The Gist Hunter (35 page)

I thumbed the flow speed back to normal and saw what Livesey had seen. The K'fondi flocked toward the contact team like kids let out of school. The BOOT men were jostled and seized, and the camera showed one agent tentatively reaching for his needle sprayer. But the aliens were patently friendly and curious. They fingered the Earthmen's clothing, plucked at hair, chattering nonstop amid what looked much like human smiles and laughter.

It was like seeing a first contact between Europeans and the peoples of the South Pacific five hundred years ago. But that reminded me of what had been done to those long-gone dwellers in paradise by the "civilized" visitors they had rushed out to welcome.

I looked at the glad K'fondi faces. "Hey, have we got a deal for you," I said to the screen.

The tapes of later contacts chronicled Livesey's descent into frustration. The K'fondi really did act like rambunctious teenagers on a holiday. And yet many of them showed what I thought were signs of aging. I flipped forward to one of the "negotiating" sessions.

A chaos of K'fondi chattered around an outdoor table somewhere on the station. None of them spoke Basic, and Livesey was struggling through sign language and the few words of local speech the lingolab had identified. The K'fondi were not listening. Some were passing around a flask. One couple left off nuzzling each other to slide beneath the table, and began demonstrating the similarities of K'fond and human love-making. Livesey put his forehead to the table and groaned.

I speed-ran the other tapes, witnessing several more encounters between BOOT and the K'fondi. I didn't bother with the file of correspondence between Livesey and sector base; I could imagine the SectAd's memos advancing from neutral to querulous to plain nasty. If the chief didn't get results here fast, BOOT would demote him so far down the hierarchy he'd need a miner's helmet to find his desk.

Which meant he'd be leaning hard on me to get those results for him.

The problem was simple: the K'fondi didn't make any sense. They had a high-tech culture, and somebody on the planet could beam a message to an orbiting Bureau ship in a language no K'fond should have known. Yet the K'fondi who came on station acted like eighteenth-century Trobriand Islanders on their day off.

The language puzzle intrigued me. I buzzed the station switchboard and was connected with the lingolab. The call was answered by a harassed man of middle years who introduced himself as Senior Linguist Walter Mtese. He gave me directions to his lab.

I stepped from my hut into a warm midafternoon. This part of K'fond seemed a mellow, balanced place. Temperature, humidity, even the light breeze were perfectly matched. An occasional cloud threw interesting shapes on the distant slopes, and the air was soft and good on my face.
A place to settle down in
, I thought. But that kind of thinking led nowhere. Earth law prohibited residence anywhere but where the state could keep an eye on you, and that meant Earth.

I cut between two storage huts and came suddenly face to face with the K'fondi that Livesey had had thrown off the station a couple of hours before. I observed that they liked close physical contact on first encounter; in fact, it couldn't get much closer than the way the pink female snaked her arms around my neck. Her skin was smooth and hot—K'fond body temperature was equivalent to a human's raging fever. She smelled indefinably of fruit.

"Jiao doh vuh?"
she inquired.

I tried to gently shrug off the weight of her arms. Physical contact between human and alien on first encounter can represent anything from a polite greeting to an indiscriminate appetite. The correct response was to try to imitate the gesture offered, according to the Bureau book. But as she pressed her chest against me and followed with her hips, I realized that going by the book this time would involve seriously violating several BOOT regulations.

With smiles and soft-voiced disclaimers, I disentangled myself and stepped back. The pink woman shrugged very humanly and said something to her companions, then they all wandered around the corner of the building without a backward glance. Seconds later, I heard a human voice shout
"Hey!"
followed by a burst of K'fond giggles. Then the group came pelting back around the corner, pursued by two puffing guards. I flattened myself against the supply hut and let the chase roll by. The K'fondi were enjoying the game.

Walter Mtese wasn't enjoying the K'fondi, I found when I entered his lingolab. Mtese was pure Bureau. A pattern of commendations and certificates decorated his walls, testaments to the linguist's integration into the BOOT view of the universe. But for a successful bureaucrat, Mtese looked a harried man.

"I think someone's playing an elaborate practical joke on us," he complained, as he hooked me up to the snore-couch. "These people get by with a vocabulary of under a thousand words, most of which have to do with sex, booze and bodily functions. Tell me how that's compatible with a technological civilization."

"How are they at learning Basic?" My voice sounded strange in the confines of the headpiece he was fitting over my ears.

"They don't learn anything," Mtese answered. "I spent a whole morning—that's six standard hours—trying to teach two of them ten words. I'd have had more luck training snakes to tap-dance. Give me your arm, please."

I felt the hypo's aerosol coolness. Subjective time slowed as the drugs depressed selected regions of my nervous system while goosing others into hyperawareness. Around a tongue now grown larger than the head that contained it, I managed to speak.

"What does '
jiao doh vuh
' mean?"

Mtese snorted as he punched codes into the snore-couch controls. "It's the standard greeting between males and females, usually answered in the affirmative, and followed by immediate direct action. It's a wonder they've got the energy to walk."

The snore-couch's headset began murmuring in my ears, the drugs took hold, and Mtese and the lingolab evaporated into golden warmth as the machine flooded my neurons with incoming freight.

Back at my hut, I found that knowing K'fondish was no big help. As the last wisps of Mtese's chemicals effervesced out of my brain, I reran Livesey's encounter tapes. The linguist was right: K'fondish conversation was at the level of the street corner banter of good-natured juvenile delinquents—simple, direct and highly scatological. If the alien who had spoken in Basic over the ship's com was one of the "negotiating team," he was keeping his mouth shut.

Livesey's records and the lingolab had taught me all they could. The next step, by the book, was firsthand field contact. According to procedures, that meant encountering the natives under controlled conditions, on station ground, and guided by a welter of Bureau regulations devised by bureaucrats who had never left Earth. I saw no reason to repeat Livesey's failure. Besides, it was always more instructive to meet aliens on their own turf.

The transport-pool guard refused me a ground car without an authorized requisition. He was still refusing as I wheeled a two-seater out of its stall and waved my way past gate security. The highway was wide, flat and empty. I urged the car up to cruising speed, took the center of the road and headed east. Five minutes from the station, I reached under the instrument panel and pulled loose a connection. Now the car's location transmitter couldn't tell tales on me. I nudged my speed a little higher, and went looking for K'fondi.

The quality of this planet's technology was obvious in the agricultural zone on the town's outskirts. A house-sized harvester trundled through a field, collecting a nutlike fruit that emerged packed in transparent containers from the harvester's rear port. A flatbed truck with a grapple followed along, stacking the containers on itself in precise rows. Neither machine had an operator. In the distance, herd animals grazed near the shores of a lake that swept across the horizon to lap against the geometry of the town's central core.

The highway connected with a grid of local and arterial roads, and I met up with other traffic. Self-directed trucks and driverless transports neatly avoided my passage, or maintained pace with me at exact, unvarying distances. Then the traffic dropped away down side roads as the highway took me into the residential suburbs.

Neat houses of painted wood or colored stone were intermixed with towers faced in metal or glass. The town looked lived-in—I saw lawns that needed a trim, a fence that was giving in to gravity, and one cracked window mended with tape. It was only after a few minutes that I realized I wasn't seeing any K'fondi. The streets were deserted.

The emptiness began to play on my nerves. Field work can be dicey. Trampling on a society's direst taboos is so easy when you have no idea what they are.

Maybe this part of the town was forbidden, or this time of day had to be spent indoors. Maybe it was death to approach this place from the west. Maybe . . . anything. At the university, we'd all heard the story of the technician who'd casually swatted a buzzing insect. He had protested that he had not known that that particular species was "sacred for the day," as the alien priests had apologetically proceeded to dismember him.

I finally found the K'fondi, lots of them, as I nosed the car out of a side street onto the lake drive. I was suddenly in a town square, beachfront and park all rolled into one, and it was the site of a carnival that made Rio's Carneval look like a Baptist church social. Knots of K'fondi surged in a cheerful frenzy through a crowd so dense it flowed like fleshy liquid. Some kind of music thumped and screeched loud enough for me to experience it as repeated
tumpa-tumpas
on my chest. K'fondi in a grab bag of costumes bobbed to the rhythm or gyrated with flailing elbows along the edge of the mob. As I stopped the car, an eddy of the crowd swirled around me. One dervish began beating out a tattoo on the engine compartment, while a large female jumped onto the hood and began a dance that had various parts of her moving in several different directions at once.

More K'fondi joined her, making the car sag and groan on its suspension. I mentally ran through all the time-tested phrases recommended for first encounters, but with this crowd I realized that I might as well declaim Homer in the original Greek.

The car was rocking steadily faster, and common sense said it was time to bail out. The crowd swallowed me the way an amoeba takes in a drifting speck. Aliens pressed me from all sides, but none paid me any attention. My head seemed to shrink and swell with the sound of the music.

Way back in school, in an attempt to make us grateful that the ECS had rescued our world from self-destructive hedonism, they'd shown us images of rock concerts from the Decadent Period. What I was experiencing among the K'fondi must have been the kind of sheer fun those old DP mass gatherings had looked to be.

The music wound down to a last subsonic rumble and crashed in an auditory rain of metal. As the sound dwindled, I could hear voices again, even pick out words I now recognized. The crowd began to thin around the knoll. Some went splashing into the lake. Others drifted back toward town or into the trees farther up the shore. And some couples entwined arms and legs, sliding down each other to the ground.

I scanned the departing remnants of the crowd. A few meters away, I thought I saw the pink female from the station among a handful of K'fondi skirting the knoll. Or it may have been a complete stranger—learning to tell aliens apart can take practice. I hurried to catch up, fell in beside her and touched her wrist. She turned without slowing, and regarded me with scant interest.

"Jiao doh vuh?"
she asked, and my lingolab-educated brain translated the phrase as "Do you want to?"

"Do I want to what?"

She looked puzzled for a moment. "It's just what people say."

I said, "My name is Kandler. I'd like to talk to you."

"Why talk?"

"Talking is what I do."

Her shrug was almost human, and I took it as an acquiescence. "I want a drink," she said, heading toward a row of low-rises bordering the park.

The K'fond bar could have blended into most Earth streetscapes, if you ignored the unusual colors of the patrons. When we had found seats at a table in the back that was crowded with her friends, I learned that the pink woman's name was Chenna—no surname or honorific, I noted—and that the town was called Maness. Chenna's friends remained anonymous. I could just barely hold her attention long enough to ask a question and receive an indifferent reply. Everyone else in the bar was enjoying the outpourings of a couple on a small stage, who were tootling some kind of flute that had two mouthpieces. I was thankful it was purely an acoustic instrument; my eardrums still hurt from the pummeling they had taken in the park.

A robot server brought us a round of drinks without being summoned. I sniffed the tall frosty tumbler, and recognized the same fruity aroma that had lingered around Chenna at the station. The concoction tasted sweet and dry. I waited a few moments to learn if I would be racked by intense pains or stop breathing. When nothing much happened, I judged the drink safe and took another sip.

By saying her name a couple of times, I got Chenna's attention again, and posed a few more questions. No, she didn't work, although it seemed to her that she might have once had some kind of job. She thought she hadn't been in Maness very long, but it was hard to tell.

If Chenna was hazy on her own personal history, the rest of K'fond society was nonexistent to her. I couldn't find a word in my new vocabulary for "government," but I tried to phrase a question about who got things done on K'fond.

"Machines," she replied airily, waving to the robot for another round. I drained my glass and reached for a second.

"But who tells the machines what to do?"

Chenna actually looked as if she was rummaging through her mind for an answer. But then she laid her cheek on an upturned palm and said, "Who cares?"

I put away my exo-soc question kit and opted for passive observation. The bar was filling up. The flute players had given way to an
a cappella
group that seemed to know only four notes, but the K'fondi happily sang along with them.