FALLEN DRAGON (79 page)

"Can't raise the captain," Ntoko said.

"You reckon the fire's reached him?"

"Could be. The Skins will come through okay. Don't know about the vehicles."

"You want to go back and check?"

"No. We keep going unless ordered different Even then I'm not keen."

"Sure."

"One good thing, nobody's going to be creeping up on us unseen now."

"Sarge, there's nobody left to creep up on us." His sensors had found a small mound that was the remains of a new-native. It looked like a lump of coal.

There was no hint of where the road
had
lain across the land. They checked their inertial guidance and started marching again. A couple of them were unhappy about leaving Kibbo and Foster behind, but Ntoko quelled their dissent with a few gruff words about how the guys would want the platoon to reach the spaceport.

The ground was still furiously hot, although it didn't present too much of a problem for their thermal fiber weave. As they walked they found patches of tigergrass and even trees that the fire had completely bypassed. There didn't seem to be any particular reason for any of them being spared. Vagaries of the land. Streams too broad for the flames to leap. Even some scrub trees with fat spire leaves that were resistant to the flames entirely, standing alone and unblemished amid the scorched desolation.

A broad ridge of rocky ground had saved the village from the firestorm. They examined it through the continuing fall of ash. Their sensors detected movement among the buildings. Ntoko decided they couldn't ignore it.

By the time they arrived, the carpet of delicate loose ash was a couple of centimeters thick, covering everything. Gusts would stir it up in small twisters, but that just rearranged it. Nothing was free of the mantle. The skirt of tigergrass around the buildings swayed and quivered in the breeze, as if trying to shake the flakes off. But they were too small, too insidious to release their hold.

The village homes were simple structures, broad circular towers with domed roofs, never more than two stories high. They seemed to be made from a pale cream coral with a rough, grainy surface that was a magnet for the ash, allowing it to lodge in every crinkle. Windows were arches covered with a thick membrane, laced with delicate silver veins.

The new-native inhabitants were mostly bipedal, smaller than the average human, with shaggy hair that continued down their spines in a thick mane; in some cases it extended out along their arms almost to the elbow. Their shirts and jerkins were cut to allow the hair to flow through. It was often braided. Bright-colored beads were favored by the children.

There were exceptions. Feline hominoids who struggled to stay upright, dropping down to use their forelimbs to walk a few paces. A squat giant that looked like a cross between a sumo wrestler and a troll. Delicate spindly elves, whose legs seemed too slim to support their bodies.

They didn't look alien, Lawrence thought, so much as primitive, although their hides were the typical Santa Chico tough, translucent amber, and none of the bipeds had a terrestrial human rib cage and abdominal arrangement. Ridges around their torsos were more insectile than anything else. Their faces, though stiffer than skin, still managed to express basic emotions, although that could have been just the eyes. Sullen glances were more or less the same the universe over.

Ntoko took Lawrence and Amersy into the village with him, deploying the rest of the platoon outside. They were subject to blank stares from the inhabitants who stood in open doorways. New-natives in the streets moved aside to let them pass. It was the first time their authority had ever been acknowledged, even if it was at gunpoint.

Lawrence's sensors detected a small level of electronic activity in the buildings, nothing above desktop pearl level. They seemed almost devoid of mechanical or electronic technology. Certainly there were no vehicles in evidence.

The new-natives appeared uncertain what to do about the Skins; they were waiting for them to set the agenda. As they walked into the center of the village more new-natives appeared and followed at a respectful distance. Unless half of the homes were deserted, the numbers didn't match up. Lawrence wondered how many villagers had been in the group beating the birds out of the tigergrass. And how many had survived.

Ntoko stopped beside a big overhanging tree that had a coating of the ubiquitous ash. "Anybody want to tell me what's going on here?"

"You fired our lands," a voice said. It was heavily accented, but had the easy lilt of Spanish roots.

Lawrence identified its owner, a woman who wouldn't reach his shoulder. Her luxuriant hair was snow-white, though whether that indicated old age he wasn't sure. She had a flat face, with several creases in her cheeks, giving her jaw a considerable degree of flexibility. The robe she wore was decorated with silver piping: a DNA helix had been embroidered down the front in scarlet and turquoise.

"You the big chieftain around here?" Ntoko asked.

"No. I am Calandrinia." She combed a hand through her hair, shaking out the latest dusting of ash.

"You going to talk to me?"

"Are you going to kill me?"

"Not unless you give me a reason."

She bared her teeth, which were long enough to qualify as tusks. "I have many reasons, but I won't be acting on them today."

"Well, thank you. Now you want to tell me what the fuck is going on around here?"

"You violated our lives. This is how we respond. What did you expect?"

"Less violence would be a good start. You people have got to be crazy. Do you know how much firepower we've got backing us up?"

Calandrinia showed her tusks again. "Less than you started with."

Lawrence used his secure command link. "Sarge, can I talk to her?"

"Sure, go right ahead if you think it will get us anywhere. I hate a smartmouth."

"Thanks." Lawrence was never quite certain, but Calandrinia seemed to turn to him just before he started talking. "I'd like to know, why did you abandon your factories?"

"Why does anybody abandon anything, Earthman? They are obsolete and irrelevant. Now we grow whatever we need directly."

"But your products weren't obsolete on Earth; they were damn useful. Why stop exporting?"

"If Earth wants medicines it should make them for itself."

"Well, for a start, without the cash from those exports you won't be able to import the products you don't make here."

She laughed at him outright. "If we don't make it, we don't want it. If we don't want it, we don't make it."

"So that's it? You've kissed good-bye to technological civilization? You're all happy regressing?" Somewhere at the back of his mind was the question of how many times he would have this conversation, and on how many planets. Regressor types seemed to get everywhere.

"Technological, no," Calandrinia said. "Mechanical, yes. What do you need machines for? Biological systems are much more efficient at providing for us."

"You can't make biological equivalents of everything."

"Not everything your society requires in order to function, no. But then we don't have your kind of society anymore. We've adapted ourselves, not bent the world to our vision. Worlds are too big for that. Why live in isolated settlements built on dead, irradiated earth when you can modify yourself to enjoy the freedom of the whole world?"

"That must be quite an ideology you've got here, to convince people they have to leave their past behind."

"It's not ideology, it's evolution. You know our ancestors came here with the intent of modifying themselves; why are you so surprised by what you found?"

"Nobody knew how far you'd taken the modifications. We didn't expect any of this. If we knew what was here, we wouldn't have come."

"Yet here you are. Now what will you do?"

"Me personally? Go home."

"Why not join us? Your children would have a beautiful future. They would never want or need for anything."

"Excuse me, but that's not even remotely tempting. If I take this helmet off, I die. You know it, and I know it."

"I could grow you an oxygen filter in my housewomb. It would be a part of you in a way your Skin never is. You would live with it in perfect symbiosis."

Lawrence held a finger up. "Yeah, stop right there. I'm not coming to live with you, okay?"

"Why? What do we lack? I do not mock, I am genuinely curious. You seem so primitive compared to us. I don't understand your reluctance. Do you not wish to better yourself, to be a part of a richer, more mature culture?"

"We're the primitives? Which of us is living in mud huts, lady? I wouldn't wish this existence on my worst enemy, let alone my own children. You're going backward faster than progress ever pulled us out of medieval squalor. Sure, this kind of life looks appealing now; you're still close enough to the industrial market economy to make you think this is all stress-free and rich in karma. Another two generations, and you won't be able to cure a cold, let alone cancer. And you call that living life to the full. I call it betraying your children."

"Ah." Calandrinia shook her hair again. "Now I begin to understand. How old am I, Earthman?"

"I haven't got a clue."

"I'm fourteen."

The information left Lawrence nonplussed. He simply couldn't see the relevance. "Really?"

"Yes. It wasn't just their biotechnology skills that our ancestors brought to this world, they brought a saying with them as well.
Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse.
Thanks to them I can do that."

"How long do you live for?" Lawrence didn't want to ask it, because he suddenly knew he wasn't going to like the answer.

"Probably thirty years. Can you imagine such a time? How it must stretch at the end."

"The oxygen. It's the oxygen, isn't it?"

"Of course. Everything here is faster, more dynamic."

"But... thirty?'

"Thirty whole years, during which time I will live and love and think. Why do you think that is wrong? Why do you want to live for such a long time?"

"To live is to experience. You can't do that in thirty years. There's so much of the universe to know."

"I do experience, far more than you ever will. I grow faster. I learn faster. I live faster. We all do. This world's life is so much more vital than your bland biology. As for the universe, it is contained in your mind. Observation is purely relative. I can watch the stars from here, all of them, while you crawl between them in your tin cans and see only one at a time. I appreciate my life, Earthman; there is less memory in my brain, and much more thought."

"Thought," he sneered. "But you don't use it. What's the point of thinking if you have no way to apply it, nothing to create?"

Calandrinia let her breath whistle out between her teeth, as did several other new-natives. "We do nothing else but create, Earthman. Do you think we have time to carry and birth our young as your women do? I adapt my children to the world as I see it and know it."

"You're talking about shape, aren't you? That's why you all look different."

"We have become morphogenic, the greatest gift our ancestors left us. What I think, my children become. Can you imagine what that is like? If I see a tree that is so tall and full of grace that I have to sit at its foot and gaze up in admiration, I can engender a child who will be able to climb to its apex and laugh with the joy of doing so. When I swim in a mountain lake, I do so for a few exciting minutes, while my daughter will be able to glide through its deeps and play with the fish. And when I shake with awe as a macrorex walks past, I can absorb its essence and mingle it with my own."

"Sweet Fate, you're talking bestiality."

"How simple your mind is. How pitiable. Do you think we alone should remain sentient and aware? If we are to live with this planet, we must share the best of what we are with it. Are you so unselfish, Earthman? Would you stop us from doing that, from waking Gaia?"

"I won't stop you. But I want no part in it. You're not human anymore."

"Why, thank you. I rarely get paid such a compliment."

"Wait a goddamn minute here," Ntoko said. "Are you telling me that the macrorexes are part human, that they're self-aware?'

"Some of them," Calandrinia said. "They are
our
friends, they help us when we ask."

"And the windshrikes, too?"

"Of course."

"Jesus H. Christ."

"If you don't have pregnancy anymore," Lawrence said, "where do all these kids come from?"

"The housewombs gestate them," Calandrinia said simply.

"House...?" He looked at the dumpy buildings that made up the village. "You mean your homes contain some kind of artificial womb?"

"Do you listen to anything? There is nothing artificial about a housewomb, it is perfectly natural. Our houses were the last stage in bridging the gap from what we were to what we are. Tell me, do your files have fastrocks in them?"

"Yeah." His Skin AS was retrieving the information. Fastrocks were essentially a polyp-type plant that grew quite slowly by Santa Chico's standards. They resembled ocher stones that grew clustered together in vast colonies and were completely fireproof. Their shells were also tough enough to resist being split open by the jaws of anything smaller than a macrorex.