“Maybe just sideways.”

“A once-proud race of creators, now driven down to this.”

“We ourselves, early man, we hunted in places like this. We could be forced back to it if—”

“No. We were hunters, like the lion. We did not scavenge.”

Miyuki said quietly, “I thought lionsscavenged.”

Tatsuhiko glared at her but acknowledged this uncom-fortable fact with a curt nod of his head. “Man the hunter did not. These Chupchups—they have let themselves be driven down to this lowly state.”

She saw his vexed position. Traits derived from genes had led humans upward in ability. It had been a grand, swift leap, from wily ape to sovereign of the Earth. That tended to salt the truths of sociobiology with the promise of pro-gress. Here, though, the same logic led to devolution of the once-great city-builders.

She said lightly. “We are merely talking wildly. Mak-ing guesses.” She switched to English. “Doing so-so biology.” Perhaps the pun would lift their discussion away from the remorselessly reductionist.

He gave her a cold smile. “Thank you, Miyuki-san, for your humor.” He turned to regard the distant feeding, where the Chupchups now nuzzled among the bones. “Those cannot be the breed that built the cities. We have come so very slightly late.”

“Perhaps elsevvhere on Chujo—”

“We will look, certainly. Still ... “

She said evenly; hoping to snap him out of this mood, “For four billion years. Earth supported only mi-crobes. Oxygen and land plants are only comparatively recent additions. If those proportions hold, everywhere, we are very lucky to find two planets that have more than alga-e!”

His angular features caught the dawn glow, giving him a sardonic look even in his pressure mask.

“You are trying to deflect my dark temper.”

“Of course.”

Each crewmember was responsible for maintaining co-hesion. They kept intact the old ship disciplines. In soli-darity meetings, one never scratched one’s head or even crossed legs or arms before a superior, and always con-cluded even the briefest encounter with a polite bow—fif-teen degrees to peers, forty-five degrees to superiors. Every week they repeated the old rituals, even the patient writing of Buddhist sutras with wooden pens. The officers polished the boots of the lower ranks, and soon after the ranks re-ciprocated. Each was bound to the others.

And she felt bound to him, though they had not been lovers for years, and she had passed through many liaisons since. Her longing to know him now was not carnal, though that element would never be banished, and she did not want it to be. She felt a need to reach him, to bring out the best that she knew lay within him. It was a form of love, though not one that songwriters knew. Perhaps in some obscure way it knitted into the cohesion of the greater expedition, but it felt intensely personal and incommunicable. Espe-cially to the object of it all, standing obliviously a meter away. She snorted with frustration.

Not noticing her mood, Tatsuhiko smacked his fist into his palm. “But so close! If we had come fifty thousand years ago! Seen those great ancestors of these ... these cowards.”

Miyuki blinked, sniffed, chuckled. “Then we would have been Neanderthals.”

4. The Library

Their flyer came down smoothly beside the spreading forest. The waving fields of dark grain beckoned, but Miyuki knew already that the stuff was inedible.

Nearly everything on Chujo was. Only the sugar groups were digestible. Their dextro-rotary sense was the same as that of Earthly ones, a simple fact that led to deep mystery. Genji’s sugars had that identical helical sense, though with myriad different patterns. And the in-telligent, automated probes that now had scanned a dozen worlds around farther stars reported back the same result: where life appeared at all, anything resembling a sugar chain had the same sense of rotation. Some said this proved a limited form of molecular panspermia, with a primordial cloud seeding the region with simple organic precursors.

But there still were deeper similarities between Genji and Chujo: in protein structures, enzymes, details of energy processing. Had the two worlds once interacted? They were now 156,000 kilometers apart, less than two-thirds the Earth-moon separation, but tidal forces were driving them farther away.

Their locked rotation minimized the stress from each others’ tides. Even so, great surges swept even the small lakes as the mother-sun, Murasaki, raised its own tides on both her worlds. Miyuki stood beside a shallow, steel-gray lake and watched the waters rush across a peb-bled beach. The rasp and rattle of stones came like the long,—indrawn breath of the entire planet.

‘Regroup!” Korernasa ordered over comm.

Miyuki had been idling, turning over in her mind the accumulating mysteries. She studied the orderly grain fields with their regimental rows and irrigation slits, as the ex-peditionary group met. Their reports were orderly, precise: discipline was even more crisp amid these great stretches of alien ground. Close observation showed that this great field was self-managing.

She watched as one of the bio group displayed a cage of rodents, each with prehensile, clawed fingers. “They cultivate the stalks, keep off pests,” the woman said. “I believe this field can prune and perhaps even harvest itself.”

Murmurs of dissent gradually ebbed as evidence ac-cumulated. Remains of irrigation channels still cut the val-ley. Brick-brown ruins of large buildings stood beside the restless lake. Small stone cairns dotted the landscape. It was easy for Miyuki to believe the rough scenario that the an-thropologists and archaeologists proposed: that the slow waning of Chujo had driven the ancient natives to perfect crops that needed little labor, an astounding feat of biotech. That this field was a fragment of a great grain belt that had fed the cities. That as life suited to cold and aridity moved south, the ancients retreated into a pastoral, nomadic life. That—

“Chupchups!” someone called.

And here they came, already spreading out from the tree line a kilometer away. Miyuki clicked her vision to remote and surveyed them as she moved to her encoun-ter position. This tribe had a herd.

Domesticated snake-hounds adroitly kept the short, bulky, red-haired beasts tightly bunched. A plume of dust pointed at the baggage train—pole arrangements drawn behind thin, flat-headed animals. An arrowfowl came flapping from over a distant hillside and settled onto the shoulder of the largest Chupchup-bringing a message from another tribe, she now knew enough to guess. The races met again.

The leading Chupchup performed as before—a long, lingering looking straight at the first human it met, then ignoring the rest. Miyuki stood still as the smelly, puffing aliens marched obliviously through the human formation.

Nomads had always been a fringe element in human civilization, she reflected. Even ancient Nippon had sup-ported some. But here the nomads were the civilization. The latest survey from satellites had just finished counting the Chupchups; there were around a million, covering a world with more land area than Earth. The head of Exo-Analysis thought that the number was in fact exactly 1,048,576-1,024 tribes of 1,024 individuals apiece. He even maintained that each tribe held 32 families of 32 mem-bers each. Even if he was right, she thought, and the musky bodies passing stolidly by her now were units in some grandly ordained arithmetic, had it always been that way? How did they maintain it?

She caught an excited murmur on comm. To her left a crewmember was pointing toward a few stacked stones where three Chupchups had stopped.

Slowly, gingerly, they pried up the biggest slab of blue-gray granite. One Chupchup drew something forth, held it to the light—a small, square thing—and then put it in a pocket of its shabby brown waistcoat. Then the Chup-chups walked on, talking in that warbling way of theirs, still ignoring the humans who stood absolutely still, aching for contact, receiving none. She almost laughed at the for-lorn expressions of the crew as the last of the Chupchups marched off, leaving only a fragrant odor of musty sweat. They did not inspect the fields or even glance at the ruins.

“It’s a library!” someone called.

Miyuki turned back to see that a crewman, Akihiro, had lifted the granite slab. Inside rested a few cubes, each ornately decorated. “I think this is a library. They were picking up a book.”

Koremasa appeared as if he had materialized from the air. “Put it back!” he ordered tersely.

Akihiro said, “But I—look, it’s—”

“Back!”

But by then it was too late. From the trees came the trolls.

Miyuki was not a first-line combat offiCer. She thus had a moment, as others ran to form a defensive line, to observe the seemingly accidental geometry that unfolded as the troll attack began. The Chupchups had stopped, turned around—and watched impassively as the trolls burst from the thick tree line. Had the. Chupchups summoned the trolls, once they saw their, library violated? She could not guess from their erect posture, blandly expressionless faces, un-moving mouths.

The trolls resembled Chupchups as chimps resembled humans—shorter, wider, long arms, small heads. But they ran with the fluid speed of a hunting animal, and caught the nearest crewmember before she could fetch her weapon forth from her pack. A troll picked her up and threw her like something it wished to discard—hurling her twenty meters, where she struck and bounced and rolled and lay still. The other trolls took no notice.

They hesitated. Had they gotten some signal from the Chupchups? But no—she saw that the wind had shifted. The odorous extract that the biotechs had made everyone smear themselves with—yes, that was it. The cutting reek of it, carried on the breeze, had confused the trolls for a moment. But then their rage came again, their teeth flashed with mad hunting passion, and they fell upon the next crewmembers.

She would remember the next few instants for all her life. The weapons carriers liked to fire from a single line, to minimize accidents. Trolls struck that still-forming line. When he saw that the smell defense had failed, Koremasa blinked, raised his hand with a sad, slow gravity—and the rifles barked, a thin sharp sound in the chilly air.

The sudden hard slaps were inundated by the snarls and howls of trolls as they slammed aside their puny op-ponents. The aliens were swift, sure, moving with enor-mous power and sudden, almost balletlike agility. In their single-footed swerves, their quick ducks to avoid a rifle shot, their flicked blows that struck with devastating power, Miyuki saw how a billion years of evolution had engineered reflexes intricately suited to the lesser gravity.

But then the concerted splatting violence took them down. Their elegant, intelligent attack had not counted on a volley of automatic fire. The great, bright-eyed beasts fell even as they surged on, oblivious of danger.

The last few reached Miyuki and she saw, in slow-motion surrealism, the flushed, heady expression on a troll that stumbled as it took a round in its massive right arm. It’s ecstatic, she thought.

But it would not be stopped by one shot. It staggered, looking for another enemy to take, and saw her. Red eyes filled with purple pupils widened. It swung its left arm, claws arcing out—and she ducked.

,

The swipe whistled over her ear, caught her with a thank in the scalp. It was more a sound, a booming, than a felt blow. She flew through the air, turning, suddenly and abstractly registering the pale-blue, cloud-quilted sky, and then she landed on her left shoulder and rolled. A quick rasping brrrrt cut through a strange hollow silence that had settled around her. She looked up into the sky, and the troll eclipsed this view like a red-brown thundercloud. It was not looking at her, but instead seemed to be gazing off into a world it could not comprehend. Then it felt the tug of mortality and orbited down into the acrid clouds of dust stirred by the battle, landing solidly beside her, not rolling, its sour breath coughing out for the last time.

5. I-Witnessing

They devoted three days to studying the fields and burying the bodies. A pall spread among them, the radio crackled with questions, and mission command wrung from each fact a symphony of meaning, of blame, of outrage_

Miyuki was doubly glad that she had—not sought a higher post in this exploration party. Koremasa had to feed the appetite of his superiors, safely orbiting Genji, with data, photos, transcripts, explanations, analysis. Luckily, two cameras had recorded most of the battle. Watching these images again and again, Miyuki felt a chill at the speed and intelligence of the troll assault. Her own head wound was nothing compared to the bloody cuts and goug-ings many others had received.

Koremasa would probably not be court-martialed—but Akihiro Saito, the crewman who had opened the cairn in a moment of excited curiosity, would have been tried and humiliated, had he survived.

It was something of a relief that Akihiro had died. They would have had to watch him, for signs of potential suicide, never leaving him alone or assigning him danger-ous tasks. No one could be squandered here, no matter how they violated the expedition’s standards.

No one ever said this, of course. Instead, they held a full, formal ceremony to mark the passing of their companions, including Akihiro. The meal was specially, synthe-sized on the mother ship and sent down in a drop package. The team sat in a precise formation, backs to the wild alien landscape outside the bubble, and within their circle Old Nippon lived still. The captain produced a bowl for each, in which reposed a sweetened smoked sardine, its spine curved to represent a fish in the water. It had been carefully placed against two slices of raw yellowtail, set off by a delicately preserved peeled plum and two berrylike ovals, one crisp and one soft, both dipped in an amber coating. A second bowl held a paper-thin slice of raw Spanish mack-erel, cut to catch the silver stripe down its back; under-pinned in turn by ‘a sliver of seaweed to quietly stress the stripe, all resting on molded rice. A small half-lobster, gar-nished with sweet preserved chestnuts, sent its aroma into the close, incense-scented air. Thin-sliced, curled onions came next, sharp and melting in the mouth. A rosette of red pickled onion heart came wrapped in a rosy cabbage leaf. Finally, tea.

And all this came from the processors aboard the mother ship. fashioned finally by the master chef who eve-ryone agreed—in the polite, formal conversation that fol-lowed around their circle—was the most important member of the entire expedition.

The beautiful meal and a day of contemplation did their silent work. Calamity reminded one to remain cen-tered, to rely on others, to remember that all humanity wit-nessed the events here. So as the numbness and anxiety left them they returned to their studies. Five crew kept watch at all times while the rest tried to comprehend why four humans and six trolls had died.

In the end, the simplest explanation seemed best: the trolls guarded the ancient, self-managing fields, and this task included the library cairn.

The biologists found rodentlike creatures that pruned and selected the grain plants, others that gathered them into bunches, and further species that stored them among the caved-in brick-brown buildings. Subtle forces worked the fields: ground cover that repelled weeds, fungoids that made otherwise defenseless leaves distasteful or poisonous to browsers, small burrowers that loosened the soil for roots. The trolls assisted these tasks and made sure that only passing bands of Chupchups ate the grain. They tended fruit-bearing trees in the next valley as well, where two more library cairns stood.

The cube from the cairn yielded nothing intelligible immediately, but would doubtless be studied in infinitesi-mal detail when they got it to the mother ship. The sciences were biased toward studying hard evidence, and the oddly marked stone cube was ideal for this. Miyuki doubted whether it could ever yield very much.

“It could be a religious talisman, after all,” she re-marked one evening as they gathered for a meager supper.

“Then it would probably be displayed in a shrine,” Koremasa said reasonably.

–They have no churches,” Miyuki answered.

“We think,” Tatsuhiko said sourly. “We have not searched enough yet to say.”

Miyuki said, “You believe the cities at the rim may tell us more?”

Tatsuhiko hesitated. He plainly felt besieged, having failed to anticipate well the danger here, a continuing hu-miliation to him. “There might be much less erosion at high altitudes,” he said warily.

Koremasa nodded. “Satellite recon shows that. High winds, but less air to work with.”

Miyuki smiled. Seen from above, planets seemed vastly simple. The yellowish flora and fauna of Chujo tricked the eyes, of even orbiting robot scanners. The mol-ecule that best harvested Mtirasalci’s wan glow was acti-vated by red-orange light, not by the skimpy greens that chlorophyll favored. That simple consequence of living be-side a lukewarm star muddied the resolution of their data-reduction programs.

“We had better leave such high sites for later work,” she ventured.

Koremasa’s eyebrows showed mild surprise, but he kept his mouth relaxed, quizzical. “You truly feel so?”

Though she did not wish to admit it, the thought of wearing the added pressure gear needed among, the raw mountains of Chujo’s rim grated upon her. She itched from dryness, her sleeping cycle veered in response to Chujo’s ninety-one-hour day, her sinuses clogged perpetually from constant colds—and everyone else suffered the same, largely without complaint. But she decided to keep her ob-jections professional. “Our error here suggests that we leave more difficult tasks to others.” There. Diffident but cutting.

Koremasa let a silence stretch, and no one else in the circle ventured into it. A cold wind moaned against the plastic of their pressure dome. Their incandescents’ blues and violets apparently irritated the local night-hunters and pests, keeping them at bay, one of the few favorable acci-dents they had found.

Still, she felt the strangeness of the dark outside pressing against them all.

She saw Koremasa’s talent as a leader, he simply sat, finally provoking Tatsuhiko to say, “I must object. We need to understand those who build the cities, for they plainly are not these Chupchups.

Then—”

‘Why is that so clear?” Miyuki cut in.

Tatsuhiko let a small trace of inner tension twist his mouth momentarily. “You saw the scavenging.

That is not the behavior of a dominant, intelligent race.”

“What’s intelligent is what survives,” she answered.

Tatsuhiko flared. “No, that is an utter misunderstand-ing of evolutionary theory. Intelligence is not always adap-tive—that is the terrible lesson we have learned here.”

“That is a hasty conclusion,” Miyuki said mildly.

“Hasty? We know far more than you may realize about these Chupchups. We have picked over their camp-sites, studied their mating through infra-distant imaging, picked apart their turds to study their diet. We patched to-gether their broken pots. Their few metal implements are probably stolen from the ruined cities and reworked down through many generations; they certainly look it.”

“It is difficult to read meaning in artifacts,” Koremasa said.

“Not so!” Tatsuhiko stood and began to pace, walk-ing jerkily around the outside of the circle. He made each of his points with the edge of his right hand, cutting the air in a karate chop. “The Chupchups wander perpetually. They cook in bark pots and leather bags using heated stones—stew with dumplings, usually. They like starchy sweets and swallow berries whole. They pick their teeth with a bristly fungus that they then eat a day later—”

“They must be civilized, then,” Miyuki broke in. “They floss!”

Tatsuhiko blinked, allowed himself a momentary smile in answer to the round of laughter. “Perhaps so, though I differ.” He gave her a quick significant glance, and she felt that somehow she had momentarily broken through to the man she knew.

Then he took a breath, lifted his narrow chin high, put his hands behind his back in a curiously schoolboyish pose, and went on doggedly. “You will have noticed that Chup-chup males and females look nearly alike. There are no signs of homosexual behavior—which is hard to under-stand. After all, humans have genetically selected for it through the shared-kinship mechanism and inclusive fit-ness, in which the homosexuals further the survival of genes they share with heterosexuals. They’re not perma-nently rutty, the way we are, and perhaps an explanation lies there—but how? The female does the courting, singing and dancing like Earthside birds. No musical instruments used. They do it more often than reproduction requires, though, just like us. Some, pair-bonding, maybe even mo-nogamy.

Approximate equality of the sexes in social mat-ters and labor, with perhaps some slight female dominance. They carry out some sex-separate rites, but we, don’t know what those mean.

Hunter-gatherer routines are—”

“Quite so,” Koremasa said softly. “We take your points.”

Somehow this ended the spontaneous lecture. Tatsu-hiko fell silent, his lips twitching, She felt sympathy for his frustration, mingling with his restless desire to fathom this world in terms he could understand.

Yet she could not let matters rest here. She set her face •resolutely. If he wished a professional contest, so be it.

“You read much into your observations,” Miyuki said. She looked around the circle to see if anyone nodded, but they were all impassive, letting her take the lead. “We must,” Tatsuhiko said testily.

“But surely we can no more portray a society by re-cording facts, filtered through our preconceptions, than a literary critic can get the essence of Murasaki’s great Genji Monogatari by summarizing the plot,” she said. “I think perhaps we are doing ‘I-witnessing’ here.”

Tatsuhiko smiled grimly. “You have a case of what we call in sociobiology ‘epistemological hypochondria’—the fear of interpretation.”

Koremasa let the wind speak to them all again, sigh-ing, muttering, rubbing at their monolayer defense against it.

“We appreciate your views, Tatsuhiko-san, but there are fresh facts before us now,” Koremasa said in calm, measured tones. “The satellites report that the Chupchup tribes are no longer wandering in a random pattern.”

Tatsuhiko brightened. “Oh? Where are they going?”

“They are all moving away from us.”

Surprise registered in a low, questioning mutter around their circle. “All of them?” the communications engineer asked.

Koremasa nodded. “They are moving toward the ridge-rim. Journeying from the moonside, to the starside, perhaps.” He stood, smiling at Tatsuhiko. “In a way, I suppose we have at last received a tribute from them. They have acknowledged our presence.”

Tatsuhiko blinked and then snorted derisively. Such a rude show would be remarkable, except that Miyuki un-derstood that the contempt was directed by Tatsuhiko at himself.

“And I suggest,” Koremasa continued with a quiet air of authority, “that we study this planetwide activity.”

“Of course,” Tatsuhiko said enthusiastically. “This could be a seasonal migration. Many animal species have elaborate—”

“These are not animals!” Miyuki surprised herself with the vehemence in her voice.

Miyuki opened her mouth to reply, but saw Captain

Koremasa raise one finger slightly. He said casually, “Enough theory. We must look—and quickly.

The first bands are already striving to cross the rim mountain ranges.”

6. Paradigm Lost

Chujo and Genji pulled at each other incessantly, working through their tides, and Mura-saki’s more distant stresses added to the geological tur-moil. This powered a zone of incessant mountain-building along the circumference of Chujo. Seen from Genji, this ring rimmed Chujo with a crust of peaks, sheer faults, and deep, shadowed gorges. Lakes and small, pale seas dotted Chujo’s lowlands, where the thin air already seemed chilly to humans, even in this. summer season. Matters worsened for fragile humans toward the highlands.

The muscled movement of great geologic forces lifted the rock, allowing water to carve its many-layered canyons. As they flew over the great stretching plains Miriki feasted on the passing panorama, insisting that their craft fly at the lowest safe altitude, though that cost fuel. She saw the promise of green summer, lagoons of bright water, grazing beasts with white hoofs stained with the juice of wildflowers.

This was a place of violent contrasts. In an hour they saw the land below parched by drought, beaten by hail, sogged by rain, burnt by grass fires. But soon, as their engines labored to suck in more, of the skimpy air, the plains became ceramic-gray, blistered, cracked. From orbit she, had seen the yellow splashes of erupting lava from myriad small peaks, and now they came marching from the girdling belt of the world. Black rock sliced across the buff colors of windblown sand. Glacial mo-raines cupped frozen lakes, fault blocks poked above eroded plains, valleys testified to the recent invasion of the great ice.

Yet this world-wracking had perhaps made life pos-sible here. Chujo was much like a fortunate Mars—small, cold, huddled beneath a scant scarf of sheltering gas. Mars had suffered swerves in its polar inclination and eccentric-ity, and this may have doomed the fossilized, fledgling spores humans had found there. But Genji-Chujo’s whirling waltz had much more angular momentum than a sole spin-ning planet could, and this had fended off the tilting per-turbations of Murasaki and the outer, gas giant planets. Thus, neither of the brothers had to endure wobbling poles, shifting seasons, the rasp of cruel change.

Small bushes clung to the escarpments of a marble mountain. Compressional scarps cut the mountain as though a great knife had tried to kill it. These were signs of internal cooling, she knew, Chujo shrinking as its core cooled, wrinkling with age, a world in retreat from its warmer eras. Twisted spires of pumice reared, light as air, splashed with stains of cobalt, putty, scarlet. Miyuki watched this brutal beauty unfold uneasily. Smoke hazed the snowcapped range ahead. The Genjians must have won-dered for ages, she thought, at the continual flame and black clouds of their brother’s perimeter. They probably did not realize that a similar wracked ridge girdled their own world. Perhaps the Genjians had seen the great Chujoan cities at their prime—it was optically possible, with the naked Gen-jian eye—but could legends of that, have survived the thousands of generations since? Did either intelligent race know of the other—and did they still? Certainly—she glanced up at the crescent of Genji, mottled and muggy, like a watercolor artwork tossed off by a hasty child—the present Chupchups could gain no hint from that sultry at-mosphere. Still,, there were hints, all the way down into the molecular chemistry, that the worlds were linked.

Koremasa rapped on the hard Plexiglas. “See? All that green?”

Miyuki peered ahead and saw on the flank of .a jutting mountain a smooth, tea-green growth.

“Summer—and we’re near the equator.”

Koremasa nodded. “This terrain looks too barren to support plants year-round.”

Tatsuhiko put in, over the low rumble of their flyer, “Seasonal migration. More evidence.”

“Of what?” Miyuki asked.

“Of their devolution. They’ve picked up the patterns of migrating fowl. Seasonal animals didn’t build those cities.”

Koremasa said, “That makes sense.”

Tatsuhiko pressed his point. “So you no longer be-lieve they are, fleeing from us?”

Koremasa smiled, and Miyuki saw that his announce-ment two days before had all been a subtle ruse. “It was a useful temporary hypothesis.”

Useful for what? she wanted to ask, but discipline and simple politeness restrained her Instead she said, “So they migrate to the mountain chain to—what? Eat that grass, or whatever it is?”

Tatsuhiko nodded enthusiastically. “Of course.”

She remarked dryly, “A long way to walk for such sparse stuff.”

“I mention it only as a working hypothesis,” Tatsu-hiko said stiffly.

“Did you ever see an animal wearing clothes?” Mi-yuki let a tinge of sarcasm slip into her voice.

“Simple crabs carry their shell homes on their backs.”

“Animals that cook? Carry weapons?”

“All that is immaterial.” Tatsuhiko regarded her with something like fondness for a long moment. Then his face returned to the cool, lean cast she had seen so much of these last few years. “I grant that the Chupchups have ves-tigial artifacts of their ancestors. Those mat-clothes of theirs—marvelous biological engineering, but plainly inherited. The Chupchups are plainly degenerated.”

“Because they won’t talk to us?”

“Because they have abandoned their cities, lost their birthright.”

“The Mayans did that well over a thousand years ago.”

Tatsuhiko shook his head, his amused smile telling the others that here an amateur was venturing into his territory. “They did not revert to Neanderthals.”

Miyuki asked with restrained venom, “You would prefer any explanation that made the Chupchups into de-generated pseudo-animals, wouldn’t you?”

“That is an unfair—”

“Well, wouldn’t you?”

“—and unprofessional, unscientific attitude.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“There is no need to dignify an obvious personal—”

“Oh, please spare me—”

“Prepare for descent,” Koremasa said, looking sig-nificantly at both of them in turn.

“Huh!” Miyuki sat back and glowered out at the view. How had she ever thought that she could reach this man?

They landed heavily, the jet’s engines whining, swiv-eling to lower them vertically into a boulder-strewn valley, just short of the green expanses. Deep crevasses cut the stony ground. Miyuki climbed out gingerly, her pressure suit awkwardly bunching and pinching. The medical people back in Low Genji Orbit had given them only ten hours to accomplish this mission, and allowed only six of them to go at all. The cold already bit into her hands and feet.

A white-water stream muttered nearby and they headed along it, toward the brown and green growth that filled the upper valley. Broken walls of the ancient Chu-joans lay in the narrow box canyon at the top of the valley, near a spectacular roaring waterfall. It had been a respect-able-sized town, she judged.

Why did those ancients build anything at all here? Most of the year this austere place had no vegetation at all, the satellite records said.

She stumbled. The ground was shaking. Slow, grave oscillations came up through her boots. She looked up, her helmet feeling more bulky all the time, and studied the mountain peak that jutted above them. Streamers of black smoke fretted away in the perpetual winds. Crashes echoed in the valley, reflected off the neighboring peaks from the flanks of the mountain—landslides, adding their kettledrum rolls as punctuation to the mountain’s bass notes.

Fretful comments filled the comm. She marched on grimly. Tatsuhiko and Koremasa seemed to have already decided how to interpret whatever they would find; what was the point of this? Sitting back in camp, this quick sortie to the highlands—a “sprint mission,” in the jargon—had seemed a great adventure.

She studied the bare cliff faces that framed the. valley. Volcanic ash layers like slices in an infinite sandwich, in-terspersed with more interesting lines of pink clay, of peb-bled sand, of gray conglomerates.

So they would have to do what they did at so many sites—sample quickly, think-ing little, hoping that they had gotten the kernel of the place by dint of judgment and luck. So much! A whole world, vast and various—and another, hanging overhead like a taunt.

The biologist reached the broad, flat field of green and knelt down to poke at it. He looked up in surprise. “It’s algae! Sort of.”

Miyuki stepped on the stuff. It was so thin she could feel pebbles crunch beneath it. She bent to examine it, her suit gathering, and bunching uncomfortably at her knees. The mat was finely textured, green threads weaving among brown splashes.

The biologist dug his sample knife into it “Tough,” he said. “Very tough.” With effort he punctured the mat and with visible exertion cut out a patch. His portable chemlab shot back an answer as soon as he inserted the patch. “Ummm. Distinct resemblance to ... oh, yes, that Chupchup clothing. Same species, I’d say.”

Tatsuhiko’s voice was tight and precise over comm. “This proves how long ago the original form was devel-oped. Here it’s assumed a natural role in the environment. Unless the Chupchups simply adapted it themselves from this original species. I—”

“Funny biochem going on here,” the biologist said. “It’s excreting some kind of metabolic inhibitor.

,

And—say, there’s a lot of hydrogen around it, too.”

Tatsuhiko nodded. “That agrees with’the tests on the

Chupchup living cloth. It interacts with the Chupchup body, we believe.”

“No, this is different.” The biologist moved on, tug-ging at the surface, taking readings. “This stuff is inter-connected algae and fibers with a lot of energy stored in chemical bonds.”

“Look at these,” Miyuki said. She lifted a flap of the thin but tough material. There was a pocket several meters long, open at one end.

“Double-layered, I guess. Wonder why?” The biolo-gist frowned. “This thing is a great photosynthetic proces-sor. Guess that’s why it flourishes here only in summer. Now, I—”

The ground rolled. Miyuki staggered. The biologist fell, throwing his knife aside to avoid a cut in his suit. Miyuki saw a dark mass fly up, from the mountain’s peak. A sudden thunderclap hammered down on them. The valley floor shook. Dust rose in filmy curtains.

“Sample taken?” Koremasa asked on comm. “Good. Let us—”

“But the ruins!” Miyuki said. “They’ll want at least a few photos.”

“Oh. Yes.” Koremasa looked unhappy but nodded.

Miyuki could scarcely believe she had blurted out such a rash suggestion. Not only was it quite unlike her, she thought, but it contradicted her better judgment. She did want to have a look at the ruins, yes, but

A temblor rocked her like an ocean wave. More smoke spat from the peak, unfurling across a troubled sky. The other five had already started running uphill across the mat.

She followed, turning every hundred meters to glance behind, memorizing the way back in case they had to retreat in a hurry. She heard Tatsuhiko’s shout and saw him point-ing just as another slow, deep ripple worked through the valley.

“Chups!”

They were in a single file, winding out of the ruins. They did not turn to look at the humans, simply proceeded downhill.

Miyuki’s perspectives shifted and danced as she watched them, the world seemed to be tilting—and then she realized that again it was not her, but the valley floor that was moving. What she felt was not the wrenching of an earthquake.

It was the mat itself. The entire floor of the valley wrinkled, stretched, slid.

The Chupchups seemed to glide across the wrestling surface of the mat, uphill from the humans. They were headed for a crevasse that billowed steam. Streamers of sulfurous yellow swirled across the mat Yet the Chupchups gave none of the gathering chaos any notice.

‘‘Back!” Koremasa called on comm. –Back into the flyer.”

They had nearly reached the ruins. Miyuki took a mo-ment to snap quick pictures of the crumbled structures. The slumped stoneworks did not look at all like housing. In fact, they seemed to be immense vats, caved in and filled with rubble. Vats for what? —

She turned away, and the ground slid out from under her She rolled. The others were farther downhill, but the jerking of the tawny-green growth under them had sent them tumbling pell-mell downward, rolling like dolls. They shouted, cried out, swore.

Miyuki stopped herself by digging in her heels and grabbing at the tough, writhing mat. It was durable material. and she could nor rip it for a better hold. In a moment the convulsions stopped. She sat up.

Pearly fog now rose from the mat all around her. She felt a trembling and then realized that she was moving—slowly, in irregular little jerks, but yes—the mat was tug-ging itself across the pebbles beneath it. She scrambled for footing—and fell. She got to her knees. Somewhere near here the Chupchups—

There. They were standing, looking toward the chasm a hundred meters away. Miyuki followed their intent, calm gaze.

The mat was alive, powerful, muscular—and climbing up the sky.

No, it merely reared, like the living flesh of a wounded thing. It buckled and writhed, a nightmare living carpet.

It jerked itself higher than a human, forming a long sheet that flexed like an ocean wave—and leaped.

The wave struck the, far side of the crevasse. It met there another shelf of rising mat. The two waves stuck, clung. All along the chasm the two edges slapped together, melted into one another, formed a seamless whole.

And rose. As though some chemical reaction were kin-dling under it, the living carpet bulged like a blister. Miyuki clung to the shifting, sliding mat—and then realized that if she let go, she could roll downhill, where she wanted to go.

She watched the mat all along the vent as it billowed upward. The Chupchups made waving motions, as if urging the mat to leave the ground. She thought suddenly, They came here for this. Not fleeing from us at all.

Then she was slipping, rolling, the world whirling as she felt the mat accelerate. Her breath rasped and she curled up into a ball, tumbling and bouncing down the hillside. Knocks, jolts, a dull gathering roar—and then she slammed painfully against a boulder. A bare boulder, free of the mat.

She got up, feeling a sharp pain in her left ankle. “Ko: remasa-san!”

“Here! Help me with Tatsuhiko!”

Tatsuhiko had broken his leg. His dark face contorted with agony. She peered down into his constricted eyes and he said, speaking very precisely between pants, “Matters are complex.”

She blinked. “What?”

“Clearly something more is going on here,” he said tightly, holding the pain back behind his thin smile.

“Never mind that, you’re hurt. We’ll—”

He waved the issue away. “A temporary intrusion. Concentrate on what is happening here.”

“Look, we’ll get you safely—”

“I have missed something.– Tatsuhiko grimaced, then gave a short,, barking laugh. “Maybe everything.”

She felt the need to comfort him, beyond placing com-presses, and said, “You may have been right.

This—”

“No, the Chupchups are ... something different. Out-side the paradigms.”

“Quiet now. We’ll get you out of here.”

Tatsuhiko lifted his eyebrows weakly. “Keep your lovely eyes open. Watch what the Chupchups are doing. Record.”

Something in his tone made her hesitate. “I ... still love you.”

His lips trembled. “I... also. Why can we not talk?”

“Perhaps... perhaps it means too much.”

He twisted his lips wryly. “Exactly. That hypothesis accounts for the difficulty.”

–Too much ... “ She saw ruefully that she had thought him stiff and uncompromising, and perhaps he was—but that did not mean she did not share those ele-ments. Perhaps they were part of the personality constellations chosen long ago on Earth, the partitioning of traits that ensured the expedition would get through at all.

He said, “I am sorry. I will do better.”

“But you ...” She did not know what to say and her mouth was dry, and then the others came.

They lifted him and started toward the flyer. The oth-ers had rolled onto the rocky ground below as the mat moved. Miyuki stumbled, this time from a volcanic tremor. She got to the flyer and looked back.

The entire party paused then, fear draining from them momentarily, and watched.

The mat was lifting itself; Alive with purpose. rip-pling, its center axis bulged, pulling the rest of it along the ground with a hiss like a wave sliding up a beach. It shed pebbles, making itself lighter, letting go of its birthplace.

“Some...some reaction is going on in the vent under it,” the biologist panted over comm. “Making gases—that hydrogen I detected, I’ll bet. That’s a by-product of this mat. Maybe it’s been growing some culture in the volcanic vents around here. Maybe ... “ His voice trailed away in stunned disbelief.

She remembered the strange vatlike openings among the Chupchup buildings. Some ancient chemical works? A way to augment this process? After all, the Chupchups had clothing made of material much like this crawling carpet.

They got Tatsuhiko into the bay of the flyer. Koremasa ordered the pilot to ready the flyer for lift-off.

He turned back to the others and then pointed at the sky. Miyuki turned. From valleys beyond, large green teardrops drifted up the sky. They wobbled and flexed, as though shaping themselves into the proper form for a fresh inhabitant of the air.

Organic balloons were launching themselves from all the valleys of the volcanic ridge. Dozens rose into the winds. In concert, somehow, Miyuki saw. Perhaps triggered by the spurt of vulcanism. Perhaps responding to some deeply imprinted command, some collision of chemicals.

“Living balloons...” she said.

The biologist said, “The vulcanism, maybe it triggers the process. After the mat has grown to a certain size. Methane, maybe anaerobic fermentation—”

“The carving,” Miyuki said.

Koremasa said quietly, “The Chupchups.”

The frail, distant figures clung to the side of the mat as the center of it rose, fattening. Some found the pockets that the humans had noticed, and slipped inside. Others simply grabbed a handful of the tough green hide and hung on.

“They are going up with it,” Koremasa said.

She recalled the carving in the ancient city, with its puzzling circles hanging in the backdrop of the tiger eating its tail, nature feeding on itself, with the Chujoan face aris-ing from the writhing pain of the twisting tail. “The cir-cles—they were balloons. Rising.”

The last edge of the mat sped toward the ascending bulge with a sound like the rushing of rapids over pebbles. The accelerating clatter seemed to hasten the living, self-making balloon. Frayed lips of the mat slapped together below the fattening, uprushing dome. These edges sealed, tightened, made the lower tip of a green teardrop.

On the grainy skin of the swelling dome the Chupchup passengers now settled themselves in the pockets Miyuki had noted before. Most made it. Some dangled helplessly, lost their grip, fell with a strange silence to their deaths. Those already in pockets helped others to clamber aboard.

And buoyantly, quietly, they soared into a blue-black sky. “Toward Genji,” Miyuki whispered. She felt a press-ing sense of presence, as though a momentous event had occurred.

“In hydrogen-filled bags?” Koremasa asked.

“They can reach fairly far up in the atmosphere that way,” Tatsuhiko said weakly. He was lying on the cush-ioned deck of the flyer, pale and solemn. The injury had drained him, but his eyes flashed with the same quick, as-sessing intelligence.

Miyuki climbed into the flyer and put a cushion under his helmet. The crew began sealing the craft. “I don’t think they mean to just fly around,” she said.

“Oh?” Tatsuhiko asked wanly. “You think they imagine they’re going to Genji?”

“I don’t think we can understand this.” She hesitated. “It may even be suicide.”

Tatsuhiko scowled. “A race devoted to a suicide rit-ual? They wouldn’t have lasted long.”

She gestured at the upper end of the valley. “Most of them didn’t go. See? They’re standing in long lines up there, watching the balloon leave.”

“More inheritance?” Tatsuhiko whispered. “Is this all they remember of the technology the earlier race had mastered?”

Miyuki thought. wonder.”

Tatsuhiko said wanly, taking her hand, “Perhaps they have held on to the biomats, used them. Maybe they don’t understand what they were for, really. A piece of biotech like that—a beautiful solution to the problem of transport, in an energy-scarce environment. Are the Chup-chups just ... just joyriding?”

Miyuki smiled. “Perhaps... “

They lifted off vertically just as another rolling jolt came. The flyer veered in the gathering winds, and Miyuki watched the teardrop shapes scudding across the purpling sky. Soon enough they would be the object of scrutiny, measurement, with the full armament of scientific dispas-sion marshaled to fathom them. She would probably even do some of the job herself, she thought wryly.

But for this single crystalline moment she wished to simply enjoy them. Not analyze, but feel the odd, hushed quality their ascent brought.

They were probably neither Tatsuhiko’s vestigial tech-nology nor some arcane tribal ceremony.

Perhaps this entire drama was purely a way for the Chupchups to tell humans something. She bit her lip in concentration. Tell what? In-deed, satellite observations, dating back to the first robot probe, had never shown any sign of a Chupchup migration here. It might be unique—a response to humans themselves.

She sighed. Cabin pressure hissed on again as the flyer leveled off for its long flight back. She popped her helmet and wrestled Tatsuhiko’s off, He smiled, thanked her—and all the while behind his tired eyes she saw the glitter, the unquelled pursuit of his own vision of the world, which Tatsuhiko would never abandon. As he should not.

The biologist was saying something about the bal-loons, details—that they seemed to be photosynthetic pro-cessors, making more hydrogen to keep themselves aloft, to offset losses through their own skin. He even had a term for them, bioloons.

So the unpeeling of the onion skins was already be-ginning. And what fun it would be.

But what did it mean? The first stage of science at-omizes, dissects, fragments. Only much later do the Bohrs, the Darwins, the Einsteins knit it all together again—and nobody knew what the final weave would be, silk or sackcloth.

So both Tatsuhiko and herself and all the others—they were all needed. There would be no end of explana-tions. Did the Chupchups think humans were in fact from that great promise in the sky, Genji?

Or were they trying to signal something with the mat-balloons—while still holding to their silence? An arcane ceremony? Some joke?

The Chupchups would never fit the narrow rules of sociobiology, she guessed, but just as clearly they would not be merely Zen aliens, or curators of some ashram in the sky. They were themselves, and the fathoming of that would be a larger task than Miyuki, or Tatsuhiko, or Ko-remasa could comprehend.

The flyer purred steadily. The still-rising emerald tear-drops dwindled behind. Their humming technology was taking, them back to base, its pilot already fretting about fuel.

Miyuki felt a sudden, unaccountable burst of joy. Hard mystery remained here, shadowed mystery would call them back, and mystery was far better than the cool ceramic sur-faces of certainty.

Genji

by David Brin

It is, fundamentally, a ques-tion of balance, Minoru reminded himself as he stepped out of the lander, keeping his stance wide and footsteps close to the ground. Balance is important when exploring a new world.

During the ten-year journey out to Murasaki System, starship Yamato’s antimatter drives had been cranked up gradually to nearly one and a half gravities, so that all three hundred and five expedition members would have time to adapt in advance to conditions on Genji. Seldom mentioned during all that time had been the other motive for pushing the engines—to try to catch up with the Spacer expedition and make it to Murasaki first.

Yantato arrived just a few weeks too late. The upstarts from the asteroid colonies had already visited the twin hab-itable worlds of Genji and Chujo, taken samples of alien life, and usurped the privilege of first contact that should have been Japan’s. Then, as if shamed by their imperti-nence, the Spacers hadn’t even waited around to hold con-ference, but fled Earthward again on the flimsy excuse that their life-support systems were strained. Perhaps, in fact, they sensed it would not be wise to hang around and test the self-restraint of the larger, better-equipped crew.

The letdown after such a long chase told on Yamato’s complement. All that hurrying to get out here

... then not be the first to set foot, to plant a flag, or to gaze into strange eyes on a new world? Japan could still claim prior discov-ery, of course. Its robot probes had sent back first word on this magnificent double-planet system. But that wasn’t the same. Not the same at all.

Minoru stepped carefully along the blackened trail laid down by the lander when it alighted on this hilltop airstrip by the sea. Behind him, the flyer hissed as it cooled—touched by drifting fingers of sea fog.

The pilot continued unloading crates of supplies Minoru and his partner would need during the months ahead. That included, to Minoru’s resignation, many kilograms of nutritionally adequate but monotonous algae paste. One more reason to make friends with the natives, who were now spilling out of their hilltop hamlets to cross swampy farms on their way toward the landing field.

Minoru glanced up toward Genji’s sister world—dry, little To no Chujo—which filled an entire octant of the sky. Chujo was so close you could make out wispy cloud formations, the dun color of its dry uplands, and the glitter of its midget seas. Here on this part of Genji, where Chujo permanently hovered at the zenith, you could tell time by watching shadows move across its constant face as the paired planets spun around a com-mon center—their “day” a composite of their linked momenta. The glow given off by Murasaki might be pallid compared with Sol’s remembered flame, but it nurtured life on both of these worlds. And as night’s ter-minator flowed across Chujo’s scarred face it was easy to see one likely reason why the natives of Genji had never invented clocks.

A neat explanation, Minoru told himself. Except for the fact that fair days like today are the exception. It’s usually overcast this close to the sea. And Genjians live nowhere else.

Probably much of his life would consist, from now on, of coming up with interesting hypotheses only to find later evidence pointing elsewhere. On a new world it wouldn’t pay to grow too fond of one’s favorite theories. Yet another reason to cultivate balance.

He stopped at the edge of the landing field and laid down his bag of trade goods. Only then did Minoru turn around to make sure Emile was following him from the lander. Encumbered by his heavy pressure suit, Minoru swiveled a bit too fast in the fierce gravity. He had to tighten his abdominal muscles to compensate. The rapid jerk sent painful throbs ripping through stretched tendons, reminding him that, after a decade of subjective time aboard ship, he wasn’t the same youngster who once upon a time set forth so eagerly toward the stars.

The weight here isn’t so bad if you’re careful. You can’t ever forget, though. Not for a minute.

And there’s the paradox, of course. For who can promise to remember every minute of every day, for a lifetime?

Long-term effects of the planet’s pull could be seen in the thick trunks and low profiles of the nearby trees, forming slope-hugging forests just beyond the ragged dirt landing field. Gravity was also manifest in the squat, wide-limbed gait of the natives, who used paths made of wooden planks to cross paddies and fern-lined fens on their way to the landing site. No matter how vivid the holoscreen images were, nothing short of the real thing brought you face-to-face with the strangeness of an alien world. The tug of gravity, the cries of this planet’s myr-iad of flying creatures, the sluggish shove of heavy, mois-ture-laden air...

Minoru wished he could feel it against his skin, but full environment suits were mandatory until the bioassay was complete, and probably for a long time after that.

He suppressed a temptation to rebel, One of the foolish Spacers had ruined his lungs by exposing them to Genji’s intense sea-level pressure. And yet, Minoru half envied that act of defiance.

“Well, they look peaceful enough,” said Emile Es-peranza, his contact-team partner, who came up alongside Minoru to watch the Genjians waddle toward them. “I

guess the Spacers didn’t alienate the locals. Or infect them.”

Despite his name, Emile’s features were as pure-blooded Japanese as Minoru’s, and much more so than the twenty or so men and women in the token “international contingent” that had shipped out aboard Yamato. Emile’s grandparents had managed a Fuji Works plant in Paraguay, then retired there for the climate, elbow room, and lifestyle. Although his family kept faith with the Purity Rules, and so maintained Nihonese citizenship, they nevertheless had picked up many gaijin ways. For instance, Minoru saw with some envy that Emile had taken off his bulky gloves and armlets, sealing his suit above the elbows but leaving his hands and forearms free to feel the wind and air. I wish I had the nerve.

“We don’t know for sure cross-infection isn’t possi-ble. There are many similarities between Genjian life and ours.”

“And even more differences,” the other man an-swered, his voice rich with Latin accents. “Genji-life uses more amino acids than we could get away with on Earth, because there’s never been much ultraviolet in this sys-tem.” Emile gestured toward Murasaki’s Star, whose yel-lowish tinge was misleading. The eye adapted to reduced light levels, and so you forgot the poor dwarf put out only two percent of Sol’s luminosity.

“So?”

“So any of their pathogens who tried to eat human cells would probably starve of some necessary ingredient. And our bugs would be poisoned by some complex chem-ical never known on Earth.”

Minoru knew what that implied. If Earth germs could find nothing to eat here, what hope had human beings of doing so? He clung obstinately to hope, however. “There may be something here that’s edible.”

Emile shrugged, as if he was indifferent to the subject. Unlike many in the crew, he showed little outward frustra-tion at the limited range of ship-grown fare. Emile never speculated, as others did incessantly, what new delicacies might await discovery on this new world.

“Anyway, none of the Spacers came down with weird plagues. And apparently they didn’t loose any on the locals, either. Do you see natives rolling around in agony?”

Minoru did not. From the nearest hilltop hamlet, a kil-ometer away, the Genjians approached without apparent hurry, carrying only a couple of those trident-spear things the locals used as weapon-tools.

From orbital scans—and data grudgingly shared by the departing Spacers—Minoru knew the creatures could move a lot faster if they had to. But as nonhomeotherms—lacking the sort of heat-balancing system Earth mammals possessed—they would naturally avoid temperature swings whenever possible.

At first glance, the natives looked like fat salamanders, whose long front legs gave them a reared, semi-upright stance. Yet, even at a distance, Minoru felt a chill of alien-ness. For even a salamander has a face.

No, he stopped and chided himself. In all honesty, so do these creatures.

,

But such a face! Instead of bilateral symmetry—two eyes atop and mouth below—the Genjians had four bulging vision organs spaced at the corners of a square, centered on their impressive, gaping jaws.

Above all that, a waving snorkel tube gave vent to the amphibians’ excited cries, audible even in the distance since sound carries so well in dense air. Opposite the snorkel tube, hanging below each Genjian’s throat, were two slender, tentaclelike “hands” that served them for fine manipulation.

So strange. And yet, these clearly were intelligent be-ings. Here on this isolated mountain island, they lived a modest,—agrarian-and-fishing existence, tending algal mats and pens of captive, iridescent-finned ichthyoids. But else-where the expedition had catalogued from space several widespread cultures possessing metallurgy, and even electricity.

“Anyway,” Emile went on. “At least the Spacers had the sense to make their first contact on remote locales like this one, so any unforeseen infection would be self-limiting.”

“Such courtesy,” Minoru said acidly. But Emile seemed genuinely glad.

“Indeed. I’m grateful the Spacers jumped in ahead of us. Now the, karma of any harm done rests on their backs, not ours.”

Emile’s blithe attitude was rare among Yamato’ s crew, most of whom still seethed at the Spacers’

effrontery. Still, he had, a point. Cultural contamination by the asteroidists spared Minoru a degree of tension that would have other-wise thickly overlain the approaching meeting. Now he worried much less about perpetrating some irretrievable faux pas that might bring with it a death-bond of shame.

Hissing and rattling, the translator apparatus made a broad range of sounds as Emile, tested its sparse store of Genjian words, donated by the Spacers and augmented re-cently by two other Japanese contact teams already oper-ating along this archipelago. Theirs wasn’t even the primary group opening talks with Genjian settlements. That, too, lifted some tension off Minoru’s shoulders.

“Hey! Are you fellows okay now? Do you want me to hang around, just in case?”

Remembering just in time to move slowly, Minoru turned carefully to look back at the lander, where their pilot had finished unloading supplies for their extended stay. “I could help you fellows erect your shelter,” Don Byrne of-fered. As one of the few Occidentals on the expedition, his Japanese was thickly accented and much too formal. It made him the butt of jokes by some of the less tolerant crewfolk. Still.

he never seemed to mind, and the cheerful Australian had won Minoru’s undying gratitude during the seventh year of the voyage, by discovering three new rec-ipes for preparing the same old hydroponic ship-fare.

Minoru liked Don. Nevertheless, he wished this assignment had been drawn by a different pilot—Yiikiko Arama. There might have been a chance to get a moment alone with her....

Ah, karma. Maybe next time.

“It isn’t necessary,” Emile told the pilot. “We can manage. You should return to Okuma Base.”

Byrne shifted his weight. “Well ... I figure I’ll just hang around a few minutes, anyway.” He began opening containers to lay out the storage dome, but Minoru noticed Don never strayed far from the rifle he had lain by one leg of the lander. And he kept glancing toward the approaching natives.

He’s staying to watch over us, Minoru realized. And to his surprise he felt no resentment over this presumption. In fact, it came as something of a relief. Emile, on the other hand, sounded mildly irritated.

“All right. But stay out of the way. And give us warning when you’re about to take off! We don’t want to frighten the Genjians.”

Emile turned away again and spread a tarp on the ground. He began laying out objects to help identify the Genjian equivalent of nouns and adjectives, to establish a more orderly dictionary. Some of the objects would also be offered as gifts at the end of each session. Minoni opened his own satchel and started doing the same. Only, as he drew a hammer from the bag, its claw snagged on the ma-terial.

Caught off balance, he was forced to lean over to compensate.

Gravity seized the momentary lapse. Minoru flailed, and hit the tarp before he could even get his hands out. Impact was sudden and also harder than instinct led him to expect. The blow stung.

Fortunately, despite his brash, gaijin-influenced ways, Emile had the decency to neither laugh nor even seem to notice. Overcoming embarrassment, Minoru moved with careful deliberation to push back into sitting position.

Balance, Minoru thought. I may live the rest of my life on this planet. And it certainly isn’t going to change to adapt to me!

Starship Yamato Crew Database:

.

General News

With phases One and Two accomplished, the fol-lowing teams are now active—

Genji Expedition: Okuma Base on Genji-moonside established atop Mount Korobachi—

4,500 meters altitude—Senior Scientist Matsu-hiro Komatsu, commanding. Five domes. Three landers. Three power units. One compute facility. One hydrox fuel-processing unit. One hydropon-ics unit. All operational. * Two hydroponics units and four planetology laboratories nearing com-pletion. *

Preliminary survey parties detached to remote islands for early, minimum-contamination contact sessions.

* Total crew on Genji—eighty-five personnel. Nineteen additional, personnel designated for landing upon return of Yamato from belt mission.

TO no Chujo Expedition: Capt. Koremasa Ta-mura has decided to lead a small-scale expedition to the smaller world personally. In addition to ar-chaeological explorations, and attempts to make contact with the local inhabitants, this team shall determine feasibility of establishing a hydrogen-oxygen plant at the shore of one of Chujo’s small spas.

Infrastructure Team: Following Captain Ta-mura’s departure for Chujo, Senior Lieutenant Hideo Ishikawa will take the Yamato, plus two scout boats, on a brief survey of nearby space in search of candidate small bodies for use in infra-structure-manufacturing processes.

Casualty figures: Added to the twelve crew mulched or cryo-stored en route ... One death at Okuma Base due to a fall. Eight gravity-related injuries, all minor. Dr. Komatsu reminds all ex-pedition members to remember their drills and observe safety procedures at all times.

Minoru slogged through the boggy fields of Green Tower Village, taking samples and supervising as his native assistants labored on a treadmill linked to, a scaffold of mas-sive wooden gearing. That clanking, rattling assemblage, in turn, rotated a machine that projected a cylinder of force into the ground, digging ever deeper into the rich sedimen-tary layers below.

It had taken several days, working in conjunction with teams on other islands, to acquire enough of the local di-alect to get across the idea that humans wanted to “hire” the natives. But once they understood, the Genjians became eager helpers, not only with the coring but also scurrying through the shallows and across the hillsides to snare and bring back countless wriggling things of all shapes and col-ors—from underground burrowers to multilegged insec-toids to flyers with one, two, even three pairs of wings—the myriad of pieces Minoru needed to start putting together his own picture of this island’s ecosystem.

Minoru stank from hour after hour in his biosuit. He itched from low-level rashes as his immune system adapted to new allergic irritants. On two occasions, valuable instru-ments had broken down, with no way of knowing yet if craftsmen back at Okuma Base could repair the parts or if they might have to send “home” for replacements—then wait forty years for them to arrive.

And yet, he could hardly complain about lack of prog-ress. He had tools, and a good work force willing to labor long and hard for lumps of iron. Metal was precious on these remote islands, where Genji’s continental industrial revolution was still no more than a rumor. Despite temp-tation, Minoru was careful not to overpay his workers, which would only disrupt their local economy.

Anyway, deferred gratification was an important les-son. You learned it early in Japan. Failure to understand the importance of patience and hard work had brought down great powers that once towered over Minoru’s homeland.

The work was going so well, Minoru had even trained some of the small male Genjians to dissect and prepare animal specimens under recording cameras. The natives’ coordination with their tiny feeler-arms, and ability to bring their eyes exceptionally close, enabled them to parse minute details, a pastime they obviously found amusing. One, a venerable brood-father named Phs’n’kah, seemed fasci-nated and enthusiastic to learn more.

It was Phs’n’Icah who nudged Minoru out of a medi-tative state listening to the slow, steady drone of the tread mill. Minoru started at the sudden tug on his arm. With their broad peripheral vision, Genjians never seemed to grasp human entreaties “not to sneak up on us from behind.”

“1 have brought more samples for study,” the trans-lator announced primly. Minoru glanced down and saw that Phs’n’kah had laid out a reed mat across the mud, where-upon he arrayed several score tiny animals, all with their necks neatly wrung.

“These were gathered within a single patch, one meter on a side?” Minoru asked, incredulously.

Phs’n’kah made an assent gesture with his snorkel tube.

“Yes. The very *** you marked off I made sure to ***”

The last part dissolved in static as the translator tried guessing, then gave up. No matter. Minoru thought he got the gist.

This was a new phase. After taking samples randomly from all over the island, letting the natives bring in what-ever was easiest to catch, it was time to start studying in depth. But he and Emile were stretched so thinly that Mi-noru had begun delegating some jobs.

“You sealed off the area as I showed you?”

“As you showed me . I *** down to one meter depth. I am sure nothing *** escaped. Nothing that *** larger than the holes in your *** sieve screen.”

Minoru bent to peer at the samples. You could learn a lot just by seeing how the Genjian had sorted them. Not by size or color. Nor, apparently, by species relatedness. At first guess it seemed Phs’n’kah had put all the obligate carnivores together on one side, all leave-cutters in another corner, and so on.

You are what you eat, Minoru thought. I should report this to the Xeno-Psychology group.

He made a note to that effect, and his auto secretary beeped acknowledgment. One problem with accomplishing so much so fast was that you absolutely relied on the semisentient computer devices to outline and send (and read!) a great many memos.

“Good work,” he told Phs’n’kah.

“Time to dissect and record?”

“No. Not yet. Let me look over the samples first. Then we’ll do another test dig together to make sure we haven’t missed a trick.”

He was confident the translator would get the meaning across. Phs’n’kah’s snorkel waved, then he gathered up the samples and the reed mat. But, before turning to head back to the science dome, the little male stopped and asked one more question.

“Have we found any *** yet that the *** humans can honorably eat?”

Minoru started. How did Phs’n’kah know? That ulte-rior motive for Minoru’s fevered sampling of flora and fauna went beyond the principal focus—of understanding this island’s complex ecosystem.

But of course, he realized. That would be the first thing to occur to a native.. . . They have no real conception of science. But eating, cooking, the search for something new and good. . . he probably thinks that’s the main purpose of all this collecting!

Perhaps this explained why it was males, the gatherers and tenders of the hearths and cook-pots, who were most enthusiastic about helping Minoru, while the females seemed to prefer gathering around Emile, with his endless appetite for words.

“No, my friend. Nothing good to eat, yet. But we can still, hope.”

“Hope is ***. Hope can even be ***.”

Phs’n’kah turned away and waddled up the path lead-ing to the science dome. Minoru wondered what piece of wisdom he had imparted. It sounded like an aphorism. He would store it, and play it back for Emile later.

“That’s enough,” he told the workers turning the corer. The translator wheezed something in the native lan-guage that must have been approximately correct, because they stopped working and squatted back, panting. Occa-sionally, one of them would open its mouth to pick its teeth with one of the slender tentacle arms. Only at times like that was Minoru able to tell, for absolute certain which was male and which female. Besides being generally smaller, the males had tongues that were longer and raspier for some reason; ending in a sort of bulbous fixture. Curiously, it did not seem to affect their speech—at least to his untutored ears. Back at Okuma Base they were still trying to figure out what the apparatus was for.

It was one topic the locals kept decidedly closemouthed about.

The latest core sample came up slickly... a tube of past history sheathed in electro-stiffened plastic.

His helpers were by now well-rehearsed in this procedure. They de-tached and then loaded the five-meter tube onto the inges-tion tray of a portable disassembler-reader. As the core passed into the machine, layer after sedimentary layer was atomized. A dust of ages came out the other end, while all the information content that had been locked in ordered patterns of mud and ancient fossils flowed as data into the capacious memory of the computer back at the dome.

Gradually,—a database was forming. It would take years, probably decades, to comprehend more than a cur-sory view of life on Genji—its detailed chemistry and com-plex, interlaced ecologies.

Nevertheless, some pieces were already falling into place.

For one thing, life was at least as old here as on Earth. Evolution had apparently progressed at almost the same pace, despite a lower incidence of ultraviolet irra-diation to cause mutations. Here, instead, a built-in driver toward diversity came about because of half a dozen extra, unconventional amino acids that were added to the protein code. With that increase came a higher chance of replicative error, and so Darwin’s grinding-mill had as much to work with as back home, producing a profusion of winners and losers to make up a broad-branched tree of life.

Broader than Earth’s, in certain respects. Murasaki System was emptier of comets and asteroids than Sol’s, and apparently there had been fewer big impacts to shake up the Genjian biosphere. Few mass extinctions meant many ancient, ancestral families and phyla that might have gone extinct still co-inhabited the planet. It was as if some of the wild experiments tried on Earth during the pre-Cambrian, recorded in half-billion-year-old formations like the Burgess Shale, had never died out but gone on to share the seas with shark and squid and whales. In addi-tion to multicelled creatures built from segmented tubes—like Phs’n’kah’s people and all metazoans on Earth—there were also distantly related branches that specialized in growing as flat sheets, or as radial stems. Orbital scans of the other hemisphere appeared to show creatures so eerie that Genjians themselves could be thought almost human.

One of his workers performed something akin to a yawn, and Minoru blinked, stepping backward suddenly. Apparently some of the other natives were as put back as he was by the gesture, since several hissed and one even tried to take a nip at the offender’s tail: She snarled back.

Then, quite suddenly, the altercation was forgotten. Almost as one, the natives lifted their heads and turned. Minoru carefully shuffled around to look, and saw that a darkness had begun approaching from the east. The deck of low-lying clouds dimmed along a sharp border that ap-proached rapidly, laying a rapidly nearing shadow across the hillsides and the fog-draped sea. A low moan rose from the Genjians as they reared to gape in the direction of Chujo—even though the sister world was covered from view by clouds. The translucence of sunlight vanished as Genji’s twin passed in front of Murasalci, signaling com-mencement of the noon eclipse.

Time to down tools. This was—at least for this cul-ture, on this archipelago—a holy interval, lasting about twenty minutes, during which it was permissible to speak and rest, but never to work or fight.

Minoru stood in what he hoped the natives took as an attitude of respect. After all, on shipboard—and even in their tiny habitation domes—many human crewmembers kept little Shinto or Buddhist or Christian or Gaian shrines.

He was proud of the Japanese attitude toward religion, which said, essentially—whatever works.

As soon as the Genjians’ keening song of greeting was finished, one of the largest females turned and approached Minoru in a slow, tail-swishing undulation. He recognized Ta’azsh’da by several scars along her left flank, which she had told Emile she’d acquired in a raid by another village, during her youth on another island. Females were the wan-derers and warriors in this species, a fact that still had some sociobiologists at Okuma Base puzzled. Minoru, at least, thought he was beginning to see why.

— You *** our Rites of *** and Shadow,—the trans-lator said, struggling with her words. It had more trouble with some topics than others. “If we are *** will you con-vey our *** to ***?”

“I’m sorry ... I “ Minoru gave up. “Connect to Emile,—he said, and almost without, a pause, his partner’s face lit up the left quadrant of his visor.

“Minoru. I’m kind of busy.”

Minoru could see Emile with three of his language helpers, squatting in the shirt-sleeve environment of the halfway dome ... set to an atmospheric pressure midway between that of Genji’s surface and what was comfortable for humans. Emile’s skin pallor didn’t look good, and his eyes were droopy, but at least he didn’t have to wear a stinking suit all the time. Minoru envied him.

“Just a quick one. Give me a read on this, will you?” And Minoru squirted over Ta’azsh’da’s question. Emile puzzled for a. moment, then he laughed. “Oh, she’s just asking to hitch a ride to Chujo.”

“To Chujo!”

Emile lifted one eyebrow. “You hadn’t heard? It seems, according to their mythology, Chujo is the home of the angels. Many of them think that’s where we came from.”

“No wonder they’re so cooperative! But what will happen when they find out—”

“Relax. There’s no religious hysteria about it. At least not among this group ... though the boys over at Purple Cliffs Island seem to have had a rough moment when the truth came out. Anyway, I’ve already explained the entire situation to several of their traveling monks, or rabbis, or holy whatever you call them—and say, did you know they’re nearly all females? Anyway, I told the priests we’re not from Chujo but another star. They don’t seem to mind.

“Here, let me give you a nice, soothing, diplomatic answer for Ta’azsh’da.”

Emile muttered a command and Minoru’s translator conveyed a string of Genjian words directly from Minoru’s helmet speaker. Ta’azsh’da took a couple of steps back at one point, rocking her head in an expression Minoru thought might mean perplexity.

But then she seemed satisfied. Or at least she turned and wandered away. Emile’s picture disappeared without a sign-off, and Minoru tried not to be offended. He him-self must, sound just as curt when experts from other teams called him, demanding quick biological answers while he was still flailing around, looking for the big picture.

Sometimes, it seemed almost too much, and he longed for crowded but comfortable Osaka.

I am doing my life’s work, Minoru reminded himself at those moments. No one could he happier.

That was true, as far as it went. Only occasionally Minoru wished he were a different sort of person altogether ... one born with simpler tastes and more mundane inter-ests, who was not the type to volunteer at age fifteen to be sent hurtling toward such a heaVy world. Weren’t there less exhausting roads to happiness?

Alas, those roads were not in his dharma to tread.

Genji Expedition Database:

SUMMARY ON GENTIAN SAPIENTS

by Shigei Owari, Chief Xenologist

The intelligent beings we call Genjians bear some resemblance to Earth’s amphibian life-forms. Such comparisons can be misleading, however, since there is nothing at all primitive about this planet’s autochthons. It is true that they have not spread to as many ecological niches as humans had, at similar levels of tech-nological development. (By the Iron Age, hu-man beings occupied even mountaintops and arctic wastes, while the natives of this world seem almost exclusively to inhabit coastlines and alluvial basins.) Nevertheless, it should be noted that—in most other indicators we seem to have met peers.

Preliminary studies by Komiko Takashita reveal an emotional range as vivid and finely textured as our own. Komiko’s pre-liminary intelligence profiles demonstrate con-siderable overlap in cognitive ability with precomputer human societies....

... the Linguistic Group has decided to adopt as generic the species self-name used in this archipelago by the autochthones. In all future documents, therefore, sentient Genjians shall be referred to as Ihrdizu.

This has been deemed ac-ceptable by natives at all contact sites....

... their strong tails, with two horizontal flukes, appear to propel the torpedo-shaped Ihr-dizu efficiently through the water. On shore, they use their tails for support and to assist locomo-tion. The heavily muscled appendages also serve as formidable weapons....

...Adult females measure about two meters in length and mass nearly 100 kilograms. The slender male seldom exceeds a meter and a half in length....

.... only capable of poor directionality with their flap-and-tympani hearing apparatus, al-though we expect the system probably works quite well underwater. Their vision system is ca-pable of extreme dark-adaptation, and can focus under a wide variety of conditions....

Another word for balance was equilibrium. Minoru contemplated this as he sat naked under a sunlamp, in padmasama position, on a reed mat that had been do-nated by the village elders. The little habitation dome hissed as it fed the produce of his respiration—and from his previous meals—into wall panels that used sunlight and algae to recycle human wastes. At the output end, there accumulated an all-too-familiar green paste that, despite, its blandness, would keep his body going, ena-bling him and Emile to extend their visit here at least an extra month.

The dome-recycler seemed a perfect example to con-template. At first sight, it appeared to be a balanced system. But it wasn’t in equilibrium, not really. The pallid glow of Murasaki was barely adequate to drive the process, for one thing. And anyway, even at best the return was less than thirty percent efficient.

Minoru often dreamed he was back aboard the Yu-mato, where, despite the ennui of ten years’

subsistence on hydroponics, there was at least some variety. And, once a month the chef would prepare delicacies from that exclu-sive, locked chamber where fish were kept in special tanks, where licentious amounts of power and resources were spent nurturing rare herbs.

Tomorrow the supply boat would come with provi-sions for the two of them. Even if it failed to arrive, the clever recycling devices would certainly keep Minoru and Emile alive for some time. But not in equilibrium. Without replenishment, they would waste away on ‘-a narrow diet of ever-declining value.

There was a parallel in his mission here. His purpose on this island was only partly to help Emile and the main xenology team on Purple Cliffs Island make contact with the Ihrdizu. Over the months and years ahead, Minoru’s principal job would be to figure out what kept this world from toppling over into catastrophe.

Catastrophe like the kind we experienced on Earth so recently, he thought. Only in his parents’

lifetime had the chain of ecological crises back home abated enough for nations to contemplate deep-space exploration again. And although heroic efforts had finally stopped the spreading deserts, Minoru knew that those gleeful, rosy-eyed propa-gandists in the press were wrong. Earth would never be “just as good as before.”

The timer on the sunlamp rattled to a stop. The warm, brilliant glow from the UV panels tapered off gradually to let his eyes readapt. These daily sessions were welcome, as well as necessary to stave off Sunlight Deficiency Disorder. But they also reinforced his sense of being on an alien world. The most luminous day on Genji wasn’t bright enough to satisfy a human’s biologi-cal hunger for light.

Nor was this a particularly shiny day even for Genji. Wrapping a robe around himself, Minoru went to the east-facing window and watched high tide finish inundat-ing the natives’ broad expanse of trapping ponds, depositing the sea’s bounty there to be left high and dry when the waters receded again. Tending these carefully designed basins took up the time of half the labor force, and their ownership was subject to fierce inheritance tra-dition... sometimes enforced by nasty local feuds among the natives.

Minoru went to his computer deck and surveyed his latest composite of this island’s biological history. Slowly, out of all his, deep core samples, soil siftings, and animal dissections, a picture was resolving. The family tree he had already traced out—of land and shore species indigenous to the region—was probably no more than two percent filled in. And yet, the shape of that tree was taking form. From the fossil record, he was beginning to suspect all was not as it appeared here on Genji.

My supervisor may not like this report, he thought as he popped a macro-cube into the memory slot and copied onto it his monograph, to be sent back to Okuma Base.

Nevertheless, he looked forward to tomorrow’s lander. Perhaps Yukiko would be the pilot.

If only I had something to offer her.

Starship Yamato Crew Database: General News

Infrastructure Team: Sr. Lt. Hideo Ishikawa, in temporary command of the Yamato, reports find-ing an unfortunate lack of carbonaceous chondrite asteroids in convenient orbits near Genji-Chujo space. It appears we will have to set up a purifi-cation plant on Chujo, after all, to provide water for our

,

orbital facilities.

To no Chujo Expedition: Capt. Koremasa Ta-mura commands from Lander Four. Exploration dome established near the Area Fifty—one Anom-aly—a purported “archaeological” site accord-ing to surveys by the Spacer party. Twenty-five total personnel. Fifteen assigned to the forthcom-ing attempt to contact purported sentients. Ten to examine Spacer landing area for evidence of contamination.

Genji Expedition: With deployment of the big antenna in high orbit, a report has been prepared for beaming back to Earth. Unlike prior data-clusters, this one shall be designed specifically for public consumption. It has been decided to focus this first show on the harmonious, cooperative na-ture of Ihrdizu society. Although violence does play a small role in life among the inhabitants, their traditions of serenity appear to have much in common with those which we have managed to maintain in Japanese society. The value of this message to the people of Earth as a whole should be exemplary.

The Ihrdizu children were engaged in one of their fre-quent games of hide-and-find-the-object.

Among the younger ones, this apparently involved a lot of sniffing and nosing around to find some concealed item—usually an overripe piece of fruit. But as the game involved older par-ticipants, teams formed and elaborate rituals of clue and deception seemed to come into play. According to. Emile, understanding the game ought to reveal a lot about the na-tives’ psychology, and so Minoru’s partner became a fixture in the village green just before sunset, when the competi-tions were most frequent. He could be seen quite often clumsily but enthusiastically following the players about in his clunking pressure suit, breathlessly speaking into his portable recorder and panning with his camera.

Minoru, meanwhile, had taken an interest in the vil-lage pets, and pests.

“So you say the Kaw Kaw were brought to the is-land by your ancestors?” he inquired of Ta’azsh’da late one afternoon, pointing to a pair of snuffling, six-legged animals that prowled the fringes of the hamlet’s garbage midden.

“It is true. ***. It is said that Ish’n’Po herself took the *** Kaw Kaw on her very own raft, lest the *** families on other rafts throw the *** things overboard during the long voyage.–

“You mean your ancestors actually had a use for those things?” he asked dubiously. The Ihrdizu had symbiotic relationships with quite a few other creatures, which ap-peared to serve roughly the same roles dogs, cats, donkeys, and falcons used to play for humans back on Earth. But this disgusting creature rooting around below them hardly seemed promising. From the natives’ name for it—which translated as something like “bad stink”—Minoru gathered it was considered vermin.

“Oh, yes. “ Ta’azsh’da’s snorkel waved clockwise. “It is said they were useful keeping the ***

under control ... and for locating nests of ***. Of course, there are no *** any longer, except on a few outlying islands.”

Minoru quashed his impatience with the translation. This conversation would presumably have more meaning later, after Emile’s next linguistic update. For now, it was important to keep the momentum going.

“It is said your people came to these islands eighty-two generations ago—”

“So very ***. Do you want me to recite my genealogy?”

“I’d be honored to hear it,” Minoru said, politely. “Might we put that off for a more convenient time?” He did not want to offend Ta’azsh’da, but listening to long lists of ancestors was a daunting prospect right now.

“That would be fine. I come from a very *** line of mothers.”

“Of that I’m certain. But what I’m most interested in is what your legends say about the plants and animals your ancestors found here. Especially those no one has seen for a long time.”

Starship Yamato Crew Database: General News

Genji Expedition: The results of preliminary contacts at several island sites seem wonderfully encouraging. There is a growing consensus that nothing stands in the way of proceeding to direct encounters with the more cosmopolitan and tech-nologically advanced Ihrdizu cultures on the mainland....

... Chief Ecologist Seigi Sato reports”

“This solar system is a less dynamic place than our own, less subject to stellar perturbations or asteroidal impacts. In this more stable environ-ment, which has not gone through the frequent fluctuations of our home system; we find none of the signs of spreading wasteland and deserti-fication that have inflicted so much pain at home.

“From orbit we see clear evidence that the Ihrdizu have been industrialized in some locales for much longer periods than humans were on Earth—although, at a lower technological level—and yet, they appear to live without significant environmental degradation, such as erosion or de-sertification. I am now convinced we have found here proof of what Japan has contended all along, that the environmental disturbances suffered by Earth during recent generations were the product of natural forces, and not the result of so-called human mistreatment of our home world. For as-tronomical reasons. Genji is a luckier planet than Earth. It is as simple as that.”

Dust rose around the jets of the !ander as its engines turned over on idle. Near the ramp, Emile Esperanza went over an inventory list next to a stack of fresh sup-plies, just delivered from Okuma Base.

Minoru, on the other hand, insisted on escorting the pilot back to her craft personally. When they reached the bottom of the ramp, he handed her the data cube containing his report, which she pushed into a pocket of her provocatively snug pressure suit.

“You’re sure you can’t stay?” he asked Yukiko, un-able to keep disappointment out of his voice.

She shook her head. “I can’t, Minoru-san. I promised to drop in at Purple Cliffs Station for dinner this evening.” Then, with a’ light in her eyes, she leaned toward him and whispered, almost conspiratorially.

“They say they have found a local berry with low toxicity levels, and what they call a ‘tart but pleasant’

taste.”

“Lucky bastards,” Minoru commented, and meant the remark in more ways than one. He knew full well what Todo and Shimura were trying to accomplish, by inviting Yukiko to stay for a “feast.”

Yukiko smiled—dimples under her brown eyes made him want to reach out and touch her smooth skin. Only propriety, and her helmet faceplate, prevented him. “I’ll let you know how it tastes, Minoru-san,” she said. “Really. If it’s any good, I’ll bring you some next time I drop by.”

“Just so.” Minoru looked away. He sometimes wished this expedition had been run in a somewhat less Japanese way. On the trip out there might have been more liberal sexuality, as practiced by the Spacers. But the Jap-anese response to intense pressures—especially those of long, confined spaceflight—was instead to tighten social strictures. There had been ten women, all of them of foreign extraction, whose berths on the Yatnato had been won only partly by virtue of their technical skills. They had also promised to “adopt” several unmarried male crewmembers each. But Minoru had seldom opted to take on that release. As for unmarried women, chastity had been the rule for ten years.

Now that they had landed, though, and people had occasional moments of privacy, something had changed in the social climate. Soon, larger living quarters would be available in the high, altiplano freshness of Okuma Bise. Room for new couples to set up house, and even start families.

He and Yukiko, like many others, had set out from Earth as teenagers. And yet he was still looked on as an awkward youth, while she was considered the most beau-tiful and desirable woman among those left unattached. Clearly she was in the process of looking, sampling, mak-ing up her mind.

Underneath his outwardly impassive shell, Minoru felt helpless and, to a growing degree, desperate.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said, turning at the top of the ramp. She reached inside the ship and brought down a slim, lacquered box, crafted delicately out of hard wood. This she handed to Minoru. “A present, since you miss the cooking we get at Okuma.”

He looked down at the gift. Under the veneer of wood, a refrigeration unit purred delicately. His mouth watered. “Is it...?”

“Sushi. Yes. Hamachi and Uni. I hope you like it.”

Her smile filled Minoru with wonder, encouraging imagined possibilities he had all but given up on only mo-ments before. “Will I see you again soon?”

“Maybe.– Then, impulsively, she touched her helmet to his for just an instant. “Take care, Minoru.”

Soon the lander rose on its column of heated steam ... watched, as usual, by a crowd of Ihrdizu gaping from be-hind a safety line scratched in the sand. Minoru watched the flying machine peel away, and followed its progress across the sky until it disappeared. Then he went to help Emile move the supplies.

“You’ve got hopes,” Emile commented succinctly, perhaps dubiously.

“Come on,” Minoru grumbled. “I still have the east slope cliffs to cover before nightfall. And haven’t you got work to do, too?”

He hoisted a crate that should have called for two in this gravity, and moved awkwardly but happily toward the storage dome, away from Emile’s knowing smile.

The laser played across the cliff face in double waves. First a gentle scan lit up every millimeter of the sheer sed-imentary surface, while widely spaced recording devices read its reflections, noting every microscopic contour and color variation. Then, when that first scan was, finished, the machine sent forth a much more powerful second beam, which seared away a thin layer wherever it touched. The monitors

,

now recorded glowing spectra from these vapors, taking down elemental compositions in minute detail.

Minoru always made certain only a few Ihrdizu were present to watch this process. He did not want superstitious awe of humans spreading even faster than at present. A certain minimal amount was good, since it meant he and Emile would probably be safe from receiving the pointy end of a trident in some future tiff or labor-management dispute. On the other hand, he had no wish to be mistaken for a god.

I might have been tempted, were the natives more at-tractive, Minoru admitted wryly.

Adolescence was not so far in the past that he didn’t recall fantasies of old. The comic books he used to read in Japan had been filled with seraglios and other imaginative scenarios to titillate bored teenagers and suppressed businessmen alike. Even on ship-board— especially on, shipboard—fantasy had been a way to swim against the tide of ennui. He recalled one mural, painted on the lower decks by frustrated engineers, that depicted green-skinned but nubile alien princesses, catering to the desires of noble Earthling demigods.

Minoru had thought the notion childish, and unlikely, given the reports on Genji from the robot probe.

Now, all he could conjure in his mind was one face. One person. His job forced him to spend too much time exploring sterile cliffs, when what he really needed to impress Yukiko might be waiting in some nearby, meadow, some underground bur-row, or a tidal shoal.

Well, at least Phs’n’kah is out—there looking on my behalf I’m sure he’ll come up with something.

Minoru focused attention onto the business at hand. What grew in the computer display was a slice-by-thin-slice representation of the cliff. Each horizontal lamina layer had been laid down along this ancient coast long ago, when the vagaries of a slowly shifting archipelago pushed lapping tidal waters over the place where he now stood. Amid the slowly growing images in his bolo screen lay speckles of bright color where the semi-intelligent device discovered the outlines of fossils... the remains of dead Genjian crea-tures in the mud so very long ago, only to have their hard tissues replaced gradually by a process of mineralization and preservation quite similar to what occurred countless times on Earth.

Playing with the controls, Minoru zoomed among these discoveries, linking and correlating each one with his database of currently living animal types. Tentative iden-tifications could be made in real time, by, phylum, family, genus ... and sometimes even by species. This, too, was just a sampling at the edges of the island’s complex history. Still, what emerged was a picture that—added to what the other teams were determining elsewhere—would eventu-ally tell the story of life here on Genji.

Already it was clear that here, just as on Earth, the epic began in the sea. Quite early, some Genjian life-form discovered a chemical similar to chlorophyll. Using sun-light as an energy source, it used this

“xanthochlorophyll” to split water, manufacturing its own carbohydrates and proteins. This had a side effect—spilling a waste product, oxygen, into the atmosphere. Eventually a crisis developed as that corrosive substance built up in the air. As on Earth, Genji’s early, microscopic creatures had to adapt to chang-ing conditions or die.

Eventually, they not only adapted, but learned to thrive on the stuff. Higher-energy chemistry enabled experiments in faster, more complex modes of living.

Over the course of time, some one-celled animals fell on the knack of combining and sharing roles just as the eukaryotes did on Earth, 700 million years before Minoru was born.

The ,complex of biochemical interactions specific to Genji had already been worked out before the Yamato ar-rived, by one of the scientists aboard the Spacer vessel. That genius among a crew of idiots had described how the typical Genjian metazoan cell operated...a picture of sym-metry and molecular cooperation—just like the machinery grinding away in Minoru’s own body.

Amazing similarities. Amazing differences. As the cliff face dissolved, micron by micron, Minoru fell into a zenlike work trance, absorbed by the beauty of the story unfolding before his eyes. His hands flew across the con-trols, eyes darting from discovery to discovery.

In his youth, he had pictured exploring alien worlds as a matter of striding forth, ray gun in hand, to rescue (and be rewarded by) beautiful alien maidens. He had envisioned himself the hero of space battles, planting the flag, beating off hordes of monsters in order to uphold the right.

The fantasies of childhood were vivid, barbaric. Mi-noru recalled them with affection but, all in all, much pre-ferred being grown up.

More transients had arrived to set up camp in the shan-tytown over by the funnel-weed swamp.

They were young adult females mostly, just past their First Blush and into their wandering, home-finding phase. They had been drift-ing in for days, from distant parts of the island, and even nearby isles, attracted by the sudden wealth of circulating metal provided by the Earthmen. The newcomers’ shelters were rude, makeshift affairs, built on high stilts to rise just over the average daily tides.

The hovels looked quite miserable in the shadow of finely carved and dressed hilltop farmsteads.

Established villagers glared down from their family compounds. Some were seen sharpening “decorative”

wooden stakes, ar-ranged in close, neat rows around their grounds. Guards were posted to prevent pilfering from the Terran domes, when Minoru and Emile were away. Recently, there had been incidents between locals and newcomers in the village common areas—scrapes and jostlings for the few jobs on Minoru’s work crews. Tail blows exchanged as young fe-males preened and competed for the attention of the be-wildered local bachelors.

Yesterday, at Minoru’s urging, Emile took a break from interviewing his personal coterie of “wise women” and began questioning some of the transients instead. On his return to the habitation dome, the young linguist had expressed dismay. “We’ve disrupted the economy of the entire island! Everything is in an uproar, and it’s all because of us.”

Minoru had not been surprised. “That’s one reason contact teams were spread widely—to lessen the impact Anyway, what you’re seeing is just an exaggeration of what went on all the time even before we came.”

“But the fighting! The violence!”

“You’ve been listening to Dr. Sato’s romantic notions about our Peaceful Ihrdizu Friends, who don’t even know the meaning of war. Well, that’s true up to a point, but don’t you ever listen to the folk tales you yourself re-corded? How about the story of Rish’ong’nu and the Town That Refused?”

“I remember. It’s a morality tale, about the importance of hospitality”

Minoru interrupted, laughing. “Oh, it’s much simpler than that. Rish’ong’nu really existed, did you know that? And the village she conquered did not burn once, but at least forty times, over centuries both before and after her adventure.”

Emile blinked. “How do you know that?”

“Simple archaeology. I’ve taken cores of the site where Rish’ong’nu supposedly lived, and found carbon lay-em that give very specific dates for each rise and fall.

“Anyway, it makes perfect sense. These beings ex-ercise female-mobile exogamy accompanied by partial polyandry based on male-intensive nesting. It’s not quite like anything seen among higher animals on Earth, but the pattern’s pretty familiar among some types of birds and amphibians back home. Young females have to set out and win a place for themselves in the world—and find a hus-band who will take primary care of the offspring. She does this either by wooing a mate from a strong, well-established line, or by pioneering new territory, or by taking a place from someone else.”

“You make it sound so savage.”

Minoru shook his head. “It’s right and proper to love and admire Nature, Emile, but never to idealize it. The process of survival is a competitive one. Always has been, in every species ever known.

“For instance, it didn’t take us long to confirm that the most fundamental rule of biology on Earth applies just as universally here, on Genji and on Chujo.”

“What rule is that?”

“It was known even before Darwin, and it goes like this—in all species, the average breeding pair usually tries to have more offspring than is required to replace them-selves. In hard times, that extra effort helps keep the pop-ulation stable, making up for those that die without reproducing at all. And during good times, or when oppor-tunity knocks, it results in the spreading of genes—”

“But if that’s the rule, what keeps animals from overpopulating?”

“Good question. And the answer is—natural controls. Predation by carnivores higher on the food chain, for in-stance. Or, for the top predators, competition among them-selves for a limited supply of food and shelter. I know it doesn’t sound nice. It’s just nature’s way.”

“But humans, on Earth... “

“Again, good point. We’re, an exception, indeed. We learned to control our numbers voluntarily. But after how long a struggle? At what price? And by what force of will? I assure you, no other Earthly species even makes the effort.

“So, it’s only natural I was curious about the sentient creatures we found here. I don’t know about the Chujo natives yet—”

“Who does?”

“—but on Genji I set out to learn, did the rule hold here as well? And if so, what about the sapient natives? The Ihrdizu? That’s why I asked you to inquire about their use of birth control.”

“They do have some means,” Emile said eagerly.

“Yes, though practiced only sporadically. And so the question remains: what else controls the Ihrdizu population?”

Emile looked at Minoru glumly. “I suppose you’re going to tell me.”

But Minoru only shrugged. “I’m still not sure myself. It seems a little bit, of everything is involved.

Some delib-erate birth control, to be sure. Some predation by sea car-nivores, whenever Ihrdizu venture out too far, foraging. There is definitely a portion of the death rate that is attrib-utable to low-level internecine fighting over the better fens, farmlands, and housing sites. At intervals, there has clearly been starvation.

“And then there’s the environment.”

“How do you mean?” Emile asked.

“Have you noticed the way Ihrdizu houses are shaped like boats, even though they’re built mostly on hilltops?”

“Of course. It’s a holdover from their ancestor-legends, from when they were seafaring...” Emile trailed off when Minoni shook his head. “No?”

“I’m afraid not. They build them that way for much less romantic, more pragmatic reasons. Because, every once in a while, the tides sweep up that high.”

Emile gasped at the mental image that evoked, but Minoru went on. “That’s why the shantytown looks so out of place. On Earth most cities used to have poor areas, even slums, which played major, long-lasting roles in community life. Here, though, everybody knows such areas can only be temporary.

For the newcomers it’s win a place on high ground, or die. And not all high ground will do. Only slopes overlooking water are really suitable.”

As the implications soaked in, Emile muttered a Bud-dhist prayer for mercy. At the same time, he crossed him-self in the Latin manner. “No wonder the level of tension is rising so!”

“No wonder. Obviously, you and I will have to leave soon.”

–But—you said this sort of thing was going on any-way, even without our presence.”

“We are setting off a local intensification, though,” Minoru said. “I don’t want the consequences on my karma. Besides, conditions here are no longer natural. We must try to finish soon, before there’s nothing left here to learn any more.”

Starship Yamato Crew Database: General News

Infrastructure Expedition: Sr. Lt. Hideo Ishi-kawa reports that smelting has begun on asteroid M27852. It is hoped that within three months we may be able to establish a minimal, phase-one solar array in orbit above the combined Genji-Chujo epicenter. Even at best, however, it will take several years to create enough infrastructure to be certain of human survival in this alien sys-tem....

A picture was beginning to take form. From his sam-pling of sedimentary layers, from his survey of the island’s flora and fauna, and from the natives’ own legends and traditions, Minoru felt he was beginning to see an outline of Genji’s recent geological history. Only a sketch as yet, but a startling one nonetheless.

Dr. Sato and the others weren’t going to like his report at all.

There were some things he hadn’t told even Emile, about what happened when the ancestors of Ta’azsh’da and Phs’n’kah arrived on this isle, eighty or so Ihrdizu gener-ations ago. The paleontological record was clear, though. Within four of those generations, half of the species native to this isolated ecosphere were extinct, or driven across the waters.

This was no intentional genocide, of course. Human migrants had done the same thing just as inadvertently, back on ancient Earth—as on Hawaii, where countless bird species vanished soon after men and women arrived in Pol-ynesian canoes. Far more of the harm was actually done by the creatures arriving with men—rats and dogs—than by human hunters themselves.

Destruction of habitat was another major cause, both on Earth and in this part of Genji, where nearly every shal-low area near the tidal zone had been carved into terraces for algae farms and collection traps.

The history of species die-offs was right there to be seen, in the uppermost layers of soil and rock.

Phs’n’kah and a few other bright Ihrdizu had been astonished when Minoru gave them lessons how to read that record. It was not the stuff of legends, just a long list of animals and plants that weren’t around any more.

But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. No, not the big-gest one at all.

Starship nrato Crew Database: General News

Genii Expedition:

... one of the most curious things about our discovery of Genji is the incredible temporal co-incidence—that we should have happened upon this world at the very time when mainland cul-tures are amidst their burgeoning industrial rev-olution, spreading both physically and in their confident grasp of their technology.

What a fluke of timing! Consider. Had we on Earth been slower, and the Ihrdizu faster by a few millennia—a mere flicker as time goes by in this vast galaxy—it might have been they who discovered us, Let this realization teach us humility as we seek to learn from our new neighbors.

She stepped down the larder’s ramp with a grace that was pleasurable to watch. It was so much like the way she flew machines across the sky, somehow both demure and erotic at the same time. He doubted any Occidental woman could ever manage it.

Minoru’s heart leapt at the sight of her; nevertheless, he kept his greeting properly reserved. They exchanged bows. To his delight, he saw she carried an overnight bag.

“So, what is this surprise you promised me?” Yukiko asked. Did something in her voice imply possibilities?

Ah, but what are possibilities? To become real, they must be earned.

“You’ll see,” he told her, and gestured toward the village, where smoke curled up from smoldering cook fires. “This way. Unless you want to freshen up first?”

She laughed. “Wriggling out of this suit so soon after

I just put it on? No, I ‘freshened’ in the lander. Come on, I’m hungry.”

So, she’s guessed what this is about. Minoru was only slightly disappointed. After all, her insight showed an as-pect of compatibility. They thought, alike.

Or. at least we share one obsession.

It hardly seemed very intimate, walking slowly side by side in clunking, ground-hugging steps, carefully main-taining balance on the sloping path. Gravity was like a treacherous octopus, always waiting to grab you. Swaddled inside their suits—even with their arms and lower legs now free by decree of Okuma Base doctors—it felt as if they were performing a long, slow promenade.

Minoru hoped to dance a different dance with Yukiko, later. One in which gravity would play a friendlier role. But he kept a tight reign on such thoughts.

“Where is Emile?” she asked as they passed several hilltop citadels and finally approached the plateau where village center lay.

“He’s observing an Ihrdizu folk moot, over there in • the civic arena.” Minoru gestured toward where several close hills formed a bowl, from which the low hum of sev-eral hundred voices could be heard, rising and falling in a moaning melody. Minoru had witnessed moots before, though none this large. They struck him as somewhat like a Greek play—with chorus, actors, and all—crossed with N6 theater, and interrupted at odd moments by bouts of something that seemed vaguely reminiscent of sumo wrestling.

“Emile persuaded the Village Mothers to hold a spe-cial event for the transients, to relieve tensions and maybe give them a stake in the community.”

“Sounds pretty daring, an alien making suggestions like that.”

Minoru shrugged. “Well, we had to try something. The poor kid was wracked with guilt feelings, even though the situation isn’t really our fault. Anyway, it seems to be working. I’d have been expected to attend as an honored guest, only I’m one of the cooks for the feast afterward, so I’m excused.”

“Ah, so.” She said it calmly. But had he picked up just a trace of excitement in her voice? Minoru hoped so.

Phs’n’kah had been tending to the preliminaries for Minoru, carefully removing the external carapaces of thirty recently snared, inch-long zu’unutsus, and one by one lay-ing the nude insectoids on a wooden cutting board near the cooking fire. Before being cut up, the zu’unutsus looked like Earth caterpillars, and fit a similar niche in this eco-system, though nowadays they were very rare.

“Thank you,” he told his assistant, then explained to Yukiko, “In my routine bioassay I finally struck it rich. Two plants and this insectoid, all of whom practice chem-ical segregation of just the kind we need.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that in all three cases, every chemical that might be toxic to humans happens to be segregated—iso-lated—to specific parts or organs. A lot better than those berries the Purple Cliffs team fed you—”

Yukiko frowned. “I was ill for a week.”

—which were considered ‘edible’ only because the poison levels were low and ‘tolerable.’ In this case, all you have to do is carefully remove the bad parts.... “ With a dissecting scalpel he deftly excised portions that served functions similar to kidneys and livers for the zu-‘unutsus, flicking them in high arcs to sizzle on the coals. “You might say it’s a lot like preparing Fugu, back home—”

“Really?” She grabbed his arm so tightly that he felt it through the suit fabric. “You devil, you!”

She seemed impressed, even thrilled, when he com-pared this delicacy to Fugu—to Oriental blowfish—which was considered one of Japan’s paramount delicacies, com-manding titanic prices back home. Fugu chefs were re-spected more than surgeons, and yet mistakes still killed hundreds of customers each year. The appetite for Fugu never slackened. Indeed, risk seemed part of the excite-ment. Minoru had been about to assure her that he had taken precautions. Even in the event of a mistake, the poisons found in the forbidden organs of zu’unutsu weren’t so bad they couldn’t be dealt with by vomiting and some an-titoxin, which he had at hand.

But Yukiko’s expression stopped Minoru. From the look in her eyes, either she had great faith in his skill, or this was a girl who relished a thrill now and then.

Even after the joyful discovery of something edible out of the countless field samples, it had still taken considerable trial and error to reach this point. The recipe had come about after many tests, of which the last involved himself and Emile as guinea pigs. Nevertheless, the cul-mination had been saved for tonight.

It was to be the first complete, all-Genjian meal served for humans, ever. That is, if all went as planned.

Carefully he slit open several yer’tani roots and slipped the flayed filets of zu’unutsus inside, along with chopped qui’n’mathi.

“They should bake for an hour,” he said, wrapping each combination in funnel-weed fronds and putting them directly on the coals. “Why don’t we go for a walk in the meantime?”

The other cooks, most of them males with infants riding on their tails, hissed amiably as Minoru led Yukiko through the press toward a steep embankment overlook-ing the tidal basins. There the two humans sat down, dan-gling their legs over a hand-wrought stone wall, looking up as low clouds parted to show the broad, desert-brown face of Chujo. It was a little eerie to realize that up there. right now, some of their crewmates were attempting to make contact with aliens more enigmatic than even the Ihrdizu.

“You know, your latest report almost got you recalled to Okuma Base,” she told him.

“I know. How is Dr. Sato taking it?”

“He’s hopping mad. And Dr. O’Leary feels hurt you made these revelations without consulting him first.”

“That might have gotten my report buried in the da-tabase. This is something that must be known by all, before we decide how to make our homes on this world.”

“Our principal purpose is study.”

“Indeed. But we’ll also live, as men and women. Have homes. Perhaps children. We should know the implications, and not take such steps unconsidered, like animals.”

She looked at him, obviously feeling his intensity. Mi-noru sensed somehow that she approved. “Tell me about the cycles, then,” she asked.

Minoru sighed. He had gone through it all so many times, first over and over in his head and in the database, then in his report, and finally in interviews for Team Ya-mato News. But this audience could be refused nothing.

“There is no coincidence,” he began. “Or not as great a one as Sato thought. It’s still surprising that two stars so near each other developed technological cultures so close in time. But we didn’t just happen on Genji’s solitary in-dustrial revolution. It’s occurred on this planet before, at least six or seven times.”

From a pouch at his belt, he withdrew a corroded lump of metal. “This may be a coin, or a medallion. I found it locally, only a little ways underground, but none of the natives can identify the writing. And I doubt they’ll be able to on the mainland, either.

“The present culture settled this, island eighty gener-ations ago. Before that, it was deserted. But earlier still, other Ihrdizu lived here. Those occupations came in mul-tiple waves. And several times they had metallurgy.”

“Did they... was each fall because of war?” Yukiko asked in a hushed voice.

“Who can say? Oh, there’s no sign of nuclear com-bat, if that’s what you mean. No war-induced endless winter. You might think there was such a holocaust, though, from the way species died out in waves, then re-covered after Ihrdizu disappeared again. And every de-cline seemed to occur at the same pace as environmental degradation.”

“No wonder Dr. Sato’s mad at you! You agree with the Americans and Spacers—that technology can harm a world!”

Minoru shrugged. “There was a time when that was a central dogma of ecology. Perhaps we abandoned such a view too quickly, for reasons more political than scientific.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“No matter.” He shook his head. “Anyway, the Gen-jians appear to have been lucky; one of the limitations of their race actually led to its survival. Since they were—and are—constrained to living in areas near, the shore, none of their past civilizations could ever do much harm to the in-teriors of the continents. Those and the great oceans served as genetic reservoirs, so that each time Ihrdizu civilization fell, and the natives’ numbers plummeted, there were lots of species that could drift into the emptied niches and fill them again. In fact, it’s rather startling how quick some recovery times were. As little as ten thousand years in one case.”

Yukiko frowned, looking down at the ground. “I’m beginning to see what you mean. Back at Okuma Base, there was talk, among some of the engineers—about some of the advantages we’ll be able to offer Ihrdizu civilization. With the right tools, they could exploit much more territory than they now have available—”

Then she blinked. “Oh ... and humans. We’ll even-tually make our homes on the highlands and mountaintops, where we can breathe without machines. But anything we do up there will affect whole watersheds....

Minoru shrugged. “Just so.”

They sat together in silence then. Minoru regretted having spoiled the mood in this way, and was at a loss how to recover their previous high spirits. Idiot, he thought. C’an’t you’ ever leave business at the shop?

But he shouldn’t have worried. Yukiko nudged him. “Well, we humans haven’t done any harm yet, have we? Never borrow karma from next week, I always say.”

He grinned in response. “A wise woman is a treasure beyond price.”

“And it’s a wise man who realizes what outlasts beauty.” She answered his smile. “So, it should be almost time now. Let’s eat!”

The moot was still in its last phases when they re-turned to the cook area. But stragglers were already slith-ering into the clearing to line up in winding queues with clay and wicker utensils. Newcomer females mixed with the locals with apparent conviviality, and Minoru could tell Emile’s plan must have worked. For now at least, all thought of strife had been put aside. Good.

He fished the zu’unutsus from the coals and gingerly unwrapped the steaming leaves. Balancing their meals on native crockery, he and Yukiko claimed jars of a yeasty native brew that had been deemed only marginally poison-ous by Okuma Base doctors... certainly no more, danger-ous than some of the concoctions whipped up, aboard the Yamato during the long voyage out.

When Yukiko inhaled the aroma, then bit into her first roll, the expression on her face was Minoru’s reward. Tears streamed down her cheeks, and he heard a soft sob of joy. The ridiculousness of such emotion—to be spent on a mere meal—did not escape her, and she burst out laughing, de-murely hiding her mouth behind one hand. Minoru, too, alternately laughed and cried as he savored the rich, deli-cious flavors.

Together, silently, they ate and watched Murasaki set-tle toward the horizon, igniting the western cloud banks with streamers of golden fire.

At last, wiping his mouth through his helmet’s chow-baffle, Minoru commented. “Stupid Spacers.

They hurried home with a few chemical samples. So what? If they’d stayed another few months, we could have sent zu’unutsus home with them, and we’d all be rich, Spacer and Yamato crew alike.”

“I’m just as glad that never happened.” Yukiko sighed. “For the first time... I think I can picture this as my home. I don’t even want to share this with Earthlings.”

She grinned at the irony of her remark.

It felt good, stretched out in the twilight, laughing together and sharing the very first moment two humans drew a full measure of sustenance from Genji and only Genji. “Of course we’ll have to plant Earth crops on the highlands, and make orbital farms, and do lots of other things. But it’s good to know we can partake of this world, too.”

She agreed in silence, but set his heart beating faster by slipping her hand into his.

The noisy clamor of Ihrdizu banqueting rose behind them, followed by a round of their strange, atonal sing-ing. Minoru and Yukiko lay contentedly, watching Chujo head slowly from crescent to quarter phase. They barely turned to look when Phs’n’kah waddled up to ask if there was anything more Minoru needed. It seemed several of the newcomer females wanted to serenade Phs’n’kah, to-night, and he had gotten a baby-sitter for the kids

“No, I don’t need anything more. You’ve already earned a bonus, today,” Minoru assured Phs’n’kah.—To-morrow, though, I want to get together some of our best foragers and go after some more zu’unutsus! We must learn how to breed them in captivity. Send samples to Okuma Base...”

Minoru was already thinking how well this might serve as a peace offering to Dr. Sato. and so he rambled on for a while before noticing the stance of the Ihrdizu male, whose snorkel drooped disconsolately.

“What’s the matter?” Minoru asked through the translator.

“No more zu’unutsus. All ***. This was the ***.” Yukiko gasped. But Minoru squeezed her hand and laughed, a little nervously.

“Oh, come on, I know they weren’t plentiful. But surely there must be some hives left in the hills. Or on other

His voice trailed off as he wished he did not know this Genjian so well. Or that Phs’n’kab weren’t so well known for utter, reliability and truthfulness.

“That is where we had to go to find these,” Phs’n’kah answered simply.

“But Minoru swallowed. “Are you absolutely sure?”

Phs’n’kah whirled his snorkel clockwise. “All the best *** foragers took part. We knew it would bond you to us .

.. if only you could *** eat of Genji. So we made a vow of ***. We did not fail. Now it is done.”

Minoru sat back against the stone wall with a sigh. This was a blow.

It was inconceivable.

It was...

Yukiko suddenly giggled. And Minoru could not pre-vent a flicker of a smile from twitching the corner ‘of his mouth.

It was... horribly hilarious!

He laughed, saw the shared understanding in Yukiko’s eyes, and broke up, shaking with guffaws.

Of course, he realized as his sides began to hurt. Of course it had to be this way. In order to make this our home, we had to do more than just partake of its substance . . . we must also share its karma.

And what better way to do that than to sacrifice the one thing on Genji we might have come to treasure above all others? Above—may the gods forgive us—even the Ihrdizu?

What better way to demonstrate what we have to lose?

Oh, he would do his best to persuade his fellow col-onists to establish rules and traditions that would keep the Earthling share of ecological shame to a minimum. Perhaps they might even help the Ihrdizu escape the cyclic trap that had them ensnared for so long.

On the other hand, perhaps humans would prove a bane to this world, helping the Genjians complete a job of destruction their own limitations had prevented them from finishing before. He would fight to prevent that, but who could predict the future?

All of that lies ahead, though, Minoru thought. All that and much more. For well or ill, we are part of this world now. Phs’n’kah was right. This is now our home.

Yukiko held up the last pair of zu ‘unutsu rolls, now cold, but still aromatic with a flavor to make the eyes water with delight ... and irony. “One we save for Emile, of course. Shall we seal and refrigerate the other one for Sato?”

He took the tender object from her, tore off a morsel, and tossed it into the bay far below. She met his eyes, and reached out to do the same. Then, with his free hand, he helped her stand.

“Let’s save it, all right,” he said. “But for a special occasion.”

“Like tonight?” Yukiko smiled. know just the thing.”

She took his arm and led him past the singing natives, down through a reed-lined valley, across glistening fens, and then up to a plateau where a white dome shone in the glow of a lantern hung over the door.

Minoru glanced back to see Emile dashing to and fro, joyously recording every aspect of the native celebration. He probably wouldn’t be back for hours.

A Plague Of Conscience

by Greg Bear

Kammer looked worse than any corpse Philby had seen; much worse, for he was alive and shouldn’t have been. This short wizened man, with limbs like gnarled tree branches and skin like leather—what could be seen of his skin beneath the encrustations of brown and green snug—had survived ten Earthly years on Chujo with-out human contact. He could hardly speak English any more.

Kammer regarded Philby through eyes paled by some Chujoan biological adaptation—the impossible that had happened to him first and then had spread so disastrously to the Quantist settlers and the Japanese stationed here. Three hundred dead, and it had certainly begun on Kam— mer’s broken, dying body, pissed on by a Chujoan shaman. They stood four meters from each other, Chujo’s sky darkling to squid’s-ink purple in the gloaming. Philby was unused to feeling nervous before any human.

Kammer, not wholly human any more, coughed, and his snug wrinkled and crawled in obscene patches, revealing yet more leather. “Not many people let to see me,” he said. “Why do you?” I come from Genji,” Philby said, “with a message from the Ihrdizu to the Chujoan shamans. Talking to you seems to be a bonus.” His voice was somewhat muffled by the isolation suit’s helmet; they were taking no chances with Kammer, or with the Chujoans.

“Ah, Christ,” Kammer said roughly, and spat a thin stream of green and red saliva on the rocky ground between them. The stream lapped onto Philby’s plastic boot covers. “Pardon. No offense. I still hate the ... taste. Keeps me alive, I think, my human thoughts think, but tastes like es-sence of crap profane.”

“You’ve heard what happened to the Quantist crew?” Philby asked.

“Bloody *criaock* and *oonshlr#hack*.”

The translator could not work with this humanized pronunciation; so little was known of Chujoan language anyway, the Masters being spare with their communica-tions. Philby jotted the words on his

,

notepad in the Chujoan phonetic devised by the Japanese, who had dropped trans-miners into a number of encampments and farm centers four years before Philby’s ship arrived in the Murasaki Sys-tem. The Chujoans had tolerated the transmitters, and what few phrases they uttered had been fed into the All Nihon shipboard supercomputers. The Japanese had been kind enough to share their knowledge with Philby.

They knew Philby would be useful. He was, after all, rational—unlike the members of the God the Physicist Church, the Quantists.

“I’ve come to talk about Carnot,” Philby said. Kammer hummed briefly and leaned on his thick, snug-encrusted stick.. Dusk was settling quickly, and Genji was a huge rotten orange high above, its own sunset line green and purple and yellow. “He’s using your name. Claims to have been blessed by you.

,

He’s spreading a re-ligion, if you can call it that, around the Budizu associa-tions, the families.... “

“I know little about the Ihrdizu,” Kammer said, voice cracking. “Never been there.” The leathery face seemed to half smile.

“He met with you, talked about his version of Jesus with you. He says you have seen visions of Chujo and Genji united under the rule of Jesus, who will come to these planets when the time is right”

The moss-covered mummy shrugged. “We didn’t talk much, doing the first,” Kammer said.

Philby tried to riddle what he meant, and decided to let context be his guide. The notepad was recording all—perhaps meaning could be found later.

“Doing the second, he was already ill. Could see that.”

“You met with him twice?” Philby asked.

Kammer nodded. “Sick the second time. He was do-ing the wind.”

“He was ill with the plague,” Philby paraphrased hopefully, his skin crawling even beneath the protective suit at the thought that Kammer had probably been the source of that plague.

“He was doing the wind,” Kammer said. “Pardon me. He was almost dead. He was looking for signs. I did what I could.”

“What was that?”

Kammer shook his head slowly and lifted his stick. “I hit him.” He brought the stick down on the ground with a sharp crack. Philby noticed there was snug on the stick as well. Some of the snug on the stick fell away in patches. “He made away before I could hit him again.”

“Do you know where Carnot has set up his base?” Philby asked, hoping that Kammer’s use of his stick had reflected an extreme personal distaste.

“Wonderful man,” Kammer said, hawking again—his entire chest patch of snug heaving like a sewage-befouled sea—but not spitting. “I don’t. Where he is. On Chujo or Genji. Who are you? Beg pardon. That means ... What will you be doing here?”

General clean-up. Triage. Sanitizing. After four years of intermittent dialogue with the Quantist ship, between the stars, pondering imponderables, watching their quasi-New Age religion grow to an obsession in the rainbow-belted times, the times of funhouse stars, in the dark profundities of loneliness every ship knows.. .

“I’m here to investigate the plague,” Philby said, ad-justing his hydrator.—And to find Carnot.”

Kammer laughed. “Thinks I’m something.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Risked doing martyr to the bullyboys. The trolls. They dislike anything new. Do the thorn fence.–

Kammer made a disgusting excretory sound in his throat and rasped, “Knew. Knew.”

Philby glanced at the line of Chujoans standing mute, motionless, six human paces east of them, and the trolls—good name that, and original with Kammer, apparently—standing with mindless patience at the edge of the village waiting for some false move, some physical or biochemical sign of his alienness, his undesirability.

“He survived the plague,” Philby said offhandedly, as if conveying sad news.

“Know that,” Kammer said. He snorted, looked di-rectly at Philby, and Philby saw for a moment the remain-ing humanity, as one might see the shadow of a former man in the face of one who has walked the streets too long, cut away from social graces. “Vector of the cultural disease.”

“Yes,” Philby said, surprised that Kammer was so in tune with his own thoughts.. “Then you agree with me, that he—that his people area danger?”

“You try to block him?”

“Yes,” Philby said. “We ... communicated with them on the way to Murasaki. They’re from the American Southwest. Fifty million New Age believers in the South-west commissioned a starship from orbiting—”

“How?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How will you do the stopping?”

“By going from village to village among the Ihrdizu, and telling them the truth. Not mystical nonsense.”

Kammer smiled, his teeth a ruin encrusted with gray. “Doing the good. I mean, that’s good of you.

What will you make of Carnot ... doing with him when you find him?”

“Make him stop polluting these worlds,” Philby said. “Ah. A service to us all.”

“You tried to stop him as well, didn’t you? With your stick?”

“He’s alive, isn’t he? You’d better go now,” Kammer said, turning his head and poking his raw-looking chin at their Chupchup observers. “They’ll make you do martyr soon. Best pass on your message from Heaven and do a ... be a trotter. Trot off. You’re beginning to bore them, you silly wretch.”

“Do I bore you as well, Kammer?” Philby said sharply. He trusted the trolls would not detect or react to his human irritation.

Kammer said nothing, the whited eyes with their pas-tel-green irises and pinhole pupils moving back and forth independently, like a lizard’s hunting for a flying insect.

“No, old fellow,” Kammer said. “I’d really like to sit and do the talk some more. But my skin tells me I’m not up to it. I always listen to my skin. Without it, I’m an indigestible memory.”

Philby nodded, the gesture almost invisible inside his helmet. “Thank you, Mr. Kammer,” he said.

Kammer had already turned and begun his limping retreat to the safety of the village. “Nothing, old folks,” Kammer said. Lurching on his beggar’s rearranged limbs, S-curved back hunched like a ridge of iron-rich mountains, without looking back he added, “Hope you know what the lo-Ihrdizu *fchix * are saying to these.” He waved a thin, crooked hand at the shaman and his attendants.

Philby didn’t. He had to take that risk.

The flat-faced, large-eyed shaman approached, ears swung forward like tiny sails, and without looking at him, as if direct eye contact was either unknown or an unspeak-able breach, snatched the Ihrdizu package from Philby’s grasp and walked away, quietly erecting his genitalia and pissing all over the sacred himatid pelt wrapper.

Philby, hair on his neck rising with fear of blue troll claws and shark teeth, walked away from the village to rejoin the transport crew on the cliff ledge a kilometer out-side the village. The Japanese escort, a small, attractive, middle-aged woman named Tatsumi, bowed on his return. Sheldrake and Thompson, pilots from his own crew, stiff-ened perceptibly. He lifted his arms and they sprayed him down, just as a precaution. Our own pissing ceremony.

Kammer’s spit had landed on the toes of his disposable boots.

“He’s become the Old Man of the Mountain,” Philby said, doffing the boot covers and tossing them into the transport’s external waste-hopper. Removing the helmet, he was left with only a hydrator and supplemental tank. Doff-ing these, he climbed into the transport. Tatsumi, Sheldrake, and Thompson followed. “He knows what I’m here for. I think he approves.”

Dream journey above the pastel land, dreary dry old Chujo, yellow husk of a world with a thin cloak of dry air and an illustrious past, if what the Japanese had witnessed years ago—that incredible ceremony of bioloons carrying Chupchups high into the atmosphere—was any indication ... And of that, Philby was doubtful.

Edward Philby, First Planetfall Coordinator of the multinational starship Lorentz, who answered only to the captains and First Manager, tried to sleep and found himself opening his eyes to stare over the mountains and once, briefly, a small pale-green lake with ancient shores like lids around a diseased eye.

We have come so far and suffered so much to be here.

He concentrated on the crooked shape of Kammer in his thoughts, broken and mummified, smelling like an un-washed tramp and yet also like something else: flowers. An odor of sanctity. Eyes like that lake.

The Quantists had come here to find something tran-scendental, their ragged poor ship surviving the voyage just barely, their faith strengthening in the great Betweens, knowing they could not return if they could not find It here, and they had been lucky. They had found It, and then It had killed them as mercilessly as the unthinking void.... Listening to the tales of their shipboard problems, the tech-nical problems with a ship not well made, the social prob-lems with a crew chosen haphazardly, on principles of ignorance. Coming to truly despise Robert Carnot as it be-came obvious the New Agers were falling into the grip of an even more radical revelation, receiving truth. . . The bitter debates corning to an end, mutual silence. . . And real-izing the New Ager ship would reach Murasaki first, a year ahead of the British ship. Arriving first, and eager to spread their revelation. And before the Lorentz had gone into or-bit, hearing the news, that ninety percent of the Benevo-lent’s crew had died of an unknown plague, and several dozen Japanese, as well. Relief at the decimation of a foe? Sadness? Triage . . .

But Carnot and twenty of his shipmates had survived, and their faith had strengthened, as Carnot integrated Kam-mer into his new religion: a glory of Chujoan biology, the truly transcendental; that which takes a man and transforms him into a survivor and a symbol. Carnot had said: “He is resurrected. The old Kammer died, just as we thought. They resurrected him, cured him of his radiation disease and his wounds, and imbued him with their spirit of Christ.” A dirty, ragged, smelly sort of Christ.

Tatsumi saw that he was not asleep. “You are worried about the settlers on Genji,” she said. “Your countrymen.”

“They’re not my countrymen,” Philby said. “I’m English. They’re bloody Southwesterners from the U.S.A.”

beg your pardon.”

“Easy mistake, we might as well be a state of the U.S.,” he said. “Europe won’t have us now. And the Spac-ers won’t have the Earth now. Or rather, then . . . “ He waved a hand over his shoulder and the seat back; time dilated by decades. He had not bothered to catch up on the thin messages from distant Sol, slender lifelines to far-flung children.

She smiled and nodded: Earth history, all past for her as well.

“You believe they will do great damage,” she offered cautiously, as if Philby might be offended to have a Japa-nese commenting upon people at least of his language and broad culture, if not his nationality.

“You know they will, Tatsumi-san,” he said. “Kam-mer knows they will. He says he tried to kill Carnot and failed.”

Tatsumi pressed her lips together and frowned. She did not appear shocked. “Camot thinks Kammer is a ... Jesus?”

“An avatar of the ancient spirituality of Chujo,” Philby said. This he had picked up from conversations with several Quantists during welcoming ceremonies on Genji. Welcome to the world we have already made our home, and the peoples we are already trying to convert. Pity you couldn’t get here sooner. “Cognate to Jesus. Jesus can be found in the universal ground state, where all our redemp-tions lie. God the Physicist shows us the way through phys-ics. Just what the Ihrdizu need—visitors from the sky able to take messages to Heaven.”

“So you take messages in his stead.”

“They know I’m not a spirit. I’m a man of solid mat-ter. I don’t feed them Physicist nonsense.”

“And what will you do next?”

“Talk to Carnot, if I can find him.–

Tatsumi frowned again, shaking her head. “He is not on Chujo? Our information was that he had left the moun tains of Nighland to come here.... “

—I’ve been looking for him for the past three weeks.—“Then he must be back on Genji. If he is there, I can find out where he is, and take you to him.”

Philby hid his surprise. “I thought your people wanted to stay out of this.–

“We thought all the cultists would die,– Tatsumi said, lowering her eyes. “They did not.”

Philby looked at her intently. Did you offer them your cure? No; they had already found their own, somehow. Would you have offered them your cure?