«Reasonably,» said Jang. «Do you have evidence to the contrary?»
I persevered. «We haven't been here long enough for anything to break, so Hu Moon has me running the mapper. Anyway, I have a lot of time to myself, and... well, I feel watched.»
«'Watched,'« Jang repeated, with no trace of impatience.
«Yeah. Well, maybe not 'watched,' you know, with all those spooks-in-the-bushes connotations. I mean, who believes in ghosts? But like something's still here, still paying attention somehow. You don't feel it?»
«Possibly,» he said.
I felt a sudden pleasure, that someone might be taking me seriously. It doesn't happen that often anymore. «What do you mean? Have you seen something?»
He took a long time to reply. «No. And it may be nothing. It's sometimes difficult for me to separate intuition from paranoia. There's a fairly indefinite line there... still, I hope not to cross it.»
«Well,» I said, finally. «I just thought I'd mention it. Just a bad feeling. Probably doesn't mean anything.»
He nodded politely, and I thought I saw in his eyes that graceful pity that the large-hearted and powerful sometimes feel for the crippled.
I retired to my shelter, no angrier than usual.
OVER THE NEXT few days we sank test pits into the colonial strata, and we started finding the occasional interesting object. The colonists had apparently done well enough, for a while. We excavated a number of artifacts manufactured on-world, indicative of a well-preserved technology.
Most of the actual artifacts we found were the ordinary domestic refuse that litters the places where humans have lived... the broken crockery, bits of corroded metal and weathered plastic... the discarded junk of existence. Of course there were cannabis pipes of all sorts, made of a wide range of materials... water pipes, effigy pipes, vaporizers, gravity pipes, and a variety of others.
We also discovered several anachronisms... objects dating from periods long after the colony's death. Hu Moon attributed these to casual visitors; curiosity seekers who might have landed briefly at the site in the many centuries since the colony had failed.
In any place where humans have lived, there will usually be at least a few things worth finding. Some of the pottery was strongly and simply made, vigorous and expressive. Some of the pipes were beautifully carved, and I felt a twinge of envy for the long-departed pipemaker's talent, which reminded me unhappily of the abilities I've lost.
My favorite piece was a low wide bowl, 40 centimeters across. Its perfection of shape and finish indicated it had been formed in a standard molecular replicator. The bowl, of translucent glass, showed an embedded image.., the view from the settlement site, looking east across the gray and umber bogs, the reddish light of the rising sun painting the low sky, the scene rendered in broad, impressionistic strokes. A melodramatic image, of course. My critical faculties have probably suffered the same fate as my imagination, but I still liked it. «A big souvenir ashtray,» I said to Irvane when he found it.
He gave me an evil look. «Shut up, Leeson.»
«Just kidding,» I said. The bowl was strangely beautiful, far more so, to my eyes, than the actual vista we saw every day. I thought about the long-dead people who had eaten from this bowl and 'wondered if they had occasionally felt the same uneasiness with their world that I did.
We found the remains of the colony's central computer, and the oriented crystal stack that comprised its main memory module. This was relatively undamaged and some of us grew cheerful at the thought that we'd be leaving Graylin IV sooner than expected. Irvane's pre-expedition research indicated that they'd had the computer before they became a colony, back when they were still an indentured people on Bonton. As a despised and persecuted minority, they'd had good reason to maintain the privacy of their files, and the stack was encrypted.
Unfortunately the encoding algorithm had been designed in such a way that we could not simply skip to the final days of the colony; we had to decode the log in sequence, since each data unit incorporated the key to the succeeding unit. Irvane set the ship's computer to reconstructing the log, using a brute-force algorithm that yielded only a few months of entries per day. There was no audio, for reasons that Irvane did not bother to explain.
The early entries were fairly dull, concerned with such matters as local terraforming, shelter-building, and the adaptation of crops and livestock to local conditions. Irvane's expert systems pored through the mass of data and chose representative bits for us to consider, which we did every night. At first, watching these records was a painfully tedious duty.
ONE MORNING we found a coldsleep worker dead in the ruins just outside the ship's security perimeter, a man we called Flash because he was so slow. The coldsleep workers are convicts, carried in the ship's stasis chambers just like the other supplies. They don't have names anymore; we give them convenient nicknames. We thaw them out when we need an extra pair of hands and ice them down again when we're done with them. They're a harmless lot, no matter what heinous crimes they committed in their former lives, because they've been brainburned into tranquil docility, with just enough intelligence left to feed themselves and follow simple instructions. The polite term for them is «servitor.» They're cheaper than mechs and require less maintenance. Still, I don't approve of icicle labor. Call me old-fashioned, but slavery is a Bad Thing, even if the slaves are too stupid to understand their condition. Even if they deserve their condition, or worse.
And also, I'm enough like them to feel a degree of uncomfortable brotherhood. Of course, their crimes were worse than mine and so their punishment was much harsher.
Flash had been operating a sifter for Irvane, and he was supposed to have gone back to the ship's hold at day's end. The mystery was not so much that Flash had died, it was that he hadn't returned to the hold. Usually his nerve collar would have been irresistibly persuasive. Sometimes the icicles just forget to come home and wander about in dull bemusement until the collar reminds them and they run screaming back to the ship. We could all see the line of red flesh under Flash's collar, where the collar had damaged the skin.
All five of us stood looking down at Flash's body. He was a very small man, though strong. He'd died kneeling in the loose gravel by the sifter screen, folded over like an old-time Meccaman praying to his god. «Did the collar cook him after he died?» I asked.
«Not unless it malfunctioned,» Jang said. «Supposed to shut down if the prisoner dies.»
I felt vaguely criticized. «I ran every collar through the diagnostic module, before we landed. Part of my job.»
«Strange,» said Jang. «Maybe a stroke, and he couldn't respond to the collar. Icicles have a high rate of cerebral accidents. The brainburning weakens them.»
He touched Flash's body with the toe of his boot and the body toppled sideways. The dead man's face rolled into the light, and we all made our individual sounds of shock and discomfort, except for Jang, who was too self-possessed to react perceptibly. The dead man's eyes were wide with what might have been terror, though I've always thought that describing corpses in such emotional terms is something of an embellishment at best. Most dead people don't seem very happy about their condition. In any case, his lips were pulled back in a toothy fearful grimace, and there was dark brownish blood on his chin from a lacerated lower lip. I saw something white in his hands, which were clasped tightly to his chest.
Irvane, who had made his disinterest in the demise of the icicle obvious, was suddenly galvanized. He knelt beside the corpse and began to pry at the fingers with a delicate little pick.
«Be cautious,» said Jang. «Maybe it wasn't a stroke that killed him.»