Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

“There’s good news and bad news, I’m afraid. We’ll talk about it later. For now I want to hear what they’re going to do about the Leef Tribe.”

“The what?” But they were almost on top of the group now, and Molly had to file the question away for later.

One of the largest Glemots continued to talk as she settled herself on the grass. Parts of his brown fur were turning black in wide ridges along his arms and legs. The language was English, but the jargon was so technical and obtuse, she could hardly follow. It sounded like politics and planning, so her brain turned off and she soaked in her surroundings instead.

Beside her, Cole leaned forward and seemed to hang on every word. Molly rested on her good elbow, her hand idly stroking the long, wide blades of grass. Insects the size of her thumb flitted about in the lush carpet, an unseen world going about its day right beneath her.

The two wrestling youths tumbled down to the stream and splashed one another. At one point a Council member grunted something in their direction and they chased each other away. Molly thought one of them had been studying her and Cole with some degree of curiosity.

She looked around for signs of Walter, wondering where he and Parsona were. Not knowing was torturous, but she could tell from Cole’s posture that he couldn’t be interrupted. He was rapt. Molly tried listening in again and could only catch a few words here and there.

Then, something flashed in her peripheral, breaking the surface of the lake. Molly turned just in time to see a giant splash, a plume of white shooting up from the rippling water. She didn’t see what it was, but it must have been big.

She left her gaze on the sparkling water. Searching the shore, she could easily imagine building a little fort up in those straight trees with a long dock reaching out into the water. She and Cole would live and play here for the rest of their lives.

Molly laid back on the soft grass and looked up into the cloudless blue sky, dreaming.

••••

Her imaginings were interrupted by the quaking ground. The meeting was over. Molly sat up and saw worry on Cole’s face as he stared at the grass, dragging a stick through the blades as if tracing various possibilities.

The large Glemot with the black fur approached them; Molly scrambled to her feet, but it hardly made a difference. The friendly-looking creature sank to his knees in front of her, which helped.

“Fair union, Molly Fyde. My designation is Franklin.” Molly could feel the words in her sternum. This guy could give her a back massage just by talking about it.

“Greetings.” Molly felt pressure to watch her vocabulary around these guys. After hearing some of the Council-talk, she knew they were already dumbing it down for her. Unfortunately, the middle-ground with these guys was still a stretch.

“The Campton Tribe of the Glemots accepts you both. Integration complete. The mechanical advantage of your positioning will be determined, and you will facilitate the engineering of Campton Tribe as it incorporates all of Glemot via rapid expansion and population controls. We highly anticipate determining your optimal positioning as a cog, which will gain purchase for the whole.”

He looked solemnly at her wounded arm. “Unfortunate. It will decrease your worth significantly in the short run, but the Council will recalculate as operation of that limb approaches normalcy. The pleasure achieved from this communication has been extreme from the perspective of this speaker. Between mastications we will resume in three point two Earth hours. Joyous afternoon, Molly Fyde.”

Franklin rumbled off after the rest, his back almost completely covered with ebony fur that seemed shiny to the point of wetness. She looked at Cole, expecting to find him laughing at the ridiculousness of the setting and speech.

But he just looked extremely upset, his eyes locked on something beyond the horizon.

“What’s wrong with you? Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked.

Cole shook his head, his eyes focusing back on her face. “This is some crazy stuff, Molly.” He glanced at her sling. “It’s a damn good thing you didn’t break both your arms.”

“Well, no nebula! It’s even better that I didn’t break both of my legs and have my head lopped off. Thanks for putting things into a cheery perspective.”

Cole didn’t laugh.

Molly knew all of his looks just from the shape of his lips. She’d spent hundreds of hours with him in the simulator as they went through every set of emotional states humanly possible. But she’d never seen this one. The closest she could remember was when she’d looked at him during the start of the Tchung Affair and they both realized, with absolute certainty, that they were about to die.

She asked him, her voice flat and full of trepidation, “Why am I lucky I didn’t break my other arm, Cole?”

The lips broke from a frozen purse. “Because they would’ve killed you.”

Molly suppressed a laugh. “These guys? They seem perfectly gentle! My gods, look at this place! It’s too fantastic for nonsense like that.”

“Keep your voice down.” He scanned their surroundings. “Let’s walk along the stream and talk. I’ve picked up quite a bit and filled in most of the blanks between. We’ve a little over three hours until we won’t have another chance to talk like this.”

Molly looked over her shoulder at the giant mounds of fur loping effortlessly up the hill. Activity was spreading out among the tents, the smoke from the cooking of various foods rising—solid white pillars holding up a windless sky. She was having a hard time feeling afraid.

“Walter may already be dead.” Cole said.

“What?!”

“Keep walking. I’m sorry to be abrupt, but I understand your euphoria; I felt it yesterday. Gods, I felt it as soon as I found you alive in the airlock. So I’m sorry to shatter your expectations, but I need to do it fast.”

“How’d he die?”

“I said he’s probably dead. It’s been determined by the council that he’s ‘without proper function.’ Also, the ship’s being dismantled as we speak. You already wouldn’t recognize it. These guys are big, but their claws are prehensile, it’s like each of them has a complete tool rig in both paws.”

“Without proper function?”

“Listen, this beautiful land is at war. Constant war. They have formulas for how to preserve the natural state of this planet, but tribes keep breaking off and establishing new ones as they argue over which formula is right and which is wrong. I can barely understand most of it, but they have genetics reduced to mathematics. They can tell what the average age in each population should be, and they maintain it.”

“Maintain it how?”

Cole steered her away from the edge of the woods, more in the open. “How do you think?” he whispered. “If the average gets too high, they kill a few of the elders. If it jumps up too fast, they kill their own young. There’s no hesitation, either. What they consider to be the ‘natural’ order must be maintained. That pursuit is so much higher than all else—it makes lesser ethical problems vanish in their eyes.”

“I don’t understand. I think I’m missing something or you skipped a step.” She reached down to pick up a stone, then tossed it into the stream in frustration.

“Okay. Quick history lesson. And keep in mind, some of this is from them and some is from the Navy reports we read, no telling how much I’m missing or getting wrong.” He cleared his throat and glanced around before beginning. “The Glemots were a race of warring tribes for thousands and thousands of years. Evolution, of course, rewarded some of the same nasty traits in their genome that we find everywhere else. But, instead of civilizing and overcoming these traits, they created a culture around them.

“Despite intellects that—well I’ll just say that what they did to control Parsona doesn’t amaze me in the least anymore. Despite this, they never got into technology. Not because their brains weren’t capable of seizing it, but because their lives were too brutal to invest in it. There was no foundation there. It was like us prior to organized agriculture, before some of us got bored and started tinkering.”

“And then the satellite,” Molly offered.

“Exactly. The satellite. The problem was, the Glemots thought they found another natural discovery. They saw this tech as something handed down from the gods. Or maybe something bubbling up from within the planet,