Fossil (1993)

by Hal Clement

  Hugh gave no thought to the possibility of road blockage; he knew it had been clear up to the point where the truck had turned off, since the vehicle’s autodriver had given them no problem until then. Of course, something might have drifted into the way in the last hour or less, but that could be dealt with when and if. He was concerned solely with finding the turnoff spot, and had little doubt that the robot would be able to do so. Information from the truck had been adequate and precise.

  Chapter Six

  And Clearest Trails The Keenest Minds Misguide

  “What’s the strangest thing your people see about star visitors, Ted?” Hugh asked when they were well under way. “Or would you rather not tell us?” For once, he had no ulterior motive behind the question, except perhaps an urge to learn something before his wife did.

  “You don’t seem to expect to find each other different,” was the prompt response. “You appear to be— well, an Erthuma is surprised when a Crotonite thinks differently from him, and a Samian is surprised when a Naxian thinks differently from him, and so on. Even Naxians, who are supposed to read feelings, seem to be surprised at some of the feelings they read. You’re not blatant about it; consciously you do expect each other to be different, but you’re still visibly startled, even the Naxians, when it happens. Why? You’re from different places, with different foods and different comfortable temperatures and different ideas of what smells good and what’s polite. Some of you lose consciousness part of the time — you can’t seem to help it — and others get impatient about it and complain about the inconvenience to them. They don’t consider the inconvenience it must be to those who—’sleep’ is the word, I think.”

  “But we know that we’re different, and allow for it!” insisted Hugh.

  “You know it consciously. Somehow you don’t seem to know it down where your minds really work. It’s as though down below those levels where you know about your own thoughts, you’re sure you are right. That’s a little frightening. We’re glad enough to have you here, of course. We spend a lot of our time just keeping alive, diving to the ocean floor for mud to fertilize the continent and working out ways to take care of people whose farms are melting away on the sun side without being unfair to the ones who work to fertilize new land on the colder shore; but we’ve liked to think about causes and other abstractions as far back as our history goes. You’re certainly giving us new things to think about.”

  “How far is that?” asked S’Nash instantly.

  “What?”

  “Your history.”

  “Currently, three hundred twenty two thousand seven hundred seventy years.”

  “Habranha years, of course.”

  “Of course. We’ve been here and about the same for a lot longer, we’re sure, but every now and then records get lost during transfer from the melting to the growing side of the Ring, and sometimes records are a little ambiguous because nothing much has happened out of the ordinary for a few thousand years. The arrival of you aliens will help enormously with that problem for a million years or so, anyway.”

  The aliens all fell silent as they tried to work out the time period in their own standards. For Hugh, it was not quite twenty thousand Common Years. A respectable recorded history, better than any Erthumoi world he knew of. But then, with a single planet-wide culture, what could happen to make history?

  It occurred to Hugh that thinking carefully about the sort of mind now being displayed by Ted, who as far as he knew was a perfectly ordinary working citizen and not a professional philosopher, might answer that question. He’d have to make time for that later. He’d also like to arrange to listen in on a lunchtime conversation, or its equivalent, between a couple of Habras.

  Or better, half a dozen if his translator could handle it.

  Keeping to the road was getting difficult. Another snow squall was blocking vision for Erthuma, Naxian, and robot. Ted was, as far as they could tell, still circling overhead; whether he was above the blinding stuff or relying on his other senses Hugh didn’t know, and the wind at the moment was too loud to let him ask. Eleventh-Worker had made himself familiar with the packed-ice structure of the road itself under the drifts, and assured Hugh that he would know if they strayed off it; but the robot’s inertial sense was probably enough to forestall that. The way was known to be straight as far as the turn-off.

  “I hope we don’t overshoot,” Hugh remarked after what seemed months of blind travel. The robot promptly answered the implied question, in spite of the presence of non-Erthumoi passengers. It must have interpreted the words as an order, missing the implications that the ability to do this might bother the aliens. Fuzzy-logic systems could do that; Hugh hoped they wouldn’t do it too often just yet.

  “Seventy-four point three kilometers from the truck’s starting point by the shed is the road distance I was told. We have three point four to go.” If S’Nash and the Locrian read anything more than the literal information in the message, they failed to show it.

  By the time two of the kilometers had been covered, the snow had stopped, but the wind had not. It was a biting, turbulent blast from their right — the south — which threatened at times to tip the carriage off its treads, had cleared every particle of loose snow from the road and left its solid surface visible to all, and was making it hard for the three living passengers to keep from blowing away. Above them, Ted was still flying, but his natural skills were being taxed near their limit and his strength even more so.

  Every minute or two he would be swept out of sight to their left, to reappear seconds later as the wind eased a little.

  Fortunately, the squall lasted less than ten minutes. When it abruptly ended, the Habra settled toward his companions, embraced the tube of the wind-sweeper, and folded his wings.

  “I’m not as surprised as I was about that detached wing you found in the Pit,” he remarked. “Mine feel as though they’ve nearly pulled off. Someone who ventured here alone and met turbulence like that could easily have trouble, especially if he wasn’t protected from the cold. Did you find any trace of armor or clothing with that wing?”

  “None,” replied Hugh. “I was there when it was excavated. The wing itself was surrounded by the usual bits of plant root you find all through the ice, but nothing artificial.”

  S’Nash cut in.

  “Did Janice date the plant material as well as the wing tissue?”

  “Sure. She’s been doing bits of root all along. The age was the same, as nearly as she could measure.”

  “Why would there be only bits, and not complete plants?” asked the Locrian. He was hard to hear; they had passed the region cleared by the wind, and the sweeper was in use again.

  “The guess at the moment is that plants like those we see around here put down roots as far as they can to hold themselves in place, until some ice dune covers them and kills them…”

  “It doesn’t always kill them,” pointed out S’Nash. “Some of them seem able to separate from their roots and blow away when threatened with burial— the tumbleweeds.”

  “True. Well, we’ve found a few complete bush specimens in the ice at various depths. Jan’s been trying to make a depth-against-age table with them and the root fragments she’s dated, but it hasn’t been very consistent so far. Whole plants are usually older-hundreds of Habra years, even a thousand— than the root fragments at the same depth, and the bits themselves vary quite a lot at any given level, and, too, we only have specimens from this particular dig — the stuff the lasers have spotted between the Pits, and the occasional things we’ve actually run into directly as the Pits deepened, like that wing.”

  “Precisely.” S’Nash uttered only the single word. Hugh felt sure it was meant more for him than for the others. He would have continued lecturing gladly had he been able to speak, but his fingers were getting tired again, and there was silence for a time as the sweeper carriage trundled along. He wondered how much Eleventh-Worker had taken in.

  Hugh knew little of Locrians and their
social systems, and couldn’t guess at the interests and mental abilities of someone presumably fairly low on their labor scale, judging by his name. His one question so far had been very much to the point; it would be best to assume that he was grasping everything unless he indicated otherwise, and risk the possibility that embarrassment would prevent his revealing ignorance. It was easy to regard the being as a person, despite his vague resemblance to a four-limbed insect.

  “We have two hundred meters to go, if the distance you supplied is correct,” the robot interrupted Hugh’s cogitations at this point. Eleventh-Worker did not wait to be instructed, but peeled back the outer lids and exposed his single eye for full penetration, not bothering to rise or shift position to get a clearer “view” ahead. Hugh watched closely, indifferent to S’Nash’s knowledge of his efforts, but failed to observe anything which he and Janice hadn’t discussed before. The Locrian sense was still a mystery to him.

  “Slow down, please,” Eleventh-Worker requested after a moment. “I want to examine everything within twenty meters on each side, and we’re going much too fast for a careful look.”

  The robot obeyed without consulting Hugh; he wondered how S’Nash and Eleventh-Worker felt about that. They showed neither surprise nor revulsion nor any other emotion Hugh could read. The Naxian, it seemed likely, had merely recorded the event as another bit of evidence; it/he was, one could reasonably infer, gathering data on how intelligent the “limited decision” robots Hugh had acknowledged using in Pitville might actually be.

  “You suspected that the truck stopped for a time in this area.” Eleventh-Worker’s words were a statement, not a question. Hugh agreed. “Stop here. Sweep the snow away for the next fifteen meters along the left side of the road, and an equal distance away from it.”

  Again the robot obeyed without waiting for Erthuma confirmation, and the roar of the sweeper battled that of the wind. No heat beam was used this time, and Hugh felt sure that S’Nash was noting the fact and considering its implications about the robot’s intelligence. There were more items for it/him to think about in a few seconds; the loose snow billowing from the surface where the jet of air struck was swept back toward the watchers by the wind, and still without consulting anyone the robot cut off the blast, moved the sweeper around to the upwind side, carefully keeping its tracks off the area described by the Locrian, and resumed operations. Within a minute the patch of bare ice predicted by Hugh appeared from under its white covering, some of the blanket sticking and resisting stubbornly for seconds before flying away in fist-sized chunks.

  The exposed surface was not perfectly smooth. Examining it closely, Hugh and the others decided that it must have stayed slushy long enough for blowing snow to be caught and build odd-shaped mounds and towers which had frozen to the substrate far too firmly for the sweeper to remove.

  Among these shapes, however, tread marks could be seen and even some motions analyzed. The truck had not come to a stop, paused, and gone straight on: it had made a turn, and Hugh felt he was not yielding too much to wishful thinking in deciding that the turn had been toward Pitville. S’Nash, more objectively, insisted that the truck could have been going either way — that they could, in fact, be examining marks left by Rekchellet more recently.

  “We can call him and check how long he stayed at the roadside,” Hugh pointed out. “That’s why I brought the transmitter. We’ll feel less silly, though, if Eleventh-Worker looks around for more signs of stopping, first.”

  “I suggest you make the call. Eleventh-Worker make the examination, and I look over this area more broadly,” answered S’Nash. “That should make the best use of time.”

  Hugh was at the transmitter before it occurred to him that S’Nash could do the talking much more easily, but both the others were now invisible in the fog which had been thickening in the minutes since the wind had died down. It seemed too much trouble to look for the serpentine form, and obviously the Locrian had to do the examining, so Hugh energized the signal equipment.

  Third-Supply-Watcher responded; Rekchellet and his Habra companions were in the air. She was able to assure Hugh that they had not paused at all at the roadside; the automatic driver had guided their truck away for some two hundred meters before reaching a point where surface elevation had changed enough since the vehicle’s earlier passage to make it go on strike over failure to follow its vertical guidance — or less figuratively, had probably interpreted the failure as a malfunction and responded to a built-in stop command. Third-Supply-Watcher could tell precisely how far this was from the road and from where they had left it, if necessary. Hugh decided that it was not, and signed off with appropriate thanks.

  He looked around to find himself still alone.

  The fog had thickened. He could see for some three meters; nearly all of the sweeper and its carriage, but little else. S’Nash, Eleventh-Worker, and, he suddenly realized, the robot were all out of sight.

  He had given the machine no instructions, which made its disappearance interesting, to say the least. One of the two possibilities which came immediately to mind was also disturbing. Hugh had been sitting on the sweeper carriage; now he slipped to the ice, stood up, glanced around carefully, looked at his left wrist, and for the first time realized that he was not carrying an inertial tracker — something he had solemnly sworn, half a Common Year ago, never again to be without on Habranha.

  Going back for one now would be neither practical nor productive. Fafnir was intermittently visible, now much nearer the horizon than when it had illuminated Rekchellet’s dive into the snow, and would furnish direction for a while yet if visibility grew no worse. The road surface itself was fairly easy to distinguish — clearance by wind was roughly up with coverage by precipitation for the moment. Looking for people might not be safe, but it was important.

  And his code sounder should be audible; the wind was down for the time being, too.

  “S’Nash? Eleventh-Worker? Are you close enough to hear me?”

  The Locrian answered at once.

  “Yes. I have covered about one hundred meters of the north side of the road, to a width of fifty meters and a depth of about three. Should I work the other side, or increase the width or length of my search pattern on this?”

  Hugh thought briefly. “Width on that side, I’d say,” he finally pronounced, mentally filing the possibility that the depth represented a Locrian limit. “That’s where things seem to have happened, if anything did. Can you see S’Nash?”

  There was a pause, presumably while the worker looked around. “Yes,” came the answer at length. “It/he and the robot are thirty meters to the south of the road, and about fifty to the east of your position, apparently examining something on the ground.”

  “Thanks.” The Erthuma took another look at Fafnir and set out toward the still invisible pair. He would have been kicking himself had his armor allowed. So what if he hadn’t brought a tracker? The robot had a built-in location system, and the Naxian had had the sense to use it. There had been no need for the safety chief to worry about losing personnel on this trip — where was Ted? He hadn’t been on the carriage when the talk with the truck had ended.

  Well, Hugh hadn’t called him. He’d surely stay within range of the Erthuma’s translator, unless—

  He had. He responded at once, and Hugh’s professional worries ceased for the moment. The native assured his chief that all of the party was obvious to his electrical sense, though he couldn’t always actually see them through the fog.

  “Can you tell me whether I’m heading toward S’Nash?”

  “Not exactly, but you’ll be close enough to see them in a few seconds.”

  “Did I start out right, or are they moving?”

  “I didn’t notice your start. They aren’t moving now. The Naxian is examining something on the ground.”

  It/he was still examining it when Hugh came close enough to see distinctly. The robot was standing a meter or so away, motionless. The man tried to make out what was att
racting the other being’s attention, but between the fog and the poor light saw nothing. He turned his own lamp on the surface.

  “What’s there?” he keyed. Ted hummed to a landing beside them. S’Nash continued to examine the ice for many seconds before answering.

  “I’m not sure,” it/he said at last. “The marks are faint, and many of them obliterated. We’re beyond the edge of the patch melted by the truck, but something has either chipped or melted or pressed small dents in the road ice — little cup-shaped openings. I don’t recognize them at all. What do you make of them?”

  “I can’t even see them,” Hugh admitted. “Ted?”

  “Nor I.”

  “How big are they? I didn’t know your people could see smaller things than mine, but maybe that’s the problem.”

  “They’re just over five millimeters across. There are a lot of small bumps and pits made by snow-flakes which stuck or liquid drops which froze when they hit, and these are mixed in with them. I distinguish them only by their regularity. They form a pattern — so.” A handler extended from the tubular armor and indicated, one after another, a row of dimples in the ice which answered his description. Hugh shook his head.

  “I’d never have made those out from the rest of the marks. You think they’re a track of some sort?”

  “Can you see the pattern, Ted?” asked the Naxian. The Habra answered negatively.

  “That’s interesting. I don’t know what they are. Hugh. A track is the best word I can think of, but I have no idea what made them.”

  “How far have you followed them?”

  “They start at the edge of the melted surface left by the truck and end here.”

  “And they’re perfectly uniform all the way? That’s — oh, thirty meters or so?”

  “About that. No, they’re not all exactly equally spaced, and they’re not all along perfect lines, but they’re all — I can’t come up with a word. They’re related. That’s the best I can say.” S’Nash looked briefly at the robot, but if it/he had planned to address it, the intention was dropped before anything was said.