“I don’t think they get it,” Godwin said. “Pet armadillos or no, I think they’re animals, not people.”
“Give it some time, Godwin,” Rhys told him, trying to be optimistic. But the next day’s trade went no better. Upon seeing the humans, the simians began to caper and playfully exchange random items, which were forgotten as soon as they left the traders’ handlike paws. As before, the episode ended in a hail of badly aimed projectiles which pelted humans, simians and their “pets” indiscriminately.
Rhys’s only reason for hopefulness was that the simians were observed to sip water from the same broadleaf fronds he’d seen growing in the lake environs. Since the fronds didn’t grow near the tree village, he could only suppose that meant the simians had transported them. But observing that more advanced behavior was denied the humans. The simians were never seen retrieving the fronds, they simply seemed to appear during the night. How, even Yoshi’s nocturnal video records failed to show.
Rhys was disappointed. “I suppose,” he told Rick and Yoshi, “that we ought to pick a new target and start again.” He shook his head. “I would have bet credits that the presence of both birds and arthropods indicated nascent domestication. Evidently, it only indicated a symbiosis.”
Yoshi nodded. “The lemurs leave refuse and the—the bogdillos and birds scavenge it.”
“Bogdillos?” Rick repeated.
Yoshi shrugged and glanced at her notes. “I get tired of saying ‘arthropods.’ There are some reptiles at a site about fifteen klicks from here that have been observed in a bipedal stance. It seems they also use sticks to pry food out of crevasses between rocks and have been observed carrying articles about what the advance team described as a village.”
“We’ll visit them tomorrow then,” Rhys said absently.
“You seem unhappy, professor,” Raymond Godwin observed.
“Unhappy?” Rhys shook his head. “No. A bit disappointed, perhaps.”
“Whatever for? Surely if you find no sentient beings on Bog it makes your job just that much easier… and your departure that much sooner.” He glanced around at the explosion of damp foliage that surrounded them, every leaf and stalk glistening with Bog’s dank perspiration. “I’ve never in my life been anyplace that sweats like this. My hair clings to my head, my clothing clings to my body. It makes Florida seem positively arid. I don’t know how you can stand it.” He gave Rhys’s kilt a disparaging glance. “I’ll certainly be glad to leave.”
“I will admit,” Rhys told him, “that Bog’s temperate zone seems to be poorly named, but… I would like to have found some new neighbors to talk to.”
“Well, speaking on behalf of Tanaka, whose interests you also claim to serve, new neighbors are a pain. They require the expenditure of time and energy which would be more profitably spent in negotiating with the Collective for planetary resources. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of candidates for sentience planetwide. While your people interview every one of them, the mineral resources of Bog lie here untapped. If you find no one, you’ve spent months or even years doing it, only to find that Bog has no masters and the minerals might have been at our disposal all along. If you do find someone, then time and energy must be put into learning their language, studying their culture, understanding their point of view—and still the resources of Bog lie there untapped. I’m sure you can see that the best case scenario as far as our employer is concerned is for Bog to be completely without sentient life.”
He had stopped just short of suggesting that Rhys come to that conclusion regardless of the circumstances. Rhys wondered if the thought had been in mind. He glanced forward to where Yoshi sat beside Rick in the front passenger seat of the buggy. Even in profile, he could see that her brow was knit and her jaw clenched mutinously. In the four years or so he had known her, Rhys had seen a thousand expressions cross Yoshi Umeki’s face. He had never seen this one.
“Have you an alternative to suggest that will not contravene Collective law?” he asked carefully.
“It seems to me we might simply set up our mining operations—in a way calculated to make a minimum impact on the ecosystem, of course— and then if, in later years, a sentient species makes itself known, we can deal with it as necessary.”
Yoshi snorted. “That’s what they said about the Aborigines.”
Godwin glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”
She spoke without turning to face him. “That’s what every conqueror has said about every conquered people since the dawn of human civilization—‘we’ll deal with them as necessary.’ Usually, the native peoples end up with their culture destroyed and their numbers seriously depleted.”
“My dear girl,” said Godwin dryly, “we are not barbarians who have failed to learn from our own history. Rest assured, should any intelligence rear its unlikely head on this sodden ball of earth, Tanaka Corp will honor both its culture and its physical wellbeing. You know Danetta Price better than I do, but whatever her merits or demerits as a CEO, she is not known for a conquistadorial attitude. But there are resources here—” He broke off, turning to address his argument to Rhys. “There are, for example, significant quantities of a natural organometallic in the water at this latitude that has tremendous potential. A natural organometallic. And then there are the ores—did you know that there are caves about 200 klicks south of here that contain incredibly pure deposits of copper? And the surface water—all of it— contains an alchemist’s laboratory stew of minerals.”
His eyes gleamed. A zealot. Rhys smiled. He recognized the look. He’d seen it often enough on Yoshi’s face, on Rick’s… in the mirror. Godwin might have been him describing an assemblage of objects dug out of someone’s two-thousand-year-old refuse bin or burial mound. And, little as he liked to admit it, there was controversy over the ethics of making use of those resources too.
The reptiles lived in an area that was as close to a desert as was likely to be found on Bog. The soil was sandy, merely damp, and sparsely foliated (at least more sparsely than 75 percent of Bog). In cleared areas the reptilians had built structures not unlike the giant termite mounds of Earthen Africa, pasting them together with clay from the bottom of small, stagnant red pools that dotted the landscape. Taken together with the jewel-bright green of the mounds’ inhabitants, the whole area looked as if Santa’s interstellar sleigh had jettisoned a cargo of Christmas ornaments.
From the cover afforded them by a tufted dune, the humans watched the activity around the mounds. Rhys was just puzzling over a group of empty and collapsed “huts” to the north of the inhabited group when Yoshi jiggled his elbow.
“Look, sir. Tool-use.”
He nodded, watching a pair of the iguana-like creatures poking about a rotting tree stump with a stick. Another teetered across the clearing on his hind legs, his arms full of water-smoothed rocks. These he deposited next to one of the mounds in a heap, shoving away one of the ubiquitous “bogdillos” which had come along to snuffle at the collection. When the creature failed to move away, the reptile chittered at it, finally picking up one of the rocks and dealing the arthropod a sharp thwack! A second reptile scurried over to snag the rock and skitter away with it, eventually pressing it into the wall of a mound.