Technically the unnecessary exposure of such advanced technology to primitive species was in contravention of Commonwealth contact procedure. Haviti contented herself with the knowledge that the violation was likely to go unremarked upon. Besides, Quofum had not been officially classified. You couldn’t break regulations that were not yet in place.
Not that she gave a damn about such things anymore.
The alcohol-flavored sea on her left was alive with as wide-ranging an assortment of seemingly unrelated life-forms as the sky and the land. Quofum was nothing if not endlessly fecund. She and her companions did not lack for divertissements of the biological kind. She would have traded every one of them for a new tridee play, or a new book, or a current news report from even an unimportant outlying world. The continued and likely permanent isolation threatened to drive her and her friends mad.
Take what she thought she was seeing now, for instance. Several days’ travel north of the village of the fuzzies and farther inland she began to see high verdant mounds interlaced with straight channels that suggested a jungle-clad city. Directing the skimmer to divert toward them, she flew low and slow over and around several of the overgrown mounds. She felt a surge of excitement, the first of its kind in many weeks. Surely the verdureclad towers she was circling could not be entirely natural? They were too regular in shape, too severe in silhouette. And there were too many of the channels, which were themselves too straight and precise. While tributaries even on Earth had been known to enter major rivers at perfectly right angles due to quirks of local geology, they tended to have a tapering shape like all good subsidiary streams. The diameter of those below her now were unvarying from one end to the other.
Penetrating onboard instruments soon confirmed her suspicions. The forest-enveloped rises beneath the skimmer were not natural in origin. They had been built, not eroded. In addition to stone there was extensive use of composite paving materials to make surface roads, decorations utilizing various kinds of glass, structures of fabricated ceramic, and most telling of all, sparse but unmistakable use of refined metal.
She circled the area several times. While considerable in size, it would only have qualified as a large town on a developed Commonwealth world. Still, there was no mistaking that it was the first bona fide conurbation they had discovered on Quofum. In size, complexity, and development it was leagues in advance of the village of the fuzzies. In construction and design it was far beyond anything of which the five native sentient species thus far encountered were capable.
Then—who had built it? The omnipresence of the invasive forest combined with the lack of any detectible activity whatsoever suggested that it had been deserted and unused for a very long time. Strapping on her utility belt and making certain its field sidearm was fully charged, she directed the skimmer to set down in the approximate center of the abandoned city.
Stepping out, she was greeted by the usual flush of moist, overheated, oxygen-rich air. Many of the life-forms she observed flying, crawling, slithering, hopping, or walking through the edifice-clinging undergrowth were by now familiar to her. As was typical of excursions anywhere on Quofum, a great many more were not. For once, she did not pause to examine even the most interesting of them. Her cap’s integrated instrumentation would automatically make note of them. The resultant recordings could be studied later.
On this particular morning something more interesting than local wildlife had piqued her curiosity—artificial structures that hinted at the work of a life-form far more advanced than any the expedition had encountered thus far. She did not automatically assume it to be local. The question of how, why, and where Quofum’s sentients had arisen remained as undetermined as when Tellenberg had first voiced the conundrum. If anything, this new discovery only added another new piece to an ever-expanding puzzle instead of filling in one of its numerous blanks.
Using a beamer cutter modified for forest work, she cleared brush away from a section of street. That portion of the offended undergrowth that was equipped to do so attempted to fight back, only to be promptly carbonized for its efforts. The avenue her efforts laid bare revealed a surface composed of a dark material that had been lightly roughened. Preliminary analysis showed that it was not hydrocarbon-derived, but neither was it a sophisticated synthetic. A hasty rudimentary field breakdown hinted at some kind of volcanic glass that had been mixed with cellulose.
Very strange blend for a paving material, she thought as she reholstered her analyzer. Which made it perfectly suited to Quofum, where there was furious competition for the title of ultimate strangeness.
Depending on the varying density of the encumbering foliage, she alternately walked or fought her way through the brush to the nearest building. Given the thick overgrowth, it was impossible just from looking at the structure to divine its purpose. It might as easily have been a temple, a storehouse, or an apartment building. The fact that the sides tapered toward the top suggested ancient Terran places of worship. The large hole in the center of the structure, from which dripped the Quofumian equivalent of vines and creepers, did not. More than anything, the seemingly extraneous circular gap hinted at an advanced aesthetic sensibility.
While studying the building she could not avoid imposing her own cultural and historical references on everything from its location to its architecture. It might, she thought whimsically as she moved toward what appeared to be a growth-barred entrance, be nothing more than an elaborate high-rise chicken coop. On closer inspection the dark oval stain at the base of the structure did indeed appear to be an entrance. The shadowy corridor that extended beyond the overgrowth reached far back into the building. Alone and far from camp and assistance, she had no intention of trying to penetrate its unfathomable depths on her own.
As it turned out she did not have to. Though heavily overgrown, the entrance itself offered up revelations of its own.
The bas-reliefs that covered both opposing walls and receded into the darkness were of exceptional quality. It was immediately apparent that they had been created with tools far more sophisticated than hammers and chisels. Several depicted scenes of what she took to be the daily life of the small city. Others—others were unmistakable representations of incidents of warfare between the conurbation’s builders and an invading horde. Perhaps it was the latter who were ultimately responsible for the fall of the city and its burgeoning civilization.
The defenders of the city were squat bipeds with oversized heads, eyes, and other facial features. Despite their short arms and stumpy legs, in the reliefs they were shown capable of considerable agility and impressive feats of strength. Whether these were accurate depictions of physical ability or exaggerations due to artistic flattery, she had no way of knowing. The weapons they employed to defend themselves and their community were far more sophisticated than the simple spears and clubs she and her colleagues had observed in use by the sentients living farther to the south. Even a cursory study of the opposing walls revealed the use of explosives, something resembling a compact crossbow, various kinds of flaming liquids, even a crude short-range device that made use of solar heat. That the city-builders had achieved a level of technology far beyond that of the more primitive southerly tribes was already apparent from the size and sophistication of their community. It was only further confirmed by the depiction of advanced weaponry.
Opposing the city’s defenders were tightly packed masses of the oddest beings she had yet seen represented on Quofum. They made the physiognomy of the stick-jellies look almost normal. Each of the invading creatures was composed of what appeared to be half a dozen pulpy, pale white balloons. Three tiny black pupil-less eyes were visible in the central balloon. In the absence of arms, fingers, tentacles, or other recognizable appendages, the outermost balloons held on to weapons and other devices by partially englobing them with elastic portions of their bodies. In the absence of legs and feet, the globular creatures advanced not by walking but by bouncing along the ground.
Larger scenes of battle
were interspersed with ennobling portrayals of individual squat city folk (local heroes, she presumed) single-handedly fending off attacks by multiple balloon-beings. When pierced or otherwise wounded the urbanites bled blood while the invaders secreted a thick mucus. Instinctively and most unscientifically Haviti found herself siding with the city-dwellers. That was the human in her, inclined in the absence of knowledge to favor battling bipeds against assailants who were as nonhuman as could be imagined. The rationalist in her quickly assumed a neutral stance with regard to the ancient conflict.
She knew nothing of either defender or invader. For all she was aware the mucus-oozing balloon-folk were the righteous saviors of all that was good and noble while the bipedal urbanites were bloodsucking slave-takers. Ever since contact with the thranx, the human-Pitar war, and the subsequent Amalgamation that resulted in the forming of the Commonwealth, humans had learned never to judge an intelligent species on the basis of appearance.
While aesthetically beguiling and of unarguable historical interest, the extensive depictions of fighting were not what had drawn her to the panels depicting combat. It was the detailed portrayals of the combatants themselves. Here were two species that were not only far more advanced socially and technologically than those to the south, but utterly different from them. The squat urbanites were as unlike the stick-jellies as the stick-jellies were to the hardshells. The raiding balloon-beings bore no more relation to the fuzzies than she did to the lazy yet sentient river-dwellers.
Rather than adding any kind of clarification, her discovery only served to further magnify the mystery that was Quofum. Seven sentient species. Seven, existing on a relatively tiny corner of one continent. What would they find if they had the where-withal to explore the entire planet? Ten intelligent species? Dozens? Hundreds? On Quofum the laws of evolution and biology were as muddled as the surface of a comet-struck moon. What was responsible? Or, she mused as she thought back to discussions she’d had with her colleagues, who?
Magnifying the madness, it was the more advanced of the two new species who had apparently died out and left no local descendants. Though she lacked evidentiary proof, it was hard to imagine that the superior urbanites and balloon-folk had somehow given rise to fuzzies and spikers and stick-jellies. It was equally difficult to imagine the reverse. On Quofum it appeared that the normal process of evolution was as a bystander instead of a mover. What would she find as she traveled farther north? Intelligent arthropods? Cities of social bivalves? Cephalopods in spaceships? For a curious xenologist Quofum was a kind of nirvana.
Or hell.
12
The village of the seals offered a respite of sorts—if finding an eighth intelligent species could be called a respite. By this time Haviti had resigned herself, as a person if not as a scientist, to the fact that Quofum could be expected to yield up an entirely new sentient species or two every couple of hundred kilometers. Having stepped through the scientific looking glass, she saw no point in driving herself crazy struggling to make sense of the biological wonderland on the other side of the fantastical pane.
The coastal locale was as pleasant and inviting a venue as she or her colleagues had come across since their arrival. Compact homes and shops built of gathered stone and rough-hewn wood lined neatly cobbled streets at the bottom of a small canyon that swept gently down to the sea between heavily forested hills. The cove at the terminus of the valley was picture-pretty. Small single-masted fishing vessels, their purpose defined by the nets that draped them front and stern like discarded petticoats, rode at anchor.
By now indifferent to any and all Commonwealth regulations, she landed the skimmer right on the beach in front of the town and just to the north of its single pier. Her first sight of the creatures who came loping to greet her immediately reminded her of Terran pinnipeds who had forgone a water-dwelling existence in favor of living on land. They had large eyes, narrow laid-back ears, small black nostrils, and expressions she could only define as winsome. Except for their dark, slick-skinned faces, their heads, limbs, and the parts of their bodies that were visible outside their simple attire were covered by short brown, black, or gray fur. They were the first Quofumian sentients she or any of her colleagues had encountered in person who wore sewn clothing. Their legs were proportionately much longer than their arms. When they ran or walked they did so by leaping sideways with their heads turned in the direction they wanted to go, giving them the look of puppies skipping on stilts.
As she emerged from behind the skimmer’s canopy and started down the extended steps her right hand automatically went to her sidearm. She did not have to draw it. Inherently friendly, the seals (as she chose to call them, following the team’s procedure of giving each new intelligent species a preliminary colloquial name) slowed as they drew near. While not complex, their language was a good deal more elaborate than that of the cautious fuzzies, for example, or the raging spikers.
While a handful of the aliens could look her in the eye, most stood no taller than her chest. Keeping her hands at her sides, she let them gather around her. Instead of fingers their hands split into opposing halves, like soft claws. While incapable of fine work, these were perfectly adequate for grasping and lifting. Gaping round mouths revealed inner horny layers easily capable of masticating fish and probably a wide variety of other Quofumian edibles. She quickly realized that she could identify and remember individuals by noting distinctive patterns of coloration in their fur.
Behind her, several of them had cautiously begun to inspect the skimmer. With the canopy closed they could not get inside, but they could see through the transparency. Their babbling speech consisted primarily of long rolling sentences devoid of consonantal harshness.
This would be a good people to study in more depth, she told herself. If they would allow it, of course. How to open negotiations? She was saved the trouble when the seals did it for her.
The crowd that had gathered on the beach parted to allow others to come forward. The advancing trio was better dressed than any of the natives she had seen thus far. They were neither especially imposing physically nor, insofar as she could tell, of advanced age, but it was immediately evident from the way the crowd made room for them that they were held in high regard.
They halted an arm’s length from Haviti, closer than any of the other sleek fisherfolk had dared to approach. Sexual dimorphism was not immediately apparent. Up close, she thought they might bear some superficial resemblance to the more primitive fuzzies. DNA and cell analysis would be necessary to reveal any actual connection. For the moment, though, she was content simply to stand and study the first land-based intelligent native species that did not greet strangers with undisguised suspicion and brandished weapons.
The difference in approach was more profound than she imagined. Lifting a necklace of perfectly transparent shells over its head, careful to avoid getting it hung on one of its narrow, extended ears, the nearest of the respected threesome had to extend itself to its maximum height in order to slip it over Haviti’s head. She inclined forward slightly to lessen the strain on the seal’s short arms. The gesture was then repeated by each of its companions, leaving her wearing three necklaces: one comprised of delicate shell-like transparencies, a second of small flowers, and a third of roughly but undeniably artificially polished pebbles. Following the presentation, two of the trio stepped back. The third began to speak.
Their speech was gently musical, occasionally rising and falling sharply in the middle of a sentence or phrase. Even in the absence of formal morphological analysis it was evident that their language was far more advanced than that of any previously contacted indigenous species. With the possible exception of the vanished city-dwellers, these were clearly the most advanced inhabitants of Quofum yet discovered.
Though she could understand nothing of their speech, certain gestures are universal among limbed intelligences. Chirping and beckoning for her to follow, they led her away from the pebbly beach and toward the town. She complied
, tolerating the hesitant touches of the bolder among the crowd. Placid in lockdown, the skimmer would look after itself. Resistant as it was to penetration by many advanced tools, she was confident these people had nothing in their possession that was capable of forcing an entrance or doing damage to the parked craft.
Proper procedure demanded that she contact her companions and inform them of her latest finding. If she was in the mood, she decided, she might do so later. One of the first things that had been dropped following their abandonment on Quofum by the Qwarm Araza was any concern for or interest in proper procedure. Valnadireb went his way according to his interests and desires, N’kosi did pretty much as he pleased, and so did she. Maybe she would tell them about the jungle-reclaimed city and the village of the seals tomorrow. Maybe she would wait until she returned to the camp. Maybe both would remain her little secret. It was not as if she was exposing herself to official recrimination.
Strange, she thought as she found herself treading the first of the town’s well-maintained cobblestone streets. One of the first consequences of the loss of hope was complete freedom.
Unlike contact with the stick-jellies and the fuzzies, the hardshells and the spikers, neither restrained nor overt belligerence was manifested in her direction. Young and old, healthy and infirm, the seals welcomed her with open, highly modified flippers. She wondered how her dropping from the sky fit into their racial mythology or religion, assuming they had either one.
An empty house was opened and presented to her. The inference was clear: it was hers to use. How could she refuse such a touching gesture? Besides, studying the seals from within their community would offer opportunities likely to be missed if she isolated herself on board the skimmer.