When night finally fell, a haze of stars in no known constellations twinkling above the clearing, it was hardly any cooler. The cooking fire the alien monsters built made it worse. Insect things he’d emulated for his spy probes swarmed out of the humming forest and annoyed him by biting his unprotected neck and face. The fallen stick fragment jabbed his spine in a different place every time he moved. He glanced at his glove’s fingerwatch, wondering how soon he’d be able to make his apologies and slip away for a comfortable night’s rest in the air-conditioned pod. Grawnkar sidled up in the dark
“O Jack Wong,” the translated voice said respectfully, “the feast begins. If you would grace it by your illustrious presence, we would be blessed beyond repayment.”
What could he do? Jack shrugged, stuck his helmet under his arm and made his way to the place of honor. The closer he got to the fire, the worse it stank. He gagged, tried hard not to throw up. That could cause a diplomatic incident. It certainly would not look good on his academic record, or his official report for that matter.
If he ever got home. If the Earth Culture rescue team ever tracked him through the wormhole and found him here before he grew old and frail and white haired, and died of old age. A tear of self-pity crept from his eye, and an insect buzzed down with sharp feet to sip at it.
Everyone was guzzling with gusto, chatting away in their awful voices, except for two ceremonial guards behind him. His stomach growled hungrily. Oh, why not? If the bugs couldn’t hurt him, maybe the food wouldn’t either? It smelled disgusting, but you could get used to anything. And he might be here for a long time. He eyed a particularly choice piece of blue vegetation, or maybe it was meat or fish, from the huge pile before him and reached out one gloved hand.
A huge wooden club whistled down from behind his right ear and thudded into the dirt not a centimeter from his fingers.
Stunned with fright, Jack whipped back his hand and sat stock-still for a long moment. All the chatter had stopped. Interested reptilian eyes peered at the sky god who had very nearly 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
