Maxwell's Demon Ch. 15-21

"Hmm. Given they have reciprocating engines, it's possible they have Dirigibles. We crashed from the sky; they might believe we are unremarkable, simply shipwrecked visitors from another area," William said.

John chuckled. "If anyone did see the Raphael under cloud break, it's not very futuristic from a distance."

"We have to learn the language. Be cooperative; find out everything you can. They have electricity, perhaps we could help them with motor designs, power factor transport, etc. Sarah, you may understand their mining. Greg, see if you can find what the state of their communication science is, we need that information," Jennifer said.

"That leaves you and I to get by on our good looks?" John asked, winking at Jennifer.

"Funny, John. Possibly. Litra seemed to enjoy sitting next to you. Maybe it's those blue eyes that only show up in their indoor lighting wavelengths. No, you and I need to learn about their weapons. Just because we didn't see any guns, it would be preposterous to imagine they haven't invented gunpowder. There is an economic or social reason they carry bows. We need to find out what that is."

"I advise you to set your electronic equipment to recharge from kinematic motion, and try to not spend all your waking time sitting. We should have enough power to run the datanet for this first long night. We'll scavenge photons when that red sun comes up in three days, though I am worried about its lack of higher wavelengths, and how it will interact with our solar cells," Greg said.

The smaller aliens, males as Greg had classed them, returned to the tavern and paired up with the crew. Mion, Kleoke, Na'une, and Benue were their names, not that Greg could tell them apart. Mion and Kleok had sharp triangular ears, that was the extent of identifying details he'd made out. The four males wore the same bright green pashmina, a scarf-like material embedded in their vests as when first met. Contrarily, the female clothing was dirty, stained, and often ripped. Nira arrived last, still unique among all Greg had seen with her green eyes. There were dark powder stains on her vest, like coal or crushed rock. She was accompanied by Litra.

William went to the counter, retrieved one of his food bars and took a bite, he pointed to it and said "food". His alien companion said something to the alien behind the counter and placed metal coins on the table. The attendant reappeared with dried pieces of meat. William fetched the compound analyzer from his pack. "I'm going to get weary of carting this thing around, but I might as well use the limited reagents we have to test the food they serve. We'll be out of rations soon."

The crew worked on verbs, shoving food around and using the words for give and take. Later, there was a change in the setting at the tavern. More aliens entered, they came in groups, females with one or two males, occasionally more. The males were consistently dressed in more elaborate clothing. When grouped at a table with a female, there was a graphic decoration present that was unique, usually on a piece of embroidered cloth worn on their shoulder.

"You notice that crest or adornment all the groups have, do you think that is some kind of social or caste marking?" Jennifer asked.

"I have yet to see two that are the same," Sarah said.

"We seem to be getting special attention," William said, looking at John and Greg.

There was a line of three females waiting next to William, John and Greg. One at a time the females greeted Mion and Kleok. "Hello" they said. Mion and Kleok pointed at the crew and made various gestures. "Foreigner," and "mountain", was all Greg could understand.

The first female handed Greg a coin, he thought, until he realized it was thinner, like metallic leaf paper, with printing on it. The other two gave similar items to William and John.

"So they gave us their phone number, I guess?" John said.

Nira returned, and the newly given cards were visible on the table. Nira noticed them. "Who?" she said to Kleok. Greg couldn't understand any of what Kleok said in reply. Nira turned to Greg and pointed to the card, "Me look please?" It was a full translation, and please was a new word. He upvoted it; it seemed to make sense in the context.

Nira picked the card up. If the slightly toothy expression was a smile, she made something not that. It showed teeth, but with her mouth closed -- unnerving, given their sharpness. Greg didn't feel special; this giving of cards ritual was happening in multiple places in the tavern. Whatever format their language used, he could tell by the pattern repetition rate that the information density on the card was high, like a sales brochure.

Mion and Kleok retrieved a deck of playing cards made from thin metal sheets. The cards showed patterns, most looked like animals. Three caught Greg's interest; he did a double take. The first image was a humanoid wearing a pressure suit, and he thought of ancient cave drawings on Earth depicting futuristic beings and craft. The name of that card was 'Lani.' The second was a standing figure that resembled humans more than Centaurans. It had smooth skin, ears near the side of the head, and a short muzzle, more like an early homosapien than the animal-like Centaurans sitting at the table. The last card class was a rendering of the binary stars Alpha Centari A and B in the sky. They would surely be a bright sky feature for anyone on this planet. It was called "Eyes of Mother."

They finished playing the card game poorly, and Greg's injured ankle was stiff; he needed to walk. Would it be pitch black outside with no starlight and no natural moon, he wondered?

"Greg want door," he said pointing to the main entrance.

"Heku?" Nira said. She asked Mion a question, then stood, replacing her jacket and said, "Come," while walking toward the door.

Outside, there was no trace of the red orb that was Proxima. In its place was a greenish glow, a continuous aurora from the magnetosphere, the result of a stellar wind much greater than on Earth. It provided light similar to a mooned and clear night on Earth, although totally green.

"Greg hihio aku?" she said pointing at his foot.

Greg pointed to his foot, "Aku?"

"No," Nira said, then took a few steps mimicking Greg's limp and said "Aku."

Greg understood, and the language model caught up rapidly after his annotations. "Yes, Greg foot hurt," he said.

Nira beckoned him to follow her along a lighted path winding southeast from the tavern.

She carried a pistol sized crossbow with her, like a frontier town. Greg had many questions, but the language barrier frustrated him. For example, Nira was different from Litra, why? With effort, he was able to point to Nira, another Centauran, and himself, and convince Nira he wanted to know what she was, not who she was.

"Nira is Teolid, Litra is Telluki," she said, following with the inevitable return question, pointing to Greg. Greg wasn't sure what to answer.

"Lani," he said, referring to the space-suit-looking character from the deck of cards in the Tavern.

Nira made an expression between the snarl and smile he'd made note of. "Lani, or foreigner," she said.

Nira outpaced him because of his gimped ankle. She stopped several times, then walked slower. "You come from luou?" she asked.

Greg didn't understand.

"Airship from luou?" She stopped walking and looked around, as if to check who was watching before engaging in a mime to show what luou meant.

She drew her pistol, mocked firing at imaginary targets, then hand to hand combat, and finally being injured by a projectile. It was amusing and uncanny how well her charades communicated the concept: war. She was asking if Greg crashed in an airship from a war.

"Yes," he said, not knowing why. They'd come to the end of the trail. To the east he saw windmills, at least that's what they looked like. He asked what they were.

"Heme nulupe," she said.

His ankle hurt. "Nira, can we go back," he said in English, pointing toward the tavern, making no attempt at Centauran, knowing she wouldn't understand.

"Kewu. Greg walking hurt," she said, turning back on the trail.

At the tavern, just before the door, Nira said several full sentences in Centauran. It was too much, too fast, and too few words translated. She looked at him, waiting. She tried again, even more frustrated it seemed to Greg.

"No understand, Nira," he said, trying to find a way to look sorry. "Thank you walking."

She mumbled something untranslatable, opened the door for him, and then left.

-*-

Two Proxima days passed, near six Earth days. Greg went for walks with Nira often. His ankle wasn't getting any worse, but he was hesitant to claim it was getting better. Jennifer and Sarah had found work, being mistaken for healers due to assisting with a miner's broken bone. John, however, was having a rough time. Greg watched Sarah hold his head up to give him water from her canteen; he'd been vomiting for hours and was dehydrated.

"I told you not to drink that red wao stuff," Greg said.

"There's nothing toxic in it that I can find," William said.

"It's an allergic reaction, we're lucky he's not in anaphylactic shock. I'm giving him a broad spectrum antihistamine and epinephrine injection. We don't have much of this stuff, so I don't know what we'll do when we're out," Sarah said with a worried look.

She administered the injection. John coughed, lifting his torso up into Sarah's lap. "It may not be the alien food or drink. It's my neural implant. I had a severe reaction to the operation, it hypersensitized me. I was taking immunosuppressants. They said I wouldn't need them anymore, but I think this environment triggered my body's reaction to it again."

"Did you bring any of these suppressants with you," Sarah asked?

"No. It'll pass. It did before," John said.

"Maybe eat our food for a couple of days, OK?" Sarah said. "I'm going to set up a challenge test for local compounds. We'll have to start consuming them; maybe if we check which elicit severe immune responses, we can avoid them, or introduce them slowly."

"What about your own arm, doc?" John said.

"I applied more bandage foam this morning after inspecting it. Whatever bacteria live here, they don't seem beyond our antibiotics or immune system."

"We've made it one full Proxima day; it will be light soon. What have we learned so far?" Jennifer asked everyone.

"This is a mining town. Kleok showed me the processing plant, a grinding facility for ore. It's lithium slurry; that's what all those windmills are for, to crush the rocks and minerals they mine. There is a rail system to take aggregates away," Sarah said.

"I learned the Centaurans operate on six hour cycles. They use the water and tides from the close elliptic orbit for their timekeeping origin. The term 'When maneo is half standing' refers to the height of water from one of their mountain lakes. They drove sticks into the shore in their history, but as you can see by the clock in here, they have periodic motion devices calibrated to match," Jennifer said.

"It corresponds with the alien's traffic patterns. They work in the mines for one six hour cycle, hang out for another in this tavern, and sleep the third," William said.

The main door burst open, there was commotion. Litra, Nira and several Centuarans entered, armed with rifle crossbows. The commotion drew Jennifer and Sarah toward the door.

John grabbed Greg's forearm. "Look," he said, glancing left and right. "Don't tell Jennifer this; I don't want her doing any fool thing like trying to get to the Raphael for my medicine, understand? We damn near got killed the last time we were out traipsing around those mountains, and she's impulsive when it comes to decisions." He shook his head as if settling word tiles in a box before he spoke, "I'm having glitches with my neural interface. It's feeding signals that don't make sense, they aren't real -- you know what I'm saying? They're like when I was interfaced in VR on EmDee. Is there anything you can do?"

"John, I don't know anything about that technology. If your body is attacking the filaments they put in your nerve tissues, then who knows what chaos that's inflicting on the signal processor."

"I went through worse during calibration. I left the pills on Raphael. It comes and goes. The software is adaptable; it's just not adapting right now."

"Is there any way to shut that thing down, just in case? We're light years away from Earth, and these people, they're centuries from having the kind of tech here to help you medically, even if we were using it."

"Nope. I knew that when I signed up for this implant. It's an incredible piece of hardware though, Greg. The things I saw on EmDee. Your ATM, Kassy, was so real."

"There was another airship crash," Jennifer said, returning to the group. "There were injuries. They want Sarah and I to set some broken bones. They still think we're doctors. I suppose by comparison to their tech level, we are."

John looked curious. "Airship?"

"Yes, blimps, dirigibles. We were right. Having them drift off course from the war and land in the mountains around the mining colony isn't unusual. I couldn't understand where they come from, the Centaurans tried to explain it to me. Somewhere'' -- Jennifer pointed toward the west -- "that direction. Either they didn't get a good look at the Raphael, or they figured it's no different than any other machine that floats."

"Did they find our ship?" John asked.

"No, but it's clear now they think we're from the war," Jennifer said. "There's a water vessel coming tomorrow, in the adjacent town. It's supposed to take us home, take people that don't belong here away. We'll be strongly encouraged to go, I gathered."

"There's one of the survivors now," Sarah said.

Greg watched as the smallest Centauran seen yet walked to the counter and ordered a drink. It had a tail. He turned back to ask Sarah a question, and instead found Nira.

"Hello, Krek," she said.

"Hello, Nira. What kind?" he said, pointing to the small alien newcomer.

"Teolid," she said.

"Why are there so few Teolids," Greg said.

"Teolids are slaves. We come here after earning our freedom from Mainlights."

"He has a tail. Do you have a tail too?"

"Of course I have a tail."

Where this tail was, Greg didn't know, because he didn't see it. The female aliens wore so much clothing you couldn't see anything. Nira sat down and polished off an entire mug in a single gulp. Their drink called wao did have a deleterious effect on them, though he had yet to see them fall over drunk. Nira was buzzed, he was pretty sure, because she tried to improve her pronunciation of his name. She was failing miserably.

"Are you leaving next cycles?" Mion, one of their language hosts asked them.

"What happens next cycles?" William said.

"Northlight's and Southlight's seaships arrive. It comes and goes. Some people it takes homes. Some people it brings homes," Kleok said.

"Maybe, we chance win some wao, Jennifer, now you credits?" Benue said.

The message was clear. Jennifer was to put up some of the credits she'd earned for her work at the mining clinic setting alien bones. "OK", she said, placing her credits into the noted area of the table, dividing them among the crew to participate.

"This card, the Lani, were they real?" William said.

"It is story, a game card," Mion said.

"Maybe not, some have seen," Benue was quick to add.

"John, are you sure you're feeling OK?" Jennifer asked

"There's nothing to be done for it. I need to go outside for a bit," he said, rubbing his forehead.

Nira polished off a third mug of wao, and Greg wondered if the cycle before Proxima daylight was like Friday to them, or maybe the seaship tomorrow was a big deal.

"You drink wao?" Nira said.

"I don't think it does for me the same thing it does for you," Greg said.

"The red wao will. It's basically grain alcohol. You got jabbed for it already. If you didn't break out in hives, it's no more a risk than the plain wao is, but I'd treat it with the obvious restraint," William said.

Nira set a mug of red liquid on the table. "Drink it," she said.

It was foul tasting. Greg felt that way about some beers on Earth though too. When the card game was over Nira said, "Greg, come outside before we go?"

He followed her outside.

"Mayana, with the green pashmina, you met the night we rescued you. She will -"

She was going too fast again. He had to stop her. "Slow, please, Nira."

"Mayana will see you next cycle. Mayana leader of Newtown. She taking Kleok and Mion back. And Na'une and Benue. You take rail. Mayana maybe ask you stay. Greg, do not go with sea ship. They take you, even if you not belong. They will say needing you. Greg maybe not be come back. Greg wanting war?"

He knew whatever Nira was trying to tell him was important, though he could make little sense of it, and his Centauran response would be equally frustrating to her.

"I don't know what doing. I need things," he said. He needed to work on his radio, to see if it would work at all, so they could talk to orbit, have some chance to be rescued. How could he explain that? The need to communicate was critical, but the language was reduced to fumbling slippery words and partial understandings.

"What things you need?"

"I need credits. And I need be there," he said, pointing to the high trail peaks of the northeast. "And I need that," he said pointing to the red orb that was Proxima in the sky.

"Mayana maybe find you job in Newtown, if you not take seaship. I no understand. Nira does not give you Mother in sky. I take you on high trail. Why you wanting?" she said, pointing to Proxima, and the trail top that Greg asked about.

Greg pointed to his portable radio, then his neckband. It was all he could think to explain his desire for a job, and why he wanted to hike to the only point he could see that might be cloud free.

"This box is machine?" she said, pointing to his radio, then his neck band. "This is how you talk?"

Greg noticed Litra was outside too, leaning against the wall of the tavern, having what appeared to be a similar conversation with John. He understood now. Their entire band of male hosts were a delegation from Mayana, a ruler from the adjacent town. They'd been helping because it was their job, and now the crew was being commanded to return to Mayana. Litra and Nira were the only local acquaintances they'd met, possibly the only friends they had on this entire planet, if that was a translatable concept. They might be the only two Centaurans who had an independent interest in the crew. Which was better, there was no way to know.

"Will Nira help me?"

Nira bared teeth at him in their way of smiling. It was disturbing at some primeval level, though he managed to not flinch in front of her.

"I will help you, with your box, and your trail. I not able to go with you next cycle."

She took a coin from a pocket in her vest. "You. hand. please," she said, pointing and holding her hand flat, showing what she wanted. "Newtown is small. You will find Litra and Nira, if you want. You ask someone, they find. Take this. Train. It take you here." She dropped the coin into his hand.

** Chapter 16: The Train to Newtown **

The pack Greg used as a pillow started beeping; the next cycle was beginning. He'd programmed their timekeeping devices with an approximation of the Centauran's cycle times, but that wasn't why his pack was beeping.

"Batteries low, huh?" William said, sitting up next to Greg against the wall that had become their corner of the tavern.

"I need to try and soak up some of those red photons this cycle, or start jogging."

"I've been thinking, they have power here. If I could find some metal to work with, I might be able to siphon power off the wires. Our wireless charging circuits don't care what the alternating current frequency is; as long as it alternates, it can grab juice out of the air."