It seemed that along with the sense of living in the open air, these people had lost their sense of civility. Was that what happened when you lived cooped up in a ship with the same people for generations?
When I just started training, I’d often been baffled by Coldi customs, but I didn’t recall ever having felt like I was floundering as much as this. They looked like people, they moved like people, but in their behaviour they might as well have been lions.
In the awkward and unfriendly silence, I started out explaining why we had come. That we were lovers, that we were, obviously, from different races, and that we would love to hear if there was any chance at all that we could have a child.
Kando Luczon’s face showed intense dislike. “She is from the all-purpose colonising race. I do not know why they were ever allowed to keep their fertility. I certainly didn’t agree with it. It was that idiot Waller Herza whose idea this was. And look at this place today! I was right.” He spread his hands.
I had no idea what was wrong with Barresh and its varied population, and after getting a taste of his opinions on it, couldn’t say I was highly interested in finding out.
In the further tense silence, I then outlined some of the known genetic connections. That the Coldi and Mirani Endri sometimes interbred. That a famous research project by a scientist on Earth called Richard Morton had proven that humans from Earth had Aghyrian roots.
While I was speaking, Lilona’s expression had pricked up. She asked me some questions in a timid voice. She knew what Thayu was—and that earned her some disapproving looks from Thayu—but didn’t know about me. Earth was not a place they were overly familiar with, but after some cross-referencing, expressions cleared.
“We seeded a population there, a long time ago,” Kando Luczon said.
He eyed me up and down, as if seeing me in a different light. He said something to Lilona, who took one of their screens and pulled up a diagram. I could see her screen, but didn’t read Aghyrian very well and this variety was even less familiar to me. Tayron came to sit next to her. They spoke quietly, pointing at various places in the diagram.
Kando Luczon sat in his chair and supported his chin in his hand. He stared at Thayu, already looking bored with the discussion.
Thayu stared back. If the daggers in her eyes were real, he would have been dead a hundred times over.
“We need to know certain things,” Lilona said eventually.
“You need blood samples?’ I asked.
“We do. We don’t have any equipment to take them.”
“The hospital does,” I offered without trying to sound too keen.
“We also need equipment to analyse.”
“They might have that as well. I’m sorry, I know nothing about medical things, but I can take you to the hospital and you can see what they have and you can ask the lab staff. Many of them are Aghyrian.” My heart was hammering in my chest. It did sound like an innocent enough proposition, didn’t it?
She said something to the captain, but he said nothing and didn’t react. Then she spoke to Tayron. He replied, his tone flat.
Lilona got up from the table and disappeared into the hallway. I frowned at Thayu. What was going on?
The feeder told me that she wasn’t sure either. They really don’t show any emotions. Coming from a Coldi person—who were often accused of not showing emotions—this was a major statement. It confirmed the unease I had felt about these Aghyrians.
The captain sat staring into the distance, and Tayron looked out the window.
With any other person, I might have chatted about the weather, but all previous attempts to chat had fallen into a black hole. Not only were they unfamiliar with the concept of weather, they were uninterested in it, or, for that matter, in other harmless subjects, like the scenery or clothing.
You couldn’t chat with them, because they didn’t know how to chat.
These people were not super-humans. Well, they might possess the genetic base from which all humans were descended, but as a society, they seemed incredibly broken.
Lilona came back to the door. She had put on the shirt with the blue piping that we had supplied for the gamra meeting they attended a few days ago. This wasn’t the right shirt for a trip into town, but I let it rest. They didn’t understand “appropriate” either.
The captain and Tayron seemed happy to let her go—and I felt guilty because they possessed a healthy dose of suspicion in some areas and seemed naïve and trusting in others, and we were going to betray what little trust they had.
We left the apartment. It was now the middle of the afternoon, and, being the dry season, sunlight was at its hottest. I was pleased to see that thunderclouds were building up over the top of the escarpment in the east, although it would probably take a few weeks until they were big enough to roll over the city every afternoon. The sky directly above was cloudless, if a bit hazy, but still clear enough to show double-edged shadows, although the suns were very close together and would go fully behind each other later this week for the occultation festival and the crazy parades that accompanied it.
I explained all this to Lilona on our way to the station, and it met with the usual reaction: indifference and silence.
Thayu rolled her eyes at me several times.
Through her feeder, she asked me why I kept trying. I truly didn’t know. I guessed our different brands of humanity couldn’t stand continued silence when in the company of others. That was the point of company: that some form of communication took place. Otherwise you might as well live alone in the jungle.
We’re communicating Thayu said through the feeder. We’re not making any sound.
That was true. Did the Aghyrians have a similar type of communication? There were rumours that some were telepathic, but if they were, their processes didn’t work on us.
The train arrived and we got in.
I could see Evi and Telaris at the end of the wagon, pretending to be travelling by themselves. I looked around for others, most importantly Coldi in unmarked non-uniform clothing, but none were obvious to me.
I sat opposite Lilona. If she was really in her sixties, she looked remarkably young. We had wondered if they used some type of rejuvenation treatment or if her younger looks were a function of conditions in the ship.
I had asked about this before, but as with most things, had received at best an inconclusive reply. I guessed it was hard for people who travelled across galaxies to understand the concept of age and time—both planet-bound concepts—but their inability to relate to anything that mattered to us was profoundly disturbing.
She was, however, more forthcoming when I asked her about her work on the ship, which was to prepare the pods and their occupants for long jumps. Normally the stasis pods would contain gas, but for jumps they would be filled with gel that would slowly be frozen over what I guessed was a period of days before the jump. Once the jump was completed, the reverse process would take twice as long.
“So when you jump, you freeze the entire crew?”
“Everyone who isn’t needed for the operation of the ship.” And apparently they could run that behemoth ship with a crew of about twenty.
“What do you do for the jump?”
She frowned at me.
“It sounds like jumping these kinds of distances is dangerous enough that you protect most people by freezing them. What about you and the other crew?”
“We’re selected to perform this task.”
It sounded like it was an honour. “But isn’t it dangerous?”
“The survival of the main population is the most important aim of the mission. Some need to be awake to ensure that the ship is healthy.”
“But do you do anything special to protect yourself during these jumps?”
“We monitor the health of the crew. It’s very important.” Her voice acquired a slightly angry edge.
Was she deliberately not answering my question? “All right then. What happens when you go into a jump?”
/> “They take a long time. All the while, we adjust the pods.”
“Isn’t there a way to do this automatically?”
She gave me a startled look. “All the internals of the ship are completely powered down during a jump.” She sounded indignant. How stupid of me not to know this.
At the same time, I sensed something inherently horrible about these jumps. Having travelled through space myself, I had tasted the acute discomfort that comes with being locked in a tin can with no gravity. The forms of space travel I had tried had been controlled and relatively easy, but extensive safety briefings brought home the fact that when the system became stressed because something went wrong, crew might need to take desperate measures to stay alive. The emergency supplies contained items such as adult nappies for when confined to one’s room unable to go to the bathroom, and scrapers to take ice off the walls in case of heating failure and other items whose purpose I was happy not to know.
If the ship’s internals were powered off during a jump and a jump lasted days, the crew might be confined to a small compartment, where air, temperature and heating would slowly deteriorate. They might need to wear hard vacuum suits, and live, eat and shit in these suits. Shields would be off, so radiation might penetrate the ship.
Hell, maybe even half the non-frozen crew would not survive a jump, and they weren’t allowed to complain because it was an honour to serve the ship.
I shuddered, once more reminded how much we put our lives in the hands of technology even when travelling through the Exchange.
“I’m bound to the ship,” she said, and her voice sounded proud.
That declaration chilled me even more.
I had asked her before what that meant, and had received an incomprehensible reply about biometrics and some micro-technology to do with blood. It seemed a biological thing, like our feeders. I suspected that a lot of the terms she used were wrongly translated, but Coldi just didn’t offer a correct translation.
I imagined that if a modern human met a Neanderthal, the level of communication would be similar. True transfer of information was impossible.
As the train slowed down at the approach to the airport station, my overwhelming thought was that we were the Neanderthals, and they could pull out a magical weapon the likes of which we hadn’t begun to consider, and they would kill us all.
On the other hand, if a modern human and a Neanderthal faced each other in a stone axe fight, the Neanderthal would win.
Axe fights it was.
Welcome to the Stone Age.
On further consideration, if a modern human faced a Neanderthal in a modern home, the Neanderthal would strangle the human with a power cord.
As long as the Neanderthal could pick the time and place of the fight, he would win if no magical weapons were present.
All this assumed that they didn’t develop some form of mutually understood communication where the modern man could make it understood that there was no need for a fight and they could be sharing a beer instead. Did Neanderthals like beer?
All right, so we were the Neanderthals. I had tried very hard, but so far failed miserably, to see the hand holding out the beer. In fact, we seemed to be facing an entirely different situation. If three modern men walked into a Neanderthal village of two hundred with the intention to take the village, they’d bring guns and make short work of the whole tribe. That seemed closer to the situation we were facing. The guns were on that ship that was waking up and that, by his own admission, Asha might be unable to stop.
The comparison made my head hurt.
Chapter 14
* * *
WE GOT OFF the train at the airport station with a big group of other people, most of whom looked like they were going to the markets. They were, for the most part, domestic staff dressed in grey with little splashes of blue or sometimes colours of whatever house they worked in. It was a happy, careless, chatting ensemble. We followed this group up the sloping road past the fence around the airport. This part of the path was exposed to the weather and right now facing the western sun. Lilona had to stop, wiping sweat from her forehead.
“Not used to the heat?” I asked, mentally chalking up the climate as a distinct advantage to the Neanderthals.
“It makes you wet.” That was clearly a great source of annoyance.
“Don’t you do exercise on board of your ship?”
Lilona gave me a blank look.
“Didn’t you see the pods for muscle stimulation?” Thayu asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“They were in one of the labs to the side. You could see in through the open door. People were asleep while machines moved their arms and legs.”
“Sleep walking.” The ultimate solution for people who hated exercise. That would have been weird to see.
Lilona was looking at the aircraft on display at the airport. From here, we could see the private area, including Asha’s craft.
“Do they look anything like yours?” I asked her. Keep trying, Delegate Wilson. The more questions I asked, the more likely I would get an answer that gave away more than she intended to share.
“They’re flyers for use in the atmosphere. How can they look much different? They need an aerodynamic shape. They need a carrying area.”
“Tell me then what yours look like.” I had already seen some of their smaller ships, in the big hall where we had entered the ship. That whole docking hall had been dark and powered down, consistent with the fact that most of the crew was in stasis.
She was still squinting at the aircraft. “The wing area is bigger.”
Thinner atmosphere? Thayu said through the feeder.
Or thicker, less need for engines, more friction, more gliding action. I pictured the images I’d always seen as a child, of designs of colonies humans had planned but that had never been built in the cloud tops at Venus.
“They’re made from hardened resin.”
Thayu filled me in. Some type of plastic, produced on board the ship.
Lilona eyed us, as if sensing the conversation that went on through our feeders.
I started moving again, uncomfortable that the shuttle that was the subject of her scrutiny happened to be one that belonged to Asto’s military.
“What is the most important thing that you notice about being on a planet?” I tried a different, more comfortable angle.
“Everything stinks.” A surprisingly frank reply. It was as if, being away from the captain, she was coming out of her shell.
Like the Coldi, Aghyrians had a keen sense of smell. “It stinks like what?”
“The recycling plants.”
“Are you familiar with them? Did you work there?”
“Everyone has to work there, especially the crew who are bound to the ship.”
“Is working there a form of punishment?”
She gave me her usual blank look. It was impossible to figure out what went on behind those blue eyes. Sure she would understand punishment?
“We do shifts,” she said, her voice soft. “It is very hot there and it stinks. Some of the equipment can malfunction and cause harm.”
It was the first time that any of them had said anything that could be remotely classified as emotional. “You don’t like working there?” I prompted.
She gave me a blank look. “It’s part of our tasks.”
“Does it scare you, working there?”
Another blank look.
I tried again, “Does it scare you, being out of your ship, with so much open air that stinks like a place you hate and where there are no safe places to hide?”
“We have the captain.”
Which, again, was not an answer.
It went on like this for a while. I asked innocent questions and Lilona replied in short sentences.
Thayu was meant to keep an interested expression and not act like security personnel, but she appeared to have given up trying a long time ago. I suspected that had he been here, even Veyada would have started fidget
ing by now. Along with embarrassment, patience was another state of mind that Coldi seemed to be incapable of feeling.
Even though the conversation consisted of starts and stops punctuated with long silences, I was starting to see a pattern. Sometimes she replied in answer to my question, sometimes not. If she got to the point where she stopped replying, she always said something about the captain or the ship, as if that was a fallback answer when she was unsure of what to say.
I found out that most of the people that she looked after in stasis were women. She didn’t ever appear to have been in stasis herself. Maybe it was a long-term thing that you could do only once?
To my questions about jumps—how many they did, how far, how long they took—she answered that the captain knew about those, and my question about what they ate on board met with the same reply: the captain knows.
Both she and her male companion had beautiful teeth, so I asked if the food caused any problems, but that was also a matter for the captain.
As we walked onto the main square, past all the eating-houses towards the tramline, I confirmed my opinion that theirs was a closed society where one person had a lot to say and the others more or less blindly followed him. This didn’t make much sense for a people of the Aghyrian intellectual calibre, but at least I was getting answers, as long as my questions remained innocent, because I ran into a wall as soon as I slipped in a question about why they were doing certain things.
“What” or “How” questions were apparently all right, but “Why” questions were not.
Yes, of course I was recording all of this, although with the rumbling of the train, the city and aircraft noises and later the tram, I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to decipher on the playback.
The hospital was on the northern side of the island at the end of the tramline from the main square. It stood on a little rise—and Barresh was extremely flat, so a little rise meant a knee-high hillock—surrounded by a new housing development built entirely on stilts over the water. Most of the stilts supported slabs of concrete that made up the ground and streets, but spaces had been left in between, where it looked as if water ran through canals. Right now, the development looked bare in the blazing western sunlight, but the slabs included large, wire-bottomed boxes filled with sand and mud where native trees had been planted in beds of rotting leaves and anchored with rope. Within a year the trees would send roots from the concrete to the muddy bottom, providing a natural anchor for the artificial structure.
Ambassador 4: Coming Home Page 13
