Tatja Grimm's World

“You don’t understand, fellow,” a third Science person spoke, a sharp edge in his voice. “Knocking over a termite mound is a peccadillo in their eyes, compared to invading the gods’ privacy. They’ve kept us alive this long because they’re having trouble devising a torture-death appropriate to our crime!”

“How can you know that for sure—”

“We know, Master Guille,” Janna Kats’s tough exterior broke for an instant, and she looked just as frightened as the others. “In the last two days they’ve taken three of us from the pit. W-we could hear the screams; one we could see. Each took longer to die than the last.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the cougher said, “I think the Termiters are scared, too—of their Seraph gods. If they can’t come up with the proper death for us, they think the gods will apply that death to them. The three they killed were … little experiments.”

“But there will be no more.” The toughness was back in Janna’s voice. “The next time they come, one big surprise we’ll show them. We won’t be skoats waiting for the slaughter.”

Rey looked up, at the rim of the pit. There were Termite Folk all around. Most carried spears, but that wasn’t the most deadly thing; spears kill one at a time, make a slow thing of a massacre. Much more ominous were the priests carrying torches. They stood near the three petroleum vats Brailly had spotted earlier. Each tank was mounted on a crude swivel. Should they choose, the torchbearers could drown their prisoners in flame. A few hours before, that prospect had filled him with sympathetic dread. For Janna and the others, it had come to be the only imaginable out.

The hours passed. At the top of the sky, Seraph widened toward full, its western ocean turning dark and reddish with the start of the midnight eclipse. The villagers marched steady patrols around the edge of the pit. Mostly they were silent. The Science’s anthropologist said they had long ago stopped responding to his shouted questions.

There were no more “experiments,” but Rey gradually realized the pit was in itself a killing place. The only water was in the shallow pool at the bottom of the pit, and that became steadily more foul. The only food was what the villagers threw into the pit: slabs of skoat cheese and balls of what turned out to be pressed termite larva. Rey had eaten some exotic things in his years with Tarulle, but the larva patties were half rotted. Hungry as they were, only a few of the prisoners could keep them down. Three of the Tarulle prisoners were dead, their bodies broken by the explosion. Two of the survivors had compound fractures; their moans came less frequently with each passing hour.

The prisoners were not alone in the pit. The true builders of the village were here, too. In the silence that dragged between conversations and occasional screaming, Rey heard a scritching sound coming from all directions. At the corner of his vision, a pebble would move, something would scuttle from one hole to another. The termites were no bigger than a man’s thumb, but there must have been millions of them in the sides of the pit. They avoided the humans, but their activity was ceaseless. The sides of the pit were not ordinary earth. All the way down to the pool, this was moundstuff. It had to be old, the detritus of thousands of years of towers, but it was still used by the tiny creatures. The stones in this “soil” must have washed down from the hills to the north. The coming of humans was a recent event in the hives’ history.

The towers of the village crowded around three sides of the pit, but beyond the broken southern lip, they could see the harbor. The Tarulle Barge was less than a quarter mile out. Deck piled on deck, loading cranes sticking out in all directions, masts and rising windmills into the reddish blue sky—the barge had never seemed so beautiful to Rey as now. Safety was just twelve hundred feet away; it might as well be on the other side of Seraph. An hour earlier, a hydrofoil had arrived from the ocean and docked in a starboard slip. There was no other boat activity, though Rey fancied he saw motion on the bridge: another meeting? And this time, a final decision to leave?

Most of the prisoners huddled on the north slope of the depression; the corpses were carried to the other side of the pit. The prisoners were bright people. They’d had plenty of time to try to figure a way out, and no success in doing so. The arrival of Rey’s group brought new hope, even though the rescue had been a failure. For an hour or two, there was renewed scheming. When it became clear that nothing had really changed, the talk gradually petered out. Many of the prisoners drifted back to inward-looking silence.

There were exceptions. One thing Rey loved about scientists was their love for speculation. Take Tredi Bekjer, the little guy who spent the hours coughing his lungs out. Tredi was a sickly fellow who should never have been on the Science expedition in the first place. He was an anthropologist, and the only captive who spoke fluent Hurdic. He might be dying, but between spasms of coughing he argued about the origin and future of their captors. He predicted that—no matter what the prisoners’ fate—the ambush had doomed the Termiter culture. Now, outsiders knew there was petroleum nearby. When that news got to the archipelagates, the Termiter Folk would have lots of visitors. Even if the locals were not booted off their land, they would be forced to make big changes. In thirty years, there would be a real city here.

There were others like Tredi, folks who could walk through the gates of death, still arguing about ideas. When the planning and the scheming was done, these few still had something to talk about. Rey found himself drawn in.

Janna Kats was the most interesting. Before specializing in Seraphy, she’d had lots of experience with other branches of astronomy. And U Bergenton had the best astronomers in the world—if you excepted the Doo’d’en fanatics on the other side of the world. Kats was just the sort of person he’d been hoping to talk to, back when he thought they’d find the Science in one piece. For minutes at a time Rey could forget where he was, and what his fate must be. Kats had had great plans for the Seraph observatory. There should be good seeing from the mountains behind the harbor. Ground resolutions better than one hundred yards would have been possible with the twenty-inch mirror. The issue of intelligent life on Seraph might finally be resolved. … Instead, the project had brought them all to this pit.

Rey grunted. “Other things are happening in astronomy. Things that aren’t so dangerous. There have been some fantastic discoveries at Krirsarque.” He described “Pride of Iron” and the spectroscopic observations it was based on. “Can you imagine! With spectroscopy, we can know what things are like on planets around other stars.” He sat back, waiting for Janna’s reaction to this news. It was one of the occasional pleasures of his job, to be the first person in an entire archipelagate to report a breakthrough.

Janna grinned back at him, but there was no surprise in her expression. “Ha! That’s one of the results the U Tsanart people sent west with Science. During the last year, they’ve got good spectra on twenty stars in our sun’s class. Every damn one of ’em is metal rich. And we have other results too. We can measure radial motions with this spectro stuff—” She laughed at the expression on his face. “You’ve written a lot of high-flown editorials about ‘Spectroscopy, Key to the Universe.’ Well, you may have understated the case. Combine the spectral shift data with proper motion studies, and it’s obvious our solar system is an interloper, just passing through the local star stream.”

Outcast Star. The title flashed through Rey’s mind. There were writers who could run with that idea—and surely would, if he got out of this alive. “You know, it’s almost as if someone were picking on the human race,” he mused. “Out of all the solar systems, that we should be on the lowmetal one, the outsider.”

He didn’t like the idea. It smacked of the theistic fantasy Cor Ascuasenya so loved: humanity as doormat to the gods.

“You’ve got it backward, my sir. Ever hear of the anthropic principle? Most likely, intelligent life exists on Tu exactly because we are different from the others. Think what an abundance of metals would mean. It’s not just a matter of wealth, millions of ounces of iron available for large-scale construction. My guess is such concentrations of metals would change the surface chemistry so much that life would never develop.”

Janna’s middle-aged features were filled with a happy smugness, but Rey did not feel put down. He was imagining deadly, treasure-house worlds. “Or life might develop, but different than here. Why, there might be —”

Janna abruptly grabbed his arm. She was looking past him, her expression intent; his speculations were suddenly of zero interest. There were scattered gasps from the prisoners. He turned and looked into the harbor. The barge had lowered a boat to the water. It glowed with white light, a jewel in the reddening dimness. Then he