Four, no, nearly five dozen round, domed structures stood in a pair of concentric circles around a cleared area of packed earth. Walkways of similarly cleared ground separated the structures from each other. The buildings’ walls seemed to be smooth, dried mud, flat dun in color. The domed roofs were made of interwoven branches.
Brad saw wheeled carts and larger wagons, most of them sitting idle in the village center. A few were being pulled by six-legged animals the size of ponies.
On the other side of the village, cultivated fields stretched outward to the end of the hollow, row after neatly tended row. Brad saw greenish plants, more than a meter tall. People moved among the rows, harvesting the plants by hand with sickles that appeared to have metal blades.
A stream meandered around the outer edge of the hollow. Several of the aliens were drawing water from it and toting heavy buckets back to the buildings.
The structures seemed pretty much the same size and the same design: round, domed, single-floored, with one window each. Brad could see only one door in each building.
Then he recognized that one of the buildings was noticeably larger than the others. It stood on the inner circle, and a half-dozen Gammans seemed to be standing at its front entrance, gesticulating.
Longhouse, he guessed. With loafers, just like home.
The sun was lowering toward the distant hills, Brad saw. He no longer thought of the star as Mithra: it was this world’s sun. And the direction in which it was setting was west, by definition.
Time to hunker down for the night, he told himself.
He slithered down the slope, away from the village, until he thought it was safe to climb to his feet. They can’t see me from down here, he thought.
After munching down condensed food tablets, Brad called Emcee.
“Did you see the village?” he half whispered.
“I saw everything that you saw,” the computer replied.
“It’s exciting, isn’t it?”
“If I had emotions, I suppose it would be.”
Brad chuckled softly.
“You should report to the controllers,” Emcee reminded him.
“But they see everything we do, don’t they?”
“Yes, but they still expect a report from you.”
Brad nodded reluctantly and called the controllers.
“You found the village, right on schedule,” said the disembodied voice.
Brad frowned inwardly at the thought of being tied to a schedule.
A new voice, feminine, announced, “This is Madeira, medical department. We need to go over your physical condition.”
“You have the readouts, don’t you?” Brad asked.
“Of course, but we need your input, as well. Protocol.”
Brad grumbled to himself as he answered the medical technician’s questions. Busywork, he thought. They’ve got all the sensors’ data, everything from my heart and breathing rates to the amount of water I’ve lost from sweating.
As if she could hear his thoughts, Madeira said, “You’ve lost a bit more water than we expected.”
“I’ve been sweating. It was a long walk, and it’s hot down here.”
“It’s going to get a lot colder pretty soon,” she replied.
“The recycling system is working, isn’t it?”
A moment’s pause. Then, “Checking the readouts. Yes, the recycler is puttering away, right on the curve.”
“Good.”
“You’re due for sleep in another hour.”
“I’m setting up camp here.”
“That’s scheduled for tomorrow.”
Again with the schedule, Brad groused to himself. Then he thought, No sense arguing with her. Or any of them. I’ll hunker down here for the night, then tomorrow morning I’ll walk back to the shuttle and haul out the camping gear.
On an impulse, he asked, “Have you detected anything dangerous in the atmosphere?”
Madeira had to switch him over to the controller in charge of checking the environment.
A man’s voice finally told Brad, “We haven’t detected anything harmful in the air. Of course, the samples we’ve studied didn’t come from precisely your location.”
“But I could take off this helmet for the night, couldn’t I?”
He could sense the controller shaking his head. “Against protocol. You wouldn’t want the local bugs nesting in your ears while you sleep.”
Brad had to admit, “No, I wouldn’t.”
He slept with the helmet on. It was uncomfortable, but he had no dreams. At least, none he could remember the next morning.
* * *
It took Brad two trips to the shuttlecraft before he could assemble a reasonably comfortable base camp. At last, though, he had erected a cylindrical plastic shelter sealed and inflated with breathable air, an almost comfortable bedroll, a minuscule cookstove, and the communications gear. All the comforts of home, he told himself. Inside the shelter he could peel himself out of the cumbersome suit and helmet and sleep more contentedly. His dream came back his first night inside the shelter, but it was muted, somehow a bit different, not as biting.
For five days Brad observed the aliens in their primitive village. And nights. Their routines were a simple round of working in the fields by day, then coming to their homes at sunset, building a fire in front of each building, and cooking a communal meal in big earthenware pots. After they ate, they went inside the huts and slept. What went on inside their circular homes Brad could not see from his perch on the rim of the hills encircling the village.
A pretty boring life, he concluded. Up in the morning, work all day in the fields, then eat and sleep.
At least, he assumed they slept. He couldn’t see any lights from inside the huts; only the flickering embers of their cook fires outside. Within less than an hour the entire village went dark. When they slept, Brad slept. He resisted the urge to sneak into the village at night and peek into those windows.
The Predecessors’ earlier probes had determined that the Gammans were hermaphrodites, sexless. So when they slept, Brad thought, they slept. No romantic maneuvers.
By the fifth day Brad realized that not all the aliens went into the fields to work. There was always a cluster of them gathered around the biggest building in the village; their longhouse, as Brad had dubbed it.
It was difficult to tell if they were the same people each day. Brad found it hard to distinguish one of the Gammans from another. But he could detect no obvious signs of rank among the loafers at the longhouse. No individual received recognizable signs of deference.
But what would their signs of deference be? he wondered.
Asking Emcee didn’t help. “Insufficient data for a meaningful reply,” the master computer answered.
At last Brad called Littlejohn. “I don’t think I can learn much more about them from this distance. I’m ready to go down and show myself to them.”
In the miniaturized communications screen, Littlejohn’s dark face looked startled.
“That’s a major decision, Brad. We’ll have to get Kosoff to agree to it.”
Brad nodded. He had expected that reaction.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk to Kosoff.”