With Amber Tears, a novel by Jilly Paddock

With Amber Tears

by Jilly Paddock

Chapter Three: Proud, Dark and Barbaric

We spent a whole week in orbit around Lysseya and learned little more than the data gleaned by that first and ill-fated survey team. The world was a hot, arid wilderness with a small catalogue of beautifully-adapted animals and plants, enough to gladden any life-scientist's heart. There were towns, for the most part small and far apart. The natives practised limited agriculture in the steep-sided mountain valleys and around the oases in the scrub-desert, and we even detected precious metals, in trace amounts in the man-made lagoons that were the only large stretches of open water on the surface. One surprise was the solitary spaceport, a strange construction to find on an alien-fearing world, although it was hidden in a curve of mountains, as if the Lysseyans were rather embarrassed by its existence. It did look little used and there were no ships down when we scanned it. You can only learn so much about a race by studying their lands and we had to finally resort to sending down a robot probe to spy out the strange peoples of the forbidden world.
Anna, I snapped out of doze at Zenni's call. It's dusk down there and the natives are beginning to stir.
Sensible, I leaned over the screen. If I lived in a climate that roasted my skin off during the day, I'd prefer to be nocturnal.
Our probe had lodged in the angle of a palm-fibre thatched roof and we looked down into the dusty square at the heart of a village. Zenni altered the controls to give a picture that might have been shot in daylight instead of the smoky dusk and we watched the Lysseyans pass by.
They were a beautiful people: skins coal-black and glossy, as if they had been oiled, tall and well-formed, not very different to the average Terran despite the deprivation of their harsh environment. Their hair was a uniform black, worn long and straight, although many of those who passed had dyed patches of their head-hair or beards, with shades of red and metallic hues predominating. Their dress was simple and loose; shifts, cloaks or pieces of cloth wound round their bodies in folds and drapes. They seemed to have a passion for ornament, with bands and chains of metal on every available limb, plain and gemmed rings around finger and toe, circles and studs of worked gold and silver threaded through pierced flesh of ear, cheek or nose, and beads and metallic cords knotted about necks and woven into hair. All of the adults we saw carried weapons, men and women both with thin, ornate knives or carved wooden staves.
A tall warrior race, proud, dark and barbaric, I quoted from the tales I'd read in my youth. They don't look particularly savage but the rest of the description is right.
Except for one thing - they aren't telepaths.
Correct. There isn't one grain of talent anywhere in that village, I sighed. This gets us nowhere, Zenni. We could watch them for years and learn nothing. I need to go down there.
Remember their xenophobia. That's fact, not your pretty fiction. White skin and yellow hair - they'd probably kill you on sight.
I could pass as a native using psionic illusion.
Until you opened your mouth.
I shrugged. Can we move the probe?
Sure, Zenni jiggled it carefully free of the roof and into the air. Against the night sky its matt bulk would be all but invisible. We skimmed over the village and sped out across the desert. At one point we flew by a line of native men walking towards the settlement, each heavily laden with a bulky pack and singing an unpitched droning dirge as they trudged over the cooling sands.
No carts or beasts of burden, Zenni observed. I know that Lysseya doesn't have any native large herbivores, but there must be an easier way to transport goods.
Someone could make their fortune here importing camels, I suggested, more than half-seriously.
These people are a paradox. They obviously have a high-level of craft skills and they certainly know about our kind of technology, yet they choose to live a primitive, nomadic life. It makes no sense.
Maybe they like it that way. I'm not sure I'd wish Earth's society onto anyone, not even a consenting adult, I peered at the horizon on the screen. Slow down, Zenni. It looks like we're coming to some more people.
It was what we called an oasis back home, a muddy pit of water and a few brave trees. Around it were about ten lumpy structures, tents of thick cloth, stark white against the sand. Zenni brought the probe to rest in a fork in one of the misshapen trees and we surveyed the encampment. Most of the tent-dwellers were tending their poor crops on the far side of the water but a few were near the cooking fire. One small figure detached itself from the group and followed the well-trodden path down to the oasis. It passed our tree, a small girl-child carrying a pot, vanishing between the scraggy bushes that clung to the pool's edge. As she passed by, the decision froze into being within me.
Where is that settlement? I asked, casually.
For once Zenni didn't outguess me and I saw the numbers flash through his thought levels, the complex system of co-ordinates that he was trying to make as much second nature to me as they were to him. He put up a map on one of the secondary screens and starred the target. There, Anna. Is it important?
I shunned the power-link between us and teleported on my own, landing in the bushes. Thorny twigs scratched at my legs. At the rustle that announced my arrival the girl-child spun around. The gourd fell from her fingers as her hands flew to her face, hiding the slack mouth. Her eyes were like white marbles, lids stretched so wide that her irises were small black smudges circled around by chalk. Before she could scream, I caught her narrow shoulders and snatched her up to Firebird.
“Anna!” Zenni cried aloud, panic in his voice.
The Lysseyan girl screamed and turned to run from me. I reached deep into her immature mind and, before I had a chance to consider what I was doing and whether it was ethical to do it, I'd snapped her into trance. She folded under my hands and I only just caught her before she fell. I lifted her into the couch and her body was so light under the dusty brown shift that her bones might have been hollow. If she had been Terran I would have judged her to be about ten years old, although her ebony face looked vulnerable and far younger in the sleep-state I had consigned her to.
“Anna!" Zenni still sounded shaken. Sometimes you frighten even me! That little trick isn't in our repertoire. You shouldn't try things like that unpractised - you might have harmed her. Whatever possessed you to kidnap her in the first place?
I need to know her language, culture and customs. I thought that this would be the quickest and best way to learn.
It was stupid of you to go down to the surface without any preparation or planning, Zenni scolded. It was an unnecessary risk. Don't you think it was a little extreme to satisfy a passing whim?
The inspiration came to me and I went with the flow. It felt so right. I don't think you ought to bawl me out for following my whims; my precog might be hit or miss but it hasn't been totally misleading up to now.
Anna, you still act like a spoilt child at times...
Leave it, partner. Let's scan her. I'm not sure how long she'll stay under.
It's morally suspect to probe the thoughts of a sentient being without their consent, Zenni muttered.
I had my suspicions that the annoyance concealed his fear for my safety. Since when were you programmed to adhere to moral codes? I demanded. You know that we won't hurt her. C'mon, mesh closer.
If Zenni had owned a pair of shoulders he would have shrugged them as he gave in, and the tendrils of his mind slid over mine. The partial link that was always with us was but a shadow of this total fusing, a submerging of our duality in a union that was too intense to share for long, so that we only used it for rapid information input or combat. The feel of the Zenith's mind was inhuman and somehow sharp and hard, clear and ultra-fast, with an overlay of warmth that was far from mechanical. Emotion and intuition had been my gift to the partnership, along with a mobile pair of hands and the particularly unpleasant streak of black humour that was all my own. We probed the young mind deftly, turning through the pages of her memory and gleaning the knowledge we needed. Since Zenni read and remembered faster than I did, I acted as a medium, content to gather snippets while he digested the whole. It was a novel experience to be able to work freely within her brain and find no resistance. When Zenni whispered that we were done, I erased the fear-etched recollection of her abduction, flinching as I saw her image of me as a monstrous, white devil.
“Break,” I said aloud and felt Zenni back away as we became two halves once more. I'll take her back now.
I gathered her up, such a fragile bundle, and teleported, turning her away from me and setting her down at the edge of the oasis before breaking her trance. Pressing back into the tree's shadow, I watched her shake her head and bend to recover the fallen gourd, then I skipped back to Firebird's flight-deck.
“When will you return to the surface?” Zenni spoke in the sibilant Lysseye tongue.
“Tomorrow at suns-set. I'll pay a visit to their largest town.”
“Not bad, but you could use some practise on the extended vowels,” Zenni chuckled. “I hope you're going to rest before you go leaping into action.”
“Yes, nanny!” I turned towards the galley in search of a large enough meal to make me sleepy. “And you needn't act so smug, just because you've got a vocal synthesiser and one hundred percent recall!”
If a machine could grin he would have. “Bon appetit, Anna!”

Back to the Kitchen .