by Scott Mackay
He grinned back. He had to agree with her. He lifted a stone and threw it into the ocean. “You’ve developed a taste for solitude,” he said.
She said: Now that our marrow rations are small the old codes fade. The instinct to pack weakens. Our empathic communications grow faint. I was solitary as a child, before the Chryse Planitia changed me. I like quiet. She smiled as the wind from the bay buffeted her face. Isn’t that a wonderful smell? I’ve never smelled anything so fresh.
He gazed out at the bay. Far beyond the east point the bay opened onto the Ocean of Forgiveness.
“Solitude has a lot to offer,” he said.
They walked another half kilometer then climbed the slope. In the grass, patches of pink lichen grew in small conical pods, adding color to the otherwise drab brown, green, and yellow ground cover.
They had just about reached the top when they startled a pair of Filaments lying in the grass.
One them, the male, leaped up and approached Cody and Lulu, headwands flashing crazily in the gray dawn. Cody looked at the female. Birth water soaked the ground. Three newborns, two of them twitching their wings, trying to stand, huddled close to their mother. The third just lay there, shivering, deformed, born with badly crippled legs. The male picked up a lump of dirt and threw it at Cody. The intent was no doubt protective. The dirt bounced harmlessly off Cody’s knee.
Cody took out his guidelight and flashed it a few times at the male. The male stared at the light. The female sat up weakly and gathered the two healthy newborns close to her. The deformed one she just left. The male looked over his shoulder, flashed something at the female. The female responded with a short flash of her own. Cody was sure they were communicating. They looked so small. They looked so helpless. They didn’t look like the enemy at all. The male faced Cody again. He looked frightened, his little lungs pumping, getting ready to fight. Cody wanted to reassure him.
He stooped. Made himself smaller.
He searched the grass and quickly found a milkberry bush. He pushed the small leaves aside and revealed a dozen purplish-white berries. He did not pick them. The Filament craned, looked at the milkberries, flashed its headwands a few times, then turned away, walked back to its mate.
The male glanced over his shoulder and contemplated Cody and Lulu a second time. Then it dragged the deformed newborn a few meters away, where only a few stalks of spore-grass grew, and pushed sand over it, burying it alive. Cody was reminded of the burials at the rock slide. Now he understood. They buried the nonviable. The fatally injured. The dying. It was cruel. But in a world where food was so scarce, necessary.
The deformed newborn didn’t struggle, simply allowed itself to be buried.
When the mound was complete the male Filament walked over to the same milkberry bush Cody had showed him, picked two of the small berries, broke them open, and mixed the juice with sand. The juice instantly whitened the sand, and the male spread the whitened sand over the mound. He plucked a stalk of grass and etched delicate lines into his child’s burial mound.
Inside a large geodesic dome 18 Filaments struggled to stay upright. Cody stared through the clear acrylic. Jerry stood beside him watching. So did Buster, a number of ranking members of the clan, and several Meek scientists.
“It’s not exactly a gentle virus,” said Jerry. “But so many of the viruses they tried simply didn’t work. This one directly targets the synovial fluid around their joints.”
Cody saw that the knee joints, elbow joints, and ankle joints of the suffering Filaments were no longer transparent, no longer brilliantly see-through, but milky, translucent.
“So the virus essentially cripples them,” said Cody.
Jerry’s eyes narrowed, and an expression of regret came to his face. “That’s about the size of it,” he said.
“And we all know what the Filaments do to their cripples,” said Cody.
CHAPTER 25
Cody and Buster huddled in the carryall, the temperature-control unit working hard to keep the interior temperature livable, the bonnet sealed in place against the intense 60-degree-Celsius temperatures outside. They were resting during the day in preparation for the evening’s travel.
Buster said: The mean temperature of Carswell has risen considerably. Because of these higher temperatures we have to broaden bodily tolerances and will need to increase our marrow rations in order to withstand the heat. Even you six humans will have to eat marrow to toughen your bodies. You won’t be able to survive otherwise. This is going to deplete our marrow supply drastically and add yet more pressure to stop the Filaments. If we can’t come up with an alternate solution for stopping them before we reach the Martian orbital plane, we’ll have no choice. We’ll have to go ahead with the virus.
“But you can’t kill them all,” said Cody. “They’re intelligent.”
Buster said: This dance you saw Tumble and the others do … several creatures exhibit ritualized behavior.
“But what about the numerical intricacies of the dance?” asked Cody. “What about the way Tumble gave Deirdre that flower at the end of it?” Cody looked away, wiped the sweat from his brow, then turned back to Buster. “Let’s add it up. First we have the headwands. In a world that’s ultimately dark most of the time, doesn’t it make sense that these creatures should communicate to each other with light signals?”
Buster said: We can’t be certain the blinking represents a language.
“You were down at the brook with me last night,” said Cody. “You saw Ears and Hunchback talking to each other. Ears blinked at Hunchback and pointed up into the branches of that tree. Hunchback looked up into the tree, then blinked something back at Ears. Then they both pointed at the tree. They finally flew toward the tree and disappeared into the branches. They were communicating to each other. Not just warning calls. Not just a food alert. Not even anything like the more complicated signals dolphins and chimpanzees send to each other. They were communicating in an abstract way. Think of it. They both have nine headwands. They blink them in combination, in sequence, dimly or brightly, at different speeds, extend the actual wands in different directions, curve them, bend them, cross them … you have the endless permutations needed for a complicated, varied language, one that might have more shades of meaning than English.”
Buster said: Just because it might look that way doesn’t mean it is that way. And I’ve had them tested on sensitive instruments for intelligence. Nothing.
“No,” said Cody flatly. “Not nothing. You found a lot you didn’t understand.”
Not anything that indicates intelligence.
But Cody was relentless.
“What about the way they bury their dead? Just the other day we saw another burial. They didn’t have any white mud so they chewed up milkberries and mixed it with the mud they had. The mud turned white, and they spread it over the burial mound. Two scribes made markings on the mound. If you look closely at the markings, you’ll see a patterned relationship between them, a stylistic symmetry in the script.”
Buster said: I’m not convinced intelligence informs those markings.
Cody sighed in exasperation.
“Okay,” he said. “What about the way they treat the milkberry?”
Buster lifted his head and gazed at Cody with wide violet eyes. It was as if for some reason the question had special significance to Buster.
What about it? he asked.
“Why do they treat the milkberry with such reverence? Why do they choose berries so carefully? Yesterday, Bigfoot took nearly two hours to find the ones she wanted. There were hundreds all over the place. Why did she finally choose the ones she chose? And they never take more than three at a time. Always two or three, never anything different. Don’t you think that indicates numerical awareness? Just like the numerical awareness in their dancing?”
Buster grew pensive. He looked around at the occupants of the carryall, all of whom were asleep except for Agatha, who suffered through a bout of morning sickness.
B
uster asked: What do you want me to do? Cody felt the emanations of Buster’s moral anxiety. Scar approached me when we were camped out on the Bay of Redemption. He came to me with three milkberries. He gave them to me. But first he offered me a choice. He held up two fingers. And then he held up three. It took me a few moments to figure it out. I held up two of my own fingers. He gave me two of the berries. We communicated. Buster looked away, the tom expression on his face showing he did indeed grant the Filaments at least some intelligence. So this is what I’m faced with. A decision that will have disastrous consequences either way. A decision that makes me act the way my enemies have acted, a situation that makes me order a bioextermination I have no wish to order. Even if they weren’t intelligent, even if they were just wild creatures, I’d still be faced with the same dilemma, because I don’t want to kill anything. It goes against what I’ve struggled diligently to become. But I have to. I have no choice.
Cody shook his head. The irony struck home again. Just as Vesta City had planned to exterminate the Meek, so now the Meek planned to exterminate the Filaments. The Meek were survivors. He knew they would have to go ahead and do it if they had to.
Buster said: Do I destroy an intelligent race for the sake of saving my own? Or do I sacrifice my own race for the sake of saving the Filaments? My Meek code tells me to sacrifice myself, but my ghost code won’t stand for it. I’ve been in contact with the other clans. So far 6,342 pesticides and poisons have been tried. None of them have worked. Many other strategies have been tested as well. The Ophir Chasm Clan built an indoor marrow farm, a protective structure of rocks, and hardened it with heat. They planted marrow inside. The structure was a meter thick, as tough as steel, with one small door. The Filaments came with tools, primitive hand axes made from a nickel-copper alloy, and hacked the structure to pieces, thousands of them, all cooperating systematically. They reduced the structure to rubble in a matter of hours and ate all the marrow. Buster shook his head. So you see, our options are clearly running out.
Cody watched Kevin Axworthy and Boris carry Artemis Axworthy down to the lake—one of the many unnamed lakes in this vast continent—in a special chair, one with poles attached for easy lifting. The lake nestled in the bottom of a valley, as still as a mirror. The sides of the valley were golden with tall grass—grass that wasn’t really grass but more a long-stemmed lichen, something that found its nourishment in the planet’s internal heat and mulchy soil.
Axworthy and Boris eased the Father into the lake. Artemis Axworthy continued to sit in his chair. The water came up to the Father’s waist. The Father weakly splashed his arms and chest. Axworthy looked on, the attentive son.
Claire approached Cody from behind, stood beside him, gazed at the tranquil wilderness lake. She watched Axworthy with a great deal of fondness. A hot breeze ruffled her short dark hair.
“How are they getting on?” Cody asked.
Claire paused before she answered. “He really loves his father,” she said. “Artemis isn’t well.” She turned to Cody. “There’s not much Jerry can do for him. He’s 91.”
The two of them watched. Axworthy, his father, and Boris seemed so small against the backdrop of the lake.
“And you and Kevin?” asked Cody.
She nodded. “Me and Kevin,” she agreed.
“Is he coming to … to terms …” He motioned at the children playing in the water further down. “Has he come to accept all this?”
She thought about it. “Kevin knows how to compartmentalize,” she said, offering Cody a compromise. “He knows that this is right, and he doesn’t let all the other stuff get in the way. It’s why I … he and I … he’s a good man in a lot of ways. You just have to learn how to recognize it.”
Cody nodded. “I know,” he said. He watched Kevin Axworthy sponge his father with a wet towel; the old man was too weak to do it himself. “He’s a good man.”
Some of the Meek didn’t survive the heat on the return trip north. Chief among the casualties were the old and the young; 9,000 deaths altogether, 100 in Olympia Mons, one of which was Artemis Axworthy.
They buried the Father a few evenings later, after the sun had set. News of his death was communicated through conventional nontelepathic means to the other clans; without a global distribution of marrow, long-distance empathic communication was impossible. Several emissaries arrived from the other clans to attend the funeral. The overcast sky was green with distant storms, and heat lightning flashed constantly on the horizon. Cody and Jerry helped two Meek dig a hole two meters deep in the hard-baked dirt. As Cody and Jerry laid the old man in his grave Cody sensed the thoughts of not any one Meek in particular but a joint communal eulogy, everybody in Olympia Mons saying good-bye to the great man, an outpouring of devotion, respect, and grief that fed upon itself until the whole hot plain seemed to vibrate with it.
When it was over, the crowd dispersed to make ready for the evening leg of the migration north. Cody took one last look at the grave.
Tumble, Scar, Hunchback, Ears, and Bigfoot—the five Filaments who were following the clan north—piled dirt on top of the Father’s grave. Cody saw that Kevin Axworthy’s eyes were narrowed under his impressive brow. The Filaments broke open some milkberries and whitened the mud. Tumble and Scar acted as scribes, drawing designs all over the burial mound with tiny sharp stones. Axworthy, always in control of his emotions, suddenly lost his rein. His eyes filled with tears.
“I’m really going to miss him,” he said, wiping his tears on the sleeve of his antigrav suit. “But I guess I’m used to missing him.”
Olympia Mons discovered five more green glass constructs on the way north. The five were all in sight of each other, rising out of the rolling hills, tubelike structures up to a kilometer tall. Cody gazed at them from 500 meters up in the carryall. Lonely and desolate, all of them catching the wind, making it moan. Many of these towers were so dirty Cody couldn’t see through the glass to the arterial networks inside.
The sight renewed the question everyone had been asking right from the start: Who had built these constructs?
“It certainly wasn’t the Filaments,” Cody said to Lulu. “They’re hardly beyond the hunter-gatherer stage.”
The Builders, everyone agreed, had to be far more advanced than that. But where had they gone? Where had they come from? Had they originated on Carswell? Or had they come from somewhere else?
The clan settled near one of the constructs for the evening, and Cody, Lulu, and Agatha, in an attempt to find a cooling breeze, and to get a better look at the nearest construct, walked to the top of a hill. Agatha stared straight ahead, not watching where she was going, still grieving for Ben. Cody and Lulu walked a little apart from her, letting her be by herself for a change.
The accident happened a few minutes after they had reached the top of the hill.
One second Agatha was walking along normally, the next second the ground swallowed her up, collapsing beneath her feet like thin ice.
Cody and Lulu rushed over. A patch of grass, dirt, and clay had caved in. A sinkhole, by the look of it, thought Cody. He knelt on the edge of the hole and peered into the darkness. Lulu knelt beside him and sent emanations but got nothing in return.
Lulu said: She’s unconscious. She’s hurt. Do you have your guide light?
Cody unlatched his guidelight from his belt and shone it down the hole. He felt further nonverbalized emanations from Lulu, concern for the baby, questions about whether the baby had been injured in the fall. Finally his flashlight beam found Agatha.
She lay on a flat surface below, a surface far too flat to be anything but a floor, a small pool of blood by her head. A dank, sweet aroma wafted up from the hidden chamber.
Cody ran to get a rope ladder while Lulu stayed at the hole, trying to wake Agatha. He came back with Buster, Jerry, Rex, and a half-dozen others. They came with a litter. Jerry had his med-kit. Cody threw the rope ladder down the hole and descended. Buster and Rex climbed down after him. Jerry had to struggle
with the ladder but he finally made it down too.
They stood in a large vaulted chamber with stone benches built into the walls. At first glance this was all they could see. They didn’t investigate further because they had much more pressing business with Agatha.
“Agatha?” Jerry called. “Agatha, can you hear me?”
No response. He took a neck brace from his kit and secured her neck. Then with Cody’s help he carefully rolled her onto the litter, and they could see how bad her injury was. The left side of her forehead had an extensive laceration at the hairline.
“It’s serious,” said the doctor. “Maybe a fractured skull. We’d better get her back to camp.”
They strapped Agatha onto the litter and hoisted her out of the chamber with a rope. Back in camp, Jerry and two other clan physicians took over Agatha’s care. Cody and some other members of the clan went back to investigate the underground chamber.
They found engraved into the wall what looked like a design plan for one of the green glass constructs. With this evidence they concluded the underground chamber, too, was something the Builders had left behind, and quickly dubbed the site Builders’ Mound.
They scrubbed an opposite wall. Under the dirt they found what Cody at first thought was an abstract mosaic made of ceramic tile: hues in the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow; geometric arrangements of squares, oblongs, and rectangles—parallelograms. The primary colors used in the wall mosaic were bright, fluorescent.
Cody theorized, “If the Builders used bright colors like these, in a world where the lack of light would always cause the colors to look gray …” And he explained how colors like these would need the reflection of light to gain their proper brilliance. “… then we can only assume that the Builders didn’t come from Carswell, that they brought their culture of color and light from a place that had sunshine. We can’t expect the use of color to arise on a place with no light. Knowing colors like red, blue, and yellow means the Builders had to come from somewhere else. A planet with a star. Not a rogue like Carswell.”