Balance of Power (5 page)

I thought mainly about the aliens, wondering why a dhow was sailing so far south. The most civilized region of Delta was a long way north of here—we’d deliberately set out to sail across the ocean the shortest way, which brought us to the bulge of the lower part of the small-case
delta.
There was nothing but forest here, and the aliens in the forest—according to the two-hundred-year-old survey reports—were Iron Age swidden farmers without much iron. Not the type of people who’d suddenly take to the sea.

Did that mean that the aliens had come on a fair bit and were sallying forth on exploratory odysseys? Or did it mean that the colony—unknown to itself—had fathered a little colony here on the alien shore, whose inhabitants were (for reasons best known to themselves) minding their own business instead of letting the prevailing wind carry the good news back home?

I was tempted to toss a coin, but I was never a great believer in oracles.

Three fish and a lot of drifting on strange seas of thought later, my attention was once again snatched back to matters close at hand.

Thayer, from his lonely station aloft, called out in tones as stentorian as they were portentous: “I can see the shore!”

My first thought, idiotically, was one of disappointment. The fool hadn’t read his script. Everyone knows you’re supposed to shout
“Land ho!”
Then you add something about the port bow.

I wished that I had my binoculars, but I’ve no head for heights and it didn’t seem to be a good idea to go fetch them. I waited for Ogburn to wave Thayer down and commandeer them himself, and then I joined him on the roof of the wheelhouse, from which we both craned our necks to get a glimpse of the promised land.

For a while, I thought that Thayer’s optimism had over-reached itself. Because of the weed the surface of the sea was mostly green with lacunae of gray and brown—from above it might have looked much like marshy land—and it wasn’t easy to spot a change of color or texture in the line of the horizon. But it was there all right—eventually I could pick out the silvery foam of waves breaking on rocks, and then the lighter green of foliage extending beyond.

Nieland came up on deck, and promptly got out his sextant. I was glad to be able to laugh. Even Ogburn came to life a little more than usual as he began handing out orders in some profusion. Nieland proved that he wasn’t just wasting his time by demonstrating that we were very close to the mouth of a major river, which ought to prove navigable for quite some distance as it wound inland through the forest. Ogburn agreed to make for the river, and we found our way into its estuary late that afternoon. We proceeded slowly, with a man taking soundings every yard of the way, but the bottom was a long way down and the river was wide.

There were mud banks on the north bank, caused not by tidal effects (Attica’s moon was only a fifth the size of Earth’s) but by the fact that the river’s dimensions varied according to season. The rainy season was well behind us for this year, and the river had shrunk somewhat. We didn’t go far upriver—hardly a mile—before we anchored. We lowered the larger of the ship’s boats, and held an informal debate as to who would join the party which—at the cost of muddy boots—would be the first human beings (so far as we knew) to set foot on the new continent. There were ten of us in all—the four passengers, Malpighi and five of the crew. We let Nieland step out first. After all, it was his ship.

The day was warm, but hardly tropical. Nevertheless, the forest beyond the mudbar did have a suggestion of jungle about it. It was extremely wet, because the ground had a tendency to bogginess, and the branches of the trees were festooned with creepers. There was a preponderance of long, spatulate leaves and languorous drapes. The tree trunks were gnarled—quite a lot were hairy or scaled like fir cones. There was a smell of staleness. There were a great many small birds moving along the branches and I saw several green snakes coiling round the stems of the creepers. Midges clustered in vaporous clouds around the shallow pools of brackish water, and the mud seemed to be alive—though much of the movement was caused by tiny bubbles of marsh gas rising to the surface rather than by the small invertebrates and amphibians which inhabited it.

I shook the branches of a particularly wizened tree, and inspected the shower of insects that inevitably resulted with some enthusiasm. Two of the crewmen, standing nearby, left me in no doubt as to their opinion of this eccentric behavior.

I found a lizard with spade-like suckered feet clinging to the bark of a tree pretending to be an excrescence of its trunk, and plucked it off. It wriggled furiously, and let its long black tongue loll out of its mouth. It was toothless, but the upper palate was ridged with rough bone contours that would be quite adequate for crushing the insects on which it fed. I let it go.

There was a constant chatter which—though most of it was made by the birds and other flying creatures—could by no means be described as “song.” It was all clicks and rattles, clucks and croaks, with only the occasional half-strangled whistle.

The distribution of the trees was highly irregular—they tended to grow in clumps and thickets, with clearings between where the space might be enjoyed either by waist-high bushes and cane-breaks or by moist sand which looked rather ominous. The crew needed no warnings about not wandering too freely—they showed little inclination to move more than a few yards away from the firm outer rim of the mud bar. There were occasional trees that grew very much taller than the rest, spreading their crowns magnificently and creating oases of shade where grew plants of different character—fleshy things and lichenous crusts.

There was no immediately obvious sign of human habitation.

I took Nieland aside. “We’ll have to go some way upriver before we can select a campsite. I don’t think there’s much point in pressing on tonight with the New Hope. Let’s fill up the water tanks from the river—I’ll check it for potability and we can sterilize if necessary. The crew can get their washing done—and so can the rest of us. If the men want to come ashore here they can, but tell them to stay close by and to move about in pairs. It’s not a particularly inviting prospect, so there shouldn’t be much dissent. It’s time for relaxation. Ask Ogburn if you and I can take the small rowboat upriver—tell him we’ll spy out the land and look for a campsite. I just want a look around. I don’t expect to see any natives, but if we do we’ll stay clear. Mariel will want to come too.”

Nieland went off to discuss the matter with Ogburn. There would be no difficulty—it was all common sense.

Mariel turned up beside me. The expression on her face was one of mild distaste.

“Not very nice,” she commented. “It’s not all like this, is it?”

I shook my head. “Upriver it’ll be a lot cleaner. Much of this place gets flooded in the rainy season. A lot of organic detritus gets brought down in the floods and deposited here, trapped by the nets of creepers. That’s why there’s so much life here...not to mention the faint odor of decay.”

“A good thing the flies don’t fancy human flesh,” she commented, looking at the clouds of minute insects.

“There’s nothing here will hurt us,” I said. “Except poisonous snakes and maybe one or two thorny things. But everyone has the sense to steer clear of things with fangs and stings. The water’s okay for bathing.”

Nieland returned, and said: “We can take the boat. He’s even thrown in Roach to row it.”

I had slightly mixed feelings about the latter bit of news, but on balance I decided that it was a good idea. I’m not a great rower, and we would be going against the current. Roach was a solid individual, with arms like a gorilla’s.

We set off without any further delay—I was glad to see the back of the ship, and I’ve no doubt the crew was glad to see the back of us. Of the four of us, Ling was easily the most popular—they wouldn’t mind his still being around.

Nieland sat in the prow of the boat, facing front. Roach was behind him, facing Mariel and myself. We both concentrated hard on the banks to either side. At first the south bank was hardly visible, but it soon drew in. It was a steeper shore than the north bank, with rough rocky faces ascending quite sheerly along most of its length. Obviously the south land didn’t get flooded even at the height of the wet season. The land to the north remained flatter and decorated by swamp vegetation, though this gradually gave way to a steeper aspect with long, slanting faces of smooth rock interrupted by cracks and crannies where tangled grasses grew. The river flowed slow and deep and had obviously worn out a deep channel over many centuries.

Mariel began to trail her hand in the water—the shore on her side was so much farther away than the shore on mine that there was very little to be seen there.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Why not?”

“There’s usually things in rivers that’ll have it off,” I said. I pointed to some long, gray shapes sunbathing on the shallow slopes of rock on the north bank.

“Crocodiles?” she asked.

“Something like that,” I told her. “Mammals, actually—scavengers and fish-eaters rather than predators, but if they see something pale trailing in the water as if it’s dead....”

“I get the message,” she said, drying her hand on her sleeve.

“There are predatory reptiles in the sea off the coast here,” I said. “More like plesiosaurs—on a small scale—than they are like crocodiles. They may come upriver, too—at least this far.”

“I can see why they put the colony on Lambda,” said Nieland.

I saw Roach looking suspiciously at the water.

“They won’t bother us,” I said. “As long as we’re careful.”

“You said it was safe to bathe,” Mariel reminded me.

“The things like plesiosaurs have small heads,” I reassured her. “They mostly live on frogs and the like. Nothing round here would size up a human as natural prey. An odd hand trailing in the water is a different matter.”

Nieland coughed and spluttered. He took something out of his mouth and wiped it off his fingers on the edge of the boat. “Swallowed an insect,” he explained.

“Why don’t they bite?” asked Roach. “The ones back home do.”

“So will these if they get a chance to get used to having humans around,” I said. “Human blood offers them as much nourishment as local produce offers us. But it’s strange. It’ll take them time to adapt and get into the habit. At the moment we smell all wrong. Enjoy your immunity while it lasts.”

It would last a good long while yet, I knew. It took about ten years of constant coexistence before the problems of co-adaptation began to rear their ugly heads. As the colony had already discovered by bitter experience.

On the floor, slanted across beneath the seat, was my rifle. It carried three clips of ammunition, but all three were loaded with anesthetic darts. I was setting a good example. The ship had its own armory, with maybe a dozen shotguns in it. I was hoping that the weapons would stay aboard the ship, largely because one of the things I most wanted to avoid was for the aliens’ first contact with humans to be with a panicky crewman armed with a shotgun. Unfortunately, I suspected that the crew of the
New Hope
wasn’t going to trust their safety ashore entirely to one outworlder with a gun that fired little needles.

We eventually stopped, tethering the boat to a tree on a mid-stream island. It was only about thirty meters by ten, but it seemed to be quite impressive largely because it was so tall. Its sides were smooth, steep rock for fifteen feet or so up from the surface of the river, and then it was domed with lichen save for a star-shaped depression in its crown, like the depression in a molar tooth, where a variety of flowering plants grew. It wasn’t an easy climb to the top, but we managed it with the aid of a slanting crack that wound along the southern face of the rock, and with the help of a couple of tough climbing plants embedded there. Its shoots would have been strong enough to support even Ogburn.

Once at the top I could sit down on the “summit” and look out over the gentle waters of the great river. We had come around too many bends for the
New Hope
to be visible, but that didn’t bother me in the least. What I wanted to see—or at least try to see—was the forest. From down below, at water level, we had been looking up even to the roots of the trees on the bank.

Even from my vantage point on the great tooth I was hardly in a position to look out upon the great green mansions of the glorious forest, but I could see for a fair distance over the crowns of the nearer trees. What I was looking for was smoke.

I scanned the north bank—the nearest one—without success. Then, a long way to the south I spotted a thin grey smudge extending into the deep blue of the sky. If the day had been cloudy, I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it out.

I pointed it out to Mariel.

Kilroy was here, all right.

We contemplated the smoke in silence for a couple of minutes. There wasn’t anything to say, really. One thought, though, nagged at my mind unvoiced. Whoever was sitting round that campfire wasn’t the kind of person who’d be sailing dhows around way out in the weed-belt. When swidden farmers go fishing they use fishing lines in the river. We hadn’t even seen a canoe in coming this far up from the sea.

Roach expressed some doubt as to whether we should be standing on the skyline. I pointed out that we could stand off an army from the top of the rock—even one armed with a pocket battleship. He didn’t appreciate my making light of it.

“It’s a long way back to the ship,” he complained.

“Well,” I said, “if the mermaids set an ambush we’ll just have to fight our way through.”

I regretted it immediately as an unnecessarily exasperating remark, but it was done. I resolved to be more diplomatic in future.

“If there are aliens nearby,” said Nieland, more reasonably, “they could have seen the boat from the forest at any time. And the New Hope isn’t inconspicuous. We’re not trying to hide from them.”