Engineman - Eric Brown [69]
She braked at a bend in the track before she reached the top. In the sudden silence she heard the musical cascade of splashing water. She concealed the bike beside the track, ducked under the branches of a palm tree and found herself suddenly on the very edge of the lagoon.
The sight of the oval sink brimming with bright blue water released a flood of happy memories. The sanguine light of the sunset, filtering through the surrounding foliage, gave the scene a tint of rose which corresponded with her recollections. The unbroken arc of water which tipped from the rockface high above might have been the very same that had surged down ten years ago. There was the flat rock she had used as a diving platform, and there, in the very centre of the lagoon, was the camel's hump.
Between the age of twelve and fifteen she had spent at least one day of every weekend here. During her holidays, summer and winter, she had often defied her father's wishes and camped overnight. What had made the place such an attraction, apart from its obvious beauty, was the fact that it was secret - a place she could call her own, a paradise from which her father and her minders were excluded.
Then, in the summer holidays of her fourteenth year, she'd discovered that someone else used her lagoon. What could have been a crushing blow turned out to be a miracle that made her secret extra-special.
She recalled the evening as if it were yesterday.
Her father was having guests for dinner, and he wanted Ella present to serve the food and pour the drinks and talk about how well she was doing at school, but the draw of the lagoon was too much. She had slipped from the house and ran up the zig-zag track to the final bend before the summit.
She had pushed her way through the fringe of shrubs and...
At first she thought the figure standing on the camel's hump of rock in the centre of the lagoon was a naked boy of around her own age. Suffused with rage and indignation, she stepped forward to shout or remonstrate.
Then she stopped. Her rage evaporated, replaced by fear - fear at having her expectations so thoroughly subverted - for the boy was not a boy at all. Ella experienced a sudden, chill dread of the unfamiliar, the unknown.
The boy was not a boy, but an alien; a member of the Lho-Dharvo people. It was tall and spectacularly elongated, and Ella's first reaction was revulsion, even though there was something beautiful about the tone of its copper-bronze skin.
Its stance on the rock was not a human stance. It stood with its arms outstretched slightly behind it, its head tilted back, eyes closed.
A shiver coursed down her spine.
This was the first Lho-Dharvon Ella had ever seen, though she had watched anthropological films about them on vid-screen, and read articles in magazines and on discs. They were a tribal people, nomadic for part of the year, who herded animals similar to goats and lived off the land. They were at the stage of their evolution that corresponded to Homo sapien's stone-age, and a xeno-anthropologist working with them over thirty years ago had recorded their religious beliefs in a work known as the Book of the Lho. They lived on all four continents of the Reach, in conditions ranging from polar to desert. Ella had never heard mention of the fact that a tribe was living so close to the Falls.
She watched the alien for the next ten minutes. It maintained its odd pose, unmoving. Wanting to get closer, Ella edged around the lagoon, always ensuring that she was concealed by shrubbery. At last she was as close as she could get to the creature, on an overhang of rock above the water, concealed by scant, sprouting grass. She knelt and stared down.
She could not tell to which sex it belonged. Where its reproductive organ should have been was nothing