Missionaries patrol the perimeter of the tent, crossbows slung across their shoulders.
Of course, a plasma weapon will cause considerable risk in this high-oxygen atmosphere. Use it, and you might blow up the whole camp—much safer for all to resort to something less destructive first.
Brothers in protective gear are wheeling dinner trolleys between the tables. There is no food on the trays, only jugs of what looks like cordial.
None of the aliens take any interest in the trolleys. None of them communicate. They sit on their benches with their backs incredibly straight and watch me—every single one. There must be at least three hundred of them and their presence is overwhelming—and then their smell. No one warned me about the smell. It’s strong, it’s musky. It permeates the filter of my mask. I feel like I’m choking. I hold the hose to the filter canister on my belt, struggling not to rip the whole contraption from my face. I can’t, I know. The lethal soup of molecules that passes for air would kill me within minutes. The inside of the visor fogs up.
In the narrow aisle, I accidentally bang my left crutch into the back of a bench.
“Excuse me.” I’m taking deep gasps of air.
From the corner of my awareness, I notice someone getting up.
Before I know what’s happening, I’m on the ground and several hot-skinned bodies crash into me. People are shouting and screaming. Two twanging shots go off. A missionary drags me under the cover of a table.
As quickly as it started, it’s over.
I sit up, dazed. One of the Hern is held down by three missionaries sitting on top of him, another is pulling at a crossbow bolt in his thigh. The rivulets of blood that run from the wound are nearly black. The creature’s eyes are fierce with anger. I feel sick and filled with a renewed respect for crossbows.
A missionary rushes to me, but instead of helping me to my feet, he picks up my crutches.
“You’ll have to keep these outside,” he says and he runs away, carrying my only means of independent motion.
I’m too flabbergasted to reply. I know the church doesn’t want me here, but does that have to mean they humiliate me in front of the natives?
Brother Copernicus helps me up, alone, which must take some strength. When he supports me through the aisle, I feel the muscles straining through his layers of protective clothing. He’s trembling. The reflective visor hides his face.
“I’ll explain later,” he says in a low voice.
I want to shout Now’s as good a time as any, but I’m not going to make a scene here. The Hern inmates are all watching us.
I make my way to the table holding onto his arm, even though my left knee spikes with pain every time I put weight on it. A group of men hustles the attackers out the door and everyone continues as if nothing has happened.
Some missionaries are already seated at the table in the middle of the tent. Most have taken off their gloves and hoods, which are UV protection, but the men still look the same to me with their shaved heads and shaved eyebrows, wearing the same brown habits. When they use face masks, I can’t even begin to guess who they are.
They nod greetings as I sit down. They sure remember who I am.
The Hern envoy who approaches the table is huge. The frame of the bench creaks when he takes his place opposite us. His black eyes rest on me, making my skin crawl. They are round and lidless, surrounded by a ring of long lashes. These creatures are human?
I bow. “Envoy.”
He doesn’t show any emotion.
I touch my chest. “I’m Miranda Tonkin. What is your name?” I hold my hand out flat. No pointing. They might take that as a sign of aggression.
His face remains blank.
“I’m sorry . . .” I hiss a whisper to Brother Copernicus. “What’s his name?” Although I’m only guessing the creature is male.
“They have never used names with us.”
No names? Some tribes consider names personal property that loses power when spread too widely, but they usually have nicknames. Clearly, the Hern distrust the missionaries too deeply to give out any personal information. I’m wondering why they even allow themselves to be incarcerated in this camp. Surely they could escape if they banded together and made use of their formidable strength?
One of the missionaries rolls out a map of a terrain that has no natural vantage points except a grid of latitudes and longitudes, and the paths of burnt forest penciled in. He points at various sections, also penciled in. Another missionary explains for my benefit how the church is negotiating sections for the Pari and Hern to live separate from each other.
The Hern envoy looks on, saying nothing while the missionaries carve up his homeland. His eyes move, but the rest of his body is perfectly still, reminding me of a predator. Who is the prey?
In the middle of a conversation between two brothers, he points at me. “Munni,” he says. His voice is rough. It’s the first time I hear any of them speak.
A couple of other Hern grumble at this word. Black eyes meet mine, conveying that somehow this means I’m fair game.
I glance at Brother Copernicus, but he shrugs. “One of the words we haven’t been able to translate.”
He sounds nervous.
I wonder how many words they have been able to translate. How many words they’ve even heard? Not too many, I’m thinking.
I’m sorry you had to experience that,” Brother Copernicus says when we’re outside the camp.
“Sorry?” I have my crutches back, given to me by the guard at the gate.
“Yes, I should have looked closer at those crutches. If I’d realized they were made of titanium, I’d have given you some replacements. For some reason, exposure to titanium makes the Hern go crazy.”
“Why couldn’t you explain that in the tent? The Hern can’t understand us anyway.”
He shrugs, and it strikes me he’s been getting increasingly uncomfortable. Because he doesn’t like being assigned as my guide? Because his superiors have told him to do things he doesn’t agree with? Like deliberately letting me take my crutches into the camp?
“What is so special about titanium?” My heart is thudding. I could have been killed in that camp. The brothers would have reported it as an accident and no one at Solaris would ever have known the truth.
“We need more time to research these people. Their attraction to titanium is not on our list of priorities, as you may understand. The Hern are a particularly impenetrable folk, but if the segregation plan works, we’ll save a lot of lives.”
“Segregation is an ugly and temporary solution and only works if both parties agree to it and understand the concept. Do you think these Hern understand?” Are you sure you’d call them human?
“We’d police the boundaries—”
“Do you think they understand?”
He faces me, but all I see is my own refection in that white landscape, like a walrus on a sunny beach.
“Solaris thinks the church are idiots, that we’ve botched this project, don’t they? You’re going to recommend withdrawing the agency’s subsidy, aren’t you?”
I don’t reply.
“Wait until you see the Pari and tell me these people don’t deserve saving.”
“I’m an envoy, an observer. I don’t make the final decision. The board does that,” neglecting to mention that I sit on the board as rotating member. “I’ll decide what I’ll recommend when the time comes.”
I don’t dare say any more, for my own safety.
The Pari camp is very different from the Hern’s, a collection of army-green tents amongst obscenely green rain forest. It’s only early morning, but the heat is relentless. The suit is meant to protect me, but I can feel the ultraviolet radiation through layers of sleeves.
The camp is ordered, with tents in neat rows. There are fields
of crops and people working in them.
A few missionaries stroll past. They carry plasma guns on their belts, but no crossbows.
A group of Pari have brought in a felled tree and are sawing it into slices with a huge, double-handled blade-saw. They’re smaller than us, muscular and brown, virtually hairless. Moisture gleams on bent backs.
We stop to watch the activity. It strikes me how they work with each other, how they chatter and how the Hern didn’t do any of those things.
“What are they making?” I ask.
“They’ll make anything. They seem to have this compulsion to build things, to accumulate structures. We’ve found huge above-ground settlements, all made from wood, palaces of incredible craftsmanship.”
The tree trunk is huge, at least ten meters wide. At cross-section, the wood is dark and glitters like crystal. It isn’t wood in the usual sense of the word and contains far more minerals and metals than wood on Earth and far less carbon. Bianca has some very tough and strange proteins that hold vegetation together on a cellular level.
I’m guessing the wood is hard, because the saw makes little progress. The metal would be titanium, since it’s the dominant metal on the planet, but no one has observed any means by which these people produce tools like this.
There is so much to see: strange clothing, mostly blue, necklaces and thick armbands—titanium also, tattoos on arms and legs, children, many of them, mostly naked with oddly wrinkled skin. To be honest, I am unsure if they are children.
A bit further into the camp, a group is taking down an army tent, folding it up meticulously. A few taller Pari are digging a hole, bringing up clods of sticky, white soil. Others use the clay to sand down poles, rubbing it over the wood in a numb routine.
“They’ll have some sort of structure up by the end of the day,” Brother Copernicus says. “That house over there only went up yesterday.”
The structure he points out is already two floors high with walls made out of intricate latticework.
“Two days old?” It’s hard to believe.
While we walk past, more and more of these people put down their tools. Some of them run to Brother Copernicus and stroke the fabric of his robe. He pulls one or two into a hug. Another missionary joins us, handing out pieces of fruit from a bowl. The yellow morsels pass from hand to hand under much chatter and sounds that resemble laughter.
It’s hard not to like these people—cute, industrious, self-sufficient, grateful.
They’ve built an enormous structure as their central gathering place. It’s three floors high, has slanted roofs covered with carved planks, diamond-shaped windows and walls made of latticework that forms patterns of stars.
“Wow,” is my first reaction.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Brother Copernicus sounds much more self-assured than he did in the Hern camp. “And then to think of those bastards out there burning all this to the ground. Just think of the cultural heritage. There’d be enough material here for an entire university of scientists. These people are willing and able to communicate with us.”
We enter the ground floor of the structure, which is only a hall from where a number of ladders lead up. I’m about to protest that there’s no way I can get up when a cage sails down from above, suspended from thick ropes. They’ve made a lift.
The Pari that steps out of the cage is taller than most, with soft brown eyes that make me think the creature is female, even though nothing else about the brown-skinned body does. But “she” sounds better than “it.” Like several of the adults, she has a fuzz of hair on her head and back. The skin on her chest shows darker patches of pigment.
“We think the size and skin coloring is a sign they’ve reached sexual maturity,” Brother Copernicus says.
She gets in the cage with us. The muscles in her back ripple when she pulls the rope that, via a system of pulleys, hauls us to the top floor of the building.
“Thank you,” I say. I reach into my pocket where my gloved hand encounters my no-longer-current travel band. I pull it out, a little piece of white plastic with an embedded microchip, and give it to her. It looks strange in the palm of her hand, technology alien to this world.
“It goes like this.” I undo the clip and fit it around her wrist. Snap the clip shut.
She looks at it, bows and runs off.
A group of missionaries meets us on the top floor of the building. While we’re being introduced, I spy the Pari girl in the corner showing off her prize. I’m smiling; it’s hard not to.
We enter a large room with a vaulted ceiling. Centerpiece of the room is a heavy wooden table with surrounding benches all carved, it seems, from the same piece of wood.
Beyond that, through the silhouetted latticework and the diamond-shaped window, the view stretches over the treetops.
I walk to the window to have a better look. I can see all the way to the mission on the other side of the white track, to the Hern camp, a dark blot in the desolate white landscape, over undulating country with a thick cover of blue-green foliage. A heat haze hangs over the forest, a soup of gases that turns the air faintly brown, like heavy pollution over a city. It’s ozone, formed under the influence of sunlight, and it breaks down again at night when the rains come.
“Miranda?” Brother Copernicus calls from behind.
Everyone is already at the table.
Our envoy is a small Pari with stooped shoulders and large brown eyes. I decide the creature is female. I ask her name, but as in the Hern camp, I’m informed they do not use names. I could believe that of the Hern, but these creatures have a lot more trust in us. Why no names?
The envoy sits at the table and folds long-fingered hands together.
“Peace,” she says.
“We will have peace,” Brother Copernicus says, “when this terrible war is over.”
“Peace,” she repeats. “We go feed the fields.”
“We’ll try,” he says.
I’m not sure what he’s talking about. I’m unsure she understands. Is this the extent to which the missionaries have been able to teach them our language? Brother Copernicus said they were able to communicate?
The dining hall of the mission is a large, echoing place, austere as the Universal Church itself.
I’ve been sitting here since returning from the camps, reading the report written by the previous Solaris envoy four months ago. It’s very quiet in this contemplative room, and I’m fighting my gritty eyes desperate for sleep.
The Pari from the nearby village were coming to the mission almost every day. The native woman Tani has made great linguistic progress. She has also shown an interest in the plants cultivated near the mission.
Wait. Hang on.
I re-read the passage. So the Pari did, at one stage, use names. They did, at one stage, communicate better than they do now.
I look up at the vaulted ceiling.
One could imagine if one were as time-lag-addled as I am, that not Bianca’s sun, but an angel looks in through the windows up there, bathing the room in a golden glow. One could believe that this was a sign, that this world was Eden, as the church used to call it, until the hell of war broke loose.
Above a dais at the far end of the room, there is a small altar with candles, which flicker in the filtered air. Slogans on the wall proclaim Space is God and Space is not empty.
It appears the church was right about the not-empty bit. Bianca is the first world where humans discovered higher intelligent life. Ever since, the question has divided the Solaris board: the Pari and Hern look human enough, but are they really? And even if they are, does that give us the right to interfere?
The Brothers of the church shuffle into the hall in twos and threes. It surprises me how many of them are old, much older than me.
It must be close to dinnertime.
Brother Copernicus sits opposite me. His frown carries an implicit question: I thought your room was comfortable enough?
“Better light here,” I say, glancing at the bright beams intersecting the roof space.
I’m avoiding his eyes. I can hardly tell him I don’t trust the brothers after the incident at the Hern camp and prefer to spend as much time as possible in a public space, where any attacks on me are likely to have witnesses.
“What are you reading?”
“Envoy El-Armeini’s report.”
“Oh.” There is no emotion in that single word, yet he must have read the report and know what’s in it.
I leaf a few pages.
“She says the Pari used to have names. Her report suggests a much deeper level of communication with them than I saw today.”
He shrugs. Sighs. Shrugs again, uneasy. What is under that not-unattractive, straight-nosed face?
When he doesn’t say anything, I read the passage aloud.
Brother Copernicus is staring at his hands, interlaced over the table. His fingers are deeply bronzed, oxygen-wrinkled and belie his age.
“The Pari are traumatized by what’s happened to them,” he says finally. “When we came here, there were thousands of them. They lived in a most beautiful and intricate village structure. You’ve seen what they can build. It was a hundred—no, a thousand—times bigger than that.”
He stops speaking, twitches his mouth, wriggles his shoulders. Moisture glistens in his eyes.
“No one understands,” he says, his voice little more than a whisper. “Why would the Hern attack a peaceful village and butcher everyone in it? The Pari didn’t even put up resistance. They stopped speaking to us. They stopped coming for lessons. It’s like this war has turned them stupid. The Hern ran in and the Pari fell to their knees as if they were worshipping them like gods—”
“Maybe they are worshipping the Hern like gods.”
He gives me a look that spells blasphemy in huge capital letters.
Oh, right. I’m in a church. One that believes that the existence of God will be proven when they find an alien race that also believes in God. Therefore, it is in their interest to study these humanoid aliens and convert them before anyone else gets the chance.
Writers of the Future, Volume 27 Page 24