Survival Page 10

  Mac ignored her, busy scanning down what turned out to be a disappointingly brief list of references. She called each up in turn.

  Emily read along. “Great. Now we know they pay their dues to the IU on time, have colonies on forty-eight intensely dreary planets, and prefer their privacy. No other species says bad things about them. No one says good things about them. How boring can a race be?”

  “Surely not this boring.” Mac was keying in other parameters without success, her curiosity engaged. “Odd. We seem to have found out more for ourselves than has been recorded about the Dhryn. You know what little that is. You’d think there’d at least be dietary info . . .”

  “Well, Brymn’s supper was wonderful. Shame you missed it.”

  “Didn’t,” Mac said absently. “ ’Cept the dessert.”

  “Maybe there’s something in the stas-unit?”

  “I cleaned it out before we left for the field. You do remember what happened last year . . .”

  Em wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I still say you should have made that a project for one of the pathology postdocs. Maybe I should send to the kitchen? Can’t have you starve, Mac.”

  “Emily. I’m not hungry.” At the knowing smile greeting this, Mac rolled her eyes and sat back, knowing Em would persist until satisfied. “Fine. For your information, Dr. Mamani, Mr. Trojanowski grabbed what he could of supper before following us onshore. We sat on the terrace and he kindly shared it with me before you showed up. That’s all.”

  “Oh-ho. That’s not all by a long shot, Mac.” Emily perched on Mac’s desk. “I want details.”

  “Asparagus, duck, little puffy things—”

  “Not those details.”

  Mac felt herself flush. “We just sat and ate cold leftovers. There are no ‘details.’ ”

  “Ai! You’re blushing!” Emily planted her hands on the desktop and leaned forward, her face pushing through Mac’s ’screen. The image retreated in self-defense. “C’mon, Mac. Spill it.”

  Avoiding Emily in this mood was like jumping out of the way of a crashing t-lev. You might survive, but there’d be a wreck to clean up. Mac sighed her surrender. “It was nice. He was nice. I enjoyed his company—when we weren’t talking shop.”

  “Not to mention those pants.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Mac insisted.

  Emily laughed and sat up. “You are hopeless, girl.”

  “I am not. In fact—” She closed her mouth in time. Emily arched one eyebrow interrogatively, but Mac shook her head. “Okay, I’m hopeless,” she agreed. She didn’t want Emily’s opinion of how the evening had ended.

  Then, something about that evening, or that afternoon, niggled at Mac. She narrowed her eyes in thought. “Emily, Brymn didn’t eat supper.”

  “Ai. Changing the subject?” With a wave of her hand, Emily gave up the chase and returned to her seat. “You think Brymn avoided eating deliberately? Interesting. I’d love a skin sample.”

  “And you accuse me of trying to start an interspecies’ incident?”

  Emily chuckled. “I said I’d love a sample—not that I’d attack the Honorable Delegate with a scalpel. Sentients tend to be sensitive about their inner workings. I worked with a Sythian once who cremated her mandible trimmings in a ceramic pot every night, just in case—”

  “Spare me.” The moment the words were out, Mac regretted them. The last thing she wanted was to set Emily off again tonight.

  Sure enough, a disapproving finger wagged in her direction. “Tsk, tsk. You see? You stick yourself to one planet and one biosystem, and this is the price. Do you know why you shouldn’t put a Nerban and a Frow in the same taxi?” Em didn’t bother to wait for Mac’s reply, saying triumphantly: “Such ignorance of our fellow beings.”

  “I’m a salmon researcher, not a taxi driver,” Mac muttered to herself.

  “Seung could help, you know. He taught an intro xeno-sentient course on the mainland last winter.”

  Mac shook her head. “I don’t need a course—”

  “You need something, Mackenzie Connor.” Emily’s eyes were flashing again.

  “Okay, Emily. I’ll bite. Why is this suddenly more of an issue with you than usual? Why now?” Deliberately calm, Mac steepled her fingertips in front of her, studying her friend’s angry face over that barrier. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “You’re the one with the Ministry envelope in her pocket. You’re the one an alien traveled through three systems to meet. And you ask me why I think you should be paying attention!”

  “I’m paying attention now,” Mac said reasonably. “How did you know Brymn went through three systems?”

  “Unlike you, Mac, I know what it takes to travel to and from this ball of dirt. I know the questions to ask and where to get answers. So while you were getting dewy-eyed with your bureaucrat, I was checking on them both.”

  Mac refused to take the bait, or offense. Emily on the warpath was a person who got results. “What did you find out?”

  Emily’s smile was wicked. “Your supper thief isn’t in any Earth-bound birth record. From his accent, slight as it is, I’d put him as no more local than a Jovian moon. I’ve a query out with the Ministry for details, but I wouldn’t hold out hope for any answers. A man of mystery still, your Nikolai.” She slowly licked her full lower lip. “Adds a certain spice, doesn’t it?”

  “Is that all you learned?”

  “About Trojanowski.” Emily’s left hand made a fist. Her right opened, palm up. “Our Dhryn archaeologist, on the other hand, is anything but a mystery. Departed his colony to hunt relics from other species—a pastime I suspect was of no particular interest to his own kind, since Brymn hasn’t been home since. It has gained him some acclaim from other pot-hunters. He’s sought after for lecture tours by a variety of system universities—one of which he canceled to come here. He’s an accomplished linguist—shaming those of us who only learn Instella.” Emily paused and her face turned serious. “Nothing I found says he’s a crackpot.”

  “I never said he was.” Mac refocused on her ’screen. “Here. Trojanowski sent me Brymn’s publications.”

  The list of publications attributed to their guest filled each ’screen, then kept scrolling.

  “Prolific fellow, isn’t he?”

  “How do you want to split it?” Mac asked.

  “We have to read all that?” Emily saw Mac’s expression and rolled her eyes. “We have to read all that. Fine. I’ll start at the beginning. You start at the end. We should be done some time next year, given you have no social life and mine will be over.”

  “I’d put students on it, but . . .”

  Emily had already settled deeper into the chair and called up her own ’screen, transferring the list from Mac’s doppelganger with a finger-touch in midair. “I know,” she said soberly. “End of the species. Need to know. All that, too.”

  Mac remembered her reaction to Brymn’s news about the disappearances, the hollow feeling in her chest even now when she considered the Chasm and its sterilized worlds. “If it’s true, we can’t risk panic,” she said, hearing the echo of it in her own voice.

  “It won’t come to that,” Emily insisted. “We aren’t alone, Mac. I keep telling you that. Others are working on this—have been working on it.” She held up two fingers and pinched them together. “We Humans just have our small parts to play. After that? It will be over and you’ll be back with your fish before you know it. Have some faith in your wise old friend Em.”

  “We’ll both be back,” Mac corrected. “If you think I’m running that device of yours on my own, Dr. ‘Wise Old Friend,’ while you cavort with sex-crazed manatees . . .”

  Emily didn’t smile as Mac expected. “Have some faith, Mac,” she repeated. “You know I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

  With the Tracer—or something else? Mac knew from experience that cryptic statements, from Emily, were never invitations to pry further. She shook her head and leaned forward again, peering at the
’screen. “I trust you to help me read as much of this as humanly possible before I see Brymn again, Em. If you don’t mind?”

  The room quieted as both became absorbed in their work.

  Or tried to. Concentrating would have been easier, Mac thought, staring at the text, if Emily had answered her question.

  Why the frustration, the outright anger, now?

  It hadn’t taken long before they found a problem in having Mac read the most recent articles first. Later articles referred to those before, some to the point of being completely incomprehensible—to a nonarchaeologist—on their own. Mac redivided the list so Emily was reading the dozens Brymn had published in the prestigious Journal of Interspecies Archaeology. She took everything else.

  “Everything else” was an eclectic mix, at first appearing random. Letters to the Editor in About Things Past. Essays in collected works on topics ranging from statistical analysis to the emergence of interstitial recording technology, many dealing with findings from Chasm sites. Articles scattered in more than twenty different publications. Even a popular treatment, a vid script that had somehow found its way into a documentary series shown on transstellar liners, entitled: Bringing the Past to Life.

  Then Mac noticed two commonalities. Although Emily had said Brymn was a linguist, these publications were in Instella, the multispecies’ language that had to be learned by any member of the Interspecies Union who wished to leave their world. It was taught as a matter of course in Human schools; the same held true for the other species in the Union, to the best of Mac’s admittedly meager knowledge. It made sense: a shared language was crucial to understanding.

  But Brymn had spoken to her in English. She hadn’t paid attention to that until now. Em was right to chide her for being blind to things outside her field. Mac bit her lip. What else had she missed?

  There was nothing particularly unusual in Brymn publishing in Instella. It was the language of choice for any scientist addressing a multispecies audience. What puzzled Mac was the lack of any reference to publications in Dhryn. Did this mean there were none—or merely that Dhryn didn’t permit cataloging of work in their language?

  The second nonrandom characteristic was quality. Brymn hadn’t exaggerated when he said his work had been noticed in “some circles.” With the exception of the vid script, all the listings Mac called up were in peer-reviewed, academic journals. Their Dhryn was taken very seriously by colleagues on many worlds. Just not by the Secretary General of the Ministry of Extra-Sol Human Affairs.

  Or by his own species? Mac suddenly wondered if the Dhryn had the same prohibition on archaeology as they did on biology.

  The workscreen winked out of existence, replaced by a soft green message at least two hands’ width high: “Can no longer compensate for fatigue.”

  Mac didn’t argue. It wouldn’t do any good. In a fit of self-protectiveness, she’d programmed the ’screen to ignore any requests to reinitialize for thirty minutes. It would doubtless take longer than that to find the password to change it.

  She was startled to find the room dark except for the glow around the doorframes. The automatics had kicked in night illumination levels when she hadn’t set the ambient to increase. There was just enough for Mac to see Emily was sound asleep in her chair, head twisted back at an angle impossible for anyone with a shorter neck, the sloppy old sweater she’d always borrowed around her shoulders. Every third breath was that soft little snore Em denied utterly when awake. Her ’screen was gone. It would have turned itself off after detecting her eyes had been closed for more than a few minutes.

  So much for Brymn paying a visit. The media must have tied him up longer than she’d expected.

  Keying on a low light, Mac stood and stretched, easing the kinks out of her spine. Some, she decided, felt permanent.

  They probably were. Winter months, Mac lived in her office, analyzing data from past seasons, writing proposals for the next, daydreaming. It was her environment, her life, that surrounded her. She could forgive Brymn taking her quarters. They weren’t as personal as this room.

  She’d had the wall removed between the dry lab and her office space the first year, replacing the window side two-thirds of that barrier with what Tie affectionately referred to as the lousiest garden he’d ever seen. It had begun as a series of old barrels, cut in half, some on tables and some on the floor. Mac was in the habit of stuffing interesting local vegetation into her backpack, roots and all. Whatever survived her collecting method would be thrust into the nearest empty bit of soil in one of the barrels and more or less left to its own devices.

  They were also abandoned to the local weather. The second winter, Mac had installed a microclimate around her growing collection. Far from creating a greenhouse, she linked the humidity, temperature, and daylight controls to those being experienced at any given moment along the shore of the spawning beds at Field Station One, some 700 kilometers northeast and 1100 meters higher than the pod. Even the wind conditions were replicated, making it not unusual for visitors to her office to be startled by a self-contained blizzard in the corner.

  Tonight, the ceiling-high mass of young cottonwood, sedges, and orchids was peaceful save for the rustle of dying leaves. Field Station One’s seasons, mirrored by those in Mac’s garden, rushed ahead of those at Base. The urgency drew her closer to the living things she studied, who had to anticipate change or die.

  Mac retracted the invisible barrier so she could feel the same soft breeze against her face. She closed her eyes and drew in the scent of soil and living things. A faint tinge of corruption on the back of her palate. Perhaps a lingering piece of salmon. She tossed a few corpses in each fall, challenging the air scrubbers. Or had one of the newer arrivals decided to rot instead of grow? Fair enough.

  The patch of wilderness indoors wasn’t the only unusual aspect of Mac’s workspace. She’d had a load of stream-washed gravel delivered at the start of her fourth winter at Base. Instead of gaming or doing puzzles in the gallery, she’d coaxed the few other full-time staff into spending their evenings re-creating a spawning bed by gluing the stones to her floor. The result snaked through her office, its authentically irregular swath owing a fair amount to the number of beers consumed during its creation.

  Needless to say, the cleaning staff wouldn’t go near it.

  Mac loved it. She’d meander along it barefoot, while the winter storms coated the pods with sleet, imagining the depressions she felt with her toes were redds, the holes scoured in the gravel by female salmon. The spawning bed ended at her garden, where overflow from rain spilled over the last few stones. When the garden froze, water eased drop by drop from under an icy rim, glazing each pebble.

  Mac had a small warning buoy she’d salvaged to put on the icy patch, in case a visitor was careless when walking.

  Almost everything else about her office was standard fare: chairs, desks, lamps, shelves, and tables. Posters, maps, and doors on two walls. The third wall and outer half of the ceiling were part of the pod exterior and could be made transparent or opaque at will. Wide doors led through the wall to the terrace that ringed the pod; fair-weather shortcut to her neighbors, impassable hazard during winter storms.

  There was, however, one other feature unique to this room. Mac watched its shadows dancing over Emily’s sleeping face and looked up with a smile.

  The transparent portion of the ceiling was festooned with wooden salmon, hanging so that they moved with every breath of air. When she’d first come to live on the west coast, Mac had found herself drawn to the stylized carvings of the Haida, their use of large, white-rimmed eyes and realistic form. She’d bought a few pieces, then commissioned more, with different species, different sexes.

  All this, so she could stand on the gravel of a spawning bed, and gaze up at the starry sky past the silhouettes of dozens of salmon as they swam through the air, while hearing a breeze stir the vegetation onshore.

  All this, so she could daydream about life and its needs.

  A
flash of brighter light played over her eyes. Squinting in protest, Mac wheeled in time to see the door to the corridor close behind the Dhryn.

  Instead of speaking, he rose to stand almost upright, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. Not the first time a visitor’s had that reaction, Mac smiled to herself.

  She took advantage of his fascination to go to Emily and shake the other biologist awake. “Waasaa? I’m reading . . . oh.” The incoherent muttering faded as Em saw who was there. She glanced quickly at Mac’s desk. Mac understood. Em was checking both ’screens were off. Not that Brymn should object to their reading his research—but still.

  Brymn probably wouldn’t have noticed if they’d strewn his publications over the floor. He kept staring as he said: “This—This is what it was like, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor. When I swam in the river.”

  “You should have visited me here first, then,” Mac observed, her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “I wouldn’t have had to throw a rock at your head.” She went to the wall control and raised the ambient lighting.

  Brymn’s torso returned to its more customary orientation. He gave a pair of low hoots. “That was you?”

  “Mac isn’t subtle,” Emily explained, rubbing her left arm beneath the cast as she stood. She noticed Brymn’s attention. “Arm’s asleep.”

  “A figure of speech,” Mac clarified, distracted by what the alien would make of creatures whose body parts rested at differing times.

  “Ah.” The sound was noncommittal. “I have brought this for you, Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor.” Brymn held out a small bag.

  Mac took it, surprised by the weight.

  “I regret you did not get to enjoy the supper provided by the Consulate,” the alien explained. “So I obtained for you the food item which received the most praise.”

  “Thank you.” Touched, Mac opened the bag and looked inside. At first, she couldn’t guess what the gooey brown mass could be, then she sniffed. Chocolate. Rum. She stuck her finger in and brought out a trace to put on her tongue. “Soufflé?” she hazarded. What remained of one, anyway. Emily stifled a giggle.