The Antarean laughed an Antarean laugh, a thick silvery snort. "Our voyage will last many weeks more. One of these days, I think, you will go to them."
"You were unconscious at least five minutes," Dawn says. "You gave everyone a scare. Are you sure you ought to go through with tonight"s lecture?"
Nodding, Schwartz says, "I"ll be all right. I"m a little tired, is all. Too many time zones this week." They stand on the terrace of his hotel room. Night is coming on, already, here in late afternoon: it is midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, though the fragrance of tropic blossoms perfumes the air. The first few stars have appeared. He has never really known which star is which. That bright one, he thinks, could be Rigel, and that one Sirius, and perhaps this is Deneb over there. And this? Can this be red Antares, in the heart of the Scorpion, or is it only Mars? Because of his collapse at the skyport he has been able to beg off the customary faculty reception and the formal dinner; pleading the need for rest, he has arranged to have a simple snack at his hotel room, a deux. In two hours they will come for him and take him to the University to speak. Dawn watches him closely.
Perhaps she is worried about his health, perhaps she is only waiting for him to make his move toward her. There"s time for all that later, he figures. He would rather talk now. Warming up for the audience he seizes his earlier thread: "For a long time I didn"t understand what had taken place. I grew up insular, cut off from reality, a New York boy, bright mind and a library card. I read all the anthropological cla.s.sics, Patterns of Culture and Coming of Age in Samoa and Life of a South African Tribe and the rest, and I dreamed of field trips, collecting myths and grammars and folkways and artifacts and all that, until when I was twenty-five I finally got out into the field and started to discover I had gone into a dead science. We have only one worldwide culture now, with local variants but no basic divergences -- there"s nothing primitive left on Earth, and there are no other planets. Not inhabited ones. I can"t go to Mars or Venus or Saturn and study the natives. What natives? And we can"t reach the stas. All I have to work with is Earth. I was thirty years old when the whole thing clicked together for me and I knew I had wasted my life."
She says, "But surely there was something for you to study on Earth."
"One culture, rootless and h.o.m.ogeneous. That"s work for a sociologist, not for me. I"m a romantic, I"m an exotic, I want strangeness, difference. Look, we can never have any real perspective on our own time and lives. The sociologists try to attain it, but all they get is a mound of raw indigestible data. Insight comes later -- two, five, ten generations later. But one way we"ve always been able to learn about ourselves is by studying alien cultures, studying them completely, and defining ourselves by measuring what they are that we aren"t. The cultures have to be isolated, though. The anthropologist himself corrupts that isolation in the Heisenberg sense when he comes around with his camera and scanners and starts asking questions, but we can compensate more or less, for the inevitable damage a lone observer causes. We can"t compensate when our whole culture collides with another and absorbs and obliterates it. Which we technological-mechanical people now have done everywhere. One day I woke up and saw there were no alien cultures left. Hah! Crushing revelation! Schwartz"s occupation is gone!"
"What did you do?"
"For years I was in an absolute funk. I taught, I studied, I went through the motions, knowing it was all meaningless. All I was doing was looking at records of vanished cultures left by earlier observers and trying to cudgel new meanings. Secondary sources, stale findings: I was an evaluator of dry bones, not a gatherer of evidence. Paleontology. Dinosaurs are interesting, but what do they tell you about the contemporary world and the meaning of its patterns? Dry bones, Dawn, dry bones. Despair. And then a clue. I had this Nigerian student, this Iibo -- well, basically an Iibo, but she"s got some Israeli in her and I think Chinese -- and we grew very close, she was as close to me as anybody in my own sixness, and I told her my troubles. I"m going to give it up, I said, because it isn"t what I expected it to be. She laughed at me and said, What right do you have to be upset because the world doesn"t live up to your expectations? Reshape your life, Tom; you can"t reshape the world. I said, But how? And she said, Look inward, find the primitive in yourself, see what made you what you are, what made today"s culture what it is, see how these alien streams have flowed together. Nothing"s been lost here, only merged. Which made me think. Which gave me a new way of looking at things. Which sent me on an inward quest. It took me three years to grasp the patterns, to come to an understanding of what our planet has become, and only after I accepted the planet -- "
It seems to him that he has been talking forever. Talking. Talking. But he can no longer hear his own voice. There is only a distant buzz.
"After I accepted -- " A distant buzz.
"What was I saying?" he asks.
"After you accepted the planet -- "
"After I accepted the planet," he says, "that I could begin -- " Buzz. Buzz. "That I could begin to accept myself."
He was drawn toward the Spicans too, not so much for themselves -- they were oblique, elliptical characters, self-contained and self-satisfied, hard to approach -- as for the apparently psychedelic drug they took in some sacramental way before the beginning of each of their interminable ritual dances. Each time he had watched them take the drug, they had seemingly made a point of extending it toward him, as if inviting him, as if tempting him, before popping it into their mouths. He felt baited; he felt pulled. There were three Spicans on board, slender creatures two and a half meters long, with flexible cylindrical bodies and small stubby limbs. Their skins were reptilian, dry and smooth, deep green with yellow bands, but their eyes were weirdly human, large liquid-brown eyes, sad Levantine eyes, the eyes of unfortunate medieval travelers transformed by enchantment into serpents. Schwartz had spoken with them several times. They understood English well enough -- all galactic races did; Schwartz imagined it would become the interstellar lingua franca as it had on Earth -- but the construction of their vocal organs was such that they had no way of speaking it, and they relied instead on small translating machines hung around their necks that converted their soft whispered hisses into amber words pulsing across a screen.
Cautiously, the third or fourth time he spoke with them, he expressed polite interest in their drug. They told him it enabled them to make contact with the central forces of the universe. He replied that there were such drugs on Earth, too, and that he used them frequently, that they gave him great insight into the workings of the cosmos. They showed some curiosity, perhaps even intense curiosity: reading their eyes was diticult and the tone of their voices gave no clues. He took his elegant leather-bound drug case from his pouch and showed them what he had: learitonin, psilocerebrin, siddharthin, and acid-57. He described the effects of each and suggested an exchange, any of his for an equivalent dose of the shriveled orange fungoid they nibbled. They conferred. Yes, they said, we will do this. But not now. Not until the proper moment. Schwartz knew better than to ask them when that would be. He thanked them and put his drugs away.
Pitkin, who had watched the interchange from the far side of the lounge, came striding fiercely toward him as the Spicans glided off. "What are you up to now?" he demanded.
"How about minding your own business?" Schwartz said amiably.
"You"re trading pills with these snakes, aren"t you?"
"Let"s call it field research."
"Research? Research? What are you going to do, trip on that orange stuff of theirs?"
"I might," Schwartz said. "How do you know what its effects on the human metabolism might be? You could end up blind or paralyzed or crazy or -- "
" -- or illuminated," Schwartz said. "Those are the risks one takes in the field. The early anthropologists who unhesitatingly sampled peyote and yage and ololiuqui accepted those risks, and -- "
"But those were drugs that humans were using. You have no way of telling how -- oh, what"s the use, Schwartz? Research, he calls it. Research." Pitkin sneered. "Junkie!"
Schwartz matched him sneer for sneer. "Economist!"
The house is a decent one tonight, close to three thousand, every seat in the University"s great horseshoe-shaped auditorium taken, and a video relay besides, beaming his lecture to all Papua and half of Indonesia. Schwartz stands on the dais like a demiG.o.d under a brilliant no-glare spotlight. Despite his earlier weariness he is in good form now, gestures broad and forceful, eyes commanding, voice deep and resonant, words flowing freely. "Only one planet," he says, "one small and crowded planet, on which all cultures converge to a drab and depressing sameness. How sad that is! How tiny we make ourselves, when we make ourselves to resemble one another!" He flings his arms upward. "Look to the stars, the unattainable stars! Imagine, if you can, the millions of worlds that orbit those blazing suns beyond the night"s darkness! Speculate with me on other peoples, other ways, other G.o.ds. Beings of every imaginable form, alien in appearance but not grotesque, not hideous, for all life is beautiful -- beings that breathe gases strange to us, beings of immense size, beings of many limbs or of none, beings to whom death is a divine culmination of existence, beings who never die, beings who bring forth their young a thousand at a time, beings who do not reproduce -- all the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe!
"Perhaps on each of those worlds it is as it has become here. One intelligent species, one culture, the eternal convergence. But the many worlds together offer a vast spectrum of variety. And now, share this vision with me! I see a ship voyaging from star to star, a s.p.a.celiner of the future, and aboard that ship is a sampling of many species, many cultures, a random scoop out of the galaxy"s fantastic diversity. That ship is like a little cosmos, a small world, enclosed, sealed. How exciting to be aboard it, to encounter in that little compa.s.s such richness of cultural variation! Now our own world was once like that starship, a little cosmos, bearing with it all the thousands of Earthborn cultures. Hopi and Eskimo and Aztec and Kwakiutl and Arapesh and Orokolo and all the rest. In the course of our voyage we have come to resemble one another too much, and it has impoverished the lives of all of us, because -- " He falters suddenly. He feels faint, and grasps the sides of the lectern. "Because -- " The spotlight, he thinks. In my eyes. Not supposed to glare like that, but it"s blinding. Got to have them move it. "In the course -- the course of our voyage -- " What"s happening? Breaking into a sweat, now. Pain in my chest. My heart? Wait, slow up, catch your breath. That light in my eyes -- "Tell me," Schwartz said earnestly, "what it"s like to know you"ll have ten successive bodies and live more than a thousand years."
"First tell me," said the Antarean, "what it"s like to know you"ll live ninety years or less and perish forever."
Somehow he continues. The pain in his chest grows more intense, he cannot focus his eyes; he believes he will lose consciousness at any moment and may even have lost it already at least once, and yet he continues. Clinging to the lectern, he outlines the program he developed in The Mask Beneath the Skin. A rebirth of tribalism without a revival of ugly nationalism. The quest for a renewed sense of kinship with the past. A sharp reduction in nonessential travel, especially tourism. Heavy taxation of exported artifacts, including films and video shows. An attempt to create independent cultural units on Earth once again while maintaining present levels of economic and political interdependence. Relinquishment of materialistic technological-industrial values. New searches for fundamental meanings. An ethnic revival, before it is too late, among those cultures of mankind that have only recently shed their traditional folkways. (He repeats and embellishes this point particularly, for the benefit of the Papuans before him, the great-grandchildren of cannibals.) The discomfort and confusion come and go as he unreels his themes. He builds and builds, crying out pa.s.sionately for an end to the h.o.m.ogenization of Earth, and gradually the physical symptoms leave him, all but a faint vertigo. But a different malaise seizes him as he nears his peroration. His voice becomes, to him, a far-off quacking, meaningless and foolish. He has said all this a thousand times, always to great ovations, but who listens? Who listens? Everything seems hollow tonight, mechanical, absurd. An ethnic revival? Shall these people before him revert to their loincloths and their pig roasts? His starship is a fantasy; his dream of a diverse Earth is mere silliness. What is, will be. And yet he pushes on toward his conclusion. He takes his audience back to that starship, he creates a horde of fanciful beings for them. He completes the metaphor by sketching the structures of half a dozen vanished "primitive" cultures of Earth, he chants the chants of the Navaho, the Gabon Pygmies, the Ashanti, the Mundugumor. It is over. Cascades of applause engulf him. He holds his place until members of the sponsoring committee come to him and help him down: they have perceived his distress. "It"s nothing," he gasps. "The lights -- too bright -- " Dawn is at his side. She hands him a drink, something cool. Two of the sponsors begin to speak of a reception for him in the Green Room. "Fine," Schwartz says. "Glad to." Dawn murmurs a protest. He shakes her off. "My obligation," he tells her. "Meet community leaders. Faculty people. I"m feeling better now. Honestly." Swaying, trembling, he lets them lead him away.
"A Jew," the Antarean said. "You call yourself a Jew, but what is this exactly? A clan, a sept, a moiety, a tribe, a nation, what? Can you explain?"
"You understand what a religion is?"
"Of course."
"Judaism -- Jewishness -- it"s one of Earth"s major religions."
"You are therefore a priest?"
"Not at all. I don"t even practice Judaism. But my ancestors did, and therefore I consider myself Jewish, even though -- "
"It is an hereditary religion, then," the Antarean said, "that does not require its members to observe its rites?"
"In a sense," said Schwartz desperately. "More an hereditary cultural subgroup, actually, evolving out of a common religious outlook no longer relevant."
"Ah. And the cultural traits of Jewishness that define it and separate you from the majority of humankind are -- ?"
"Well -- " Schwartz hesitated. "There"s a complicated dietary code, a rite of circ.u.mcision for newborn males, a rite of pa.s.sage for male adolescents, a language of scripture, a vernacular language that Jews all around the world more or less understand, and plenty more, including a certain intangible sense of clannishness and certain att.i.tudes, such as a peculiar self-deprecating style of humor -- "
"You observe the dietary code? You understand the language of scripture?"
"Not exactly," Schwartz admitted. "In fact I don"t do anything that"s specifically Jewish except think of myself as a Jew and adopt many of the characteristically Jewish personality modes, which however are not uniquely Jewish any longer -- they can be traced among Italians, for example, and to some extent among Greeks. I"m speaking of Italians and Greeks of the late twentieth century, of course. Nowadays -- " It was all becoming a terrible muddle. "Nowadays -- "
"It would seem," said the Antarean, "that you are a Jew only because your maternal and paternal gene-givers were Jews, and they -- "
"No, not quite. Not my mother, just my father, and he was Jewish only on his father"s side, but even my grandfather never observed the customs, and -- "
"I think this has grown too confusing," said the Antarean. "I withdraw the entire inquiry. Let us speak instead of my own traditions. The Time of Openings, for example, may be understood as -- "
In the Green Room some eighty or a hundred distinguished Papuans press toward him, offering congratulations. "Absolutely right," they say. "A global catastrophe." "Our last chance to save our culture." Their skins are chocolate-tinted but their faces betray the genetic mishmash that is their ancestry: perhaps they call themselves Arapesh, Mundugumor, Tchambuli, Mafulu, in the way that he calls himself a Jew, but they have been liberally larded with chromosomes contributed by Chinese, j.a.panese, Europeans, Africans, everything. They dress in International Contemporary. They speak slangy, lively English. Schwartz feels seasick. "You look dazed," Dawn whispers. He smiles bravely. Body like dry bone. Mind like dead ashes. He is introduced to a tribal chieftain, tall, gray-haired, who looks and speaks like a professor, a lawyer, a banker. What, will these people return to the hills for the ceremony of the yam harvest? Will newborn girl-children be abandoned, cords uncut, skins unwashed, if their fathers do not need more girls? Will boys entering manhood submit to the expensive services of the initiator who scarifies them with the teeth of crocodiles? The crocodiles are gone. The shamans have become stockbrokers.
Suddenly he cannot breathe. "Get me out of here," Schwartz mutters hoa.r.s.ely, choking.
Dawn, with stewardess efficiency, chops a path for him through the mob. The sponsors, concerned, rush to his aid. He is floated swiftly back to the hotel in a glistening little bubble-car. Dawn helps him to bed. Reviving, he reaches for her.
"You don"t have to," she says. "You"ve had a rough day."
He persists. He embraces her and takes her, quickly, fiercely, and they move together for a few minutes and it ends and he sinks back, exhausted, stupefied. She gets a cool cloth and pats his forehead and urges him to rest. "Bring me my drugs," he says. He wants siddharthin, but she misunderstands, probably deliberately, and offers him something blue and bulky, a sleeping pill, and, too weary to object, he takes it. Even so, it seems to be hours before sleep comes.
He dreams he is at the skyport, boarding the rocket for Bangkok, and instantly he is debarking at Bangkok -- just like Port Moresby, only more humid -- and he delivers his speech to a horde of enthusiastic Thais, while rockets Bicker about him, carrying him to skyport after skyport, and the Thais blur and become j.a.panese, who are transformed into Mongols, who become Uighurs, who become Iranians, who become Sudanese, who become Zambians, who become Chileans, and all look alike, all look alike, all look alike.
The Spicans hovered above him, weaving, bobbing, swaying like cobras about to strike. But their eyes, warm and liquid, were sympathetic: loving, even. He felt the flow of their compa.s.sion. If they had had the sort of musculature that enabled them to smile, they would be smiling tenderly, he knew.
One of the aliens leaned close. The little translating device dangled toward Schwartz like a holy medallion. He narrowed his eyes, concentrating as intently as he could on the amber words flashing quickly across the screen.
". . . has come. We shall . . ."
"Again, please," Schwartz said. "I missed some of what you were saying."
"The moment...has come. We shall...make the exchange of sacraments now."
"Sacraments?"
"Drugs."
"Drugs, yes. Yes. Of course." Schwartz groped in his pouch. He felt the cool, smooth leather skin of his drug case. Leather? Snakeskin, maybe. Anyway. He drew it forth. "Here", he said. "Siddharthin, learitonin, psilocerebrin, acid-57. Take your pick." The Spicans selected three small blue siddhardiins. "Very good," Schwartz said. "The most transcendental of all. And now -- "
The longest of the aliens proffered a ball of dried orange fungus the size of Schwartz"s thumbnail.
"It is an equivalent dose. We give it to you."
"Equivalent to all three of my tablets, or to one?"
"Equivalent. It will give you peace."
Schwartz smiled. There was a time for asking questions and a time for unhesitating action. He took the fungus and reached for a gla.s.s of water.
"Wait!" Pitkin cried, appearing suddenly. "What are you -- "
"Too late," Schwartz said serenely, and swallowed the Spican drug in one joyous gulp.
The nightmares go on and on. He circles the Earth like the Flying Dutchman, like the Wandering Jew, skyport to skyport to skyport, an unending voyage from nowhere to nowhere. Obliging committees meet him and convey him to his hotel. Sometimes the committee members are contemporary types, indistinguishable from one another, with standard faces, standard clothing, the all-purpose new-model hybrid unihuman, and sometimes they are consciously ethnic, elaborately decked out in feathers and paint and tribal emblems, but their faces, too, are standard behind the gaudy regalia, their slang is the slang of Uganda and Tierra del Fuego and Nepal, and it seems to Schwartz that these masqueraders are, if anything, less authentic, less honest, than the other sort, who at least are true representatives of their era. So it is hopeless either way. He lashes at his pillow, he groans, he wakens. Instantly Dawn"s arms enfold him. He sobs incoherent phrases into her clavicle and she murmurs soothing sounds against his forehead. He is having some sort of breakdown, he realizes: a new crisis of values, a shattering of the philosophical synthesis that has allowed him to get through the last few years. He is bound to the wheel; he spins, he spins, he spins, traversing the continents, getting nowhere. There is no place to go. No. There is one, just one, a place where he will find peace, where the universe will be as he needs it to be. Go there, Schwartz. Go and stay as long as you can. "Is there anything I can do?" Dawn asks. He shivers and shakes his head. "Take this," she says, and gives him some sort of pill. Another tranquilizer. All right. All right. The world has turned to porcelain. His skin feels like a plastic coating. Away, away, to the ship. To the ship! "So long," Schwartz says.
Outside the ship the Capellans twist and spin in their ritual dance as, weightless and without ma.s.s, they are swept toward the rim of the galaxy at nine times the velocity of light. They move with a grace that is astonishing for creatures of such tremendous bulk. A dazzling light that emanates from the center of the universe strikes their glossy skin and, rebounding, resonates all up and down the spectrum, splintering into brilliant streamers of ultra-red, infraviolet, exoyellow. All the cosmos glows and shimmers. A single perfect note of music comes out of the remote distance and, growing closer, swells in an infinite crescendo. Schwartz trembles at the beauty of all he perceives.
Beside him stands the seal-slick Antarean. She -- definitely she, no doubt of it, she -- plucks at his arm and whispers, "Will you go to them?"
"Yes. Yes, of course."
"So will I. Wherever you go."
"Now," Schwartz says. He reaches for the lever that opens the hatch. He pulls down. The side of the starship swings open.
The Antarean looks deep into his eyes and says blissfully, "I never told you my name. My name is Dawn."
Together they float through the hatch into s.p.a.ce.
The blackness receives them gently. There is no chill, no pressure at the lungs, no discomfort at all. He is surrounded by luminous surges, by throbbing mantles of pure color, as though he has entered the heart of an aurora. He and Dawn swim toward the Capellans, and the huge beings welcome them with deep, glad, booming cries. Dawn joins the dance at once, moving her sinuous limbs with extravagant ease; Schwartz will do the same in a moment, but first he turns to face the starship, hanging in s.p.a.ce close by him like a vast coppery needle, and in a voice that could shake universes he calls, "Come, friends! Come, all of you! Come dance with us!" And they come, pouring through the hatch, the Spicans first, then all the rest, the infinite mult.i.tude of beings, the travelers from Fomalhaut and Achemar and Acrux and Aldebaran, from Thuban and Arcturus and Altair, from Polaris and Canopus and Sirius and Rigel, hundreds of star-creatures spilling happily out of the vessel, bursting forth, all of them, even Pitkin, poor little Pitkin, everyone joining hands and tentacles and tendrils and whatever, forming a great ring of light across s.p.a.ce, everyone locked in a cosmic harmony, everyone dancing. Dancing. Dancing.
Sundance.
by Robert Silverberg.
Today you liquidated about 50,000 Eaters in Sector A, and now you are spending an uneasy night. You and Herndon flew east at dawn, with the green-gold sunrise at your backs, and sprayed the neural pellets over a thousand hectares along the Forked River. You flew on into the prairie beyond the river, where the Eaters have already been wiped out, and had lunch sprawled on that thick, soft carpet of gra.s.s where the first settlement is expected to rise. Herndon picked some juiceflowers, and you enjoyed half an hour of mild hallucinations. Then, as you headed toward the copter to begin an afternoon of further pellet spraying, he said suddenly, "Tom, how would you feel about this if it turned out that the Eaters weren"t just animal pests? That they were people, say, with a language and rites and a history and all?"
You thought of how it had been for your own people.
"They aren"t," you said.
"Suppose they were. Suppose the Eaters-"
"They aren"t. Drop it."
Herndon has this streak of cruelty in him that leads him to ask such questions. He goes for the vulnerabilities; it amuses him. All night now his casual remark has echoed in your mind. Suppose the Eaters ... suppose the Eaters ... suppose ... suppose ...
You sleep for a while, and dream, and in your dreams you swim through rivers of blood.
Foolishness. A feverish fantasy. You know how important it is to exterminate the Eaters fast, before the settlers get here. They"re just animals, and not even harmless animals at that; ecology-wreckers is what they are, devourers of oxygen-liberating plants, and they have to go. A few have been saved for zoological study. The rest must be destroyed. Ritual extirpation of undesirable beings, the old, old story. But let"s not complicate our job with moral qualms, you tell yourself. Let"s not dream of rivers of blood.
The Eaters don"t even have blood, none that could flow in rivers, anyway. What they have is, well, a kind of lymph that permeates every tissue and transmits nourishment along the interfaces. Waste products go out the same way, osmotically. In terms of process, it"s structurally a.n.a.logous to your own kind of circulatory system, except there"s no network of blood vessels hooked to a master pump. The life-stuff just oozes through their bodies as though they were amoebas or sponges or some other low-phylum form. Yet they"re definitely high-phylum in nervous system, digestive setup, limb-and-organ template, etc. Odd, you think. The thing about aliens is that they"re alien, you tell yourself, not for the first time.
The beauty of their biology for you and your companions is that it lets you exterminate them so neatly.
You fly over the grazing grounds and drop the neural pellets. The Eaters find and ingest them. Within an hour the poison has reached all sectors of the body. Life ceases; a rapid breakdown of cellular matter follows, the Eater literally falling apart molecule by molecule the instant that nutrition is cut off; the lymph-like stuff works like acid; a universal lysis occurs; flesh and even the bones, which are cartilaginous, dissolve. In two hours, a puddle on the ground. In four, nothing at all left. Considering how many millions of Eaters you"ve scheduled for extermination here, it"s sweet of the bodies to be self-disposing. Otherwise what a charnel house this world would become!
Suppose the Eaters ...
d.a.m.n Herndon. You almost feel like getting a memory-editing in the morning. Sc.r.a.pe his stupid speculations out of your head. If you dared. If you dared.
In the morning he does not dare. Memory-editing frightens him; he will try to shake free of his newfound guilt without it. The Eaters, he explains to himself, are mindless herbivores, the unfortunate victims of human expansionism, but not really deserving of pa.s.sionate defense. Their extermination is not tragic; it"s just too bad. If Earthmen are to have this world, the Eaters must relinquish it. There"s a difference, he tells himself, between the elimination of the Plains Indians from the American prairie in the nineteenth century and the destruction of the bison on that same prairie. One feels a little wistful about the slaughter of the thundering herds; one regrets the butchering of millions of the n.o.ble brown woolly beasts, yes. But one feels outrage, not mere wistful regret, at what was done to the Sioux. There"s a difference. Reserve your pa.s.sions for the proper cause.
He walks from his bubble at the edge of the camp toward the center of things. The flagstone path is moist and glistening. The morning fog has not yet lifted, and every tree is bowed, the long, notched leaves heavy with droplets of water. He pauses, crouching, to observe a spider-a.n.a.log spinning its asymmetrical web. As he watches, a small amphibian, delicately shaded turquoise, glides as inconspicuously as possible over the mossy ground. Not inconspicuously enough; he gently lifts the little creature and puts it on the back of his hand. The gills flutter in anguish, and the amphibian"s sides quiver. Slowly, cunningly, its color changes until it matches the coppery tone of the hand. The camouflage is excellent. He lowers his hand and the amphibian scurries into a puddle. He walks on.
He is forty years old, shorter than most of the other members of the expedition, with wide shoulders, a heavy chest, dark glossy hair, a blunt, spreading nose. He is a biologist. This is his third career, for he has failed as an anthropologist and as a developer of real estate. His name is Tom Two Ribbons. He has been married twice but has had no children. His great-grandfather died of alcoholism; his grandfather was addicted to hallucinogens; his father had compulsively visited cheap memory-editing parlors. Tom Two Ribbons is conscious that he is failing a family tradition, but he has not yet found his own mode of self-destruction.
In the main building he discovers Herndon, Julia, Ellen, Schwartz, Chang, Michaelson, and Nichols. They are eating breakfast; the others are already at work. Ellen rises and comes to him and kisses him. Her short soft yellow hair tickles his cheeks. "I love you," she whispers. She has spent the night in Michaelson"s bubble. "I love you," he tells her, and draws a quick vertical line of affection between her small pale b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He winks at Michaelson, who nods, touches the tops of two fingers to his lips, and blows them a kiss. We are all good friends here, Tom Two Ribbons thinks.
"Who drops pellets today?" he asks.
"Mike and Chang," says Julia. "Sector C."
Schwartz says, "Eleven more days and we ought to have the whole peninsula clear. Then we can move inland."