Foragers Page 3

  But there was something more that had drawn her to him. He talked like a good ethologist who displayed his knowledge of animal behavior through stories, and even though his people believed some odd things—such as snakes who tried to crawl into people’s anuses—what Esoch knew about the ungulates he once hunted revealed a kind of sympathy she did not expect to hear from a hunter. His people talked, they told stories, they joked a lot in certain relationships, and she loved talking with him, loved hearing stories and jokes.

  So maybe it was love. And after a year of it, when she was out of the military, with the combat pay that would help her husband and her father maintain the business they owned together, what then? Both her family and her husband’s lived in the same village. When she had moved into her husband’s home, he had moved into her father’s office. There was a child, and the expectation of two more. There were cousins and aunts and uncles. How could she tell any of them? How could she tell Esoch there were forces more important than love?

  Perhaps slazans were a successful species because they weren’t torn in two by such contradictions. A species that preferred solitude to socializing must create fewer ties to confound their lives.

  Hanan had finished putting on her uniform when the executive officer called on the comm and asked her to report at once to the loading dock.

  Tamr and Maryam, head engineer and assistant, comrades-in-arms and fellow workers, were unloading the scientists’ probes when Hanan entered the loading dock, in uniform and properly veiled. Tamr finished securing the emerging probe, then waved to Hanan. “All that veil will do is get in your way; hang it on one of those pegs over there.” Hanan looked a bit surprised. She, like the other three scientists, was always surprised when Tamr didn’t conform to her image of a devout believer. Tamr answered the call to prayer five times a day; she tried to make sure all believers showed for the evening prayer if they weren’t on duty; she quoted the Quran when appropriate; but she also preferred the practical over the traditional, and she loved loud, bawdy jokes.

  Hanan hung up her veil alongside those belonging to the three other scientists. She waved to Tamr, then joined her own comrade-in-arms—the Christian woman—and the two Hindu men. Surrounding them were the probes. Each one was large, ovular, and gray, scarred by straight lines and right angles, the only hint of the external openings from which emerged thrusters, stabilizing wings, and struts for landing, solar panels, waldoes‚ and camera eyes for planetside research. The scientists had hatched two of the probes, the egg split open, heavy internal hinges holding the top half perpendicular to the bottom.

  Tamr watched while the younger of the two Hindu men spoke to Hanan in quiet tones. She looked confused at first, then distraught. The xenobotanist‚ the Christian woman, wrapped her arm through one of Hanan’s. The young Hindu must be telling Hanan about Dikobe. Tamr felt for the young woman. She was sweet and well-meaning. Tamr also felt that Hanan had been led astray by her scientist friends. Early in the voyage Tamr had overheard the xenobotanist encourage Hanan to share her mat with the Ju/wa: “No one has fond memories of resisting temptation.” The xenobotanist, Tamr had heard, was a woman who had joined the military to escape her family. Someone who flees a family was bound to talk that way.

  The final probe to unload was the decoy. Tamr and Maryam both reached out for it, as if to guide the form, as if they could actually do anything with the heavy loads if the waldoes ceased functioning. Tamr watched Maryam’s willowy form move with the decoy probe; she watched her thin fingers press against the probe’s curved skin. Tamr’s own thick hands were placed on the opposite side, doing the same. This is why they were such good comrades-in-arms.

  At first glance the decoy probe looked the same as the others, but the lines for wing stabilizers and the location of thruster rockets were different. On the surface was a closed panel, like a door just large enough for a human body. A line ran across the middle of the door. Half slid up; half slid down.

  Maryam did a personal override on the waldoes, then worked the controls herself, the mechanical arms reaching out to one end of the probe and pulling the coffin out of the decoy probe’s center. The coffin was a rectangular object, its edges curved, its sides pimpled so the electronics inside could connect with the life-support mechanisms stored in the probe.

  “They’re so solemn,” Viswam, the younger Hindu said, his voice loud enough for Tamr and Maryam to hear, “you’d think someone had died.”

  Tamr looked away from her work and toward the scientists. Hanan had taken the older Hindu’s arm. The old man held himself stiffly, but he patted the young woman’s hand. Tamr could read Hanan’s face; she had realized whom the coffin was for, that the Ju/wa was being sent planetside. And there was enough fear and concern in the look that Tamr was certain Hanan had finally given her heart to him.

  The coffin was on the deck now. The top, section by section, slid open, until the bare insides were revealed. All of Lieutenant Esoch al-Schouki’s vital and nonvital statistics were listed by the intelligence, and Tamr adjusted the insides for his small body. Tamr actually like Esoch. He was generous and unassuming. But she was uncomfortable with some primitive quality about him, his persistent rejection of civilized life. Even though Esoch had had a Muslim comrade-in-arms, he still had not bowed down to God. Esoch first had shared mats with Dikobe, and now, obviously, with a married woman. There was the primitive hunter in the man’s blood; he was surely the best one to go planetside.

  Everything was now ready. There was nothing to do but wait until the scientists were done; then she and Maryam would have to check everything over. An hour later Esoch appeared. Hanan was immediately by his side. They spoke quietly, Hanan looking more distraught, Esoch wearing a mask of uncertainty. What would he tell her? The executive officer had told Tamr that the Ju/wa would stay down with Dikobe for the remainder of the mission, for the whole two hundred days—that is, if Dikobe was still okay.

  Amalia, the xenobotanist‚ the younger Hindu’s lover, joined Hanan, urged her to the door, to leave with Esoch, which after some hesitation she did. Tamr watched the couple leave together, and she was surprised by how angry she felt.

  “Don’t be so hard,” Maryam said softly. “He might not come back.”

  Tamr nodded. She hated the way the anger boiled in her when she watched people make the kinds of mistakes they had made since before Muhammad, since before Abraham. She had enjoyed talking with Dikobe, learning about anthropology and primitive life, and Dikobe had been more than happy to talk about the Quran and the war. Tamr had been sincere when she had wished the anthropologist well. “God willing, your work will help us defeat the slazan enemy.”

  Dikobe had exploded. “Is it God’s will to wipe out thousands, maybe millions, of slazans?”

  “If that is God’s will, then that is what must happen. Humans must live safely in this galaxy.”

  “Perhaps,” Dikobe had said, “that is why, right now, I’d rather be slazan than human.”

  So right now she was planetside‚ a human who’d gone slazan or a human who’d been attacked by slazans. Esoch had the blood of a primitive hunter. He’d have his primal fuck, and he’d be ready to go down and save Dikobe.

  The Sixth Day

  Rachel Stein—Jihad to her shipmates on the Way of God—had entered the university in the hope that after close study of the Torah and the Talmud she could one day comprehend the mind of God, only to discover that an artificial intelligence who thought at light-speed and chatted across light-years with others of its kind was the only vast intelligence she could hope to study and understand. But now, while she and the captain stood outside the loading-dock door and awaited Lieutenant Esoch al-Schouki‚ she felt some of that old faith pulling at her, asking her its ritual, unanswered questions about justice before God. The captain was following her counsel, and she wanted to believe she had counseled well. She wanted to believe this elaborate business with the probes was truly necessary.

  But how likely was it that the enemy had
followed them here? Jihad had gone through the calculations with the ship’s intelligence. They had calculated how an enemy ship could have hidden behind one of the planet’s two moons without being detected; they had calculated a flight path for it to leave the planet’s surface and enter orbit without being detected until the last minute; they had programmed the weapons for just such contingencies; but they could not render it mathematically feasible that the alien ship had followed them out here; the flashes of light that accompanied their jumps into hyperspace spewed out photons that traveled at the speed of light and hence would take years to reach any alien astronomer; you would need a device that could look into the future to spot those flashes soon enough to follow them.

  So maybe Jihad had said the wrong things in her desire always to be right, to be the one the captain turned to for advice. Maybe they should have dispatched a one-man fighter or a lifeship the instant Dikobe had broken contact. Because, now, if Dikobe was in trouble, or if she was dying from adaptation sickness, Jihad’s elaborate designs would be responsible for her death.

  The captain leaned against the corridor wall and the image of an alien tree. Jihad wanted to say something to her, but the courage of words seemed to come to her only during debate. Esoch finally appeared at the edge of a clearing that was projected where the corridor curved out of sight. He was properly veiled and alone, not with Hanan, which was what Jihad’s comrade-in-arms had told her to expect. He carried two onesuits and a toilet kit. The captain nodded to Esoch, then faced Jihad while she placed her thumb alongside the eyeplate. The circles under the captain’s eyes were dark, the eyes themselves darker.

  The captain spoke. “There will be no honor lost if you change your mind now.”

  Jihad looked to the captain, and realized the captain was speaking to Esoch.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  The captain’s thumb pressed against the eyeplate‚ and the door to the loading dock slid open. Cleared of everything—the shuttle launched, the probes all loaded within the last few hours—the loading dock seemed as expansive as the gym, and way too small to have held everything that once had filled its deck. To the rear of the dock rested one probe, and beside it, an open coffin.

  On either side of the coffin stood Tamr and Maryam, their blue onesuits darkened with sweat under the arms. Maryam was fastening her veil; Tamr’s veil was nowhere to be seen. The captain, who usually waited in silence until such matters were taken care of, simply said, “Are we ready?”

  Tamr nodded. Jihad knew Tamr had rechecked everything several times; the head engineer put her faith in God, not in military design. For a moment Jihad remembered how the three of them—Tamr, Jihad, and Dikobe: the Muslim, the Jew, and the doubter—had time and again sat at the same table, had devoured hours arguing about the relationship between God and human, the words growing heated, the arguments losing their cleverness, and Dikobe never understanding that poor, devout Tamr was always arguing for her life. In the loading-dock silence, while standing near the coffin and the possibility of Dikobe’s death, the heated words all felt so empty.

  Esoch stepped up to the coffin and looked down. He tried to smile. Tamr took his things and passed them to Maryam, who loaded them in a regulation backpack. Tamr faced Esoch directly, clasped his shoulder, then gestured to the interior. Esoch nodded before stepping in and lying down.

  Unsure of her own role in his send-off, Jihad knelt by the coffin and did a run-through of procedure. She barely heard her own words. Tamr and Maryam worked around her, readjusting the contours of the coffin’s padding to match Esoch’s small frame before strapping him in. Jihad couldn’t help but notice how close the walls were on either side of him; bend the elbow a bit, a flick of the wrist, and his fingers could easily reach all the controls. There was no distance between floor and feet, and only because he was much shorter than the norm was there a significant space of air between his head and the ceiling. “Remember,” she heard herself say, “the ship’s intelligence guides all the probes down to their landing sites. That is normal procedure. You must maintain radio silence. The minute you open up communications, anyone who is listening in will know that yours is the decoy probe. Same when you get to the planet. We want no potential enemy to know where you are.” And what if there is no enemy, thought Jihad, but our own paranoia? How close to death will Dikobe be when Esoch finds her?

  “Esoch,” said the captain, for the first time calling the lieutenant by his first name, “are you okay?” There was a weight to her voice, a trace of concern in the common words. Both the captain and Jihad had read Esoch’s file. He had made four previous coffin drops during his military training: three had been reality simulations; the fourth had been an actual drop into E-donya’s atmosphere, a run-through invasion of a slazan homeward.

  “I’m fine, Captain,” he said.

  Tamr stowed the backpack in the compartment below his feet. Along with his onesuits‚ it contained rations, med-kit‚ tracking disc, pistol, and the five sections of a needle rifle. Dikobe had once told Jihad how members of certain pre-industrial cultures buried their dead along with things they would need for the afterlife.

  Esoch looked at the sides of the coffin as if he saw the lighted panels for the first time. Jihad reached in and waved her hand across a series of meters. “These monitor your air supply,” she said. Esoch’s comrade-in-arms had died in that fourth drop when the coffin’s air pump had malfunctioned.

  “God is good,” Tamr said. “We will hope for the best.” She reached behind Esoch’s head to unfasten his veil, which she folded and pocketed. She displayed a reality visor in her hands, then tenderly placed it over Esoch’s eyes. Esoch reached back to fasten the strap around his head. Jihad had preset the visor’s imagery. Esoch would be standing on the planet surface, rather than trapped in a box soon surrounded by the empty dark. The hatch slid over Esoch and clicked shut. The four women looked at each other; then Tamr turned to the controls. The coffin was slid into the ovular decoy probe, which in turn was loaded into the drop hatch. Soon he would be gone.

  He’ll be back in six months, Jihad told herself. If everything works out, he’ll be back. She couldn’t convince herself that she hadn’t made a horrible mistake.

  The cushion molded firmly to the curve of his back, the straps fit securely around his chest and thighs. A part of him sensed the closeness of the walls around him even though his eyes and ears, nourished by the reality visor, told him something different. He was still amazed by all the planet’s shades of green, by the array of sounds. Breezes whispered among the leaves. Birds and flying reptiles sang and croaked out their territories. The land was so rich compared to the desert reserve where he had been a child and a young man. There were metallic sounds, clangs and pneumatic hisses, and he could trace in his mind the decoy probe’s path into the drop hatch.

  He wished he had taken one last look at the loading dock, at the captain and Jihad, at Tamr and Maryam, before the coffin hatch had slid shut above him. He wished Hanan had been there to see him off or that he had kissed Her good-bye one last time.

  Esoch inhaled; he tasted the sweet staleness of air that was being properly recycled. He breathed and he waited. They were going to drop three probes before his, and they assured him it wouldn’t be that long. He breathed and waited. The alien sounds of the forest made him edgy. They were dropping him an hour before dawn lit up the clearing where Dikobe’s shuttle craft had landed; the Way of God’s intelligence would guide the decoy probe to land in a clearing within ten kilometers; if she was still there, Esoch would find her early in the morning.

  And if she wasn’t?

  Esoch subvocalized a reality switch, and now the visor presented a composite view drawn from the Way of God’s external monitors. Strapped into the coffin’s contours, the ship’s full gravity pulling him to the coffin’s floor, he now had the illusion of standing below the warship’s hull, surrounded by vast distances. Below him was the planet, unnamed and unnumbered. It was beautiful: brown and green and
blue, mostly blue, beneath whorls of white. It was hardly ten days ago when Tamr and Esoch had shared tea while Tamr laid her palm against the holographic image of this planet and said, “We now know of six planets that look like this, and they all have plants and trees and fish and insects and reptiles and mammals—what further proof do you need of one god with one plan for life?”

  Ghazwan‚ his dead comrade-in-arms, had once said the same thing. The words had such a ritual sameness to them that they had left Esoch unconvinced, but now the memory of those words, of Ghazwan’s quiet, sincere devotion, overwhelmed him. Ghazwan had grown up in an orbital community, a Muslim utopian colony. He had been trained for the military on an orbital base. He had died in his first and only descent toward E-donya. He had died with no true blood on his hands. Ghazwan had killed only in simulated attacks, in military exercises, where the dead rose (never truly dead) after battle was over. Ghazwan had never taken a knife and jabbed it into someone’s belly. He had never watched madness seep into another’s eyes, so he had never fled the way Esoch had fled Dikobe’s embrace, escaping the way an animal escapes a brush fire, to stand on some dune, nose twitching, to watch the burning, to feel relief at the escape, and to watch her make her solitary preparations, board the shuttle, and leave for planetside‚ where everything had gone wrong.