Invardii Series Boxset Page 8

  The shuttle passed over small pockets in the forest where regrowth might have been from recent cultivation, and then circled over a thin wisp of smoke that worked its way out of a thickly wooded canyon. No one was game to ask if that might mean intelligent life.

  “I think some of the trees are connected to others,” said Roberto a little later, “colonies that have spread from one parent.” He and Andre looked down on islands of interconnected trunks in the green and blue of the forest.

  “First flyover target ahead,” said Habid, and everyone fell silent. Andre loosened himself from the g-webbing, and took over from Habid at the controls. If there were people like themselves here, they would look similar, and not like the much broader Hudnee. The pilots would be staying out of sight from now on.

  Celia had asked for a flight path that flew them over one of the cleared areas while they were on their way to the one she had chosen as their final landing site. It would give them some idea of what they would find when they landed.

  Andre slowed the shuttle as much as he could, cutting back the burners until the were drifting along, more like a hot air balloon. And then the clearing came into view, and Celia could hardly bear to look.

  CHAPTER 12

  ________________

  “Those are cultivated plants of some sort,” said Celia excitedly, pointing at uniform patches of vegetation, interspersed by paths.

  “But not enough for a village to live off,” said Sallyanne, “Unless this is just for one or two families.”

  “No, no,” said Jeneen excitedly. “Look over there. Isn’t that a hall of some sort, something permanent?”

  “Goddammit,” breathed Roberto. “Longhouses!”

  “What?” said several voices at once.

  “Longhouses,” said Roberto. “One long living space, a primitive Human modular system, rooms added either end as needed, with a deck along the front.

  “But this is different. In Borneo longhouses were up on poles, to keep out predators and war parties. This one looks like it’s built into the forest at ground level.”

  The clearing fell astern.

  They hadn’t seen any figures in the clearing, or by the longhouse, and there was a sense of disappointment in the shuttle.

  “Hey, it makes sense,” said Andre, trying to lighten the mood. “The burners on this thing must sound like the growl of some giant animal, even when we’re this far above them. Would you stick around if you heard that?”

  Celia shrugged non-committally. They had been over the settlement and gone in a very short time. Either the natives had good hearing, or they took everything as a threat and could move damn fast.

  But then again, she thought, feeling her heart race, they now knew there were natives. The thought glowed in her mind. There were first Humans here, ancestors, people with a whole new story to tell. It was exhilarating.

  “Changing to air compressors. Speed slowing,” said Andre, as the burners folded into the shuttle’s sides, and the huge intakes along the top of the shuttle began to hiss as they compressed the planet’s atmosphere.

  “Final clearing ahead,” he reported, throwing the long-range visuals up on the screen above his pilot’s position. Celia caught a glimpse of something disappearing into the forest at the back of the clearing, then two tiny figures ran out of another longhouse on one side of the clearing. They vanished into the trees as well.

  Got you! she thought triumphantly. Up until now the people of this planet had been too circumstantial, too imaginary, for her. There was nothing like seeing proof of a thing with your own eyes.

  “Circling to land,” said Andre, as he began a wide sweep over the clearing.

  They weren’t going to find a landing site ready and waiting for the shuttle. Andre’s job was to land safely, while doing as little damage to the surroundings as possible. It would hardly be a good start to a relationship with the native peoples if the shuttle flattened the longhouse’s medicinal plants, or killed some of the livestock.

  At least we’re quieter with the burners put away, thought Celia, as the air jets lowered them to the ground. A crop of some kind bent away from the blast of air under the shuttle.

  Andre landed the shuttle in the middle of a patch of low plants on the far side of the clearing from the longhouse. There was a cleared area in the middle of the settlement, but Sallyanne had warned them it was probably used for social or ceremonial purposes, and was not something you entered – even from above – uninvited.

  The shuttle shifted underfoot as the soil settled to take its weight, and Andre cut off the air jets. Then there was nothing but silence.

  The doors of the shuttle popped as they opened inward, a slight decompression due to a difference in air pressure, and then slid sideways inside the walls. Habid and the three other Hud pilots stayed at the back of the shuttle. They had hand weapons hidden inside loose clothing that covered lightweight body armour.

  The pilots might have faces and hands that were now a similar shade of colour to their Human colleagues, but they were too obviously different – at least too different this early in the meeting of the old and new versions of the Human race.

  The Mersa, with their covering of short fur, were not so easy to disguise, and Cantoselli and the technician she had brought with her also retreated to the rear section of the shuttle.

  Celia and Sallyanne stepped down onto the ground of Orouth. It was a heady moment. Celia set up a lightweight table a dozen paces out from the open doors, and Sallyanne placed a translation device on it. The two men stayed out of sight inside the shuttle. It was hoped a small, all-female approach might seem less threatening.

  Sallyanne tapped in a command, and the voice of a Kalahari bushmen, as first recorded over 600 years ago, sang out across the clearing.

  “Hock !Thung padlut mhit harn !K’ar,” said the voice, translating what Sallyanne had given it to say. There was a silence, and then two more of the strange sentences, interspersed with the odd glottal stops of the bushman language.

  There was no reply. Sallyanne repeated the performance two more times.

  “Are they still somewhere near the clearing,” she called softly to Jeneen, who sat on the floor of the shuttle just inside the door. Jeneen turned enquiringly to Andre, still in his pilot’s seat.

  “The scanners tell me there’s no one in the longhouse,” said Andre, “but there’s a group of maybe ten in the forest on the far side from us. There are others at the top of the rise behind the clearing, still moving away. Also five circling around to our right through the forest.

  The most experienced hunters, thought Sallyanne, coming to have a closer look at us through the trees. That’s okay. Let them report back to the elders that we’re not a war party.

  Sallyanne continued repeating the greeting through the machine, but there was no reaction from the people of the longhouse. Andre updated them a little later, with the news the smaller group that had scouted the area on their right had returned to join the larger one. It didn’t appear to have changed anything. She looked at Celia, who shrugged.

  “What do you suggest,” said the team leader. There was a short conference, and Sallyanne called Jeneen and Roberto out of the shuttle. Perhaps the people hidden in the forest were confused by the absence of men. It was hard to know what the local customs were. Andre stayed behind to coordinate the scanners and the Hud pilots, who were their first line of defence if they were attacked.

  The three women and Roberto walked forward until they came to the circle of beaten earth in the middle of the clearing. There were logs pulled up at the edges, and woven rushes on the ground, which suggested seats of some sort. Sallyanne motioned to the others to take a place on the side nearest the shuttle. Then she set up the translating device next to her.

  She hoped the message they were sending was clear enough – if this is your social and ceremonial centre, we have come here to share these things with you.

  Sallyanne spoke quietly into the pickup lead, and the machine sen
t her translated words out across the clearing. She waited for a while, but there was no reply.

  Then she tried a different approach, stepping out in front of her group and giving a long, impassioned speech in her own language. She tried to build a rhythm into it, the cadences rise to a pitch and falling away, time after time. It was a standard ceremonial method among early tribes on Earth.

  At last there was a sound like a bird calling, from the opposite side of the clearing. This was followed by a rising and falling female voice, wailing in the same rising and falling manner. Then there was silence again.

  “A song of greeting onto a sacred place, I think”, said Sallyanne. “It wasn’t known to be bushman custom, but a lot can change in 200 thousand years. I don’t know what we’re supposed to do in reply.”

  There was a long pause while the female members of the little group looked at each other. They instinctively knew it had to be one of them that accepted this challenge.

  “Let me give it a shot,” said Jeneen. Sallyanne looked at her for a moment, then nodded.

  Jeneen repeated the song as best as she could recall it, showing quite some musical ability.

  “Grad school choir,” she muttered as she sat down, seeing Celia’s raised eyebrows.

  After a while a single short sentence hailed from the trees on the other side of the clearing. The words seemed similar to the bushman language, but when Sallyanne put a short welcoming speech through the translator, there was silence once more.

  Sallyanne was about to try again when there was a long speech from one of the people in the forest. She recorded it, and moments later put the linguistics program to work. The machine came up with a readout on the small screen.

  “Damn it all, I can’t get a match,” said Sallyanne. “If this is the population our ancestors came from, then the language has developed along different lines to that of the Kalahari bushmen. The other possibility is Earth’s ancestral population lives on the other side of the planet, and always spoke differently.”

  “Well, we’re here now,” said Celia. “Let’s see what we can learn from the oral traditions of these people. They should be able to tell us something about their neighbours in the area as well.”

  After a lot more encouragement, a curious cavalcade wound its way out of the forest and along the path toward the centre of the clearing. Six men led the column, carrying spears that had been reversed, and were presumably a sign of peace.

  Then a group of women carried a twisted figure on a woven mat, several of them to each side of the mat. Behind them came two men and a woman. They had a more dignified bearing, and raised welts on their cheeks that presumably showed a higher status.

  “They’re taller than bushmen,” murmured Celia, surprised they were not much shorter than her own rather average height.

  “Diet,” murmured Sallyanne. “More protein in the rain forest than in the semi-arid Kalahari desert.”

  The people from the shuttle stayed seated, as the newcomers approached the circle of beaten earth at the centre of the clearing. Celia was surprised to see the figure on the woven matting was an old woman. She was clearly crippled, her legs twisted and stick-like.

  When the cavalcade stopped just outside the circle, and seemed to be waiting for something, Sallyanne motioned to the others to rise, and to do so slowly. This must have been enough, because the waiting party stepped forward into the circle, and took up some of the seating opposite the shuttle team.

  Now comes the hard part, thought Celia, and patiently began to point to objects and say the Human word for them. One of the dignitaries who had arrived at the back of the cavalcade made some sort of short speech, but he subsided when Celia did not respond.

  Celia began again, pointing to objects and saying the word in her language. The old woman on the mat finally smiled and started to respond, repeating the word fairly accurately, and then giving, presumably, her word for the same thing. Celia smiled and nodded.

  By the middle of the day Celia judged both sides had had enough of the game, and she called her team back to the shuttle. The local party made its way hesitantly to the longhouse, unsure of the shiny longhouse that now sat opposite theirs.

  It was an excited research team that gathered in the front of the shuttle much later, as darkness fell, and Andre darkened the transparent front of the cabin so they couldn’t be observed.

  “They’re here,” said Celia. “They’re really here! It’s like talking to your ancestors, actually asking them what their life was like.”

  “Except we can’t talk to them yet, can we,” interrupted Andre.

  “Oh, we will,” said Sallyanne, a gleam in her eye. “We are going to have conversations with them like you wouldn’t believe!”

  CHAPTER 13

  ________________

  Celia waited until the middle of the next day to return to the meeting place. She didn’t want to crowd their new longhouse friends. Eventually she escorted Sallyanne and Roberto to the patch of beaten earth at the centre of the clearing.

  It wasn’t long before the old woman was brought out on her mat, and left inside the meeting place with some of the younger women. Celia had seen other groups leave the longhouse earlier in the day, and she presumed they were out hunting, or gathering – or just spreading the news of the shiny new longhouse.

  “We need to get some of the children wired up,” she said to Roberto, as the old woman was made comfortable opposite them. “It will take us a lot longer without the the children involved. They’re are quicker to learn, and we can make it seem like play.”

  Roberto nodded. “I think it’s a matter of trust,” he said. “How long would it be before you trusted your children with strangers?”

  He was right of course. For now Celia would keep working with the old woman. She, at least, had some spare time on her hands, and the time might come when they could ask her about the tribe’s stories, and she might entrust Celia with them.

  Roberto nodded. He had the standard recording belts ready for adults, and could adjust them for children just as easily. The belts were light and flexible. He wondered how long it would be until the people of the longhouse allowed their children to get involved in the visitors’ strange talking games.

  It was two days before Sallyanne thought the old woman might be ready to help them translate more of the longhouse language. The native peoples grasped the idea readily enough – that a common language was needed – but they didn’t understand the visitors’ way of achieving that goal.

  Sallyanne spent the most time with the old woman, and eventually learned that her name was K’duc Hana, the first word an honorific denoting elder, or spiritual leader.

  She adjusting the wide belt about her own waist, and clicked it into place. Then she mimed what she wanted K’duc Hana to do. She pointed to one of the logs around the meeting area, and said the longhouse word for it. The multi-media sensors on the belt identified what she was pointing at, recorded the word, and made an attempt to use it with a verb.

  “Log run?” it queried in the longhouse dialect. Sallyanne laughed and said the longhouse word for the informal negative. She hoped that Hana was beginning to understand what was required.

  The belt did other things as well, but Hana would find them out for herself. When it saw something for which it had no relevant words, the belt would ask a question, and if it didn’t understand the reply, it would say the longhouse equivalent of ‘eh?’.

  At first the old woman wouldn’t touch the belt, looking suspiciously at it to see where the voice was coming from. Sallyanne changed tactics, carrying the belt around the clearing, asking some of the other women to say the names of things she pointed at. When they seemed unharmed, Hana tentatively accepted her new role of helping with translation. Sallyanne felt a little mean, but she knew Hana would accept the belt to show her elder status over the other women.

  Sallyanne managed to get belts fitted to two of the children two days later. From there on the database for the longhouse lang
uage grew rapidly.

  The first real surprise came when Sallyanne started to test out the longhouse vocabulary, which had now reached 1500 words – the level sufficient to hold a simple conversation about everyday activities.

  She found Hana out in the sun, early in the following afternoon. She was propped up against one of the logs, showing a small child how to weave a palm-like leaf into a small dish to hold food. Hana gave the child more of the palm-like leaves and shooed her away to practise. Sallyanne sat down and set up the translator device between them.

  Hana was surprised, and quite moved, to hear the shiny box speak to her in whole sentences. At last she could ask the hundred and one questions the longhouse people had about the strange visitors.

  After a while Sallyanne steered the conversation round to the neighbouring tribes. Hana talked excitedly about a number of their neighbours, outlining the various links by marriage. Then she elaborated on the longhouse custom of sending a child to another tribe for a fresh start if both parents died while the child was still young.

  As she drew on her prodigious memory to describe tribes further and further away, her speech slowed down, and her words were more carefully chosen. Some of her information came from the previous generation, or the one before that. The longhouse people had lost touch with many of these tribes, but it was clearly a matter of great importance that Hana not forget these links.

  Amongst the last of the peoples she described were a numerous tribe living in the hills to the east. They were a peaceful people who rarely came out of the hills, and were little known by the tribes that lived around them.

  Were there no links by marriage, or trade, enquired Sallyanne innocently. Hana looked shocked.

  “!K’doc H’jung!” she declared emphatically. “It is forbidden by the gods!”

  Sallyanne realised she had made a mistake. But it raised a question. How was this hill tribe different to all the other tribes?