Ofelia Falfurrias on shuttle 3-H.
Kira wondered why they’d been separated. She had always assumed families were transported together. Not that it mattered, really. She did wish they had an arrival manifest for the Sims Bancorp colony transport, but it hadn’t yet arrived where it was going. She wrinkled her nose, glad that she didn’t have to travel on the old, slow, sublight ships. Cryo made such travel possible, but nothing could make it efficient.
“I’ve got another light source,” she said to Chesva, who merely grunted. She glanced over, and saw that he was doing something to a single frame of the earlier visual data. His screen changed color, the images shifting to more contrasting hues.
Kira went back to her own investigations. Something — she was sure it was the same indigenes that had wiped out the second colony at landing — was in the buildings, and using at least the light switches. What else could they be using? She glanced at the Sims Bancorp material to remind herself what was down there. Waste recycler, which provided fuel for the basic powerplant producing electricity for the lights, the coolers, the fans, the pumps. The vehicles… some electrical, some running off biofuels. No aircraft, thank the Luck. No surviving boats… Kira wondered what had happened to them. With the electricity on, the indigenes could make the stoves hot and the coolers cold, but they couldn’t get into real trouble. She hoped. Like most colonies, this one had had few weapons, and the evacuation teams reported that they’d removed them.
Of course, they’d also reported turning off the powerplant. Kira had another cold feeling, along with the certainty that “What else?” was a question that should have been asked long ago. She checked the loworbital scanner. It was behind the planet now, probably still doing its first run of pre-programmed tasks. She no longer cared about atmospheric gases, about tidal reflectance data.
“Aha!” Chesva said. “Come see this.”
Kira moved over. It was a single motionless screen, again visual, but not what they’d seen before. For one thing, the sun was higher, the shadows shorter, and in the other direction. “Midmorning,” Chesva said. “I threw in some search parameters based on those few frames we had, and this is the best I’ve found so far.”
“Why was the weathersat doing an optical scan? It was turned off when you queried, wasn’t it?” “Probably one of those things put its foot on the controls,” Chesva said. Clearly he didn’t care how the weathersat had come by its images, now that he had them. Kira felt the same way. “Two legs,” Kira said instead of commenting on the unlikelihood of some animal stepping in the right place and then stepping there again to turn the same scan off.
“Yeah… you were right about bipedal. The theory’s always said it’s more likely. Two upper limbs, too — the shadows show that clearly. But look here—” He pointed to a shorter figure among the others. Shorter, its proportions familiar. Human.
Kira choked back all the rude expressions she knew, and said instead, “Vasil will not be happy about this.”
“No,” Chesva said. He grinned at her. “But it should get his mind off Bilong, don’t you think?” There was now no question of landing anywhere but the Sims Bancorp shuttle strip. They had been lent a military-grade drop shuttle, supposedly impervious to anything but “extremely advanced technology,” the military pilots said. The pilots had come with the shuttle, along with a small contingent of “advisors” who had not mingled at all with the scientific and diplomatic specialists during the voyage. The shuttle had made several reconnaissance flights after the low-orbital scanner showed no evidence of technology that could blow them from the sky. Evidence of lower-level technology filled the datastrips and cubes. Stone buildings — obvious permanent settlements — clustered on the rocky coast far north and east of the Sims Bancorp colony, and troops of nomads accompanied by herds of quadruped grazers in the grasslands west of the settlements.
“I’m not surprised they missed the nomads,” Vasil said. “They could be other migrating animals, nothing special. They don’t seem to build fires, or structures. Its only that we know to look for them. But how they could have missed those cities — !” He shook his head dramatically.
Kira refused to restart the discussion of critical points and emergence, gradualism versus cultural discontinuity. They didn’t have the historical data they needed to determine when the indigenes had achieved the cognitive and cultural complexity needed for this level of technology, and they couldn’t get it up here. Down there, if Ori and his backup were good enough, might be the data they needed to settle the question. Instead, she concentrated on biota: the four-legged herds the nomads accompanied… hunted? Herded? Herbivores, surely; only abundant plant growth would support that mass of flesh. Prey animals, certainly, with those eyes set on the sides of longish heads, eyes that could see behind and around. Were the indigenes the only predators? She looked for, but did not find, something equivalent to canids. “Boats, with rowers, and sails,” Ori said, gloating over the pictures taken of the coastal settlements. “They can work wood — I wonder if it’s all as hard as the stuff Sims exported from the tropics. We have to have metal for that. If they have metal tools—” Kira looked at the creatures themselves. Indigenes, she reminded herself. She couldn’t tell what they were most like, mammals or reptiles or birds… they had no visible hair or feathers, but their surface looked more like skin than scales. Their gait, with its long-legged, bouncing quality, reminded her of ratites, the large flightless birds of old Earth, but the obvious joint in the leg faced forward, like the human knee. Large eyes, placed slightly more to the side of the head than human eyes; they would have both binocular and monocular vision, she suspected. Four-toed, four-fingered… an opposable digit on the hand, and one of the toes looked as if it were almost opposable.
“Look at those buildings,” Ori said, breaking her concentration for a moment. “And I’d swear those are pipes — maybe just hollow reeds or something, but tubes to carry — yes! Something just came out of that one.” Kira had looked just too late; she saw the tubes, but not whatever had been in them. Memnin, the anthropologist on the backup team, spoke up. “I’m noticing how aware they are. Did you notice, Ori, how they looked up at the shuttle? No panic, no real surprise, and that one there—” he pointed at a corner of the image. “It’s sketching something, I’d bet.”
Bilong and Apos, the linguists, stood in the corners watching. They had nothing to do, since the scanners had not picked up any sound. Apos looked alert, but Bilong pouted. Kira wished again that Bilong hadn’t been chosen for the primary team. Apos might be younger and less experienced, but at least he wasn’t trying to make trouble.
Several days of overflights and data analysis — enough new data to keep an entire faculty busy; Kira felt she was drowning in it — and finally the military pilots agreed that they could risk a landing at the old colony. They insisted that everyone wear protective gear, hot, heavy, clumsy, and unfamiliar to the civilians. Kira was sure the military advisors were laughing at them. They probably did look ridiculous, she told herself, trying to see the funny side as she struggled with the toggles and slides that held the thick panels together. At least they were going to see the real world at last; it was worth this inconvenience on the way.
Unfortunately, from her point of view, the military version of a shuttle had no viewports, nor any of the other amenities of civilian shuttles. She had expected to watch the approach, seeing for herself how the atmosphere changed color and affected the look of the landscape. The exterior cameras would capture that for later analysis, but that didn’t make up for not seeing it herself. She had to sit staring at the back of Vasil’s head all the way down, her rump going numb on the hard seat, her ears assaulted by the roar and rattle. She had no idea how far along they were until the pilot’s announcement that they would be landing in two minutes. The shuttle dipped, swayed, and shuddered in the disconcerting way of all shuttles, and Kira very consciously did not clench her hands. She hated this; she couldn’t even see the runway. Then the seat smacked against her backside, and she felt the uneven rumble of the wheels rolling on the rough, overgrown surface.