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11
WE WENT THROUGH THE FINAL CHECKOUT THREE TIMES, AND EVEN THEN our stomachs turned over a little as the Gurix lurched away from Wahkopem Zomos. We had discussed this many times—going down in one versus going down in two landers—but Kekox’s military sense had won out over pleas from Soikenn and me for engineering, and we would not be dividing our forces (though it meant running the risk of a single equipment failure for this first mission). Later, of course, we would be flying both landers routinely.
Otuz was still our best pilot by far, and she had never crashed on a simulation run, so she was at the helm. I called off numbers for her from the navigation computer, and everyone else, I suppose, just sat there and worried.
Antimatter is a compact fuel—it has such a high specific impulse that you don’t have to use much of it to get where you’re going. We fired the main rocket to slow the Gurix down and start it on its drop into the atmosphere, and the fuel indicator barely showed a fraction of a percent consumed. The glowing stream of plasma whipped out ahead of us, distorting in the planet’s bizarre magnetic field, and we sank toward our destination, weight pushing against our feet.
It was very different from the space flights I remembered from my childhood. There was enough surplus power so that rather than using the air to slow us, for the most part we simply rode down on the engine. As we hit the outermost tenuous atmosphere there was a brief, dull red glow from some of the Gurix’s exposed parts, because our speed was still very high relative to the air, but it cooled and darkened. By the time the sky above us had turned to deep blue and the stars had vanished, the outside of the ship was cool. We watched the air over the lands below grow from a thin film to a thick smear, and then merge into the world around us. The lands around our landing site went from blotches on a globe to smears on a map, and then to sharply detailed relief, until finally we found ourselves hanging above land, descending past a few white, fluffy clouds. The great inland sea to our west vanished from our viewports, and then the salt lake north of us likewise disappeared; the thick forests below began to take on traces of individual detail.
We hovered as Otuz corrected our position slightly, moving us some distance south and a little east. We had decided we would land within sight of the largest village. If they turned out to be more intelligent than we thought they were, then our descent from the sky on a pillar of flame would surely help to produce the awe we would need to subjugate them.
The village became individual buildings, and then we could see the animals running and scrambling around inside its palisade. We sank slowly onto one of their grain fields, the Gurix now just balancing on its exhaust. We could see individuals clearly, as they raced about, gesturing frantically at each other, flinging themselves on the ground or leaping up to see us.
Our engine exhaust lashed into the field of rain-damp grain, setting a wide ring of it smoldering, scorching a spot below us into a great black circle. Otuz slowed us still further, and as gently as the flying insects of Setepos settle onto its flowers, the Gurix put its feet down onto the freshly charred field of grain.
“Well,” she said, turning to us, “was that satisfactory?”
“It was brilliant,” Kekox said. “As you know. All right, everyone, get ready. It’s time to put on our little show.”
We had spent some effort on planning just what we would do when we stepped out of the ship. The problem, of course, was that we were dealing with animals (or just possibly thinking beings) of a type we had never met. Would they recognize a weapon if we threatened them with it? How would they respond if we killed a few of them? And since we didn’t want to feed them or have to tend them—the idea was to have them do those things for us—how could we avoid having them all sit down and wait for us to tell them what to do?
The three steam rifles we had been supplied with were hunting weapons, intended for killing fresh game and repelling large predators, not for any sort of military use. They held thirty-two shots per magazine, each delivering enough momentum to knock a quadruped four times our mass off its feet. Magazines could be reloaded using a little gadget that drew electricity from the Gurix’s power plant; plain sand was all the raw material needed. They were nice weapons, but there were only three of them, and we had no way to make them more potent than they were. We had already figured out, from the wildlife observations, that the steam rifles wouldn’t be adequate for large areas of Setepos; Soikenn’s theory was that the lower gravity here had allowed animals as a whole to be bigger, and this included predators much larger than the steam rifle had been designed to deal with. We just hoped that we were right in thinking that if the smart animals could live in this area, and they were about our size, then there wasn’t much around here that would kill or eat them routinely.
Otuz, Kekox, and Mejox had practiced a lot with the steam rifles in simulation, enough so that we were fairly confident that they could make them work when we needed them to. The plans we had settled on—one for if the Seteposians turned out to be smart animals and one for if they were stupid people—weren’t so much plans as first steps, to be followed by a lot of contingencies and improvisations.
The first step went perfectly. We looked out the viewports to see that the animals from the village were approaching the Gurix in a great, incoherent mass. “One right guess,” Mejox said with satisfaction. “They’re not in any kind of order or under any kind of leadership.”
“That’s not much to evaluate them on,” Kekox said. “I’d imagine they were taken by surprise, even if every one of them is a genius.”
We formed up, facing the door. Kekox took the point position, his steam rifle at ready. Behind Kekox, I stepped into place, with the improvised incendiary launcher that we had come up with: a simple tube with a hydrogen-oxygen capsule at its closed end, and a thin plastic can full of methanol blocking its open end. With luck, anyway, when I pressed the button on its side, the capsule would explode and throw the can out the end of the open tube. The explosion should also set fire to a wick in the can, and when it hit, if we were right, the lightweight can would break, the wick would ignite the methanol, and we’d set whatever building we pointed it at on fire.
At my side was Priekahm, with another incendiary launcher. Then behind us, with recording gear, were Osepok and Soikenn, with cameras to record our first encounter with these animals—if they had some sort of rudimentary language, we needed to start learning it. Finally, behind us, came Mejox and Otuz, steam rifles ready.
Even if worse came to worst, and they attacked us straight off, we knew that between what was already loaded into the steam rifles and what was in the magazines we were carrying, we had three slugs for every inhabitant of the village. Against that, they had a collection of pointed sticks—big thick ones to stab with and little thin ones they propelled with a bent stick, in some way we had not yet figured out from watching moving pictures of them. And of course they could throw rocks or hit us with sticks.
So when we had planned all this, we had been about as sure as we could possibly be that this next part would go well. We had been more worried about seals holding and navigation gear working on the Gurix than we had about this first contact. The difference now was that we knew the Gurix had landed and we didn’t know how this was going to come out.
“Our public awaits,” Mejox said. “Let’s go.” Kekox pressed the button and the door slid open; beyond it, the stairway extended down to the wet ground.
They were close to us, now, but they seemed to freeze in fear when the stairs came down. Kekox walked slowly down the steps, his head moving quickly from side to side as he scanned for any threat. We came down the steps after him, as quickly as we all could without falling, since if trouble started we didn’t want to be bunched together. As soon as we were off the stairs we fanned out into a rough triangle, with Osepok and Soikenn at the center, and Mejox and Otuz forming the back corners. At Kekox’s command we moved slowly forward.
One of them approached Kekox. They
were an ugly species, flatter in the face than Palathians, with less fur than even a Shulathian, and head fur that grew in great messy profusion, not in a neat crest like a Palathian’s cut on top of the head (and all over the face as well, in the males), so that the whole effect was of a blank wall with eyes behind a curtain of hair.
They were shorter than Shulathians and taller than Palathians, narrower in the shoulder than Palathians and broader than Shulathians. They had small rounded ears like a Palathian but the tops of their heads were crestless like a Shulathian’s.
Yet though they were in some ways intermediate between our races, they did not look like the crossbred Nisuans I had seen in biology textbooks, or exhibited stuffed in museums. Those had been curiously attractive; these creatures were simply hideous.
The tall one approaching us was only half a head shorter than I, and I was the tallest of our crew. He was dressed in a long tunic—really not more than a shirt that extended to his knees—into which had been stuck hundreds of soft, rustling objects. Later I was to learn that these were the “feathers”—flexible scales—of “birds”—those flying creatures we had seen in such great numbers in the probe pictures.
He drew close to us. His eyes were strange—only a small area around the lens was colored, so that instead of a smooth swath of red, yellow, or green like ours, their eyes were white with a small colored circle. I did not know at the time that one reason why the white part was so large was because he was terrified.
At last he spoke. There was no question that he was using words.
“Anyone have any idea what he’s saying?” Priekahm asked.
“Forgot to bring my dictionary,” I said.
This started all of them gabbling at each other, so that the tall one turned around and spoke very loudly. Their voices were very odd; Otuz and I figured out later that it was because in normal speech they emitted a large number of tones all together, rather than the single pure tone that we usually spoke in. We had no idea of it then, but they had just named us the “Singing Ones.”
“People or animals?” Kekox asked us. “Anyone got an opinion?”
“People,” I said. “Not necessarily smart ones.”
“People,” Otuz and Priekahm concurred.
“I agree,” Kekox said. “Anyone think differently?”
There was a long pause. I was slowly beginning to notice things around me: the burnt smell from the charred grain, the warmth of the air, the more distant faint odor of the forest. So many different colors, so many different smells, the sounds of what must be hundreds of kinds of living things; I had just a moment to think I might like it here.
“Then we’re gods,” Kekox said. “We go with Plan Two. Remember to stay bunched up. If any of them moves between us, shoot it; we’ve got to stay compact.”
As we neared the village, the crowd began to pack in closer. There must have been a hundred fifty or more inhabitants, counting only those old enough to walk by themselves. And to judge by the number of infants being carried by mothers, the population was growing rapidly.
The press of people gave me a chance to sneak a look at their tools. “Shaped stone, as we thought,” I said. “Looks like they grind or polish it. Heavy, but it probably does what they want it to. Copper ornaments, maybe some tin and silver. And of course the stuff they tore off the probe.”
“They do some kind of weaving,” Priekahm observed on my other side. “Very coarse. They probably hand-plait the thread and then just lay it crisscross to make the cloth. Probably keeps the worst of the rain off them, and assuming the adult males have genitals that protrude as much as the juveniles near us do, I’d guess that it’s for comfort as well.”
Osepok noted, “I can’t make any kind of sense of it yet, but it feels like all the ornamentation falls into some kind of pattern. Probably a very complicated system of ranking and relations.”
We walked on toward the village; it was a short distance away, but the crowd around us was thick, so it took a long time. So far none of them had tried to get between us, and I was certainly glad about that because the ones that seemed most apt to get into the middle were the young ones, and Kekox’s orders or not, I didn’t think any of us could shoot a little one.
As we entered the open gate in the palisade, I noticed a plate of lashed-together logs sitting beside the opening, and two upright logs set behind the main walls. “Probably they slide that across the opening at night,” Priekahm said. “Which means either they’ve got big predators or they’ve got warfare.”
“Bad news either way,” Soikenn said. “Have you noticed how much they talk and argue with each other? I’m afraid they’ll never make well-behaved slaves.”
“It’s a little late to change plans now,” Kekox said, curtly. “Unless you all want to take a vote in the middle of this mob?”
We didn’t, of course. I was going to wonder a lot later what might have happened if we had. But I know my heart was starting to sink; there’s only so much you can see on a probe camera, and the one thing you can’t see is the way they look at you, the way they clearly want to communicate. I wanted nothing so much as time to think, and time to think was the one thing we did not have—unless, as Kekox said, we wanted to stop, right there in that dusty public courtyard, and conduct a debate. The Creator alone knew what they might make of that—But then, a little voice in the back of my mind said, the Creator alone knows what they will make of the next thing we’re going to do, anyway. I hope this works the way we thought it would. Too late now. Kekox had gone through the open gate, and we followed him toward the temple at the center of the compound.
It was a two-story building, of a sort, made of logs with a mud-brick facing on the vertical walls. The first story was short and had no windows or doors; a broad flight of mud-brick steps ran up to a sort of porch that stuck out of the second story, and a doorway opened onto that porch. On the porch itself there was a simple mud-block table, on which we had seen them sacrifice animals, and on top of which now lay the remains of the first probe that we had sent on ahead of us. Behind it was a large clay statue of a Seteposian female sitting cross-legged.
We halted. There was no one between us and the temple. Priekahm and I nodded to each other and raised our incendiary throwers, when abruptly one of the Seteposians came out the door of the temple.
The thick thatch of hair surrounding his head was a deep gray, and his face was lined and brown. Perhaps because it was a common color change everywhere—as animals get older they make less pigment—or perhaps because of the slow, shuffling way he walked, we knew at once that he was old.
He raised his hands over his head and started shouting at us. We didn’t know if it was greeting, or exorcism, or what. “Anyone got any ideas?” Kekox said.
“He’s got to be the priest of the old god,” Mejox said. “Who we’re getting rid of.”
“So do we recruit him or make him a martyr?” Otuz said.
“This is turning into a debate,” Kekox said.
All of them were staring expectantly at us. Clearly it had been some kind of challenge, or at least they were trying to see what would happen. There wasn’t a breath of air, and no sound but the drone of distant insects; every Seteposian was motionless. “We have no idea how to recruit him,” I pointed out, “and I think he just called us out. So if he’s the old god’s priest, he gets to be the old god’s martyr.”
“Makes sense,” Kekox said, raised his steam rifle, and fired.
The steam rifle made a little phht! A gush of blood, red like ours, sprayed out of the old Seteposian’s back, and he fell over on his face, dead. We had loaded the steam rifles with expanding slugs, intended originally for maximum stopping power against big, fast predators, and the result was that when they hit the Seteposian in the chest, they tore whatever internal organs were nearby to jelly.
There were murmurs and cries among the crowd. I raised my incendiary thrower and fired it, sending the little fire-starter canister in through the temple door. By sheer good
luck it hit the female statue and caused flames to leap up from it; the Seteposians screamed and fell to their bellies around us.
Priekahm’s shot arced higher, landing in the heavy thatch of the roof, and burst against a rafter there, setting the whole roof on fire. Flames leaped up, billowing bodylengths tall within the span of two breaths.
There were screams and cries from the crowd around us, and the more distant of them turned and ran.
“The tall ones that greeted us at the ship are right over there,” Priekahm said, pointing. “And whatever they’re chanting, others seem to be picking it up.”
“More martyrs for the old faith,” Otuz remarked; and shot the three leaders and several Seteposians around them.
“Get the ones with spears,” Kekox said. “Spare anyone who doesn’t have a weapon.” He and Mejox shot with a steady, even rhythm, raising steam rifles and killing Seteposians who had their hands on spears or axes, about one per breath; one more way to tell that these people were smart enough was that before ten more of them died, the rest were throwing away their spears and axes, and then prostrating themselves.
Encounter with Tiber [v1.0] Page 40