He smiled at Nia.
“This person is showing teeth the way that Deragu always does.”
“It means that he’s friendly.”
“This is a man?” asked Nia.
I made the gesture of affirmation.
“What are the signs? He is no bigger than you are, and I can’t tell if his fur is different from yours. You both have so little.”
“The texture of the fur doesn’t matter. But the location does. Only men have fur on the lower part of the face. But not all men do. His voice is deeper than mine, and his shoulders are wider. Those are signs.”
Nia frowned. “I cannot hear much difference in your voices, and you both look slender to me.” She made the gesture that meant “so be it.” “Tell the man, it is my wish to be friendly.”
“Okay. If Nia could smile, she would,” I said in English. “But among her people, smiling is not an act of friendship. And—as far as I have been able to tell—they don’t have a comparable expression.”
“Shit,” said Brian. “Does that mean I’ve done something wrong?”
“No. She’s been with me and Derek, who—as you may remember—smiles a lot.”
“Yeah. I remember. The famous Sea Warrior shit-eating grin. Tell her I’m glad to meet her. Tell her this is a great day.”
“I will.”
We entered the dome. The entrance area had a carpet: light brown with a tight weave. The oracle stopped and rubbed his bare foot across it. “Is this a gift that your people offer? Or does it come from another village?”
Most likely the carpet came from Earth. I said, “It comes from another village a long way from here.”
“The people on the plain—my folk and Nia’s—make carpets that are softer and that have patterns done in many fine colors. This is nothing much to look at.”
Nia said, “I know you are crazy, but you ought to remember something about good manners. It is not right to criticize the things that other people have.”
“I would have kept quiet, if this had been made by Lixia’s people.”
We went on down the hall. The dining room was empty. I led my companions into the kitchen, which was empty, too. Sunlight came in through high windows and everything gleamed, even the wooden cutting table, which had just been washed. The kitchen people must have left a few minutes before.
I looked around. “There must be food here somewhere.”
Derek pushed through the doors. “They said—I was hoping. Nia, can I embrace you?”
Nia looked surprised, then made the gesture of assent.
He gave her a quick hug.
“But not me,” the oracle said. “I am a man, even if I am crazy. I do not like to be touched.”
“Okay.” Derek looked at me. “Everyone is running around out there shouting, ‘The natives are coming, the natives are coming.’ I told Agopian to find the kitchen team.”
“Good. What about Eddie?”
“We’re looking for him.”
“What are you saying?” asked Nia.
Agopian came in with the little blond man. He was dressed in denim now, and his long hair was down. He wore it clipped at the nape of his neck. From there it flowed most of the way to his waist.
“Glory be to heaven,” he said.
I said, “They’re hungry.”
He nodded. “Sandwiches. And we have a pretty good lentil soup.”
I glanced at Derek. “Do you think it’s safe for them to eat our food?”
“An interesting question, and one I don’t want to answer on my own. I’d better go find a biologist.”
“I’d like to know what you are saying,” Nia said.
“We are trying to decide if you can eat our food.”
“Why not?”
The blond man said, “Could you people get out of my kitchen? We have strict regulations re sanitation.”
“Does that remark indicate prejudice?” I asked.
“It certainly does. I have a strong prejudice against dirt and against many microorganisms. Now, please, out.”
We went back into the dining room. Derek left with Agopian, and I sat down at the table. Nia and the oracle followed my example. They looked nervous. I couldn’t remember seeing a chair in any native house.
“Your people are noisy,” Nia said.
I made the gesture of agreement.
The oracle looked out the window. “They run around a lot.”
“Only when strangers arrive or when something happens that is unusual.”
“Hu!”
The blond man came in, carrying a pitcher and two glasses. “This is local water. It’s been analyzed and then distilled. It ought to be safe for everyone.”
He set the glasses down and filled them. “Here you are.” He handed one to Nia and the other to the oracle.
They frowned. Nia set her glass down. She touched it lightly. “What is this? It looks like ice, but it is not cold.”
“It is called ‘glass.’ It won’t melt, and you can’t eat it. It breaks easily. If it breaks, the edges are sharp.”
There was ice floating in the glass. A cube. She prodded it. “Is this more guh—more of the same thing?”
I made the gesture of disagreement. “That is ice.”
“Why is it shaped like a box? Why does it have a hole in the middle?”
“And why is it in our water?” the oracle asked.
“My people like their water to be cold, that’s why we put ice in it. The ice is like a box because…” I hesitated. “We make it. We cast it like metal in a mold, and the mold is square on all sides.”
“Aiya!” She lifted the glass and tilted it. Water ran over her chin and dripped on her ragged tunic. “This cup is not well made!”
“That may be,” I said.
The oracle tried. Like Nia, he spilled a fair amount of water. They were nervous, both of them. Why, I could not imagine. Here they sat, surrounded by hairless magicians, trying to make conversation while their stomachs made hungry noises.
They finished drinking the water. The oracle pulled an ice cube out of his glass. He held it on his palm, looking at it. Then he poked it with a finger. “It is ice.” He popped it into his mouth. I heard a crunch.
“You can do that with the ice,” I said. “But not with the glass.”
The oracle made the gesture that indicated understanding. Derek returned, a woman with him as tall as he was and as black as coal. She wore a bright yellow coverall and a pair of truly amazing earrings. Two huge disks made of hammered metal. When she got closer, I saw her eyes. The irises were silver, the same color as the earrings. There were no pupils.
Contact lenses, of course. It wasn’t an Earth fashion. She was from one of the L-5 colonies or from Luna or Mars.
She had a bag in one hand. After a moment I realized the bag was moving. Something inside it was alive. She looked at Nia and the oracle. “Well, they certainly are alien. There can be no doubt of that.”
Derek said, “According to Marina, they ought to be able to eat our food.”
“The trouble isn’t that we are poisonous to one another,” the woman said. “The trouble is the members of one system cannot metabolize the food that comes from the other system. If these people eat our food for any length of time, they are going to end up with some really terrible deficiency diseases. But one or two meals should not hurt them.
“However,” she paused. “Having said all that, I do not recommend that we give them our food. Instead—” She reached into the bag and pulled out a fish. It twisted in her hand. “Ask your friends if this is edible.”
I did. Nia made the gesture of affirmation. Marina gave the fish to the blond man. “Broil it. Add nothing. No butter. No salt.”
“All right,” the man said. He went into the kitchen.
Marina sat down. “There are always allergies, and unpredictable reactions of one kind or another. We don’t want to kill the first aliens we have ever met.”
“No,” I said.
“What
is going on?” asked Nia.
“The little man is going to cook the fish,” I said. “The woman who just came in says it is possible that our food might harm you.”
“Aiya!” said the oracle. “This is a strange experience.”
Nia made the gesture of agreement.
The black woman introduced herself. Her name was Marina in Sight of Olympus, and she was from Mars. She was a biologist. Her specialty was taxonomy. She had spent years classifying the fossil life of her home planet.
“It got to be depressing. All those wonderful little creatures! As strange as anything we had on Earth during the Precambrian. And all of them were gone. Everything was gone. The planet was dead except for us. You can see why I jumped at the chance to join the expedition.”
Nia looked irritated. “It is hard to be around people who do not understand the language of gifts.”
I made the gesture of agreement. The blond man came back with two plates of broiled fish.
“It was hard,” he said. “I couldn’t even add a garnish.”
Nia and the oracle ate quickly and neatly with their hands. The rest of us tried not to stare at them.
When they were done, Nia said, “I am going into the forest. If I can find the right kind of wood, I’ll make a trap. I have been afraid to go down by the lake, since your people seemed to be everywhere on it. But now I am less afraid. And if I cannot eat your food, I will have to find food for myself.”
I made the gesture of agreement.
“So many new things! How do I get out of this house?”
I led her to the door.
“I will be back at nightfall.” She turned and walked through the camp toward the forest. People watched her. I returned to the dining room.
The oracle said, “I would like to sleep.”
“Okay,” said Derek.
They left. The blond man made a stack of plates and glasses. “They are going to have to learn to pick up after themselves.”
“They aren’t likely to be using the dining room much,” I said.
“Maybe not.” He went into the kitchen.
I looked at Marina who said, “I have to go feed an ugly-nasty.”
“What?”
“I am collecting specimens, and I haven’t started giving them Latin names. This has been an amazing day. See you later.”
She left. I sat a while longer, alone, thinking, they are alive. Then I went outside.
The wind blew south and east, carrying the clouds away. By midafternoon the sky was clear. I located the biology dome. It was pale yellow and full of cages. Most of the cages were occupied. Birds whistled. Bipeds made piping noises. The ugly-nasty grunted and snuffled.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I figure it’s a prince, under some kind of a curse,” Marina said. “Look at those warts! Look at those bristles!”
The creature paced, claws clicking. It was designed for digging and had a long narrow snout. Not like an anteater. This creature had a lot of teeth.
“I can see what’s ugly about it.”
“But what is nasty? It throws up when it gets nervous. I think it’s a defense mechanism. It surely put me off.”
“What is it?”
“That is an interesting question.” Marina seated herself on a corner of a table. Next to her was a cage full of little lizards, striped yellow and bright pink. The lizards scurried up the sides of the cage and hung from the top. “There, there, honeys. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
The lizards stopped moving. They hung upside-down, frozen. I had the sense they thought they were invisible.
“Remember that cave you found just before you reached the river valley?”
I looked at her surprised. “Yes.”
She grinned. “I’ve seen the reports. There were paintings on the walls. People and bipeds and some mighty big lizards, but no—I’m not certain what to call them—pseudo-mammals. Or mammaloids. No furry critters.
“We think there is a chance that the two continents here have been separated for a long time and have developed really different ecologies.
“There are birds on the big continent. They could have flown there. And a lot of animals that remind us of mammals. But no bipeds.
“This continent is full of birds and bipeds and animals that remind us of lizards. But there are not a lot of animals with fur. Most are small or, if not small, they are domesticated.”
“They came with the people,” I said. “And the people came from the big continent.”
“Right. That’s what we think. But we are working from almost no data.
“We think the paintings that you saw were done after the first people arrived, but before they’d had much of an effect on the local fauna. Maybe the first people came before the domestication of animals. Or maybe they had boats too small to carry much of anything. As I said, we have almost no data.
“Which brings me to the ugly-nasty.” She waved at it.
It snuffled, then yawned, showing rows of pointed teeth. A black tongue curled. What did it eat?
“Raw meat and leaves,” Marina said. “It is an omnivore.”
“Can you read minds?”
“I can make obvious deductions.” She waved again. “It’s too big to have hidden on a boat—or raft—or whatever the people used to get here. And I can’t think of any reason why anyone’d want to bring a thing like that on an ocean voyage. And it isn’t all that similar to the mammaloids I’ve seen.”
I made the gesture of inquiry.
“You’d better speak English.”
“It isn’t?”
“No. For one thing, it doesn’t have tits. I can find no evidence that it lactates. The animals on the big continent do. For another thing, it has vestigial scales. They’re hidden in among the warts and bristles.”
“Really?” I took another look at the animal. It was hard to figure out what it looked like. A sloth? Not really. A spiny anteater? No. How about a hairy lizard? Maybe. Or how about a cross between a badger and a toad?
Nothing fit. It was its own kind of creature.
“Do you think it lays eggs?”
“Maybe. I won’t know till I cut it open.”
I decided not to think about that. “Where do you think it comes from?”
“I have no idea. Maybe it evolved here. Maybe it came from one of the islands. Maybe it’s from the big continent. It might have changed after it got here, found an empty ecological niche, and grown to fill it.
“It has been pure hell on the ship. We’ve had too many questions and too little information. We’ve been sitting up there and weaving crazy theories, like a bunch of spiders who’ve been given a hallucinogen.” Marina stood up. “Well, that’s over. I’m going out to check my traps.” She grinned. “It’s just amazing. I have no idea what I’m going to find.”
I stayed behind and watched the animals. They all had the faintly miserable look of creatures in cages. Maybe I was reading in. I wouldn’t like to be where they were. Maybe they didn’t mind.
The ugly-nasty looked at me, then paced some more. Was it getting nervous? I decided to leave.
There were two boats at the dock now, and people were unloading boxes. I went to help.
We finished about the time the sun went down. The river bluffs cast long shadows over the camp. The lake still gleamed, reflecting the blue-green sky. The people I’d been helping thanked me. I went back to my dome and found Derek in the hall outside my room. He was dressed in a pair of white denim pants. The pants were soaked. He had nothing else on. “I’ve just introduced the oracle to hot and cold running water. I’d better get back there. He might drown. Go to the supply dome. Get medium shorts and a shirt. There is no way he can wear that rag any longer.”
“Okay.” I turned and went back the way I had come.
By the time I returned, the oracle was out of the bathroom. He wandered in the hall, wearing a floral-print towel. One of our dome mates—an Asian woman—watched him. She looked bemused.
> “Where is Derek?” I asked.
“In the water room. Have you brought me something to wear?”
“Yes. Come on in here.” I led the way to my room. The woman shook her head and went about her business.
I helped him put on the shorts. They were Earth blue with a lot of pockets. The shirt was cotton and short-sleeved: a pullover, yellow with the name of the expedition in bright red Chinese characters. He needed help with that, too.
When the struggle was over, I stepped back and looked. His fly was closed. His fur was only a little disheveled.
Derek came in.
“How do I look?” asked the oracle. “Am I impressive? Is this the way a man is supposed to dress among your people?”
“Yes,” said Derek.
“Look behind you,” I said.
He turned and faced a mirror. “Aiya! It is big! Even my mother the shamaness did not have a whatever as big as this one.” He peered at his reflection, frowning, then baring his teeth. He picked a fleck of something out from between his upper incisors. “I hope Nia comes back soon. I am hungry. It’s hard work taking a bath the way you people do it.”
“You can say that again,” Derek said.
“No,” said the oracle. “Once is enough. I want to go out now. Your houses are too little. I feel as if the walls are pressing in on me.” He pressed his hands together in illustration.
“You take him,” Derek said. “I want to change my clothes and take a nap.”
“Okay.”
The camp lights had come on. They shone over doors and from the tops of metal poles. A hillclimber bumped past over the rutted ground. Someone called to me. I smiled and waved, not recognizing the voice.
We ended on the dock. There were lights on it: little yellow ones that illuminated our feet and the surface of the dock. I wasn’t entirely certain what it was made of. Cermet? Fiberglass? Something gray and rough. It rocked under our weight. The segments rose and fell every time a wave came in.
Bugs crawled around the lights. They were all the same kind: narrow green bodies and huge transparent wings. The wings glittered.
“I am almost ready to eat those,” the oracle said.
I looked down the beach. A person came out of the darkness carrying a string of fish. “Nia?” I called.
A Woman of the Iron People Page 38
