Foragers Page 2

  “A little chemistry will do the anthropologist some good,” she listened to herself say. “Things will be fine in the morning.”

  Al-Shaykh wanted to believe that the problem was just biology, that it was just adaptation sickness, that Dikobe’s body was suffering from a difficult adjustment to an atmosphere full of micro- and macro-organisms that were testing this novel ecological niche for its food possibilities. She could see the anthropologist with her mind’s eye. Dikobe, wearing nothing but a leather pubic apron, should be lying in the tiny bed, dark skin against the whiteness of the sheet, her arm strapped in and hooked up to the medical computer, the medcomp monitoring a careful recycling of her blood, balancing her systems with some cell modifications, leaving her body weak but functional by morning. Al-Shaykh could understand why Dikobe would want her solitude, why she would want the implant in her head quiet, why she wouldn’t want every tremor and bout of vomiting recorded on a readout screen in a warship orbiting high above.

  But that wasn’t the Dikobe that al-Shaykh had come to know in the past few months. Instead, a different image forced its way into al-Shaykh’s mind: Dikobe was pacing. Her lean legs measured out the four or five steps from acceleration couch to bed. Her compact body was caged in by the shuttle’s narrow bulkhead, by the rows of lockers and equipment that had been built into the shuttle’s interior. The curve of her quadragenarian belly pushed out against the pubic apron she was wearing. Sweat gathered on Dikobe’s forehead. Her eyes were dark and mad. This was the Dikobe who had day by day become more strident, more solitary, who had stretched, then broken, any ties that she had formed during her first three months on the ship. As far as al-Shaykh was concerned, Dikobe could have the entire night to get over whatever was ailing her.

  The call to evening prayer came as something of a relief. The corridor walls of the rest of the ship still bore the images of the dense alien greenery of the planet below, the ceiling’s sky an off-color blue, and the floor and animal-trodden path that seemed too thin for even the ship’s corridors. But outside the prayer room there was always the image of a mosque’s courtyard whose virtual walls surrounded an actual fountain that sprinkled actual water into a pool, the calming sounds of water falling into water easing al-Shaykh’s tension.

  She performed her ritual ablutions at the fountain and tried to take some comfort in the thought that all things human fall apart; only God’s work is full of glory. The interior of the mosque was cool and quiet. Verses of the Quran flowed across the walls, the ease and curve of the calligraphy a kind of stability. She looked to see who else had come for evening prayers, who had come with her comrade-in-arms, who had come alone. There was no rank here. They were equal before God’s judgment. Like the others, she spread out her prayer mat toward the bow of the ship. The ship’s aft was fictive north, making the ship’s forward direction the metaphor for the direction Muhammad took when he left his exile in Medina and headed south to Mecca.

  Alifa al-Shaykh bowed before God. She tried to concentrate on the words—“There is no god but God”—but the words became ritual and her heart remained cold. It was her mind that was alive, her thoughts heated and troublesome. What were they to do?

  The alien landscape projected on the corridor walls came as something of a shock. A faint breeze carried the scent of a strange forest, and al-Shaykh suddenly felt nauseous.

  Back in her cabin, al-Shaykh’s comrade-in-arms, the executive officer, was dressing, preparing for her shift on the bridge. The ship’s day was normally divided into three shifts, but during the five days Dikobe had been planetside‚ the two comrades-in-arms had alternated half-day shifts, with al-Shaykh eating dinner while the executive officer ate breakfast. Al-Shaykh rediscovered that she had trouble sleeping alone; she missed the heaviness of the executive officer’s warmth, her back pressed against al-Shaykh’s side. Al-Shaykh did not think she would sleep tonight, not until she heard Dikobe’s voice again.

  “Alifa?” the executive officer said. “Are you sure it’s wise to wait until morning?”

  “You want to send someone down.” Al-Shaykh’s words failed to sound neutral. What would Dikobe think? She had just spent five days getting the natives habituated to her presence after landing a shuttle craft near where a number of them lived. “Land another ship, and the locals might get scared enough to move away.”

  “What if she’s too sick to take care of herself?”

  Al-Shaykh had considered this possibility and had wondered why it was so hard to order down one of the lifeships. She prayed to God, the merciful, the compassionate; where was her own compassion now? “She cut us off. If Dikobe needs help,” she said, knowing she had to follow her line of thought, “she will have to open communications with us.”

  “What if she wasn’t the one who shut them off?”

  Al-Shaykh said nothing, waiting for the explanation first.

  “While you were at prayers, I spoke with Jihad.” The name of the AI handler was Rachel Stein, but she was called Jihad because of her zealous approach to everything. “She’s still trying to reestablish contact between our intelligence and the shuttle’s. The communication shut-down is thorough. As far as we can tell, it’s virtually a complete electromagnetic shutdown.”

  The executive officer let the words have their effect. The enemy had developed a sophisticated ability to interfere with all electromagnetic systems, and humans had developed very sophisticated defenses. Except for a well-protected nuclear core, the shuttle craft had no defense against such an attack.

  “The mapping satellites,” al-Shaykh said. “What do they show us?”

  “Nothing. Just the locals on the hillside.”

  “So Dikobe’s not being attacked. It’s more likely that she shut down things herself.”

  “Yes, but, Alifa‚ we can’t come up with a motive for Dikobe to do this; she can’t be that much at odds with us. Jihad’s sure the war has followed us out here.”

  There were a number of good reasons to dismiss Jihad’s worries. Over the past few months Dikobe had voiced her doubts to al-Shaykh, to Jihad, to anyone who would listen. It was easy to hear the growing bitterness in the anthropologist’s voice as she became certain that this mission was immoral. But once she was planetside‚ she was in her element. For the first few days everything seemed fine until Dikobe became sick, then irritable. She had an implant in her head so that the ship could communicate important data to her whenever she was away from the shuttle. But Jihad had fallen in love with this mission, and she was always talking to Dikobe, her voice always in Dikobe’s head, communicating every tiny detail: the temperature, the number of slazans nearby, their approximate distance from Dikobe, each of their movements, no matter how trivial. No one was surprised when Dikobe screamed out: “Leave me in peace. I’m sick enough without feeling like a madwoman who’s always hearing voices. Just, please, shut up!” So it wasn’t difficult to imagine a sickened, alienated Dikobe flicking a few switches and removing all human voices from her head. Al-Shaykh could see Dikobe planning this for hours as she wandered well-trod paths, the natives avoiding her so carefully that at times they went unseen.

  And al-Shaykh would have dismissed Jihad’s worries except for two incidents that had taken place six days before, just after they had begun orbiting the planet below. Twenty-three mapping satellites had been laid down in twenty-three geosynchronous orbits. Not long after, the ship’s intelligence had detected, for the briefest of moments, an electromagnetic energy source on the planet’s surface. Within an hour, three of the twenty-three mapping satellites had ceased to function. But when the three satellites were brought on board for examination, there was no sign of damage. Jihad had been certain the enemy was planetside. But the energy source was not detected again; it could just as easily have been a misreading made by their ancient ship’s intelligence, who had mistranslated data once or twice before. Plus, there was no good reason for the enemy to knock out three satellites. Why not all of them? Why not the Way of God itself? So in the rush
of the next five days—Dikobe’s descent to the planet, her first glimpses of the locals, her bout of adaptation sickness—the earlier events were forgotten as anomalies, Jihad’s worries filed away as youthful melodrama.

  Now al-Shaykh was no longer so sure, and Jihad was called to meet the captain and the executive officer in their quarters. The executive officer, always the proper host, prepared coffee on the little machine each room had, and, after all three women had removed their veils, al-Shaykh and the executive officer sipped their coffee in quiet while Jihad talked, her heavy cheeks flushed with excitement, her dark eyes bright with energy, light glinting off the deep-black hair done up in a bun. The executive officer remained unusually quiet while al-Shaykh asked her usual array of pointed questions, playing devil’s advocate to each response. Jihad tried hard to be deferential to the two superior officers, but her enthusiasm kept slipping out of her control. She answered questions that had only been half asked and contradicted anything with which she didn’t agree.

  And then Jihad stopped. Her flushed round cheeks, her dark, intense eyes, held the silence. She leaned forward and said, “How about this? If Pauline is suffering from severe adaptation sickness, we want to get someone down to her in a way that won’t disturb too many of the locals. That leaves out a lifeship or a one-man fighter. But if we do anything unusual, and if there is a contingent of the enemy down there, then we draw attention to ourselves, and perhaps we draw their fire as well. So we want to be on the safe side. We want to look like we’re conducting business as usual. We want to act like we’re on a research mission and suspect nothing.” Jihad paused, and waited politely before recommending action.

  The executive officer said, “Let’s hear your proposal.”

  “Let’s make the four scientists happy and send down their probes. The enemy, if he’s there, won’t know we’re sending them down early. And along with the probes we’ll send down a decoy probe.”

  Al-Shaykh hesitated, uncomfortable with the way the two women sat there silently as if they could watch her think. Al-Shaykh was still certain Dikobe had done the shutoff. But what if Jihad was right? They still had no idea why this colony of gathering and hunting slazans existed here light-years away from the war; perhaps some professional anxiety was in order. If you fought the paranoia of war too hard, you erred on the other side of judgment. And if they waited too long, Dikobe’s condition could worsen; she could die.

  Al-Shaykh nodded her assent before they went on to consider whom they would drop down in the decoy probe. Even though they tried out various names, the answer had been obvious from the start. Of all those qualified to go down, only one had the right thumbprint, one that when touched against the eyeplate would cause the shuttle door to open.

  Still al-Shaykh hesitated. She didn’t want to choose him for the wrong reasons; she didn’t want to choose him because he appeared to be the most expendable person on the mission.

  The truth was this: Once there had been a crew of thirty, of fifteen comrades-in-arms, plus a captain and her executive officer. The pairings had been made after extensive training and testing, after specialties had been selected and skills refined. The crew had been chosen on the basis of performance scores received on numerous tests, exercises, and simulations, until it was known, as well as it could be known when machines advised human decisions, that these thirty personalities drawn from disparate cultures, these fifteen different pairings and specialties, would make for an effective and honorable crew.

  They had patrolled slazan space for a half year, had once almost died in battle. They had patrolled E-donya’s stellar system for another half year, a standard rotation away from the war, to muster their courage to face six more months of battle before their tour of duty would end. Instead they had been chosen for this mission that would take up two years of their lives and take away the honor of combat. And this crew of thirty—selected and trained to work together as crew—had been reduced to eight in number. Four had been removed so four military scientists could be added to the roster. Two more had been removed to give a private cabin to the civilian anthropologist. And two hours before departure, at General ibn Haj’s orders, another pair of comrades-in-arms, to provide a cabin for Lieutenant Esoch al-Schouki‚ Dikobe’s newly-appointed aide.

  The lieutenant was a small man, every part of him thin, but he moved with a kind of concentrated grace, like one who had grown up learning how to let the body consider its own steps. He was ill at ease among the crew members, his smiles deferential. He looked terribly isolated, having no comrade-in-arms and no apparent reason for being on board. He had no training in any of the Semitic religions, nor did he have the technical background for crewing a starship, since he had been trained in ground-level combat. Before being recruited for the war effort, he had lived on a reserve set aside for a group of gatherers and hunters whom Pauline Dikobe had studied to earn her doctorate. As the voyage progressed, some thought he had been assigned to the mission to advise Dikobe on the life of gatherers, but Dikobe, it turned out, was not one who took advice well. For the three months that he shared her quarters, it was said that this was his purpose: to provide Dikobe some fleshly company before she spent two hundred days alone on an alien planet.

  But now, with Dikobe alone and perhaps dying, Lieutenant al-Schouki‚ it appeared, would have a purpose.

  Currently, Lieutenant Esoch al-Schouki was asleep in the cabin that had been assigned to Hanan Salib‚ the mission’s ethologist, and Amalia al-Farabi‚ the mission’s xenobotanist. Amalia was currently in the lab with the two other scientists, purposefully giving Hanan and Esoch time to be alone. The cabin’s two sleeping mats had been laid together, and Esoch was stretched out on his back on Amalia’s mat. Lying next to him, her head propped up on her hand, was Hanan‚ who was wide-awake, almost mesmerized by the soft rise and fall of Esoch’s chest, the peaceful way he breathed. Beyond him, on the far wall, was an enhanced image of the planet below: blue water, swaths of land, arabesques of cloud. God, the one god, the merciful and compassionate: all his worlds with life looked the same to the eyes of a generalist, the land cupped with blue and white, plants reaching up to the sun with (mostly) green leaves, animals traversing the slopes upon four legs, flying insects landing upon six. Who could not say there was a divine plan for the way the universe worked?

  She was thinking that she should have shared her mat with him long ago, closer to the beginning of the voyage, before Dikobe had taken advantage of his loneliness. How betrayed and confused she had felt the night Esoch had first slept in Dikobe’s cabin, his body resting peacefully next to hers, when, now, in current time, the door sounded. She assumed it was Amalia, leaving the shift in the lab early to fetch the two of them for dinner. Hanan called out to wait while she looked for something to put on.

  Once the black abaya draped her naked body and the veil covered her face, she pressed the eyeplate to open the door. Standing on the other side was Sarah Karp, the ship’s quartermaster, Jihad’s comrade-in-arms, and the crew’s chief gossip. Within a shift everyone would know why Hanan had not been at evening prayers. They would hear how Hanan had shown up at the door wearing the traditional dress of a married woman while her lover slept behind her.

  Sarah Karp was apologizing for the intrusion. “But,” she said, “the captain needs to speak with Lieutenant al-Schouki. It’s urgent. Have you seen the lieutenant?”

  Sarah Karp’s voice was so kind, her manner so courteous, Hanan almost let herself believe that maybe the woman wouldn’t tell anyone else. Because they had to get along for another year, Hanan let herself be deceived and let herself feel as friendly as she could when she told Sarah Karp that Esoch would report to the captain right away.

  The door closed, and Hanan turned. Esoch was stretched out under the sheet, watching her expectantly, and she felt sullied by his presence. This was the first time since she had taken him to her bed two nights ago that Hanan had truly thought of her husband: how easily the body lets us betray the ones we love.


  “You better bathe,” she said, hearing the edge in her voice. “Captain al-Shaykh wants to see you.”

  They said nothing while he stood under the shower and drier, but she found it hard not to stare at him, at this body that had pressed so wondrously against hers. It wasn’t so much his body as his penis that captured her attention. Semi-erect, like her child’s penis when he had to pee badly, it lay atop his scrotum, rather than dangling like her husband’s, or those of most men, she assumed, and she couldn’t help but feel awe at the way it moved complacently with the movement of his body, or at the way its controlled energy recently had reached in and released so much within the core of her. Her husband’s erections had become nothing more than a male habit and lovemaking a routine. She had forgotten how there had been a time when embraces were fresh and the penis, rising to its glory, merged both love and desire into the same feeling.

  Esoch gone, she stood in the tiny cubicle and waited for the ration of water to be filtered and warmed, and she tried to avoid all the thoughts that came while waiting. She couldn’t show up at the lab smelling of the early-evening’s warmth. The water felt good. She imagined Esoch still there, watching her the way she had watched him. She turned her back to the doorway, surprised by how the sudden blush of desire made her feel ashamed.

  She sipped coffee and fingered the fabric of her uniform and tried to face new anxieties. What would she do a year from now if she loved Esoch like this when they returned to E-donya? Of course, the strength of her desire might not be love at all. She was the ethologist, she had spent years comparing the mating habits of a variety of animals. She knew as well as anyone that what she felt could simply be the evolutionary, blind-to-contraception urge to produce children with strong genes, that she was attracted to his lithe body and the strength in his walk, that she was answering an inborn leaning toward variety: the epicanthic eyefolds‚ the yellow-brown skin, everything so different from the look of the crew, whose genes had been given a slight touch of cultural tailoring so that they all had olive skins, dark eyes, and aquiline noses conforming to someone’s long-ago ideal of what an Arab should truly look like. But desire also leaned toward success and prestige, and that did not describe Esoch anymore. His presence on the ship was a solitary one. He had begun to socialize with the four scientists because he didn’t fit in with the women who ran the ship, his rank of lieutenant having no true meaning in the ship’s own hierarchy. He watched closely and learned, an anthropologist of sorts, the kind of person Dikobe would have been if she hadn’t decided to try to teach a ship of soldiers to like the enemy, a crew of civilized monotheists to respect the primitive.