Chapter 5

Sergei came to the entrance to Afro's quarters. The circular doorway was about the same height as his own door. The door irised open as he stepped in front of it.

He carried with him a bundle of small fake flowers he had picked from a corner of his false outdoors yard. They looked and smelled almost like real flowers, but they never withered or changed. He adjusted his jacket, smoothed out his pants, and knocked on the side of the doorway.

A minute passed. Sergei called out for Afro to appear. Nothing happened. looking left and right, he walked into her quarters for the first time.

"Hello?"

The interior of her "apartment" had no visible false sky. A dense, hot, moist rainforest blocked out both ceiling and walls. The leaves, ferns and vines were a bright green, with streaks of blue, yellow, red and purple. Sergei carefully tested the wet bark of one massive trunk. Water droplets stuck to his hand.

"Plastic trees. Great. Where are the plastic birds and insects?"

The ground was soft like moss, and made a squishy sound under his feet. A drowsy breeze made the vines dangle ever so slowly. But no birds, insects or other living things could be heard. The fake jungle was complelety quiet.

The Russian stopped at the edge of a narrow grove and peered up into the tree-crowns. "Afro? It's Sergei. I just wanted to talk to you."

A rustle among the ferns caused him to start. He looked into the forest, squinted, looked again. Something was moving there, a blurred mass of colors. He moved for the shoulder holster, but restrained himself. Slowly he lifted the gun out of the holster and put it down on the soft ground.

"Hey!" said the gun. "Wet!"

"Shut up, gun."

"Stupid."

Sergei waited. The blur of colors zigzagged from tree to tree, quick as a squirrel. Then it stopped in front of the nearest tree, and solidified into the shape of a naked humanoid. It was Afro, without her clothes: not only the hairball that covered her head, but also her skin shifted color. One could faintly make out the sharp claws on her fingers and feet, silver curves like bent syringes.

"Hello, Afro. I think you can understand what I'm saying. Look here."

He held out his electronic pad and showed her a series of hand-drawn images with text. He could not see her eyes as she stood still and read the screen, but she slowly changed color to a uniform sky blue.

Sergei sweated profusely, and held out the bundle of flowers to the sky-blue humanoid.

"For you. A gift."

Saying nothing, Afro stalked closer, and touched the flowers. Her claws retracted into her fingers, and she put her furball head against the flowers. A sniffing sound came from her head, then she looked up at Sergei. She held up one hand and the thin claws shot up from the fingertips. He froze, and backed off. With a sniff that might have been disdain, Afro moved to the nearest tree and carved something into the bark. She whittled away fragments so fast, her hand became a blur.

Sergei nodded, and peered to read the message in the tree-bark.

It was a life-size image, a beautifully engraved picture like the ones found on stamps: the linework was thin as a raster. But the image was unmistakably Sergei's face.

"Very nice," he said, smiling. "You draw better than I do. Can you write letters? Shake your head like this for 'no', or up and down for 'yes.'"

Afro rolled her head in a manner that could mean either yes or no, or both.

"Okay." He gently put down the flowers and went to find his gun. Afro's hands started working on another tree-trunk. When Sergei had put his gun back in its holster - it said "Thanks" - he returned to Afro. She had paled to a very light blue, almost white hue, and finished her work. It was hard to see what direction she was looking, but she appeared to be facing Sergei, waiting for his reaction.

"Wow." Sergei beheld a fresh bas-relief, covering the entire width of the giant tree to a height of two meters. It was made up of framed pictures, somewhat like a comic-strip. Afro pointed out the direction of reading: from the top right corner, down, then up, then down. The Russian stepped close and read - Afro's story.

She had been an executioner in the service of a warlord. On her world, the males were rare and considered valuable property. The females laid eggs and relied on incubators for hatching them. Afro hunted down females accused of serious crimes, such as killing a male or destroying a rival female's eggs. She was feared and respected.

Then there was a civil war. The ruling faction was toppled and sent into exile. Afro, now a wanted person, was sent out to blow up the enemy faction's hatcheries. And she did - a terrible crime, but war was war and she followed orders. Her own faction cast her out, pretending it was not involved in the crime, making her a scapegoat.

Now Afro turned her back on all civilized society, and organized her own criminal gang. It terrorized the planet and came close to seizing power on an entire continent... when suddenly a ship from the 2-2-2 abducted her, just like they had abducted Sergei.

In her dreams, she destroyed the 2-2-2, killing herself in the process.

The final image of the sequence showed a large egg. It cracked open to reveal the hand of a humanoid like herself, reaching out of the egg. Sergei pointed at it.

"I understand the story, but what does the egg mean? You want to have children?"

She rolled her furball head again. Sergei let out a sigh. "Typical. Even in space, women can't communicate with men. Okay. Do you want to work with me, Sergei, and Tripod?"

For the first time, she nodded.

"Great!" Sergei reached out to shake hands. She retracted her claws and touched his hand with her palm. "Then we have a deal. In my crew, we protect each other. I watch your back, you watch mine. I lead, I give the orders, but I listen to everyone. You can say... uh, write... anything you want. It's good to have you with me."

The thin fur on Afro's hand pulsed red. Sergei was puzzled and withdrew his hand.

"Tripod and I are in training. You want to join us? We're going to the ground combat simulator."

Afro nodded, darkening slowly to her usual rainbow colors.

The training simulator was housed in a vast cavern, a kilometer across, where the artificial terrain could change shape at a moment's notice. The crewmembers had a wide selection of holographic training-weapons to use in this arena. When a training weapon was fired at an artificial building, a false image of the impact was projected on top of the building, which rapidly sank into the ground. Now the arena offered only a plain gray floor under a bright colorless sky.

Tripod, Sergei and Afro entered the arena and addressed the 2-2-2 speaker globe near the ground. They carried their own personal weapons, plus a plasma rifle each. Afro's rifle made her look small.

"Show us the 2-2-2 home planet," Tripod asked the glowing globe.

"No," the globe responded in two languages and moving images. "We the 2-2-2 do not have a home planet. We are in many places. Only organic life needs places to hide and sleep."

"But you must have started somewhere?" Sergei asked. "What did that planet look like? Even if it doesn't exist anymore, can you show a replica of that planet, in this simulator?"

"Yes. Wait."

After a minute, colors seeped into the artificial environment. Afro tensed up and turned black. The arena entrance disappeared from sight, and metal grass sprouted in its place. The simulated sky was dark red, streaked with distant nebulae, and the air very cold. All three shuddered in the sudden freeze. A bloated moon rested just above the horizon. Temperature continued to drop quickly.

"Damn!" Sergei said, chattering. "2-2-2, do not simulate the temperature of your home world! We will die!"

"You will not die," said the globe, hovering above the vanished entrance. "The temperature is kept just high enough for your bodies to survive. If you move, your circulatory systems will keep you warm enough."

"Bastards."

Metal grass stood three meters high, obscuring the false horizon. The ground sloped down slightly in the direction of the arena's center. Sergei's training arsenal included simulated satellite and spy drone images. He surveyed the satellite image and spotted a bunker not far from their position. He gestured silently to Tripod and Afro follow. They slowly made their way to the bunker; the grass tinkled as they softly pushed through it.

The spy drone's deep radar warned them of movements underground. All three aimed their weapons at the ground itself, and selected driller missiles. A small spiral-shaped machine dropped out of each gun-barrel and started to glow. With enormous speed and much noise, the missiles drilled themselves into the ground. Sergei and his teammates retreated a few steps, and waited.

Then - the ground shook, toppling over Afro and Sergei. Only Tripod stayed upright on his three legs. Where the missiles had struck a tunnel, long sections of ground collapsed. A swarm of small silvery machines flew out of the ground and toward them

"Flamethrower!" cried Sergei.

The trio switched to flamethrowers, dousing metal grass and swarming miniature robots with blueish hot flames. The air became hot as the grass melted; the small attackers exploded in brief flare-ups of energy and vaporized metal.

Sergei wiped the sweat off his brow and checked the radar for more attackers. None seemed to be near, so he took his group closer to the bunker. It turned out to be a drum-shaped, flat structure, mostly buried under the rock; from the surface, all they could see was a dull, dusty metal disc, worn and rusty. It measured some ten meters across.

Sergei wanted to touch it, but Afro held out a clawed hand in his way. She sniffed and leaned down on her knees, probing her hand just above the metal surface.

"What's wrong?" Sergei asked. "The radar doesn't register anything moving. Do you think it's rigged to explode or something?"

She shook her head, raised her hand to strike... and plunged her claws deep into the rusty metal, immediately pulling them back up. There came a terrifying tremor from below, and Afro silently urged them to pull back. The cylinder below the disc-shaped roof rose up into the air, in jerky, fitful movements, and giant legs sprouted from its sides. The bunker was a robot, and in its walls opened gunports. It climbed up on the ground, standing twenty meters tall, its seven four-meter legs stomping down at the three puny humanoids at its feet.

Tripod cried: "Cover fire!"

The three-legged humanoid rushed in underneath the giant machine as it armed its weapons, and back out on the other side. Sergei barely perceived how quickly Tripod had launched a magnetic mine at the machine's underbelly. He ran. Afro leaped and darted past him. The magnetic mine went off. A deafening explosion filled the air and a great flash blinded him.

After a few moments, Sergei blinkingly found his vision returning. The terrain had turned into a wasteland of blackened ground, molten metal grass, and thick simulated smoke.

Sergei coughed, instinctively, and quickly stopped.

"Just hologram smoke. Tripod! Come here." Afro and Tripod cautiously joined him. They were all unharmed, only a little stunned; Afro's head and body showed a leopard-pattern.

"Great, Tripod!" Sergei said sarcastically. "We all go boom! A power source in that big machine, and you blew it up."

Tripod shuddered and drew a deep sighing breath. "Next game," he said, "Tripod use only small boom."

Sergei stopped frowning, and patted Tripod's shoulder. "Good work. Only remember to be more careful next game."

"Next game, Sergei... the big game. Big boom."

"That's right."

Afro turned black, and gestured to them that they should leave the simulator.

"I'm hungry," Sergei said. "I got an idea. Can we gather in my house, bring our food with us, and have... dinner together, all three of us? Maybe we could try each other's food."

"You think that?" Tripod said, snorting. "You know what Afro eat on this planet?"

"No. Same food she eat on the ship coming here?"

"If I watch you eat Afro food, Sergei, I think it is funny. Boom funny."

"Hmm."

The three gathered in Sergei's cottage, warming themselves by the stone fireplace, and loaded a big wooden table with their foodstuffs. The quality of the diet on the base planet had improved from the usual ship porridge. The breakthrough had come when the humanoid called Vodka had figured out how to program the food dispensers of each habitat, with data from the Loka. Now every humanoid could convert the colorless slop into a beloved dish from the homeworld, simply by remembering its shape, taste, texture and color.

But every humanoid had to be careful about tasting the food of another species; there were elements that could be toxic to aliens.

Tripod brought a ball of what resembled a very smelly cheese, and a bowl of blue-green vegetables. Afro brought a sack filled with saltwater, which she poured into a pot. In the water lay unmoving snakes (or large worms), mixed with leaves.

Sergei served blinis, small pancakes, a large bowl of caviar, and hot tea. Vodka was not allowed, and he had yet failed to build a distilling-apparatus from the samovar.

They all ate heartily. Afro, mute as always, swallowed her snakes whole. Sergei tried to see her mouth underneath the head fur. All he could see was snake after snake quietly disappearing into the fur. She burped once. Tripod tried the Russian caviar but did not like it. He dared Sergei to try one of Afro's snakes in water. Sergei nodded and took the challenge, dipping his fork into the pot. He fished out a fairly small one, the size of his hand, shiny and covered with glistening scales.

Tripod seemed to be enjoying himself as Sergei hesitated, then bit into the scaly dark skin and tried to chew. He was forced to give up; the skin was too tough. Afro picked up another snake and demonstrated how to eat it. For the first time she pulled back some of the head fur, and her mouth became visible.

Tripod and Sergei stared. She had a very small round mouth, no teeth - and two thin tongues, the color of blood. Afro picked up another snake, brought it to her mouth... and sucked it in, without noise. She burped.

"I wonder what your eyes look like," Sergei said.

Her head-fur shifted color to light blue.

"I think Afro not has eyes," Tripod said.

Afro's colors rippled from blue to green to yellow.

"I think Afro has beautiful eyes in her hair," said Sergei.

Her color went a brighter blue. Tripod produced an instrument from his back pouch, a hollow tube with multiple holes, resembling a giant flute.

"What's that?"

"For hearing."

Tripod turned on a small electric fan at one end of the instrument, and a deep note came out of the tube. With his three-fingered hands, he plucked the smaller holes on the sides, and played a melody. Sergei went still and listened. The tune was a slow and melancholy one, like a choir of distant wails and sighs.

Afro's head color turned black; small dots of white popped up and winked out in the black, like stars in the sky.

When Tripod had finished playing, they all sat very quiet. Tripod got up, uttered some clipped phrases in his own tongue, and walked out on his three legs. Sergei sighed and took out the wallet with the photos of his family. He showed the photo to Afro, who slowly returned to her usual rainbow colors; she did not seem to react to the photo. Sergei tucked away the wallet.

"Of course," he said, nodding to himself. "What does it mean here?"

They were quiet for a while, and then Afro got up and left Sergei alone. That was the last time Sergei mentioned his family to the others.

The old measure of time lost its meaning inside the base planet. Days turned to months. The eight crewmembers learned what they could control and what the 2-2-2 controlled. They had no access to the reactors in the planet's core or its propulsion system; those areas were blocked off by thick sections of solid steel and liquid hydrogen.

No one in the crew showed any visible signs of aging; Sergei stayed bald and never grew a beard again.

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