Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (13 page)

She took a look back at the fields. “I don't think so, Alasdair. I think we just equip our ship, get out of this place and leave them to their gold."

She'd persuaded me. “That's right. That's absolutely right. I was just testing you."

"Besides, what use will gold be to us? Unless you have a mountain of any metal nowadays, you're nobody."

"But a high temperature superconductor, working above the boiling point of water,” I continued, “that's worth what a mountain of gold would have been worth
before
spaceflight. Gold enough to make a leprechaun green with envy!"

"Leprechauns,” burbled Yuri from the back seat with admirable lucidity for a man who could probably see them by now, “are already green."

The tractor shuddered to a halt outside Uncle Kwon's, where I'd told it to. Far behind us, I watched a straight-backed, proud-statured Midasite walk into one of the field killers, holding a smaller Midasite in its tentacles. The door closed. The device hummed efficiently and did its work. The next Midasite in line stepped up.

"Just before we leave,” I said, “I would like to put a home made grenade in one of those cyanide bowsers.
Poof!
Cyanide gas all over the settlement. You know it doesn't kill Midasites? Maybe they'll get the idea. The idea of how to fight back."

Brad shook her head. “The better type of Australian settler thought the same thing looking at the aborigines, Alasdair.
Maybe if they figure out how to make guns somehow. Maybe if they work out they could throw flaming boomerangs into the powder magazine.
It won't happen. They're a lame duck civilization. Their great crime is the same crime as the Africans'. To have been
useful.
They say the useless tree, the gnarled tree, the tree full of knots and twists, is always the oldest tree in the village. You know why that is?"

I shrugged. “Because old trees get like that?"

"Because
no-one ever bothered to cut it down.
Now stop philosophizing and help me get Yuri's stretcher down off the wagon."

I stepped down from the rover. In the fields outside the settlement, the doors continued to open and close, open and close, open and close.

Copyright © 2009 Dominic Green

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Every summer, Ganesha Colony invited a major scholar to spend a month on their outrageously monied premises, six jumps from Earth on a planet that only the wealthy could love. There were lectures and workshops, reading groups and research, and at the end of the month there was a twist.

This year, Simon Trung was the major scholar.

I was the twist.

"For lack of a better word,” said Simon Trung, “my colleague and I are called anthropologists.” He spoke from a grand Earth-oak podium to the Ganeshans assembled in the General Philosophy Hall. There were perhaps three hundred present, a good percentage of the colony's population, most in their late fifties or sixties. I stood at the opposite side of the stage, behind a less expensive podium.

In the final three days of the Summer Lectures, a second, rival thinker was invited to debate the Guest of Honor on the Ganeshan stage. If the upstart won, she took the lecturer's stipend, as well as bragging rights that could earn a tenured chair at any university in the worlds.

"That word,” continued Trung, “is of course a misnomer:
anthropos
is only the Greek for ‘human'. Whatever we have in common with traditional anthropologists, my studies and Dr Desai's are not much concerned with the human.” This garnered an appreciative chuckle from the crowd. They loved a pedant. I knew where Trung was headed.

"Others in our field have proposed a range of neologisms we might adopt instead, such as ‘Embedded Transplanar Xenologist'. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned, but I insist there's some value left in our familiar classification. For all its imprecision, ‘anthropologist’ has a certain
earthiness
I enjoy; more to the point, I'm not convinced that the other titles are any less problematic. Call me conservative, but I prefer not to be embedded on a first date."

Another round of appreciative laughter.

He smiled brightly.

At thirty-four, Trung was younger than most Guests of Honor. He held, however, the same class of credentials: a doctorate from Oxford São Paulo and dual Nobel Prizes (Peace and Chemistry). Small-statured and more or less attractive, he wore short hair and long mutton chops. His eyes, owing either to expensive genetics or expensive nanites, glowed a faint blue. The overall impression was striking.

"I apologize if I've strayed a bit outside the purview of today's debate, but I raise the questions of name and taxonomy for a reason. I want to suggest that Dr Desai has forgotten—anthropologist though she may be!—that she no longer studies man. Too often she defines
alien
behavior in
human
terms, when those terms derive from a specifically human conceptualisation of the world. We've little choice but to rely on our native concepts, of course, but when speaking of the Other we must justify our use of human descriptors. It is on this duty, I'm afraid, that Dr Desai will be found sadly derelict."

Trung looked sidelong and smiled, like a child on a particularly excellent playground. There was no malice in it: just a sort of unabashed giddiness.

"That's all I have in the way of introduction,” he said, “so I suppose I'll have to turn you over to my colleague."

His blue eyes glowed.

Ordinarily I wouldn't have slept through the jumps. On trips to Yama I took a certain satisfaction in withstanding the same rigors as the jump-crew. If they could suffer bruising, double-over nausea while running simultaneous deep-q equations, well, I could certainly grit my teeth and bear it.

Six consecutive jumps, however, are a bit much for anyone, so this time I submitted to drugs and sleep. Mistake: I woke unable to move my limbs, and with an ugly beast of a migraine to boot. My whole body buzzed, the same feeling as a foot gone to sleep, and even the dim light of the cabin grated. I lay in my cot for twenty or thirty minutes before I tried to sit up, and longer still before I packed all my books and toiletries into my carry-on. A jump attendant knocked on the cabin door as I gathered the last of my things.

"Are you well, Dr Desai?"

I opened the door and flinched at the brighter light outside. The attendant was cute and pale, a few years younger than me. His smile was perfect, reserved, professional.

"Well as can be. How do you
smile
after that?"

Now he grinned. There was a certain wryness in the corners that might have been authentic. “I'm accustomed."

Large windows ran down the length of the jumpship corridor, and outside was snow. Not just snow: blizzard. Whiteness in drifts and great flakes. I'd seen snow before, on trips to the Antarctic Settlements, but even the polar storms were nothing like what fell outside. Bodies in thick snowsuits strolled among squat gray buildings. I stopped and stared.

"Welcome to Ganesha,” said the attendant.

He led me through white corridors to the arrival gate, where an elegant purple banner bore Trung's name and the dates of the Summer Lectures. There was a delegation waiting at the gate: Trung in a crisp suit, instantly recognizable; a gray-haired couple who were almost certainly the Pritzhak-Khubchanis, Ganesha's Founders; a bald young woman in form-fitting black. Before anyone else could speak, Trung stepped forward, inclined his head, and extended his hand.

"Dr Desai,” he said. “I am honored and entranced."

I shook his hand, still a bit dazed and uncomprehending. The grueling trip, the ice world, this sweaty-palmed, blue-eyed celebrity: it was all accumulating so quickly that none of it seemed very incredible at all. The Pritzhak-Khubchanis introduced themselves in turn, but their words, mild and plain, vanished from memory as soon as they registered. The pair reminded me of no one more than my own grandparents; they finished one another's sentences, seemed nearly to speak in tandem. I looked to the woman in black expecting a final introduction, but she stared straight ahead with her hands clasped behind her back. At first I thought she stood with her eyes closed, but now that I saw her more closely I understood: her eyes were as black as her skin and bodysuit. Neither Trung nor the Pritzhak-Khubchanis acknowledged the woman, and my curiosity quickly overcame my reserve.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

Marius Pritzhak misunderstood the question. “She'll take you to your suite, yes. I know you're tired, my dear. Please have a tuck in before the reception tonight.” As the woman in black took my bags, I thought I saw a thin smile and a wink, some brief inscrutable confidence between us.

Tonight.
Now that I thought about it, I didn't know the time of day, or even how long a day ran on this planet. That, I think, is what most confirmed for me the reality of travel, that weird fact of elsewhere.

I didn't know how long a night could last.

"Yama is a puzzle. No doubt about it.” My palms left their moist prints on the lectern; I wrung my hands. I had always been easy before crowds,
known
for my easiness, but this was new and awful. I wanted to look at Trung—to prove to myself that I could, to show myself that he was only a man at a podium—and I wanted never to see him again. Perhaps I sounded self-assured, but it felt like I was sweating out of my bones.

"Indeed, Dr Trung is right to raise the question of names. We have a dead, blasted world that we call ‘Yama’ and a living, unlikely people for whom we use the same name. They are the only
other
beings we've yet encountered in our multiverse, and we found them not on an alternate Earth but among the detritus of one. To say the word ‘Yama’ is to speak of death and impossible life; the name itself is puzzle and paradox."

Was I babbling? I had no idea. I couldn't tell whether or not the Ganeshans were engaged. The Pritzhak-Khubchanis smiled in their kind, vacant way, but that told me nothing: only that I'd not yet put them to sleep. I snuck a quick peripheral glance at Trung. He watched me with clasped hands and an expression of polite interest.

"It is Dr Trung's contention that the Yama are non-native to their present habitat. His argument is essentially environmental: because they are capable of digesting only a small percentage of the minerals available to them, the planet Yama is in his view unlikely to have fostered the species through the course of its development. I will demonstrate first that this argument is unpersuasive, and second that Dr Trung's thesis fails to account for several nesting behaviors of the Yama. Finally, I will prove that the Yama are their universe's Earthborn, and therefore the first natives of an alternate Earth with whom we have made contact."