“How lonely Port Kato looks from the air,” she remarked. Though accented, her English—the agreed-upon common language at this particular station—was fluent: one reason she had come here to investigate the possibility of taking a post.

  “Because it is,” Jannika answered in her different accent. “A dozen scientists, twice as many juniors, and a few support personnel. That makes you extra welcome.”

  “What, do you feel isolated?” Chrisoula wondered. “You can call to anywhere on Nearside that there is a holocom, can you not?”

  “Yeah, or flit to a town on business or vacation or whatever,” Hugh said. “But no matter how stereo an image is and sounds, it’s only an image. You can’t go out with it for a drink after your conference is finished, can you? As for an actual visit, well, you’re soon back here among the same old faces. Outposts get pretty ingrown socially. You’ll find out, if you sign on.” In haste: “Not that I’m trying to discourage you. Jan’s right, we’d be more than happy to have somebody fresh join us.”

  His own accent was due to history. English was his mother tongue, but he was third-generation Medean, which meant that his grandparents had left North America so long ago that speech back there had changed like everything else. To be sure, Chrisoula wasn’t exactly up-to-date, when a laser beam took almost fifty years to go from Sol to Colchis and the ship in which she had fared, unconscious and unaging, was considerably slower than that…

  “Yes, from Earth,” Jannika’s voice glowed.

  Chrisoula winced. “It was not happy on Earth when I left. Maybe things got better afterward. Please, I will talk about that later, but now I would like to look forward.”

  Hugh patted her shoulder. She was fairly pretty, he thought: not in a class with Jan, which few women were, but still, he’d enjoy it if acquaintance developed bedward. Variety is the spice of life.

  “You really have had bad luck today, haven’t you?” he murmured. “Getting delayed till Roberto—uh, Dr. Venosta went out in the field—and Dr. Feng back to the Center with a batch of samples—” He referred to the chief biologist and the chief chemist. Chrisoula’s training was in biochemistry; it was hoped that she, lately off the latest of the rare starcraft, would contribute significantly to an understanding of life on Medea.

  She smiled. “Well, then I will know others first, starting with you two nice people.”

  Jannika shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “We are busy ourselves, soon to leave, and may not return until sunrise.”

  “That is—how long? About thirty-six hours? Yes. Is that not long to be away in…what do you say?…this weird an environment?”

  Hugh laughed. “It’s the business of a xenologist, which we both are,” he said. “Uh, I think I, at least, can spare a little time to show you around and introduce you and make you feel sort of at home.” Arriving as she did at a point in the cycle of watches when most folk were still asleep, Chrisoula had been conducted to his and Jannika’s quarters. They were early up, to make ready for their expedition.

  Jannika gave him a hard glance. She saw a big man who reckoned his age at forty-one Terrestrial years: burly, a trifle awkward in his movements, beginning to show a slight paunch; craggy-featured, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, close-cropped, clean-shaven, but sloppily clad in tunic, trousers, and boots, the style of the miners among whom he had grown up. “I have not time,” she stated.

  Hugh made an expansive gesture. “Sure, you just continue, dear.” He took Chrisoula under the elbow. “Come on, let’s wander.”

  Bewildered, she accompanied him out of the cluttered hut. In the compound, she halted and stared about her as if this were her first sight of Medea.

  Port Kato was indeed tiny. Not to disturb regional ecology with things like ultraviolet lamps above croplands and effluents off them, it drew its necessities from older and larger settlements on the Nearside mainland. Moreover, while close to the eastern edge of Hansonia, it stood a few kilometers inland, on high ground, as a precaution against Ring Ocean tides which could get monstrous. Thus nature walled and roofed and weighed on the huddle of structures, wherever she looked—

  —or listened, smelled, touched, tasted, moved. In slightly lesser gravity than Earth’s, she had a bound to her step. The extra oxygen seemed to lend energy likewise, though her mucous membranes had not yet quite stopped smarting. Despite a tropical location, the air was balmy and not overly humid, for the island lay close enough to Farside to be cooled. It was full of pungencies, only a few of which she could remotely liken to anything familiar, such as musk or iodine. Foreign too were sounds—rustlings, trills, croakings, mumbles—which the dense atmosphere made loud in her ears.

  The station itself had an outlandish aspect. Buildings were made of local materials to local design; even a radiant energy converter resembled nothing at home. Multiple shadows carried peculiar tints; in fact, every color was changed in this ruddy light. The trees that reared above the roof were of odd shapes, their foliage in hues of orange, yellow, and brown. Small things flitted among them or scuttled along their branches. Occasional glittery drifts in the breeze did not appear to be dust.

  The sky was deep-toned. A few clouds were washed with faint pink and gold. The double sun Colchis—Castor C was suddenly too dry a name—was declining westward both members so dim that she could safely gaze at them for a short while, Phrixus at close to its maximum angular separation from Helle.

  Opposite them, Argo dominated heaven, as always on the inward-facing hemisphere of Medea. Here the primary planet hung low; treetops hid part of the great flattened disc. Daylight paled the redness of its heat, which would be lurid after dark. Nonetheless it was a colossus, as broad to the eye as fifteen or sixteen Lunas above Earth. The subtly chromatic bands and spots upon its face, everchanging, were clouds more huge than continents and hurricane vortices that could have swallowed whole this moon upon which she stood.

  Chrisoula shivered. “It…strikes me,” she whispered, “more than anywhere around Enrique or—or approaching from space…I have come elsewhere in the universe.”

  Hugh laid an arm around her waist. Not being a glib man otherwise, he merely said, “Well this is different. That’s why Port Kato exists, you know. To study in depth an area that’s been isolated awhile; they tell me the isthmus between Hansonia and the mainland disappeared fifteen thousand years ago. The local dromids, at least, never heard of humans before we arrived. The ouranids did get rumors, which may have influenced them a little, but surely not much.”

  “Dromids—ouranids—oh.” Being Greek, she caught his meanings at once. “Fuxes and balloons, correct?”

  Hugh frowned. “Please. Those are pretty cheap jokes, aren’t they? I know you hear them a lot in town, but I think both races deserve more dignified names from us. They are intelligent, remember.”

  “I am sorry.”

  He squeezed a trifle. “No harm done, Chris. You’re new. With a century needed for question and answer, between here and Earth—”

  “Yes. I have wondered if it is really worth the cost, planting colonies beyond the Solar System just to send back scientific knowledge that slowly.”

  “You’ve got more recent information about that than I do.”

  “Well…the planetology, biology, chemistry, they were still giving new insights when I left, and this was good for everything from medicine to volcano control.” The woman straightened. “Perhaps the next step is in your field, xenology? If we can come to understand a nonhuman mind—no, two, on this world—maybe three, if there really are two quite unlike sorts of ouranid as I have heard theorized—” She drew breath. “Well, then we might have a chance of understanding ourselves.” He thought she was genuinely interested, not merely trying to please him, when she went on: “What is it you and your wife do? They mentioned to me in Enrique it is quite special.”

  “Experimental, anyway.” Not to overdo things, he released her. “A complicated story. Wouldn’t you rather take the grand tour of our metropolis?”

  “Later I can by myself, if you must go back to work. But I am fascinated by what I have heard of your project. Reading the minds of aliens!”

  “Hardly that.” Seeing his opportunity, he indicated a bench outside a machine shed. “If you really would like to hear, sit down.”

  As they did, Piet Marais, botanist, emerged from his cabin. To Hugh’s relief, he simply greeted them before hurrying off. Certain Hansonian plants did odd things at this time of day. Everyone else was still indoors, the cook and bull cook making breakfast, the rest washing and dressing for their next wakeful period.

  “I suppose you are surprised,” Hugh commenced. “Electronic neuranalysis techniques were in their infancy on Earth when your ship left. They took a spurt soon afterward, and of course the information reached us before you did. The use there had been on lower animals as well as humans, so it wasn’t too hard for us—given a couple of geniuses in the Center—to adapt the equipment for both dromids and ouranids. Both those species have nervous systems too, after all, and the signals are electrical. Actually, it’s been more difficult to develop the software, the programs, than the hardware. Jannika and I are working on that, collecting empirical data for the psychologists and semanticians and computer people to use.

  “Uh, don’t misunderstand, please. To us, this is nearly incidental. Mindscan—bad word, but we seem to be stuck with it—mindscan should eventually be a valuable tool in our real job, which is to learn how local natives live, what they think and feel, everything about them. However, at present it’s very new, very limited, and very unpredictable.”

  Chrisoula tugged her chin. “Let me tell you what I imagine I know,” she suggested, “then you tell me how wrong I am.”

  “Sure.”

  She grew downright pedantic: “Synapse patterns can be identified and recorded which correspond to motor impulses, sensory inputs, their processing—and at last, theoretically, to thoughts themselves. But the study is a matter of painfully accumulating data, interpreting them, and correlating the interpretations with verbal responses. Whatever results one gets, they can be stored in a computer program as an n-dimensional map off which readings can be made. More readings can be gotten by interpolation.”

  “Whe-ew!” the man exclaimed. “Go on.”

  “I am right this far? I did not expect to be.”

  “Well, naturally, you’re trying to sketch in a few words what needs volumes of math and symbolic logic to describe halfway properly. Still, you’re doing better than I could myself.”

  “I continue. Now recently there are systems which can make correspondences between different maps. They can transform the patterns that constitute thought in one mind into the thought-patterns of another. Also, direct transmission between nervous systems is possible. A pattern can be detected, passed through a computer for translation, and electromagnetically induced in a receiving brain. Does this not amount to telepathy?”

  Hugh started to shake his head, but settled for: “M-m-m, of an extremely crude sort. Even two humans who think in the same language and know each other inside out, even they get only partial information—simple messages, burdened with distortion, low signal-to-noise ratio, and slow transmission. How much worse when you try with a different life form! The variations in speech alone, not to mention neurological structure, chemistry—”

  “Yet you are attempting it, with some success, I hear.”

  “Well, we made a certain amount of progress on the mainland with both dromids and ouranids. But believe me, ‘certain amount’ is a gross overstatement.”

  “Next you are trying it on Hansonia, where the cultures must be entirely strange to you. In fact, the species of ouranid—Why? Do you not add needlessly to your difficulties?”

  “Yes—that is, we do add countless problems, but it is not needless. You see, most cooperating natives have spent their whole lives around humans. Many of them are professional subjects of study: dromids for material pay, ouranids for psychological satisfaction, amusement, I suppose you could say. They’re deracinated; they themselves often don’t have any idea why their ‘wild’ kinfolk do something. We wanted to find out if mindscan can be developed into a tool for learning about more than neurology. For that, we needed beings who’re relatively, uh, uncontaminated. Lord knows Nearside is full of virgin areas. But here Port Kato already was, set up for intensive study of a region that’s both isolated and sharply defined. Jan and I decided we might as well include mindscan in our research program.”

  Hugh’s glance drifted to the immensity of Argo and lingered. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said low, “it’s incidental—one more way for us to try and find out why the dromids and ouranids here are at war.”

  “They kill each other elsewhere too, do they not?”

  “Yes, in a variety of ways, for a larger variety of reasons, as nearly as we can determine. Let me remark for the record, I myself don’t hold with the theory that information on this planet can be acquired by eating its possessor. For one thing, I can show you more areas than not where dromids and ouranids seem to coexist perfectly peacefully.” Hugh shrugged. “Nations on Earth never were identical. Why should we expect Medea to be the same everywhere?”

  “On Hansonia, however—you say war?”

  “Best word I can think of. Oh, neither group has a government to issue a formal declaration. But the fact is that more and more, for the past couple of decades—as long as humans have been observing, if not longer—dromids on this island have been hellbent to kill ouranids. Wipe them out! The ouranids are pacifistic, but they do defend themselves, sometimes with active measures like ambushes.” Hugh grimaced. “I’ve glimpsed several fights, and examined the results of a lot more. Not pleasant. If we in Port Kato could mediate—bring peace—well, I’d think that alone might justify man’s presence on Medea.”

  While he sought to impress her with his kindliness, he was not hypocritical. A pragmatist, he had nevertheless wondered occasionally if humans had a right to be here. Long-range scientific study was impossible without a self-supporting colony, which in turn implied a minimum population, most of whose members were not scientists. He, for example, was the son of a miner and had spent his boyhood in the outback. True, settlement was not supposed to increase beyond its present level, and most of this huge moon was hostile enough to his breed that further growth did seem unlikely. But—if nothing else, simply by their presence, Earthlings had already done irreversible things to both native races.

  “You cannot ask them why they fight?” Chrisoula wondered.

  Hugh smiled wryly. “Oh, sure, we can ask. By now we’ve mastered local languages for everyday purposes. Except, how deep does our understanding go?

  “Look, I’m the dromid specialist, she’s the ouranid specialist, and we’ve both worked hard trying to win the friendship of specific individuals. It’s worse for me, because dromids won’t come into Port Kato as long as ouranids might show up anytime. They admit they’d be duty bound to try and kill the ouranids—and eat them, too, by the way; that’s a major symbolic act. The dromids agree this would be a violation of our hospitality. Therefore I have to go meet them in their camps and dens. In spite of this handicap, she doesn’t feel she’s progressed any further than me. We’re equally baffled.”

  “What do the autochthons say?”

  “Well, either species admits they used to live together amicably…little or no direct contact, but with considerable interest in each other. Then, twenty or thirty years back, more and more dromids started failing to reproduce. Oftener and oftener, castoff segments don’t come to term, they die. The leaders have decided the ouranids are at fault and must be exterminated.”

  “Why?”

  “An article of faith. No rationale that I can untangle, though I’ve guessed at motivations, like the wish for a scapegoat. We’ve got pathologists hunting for the real cause, but imagine how long that might take. Meanwhile, the attacks and killings go on.”

  Chrisoula regarded the dusty ground. “Have the ouranids changed in any way? The dromids might then jump to a conclusion of post hoc, propter hoc.”

  “Huh?” When she had explained, Hugh laughed. “I’m not a cultivated type, I’m afraid,” he said. “The rock rats and bush rangers I grew up amongst do respect learning—we wouldn’t survive on Medea without learning—but they don’t claim to have a lot of it themselves. I got interested in xenology because as a kid I acquired a dromid friend and followed her-him through the whole cycle, female to male to postsexual. It grabbed hold of my imagination—a life that exotic.”

  His attempt to turn the conversation into personal channels did not succeed. “What have the ouranids done?” she persisted.

  “Oh…they’ve acquired a new—no, not a new religion. That implies a special compartment of life, doesn’t it? And ouranids don’t compartmentalize their lives. Call it a new Way, a new Tao. It involves eventually riding an east wind off across the ocean, to die in the Farside cold. Somehow, that’s transcendental. Please don’t ask me how, or why. Nor can I understand—or Jan—why the dromids consider this is such a terrible thing for the ouranids to do. I have some guesses, but they’re only guesses. She jokes that they’re born fanatics.”

  Chrisoula nodded. “Cultural abysses. Suppose a modern materialist with little empathy had a time machine, and went back to the Middle Ages on Earth, and tried to find out what drove a Crusade or Jihad. It would appear senseless to him. Doubtless he would conclude everybody concerned was crazy, and the sole possible way to peace was total victory of one side or the other. Which was not true, we know today.”

  The man realized that this woman thought a good deal like his wife. She continued: “Could it be that human influences have brought about these changes, perhaps indirectly?”

  “It could,” he admitted. “Ouranids travel widely, of course, so those on Hansonia may well have picked up, at second or third hand, stories about Paradise which originated with humans. I suppose it’d be natural to think Paradise lies in the direction of sunset. Not that anybody has ever tried to convert a native. But natives have occasionally inquired what our ideas are. And ouranids are compulsive mythmakers, who might seize on any concept. They’re ecstatics, too. Even about death.”