David Brin - The Practice Effect

His head felt light. A phenomenon, he remarked internally, touching the object lightly.

He was brought back to the present by a peeping cry from above. The pixolet chirped at him twice, shaking its head vigorously. Then it soared off into the thicket.

Dennis reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out the camp-watch. The little screen showed red lights on the road, coming this way.

He rewrapped the artifact. The mystery would keep. He hefted the pack once more and set to hacking in earnest with the machete. He had to get off the road!

Brambles caught at his pack and at the arm he kept up to protect his face as he bulled his way through the thicket. Finally, like a pip squeezed from a melon, he flew into the meadow and sprawled onto the grass.

Dennis rolled over, breathing heavily.

At least this time I’ll get a good look at them, he thought as he crawled away from the break in the hedge. At last I’ll find out what the natives look like!

He drew out the camp-watch again. The display showed a great many yellow lights, apparently depicting the herds of grazing animals Dennis had seen on the hillsides. To one side of the screen he saw two red dots and two yellow, coming this way down the road.

A pair of riders.

Pix’s green marker was nowhere to be seen. The fickle creature must have left him again.

He was concentrating so hard on the red dots on the road that it took him a moment to notice that two small pink lights had detached themselves from a nearby herd of yellows to the south. They were moving rapidly toward the center of the screen.

Toward the center , Dennis realized… that’s me .

“Haaaa-aayy-oooaaoo!!”

It came from behind him, a high, shrill cry that sent a shiver down his back. With the ululation came the sound of running footsteps. Someone was charging down on him from the rear!

Dennis clawed at his holster, holding little hope he could scramble about in time., At any instant he expected the sudden flash of some alien death ray to cut him down.

“Haaayyoo-oh!”

Encumbered by the pack, he rolled over onto his stomach, trying to bring his weapon up. He held the needler out in two shaky hands ready to fire at... the dog.

He blinked, poised to shoot… the small dog that growled at him, then hopped back to take cover behind a pair of small legs... the stubby, scuff-kneed legs of a small boy.

Dennis looked up and stared. The most ominous weapon in sight was a shepherd’s crook held by a four-foot-tall towhead with a dirty face.

The first sapient extraterrestrial with whom Dennis had made contact wiped a lock of untidy brown hair out of his eyes and panted. “… Ayoo-missuh…” The boy breathed excitedly. “ Ooowan’ seem’pop?”

A bit numb from surprise, Dennis realized he probably looked silly laying there. Slowly, so as not to frighten the child; he picked himself up.

He decided not even to think about the incongruity of finding a human boy—apparently about eight years old— here on an alien world. There was no profit in it. He made himself concentrate on the language problem. Something about the sounds spoken by the boy had sounded strangely familiar, as if he had heard them somewhere before.

He tried to remember a few facts from the linguistics course he had taken in college in order to get out of the infamous Professor LaBelle’s English 7. There were a few sounds, he had learned, that were nearly universal in meaning among human beings. Anthropologists used to use them at the beginning of contact with newly discovered tribes.

He swallowed, then ventured one of them.

“Huh?” he said.

By now the boy had caught his breath. With a sigh of exaggerated patience he repeated himself.

“You wanna see my pop, misser?”

Dennis gulped. He did manage, at last, to make his head go up and down in a nod.

The pup ran around them, yapping about their feet. The boy—who said his name was Tomosh—walked earnestly beside Dennis, leading him over the hilly meadow toward his home.

As they walked, Dennis saw a pair of riders pass by on the highway. Seen through breaks in the hedge, the sources of the threatening red dots that had sent him plunging into hiding minutes before turned out to be a couple of farmers cantering past on shaggy ponies.

He was just starting to adjust to all this. Of all possible first contacts, this one had to be the most benign and the most confusing. Dennis couldn’t even begin to imagine how there had come to be humans here.

“Tomosh,” he began.

“Yessirrr?” The boy rolled his “r’s” in an accent that Dennis was only just getting used to. He looked up expectantly.

Dennis paused. Where could he even begin? There was so much to ask. “Er, will your flock be all right while you escort me to meet your folks?”

“Oh, the rickels will be fine. The dogs watch ’em. I just gotta go out an’ count ’em twice a day an’ give an alarrm if one’s missin’.”

They walked on in silence for a few more steps. Dennis didn’t have much time to prepare for his first meeting with adults. Suddenly he felt very nervous about it.

Before running into the boy he had resigned himself to standing out as an alien and taking his chances. To be slain on sight by mammal-hating antmen, for instance, would have merely been unavoidable bad luck. Nothing he could have done about that.

But small details of his own behavior could affect the way local humans reacted to him. A simple mistake in courtesy—a careless slip—might cost him everything. And in that case the fault would be his.

Perhaps he could ask a child questions that would only cause an adult to become suspicious.

“Tomosh, are there many other farms around here?”

“Nossirr, only a few.” The boy sounded proud. “We’re almost the farthest! The King only wants miners an traders to go into the mountains where the L’Toff live.

“Baron Kremer feels different, o’ course. M’pop says th’ Baron’s got no right to send in lumbermen an’ soldiers…”

Tomosh rambled on about how tough and mean the local overlord was and how the King, who lived far away to the east, would put the Baron in his place someday. The story broke down into gossip that sounded a bit sophisticated for a small boy… how “Lord Hern” was slowly taking over all the mines in the Baron’s name and how no circuses had come to the region in more than two years because of the troubles with the King. Although it was hard to follow all the details, Dennis gathered that the local setup was a feudal aristocracy, and apparently war was not uncommon.

Unfortunately, the story didn’t tell him anything about the crucial question of the world’s technology. The boy’s clothes, though dusty, looked well made. There were no pockets, but the belt of button-down pouches looked like it came straight out of a Kelty catalogue. Tomosh’s shoes looked a lot like the tough old sneakers Dennis had worn as a child.

A rambling farmstead came into view as they crested a low hill. A house, barn, and storehouse lay about a hundred meters back from the windbreak along the road. The yard was surrounded by a high stockade. To Dennis the place looked prosperous enough. Tomosh grew excited and pulled on Dennis’s hand. Dennis uneasily followed the boy down the hill.

The farmhouse was a low, rambling earth-sheltered structure with a shallow, sloping roof that gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. At first Dennis thought the reflection came from aluminum siding. But as they came closer he saw that the walls were actually laminated wooden panels, beautifully joined and vanished.

The barn was similarly constructed. Both buildings looked like pictures out of a magazine.