No, it was still the same.
She considered the magic plate and the contents of her purse. “I wonder if it would duplicate my phone,” she said.
She stopped.
Camilla was simply staring at her. The lipstick was in her hand, but the girl had made no move to apply it. “What do you think?” she said.
The girl said something in a language other than Portuguese. Valya recognized it: German. “About what?”
Camilla’s eyes were bright, but vacant...much like those of eighty percent of the teenagers Valya had seen in the past generation, all linked to Slates and earbuds and even experimental direct-neural taps.
She was distracted and unable to respond.
By whom? she wondered. Or what?
“Let’s go back to the others,” she said.
Without a word, Camilla got to her feet and began walking, and never looked back or sideways.
Valya wanted to run.
ARRIVAL DAY: MAKALI
“Makali girl, when did you eat last?”
Vikram Nayar’s voice jarred Makali like a slap. She was sitting against the wall of the Temple—or, as she persisted in thinking of it, part of an alien structure on an alien world!—writing in her notebook. Nayar was squatting, tailorlike, a few meters away. There was no one else around. The deadened air of the Keanu habitat made it seem as if she and Nayar were the only humans within kilometers.
“I don’t know,” she said. In the weeks she had worked with the Brahma mission director, she had grown to appreciate his fatherly side. She would have appreciated it slightly more if she’d believed his attentions to her were entirely fatherly. “Since the shooting.”
Nayar grunted at the reminder. Although famously ill-tempered—Makali had not yet enjoyed the full force of the man’s wrath, but she had seen it descend on any number of young and not-so-young men in the control center—he claimed to be bothered by violence. He claimed Gandhi as his model. Well, as Makali’s father used to say, “We all need our ideals, no matter how short of them we fall.”
“There isn’t much food left.”
She slid her Moleskine back into her purse and stood up. “Then why tell me to eat?”
“You need your strength. We all do.”
“Humans can function on far less food than they know. I believe Gandhi proved that.”
She knew she was provoking Nayar—knew also that a man his age might take that as flirtation, which meant that she ought rightly to share the blame for his attentions.
But she couldn’t help it. Fighting back—all the while knowing that Nayar wasn’t likely to explode at her as he would with a male subordinate—gave Makali a sense of power, which was a rare and precious thing for an Austro-Indian woman in India.
And all Nayar could do was grunt.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“A minute, no more.” His face told her he was underestimating, that he had likely sat there for some time. “What are you writing so furiously?”
“Observations, of course.” She had no need to lie about it. “I’m an exoterrestrial specialist in an exoterrestrial environment. Every breath is an observation.”
“Or, rather, an interaction—and possible contamination.” He smiled. He was reverting to fatherly, possibly even professorial mode.
“I’ve been forced to accept the contamination,” she said. And she wasn’t lying about that, either. For years exoterrestrial specialists had fretted about the possible damage alien cultures could inflict on each other, from cultural and religious right down to the biological. Astronauts who had accomplished the first few lunar landings fifty years back had been forced to endure two weeks of isolation upon returning to Earth, just in case they might be carrying virulent, deadly lunar organisms.
From the airless, sun-blasted, billion-years-dead Moon.
By those standards, the collision of humans with Keanu was so appallingly rich and uncontrolled that Makali was unable to study the matter. It was like obsessing about a potential scratch on your finger only to have your head chopped off. Air, water, the touch of Keanu soil—she had been exposed to all of it.
And now, as Nayar was reminding her, she needed to consume some of what grew here.
“I must confess, I was always bemused by the way you took notes.” Makali preferred pens and pencils and expensive, pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks to even the most capable Slates and tablets. It wasn’t a political decision, though she was proud of the green values of her method, but a practical one.
She had found that she remembered thoughts and observations if they were tactile...if she physically wrote words or drew images. Even the act of typing was insufficient to allow her to capture her discoveries—data flowed into her eyes and brain, and, apparently, right out of her fingers.
Of course, she owned so many Moleskines that she could not put a number on it. (“Sorry, Cedric!”)
But thanks to her notebook and pencil, she was able to continue making her observations, about the weather, the light—and what was wrong with the light? Shouldn’t there be a night and a day?—the smells, the soil, the dimensions of the habitat, the architecture...
The Temple structure fascinated her, of course. Aside from the fact that Keanu itself was a structure, the oddly proportioned ziggurat was the first artifact she had ever been able to study. And she had been busy sketching the walls, speculating on what kind of material they were made of, when Nayar found her.
She was amazed to find that, in addition to studying this alien structure, she was also interacting with it...treating it as just another building to walk around. Makali wasn’t alone in this; there were dozens of humans lingering around the base of the Temple, some sitting, others collapsed in sleep, a few arguing, one elderly Indian man staring into a far distance only he could see—
And several people devouring fruits and other vaguely edible-looking objects.
Nayar approached a young man who seemed to have taken charge of the distribution. “Xavier,” he said. “Makali here hasn’t eaten.”
Xavier turned toward her...and favored her with a look she had not seen in many days and had never expected to see in this world: Makali was ethnic Hindu, but that was where her links to the subcontinent ended. She had been raised in Australia, had surfed and done martial arts, and was about as far from the bindi-wearing stereotype as a woman could get. She was wearing a loose shirt and khakis, but they still showed off a figure one of her girlfriends had described as “lean but oh so womanly.”
Here, on an alien world, after two days of insane travel in an alien bubble craft, Xavier reacted to Makali as a pretty young woman. She didn’t realize that she needed that affirmation, and perhaps she truly didn’t back on Earth, where she had tended to be too appreciative at times.
But she rather liked it now.
Not that it helped her get fed. “Sorry, that’s all there is.” Makali tried to place the young man’s accent; growing up in Australia, but having lived in the United States, England, and India, she had grown sensitive to the many voices of English. This was definitely Cajun—“that” was actually “dat”—but with some other flavoring.
Nayar took her part. “Nothing! How could you let that happen? Aren’t you keeping track? Are you certain everyone has eaten? Have you taken roll?”
One of Nayar’s Indian engineers would have shrunk visibly from this assault, but the American teenager just looked more sullen and dug in.
“It’s all right,” she said to Nayar, reassuring him by putting a hand on his arm, a trick that never failed. “We got the food from those trees there,” she said to Xavier.
He pointed down-habitat, toward the wall the Temple entrance faced. “I’ll just pick something for myself.”
“I can’t allow that,” Nayar said. “It could be incredibly dangerous.”
“I rather doubt that,” she said. “We’ve seen no signs of physical danger at all. This habitat was clearly designed for humans.”
“Please don
’t put your theory to a field test.”
“You’re not going to wrestle me to the ground, are you?”
Even the mild suggestion of physical contact made Nayar uncomfortable. He merely shrugged, then gestured as if to say, What’s a fatherlike figure to do? and stepped aside.
As Makali walked around the corner of the Temple, headed for the depths of the habitat, she saw, scrawled on the rough, textured side of the Temple, these words: KAENU SUX.
At first she was offended. What kind of idiot thinks it’s proper to scrawl graffiti anywhere—and on an alien artifact? And to misspell the name!
But her second thought was more forgiving. It meant that the Keanu habitat was already feeling like home to some of them. Given that it was likely they would be spending a long time—possibly the rest of their lives here—that was vaguely comforting.
Her momentary satisfaction about Keanu and its human inhabitants quickly gave way to an emotion that was largely wonder (she was inside an alien spacecraft!) liberally spiked with fear (she had zero control over what was happening!).
Exhibit One: As she slipped away from the Temple, working her way through clumps and clusters of Bangalore and Houston people, some of them simply collapsed on the ground, she noted the bizarre way in which light kept changing.
The roof of the habitat—hell, it was so high you might as well call it the “sky”—contained several dozen long snaky shapes that seemed to provide illumination...but at a very low level, not much better than a summer twilight in Melbourne. (In fact, though it was difficult to tell, it appeared that fewer than half of the sky-snakes were actually lit.)
Suddenly, when Makali was halfway to the “wall” where the vege-fruit grew, the sky-snakes burst to life, a wave of bright light sweeping down the entire habitat, as if a swift-moving cloud had revealed the sun.
Fine, not so freaky; it was now dawn here in the habitat. Of all the humans who had been scooped up by the Objects, Makali considered herself—and should have been—the one best prepared to accept alien environments, life forms, means of communication....
But then, within seconds, the sweep of light repeated itself, another bright wave washing over the entire habitat.
And another. And a fourth, the last two coming so quickly that they overlapped—the third wave was still lighting the “north” end of the habitat, where the humans had emerged from the tunnels, when the fourth wave blew through.
And then, as if nothing had happened, the sky-snakes resumed their earlier level of activity...and the light returned to twilight.
It wasn’t hunger that made Makali want to hurry to the trees, get food, and return to the Temple.
It was a classic human emotion.
Fear of the unknown.
Makali Pillay’s father had been the space buff in the family. Senior Pillay’s favorite movie was The Dish, a charming account of the Australian astronomers who helped the crew of Apollo 11 transmit video of the first steps on the lunar surface to a worldwide audience of millions.
When his daughter was born just after The Dish reached theaters, it was natural for him to give her an astronautical name...Makali meant “moon.”
Makali had learned to share her father’s interest in space, to some degree. Given the books and movies and pictures lining the walls of their apartment above the restaurant, she had little choice.
But she didn’t necessarily share his interest in astronauts and space shuttles, nor ethnic pride in India’s accomplishments, including becoming the fourth spacefaring nation on the planet.
Makali had become fascinated by the possibilities of First Contact and alien life forms. Her father had balked at this: “I like the idea, too, but it’s still a science without a subject! You want to go to the U.S., fine! Go to the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab!”
Makali knew even then that although JPL had developed space probes for America and NASA for sixty years, it was not the home of exobiology.
Instead she had taken her double degree in biology and chemistry and gotten a fellowship at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in Houston.
It was there that she expanded her studies to include atmospheric physics and geology and even languages. She had spent six months at the South Pole searching for Martian meteorites and extremophiles.
It was there, also, that she escaped from her father’s control, dating one unsuitable man (by her father’s standards, that is) after another, and earning herself a slightly exaggerated reputation as a good-time girl.
Well, she had grown up in Melbourne, not Delhi. She looked like a resident of the subcontinent, if you ignored the blue eyes and the broad-shouldered build, a gift from years of swimming and surfing.
She had not been able to decide which was worse: to have been condemned to the stereotypical studious submissive Indian woman role, or to be considered an Aussie tart. Obviously the party-girl image had made it difficult to gain responsibility and authority—even as it opened other doors and encouraged male supervisors to welcome her arrival.
But, while she had indeed run through a lot of boyfriends in a decade, she never overlapped them...no one-night stands, either, allowing for some liberal interpretation of the standards. She had spent the past five months in a committed relationship with Cedric Houghton, a thirty-five-year-old bachelor credit specialist in Pearland, Texas, who was probably frantic about what had happened to her. (Because of her assignment to Bangalore, they hadn’t seen each other in a month...but they had video-chatted the night Venture and Brahma had landed on Keanu...which seemed, now, to have taken place a year in the past.)
Makali had been faithful to Cedric; even without the spur of a relationship, she would not have considered a relationship with any of her co-workers on the ISRO exo-intelligence panel.
Which was one of the reasons she had found Valya Makarova’s wanton behavior appalling, especially with a loathsome male specimen like Dale Scott, who had propositioned her several times. Never crudely; oh, no, compared to the very direct Aussie boys Makali had known in Melbourne, for example, Scott was a master of sophistication...he didn’t touch, he merely loomed. He didn’t leer, he only shared confidences, winks, ostensibly harmless data.
He never took no for an answer because there was never a question.
All of this behavior was inescapably obvious to Valya, yet she had continued to swoon every time Scott entered a room, like a lovesick teenager in her first sexual relationship.
Which made Makali, briefly and unhappily, wonder if Dale Scott’s bedroom skills were the reason for Valya’s erotic stupor....
Fortunately, the chaos of the discoveries from Keanu had driven all personal matters from Makali’s mind. She had been scooped up from the wreckage of Bangalore Control Center, and after surviving the initial shock of what had happened, she had spent the trip from Earth to Keanu silently evaluating the data—Keanu’s maneuvers at the time of the Venture and Brahma landings, the discovery of structures inside Vesuvius Vent, the habitat itself.
None of these had been a shock, frankly. Thanks to a bit of luck and data from underused and ill-funded Asian astronomers, ISRO and the Russians had detected unusual signals from Keanu long before its closest approach to Earth; hence the clandestine creation of an exo-intelligence panel staffed with the world’s experts who were not American citizens. Makali and the other members of the team had suspected that the human landing on Keanu was going to lead to First Contact.
So far, so good. What they had not anticipated—and who could have?—was the discovery of resurrected or reincarnated or reconstructed human beings inside Keanu. Makali believed, and there had been hints in what Zack Stewart said, that these creatures had been deliberately “created” by Keanu’s builders and operators in order to communicate with humans.
Perhaps that communication had been too easy—how else to explain the horrifying series of accidents that had led to, well, the bombardment of Earth by a pair of Keanu-launched Objects.
Makali’s father was also fond of saying, “Don’t
look back.” There was no point in trying to apportion blame; in some sense, Makali knew she should be grateful. When she took up exobiology, she had assumed her career would be spent constructing biospheres for newly discovered exoplanets and trying to determine which probe-gathered samples from Mars, asteroids, and the Earth’s surface would give proof of alien life.
As her lost boyfriend Cedric would say, “You’ve got that covered.”
(“Thank you, darling!”)
She reached the trees and, fully aware of the lack of food, immediately began searching for these vege-fruits.
The first problem was that others had been here first; the branches showed clear signs of having been stripped, eagerly, swiftly, and violently. She made a mental note to do some calculations relating the amount of available food to the daily needs of the population. She suspected the two lines would intersect rather soon, and they would run out...of course, why be pessimistic? Hadn’t she just insisted to Nayar that the Keanu habitat was designed for humans? She had no data on how quickly the habitat would produce more food.
Right now, however, it was looking grim...she had worked her way along the habitat walls, through the “orchard,” for several meters, perhaps ten, without seeing anything larger than an acorn.
And then she found something that disturbed her as much as the flickering sky-snakes had.
As far as she could see down-habitat, toward the far “southern” end, the trees were now covered with a black mold.
She touched it—what the hell, maybe it was Keanu packaging of some kind, like wax on an apple—and quickly regretted the gesture. Her fingers burned as if she’d dipped them in battery acid.
(“Cedric, baby, this isn’t good!”)
Turn around, then. Go the other way.
She had not completed the maneuver when a shape appeared in front of her—
—and struck her!
For an instant, as terrified as she had ever been in her life, she shouted and lashed out...before realizing her assailant was a dog! It was a Lab that had been scooped up with the Texans...certainly the animal had not been aboard the Bangalore Object. Makali had seen it earlier in the day, running freely.
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