“I will admit,” Rhys told him, “that Bog’s temperate zone seems to be poorly named, but... I would like to have found some new neighbors to talk to.”
“Well, speaking on behalf of Tanaka, whose interests you also claim to serve, new neighbors are a pain. They require the expenditure of time and energy that would be more profitably spent in negotiating with the Collective for planetary resources. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of candidates for sentience planet-wide. While your people interview every one of them, the mineral resources of Bog lie here untapped. If you find no one, you’ve spent months or even years doing it, only to find that Bog has no masters and the minerals might have been at our disposal all along. If you do find someone, then time and energy must be put into learning their language, studying their culture, understanding their point of view—and still the resources of Bog lie here untapped. I’m sure you can see that the best case scenario as far as our employer is concerned is for Bog to be completely without sentient life.”
He had stopped just short of suggesting that Rhys come to that conclusion regardless of the circumstances. Rhys wondered if the thought had been in his mind. He glanced forward to where Yoshi sat beside Rick in the front passenger seat of the buggy. Even in profile, he could see that her brow was knit and her jaw clenched mutinously. In the four years or so he had known her, Rhys had seen a thousand expressions cross Yoshi Umeki’s face. He had never seen this one.
“Have you an alternative to suggest that will not contravene Collective law?” he asked carefully.
“It seems to me we might simply set up our mining operations—in a way calculated to make a minimum impact on the ecosystem, of course—and then if, in later years, a sentient species makes itself known, we can deal with it as necessary.”
Yoshi snorted. “That’s what they said about the Aborigines.”
Godwin glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”
She spoke without turning to face him. “That’s what every conqueror has said about every conquered people since the dawn of Human civilization— ‘we’ll deal with them as necessary.’ Usually, the native peoples end up with their culture destroyed and their numbers seriously depleted.”
“My dear girl,” said Godwin dryly, “we are not barbarians who have failed to learn from our own history. Rest assured, should any intelligence rear its unlikely head on this sodden ball of earth, Tanaka Corp will honor both its culture and its physical well-being. You know Danetta Price better than I do, but whatever her merits or demerits as a CEO, she is not known for a conquistadorial attitude. But there are resources here—” He broke off, turning to address his argument to Rhys. “There are, for example, significant quantities of a natural organometallic in the water at this latitude that has tremendous potential. A natural organometallic. And then there are the ores. Did you know that there are caves about two hundred klicks south of here that contain incredibly pure deposits of copper? And the surface water—all of it—contains an alchemist’s laboratory stew of useful minerals.”
His eyes gleamed. A zealot. Rhys smiled. He recognized the look. He’d seen it often enough on Yoshi’s face, on Rick’s... in the mirror. Godwin might have been him describing an assemblage of objects dug out of someone’s two thousand year old refuse bin or burial mound. And, little as he liked to admit it, there was controversy over the ethics of making use of those resources, too.
o0o
The reptiles lived in an area that was as close to a desert as was likely to be found on Bog. The soil was sandy, merely damp, and sparsely foliated (at least more sparsely than 75 percent of Bog). In cleared areas the reptilians had built structures not unlike the giant termite mounds of Earthen Africa, pasting them together with clay from the bottom of small, stagnant red pools that dotted the landscape. Taken together with the jewel-bright green of the mounds’ inhabitants, the whole area looked as if Santa’s interstellar sleigh had jettisoned a cargo of Christmas ornaments.
From the cover afforded them by a tufted dune, the Humans watched the activity around the mounds. Rhys was just puzzling over a group of empty and collapsed “huts” to the north of the inhabited group when Yoshi jiggled his elbow.
“Look, sir. Tool-use.”
He nodded, watching a pair of the iguana-like creatures poking about a rotting tree stump with a stick. Another teetered across the clearing on his hind legs, his arms full of water-smoothed rocks. These he deposited next to one of the mounds in a heap, shoving away one of the ubiquitous ‘bogdillos’, which had come along to snuffle at the collection. When the creature failed to move away, the reptile chittered at it, finally picking up one of the rocks and dealing the arthropod a sharp thwack. A second reptile scurried over to snag the rock and skitter away with it, eventually pressing it into the wall of a mound.
“Now there’s Human behavior,” said Rick.
“That, too.” Yoshi pointed to where a clutch of immature reptiles was attempting to feed one of the bogdillos a large, decimated leaf. The creature seemed completely uninterested, which in turn caused the ‘children’ to lose interest in it. They next offered their wizened frond to a flock of avians with more success.
Godwin, checking the soles of his boots for unmentionables, said, “Well, Doctor. I’ll bet you’re just in seventh heaven. There’s more Humanoid behavior going on out there than I’ve seen in most spaceport cantinas. Shall we make an appearance and ask to be taken to their leader?”
“Perhaps,” Rhys told him, “if we can determine who that leader is.”
They watched the reptiles for three days without making a single move. In that time, they collected a plethora of data on community life and interaction, noted the hierarchy among the ‘lizards,’ and chased away nosy arthropods and avians. On day three, Godwin—whose patience was apparently not a virtue that got much exercise—returned to the base camp, complaining of sand fleas and insomnia. The sands around their mobile cabin made a peculiar sucking noise at night, which Godwin found unbearable. Rhys silently (and guiltily) thanked the sands.
Their observations did indeed yield the identification of a dominant member of the reptile community. It was a female, judging from physiological and behavioral cues, who ruled the reptile roost. It was to this noble creature that Rhys at last decided to make himself known.
At first, he merely let them see him at the edge of the village, laying out his merchandise and making observations to his notepad. After a while, he moved in closer. The reptiles watched him with their golden, saucer-round eyes, occasionally opening and closing their wide mouths; Rhys expected to hear the clack of castanets. The elder female watched him most carefully as she went about her business, which consisted largely of scolding the younger members of her group who brought her food and occasionally rocks for her mound.
By the time he was face to face with the matriarch, she accepted him without tremor or outrage, merely observing his every move through her extraordinary eyes. He proffered her a piece of glazed azure tile. She looked at it, reached out a scaly digit and touched it, then scratched her neck. He rose and pressed the tile into the earthen wall of the mound she basked beside; she watched him with vague interest. Carefully, he took a rock from the pile her young cohorts had brought her and placed it among his wares; she blinked and scratched her neck again.
He repeated the exercise a few more times, drawing a small crowd of the reptilian Bogies. Finally, one of the creatures came forward and gingerly poked at another piece of tile. Rhys held his breath, affording a quick glance over his shoulder to where Yoshi and Rick observed and recorded the goings on.
The reptile handled the tile, turning it this way and that so the bright, glazed surface caught the sun, then he picked it up in one long-fingered hand and scuttled away with it to place it in his own pile of building materials some yards away. He did not return with an offering.
Rhys let out a long breath and tried not to let his hope go with it. But twenty or so pilfered tiles later, he admitted momentary defeat an
d retired to the camp.
“It seems,” he sighed some days later with no further progress to show, “that all we’ve accomplished is to leave our reptilian friends with gaudier houses.”
“Houses they may not even live in that much longer,” Yoshi added. “I explored the other side of that little knoll.” She indicated a nearby hillock covered with sand and some wispy bushes. “It seems that what these creatures do is build up their little mud igloos until the inner passages are all clogged with rocks and bits of wood or the roofs cave in. From what I can tell, they just abandon the villages little by little and start new mounds right next door.”
Rhys nodded. “Which explains the trail of mud huts we followed to get here.”
“Professor...” Rick was watching a playback of Rhys’s interaction with the reptiles. “This is probably irrelevant, but does it seem to anyone else that those mud huts bear a more than passing resemblance to Yoshi’s bogdillos?”
Both Yoshi and Rhys brought their attention to the video. “Roddy’s right,” Rhys murmured thoughtfully. “Although that could just as easily be by accident as by design.”
Rick selected another time index, presenting them with a view of their encounter with the lake dwellers. It escaped no one that the water-bound lodges of the amphibians, with their anarchic polka-dots of bright stuff, looked much like submerged bogdillos.
Rhys exhaled explosively. “Worship? Art? Coincidence?”
“Do we stick around or move on?” Rick asked.
“I guess we’d best move on,” Rhys decided. “But we’ll be back. Maybe I just need some fresh ideas.”
Raymond Godwin greeted their return to base camp with ill-concealed relief. “No luck, eh? Will you be giving up, then?”
“Yes,” Rhys said mildly, “we’re going to move the base camp to the next location.”
Godwin grimaced. “And may I ask how many ‘locations’ there are?”
“About a dozen, all told. The habitable zone on Bog is rather small, after all.”
“A dozen.” Godwin glanced from Rhys to his two assistants. “And I suppose you’re going to check out every one of them, aren’t you?”
Rhys smiled. “Until we find sentience or determine it’s not to be found. That’s our job, this time out.”
“Professor Llewellyn, you obviously have very little business acumen. I don’t know how you managed to impress Ms. Price as a negotiator.” Godwin turned on his heel, narrowly avoiding doing the splits on the ever-soggy turf, and made a most dignified exit.
Putting Godwin’s ill temper out of his mind, Rhys visited the logistics chief next, to arrange for the camp move. Unlike Raymond Godwin, Chief Pinski was thrilled with the prospect of some action.
“My people have been going stir crazy,” he told Rhys. “While you folks’re out doing the jungle, all they’ve got to do is read and play VR games. You want to see how bored people can get?”
He beckoned Rhys to the door of his portable office and nodded toward the cargo area, where a quartet of bright blue, tarp-covered pallets stood awaiting dispersal. At the edge of the area, a handful of men and women in varicolored coveralls lobbed the local version of pinecones into the forest.
“What are they aiming at?” Rhys asked.
“Oh, anything and everything. Leaves, seed cones on stumps, the blossoms on those big, droopy trees, the critters that skulk around the edge of camp.”
Rhys smiled wanly. “I see. Well, do you think you could ask them not to target anything that moves? I’d hate to annoy the neighbors.”
Pinski chuckled. “I see your point. Sure, Doc. Now, when would you like to bug out?”
“Tomorrow morning will do fine. I’ll have the coordinates for you by supper time.”
Leaving Pinski’s office, he heard a rousing cheer go up along the edge of the cargo dump. He sighed, praying the site crew hadn’t hit anyone who would hold a grudge.
o0o
They were up by Bog’s green early light. Forest denizens strove to outdo each other in song, and a legitimately cool breeze rustled the rampant foliage. Rhys took his morning shower—essential to starting a day on Bog—and realized he couldn’t face putting on his kilt. The humid atmosphere made the wool itch and cling, and he was damn tired of smelling like a wet sheep. Nattily attired in a jump suit of jungle green, he was walking across camp when Yoshi fell into step with him.
“Good morning, sir,” she said.
“Yoshi, how long have we been working together?”
“Four years, three and one half months,” she said, as if she’d been calculating that very thing the moment he’d asked.
“And during those four years, three and one half months, how many times do you suppose you’ve agreed to stop calling me ‘sir?’”
She gave him a sheepish look from beneath the black silk that fell across her forehead. “Oops. Sorry, Rhys. Sometimes it just slips out. Blame it on my family—small town, Shinto-Buddhist-Bahá’í values. Every time I forget to use a term of respect for an elder or a teacher, I see my aunt Mineko shaking her finger at me and saying, ‘Yoshiko, honor those to whom honor is due.’”
“Godwin’s an elder; you never call him ‘sir.’ Besides, I’m not that much older than you are.”
She glanced at him out of the tail of eyes that somehow blended contrition and impishness. “Your point?”
“My point is that after four years—”
“And three and one half months,” she added, and smiled. “I’m trying, but old habits die hard, and sometimes you’re such a curmudgeon...”
Rhys snorted. “Curmudgeon, your Aunt Mineko!”
They’d come to the mess tent and he’d pulled back the waterproof cowling over the door when he heard someone shouting for him. He turned. Rick Halfax was hurrying toward them from the direction they’d just come, waving his arms.
“You aren’t going to believe this!” he panted when he reached them. “Something... I mean someone left us a pile of goodies during the night.”
It was indeed a pile of goodies. The jumble of rocks, flowers, and conifer seed-cones had been left between a pair of tarp-covered pallets at the eastern fringe of their supply yard. The rocks formed the bottom-most layer; the Bogish pinecones tumbled atop those; the flowers were sprinkled over all like brown sugar on oatmeal. Some of the Tanaka site crew were standing nearby, looking on with mild interest.
A young woman pointed at the heap of stuff and said, “This is just the way we found it, professor. We haven’t touched a thing.”
Rhys knelt by the knee-high mound and picked up one of the large, purplish blossoms. “Interesting,” he murmured. “All of the same variety.”
“The botany team was really interested in those,” the young woman told him and smiled. “I think the fragrance was a hit.”
Rhys nodded. “There’s a lot of money in perfume on just about any world.”
“Mimicry?” The one word question came from Rick, who was sampling one of the rocks with a field scanner. “They’ve seen us pile stuff up like this. Maybe they’re just aping us.”
Rhys shook his head. “Possibly, but the young lady is right—these flowers are ones the botany team was particularly interested in.” He sniffed at the bloom. “Tantalizing. They collected scores of them.”
“And you think one of the native species noticed that?”
In answer, Rhys nodded at the rock in Rick’s hand. “What’ve you got there?”
“Ore-bearing. Barium...” He gestured at another, lighter colored specimen on the ground at his feet. “Gold. Also heavily sampled by the advance team.”
Yoshi nudged a seed-cone with her toe. “Dr. Gallioni says these are a storehouse of natural antibiotics...I guess we’ve been noticed.”
“Hmmm.” Rhys was examining the spongy ground around the cache, looking for tracks. “But by whom?”
“Oh, dear God, it’s true.” Raymond Godwin stood at the corner of the nearest pallet, looking aghast at the collection of native wares. “Someone or som
ething has actually made an overture. And I thought this was going to be a simple matter of a corporate claim. Well, which one of our lovely natives left this little offering?”
Rhys turned one of the native plants in his hands, feeling a heady wash of exhilaration. “I don’t know, Mr. Godwin, but I intend to find out.”
“I take it this means our move is canceled.”
Rhys nodded absently, already pondering his next step.
It was easy enough to talk about finding the would-be traders, harder to do. After a long night of sleepless reflection, Rhys still hadn’t decided where to begin or what he could do that he hadn’t already done to flush Bog’s sentients out of the swamp. He reviewed behaviors—leaf sipping, rock carrying, tree-house building... icon making? Any and all could be significant.
He rose the next morning, showered, dressed and literally flipped a coin. The ancient British ha’penny came up heads, and Rhys took his crew off to the reptile village. Three days later, he was ready to give up. Aside from building houses that possibly paid tribute to the bogdillo, the reptiles showed no sign of abstract thought.
“Perhaps,” Yoshi said the morning they moved their remote camp to the arboreal village, “we’re not going about this the right way.”
Rick Halfax snorted. “Obviously not.”
Yoshi ignored him. “I mean, maybe there’s some sort of protocol we’re missing.”
Rhys raised his tired eyes to her face. “I’m all ears.”
“Well, they brought their goods to our camp and left them where we’d be sure to find them.”
“Which is precisely what we’ve been doing. For all we know this could just be a case of mimicry.”
“Or,” Yoshi continued, “it could be a step in some sort of trading ritual. Like the Pa-Kai dances or the Garulin processionals.”
She had his attention now and he waved her on.
“We left our goods at their doors—”
“Whose doors?” Rick asked. “We left our goods at several doors.”
Yoshi nudged him aside with a preemptory flick of her fingers. “I don’t know yet, but what if they took that as the first step in the protocol? A bid to establish the trading ground, let’s say. To them, what we’re saying is, ‘We elect your village to be the trading ground.’ So they take the next step; they elect our ‘village.’ Now we’ve put the ball back in their bailiwick. But maybe that’s not the polite thing to do, maybe we’re supposed to accept their offer to let us host the trading.”
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