by Sue Burke
Close to the river, a team in a flax workshop paused to wave.
If I wanted to hunt velvet worms, I needed to start a campaign, just like a politician. “He got hurt by a red velvet worm,” I called out.
“Will he recover?” a man said.
“I think so, but where there’s one worm, there’s more.”
“Be careful.” He returned to his work.
Where was the panic? I was going to have to explain exactly how dangerous red velvet worms were to get the panic I needed.
Right at the river’s edge, I took a look at the old statue of Uncle Higgins, dead for a hundred fifty years, the first one to talk to Stevland. The children’s flower garden around it was green and colorful even in this weather. I couldn’t remember how we did that as kids, exactly what we planted so the garden was always in bloom. I’d been fascinated by the jewel lizards who lived there. None were out sunning themselves now on the statue, though, since it was raining. I wanted to get out of the rain, too.
We crossed the rope bridge over the river one by one, Cawzee and Chesty chortling nonstop. The fishing boats were tied up. In the workshops, Humans and Glassmakers were bent over wood or leather or reeds, and no one looked up until Chesty made a nutty sort of smell and all the Glassmakers turned to look, and then the Humans turned to look at what they saw.
“He got attacked by a red velvet worm,” I called out. “They’re in the forest now, not just in the Coral Plains.”
“How’s he doing?” a woman asked.
“He’ll recover, but where there’s one worm, there’s more. They’re in the forest now.”
“Good he be-he back at city,” her partner said. And they went back to work. So did everyone. I was going to have to campaign hard to get my chance for some fun hunting.
The pavement of the road up the bluff gritted under our feet from the sand sprinkled to provide traction in sleet. We walked through the big wooden gate in the walls and we were home. Stalks of extra-tall rainbow bamboo arched overhead at the entrance. I waved up at them. I knew Stevland would be watching and he’d be concerned. The rest of the city was quiet in the rain, except for drops spattering on the glass-and-stone houses and on the dirt in the gardens between them.
We made it to the clinic without much notice. The medics hurried to help poor, cold, wet, poisoned, injured Cawzee. I delivered a quick report on what had happened.
Ivan, the lead medic, put him on a bed, removed the bandages, and inspected the wound and then the bandage. “It looks good.” He checked Cawzee’s breathing, listened to his heart, prodded his thorax, and looked into his mouth.
“Good first aid. He’ll be fine.”
“I’m worried,” I said. “There are more red velvet worms out there.”
“Spread the word among the hunters who go down south, then.”
Up until that moment, I had always admired Ivan’s calm in the face of everything. But I wanted some drama. I wanted to hunt.
I’d get my chance with my report that evening in the Meeting House. Usually I’d rather hunt flesh-eating slugs than talk to thirteen politicians sitting at a table pretending to listen, so I hardly ever went.
The minute I walked into the Committee meeting that night, I didn’t like what I saw. It’s a big building, actually three round buildings connected by wide halls to make sort of a triangle, and it was almost empty. Just a couple dozen people in the main room. The far ones weren’t even lit. Where was the panic? Worms were about to attack! Not even all the Committee members were there, just seven not counting Stevland, a bare quorum.
Worst of all, Cawzee’s queen, Rust, was one of the two Glassmaker representatives on the Committee and the only one who had shown up. Proportional representation, but disproportional noise. Not just because Glassmakers were high-decibel. They were always looking for a fight, especially her. And there was a lot on the agenda I had to sit through before the item on velvet worms.
But Fern was in the audience, the woman I’d marry if she’d ever talk to me so I could ask her. I found a place near her so she’d have to notice me. She was carving some bit of wood in calloused fingers, a sculptor, the best in the history of the planet Pax, some said. I wanted those calluses to touch me.
She had a very young pet fippokat at her feet playing with the shavings. I tapped the floor so it would come to me. It turned its little ears, then hopped over. Its pink nose was sniffing my hand when another hunter sat next to me with his baby boy in his arms. Show-off. I picked up the little kat in one hand and held it for the baby to look at. The kat still had a few patches of brown baby fur, but mostly it was bright green. The baby squealed and reached out, and I guided his hand to gently pet the kat.
I cooed at the baby, and I glanced at Fern. She looked at us, laughed, then returned to her carving with a smile. Look at me again, I’m trying to show you I can give you the best babies on the planet!
She had looked at me, at least. I made her smile. Victory was mine! Someday.
Eventually the agenda got to me. “Cawzee and I spent four days hunting in the southern forest. We were training.”
Queen Rust stood up and interrupted. “You were to teach him to hunt, not let him be attacked.” She was as tall as me, with brown-on-brown patterned fur, but her body was long and wide compared to workers and majors. Her skinny legs didn’t look like they could hold her up. All queens were clumsy compared to majors and workers, but she was the worst. And somehow, maybe the way she bent every joint in her legs and arms at a different angle, she looked fierce. I wanted to be that scary. It was all attitude. I wanted that attitude.
“Sorry,” I said. “First thing to learn about hunting is that you can be hunted, too.”
“Thank you, Arthur,” said Ladybird, the co-moderator, showing the warm smile she gave everyone, warm but don’t cross her or it turned cold. “Cawzee should make a full recovery thanks to your quick attention.” She wore a big skirt, just in case anyone forgot she was a woman. Stevland was the other co-moderator. The Human moderators were always women. Women were always in charge.
I knew I was supposed to sit down then, but I had more to say. “A red velvet worm attacked him. There are red velvet worms in the south forest, and they’ve come in from the Coral Plains.”
“Just one,” said the cooks’ representative on the Committee.
“They never travel alone,” I said. “The locustwood are still saying there are more, right?”
“That is correct,” Stevland said. “I get frequent reports from them and from other plants to the south about many kinds of intruders from the plains.”
He was using a strange, echoing voice that night. Some old Earth or Glassmaker sound technology had been re-created to give him a loudspeaker unit so he could talk, and he liked to play with sounds. A box with a speaker was clamped to one of the thick stalks of bamboo growing out of a space in the flooring. Technicians worried that Stevland would feel pain when the wires went in, but he said he felt light, and light fed plants, so it was good.
“Sometimes there’s more slugs than other times, too,” said the farmers’ rep, Geraldine. “Nothing new.”
Ladybird saw that I had more to say, and she gestured for me to speak.
“We need to look for them and hunt them down,” I said. “They burrow. They could come up anywhere where there’s dirt.”
“Two days’ hike away,” Geraldine said. “We don’t farm down there.”
“I know it’s frightening, son,” said Ivan, the medical rep, “but one isolated incident is just that, an isolated incident.”
“We could really use more meat,” the cook said. “More and better hunting.”
And that was why I never came to Committee meetings. No matter what anyone talked about, it turned into a bicker, and good ideas got tortured and left to die as slowly as possible.
“But they’re new.” I pointed up to the dome where glass bricks made a circular rainbow. The big crack had been repaired, but they all knew what I meant. “Something happen
ed out on the plains with the earthquake, and animals are moving, and we don’t want them coming here.”
“That was two years ago,” the farmer said.
A woman in the audience who did a lot of fishing stood up. “Something did happen. Right after the earthquake, the river went low for a while. We were all worried about that, remember? Now we have fewer crayfish and hardly any natans. There’s that new crab, the pink one with three big claws, and spiky corals keep trying to anchor on boats and bridges and even nets.”
“Corals are always doing that,” Geraldine said.
“Not so many!”
“We should investigate every new danger,” Stevland said.
“Have you seen anything?” Geraldine said.
“My roots are thin that far south, and I have few stalks,” Stevland said. “But I get other reports. I believe this is serious and action is needed.”
“Then let’s have a planting expedition for you!” Geraldine laughed. “Forget the worms. Strange weather makes things move around. Come spring, they move back.”
Farmers. Most people were farmers, so my idea died there. It came to a vote and was eviscerated five to one. Ladybird and Stevland abstained, as usual, but it wouldn’t have made a difference.
I stayed and watched more debates for a while. I felt glad I wasn’t Ladybird, who had to try to keep the debate moving. I liked the way Stevland announced data and information at just the right time to nudge the debate, or at least he tried to. We’d have starved without him. Death by incompetence.
I thought about the way we were all divided by our main jobs, and we didn’t understand what other jobs did. Then we were divided into Humans and Glassmakers, men and women, animals and plants, and old and young. None of them understood the other.
We were divided by generations, too, counting back to the First Generation, the Parents, who came from Earth. Each set its own rules and had its own marker. I was Eleven, and we wore black hats, Ten shaved their heads, Nine wore raindrop shapes, Eight wore stripes, and Twelve wore red belts. Thirteeners were too young to have decided yet. Each generation thought it was the best.
And teams. Each project had a team, selected by the team leader. With everything else in play, teams usually included the people the leader liked best, not the people who were best at their jobs. That’s why so many teams failed.
We were incompetent because we couldn’t get along. We were stupid.
* * *
Late the next morning, I escaped. I perched in a hunting blind less than a half-hour hike from the city, waiting for something to go past that I could kill. I was tired of tramping all over in the slush for people who didn’t care what I thought. Then I heard a shriek for help. I recognized the voice, a working-caste Glassmaker, probably farming. I didn’t want to help, but I had to come running. It was the law.
I found a crowd that included some of my least favorite people, so I would have gone back to the blind except I thought I heard Geraldine yell, “Velvet worms!” She was having a fit. I took a closer look.
“It’s full of them!” She pointed at something in the brush alongside a field. Then she looked around with huge panicked eyes at the bare, plowed ground, as if worms were about to pop up out of anywhere. She grabbed her Glassmaker worker and ran away. Coward.
That left four other farmers plus me standing there, and I was the guy with weapons.
“Lemme take a look for you,” I said, nocked an arrow on my bow as cocky as I could, and sauntered over.
A little trap for crabs or geckos sat in the brush, and inside something slithered, scarlet-brown. A head snapped up and pressed against the mesh to shoot glue toward me. Then a second worm in the same trap attacked.
“I told you,” I said. “There’s red velvet worms around.”
“Okay, you were right,” said a woman, annoyed to admit it. She carried a basket filled with twigs and bark. “What do we do?”
“The woods aren’t as safe as they used to be.” I took a big step back and knelt down to look at the trap from another angle, then realized a worm could jump out of the ground and bite my butt. I stood up, made it look casual. “Those traps are just baskets, and I don’t think they’ll hold forever. Let’s see, I have these arrows, a long knife, a sling, a spear. The kind of things you’ll all need to carry now. And I’m telling you, these worms move fast.”
“Are there more around?”
“No way to know. We don’t know much about them.” I took my quiver of arrows from my shoulder. “I’ve got some barbed tips here. I wonder if that’ll do it. One way to find out.” I selected an arrow with a narrow shaft and tiny point, and I guessed it could pass through the mesh without breaking open the trap. I hoped, at least. “Hey, everyone, get back. These worms don’t die easy.”
They all stepped back twice as far as they needed to.
I couldn’t miss at that range. I hit a worm, and it roiled around so much it knocked over the trap. By then I’d released two more arrows into the other worm. I had a fourth ready and waited for a while. I didn’t want to make it look too easy. The worms fought, then twitched, then seemed to be still. I let the fourth and fifth arrow go just to be sure. The worms didn’t move.
I got a sixth arrow ready to make things look more dangerous. “By the way, are there any more traps?”
“Geraldine and Tweeter would know.”
“Yeah, but they ran away. Here, I think these are dead.” I poked at the trap with my spear. Nothing moved. I looked at my audience, and behind them, across the fields, more people were coming running. One of them was Jose, the chief hunter, gray-haired and wrinkled but still strong and fast. And smart. He’d be happy with my work.
He was. We tracked down the cowardly farmer, learned where the other traps were, and found one more worm. It had crawled into the trap to attack a little owl in it, and once we’d killed the worm, we took a good look. Its poison or saliva had dissolved the bird from the inside. The worm had sucked it dry, leaving an empty sack of skin and spiny feathers.
That night, terrified people filled the Meeting House to overflowing, but they cleared a path to let me and Jose make our report.
“It’s time for an organized hunt,” Jose insisted.
“I’m ready to serve the city,” I said. This was going to be fun.
Then a woman stood up. “It’s more serious than that. I said last night, the red velvet worms are just one change out of many. To me, as a geologist, this pace suggests a permanent change since the earthquake, and it’s taken two years for us to see the results. That is, there may be a change in the Coral Plains. We need to authorize a team to investigate.”
Stevland spoke up, this time in the most beautiful woman’s voice I’d ever heard. “I have never had a seed germinate in the plains. Or perhaps they germinated but were killed as seedlings. It is an environment hostile to me and to you, too. That may be why no Human has gone there for seven years, and no Glassmaker ever. The corals constantly try to encroach northward, and we plants constantly repel them, but we are fighting harder than ever. Something has changed.”
There was silence. Stevland had spoken. Then he added, “I can understand the reticence to go. Winter carries certain inconveniences, but it is the safest time to go, since corals and other predators are relatively dormant.”
More silence. No one wanted to go, since not everyone came back.
Finally the woman who managed the lentil orchards stood. “Remember all those little brown lizards last summer? They ate a lot of lentil buds, and we had a small crop. We don’t want that again.”
Geraldine nodded. “It’s not just bad weather.”
“Then,” Ladybird said, “we agree to send a team to investigate?”
“Arthur,” Queen Rust said. “We perhaps will spare him.”
Vindictive old lady. I began to object, but Jose started talking.
“Yes, Arthur is a good choice. He likes to explore, and it’s time he led a team. I nominate Arthur to lead a team to explore.” He looke
d at me firmly. “I’ll help him out, of course.”
I couldn’t say no to him, not without making him look bad, which would come back to me soon enough, and, well, yes, I did want to be an explorer. Just not of the Coral Plains. But he said I could lead a team! And he would be on it.
“I’ll do it,” I said. I’d come back alive and face down Rust. I’d show them how it was done.
“If he perhaps find change,” she added, “we send genuine expedition.”
I opened my mouth, but Jose kicked my foot, and I could take a hint sometimes.
Motion made, seconded, and passed on a voice vote.
Then they talked about a “moving star” that a guard had spotted the night before, which could be a little moon no one had ever noticed before or a giant floating cactus or a superfast comet. Investigating a harmless light in the sky seemed like a good idea to everyone, while the near death of a major like Cawzee hadn’t made velvet worms seem like a problem. They had to scare Geraldine silly for that.
The first thing I learned after the meeting was that Jose meant he’d give me advice, not come with me. I asked a couple of other hunters to be on my team, but they all had excuses.
* * *
The next morning I posted a general call for volunteers on the boards at the Meeting House and dining hall and asked Jose to help.
By noon, nothing. I began to think I wasn’t popular, somehow. At lunch, I was sitting in the dining hall with two Black Hat friends when Honey walked toward me carrying a big roll of paper.
There were more than five hundred Humans in Rainbow City, and I knew everyone more or less, and I’d never had a reason to get to know her better. She was the youngest of the Raindrop generation, so she was their coddled baby, and younger than me, and she had big blue drops tattooed on her cheeks. Like big teardrops, like she was crying all the time.
She was spoiled and bossy. She’d never gotten a haircut in her life, to prove she wasn’t a Baldie, and her hair hung down to her knees, not as long as you’d think because she was short, too.