Maya Bohnhoff: Marsh Mallow

“What, and allow Bristol-Benz to sneak in and snap up resources? I assure you, what their advance teams lack in scientific method, they make up for in expediency.”

“I’d hardly allow that to happen,” Rhys assured him. “I’ve a few negotiations to my credit as well.”

“Commodities. You negotiate commodities. I’m talking about planetary rights, Professor, not trinkets.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, sir. You will simply have to determine the existence or non-existence of sentient beings in a reasonable length of time. Whether I deal with those sentients or deal with the Collective, I have a charter from Tanaka to acquire the mineral rights to Bog. As depressing as this ball of mud is, that sickening stew of elements he gestured toward the lake—“is worth its weight in platinum. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“What an obnoxious character!” Rick Halfax exclaimed to Godwin’s receding back.

Rhys followed his gaze. “Hmm. And impatient. Well, let’s see if we can’t get Mr. Godwin his stew.”

“Do we have to?” Yoshi was watching the acquisitions director with undisguised distaste.

Rhys glanced at her in surprise. In their several years together, he had rarely known her to express personal dislike for anyone. Yoshi reacted to causes rather than personalities and she had obviously decided that Mr. Raymond Godwin was inimical to the cause of Bog.

The next several weeks Rhys and his colleagues spent ferrying their wares to different parts of the local marsh. Within the habitat of each of their candidates they created what they hoped were attractive displays of goods. The arboreal simians hid from them, the reptilians ignored them and the amphibians wrecked the “marketplace” and incorporated the wreckage into their gloppy constructions.

“Interesting,” Rhys enthused, studying a particularly elaborate mound that now sported strips of bright, human-made fabric and squares of therma-plast and metal.

“You’re not actually encouraged by this random destruction are you?” Wearing a crisp new camouflage coverall and a small helmet, Raymond Godwin gaped at him from the midst of their decimated cache.

“There’s nothing random about it. They needed material for their constructs—they took it.” Rhys returned to where Yoshi waited at the cache with his field kit and began to rummage in it.

“Yes, indeed they did. They took fabric, food, tools, baubles—anything and everything—and used it indiscriminately. Surely you can’t argue sentience based on that? Beavers do that, Pekulan treemunks do that, yet I doubt even you would attempt to open trade relations with them… What are you doing?”

Rhys ignored him, continuing to describe a circle on the soggy forest floor with a fluorescing powder. Within the circle, he placed a group of objects taken from the rear deck of their enclosed swamp buggy.

“Oh, I get it,” Godwin said. “You’re attempting to communicate, aren’t you? You’re trying to tell our amphibian friends that this stuff didn’t get here by accident.”

“Something like that,” Rhys admitted. “I’m also trying to determine if they’ve a preference for certain materials.”

Godwin glanced back across the glade to where the Bogies’s mud lodges poked in misshapen domes from the water. “Shiny or bright stuff. They seem to like… ornamentation.”

Rhys acknowledged the observation with some surprise. “Yes. The question is, is it a cultural affinity for ornamentation, as you call it, or is it merely an animal’s attraction to shiny objects?”

Godwin seemed to show a little more interest in their mission after that and even helped set up their surveillance net. With vidicams focused on the cache and on the arm of ooze (a lagoon, technically) that poked into the glade from the marshy lake, they took their swamp buggy and withdrew to watch and wait. Before they’d gone even a handful of meters from the spot, the amphibians came ashore to explore the cache. They were bashful at first, skirting the display of goods and sipping condensation from the broad, glossy fronds of a low-growing plant—for all the world like a band of burglars trying to look nonchalant as they cased a prospective target. When they finally moved, they ignored the bright chalk circle—except to spread it about with their Hat, webbed feet—and went straight for the shiniest or most brightly colored objects they could find, carrying them back to the water in their wide mouths. Other creatures appeared as well—some large, colorful avians the size of small macaws fluttered down to pick at anything fibrous; a small mammal of some sort shuffled among the foodstuffs; a shapeless, lumpy thing like a headless, legless armadillo scuttled here and there, its only remarkable feature the irregular patches of bright color that decorated its otherwise drab hide. It trailed a cloud of the gnat-sized fireflies, recognizable in daylight only by their iridescent green wings. Everything got thoroughly pawed over, but except for the bright building materials and the food, nothing was taken. All in all, a disappointing episode.

They moved their “trade center” north after that, determined to give the bashful simians more study. The lemuresque creatures seemed to have some promising social habits. They built tree houses—or at least elaborate nests—they lived in family groups, and formed communities made up of a number of families.

“I’m actually quite hopeful,” Rhys said when they’d completed setting up shop in the fringes of one of the arboreal “villages.” “They exhibit a number of distinguishing social characteristics that could indicate sentience.”

“Doesn’t the mere fact that they build those little tree-houses mean they’re sentient?” asked Godwin.

“That makes them tool-users, doesn’t it?”

“There are any number of animals that weave nests at least that elaborate,” said Rhys. “That doesn’t mean they’re people.”

“What would make you consider them… people?”

“Observing trade would incline me to hopefulness. As would the use of a discernible language—or some other system of observable communication.”

“Ah… the operative term being ‘system.’ ”

Rhys nodded. “Another bit of evidence might be the cultivation of food or the domestication of animals.”

Yoshi, peering at the monitor, glanced up. “You mean like the birds? They seem to be all over the village here. And what about those big arthropods?”

Rhys, Rick and Godwin all moved to look over her shoulder at the large flat display. In the clearing central to the simians’ tree-houses, several of the lumpy, waddling creatures milled like legless, armored sheep. The simians sat peacefully among them, feeding on the seed-cones of the lacy coniferous trees, tossing the used-up cores at the native “armadillos” which snuffled up whatever the swift avians didn’t nab, occasionally using some well-concealed body part to fling one back toward its point of origin.

Yoshi chewed her lip. “Pets? Livestock?”

Rhys nodded. “Could be. Could also be simple scavenging. Only time will tell.”

They watched their cache of goods with great anticipation, but the simians’ interaction, when it came, had more in common with pillaging than with shopping. Accordingly, Rhys took the next step. Over a period of days, they moved their observation station closer to the village perimeter, insinuating themselves into the landscape. When the simians no longer ran squealing for the trees the moment the humans twitched a toe, they staged what Raymond Godwin snidely referred to as their “inane little skits. ” Rhys and Rick went through the motions of trade, playing merchant and customer, making a performance of the exchange of goods. Their performances drew a furry crowd of onlookers; the lemuresque creatures became bolder, even going so far as to touch some of the wares displayed behind each actor.