The good new stuff, p.39
The Good New Stuff, page 39
“Mary!” he bellowed, forgetting the comset.
“I got us into this, I baited them. I’d rather go down fighting.” Despite the brave words, her voice trembled. “Good luck, friend.”
He clung half in and out of the water like a paralyzed lungfish and watched the two human vessels collide. There was a tremendous thundering boom as they hit, followed by cracking and splintering sounds. In seeming slow motion, the ram rode up over the submarine and the rock walls transmitted an eerie hollow grating sound to him as the submarine’s keel scraped along the canal’s stone bottom. The combined wreck grated down the channel with scarcely diminished speed like a piston toward the massive gate.
There was too little room for him to remain where he was. He released his hold, slipped back into the water, and swam for the gate. Maybe everything would grind to a halt before it got there.
Underwater, Drin heard a sudden, ear-piercing crack. Pollution! he thought, the hull of the submarine must have broken. He surfaced and looked back. Both ends of the submarine stuck out of the water. The primitivist ship rode farther up on one of the pieces and then fell off to the side, gouging its ram into the side of the canal. Its stern hit the other side and, with a great screeching and rending, the keel of the ram snapped, leaving the broken human ship stopped sideways in the channel. Men, some of them skewered by splintered oars, tumbled from the broken vessel like fish from a torn net. The mess ground to a halt just a Charter unit from the gate.
“Mary?” he sent. There was no answer. Flames, from spilled heating fires aboard the ram, or discharging power leads on the submarine, began spreading in the above-water wreckage.
Drin threw himself into the devastation, prying blood-stained pieces of the ram away from the broken submarine hull. There was movement all around him, and he saw that the human survivors were having no better luck than he in climbing the slippery canal sides. Hoping that the time it took would not prove critical, Drin seized the still upright mast in his beak, snapped it with a vicious twist of his body, and let it fall so that its top rested on the dike above.
“CLIMB!” he roared to anyone who would listen.
Some of the astonished humans caught on and began scrambling up the mast to safety above. One was a large red-bearded man—the same one, he realized, that had mocked him from the decks of another ship only weeks ago. They stared at each other in a frozen moment of recognition, but Drin had more than an arrest on his mind.
Ignoring minor burns and lacerations, Drin clawed away the remains of a lower deck to expose the broken pressure hull of the submarine. It was filled with water. Drin stuck his tongue in and located the cockpit from feel and memory. Mary was not in the seat, but he could scent her blood. He felt around the tiny compartment, using both branches. He found her underwater gear, and, presuming success, grabbed it. A few more precious seconds, and he found Mary motionless in a small air pocket near the back of the cockpit.
With both branches wrapped around her, he strained to pull her up like a hatchling, into his mouth. With her legs sticking painfully down his throat, he was just able to close his beak over her head. Then he smashed his way out of the wreck, inhaled an hour’s worth of air, and dove back into the putrid water. Over-buoyant, he swam down to the wooden grid and held on with his legs.
There was hardly room for both Mary and his tongue, so, with the skill of a contortionist, he managed to slip a loop of the tongue out the fleshy corner of his mouth, leaving the ends of the manipulator branches inside. Drin lowered his head and squeezed water from her lungs. They reinflated on their own as he forced the water from his mouth with air from his bladder. He squeezed again. She moved. Conscious? He hoped she would understand quickly enough not to panic.
He felt her hand pat one of his fingers. It seemed a controlled, understanding, gesture. He turned his attention to his external predicament.
With gloom and debris in the water, and Aurum low in the antarctic sky, he should be invisible from above. He began exploring the bottom of the gate where the submarine had smashed into it. Here and there, an outer buffer of great tree trunks had been smashed to kindling. But nothing behind had broken enough to let him through.
There was purposeful movement inside his mouth. “Drin, I’ve got my gills on. You can let me out now.” Mary’s voice in his ear was the best news he’d had since he’d come into the primitivist cesspool. Using his tongue to keep her from bobbing to the surface, he expelled the bubble of air from his mouth, then let her float free.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Lousy. No broken bones, I think. Tired. I’ve still got a little fluid in my lungs.” She drifted slowly over to the grate and surveyed the damaged gate. “I guess I didn’t put a hole in this thing.”
“It appears not.”
Trapped. They were both silent.
“Uh, Drin? Can you think of any way we could make them think I did break through? If they think we’re already gone maybe they’ll open the gate to come after us, or to clear the floating debris.”
The grate was too fine for even Mary to squeeze through—it was probably designed with human sappers in mind. His tongue could just fit, but wasn’t long enough. But maybe …
“I could try to blow a bubble with some debris through the grate and out the other side.”
“Hey, go for it!”
He did it, placing his blowhole against one of the spaces between the beams of an undamaged section and blew. Some of it escaped on their side, but not much—some must have gone through. They waited for a subjective eternity. He was on the point of suggesting another frontal assault when they heard a hideous, hollow, creak.
They waited. Nothing.
Then another creak. Drin thought he could detect a slight shudder.
“I think they’re trying to open it,” he said. “You might have jammed it a bit when you rammed it. That’s a case of an emotional, spur of the moment action that did exactly the opposite of—”
“Drin, your folk’s eyes are built for hindsight. Why don’t you stop philosophizing and just try to help them open the gate?”
Of course. With a firm clawhold on the bottom stones, and not having to fight gravity, Drin could apply his full strength. He waited until a creak signified another attempt to open the gate, then pushed. Slowly it began to move. There was a crack and a grind as something let go. Drin released his hold immediately, and the gate began to swing open on its own.
Hiding on the bottom beneath flotsam from the wreck, they drifted with the current out through the opening. Then, with Mary hanging onto a leg, he swam hard for clear water until he judged they were well over Lord Thet’s horizon. He surfaced, turned on his back and sheltered Mary between his legs as he would a hatchling, and let horizon-grazing Ember and Aurum do what they could to warm her, while he took great breaths through his mouth to rid himself of heat and to pay his oxygen debt.
Mary was quiet for a while, exhausted, Drin surmised. So it startled him when she suddenly sat up and yelled: “Look, Drin, contrails!”
Do Tor had finally arrived.
Among all races, when violence is obviously futile, reason is encouraged. For this reason, where there is the likelihood of an irrational physical confrontation, the inclusion of a large Do’utian Monitor is highly recommended. Humans excel where strength is needed in confined places. And, where overhead intelligence and logistic agility are required, the Kleth can make a major contribution—but care should be taken to avoid endangering Kleth individually.
—Planet Monitor’s Handbook,
Team Composition
… their mating bond is such that individuals become physiologically dependent on each other. A Kleth seldom survives the death of a mate, nor is their any record of one wanting to do so. Efforts to sustain life in these circumstances are always futile and should not be attempted.
—Planet Monitor’s Handbook,
Medical Appendix
The Kleth aircraft met them just over the horizon from Lord Thet’s city, on the beach of an uninhabited island dominated by a huge granite crag that gave shelter from the circumpolar wind. After greetings, Team Leader Do Tor and his mate started unloading supplies.
Mary was exhausted, so Drin scraped a deep pit in the sand for her, gathered wood, and lit a fire. Then, despite her exhaustion, and still limping from her wound, she insisted on washing her clothes and body in the frigid polar water, and turned an amazing shade of blue before she got back to the fire.
“D-don’t worry,” she told him as she shook convulsively under a blanket in front of the fire, “It’s-s h-how we get our b-body heat b-back up.”
Do Tor and his mate stretched their wings to catch some fish for her, and jibbered with amusement as she threw away all the good parts and heated the remaining muscle almost to the point of decomposition on a flat stone she put by the fire. Drin looked forward to having a good long feed later that night, in his own manner, on his way back to Gri’il’s beach.
“Sorry late. Assumed you’d just leave Thet and wait for us,” the Klethan said in a guttural, sing-song English that was actually lower pitched than Mary’s, despite his being less than half her mass.
“We tried,” Mary laughed. “Things got in the way. We surface dwellers have certain problems about just flying away when things turn sour.”
“Don’t understand why primitivists had so much technology.”
“Lack of interest on our part. Ignorance of the Charter and evolutionary pressure on theirs,” Drin offered. “The best fighters end up in charge, and the best fighters are, more often than not, those with the best weapons. Also, if you can’t make it clever, make it big.” It would be a long while before he would forget the huge ram bearing down on him. “I doubt that Lord Thet or many of his people even understand why the Charter prohibits development in these areas; they’ve rebelled against anything resembling a scientific education.”
“For humans, there is an inherent contradiction between ‘back to nature’ and ‘no technology,’” Mary contributed, “because human nature is to make and use tools. So what happens is that the primitivists reinvent the wheel using primitive technology that, per capita, pollutes unmercifully and requires gobs of labor.” Mary picked up a stone and threw it out of sight. “So then you get leadership dominance games that the most ruthless win, with slave labor of one sort or another for the losers. That works well long enough for the glandular bullies to start assembling miniature empires, and then …” She shook her head. “Allowing this Lord Thet set-up was taking noninterference too far, in my view. But that’s up to the council. Anyway, we have our killers.”
“Maybe,” Drin demurred. “But I don’t think this is a one-species issue.” From a philosophical standpoint he certainly didn’t want it to be human versus Do’utian, but something more than that was bothering him. “I’m not sure we have the whole story. In defending his hunting, the human Jacob Lebretzsky seemed to include the Do’utian primitivists in his defense.”
“Do’utians help get selves butchered?” Do Tor clucked. “Strange thing, I think.”
“If you think in groups, yes. But that isn’t the natural Do’utain way to think.” Drin moved his head slightly from side to side in mild negation. “I want to ask Gri’il some questions and learn more about this murdered beachmaster and his harem. I may have made some unfair assumptions about the last victim.”
“Name was Glodego’alah, by the way,” Do Tor added. “Left the north pole as a disillusioned student eight cubed great revolutions ago. Not happy as primitivist, either, but responsible. Took care of harem. Good being. We did our homework.” The Kleth held its hard translucent wings out in a gesture of pride.
“Oh yes,” his mate said, the first words she uttered, surprising Drin. Until now, Go Ton had been inert, folded up. One partner or the other might dominate, but they were always together. Divorce was unknown, as were widows or widowers. Go Ton’s contribution was unusually forward, for a subordinate Klethan. But Monitor couples were known to be more independent.
“Did you bring the Do’utian interface coronet?” Drin asked.
“Not so late, otherwise.” Do Tor rummaged in the pile of unloaded supplies and found a glasscloth package the size of a folded human tent. “Here.”
Drin placed it in his pouch. Its woven-in antennae picked up and decoded motor nerve impulses—even those sent to absent peripheries. Now, not only could he ask questions of Gri’il; she would be able to answer.
There were also a tent and collapsible kayak for Mary. The tent fit nicely in the hollow he had dug, and she opened it up with its door to the fire. As it resumed its memorized shape, she turned to her fellow monitors.
“This,” she said, “is camping. It’s what most of us have in mind when we think of going back to nature, or living in a primitive situation. But, as you see, it’s not primitive at all. And it’s not social, we usually try to get away from other people when we do this. What’s happened back at Thet just hasn’t really registered with my people. I—”
“Mary, why should it register with you any more than with the rest of us?” Drin interrupted. “You have no special responsibility for them just because they happen to be human. There is no need to apologize.”
“Oh yes, Go Ton agrees,” Do Tor’s mate spoke up. “We are one civilization on this world. Whole purpose of Planet Trimus. Eight-cubed years of lives meaningless if not. Eyes of Trimus we are. We should have noticed violations before dead bodies appear.”
“Any Do’utian can smell that place in currents an eighth of the way around the planet. We ignored it,” Drin said.
“Th-thanks,” Mary said. “I just …” She shook her head and made sounds of human sadness, though Drin thought it was more in relief. He flicked out his tongue and wrapped his fingers around her hand, and she rewarded the gesture by squeezing him gently back, and baring her teeth in a big smile.
“We all go to the beach tomorrow, and gain more understanding,” Do Tor said. “Now rest.”
“You rest,” Drin answered, reminding him that Do’utians didn’t sleep in the eternal days of a polar summer. “I need to eat, feed the harem, and keep my injuries in water until they heal more. I will see you there at the beach. Take care, Mary.”
She hugged his fingers to her, careless of her wrap, and his most sensitive organs were pressed into the alien heat and smell of her. He was overwhelmed for a moment, then she released him. “Yeah, you too,” she said.
He backed away from the fire carefully, to avoid upsetting anything. Clear, he turned. And as his body turned toward the water, his mind followed, thinking ahead to his duties. His cuts and bruises were beginning to hurt, true. But something in the back of his mind was pushing him, something perhaps as powerful as the instinctual desire to join with the harem that chose him as their provider and their protector. It did not make sense to him that humans—even as degenerate as Lord Thet and his gang—would or could suddenly start preying on Do’utians, even given the sort of general philosophical license primitivism in both species seemed to grant. Something less random and more evil was happening. Perhaps Gri’il could help him.
The Planetary Civilization must be permitted to evolve, and experiments must be encouraged, for only through change is knowledge expanded.
—The Compact and Charter of Planet Trimus, Article 5
Aurum stood high above Ember when Drin returned to the harem beach with his mouth full of fish, and the star had moved a dociradian west by the time he finished the simple duty of placing the fish into throats. Once done, he unpacked the neural interface cap and approached Gri’l.
Even now she hesitated, putting her nose to the beach. Despite everything that had happened, her distaste for this artificiality was evident. But then, apparently recognizing the necessity, she raised her head and came to him. He fitted the cap over her.
“It will take a while to calibrate itself. There will be a bit of a delay to start with, but you’ll get used to it. Now, just tell me your name, as if you were whole again. Repeat it until the computer in the cap gets it right.”
It produced an intelligible “Gri’illaboda” after about six tries, and she got used to it in a few more. Finally, she could speak through the device more or less naturally.
“OK,” Drin said. “I’m going to record this, so why don’t we start by having you say who you are?”
“I am Gri’illaboda, co-mate of Drinnil’ib.”
Great. Just great. “I am sorry, Gri’il. I am a planetary monitor, and not a primitivist. I care for you, yes—but more as a senior family member, not as a mate.”
“You replaced our beachmaster, mated with my co-mates.”
“It was not my choice. I did not seek you or them to mate.”
She was silent for a few heartbeats. He could hear the waves and the sea birds.
“Drinnil’ib, I was the daughter of Slora’analta and Broti’ilita. Did you know either of those?”
“The historian.”
“Who told the old tales of the free seas and made a romantic out of his daughter. I was bored with school. I met a free rover. He took me here, quickened my ovaries … then took my tongue.”
“Glodego’alah?”
“Never. Glodego’alah was a tourist who saw what had happened, fought the free rover for us, then took us here to be safe. But he paid for his charity in a way that happens all too often here.”
“Then I am sorry for what I thought about Glodego’alah. We are seeking the humans who killed him, and four others who were killed. Did you know any of them? Did they have families here?”
