Remnant Population (12 page)

All day she told herself it was only natural. Of course they had to eat, and of course nothing in the village could feed them, any more than she could eat the fruit of the great forest trees. Why shouldn’t they hunt? Humans hunted, if they lived on worlds with game they could eat, and they ate farm animals elsewhere. She herself liked meat. She didn’t like killing, but then she hadn’t learned how early enough. These things had been hunting from childhood, she supposed. It didn’t mean they were killers, really. Killing things to eat was not the same thing as killing them just to kill.

But the treeclimbers were just as dead. And she had not seen them eating the treeclimbers. Suppose it had been only sport, only for fun. She shivered. Those long knives… had that been how the other colonists died? No, because she had heard explosions. They had spoken of other weapons. She had seen no weapons but the knives, no tools but the musical instruments. Were these the same aliens that killed, or something else? And how had they lived here for forty years without meeting them before? In the afternoon, she went back to the center, secured the door to the control room as well as she could, and latched the other doors, including the outside door. Then she went back to her house. It was not secure — nothing was secure — but she wanted to sleep in her own bed again. If it was the last night, very well: she would be comfortable for that night, at least. No more sleeping on floors, whatever happened. She had stretched out on her bed, her body happily finding its hollows and bulges again, when she heard them coming back up the lane in the dark. Grunts, squawks, more of the low churring that sounded like contentment. The one with the set of tubes was blowing into it again; she could hear the notes above their gabble.

She knew when they came to the locked center by the chorus of squawks. Anger? Disappointment? Who could tell, with aliens? Thumps against that door. Would it hold? More gabble. Then, inevitably, thumps against her own door, followed by a trill from that odd collection of tubes. Ofelia felt a rush of hot anger. They had the whole village to live in: why did they have to bother her? Why couldn’t they let her rest?

Didn’t they know she was an old woman, a tired old woman who needed her sleep? Of course they didn’t. She had no idea how old they were. Grumbling, she got off the bed, turned on the light, and went to the door, in no humor to cooperate with them, whatever they wanted. The one with the instrument held it up, shook it, and then gestured to the center. It probably meant it wanted to hold another musical night there. She didn’t. She wanted to sleep in her own bed, all night long, without interruption. And she wasn’t about to turn them loose in the center without her supervision. “Sleep somewhere else,” she said. “All the houses are open.” Except hers; she stood in the door determined not to let them in.

The one with the instrument shook it again, pointed again, and this time held out two of its long-nailed digits. Two? Two
what
? Two musical evenings, two nights, two of the creatures? Now it pointed at the instrument, and then at the center door, then held up two digits.

“I don’t want you in there alone,” Ofelia said, “You’ll make more mess.” The many eyes blinked at her. The creatures did not go away; they did not move. She knew if she shut the door, they would bang on it again. She knew she could not get to sleep until they were satisfied. It was as bad as having the family again. She knew she had given up a long moment before she was ready to admit it to them, “All
right
,” she said. “But you’re not spending the night there.” They would, and she couldn’t stop them. She would have to decide where to sleep, and her body had already made that decision. She needed her own bed. When she opened the center door, two of them slipped past her and darted into the sewing room on the right. The rest stayed in the lane. In the light streaming out from the hall, Ofelia saw that no tree-climber bodies hung from their belts; they must have eaten them. She shivered. The two creatures reappeared, one with another bundle of tubes, and one with the gourd hung with strings and beads. They waved these at the others, and with a series of rapid grunts the whole company moved off down the lane, eastward as they had come.

All they had wanted was their instruments. Ofelia could hardly believe it. She turned off the lights, relatched the door, and watched as the shadowy forms melted into the darkness farther down the lane. Back in her own house she lay a long time awake in her bed. Who could imagine how aliens thought? Who could imagine why they did what they did? The music she enjoyed, but the killing… so quick, so easy, so casual… though she had seen people kill like that, the quick twist of the neck for chickens, the quick thrust of the knife for sheep, for calves. But not at a run, not loping across the grass. She could not help but imagine herself, her old stiff body in a shambling, hopeless run, with the creatures chasing her, laughing to each other, enjoying the chase, until one of those hard-taloned hands caught her by the neck, and one of those long sharp knives emptied her belly onto the grass.

The soft music trickled in through the closed shutters of her windows. They had settled somewhere nearby, perhaps in a corner of some garden, and now they made music. She imagined the comfort of having full bellies after several hungry days during the storm, and heard that in the music. Not that it made sense. She fell asleep at last, arguing with herself about whether it made more sense to sing or sleep after a feast. Her dreams terrified, but never quite woke her. Morning. Still muggy, but less so. A stronger breeze from the sea, damp but fresher. Ofelia woke comforted by her own bed, by the familiar shapes and smells of her own room. The terrors of the dreams translated quickly to the comfort of her own space, her own time.

She went into her garden before the sun was high, for the first time in too many days. The tracks of the creatures didn’t bother her; they had mashed only two bean plants and one of the green squashes. She busied herself restaking the tomatoes, raking away the rotting leaves, loosening the soil. She found a little yellow tomato, one of the sweet ones, that she had missed the evening before, and put it straight into her mouth. Sweet, juicy. A grunt across the fence; Ofelia looked up to see one of the creatures watching her. How had it come so silently? She kept turning up leaves, looking for crawlers, for slimerods, for aphids, for another ripe yellow tomato. A slimerod halfway up the stem; she picked it off and cracked it. The creature squawked. Ofelia looked at it. It held out its digits.

“You want the slimerod?” She could not believe that. Slimerods were slimy, itchy nuisances. But she walked over and dropped the slimerod into that waiting hand. The creature grunted at her, and flipped the slimerod into its mouth.

Ofelia tasted bile at the back of her throat. Eating a
slimerod
. “That’s disgusting,” she said, even though she knew it couldn’t understand. Its expression didn’t change. She wasn’t sure what its expression meant anyway. She went back to her work. When she found another slimerod, she looked over her shoulder. There it was, watching her. She held up the slimerod. It reached out; this time she gave it the slimerod uncracked. Again that flip of the hand, that quick crunch and gulp. Utterly disgusting. Yet slimerods were native here, so something must eat them. Why not these creatures?

She found another slimerod under one of the squash plants, already halfway through the stem. Dratted tiling. She pulled it out, handed it to the waiting creature as it leaned over the fence, and then pulled off the unripe squashes. The vine would die; she would save what she could. She could pickle the little squashes just like cucumbers, at this stage. Sometimes she even ate them raw, though most were too bitter. She nibbled the end of one. Not too bad. The creature grunted sharply, and when she looked up, its eyes had narrowed, just like the one with the mop. Distress? Well, she had been distressed when it ate the slimerod. Defiantly, she bit a larger chunk from the squash, only to find it too bitter after all. She swallowed with difficulty, tossed the rest of the squash across the garden toward the compost trench, and smiled at the creature.

It did not move for a long moment, then seemed to shake itself slightly before turning to walk off. Westward down the lane, she saw three others, walking with that high-stepping easy stride that made her think of them all as exuberant children. Ofelia shrugged and went back to work. She had a lot to do, and today she really must check on the animals.

The sheep, when she found them, were huddled at the west end of their long meadow, ears twitching nervously. When she tried to approach them, they broke into a panicky run as if she were a wolf. She didn’t try to chase them; she knew better. Instead she tried to count… were there as many? It seemed so, though in the flowing mass of gray backs and twinkling feet she could not be sure. Had the alien creatures been tormenting them? It seemed possible, but she had no proof. She went on around the west end of the village to the river meadows. The river had risen, spreading out from its banks. The cattle, unlike the sheep, seemed calm, spread out grazing between the pump house and the old calf-pen. Ofelia counted them; none were missing.

Back in the village itself, she began to make her rounds looking for damage from the storm. Broken shutters, damage to roofs, fallen trees. From time to time she saw the creatures in the distance, but none of them approached her. She couldn’t figure out what they were doing, but if they didn’t bother her or the animals she really didn’t care.

By nightfall, Ofelia had surveyed the village and knew all the repairs she would have to make. She remembered that she had considered letting some of the buildings go, not worrying about them any more, but that had been pre-storm depression. She never had any energy before a big storm. Now it was over, and she could not imagine just letting things slide, no matter how tired she was. She opened the center to check the weather monitor. No storms approaching, though far to the east another whirl of clouds might become one. Two storms in one season were very rare; it had happened only twice in forty-odd years. Probably that storm would veer away and go somewhere else. She hoped so.

She unlocked the keyboards to enter a brief report on the past few days. How could she say this? Even though she knew no one would ever read it, she didn’t want it to be as crazy as it was. “In the middle of the storm, I went out and there was an alien in the street.” That sounded like an entertainment cube, something made up by the crazy people. She wasn’t crazy. They were real. How could she make them sound real?

Clicking in the hall. Of course they would have come in; she hadn’t closed the door. She looked around. One was watching her, its eyes bright and interested. Of course they were real. It held the gourd with the beaded strings wrapped around it; when she met its gaze, it shook the gourd. What was that? Invitation? Explanation? She didn’t know. She didn’t really want to think about it; she wanted to get this into the record in some way that made sense to her, that might make sense to another human, even though another human wouldn’t see it.

Her experience in writing about the colony’s past was not enough. She could tell about the loves and hates, the betrayals, the quarrels, because she understood them fully. She knew exactly how the wife felt when the husband was jealous for no cause — or with cause. She knew how the human feelings acted on each other, flavoring the simplest interaction with complicated swirls of hidden meaning. But these? It would be like writing about animals, and she had never written about animals. It would be like writing about animals that could think, and she had never known animals that could think. She waved dismissively at the creature; it withdrew. Was it understanding her gesture, or just not that interested in what she was doing?

“In the middle of the storm…” She read what she had written. “Alien” was the wrong word, really. These were native animals, like the treeclimbers. What was the word for that? She didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to ask the dictionary function now. Aliens would do for the moment, or native beings. Creatures. “I thought it was a pile of trash, and then it looked at me.” That sounded sufficiently crazy too. But that’s what she’d seen, a pile of trash with eyes. Let them laugh at her, the ones who might read this if anyone ever came to find out about those who had died.

Slowly, with many corrections, she tried to put it down. It was not, as she’d hoped, a short task. For it to make any sense at all, she had to put in her feelings, her inferences, her assumptions. She had to put in everything she had done, and everything they had done. She had to try to reproduce the sounds they made… no, she didn’t. The automatic recorders would have recorded some of it. She could insert that into her own record, if she could retrieve the right segment.

When she leaned over to the other control board, to enter the search criteria for the segments she wanted, her back cramped. She gasped with the pain, and a squawk from outside let her know that the creatures were still observing her, as much as she was observing them.

It was late. It was very, very late and she would sleep late in the morning and feel groggy and miserable half the day if she didn’t go home and go to sleep now. She shut the boards down, resetting the alarms, and got herself upright with many pops and creaks from her joints. Three of the creatures were sitting in the hall when she came out. She shut the door behind her, retied the latch she’d improvised, and said firmly “Let it alone. It’s not for you.” They said nothing, only watched her as she went down the hall. Would they follow? No. They wanted to be in the center without her, and she was not strong enough to get them out. At the moment she didn’t care. She wanted sleep, in her own bed, and if they destroyed all the machines that had helped her stay alive, then she would die. But she would not worry about it now.

The next morning, Ofelia woke with the sensation that she had been fuzzy-headed for days, missing things she should have seen. Aliens, yes. Intelligent aliens, yes. And they hadn’t killed her yet. They had…
studied
her. They had arrived before the storm, how long before she could not know. The houses she had found open, the things she had found moved… they had moved them. They were not thinking of her as prey, or as an enemy, but as something interesting.

She did not have to fear the chase, the long knives.

Unless they were like some people she had known.

She could not know that. She could not know anything, unless she studied them as well. She had no idea how to do that, but she could try, as she had tried to understand Sara’s third child, who had been born without the gift of speech, who had mewed and screamed.

They did not scream. When she went out into her garden, one of them was there, carefully looking among her plants. She suspected it wanted more slimerods, but it would not find them among the maize rows. She found one under the tomatoes, a favorite haunt, and called to the creature. “Here’s one.” It looked around; she pointed to the slimerod. It came, picked it up deftly, and flipped it into its mouth. Ofelia managed not to shudder. “We call them slimerods,” Ofelia said. She realized that she had not really looked at the creatures more than she had to. She had resisted thinking of those taloned digits as fingers… of the collection of them as hands. Yet they functioned as her hands functioned. Now she looked. Four digits, not five. One, as in her own hand, broader and thicker, angled to oppose the others. This made the hand look longer and narrower than it really was. The wrist too was different, though she could not define it. Did the creature have two bones in its lower arm, or only one? One bone in the upper arm, or more? Were the bones
bones
or something else?

Four fingers, she told herself. Four-fingered hands. She watched, as the creature turned over more tomato leaves itself. The long, hard talons didn’t interfere with precise, delicate movement. It didn’t tear the leaves; it didn’t miss turning any of them.

She looked down at the creature’s feet. All she had seen at first were long feet with splayed toes. Now she noticed four toes, three almost parallel and one angled aside, all with heavy dark toenails blunted at the tips. No… the angled one had a narrow front, almost spike-like. This creature, placidly squatting in her garden and turning up leaves, had its feet flat on the soil, but the tracks she had seen didn’t show the heel. How, then, did it walk? On its toes? She turned away and looked over the lane fence. There were two of them far down the lane; she couldn’t tell.

She wasn’t a… whatever it was that studied animals or aliens. She didn’t know how to do this. It grunted, and she turned back to it. It held a ripening tomato in the pincer of its digits; it had not bruised the tomato nor broken the stem.

“It’s not ripe yet” Ofelia said, shaking her head. Gesture might be easier than words; certainly she had learned none of their words yet. Assuming the grunts and squawks were words, and she had to assume that now. She spotted a ripe tomato on another plant and touched it. “This one is ready. Ripe.” She nodded, then pulled it off. The creature looked at her a long moment, then let go of the one it had touched. Ofelia put the tomato in the basket and then picked a handful of beans. The creature touched the beans, then the tomato. Different. Of course they were different, beans and tomatoes. Green beans, orange tomato. Long skinny beans, fat round tomato. “Beans,” Ofelia said, touching the beans. “Beans.” Then the tomato. “Tomato.”

The creature grunted, making no attempt to say the words.

“Beans,” Ofelia said again. “These are beans. Tomato.”

A series of grunts, none resembling the words she had spoken. Why should she expect words? They were aliens; they might not be able to make the same sounds. Terran animals couldn’t. Besides, she had more work to do. She picked more beans, aware of the creature watching her closely. When she had as much as she wanted, she stood, grunting. Did the creatures think her involuntary grunts and groans were attempts at speech? She couldn’t tell. This one had not reacted in any way she could detect to the noise she made. It followed her to the door of the house, but did not come in. She rubbed her feet on the doorstone, scraping off the bits of mulch that clung to them. The creature watched that, head tilted. She did not shut the door, but she glanced that way often. She put the beans in the drawer of the cooler; she would cook them in the evening. The tomatoes went in a bowl on the table.

When she opened the containers of flour, salt, sugar, the creature leaned in the door. Ofelia decided to make raised bread instead of flatbread. Yeast breads had always been a festival bread, made but once or twice a year. The waste recycler was capable of maintaining a yeast culture, but the flatbread was familiar, and so much faster. She had not made yeast bread since before the colonists left. Could she remember exactly how much sugar? She really should look it up.

When she took down the stained little book that had been her mothers, she glanced again at the creature. Would it understand reading? Did it have any similar system for making words last? She paged through the book. Some people insisted that there was no need for hardcopy cookbooks, but Ofelia liked this one. It reminded her of her mother.

She put the lump of yeast culture from the cooler into warm water with a pinch of sugar and flour. Sugar, salt, fat — she could use the fat she’d saved from the sausages. Rosara had not approved of using that fat, but Ofelia saw no reason to make the waste recycler clean it. She melted the fat and strained it into her big mixing bowl through a clean cloth cut from one of Barto’s old shirts. Then she mixed the fat, the sugar, the salt, with warm water and tested it with her wrist. Warm enough, cool enough. She glanced at the door. Two of the creatures now, both watching intently. Ofelia scooped flour into the big mixing bowl, stirring with a wooden paddle. She didn’t measure the flour; she knew that by feel. The lump of yeast culture had softened, was beginning to bubble in its little cup of water and sugar. She poured it in and kept stirring. When it was smooth, she worked in more flour, and more, until the dough pulled away from the bowl. Now flour on the table, plenty of it — her mother had said there was no use making raised bread if you were going to worry about wasting a little flour — and she turned the dough out.

It was fun to knead. This was something else she had missed, without realizing it. A few of the women had made raised bread more often; they had said they enjoyed it. At the time, Ofelia had thought of the mess it made, the flour drifting onto the floor, their hands sticky with dough. Now, her fingers sank into the warm dough, enjoying its resilience, the way it pushed back against her. She turned it, flattened it, rolled it up and flattened it again.

The creatures chittered. Ofelia looked at them. One had cocked its head, and now lifted a foot, as if to step forward. Was it asking permission? She chose to think it was.

“Yes, come on,” she said, sweeping a welcome with one floury hand. It came to the table, and leaned over, peering closely at the bread dough. One taloned digit hovered over the dough. She could see the dirt around the long, dark nail, and who knew what else under it? “You have to wash,” Ofelia said. She nodded at the sink, and when the creature didn’t move, she sighed. Just like children, who never believed they were that dirty. She brushed the flour off her hands, and reached slowly to take the creature’s arm. “Wash,” she said. “Over here.” She led it to the sink, and nodded again. It looked at its hands, and then at hers. With only a little fumbling, it turned the water on and held its hands under the flow. It eyed Ofelia. She didn’t want to get her hands wet, not when she still had more kneading to do, so she mimed scrubbing. The creature blinked, but complied, and she could see the dirt coming away from its nails. Ofelia turned off the water when she thought it was clean enough, and handed it a dishcloth.

“Dry off,” she said. As if it could understand, it squeezed the cloth in its hands, drying them well enough. Then it followed her back to the table. Again it extended a tentative digit. Ofelia nodded this time, and it poked at the dough, giving a sharp
Eerp
when its digit sank into the dough and came out sticky. Ofelia grinned, and went back to kneading the dough.

The creature touched the dough more lightly, then very slowly moved its digit to her face. What? Ofelia felt herself frowning. Again, very slowly, the creature touched the dough, and then this time her mouth. She couldn’t figure it out. She put her own finger on the bread, lifted it to her mouth — oh. Of course.

Eating. It wanted to know if this was food.

“Yes, but not yet,” she said. How to explain bread? She made an attempt anyway, moving her hands to show the dough growing fat, the second kneading, the second rising, the shaping into loaves, the baking. The creature’s expression didn’t change. Well, it would have to observe, that was all. The dough had gone silky, the way it should, firm and responsive under her hand. She covered it with a cloth, cleaned her hands, and remembered that she had meant to cook a pot of beans. She opened another container, poured out the beans into a cooking pot, and covered them with water.

The creature watched closely as she did this, then reached out to the cloth-covered dough. “Let it alone,” Ofelia said sharply. “It needs to rise.” Again, she mimed the enlargement of the dough. The creature pulled its hand back.

She had more work to do. She needed to air the house, sweep the floor. She eyed the creature but it didn’t go away. Well, then, let it watch. Ofelia went to work, and the creature watched. It moved away when she came toward it with the broom, staying out of her way, but not departing. When the bread dough had risen, and she punched it down, the creature stood beside her. It skipped back a step when the dough whoofed out its excess air, then came forward again as Ofelia kneaded and shaped the dough into two round loaves. She put the cloth back over the loaves, and checked the beans. They had just begun to soften.

By the time the bread had risen the second time, Ofelia had her house cleaned to her satisfaction. Now, with the creature watching closely, she turned on her oven, and when it was hot enough, she put the loaves into it. The creature seemed fascinated by the hot gush of air from the oven when she opened it. Ofelia waved it back — it could not know what part of the stove got dangerously hot. Then she showed the creature the cooler. Like a small child, the creature stood in the cold flow of air from the open door until Ofelia pushed past to shut it.

“You can’t waste it,” she said. The creature looked at her, and Ofelia was sure it wanted to argue, as her children had. She had no intention of arguing. She wanted to find some way to communicate with these creatures, some sound they could both make. “Cooler,” she said, laying her hand on it. “Cooler — makes things cold.” The creature stared, as always. She moved to the stove. “Stove,” she said. “Makes thing hot. Hot… cold.”

The creature fumbled at the cooler latch, opened it, and waved its hand in the direction of the downward flow of cold air. The sound it made was neither
cooler
nor
cold
, but it did begin with a harsh consonant that Ofelia thought might be an attempt at a “kuh.” Somewhat to her surprise, it closed the door. “Cooler,” Ofelia said again. “Cold.”

“Kuh.”

Well, it would do. It was a start. Babies started that way, one sound at a time. It moved to the stove, held its hand safely above it. Now what? Should she say “stove” or “hot”? She had always said “hot” to babies, but these weren’t babies. It grunted, clearly impatient. She might not know the words, but she had a lifetimes experience with impatience.

“Hot” she said, emphasizing the initial sound. “Hot.”

“Kuh.” It patted at the cooler.

They knew nothing. They would not know that flour came from grain, and the grain from grasses, from the seeds of wheat grown in the little walled plots to protect them from sheep and cattle. They would not know about cutting the grain, beating the gathered stalks to release the seeds, winnowing the seeds to remove the chaff. Or perhaps they did know that much; perhaps they harvested this world’s equivalent of grass in much the same way. Ofelia wondered how much they did know, and how she could find out. Were any of those things hanging from the belts and straps the equivalent of sickle and shears?

She remembered that in the first years of the colony, long ago, the colonists had had to do it all by hand. The machines were too busy fabricating parts for other machines, for building materials, for cloth and crockery. She and the others had cleared and weeded and harvested with hand tools that gave them blisters and sore backs. Later, the fabricator had turned out little harvesters that fit even in the smallest enclosures and could cut the grain faster than women with sickles. The fabricator could convert rough grain to coarse or fine flour, with the waste material remade into a variety of forms. Even though she had grown up in a city, with store-bought foods, she had been almost awed by the little machines, the first harvest that she didn’t have to do all by hand.

Would these creatures be awed? Did they believe in magic? Or would they take it all for granted? The conversation begun when the People first found the city ran alongside a dozen others. Was this the same kind of monster? It wore no clothes on its feet, and little on its body. Yet it had the short soft toes of the invaders, thieves, nest-destroyers. It had five of those toes, and five on the upper limbs. It had white hair instead of dark on its head, but the same arrangement of holes and protuberances. It is the same. There is the scar where the flying monsters landed.

It is not the same. It is alone; it has white on top.

It is interesting. It does things strangely.

It is a monster, what did you expect?

It is not a hunter. Is it prey?

We cannot eat it. We can watch it.

Soft skin. Wrinkles. Things hang loose.