Shaman (35 page)

“We'll visit them tomorrow then,” Rhys said absently.

“You seem unhappy, Professor,” Raymond Godwin observed.

“Unhappy?” Rhys shook his head. “No. A bit disappointed, perhaps.”

“Whatever for? Surely if you find no sentient beings on Bog it makes your job just that much easier... and your departure that much sooner.” He glanced around at the explosion of damp foliage that surrounded them, every leaf and stalk glistening with Bog's dank perspiration. “I've never in my life been in a place that sweats like this. My hair clings to my head, my clothing clings to my body. It makes Florida seem positively arid. I don't know how you can stand it.” He gave Rhys's kilt a disparaging glance. “I'll certainly be glad to leave.”

“I will admit,” Rhys told him, “that Bog's temperate zone seems to be poorly named, but... I would like to have found some new neighbors to talk to.”

“Well, speaking on behalf of Tanaka, whose interests you also claim to serve, new neighbors are a pain. They require the expenditure of time and energy that would be more profitably spent in negotiating with the Collective for planetary resources. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of candidates for sentience planet-wide. While your people interview every one of them, the mineral resources of Bog lie here untapped. If you find no one, you've spent months or even years doing it, only to find that Bog has no masters and the minerals might have been at our disposal all along. If you do find someone, then time and energy must be put into learning their language, studying their culture, understanding their point of view—and still the resources of Bog lie here untapped. I'm sure you can see that the best case scenario as far as our employer is concerned is for Bog to be completely without sentient life.”

He had stopped just short of suggesting that Rhys come to that conclusion regardless of the circumstances. Rhys wondered if the thought had been in his mind. He glanced forward to where Yoshi sat beside Rick in the front passenger seat of the buggy. Even in profile, he could see that her brow was knit and her jaw clenched mutinously. In the four years or so he had known her, Rhys had seen a thousand expressions cross Yoshi Umeki's face. He had never seen this one.

“Have you an alternative to suggest that will not contravene Collective law?” he asked carefully.

“It seems to me we might simply set up our mining operations—in a way calculated to make a minimum impact on the ecosystem, of course—and then if, in later years, a sentient species makes itself known, we can deal with it as necessary.”

Yoshi snorted. “That's what they said about the Aborigines.”

Godwin glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

She spoke without turning to face him. “That's what every conqueror has said about every conquered people since the dawn of Human civilization— ‘we'll deal with them as necessary.' Usually, the native peoples end up with their culture destroyed and their numbers seriously depleted.”

“My dear girl,” said Godwin dryly, “we are not barbarians who have failed to learn from our own history. Rest assured, should any intelligence rear its unlikely head on this sodden ball of earth, Tanaka Corp will honor both its culture and its physical well-being. You know Danetta Price better than I do, but whatever her merits or demerits as a CEO, she is not known for a conquistadorial attitude. But there are resources here—” He broke off, turning to address his argument to Rhys. “There are, for example, significant quantities of a natural organometallic in the water at this latitude that has tremendous potential. A natural organometallic. And then there are the ores. Did you know that there are caves about two hundred klicks south of here that contain incredibly pure deposits of copper? And the surface water—all of it—contains an alchemist's laboratory stew of useful minerals.”

His eyes gleamed. A zealot. Rhys smiled. He recognized the look. He'd seen it often enough on Yoshi's face, on Rick's... in the mirror. Godwin might have been him describing an assemblage of objects dug out of someone's two thousand year old refuse bin or burial mound. And, little as he liked to admit it, there was controversy over the ethics of making use of those resources, too.

o0o

The reptiles lived in an area that was as close to a desert as was likely to be found on Bog. The soil was sandy, merely damp, and sparsely foliated (at least more sparsely than 75 percent of Bog). In cleared areas the reptilians had built structures not unlike the giant termite mounds of Earthen Africa, pasting them together with clay from the bottom of small, stagnant red pools that dotted the landscape. Taken together with the jewel-bright green of the mounds' inhabitants, the whole area looked as if Santa's interstellar sleigh had jettisoned a cargo of Christmas ornaments.

From the cover afforded them by a tufted dune, the Humans watched the activity around the mounds. Rhys was just puzzling over a group of empty and collapsed “huts” to the north of the inhabited group when Yoshi jiggled his elbow.

“Look, sir. Tool-use.”

He nodded, watching a pair of the iguana-like creatures poking about a rotting tree stump with a stick. Another teetered across the clearing on his hind legs, his arms full of water-smoothed rocks. These he deposited next to one of the mounds in a heap, shoving away one of the ubiquitous ‘bogdillos', which had come along to snuffle at the collection. When the creature failed to move away, the reptile chittered at it, finally picking up one of the rocks and dealing the arthropod a sharp thwack. A second reptile scurried over to snag the rock and skitter away with it, eventually pressing it into the wall of a mound.

“Now there's Human behavior,” said Rick.

“That, too.” Yoshi pointed to where a clutch of immature reptiles was attempting to feed one of the bogdillos a large, decimated leaf. The creature seemed completely uninterested, which in turn caused the ‘children' to lose interest in it. They next offered their wizened frond to a flock of avians with more success.

Godwin, checking the soles of his boots for unmentionables, said, “Well, Doctor. I'll bet you're just in seventh heaven. There's more Humanoid behavior going on out there than I've seen in most spaceport cantinas. Shall we make an appearance and ask to be taken to their leader?”

“Perhaps,” Rhys told him, “if we can determine who that leader is.”

They watched the reptiles for three days without making a single move. In that time, they collected a plethora of data on community life and interaction, noted the hierarchy among the ‘lizards,' and chased away nosy arthropods and avians. On day three, Godwin—whose patience was apparently not a virtue that got much exercise—returned to the base camp, complaining of sand fleas and insomnia. The sands around their mobile cabin made a peculiar sucking noise at night, which Godwin found unbearable. Rhys silently (and guiltily) thanked the sands.

Their observations did indeed yield the identification of a dominant member of the reptile community. It was a female, judging from physiological and behavioral cues, who ruled the reptile roost. It was to this noble creature that Rhys at last decided to make himself known.

At first, he merely let them see him at the edge of the village, laying out his merchandise and making observations to his notepad. After a while, he moved in closer. The reptiles watched him with their golden, saucer-round eyes, occasionally opening and closing their wide mouths; Rhys expected to hear the clack of castanets. The elder female watched him most carefully as she went about her business, which consisted largely of scolding the younger members of her group who brought her food and occasionally rocks for her mound.

By the time he was face to face with the matriarch, she accepted him without tremor or outrage, merely observing his every move through her extraordinary eyes. He proffered her a piece of glazed azure tile. She looked at it, reached out a scaly digit and touched it, then scratched her neck. He rose and pressed the tile into the earthen wall of the mound she basked beside; she watched him with vague interest. Carefully, he took a rock from the pile her young cohorts had brought her and placed it among his wares; she blinked and scratched her neck again.

He repeated the exercise a few more times, drawing a small crowd of the reptilian Bogies. Finally, one of the creatures came forward and gingerly poked at another piece of tile. Rhys held his breath, affording a quick glance over his shoulder to where Yoshi and Rick observed and recorded the goings on.

The reptile handled the tile, turning it this way and that so the bright, glazed surface caught the sun, then he picked it up in one long-fingered hand and scuttled away with it to place it in his own pile of building materials some yards away. He did not return with an offering.

Rhys let out a long breath and tried not to let his hope go with it. But twenty or so pilfered tiles later, he admitted momentary defeat and retired to the camp.

“It seems,” he sighed some days later with no further progress to show, “that all we've accomplished is to leave our reptilian friends with gaudier houses.”

“Houses they may not even live in that much longer,” Yoshi added. “I explored the other side of that little knoll.” She indicated a nearby hillock covered with sand and some wispy bushes. “It seems that what these creatures do is build up their little mud igloos until the inner passages are all clogged with rocks and bits of wood or the roofs cave in. From what I can tell, they just abandon the villages little by little and start new mounds right next door.”

Rhys nodded. “Which explains the trail of mud huts we followed to get here.”

“Professor...” Rick was watching a playback of Rhys's interaction with the reptiles. “This is probably irrelevant, but does it seem to anyone else that those mud huts bear a more than passing resemblance to Yoshi's bogdillos?”

Both Yoshi and Rhys brought their attention to the video. “Roddy's right,” Rhys murmured thoughtfully. “Although that could just as easily be by accident as by design.”

Rick selected another time index, presenting them with a view of their encounter with the lake dwellers. It escaped no one that the water-bound lodges of the amphibians, with their anarchic polka-dots of bright stuff, looked much like submerged bogdillos.

Rhys exhaled explosively. “Worship? Art? Coincidence?”

“Do we stick around or move on?” Rick asked.

“I guess we'd best move on,” Rhys decided. “But we'll be back. Maybe I just need some fresh ideas.”

Raymond Godwin greeted their return to base camp with ill-concealed relief. “No luck, eh? Will you be giving up, then?”

“Yes,” Rhys said mildly, “we're going to move the base camp to the next location.”

Godwin grimaced. “And may I ask how many ‘locations' there are?”

“About a dozen, all told. The habitable zone on Bog is rather small, after all.”

“A dozen.” Godwin glanced from Rhys to his two assistants. “And I suppose you're going to check out every one of them, aren't you?”

Rhys smiled. “Until we find sentience or determine it's not to be found. That's our job, this time out.”

“Professor Llewellyn, you obviously have very little business acumen. I don't know how you managed to impress Ms. Price as a negotiator.” Godwin turned on his heel, narrowly avoiding doing the splits on the ever-soggy turf, and made a most dignified exit.

Putting Godwin's ill temper out of his mind, Rhys visited the logistics chief next, to arrange for the camp move. Unlike Raymond Godwin, Chief Pinski was thrilled with the prospect of some action.

“My people have been going stir crazy,” he told Rhys. “While you folks're out doing the jungle, all they've got to do is read and play VR games. You want to see how bored people can get?”

He beckoned Rhys to the door of his portable office and nodded toward the cargo area, where a quartet of bright blue, tarp-covered pallets stood awaiting dispersal. At the edge of the area, a handful of men and women in varicolored coveralls lobbed the local version of pinecones into the forest.

“What are they aiming at?” Rhys asked.

“Oh, anything and everything. Leaves, seed cones on stumps, the blossoms on those big, droopy trees, the critters that skulk around the edge of camp.”

Rhys smiled wanly. “I see. Well, do you think you could ask them not to target anything that moves? I'd hate to annoy the neighbors.”

Pinski chuckled. “I see your point. Sure, Doc. Now, when would you like to bug out?”

“Tomorrow morning will do fine. I'll have the coordinates for you by supper time.”

Leaving Pinski's office, he heard a rousing cheer go up along the edge of the cargo dump. He sighed, praying the site crew hadn't hit anyone who would hold a grudge.

o0o

They were up by Bog's green early light. Forest denizens strove to outdo each other in song, and a legitimately cool breeze rustled the rampant foliage. Rhys took his morning shower—essential to starting a day on Bog—and realized he couldn't face putting on his kilt. The humid atmosphere made the wool itch and cling, and he was damn tired of smelling like a wet sheep. Nattily attired in a jump suit of jungle green, he was walking across camp when Yoshi fell into step with him.

“Good morning, sir,” she said.

“Yoshi, how long have we been working together?”

“Four years, three and one half months,” she said, as if she'd been calculating that very thing the moment he'd asked.

“And during those four years, three and one half months, how many times do you suppose you've agreed to stop calling me ‘sir?'”

She gave him a sheepish look from beneath the black silk that fell across her forehead. “Oops. Sorry, Rhys. Sometimes it just slips out. Blame it on my family—small town, Shinto-Buddhist-Bahá'í values. Every time I forget to use a term of respect for an elder or a teacher, I see my aunt Mineko shaking her finger at me and saying, ‘Yoshiko, honor those to whom honor is due.'”