Shaman (36 page)

“Godwin's an elder; you never call him ‘sir.' Besides, I'm not
that
much older than you are.”

She glanced at him out of the tail of eyes that somehow blended contrition and impishness. “Your point?”

“My point is that after four years—”

“And three and one half months,” she added, and smiled. “I'm trying, but old habits die hard, and sometimes you're such a curmudgeon...”

Rhys snorted. “Curmudgeon, your Aunt Mineko!”

They'd come to the mess tent and he'd pulled back the waterproof cowling over the door when he heard someone shouting for him. He turned. Rick Halfax was hurrying toward them from the direction they'd just come, waving his arms.

“You aren't going to believe this!” he panted when he reached them. “Something... I mean
someone
left us a pile of goodies during the night.”

It was indeed a pile of goodies. The jumble of rocks, flowers, and conifer seed-cones had been left between a pair of tarp-covered pallets at the eastern fringe of their supply yard. The rocks formed the bottom-most layer; the Bogish pinecones tumbled atop those; the flowers were sprinkled over all like brown sugar on oatmeal. Some of the Tanaka site crew were standing nearby, looking on with mild interest.

A young woman pointed at the heap of stuff and said, “This is just the way we found it, professor. We haven't touched a thing.”

Rhys knelt by the knee-high mound and picked up one of the large, purplish blossoms. “Interesting,” he murmured. “All of the same variety.”

“The botany team was really interested in those,” the young woman told him and smiled. “I think the fragrance was a hit.”

Rhys nodded. “There's a lot of money in perfume on just about any world.”

“Mimicry?” The one word question came from Rick, who was sampling one of the rocks with a field scanner. “They've seen us pile stuff up like this. Maybe they're just aping us.”

Rhys shook his head. “Possibly, but the young lady is right—these flowers are ones the botany team was particularly interested in.” He sniffed at the bloom. “Tantalizing. They collected scores of them.”

“And you think one of the native species noticed that?”

In answer, Rhys nodded at the rock in Rick's hand. “What've you got there?”

“Ore-bearing. Barium...” He gestured at another, lighter colored specimen on the ground at his feet. “Gold. Also heavily sampled by the advance team.”

Yoshi nudged a seed-cone with her toe. “Dr. Gallioni says these are a storehouse of natural antibiotics...I guess we've been noticed.”

“Hmmm.” Rhys was examining the spongy ground around the cache, looking for tracks. “But by whom?”

“Oh, dear God, it's true.” Raymond Godwin stood at the corner of the nearest pallet, looking aghast at the collection of native wares. “Someone or something has actually made an overture. And I thought this was going to be a simple matter of a corporate claim. Well, which one of our lovely natives left this little offering?”

Rhys turned one of the native plants in his hands, feeling a heady wash of exhilaration. “I don't know, Mr. Godwin, but I intend to find out.”

“I take it this means our move is canceled.”

Rhys nodded absently, already pondering his next step.

It was easy enough to talk about finding the would-be traders, harder to do. After a long night of sleepless reflection, Rhys still hadn't decided where to begin or what he could do that he hadn't already done to flush Bog's sentients out of the swamp. He reviewed behaviors—leaf sipping, rock carrying, tree-house building... icon making? Any and all could be significant.

He rose the next morning, showered, dressed and literally flipped a coin. The ancient British ha'penny came up heads, and Rhys took his crew off to the reptile village. Three days later, he was ready to give up. Aside from building houses that possibly paid tribute to the bogdillo, the reptiles showed no sign of abstract thought.

“Perhaps,” Yoshi said the morning they moved their remote camp to the arboreal village, “we're not going about this the right way.”

Rick Halfax snorted. “Obviously not.”

Yoshi ignored him. “I mean, maybe there's some sort of protocol we're missing.”

Rhys raised his tired eyes to her face. “I'm all ears.”

“Well, they brought their goods to our camp and left them where we'd be sure to find them.”

“Which is precisely what we've been doing. For all we know this could just be a case of mimicry.”

“Or,” Yoshi continued, “it could be a step in some sort of trading ritual. Like the Pa-Kai dances or the Garulin processionals.”

She had his attention now and he waved her on.

“We left our goods at their doors—”

“Whose doors?” Rick asked. “We left our goods at several doors.”

Yoshi nudged him aside with a preemptory flick of her fingers. “I don't know yet, but what if they took that as the first step in the protocol? A bid to establish the trading ground, let's say. To them, what we're saying is, ‘We elect your village to be the trading ground.' So they take the next step; they elect our ‘village.' Now we've put the ball back in their bailiwick. But maybe that's not the polite thing to do, maybe we're supposed to accept their offer to let us host the trading.”

“So you're suggesting we lay our goods out where we picked theirs up—in the middle of the supply dump?”

Yoshi nodded. “We make a gesture of accepting the goods they brought and place our own on the exact spot where they were delivered.”

Rhys glanced at Rick, whose nose was buried in his coffee mug. “What do you think, Roddy?”

The other man shrugged. “I say anything's worth a try. If we can't prove any of the Bogies are sentient, this planet is going to become a big, soupy rock quarry.” He leaned closer to Rhys across the table and lowered his voice. “I've seen the geological reports Godwin's been salivating over. There are so many rare-elsewhere minerals in the so-called crust of this mud ball that there's virtually no place you can dig that you won't unearth something marketable. And if you don't think Godwin would cheerfully tear up every tree, siphon off every drop of standing water and dispossess every native lifeform to get it...”

“Danetta would never allow that,” Rhys protested. “And she's in the driver's seat at Tanaka.”

Rick gave him a wry glance. “Come on, professor. You know big business better than that. Even Danetta Price has to listen to the Board of Directors. And the Board of Directors listens to the shareholders, and a lot of shareholders listen to the siren song of the almighty credit.”

“You're right,” Rhys admitted, guiltily recalling that they, too, worked for Tanaka. “And Godwin's been singing that song since we met him. He has a vested interest in our failure because our success would mean a substantial investment of time. And Tanaka Corp has traditionally favored investing financial resources over investing time. Whatever we determine about the lifeforms on Bog, we've got to be damn certain.”

They pursued Yoshi's idea, making a studied ritual out of accepting the native collection of goods and replacing the stash with one of their own. Then they settled down to watch. When no one and nothing put in an appearance by nightfall, they turned in for the evening and turned on the brace of monitoring holocams around the site.

The pile of goodies was still there in the weak morning light. But something else was missing. All four of the stockpiles near the cache had been relieved of their bright blue coverings.

While Pinski had his crew replaced the tarps with extras from their shuttle's supplies, Rhys and company checked the recordings. It had been a foggy night, which is to say a normal one, and shapeless wings of mist trailed across the camera eye or rolled along the ground. Rhys began to realize that virtually anything could be concealed in that.

“What's that?” Rick asked, pointing a finger to what looked like a field of tiny stars in a slowly swirling nebula. “Fireflies?”

Rhys squinted at them. “Or the local equivalent. We've seen them before.”

“Sure. Over the bog. Never in camp.”

“They may travel at night. They're certainly not our traders.”

Rick grinned. “Oh, I don't know. Maybe if a whole bunch of them teamed up...”

Rhys gave him a mock severe glare. “I suppose you'd like your signature to be on the report that identifies a local insect as the species Tanaka has to do business with?”

Rick turned his attention back to the monitor screen. “Not a chance.”

‘Not a chance' pretty much described their attempt to ferret any new visual evidence out of the video record. There was darkness, fog, more darkness and a flotilla of brightly lit insects. Rick hit on the idea of turning off the picture and focusing on the sound. That yielded little more—only the sound of plastic clips being sprung and tarpaulins being tugged from their mounts and dragged away through the primordial ooze.

There was nothing for it but to attempt tracking the missing tarps. Under normal circumstances, following a drag trail would have been a simple task, but Bog's springy soil and general sogginess made it a hit or miss game. There was nothing like a discernible spore, but only broken fern fronds and irregularly depressed patches of earth. They found the trail; they lost it; they found it again. Then they found a place where it appeared to fork.

“It looks like they split up,” Rick observed. “One tarp was dragged off that way,” —he pointed northeast— “another toward the lake. And from the look of that...” He broke off to examine a third swathe of disturbed ground and foliage. “Two toward the eastern plateau.”

Rhys straightened from his own perusal of the trails. “Roughly, one deeper into the forest, one toward the amphibian population and two toward the reptile village.”

“Coincidence?” asked Yoshi.

“Let's find out. The simian tree houses are closest. Let's try that direction first.” Rhys led on, following the on-again, off-again trail until they came within sight of the nearest tree village. He was scanning the foliage above and before when Rick gave a shout.

“Pay dirt!”

Rhys, Yoshi, and the several members of the site crew who had joined them, hurried in the direction of his voice. He had found one of the missing tarpaulins snagged over a small sapling and a couple of ferns. A handful of small avians bathed themselves in the water that had pooled in its draped folds.

One of the site crew made a move to reclaim the tarp; the birds fled, chittering. Rhys put a hand up to stop the man. “Leave it. They paid for it, after all.”

“But it's just sitting here, gathering water.”

Rhys dabbled a finger in the pool vacated by the birds, then glanced toward the village where a group of the simian inhabitants watched with mild interest. “Indeed. Yoshi... set up a monitor pack to take in the tarp and its immediate area. Then we'll be on to the next site.”

“Why bother, Doc?” Rick asked. “Doesn't this pretty much prove that the simians are our sentients?”

“There are two other trails to follow, Roddy. Trails that may lead to other conclusions entirely.”

They took a couple of swamp buggies to the reptile colony next. Both of the missing tarps were located with ease, sheerly by contrast to the earth-toned surroundings. Like the first one, these had been draped in deceptive abandon over protruding objects so that fresh water from the humid atmosphere pooled in the low points. They found the first of the two roughly two-thirds of the way between their base camp and the reptile colony. The other was just outside the village at which Rhys had attempted to barter some time before. And this one was in use—a group of the reptilians were gathered about it, sipping in turns from the vivid puddles while one or two avian friends showered beneath drops of spillage. Rhys took notes, Yoshi made a video record, then they continued to the third site.

It took longer to find the fourth tarp. Blazing blue notwithstanding, the lusher colors and foliage around the lake made spotting difficult. But spot it they did, near sunset. Once again, it appeared to have been set up to collect fresh water.

The five-person team from the site crew took their buggy and returned to camp immediately, having no particular desire to bivouac in a true swamp overnight. Rhys hardly noticed their absence. Nor did he particularly notice the presence of Raymond Godwin, who, realizing the importance of recent events, thought it in his best interests to stay close by.

By the time Rhys and his cohorts had set up camp, the rude water collection system had been in use several times by both amphibians and avians. Review of the monitor packs Yoshi had set up at the other tarpaulin sites showed similar use by both simians and reptiles.

“Are they all sentient?” asked Godwin irritably as they sat in the twilight and watched the activity over the lake. “Have we stumbled onto some sort of... of alien co-op?”

Rhys, watching the movements of aquatic life in and around of one of the waterlogged lodges, shook his head absently. “So it would seem. Damn! They communicate with each other—how do we get them to communicate with us?”

Rhys fell silent, gazing out over the lake as the alien sun pulled in its green-tinted skirts, plunging the swampy glade into sudden dim twilight. He reached for a camp-light. Yoshi's hand fell on his arm, sending an inexplicable army of goose bumps marching up and down its length.

“Rhys, look at this.”

“This” proved to be billows of the tiny Boggian fireflies that, though nearly invisible by day, were anything but at dusk. It was as if someone had released a cloud of willful sparks; the fireflies danced over the face of the thick water and the water's surface gleamed in reply. It was a rare and remarkable sight. The mass of insects was so bright the camp-light seemed superfluous.