21
Savages do not leave footprints in the sands of time.
—Margo Wakefield, Aliens: Why Fear Is Pointless, 6111 CE
The satellite was mostly a rock. But two rows of houses stood on it. They were separated by a walkway. There were fences, sheds, a swing hanging at an odd angle, and a streetlight. All afloat in the sky. The streetlight wasn’t on. I saw no sign of any occupants, fortunately, because the construct was sloped down at about thirty degrees, so that anyone coming out of a house would have tumbled across the lawn and ultimately fallen off the edge. Which was why the swing hung at an angle.
We all froze. Finally Robbi Jo broke the silence. “Belle,” she said, “could you replace it with a picture of the Korella village?” The satellite blinked off and we were looking at the village by the lakeside. The street was visible near the center of the town. It was identical. Swing, streetlight, nine houses on one side, eight on the other. “I guess we found them,” she said.
“The buildings are the same style,” said Alex. They were. There was a country aspect to them. They were mostly made of stone. And I know how that sounds. A couple might have been wood. There were no chimneys, but there were lots of windows. All the houses had porches. Village in the sky.
“How the hell,” I asked, “did they do this? Why did they do it?”
Gabe threw up his hands. “I have no idea what’s going on here.”
“I hope,” I said, “that we aren’t going to put a couple of us on that rock and start knocking on doors.”
“So,” said Robbi Jo, “how do they pick up sections of their village and just move them around? How do you put a street on the outside of a satellite?”
“That’s a good question.” Alex took a deep breath. “Let’s get a closer look.”
I think we’d all suspected that it was a hologram. But we sent the lander over. I turned on its spotlight and watched the beam move across the front of one of the houses. It looked solid, but there was no way to be certain.
We switched our attention back to the ground. Did anybody see any lights anywhere? Anything at all? We moved across the sky, through sunlight and darkness. Since it had no oceans, this was a world with a lot of ground to cover. But we saw nothing. And neither did Belle.
“Maybe,” said Gabe, “we should just get on the radio. See if anyone’s really there.”
“Not a good idea,” said Robbi Jo.
The monitor gave us a starlit river in the middle of a swath of plains and hills. A herd of large horned animals were moving casually through the area.
I was in favor of using the radio, but I stayed out of it.
Robbi Jo crossed her arms. “You guys do what you think. But if it works, we’ll have some explaining to do when we get home.”
Gabe and Alex exchanged glances. Then Gabe looked up at the overhead. “Belle?” he said. “You there?”
“I’m here, Gabe.”
“Send something. Say hello.”
“As you wish.” She didn’t approve of the idea. And a moment later: “Greetings from the Belle-Marie. Is anybody there?”
We waited. She repeated the transmission. I found myself almost hoping the silence would continue. I was ready to go home. Except I wanted to meet the aliens.
It took a couple of minutes, but we got an answer. It was a strange language, of course. I activated my mike. “Hello,” I said. “We’d like to talk with you.”
The voice replied. It sounded like a male, and it also sounded ecstatic. Happy to see us, even if we couldn’t exchange information.
“Belle,” said Alex, “can you track the source?”
“North of us,” she said. “On the ground.”
It took a while to find them. We passed over endless plains, hills, rivers, lakes, and forest. “Signal’s getting stronger,” said Belle. She had us on a northwestern course by then. And roughly a half hour after we first picked up the signal, we found them.
It was a village. No surprise there, I guess. It lay in fading daylight on the west bank of a large river. It wasn’t identical with the village in the Columbia pictures, though. Gabe was quick to note that the blocks of houses were the same, but they’d been rearranged. It was as if we were looking at a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces had been inserted in different places.
They were surrounded north and south mostly by forest. A field with only a few scattered trees lay west of the town. There were low hills across the river, one of which resembled a bowl that had been turned over.
“There’s something else,” said Robbi Jo. She pointed at a walkway on the north side. It divided seventeen houses. The arrangement was identical with the group on the satellite. And the swing was there, in the same place, though it was different: this one wasn’t hanging at an odd angle.
We saw movement. Belle focused the telescope, and we could make out a couple of creatures walking in the streets and two or three seated on porches. No vehicles were visible.
“You picking up any of the language?” I asked Belle.
“Nothing yet, Chase.” It was midafternoon on the ground.
“They’re putting us in a difficult position,” Alex said. “I’d assumed we’d be able to have Belle connect with an AI, pick up each other’s language, and make for an easy exchange. Now it looks as if we’re going to have to take the lander down, do what we can with the language, and hope everything goes well. That will be even more of a shock back home than making radio contact. I’m not sure we won’t wind up in jail.”
“Or dead,” I added. “Going down to say hello to high-tech strangers without establishing a connection first could have a bad ending.”
“Right now,” Alex said, “it doesn’t look as if we’re going to have much choice.” He looked over at Robbi Jo. “What do you think?”
Her eyes closed momentarily. “I don’t see how we can walk away from this.”
We decided their midmorning would be a good time to make the descent. Next question: Should we carry weapons?
It would probably not be the best way to arrive. “The Ulakans,” Robbi Jo said, “to the best of our knowledge, carried books, not guns.”
“But they knew all about us,” I said.
We settled into a stationary orbit, and somebody saw us. They began coming out of the houses and off their porches. Some of them waved in our direction. “So how do we handle this?” asked Robbi Jo.
“I suggest,” said Gabe, “we just stay in orbit for now, as discussed. It’s going to be getting dark soon. We wouldn’t want to be on the ground when that happens.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Alex said.
“Belle,” I asked “any way you can get a handle on the language?”
“Not unless I have a way to make some connections,” she said. “Somebody will have to go down and talk with them, wear an imager so I can watch and more or less pick up what they’re talking about.”
Alex explained to the voice on the radio that we would stay nearby, and that we would go down in the morning. The voice responded.
“I think,” Gabe said, “that he understood we were signing off. He sounds glad that we’re here.”
“Like the snake?” I asked.
We watched the telescopic images on the monitors until finally night descended. The lampposts came on and the houses lit up. Our time was midmorning, slightly after 1100 hours. Gabe and Robbi Jo tried to get some sleep but didn’t manage it. They eventually opened a couple of books. Gabe got caught up in a historical examination of widely believed tales that weren’t true. Like the theory that Kory Sumter, who had been the world president on Dellaconda at the beginning of the Mute War, had known the attack on Point Edward was coming but had done nothing to prevent it because he wanted an excuse to take on the Mutes. Robbi Jo spent her time paging through the astronomy book.
Our stationary position over the village was burning excess fuel, so we left it and slipped back into orbit. We missed the village on our next pass but picked it up after that. The houses had gone dark, with one or two exceptions. But the lampposts were still on. We waited three hours past sunrise before we tried talking with them again. The same voice replied, and we went back into our stationary position. Belle told us it was probably just trying to say hello.
We were still debating whether we should go down. The Spaulding Mandate required that we leave and let the authorities decide on the proper approach. We were already in trouble because of the radio transmission. “If we play it safe and just go home,” said Alex, “we’ll be in better shape. We’ve found them. What else do we need to do?”
“No,” Gabe said. “I say we go down. I’ll do it. When we get home, we can claim I took the lander in the middle of the night. None of you guys knew about it.”
“No,” said Alex. “We don’t know yet what the reaction will be on the ground. If things turn bad, two of us would at least have a chance to get clear. We’ll take the blasters.”
I’m not sure it could ever have gone the other way, but when we finally decided to complete the visit, Alex spoke into the mike again, using his gentlest tone: “We’re coming down. We’ll see you in a few minutes.” We got a short reply, and Belle said it was probably asking whether we would visit them.
Then we had to decide who would go.
“Best if it’s me,” Gabe said. “I have no license to lose. Worst they can do is fine me.”
“Or jail you,” said Robbi Jo.
“And the fine would be substantial, I suspect,” said Alex. “To be honest, I doubt that when they’re deciding to level charges, it will matter much if you’ve gone down or just stood by and watched it happen. And if things go seriously wrong, we will probably all serve some time.”
Gabe smiled. “Whatever.”
Alex nodded. “Okay. If the fine happens, Rainbow will pay it.”
Robbi Jo raised her hands. “Enough nonsense, guys. I’ll go.”
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I thought there was a substantial risk in just dropping out of the sky to talk with people who, for whatever reason, had recently cleared out of Korella.
Gabe suggested that either I or Robbi Jo stay with the Belle-Marie. “Alex, do as you wish.” He was going.
Robbi Jo said she’d go.
I said nothing.
The only one who seemed to notice was Alex. He glanced my way but turned quickly in another direction. “No,” he said. “If things go wrong, I don’t think we want Chase making that long flight home alone. Robbi Jo, you stay too. Gabe and I’ll do it.”
Robbi Jo’s features hardened. “Alex, I thought you were better than this. Chase never suggested that you push women into a back seat.”
Belle estimated the temperature at about 27 degrees Celsius. A bit warm but okay. Everything was quiet. Alex showed up with some coffee and a few chocolate chip muffins. “Thought you’d like some,” he said. He was still trying to adjust to Robbi Jo’s comment. She and I were seated in the passenger cabin. She never took her eyes off the notebook.
“Thanks,” she said. Her voice was cold.
I could see that Alex was trying to find a way to calm the waters. I jumped in to help: “Thank you, Alex,” I said. “I think we should settle back into a standard orbit. We’d use less fuel.”
“We have a fuel problem?”
“No. I just don’t want to waste it for no reason.”
I knew he’d reject the suggestion. And he did. “Let’s stay where we are, Chase. Ask Belle to keep an eye on us. If she sees any unusual activity while we’re on the way down, let us know.”
“Okay, Alex.”
His snack consisted of one muffin. He finished it off and went back to his cabin. “You know,” Robbi Jo said, “there’s no reason you and I couldn’t take the lander down.” She smiled to show she meant it.
“We can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not? You one of those women who does everything she’s told? We could probably go down, say hello, give Belle some time with their AI, if they have one, and come back up before they even get dressed. We wouldn’t even have to say anything to them.”
“Let’s let it go, okay?”
“How about if I take it down? You can deny any knowledge.”
“Robbi Jo, you don’t really want to do that.”
“Actually, I do. I’d love to do it. Meet the aliens. What are we afraid of? They could hardly look more friendly.”
“That sounds like a good way to get killed.”
“Chase, we know they’re high-tech. They’re not savages; they built a civilization.”
“That’s not the point. Look, if you want, I’ll talk to Alex. Tell him what you want to do.”
“No. He already knows what I want to do.”
“Whatever. He owns the Belle-Marie. And Rainbow Enterprises. You haven’t been part of this organization for years. It’s easy for you to talk about ignoring him.”
Her eyes closed and she exhaled. “I know.” She raised her hands. “You’re right. Answer a question for me, Chase.”
“Okay.”
“What would you do if I took the lander down?”
I pushed back in my seat. “Belle?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“You heard this?”
“Yes.”
“Lock the lander.”
Robbi Jo let out a long sigh. “Let me try something else.”
“Go ahead.”
“Would it really be hard on you if you had to go home alone? If something happened to the rest of us?”
“I wouldn’t want to lose Alex or Gabe. But to answer your question, I could live with it. If you can talk him into taking you along, do it. It’s okay with me.”
Gabe came into the passenger cabin a few minutes later. Robbi Jo passed him a muffin. “You guys about ready to go down?”
He smiled. “Yes, we’re ready. Or at least we will be when Alex gets out here.”
“Gabe, I would like to go with you.”
“That’s not a good idea. Too many people at risk.”
She looked around the cabin. “You could stay. Do you care that much?”
“About your safety? Sure.”
“I care about yours, too. But I’m not using it to deny your being present during the moment this whole trip has been about.”
“I understand what you’re saying, Robbi Jo. But we just can’t do it your way.”
“Don’t you think that should be my call?”
“If something bad happens, think about the situation Chase would be in.”
“Chase says she has no objection if I go down with you guys. Is that all right with you, Gabe?”
His brow got wrinkly. He looked at me and I smiled back. I almost said, Please, don’t take her. But I understood what she was going through. We were about to make history, and I could already see the story would be how the guys went down while the women stayed back and played it safe. “How about,” I said, “if all four of us go down?”
Gabe rolled his eyes and asked me not to be silly.
We heard Alex’s cabin door open. Gabe got up and went back. We could hear them talking, and when they joined us, Alex immediately confronted Robbi Jo. “If,” he said, “this is really what you want to do.” And he apologized to me.
Robbi Jo let me see she wanted to talk. I went up onto the bridge. She followed me, smiled, and asked if I was okay.
“I’m all right.”
She leaned over the controls and checked the microphone to be sure it was off. “I’m sorry about causing all the fuss.”
“It’s all right. I should have backed you up.”
“You did. I know the job means a lot to you. You’re not interested in risking it. I understand that.”
“It’s more than the job, Robbi Jo. It’s Alex. I know what he expects from me, and I don’t want to disappoint him.”
“I doubt that could ever happen.”
Alex, Robbi Jo, and Gabe put pressure suits into the lander as a precaution. They clipped imagers to their shirts so Belle and I could watch. They also took the astronomy book we’d received from Larry. When they were ready to go, they assured me they’d be careful and climbed into the lander. Alex took a last disapproving look at me and closed the hatch. I went back to the bridge. Belle depressurized the cargo area, opened the cargo door, took the lander outside on the cradle, and released it.