Soul Pipes
By Ray Aldridge
/Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dec2002, Vol. 103 Issue 6/
WE WORKED THE RUINS EVERY day under the brown sun, and every night I wished I were elsewhere. Initially I was bored and resentful, but soon I grew fearful.
It wasn't that our discoveries were so disturbing, at first. When we landed on Graylin IV, the ruins seemed benign, ground down into the innocence of great age, scoured clean by emptiness. Of course, something had killed the colony. But that fatal unpleasantness was long gone, worn away with the walls. Graylin IV was an inhospitable world and the colonists were religious crazies... an infinite variety of unfortunate events might have ended their attempt to sink human roots into alien soil.
Still, as the days passed my uneasiness grew, for no apparent reason. The wasteland where we'd pitched our small camp wasn't haunted in any obvious way by hungry ghosts. Ravening night-monsters weren't stalking the darkness outside the perimeter, so far as I could tell.
All that came later.
A few days after landing I spoke to Irvane about my anxieties. «Do you feel it?» I asked.
«What?» Irvane seemed mesmerized by the screen of an analyzer, which he had focused on a bit of bone embedded in the mossy stonework. Our archaeologist was a large, pale, loose-fleshed man, perpetually scowling but occasionally amusing. He had chosen to adorn himself with a thin line of nappy red fur, spiraling out from the crown of his otherwise naked head. It wrapped twice across his face, eventually disappearing into his collar. I assume the track continued on its course around his protuberant belly. For some reason this cosmetic eccentricity prevented me from taking him seriously, though he was, I understood, a scientist of moderate reputation. I suppose this means that I'm now a very shallow person, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
I suppressed the nervous smile I felt tugging at my mouth. «Have you noticed that there's an odd atmosphere about the place? Something uncomfortable. Not quite right.»
Irvane gave me a dismissive look. «I thought you claimed to have no imagination,» he said.
«That's what concerns me,» I said, but clearly he wasn't paying attention. He turned back to his analyzer and I went to my work, which was not so important to the expedition as his.
Officially I was the expedition's mechanic, but in the early phases of the dig I monitored a mapping mech as it crawled over the site, cataloguing the surface features and developing a deep structural profile. The job didn't demand much of me; it was much like ambling through the park with a docile pet, one that occasionally paused and detonated a small sharp explosion beneath its carapace. I kept the mech supplied with recording media and fuel cells. Twice a day I took abstracts of its findings to Hu Moon, the expedition leader.
She was more attractive and less amusing than Irvane. A slender woman with large yellow eyes, Hu Moon's white skin was tattooed, apparently everywhere, with faint, pale blue contour lines, emphasizing the delicate topography of her body. She wore her long black hair in a thick braid, tipped with tiny glittering fling knives. I found her ornamental, even arousing, and I might have enjoyed seeing more of her handsome terrain, except that her personality was repellent, at least to me. She was both passive and overbearing, as the mood took her, and this inconsistency annoyed me. She regarded me with indifference, except when I was late with the reports.
Her lover, not coincidentally, was the expedition's scribe and general recorder. Dueine was a very young woman of conventional prettiness, with an unmanageable mass of curly blond hair and a pleasantly bland personality. Her talents as a scribe struck me as imperceptible... but of course I am a practiced cynic, a habit of mind that has survived the changes I've undergone. When we hung in space above the dead colony, Dueine described Graylin IV in these terms:
«... it's an ugly world, and one wonders why the colony chose it. Small, dull, cold, and dark, the world inspires no dreams of wealth to be won, homes to be built, dynasties to be founded... at least to this observer. Of course, the colonists were fleeing persecution on their former world, and perhaps this wilderness struck them as a good hiding place. Maybe so, but it's certainly an unpleasant lair. The swampy plains are gray-green, patchy with algae and a few primitive treelike plants. Our preliminary survey shows no animals more evolved than simple insects and sessile invertebrates. What could they have been thinking, to land on so desolate a world? What went wrong? That's what we're here to find out!»
A sour smile pulled at my mouth when I first read this passage. Dueine's prose drew my scorn, of course, but also her ignorance and naiveté. As folk of small vision often do, she describes the whole planet as if it were identical to the colony's site. Graylin IV has icecaps covering a third of its surface, and an equatorial ocean, and even in the temperate regions, where the colony was founded, there are enormous variations in terrain and biota.
She'd left out many other aspects of the planet. The simple fauna present on Graylin IV, for example, had a developmentally truncated quality, with no species lines leading very far up the evolutionary intelligence ladder. Sometimes this indicates a disaster wrought by overreaching sentience, a war that ended the futures of the higher species. But Graylin IV showed no signs of such cataclysmic events, no great craters, no lava dikes from core taps run wild, and no obvious ruins other than the colonial remnants.
I discovered these facts in the ship's knowledge base. A lack of imagination does not always mean a lack of curiosity. In fact, I was sure I'd have made a better scribe than Dueine, though I am untrained in that skill. I really do believe this, in spite of what they say about folk like me. The literal-mindedness that was forced upon me should be no great handicap for a journalist.
I might not have minded fulfilling Dueine's unofficial duties, too, even if Hu Moon's personality grated a bit. Hu Moon's beauty was stylishly eccentric– my favorite kind. Sometimes personalities change when skin touches skin, or hidden depths become apparent. I suppose I told myself this to justify my attraction to the woman.
The remaining full-time member of our group of knowledge seekers was Jang, a weapons master from one of Dilvermoon's Holding Arks and a man everyone treated with respectful caution. He was physically imposing... tall, wide, with dense slabs of muscle under a gray, artificially hardened skin, completely hairless. He had a quiet closed face, his ears were cropped, and his teeth were glittering bands of sawtoothed alloy, so sharp that his tongue and lips were scaled with protective metal. I saw him yawn once when he didn't know I was looking and learned that his mouth could open much wider than any unmodified human's. I could not imagine how foolish or how insane one would have to be to pick a fight with Jang.
Jang seemed uninterested in archaeology, though he would cheerfully work with us whenever he wasn't busy checking his security devices or maintaining his weapons. His real job was to see that we all remained alive and that our ship returned intact. He was paid by our insurer, not by the university financing the dig, and though he behaved with perfect courtesy toward Hu Moon, he was not actually under her orders.
That night Jang sat, as he sometimes did, apart from the others, beside an artificial campfire in his corner of the security compound.
«Jang,» I said, with that insincere joviality people often feign when they approach an obviously dangerous person.
«Leeson,» he responded in his low, unemotional voice. «How are you?»
«Fine, fine,» I said. «Well, not entirely.»
«How so?» Despite his professional detachment, Jang was not unsociable; in fact, he was unfailingly polite to me.
I sat and drew a deep breath. «I don't want to sound foolish, but are you sure we're alone?»