Remnant Population

FOURTEEN

Kira Stavi reminded herself frequently that she had not expected this trip to be pleasant. It didn’t need to be pleasant; it was a chance to meet the first alien intelligence ever found on a colony world. On any world, for that matter. What did the usual shipboard nonsense matter, with that in view?

Still, it was annoying. All of them had superior academic qualifications—that went without saying—so there was really no need for the covert pushing and shoving, the backbiting, the attempts to impress. They’d all get publications out of this, no matter how it turned out—material for a lifetime’s maneuvering in the academic or bureaucratic jungle. They were not competing with each other.

Except that they were. Primary and backup teams, two sets of paired specialists, eight active minds each determined to make or complete a reputation out of this trip, and too much shipboard time with too little to do besides worry about how the others might frustrate that ambition.

The primary team alone could generate, Kira thought, a storycube of problems. Bilong Oliausau had to impress them with her knowledge of neolinguistic AI, and her sexual attractiveness. Ori Lavin, normally a calm, pragmatic Pelorist, almost a caricature of that sect, had reacted to Bilong as if to a shot of rejuvenating hormones, and sleeked his moustache every time she undulated by. He had engaged in one fierce argument after another with Vasil, most of them unnecessary. Vasil, for his part, interpreted “team leader” to mean that both Bilong and the lion’s share of transmission time were his by rights.

Kira didn’t care about Bilong’s behavior—she even had a sneaking sympathy for the girl, off on her first long expedition, given a place on the primary team only because the director of the linguistics faculty had chosen this inauspicious time to collapse with a richly deserved bleeding ulcer. Kira had heard about the almost-mythical Dr. Lowaasi, who went through secretaries and graduate assistants with equal voracity. Rumor had it that the linguistics faculty cheered as the ambulance drove away. Anyway, it was no wonder Bilong seemed immature and unstable, and threw herself at Vasil while flirting over her shoulder with Ori. What really upset Kira was the way Vasil hogged the transmission time.

Kira reminded herself that her own position was secure. She had tenure; she had a high citation index, and after this it would go even higher. The xenobiologist on the backup team, whose unpronounceable name everyone rendered as Chesva, respected her without embarrassing hero worship, leaving Kira free to do the thinking, and treat Chesva as a normal assistant. Whether the creatures were intelligent or not, whether they signed a treaty or not, she would have exclusive access to the biota . . . wish fulfillment for a xenobiologist. She had samples already—Sims Bancorp had deposited the requisite samples with the colonial office decades before—but samples were no substitute for observing living organisms in their native ecosystem. All she had to do was survive the voyage without committing assault on her team members.

She reminded herself of this day after tedious day, through the intermediate jumps and the long insystem crawl to the planet. She reminded herself that it would have been worse—it would have taken longer—on most ships. Although it was tempting to think that a larger team would have been less difficult, she knew from previous field experience that large teams could offer just as many opportunities for interpersonal unpleasantness. Here, the small size of the team would force them to cooperate once they were on the planet. And she, the only one presently acting like a responsible adult, would make sure of that.

When they were close enough, she joined the others at the wardroom viewscreen. Blue, white, tan, dark green . . . polar caps, mountain ranges, forests . . . no wonder someone wanted to colonize it, she thought. If it had been purpose-built for humans, it could not have been closer to ideal.

“Needs a moon,” Ori said, as if reading her mind. Sometimes he could; they had been on several expeditions together. Kira took it as a sign that he was getting over his infatuation with Bilong. She smiled at him without saying anything.

“We’re going to sit out here for awhile and really look at things,” Vasil said. He had said this before, more than once; Kira felt her shoulders tighten now. She didn’t like being treated as an idiot who couldn’t remember. Perhaps that was what he was used to; unlike the others, he had no academic appointment. She tried to convince herself that this explained his attitude. “We’re going to launch a low-orbit scanner,” he went on. Kira could have repeated his next words with him; she did it silently, careful not to move her lips. “And only when we know what we’re getting into, will we decide where to land.”

The obvious place was the old colony site, since their mission included shutting down that powerplant. Vasil knew that. The shuttle pilot knew that. Kira glared at the viewscreen and told herself she’d feel better when she got out of the ship for awhile.

She watched the launch of the low-orbit scanner, and then went to the lab to put the first transmissions through her own special filters. She didn’t expect the analysis of atmospheric gases to have changed from the baseline data filed before Sims Bancorp was issued the first development license, but she would be more comfortable with her instruments than the tension in the wardroom.

Chesva followed her. “Would you like me to do the atmospheric stuff, and let you get right to the surface data?”

“I don’t think there’ll be any surface data for awhile, but we can check the response of the visuals.”

“I’ll load the old data for comparison.” They knew it by heart, but the computer would catch subtle changes they might miss.

“Thanks,” Kira said. She wished Chesva were on the primary team with her . . . but then she might have had someone like Bilong for her backup. Better this way, probably.

The atmospheric data began to show up on her screen. She pulled up the old, and had the computer highlight any changes. Nothing showed. Just as she’d expected.

“What about that old weathersat?” Chesva asked. “Do we have the access codes?”

“I’ll check.” Kira ran through the expedition manual, which was supposed to contain a precis of all relevant data, including enabling codes for any equipment Sims Bancorp had left behind. “Yes—and I’ll just give it a shove—”

The weathersat’s computer obligingly dumped a long file of weather observations, graphics and all. Kira called up the current image. Blue water, swirling white clouds in streaks along the wind patterns, a mass of clouds lumped up over something on the western side of the image. She muttered her way through the selection tree to pull up information about that. Mountains, it turned out to be.

Chesva had moved over to her workstation. “Do you suppose the weathersat has any idle scanners? If so, maybe we could get an early peek—”

“Good idea. Have you ever peeled this kind of system?”

Chesva grinned. “Actually, yes. And it nearly got me drafted into the military.”

“Sounds like a good story,” Kira said. “But in that case, why don’t you fiddle with this, and I’ll watch and learn.”

Chesva explained as he went along, but Kira was more interested in the incoming data than in the way he convinced the weathersat to realign scanners and antennae to pick up and transmit the data he wanted. By the time he had it running to his satisfaction, the weathersat’s area of observation was moving toward the nightside.

“Handy that the powerplant’s still on,” Chesva said. “It’s the thermal peak there which has let the weathersat stay in position all these years.”

“Really.” Kira wasn’t that interested. She could see the bright dot on the infrared herself. Around it were the softer, dimmer blurs of buildings radiating heat absorbed from the sun, distinctly different from the ground only on the side where shadows had cooled the soil . . . they all seemed to have one sharp edge, and the rest blurry.

“Now if we can just get the magnification working—” Chesva said. “Ah. There. Now what do you suppose that is?”

A visible light scan, this time, the low slanting rays of the setting sun making bold shadows . . . there were the buildings of the abandoned colony, arranged in neat rows, the forest ramparts with their longer shadows . . . and something moving between the houses.

Kira felt a shiver run down her back. Animals. Probably only animals, either the surviving domestic animals abandoned by the colonists, or the forest animals they had described. The aliens had been thousands of kilometers away; the colonists had lived there forty years without seeing anything dangerous. But the shadows they cast were long, upright.

“Thermal sources,” Chesva said. “Whatever they are, they’re warm-blooded, but not as hot as the powerplant.”

“Upright,” Kira said. She was glad to hear that her voice was steady.

“Yes.” His voice was as calm as hers. They were professionals, academics, adults . . . but her heart pounded. She knew . . . she knew these were not cows or sheep or monkeylike forest climbers. These were the ones who had destroyed a colony—blown up a shuttle—and now prowled about, learning entirely too much.

Sunlight vanished from the scene, and without the stark contrast of sun and shadow she could see nothing, not even movement. On the infrared, she could still see the buildings radiating their stored heat. At a little distance, two clumps of brighter dots might be cattle and sheep. And between the blurred shapes of the buildings, she could see little pale dots moving. Abruptly they disappeared.

“Went inside something,” Chesva said. “One of the buildings.” She heard him swallow. “They’re really there.”

“We’re theorizing ahead of our data,” Kira said, trying to sound professional. Chesva snorted.

“You know we’re not,” he said. “We just got more data than anyone else has had.”

“Yeah,” Kira said. “I think so.”

Suddenly the visual scan changed. Lights sparkled on the dark screen.

“We know so,” Kira amended. “They’ve figured out the lights—”

“Wouldn’t be hard,” Chesva said. He sucked his teeth, his only irritating habit, and then went on. “It wouldn’t take digits, necessarily. A hand-swipe—if those are standard toggle switches. A tentacle. Even a beak.”

“Bipedal,” Kira said. “Those upright shadows.”

“Not necessarily bi,” Chesva said. “But I agree, they’re upright. Let’s pull up one of the earlier frames and really go over it.”

“You do that. I want to watch this—” Kira waved at the screens. Lights. The computer said four lights. She put a trace on the IR pattern that had moved, the little dots that had crossed the street and gone inside. Now that she had a moment to think, she called up the village street plan furnished by Sims Bancorp, and decided that the—indigenes, she had better think of them, rather than aliens—had gone into the multipurpose building that housed the control and monitoring functions, the rainwater storage tanks, schoolrooms, communal workrooms, and so on.

The computer bleeped; when she glanced at the visual display, another light had come on. She looked back at the village plan. Falfurrias, Bartolomeo et u. et m., it said. She translated the archaic notation: et ux et mater, “and wife and mother.” Originally built and occupied by Humberto and Ofelia Falfurrias. She looked up the evacuation report. Bartolomeo and Rosara Falfurrias had been taken up on shuttle 3-F; Ofelia Falfurrias on shuttle 3-H.

Kira wondered why they’d been separated. She had always assumed families were transported together. Not that it mattered, really. She did wish they had an arrival manifest for the Sims Bancorp colony transport, but it hadn’t yet arrived where it was going. She wrinkled her nose, glad that she didn’t have to travel on the old, slow, sublight ships. Cryo made such travel possible, but nothing could make it efficient.

“I’ve got another light source,” she said to Chesva, who merely grunted. She glanced over, and saw that he was doing something to a single frame of the earlier visual data. His screen changed color, the images shifting to more contrasting hues.

Kira went back to her own investigations. Something—she was sure it was the same indigenes that had wiped out the second colony at landing—was in the buildings, and using at least the light switches. What else could they be using? She glanced at the Sims Bancorp material to remind herself what was down there. Waste recycler, which provided fuel for the basic powerplant producing electricity for the lights, the coolers, the fans, the pumps. The vehicles . . . some electrical, some running off biofuels. No aircraft, thank the Luck. No surviving boats . . . Kira wondered what had happened to them. With the electricity on, the indigenes could make the stoves hot and the coolers cold, but they couldn’t get into real trouble. She hoped. Like most colonies, this one had had few weapons, and the evacuation teams reported that they’d removed them.

Of course, they’d also reported turning off the powerplant. Kira had another cold feeling, along with the certainty that “What else?” was a question that should have been asked long ago. She checked the low-orbital scanner. It was behind the planet now, probably still doing its first run of pre-programmed tasks. She no longer cared about atmospheric gases, about tidal reflectance data.

“Aha!” Chesva said. “Come see this.”

Kira moved over. It was a single motionless screen, again visual, but not what they’d seen before. For one thing, the sun was higher, the shadows shorter, and in the other direction.

“Midmorning,” Chesva said. “I threw in some search parameters based on those few frames we had, and this is the best I’ve found so far.”

“Why was the weathersat doing an optical scan? It was turned off when you queried, wasn’t it?”

“Probably one of those things put its foot on the controls,” Chesva said. Clearly he didn’t care how the weathersat had come by its images, now that he had them. Kira felt the same way.

“Two legs,” Kira said instead of commenting on the unlikelihood of some animal stepping in the right place and then stepping there again to turn the same scan off.

“Yeah . . . you were right about bipedal. The theory’s always said it’s more likely. Two upper limbs, too—the shadows show that clearly. But look here—” He pointed to a shorter figure among the others. Shorter, its proportions familiar. Human.

Kira choked back all the rude expressions she knew, and said instead, “Vasil will not be happy about this.”

“No,” Chesva said. He grinned at her. “But it should get his mind off Bilong, don’t you think?”

There was now no question of landing anywhere but the Sims Bancorp shuttle strip. They had been lent a military-grade drop shuttle, supposedly impervious to anything but “extremely advanced technology,” the military pilots said. The pilots had come with the shuttle, along with a small contingent of “advisors” who had not mingled at all with the scientific and diplomatic specialists during the voyage.

The shuttle had made several reconnaissance flights after the low-orbital scanner showed no evidence of technology that could blow them from the sky. Evidence of lower-level technology filled the datastrips and cubes. Stone buildings—obvious permanent settlements—clustered on the rocky coast far north and east of the Sims Bancorp colony, and troops of nomads accompanied by herds of quadruped grazers in the grasslands west of the settlements.

“I’m not surprised they missed the nomads,” Vasil said. “They could be other migrating animals, nothing special. They don’t seem to build fires, or structures. It’s only that we know to look for them. But how they could have missed those cities—!” He shook his head dramatically.

Kira refused to restart the discussion of critical points and emergence, gradualism versus cultural discontinuity. They didn’t have the historical data they needed to determine when the indigenes had achieved the cognitive and cultural complexity needed for this level of technology, and they couldn’t get it up here. Down there, if Ori and his backup were good enough, might be the data they needed to settle the question. Instead, she concentrated on biota: the four-legged herds the nomads accompanied . . . hunted? Herded? Herbivores, surely; only abundant plant growth would support that mass of flesh. Prey animals, certainly, with those eyes set on the sides of longish heads, eyes that could see behind and around. Were the indigenes the only predators? She looked for, but did not find, something equivalent to canids.

“Boats, with rowers, and sails,” Ori said, gloating over the pictures taken of the coastal settlements. “They can work wood—I wonder if it’s all as hard as the stuff Sims exported from the tropics. We have to have metal for that. If they have metal tools—”

Kira looked at the creatures themselves. Indigenes, she reminded herself. She couldn’t tell what they were most like, mammals or reptiles or birds . . . they had no visible hair or feathers, but their surface looked more like skin than scales. Their gait, with its long-legged, bouncing quality, reminded her of ratites, the large flightless birds of old Earth, but the obvious joint in the leg faced forward, like the human knee. Large eyes, placed slightly more to the side of the head than human eyes; they would have both binocular and monocular vision, she suspected. Four-toed, four-fingered . . . an opposable digit on the hand, and one of the toes looked as if it were almost opposable.

“Look at those buildings,” Ori said, breaking her concentration for a moment. “And I’d swear those are pipes—maybe just hollow reeds or something, but tubes to carry—yes! Something just came out of that one.” Kira had looked just too late; she saw the tubes, but not whatever had been in them.

Memnin, the anthropologist on the backup team, spoke up. “I’m noticing how aware they are. Did you notice, Ori, how they looked up at the shuttle? No panic, no real surprise, and that one there—” he pointed at a corner of the image. “It’s sketching something, I’d bet.”

Bilong and Apos, the linguists, stood in the corners watching. They had nothing to do, since the scanners had not picked up any sound. Apos looked alert, but Bilong pouted. Kira wished again that Bilong hadn’t been chosen for the primary team. Apos might be younger and less experienced, but at least he wasn’t trying to make trouble.

Several days of overflights and data analysis—enough new data to keep an entire faculty busy; Kira felt she was drowning in it—and finally the military pilots agreed that they could risk a landing at the old colony. They insisted that everyone wear protective gear, hot, heavy, clumsy, and unfamiliar to the civilians. Kira was sure the military advisors were laughing at them. They probably did look ridiculous, she told herself, trying to see the funny side as she struggled with the toggles and slides that held the thick panels together. At least they were going to see the real world at last; it was worth this inconvenience on the way.

Unfortunately, from her point of view, the military version of a shuttle had no viewports, nor any of the other amenities of civilian shuttles. She had expected to watch the approach, seeing for herself how the atmosphere changed color and affected the look of the landscape. The exterior cameras would capture that for later analysis, but that didn’t make up for not seeing it herself. She had to sit staring at the back of Vasil’s head all the way down, her rump going numb on the hard seat, her ears assaulted by the roar and rattle. She had no idea how far along they were until the pilot’s announcement that they would be landing in two minutes. The shuttle dipped, swayed, and shuddered in the disconcerting way of all shuttles, and Kira very consciously did not clench her hands. She hated this; she couldn’t even see the runway. Then the seat smacked against her backside, and she felt the uneven rumble of the wheels rolling on the rough, overgrown surface.

At first view, the abandoned colony looked exactly like an abandoned colony. They had landed at local dawn, and a hazy pink light glowed from the walls of the shabby little one-story houses. Nothing moved. Parked in a ragged row beside the shuttle strip were the colony vehicles, streaked with rust, tires deflated. Tough grass, and even a few shrubs, had encroached on the runway itself. A moist warm breeze stirred the grass and carried the strange alien smell of a different world.

The shuttle skin popped and hissed; Kira could hear nothing more at first, until her own ears popped. Far off, something groaned horribly; she jumped. Ori said, “That must be the cows” and she could have kicked herself for not recognizing the sound. She was the xenobiologist, after all; she was supposed to know animals. Vasil started down the ramp, but one of the advisors stopped him.

“We aren’t sure yet,” the advisor said. Sure of what, Kira wondered. They were sure the indigenes were here, and at least one human. They had speculated endlessly about that human, seen only on the weathersat visual scans: who was it, how had he or she found this place, and why? Some drunken crewman left behind after the colony was evacuated? Some exploring entrepreneur come to salvage the leftover equipment? Someone who wanted to claim the planet for himself?

“Somebody—” said another of the advisors. Despite Vasil’s arguments, they had brought weapons along. He might be the team leader, the future ambassador, but they had traveled on a military ship, landed on a military shuttle; he had not been able to change the captain’s orders. “To defend the shuttle” the captain had said to Vasil; Kira, standing behind him, had seen his ears redden. He had told the others he would take care of it, meaning get rid of the weapons, but his bluster had gotten him nowhere. Now the advisors had their weapons out. Kira was not surprised.

“Don’t do anything,” Vasil pleaded. They ignored him. Kira, sweating in her protective suit, ignored him too.

“One individual,” the advisor said. He was speaking into a mic more than to them. “Appears to be human, female . . .” Then in a tone of surprise, “Old. An old woman, alone.”

Kira couldn’t see what they were seeing; the advisors and Vasil, all in bulky suits, blocked her view up the village lane. They could have moved enough to let those behind see, but they were all standing foursquare, as if intending to be as obtrusive as possible. She looked sideways instead, back down the runway with its ragged rows of grass, to the river—a surface gleaming in the early light—then the other direction, where a distant green wall was the forest. Kira could not tell this second-growth forest from the uncut primary forest a little to the west, even though it had shown up clearly on the scans from space.

“She’s . . .” A long pause, almost a gulp, then the advisor found the right official phrase for it. “Inappropriately attired. Wearing . . . uh . . . just some sort of cape-like garment and some beads. Barefoot. Uh . . . this individual may be disturbed . . .”

Kira couldn’t stand it. She was the assistant leader of this expedition, and they were ignoring her. She pushed forward, not too carefully, and Vasil staggered into the advisor, who almost went over the edge of the ramp. She didn’t care; she wanted to see. And there, walking slowly toward the shuttle, came a scrawny little woman with an untidy bush of white hair. Barefoot, yes, and wearing an embroidered cape over her tanned skin . . . some kind of garment slung around her hips. And beads.

She didn’t look disturbed, not like the senile clinic patients shown in newscubes to remind people to take their anti-senility pills. She looked annoyed, like someone who has had unexpected company drop by on a day when she had planned to do something else. It was this very assurance, the way she planted her gnarled old feet carefully on the ground, one after another, that silenced them all, Kira thought. The old woman was not embarrassed by her odd attire; she was not impressed with them.

They stood, sweating in their protective suits, as the old woman walked slowly up to the foot of the ramp. Kira tried to make out the design embroidered on the cape, and suddenly realized it was faces—faces and eyes. Too many eyes. The old woman tipped back her head and glared at them with her bright black eyes.

“This was not a good time,” she said. “You’ve upset them.”

Vasil shook himself into action first. “By the authority vested in me—” he began. The old woman interrupted.

“I said it wasn’t a good time,” she said. “You could have listened when I tried to talk to you.”

“Talk to us?” Kira asked, cutting off Vasil’s angry sputter.

“Yes.” The woman’s head bobbed, then came up again. “But you folk have done something to the weathersat, so I can’t get it to listen.”

“You took those pictures?” Ori asked. “You made it do the visual scanning of this location?”

“Of course,” the old woman said. “They wanted to see what it looked like, not just the weather. It helped them understand.” They. Kira shivered as she realized what the old woman must mean by they. Perhaps she was crazy, if she had been showing them the technology. Surely even an uneducated old woman knew better.

“By what right—!” began Vasil, just as the senior advisor said, “Under whose authority—?” The two men glared at each other.

“Who are you?” asked Kira, into the moment of silence.

“Who are you?” the old woman asked, without answering the question. If she was senile, perhaps she had forgotten her own name.

“We won’t hurt you,” Kira said, trying to sound gentle and patient. “We want to help you—” That sounded stupid, even to her, and she was not surprised when the old woman made a scornful noise.

“I don’t need help,” the old woman said. “If you’re one of that other lot, you’re in the wrong place.”

“That other lot?” Vasil got that out, silencing the advisor with another glare.

“Come awhile back, tried to land—you must know about them.”

“Yes,” the advisor said, this time beating out Vasil. “What do you know about them?”

“Heard it on the com,” the old woman said. “Heard them coming down, heard them calling for help.” She clamped her mouth together, then said, “Heard them die.” She looked down.

“Didn’t you try to help?” Vasil asked. Kira was cheered to find that someone could say something stupider than she had. Did Vasil really think that this frail old woman could have stopped a massacre that had happened thousands of kilometers away? The old woman said nothing, just kept looking up at them. Vasil turned red, and cleared his throat. The advisor, Kira noted, looked amused.

“Have you been here all along?” Kira asked, since no one else broke the silence.

“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 backs 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.