March Upcountry

" 'We're getting air-trucked to the barracks,' " Mutabi said in an evil tone. Middle finger up.

"Oh, man, you would have to say that one!" Julian chuckled. "My aching feet."

"Modderpocker," Poertena said. "Chus what we need. Surrounded by tee ca

"Chill, Poertena," Sergeant Despreaux advised. "They're friendly."

"Sure they are," Poertena replied. "Why fight tee roc if you can get it to fly into tee pot."

Even as he spoke, his helmet registered another contact. Then another. It began popping up icons everywhere, and an entire line of Mardukans materialized magically out of the rain.

"Modderpocker," Poertena said again, quietly. "Neat trick."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The company barely fitted inside the walls of the village. The Marines and their equipment were packed into every nook and cra

Platters of grain, similar in texture to rice but tasting more like barley, were scattered about among the residents and visitors, along with carved wooden bowls of fruits. The predominant fruit species appeared to be a large, brown oval with a thick, inedible skin but a ripe red interior that tasted something like a kiwi fruit. Since it grew on palmlike trees, the humans promptly christened it a "kiwi-date" or "kate" fruit. In addition to the grain and fruit, there were steaming platters of unrecognizable charred things. Most of the humans passed those up.

There was also a sort of wine made from fruit juices, but it was obviously distilled and not just fermented. Like humans, the Mardukans metabolized alcohol for pleasure, and after one tentative sip of the potent beverage, the sergeant major growled at the platoon sergeants. Her growls then wandered down the chain of command until even the lowliest private was aware of the penalty for getting plastered in the middle of a potentially hostile jungle. There was also a heavy and bitter beer that some of the Marines relished and others found disgusting.

The Marines followed the custom of their hosts, reaching into the piles to extract handfuls of grain and fruit and brushing away gathering insects, livestock, and pets.

Pride of place was given to a large lizardlike creature roasting on a spit at the center of the camp. The head had been removed, but the bulky body was a meter and a quarter in length, with a longer tail dragging off into the fire. The spit was turned, with serious and dedicated attention to the responsibility, by a Mardukan child—one of several ru

The Mardukans were viviparous and bore live young, but they had "litters" of four or more. Baby Mardukans were extremely small, barely the size of a Terran squirrel, and mostly stayed glued to their mothers' backs, mired into the mucous from which they also derived nutrition. Half-grown Mardukans were everywhere underfoot, inextricably mixed with livestock, pets, and, now, Marines.

O'Casey stopped tapping at her pad and shook her head.

"They must have an enormous infant mortality rate," she said with a yawn.

"Why?" Roger asked.

As one of the stars of the evening, he was seated in a place of honor under the awninglike front section of Delkra's hut. He took one of the charred things off the broad leaf that served as a platter and tossed it to a lizardlike creature which had been looking at him with begging eyes. It started to pounce on the morsel, but was pushed aside by a larger version. The larger beast, patterned red and brown with pebbly skin like the flar beast's, and with the ubiquitous six legs and a short, wide tail, came over to the prince, sniffing at his platter, but Roger shooed it away.

"I mean," he continued, still looking at the smaller beast, "what makes you say that?"

The little beast was interesting, he thought. The legs, instead of being splayed out like a lizard's, were directly under the body, like a terrestrial mammal's. And the eyes looked much more intelligent than any Terran lizard's.

But it still looked like a six-legged lizard.

"All these children," O'Casey said, snapping her pad closed. "There are six children below what I would guess to be reproductive age for every adult. Now compare that to humans, and you can see that they must have either a tremendous rate of population growth, or a high infant mortality rate. And there's no evidence of population growth. So—"

"What would cause it?" Roger asked absently, holding out another charred bit to the lizard. It shuffled forward hesitantly, sniffing at the tidbit and looking around cringingly. Reasonably sure that it was in the clear, it bared two-centimeter long fangs and hissed, then darted forward with the speed of a striking snake to take the offered treat out of Roger's fingers. It was a precise strike; Roger was left holding a tiny bit of the meat, which had been sheared off cleanly within a millimeter of his fingertips.

"Youch," he said, wiping off the carbon on his fingers.

"Oh, various things. I suppose barbarism is probably the biggest single factor." O'Casey leaned back on Matsugae's rucksack. The valet had left the overstuffed container in her "care" while he went around the camp, examining the cooking methods of the Mardukans. He was currently discussing something with a Mardukan female who'd emerged from one of the huts to lather a substance on the lizard being cooked in the center.

"People evolve to barbarism and usually stop there. Little civilizations rise and fall under the tide of barbarism." She yawned and thought about the history of Earth and some of the less well-prepared slow-boat colonies. "Sometimes, it seems that barbarism, for all its horrors—and they are many—is the natural state of a sentient species. So many, many times humanity has slid into barbarism in one area or another on one planet or another. In fact, we came within a centimeter of it on an interstellar scale during the Dagger Years; I think only your great-to-the-umpteenth grandmother prevented it. Not that that was what she was thinking about—"

She broke off as a yawn interrupted her, then winced as she stretched.

"God, I hurt," she observed, and lay back and closed her eyes. "Which, I might add, is a consequence of another mortality factor: living in a jungle ain't easy. It's a very competitive environment. Something is always trying to eat you, and finding things you can eat is hard."

She reopened her eyes looked up at Roger as the rain began to fall once more. The thunder of it on the thatch was lulling, and she yawned again.

"Roger, we're in a jungle," she said, and her tone was oddly ambiguous. "Jungles try so hard to kill you. They're always trying to." She stopped and smiled at him. "I've tried to get you to listen to me so often, but I'm going to try again. You have to check your tongue. You have to keep your temper. Learn from Pahner, don't piss him off, okay?"

He opened his mouth to protest, but she waved him quiet.

"Just... try to bite your tongue from time to time, all right? That's all I ask."

The last two days of strain had drained her, and she could feel herself drifting off despite every intention of staying awake. Not only was the social organization of the natives fascinating, but opportunities to catch Roger in a mood to learn anything but sports and hunting tricks were rare. Yet, despite that, she simply couldn't keep her eyes open.