Foreigner

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “‘Emergency,’” said Novato. “Something like that.”

  Garios sounded surprised. “What makes you think that?”

  “Have you ever been on a hunt that’s gone badly? Lots of injuries? When healers arrive, they prioritize whom to treat. Those who have the most critical need for attention are tended to first. Of all the things on this ship, the only one that we’ve seen any sign of still working at all is this panel, whatever it is. It’s obviously the priority now that a little power is somehow trickling into the ship. I’m no sailor, but I suspect Keenir would say that if he had to prioritize things aboard a ship, lifeboats, fire-fighting buckets, and other emergency equipment would be the most important.”

  Garios grunted, not convinced. He had brought plans of the ark with him. He set his lamps on the floor and proceeded to unfurl a chart, kneeling down to read it. “According to this, there’s just another one of those multi-bed rooms on the other side of this wall. Now, yes, the wall is thicker than normal here—it’s about a third of a pace thick. That’s not unusual, though. There are lots of places where the walls are even thicker. But surely there can’t be any lifeboats stored behind here. Whatever is back there can’t be very big.”

  Novato nodded. “Let’s see if we can get the panel off. It must open somehow.”

  “Maybe it’s a sliding door, like the others we’ve seen.”

  Novato’s tail swished in negation. “Those doors are recessed and apparently normally were moved by an arrangement of gears that must have required some power to operate. No, if I’m right—if this is a hold for emergency equipment—it’ll be designed to open without any power.” She paused. “If you were one of those five-eyed creatures, how would you open something?”

  Garios looked at the floor. “Well, I’d only have one useful limb—that long trunk—so the method would be something that you or I could do with one hand. And, let’s see, those creatures only came up to about here on me.” He held a hand at the middle of his chest. “They’ve got a lot of reach with those trunks, but I imagine if they wanted any real leverage, they’d have to fold the trunk over.”

  Novato nodded. “So, if we’re looking for a handle, it would be in the middle of the panel, right about here.” She pointed.

  “But there isn’t anything there,” said Garios.

  Novato, ever the empiricist, pressed her palm against the center of the panel. Nothing. She tried again, leaning all her weight against it. As soon as she stopped, the panel popped forward as though it had been on springs. Garios surged in and grabbed one side of the heavy sheet. Novato took the other side, and they lowered it to the floor. From the back they could clearly see the little array of glass inlays that had caused the flashing.

  A shallow closet had been revealed. Inside were three metal boxes. Each had embossed on its side the same word Garios had traced out on the wall panel. The boxes had handles sticking out of their sides. Novato pulled on one of the handles, and the box came out of its holder. A tail of flexible clear strands stuck out of its back connecting it to the rear of its holding compartment, but as Novato pulled a little harder, the strands came loose. At the end, they were bundled together in a little plug, as if they’d been designed to come out this way.

  The box itself had clamps on its side, holding the lid securely on. Novato had seen clamps like this several times aboard the ark. They required an uncomfortable backward bending of the fingers to undo, but she’d gotten the hang of it over time. She opened the box.

  Inside was orange dust.

  Garios loomed in for a peek. “Rust,” he said. “Whatever was in there decayed long ago.” He backed away.

  Novato put her hand in the box and wiggled her fingers, looking for any fragment that hadn’t completely decayed. The orange dust felt strange. Warm. A lot warmer than it had any right to be. And it wasn’t sharp like iron filings. Rather, it was soft, like talcum, and slightly heavier than it looked, as if the material was very dense. Novato didn’t bring it too close to her face; she was afraid of inhaling the powder.

  Just dust, that’s all it was. Ancient dust.

  She knelt down and upended the box onto Garios’s floor plan, hoping there would be something inside all the dust. But the orange grains just sifted out; it seemed to be a uniformly fine grade. The dust made a good-sized mountain in the center of the plan. Individual grains spilled toward the sheet’s edge.

  Disappointed, Novato turned her attention to the two boxes still embedded in the wall. The second one had apparently been damaged in the ark’s crash and its contents had long since escaped through a crack in the container’s bottom. The third box was rusted or fused to its holder. They tried again and again for an extended period, but no amount of tugging by either her or Garios could dislodge it.

  Novato sighed and turned around.

  What the—?

  The mound of orange dust was no longer centered on the floor plan. In fact, the center of the plan was completely clear and the mound was now half on and half off the sheet of leather.

  It must be flowing downhill, thought Novato.

  And then she realized that wasn’t right at all.

  The dust, the ancient orange dust, was flowing, all right, but it was flowing uphill, heading toward the corridor that led to the double-doored room.

  “They weren’t just dumb animals, were they?” said Captain Keenir of the Dasheter, his tail swishing back and forth across the beach. “They were people.”

  Toroca pointed at the body of the Other, lying in a pool of blood. “That one was wearing copper jewelry,” he said.

  “And the one we, ah, encountered was also sporting jewelry,” said Babnol, who had removed her sash and was using it to wipe her face clean of blood.

  “The braincases were bigger than those of any animal,” Toroca said. “So, yes, they were people, of a kind. Thinking beings.”

  “And we’ve killed two of them,” said Babnol, shaking her head. “I—I don’t know why I reacted the way I did. It was as though the sight of the—the thing was enough to trigger dagamant. I felt as if my territory had been invaded. My claws popped out, and then everything became a blur. Next thing I knew, Spalton and I were standing over the dead body.” She paused. “What was left of the body, that is.”

  “You didn’t feel the same thing?” Keenir said to Toroca, almost imploringly, as if seeking absolution.

  Toroca’s tail swished. “No. The appearance of the Other was startling, but it didn’t trigger any rage in me.”

  “You’re unusual, of course,” said Babnol matter-of-factly. “You’re free of the territorial instinct.”

  “True.”

  “Something about these Others sets off that instinct,” said Babnol. “The sight of them, or maybe their pheromones. Something.”

  “It wasn’t pheromones,” said Keenir. “The one Toroca and I saw was downwind of us.” He looked out over the waters. “The sun is setting. We should get back to the Dasheter.”

  “What about the bodies?” said Toroca.

  “What do you mean?” asked Babnol.

  “I mean, what do we do with them? Do we just leave them on the beach?”

  “What else?” said Keenir, aghast. “You’re not suggesting we take them back to the ship as food?”

  Toroca wrinkled his muzzle in disgust. “No, of course not. But we should do something with them.” He leaned back on his tail. “If we’re going to have any further contact with the natives here, we’ve got two choices. Either we try to explain to them what happened—offer our apologies and let them do with the bodies whatever they normally do. Or we hide the bodies and hope that suspicion for the disappearance of these two individuals never falls on us.”

  Babnol looked at Toroca. She was an unusual Quintaglio herself, having retained her birthing horn into adulthood. The fluted cone cast a shadow across her muzzle. “I suggest we simply hightail it back to the Dasheter and get as far away from these islands as possible. They’re evil, Toroca.”

  Toroca look
ed surprised. “Evil? That’s the same word the captain used before you joined us. In any event, we’ve got to explore these islands; that’s the whole point of the Geological Survey. But as to whether we, ah, admit involvement with these deaths…”

  “Don’t do it,” said Keenir. “How could we explain what we did? We can’t even fathom it ourselves. No, we’ll take the bodies back out in the shore boats, tie rocks to their ankles, and dump them overboard when we’re far from shore.”

  Babnol’s voice was distressed, and her tail moved in agitated ways. “I don’t feel right about doing that.”

  “Nor do I,” agreed the captain. “But since we don’t know anything about these people, it’s best we not make our initial presentation of ourselves to them as…as…”

  “Murderers,” said Toroca.

  Keenir sighed. “Yes.”

  Toroca’s turn to sound uncomfortable. “If we are going to take the corpses, please don’t dump them overboard. I’d like to, ah, study them.”

  “Very well,” said Keenir. A pause, and then, his voice heavy: “Let’s fetch them.”

  And they set out to do just that. The one that Keenir had killed was still nearby. Wingfingers were picking at the gaping wounds, but they took flight as soon as the Quintaglios approached. Spalton and the captain carried the corpse to the shore boat and began paddling back to the Dasheter. Toroca and Babnol covered the bloodstained ground with clean sand, then headed down the beach. They came to where the vegetation jutted into the water and made their way through the growth until they arrived at where Babnol and Spalton had encountered their Other.

  “Uh-oh,” said Babnol, her head swiveling left and right.

  The second body was gone.

  Chapter 5

  Nav-Mokleb’s Casebook

  Word of the talking cure is spreading, apparently. I’ve received an imperial summons asking me to take on a new patient. I’d hoped that the subject was going to be Emperor Dy-Dybo himself. I thought he might be having emotional difficulties, stemming from the challenge to his leadership two kilodays ago. True, he’d acquitted himself well in the battle with the blackdeath, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were residual problems. After all, he did see six apprentice governors die in front of his eyes, and, as if that weren’t bad enough, he’d had to chew his own arms off.

  But, no, my new patient isn’t quite that highly placed in the government. Still, Sal-Afsan should be an interesting case nonetheless. I’ve been reviewing what is generally known about him. Afsan is middle-aged, having hatched some thirty-four kilodays ago in Pack Carno, part of Arj’toolar province. Extremely gifted intellectually, he was summoned to Capital City at the age of thirteen to be the latest and, as it turned out, the last in a series of apprentices to Tak-Saleed, the master court astrologer.

  Afsan has certainly lived an interesting life. He was aboard the sailing ship Dasheter when it made the first-ever circumnavigation of our world. He is credited with figuring out the true nature of the Face of God, and with discovering that our world is doomed to break up into a ring of rubble. Originally his idea was denounced as heresy, and the late Det-Yenalb, Master of the Faith back then, used a ceremonial dagger to poke out Afsan’s eyes in punishment. But an underground of Lubalite hunters declared that Afsan was “The One,” the great male hunter that Lubal had prophesied as she lay dying. Afsan’s hunts—before he was blinded, of course—were indeed spectacular: he killed the largest thunderbeast ever seen, defeated a great water serpent, and even brought down a fangjaw.

  Because of this, all eight of Afsan’s children by Wab-Novato were allowed to live. The bloodpriests, an order closely allied with the Lubalites, refused to devour any of The One’s egglings.

  And now, apparently, this remarkable fellow is having nightmares.

  I’ve long suspected that genius and madness were closely allied. Well, I’ll soon learn whether the individual pushing us to the stars is merely troubled, or, as some of his detractors have always claimed, completely insane…

  Rockscape had lost some of its appeal. Oh, visitors to the Capital still trekked out to see the ninety-four granite boulders arranged in patterns, spread across a field of tall grasses by the edge of a cliff overlooking water. No one knew exactly when the boulders had been laid out in these designs, but it had been in a time before written history.

  Still, Rockscape seemed insignificant compared to the ancient spaceship unearthed by Toroca in Fra’toolar. That giant ark was millions of kilodays old. Rockscape, even if it was the oldest known Quintaglio settlement, couldn’t compete with that.

  Nonetheless, Afsan continued to visit Rockscape most days, using it as an open-air classroom for his students, and, when alone, as a restful, isolated spot for quiet contemplation.

  Except, of course, he was rarely alone. His lizard, Cork, was usually with him, lying on its favorite Rockscape boulder, warming in the sun. Afsan also had a boulder he was partial to. He was straddling it now, tail hanging off the back, his sightless eyes turned toward the cliff’s distant edge. He could hear the pipping calls of wingfingers as they rose and fell on the air currents and the sounds of crickets and other insects in the grass. Although he was a good piece north of Capital City’s harbor, Afsan could also make out the identifying drums and bells of ships and occasionally the shouts of merchants arguing over what constituted a fair trade for newly arrived goods. There were many smells, too, including a salt tinge to the wind and a rich variety of pollens and lowers.

  “Permission to enter your territory?” called a voice Afsan didn’t recognize.

  He turned to face where the words had come from. “Hahat dan,” he said. “Who’s there?”

  The voice grew closer but the wind was blowing the wrong pay for Afsan to catch any whiff of pheromones, so he couldn’t tell whether his visitor was male or female.

  “My name is Nav-Mokleb,” said the voice, now, judging by its volume, no more than fifteen paces away. “Late of Pack Loodo in Mar’toolar province.”

  There was no need for Afsan to reciprocate with introductions, there were few blind people in Capital City, and his sash, half black and half green, the colors of the exodus, removed any possible confusion about which blind person he might be, even if one didn’t know that he frequented Rockscape. Still, with typical modesty, Afsan identified himself, then bowed concession and said. “I cast a shadow in your presence, Nav-Mokleb. Dybo said he would send you out to see me.” Dybo had referred to Mokleb is female, yet she was still downwind of Afsan, so he’d had no idea of that himself.

  “It’s my pleasure to serve,” Mokleb said. Then, after a moment, “I hear, ah, you are having difficulty sleeping.”

  Afsan nodded.

  “And I received word today from Dar-Mondark that your eyes have regenerated, but you still cannot see.”

  “That, too, is true.” Afsan was quiet for a time. “Is there anything you can do for me?”

  “No.” said Mokleb at once, “nothing at all.” She raised a hand to forestall Afsan’s objection, then clicked her teeth, realizing bat Afsan couldn’t see the gesture. “Don’t misunderstand me, though. The talking cure can indeed help you, but I do nothing. The problem is within you, and so is the cure. I just facilitate the process.”

  Afsan scrunched his muzzle. “I don’t understand.”

  “What do you know about psychology?”

  “It’s the study of the mind,” said Afsan. “The ancient philosopher Dolgar is often thought of as its founder.”

  “That’s right,” said Mokleb. “But Dolgar was way off base. She thought of the head and tail as being discrete repositories for opposing forces in our personalities—the artistic and sensual residing in the head, and the strong and insensate in the tail.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” said Afsan.

  “That’s an outdated view, of course. Oh, there are two opposing forces—the high mind and the low—but they reside in our brains, not various parts of our bodies. The high mind contains the conscious, the understoo
d, the learned—that of which we are aware. The low mind consists of instincts and base impulses, of drives; it’s the province of the subconscious. The struggle between high and low mind produces the personality.”

  “But surely the high mind is who we really are,” said Afsan.

  “No. The high mind may represent who we want to be, or who the church says we should be, but we are just as much our low minds as we are our high; the low mind shapes our behavior, too.”

  “But if the low mind is unknowable, then it’s as if it didn’t exist,” replied Afsan. “Dolgar’s contemporary, Keladax, said nothing is anything unless it is something. In other words, a concept without material reality is meaningless.”

  “Ah, indeed,” said Mokleb. “Perhaps I’ve spoken imprecisely. The low mind is normally unknowable, but together we can explore it. Just as the far-seer allowed you to learn things about the heavenly bodies that previously had been secret, so my technique allows us to see that which is normally hidden. There, Sal-Afsan, if you are willing to undertake the journey, in the part of yourself that you don’t really know, the part that is suppressed and hidden, that’s where we’ll find the cause of your problems.”

  It looked like the ark was melting.

  The alien ship still jutted from the cliff face, but the rocks immediately beneath it were now the same blue as the ship itself, as if melting residue were flowing down the steep slope. Except the ship wasn’t melting at all—it still had sharp edges. And yet the blue stain on the cliff continued to grow.

  Novato scrambled down the precipice like a green spider, using the web of climbing ropes attached to the cliff by metal spikes. She was overtop of plain downrock layers, but about fifteen paces below, the web crossed the lowest lobe of the amorphous blue. She continued down, tail hanging off her back, until she was over the blueness.

  The coarse ropes of the web normally shifted slightly in the breeze, but here they seemed to actually be stuck in the blue material coating the cliff. Novato negotiated her way to where the blue stopped and the cliff face was exposed again. She ran her fingertips over the join between the rock and the blue material. She’d expected the blue stuff to have stood slightly proud of the cliff, the way rivulets of sap do on a tree, but it seemed, if anything, to be recessed. Still, that could make sense: the blue material must surely have been liquid before it hardened. It would naturally have flowed into the declivities in the wall of sandstone.