Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Read online

  Asher wondered why the translation software was having such a hard time with Sarudeero but had had no problem with Qwadaleemia’s speech. Perhaps, he thought, the two Cythran sexes speak slightly different dialects. That would be very odd, but he had heard of stranger things. Another possibility was that Sarudeero was some kind of low-functioning individual, but it hardly seemed likely that the mentally deficient would be hired to crew one of the first ever Cythran spaceships. He realized that speculation was useless. He didn’t have enough information on the Cythrans yet. The Zvezda download was clearly inadequate.

  A bump and slight vibration that Asher felt through the soles of his boots signaled the retraction of the docking tunnel. He knew they were now sliding away from the station, mainly using the forward maneuvering thrusters. It was strange feeling the motion of a ship in a vacuum when you couldn’t see out to watch the station and other ships slide by, but old cargo vessels like this one rarely bothered with portholes. He had to judge their motion by the the effects of inertia on his body. After a period of turning, he felt the beginnings of forward movement. “Get ready,” he said to his fellow passengers. He straightened his spine and pushed himself back into the crash seat.

  The older Zvezda operative smiled nervously. He must not be used to traveling in an obsolete vessel like Sissilbeni. Asher was always amazed at how many of the people who lived and worked in space stations and other orbitals were nervous when they had to actually get on a ship. It must be some deeply-ingrained instinct of the species.

  The whole ship began to vibrate as the torch ignited. Then the acceleration began. At first, it felt like someone gently pressing him down into his seat. It gradually increased, feeling as though a heavy person had grown tired of pushing him and had decided to take a break by sitting on his lap. Just when the feeling reached the edge of his comfort threshold, the acceleration stopped. For the next fifteen minutes or so, they were inside what amounted to a giant bullet hurtling toward Cierren Cythra.

  He looked around at his fellow passengers. The nervous man had his eyes closed. Asher figured he would stay like that for the whole flight. If he was this nervous about being in this bucket during void flight, he would be three times worse when they entered the atmosphere and had to contend with friction, turbulence, and higher gravity. The security woman, on the other hand, was looking confident and unfazed. Asher thought about trying to strike up a conversation, but she had a closed look to her, as though she wouldn’t appreciate the intrusion. He decided to just spend the flight in silence. Maybe he would delve back into the downloaded data and try to learn more about the Cythrans.

  He was vaguely aware of the ship braking. When the cargo bay started to swivel on its pivot point, the older Zvezda operative let out a little squeak. “Relax,” said the security woman. “The cargo bay is just coming around so atmospheric braking doesn’t suddenly send everything flying back the other way—including us. A lot of older ships work this way.” Asher thought that the man didn’t look very relieved.

  The upper atmosphere of Cierren Cythra was very thin, so it took Asher a moment to realize they had hit it. The inertia pushing him back into this seat increased steadily as they descended. Pretty soon, it felt just as strong as it had during the original burn. The vibration was more pronounced now, though, as they traversed the variable pressure zones of a planetary atmosphere.

  Suddenly, the weight came off his chest. He could feel the planet’s gravity pulling him down toward the floor of the passenger compartment. They had leveled off and were in regular atmospheric mode now. The retractable wings would presumably have extended. In fact, in a thin atmosphere like Cierren Cythra’s, the wings had probably been lengthened and widened with additional plasteel. Their little spaceship had now become a fairly large airplane. All maneuvering from now on would be with the atmospheric jets. The thrusters and the torch had probably been retracted or sealed off.

  The descent lasted about forty-five minutes from the time they hit the atmosphere, as Qwadaleemia had predicted. The whole passenger compartment lurched a little when they touched down on the runway. On the whole, though, it was a fine landing. In fact, the whole flight was very professionally handled. The Cythrans might be relatively new to space-faring, but Qwadaleemia was certainly able to handle her ship.

  Sarudeero reappeared to usher them out. There was no boarding tunnel or pick-up service. The ship was just sitting alone on the concrete landing strip of a small, dusty spaceport. Asher took a look back at the vessel as they departed. The cigar-shaped hull was the dull silver of unpainted plasteel. It was heavily pitted by collisions with micrometeorites and other upper-atmosphere hazards. As he had expected, the wings had been extended and widened by the addition of plasteel panels. These newer pieces were white as opposed to the silver of the rest of the ship. Sissilbeni looked like she’d been rescued from a backwater junkyard, which probably wasn’t far from the truth.

  The two Zvezda operatives wandered off toward a small building standing to one side of the landing strip. There was large sign on it emblazoned with a series of strange squiggles. Asher’s neural net translated that as “Customs/Arrivals.”

  “You are Hokozana man, no?” asked Sarudeero, behind him.

  Asher turned around. “Yeah, that’s me. Asher from Hokozana.”

  “Follows me, please. Captain Qwadaleemia would speak with you.” The little Cythran led the way around the nose of the ship to a ladder that had been lowered to allow egress from the control cabin. Qwadaleemia was descending the ladder. She moved with surprising grace, despite her lack of hands. Her prehensile toes and the two longest head-appendages seemed to be all she needed to keep her balance. She jumped off the lowest rung and turned to face Asher.

  “You are Asher?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m Asher. He tried to concentrate on the translation from his neural net and not on the fluid movement of her head-appendages. As a method of communicating, he found the Cythran wriggling and burbling somewhat unsettling.

  “I am to take you to your people,” she said. “If you will follow me now. Sarudeero will stay with the ship and supervise the unloading.” Qwadaleemia turned and started walking across the landing strip, away from the arrivals building.

  Asher hesitated. “Wait a moment. Don’t I need to go through customs?”

  “A formality,” she said. “We only have it because the Zvezda people tell us it is the way things are done. Those who need to know are already aware you are here.”

  After this slightly unsettling pronouncement, Asher trudged along quietly behind his Cythran guide as she led him toward a line of mud-brick apartment houses that bordered the spaceport. His neural net told him he was going basically local east.

  The Zvezda downloads informed him that Marateen was the largest city on Cierren Cythra. It was located in the northern hemisphere, a few degrees north of the main band of tropical forest. It could be considered the local capital, although the brochures kept reminding him that Cythran socio-political structures were “simpler than that,” whatever that meant. As far as Asher could tell, the city was a confused, crowded warren of four to six story apartment-like adobe buildings arranged around courtyards. It was interesting to note the discordant splashes of modern technology in this archaic setting. There was the concrete of the spaceport, the lone spaceship, and some flashing signs among the buildings that might be electronic billboards. His neural net was picking up a large amount of chatter on various radio and microwave bands, suggesting broadcasting and commo networks. Behind them, on the far side of the spaceport, he saw a fast-moving ground vehicle with large wheels. Qwadaleemia and Sarudeero were obviously fitted with their own translation software, given the ease with which they understood him, despite the extreme differences in their methods of communicating. Since he could see no obvious tech on them, he assumed that they had acquired Cythran-adapted neural nets.

  Other than the discordance of the low-tech/high-tech city, he was struck by the biting cold of the air. His s
kinsuit and uniform did a pretty good job keeping the worst of it out, but his exposed face quickly began to numb. A memory check, though showed that Marateen was only a little above sea level and this was the height of the local summer. He decided right then that he needed to be off the planet before winter rolled in.

  Qwadaleemia’s short legs were not as well adapted for walking as Asher’s, and he found that he had to walk quite slowly so as not to outpace her. In fact, Cythran bodies were so strange he found himself wondering about their evolution. Apparently he wasn’t the first. His downloads informed him that the biological origin and development of the Cythran was not well understood. Asher realized that this was the kind of question was right up his fathers’ alley. Maybe more of the old man had rubbed off on him than he had ever thought. Maxim Asher would be in his element on a planet like this, trying to track down the obscure evolutionary origins of everything from the rubbery, bluish shrubs to the odd-looking Cythrans themselves.

  “We will be there soon,” said Qwadaleemia as they entered the narrow alleys that ran between the mid buildings. “Sorry. This is an old part of town and it hasn’t been redesigned for humans yet. You may find some of the spaces a bit confining.”

  “You’re redesigning the city for humans?” Asher tried to hide his near-shock at the idea. He had never heard of a recently-contacted, archaeo-tech species doing such a thing.

  “Well, in a sense,” said Qwadaleemia. “Really, we’re rebuilding for ground vehicles. But that means open streets and a regular pattern, probably a grid. You’ll see when you come to some of the newer areas. I’m told by some of the Zvezda Company operatives that those areas are far more comfortable for your people than the narrow alleys of the older quarters.”

  “That’s amazing,” said Asher. “You’ve only been in contact with Ordered Space for about twenty years and you’re already rebuilding your settlements around the new tech. I’ve seen worlds that were contacted generations ago where sentient species have refused to change a single thing to accommodate the rest of the galaxy.”

  “I’m told that we Cythrans are special. We have what may be a unique mindset about change and innovation.”

  “What mindset is that?”

  “It’s complicated, but it boils down to ‘whatever works.’ You see, we have always valued practicality above almost anything else. Learning to absorb and learn from new experiences—and then apply the results—is part of being a Cythran. Something we have in common with you humans, I think.”

  Asher thought about that. Humans were, indeed, probably the most adaptable and practical high-order sentient he knew of. Some of the other Participant Species had been more technologically advanced when contacted, but humans always made up the difference in a seeming blink of an eye. Still, he wasn’t sure that ancient, archaeo-tech humans contacted out of the blue by high-tech aliens would have coped quite so well as the Cythrans appeared to be doing.

  “I have a question,” said Asher. “Feel free not to answer if it’s offensive or whatever.”

  “Go [expression not observed] and ask,” said Qwadaleemia.

  He found it was disconcerting to have to look directly at her whenever she spoke. If he didn’t, though, his eyes and micro-cams wouldn’t always be able to pick up enough of the appendage-waving to get an accurate translation. Cythrans were obviously familiar with the problem, though, and Qwadaleemia made an effort to face him when she talked. He supposed that Cythrans would have to do that for each other, too, since so much of their language was visual.

  “Well,” he said, “I was wondering why I understand you so fluently when Sarudeero’s speech seemed so halting and idiosyncratic to me.”

  Qwadaleemia’s appendages writhed in what Asher’s neural net translated as [Laughter]. “That is simple. He is a male. Males are stupid.”

  “Oh,” said Asher. So Sarudeero had been a low-functioning individual. Apparently all males were.

  Qwadaleemia continued, “Your concepts of male and female were strange to us at first, but we are both sexual species, so we have a common ground for understanding. The reason you class my sex as female is because we are the ones who bear young after mating. However, to us, males are more like a separate race or species. We understand that biologically we are the same beneath our surface differences, but males lack the intelligence, independence, and curiosity of females. They have a place in society carrying out simple tasks and filling support roles, but you will find that it is my sex that makes decisions and works independently.”

  Asher thought about this. He realized that he was immediately classifying the Cythrans as a matriarchal society, but that was wrong. As Qwadaleemia had pointed out, calling one sex male and another female was just an arbitrary decision on the part of the translation software based on their roles in reproduction. Nothing about human sexual roles and values should be carried over to alien species. He knew this, but it was always somewhat jarring to have such a stark reminder of how differently things could be organized.

  They were deep into the winding alleys of the mud city now. The buildings around them towered three of even four stories tall. As Qwadaleemia had said, the spaces were not designed for humans, and he often had to duck under overhanging eaves or avoid roof beams that stuck out of the walls right about the level of his face. As they walked down one alley, a bat-winged thing perched on the edge of one of the roofs squawked at them. Whatever it was, it had a huge mouth and sharp-looking teeth. Asher hunkered against the rough wall of the building behind him. His hand went to the butt of the pulse gun that he had in his hip-holster.

  Qwadaleemia barely glanced up at the monster. “Flutterbat scavenging for garbage. Ignore it.”

  Asher found that ignoring the bat-winged dragon-thing was harder for him than it was for her. He kept one eye on it as they walked under its perch. It squawked again, a harsh sound not unlike a very loud parrot, but it made no move toward them.

  As it turned out, that was the last alley they had to navigate. Asher stumbled out of it right behind Qwadaleemia, almost barging into her as he kept glancing back at the flutterbat. They had come into a large courtyard or small plaza surrounded by tall apartment blocks. For the first time, Asher saw other Cythrans. It wasn’t crowded, exactly, but there were a fair number of females wandering about engaged in various tasks, some of which Asher understood and some he didn’t. Two large females nearby were herding a gang of small, bluish-green Cythrans that Asher took to be children. Perhaps those females were the local equivalent of teachers or baby sitters. Further away, another female was standing in front of two males, wriggling her head-appendages at them excitedly. The translator couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it did surmise that she was very angry about something. There were also far stranger goings-on. Two females seemed to be groping each other with their appendages. To Asher, that seemed like a vaguely sexual act, but he had no idea whether it was or not. Another female was lugging some kind of large, pink, fluffy thing up a flight of stairs into one of the buildings. At first, Asher thought it was some kind of animal, but he decided it was artificial. For all he knew it could be a piece of furniture or a work of art.

  “Welcome to my creche,” said Qwadaleemia. “Your people are here, staying in the house of my [expression not translatable].”

  “I’m sorry,” said Asher. “Whose house are they staying in?”

  “Of course. Your translation devices always struggle with our words for social relationships. You might say that the house belongs to the mother of my childhood friend. That would be the gist of the relationship, even if it misunderstands much of the nuance.” Qwadaleemia started walking across the courtyard. She turned back and said, “This way, Asher. Right over here.”

  She led him to a building that looked much like all the others. The mud walls seemed to be stuccoed or plastered with mud. It also appeared to have been painted with mud-colored paint. Perhaps it was more of a clay wash. The house was five stories tall and had a single door facing the courtyard. Ashe
r could see no windows, but he had seen enough to realize that windows were not a common feature of Marateen architecture.

  Asher stepped through the front door of the house into the dark interior. He understood immediately understood why the humans had been quartered here. The house must have exceptionally high ceilings, by Cythran standards. Asher barely had to stoop at all to void striking his head on the roofing timbers. The ground floor consisted of a single, windowless room lit by two small electric bulbs. A staircase against the back wall must lead to the second story. The room was furnished as a living space or den, with a heavy wood frame sofa and chairs. These looked brand new, and Asher would not have been surprised to hear they were made explicitly for human use. They certainly didn’t look like they would be comfortable for Cythrans, with their short legs and stocky torsos.

  A woman stood up from the sofa and walked toward them, “Qwadie,” she said, giving the Cythran pilot a firm hug, “welcome back. I take it this is our last team member.” She turned to Asher and held out her hand in greeting.

  Asher recognized Lorien Worthy from her dossier photo. He had pictured her as a small-framed woman, for some reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. She was probably six feet tall—just a couple of inches shorter than Asher himself—with a strong, athletic build and a firm handshake. Her dossier ranked her as a One-Star, so she was technically Asher’s superior. “Hello, Ma’am,” he said. “I’m Two-Bar Asher, from Security Ops.”

  “I know who you are, Mr. Asher. Even if I hadn’t downloaded your dossier, Kaz would have told me all about you. Leave that ma’am stuff alone, won’t you? Call me Lori.” She smiled and gestured toward an armchair, offering Asher a seat.