The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  Me: So what do we do about it?

  Chee: [Closing eyes and holding fingers to temples.] I disbelieve, I disbelieve, I disbelieve. [Opening eyes again and looking at Harque] Shit.

  The Globe

  “I think we have enough to construct a map of the day side,” Yarrun said. He tapped a few keys and a globe appeared on the screen in front of us: north pole at the top of the view, south pole at the bottom. (By convention, all planets are assumed to rotate west to east; once you determine west and east, north and south fall out automatically.)

  On the left of the display, two land masses were emerging from shadow at the terminator. One lay roughly in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The positions of the continents reminded me of North and South America on Old Earth, but the coastlines were very different. For that, I was grateful.

  The daylit part of the north continent formed a breast-shaped bulge jutting eastward into a crystal blue ocean. That sparkling blueness on the view screen was deceptive—the computer used color to represent water depth, not tranquility. On land, various colors represented types of terrain, splitting continents into patchworks of yellow desert, gray mountains, green forests. Every few seconds, a region of the map shimmered for a moment, as the colors were updated on the basis of more specific data. The effect always made planets look more cheerful than they actually were.

  A narrow spine of mountains cupped the lower coast of the northern bulge, extending east into the water to form a tail of rocky islands and rounding northwest into the darkness of the night side. Inside that cup of mountains, the rest of the bulge appeared to be a grassy basin, broken by three linked lakes that emptied into a river flowing northeast.

  The south continent had a concave coastline, gouged by a large bay slightly south of center. North of the bay, the land supported a tropical forest; south was a strip of hilly woodland along the ocean, but thinning to desert farther in. The lowest part of the coast offered jagged fjords, zigzagging down to the whiteness of polar snow.

  “Designating those continents the western hemisphere,” Yarrun announced formally.

  The eastern hemisphere had two continents too. Most of the northern continent had disappeared into the night side. The remainder was an egg-shaped protrusion narrowing to a long peninsular arm that reached almost all the way down to the southern continent. The peninsula had once been mountainous, but the mountains were old and worn with erosion. The range continued back into the mainland of the continent, dividing it into plains to the south and forest to the north.

  The southern continent lay more to the west, and most was still in daylight. The land was shaped like a Y lying on its side, two arms pointing west and the tail pointing east. Between the arms clustered an archipelago of hundreds of hilly islands, no more than a few square klicks each. The northwest arm of the Y held a broad patch of desert, but the rest of the continent was a combination of forest and meadow.

  “What do you think?” Chee asked.

  I pointed to the lakes on the northern continent, western hemisphere. “What’s the weather like here?”

  Yarrun turned a dial. Cloud patterns became visible over various regions of land and sea, but the sky over the lakes was clear. “Temperate mid-autumn,” Yarrun said. “The temperature is only about ten degrees Celsius at the moment, but it’s just an hour after sunrise. It could go up to twenty degrees by the middle of the afternoon.”

  “Shirtsleeve weather,” Chee grinned and Yarrun nodded.

  “Okay,” I decided. “Concentrate the probes there. We’ll see what looks good.”

  “Keep the probes in high atmosphere?” Yarrun asked.

  “No,” I answered, “send them in as low as you want. If the place has natives, we’ll give them a thrill.”

  Fields and Forests

  In a few minutes, the lake district bloomed on the screen, marked with fifteen-meter contour lines. Moderately tall bluffs rose at several points around the lakes, but most of the shore was sandy beach. Inland, the countryside consisted of rolling hills with plenty of streams, a few marshes, clots of forest here and there, and wide stretches of grassy meadow.

  “Looks pleasant enough,” Prope said.

  “That’s what you think,” I told her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There are too few trees,” Yarrun answered for me, scanning some figures thrown up by the computer. “All those open fields…with that kind of soil and climate, you expect forests to encroach on fields and eventually cover them. On a truly Earthlike planet, there’d be trees everywhere unless….” He turned a few dials and checked a readout. “Well, the computer gives seventy percent chance there was a forest fire south of the eastern lake, between ten and thirty years ago…but the fire only took out a few dozen hectares. Not nearly enough to explain the discrepancy. I suppose Melaquin might have evolved a particularly aggressive form of grass that doesn’t need much light—one that encroaches on trees, starving out their roots….”

  “Yarrun is grasping at straws,” I told Chee. “The truth is, this terrain profile looks more like farmland than virgin wilderness. Not meadows, but cleared fields.”

  “Any sign of actual cultivation?” Chee asked.

  “No,” Yarrun replied, “but the probes are spreading their attention over a large area. They could easily miss cultivation on the scale of garden plots. Or larger fields that have lain fallow longer than five or ten years.”

  “Sentients!” Prope said in a hushed tone intended to be dramatic. She had assumed yet another pose, staring at the monitor through narrowed eyes, her head lifted to show the clean white edge of her jaw. “Do you suppose this could be a world of sentients, once great, now fallen? Yet even though the planet lies barren, something has been left behind. Something that has killed before and will kill again….”

  “Shit,” muttered Chee. “I told the council we shouldn’t let Vacuum officers take Pulp Literature as an elective.”

  The Lake

  “Let’s do a full workup on this lake,” I said, tapping the one lowest on the view screen.

  “Why?” Chee asked.

  “It’s closest to the equator. Winter’s coming to the whole lake district, and I’d prefer not to freeze my tail off if we get stranded down there.”

  “Explorer Ramos grew up in an unduly warm climate,” Yarrun explained to the admiral. “She is rather delicate when it comes to chills.”

  I did not rise to the bait. Yarrun’s own home colony was snowed in more than half of each year, and his people had developed an unhealthy reverence for subzero temperatures. They ascribed all manner of beneficial properties to freezing cold: it built stamina, it built strength, it built moral fiber. As far as I could tell, all it built was an irrational disdain for those of us who had the sense to be born in environments free of frostbite.

  “Yarrun,” I said, “check out the south lake. The southern shore.”

  He rubbed a dial. Far below us, one of the four probes sacrificed almost all its airspeed as it arrowed into the water. The splash was big enough for the other three probes to register: a pimple of red marked the splash point on the view map, until the computer factored it out.

  “The water is fresh,” Yarrun reported as the sunken probe began to return data. “The usual natural trace elements; no signs of industrial pollution. Microorganism count measures a bit low.”

  “Does that mean anything?” Prope asked.

  “Probably not,” I told the captain. “Lots of simple factors could decrease the micro count in a given area—anything from a strong current, to a recent rain, to a nearby school of filter-feeders.”

  “Still…it seems a little sinister, don’t you think?”

  I ignored her.

  The Bluffs

  “Let’s concentrate on these bluffs,” I said, pointing to a line of elevation on the south side of our chosen lake.

  “Why there?” asked Chee as Yarrun twisted dials to send the three remaining probes on a close flyby.

  I thumbed a di
al myself to magnify that area of the map. “Along the top, we have open fields…good visibility. If we’re in for a long stay, we can get fresh water from the lake, but in the short term, we’ll be far enough away that we don’t have to deal with the complexities of shoreline ecologies.”

  “What if something unspeakable charges the party and knocks you off the cliff?” Prope asked.

  “If we see something unspeakable, I for one will jump off the cliff,” I answered. “Our tightsuits will protect us from the brunt of the impact, and the long leap is a nice fast escape route.”

  Prope’s expression showed what she thought of people who would jump off a cliff rather than face something unspeakable; but she held her tongue.

  Pictures

  “Pictures,” Yarrun said; and the map on the screen shimmered to show a sunny meadow dotted with yellow wildflowers. Off to one side stood a deciduous tree, something like a maple; a bird flitted into the leaves, too fast to see clearly, but it had two wings, a small head, and a black or dark brown body. A few dozen meters behind the tree, the land dropped off at the edge of the bluffs, down to the sparkling blue lake.

  The view slowly shifted as the transmitting probe moved along. We saw a gray rock outcrop, more deciduous trees, a thicket of brambles. Something darted into the brambles, and my mind said “rabbit”…but an Explorer had to ignore such snap judgments. The human brain is still hopelessly tied to Old Earth; it always interprets a fleeting image as something terrestrial, no matter how alien the creature might really look.

  “Try it ten kilometers to the east,” I said. Yarrun played with dials.

  Prope sneered. “You think the meadow looks too dangerous?” she asked.

  I tapped the screen. “Didn’t you see that animal run into the briar patch?”

  “You’re afraid of a little beast like that?”

  “I’m wary of a little beast like that,” I told her. “I’m afraid of whatever the little beast was running from.”

  Our Choice

  The picture dissolved into a view from another probe, this one hovering over the lake and looking shoreward to the bluffs. The cliffside was tangled with weeds and scrubby bushes. Here and there, swaths of bare sandy soil interrupted the undergrowth—gullies probably washed out by spring runoff. Erosion was slowly undercutting the top edge of the ridge; at one point, the rim had collapsed in an earth slide that dragged down a great strip of brush.

  The probe moved toward the land, and slowly rose to give us a view of the heights: another flowered meadow, with a few lichen-covered outcrops of rock. A short distance inland, a deep ravine ran parallel to the bluffs—probably the bed of a stream on its way to the lake. Trees grew up the sides of the ravine, but none were visible on the flat land.

  “This an example of what we were talking about,” I said, pointing at the screen. “If you have trees growing in the ravine, you should have trees growing in the field—it has to be easier for them to root on level ground than on a slope. But it looks like the flat has been cleared.”

  “Is that enough to scare you off again?” Prope asked.

  “Not in the least,” I answered, working to keep my temper. “Cleared terrain is good for a Landing. You’re less likely to hit something on the Drop, and you have an unobstructed view of things coming to eat you.” I turned to Yarrun. “What about it?”

  Instead of answering, he fiddled with dials, rotating the screen’s view through a slow 360 degrees. The meadow seemed very peaceful…no motion but the gentle waving of grass in the wind. “The motion sensors are picking up a lot of animal life,” he reported, “but nothing big. Mostly on the order of insects, with the occasional field mouse. Which is to say, something warm-blooded the size of a field mouse.”

  It was easy to forget this wasn’t some tame terraformed world, stocked with all the species we knew, and loved, and could kill if necessary.

  “Any thoughts?” I asked the room at large. Prope looked as if she wanted to say something scathing, but knew it would only delay things. “Okay,” I told Yarrun. “Have the probe drop a Sperm anchor. Immortality awaits.”

  Part V

  LANDING

  Our Robing Chambers

  The Jacaranda had four robing chambers for Explorers. This was a matter of prestige. A frigate was equipped with only two robing chambers; a light cruiser had to surpass a frigate in all possible ways, so it had three chambers; and a heavy cruiser like the Jacaranda was obliged to be better still, so it had four.

  All three types of ship carried only two Explorers. There was no prestige in having extra Explorers.

  Suiting Up

  Each of us suited up alone—Yarrun and I in our usual places, Chee in one of the dusty surplus chambers.

  Suiting up was a simple procedure: I stood passively, wearing nothing but a light chemise, while robot arms did all the work. Tightsuit fabric was extremely stiff and difficult to handle. Every six months, I had to go through an emergency drill where I wrestled in and out of a suit without robot help, and it always left my hands aching with exertion.

  As the suit was being sealed around me, Chee shouted through the wall, “‘And from the tents, the armorers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.’ What’s that from, Ramos?”

  “Shakespeare…Henry V,” I replied, glad that I happened to remember; but I hoped Chee wouldn’t quote from Timon of Athens. I had skipped Timon in the Academy Shakespeare course; Jelca had actually said yes to going on a date, and it put me in such a dither, I couldn’t concentrate for three days.

  The tightsuit continued to assemble around me. As it came together, robot eyes scanned every joint and seam, checking for flaws. There were eight such eyes, each as wide as my thumb, each on the end of a metal tentacle that curled through the air with the nonchalance of a cat’s tail. Yarrun had given each eye a name: Gretchen, Robster, Clinky, Fang…I forget the rest. He swore they had different personalities, but I think he was putting me on.

  The eyes swirled about on one last inspection—peering into my suit’s crotch, armpits, the ring around my neck that my mother always claimed was dirty—then the tentacles retracted into the walls and the sterilization process began. I saw none of it; the visor in my helmet opaqued in response to the opening salvo of microwaves. However, I knew I was being bombarded by heat, UV, hard gamma, and several more exotic forms of energy the League of Peoples contended were necessary to cleanse all possible contaminants from the skin of my suit.

  We followed this procedure meticulously whenever landing on unexplored planets—especially ones where there might be intelligent beings. It was a dangerous non-sentient act to introduce foreign microorganisms onto someone else’s planet.

  The sterilization bombardment was another reason why we always let the robots seal us into our tightsuits. If you touched the exterior of a suit with your bare hands, the resulting fingerprints turned a burnt-looking brown under the onslaught of the sterilization energy. You ended up looking like some smear-handed child had wiped chocolate on your crisp white outfit.

  Fellow Explorers didn’t tease you about that, but the Vacuum personnel always snickered.

  Limbo

  When the sterilization was complete, a bell chimed and a blue sign flashed please exercise. For five minutes, we were supposed to get used to moving in the suit, by stretching, picking up small objects, doing deep knee bends, and so on. The Admiralty called this the “Limbering-Up Period.” Explorers shortened the name to “Limbo.”

  It was a point of pride that Explorers never limbered up as specified. The prescribed exercises were invented by an Admiralty consultant who tried on a tightsuit and found (to her surprise) she couldn’t get the hang of it right away. Never mind that Explorers spent much of their four years at the Academy lumbering around in tightsuits. Never mind that by the time we graduated, we felt more at home in a suit than in street clothes. A consultant came in for a day and found she was clumsy; therefore, the Admiralty immediately agr
eed that her ideas about tightsuits should become official Fleet policy.

  The de facto Fleet policy was more mundane: instead of exercising, Explorers used their five minutes of Limbo to empty their bladders. Tightsuits had extensive facilities for handling waste, recycling the liquids into coolant water and compressing solids into cubes that could later fertilize mushrooms; but actually using these facilities required painstaking attention to the alignment of valves, tubes, and bodily orifices. It was better to relieve yourself in the quiet safety of the ship than to try it under more stressful conditions planet-down.

  Besides, thinking about the mechanics of pissing took your mind off the Landing. And if you let yourself get sloppy, your suit would stink of urine for the whole mission. An Explorer could pay a severe penalty for inattention; it didn’t hurt to have that kind of reminder in your nostrils for a few hours.

  One Minute Warning

  The PLEASE EXERCISE light went off. That meant we had one minute left. One more minute of Limbo.

  During this minute, some Explorers prayed. Some sang. Some discussed final details of the Landing over their radios. Some talked to themselves about the great or mundane regrets of their lives.

  Some screamed.

  I don’t know what Yarrun did. He never told me. I never asked.

  If he had asked me the same question, I couldn’t have told him what I did. I just waited. I just waited the full minute.

  The Admiral’s Worth

  But this time, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to wait in silence. Instead, I tapped a button on my throat to turn my transceiver implant to “local.”

  “Admiral,” I said.

  “Hey! What?”

  “Admiral, tell me something you’ve done that you’re proud of.”