opened his eyes, and said, “We can’t avoid it, not now. That’s the last of the reserves—”
Huoy gulped down her utterly fake, perfectly bland Cambodian pork then snapped, “Not as long as the vitamins hold out. The water’s safe, so there’s no need to—”
(Beside me, Reba—paying no attention to the spoken words of her fellow esper—kept glancing at the surrounding ’lopes, an unreadable expression on her lightly freckled face. And for their part, the ’lopes likewise remained unreadable, or—at least to us incomprehensible....)
“Ever see a heart after starvation sets in?” Elizabeth asked in that mild, dreamy brogue of hers, face pale beneath burning-brown eyes. Huoy was suddenly engrossed in the crumbling soil and in the brown-to-tan-ombre spotted pebbles resting near her lotus-positioned feet, as the doctor continued, “It becomes like leather, brown leather. Not red. Not soft. Not very big.”
Elizabeth held up her fisted right hand, the skin red-gold from the light of the too-small sun above us. “The body eats itself, attacking the muscle once the fat is depleted. The heart grows hard—”
Huoy stopped shifting the dirt particles between her stubby fingers. “So?” For a second I thought she was going to throw the dirt at Elizabeth. “Either way, we’re dead. Matter of time. We know the anatomy of death by starvation.
“But once we eat this”—soil-stained fingers pointed at the fleshy tubers and foliage around us—“who knows?”
Jimmie crushed the remains of his packet against his chest, sighed deeply then replied, “Ecology here is certainly carbon-based. Right-handed sugars. Digestible at any rate. No toxins showed up in the tests I ran, least so far. Not many of the aminos we need but I can cob up whatever else is missing. At least we didn’t run up against any left-handed sugars or—”
“None of the animals have died,” Neil added, scooping up pebbles and rattling them, gourd-like, between cupped palms.
Huoy’s head whipped around so quickly I heard one of her vertebrae pop softly. “‘None of the animals have died’? My, my...oh brilliant, dear Mr. Aaron. How utterly perceptive of you.... Wait a minute, Mr. Aaron, perhaps I’ll clap for you. Now, do you remember how rats can grow immune to almost any poisons? Or cockroaches? Remember, Neil? Their physiology is not like ours.” Then Huoy’s conversation went silent, her voice taut with unvoiced argument; the others leaned slightly forward, in the unconscious way of espers, and once again I felt like a child—too young and too stupid to be included in the conversation.
Reba suddenly dropped out of silent argument and gave me a little look of sympathy. Poor esp-mute, little boy lost! She leaned closer against me, chin level with my shoulder, and gestured. “That tree over there. Me Eve, you Adam, ’kay, Scott?” She rose to her feet with a graceful motion that made my heart jump. Damn, she was beautiful!
Padding over to one of the two-meter high plants we dubbed “trees” for lack of anything else tall and tree-like on the horizon, Reba reached up and pulled one of the brownish, stick-shaped fruits off of the tree, before carrying it back to our “circle” of two.
The fruit’s peel was husk-dry, faintly pebbled with bumps a shade darker than the rest of the dappled surface. Like ’lope fur, I thought, as Reba dug into the peel with a blunt thumb. The interior was meaty, seed-laced pulp, stringy, yet glistening with juices. It smelled wonderful; a heady, musky, tart pungent aroma which made it past my painfully blocked sinuses, as if it were a sign of virtue. Scooping out some pulp with her index and middle fingers, Reba handed the rest of the fruit to me, her freckled face aglow with an impish smile. Before awareness of our absence had time to register on our crewmates, Reba softly said, “Look the other way, God,” before taking her first dripping taste.
“No, Reba!” Huoy screamed, flat face furrowing as she dashed to where we stood. Jimmie called after her, “Come back, Huoy, what other choice do we have—” but Huoy already had her hands on Reba’s cheeks, shouting; “Spit it out! Spit-it-out-now!” As Huoy tried to force open Reba’s lips, I leaned over and yanked the geologist’s forearm away, warning, “Leave her alone. You know that a biologist like her knows the risks better than anyone—unless biology is also your specialty now—”
Then Reba swallowed, stuck her tongue out at the other woman and spat, “And it’s good, Huoy. Not processed sludge in a damned pouch. It’s good. And I know the ’lopes eat it—they haven’t keeled over yet.”
Huoy stood up, hands fisted against her sides, and snapped, “Since when did you grow a tail and a spotted pelt?” before turning on her heel and running back to the ship. Watching her leave, I raised my eyes to the heavens and took my first taste of fruit. It felt cool sliding down my throat, cool and mild. Running my tongue over my teeth, I found that the fruit’s taste was piquant; a little like kiwi, yet smoother; all I could think to call it was red, that odd flavor peculiar to crimson gum drops or cheap jelly beans.
Wordlessly, I handed the husk to Neil Aaron, commander of the grounded Sagittarius IV. Solemnly he scooped out a dripping finger full of the pale orange pulp and deposited in his mouth, before passing the husk to Elizabeth. Jimmie finished the last of it, and after we’d all had a taste, we sat there, expectant, waiting for someone to keel over in agony—until the inherent ludicrousness of our situation made Reba giggle behind a hand pressed against her lips.
From their semi-hiding place in the tubers beyond our circle the ’lopes chittered, watching us with what seemed to be ’loper expectation.
Then Jimmie—clown prince of dieticians—rolled his eyes, stuck his tongue out until he could almost lick the cleft in his brown chin, and toppled over, laughing and drumming the flat grass with the heels of his booted feet. Even Elizabeth joined in the laughter, forgetting her Irish martyr act for a few minutes.
Our prolonged laughing fit scared the ’lopes; they took off en masse, kicking up billows of acrid dust with their powerful hind legs. By the time we looked in their direction, all we saw were upraised tails flailing madly, like a cat’s does when it tries to keep its balance. I recognized Penti, silly little thing, by the distinctive white daub on her tail.
Reba recognized her too. With a rare sardonic tone in her voice, she remarked, “That adolescent female’s been hanging around quite often...we must interest her.”
I knew what Reba meant by “We.” It wasn’t too long ago, just after we found our strength in the thin air of this new planet, that Reba and I had been playing Adam and Eve for real in the thicket. We’d been in there a long time, and when we finally looked around us, there was Penti watching us intently. No telling how long she’d been there. I thought it’d been funny, but Reba never saw the humor in that kind of thing.
Resting a hand on her waist, I said, “You must’ve been curious when you were a kid. Most of the ’lopes we see are young...Heidi, Baby Boy, Penti, Lucy, Mister...maybe the older ones know better, or just don’t care. Remember the autopsy you did on the one....”
“It was dead for who knows how long when Neil entered the thicket and saw it—”
“Next to the hole they’d dug for it?”
Reba’s cheeks colored deeply; I’d hit a nerve. She waited until the others drifted away from the circle, heading back for the ship, before saying, “We don’t know that they’d ‘dug’ a grave. They bury their excrement. No proof at all they’re capable of human-style burial. The size of their posterior fossa doesn’t bear it out. True, their cerebellum is fairly large, but their neuron count is way too low.” Reba’s eyes were glistening, and her breath was coming in short sharp gasps, as she concluded, “And the evidence of possible structural thought processes was minimal, at best...in other words, they can’t be intelligent enough to even want to bury their dead. Wanting would mean thinking—”
(Anger can make Reba so beautiful....)
Once more into the breech, into the breech again! Boredom led to the most pointless arguments, and boredom is something we have in ton lots. I chuckled, “What’s there to think about here? ’Sides, you’re using