Quozl (12 page)

Harnesses were hastily unfastened. All-weather sandals slapped against the deck as the team prepared to go outside. Weariness notwithstanding, Flies-by-Tail made ready to join them. Her body was limp but her tone upbeat as she joined the others near the hatchway, pressing close to Looks-at-Charts.

“Someone should be here to say ‘Welcome home,'” she whispered. When a glance at his body posture suggested she could safely invade his Sama, she reached out to caress his cheek with six fingers. The excitement of the moment was sufficient to override the standard suppressant dose she'd taken prior to departure. Looks felt himself responding and deliberately moved away. A shared touch was one thing; now was not the time or place for the rest.

The final check run, they opened the hatch. Shiraz greeted them with cold wind, icy rain, and a blast of stroboscopic lightning. Looks was comforted by the inclement weather. It would take pretty sophisticated instrumentation to detect a descending vessel in this muck. If their preliminary observations were accurate, the natives did not possess it.

Striding down the ramp, he braced himself against the wind as he turned northward. There was no sign of their landing craft, which suggested it had made planetfall successfully at the opposite end of the valley. Behind him the four members of the survey team were struggling to assemble their equipment. Their task was twofold: to confirm readings and measurements made from orbit and to stand ready to provide last-second corrections if necessary. Though they wore protective oversuits, the howling wind and beating rain still made their work uncomfortable.

“What a wonderful place,” he mused aloud. “No doubt our offspring, may they be honored and respected, will bless us profusely for choosing it.”

“We had no choice.” Flies-by-Tail stood close to him, watching the landing team struggle with their instruments. “We had to come down somewhere unpleasant. At least the Shirazians are like us in that respect.”

“We don't know that,” he corrected her. “They may have other reasons for avoiding this place, reasons we cannot imagine or suspect.” He blinked away rain. “Although I do not think they would come here for the benign climate.”

It helped to concentrate on the trees that began growing halfway up the valley slopes and continued to the cloud-concealed crests of the mountains. Trees, even alien trees, were reassuring sights, harbingers of warmth and productivity and a generous nature. Such strange trees they were, unlike anything on Quozlene or the other settled worlds, with their narrow sharp-tipped leaves and deeply ribbed bark. He wondered if the vegetation in the temperate regions to the south was much different.

Despite his protective jumpsuit and his well-groomed fur he found he was cold. The wind ruffled his fur and let the rain penetrate to the skin. Lightning arched across the sky, jumping from one mountaintop to the other, a billion-volt bridge. Accompanied by Flies-by-Tail he walked a little ways away from the ship. Since none of the landing team was asking his advice there was nothing for him to do except stay out of the way unless needed.

“Not such a terrible place,” he murmured hopefully. “If it were other than isolated, cold, and difficult to reach, it would be overrun with Shirazians.”

“The crucial point.” Flies-by-Tail had her ears down to protect her cheeks, her arms folded over her chest.

As he looked at her he was startled by the realization that her training was now redundant. Had this been a normal colonization she could have looked forward to many years of convoying survey teams and scouts across the surface of the new world. Instead they were going to have to hide in their burrows, unable to travel freely across the surface much less through its blue skies. If they were to function as productive members of the new colony, Flies-by-Tail and the other pilots would require extensive retraining, training they might not take to with ease or enjoyment.

Come to think of it, what would be his fate? Would any exploration of the surface be permitted in his lifetime? He refused to consider the other possibility.

“I'm sorry,” he heard himself murmuring.

She looked at him in surprise, her nictitating membranes shielding her eyes from the rain. “For what?”

“For the thoughts I was having. They were selfish and egocentric. I am abased.”

“You are forgiven,” she said softly without knowing what she was forgiving him for.

They stood close together watching the survey team work, four of his fingers toying idly with her tail where it protruded from the seat of her suit. He was thinking of Burden-carries-Far and how they had argued over who would be first.

Both had achieved important firsts, both regrettable. Burden had been the first Quozl to be slain by a member of another intelligent species, while Looks had been first to kill in turn.

As his spirits fell, something else rose. It was unQuozl, he tried to tell himself. Wrong time, wrong place. But despite the suppressants he could feel his body coming alive. Flies-by-Tail's eyes glistened blue-gray through the rain. He let his mind dwell on the husky whisper of her voice as his fingers worked the smooth fur of her tail.

Perhaps, he thought, the time of firsts was not yet over.

“I realize that the weather is less than ideal and the ground here hard, but possibly …?”

She met his gaze straight on. From that point, as was the way of Quozl, additional words were unnecessary.

So another first was perpetrated, though only two knew of it. Yet there was more to it than that. Looks later thought of it as a kind of memorial service for Burden-carries-Far. It was the type of memorial he would have approved of.

After they had concluded and were slipping soaked but content back into their suits, Looks told Flies-by-Tail of the discussions he and his dead colleague had engaged in over the years. She concurred somberly that what they had done was as fitting a memorial as any Quozl could ask for.

They talked until interrupted by an all-pervasive rumbling overhead. It was deeper than the thunder generated by Shirazian lightning. Tilting their heads back they could see that one cloud had broken through the underlayer of storm and was descending slowly on a cushion of lambent air.

Slowly the
Sequencer
, massive as a small mountain, was coming down.

If the drive failed now, or if someone in Engineering made a mistake, the great ship could be lost or, at best, severely damaged. If it swerved too far north or south, either of the survey teams would be crushed to the thickness of individual molecules. But neither drive nor crew erred. All had waited too long for this moment.

Slowly the ark eased into the notch between the craggy flanks of two mountains. The cushion created by the drive turned the river that ran thought the valley into a dense mist that hissed in all directions, fleeing the descending mass.

Lightning flashed repeatedly above the descending vessel, lessening as the great bulk settled to the groaning earth. The metal walls of the ship rose a third of the way up the side of the flanking peaks, filling the valley from side to side.

New calm came over Looks-at-Charts, accompanied by renewed confidence. The ship was down. None had perished as a result of the landing. As near as anyone could tell, the natives had not sensed its arrival and were ignorant of its presence. How long that would last none could predict, but for now, for the present, he and Flies-by-Tail and Captain Stream-cuts-Through and the rest of his brethren Quozl were alive and safe. The ship was down. Now they could begin to make this small piece of Shiraz their own.

As for tomorrow—tomorrow would bring its own Samizene. Today was time enough. Who could say what might be theirs tomorrow?

Even had natives been living nearby they would not have heard the touchdown, so skillfully had it been accomplished. The valley's parameters have been calculated with exquisite precision, so that the ship's sides had barely scraped rock as she descended. The silvery glow faded from the vast underside. Conscious of the fact that the ship's superstructure could barely support its own weight under the influence of real gravity, the engineers shut down the drive. For the first time in generations, the
Sequencer
was silent.

Now it was the turn of Geology and Engineering to deploy their waiting troops. They swung into action as the storm continued to rage around the ship.

Looks-at-Charts was conscious of the special privilege that had been his; to be in a position to watch as the
Sequencer
mated with its final resting place. Her journey was at an end, that of the colonists' was just beginning. Six generations in all had lived and died within her protective hulk, thousands who had spent their lives engaged in maintenance and repetition, just to make this moment possible. He and his generation would not let their ancestors down. They would not fail. They were Quozl. He brushed at an earring.

The
Sequencer
would not rise again. Indeed, it could not, now that they had committed themselves by shutting down the underspace drive. They were no longer citizens of the ship but of this world, no matter how its bizarre inhabitants might react to their presence.

He could imagine anxious colonists clustered around screens hoping for views of their new home. At this point they were probably being treated to a long lecture by Senses-go-Fade or one of his assistants designed to prepare them for the shock of permanent burrowing. The geologists and engineers had an easier task than the philosophers. All they had to do was move rock and metal, not minds and attitudes.

You could see them now, already blasting out huge quantities of rock and debris. The big levitators were coming out, sucking up the crumbled stone and soil and depositing it around the
Sequencer
's flanks. Like some monstrous, prehistoric burrowing creature it slowly began to sink into the earth, attended by a horde of tiny workers. It would serve the colonists as First Burrow, as home until the first tunnels could be constructed. Tunnels which would lead not to the surface but into the hearts of the two mountains that formed the valley.

They would dig in as their primitive ancestors had, expanding carefully and safely beyond the sight of the Shirazians. All they would see of the strange fur-spined trees would be their roots. The engineers would excavate rooms and galleries, tunnels and theaters and farming chambers.

They'd found their world. In addition they would now need secrecy, and time.

The providential storm lasted eight days, ebbing and surging like a wave without clearing completely for more than a few minutes. It was more than the engineers needed. When the clouds parted on the ninth day there was nothing to indicate that an enormous starship lay entombed beneath thousand of tons of rock and earth. Above the buried vessel the landscape had been reproduced with extraordinary precision, down to the smallest bush and smoothest stone. Anyone viewing it from above would consider it unchanged. It would take precise measurements to reveal that the level of the valley bottom was now several hundred feet higher than it had been a week earlier. Even the twists and turns in the river that now flowed on top of the hidden starship had been reproduced with admirable fidelity.

The most professional observer would shrug and put down the difference in altitude to errors in the old maps.

Only after ensuring that the surrounding countryside was deserted did Stream-cuts-Through and Lifts-with-Shout and a chosen few specialists tunnel out to inspect the surface. They compared what they could see with the recording made by the first survey team.

Meanwhile the ship's philosopher-meditators worked overtime to soothe the frazzled nerves of the less stable settlers. For the most part they were taking it well. Many had prepared themselves to live out their lives on board the
Sequencer
. That they would now do so underground did not involve any profound psychological readjustments. The younger colonists were more forcefully affected, since they had entertained reasonable expectations of setting up housekeeping on the green surface of their new home. With therapy and patience they would come to terms with the future that fate had dealt them.

As the colony settled in, Looks-at-Charts was permitted to spend time on the surface, gathering invaluable information while convoying small groups of scientists and educational specialists. Since orbital observation indicated that the Shirazians were primarily diurnal, such excursions took place exclusively at night. At such times he was conscious of the great privilege that had been awarded to him. Most members of the colony would never be allowed to set foot on the surface of their new home.

As time passed they learned much more about their new world. Only rarely did Shirazian atmospheric craft pass within range of the ship's detectors, and never directly over the burrowsite itself. There was nothing to suggest that the natives suspected the presence of the
Sequencer
and its expanding population in their midst.

Some discoveries were as pleasing as they were surprising. The geology team located water in ample quantities at a modest depth, water of unmatched purity and taste. There would no need for the extensive and complicated pipeline which had been planned to tap the waters of the nearest lake.

While not especially rich, the rocks enclosing the burrow contained metals in quantities sufficient to supply the colony's needs. It was also stable and dense enough to permit the excavation of tunnels and rooms without the need to add internal bracing or supports. This enabled the engineers to expand far more rapidly than would have been the case in softer terrain.

Artists resumed their work, often inspired by the images and recordings brought back by the small exploration teams. Farming expanded from the ship into surrounding galleries. Life was good, if tense. Above the buried ship the native fauna returned in numbers. It was as though the arrival had never been.

Caution remained the byword of the colony, however. The requests made by Looks-at-Charts and the other scouts and scientists for permission to travel farther afield on the surface were repeatedly denied. The continued safety of the colony required only knowledge of their immediate surroundings. It was far too soon to risk discovery merely for the chance to add to the sum total of general knowledge about the new world. The violent death of Burden-carries-Far was still fresh in many minds. That he was followed not long after touchdown by Walks-with-Whispers did little to alleviate the Council's concerns. The mental confusion and depression brought on by the death of a colleague and the concomitant slaying of an intelligent native had in the end been more than the gentle geologist could handle.