Xeelee Redemption

by Baxter, Stephen

  Jophiel followed her gesture.

  And there, in the shade of nearby trees, he saw hulking forms. Low, heavy, moving almost silently – no, not quite silently. He heard a rustle of leaves as big hands explored the ground. Cracks, sharp and brisk, as massive jaws closed around nut shells.

  Bright blue eyes, startlingly clear, looking out of the shadows at him.

  ‘Stay calm,’ Susan Chen said softly, whether to the two of them or the forest inhabitants Jophiel wasn’t sure. She was still smiling.

  Nicola murmured, ‘You were right, Susan. Michael Poole will kick himself when he discovers he’s missed this.’

  ‘I’m recording it all.’ Asher walked out to join them, treading softly. ‘They seem curious about us. And the flyer. I tracked back through the records; they moved in, cautiously, as soon as the trek parties moved out. I think there’s one adult, and several children.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Susan said. ‘Take a closer look.’ She pointed. ‘That’s an adult female. Those lesser ones are males. There are children with them, but a lot smaller – see, the infant clinging to the female’s back?’

  It was difficult to make out details. The visitors were all squatting, and it was hard to judge their height. They didn’t look tall, but massive, heavy, like bloated weightlifters. They were nude, but wore their hair long and unkempt. Their skin, scuffed with dirt and the stains of leaves and other vegetation, was dark too, both male and female, apparently. And the skin was not covered in hair, Jophiel thought, not like an ape, though hairier than a human. Their hands worked at the ground continually, scratching for nuts, roots, lifting the goodies to those robust mouths, even as they stared at the Cauchy crew.

  Their squatting bodies looked almost conical, Jophiel thought. And their heads looked oddly small, behind very human faces.

  ‘That big female,’ Nicola said. ‘She’s staring straight at us.’

  ‘I wouldn’t make eye contact,’ Susan said. ‘She’s curious. Wondering if we are another pack, probably. She won’t fear us, but she might misinterpret a stare as a challenge. A fight over her pack of males, maybe – it looks to me as if females are dominant.’

  Jophiel accepted this wisdom, thinking of the bleak millennium of study and observation Susan must have endured while she cared for the diminished descendants of the Gourd crew on Goober c.

  ‘They eat all the time,’ Nicola observed. ‘Nuts and roots they grub up. They’re so big it’s hard to imagine anything much smaller than a lion taking them down. But they look so heavy – surely they would have trouble hunting down meat.’

  Asher nodded. ‘Vegetarians, probably. And—’

  A crack, from high above.

  ‘Look out!’ Asher shoved at Jophiel, instinctively, her hands passing into his Virtual flesh. The protocol-violation sting of that was bad enough.

  Then a tree branch came crashing down from above, and passed through his sitting body. He jumped up, stumbled back. The protocol-generated pain was astounding.

  Max Ward’s perimeter guards came running, vaguely waving their blasters at shadows in the trees above.

  But Susan Chen, still sitting, was holding out her hands, palms forward. ‘Jophiel! Stay quiet. You people, put away those guns. It was an accident – look at that branch, it’s rotten, it just broke away – believe me, they intended no harm. Anyhow the root-eaters have gone. And the other sort, they’d rather we didn’t notice them at all.’

  Asher seemed confused. ‘What other sort?’

  Susan, cautiously, pointed upwards.

  Jophiel looked up. It was difficult to see anything, so shadowy was the lower canopy above him. He subvocalised system commands to enhance his vision; generally he didn’t like to cheat . . .

  A touch of night vision showed them clearly.

  Human forms, up in the branches, clambering, squatting, even swinging from one arm at a time. All but silent. More bright eyes looking back at him.

  ‘A different kind,’ Asher murmured. ‘They look a little more – human. The body plan. Hairier, though.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Nicola said. ‘The proportions of the arms and legs are subtly off. Big hands – and big feet too, which look like they could grip.’

  ‘And small brains,’ Asher said with a tinge of sadness.

  Jophiel said, ‘Thus the crew of the Gourd, I guess. Or some other captured scatterships. Or rather their remote descendants.’

  Susan nodded. ‘Certainly it is must be generations since they remembered their origins. Generations more since they knew anything more than an endless present in the green. A present of no significant events save those of their own small lives. Births and deaths, hungry days, days of feast. No change, no challenge. And so—’

  Another irruption of noise.

  This time it came from the edge of the clearing. An animal, howling, burst out of cover, dashed into the open space, and stumbled to a halt.

  Everybody scrambled out of the way.

  Jophiel glimpsed a low body, big and muscular, but with the body plan of a hunting cat: long, supple legs, paws tipped with claws, a meaty tail, black eyes, folded-back ears – and incisor teeth like kitchen knives.

  The perimeter guards, surprised, yelled and waved their blasters around, threatening more harm to the humans than the animal, Jophiel thought. Nicola, evidently with the same instinct, hauled Susan Chen back out of the way. But the animal was already wounded, Jophiel saw, with a cruel-looking arrow sticking out of one bloodied haunch.

  It stood still for a heartbeat, panting hard.

  Then it dashed across the open space and was gone.

  It was followed by a silent, intent Wina, running almost as fast, another arrow ready to fire from her bow.

  Hunter and prey passed out of sight. A kind of stunned peace returned.

  Jophiel looked around. Nobody, it seemed, had come to any harm.

  But, he saw, the humanoids, the big forest-floor browsers and the agile climbers both, had all gone.

  When Poole and his party returned, the explorers compared notes.

  ‘We walked to the river from the clearing where we landed,’ Michael Poole said. ‘Keeping to cover, moving quietly. Plenty of animal life, if you give it a chance to show itself. I thought we saw something like wild boar. Did the Gourd carry pigs? And a flightless bird, on the prowl – a big one.’

  Ward grunted. ‘Wina saw a nest on the ground, and was all for raiding it for eggs. I put a stop to that.’

  ‘I mean, really big,’ Poole said, apparently shaken. ‘It saw us, but it ran off after what looked like rabbits, with long heads, pointed snouts—’

  ‘Maybe they were ant eaters, I thought. Or specialists on termite mounds.’ Harris seemed bewildered too. ‘But with the bodies of rabbits.’

  ‘And at the river itself, when we got close to the bank, more big beasts. Fat browsers, like hippos. A thing not unlike a crocodile, but mammalian . . . Whereas here—’

  ‘We had visitors,’ Jophiel summed it up. ‘Things like gorillas. Things like chimpanzees.’ He briefly described the experience.

  Susan Chen said, ‘I know that in the forests of Earth, gorilla packs were dominated by single males, with smaller females. Sexual dimorphism. Here, the same, but with the dominant figure a female.’

  Harris was interested, but shrugged. ‘If we get the chance we should study this. How the sexual role-reversal affects pack politics. Evidently the genes found a way to make it work . . .

  ‘Still, chimps and gorillas. I guess there are only so many ways for big primates to make a living in a dense forest. Floor dwellers living off fruit, nuts, roots, with big heavy jaws to take food nobody else could – jaws that could break through tough shells, chew up stringy roots. Or else you live like chimps, competing for fruit in the canopy – maybe indulging in a little opportunistic meat-eating.’

  Poole nodded gravely. ‘
But aren’t you missing the main point? There were no apes or monkeys in the Gourd parkland inventory. Just chickens and rats and rabbits—’

  ‘And people,’ Max Ward growled.

  Asher nodded. ‘The old forms were still there, in our genes. They just needed the time, the opportunity to bring them back.’

  Max grunted. ‘You’re saying they lost their minds, and went climbing trees, or sat on their butts cracking nuts?’

  ‘And for a long time too,’ Harris said, looking now at softscreen images of the ‘gorillas’. ‘You can see by the adaptation of the jaw, the big muscles hinged on the upper skull . . .’

  ‘How come they didn’t stay smart?’ Chinelo asked. ‘Wouldn’t that be an advantage when you’re facing a rat that’s evolving into a, a leopard?’

  Asher sighed. ‘Only if you’re in an environment that favours smartness. Max said it, back in High Australia. The forest looks spectacular, but that’s pretty much all there is here. The soil is shallow; almost all of the organic matter here is above ground, in the trees. And under the shallow soil, a layer of soft rock, like sandstone, and, not much deeper than that, hull plate. Just imagine how it must have been. Half a million years. Generation upon generation, the tools they must have brought with them from the Gourd breaking down with no way of repair. There was no way they could escape from the cupworld, of course. You’d make spears and bows from wood – like the High Australia folk. But with time you would see your grandchildren growing ever clumsier, ever less interested. Because the ability to run and fight counted for a lot more than the ability to make stuff. Minds like burning-out candles.’

  As Asher spoke, Jophiel glanced at Susan Chen. These hominins, tree-climbing, nut-cracking, could well have descended from the crew of the Gourd. And yet she did not seem distressed. Not bitter, or angry, still less horrified. Oddly content with what she was finding.

  ‘That’s enough.’ Michael Poole stood decisively. ‘It’s clear to me there’s nothing for us here. Take whatever samples and readings you need, Asher, Harris. We’ll stay here one watch. Try to get some sleep. Rotate the guard.’ He looked up, as if seeking the sky. ‘Then we go on. To the grasslands.

  ‘And beyond.’

  65

  Jophiel felt a great sense of relief to be back aboard the flyer, in the air and over an expansive grassland: a sea of rippling grass broken by scattered rivers and lakes, and small clumps of trees, a few rocky outcrops. A sense of release, he thought, to have been lifted out of the shadows of the trees.

  ‘Of course you feel like that,’ Harris Kemp said, when they talked about this. ‘You are evolved for the plain. Open and full of light. Long eye lines, where you can see what’s coming over the horizon, and it can see you. So both predators and prey are adapted for speed, for long-distance running. On a grassland everything is in flight, all the time . . .’

  He was right.

  The flyer passed over fleeing herds.

  Big heavy rabbits with thick, hairless hides. They were like elephants, or rhinos perhaps, equipped with horny skulls and sharp claws for defence. Or slimmer, more agile rabbits, with those big muscular rear legs adapted to running, or in some cases jumping. Rabbits distorted like gazelles, or kangaroos. Some of these herds were enormous. And as the flyer crossed over, the streams of herbivores would be disrupted, the animals scattering.

  Then there were the carnivores that preyed upon the herbivores. Big flightless birds that seemed, as Poole observed, to be reaching for genetic memories of the dinosaurs.

  And people.

  Max, sharp-eyed, was the first to spot them. He sat up in his couch and pointed. ‘There. Look. No doubt about it. A band, must be about fifty . . .’

  Jophiel peered down.

  They didn’t look like chimps or gorillas this time. Slim, tall-looking, they were naked, out on the plain. Adults, some children, a few infants on their parents’ backs. He saw that some of them surrounded a fallen animal, apparently one of the elephantine rabbits, and were hastily butchering it.

  They didn’t look up as the flyer crossed over. Evidently they didn’t expect any visitors from the sky.

  ‘So, hunters,’ Max said. ‘And carnivores.’

  Wina spoke, surprising Jophiel.

  ‘No. Not hunters. Look.’

  She rarely contributed to the discussions of the group. It wasn’t that she was shy, Jophiel thought; it was just that she stuck to her own area of expertise, and spoke only when she had something to say. A habit, Nicola had once observed drily, that a few others among this crew could do with copying.

  Now she showed Jophiel a magnified image on a softscreen. ‘This animal was not brought down by weapons, by spears or arrows. See? Its throat has been torn out. By big teeth.’

  ‘Ah,’ Asher said, blowing up the image further. ‘Killed by one of the big predators, then. So the real killers abandoned their catch, for some reason.’

  Wina nodded. ‘And these . . . people moved in, to take the meat.’

  ‘They are scavengers,’ Max said. ‘Humans, scavenging over prey brought down by rats.’ He laughed. ‘How pathetic.’

  Wina looked angry, offended. ‘There is no shame. If you are hungry you take your meat where you find it.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Harris said grimly. ‘And you, Max, shouldn’t believe the stories about the heroic advance of humanity they told you when you were a kid. We always scavenged – or our ancestors did.’

  ‘Let’s take her down and see,’ Poole said firmly.

  That turned out not to be so easy. As soon as the flyer started to descend, the human types noticed it, at last. They broke up into smaller groups, adults grabbing children, and scattered.

  Wina laughed now. ‘They are so fast! A race between them and the best runners of the People of the Vanquished First Slaver would be interesting.’

  Jophiel saw that one small group, away from the flyer, had paused. They had taken chunks of meat from the kill; now they dumped this on the ground and began to eat, hastily, almost furtively – expecting it to be stolen, Jophiel saw. The lure of the food overcame their fear, for now, though they stared fixedly at the flyer.

  ‘Send me down,’ Jophiel said on impulse. ‘Split off a copy. Let’s just take one close look, before we move on.’

  Nicola raised a silver sketch of an eyebrow. ‘Dressed like that?’

  He glanced down at his bright blue coverall. ‘So give me a neutral colour.’ He thought of that other Poole. ‘Give me grey. He suits it.’

  Michael Poole looked at him oddly. ‘Who?’

  ‘Never mind. Just do it . . .’

  And he was on the plain. In an infinity of grass, an abstraction – it was like a Virtual environment on the Gea, perhaps.

  He stood, facing the group.

  One child, looking over its mother’s shoulder, spotted him. It gurgled, and pointed.

  Jophiel smiled.

  One by one the runners turned, saw him, eyes widening. Parents instinctively reached for their young. But they did not flee.

  Harris murmured in his ear, ‘They don’t know if you are a threat, or prey. They’ve never seen anything like you. Just stand still.’

  One tall male stood up, stared at Jophiel, and jabbered what sounded like a paragraph of speech but probably wasn’t. He walked forward.

  And he loomed over Jophiel.

  They were all so tall, Jophiel saw immediately, women and men alike, and their bodies well balanced, with muscular limbs, broad shoulders, flat torsos. Like decathletes, perhaps, trained for a variety of sports, for speed and strength and agility.

  ‘Sit down,’ Harris murmured now. ‘Sit on the ground. The less you look like a threat, the better.’

  Good idea, but too late, Jophiel thought. Even as he sat, the big male hurried off, apparently alarmed. The group gathered back at the spot where they had been eating, and stood i
n a circle, the younger adults facing out, the older adults and the infants inside. Jophiel saw now that a couple of the adults held weapons, just roughly sharpened wooden spears, though the tips were blackened.

  Asher had noticed the same thing. ‘Fire-hardened,’ she murmured to Jophiel.

  ‘So maybe they still have fire?’

  She shrugged. ‘Or they just exploit lightning strikes.’

  When no immediate threat came from Jophiel, the next step seemed to be exploration.

  One young woman walked out of the group, hesitantly – and yet defiantly, for she walked straight up to Jophiel.

  ‘Remarkable,’ Jophiel breathed. Cautiously he got to his feet, and approached her.

  The woman flinched back.

  Then, when he offered no threat, she walked around him. Jophiel could see the fine hairs on her bare skin, smell a scent of dust and sweat. She was quite naked, her hands empty.

  ‘She’s – beautiful. They all are. Perfect bodies, almost an idealised human form. Like the stars of some Virtual soap opera.’ He laughed, making the woman flinch, but she stood her ground. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Flat stomach. Strong shoulders, well-muscled limbs. She’s meant for running. Very well adapted to this plain of grass, evidently.’ He had to look up to meet her eyes. ‘Taller than me. Eyes quite normal, as far as I can see. Human eyes, with whites, not like an ape’s. But the head, the shape of the face . . .’

  Her jaw was too heavy, too strong. Her nose was broad and flat. Her eyes were sheltered from the light of the sky by a heavy, bony ridge. And the brow behind that eye ridge was flat, receding, and her skull small at the back. For all her athlete’s body, Jophiel felt he could have cupped that skull in one hand, as if cradling a baby’s head.

  ‘Her eyes look human,’ Jophiel said. ‘As human as mine. Bright. But – calculating. It’s like looking into the eyes of an animal. A lion, maybe—’

  Abruptly she raised a hand and thrust it, as if to grab Jophiel’s throat. Jophiel recoiled instinctively, though she could not harm him. There was a stinging flare of pixels where her flesh touched his, and she flinched back. Her face twisted in anger, in threat, and she jabbered a string of syllables at him.