“We have to eat them?”
“It is considered polite.”
She watched Twisty’s bland face. When in Rome …
“Wait a moment, Twisty.”
She went inside for her field knives. For the main job, she took a long blade with a guard and a large handle. A small knife could turn sideways in your hand when it hit bone. A short knife for finer work. Plus some tight gloves. And her phone, to record the procedure. Cliff was still snoring. She stood quietly for a moment and steeled herself for what she had to do.
When she came out, the two big carniroos were holding the corpse between them, lifted high enough for her to work easily. Their impassive blunt-nosed faces simply regarded her with no expression she could read. She smiled, not knowing if these aliens would understand human facial expressions, and thought. At least I’ll learn some anatomy.…
Old field practice: First, look in the mouth. This roo was an omnivore browser, not a grazer. Its teeth combined sharp wolflike fangs in the front of the mouth, grinders toward the back. Snub-faced so the big dark eyes could see forward panoramically.
She sized up the problem by turning the body, in the grip of its fellows. A rigid lumbar spine, as befit a fast hopper. Arms and hands that could support the full body weight, so they could deal with a fall and get right back up. They could use both legs, arms, and tail for a five-point gait, if needed. At least two hundred kilos weight, a real muscular monster compared to her own seventy kilos.
With the ears uncovered, she could see their unusually complex spiral inner structure. To increase hearing sensitivity? She noticed, too, that their fur caused water to bead up instead of soaking in.
Now the hard part … She took care slitting the belly open. Was there some alien ritual she should obey? Twisty stood nearby, studying her. She raised eyebrows at it, but the alien just shook its head.
Was this some test? All she had to go on was her experience dressing out deer in the field. High up in the Sierra, you carried out the good meat and left all else behind. Here, quite plainly there was some social role to play. She decided to stick with what she could recall of that Sierra experience, centuries ago.
She slit the tawny skin to peel it back before cutting through the muscle layer. Plenty of dried blood that gave a curious iron tang to the warm air. It was easiest to remove the skin within the first two hours, while the body was still warm—but now it had stiffened. After making a shallow slit, she turned the knife blade upward. Here goes.
Starting at the broad pelvis, she cut through the muscle layer along the same line, using the fingers of her free hand on either side of the blade tip. This unzipping effect pulled the muscle layer up and away from the blotchy belly organs. That ensured that she didn’t puncture the stomach and intestines. Her nose wrinkled at the smell. Flies came zooming in and swarmed eagerly for the pasty gray blood.
Concentrate. Pretty sure vomiting is not polite. The flies had long bodies and a line of wings. She looped the knife up the chest and neck to the jawline. This thing is built like Earthside critters. So follow your intuition.…
She was going by the general mammal body plan, so she cut through the cartilage of the breastbone with the knife, sawing hard. That let her spread the ribs—ten sets of them, no less, and thick—for easier cleaning. For that, she quickly cleared the bones with her short knife.
Carnivores had simple digestive tracts, just a straight shot through, not the complicated large and small intestines of humans and other omnivores. This carniroo was different from anything Earthside. It had an odd, tapered digestive tract like a funnel, ending in a big anus. No urethra, so maybe they compressed urine into crystals and shat it out. Earthside, birds and reptiles did that to avoid carrying a lot of liquid aboard.
Now the worst part …
Next, she cut a hole around the thing’s big ruby-red anus. She pulled it to the inside, not breathing. She had line cord in her work belt, so she spooled some out with a single pull. She shot a quick glance at the carniroos on each side, who were huffing and snorting some now. Why? Did I do something wrong?
Ah, the genitals. This carniroo was a male. The phallus was small and tucked into its own pouch. It was thick-veined so would grow a lot when needed. Carefully she tucked it in with the anal zone, held them together. She did not look aside at the aliens while doing this. No rustling of discomfort. Good.
Still not looking into the alien eyes, she tied off the anus and colon with the line cord. Done. That has to be crucial to the ritual, to prevent spillage. The roos stirred, their feet shuffling, as she made a loop cut around the entrails and pulled them free. The roos snorted. Approval? Impossible to tell.
Then she just ran on intuition. Quickly she sliced away the long windpipe, since it could taint the meat. She cut the windpipe and esophagus in two as far up the neck as she could. Now the finale … She put aside the knife, grabbed the windpipe with both hands, and pulled down hard. The entrails came free down to the midsection.
She cut the connective tissue holding the moist entrails next to the backbone. Without pause, she dropped the whole bag of guts to the balcony floor. Then she grabbed the skin with both hands at the back of the head. Glanced at the carniroos, then Twisty—who nodded. At last, a signal.
With a grunt she pulled down hard. The skin came off with a sound like a wet zipper, down to the forelegs. All the raw red meat stood glistening in the sun.
“What the hell?!” Cliff stood naked beside her. She had not noticed him come out.
“I’ll explain later,” Beth said slowly. She turned to Twisty. “We’re supposed to…?”
Twisty waved all its hands, as if in explanation. “Make a victory meal of their friend.”
Cliff snorted. “I don’t—”
“Never mind. Look, can you carve out the steaks?”
Cliff blinked. “Uh, sure. For—”
“A feast, yes. Breakfast. I’ll go roust out the others. And build a fire. A big one. Festive, I guess.”
Twisty spoke in rapid-fire bursts to the carniroos. Beth noticed the big beasts did not seem tired from holding their dead buddy up. They had big bulging muscles in their several arms and legs, even in their tails—casually very strong. The carniroos rattled back in crisp, sharp consonants.
Cliff took her knives and went to work, not bothering to get dressed. Beth realized there was no point in being embarrassed at standing naked before aliens. Nudity was a carefully governed human taboo zone, full of portent—but that meant nothing to aliens. And washing the blood off would be easy.
To watch Cliff, the carniroos holding the body stretched out their heads toward him at the same time. They wrinkled their black lips and opened their mouths so wide she could see their big square tombstone back teeth. As Cliff sawed away, the roos made snuffling and whuffling sounds through shotgun-barrel noses, sighting at him and shuffling their big feet. Apparently the final rendering into cuts for cooking was vastly important. Alien manners.
She watched him, too, slicing off cuts from the thick carniroo muscles. Fresh game. How long has it been? Nearly a century since, back on the Bowl …
She turned to Twisty with a sudden intuition. “Yes, we’ll have a big breakfast feast. Shall we invite some of the carniroos to a … ceremony?”
She braced herself for a retort, but Twisty nodded. It was picking up human signaling. “They will appreciate sharing in the feast.”
Cannibalism, too?
Beth made herself take a long, deep breath. Kipling had a saying, centuries back: “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right.”
She had to admit, the carving and trimming had restored her old field appetites. She had another idea. “Think you or they can find some eggs? You know, from some birds?”
Twisty’s arms danced. “I think I know your reference. Yes, there are such here. Unfertilized eggs. Some quite large—” It measured out about a foot length between two arms. “From large fliers. This links to your
early origins.”
“Huh?”
“I gather you come from the warm-blooded. They once, going by your evolutionary tale, lived by scavenging up the eggs of your ancient dinosaurs. Small, frightened, they supposedly foraged at night. So even now, you eat eggs after you awaken.”
“Never thought of it that way,” Cliff said as he sliced and layered the meat. The two carniroos were still holding their late comrade aloft, seemingly without effort—though they were both sweating a bit now. Flies buzzed around. Beth realized she was very hungry. Also dirty.
“Let’s do our mammal thing, then.” She felt bouyant, freed, after the awful, bloody cutting. “Get us some eggs, Twisty, to go with the roo. Steak and eggs, yes. Yum!”
TWENTY-ONE
STRANDS OF STRANGENESS
Redwing did not think education ever did him any great harm, but it had failed to teach him how to hide his irritation. “Why the hell are they discussing all this airy stuff with that damned Glorian, that Twisty?”
The Translator ’Lect said in her soft, calm tones, “It is how the Glorians, whomever that might be, chose.”
“That Twisty doesn’t seem fazed much. Seems damned casual, after losing two of us in a diplomatic party he’s escorting.”
“This is a vastly different kind of intelligence than your expedition has seen. The Bowl aliens were various, as well. You suffered casualties there, too.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Yes, sir.” It even knew to slur the s.
Redwing grimaced and picked up a coffee from his personal maker. Pointless to argue with the Translator ’Lect about strategy. He lounged back in his cabin and watched, for yet another time, the videos from Beth’s helmet camera. Here came the roolike aliens, hopping in arcs thirty meters long. That Honor moon had a bit lower grav than Earth, but the ferocious speed of the animals’ attack still startled him.
He noted that some wore a long vest. He paused the feed. The tan vests were nearly the same color as the hide and had pockets, tool kits, even symbol displays of curious spiral designs.
Smart tool users, attacking in packs? With clothes, but no obvious weapons? He shook his head. Even he knew this was odd.
No wonder that in Beth’s team talk afterwards, which he listened to intently, the bio team members were puzzled, angry, confused. Like him.
The Translator ’Lect said softly, “I have consulted your species history. Your culture changes swiftly, but often forgets. Humans think of science fiction as a late-nineteenth and twentieth-century genre, as though future thinking emerged then. But the remarkable Voltaire wrote a science fiction novella called Micromégas, in which aliens from another star and from Saturn come to the Earth. When they make first contact with people, the first thing they discuss was, ‘Is Plato or Descartes correct about how the soul and body connect to each other?’ and ‘Is Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of Aristotle’s divisions of the parts of the soul true?’ Voltaire’s society was obsessed with theology’s collisions with the new. So to them, providence and the existence of God and the immaterial soul were what his people talked to aliens about. These were to Voltaire as plausible subjects, as our science fiction works are to us.”
Seldom did the Translator ’Lect hold forth, so Redwing considered the example, though it irked him with its irrelevance. “The Glorians are telling us something about themselves, with these deaths?”
“This could be,” the Translator ’Lect said. No more.
The danger of Artilects wasn’t that they would take over as captains of human destiny. Still, a human captain could overestimate their comprehension. No machine mind, with qubits galore, had ever moved into strange territory, explored and fathomed and used it. Humans had.
Redwing knew to be careful with such systems. They had limited range, and no true natural feel for the vagaries of human language. At first, the Translator ’Lect had Glorians interpreting words oddly. Once the Glorians mistook coffee for “one upon whom one coughs.” They could seldom spot a joke. But the Voltaire point troubled him.
Worse, much worse, were the tactical implications of this latest death. Sergeant Schindelmeisser had her four-eyes gear running, too, but not well. The tiny survey eyes riding on the back of her neck alerted her to the carniroo pack coming up fast behind her—but she hadn’t picked up the warning flash in time. Gear could do only so much, in the field. The carniroo attack had been too quick.
They were down there, wrapped in a blanket of bandwidth, but paying attention to it was a problem. The system automatically paired with each team member’s medical transponder, a gadget as small as a grain of rice. But it wasn’t smart enough to deal with the data flood. Expect the unexpected was a cute rule, hard to do in alien lands.
Beth’s team had given each other plenty of side-eye looks in their discussion, a ripple of uncertainty. What will happen next? Who will die? These weren’t hardened military types at all. Bio, engineering, tech aplenty—but no real grunts ready for a fight. Maybe he should pull them out? Negotiate some protocols with … who? The only Glorian they knew was Twisty—another block in understanding.
He had watched as morning light spread across the land in pastel smears, seen the steak and big-eggs feast. Maybe that made the team feel better, but he doubted it. He would watch, listen, judge the odds. Aliens were alien.
Meanwhile, the crew aboard SunSeeker were resurrecting more from cold sleep. They all had to be ready to spread through the Cobweb in enough numbers to firm up their presence. That imperative came from Earthside strategy behind this whole expedition, and others like it—spread humanity through the galaxy neighborhood, as species insurance. Plus, learn a lot, to piece together humanity’s place in the galaxy.
Redwing studied on split screens the many visual feeds from the net of drones surveying the Cobweb above Honor. Here was one in the air above Beth’s team. Here was the view captured when Glory eclipsed the Cobweb and Honor in shades of bruise-colored, solemn shadows. The Honor landscape had domes, apparently for separate biospheres—why?
He watched visuals above the enormous Cobweb lands, rich in moisture. Clouds bunched over continent-broad slabs stacked along the Cobweb axis. Gravity acted along the Cobweb axis and he saw these pancakes of landmass from the side. Each slender wedge of land had a slightly different, near-zero gravity, because of their distances from the two worlds. From afar, the tubes and columns that framed the Cobweb mingled with pipes, tubes, sometimes even purple corkscrew plumbing. They were intricately color-coded in grays, pinks, blues, and orange shades, and ultraviolet and infrared, too, apparently so engineers could easily parse their functions. The magnitude of such a vibrant, living vault still stunned him. Whole oceans and atmospheres flowed along the web axis, bringing life in slender columns.
This was fluid wrangling on a huge scale. Though Earth’s air seemed boundless, it was tiny on planetary terms of gross mass. All the hundred or so kilometers of Earth air weighed only a bit more than the Mediterranean Sea. That was why the first clear signs of humanity’s impact on their world came in the air they breathed and polluted.
He watched holo views of the Bulge, showing SunSeeker as a tiny, silvery sliver magnetically moored alongside. Here the fluid ferment of a vast biozone hung in the blackness. Looking from the edge of the Bulge, Glory blocked its star.
Then he had the Artilects merge the distant views, backing away to a point beyond Honor. The lesser world’s atmosphere was very cloudy, and the Cobweb tapered away to Glory. For clarity, the Artilects had filtered out the shadows, revealing the silvery strutworks that made them name it Cobweb.
The many small probe swarms he had sent flanking along the Cobweb’s length showed that the Cobweb’s contained atmosphere was several thousand times more massive than all Earth’s air.
What’s more, rather than Earth’s stagnant layers, air circulated through the Cobweb in apparent disobedience of physics. No big density gradients. The same for the water that flowed across the broad continental-sized platforms. Hig
h up along the Cobweb, some silvery-blue lakes even floated in air, great sheets across most of the Bulge. Maybe air currents alone, in that fat low-grav zone, kept the hanging lakes aloft. The handiwork of unseen giants.
His board lit with an incoming signal. Ah, from the Bowl.
Mayra Wickramsingh’s face was even more worn and weary. She preferred to report standing, her SunSeeker uniform neat and lean body still fit. He had made her the voice of the human colony on the Bowl because she kept a neat shop and took no backtalk.
“Hail again, Cap’n,” she began. “Got lots to report—my written is running parallel to this stream, per request. Got a big problem headed your way.”
The screen filled with three white-hot plumes flaring widely against a starry background. “This is that band of corsairs—as the Folk put it—who cast off the Bowl rim back around a year or so ago. Nobody knew it until they turned on their ramscoop full blast, to get away from us. They’re still accelerating and—watch this—”
The first plume flickered out, and a speck appeared, the actual ship. It close-upped further and Redwing could see the tubular shape turn on its axis. Yellow and red plasma turbulence flared around it, like a silver insect roasting in a roiling fire.
“Starting deceleration. They’re out about as far as that grav wave transmitter you got a look at, going in.”
Redwing ached to shoot back a question, but speed-of-light delay was still months long. The speck finished spinning around its axis, and a white-hot plume again scorched across the blackness, now pointing toward the bright lure of Glory.
Mayra said, “There are three of them, keeping close together. I think they may swoop by that grav wave emitter. I noticed the whole array is in the bow shock region of the star. I guess that’s to max the ambient plasma. Anyway, our detectors may have picked up a surge of plasma emissions near that grav wave thing. Looks like some knots of plasma are approaching it from the Glory side. They may be the Diaphanous who left you, as you spiraled into the inner system. Looks like trouble brewing, anyway.”
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 17