Damocles (15 page)

“Yes.” She pressed the tips of her fingers into the skin over her eyes and then blinked hard several times. The leader called out something behind her and she bobbed her head. Putting a hand on his shoulder, she smiled. “Meg dropping.”

“What?” He asked even though he knew she couldn’t understand him. “No.”

“Yes.” She turned away from him and headed toward the shelter where Cho also squatted. Loul followed her.

“No, Meg. Are you going to drop like those other two? For a shift? Two shifts?” He felt stupid. He knew she didn’t know what he was saying and he could tell nothing he did get through would stop her, but the thought of her disappearing from his sight, even for just a shift, made him want to stomp his foot and throw a tantrum. It terrified him.

Cho crawled into the tent and Meg folded her long legs down to follow him. Loul dropped into a deep crouch, hearing the Effans hurrying up behind him. The realization must have hit them too. Meg and Cho were their only links to the world of the Urfers. The other three crew members remained aloof, less adept or maybe less inclined to communicate. It might only be a shift or two but Loul and the Effans burned with need to interact with these beings. How could they just interrupt the encounter like this?

Meg disappeared within the dome, the filmy flap falling into place behind her. Loul couldn’t help himself. He grabbed the film and pulled it back. In the milky light filtering through the dome, he saw Cho unfold himself on his back on a dark, puffy pad. When he saw Loul’s intrusion, he made a low sound to Meg, who turned and smiled at Loul. Sitting on the ground beside Cho’s supine body, she pulled out the light screen.

“Meg dropping,” she said and pointed to the screen. Her finger hovered over the yes button. “Yes.” She pressed the button several times, much as she had pressed the question mark button earlier. Another voice came from the speaker patch, lower but not Dideto. Cho’s probably, amplified in the recording. “Leep.” That’s what the Effans had said Cho had called it, although he thought he could hear more sound in the word, more like
fleep
or
gleep
.

Loul pressed the question mark button several times.

Meg smiled and touched his hand. “Meg is okay. Meg dropping. Yes.” And with that, she lay back on the ground beside Cho, dragging up a thin sheet of fabric to cover their bodies. Cho had one of his long arms draped over his face, covering his eyes, and Loul could tell he and Meg were speaking softly to each other. Whatever they said made Meg smile, her breath coming out in short puffs that moved the fabric over her body. Loul and the Effans waited, watching, but within minutes both Urfers grew unnaturally still, the only movement the rising and falling of their thin chests beneath the fabric.

“Landing on a planet of people who don’t sleep—proof there is no God.” Cho groaned, throwing his arm over his eyes. Meg laughed and settled in beside him.

“Looks like we may have an audience while we sleep.”

“Nothing creepy about that.”

She pulled the blanket up over them both. Every inch of her wanted to roll onto her side, throw her leg over Cho, and fall asleep, but she knew the Dideto were puzzled by sleep. She didn’t need to complicate information. Of course, if Loul and the other
two watched them the entire time, who knew what they would see? Cho snored, and she knew she talked in her sleep, to say nothing of the ordinary shifting and thrashing through dream sequences. There was nothing to be done about it now, however. They’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours. They all needed at least five hours of sleep to continue to function. Prader and Jefferson had gone first. As captain, Wagner volunteered to go last. All Meg knew for sure was that she had to sleep right now, and despite the hard ground, she felt herself drifting off.

“What the hell is that noise?” Cho blew out a loud breath, pulling her out of sleep. “Are they talking? Humming? What is it?”

It took her a minute to understand what he meant. Then she heard the low throat sounds of Loul and the Effans where they sat perched at the door of the dome. “It’s their sound. It’s like a vocal body language, I think.”

“Can they tone it down?”

“I doubt it. Think of it as white noise, like the sound of cicadas.” She murmured a happy sound as he rolled onto his side and pulled her toward him. She rolled too, pressing her back into his chest, relaxing under the weight of his arm on her waist.

“I hate cicadas.”

“Grumpy.” She yawned, settling in. “I like the sound. I like these people.”

Cho’s only response was a soft breath against the back of her neck.

When the alarm went off on Cho’s armband, Meg lay on her stomach, the small pillow damp beneath her cheek. Cho sprawled off the pad, the sound making him jump.

“Oh my God.” His voice was thick with sleep. “What did we sleep? Five minutes?”

Meg rolled over and stretched long, feeling her body complain at the movement. Before her eyes were fully focused, the flaps to the dome opened and three Dideto faces appeared. She covered her face with her hands to smother a giggle as Cho sighed.

“You know, I used to have a dog that did that every morning. Just stand there and breathe on me until I woke up.” He sat up and raked his hands through his rumpled hair. “I didn’t keep that dog long.”

“Yeah.” Meg pulled herself up too, smiling at Loul. “You didn’t land on your dog’s planet. Their world, their ways. Their smiling faces everywhere we go.”

Cho sighed as the Effans started talking to him, his name the only word he could understand. “Well I’m going first and then you can let your boy there follow you into the port-toilet. That should make for some interesting syntax building.”

“You’re the bioscience officer.”

“I’m also bigger, faster, and meaner than you.”

“Yeah?” She shook her hair out from the loosened ponytail. “But I have breasts.”

He shot her a side eye, trying not to smile. “Cheater.”

“Yep.” She kissed him on the cheek before crawling toward the door. “Breasts always win. Remember that.”

Loul was already talking to her as she climbed from the dome, squinting in hot sunlight. She nodded at him and let him follow her as far as to the door of the small port-toilet dome. When he made motions to follow her, she put her hands on his chest. “No.”

“Dropping? Meg dropping?”

“Meg is okay.” She nodded again, trying not to giggle at the accidental toilet humor. She put her hands on his chest and could feel the powerful muscles beneath her hands. If he forced
himself, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. Not that there was anything to hide really. It was just that there were so many things they needed to learn to say to each other. Explaining why she was pulling down her pants and squatting over a bowl of genetically modified algae and underneath a solar panel was not how she wanted to start her day. Besides, Cho was the bioscience officer. That would be a fun part of his information sharing.

Cho waited outside the door for his turn, Loul and the Effans talking over each other. She had to laugh at the still-grumpy expression on his face. “You know, you’re going to have to turn your translation com on today. There’s no avoiding it.”

He scowled as he passed by. “Science in the morning is never a good thing. If it’s even morning. Tell Wagner to get some sleep. And tell Chatty Cathy and company that we’re going to talk about food when I get out.”

“I’ll get your kit.”

Meg held out her arms wide, gesturing to Loul and the Effans to move away from the dome and back to the center of the field. She grabbed Cho’s small biokit from outside their shelter and needed only to nod at Wagner to give him the signal to take his much-needed sleep. Prader and a cluster of Dideto in green suits were crouched by one of the landing boosters of the
Damocles
sub, the sounds of metallic clanging and shouting bursting out now and again. Jefferson worked alone, scanning through his light screen, still gathering geological data from his probes that had come back online.

Meg settled Loul and the Effans in a semicircle, motioning for them to be still while she got some food and water. She’d need Cho to help her explain what they needed nutrient-wise and to analyze whatever the Dideto ate to see if their food was compatible with Earther biology. Grabbing a couple of protein blocks
and a bag of water, she settled across from her Dideto friends. Cho joined them a moment later.

“I suppose it’s too much to ask,” he said, crossing his legs beneath him, “to hope that coffee is a required nutrient on this planet.”

Meg took a deep drink of water. “Why? Do you think they have trouble staying awake?”

Cho finally laughed, the restorative effects of even their brief sleep brightening up this mood. He took the water from Meg, toasted the wide-eyed and fidgeting Effans, and drank.

“Good morning, ladies. Let’s get started, shall we?” He activated his translation com.

The days sped by, Cho warning them to set their alarms. Although the levels of daylight shifted as the various suns rose and fell, true nightfall never came and their bodies adjusted with some difficulty. Eating, sleeping, and even bathroom breaks had to be scheduled to keep their bodies working smoothly. There were only five Earthers on the planet and a never-ending stream of new teams of Dideto to work with. The Dideto didn’t sleep in the sense that the Earthers did, their regularly spaced dropping sessions adequate to refresh them. Meg laughed and teased Cho when she saw that he had become as obsessed with understanding the dropping as the Effans were with examining his sleep.

The food and water discussions made headway at a pretty decent pace. Fortunately the Dideto also required water, although not as much as the Earthers, and Cho had little trouble explaining to the Effans that the crew would need a large vat of water on hand. Cho set up a solar-powered purification system, at which Jefferson had smirked: “Do you think we’ll have enough daylight to run it?”

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.