Peter Hamilton: Manhattan in Reverse

Which made Paula give the heavens a brief resentful glance. Actually, she supposed it was a sign of civilization, nobody reaches for a gun any more, just their lawyer .

When she dropped her gaze back to Dino he was trying not to smirk. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘What sort of range does that tracker have?’

The rain was a great deal heavier than she’d been expecting. In fact she’d been on few planets which produced a downpour with such volume. Her broad-brimmed hat and range coat with its high collar were almost irrelevant. The water hit so hard it seemed like it was soaking straight through the coat’s guaranteed waterproof layers. It was cold, too. Making her shiver even though she could still see the hot late-afternoon sunlight pouring down from a clear sky on the western horizon.

Both horses plodded forward through the deluge, their heads hung low, snorting and steaming. Her OCtattoos were showing her the tracker was barely fifty metres ahead of them now, somewhere in amongst a rambling stone outcrop. Without a word, she and Dino dismounted simultaneously. They both hunched down and crept forwards.

In these conditions infra-red vision was next to useless as they slithered among the thick stone spines. Paula scanned round as far as the sensor inserts on her arms and head could reach, which in this weather wasn’t much beyond two hundred metres. There were no other Onid showing up in any spectrum she had available — though admittedly the inserts weren’t configured for this kind of work. The herd must have left the tagged one behind. But why?

Twenty metres. The signal was perfectly steady. Coming from behind a big chunk of flaky sedimentary rock nearly twice her height, and leaning at a slight angle away from her, forming an overhang where the tagged Onid must be sheltering. Water ran down its sides, making them slick; even the streaks of grey-blue moss in the crevices had turned to soggy sponge.

She pointed to Dino to take the left side, and held up her janglepulse pistol, which theoretically should work on Onid nerve fibres. Dino moved surprisingly fast, and Paula rolled herself round the rock, guided by targeting graphics to bring the pistol into perfect alignment on…

‘Shit!’

There was no Onid. The little tracker pellet lay on the mud, its adhesive side still sticking to a strip of flesh.

A frowning Dino picked up the small neutral-grey pellet, wrinkling his nose up at the dangling flesh. ‘This was torn off,’ he exclaimed.

Paula could just about hear him clearly now. The buzzing in her ears had declined to a nasty tinnitus ringing during their pursuit across the grasslands. ‘Why would they do that?’ she asked.

Dino’s shrug was eloquent enough, even with his long coat obscuring his shoulders. ‘Wrong question. How did they know it was there?’

‘If something whacks you in the arse, you tend to know about it.’

He shook his head. ‘Naah, don’t believe it. Not an animal. It wouldn’t know this from a nut dropping off a tree. Besides, the tracker is designed to flex on impact, reduce the smack so there’s no suspicion.’

‘So you’re saying a proto-sentient might manage to work out that the tracker was something bad?’

‘Even if we ballsed up the classification, and they are proto, how would it know?’

Paula shoved the pistol back in her holster. ‘Simplest solution applies: someone told it.’

‘Really? Someone sat down and explained the principles of encrypted digital radio tracking to a creature who has a total of two grunts, one for “food” and another for “danger”?’

‘You classify by vocabulary?’

‘It’s a big part of the assessment process, yes. Communication is the bedrock for sentience; as an indicator for self-awareness it has yet to be beaten. The greater your comprehension beyond the range of simple instinctual triggers, the higher up the scale you are.’

‘Okay, so how did it know to get rid of the tracker?’ She gave the device and its incriminating flesh another look. ‘And it must have really wanted to get rid of it, tearing that off must have hurt like hell.’

Dino started examining the mud around the rock. ‘They don’t have good teeth,’ he mumbled. ‘So… Ah, here we go.’ He fished a slim shard of rock out of a puddle, and held it up, squinting. ‘Interesting. My inserts can just detect cellular material on the edge here. Rudimentary knife, I’m guessing.’

Paula winced. The ‘edge’ wasn’t that sharp. ‘So they do know tools?’

‘Possibly. We never saw any evidence of tool usage before. It’s probably just an instinctive solution.’

‘I’d say you’d have to think about a solution like that.’

‘Good job you’re not the expert filing these reports, then. Dropping a snail on a rock to crack its shell: sign of tool usage, or instinct?’

Paula gave him a look , doubtless wasted with her skin soaking wet and sodden ebony hair plastered to her cheeks. ‘We need more information.’

‘Of course we do. That’s why we’re here.’

She couldn’t work out if he was deliberately being rude, or he unconsciously talked down to non-xenobiologists. ‘We can set up camp here for the night. I seriously need to get dry. Their trail will be easy enough to follow in the morning.’

‘Did you bring a tent?’

‘I’m sure my assistant remembered to pack one for me.’

Paula was pleased to see he didn’t oversleep. Like her, Dino was up at dawn, ready to begin the day. Not a classic academic, then.

Her hemispherical plyplastic tent shrank back down to a ball barely larger than her fist while she got on with triggering the thermal tabs on her breakfast packs. Chilled orange and mango smoothie to start with, then hot tea with a smoked salmon and scrambled egg bagel.

‘Creature comforts, eh?’ Dino said as he folded away the more traditional lightweight tent he’d spent the night in.

She grinned as she bit into the bagel. At least he was using packs rather than trying to light a Cro-Magnon campfire and spear something to eat. ‘We’ve spent centuries building up the benefits of civilization. Why abandon them now?’

‘My tent is simple yet perfectly adequate. Yours is the extreme end of consumerism technology. Ten times the cost, and you can’t patch it up if you puncture it.’

‘Plyplastic doesn’t tear easily. It’s not a balloon.’

‘You’ve reinvented the wheel.’

‘We’ve refined the wheel. We took your circle of wood and gave it a tyre and suspension. Because that’s what we do, improve things.’

Dino pushed the last of a bacon sandwich into his mouth. ‘I wonder if the Onid agree with that.’

‘If they philosophize about that kind of thing, then they’re definitely sentient.’

‘Yes.’ He started strapping various packs onto his saddle.

‘So are they? Something alerted them to that tracker. They knew it was wrong, or dangerous. Doesn’t that indicate a rational analytical process?’

‘I don’t know, okay? I spent most of last night trying to put this together, and I got nowhere. There’s nothing in any of our data which could have anticipated this behaviour. We’re missing something.’

‘All right then, let’s go and find it.’

The herd’s track was easy enough to find again. After leaving the Aleat homestead they’d headed for the Kajara Mountains, cutting a straight line of trampled grass-equivalent across the land.

‘Do they have some kind of home we can track them to?’ Paula asked. ‘A nest, or warren, or something?

‘The burial ground is always their centre,’ Dino said. ‘Herds don’t normally stray too far from it, just enough to graze for food.’

‘They’re herbivores, then?’