“He’s been near Earth,” she whispered. “He’s been near Earth, and he’s going to take us back there again. If I can get out of this rock, I can call for help. I can be saved.”
“Excuse me?” the ship said.
She sat up again, perplexed. Somehow this didn’t make sense. If this asteroid was going near Earth, how could it travel so fast? Some ships were faster than hyperradio, but not that much faster.
She reached out and put her hand on the hull. It vibrated slightly.
“Ship, is this asteroid in hyperspace?”
“I cannot determine that through the metal shell of the asteroid,” the ship said.
Did the Rinneret have some superfast drive?
Was she going back to Earth? Was she going home?
Then she remembered Weapon-Maker. He had said he meant to attack Earth.
“I’ve got to plan my escape,” she said. “The whole planet might depend on me. I’ve got to get outside and send a message to warn them. And I can ask for help. We might be right next to Earth. To home. We must be!”
“Excuse me?” the ship asked.
“And you’re going to have to help,” she told the ship.
CHAPTER 8
When it punched above Earth’s atmosphere, the Predator Cruiser coasted a moment at the peak of the flight’s arc. Tarkos, Bria, and Dr. Yeats were tossed into microgravity, as if their seats were disgorging them. Dr. Yeats gripped the handles of her armrests. Her eyes grew round and she clamped her mouth shut tight. She peered around the narrow room of the Cruiser’s cabin, as if seeking a steady place to rest her lurching stomach. Tarkos recognized that she was fighting nausea. He’d made that same face, pressing his lips together, his first few experiences with the shift to weightlessness. He turned in his seat, letting Bria fly the ship alone, and tried to distract the scientist.
“Sorry about the rough flight,” he said quietly. “We get special clearance from the military, we don’t even tell the civilians our path, and then we shoot right up out of the atmosphere and coast down to our destination. It’s rough, but it’ll get us to Brazil in less than four hours. We’ll start back down in a minute, and then you’ll feel your weight again. Just breathe deeply.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, sharply. Tarkos nodded. Alright, he thought. She doesn’t like sympathy. Time to change the topic.
“So, it was completely a dead end at Genmine?” he asked.
She nodded again, briefly and quickly. Tarkos turned and lowered the heat in the room. He always found it better to be cold when nauseous. Bria surely wouldn’t mind at all.
“It was clean,” she said quickly. “No illicit sales of tardigrades that we could find. No evidence of missing samples. Accounting AIs said nothing obviously wrong with their numbers.” She held up a finger. “But, it wouldn’t take much. Someone could breed them off record in a lab anywhere in the building. A grad student could do it easily.”
She closed her eyes and swallowed, obviously feeling sick.
“Keep breathing deeply. If you think you’ll vomit, use the nausea patch. It works quick. We’ll start to feel gravity again in just about a minute now. Have you ever been to the Amazon?”
Yeats shook her head. “Always wanted to go. This trip is special. Few scientists are allowed in the Yanomamo lands. Genmine is one of the only companies allowed prospecting rights there.”
Slowly their weight began to settle. Air roared at the hull as they reentered the atmosphere. Yeats dropped her shoulders, relaxing.
Mention of the Yanomamo reminded Tarkos. He wanted to talk to Bria about their next steps. He nodded and smiled to reassure Yeats, and then turned his seat back to face Bria.
“Commander,” he said. “About where we’re going....”
He paused, thinking. Bria said nothing. Reflections from the console lights glowed in her eyes. She never did encourage him when he had trouble saying anything.
“Well... the Yanomamo. I don’t really know them. But, uh, I think that they live mostly without... well, what I mean to say is, I think they don’t really participate in the broader economy. They live... traditional lives. Or, partly they do. In the forest. I think.”
Bria looked at him. Her top eyes didn’t quite close, but the lids did compress a little: a weak indicator that she thought Tarkos might be on the verge of uttering something stupid.
“Some Sussurat live so,” she said.
“Really?”
“They are sacred.”
Tarkos nodded. He hadn’t known that, but maybe he shouldn’t be surprised. To him, all Sussurats looked ready to shed technology and run off to hunt in a forest. But everything was a matter of degree, he concluded.
“It’s just...” Tarkos added, “I don’t know how they’ll react to you.” He had visions of the Yanamamo brandishing long, flimsy spears at the huge Sussurat, maybe pricking her with some frog-mucus-poisoned tip.
“I have walked many worlds,” Bria said. She left it at that. Tarkos sighed, but did not press the issue. They would just have to see how it went.
I can’t feel responsible for the whole human race, he thought.
But then, how couldn’t he? He was a Predator, he’d just spent three years being the first human being that most Galactics ever interacted with. He’d grown accustomed to that burden. And, really, things would be a lot better on Earth if everyone felt like they represented the whole species with their every act. It was a bit of a shock to come back down into the Terrestrial gravity well, after nearly five years away, three of them as a Harmonizer, and find he had changed completely, and most people on Earth had changed not at all. The average human clung to her old way of life, his old way of thinking, savoring habits formed during the long centuries when the human race was the sum of all known intelligence. Even the upcoming referendum, that would decide the future of the human race, seemed just another political issue to debate before dinner.
But their universe had gotten bigger, and humanity had gotten a very lot smaller and humbler, and Tarkos wanted his species to grow up and act responsibly. He felt angry and embarrassed and ashamed that every human they met would freely voice any old idea to his Commander. Most people treated Bria, as DiAngelo had said, as his teddy bear.
And he felt ashamed to see the news reports about the Terran Liberation Front. Last night, he had watched a newscast of a sea of angry white faces in a crowd in some gymnasium in America. People screamed in agreement with some politician he’d never seen before, as they held up signs that read MAKE EARTH GREAT AGAIN. A popular movement against the Alliance had begun.
Tarkos wished that the humans that he had known and loved off Earth—the Terran Intelligence Agent Pala Eydis, or the galactic wanderer Pietro Danielle—were here with him. They would understand. But both of them had died. He pressed down the sorrow that always came when he thought of Eydis. Well, nothing to do but push ahead. He leaned forward, and instructed the ship to alter its shape, forming a better lifting body for the atmospheric reentry.
_____
The Yanomamo village lay on the hillside of a valley, in a sharp bend of a wide tributary of the Amazon. Tarkos had been given coordinates, and the specified landing site turned out to be a small grassy field, a flat spot on the hillside, within view of the village by the water. They set the Predator Cruiser down, and felt it slowly sink on its three legs into the grass and sandy loam. The engines whined down to silence.
The three of them walked to the center of the ship and opened the starboard door. Hot, moist air rushed in. Tarkos inhaled deeply, smiling, as he climbed down the extruding ramp. Somehow, even strange new smells on Earth had a quality that seemed, if not familiar, then somehow homely and appropriate. Birds cried out from the forest. When he looked back and saw Dr. Yeats stared at him, he nodded and smiled in admission. “I still am very much enjoying the smell, the feel, the air of my homeworld.”
“It must be strange to never quite breathe air that’s... normal.”
“Exactly.”
&nb
sp; She frowned. “I don’t think I could do it.”
Bria thudded down heavily in the grass next to them. As in New York, she was not wearing a breather. Tarkos knew that Earth’s atmosphere was a challenge for her. It was low in oxygen, and could make her light-headed. But she seemed to want to face the planet without any barrier. Tarkos wondered, suddenly, whether she did this to honor him, and honor his planet.
The huge Sussurat walked a short distance from the ship. Yeats and Tarkos followed. Then Bria turned and looked at the cruiser. Her implants talked with the ship’s computer, and in a moment the ship’s ramp slipped back up, and the hull sputtered, shifted, and then disappeared into the background.
“Predators should be unseen,” Bria said, for Dr. Yeats’ benefit.
“How does it do that?” Yeats asked.
“The exterior hull is actually a quantum computer,” Tarkos explained. “The whole surface is a grid of tiny, isolated qbits, but they can be made to operate like normal, photosensitive bits, and each can take on a holographic array of colors, and so imitate a background. In deep space, instead, we need the ship to be cold in order to hide it. So, we put the hull into quantum-computation mode, with a known random setting, and then use the skin for quantum computational cooling. It turns as cold as space. Invisible to anything.”
“Incredible.” She ran a hand over her forehead. She was sweating already in the heat. The bright sun had moved only a few degrees past its zenith. “A little frightening. No?”
Tarkos frowned, about to ask her why she found it frightening, but she had already begun to walk away. She pulled a small cylinder from her pocket. Tarkos smiled in surprise to see it was a small, old fashioned optical microscope. She walked over to the ship, hands held out as if walking in the dark as she felt for the hull. When she touched it, she leaned forward and pressed the microscope on the hull. She put her eye down over the lens.
Bria huffed once. Tarkos looked to her, and then followed her gaze. Before them, four men strode through the grass, taking long steps. They were not tall, and had short dark hair. They wore only colorful sporting shorts—like high tech soccer clothes, Tarkos thought—and carried thin ceremonial spears. Dark tattoos marked their arms. One man, a little in the lead, had a crown or halo of green feathers over his head.
Tarkos turned on the Portuguese translator he’d loaded into his implants. “Dr. Yeats,” he called.
“Yes?” She looked up from where she leaned against the hull, still squinting from her one-eyed look down the optical scope. “Oh,” she said, seeing the approaching Yanomamo men. She came to his side, stuffing the scope in her pocket.
Tarkos held his breath, waiting to see how the Yanomamo reacted. They called themselves The Fierce People, he knew. They were a sovereign nation here, and they had only been contacted through Brazilian intermediaries. He really had no idea what their impression of his mission was.
“Greetings,” the man with the green crown of feathers called, speaking in Portuguese. “Welcome. You are the sky people?”
Tarkos opened his mouth to speak, but then stopped. All four of the men stared at Bria. Tarkos and Yeats merited nothing more than a glance. Tarkos turned to his commander.
Bria rose to her full height. It was sight that could still make him flinch, even after three years as her partner. Bria was huge, and so very obviously deadly. But the small Yanomamo warriors only stared, their faces betraying nothing more than a hint of interest. Or perhaps awe.
“I am Briaathursiasaliantiormethessess,” she said in Galactic. The computer on her belt translated to Portuguese. “I am a sky being.”
“You honor us,” the man said. Then, to Tarkos’s great shock, the man shifted into speaking Galactic. “I am chief here, although we are an anarcho-syndicalist cooperative and my position is solely honorary. We welcome you. We have heard much of the Sussurat, great mothers of renowned sky forests. We want to talk with you of ecology. But first, come and eat with us, Sussurat mother. We will take counsel. Bring your people. They are welcome.”
“I thank you,” Bria said in Galactic. She bowed her head, then dropped to all fours. The men turned and started for the village, with Bria following.
“Hah!” Yeats said. Tarkos looked at her, and saw that there was no humor in her exhalation. She fixed him in her gaze. “You are ashamed of your species, Harmonizer Tarkos. I heard what you said to that Sussurat on the cruiser. And yet look at these men. They are gracious and wise. They have shown you’re a fool.”
Before Tarkos could answer, Yeats walked off at a strong pace, following Bria.
_____
The village was a strange mix of locally sourced materials and bleeding-edge manufactured elements. Four tree trunks, stripped of bark but otherwise untreated, formed the slick pillars of a central building without walls, but with a roof formed of black photovoltaic panels. Around this central square, huts were arrayed seemingly randomly, most of them with photovoltaic roofs. Tarkos saw many people carrying machines—portable computers and scientific instruments. At the edge of camp, two robots tilled a small garden. A satellite dish marked the edge of the field, its black disk aimed at the bright sky. The forest encroached to within a meter of the outermost huts. The smell of the river came up through thick green bushes that otherwise mostly obscured the Amazon.
“I count seventeen huts,” Yeats said, speaking—Tarkos felt—mostly to herself. “I wonder how many live in a hut? Four? Twenty eight of them here, then? It’s great that they still live so directly integrated into the ecosystem.”
“You have a passion for anthropology too?” Tarkos asked.
“Unlike you” she said.
Tarkos frowned. Somehow he had alienated Yeats. But now was not the time to try to fix that. Many people gathered around them to stare at Bria. The Sussurat did not seem to mind. As she walked through the crowd, feet thudding audibly on the pale earth of the path, a murmur of admiration tinged with awe went through the tribe. Small children, armed with tiny bows, ran through the legs of the adults, maintaining pace with Bria.
Bria followed the chief to the open, central building. All the adults of the village gathered under the black roof. Tarkos counted forty two of them. The chief gestured to Bria, and she sat on the wood floor. A woman threw logs on the fire that smoldered in a pit in the center of the space. Then about twenty of the adults, the oldest, formed a large ring and sat. Tarkos and Yeats backed into a corner, forgotten.
“They know who’s in charge,” Tarkos muttered.
“Of course,” Yeats said.
The chief shouted something that Tarkos’s translator did not catch. The ring of men fell silent.
“Tell us what you seek, sky mother,” the chief said in Portuguese—so that everyone there could understand, Tarkos assumed. But then the Chief repeated himself in Galactic. His intonation was, Tarkos had to grudgingly admit, better than Tarkos’s own. “Outsiders are not allowed here often. They have done harm to the forest. And the many ranchers around us, they oppose our way of life. But we have been asked to help you. You are welcome. Sussurat is known to us. A world with many Amazons. A world of black forests and green oceans. A world where the great hunters like yourself live as we live, without hierarchical government. You will not do harm here, if the words said of you are true.”
Bria pulled her three-d projector from her belt, and set it on the floor. She patched into it with her implants and translator. “Thank you great chief,” Bria hissed in Galactic. The three-d projector spoke a clear translation in Portuguese. “I am a commander of the Predators. This is my partner,” she gestured at Tarkos. “He will explain our mission.”
Tarkos stepped forward. He patched into Bria’s three-d and made it project an image of the waterbear, and explained then that the organism came from their forest, had been used in a crime, and that they were here to discover who had stolen it from the forest.
“Genmine takes from the forest,” the chief said.
“The chief of Genmine promises that they did n
ot take this animal,” Tarkos said. “Have others from beyond Earth come here, perhaps?”
Many of the adults in the circle began to murmur. Too many voices for Tarkos’s translator to catch any clear phrase. And they spoke now quickly in a mix of Portuguese and some other language. The chief listened to them attentively, before he said, “There is the Thrumpit. It has sanction of our tribe. We have trusted it before now.”
“The scientist?” Bria asked.
“Mycologist,” the chief said, using the English word.
Tarkos nodded. “This one is known to us, and is to be trusted.” There had been a mycologist listed as part of an official Galactic mission to the Amazon. But Tarkos and Bria had not expected to hear mention of the Thrumpit here. The Amazon, though much harmed and reduced, was still huge.
A man shouted something in the Yanamamo tongue. Again, Tarkos’s translationware failed. But the chief nodded. They talked quickly. Finally, the chief looked to Bria, then Tarkos, and explained in Portuguese. “Many have spoken of strange sounds in the forest. As of something big moving there. And the river flows strangely sometimes, as if great fish swam below. And also, these men tell of the mad woman. She arrived here weeks ago. She weeps in the forest at night. She is human, but changed: there is metal in her head. She is pale, and tall, like her.” The chief pointed at Dr. Yeats.
Tarkos looked at Yeats and then Bria. Both seemed as uncertain but as intrigued as himself. “Is this woman here? Can you take us to her?”
“No,” the Chief answered. “She has been seen up the river. Our medicine woman has talked with her, but only at a distance.”
The chief looked to a woman at the far side of the circle. The old woman stood. She said, “I am the medicine woman. I saw her. I could not get near to examine her. But she appeared to have cybernetic implants. Very crude work.”
The woman sat. The chief looked at Bria. “The mad woman is unhealthy. We ask you to take her away.” The chief stood. “Tomorrow you will go with the medicine woman. We can take you upriver, to seek this mad woman. But today there is light as the sun lingers. Will you hunt with us, sky mother of Sussurat?”
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