The floor of my valley sloped up gradually, becoming steeper the nearer I got to the rim. The first few times I climbed to the rim, I was winded so severely that the most I could do was throw myself on the ground and wheeze, chest heaving. Now, after living outside for the last few months, I had gradually toughened and was able to make it without trouble.
I sat with my back against the guard post and waited for Hresah, my guard, to scuttle around the rim to where I was. He still had a ways to go, so I drew up my legs and rested my chin on my knees, looking out over the empty, sun-bleached land.
Hresah arrived, and switched on the power to the guard post. Actually, it was more like one of the automated information kiosks that you see in large cities. He spoke to it, the computer inside translated, and it spoke to me. Over time, I had learned to filter out his actual voice and hear only the kiosk’s translation. Onalbi voices were dry and whispery, like the desert wind.
“You are well?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m well.”
“I apologize for being long to get here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. The one thing that I had asked of the ship’s crew was that they bend every effort to get our languages in synchronization. Setting aside my little problem, the sooner we got our words aligned, the sooner we could get our future straightened out. They had done remarkably well, but some things still tended to sound a bit odd coming from Onalbi into English.
“Snow will come soon.”
“Really? I know it’s been getting chilly, but it’s not that cold.”
Hresah raised his claws out of the way and used the secondary limbs underneath his forward shoulders to prod at the side of the guard kiosk. An image appeared, looking something like different colors of swirling mud—their version of a weather map showing temperatures and isobars and such. He traced the curve of one arc of purplish brown with one of the limber tentacles on his secondary arm.
“See here? How it pushes this way?”
Try as I might, I still couldn’t read their maps. A theory had floated back to me from the ship that they might be able see a broader range of frequencies. There might be colors there that 1 could not see. Presumably in the infrared, from what Ronald had told me. It was a low-priority issue at the moment, but someone would investigate as soon as there was time.
Instead of wasting my afternoon trying to read the map, I put it into more practical terms. “How long before the snow gets here?”
“Early tomorrow morning.”
“Could I get you to toss down another tree or two? I’ll need some more stuff to burn to stay warm.” They weren’t trees, of course, they looked more like heavy-limbed shrubs, but that’s what the guys back at the ship and the Onalbi had agreed to call them.
“You are empty?” More work needed on that bit of translation.
“Not yet, but I will be if I don’t get some more.”
“Looking ahead is something that humans do not always do.”
All I could do was chuckle and say, “If I had looked ahead, I would not have killed Grenabeloso, and you and I would not be here talking this afternoon.”
“You are better at it since you became a prisoner.”
There could be any number of interpretations of that, so I asked him to rephrase what he’d said.
“When you first came here, you only looked at the now. Now you look more ahead.”
I sighed, picked up a pebble and cast it over the edge into my valley. “I don’t know if the computer knows the word, but we have a word called maturity. It means that we learn as we go along.”
“We learn, too.”
“Maturity isn’t quite the same as learning. You’re already wise when you’re born. A human must learn that actions have consequences. Learning that helps give a human maturity… the ability to choose the right course of action, even if it hurts now, in the hopes that it will be seen as the right thing later on. If I had been wiser when I was in school, I would have studied harder. Then I would have been able to be more than a cook.”
“I do not understand how you can be born not knowing this.”
“From what I’ve been told, you Onalbi live a long time and are not subject to hormonal surges. Your longer life span permeates your entire culture. It’s ingrained in you to consider the consequences of your actions—you might live long enough to see them. Also, your more stable hormonal levels don’t lead you into some of the… ah, impetuous actions that humans are subject to.”
“But we are hunters, like humans.”
Somewhat oblique, but a good point. Eventually, I nodded. “My hunter instincts were part of what led me to kill Grenabeloso. Humans are territorial. We also tend to protect our own kind. In my haste to decide how to act at the time, I assumed that the besa was more nearly human and deserving of my protection.”
Hresah waved one huge claw from side to side, a gesture I’d been told to interpret as a nod, even though it looked more like equivocation. “We are not territorial,” he agreed. “It is hard to understand how humans feel that they own certain things. How can you own a piece of land, for instance? I have heard you refer to the valley as ‘yours’ many times, and yet you did not make it. Onalbi only call theirs something that they made. You did not make the valley, nature did, yet you call it yours when even by your standards, it should belong to the Onalbi. How can it be yours if it is ours? I can understand the mud hut. You built it. It is yours. But the valley, I do not understand.”
I shrugged, hoping that he understood the gesture. “I agree. The things you say are true. I will think about them and try to have an answer the next time I climb up here to see you.”
Hresah laid one fearsome claw next to my thigh. I didn’t flinch; it was a gesture akin to placing a hand on someone’s shoulder. “Please make that climb happen soon. I will look forward to your answer.”
As I climbed back down to my hut, I felt the first whisper of a cold wind. In my imagination, it was the chill touch of the Grim Reaper that I felt!
When I awoke the next morning, the ground was already three or four centimeters deep in snow. The fat, sticky flakes were driving in steadily, with very little in the way of a breeze.
I pushed the mud-covered branches that served as my door back into place and set about nursing the embers from the previous evening’s fire to life. The fire had to be just the right size—too small and it wouldn’t give off enough heat to warm the hut, too large and it would fill the domeshaped hut with eye-stinging smoke and send me scrambling outside to cough my lungs out. When I had things just right, there was a thin stream of smoke that rose straight up through the round vent hole I’d left in the roof.
The only thing surprising about Ronald Hickok’s footsteps outside the door was that I hadn’t expected him for another day or two.
“Knock, knock,” he called.
“Come in.”
“What do I do… just push through?”
I reached over and pulled the plug aside. Cold air laden with snowflakes drifted in with him before I got it back into place.
“Thanks,” he grunted, hunched over uncomfortably as he inched his way around the fire in the middle of the floor. He sat heavily. “I brought you another blanket. Thought you might need it, what with the snow and all.”