Absorption (11 page)

Brett wondered how Williams was doing at the Herbirthday feast in Landfall, or if he had ducked out at the last minute.

Since most of the voices didn’t speak English, Brett’s ear distinguished the few that did. To his left, a man in a blue shirt approached one with a big straw hat.

“I’m Tex. Do you think we’re the only English speaking train collectors around here?”

Train collectors? Trains of woman’s dresses? Ancient predecessors of monorails? The man in the straw hat had a high pitched voice. “I’m Lewis. Mine run through a model of the town where Jesse James and Ronald Reagan lived.”

Something sounded slightly wrong about that, but Brett wasn’t big on the ancient prehistory of Old Earth. Tex blinked. Then he replied, “I have one big enough to ride on.”

Huh? Had the nannies been used to bring together two people who, unknown to themselves, shared some esoteric knowledge? What were they talking about, and where were Michael and Ariel? “Excuse me, Tex. How do I find someone?”

His voice sounded unaccustomedly diffident to Brett’s own ears.

Tex turned. His nose had a reddish cast. “There’s not much point coming here without a cap and booster box, is there? I mean, I know arrangements are made for Armish and offworlders and such, but then you wouldn’t be right here.”

There were Armish on Old York, a Christian sect of ancient origin. They mostly grew their own food and eschewed high technology. Brett couldn’t imagine them participating in this.

Tex’s accent was almost standard. Most of the words were familiar. Only when taken as a whole were they incomprehensible.

While Brett tried to phrase a question, the man continued. “If you’re not willing to trust the Prince of the Feast with at least some basic hints and the ability to guide you when you ramble, why come to a Herbirthday festival, especially at Ulayn?”

Enough of staring in silent bewilderment like a lunatic or fool. The tone sounded so reasonable that things might start to make sense if he kept the man talking. He replied, “You may have a point.”

“I do. Michael may be a politician rather than a Neuron, but he has a lot of good people helping him.”

Michael?

The man’s brow wrinkled. “Sorry to bother you. Something looked off, but I guess I’m intruding. Excuse me.”

By the time Brett had caught up with the conversation, the men had vanished into the crowd. Just as Brett had almost gotten a clue. He was sure his body language had expressed interest in talking – why had the man concluded otherwise?

Rather than chase after him, Brett listened for familiar words. A pang of loneliness surprised him. At first he attributed it to being alone in a crowd of people who mostly didn’t speak any language he knew. Then he decided the easy camaraderie of the crowd mattered more.

He raised his voice. “Excuse me, does anyone here speak English?”

A few heads turned, but nobody replied. He decided shouting at the top of his lungs wouldn’t help. He could always go back to the pod station. Becoming a nuisance didn’t seem the best way to be a diplomat, or learn anything vital either.

Michael’s words from a few weeks ago came back to him. Was he somehow engaged in a duel of wits, where admitting he couldn’t figure out the rules would be failure?

The next English speaking voice he heard was female, with a rather piercing tone. “I guess they’ll be starting the telepathy soon.”

Brett could distinguish the general direction, but when he turned that way he didn’t see any likely speakers.

A new voice spoke up three or four yards away, and slightly to his left. “That’s part of what makes the Feast at Ulayn so much fun. Everyone speaks different languages, so they can’t just encourage people to send and receive words without speaking. It’s not just thoughtmail with different protocols.”

Somehow the crowd had lost its fluidity. A tight knot of people blocked the direction he wanted to move, and others materialized when he tried to step around. A voice came from further off now. “It’s deeper, like real telepathy would be.”

A man near her agreed. “You’ve got it.”

A few minutes later, the amount of speech he heard began to decrease. More and more, small groups stared at each other in silence, with occasional outbursts of laughter. As he wandered, he found himself drawing more than a few looks, as if merely being alone in a crowd of strangers was odd. Normally he didn’t mind sticking out, even had the attention been overtly disapproving, but he liked to know why and have made a choice in the matter.

It had sounded as if the first woman spoke to another person. Was someone unseen aware of him somewhere? She had in fact explained what happened just before it did. Was she merely pretending not to address Brett, or had she been nudged to say those words at that time?

En masse, people sat at the tables without dithering or commotion. Many others were converging on the long wide path. People shifted and regrouped. As people near him sat, Brett’s range of vision increased, and though he still couldn’t see the whole crowd, a huge parade involving thousands of people formed. He took one of the last empty spaces on a bench near him. The aluminum table was painted white.

Brett saw no organizers, but order swiftly emerged from chaos. Nobody wore uniforms, with everyone dressed up in their own style and colors, but somehow individuals were grouped so that each line had their own color combination. Hundreds of men and women formed into a bold red and black design, complemented elsewhere by blue and white. Perhaps they had been told beforehand what to wear and which section to join? Brett found the idea of a spontaneous assembly going so smoothly unsettling. Lines of every color of the rainbow wove in and out as the parade began, forming and separating, merging and splitting. They did not march in unison, but their movements were halfway between walking and dancing. Camouflaged arches and tunnels allowed streams of color to go under and over each other. On exactly opposing points of one circle, a youngster broke ranks to jump and wave, while an old man waved his walking stick in the air. Both apparently spontaneous behaviors synchronized.

The center of the pattern had several circles without the same touch. One was people dressed in black whose dance seemed to be well rehearsed. Did even some Armish participate after all?

The other was quite ordinary, mediocre dancers having fun, making errors, showing no special timing or skills. They didn’t wear skullcaps, so apparently some non-Armish adults didn’t use the nanotechnology.

At first it looked like the other occupants of his table were silently and raptly observing the dance, but from the shifting eye contact, varying facial expressions, and occasional laughter he soon deduced that this was not the case. As often happens to someone with a group of people laughing and commenting in a language they don’t share, Brett started to feel a few of them were talking about him. After a bit he decided it wasn’t his imagination.

Why should he care? “Hello? Anyone speak English?”

Nobody responded, but pre-teen children in white uniforms and men and women in red uniforms placed a number of small dishes in front of everyone at the table except Brett. Brett resolved that if they wanted to let him remain hungry he wasn’t going to beg, but a woman in a red robe hesitated repeatedly near him. Finally he asked what she wanted, as if politely concerned only for her sake.

“It’s just that I noticed nobody was bringing you any food. I keep having a feeling someone else is taking care of it, but nobody does.”

“Does it have anything to do with the fact that I don’t come from Oceania and don’t have nanotechnology?”

“Maybe, but it shouldn’t. I’m sure it’s being fixed, but I guess you’re hungry now.”

Brett turned his head to face her. “I’m also wondering about something else. I was invited here by someone who I can’t find. I had the impression if I arrived at Ulayn pod station 227301 I would end up where I was expected. Things may be as my… umm… acquaintance intended, but I wanted to ask just in case.”

She focused her brown eyes on Brett. He saw green jade earrings dangling from her ears. “I’ll look into it after lunch.”

Brett nodded. Eventually she took a few items from each person in reach. The rather random assortment of foods Brett ended up with made a better meal than expected. He’d always wanted to try sunflare fish. The glowing vegetables in the stir fry were by now old friends. The fruit was tangy and cool going down his throat, and the ice cream statue was almost too perfect to eat.

It was an eerie solitary meal all the same. This was the only activity Brett had been able to participate in so far, so he had to hold back the urge to stuff himself to the gills. He stood up from the table about the same time the others around him did.

People mingled again, differently than before. They paired off for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, apparently not knowing who they were looking for until they saw them. People in red robes handed out small objects. A woman who spoke only English had trouble communicating with one who spoke some Asian language, but when they were handed pads and pencils they happily started swapping drawings and giggling. Two men seated themselves for a game of chess. One entire table was taken up by two people who at first appeared to be mimes pretending to play ping pong, but Brett eventually decided they were playing virtual pong without VR glasses. Brett didn’t stare when one couple took a look at each other and began to kiss passionately. Two flutists actually made a rather good duet. Brett wasn’t the only one who stopped to listen.

It was fun to watch, but Brett felt left out. He did notice two trends: the groups of people became larger as the afternoon turned to evening, and the activities gradually got more athletic as it grew cooler. Some people started setting up a volley-ball net a few feet away from Brett. It would have been easier to ask to join if there had been normal verbal conversation, but although people laughed out loud, all the conversation must have been mental. Further away he saw two people setting up a net for a soccer game, while a third balanced a black and white soccer ball on her head.

Strains of cheerful music rang out from above. It took Brett a moment to locate the happy bird at the top of another bright blue tree. He set his computer to operate as binoculars, and studied the resultant picture on the little screen. The rainbow of red, green, and blue feathers was startling since the tropical coloring didn’t seem to go with the temperate climate and vegetation in the area.

After he took a few pictures, he consulted the database. The bird was a scavenger which typically lived near humans. Biologists believed the colors and songs had not evolved to attract mates or warn off other birds, but because humans tended to leave them in peace. They sometimes nested in bluetube trees, which were less frequented by squirrels and raccoons than imported trees.

Brett wondered why it was called a bluetube tree. A few fronds were singular instead of being part of ‘fans.’ They were rolled up into long tubes which emitted a faint scent, sweet yet faintly sickening. He didn’t care enough to consult the database again, but wondered if they helped control insects and other pests, encouraging humans to cultivate them when so much native vegetation had already died out.

As he examined the tree, he noticed one other thing. The fronds moved a little, even when the wind didn’t blow. When he blocked the sunlight for more than a few minutes, the fronds would move around a few moments, seeking sunlight, before giving up and going limp. It might have fascinated a botanist, but Brett found it creepy.

Nobody else was giving the tree a glance, so it must be familiar to most of them. Suddenly the intensity of his isolation loomed large in his awareness. Instead of a temporary situation created by circumstances, it became a symbol of who he was and what was wrong with him. Even among friends and fellow soldiers, he had still been alone. He had set out to be a wiseass, but only been a belligerent hermit. He wanted to shrug it off as a cumulative effect of the odd experiences of the evening, but the more he told himself it was a mood, the more he felt he had discovered something profound about himself. And even about the culture which had chosen him as a representative. It had been some time since he had made any attempt to find Michael, or get someone to explain to him more about what was happening. He tried to summon the energy required.

A man in a blue robe trimmed with gold walked up. A few minutes ago Brett might have been secretly relieved while pretending not to care. Now it truly didn’t matter.

“Come with me, Major.”

Brett wore civilian clothing. Either the man had been sent to find him, or he had done a little bit of research.

The man walked off without looking back to see if Brett was following him – or could he see through the eyes of those around him? Brett followed. The crowd was drifting that way, and Brett preferred walking to standing.

The place to which he was led looked like a natural amphitheatre for the first few seconds after Brett saw it. The stone, however, looked artificially smooth. The shallow slope would be easy to walk on, and no seats were carved into the featureless stone. At the very center lay a round level surface.

Suddenly the crowd began dancing, perfectly in time, to a music Brett could not hear. Unlike the parade he had seen before, it was a complex and formal measure, with rapidly changing partners. His guide used a gesture to direct Brett’s gaze outward, and he realized the dance was an organic unity as far as the eye could see. He couldn’t make out individual dancers or steps from far off, but he could detect the rhythm and tempo.