Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition)

by C. J. Cherryh

  There was, in their reliance on food from orbit, a most pressing reason to identify grasses, and dissect seeds, and figure out their processes and their chemistry, where it was like Earth’s and where it was different: ecologically different, the Guild had said, probably full of toxins, not to meddle with.

  But the Guild was going to be wrong on that one, if the results held—God, the tests were looking good, down to the chemical level where it really counted: there were starches and sugars they recognized, no toxins in the seeds that, the Phoenix histories informed them, could be processed and cooked in ways human beings had done for a staple food for thousands of years.

  That again, for the Guild’s insistence they needed no understanding about natural systems—the Guild said they had no use precisely because in the Guild’s opinion planets had no use, and, the unspoken part, stations and station-dwellers had no use except for the services they provided. The Guild talked about ecological disasters—about native rights, about all manner of rights including the local fauna that had more rights than the workers on the station … the Guild, that adamantly refused understanding of any natural system.

  But contrary to predictions, the microbes they collected and the ones that necessarily attended human beings showed no dispensation to run amok with each other or with them or the planet—that had been their greatest fear, viruses getting a hold in human bodies or human-vectored bacteria wreaking havoc faster than the genetics people could patch the problems. They’d prepared for it, they’d taken precautions—but it hadn’t happened catastrophically; they weren’t seeing the problems they’d prepared for, even in lab cultures. The very fact they were finding biological correspondences was a hazard, of course, but so far and with fingers crossed, the immunologists were beginning to argue that the mere fact there were correspondences might mean some effective defenses. Talk around the lab began to speculate on microbial-level evolution more intimately related to geology and planetary formation than theory had previously held to be the case, wild stuff, the geneticists and the geologists and the botanists putting their heads together on one spectacular drunk the night they’d gotten the supply drop with the unscheduled Gift from Upstairs—

  God, the irreverent insanity down here, after a lifetime of the solemn Cause, and the politics, and the Movement. But discoveries were pouring in on them after a century and a half of stagnant study of taxonomies. They were drunk with invention. They were understanding the natural systems they were seeing. They’d formed a comparative framework with its essential questions foremost, worked out on Lenoir’s principles, for a hundred fifty years of information trickling up through optics and hands-off observation of the planet; they’d held on to planetary science—and they’d done it in the face of the Guild’s ridicule and the Guild’s absorption of resources, and the Guild’s ship-building, and every Guild-blessed project that drank up station time and materials.

  And if the Guild profoundly repented anything it had let pass council, it had to be the decision that had begun station construction here, in orbit about a blue, living planet, instead of barren, virtually airless Maudette.

  Safer, the scientists of that day had argued. Within reach of resources, if something went wrong.

  It certainly was within reach of resources, resources and the intelligent civilization they had already detected on the planet. Oh, yes, the Guild raised ethical arguments from the start, but say the truth—the Guild with its talk of moral choices, the right of the planet to develop on its own—they had such a deep concern for the planet-dwellers, papa was wont to say. So why is life down there so sacred to the Guild, and why do they count our lives so cheap?

  So he was here, because papa couldn’t be, and mama wouldn’t, without papa: the station and the Movement needed them where they were, if that lander was going to pass a council vote.

  What the Guild reasoned now, he didn’t know. Or care. Thank God, hereafter the politics of the Movement, and who was in charge, and who led and who followed (being an administrator’s son, he’d heard all the arguments for and against his being down here, and suffered personally from some of them) and what steps were first and what their policy would be in dealing with the Guild—none of that was his problem anymore. He was down here to practice the science he’d become fascinated with at age eight … and realized when the Guild brats ridiculed him that he’d have no real chance of doing anything with it as a job.

  But papa’s dream had been an of-course to him, even at eight … that was why he’d spoken out without thinking, of course they’d go to the world, of course they’d walk down there someday.

  And now he did walk the planetary surface, now he did Lenoir’s work, he did it, and for Lenoir’s reasons: all the collections, the taxonomies, the equivalencies that might let them extrapolate from the natural system in the data storage to deal with a living one. He was laying the foundation for a natural science of this world and a means of dealing with this world and protecting it from their own mistakes—because, dammit, they had to; sooner or later they had to be here. Lenoir was right—the world might have a higher life form already, and the world already and for thousands of years had surely had a name, in someone or something’s language—but humanity had come to this solar system without a choice, and it was equally inevitable that they deal with the world, before it was space-faring or after, because Maudette was not their choice, and they knew Maudette was not even the Guild’s choice—just a way to get the Guild’s worker-drones away from the only planet that gave them options. The world had become their hope and their way of securing their freedom and their identity, before they had ever set foot on it.

  Until here he was, in a place generations had worked to reach, and, one way or the other, he wouldn’t be admitting defeat. He wouldn’t be going back Upstairs, rescued from starvation by some Guild ship.

  And he damned sure wouldn’t be gathered up and transported to airless Maudette, on Guild terms.

  Too late for that now, everlastingly too late.

  Speaking of late …

  It was Julio in the window, shadow against the light.

  Shadow that ducked its head in a sudden sneeze.

  III

  Perhaps it was cowardice, Manadgi thought, that held him from going down to the valley. Perhaps it was prudence that argued, in the quiet he saw settle about the buildings as the sun set, that watching and thinking through the night might grant him some useful understanding.

  One building had windows. Most did not. The size and the height of the windows was ambiguous with distance. He saw the isolated movements of living beings between the buildings, toward twilight, and occasionally after.

  He saw the predating machines, prowling about the desolation they had made. None came near him, perhaps because he had settled himself well away from such tracks, which evidently it was the purpose of such machines to make, all about the area, a net of them, as if there were less intent to reach any specific place than to have as many routes as possible within the immediate sight of these buildings.

  But did they need devastation on which to walk?

  Or was there some purpose to this stripping of the land that made sense to moon-folk? They feared the approach of enemies, perhaps. Perhaps they wished to afford no cover to spies.

  Perhaps they wished to demonstrate the devastation, or—one hated to imagine—found such destruction aesthetic.

  He might walk up to the buildings as he had purposed and present himself to some authority. But aesthetic destruction … that thought gave him considerable pause.

  A machine passed below his hiding-place, casting light as bright as the vanished sun along the rutted ground and over the grass along the edge of the devastation. It had no wheels, but linked plates on which it crawled. Its forepart was a claw, which it held rigid. It might be for digging or for stripping the ground. It might be a weapon.

  Certainly one did not want to walk up to that and ask its inclinations.

  A beam of light hit the rocks and ran
along the hill, and Manadgi held his breath, not daring to move. Someone surely sat in mastery of that machine, he told himself, but there was something so disturbingly clockwork about the swing of those lights that watching it made his flesh crawl.

  What, he asked himself, if they were clockwork, such machines? What if the owners simply turned them loose to destroy, committing them to fortune and not caring what or whom they laid waste?

  A spear of light stabbed backward from the clanking machine. Too close, Manadgi said to himself, and drew back from his position—then stopped cold as he saw the sheen of glass and smooth metal among the brush and the grass of the slope just below him.

  An eye, he thought, a machine’s single eye thrust up through the grass, as yet not moving, perhaps not cognizant of him.

  He had come here to make considerate approach. But not to this. Not to this. He held his breath, wondering if he dared move, or if it would move, or how long this eye had been there until the light from the machine showed it to him.

  The area of brush where the clawed machine had disappeared was dark, now, and he sat in an awkward crouch, half ready to move away, doubting whether he dared, wondering if there was another such machine lurking with mechanical patience, or if such eyes might be threaded all through the grass and the rocks, and he had somehow blundered through them unseen. He trembled to think, considering that it was himself on whom the fortunes of greater people leaned, and that on his auspicious or inauspicious choice, on a sum of strange participants whose number he could not at all reckon, chance was delicately-balanced, awaiting his decision one way or the other to tip events into motion, for good or for ill to the aiji, whose interests bound up many, many lives.

  Clearly the moon-folk had no right intruding on Tachi land, within the aiji’s power. They had done damage in their arrogance and their power and challenged the people of the whole Earth—and it was on him to decide what to do, whether to risk this eye developing legs and running to report, or a voice, to alert other eyes, and to call the clawed machine back to this slope.

  It had done neither, so far. Perhaps it was shut down. Perhaps it was not a whole machine, in itself, only a part from a damaged one. If they fell from the sky, perhaps a petal-sail had failed, and one had smashed itself on the rocks.

  He could scarcely get his next breath, as he moved himself ever so silently backward and backward, straining his mortal eyes into the dark toward the eye and asking himself if the eye might have ears to hear the whisper of cloth or the drawing of his breaths or—it seemed possible to him—the hammering of his heart. But the eye sat in darkness, perhaps blind, perhaps asleep—or feigning it. Did clockwork things hear, or smell, or think?

  Or how did they know to move? Did they turn on and off their own switches? That seemed impossible.

  It stayed inert, at least. He gained his feet, moving with what stealth he could, uphill, encountering, at least, no other eyes in the grass.

  He settled into a nook higher on the hill, there to tuck up among the yet unravaged rocks, to catch his breath and regain his composure.

  The aiji, he told himself, should have sent one of his assassins, not a speaker—should have sent some one of his guard accustomed to hazardous actions, who would know how to move silently and how to judge the hazards of this situation.

  And perhaps having seen clearly that it was a matter outside his judgment, his wisest course would be to withdraw with what he had seen, and to advise the aiji and the hasdrawad to send someone with the skill to penetrate this devastation. He saw no safe approach.

  Yet had any machine attacked him? Had the machines harmed the children, or could the Tachi prove such wandering machines had killed any of their herds?

  He had to admit fear had swayed his judgment a moment ago. The clockwork machines had wreaked havoc on the land, but not, though given opportunity, attacked people or livestock. The children that had reported machines had escaped unharmed, and nothing had tracked them to their village. The herdsmen that had spied on the landing places of the petal-sails had escaped, alive and well, without the machines of the moon-folk following them.

  So perhaps the machines were deaf and even witless things, and he had been foolish to run, just now.

  He was certainly glad no one was here to witness his dilemma, huddled in a hole in the dark, shivering, and not with the cold.

  Was that the story he wanted to tell the aiji and his court, how he had fled, without any closer observation? He had confidence in his skills as an observer and as a negotiator. And could he fail to gather at least an assessment of numbers and position, which would be useful as the hasdrawad debated and the aiji arranged another, more aggressive, mission?

  He dared not carry back a mistaken report, or ask for assassins, and perhaps, in an assassin’s too-quick reaction to threat, push the whole situation to hostilities that might not be anyone’s intention. He had come here plainly to ask the moon-folk what they were doing, and to have an answer from them for the aiji. He had always realized the chance of dying by error or by hostile action. It was a risk he had been willing to run, when the aiji asked him the question in the safety of the aiji’s apartments.

  Could he retreat now, claiming the machines had threatened him—his only excuse but cowardice—knowing that report would be taken as a reasoned conclusion, and that it would loose irremediable consequences?

  No. He could not. He could not remotely justify it. The aiji had seen applicability in his skills to make him the aiji’s considered choice for this mission.

  He hoped the aiji had also seen intelligence, and judgment, and resourcefulness, not alone for the honor of the aiji’s opinion, but because his personal resources seemed very scant just now, and the night was very cold, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

  IV

  The morning came as milky pale as the first morning Ian had wakened on the planet, with a scattering of improbably pink clouds. Pink … and gold, and pearl white, with a little mist in the low places. Condensation due to the air being saturated with moisture and the ambient temperature reaching the critical point: weather. The moisture came from previous precipitation and from evaporation from the ground and from respiration from the plants. One could generate the same effect in the herbarium, up on the station, by a combination of natural and mechanical processes.

  It was a pretty effect there. But they’d never thought of pink clouds. A shame, Ian thought. They should put gels on the spots and arrange tours. See the planetary effects.

  It’s pretty, Julio had said from the barracks door. —It’s pretty, it’s cold, have fun.

  Estevez with his regulated temperatures and filtered air: a life systems engineer with an allergy to the environment was not a happy experimental specimen for the medics.

  Estevez flinched from the day sky. And Estevez admit to his fear? Retreat from it? Not if he had to go back in and throw up, after his glance at the weather. Allergies, Estevez said.

  And it was funny, but it wasn’t, since Estevez couldn’t leave this world. Steroids weren’t the long-term answer, and they hadn’t had an immune response problem in a hundred years and more on-station. Gene-patching wasn’t an option for their little earth-sciences/chemistry lab down on the planet, they couldn’t send specimens Upstairs, they hadn’t anybody trained to run the equipment if they could get it down here, they weren’t a hundred percent sure a gene-patch was what they ought to try under exotic circumstances, anyway, and, meanwhile, Archive had come up with an older, simpler idea: find the substance. Try desensitization.

  Fine, Estevez said, sleepless with steroids, stuck with needles, patched with tape, experimented on by botanists and zoologists. He’d try anything. Meanwhile Estevez stayed under filtration and stayed comfortable and maintained his sense of humor—except it was scary to react to something after two months down here. The medics thought it should take longer. They weren’t sure. There’d never been a hundred-fifty-year-old genetically isolated, radiation-stressed human population expos
ed to an alien world. Not in their records.

  Wonderful, said Estevez.

  Meanwhile all of them who went out on Survey, laying down their little grids of tape and counting grass species, took careful specimens of anything new, bushes, grasses, seeding and sporing plants and fungi and the like. The medics waved a part of that sample past Estevez’ nose and taped other samples to his skin. They hung simple adhesive strips in the wind, and counted what impacted them, and analyzed snips of the filters, figuring at first that whatever Estevez was reacting to had to be airborne. But they were working on a new theory now, and analyzed samples of soil and dead grasses, looking for molds.

  So they added the soil punch to the regular test, and extended the grid of samples beyond the sterilized ground. Ian took a soil sample every hundred meters, a punch of a plastic tube down past the root-line, and left his blue plastic tube inserts in a row down the hillside, to pick up on the way back. The old hands down here could walk briskly. He ambled, stopped often, lungs aching, on the long easterly climb uphill, into the rising sun.

  He’d spotted different color on the east hill yesterday. It looked like a blooming plant, and if it did bloom, in the economy of nature, one could guess it did that to put forth genetic material for sexual combination to produce seed, as the grasses did, a likely and advantageous system according to their own Earthly prejudice.

  That indicated, then, that it was shedding something into the air, and if it was shedding something, one might well argue it was pollen. The committee was still arguing the matter—quasi-pollen or quasi-spores from quasi-flowers, but ask Estevez if he cared. The reproduction of the broadleaf grasses might need debate, and possibly a new nomenclature, but those looked to him like flowers of the sort they grew in the herbarium from Earth seed, red-violet, specifically, different than anything they had yet seen in the landscape.