All My Sins Remembered (3 page)

And as for being on the regular spacelanes, Bruuch had one cargo ship a week, usually late.

“Here, let me see those papers.” The clerk gladly handed over the clearance forms. “I’ll take full responsibility.” He scrawled initials in a dozen places and handed them back. “This is no common tourist—without the influence of his book, you’d be working in the mines. Ne pushing paper once a week.”

The clerk pushed a button and the turnstile buzzed. “Let’s go, Isaac. The Company’ll buy you a drink.”

Crowell squeezed through the narrow opening and shuffled after Lyndham to the spaceport bar. The place was furnished with native handcrafts: tables and chairs carved from the dense black ironwood that resembled obsidian more than any other Terran material.

Crowell had difficulty drawing the heavy chair out from under the table. He plopped down into it and wiped his face with an outlandishly large handkerchief.

“Jonathon… I don’t know if I can handle this gravity. I’m not a young man anymore and…well, I’ve let myself go a little.” Ten per cent reminded itself: I’m
thirty-two and in superb physical condition
.

“Oh, you’ll get used to it, Isaac. Let me enroll you in our health club—we’ll shrink those extra pounds off in no time.”

“That would be nice,” Crowell said hastily (no amount of exercise will reduce plastiflesh), “but I doubt I’ll have the time. My publisher sent me here to gather material for an update of
Anomaly
… probably be here a month or less.”

“Oh—that’s a pity. But I think you’ll find that things have changed enough to warrant a longer stay than that.” A woman came and took their drink orders, two brandies.

“Changes? We don’t hear much of Bruuch on Macrobastia, where I’ve been teaching. Some changes are obvious—” with an economical gesture he indicated their surroundings—“this port was only packed earth and a metal hut when I left last time. But I’m more interested in the Bruuchians than you colonists. Are things much the same with them?”

“Um… not really.” Their brandies came; Crowell inhaled the fumes deeply and drank with obvious relish.

“No brandy in the Confederación like Bruuchian. A pity you don’t export.”

“The Company’s supposed to be working on that. That and the native handcrafts.” His shoulders twitched in a shrug. “But kilogram for kilogram, they make much more on rare earths. Every planet makes beverages and most have busy autochthones.”

“Yes, the Bruuchians… things have changed?”

Jonathon took a small sip of brandy and nodded. “Both in the long view and, well, recently. Have you heard that the natives’ average life-span is down?”

Otto McGavin knew but Crowell shook his head, no.

“In the past six years, down some twenty-five per cent. I think the average life-span of a male is down to about twelve years. Bruuchian, that is; about sixteen Standard. Of course, they don’t seem to mind.”

“Of course not,” Crowell mused. “They would see it as a blessing.” The Bruuchians preserved their dead in a secret rite and the carcasses were treated as living creatures, with more status in the family than anyone who was still moving around. They were consulted as oracles, the oldest living family member divining their advice by studying the corpses’ immobile features.

“Any theories?”

“Well, most of the males work in the mines; there is some bismuth associated with the rare-earth deposits; bismuth is a powerful cumulative poison to their systems. But the mineralogists swear there’s not enough bismuth in the dust they breathe to cause any health problems. And of course the creatures won’t let us have a body for autopsy. It’s a sticky situation.”

“Quite so, I can see. But I recall the Bruuchians having enjoyed small doses of bismuth as a narcotic—could they simply have found a large source and gone on a species-wide orgy?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve looked into the matter rather closely—God knows, Deirdre’s always harping on it. There aren’t any natural concentrations of bismuth on the planet, and even if there were, the creatures lack the technology, the basic grasp of science, needed to refine it.” Crowell winced inwardly every time Lyndham called them “creatures.”

“The Company doesn’t mine it,” Lyndham continued, “and it’s on the ‘forbidden imports’ list. No, I really think bismuth poisoning is the wrong tack.”

Crowell drummed two fingers on the table, gathering his thoughts. “Excepting metabolic quirks like that, they seem quite a hardy people. Could it be overwork?”

“No possibility, absolutely none. Ever since your book came out, there’s been a Confederacion observer, a xenobiologist, keeping track of the creatures. Every one that works in the mines has a serial number tattooed on his foot. They’re logged in and out, and not allowed to spend more than eight hours a day in the mines. Otherwise, they would, of course. Strange creatures.”

“True.” In the home, Bruuchians were placid, even lazy. In places defined as work areas, though, they would routinely work themselves to exhaustion—not exactly a survival trait. “Took me nine years to find out why.”
The disappearances
, the Otto part of his brain was whispering, reminding… “You said something about ‘recent’ changes?”

“Um.” Jonathon fluttered his hands and took another sip. “It’s rather distressing. You know, we still have only about five hundred people on the planet, permanent personnel.”

“Really? I’d expected more by now.”

“Company doesn’t encourage immigration; no jobs. At any rate, we’re a pretty closely knit group; everybody knows just about everybody else. More like a family, we like to think, than just a group of people with a common employer.

“Well, people have been… missing, disappearing, over the past few months. They must be dead, since humans can’t survive on native food, and our own food supply is closely monitored, all meals accounted for.

“All of them disappeared without a trace. Three people, to date, one of them the Supervisor of Mines. Quite frankly, the general consensus of opinion is that the creatures did them in for some—”

“Incredible!”

“… and as you can imagine, a good deal of bad feeling has been generated. Uh, several of the creatures have been killed.”

“But—” Crowell’s heart was beating dangerously fast. He forced himself to sit back, take a deep breath, speak calmly: “There is absolutely no way a Bruuchian can take a human life. They don’t have the concept of killing, not even for food. And as much as they revere their dead, and aspire to be a ‘still one,’ they never hurry the process… they can’t grasp the idea of murder, or suicide, or even euthanasia. They don’t even have
words
for these things.”

“I know, but—”

“Do you remember that time, it was 218, I think, when a drunken worker killed a Bruuchian in the mines? With a shovel; the native had backed a cart over the man’s foot.

“I had to go to the village and find the proper household, try to explain. But the news got there before I did, and the household was in a delirious state of celebration-never had so young a one passed into stillness. They regarded it as a special favor from the gods. Their only concern was to recover the body and preserve it, and two of them were out on that chore when I arrived.

“When I told them that a man had done it, they thought I was jesting. Men are close to godhood, they said, but men are not gods. I tried to explain it over and over, using different… modes of address—but they only laughed. Finally they called in the neighbors and had me keep repeating the story for their amusement. They regarded it as a wonderfully blasphemous joke, and it was told and retold for years.”

Crowell emptied his glass in one gulp.

“I can’t say I disagree with you—the accusation is absurd. But they are powerful creatures, and a lot of people are growing afraid of them,” Lyndham said. “Besides, the alternative explanation is that there’s a murderer in our midst, in our family.”

“Maybe not,” Crowell said. “Maybe there’s something in the planet’s environment that we’ve overlooked before, some hidden danger. Did they drag the dustpits for bodies?”

“Some. Didn’t find anything.”

They talked for a half hour on this and less bizarre topics, but Crowell/McGavin learned nothing that hadn’t already been programmed into him during four weeks of personality overlay. Lyndham was paged over the public-address system.

He got up to go. “Can I detail someone to get you to Transients, Isaac? I may be tied up for a while, cataloguing.”

“No, I can find my way. You’re still in import/export, then?”

“Yes, indeed. At the very top, now.” He smiled. “Chief of the Imports Section. Which makes me very busy once a week, sorting through everything that comes in.”

“Well, congratulations,” Crowell said. McGavin moved the man up one notch on his list of suspects.

3.

The two-wheeled cart lurched to a stop and Crowell got out carefully, heavily. He gave a small coin of Company money to the native who had pulled him over a kilometer, and said in the formal mode:

“For your labors / this small token.”

The native took it in a huge trifurcate hand and placed the coin in his mouth, then tongued it to the voluminous pouch under his chin. He mumbled a ritual answer in the same mode, then scooped up Crowell’s baggage and carried it through the open door marked T
RANSIENTS
’ B
ILLET
# 1.

Crowell lumbered his large frame down the walk, envying the native’s easy jog. The Bruuchian had a coat of short brown fur, now slightly misted with sweat. From the rear, he resembled a large Terran monkey, though he was tailless. His great splayed feet were larger versions of the hands, with three mutually opposable toes. His legs were short in proportion to his body, with high knee joints that allowed movement some forty-five degrees from the perpendicular—in both directions. Thus his gait had a cartoonish character, amplified by the fact that his arms dropped straight from outsize shoulders to within a few centimeters of the ground.

There was nothing comic about his frontal aspect, though, with the two huge glaring eyes that never blinked (though a transparent nictitating membrane slid up and back every few seconds), and the forehead cluster of low-definition eyespots that, being sensitive to infrared, allowed him to find his way in almost total darkness. A huge mouth was covered by a single lip-flap, which curled up frequently to reveal a set of improbably large molars. He had ears that would resemble a cocker spaniel’s, except that they were hairless and heavily veined.

This particular individual sported two concessions to his human employers: a pair of striking earrings and a loincloth concealing nothing of any conceivable interest to a human being. He also spoke two human words, “yes” and “no.” That was about average.

The native was out the door again before Crowell had labored halfway there. He ran around Crowell without a word, harnessed himself to his cart, and rushed off.

Crowell went into his billet and sank onto the spartan bunk. He had lived in more elegant surroundings. The room had a crude table and chair of native manufacture, an unimaginative print of a winter scene on Terra, a military-type locker, and a shower operated by hoisting a perforated bucket to head level. There was another bucket to transport water in, a washbasin, and a fogged mirror. There being no other sanitary facilities, Crowell assumed they still had the outhouse he’d grown to hate ten years before.

He was debating whether to recline on the bunk (not sure he could get back up) when someone tapped on the door. “Come in,” he said wearily.

A gangly young man with a wisp of beard stepped diffidently to just inside the door. He was wearing khaki shorts and shirt and carried two bottles of beer. “I’m Waldo Struck-heimer,” he said, as if that explained something.

“Welcome.” Crowell couldn’t take his eyes off the beer. It had been a dusty ride.

“I thought you might appreciate something to drink,” he said, loping across the room in two steps, carefully uncorking a beer.

“Please…” Crowell gestured in the direction of the native chair and took a large swallow while Waldo was folding himself into a sitting position. “Are you also a transient?”

“Me? Oh, no.” Waldo uncorked the other bottle, put both corks in his jacket pocket and thumbed it shut. “I’m the xenobiologist in charge of native welfare. And I hear you’re Dr. Isaac Crowell. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

They made polite noises for a minute. “Dr. Struckheimer, I’ve only talked to one other person since I landed… what he said was pretty alarming.”

“About the disappearances?”

“That, too. But mainly the rapid decline in Bruuchian life-expectancy.”

“You didn’t know about that?”

“No, nothing.”

Waldo shook his head. “I wrote an article for
J. Ex
. two years ago. Still hasn’t come out.”

“Well, you know how that goes. If it’s not about Ember or Christy’s World—”

“Bottom of the stack, yeah. No news like new news. Who did you talk to?”

“Jonathon Lyndham. He mentioned bismuth.”

Waldo made a tent out of his long fingers and looked inside. “Well, that was the first thing I thought of. They do show most of the clinical signs, but they’re common ones—like nausea or shortness of breath in humans. Anything from a hangover to cancer.