Marsh Mallow

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

They called the planet Bog for lack of anything nicer to say about it. The name was certainly appropriate if not 100 percent accurate. The entire planet was not a bog, but anyone set down in its narrow “temperate zone,” would find that hard to believe. The planet’s abundant supply of surface water brought to mind words like “sludge” and “morass”—even “bilge.” Not a drop of the stuff was drinkable. It contained salts and minerals in such concentration that, in some of the smaller bodies of water, you could float objects that would have sunk to the bottom on Earth or Pa-Loana or just about any other habitable planet Rhys Llewellyn could name.

Take that gently bobbing field lamp, for example. Rhys gazed at it in consternation as it was carried away on the sludgy currents of Brown Salt Lake, gliding serenely just out of his reach.

“See what I mean?” Roderick Halfax lobbed a flat rock at the lamp. It struck the metal casing with a muffled ping! and plopped into the water where it began the tedious and protracted process of sinking. A tiny cloud of native “fireflies,” already visible in the twilight, eddied above the flotsam, apparently attracted by the gleam of alien metal.

“I’d rather not have demonstrated it at the expense of our field supplies,” Rhys admitted, “but yes, I do see.”

Rick peered at the sludgy liquid. “You could probably walk out and get it… but I wouldn’t recommend it.” He turned back from the water to make his way up the newly constructed pier laid just last week by Tanaka Corp’s advance team of engineers.

After a last glance at the lost field lamp, Rhys fell into step beside his assistant. “I’ll bet you can build a boat out of just about anything here— wood, metal, stone—”

“Ah, but sir,” Rick countered, a frown puckering his brow, “the natives here don’t build boats, nor do they work wood, make metal or carve stone… sir.”

Rhys laughed; the younger man’s impersonation of his very earnest female assistant, Yoshi Umeki, was humorously accurate. And, of course, what he said was also true. The “natives” of Bog did none of those things, which posed the question of whether they were “natives” at all in the anthropological sense. There was nothing like alien/human contact to blur the lines between man and intelligent animal. Rhys could recall particular humans whose behavior blurred the lines even further. It was that sticky question of sentience that Rhys Llewellyn had been brought to Bog to answer.

“Ah, Yoshi!” He looked up and saw the girl making her way toward them through the stacks of tarp-covered trading goods and camp supplies that sat upon what passed for terra firma in this neck of the swamp. She was pecking at a notepad with one finger and frowning earnestly over the results of her work. Seeing Rhys and Rick, she paused and waved, oblivious to the admiring glances of a handful of Tanaka engineers who’d gathered around the mobile cantina.

Rhys lengthened his stride and covered the distance between them to give the girl a hearty hug. “So, Yoshi—any candidates for sentience among our Bogies?”

“Well, there appear to be several at this location.” She consulted her notepad. “The top candidates are a bipedal, brachiating mammalian reminiscent of a lemur, a burrowing reptilian form not unlike an iguana, and an amphibian that builds mud lodges in the swamp.”

“Ah, now that sounds promising.”

“I’m glad you think so, Professor. Personally, I find it all rather depressing.”

The voice, sporting a decidedly British accent, came from over Rhys’s shoulder, making him turn. He found himself face to face with an inappropriately well-dressed man of perhaps middle age. He was average in height, bland in coloring, and wore an expression of annoyed boredom. “And you are?” Rhys asked.

Yoshi jumped into the conversation. “I’m sorry, sir—I mean, Rhys. This is Raymond Godwin. From, um, Acquisitions. ”

Godwin extended his hand in Rhys’s direction, his eyes sweeping the younger man with urbane horror before lingering pointedly on his McCrae tartan kilt. “Director of acquisitions, this sector.” His upper lip twitched minutely.

Rhys, suddenly conscious of how itchy the woolen kilt was in the marsh’s thick sauna of an atmosphere, tried to make his smile sincere. “Rhys Llewellyn, acting Director of Trade and Cultural directions. Exactly what is it you hope to acquire, Mr. Godwin?”

“Mineral rights to this entire planet. And first shot at its other resources.”

Rhys frowned, trying not to twitch under the combined attack of wool, perspiration, and sudden unreasoning dislike. “I don’t understand…”

“The advance reports on Bog came into Corporate Acquisitions just over a week ago. I was immediately dispatched to make known to the powers that be that Tanaka Corporation wishes to possess mineral rights on Bog.”

“Did acquisitions also receive the advance reports on the native life-forms?”

Godwin nodded. “No signs of civilization.” The idea obviously delighted him.

“No sign of civilization as we know it,” Rhys cautioned. “Any of the creatures on Bog might be sentient.”

Godwin shrugged. “Fine. You find the sentients, I’ll negotiate for mineral rights.”

Oh, so simple. “Have you ever done anything like this before?” Rhys asked, keeping his voice carefully neutral.

“Dr. Llewellyn, acquisitions is my career. Of course, I’ve done this before.”

“What I meant, Mr. Godwin, is have you ever pursued an acquisition this early on—before a trade partner’s even been identified? Before a language has even been determined in which the parties can negotiate?”

“No. But you’re the expert in that department, Dr. Llewellyn. I’m counting on you to find the trade partners and their language.” He smiled. “After all, that’s what Tanaka pays you for, is it not?”

Rhys glanced sideways at Yoshi, whose expression, for once in her life, was blank. “It is. I’m merely surprised that the company is acting so precipitously.”

Godwin shrugged. “Bog is a mineralogically wealthy, if miserable, planet. We surely don’t want that wealth falling into someone else’s pockets… Bristol-Benz, for example.” He favored Rhys with a lopsided smile. “Frankly, I’m surprised Vladimir Zarber isn’t here already, breathing down your neck.”

At the mention of his arch-rival, Rhys grimaced. “Like you, Vladimir Zarber is used to working more… established prospects.”

“Well, Professor, I’m told that establishing prospects is your forte. I’m looking forward to seeing you in action.” He glanced about at the pallets of goods. “Now, I see you have a variety of merchandise. How do you plan to determine to whom it should be offered?”

“Shotgun, Mr. Godwin. We open up our little marketplace and see who shows up to shop.”

“And how long do you expect this process to take?”

Rhys smiled. “Why there’s no telling about that. Could take days… months…”

“Years,” murmured Yoshi.

Godwin threw her a subtly horrified glance. “You’d willingly spend that much time to determine sentience? Months in this godforsaken cow wallow?”

Yoshi’s mouth twitched. “Or years,” she repeated.

“That’s ridiculous. Tanaka doesn’t have that kind of time to invest in such a pursuit.”

“You’re always free to leave,” Rhys told him. “We’d gladly contact you when and if we had something positive to report.”

“What, and allow Bristol-Benz to sneak in and snap up resources? I assure you, what their advance teams lack in scientific method, they make up for in expediency.”

“I’d hardly allow that to happen,” Rhys assured him. “I’ve a few negotiations to my credit as well.”

“Commodities. You negotiate commodities. I’m talking about planetary rights, Professor, not trinkets.” He shook his head emphatically. “No, sir. You will simply have to determine the existence or non-existence of sentient beings in a reasonable length of time. Whether I deal with those sentients or deal with the Collective, I have a charter from Tanaka to acquire the mineral rights to Bog. As depressing as this ball of mud is, that sickening stew of elements he gestured toward the lake—“is worth its weight in platinum. Now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“What an obnoxious character!” Rick Halfax exclaimed to Godwin’s receding back.

Rhys followed his gaze. “Hmm. And impatient. Well, let’s see if we can’t get Mr. Godwin his stew.”

“Do we have to?” Yoshi was watching the acquisitions director with undisguised distaste.

Rhys glanced at her in surprise. In their several years together, he had rarely known her to express personal dislike for anyone. Yoshi reacted to causes rather than personalities and she had obviously decided that Mr. Raymond Godwin was inimical to the cause of Bog.

The next several weeks Rhys and his colleagues spent ferrying their wares to different parts of the local marsh. Within the habitat of each of their candidates they created what they hoped were attractive displays of goods. The arboreal simians hid from them, the reptilians ignored them and the amphibians wrecked the “marketplace” and incorporated the wreckage into their gloppy constructions.

“Interesting,” Rhys enthused, studying a particularly elaborate mound that now sported strips of bright, human-made fabric and squares of therma-plast and metal.

“You’re not actually encouraged by this random destruction are you?” Wearing a crisp new camouflage coverall and a small helmet, Raymond Godwin gaped at him from the midst of their decimated cache.

“There’s nothing random about it. They needed material for their constructs—they took it.” Rhys returned to where Yoshi waited at the cache with his field kit and began to rummage in it.

“Yes, indeed they did. They took fabric, food, tools, baubles—anything and everything—and used it indiscriminately. Surely you can’t argue sentience based on that? Beavers do that, Pekulan treemunks do that, yet I doubt even you would attempt to open trade relations with them… What are you doing?”

Rhys ignored him, continuing to describe a circle on the soggy forest floor with a fluorescing powder. Within the circle, he placed a group of objects taken from the rear deck of their enclosed swamp buggy.

“Oh, I get it,” Godwin said. “You’re attempting to communicate, aren’t you? You’re trying to tell our amphibian friends that this stuff didn’t get here by accident.”

“Something like that,” Rhys admitted. “I’m also trying to determine if they’ve a preference for certain materials.”

Godwin glanced back across the glade to where the Bogies’s mud lodges poked in misshapen domes from the water. “Shiny or bright stuff. They seem to like… ornamentation.”

Rhys acknowledged the observation with some surprise. “Yes. The question is, is it a cultural affinity for ornamentation, as you call it, or is it merely an animal’s attraction to shiny objects?”

Godwin seemed to show a little more interest in their mission after that and even helped set up their surveillance net. With vidicams focused on the cache and on the arm of ooze (a lagoon, technically) that poked into the glade from the marshy lake, they took their swamp buggy and withdrew to watch and wait. Before they’d gone even a handful of meters from the spot, the amphibians came ashore to explore the cache. They were bashful at first, skirting the display of goods and sipping condensation from the broad, glossy fronds of a low-growing plant—for all the world like a band of burglars trying to look nonchalant as they cased a prospective target. When they finally moved, they ignored the bright chalk circle—except to spread it about with their Hat, webbed feet—and went straight for the shiniest or most brightly colored objects they could find, carrying them back to the water in their wide mouths. Other creatures appeared as well—some large, colorful avians the size of small macaws fluttered down to pick at anything fibrous; a small mammal of some sort shuffled among the foodstuffs; a shapeless, lumpy thing like a headless, legless armadillo scuttled here and there, its only remarkable feature the irregular patches of bright color that decorated its otherwise drab hide. It trailed a cloud of the gnat-sized fireflies, recognizable in daylight only by their iridescent green wings. Everything got thoroughly pawed over, but except for the bright building materials and the food, nothing was taken. All in all, a disappointing episode.

They moved their “trade center” north after that, determined to give the bashful simians more study. The lemuresque creatures seemed to have some promising social habits. They built tree houses—or at least elaborate nests—they lived in family groups, and formed communities made up of a number of families.

“I’m actually quite hopeful,” Rhys said when they’d completed setting up shop in the fringes of one of the arboreal “villages.” “They exhibit a number of distinguishing social characteristics that could indicate sentience.”

“Doesn’t the mere fact that they build those little tree-houses mean they’re sentient?” asked Godwin.

“That makes them tool-users, doesn’t it?”

“There are any number of animals that weave nests at least that elaborate,” said Rhys. “That doesn’t mean they’re people.”

“What would make you consider them… people?”

“Observing trade would incline me to hopefulness. As would the use of a discernible language—or some other system of observable communication.”

“Ah… the operative term being ‘system.’ ”

Rhys nodded. “Another bit of evidence might be the cultivation of food or the domestication of animals.”

Yoshi, peering at the monitor, glanced up. “You mean like the birds? They seem to be all over the village here. And what about those big arthropods?”

Rhys, Rick and Godwin all moved to look over her shoulder at the large flat display. In the clearing central to the simians’ tree-houses, several of the lumpy, waddling creatures milled like legless, armored sheep. The simians sat peacefully among them, feeding on the seed-cones of the lacy coniferous trees, tossing the used-up cores at the native “armadillos” which snuffled up whatever the swift avians didn’t nab, occasionally using some well-concealed body part to fling one back toward its point of origin.

Yoshi chewed her lip. “Pets? Livestock?”

Rhys nodded. “Could be. Could also be simple scavenging. Only time will tell.”

They watched their cache of goods with great anticipation, but the simians’ interaction, when it came, had more in common with pillaging than with shopping. Accordingly, Rhys took the next step. Over a period of days, they moved their observation station closer to the village perimeter, insinuating themselves into the landscape. When the simians no longer ran squealing for the trees the moment the humans twitched a toe, they staged what Raymond Godwin snidely referred to as their “inane little skits. ” Rhys and Rick went through the motions of trade, playing merchant and customer, making a performance of the exchange of goods. Their performances drew a furry crowd of onlookers; the lemuresque creatures became bolder, even going so far as to touch some of the wares displayed behind each actor.

During the third or fourth skit came the breakthrough that Rhys had been hoping for; one of the simians picked up a piece of off-world fruit and made an attempt to interest one of his comrades in it. In a matter of minutes the creatures were picking up food and playing at exchange. Eventually, the trade broadened to include sticks, rocks, seed pods from the trees, anything they could find. Some courageous individuals even offered pilfered foodstuffs to the humans. But Rhys Llewellyn watched with increasing disappointment; there was no method to the madness, no pattern. The simians weren’t trading, they were merely mimicking observed behavior. Even as he looked on, still searching for signs that the Bogies comprehended their actions, they began flinging stuff about and the “trading” degenerated into a food fight. The humans withdrew.

“I don’t think they get it,” Godwin said. “Pet armadillos or no, I think they’re animals, not people.”

“Give it some time, Godwin,” Rhys told him, trying to be optimistic. But the next day’s trade went no better. Upon seeing the humans, the simians began to caper and playfully exchange random items, which were forgotten as soon as they left the traders’ handlike paws. As before, the episode ended in a hail of badly aimed projectiles which pelted humans, simians and their “pets” indiscriminately.

Rhys’s only reason for hopefulness was that the simians were observed to sip water from the same broadleaf fronds he’d seen growing in the lake environs. Since the fronds didn’t grow near the tree village, he could only suppose that meant the simians had transported them. But observing that more advanced behavior was denied the humans. The simians were never seen retrieving the fronds, they simply seemed to appear during the night. How, even Yoshi’s nocturnal video records failed to show.

Rhys was disappointed. “I suppose,” he told Rick and Yoshi, “that we ought to pick a new target and start again.” He shook his head. “I would have bet credits that the presence of both birds and arthropods indicated nascent domestication. Evidently, it only indicated a symbiosis.”

Yoshi nodded. “The lemurs leave refuse and the—the bogdillos and birds scavenge it.”

“Bogdillos?” Rick repeated.

Yoshi shrugged and glanced at her notes. “I get tired of saying ‘arthropods.’ There are some reptiles at a site about fifteen klicks from here that have been observed in a bipedal stance. It seems they also use sticks to pry food out of crevasses between rocks and have been observed carrying articles about what the advance team described as a village.”

“We’ll visit them tomorrow then,” Rhys said absently.

“You seem unhappy, professor,” Raymond Godwin observed.

“Unhappy?” Rhys shook his head. “No. A bit disappointed, perhaps.”

“Whatever for? Surely if you find no sentient beings on Bog it makes your job just that much easier… and your departure that much sooner.” He glanced around at the explosion of damp foliage that surrounded them, every leaf and stalk glistening with Bog’s dank perspiration. “I’ve never in my life been anyplace that sweats like this. My hair clings to my head, my clothing clings to my body. It makes Florida seem positively arid. I don’t know how you can stand it.” He gave Rhys’s kilt a disparaging glance. “I’ll certainly be glad to leave.”

“I will admit,” Rhys told him, “that Bog’s temperate zone seems to be poorly named, but… I would like to have found some new neighbors to talk to.”

“Well, speaking on behalf of Tanaka, whose interests you also claim to serve, new neighbors are a pain. They require the expenditure of time and energy which would be more profitably spent in negotiating with the Collective for planetary resources. There are probably hundreds or even thousands of candidates for sentience planetwide. While your people interview every one of them, the mineral resources of Bog lie here untapped. If you find no one, you’ve spent months or even years doing it, only to find that Bog has no masters and the minerals might have been at our disposal all along. If you do find someone, then time and energy must be put into learning their language, studying their culture, understanding their point of view—and still the resources of Bog lie there untapped. I’m sure you can see that the best case scenario as far as our employer is concerned is for Bog to be completely without sentient life.”

He had stopped just short of suggesting that Rhys come to that conclusion regardless of the circumstances. Rhys wondered if the thought had been in mind. He glanced forward to where Yoshi sat beside Rick in the front passenger seat of the buggy. Even in profile, he could see that her brow was knit and her jaw clenched mutinously. In the four years or so he had known her, Rhys had seen a thousand expressions cross Yoshi Umeki’s face. He had never seen this one.

“Have you an alternative to suggest that will not contravene Collective law?” he asked carefully.

“It seems to me we might simply set up our mining operations—in a way calculated to make a minimum impact on the ecosystem, of course— and then if, in later years, a sentient species makes itself known, we can deal with it as necessary.”

Yoshi snorted. “That’s what they said about the Aborigines.”

Godwin glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

She spoke without turning to face him. “That’s what every conqueror has said about every conquered people since the dawn of human civilization—‘we’ll deal with them as necessary.’ Usually, the native peoples end up with their culture destroyed and their numbers seriously depleted.”

“My dear girl,” said Godwin dryly, “we are not barbarians who have failed to learn from our own history. Rest assured, should any intelligence rear its unlikely head on this sodden ball of earth, Tanaka Corp will honor both its culture and its physical wellbeing. You know Danetta Price better than I do, but whatever her merits or demerits as a CEO, she is not known for a conquistadorial attitude. But there are resources here—” He broke off, turning to address his argument to Rhys. “There are, for example, significant quantities of a natural organometallic in the water at this latitude that has tremendous potential. A natural organometallic. And then there are the ores—did you know that there are caves about 200 klicks south of here that contain incredibly pure deposits of copper? And the surface water—all of it— contains an alchemist’s laboratory stew of minerals.”

His eyes gleamed. A zealot. Rhys smiled. He recognized the look. He’d seen it often enough on Yoshi’s face, on Rick’s… in the mirror. Godwin might have been him describing an assemblage of objects dug out of someone’s two-thousand-year-old refuse bin or burial mound. And, little as he liked to admit it, there was controversy over the ethics of making use of those resources too.

The reptiles lived in an area that was as close to a desert as was likely to be found on Bog. The soil was sandy, merely damp, and sparsely foliated (at least more sparsely than 75 percent of Bog). In cleared areas the reptilians had built structures not unlike the giant termite mounds of Earthen Africa, pasting them together with clay from the bottom of small, stagnant red pools that dotted the landscape. Taken together with the jewel-bright green of the mounds’ inhabitants, the whole area looked as if Santa’s interstellar sleigh had jettisoned a cargo of Christmas ornaments.

From the cover afforded them by a tufted dune, the humans watched the activity around the mounds. Rhys was just puzzling over a group of empty and collapsed “huts” to the north of the inhabited group when Yoshi jiggled his elbow.

“Look, sir. Tool-use.”

He nodded, watching a pair of the iguana-like creatures poking about a rotting tree stump with a stick. Another teetered across the clearing on his hind legs, his arms full of water-smoothed rocks. These he deposited next to one of the mounds in a heap, shoving away one of the ubiquitous “bogdillos” which had come along to snuffle at the collection. When the creature failed to move away, the reptile chittered at it, finally picking up one of the rocks and dealing the arthropod a sharp thwack! A second reptile scurried over to snag the rock and skitter away with it, eventually pressing it into the wall of a mound.

“Now there’s human behavior,” said Rick.

“That too.” Yoshi pointed to where a clutch of immature reptiles were attempting to feed one of the bogdillos a large, decimated leaf. The animal seemed completely uninterested which, in turn, caused the “children” to lose interest in it. They next offered their wizened frond to a flock of avians with more success.

Godwin, checking the soles of his boots for unmentionables, said, “Well, doctor. I’ll bet you’re just in seventh heaven. There’s more humanoid behavior going on out there than I’ve seen in most spaceport cantinas. Shall we make an appearance and ask to be taken to their leader?”

“Perhaps,” Rhys told him, “if we can determine who that leader is.”

They watched the reptiles for three days without making a single move. In that time, they collected a plethora of data on community life and interaction, noted the hierarchy among the “lizards,” and chased away nosy arthropods and avians. On day three, Godwin, whose patience was apparently not a virtue that got much exercise, returned to the base camp complaining of sand fleas and insomnia. The sands around their mobile cabin made a peculiar sucking noise at night which Godwin found unbearable. Rhys silently (and guiltily) thanked the sands.

Their observations did indeed yield the identification of a dominant member of the reptile community. It was a female, judging from physiological and behavioral cues, who ruled the reptile roost. It was to this noble creature that Rhys at last decided to make himself known.

At first he merely let them see him at the edge of the village laying out his “merchandise” and making observations to his notepad. After a while he moved in closer. The reptiles watched him with their golden, saucer-round eyes, occasionally opening and closing their wide mouths; Rhys expected to hear the clack of castanets. The elder female watched him most carefully as she went about her business, which consisted largely of scolding the younger members of her group who brought her food and occasionally rocks for her mound.

By the time he was face to face with the matriarch, she accepted him without tremor or outrage, merely observing his every move through her extraordinary eyes. He proffered her a piece of glazed azure tile. She looked at it, reached out a scaly digit and touched it, then scratched her neck. He rose and pressed the tile into the earthen wall of the mound she basked beside; she watched him with vague interest. Carefully, he took a rock from the pile her young cohorts had brought her and placed it among his wares; she blinked and scratched her neck again.

He repeated the exercise a few more times, drawing a small crowd of the reptilian Bogies. Finally, one of the creatures came forward and gingerly poked at another piece of tile. Rhys held his breath, affording a quick glance over his shoulder to where Yoshi and Rick observed and recorded the goings-on. The reptile handled the tile, turning it this way and that so the bright, glazed surface caught the sun, then he picked it up in one long-fingered hand and scuttled away with it to place it in his own pile of building materials some yards away. He did not return with an offering.

Rhys let out a long breath and tried not to let his hope go with it. But twenty or so pilfered tiles later, he admitted momentary defeat and retired to the camp.

“It seems,” he sighed some days later with no further progress to show, “that all we’ve accomplished is to leave our reptilian friends with gaudier houses.”

“Houses they may not even live in that much longer,” Yoshi added. “I explored the other side of that little knoll.” She indicated a nearby hillock covered with sand and some wispy bushes. “It seems that what these fellows do is build up their little mud igloos until the inner passages are all clogged with rocks and bits of wood, or the roofs cave in. From what I can tell, they just abandon the villages little by little and start new mounds right next door.”

Rhys nodded. “Which explains the trail of mud huts we followed to get here.”

“Professor…” Rick was watching a playback of Rhys’s interaction with the reptiles. “This is probably irrelevant, but does it seem to anyone else that those mud huts bear a more than passing resemblance to Yoshi’s bogdillos?”

Both Yoshi and Rhys brought their attention to the video. “Roddy’s right,” Rhys murmured thoughtfully. “Although that could just as easily be by accident as by design.”

Rick selected another time index, presenting them with a view of their encounter with the lake dwellers. It escaped no one that the water-bound lodges of the amphibians, with their anarchic polka-dots of bright stuff looked much like submerged bogdillos.

Rhys exhaled explosively. “Worship? Art? Coincidence?”

“Do we stick around or move on?” Rick asked.

“I guess we’d best move on,” Rhys decided. “But we’ll be back. Maybe I just need some fresh ideas.”

Raymond Godwin greeted their return to base camp with ill-concealed relief. “No luck, eh? Will you be giving up then?”

“Yes,” Rhys said mildly, “we re going to move the base camp to the next location.”

Godwin grimaced. “And may I ask how many ‘locations’ there are?”

“About a dozen, all told. The habitable zone on Bog is rather small, after all.”

“A dozen.” Godwin glanced from Rhys to his two assistants. “And I suppose you’re going to check out every one of them, aren’t you?”

Rhys smiled. “Until we find sentience or determine it’s not to be found. That’s our job this time out.”

“Professor Llewellyn, you obviously have very little business acumen. I don’t know how you managed to impress Ms. Price as a negotiator.” God win turned on his heel, narrowly avoiding doing the splits on the ever-soggy turf, and made a most dignified exit.

Putting Godwin’s ill-temper out of his mind, Rhys visited the logistics chief next to arrange for the camp move. Unlike Raymond Godwin, Chief Pinski was thrilled with the prospect of some action. “My people have been going stir crazy,” he told Rhys. “While you folks’re out doing the jungle, all they’ve got to do is read and play VR games. You want to see how bored people can get?” He beckoned Rhys to the door of his portable office and nodded toward the cargo area where a quartet of bright blue, tarp-covered pallets stood awaiting dispersal. At the edge of the area, a handful of men and women in varicolored coveralls lobbed the local version of pine cones into the forest.

“What are they aiming at?” Rhys asked.

“Oh, anything and everything. Leaves, seed cones on stumps, the blossoms on those big, droopy trees, the critters that skulk around the edge of camp.”

Rhys smiled wanly. “I see. Well, do you think you could ask them not to target anything that moves? I’d hate to annoy the neighbors.”

Pinski chuckled. “I see your point. Sure, Doc. Now, when would you like to bug out?”

“Tomorrow morning will do fine. I’ll have the coordinates for you by supper time.”

Leaving Pinski’s office he heard a rousing cheer go up along the edge of the cargo dump. He sighed, praying the site crew hadn’t hit anyone who would hold a grudge.

They were up by Bog’s green early light. Forest denizens strove to outdo each other in song, and a legitimately cool breeze rustled the rampant foliage. Rhys took his morning shower-essential to starting a day on Bog—and realized he couldn’t face putting on his kilt. The humid atmosphere made the wool itch and cling, and he was damn tired of smelling like a wet sheep. Nattily attired in a jumpsuit of jungle green, he was walking cross-camp when Yoshi fell into step with him.

“Good morning, sir,” she said.

“Yoshi, how long have we been working together?”

“Four years, three-and-one-half months,” she said as if she’d been calculating that very thing the moment he’d asked.

“And during those four years, three-and-one-half months, how many times do you suppose you’ve agreed to stop calling me “sir?”

She gave him a sheepish look from beneath the black silk that fell across her forehead. “Oops. Sorry, Rhys. Sometimes it just slips out. Blame it on my family—small town, Shinto-Buddhist-Baha’i values. Every time I forget to use a term of respect for an elder or a teacher, I see my aunt Mineko shaking her finger at me and saying, ‘Yoshiko, honor those to whom honor is due.’ ”

“Godwin’s an elder; you never call him ‘sir.’ ”

She glanced at him out of the corner of eyes that somehow blended contrition and impishness. “Your point being?”

“My point being that after four years—”

“And three-and-one-half months,” she added, and smiled. “I’m trying, but old habits die hard, and sometimes you’re such a curmudgeon—”

Rhys snorted. “Curmudgeon, your Aunt Mineko!” They’d come to the mess tent and he’d pulled back the waterproof cowling over the door when he heard someone shouting for him. He turned. Rick Halfax was hurrying toward them from the direction they’d just come, waving his arms.

“You aren’t going to believe this!” he panted when he reached them. “Something… I mean someone left us a pile of goodies during the night.”

It was indeed a “pile of goodies.” The jumble of rocks, flowers and conifer seed-cones had been left between a pair of tarp-covered pallets at the eastern fringe of their supply yard. The rocks formed the bottom-most layer; the Bogish “pine cones” tumbled atop those; the flowers were sprinkled over all like brown sugar on oatmeal. Some of the Tanaka site crew were standing nearby looking on with mild interest. A young woman pointed at the heap of stuff and said, “This is just the way we found it, Professor. We haven’t touched a thing.”

Rhys knelt by the knee-high mound and picked up one of the large, purplish blossoms. “Interesting,” he murmured. “All of the same variety.”

“The botany team was really interested in those,” the young woman told him and smiled. “I think the fragrance was a hit.”

Rhys nodded. “There’s a lot of money in perfume on just about any world. ”

“Mimicry?” The one word question came from Rick, who was sampling one of the rocks with a field scanner. “They’ve seen us pile stuff up like this. Maybe they’re just aping us.”

Rhys shook his head. “Possibly, but the young lady is right—these flowers are ones the botany team was particularly interested in.” He sniffed at the bloom. “Tantalizing. They collected scores of them.”

“And you think one of the native species noticed that?”

In answer, Rhys nodded at the rock in Rick’s hand. “What’ve you got there?”

“Ore-bearing. Barium…” He gestured at another, lighter-colored specimen on the ground at his feet. “Gold. Also heavily sampled by the advance team.”

Yoshi nudged a seed-cone with her toe. “Dr. Gallioni says these are a storehouse of natural antibiotics… I guess we’ve been noticed.”

“Hmmm.” Rhys was examining the spongy ground around the cache, looking for tracks. “But by whom?”

“Oh, dear God, it’s true.” Raymond Godwin stood at the corner of the nearest pallet, looking aghast at the collection of native wares. “Someone or something has actually made an overture. And I thought this was going to be a simple matter of a corporate claim. Well, which one of our lovely natives left this little offering?”

Rhys turned one of the native plants in his hands, feeling a heady wash of exhilaration. “I don’t know. Mr. Godwin, but I intend to find out.”

“I take it this means our move is canceled.”

Rhys nodded absently, already pondering his next step.

It was easy enough to talk about finding the would-be traders, harder to do. After a long night of sleepless reflection, Rhys still hadn’t decided where to begin or what he could do that he hadn’t already done to flush Bog’s sentients out of the swamp. He reviewed behaviors—leaf sipping, rock carrying, tree-house building… icon making? Any and all could be significant.

He rose the next morning, showered, dressed and literally flipped a coin. The ancient British ha’penny came up “heads,” and Rhys took his crew off to the reptile village. Three days later, he was ready to give up. Aside from building houses that possibly paid tribute to the bogdillo, the reptiles showed no sign of abstract thought.

“Perhaps,” Yoshi said the morning they moved their remote camp to the arboreal village, “we’re not going about this the right way.”

Rick Halfax snorted. “Obviously not.”

Yoshi ignored him. “I mean, maybe there’s some sort of protocol we’re missing.”

Rhys raised his tired eyes to her face. “I’m all ears.”

“Well, they brought their goods to our camp and left them where we’d be sure to find them.”

“Which is precisely what we’ve been doing. For all we know this could just be a case of mimicry.”

“Or,” Yoshi continued, “it could be a step in some sort of trading ritual. Like the Pa-Kai dances or the Garulin processionals.”

She had his attention now and he waved her on.

“We left our goods at their doors—”

“Whose doors?” Rick asked. “We left our goods at several doors.”

Yoshi nudged him aside with a preemptory flick of her fingers. “I don’t know yet, but what if they took that as the first step in the protocol? A bid to establish the trading ground, let’s say. To them, what we’re saying is, ‘We elect your village to be the trading ground.’ So they take the next step; they elect our ‘village.’ Now we’ve put the ball back in their bailiwick. But maybe that’s not the polite thing to do, maybe we’re supposed to accept their offer to let us host the trading.”

“So you’re suggesting we lay our goods out where we picked theirs up—in the middle of the supply dump?”

Yoshi nodded. “We make a gesture of accepting the goods they brought and place our own on the exact spot where they were delivered.”

Rhys glanced at Rick, whose nose was buried in his coffee mug. “What do you think, Roddy?”

The other man shrugged. “I say anything’s worth a try. If we can’t prove any of the Bogies are sentient, this planet is going to become a big, soupy rock quarry.” He leaned closer to Rhys across the table and lowered his voice. “I’ve seen the geological reports Godwin’s been salivating over. There are so many rare-elsewhere minerals in the so-called ‘crust’ of this mudball that there’s virtually no place you can dig that you won’t unearth something marketable. And if you don’t think Godwin would cheerfully tear up every tree, siphon off every drop of standing water and dispossess every native lifeform to get it—”

“Danetta would never allow that,” Rhys protested. “And she’s in the driver’s seat at Tanaka.”

Rick gave him a wry glance. “Come on, professor. You know big business better than that. Even Danetta Price has to listen to the board of directors. And the board of directors listens to the shareholders and a lot of shareholders listen to the siren song of the almighty credit.”

“You’re right,” Rhys admitted, guiltily recalling that they, too, worked for Tanaka. “And Godwin’s been singing that song since we met him. He has a vested interest in our failure because our success would mean a substantial investment of time. And Tanaka Corp has traditionally favored investing financial resources over investing time. Whatever we determine about the lifeforms on Bog, we’ve got to be damn certain.”

They pursued Yoshi’s idea, making a studied ritual out of accepting the native collection of goods and replacing the stash with one of their own. Then they settled down to watch. When no one and nothing put in an appearance by nightfall, they turned in for the evening and turned on the brace of monitoring vidicams around the site.

The pile of goodies was still there in the weak morning light. But something else was missing. All four of the stockpiles near the cache had been relieved of their bright blue coverings.

While Pinski had his crew replaced the tarps with extras from their shuttle’s supplies, Rhys and company checked the recordings. It had been a foggy night, which is to say a normal one, and shapeless wings of mist trailed across the camera eye or rolled along the ground. Rhys began to realize that virtually anything could be concealed in that.

“What’s that?” Rick asked, pointing a finger to what looked like a field of tiny stars in a slowly swirling nebula. “Fireflies?”

Rhys squinted at them. “Or the local equivalent. We’ve seen them before.”

“Sure. Over the bog. Never in camp.”

“They may travel at night. They’re certainly not our traders. ”

Rick grinned. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe if a whole bunch of them teamed up…”

Rhys gave him a mock-severe glare. “I suppose you’d like your signature to be on the report that identifies a local insect as the species Tanaka has to do business with?”

Rick turned his attention back to the monitor screen. “Not a chance.” “Not a chance” pretty much described their attempt to ferret any new visual evidence out of the video. There was darkness, fog, more darkness and a flotilla of brightly-lit insects. Rick hit on the idea of turning off the picture and focusing on the sound. That yielded little more—only the sound of plastic clips being sprung and tarpaulins being tugged from their mounts and dragged away through the primordial ooze.

There was nothing for it but to attempt tracking the missing tarps. Under normal circumstances, following a drag trail would have been a simple task, but Bog’s springy soil and general sogginess made it a hit or miss game. There was nothing like a discernible spoor, but only broken fern fronds and irregularly depressed patches of earth. They found the trail; they lost it; they found it again. Then they found a place where it appeared to fork.

“It looks like they split up,” Rick observed. “One tarp was dragged off that way,”—he pointed northeast— “another toward the lake. And from the look of that—” He broke off to examine a third swathe of disturbed ground and foliage. “Two toward the eastern plateau.”

Rhys straightened from his own perusal of the trails. “Roughly, one deeper into the forest, one toward the amphibian population and two toward the reptile village.”

“Coincidence?” asked Yoshi.

“Let’s find out. The simian tree-houses are closest. Let’s try that direction first.” Rhys led on, following the on-again, off-again trail until they came within sight of the nearest tree village. He was scanning the foliage above and before when Rick gave a shout.

“Pay dirt!”

Rhys, Yoshi, and the several members of the site crew who had joined them, hurried in the direction of his voice. He had found one of the missing tarpaulins snagged over a small sapling and a couple of ferns. A handful of small avians bathed themselves in the water that had pooled in its draped folds.

One of the site crew made a move to reclaim the tarp; the birds fled, chittering. Rhys put a hand up to stop the man. “Leave it. They paid for it, after all.”

“But it’s just sitting here, gathering water.”

Rhys dabbled a finger in the pool vacated by the birds, then glanced toward the village where a group of the simian inhabitants watched with mild interest. “Indeed. Yoshi… set up a monitor pack to take in the tarp and its immediate area. Then we’ll be on to the next site.”

“Why bother, Doc?” Rick asked. “Doesn’t this pretty much prove that the simians are our sentients?”

“There are two other trails to follow, Roddy. Trails that may lead to other conclusions entirely.”

They took a couple of swamp buggies to the reptile colony next. Both of the missing tarps were located with ease sheerly by contrast to the earth-toned surroundings. Like the first one, these had been draped in deceptive abandon over protruding objects so that fresh water from the humid atmosphere pooled in the low points. They found the first of the two roughly two-thirds of the way between their base camp and the reptile colony. The other was just outside the village at which Rhys had attempted to barter some time before. And this one was in use—a group of the reptilians were gathered about it sipping in turns from the vivid puddles while one or two avian friends showered beneath drops of spillage. Rhys took notes, Yoshi made a video record, then they continued to the third site.

It took longer to find the fourth tarp. Blazing blue notwithstanding, the lusher colors and foliage around the lake made spotting difficult. But spot it they did, near sunset. Once again it appeared to have been set up to collect fresh water. The five person team from the site crew took their buggy and returned to camp immediately, having no particular desire to bivouac in a true swamp overnight. Rhys hardly noticed their absence. Nor did he particularly notice the presence of Raymond Godwin, who, realizing the importance of recent events, thought it in his best interests to stay close by.

By the time Rhys and his cohorts had set up camp, the rude water collection system had been in use several times by both amphibians and avians. Review of the monitor packs Yoshi had set up at the other tarpaulin sites showed similar use by both simians and reptiles.

“Are they all sentient?” asked Godwin irritably as they sat in the twilight and watched the activity over the lake. “Have we stumbled onto some sort of… of alien co-op?”

Rhys, watching the movements of aquatic life in and around of one of the waterlogged lodges, shook his head absently. “So it would seem. Damn! They communicate with each other—how do we get them to communicate with us?” Rhys fell silent, gazing out over the lake as the alien sun pulled in its green-tinted skirts, plunging the swampy glade into sudden dim twilight. He reached for a camp-light. Yoshi’s hand fell on his arm, sending an inexplicable army of goosebumps marching up and down its length.

“Rhys, look at this.”

“This” proved to be billows of the tiny Bogian fireflies that, though nearly invisible by day were anything but at dusk. It was as if someone had released a cloud of willful sparks; the fireflies danced over the face of the thick water and the water’s surface gleamed in reply. It was a rare and remarkable sight. The mass of insects was so bright, the camp-light seemed superfluous.

Rhys, unable to withdraw his arm, glanced at Yoshi’s face in the spectral glow. Her eyes were bright mirrors of wonder. His, suddenly captive, watched the glow of alien fire in them. “Bioluminescents,” she murmured, “never cease to amaze me. I’ve never seen so many all in one place.”

“Oh, and here come a few more,” said Godwin dryly.

A few more was a gross understatement. A small, compact fleet of the fireflies was flitting through the tall grasses and ferns that bordered the lake. They moved at a leisurely pace, taking time to spiral skyward now and again before coalescing into a puff of green-gold brightness.

“That’s odd…”

Yoshi’s sudden tension broke the odd spell that had momentarily held Rhys in thrall. As the hand that had lain across his forearm went to her field scanner, he blinked and followed her gaze. Below the cloud of approaching fireflies, the grasses waved and bobbed as if the beating of those tiny wings was creating a massive downdraft. At the water’s edge, no more than thirty feet from where the humans sat, the reeds parted.

“Huh!” snorted Rick. “Mystery solved. I didn’t think those little sprites could create that much commotion.”

Yoshi nodded, watching as two bogdillos slid into the water, their escort of fireflies commingling with the brilliant mist that hovered over the lake. “I forgot they were parasites.”

Rhys stared at the bright water. “Parasites? Or pets?”

“What?”

Rhys was on his feet, keeping his voice low with an effort. “What was the one thing we did see on the security monitor the night the tarps were taken?”

Yoshi had risen too. “Fireflies.”

“And what do fireflies have in common with every one of our potentially sentient species?”

Yoshi’s brow knit. “Bogdillos?”

“Bogdillos?” Rick repeated. “But they’re scavengers. They sponge off everybody. They even horn in on the houses the amphibians build.”

“They’ve got symbiotic relationships with not just one other species,” argued Rhys, making emphatic gestures with both hands, “but with three or more. They get fed, petted, and scratched—”

“And in return,” said Godwin, “they provide house plans?”

“No. They provide water!”

“Water?” echoed Rick. “I don’t—” “Remember the broadleaf plants we couldn’t account for near the simian village? Good God, they were all over the ground in the reptile colony too, I only just realized. What if those are the bogdillo s attempts to provide water to the other species? We came into town with a better system of trapping water, and the bogdillos— having observed what we found interesting—traded some of it for what they found interesting. Namely, big, blue ‘leaves’ that could be used to trap precious water in larger quantities.”

“They’re a diurnal species,” added Yoshi, “yet they have adapted to nocturnal activity by—possibly—harnessing another lifeform to provide light.”

“And just how do you propose to prove this marvelous construct?” Godwin asked, blinking up at them through the eerie faux-twilight. “We’ve heard not murmur one from those bug-dillos of yours. ”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Rick objected. “They could communicate via species-specific telepathy for all we know.”

“We’ll offer further trade,” said Rhys decisively.

Bearing another tarpaulin along with plant and mineral samples Tanaka had found most interesting, Rhys and Rick approached the shore of Brown Salt Lake. Yoshi monitored while Godwin stood by like bored royalty. With Rick behind him holding a tarp, Rhys hunkered at the water’s edge and smacked the surface lightly with the flat of his hand. He repeated this several times, then paused and glanced back over his shoulder to where he could see Yoshi with her vidicam. She was nodding.

“They’re there. Just out beyond that near lodge.”

Glancing to where Yoshi had directed, Rhys could see them too, looking like nothing so much as a clump of giant chocolate marshmallows bobbing in a cup of hot cocoa.

And there, for all of Rhys’s ministrations, they stayed. He had Rick wave the tarp. He laid out the samples of the goods the bogdillos (presumably) had brought them, trying to demonstrate that he would trade one thing for the other. He even left the tarpaulin on the shore and retreated. The marshmallows stayed right where they were, bobbing beneath their radiant canopy.

“I think,” said Godwin, “that I am going to run, screaming, into the jungle. How do you manage to have so bloody much patience? If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were all brain-addled.” He snorted. “Hell, I’m not sure I do know better. Are you all brain-addled?”

“I was beginning to wonder myself,” yawned Rick, gazing at the motionless dumplings.

“They’re waiting for something,” murmured Yoshi. “I can feel it.”

“Oh, now that’s scientific!” Godwin got up and went out to the shore to stare at the flotilla of bogdillos. “I say,” he addressed them. “Are you in the mood for a spot of tea? Eh? How about some anchovy wine or something equally tasty?” He bent over then, and before Rhys could guess his intention, he had tossed a rock out into the water. It landed with a squishy smack! right in front of his alien audience. They dispersed immediately.

Rhys was on his feet in an instant. “Godwin! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The other man turned on him, face red with frustration. “Trying to communicate.”

“Communicate? You frightened them away!”

“At least, my way got some result.”

Rhys took a step toward the other man forcing him to withdraw to the other side of the swamp buggy.

Twilight lingered for perhaps an hour. True darkness fell. Now no fireflies brightened the lake’s murky surface, no bogdillos plowed through the waist-high reeds. Rhys was thoroughly depressed and disgusted, convinced Godwin had ruined their chances of communicating with the Bogian denizens. He was sitting in the stygian darkness between an equally glum Yoshi and a dozing Rick when something thudded to the ground just out of reach. Startled, he leapt to this feet and reached for a palm torch, flipping on the diffuse beam. Yoshi echoed both movements, adding her light to his. Barely an arm’s length from where they had sat was a rock.

“Are they attacking?” Yoshi whispered.

“I don’t know. Kill your beam.” He matched action to word, flicking off his own torch and plunging them into darkness. When nothing else happened, he stepped to where the rock had fallen and knelt to examine it, switching on his torch again to do so. Almost immediately, a second object plopped to earth another three feet or so ahead of him. As he rose to find it with his eyes, the entire lagoon was lit up like the Christmas trees of yore.

Rhys extinguished his torch. The alien insects went dark a heartbeat later. He felt Yoshi at his side and gave her a quick glance before stepping to the second projectile. It proved to be a large, soggy seed-pod of some sort.

“Your torch,” Yoshi whispered.

He turned it on. The fireflies blazed in reply. Another missile fell midway between Rhys and the shoreline. He heard a soft exclamation from behind him, and realized Rick was awake. A fraction of his mind wondered what Godwin was doing just about now. He stepped to the next marker without turning off his torch.

Yoshi flicked hers on as well. “I’ll get the goods.” She was gone for a moment, during which time Rhys responded to another invitation to come closer. He was now a mere foot from the waterline and could see the lumpy shapes of the bogdillos out in the water. He waited, but they came no closer. When a full minute had elapsed, he bent, picked up the rock at his feet and tossed it out into the little lagoon, so that it fell midway between shore and watchers. After a moment of hesitation the bogdillos drew closer, moving as one.

Rhys felt a chill sail up his spine. There was a moment in every first contact Rhys had known when he wondered if the other party would suddenly prove to be fanatically carnivorous xenophobes. In this case, the possibility presented itself that the bogdillos viewed the visiting humans as a potential addition to their petting zoo. He cursed the forefathers of science fiction, chased the ridiculous thought away, and tossed out another rock, this time bringing the arthropods to just over a yard from where he stood. Signaling Yoshi to attend him, he squatted on the shore and began playing charades. He showed the bogdillos the tarpaulin, describing it (“tarp”) in case they could hear him, and demonstrating with a flask of water that he understood what they used it for. Then he displayed the several most valuable of the items they had left in the base camp cargo dump, and lastly, laid the tarpaulin on the shore and stepped back.

During the brief wait, he was witness to what he could only call a conversation between the various members of the bogdillian group. There were dolphin-like squeaks, watery gargling sounds, a gamut of muted tones, and tiny, rhythmic slapping patterns executed with a foot or tentacle (he couldn’t see which) upon the stiff surface of the water. Most incredibly of all, the fireflies dancing above each bogdillo—for he could now see that each entity had its separate tribe— winked on and off and subtly altered color and direction during the exchange.

“My God.” The exclamation was in starchily accented English. Raymond Godwin had come down to the shore to watch.

“Don’t you dare,” growled Rhys, “throw anything.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

The bogdillos had obviously come to some sort of decision, for some of their number dispersed, some withdrawing to the shore and into the tall grasses, others disappearing into the amphibian lodges, still others seeming to dive beneath the water— an amazing feat considering its native buoyancy. Two of the remaining individuals glided right to Rhys’s feet and emerged to face him. After each had appraised him via a trio of eyestalks, they proceeded to handle the tarpaulin with what appeared to be fins… or tentacles… or flabby pincers, depending on the use to which they were put—lifting, poking or pulling.

Rhys sucked in a long awful breath. Now, that was adaptability. Even so, he noticed that one of the bogdillos was having a little trouble folding back a corner of the thin but durable fabric. Noticed, too, how it kept changing the shape of its pseudohand to gain a better purchase. On a whim, Rhys lowered his own hand to where the bogdillo could see it and slowly, carefully peeled the corner back. He left his hand in plain view— the eyestalks took note. After a few permutations, the bogdillo had approximated a hand (albeit, without digits it looked like a hand in a sleek, shiny mitten) and had satisfactorily manipulated the thin folds. Rhys sat back in amazement.

In short order, the missing bogdillos returned and, after a very brief and bright consultation with their confreres, deposited an array of goods on the silty squelch of beach. Rhys heard a scanner’s metallic purr to his right.

“Lord,” said Godwin. “What a treasure trove.”

The two arthropods in possession of the tarp made a show of removing it from the beach, then returned to gesture very pointedly at their own pile of offerings, now at Godwin’s feet.

Rhys glanced at the acquisitions director. “Fair trade?” he asked.

“Oh, I’d say so.”

“Then make a show of picking it up.”

“Me? You want me to take part in this… negotiation?”

“It seems you may have started it. What could be more appropriate than for you to close it?”

Godwin bent and picked up an armful of ores and plant-stuffs. He stepped back a stride for good measure. The bogdillos seemed satisfied. They took their tarpaulin and departed, fireflies blazing. The lagoon returned to a deep green sort of t wilight as the alien light receded further into the lake.

“Well,” breathed Godwin. “That was something, wasn’t it? Did I really start all that, do you think?”

“I’m pretty sure of it.” Rhys chuckled. “When I think of all the clues we got—lakeside foliage turning up in relatively faraway places, bogdillo-shaped constructs, the simians tossing food at them…” He trailed off, a strange expression flitting across his face.

“They were aping the bogdillo trading methods, you mean?”

Rhys nodded, his eyes apparently on some fourth dimension only he could see. “So it would seem. And while we were being pleased with ourselves for all our neat efforts toward trade in the villages, what probably convinced the bogdillos to give us that first cache of goods was the cargo crew lobbing seed cones at them.”

Yoshi waggled her palm torch. “Now they know we can harness light… just like they do.” She grinned. “I guess that makes us bogdillos too.”

“I’m willing to bet they’ll suspend coming to any firm decision until they’ve known us longer, but this,” said Rhys, “is where we step out, Mr. Godwin.”

The Englishman did a double-take. “I beg pardon?”

“We have found you a sentient life-form. I will even recommend the experts necessary to continue working with them. But they will have to determine if the bogdillos can lay claim to the mineral resources of this planet on a scale necessary to cede them wholesale to Tanaka.”

“Now wait just a moment. You’ve found a sentient, now you’re supposed to recommend that I negotiate with them for Bog’s resources.”

“A sentient, yes, but I’ve not proven them to be the representatives of a civilization. All I’ve shown you is a race of clever natives, which you wish to deal with as necessary, or so you said. The Collective takes a dim view of people—or even major corporations—dealing with native populations according to expediency. This is a culture, Godwin. There is potential for trade, potential for communication. But are these people in a position to barter away the mineral rights for their entire world? Would they even understand what they were bartering away? Until we know those things, we can do no more than deal with them on a purely local basis.”

“Like this, you mean?” asked Godwin incredulously. “Beads and trinkets for ores and botanicals?”

“Not trinkets. An exchange of useful commodities. But yes, just like what we did here. A little at a time—while we establish communications… and search for other possible contacts.”

“Ah. Other contacts which could negotiate mineral rights for Bog.”

Rhys shook his head. “You’re forgetting a fine point of Collective law, Mr. Godwin. If the bogdillos are not the only race of men on Bog, neither party would be allowed to barter away planetary resources. I believe you have jumped the gun. There is nothing here for you to acquire… yet. Only trinkets, as you call them.”

Godwin, crushing his armful of ores to his chest, brought himself stiffly upright. “You sir, have forgotten who pays your salary. I intend to tender a full report to Corporate as soon as I return to headquarters. I’ll call in the requisite experts—”

“I’ll give you my recommendations.”

Godwin opened his mouth to retort, but Rhys cut him off. “They’ll get the quickest results, Godwin. Don’t sabotage yourself out of dislike for me.”

“Take me back to the base camp.”

“With pleasure.”

“He’ll try to find a work-around, you know,” said Yoshi, her eyes following the stiff column of Godwin’s back. “He’ll try to find a way to get more sooner.”

“Of course he will,” Rhys acknowledged. “But fortunately there are saner heads at Tanaka. And there are the laws of the Collective. Until he can prove the bogdillos have the knowledge and authority to negotiate for such vast resources, those laws will force Tanaka to be content with limited commodities—still worth having, if our advance surveys are any indication.”

“Until?” Yoshi turned off her palm-torch, plunging them into moist darkness. “What if he never can prove it? What if the bogdillos are not world-aware enough to negotiate and no other sentients turn up?”

She could feel his smile even in the darkness. “Oh, I think there may be other sentients here, all right. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

“I don’t get you.”

“The bogdillos provide water to at least three other species—species capable of community existence and lodge building. Species also capable of a high degree of mimicry. Alter all, we saw them throw things at the bogdillos, and we saw the bogdillos throw them back.”

Yoshi sucked in a deep breath. “You think the bogdillos are trying to get the other species to barter?”

“Maybe it’s that simple. Maybe it’s not. Consider this: What if the bogdillos are trying to teach the other species barter? What if they’re trying to help them take an evolutionary step?” “Is that possible?” Her voice came out in a awed whisper.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t around when our ancestors learned these things. But I do know this—Mr. Godwin will have to acquire someone else’s resources.”

“Rhys, do you hear yourself? It’s not just Godwin. It’s Tanaka Corp. Most employers take a very dim view of an employee who feels he’d scored a moral victory in keeping them out of a multibillion credit deal.”

Rhys grimaced. “You’re right. And one of these days I expect my scruples will catch up with me. Unless my conscience gets there first.”

“Your conscience?” She shifted closer to him in the dark to peer up into his face. “What would you have to feel guilty about? You’ve always conducted yourself ethically. I should know. I’ve always been there.”

He turned to look at her, realizing that she had, indeed, always been there. He could just see the pale moon of her face, the glitter of her eyes. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like,” he asked, “not to serve a corporate master? To be a scientist, pure and simple?”

“I know what it’s like. So do you. When we were on sabbatical—”

“Not just when we’re on sabbatical, Yoshi. But every day. You saw what happened on this assignment. The same thing that always happens. We serve two masters—Tanaka and science, in that order. And sometimes, like this time, their aims are mutually opposed. Science doesn’t care if it takes a century to establish meaningful contact with the denizens of Bog. Tanaka most certainly does. And that puts us in an untenable position.”

“You’ve thought about resigning before.” It was a bald statement of fact.

“Aye, but I don’t recall discussing it with you.”

He could see the flash of white as she smiled. “I know things.”

“Ah, now don’t go all inscrutable on me, Yosh. In this frame of mind, I don’t think I can take it.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “Come on. We’d best get Godwin back to his tidy corporate shuttle before he starts throwing things again. I’d be dreadfully embarrassed if he accidentally started another round of negotiations and us with nothing to trade.”

“You do have to give him credit for that,” Yoshi acknowledged as they picked their way back to the swamp buggy, leaving their torches dark in silent mutual consent.

“I do? Well, I suppose you’re right. After all, he’s leaving. I can afford to be charitable.”

“Aren’t we leaving too? I thought you were going to recommend some experts to take the post.”

Rhys scratched his cheek. “Yes, well. Actually, I thought I’d recommend us. After all, we’re already here, aren’t we? Godwin wants expediency—how much more expedient can you get? Besides, if what I think’s going on here is going on here, I surely don’t want to miss it.”

“And your resignation?”

“Can wait. A wee bit longer.”

They had reached the swamp buggy by now and could hear Godwin, already within, haranguing Rick Halfax about his superior’s complete lack of company loyalty. Rhys sighed. Well, perhaps a very wee bit.

Illustrations by Steve Cavallo.

Content

Marsh Mallow
by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff