The Ninth Circle (14 page)
Authors: R. M. Meluch
But the mammoths were unconcerned. One or two turned orange eyes at Glenn and Patrick for a moment, then paid them no more heed than they did the native creatures in the field.
Having never seen anything like the humans, the mammoths hadn’t developed any aversion to them.
Glenn and Patrick joined in with the herd.
There were other hangers-on among the mammoth troop. Lizard-like things assumed the role of ox-peckers. Spindly-legged avians scavenged seeds in the mammoths’ deep footprints.
Patrick’s ambling brought him alongside one mammoth, Glenn close behind him. The mammoth’s golden curtain of fiber swayed and gleamed in the sunlight. Glenn had to touch. She let the back of her hand brush the long silky strands.
“Oh!” she said quietly.
Patrick grinned, confirmed what she had just discovered. “They’re feathers.”
Glenn smiled, amazed, letting the silky feathers fall through her fingers. They flashed light and dark.
“The color’s not pigment,” Patrick said. “It’s structural. The feathers are refractive. That’s why they turn color in the sun. Like hummingbirds.”
“Big hummer,” said Glenn. The mammoth hadn’t minded—or perhaps not noticed—her touch.
“There’s probably a layer of down underneath her silk jammies but I’m afraid to grope her to find out.”
“Her?”
“This is a gal.”
The she-mammoth was tusked like the males.
Looking across the meadow, Glenn couldn’t tell the boys from the girls, except for the moms with their babies.
Glenn and Patrick agreed without speaking that it was best not to go near the babies.
The babies were classically cute, chubby, round, with big round heads and big round eyes, and downy feathers. They were clumsy. They tripped over their own trunks. The smallest baby was eight feet tall.
Patrick fished out his omni from one of his many pockets. He’d known what he was doing when they set out on this safari. He was recording. He checked the chart of extremely low frequency noises.
“Someone’s talking.” He pointed at a line moving on the graph of his handheld.
Patrick looked around. He pointed the omni toward a particularly mammoth mammoth. “The big guy there. Long John. He’s doing the talking.”
“What has a mammoth to say?” Glenn asked.
Patrick shrugged. “He might be telling another herd the grazing is good over here. Or he could be giving the saber tooth report.”
He pocketed the omni, moved up to walk next to their she-mammoth’s head. He fell into her slow rolling gait. Imitating her, he moved his arm like a trunk and plucked a handful of seed-topped grass.
Patrick Hamilton was socially inept among most humans, except other scientists. But he had a special connection with most aliens. Maybe because he took an interest in aliens. He was an intellectual snob and a pedant. He found most human conversation tedious, and it offended people when his eyes glazed over while they were talking. He liked the puzzle of deciphering alien thought and speech. He paid attention to what aliens said and made an effort to understand them. And aliens didn’t know how juvenile his conversation usually was.
“Hey, spicy hembra, is this where all the hot mammoths graze?”
The she-mammoth lifted her trunk to snuffle his head. Her large hairy nostril breathed him in. Then she curled her trunk around the grass he held in his hand. She took the grass from him and tucked it into her mouth. Chewed with broad flat teeth. Her stubby tusks moved with her chewing.
She exhaled sweet oaty breath.
“I hope this doesn’t mean we’re hooked,” said Patrick. “I’m happily married, you see.”
Glenn noted the “happily.” A significant word there.
The she-mammoth gave a little chirp.
Glenn smiled at the tiny sound. “Was that her? Did she do that?”
Patrick nodded. “That’s all we’ve got on record for mammoth vocalization. I knew they could do better than that. This.” He drew his omni from his pocket and showed her the chart of bellowing low-fi noises. “This. This is their language. Maybe.”
Glenn gave him a puzzled look. “Maybe?”
“The question is whether it can be called language,” he qualified.
“There’s a wide fuzzy gray line between language and animal communication. My mammoths fall solidly in the fuzzy zone. They don’t create. But they do communicate.”
“Your mammoths,” said Glenn. “I thought they were Dr. Szaszy’s mammoths.”
“Szaszy likes to think they’re his mammoths.”
“You’re stepping in his field,” said Glenn.
“Szasz deserves stepping on. The mammoths are wasted on him. He never bothered to
listen
to them. This is a language. And I
think
I’ve isolated a few actual words. Predator. Water. And I think there’s a difference between big water and little water. This is little water right here.”
listen
to them. This is a language. And I
think
I’ve isolated a few actual words. Predator. Water. And I think there’s a difference between big water and little water. This is little water right here.”
He nodded at the creek that fed the larger stream. The she-mammoth dragged her trunk in the clear running current.
“I’m pretty sure big water means the river way down below camp. They also have sky water.”
“Rain?”
“That would be my guess.”
Their she-mammoth companion moved away from the creek. She looped her trunk around a bunch of wheaty grass and made an unmistakable gesture of offering it to Patrick.
“For me?” Patrick said with a terrified smile. “Really?” he took the offered grass. He glanced at Glenn, unnerved. “It’s probably only polite to eat it, hm?”
Glenn could tell that he wanted her to talk him out of it.
Instead she said, “Are you carrying a panic button?”
“Yeah.”
“Give it to me.”
In case stabs of poisoning came over him, Glenn could signal for help—though she was not sure how fast the LEN would send out a rescue party.
Not the answer Patrick was looking for. “You mean you want me to do this?”
“John Farragut has been known to swallow alien substances not to give offense to aliens,” Glenn said.
“I’m not John Farragut,” Patrick said.
Glenn said nothing.
Patrick said, “You didn’t pick up the obvious straight line. You must still love me.”
“Eat your wheat,” Glenn said.
“Or maybe you don’t.”
“Well, I can’t volunteer to eat it for you. She’s your girlfriend. And she’s getting testy.”
The hembra pushed Patrick’s hand, the one holding the wheat, to his face.
“Smells good,” he said, weakly hopeful.
A tasty smell usually meant something was edible on Earth. This was not Earth. Perceptions here were likely skewed.
Glenn gave his shoulder a hard pat. “Bon appetit.”
“Okay then. If I keel over, we get to see how good a doctor Cecil really is.”
His body visibly tensed. Patrick bit into the seed heads.
He chewed gingerly. A look of mild surprise relaxed his face. “This isn’t bad.”
He swallowed. Paused cautiously as if listening to his stomach.
“How do you feel?” Glenn asked.
“Good!” said Patrick, surprised. He gathered up some more seed heads for himself.
Glenn smelled his breath. The crushed seeds gave off an oaty, wheaty, sesame aroma.
The scent made her mouth water. She hoped her nose was not mistranslating the alien smell.
“This is going down easy,” Patrick said.
Glenn already knew that local flora had many proteins in common with Earth and that some of the native plants were edible. But she and Patrick didn’t know which ones. And ingesting alien organics was not the generally accepted way of conducting a composition analysis. You could not judge alien organics by terrestrial measures.
Well, you could, but you could also be dead.
After hours of wandering with the mammoths, anxiously monitoring Patrick’s vital signs, and listening to her own stomach rumble with hunger, Glenn asked, “Anything hurt?”
“My legs,” Patrick said.
Not a surprise. Patrick was no athlete. This hike was the farthest he’d walked since she’d known him.
“How do you feel?”
“Great, actually. You?”
“I’m hungry!” Glenn snarled along with her stomach.
She gave Patrick one last checkup. His heartbeat was regular. His pupils looked normal and he wasn’t sweating. His energy was good. Better than hers.
As they’d been walking, he had peeled the husks off a bunch of seeds for her. He emptied a pocketful of them into her cupped hands. She wolfed into them, chewing blissfully, her head full of wheaty, oaty, sesame scent.
As soon as she swallowed, she felt a subtle rush like carbohydrates hitting her bloodstream after a long fast. She gave a happy moan.
“Know what this means?” Patrick asked.
Glenn guessed, muffled, her mouth full, “New food crop?”
“Means we don’t have to go back.”
The adjutant in the outer office advised Admiral John Alexander Farragut, “Sir, your father is here.”
Mohammed was a whole lot less surprised when his mountain knocked on the door.
That
had been expected.
This
just could not be happening.
That
had been expected.
This
just could not be happening.
Not a phone call. Not a messenger.
Your father is here
.
.
Himself.
Justice of the State Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, the admiral’s father was the supreme master of his domain. His Honor waited for no one. You wait on His Honor.
His Honor was waiting in the outer office.
Had anyone scanned this being’s retina and checked his DNA before allowing him on base?
This could not be good.
His Honor had made the first move.
Admiral Farragut shot across his office to open the door for himself. “Sir.”
As soon as he saw the man, Admiral Farragut knew he was real.
Justice John Knox Farragut nodded and advanced through the open door, his back straight but with an unfamiliar humbled air. His ambivalence was familiar. So was the resentment. But his enormous pride was crushed down to a civil calm.
Admiral Farragut was an incorrigible hugger, but he resisted the impulse to embrace his father. His Honor had crossed the abyss first. The son left him his personal space.
His Honor’s alpha superiority had slipped by coming here. He trudged into the admiral’s office and sat heavily.
Admiral Farragut’s first fear came out of his mouth, “Mama?”
His Honor waved that off. “Your mother’s—” He stopped before he could say
fine
. He said instead, “Your mother is your mother.”
fine
. He said instead, “Your mother is your mother.”
But something was very wrong. The trouble had to be one of the admiral’s twenty brothers and sisters or his fruitfully multiplying nieces and nephews. Or else something was wrong with the Old Man himself, who looked beaten down.
His Honor’s hollow gaze wandered, spied the baby under the admiral’s desk. He slid from his chair, hunkered down with one knee on the floor to pick her up. He gave her a sad smile, like someone grieving while holding a new life between his hands.
Bad news wasn’t going anywhere.
His Honor looked into the button-nosed face, the petal lidded eyes. Managed a sad smile. “Now who is this?”
His Honor had been at Admiral Farragut’s wedding—mainly because Mama had threatened him with all the devils of hell and her eternal wrath, which seldom seen was nonetheless terrifying, if he did not attend.
Father and son hadn’t seen each other face-to-face since.
The admiral introduced the infant, “Your grandbaby. Patsy Augusta.”
“Patsy. For your Grandmama Winfield,” His Honor said approvingly. “And Augusta?” Of course he couldn’t place that name.
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