Deucalion (3 page)

Standard. Wordspeech for the language he used to ask the question.

‘A . . . little.' The alien words were harsh on his tongue, but Cael knew the shapes that made the speechsounds. Toev had taught him.
(‘In case you ever have to work the plantation.')
In everything, Cael was a quick learner.

‘What are you doing here? Why are you spying on the Centennial celebrations?'

Most of what the man said was beyond Cael. He formed the reply in his head, then made the word-shapes. ‘Watching . . . colours. Shelters . . . Watching.'

The man shook his head in frustration. ‘I know you were watching. I want to know why.'

Why? Question. Request for reason.

‘No why. Watching.'

Again, the offworlder shook his head. ‘It killed the cat, you know . . . curiosity. You're just lucky it was me who saw you, not Mackenzie. He hates ferrets.'

Ferret. Offworlder hate-name for Elokoi.

But Cael could still taste no hate in the colour of the offworlder's tone, and as he watched, he saw the dark man smile.
‘I don't know why he should. Hate you, I mean. But who knows what makes anyone tick?
I
sure as hell don't. You'd better get out of here, before the J-man finishes his speech and everyone comes out. If Mack does a sweep and finds you, he'll do a bit more than ask you what you're doing here. Go on. Get out of here. Go!'

Go! Imperative. Instruction to leave.

Without removing his gaze from the offworlder's dark face, Cael moved slowly backwards into the underbrush. Then he turned and ran. And he did not slow his pace until he was safely back on the Reserve.

DARYL

One thing I'll say about the ‘frontier'. They throw a good party. We ate until we were stuffed, drank like there was no tomorrow and danced until the sun came up. But it was the Centennial, after all, and you only get an excuse like that once every hundred years.

Even so, all through it, I kept thinking back to the young Elokoi I'd caught that afternoon. He knew hardly a word of Standard, but I got the feeling that he understood a lot more about me than I did about him. After all, he did know a few words, which put him a step ahead of me. I don't know anyone who knows
any
Elokoi speech.

Johannsen flew back to New G first thing next morning. The PR had been done, the voters were happy. But I had a few days of rec-leave owing to me, and I thought I might stick around. You know, help the girls of Neuenstadt to celebrate properly. That, at least, was my excuse. But I think I knew deep down that there was more to it than that.

Next day, I found myself on top of the cliff overlooking the town. Actually, it's not a natural cliff at all. It's the face of an old open-cut mine. The Corporation gouged away half the mountain before the mineral deposits became uneconomical, and they decided to sink shaft mines instead. That was about sixty years ago. Since then, the town has expanded into the scar, so that now the cliff looks right down into it. And if you move around to the western edge of the cut and face south, you can look down on the Elokoi Reserve.

I spent most of the morning up on that cliff, in blistering heat, 'scoping the Reserve. The 'scope was ether-linked to the laser-disk in the flyer, and from time to time, if something caught my attention, I recorded a bit. It's against regulations, of course, but what isn't? I didn't have a clue what I was doing up there in the first place, so a little rule-bending wasn't all that surprising.

It was only when I sat down in the tech-room that evening, and went through what I'd recorded that I realised just what kind of things had caught my attention.

An old Elokoi, sitting in the sun outside his hut, carving. While a youngster sat in front of him and just watched. Every movement. Every knife-cut.

A group of adolescent females sitting in a circle, while an older female walked around inside the circle; up and down, between the younger ones, who followed her with their eyes. They were out of audible range even for the 'scope, but it probably didn't matter; the Elokoi communicate very little in spoken words, and we haven't developed the technology yet to pick up thoughts.

Females occupy a special position in Elokoi society. For one thing, they tend to be a little bigger than the males, but more importantly, there are far fewer of them. Only about one Elokoi baby in four is female, so I guess it's natural they should be treated differently. It also explains why they tend to take a number of mates. Anything up to five, in a sort of hierarchy, where the firstmate dominates the others – but never with any violence. The Elokoi are about the least violent of any of the intelligent races yet discovered. Which probably explains why the early colonists hunted them almost to extinction.

I didn't know all this until I accessed one of the library disks that night. It showed a lot of interesting stuff about Elokoi culture, too. Mack might think they're just a sub-species of rodent, but I'll bet he never took the time to look at the disk. Painting, dance, even an oral literature and history called the Telling – most of which we managed to wipe out by killing off a whole generation of Tellers in the first few years after the Arrival.

The whole experience reminded me of something, but I couldn't put my finger on just what. Then it hit me . . .

I was ten years old and it was a few months before my family shipped out on the freeze-liner and ended up sweating out a new life on Deucalion.

Ten years old, and at school they decided it was time we got in touch with our roots. Australasia, Old Earth. Three hundred years of immigration, before the isolationists took control. Anyway, they decided to give us a crash course on ‘cultural diversity'. Edited highlights from the encyclodisks; all the juicy bits from cultures that mostly no longer existed, except in museums and gigabytes of information on the international databases.

But one segment blew me out.

I was only ten, remember, and my parents, my
real
parents, had been dead for most of that time, so it came as a bit of a shock to see people on the screen with skin as dark as mine. There weren't so many of us around. At least, not where I lived. I watched them, as the voice on the disk prattled on about ‘indigenous peoples', and ‘unique cultural identities' – which meant squat to me. But the images touched something in me.

Afterwards, the teacher accessed a craftwork program, and we learned how to do something from one of the cultures on the disk. I scored some synth-wood, and carved this small flying toy, which flew pretty well, but didn't come back like it was supposed to. It was flat, and shaped like a bent stick, and I covered it with these out-of-shape line drawings of strange animals, which I copied straight from the screen.

When I showed my mother, she looked at my father and flashed him an odd sort of smile, then she told me how nice she thought it was. I packed it with my other stuff when we left Earth a few months later. I haven't seen it for years, but I guess it's at home somewhere. My mother never throws anything away.

On my second day on the cliff, I saw him.

He wasn't hard to recognise. The Elokoi don't have too many young, so the number of adolescents on the Reserve was quite small, and the white flash over his eye was a giveaway.

He was heading south, away from the Reserve and the town, and through the 'scope, it seemed like he was trying too hard to look casual. It's a bit difficult to tell with the Elokoi, because they show so little emotion on their faces. With their long snouts, and their intelligent eyes, I always think they look more like dogs – terriers, maybe – than ferrets. Whatever. The point is, it's hard to pick what they're thinking.

It was just something in the way he moved. The fact that he kept glancing over his shoulder and then from side to side as he walked. I decided to follow him. Not too closely, of course. There was no need. Like I said, the 'scope is pretty sophisticated. Once I had him marked, he was mine.

We travelled for maybe an hour – no mean journey in that heat. Then he disappeared into a small cave at the base of one of the small hills that form part of the border of the Great Desert. I waited outside for a few minutes, then I followed him into the cave.

SAEBI

Saebi was already hard at work when Cael arrived, mixing colours and preparing the tools. It was all she could do for him. The vision was his, and the memories. Only Cael knew the Pictures with an artist's eye. Only his hands could bring them to life again; create the Wall anew. This was the reason the Ancestors had chosen him so young, and blessed him with the passion.

She watched him as he stood before the living rock, and she knew that he had moved beyond her. Retreating into the shadows, she sat in silence, as the next Picture took life beneath his hands. And as she watched him, she knew that she would one day mate with him. That he would be her firstmate. Her only-mate. There could be no other . . .

Then, suddenly, they were not alone.

The light which filtered in from the entrance was blocked as the huge form entered, and as she sprang to stand beside Cael, he turned. She felt the anguish in his wordless cry, and saw the colour fall in slow motion from the pot he held in his hand, soaking into the sand of the cave floor.

The offworlder stopped a few paces into the cave, and looked up at the Wall. He drew a breath, then looked at Cael, who had not moved.

‘You did all this?'

Saebi watched Cael nod his head. An offworlder gesture. He answered in wordspeech. ‘You . . . take old Pictures. I paint . . . new Pictures.'

The offworlder looked up at the Wall again, then down at Cael. Then, without a word, he turned and left the cave.

Every day, she watched the cave. Cael had not left the Reserve. Had not eaten. He was waiting for the end of his Dream. But still she watched.

On the tenth day, the offworlder returned. But he was alone. He came in a small, private flyer, which he landed close to the cave entrance. Then he went inside. A few moments later, he reappeared, climbed back into the flyer and took off, back over the mountains towards the tower-city, leaving behind only silence.

Saebi waited a few minutes, then climbed down to the cave. For a moment, she paused. Then she made her way inside.

It stood in a crevice halfway up the Wall. She reached up and took it in her hands, turning it over, examining the strangeness of it. It felt like hardwood, but it had never been alive. Never grown from any seed. It was curved and flat, and all along its length were pictures. Simple, child-pictures of strange creatures, painted in bright colours, framed with a pattern of lines and circles, speaking of something long lost.

Something else caught her eye. Lodged in the crevice was a small piece of paper. She reached up to grasp it. It was folded in half. Inside were written two words. Offworlder words she could not read. But she knew that Cael would find their meaning. She looked at them for a long moment, before she refolded the paper and put it into her pouch.

i understand

With one final glance at the Wall, she turned and walked out into the light.

2

DEUCALION

(Extracts from the works of AJL Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with permission of his estate: 2
/7/2325
Earth standard)

From:
Deucalion: The First New World
(Chapter One)

. . .
DiBortelli's fortuitous discovery of warp-travel opened up the universe in a way which few prophets at the beginning of the twenty-first century had even dared to contemplate. It did not, however, lead immediately to extraterrestrial contact. In fact, while unmanned warp-shuttles explored more than two hundred worlds, in well over eighty star-systems, during the first fifty years of exploration, not a single sign of intelligent life was brought back.

This situation has altered markedly in the past century, with the adoption of a more systematic and coordinated approach, but the necessarily random nature of exploration in the early years bore few concrete results.

Primitive life forms, such as the huge slug-like creatures of the planet Centauri Beta (the earliest of the dome-worlds, later named Chiron by its first, doomed settlers), or the variety of plant-like forms found on a number of other worlds, were of great interest to geneticists and biological researchers, but the apparent absence of truly intelligent life within reach of human contact was a great disappointment.

Far worse, from the point of view of the governments and entrepreneurs who had financed the expensive expeditions, only very few of the worlds which the shuttles had visited had environments even remotely Earth-like. It must be remembered that while unmanned shuttles could travel any distance and gather information, opportunities for manned expeditions were severely limited.

From the very beginning, the practical limit for sub-light-speed exploration or colonisation was about eighty light-years. Cryogenics – or freeze-sleep – then, as now, could preserve a human body for no more than a hundred Earth-years before irreversible organ deterioration set in. This made it imperative that habitable worlds be found within that eighty light-year range.

Terra-forming was attempted in a limited way in the dome-communities established on a number of planets, with some minor successes, and some notably disastrous – and fatal – failures, but interstellar colonisation remained a dangerous and expensive undertaking.

Then, in 2075, a warp-shuttle returned from the sole planet in the Aeolian system, and from the moment gravitational data, and soil and atmosphere analyses were downloaded, it was clear that finally the long search had borne fruit.

Deucalion was Earth-like. Its atmosphere was breathable, its temperature range was within survivable limits, and it had plant and animal life that resembled that of Earth more closely than we had any right to expect.

And it had the Elokoi.

From:
Deucalion: A Social History
(Chapter Four)

. . .
The early colonists, drawn as they were from the less privileged classes of Old Earth, came with high expectations of life on the New World. Few members of the Old Money families, and even fewer of the Funded Researchers, would make the trip to such a dangerous and uncertain environment, knowing that the logic of Jump-Time, with its half-century in stasis, meant the journey would almost inevitably be one-way.

It has been claimed that it was the high expectations of the early colonists, as much as their xenophobic attitudes, that led to the destruction of the native Elokoi population. Coming as they did from underprivileged and mainly urban backgrounds, the early colonists had absorbed the enlistment propaganda:
Land of your own. Full employment in a booming environment. No pollution, no ruling class. Build a new life with hard work.

The reality was far less ideal.

Life in the new colony was hard; long work hours for little reward – mostly in the mining ventures that grew up almost overnight; land that proved resistant to any attempts at farming – unless you had the resources of the large agricultural conglomerates, who quickly bought up the leases of the unsuccessful ‘pioneers'. A ruling council, made up of public servants and representatives of the exploration companies who had financed the venture, was at least as oppressive and demanding as the governments they had come so far to escape.

Frustrated and disillusioned, so quickly forced into the familiar role of underclass, it is not really surprising that they should find, in the Elokoi, a group on which to take out their frustrations.

Small and non-violent, and with a telepathic ability that was just alien enough to suggest a possible threat, the Elokoi were murdered and beaten by individuals and groups. Before the establishment of the Reserves, there were even recorded instances of massacres and ‘ferret' hunting parties, which destroyed whole Clans of Elokoi. The survivors were scattered and forced into the deserts, risking the dangerous journey to the barren coast and the islands of the inland sea.

It was a sad and desperate retracing of the Great Trek, which had, according to Elokoi legend, brought the Forty Clans to the east coast of Deucalion's huge main continent during the Time before the Telling.