Whereas prosthetics had been the way damaged adults replaced lost limbs or senses, the new Moto- Prosthetics line went further than that by presenting the handicapped with such refined functions that no «physical» handicap remained. For the shellperson, it meant they could «inhabit» functional alter-bodies and experience the full range of human experiences firsthand. That knocked a lot of notions of limitations or restrictions into an archaic cocked hat. Since Keff had first heard about Moto-Prosthetic bodies for brains, he had nagged Carialle to order one. She evaded a direct «no» because she valued Keff, respected his notion that she should have the chance to experience life outside the shell, join him in his projects with an immediacy that she could not enjoy encapsulated.
The idea was shudderingly repulsive to her. Maybe if Moto-Prosthetics had been available before her accident, she might have been more receptive to his idea. But to leave the safety of her shell—well, not really leave it, but to seem to leave it—to be vulnerable—though he insisted she review diagrams and manuals that conclusively demonstrated how sturdy and flexible the M-P body was—was anathema. Why Keff felt she should be like other humans, often clumsy, rather delicate, and definitely vulnerable, she couldn't quite decide.
She started Simeon's gift tape to end that unproductive, and somewhat disturbing line of thought. Although Carialle had a library that included tapes of every sort of creature or avian that had been discovered, she most enjoyed the grace of cats, the smooth sinuousness of their musculature. This datahedron started with a huge spotted feline creeping forward, one fluid movement at a time, head and back remaining low and out of sight as if it progressed along under a solid plank. It was invisible to the prong-horned sheep on the other side of the undergrowth. Carialle watched with admiration as the cat twitched, gathered itself, sprang, and immediately stretched out in a full gallop after its prey. She froze the frame, then scrolled it backward slightly to the moment when the beautiful creature leapt forward, appreciating the graceful arc of its back, the stretch of its forelimbs, the elongated power of the hindquarters. She began to consider the composition of the painting she would make: the fleeing sheep was frozen with its silly face wild-eyed and splay-legged ahead of the gorgeous, silken threat behind it.
As she planned out her picture, she ran gravitational analyses, probable radiation effects of a yellow-gold sun, position of blip possibly indicating planet, and a computer model, and made a few idle bets with herself on whether they'd find an alien species, and what it'd look like.
Chapter Three
Keff ignored the sharp twigs digging into the belly of his environment suit as he wriggled forward for a better look. Beyond the thin shield of thorny-leafed shrubbery was a marvel, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. Closing with his target would not, could not, alter what he was viewing at a distance, not unless someone was having fun with optical illusions—but he painfully inched forward anyway. Not a hundred meters away, hewing the hard fields and hauling up root crops, was a work force of bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical beings, heterogeneous with regard to sex, apparently mammalian in character, with superior cranial development. In fact, except for the light pelt of fur covering all but lips, palms, soles, small rings around the eyes, and perhaps the places Keff couldn't see underneath their simple garments, they were remarkably like human beings. Fuzzy humans.
«Perfect!» he breathed into his oral pickup, not for the first time since he'd started relaying information to Carialle. «They are absolutely perfect in every way.»
«Human-chauvinist,» Carialle's voice said softly through the mastoid-bone implant behind his ear. «Just because they're shaped like Homo sapiens doesn't make them any more perfect than any other sentient humanoid or human-like race we've ever encountered.»
«Yes, but think of it,» Keff said, watching a female, breasts heavy with milk, carrying her small offspring in a sling on her back while she worked. «So incredibly similar to us.»
«Speak for yourself,» Carialle said, with a sniff.
«Well, they are almost exactly like humans.»
«Except for the fur, yes, and the hound-dog faces, exactly.»
«Their faces aren't really that much like dogs',» Keff protested, but as usual, Carialle's artistic eye had pinned down and identified the similarity. It was the manelike ruff of hair around the faces of the mature males that had thrown off his guess. «A suggestion of dog, perhaps, but no more than that last group looked like pigs. I think we've found the grail, Cari.»
A gust of cold wind blew through the brush, fluttering the folds of loose cloth at the back of Keff's suit. His ears, nose, and fingers were chilly and growing stiff, but he ignored the discomfort in his delight with the objects of his study. On RNJ-599-B-V they had struck gold. Though it would be a long time before the people he was watching would ever meet them on their own terms in space.
Coming in toward the planet, Carialle had unleashed the usual exploratory devices to give them some idea of geography and terrain.
The main continent was in the northern hemisphere of the planet. Except for the polar ice cap, it was divided roughly into four regions by a high, vast mountain range not unlike the European Alps of old Earth. Like the four smaller mountain ranges in each of the quadrants, it had been volcanic at one time, but none of the cones showed any signs of activity.
The team had been on planet for several days already, viewing this and other groups of the natives from different vantage points. Carialle was parked in a gully in the eastern quadrant, four kilometers from Keff's current location, invisible to anyone on foot. It was a reasonable hiding place, she had said, because they hadn't seen any evidence during their approach of technology such as radar or tracking devices. Occasional power fluctuations pinged the needles on Carialle's gauges, but since they seemed to occur at random, they might just be natural surges in the planets magnetic field. But Carialle was skeptical, since the surges were more powerful than one should expect from a magnetic field, and were diffuse and of brief duration, which made it difficult for her to pin the phenomenon down to a location smaller than five degrees of planetary arc. Her professional curiosity was determined to find a logical answer.
Keff was more involved with what he could see with his own eyes—his wonderful aliens. He studied the tool with which the nearest male was chipping at the ground. The heavy metal head, made of a slagged iron/copper alloy, was laboriously holed through in two places, where dowels or nails secured it to the flat meter-and-a-half long handle. Sinew or twine wound around and around making doubly sure that the worker wouldn't lose the hoe face on the back swing. By squeezing his eyelids, Keff activated the telephoto function in his contact lenses and took a closer look. The tools were crude in manufacture but shrewdly designed for most effective use. And yet no technology must exist for repair: the perimeter of the field was littered with pieces of discarded, broken implements. These people might have discovered smelting, but welding was still beyond them. Still, they'd moved from hunter/gatherer to farming and animal husbandry. Small but well-tended small flower and herb gardens bordered the field and the front of a man-high cave mouth.
«They seem to be at the late Bronze or early Iron Age stage of development,» Keff murmured. «Speaking anthropologically, this would be the perfect species for a long-term surveillance to see if this society will parallel human development.» He parted the undergrowth, keeping well back from the opening in the leaves. «Except for having only three fingers and a thumb on each hand, they've got the right kind of manipulative limbs to attain a high technological level.»
«Close enough for government work,» Carialle said, reasonably. «I can't see that the lack of one digit would interfere with their ability to make more complex tools, since clearly they're using some already.»
«No,» Keff said. «I'd be more disappointed if they didn't have thumbs. A new species of humanoid! I can write a paper about them.» Keff's breath quickened with his enthusiasm. «Parallel development to Homo sapiens terraneum? Evolution accomplished separately from Earth-born humanity?»
«It's far more likely that they were seeded here thousands of years ago,» Carialle suggested, knowing that she'd better dampen his enthusiasm before it got out of hand. «Maybe a forgotten colony?»
«But the physical differences would take eons to evolve,» Keff said. The odds against parallel development were staggering, but the notion that they might have found an unknown cousin of their own race strongly appealed to him. «Of course, scientifically speaking, we'd have to consider that possibility, especially in the light of the
