Foreigner Read online

  “That’s right. It’s a coincidence, of course. The province is named after Kevo, one of the fifty original Packs. The ‘kev’ in the planet’s name is just an old word for ‘bright.’”

  “And what does Kevpel make you think of?”

  “Well, Novato, I guess. When we first met, she showed me her sketches of Kevpel. And phases, of course: you can see Kevpel’s phases clearly, even with a small far-seer. Oh, and rings: Kevpel has rings around it.”

  “There’s another ringed planet, isn’t there?”

  Afsan nodded. “Bripel. But it’s not as easy to see through a far-seer. And it’s farther away from the sun than we are, so it doesn’t go through phases.”

  “Novato. Tell me about her.”

  “Well, she’s head of the exodus project now.”

  “But more than that, if I recall the stories I’ve heard correctly, she and you mated.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now phases. Tell me about phases.”

  “Well, they’re cycles.”

  “Cycles?”

  “You know: periodic occurrences.”

  “And rings. What things are ring-shaped?”

  “A guvdoc stone.”

  “Yes. Anything else?”

  “Certain trading markers, no?”

  “I suppose. Anything else?”

  “No, well—eggs are laid in a circle with empty space at the center. A clutch of eggs looks like a ring.”

  Mokleb nodded. “You couldn’t remember the province of Kev’toolar, because your mind was blocking out the similarly named planet Kevpel, and Kevpel makes you think of Novato, cycles, and rings.”

  “Oh, be serious, Mokleb. Those are just random connections, surely.”

  “Cycles and rings. Rings of eggs. And Novato, whom you once mated with. Let me ask you a question, Afsan. Tell me: is Novato about to be an integral number of years old? That is, is she about to cycle into her receptive phase, and take a mate?”

  Afsan’s jaw dropped. “Mokleb—!”

  “Forgive me if I’m wrong.”

  “No, no, you’re absolutely right. She’ll be in heat anytime now.”

  “And again forgive me, but have you perhaps been wondering if you and she will couple again? If the two of you will produce another clutch of eggs?”

  Afsan’s claws slipped out for a moment, but then slid back into their sheaths. “Yes, Mokleb, as much as I have no right to wonder about such things, the questions you ask have indeed been disturbing me. I mean, normally I’d have a good chance at it, having been the first person she coupled with. But, ah, I’m blind and far away from her, and, well, there is the matter of Garios.”

  “Garios?”

  “Den-Garios. A fine fellow, really. Novato and I coupled prior to what would have been her normal first estrus; she mated with Garios about two kilodays later. So, yes, Mokleb, I have been wondering whether she and I will mate again. It’s not a proper thing to think about, I know, but…” He lifted his hands helplessly.

  “As you can see,” said Mokleb, “the most insignificant-seeming slip can be of major importance. We’re beginning to gain access to your mind, Afsan; soon we’ll have our prey in sight.”

  Chapter 9

  Toroca’s lessons in the Other language progressed rapidly. He soon had a vocabulary of perhaps two hundred words, mostly nouns. The pace had picked up once he realized that when Jawn pointed at an object with his palm open, the word he spoke was the general term (furniture, say), and when he pointed with his palm closed, the word was specific (table, for instance). Jawn was a good teacher, with inexhaustible patience; Toroca guessed that teaching the Other language to youngsters had once been his job. Nonetheless, Toroca found the language confusing. In the Quintaglio tongue, related nouns usually ended in the same suffix: -aja for kinds of wood, -staynt for types of buildings, and so on. But the Other language didn’t seem to have any such simplicity; a sailing ship was a ga-san whereas a rowboat was a sil-don-kes-la.

  Eventually, some questions could be asked. There were six standard interrogatives in the Quintaglio language: who, what, how, why, where, and when. It became apparent, however, that there were eight in the Others’ speech, six corresponding to the Quintaglio ones, plus two more that Toroca gathered meant “with what degree of certainty?” and “how righteous is this?” He’d picked up the latter by Jawn repeatedly asking questions and pointing through the glass roof at the gibbous Face of God; the Other religion centered on the Face, just as the Quintaglios’ own discredited Larskian faith had.

  The first question Jawn asked was the one Toroca had expected. Jawn leaned back on his tail—Toroca had decided to refer to Jawn as “he”; it was too difficult maintaining a mental image of a “she” with a dewlap—and said in his own language, “Where you from, Toroca?”

  Toroca had to answer with a question of his own. “Picture land,” he said, and made the beckoning hand sign that meant “give me.”

  Jawn looked momentarily confused, then apparently realized that “picture land” must refer to a “map,” a word the Other equivalent of which Toroca didn’t know. Jawn spoke to Morb, the fellow with the black armbands, and a map was brought in. It was made of neither leather nor paper, but rather a pinkish material that had a waxy feel to it; perhaps a plant derivative. Once the map was unfurled, Toroca was surprised to see that although the page it was printed on was square, the image was perfectly circular. Rather than having the Others’ archipelago in the center, it was displaced toward the upper left. In the correct relative positions the northern and southern polar caps were indicated.

  Suddenly it hit Toroca: the circular view showed all of the back side of their moon, everywhere from which the Face of God was visible. Had the Others never sailed farther than that? Perhaps with a religion built around the Face, they refused to sail beyond its purview. Indeed, the glass roofs of their buildings might be for more than simply letting in light; perhaps they ensured that the Others were never out of sight of their god.

  Toroca used his hands to make the map bulge up from the tabletop into a dome, in hopes of indicating that it represented one hemisphere. Then, with an exaggerated gesture of his muzzle, he tried to show that he came from around past the borders of the map.

  Jawn looked shocked. He glanced over at the guard, but Morb was paying little attention. Jawn said just two words, the two interrogatives unique to the Other language: With what degree of certainty? How righteous is this?

  “Loud,” said Toroca in Jawn’s language, and then, realizing he was using the wrong word, “Much.”

  Jawn shook his head. “How you here?”

  Toroca hadn’t learned many verbs yet, but that sentence was easy enough to decipher even without them. “Ga-san,” he said. Sailing ship.

  “No see,” said Jawn.

  Toroca gestured in the direction of the water, then curved his arm down, hoping to convey that the ship was below the horizon. “No far,” said Toroca, wanting to make clear that it hadn’t gone all the way back to Land.

  Jawn touched his own chest. “Jawn,” he said. He pointed at Toroca. “Toroca.” Then, wrinkling his muzzle in a way that Toroca had come to associate with asking questions, “Ga-san?”

  “Dasheter,” said Toroca. “Ga-san Dasheter.”

  Jawn pointed at himself, then Toroca, then Morb, the guard. “Three,” he said in his language. “Three here. Ga-san?”

  Toroca only knew the numerals to ten. “Ten and two,” he said.

  “Farg-sol,” said Jawn.

  Toroca briefly wondered what “eleven” was; he hated gaps in his knowledge. But Jawn pressed on. “Few,” he said.

  And that was the key point. Yes, there were only a few people aboard the Dasheter, even though it was a big ship. Toroca had never thought the ship particularly empty, but by the standards of these people, it would be. How to explain territoriality? For God’s sake, he was the least expert of all his people on that topic.

  With one hand he lifted the corner of the map and flic
ked the edge. With the other, he made the beckoning gesture. Jawn understood immediately and fetched blank drawing sheets and graphite sticks. Toroca drew a circle and then put a dot in it. He pointed at the dot, then pointed at himself, palm opened, conveying, he hoped, that the dot represented one Quintaglio rather than him in particular. He said, “Bal,” the Other word for one, followed by “hoos-ta,” the Other word for good. Then he put in a second dot, but far away from the first, and said “hoos-ta” again. Then he added a third dot, close to the first. “Hoos-na-ta.” Bad. And a fourth dot, even closer. “Hoos-na-ta, hoos-na-ta”—repetition being the way the Others showed successive degrees.

  Jawn looked dismayed. He gestured with his hand, showing how much room was still left in Toroca’s circle.

  “Bad, bad,” said Toroca again.

  Jawn wrinkled his muzzle and said that word, “Glees,” meaning, how righteous is this?

  Not very, thought Toroca, but he didn’t know how to say it.

  “All right,” said Novato to the group assembled on the hillside. “It seems that whatever was being built is finished. Let’s review what’s happened.” Garios and the other five members of Novato’s staff were lying on the grass. Early morning sunlight sporadically punched through the clouds.

  “Some orange dust escaped from the ark and came into contact with the cliff,” said Novato. “It—the dust—seems to have undertaken a two-stage project. In the first stage, it converted a cube of cliff material into the same super-strong stuff the ark is made of. That cube, which was originally almost entirely buried in rock, measures roughly a hundred and thirty paces on a side, and one face of it roughly corresponds with what was originally the face of the cliff. In and of itself, that single cube constituted the largest artificial structure in our entire world.

  “But after completing the first stage—construction of the central cube—a second stage began. That involved expanding the cube on top and on its four sides by adding new material to turn the overall structure into a pyramid, with a base approximately three hundred paces on a side. Making the central cube was relatively straightforward, if such words can be applied to miracles: it only involved converting existing rock into the blue material. This second stage has required bringing in new material, and we’ve all seen that going on: rocks seeming to liquefy, but without giving off the heat we expect of molten material, then flowing into new shapes, and, as they resolidify, turning blue.

  “Gatabor and I watched as part of the pyramid’s crown pushed up from under the ground, and you’ve all seen the one sloping side of the pyramid projecting out of the cliff face.

  “The pyramid doesn’t come to a point at its apex. Rather, there’s a central shaft dropping straight down into the structure. The opening is square, about fourteen paces on a side. Gatabor and I only had time for a brief look down into the depths of the pyramid’s interior before the apex was lifted too high off the ground for us to be able to see within it. Things are moving around down at the bottom of the pyramid: things with wheels, things with metal jaws, things with long prows that coil to a point. Incredible as it may seem, we can only conclude that these things were somehow built or grown by the same orange dust that escaped from the ark.”

  Novato shuddered, recalling the wonder of it all.

  “As I said, the apex of the pyramid is now too far off the ground to reach, but it’s easy to measure the angles of its sides. One can draw an imaginary line right through the remaining rocks of the cliff and it would join up perfectly with the part of the pyramid’s base now projecting out of the cliff face, across the strip of beach, and into the water. As you’ve all no doubt observed by now, a large part of the material of the cliff has been consumed, so the total pyramid is only partially buried in rock now.

  “And what about the ark? It seems intact, although most of it is now buried within the pyramid. The door is still exposed, although there’s no cliff face left near it to get hold of, and the blue material provides no footholds of any kind. However, we could lean a very tall ladder against the side of the pyramid to gain access to the ark. I was hoping to put the crafters of Pack Derrilo to work constructing such a ladder, but the pyramid burst through the plain on which their old stone buildings existed. First the buildings fell apart, and then the stone material—which had been quarried out of the cliff face, after all—was absorbed into the structure. The Pack has moved on; the pyramid has scared off all the shovelmouth herds.

  “You will have noticed that the sides of the pyramid aren’t completely solid. Rather, there seems to be a tunnel entrance in the middle of each face. I forbade anyone from entering these until construction stopped. However, it seems now that the pyramid is complete. It’s not getting any taller, although it may still be growing down and wider beneath ground level; there’s no way to tell. If it remains quiescent for another day, I’ll authorize the first teams to go inside. Any questions?”

  “I have one,” said Garios, lifting his long muzzle to look at her. “What do you make of that stuff projecting out of the top of the pyramid?”

  “What stuff?” said Novato.

  “Oh, you must have seen it. The stuff rising toward the sky. It’s been going up since this morning.”

  Without a word, Novato ran to where she could get a decent look at the vast, blue pyramid.

  The third stage had begun.

  A hunt! Simple, primal, soothing…

  Afsan stalked his prey through tall grass. He couldn’t see exactly what it was he was pursuing—the grass hid it from view—but he could smell it and he could hear it. Afsan moved quickly through the grass, the sound of his passing hardly more than an undercurrent beneath the steady east-west wind.

  At last his quarry moved into a clearing. It was a small shovelmouth—a juvenile, no doubt, not much larger than Afsan himself—moving along on all fours, its pendulous gut waggling back and forth as it walked. The beast’s head was drawn out into a flat prow and atop its skull was an ornate three-pointed crest. Its pebbly skin was a mixture of light green and yellow.

  Afsan crouched down in the grass, then leapt, his legs unfolding, his jaws swinging wide for the killing bite.

  But the leap seemed to stretch out, and time itself appeared to slow down. Everything happened ponderously, as if the whole scene were taking place underwater. The juvenile shoveler swung its head around to look at Afsan and its prow opened wide to let out a thunderous yell.

  And then the impossible happened. As the call spewed forth, both the upper and the lower halves of the shoveler’s prow split apart and grew longer and longer, great fleshy globs pulling away from them. The globs, light green and yellow, like the rest of the beast’s skin, soon resolved themselves into four tiny Quintaglio heads, black eyes round with terror. Meanwhile, the triple points of the head crest flared out into tiny greenish spheres that sprouted saw-toothed muzzles and obsidian eyes.

  The shoveler’s thunderous cry split into a choir of seven Quintaglio screams as Afsan continued to sail through the air, now on the downward part of his parabolic leap. As the distance between himself and the shoveler closed, Afsan thought for an instant that he recognized the tiny faces, but then he hit, the impact knocking the wind from his lungs. With a single darting movement of his neck, Afsan scooped out a tract of flesh from the shoveler’s shoulders and throat. The beast fell to the ground, dead. Afsan scrambled to his feet and rolled the creature’s head over so that he could clearly see it.

  The tiny Quintaglio faces were gone. The prow was back to normal, and the crest had re-formed into its original triple-pointed configuration.

  Afsan stood stupefied for a moment. A shadow passed over him. Above, a giant wingfinger was circling, its purple wings vast and amorphous, billowing up around its body, waiting for its chance at the carcass.

  Afsan rolled the shoveler onto its side so that he could get at the belly. With a great bite, he opened the abdomen wide, blood spilling out like water from a sluice. He pushed his arms into the warm flesh, spreading open the c
hest to expose the tasty organs within.

  Suddenly a second pair of arms appeared. He couldn’t see whom they belonged to; indeed, they seemed to be coming from his own chest, although for some reason his muzzle refused to tip down so that he could see the precise source. These intruding hands pulled at the shoveler’s flesh, too, their claws raking into the outer layer of yellow fat and the red meat beneath.

  Afsan tried to pull the mysterious hands out of the body cavity, but soon another pair appeared, and then another and another, all trying to grasp a piece of the kill, greedily tearing out chunks of flesh. Afsan tried to slap them away, but they began to tear at his own arms, the claws scratching his skin, long blood trails running along his forearms all the way from wrist to elbow.

  More arms appeared. They seized Afsan’s own upper arms, their sharp clawpoints digging into his skin. Afsan fought to free himself, but stringy tendons and bones—his own radius and ulna—were now glistening gray-white beneath his torn flesh.

  Afsan brought his muzzle down and chomped through one of the foreign arms, then shook his head, flinging the thing aside. He heard a scream coming from somewhere, and the shadow of the purple wingfinger moved again and again across the scene. Afsan’s neck darted once more and another arm snapped off. Meanwhile, he fought with all his strength to twist free of the arms holding his own. Finally, after chomping through five, ten, twelve, fourteen phantom limbs, Afsan, his own arms reduced to articulated skeletons, dug into his meal, getting every last bit of meat for himself.

  Chapter 10

  “Your name is Sal-Afsan, correct?” asked Mokleb.

  “Of course,” said Afsan, irritated.

  “Tell me about that,” Mokleb said.

  “Tell you about what?”

  “Your name. Tell me about your name.”

  Afsan shrugged. “It means ‘meaty thighbone.’”

  “Unusual name for a skinny person.”

  He sighed. “You’re not the first to have observed that. But what choice did I have? The name was given to me by the creche masters in Pack Carno. I had no say in the matter.”