Grazing The Long Acre Read Free

having a lovely holiday. She didn’t even have to eat the funny food. She made no attempt to try and find the limits of what Cheops allowed: in fact she rarely moved more than fifty metres from the lander, except when she joined organised excursions into town. She seemed to Merle to be constantly looking, on her little walks around the golf-course, for a sign directing her to the beach.
    Nanazetta watched out for trouble.
    Sasha Mihalavska and Bob Irwin made notes. They established that the Ma’atians in this village had no meat or dairy animals. They observed what appeared to be several species of flying lizards (they flew like bats) and many things that looked like brightly-coloured, giant millipedes. These seemed to be the only large fauna around. The vegetation suggested an equable, warm, temperate climate; wind direction was steady and gentle. Bob deduced—perhaps prematurely—that the Cheops had landed on an island. Sasha was not so sure. There were convincing indications, in the variety of artifacts and implements, that the Ma’atians belonged to a large and sophisticated cultural group. If this was an island, it was a big one. There ought to be towns, maybe cities, and yet they must be some distance away. No other natives had come to or left the village since Cheops landed.
    In the crew environment they typed up their notes, under Merle’s sardonic eyes.
    The question of Ma’atian gender was not cleared up for many days, not until they’d evolved some quite sophisticated gestural communication. The answer explained the odd calm of their first encounter. Ma’atians were not well endowed with secondary sexual characteristics. Their apparent dimorphism was a matter of age. It seemed that their vertebrae settled together and major bones became more dense and shorter at maturity: the tall, slender ones were children.
    They were very like human beings. If there were ever humans, that is, who lived in such perfect contentment.
    “What happens to you when you die?”
    Sasha and Bob had found an older Ma’atian, an ‘old lady’ they called her, who was willing to be their confidante. Her social role was not clear but she seemed unafraid of the strangers, and accustomed to impart and receive knowledge. It bothered Sasha that she still was not sure whether her voice could be heard ‘out there’ as it sounded inside her suit. Self-consciously, she mimed death.
    We go to another place, answered the old woman.
    “What’s it like, this other place?” asked Bob. He was becoming very adept with his dumb shows.
    The old lady thought for a moment, then made the sweeping, distancing gesture.
    “Schoo…Schoo…Ichi…Ichi…”
    She thought again, and started away, beckoning.
    “She’s taking us to paradise,” crowed Bob Irwin, sotto voce.Not to heaven, but to a blue lake, unsuspected before, beyond the terraced houses and gardens. It was the first body of water they had seen. The old woman crouched down. She smiled, (needle teeth, the same modified snarl) and swept an arm over the water.
    “Water burial?”
    “No.” Sasha knew how much room there was for misapprehension; and yet what was there to trust in a situation like this, if not intuition. Understanding thrilled her. “I know what she means. She means the reflection. Heaven is like here. Heaven is just the same as being alive.”
    Someone laughed. A shiny doll stalked across the turf: Merle had been following them. She knelt by the pool and flicked her silver, stylized hand into the surface. Loveliness vanished in a welter of bobbing ripples.
    “You can look, but you’d better not touch.”
    Merle laughed again inside their helmets, and the doll walked away.
    “I’m getting very worried about the captain,” said Sasha.
      
    Merle picked a fight with Bob Irwin. She was envious of the new friendship, of course, and it had to be Bob she attacked, because she was a little afraid of Sasha. Bob made some joking remark about the Ma’atians getting the