“A teacher? Really?” Jordan realized that he hadn’t seen any children in the city. Not one.
“Yes.”
“Can you teach me your language?”
She smiled. “It’s very different from yours. We use different tones, different parts of the vocal organ.”
“Would it be very difficult to teach me?”
“It might be,” Aditi said, her face growing serious. “The most arduous part of learning is preparing the mind to accept new knowledge.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Would you like to see more of the city? The farms, the orchards, they’re quite lovely.”
Jordan felt she was changing the subject, but he nodded readily. “I’d be happy to have you show them to me.”
“Good,” said Aditi. “First thing tomorrow.”
At last they finished the meal with cups of a brew very much like coffee. Jordan bade a reluctant good night to Aditi and Adri, then he and his brother made their way back to their quarters.
“No dessert,” Brandon noted.
“So they’re not trying to fatten us up for the slaughter,” said Jordan.
“From what Adri told me, they don’t slaughter meat animals. The grow their meat in biovats, just as we do on the ship.”
Jordan nodded. “Makes sense. Why raise an animal just to kill it when you can grow the same meat from a culture of a few cells?”
They entered their suite. Jordan popped his phone open and called up to the ship. Trish Wanamaker’s chunky face appeared on the wall screen.
“Where’s Thornberry?” Jordan asked.
“Sleeping, I guess. He’s been at this station all day, just about. I’ve taken over the night shift.”
“I see. Well, we’ve had a pleasant dinner with our new friends and now we’re going to retire. I’ll turn off the phones, but I’ll call you when we awake.”
Wanamaker looked troubled. “Geoff won’t like that.”
“I know. We’ve been through all that. Geoff will just have to accept it.”
With a shrug, Wanamaker said, “You’re the boss.”
“Good night, Trish.”
“Good night, boss.”
Her image winked off and Jordan clicked his phone’s power button. Brandon pulled his phone from his shirt pocket and did the same.
“No alcoholic beverages,” Brandon observed as he went to the sofa and plopped down on it.
“That drink they served with dinner wasn’t bad, though,” he said to his brother.
“I wonder why they didn’t serve us the wine that Adri told us they make?”
Jordan shrugged. “Perhaps they didn’t want us to get sloshed our first night here.”
Brandon grinned at him. “It’s been a helluva day, hasn’t it?”
“Indeed it has.”
“Do you think Hazzard’s right? Are we in any danger here? Should we be on our guard?”
Jordan eased himself down onto the armchair nearest the sofa. “We’re in the lions’ den, Bran. If they harbor evil intentions we’ll know about it soon enough.”
“They’ve got a high technology. Higher than ours, with their bioengineered animals and energy domes.”
“And a lot more, I’m sure.”
Leaning forward intently, Brandon said, “I get the feeling that they expected us. They knew we were coming.”
“Well, they did set up the laser beacon to attract us.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I think they expected us to send a ship here. They probably tracked us all the way from Earth.”
“Really?”
“They’ve been studying us, Jordy. For god knows how long. They’ve learned our language, they know where we’ve come from. It’s like they expected us.”
“They could have learned a lot by tapping into our radio and video broadcasts, I suppose. And the webs, of course.”
“Why? Why would they do that?”
“Why not? They’re as intelligent as we are. We sent probes to this planet before our mission was launched. Of course they knew about us, expected us.”
“But why didn’t they try to contact us? If they can pick up our radio and video, why didn’t they call us?”
“I’ll have to ask Adri about that.”
Brandon shook his head. “It’s all just too damned convenient. A planet just like Earth. Human beings. We can breathe their air and eat their foods. It’s uncanny. It gives me the creeps, kind of.”
Jordan said nothing.
“Tell me the truth, Jordy: doesn’t all this bother you? Doesn’t it worry you?”
Jordan thought about it as he looked into his brother’s troubled eyes, and found that the truth startled him. “Bran, the truth is that I feel as if I’ve just arrived home.”
Rebellion
Jordan awoke and stared at the ceiling for long, languorous moments. Morning sunlight slanted through the room’s one window. A bird—a winged creature about the size of a hummingbird with feathers gleaming like jewels—was flitting back and forth up near the ceiling. Bug catcher? Jordan wondered.
His bed was one of the most comfortable he’d ever slept in; it seemed to mold itself to his body shape. He knew he had dreamt, but he couldn’t remember what his dreams were about. Probably better that way, he thought.
He rose, showered, then shaved with implements neatly laid out on the bathroom cabinet top. His pencil-thin mustache seemed a bit less ragged than it had appeared a few days ago.
Three ankle-length robes hung in the bedroom closet, all in the same bluish gray tone. Underwear in the bureau drawer, together with slipper socks that had padded soles. They all fit reasonably well, although the underpants felt looser than Jordan would have preferred. So they know my approximate size, he thought, but not my precise preferences.
Brandon was already in the sitting room, wearing his own slacks and wrinkled shirt from the day before, in thoughtful conversation with Paul Longyear.
“It’s just plain impossible,” the lean-faced biologist was saying. “I spent half the night running a statistical analysis of the likelihood of a biosphere being so exactly like Earth, and the program kept blowing up in my face. Everything goes to infinity! It’s just impossible!”
Brandon made a sour face at the image on the wall screen. “Paul, you know there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. It doesn’t matter what the computer program says, the planet is here. It exists.”
“How can it be so much like Earth?”
“Maybe Earthlike planets are commonplace. For all we know—”
“Come on, Brandon,” Longyear interrupted. “Out of the thousands of exoplanets that have been discovered, this one individual planet is a duplicate of Earth. An exact duplicate!”
“Not entirely exact,” Brandon said.
“With human beings living on it!”
Jordan had never seen the normally imperturbable, stolid Longyear so worked up. His hair, normally braided in a neat queue, looked frayed, hanging down over his shoulders in careless disarray. His dark eyes glittered with suspicion. Or is it fear? Jordan asked himself. Fear of the unknown. Fear that we’re finding ourselves pretty ignorant, compared to Adri’s people.
“It exists,” Brandon repeated. “It’s real, no matter what the theories or the statistics may say.”
“Have you considered,” Longyear said slowly, as if trying to calm himself, “that everything you’re seeing is an illusion? A trick? Maybe they can manipulate your senses so that you see what they want you to see.”
Brandon rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. Then, “Listen, Paul. The food I ate last night wasn’t an illusion. It gave me a gas attack. I’ve been burping and farting all damned night.”
Jordan laughed aloud as his brother abruptly ended the link and Longyear’s image on the wall screen winked off.