by E. M. Foner
“Are all of your people mute?”
The Original opened his mouth and produced a noise that was vaguely reminiscent of the ancient dial-up modems I had encountered on Earth when servicing fax machines. I felt a slight tickle in the radio frequency spectrum at the same time, but either it didn’t contain any information or the signal-to-noise level was too low. The overall effect was like nothing I’d ever experienced or heard of.
“Telepathic?” I guessed.
Art pursed his lips in an odd manner and tilted his head slightly to the left and right, like a human expressing the concept of so-so.
“Are you in communication with the Ferrymen?”
He picked up the slate again, rubbed it clean, and then took a moment, apparently rethinking what he’d intended to write. Finally Art scratched out, “No,” and took another sip of his ale.
“How about with other humans?”
Again he took his time before printing his own question in response. “Like you?”
I hesitated myself, unsure whether or not Art had somehow sensed that I wasn’t a member of the same species as the refugees from Earth. It seemed unlikely that he could have seen through my encounter suit, but then again, maybe that odd sound he had made earlier was some sort of natural scan, like a bat’s sonar.
“Yes,” I said, and then hedged since I was more interested in getting the correct answer than semantics. “There’s more variation in humans than in your own people. We come in all shapes and sizes, while the small number of your species I’ve seen all look pretty much alike.”
This seemed to tickle the Original, and he printed, “We get that a lot.”
“From who?” I asked, before it occurred to me that he was making a joke. “Okay. You ever hear the one about the rabbi, the priest and the imam?”
The slate was erased again, and this time, Art laboriously printed, “Is this an ethnic joke?”
“No, I don’t tell those. It’s a religion joke, well, really it’s more about the grocery business, but—” I stopped talking to look at the new message he printed.
“Salt?” I read out loud. “But that’s the punch line! How could you know about kosher and halal meat processing?”
The Original shook his shaggy head in irritation and drummed his claws on the bar before taking the chalk up again and writing, “For me. Snack.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling guilty about falling down on the job and retrieving my bar munchies from the high shelf that kept Spot from temptation. “I’ve got these little dried fish, salt-brined hard-boiled eggs, and baked dough twists.”
Art picked up the basket with the fish, sniffed, and then put it down and pushed it as far away as he could reach with his disproportionately long arms. Then he studied the jar of eggs, dipping one claw in the brine and licking it off before giving a ho-hum shrug. Finally he took up one of Sue’s homemade pretzels and examined it closely. He picked at one of the large salt crystals with the tip of a claw before taking a cautious nibble. Then a look of shock passed over his hairy features and he pointed behind me.
Cursing myself once again for the self-imposed radio frequency silence that prevented me from using my active sensing suite, I spun around to investigate the threat. I was still trying to figure out what had frightened the Original when I heard the door again and realized that I’d been tricked. The tankard was empty and the basket of pretzels was gone. For a moment I considered going after Art, but then I saw the silver coin on the bar, which amounted to an eight-hundred-percent tip.
Rerunning the conversation in my head, I confirmed that by Library standards I was well within bounds for a first contact and the whole exchange wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if it came up for review. I wasn’t too concerned about Ferrymen laws since the secret presence of my team on Reservation was already a violation of their local sovereignty. Besides, I was confident that Art would be back in contact when he had something to say, probably after consultation with others of his kind. If I needed to talk to him beforehand, at least I knew where he hung out during eBeth’s classes.
Six
The Ferrymen landing ships flew low over the village common in tight formation and then broke apart in a dozen crazy directions, some colliding with each other as they went out of control. Children pointed and laughed as their parents struggled to control the giant kites which were painted to look like spacecraft, but dependent on the wind and string tension to stay aloft.
Sue and I observed the festivities from a blanket she’d spread on the grass which had been grazed to stubble by a wrecking crew of cows and goats. The parade of kites devolved into a contest for survival as the ground crews battled by sawing at each other’s strings, and before long the sole survivor, with a hole poked in its paper airfoil, came in for a victorious crash landing.
“It’s a good thing your cousin’s apprentice waited to launch because I would have disqualified him from the competition,” the headmaster informed us, taking a seat on the grass nearby without the benefit of a blanket. “That thing is a monster.”
“Doesn’t anybody fly box kites around here?” I asked.
“But it’s got ten times the sail surface of the other kites. It’s lifting eBeth completely off the ground!”
I started to my feet, prepared to break radio silence if I had to call for help, but I immediately saw that Joshua had been exaggerating. The kite probably had enough lift to make off with the girl if she’d been the only one holding the braided cord, but eBeth and Peter had roped themselves together to prevent any such accident. As the kite gained altitude, I noticed that it was demonstrating more maneuverability than the single line could account for, and it occurred to me that Paul was nowhere in sight. I wasn’t picking up any radio frequency signals, but I did detect a suspicious red dot flickering over the control surfaces of the kite that practically shouted “ruby laser.”
“Our daughter tells me that you’ve been attending her class,” Sue was saying to the headmaster when I sat down again. “Are you planning a trip north?”
“Studying a new language keeps my brain pointy,” he replied in English. “We were fortunate to rent her.”
“Hire,” Sue corrected him. “You can rent a house or a bicycle, but you hire a person. And we want our brains to stay sharp, not pointy.”
Joshua pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and penciled in these gems of wisdom. “Thank you. Your husband never corrects my errors. Isn’t that right, Mark?”
“I learned Northern as an adult so I’m not confident about the fine differences,” I said, which was at least half true. “Sue’s the one with a gift for languages.”
This compliment got a blush out of my second-in-command’s encounter suit, or perhaps she was embarrassed by my lying about her being the team’s linguistic expert. For some reason, the redness in her cheeks triggered a reaction in my visual processing center which fed back into a heightened feeling of protectiveness towards her on the part of my threat-assessment subsystem. This led me to check the last time I’d run a self-diagnostic on the suit, and I almost fell over when I realized I’d been putting it off day-by-day since before we left Earth.
“Actually, I had an ulterior motive in plopping myself down next to your blanket,” Joshua said. “It being Ferrymen’s Day and all, I naturally got to thinking about our clock project. I wanted to ask if you’d had a chance to do any shopping.”
“I think I found what we’re looking for last night,” I told him. “I sent Spot to the local post office with a letter and a deposit this morning, but he came home in a foul mood with the messenger bag untouched, so I assume the branch was closed.”
“Yes, everything shuts down for Ferrymen’s Day. Wasn’t it the same when you were growing up?”
I mumbled something about my parents being nonconformists.
“So tell me about our clock,” the headmaster continued, though I had the feeling that he’d be making a note of my latest slip in his little book.
“Well, there’s always a
chance somebody else will snap it up, and this was my first issue of the Clockmaker’s and Watchmaker’s Guild edition, so it’s possible the ad ran last month as well and a sale is already in progress.”
“I’m familiar with the delays involved in buying through mail-order,” Joshua said dryly, a reminder that most of the school’s supplies were sourced from distant distributors. “What about the clock itself?”
“A four-hundred year old Zeno,” I told him, unable to suppress my pleasure at the find. “It was discovered in a barn in Province Three after an estate sale. The seller doesn’t know anything about the clock’s history, but from the description of the condition, I’ll bet somebody bought it years ago with the intention of restoration but never got started.”
“And the price?” the headmaster prompted me.
“Seven gold delivered. That leaves sixty silver for parts.”
“When would it arrive?”
“In the letter I asked for it to be sent by canal because there are only a half a dozen locks between the shipper’s address and the warehouse at Fisher’s Point,” I said, naming the nearest branch-canal terminus. “I think we could have it here within a few weeks.”
Joshua’s face fell. “We were hoping for sooner than that,” he confessed.
“I expect the restoration process to take at least that long. eBeth will be doing all of the work as her apprenticeship graduation project.”
“Well, I can’t complain about anything that involves our star teacher,” the headmaster said, standing up and brushing off his pants. “I better let the others know about the schedule so they don’t all come around pestering you.”
“I have a question of my own, if you don’t mind my asking. It’s about the gardens you plant at the back of the large indoor spaces. Do they have a purpose beyond air purification and the obvious aesthetic benefit?”
“Air purification?” Joshua chuckled. “We aren’t in the habit of introducing dangerous gasses to our rooms and none of our buildings are hermetically sealed. Is that something they do in the north?”
“It’s colder there and they use a lot of insulation, so air flow can be an issue,” I replied, realizing that I’d misread the purpose of the gardens, and hoping he wouldn’t call me out on such an obvious blunder for somebody who supposedly grew up on the planet. “I guess there’s a lot of variation between provinces.”
“If you say so, Mark, but the reason we include gardens in public meeting places around here is to give the Originals a place to come and observe. I’m not aware of any specific instances of their taking us up on the invitation, but if they came and went at night, nobody would be the wiser. It’s a traditional gesture of goodwill that’s been passed down by our ancestors.”
“Did the tradition originate with the Ferrymen?” Sue followed up, her recently developed intuition telling her that I was too embarrassed to do so myself.
“I don’t believe so, though it’s hardly my area of scholarship,” Joshua replied. “My true expertise is in pies.”
“Pies?”
“Lemon meringue, apple, blueberry. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
A man on the other side of the village common shouted something that was lost in the breeze, but other people between us took up the cry, and after a very few seconds, the message reached us.
“Judges to the pie contest. Judges to the pie contest.”
“That’s me,” the headmaster said. “Happy Ferrymen’s Day if we don’t bump into each other again before sunset.”
“Happy Ferrymen’s Day,” Sue and I chorused, though I caught my second-in-command multiplexing her speech to blend the words “Helen’s pecan pie,” into the traditional salutation. I waited until Joshua was out of earshot before reprimanding her.
“Planting subliminal suggestions in a non-emergency situation is a violation of our basic Observer ethos.”
“Really, Mark. It’s just a friendly contest and Helen spent all night baking that pie. Besides, don’t you think we have something more important to talk about?”
“You’re right.” I gently took her face in my hands to disguise a shift into secure infrared communications and transmitted a complete transcript of my conversation with Art which had taken place the previous night. She didn’t react at all to the news and it took me a second to register that her eyes were closed. “Sue?”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked, opening one eye halfway.
“I was sending you an infrared data dump,” I admitted, feeling a bit foolish.
Both of Sue’s eyes came open and she removed my hands from her face more forcefully than necessary to accomplish her purpose. “The last time I checked we don’t have to be touching for that,” she said, sounding more than a little annoyed. “What’s so important?”
I looked directly into her eyes and repeated the transmission, and I could sense her setting aside whatever had been on her mind in order to digest the new data.
“Put it together with what the headmaster just told us about their indoor gardens and it’s probable that the Originals know a lot more about what’s going on here than we do,” I added in a final burst of infrared.
“Have you shared this with any of the others yet?” she asked out loud.
“No,” I replied, which seemed to please her. The truth was that I hadn’t run into any other members of the team since Art’s visit, but I had an intuition of my own about what she wanted to hear and gambled on a minor embellishment. “I wanted to tell you first.”
“It may be time to visit Library for consultation,” my second-in-command sent via infrared. “The Originals are obviously a sentient species that could qualify for League membership, and without their express permission, the Ferrymen never should have brought a colonizing population to this world.”
“I’ve been thinking about that and I want to clear up a few points the next time I speak to Art,” I replied the same way. “It’s possible that the Ferrymen did get permission from the Originals to settle this world with humans. That would mean that the laws and traditions regulating how the two communities interact were a matter of negotiation rather than a charitable gesture on the Ferrymen’s part. Given the ability of the Originals to comprehend spoken language, and the indoor gardens that give them a convenient hiding spot to listen in on human activities, we have to assume that they are at least as cognizant about the greater galaxy as the locals.”
“Hey, what are you two love birds chatting about?” Kim asked, sitting herself down on the blanket. Justin took the spot next to her, so that there were now four AI in human encounter suits and one large dog sharing a blanket. I hadn’t even noticed that Spot had joined us, and he seemed to be paying pretty close attention considering that none of us were eating. When I looked in his direction, he began vigorously scratching behind his ear with one of his hind paws.
“Mark was just telling me how much he missed seeing the two of you at our party last night,” Sue said, simultaneously squirting them with an infrared transmission that recapped our conversation.
“We could hear the singing from across the road, not that I’m complaining,” Justin responded, overlaying an encrypted data package of his own. “You have a fine tenor, Mark.”
I decrypted my team member’s transmission and blurted out in English, “Are you sure?”
“It seems that I’m not the only apothecary on the planet dishing out miracle cures,” Kim said with a light laugh.
Justin’s data described a patient who had visited their shop the previous evening with a headache that had persisted for several days. The woman’s breath had triggered a red flag in Kim’s internal spectrum analyzer and she recognized the molecules as the decay product of self-terminating nanobots that had depleted their internal power sources and were exiting the body through exhalation.
“So your patient was initially treated far away,” Sue said out loud, by which she was clearly implying off-world.
“Oddly enough, no,” Kim replied. “The medicine had
been administered in the last week. The headaches the patient was experiencing were actually a good sign as her brain adjusted to the shrinking of the tumor.”
“Then the herbal remedy was imported,” I said as a couple of villagers walked past our blanket.
“It certainly wasn’t made up locally,” Justin said, then shifted back to infrared. “But was it brought in by the Ferrymen, by a human, or some third party? Without a detection grid we’re flying blind here. What if the League Council leaked our mission like they did when we were on Earth? There could be aliens coming and going all the time.”
“The council doesn’t know about our mission yet, unless our representative has told them. And Library’s portal engineers would never connect a world without authorization. Even though we’ve maintained radio silence, I’m listening all the time and I wouldn’t have missed the chatter from an incoming ship.”
“Unless they’re maintaining radio silence as well,” Kim pointed out silently. “Maybe this whole world is crawling with advanced species communicating with line-of-sight signaling.”
“But the Ferrymen would have noticed by now,” I objected.
“Unless they aren’t even here,” Sue pointed out.
“We’ll find out when Paul and Stacey report back from the provincial capital.”
“They haven’t even left yet,” Justin reminded me. “In fact, here they come now.”
Not knowing the locations of my team members at all times was really starting to get on my nerves, and I looked over just in time to see Paul spreading his jacket on the grass. Then he sat down cross-legged next to it while Stacey settled gracefully on the sacrificial garment. For a moment I felt like he was showing me up in front of Sue, but then I remembered that we were sitting on a blanket.
“What’s that in the rucksack, Paul?” I inquired.
