Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  So far the strategy seemed to have worked. In the seven months since the fabrication crew, working around the clock, had erected the outpost, not even a stray communication had come the way of the two agents. That was fine with Bowman. He didn’t mind the isolation. He and LeCleur were trained to deal with it. And they were very well compensated for maintaining their lack of offworld contact.

  A few clouds were gathering. There might an afternoon rain shower, he decided. If it materialized it would be gentle, of course, like everything else on Hedris. No dangerous lightning, and just enough distant thunder to be atmospheric. Then the sun would come out, attended by the inevitable rainbow.

  The sweet smell of muffin on the grill reached him from inside and he turned away from the brightening panorama. It was LeCleur’s week to do the cooking, and his partner had long since mastered different ways of preparing the eminently edible indigene. Not only were the multitudinous muffins harmless, cute beyond words, and easy to catch, their seared flesh was tender and highly palatable, with a sugary, almost honeyed flavor to the whitish flesh that was nothing at all like chicken. Tastewise, it far surpassed anything in their inventory of prepackaged concentrates and dehydrates. There wasn’t a lot of meat on a muffin, but then, neither was there a shortage of the hopping, preoccupied, two-legged creatures.

  The slim, diminutive humanoid natives virtually lived on them, and lived well. Only their metabolism kept them thin, Bowman reflected as he closed the front door of the station behind him. Overawed by the much larger humans, the native Akoe were occasional visitors to the outpost. They were invariably polite, courteous, and quietly eager to learn about their extraordinary visitors. Their language was a simple one and with the aid of electronic teaching devices, both experienced agents had soon mastered enough of it to carry on a rudimentary conversation. The Akoe were always welcome at the outpost, though sometimes their quiet staring got on Bowman’s nerves. An amused LeCleur never missed an opportunity to chide him about it.

  “How’s it look outside?” LeCleur was almost as tall as Bowman, but not nearly as broad or muscular. “Let me guess: clear and warm, with a chance of a sprinkle later in the day.”

  “What are you, psychic?” Grinning, Bowman sat down opposite his friend and partner. The platter of grilled muffin, neatly sliced, sizzled in a warmer in the center, ringed by reconstituted bread, butter, jams, scrambled rehydrated eggs from three different kinds of fowl, and two tall self-chilling pitchers containing juice. Coffee and tea arrived in the form of the self-propelled carafes that followed the men whenever they verbally expressed their individual thirst.

  “Thought we might run a predator census between rivers Six EW and Eight NS today.” Having finished his meal, LeCleur was adding sweetener to his mug of hot high-grown tea.

  Bowman was amenable to the suggestion. “Maybe we’ll see another volute.” They’d only encountered one of the pig-sized, loop-tailed carnivores so far, and that from a distance. He was smearing rehydrated blackberry jam on his toast when the perimeter alarm went off. Neither man was alarmed.

  “I’ll get it.” LeCleur rose from his seat. “My turn.”

  While Bowman finished the last of his breakfast, LeCleur activated the free-ranging headsup. A cylindrical image appeared in the middle of the room, a perfect floating replica in miniature of a 360º view outside the outpost. A spoken command from LeCleur caused the image to enlarge and focus on the source of the alarm. This was followed by an order to shut down the soft but insistent whine.

  The agent chuckled into the ensuing silence as he recognized the slim, standing figure that had set off the alert. Its image looked, as always, slightly bewildered. “It’s only old Malakotee.”

  Wiping his mouth, Bowman rose. “Let him in and we’ll see what he wants.” It was always interesting and instructive to observe the elderly native’s reaction to the many miracles the outpost contained. Also fun. He and LeCleur had few enough diversions.

  Precisely enunciated directives caused the circumferential viewer to be replaced by a floating command board. In seconds LeCleur had shut down the station’s external defenses, rotated the bridge to cross the excavated ravine that encircled the outpost, and opened the front door. By the time Bowman was finishing up the dishes, the Akoe elder had arrived at the front door.

  Old Malakotee was a leader among his people, wizened and much respected. The Akoe were led by not one chief, but a group of chosen seniors. Decisions were made by group vote. All very democratic, LeCleur mused as he greeted the alien in its own language. Malakotee responded in kind, but declined to enter, though he could not keep his eyes from roving. Nor did he accept the offer of one of the chairs that sat invitingly on the porch. His much slighter, smaller body and backside tended to find themselves engulfed by the massive human furniture. Also, he never knew what to do with his tail. It switched back and forth as he chattered, the tuft of kinky black hair at the tip swatting curious flying arthropods away.

  Dark, intelligent eyes peered out from beneath smooth brows. The alien’s face was hairless, but the rest of his body was covered with a fine charcoal-gray fuzz. When he opened his mouth, an orifice that was proportionately much wider than that of a comparably sized human, LeCleur could see how the pointed incisors alternated with flattened grinding teeth. In place of a nose was a small trunk with three flexible tips that the Akoe could employ as a third, if very short, hand.

  A cloak comprising the skins of many native animals, especially the ubiquitous muffin, was draped elegantly over his slim form. It was decorated with bits of carved bone, hand-made beads of exceptional quality (the two humans had already traded for examples), and shiny bits of cut and worked shell. The Akoe were very dexterous and of reasonable artistic skill. Necklaces hung from Old Malakotee’s throat, and bracelets jangled on his wrists. He leaned on a ceremonial kotele staff, the wood elaborately garnished with feathers, beads, and paint.

  “Thanking you for offer to come into your hut,” the native explained to LeCleur, having to crane his neck to meet the much taller human’s eyes, “but I not stay long today. Come to tell you my people, they are moving now.”

  The agent was openly surprised. Recovering from their initial shock and stupefaction at the humans’ arrival, the Akoe had been a fixture on the shores of river One NS ever since. Calling for his partner to join them, LeCleur queried their visitor.

  “The Akoe are moving? But where, and why?”

  Raising his primitively florid staff, the elder pointed. “Go north and west soon. Long trek.” Bowman appeared on the porch, wiping his hands against his pants as Malakotee finished, “Find safety in deep caves.”

  “Safety?” Bowman made a face. “What’s this about ‘safety’? Safety from what?”

  The elder turned solemn eyes to the even bigger human. “From migration, of course. Is time of year. When migration over, Akoe come back to river.”

  The two men exchanged a glance. “What migration?” LeCleur asked their pensive visitor. “What’s migrating?” Uncertainly, he scanned the vast, barely undulating plain beyond the outpost’s perimeter.

  “The muffins. Is the time of year. Soon now, they migrate.”

  A modest herd of less than a hundred thousand of the small brown browsers was clustered in the grass in front of the outpost, grazing peacefully. Their familiar soft peep-peeping filled the morning air. LeCleur watched as several, each no bigger than his closed fist, hopped as close as they dared to the edge of the perpendicular-sided ravine that surrounded the station to graze on the ninicumb flowers that were growing there.

  “We’ll see you when you come back, then.”

  “No, no!” Old Malakotee was surprisingly insistent. “I come warn you.” He gestured emphatically. “You come with Akoe. You big skypeople good folk. Come with us. We keep you safe during migration.”

  Bowman smiled condescendingly at the native, whose appearance never failed to put him in mind of an anorexic munchkin. “That’s very kind of you and your people, Malakotee
, but Gerard and I are quite comfortable here. We have protections you can’t see and wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain them to you.”

  The miniature snout in the center of the Akoe’s face twitched uneasily. “Malakotee know you skypeople got many wondrous things. You show Malakotee plenty. But you no understand. This is ixtex,” he explained, using the native word for the bipedal muffins, “migration!”

  “So you’ve told us. I promise you, we’ll be all right. Would you like some tea?” The chemical brew that was Terran tea had been shown to produce interesting, wholly pleasurable reactions within the Akoe body.

  Ordinarily, Old Malakotee, like any Akoe, would have jumped at the offer. But not this morning. Starting off the porch, he gestured purposefully with his staff. Beads jangled and bounced against the light-colored, streaky wood.

  “I tell you. You come with Akoe, we take care of you. You stay here,” he rendered the Akoe gesture for despair, “no good.” Reaching the ground, he promptly launched into a slow-spinning, head-bending, tail-flicking tribal chant-dance. When he was through, he saluted one final time with his ornamented staff before turning his back on them and striding deliberately away from the outpost.

  As LeCleur called forth the headsup and rotated the bridge shut behind the retreating native, Bowman contemplated what they had just seen. “Interesting performance. Wonder if it had any special significance?’

  LeCleur, who was more of a xenologist than his partner, banished the command panel display with a word and nodded. “That was the ‘Dance for the Dead’. He was giving us a polite send-off.”

  “Oh.” Bowman squinted at the sky. Just another lovely day, as always. “I’ll get the skimmer ready for the census.”

  * * * *

  The Akoe had been gone for just over a week when LeCleur was bitten. Bowman looked up from his work as his partner entered. The bite was not deep, but the bright blood streak running down the other man’s leg was clearly visible beneath the hem of his field shorts, staining his calf. Plopping himself down in another chair, LeCleur put the first-aid kit on the table and flicked it open. As he applied antiseptic spray and then coagulator, Bowman watched with casual interest.

  “Step on something?”

  A disgruntled, slightly embarrassed LeCleur finished treating the wound with a dose of color-coded epidermase. “Like hell. A damn muffin bit me.”

  His partner grunted. “Like I said; step on something?”

  “I did not step on it. I was hunting for burrowing arthropods in the grass in the east quad when I felt something sharp. I looked back, and there was this little furry shitball gnawing on my calf. I had to swat it off. It bounced once, scrambled back onto its feet, and shot off into the grass.” He closed the first-aid kit. “Freakish.”

  “An accident, yeah.” Bowman couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “It must have mistaken your leg for the mother of all casquak seeds.”

  “It wasn’t the incident that was freaky.” LeCleur was not smiling. “It was the muffin. It had sharp teeth.”

  Bowman’s grin faded. “That’s impossible. We’ve examined, not to mention eaten, hundreds of muffins since we’ve been here. Not one of them had sharp teeth. Their chewing mechanism is strictly molaric dentition, for grinding up and processing vegetation.”

  His partner shook his head slowly. “I saw them, Jamie. Sharp and pointed. Saw them and felt them. And there was something funny about its eyes, too.”

  “That’s a description that’ll look nice and scientific in the record. Funny how?”

  Clearly distressed, LeCleur pursed his lips. “I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look. They just struck me as funny.” He tapped his leg above the now hermetized bite. “This didn’t.”

  “Well, we know they’re not poisonous.” Bowman turned back to his work. “So it was a freak muffin. A break in the muffin routine. An eclectic muffin. I’m sure it was an isolated incident and won’t happen again.”

  “It sure won’t.” LeCleur rose and extended his mended leg. “Because next time, you do the arthropod survey.”

  It was a week later when Bowman, holding his coffee, walked out onto the porch, sat down in one of the chairs, and had the mug halfway to his lips when he paused. Lowering the container, he stared for a long moment before activating the com button attached to the collar of his shirt.

  “Gerard, I think you’d better come here. I’m on the porch.”

  A drozy mumble responded. The other agent was sleeping in. Bowman continued to nag him until he finally appeared, rubbing at his eyes and grumbling. His vision and mind cleared quickly enough as soon as he was able to share his partner’s view.

  On the far edge of the ravine, muffins were gathering. Not in the familiar, tidily spaced herd cluster in which they spent the night for protection from roving carnivores, nor in the irregular pattern they employed for browsing, but in dense knots of wall-to-wall brown fur. More muffins were arriving every minute, filling in the gaps. And from the hundreds going on thousands rose an unexpectedly steady, repetitive peep-peeping that was somehow intimidating in its idiosyncratic sonority.

  “What the hell is going on?” LeCleur finally murmured.

  Bowman remembered to take a drink of his coffee before pulling the scope from its pocket on the side of the chair. What he saw through the lens was anything but reassuring. He passed it to his partner. “Take a look for yourself.”

  LeCleur raised the instrument. The view it displayed resolved into groups of two to three muffins, bunched so tightly together it seemed impossible they could breathe, much less peep. They had swollen slightly, their compact bodies puffed up about an additional ten percent, brown hair bristling. Their eyes—LeCleur had seen harbingers of that wild, collective red glare in the countenance of the one that had bit him a week ago. When they opened their mouths to peep, the change that had taken place within was immediately apparent. Instead of a succession of smooth, white eruptions of bone, the diminutive jaws were now filled with a mixture of grinding projections and triangular, assertively sharp-edged canines.

  He lowered the scope. “Christ—they’re metamorphosing. And moving. I wonder how much?”

  Bowman already had the command headsup in place. A few verbal directives were sufficient to materialize an image. Atop the single-story station, remote instrumentation was responding efficiently.

  The surface around the outpost was swarming with rustling, stirring movement. By mid-day, they no longer needed the instruments to show them what was happening. The two men stood on the porch, observing manually.

  All around them, as far as they could see and beyond, the grass was coming down, mown flat by a suddenly ravenous, insatiable hoard. Within that seething ocean of brown fur, red eyes, and snapping teeth, nothing survived. Grass, other plants, anything living was overwhelmed, to disappear down a sea of brown gullets. From the depths of the feeding frenzy arose a relentless, ostinato peeping that drowned out everything from the wind to the soft hum of the outpost’s hydrogen generator.

  Bowman and LeCleur watched, recorded, and made notes, usually without saying a word. By evening the entire boundless mass of muffins, like a moving carpet, had begun advancing as one being in a southeasterly direction. The Akoe, Bowman recalled, had gone north. The two agents needed no explanation of the phenomenon they were observing.

  The migration was under way.

  “I suppose we could have offered to let the Akoe stay here,” he commented to his partner.

  LeCleur was tired from work and looking forward to a good night’s sleep. It had been a busy day. “Don’t believe it would’ve mattered. I think they would’ve gone anyway. Besides, such an offer would have constituted unsupported interference with native ritual. Expressly forbidden by the xenological protocols.”

  Bowman nodded. “You check the systems?”

  His friend smiled. “Everything’s working normally. Wake-up alarm the same time tomorrow?”

  Bowman shrugged. “That works for me.” He glanced out at
the heaving, rippling sea of brown. “They’ll still be here. How long you estimate it will take them to move on through?”

  LeCleur considered. “Depends how widespread the migration is.” Raising a hand, he pointed. “Check that out.”

  So dense had the swarm become that a number of the muffins at its edge were being jostled off into the ravine. The protective excavation was thirty feet deep, with walls that had been heat-treated to unclimbable slickness. A spider would have had trouble ascending those artificial perpendicularities. The agents retired, grateful for the outpost sound-proofing that shut out all but the faintest trace of mass peeping.

  The station’s pleasant, synthesized female voice woke Bowman slightly before his partner.

  “Wha…?” he mumbled. “What’s going on?”

  “Perimeter violation,” the outpost replied, in the same tone of voice it used to announce when a tridee recording was winding up, or when mechanical food pre-prep had been completed. “You are advised to observe and react.”

  “Observe and react, hell,” Bowman bawled as he struggled into a sitting position. Save for the dim light provided by widely-spaced night illuminators, it was dark in his room. “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Four a.m., corrected Hedris time.” The outpost voice was not abashed by this pronouncement.

  Muttering under his breath, Bowman shoved himself into shorts and shirt. LeCleur was waiting for him in the hall.

  “I don’t know. I just got out of bed myself,” he mumbled in response to his partner’s querulous gaze.

  As they made their way toward outpost central, Bowman queried the voice. “What kind of perimeter violation? Elaborate.”

  “Why don’t you just look outside?” soft artificial tones responded. “I’ve put on the lights.”

  Both men headed for the main entrance. As soon as the door opened, Bowman had to shield his eyes. LeCleur adapted faster. What he exclaimed was not scientific, but it was descriptive.