Grazing The Long Acre (2 page)

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, and felt herself hunching up in the suit, trying defensively as always to hide her horrible folds of flesh. “I don’t know. I haven’t a clue.”

Nanazetta was muttering, “Watch out. Watch out. This could turn sour at any moment.”

Sugi chortled. “Oh, shut up, you old misery,” and thumped him playfully.

The captain tried not to look at anyone, especially not at watchful Sasha. Her throat was swollen and her eyes were stinging. She felt humiliated. It was the sunset light, the venous sun now vanishing in a haze of gold, the flowers whose scent she would never know. It was the comfort and joy out there, out of reach. These things were getting to her as if she was a maudlin drunk.

Two plump Ma’atians came over. They indicated, quite clearly, that it was
Earth’s
turn to perform. Sorry, but no thanks, indicated the
Cheops
crew.

Oh, but you must.

Sorry.

The plump Ma’atians were consternated. This failure seemed to worry them far more than the strangers’ weird appearance, or their refusal of food and drink. Maybe they’re not human after all!—they whistled to each other.

And they were right, of course.

“Well come on, why not?” Sugi was ready. “Let’s get down.”

“No!” snarled the captain.

“We can’t dance.” she told the Ma’atians, in English, forgetting to gesture. “We don’t dance. Not since we joined this expedition. We’ll never dance anymore.”

The Ma’atians put up their crossed forearms, repeatedly. They made soothing gestures, apologetic at having run heedlessly into an alien taboo.

“We want to go back to our ship!” shouted Merle.

They understood that, too.

Cheops
had found exactly what it was looking for. It settled down in orbit to count over the treasure. Its landing party, meanwhile, behaved according to profile. Sugi was having a lovely holiday. She didn’t even have to eat the funny food. She made no attempt to try and find the limits of what
Cheops
allowed: in fact she rarely moved more than fifty metres from the lander, except when she joined organised excursions into town. She seemed to Merle to be constantly looking, on her little walks around the golf-course, for a sign directing her to the beach.

Nanazetta watched out for trouble.

Sasha Mihalavska and Bob Irwin made notes. They established that the Ma’atians in this village had no meat or dairy animals. They observed what appeared to be several species of flying lizards (they flew like bats) and many things that looked like brightly-coloured, giant millipedes. These seemed to be the only large fauna around. The vegetation suggested an equable, warm, temperate climate; wind direction was steady and gentle. Bob deduced—perhaps prematurely—that the
Cheops
had landed on an island. Sasha was not so sure. There were convincing indications, in the variety of artifacts and implements, that the Ma’atians belonged to a large and sophisticated cultural group. If this was an island, it was a big one. There ought to be towns, maybe cities, and yet they must be some distance away. No other natives had come to or left the village since
Cheops
landed.

In the crew environment they typed up their notes, under Merle’s sardonic eyes.

The question of Ma’atian gender was not cleared up for many days, not until they’d evolved some quite sophisticated gestural communication. The answer explained the odd calm of their first encounter. Ma’atians were not well endowed with secondary sexual characteristics. Their apparent dimorphism was a matter of age. It seemed that their vertebrae settled together and major bones became more dense and shorter at maturity: the tall, slender ones were children.

They were very like human beings. If there were ever humans, that is, who lived in such perfect contentment.

“What happens to you when you die?”

Sasha and Bob had found an older Ma’atian, an ‘old lady’ they called her, who was willing to be their confidante. Her social role was not clear but she seemed unafraid of the strangers, and accustomed to impart and receive knowledge. It bothered Sasha that she still was not sure whether her voice could be heard ‘out there’ as it sounded inside her suit. Self-consciously, she mimed death.

We go to another place, answered the old woman.

“What’s it like, this other place?” asked Bob. He was becoming very adept with his dumb shows.

The old lady thought for a moment, then made the sweeping, distancing gesture.

“Schoo…Schoo…Ichi…Ichi…”

She thought again, and started away, beckoning.

“She’s taking us to paradise,” crowed Bob Irwin, sotto voce.Not to heaven, but to a blue lake, unsuspected before, beyond the terraced houses and gardens. It was the first body of water they had seen. The old woman crouched down. She smiled, (needle teeth, the same modified snarl) and swept an arm over the water.

“Water burial?”

“No.” Sasha knew how much room there was for misapprehension; and yet what was there to trust in a situation like this, if not intuition. Understanding thrilled her. “I know what she means. She means the reflection. Heaven is like here. Heaven is just the same as being alive.”

Someone laughed. A shiny doll stalked across the turf: Merle had been following them. She knelt by the pool and flicked her silver, stylized hand into the surface. Loveliness vanished in a welter of bobbing ripples.

“You can look, but you’d better not touch.”

Merle laughed again inside their helmets, and the doll walked away.

“I’m getting very worried about the captain,” said Sasha.

Merle picked a fight with Bob Irwin. She was envious of the new friendship, of course, and it had to be Bob she attacked, because she was a little afraid of Sasha. Bob made some joking remark about the Ma’atians getting the impression that Earth was a female-ordered society, and she was onto him immediately.

He defended himself. “Well, you are the captain. And you girls out number us boys. That’s all I meant .”

“And why do you think that is, Bob?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be statistical? Could it be there are so many more ‘mad’ women scientists available, that with the worst will in the world this transgalactic, political advertisement had to have a female majority? In fact, over all, Bob, I think you’d find there are far more ‘mad’ women about of any persuasion. Able to walk and talk and keep themselves clean, that is. Men have to be doubly incontinent before anyone declares them unemployable or locks them up. “

“Quiet down!” yelled Nanazetta, banging his dinner tray on a bulkhead. It was mealtime again, of course.

Shards of mashed potato and bloody beef sailed through the air and landed—splat—because they were not in space now and they all knew it.

“I’m watching you, Captain Shaw. You’re trying to fuck us up. You’re bad for our morale, Captain. And I’m going to report that, when we get home.”

“You stupid bastard. None of us is ever going home.”

“Yes we are, Merle,” Bob broke in quickly (he wished he’d never started this). “When the survey’s done we’re going right back to where and when we started from, we’re going to get debriefed out of the project and go on with our normal lives.”

“Only richer,” he added heartily, and Sugi cheered.

Merle seemed to grow calm. Perhaps even she realised she’d gone too far. She smiled a little and nodded.

“Mmm, yeah. Okay.” She sighed innocently. “You know Bob, I’ve thought of a better name for this place. You ought to call it Duat, not Ma’at. I’m sure you remember. That was the Ancient Eygptian word for heaven.”

Bob and Sasha and Sugi all began to smile.

“You know, the place where the dead people go.”

They stopped smiling.

The captain snickered unkindly.

Sasha explored the outskirts of the Ma’atian village, admiring the beautifully tended little patches of subsistence farming. No doubt because of the confusion of that first encounter, she had a persistent impression that the Ma’atians were not the simple primitives they seemed. But there was no real evidence for this fantasy of an advanced, post-industrial idyll. Not that it mattered. She had to admit, Merle had a right to sneer. She and Bob were just playing. They had no way of knowing even whether their ‘notes’ actually found their way into
Cheops
‘ records. Still, she couldn’t help looking at this place with greed and awe. A new race! It was riches beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

She supposed that must be what the
Cheops
was thinking too, as it circled around this world. Riches!It was absurd to feel concern for the Ma’atians. No doubt the crowded and hungry
Earth
would be glad to colonise this lovely place. But there was little danger of imminent invasion. Even apart from the ruinous expense, you wouldn’t get the most desperate colonists to accept the terms the crew of the
Cheops
had accepted: and the alternative (she had a rough idea of the notional real-time/space element of their voyage so far) would be a journey of several hundred years.

There was nothing to be done in any case. Sasha, none of them, had any chance of concealing information, of taking any control at all of the mission or their ship. She thought wryly of jeering comments that the first American astronauts had had to endure from their pilot buddies: a monkey’s gonna make the first flight. The
Cheops
crew were less than monkeys. They travelled on the
Cheops
like fleas on a dog, though a quite irrational proportion of the finance had been devoted to arranging their passage. Human interest stories always help to raise funds. The ‘experiences’ of the crew would be retrieved and reconstructed as marketing videos. But she had no control even of this ‘suit’ in which she walked, though apparently by her own will. It was a remote function of the AI out in space, like the lobster things but less useful.

The development that had made a crewed probe possible was a technique for transferring the whole of a human subjective entity into electro-chemical storage. As pure information then, the passengers could disintegrate and reintegrate without injury: stitching in and out through the vastness of space/time. The process was a genuine transfer, not replication. A brain-dead body remained on
Earth
, while that which was Sasha felt itself to be here and intact: filling this suit with arms, hands, belly, fingers, like some Kirlian ghost. In a way it did. They had been told that EVA ‘in’ these humanoid shells was important for their survival: analog of the endless exercises with which earlier spacefarers had warded off bone death. But where was she in reality? She had been able to accept, just about, the consensual reality which they created inside the lander (very small, for five people, as the Ma’atian child had so naively observed): and been able to stretch that reality to include their earlier excursions. It was Ma’at that was giving her problems, breaking her up.

None of them knew how anything worked.
Cheops
was supposed to run a life support system, giving them anything they needed in the way of perceptual construct to keep them sane. How far would it go? Sugi Ohba had always cared least—or, at any rate, seemed to think least—about their existential predicament. Since the landing on Ma’at she’d been behaving exactly as if her suit actually contained her body. She picked flowers! What did the AI out in orbit make of that?

Sasha felt the vertigo which they had been warned to avoid. Like Orpheus they must not look at what they were doing, or it would vanish….She trembled (and that seemed real). She had accepted the bargain willingly, embracing a heroic destiny as they said on her country’s television. She had felt that she hardly deserved all the approval: after all, she didn’t have a lot to lose.

Sasha chewed miserably on her non-existent lip.

To dance.

To touch someone’s hand…to touch even a leaf or a flower….

They must keep the consensus going. That was why Merle’s cynicism was as dangerous as Sugi’s thoughtlessness. It was true that sexual equality still had to be achieved, especially in the former ‘Western’ nations. It was true they all had hard-luck stories. But life is always better than death.

Beyond the farm patches, forested hills began, but there was a well-trodden path. A plump terracotta figure was watching her, leaning on a kind of hoe in one of the last vegetable gardens.

“Is there another village?”

Sasha pointed down the path and sketched roofs in the air. The woman (close up you could tell from the clothes) left her hoe and came over. She gestured, and whistled “Schoo.”

Sasha and Bob had decided that that one meant something like ‘far’. They were compiling a tentative glossary.

The woman looked her dead in the eye (another shared cultural gesture, like the concept of heaven). She crouched, and drew in the dirt. Houses: a little cluster of turned up roofs. “Schoo, schoo…” Down the path…several strides. Another tiny sketch of roofs. The scale was clear.

“Heesh! Heesh!”

The woman jerked her hands in the affirmative sign: and again looked at the invader straight: firmly, undeniably intelligible. We like it that way, she said. We like to be friendly, but we like people to keep their distance.

Sugi was by the lander, looking lost. She was waiting for a mealtime, guessed Sasha. Sugi could not snack, she had lost the ability in institutional years.

“These people are so nice,” she burst out. “You know the boys who come and hang around the ship?” Those were girls and boys, but Sugi didn’t understand that. “They were here earlier. And the one I call Charlie, he sort of asked me—clear as words—: Why don’t you stay with us forever?” They entered the lander. As usual, Sasha’s consciousness elided the transition: the two of them were in the crew environment, in their shipboard clothes. The idiot woman beamed and sighed. She was having a holiday romance now.

“Isn’t that lovely. D’you think he means it?”

Sasha wished that someone else was here.

“He means it. They don’t want any of us to get back to
Earth
.”

“Huh? Er—why not?”