Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (12 page)

 
          
The
native cocks his head, as if listening to something too far away for us to
hear, yet very close to him.

 
          
He
opens his mouth and taps a slim mauve tongue. “SW,” he remarks. “
Saal
.” His teeth are like a child’s
milk-teeth.

           
“We must learn your tongue,” nods
Ren6. “I just hope we haven’t landed in the language equivalent of
New Guinea
.”

 
          
Now
the native shapes a ball of air with his hands, and separates the two cupped
halves. One half he holds out to the three points of the compass (three? the
three sub-oceans?). Tapping the ground with his foot, he holds the cup to his
lips. “
Getka”
he says. And, “
Getka-saali
.” The other cup he
collapses to a fist and throws away. Over there. “
Menka
.” Sketching a sphere in the air, he rotates cupped hands
about the imaginary globe, holding ‘Menka’ towards it and ‘Getka’ away from it.

 
          
“The
two hemispheres? And it would seem this language is spoken all over the
inhabited side—the Getka side?”

 
          
“A
single language, with all these separate islands scattered over a vast area? It
isn’t very likely,” says Peter.

 
          
“A
lingua franca, then! They must have a world-wide culture. Hemisphere-wide, at
any rate.”

 
          
The
native points over the stone ridge in the direction of the city. He steps back
to retrieve his head-mask, but he only holds it, does not put it on. He waits.

 
          
I
call to Ritchie, “Come on out! We’re welcome.” Yes, the ‘Other’ has accepted
us.

 
          
Ritchie,
and then two other aliens of seemingly divergent species descend—one tall,
black, broad-nosed, frizzed-headed; and the other small, of polished yellow
ivory, with eyes slit in tight flesh as though by a knife. We are dominoes, all
of different spots. Black, white, red and yellow: there’s no way to match us.
Perhaps we are a sextet of six interlocking sexes?

 
          
Ritchie
secures the hatch. Distributing the available trek-packs among us, we set off
with the golden natives up along the rock’s spine.
Alpha
is left behind like an empty can balanced on the looming
rock. When I look back it litters the countryside, even with its lid resealed—a
huge disposable dropped into alien wilderness. We have indeed disposed of it
now, forever.

 
          
Oh
caravanserai, oh
sun-bright
waterfront, how shall I ever get to sleep? As the long morning wends ever so
slowly nearer
noon
...

 
          
Light
fills the long high room. It filters from adjacent rooms through papery
screens. These trestle beds, with their quilted flock palliasses and their
hairy ginger blankets for true dark night, are known here as ‘sleep trees’...

 
          
Is
this a memory of arboreal descent, recapitulated in their urban life after so
long? Or is it simply the name for the cinnamon-coloured wood from which they
carve the trestles? Or is it something else again? The prefix and suffix
get
—as in the name of this hemisphere
(ka
being a half-unit)—seems to refer to
changing states; while
men
refers to
the hard, the solid, the fixed and permanent—the other hemisphere, Menka, is
indeed a dry solid landmass locked to the face of the gas giant. Yet they ask,
as a politeness,
‘G’hera’vaa-get?’
or
‘G’hera’vaa-men
?’: ‘Did you climb the
sleep tree softly, or hard?’—as though it is an actual journey which we made or
did not make. And they ask us, ‘Have you fallen asleep?’ when we wake up, as
though they confuse the waking and sleeping states. (Yes,
fall
asleep: fall out of the sleep tree.) Their tenses of time are
still beyond us.

 
          
Puzzles
chase each other round my tongue as I muse by the window frame, strung to a
pitch too high, if I lie down, to do anything but toss and turn. Lucky Zoe is
out cold, but Ren6 holds himself too rigidly still to be other than mocking
sleep at
midday
. For
us there must be morning-day and afternoon-day with a false night of sleep
through
noon
, then a
wakeful first- night and a wakeful second-night separated by more sleep. For
our first ten Getkan days we have lived a cycle of insomnia, alertness and
exhaustion as if at a party that goes on and on—with all the interesting guests
disappearing just when we’re about to get to know them properly. In recognition
of our alien sleep rhythms, during the last three long nights a night-shift
tutor has come on duty, wrapped in a thick cloak, to occupy our hours of waking
darkness.

 
          
Peter
sits hunched by another window frame, staring over the lake at the strange
empty island of glinting walls and courts and pyramid.

 
          
Tall
natives pass along the paved waterfront. One wears a blank head-mask—what
are
those? Momentarily his head melts
into the white scarp beyond the lake. A headless trunk strides along until,
against canary rigging, the trunk bears the sketch of a head. Another native
rides by, perched on the high shoulders of a
rhaniq
—as they call the brindled gangling quadrupeds with their
humpbacks and gawky legs, snake necks and sheeplike features. The rhaniq pulls
a huge four-wheeled rack-wagon loaded with baskets of blue fish . . .

 
          
On
the first day they took blood samples from us. Only after analysis were we
banqueted with their own food (fish, little birds, bittersweet pastes, sticky
dough, flowers in jelly, mild milky wine and berry juices). Behind the
simplicity of life style they’re good biochemists, we feel—and good engineers
too, if they choose. Solar-heated water flows from ceramic taps in the washing
area. Waste from the squat-toilets is vibrated away.

 
          
Fine
sanitary engineers though they are, they have neglected transport and left it
medieval. The beast’s single wide nostril flares in our direction, studying us
by scent. It blares and skitters in the shafts. Its rider glances our way and
nudges it with bare knees which, golden-downy themselves, are almost lost in
the beast’s flanks. Things melt into each other on this world. We haven’t yet
tamed its contours and colours.

 
          
Underneath
the window a border of large lobster-red flowers turns, heliotropically, to
follow the sun’s slow progress up the sky, attracting tiny nervous birds with
gossamer wings. The flowers have the cloying smell of fermenting bananas.

 
          
There
are fat cream lake-birds too, which flash blue as they rise into the air, and
large domesticated ground-trotters with garishly spurred scarlet feet, and
there are coiled-spring chameleon hawks which hug the ground, imitating turf or
stone, till they pounce upwards, catching their prey by surprise by attacking
from the wrong direction. Their colours shift so rapidly that it seems as if
pockets of scenery are shifting suddenly from place to place ...

 
          
During
the endless night, when the largest of the other moons is less than the size of
one’s thumbnail held at arm’s length, the shuttered ‘heliotrope’ flowers cycle
back slowly to await the dawn, providing a botanical clock for those hours of
darkness. There are no other clocks or sand-glasses or sundials. Time has
halted.

 
          
Ritchie
has found Sol in the night sky (he thinks). He and Wu are out exploring.

 
          
Peter
sighs and comes over.

 
          
“Tired,
love?”

 
          
He
smiles wearily. “
Vuth
,
dath
. . .” (You, I. ..) His lips move
automatically. “How do you say in Getka-saali, ‘When
we
have a baby, he’ll be both of us in one person’?”

 
          
“How
long do these people live, Peter? These huge days and nights might be wearing
us down. But maybe in the long run the gradual light gradient and the even
quality of light all year long could be calming. Do you remember spring
hysteria?”

 
          
“The
rising of the sap.” He grins.

 
          
“Spring
suicides and depressions. Too much flooding in of light. So much more to see.
So much more information brightly forced on you ... So that, in a sense, a lot
of people switched off—yes,
depressed
themselves, to control it. I always loved seasons—and I hated them too. I hated
coming in to a bright season even if it seemed like a rebirth—bulbs, birdsong,
snails crawling out of the cracks. Maybe these people live much longer here.”

 
          
“Maybe
that’s why they’ve got this static quality about their culture. Carts, sailing
ships—”

 
          
“And
good plumbing, and solar energy, and biochemistry? We don’t really know that
it’s static. We can’t see the plan yet.”

 
          
He
gestures in the direction of the island. “Oh, there’s the plan! Why build a
full-scale model town which isn’t even for use, though? One without roofs or
proper buildings?”

 
          
“Because
the ideal isn’t inhabitable? Maybe they don’t believe in living in an ideal
community, even though they know what it is. It would be static—unchangeable.
There seems to be a constant contrast, doesn’t there, between
get
the changeable and
men
the hard, the everlasting? That
island’s called
Menfaa
: ‘hard ...
tree?’ I can’t see any trees there ..

 
          
“It’s
more than just a piece of terra firma in the midst of water. And I think I know
what, Amy. It’s something I never expected to find, laid out in brick and
mortar terms instead of just a concept. Back . . . back home . . . shaman
cultures liked to connect everything on earth with some ideal cosmic
counterpart, didn’t they? A particular mountain had its ideal prototype in the
sky. The river
Tigris
had its ‘model’—its transcendent
counterpart—in such-and-such a star. These people here go ahead and build the
counterpart in full view, opposite the mundane world!
Why?
The whole point of the counterparts system was to link the
earthly state with an
invisible
reality that was perfectly concrete, of course, but not
here.
It was always somewhere else, in Heaven.”

 
          
The
day grows brighter still, as we grow wearier.

 
          
“Can’t
we rig some heavy blinds?”

 
          
“Do
we want to hide ourselves? The message of blinds is . . . Well, at least they
have paper screens. They’re quite unprivate people, aren’t they? It’s as if
they want light to pass through everything. Yet they hardly bother to light the
town at night.”

 
          
“Haven’t
you noticed how accommodating their eyes are? Consciously so, not like cats or
owls. They can do it voluntarily. They drink in light. And who’s ever awake at
night, to want street lighting?”

 
          
“Yes,
they smile with their eyes . . . How on earth do they see through those masks?”
He scratches at his red beard. Our men are all fast becoming Victorian
explorers. They could surely shave again after the long interlude of
non-gravity. But they don’t. How would furry aliens interpret an obsession with
depilating oneself? The natives do seem intrigued by our men’s body hair. They
‘drink’ it in; and drink in our smooth female chins and cheeks as though
stepping up the input to their eyes to search for . . . what? nascent beard on
us too? No doubt the difference puzzles them.

 
          
“You-and-I,”
he harks back. “How do they say it? There’s a singular, and a plural. Then this
third ‘number’ they insist we learn:
paravuth,
paradath. Para's
‘two’, so it should be a dual form, a dyad usage. How on
earth can T be in the dual? How can there be two of ‘me’? I wish Sachiko was
here.”

 
          
“They
don’t use it that way, Peter. ‘I and another’ goes straight into the plural. On
the other hand, the fellow with the double name who brought us in—the masked
one—he uses
paradath
of himself, and
we have to use
paravuth
to him. So is
it a title? Is it to do with wearing a mask? What’s the connection?”

 
          
“Ah,
what’s the connection between this city and the one over there?”

 
          
Here
come our brave scoutmaster and the dowager empress.

 
          
Lately,
Wu and Ritchie have taken to strolling out just before
midday
‘nightfall’ and before genuine nightfall to
scout the city. An air of flirtatious conspiracy pervades their walks.

 
          
“Past
their bedtime!” Peter grins. “I feel like a kid here— having to go to bed while
it’s still bright day! Maybe if we look at it that way instead of wearing
ourselves out—”

 
          
Children's Crusade
: I remember Wu’s acid
taunt on board
Pilgrim.
We set out to
make history—to
save
it (or at least
she did). Now we’re the Babes in the Wood. We haven’t any history here any
more. That’s all gone, along with Earth, and I’m
glad
of it. These aliens could have been living here like this for
a thousand years or a hundred thousand ...

 
          
“Do
you know, I’ve got a feeling that maybe these people got their history over and
done with long long ago . . .”

 
          
He
cocks an eyebrow. “But they send out interstellar messages. Visions.”

 
          
“We
assume they did.”

 
          
“Oh,
come on, they
know
who we are—and
why. They’re used to us already. They expected us. I think they just didn’t
expect us to land here, that’s all.”

 
          
A
faint hiss of waxed wood on wood. Wu is drenched in daylight, Ritchie squiring
her. I thrust a finger to my lips, nodding towards Zoe who is lucky enough to
be asleep while Rene is still sternly pretending. Ritchie goes to douse his
face in the washroom, returning with his blond hair slicked back boyishly,
leaving the screen door to the washroom wide open. Even bearded, he’s a boy. He
pours cups of the cool, sweet, herb-flavoured
lariz
for

 
          
Wu
and himself from a glazed stone jug, sinks on to one of the floor cushions,
blinks and yawns.

           
“We tried to get into the pyramid along
there, but they shooed us off. I guess you wouldn’t let some guys who can’t
read the signs tramp round a radio station. Or whatever it is ... A mosque,
maybe? No admittance to unbelievers? Maybe you should try, Peter. We’re just
rats.”