Remnant Population (18 page)

Kira choked back all the rude expressions she knew, and said instead, “Vasil will not be happy about this.”

“No,” Chesva said. He grinned at her. “But it should get his mind off Bilong, don’t you think?” There was now no question of landing anywhere but the Sims Bancorp shuttle strip. They had been lent a military-grade drop shuttle, supposedly impervious to anything but “extremely advanced technology,” the military pilots said. The pilots had come with the shuttle, along with a small contingent of “advisors” who had not mingled at all with the scientific and diplomatic specialists during the voyage. The shuttle had made several reconnaissance flights after the low-orbital scanner showed no evidence of technology that could blow them from the sky. Evidence of lower-level technology filled the datastrips and cubes. Stone buildings — obvious permanent settlements — clustered on the rocky coast far north and east of the Sims Bancorp colony, and troops of nomads accompanied by herds of quadruped grazers in the grasslands west of the settlements.

“I’m not surprised they missed the nomads,” Vasil said. “They could be other migrating animals, nothing special. They don’t seem to build fires, or structures. Its only that we know to look for them. But how they could have missed those cities — !” He shook his head dramatically.

Kira refused to restart the discussion of critical points and emergence, gradualism versus cultural discontinuity. They didn’t have the historical data they needed to determine when the indigenes had achieved the cognitive and cultural complexity needed for this level of technology, and they couldn’t get it up here. Down there, if Ori and his backup were good enough, might be the data they needed to settle the question. Instead, she concentrated on biota: the four-legged herds the nomads accompanied… hunted? Herded? Herbivores, surely; only abundant plant growth would support that mass of flesh. Prey animals, certainly, with those eyes set on the sides of longish heads, eyes that could see behind and around. Were the indigenes the only predators? She looked for, but did not find, something equivalent to canids. “Boats, with rowers, and sails,” Ori said, gloating over the pictures taken of the coastal settlements. “They can work wood — I wonder if it’s all as hard as the stuff Sims exported from the tropics. We have to have metal for that. If they have metal tools—” Kira looked at the creatures themselves. Indigenes, she reminded herself. She couldn’t tell what they were most like, mammals or reptiles or birds… they had no visible hair or feathers, but their surface looked more like skin than scales. Their gait, with its long-legged, bouncing quality, reminded her of ratites, the large flightless birds of old Earth, but the obvious joint in the leg faced forward, like the human knee. Large eyes, placed slightly more to the side of the head than human eyes; they would have both binocular and monocular vision, she suspected. Four-toed, four-fingered… an opposable digit on the hand, and one of the toes looked as if it were almost opposable.

“Look at those buildings,” Ori said, breaking her concentration for a moment. “And I’d swear those are pipes — maybe just hollow reeds or something, but tubes to carry — yes! Something just came out of that one.” Kira had looked just too late; she saw the tubes, but not whatever had been in them. Memnin, the anthropologist on the backup team, spoke up. “I’m noticing how aware they are. Did you notice, Ori, how they looked up at the shuttle? No panic, no real surprise, and that one there—” he pointed at a corner of the image. “It’s sketching something, I’d bet.”

Bilong and Apos, the linguists, stood in the corners watching. They had nothing to do, since the scanners had not picked up any sound. Apos looked alert, but Bilong pouted. Kira wished again that Bilong hadn’t been chosen for the primary team. Apos might be younger and less experienced, but at least he wasn’t trying to make trouble.

Several days of overflights and data analysis — enough new data to keep an entire faculty busy; Kira felt she was drowning in it — and finally the military pilots agreed that they could risk a landing at the old colony. They insisted that everyone wear protective gear, hot, heavy, clumsy, and unfamiliar to the civilians. Kira was sure the military advisors were laughing at them. They probably did look ridiculous, she told herself, trying to see the funny side as she struggled with the toggles and slides that held the thick panels together. At least they were going to see the real world at last; it was worth this inconvenience on the way.

Unfortunately, from her point of view, the military version of a shuttle had no viewports, nor any of the other amenities of civilian shuttles. She had expected to watch the approach, seeing for herself how the atmosphere changed color and affected the look of the landscape. The exterior cameras would capture that for later analysis, but that didn’t make up for not seeing it herself. She had to sit staring at the back of Vasil’s head all the way down, her rump going numb on the hard seat, her ears assaulted by the roar and rattle. She had no idea how far along they were until the pilot’s announcement that they would be landing in two minutes. The shuttle dipped, swayed, and shuddered in the disconcerting way of all shuttles, and Kira very consciously did not clench her hands. She hated this; she couldn’t even see the runway. Then the seat smacked against her backside, and she felt the uneven rumble of the wheels rolling on the rough, overgrown surface.

At first view, the abandoned colony looked exactly like an abandoned colony. They had landed at local dawn, and a hazy pink light glowed from the walls of the shabby little one-story houses. Nothing moved. Parked in a ragged row beside the shuttle strip were the colony vehicles, streaked with rust, tires deflated. Tough grass, and even a few shrubs, had encroached on the runway itself. A moist warm breeze stirred the grass and carried the strange alien smell of a different world.

The shuttle skin popped and hissed; Kira could hear nothing more at first, until her own ears popped. Far off, something groaned horribly; she jumped. Ori said “That must be the cows” and she could have kicked herself for not recognizing the sound. She was the xenobiologist, after all; she was supposed to know animals. Vasil started down the ramp, but one of the advisors stopped him. “We aren’t sure yet,” the advisor said. Sure of what, Kira wondered. They were sure the indigenes were here, and at least one human. They had speculated endlessly about that human, seen only on the weathersat visual scans: who was it, how had he or she found this place, and why? Some drunken crewman left behind after the colony was evacuated? Some exploring entrepreneur come to salvage the leftover equipment? Someone who wanted to claim the planet for himself? “Somebody—” said another of the advisors. Despite Vasil’s arguments, they had brought weapons along. He might be the team leader, the future ambassador, but they had traveled on a military ship, landed on a military shuttle; he had not been able to change the captain’s orders. “To defend the shuttle” the captain had said to Vasil; Kira, standing behind him, had seen his ears redden. He had told the others he would take care of it, meaning get rid of the weapons, but his bluster had gotten him nowhere. Now the advisors had their weapons out. Kira was not surprised.

“Don’t do anything,” Vasil pleaded. They ignored him. Kira, sweating in her protective suit, ignored him too.

“One individual,” the advisor said. He was speaking into a mic more than to them. “Appears to be human, female…” Then in a tone of surprise, “
Old
. An old woman, alone.”

Kira couldn’t see what they were seeing; the advisors and Vasil, all in bulky suits, blocked her view up the village lane. They could have moved enough to let those behind see, but they were all standing foursquare, as if intending to be as obtrusive as possible. She looked sideways instead, back down the runway with its ragged rows of grass, to the river — a surface gleaming in the early light — then the other direction, where a distant green wall was the forest. Kira could not tell this second-growth forest from the uncut primary forest a little to the west, even though it had shown up clearly on the scans from space. “She’s…” A long pause, almost a gulp, then the advisor found the right official phrase for it.

“Inappropriately attired. Wearing… uh… just some sort of cape-like garment and some beads. Barefoot.

Uh… this individual may be disturbed…”

Kira couldn’t stand it. She was the assistant leader of this expedition, and they were ignoring her. She pushed forward, not too carefully, and Vasil staggered into the advisor, who almost went over the edge of the ramp. She didn’t care; she wanted to see. And there, walking slowly toward the shuttle, came a scrawny little woman with an untidy bush of white hair. Barefoot, yes, and wearing an embroidered cape over her tanned skin… some kind of garment slung around her hips. And beads. She didn’t look disturbed, not like the senile clinic patients shown in newscubes to remind people to take their anti-senility pills. She looked annoyed, like someone who has had unexpected company drop by on a day when she had planned to do something else. It was this very assurance, the way she planted her gnarled old feet carefully on the ground, one after another, that silenced them all, Kira thought. The old woman was not embarrassed by her odd attire; she was not impressed with them. They stood, sweating in their protective suits, as the old woman walked slowly up to the foot of the ramp. Kira tried to make out the design embroidered on the cape, and suddenly realized it was faces — faces and eyes. Too many eyes. The old woman tipped back her head and glared at them with her bright black eyes. “This was
not
a good time,” she said. “You’ve upset them.”

Vasil shook himself into action first. “By the authority vested in me—” he began. The old woman interrupted.

“I said it wasn’t a good time,” she said. “You could have listened when I tried to talk to you.”

“Talk to us?” Kira asked, cutting off Vasil’s angry sputter.

“Yes.” The woman’s head bobbed, then came up again. “But you folk have done something to the weathersat, so I can’t get it to listen.”

“
You
took those pictures?” Ori asked. “You made it do the visual scanning of this location?” “Of course,” the old woman said. “They wanted to see what it looked like, not just the weather. It helped them understand.” They. Kira shivered as she realized what the old woman must mean by they. Perhaps she was crazy, if she had been showing them the technology. Surely even an uneducated old woman knew better.

“By what right — !” began Vasil, just as the senior advisor said, “Under whose authority — ?” The two men glared at each other.

“Who
are
you?” asked Kira, into the moment of silence.

“Who are
you
?” the old woman asked, without answering the question. If she was senile, perhaps she had forgotten her own name.

“We won’t hurt you,” Kira said, trying to sound gentle and patient. “We want to help you—” That sounded stupid, even to her, and she was not surprised when the old woman made a scornful noise. “I don’t need help,” the old woman said. “If you’re one of that other lot, you’re in the wrong place.”

“That other lot?” Vasil got that out, silencing the advisor with another glare.

“Come awhile back, tried to land — you must know about them.”

“Yes,” the advisor said, this time beating out Vasil. “What do you know about them?” “Heard it on the com,” the old woman said. “Heard them coming down, heard them calling for help.” She clamped her mouth together, then said “Heard them die.” She looked down. “Didn’t you try to help?” Vasil asked. Kira was cheered to find that someone could say something stupider than she had. Did Vasil really think that this frail old woman could have stopped a massacre that had happened thousands of kilometers away? The old woman said nothing, just kept looking up at them. Vasil turned red, and cleared his throat. The advisor, Kira noted, looked amused. “Have you been here all along?” Kira asked, since no one else broke the silence.

“Of course,” the old woman said. “Forty years and more, by now.”

“But Sims Bancorp said—”

The old woman grinned, “Company wasn’t going to waste time hunting down one old woman they didn’t want anyway. Already charged my family extra for me being overage, figured I’d die in cryo.” Kira shivered. She had not imagined that kind of crassness, even from Sims Bancorp. Surely it was against the law — but who would enforce such a law, out here in the frontiers? “So I stayed,” the old woman said. She was still grinning; it looked grotesque.

“On purpose?” Vasil asked, as if he still couldn’t believe it. The old woman scowled now. “Yes,” she said shortly. Kira wondered how — how had she survived all alone? Or had someone else stayed behind? But she could not ask that angry face.

“Well,” Vasil said, doing his best to get back in control. “Whatever your reasons, you are in violation of the order to evacuate, and by your actions you have jeopardized the position of Sims Bancorp—” The old woman muttered something Kira could not hear, but from the expression on her face it had not been complimentary.

“—And you have presented us with an unnecessary dilemma,” Vasil went on. “What are we going to do with you?”

Kira was not surprised when the old woman gave the obvious answer. “Let me alone,” she said, and turned away.

“But — but you must understand the seriousness of the situation,” Vasil said. The old woman turned back. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I understand — but you came at a bad time. Now go away.” Then she turned and walked off, the long fringe on the back of her cape brushing the backs of her crooked tanned legs. The back of the cape had a single large face on it, in glittery embroidery; the overlarge eyes had long eyelashes like rays extending to the margin of the face. Kira felt uncomfortable, as if the eyes were staring at her, and more uncomfortable for having that reaction. She was not a primitive; she shouldn’t be affected by such obvious symbolism.

“Come back here!” Vasil ordered, but the woman did not turn around. Vasil turned to one of the advisors, but Kira tapped his arm.

“Let me try. She’s a woman, after all, and if she’s been here alone for several years, she may be overwhelmed by all of us.”