Nicodemus roused himself from his early morning stupor. “He is a company sergeant.”
“Oh. Right.” Marais thought for a moment “What would the naturales be fighting about? Not us, surely.”
“One wonders,” Wanjau said.
Dr. Motofugi entered the tent, looking sleepy. Marais set a bowl of miso in front of his nose. “Tomomi, Isaac heard shooting last night”
“He must be mistaken. I slept well and heard nothing.” Motofugi poured himself tea. “Someone in the shower is singing that pig song again.”
Pigs whistle when they lose, and they whistle when they win,
'Cause when the shooting's over they scrub off and start again.
Nicodemus grinned, “Well, that is a matter of opinion.” Although Brit Smits was very popular despite--or perhaps because of--the harassment he took for being vain about his looks, he was moderately tone-deaf.
Motofugi carefully put his spoon down and held his hands to his ears. “If I hear another verse, I will scream. Is Dr. Seki awake?” .
“He and Dr. Ando are reviewing their notes.” Marais reached for a rice cracker and spread peanut butter on it “We found out yesterday that the naturales have a money economy.”
“We, of course, have our own little economy based upon scarcity of desserts,” Wanjau observed.
Motofugi, who didn't have much of a sweet tooth, ignored the dessert issue. “This is a wonderful breakthrough. How did you get them to talk about money?”
Marais gestured with the butter knife.”I couldn't get Kanyase to discuss it, so Iturned Isaac loose on the problem.”
“The Blues reckon prices in hypothetical units of electrum,” Wanjau explained modestly.
“Electrum?” Motofugi appeared dumbfounded.
”It is an alloy of gold and silver.” Wanjau kept a straight face. Marais tried to eat and speak at the same time. “I think he wants to know how you found out.”
“Why, yes,” Motofugi amplified.
“When the Blue soldiers pump me for information, they often tell me things without meaning to. I explained to them how I met my wife and what I had to pay for her, and then Lupwaekoawuk explained what his wife cost. He is an officer, and he is hoping to afford another someday. None of the privates spoke much, but I think they are all hoping that they will be able to afford a wife someday.”
Dr. Motofugi's eyes bulged.
Wanjau patted Motofugi's arm. “I told them that humans have differing customs, and that instead of a bride-price, most men pay for being married in other ways.”
“Ekpalawehud admitted some of it when I questioned him directly.” Marais put peanut butter on another cracker and bit into it.
”Wanjau-san, you do not appear to comprehend.” The Japanese linguist trembled with suppressed excitement '“This is truly an important breakthrough. The insight this will give us into their speech patterns and into the origin of words is very important.”
“It might also give us insights into their society,” Wanjau wondered aloud with seeming innocence.
“Oh, someone may wish to look into those aspects.” Motofugi nodded to himself, to all outward appearances already lost in thoughts appropriate to his discipline. “Language is, of course, a mirror to society.”
Marais cursed softly. Wanjau grinned, then said. “And we're having pudding tonight”
“I learned a great deal about human nature during my stay in Japan,” Wanjau said. still grinning.
Smits entered the tent with his towel over his arm. “Kobus has the shower next, but after that it’s free.”
Wanjau moved his head up and down slowly to get a better look at him. “Your top shirt button is undone. Showing yourself off to the native women? What would your good friend Miss Deltje say?”
Smits blushed to the roots of his hair and hastily buttoned the offending button. He then placed a wad of wet hair in the cooker set aside for that purpose and watched it incinerate. A slight odor filled the tent.
“It is my view that the directive concerning disposal of hair and nail clippings is especially senseless,” Motofugi complained.
“It is bad luck to let an enemy have a part of you,” Wanjau replied calmly.
“I wish that you would not refer to the naturales as enemies,” Motofugi said peevishly. “And what would they do with our hair? Make voodoo dolls?”
“Extract the DNA,” Wanjau replied.
In Orbit, HIMS Zuiho [3-cloud Rain 13]
“THIS IS THE DIABELLI VARIATIONS,” PIOTR KOLOMEITSEV EXPLAINED TO NICOLA BOSENAC.
Although unlike in every other way, the Franciscan and The Iceman shared a love for music. Perhaps lonely, Kolomeitsev had made an effort to cultivate Bosenac, professing to regard him as the keeper of Vereshchagin's conscience.
Bosenac searched for an appropriate phrase. “It is interesting.”
Kolomeitsev chuckled. “It is perhaps not among Beethoven's finest works. I have seen it described as 'an act of artistic aggression,' but I enjoy it. To me, it is a challenge, taken up and hurled back.”
Bosenac recalled the tape of a discussion that a Blue named Tapakoase had with Dr. Ando over the nature of poetry. Perhaps speaking for a consensus of Neighbor’s inhabitants, Tapakoase had asserted, insofar as Ando was able to follow, that the essence of poetry is aggressive, feverish expression, and that beauty lies in violently forcing the unknown to bow before the mind. It was a sobering and in some ways revealing argument, one of the few that the contact team had managed to elicit. “Have you always loved music?” he asked.
“Until I retired, the lives of individuals were in my hands, and I did not develop interests apart from fishing.”
The piece ended. “I spoke with Commissioner Vereshchagin today,” Bosenac said.
“He mentioned your frustration.”
“I read everything that comes through from the contact team.” Bosenac clenched his fists. To be so near and not understand these people--their feelings, their beliefs.”
“Most of us are equally dissatisfied”
“Are you?”
“I am patient” The Iceman scrolled to find Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. “I believe that there is a universal human nature, one that is recognizably the same as it was millennia ago. The motives and feelings of the personalities in The Tale of Genji or Henry V are thoroughly and idiosyncratically human, as recognizable now as when these were written. The Blues are people like us. But they are not human.”
”But we don't know that. Whatever the Blues are, they hide it from us, Piotr. I know that they are not like us in every respect, but I believe that the essence of what makes them people is very human, and in every important way, they are people just like ourselves.” He almost added, “with souls.” He reflected, “I find it fascinating that although a technologically advanced stage is the merest blink of an eye in all the thousands of years of their history, we reached them just at this time.”
The Iceman gave him a sour look. “If your deity had a hand in this, he plays with weighted dice. Unfortunately, fro m the examples at hand, technologically advanced civilizations tend to be destructive ones.” Kolomeitsev studied Bosenac's face. “You have been thinking your way to a question or questions all evening.”
Bosenac laughed “Yes, I suppose I have.” He paused “What is it about war that so fascinates people?”
“War,” The Iceman said solemnly, “is murder and destruction on a grand scale. And yet it is the most powerful catalyst for change, both good and ill, that human societies know. The unlamented Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who factored so prominently in my nation's troubled history, viewed an army as the ideal organizational model because of its power to impart a single will to millions of people. Waging modern war and preparing to wage it have shaped nations and their governing institutions, and unending war, which atomizes potential internal opposition and generates powerful pressure to enlarge the authority of the state, is the textbook recipe for successful t
otalitarianism.”
”I would like to think that yours is a cynical view of human history.”
“Unfortunately, I find myself looking for parallels here, and in a thoroughly unscientific manner, perhaps finding them.”
“I pray that you are wrong.” Bosenac ruminated.
The Iceman paused. Then he said, “I was intensely religious once. Before my wife died. It took her three months to die.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a photograph, encased in plastic for permanency.
Bosenac looked at it. The woman in it was in no way remarkable.
“I read what has been written to explain why people suffer pain and die,” The Iceman said, “and no explanation I have read suffices. Your church teaches that your God suffered and died for man, but I have seen many men suffer and die.”
“You are surely a unique man,” Bosenac said quietly and carefully, “to have borne so deep an anger so calmly for so many years.”
“So I have been told,” The Iceman replied.
Day plus 82 [5-cloud Rain 13]
“I SUPPOSE IT’S A LITTLE LATE TO ASK THIS SENIOR QUARTERMASTER SERGEANT VULKO REDZUP commented idly as he stared out the opened shuttle door into the darkness, “but I wonder whether the line is going to hold”
“Of course, it will,” the engineer in Meri Reinikka responded. “The composite fiber of the cable has roughly 123 times the tensile strength of LV8 steel of equivalent diameter. The airframe will tear loose before the cable breaks.”
“Oh?” Redzup raised one eyebrow.
“As a safety precaution, the winch mounting will go before the airframe does.”
Redzup, a resupply specialist for most of his life, turned his head around and braced himself against his safety line. With the shuttle's cargo bay darkened, the only light came from the starlight magnified fifty thousand times by the night goggles he and Reinikka wore. “I hope Alariesto has sense enough to pick a truck that isn't loaded.”
“Statistical probabilities and the ancient law of Murphy being what they are, the vehicle will be full of lead”
The problem with stealing a motor vehicle lay in getting it off the ground without landing a shuttle and wheeling it on board, which was something that Coldewe felt the Blues might notice. Trucks, as a rule, do not fly, and the magnetized arresting wire that a shuttle lowered to snag balloons was clearly not up to the task of snagging flying trucks. The problem remained unresolved until Section Sergeant Markus Alariesto reported that the Blues parked vehicles overnight in an unfenced area on one of the south coastal mesas.
With the precipitous drop-off from the mesa to the sea and a heavy night wind blowing out, Redzup and Reinikka surmised that a low-flying shuttle might be able to jerk a truck off the mesa and pull it in. and Flight Sergeant Ivan Kokovtsov was eventually persuaded, with some difficulty, to fly the mission.
Redzup grinned wolfishly. “Lead might prove embarrassing.”
Kokovtsov interrupted. “Final course alteration. Bearing 178 degrees. Altitude 120 meters. Winds gusting at thirty-two to thirty-five kilometers per hour. Alariesto reports green.”
Reinikka punched the intercom. “Green here.”
“Estimate one hundred seconds to contact. Kokovtsov out.”
“Coconut is getting almost talkative in his old age. You know, I wonder if anyone has tried this before?” Reinikka mused. A moment later, he said, “It wasn't that funny.”
Redzup wiped his eyes. “Meri, you missed your calling in life becoming an engineer, you really did.”
“I said it wasn't that funny.”
Kokovtsov broke in. “I see the balloon. The wind is pushing it out to sea at a 45-degree angle.” He checked his instruments. “A 44-degree angle.”
Reinikka glanced at his calculations and hit the intercom. “Still green.” He looked at Redzup. “Ready?”
Redzup nodded.
A second later, the shuttle's airflow jerked the balloon alongside the open cargo bay. “Pull it in!” Redzup said.
Reinikka powered the winch. The shuttle jerked, then thrust forward as Kokovtsov increased power. Reinikka found himself breathing in short, ragged gasps. “Did it work?”
“Yes and no.” Redzup braced himself and leaned out to take a better look. “It was loaded. Which end of a Blue truck has the engine, do you think?”
“I hope the fishes are okay,” Kokovtsov commented laconically.
Within hours after their safe return, an anonymous rhymester posted a poem in the style of Tennyson, which opened with the immortal line, “Half a truck, half a truck, half a truck onward,” and concluded, “When can their glory fade?/Oh, what a gaff they made/Honor the shuttle brigade/Gallant half dozen.”
“You wouldn't know who wrote that poem, would you?” Reinikka asked Coldewe suspiciously.
“Of course not. But it was good for morale, wasn't it?”
“Most people's.”
L-Day plus 175 [4-flint Rain 13]
“INFANT G-3 DIED TODAY, LEAVING ONLY FlVE SURVIVING INFANTS, INCLUDING ONE BORN to the dominant female and given to another female to nurse. Lack of food due to increasingly arid conditions has induced the lemur-apes to make their closest approach to civilized areas. It will be important to assess whether the next breeding cycle reflects a similarly high mortality.”
To the dismay of Omori, the Japanese trooper assigned as his bodyguard, Dr. Ozawa spoke almost continuously into his recorder as he worked.
Ozawa followed the lemur-ape troop up a ridge line, plunging through a thorn thicket “The local year, which is twenty-three days longer than a standard year, appears to be well suited to a generally slower growth rate among higher animals, due to what are both objectively and subjectively harsher environmental conditions than are found on most similar worlds.”
Omori struggled after him.
Unnoticed, the thorns took Ozawa's spare recorder from his belt. Hours of searching failed to locate it
L-Day plus 182 [2-dust Rain 13]
IGNORING THE ASH FROM THE MINE'S SMELTERS, SECTION SERGEANT THYS MEIRING NODDED at his partner, Superior Private Pieter Kriel.
With a small dog and a portable sensor as insurance against traps, Meiring cautiously poked an optical fiber around the small building's door. Satisfied there were no alarms or unpleasant surprises, Meiring, son of a mining engineer, went to work on the surprisingly familiar-looking padlock with his cutting bar, sawing through it in short. careful strokes. He disappeared inside to fill his bergen with local explosives.
“Just like home,” Meiring remarked as they fled the scene of the crime.
“You know, Thys,” Kriel commented, “I like blowing things up as much as the next man, but working with funny detonators makes me nervous. I know Zuiho will look over this stuff six ways from next Tuesday, and if the Blues analyzed residue from our stuff they might raise some eyebrows, if they had any, but still--”
Meiring grinned. “Pieter, you talk too much.”
Following an exhaustive series of tests on the explosives in space, Meiring and Kriel obtained pieces of ceramic railway and a ceramic power line, disguising their work as local sabotage. As Dr. Kita's working group discovered, both fragments had layered, ambient--temperature superconductive cores. The power line excited particular interest. The working group estimated that it would dissipate a tenth of a percent of conducted energy per hundred kilometers, which meant that the Blues effectively had a continentwide power grid.
The finding helped explain the trap that killed Zerebtsov and ended any talk about the Blues being backward.
LOVE __________________________________
The pig got bored with football, and he wanted something new,
So he found himself a planet where the folks were colored blue.
The pig put on his manners and he wore a tie and suit,
And the people were so friendly that they almost didn't shoot!
- “The Whistling Pig”
In Orbit, HIMS Zuiho [6-wind Rain 14]
COLDEWE ROLLED OUT OF HIS HAMMOCK WITH PRACTICED EASE. “Hello, Simon. What can I do for you?”
“Kantaro Ozawa broke his leg.” Beetje looked around for a chair in Coldewe's cabin.
“Yes, it sounds like a compound fracture. Wessels is going to bring him back to base camp after dark.”
“It is an exceedingly awkward time for him to be injured. Hans. This year’s breeding season data is crucial to the lemurape study.”
“I have most of the recon platoon sitting around base camp eating their heads off. How about if I put DeKe de Kantzow and Kalle Kekkonen back on the project?”
Beetje shook his head impatiently. “I need to go, Hans. We've spent nearly thirteen months on this, and I have to be sure that I have good data for two seasons to support my conclusions.”
“Good data is something we're short of all around. Captain Kobayashi and Detlef Jankowskie are still trying to match population density to food production for their statistical analyses, and there still seems to be more Blues than food to feed them. To put it bluntly, they've lost considerable faith in the values your people have given them to work with.”
Arita, the young ensign whose job it was to rewrite the statistical programs Aoba's computers used to translate raw sensor data into usable information, had suffered a nervous breakdown, and Coldewe had been forced to send Esko Poikolainnen over to Aoba to try to crack the problem.
“I'm sorry, Hans,” Beetje apologized. “Short of cutting up a Blue, I'm not sure what we can do.” Except for holdouts like Dr. Seki, all of the expedition's personnel had fallen into the habit of calling Neighbor’s inhabitants Blues.
Coldewe yawned. '“In theory, the problem ought to be easy. The Blues don't have maize fields, rice fields, wheat fields, or amber waves of grain. All they have is that silly water potato and that silly purple yam, two root crops.”
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