Foreigner Read online

  Manadgi stood up, dusted his hands, and found, in the last of the sunlight, a flat stone to take him dry-shod across the brook—a slab of sandstone the wheeled machine had crushed from the bank as it was gouging a track up the hill. It was a curiously made track, a pattern in its wheels repeating a design, its weight making deep trenches where the ground was wet. And not bogging down, evidencing the power of its engine … again, not at all astonishing: if the moon-folk could catch the winds of the ether and ride enormous sails down to earth, they were formidable engineers. And might prove formidable in other ways, one could suspect.

  He certainly had no difficulty following the machine, by the trail of uprooted trees and mud-stained grass. Dusk was deepening, and he only hoped for the moon-folk not to find him in the dark, before he could find them and determine the nature and extent of their activity.

  Not far, the Tachi aiji had said. In the middle of the valley, beyond the grandmother stone.

  Almost he failed to recognize the stone when he climbed up to it. It lay on its side.

  Distressing. But one would already suppose by the felling of trees and the devastation of the stream down below, that moon-folk were a high-handed lot, lacking fear of judgment on themselves, or perhaps simply lacking any realization that the Tachi were civilized people, who ought to be respected.

  He intended to find out, at least, what was the strength of the intruders, or whether they could be dealt with. That was ahead of other questions, such as where they did come from, or what the unfixed star might be and what it meant.

  All these things Manadgi hoped to find out.

  Until he crested the next rise in the barren clay track of the wheeled machine, and saw, in the twilight, the huge buildings, white, and square, and starkly unadorned.

  He sank down on his heels. There was no other way to hide in the barrenness the moon-folk had made, this bare-earth, lifeless sameness that extended the width of the valley around cold, square buildings painted the color of death, their corners in no auspicious alignment with the hills. He put his hands in front of his mouth to warm them, because the sinking of the sun chilled the air.

  Or perhaps because the strangeness suddenly seemed overwhelming, and because he doubted he could go alive into that place so ominously painted and so glaringly, perhaps defiantly, misaligned to the earth—he began to be in dread of what he might find as their purpose, these folk who fell to Earth on petal sails.

  II

  The sun eclipsed by the planetary rim was a glorious sight from space, but a station-dweller saw it only from cameras and stored tape—while a planet-dweller saw it once a day, if he cared to go outside, or stop on his way back from work. And Ian Bretano still did care to, because it was still that new to him.

  New and disorienting, if he fell to thinking about where he was on the planet … or where home was, or what it was or would be, for the rest of his life.

  And sometimes, at night when the stars swung above the valley, sometimes when the moon was above the horizon line and all of space was over their heads, he missed the station desperately and asked himself for a wild, panicked moment why he had ever wanted to be down here at the bottom of a planetary well, why he’d ever left his family and his friends and why he couldn’t have contributed to the cause from the clean, safe laboratories upstairs—Upstairs, they all called it, now, having taken up the word from the first team down.

  Upstairs—as if the station and safety and families and friends were still all as attainable as a ride in a lift.

  But family and friends weren’t in their reach—wouldn’t be soon, nor might ever be, for all they could know. That was the gamble they had all taken, coming down here and subjecting themselves to unregulated weather and air so thin that just walking across the compound was strenuous exercise.

  They’d acclimate to thinner air with no trouble, the medics claimed, they’d adjust—although a botanist who’d previously had mostly to do with algaes in convenient tanks and taxonomy in recorded text wasn’t sure that he was adequate to be a discoverer or a pioneer.

  Still, for all of the discomforts there were compensations. Every specimen in the lab was a new species, the chemistry and the genetics was all to discover.

  And for those of them who’d grown used to the day sky, and all that glowing, dust-diffracted blue space overhead, for those of them who had convinced their stomachs that they weren’t going to fall off the planet when they looked outward to the horizon—thank God for the hills around them, that gave the illusion of a positive, not a negative curvature—they could take deliberate chances with their stomachs, walk with their eyes on an opaque sky and watch the colors change behind the hills as the world turned its face to deep space.

  Every evening and every morning brought new variations of weather and different shadows on the hills.

  Weather and hills … words they’d learned in Earth Science, from photos that had never hinted at the transparencies of a worldly sky, or the coolth of a storm wind and the rushing sound it made in the grasses. He still found it unnerving that windows dared be so thin that thunder rattled them. He’d never realized that a cloud passing over the sun would cool the air so quickly. He’d never have guessed that storms had a smell. He’d never imagined the complexity of sound traveling across a landscape, or the smells, both pleasant and unpleasant—smells that might be more acute once his nose quit bleeding and his lungs quit aching.

  He still found it hard to make the mental conversion from being on the station looking at tape of a planet he couldn’t touch, and being on the ground looking at a point of light he might never reach again.

  It had been a hard good-bye, Upstairs. Parents, grandparents, friends … what could one say? He’d hugged them for what he knew might be the last time, in the lounge where the cameras weren’t allowed—and he’d been fine right down to the moment he’d seen his father’s expression, at which point his doubts had made a sudden lump in his throat and stayed there for the duration of the capsule ride, even after they had felt the parachute deploy.

  “See you,” he’d said to them when he was leaving. “Five years. In five years, you’ll ride down.”

  That was the plan—set up the base, and start taking selected colonists down—force the building of the reusable lander, once they’d found something the Guild wanted badly enough; and priority on that safer transport would go to family and friends of the team members on the initial phase of the on-world mission. That was a privilege he won for them by being here and taking the risk … not quite among the first down, but still on the list, dropped in early enough to be counted a pioneer.

  God, he’d been scared when he’d walked out of that room and into the suiting area, with the ten other team members. If there’d been a way to turn around, run back, beg to wait for another year of capsule-drops, to prove to him that that chute was going to open.

  If that was being a hero, he didn’t want to do it twice, and God, the freefall descent … and the landing …

  The first astronauts had done planetfall in such capsules, by parachute. The history files said so. All old Earth’s tech was in the data banks. They’d known that that first capsule would work, the same way they knew the recoverable lander was going to work—when the Guild turned loose enough resources to see it built.

  But come what might, they were down. The Guild might have refused to fly them down, but the Guild hadn’t had the right to stop the launch of what they’d built—and what they’d built, by its unpowered nature, hadn’t needed Guild pilots; what they’d built had come all of spare parts and plans from history files the Guild in its wisdom had called irrelevant to where they were.

  The Guild could have applied force to stop them, hauled the capsules back after launch—of course, the Guild could still do that, and the division was potentially that bitter.

  But so had the station its own force to use, if the Guild wanted to play by those rules—and the Guild evidently didn’t. The Guild hadn’t reached consensus, maybe, or hadn’t
expected the first cargo lander to make it, or had a crisis of, God help them, conscience—no station-dweller knew what passed in Guild councils, but the almighty Guild hadn’t made a move yet. And the Guild couldn’t starve them out once they were down here without bringing about a confrontation with the station that they’d already and repeatedly declined. The food and equipment drops, so far, kept coming.

  Food and equipment drops that might not be absolutely critical by this time next year. And then let the Guild order what they liked. If they could eat what grew here—they could live here. The first close look Phoenix had had at the planet, had seen cities and dams and the clear evidence of agriculture and mining and every other attribute of a reasonably advanced civilization … natives, with rights, to be sure. But not rights that outweighed their own rights.

  The sun sank in reds and yellows and golds. A planet shone above the hills. That was Mirage, second from the sun they called just … the sun, having no better name for it, the way they called the third planet the world, or sometimes … Down, in the way the Guild-born didn’t use the word.

  Stupid way to name the planet, Ian thought; he personally wished the first generation had come up with some definite name they could use for the world … Earth, some of them had wanted to call it, arguing that was what anyone called their home planet, and this was, in all senses that mattered, home. The Guild had immediately rejected that reasoning.

  And others, notably the hydroponics biologist, Renaud Lenoir, had argued passionately and eloquently that, no, it wasn’t Earth. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t the Sun. And it wasn’t the star they’d been targeting—when whatever had happened in hyperspace, had happened, and Taylor had saved the ship.

  Taylor might be the Guild’s saint—Taylor and Mc-Donough and the miner-pilots that, God save them, every one alive owed their lives to—but Lenoir, who’d argued so convincingly not to confound the names of Earth with this place, was due a sainthood, too, no matter that what would soon become the Guild had voted with him for reasons totally opposed to what Lenoir believed in; and that the construction workers and the station technicians, whose sons and daughters would carry out Lenoir’s vision and go down to the surface, had mostly voted against him in that meeting.

  Not Earth, Lenoir had argued, and not their target star. The planet had undergone its own evolution, all the way to high intelligence, and by that process made up its own biological rules, through its own initially successful experiment at life, and its own unique demands of environment on those ancestral organisms.

  The biochemistry, the taxonomies and the relationships of species down to microbes and up to Earth’s major ecosystems—whole branches of human science sat in Phoenix’ library: the systematic knowledge of the one life-affected, human-impacted biosphere humans had thoroughly understood, thousands of years of accumulated understanding about Earth’s natural systems and their evolution and interrelationships.

  Pinning Earthly names on mere surface resemblances, Lenoir had argued, would confuse subsequent generations about where they were and who they were. It could create a mindset that thought of the world in a way connected with their own evolutionary history, a proprietary mindset, which Lenoir argued was not good; and more, a mindset that would repeatedly lead to mistaken connections throughout the life sciences and, by those mistaken connections, to expensively wrong decisions. Corrupting the language to identify what they didn’t wholly understand could on the one hand prove fatal to their own culture and their humanity, and on the other, prove damaging to the very ecosystems they looked to for survival.

  So, Earth it was not. The council had deadlocked on the other choices; and what could Lenoir’s great-great-grandson find now to call it but the world, this blue, cloud-swirled home they had, that Taylor had found for them?

  So now that they had mined the solar system, built the station, built an economy that could, with difficulty, build the lander to reach the planetary surface, the Pilots’ Guild wanted them to leave—asked them, after nearly a hundred fifty years of orbiting the world, to shut down the station and transfer everything to the airless, waterless planetary base the Guild would gladly give them on Maudette, fourth from the sun … far from interference in a world the Guild adamantly maintained should stay sacrosanct, untouched by human influence, uncontaminated by human presence.

  Meaning that the Guild wanted them all to live under the Guild’s thumb—because that was also the price of Maudette.

  The sun touched only the top of the buildings now. The western face of the hill was all in shadow, and Ian leaned his back against lab 4 and watched the colors flare, gazing past the red clay scar of the safe-tracks toward the hills of sighing grass.

  Grasses was definitely what they were, the department had ruled so officially, and they could officially, scientifically, use that word as of two weeks ago—confirming the theories and the guesses of a century and a half of orbital survey. They were exact in their criteria, the ones of them that believed such things were important—the ones of them who had spent their careers memorizing the names for things they saw only in pictures and teaching them to generation after generation—a hundred fifty years of studying taxonomies and ecosystems of an ancestral world they’d never known—

  No damned use, the Guild said, of course. The Guild’s sons and daughters didn’t enter Earth Studies, oh, no. The Guild’s sons and daughters had been learning physics and ship maintenance and starflight in all those long years before Phoenix had flown again—and was that practical, to launch a starship when they were struggling for basic necessities?

  But, Fools, the Guild brats called the station kids fools and worse.…

  For what? Fools for endangering a planet the Guild didn’t give an honest damn about? Fools for wanting the world they could see offered abundantly everything they had so precariously, most of what they mined reserved for the Guild’s list of priorities?

  Fools for challenging Guild authority—when you couldn’t be Guild if you weren’t born a descendant of Phoenix crew? Wasn’t that the real reason the Guild-born called them fools? Because no station-builder brat could ever cross that line and train as Guild, and the Guild had every good reason for keeping it that way.

  Of course the name-calling had stung with particular force, the way the Guild kids had meant it to. Never mind that if the older generations caught the Guild brats at it, they put them on rations for a week … it didn’t break a Guild brat’s pride, and it didn’t admit a station kid to what he wasn’t born to reach, or make the science of their lost Earth and lost destination either relevant or important to the Guild.

  So now the Guild said, Leave this world? Go colonize barren Maudette, while they searched the stars for other planetary systems free of claimants—oh, and, by the way, mine and build stations at those stars to refuel the Guild’s ships, and live there and die there and do it all over again, all the lost lives and the sweat and the danger—be the worker-drones while Guild ships voyaged to places that would need more worker-drones to build, endlessly across space, all the while the Guild maintained its priorities and its perks that took most of every resource they had.

  Better here, in a cold wind and under a fading sky. Their sky, in which Mirage was setting now and Maudette had yet to rise, that curious interface between the day-glow and the true night.

  They could die here. Things might still go wrong. A microbe could wipe them out faster than they could figure what hit them. They could do terrible damage to the world and every living creature on it.

  The fears still came back, in the middle of the dark, or in the whispering silence of an alien hillside. The homesickness did, when he thought of something he wanted to say to his family, or his lifelong friends—then, like remembering a recent death, recalled that the phone link was not all that easy from here, and that there was no absolute guarantee that the reusable lander they had bet their futures on would ever be built.

  Estevez had come Down with him, God help Julio and his sneezes. Estevez and he just
didn’t talk about Upstairs, didn’t talk about the doubts … they’d gone through Studies together, been in training together—known each other all their lives … how not, in the limited world of the station? He and Julio had hashed over doubts aplenty before they’d made the cut, but not dwelled on them once they knew they were on the team, and most of all hadn’t rehashed them once they were down here. Here everything was fine and they weren’t scared, and Estevez wouldn’t worry if he was late for dinner, no, of course not. Julio would just be standing by the window by now, wondering if he’d gotten sick on the way or gotten bitten by some flying creature they hadn’t catalogued yet.

  Ian shoved his hands into his pockets and began to walk back to the barracks—Estevez probably had supper in the microwave, timed to the last of sunset—they had no general mealtime, with all of them on lab schedules, and supper, such as it was, fell whenever the work was done. No amenities, no variety in the menu, no reliance on freezers or fancy equipment: every priority was for lab equipment, everything was freeze-dried, dried, or add-water-and-boil, and damned disgusting as a lifelong prospect. Probably the Guild looked for the cuisine to bring them to their knees … to have them begging the Guild for rescue and a good stationside dinner.

  Meanwhile he had discovered a sudden, unusual preference for sweets, which, with the coppery taste he had almost constantly, was the only thing that tasted good. And mostly those came out of the labs he’d worked in, so he named them what they were, in all their chemical parts.