Remnant Population (23 page)

Down the lane, she saw the young woman talking to one of the creatures. Ofelia’s stomach knotted; she looked at Bluecloak, but it seemed not to care. The creature stood awkwardly, like a halfwit, Ofelia thought, which it was not. The tall man, the one in charge, stood in the lane outside the center, looking west; Ofelia could see nothing beyond him but the lane itself dwindling into grass. He turned, caught sight of her, and frowned.

“I was looking for you,” he said, as if she had missed an appointment. Ofelia did not want to be ungracious, but there was nothing to say to that. They had not looked where she was; they had not called loudly enough to get her attention. That was not her fault. She smiled, as tension and resentment knotted her belly. “You need to understand how we’ll go about our mission,” he said, after a moment. “We will study and make official contact with these… indigenes. I’m sure you think you have already made contact, but after all you have had no training in this sort of thing. You were a… a what?… housewife?” Ofelia did not correct him. Whatever she had been, on the work rolls of the company, that was long ago, and it made no difference. Whatever training she had had would mean nothing to such a one. “It’s not your responsibility, is what I’m trying to say,” he went on, his face shining in the sun. “You did very well, I’m sure, to have gotten along peacefully with them, but now we’re here, and we’ll take it off your hands.” He took a deep breath, as if to say more, then let it out slowly. “You do understand, don’t you?”

She didn’t understand all, but she understood enough. She didn’t matter, she didn’t count, she was nothing. Exactly right, the old voice said to her. This is how it is; this is how it has always been. Accept it, and they will accept you as what you are. Old woman. Nothing.

“And well have to figure out something…” he said vaguely, not looking at her. “About the machines…” Fear chilled her. She needed the machines. “What about the machines?” she asked, though she was afraid she knew.

He made an impatient gesture. “Advanced technology. They shouldn’t have it. They shouldn’t even have seen it. Part of our mission was to shut it all down. I suppose we can find you a place somewhere — it’s Sims’ fault; they’ll have to pay some kind of fine, and that should be enough for a place in some residence…” “You mean… leave?” Her vision darkened; she forced herself to breathe. She would not faint in front of this person, “Well, you can’t stay here,” he said, as if that were obvious. “Even if we have a permanent mission… there’s no post for someone like — someone your age, you see. And the need to secure the technology, prevent cultural contamination… it will be difficult, even for trained personnel. You can move aboard the shuttle with us; then we can shut down the powerplant—” “Not now,” Ofelia said, hating the quaver in her voice that left her desire as vulnerable to his will as her naked skin had been to his eyes.

“Oh, not today,” the man said, as if it didn’t matter. “I suppose they’ve been here for some time; it’s not as if we could prevent what they’ve already seen. But they can’t have understood much of it, and the longer we let them have access, the more chance they’ll learn too much. When the preliminary works done… then you should prepare to leave.” He smiled, the wide smile of someone whose decisions cannot be changed. “Don’t worry… uh… Sera Falfurry… we’ll take care of you. You won’t be alone any more.” He went into the center, his body swinging, satisfied with the power he’d shown. Ofelia could not have moved if someone had poked her; she wished she could be blown away in a gust of wind. She was not so lucky; no wind stirred the leaves. Bluecloak chirped, and she looked at it. It nodded at the departed human.

“Kuss-cough-click,” it said.

“Stuck-up bossy lout,” Ofelia said; she had no doubt they meant the same thing. In her own house, alone because Bluecloak called the others out and set them as guards at her door, she raged silently, yanking clean sheets onto the bed, slamming pillows down. She would not leave. She had not left before, and she would not leave now. They could not make her. They can, said the old voice. They will. They know you evaded once; you can’t do that again.

It isn’t fair, she wailed silently. I worked so hard; I did so much; it’s their fault. It doesn’t matter, said the old voice. You are nothing to them; they have the power, and they will take you away. The old voice reminded her how much her protests sounded like those Rosara and others had made, protests she had been contemptuous of, back when she thought she could escape. She raged at that, too. Finally, exhausted, she lay down and napped, waking to quiet afternoon. She heard voices outside, human voices; when she peeked out the front windows, the two women were walking along side by side, so much like her former neighbors that she almost called out to them.

They were not neighbors. They were enemies who would take her away. They were enemies who would destroy everything she had worked for, the life she had made for herself, the new friends she had found.” The next morning, the shorter man, Ori, appeared at her garden fence to interview her. He was willing to ask his questions and listen while she worked; he even asked intelligent questions about the varieties of beans and tomatoes and corn she chose to grow. Despite herself, she found it easy to tell him which strains had been supplied by the Company, and which the colonists had developed on their own. “Then you had geneticists among you?” he asked. If he had had ears, they would have been pricked up, alert.

“Not… like in colleges,” Ofelia said. How to explain? “They taught us all what they thought we could use,” she said finally. “Practical things. How to choose the best progeny for seeds. How to repair the pumps and power plant and waste recycler. But they wouldn’t tell us why, on most things.” “Did that bother you?” he asked, this time without much interest. Ofelia was surprised at her own ability to tell that; she didn’t know how she knew.

“Not really,” she said. “We had much to learn, and little time.” It had not seemed like little time, all those nights in class or studying, when the children were small and she could have been mending or cleaning or simply resting. But in terms of absolute hours, they had had too much practical material to fit in to allow of much theoretical digression.

Ori leaned back, satisfied with her answer; she did not explain further. “Now — the first time you saw the creatures, what did you do? What did you think? Did you recognize them right away?”

The first time… she had to start with the sea-storm, with her attempt to ready the village. That bored him, though he didn’t say so; his eyes drifted away, seeing something else entirely, something beyond her head. When Bilong crossed her own view, a minute or two later, she knew what it had been. She told of that first storm-bound afternoon and night, the first few days. At first he let her talk on without interruption, only urging her to continue when she stopped. But then he wanted to ask questions. How had she first noticed that they were intelligent? How did she know who was in charge? What had she learned of their social structure? How territorial were they?

“I don’t know,” she kept saying. “They don’t do it like that—” Whatever it had been, from dividing up food to making decisions to marking rank. The more he asked, the more she felt she knew nothing about the creatures at all. It had never occurred to her to wonder if both sexes had extensible throat-sacs; she tried not to think about their sexes at all. When she said that, shyly, he gave her the smile of an adult to a backward child.

“Its all right,” he said. “Anthropologists look at these things differently.” The right way, he meant. That he was too polite to say it didn’t really take the sting out of it. He asked more, and she told what she knew… except about the babies, about being Click-kaw-keerrr. She was afraid someone would harm the babies; she hated herself for the knowledge that humans would certainly kill those babies if they thought it prudent. This man himself, with his gentle voice, she might have trusted, except that his eyes slid too often to the young woman… and his rival was the tall man, the cold-eyed team leader that Ofelia did not trust at all.

After that one long interview, Ori did not come back. She saw him following the creatures around, sitting where he could watch them with a sketchpad on his knee. He had told her that the act of drawing sometimes taught him more than the best video clips. He had showed her a few of his first sketches, and she had admired the graceful lines, drawn surely and quickly, that did seem to capture the essence of the creatures’ forms and movements. She would like to have seen his sketches of the babies, the alert way they carried their snouted heads on those flexible necks, the brisk swipes of their striped tails. The team leader ignored her completely, barely nodding as he strode up and down the streets, in and out of most buildings. He talked endlessly into a recorder that hung from his belt. He seemed to be making an inventory of every item of human origin in the village, even to the number of tomato plants. He avoided the one where Gurgle-click-cough nested; Ori had insisted that humans not intrude when the creatures made it clear they were unwelcome.

The tall woman took short trips into the forest, collecting samples of plant life from the intermediate zone as well as areas of pure native growth. She set out fishing lines in the river, put out traps for small animals. The creatures watched her, with expressions that Ofelia interpreted as a mixture of avid curiosity and mild disgust. Ofelia did not know how to ask what she herself wanted to know: did they mind another hunter in their territory, and one that did not even eat the catch?

The young woman, Bilong, seemed to spend most of her time wandering from man to man; she had a recorder, and she had placed pickups in the center — Ofelia saw that, and assumed she had put them other places as well — to gather language samples. What Ofelia knew, and Bilong did not, was that the creatures knew exactly where the pickups were, and amused themselves by standing under them reciting… reciting what Ofelia suspected were merely lists, possibly even nonsense words. Certainly their speech then had none of the rhythm and feel that it had most of the time.

Ofelia went back to her old life, as much as she could, slipping across to play with the babies — the rapidly growing and very active babies — when the humans were not in evidence. Quite often they were not in evidence. She suspected the creatures of having something to do with that, of intervening to be sure that the Click-kaw-keerrr had ample time with the babies.

The babies changed faster than human babies, in those first days. In this they were more like young calves or lambs, quickly alert and active. Ofelia had always assumed that the slow early development of human babies went with their higher intelligence — that anything which was born able to run around was also born limited, close to its adult potential of wit. She remembered parenting classes, early-childhood development classes, in which she was taught precisely this. Children took a long time to grow, because they had a long way to go; the human brain had to organize itself, teach itself how to learn. Other baby animals could be born with more behaviors wired in, because they didn’t have to be able to learn much later.

These babies… already their high squeaks sounded speechlike. Already their busy four-fingered hands manipulated the stalks of grass and sprigs of herb in their nest. Handed empty gourds by an adult, they put in pebbles, and poured them out. They squabbled with each other, shoving and nipping, using their tails to hold one another down… but these squabbles quickly shifted into cooperative play, if someone offered a toy. At ten days, twenty days of age, they were more like children of three years. Ofelia could not merely observe; she found herself being used as a plaything, a living obstacle course. The other creatures handed her the items they thought the babies should have: gourds, beads, pebbles, bits of string. She was the one who hissed disapproval when one of them wound string around its throat. It froze, eyes wide. Ofelia mimed strangulation, producing a guttural squawk. The baby blinked; the others, sitting up on legs and tail, squeaked softly. To her surprise, none of them tried that again. If they were like human toddlers, then… she wondered if they could learn letters and numbers. If the other humans hadn’t been there, she would have taken them to the center, would have shown them the books and the teaching computers. She couldn’t do that now. Her conscience nagged her; she shouldn’t
want
to do that. She should protect human technology from them, and them from human technology. Water rushed into the sink, startling her out of that reverie. One of them stood on the long faucet of the deep sink, its talons hooked around the cold-water tap, pulling; the other two, braced against the wall, had pushed at the same tap with their feet. Now, as she watched, they reversed their force: the ones who had been pushing hooked their talons over and tried to pull. The one on the faucet tried to push… and lost its footing, to splash into the sink. Ofelia heaved herself up, and put her arm into the water. The talons dug in, as the baby climbed her arm, squeaking furiously.

So much for protection, either way. They would have to learn how to use the technology safely; there was no way to keep them from using it.

Although the daily sessions with the babies delighted her, Ofelia felt a steady weight of apprehension. Someday — some one of these hardly numbered days — the team leader would think they had done enough, seen enough, and would order Ofelia to the shuttle. She would have to leave, or die. She had not thought of any way to escape this time, not with her inability to eat the local food, not with the determination of these people to find her and bring her back. She would have to leave, and leave her creatures — her responsibility, the babies — to these others, whom she did not trust.

After days of scant contact with the other humans — polite but distant greetings that made it clear they didn’t have time to waste with an ignorant old woman — Ofelia noticed that she had become real to them again. She wasn’t sure she liked it. She suspected it meant that they were finishing up their contact work, as they called it, and getting ready to “make a final determination” (the team leader’s phrase) about her, and the colony, and the creatures.

The change began with slightly warmer greetings when they saw her, politely asking how she was, how her garden prospered. The tall woman commented on a necklace Ofelia had made. The stocky man told her he had discovered that Bluecloak was a minstrel or entertainer, a singer. The younger woman began hanging around Ofelia without saying much, just like a pesky child. Ofelia noticed that she had pilfered a necklace to wear, and that she left too many of her shirt buttons undone. After a few days of hovering that nearly drove Ofelia to rudeness, she actually began a conversation. She asked how Ofelia had taught the creatures to speak.

Ofelia explained, as well as she could. She had tried to teach them as she had taught babies — human babies, she repeated, though Bilong didn’t know about the others.

“That’s not how you teach a language,” the woman said. “I know you probably thought you taught your children to talk, but human children don’t have to be taught — they just learn.” Bilong was trying to be polite. Ofelia could tell that, just as she could tell that the woman was treating her with exaggerated patience, as if she were a naughty child. She herself tried not to resent the rudeness which was not intended.

“Some do,” Ofelia conceded. Most, probably. But had any mother ever been able to resist teaching? “All of them,” Bilong said, emphasizing it, “—all human children learn to talk on their own, because they’re designed to speak human language.”

Ofelia wished she could remember how to do what she had done for so many years, remove herself from the talk and let it pass by, but it was impossible to put that chicken back in the egg. “Sara’s child,” she heard herself saying, even as the old, cautious voice implored her to keep quiet. “It couldn’t talk, no matter what.”

“I meant
normal
children,” the woman said, less patiently “But these are aliens, Ofelia — I can call you Ofelia, can’t I?”

A girl from this neighborhood has no business getting a swelled head, her father had said. Pride goes before damnation, someone had said. The tall stalk asks for the knife. You are nothing. “Sera Ofelia,” she said, with the least emphasis.

“Oh — Sarah? I’m sorry; I thought you were called Ofelia.” The woman seemed confused, but willing. Her accent, Ofelia realized, meant that she could not hear the difference between the name Sara and the title Sera. Nor had she paid attention when the stocky man addressed her correctly as Sera Falfurrias. Ofelia did not enlighten her. She waited, hoping her face would remember the bland expressions that had kept her out of trouble before.

“Sarah,” the linguist said. “Let me explain about alien languages.” Ofelia waited in silence, but her mind crackled with comments. “They aren’t like human languages,” the linguist went on. Oh really? Did she think Ofelia hadn’t noticed? “Since their biological nature is different, the very structure of their brains — if we can call them brains, which is doubtful — determines a different structure of language.” Ofelia repressed a snort with difficulty: Whatever the brain had to do with language, some of the messages would have to be the same. I’m hungry, feed me. I’m hurt, comfort me. Come here. Go away. OUCH. Do it again. What is that and how does it work?

“They may not intend any of the same meanings,” the linguist said, completing the picture of an idiot. Prudence lost out; she had been too long free to speak her mind, if only to herself. “They have to say some of the same things,” she said. “If they’re hungry. If they hurt.”

The younger woman’s eyebrows went up. “Well… there are a few nearly universal messages. But those are least interesting; even a non-language species may have vocalizations associated with hunger or pain. Besides, in the languages we know, these aren’t expressed the same way. The goetiae, for instance, actually say ‘my sap dries’ when they mean I’m hungry,’ and in one dialect of your language—” The linguist said “your language” as if it were particularly silly. “—the South Naryan, I think it is, no one ever says ‘I hurt’ — they always use the form ‘it pains me.’”

Ofelia rubbed her foot a little backwards and forwards on the ground, reminding herself of that reality. She had never heard of the goetiae — were they aliens? — but she had had an aunt who was South Naryan, and she knew perfectly well that her aunt said “I hurt myself’ when she fell over something. Did this linguist say “I hurt” when she had a backache? Or did she say, more sensibly, “My back hurts”? She thought of a question she could ask.

“How many alien languages do you know?”

The woman flushed. “Well… actually… not any. Not truly alien, that is. No ones ever found one. This will be the first.” As if Ofelia had said what she was thinking, the linguist hurried on. “Of course, we practiced with computer generated languages. The neural modelers created alien networks, and we practiced with the languages they generated.”

Ofelia kept her face blank. She understood what that meant: they had created machines that talked machine languages, and from this they thought they had learned how to understand alien languages. Stupid. Machines would not think like aliens, but like machines. The creatures were not machines — very far from it.

But the linguist was leaning closer, confiding now, as if Ofelia were a favorite aunt or grandmother. She did not want to be Bilong’s mother, or her grand-mother. She had done with these roles, with being a good child, a good wife, a good mother. She had put seventy-odd years into it; she had worked hard at it; now she wanted to be that Ofelia who painted and carved and sang in an old cracked voice with strange creatures and their stranger music. The role the creatures had given her was more than enough. “It’s all this tension,” the linguist was saying. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—” Then don’t, Ofelia thought. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear it. “—but you’re wise, even if you don’t have an education.” The arrogance in that almost yanked a reply from her, but she managed to squeeze it back. Wise even if she had no education? What did wisdom have to do with education? Besides, she had an education; she had spent hours studying, nights and early mornings studying, long before this child was born. This… this chit of a girl who hadn’t known how to repair the pumps, who had blithely walked between a cow and her calf.

“The thing is,” the girl went on, in happy unawareness of Ofelia’s thoughts, “they don’t like each other and never have. So they’re using me as an excuse. One says I’m flirting, and the other one says I’m not flirting, and—” “Are you flirting?” Ofelia asked. She thought so; why else wear that perfume? Why else swing her ripe young body back and forth like fruit on a vine, every motion declaring her readiness to be picked and eaten?

“Of course not.” A flounce, an outraged glance. Just like Linda, who had always denied with her mouth while proclaiming with her hips. But this was not Linda. “Well… maybe. But not
seriously
, you know. It’s not like your culture, you know.” Again that gentle condescension. “We don’t have the same rules—” As if human biology would shift aside for her convenience, as if men were not animals born to respond to smells and motions. “I do rather like one of them, and there’s no reason he shouldn’t know it. But that’s not really flirting.”

“Do you have sex with him?” Ofelia asked. The girl flushed and scowled,

“It’s none of your—” She stopped abruptly and her face changed, as if someone had wiped a thumb across clay. “Oh, in Kira. How’s the tech survey going?”

Ofelia looked up at the other woman. Older, warier, than the young one, but still young to Ofelia. She was angry about something; Ofelia suspected it was the girl’s antics.

“There’s a staff meeting in twenty minutes, Bilong, and you’re supposed to have the preliminary analysis

ready—”

“I can’t — it’s too soon — all I can do is discuss the raw data—”

“Then do that.” Kira stood there, as threatening as a sea-storm wall cloud until the younger woman got up and walked away, her shoulders stiff.

“You are angry?” Ofelia said. She leaned back against the sun-warmed wall and hoped she looked old and stupid.

“She is not supposed to waste her time talking to you,” Kira said. “She has work to do.” Ofelia waited. She had seen just this maneuver in older children who chased young ones away. What they really wanted was their own chance at the mother or grandmother.

Kira sighed, the kind of dramatic sigh that meant she too was going to confide. Ofelia let her eyelids sag almost shut. Maybe she would change her mind if Ofelia looked stupid enough. “You’re not a chatterbox,” Kira said. Mistake, This woman had wanted a safe confidant, and for that purpose stupid and quiet would do well enough. Ofelia opened her eyes but it was too late to pretend alert garrulity. Kira’s mouth quirked. “And I don’t think you’re half so dim as you pretend, either A stupid woman couldn’t have survived alone so long.” Good observation, if unflattering. Just once, Ofelia would have liked people to see her as she was, not as their ideas painted her. She looked at Kira, the short hair so carefully shaped that it must be a style of some sort, the smooth young-woman skin just showing the first lines of age. Who was this person, really? “I don’t think I’m stupid,” she said.

Kira’s eyes widened, then narrowed

“No. I can see that. What I can’t see is why you chose to stay behind.”

“No,” Ofelia said, mimicking Kira’s intonation, “I can see you don’t. But you are too young.”

“You didn’t want to die aboard the ship, in suspension?”

Ofelia shrugged, annoyed. They always came back to death, these young ones; they were obsessed with it. She tried again to explain. “It was not about death. It was about life. If I stayed, I would be alone—” “But no one can survive isolation,” Kira said, interrupting Ofelia as she had done before, as they had all done. “You must have been terribly lonely. It’s lucky for you that the indigenes showed up when they did.”

It would do no good to argue that she had not been lonely. She had tried that, and they had looked at her with such pity, and such certainty.

“Perhaps I am crazy,” Ofelia said.

“Your psych profile didn’t show anything before,” Kira said. So they had snooped into her personnel file, something she had never done herself. Again the slow anger burned. What right had they? They were not her people: not family, not friends, not fellow colonists, not even someone she had gone to for help. “Its not… normal,” Kira said. “Wanting to be the only human on the whole world — that’s not normal.” “So I am not normal,” Ofelia said. Silence would not work with this one; she knew that already.

“But why?”

Ofelia shrugged. “You did not like my answers before; you told me I didn’t understand. Should I tell you the truth I know, or try to guess the untruth you want?”

Kira’s eyes widened. Surprise, the old lady has teeth. “You don’t have to be so — so vehement. I only wondered.” She sounded offended. Fine. Let her be offended. “I wanted to be alone. I had not been alone for years. It didn’t bother me to be alone as a child, and it didn’t bother me this time either.” Kira gave her perfect haircut a little shake, warding off that understanding. “Was it because your husband and children had died here? And you felt close to them?”

Ofelia sighed, and pushed herself away from the wall, standing slowly. These people felt almost as alien as the creatures, and they had less interest in understanding her. “If you don’t listen, you can’t hear,” she said, tugging her ear for emphasis. They would make up their own minds anyway, and nothing she said would change that.

She walked away, around the far end of her house, and out into the meadow. Kira followed her a few steps, bleating something incomprehensible. Then she fell behind. Ofelia did not turn to look, but she could feel Kira’s stare on her shoulderblades.

Out among the sheep, the blessedly silent sheep, who ignored her at this time of day, Ofelia hid in plain sight from the other humans. She used the basket she had brought to gather sheep droppings. She spread them along the outer margins of the meadow, supporting the terraforming grasses with their mix of bacteria and fungi, maintaining the meadows boundaries.

The newcomers hated the droppings, hated anything that smelled alive: “stank of organics,” is how they put it. They wanted nothing to do with her while she was doing work they considered dirty. After that first rapture over fresh tomatoes, they had recoiled from the discovery that she did not sterilize the sheep and cow manure, the kitchen garbage, that went into the compost trench and then into the soil. They accepted no more tomatoes, and refused the cooling fruit drink — although they would pick fruit themselves, and then scrub it in the kitchen sink in the center.

She was tired of the newcomers’ silliness about dirt, tired of their busyness, tired of the way they interrupted her without apology, talked as long as they wanted to, and then walked off, leaving her as casually as they would leave a building. She was behind in her garden work; she could not enjoy sewing or crocheting or making jewelry when at any moment someone might come interrupt her, with that expression which meant they thought she was especially silly to be making things now, when she would have to leave. They seemed to go out of their way to make her feel unimportant. The contrast between their behavior and that of the creatures could not be ignored. The old voice, smug in its certainty, told her that was to be expected. She could mean nothing to the humans; they knew how to rate humans, and she came at the bottom. The creatures could not know. They might like her because she had been their first human; they might value her for the novelty. Whatever the reason for their respect, they could not value her for anything important; they didn’t know what was important. In the sun’s heat, the droppings had dried quickly; Ofelia did not mind picking them up, although the stooping bothered her. Her head hurt now only when she bent over, as if all the blood rushed into that swollen knob and pulsed there. Maybe it did. The shirt she wore pulled across the shoulders. The old voice told her how old she was, how weak, how useless. The new voice said nothing, but lived like a cold knot in her heart. She tried to ignore the old voice, and kept on working. Maybe if she stayed away from the other humans, the new voice would speak to her again. She missed it. A shadow, a blur of motion; one of the creatures. She looked up, attempted the chest grunt of greeting, and got one in return. This creature wore one of her necklaces draped over its own accouterments. When it had her attention, it tapped the basket and gurgled its question. This one rarely attempted human speech. “Sheep droppings,” Ofelia said, as if the words had been clear. “For the grass. It feeds the grass.” The creature moved slowly to one of the sheep, which lifted its head to stare. Even more slowly, the creature leaned down, yanked loose a tuft of grass, and offered it to the sheep. The sheep accepted it docilely and its narrow jaw worked back and forth. The creature touched the sheep’s throat, then lightly ran its hand down the body to the rump. Ofelia could follow that: food goes in here, and goes through… When the creature tried to lift the sheep’s tail, the sheep yanked away and moved off briskly. The creature gaped its mouth at Ofelia — laughter? annoyance? — and then pointed at the sheep’s rump, then droppings on the ground.