Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  AUTHOR ’S NOTE

  “Hives” came about as the result of several ideas colliding. The little SF I write tends to be stories about ordinary folk, and how technology may enhance or, more likely, complicate everyday life. “The street finds uses for technology,” as the saying goes, but those uses are not always benign.

  There’s been a lot of attention in the media in recent years on young girls in groups, and how the competition for status in the schoolyard pecking order can damage a girl’s psyche. This theme is addressed in such books as Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons and Fast Girls by Emily White, as well as the movie Mean Girls.

  Cell phones are a technological marvel whose unexpected consequences are showing up all over, from buses becoming rolling phone booths for commuters to the “flash crowds” that a certain candidate made use of in the last presidential primaries. And, of course, cell phone use is growing fast among teenagers, whose need to connect to friends was already well established with old-style landline phones.

  Curiously, one study I read about noted that most cell phone calls are not for emergencies, but instead for the most ordinary of communications—just keeping in touch. Like the baaas within a herd of sheep, indicating “I’m here. We’re all here. It’s okay. All’s well.” Constant reassurance for social creatures is key.

  And young girls are intensely social. So for teen girls, especially the shy and awkward, wouldn’t it be wonderful, even addictive, to be in constant, voice-in-head-close contact with their friends, their clique, their in-group? It would be like heaven…until it stops. And then it’s hell.

  The additional note of “telepathic sound” was something I came across on the Internet. Given the wide-open range of stuff you find on the Web, all must be taken with a grain of salt until corroborated, but there were enough other references that it carried the whiff of truth, and added a healthy dose of paranoia to the plot.

  So all these factors came together in the writing of “Hives.” Curiously, not long after I’d finished the first draft of the story, I saw a commercial on TV for A Major Phone Carrier. This ad described a woman setting up a prototype cell network on her home computer. Her teenage daughter notices and asks how it works. Then promptly borrows it to get her friends together for an afternoon outing. Gave me chills. Looks like phone “hives” could be just a few years away. I just hope the dark side of the story doesn’t happen, too.

  Alan Dean Foster

  PERCEPTION

  Stefan didn’t want the assignment to Irelis. He didn’t want to work at the Outpost. He’d seen pictures of Irelis, and the Outpost, and the Allawout natives, and found all of them unpleasant in equal measure. But advancing up the company ladder meant climbing the rungs in order. Skipping one now and then, if you were fortunate. For a young apprentice such as himself, Irelis was a rung that couldn’t be skipped.

  So it was that he found himself installed for a year at the Outpost, a self-contained subdivision of the larger Irelis station set in the middle of a swamp. It could as easily have been anywhere on Irelis except at the poles. Swamp or savanna, take your choice: they were what covered nearly all of Irelis except for the murky, algae-coated oceans. Of the two, the savannas offered the more pleasant prospect, with drier, cooler weather. Unfortunately, humans weren’t the only ones who preferred the plains to the swamps. So did the several dozen species of ferocious biting arthropods that drained body fluids without discriminating between planets of origin.

  The Allawout got around the swamps on primitive flat rafts fashioned from fiberthrush and covango saplings fastened together with strong, red looporio vine. Ages ago, some Allawout Einstein had figured out that if you built the rafts with points at both ends, not only would they go faster through the tepid, turgid water, but you wouldn’t have to turn them around to reverse direction. That discovery represented the height of Allawout nautical technology. The idea of a sail was beyond them. Ignoring directives that forbade supplying indigenous aliens with advanced knowledge, visiting humans who observed the locals struggling with poles and paddles had taken pity on them and introduced the concept of the rudder, an innovation that the natives readily adopted and for which they were inordinately grateful.

  To the Outpost the Allawout brought the pleasures and treasures of the Irelis hinterlands: unique organic gem material; seeds from which exotic spices were extracted; sustainable animal products; barks and resins and flowers from which were derived uniquely unsynthesizable pharmaceuticals; and their own fashionable primitive handicrafts. Widely scattered and hard to find, located in disagreeable, dangerous country, these diverse products of Irelis found their way into the insatiable current of interstellar trade through the good offices of the dirt (literally) poor natives. Everyone benefited, and the Commonwealth government was happy.

  Stefan was not happy. He did not quite hate Irelis, but he disliked the place intensely. The swamp, for one. There was nothing in the way of entertainment. Worst of all was having to work with the locals. None of the Allawout stood taller than a meter in height—if you could call it standing. In the absence of anything resembling legs or feet, it was hard to tell. They slimed their way along, their listless pace in perfect harmony with their sluggish metabolisms. A quartet of narrow but strong tentacles protruded from their cephalopodian upper bodies. These were covered in a fine, hairless, slick skin not unlike that of a frog or salamander. From the center of the upper bulge that was not quite a proper head, two large round eyes marked by crescent-shaped pupils took in the swamp that was their world. They had no external ears, no fur or horns, and wore no clothing. Not that there was much to cover.

  When they burbled at one another in their rudimentary, vowel-rich language, bubbles frothed at the corners of their lipless mouths. They had no proper teeth and subsisted on a wide variety of soft plant life, supplementing this with the occasional freshwater mollusk that did not require overmuch chewing. Soon after arriving, Stefan had had the opportunity to see them eat. It was not a pretty sight.

  It did not take him long to learn from his three coworkers that the Allawout were as oblivious to human sarcasm as they were to much of the world around them. Making fun of the slow-moving, slow-thinking natives was one of the few spontaneous entertainments available to the Outpost’s inhabitants. Except when a supervisor came visiting, it was a sport they indulged in shamelessly, taking care to do so only out of range of the station’s largely humorless scientific complement. By the time Stefan’s tour of duty was half over, his own personal file of Allawout jokes had grown as fat as one of the natives.

  Not that they were inherently unlikable, he mused as he lazed his way through his daily turn at the trading counter. On his right was a projector that could—magically as far as the Allawout were concerned—generate a three-dimensional, rotatable image of anything in the Outpost’s warehouse. Visiting natives who made endless demands of the device simply for its entertainment value soon found themselves cut out of the trade loop. Once word spread among the local clans, this abuse stopped. The Outpost, they learned, was a place in which to conduct serious trade.

  The tripartite clan that was now leaving carried between them several parcels sealed in the ubiquitous, biodegradable plastic wrap that was used to package all trade goods. As he watched them depart, Stefan directed the room’s air purifier to grade up a notch. Allawout body odor was no more pleasing than their appearance. In a few minutes the atmospheric scrubber would have removed the last lingering traces of the clan’s visit.

  Pervasatha waited for the cheerful, noisily bubbling family to exit before coming in. Despite his special cooling gear, he was sweating profusely. A number of visiting supervisors and scientists felt that would have been a better name for the planet: Sweating Profusely. It was certainly more descriptive than Irelis IV.

  “Got something for you, Stef.” Perv, as his friends and coworkers called him, leaned on the counter. The corners of his mouth twitched. He seemed to be striving hard to repress a grin.

  “Not another
carved Ohrus tooth.” Stefan eyed the other young man warily. “They’re pretty, but we’ve already got a boxful.”

  “Nope. Better than that.” The grin escaped its bounds. Perv gestured toward the door. “Enter! Come inside.”

  A native slid slowly inward on the familiar, disgusting trail of lubricating gunk. Behind it, the floor did its best to clean up after the visitor. Unfeeling mechanical though it was, Stefan still felt sorry for the autocleaner. Unlike the rest of them, it could never look forward to a day off. Not on Irelis.

  Perv’s grin was wider than ever. “You remember that directive? Not last week’s—the one before. Page twelve. ‘All company Outposts must strive where possible to encourage local life-forms to participate in the ongoing activities of a given station, with regard to maintaining and enhancing benign relations between the human and native populations.’”

  “Yeah,” Stefan replied guardedly. “I remember it. So what?” He slapped at his forehead, smashing something small, irritating, and resistant to the cocktail of insecticides that he had liberally applied earlier.

  Perv gestured grandly at the newcomer, who was gazing around at the interior of the station with eyes that were even wider than normal. “Meet your new native assistant!”

  Stefan blanched, recovered when he thought it was a joke, eyed his friend in disbelief when it began to sink it that it was not. “Don’t try to be funny, Perv. It’s too hot today.”

  “And it’ll be too hot tomorrow, and the day after that, and the one after that also. But this is still your new assistant. Morey says so.”

  “Screw Morey!” As if the native were not present, Stefan gestured in its direction. “We don’t have indigenous assistants. No local works inside the Outpost.”

  “We do now,” Perv shot back. “They do now.”

  The other man’s eyes narrowed. “Then where’s your assistant?”

  “Regulations say that, at this point in the Outpost’s development, we only need one. She’s it. She’s yours.” His smile flattened. “Lack of seniority says so.”

  “‘She’?” A dubious Stefan studied the lumpish native, who continued to ignore the two young humans as she gawked at the interior of the trading room. “I thought the biologists hadn’t figured out how to sex them yet.”

  Perv stood away from the counter. “Far as I know, they haven’t. But that’s the classification I’ve been given.” He winked and turned to go. “I’ll leave you two alone now.”

  The other man gestured wildly. “Hey, wait a minute! What am I supposed to do with this—with ‘her’?”

  Perv kept walking. “Not my concern. Morey says she’s your new assistant. Get her to assist. Me, I’ve got work to do on the bromide concentrator or the delay’ll go down on my record.” He exited at a brisk clip, not looking back.

  Stefan was once again alone in the room. Well, not quite.

  Maybe if he ignored the native, it would go away. Sitting back down, he muttered the “unpause” command and resumed watching the game he had been engrossed in prior to the trading clan’s arrival. Images danced in the air half a meter in front of his eyes. After a while, he became aware that he was not alone. As was often the case, it was the smell that tipped him off.

  Advancing silently on its sheet of motive slime, the Allawout had sidled up as close behind him as it dared, and was dutifully gazing up at images whose origin, meaning, and purpose must be as alien to it as tooth gel.

  Nostrils flaring in revulsion, he looked over his shoulder and down at the creature. Morey had declared it was his new assistant. Until he could make the notoriously gruff Outpost administrator see reason, Stefan realized with a sinking feeling that he was probably stuck with the creature. (But fortunately, he told himself, not to it.) If he abused it physically, there could be trouble. Members of the station’s scientific contingent, who infrequently mixed with the much-younger and less experienced team of trader apprentices, would report him. His advancement up the company ladder would be questioned, and he might even be dropped down a rating or two. That could not be allowed to happen. Not after the horrid half year he had already been forced to put in on Irelis.

  Swallowing his distaste, he asked in Terranglo, “Do you have a name?”

  The dumpy alien quivered as if trying to slough off its skin. Flesh-protecting mucus oozed from pores and slid down its sides. “I am chosen Uluk.”

  At least it could talk a little, Stefan thought. Come to think of it, the staff would not have selected one to work inside the station, with humans, unless it had acquired at least some facility with the visitors’ language. Then something happened that completely broke his train of thought.

  Raising a tentacle, the Allawout pointed at the hovering wordplay image and said, “Pretty—what means it?”

  It was the first time in nearly six months that Stefan had heard a local ask a question not directly related to trading. Minimal fluency he had expected; intellectual curiosity, if such it could be called, was something new. Without pausing to wonder why he was bothering to reply, he struggled to explain something of the subtle nature of a wordplay.

  She did not understand. That was not surprising. Had she comprehended even his childishly simple explanation, he would immediately have passed her along to the scientific staff as an exemplar of Allawout acumen. On the indigenous scale of intelligence, she doubtless qualified as quite bright. About at the level of a human eight-year-old, only without any book learning to draw upon. It was unlikely she would grow any smarter.

  But as the months progressed, she did. Or at least, her vocabulary increased. Struggling with the most fundamental concepts, she did everything he asked of her, from laboriously dragging trade goods into the back chamber to be sorted, cataloged, prepriced, and packaged for shipment off-world to making suggestions to visiting locals about what goods the strange dry-skin folk preferred and would pay well for.

  It was funny to see how the other natives deferred to her. Even mature males, thick of tentacle and sharp of eye, seemed to shrink slightly in her presence. For a wild moment he thought she might be some kind of local equivalent of royalty, much as the notion of an Allawout princess seemed a contradiction in terms. Belleau Lormantz, one of the xenologists, assured him that could not be the case.

  “In the nearly twenty years there has been a human presence on Irelis, no evidence has surfaced of any level of government above that of the extended family or clan. They haven’t even achieved the tribal level yet. They’re just starting to emerge from the hunter-gatherer stage.” Belleau had a nice voice, Stefan mused. About the nicest voice on Irelis. And unlike most of the scientists, she was nearly the same age as he was.

  They were sitting together on one of the elevated walkways built atop balumina pilings that had been driven down through water and muck into the reluctant bedrock far below. Irelis’s sun, redder than that of his homeworld, was setting behind red and yellow fiberthrush, the light peeking through the fronds to illuminate the station’s sealed-together, prefabricated modules. Belleau was almost as reflective as the metal walls, he decided.

  A voice sounded behind them, plaintive yet insistent. “Stef-han, what should I do with kaja bowls just buying today?”

  He looked around irritably. “They go in the back, on the bottom shelves on the right-hand side. You know that, Uluk!”

  Her tone did not change, and she had no expression to alter. “Yes, Stef-han. I will make it so.” It took her several minutes to slip-slide back inside.

  He returned to contemplating the sunset, the violet underside of the evening cumulus filling his head with thoughts that did not belong in as unpleasant a place as the Outpost.

  “I hear that you’re leaving the station.”

  She nodded. “Sabbatical. On Rhenoull V. To consolidate my reports, put some into book form, give lectures—that sort of thing. I think I’ll be back, to start in on my advanced work. There’s a lot about these creatures we still don’t know.”

  “Is there that much more to learn?�
� When she did not comment, he added, “How do I know you’re coming back, Belle?”

  “Because I say so. Because my work is here.”

  He peered deep into her eyes. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and cheeks. She was wet, tired, unkempt, and beautiful. “Is that the only reason?”

  She turned away from him, to the sunset. “I’m not sure—yet,” she replied candidly. “I like you, Stefan. I like you a lot. But I’m so deep into my work that much of the time I feel like I’m drowning.”

  “Drown in me,” he told her with more intensity than he intended.

  Her hand slipped sideways to cover his. “Maybe when I come back,” she told him frankly. “When I have more confidence in my own future. Then, maybe—we’ll see. You’re a little young for me, Stefan.”

  “I’m not that young.” When he reached for her, she leaned away, laughing affectionately.

  “No, not now. As sweaty as we are, if we hold each other too tightly, we’re liable to slip right past each other and into the water.”

  He laughed, too, and settled for squeezing her hand, and waiting for the alien sun to finish its day’s work.

  He sweated out another six months, her absence made all the more frustrating by his having to deal with Uluk. Just when it seemed she was acquiring some real skill, she would do something supremely stupid. He was forced to reprimand her, sigh in exasperation, and explain the procedure all over again. She would listen patiently, indicate understanding, go along fine for a while, and eventually repeat the same mistake. Something about the Allawout seemed to render them incapable of retaining any pattern of information for more than a few weeks at a time. It was as if the entire species was afflicted with Attention Span Deficit Disorder.

  To make matters worse, he had to endure the endless jokes and gags the rest of the staff enjoyed at his expense. His only compensation was the occasional reluctant, approving grunt from Administrator Morey, who recognized the strain his most junior employee was operating under, plus praise from the scientific staff. The behaviorists in particular would seek him out to query him endlessly about his conversations with the Allawout.