Piers Anthony - Cluster

Flint let him ramble. He looked through the telescope again, locating Sirius, fainter now with the coming dawn, and then, with special effort, the twin stars of Sol and Toliman. This was his last chance before Etamin blotted them out for the day. Strange to imagine that man had evolved on that far little planet circling that almost invisible star—

“Shaman!” he exclaimed. “Sol’s gone!”

The Shaman started, then relaxed. “That would be an eclipse. One of our satellites. With nine moons, these things happen.” He paused. “Let me see—that would be Joan. She’s the only moon in the Sirius constellation at this hour. I had forgotten.”

“You need a memory bank,” Flint said, smiling. If there was one thing that grew even longer and clearer with time, it was the old man’s memory.

“I need a computer —to figure out all the nine orbits, the patterns of occlusion, so unpredictable by the naked mind. On Earth the early cultures, not so far ahead of you, had a computer. A marvelous device. It was made of stone—huge stones, each weighing many tons, set in a monstrous circle. It was called Stonehenge by the later natives. With that, they could accurately track the phases of the sun—Sol sun, I mean—and predict the eclipses by Earth’s moon, Luna. It was a monstrous moon.”

“A moon covered up the sun?” Flint asked incredulously.

“It happened. Here, the moons are too small and distant. There, its disk appeared to be as large as that of Sol. The ancient astronomers went to extraordinary trouble to chart its cycles—”

“Civilized Ancients!”

“Not the way you mean! It is true that there appears to have been a pattern of early artifacts on Earth, prehistoric yet vast. So vast that the evidences of that primal civilization went virtually unnoticed for millennia, and only recently have they been appreciated for what they are. They—”

“That is the way I mean!” Flint said, growing excited. “Here on Outworld there are artifacts of Ancients, things we can’t understand. Why not the same on Earth?”

“The Earth Ancients dated from four or five thousand years ago,” the Shaman said indulgently. “The Alien Ancients may date from four or five million years ago. There is no comparison! It’s like the common error of putting cavemen and dinosaurs together, because both are prehistoric, when actually—”

Flint burst out laughing. The Shaman seldom made jokes, but when he did, they were beauties! “Cavemen and dinosaurs! It’s an error to put them together, all right!”

The Shaman sighed. “I keep forgetting…” Then he sat up, startled. “Sol? Are you sure? Sol has been obscured?”

“Sol. I see Toliman—”

“An omen! An omen! Clear as the star itself!”

Flint put down the telescope. “Do you really believe in such?”

“On Earth, thirty years ago—I mean, two hundred and thirty years ago—no. I wasn’t superstitious. But here on Outworld, in the Old Stone Age, the people expect it from me. After a while it becomes easier to accept. And I must admit, for those who follow omens, this is as clear as they come. Sol is going to change your life—significantly. And soon. Take it from an old scientist who converted to a medicine doctor to survive among savages: you have been warned by the stars.”

“No!” Flint said. “Sol is nothing to me, and I don’t believe that rubbish.” But he felt a premonitory chill, for despite his denials, he did believe.

“Flint! Flint!” the child cried. “The hunt—you must come!”

Flint stopped in the path, letting the lad come to him. It was a messenger runner. “I’m not involved in hunting anymore; you know that. I’m the stonemason.” He did not need to add that he was also apprenticed to the crazy Shaman.

“Three are dead, five gored, two trampled. We need help!”

“Three dead! That was supposed to be a routine morning hunt! What did they flush?”

“Old Snort,” the boy cried despairingly.

“No wonder! That dinosaur is best left alone. Anyone fool enough to tangle with him—”

“Chief Strongspear—”

“That explains it!” But Flint was on nervous ground, for if word of his insolence reached the Chief there could be unpleasant repercussions.

“Chief Strongspear’s son is dying. Old Snort won’t let them recover the dead. You must come.”

“I told you—I no longer hunt!” But he wondered. The Shaman had spoken of leadership, and now the Chief’s son was dying. The heir was stupid, like the father—but who would fill that office if the muscular Chiefson died? In a year the Chief would be retired. And Sol had been eclipsed. Since Flint had seen it happen, he was the one directly affected by the omen.

“Chief Strongspear says if you don’t come now, he’ll put a pus-spell on Honeybloom.”

The Chief was fighting dirty! The very thought of such disfiguration on the prettiest girl in the tribe turned Flint’s stomach. “I’ll come. Show the way.”

The boy showed the way, running swiftly ahead. These runners were agile and long-winded; they could keep the pace better than any man. Flint followed, pausing only to don his harness and secure his best handax. They left the fruitpalms of the oasis behind, hopped from hummock to hummock through the thornreed swamp—the village’s chief bulwark against predatory dinosaurs—and climbed nimbly up the trailing tentacle of a vine. At first it was only a few inches in diameter, requiring careful balancing, but as they approached the vine’s center web it swelled to more than a yard across.

Out along the opposite tentacle they went, dropping to the firm ground beyond the swamp. They passed a bed of fragrant honeyblooms, the big green-and-red flowers as pretty as they smelled, reminding him poignantly of their namesake: his woman. He and Honeybloom would be wed in midsummer. He would go to her tonight…

The boy slowed. An alien was squatting in the path. A Polarian.

They drew up before the strange creature. It was a teardrop-shaped thing with a massive spherical wheel on the bottom and a limber tentacle or trunk at the top. When that tentacle reached straight up, it would be as high as Flint, and the body’s mass was similar to his. But the Polarian had no eyes, ears, nose, or other appendages.

The Shaman claimed they were similar to human beings because they liked similar gravity, breathed the same air—though they had no lungs—and had a similar body chemistry. Their brains were as massive and versatile as man’s, and they were normally inoffensive. But they looked quite different, and such details as how they ate, reproduced, and eliminated were mysteries.

But Flint had promised himself to treat the next alien he met with special courtesy. He and the boy halted politely. “Greetings, explorer,” Flint said.

The creature’s body glowed with simulated pleasure. It put its stalk down to the ground. In this position it looked more than ever like a dinosaur dropping. Flint stifled a laugh.

A little ball in the tip of the trunk spun rapidly. “Greetings, native,” the ground said.

Flint was not surprised. He had been familiar with the mechanism from infancy. The little ball vibrated against the ground—or any available surface—to produce intelligible sounds. As the Polarian had no mouth, it could not talk as humans did.

“I am Flint, Solarian male.” What was obvious to a human was not necessarily evident to a Polarian—and vice versa. Protocol did not require such an introduction; he could have gone on after the first exchange. The runner boy was already fidgeting at this delay. But Flint had a resolution to fulfill: appreciate an alien.

“Tsopi, Polarian female.”

“Peace, Topsy.”