Then he turned awkwardly—all of his parts moving at once, like a hanged man twisting on a rope—to Harry. "To answer your question," he said in that same buzzy, mechanical tone, "we are the Group. It is known that formerly you were organic. Therefore please do not address us except in case of urgent need."
That made me cut in. "I have an urgent need," I said. "I need to know exactly what we're supposed to do on this planet."
The Kugel turned back to me in the same marionette way. To answer, I thought. I was wrong about that. He stared at me for a moment out of those oddly lifeless eyes, and then the image slowly fell apart and disappeared.
I looked at Harry and Harry looked at me. I said, "I guess we don't get any real instructions from them either, do we?"
He shrugged. "Anyway, we can try to find the place where I was stranded," he said, apparently pleased by the prospect.
Which was more than I was. I had no great interest in seeing a place where something had once been true, but wasn't true anymore. It did not seem enough of a reason to justify flying seventy thousand light-years.
IV
After the lander had separated from the spacecraft we had left in orbit, it took more than eighteen minutes, as the organics count, for us to get down to the surface. That's a very long time. I have prepared actual, physical meals for three thousand people, many of them from scratch, in a lot less than that. It would have been plenty of time for a group of new-met shipmates to get to know each other better—swapping stories, chatting about the mission, just going about establishing a friendly relationship.
It wasn't that way with the Kugel....
Well, let's get our nomenclature straight. Probably it would be more accurate for me to say with the Kugels, plural, because there was a vast number of them buzzing around inside their containment—millions at least, maybe many times that. But what we saw didn't look like millions of anything. The Kugels chose to display themselves to us as a single more or less hominid person—that is, they did when they chose to display themselves at all, which wasn't very much of the time. When the stick figure had nothing more the Kugels wished to communicate, he simply turned raggedy, evaporated and then was gone. When I asked a question, provided it was a question about such physical things as the internal workings of the lander, the figure slowly congealed again long enough to answer, then dissipated again. Other questions—such as, "Can you tell us, Group, what it is that you expect to accomplish on Arabella?"—the Kugels simply ignored, even if they came from me. Questions from Harry, that former organic, they never responded to at all.
"Interminable" wasn't quite the right word for our descent. It did ultimately terminate.
The only way I could tell that we had landed was when my instrumentation recorded an increase of weight not due to any movement of our vehicle, about eighty percent of Earth normal. The lander shuddered a bit, then was still.
We had arrived.
I saw no point in delaying what we had come to do, so I promptly sent out an exploring pattern. A moment later Harry followed.
We had landed on the sunlit side of Arabella, but it was quite gloomy. It appeared we had arrived in the midst of what I immediately recognized, from the datastores I had accessed, as a rainstorm.
If there was any animal life left in this part of the planet it was not in sight—hiding in burrows, perhaps, to avoid the pelting rain. It was rather chilly by the standards of what I knew of temperate Earth climates, at about 277 kelvins, and there was a vivid electrical display lancing through the clouds overhead.
Beside me Harry was shivering—purely for psychological reasons, of course, since he was no more affected by changes in the physical environment than I. "Does anything look familiar?" I asked.
He shook his head dismally. "Never been here before in my life."
"But of course you have, Harry," I said, gently correcting him. "This is Arabella. You spent forty-five organic years on this planet, and you surely have not forgotten."
He gave me a rebellious look. "I haven't forgotten one goddamn second of that time, but what makes you think I've ever been in this part of Arabella before? It's a whole damn planet, isn't it? And, remember, we didn't have an aircraft to ferry us around. How much of it do you think we visited on foot?"
That startled me. For the first time in our relationship there was a question on which Harry was right and I wrong. It was not an experience I was accustomed to, or liked. I said humbly, "I'm sorry, Harry. Don't you recognize anything at all?"
He didn't rub it in. He simply gestured at a small copse of trees, or treelike organisms, a few dozen meters away. "I know what those are. You can eat the leaves of those things when they first come out," he said. "Later on, no, because they'll make you real sick. Bertha pretty near died when she tried them."
"So you do recognize something?"
He looked at me with weary scorn. "I said I recognized the trees. The trees are the same kind, Markie, but this isn't the same place. Where I was there were lots more of them. It was a real forest, hundreds of square kilometers of the things. When the leaves first came into season in the spring, boy, we really stuffed ourselves."
Harry was grinning, as though it brought back happy memories. Perhaps it did. For Harry and the other castaways, any time they could fill their bellies must have been a happy time. I pressed him, pointing to a largish mountain chain off on the horizon, swallowed up in cloud in the optical frequencies but clearly visible in microwave. "What about those hills?" I asked.
He looked at them without enthusiasm, then shook his head. "I dunno, Markie. I don't think so. Maybe if we could see what's on the other side of them?"
"No problem," I said, and relocated our patterns to the top of the highest visible mountain. The storm was even worse there, with many electrical discharges and a good deal of precipitation. The difference was that what was coming down was hexagonal crystals of water in its solid phase—the stuff that is called snow. Still, the site had its advantages. From the hilltop we could see more than a hundred kilometers to the horizon. One of the nearest peaks had a chopped-off top, with a crater lake inside—once a volcano, but apparently not currently an active one. Another lake, much larger, was in the distance, with a broad, sluggish river flowing into it through marshes and stands of reeds. It looked to me as though those would make it easy to identify. "Anything, Harry?" I asked.
He winced as one of those electrical discharges grounded no more than two hundred meters from us, then shook his head again. "There were swamps like that near the caves. We spent a lot of time there because we could catch bugs and kind of shrimp things in the water. My God, they tasted lousy," he added, wrinkling his nose in distaste, "but they were pretty near all we had to eat in the cold weather. And, listen, there wasn't any lake like that one there, either."
I sighed. "All right, let's try over there."
So we did. And then we tried another place, and another still. And then, at about the ninth or tenth try, the misshapen form of the Kugels congealed beside us. "There is nothing here of interest," he—they—announced. "We have a question to ask."