Heat

Chapter Six

Tagen had been led to believe that humans lived in social groups. The one point on which the misinformation from five hundred years past and present experience agreed was that humans collected in large numbers. He had been prepared for difficulty in isolating one. He pla

It had the look of a well-maintained building. Certainly the grounds surrounding it were exceedingly trim. Grass grew in a deliberate square before the wooden porch, cut short and colored deep green in defiance of the sun, and fenced by stones of matching size and color. There were bushes, some flowering, and trees, well-kept. The porch itself looked, from this distance, clean and orderly. It could only be a residence. No other building had quite this same look of regular inhabitation.

The similarity between this house and that one in which Kolya Pahnee had bought to raise his son was staggering. It was not the same design, of course, not even the same color, but the overwhelming neatness and organization of the place was an exact mirror to the house in which Tagen had been raised.

As Tagen marveled, the door of the house opened and a human emerged. Only one human, for all that the house was of good size. Tagen actually felt a little disappointed as he realized that he had wasted all those plans and preparations for isolating one from a group.

The human was small, as all humans were. It had long hair, nearly to its waist, loose and wavy and brown. It was the only feature he could see clearly from this distance, and while hair wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of health, it was a good sign. The human was fussing with the door, no doubt making it secure against intruders. There were bars protecting all the lower-floor windows, but Tagen shrewdly noticed that the windows above the overhanging porch appeared to be open.

The human, satisfied with the security of its home, turned away and moved off the porch. It entered a groundcar, and soon the sound of an engine started up and the human drove away.

Tagen didn’t know how fast a human groundcar could travel, but he did have a pretty fair notion of how isolated this building was. He walked openly across to the house and climbed to the porch roof. The windows facing him were indeed open, although they were screened. Tagen was ready to cut the mesh with his claws when he realized that the screen could simply be pulled away. He did so, and then began to place the screen inside the house where it was in no danger of falling from the roof. He stopped when he saw the state of the room he was invading.

From the outside, the house had been trim and organized. On the inside, it more resembled a smuggler’s cargo hold. The floor was unreachable; stacks of boxes and crates blocked more than half the room to any access. Unused furnishings took up the rest of the space. There were human-sized desks, chairs, a long sofa, even potted plants. Everything was stacked on top of everything else, and every surface was coated with dust.

Tagen knew he couldn’t wait out here on the overhang all day and no other windows were within reach. He set the screen on top of a tall pile of boxes and slowly negotiated his way inside. He tested his weight on every box until he found one that seemed like it would hold him, and then stepped down onto a thin strip of floor. There was just enough of a path to take him to the door and just enough of a clearing there to open it. Still staring around at the clutter, Tagen grasped the stubby handle and pushed, pulled, then finally twisted it.

He took two steps out into the hallway that revealed and then stopped and had to look behind him to make sure that, yes, this was the same house. The hall was empty, the walls washed, the carpeted floor utterly free of markings. There were flat panels of artwork on the walls, enclosed in wood and glass, and the glass was spotless. There were glass bulbs hanging from the ceiling and they were spotless. The bulbish handles on the three doors that faced the hall were shiny and untarnished. The rails that lined the stairwell down were newly-oiled.

Tagen spared the cargo room one last puzzled look, and then shut the door and opened another.

There was a strong astringent smell and then his eyes were dazzled by white. White tiles on the floor, white walls, white ceiling, white patches of carpeting on the tile, white cupboards and white countertop, shiny white furnishings of unknown function, white globes of glass on the wall, white cloths folded on white shelves, white bowls holding white soapy-smelling blocks. And wherever there was not white, there was steel, all of it brilliantly-cleaned. On impulse, Tagen dropped to one knee and looked under the counter. The kickboard there was white and utterly without blemish.

Tagen sat back on his heels, a little u

‘Then again,’ he thought, looking at all the immaculate white. ‘How unsanitary could it really be?’ You couldn’t accuse the human of not keeping it clean.

He left the white room and opened the last door, braced for anything. Here, he found a bedroom, and for the first time, it struck him that the human who lived here really lived here. After the sterility of the bathing room, he found the colors—ocean green, grey, and slate blue—soothing, almost cooling. He moved around the room, lingering to look at objects that caught his eye, marveling that humans could live so…so normally.

There was a squat, strange wardrobe, identifiable only because one of the drawers was open and filled with folded clothes. Atop it, a mirror, and several decorative boxes containing what he supposed were human ornamentation. The bed was broad and well-layered in pillows and coverings. There was a table beside it, just large enough to support a light and an object Tagen determined really was the book it appeared to be. He picked this last up and opened it, sca

Flipping pages, Tagen sat on the edge of the bed, and instantly leapt up again as something moved beneath him. He whirled, dropping the book and grabbing his plasma gun, all his senses tingling with the expectation of ambush.

From the folds of the bedding, a small orange head emerged. Gold eyes stared into gold eyes, and then the rest of the creature slithered out. It mi’acked at him.

Tagen lowered his weapon, feeling a little foolish. He had no idea what he was looking at, but he doubted it was a threat. On closer inspection, it somewhat resembled a rurr’ga, only with short ears and a long tail instead of the right way around. And, although it might be unfair to say so, considering that this was an unfamiliar species and he had no real idea of what constituted a normal body size, it was hugely fat. Cautiously, Tagen reached out and offered his hand to the thing.

The creature sniffed once, and then rubbed its jaws on Tagen’s fingers and began to make a contented growling sound. Its fur was very soft and it was amenable to being petted. When Tagen turned to leave the bedroom, the animal jumped down from the bed and followed him.

There were images of humans on the wall all the way downstairs, carefully and artfully arranged behind glass, and Tagen paused on each step to study them. The same face appeared several times, in varying stages of maturity, and he thought it might be the same human who lived here. It was hard to imagine why it would keep pictures of its own face. Presumably, it knew what it looked like.

Tagen came down into a sitting room, right in the front of the house where anyone walking in could see it. There were comfortable furnishings, tasteful decorations, ample light, and a device that simply had to be a viewing monitor as the focus of it all. The monitor was dark and silent now, but it was an encouraging sign, indicative of media resources. The largest piece of furniture, a padded sofa, faced the monitor exactly and had the look of much use. It went without saying that everything was painfully clean.

There were shelves to one side of the monitor, enough to completely cover that wall. They were filled with flat, colorful squares of some synthetic, hard material. There was human writing on each of these, and many had images of videographic quality on their face as well, but Tagen couldn’t understand their function. He discovered he could hook a claw in the seam of one and open it like a book, but all that lay within was an iridescent disc. Curious, Tagen opened several more containers and found the same disc, or one very much like it, in each one. He suspected they interacted in some way with the monitor, but couldn’t make out how.

The animal yowled at him from a doorway leading deeper into the house. When it saw it had attracted Tagen’s attention, it turned and moved off at a rapid waddle, making urgent little sounds as it went. Tagen put the disc-container he was holding down on the low table in the middle of the room and went to follow the creature.

He paused to open every door he passed and found two small storage spaces and another privy, but eventually he ended in a large room lined with wooden cupboards, all of them rubbed to a high gloss. The smell of cleanser was here as well, not as strong as it was in the bathing room, but Tagen suspected it would be if only this room had doors to shut the odor in. As it was, Tagen could stand in the center of this room and see out into the hall or over into what he imagined was a dining room. There was one door at the far end of the room, but he left it for now to better examine his present surroundings.

There was a small table against the near wall, with a chair pushed out before it at an angle that suggested the human who sat it had just risen and walked away. Atop the table, a computer idled. Its processing unit and monitor might have come from any museum on Jota, and its keyboard, although too wide and with keys too small for Jotan hands, was easily recognizable as well. Tagen ran his eyes over the unfamiliar characters and symbols that faced the keys, then reached out and tapped one with a claw. The monitor blinked on at once, showing him the image of a rolling hill under an azure sky, as well as a number of unknowable icons.

The animal was rubbing frantically at his leg, making its urgent yowling plea and slapping at him with its soft paws. Tagen allowed himself to be distracted, and as soon as it had his attention, it turned and ran across the room, its round belly swaying at its knees.