Denner's Wreck

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Both mothers gasped in horror at the idea, and each quickly offered to give up her claim to forestall such a catastrophe.

  "'I thought as much,’ said the Adjuster. ‘That story never sounded right to me. Let us see if we can't do better. Give me your hands.’ And he reached out to the two women.

  "Well, naturally, both were hesitant to touch the actual flesh of a Power, but first one reached out, and then the other, not wanting to be bested, did the same. They held hands with the Adjuster for a moment, and then he released them and stepped back. He picked up the baby, then returned it to the cradle.

  "A moment later he announced, ‘This woman is the child's true and rightful mother, the woman who bore him,’ and he pointed to the woman on the left. ‘The sheens prove it.'

  "No one knew why Rawl spoke of sheens, but it's sworn by all who were there that that was his word, or one very like it.

  "When he had made his announcement, the other woman flung herself at his feet, confessing that it was true, that her child had died and she had taken the other in its stead, and the Adjuster bade her rise and stop weeping.

  "'I cannot give you back your dead child,’ he said, ‘but I can give you another just like it. Bring me the remains of the dead child.'

  "And the woman ran behind her house and began scraping at the dirt where she had buried her babe.

  "The Adjuster followed, and the dirt flung itself aside at his gaze. He reached out and pinched the dead child's arm, then returned it to its grave.

  "'In three days,’ he said, ‘I will bring you your child.’ And he vanished.

  "The people wondered mightily at this, and for three days they spoke of little else. Most of them doubted that even a Power could create a new child without a mother's womb, and certainly not in three days; some ventured to guess that Rawl had gone to search the world for an orphan to take the place of the lost infant.

  "But lo, when the three days had passed, the Adjuster returned with a baby in his arms, and the child was newborn, and in fine health, and was in every way the exact image of the poor dead boy that lay behind the house, with hair and eyes and features just the same.

  "'A clown,’ the Adjuster said. ‘This is a clown of the one that died.’ He handed the baby to the dead boy's mother, and then he vanished again.

  "But the odd thing is that the Power's prophecy was wrong, and when the boy grew up he became a fine blacksmith, and not a clown at all."

  —from the tales of

  Atheron the Storyteller

  * * * *

  Crystal shimmered white in the air above the terrace, and Lady Sunlight stepped down onto the pavement. A polychrome torrent of flying sparkles poured after her, glittering in the sun, and a golden-furred creature the size of her hand leapt out beside her, nose up and alert.

  “Hello!” she called. “I'm here!"

  “Hello, Sunlight,” a hoarse voice replied.

  She turned, startled, and found a short man dressed in black standing at one corner of the terrace, where he had been admiring the view to the west. A thick black disk perhaps a dozen centimeters in diameter hovered above one of his shoulders, and a black-furred and bat-winged creature glared at her from the other. A small feelie vine was wrapped around his wrist.

  “Oh, hello, Rawl,” she said. “I didn't know you were here."

  “I'm here,” he replied.

  “I can see that,” she said, annoyed. She shifted her shoulders, drawing her flowing polychrome gown more closely about her and sending her insectile aerial circus into an uproar. “Is Sheila here yet?"

  “She's inside,” Rawl said, jerking his head toward the gleaming windows.

  As he spoke one of the transparent panels vanished, and a tall, handsome woman in a brown body-suit leaned out, brown hair stirring in the breeze. Music spilled out around her, the mellow droning of an ancient Fomalhautian mood piece, and the accompanying images swirled behind her.

  “Hello, Sunlight!” she called. “I'm glad you could come!"

  “Hello, Sheila!” Sunlight answered, waving gaily. “I wouldn't miss it! I brought some flutterbugs to brighten up the place!"

  “Well, then, don't just stand there, come on in, and bring them with you! You, too, Rawl; Autumn House is now officially open."

  “It isn't autumn yet,” Rawl said, as he turned away from the panoramic view of the western foothills and the desert beyond. The floating disk spun slowly, and faded from sight; his creature blinked slowly and curled itself up to his neck. The feelie vine stroked his wrist soothingly.

  “Oh, I know that,” Sheila said. “But I felt like coming up here a little early this year. It's just another hundred hours or so, anyway; that's close enough. Come on in!"

  When his inhuman passenger was secure on his shoulder Rawl strode across the terrace with calm assurance. Lady Sunlight hesitated.

  “Sheila, who else is here?” she asked, reaching down to scoop up her golden-furred companion.

  “No one, yet,” Sheila replied, momentarily puzzled. Then her expression cleared. “Oh, you mean Geste. I haven't gotten hold of him yet; they tell me he's out bothering the natives again. I don't think he knows I came early, so you should have a couple of days—local days, at the very least—before he gets here."

  “Good!” Lady Sunlight said.

  Rawl passed her on his way to the house. “They aren't natives,” he said, almost to himself.

  “Oh, certainly they are,” Sheila retorted. “They were born here, weren't they? They've been here for thousands of years, so they're natives now, and it doesn't matter where their ancestors came from."

  “Yes, it matters,” Rawl insisted, as he stepped into the lounge.

  “Well, yes, it matters,” Sheila admitted, annoyed, “because they're human and not extraterrestrials or artificials, but damn it, Rawl, they're natives now, and we need some term to distinguish them from our own little expedition."

  Rawl just shrugged at that, and gestured for a drink. A silver dish—actually a small, self-aware machine, akin to his own disk-shaped device—that floated in mid-air appeared, a ball of crystalline fluid held in a field above it.

  Sheila helped Lady Sunlight into the house—not that she needed it, but simply as a gesture of welcome. The glittering flutterbugs scattered across the lounge, transforming the seething Fomalhautian imagery to something much quicker, more cheerful and more scattered. The music changed to match, improvised by the household machines, and an odor of cinnamon and new grass wafted through the room. “I wish you and Geste got along better,” Sheila said.

  “Oh, sometimes I wish we did, too,” Lady Sunlight replied, sighing as she settled into a floating red chair. A feelie vine offered itself to her ankle, but with a gentle twitch she sent it away. “We did once, you know—we were lovers for about a decade once. But he's just so childish and immature with his stupid pranks! Do you know what he did? He..."

  Sheila, sinking into her own seat, cut her off. “Yes, I do know, dear, because he came and told me about it himself, and you shouldn't hash it over again."

  “I suppose he was bragging about it."

  “No, he was apologizing, explaining why he wouldn't be able to visit at the same time you did for awhile."

  Rawl sipped his drink through a pseudopod of force, and asked, “What did he do? I hadn't heard."

  “Oh, this isn't anything new,” Sheila said before Lady Sunlight could speak. “I told you about it. It was almost three years ago, now."

  “Oh, that,” Rawl said, shrugging. “Nothing."

  “Nothing!” Lady Sunlight exclaimed.

  “Nothing important,” Rawl amended.

  “Maybe not to you, Rawl, with your damned high ideals, but it's important to me when some young idiot ruins a party for some stupid joke that he should have outgrown before they ever let him leave Terra!” She settled back, stroking her tiny pet. The creature chirrupped softly.

  “Is Geste Terran?” Rawl asked with mild curiosity.

  Lady Sunlight hesitated. �
��Is he?” she asked Sheila.

  Sheila shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. “I never worried about it."

  “Housekeeper, is Geste Terran?” Lady Sunlight demanded of the ceiling.

  “I'm sorry, my lady, but that information is not in any of the household records. Shall I ask the mother ship?"

  “No, don't bother, it doesn't matter,” she said.

  Rawl, his curiosity piqued and disappointed in his companion's disinterest, closed his eyes and put through his own call internally. He learned that Geste had been born in Three Rivers, on Achernar IV, which seemed very appropriate for a prankster; that said, he declined the automatic tell-me-more before it went any further. He was not particularly interested in any of the details of Geste's past just now. He opened his eyes again without having missed a word of the conversation.

  “The housekeeper should have asked Mother without waiting for orders,” Sheila was saying. “I think the programming must have deteriorated pretty badly. I've been putting off re-doing it for sixty or seventy years now, but I think it's about due."

  “Sometimes I hate roughing it here, with these inadequate machines Aulden brought along—I mean, they work, but they aren't exactly state of the art, are they?” She waved at the flutterbugs, the light show, the stone-floored, wooden-beamed room. “But then I remember what it was like back home and decide that it's worth a little inconvenience to have the elbow room,” Sunlight said. She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what the poor machine does with itself when you're not here, don't you?” she asked. “Do you leave it awake?"

  “I let it decide for itself, of course, and I honestly don't know what it did this year."

  Rawl already knew that the housekeeper had remained awake, fussily removing every fleck of dust or trace of wear, shooing away every form of wildlife from the larger bacteria up to fair-sized goats, always without harming them. He knew because he had stopped by to visit with the machine once or twice. He suspected that Sheila knew as much, but neither of them mentioned it. Sunlight, he knew, already considered the wanderers, especially Geste and himself, to be crazy, and would be even more firmly convinced of it if she knew he took pleasure in visiting a mere machine. She thought it was quite bad enough that he spent so much time with the first-wave colonists—the natives, as Sheila insisted on calling them, a name that was at least preferable to “primitives” or “savages,” terms some of the other recent arrivals used.

  Not, he admitted to himself, that their arrival was all that recent any more. They had been on this planet, listed in the ancient records under the curious name Denner's Wreck, for roughly four centuries by local time, four and a half by Terran standards.

  He finished his drink and sat down, trusting the housekeeper to make sure that a good chair, customized to his particular proportions, was waiting beneath him.

  The housekeeper did not fail him. It was not that badly deteriorated.

  “Who else are you expecting?” Lady Sunlight asked.

  “Oh, I'm not really sure,” Sheila replied. “I've told Mother that I'm having my annual autumn housewarming, and I expect Grey to put in his usual appearance and spend the entire time talking about horses and pseudoequines and so forth, and Brenner will probably show up and argue the whole time, and the Skyler may come if I can convince her it won't be too crowded—the usual people. I haven't bothered with actual invitations in almost a century, you know, I just wait to see who turns up. I'm sure that Geste will come by eventually, when he stops teasing the natives long enough to notice what time of year it is."

  “Is that what he's doing?” Rawl asked.

  “Probably,” Sheila replied. “You know what he's like."

  Rawl nodded agreement, disturbing the creature on his shoulder so that it flapped awkwardly upward and set out to find a better perch. “At least he has the grace to try and make amends when he's through abusing them. He doesn't treat them like just more machines or creatures."

  Lady Sunlight sniffed derisively.

  “You think I'm over-protective of them?” Rawl asked. He knew perfectly well what Lady Sunlight thought, and for that matter what each of the others in their group thought, but he asked in the interests of provoking discussion, in hopes of deepening his insight.

  “I think you're too concerned with them,” Lady Sunlight said. “I won't say they don't need protection from themselves, but it isn't any of our business, is it? There's no need for us to involve ourselves with them at all."

  “That's what you said when we landed,” Rawl remarked mildly. “You haven't changed your mind?"

  “No; why should I?"

  “You've had four hundred years to observe them now."

  Lady Sunlight looked at him in genuine surprise. “Observe them? Why in the universe would I do that? I've done all I can to avoid them! Just today, before I left to come here, I had one of those stupid robots chase one of the natives away, because he was spying on me. They're just a nuisance, Rawl; I leave them alone, and all I ask in exchange is that they leave me alone."

  “They're people,” he reminded her.

  “Oh, yes, well, I suppose so, but they aren't anyone I care about. I don't even know why we all insist on speaking their language all the time!"

  “Well, we have to, now,” Sheila pointed out, “because a lot of the machines and creatures don't understand anything else."

  “And whose idea was that?” Lady Sunlight said, glaring at Rawl.

  “Aulden's,” he replied mildly. “He was all for sharing our technology, even more than Imp and Geste and I were."

  “Giving them anything isn't our business,” Lady Sunlight insisted. “That's the job of a cultural analysis team. We're just tourists. I said then, and I still say now, that they're none of our business, and that's the way the vote has always gone."

  “The majority is not necessarily right,” Rawl muttered. Lady Sunlight did not hear him.

  “It's not as if we expected to find them,” she was saying. “When we came here looking for a lost colony we never expected to actually find it! I thought we might find some interesting ruins or antiques, an abandoned settlement, or maybe even a little civilization out of the mainstream, but I never thought we'd find short-lived primitives!"

  There was that word again, and Rawl shut up, rather than risk a messy argument over it. He reminded himself that he had picked the quarrel himself, in the interests of livening up the conversation.

  He resolved to keep his mouth shut henceforth—at least for a few days. Maybe only the fourteen-hour local days, but a few days.

  “I mean, really,” Lady Sunlight was continuing, “how can they go on like that, century after century, living their pointless little lives, farming their crops and killing animals to eat and never getting anywhere? I know they had to start practically from nothing, but they've been here for thousands of years now, and there isn't a city on the planet, and they don't know the first thing about building any kind of machine, let alone engineering themselves useful plants or animals or even bacteria. How can they have lived like this for so long without dying out? It's a mystery to me, I'll tell you that!"

  How, Rawl wondered, could anyone live as long as Lady Sunlight had, and remain so ignorant? History held hundreds of examples of stable agrarian societies, on dozens of planets.

  He had resolved on silence, however, and silent he remained as he gestured to the floater for another drink. He noticed that his companion creature had found itself a place atop a wooden beam overhead, and he amused himself for a moment by looking at the room through its eyes. The entertainment system had given up on any attempt to coordinate its images with the independently-minded flutterbugs, so the low music was now only sound, and the view unimpeded.

  “Excuse me, my lady,” the housekeeper said, slipping into a break in the conversation and fading the music still further, “but you have a call from Brenner of the Mountains."

  “Brenner? Put him through,” Sheila said, brightening. Rawl guessed that she, too, found Lady Sunlight's
attitudes somewhat irritating, and welcomed the distraction.

  Immediately, Brenner's image appeared before them, black-bearded and frowning; he had not bothered with full-figure transmission, so his head and leather-clad shoulders floated in the air unsupported.

  “Hello, Sheila,” he said. “I'm calling to let you know that I may not be able to come to your open house this season."

  “No? But why not?"

  “Oh, well, it seems that Thaddeus is upset about something; I don't have the faintest idea what the hell he thinks I did this time, and the idiot won't tell me, so I couldn't apologize even if I wanted to. Whatever it is, he's shooting at me, and using some fairly serious stuff, too. I don't think it would be a good idea to leave home right now. He might slip something in somewhere, or try to pick me off while I'm travelling.” He shrugged. “I'm sorry, but it's really not my fault."

  Intrigued, Rawl shifted his vision back where it belonged and brushed away his new drink.

  “He's shooting at you?” Sheila asked.

  “Well, yes, but..."

  “He can't do that!” Lady Sunlight exclaimed.

  Rawl rose and stepped into Brenner's field of vision. “Brenner, I know you don't think much of me,” he said, “but I've made a hobby of settling disputes, if you'd like my help in this one."

  “Rawl? Well, I'll be damned, I haven't seen you lately!"

  “I've been around."

  “I'm sure you have. No, I don't need any help, thanks."

  “Brenner, wait,” Sheila said. “Thaddeus hasn't got any business to be shooting at you, no matter what you did. The party hasn't started yet; we're coming down to give you a hand, all three of us. All right?"

  Brenner's mouth twisted slightly, as if he were not sure whether or not to permit himself a smile. “Well, I won't stop you,” he said. “But Thaddeus might."

  Rawl thought he heard relief in Brenner's tone. He ran the recorded words through an emotional analysis in his internal computers, and concluded that yes, Brenner was relieved. He was far too proud to ask for help, or to admit even to himself that he might need it, but he was worried.