Remnant Population

by Elizabeth Moon

  “Of course,” the old woman said. “Forty years and more, by now.”

  “But Sims Bancorp said—”

  The old woman grinned. “Company wasn’t going to waste time hunting down one old woman they didn’t want anyway. Already charged my family extra for me being overage, figured I’d die in cryo.”

  Kira shivered. She had not imagined that kind of crassness, even from Sims Bancorp. Surely it was against the law—but who would enforce such a law, out here in the frontiers?

  “So I stayed,” the old woman said. She was still grinning; it looked grotesque.

  “On purpose?” Vasil asked, as if he still couldn’t believe it. The old woman scowled now.

  “Yes,” she said shortly. Kira wondered how—how had she survived all alone? Or had someone else stayed behind? But she could not ask that angry face.

  “Well,” Vasil said, doing his best to get back in control. “Whatever your reasons, you are in violation of the order to evacuate, and by your actions you have jeopardized the position of Sims Bancorp—”

  The old woman muttered something Kira could not hear, but from the expression on her face it had not been complimentary.

  “—And you have presented us with an unnecessary dilemma,” Vasil went on. “What are we going to do with you?”

  Kira was not surprised when the old woman gave the obvious answer. “Let me alone,” she said, and turned away.

  “But—but you must understand the seriousness of the situation,” Vasil said. The old woman turned back. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I understand—but you came at a bad time. Now go away.” Then she turned and walked off, the long fringe on the back of her cape brushing the backs of her crooked tanned legs. The back of the cape had a single large face on it, in glittery embroidery; the overlarge eyes had long eyelashes like rays extending to the margin of the face. Kira felt uncomfortable, as if the eyes were staring at her, and more uncomfortable for having that reaction. She was not a primitive; she shouldn’t be affected by such obvious symbolism.

  “Come back here!” Vasil ordered, but the woman did not turn around. Vasil turned to one of the advisors, but Kira tapped his arm.

  “Let me try. She’s a woman, after all, and if she’s been here alone for several years, she may be overwhelmed by all of us.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t think—” began one of the advisors, but Kira had already started down the ramp. “You want an escort?” asked the advisor.

  “No—she’s not going to hurt me,” Kira said. She was finding it surprisingly hard to walk down a ramp in the protective suit. She fumbled at its fastenings, and opened the front seam. As hot and humid as it was, that wouldn’t help much, but anything—

  She made it to the foot of the ramp without stumbling, and then found that the suit’s weight slowed her so that she could hardly overtake the old woman—and the old woman had a twenty meter lead. Already she was at the end of the lane, between the first houses.

  “Don’t get out of our sight,” the advisor called. “If you go too far—” She waved vaguely backward, meaning she had heard and would do what she thought best. Admittedly, she probably shouldn’t get out of their sight, when she knew the aliens—no, the indigenes—were somewhere in the area.

  “Please—” Kira called to the old woman. “Wait for me. They’ll stay back, but one of us must talk to you.”

  The old woman stopped and turned slowly, as if she were stiff. Kira tried to take a longer stride, tripped, and nearly fell. Now she could see the old woman’s expression clearly. The dark eyes sparkled with amusement.

  “Sorry,” Kira said, out of breath. “But—we really do—”

  “It’s a bad time,” the woman said again. This close, Kira could see the remaining dark strands in the white hair, the warts and patchy discoloration of a lifetime’s unprotected existence in open air and sunlight. The old woman’s hands were wrinkled and weathered, the knuckles swollen and distorted. She should have looked sick—any individual feature Kira noted had pathology all over it—but the general impression was one of vigor, both mental and physical.

  “Which is your house?” Kira asked. She would have to be firm, she knew that. With the ignorant—and colonists like this had almost no education, not real education—and the wavering old, it was necessary to be firm. “We can go there, and you can rest, and we can talk.”

  The old woman just stared at her, eyes no longer sparkling. She sighed. Then she scratched the back of one leg with the dirty toes of the other foot. “It will be hot today,” she said.

  A local custom, to start with the weather? “Is this the hot season?” Kira asked, hoping courtesy would engender trust.

  Another long stare. “You’ll sweat in that thing,” the woman said, pointing to Kira’s protective suit.

  “Yes.” Kira made herself laugh. “It was the advisors. They were afraid someone would shoot us, or something.”

  “Advisors . . . Company advisors?”

  “No, the military.” The old woman’s expression did not change; Kira felt she was talking to a computer with a defective I/O subroutine. “Let me explain,” Kira said. “When the other colony was attacked, the orbiting ship went back and told the government—” Never mind the delay caused by the mutiny; she didn’t want to overload the old woman’s capacity. “And then they decided to send us to assess the situation.”

  “To kill the aliens,” the old lady said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “No!” Kira surprised herself with the vehemence of her answer. “Not to kill, to study. To see if they can become allies. We did want to dismantle the powerplant, so they wouldn’t have access to our technology . . .”

  Now the old woman was smiling, but it was not a nice smile. “They are very smart,” she said. “They understand it.”

  Kira hoped she had misunderstood. “Understand—?”

  “The powerplant. Electricity. Machines.”

  Impossible. This old woman didn’t know what she was talking about; she herself couldn’t understand all that. She probably thought being able to move a switch was the same thing as understanding. But perhaps she and the other colonists had known of the indigenes before, even though they hadn’t reported it for some reason. “Did you know about them before—before the evacuation?”

  “No. We never saw such creatures, not in all my years here, until after that other colony tried to land.” She scuffed one foot in the dirt. “Then they came. They found me.”

  “And you showed them everything?” Kira could not keep the tone of disapproval out of her voice. Even an ignorant colonist should have known better than that; she was sure that was part of the lectures given all outgoing colonists. If anyone found an alien intelligence, it was to be reported, not allowed contact with human technology.

  The old woman ducked her head, and shrugged, much like a guilty child hoping to escape punishment. She probably wasn’t too bright—possibly mentally ill, or why else would she have stayed behind? Ignorant, disturbed, and a little slow, she had probably seen the indigenes as something interesting. A wonder they hadn’t killed her.

  “Come on,” Kira urged, being consciously gentle again, charming, as she would have been to a slow child. “Show me where you live; let’s have a little chat.”

  Now the black eyes were opaque as obsidian, and the old woman’s body seemed to settle, as if she’d turned to stone. “It’s a bad time,” she said. “Come back later.”

  “You don’t have to worry about cleaning up, if that’s what you meant,” Kira said, imagining the kind of housekeeping this woman might do, she with her cape and loincloth and bare feet. She probably hadn’t washed a dish in the years she’d been here; it would be squalid and horrible, but . . .

  “It’s not that,” the old woman said. “It’s just a bad time. Come back later.” She turned away again. “Tomorrow. And don’t follow me.” She walked off, slowly and steadily. The morning sun had burned through the mist, and revealed all the varicose veins on the b
acks of the old woman’s legs.

  Kira stood staring after her. She had not had anyone snub her like that since childhood. She hoped she was not one of those academic terrors who demanded deference beyond their rights, but a little common courtesy . . . she fought down the irritation. She was hot and sweaty, that was all, and the old woman wasn’t quite right in the head. What could you expect of someone who would choose to stay behind, alone—although the old woman hadn’t said that. Perhaps she had had another companion, another old person who’d stayed and now was sick. That would explain a lot.

  Kira watched as the old woman kept going, up the street—hardly more than an open way between the houses, not paved at all, though it had a ditch to either side. The old woman turned aside, finally, entering what seemed to be a gap between the houses, or a garden. From here, Kira couldn’t see for sure. She turned, and lumbered back to the shuttle, uncomfortably aware of the warmth of the sun. Sweat soaked her clothes inside the suit already; she could smell herself. It would be stifling by midmorning, and she didn’t like to think about the afternoon.

  “And what did you accomplish, Kira?” Vasil asked. He sounded very sure she had accomplished nothing.

  Kira stopped at the foot of the ramp, and deliberately unfastened the rest of the protective suit. She clambered out of it, nested the segments and folded them, then looked up at the others. She could feel a faint breath of breeze on her wet clothes.

  “She still says it’s a bad time for her, and we should come back tomorrow. She thought we came to kill the indigenes, because they killed the people at the other colony site.”

  “Did you make her understand our mission?” Vasil asked.

  “I tried. She’s not too bright, ill-educated, and as the advisor said, possibly disturbed. Very old, I would say, but not senile in the usual sense. Not that much there to start with.” As she said this, Kira felt a guilty twinge. Was the old woman really stupid and crazy . . . or was she taking out her own discomfort on someone who had made her uncomfortable?

  “She has no right to tell us to wait,” Vasil said.

  “If we want her cooperation,” Ori said, “it would be wise to wait. This is her space, in one sense. She has been here a long time. Speaking as an anthropologist—”

  Vasil glared at him. Bilong heaved a dramatic sigh that got the attention of both men. For once, Kira approved—anything to forestall another turf battle: Vasil hated it when Ori called himself an anthropologist rather than a technology assessment specialist.

  “It is too hot for these suits, and no one is shooting at us. We might as well be comfortable.” Bilong began peeling out of hers with conscious grace. Kira glanced at the military advisors, who looked disgusted, but said nothing.

  FIFTEEN

  Ofelia had finally understood from Bluecloak what the odd behavior of one of the creatures meant. Pregnant, needing a nest. She eyed the creature; she still could not tell male from female, not with those little skirt things. She presumed they had some sort of organs under there but her curiosity didn’t run that direction. The creature about to give birth certainly didn’t have the hugely swollen belly she associated with pregnancy.

  It had scratched out a hollow in the tall grass by the river, but the others had discouraged it. Ofelia could follow some of the explanation now: big biting things that lived in the water might eat the nestlings. The grass in the sheep meadow, while far enough away from the river, wasn’t tall enough. The pregnant creature scratched at it with obvious distress, kicking the loose bits away.

  Despite the progress made with Bluecloak, Ofelia had great difficulty understanding what the creature needed in a nest site. Tall grass for cushioning? She offered a bundle of soft cloths, which the pregnant one snatched away and threw into the air. The others retrieved them, bringing them to Ofelia with averted faces, as if expecting her to be angry. Ofelia knew better than that; if the creature was about to give birth, she—it—would naturally be edgy and irritable. Tall grass for concealment? From what? Bluecloak gestured to the air; Ofelia looked up, seeing nothing. Bluecloak made wings of its arms, mimed a soaring hunter that might swoop on young. That made sense, except that Ofelia had never seen a winged thing big enough to bother the creatures. Maybe that, too, came from the far north.

  Why not give birth inside, in one of the houses? She tried to convey this with gesture and the few grunts and squawks she could now make. Bluecloak stared at her, and she wondered if she’d said something rude by accident. Then it led the way to the center, to the schoolroom. It fumbled through the books on the shelves until it found the one it wanted. Ofelia took it. This was now a familiar routine. She could page through the old textbooks more easily than it could, especially if she had a clue—ah, yes. This one told of a child whose aunt took care of her while her mother went away to work in the city.

  She turned the pages, looking for the picture she thought Bluecloak would want, the one it had chosen many times before, where the child waved goodbye to her mother and the aunt had a hand on her shoulder. Sure enough, Bluecloak’s talon came down on the page when she opened the book to that picture. It tapped the book.

  “I’m looking,” Ofelia said.

  “Uhoo,” Bluecloak said, its version of “you.” It pointed at the aunt. It had done that before. Ofelia thought it meant that she had cared for other children than her own, and that was true.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve done that.”

  It made the sound she now thought of as the pregnant one’s name, though she couldn’t ever get it right herself: “Gurgle-click-cough” was the closest she could come. Then it pointed to the departing mother. That was clear enough—Gurgle-click-cough was going to be a mother. It pointed again to the picture of the aunt and to her. And she was to be the aunt of Gurgle-click-cough’s baby? She felt her face growing warm. It could only be an honorary position, but—but it was nice of them to trust her.

  “Nesst . . .” Bluecloak gestured around, clearly meaning inside a building. “Uhoo aant.” If Gurgle-click-cough nested inside, Ofelia would be the aunt? Clear enough, but . . . that sounded like an obligation more than an honor. “Aant iss . . .” another unpronounceable cluster of sounds that Ofelia tried silently, only to find her tongue wandering around the roof of her mouth looking for the place that worked. Bluecloak said the word again, and again, until she tried it aloud. Then it said it again, while she tried to shape her pronunciation to what she heard.

  When she had come as close as she could—it still sounded like “click-kaw-keerrrr” to her—Bluecloak called in the others, and spoke briefly to them. They enacted a pantomime of the soaring hunter, the creeping hunter, the hunter that leapt from behind things . . . Ofelia watched in amazement and delight. She had not realized how many things might hunt these efficient hunters, and she had not realized how cleverly they could mimic other creatures. Did they mimic her like that, when they were alone? She had no time to think about that, for Bluecloak was making sure she understood. The click-kaw-keerrrr, equivalent to the aunt in the storybook, protected nestlings from the various threats, and between times held the nestlings, soothed them, sang to them.

  It seemed to Ofelia more the mother’s role than the aunt’s, unless all their mothers went away after the birthing. Why would that be? It also seemed that they would expect a lot from her for letting the pregnant one nest in one of the buildings. Did they really expect her, all alone, to take care of a baby she knew nothing about? Bluecloak halted the performance with a gesture, then spoke again. “Alll click-kaw-keerrrr-llluk putt uhoo click-kaw-keerrr ost.” The mix of languages confused her for a moment, then she worked it out. All of them were sort of click-kaw-keerrrs, but she would be the most click-kaw-keerrr, if she invited the pregnant one to nest inside.

  She wondered then what obligations she had taken on when she invited the original group inside in the sea-storm. Perhaps that explained their familiar behavior, and the odd moments of respect. Still. . . . she could not see a pregnant creature, even an alien, give
birth in a place it thought dangerous, when she had a place it might find more comfortable.

  But which place might it find more comfortable? They had all spent time in the center, but the center rooms were big, cluttered with machines. The size of the nest-cavity it had scratched out in the tall grass suggested to Ofelia that a closet in one of the houses might suit it better. She led Bluecloak to the house next to the center, and offered the closet in the main bedroom. It smelled a bit damp, but airing would help. At least it was not the wet season. She still had the armful of cloths; she mimed putting them on the floor.

  Bluecloak conferred with those who had trailed along, the language far too fast for Ofelia to follow. Some moved away immediately, to begin opening windows. One left the house; she could hear it running away up the lane. To tell the pregnant one? Ofelia wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure about anything except that she was about to become an aunt. And a click-kaw-keerrr, which she hoped would be within her ability.

  The ones in the house began to clean it, using the brooms from the center. When they took the brooms back, they disappeared for a time. Ofelia went to the herb garden she maintained three houses down, and came back with clean-smelling herbs. She had seen the creatures leaning over these plants as if they, too, enjoyed the scents. Already one of the others was back, with fresh-cut tall grass which it spread on the closet floor. The pregnant one came in, stepping warily through the door. She—Ofelia could not think of a pregnant creature as “it”—grunted when she saw the closet with its layer of grass. Two others arrived with more grass, and the pregnant one went into the closet and began trampling the grass in a pattern that resulted in a compact coiled arrangement looking very much like pictures of birds’ nests. Ofelia noticed that she hardly touched the grass with her hands. This went on until the nest rose half a meter above the closet floor. Then the others brought finer grasses and other fine-leaved plants that looked softer than the coarse tall grass used so far. This the pregnant one worked into the interior of the nest. Then the pregnant one stepped out and churred at Ofelia.