That seems like a profound flaw in outpost security, not to mention all the procedures designed to avoid non-contamination of the locals, but the outpost reminds me that this is all based on my past orders, which it is powerless to disobey. Do I sense a tone of reproach? I wouldn’t be surprised.
But, yes, I did tell it that. One of my many lapses of judgment. Be alone enough, let your emotions out of the box enough, you’re going to make some poor calls. And if the Corps would just come back for me, I’d take the rapped knuckles. But they haven’t. Which, after that much time, very likely means that they won’t. Ever.
I hear the great hollow vacancy where my depression should be, if it wasn’t locked away. These are the thoughts that lead me down dark paths. I need to find something positive to think about, and apparently there are some locals who’ve come up the mountain. Perhaps they’ve brought offerings or gifts. Perhaps they’re going to try to kill me or something. They are barbarous creatures after all. It will, in any event, be a diversion.
Before descending to the base of the outpost to meet with them, I check over the security diagnostics: more than equal to any attempt to harm me using known local technology. Of course, some of my involvement with the locals has revolved around when they got hold of old colonial-era tech, much of which remains buried about the planet wherever the original pioneers left it. The locals themselves maintain a post-tech society, but the old tech rates highly for ease-of-use, and historically those who uncover working remnants are not slow in finding ways to use perfectly innocent tools as weapons.
If these visitors have something like that, then the outpost systems may have to work a little harder to protect me. I examine how I feel about that. I feel nothing about it, which is precisely the downside with relying on DCS routines to shield me from my emotional responses. Theoretically I should be making better judgment calls without my animal half tugging me around in its teeth, but that same animal half is responsible for giving me my priorities. Right now I can make the decision, entirely rationally, that if the savages kill me with salvaged old Earth tech, that’s just a thing that will have happened.
Descending in the elevator, I am very aware of all the sad I am not feeling, how lonely and lost I don’t care that I am, and how trivial it is that I am utterly cut off from the civilization that gave rise to me, and anyone who might know or care who Nyr Illim Tevitch is. Yes, all these things are inconsequential and I don’t have to feel them. I just peek into their cage and watch them looking up at me hungrily, waiting to be fed.
And then I am striding out into the base of the outpost, ready to confront the barbarian horde. But there are only two of them, two women. One of them is familiar. I stop, because I am getting a great deal of information from my locked-off emotional state, which has had a change of heart. Positive things. It hardly seems likely, but apparently I’m feeling good about something.
I disable the DCS and sip at my emotions, feeling a dizzying whirl of fondness, happy nostalgia, the onrush of memories that previously were just data and are now recalled experience. How we fought! How we rode together, where the fighting was thickest. I remember coordinating with the satellite to bring her word of her enemies’ movements. I remember dusting off the equipment locker and going into battle—into battle, me, the anthropologist!—at her side. I could have stayed. I almost stayed with her, and grew old and died. A woman of a primitive culture who could never have understood what I am, and yet magnificent, radiant. And I had been alone for so long by then.
With my DCS hat on, it’s clear that I suffered multiple lapses of professional judgment when I met her last. I should put that hat on again, to stop me suffering more of them, but I am just looking at her and remembering how good it was, to have company and not be alone for a while. Even company of a different culture, virtually a different species. It’s always a shock, when I look on them the first time after waking. I forget how their stock and mine have diverged since the first colony ships left Earth. She is closer to baseline than I, but then the second great rise of Earth culture was one of grandiose ambitions and a refusal to accept limits, even the limits of human form. I am much altered from my ancestors, within and without, and these post-colonial natives have changed little.
But I stride forwards, feeling all these good things, and I remember the correct form of address.
“Astresse Regent, welcome again to my home!” No handshakes or clasped shoulders or physical contact, not yet, not casually, because I recall that as a cultural taboo—a people who save such things for when they have meaning. Just an open hand to signify peace, arms wide to signify trust.
And silence. Awkward silence. I stand there, with those wide arms, and the two women stare at me. I am again reminded how different I look from their kind: I am a head taller than either of them. And there are the horns.
I have a lot of complex instrumentation in them. They are useful augmentations to the natural human state. But I am anthropologist enough to know that Earth Resurgent adopted the modifications primarily as a display affectation, one which has in the past caused some alarm amongst the locals here.
That is not the sole reason for their being taken aback, however.
“Astresse,” says Astresse slowly. “Astresse Once Regent was my great-grandmother, Nyrgoth Elder.”
I stare at them. All those happy memories have lost their colour, all at once. I clutch for them, but they are like sand, gritty and abrasive. Sand under the eyelids. Sand in the mind. And of course she is dead. The outpost reported dates and times faithfully. If I had been thinking properly, I’d have been fortified against the revelation, not even have made the mistake in the first place. It has been well over a century, at least twenty-five of the locals’ long years, their “Storm-seasons,” as they call the dual-lunar cycle of climatic chaos that sweeps this world. Astresse, at whose side I rode to war in the most absurd and glorious venture of all my long years, has been dust for generations.
I force myself to re-establish the DCS, distancing me from the fresh wave of despair about to crash down on me. It is almost more than I can manage. Part of me just wants to give up, at that point. But seeing this girl, this stranger, gave me such hopes.
And now I am rational again, and all that nonsense is locked away, and I compose my face and look sternly at the pair of them, constructing my sentences in the local dialect, whose roots to old Earth languages I painstakingly dissected centuries before.
“Why are you here?” I ask, or at least that’s the sense I’m aiming at. The locals’ speech is ornate and filled with qualifiers and conditionals, so perhaps it comes out a little fancier than I intend.
Lynesse