Quofum (17 page)

N’kosi was a good example. On the way to Quofum and for a time after landing, the two of them had been colleagues and good friends. Abandoned, they had eventually become more than just good friends. Now they were friends again. With only three people comprising the totality of their little society, one of them nonhuman, personal interaction was of necessity constrained.

There had been many times when she just wanted to scream. There had been numerous occasions when, locked in her quarters, she had broken down and cried. Neither left her feeling much better. Nowadays…As the months continued to pass without any sign or hope of rescue, she was simply becoming more and more numb. If not for the work that had taken on something of a life of its own, she knew there had been days when she would have chosen to sit down on her bed or a chair in the dining area and done her best to stop breathing.

N’kosi was already in the dining area, having worked his way through half a joyless meal. Valnadireb was just coming in. The thranx entered from the opposite direction, from outside. Despite the forest’s constant heat and humidity he was not covered in perspiration. For one thing, thranx thrived in heat and humidity. For another, they did not sweat. That did not mean that the insectoid xenologist was buoyant. He was as subdued as both of his human colleagues.

No one said anything. No greetings were exchanged. They had moved beyond that. They had merged to become three parts of a single scientific organism whose individual elements communicated only when it was necessary to ensure mutual survival.

Haviti drew a drink from one of three available dispensing spigots. She did not bother to request the device’s name for today’s synthesized juice. It was cold and wet, which was all she was interested in.

“I’m going out.” Her tone was muted, her words precise. “I’m taking the skimmer. I thought I’d run up the coast a ways. Take a few days, see some totally new territory. I’ll keep the onboard monitors running around the clock, of course.”

N’kosi spoke without looking up from his meal. Using his fork he rearranged some reconstituted julienned potatoes, to no particular end. “Want company?”

She did not look in his direction. Among the three of them eye contact was no longer necessary or expected. “Not particularly. You can come if you like.”

N’kosi hesitated. “I’m finally getting the Order organized for those trees with the crystalline shoots. I think I’ll stay here.”

She did not reply. There was no need to do so. Having divested himself of his abdomen pack and other field gear, Valnadireb was ambling toward the main food processor. His antennae did not incline in her direction.

“Keep in touch,” the thranx told her. “Once in a while, anyway.”

“Sure, why not?” she replied impassively. She finished the last of her juice. “I’d do that, of course.”

“Of course,” he echoed as he punched in a sequence of requests specifying a favored range of nourishment.

When she left the following morning neither of her colleagues came to see her off. What would be the point? She knew they wished her well, just as she wished them well in their own daily research and maintenance duties. That her absence for an unspecified length of time would mean that her portion of the allotted upkeep work would have to be shared between those who remained behind caused no friction. Such responsibilities were minimal. Except for the first of a few small equipment breakdowns that were expected and had been successfully dealt with, the camp largely sustained itself. And if she perished somewhere off to the north, beyond hope of timely help from her companions, well, the inevitability of death was a consequence with which they had all long since made their peace.

She had stocked the skimmer with supplies sufficient for a couple of weeks. That was about as long as it could travel without a recharge anyway. One week to explore, one week to return. She had no idea what she might see, encounter, or learn. Prior to touchdown, survey from orbit had been pretty minimal—just enough to find a landing site that was safe and interesting. A larger original or follow-up expedition would have been equipped to place relay and reconnaissance satellites in orbit. She and her colleagues had no such ancillary orbital tools to aid them in their work. A minimal first contact team like theirs was designed to get in, perform a quick preliminary survey, and get out. It was not designed to accommodate leisurely or long-range investigations.

The morning of her departure had dawned lightly overcast; a watercolorist’s gray wash tinged with pink. Based on what it had learned of local climatological conditions in the limited time since it had being erected on the planet’s surface, the camp’s meteorological station predicted only a slight chance of light rain along the coast, with the possibility of heavier afternoon showers soaking the interior. She planned her route northward accordingly.

Responding to her commands, the compact, plexalloy-domed vehicle rose high enough to clear the camp’s charged perimeter, angled west, and accelerated. As soon as it reached the sea she directed it to turn north and follow the coastline. The low-flying craft’s atmospheric scrubbers could not entirely remove the sharp tang of oceanic alcohol from the air inside the skimmer’s passenger compartment. She did not particularly mind.

Skimming along just above the wave-caressed beaches she encountered one new species after another. She rarely bothered to pause long enough for the craft’s instruments to make proper recordings. Quofum was a nonstop cornucopia of biological riches, a bottomless pit of often seemingly unrelated species that was extensive enough to populate not one but many worlds.

Her reaction to the unending parade was unexpected. Over the course of the preceding months something had happened to her that she could never have predicted. Something that as a young, enthusiastic xenologist she would have bet all she owned would never have come to pass.

She had grown bored with discovery.

That did not mean she ignored the stream of new flora and fauna she encountered. She simply took note of it, species by species, hoped the skimmer’s automated recording equipment was doing its job, and moved on. Just being away from the camp for more than a day was a breath of fresh air. The change was mildly rejuvenating, if not exactly exciting.

She lingered for a moment to have a look at the village of the fuzzies. The inhabitants had restored many of the simple structures that had been destroyed in the attack by the combined forces of the spikers and the hardshells. Interestingly, there was no sign of the stick-jellies. It was possible that the latter only sided with the fuzzies in times of warfare and that their alliance did not extend to the more mundane and more time-consuming process of reconstruction. Once her presence was noted, a few clubs and spears were flung in her direction. Those that reached the low-flying skimmer bounced off its composite sides and did no damage. This exhibition of unprovoked hostility did not cause her to judge the natives. As both a scientist and a human being, she knew she did not have enough information to do so. She resumed her journey northward.

Technically the unnecessary exposure of such advanced technology to primitive species was in contravention of Commonwealth contact procedure. Haviti contented herself with the knowledge that the violation was likely to go unremarked upon. Besides, Quofum had not been officially classified. You couldn’t break regulations that were not yet in place.

Not that she gave a damn about such things anymore.

The alcohol-flavored sea on her left was alive with as wide-ranging an assortment of seemingly unrelated life-forms as the sky and the land. Quofum was nothing if not endlessly fecund. She and her companions did not lack for divertissements of the biological kind. She would have traded every one of them for a new tridee play, or a new book, or a current news report from even an unimportant outlying world. The continued and likely permanent isolation threatened to drive her and her friends mad.

Take what she thought she was seeing now, for instance. Several days’ travel north of the village of the fuzzies and farther inland she began to see high verdant mounds interlaced with straight channels that suggested a jungle-clad city. Directing the skimmer to divert toward them, she flew low and slow over and around several of the overgrown mounds. She felt a surge of excitement, the first of its kind in many weeks. Surely the verdureclad towers she was circling could not be entirely natural? They were too regular in shape, too severe in silhouette. And there were too many of the channels, which were themselves too straight and precise. While tributaries even on Earth had been known to enter major rivers at perfectly right angles due to quirks of local geology, they tended to have a tapering shape like all good subsidiary streams. The diameter of those below her now were unvarying from one end to the other.

Penetrating onboard instruments soon confirmed her suspicions. The forest-enveloped rises beneath the skimmer were not natural in origin. They had been built, not eroded. In addition to stone there was extensive use of composite paving materials to make surface roads, decorations utilizing various kinds of glass, structures of fabricated ceramic, and most telling of all, sparse but unmistakable use of refined metal.

She circled the area several times. While considerable in size, it would only have qualified as a large town on a developed Commonwealth world. Still, there was no mistaking that it was the first bona fide conurbation they had discovered on Quofum. In size, complexity, and development it was leagues in advance of the village of the fuzzies. In construction and design it was far beyond anything of which the five native sentient species thus far encountered were capable.

Then—who had built it? The omnipresence of the invasive forest combined with the lack of any detectible activity whatsoever suggested that it had been deserted and unused for a very long time. Strapping on her utility belt and making certain its field sidearm was fully charged, she directed the skimmer to set down in the approximate center of the abandoned city.

Stepping out, she was greeted by the usual flush of moist, overheated, oxygen-rich air. Many of the life-forms she observed flying, crawling, slithering, hopping, or walking through the edifice-clinging undergrowth were by now familiar to her. As was typical of excursions anywhere on Quofum, a great many more were not. For once, she did not pause to examine even the most interesting of them. Her cap’s integrated instrumentation would automatically make note of them. The resultant recordings could be studied later.

On this particular morning something more interesting than local wildlife had piqued her curiosity—artificial structures that hinted at the work of a life-form far more advanced than any the expedition had encountered thus far. She did not automatically assume it to be local. The question of how, why, and where Quofum’s sentients had arisen remained as undetermined as when Tellenberg had first voiced the conundrum. If anything, this new discovery only added another new piece to an ever-expanding puzzle instead of filling in one of its numerous blanks.

Using a beamer cutter modified for forest work, she cleared brush away from a section of street. That portion of the offended undergrowth that was equipped to do so attempted to fight back, only to be promptly carbonized for its efforts. The avenue her efforts laid bare revealed a surface composed of a dark material that had been lightly roughened. Preliminary analysis showed that it was not hydrocarbon-derived, but neither was it a sophisticated synthetic. A hasty rudimentary field breakdown hinted at some kind of volcanic glass that had been mixed with cellulose.

Very strange blend for a paving material, she thought as she reholstered her analyzer. Which made it perfectly suited to Quofum, where there was furious competition for the title of ultimate strangeness.

Depending on the varying density of the encumbering foliage, she alternately walked or fought her way through the brush to the nearest building. Given the thick overgrowth, it was impossible just from looking at the structure to divine its purpose. It might as easily have been a temple, a storehouse, or an apartment building. The fact that the sides tapered toward the top suggested ancient Terran places of worship. The large hole in the center of the structure, from which dripped the Quofumian equivalent of vines and creepers, did not. More than anything, the seemingly extraneous circular gap hinted at an advanced aesthetic sensibility.

While studying the building she could not avoid imposing her own cultural and historical references on everything from its location to its architecture. It might, she thought whimsically as she moved toward what appeared to be a growth-barred entrance, be nothing more than an elaborate high-rise chicken coop. On closer inspection the dark oval stain at the base of the structure did indeed appear to be an entrance. The shadowy corridor that extended beyond the overgrowth reached far back into the building. Alone and far from camp and assistance, she had no intention of trying to penetrate its unfathomable depths on her own.

As it turned out she did not have to. Though heavily overgrown, the entrance itself offered up revelations of its own.

The bas-reliefs that covered both opposing walls and receded into the darkness were of exceptional quality. It was immediately apparent that they had been created with tools far more sophisticated than hammers and chisels. Several depicted scenes of what she took to be the daily life of the small city. Others—others were unmistakable representations of incidents of warfare between the conurbation’s builders and an invading horde. Perhaps it was the latter who were ultimately responsible for the fall of the city and its burgeoning civilization.

The defenders of the city were squat bipeds with oversized heads, eyes, and other facial features. Despite their short arms and stumpy legs, in the reliefs they were shown capable of considerable agility and impressive feats of strength. Whether these were accurate depictions of physical ability or exaggerations due to artistic flattery, she had no way of knowing. The weapons they employed to defend themselves and their community were far more sophisticated than the simple spears and clubs she and her colleagues had observed in use by the sentients living farther to the south. Even a cursory study of the opposing walls revealed the use of explosives, something resembling a compact crossbow, various kinds of flaming liquids, even a crude short-range device that made use of solar heat. That the city-builders had achieved a level of technology far beyond that of the more primitive southerly tribes was already apparent from the size and sophistication of their community. It was only further confirmed by the depiction of advanced weaponry.