“My son,” he said to Tachstucha, “you must obey me in one thing. You must not speak of this to anyone. I will take it up with those in power, but it must be done with absolute discretion.”
Seeing that Tachstucha regarded him with only partial comprehension, he tried again. “Do not mention this to anyone.”
“Only my shipclan,” replied his son. “Yes, Father.”
“Not your shipclan,” said Gahcha, angrily. “Not anyone!”
“But, Father, shipclans share everything.”
“They do not share this! This is something you must forget you ever saw.”
Tachstucha thought about forgetting. The more he thought about forgetting the more vividly the memory presented itself in all its details. The squirmling had made a sound of pain. The squirmling was his very own, and they had hurt it. Of course, if he had eaten it, it would probably have felt pain, too, but that had the sanction of tradition. “Father, I do not think I can forget it, but I will try not to tell anyone.” He drew himself up with resolution. “I will try not to forget not to tell anyone.”
Gahcha regarded him closely. Even for a youth, Tachstucha was not very bright. “Come closer, my son,” said Gahcha. “Lean down to hear what I am saying…”
When the young Derac leaned down, Gahcha bit him through the spine, just at the skull, and held him tenderly for the few moments it took him to die. The ship was empty of other Derac, and its fusion furnaces were still functioning. Though it took Gahcha some time, he managed to lug the lifeless body to the door of the furnace, and it was then he saw the movement in the pocket of the brood apron. Before loading the corpse into the furnace, he removed the apron, chiding himself for the sentimentality of the gesture. Retired communities, however, could rear young ones just as well as shipclans could. He would foster them himself.
He took the squirmlings from the apron, admiring their strength, their flexibility, the intense green of their skins, the adorable buttons of the nose horns that sprouted below the protruding topaz eyes. Ah, well. By Great Scaly Caough, they would be a good souvenir of his dear, dead Tachstucha.
THE PUPPIES
Scramble pupped in my room during her third night on Moss, while black Behemoth lay outside the door, fur and ears up, daring anyone to intrude upon the process. The trainers had brought collapsible whelping boxes with them, and within a couple of hours, seven little ones were born, three dogs and four bitches. All of them were dark, some were marked with brown. When Scramble had them thoroughly cleaned up, licked into shape, and nestled against her belly with one thigh protectively covering them, I opened the door for Behemoth. He greeted Scramble, nose to nose, then took a sniff of the puppies, pushing them this way and that with his huge muzzle. Scramble didn’t object, and when he had satisfied himself that all was well, he went out to his bed, dragged it in through the door, and lay upon it inside the door, on guard.
“If it weren’t for me,” said I, “you’d be hunting now, wouldn’t you?”
“Yuh,” said Behemoth. “Werna hyou, llon gone.”
It was true. If he’d been wild, he would have been long gone, hunting food for his mate and the pups. If it hadn’t been for me, or Gainor, or Shiela, or a hundred others. Of course, if it hadn’t been for those of us who’d fought like devils to protect them, all dogs would have been long gone, on Earth at least. Those of us in the battle felt…no, we knew we had a debt to pay, one that extended at least forty thousand to fifty thousand years into the past. Dogs were part of the “Litany of Animals” we sang at temple.
“Bulky shouldered bison, built like a bastion;
wily alligator, floating like a log;
wolf in the wildlands, jackal in the jungle,
dutiful and diligent, man’s friend, dog.”
“We owe you,” I said, “I know we still owe you.”
“Yuh,” said Behemoth, staring through me. “Oh, yuh.”
I said, “Dapple will have Titan’s babies next, then Vigilant will have Wolf’s. Have you thought any more about switching mates?”
He gave me a stare, his fur all the way up, a low growl rumbling through his body, like a heavy piece of equipment idling, ready to roar. “Nah rran oomahns.”
It was an insult, not unexpected, but the reality was more than a little scary. I said hastily, “Quite right, Behemoth. I knew it wasn’t the right thing. The babies will mix the genetic pool enough when they grow up, among themselves.”
His fur smoothed, and he began to lick his forepaws, turning them so he could get his teeth between the pads to pull out bits of moss, which he spat out, nose wrinkled.
“Don’t like the smell, huh?” I commiserated.
“Rran,” he growled, his word for rank, or stinky, or foul, though Behemoth thought some things smelly that I quite liked and vice versa. Rran usually meant shit, or something similar.
“Where’d you pick it up?”
He turned his head to the north, ears up.
“On the meadow? Where the Mossen danced.”
“Yuh.”
“What is it?”
He said something like Rrnn, or wrnn.
Shit. “Mossen shit? Show me where, tomorrow. I’ll take a sample for analysis.”
“Nrrr. Wrrn. Mhsn wrrn.”
N, which Behemoth could produce, took the place of D or T, which he could not. “The smell is a Mossen word?”
“Yuh. Wrrn.”
Yes, word. Now what did that mean? Shit was a word for shit? Which could be. Prelinguistic. The thing was the name of the thing. Show me a rock, I mean rock. This rock means all rocks. A kind of sign language? That’s the way written language started with humans. Point to the sky. See sky! The point becomes word for sky. Draw the hand with a pointing finger up, it means sky. Over centuries it reduces to a slanting line with a loop at the bottom. A sack of wheat is signified by a clay model of a sack of wheat. To keep it secure, wrap it inside a clay envelope with a picture of the sack on it. Finally, realize the model is redundant, the sign on the clay is enough. Very interesting, but I was too tired to think about it.
“See you in the morning,” I said, turning off the light.
“Yuh,” said Behemoth.
I woke very early and went with five dogs for a walk in the woods. Adam, Frank, and Clare were still asleep. Behemoth was sitting guard over the puppies in my bedroom, and Scramble, for the moment released from motherhood, ran rapidly, nose to ground, moving away from our general line of travel then back to it, scouting.
During this first contact with the world, I tried to pay attention to everything. The extravagant variety of foliage and structure made it difficult. It reminded me of my trip to Quondangala, where their males adored their clothing as our males do their sports. It was important to the Quondan that no two be wearing the same arrangement of clothing at a gathering, as doing so this betokened a lack of originality, of artistry. The botanic inhabitants of Moss seemed to have the same tradition. If I stopped and looked around, I could seldom find two growths alike within view, but when I moved on, others of the same varieties would show up. Each thing was its own thing, among other, different things. Did each have a specific purpose? Was the arrangement organic? I hadn’t a clue.
The mosses were of generally soft colors, greens, blues, grays, pale yellows, even paler pinks, but among them were occasional patches of brilliant blue, fiery red, poison green, and sharp ocher. The blues scalloped the sides of tree trunks, emitting a rich, fruity scent, their surfaces gemmed with drops of sapphire nectar. The poison green hung in fringes from branches, and I sneezed at the sharp vinegar odor. Pillows of the red mounded on the ground, smelling of…what? Baffled and unthinking, I reached down to touch a tiny patch of it, jerking my hand back when it tingled as though burned, a sensation followed immediately by a wave of euphoria, racing up my arm to my shoulder, into my neck, into my head. I stood there, cradling my hand, smelling that smell, lost in a totally ecstatic moment.
Minutes later, the feeling evaporated. I reached out my ha
nd to touch it again and was thrust back. Scramble. Her head and neck making a barrier, pushing me away.
I took a deep breath, turned resolutely, and stepped away. “Not a good idea, huh?”
She gave me a look that made me flush. “Right,” I said. “Not a good idea.”
“’Mell ain’erus.”
“It is dangerous, no doubt. Glad you were here, Scramble.”
The other dogs had spread away. I heard one or more of them moving, off to my left, so Scramble and I went in that direction. As I came close to the sound, I whistled. The reply should have been a short yap, once, to let me know they had heard. No reply. So the sound wasn’t made by the dogs. The hair on Scramble’s neck was up, her ears were forward. “ ’Mell. ’Aim,” she said.
Between me and the sound source, an ocher curtain draped over one of the skeletal trees. The curtain was actually woven, that is, strands of moss grew both vertically and horizontally, as though the fabric had been loomed. Or was a loom. Through a rent in this fabric I saw color first, a large bank of the redmoss, then movement: people, lying on the moss. Two. A man and a woman. They were naked and almost skeletal. Starved, but heaving slightly in gruesome charade, a morbid mockery of sexual desire. I had seen something similar in maimed concs, that same…grotesquerie. The figures before me shuddered, the sound went on, and I realized that neither sound nor motion originated with them but with the creeping mosses around them.
I waited. The two did not stir. I went forward, slowly, Scramble at my side, both of us stopping about an arm’s length away. They weren’t breathing. The woman lay sprawled across the man, her hair hiding his face. From beneath them the moss heaved itself, and it was this undulation that had given the illusion of movement to the figures upon it. Now it crept with a slight crackle, up their sides and then across, to cover them.
I took a deep breath, made sure the moss was not near the toes of my shoes, then reached forward and pulled the woman’s head away so I could look at the man’s face beneath. Bar Lukha. The one who’d met me at the ship. I dropped the woman’s head and moved away slowly, searching the area. “Where are their clothes, Scramble?”
She quartered the area, barking sharply, “Eer.” The clothing had been dropped in a heap, ID tags on top.
Leaving the clothing, I took the tags. “Call the others, please.”
Scramble lifted her head and howled. Within moments the other four were assembled. “Danger,” I said, pointing at the redmoss. They couldn’t distinguish among shades of red, but they could certainly smell the stuff well enough to identify it and the fact that the people on it were dead. “Don’t touch, don’t let anyone touch. What will you call it?”
“Rrr-igh,” said Scramble, two tones, one low and growling, the other a yelp ending on a high, choking sound, like a puppy, hurt or scared. It was not unlike the word they used for me, when they needed something. The low, growling note followed by a two-tone howl, rrr-aroo, rrr-aroo. Wherever I might be, if I heard that call, I knew they needed me.
“Rrr-igh,” parroted I. “Listen, be careful.”
They looked into my eyes, then at Scramble, as though for her agreement, before sniffing the moss patch and walking around it to sniff the other side before going back to their explorations. I, meantime, took my tool kit from my belt and found a knife with which to collect a sample of redmoss, cutting it as far from the swallowed bodies as possible, putting the severed tuft into a leakproof bag. Even detached from the main body it kept making that tiny crepitation. As I sealed the bag, I noted something odd where I had cut the moss, a protruding something. With pliers from my kit, I pulled it out, a small bone. A finger bone. human-looking. I dropped the bone into another bag. Before I went on any more walks I would talk to Gainor Brandt’s man out on the ESC island. Ornel Lethe.
Bar Lukha’s fate, and that of the woman, made me feel numb, but their deaths had certainly been voluntary: the clothes removed, the identity tags on top. It made no sense to treat it as an emergency; there was time enough to warn people after I returned to the installation. Assuming, I cautioned myself, they didn’t already know.
I was more alert from that time on, more attentive. I behaved as I would at home, keeping my hands to myself, watching where I put my feet. Many of the same growths I had seen on Treasure were found here: the same arched branches hung with little teardrops, the same round red bushes with golden tassels. Well, I told myself, PPI has been on planet for several years, and ESC ships have gone back and forth, stopping on Treasure. They no doubt carried spores to and fro. It was a logical explanation that should have satisfied me but didn’t.
Every now and then the wind shifted, and when it came from the north, from the installation or some point beyond it, it brought a peculiar odor that made me think of snakes. Each time, Scramble growled in her throat to signify danger, not imminent, but present. The third time it happened, I made a note of it in the little pocket recorder I always carried. Something to be investigated.
When the dogs and I had explored for another half an hour, I questioned, “Home? Guide please.” Scramble turned to guide me back while the other four went on with their investigations.
The trainers were still abed. I went first to the kitchen, to start coffee, real coffee, which PPI seemingly had in generous supply, even though no one on Earth did. While I waited for it to brew, I returned to my room to show Behemoth the moss and bone, opening the bags so he could smell them. I warned him as I had warned the others, “Rrr-igh,” I said. Scramble lifted her head from among the puppies and confirmed my warning by repeating it. Released from puppy watch, Behemoth went out the door at a run, following the scent trail the others had left.
Scramble said, “Unng-ee,” and I fetched food for her, topping her bowl with a spoonful of calcium supplement. She made a face at it, but she ate it, interrupting herself to ask; “Mahs ar-kine?”
“I don’t know what kind of moss, Scramble. Like nothing on Earth.”
Frank came into the corridor, sleepy-eyed. “We having breakfast here or at the commissary?”
“Whatever you like,” I offered. “There’s packaged stuff in the radiated storage. I’ve put a pot of coffee on, a far better brew than we’ve ever had on Earth.”
“PPI actually owns a coffee plantation on Orgrup III,” he muttered, returning to his room to get dressed. “It’s probably from there.”
Through the open door into the living area, I saw Paul prowling toward the coffeepot. Damn. He could have heard me talking to Scramble. I had to get into the habit of keeping that connecting door shut and locked! In a moment, he prowled back to his own quarters with the pot, almost full, in hand. Enough for six, and he was taking it all. Typical. I returned to the kitchen—this time shutting the door behind me—found another pot, and brewed more coffee. When it was ready, I carried the pot, mugs, and sweetener down to my room, shutting and locking the door behind me. When I set the coffee on my desk, the aroma fetched all three of the trainers.
“We can have coffee here in the mornings,” said Adam. “Then go to the commissary, get to know the PPI team.”
“We can have coffee here or in the living quarters, but that door has to be shut,” said I, putting my specimen sacks on the desk. “Look what I found.”
“Human bone?” asked Clare. “There’s been nothing said about fatalities on the planet!”
“Firstly,” I murmured, “abandoned Hessing ships have been found up on the plateau. We have no idea what happened to their people. Secondly, this installation is obviously understaffed, despite the fact that preretirement people have been coming in for short stints with PPI for two years or more. Thirdly, this redmoss is a euphoric. A…remarkable and lethal euphoric.”
“You didn’t…?” Adam said.
“Nobody warned me, Adam. I touched the stuff. It works on contact, and it wipes you completely off the charts for however long it takes to wear off. The immediate inclination is to do it again.”
“Which you…”
“Whic
h I didn’t do, thanks mostly to Scramble. Look around us. There’s supposed to be a large contingent here. Where are they? I see people who look half-dead, and I find finger bones in the redmoss.” I drew a deep breath, “And I saw two people who had just died on it.”
They let me tell it, not interrupting. “Their clothing’s lying out there in a pile with the ID tags on top. Bar Lukha was one of them, a woman named Surri Ponak was the other. They hadn’t been dead long when I first saw them, and I watched the red stuff crawl out from under them and crawl back to swallow them.”
“How far out was it?” asked Clare.
“I was maybe half a mile or so into the bush, the forest, the whatever. Behemoth had stayed with the pups while Scramble had a break.”
“Anything besides the redmoss and the bone?”
“Just…beauty, and eeriness, and a lot of stuff that’s fabulous, chimerical, bizarre…Pick any adjective, you’ll find something it fits. If you go out, wear cover, no breves. If you’re going to be touching stuff, wear gloves. Try not to let your skin touch anything until we find out about it.”
“Could the euphoric effect be a defense mechanism?” asked Adam.
“It would certainly be a good one, defense or offense,” I agreed. “Start to pick the stuff, or eat it, get it on your skin, then just stand there forever while it eats you. Anyhow, until we find something out about it, best keep hands off.”
“How do we find out anything about it?” asked Clare.
“I have an appointment to meet with an ESC man out on the island. He has access to all the data ESC has collected.”
“Nothing subjective, then,” remarked Adam. “No impressions.”
“Impressions!” I laughed. “I’ve got a few thousand, but none of them strike me as helpful. There’s a peculiar smell out there that I catch every now and then when the wind shifts from the north. It makes me nervous; I don’t know why. Some of the PPI people, Drom included, look underfed, with black circles around the eyes…”