Tatsumi said to him, in a voice barely above a whisper, “You, Jordan-san, already felt like an exile.”

  Rilla stopped walking to check her tanks. Not quite halfway used. She could walk a little ways yet. But not far. She would have to find Tmafekitch soon. Or

  She was farther away from the field dome than she had ever been, except in the flyer. The village was far behind. Around her were no birth pools, no Carnot temple, no food ponds. Only low yellow plants and marshy ground and low hillocks and the path, hard and firm, that generations of Ihrdizu had worn for trade. There were no people. Rilla didn’t like to admit how much she wanted to see a snorkel waving above the vegetation. Anybody’s snorkel, it didn’t even have to be Tmafekitch’s. How could Tmafekitch leave without saying goodbye! How could she!

  Rilla walked on a little farther. Above, Chujo was full face, the color of the sand that she and Tmafekitch used to build domes with. Chujo was streaked at one edge with white clouds. It was ugly. Tmafekitch wasn’t there.

  Her tanks suddenly chimed, very loud. They were half empty.

  Rilla sat down on a rock beside the path and started to cry. She had to go back. She wasn’t going to see Tmafekitch after all. She had to go back or she would die. She couldn’t even, in fact, afford the time and energy to sit here and cry.

  Life was awful. Nobody had ever told her life was going to be this awful. Rilla got heavily to her feet, and Tmafekitch came trotting around a hillock.

  “Tmafekitch! You’re here!”

  Tmafekitch stopped dead and clicked her feet in astonishment. Her snorkel waved in loops. She said to Rilla in their personal language, “Why are you here? Where do you go?”

  “I came to find you! You left before I came back!–“It was time for my mating journey,” Tmafekitch said, still clicking and looping. “Are you going on a mating journey now?”

  “Of course not!” Rilla said. This was not the meeting she had envisioned. A new thought occurred to her.

  ‘‘Tmafekitch—why are you traveling back toward your village?–“I cannot go on my mating journey.”

  “Cannot?” Rilla said. She had never heard of such a thing. “Why not?–“Because it is ****.”

  Rilla had never heard the word. Something odd in Tmafekitch’s snorkel loops made her think suddenly that Tmafekitch had never said the word, either. But that didn’t make any sense. Rilla wished she had the translator with her after all.

  “Tmafekitch, what does that word mean? The one you just said?”

  Tmafekitch came close to Rilla’s rock. She sat down on her tail, then got up again, which meant she was thinking hard. Her snorkel looped wildly. A flock of silverbirds flew overhead, and only one of her upper eyes tracked it, so distracted was she. Finally she sat down again on her tail and put her face very close to Rilla’s, as talkers often did when they came to the exciting parts in a story they were talking.

  “It means time. And an animal killed after long hunting. And... a problem solved.”

  “What?” Rilla said. “What?”

  Tmafekitch took her face away. The silverbirds suddenly started to screech, and Rilla looked up. A flyer approached. Mommy or Daddy. Or both. Probably furious.

  “Oh, uneaten turds,” she said. “Trnafekitch, are you really coming back to your village?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your mating journey?”

  “I cannot go. It’s ****.”

  There it was again. Rilla had never heard of anything interrupting a mating journey once it was started.

  “What about your heat flush?”

  “Gone.”

  Rilla had never heard of that, either. “Will it come back?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When?”

  “After ****.”

  The flyer landed. Through the window Rilla could see Mommy, gesturing at her furiously. Nothing was going right. Except, of course, that Tmafekitch was coming back to the village. Even if that made no sense.

  “Tmafekitch—how come you never told me this word before, if it’s so important it can stop your mating journey?”

  Tmafekitch seemed to think deeply. Her snorkel ceased all motion. A long moment went by, in which Mommy climbed out of the flyer and stalked toward Rilla.

  “Because,” Tmafekitch finally said, “it was not before in me.”

  “That’s crazy!” Rilla burst out angrily.

  “Yes,” Tmafekitch agreed. “The Masters are sometimes crazy. They did not put the word in the Ihrdizu. Not before. Only now.”

  All over Genji, Ihrdizu on their mating journeys stopped, turned around, and walked back to their villages. Researchers raced to question them. Each little-she re-sponded courteously.

  “It is ****.”

  Fishing boats stopped fishing, stowed the catch they already had, and sailed back to their fishing ports. Two scientists, one Japanese and one Anglo, took flyers to two different ports, made ritual-greetings, and asked why the boats had returned.

  “It is ****,” the Ihrdizu said.

  A three-day festival in the Southland central valley, a gathering of two thousand Ihrdizu, came to a sudden halt. The festival-goers packed up their young and their provisions and started back to their own food ponds and birthing pools. The itinerant talkers who had come for the festival, who had much local fame but no food ponds or birthing pools of their own, each went with a different group of Ihrdizu. Bruce Johnson flew to Southland to question as many talkers as he could. Why did the festival stop? Why were the talkers each boarding with an Ihrdizu household instead of continuing on their accustomed circuit?

  “It is ****,” the talkers said.

  “How the hell did a Chujoan word get into their vocabulary?” Don Serranian cried. “A word that apparently none of them knew before the same identical moment all over the fucking planet?”

  Bruce Johnson said, “Hard-wired. Into the genetic structure. Had to be. All set for conscious access at some signal. some timing system.” Johnson hardly slept. Dane thought. As tightly wrapped as Serranian, Johnson nonetheless was responding differently to this latest development. He was completely absorbed, forgetting even to eat, to bathe. Serranian, like many of the others, was frustrated and scared by events that made no sense. Johnson loved it.

  Serranian said tightly, “What sort of signal?”

  “How should I know?–Johnson said. He walked in tight circles in front of the QED. “Maybe astronomical, like the minute variations in light that trigger some bird migrations on Earth. Maybe internal. If knowledge was stored in the Ihrdizu brain, passed on generation after generation, until some chemical inhibitor was removed in the synapses ... Yes! Yes!” He began punching keys furiously.

  “Removed how?” Serranian yelled. “You can’t just have spontaneous genetic combustion!”

  “We can’t,” Johnson said gleefully. “Can the Ihrdizu?”

  “No!”

  “How the hell do you know? Could they have an outside trigger?”

  “Like what?” Serranian was furious; Dane actually thought he might strike Johnson. Dane moved swiftly between them. A First Conciliator was not supposed to be a bodyguard, but to keep fanatics conciliated

  ...”

  But Johnson seemed to calm down a little, even if Serranian did not. His next words were very soft, almost inaudible. His face shone. “An outside trigger. Yes. Tell me, Serranian—how do the carpet whales communicate with each other across huge expanses of ocean?”

  “We don’t know!”

  “Carpet whales,” Johnson said musingly, his face still radiant. “Carpet whales.” He started typing rapidly in QED mode, inputting to the fuzzy-logic program he had set up to coordinate event-data. After a while he leaned back and watched the screen.

  “Will you look at that,” he said softly. “Just look at that.”

  Every mature carpet whale on Genji had arrived at the Southland-Nighland strait, south of the sub-Chujo node.

  They blanketed the sea for kilometers with their sinuous black flatness billowing on the waves, their dozens and dozens of pairs of thin waving tentacles. The largest of the whales stretched a hundred meters long, twenty-five meters wide. There was not enough food in the sea for all the stomatalike mouths to graze on, so the himatids seemed to have simply stopped eating. They did not move much. However alien they were, it seemed obvious what the carpet whales were doing. They were waiting.

  All over Genji, the Ihrdizu returned to their villages, and waited. On Chujo, the mats of snug grew and writhed, and, circled around the mats, the Chupchups waited. The humans looked at each other. The fascinated ones, Dane thought, the ones like Bruce Johnson, ran data program after program, straining even the QED’s powers. The others, the ones used to the orderly accumulation of knowledge that grew rather than decreased in logical connections, sat around tight-lipped—and cursed the waiting.

  “I want her out of here!” Jane Johnson said to her husband. “I want Rilla on the orbital ship, away from all this! It’s just too weird, and nobody knows what will happen!’

  ‘

  “I won’t go!” Rilla said. “I want to stay here on Genji!”

  Jordan Dane doubted that Bruce Johnson actually heard either of them.

  “In my grandmother’s sand garden,” Suzy Tatsumi said reflectively to Dane, “were quiet empty spaces, bare sand or bare polished rock, as much a part of the design as the living bonsai.”

  For days there were storms. Powerful winds blew Genji’s thick air masses. Rain whipped across the seas. In the low-lying villages, the waters rose dangerously above flood tide. But then the winds blew themselves out, the clouds dissipated, and one of Genji’s rare clear skies shone above noontime Southland. And the carpet whales, the massed and tightly packed carpet whales in the Nighland-Southland strait below Chujo, all rolled over to their ventral sides. Signals began to flash into the sky.

  Grains of metal from the seas, grains gathered over millennia and apparently stored in precisely measured amounts in precisely measured locations on the ventral surface, reflected the light of Murasaki. Clouds of gases released from millions of stomata refracted the light. Focused it. Sent it toward Chujo, which was not in eclipse with Genji and therefore was experiencing midnight, a moonside midnight clear and cloudless at the sub-Genji point.

  “The light signals are of course very faint. Far too faint to activate any phototropisms in the snug mat,”

  Kenzo Ohkubo transmitted from Chujo. He said it as if he did not expect this information to make the slightest bit of difference, as indeed he did not. They had all, or nearly all, given up expectations. What expectations should E. coli have about the next food to come down the human gullet? Ohkubo, thought Jordan Dane, sounded almost jaunty. He was not among the scared ones. The electromagnetic signals—clearly more than just light—went on striking the great snug mat on Chujo. The mat stirred. “A hive mind, perhaps,” Bruce Johnson said.—“Or something.” —

  All around the moonside of Genji, the Ihrdizu sat still, remembering things they had never before known. Nearly every scientist flew, after wild negotiations for flyer space, to the Southland-Nighland strait, and agreed-upon research spheres be damned. OW= Base was effectively deserted. Technicians remained, along with Jordan Dane, Suzy Tatsumi, and—to Dane’s surprise—the Johnsons. At first Dane thought that Bruce Johnson was staying for Jane’s sake. Later he realized that Johnson wanted to be near the QED. preferring to analyze data than to gather it.

  Jane Johnson, tight-lipped, disappeared into the dorm dome, taking, Rilla with her. Bruce, Dane, and Tatsumi were gathered at the screen in the main dome when Miyuki Kaneko appeared on the all-channel transmission from Chujo. Unlike Kenzo Ohkubo, Miyuki’s voice was not jaunty. It was perfectly steady, without shading but not empty, as white light is without color because it contains all colors.

  Miyuki said formally, “To all human scientists: The Chujo team has succeeded in opening the Chujoan

  ‘book’ voluntarily given to us by the Chujoan spokesman. The artifact is a container of opaque and very hard glass. It has taken the team so long to open both because they did not wish to break it and because the method of closing, locking, and opening is unlike anything humans use. Dr. Ohkubo, who is at the snug-mat site, has asked me to describe to all of you exactly what we have found.”

  She drew a careful breath. “To call the artifact a ‘book’ is incorrect, although to call the cairns a ‘library’

  is not incorrect. The glass box contained a pile of etchings on thin plates of glass. These are unmistakably numbered by dots in the left-hand corner of each: one dot for the etching on the top, two dots on the next we encountered. We will transmit the etchings now, with commentary on what we have learned thus far.”

  “Listen to her. Prerecorded, all of it. As good as already written the journal paper,–Bruce Johnson said. He could not sit still. He danced in front of the screen, his eyes burning with excitement and fatigue. Tatsumi, pouring tea for Jordan Dane, said, “Formality can be such a protection against disbelief.”

  The huge mat of snug, covering the entire floor of the valley, wrinkled, stretched, slid. The Chupchups scrambled across its surface, heading for a crevasse that billowed steam. Streamers of sulfurous yellow billowed across the mat. Suddenly, one edge of the mat reared, jerked, and leapt into the sky. The edge struck the far side of the crevasse, to join with a second leaping edge. The two waves stuck, clung, forming a seamless whole. The bioloon started to billow along the crevasse.

  “Not again,” Miyuki said, in the same formal voice in which a few hours ago she had recorded the contents of the Chujoan glass box. “They should not die again.”

  No one heard her. The rest of the team recorded, scanned for samples left behind, controlled the movements of the robot probe that would fly as close alongside the rising bioloons as Kenzo Ohkubo dared. They observed. They were scientists.

  “The first etching,” said the prerecorded Miyuki, “as you can see, shows two Chujoans standing with an Ihrdizu on what clearly seems to be the surface of Genji. Please look carefully at the Ihrdizu, who is a mature female. Around her snorkel is a ... a ‘necklace.’ It is an actual necklace, in miniature, made separate from the etching and then embedded in the glass.”

  The picture of the etching held, then magnified the Ihrdizu’s snorkel. Dane leaned as close as possible to the screen. He realized he was breathing heavily. Like Bruce Johnson, he thought ruefully, and glanced at Tatsumi. She went on drinking her tea, her dark eyes large.

  The screen transmitted an image of a corroded lump of metal. Miyuki’s voice said formally, “We all have known, of course, that the Ihrdizu once had metallurgy. This coin or medallion was found by the expedition’s first ecospecialist, Dr. Katsuyoshi Minoru, twenty-five years ago. Core samples taken under choice Ihrdizu seaside villages have shown that, just as they have shown that the Ihrdizu culture flourished in waves, dying off and then being rebuilt at least six separate times. Each time many other flora and fauna have died with them and never been replaced.

  “A great question has always been: What caused the die-offs on Genji? What upset the ecological balance so much that the Ihrdizu had to fight for prime space, by the sea but on very high ground, just to survive? What ecological disaster raced through Genji, changing everything eighty generations ago in a breathtakingly short space of time?”

  The snug mat was lifting itself. Alive with purpose, rippling, its center axis bulged, pulling the rest of it along the ground with a hiss like a wave sliding up .a beach. It shed pebbles, making, itself fighter, letting go of its birthplace.

  Beneath, in the vat, hydrogen by-products of the snug combined with other gases. The mat rose, shaping itself into a teardrop. A teardrop with pockets. From the other valleys of the volcanic ridge, other bioloons rose, each bearing a load of Chujoans clinging to the sides, scrambling into the pockets.

  “They will all die again,” Miyuki said. “All die! Like the successive generations on Genji, like the carpet whales slaughtered by the Ihrdizu ... death. All death!”

  Kenzo Ohkubo looked away from his recording instruments long enough to glance at her. He said quietly, “You forget yourself, Kaneko-san.”

  The rebuke, gentle as it was, sobered her. She watched the bioloons rise to the sky, paced by the robot probe.

  “The second etching,” said the formal Miyuki two hours earlier, “shows the same two Chujoans—computer analysis shows all four figures to have been etched from the same plate—standing still on Genji. This time the necklace-bearing Ihrdizu is dead at their feet. The plants around them are dead. The village behind them is in flames. The small birthing pool in the lower left corner is overgrown with what seems to be—this is just supposition—some sort of snug. It is not possible, given our current uncertainty about Chupchup culture, to read the identical expressions on the two Chujoan faces.”

  “Grief,” said Jordan Dane at once. He glanced at Tatsumi. She put her teacup on the table; it rattled in her fingers.

  “They caused it,” Bruce Johnson said. “Dane—the Chujoans fucking caused the die-offs. Or that die-off, anyway. Look at that birthing pool. Snug. It was like the wineskin plague, only this version attacked Genji-life-forms. The Chujoans were the bioengineers, and they fucked up, and they caused an ecological disaster!”

  Dane said shakily, “You don’t know that.”

  Johnson said, “I’m going to set a QED fuzzy-logic program right now to correlate the data and deduce the probabilities.”

  Tatsumi said, “He said—” She stopped.

  Dane turned toward her. Her face, ordinarily the clear pale gold of good brandy, had gone white. He put a hand

  on her shoulder, gently, the first time he had ever touched her. “Who said what, Suzy?”

  “Kammer. He said to me, after the Chujoans had covered him with that snug, twisted and deformed him

  ... “

  “What, Suzy? What did Kammer say?”

  “‘Learned much myself on Chujo about understanding and standing between. Masters and slaves. Everybody’s right, everybody’s wrong.”

  “Masters,” Dane said. “Masters of bioengineering.” They watched the screen, waiting for the next etching.

 

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