Damon Knight - Orbit 20

Hanna could hear Jon swearing under his breath; but sudden illumination had come to her. It had taken the Konans all night to reach this question from their previous statement; were they simply very slow conversers, assimilating new ideas only extremely gradually? She said cautiously, “You wish to know why they made you not to be, and why they are not?”

This time, the response was instant. “Yes, we wish to know . . . why did they make us not? ... we wish to know . . . not to be . . . they are . . . why are they not? ... we wish to know . . .” She had the reassuring sense of being accepted into their joint comment.

“What did you say?” asked Erring, and she told him briefly the conversation, and her conclusions. “If I’m right, we can manage now,” she finished off. “We just have to take things very slowly —say a new modification every couple of hours, though that may be rushing it a bit.”

“Every two hours!” Jon was almost shouting. “We can’t take that long—it’d take us months—we’re supposed to be home next month—we haven’t got time—”

Erring patted him on the shoulder and said, “Okay. Okay. Take it easy. We’ll work it out.”

Hanna said curtly, “Well, we can only go at their pace. If we don’t finish in time, it’s too bad.” Half of her mind was listening intently for any change in the Konan chant; she felt quite incapable of dealing with Jon’s problems at the same time. An undercurrent of irritation set up in her mind; against Jon, who was supposed to be interested in aliens, against the dreadful burden of continually adapting to extraterrestrial conditions, against Terran bureaucrats concerned only to push off the monthly quota of colonists from their depleted planet. Deliberately she turned her full concentration to the Konans.

The day dragged wearisomely to a cold end. At dusk the Terrans were very tired; but the Konans seemed perfectly untouched by cold or fatigue, and equally incurious about the state of their visitors. Again, Hanna felt a stab of resentment toward them for their easy mastery of their environment, and wished illogically that one of them would shiver, or drop out and go to sleep, give any indication of something like human endurance. But they continued to sit their tall white horses easily, unhurriedly, apparently untiring.

Still, as she explained to Erring while they tramped back to the shuttle, they had made progress. It appeared that by “they,” the Konans meant the prewar survey team. They had made the Konans not to be with—Hanna thought—something like laser guns or flamethrowers. The Konans called it “flying flame.” All this had happened “many sun-turns” past, but the Konans seemed unable to say how many.

“But what do they want to know?” asked Erring. “Are they afraid we’ll start firing flamethrowers at them too?”

“Oh, I don’t think they’re frightened of us ...” Hanna paused, and said at last, uncertainly, “I don’t know what they want. They say they don’t understand—over and over again, that they don’t understand.”

“What—they don’t understand aggression? That would make sense. The report says they’re nonaggressive.”

Hanna hesitated again. It was, as far as it went, a good and probably correct answer. “What did you think, Jon?” she asked finally.

Jon said sullenly, “I don’t think any of this talk is going to get us anywhere. I think we need the Dixon-Ehrmann approach.”

“Which is?”

“The practical nonverbal thing. You live with the people you’re studying twenty-four hours a day, and copy their every movement.”

Hanna was very tired from long hours of concentration, and very cold. The words snapped out before she could stop them. “Well, (a), if you’re going to follow their every movement, you’ll have to talk like crazy, and (b), what sort of a horseman do you think you are? Could you ride one of these bloody great brutes for forty hours at a stretch?”

Erring said brightly, “I wonder if Alissin and Gerry have found anything useful today?”

Alissin and Gerold had achieved nothing in their day’s work but fatigue and frustration; and Biren had conceived a great dislike of Kona. “Nasty place. Feels too big,” she said, cryptically but with decision.

“It can’t feel any bigger than it is, and it’s about the same size as Terra, so what are you babbling about?” said Gerold.

“Didn’t say it was bigger. It just feels bigger.”

Hanna said, “Actually, I know what you mean. It feels as if we can’t handle it. Every time I look at that blasted plain, I don’t think I’m going to be able to get anywhere if I start walking across it. And the people are the same. They’ve been sitting on those horses for a day and a half now, and they don’t even seem to be tired. It’s as if the whole thing’s on a bigger and stronger scale than we are. As if we were trying to talk to angels or something.”

“Back on the old immortality kick, are we?” said Gerold unpleasantly. But Alissin said, ignoring him, “Do you really mean that, Hanna? I mean, have you got any evidence, or are you just saying it?”

A pause; then Hanna said, “Fifty-fifty. It is the way I feel, but there are a few things it would fit in with. This language business—they don’t have a word for ‘die,’ or ‘death,’ or not one that I can find. It must be very rare, if there is one. And the language has hardly changed at all since those tapes were made. That’s odd. Even in a really highly literate society, it should have changed in a hundred and fifty years. And this thing they keep talking about. It must be the time of the first survey, because they keep saying ‘creatures like you,’ and they haven’t been visited since then. But they use ‘we’ all the time when they talk about it, and it really means personal involvement in Konan. They’ve got a different pronoun to mean ‘our group in general.’ And they just are stronger than we are. They’ve been on those horses for a day and a half nonstop, and they don’t look like wanting to rest. And they move faster, and they seem to have such a lot of time to talk, as if they know there’s no hurry at all. Things like that, that I suppose you can explain, but they make a funny impression overall. Why? Have you—?”

Alissin balanced a slide thoughtfully on one finger. “Oh, just a few odd things, as you say. I can’t find any plants with seeds, though it should be autumn-equivalent here. Well, there are lots of ways for plants to reproduce, but I wish I could find traces of some. I mean, if reproduction is at all frequent, there should be traces. And some of the cell structures are odd. I know I haven’t got the proper facilities here, but it does make you wonder.”

“Yes, doesn’t it.”

Gerold said, “When we’ve quite finished the wish-fulfillment, could we possibly get down to possibilities?”

Alissin said tartly, “It’s quite possible, and it’s not wish-fulfilment. Life extension’s been a theoretical possibility since the twentieth century on Terra, and the only reason we haven’t got it now is that when it came to the point of doing it commercially, people apparently weren’t willing to risk it.” She added thoughtfully, “They did it by lowering the temperature, too, and this is a coldish planet.”

Gerold said, “You’re just being unscientific about this, Hanna. Are you suggesting these locals are some kind of spirits—don’t eat, don’t sleep, don’t rest, don’t shit—”

Alissin said calmly, “We didn’t say anything of the sort. They probably do all those things—though I suppose they might do them at much longer intervals than we expect—but at the moment we simply don’t know. I expect Hanna will find out later.”

Gerold said loudly, “Well, I’ll believe in immortality when I see it.” No one answered him, but Hanna heard Alissin mutter, “You could try opening your eyes.”