“OK, friends,” I told them. “I need to go back to town for dinner.”
They followed along with me until we were about a kilometer from town. I walked on a short distance, then turned and waved to them rotating my palm the way they did their tips. “See you tomorrow.” It seemed to amuse them. One of them hooted, a low sound from somewhere underneath him, and they scurried back to the south.
Jake met me just outside of town where he was keeping vigil.
“I’m glad you’re back. I was watching the feed from one of Star’s sensors but I didn’t trust the Tarakana to let you leave until the last of them turned back. I haven’t told anyone about your experience with them because I knew Angela would have wanted to kill you and me both. Assuming you made it back alive.”
“Jake, it was amazing. It was like they knew what I was looking for and led me straight to it. Best local guides I’ve ever worked with.”
“I’m not surprised. After completing the dissections I would be surprised if they aren’t smarter than you and with more sense.”
I looked at him. “You’re serious.”
He stopped while we were still a few hundred meters away from the building. “It scares me a little. They have a distributed nervous system but what must be the brain is huge and there are parts in them,” he shook his head, “I have no idea what they are.
“Maybe they control the color changes?” I suggested.
“There’s much more to them than that. They breathe through their skin, at least in their current form. The cellular structure makes me think they might be able to change shape as well. Although if they could, why would all of them look the way they do?”
“Because they think they are so beautiful,” I answered without thinking, knowing it was true.
“Sure. What are you going to put in your report to Angela?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid she won’t let me go back out if I put in everything I felt. Or she’ll think I’m crazy and have Star start mixing meds in with my breakfast. I’ll mention the Tarakana going along with me but I want something a little more empirical before I report everything.”
Jake nodded. “Let’s get something to eat. Waiting for you to come back made me hungry.”
I looked around our makeshift mess hall. “Where is our chaplain this evening?”
“She’s having dinner with her new flock,” Charlotte answered. “The Hetman gave her permission to use an old church on the square next to the courthouse. She was talking to a good sized crowd when I left town.”
“Is she safe?”
“I’m sure she is for now. The colonists seemed eager to hear what she had to say. I think it’s been awhile since there was any authority here other than the Hetman. If we stay long he may regret letting her talk.”
Charlotte nodded toward the table where she was sitting with Peter Jenkins and Hannah. “Why don’t you get something to eat and join us?”
“Are you sure?”
“It would be good for both of you. Controlled environment, plenty of interesting things to talk about. If you say anything offensive I’ll tell you to leave.”
I filled my tray and sat down opposite her. “Hannah.”
She looked at me. “Ted. How did your field trip go today?”
I told her about what I had found but left out the stranger parts of my experience with the Tarakana. Still, it was hard not to sound excited by the geology I was exploring.
“How are the negotiations going? Is Angela making any progress?” I asked.
She tipped her head and looked at me before answering. “You don’t like the Hetman and his inner circle, do you?”
“I don’t know them well enough to dislike them.”
She smiled. “Still not a good liar, Ted. But it’s OK if you hate them. They have no place in the Union. We prefer our brutality to be sheathed in layers of civility like the conflicts on Dulcinea. When this colony is relocated the Hetman and his group will have to be replaced with more diplomatic men. And women.”
Charlotte gave me a warning look which I ignored.
“He doesn’t seem like the kind of man who will graciously step aside when that time comes.”
She leaned across the table toward me, her eyes intense. “Exactly. You see it too. There are others here who are ready to step in during the transition, but Angela won’t address them, she refuses to even talk to them. They could be the leaders these people need. They have a vision of what their future could be.” She pulled back, realizing she had said too much. “I’m sorry, my emotions still get the better of me.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re wrong. More like brilliant.” Her excitement swept me along with her, as it always did.
She looked away from me, her face flushed. “I need to excuse myself, get some air.” She got up and walked toward the exit.
“You shouldn’t encourage her outbursts, Ted,” Peter warned. “She needs to relearn the ability to express herself calmly. Whether she’s right or wrong, brilliant or stupid is irrelevant.”
“I’m sorry. It’s the first time I’ve seen anything in her eyes other than anger in a while. That wild look she gets is why I—” I stopped and looked at them. “How much damage did I do?”
Charlotte took my hand. “Not much. It’s going to be a few more weeks before she has full control. Until then, stay back and be there when she needs you, not the other way around.” She looked at Peter, then back at me. “Ted, you do know that your emotions are just as messed up right now as hers, right? You keep acting like you want things to be the way they were on Dulcinea but you know that can’t happen, not for many months and not unless you both choose that path when the mission is over.”
“I know that, I know I have to wait, but then I see her or talk to her and then nothing else matters. I want the impossible, even knowing it’s impossible.”
“Not impossible, just not here, just not now.”
I woke the next morning at 0238. The walls we had used to build out the dorm were thin and I could hear the sound of Hannah crying in the dark, Charlotte’s low voice comforting her, knowing that it was my fault.
After she stopped I was able to sleep for only a few more hours. I was up early drinking a cup of coffee by the time the sun was rising over the red hills east of town.
Alice sat down next to me, looking bulky in layers of sweaters and coats against the morning chill. I was not surprised to see her.
“I hear you did good work yesterday,” I told her.
“I did. ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few’. ”
“I was going to ask you to help analyze what I collected yesterday but it sounds like you plan to be a chaplain today, not a geologist.”
She looked at me closely. “Yes, a chaplain today because that’s where I am needed most. Someday, maybe, something else.”
“I want to start Star chewing on my samples to get dates for each layer. She should have them done by the time I get back and maybe you’ll have time to help load them into the simulation.”
“That will take her days. Where are you going?”
“The caves ten kilometers north of here. I’ll leave this afternoon and be gone four or five days at least. I’ll take food and water for a week but I’ll be limited by how much I can carry back. Have you ever been spelunking?” She shook her head. “I’ll probably be taking several trips there. You should come with me some time. Jake refuses. When we were exploring once, he got stuck in a narrow passageway about three hundred meters down. His lights failed, and his radio died…” I looked at the expression on her face. “I’m not doing a very good job of talking you into this, am I?”
She shook her head again and smiled at me. “I’ll be here waiting for you. Let me know when you’re back and ready to work on the simulation.”
I spent all morning preparing the samples and making sure Sta
r understood what to look for to start building a geochronology for Cleavus. I finished before lunch and Jake promised to make sure the auto-loader was working and to let me know when the testing was completed. I was busy stuffing packages of food into my pack when Angela found me.
“I read your report from yesterday. It looks like a promising start and I’m looking forward to what the radiometric dates tell us. Seeing Cleavus the way it is now, it’s hard to imagine it covered by a planetary ocean.”
“It’s funny,” I told her. “As a geologist, I look at the layers in the hills and it’s all I can see. Ocean, then desert, then ocean again over and over.” I smiled at her and stuffed more food into the pack. “The ocean is coming again. Give me a week and I’ll tell you when.”
“Have a good trip, Theodore, and let me know what the Tarakana do. Our focus is on reintegrating this colony but I don’t want to ignore the native animal life.” She tapped her ear. “Stay in touch.”
Finished with the provisions, I picked up my freshly printed camping equipment and was preparing to leave when I saw Hannah sitting at our long dining table eating lunch by herself and working on something on her display pad. I closed my eyes, willing myself to open the door and leave. I sat down on the opposite side from her, a couple of chairs down and leaned my pack against the table. I had a brief glimpse of what she was working on before she flipped the pad over. It had looked like the Sleeping Star algorithm.
“I’ll be gone for the next few days exploring the caves north of here,” I told her, not looking directly at her. “If you need to talk to me, just say my name and I’ll hear you.”
She nodded, touching her ear. “Thank you.” I wasn’t sure if she was thanking me for the offer or for leaving. “Will you have your friends with you, do you think?” she asked.
“My friends?” I looked at her then. She had a mischievous glint in her eyes.
“The Tarakana. I read your full report from yesterday.”
“The full report? I thought only Angela could… Never mind. Yes, I imagine they’ll be walking along with me.”
“How smart do you think they are?”
“Jake thinks smarter than me. A low bar, I know, but I think it’s possible after being with them yesterday. There are things I didn’t put in the report or tell you about at dinner last night.”
“I thought so. Did you talk to them? Do they have a language?”
“I don’t know. It was like we understood each other.” I looked into her eyes and the wild look was there carrying me along with her. “They might, but it’s so different that I’m not hearing it yet.”
“A non-human language.” Her eyes sparkled as she considered it.
I started to open my mouth, about to invite her to come with me, to leave with me right then, to go study the Tarakana for a week or more, to share my tent with me. I stood up, breaking the spell.
“I need to leave. I want to find a good place to camp before it gets dark. I’ll let you know if I start to understand them. So far it’s all been kind of subliminal.”
“Of course. If there is a language maybe you can co-author my next paper with me.”
“I’d like that.” I gave her a last smile and made it through the door without looking back.
The first Tarakana met me just outside of town as if it had been waiting for me. We were soon joined by others. Although not as numerous as the day before, these were more bold, walking close to me, touching my hands, nudging up against my legs. They were soon encouraging me to deviate from the path Star had mapped to the caves and I followed along willingly, ignoring her whispered not recommended in my ear. We reached a deep valley about an hour later. Star had planned for me to cross well to the east, down and back up a complicated series of switchbacks. The Tarakana led me to the valley’s narrowest, steepest section where a five meter wide bridge spanned a gap of little less than a hundred meters.
“Star,” I asked, “how did you miss this? Do you have one of your sensors over me?”
“I see it, Mr. Holloman. It does not show up in my survey imagery. Could it be recent construction?”
“I don’t think so.” I walked across the bridge, tapping my fingers on the railings. “It’s made of some kind of metal.”
“I’ll have the sensor drop down for a closer look after you and the creatures near you have passed.”
“Thanks.”
It was late afternoon when I reached the first cave entrance having crossed a terrain of basins and sink holes for the past hour. The opening was at the bottom of a wide basin and I could feel cold air welling out of it as the cave breathed.
I dropped by backpack and stretched, rolling my head back and forth. The two Tarakana that were still with me seemed to find the display interesting. “I don’t suppose you guys know of a good hotel nearby. Soft beds and maybe a pool?” They stood facing me rotating their tips back and forth. “Or a nice place to set up my tent would be fine too.”
I followed them a short distance to an ideal spot. Drifted sand made a flat, firm floor and it was protected from wind on three sides by outcrops but with a clear view of the sky.
“So,” I said as I laid out a ground cloth and started erecting my tent, “there are some things that are bothering me about you. Like how is it that you know what I want? How do you make me feel like I kind of understand you?” I gestured at one with a tent stake. “And how the hell did you hide that bridge from our optical and radar scans?” I finished the tent and built a fire ring a few feet away while the Tarakana continued to watch. There was no wood but I had a dozen self-igniters that would each burn for several hours. I sat down in front of the fire when I was finished and the Tarakana came close, turning one side, then the other to the flame seeming to enjoy the warmth as much as I was.
I shook my head at them. “Or are you just curious about me like I am about you?”
I logged onto my pad and wrote my daily report while the two Tarakana were occupied with the fire, passing the tips of their tentacles quickly through the flame and then gently butting their heads together. I had a feeling of amusement from them, like they were playing.
I continued typing while I scolded them. “If you burn your tentacles off don’t come crying to me.”
A minute later one of them hooted and I looked up. The colors on their tips now pulsed the same colors as the flame, making it look like the ends of the tentacles were on fire.
I laughed. “Great. Surrounded by super intelligent aliens and they send the two class clowns to keep me company.”
I submitted my report, including my concerns about how Star had missed seeing the bridge, and the three of us sat around the fire while I ate dinner. I talked to them late into the evening. I told them my life story, about what Earth was like, what I enjoyed about my friends, how the Union was being reunified and finally, about Hannah. The Tarakana sat by the fire listening. I don’t know how much they understood, but they let me talk until it was all out of me. I watched the sky for a while, seeing an occasional meteor flash briefly in the dark. Sometime later I noticed that their tentacles were lying flat against their sides and I climbed into my tent and slept peacefully through the night.
CHAPTER 10
MONSTERS
SOMETHING WAS SPLASHING IN THE water but I was having trouble finding it. The beam from the light strapped around my helmet swung across the surface finding only ripples. I was a couple of hundred meters below ground and an hour away from the cave entrance near my camp. I had sent one of Star’s sensors off exploring the cavern my first morning and it had created the map that I was using now, keeping me from wasting time on blind passageways and guiding me to more interesting features.
Another splash somewhere to the left. I turned quickly. Nothing but ripples, too large to be from water dripping from the ceiling. I knelt and filled a couple of vials from the pool and made a notation on their labels.
“Next time,” I said aloud, “I’m bringing a boat with me. See if you can hide then.”
Five days of exploring had yielded a good thirty kilos of material for me to carry out and hundreds of images of cave formations and of the karst features on the surface. The Tarakana had accompanied me most of the time but I was alone now as I started back to the surface. They had led me south and east of the camp, both on the surface and below it. Looking at the map I realized I had no idea what lay north or west. Next time.
It was late afternoon when I reached the cave entrance, the low angle sun and red rocks reminding me of home. I looked at my display pad as it resynced with Wandering Star. There were lots of messages from Angela, Jake and Sipa. I sat down and took my helmet off while Star connected me.
Angela answered, Sipa on a split screen next to her. “What’s up?” I asked.
“How quickly can you get back to the landing pad?”
“A couple of hours at least. My pack is heavy and it’s getting dark.”
“Leave everything and start back now while we talk.” There were Tarakana gathering around me now and for the first time since being with them I felt an emotion from them other than friendly goodwill. I felt fear.
I detached the light from my helmet and grabbed the spare from my pack and started walking. “I’m on my way. What happened? Sipa, why are you back on the ship?”
Sipa leaned forward. “Do you recall that I had misgivings about the colony’s ability to supply as much food as they claimed? Well I found the answer today hidden in one of the buildings.” He held up a brown wrapped package. “Synthetics, packaged on Bodens Gate.”
“How did those get here?”
“How indeed. None of this really made sense from the beginning. The farms were too small, the number of colonists insufficient to be genetically stable yet Jake’s tests showed nothing abnormal. Their language is nothing like what we expected and the power they can generate with their solar system at the courthouse is not enough to run their printers more than an hour or two a day. After I found the synthetics I contacted friends I have in the Bodens Gate Central Government. I finally got them to admit to something they didn’t want to reveal. A couple of years ago there was a clan called the Bovita that was attacking citizens and holding them for ransom.”
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