Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Read online

  The shining blue and green tendrils below came closer and closer. He still couldn’t tell what they were, but he could see that they rippled with movement, like pulses of energy coursing along a cable. He nervously unhooked his pulse pistol in its hip holster. They might just be some harmless phenomenon, but he wasn’t about to take chances. In his exploration of exobio communities with his father, he had seen some of the strangest and most dangerous creatures imaginable, like the whip-wands of Bengal II and the flying whistlers of Jauram. On the other hand, he also knew that most alien predators had little or no interest in humans. After all, there was nothing biologically compatible about the species of different planets. An alien digestive system would probably not be optimized for human flesh.

  He swung his right foot out of a rung of the ladder and sought with his toe for the next foothold. When he couldn’t find it, he twisted around and tried to get the penlight clenched between his teeth to illuminate the tree-trunk. The light slipped and fell from his mouth and twirled down past his outstretched foot, only to come to rest on the ground about a yard below. With a grateful whoop, Asher let himself fall the last few feet to the ground and landed in a crouch among some kind of soft, mossy substance that grew all about the bole of the tree.

  “What happened?” called Jaydrupar from about ten yards up the tree.

  “Nothing,” said Asher. “I’m at the bottom. Its springy and it smells like mold, but its real ground!”

  From above, Kaz’s deep voice drifted down, “Well don’t keep yelling about it. We’ll have every creature on Cierren Cythra here checking us out, just out of curiosity.”

  Soon, all three were crouched around the bole of the tree. Like Asher, the others had drawn their sidearms and held them at the ready. “What now?” hissed Jaydrupar.

  “Well first, I say we find out what that glowing stuff is,” said Asher.

  They worked their way across the forest floor to the nearest area where the glow seemed brighter. They found what at first looked like a stream of flowing blue light. It wasn’t until Kaz said, “bugs,” that Asher realized what he was looking at. It was a roiling mass of small creatures, much like some kind of insects. The glow, clearly some kind of bioluminescence, came from the rear of their carapaces. The tendrils across the forest floor must be avenues, great bug migration corridors.

  “Well,” said Jaydrupar, “I wouldn’t want to put my hand in there, but at least they don’t seem to be aggressive. They’re just going about their business, whatever that is.”

  “Here’s something else,” said Kaz.

  Asher looked up. In the eerie blue light, he could see that Kaz was pointing off toward the tree they had just come from. In that direction, more bioluminescent things were moving. Unlike the bugs, these blue blobs were floating above the ground surface like tiny balloons. There were five of them, each perhaps about waist height to Asher. As they came closer, they bobbed and weaved drunkenly. The three men stared at them. Asher fingered the trigger of his pulse pistol. He doubted that these things were particularly dangerous, but they were certainly eerie.

  As he watched the blue globes, Asher was surprised to feel something sharp stuck against his left side, just below the kidney. Glancing down, he saw what appeared to be a very sharp knife held by the head appendages of a small Cythran. He slowly set his gun back in its holster. “Guys?” he said.

  “I know,” said Kaz. “One of them’s got me too.”

  “And me,” said Jaydrupar.

  “Damn,” said Asher. “All this super-secret reconnaissance mission stuff and here we go and get ourselves caught right off the bat.”

  The globes came closer. Asher could now see that they were held on sticks by more of the small Cythrans. There were probably twenty or thirty of them all together. Most were armed with knives like the one that was pressed into Asher’s side. These were long, straight blades, quite narrow, which the Cythrans had tied to the longest of their appendages. As one of the newcomers stood before him and began waving its tentacles around in Cythran speech, Asher almost winced at the blade flying back and forth just inches from its owner’s face.

  “[Untranslatable] come from [untranslatable] bone tree people,” said the Cythran. Or at least, that was how Asher’s neural net translated its burbling and arm-waving.

  “I am sorry,” said Asher. “I cannot understand you clearly.”

  “Bone tree people [untranslatable] outside falling [untranslatable].”

  “Kaz, Jaydrupar, are you understanding any of this? My neural net can’t make sense of it.”

  Kaz grunted. “Mine neither. And this blade in my side is getting more than a little tiresome.”

  The little Cythran who was talking to Asher turned to Jaydrupar and tried again. After several moments of its wriggling appendages and throaty gurgling, Jaydrupar said, “My net doesn’t get it either. I think it must be a different dialect or something. Perhaps a whole different language. What’s worse, they don’t seem to be able to understand us.”

  “Well, what do we do now?” asked Kaz. Asher, too, was at a loss. It seemed that the pointless attempt at interspecies communication would soon end, and then the Cythrans would probably just kill the three operatives. After all, he thought, they don’t really have any reason not to fear us. We just dropped out of the sky on what must look like a shooting star.

  “I think they must be wild Cythrans,” said Jaydrupar. “You know, like they all were before the Ferethers came and engineered or replaced some of them. These seem to be a nomadic band. And look, they’re all the same size.”

  “Yeah,” said Kaz. “I noticed that. They’re all small, like the males in Marateen.”

  “OK,” said Asher, “but none of this helps us. What do we do?”

  “Asher, do you think you can take your man?” asked Kaz. “Because I have a plan for mine.”

  Asher stole a sidelong glance at the Cythran that held its knife to his side. It had the edge of the blade pressed in to him, rather than the point. He thought for a moment and said, “Sounds like our best chance Kaz. On three?”

  “OK. One, two, three!”

  Both security operatives made their moves. Asher swept his elbow back into the Cythrans face, striking right in the center of its mass of appendages. He felt the knife draw sharply across his skinsuit and then bite just a little into his skin beneath as the Cythran stumbled back a short distance. Asher ignored the pain and followed up as quickly as he could, turning and throwing his knee up into the Cythran’s body. He reached for his pulse pistol. Just then, a shot erupted from behind him. A muzzle flash lit the boles of the surrounding trees. Asher drew his pistol and backed toward Kaz, who had freed himself of his attacker and fired his shotgun over the heads of the Cythrans. “That went better than I’d hoped,” said the big man.

  “The question is, will they realize that our guns can hurt them?” said Jaydrupar. Asher was mildly surprised to see that he had also successfully escaped the clutches of the Cythran that had held him. The three humans stood back-to-back, each covering the surrounding Cythrans with his weapon.

  Despite Jaydrupar’s misgivings, the Cythrans did seem to understand the danger of the guns. They backed off a short distance and stood in a circle surrounding the humans. Asher noted that a couple of them were slower to move back than the others. One seemed to be particularly badly wounded, as it dragged one leg behind it. He hadn’t done much damage to his Cythran, so he assumed that that one must belong to either Kaz or Jaydrupar. He would have bet on the big security man, he knew from first-hand experience that Kaz was a powerful and potentially vicious hand-to-hand fighter.

  “Well,” said Jaydrupar. “We’re better off than we were, but I’d say now we’re at a bit of an impasse.”

  Kaz raised his shotgun. “Impasse my ass. If we shoot a few of them, the rest will run.”

  Jaydrupar raised a hand and gently pushed Kaz’s gun back down. “Perhaps, but I’m not ready to just start killing the first genuine native sentients we’ve se
en on Cierren Cythra.”

  “Sentients?” asked Kaz. “I don’t know, but they sure don’t seem as sentient as Qwadaleemia and the Cythrans in Marateen.”

  “But we are working on the theory that Qwadaleemia and her people are not really Cythrans at all. These must be the real thing. And they do seem sentient to me. They wield knives and other tools like those light-globes, they are capable of speech and concerted group action.” Jaydrupar gestured at the band of Cythrans encircling the three humans, as if to demonstrate just what kind of action they were capable of taking. “I would say they are roughly equivalent to a lot of our own not-so-distant human ancestors. Plus, if you think about it, if you two really did see some kind of agricultural operation up in the tree, then they are capable of domesticating crops, which may put them well ahead of our ancestral species and make them more like many of the archaeo-tech human societies of Earth’s past.”

  Asher cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “interesting as this discussion is, we still need a way out of our current predicament.”

  Just then, one of the Cythrans stepped forward from the group. Asher wasn’t sure, but he thought that it might be the one that had tried to speak with him earlier. It came to stand more or less in front of Jaydrupar, so that Asher could only see it out of the corner of his eye and Kaz probably couldn’t see it at all. “If I didn’t know better,” said Asher, “I’d say they sent someone to negotiate.”

  The Cythran said something then, but Asher’s neural net didn’t pick it up at all, as he was at a poor vantage to see the envoy’s head appendages. “What was that?” he asked Jaydrupar. “Did you get any of it?”

  The Intel man said, “Only a little. It said something like ‘Fire sky fall—something—black rain—something—bone tree people.’ Or at least, that’s the best translation I could get.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that ‘fire sky fall’ is us coming down in the drop-pod,” said Asher. “They’ve also said ‘bone tree people’ several times. I think maybe it’s what they call themselves.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” said Jaydrupar. “Any ideas on ‘black rain?’”

  “Can’t help there. Anyway, what does it matter? Even if we figure out exactly what it means we can’t talk to them. We don’t have enough appendages. I guess we could try charades, or something.”

  The Cythran spoke again, and again Asher’s net didn’t pick up much of it. However, he turned his head a bit more this time and he did get the end of what seemed to be a fairly long speech. “[Untranslatable] home [untranslatable] bone tree people follow us now sky fire people.”

  With that, the Cythran turned and rejoined his companions, who slowly turned away from the three humans and began to walk away through the woods.

  “Where they going?” asked Kaz.

  “I think they want us to follow them,” said Asher.

  “Yes,” said Jaydrupar. “That seemed to be the gist of it.” He started walking slowly after the retreating Cythrans.

  “We’re not going, are we?” asked Kaz.

  “What choice do we have?” asked Jaydrupar.

  “I don’t know,” Kaz muttered, “maybe we could head off through the woods toward Marateen like we originally planned?” Even so, the big man fell in behind Jaydrupar. Asher noticed that he kept his shotgun trained on their Cythran guides.

  The walk through the cavernous space beneath the forest canopy was one of the strangest experiences of Asher’s life, even counting the exobiology expeditions he had been on with his father. The Cythrans were slow movers, so their light globes always bobbed a short distance ahead, shedding their blue glow on the boles of the mighty trees. The mossy ground cover, which Asher thought was black or at least very dark gray in color, came up to his ankles and sometimes to his knees. Whatever it was, he could push through it like sea foam. It seemed to have no real internal coherence. The bioluminescent bugs crossed their paths like tiny streams. Whenever they came to one of these flows, the Cythrans just crunched through it unheeded. Soon, the humans gave up the hopeless task of trying to avoid stepping on the bugs as well, and just waded right through the streams. There certainly was no shortage of candidates to replace the bugs they crushed. Around them, various woodland creatures made strange calls. Something hooted from the lower canopy of overhead. Something else shouted, an eerily human sound, somewhere off to their left. The Cythran natives seemed unperturbed, so Asher tried not to picture horrible predatory beasts bearing down on them every time he heard one of these sounds.

  According to Asher’s neural net, they were heading roughly north, as things were measured according to the magnetic poles of Cierren Cythra. It was harder to measure distance, as he had to have his neural net run a pace-counting program and another that extrapolated distance by comparing his height to that of trees and other features they passed and then using that to estimate the distance to similar features ahead. Normally, this process would be greatly simplified by linking to overhead tracking satellites. Here, though, all such satellites had belonged to Zvezda One, which meant they were now presumably under DiJeRiCo control. The worst thing they could do would be to broadcast their presence. It had been a large enough risk just bringing Komaru in-atmo and making the pod-drop, and that had been done with complete knowledge of the exact position of every satellite, so as to minimize the chances of detection. Now anything could be overhead, with an eye on the planetary surface just waiting for an unidentified transmission.

  After about seven kilometers of relatively easy walking across remarkably level ground, a number of lights appeared among the trees in the distance. At first, Asher could only distinguish about three globs of blue, but as they advanced, his eyes resolved more and more distinct points of light. There seemed to be about a hundred of the Cythrans’ light-globes. What was more, these globes were hanging fairly steady at about head height or higher, unlike the bobbing globes their guides carried at about the same level as Asher’s waist.

  “What are we looking at?” asked Kaz. “Some kind of camp?”

  “That would be my guess,” said Jaydrupar, who was walking in the lead of the three humans, not far behind the last of their Cythran guides. “Maybe even a small village, judging by the number of lights.”

  They soon came among the lights of what was, indeed, a Cythran village. Unlike Marateen and the other cities of the plains, the forest Cythrans lived in huts that looked like large beehives made from the same foam-like moss that covered the forest floor. It looked to Asher as if he could put his hand right through the walls of one of the dwellings, but then he saw one under construction. The frame of the house was made from slender, whip-like branches. Over these, a lattice of thick leaves was woven. The moss-like stuff was only the outer layer of the construction. Perhaps, thought Asher, it served as insulation.

  There were probably fifty or sixty such houses in the village, each seemingly only large enough for a single Cythran. Indeed, there were heads with wriggling appendages sticking out of the low doors of several of the residences. On most of the houses, a light-globe was suspended above the door. Asher saw more light flooding out from within some of the dwellings, suggesting that they had internal globes as well. In the gloom of the forest, the blue light washed out color, leaving everything around them flat and monotone.

  Asher checked his neural net, which told him that Bright had set some time ago and they were almost to Dimset now. Still, the quality of light down in this forest world never seemed to change. He wondered how these Cythrans told time, or even if it was a concern to them. Living in perpetual darkness, perhaps they just slept whenever they wanted, rose when they wanted, and didn’t worry about the day-night cycle that was normally such an overriding concern on the surface of any planet.

  “Certainly not much like Marateen,” said Kaz.

  “Indeed,” said Jaydrupar. “In fact, I would say that this is the first time since I first came to this planet that I have really felt like I am in an alien place.”

&nb
sp; “Second,” said Asher. “The first was in that weird epiphyte farm in the treetops.”

  Jaydrupar looked back at him. “It just convinces me even more that this whole place is the scene of a Ferether trap.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, think about it,” said the Intel man. “If we had found Cythrans like these, we would have been interested, of course, but it would have been the realm of the exobios and the exoanthros—a place for scientists. Instead, we found mud-walled cities surprisingly reminiscent of our own past and a people who, however alien they looked, acted not terribly unlike our own species.”

  “So what you’re saying is they set their trap with sentients who were alien, but not too alien.”

  “Exactly. Strange enough to intrigue us, but familiar enough to reassure us.”

  “If so,” said Asher, “and if it was the Ferethers, then they really are far more subtle and patient than most humans.”

  “I think so, it is why I have always feared them.”

  “If they can really plan that carefully and that far ahead,” said Kaz, “then maybe we’re all a little out of our depth here.” The other two gave him sharp looks. “What? I’m not the only one thinking it, am I?”

  Chapter Nine

  A debate had broken out in the Cythran village. The thirty or so Cythrans who had brought the Hokozana operatives to the village, a group that made up perhaps half of the population, seemed to be on one side, with several Cythrans who had emerged from the beehive-huts on the other. Asher’s neural net only picked up the odd word or phrase, but it seemed clear that some of the villagers were angry that the humans had been brought among them. He did catch one term that stuck in his mind. There seemed to be a lot of references to the “new-other people.” Apparently the forest-dwellers, or at least those from this village, were the “Bone Tree People.” It seemed that Asher and his companions had been baptized the “Sky Fire People.” He assumed that could only mean that these “new-other people” were the fake Cythrans of the plains cities.