For a long moment Veronica Julia didn’t know what to do; the surprise had been too great. The roller stood motionless in front of her, upright on its hind legs and stabilizing itself with its tail, observing her attentively. In that position, its eyes were almost on the same level as those of the girl seated on the ground.
Suddenly Veronica Julia realized that her doll lay forgotten on the ground at her side. She began to laugh softly.
The roller again made its characteristic sound. It didn’t move. Neither did the rollers who formed a circle around them.
Finally Veronica Julia recovered enough to take the initiative once more. Again she extended a hand toward the roller. She didn’t quite touch it, but stopped a scant few millimeters from its face. Then the roller slightly opened the slit of its tiny, lipless mouth and stuck out a rose-pink tongue, long and slender, with which it gently licked the palm of the girl’s hand. Veronica Julia let out another giggle. The roller let out another pffft.
And then the spell was broken. A couple of pilgrims emerged from the pyramids’ nearest access hatch. They didn’t have time to see anything; the rollers’ reaction was instantaneous. The one in front of Veronica Julia rolled back up, changing back into a ball in mere tenths of a second, and they all fled. This time they really fled. Before anyone could realize anything, they were gone.
“Oh, no!” shrieked Veronica Julia, frustrated. “Oh, no!”
The couple—a man and a woman, both young—looked uncomprehendingly at the girl.
“Didn’t you see anything?” Veronica Julia asked them impatiently. “Did you really not see anything?”
She didn’t wait for their answer. She grabbed her doll in a flash and ran off toward the entrance hatch to tell her father everything.
Veronica Julia was a fanciful child, given to imagining the most improbable tales. Her father listened attentively, but didn’t believe her.
“I’m telling you the truth, I swear to all your gods!” exclaimed the child, irritated. “It unrolled, looked at me, and licked my hand!”
That last made Melo Spiegel shift gears. He whisked Veronica Julia off to the analytical lab and asked her which hand the roller had licked. The right, she indicated. An analysis of the fluids retained on her skin showed the presence of unidentifiable compounds, different from the sweat and other secretions of human skin. The Caretaker was notified right away. It wouldn’t have been necessary, because the results of the analysis had been transmitted automatically to the ship’s brain and from there to the Caretaker, but one had to follow protocols. The Caretaker thought Veronica Julia could be a good first contact with the planet’s indigenous life.
“Oh, but I don’t know whether Pffft will come back!” the child exclaimed, frustrated. She had decided the roller’s characteristic sound was a good name for it.
Machines are not big on intuition, but the Caretaker was the exception that proved the rule. “Oh, it will,” he said. “Indeed it will.”
Thus was born the legend of Veronica Julia and her contact with the rollers. From that moment on she was encouraged to spend as much time as possible outside, taking advantage of her lack of agoraphobia, in the hope of a future contact. A tent was set up near the pyramid platform to protect her from the sun and keep her as comfortable as possible at any time of day, and no one else was permitted around it. As witnesses to whatever happened in the event of a new contact, all kinds of cameras and detectors were set up in and around the tent, including a communicator through which her father could give her instructions at any time.
In the next two weeks, absolutely nothing happened.
“They won’t come back,” Veronica told her father, half pained and half irritated. “They know you and your team are here, and that keeps them away. Besides, you know they only come out at dusk. You have to leave me alone with them.”
After many discussions, Melo Spiegel agreed. “Okay, we’ll do it your way,” he said. “We’ll leave you alone.”
“And take away the tent,” said Veronica Julia.
“But you’ll get sunburnt.”
“I don’t have to be outside all day. I like to go out when the sun has set. So do they.”
“Okay.” At heart, Melo Spiegel trusted his daughter’s childish wisdom.
So Veronica Julia went back to her original routine of going outside at nightfall, alone, to tell her fantastic stories to her doll. But now she sought out her own space; she didn’t want anyone to interrupt any possible contact. She headed for the nearest foothills and found a secluded and comfortable nook, where she set up what she called her “story room”: a small mat, a cushion, and a bottle of water. And she began telling Claudia Antonia new tales of epic feats, in which the rollers played an important role.
For several days nothing happened. Then the rollers started coming back and gathering around her.
They did it gradually, as if they were spreading the news to others. They formed their usual circle, first a few, then a few more. They sat there as if listening, as if waiting for something, and they stayed there when the girl, seeing that nothing was happening, finally gathered her things and went away. None of them ever followed her.
On the eleventh night a roller detached itself from the circle and approached her.
For a moment Veronica Julia thought her heart would stop. The roller stopped in front of her, a scant half meter away. For a few moments both faced each other, motionless. Finally, slowly, the roller unwound: its body stretched out and stood up, until its eyes were almost on a level with those of the girl, seated as always on the ground. Its lenticular pupils contracted slightly, as if questioning.
“Pffft?” Veronica Julia asked timidly, hesitantly.
The roller shook its body slightly in a sinuous, undulating movement. Veronica Julia extended a cautious finger as if to pet it. The roller drew its head back a little, opened its mouth slightly, and stuck out its long, slender, pink, wet tongue. It wrapped it gently around Veronica Julia’s finger in a calm, caressing motion.
The girl let out a giggle.
“Pffft,” the roller said softly.
Veronica Julia couldn’t contain herself. Even at the risk of frightening the roller, she stretched out her other hand, gently grasped the little animal’s head with a hand on each side, just at the height of its ears, drew it toward her, and planted a long, wet kiss on its cheek.
There was a general agitation in the circle of rollers. Veronica Julia had the momentary feeling that Pffft (if it was really him) was going to curl back up and roll away from her at full speed. There was a kind of vibration in the little body whose face she still held with both hands, but that was all. The roller looked directly into her eyes, its pupils wider than ever.
“Pfffffft,” it said, and Veronica Julia had the impression that for an instant its face took on the same expression as that of Mr. Whiskers in his moments of feline ecstasy.
Time froze for what seemed an eternity. Then the roller moved its body closer to hers. Its legs were too short to embrace anything, but the girl had the impression that it wanted to hug and be hugged. She remembered Claudia Antonia and how she always squeezed the doll in her arms while playing. Instinctively she enfolded the unresisting body of the roller in a soft embrace and pressed it against her breast in a gesture of both affection and protection.
“Pffffffffffft . . . ,” said the roller, and the sound couldn’t have been more like the purr of a contented cat.
Veronica Julia would never be able to remember how much time she spent holding the roller, petting it gently, feeling its warmth and the beats of its little heart, hearing its peculiar satisfied sound: not a purr, not a hum, not exactly a snort, but with something of all of those. It might have been an eternity; time seemed to have stopped in her neighborhood, as if encapsulating her in an infinite instant. The roller had its eyes wide open and raised toward her, its pupils completely dilated while it gazed steadily at her, as if it wanted to plumb the depths of her soul.
And suddenly the t
rance was broken. Not abruptly, but naturally and gently, like someone saying good-bye to a friend. The roller pulled away from her, without looking away, and Veronica Julia let it go. For a moment the animal remained standing in front of the girl, as if evaluating the last traces of that ultimate sensation, and then folded calmly into itself, curled up, and became once more a ball of gold-brown fur indistinguishable from all the others that surrounded her. The circle broke up and the rollers dispersed slowly, as if in a procession. In a few minutes Veronica Julia was again alone in her story room.
She ran off to tell her father.
Melo Spiegel was tremendously excited at the news. He regretted not having any graphic record of the encounter, but he did not criticize his daughter for refusing to take any recording device with her. He called a meeting of the zoological team, with the Caretaker at its head.
“It seems that the rollers are the most evolved species on the planet,” suggested one of the zoologists, after listening several times to the recording of what Veronica Julia had told her father about the encounter. “At least the most intelligent.”
“But from all we know, their hands lack an opposable thumb,” another put in. “They can’t use tools, and without that essential—”
“That’s an erroneous old convention from traditional terrestrial zoology,” said the Caretaker from the throne of wisdom that came with being the direct incarnation of the ship’s knowledge, “the fruit of its special development toward primates and man. Many animals on Earth get along perfectly in their habitats with no need for a thumb. Being able to use tools is not a sinequanon for the development of intelligence.”
“But you and your servants have thumbs, and thanks to them you’ve made yourselves the operative extensions of the ship, which doesn’t have them.”
Melo Spiegel thought he saw the hint of a smile on the Caretaker’s mouth grid. In fact, he thought, the handicap that made the ship’s brain depend on its physical extensions to interact with its surroundings was not its lack of opposable thumbs, but its lack of mobility. And it had known very well how to solve that problem.
“Every case is a world unto itself,” the machine said in a condescendingly didactic tone. “There are many ways to interact with the environment. Not everything boils down to physical manipulation of matter.”
Long, nitpicking arguments led to the obvious conclusion that it was necessary to study the rollers in more depth. So a plan for direct study was drawn up. Given how Veronica Julia felt about her protégés, she was left on the fringes of the plan.
The first thing that had to be done was to pin down the rollers’ habitat. Evidently, they lived in the foothills near the pyramids, although at first glance there was no sign of their presence. The most sophisticated detection equipment went over the area with a fine-toothed comb and promptly and predictably got results. On the side toward the pyramids, the lower slopes of the mountain were riddled with a complex labyrinth of tunnels, galleries, chambers, caverns, intersections, and branches that formed something like an immense and chaotic underground city. Heat detectors showed that it was inhabited, though the number of its occupants could not be determined. The sizes of the ones that could be determined individually matched those of the rollers, and although many were always moving around they tended to concentrate in nuclei within the whole, great collections of mass indicating that some parts of the enormous subterranean labyrinth were densely populated—mainly a series of large hollows that the colonists called dormitories—while others were practically empty. There were many exits from the complex, but they were so well camouflaged that they were practically invisible to the human eye, and only the precision of the detection apparatus revealed them.
Veronica Julia kept going to her story room. But, to her surprise, alarm, and disappointment, the rollers again stopped coming. The first three days she blamed the intensity of that first encounter. By the fifth day she didn’t know what to think. On the seventh day she went to speak with her father.
Melo Spiegel knew what was happening. He had had remote surveillance cameras installed around his daughter’s story room, far enough away to be unnoticed but close enough to clearly record everything that happened there. Of course he had said nothing of this to Veronica Julia.
“Maybe they’re more timid than we thought,” he suggested. “Maybe they need some time to recover from that mutual first impression. Maybe after that first bold act, now they’re afraid.” In his heart of hearts he didn’t really believe any of those three things.
“I don’t know, Daddy,” said the girl. “You aren’t plotting something against them?”
Melo Spiegel adopted the most innocent of expressions. “Us?” he lied through his teeth. “We would never do anything like that. Besides, it would go against our religion.” One of the fundamental precepts of the ship’s religion was that all life is sacred.
For the ship, the indispensable first step in the physical conquest of the planet was to learn and understand all the elements that made it up. So, some time ago it had launched an exhaustive study of the flora and fauna of the various regions of the planet, just as the geologists had undertaken an in-depth study of the crust of Earth Two. Part of the ship had been set aside for the collection of all types of living specimens, native plants and animals conveniently confined in stasis fields until they were needed. Eight thousand species of plants and twelve thousand species of animals (almost ten thousand of them insectoid) had been collected. But not one roller had been caught. In fact, no rollers had been detected in any part of the planet except the one chosen by Diaspora for its primary base. All attempts to penetrate their burrows by one of their many entrances ended in catastrophic failure when the tunnels caved in as soon as the explorers were a few meters inside. It seemed that the rollers knew very well how to preserve their privacy.
Veronica Julia kept going to her story room every night, with her inseparable Claudia Antonia as her only listener. A couple of days her mother (who served as official chronicler of the pilgrims’ settlement on the planet) tried to join her, but the girl was able to talk her out of it. The woman went off a bit frustrated, without understanding her daughter’s reasons.
Fifteen days after Veronica Julia returned to sitting alone in her secluded corner after the historic encounter, the rollers returned.
Or rather, the roller returned.
It came down the mountain as they had always done, by leaps and bounds, but this time alone, and stopped at its customary five meters from Veronica Julia, quivering slightly but without abandoning its spherical shape. For a long moment, child and animal remained motionless, face to face, as if studying each other. Then Veronica Julia ventured a timid: “Pffft?”
As if moved by a magic word, the roller opened up before the girl. It did it slowly, as if reluctant, and kept its five meters of distance; it did not come forward. Veronica Julia couldn’t tell whether it was the same roller she had hugged the other night, though something inside her told her it was. She waited a few moments, then, slowly, holding Claudia Antonia with one hand, she stood up.
The roller did not move away.
Very, very slowly, the girl approached it. The roller kept raising its gaze to avoid breaking eye contact, but otherwise it didn’t move. When Veronica Julia was within half a meter she knelt down, so their two pairs of eyes kept looking at each other on the same level. She laid her doll aside.
“Pffft?” she asked again, uncertainly.
“Pffft!” the roller responded emphatically. It leaned forward, standing on its hind legs and tail, and extended its short forepaws like little arms in an unmistakable gesture of invitation. Veronica Julia extended her own arms, and girl and roller embraced tightly.
Veronica Julia wasn’t sure how or when it happened, but when her tear-blinded eyes again looked around, her story room was filled with a circle of rollers, more of them than ever before.
And in the observation room of the central pyramid, Melo Spiegel had the feeling that they had taken
another great step forward.
More than seven months had now passed since Thor Ashner’s shuttle made its first descent to the planet, and 80 percent of the colonists had moved down to the surface, when two profoundly important events happened in the colony: a violent storm that pounded the pyramid zone unexpectedly and mercilessly, and the first three traumatic deaths on the planet.
Rain was a real rarity on Earth Two: The planet’s aridity marked its meteorology like a stigma. In the almost eight months since they’d been here it had only rained three times in the zone, and so little that it seemed a mere token. The planet’s few rains were blocked by the mountainous zones, and the porous soil eagerly absorbed the little water that fell from the sky until it was stopped by some impermeable layer that trapped it in great underground pools or made it circulate underground until it flowed forth into some river or one of the planet’s two seas. Fortunately, the groundwater under the pyramid complex was abundant enough to guarantee the colony a good permanent supply. But that did not reduce the feeling of extreme aridity that the country produced.
So it took everyone by surprise—even with the routine weather forecasts that the ship periodically made from orbit—when suddenly a strong wind began blowing from the other side of the mountains and the sky filled with clouds. It was so sudden that nobody was prepared for it. In less than fifteen minutes the winds had reached a speed of more than a hundred kilometers per hour and the rain began to fall intensely and violently, a driving rain that carried with it a great deal of suspended dust. The sky, suddenly dark, was streaked with an uninterrupted succession of tremendous electrical discharges, an impressive display of blinding lightning bolts and deafening thunderclaps.
Orson Leibovitz, the ground captain, a role split off from that of Rhina Solomon after the initial descent and corresponding to hers (now renamed captain of the ship), watched the unexpected spectacle via the screens in the control room of the central pyramid. He was as much surprised as impressed and alarmed. None of the pilgrims had anticipated anything like this. People who had gone outside to carry out their routine duties around the pyramids—planting the first crops, fencing the first stockyards, raising the first buildings on the surface—had returned hastily to the interior of the pyramids, terrified.
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