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Nothing about your behavior with A should either surprise or embarrass you. If desire did not dim the brain, nobody would ever get married, drunk, or fat.
-V
By the time Sel and Po had been a fortnight gone, with almost two hundred kilometers behind them, they had talked about every conceivable subject at least twice, and finally walked along in companionable silence most of the time, except when the exigencies of their journey forced them to speak.
One-sentence warnings: "Don't grab that vine, it's not secure."
Scientific speculations: "I wonder if that bright-colored froglike thing is venomous?"
"I doubt it, considering that it's a rock."
"Oh. It was so vivid I thought--"
"A good guess. And you're not a geologist, so how could you be expected to recognize a rock?"
Mostly there was nothing but their breathing, their footfalls, and the sounds and smells and sights of a new world revealing itself to the first of the human species to pass through this portion of it.
At two hundred clicks, though, it was time to stop. They had rationed carefully, but their food was half gone. They pitched a more permanent camp by a clear water source, chose a safe spot and dug a latrine, and pitched the tent with the stakes deeper and the ground more padded under the floor of it. They would be here for a week.
A week, because that's about how long they expected to be able to live on the meat of the two dogs they slaughtered that afternoon.
Sel was sorry that only two of the dogs were smart enough to extrapolate from the skins and carcasses that their human masters were no longer reliable companions. Those two left--they had to drive the other pair away with stones.
By now, like everyone else in the colony, both Sel and Po knew how to preserve meat by smoking it; they cooked only a little of the meat fresh, but kept the fire going to smoke the rest as it hung from the bending limbs of a fernlike tree...or treelike fern.
They marked out a rough circle on the satellite map they carried with them and each morning they set out in a different direction to see what they might find. Now they collected samples in earnest, and took photographs that they bounced to the orbiting transport ship for storage on the big computer there. The pictures they sent up, the test results, those were secure--they would not be lost, no matter what happened to Sel and Po.
The physical samples, though, were by far the most valuable items. Once they brought them back, they could be studied at great length using far more sophisticated equipment--the new equipment the xenos on the new colony ship would bring.
At night, Sel lay awake for long hours, thinking of what he and Po had seen, classifying it in his mind, trying to make sense of the biology of this world.
But when he woke up, he c
ould not remember having had any great insights the night before, and certainly had none by morning light. No great breakthroughs; just a continuation of the work he had already done.
I should have gone north, into the jungles.
But jungles are far more dangerous to explore. I'm an old man. Jungles could kill me. This temperate plateau, colder than the colony because it's a little closer to the poles and higher in elevation, is also safer--at least in summer--for an old man who needs open country to hike through and nothing unusually dangerous to snag or snap at him.
On the fifth day, they crossed a path.
There was no mistaking it. It was not a road, certainly not, but that was no surprise, the formics had built few roads. What they made were paths, and those inadvertent, the natural result of thousands of feet treading the same route.
Those feet had trodden here, though it was forty years before. Trodden so long and often that after all these years, and overgrown as it was, the naked eye could trace the path of it through the pebbly soil of a narrow alluvial valley.
There was no question now of pursuing any more flora and fauna. The formics had found something of value here, and archaeology took precedence, at least for a few hours, over xenobiology.
The path wound upward into the hills, but not terribly far before it led to a number of cave entrances.
"These aren't caves," said Po.
"Oh?"
"They're tunnels. These are too new, and the land hasn't shaped itself around them the way that it does with real caves. These were dug as doorways. All the same height, do you see?"
"That damnably inconvenient height that makes it such a pain for humans to go inside."
"It's not our purpose here, sir," said Po. "We've found the spot. Let's call for others to explore the tunnels. We're here for the living, not the dead."
