Damon Knight: Orbit 21

“It is a very old planetary system, one-point-six billion years older than Earth,” Kathin had told her. “The natives are, however, technologically unsophisticated. Their most advanced mechanical system is a wind-driven irrigation system,”

“How far is it from Earth?”

“Immaterial. Our interstellar flight capacity is adequate to the purpose. We travel through space quite well. You will go there.”

“Why?” she had asked. “What can I do that your people cannot? What report from a primitive world about time travel could possibly interest you?”

“For the first point—our investigators have failed. You are closer to them than we are, culturally and emotionally. It may prove to be the only way you can return home. You are strongly motivated, therefore, to find the answer. You will go. It may be our last hope.”

The alien spoke just above her left ear. Dea had not heard this new one come; she repressed a start. “What would you have of us, human? What is this foolishness?”

Dea pivoted with deliberate slowness. The alien seemed old. There were lines running from mouth to neck, the pouch was shrunken and skin bagged loosely on its legs. An elder male, speaking for the others? She used the to-equals tense, her voice level. “It has been spoken of before, elder one.”

The elder snorted, “Speak of it again, female.”

“The Ymon.”

“Ymon—they are animals! They know nothing but the beasts and the jungle demons. We took them from the devils of the jungle, so they need not fear the monsters. They could be safe, working for us as our Ymon. Do they work? No! Would you see them, female? See the worthless Ymon?” He gestured with his smallest finger crooked. A shorter, slighter version of the alien scrambled across the compound. Adult in proportion, it was only Dea’s height. A string of black beads clinked around its neck,

“Idle and lazy,” the elder said, aiming a kick. The Ymon yelped and cowered—somewhat perfunctorily, Dea thought. “They beg, or steal, or cheat our men in games of chance. They are foul and sullen. They will not work. They have no souls, and no warrior would dirty his foot by stepping in their paths—”

“Do you wish for the human trade, elder?” Dea asked. “You have heard of metal, of spearheads that will not shatter, of shafts that will not crack, of knives and snares and throwers that would make a hunter great. Has this talk reached your ears, elder?”

The elder stood like a rock. Dea faced him down. With a sudden whipsaw shout, the elder snatched at the Ymon’s necklace. The string broke; black bits fell in the dust and lay, trembling, in the elder’s clenched fist. “Beads!” he cried. “What do the humans want with Ymon beads?”

Dea let her silence fill the air until there was quiet. “You will let the Ymon go with me to the jungle,” she told him. “You will not hinder them or me. If we trespass on the shrines or sacred places, unknowing, you will not kill us, I go with them, and our safe passage has been fairly paid.”

Six of the Ymon gathered with her outside the village wall. “Where are you going, funny-shaped?” one asked her. Its tail waved in gentle sweeps.

“To—the jungle? With you?” Dea said.

“The forest?” They conferred, talking with hands and tails, frequently glancing back at Dea. Finally the first one turned back to her. “Where is the forest?” it asked plainly.

Mute, Dea pointed to the line of green on the horizon. The Ymon stared vaguely in that direction; their eyes did not focus on the distant target. After another brief conference:

“We’ll let you show us,” the Ymon said graciously. They lined themselves up behind Dea. Feeling suddenly older, she started for the jungle.

It had been good, growing up in her father’s house. The mornings sunlit: a breakfast of fruit and hot chocolate in the coolness of the patio, she and her brother teasing each other, their mama keeping a lazy peace. Then Papa would put down his cup of steaming cafézinho and issue the instructions for the day. Off they would scatter, for lessons or riding or new bits of their world to conquer. It was good to be young in the morning of the world. . . .

Papa had aged years when Josinho died; his eyes were old overnight. Mama never wailed, never told her anguish, but her tears ran like water at the funeral. Dea resolved then that she would take Josinho’s place. She would be everything to her parents and the fazenda that he had been. She would never leave them. Never.

They moved among brush and clumps of trees for hours before they came to the rain-forest proper, A stream marked the boundary with mindless, natural precision. Greenery made an imposing wall on the other side. The Ymon stopped to splash in the water. One sat down and poured water over itself, handful after handful. The others shouted and laughed, spraying each other, getting enormously wet. The reserve and quiet she had come to associate with them might never have existed. The water sparkled. Briefly, the heat was gone.

Dea forded the stream and knelt on the other bank to watch the Ymon. One of them splashed to her. She drew back, then waited.

“Bina,” it named itself.

“Bina,” she repeated. “Dea.”

“Dea.”

Carefully, it brought a cupped handful of water up to her face and let it drip down.

She had taken her brother’s place, trying to live up to everything he had been and could have become. She worked harder in those two years after his death than she had in any of her previous sixteen. She learned accounting, iron-smelting, and how to gather the wild pampas cattle. She supervised crews clearing land for coffee and rubber. She fought against the jungle, as members of her family had fought for eight generations, and learned to hate it with a personal and unrelenting enmity. And her father’s pride in her grew.

The jungle hit her like a silent explosion. Her eyes fled from birds to flowers to the dim towering roof of trees to the grand cathedral spaces, clutching at detail after detail and refusing to accept the whole. The roar of insect noise was a wave of sound, deafening before her ears tuned it out. It was immense and terrifying. The Ymon took the lead quickly, seeming to recognize landmarks by smell and instinct. They traveled at a half-lope, chatting, telling jokes, laughing. As if it were a playground—

Soon Dea was panting hard, trying to keep up. Insects whirred in her ears and roots twined around her feet. The dimness could hold anything, snakes, animals— Dea kept her eyes on the line of Ymon, barely more than animate shadows, and doggedly followed.

They were in the Ymon village before she was aware, stupidly, of anything but the jungle. The Ymon kept going to the central stream. Dea collapsed on a rock. The villagers piled out to them like ants; greetings, explanations and critical comments flew at large. From her vantage point, Dea could see the strings of black beads around their necks.

“Pitchblende,” Kathin had told her, breathing shallowly and evenly as all future humans seemed to do. Her pale eyes did not quite encompass Dea, as if she contemplated a more absorbing, a more destructive vision. “The Ymon use the mineral for decorative and ornamental purposes. Pitchblende is an ore of uranium and radium. The half-life of—”

“I know about radioactive half-lives, Kathin. Radioactivity was known by the twenty-first century.”

“Very good. You will know, then, how radioactive isotopes, while diluted to such a degree in natural materials as to be harmless to living organisms, may be used to date artifacts and once-living objects. The Ymon beads come from times ranging from two thousand years in the future to five hundred million years in the past.”