“All around us. Throw a rock in any random direction and chances are you’ll hit one. I count at least thirty.”
Barath turned in a slow, deliberate circle, again seeing nothing but soggy deadfall. Or was he wrong? Over there, to his right: was that a telltale shifting in this place’s damnable patterns of light? “Why are they hiding?”
“Since I’ve been communicating with them all day long, I would hesitate to call it ‘hiding.’”
Barath’s claws twitched. “Why don’t they show themselves to me?”
“Perhaps they don’t like your attitude.”
“Mukh’than…”
“They’re empaths. They sense these things.”
“I can’t turn my emotions on and off like a power switch!”
“Then look at it this way,” Mukh’than said. “They’re shy people. They’ve dealt with my kind before. They even know me personally. But your people are rarer, here. You’re a mystery to them. And a formidable one: they don’t like your size, or the look of your claws and tusks.”
Barath sheathed his claws, sought a dry place to sit, and, finding none, lowered his armored rump into the mud. He could almost feel the parasites finding ways to get at the soft meat between his armor plates, but he was willing to put up with the discomfort as long as it tempered first impressions. “Tell them I don’t bite.”
Mukh’than produced some noises with his mouth and gestured with his fingertips.
Three Trivids appeared, passing from the unseen to the seen without any obvious transition. Thin, bony bipeds with sad, comical faces that reminded Barath of pie plates with beaks, they were taller than Barath had expected, towering a head and a half above Barath’s height at full neck-extension. They each strode in the precarious manner of bipeds like Human Beings and Riirgaans, and wore body paint designed to blend with the splintered wood around them. But they were less intimidating than they intended—so lean and pale, so hollow-eyed and melancholy—that Barath almost laughed out loud at the fear he had begun to feel. They were worse than Tchi; so malnourished that the sharpened staffs they carried at their sides looked less like spears carried by warriors and more like walking sticks carried by the disabled.
The three creatures were clearly the same species, but there were gross physical differences between them: a ridge of jagged flesh across the shoulders of one, a gaping maw in the chest of another, an array of tentacles dangling from the jaw of the third. Sexual differentiation, Barath guessed, remembering something Mukh’than had said about the Trivids possessing three genders. If so, this could be a mated group, and the tentacled one, heavy in its lower abdomen, might have been heavy with child.
None of which interested Barath as much as the rag doll the ridged one wore on a knotted cord around its neck.
It depicted a biped, like them, and for that matter, like Mukh’than: a head atop four limbs. There was no detail. But the proportions didn’t resemble theirs, or Mukh’than’s. The head was too big, the arms too short.
As a representation of one of their own, it was pitiful. As a representation of a Riirgaan, it was complimentary. As a representative of one of Barath’s people, it was insulting.
As a caricature of a human being, it was perfect.
Barath sat up a little straighter. “Mukh’than.”
“I see it.” The Riirgaan exchanged some pidgin sounds with the natives. “They say it’s a totem.”
“Where did they get it?”
More noises. “They say their human made it.”
Barath might have leaped to his feet at that, but his people, fierce as they could be in battle, had never been graceful risers. “They actually said human?”
“Clearly not. They don’t speak your tongue, my tongue, or the human tongue, Hom.Sap Mercantile. They said a word of their own invention, which I assume to mean Human. I’m not certain whether they see it as a category, a proper name, or a title. If you wish, I can come up with a subtler translation—”
“‘Human’s’ good enough. Introduce me. Tell them we’re happy to make their acquaintance and eager to see their human.”
Mukh’than obliged, listened to the jabber the natives offered in return, spoke some more, then turned his blank mask toward Barath and shook his head.
Barath’s hearts fell. The Human Being they sought was dead. They’d traveled all this way and the human was dead. The reward for his return would remain in the hands of the creature’s own people; Mukh’than would pocket his guide fee and return to his hovel in the jungle; and Barath would have to slog back up the river to the mine and continue working as beast of burden, trying to pay back the debt that had led him to such unpleasant labor in the first place. All because one human too old to care could not be bothered to keep his worthless heart beating long enough for somebody like Barath to come and claim him. “He’s dead?”
“He’s alive,” Mukh’than said. “And they say you can see him. But they also say they will not let us take him away.”
Our human has emotions and feelings that do not resonate to the same rhythm as our own. His feelings may not be outright painful to us—they do not prevent us from growing our food or raising our families; they do not make existence in his presence a torment—but they are, unmistakably, Other.
The Trivid village was a collection of mud and grass huts arrayed on an artificial island made of the same mud and dirt, supplemented with crisscrossed strips of cured frond. It was inhabited by maybe a hundred of the frail bipeds, including the thirty who had met Barath and Mukh’than in the jungle. At least a third of those who had stayed home were solemn-eyed young, who watched the off-worlders with a silence that could have indicated anything from awe to defiance. Few seemed to be doing work of any consequence. Several wore the human’s rag-doll image on knotted cords around their necks. All stood by and watched as the party from the woods led Barath and Mukh’than to a straw hut at the heart of the tiny community.
The villager guiding them jabbered at Mukh’than until the Riirgaan translated: “He says their human lives here. He says that their human is very old and very frail and doesn’t leave his hut very often. He hopes we will be kind to their human and understand his limitations.”
“Tell the Trivid whatever he wants to hear.”
After a few more moments of negotiation, the villager handed Mukh’than the handmade human totem from around his neck. The way was cleared, and both Barath and Mukh’than went inside.
The interior of the hut was dim and redolent with the stench of sickness and death. The dominant sound was the tortured wheezing of the emaciated figure lying on a wooden platform opposite the shrouded entranceway. The figure was indeed a human being, but not a human being of the sort Barath had encountered. Most of those had been young and robust, living on minimal sleep with maximum enthusiasm, enjoying exceptional health and vigor thanks to the treatments the mine owners leased from AIsource Medical. By contrast, this creature was even thinner than the natives outside and lacked even their vitality: he lay curled in a circle, one hand twitching, both eyes uncomprehending, his every breath a painful gasp, his skin disfigured by some kind of ugly skin-creases that seemed to have turned his face into a relief map of hilly terrain.
Barath felt repelled. “What are those?”
“Wrinkles. They happen to older humans. Their flesh starts to sag.”
It was one of the most alien things Barath had ever been told about the Hom.Saps, who he’d considered pretty disagreeable already. “I’ve seen hundreds of humans and never encountered this before.”