Return to Eden (16 page)

It sucked that she’d traveled so far
only to discover that you can’t leave grief behind by leaving
everything familiar! That just made you miss everything else on top
of missing the person you’d lost!

“
You aren’t the only one
that’s bored stiff, you know!” Monica said testily, effectively
distracting her.

Noel shrugged. “I know.”

“
You at least have
something to study!”

“
Dead things?” Noel let
out an irritated huff. “You have the recordings from the probes if
it comes to that.”

Monica rolled her eyes. “I
have
memorized
that shit! I have analyzed it
ad
nauseum
! The social structure looks very
reminiscent of the mythology about Amazon women,” she said
irritably, “but that’s just a wild guess based on the fact that
they appear to be warrior women and there doesn’t seem to be any
men—or at least a separation of the sexes, I suppose. That’s pseudo
science at the very best!
You
could’ve guessed that much!”

Noel frowned. “What do you mean by
that?”

“
I didn’t mean to be
insulting,” Monica snapped. “I was just pointing out that I
wouldn’t have to have a degree in xeno-sociology to ‘guess’. I need
hard facts! I don’t know how the hell I’m going to get them cooped
up in here!”

Noel
completely
empathized with her—she
was desperate to do some ‘real’ research herself—and yet the moment
Monica expressed a desire to leave the safety of the colony she
felt a shiver creep up her spine. “We haven’t been here even a
week—well by this world’s time.” She frowned, thinking. “By Earth
time ….”

“
What difference does
Earth time make when we’re here, damn it?
This
time matters!”

Noel huffed an irritated breath. “Ok,
already! Don’t bite my head off!”

Monica looked vaguely uncomfortable.
“Sorry! But don’t try that ‘holier than thou’ attitude on me!
You’re bored stiff, too! We don’t have any fresh material and I’ve
studied that shit the probes collected until I feel like puking
every time I look at it!”

Noel shrugged. “The delegation is bound
to be back any time now. As soon as we know for sure that we have a
peace treaty with the natives, we can leave the colony and do a
little real exploring. It isn’t like either of us could really do
our jobs without the treaty, you know.”

“
I
can’t! You’re a xeno-biologist. There’s plenty of biology you
could study.”

“
Hey! You can study the
social behavior of the lower life forms just easily as I could
study the biology! We just can’t tackle what we’re really
interested in.”

Good point. Monica still wanted to
argue that she was worse off than Noel and had more room to
complain. They both knew that the social behavior of the lower life
forms wasn’t nearly as important to the future of the colony as
studying the natives.

The problem was that Noel had already
made that point—none of the alien life forms were as important as
the natives—because they were intelligent and could create more
problems than pretty much any of the other life forms.

Of course the chances were high that
they were going to run into problems with all sorts of things. They
could upset the eco balance if they weren’t careful. They didn’t
belong in this particular food chain.

* * * *

The impulse to skip out on their
afternoon shift had been a poor one. Noel and Monica had reason to
be glad they rethought the impulse and headed back once they’d had
lunch at the apartment they shared. If they hadn’t, they would very
likely have been written up as displaying rebellious and/or
irresponsible behavior and that could have had all sorts of
unpleasant repercussions. The most important being that they
wouldn’t have been there for the ‘special treat’ everyone was
allowed late in the shift.

The department head had managed to
wrangle permission to leave the compound to collect new specimens
for study.

Noel and Monica were both instantly
nearly hysterical with excitement and sheer terror and struggling
to hide both as they left the facility with the small group of
‘chosen ones’ and headed toward the main gates of the city, lugging
specimen containers and equipment.

Noel was inclined to think
that was a punishment of sorts in and of itself. They had robots
for god’s sake—a
lot
of them! Eighty percent of the construction bots that had
built the sprawling complex that made up their first city while the
colonists themselves were en route to it had been ‘decommissioned’
and reassigned other duties once they weren’t needed for
construction anymore—ten of the twenty percent held in reserve for
future construction projects and the other ten reprogrammed for
maintenance.
All
of the robots hadn’t been reassigned to handle security—most,
but not all.
One
could have been spared to haul equipment!

But the colony president, when
contacted, had decided that the request for a carrier violated the
self-sufficiency pack the colonists had sworn to when they’d signed
up.

Noel was damned if she
could see that scientists exerting themselves physically was
beneficial to the colony and
not
exerting themselves wasn’t! What if somebody
strained something and wasn’t able to work? What if they dropped
something heavy on some body part and it was damaged? It wasn’t as
if they had
everything
that was available back home! They were living on the edge—on
a primitive colony! It seemed to her that there was the possibility
of a lot more bad things coming of them hauling the damned heavy
equipment than good!

What if somebody fell down and damaged
irreplaceable equipment?

They’d arrived on Gemini
less than a month earlier. Nobody was completely acclimatized to
the gravity and pressure of the new world! She weighed
twenty
pounds more than
she was used to! And she was one of the lucky ones—smaller and
lighter than average and fairly athletic due to her passion for
dancing. Some of the colonists wouldn’t even have qualified for
inclusion due to their physical condition if not for their
expertise in their fields. They were carrying around an extra forty
pounds or more—
without
the damned heavy equipment they had to carry!

“
If you don’t quit
muttering under your breath …,” Monica hissed.

Noel glanced at her in surprise. “I was
talking out loud? I thought I was just thinking hard.”

Monica gave her a look but since their
supervisor called a halt at just that moment, it redirected their
attention from each other to their surroundings.

Noel felt a prickling sensation creep
up her spine and lift the fine hairs on the back of her neck. An
involuntary shiver skated through her.

“
You cold?” Monica
whispered in surprise.

Noel glanced at her friend, her mind
tumbling the question around while she ‘felt’ with her senses. It
was winter, but they were close to the equator and so far the
winter on their new home world had been mild—mild enough it hadn’t
actually caused much of a die off of the plant life. The wind was
cool, true, but they were working on the plain and there was little
there to cast shade and shield them from the sun’s warming rays.
Finally, she shook her head. “I’m fine,” she lied. “It just feels …
weird to feel wind against my skin after so long.”

Monica looked irritated—as if Noel had
unnerved her and she felt like it had been a false alarm. She
grunted but since she had leaned down to set her equipment down
Noel wasn’t sure if that was a comment or just an expression of
exertion. She settled her tote full of specimen containers on the
ground and looked around.

She didn’t see anything that would
account for her reaction. They hadn’t moved more than a few yards
beyond the main gate. She could already hear a few muttered
complaints from some of the others that they weren’t far enough
from the colony to make it likely they were going to catch any
specimens that could run.

The botanists were already busy,
however.

Noel was in no great hurry to follow
suit and chase bugs. Instead, she studied her surroundings for many
moments, trying to decide what her primal instincts had been trying
to warn her about—if there really was some threat or if it was
purely a reaction to the alien environment. After thoroughly
examining everything around her, she finally decided it was the
latter. All of her senses were screaming at the strangeness of her
surroundings.

The force field that protected the
colony allowed them to see through it. Sounds could also penetrate
it, but nothing else. She hadn’t, she realized abruptly, truly
experienced the new world before now. The sights and sounds of the
busy colony itself prevented her from really seeing or hearing the
world beyond it and the smells they’d captured with their specimens
had been corrupted over time with the chemical preservatives and
even scents from their own environment.

She was so bombarded so abruptly by
everything of an alien nature she was just stunned that no one else
seemed as effected as she was. Even the warmth of the alien sun
felt completely different.

And yet, she could see living proof all
around her of panspermia.

Which had been accepted as scientific
fact at least a decade earlier, but she didn’t think she’d fully
appreciated what it meant until now.

Because as alien as everything seemed
in some ways, it was also familiar in others.

Gemini certainly wasn’t Earth’s
identical twin, but it was close enough to be a sibling, or maybe a
half sister? The bottom line was that everything about their new
home was close enough to make the place suitable for them—for Earth
life—and, because of panspermia and predictable factors in the
evolution of living things, and Gemini’s similarity to Earth much
of the life they’d discovered on Gemini was also similar to life
forms on earth.

That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be
dangerous deviations, unfortunately. There were also bound to be
things that simply didn’t seem logical.

The higher life forms, for
instance.

No one had been able to come up with a
solid theory as to why the natives were androgynous or at least
seemed to be.

Or even why they appeared to be fairly
primitive.

Gemini, as far as they had been able to
determine, had been around at least as long as Earth had—and some
speculated that it was a good deal older.

Of course the appearance and
development of a species of higher intelligence could have come at
any time. Maybe, despite the age of the solar system/planet, the
species had emerged far later than humans? Maybe they’d experienced
more catastrophes and those had forced the species to start over,
building from the bottom up repeatedly? Or maybe there’d been an
earlier civilization that had been wiped out completely and the
current natives had arisen since?

That didn’t seem to hold water, though.
There didn’t seem to be enough time for that possibility to be
likely.

Humans had been brought to the brink of
extinction several times by natural disasters on Earth. There was
no reason to think that might not be the case on other planets. The
universe was a dangerous, unpredictable place—likened more than
once to a cosmic shooting gallery.

Shaking her thoughts finally with the
reflection that she wasn’t going to figure it out without some
data, Noel turned her attention to trying to find a specimen of
something they hadn’t already examined since she hadn’t been
particularly intrigued by anything their probes had brought
them.

And, in any case, most of them had
already been snatched up as pet projects of the senior biologists
in the group.

She’d just crouched down to examine
what she’d first dismissed as a rock covered in something like
lichen when a noise she’d only been vaguely conscious of finally
reached an identifiable level.

It sounded like a herd of something
heavy coming their way!

Noel shot to her feet, glancing quickly
around to try to identify the direction of the threat. Despite her
focus in trying to identify a threat and the direction of it,
around her, she was dimly aware that some of the other scientists
had also looked up, although she was the only one who seemed
alarmed enough to have abandoned her pursuit of specimens.
Regardless, and somewhat insensibly since no one knew what was
making the noise or if it was a threat or not, she felt her
adrenaline kick up to a higher level of alarm when she saw that the
sounds had also caught the attention of the others.

Just as Noel was beginning to feel the
discomfort of the suspicion that she might have reacted to a threat
that didn’t exist, a scream—a human scream—abruptly rent the air
around them. It sent a shockwave through everyone on the plane and,
hard on the heels of that, blind panic. Unfortunately, most of them
were so shocked they were paralyzed and those not paralyzed with
fear seemed confused as to whether they should run or not since no
one else seemed inclined to run.