FROM WAYFIELD, FROM MALAGASY by Robert J. Howe
Every culture has its own ideas of “human nature.” When the differences become a matter of life and death.... 
* * * *
[Insert Pic AFF1006story.jpg Here]
Illustrated by John Allemand 
* * * *
Wayfield stood in the torrential rain, trying to wall off his feelings of despondency behind a professionally somber expression. He didn’t think he was making a very good job of it. One of his officers read the traditional verse for the departed souls of Greene, Durban, and Mansourian, committing them forever to deep space. Though the ship had grounded, the verse was fitting, since the crewmembers’ bones would be forever entombed in the lethally radioactive hull of the Malagasy.
He hadn’t lost a crewmember in twenty-nine years of spacegoing, including several gunfights—one that holed his ship’s hull. Now he was burying three of his crew in one miserable day. The rescue service’s unofficial motto was “you have to go out, you don’t have to come back.” It was one thing to lose crewmembers to a rescue mission, though, and another to lose them to a reactor accident. He felt like a failure for allowing three deaths under his command, and more of a failure for not being able to manage the kind of detachment required of a commanding officer.
Though there was much to be done before sunset, the crew needed a few minutes to catch their wind, literally and figuratively. In addition to the deaths of three shipmates, the space-weak crew was wrung out from the mad scramble to offload everything portable that wasn’t contaminated with radiation.
While the crew stood at attention for a moment of silence, Wayfield’s eye wandered over the heaps of gear hurriedly salvaged from the ship, calculating their short-term needs for survival. He hoped they wouldn’t end up missing the twenty-one rounds the honor guard used to salute their dead shipmates.
He worried whether the Unmanned Communication Vehicles made their jumps intact, and if their beacons would be picked up. He hoped his wife and daughter wouldn’t find out that Malagasy was declared overdue and have to endure a long, tense search. Luba was a service wife—she would probably handle it well enough—but Lydia had never gotten used to his long patrols, and even as a young woman still got weepy when he left for the port. It would break her heart if they weren’t recovered soon.
Wayfield was yanked abruptly from these maudlin thoughts by calls from the sentries posted at the far edge of the field. The crew stared as one in the direction of the treeline, straining to hear the sentries’ words over the din of the heavy downpour.
Petty Officer Soyombo came splashing back toward the group, his weapon at port arms, groundside weather gear streaming water. He pulled up breathlessly in front of Wayfield and the others. Though tall and thin like a runner, Soyombo hadn’t had the chance to jog ten meters since he’d come aboard the ship, nor were his muscles used to planetary gravity.
“Skipper, there’s people coming up from that village,” he gasped out. “Three or four of them.”
“Humans?” Commander Nylund, Malagasy’s executive officer, asked.
“Yes, ma’am, appeared to be. Mixon is watching them,” Soyombo said. “They’re coming right along,” he added anxiously.
Wayfield looked at his executive officer. “Okay, XO, get ship’s company deployed in a perimeter. Make sure all the weapons are safed.”
Nylund nodded and turned to the division heads, who’d already heard the captain. “Jan,” she said to the operations officer, “put your people along the treeline.” She turned to Lieutenant French, the engineering officer. “Put yours about halfway back to the ship.”
As the officers got their crewmembers disposed, Nylund raised her voice to a bellow to address the entire ship’s company.
“All right,” she shouted, “weapons on safe and pointed at the ground. Watch your officers for their lead.”
They all looked nervous, Wayfield thought. Only a very few of the veterans had ever been in a fight, and none had ever made first contact. Still, they carried out their orders steadily enough, especially for a crew that had just survived a ditching and the deaths of three shipmates.
By the time the crew was spread out in defensive positions, Petty Officer Mixon walked out of the treeline followed by the three natives.
The three men were all tall, dark-haired, and bearded. They were apparently trying to talk to Mixon, who was ignoring them and heading straight for Wayfield and Nylund. Wayfield noticed that the two petty officers guarding them held their weapons with white knuckles.
“Easy does it,” Wayfield said in an undertone to the nervous guards. “Nobody’s going to get hurt today.”
From their similar height, rusty complexion, and features, the natives could be brothers. Their clothes were slightly unusual—jumper-like tops and close-fitting trousers—and the weave of the garments was a bit loose and uneven, but nothing that would have gotten a second look in any cosmopolitan port. None carried anything that looked like a weapon, though they could well have them concealed under their clothes.
The natives continued to try to talk to Mixon once he stopped in front of Wayfield. After Mixon shook his head vehemently and pointed at the captain, one of the trio—distinguished by a missing patch of beard where his chin looked scarred—turned to Wayfield and appeared to pick up the conversation where he’d left off with the sailor.
The natives’ language wasn’t remotely familiar to Wayfield, and he’d heard a lot of strange tongues in his years of service. He motioned over Carde, the ops officer, who’d recently been through Boarding Officer School.
“You recognize this language, Jan?” he asked.
“It’s an outworld dialect of some kind, Captain,” Carde said. “I think...”
The native who’d been addressing Wayfield looked from him to Carde and back, then said in passably accented Standard, “It’s an outworld dialect of some kind, Captain.”
* * * *
Most of the crew was already at their stations when general quarters sounded on the SGC Malagasy: the delta-vee alarm always brought curious off-watch personnel to the pilothouse and engineering control room.
PT3 Mansourian, on throttle watch, was the first to notice the radiation leak, and the first to die. Because of a design flaw in the ventilation system, there were some dead spots in the air circulation, and the steady ooze of highly radioactive coolant hadn’t reached any sensors to trigger an alarm. Mansourian used the IC to tell the engineering officer of the watch about the leak.
On the bridge, Wayfield didn’t know how widespread the leak was, but he had to assume the worst.
“What’s the nearest jump point?”
“Captain, the nearest loop takes us further from a known system; so does the next closest,” the watch officer said.
With Wayfield looking over his shoulder at the nav screen, the officer found a jump to a charted solar system with a habitable planet, though one without a port, or even a full descriptor in the files. A G-type star, with one E-type planet, noted in passing by a survey ship, but only sampled from orbit. “Probably no IIL,” the surveyor had written: no indigenous, intelligent life. As if they could tell from a few orbital passes.
The jump was nineteen hours away at maximum sustainable acceleration—weeks closer than their destination port, and almost two months closer than their point of departure. Not knowing how long he’d have reactor power, Wayfield ordered a course to the newly surveyed solar system at two-thirds MSA.
Once Malagasy was underway toward the jump point, Wayfield ordered its three UVCs launched: two for the jump back to the ship’s point of departure and a third for the jump to their original destination.
From where they were, sending a radio message though straightspace was useless. It would take thousands of years to arrive at the first habitable outpost, much less one that could launch a rescue effort. The UCVs were programmed to send a Mayday once they reached the far side of their respective jumps, continuously broadcasting Malagasy’s situation report, intended touchdown, and course and speed information.
If the UCVs worked, their chances were fair that another ship would raise the beacon, but the version Malagasy carried was being phased out of the fleet because of intermittent jump failures. The vehicle would run up to the hole, then the logic circuit would fail to pull the trigger, and the UCV would sail on uselessly in straightspace forever.
Whether a rescue could be mounted before they ran out of food, or succumbed to disease or hostile fauna, was an open question. Some uncatalogued planets had Earth-normal strains of flora and fauna, seeded during successive pulses of human expansion through loopspace, but that also increased the possibility of lethal indigenous microbes.
* * * *
The landing itself would be the moment of maximum danger, when the thrust required to settle the ship gently on the ground would call for considerable power. Everything that could be quickly offloaded from the ship had been stacked in orderly piles along the passageways that served the cargo elevator, with foodstuffs and the most critical gear—weapons, Field Nanodox, and ground weather clothing—preloaded into the elevator.
The leak worsened on the run-up to the jump. When the ship adopted its stern-down attitude for landing, radioactive coolant was going to pool on the aft bulkhead of the reactor space, what would be the overhead of the control room. The gastight bulkhead would prevent any leakage, but depending on how much coolant ran off the reactor during descent, it could give off a lethal dose of radiation to the operators standing in the compartment just below.
It was how they lost Greene, and Durban, who went in to get him.
Wayfield was immensely relieved when the cutter dropped into straightspace and found the planet right where it was supposed to be. They made two passes to survey the planet for a drop site. On the second, Carde called him over to the IR display of the groundtrack.
The ops officer pointed out a cluster of red hotspots near a cooler blue band. “Skipper, I make those cooking fires along a stream,” he said. “And these,” he pointed to a series of warm yellow blobs around the hotspots, “I make people—almost certainly humanoid by body temperature and conformation.”
No indigenous, intelligent life, my ass, Wayfield thought. “Very well,” he said. “That’s where we’ll drop the ladders.”
* * * *
When the native mimicked Carde’s words in Standard, his two companions stopped trying to talk to the other crewmembers and gave Carde their undivided attention. Likewise, all the hushed talk among the crew stopped immediately. Carde pointed to the captain, the XO, and himself in turn, and said their names and ranks.
The native with the bald patch on his chin appeared to understand immediately. He repeated the names, nodding to each of them, then pointed at himself and said, “Boget.” He then pointed to the other natives and said names that sounded to Wayfield like “Plensow” and “Garr.” He then waved to indicate all of the crew and pointed at the grounded Malagasy, then pointed up into the streaming sky.
It was an intimidating display of composure and intelligence, Wayfield thought. Strange people had apparently come from the sky in an unfamiliar object, yet the native had immediately inferred those facts and seemed unfazed by them.
“Yes,” Carde said, nodding his head. He indicated the crew and the cutter. “We are off the ship.”
Boget said “Ship,” and started walking toward it.
“No!” Carde had to take two steps to get in front of the native. “Radiation—dangerous!” he said.
Boget stopped short and looked surprised. He pointed at his eye and at the ship, then made to step past Carde. His meaning was clear: I want to get a closer look.
The armed crewmen held their weapons self-consciously, not sure if they should intervene. Wayfield shook his head and made a palm-down motion to them.
Carde yelped “No! Wait!” and again stepped in front of the native, who was now plainly annoyed. Carde looked around, obviously trying to think of a way to explain the invisible threat of radiation without provoking the man. He bent over and picked up a fist-sized rock.
“Look” he said, pointing at the native, then at himself. Carde pantomimed hitting himself with the rock while grimacing theatrically.
“Bad,” he said, “Dangerous!”
Boget looked blank.
Carde repeated the action, saying “Dangerous!” emphatically. Then he pointed at the ship again: “Dangerous!”
The native looked at Carde, then at Malagasy. “Ship dangerous,” he said.
“Yes, yes!” Carde said, nodding extravagantly. “Dangerous, bad.”
Once again, Wayfield was struck by the native’s quick grasp. Boget wasn’t just mimicking Standard. Given even the slightest context he understood the language almost as fast as he heard it.
* * * *
All of this was taking place in a cold, drenching rain. Even wearing groundside weather gear, the crew was suffering from the wet and the five-degree temperature. Who knew what bugs this planet had? The weaker the crew’s resistance—already compromised by stress—the more likely they’d sicken. Malagasy’s single medical corpsman, Durban, lay entombed in the dead hull.
“Lieutenant, ask him about shelter,” Wayfield said. Carde seemed to be doing well with Boget, and Wayfield didn’t want to muddy the waters.
Carde launched into the question, mostly through pantomime. The native seemed to grasp the idea of shelter, or at least protection from the rain, quickly enough, but the officer couldn’t get across the need to get the crew out of the weather.
Carde turned to him. “Captain, why don’t a few of us go back to the village with them?”
Wayfield hesitated for a moment. This was a tough call. They hadn’t long until nightfall. Would the temperature drop below freezing at night? It seemed possible. On the other hand, they’d set the ship down less than a kilometer from the native settlement.
Finally he said, “Okay, Lieutenant, good idea. Have Soyombo and a couple others go with you, and make sure you have lights. You should start back in, say, two hours.”
Wayfield wasn’t happy about having his ops officer go off with a lightly-armed party, but they needed information, and there was too much work to be done getting the salvaged gear sorted out to mount a larger exploration party.
“XO, let’s get as much of the salvage under cover as we can,” he said. “Get them started on some kind of shelter, and get at least one fire going.” He gestured to the treeline. “There must be some standing wood dry enough to burn, even in this downpour.”
“Most of the food and weather-sensitive gear is under tarps, so we’re okay there,” Nylund said. “Once we get a cover overhead, I’m going to start resting them in sections.”
Wayfield assented, and Nylund went off to organize the crew, shoulders slumped with fatigue. Like many of the crew, she hadn’t slept much since the reactor emergency began. Despite logging more than the required hours on the shipboard exercisers—he was a stickler for that—the planetary gravity was wearing them all down rapidly.
Watching the crew gamely get to work in the cold and wet, he tried to suppress his own exhaustion and the creeping defeatism that came with it. Despite the fatalities, things weren’t as bad as they could be. If the natives could scratch out a living here, his crew could probably survive long enough to be rescued.
* * * *
Carde, Soyombo and Mixon were back before the crew had made much progress on a shelter.
“The village is just on the other side of the river,” Carde said, “less than a kilometer.”
“How many people?” Nylund asked.
“Many more than us—maybe a few hundred or so,” Carde said. “It’s a bit hard to tell. It looks like every adult has his own little house. The village is laid out along the bank for a ways upstream, but it only extends back from the river a hundred meters or so.”
Carde glanced over at the group of crewmembers working to gather materials for a shelter. “Some of the houses—they’re like huts, really—have these big flat leaves on top, like roofing shingles. The trees grow along the river bottoms. Soyombo can show the rest of the crew.”
The XO nodded, and Soyombo and Mixon trudged off to join the working party, their weapons slung upside down on their back to keep the everlasting rain out of the muzzles.
Carde turned back to Wayfield. “I think we pissed off some of the locals while we were looking around, Captain,” he said. “There was a kind of cooking frame outside one of the little huts. It looked like metal, and Mixon picked it up to check it out. All of the natives looked at Mix like he slapped them. He put the thing down fast, but they still looked unhappy.”
“Was the thing made of metal?” French wanted to know.
“Mix says no,” Carde said. “Some kind of wood, probably hardened by fire.
“Anyway,” he went on, “We tried talking for a bit more, but there didn’t seem much point in it. There aren’t any structures big enough to house more than one or two people at a time. Boget showed us his little house—windows but no glass, rough plank roof and floor, but dry inside with tight joints. There was some wood furniture inside, a bed, table and stools, and some boxes, but we didn’t touch anything, and I didn’t see any tools or metal.”
Wayfield nodded. “Food?” he asked.
“They didn’t offer any, but we saw some local plants in the houses,” Carde said. “The big thing is that they have domestic cattle, Skipper. Shitloads of them west of the river. When you get close to the village you can smell meat cooking.”
The size of the settlement and the cattle were a good sign, Wayfield thought. Of course there was no way of testing whether the genetics were compatible, except with their stomachs. For the thousandth time that day he wished for more survey equipment, or at least access to Malagasy’s libraries.
“One thing that struck me as odd,” Carde said. “They were looking at our gear the whole time, especially the metal and synthetics, but they never tried to touch anything, even to feel the texture. They never even gestured as if they wanted to hold anything.”
Wayfield chewed this over. He was never a survey officer, but he’d touched down in some exotic places, including a handful of first—or re-contacts. Local manners varied widely, but he’d never seen any culture that wasn’t wildly interested in any new technology, from portable reactors to mill-woven fabric. Some humanoid cultures would enthusiastically strip unarmed crewmembers naked to sample their gear.
“Okay, that might have been in response to you stopping them from approaching the ship,” Wayfield said. “We don’t have much to go on. Don’t worry about their reaction to Mixon. This was a pretty successful contact. Good job.”
The natives were not overtly hostile, at least, and if it came to that, the ship’s company appeared to have the upper hand in weapons. For the moment, the main job was still getting his crew sheltered and warm.
* * * *
The rain tapered off by nightfall of the first day. The sun rose hot and white the next morning, and by midday the temperature in the shade was just over thirty degrees. The only work Wayfield allowed was the spreading out to dry of wet gear and clothing, and gathering of more firewood. The shelter they’d erected the first day was inadequate, but he gambled the good weather would hold at least one more day against the certain advantages of letting the crew bake in the hot sun and sleep themselves out.
Nylund charged two quartermasters with marking the times of sunrise, apparent noon and sunset. A local day was 39.7 standard hours, or about 1.7 Sols. That was close to the survey crew’s guesstimate. The length of day and night appeared equal. That could mean they’d just happened to arrive at an equinox, or that the planet had a very long year, or a very small tilt of its axis relative to the elliptic plane, or some combination of the three.
Boget and another native, one they’d not seen before, returned to the landing field on the second day, and Wayfield had the word passed to the ship’s company that no one was to pick up or touch anything of local manufacture, or that appeared to belong to the natives.
Boget spent most of his time with Carde. The other native stalked around looking at all the gear spread out to dry, observing the “look but don’t touch” rule Carde had inferred from his trip to the village. Once they’d eyeballed all the gear, Boget’s companion became visibly bored, and the natives left.
The fine weather held, and no one appeared to sicken despite exposure to the new planet and natives of uncertain genotype. A few crewmembers were mildly sunburned from sleeping in the open, but otherwise the ship’s company was healthy and was adapting to planetary gravity.
The natives were obviously of ancestral stock, but Wayfield didn’t have access to a DNA lab to know whether speciation had taken place. Of course, the answer to that question would be solved the old-fashioned way if they stayed on the planet long enough: sooner or later his crew would interbreed, or try to, with the native population.
Likewise, they didn’t know whether the flora and fauna were ancestral, exotic, or some combination of the two. This had the most dire implications for their mid—to long-term survival. With no way to preserve their deep-frozen foodstuffs, the ship’s stores would run out in a few standard weeks. It seemed likely that if the human genotype was here, ancestral plants and animals had to be as well. But it was entirely possible that the native population and its food chain had evolved far enough from the baseline to render the local menu inedible for Wayfield’s crew.
* * * *
It took an astonishingly short time for the crew and the natives to start conversing in a pidgin tongue that was mostly Standard, except for words to describe local geography. Carde tried to learn the local tongue. The natives weren’t so much uncooperative as overwhelming in their enthusiasm for Standard.
Each evening the officers met in the “wardroom,” a crude, three-sided shack with a leafed roof. Among other things, the nightly meeting generated the ever-expanding list of questions they needed to ask the natives.
Carde was frustrated to report that he had not heard ten words of local dialect all day.
“I point at something and I say the Standard word for it, and they all nod appreciatively and repeat it after me,” Carde said. “It’s like I’m their language tutor.”
French arrived at the meeting with Petty Officer Soyombo in tow. “Skipper, I think you ought to hear what Nal thinks about the natives’ language abilities,” he said.
“Yes?” Wayfield said. “What’s on your mind, Soyombo?”
The sailor was clearly ill at ease addressing the officers. “Sir, it’s NLP, I think,” he began. “I read about it in a journal in the library.”
“What is, petty officer?” Nylund said, a little too sharply.
“Why the natives can pick up Standard so fast, ma’am,” Soyombo said. “NLP is Neotenic Linguistic Plasticity. You know babies can learn a language faster than adults? NLP is a mutation of the Fox2P site; adults that have it can acquire new languages organically, the same way babies do.” He turned to Wayfield, “That’s what ‘neotenic’ means, Captain, the retention of juvenile traits or characteristics in adults of a species.”
Wayfield had to suppress a smile at the easy way the technical terms rolled off the sailor’s tongue. “Where did you learn this, Soyombo?” he asked.
“In the Journal of Biological Anthropology, Captain. In the ship’s library.”
Malagasy carried the Standard II Library in her computers. Its 2.6 billion volumes didn’t match the really big libraries the research boats had, but it covered a fair number of disciplines in some depth. Wayfield knew that on long patrols so-called Great Books reading clubs would sometimes spring up among the crew, but most sailors confined themselves to popular entertainment and novels (under his predecessor, books and entertainments about penal colonies were apparently quite popular). Of the many things he wished they could have salvaged from the ship, the library was near the top of the list.
“Were you reading this for a course?” he asked.
“No, sir. Just for fun,” Soyombo said. “I read a lot.”
“Anything else you can recall about this NLP?” Carde asked.
“Uh, let’s see,” he said. “It’s rare, mostly confined to homogeneous outworld populations—that’s what made me think of it, sir, the homogeneity. I think that’s all. I read the article a long time ago,” he finished apologetically.
“Soyombo, that was excellent work,” Wayfield said. “If anything else occurs to you from your reading, don’t hesitate to bring it to Mr. French—even if you think it’s not important.”
“Yes, sir,” Soyombo said, beaming.
“Okay, well done, sailor,” Wayfield said.
Soyombo saluted and left, making the officers smile. Outside of musters and ceremonies, saluting was a courtesy rare among cutter crews.
“He reads biology journals just for fun,” Carde said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, smart kid,” French said. “He couldn’t get into a research rating because he took a short contract, so he’s watching screens and cleaning the control room for me, instead. He’s going back to school when he gets out.”
“Again I remind everyone to mind what you say around the natives,” Wayfield said. “They’re soaking up everything we say. And pass the word again among the crew. Boget already knows a few more anatomical references than he needs to.”
The officers laughed. The natives treated new words like shiny souvenirs and would sometimes come out with crass sailor expressions unexpectedly.
The most worrisome pattern that emerged, however, was that every attempt to trade, even trivial items, was stolidly rebuffed by the natives. When a crewmember looked at an item of local manufacture, the native it belonged to might offer it to them for inspection, but if the crewman dawdled with the artifact too long, or tried to move away with it, the native would physically take it back. Likewise, when offered crew-members’ gear for inspection, the natives would handle and inspect the item enthusiastically, then quickly hand it back to its owner.
“If you show the least interest in learning, they’ll try to teach you how to make anything,” Carde said. “They’ll spend hours doing it. But they get very agitated if you try to take any little thing, even a flake of worked stone.”
“Well, we’re not going to force the issue yet,” Wayfield said. “But we need to try and find something they’ll trade for. Maybe water cans? It’s got to be hard to make cans or buckets from local materials. Plastic would be better for storing cow’s milk...”
“They don’t drink the milk, Skipper, or make cheese or butter,” Carde said. “Apparently it gives you bad, bad diarrhea.”
“Could they be gut-intolerant?” Nylund said. “A genetic thing, like the language?”
French shrugged. “It’s possible, XO, but the milk could also be full of bacteria,” he said. “I’d hate to experiment with it, unless we were in a really tight squeeze, food-wise.”
“Well, there’s a lot of other options we need to explore first,” Wayfield said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
* * * *
The real trouble began as soon as the natives learned enough Standard to move beyond simple descriptions of objects. Boget pointed at Wayfield’s uniform coverall and asked, “Who is that from?”
Wayfield was stymied. He looked at Carde, who was ahead of everyone on understanding the natives’ pidgin Standard, but the Lieutenant just raised his palms in a “who knows?” gesture.
“From?” Wayfield repeated. “Who gave it to me?”
Now Boget looked puzzled. He turned to Carde. “What is gave?”
Carde took a wetpen from the pocket of his coverall and handed it to the native. “I gave you the pen,” he said. When Boget still looked puzzled, Carde picked up a stone and handed it to Wayfield.
“I gave the captain the rock,” he said, pantomiming the giving motion while he said “gave.”
The native considered this for a moment, then appeared to dismiss his thoughts with a shake of the head, a gesture he’d picked up from the crew. He handed the pen back to Carde.
“No, who taught Wayfield to made the clothes,” Boget said carefully, pointing to the captain’s garment.
“Ah,” Wayfield said. “I didn’t make—made—the clothes,” he said to Boget. “It was made on ... In another place, by somebody else. I don’t know who.”
Boget looked at Wayfield, then at Carde, obviously confused. “Another person made the clothes?” he said, going as far as taking a fold of fabric between his fingers to make the point.
“Yes,” Wayfield said. “Another person made this. Why?”
Boget looked at Carde’s coverall. “Who is that from?”
Carde and Wayfield exchanged slightly troubled glances; from the native’s tone he was obviously upset.
“I didn’t make this,” Carde said. “It was made in another place, by other people. That’s their work, to make the clothes.” He didn’t go into the idea of factories, or the likelihood that the garments were made entirely by machines, which were made by other machines, which were made by still other machines. Somewhere up the chain was another person or persons, and that was clearly the sense of Boget’s question.
Boget pointed at a water can. “Who made that?”
“Another person, back home,” Carde said.
Boget pointed at Malagasy, shut off behind an impromptu safety barrier. “Who made the ship?”
“Many people,” Wayfield said, “Not people here; people back in another place.”
This was apparently too much for Boget, who stared incredulously at Wayfield for a moment, then turned on his heel and headed for the river.
“Could they really think we made all this stuff?” Nylund said.
“They make all of their own tools and implements and whatnot,” Carde said. “As unimaginable as it is to us to build a starship—or even a water can—I guess they assumed we did, too.”
“I think our friend there just got the impression that we’re idiots,” Wayfield said. “Is it possible they don’t use anything they can’t make themselves?”
“Explains their low level of technology, compared to their linguistic sophistication,” Nylund said. “And why they get upset if we pick up any of their gear, even just to move it out of the way.”
Wayfield nodded. “The reality is that we need them more than they need us,” he said. “This just underscores it. Let’s hope Boget gets over his mad, and doesn’t get the others turned against us.”
Without the natives’ help, the crew—by and large technical people who’d never lived on a world where anyone actually grew or hunted their own food—would have to learn which plants were edible and which game could be hunted, to feed themselves when the ship’s stores ran out. So far, no one had seen any large game. There were birds aplenty, shy nocturnal mammals that lived in the trees, and a ubiquitous small lizard, but no one knew if their protein was digestible. For that matter, they didn’t know whether the cattle were edible, either.
They would have to start sampling the local produce in small amounts, Wayfield decided. And they’d have to try capturing larger game, if any existed—he hoped their absence locally was merely due to the presence of the natives and their domestic grazers.
Wayfield had read too many accounts of first colonies that had starved or frozen to death or succumbed to disease between resupplies. In most ways the crew of Malagasy had less experience and fewer implements with which to make a living.
* * * *
French turned out to have an aptitude for hunting. Normally a taciturn man who tended to dampen conversations with his long face, he was grinning from ear to ear when he came back into camp with a small antelope slung over his shoulders. Even Boget seemed impressed. He said the antelope were tasty, but rare.
Wayfield allowed only three volunteers to try small portions of the antelope meat. After the three crewmembers seemed to suffer no ill effects, he allowed the rest of the butchered animal to be cooked and distributed as fairly as possible. Wayfield took a few bites of the game, which was dense and strongly flavored, but palatable.
Whether the crew could get nutrition from the exotic game, and whether it harbored any parasites that might not be destroyed by cooking, would only be answered in time.
* * * *
Boget gestured to the chronometer Wayfield was recalibrating to the local day. “How can you say this is yours, if you did not make it?” he wanted to know.
As always with an alien culture, it was hard to judge the depth of explanation suited to the question. The chronometer didn’t belong to Wayfield personally, of course—it was property of the service—but that didn’t get to the heart of what Boget was asking.
“I did not make this,” he said, “but I did things for other people, who gave me this in return. A ‘trade.’ I know Lieutenant Carde has told you about trades.”
“Why would you not learn to make the thing yourself?” Boget asked. “It makes you like a child to use things without understanding them. What will happen if this thing breaks?”
It was a shrewd question, and from Boget’s point of view, absolutely correct. In a non-industrial society, depending upon technology you couldn’t make or repair yourself was a recipe for disaster in the long term. Wayfield hoped they’d be rescued in the short term, but hope wasn’t a plan. Of course the natives here took self-sufficiency to ridiculous extremes, he was beginning to realize. They passed up tremendous rewards in time, labor, and material well-being by not cooperating on tasks, even within families.
“We want to learn how to make things, as you know,” he said. “But this chronometer takes more tools...” How to explain infrastructure? “It’s not possible to do it with what we have here. It would take many, many years for one of us to make anything even a little like this.”
“I understand this, okay,” Boget said. “But this is not from Mesurda,” he said, using the native name for the planet. “It is not for you to just pick up from the ground. Why do you use it? Aren’t you...” he groped for the Standard word. “Aren’t you shamed? Is that right?”
“Yes, shamed, ashamed—that is right,” Wayfield said. He wondered from what context Boget had picked up that word. “For us there is no shame in it. I cannot make this, but I can do many other things. The people who can make this cannot do many of the things that I can do, so we make a trade.”
As always Boget listened carefully to the explanation, though his expression remained troubled. When Wayfield was finished, the native thought for a moment, then gave a dismissive headshake. “I understand what you say,” he finally replied, “but I don’t think it is right.”
* * * *
Most of the crew was assigned to do little but learn the local technology. As stinting as the natives were with their belongings—even husbands and wives, if that term meant anything here, didn’t share households, or food, or implements—they were incredibly patient and generous in teaching anyone. And they were always disappointed when the crew had so little to teach them in return.
The weather closed in again, much more fiercely than on the day they ditched. Driving rain and high winds stripped part of the roofing from the main shelter. The crew’s misery was partly alleviated by roaring fires, but the storm set back their efforts to learn local skills.
In bad weather, the natives holed up in their huts. They didn’t visit one another’s little houses, nor cross the river to the camp.
* * * *
When the weather blew out Wayfield hoped to make up time in getting a handle on the natives, but the next conversation with Boget was in the familiar, frustrating rut. Wayfield started the conversation asking about the cattle. Was there something the crew could trade for a few head?
Boget dismissed the question tersely. “We don’t have want for the things we can’t make,” he said.
“Could you give us one animal?” Wayfield asked. Establishing the precedent might be more important than the amount of food he negotiated.
“Are you children?” Boget asked scornfully. Before Wayfield could reframe the question, the native gestured to a simply made box for spare electronics and asked, “Who is this from?”
It was as if, by asking the same question about each item that caught his eye, the native hoped he would stumble across one thing that someone aboard Malagasy had actually crafted himself.
“No one here made that,” Wayfield said.
As usual, Boget looked pained. He shook his head nervously. “Is there anything you can make yourself?” he finally blurted out, looking highly agitated.
From what he knew of the culture, and from the native’s demeanor, Wayfield imagined that this would be a highly provocative question among his own kind. Yet he sensed Boget was genuinely trying to understand him and his inept shipmates.
“The others look to you like children do,” Boget said, while Wayfield was still groping for a satisfactory answer to the question. “What can you make that they cannot?”
“Decisions,” Wayfield said without thinking about it. “I make decisions for them. For the ship. I’m their leader, like you are the leader of your people.”
Boget seemed to consider this. “Leader?”
“Yes, like you, I tell the others what to do...”
He stopped because Boget was looking at him open-mouthed. “I don’t tell my brothers and sisters to do anything,” he said emphatically.
“Who makes the decisions that affect the group?” Wakefield asked, again having the frustrating sense that he’d wandered out onto thin ice.
“I am only Boget,” the native said. “I think about ... about how to live.” Boget seemed to struggle with translating the concept. “Then I talk about it. That is all. The others are no children. No one should tell them what to do.”
Wayfield had an idea. “Are you a theist? A priest?”
Boget looked at him blankly.
“Do you believe in a god?” Wayfield asked, pointing at the sky. “A spirit?”
Boget looked up, than back at Wayfield, his expression still blank.
“What is a spirit?” Boget said. “Do you have it here?”
Wayfield’s heart sank. Now he was condemned to a long, convoluted explanation of an abstract concept, at the end of which Boget would once again be incredulous and disappointed. This was a conversation he needed to have with Carde present.
“No, it’s not ... I can’t show it to you,” he said. “Tomorrow I will tell you about it.”
Boget appeared very reluctant to relinquish the conversation, but after a minute he nodded and waved goodbye, another mannerism learned from the crew.
Wayfield watched him go. What struck him about Boget’s curiosity is why it wasn’t shared by more of the natives. Only a small handful sought out the crew, even though many of them spoke Standard passably well. They would talk to crewmembers if approached, and were unfailingly generous in instructing them in local crafts, but seemed otherwise uninterested in the strangers who’d landed in their midst.
His low mood made him think about Luba and his daughter waiting back home for news of Malagasy. He shook himself—no good going down that road. Work was the anodyne, especially stranded here with no other diversions. What should be the next step?
* * * *
Wayfield took Carde to visit the native village. Along the way he filled Carde in on his abortive conversation with Boget about theism.
“I don’t think they have the concept, Skipper,” Carde said. “They bury their dead to keep them from stinking up the place, but they don’t seem to believe the dead somehow continue on. I think Boget is just uncharacteristically curious. Uncharacteristically for them, I mean.”
Wayfield digested this as they walked along the length of the village. There were no doors on the huts, just flimsy privacy panels that could be pushed aside with one hand. None of the natives would dream of touching another person’s property, even to move it out of the way.
As usual, the officers spent more time explaining themselves to the natives than the reverse. If information was currency, the natives enjoyed a five-to-one exchange rate in their favor, enforced by sheer mulishness.
Boget was off the word “spirit,” thankfully, but wanted to know what a “mission” was, having apparently overheard Nylund use the word to one of the crew. Of course the word had no local analog, since it involved acting on behalf of others and following orders. By using the example of hunting to feed a child, Wayfield and Carde thought they had more or less made their point. Then Boget asked what was Wayfield’s mission?
“To get my crew back alive,” he said. “Which is why we need to talk about the cattle.”
Back where? Boget wanted to know, ignoring Wayfield’s negotiating sally.
“Back to—” Wayfield almost said civilized space. “Back to where we came from.”
Boget then asked Carde the same question.
“The captain’s mission is my mission. I take my orders from him.”
“How will you do this mission?” Boget asked.
“I will keep the crew alive until another ship comes to get us.”
Boget shook his head, a familiar gesture of scorn and puzzlement over these people who depended on the help of others. He said goodbye and headed back to his little house.
“That didn’t get us very far,” Wayfield said, watching the native go.
“It’s eerie, Skipper,” Carde said. “When the children reach maturity they’re given their share of cattle and that’s it. Nothing else. They have to build their own houses—I think most of them start building their first house before they’re seventeen, but that’s why the younger people mostly have the worst houses.”
“How do they maintain a population?” Wayfield asked. “What happens when they get sick?”
“I gather they die,” Carde said. “It’s not a subject they’re very interested in talking about.”
That was cheery, he thought. “How are we on food?”
Carde grimaced. “Not so good. Even at half rations, we probably won’t go another forty days before we’re out altogether.”
French’s luck with the antelope hadn’t been repeated. There wasn’t any large game within walking distance of the camp. The crew’s muscles were adapting more and more to local gravity, which meant they needed to consume more calories just to maintain normal weight.
The small game around the camp was inedible; the lizards were actually toxic, which is probably why they were so abundant close to the native village. The natives ate none of the lizards or birds around the village. Only the animals that colonized the planet concurrently with the natives—the cattle and antelope—were fit for human consumption, it seemed.
Carde had sampled the cattle flesh, to no ill effect, by the simple expedient of borrowing a bone set aside for tool making and gnawing off the remaining raw meat. The grasses upon which the cattle grazed and some edible plants had obviously been established in an earlier pulse, but they hadn’t yet crowded out all the indigenous fauna, or the biomass it supported.
They were quickly learning the hard facts of pre-industrial economics. The work expended to find game and bring it back to camp couldn’t be greater than the caloric value of the meat itself, and in fact had to be significantly lower than the break-even point to justify the hazards of sending out hunting parties.
The natives and their cattle seemed to have killed or displaced all the antelope, which were said to be abundant elsewhere. It was a mistake, Wayfield realized, to ground the ship close to the village. Had they landed somewhere in the wilderness, near another body of fresh water, they might have found a high enough concentration of antelope to support the crew until rescue.
By the time they returned to camp, Wayfield was worn out from the walk, and from wrestling with problems that seemed to have no solution.
* * * *
“Population size is tied to the cattle herds, I’m guessing,” Nylund said. “We can’t even get them to trade away a stone tool; I can’t imagine that they’ll part with a head of cattle under any circumstances.”
Unless something changed, the crew was going to starve to death before they could be rescued. Wayfield didn’t know what would happen if they tried taking food from the natives by force. The crew was outnumbered almost eleven to one, but the natives only had stone and wood hunting weapons, and a few tools that would be lethal in close quarters. That might be enough if they attacked the crew all at once. There were six sidearms and fifteen assault weapons in the armory, with thousands of rounds for the rifles and a few hundred rounds for the pistols, in addition to some nonlethal munitions. Small arms were the one area in which the fleet’s lag in modernization gave the crew an advantage. If they’d been equipped with magnetic rifles like the newer research boats, they would have been dependent upon batteries that couldn’t be recharged without a reactor. As it was, given a small amount of warning, they’d be able to defend themselves. Probably.
How many natives was he going to have to kill to save his crew? Even though the natives’ obdurate unwillingness to share resources, or even trade for them, angered Wayfield and put his crew at risk, he didn’t want to kill any of them. And in the back of his mind was the possibility that he might face charges once they were rescued. Worse, his officers might face charges, too.
He had to decide before they were completely out of food. The crew had to be strong enough to fight, if it came to that.
He sent for Nylund, Carde, and French. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. He didn’t want to have this conversation in earshot of the crew or the natives.
They headed for “Red Hill,” named for the ocher rocks on its flanks. It took a half hour to reach the summit, and all of them except Carde were panting with exertion by the time they reached the top.
Wayfield took in the view while they let their breathing return to normal. It was just past local noon, and the river was a beautiful silver ribbon between lush green banks. The sun was warm. But not oppressively so, and the small peak caught a good breeze from the west.
When everyone was breathing normally again, he spoke for a few minutes, laying out his general plan.
They had two choices: they could leave the landing site and try to find a location with more game, or they could make the natives give up some cattle by force.
The former course seemed a poor option. If they expended their meager rations on a migration without finding sufficient game, they were dead. Hunting parties had already gone far up—and downstream, and had returned empty-handed and starving. To press further was to ante up on a weak hand.
If they struck out east or west of the river, they would have to find food and water. Balanced against the certainty of hundreds of head of cattle just a kilometer away, it seemed a bad gamble.
“Captain, we’re all behind you a hundred percent, whatever you decide to do,” the XO said, unnecessarily, Wayfield thought. “These natives were obviously dropped here, or their ancestors were. We don’t have any way of knowing whether there are any others on the planet until we’re recovered.”
“And?” Wayfield asked.
“I say take everything we need now, in one shot. The seed plants, breeding cattle, whatever we decide,” Nylund said. “Then we prepare to defend it and see what move they make. We might get lucky; they might complain but not do anything. Or not. If we do it all at once, though, I think we minimize the chances that we’ll have to do a lot of shooting.”
“And if not?” Wayfield said.
Nylund shrugged. “What else can we do, Captain?”
“What about when we’re rescued?” French said, speaking for the first time.
Wayfield knew of all the officers save himself, French felt the most responsible for the predicament they were in. As the engineering officer he’d subjected himself to endless second-guessing about whether he should have caught the reactor leak when they were still close to a port. Anything that they did to the natives would be an additional burden on French’s conscience.
“It’s you who’ll carry the freight, Captain, if we get off this rock,” French said. “You’d have to face a board if there’s any real shooting.”
“That’s a risk I’m prepared to take,” Wayfield said. “Don’t concern yourselves with that. I’ll face a board in any case, even if we get away with just losing Mansourian and the others.”
“We could lose more people if the natives decide to fight,” Nylund said. “They don’t seem particularly warlike, but we’ll be taking away their food.”
It was time to stop the discussion. Up to a point, soliciting your officers’ opinions was fine. Doing so gave you more options and made them think creatively, but any further debate on this issue would just increase their trapped sense without bringing any new ideas to the table.
“Okay,” he said. “I want a tactical plan to grab everything we need at once, with a few contingencies: if they fight all-out; if they fight a little; and if they just accept it. Obviously the plan should minimize the opportunity for confrontation. If we can take the goods by stealth, rather than by force, so much the better.”
* * * *
French came back from a reconnaissance of the herd the next day. He was streaming sweat from the three-kilometer walk back from the cattle pastures.
Nylund pushed a crate toward him with her foot. “Take a load off, Frenchie, you look wiped.”
The engineering officer settled gratefully on the box and mopped his streaming face with his sleeve. “That’s some hike, Captain, and mostly uphill,” he said. “We probably need to get the crew trained up a bit more before we try herding a bunch of cattle all that distance.”
Wayfield frowned. This was another squeeze. The crew, already on reduced rations, needed more energy to train themselves for physical exertion in planetary gravity.
“Okay, something to consider,” he said, noncommittally. “How does the herd look? Will we be able to drive them up here?”
“They’re well used to people,” French said. “I’ve only seen the locals herd them in ones and twos, but they must have to do it in bigger groups when they’re moving the cattle to and from the dry-season pasturage.”
“Okay. Anything else?” Wayfield asked.
French shook his head. “I’ll tell you, Skipper, every time I talk to one of the natives it makes me worry about all the things we don’t know.”
* * * *
Though many of the crew had been routinely armed since planetfall, once they started training for the raid, they held their weapons with self-conscious seriousness.
Once the officers reviewed the plans, Carde and French had drilled the fifteen riflemen and seventeen cattle drivers, drawing out the tactical arrangement with a stick in the dirt while two petty officers kept watch to ensure no natives wandered by.
Wayfield ruled out a nighttime raid as too dangerous. French, who came from a world with free-roaming cattle, pointed out that it would be harder to get the cattle moving at night, anyway, and harder to control them once they did.
Though his expertise with cattle was solely gleaned from schoolboy trips to cattle stations, French’s opinions heavily shaped the plan. They would have to drive approximately twenty-five head north along the bank from the pasture, through the native village and across the fords and up to their camp, a distance of about three or four kilometers.
Wayfield worried aloud that the number of cattle and the distance might be beyond the abilities of thirty-odd inexperienced crewmembers.
“I don’t see what else we can do, Captain,” French said. “We ought to be thankful that it’s the wet season and there’s plenty of grass in the pasturage down here by the river. Dry season they’d be spread out over a much bigger area—it’d take a day or more to round them up.”
The armed crewmembers, led by Carde, would guard the cattle drivers, led by French. If possible they were to try to take at least one bull, though no one had any idea what the cattle’s breeding cycle was like.
Wayfield decided not to try to take any tools or cooking utensils, which could be improvised later, or seeds or greens. It would unnecessarily spread out the small force and give too much time for the natives to react.
The drivers spent several days being lectured by French on how to move cattle and cutting switches such as the natives used. “Always, always, give them a way out,” French emphasized. “Especially bulls. Their route of escape should be the way you want them to go.”
They’d move the herd across the fords and into a bight of the river downstream that would act as a natural corral, where they could be surrounded and defended by the crew.
Wayfield wouldn’t lead the raid himself, of course. Carde would be in tactical command. But, over his officers’ strenuous objections, Wayfield wanted to be close enough behind the raiding party to step in if he was needed. Unlike a landing or boarding party, this raid would involve almost all of his crew. His place was with them.
* * * *
Just before dawn on the day of the raid, Wayfield was filled with foreboding. Even the few crewmembers who were veterans of a gun battle or two weren’t trained ground troops. The best of them only knew how to secure a port or clear a ship compartment by compartment. The most junior crew, if they had any inkling at all, knew about combat operations strictly from reading the manuals in their advancement courses.
His real misgivings weren’t tactical, though. Wayfield had joined the Guard to be in the rescue service, and had spent his career in the so-called whitehull fleet—the medium and short-range ships—rather than in the more prestigious, and long-legged, research vessels.
Even after almost three decades of chasing emergency beacons, Wayfield got a little thrill every time he read the phrase “proceed at best speed and render assistance,” the boilerplate that closed all rescue messages from Search Group.
You took the good with the bad in the service, and Wayfield had seen his share of unpleasant duty, including interdicting illegal ports and enforcing cordon sanitaire during epidemics. You made up for those times when you were under heavy boost and just working a nav terminal took all your strength, on the way to some long-leg ship with a holed hull or an inboard fire. Or a crashed reactor.
He never lost the excitement he felt when they sent the message, “This is Guard Cutter Malagasy. We have you on our radar,” the signal to stranded crews that their ordeal was almost over.
Taking the cattle by force was a bad business. The only thing that would be worse would be burying more of his crew. Of course crewmembers could get injured, maybe fatally, during the raid, too.
But they had to act now, before desperation set in. So far the crew had responded to the short rations with the usual sailor bitching, but no one had seriously tried to get more than their share of food. Even if that state of affairs persisted until the food ran out altogether—and that was asking too much of human nature—Wayfield wanted to insure that none of his people were tempted on their own to start stealing the natives’ food or cattle.
If he gave the orders to take the cattle, it provided a certain amount of moral and professional insulation to the crew, and preserved the command structure, which was more important to their survival in the long term.
Carde and French approached in the dim light to say that the raiding party was ready to move out. A few crew-members would be left to guard the camp. To avoid alerting the villagers, the rest of the party would work its way south along the river until they reached another ford below the pastures, then cross over. With luck the natives’ first inkling that something was afoot would be when the cattle were driven through the village. Wayfield would have liked to take the cattle out along the same route they were using to reach the pastures and avoid the village altogether, but the banks were too high and steep at that stretch of the river for cattle to cross.
“All right, Lieutenant,” Wayfield said, “let’s get them moving. XO and I will follow up behind.”
“Aye aye, Skipper,” French said. He and Carde went back to where the party was massed. A few moments later they heard the soft clatter of rifle actions being worked to chamber rounds.
Once the raiding party moved past, he and Nylund fell in behind. There was enough light to see the column of crewmembers in front of them, but it was still dim under the trees, and there were occasional stumbles and muttered curses.
Wayfield tried to ease the tension in his gut by running over contingency plans in his head, but there were too many unknowns, and the plans themselves fed new anxieties. He hoped Nylund and the others couldn’t read his misgivings.
The sun was just above the horizon when they arrived at the southern crossing point. The scramble down one bank, the thigh-deep ford in the icy current, and the hand-over-hand climb up the far bank, was an exhausting, muddy business that left them all short of breath. French had been right about not taking the cattle this way.
There were few trees on this side of the river, and the raiding party was completely exposed in the calf-high grasses. The terrain dipped slightly here, so they were still out of sight of any natives astir this early in the village, but once they crossed the slight ridge that bounded the lower end of the pasture, they’d be visible to anyone that happened to look their way.
Carde halted the party just below the ridge and crept to its rounded top to see if there were any natives in eyeshot. If there were none, the column would continue on in a quiet stalk; if natives were up and about they would have to close the distance from the ridge to the pasture’s edge at a run and risk spooking the cattle.
The ridge sloped very gradually down to the pasture below, where about a third of the cattle were still bedded down; the rest grazed quietly, seemingly unaware of their presence. In the village, nearly a kilometer away, Wayfield could see no one stirred, though a few cooking fires sent thin lines of smoke up from some of the houses. It was a peaceful scene, and Wayfield had a depressing sense that they were about to kick over the anthill.
“Let’s go,” was all he said.
They filed over the ridge and down toward the pasture with the shooters on the wings and the cattle drivers in the center. Wayfield and his XO hung back until all the raiders had passed, then followed them down into the grazing fields.
When the raiders appeared en masse on the ridgeline, the cattle began to mill around nervously, heads turned to keep the party in sight. Those that had been down on their bellies resting struggled to their feet.
The shooters gave a wide berth to the portion of the herd Carde had designated, acting as a sort of moving funnel with the drivers at its base and the open end pointed at the village.
As they got closer, the herd began to drift away from them toward the north. French ordered his drivers to advance a little faster on the herd’s left flank, which bent the stream of animals toward the village.
None of the natives had stirred yet, and Wayfield began to think that the operation might work, after all. Some animals spilled out of the mouth of the funnel as they advanced, hurrying a little to get past the drivers and back to the main body of the herd, but many more than they needed were moving slowly and with minimal alarm toward the path that led through the village and down to the fords.
Now that they were close to the animals and moving across their pasture, the smell of cattle and cattle dung was strong. The moving animals raised some dust, and Wayfield thought it was a lucky thing that it had rained in the past few days, or they might have been enveloped in a cloud by now.
Problems surfaced when the leading edge of the herd reached the first houses and the animals balked at being hemmed between the structures. The stopped cattle stood in fearful knots, heads turning between the oncoming drivers and the buildings, forcing the rest of the herd to move closer to the drivers along the sides. The cattle closest to the drivers began to speed up, some breaking into an ungainly trot.
As they advanced, the crew fell into a ragged, U-shaped formation that drove the cattle toward its open end. About half of Carde’s shooters—the leading edges of the U—had outpaced the bulk of the herd, and were now in the village, advancing on either side of its central dirt path.
When French saw that the cattle were fearful of moving into the relative confinement of the lane, he tried to call back Carde and his men, but the sound of moving cattle drowned out his voice and he only managed to spook the animals closest to him.
The whole mass of men and animals was slowed to a huge, milling plug when the first natives appeared from their houses.
Wayfield cursed as he saw the natives’ frantic gestures over the backs of the agitated herd. The natives had yet to see his crewmembers, apparently. They probably didn’t realize what was happening, and were just alarmed and confused by the herd’s appearance at their collective doorstep.
It didn’t matter. Waving their arms and yelling, the natives arrested the herd’s last bit of forward motion, and nervous cattle began to double back toward the drivers.
French waved his arms and bawled, trying with his drivers to get the cattle moving in the right direction again, but there were more and more natives pouring into the lane in front of the animals.
Though the cattle were more afraid of the unfamiliar crewmembers, the raiders were outnumbered, and were trying to hold a moving cordon across a much wider space. The herd began to break.
Wayfield and Nylund had gradually closed the distance to French’s drivers, and they were now among the sailors trying to keep the herd moving into the village. Though their faces were taut with suppressed fear, the sailors advanced on the cattle, whacking their flanks with driving sticks to keep them moving.
More and more cattle broke back toward the sailors. Seeing that some of his crew was about to be run down, Wayfield drew his weapon.
“XO, fire over their heads,” he shouted, discharging his own sidearm into the air.
The effect was electric: the herd went into headlong flight in every direction. Though the fearful cattle tried to shy away from the crew, they were pressed in too narrow a space.
Wayfield saw one driver, a large petty officer in the electronics department, get bumped by a steer’s shoulder and go flying backwards into the grass. Wayfield lunged past an animal and dragged the petty officer to his feet, but as he did so he saw another crewmember go down in front of a mass of animals.
Over the incredible noise of running, bellowing animals he could faintly hear firing from the front of the herd, and hoped no other sailors had been trampled.
The operation had become a complete balls-up. Cattle and crew were scattered over a wide area. Carde and French had lost control of their respective detachments, and Wayfield had lost control of them all.
At least one sailor was certainly dead—he’d seen her go under the mass of panicked animals—and there were going to be casualties among the natives.
As the last of the cattle trotted past in ones and twos, French came over, limping. “Captain, we’ve got to get the crew back to the company area,” he said. “I don’t know if any head made it to the ford, but...”
“You’re right, Frenchie,” Wayfield said. “The cattle are secondary now. Form the crew up. I saw Street go down—make sure a detail brings her back.”
About half the crew remained west of the village. French formed them up and assigned a detail to collect the dead sailor’s remains: boots and a gore-soaked coverall that served as a crude body bag for the crushed flesh and bone. Two sailors carried what was left of Street’s body on a litter improvised from driving switches and jackets.
Another sailor, unconscious with a head injury, was carried across the shoulders of shipmates.
As they passed through the village they saw that at least a few natives had been trampled, one beyond recognition. The cattle had apparently exploded out of the lane when the firing started, demolishing or damaging a number of the smaller huts.
Most of the villagers appeared to be in shock, and they stood aside as the sad little procession passed. But near the fords they were met by Boget and several other natives, one of whom was carrying a spear.
“What did you do?” Boget demanded. The native was wild-eyed, and had bits of grass in his beard.
“My crew is running out of food,” Wayfield said, suddenly feeling very fatigued. “You know this. We tried to bargain, to trade for cattle.”
“You tried to take them?” Boget said. “Like children?”
“My crew will starve without cattle, Boget,” he said. “I had no choice.”
One of the other natives pointed with a spear, causing the armed escorts to raise their weapons nervously.
“You are ... the bad people,” he said haltingly, taking no heed of the rifles pointed at him. “Bad! You do a bad thing,” he said, and flung his spear to the ground in anger.
The gesture was misinterpreted by a sailor with taut nerves, and a rifle cracked, sending the native down in a spray of blood and tissue from a hypersonic round in the chest.
The sailor who fired looked shocked and abashed.
“No, no!” Boget grabbed his hair with both hands. “No!” he screamed at the sailor.
French prevented further tragedy by grabbing the muzzle of another sailor’s weapon and pushing it toward the ground.
“Hold your fire!” Wayfield barked. “All of you!”
Another person dead, for no good reason. “Lieutenant, get the party across the river,” he said to French.
The natives made no move to stop them; they were bent over the stricken native, talking to him, though he was almost certainly dead before his body had hit the ground.
“Boget,” Wayfield said. “I am sorry. That ... That was an accident.”
A native looked up from the fallen man in anguish. “Just go,” he said. “Go back where you came from, bad people!”
* * * *
They’d captured three head of cattle. For that slight accomplishment they’d lost four crewmembers and had three others who were badly injured, including Soyombo, who had a compound leg fracture.
The cattle grazed placidly in the company area, near the fresh graves of Lieutenant Carde and Petty Officers Street, Vang, and Glende.
There would be no rifle salutes today. They couldn’t spare the ammunition, and the last thing they needed was to spook the few cattle they had into flight.
The natives hadn’t caused a single casualty; all the dead crewmembers were killed by panicked cattle. Carde, true to form, died with Glende, trying to drag him to safety. Like Street, Vang had been in the middle of the herd when the shooting started, and couldn’t get out of its way.
He knew Jan best, of course. Carde had been his ops officer for several years; he would have soon moved up to be XO of a big ship, or command of a smaller vessel. Now he would never see space again.
Glende and Vang he didn’t know very well—both had come aboard recently and hadn’t made their mark on the crew yet.
Of them all, it was Street’s death that affected him the most. He’d seen her go under the cattle’s hooves, and she was the youngest of the four—probably his daughter’s age, barely an adult.
He wondered anew whether his family knew if Malagasy was missing. It was overdue at its port call by now, but the Guard wouldn’t have necessarily notified them yet. He hoped, for Luba and Lydia’s sakes, that they only found out about the ship after he and the crew were rescued. It seemed like a selfish wish, standing over four new graves.
* * * *
Carde’s death left a void in the wardroom. French, taciturn to begin with, was even more silent and morose after the disastrous raid. The XO, feeling the pressure of their situation and the absence of Carde’s easy touch with the crew, was increasingly bad-tempered. She had even snapped once at Wayfield—a lapse that left her obviously mortified and apologetic, but no less brittle.
Three days passed since the raid and neither Boget nor any of the other natives had crossed the river. Wayfield, French, and the XO stood in the company area, discussing their three head of cattle, all steers. They hadn’t managed to get one breeding cow or bull, but since they were so few, there was grazing enough in the camp for the animals. Keeping them close meant that the crew didn’t have to mount an extra guard detail downstream where they’d planned to corral the stolen herd.
Nylund wanted to slaughter one of the cattle to supplement their ever-thinning ship’s rations—on its face, a good idea. The raid and the death of four sailors had plunged morale through the deck, and fresh meat might help restore them physically and psychologically. Something, though, held Wayfield back.
“We have enough frames to smoke the meat,” Nylund was saying. “We should probably get on with it while the weather’s dry so it doesn’t rot.”
“Frenchie, how much meat do you think is on one of those animals?” Wayfield asked.
The engineering officer looked at the cattle thoughtfully. “The big one is maybe 500 kilos,” he said. “Less than half that is meat ... Say 175 to 225 kilograms per head, Skipper, all dressed out.”
Wayfield did the math in his head. If each crewmember got half a kilo per day of meat, one animal would last them two weeks, at best. He had caused the deaths of four of his crew and several natives for less than six weeks’ worth of food.
Two of his injured would likely recover, but Soyombo was still touch and go, despite the profligate use of their precious antibiotics and plasmites. They’d reduced his fracture as best they could, but he was in for a longish stint at fleet hospitals to repair the bones and restore destroyed muscle tissue. If he lived.
In his career Wayfield had made some decisions that were worse than others—that came with the territory when you made dozens of choices every day—but this was the first time in his professional life that he’d made a wrong decision. He hadn’t just been mistaken, he’d been too willing to accept a morally repugnant solution. That it had turned out badly was worse for the crew.
“Captain, I’ll tell the crew to slaughter one of the cows?” Nylund said, breaking into his thoughts.
“No, don’t do that.”
“I thought you said...” Nylund began, but he cut her off.
“No, we’re not going to slaughter any of the animals,” he said, a decision crystallizing in him. “Frenchie, round up a detail of drivers—take as many as you need to make sure the cattle don’t get out of control—and return them to the natives’ pasture.”
“What?!” Nylund threw her arms in the air. “Captain, what are you talking about? Are you—”
But Wayfield didn’t let her finish. “This isn’t a debate, Commander,” he said sharply, raising his voice. “I wasn’t soliciting your opinion. Lieutenant French will form a work party and return the cattle forthwith. Period.” He turned to French. “Lieutenant, you’ll be the only one armed. Don’t fire unless it’s to prevent further loss of life, is that clear?”
“Aye aye, Captain,” French said crisply.
Some of the crew was within earshot and were obviously following the conversation about the cattle intently, though they’d been doing their best to be unobtrusive. They now gaped openly at the exchange between the officers. None of them had ever heard the captain raise his voice before.
Nylund, clearly stung by the public rebuke, turned on the watching sailors. “What are you looking at?” she said, “There’s a ton of wood that needs cutting. Turn to!”
“Belay that,” Wayfield said. He only mildly regretted that he had to cut his XO off at the knees in front of the crew—there were bigger issues on the table. “XO, assemble the ship’s company in front of the wardroom,” he said.
Nylund collected herself with visible effort and called the crew to muster—those few that hadn’t already noticed the officers’ public disagreement.
“Not you, Frenchie,” Wayfield said. “Get your people together and go. Now.”
The engineering officer nodded and went to collect his detail.
Wayfield stood in the wardroom’s doorway—its raised floor was an expedient platform to speak from—and waited for the crew to assemble. He was at ease, now that he’d made his decision. The sailor’s expressions were mostly expectant, though some looked troubled. He wasted no time when they were all assembled.
“I’ve ordered Lieutenant French to return the cattle to the natives,” he said. A murmur ran through the crew.
“Despite our food situation, it was wrong to take those steers,” he said. “I didn’t join the service to be an armed bandit and neither did any of you. Even if we’d brought back the whole herd, even if we didn’t lose Street, Vang, Glende, and Lieutenant Carde, we wouldn’t be justified in taking cattle at gunpoint.”
The crew gave him their rapt attention.
“I can’t do anything to bring back our shipmates, or the natives we killed in the raid,” he said, “but keeping the cattle would only have made things worse. We’re in the rescue service. The law we live by is the law of rescue, and we can’t keep that law and the cattle both.”
The crew was intent and silent, their faces mostly unreadable. Wayfield didn’t care.
“Tomorrow we’ll send out reconnaissance parties east and west of the river, preparatory to relocating the camp. We can’t stay here and starve, and we won’t take what we need by force,” he said. “Understand what I mean: we might survive, if I authorized more raids. But I will not. When the rescue cutter grounds here, it will find a Guard crew, not a band of outlaws terrorizing the natives. Okay, that is all.”
Wayfield nodded to Nylund. “XO, dismiss ship’s company and join me in the wardroom.”
Nylund waited for him to speak.
“I don’t need to tell you that I expect your complete support, XO,” he said to her.
“Yes, sir,” she said, not making eye contact. “I understand.”
“Do you?” he said, allowing a little of his own irritation to creep into his voice.
Nylund hesitated for a long moment before she answered. “Captain, I’m not angry because I think you’re wrong about the cattle,” she said stiffly. “I’m angry because you may be right, and I didn’t see it before now.”
“You’re not the only one,” he said ruefully. “Okay, that’s all.”
* * * *
The crew was quiet the next day. Scouting parties previously turned away volunteers, despite the hardships involved, but after the raid French could barely manage to fill out two groups of four without drafting sailors.
He and French were going over the maps they’d cobbled together for the scouting missions when a sailor jogged up to the wardroom to tell them that Boget was on his way up from the river.
The two officers looked at each other. When French returned from driving the cattle back to the native pasture, he’d told Wayfield that they encountered no opposition from the locals, but the crew had been watched closely in icy silence.
“Want me to stay, Skipper?” French asked.
“No, it’ll be okay,” Wayfield said. Since the raid, all the officers wore sidearms all the time, but he didn’t think the native was coming to attack him.
Boget gave French a long look as they passed in front of the wardroom, then launched into what he had to say without preamble. “Yesterday I returned five of my brothers and sisters to Mesurda,” he said. “Before I am done, your people walk through our village, bringing again the cattle. What does it mean?”
“What we did was wrong,” Wayfield began. “Bad for you and bad for us. I am very sorry it happened.”
“Yes?” Boget said. “Bringing the cattle again will not stop the badness. My brothers and sisters are gone.”
“And my crew. Four are dead,” he said. “But I didn’t order the cattle returned for that reason, because of the ones who were killed.”
“Then why?” Boget asked.
“Because to keep them would be more wrong, would extend the badness,” he said, groping for words. “It was the right thing to return them.”
“You expect to see the cattle again will make us happy?” Boget asked, his tone incredulous.
“No, I understand it will only make you less unhappy,” Wayfield said. “That would be a good reason to return the cows, but that isn’t why I ordered it. To keep them would be bad for us, for my crew.”
Boget was plainly puzzled. “Bad why? You wanted food, then you took the cattle. So you had food.”
“Yes, we need food, but our mission—not to get home again, but our big mission—is to help others,” Wayfield said. It sounded ridiculous when put in such simple terms, but he needed to make his point in a way the native could understand. “Sometimes we risk our own lives for the mission.”
“Where is this mission from?” Boget asked.
“From the Guard—from Malagasy,” Wayfield said. To the natives the grounded cutter stood in for a far-flung service they couldn’t comprehend. “We will find another way to get food.”
“This mission is more important to you than getting the food?” Boget said.
“Yes, in this case, it is.”
The native stared at him for a few seconds, his expression unreadable, then shook his head. “Okay,” Boget said abruptly. It was the word he frequently used when he failed to understand the peculiar visitors’ irritating ways.
French came in as the native stalked off. “How’d it go, Skipper?” he asked.
“Another meeting of the minds,” Wayfield said tiredly. “About what you’d expect.” He gestured to the maps, “Let’s get back to the scouts; I want them to be outbound at first light tomorrow.”
* * * *
The weather closed in during the night, and by morning the crew was crowded in the shelter to avoid the cold torrent.
Wayfield stood in the doorway of the wardroom, disgusted by the weather. The reconnaissance parties would have to be delayed until it broke. The wait would further erode their thin cushion of food supplies.
Nylund and French morosely pored over inventory lists, triaging what needed to be taken and what could be left behind if and when the scouts found a new location. Though Nylund remained a bit cool, to her credit the weather provoked no word or gesture of reproach from her.
The scouting parties were a terrible gamble, but at least they’d be assured of surface water for a few days from the rain. Still, the chance that they’d find a location with sufficient game to support the crew, and at a manageable distance, was razor-thin.
His brown study was interrupted by a chorus of shouts from the river sentries. Now what? he thought, as a messenger slogged uphill in the rain.
Mixon splashed up to the wardroom door like a muddy scarecrow. “Skipper, you got to see this,” he said breathlessly. “The locals are bringing up a bunch of cattle; a whole herd.”
“Bringing them to us?” Nylund said over Wayfield’s shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mixon nodded emphatically. “Boget said.”
The three officers tramped back toward the river with Mixon. As the petty officer said, Boget and a dozen other natives were leading at least fifty head of cattle across the fords and up toward the camp. Unlike the raiders, Boget’s people weren’t driving the cattle from behind; the animals seemed to be following a bull being led on a short rope.
“What’s this?” Wayfield said when he met Boget at the head of the herd.
“You need cattle. Here are cattle for you,” the native said with customary brusqueness.
Wayfield looked at his officers. Neither said anything, but even French looked pleasantly surprised.
“Why?” he asked Boget. “Are these to trade?”
“No trade,” Boget held up a hand in a preemptory gesture. “That would be bad for us, for my brothers and sisters.” He nodded at the other natives. “When we talked for a long time we saw that this would be a right mission for us. To bring you these cows.”
“I don’t understand,” Wayfield said. “You said it was wrong to give us things—like children.”
Boget shook his head and smiled in a gentle way Wayfield hadn’t seen before. He leaned forward and tapped the captain’s chest with one long finger. “This is from you. From Wayfield, from Malagasy.”
Copyright © 2006 Robert J. Howe
BIOLOG: ROBERT J. HOWE by Richard A. Lovett

* * * *
Robert J. Howe may well be the first science fiction writer of the Space Age. That’s because he was born in 1957, only six days after the Russians launched the first Sputnik satellite. His story this month is his third in a year, but he wrote several in the 1980s and ‘90s, before his recent return to fiction.
Like many writers, his is an exotic career history. He’s baked bagels, written publicity materials for colleges, and worked as a technician in an emergency veterinary hospital. There were also stints in the Coast Guard and on an oil tanker and an oceanographic vessel in the Merchant Marine.
Also like many writers, he thinks the ability to craft fiction is born from life’s less pleasant experiences.
“I’m sure that somewhere there’s a writer who had a happy childhood,” he says. “But my experience is that a bad childhood makes you a tuning fork for other people’s emotions. Fiction is a machine for evoking emotion, and you have to feel those emotions to be able to evoke them.”
But there’s also the matter of learning the craft. For Howe, that began at sea. “That was before emails,” he says, “and phone calls were ridiculously expensive. So I wrote hundreds of long letters, trying to be funny and entertaining. When I got out, I knew I wanted to be a writer.”
Next came the 1985 Clarion workshop. Being accepted was his first validation as a writer; then the workshop introduced him to the not-always-gentle realm of story critique.
“I told someone the best thing he could do for art was cut off his hands and bury his typewriter,” Howe admits. “And my own first story was so dreadful that one of the kindest things people said was that it was like Ken and Barbie in space.”
In some groups, such remarks might produce fisticuffs, but Howe’s bonded. Now, he helps run a more kindly critique group in Manhattan.
“Fiction writing is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” he says, “because it involves keeping so many balls in the air. You rarely manage them all perfectly, but you can’t drop any. You have to keep the plot going, you have to have the background, and you have to have a certain facility with character and dialog. There’s infinite room for improvement.”
Copyright © 2006 Richard A Lovett