Engine City (6 page)

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, nodding.

The selkie tapped the fossil with a blunt, ridged fingernail. Then he pointed over to the bones; at the skiff; at the sky; then away at an angle as he had done earlier; pointed at himself, and finally waved his finger back over his shoulder at the others. He settled back, buttocks on heels, elbows on knees, waved a hand to include Gregor and Elizabeth, and repeated the interrogative grunt.

“Translation,” Elizabeth said, turning to Gregor. “ ‘The spidery things carried us in skiffs long ago. Where do you come from?’ Agreed?”

“Yup,” said Gregor. “But maybe there’s more to it than that. What’s with that pointing at the ground?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s more of the things buried over there?”

“Hey, that’s a thought. We can check it later. What do we tell him? And how?”

“Same way as he told us.”

Elizabeth stood up and walked over to the bones. Gregor watched her with a slightly worried look. She beckoned to the selkie, who came over but stayed a few meters distant. She pointed down at the alien skeleton, then at herself, then moved her head from side to side. The selkie tipped his head back a couple of times. She hoped this was a nod.

Elizabeth reached for the trowel, still lying there undisturbed, and sketched in the sand a spidery shape. Indicating it, and the bones, elicited another backward jerk of the head. She smoothed over the disturbed sand and drew a semicircle joined to a V to make a crude outline of a saur’s head. Four curved strokes outlined the almond-shaped eyes, a slash the slit mouth. She pointed to the saur face, then to the skiff.

The selkie stared at her. He made what she’d taken as the interrogative sound, but this time with a sort of strain in his voice—the human equivalent would have been
“Huh?!”
He squatted beside her and held out a hand for the trowel. She gave it to him; he grasped it confidently as though holding a paintbrush and rapidly added a rendering of a saur’s spindly body beneath the head. Beside it, he drew with equal speed and economy an ellipse with three legs, then put down the trowel and looked at her.

“Yes,” she said firmly, nodding backwards.

The selkie’s mouth and eyes widened. He stood slowly, as though weary, and walked back to the others. They conferred in a huddle. Some of them made downward slapping gestures that puzzled Elizabeth for a moment, until she realized that in water it would have been deliberate splashing at the surface, perhaps as a warning. Then they all jumped to their feet and fled into the sea; but the bold one was the last, and he looked back over his shoulder as he ran.

After marking the spot and photographing it they finished the excavation, laid the small skeleton carefully in a plastic tray, and into another tray they shoveled the sand in which it had been buried and which contained myriad tiny rods that might be small bones or internal parts or otherwise related to it; or perhaps just the spines of sea urchins; in any case, part of the puzzle. They lifted the two trays into the skiff, along with clinking racks of tubes containing the other specimens Elizabeth had collected. By comparison with the apparently alien skeleton, these specimens seemed trivial, but in the long run nothing was trivial in science. Not wishing to hang around where the selkies had been, as much to avoid further alarming them as out of uncertainty about how dangerous the alarmed selkies might be, they took the skiff back to the whaling station and parked it well up the beach. Over a hasty midday ration, they discussed what to do next.

“The first thing we have to do,” said Gregor, “is take another look inland.”

Elizabeth waved a half-chewed chewy bar at the cliffs. “We’ve already looked. There’s nothing but sea-bats and insects.”

“We weren’t looking for
that.
What we need to know is whether it’s just some waif or part of a breeding population.”

“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll fly. You look.”

The skiff was human-adapted, but its control panel still assumed four-fingered hands: that configuration was buried so deep in the manufacturing-control program that it was impossible to change without a radical redesign of the craft. Elizabeth sat on the padded seat in front of a section of the circular shelf under the encircling viewscreen, a section that contained a few dials and gauges and a pair of shallow, hand-shaped but four-fingered depressions. She rested her fingers in the hollows, her thumbs to the sides, and consciously relaxed for a moment. Control was intuitive, something you had to ease yourself into, dependent on chords of varying pressures rather than any one-to-one correspondence. She let her fingers do the flying, and the craft lifted.

The view tilted from side to side as her initial tremors of hesitation transmitted themselves to the drive, then steadied as the machine rose above the top of the cliff. Higher, and the jumbled landscape of Lemuria Beach opened before them. The island was about a hundred kilometers east to west, and fifty north to south. Behind the tilted sedimentary strata of the southern cliffs were ragged strips of rock alternating with long bands of rough grass, which, after a few kilometers, gave way to a more recent mixture of volcanic rock and tuff, basalt flows, sulphurous geysers, and bogs of lime-green algae, interrupted by snow-covered remnant plateaus and outcrops of the sedimentary rock and lumpy intrusions of even older metamorphic and basal layers.

“Let’s follow the clifftop grasslands first,” said Gregor.

Elizabeth leaned down on her left hand, spinning the skiff to that side. She pressed her fingertips down and the skiff moved forward, rocked back the heels of both hands and it rose. They settled on a cruising altitude of thirty meters. Gregor paced around the circular space between the viewscreen and the central engine fairing, gazing out with binoculars. Every so often he’d spot something and Elizabeth would bring the craft down, tip it on edge or even right over, so that they could look at the ground just inches above their heads. But the bones always turned out to be of seabats, and the momentary excitement of finding in a grassy bank a huge warren of burrows was dimmed somewhat by the discovery, which at any other time would have made their day, that they were the work of a peculiar flightless bird which they provisionally dubbed the “mole penguin.”

“I’m amazed the whalers didn’t hunt them to extinction,” said Elizabeth.

“Probably taste disgusting.”

She looked at him sidelong. “And your point would be?”

They laughed and took themselves aloft.

The volcanic badlands were, not to their surprise, an even less thriving habitat for land animals. They chipped some interesting mats of yellow, stinking extremophile bacteria and netted a few specimens of a small spider that skittered across the algae-clogged pools, but that was it. They returned to the whaling station as the short day ended. The wind had dropped, and the sea was calm, smooth on the surface of its ceaseless swells. Elizabeth and Gregor stowed their less fragile specimens, marked and tagged for later collection, in the whaling station. In the long twilight they built a fire from the whitened timbers of a ruined boat and cooked over it their first hot meal of the day. They lingered, huddling closer together against the cold, as the embers faded with the light and the stars came down to the horizon. The southern hemisphere constellations were so unfamiliar they didn’t have names. Repairing this omission and identifying the two stars, among the many visible, that they’d visited themselves, was keeping them idly occupied when they heard heavy footsteps crunching up the beach.

“Behind the fire,” Gregor said quietly.

They scrambled to their feet and backed off, one to each side, and peered toward the shoreline. The footsteps became quieter as they moved from the shingle to the sand, then stopped. Elizabeth could dimly make out a selkie silhouetted against the starlit sea. He spread his hands wide and stepped forward into the dim circle of light from the fire. One arm was raised, shielding his eyes from the glow as he peered over his thick forearm at them. It was the bold one they’d met before.

He began to speak, his deep voice loud above the surf but quiet in itself. There was something in it of frustration, perhaps sorrow, but nothing of anger or fear. He spoke for about two minutes, then trailed off and ended with a gurgling laugh. Then he hunkered down, spread his hands, and looked at them across the fire, his eyes having apparently adapted to the light. Elizabeth stepped over beside Gregor, put a hand on his shoulder, and he joined her in squatting down. She faced the selkie, spread her hands, and leaned forward earnestly.

“What you are saying,” she said, her voice speaking to the selkie but her words for Gregor’s benefit, “is that you are speaking, and therefore you are a rational being, and that you want us to recognize you as such, and that you find our lack of a common language as frustrating as we do. Well, I understand and agree with that. In fact, I think that for all your nakedness and living in the wild, you are not a savage, a hunter-gatherer, although that may be how you live now. I think you’re basically as civilized as we are, and as aware of the nature of the universe. You can draw, you’ve seen a skiff before, you’ve met aliens. Am I right?”

Gregor nodded. The selkie responded with another minute or so of speech, looking down a little, as though in abstraction. When he’d finished, he looked up, and his teeth flashed in the embers’ glow. He reached for a stick from the fire, motioned to them and began to draw in the sand. They joined him and watched as he slashed in the sand the glyphs of skiff and spidery alien—ten lines, little more. He pointed at himself, waved a hand out to sea, and then raised a hand, palm forward: Wait. He rose and tramped into the dark, beckoning them after him. When they were all out of the circle of light, a few tens of meters along the beach, he held out an arm stiff with a pointing finger. It started at the angle to the ground he’d pointed at before, then swung smoothly up and around, until it was aimed at a bright red star about halfway up the sky to the east. They joined him in sighting along their arms at the star. Just to make sure they were looking at the right one, he poked a finger in the sand and dotted out the pattern of the stars around it, completing the picture with the one he’d pointed at, jabbing his finger in deep, then pointing again. He pointed at his chest again, then at the sea, then at the star again. Elizabeth and Gregor nodded vigorously. The selkie’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a grin that would have been frightening had they just encountered him.

He laid a hand first on Gregor’s shoulder, then on Elizabeth’s—it was like being a child again, looking up at him—and said something, then walked away into the waves.

“You know what I just figured out?” Gregor said, as the selkie’s back vanished.

“What?”

“The way he was pointing downward earlier, and at the start just there? He was pointing to where the star was in the morning, when it was below the horizon.”

She stared at him. “Could you do that?”

Gregor had been a navigator for twenty years. He had a more direct and practical knowledge of the sky than most astronomers. He thought about it for a moment and shook his head.

“Which means,” said Elizabeth, “that I may have been wrong about the selkies. They’re not as smart as we are. They’re smarter.”

A storm blew up later that night. Gregor and Elizabeth had already stowed some of their kit in the whaling station’s gloomy rooms, but they decided to spend the night in the skiff. With its field on it was less moveable than a rock. Its encircling view-screen picked up enough light from outside to give them a clear view, even with the interior lights on. They sat exhausted, gazing outward. It was like watching black-and-white television—white the surf, black the waves—but interesting.

“Wonder how the selkies are doing,” Elizabeth said.

“They can ride it out,” said Gregor. “Like seals.”

“But they’re not like seals. They’re not that aquatic. I can imagine them huddled on a beach somewhere. Poor things.”

“They look tough.” He grinned. “ ‘Hardy Man,’ all right.”

Elizabeth saw Gregor’s gaze drift back to the plastic tray in which they’d placed the anomalous octopod’s bones. Of all the specimens they’d collected, this was the one they could least afford to lose. They had not cared to examine it further with the crude instruments—scalpels, tweezers, pliers, hammers—that were on hand. They hardly dared to think about it. Not thinking about it was making them dizzy.

“This is big,” he said. “This is evidence, the first solid evidence we’ve had of the aliens for a start, and it looks like evidence that they’ve settled the selkies here. Or that they’re still doing it.”

Elizabeth smiled wryly. “The long-awaited invasion?”

“Something like that.” Gregor sighed. “Whatever. We have to report back.” He reached sideways and clasped her right hand, intertwining their fingers. “The journey’s over.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s the next journey I’m worried about.” It had been a good journey, almost a holiday. It could even have been the beginning of a retirement, or the resumption of their true careers after a long interruption. They’d always promised themselves that someday they would pay their home planet, Mingulay, the attention of a
Beagle
voyage. Marine biology had been, for both of them, their first love. When they’d both been twenty years younger, eighty-odd years ago, Gregor had found in the structures of the cephalopod brain the key to his family’s generations-long Great Work—to reverse-engineer the control program of the lightspeed drive, hitherto monopolized by the kraken navigators who plied the fixed trading routes of the Second Sphere. Implementing the program on the ancient onboard computers of the
Bright Star,
the ship in which Gregor’s ancestors had been hurled across the galaxy to humanity’s second home, had taken Gregor and Elizabeth across the four light-years to Croatan and, a month or two later, the four light-years back. The lightspeed jumps were subjectively instantaneous. While they’d been away, people had grown up or aged or died. That first experience of skipping forward in time had been a jolt. As the Cairns clan’s starship fleet had expanded and new planetary systems were laboriously added to the navigation programs, their journeys’ reach had extended, and that first jolt had been followed by many more. Already, the oldest members of Elizabeth’s family, who’d had decades yet to live when her starfaring had started, were long dead. Her parents were barely recognizable centenarians. Her children—at least they had kept pace, because they’d traveled with her. Elizabeth was already beginning to feel that disconnection with common humanity, and that identification with her traveling-companions, that was so patent in the long-established merchant families who for millennia had traveled in the krakens’ ships, slipping through centuries in months.