Deucalion

by Caswell, Brian

  There was a sudden flurry of activity outside one of the structures on the Greenspace, and Cael focused his wandering attention. The memories faded; he was watching the crowd of offworlders, as they filed into the wide entrance. Inside, someone was speaking, and there was the sound of offworlder music, but he was too far away to hear what was being said.

  DARYL

  Johannsen was making one of his usual election speeches. Not that it was supposed to be anything of the kind – this occasion was supposed to be a celebration, not a rally. The guy just couldn’t help himself. Once a politician, always a politician, I guess.

  I’d just as soon have been back in New Geneva, celebrating in comfort, but I’d drawn bodyguard on the work roster, and having blown a week’s credits backing my ego in a game of mahjong against Tieu, I needed the job.

  What the J-man was doing, speaking at a celebration in a hick mining centre like Neuenstadt, I’ll never know. But then one thing I’ll never be (up there with rich, popular and white) is a politician. The party numbers-men must have decided it would mean more votes for Johannsen to be seen on the tube, celebrating the Centennial somewhere on the ‘frontier’.

  What a joke! The only thing remotely ‘frontier’ about Neuenstadt is the fact that the Deucalion Mining Corporation is so tied up in ripping out as much profit as they can from under the mountains, for as little outlay as possible, that they haven’t even bothered trying to reclaim the desert, except for the couple of hundred hectares of Greenspace they use for all the ‘community’ stuff. Like Centennial celebrations, for example.

  The Greenspace, and, of course, the Ocra plantation. Talk to most people who drink Ocra, and they won’t even be able to tell you where it comes from. They just think it’s some kind of pretty special – and expensive – tea. Actually, it’s made from the leaves of the Ocra tree. The Ocra’s a small evergreen, about three metres high, and the only place it grows is on the Fringes of the desert and, to a lesser extent, on the flatlands just east of the Ranges. Even a mature tree looks like a young sapling. They never grow very thick and they have the most incredibly flexible trunks. It’s how they survive the winds that howl in across the desert in the evenings. I’ve seen them bent almost flat to the ground in a bad blow.

  The Elokoi have used the Ocra tree for everything since just about the beginning of time, but one thing they never did was to turn it into a drink. I think it might have something to do with the fact that Ocra tea, while it might fetch fifty creds a kilo in New Geneva, and thirty times that amount back on Earth, just makes the Elokoi violently ill. Feed them enough of it and they’ll probably die on you.

  The Ocra plantation is one of the few places where the townspeople and the ‘natives’ really come into close contact. They use Elokoi to work the plantations because they handle the heat so much better than humans – even black ones, like me. It can hit 50 degrees during peak periods in summer out here.

  But that’s about as far as the contact goes. You won’t see Elokoi on the streets of Neuenstadt, any more than you will in New Geneva itself. Talk to most people, and they’ll tell you the Elokoi are little more than intelligent animals, even if they can read each other’s thoughts and produce interesting artefacts. After all, they’ve got fur. How can anything with fur be really intelligent? They don’t even have a written language, do they? And it’s difficult as all hell to teach them to read and write ours, so why bother?

  How many people do you know who’ve actually read Tolhurst’s books on the Elokoi, on disk or in hard-copy? How many people do you know who read anything any more? It’s much easier to get your news from the tube. And unfortunately the Elokoi just aren’t news. Not in the tube sense. They don’t cause trouble, they stay on their Reserves, and they take what’s dished out to them.

  Not that it helped them all that much a century ago, when the first Colony ships arrived. It was okay for the first couple of months. The Elokoi were all part of the charm of the place. Sort of exotic, I guess. And cute. Until people started noticing that they seemed to be able to tell each other an awful lot without actually saying very much. I guess it would have been scary – and a little annoying – to encounter telepathy on a strange planet, when all the work they’d been doing on it back home since the twentieth century had led to nothing. Not that it excused the killings. But perhaps it did explain them . . .

  Anyway, I got bored with the J-man’s speech. As usual. He was a pretty impressive speaker. Anyone will tell you that. It’s just that I’d pulled more than my share of bodyguard shifts in lots of out-of-the-way places, and he used the same lines and the same jokes every time. He couldn’t get away with it in the city, of course. He was too over-exposed. But out in the sticks, it was a different ball game.

  So I stepped outside. And that was when I saw the young Elokoi. He didn’t know I saw him. I was too far away. I was just doing a random sweep with my ’scope, and I picked up his body-heat on infra-red. He was lying in some bushes a couple of hundred metres away, watching the activity on the Greenspace.

  Not that there was too much activity at that moment. Johannsen was just warming up; talking about ‘pride and purpose’ and carving a new nation out of the wilderness of a hostile planet. The usual stuff. As planets go, I don’t think Deucalion is particularly hostile, but it all sounded pretty impressive – especially during a Centennial celebration. And it kept the hicks of Neuenstadt entertained.

  But it left the young Elokoi without very much to look at. I slipped behind one of the smaller tents, and switched the ’scope from infra- to true-light. One thing they don’t skimp on in Security is the hardware. It had a magnification of about ×200, with full colour hi-resolution video. I could see the creature like he was lying right there at my feet. It was as if I was staring straight into his huge black eyes. Only he had no idea I was there. He was only young, an adolescent. His fur was still a mottled brown, with only a few small patches of the silver-grey it would turn when he was fully mature. But he had an unusual white marking over his right eye, that extended to just behind his little pointed ear and made it look like he was wearing a headband.

  What really surprised me was that he was there at all. Most Elokoi stay well away from town, and they aren’t normally noted for being particularly curious about how we spend our time. I looked at my chrono. The J-man had a good half-hour to go, and none of the audience was carrying any concealed weapons, so I figured it was a safe bet. I headed for the southern end of the Greenspace, keeping the tents between me and the Elokoi’s line of sight, then I began to circle around behind him . . .

  CAEL

  – Cael!

  Suddenly, Saebi’s mind-speech crashed into his thoughts.

  – Behind you. Offworlder!

  For a moment, Cael froze indecisively. Then, close behind him, he caught a rustle in the underbrush. He turned his head and found himself looking up into the eyes of a male offworlder.

  The young Elokoi did not move. There was no point; hanging from a ring on his belt, the human had a shooting-stick. Even at full speed, an Elokoi could not outrun death.

  Cael could feel his pulse racing, and yet a part of him was surprised at how calm he felt. The stories told him just what an Elokoi might expect, caught alone outside the Reserve, spying on the activities of the offworlders. That was why Saebi did most of her spying from high on the clifftop. But something told him that this time, the stories were wrong.

  Of course, he could not read the thoughts of such an alien mind, but the colour of the mind-tone emanating from this offworlder was different from the others he had tasted. As different as the colour of this one’s skin. There was no hatred in his tone. Nor any superiority. As he stood there, looking down, he seemed merely curious. His stance was relaxed and he had made no move to reach for his weapon.

  Carefully, Cael stood up, not taking his eyes from those of the offworlder for a moment. They were brown eyes; dark, not pale like the eye
s of most of the offworlders he had seen. But it was his skin that set him apart: a darker brown, almost black, and shining as he sweated in the heat.

  The offworlder wiped a hand across his forehead and spoke in the harsh tongue of his people. ‘Do you speak Standard?’

  Standard. Wordspeech for the language he used to ask the question.

  ‘A . . . little.’ The alien words were harsh on his tongue, but Cael knew the shapes that made the speechsounds. Toev had taught him. (‘In case you ever have to work the plantation.’) In everything, Cael was a quick learner.

  ‘What are you doing here? Why are you spying on the Centennial celebrations?’

  Most of what the man said was beyond Cael. He formed the reply in his head, then made the word-shapes. ‘Watching . . . colours. Shelters . . . Watching.’

  The man shook his head in frustration. ‘I know you were watching. I want to know why.’

  Why? Question. Request for reason.

  ‘No why. Watching.’

  Again, the offworlder shook his head. ‘It killed the cat, you know . . . curiosity. You’re just lucky it was me who saw you, not Mackenzie. He hates ferrets.’

  Ferret. Offworlder hate-name for Elokoi.

  But Cael could still taste no hate in the colour of the offworlder’s tone, and as he watched, he saw the dark man smile. ‘I don’t know why he should. Hate you, I mean. But who knows what makes anyone tick? I sure as hell don’t. You’d better get out of here, before the J-man finishes his speech and everyone comes out. If Mack does a sweep and finds you, he’ll do a bit more than ask you what you’re doing here. Go on. Get out of here. Go!’

  Go! Imperative. Instruction to leave.

  Without removing his gaze from the offworlder’s dark face, Cael moved slowly backwards into the underbrush. Then he turned and ran. And he did not slow his pace until he was safely back on the Reserve.

  DARYL

  One thing I’ll say about the ‘frontier’. They throw a good party. We ate until we were stuffed, drank like there was no tomorrow and danced until the sun came up. But it was the Centennial, after all, and you only get an excuse like that once every hundred years.

  Even so, all through it, I kept thinking back to the young Elokoi I’d caught that afternoon. He knew hardly a word of Standard, but I got the feeling that he understood a lot more about me than I did about him. After all, he did know a few words, which put him a step ahead of me. I don’t know anyone who knows any Elokoi speech.

  Johannsen flew back to New G first thing next morning. The PR had been done, the voters were happy. But I had a few days of rec-leave owing to me, and I thought I might stick around. You know, help the girls of Neuenstadt to celebrate properly. That, at least, was my excuse. But I think I knew deep down that there was more to it than that.

  Next day, I found myself on top of the cliff overlooking the town. Actually, it’s not a natural cliff at all. It’s the face of an old open-cut mine. The Corporation gouged away half the mountain before the mineral deposits became uneconomical, and they decided to sink shaft mines instead. That was about sixty years ago. Since then, the town has expanded into the scar, so that now the cliff looks right down into it. And if you move around to the western edge of the cut and face south, you can look down on the Elokoi Reserve.

  I spent most of the morning up on that cliff, in blistering heat, ’scoping the Reserve. The ’scope was ether-linked to the laser-disk in the flyer, and from time to time, if something caught my attention, I recorded a bit. It’s against regulations, of course, but what isn’t? I didn’t have a clue what I was doing up there in the first place, so a little rule-bending wasn’t all that surprising.

  It was only when I sat down in the tech-room that evening, and went through what I’d recorded that I realised just what kind of things had caught my attention.

  An old Elokoi, sitting in the sun outside his hut, carving. While a youngster sat in front of him and just watched. Every movement. Every knife-cut.

  A group of adolescent females sitting in a circle, while an older female walked around inside the circle; up and down, between the younger ones, who followed her with their eyes. They were out of audible range even for the ’scope, but it probably didn’t matter; the Elokoi communicate very little in spoken words, and we haven’t developed the technology yet to pick up thoughts.

  Females occupy a special position in Elokoi society. For one thing, they tend to be a little bigger than the males, but more importantly, there are far fewer of them. Only about one Elokoi baby in four is female, so I guess it’s natural they should be treated differently. It also explains why they tend to take a number of mates. Anything up to five, in a sort of hierarchy, where the firstmate dominates the others – but never with any violence. The Elokoi are about the least violent of any of the intelligent races yet discovered. Which probably explains why the early colonists hunted them almost to extinction.

  I didn’t know all this until I accessed one of the library disks that night. It showed a lot of interesting stuff about Elokoi culture, too. Mack might think they’re just a sub-species of rodent, but I’ll bet he never took the time to look at the disk. Painting, dance, even an oral literature and history called the Telling – most of which we managed to wipe out by killing off a whole generation of Tellers in the first few years after the Arrival.

  The whole experience reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on just what. Then it hit me . . .

  I was ten years old and it was a few months before my family shipped out on the freeze-liner and ended up sweating out a new life on Deucalion.

  Ten years old, and at school they decided it was time we got in touch with our roots. Australasia, Old Earth. Three hundred years of immigration, before the isolationists took control. Anyway, they decided to give us a crash course on ‘cultural diversity’. Edited highlights from the encyclodisks; all the juicy bits from cultures that mostly no longer existed, except in museums and gigabytes of information on the international databases.

  But one segment blew me out.

  I was only ten, remember, and my parents, my real parents, had been dead for most of that time, so it came as a bit of a shock to see people on the screen with skin as dark as mine. There weren’t so many of us around. At least, not where I lived. I watched them, as the voice on the disk prattled on about ‘indigenous peoples’, and ‘unique cultural identities’ – which meant squat to me. But the images touched something in me.

  Afterwards, the teacher accessed a craftwork program, and we learned how to do something from one of the cultures on the disk. I scored some synth-wood, and carved this small flying toy, which flew pretty well, but didn’t come back like it was supposed to. It was flat, and shaped like a bent stick, and I covered it with these out-of-shape line drawings of strange animals, which I copied straight from the screen.

  When I showed my mother, she looked at my father and flashed him an odd sort of smile, then she told me how nice she thought it was. I packed it with my other stuff when we left Earth a few months later. I haven’t seen it for years, but I guess it’s at home somewhere. My mother never throws anything away.

  On my second day on the cliff, I saw him.

  He wasn’t hard to recognise. The Elokoi don’t have too many young, so the number of adolescents on the Reserve was quite small, and the white flash over his eye was a giveaway.

  He was heading south, away from the Reserve and the town, and through the ’scope, it seemed like he was trying too hard to look casual. It’s a bit difficult to tell with the Elokoi, because they show so little emotion on their faces. With their long snouts, and their intelligent eyes, I always think they look more like dogs – terriers, maybe – than ferrets. Whatever. The point is, it’s hard to pick what they’re thinking.

  It was just something in the way he moved. The fact that he kept glancing over his shoulder and then from side to side as he walked.
I decided to follow him. Not too closely, of course. There was no need. Like I said, the ’scope is pretty sophisticated. Once I had him marked, he was mine.

  We travelled for maybe an hour – no mean journey in that heat. Then he disappeared into a small cave at the base of one of the small hills that form part of the border of the Great Desert. I waited outside for a few minutes, then I followed him into the cave.

  SAEBI

  Saebi was already hard at work when Cael arrived, mixing colours and preparing the tools. It was all she could do for him. The vision was his, and the memories. Only Cael knew the Pictures with an artist’s eye. Only his hands could bring them to life again; create the Wall anew. This was the reason the Ancestors had chosen him so young, and blessed him with the passion.

  She watched him as he stood before the living rock, and she knew that he had moved beyond her. Retreating into the shadows, she sat in silence, as the next Picture took life beneath his hands. And as she watched him, she knew that she would one day mate with him. That he would be her firstmate. Her only-mate. There could be no other . . .

  Then, suddenly, they were not alone.

  The light which filtered in from the entrance was blocked as the huge form entered, and as she sprang to stand beside Cael, he turned. She felt the anguish in his wordless cry, and saw the colour fall in slow motion from the pot he held in his hand, soaking into the sand of the cave floor.

  The offworlder stopped a few paces into the cave, and looked up at the Wall. He drew a breath, then looked at Cael, who had not moved.

  ‘You did all this?’

  Saebi watched Cael nod his head. An offworlder gesture. He answered in wordspeech. ‘You . . . take old Pictures. I paint . . . new Pictures.’

  The offworlder looked up at the Wall again, then down at Cael. Then, without a word, he turned and left the cave.

  Every day, she watched the cave. Cael had not left the Reserve. Had not eaten. He was waiting for the end of his Dream. But still she watched.