The Evolutionary Void (66 page)

D
AWN ARRIVED
as the
Last Throw
lifted silently back into the chill air above the Delivery Man. Ahead of him
the sun was rising, a sliver of rose-gold incandescence emerging above the
mountains on the horizon. He could feel the weak heat on his face as he started
to walk down the slope. Thin strands of mist were stirring above the tiny coils
of grass-equivalent, filling the folds in the land to form wraithlike streams.
Local birds were already calling out in their guttural warbles, taking flight
from the black trees as the light grew stronger.

The Delivery Man watched them lumber upward, amused by the sight. It
looked like evolution hadn’t gotten it quite right on this world; what they
lacked in grace, they made up for in bulk.

A sleeping herd of quadruped beasts grunted and shook themselves,
greeting the new day in their own laborious way: ponderous creatures the size
of a terrestrial rhino and imbued with almost the same temper. Their heavily
creased hide was a dapple of rust-brown and gray, and legs as thick as the
Delivery Man’s torso could plod onward all day with prodigious stamina. These
were the animals the Anomine kept to pull their plows and wagons.

The Delivery Man skirted the herd before they noticed that something
strange walked among them. It would hardly do to stampede the animals before
he’d had a chance to greet the natives.

He could smell smoke upon the breeze as he neared the village. Fires that
had blazed throughout the night were finally dying down to embers now that they
had performed their task and warned off the wilder animals during the long
hours of darkness.

The
Last Throw
’s sensors had run a passive
scan across the village as they came down to land, revealing a broad
semicircular sprawl of buildings along the banks of a small river. There was
little evidence of stonework aside from a few low circular walls that appeared
to be grain silos. The buildings all employed wooden construction. Retinal
enrichments gave him a good look at them as he covered the last half mile to
the village. The houses stood on thick legs a couple of meters above the dusty
ground. Roofs were tightly packed dried reeds overhanging bowed walls made from
curving ovals of polished wooden frames that held some kind of hardened
translucent membrane. He could just make out shadows moving within the houses
he was approaching.

A couple of Anomine tending one of the village’s five fire pits stopped
moving and twitched their antennae. They were elderly; he could tell that from
the dark lavender color of their limbs and the way their lower legs curved
back, reducing their height. Youngsters were a nearly uniform copper color,
whereas the adults in their prime had a jade hue. These ones were also larger
around the trunk section. Weight gain clearly didn’t affect only humans as they
got older.

He walked into the village as his u-shadow ran one last check through the
translator unit hanging around his neck on a gold chain. It was a palm-size
rectangle, capable of producing the higher-frequency sounds employed in the
Anomine language. Navy cultural anthropologists had resequenced their vocal
chords so they could speak with the Anomine directly, but it hadn’t been an
unqualified success. The effort had been appreciated, though; the Anomine
really didn’t like machines more advanced than a wheel.

The Delivery Man studied the etiquette profile file displayed by his
exovision. “I greet you this fine morning,” he said, which immediately came out
as a series of squeaks and whistles similar to dolphin chatter. “I have
traveled from another world to visit you. I would ask you to share stories of
your ancestors.” He bowed slightly, which was probably a gesture wasted on the
aliens.

They were taller than he by nearly a meter, especially when they stood up
straight, which they did to walk. Their tapering midsections were nearly always
bent forward, and the upper knee joints of the triple-segment legs folded the
limbs back to balance.

The one whose limbs were shading from purple toward black replied. “I
greet you this morning, star traveler. I am Tyzak. I am an old-father to the
village. I can spare some time to exchange stories with you.”

“I thank you for showing me such a kindness,” the Delivery Man said. If
there was excitement or curiosity in Tyzak’s posture, he couldn’t gauge it.
Unlike the weight issue, there was no human-parallel body language, no
jittering about or understandable agitation. It would have been hard, he
admitted to himself. Their skin was almost like scales, making subtle muscle
motion impossible. As for the classic darting eyes, their twin antennae were a
uniform slime-gray of photosensitive receptor cells waving up from the small
knobbly head that was mostly mouth, giving them a visual interpretation of
their world wholly different from that of a human. The brain was a third of the
way down inside the torso, between the small midarms and larger main upper
arms.

“Your true voice is silent,” Tyzak said.

“Yes. I cannot make the correct sounds to speak to you directly. I
apologize for the machine which translates.”

“No apology is required.”

“I was told you do not approve of machines.”

The two Anomine touched the small claws of their midarms. “Someone has
been less than truthful with you,” Tyzak said. “I am grateful you have come to
our village that we might speak the truth with you.”

“It was my own kind who informed me of your aversion to machinery. We
visited a long time ago.”

“Then your kind’s memory has faded over time. We do not dislike machines;
we simply choose not to use them.”

“May I ask why?”

Tyzak’s middle and upper knees bent, lowering him into a squatting
position. The other Anomine walked away. “We have a life path laid out by this
world which formed us,” Tyzak said. “We know what happened to us when we chose
a life path centered around machines and technology. Our ancestors achieved
greatness, as great as you, even.”

“Your ancestors reached farther than we have in so many ways,” the
Delivery Man said. “Our debt to them is enormous. They safeguarded so many
stars from an aggressive race, for which we are forever grateful.”

“You speak of the oneness which lives around two stars. It sought to
devour all other life.”

“You know of them?”

“Our life path is separate from our great ancestors, for which we feel
sorrow, but we rejoice in their achievements. They went on to become something
other, something magnificent.”

“Yet you didn’t follow them. Why was that?”

“This planet created us. It should choose the nature of our final days.”

“Sounds like another goddamn religion to me,” Gore said over the secure
link.

“More like our factions,” the Delivery Man countered. “Their version of
the Accelerators went off and elevated, while the Natural Darwinists wanted to
see what nature intended for them.”

More Anomine were coming down from their houses, jumping easily onto the
ground from thin doorways several meters above the ground. Once they were on
the ground, they moved surprisingly swiftly. Long legs carried them forward in
a fast loping gait, with each stride almost a bounce. As they moved, they
bobbed forward at a precarious angle.

Their balance was much better than a human’s, the Delivery Man decided,
even though the motion sparked an inappropriate comparison to a pigeon walk.

A group of younger ones bounded over. He was soon surrounded by Anomine
children who simply couldn’t keep still. They bopped up and down as they
chattered loudly among themselves, discussing him, the strange creature with
its odd body and clothes and weak-looking pincers and fur on top. The noise
level was almost painful to his ears.

He heard Tyzak explaining what he was.

“Where do you come from?” one of the children asked. It was taller than
its fellows, getting on toward the Delivery Man’s height, and its apricot skin
was darkening to a light shade of green.

“A planet called Earth, which is light-years from here.”

“Why are you here?”

“I search out wisdom. Your ancestors knew so much.”

The children’s high-pitched calls increased. The translator caught it as
a round of self-reinforcing: “Yes. Yes, they did.”

“I eat now,” Tyzak said. “Will you join me?”

“That would please me,” the Delivery Man assured him.

Tyzak stood swiftly, scattering several of the children, who bounded
about in circles. He started walking toward one of the nearby houses, moving
fast. His lower curving legs seemed almost to roll off the ground. The Delivery
Man jogged alongside, keeping pace. “I should tell you, I may not be physically
able to eat most of your food.”

“I understand. It is unlikely your biochemistry is compatible with our
plants.”

“You understand the concept of biochemistry?”

“We are not ignorant, star traveler. We simply do not apply our knowledge
as you do.”

“I understand.”

Tyzak reached his house and jumped up to a small platform outside the
door. The Delivery Man took a fast look at the thick posts the house stood on
and swarmed up the one below the platform.

“You are different,” Tyzak announced, and went inside.

The membrane windows allowed a lot of light to filter through. Now that
he was inside, the Delivery Man could see oil-rainbow patterns on the taut
surface, which he thought must be some kind of skin or bark that had been
cured. Inside, Tyzak’s house was divided into three rooms. There wasn’t much
furniture in the largest one where they entered. Some plain chests were lined
up along an inner wall. There were three curious cradle contraptions that the
Delivery Man guessed were chairs and five benches arranged in a central
pentagon, all of which were covered by fat earthenware pots.

His first impression was that half of them were boiling their contents.
Bubbles fizzed away in their open tops. And the air was so pungent, it made his
eyes water. He recognized the scent of rotting or fermenting fruit, but so much
stronger than he’d ever smelled before.

After a moment he realized there was no heater or fire in the room even
though the air was a lot warmer than outside. The pots really were
fermenting—vigorously. When he took a peek in one, the sticky mass it held
reminded him of jam, but before the fruit was properly pulped.

Tyzak pulled one of the pots toward him and bent over it, opening his
clam mouth wide enough to cover the top. The Delivery Man had a brief glimpse
of hundreds of little tooth mandibles wiggling before the Anomine closed his
mouth and sucked the contents down in a few quick gulps.

“Would you like to sample some of my >no direct translation: cold-cook
conserve/soupsignificance to your kind. There must be one here harmless enough for you to
ingest.”

“No, thank you. So you do remember members of my species visiting this
world before?”

“We hold the stories dear.” Tyzak picked up another pot and closed his mouth
around it.

“No one else seems interested in me except for the younger villagers.”

“I will tell the story of you at our gathering. The story will spread
from village to village as we cogather. Within twenty years the world will know
your story. From that moment on you will be told and retold to the new
generations. You will never be lost to us, star traveler.”

“That is gratifying to know. You must know a lot of stories, Tyzak.”

“I do. I am old enough to have heard many. So many that they now begin to
fade from me. This is why I tell them again and again, so they are not lost.”

“Stupid,” Gore observed. “They’re going to lose a lot of information like
that. We know they used to have a culture of writing; you can’t develop
technology without basic symbology, especially math. Why dump that? Their
history is going to get badly distorted this way; that’s before it dies out
altogether.”

“Don’t worry,” the Delivery Man told him. “What we need is too big to be
lost forever; they’ve certainly still got that.”

“Yeah, sure; the suspense is killing me.”

“I would hear stories of your ancestors,” the Delivery Man said to Tyzak.
“I would like to know how it was that they left this world, this universe.”

“All who visit us upon this world wish this story above everything else.
I have many other stories to tell. There is one of Gazuk, whose bravery saved
five youngsters from drowning when a bridge fell. I listened to Razul tell her
own story of holding a flock of >no direct translation: wolf-equivalent<
at bay while her sisters birthed. Razul was old when I attended that
cogathering, but his words remain true. There are stories of when Fozif flew
from this world atop a machine of flame to walk upon Ithal, our neighboring
planet, the first of our kind ever to do such a thing. That is our oldest
story; from that grows all stories of our kind thereafter.”