Water and Stone
By Clint McInnes
I hate my job.
‘Oh?’ you say, and ‘Really?’ you say, and ‘That’s
rich!’ you say. And I know you must
wonder what’s so different about that, and it’s not as if I could blame you for
thinking that way, since just about everyone who does field work for Survey
would like to be somewhere, anywhere else. Or don’t you feel that way?
Oh. You don’t
work for Survey? Just passin’ through,
huh?
Sales?
Whatcha sellin?
Nah. I’ve
already got three implants, and this place ain’t got a GPS yet, so the
subdermal locator wouldn’t do me much good.
Looks like you’re out of luck.
Oh, they gave you your walkin’ papers already? I guess it’s started then. But I beat ‘em to the punch.
You must not have run into too many Surveyors,
then. How long you been on this sales
job?
Ha!
Okay. You haven’t even been
through your first regen yet, have you?
Fine. None
of my business. I’m just here to get
wasted anyway.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard ‘em all. Everybody has the galaxy’s worst
bitch of a job. That’s a given. But this is a whole new level of hate. Trust me.
No. I hate …
really, really, really, really hate … my job.
And my boss.
I hate her, too. And her
boss. And the Regional
Coordinator. Him I hate worst of all.
You have to ask?
He’s the one that picked me for this plum assignment, this cushy little
position on this … idyllic
planet. Yeah, this is his fault. For the time bein’.
Hey, bud, hang on a sec.
Yo,
barkeep! Do it again.
Oh,
come off it, you know I’m good for it!
Fine. Here’s my chit. Keep it.
Yeah,
whatever, just leave the bottle. I
ain’t going anywhere.
Excuse me?
Oh, well, he brought me in from the regional headquarters on Distant
where I never actually had to look into the faces of the races we … um … deal
with.
Of course I’m serious. Oh, yeah, I had it made back at HQ! Nice office all to myself where I wrote my reports and totaled up
my statistics and banged my assistant three or four days out of five.
Nah, she wasn’t what you’d call ‘beauty-queen
material’, but she wasn’t bad. Long
hair. Nice rack.
Why? Not a
clue. To this day I don’t know what I
did to get him so totally pissed off, but he really had it in for me. If I could just …
How’s that?
Oh, why do I hate the job? Okay. Have you been
Outside yet? Well, it’s a pretty little
ball o’ dirt. No dangerous wildlife to
speak of; nice, warm oceans; beautiful weather year-round; and more prime,
beach-front property than Eden, Earth, and Prosper combined.
Yeah, the lower gravity don’t hurt either.
You really interested? I’ll dish out the lowdown, if ya got a couple hours. I oughta be good for that much longer.
Fine. Here,
let me top off your drink. You’ll wanna
get comfortable …
--
It was maybe two hours after making landfall that I
first decided T'knn-t'krri't had retirement-community potential. Y’know, though, somebody’s eventually gonna
have to do something about that name. It translates as ‘High-Mother of the Chosen Folk’ or words to
that effect. Say what you want to about
the univoders, they always lose (or add) some nuance of meaning that you can
only get by absorbing the language yourself.
Main worry with that is that no human could begin to
pronounce it correctly, since the natives’ lingo drifts into the ultrasonic
about half the time. Angie had
suggested I name the planet ‘Oemor’.
That’s her dog’s name. It’s
‘Romeo’ spelled backwards. He’s a
shih-tzu-chihuahua cross-breed. She
named him that because he was so scared of a toy poodle bitch he’d run into
right after she got him.
Angie? My
girlfriend. Survey researcher. Best thing on the whole planet. I’d’ve slid right off the plate if she
hadn’t been here.
Nah. I’m not
into dogs … especially those tiny, witless, self-propelled-mop types that yap
constantly … and I could tell the feeling was mutual. Oemor was a particularly loathsome example of the species. I’d go without sex for three months before I
named a planet after that drooling flea-hotel, and I said as much.
Got that right.
Given Angie’s reaction, I’d say three months was a conservative
estimate.
Oh, yeah, picking out a name for the place was part
of the job. They called it a perk. Big deal.
The rules said I couldn’t name it after myself, so what’s the point?
But I digress.
Oh!
Sorry! Didn’t mean to spill it
on you, bud. Here, have a wipe.
Okay, you wanted some background, so here it
is. We’re in Corridor Three, roughly
the same distance from the galactic core as Earth. Our star looks like it grew up in the same nursery as Sol, and
the planet’s year is 1.06 Standard years.
The day’s twenty-two Standard hours and change, but they divide it into
ten sections, just like everywhere else in the Commonwealth. It’s a little less dense than Earth, and a
good bit bigger as well, so we only have to deal with oh-point-eight-eight
gravities.
Yeah, it’s a pretty decent benefit. Nice for the joints, if you still have your
original equipment, which I do. It’s a
mostly-water world, even more so than Earth.
About five sixths of the surface is ocean, and the land spreads out over
two smallish continents and some fifteen million mostly-tropical islands.
Yep, you heard right. Fifteen million … plus.
And if you don’t get more than a couple thousand klicks from the
equator, you can swim from one island to the next in a few minutes. Beach-house anyone? You can understand Survey’s interest in the
place.
Believe it.
As long as I was out of sight of the water, it reminded me of Eden. The forests were unbelievable, the trees
pushin’ up over two hundred meters.
Well, technically, they ain’t trees, according to the scientific
types. More like a reinforced variation
of grass, and it grows a couple meters a day in the wet season. But they look a hell of a lot like trees,
and I don’t worry about details. A guy
can get really bogged down in details.
Right. Which
brings me to the natives. Now, I’m as
open-minded as the next guy. Hell,
you’ve gotta be if you want a career in Survey. And I’ve met four of the xeno’s here and there. Noxians, Brulls, The Ett, Alorr-dorada. You know your xeno’s?
Good, then you know not a one of those is remotely
humanoid in shape. Hell, they ain’t
even recognizable as a life-form to most humans. Maybe that’s what made it okay, just their sheer alien-ness. The Ett don’t need to eat anything, just absorb
cosmic rays for life energy, and the Noxians aren’t precisely solid, being
two-dimensional representations of … but you already know about that stuff,
don’t you?
Okay. Your
average Krri’t is about, oh, two and a half meters … long? Tall?
Depends on how many of its legs it’s using. You’ve seen vids?
You’re kidding.
Oh, that’s right, you’ve only been here two days! Okay, I can see that. Guess you haven’t had much chance to nose
around, huh?
Whatever.
Couple meters and change, nose to tail.
Look like a third-grader’s idea of Space Otters, if the third-grader
happens to be stoned. They’re long and
sleek enough, and they’ve got that rich, brown fur, so if the light’s bad and
you don’t look too close and there’s nothing around to give ‘em scale, you might take one for a mink. But then you notice all those legs,
and the fact that its arms have two elbows and hands on the ends, opposable
thumbs and all, and then you realize it’s watching you with four eyes, not two,
and that its tail is a lot thinner than an otter’s, and forked, and prehensile.
Still, they’re one of the most nearly-humanoid races
we’ve ever run across. And they’re
smart, too, in their own way.
Ha! ‘Their
own way.’ That turned into my
biggest problem. They did things their
own way, and no amount of reasoning or persuasion or threat made a dent. But I was too stupid to figure out why.
See, the main reason I’m here is to get the dam
project going. I said that, didn’t
I? No?
Oh. Well, it is. ‘Cause of the rain. We’ve got better than four meters … meters,
now, not centimeters… of rain coming down on most of the land area every year,
and …
Yeah, that’s right.
Rains some every day. It’s
rainin’ out there now. Anyway, every
piss-ant little island has at least one major river. Fresh, too, spring-fed and everything. See, the ocean is reeeeal
shallow near the equator, that’s some of the reason behind all those
islands. It gets way deep at the poles,
fifteen, twenty, maybe twenty-five klicks, but around here it’s only a hundred
meters or so, tops, and usually less than ten.
Between the islands and such.
Survey saw the numbers and … well, okay, I was the one who worked up the
numbers. But it wouldn’t have mattered
who did it, the conclusion was a real no-brainer. Hydroelectricity.
No. See, the
natives don’t use electrical power.
No kiddin’.
Say what you will, but I know it’s a choice they
made. They could produce it if they
wanted to. I mean, you’ve seen examples
of their machinery, ain’t ya? Seen a mill? A steam engine? A casting house? No,
wait, you ain’t been Outside. Keep
forgettin’ that. Anyway, they get an
unbelievable amount of energy from the rivers, but it’s all
mechanical! Such gear-trains and drives
and transmission systems you never saw!
And it ain’t like they don’t have the raw materials or anything. They use copper and aluminum for all kinds
of things, and they get real fancy with some of their alloys, and they’ve had
the local equivalent of thermoset plastics for better’n two hundred years, and
hell, we’ve only had that for
about four hundred. These buggers are smart,
I don’t care what the psycho wonks say.
They’ve just got this kooky aversion to electric power. Hah!
And nobody ever bothered to find out why. Our techies just figured the natives for a bunch of
schmucks. I mean, how wrong could you get!
But the dams were going in anyway, local wishes or
not. One of the more distasteful tasks
I get to perform is clearing the locals out where the reservoirs will be. That’s what I’ve been doing for weeks and
weeks now. Seems more like years. They don’t like it, not even a little. See, they’ve got this, whaddaya call it,
this connection to the land where they were born. You know how salmon always come back to the same spot where they
were spawned?
Well, they do.
Very same stream. And these guys
are just as attached to the old homestead.
Some of the Enforcers were thinkin’ it’s a damn good job they don’t have
a central government, or we’d’ve had a real fight on our hands, for sure, no
lie.
Uh-uh. They
didn’t get it either.
I’ll get to that.
So, what was I sayin’? Oh,
yeah. The clans trade some with each
other, and they don’t have any wars going or anything, but they don’t exactly
mingle, you know? Hah! And here I am, the freakin’ “cultural liaison”,
and I didn’t have a clue about why.
What a dope!
Here, lemme top off your glass. Ya look thirsty.
Yo,
barkeep! One more just like it.
Yeah,
the whole bottle, whadda I look like, a Cub Scout?
You
let me worry about that. I need advice,
I’ll call my mother.
Sorry about that.
Where was I? Oh, right. Dams.
Yeah, I tell ‘em ‘bout the dam.
They don’t care. I tell ‘em how
they’ll be under six meters of water if they stay put. They either don’t care or don’t believe me. And then if I’ve gotta get Enforcers
involved, things can get pretty tense.
Krri’t are a good bit stronger than your average human, but the
Enforcers, ya might say, ain’t average.
We never did lose anybody, on either side, but it got close more than
once. If I’d just done my homework,
instead o’ believin’ everything the psych techs told me as gospel, we coulda
got around that, but noooooo. I had to
be Mister Dense. And there was this one
clan …
--
Lotta things run across my mind as the boat pulls up
to the dock, but the one that kept popping to the surface is, This is my
eighth trip out here. I thought
about that a lot, as I mulled over the fact that I’d yet to even get a glimpse
of the matriarch, much less a meeting.
That’s what really galled me.
There I was, trying to save the lives of these … well … these
beings. Okay, maybe not save their lives,
exactly, ‘cause they could just swim away, but … well, help ‘em out. You know?
Get ‘em a little compensation for the hell the Corporation planned to
put ‘em through. I mean this is
their world, after all, and we are sorta like invaders, if you
think about it.
Yeah.
Tyrants, in the old sense of absolute rulers. The final arbiters of reality, as Nietzsche would put it. Benevolent tyrants, but tyrants all the
same.
Damn. Can’t
seem to keep my mind from wandering today.
But I’d been out there eight times, and the clan
leader wouldn’t give me the time of day.
And it’s not as if I could teleport.
Oh, no. Everything at Base is
still on darkforce batteries, and they aren’t too keen on “wasting” their power
on frivolities like, you know, making my
job something other than grueling.
It’ll be months before they have a grid set up in the beachhead
settlement, and years before anything gets out that far.
Huh-uh. No
aircars either, heavens no! Can’t be
upsettin’ the locals with big, white “things” flying around overhead. As if management gives a damn what
the locals think. They’re just being
cheap. Standard operating procedure.
Oh, it’s never hard to find ‘em. The Krri’t like to live near the water. That’s no trick on this planet, since
there’s more coastline here than on most of the rest of the worlds in the
Commonwealth combined, so the bulk of ‘em make their homes on the islands. The ones who choose to live on the continental
masses always stay near the local watercourse, and again there are just so many
rivers that’s not a problem either.
They’re about as aquatic as a land-creature can get, and are just as
much at home in the salt water as the fresh.
Not that this humongous ocean is all that salty, especially near the
equator. The exogeologists have any
number of theories about that, and I didn’t think much of a single one of
‘em. Knowing what I
know now, that goes double. Blind,
completely blind, and I’m just as bad.
Nah, hell no, we haven’t
been here long at all. Not quite a
year. And we’ve only been on decent
terms with the natives for the last, oh, seven, maybe eight months. And those knuckleheads think they can scope
the whole history of the place in that time!
But the jerks missed something … something big. We all did.
You’ll see what I mean in a minute.
Uh-uh, that’s my point. See, T'knn-t'krri't is tectonically active. You seen all the volcanoes? No, wait, you haven’t been Outside; damn,
why can’t I remember that?
Whatever.
This place was very active in recent times, geegogic …
geliogolo … dammit … ge-o-lo-gi-cally speaking. Better slow down. I’ve
wondered more than once how that might’ve affected the natives’ development. I mean, it was barely five thousand years
ago that this planet was all but covered with volcanoes. The … ge-o-lo-gi-cal record … ya wouldn’t
think that’d be such a hard word to say … the geological record shows evidence
of a couple hundred-thousand years of incredibly violent earthquakes. I’m talkin’ world-shattering stuff. Like the crust just couldn’t get
comfortable, you know? And they’ve been
here a hell of a lot longer than that, and I’m thinking, how did they
survive? Where did they
survive? The place just wasn’t inhabitable.
It bothered me if I thought about it too long, so
lately I’d been tryin’ not to think about it at all. Hoo-boy, was that
a mistake!
Ease off, chum, I’ll get to that. So, about the visit. The skipper tied up the boat and I jumped up
onto the dock. Krri’t don’t jump. They slide.
They flow. They zip. They launch. They’re lots of fun to watch, ‘specially if a group of ‘em start
playing in the water. Reminds me of
juvenile otters, the way they go at life with such zest. That’s probably another thing that makes ‘em
not-so-threatening to humans. They
always seem to be in a good mood. As
long as you don’t mess with ‘em. That
was our mistake.
This stuff ain’t bad for rotgut, is it?
Yeah, course it’s imported. Human’s don’t mess with the local booze,
even if the natives do try to get us to drink with ‘em.
And, hey, that’s one more thing that
bothers me about this situation with Ko’oor, the matriarch. She’s the first Krri’t to give me the cold
shoulder (cold neck? cold elbow, maybe? they don’t really have shoulders) the whole
time I’ve been here. But that day, I
was determined to talk with her. The
dam was finished. It was scheduled to
start floodin’ the valley in two days, or as soon as I could get the last of
the locals out, whichever came first.
Yeah. You
heard me right. They were gonna flood
the valley whether the Krri’t moved out or not. Really, I guess it’s not quite as bad as if it was humans they
did that to. Krri’t swim like fish
after all. But just taking their land
away like that, when they don’t want to go?
It just seemed … well, dishonorable.
You know … mean. ‘Low-rent’, as
they used to say back home.
So I figured this was my last chance to get ‘em to
move. I knew, no matter how greedy and
grasping the management was here, they wouldn’t, at least, flood the place
until I’d left. And I wasn’t leaving
without this clan.
Theirs was a sizable island, maybe a hundred-fifty
meters wide and ten times that long, a big chunk of basalt stickin’ up out of
the riverbed, covered with thousands of years’ worth of deposits and plant
growth. It split the river but good,
those tree-things growing thick down the middle. Looked kinda like a spine or something. I took one of the paths in toward the longhouse.
There were lots of Krri’t zipping around. It was getting into the cane harvest season,
and they like to get the early growth for mash. You don’t know about their hard liquor, do you?
Yeah, they pull the new canes when they’re just
starting to turn from green to yellow, mash ‘em up, and let the mess ferment
for a few weeks. It gets pretty potent
even before they distill the stuff.
Runs about a hundred-sixty proof after all’s said and done, and that by
itself would be enough to knock you on your ass, but there’s some other ingredients,
trace elements and the odd protein, that make it an experience you don’t want to repeat. Downing a shot of that stuff feels a little
like havin’ your face pushed out the back of your head by a chunk of dry
ice. And the hangover’s much, much
worse.
Yeah, I did.
Just once, and that was twice too many.
But the natives drink the stuff like mother’s milk.
So. I kept a
sharp eye peeled for the matriarch.
There’s not a whole lot of difference between the sexes, from our
standpoint. Hell, most of ‘em don’t
even have a set gender at all, best we can tell. Drones, or some such. But
it takes a drone and donor and receptor to do the deed. The matriarch is the oldest donor of the
clan.
Yeah, I know, but there’s no other reasonable word
that makes sense, and I can’t pronounce the title they use. She’s the clan’s big cheese. Deal with it.
And she is big, by the way, relatively
speaking. The matriarch is always
heftier than the rest of the clan members, and some of the older ones have
lighter patches on the throat. I knew
Ko’oor was pretty old, maybe pushing three hundred, so she’d likely have the
patches. But I walked the length of the
island and then back to the center without seein’ anything that might be her.
Here, have some more. Your glass looks lonely.
Heh. Killed
it, did we?
Yo,
barkeep! You know, you gotta say that to get its
attention.
Beats
me. I guess it’s just the way they’re
programmed.
Huh. Worked before. Yo, barkeep! Hey,
can we get some service over here?
No,
dammit, I haven’t had enough.
Trust me, you’ll be able to tell when I’ve had enough. Make it Tanqueray this time.
Blasted
AI’s! Think they know what’s best for a
human.
Yeah,
same to you, bub!
You
know damn well I don’t have an aircar.
And leave the bottle!
Where was I?
I asked you that before, didn’t I?
Right. I stopped by the back
door of the longhouse and waited until one of ‘em scooted up to go in. I did the whole ‘greeting’ bit and went
through the Ritual of Travelers, and he invited me to their third meal – they’ve
got seven standard periods set aside for eating during the day, something about
high metabolisms that I never really studied – so I followed him inside.
No, she wasn’t.
You might say the next couple of hours gave me a new appreciation for
the definition of ‘tedious’. I tried to
chat ‘em up, you know, get one of ‘em to tell me where I could find Ko’oor, but
they all seemed immune. Oh, they were
friendly enough. Shared their water,
shared their food, what of it a human could eat. There are some local alkaloids that you don’t want to get on the outside of, mostly in the starchy
foods. One the Krri’t eat all the time,
grows in the river like a cattail, looks a little like a yam when you dig it
up. Works faster than cyanide. The ‘One-Bite Potato’ we call it.
Yeah, we did lose a couple who didn’t feel like
following the rules. The sucker smells
great when it’s cookin’. Management put
the lid on any more ‘experimentation’ after that.
Well, they tried to share their booze, but you might
say I wasn’t in the mood. I’ll never be
in the mood for that stuff again, believe you me. But they weren’t talking, not about what I wanted to know.
I decided to do one more walkabout before calling in
the big guns, and took off for the far end of the island about, oh, forty
minutes before sunset. I figured I
could take a good look around and still have a little light left for the
Enforcers, if it came to that. Turns
out it wasn’t necessary.
Krri’t aren’t what you’d call nocturnal, but they do
okay in low light. They’ll usually go
about their business until a human thinks it’s pitch dark, but when I stepped
outside I couldn’t see a soul. Not a
one. Pretty weird, but I took off for
the head of the rock.
She was waiting for me, right there on the
point. Just sittin’, smokin’ that awful
weed they like. I stayed away from her
downwind side and sidled up all respectful to get her attention, but she spoke
first.
I told ya I didn’t like the univoder, didn’t I? Yeah, piece o’ junk. Don’t know who sets the damn things up, but
he must speak ‘pidgin’ as a native language.
Anyway, she tells me I’m wasting my time. Right off the bat, no lie!
No ritual, no greeting, no nothin’.
So I launch in to try to explain about the dam, and she stops me and
says it won’t make any difference. Says
they ain’t leaving, and nothing I say can change her mind. I begged, I yelled, I threatened, I
promised. No good. She said they didn’t need to leave, that the
clans along the river had gotten together and they “had it all fixed” and I shouldn’t
worry. And that’s all she’d say. She just sat there, smokin’, lookin’ at me,
all calm and cool. I told her the
Enforcers would be there in a few minutes to move ‘em all whether they felt
like leaving or not, but she just did that two-handed wave thing they do when a
human would shrug, and told me they wouldn’t stay moved, and to do what I felt best.
It was the funniest thing. I had my comm out to call Base, but for some reason I couldn’t
say anything. It was like … well, I
don’t know what it was like.
It was weird. I figured, in the
back of my mind, that she was doin’ something to me, but I didn’t know
what. The tech guys had determined
pretty early that Krri’t don’t have any esper talent. But I stood there with the comm in my hand until the sun had
almost disappeared. She just sat and
watched me the whole time. I never did
call ‘em. I finally just stuck it back
in my pants and stalked off to the dock.
I was in such a bad mood by the time I got back to
the boat that I wasn’t worth talkin’ to at all. I clumped down onto the deck and stomped over to the chair I’d
had bolted to it, and flopped down into the canvas, all the time thinkin’ about
what idiots they were. Stubborn
fools. In two days the rising water
level would have crept back to their island.
In a week, half of it would be flooded, and in another only the trees
would be visible. But they’ll stay, oh,
yes, heaven forbid they should listen to reason. And heaven forbid management should consider any of the
alternatives!
My sour face must have struck the skipper as
funny. They think we look pretty
comical anyway, you know, lurching around on just two legs the way we do. They have somewhere between six and twelve
feet on the ground all the time, and they don’t even grasp the concept of ‘tripping’, much less having
a word for it in their language. I
noticed him makin’ that high squeak they make when they get amused.
Hey, you know, that’s another thing. See, if you translate their jokes, the punch
lines sound funny to us, and vice-versa.
I figure any race that shares our sense of humor must be at least a
little whacked. So, anyway, I ask him
what’s up and he don’t say anything, just keeps chuckling. But I keep at him, and after a while he just
points toward shore. I follow his
finger.
There, right there in plain sight, big as life, the
group I relocated not four days before is setting up shop … lock, stock, and
kittens. I cussed ‘em the rest of the
way back to Base.
That evening I dropped into Caitlynn’s office –
broke in on a meeting she was having with a couple of suppliers – and gave her
my report in four sentences, and I didn’t spare the language. Then I went to my room and locked the door
and drank myself blind. Angie tells me
I didn’t come up for air for days, but I have no recollection of anything that
happened until the beginning of this week.
That was three days ago. She
took me over to her place to dry out, and I did
appreciate it. But she could have saved
herself the trouble. I dove back in
after I found out what was really happening.
And that brings us to today. This morning.
I jerked and rolled over when the alarm chimed, and
I whacked at it a few times to turn it off.
Angie must have set it in case I chickened out. The sun was just starting to peek over the
horizon and through the window, but I couldn’t work up enough energy to
care. Getting out of bed was the very
last thing I wanted to do. Someone had
decided to use my head to test sonic disruption ordnance, and a flock of
incontinent parrots had obviously roosted in my mouth for at least a week. Besides that, I knew what faced me, knew
that I was expected to go out to the site and verify the reservoir depth.
Well, screw it.
They could whistle for their damned report.
Sometime later (it was full daylight, but my eyes
were still too unfocused to read the clock) the intercom started buzzing at
me. In a few seconds Angie’s voice came
in. “Jon!” she says, “get your lazy ass
out of bed and answer the damn door!
I yelled at her to go away.
Hey, bud, take a note here. Never scream at somebody when suffering the
effects of a monumental hangover. I
thought my poor head was gonna split open front-to-back.
She says, “The hell! You got work to do sucker.”
I answered, much more softly, “Screw
work.”
And she says, “It’ll screw you if you
don’t hop to it. Now buzz me in!”
I knew she’d never leave until I did. She’s just as stubborn as I am. I got up, hit the access button, and
stumbled off to see if I could find my pants somewhere. I just hoped I had a pair that I hadn’t
thrown up on yet.
She got me straightened out – as much as I could
be straightened out in that condition – and we hopped a grounder over to Base
HQ. When we got there I dropped by the
nurse’s station and got a couple of pills for my pounding head, then headed up
to my office. I needed a few pieces of
equipment to check the reservoir.
We had one of the Enforcers drive us over to the
site of the dam. First of many. Dams, that is. The plan is – or that is, the plan was – to dam
every continental river with a flow of more than a hundred thousand liters a
minute. And that’s most of ‘em. So we get to the dam and, sure enough, the
water level’s up to within less than a meter of the fill line.
It was just a damn cryin’ shame, you know? They were real happy before we showed
up. So they didn’t have electricity, so
what’s the big deal? They live twice as
long as we do, and as far as we can tell they don’t have any serious
diseases.
Naw, I don’t have any hard proof on how they managed
that. Got a hunch, though, you might
say.
And what are they gonna use it for? Computer games? Like that’ll really improve their society. All that stuff was goin’ through my head. I really did feel sorry for the buggers.
So, we got a boat and tooled on up the river. Lake, by then. But it was the funniest thing.
I coulda sworn the land had been flatter than it looked now. And when I took the time to notice, I saw
that the riverside settlements were all still there. Like they’d never left.
It was really weird. And not
long after that, we came in sight of the island.
No, you heard right. It was still there.
Oh, it beat the total bloody hell outta me. It looked exactly the same as
it had two weeks before. Same rocks on
the shore, same trees on the ridge. Same
mill with the same waterwheel. I was
Johnny-on-the-spot to take some depth readings, and everything checked out the
way it should until we got within thirty meters of the island. Then the river bottom shot up like a
skeeball. Like it had been raised up or
… or grown or somethin’. To keep pace
with the water level.
Oh, I couldn’t wait to talk to Ko’oor! Found her pretty quick, too. It was almost like she was waiting for me.
“Jon!” she says.
“You see worry you not. We fix
it too good.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but I finally
asked her what it was they fixed.
She allowed as how they had a new “agreement”. And I wanted to know what the hell she was
talkin’ about. Who did they have an
agreement with?
And she says, “Our mother.” Like that explained everything.
Angie grabbed my arm and I had to yell. I mean, she left bruises! She screamed something about the shore, and
I looked around, and you know what?
No, see, I didn’t understand what I was looking at
to begin with. But then I noticed the
big group of Krri’t standing in a long line against the trees, and I saw the
shoreline and it was … moving. Sort of
repositioning itself. Not much, not
far, but it definitely moved. Like what
had been the shoreline before the water rose had to … well, had to get
comfortable again. And Ko’oor says,
“Jon not about worry dam. We fix. All good.”
Yeah, I know it’s impossible. Why’d you think I was here getting bombed in
the first place?
Uh-uh. You
want my honest opinion, they’ve got some kind of control over the whole damn
planet. Turns out some of the Krri’t
elders started studyin’ Survey cosmology a few months ago, and while I was out
at the island they were havin’ a meetin’ with the Representative of the
Coordinator and fillin’ him in on how things are gonna be from here on
out. Found out about it when I got
back.
Nah. It
ain’t a bad deal, all things considered.
They don’t care if we make electricity, as long as it’s just for
ourselves, in a few well-defined and fairly small areas. They won’t use it because they
think it’ll offend their Mother. But as
long as we stay in tight little groups, the planet doesn’t care whether we
churn out the stuff or not.
Eh.
Planet. Natives. Whatever.
Not much difference I can see.
The land around that dam moved so smooth an’ clean the contractors never
even noticed until yesterday, and they were too spooked about it to tell
anybody. Can you blame them?
Ah, see, now that’s the kicker. We’ve got sixteen other dams under
construction, right?
Well, we do.
And one of ‘em, about two hundred klicks from here, got taken out last
night.
Damn straight, we lost some. Whoever happened to be on the dam at the
time. Personnel ain’t finished goin’
over the records yet, but they figure somewhere between fifteen and
eighteen. The guards and the few
workers on the ground said there was one almighty big crack, and then
everything went quiet. The whole dam
just sank into the ground, took all the construction equipment with it. Didn’t even take a minute. No tremors, no dust, and no dam. Go out there now and you can’t even tell
anybody tried to build one.
That’s what I figure. You might look at it as somethin’ in the way of a warning. We’re welcome, as long as we play by the
rules and stick to our own sandbox.
Fine. You
believe what you want to. Angie’s
already got all our essentials packed, and she’s gonna have me collected in
plenty of time to make our departure flight at noon tomorrow. This time next week I’ll be back on Distant,
and I promise you I’ll never get within thirty parsecs of this world again.
Cheers.
Oh, look at that.
The Tanqueray’s all gone.
Yo,
barkeep!