Asimov's Science Fiction (15 page)

"Yes." She was flushed and wide-eyed and beautiful. Zed felt nothing.

She cried, "All the creepy aliens vanished! These traitors had no idea that you—
I
had no idea! Why didn't you tell me you're an Earther? You got our revenge!"

"I'm not," Zed said, "and it wasn't revenge. Where is my mother?"

"She died, Zed. Last month."

He nodded. Somehow, he'd known that. Part of far-seeing? He wasn't sure, just as he wasn't sure, and never would be, if the aliens who had changed the world had or had not been human.

They had felt responsible for humanity's fate and the long-term consequences of its actions:
"So why is that your problem?" "I cannot tell you that yet."

They had come from very far away to stop what looked to them like self-destruction.

They knew so much about the human mind—and yet not enough to understand what they had turned Zed into. Nor to understand that they could not really change the course of human history. Only humans could do that.

"Isobel," he said urgently, "tell the soldiers not to destroy anything. There are projects here that can—tell them the aliens are gone but the people here know how to— Isobel—"

"What?"

He said slowly, "Tell them that what the people here know, the knowledge in their heads, can make you all
rich.
Very, very rich."

The soldiers slightly loosened their grip on Zed's arms. Isobel's eyes gleamed.

"I'll tell Gary, who will tell the Commander. You're a hero, Zed."

A hero. Already it was starting again: heroes, riches, rivalries. That was what Zed had to work with. Well, he would use whatever he had, to create change from the inside, not imposed from without. Although no one—certainly not Isobel—would understand that his act had not been revenge, no more than June 30th had been war.

Already the far-seeing pattern in his mind was shifting, growing blurry. Did that mean it could be changed? He didn't know, but he had to try.

For the common good.

Ian McHugh's stories have appeared in publications that include
Analog, Daily SF,
and
Beneath Ceaseless Skies,
as well as previously in
Asimov's.
His first short story collection, entitled
Angel Dust,
will be out in 2014. You can find the author online at
ianmchugh.wordpress.com.
His latest tale for this magazine takes us to a distant planet and gives us the chance to read a young field scientist's...

On the move, the caravan inevitably kicks up a lot of dust. The hunter-males walking up front are no more than indistinct silhouettes from my already habitual vantage at the rear of the line. I couldn't tell which of them it was who raised both arms to point ahead and gave the first cry of, "Yoom!"

The rest of the clan echoed the call. The word translates approximately as, "Oh, happy thing!"

"Yoom!" boomed Bubba, beside me.

"What is it?" I asked.

He peered down at me from his three-and-a-half meter height, craning his neck to see past the fringe of his leaf collar. "A river," he answered. He drummed woody fingers on the sides of his torso. "Yoom!"

His armaments clanked with the movement of his arms. Like the hunter-males, Bubba and his neuter-brothers wear harnesses hung with a variety of ranged and close-quarter weapons. They and the non-related hunter-males traveling with the clan refer to each other mutually as "hadhagnug," meaning, loosely, "threat." Even with the weapons they carry and the size of the male neuters, the term is much easier to reconcile with the hunter-males than with Bubba and his neuter-brothers. I speculate that perhaps Bubba and his brothers, having been told that I'm female, have rationalized my presence with their clan by adopting me into their sphere of protection.

Intriguingly, the non-related males do not apply "hadhagnug" to the clan's hunter-males, referring to them as "mnagmanag," the same term they use for the clan's breeder-and neuter-females. Raffarin's definition of "mnagmanag" as "fit for breeding" may require revision.

The pace picked up as we neared the river, both the bnebene afoot and the ondrordore that carried the neuter-mothers and most of the clan's juveniles growing excited at the prospect of fresh water. Hanging back a little to watch, I was struck by a powerful and very specific sense of
strangeness.

Anthropocentrically speaking, bnebene have the "right" number of arms and legs, but these seem far too large and long for their torsos and heads—the heads really just a fifth limb that houses binocular eyes and frond-like olfactory organs. By far the most disconcerting thing about both bnebene and their "plants of burden" is the way they move. The locomotion and gestures of both species tend to be quick, but have a curious jerkiness, as though one is watching poorly made stop-motion animation. Added to that, the ondrordore look like something Cinderella would ride in, shaped like giant garlic cloves with feathery leaf tufts at their pinnacles.

Reaching the river, the ondrordore rotated with ponderous dignity to put their rearmost pairs of vine-legs in the water, before folding open their front wall segments to disgorge their passengers.

The older juveniles climbed down with a kind of staccato flow, and then they and the breeder-females helped their neuter-mothers to follow. Bubba and his neuter-brothers retrieved the very youngest saplings from inside, still planted in soil tubs and not yet sapient or animate, and carried them to the water.

The whole clan lined up with their toes in the river, leaf collars raised toward the afternoon sun. Within a few minutes, all had become quiet. What had been a bustling caravan of
people
was now suddenly transformed into a stand of unfamiliar
trees
of various sizes, silent and still.

In the distance, around the rim of the bay, I could see a small cluster of buildings. A fish farm's grid of nets and jetties criss-crossed the discolored water at that end of the bay. Rochefort is the town's name, according to my mobile, all of seven years old and claiming a population of a couple of hundred.

The afternoon was getting on, and it was a Sunday, which mattered in these parts. I dusted the pebbles from a patch of dirt and settled down to write while the bnebene finished their drink.

I walked into Rochefort today for supplies and stopped in at the post office to hire a terminal for half an hour, enjoying the luxury of a full-sized interface—even a cheap, outdated one—compared to the basic pad I hook up to my mobile in the field. I tried to ignore the way the postmaster kept staring at my chest while I worked. At my age, sexual attention
could
have been flattering.

There were a dozen new video, audio, and text messages forwarded from the faculty office at the university, from overseas and even offworld colleagues who wanted to crash my research. I sent back via the office my blanket text-only response, IS PROGRESSING WELL. SUBJECTS ARE ACCEPTING BUT SENSITIVE. FURTHER DISRUPTION WOULD BE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE AT PRESENT.

I came back to the counter with a handful of articles printed on cheap synthetic vellum for later reading. The postmaster squinted at me—at my face, for once— while he processed my credit. "You travelin' with them aliens, ain't you?"

"Bnebene," I corrected him, managing to keep my tone light. "We're all aliens here."

He grunted. "Tinkers, ain't they?"

I ground my teeth. The term is Raffarin's, whose theory of the Universal Metaperson dominates scholarship of bnebene as it does that of other communicative sapients. Still, I told myself at this particular moment, it's better than "aliens."

I tried not to touch the postmaster's skin when I took back my card. He stared at my chest while I thanked him and wished him a good day. Outside, I paused to take a deep breath before crossing the road to the town's general store. From the post office steps, I could just make out the silvery thread of the space elevator disappearing into the upper reaches of the sky, anchored on the far shore of the inland sea at Persepolis.

I came out of the general store with a thoroughly unappetizing collection of dehydrated ration packs in a thin sucrose bag that
might
last the walk back to the campsite. I wondered if perhaps I could convince one of the hunters to go and rustle me up some rabbits, imagining their amusement if I did so. A day is yet to pass that one member or other of my bnebene clan doesn't remark on my inefficient physiology, with its daily demands for material sustenance.

Still, ration packs are a small price to pay, and I am determined to make more of my once-in-a-generation opportunity than Golovlyov did.

The riverside camp is about an hour from Rochefort, traveling on foot. I walked beside the vast, pungent enclosures of oysters and sardines that are the town's sole reason for existing.

The silence of Aralsea on a still day, and of the dry plateau that surrounds it, is intimidating. Not much has made it out here yet to alleviate the monotonous pale umber of dust and stone; only lichens, grasses, and a few insect species—and rabbits.

The sucrose bag gave up the fight about three-quarters of the way back to the camp. I had to fill my pockets and nurse the rest inside my jacket like a pregnant belly.

Approaching the camp, I spied wisps of smoke from campfires. Bnebene only make fires to cook with, which meant someone
had
been out rabbiting. My mouth watered.

I took off my boots, socks, and pants to wade across the thigh-deep water, as I had on the way out. The ondrordore still stood with their back ends in the river. When we arrived, their wall segments had a shriveled look. A day later, they're as plump as inflated balloons. Most of the juvenile members of the clan were still in the river beside them, unmoved from the day before. Consistent with Golovlyov's observations of ship-borne bnebene, young caravan nomads typically remain less active than the adults, even after they uproot from their planter boxes.

Nimble breeder-females and tall hunter-males hunkered around the fires, holding out small, rapidly charring carcasses on skewers. Bubba and Jolly squatted among them, while Big Red stood like a solitary watchtower on a low rise a short distance from the camp. Pixie, the middle in age of the clan's adult neuter-mothers, squatted on a stool to rest her legs while she dipped her toes in the river.

Old Chook and Chuckles, her sisters, struck identical poses a couple of meters away. All three had tucked up around their hips the hems of the silk ponchos they wear to cover their Venus Fly Trap mouthparts and the several seedpod organs around their torso-trunks. Other genders, with only mouths and genitals on the front of their trunks, wear aprons instead.

I waded out of the river near Pixie and her sisters and lifted my jacket to let the foil packets spill onto the ground at the water's edge. The three neuter-mothers observed this performance, beady eyes unblinking in their small triangular faces. The slight ruffling of their leaf collars indicated they were amused.

"Are sedentary bnebene cultures as hidebound as sedentary human ones?" I said.

This prompted a brief discussion of the term "hidebound." According to the Babel in my ear, their consensual definition was reasonably accurate. Once satisfied, all three of them adjusted their ponchos, looking like nothing so much as human grandmothers straightening their frocks.

Pixie turned to me. "You had a poor experience of your fellows in the town, gunnug?"

According to the Babel, which uses Raffarin's bnebene lexicon, "gunnug" means "undesirable," as in "not fit to mate with," the semantic opposite of "mnagmanag."

The caravan nomads apply the term equally to Merchanter bnebene as to humans and other non-bnebene sapients.

I recounted my conversation with the postmaster.

Old Chook murmured something that the Babel didn't pick up. Pixie said, "This bnebene is familiar with such attitudes among the gunnug of the towns."

"Bnebene
gunnug?" I asked.

"Gunnug is gunnug," she said.

Her use of the term compels me to concur with Raffarin that bnebene don't maintain a clear ideological distinction between culture and biology as means of differentiation.

I ate my dinner of charcoal-baked rabbit and re-hydrated vegetables with Bubba and Jolly. To take food, bnebene squat with knees up behind their shoulders, their plates on the ground, and delicately pick at the surprisingly tiny morsels with their long fingers. The food is lifted up underneath their aprons to their mouthparts, which adult bnebene rarely uncover. Most of their meals consist of sitting still while they go through the early parts of digestion. The waste that remains in the mouthparts is discreetly spat out a couple of days later into shallow pits the bnebene dig with their toes.

In deference to the sensibilities of my hosts, I hang a gauze veil over my head and shoulders while I eat with them. The size of my meals is as much of a source of astonishment for the bnebene as is their frequency. Jolly and Bubba tapped each other's torsos while they digested and I was still shoveling food up under my veil.

The evening was warm, so I had left my pants off, underpants sufficing for modesty in this non-human company. It was the most of my skin they had seen, as all my outer clothes consist of full-length pants and long-sleeved shirts. My legs look superficially similar to bnebene limbs, with smooth thighs and calves and wrinkled, knobbly knees, although bnebene dermis has a waxy texture and hardness like that of a smooth-barked tree.

Bubba, beside me, reached out two fingers to prod my thigh. He recoiled.

"Hree!" "Hree!" Jolly echoed. Their leaf collars flared. A heartbeat later, I heard an identical, distant, cry from Big Red, out on sentry duty.

My Babel translated the word as a diametric opposite to "Yoom!"

Around the camp, the head of every hunter-male snapped around to look our way. I suddenly felt like the person who'd farted noisily in the busy silence of an academic library. Or, as the flat gazes of the hunter-males remained fixed in our direction, the person who had tried to tiptoe through a lion's cage and kicked over a metal bucket halfway.