“Thanks,” mumbled Amber, rubbing her mouth.
Meoraq grunted back at her. He took a piece of what might be kidney off his skewer, then paused, his gaze shifting beyond her, and popped it into his own mouth.
She looked back, already knowing she was going to see Scott, and there he was, marching toward them. He wasn’t alone. Since the saoq was cooking and staring at it couldn’t help it roast faster, quite a few Manifestors were trickling over to Meoraq’s small fire, hungrily eyeing his gut-kabobs, his roasting severed head, even the bloody heap of hide. The lizardman watched them circle without expression, but the hand that did not keep an easy hold on his saoq-kebob drifted down to the hilt of one of his swords.
“You might want to give him some space,” Amber remarked.
Scott took a step back at once, then pinked and glanced behind him at the watching Manifestors. “I can’t believe you say that thing isn’t dangerous. It’s a textbook example of a hostile alien predator. Textbook. Even if we could disarm it, he could still bite someone’s hand off.”
“He’s not hostile and he doesn’t bite.”
Meoraq naturally chose that moment to take a huge bite of liver. His relatively few yet large and apparently very sharp teeth sheared through the tough meat so easily that they snapped audibly when his jaws met. He eyed Scott, contentedly eating in his lizardish way, and drew his hooked sword to tap against the toe of his boot.
“Really?” said Amber, looking at him.
His spines flicked.
“The only reason for anything to have a mouth like that is for biting,” Scott announced in a knockout imitation of a man who knew what he was talking about.
“Olfaction,” said Mr. Yao.
They all looked at him—Amber, Scott, and the lizard.
Mr. Yao rolled one shoulder in a shrug (Meoraq’s spines swept forward; he rolled one of his shoulders too, just a little bit, as if testing its range of motion). “I’m not a doctor of medicine,” he said. “I’m an evolutionary biologist.”
A short silence followed this statement. Mr. Yao seemed to be expecting it.
“Okay,” said Amber at last. “I have no idea what that means.”
“It means that I have studied the way animals evolve. I was assigned to this mission to assess whatever forms of life we might have encountered on Plymouth. There was always a chance, you see, that it might be inhabited, even though the probes never detected any higher signs of intelligent life.”
“Higher signs like what?” Amber asked as Scott said, “This is probably classified and you shouldn’t be discussing it with civilians.”
Mr. Yao chose to answer Amber. “Signs such as city lights, roadways, radio or satellite transmissions. Anything, in other words, that could be detected by a probe. They never found anything, but Plymouth was an Earth-class planet with a wide range of eco-systems. There were plants, it stood to reason there would be animals, and while they would surely be of some alien design, those designs must still serve some logical purpose, such as—” He glanced at Scott. “—the reason why certain animals have a snout-like mouth. Not to hold teeth, but to hold scent receptors.”
“Okay, that’s a great theory,” Scott said dismissively, already waving one hand to try and cut Mr. Yao off. Meoraq’s head tipped; his eyes tracked each movement of that hand. “But you can’t possibly prove it. This is an alien.”
“Nature follows necessity,” said Mr. Yao. “Generally speaking, the more pronounced the nasal area is, the more advanced the animal’s olfactory ability should be. Since our friend does not have many teeth, it can be assumed he uses that space for some other purpose, such as scent reception. In fact, if you look at him closely—”
They all did. Meoraq returned their stares without obvious concern, except that the sword he was playing with lifted ever so slightly.
“—you will see several pit-like pores around his mouth, separate from his nasal openings. Certain animals—particularly reptiles—have two distinct olfactory systems, one of them used mainly to detect pheromones. If I were to hypothesize further—”
“There’s nothing to be gained by discussing any of this,” Scott interrupted. “Regardless of Mr. Yao’s ideas on alien physiology, just the fact that the lizard is armed to his extremely sharp teeth proves that it has the potential to be dangerous.”
“He also has the potential to bring us food,” Amber pointed out. “And I noticed you took it before you started all this bullshit about how dangerous he is. Look, if he’d wanted to sneak out and come back with an army of raging lizardmen, he could have done that. If he’d wanted to slit our throats in the night, he could have done that too. Instead, he brought us breakfast and you’re bitching about it.”
“Thankfully, it’s not your job to concern yourself with the safety of others, Miss Bierce, because you appear to be as bad at that as you are at teaching English. I, on the other hand, can be objective about the benefits and detriments our native friend brings to the colony. So why don’t I do my job and you can try to do yours and everybody will be much happier?”
“Fuck you, Scott.”
Scott nodded as if this were exactly the answer he’d expected. If he’d reached out to pat her on the head as his smirking expression indicated he might, she might have lost it, but he didn’t, so she didn’t. He walked away, taking his Manifestors with him and instructing these to gather wood and those to build more fires so they could all see how commanding he was.
Amber watched them go, confused and pissed off and mostly tired and cold and still hungry. She had always been very good at dealing with life’s little shit-heaps, but she honestly couldn’t see any way out of this one. She could see it getting worse almost by the minute, but she couldn’t see how to stop it. All she could do was get the lizard talking as quickly as possible and hope that once the others saw that someone was with them who actually knew what he was doing, all this Commander crap would just…blow over.
‘Never happen,’ she told herself in the voice of her dead mother. ‘If it all goes right, the lizardman will be Commander Scott’s friendly native guide. If it all turns to shit, he’ll be the mistake you brought into camp. Either way, Commander Scott is here to stay, so you can suck it up, little girl…’
“Or you can blow it out,” Amber finished, then sighed and looked at Meoraq. When he looked back at her, she made herself smile. “We’re going to do this,” she told him. “We just have to start simple, right?”
He frowned.
“Right.” Amber patted herself on the chest. “Human. Say it with me. Human.”
Meoraq’s gaze dropped to her hand. He grunted and handed her what was left of his gut-kebob. He told her to eat it, then got up and went into his tent, leaving her alone with the saoq’s slowly roasting head and its silent, judgmental stare.
9
The first days among the creatures who called themselves humans were a true test of Meoraq’s discipline. Oh, they weren’t wild, or at least, they weren’t aggressive. Although they remained cautious and their leader in particular did a lot of barking from a short distance, they accepted him into their pack without challenge. It was what they did afterwards that wore on a man.
In spite of their clothing, their shelters, and their primitive attempt at language, Meoraq often found himself questioning his conviction that these were intelligent creatures—people—and not constructs of Sheul’s devising made just before their first meeting. They showed no ability or even any interest in taking care of themselves. Except Amber, who made herself positively obnoxious every morning when he set out for the day’s hunt.
Meoraq had no experience with either cattle or children and had to rely upon prayer and his own instincts where the bulk of their care was concerned. At times, he marveled that he had not lost one yet, especially since it seemed that the instant his attention wandered, they were squabbling or wandering out into the plains or falling asleep with their fires unbanked. Some days it seemed his prayers were evenly split between asking Sheul for guidance in keeping them from killing themselves and begging Him to let Meoraq do it himself. And perhaps the humans sensed it, because although they ate what he fed them, none of them dared to come too near.
