The Great Hydration

by Barrington J. Bayley

  “One can see it, then? See it but not hear it?”

  Kurwer replied slowly, after a pause. “No, one cannot see it.”

  The pattering of water was the only sound to be heard. Hrityu rubbed his eyes, which the humidity had made sore.

  The Crome chuckled. “If these Analane could invent machinery as well as they invent lies then we Crome might indeed have something to fear! Sound that cannot be heard, because it is light—except that it cannot be seen! Such soundless, invisible light describes their machine very well, because neither of them exist!”

  Suddenly Rherrsherrsh turned to Nussmussa the Toureen. “Is it true you made an offer for this device?”

  “Yes, Market Master.”

  “Did you see it in operation?”

  Nussmussa glanced at the Analane fretfully. “No, I did not. I did not see it at all, and the bargain was agreed only in principle. They took me to see the device, but it was not there.”

  “More trickery!” the Crome jeered. “They duped this poor creature from a distant land so as to lend their story a semblance of credibility!”

  “The radiator is real!” Kurwer burst out. “Our enemy the Crome stole it!”

  Hrityu realized how badly the exchange was going. “Market Master,” he stuttered, “this device could be of great use to the Tlixix. It would enable messages to be passed instantly between the water refuges. We would gladly donate it in return for protection.”

  “Then why did you not offer it to the Tlixix?” Rherrsherrsh retorted, with thunderous hoarseness.

  Hrityu could not find a reply. The idea had been considered, but though the Tlixix liked to promulgate the idea that they could control all wars in the world, it was doubtful if their word alone could actually prevent one. The elders of the Analane had decided that the most likely outcome of such an offer was that the Tlixix would appropriate the device and then encourage the extermination of the Analane to give themselves a monopoly of it.

  The two masters conferred together in rustles and clicks, faces almost touching, placed wetly against the fabric of their water-tents. Then Rherrsherrsh swung back to loom over the humanoids.

  “There is too little evidence to support either version of events,” he husked. “The defence offered by the Crome, however, is more plausible than the complaint laid by the Analane, and we find in favour of the Crome. The making of a false accusation infringes the laws of the market. The race of the Analane is barred from dealing here henceforth.”

  “That’s not fair!” Kurwer cried out.

  The massive crustacean head, ancient and hoary, bent low over the Analane. This was the first time they had seen a Tlixix so close. The wet shell, the four tiny, white, expressionless eyes, the ever-restless feelers and whiskers, presented a vision that struck them both to the bone.

  “We—we must be given time to search for our machine!” Hrityu stuttered. “To prove that it exists!”

  The Tlixix deliberated. “Three days are allowed for that Purpose. The Gamintes, too, are ordered to search for the supposed apparatus during that time. To that end you will give them a complete physical description—if you can.”

  The audience was at an end. All humanoids, even the Gamintes, were by now breathing with difficulty in the vapour-laden air, enclosed as it was by trickling walls and a moistly shining floor. Yet as they left the pavilion the Analane could only feel despair, despite the physical relief.

  “They are against us!” Kurwer wailed. “What can we do?”

  Hrityu shook his head sadly. “I do not think they believe the Crome’s word more than ours. They are driven by expediency. They may already have given the Crome permission to exterminate us, and wish to retain their support.”

  The potential value of the radiator, he reflected, did not seem to have occurred to them. Or—a startling thought—did Rherrsherrsh think the Crome had stolen it, and would give it to them?

  Nussmussa and the Crome departed in opposite directions. A Gaminte approached, questioning them on the appearance of the radiator. The jet-black creature spoke in a polite voice and ventured no opinion of his own. His face was blank with concentration as Hrityu described the apparatus.

  “Something that size wouldn’t be easy to hide, unless it’s been smashed to pieces,” he said finally. “I suggest you search the market yourselves, since our own efforts will be scant. Remember, though—no fighting.”

  He turned and strode away. Hrityu and Kurwer stood together on the sand, wondering how they could ever face their co-tribesmen now.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Roncie Reaul Northrop was not sure whether to be pleased or disappointed when his cell door opened and he saw standing there, not a sexually receptive Joanita Serstos, but Johnny Castaneda.

  “Hello, Roncie. You’re back on the team.”

  Castaneda stepped into the cell. He looked tired and depressed. Northrop put down the book he had been reading. “What gives, Johnny?”

  Finding a chair, the geological team leader sat down wearily. “Didn’t Joanita keep you informed? Oh, we have a job to do. Pretty routine technically, but K & B will sure get it in the neck if they’re ever found out. How are you for radioactivity by the way? I’ve had such a lot of cancer …”

  “Who hasn’t?” Northrop said with a shrug. “I’ve had it three times myself.” It was something everybody got now and then, if they spent much time in space.

  “I’m practically a garden for carcinomata. The doc’s told me to avoid getting them in future, if I can.” Castaneda sighed. “Well, come on, Roncie, I’ll give you the details.”

  Northrop glanced round the cell, his home of the past few weeks, before they left. Briefly he wondered if Joanita would be as accommodating towards him now he was out.

  They made their way to Castaneda’s office. On the wall was pinned a lithographic map, presumably of the planet the Enterprise was orbiting. The word TENACITY had been inked at the top of the sheet. Castaneda began to fill him in on the planet’s remarkable recent history, and what their employers were planning.

  “Our part’s fairly simple,” he finished. “We’re to go down and do some test drilling and some seismic stuff, and then drill the shafts. Meanwhile the shock bombs will be put together up here in the Enterprise. K & B will make contact with the lobsters in person and open negotiations. When we get the word we lower the tubes and get the hell out while they go off.”

  “K & B are going to leave the ship to their bondpeople?”

  “O’Rourke will be in charge. He’s absolutely dependable. And they’ll put a lock on the stardrive, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  Mildly appalled by what he had just heard, Northrop began totting up a mental list of the crimes Krabbe & Bouche were about to commit.

  “I suppose he’s got Shelley working on all this,” he said.

  “Sure.” Shelley was the firm’s bonded lawyer, and a joke to the rest of the staff. ‘Now then, Shelley, what’s the law on so-and-so?’ ‘Whatever you say it is, Partner Krabbe, Partner Bouche, sirs!’

  Castaneda went on: “Take the law against using nuclear technology on a planet that hasn’t already developed it. On Tenacity they use naturally occurring radium to power small engines. Shelley argues that makes the natives nuclear engineers! In fact they might just as well be using coal. And so on all down the line. According to Shelley we won’t be undertaking planetary alteration at all. We’re simply rectifying an inconvenient climatic deviation.”

  “In which some dozens of intelligent species will be wiped out.”

  The door banged open. Krabbe and Bouche burst in. They seemed to be in high spirits. For a moment Northrop thought they were drunk.

  Their faces were bronze with radpaint, the standard precaution when going into a high radiation area. More extraordinary was their apparel. They had bedecked themselves in burnouses, the loose, flowing hooded cloaks once worn in hot deserts on Earth.

  Bouche caught sight of Northrop. “Ah, there you are. Learned your les
son, I hope?”

  Northrop drew himself up. “Sir, I wish to protest. I was on the point of renouncing my bond in Duravia, as is my right. I should not be here.”

  Krabbe stared at him as though he were mad. Bouche answered.

  “But you didn’t renounce your bond, Northrop. You jumped ship instead. We can hardly have that. If you had followed legal procedures, of course, then everything would be different.”

  Northrop listened incredulously to this last statement.

  “In the event, you are here, so let’s see you work with a will,” Bouche finished.

  “And suppose I refuse to work?”

  Again Krabbe stared. “You want to renounce your bond now? You want off?” He laughed, and his eyes went to the map of Tenacity. “You might not find the local taverns to your liking.”

  Northrop swallowed. At least he had made his point, he thought.

  Krabbe swung to him, adopting the paternalistic tone he had used earlier on Spencer. “You should be thanking heaven to be on this jaunt, Northrop. This planet is a one-off. Everybody will get a share of the profit. The firm of Krabbe and Bouche knows how to take care of its bond people.”

  An embarrassed Castaneda put in a word. “Northrop is just a little confused from his time in the brig, sir. He’ll be all right. I was just explaining the job to him.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll be able to put in a good report on his conduct, Castaneda. Partner Bouche and I are descending to the surface now. Spencer says Tenacity has a world language, imposed by the lobsters as the dehydrate species evolved. We’ll spend a few days in the market learning it, then we’ll make contact. Is your team ready to move?”

  “The equipment is being checked now, sir.”

  “Don’t be too long about it. We want that work done on time.”

  They lurched out of the door, as if on their way to a fancy dress party.

  “Better get your radpaint on, Roncie,” Castaneda said.

  His voice was laden with gloom.

  Half an hour later, painted up, Northrop was surreptitiously sidling from the communications room. He stopped, blinking in embarrassment, on seeing Joanita Serstos turn the corner into the corridor.

  “Well, hello, Joanita.”

  She halted, confronting him.

  He forced a smile. She offered none in return. Instead, her expression was severe.

  “What were you doing in the communications room?”

  He banged the door shut behind him. “Looking for Spencer. Somebody told me I’d find him here.”

  “Neither Spencer nor you are allowed in there. It’s out of bounds to everyone except the partners and O’Rourke. In fact, how did you get in?”

  She stepped forward and tugged on the door handle. The door held.

  “It was open when I got here,” Roncie said casually. He reached up and touched her hair. “Anyway, I’m glad to run into you. I have to be down on the surface in an hour. How about twenty minutes on my bunk?”

  She twisted away from his searching hands. “No way. In any case I’m on duty.”

  Joanita’s voice was icy. He fell back. “I get it. And your duties have been changed, eh? I suppose I had Bouche to thank for everything after all.”

  “What makes you think I want to make love to someone wearing radpaint?”

  Her excuse was unconvincing. The change in her manner was too obvious.

  While he was in the brig the thought that she was being sent to him along with the food hadn’t bothered him. Now, for some reason, it did.

  “Okay, Joanita. See you when I get back.”

  Disgruntled, he made his way towards the bay where the ferry was being loaded up for departure.

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was something about the view that Karl Krabbe saw through the slatted window of his and Boris Bouche’s lodging that was nudging at his memory. Along the main market concourse traders of a dozen races and colours, lizard and humanoid, passed to and fro between airy pavilions constructed of metal and coloured glass. It was kaleidoscopic, but also barbarically warlike. There was no one who did not seem to carry a weapon of some sort, and mostly the various tribesmen were naked except for bracelets, bangles, straps and belts.

  The lighter had put Krabbe and Bouche down a few miles out in the desert. They had ridden in on a balloon-tyred vehicle that did not look at all out of place in the market’s parking lot, and had sought out a room in one of the accommodation blocks, transferring their supplies from the dune buggy mostly at night.

  No one had taken the least bit of notice of them. In appearance the aliens from another world were apparently not particularly unusual.

  Suddenly the comparison that had been niggling at the back of his mind popped into his consciousness. He turned to his partner, a broad grin on his face.

  “Eh, Boris! Barsoom!”

  Bouche had just finished his daily contact with O’Rourke and was folding up the communicator’s dish aerial. “What?”

  “We should have called this world Barsoom! That’s what it’s like.”

  Bouche stared blankly.

  “You know!” Krabbe urged. “Edgar Rice Burroughs! His name for Mars.”

  Krabbe’s preoccupation with the 20th century writer was known to Bouche, but he had never read any of his work himself.

  “Is that so? Well, I just told O’Rourke the language is now about adequate. Maybe we should make a move tomorrow.”

  Krabbe closed the window slate, shutting out the sunlight, leaving the room illuminated only by the radium-energised fluorescent patch on the ceiling. In the greenish glow their living space was little more than a large cell, meant to accommodate visiting tribesmen to the most perfunctory of standards, and now crammed with stores and equipment.

  For the past three local days they had eavesdropped continuously in various parts of the market with directional microphones and hidden cameras. At length the language machine had produced its miracle, comparing sound, gesture and situation to build up a usable vocabulary. Krabbe and Bouche could now wear earplugs which would receive Tenacity speech and convert it into Terra standard. Disks worn at the base of the throat, kept in place by neckbands, likewise converted their speech to that of Tenacity, at the same time damping the original voice with cancelling anti-sound.

  Now the time had come to meet with this world’s controllers. Krabbe had to admit he was intrigued.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll find out how to gain an audience with the—the ‘Tlixix’—tomorrow.”

  He was interrupted by the slap of bare feet on the metal floor in the corridor. The door was suddenly shoved forcibly inward. Three black, fierce-eyed Gamintes charged into the room. One of them held on a leash a purple salamander-like creature the size of a small dog, but with six scrabbling legs.

  Krabbe and Bouche retreated. The salamander creature rushed about the room, towing its keeper after it, uttering sneezing noises and scratching at the food crates. Then it began butting its head against one of the four water drums in the corner.

  The Gamintes glared about them, fingering their flingers. Krabbe picked up a translator plug and began fitting it into his ear. One of the Gamintes knocked his arm away, sending the plug flying. But not before he had caught his first few harsh words.

  “There is water in this room! You have been stealing water!”

  The explanation came to Krabbe. He or Bouche should have thought of it before, he told himself. It was logical that the Tlixix would breed an animal capable of sniffing out the stuff that obsessed them most. The market was probably patrolled by the beasts, to locate any leaks in their system. Their noses were sensitive enough, evidently, to smell the small amount the Earthmen had been using.

  A second Gaminte knelt at the water drum and after a few moments succeeded—to Krabbe’s surprise—in fathoming the screw cap. He recoiled as the cap came off, then screwed it on tight.

  Bouche edged towards a DE beamer, but he never reached it. There was shouting from the Gaminte. Lean, rubbery, ama
zingly strong arms seized the Earthmen, who were swiftly propelled from the accommodations house. Standing in the sun was a vehicle that was little more than a platform on fragile caterpillar tracks.

  Krabbe and Bouche managed to raise the hoods of their burnouses before, ungraciously, they were heaved aboard it.

  The Hydrorium was a large metal building, clad in white glass which made it dazzling to look upon. The Pavilion of Audience that confronted it was, however, the smallest in the Market. Entrance was through a circular doorway which irised open. Not until they were in the short tunnel behind it, and the door had closed, did a second door open ahead of them.

  “It’s a vapour lock,” Bouche said admiringly. “They’re taking us to the lobsters. Hell, Karl, do you realize something? This planet is as alien to them as it is to us!”

  Krabbe did not answer. They were in a dimly lit hall, the walls running with moisture, the floor wet and slippery. Some distance off, in tented bath-couches, washed by sprays, were two Tlixix.

  The Gamintes pushed their prisoners forward. A sharp, salty, seaweed smell wafted from the lobster-creatures, a smell from Tenacity’s remote past, seeming to bring with it images of tidal pools, of surf, of tangy breezes and scudding foam. The tents parted. The Tlixix reared above them.

  Feelers quivering, antlers waving in agitation, massive crustacean heads bent in inspection, their faces, if such they could be called, alive with whiskery motion, and framed by the helmet-like upper segments of their body shells, which glistened green and blue.

  For all their alienness there was a cold sense of power about the beasts. It was a feeling Krabbe had expected, and one which he relished.

  A voice hoarse and breathless, harsh and clicking came from one of the Tlixix. In reply a Gaminte embarked on a long explanation in guttural tones. Then the Tlixix turned to the Earthmen and spoke again. Bouche raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture.

  “We are strangers, Market Master,” he answered in Terra standard. “We cannot understand you.”