Damocles, page 28
He stopped spinning, the wrench banging against his shin. “Hey, question for ya. If they don’t know what a boat is, what word do you suppose they’re using to say ship? Banana? Underpants? Lavender?”
“Jefferson!” Wagner moved closer to him, putting himself between the geologist and the slowly approaching soldiers. “Knock it off.”
“Sorry, Captain, just free thinking, you know.” His Galen drawl got thicker as he loosed a wide, stupid-looking grin. “That’s what we’re gonna hafta do, aren’t we? Just like ole Meg there. Think outside the box. Think like we never thunk before, right Meg? Get inside those hairy little skulls since we’re gonna be stuck here with them for the rest of our freaking lives.”
Meg clenched her fists. “Shut up, Jefferson. Just shut your mouth.”
“I will, Officer Dupris. I will stop talking and I will start reaching out to discover the wonder that is the Dideto.” He exaggerated each syllable of that last word. “As a matter of fact, I’m gonna start right now, and I’m gonna find out just what it is about that slab that’s got these boys so worked up. Whaddya think, Prader?”
Prader’s laugh hissed in the coms. “I think that’s a very scientific approach.”
“Both of you,” Captain Wagner said, “stand down now.”
“Aye-aye, Captain,” Jefferson said. “Let me just get rid of this wrench.”
Meg didn’t breathe as she watched Jefferson heft the wrench over his head, his long strong arms swinging the heavy metal bar over his head in ever-widening circles. She wanted to scream, to close her eyes, to shoot him, anything to stop him from what she knew he planned to do. But she couldn’t do anything but watch as the wrench whipped out of his grip and sailed end over end, smashing against the upper edge of the landing slab.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. The soldiers stopped their approach and every thrum fell silent. The only sound was Jefferson’s labored breathing. Until the cracking started.
At first it sounded like sand pattering to the ground. Then a crackling, grinding sound arose. A dark web of cracks skittered across the surface of the slab, racing out from the point of impact, stretching far past the nose of the ship. Everything grew silent once more for just a moment and Meg watched in horror as a dozen feet of the front of the slab disintegrated into rough chunks that crashed to the ground in a cloud of dust.
LOUL
* * *
Loul fell into a deep crouch. He wasn’t alone. The Effans, Hark, Po, Kik and crew, even The Searcher dropped down low to the ground as an enormous section of the Roana Temple crumbled into pieces. The soldiers stopped their advance, stunned at the sight. Nobody could speak. Nobody could look away.
In that minute Loul didn’t believe in anything. He had never really believed the temple slab was an actual footstep of the Sea Gods. He didn’t even know if he believed in the Sea Gods to begin with. He realized he’d never truly believed in the ornate, complex structures theorists had depicted being built on the stone. He didn’t believe that if someone ran across the surface they would be transported to one of the other six slabs around the globe. He didn’t believe that inside the slab lay the remains of the Sea Gods themselves or that any ancient creature was chained beneath the stone waiting to wreak havoc among the living. He didn’t believe science would ever explain the presence of the seven slabs and at that moment he didn’t care.
What he cared about was the slab itself. All its mystery, all its history, whatever it was, it was a piece of his world, the world he’d been born into, the world he loved. Nobody touched the slabs. Nobody crossed them or defaced them or drilled into them. Nobody. When he had seen the Urfer ship perched on that slab, it had only driven the point home more solidly. The slabs, whether the Roana Temple or the Steps at Ga or twin slabs of North Her Mer, it didn’t matter which slab it was, the slabs mattered. They were sacred. What kind of being, what kind of human being would purposefully and recklessly damage one? To what end? Another thick section of the slab crumbled, and in the rosy light filtering down through the dust, Loul saw the Urfers in a new light. They had never looked more alien.
The Urfers stood frozen. Meg’s eyes were enormous, her hands clamped over her mouth. A sea breeze picked up, spinning the dust in little twisters through the work site, picking up as the sky color shifted. It was like the planet itself felt the damage to the slab. It felt like the wind was angry. Tiny pebbles thrown by the wind pinged against the metal cases on the work site. Another set of fissures widened, cracking loudly before separating into jagged boulders and crashing to the dirt. For one horrible moment, Loul found himself calculating how long it would take for the entire slab to disintegrate.
General Ada’s radio crackled, breaking the stunned silence. All around him people broke into muttered sounds of protest and despair. Loul never thought he’d see anything harder to believe than the presence of an alien vessel on his world. The shattered corner of the ancient slab changed that forever. He heard Meg saying something low and urgent to the Urfers, something that made them break their stillness and move slowly toward the center of the site. They walked with the same careful precision they had used when they had first arrived. They moved like animal trainers frightened of spooking their charges. He almost laughed. It was a little late for that precaution.
Ada shouted an order and the soldiers settled back into their formation, the pom-cannons level and loaded. Loul saw the Urfers’ hands moving toward their legs. That’s where they had kept their weapons when they had landed. He thought they had put their weapons away. At some point they had all managed to replace them. Slowly, in rhythm, the five long-legged aliens stepped closer to each other, bony fingers flickering at the sides of their legs. It was like watching their arrival in reverse. It was like watching reality unravel.
The little one, Prader, stumbled over one of the tools she had kicked from her toolbox, and the sudden motion made two soldiers on the end of the line raise their shields aggressively. Agnar and Cheffson reacted quickly, drawing slender weapons from their pockets and aiming into the barricade. Someone barked another order, and the first pom-cannon ignition switch was opened. Loul felt a curious detachment. He’d never seen a pom-cannon fired before. He’d seen the aftereffects, the shrapnel and flaming debris; he’d even heard the roaring boom on tape. He wondered if it would hurt his ears to hear one go off this close.
The Urfers were talking, their voices low and hissing in his earpiece. He could hardly make out the sounds, and the translator made sense of none of the words. Prader picked herself up off the ground carefully, dusting rocks off of her hands as she righted herself. Not rocks, Loul corrected himself, pieces of the slab. Pieces of the Roana Temple that lay in crumbling mounds because one of the aliens had hit it repeatedly, hammered at it and smashed it like a waterbird pecking at a loro nut on a cliffside. But a waterbird needed to eat. Why would anyone need to smash a slab?
His thoughts whirled and fizzled like the dust twisters blowing red and hot in the changing light. The Purpling. Maybe that was it. Maybe the changing suns had driven the Urfers insane. It wasn’t impossible. How many stories had he read where the lowering light and the appearance of the pin lights in the sky had driven people mad? Loul ground his teeth, chastising himself. Stories, he shouted in his own mind. Stories. His whole world had been stories. This wasn’t Magagan. This was real. Soldiers pointed pom-cannons at five aliens who had defaced the Roana Temple.
Not aliens. Urfers. Meg. Pom-cannons were pointed at Meg.
He rose from his crouch, his fists tight against his side. “Stop.”
All eyes moved to him. He pointed his fists at the Urfers. “Stop. No.” Then he pointed at the soldiers. “Stop with the cannons. This isn’t the way to do this.”
“Pell,” General Ada yelled, “get out of the way. We’ve waited too long to get a handle on this and now they’ve gone too far. They’re trying to destroy the Roana Temple.”
Loul couldn’t help but laugh. “And so what’s your plan? To shoot pom-cannons at it? Those things can blow through buildings. Even if you hit the Urfers, even if you blow them right out of their shoes, do you think you won’t damage the temple?” He didn’t know if the general was listening but Loul could see the doubt on the soldiers’ faces. “It’s already cracking farther down the length. Look. You shoot anywhere near the slab and it’s going to crumble.”
“Well what do you suggest we do, Pell?” Ada said. “Wait until they finish destroying it? Give them a map and see what else they’d like to attack?”
Loul saw Hark and Reno Dado watching him. Po stood beside The Searcher, eyes flying over every inch of the scene. “Who says they’re attacking?”
“What the hell else would you call it?” Ada’s voice cracked as he yelled. “What else could it possibly mean?”
He looked at Meg, whose hands he noticed were not reaching for her weapon. One hand rested near her throat, wrapped around the ornament that hung there. The other she held out away from her body toward the other Urfers, palm down. Holding them back. Waiting.
“Why don’t we ask them?”
MEG
* * *
At that moment, Meg wanted to do a number of things. She wanted to punch Jefferson in the face. Prader too. She wanted to throw herself in front of Loul and beg him to forgive them. She wanted to find a quiet spot to rip off Cho’s clothes and lose herself in his body. She wanted to invent a time machine so she could go back to her childhood and pick a very different path than the one that had placed her on an alien planet billions of years from home with no way of returning and a crew that blamed her because of some idiotic superstition. And she had to pee.
She did none of those things. She did nothing. She found she could do nothing but stand and stare as huge chunks of the landing slab slid to the dry earth, listening as the thrums of the Dideto around her rose and fell in harsh distress. Then those weird tube machines came rolling in, complete with teams of soldiers, and before she let out the breath she’d been holding, Prader was on her knees, weapons were drawn, and Loul was standing the middle of it.
Loul shouted to the generals. Wagner spoke low in the coms, asking Meg what was happening and what they should do. She resisted the urge to scream, “Now you want my feedback? Now you need me?” Because they did need her. Not that she was going to do any good to any of them. She had no idea what the significance of the landing site was to Loul and his people, but in her experience, enormous hunks of unique, shaped rock did not just lie around untouched because nobody had noticed them. The ground around the site had been maintained, if left empty. Nothing about the landing site seemed accidental.
Meg heard the word ask, and the tubes pointed at them lowered to the ground. Whatever Loul had said, the soldiers had listened. Maybe she hadn’t been wrong in her bluff about Loul’s importance. If it kept this situation from erupting into violence, she’d happily admit her mistake.
“Meg.” Loul moved toward her, his movement steady, but she could hear the hammer of his thrum. “Talk this. Talk this.” He waved his hand over the Earther crew.
“I’m sorry.” It wouldn’t translate but she hoped Loul could see the meaning in her face. She looked down at him, the reddening light picking up flecks of amber in the hair around his eyes. His inner eyelids rose slightly as the wind shifted. The enormity of what she had to say made her want to lie down on the ground and go to sleep.
“This.” Loul jabbed his fist toward the slab. “This. Cheffson.”
Meg nodded. “Jefferson is not good/bad. Jefferson thinks…” She sighed, ignoring Jefferson’s huff of protest in the coms. “Earthers think…shit. This is pointless. You can’t understand what I’m saying to you. I’m just talking and talking and it’s not getting us anywhere.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “And now that we have all the time in the world to talk I can’t think of a single way to explain any of it to you.”
She stood there, swaying, eyes closed, listening to the discordant sound of worried thrums all around her. She heard her crew breathing in the coms and tiny pebbles blowing against metal in the rising wind. Then she felt rough fingers brush against her hand where it hung limp by her side.
“Meg,” Loul said, tugging at her hand as he dropped into a crouch. “Talk Loul.” He crouched down low, looking up at her, his thrum now low and steady like this was any other day. Any other day with a team of aliens on his planet walking around like they owned the place. He crouched and waited for her to join him. So, surrounded by drawn weapons and a damaged landing slab, Meg folded her legs beneath her, sinking down to the ground to sit cross-legged, face-to-face, the way she had done when they had first met.
Loul didn’t rush her. He waited while she searched for a way to reach him. She figured she might as well get right to the point. “The ship.” She pointed to the sky above them. “The big ship. It’s not coming. Earthers are not going.” She saw his surprised smile start and shook her head. “Not good/bad. Meg talks about Aaronson? Yes?” He tapped his knuckles. “Aaronson is…Aaronson does not come to Didet. Aaronson does not come to the Earthers.”
“Why?”
She smiled. It was such a big word for making such a small sound. It was a universal question in a breath. She picked up a clod of dirt in her hand and held it up for him to see. “The ship is…” She crumbled the dirt, letting the dust fall from her fingers. “Earthers not going. Earthers stay on Didet. All time.”
Loul watched her face, shifting as he did in his crouch. He looked at the dirt scattered at their feet. Shifting forward, balancing on the knuckles of his right hand, he lifted his left hand and reached out for Meg. His fingers opened and he brushed the tender pads against her throat where a Dideto’s thrum spot would be.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” Meg said, leaning into his hand.
In her com, she heard the sound of a deep breath being sucked in, and then Prader’s voice hissed. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch! Jefferson, can you see this?”
The Earthers spun around to see Prader, who knelt on the ground in front of the damaged slab. Loul had heard her as well and rose from his crouch as Meg got to her knees to look behind her. Prader pressed at the seam of one of the deeper fissures that stretched to the ground beside her. Her fingers clawed at the crumbling stone, clearing room enough to stick her arm in up to the elbow. She climbed to her feet, pulling at the rock, ripping away chunks of crumbling stone.
Prader’s voice was a whisper. “Meg, ask them where this rock came from.”
Meg turned back to Loul, watching as the translator made sense of Prader’s request. She didn’t need to repeat it. He jabbed his fist at the slab. “This. From there.” His arm swung toward the cliffs, toward the sea.
Jefferson ran to Prader and joined her in ripping off chunks from the already damaged slab. As the tan stone fell away they could see in the darkening red of the sunlight a wide ribbon of black rock speckled with rough maroon lines and flinty gray streaks. Jefferson pressed his cheek to the stone, his arm stretched long to caress the seam.
“Class IV.”
TWENTY
MEG
* * *
Every muscle in her body screamed for relief. Her back twinged with effort, her arms trembled as she slid another pallet into the passenger hold. Her fingertips had bled and scabbed over so many times she could no longer feel them or tell where the black rock dust ended and her skin began.
Kik’s destructive tendencies had turned out to be crucial to retrieving the silicate from beneath the slab’s exterior. His natural inclination to break things translated into a cunning skill at unearthing the black rock. As he dug and chipped and broke away the slab, the Class IV silicate revealed itself not as a slab of its own but rather jagged mounds jutting up from the ground. The tan clay covered them solidly, making one solid slab out of a pile of black debris. Even as they excavated, Jefferson couldn’t help but marvel at the precision with which the silicates had been covered.
“There are seven of these on the planet?” He kept asking the crews around him who just grunted their assent as they drilled and hauled the silicate out from its hiding place. “Why don’t you have these in your database? Why don’t you keep a record of them?”
“Maybe they do,” Meg said after hearing his question a dozen times. “Maybe they just don’t look at it like you do. Maybe it’s more important just being what it is than for what it’s made from.”
Jefferson wiped a muddy hand across his forehead, leaving a streak across his orange-tinted skin. “Then why are they letting us have it? If it’s so important, why just hand it over?”
Meg moved aside to let a crew of Dideto push a heavy wagonload of the silicate to the cargo hold. “Because we asked nicely?”
Jefferson stared at her for a long moment and then laughed. “How about that?”
Of course it hadn’t been as easy as that. Upon discovering the silicate, Jefferson had continued to hammer at the edifice while Prader yelled and waved her arms, holding off Kik and Mil and the rest of the Dideto ground crew nearby. Wagner had dragged over the geologist’s test kit, and when the black mottled stone proved to be Class IV, Jefferson had held it up over his head as if its existence justified the destructive behavior. When the three generals marched forward, soldiers in tow, and shouted at the Urfers in a loud, barking chorus, Meg had tried to intervene. Loul jumped in with her, shouting and waving hands and generally adding to the chaos. It was Wagner who changed everything.
He had taken the sample, glowing blue in the testing fluid within the clear jar, and held it before the generals. “We need this.” He didn’t shout. He didn’t threaten or tower over them. He held the jar out for their inspection, and when they looked back up at him, he waved his hand over the slab behind him. “We need this rock. To live. To go. Please.” And with a grace that surprised even his own crew, Wagner sank slowly to his knees before the generals. “Please.”
