobbies.

But teaching the Loosies a few signals in sign language doesn't prove they're intelligent, boy. A couple of twentieth-century researchers did that much with chimpanzees."

"Yeah, well, that's all I hoped to achieve in the beginning," Blaize said. "Believe me, after a couple of months on Angalia, a signing chimp would have seemed like real good company! But they picked it up like—like a brainship picks up Singularity math. That was the first surprise. I was teaching three of them who sort of hung around — Humdrum and Bobolin and Gargle." He flushed briefly. "Yeah, I know they're damn silly names, but I didn't know they were people then. 1 was just copying some of the strangled noises they made when I would talk to them and they'd try to talk back, before I realized they'd never developed the vocal equipment for true speech — that was when I started on the sign language — sorry, I'm getting mixed up. Where was I?"

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"Teaching Humdrum to sign 'Where ration bar?'"

Forister told him.

Blaize laughed. "Not bloody likely. His first sentence was more like, 'Why did Paunch Man throw ration bars in mud and treat us like animals, and why do you make stacks and hand them to us one at a time with proper respect?'"

He stopped and turned to face them, his freckled face dead serious for once. "Can you imagine how it felt to hear a question like that coming from somebody I'd been thinking of as — oh, like a trained spider to while away the hours of my prison sentence? I knew then that the Loosies weren't animals. Figuring out what to do about it," he said, resuming his progress through the reeds, "took a little longer."

"I deduced the telepathy when I noticed that a week after Humdrum caught on to ASL, every Loosie who showed up for rations was signing to me. Fluently. He couldn't have taught them the rudiments that fast; they had to have been picking the signs and the language structure out of his mind as the lessons progressed. In fact, they told me as much when I asked about it. Which wasn't all that easy. ASL doesn't have a sign for 'telepathy,' and since they don't know English, I couldn't spell it out. B ut eventually we got our signals straight."

"If they were as intelligent as you claim, and had a system of communication, they should have advanced beyond their primitive level without intervention,"

Micaya objected.

"Easy for you to say," Blaize told her. "I wonder how well you or any of us would do if we had evolved on a planet where the only surface fit for farming is rearranged by violent floods once a week, where the caves we used for shelter crumbled and were shattered by periodic quakes? They had a hunter-gatherer culture until a few generations ago — a small population, 230

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not more than the planet could support, ranging through the semi-stable marshlands on the far side of this continent"

"Then what?"

"Then," Blaize said, "they were discovered. The first survey thought they might be intelligent and requested Planetary Technical Aid support By the time the second survey team came along, this PTA station had been handing out unlimited supplies of ration bricks for three generations, and the culture was effectively destroyed. Instead of small bands of hunter-gatherers, you had one large colony with no food-gathering skill. There were far too many for the existing marshlands to support, with nothing to do and no hope of survival except to collect the ration bricks. The second survey, not unnaturally, decided they weren't intelligent. After all, nobody on the survey team was stuck here long enough and lonely enough to try signing to them. But they recommended on humanitarian grounds, or kindness to animals, or whatever, that we not discontinue PTA shipments and starve them to death."

"But if they're intelligent— " Forister objected again.

They are. And they can build for themselves. They just needed a—a place to start" Blaize pushed the last of the feathery reeds aside with both arms and stepped to one side, inviting Forister and Micaya to admire die view of the mine. "This was the first step."

From this vantage point, Nancia observed, they could see far more of die mine's operations than had been visible from the landing field. Teams of blue-uniformed workers were scattered across the hillside and grouped under the roofs of the unwalled processing sheds — twenty, forty, more than fifty of them, divided into groups of four or five individuals who worked at their chosen tasks with perfect unanimity and wordless efficiency.

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"Could you train chimps to do that?" Blaize demanded.

Forister shook his head slowly. "And I suppose the mine is the source of your prodigious wealth?"

"It's certainly the source of the credits in that Net account," Blaize agreed.

"Exploiting intelligent sentients isn't any better dian exploiting dumb animals."

Blaize ground his teeth; Nancia could pick up the clicks and grinding sounds through the contact button. "I. Am. Not. Exploiting. Anybody," he said.

"Look, Uncle Forister. When I got here, the Loosies didn't have ISS. They couldn't be owners of record for the mine, they couldn't have Net accounts, they couldn't palmprint official documents. Of course my code is on everything! Who else could front for them?*1

"And your code is also," Micaya pointed out, "as-sociated with the illegal resale of PTA ration shipments that were supposed to be distributed to the natives."

Blaize nodded wearily. "Needed money to get the mine started again. I tried to get a loan, but the banks wanted to know what I was going to do with it When I told them I was going to revive the Angalia mines they told me I couldn't do that because there was no source of labor on the planet, because the CenDip report said Angalia had no intelligent sentients. Without credits, I couldn't start the mine. And without the credits for the mine, I couldn't — well, we'll get to that in a while.

Look, I falsified a few PTA reports. Said the population had tripled. Ration bars aren't exactly a hot item in international trade," he said dryly. "I had to have a targe surplus to bargain with. Fortunately, I had an outlet right at hand. That bastard Harmon was keeping the Loosies at semi-starvation level so he could trade some of their ration bars for liquor. I had to have a little talk with the black market trader to convince him I wanted hard credits instead of hard liquor, but 232

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eventually he ... um ... came around to my way of thinking."

"Don't tell me how you persuaded him," Forister said quickly. "I don't want to know."

Blaize grinned. "Okay. Anyway, you've seen the mine; now I want to take you on a tour of Project Two.

Well have to go up the mountain for that, I'm afraid; I want you to get the long view."

The path up beside the mine was steep, but switchbacks and steps made it easier than it looked from a distance. As they passed the mine door, several Loosies looked up from their work to smile at Blaize.

Their loose-skinned, grayish hands moved rapidly back and forth in flickering gestures that Nancia captured as imageflashes for later interpretation. For now, she was willing to accept Blaize's translation.

"They're asking who my mentally handicapped friends are, and whether you'd like a ride down to the processing sheds," he explained.

As he spoke, the team working at the mine's mouth filled a wagon with chunks of ore and poised it at the head of the rails swooping down into the valley. The three workers perched on top of the ore, hands gripping the sides of the wagon, and a member of the next team gave them a shove that started them off on a roller-coaster glide down the hill, swerving around rocks and dipping into hollows.

"Lost a few that way, at the start," Blaize commented, "before I remodeled the rail track so that the dips wouldn't throw anybody off."

The vegetation thinned out above the mine, giving them a view of the terraced gardens that replaced clifls and rocks wherever a shovelful of soil could find a place. Micaya sniffed appreciatively and commented on the pungent aroma of the herbs growing in the mini-gardens.

At the top of the mountain they enjoyed a PARTNERSHIP

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panoramic view of what had been the Great Angalia Mud Basin, now a grassland in which fields of grain shared space with brightly colored blossoms.

"This'll be our first year's crop," Blaize said. Td just finished the necessary preparations for planting last year, when those nitwits I came out with were here for the meeting. None of them noticed anything different, of course. But if your brainship can call up files of the first survey — "

"She can do better than that," Forister told him.

"She's been here herself. Nancia, do you observe any changes here? Apart from the growing things, that is?"

Blaize paled between his freckles. "Nanria?"

"You have some problem with my brainship?"

Forister inquired mildly.

"We... didn't part on the best of terms," Blaize con*

fessed in a strangled voice.

Nancia was feeling rather more kindly towards Blaize now, but she wasn't quite ready to admit that to him. "Horizon shows changes between all major peaks," she reported in the neutral, tinny voice forced on her by the contact button's limitations. "Magnifica-tion of one area of variation shows new construction of rammed earth and boulders blocking a system of gul-lies that appears now to be under 17.35 meters of water...."

"Lake Humdrum," Blaize said. "My first terraform-ing effort. Trouble was, I had to block all the outlets, and build up reservoir walls, before I could guarantee the floods wouldn't crash through the mud basin.

Then we needed irrigation ditches down into the basin. And silt collection systems, so that the soil the floods used to carry down here would still reach the basin and renew its topsoil. You want to come back down now? I want to show you the grain samples and the test results. It's not quite ripe yet, of course," he chattered as he led the way down the path, "but it's 234

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going to beaprime crop. Amaranth-19-hyper-J Rev 2, if that means anything to you. High in protein, loaded with natural nutrients, super yield from that rich topsoil. We should be able to feed ourselves and have a surplus to sell. That's why I waited until now to claim Intelligent Sentient Status for the Loosies; I wanted to be sure we would be self-sufficient in case PTA decided to curtail the ration shipments. And I didn't dare start planting until the whole flood control system had been put in place and tested. The Loosies would never have trusted me again if they'd put in a crop and seen it washed away. We needed a lot of heavy-duty ter-rafbrming equipment; sucked up all the mine's profits for the first three years."