Case and the Dreamer (32 page)

He sat willingly, and then grimly, through endless hours of holo reports on expeditions to Arca, going back 112 terrayears, and, indeed, Altair II had been right when he said that nothing ever happens there. Once there had been a seism and a rift that tore almost a third of the central building away, and that created some interesting visuals as the Arcans, virtually without tools but for simple levers and a sort of hod with straps to carry materials, swarmed over the structure like disturbed ants and repaired it with surprising speed. The commentary at that point drew attention to something Dom Felix had already noticed—that each individual seemed capable of doing any task with the same degree of skill, and that all worked together with no apparent direction from a leader. They made no sound but for increased breathing when the load was heavy; there
was no audible or visible signal from one to the other. Ants, at least, stop and “greet” one another, touch antennae. Bees “dance” to inform the hive. If the Arcans had an equivalent, it was not (or not yet) detectible. When asked how they communicated, or if not, how they could cooperate with out communicating, Aquare droned, “There is no need,” through his translator, and, as he did so often, would not be budged further.

And on two occasions the sensitive airfoils of a winghouse were not up to the insane swirling of the Medean winds and the structure was damaged. Twice—in a century. He saw the ground cycles of the Terran expeditions arrive, and the Terrans exploring, testing, and trying desperately to communicate with the passive Arcans, and failing two years ago as they had failed repeatedly in the previous ninety. He saw the translators offered, refused (ignored is a better word) piled up and, on successive later viewings, gradually scattered and lost. And Altair’s comment that nothing ever happens in Arca turned out to be only too true. The main hall and its power had changed virtually not at all since the first recordings. Outbuildings came and went, but not much. A dozen or a score of Arcans would file out once in a while, and could be seen trudging away into the mountains until the “thick light” obscured them. A dozen or a score would file out of the mountains and into the hall—whether or not they were the same ones there was no way of knowing. There was no noticeable sex differentiation and there were no young. “There is no need,” Aquare explained. (Explained?)

Until Dom Felix had absorbed all the information there was (and to do that without spending a lifetime, he had to ask the computer to report only changes and to delete all repetition) he kept his plans to himself, and absorbed a part of his mind with devising ways and means to persuade Aquare to guide him to Arca. Physical, geographical guidance was unnecessary, and there would certainly be no resistance or interference from the Arcans, but he liked to think he had formed some sort of bond with the ubiquitous creature, and that he could expand if not exploit it. Some of his plans were quite elaborate, starting with subtlety and sidling into the suggestion that he visit Arca and that Aquare accompany him. Many of them were
scenarios of how the Arcan could be manipulated into suggesting it himself, together with Dom Felix’s reluctance and gradual persuasion. Always he encountered the difficulty of dealing with the creature who thought quite as well as a human but not
like
a human. In the end he decided to start from the top, or the bottom, or however one might describe irreducible directness, and he said,

“Aquare, I want to go to Arca and I want you to go with me.”

And Aquare performed the bubbly squeak which emerged from his translator as “Yes.” Dom Felix, totally prepared and tensed for a long campaign of trial and error, regrouping and flanking, almost physically stumbled, like a man running up seven steps when the architect had put only six in the flight. Ask him what it was he fell over.

Altair (after having said the inevitable “what the hell for?”) told him he would have to start Aquare out first and drive out a couple of terradays later, because no Arcan had ever agreed to ride on a cycle, and the only alternative would be to hoof it with Aquare, which no human in his right mind would attempt, not on Medea. Aquare, who was present at this interchange, mumbled and squeaked and his translator said, “I ride,” and it was Altair’s turned to fall over the step that wasn’t there.

The cycle—and it was a new one, equipped with a stable platform Kert Row had designed—required very little instruction. The route to Arca had been scanned many times before, and was not only visible depicted on a large screen, but was compared with the scanned reality as it traveled, so that any change—a boulder on the path, for example, or an animal over a certain size, or an Arcan pedestrian, would be noticed, alerted, and avoided instantly and automatically. There was no speed control as such, but a simple G
O
and S
TOP
lever and on-off O
PTIMUM
button. With this in the on position, speed was a safe balance between performance and terrain. There were manual overrides for both speed and steering, but it would be hard to imagine a situation in which they would be useful.

The machine was in constant communication with the enclave, not only with the ever-ready voice transmitter, which, though it could
be turned off, would turn itself on again in even the slightest emergency, but with a locator signal which had no override. It was powered by a battery that, for surface travel, was virtually inexhaustible and that could leap the machine for several days before it required recharging sufficiently to leap again. The leaps, ten to twenty meters at a time, were undertaken only when the vehicle’s computers decided they were safe with all variables scanned: speed, slope, planned course, obstacles, and especially the wind. The strange, surging gait of this machine had become traditional in the enclave, even working its way into some love poetry; it (the gait, not the poetry) was exhilarating to some Terrans, soothing to others, and absolutely nauseating to a few. Kert Row’s refinement had lessened all these phenomena. It had yet to work its way into literature.

Two and a half days of foot-slogging for an Arcan equaled two and a half hours for the cycle, and Dom Felix was surprised to find that his burnoose was all the equipment he needed, and that departure time was completely up to him, since the holo’s had informed him (and informed and informed him) that the Arcans observed no special sleep time. He was pleased at the discovery, although there was a child-like quantum of disappointment in him that there were no safari-like preparations, no crowds waving goodbye from the gate, or a delegation to travel the first kilometer with them, no leis around their necks, nothing to speed them on their way except (from three different sources) “Going to Arca? What the hell for? Nothing ever happens at Arca.” They simply walked out of the fifth corridor, the Rim of Pellucidar, battled their way across the dusky, blustery compound to the motor pool where the cycle, with its whispering gyros and its gleaming transparent canopy, awaited them. (It was Dom Felix who battled. Aquare’s short flat fur was infinitely better suited to the pluckings and grabbings of Medea’s whirling atmosphere than a flapping burnoose.) The attendant waited until they had reached the vehicle and had instructed Dom Felix to put one foot on the stirrup before he activated the canopy. It slid back just far enough to permit them to skin inside before it slammed shut, and even then it took half a minute for it to pump out the dust that had whirled in with them. The course chip had already been plugged
in, and the screen was illuminated; all Dom Felix had to do was to push the G
O
lever. As the machine wheeled around to nose into the plotted course, he saw the attendant scurrying back to the shelter; the fellow didn’t even wave. “Well,” he said inanely, “here we go.” Aquare apparently did not feel that this called for a response. They sat side by side in silence while the cycle ascended and settled, slid and surged its sibilant way. They flashed past the strident cool air of the Terran fields, a light so very different from the many glows natural to Medea, and on into the shifting dusk of the backcountry.

For a while Dom Felix attended to the passing scene, but it became an effort; there is a sameness to the many differences in the topography of Medea, and it is not easy even while standing still for Terran eyes to take in detail. Bounding and sliding across and through it defeated the hope of seeing a spectacular formation or a fleeing animal, and the stable platform robbed the rush along a side-hill or the mounting of a slope of its reality. The Terran eye is magnetized by brightness, and he found himself paying more attention to the screen before him than to the view outside; it was like looking at a line drawing of the Mona Lisa instead of at the painting itself, and somehow, to his own irritation, finding that more satisfactory.

He was aroused from these confusing thoughts by a touch on his shoulder, and he turned to Aquare.

The Medean pointed his two long central fingers at the panel before him, where a small plate glowed green. He made a slight stabbing motion toward it. Dom Felix realized several things at once: first, that never, not once, even by accident, had Aquare ever touched him; the contact on his shoulder was so extraordinary that, light as it had been, and brief, he still felt its residual. Second, the control he indicated was the voice communicator to the enclave. Third, he was (also for the very first time) conveying something with gestures rather than speaking through his translator. Dom Felix quelled the reflex to blurt out a question, and spread his hands:
What do you want?

Again Aquare stabbed toward the green-glowing plate. Dom Felix reached toward it—slowly, lest this not be what was meant—until he touched it. It immediately turned red, with a diagonal line: by ancient tradition, O
FF
.

“Aquar—” But before the whole name was out, the Medean shot out a commanding hand, an unmistakable message. Don Felix shut up. To his astonishment Aquare squatted on the deck in front of his feet and with the powerful beak in the palm of his hand drew out a locking pin. A panel came ajar; he opened it and reached inside. He did not fumble; he seemed to know exactly what to do. There was a faint click, and he rose up and sat back.

Dom Felix stared at him in utter astonishment. He had never seen Aquare operate a machine or device of any kind, and nothing Wallich or Altair had ever said about him hinted that he might have any comprehension of one. Further, nothing in those endless holo’s had demonstrated tool use, beyond the wedge and the lever, those powerful and flexible hands, and whatever instinctive, possibly programmed genius for design it took to build the winghouses (significantly, a single and repeated pattern) were really no more remarkable than the nest of the bower-bird, or a beaver dam, or a beehive. Yet here was Aquare, sitting back comfortably on the cushioned seat, chirping his mirth and saying authoritatively, “Can talk now. Automatic voice recorder also off.”

“Aquare, you … how … I never knew.…” Dom Felix stopped spluttering and tried again. “Why didn’t you ever tell anyone that you—that you could—knew how to …” He was spluttering again, so he stopped.

Chirp-chirp-chirp
. “There was no need.”

“Oh for God’s sake, don’t do that to me.”

Aquare, quite relaxed, said nothing. He seemed to be waiting. Dom Felix looked up at the red-lit communicator switch, at the panel still ajar under the control board.
Can talk now
. Can talk without being overheard, without being recorded. “What is it you want to tell me, Aquare?”

Aquare turned toward him with his torso, averting his head, and again Dom Felix had to remind itself that the native did not have binocular vision. The turn of the body strangely intensified the feeling of being totally observed. The gentle burbling and moaning came through the translator as “You give confidence.”

“Thank you.” Something in Aquare’s stillness told him that this
was not quite right. He amended it. “If you mean what I think you mean—thank you.”

“Not thank me. Wrong confidence.” It came haltingly; these were not words, apparently, that Aquare had used before.

Wrong confidence. What then would the right confidence mean? Make someone confident. Cheer someone up. Confidence … oh, the kind of confidence you keep. “You mean, you have something to confide? That kind of—”

“Yes. No.” A long pause. “I confide. You not talk.”

“Go ahead. I won’t interrupt.”

The lithe hands came up and together; the beaks clashed, once. Not chirp this time—and this was another first; the very first time Aquare had exhibited impatience. “Confidence,” he said at last. “I confide. You not talk. Never. Never. Never.”

“Ah.” It came to him in a rush. “Can I keep a confidence! Is that what you’re asking? If you tell me something in confidence, can you trust me? Is that what you want to know? Is that why you—” he gestured, “—shut off the communicator and the recorder?”

“Confidence, yes.”

“Well then. Aquare,” Dom Felix said devoutly, “I give you my faithful word that whatever you say to me in confidence, I will never repeat to a single living soul.”

“Soul.” It was probably a question.

“I will never repeat a confidence to any person in any way.”

“Never.”

“Never.”

Dom Felix set himself to receive revelations—shattering, amazing revelations. He watched in new astonishment as Aquare slipped off the seat, reached behind the panel, and turned on the recorder. He closed the panel, slipped in the locking pin, and gestured to Dom Felix to turn on the communicator. Dazed, Dom Felix did. (It was not until weeks later that he learned that such controls would respond only to the human hand, so designed that no falling object or carelessly placed cargo could activate it by accident; and that the Medean hand would not affect this type of switch. Just how much Terran technology did this creature understand?) He sat there staring at his
companion and underwent a whole dizzying chain of reactions: disappointment, puzzlement, and when he opened his mouth to demand more information, anger, for the green listening glow of the communicator informed him that he could not do so without breaking the confidence he had so devoutly given only a moment before. Then admiration at the sheer skill of the Medean’s manipulation—even though he had been its … subject? target? victim?… overcame him, and he laughed. He laughed, and Aquare chirped, and in good time they came to Arca.