Tomm shrugged. He had grown up on a farm. He knew about life, injury, death.
He waited to see what happened next.
The air was warm, and smelled of rust. The land was like a tabletop, worn flat.
Kard had dumped heaps of equipment out of the flitter onto the ground, and was pawing through it.
Xera said, ‘Admiral – what happened?’
‘The Squeem,’ Kard said bluntly. ‘Dead, every last one of them. All the systems are down. We didn’t even get a mayday out.’ He glanced at the complex sky. ‘The controllers don’t know we are here. It’s happened before. Nobody knows how the little bastards manage it.’
‘You’re saying the Squeem killed themselves to sabotage us?’
‘Oh, you think it’s a coincidence it happened just as we came into our final descent?’
The Squeem were group-mind aquatic creatures, a little like fish. Once, it was said, they had conquered Earth itself. Now, long Assimilated, they were used as communications links, as a piece of technology. Some humans had even taken Squeem implants. But it seemed that the Squeem were still capable of defiance. Maybe, she thought, the Assimilation wasn’t as complete as it was presented by Commission propagandists.
Kard’s hard gaze slid over the bundled pilot, as if reluctant to look at him too closely.
Xera said, ‘Stub is hurt. The cloak will keep him alive for a while, but—’
‘We need to get to the base camp. It’s north of here, maybe half a day’s walk.’
She looked about dubiously. There was no sun, no moon. Even Home’s sibling worlds were invisible. There were only stars, a great uniform wash of them, the same wherever you looked. ‘Which way’s north?’
Kard glared, impatient. He seemed to see Tomm for the first time. ‘You. Aboriginal. Which way?’
Tomm pointed, without hesitation. His feet were bare, Xera noticed now.
‘Then that’s the way we’ll go. We’ll need a stretcher. Xera, rig something.’
Tomm said, ‘My home’s closer.’ He pointed again. ‘It’s just over that way. My parents could help you.’
Xera looked at Kard. ‘Admiral, it would make sense.’
He glared at her. ‘You do not take an injured Navy tar to an aboriginal camp.’
Xera tried to control her irritation. ‘The people here are not animals. They are farmers. Stub might die before—’
‘End of discussion. You. Earthworm. You want to come show us the way?’
Tomm shrugged.
Xera frowned. ‘You don’t need to tell your parents where you are?’
‘You’re the Navy,’ Tomm said. ‘We’re all citizens of the Third Expansion. You have come here to protect us. That’s what you told us. What harm can I come to with you?’
Kard laughed.
The ground was densely packed crimson dirt, hard under her feet. Soon she was puffing with exertion, her hips and knees dryly aching. After half a year in the murky gut of a Spline ship Xera wasn’t used to physical exercise.
Kard, a bundle on his back, walked stiffly, with obvious distaste for the very dust under his feet.
At least the ground was level, more or less. And Stub, on his improvised stretcher, wasn’t as heavy as he should have been. Evidently the smart med-care cloak contained some anti-gravitational trickery. Stub wasn’t improving, though, despite the cloak’s best efforts. Around his increasingly pale face, the cloak’s hem glowed warning blue.
The boy, Tomm, just seemed interested in the whole adventure.
Away from the cultivated areas the ground looked nutrient-leached, and the only hills were eroded stumps, as dust-strewn as the rest. This was an old place, she thought. The population was evidently sparse, no more than this worn-out land could support.
And the sky was baffling.
Xera had grown up on a small planet of 70 Opiuchi, less than seventeen light years from Earth itself. There, in the Galaxy’s main disc, three thousand stars had been visible in the night sky. In this globular cluster there were forty times as many. Shoals of stars swam continually above the horizon, casting a diffuse light laced with pale, complex, shifting shadows. There were too many of them to count, to identify, to track. This world had no sun and too many stars; it knew no day, no night, only this unchanging, muddy starlight. Here, time washed by unmarked, and in every direction the sky looked the same.
They had to cross a cultivated field. A floodlight bank loomed over the green growing things, presumably intended to supplement the starlight.
Kard hauled a semi-transparent suit out of the scavenged bundle he carried, and tied off the arms and legs. ‘You,’ he said to Tomm. ‘Take this. We need supplies.’
Xera made to protest at this casual theft of somebody’s crop. But Tomm was already running alongside Kard’s long strides. They began pulling handfuls of green pods into the tied-off suit. Xera waited by Stub.
Kard snapped, ‘Tell me what you eat here.’
‘Peas,’ said Tomm brightly. ‘Beans. Rice. Wheat.’
‘No replicators?’
Xera said, ‘Admiral, Tomm’s ancestors are here because they fled the Qax Occupation of Earth, seven thousand years ago. Nano replicators are Qax technology. To the colonists here, such things are hated.’
Kard glanced around. ‘So how did they terraform this place?’
‘The hard way. Apparently it took them centuries.’
‘And now they grow wheat.’
‘Yes.’
Kard laughed. ‘Well, our suits will filter out the toxins.’
‘We have goats too,’ said the boy.
‘Oh, imagine that.’
They came to an ancient, tangled tree, and Kard bent to inspect its roots. He pulled out a handful of what looked like fungus. ‘What’s this?’
‘Dreaming mould,’ said Tomm.
‘Say what?’
Xera hurried over. ‘That is why we’re here. It’s a relic of the native ecology, spared in the terraforming.’
Kard hefted the greyish stuff. ‘This is supposed to be sentient?’
‘So the locals claim.’
‘It can’t even move.’
‘It can,’ insisted Tomm. ‘It moves like slimy bugs.’
Xera held up her data desk, showing Kard images. ‘On the move it absorbs nutrients from organic detritus, local analogues of leaves and grass. Then the protoplasm hardens into a definite shape as the mould prepares to fruit. In some species you get little parasols and rods.’
This organism was actually like the slime moulds of Earth: a very ancient form from a time when categories of life were blurred, when the higher plants had yet to split off from the fungi, and all animal life had streamed in protoplasmic shapelessness. What was more controversial was whether these moulds were sentient, or not. Already she was wondering how she could complete her assessment – how could she possibly tell?
Kard saw her doubts. He turned to the kid. ‘How can this mould of yours be so smart if it can’t use tools?’
‘They used to,’ said Tomm.
‘What?’
‘Once they built starships. They came from over there.’ He pointed into the murky roof of stars – but the way he was pointing, Xera realised, was towards the Galaxy’s main disc.
She asked, ‘How do you know such things?’
‘When you touch them.’ The boy shrugged. ‘You just know.’
‘And why,’ Kard asked, ‘would they come to a shithole like this? It hasn’t even got a sun.’
‘They didn’t want a sun. They wanted a sky like that,’ pointing up again.
‘Why?’
‘Because you can’t tell the time by it.’