Damocles, page 12
As the bioscience officer, Cho had volunteered to be the guinea pig for the first sip of the purified liquid. He’d swirled the water around in a beaker, eyeing the clear liquid and then taking it all down in one gulp. He’d smacked his lips, nodded his approval, and promptly dropped to the ground, gripping his stomach and collapsing in a twisted, writhing mess. The other four were just overworked, underfed, and sleep-deprived enough to shatter into giggling huddles. “The first sip’ll kill ya” routine was about as corny as deep-space humor got, but even Wagner laughed until he snorted at Cho’s little show. For their part, the Dideto had become accustomed to these short outbursts of strange behavior from the normally calm aliens.
They rationed out their dwindling supply of protein blocks and the carefully contained Gro-Wall within the shuttle. Both Cho and Jefferson had strenuously urged caution with the food source. As a plant genetically modified to grow quickly and in harsh conditions, they stressed the danger of releasing the plant into the flora of Didet. If it took root or even managed to cross-pollinate, it could easily overwhelm the ecosystem, so Prader rigged up an isolation barrier, keeping the plant contained in the now-empty loading bay of the shuttle, and Meg made it clear the Dideto were to stay far from the door. The pods of the beans were counted out and recounted when collected to be sure not a trace of the plant remained unaccounted for.
The Effans and their fellow scientists brought forward all manner of food for Cho to analyze. Most of it, while compatible in the strictest nutritional sense, was inedible. The Dideto teeth were as dense as the rest of their bodies, further strengthening Cho’s theory that they had evolved from a burrowing race of primates. The grinding strength of their teeth suggested they had the capacity, if not the digestive need, to consume a certain amount of grit in their food. While nothing in his research suggested they still actually sifted their food through the dirt before eating it, most of the foods presented to him were far too grainy, fibrous, or pitted for any of the Earthers to chew.
“Does this mean we’re going to run out of food?” Wagner asked, showing the closest thing to anxiety he had ever shown. The captain had a fast metabolism and a big appetite, paired with a badly disguised dislike of the Gro-Wall beans.
Cho shrugged. “My guess is we’ll be eating something they don’t consider food.”
“That sounds appetizing,” Prader muttered.
“You’re welcome to try to chew on this…gravel bread.”
It was Loul who brought in the first Earther-edible foodstuff even though he did so accidentally. He and Meg were seated in their favorite spot, underneath an awning the soldiers had constructed on the edge of the military barricade. Cho had managed to explain to the Effans that the Earthers needed a break from the endless sunlight. The military had certainly been pleased to block out the occasional media spy cam that slipped through the barrier. The awnings served both purposes, and Meg and Loul had staked out a spot at one of the portable booth-table setups the soldiers had installed. It felt cozy in the booth, the sides of the chairs curling around them, creating a sense of privacy.
They worked together on sorting through the vocabulary the other teams were building. As she had expected, Loul took to the light screen and the program itself with a natural intuition that couldn’t be taught. She had given him his own earpiece, rigging it up with some bandage wiring to help it fit more snugly against his flatter ear, and he had gasped when he’d first heard her voice clearly. She hadn’t realized how much he hadn’t been hearing until he responded to her laughter and voice with renewed enthusiasm.
Meg was trying once again to find a way to express the concept of time, starting with before and after. It was difficult in a culture whose concept of time she didn’t understand. Day and night—even in deep space, even in the most remote space colonies—Earth-originated humans clung to a day-night basis for time. Some colonies lengthened their day-night periods, but even those who lived in regions where daylight lasted for weeks on end clung to a cyclical diurnal-nocturnal schedule of timekeeping. Cho had explained that Earth biology demanded it. Until landing on this multisunned planet it had never occurred to Meg to consider another way of expressing time.
Loul tried. She could see he wanted badly to understand the nature of the question she tried to ask, but whenever she thought she was expressing a sequence of events, and thus the passage of time, he responded with an answer of location. Here and there, not now and then. They did stumble upon a general understanding of the concept of more and less, which easily adapted to bigger and smaller, older and younger, better and worse, with varying degrees, all with the activation of a simple wedge symbol. For some reason, that had made both of them giggle for almost a quarter of an hour. Language was such a strange thing.
Taking a break to just enjoy the laughter, Loul had pulled out the lunch he’d packed. Meg called it lunch, since it fell lunchtime-ish on her clock. She’d yet to discover any sort of pattern to the Dideto and their meals. Maybe it was just the pressure of working nonstop within the barrier; maybe they didn’t schedule their world around meals. The very thought of the latter and Meg could feel her mother roll over in her grave.
Loul unwrapped what looked like a dark-green ear of corn. Meg had seen them before and knew peeling back the fibrous leaves revealed only more leaves, denser and damper than the dried outer sheaths. Cho had declared the plant edible or at least not poisonous, but further analysis showed that the nutritional content was hardly worth the hours of chewing the Earthers would need to do just to bite off a piece. A truck had recently delivered cartons of these plants—mogi, Loul called them—and left them in stacks near the water vats. These plants seemed to be fuller and rougher, less trimmed than the other mogi she had seen. At the tip of the plant, where Loul peeled back the leaves, he picked off a dry, brownish pod that he dropped beside his bowl.
Meg had rolled the little pod between her fingers, knowing Loul watched her. He seemed fascinated by her fascination with the everyday objects he brought to her. While he ate, she picked at the pod. “Loul eat?” She asked him, holding it up.
“No. No good.” They had worked on clarifying the difference between bad and not good, an important difference when trying to determine if completely alien items were simply useless or incredibly dangerous.
Meg had let Loul eat, picking at the useless pod and thinking about a new way to approach the time problem, when her fingers broke through the husk and dipped into a mushy white center. At the same time, an idea occurred to her and she turned back to the light screen. Without thinking, she stuck her fingers in her mouth to clear off the white mush and froze.
She tried not to swallow, knowing Cho had not tested the dried pods on the ends of the mogi to see if they were safe. “Cho!” The bioscience officer held up a hand toward her, not turning away from the test he was running, and she yelled again, her voice muffled by the spit pooling up in the bottom of her mouth. He turned to look at her and she pointed to her face.
“I ay suh-hing.” She held her tongue out, hoping the white mush had just stayed there.
“Really, Meg?” Cho didn’t panic but hurried to her, pulling a disinfectant pad out of his kit. “You just decided to snack on something? After all this time?” She rolled her eyes in exasperation as he wiped all the residue he could off of her tongue.
“Ick.” She licked the antiseptic taste out of her mouth.
“Yeah, because you wouldn’t want to taste anything gross like an alien life-form.” Cho dropped the pad into a testing vial and grabbed the broken pod. “This?”
“Yeah, it’s the dried end of the mogi so it’s probably not poisonous, right?”
“Right,” Cho said, smashing the white pulp against the scanner over it. “And we have absolutely no plants on Earth that are edible in some parts and poisonous in others.”
“Just scan it.” She looked over at Loul, who watched their interaction with wide eyes. Since being fitted with the earpiece, he couldn’t get enough of listening to conversations among the Earthers. She saw him focusing when tones changed and knew he was starting to piece together the different tempos and temperaments different crew members used. Meg had yet to learn if the Dideto engaged in sarcasm. If not, Cho would be difficult to translate.
“Good news and bad news,” Cho said, shutting off the scanner. “Good news? These little pods are packed with nutrients—potassium, vitamins, even some calcium. They’re practically a superfood.”
“Is the bad news that they’re poisonous?”
“No. The bad news is they probably taste like plantains and I hate plantains.”
Meg giggled at Cho’s deadpan revelation of the best news they’d received resource-wise since landing. “Dammit. Another failure, huh? Maybe they come in strawberry too.”
Cho swiped a finger’s worth of the pulpy mess off the scanner and held it up to his face. “The things I do for science.” He swallowed it down, his expression unchanging.
“Well?”
“It ain’t strawberry.” He smacked his lips. “But it is better than the protein blocks.”
Meg grinned and turned to Loul. “Talk this?”
Loul swallowed hard, staring at the pod husk. “Tut.”
“Tut.” Meg repeated. “Earthers eat tut.”
“Okay.” His expression could best be described as unenthusiastic.
Meg whispered to Cho. “I think maybe this grosses him out.”
“Have you heard the sounds they make when they eat that gravel bread?” Cho asked. “Let’s just say this makes us even.”
And so the cartons of mogi were stripped of their tut and the Earthers finally had a Dideto source of food. The fact that the scientists and engineers and archivists and generals turned away whenever the white pulp emerged from the brown husks didn’t deter the crew from enjoying the new foodstuff. Of all the things the two civilizations were anxious to share with each other, it became clear rather quickly that mealtime was not one of them.
NINE
LOUL
* * *
Loul used to think it would have been cool to be a news reporter. He used to think they dashed into dangerous situations, uncovered deeply hidden secrets, and were obsessed with reporting life-shattering news to the masses. Then he had to deal with them. Sure, he had missed the first ripple of shock around the world as news of the Urfers broke, watching the press conference on the portable screens in the barrier area without really paying attention. Instead, he’d paid attention to the way Meg and her team watched it. He wondered if they pitied the Dideto for the dull, grainy pictures.
The press blew the story up in every way possible and yet, from what he had seen, they never really touched upon the truly amazing reality that there were aliens sitting, breathing, talking, and walking around on Didet. The news crews speculated on the presence of a mother ship in the sky and the probability of invasion, using clips of the latest blockbuster films to animate their theories. The generals made quick work of nipping those stories in the bud, assuring the world media that there was no invasion imminent. They played their roles convincingly, especially since they hammered at Loul incessantly to find out if indeed there were more Urfers coming. Loul had tried to ask, but either Meg didn’t understand the question or she didn’t want to answer.
He surprised himself at how little he cared about the answer. All those years he and Po and Hark had talked about alien invasions; all the time he had spent calculating the eventualities of such an event for his telemetry report; all the unimaginable possibilities and questions their presence raised—but all he could really think about was what made Meg laugh. He’d put together the high breathy sounds as laughter. He wanted to know what she thought of Didet and of him and why she had traveled so far from her home and what it was like. Dangers and threats and warnings just sort of evaporated every time he sat down with her over her screen.
And what did the media worry about? The fact that Urfers ate tut. The media went insane over the information. Some sides proclaimed the aliens as the solution to the world’s garbage problem, tut heaps being a heated debate topic in urban management. Others declared this would upset the entire farming ecosystem, since the Briggen livestock subsisted mainly on discarded tut. Dire predictions were made of future famines, vying with rhapsodic visions of utopia, all because five rather tall beings ate a dozen or so tut every round. Loul decided to stop watching the news.
But the news crews were far from done with the Urfers. The generals had assembled a media handling team consisting mostly of those science members who had spent their time pontificating to anyone behind the barrier who would listen. Loul recognized several of the faces from their appearances on news shows and press conferences over the years. He had yet to see any of them making one-on-one contact with the Urfers so far. Instead, the barrier zone broke into three distinct groups. There were the contact teams—he and the Effans, the mechanics and engineers, a dozen or so geoscientists, and a handful of roving archivists who hovered around the edges recording unobtrusively. These were the groups who made the majority of contact with the Urfers, who worked up close with them, struggling through language and technology barriers.
Behind this group, the bulk of the barrier zone was filled with the clerks, soldiers, and science teams processing the enormous amounts of information being relayed back to them. Dozens of teams worked nonstop coordinating information, bringing in supplies, and making plan after failed plan to move the Urfers to another location. And finally, on the outer ring of the barrier, were the faces of the event, the talking heads of the Cartar Administration, the polished professionals who picked through the mountains of information and selected the most appropriate and manageable factoids to deliver to the media.
Every now and again Loul would get an urgent missive from the outer ring needing clarification on some point or another. He usually dismissed them with a perfunctory answer, knowing they would spin it how they liked it, regardless of the facts. When the missive came in carried by none other than Ba Mo and Addo Lat, the two most famous spokespeople for the Cartar Administration, Loul paid attention. The team, popularly referred to as “Baddo” for their uncanny ability to finish each other’s sentences and seemingly read each other’s minds, swooped into the inner ring of the barrier accompanied by a security team and a camera team. Loul noticed these cameras weren’t the run-of-the-mill archiving kind. These were the eyes of big media, and they were trained on Baddo.
Meg looked up with interest at the well-dressed man and woman as they approached the booth amid their entourage. Loul knew she had seen nothing of Cartar fashions except the work clothes everyone wore inside the barrier, and he wondered what she thought of the dark, rough overshirts both reporters wore. All Loul could think was how expensive they looked.
“The Red Sun agrees with you, Mr. Pell.” Ba Mo’s smile perfectly matched her overblown greeting. Obviously the cameras were rolling.
“And you, Ba Mo.” He saw Meg’s fingers flashing over the light screen, capturing the exchange in her program. He smiled when he noticed how she kept her long fingers over the bulk of the screen, shielding it from the camera. “Is there something I can help you with?”
Addo Lat nudged a security guard at his side, and two men rushed off to grab another booth, dragging it over to where Loul and Meg sat. “We’re hoping to share an up-close look at our guests with our audience. We understand that you, Mr. Loul Pell, are the first contact.” He spoke smoothly, never missing a beat as the guards put the booth beside their own and he and Ba sat down with perfect synchronization.
Ba Mo laughed with that self-deprecating squint that had made her famous. “You may not know this, Loul—may I call you Loul?—but I was a language major back at West Face College. Go Ellers!” She winked into the camera, knocking her knuckles together. The camera panned back, moving behind Loul, but Meg’s attention was over her right shoulder. She stared at the back of the booth as if she could see through it, her eyes tracking something Loul couldn’t see. She leaned away from the reporter, putting her weight on her thin arm, and craned her long neck toward the far edge of the seat. Just a moment later, another cameraman slowly slid into sight, obviously trying to be stealthy. He jumped back, dropping his camera when he saw how close Meg had come. In his earpiece, Loul could hear Meg laugh.
“Cut.” Addo’s voice dropped its buoyant charm. With the cameras off, Baddo became a serious pair of unsmiling professionals. Professional what, Loul couldn’t be sure, but the high-spirited bantering disappeared. “How did it know our guy was coming up behind it?”
Loul shrugged. “First of all, it is a she. This is Meg. Meg, this is Ba Mo and Addo Lat.” Meg bobbed her head, her smile not showing her teeth. “And I don’t know how she knew he was sneaking around behind her but she knew it. They have very keen senses and we’re not sure we even know what all of them are. But we do know that you can’t sneak up on them.”
“We weren’t sneaking up on them,” Ba said with a sharp rap on the table. “We were hoping to get a candid shot, one that wasn’t prepared and staged.”
Loul couldn’t help but snort at that. “It’s pretty candid in here. We don’t have the time or language for staging things.”
Addo eyed the light screen hovering over the table. “You have the technology, though. What can you tell me about that?”
“Not much,” Loul said. “It’s a language program of some kind. She records what we say and somehow sorts it out to translate. That’s what we’ve been doing, finding common ground in the languages so we can communicate.”
“And it’s working?”
“Obviously.” Loul waved his hands at the teams working around the field. “The engineers have been going nuts over whatever compound that ship is made of and the bio teams have already gotten full-body scans, blood tests, and neurological readings.”
