by David Drake
"Hope it doesn't fall while we're underneath," Wenzil said, though she didn't sound concerned. Things that she couldn't shoot and weren't going to shoot her didn't interest the weapons specialist very much.
At the bottom of the grotto, the pale light reminded Guibert of that beneath thirty meters of water. He could see objects well enough, but their outlines were softened by the faint, diffused illumination.
It was a pity that nothing similar could be done about the smell. Guibert at first thought the pong was that of concentrated Sawickis—there were about a hundred of them in sight, working on crafts or (more generally) lounging and curling their lips at the tourists clustered about them.
After a moment, Guibert realized that while Sawickis did stink, their dung stank a great deal worse. The noble autochthons squatted wherever they happened to be when their bowels gave them the signal.
He looked queasily at his feet—found that his fears were justified—and then noticed that the turd was so dry that it crumbled rather than clinging to the soles of his boots.
"Watch where you step," he warned his team.
"That's funny," Dayly said. "The files say they use their shit as part of the compost they grow the fungus on. Here they're just leaving it lie around."
"It's probably contact with outsiders that has caused the breakdown in the normal routine of the Big Grotto," Hairball said. "It's courageous—heroic, in fact—for the True Persons to sacrifice one of their own villages so that other races can be exposed to the purity of their culture."
"Or it's their idea of a joke on the tourists," Karge said. "As a matter of fact, I wonder if this whole place isn't a joke on the tourists. Do we know anything about how the slugs on the rest of the planet live?"
"Negative," said Dayly.
"Certainly not!" the Mromrosi said. "It's quite enough that one village be sacrificed to the greed of the Magnicate!"
"Judging by the prices for them baskets and the slush the slugs call food," Dayly said, "I wouldn't say the Magnicate was in the same league."
Guibert squared his shoulders and took a deep breath—the latter which he instantly regretted. They should have brought nose filters as well as emergency rations. "Well," he said, "if I could figure out a cute way to learn about the missing cutter, I suppose I'd try it. Since I can't, I guess I'll go ask the chief what he knows."
"That bugger McBrien could have managed that himself," Karge said.
Guibert cocked an eye at the ethnologist. "Got a better idea?" he demanded.
"Staying back on the Night-Blooming Cereus and playing with myself," Karge said. "Apart from that, no."
A Sawicki male, neither more nor less disgusting than any other Sawicki, sat on a block of fallen limestone in the center of the cavern. Given his elaborately-layered costume and the number of tourists clustered around him taking low-light holograms, he must have some rank.
"Once more into the breach . . ." Guibert muttered as he walked toward the fellow.
He passed near a pair of female Sawickis hacking patterns into mushroom caps with stone burins as more tourists recorded the process.
"That's odd," Karge said. "They aren't any good at all."
He was right. While the works for sale on the surface were craft raised to the level of art, these Sawickis were creating junk along the lines of jack-o'-lanterns butchered by three-year-olds.
"I could chew mushrooms and shit a better design," Wenzil agreed.
"See how contact with the outside has warped these poor innocents?" Hairball said.
"That doesn't," said Guibert, "explain where the good work is coming from, does it?"
"Good in patriarchal, anthropocentric terms, you mean," Hairball replied, adding a click that passed for a sniff in Mromrosi terms.
True enough; but not an answer to the question.
Guibert looked at the crowd. "You lead," he said to Hairball.
"Make way for the Mromrosi delegate!" he added loudly. Tourists turned and realized the tickle on the backs of their thighs was frizzy orange hair that walked. They hurled themselves sideways faster than Guibert could have moved them had he slammed into the crowd full tilt.
The front rank of tourists around the chief was on its knees, calling questions to the disdainful Sawicki. Hairball stopped and looked upward at the team leader. "To speak to the village chief," he said, "you must kneel. By this act you honor not the personhood of the chief, but rather the planet Sawick itself."
"Here, I'll take care of it," said Karge. The ethnologist pushed ahead of Guibert and the Mromrosi. He turned and dropped his trousers.
"Karge!" Guibert said. "What on earth are you doing?"
Tourists gasped, screamed, or giggled, depending on temperament. The crowd universally moved well back from the Harriers. The chief called something, bringing Sawickis on the run from all parts of the cavern.
"Honoring the planet as the locals do," Karge explained as he squatted. "Taking a dump."
"You can't do this!" Hairball cried.
"When on Sawick . . ." the ethnologist said. "Do as the Sawickis do."
"Mister Karge," Guibert said. "Don't. Or you walk home."
"What's going on here?" the chief demanded.
"Well, seeing as he's addressing us directly . . ." Karge said. He stood up again.
The autochthons had halted in a wide circle around the team instead of rushing directly to the chiefs aid. Guibert noted that the Sawickis' attitude appeared to be fear rather than anger.
Sawickis were the sort of bullies who wilted when anybody stood up to them.
"Of course, a seven-five-one setting, Marathrustran Bivalves, might throw them into syncope," Wenzil murmured. The weapons specialist seemed as happy as a pig in shit.
"What?" said Hairball. "What?"
Karge refastened his trousers. In a low voice, the ethnologist began to sing a Chippewa song, "Do you think she was humiliated, that Sioux woman I beheaded?"
"Some teenagers from a Magnicate dreadnought landed here last week in an eight-place cutter," Guibert said, "and they haven't come back. We were wondering if you recalled anything about them. Sir." Courtesy didn't cost much.
"Why should any True Man be concerned with faceless non-persons?" the chief said.
Wenzil turned to face them. "That doesn't sound like an answer to me," she said. The peculiar lilt in her voice made Guibert shiver.
Enough of the implications must have translated that the Sawicki chief said, "The question was asked through the non-persons who run the devil-machines that guide non-person spaceships. We at once held a village council. No one recalled the missing non-persons, since your faces are all the same anyway."
The guide who'd met the barge added, "We prayed that the soulless non-persons had died with minimal pain, however."
"Then I don't suppose there's much we can do here," Guibert said. "Thank you."
The team headed back toward the ramp up the side of the grotto.
"We'll do the nature watch and spend the night in the tourist lodgings," Guibert said. "Since according to the techs in the landing control facility, that's what the cutter did. We're playing this one by ear."
"You know," Dayly said thoughtfully, "he's lying. But lies are information too."
"Yeah," Karge agreed. "And it's information that turd-burglar McBrien wasn't going to have understood."
"Why would anybody pay good money to watch hogs root through garbage?" Guibert wondered aloud as he walked into the male barracks he, Karge and Dayly shared with ninety-odd other men. "Nature area, hell!"
"Ouch!" said Karge, crushing across his biceps the fly that just stabbed for a meal of his blood.
"Damned good money," Dayly agreed. "This all is coming out of official funds, isn't it, sir?"
"That, or out of that limp-wrist McBrien's hide," Karge said.
Tourist accommodations on Sawicki were sex-segregated. Hairball had presumably tossed the Mromrosi equivalent of a coin before deciding to go with Wenzil.
Not that the
re was much place to go. The barracks were pole frames, roofed with branches. They couldn't have approached being watertight even before their leaves dried up and fell away weeks or months before. The bunks were three-high, with no mattresses or bedding.
Lights were whatever individual tourists brought with them.
"True Men lie directly on bare rock," the autochthonal concierge—warden?—explained to a tearful father with an infant, no bedclothes, and no light with which to pick his way back to the landing field and a ship that might well be sealed for the night anyway.
"Wonder how that slug would like to be laid on the bare rock?" Karge said, fingering the knuckles of his big right hand. He peered at the circle of "floor" in his handlight and added, "Or mud, as the case may be."
Guibert guided the ethnologist toward their rack of bunks. "That's not what we're here for," he reminded Karge.
"Still," Karge said, "it'd be a way to improve my time. . . ."
Dayly sat on the top bunk, running data through the chip reader he was never without. From the team leader's angle, Dayly's air-projected holograms appeared to be chunks of terrain from the orbital scans.
Guibert's rank gave him the choice of accommodations: the bottom bunk, where his subordinates provided more rain cover than the roof did, or the top bunk which would prevent him from being crushed if the whole flimsy rack collapsed. He'd gone for the former, because Karge had picked the middle where his momentum would be low. Dayly didn't weigh enough to worry about.
"Ouch!" Karge said, slapping another fly. He wiped his hand disgustedly on his trouser leg for want of a rag. "They're sticky when they squish, and they seem to like me even better than they do the pigs. This is not going to be a fun night."
"Suoids, not pigs," said Dayly as he continued to sort through pictures of forest. They're native to Sawick."
"Don't tell me I don't know what a pig is," the ethnologist grumbled. "I'm from Lontano, remember? For that matter, I swatted my share of these damned gadflies when I was growing up, too."
Tourists huddled in clots around their fellows who'd brought lights, talking in desultory, often despairing, tones. When they got back to their homes, they would pontificate about the benefits they had bestowed on their offspring by exposing the children to the pure beauties of nature.
Not now, however. Guibert wondered whether some of the fortunate offspring weren't going to be strangled here on Sawick unless they stopped wailing. Not that he blamed the kids.
"Who says the pigs are native here?" Guibert asked. "Dayly?'
"The place was discovered forty years ago," the data specialist said without emphasis. "The suoids are present over the whole continent. Therefore they aren't Terran pigs."
"If insects can live on them and on humans, of whom I am one," said Karge, "then they're Terran pigs."
"Is there any other warm-blooded life on Sawick, Dayly?" Guibert asked.
"Sure, the Sawickis," Dayly said.
"Warm-blooded slugs," Karge said.
"Bingo!" said the data specialist. He reached down with his chip reader, making the rack creak dangerously as he did so. "Look at that, sir. This is an enhanced infra-red scan, blown up to one to a thousand."
Guibert stared at a hollow cross formed of faint white lines against the dark background. "Yeah?" he said.
"I told the system to sort for anomalies," Dayly explained. "This is what it came up with."
Karge craned his neck to see the display from the correct angle. "Its not the OC's cutter," he said.
"Of course not," Dayly said. "Even the Grands would have found that. This is the remains of a village. Trees have grown up over it, but on IR you can still see where the foundations were."
"Well I'll be damned," Guibert said. "The cutter had a complete recon system, didn't it?"
"You think the lads noticed something funny and decided to take a look?" Karge said. "I can't imagine they were satisfied with the entertainment they were getting around here."
"Yes sir," Dayly said. "I don't suppose Hairball would let us go take a close-up look tomorrow, would he?"
"Not at a proscribed area of the planet, unless we had direct evidence the cutter was there," Guibert said thoughtfully. "Of course the lads shouldn't have been there either."
"The lads," Karge noted, "shouldn't have gone off joyriding in that faggot McBrien's cutter to begin with."
Dayly snickered. "This means a bunch of spoiled kids figured out something that the Magnicate bureaucracy couldn't in forty years," he said.
"Does that surprise you?" Karge asked. "Remember, the kids didn't have Mromrosii from the EPFC sitting on their shoulders, making sure truth was twisted into the politically correct pattern."
"Well," said Guibert, "let's see if we can't get some sleep. We're likely to have a long day ahead of us tomorrow, unless Hairball can keep us from having engine trouble at the point I sort of think we're going to."
"Oh, golly!" Guibert said when the altimeter read 30K. "We're losing power! We have only enough thrust to permit me to set down softy."
"I'll engage the emergency alert transmitter!" said Karge cheerfully from the duplicate console. He switched the barge into stealth mode.
Guibert disconnected the barge's AI pilot and chopped the power. Dipping the nose, he started to glide toward the ancient building site. It was a bright, clear day. Inertial guidance and the vessel's passive sensors would be sufficient to put the team where they wanted to be.
The barge's skin formed a laminar path for the optical spectrum; longer wavelengths were scattered or absorbed. So long as the pilot avoided a turbulent wake (ripples in the atmosphere were radar-visible even if the cause of the disturbance wasn't), the vessel was virtually invisible.
The OC's cutter had even better stealth characteristics than the Petit Harrier barge did. Based on the description the port controllers had given, the lads had known exactly how to use their equipment.
Might be worth mentioning to a recruiting officer. Assuming the kids get back. Assuming we get back too.
"Shouldn't we be calling the port for help?" Hairball asked. The Mromrosi's voice remained a calm, dulcet baritone, but he looked twice as large as usual. His orange hair was sticking straight out from his skin.
"What?" said Karge. "You would have us use the manual override to interfere with the automatic alert system? You would have us violate Standard Operating Procedure?"
"Well, I—" the Mromrosi said. "Ah—of course those technical things aren't my field, you realize."
"Violate SOP indeed," Karge muttered.
"I'll log the improper request, sir," Dayly said, surprising Guibert. The data specialist was normally too straightforward to pick up on these little games.
Poor guy. Focused on Truth in a society dominated by Fairness.
"Or for that matter, setting three-three-one," Wenzil said, speaking aloud but without real hope that anybody else was interested. "Leonids and Hraunian vertebrates in general. The slugs' serotonin release system might well be similar."
"Hang on," said Guibert. "There may be some tree branches or—"
But there weren't. Guibert fluffed to a momentary hover on the attitude jets a few meters above the surface, then dropped the barge neatly into a circular clearing at the base of a low bluff.
"I do hope the True Persons won't be offended that we've trespassed on their planet," Hairball said. His concern, though real enough, had waited for the barge's safe landing.
"Maybe they've gotten used to it," said Dayly. He'd been watching the visual display without responsibility for the controls. "There was exhaust scarring on the soil. Another ship's been here recently."
"What?" said Hairball. "Trespassers in a proscribed area?"
"I think," Guibert said as he opened the hatch, "we've found the lads. Or at least where the kids went when they left the Big Grotto."
"Now, setting two thirty-six would provide improved range through this atmosphere. . . ." Wenzil said.
She smiled as she led the team
out through the hatch. Hairball was uncharacteristically silent.
The air was warm and musty, but it lacked the sour smell that pervaded the environs of the Big Grotto. The Sawicki stench was for the most part confined underground, but the tourists were expected to dump their waste and garbage on a midden. Hogs and bacteria provided the remainder of the reclamation process, neither category an odor-free medium.
"There certainly isn't any sign of foundations from up close," Guibert said. "Did I land us in the right spot, Dayly?"
"Yessir," said the data specialist as he squatted. He opened his field kit and took out a small prybar.
The vegetation was subtly different from that in the neighborhood of the Big Grotto only a hundred klicks away. This forest wasn't quite a monoculture, but the large trees were limited to three or four species. Guibert had noted literally hundreds of different varieties along the path from the landing field, and he wasn't trying to make a detailed census.
"This is regrowth on a cleared area," he said. He walked toward the bluff twenty meters away.
He'd seen the outcrop during landing, but he'd expected that at ground level it would be concealed by the boles of closely spaced trees. The vegetation hadn't had time to build itself into the impenetrable layers that would thin the forest floor by light-starvation.
There was a path from the clearing to the bluff. Trees had been cut or shoved sideways by an object which was dragged through them with enough force to pull up half their roots.
"Well," offered Hairball, "obviously the Sawickis evolved on the surface. These are the remains—you say there are remains—of an early Sawicki village."
Dayly dropped a bit of black material into the isotope separator from his kit and paused for its reading. "Not as early as all that," he said. "Fifty-seven years ago, plus or minus three, from carbonized material trapped under the fused rock."
Karge laughed.
"Fused rock?" the Mromrosi said, utterly at sea. "From a volcano?"
"From an energy weapon," Guibert said. "Somebody blew the center out of a village, then used heavy equipment to break up the rest of it. Most of the buildings were probably wood anyhow."
