Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds (5 page)

I rolled back to the safety of the wall, burning my calf on one of the kumalis but heedless of the pain. Calming somewhat, I was surprised to see that the creature seemed not to have harmed me beyond leaving mild abrasions all over, such as you might give yourself by scratching an itch too vigorously.

The one that had attacked me was flopping around as Raj's was; in less than a minute both were limp, dead. Alien protein, of course. There was no way they could sense our toxicity without tasting; evidently one taste was plenty. I supposed the simple creatures mistook us for Obelobelians, which triggered the aggressive behavior. The truth turned out to be somewhat stranger.

I hadn't asked Raj what was to be done with his remains, should the hunter become the quarry, but assumed he was conventionally Moslem in that regard. On Qadar the ceremony goes on for days, and a lot of the ritual involves the physical corpse.

It was an interesting problem. I'm conventionally tolerant of other people's notions, and there was the added incentive that Raj's relatives might not honor his debts with only my word that he had died. But there was no way in hell I was going to saunter out there and drag him away. Just have to wait until daylight, when the balaseli were dormant again. He would be a pretty sight in ten hours.

Something touched me on the shoulder and I almost jumped out of my aching skin. It was the old host. “I watch,” it said. “He is die; you are passage.”

“Guess so,” I said. I did kill a balaseli, though the weapon I used was not especially heroic. Sweat.

The host solved part of my problem. It had a long looped cord that ended in a wooden hook. On the third toss, it snagged Raj behind the knee; together we were able to haul him to the wall. Carrying him out was not something I would ever care to try again. It took a long time. The host would not touch him—probably wise—and his dead weight nearly defeated me. I collapsed twice on the passage out and again as we staggered from the cave entrance. Several of the xenologists were waiting with a pair of improvised stretchers. One of them, an older woman I hadn't seen, touched my arm and I felt a slight pinprick. All the pain washed away and I fell asleep.

I carried Raj back to Qadar frozen solid in a specimen bag. His family paid my fee in gold and had me thrown out of the house, the castle. I decided it would be prudent to leave Qadar immediately.

Odd how things sometimes come together. I had done a lot of soul-searching on the way back, and decided that I had been a hunter for far too long. The fee for this one would allow me to live prudently for several years on Selva or Thelugi, both of which had good universities for xoology and animal behavior. I could finish the degrees I started twenty years ago and stop killing the things that I liked the most.

When I got back to the spaceport there was a Hartford courier waiting for me with a bright red Confederación envelope. It was a message from Dr. Avedon, the xenologist who had been so happy to see me and Raj when we showed up with our phony papers. She said that the Obelobelian tribe they were observing had refused to cooperate with anyone but me, since I was the only human who had undergone the rite of passage. Would I consider coming out to assist them for a regular consultant's fee? She wasn't enthusiastic about having any of her people go into those caves at night, for certification.

I could just see her teeth grinding as she wrote a letter of supplication to Gregorio Fuentes, heartless poacher. She probably knew that the maximum pay she could offer was less than a tenth of my normal fee. I would refuse contemptuously and they would be stuck.

Of course I did go back. I stayed on Obelobel for twenty-two years, and still return every three years for a tribal purification ceremony, which will kill me if I live long enough. That honestly is something that bothers me not at all. Not because I'm old or tired of life.

We've learned a lot from the Obelobelians, including humility. The second surprise was telepathy, which we learned through my own initiation as a host-surrogate. The first surprise was from their biochemistry, a discovery that had been in the making when Raj and I arrived there: the Obelobelians came from another planet. Their body chemistry was as alien to Obelobel as ours was—and the balaseli found them just as poisonous. The ones who survived their rite of passage did exactly as I had. The creature's flaying reflex is triggered by its prey's struggling. If you remain motionless long enough for it to reject you, you may live.

It seems cruel, by human standards, to subject the young to such an awful test. But to their way of thinking a male or female is not born until he or she comes back out of the cave; a child killed by the balaseli is a late miscarriage. To be allowed to reproduce you have to show absolute fearlessness. You have to show that you are grown.

So where did they come from, and how, and why? They are not willing to answer such questions. Able, but not willing, and anyone with a grain of objectivity about human nature would have to agree with them.

We thought it was a case of an advanced civilization dealing with childish savages who could think and communicate only at the most basic level. We were right.

A !TANGLED WEB

Your spaceport bars fall into two distinct groups: the ones for the baggage and the ones for the crew. I was baggage, this trip, but didn't feel like paying the prices that people who space for fun can afford. The Facilities Directory listed under “Food and Drink” four establishments: the Hartford Club (inevitably), the Silver Slipper Lounge, Antoine's, and Slim Joan's Bar & Grill.

I went to a currency exchange booth first, assuming that Slim Joan was no better at arithmetic than most bartenders, and cashed in a hundredth share of Hartford stock. Then I took the drop lift down to the bottom level. That the bar's door was right at the drop-lift exit would be a dead giveaway even if its name had been the Bell, Book, and Candle. Baggage don't generally like to fall ten stories, no matter how slowly.

It smelled right, stir-fry and stale beer, and the low lighting suggested economy rather than atmosphere. Slim Joan turned out to be about a hundred thousand grams of transvestite. Well, I hadn't come for the scenery.

The clientele seemed evenly mixed between humans and others, most of the aliens being !tang, since this was Morocho III. I've got nothing against the company of aliens, but if I was going to spend all next week wrapping my jaws around !tangish, I preferred to mix my drinking with some human tongue.

“Speak English?” I asked Slim Joan.

“Some,” he/she/it growled. “You would drink something?” I'd never heard a Russian-Brooklyn accent before. I ordered a double saki, cold, in Russian, and took it to an empty booth.

One of the advantages of being a Hartford interpreter is that you can order a drink in a hundred different languages and dialects. Saves money; they figure if you can speak the lingo you can count your change.

I was freelancing this trip, though, working for a real-estate cartel that wanted to screw the !tang out of a few thousand square kilometers of useless seashore property. It wouldn't stay useless, of course.

Morocho III is a real garden of a planet, but most people never see it. The tachyon nexus is down by Morocho I, which we in the trade refer to as “Armpit,” and not many people take the local hop out to III (Armpit's the stopover on the Earth-Sammler run). Starlodge, Limited, was hoping to change that situation.

I couldn't help eavesdropping on the !tangs behind me. (I'm not a snoop; it's a side effect of the hypnotic-induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, and the other was full of useful advice. “He”—they have seven singular pronoun classes, depending on the individual's age and estrous condition—was telling “her” never to make any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have told her not to breathe on anyone. One of the by-products of their metabolism is butyl nitrite, which smells like well-aged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.

I've worked with !tangs a few times before, and they're some of my favorite people. Very serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant's trunk protruding. They have two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it's impolite to take them out in public unless one is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologist with a magnifying glass to tell when.

He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Their metabolism parts company with ours over proteins and fats, but they love our carbohydrates and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.

A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank back into the booth. Too late.

He strode over and stuck out his hand. “Dick Navarro!”

“Hello, Pete.” I shook his hand once. “What brings you here? Hartford business?” Pete was also an interpreter.

—Oh, no, he said in Arabic. —Only journeying.

—Knock it off, I said in Serbo-Croatian. —Isn't your native language English? I added in Greek.

“Sure it is. Yours?”

“English or Spanish. Have a seat.”

I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. “To be eating you want?”

“Nyet,” he said. “Vodka.” I told her I'd take another.

“So what are you doing here?” Pete asked.

“Business.”

“Hartford?”

“Nope.”

“Secret.”

“That's right.” Actually, they hadn't said anything about its being secret. But I knew Peter Lafitte. He wasn't just passing through.

We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he explained to her how to decide which public bathroom to use when. This was important to humans, he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.

“How did that Spica business finally turn out?” he asked.

“Badly.” Lafitte and I had worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV, with the Confederación actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. “I couldn't get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn't get the natives to believe that refining the minerals didn't affect their spiritual status. It came to a show of force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn't like to be there in twenty years, though.”

“Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.”

“That's what I tried to tell them.” Arcturus wasn't a regular stop any more, not since a ship landed and found every human artistically dismembered. “You're just sightseeing?”

“This has always been one of my favorite planets.”

“Nothing to do.”

“Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though.”

Ah ha. “Ocean fishing?”

“Best in the Confederación.”

“I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?”

He smiled and looked directly at me. “Little coastal village, Pa'an!al.”

Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I'd be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the information into my ring.

I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself, saying I was time-lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounced straight to the Hartford courier's office.

The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the pleasantries. “How long to get a message to Earth?”

She studied the clocks on the wall. “You're out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I'm not going to Armpit until tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I'll miss the Earth run by half a day.

“If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there can take it on the Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes' beam time. You know what you want to say?”

“Yeah. Set it up.” I sat down at the customers' console.

STARLODGE LIMITED
642 EASTRIVER
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 100992
ATTENTION: PATRICE DUVAL

YOU MAY HAVE SOME COMPETITION HERE. NOTHING OPEN YET BUT A GUY WE CALL PETER RABBIT IS ON THE SCENE. CHECK INTERPRETERS GUILD AND SEE WHO'S PAYING PETER LAFITTE. CHANGE TERMS OF SALE? PLEASE REPLY NEXT SAMMLER RUN—RICARDO NAVARRO/RM 2048/MOROCHO HILTON

I wasn't sure what good the information would do me, unless they also found out how much he was offering and authorized me to outbid him. At any rate, I wouldn't hear for three days, earliest. Sleep.

Morocho III—its real name is !ka'al—rides a slow sweeping orbit around Morocho A, the brighter of the two suns that make up the Morocho system (Morocho A is a close double star itself, but its white dwarf companion hugs so close that it's lost in the glare). At this time of day, Morocho B was visible low in the sky, a hard blue diamond too bright to stare at, and A was right overhead, a bloated golden ball. On the sandy beach below us the flyer cast two shadows, dark blue and faint yellow, which raced to come together as we landed.

Pa'an!al is a fishing village thousands of years old, on a natural harbor formed where a broad jungle river flows into the sea. Here on the beach were only a few pole huts with thatched roofs, where the fishers who worked the surf and shallow pools lived. Pa'an!al proper was behind a high stone wall, which protected it on one side from the occasional hurricane and on the other from the interesting fauna of the jungle.

I paid off my driver and told him to come back at second sundown. I took a deep breath and mounted the steps. There was an open-cage Otis elevator beside the stairs, but people didn't use it, only fish.

The !tang are compulsive about geometry. This wall was a precise 1:2 rectangle, and the stairs mounted from one corner to the opposite in a satisfyingly Euclidean 30 degrees. A guardrail would have spoiled the harmony. The stairs were just wide enough for two !tang to pass, and the rise of each step was a good half meter. By the time I got to the top I was both tired and slightly terrified.