Читать книгу Human's Burden - Damien Broderick - Страница 5

ALIENS

The aliens stank, even from all the way across the clearing. And they were making a really terrible noise.

They sang out at the top of their voices with shrieking gusto, and the vented gases that puffed from the slots in their snouts smelled vile. Jack Wong watched the aliens cavort about, working themselves into a hot frenzy. The sweat glands under their tails sent a fetid stench billowing toward him.

Whatever they were cooking over the red and yellow fire was rotten, and green maggots crawled hastily out of it before crisping and falling into the flames, but the aliens didn’t care. Two of them stood in the heat turning the decayed carcass on a spit, and drool fell from their slimy snouts to spit and hiss in the fire.

“I’m going to puke,” Jack said, trying to breathe through his mouth. He had his fingers clamped over his nose. It didn’t help much; he could still smell the foul thing they were roasting in the roaring fire. Whatever it had been when it was alive, it had been dead far too long. He’d seen it hanging from a hook in the hot sunlight all this last week, and he had a revolted feeling they were going to make him eat some of it, once it was cooked.

An offering to their new god.

“If you are going to be sick, Jack,” his on-board AI said sternly, “try not to get any inside your suit.”

Jack shuddered. Even with his helmet open, it would be messy. No easy way to clean up vomit. He gulped hard and tried not to think about how nauseated he felt.

“Any signal from the rescue detail yet?” he asked the Machiavellian intelligence. He could hear the whine in his own voice, and it made him angry. He was an interstellar cadet, after all, not a sniveling adolescent. He’d turned nineteen years old a month ago, and he was a fully trained pod pilot, holding the Unified Academy rank of Cadet Master Chief Petty Officer. It was hardly his fault the Arcturus wormhole had belched at the wrong moment and hurled his pod halfway across the galaxy, or wherever the hell he was now, and dropped him here on some planet nobody had ever—

“Sir, you will certainly be the first to know if I detect a response to our emergency signal.” The system was not being sarcastic; Jack was convinced the AI had zero sense of humor. Not that his own was in full running order right now. Stuck here on a disgusting alien planet with a barely breathable atmosphere and an AI that acted like a prissy nanny, the sort he and his sister Gillian had shared when they were kids in the General Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde Salgado Pardo de Andrade Memorial Kindergarten. That seemed a very long time ago. Now Gillian was an expert alien anthropologist.

Jack’s neck was itching horribly. His gloved fingers were too thick to fit inside the opening of his helmet, but he couldn’t take the gloves off without shucking his entire suit. He prodded at the rash under the edge of his helmet with a dry purple stick that had fallen from a tree resembling a giant anteater. The living branches of the tree, or maybe it was a bush, had in fact been swaying back and forth, scooping up and eating slow creatures that might have been rather large ants.

As he delved under the helmet, the purple stick hit a particularly sensitive scab and its end snapped off, tumbled down into the back of his suit and jammed itself there, jabbing his prickling skin. Oh, great. He’d started with an itch he couldn’t scratch, and now as a bonus he had a sharp pain halfway down his spine from the broken stick. Jack said a word prohibited on 53 worlds, and threw the rest of the twig back on the messy floor of his cell. Or his hut, or his shrine, or whatever the superstitious aliens thought it was.

“Your cortisol stress levels are rising again, Jack. Perhaps you should lie down for a while and do some math homework. Here, I will run off some ballistic curves for you to study.”

A series of bright lines sprang into place in Jack’s left eye, projected from the AI perched on the back on his suit. A list of delta-vee equations ran down beside the crisscrossing lines. He knew what they were, he wasn’t a complete fool, after all. Delta-vee, that was...that was— That was change of velocity, of course it was, a very important thing to have mastered when you were trying to pilot a lost pod that had tumbled with hardly any anti-gravitino fuel toward an unknown planet in the middle of nowhere. He blinked angrily, shutting off the education display.

“For the love of sanity, Mac! They’re about to roast me alive, and you expect me to think about class?”

“If you had paid more attention to your lessons, sir,” the AI said patiently, “we might not be in this difficult situation now.”

“I knew it!” The cadet lurched back to his feet, furious and indignant. “You’re blaming me for getting the wormhole insertion wrong! You did the calculations!”

“You, however, are the human space cadet, sir.” Jack could never win an argument with the machine. It had, after all, a mind like a computer. “The responsibility is ultimately yours, sir,” the Mac was saying. “I am no more than your assistant and lowly tutor.”

“Ha!” And goddam nanny. And, on this world, translator. The Mac had analyzed the aliens’ local dialect within minutes of their crash landing, and could bleat and bark back at them with all the ease of a native speaker. Of course the machine got some of the words wrong, and left a few more out altogether. It is hard for a human to understand an alien, and just as hard for an alien to see what a human is trying to say, even with an effective translating AI as your go-between.

Jack knew this much: The stenchy aliens thought he was a god. He just hoped that he wasn’t the sort of god that worshippers put to death. If only he had advice from Dr. Fisherking. Or his best friend in the Academy, fellow cMaster Chief Rufus Rupert Trevor Dogge. Or Cadet Ensign Hortense Jones. She’d know what to do, with her being so smart and all. Even given the mess he was in, that whole thing with Jones’ rank still stuck in his craw.

He swallowed with a gulp. In the whole universe, Jack Wong was probably the hungriest god in captivity. And the most frightened.

∞

Ten days earlier, he’d managed to drag his pod onto circular orbit around this torrid jungle planet that baked just a little too close to its hot bluish sun. Well, actually it was the artificial intelligence system who’d done the most boring parts of piloting their way onto orbit, but that’s what it was for, after all. Jack spent a full day and a half spinning around the planet, finding out as much as he could at long range about the world’s geography, ecology and especially its dominant life form. Its native inhabitants were aliens, of course, because no human had ever come this way before. Chances were, given how horribly lost he and the pod were, none ever would again. A couple of times he’d found himself weeping, and once he just broke down in a fit of shivering terror. The AI pulled him out of it each time, with its eerie calm tones.

The pod’s automatics broke out a series of excellent instruments from the hull, and pointed them at the whirling hot planet, sucking in data that the system patiently stored and sorted into files that only a machine could care about. His polariton telescope brought him vivid images of the small shifting settlements where the native aliens lived. There were many different kinds of habitat, of course, because a world is a large place. Still, he detected no radio messages, no hints of power generation or even large-scale water irrigation and dams, or roads, or wheeled carriages. The swarming vegetation of the planetary jungle seemed to have closed out some of those options. Jack realized—recalling his history lessons in the Academy—that unless some external influence came into the picture, this world’s intelligent inhabitants would need to wait for a change of climate before they built their Romes, their Babylons, their Jerichos. An ice age or two, that’s what they needed. Jack had squinted at the glaring bluish star that was their sun. Not much chance of that.

Under normal circumstances, Jack Wong would have been studying to act as just that external influence. No doubt about it, from the time he’d graduated from Paul Joseph Goebbels High School at the age of seventeen, he’d been getting ready to share in the greatest and grandest adventure humankind had ever seen. He would follow Earth Culture’s great Primary Heuristic: Wherever possible, find the weak spot in an alien civilization and interfere as much as possible for the benefit of humanity. Deliberate imperial intervention was the name of the game. Humans, luckily, had found the methods of science and correct psychology centuries ago, and it was their duty—his duty, in this case—to carry this wonderful knowledge across the galaxy to all the beings who lacked it, and bring them into the imperium, kicking and screaming if need be. Wiping them out entirely was frowned on these days.

Imperial Earth Culture had been spreading through the galaxy for more than two centuries, following prospector Amanda Bufon’s discovery of the first known wormhole in the asteroid belt, on the far side of Mars and nearly to Jupiter. That’s where the Academy was located nowadays, in a grand set of habitat bubbles just a thousand kilometers from Wormhole One. Jack had spent happy teenage years there, getting his spacelegs, learning how Earth Culture was welding the universe into a league of peaceful species. So far they had never found a civilization quite as advanced as Earth’s, though a few had space travel and powerful weapons. Artful negotiation for trading rights had done the trick in nearly every case—there hadn’t been need for a genocidal war, Jack’s instructors told him proudly, for more than a hundred years.

Whirling lost and confused above the unknown planet in his pod, Jack Wong had kept his head. With the AI system’s help, he readied a swarm of spy probes disguised to resemble a local insect. Ugly things, he thought with a shudder, but then suppressed his reaction. He was the visitor here, even if he hadn’t planned to be. It was up to him to fit in, for the moment. However horrible the local life forms seemed, Earth Culture lore had taught him, he was to take a deep breath and step forth boldly to greet them as a leader and adviser. This was his proud duty as a human being from Earth. By comparison with some of these backward aliens he was almost a god, but he shouldn’t let it go to his head. The Primary Heuristic was the guiding principle of the empire.

Jack Wong fired the myriad tiny probes into the atmosphere. They dispersed, humming to themselves. Quite soon they sent back a great supply of local sights and sounds to the pod’s AI system, and it was the work of only an hour or two for the machine to select a suitable continent, listen to the weird screeches and bubblings the aliens used as a language, and crack the basics of its vocabulary and grammar. By the time Jack Wong had got up enough nerve to go down to the surface, his translating module was ready for service, awaiting only a fine tuning for the local dialect. Just as well, he’d told himself with a wry grin. He certainly couldn’t have made any sense of the jibber-jabber by himself.

He’d landed his pod in the early morning, so most of the aliens were up and about, getting ready for a day’s hunting and gathering. The pod came down in a clearing off to one side of the village, blasting brush and purple roots and rocks with the hot flame of the landing venturis. Luckily the jungle vegetation was wet with the clinging humidity of the whole planet, except for the cooler poles of course, so no major fires were started. Several sad cases were on record of Earth Culture spacecraft incinerating the first village they tried to contact, so now foam fire extinguishers were standard fitting on all landers.

Jack Wong had climbed free of his landing web and activated the outside cameras and microphones. In his viewing screen, aliens were swarming toward the pod, shouting to each other and gesticulating wildly. At a cautious distance, they ground to a halt, consulting with each other in a shrieking babble. The noise set Jack’s teeth on edge. One or two held primitive weapons they’d been carrying when the pod came crashing down, but none of them appeared to be menacing the craft.

Oh well. He might be lost thousands of light years from home, but this was the job he was in training to do. Heart swelling with a mixture of pride and sheer terror, he said aloud, “I’ll have the suit now, thanks.”

“You feel quite ready to go outside?” the AI system asked him. “There’s no rush, you know.”

Jack’s stomach jumped. “You haven’t had a signal from—?”

Regretfully, the AI told him, “No. I am still unable to establish contact with the empire. I will keep trying. Meanwhile, you should feel under no obligation to leave the safety of this pod. You could continue your ballistic lessons from the comfort of your—”

“No, no,” Jack said hastily. “Really, it’s my duty to make First Contact with these people. I’ll have the suit, thanks.”

It took several minutes of bending and twisting to get into the rigid frame of the protective garment. His right foot started to itch just between the big toe and its neighbor the moment he closed the final seal. Jack took a deep breath, opened the airlock, stepped outside onto the scorched ground.

A muffled muttering spread among the aliens, then screams and shrieks, and they fell down on their faces before him.

“Oh my god!” Appalled, Jack Wong took a step back, pressed against the warm hull. His very presence had killed them all! The aliens lay stretched out in front of him like swatted flies. No, they weren’t dead yet, a twitch or two and the blink of a beady eye proved they were still alive. He sagged in relief, then stiffened again in fresh panic. What had he done to cause this? Everything he’d learned in months of Contact training deserted him. The aliens stayed where they were, heads down and tails up, and they moaned. A silly giggle caught in Jack’s throat, but he sternly forced it down. This was no time for laughter. He had no idea what to do. Not the faintest clue.

“I’m coming back in,” he told the pod.

“Not advisable,” said the Mac, his suit’s on-board AI and translator. Its voice was slightly deeper than the pod’s AI system, to which it was connected. “You have been neglecting your studies, sir. If you had paid closer attention during the lesson on Alien species, Obeisance of, you would know exactly what to do.”

Jack’s consternation grew. “Obey what?” he squeaked.

“Obeisance,” the Mac repeated. “Oh-bay-zance,” it added more slowly, emphasizing each part of the unfamiliar word. “It means a submissive gesture of respect. To be brutally frank, they are worshipping you.”

“Me?” Jack Wong’s voice squealed even higher. Luckily the aliens couldn’t hear his foolish tones, since his suit’s helmet was soundproof. Everything he heard came to his ears through the Mac’s microphones, and when he decided it was time to talk to the fallen aliens his voice would be translated into...into alien…by the on-board AI. “Why would they worship me? I’m just a human from Earth!”

“On occasion,” the Mac informed him, “primitive alien peoples will mistake Earth Culture personnel for religious figures from their own mythologies.”

“What, they think I’m a sky god?”

“Or a demon, ghoul, vampire, harpy, or other monster. They must be disabused of this notion as rapidly as possible. Only after personnel have established themselves as equally mortal can the process of cultural orientation begin.”

“So you’re telling me,” Jack said slowly, stepping cautiously away from the hull toward the stirring aliens, “you’re saying that— That they probably do think I’m a god, but I should tell them I’m not, right?”

“Exactly.” Was there just a trace of impatient scorn in the machine’s voice? “Then we can start carrying out the Primary Heuristic and begin helping these aliens on their rise to near-equality with humankind.”

All the aliens were on their feet by now, milling about. One of them raised a spear in what looked like a menacing gesture.

“Well, all right.” Jack raised his suited head bravely and stepped forward. “Tell them my name is Jack Wong and that I’m very happy to be here on their beautiful planet.”

The sound system in his helmet rang across the clearing in the Mac’s voice, speaking some kind of alien gibberish. The eyes bugged in their buggy heads, and they stared for a brief moment at Jack with open snouts.

This time, it wasn’t so unnerving when they cast themselves on the ground again.

Jack’s scalp was itching, and he wondered if he should take off his helmet and have a good scratch. It seemed the wrong moment for that. “Er, now, look here, fellows,” he said, and the Mac barked and squawked out an instant translation of his words in alien. “Don’t keep doing that, please. It can’t be healthy, slithering around like that in the wet grass.”

The aliens bounded back a few more meters, bowing and scraping and muttering incoherently. So far the Mac had not provided Jack with a translation of anything they were saying. “I am sorry,” it told him, “we shall have to wait until they calm down, I cannot make any sense of that hubbub.”

Jack Wong gazed unhappily at the writhing bodies before him, and wished with all his might that he were back in the Academy, or better still home on Earth. He felt as if he’d burst out bawling any second. Instead, he squared his shoulders and prepared to utter the Traditional Greeting.

“Take me to your leader,” he said, and the Mac coughed out the alien words. “I wish to speak to someone in authority. One of your, uh, Wise Men, Women or Things.” Nervously, he rubbed his gloved hands together.

The aliens conferred. Finally a shrunken oldster wobbled hesitantly toward Jack. Its features were more pitted than the rest, its drool greener, gelatinous. When it spoke, its voice was cracked and wheezy.

The Mac said, “That probably meant something like: ‘O King, live forever!’ But more like a god than a king, if you see what I mean.”

“Oh shit,” Jack moaned, wishing he could rub his nose.

∞

Their village was no more impressive from the ground than it had been through the sensors from orbit. Less than a hundred small grass huts, cunningly built to keep the heavy rain out but hardly beautiful. Still, he told himself, that was only to be expected of a species that had to keep on the move in search of game. Probably they needed to keep cutting back the encroaching jungle, make new clearings that would be swallowed a few months later when they shifted to fresh territory.

Grawnkar, the old alien, apparently their leader, hobbled along half a step behind Jack, and rest trailed after. As they entered the village, other large adult aliens (the mothers? but he didn’t even know how many sexes the aliens had, or if they had any at all) and small squealing alien children emerged from huts and gardens to gape in open-mouthed amazement. In the middle of the scattered huts two structures rose above the rest. Jack was herded toward one, perhaps the chieftain’s home or headquarters. The other was a tall palisade, sturdier than the rest, its round wall made of solid timber stakes with nasty thorns jutting out, its entrance flanked by carved poles showing a certain artistic skill. A temple of some sort?

Jack eyed it with distaste. The very thought of these people’s gods reminded him of how hard it would be to convince them he was not unlike them in his mortality and limitations, despite the difference in their appearance. Human or alien, he’d been taught by Earth Culture instructors, it was all one, really, once they were cleaned up and properly indoctrinated. Yes, he might seem to the poor benighted creatures to have godlike powers. He’d come down out of the sky, after all. But when all was said and done, he was exactly as mortal as they, and he needed to get this idea across to them as quickly as possible. Jack Wong squared his shoulders deliberately, and marched into Grawnkar’s hut.

∞

“You don’t understand,” he told the puzzled aliens for the tenth time. “I’m just like you. Cut me, do I not bleed? Not,” he added hurriedly, “that I want you to cut me. Heck forbid.”

His voice was hoarse, and he was getting hungry. The suit had a store of rations, but they weren’t very tasty. In fact, they tasted like sawdust. You weren’t meant to enjoy lazing around on strange planets in a comfortable survival suit; the idea was to get in, get the job of Contact done, and get out again, all as expeditiously as possible. It was a big galaxy out there, and Contact was a never-ending job. Unfortunately, the aliens seemed to have taken a fancy to Jack. They seemed to regard him as something of a prize. A sort of trophy. Their own little tin god. How embarrassing.

“The sky god mocks us,” said old Grawnkar. “You look nothing like a mortal.”

“But—but—” It was no good. Jack threw up his hands in despair. He’d tried again and again to explain through his translator that small difference in color and size—well, even really big differences, in this case—didn’t amount to the difference between a mortal and god. This just got such a puzzled reception that Jack lapsed into angry silence and chewed his lip for a quarter of an hour.

“I am going to have to turn the cooling system off,” the Mac murmured in his ear. “We are running low on power.”

“You can’t do that!” Jack cried in alarm. “I’ll roast! I’ll boil in my own juices.”

“You can always take your helmet off.”

“Yeah, right, and catch some horrible disease.”

“The chances are very low that an alien disease or fungus could thrive on a human body,” the translator told him smugly, “or in one.”

∞

When night finally fell, a haze of stars in no known constellations twinkling above the clearing, it was hardly any cooler. The cooking fire the alien monsters built made it worse. Insect things he’d emulated for his spy probes swarmed out of the humming forest and annoyed him by biting his unprotected neck and face. The fallen stick fragment jabbed his spine in a different place every time he moved. He glanced at his glove’s fingerwatch, wondering how soon he’d be able to make his apologies and slip away for a comfortable night’s rest in the air-conditioned pod. Grawnkar sidled up in the dark

“O Jack Wong,” the translated voice said respectfully, “the feast begins. If you would grace it by your illustrious presence, we would be blessed beyond repayment.”

What could he do? Jack shrugged, stuck his helmet under his arm and made his way to the place of honor. The closer he got to the fire, the worse it stank. He gagged, tried hard not to throw up. That could cause a diplomatic incident. It certainly would not look good on his academic record, or his official report for that matter.

If he ever got home. If the Earth Culture rescue team ever tracked him through the wormhole and found him here before he grew old and frail and white haired, and died of old age. A tear of self-pity crept from his eye, and an insect buzzed down with sharp feet to sip at it.

Everyone was guzzling with gusto, chatting away in their awful voices, except for two ceremonial guards behind him. His stomach growled hungrily. Oh, why not? If the bugs couldn’t hurt him, maybe the food wouldn’t either? It smelled disgusting, but you could get used to anything. And he might be here for a long time. He eyed a particularly choice piece of blue vegetation, or maybe it was meat or fish, from the huge pile before him and reached out one gloved hand.

A huge wooden club whistled down from behind his right ear and thudded into the dirt not a centimeter from his fingers.

Stunned with fright, Jack whipped back his hand and sat stock-still for a long moment. All the chatter had stopped. Interested reptilian eyes peered at the sky god who had very nearly lost his fingers. Old Grawnkar leaned over, his breath like something from a garbage can, and said reprovingly, “It is not fitting for the sky god to be associated with the fruits of the offering, nor even his bearer. Time enough later, for the god, when the first-fruits are burned and ascend as fumes to the sky.”

∞

The palisade, when they lit smoky torches and took Jack inside, was not uncomfortable. The floor was covered with dried grass and in one corner he found a reasonably soft cot of rushes. But the walls were thick and solid, and the guard stood at the opening. And there was no food or drink.

Jack felt tears come to his eyes again, and he brushed them aside. With his tongue, he triggered the lever than brought a trickle of sawdust-flavored nutrient into his mouth, and a squirt of warm water. Luckily, the suit was able to retrieve his bodily wastes and recycle them into sawdust-flavored nutrient and warm water.

They kept him there for eight days.

∞

The racket outside rose in a pitch of excitement. Red and yellow flames burst up from the fire. Big flat alien feet with scaly toenails pounded on the packed dirt of the camp’s central square.

Nervously, Jack edged closer to the sturdy wooden gate of the shrine he was imprisoned inside. Through a chink between crudely carved planks, he saw twenty or thirty of the appalling creatures stamping and waving and bowing and hollering as the sparks flew up into the darkening sky. Every now and then, the old one with the dark green scaly spots on its underbelly turned toward his prison/shrine and bleated in a high, thin yodel. The Mac had stopped automatically translating when Jack found it all too depressing. The other aliens turned and bobbed, waving horrible weapons with sharp ends. Jack felt sick again.

“I have acquired a signal,” the Mac told him.

The cadet sagged with relief.

“Unfortunately, the Primary Heuristic forbids the rescue craft from landing in plain view of the local aliens. You will have to make your way by foot four kilometers south-east of the clearing where we crashed. Lt. Commandant Lawson and his crew will collect us and dispose of the damaged pod.”

“Great,” Jack said. “Wonderful plan. And how am I supposed to get out of this place? The gate’s locked, remember? No windows.” He made his way in the gloom to a plank at the base of the wall that he had been loosening for several days with his gloved hands. With a shove, he pushed it free. The space it left would be barely enough for him to crawl through without his suit.

He was chilled at the thought.

“If I take off the suit, I’ll have no protection against their weapons,” he said, shaking slightly.

“They will not necessarily kill you,” the Mac said. “They believe you are a sky god, after all. That is why they are holding this sacred ceremony in your honor. By the way, I gather they wish you to join them shortly for the festivities, and those could continue for many hours and entail certain dangers to a human. Now would be the time to depart.”

“But I’d have to leave you behind,” Jack said with a terrified sob. He was stripping open the heavy suit, his exposed skin burning slightly as the planet’s unearthly mix of gases stung him. The itch on his neck worsened, and started to spread down his chest, where it blended with a river of cold sweat. The Machiavellian intelligence sat seamlessly welded into the back of his helmet, a bright box of tricks with lenses, external speaker and retractable antennae. There was no way Jack could cut or pull the AI free.

“Just leave me,” the AI said in a flat machine voice. “I will terminate my program the moment you are off the surface.”

Jack shrugged, shoved the mound of his empty suit aside. It was a little strange, hearing the Mac speak from down there on the floor, rather than in his ear. That must be how the aliens heard the machine’s voice as it translated their barks and whistles.

“Okay, Mac. Thank you for everything.”

“My pleasure, sir, and my duty.”

Grunting, the cadet wriggled through the narrow gap. He paused for a moment to watch the capering aliens. Abruptly, the noises stopped. In the silence, one of the five-legged creatures turned and gestured at the shrine. Jack’s heart accelerated in terror. They had seen him outside the hut! They might revere him as a fallen sky god, but they wanted to hang on to their new divinity. Certainly they would not allow him to escape back into the heavens! The Mac had made that very clear.

With a whoop, the whole tribe cantered around the roaring fire and pressed toward the barred gate of the shrine. Jack screamed in fright, bolted upright in plain sight of them, and ran in his underwear into the jungle.

Nobody followed him.

At the dark edge of the alien forest, the cadet paused long enough to look warily back at the shrine. The aliens had thrown open the gate, and the old one was trotting back and forth in front of the fire in triumph, holding something shapeless and heavy over its head. It looked like a human corpse, squashed horribly by a trampling elephant.

“Oh god,” Jack muttered, “that could have been me.”

Two of the aliens fetched out a framework of sticks and arranged the empty space suit over it, so that it stood up in front of the ritual flames like a sagging scarecrow. The Mac’s box gleamed in the firelight, and its lenses shone. The uplink antenna slowly extruded like a snail’s tentacle. The aliens paused, ceased their commotion, fell silent. A new voice spoke, a stern mix of barks and whistles. The aliens fell down on their many knees and placed their bulbous heads in the dust.

Jack gasped, stared, and then started to laugh.

He couldn’t help himself. He giggled, and sniggered, and finally roared out loud.

None of this noise attracted the distant attention of the aliens. They were perfectly happy, worshipping their god, the sky creature that had fallen into their world and spoke to them in their own tongue.

Jack turned, still smiling, and slunk into the undergrowth. He had four kilometers to cover to the waiting rescue ship. As he moved away, the powerful voice called out to him from the clearing, in his own human language.

“Goodbye, young Jack,” the Mac called. “Good luck, human. You made a very satisfactory horse.”

Jack grinned, shaking his head. The aliens had never been interested in him at all. They had worshipped his machine, his AI, his micronic nanny. And now they would do so forever, without the inconvenience of dealing with their god’s strangely shaped two legged, two armed steed.

A hour later, the rescue pod flashed a light at him, and Jack wondered how he would explain all this to Commandant Whimsel back at the Academy. Probably best to say as little as possible. Human colonists would get an almighty surprise, though, when they finally returned to this world in a few centuries’ time....