Shaman (39 page)

“Dr. Zarber doesn't work for Bristol-Benz anymore, I take it,” Rhys remarked. “Is he freelancing, then?”

“He's actually on the Tanaka payroll as a consultant. He's busy right now, or he'd already be on the job. I'd like to offer you as an alternative.” Danetta smiled. “Cut him off at the pass.”

“Damn you, Danetta. You know me far too well.”

“You'll do it?”

“One question: why would Reinhold
let
me do it?”

The smile turned to a grin. “Because he only knows you by reputation—the one that exists in the executive offices. You're the Money Man. The one who, for all his odd quirks and affectations” —she slanted a glance over the galley counter at his McCrae tartan kilt— “has put Tanaka Corp in some of the most lucrative deals it's ever negotiated. You're the paragon who found trading partners where there were none and who transformed seemingly fierce enemies into allies.”

Rhys emitted a bark of laughter. “When did I perform those miracles?”

“On Bog and Velvet.”

“Trading partners? I discovered a sentient race on a planet to which Tanaka's board expected to simply acquire stewardship rights. And on Velvet I did what I did to ensure that the Tsong Zee wouldn't be run off their own homeworld by humans.”

“You were a hero.”

“I was a subversive.”

“You averted a war.”

“The Tsong Zee had no weapons to fight a war.”

She shrugged. “Who knew?...Spin, dear. It's all in the spin. Vince Tanaka valued you because he understood that you have to give something real to get something real. Reinhold is a different animal.”

“You don't like him.”

“I actively despise him, which makes my resignation imminent.”

“You're too young to retire,” he told her.

She waved him away from that line of thought. “I'll burn that bridge when I come to it. How soon can you get to Fourier's World?”

o0o

Less than a week later, Rhys and his pair of assistants gathered about a table in the common room of their hab-module on Fourier's World, poring over samples of fool's tungsten and advance team intel. Their hab-mod was on the fringes of the Human encampment, which was at the northernmost end of the native habitation and just out of sight of a long, narrow swathe of “Furry” homes and shops.

Tanaka Corp's interest on the planet lay in a long, low mountain range in which fool's tungsten was like the thick, chewy heart of a chocolate-covered nougat. Well, perhaps it was not that omnipresent, but it made up a substantial amount of the mineral content of the range. It riddled the walls of caves hollowed out of the mountains by volcanism and water.

The crystalline form, which ran in thick veins in and about a silvery matrix, was glorious. Due to some impurities in the wolframite component, it came in electrifying shades from deep garnet to a sunny yellow. The dominant color was a rich saffron orange that made Rhys crave Indian cuisine.

“The natives call the matrix
roesel
,” said Rick Halfax, consulting the meager lingua-base the advance team had compiled. “They call the crystals
geifa
. The advance team has no idea what either means.” He glanced at Yoshi Umeki who was tapping notes into her new Lingua Franca translation device. “That's your job, m'dear.”

Yoshi nodded, her eyes intent on her tablet's display.

The aforementioned natives of this part of Fourier's World lived in rammed earth homes between the base of the mountains and a river. The houses and shops were all alike; at first glance, the village resembled a jumble of overturned clay pots or termite hills.

“The natives smelt the roesel down in small amounts using those big clay kilns you see about the village,” Rick continued, “but as you can also see, the high melting point of the metal wreaks havoc on the smelters. The advance team reckons about half of them are cracked clean through and have been abandoned.”

“I noticed that on our fly-over,” said Yoshi earnestly (as she said most things). “There are a few places in the village with collections of ruined kilns that seem to have been abandoned in succession. I counted five in back of one shop—all but one cracked. I wonder why they don't repair them?”

“Patches probably don't hold,” suggested Rick. “Besides, they seem to be experimenting with increasingly thicker walls and different types of clay. Maybe someday they'll build a kiln tough enough to handle the heat. It's kind of weird, though, that they don't demolish the old ones to build the new or at least scavenge materials. The back lot of the metalworker's shop looks like a bee metropolis.”

“They do seem to have a fondness for that beehive shape, don't they?” Rhys observed. “All the buildings follow that design, too. Perhaps it's sacred.” He nodded toward the window of their hab-module. Framed in it was the tallest of the mountains overlooking the settlement. If you looked at it just right, it, too, suggested a beehive.

Rhys was fascinated by the way the village hunkered between the mountain and the river; the natives did not seem inclined to expand to the other side of the stream—which was quite wide. Possibly, Rhys theorized, they considered the mountain their protector. Whatever the reason, the township, when viewed from the air, had a distinctly snakelike profile. Rhys had to allow it made the acquisition of water easier. No one had to walk very far to fill their tankards.

“Inquire about sacred shapes,” Yoshi told her tablet. “Anything else from the geology team?”

Rick shook his head. “Just that the natives have little interest in the ore. The project manager said they seemed surprised when he finally got across the idea that the mountain was full of the stuff. The Furries get their supply from the base of a cascade just upstream from the village and discard most of the ore. Tanaka stands to cut a favorable deal.”

Yoshi frowned, her eyes acquiring an intensity that, Rhys had found played havoc with his viscera. “But they use the ore, too. They make cooking utensils out of it.”

Rick shrugged. “Minimal use by any standards. They make just as many pots and pans out of friendlier metals.”

Yoshi's mouth popped open to protest.

“I'm just telling you what Ivan, the head geologist, told me—that the natives seem to have so little interest in the ore that he suspects they'll happily barter most of it away.”

“Which is why we're here,” said Rhys. He rose from the table. “It's time for us to meet the town elders and ask for a guided tour. After we've gathered some more detailed impressions, I'll hie off to have a word with Team Tanaka.”

“Don't you want to talk to them first?” Rick asked. “Get their impressions?”

“Their impressions are the last thing I want,” Rhys told him. “Literally.”

Rick nodded. “Right. Not to prejudice what we see. Guess we've been immersed in dead civilizations for so long I've lost my cultural anthro chops.”

Rhys found the thought sobering. Did one lose one's “chops” in dealing with live cultures when one focused on dead ones? He'd asked the question more than once in regard to other scientists. He'd never once thought it could apply to him.

o0o

Their walk through the town was pleasant. The village was arranged along a central avenue that paralleled the river. All of the rammed earth buildings looked as if they'd begun with one beehive-shaped section only to sprout more with the passage of time. The smallest single “cell” structures had generally smooth exteriors. The more complicated arrangements had outer shells of stucco or wattle and daub. A good design, Rhys had to allow. It took minimal upkeep, and weathered sun and storm equally well.

They were watched amiably by scads of Furries (dear God, he did not want to get in the habit of calling them that) that came in a variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Their short, glossy fur was variously striped, mottled, brindled and tipped with white, gray, black, rust or brown. Their heads were domed and rounded, their point-tipped ears placed roughly where human ears were, their muzzles were composed of wide mouths that seemed perpetually to smile and noses that looked so velvety soft Rhys had to fight the impulse to reach out and stroke them. They were bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical, and possessed two large, wide-set eyes that were uniformly dark.

They reminded Rhys of the iconic creations of Theodore Giesel, a long-dead writer of classic children's books. Whos—that's what they were called.

Rhys grimaced. These were people, he reminded himself, not cartoon creations. For all he knew, their human visitors might look like the whimsical creations of some ancient Furry fictioneer.

“Yoshi,” Rhys said between gritted teeth. “Please put a high priority on finding out what these people call themselves, would you?”

She did not say, “Yes, sir. I will, sir” or “as you wish” or one of hundreds of earnest assurances from her vast repertoire. She grinned at him. His viscera took note.

The natives kept their distance at first, assessing the new humans baldly and offering them the same gesture of greeting they gave to each other—an extension of one hand, palm up. The children, naturally, were boldest and trailed the trio of humans closely as they made their way up the main avenue.

As they reached the southernmost end of town, which seemed to be the commercial and administrative hub, Rick let out a low whistle and pointed.

“Will you look at that?”

“That” was a building so different from the kiva-style homes and shops as to look completely alien among them. Large, rectangular, and made of rough-hewn rock, it sat at the upper end of a plaza of hard-packed earth. The rock walls supported a roof of great, dark wooden beams clad in foot-square shingles. The ridgepole and major support beams jutted from the walls reminding Rhys of a reproduction Viking lodge he'd visited in Norway years before. Connecting the building to the plaza was a short, broad flight of rock steps.

Proceeding down the steps was a trio of Furries—one pale gray, one brindled, and one a deep gray with black striping. As different as they were of coat, they were nearly identical in dress. Their breeches and tunics were as colorful as anyone else's, and over these each wore a cloak of a different vivid hue—red, purple and orange. They were, in a word, “splendid.”

One of the young Furries who had been hanging rather close to Yoshi pointed at the three and said, “Ewis homs,” over-pronouncing the words as if by so doing he (or she) would make himself understood.

Yoshi had already unholstered her Lingua Franca, and now watched it consume the youngster's words before spitting them back out again in her voice.

The young native took a step back, eyes going wide. He pointed at the device and tossed an excited babble of words over his shoulder at an adult by-stander. A parent, Rhys guessed, judging by the similarity of coloration and markings. The parent waggled its head and beckoned the child to its side.

Yoshi pointed at the approaching trio and uttered a wordless tone that rose to an audible question mark.

The child blinked, then repeated succinctly, “Ewis homs. Ek ol jab.” The accompanying gesture took in the entire gathering which had, Rhys realized, grown as they'd wended their way here.

“I think he's saying these are the leaders of their people,” said Yoshi. “The advance team's linguistic database identifies the word
hom
as referring to a person and
jab
to mean the township. I'm not sure about
ewis
, but the LF indicates it might mean ‘leader.' According to the A-team's notes these individuals are Parsim, Prosim, and Rasimet.”

The three elders reached them and bowed ceremonially. Rhys and his cohort returned the gesture of respect, then Rhys made the open palm gesture to the elders, saying, “Ewis homs?”

The brindled, red-cloaked figure at center canted his head and made a circling motion that took in his two companions. “Ewis homs,” he agreed. “Moy gat Prosim...” He patted his own chest, “ar Parsim, ar Rasimet.” He pointed with all his fingers at the other two.

As introductions were made and Yoshi's handheld LF unit sucked it all up, Rhys made further mental notes on gender differentiation. Rasimet was a female as evidenced by the presence of mammary glands that, set somewhat lower than a human female's, caused her tunic to hang differently than her male companions'. He noted, too, the secondary characteristics: though she was of a size with her male cohorts, and possessed a similar narrow mane of longer hair that ran from the brow over the crown of her head, her voice and facial features were more delicate. She seemed younger than her male counterparts. Where the two gentlemen had white age-ticking around their muzzles and ears, Rasimet's gray and black striping was crisp and vivid.

Rhys introduced himself, Yoshi, and Rick one by one, then signed a request for a guided tour of the village: fingers to eyes, from eyes to the village behind them. He added the spoken word, “Jab?”

Prosim hesitated only a moment before waving Rasimet forward. She bowed anew and said, “Mu, Rasimet, howasi jab.”

Yoshi glanced down at her LF and smiled, mouthing the new words and reminding Rhys forcibly that, for a linguist, living languages were a far more rewarding study than dead ones.

o0o

Rasimet was a good guide. She showed them the large, rectangular building first, referring to it as
rhok jab
. The LF equated jab with building in this case, though it clearly meant village in other contexts. Rhys suspected the meaning was more general—place or home. But home of what?

The rhok jab was composed of a central hall so large as to put the courtyards of many a medieval castle to shame. The rafters soared above the stone flooring, meeting in a “V” so high that the ridgepole was obscured by the smoke of the braziers stationed about the room. A broad gallery ran along the perimeter at the second-story level and, from it, curious eyes looked down on them. A dais occupied the entire width of the far end.