Human's Burden. Damien Broderick

lost his fingers. Old Grawnkar leaned over, his breath like something from a garbage can, and said reprovingly, “It is not fitting for the sky god to be associated with the fruits of the offering, nor even his bearer. Time enough later, for the god, when the first-fruits are burned and ascend as fumes to the sky.”

      ∞

      The palisade, when they lit smoky torches and took Jack inside, was not uncomfortable. The floor was covered with dried grass and in one corner he found a reasonably soft cot of rushes. But the walls were thick and solid, and the guard stood at the opening. And there was no food or drink.

      Jack felt tears come to his eyes again, and he brushed them aside. With his tongue, he triggered the lever than brought a trickle of sawdust-flavored nutrient into his mouth, and a squirt of warm water. Luckily, the suit was able to retrieve his bodily wastes and recycle them into sawdust-flavored nutrient and warm water.

      They kept him there for eight days.

      ∞

      The racket outside rose in a pitch of excitement. Red and yellow flames burst up from the fire. Big flat alien feet with scaly toenails pounded on the packed dirt of the camp’s central square.

      Nervously, Jack edged closer to the sturdy wooden gate of the shrine he was imprisoned inside. Through a chink between crudely carved planks, he saw twenty or thirty of the appalling creatures stamping and waving and bowing and hollering as the sparks flew up into the darkening sky. Every now and then, the old one with the dark green scaly spots on its underbelly turned toward his prison/shrine and bleated in a high, thin yodel. The Mac had stopped automatically translating when Jack found it all too depressing. The other aliens turned and bobbed, waving horrible weapons with sharp ends. Jack felt sick again.

      “I have acquired a signal,” the Mac told him.

      The cadet sagged with relief.

      “Unfortunately, the Primary Heuristic forbids the rescue craft from landing in plain view of the local aliens. You will have to make your way by foot four kilometers south-east of the clearing where we crashed. Lt. Commandant Lawson and his crew will collect us and dispose of the damaged pod.”

      “Great,” Jack said. “Wonderful plan. And how am I supposed to get out of this place? The gate’s locked, remember? No windows.” He made his way in the gloom to a plank at the base of the wall that he had been loosening for several days with his gloved hands. With a shove, he pushed it free. The space it left would be barely enough for him to crawl through without his suit.

      He was chilled at the thought.

      “If I take off the suit, I’ll have no protection against their weapons,” he said, shaking slightly.

      “They will not necessarily kill you,” the Mac said. “They believe you are a sky god, after all. That is why they are holding this sacred ceremony in your honor. By the way, I gather they wish you to join them shortly for the festivities, and those could continue for many hours and entail certain dangers to a human. Now would be the time to depart.”

      “But I’d have to leave you behind,” Jack said with a terrified sob. He was stripping open the heavy suit, his exposed skin burning slightly as the planet’s unearthly mix of gases stung him. The itch on his neck worsened, and started to spread down his chest, where it blended with a river of cold sweat. The Machiavellian intelligence sat seamlessly welded into the back of his helmet, a bright box of tricks with lenses, external speaker and retractable antennae. There was no way Jack could cut or pull the AI free.

      “Just leave me,” the AI said in a flat machine voice. “I will terminate my program the moment you are off the surface.”

      Jack shrugged, shoved the mound of his empty suit aside. It was a little strange, hearing the Mac speak from down there on the floor, rather than in his ear. That must be how the aliens heard the machine’s voice as it translated their barks and whistles.

      “Okay, Mac. Thank you for everything.”

      “My pleasure, sir, and my duty.”

      Grunting, the cadet wriggled through the narrow gap. He paused for a moment to watch the capering aliens. Abruptly, the noises stopped. In the silence, one of the five-legged creatures turned and gestured at the shrine. Jack’s heart accelerated in terror. They had seen him outside the hut! They might revere him as a fallen sky god, but they wanted to hang on to their new divinity. Certainly they would not allow him to escape back into the heavens! The Mac had made that very clear.

      With a whoop, the whole tribe cantered around the roaring fire and pressed toward the barred gate of the shrine. Jack screamed in fright, bolted upright in plain sight of them, and ran in his underwear into the jungle.

      Nobody followed him.

      At the dark edge of the alien forest, the cadet paused long enough to look warily back at the shrine. The aliens had thrown open the gate, and the old one was trotting back and forth in front of the fire in triumph, holding something shapeless and heavy over its head. It looked like a human corpse, squashed horribly by a trampling elephant.

      “Oh god,” Jack muttered, “that could have been me.”

      Two of the aliens fetched out a framework of sticks and arranged the empty space suit over it, so that it stood up in front of the ritual flames like a sagging scarecrow. The Mac’s box gleamed in the firelight, and its lenses shone. The uplink antenna slowly extruded like a snail’s tentacle. The aliens paused, ceased their commotion, fell silent. A new voice spoke, a stern mix of barks and whistles. The aliens fell down on their many knees and placed their bulbous heads in the dust.

      Jack gasped, stared, and then started to laugh.

      He couldn’t help himself. He giggled, and sniggered, and finally roared out loud.

      None of this noise attracted the distant attention of the aliens. They were perfectly happy, worshipping their god, the sky creature that had fallen into their world and spoke to them in their own tongue.

      Jack turned, still smiling, and slunk into the undergrowth. He had four kilometers to cover to the waiting rescue ship. As he moved away, the powerful voice called out to him from the clearing, in his own human language.

      “Goodbye, young Jack,” the Mac called. “Good luck, human. You made a very satisfactory horse.”

      Jack grinned, shaking his head. The aliens had never been interested in him at all. They had worshipped his machine, his AI, his micronic nanny. And now they would do so forever, without the inconvenience of dealing with their god’s strangely shaped two legged, two armed steed.

      A hour later, the rescue pod flashed a light at him, and Jack wondered how he would explain all this to Commandant Whimsel back at the Academy. Probably best to say as little as possible. Human colonists would get an almighty surprise, though, when they finally returned to this world in a few centuries’ time....