Analog SFF, October 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "We want to learn how to make things, as you know,” he said. “But this chronometer takes more tools...” How to explain infrastructure? “It's not possible to do it with what we have here. It would take many, many years for one of us to make anything even a little like this."

  "I understand this, okay,” Boget said. “But this is not from Mesurda,” he said, using the native name for the planet. “It is not for you to just pick up from the ground. Why do you use it? Aren't you...” he groped for the Standard word. “Aren't you shamed? Is that right?"

  "Yes, shamed, ashamed—that is right,” Wayfield said. He wondered from what context Boget had picked up that word. “For us there is no shame in it. I cannot make this, but I can do many other things. The people who can make this cannot do many of the things that I can do, so we make a trade."

  As always Boget listened carefully to the explanation, though his expression remained troubled. When Wayfield was finished, the native thought for a moment, then gave a dismissive headshake. “I understand what you say,” he finally replied, “but I don't think it is right."

  * * * *

  Most of the crew was assigned to do little but learn the local technology. As stinting as the natives were with their belongings—even husbands and wives, if that term meant anything here, didn't share households, or food, or implements—they were incredibly patient and generous in teaching anyone. And they were always disappointed when the crew had so little to teach them in return.

  The weather closed in again, much more fiercely than on the day they ditched. Driving rain and high winds stripped part of the roofing from the main shelter. The crew's misery was partly alleviated by roaring fires, but the storm set back their efforts to learn local skills.

  In bad weather, the natives holed up in their huts. They didn't visit one another's little houses, nor cross the river to the camp.

  * * * *

  When the weather blew out Wayfield hoped to make up time in getting a handle on the natives, but the next conversation with Boget was in the familiar, frustrating rut. Wayfield started the conversation asking about the cattle. Was there something the crew could trade for a few head?

  Boget dismissed the question tersely. “We don't have want for the things we can't make,” he said.

  "Could you give us one animal?” Wayfield asked. Establishing the precedent might be more important than the amount of food he negotiated.

  "Are you children?” Boget asked scornfully. Before Wayfield could reframe the question, the native gestured to a simply made box for spare electronics and asked, “Who is this from?"

  It was as if, by asking the same question about each item that caught his eye, the native hoped he would stumble across one thing that someone aboard Malagasy had actually crafted himself.

  "No one here made that,” Wayfield said.

  As usual, Boget looked pained. He shook his head nervously. “Is there anything you can make yourself?” he finally blurted out, looking highly agitated.

  From what he knew of the culture, and from the native's demeanor, Wayfield imagined that this would be a highly provocative question among his own kind. Yet he sensed Boget was genuinely trying to understand him and his inept shipmates.

  "The others look to you like children do,” Boget said, while Wayfield was still groping for a satisfactory answer to the question. “What can you make that they cannot?"

  "Decisions,” Wayfield said without thinking about it. “I make decisions for them. For the ship. I'm their leader, like you are the leader of your people."

  Boget seemed to consider this. “Leader?"

  "Yes, like you, I tell the others what to do..."

  He stopped because Boget was looking at him open-mouthed. “I don't tell my brothers and sisters to do anything,” he said emphatically.

  "Who makes the decisions that affect the group?” Wakefield asked, again having the frustrating sense that he'd wandered out onto thin ice.

  "I am only Boget,” the native said. “I think about ... about how to live.” Boget seemed to struggle with translating the concept. “Then I talk about it. That is all. The others are no children. No one should tell them what to do."

  Wayfield had an idea. “Are you a theist? A priest?"

  Boget looked at him blankly.

  "Do you believe in a god?” Wayfield asked, pointing at the sky. “A spirit?"

  Boget looked up, than back at Wayfield, his expression still blank.

  "What is a spirit?” Boget said. “Do you have it here?"

  Wayfield's heart sank. Now he was condemned to a long, convoluted explanation of an abstract concept, at the end of which Boget would once again be incredulous and disappointed. This was a conversation he needed to have with Carde present.

  "No, it's not ... I can't show it to you,” he said. “Tomorrow I will tell you about it."

  Boget appeared very reluctant to relinquish the conversation, but after a minute he nodded and waved goodbye, another mannerism learned from the crew.

  Wayfield watched him go. What struck him about Boget's curiosity is why it wasn't shared by more of the natives. Only a small handful sought out the crew, even though many of them spoke Standard passably well. They would talk to crewmembers if approached, and were unfailingly generous in instructing them in local crafts, but seemed otherwise uninterested in the strangers who'd landed in their midst.

  His low mood made him think about Luba and his daughter waiting back home for news of Malagasy. He shook himself—no good going down that road. Work was the anodyne, especially stranded here with no other diversions. What should be the next step?

  * * * *

  Wayfield took Carde to visit the native village. Along the way he filled Carde in on his abortive conversation with Boget about theism.

  "I don't think they have the concept, Skipper,” Carde said. “They bury their dead to keep them from stinking up the place, but they don't seem to believe the dead somehow continue on. I think Boget is just uncharacteristically curious. Uncharacteristically for them, I mean."

  Wayfield digested this as they walked along the length of the village. There were no doors on the huts, just flimsy privacy panels that could be pushed aside with one hand. None of the natives would dream of touching another person's property, even to move it out of the way.

  As usual, the officers spent more time explaining themselves to the natives than the reverse. If information was currency, the natives enjoyed a five-to-one exchange rate in their favor, enforced by sheer mulishness.

  Boget was off the word “spirit,” thankfully, but wanted to know what a “mission” was, having apparently overheard Nylund use the word to one of the crew. Of course the word had no local analog, since it involved acting on behalf of others and following orders. By using the example of hunting to feed a child, Wayfield and Carde thought they had more or less made their point. Then Boget asked what was Wayfield's mission?

  "To get my crew back alive,” he said. “Which is why we need to talk about the cattle."

  Back where? Boget wanted to know, ignoring Wayfield's negotiating sally.

  "Back to—” Wayfield almost said civilized space. “Back to where we came from."

  Boget then asked Carde the same question.

  "The captain's mission is my mission. I take my orders from him."

  "How will you do this mission?” Boget asked.

  "I will keep the crew alive until another ship comes to get us."

  Boget shook his head, a familiar gesture of scorn and puzzlement over these people who depended on the help of others. He said goodbye and headed back to his little house.

  "That didn't get us very far,” Wayfield said, watching the native go.

  "It's eerie, Skipper,” Carde said. “When the children reach maturity they're given their share of cattle and that's it. Nothing else. They have to build their own houses—I think most of them start building their first house before they're seventeen, but that's why the younger people mostly have the worst houses."
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  "How do they maintain a population?” Wayfield asked. “What happens when they get sick?"

  "I gather they die,” Carde said. “It's not a subject they're very interested in talking about."

  That was cheery, he thought. “How are we on food?"

  Carde grimaced. “Not so good. Even at half rations, we probably won't go another forty days before we're out altogether."

  French's luck with the antelope hadn't been repeated. There wasn't any large game within walking distance of the camp. The crew's muscles were adapting more and more to local gravity, which meant they needed to consume more calories just to maintain normal weight.

  The small game around the camp was inedible; the lizards were actually toxic, which is probably why they were so abundant close to the native village. The natives ate none of the lizards or birds around the village. Only the animals that colonized the planet concurrently with the natives—the cattle and antelope—were fit for human consumption, it seemed.

  Carde had sampled the cattle flesh, to no ill effect, by the simple expedient of borrowing a bone set aside for tool making and gnawing off the remaining raw meat. The grasses upon which the cattle grazed and some edible plants had obviously been established in an earlier pulse, but they hadn't yet crowded out all the indigenous fauna, or the biomass it supported.

  They were quickly learning the hard facts of pre-industrial economics. The work expended to find game and bring it back to camp couldn't be greater than the caloric value of the meat itself, and in fact had to be significantly lower than the break-even point to justify the hazards of sending out hunting parties.

  The natives and their cattle seemed to have killed or displaced all the antelope, which were said to be abundant elsewhere. It was a mistake, Wayfield realized, to ground the ship close to the village. Had they landed somewhere in the wilderness, near another body of fresh water, they might have found a high enough concentration of antelope to support the crew until rescue.

  By the time they returned to camp, Wayfield was worn out from the walk, and from wrestling with problems that seemed to have no solution.

  * * * *

  "Population size is tied to the cattle herds, I'm guessing,” Nylund said. “We can't even get them to trade away a stone tool; I can't imagine that they'll part with a head of cattle under any circumstances."

  Unless something changed, the crew was going to starve to death before they could be rescued. Wayfield didn't know what would happen if they tried taking food from the natives by force. The crew was outnumbered almost eleven to one, but the natives only had stone and wood hunting weapons, and a few tools that would be lethal in close quarters. That might be enough if they attacked the crew all at once. There were six sidearms and fifteen assault weapons in the armory, with thousands of rounds for the rifles and a few hundred rounds for the pistols, in addition to some nonlethal munitions. Small arms were the one area in which the fleet's lag in modernization gave the crew an advantage. If they'd been equipped with magnetic rifles like the newer research boats, they would have been dependent upon batteries that couldn't be recharged without a reactor. As it was, given a small amount of warning, they'd be able to defend themselves. Probably.

  How many natives was he going to have to kill to save his crew? Even though the natives’ obdurate unwillingness to share resources, or even trade for them, angered Wayfield and put his crew at risk, he didn't want to kill any of them. And in the back of his mind was the possibility that he might face charges once they were rescued. Worse, his officers might face charges, too.

  He had to decide before they were completely out of food. The crew had to be strong enough to fight, if it came to that.

  He sent for Nylund, Carde, and French. “Let's take a walk,” he said. He didn't want to have this conversation in earshot of the crew or the natives.

  They headed for “Red Hill,” named for the ocher rocks on its flanks. It took a half hour to reach the summit, and all of them except Carde were panting with exertion by the time they reached the top.

  Wayfield took in the view while they let their breathing return to normal. It was just past local noon, and the river was a beautiful silver ribbon between lush green banks. The sun was warm. But not oppressively so, and the small peak caught a good breeze from the west.

  When everyone was breathing normally again, he spoke for a few minutes, laying out his general plan.

  They had two choices: they could leave the landing site and try to find a location with more game, or they could make the natives give up some cattle by force.

  The former course seemed a poor option. If they expended their meager rations on a migration without finding sufficient game, they were dead. Hunting parties had already gone far up—and downstream, and had returned empty-handed and starving. To press further was to ante up on a weak hand.

  If they struck out east or west of the river, they would have to find food and water. Balanced against the certainty of hundreds of head of cattle just a kilometer away, it seemed a bad gamble.

  "Captain, we're all behind you a hundred percent, whatever you decide to do,” the XO said, unnecessarily, Wayfield thought. “These natives were obviously dropped here, or their ancestors were. We don't have any way of knowing whether there are any others on the planet until we're recovered."

  "And?” Wayfield asked.

  "I say take everything we need now, in one shot. The seed plants, breeding cattle, whatever we decide,” Nylund said. “Then we prepare to defend it and see what move they make. We might get lucky; they might complain but not do anything. Or not. If we do it all at once, though, I think we minimize the chances that we'll have to do a lot of shooting."

  "And if not?” Wayfield said.

  Nylund shrugged. “What else can we do, Captain?"

  "What about when we're rescued?” French said, speaking for the first time.

  Wayfield knew of all the officers save himself, French felt the most responsible for the predicament they were in. As the engineering officer he'd subjected himself to endless second-guessing about whether he should have caught the reactor leak when they were still close to a port. Anything that they did to the natives would be an additional burden on French's conscience.

  "It's you who'll carry the freight, Captain, if we get off this rock,” French said. “You'd have to face a board if there's any real shooting."

  "That's a risk I'm prepared to take,” Wayfield said. “Don't concern yourselves with that. I'll face a board in any case, even if we get away with just losing Mansourian and the others."

  "We could lose more people if the natives decide to fight,” Nylund said. “They don't seem particularly warlike, but we'll be taking away their food."

  It was time to stop the discussion. Up to a point, soliciting your officers’ opinions was fine. Doing so gave you more options and made them think creatively, but any further debate on this issue would just increase their trapped sense without bringing any new ideas to the table.

  "Okay,” he said. “I want a tactical plan to grab everything we need at once, with a few contingencies: if they fight all-out; if they fight a little; and if they just accept it. Obviously the plan should minimize the opportunity for confrontation. If we can take the goods by stealth, rather than by force, so much the better."

  * * * *

  French came back from a reconnaissance of the herd the next day. He was streaming sweat from the three-kilometer walk back from the cattle pastures.

  Nylund pushed a crate toward him with her foot. “Take a load off, Frenchie, you look wiped."

  The engineering officer settled gratefully on the box and mopped his streaming face with his sleeve. “That's some hike, Captain, and mostly uphill,” he said. “We probably need to get the crew trained up a bit more before we try herding a bunch of cattle all that distance."

  Wayfield frowned. This was another squeeze. The crew, already on reduced rations, needed more energy to train themselves for physical exertion in planetary gravity.
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br />   "Okay, something to consider,” he said, noncommittally. “How does the herd look? Will we be able to drive them up here?"

  "They're well used to people,” French said. “I've only seen the locals herd them in ones and twos, but they must have to do it in bigger groups when they're moving the cattle to and from the dry-season pasturage."

  "Okay. Anything else?” Wayfield asked.

  French shook his head. “I'll tell you, Skipper, every time I talk to one of the natives it makes me worry about all the things we don't know."

  * * * *

  Though many of the crew had been routinely armed since planetfall, once they started training for the raid, they held their weapons with self-conscious seriousness.

  Once the officers reviewed the plans, Carde and French had drilled the fifteen riflemen and seventeen cattle drivers, drawing out the tactical arrangement with a stick in the dirt while two petty officers kept watch to ensure no natives wandered by.

  Wayfield ruled out a nighttime raid as too dangerous. French, who came from a world with free-roaming cattle, pointed out that it would be harder to get the cattle moving at night, anyway, and harder to control them once they did.

  Though his expertise with cattle was solely gleaned from schoolboy trips to cattle stations, French's opinions heavily shaped the plan. They would have to drive approximately twenty-five head north along the bank from the pasture, through the native village and across the fords and up to their camp, a distance of about three or four kilometers.

  Wayfield worried aloud that the number of cattle and the distance might be beyond the abilities of thirty-odd inexperienced crewmembers.

  "I don't see what else we can do, Captain,” French said. “We ought to be thankful that it's the wet season and there's plenty of grass in the pasturage down here by the river. Dry season they'd be spread out over a much bigger area—it'd take a day or more to round them up."

  The armed crewmembers, led by Carde, would guard the cattle drivers, led by French. If possible they were to try to take at least one bull, though no one had any idea what the cattle's breeding cycle was like.