“Yes, and look before you sit. Apparently they are attracted to sanitation facilities.” Cy turned pink. Rigi just nodded. Her aunt and uncle seemed amused for some reason. Well, when they’d gone to the Kenusha Plains, they’d had to worry about stampedes of wombeasts and even of striped leapers that might force their way past the dissuader field and into camp, with predators close behind. And then there’s been the hunter lizard, and the carnifex leaper, and . . . she stopped her mental tally because Cyril had started glaring at her.
“You didn’t say this would be so dangerous, Uncle Ebenezer. I don’t think Auriga should be here if it is this rough.”
Rigi stared back at her brother. “It’s not that rough, Cyril. This is Shikhari, after all, not Home.” In truth she preferred dealing with known dangers and predatory animals than some of the nasty people she’d encountered on Home. “I have a shooter, two now, and Martinus, and I do not plan on wandering through the forest on my own staring up at the pretty birdies, or get so lost in admiring the sunset that I walk off a cliff.”
“You don’t understand, Auriga. You’re a woman, not a girl. Things are different now.”
Rigi drank a little, ate another piece of grilled tuber, and counted to ten. “Cyril, I appreciate your concern. But yes, I am a woman grown. I survived escaping and evading captivity on the Indria Plateau, to use your terms. I’ve hunted, and Martinus and I killed a carnifex leaper, the same one that became his tail addition.” As she spoke her brother’s eyes widened until they seemed to take up half his face. “Martinus, Makana, and I survived attempted assassination, and I’ve eaten breakfast grain mush on two different starliners and lived to tell the tale. I’ve even sat through university finance meetings without throwing my datapad out the window. I know how to protect myself, and when to run like a three-legged wombeast if a terror-bird comes in sight. Brother, I love you, but don’t wrap me in leaper fur.”
“She’ll probably shed on you if you try, Cyril,” Aunt Kay observed. “You have a full permit now, Rigi?”
“Yes, ma’am, both hand-shooter and long-shooter.” She tipped her head to the side a little. “I still wonder about just how useful a long-shooter would be inside the city, though.”
“Wombeasts if the shields go down. Lets you keep what you shoot, unlike a pure self-defense long-shooter. Less paperwork,” Dr. De Groet said matter of factly, as if shooting 1000 kg herbivores in the streets happened every feast-day. “Although I confess, I would love to see His Excellency’s expression if a wombeast migration got into NovMerv.”
“No thank you. Miss Leopoldi’s shrieks would send them fleeing right back into the wilds,” Cyril muttered into his bottle. Rigi and her aunt exchanged looks behind his back. Perhaps Miss Leopoldi wasn’t quite as charming as Rigi had assumed? Ah well, Miss Leopoldi and her suitors had nothing to do with Rigi for the next two weeks.
“Ah, on a less lovely topic,” Uncle Eb interrupted her thoughts. “Do be careful with sanitation. There some very unpleasant insects that bite or sting, nothing fatal if you are young and healthy, but still dangerous. We don’t have a fast evacuation vehicle, so I strongly suggest looking carefully before you answer nature’s call. Ah, and Miss Rigi is our emergency nurse.” Cyril turned crimson and Rigi quickly looked away. No, she did not want to have to take care of bites or stings there. Or there. Especially on her brother! Lexi and Kor exchanged puzzled looks and tipped their heads to the right the exact same amount, looking like twins for a moment. As she watched, Rigi suddenly wondered if they did come from the same stock, given Lexi’s black head and forefeet. Both broke Stamm downwards, and both had the same dry, almost human wit and precise speech patterns, although Kor spoke far less, or had until a year and a half ago.
“So,” Micah stated. “Supper is in another hour. Miss Rigi, there is a dedicated charger/generator at your quarters, should Martinus need that much power.” She nodded, catching his meaning. “Breakfast will be at half past five local time, which is now seventeen hundred. I’d like to be at the site by seven tomorrow, so we can work there in the morning, then go inland once the on-shore wind starts to pick-up. It is gnat season, I am sorry to say.” Kor made a quiet “thppth” sound. “I know. There are gnat nets as well as powered repellers, just in case. I gave the cook and his assistant the list of foods you prefer not to eat, Cyril, Miss Rigi, so that should not be a problem. Tonight is fowl, as in bird meat,” he quickly specified as Lexi’s ears started to tip to the sides. Rigi looked up at the canvas ceiling to keep from giggling. The Common word for bird-meat sounded very much like a Staré term for rotting, under-tanned leather.
Rigi and Martinus went to her shelter. She had one to herself, because Martinus took up room, Cyril and Tomás would share as did her aunt and uncle, Micah had one to himself, and Kor and Lexi had spaces near the hired Staré. “I wonder why Dr. De Groet never hires any humans?” Rigi asked Martinus. “Don’t humans ever work as expedition staff on this continent?” They might not, as she thought about it. Well, aside from the humans that Dr. Szabor had been forced to employ out on the plains. Or had she imposed on students? Oof, that would be hard work, doing expedition things all day and then turning around and having to cook, and move camp, and hunt if hunting were needed, and work on vehicles if necessary. Rigi sighed a little, wishing once more that Dr. Szabor had not been quite so rude or unwilling to listen to local advice.
Rigi shook out her camp boots before putting them on. Yes, they’d been in her bag, but getting into good habits from the beginning never hurt. She brushed her skirt, glad she could still wear the sturdy clothes she’d gotten for the Indria Plateau trip, those that had survived. She suspected that her mother had quietly burned the dress and underthings that Rigi had worn for almost a month straight, even after the soldiers had washed them. Rigi never inquired as to where they had disappeared to—she didn’t miss them.
Rigi gave the sanitation tent a quick look-over, triple checked around the necessary and peered under the seat, made use of the facility, and then went back to the main dining tent. The sun would not set until after 2100 this time of year, so she didn’t have to worry about nocturnal creatures yet. Rigi stopped outside, looking up at the sky. A few puffy white clouds moved from west to east, and she thought she saw a large bird high up, like one of the enormous carrion eaters that supposedly prowled the slopes of the Snow-Tooth Mountains. Now she could smell a briny, slightly bitter scent in the air, under the leafy, loamy “forest” scent. That must mean that the wind had shifted from the sea, or that they’d moved close enough to the shore for that wind to reach them. Or was there a tidal estuary nearby? No, she sniffed again, it didn’t smell rotting-stuff-mud-brine like the Kenushamouth did. Her stomach reminded her that a few nibbles did not a proper supper make and she went inside.
The next morning Rigi tumbled out of the transport and gawped at the site. Nothing she'd seen—Stela was a tiny speck of a find compared to what sprawled before. Towers!
“Wooeef?”
“Oh yes, Martinus,” she managed once she remembered to breathe. “Wooeef indeed. Very wooeef.”
“This isn’t supposed to exist,” Cyril croaked beside her. “Nothing on this scale could have existed before humans arrived. I read the report.”
“Apparently the ancestral spirits failed to consult with xenoarchaeologists,” Micah De Groet said. He sounded very smug, and his smile revealed all of his slightly-crooked teeth. He folded his arms. “As Master Martinus so eloquently stated, ‘wooeef.’ Welcome to Strahla City, because I can’t think of any other way to describe it.”
Rigi had her sketchpad in hand and had already started drawing, her eyes moving from west to east, upstream, taking in the ten-meter high structures and the piles of rubble between them, and the large trees growing throughout the scene. “How far downstream did this extend, Micah?” she heard Uncle Eb asking, awe in his voice.
“A few hundred meters at least, but all I can find are what appear to be foundations. If there were structures, they disappear
ed long ago. Nothing seemed to be denning here, at least as of three weeks ago, and Thorna says she hasn’t seen activity since then. Thorna is the senior hunter for the Staré settlement inland,” he added. Kor grunted and puffed //distaste/puzzlement// but didn’t speak. The others walked closer to the site but Rigi and Martinus stayed on the little rise, probably an old river terrace, and she continued to sketch, taking in the general setting and shape of things, adding notes about color and shading. Only when she’d finished did she walk into the site, taking her time and watching her footing on the gravel and cobbles underfoot. Cobbles? That seemed odd, and Rigi stopped to add a note on the margin.
The walls had weathered grey and smooth. Micah and his helpers hadn’t removed all of the vegetation, and here and there trees grew out of buildings as well as between them, cracking the walls or looming over the remains of something. So much debris filled the spaces between walls that Rigi had trouble telling what was building and what wasn’t. Or had they all been buildings, and she was going from basement to sub-surface passageway? The walls appeared to stop at eight or ten meters tall, making them the largest ancient structures she’d seen on Shikhari. That alone should have been worthy of Dr. Szabor’s presence, Rigi sniffed. And how had they been missed on scans? Probably the same way that other sites failed to appear on anything but the most specialized of ground-penetrating and visual images. Once again Rigi wondered what the Staré of the First World, the Ancient or Ancestral Spirits as some Staré called them, had used to build the “ghost villages.” A shadow and a curve cut into a wall caught her eye and she stopped, flipped to a fresh page and started work.
Uncle Eb and Lexi found her some time later, now on the third—or fourth?—page as she tried to draw the entire pattern covering the wall. It started at knee-height, extending to within a hand-width of the top of the wall as it currently stood. Leapers and Staré with animal-heads alternated, almost in a procession of some kind, approaching an enormous figure like a cross between a hunter-lizard and a Staré, with Staré ears and forelegs but the big ambush predator’s body and head. It seemed to be guarding or standing over a nest with eggs and newly-hatched Staré. Rigi got closer to the wall, peered at it, sniffed it, then backed up, absently stepping over a lump of something. “This came after,” she said, hands still moving. “It is scratched, not really carved, and never colored that I can tell.”
“I’ve never seen that creature depicted with pouchlings and hatches,” Uncle Eb said.
A scent of //agreement// wafted through the air. Lexi said, “Neither have I, sir. It would appear to be a depiction of a guardian, perhaps? The general form matches that of Stela and Fountain, but not the details.”
“Other wall.” Rigi squinted and frowned again, trying to see if that really was a forefoot or just a scratch. "Behind me, sir."
“Great Caesar’s ghost!”
“Shed fur and shattered eggs!”
Rigi heard someone else come racing up, skid and swear, then trip over something and swear again in Staré. Only when she finished the line, made her notes and turned to a clean page did she turn around. She also needed to sharpen her pencil, which she did by feel, five turns of the sharpener, as she watched her uncle and the two Staré looking at the drawing on the other wall, this one not as tall but more detailed, and more deeply cut into the surface. “Not stone,” Kor said.
“No, sir. It is a thick gypsum-like compound, but not plaster, more like a synthesized material, and they used a metal blade to make the design, assuming what Martinus pawed up there in the corner is it. I didn’t touch it, just drew it. I think he smelled something and was checking for snakes.” He didn’t really smell, not like a bio-dog, but his olfactory sensors detected chemical traces and pheromones. She swallowed hard. “I don’t think it was done too long after the end of the First World, sir.”
None of the patterns or designs they’d found thus far showed so many dead Staré, people crushed or buried under things, people running, people trying to shelter hoplings, or cowering with forefeet over eyes. And above all of it was a giant bird with lightning bolt-like things coming from its eyes that knocked down a building. She assumed it was a building. She shouldn’t, the xenoarchaeologists and xenologists all said you could never assume that what you thought you saw was really what the maker had intended, but something told her they were buildings.
She could hear the smirk in Uncle Eb's voice. “You do realize that this demolishes Dr. Szabor’s entire thesis?”
“It would if it could be dated, sir,” Rigi slowly, unhappily, reminded him. “We are probably not considered trustworthy reporters anymore.” She took a deep shaky breath. The image scared her. “That said, yes, sir, this image, if it dates to the time of the destruction of this site, and if this site proves to have been subject to a single, rapid disaster of some kind, would undo the Petrason document and confirm the accuracy of the Elders’ oral traditions and of the artifacts in their care.” She tried to sound very professional and grown-up. Inside she wanted to run away and hide in a cave or hole where nothing could find her. Think about something else, she ordered her mind, something from your learning texts. “The similarity of the other panel to the Temple at Stela is remarkable, given their distance.”
“What?” Uncle Eb twisted his head around, looking at the other wall. The Staré seemed entranced by the disaster images. “Oh. Oh! Even the size is similar, as is the style, yes. That is quite odd, I agree.” He ran a hand through his unruly hair, stopped, and stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time. “Rigi, what’s wrong?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t supposed to know. He picked a path through the debris to her, resting his hands on her shoulders. “Auriga, child, what’s wrong?”
“The bird, sir,” she whispered. “The signals, alien signals, the Navy recorded. Is that going to happen to Sogdia, and NovMerv, and Keralita, and the new Staré towns?” She sounded like a twelve-year-old again, at least to her ears, and she blushed with shame. She was a woman, not a girl.
“How did—?” He stopped, then snarled, “Tomás told you.”
She nodded, looking down.
Uncle Eb hugged her, holding her close, as he had after the carnifex leaper attack. “This is different, Auriga Maris Regina. The First World Staré didn’t have extra-solar transports and war ships. They didn’t know how to defend themselves from extra-atmospheric attack. The Second World is different, Auriga. We are different. And the Staré are different now, too. And we do not know where those signals came from, young lady." He relaxed his grip and wagged one finger at her. "They could be a sort-of ‘hi, we’re here. Hi, we’re here’ like we humans sent out long before we could leave Home’s gravity well.” He shook her a little and let go. “And you never heard anything from that young man, whose trouser seat I am going to tan if I get my hands on him.”
“Yes, sir.” But he had not said it wouldn’t happen, only that things were different. He hadn’t promised. Rigi wanted to feel better, but she couldn’t really. Not until he promised. When Uncle Eb promised, that made it true.
Uncle Eb led her out, into a larger, cleared—or at least not as rubble strewn—area. “The others are that way,” he pointed downstream. “Ogling another stela. I’ll document what you found, and see if I can pry Kor and Lexi away.” He sighed. “I should have brought a bag of leftover Staré candy so I can lure them back to work.”
“Yes, sir. Martinus, find Cyril.” His tail-rod swept a circle, another circle, then he started walking in the direction Uncle Eb had pointed. Rigi followed him, now paying close attention to things in shadows as well as to her footing. Predatory or just annoying lizards might have moved into shade. She saw a few prints of something with large claws, and she undid the safety strap on her hand-shooter, just in case. She didn’t smell anything, or hear it, but the hunter-lizard that had almost grabbed Lexi hadn’t had any scent at first. The debris and walls shifted color, from medium grey to a dusty white. Martinus pointed around a corner and Rigi stepped into the
middle of the space between the walls, then turned.
The rear-end of a wombow confronted her, at least three meters tall. Uncontrollable laughter bubbled up, then erupted. Rigi laughed so hard that she had to lean against the wall to keep from falling over, tears streaming. “I’m cursed! Everywhere I go, I see wombow wumps.”
“Woo?”
“No, she has not lost her mind,” she heard Aunt Kay’s voice. “I hope.” Rigi wiped her eyes and saw her aunt appear from behind a small half-wall that stuck into the area around the wombow. Rigi pointed and Kay stopped, turned to her left, and covered her eyes. “Oh dear. So much for an advanced civilization.”
Once she could see and breathe again, Rigi straightened up, assured Martinus with several pats and strokes that she had not been injured, and went to take a closer look at the statue. What remained of the front certainly looked like a wombow, although one the size of two wombeasts standing on top of eachother. As she got closer, Rigi could see marks in the material that acted like fur, suggesting the creamy-grey-brown material had either faded or the color had washed off. “This isn’t stone,” her aunt said. She thumped it with one fist, carefully. “It feels like artificial marble, but chalkier, as if the binding matrix were breaking down.” She winked at Rigi. “Like the unfortunate statue in Regal Square on Eta Tolima.”
Rigi giggled again. “Um, ah, that is, yes ma’am. Ahem. The one that had been intended for display in a more sheltered space.” The matrix the sculptor used should never have been exposed to sunlight and weather, and it had begun to melt, sort of, turning the statue of a royal ancestor into something far less appropriate for public display, or so it was claimed. The brief glimpse she’d gotten of the unfortunate monument hadn’t really looked that inappropriate to Rigi, but some people had salacious imaginations.
“I do hope we find the head and shoulder,” her aunt continued. “Otherwise I shudder to imagine what the psyscho-xenoarchaeologists will say, although I do know it will be with great eloquence and in painful detail for many volumes.” Kay shook her head. “Cy and Micah are over here.” She stepped over some lumps of what might have been wood, around a bush growing through the pavement or floor, and led Rigi to another statue, this one smaller, but also in poor condition and laying flat.
Stamme: Shikari Book Three Page 17