Take that gently bobbing field lamp, for example. Rhys gazed at it in consternation as it was carried away on the sludgy currents of Brown Salt Lake, gliding serenely just out of his reach.
“See what I mean?”
Roderick Halfax lobbed a flat rock at the lamp. It struck the metal casing with a muffled ping! and plopped into the water, where it began the tedious and protracted process of sinking. A tiny cloud of native “fireflies,” already visible in the twilight, eddied above the flotsam, apparently attracted by the gleam of alien metal.
“I’d rather not have demonstrated it at the expense of our field supplies,” Rhys admitted, “but yes, I do see.”
Rick peered at the sludgy liquid. “You could probably walk out and get it... but I wouldn’t recommend it.”
He turned back from the water to make his way up the newly constructed pier, laid just last week by Tanaka Corp’s advance team of engineers.
After a last glance at the lost field lamp, Rhys fell into step beside his assistant. “I’ll bet you can build a boat out of just about anything here—wood, metal, stone...”
“Ah, but sir,” Rick countered, a frown puckering his brow, “the natives here don’t build boats, nor do they work wood, make metal or carve stone... sir.”
Rhys laughed; the younger man’s impersonation of his very earnest female assistant, Yoshi Umeki, was humorously accurate. And, of course, what he said was also true. The “natives” of Bog did none of those things, which posed the question of whether they were “natives” at all, in the anthropological sense.
There was nothing like alien/human contact to blur the lines between man and intelligent animal. Rhys could recall particular Humans whose behavior blurred the lines even further. It was that sticky question of consciousness that Rhys Llewellyn had been brought to Bog to answer.
“Ah, Yoshi!” He looked up and saw the girl making her way toward them through the stacks of tarp-covered trading goods and camp supplies that sat upon what passed for terra firma in this neck of the swamp.
She was pecking at a notepad with one hand and frowning earnestly over the results of her work. Seeing Rhys and Rick, she paused and waved, oblivious to the admiring glances of a handful of Tanaka engineers who’d gathered around the mobile cantina.
Rhys lengthened his stride and covered the distance between them to give the girl a hearty hug. “So, Yoshi—any candidates for sentience among our Bogies?”
She consulted her notepad. “Well, there appear to be several at this location. The top candidates are a bipedal, brachiating mammalian reminiscent of a lemur, a burrowing reptilian form not unlike an iguana, and an amphibian that builds mud lodges in the swamp.”
“Ah, now that sounds promising.”
“I’m glad you think so, Professor. Personally, I find it all rather depressing.”
The voice, sporting a decidedly British accent, came from over Rhys’s shoulder, making him turn. He found himself face to face with an inappropriately well-dressed man of perhaps middle age. He was average in height, bland in coloring, and wore an expression of annoyed boredom.
“And you are?” Rhys asked.
Yoshi jumped into the conversation. “I’m sorry, sir—I mean, Rhys. This is Raymond Godwin. From, um, Acquisitions.”
Godwin extended his hand in Rhys’s direction, his eyes sweeping the younger man with urbane horror before lingering pointedly on his McCrae tartan kilt. “Director of Acquisitions, this sector.” His upper lip twitched minutely.
Rhys, suddenly conscious of how itchy the woolen kilt was in the marsh’s thick sauna of an atmosphere, tried to make his smile sincere. “Rhys Llewellyn, acting Director of Trade and Cultural Directions. Exactly what is it you hope to acquire, Mr. Godwin?”
“Mineral rights to this entire planet. And first shot at its other resources.”
Rhys frowned, trying not to twitch under the combined attack of wool, perspiration, and sudden unreasoning dislike. “I don’t understand...”
“The advance reports on Bog came into Corporate Acquisitions just over a week ago. I was immediately dispatched to make known to the powers that be that Tanaka Corporation wishes to possess mineral rights on Bog.”
“Did Acquisitions also receive the advance reports on the native lifeforms?”
Godwin nodded. “No signs of civilization.” The idea obviously delighted him.
“No signs of civilization as we know it,” Rhys cautioned. “Any of the creatures on Bog might be sentient.”
Godwin shrugged. “Fine. You find the sentients, I’ll negotiate for mineral rights.”
Oh, so simple. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” Rhys asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.
“Dr. Llewellyn, Acquisitions is my career. Of course, I’ve done this before.”
“What I meant, Mr. Godwin, is have you ever pursued an acquisition this early on—before a trading partner’s even been identified? Before a language has even been determined in which the parties can negotiate?”
“No. But you’re the expert in that department, Dr. Llewellyn. I’m counting on you to find the trade partners and their language.” He smiled. “After all, that’s what Tanaka pays you for, is it not?”
Rhys glanced sideways at Yoshi, whose expression, for once in her life, was blank. “It is. I’m merely surprised that the company is acting so precipitously.”
Godwin shrugged. “Bog is a mineralogically wealthy, if miserable, planet. We surely don’t want that wealth falling into someone else’s pockets... Bristol-Benz, for example.” He favored Rhys with a lopsided smile. “Frankly, I’m surprised Vladimir Zarber isn’t here already, breathing down your neck.”
At the mention of his arch-rival, Rhys grimaced. “Like you, Vladimir Zarber is used to working more... established prospects.”
“Well, Professor, I’m told that establishing prospects is your forte. I’m looking forward to seeing you in action.” He glanced about at the pallets of goods. “Now, I see you have a variety of merchandise. How do you plan to determine to whom it should be offered?”
“Shotgun, Mr. Godwin. We open up our little marketplace and see who shows up to shop.”
“And how long do you expect this process to take?”
Rhys smiled. “Why there’s no telling about that. Could take days... months...”
“Years,” murmured Yoshi.
Godwin threw her a subtly horrified glance. “You’d willingly spend that much time to determine sentience? Months in this godforsaken cow wallow?”
Yoshi’s mouth twitched. “Or years,” she repeated.
“That’s ridiculous. Tanaka doesn’t have that kind of time to invest in such a pursuit.”
“You’re always free to leave,” Rhys told him. “We’d gladly contact you when and if we had something positive to report.”
“What, and allow Bristol-Benz to sneak in and snap up resources? I assure you, what their advance teams lack in scientific method, they make up for in expediency.”
“I’d hardly allow that to happen,” Rhys assured him. “I’ve a few negotiations to my credit as well.”
“Commodities. You negotiate commodities. I’m talking about planetary rights, Professor, not trinkets.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, sir. You will simply have to determine the existence or non-existence of sentient beings in a reasonable length of time. Whether I deal with those sentients or deal with the Collective, I have a charter from Tanaka to acquire the mineral rights to Bog. As depressing as this ball of mud is, that sickening stew of elements” —he gestured toward the lake— “is worth its weight in platinum. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”
“What an obnoxious character!” Rick Halfax exclaimed to Godwin’s receding back.
Rhys followed his gaze. “Hmm. And impatient. Well, let’s see if we can’t get Mr. Godwin his stew.”
“Do we have to?” Yoshi was watching the Acquisitions director with undisguised distaste.
Rhys glanced at her in surprise. In their several
years together, he had rarely known her to express personal dislike for anyone (with the notable exception of a former professor of Rhys’s who had incurred her ire). Yoshi reacted to causes rather than personalities, and she had obviously decided that Mr. Raymond Godwin was inimical to the cause of Bog.
o0o
The next several weeks Rhys and his colleagues spent ferrying their wares to different parts of the local marsh. Within the habitat of each of their candidates they created what they hoped were attractive displays of goods. The arboreal simians hid from them, the reptilians ignored them, and the amphibians wrecked the “marketplace” and incorporated the wreckage into their gloppy constructions.
“Interesting,” Rhys enthused, studying a particularly elaborate mound that now sported strips of bright, Human-made fabric and squares of therma-plast and metal.
“You’re not actually encouraged by this random destruction are you?” Wearing a crisp, new camouflage coverall and a small helmet, Raymond Godwin gaped at him from the midst of their decimated cache.
“There’s nothing random about it. They needed material for their constructs—they took it.”
Rhys returned to where Yoshi waited at the cache with his field kit and began to rummage in it. Godwin pursued him, stepping over the litter of left-behind objects.
“Yes, indeed they did. They took fabric, food, tools, baubles—anything and everything—and used it indiscriminately. Surely you can’t argue sentience based on that. Beavers do that, Pekulan treemunks do that, yet I doubt even you would attempt to open trade relations with them...What are you doing?”
Rhys ignored him, continuing to describe a circle on the soggy forest floor with a fluorescing powder. Within the circle, he placed a group of objects taken from the rear deck of their enclosed swamp buggy.
“Oh, I get it,” Godwin said. “You’re attempting to communicate, aren’t you? You’re trying to tell our amphibian friends that this stuff didn’t get here by accident.”
“Something like that,” Rhys admitted. “I’m also trying to determine if they’ve a preference for certain materials.”
Godwin glanced back across the glade to where the Bogies’ mud lodges poked in misshapen domes from the water. “Shiny or bright stuff. They seem to like... ornamentation.”
Rhys acknowledged the observation with some surprise. “Yes. The question is, is it a cultural affinity for ornamentation, as you call it, or is it merely an animal’s attraction to shiny objects?”
Godwin seemed to show a little more interest in their mission after that, and even helped set up their surveillance net. With holocams focused on the cache and on the arm of ooze (a lagoon, technically) that poked into the glade from the marshy lake, they took their swamp buggy and withdrew to watch and wait.
Before they’d gone even a handful of meters from the spot, the amphibians came ashore to explore the cache. They were bashful at first, skirting the display of goods and sipping condensation from the broad, glossy fronds of a low-growing plant—for all the world like a band of burglars trying to look nonchalant as they cased a prospective target.
When they finally moved, they ignored the bright chalk circle—except to spread it about with their flat, webbed feet—and went straight for the shiniest or most brightly colored objects they could find, carrying them back to the water in their wide mouths.
Other creatures appeared as well—some large, colorful avians the size of small Macaws fluttered down to pick at anything fibrous; a small mammal of some sort shuffled among the food stuffs; a shapeless, lumpy thing like a headless, legless armadillo scuttled here and there, its only remarkable feature the irregular patches of bright color that decorated its otherwise drab hide. It trailed a cloud of the gnat-sized fireflies, recognizable in daylight only by their iridescent green wings.
Everything got thoroughly pawed over, but except for the bright building materials and the food, nothing was taken. All in all, a disappointing episode.
They moved their ‘trade center’ north after that, determined to give the bashful simians more study. The lemuresque creatures seemed to have some promising social habits. They built tree houses—or at least elaborate nests—they lived in family groups, and formed communities made up of a number of families.
“I’m actually quite hopeful,” Rhys said when they’d completed setting up shop in the fringes of one of the arboreal ‘villages.’ “They exhibit a number of distinguishing social characteristics that could indicate sentience.”
“Doesn’t the mere fact that they build those little tree-houses mean they’re sentient?” asked Godwin. “That makes them tool-users, doesn’t it?”
“There are any number of animals that weave nests at least that elaborate and that use tools,” said Rhys. “That doesn’t mean they’re people.”
“What would make you consider them... people?”
“Observing trade would incline me to hopefulness. As would the use of a discernible language—or some other observable system of communication.”
“Ah... the operative term being ‘system.’”
Rhys nodded. “Another bit of evidence might be the cultivation of food or the domestication of animals.”
Yoshi, peering at the monitor, glanced up. “You mean like the birds? They seem to be all over the village here. And what about those big arthropods?”
Rhys, Rick, and Godwin all moved to look over her shoulder at the large flat display. In the clearing central to the simians’ tree houses, several of the lumpy, waddling creatures milled like legless, armored sheep. The simians sat peacefully among them, feeding on the seed-cones of the lacy coniferous trees, tossing the used-up cores at the native ‘armadillos,’ which snuffled up whatever the swift avians didn’t nab, occasionally using some well-concealed body part to fling one back toward its point of origin.
Yoshi chewed her lip. “Pets? Livestock?”
Rhys nodded. “Could be. Could also be simple scavenging. Only time will tell.”
They watched their cache of goods with great anticipation, but the simians’ interaction, when it came, had more in common with pillaging than with shopping. Accordingly, Rhys took the next step. Over a period of days, they moved their observation station closer to the village perimeter, insinuating themselves into the landscape. When the simians no longer ran squealing for the trees the moment the Humans twitched a toe, they staged what Raymond Godwin snidely referred to as their “inane little skits.” Rhys and Rick went through the motions of trade, playing merchant and customer, making a performance of the exchange of goods.
Their performances drew a furry crowd of onlookers; the lemur-like creatures became bolder, even going so far as to touch some of the wares displayed behind each actor.
During the third or fourth skit came the break-through that Rhys had been hoping for; one of the simians picked up a piece of off-world fruit and made an attempt to interest one of his comrades in it. In a matter of minutes the creatures were picking up food and playing at exchange. Eventually, the trade broadened to include sticks, rocks, seedpods from the trees, anything they could find. Some courageous individuals even offered pilfered foodstuffs to the Humans.
But Rhys Llewellyn watched with increasing disappointment; there was no method to the madness, no pattern. The simians weren’t trading; they were merely mimicking observed behavior with no apparent understanding of it. Even as he looked on, still searching for signs that the Bogies comprehended their actions, they began flinging stuff about and the ‘trading’ degenerated into a food fight.
The Humans withdrew.
“I don’t think they get it,” Godwin said. “Pet armadillos or no, I think they’re animals, not people.”
“Give it some time, Godwin,” Rhys told him, trying to be optimistic.
But the next day’s trade went no better. Upon seeing the Humans, the simians began to caper and playfully exchange random items, which were forgotten as soon as they left the traders’ hand-like paws. As before, the episode ended in a hail of badly ai
med projectiles, which pelted Humans, simians, and their ‘pets’ indiscriminately.
Rhys’s only reason for hopefulness was that the simians were observed to sip water from the same broad-leaf fronds he’d seen growing in the lake environs. Since the fronds didn’t grow near the tree village, he could only suppose that meant the simians had transported them. But observing that more advanced behavior was denied the Humans. The simians were never seen retrieving the fronds; they simply seemed to appear during the night. How, even Yoshi’s nocturnal video records failed to show.
Rhys was disappointed. “I suppose,” he told Rick and Yoshi, “that we ought to pick a new target and start again.” He shook his head. “I would have bet credits that the presence of both birds and arthropods indicated nascent domestication. Evidently, it only indicated a symbiosis.”
Yoshi nodded. “The lemurs leave refuse and the—the bogdillos and birds scavenge it.”
“Bogdillos?” Rick repeated.
Yoshi shrugged and glanced at her notes. “I get tired of saying ‘arthropods.’ There are some reptiles at a site about fifteen klicks from here that have been observed in a bipedal stance. It seems they also use sticks to pry food out of crevasses between rocks and have been observed carrying articles about what the advance team described as a village.”
“We’ll visit them tomorrow then,” Rhys said absently.
“You seem unhappy, Professor,” Raymond Godwin observed.
“Unhappy?” Rhys shook his head. “No. A bit disappointed, perhaps.”
“Whatever for? Surely if you find no sentient beings on Bog it makes your job just that much easier... and your departure that much sooner.” He glanced around at the explosion of damp foliage that surrounded them, every leaf and stalk glistening with Bog’s dank perspiration. “I’ve never in my life been in a place that sweats like this. My hair clings to my head, my clothing clings to my body. It makes Florida seem positively arid. I don’t know how you can stand it.” He gave Rhys’s kilt a disparaging glance. “I’ll certainly be glad to leave.”
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