by Jo Clayton
The decision made, tension drained from her; her breathing slowed and she slept.
6
She sat in the chair on the creepier, listening to the Taalav chatter their symphonies and growing fonder of the odd, ugly creatures as the hours slipped past. They were as playful as otters, and they punned relentlessly in a langue that was a gift to wit-snappers and persifleurs. She nearly fell out of the chair in her efforts to stifle laughter when they threw quips back and forth describing the Kliu guard, especially when they were speculating about his sexual involvement with the creepier.
She sobered rapidly as the implications of that came clear. This new xenobi might be studying the Taalav, but the Gestalts were studying them back with an equal intensity and making some amazingly accurate deductions despite their isolation here.
They were more serious about her.
It took a while, gathering hints from the flow of their speech, to understand why. Their eyes were very good; they saw finer detail in the reddish twilight that was Pillory’s high noon than a hawk hunting in the brilliant light of a yellower sun. And they were clever at patterns, not just with words. They noted the basic similarities between her and someone else. They wondered if Shadith and this other woman were a separate species from the men in the lake place. They didn’t say men and women, of course, but talked about the diamond-shaped ones with the double-lumped high front and the wedge-shaped ones with the single smaller lump at the crotch.
They grumbled at her, wanting her to stand up so they could get a further comparison of heights. They speculated on the reason for the different skin colors of these two-bump people.
She glanced at the guard. He wasn’t technically sleeping on the job, but he’d let his body slump down on his support limbs and his secondary lids had slid across his eyes. She felt at him and came up with a sense of relaxation so deep he couldn’t be aware of much going on around him.
Still listening to him, she got carefully to her feet and walked to the lowering platform of the creepler.
They were excited about that, a little wary, but still not afraid even when the descent of the platform was finished and she stepped off of it.
She walked toward them, stopping when their nervousness increased sharply, then stood where she was and used the motors to help her stretch her arms out straight from her shoulders.
When she didn’t move, they edged closer, the biggest one taking the lead. It lifted its nose tube, hesitated, then brought it closer and closer to her, until it was finally nuzzling at her clothing and the metal skeleton of the exo.
Gentle touches. Tickling her. Getting very personal at times.
She twitched away, giggled-which they found fascinating so they repeated the touches. She lowered her arms slowly so she wouldn’t frighten them, moved the nose tubes away, then licked her lips and attempted a crude version of their langue, a kind of pidgin whistle talk.
Greet you tied to the land
I, Singer No-harm offered wanted
This one who stands here
They were enormously excited by this. It was the first time anyone had ever attempted to talk to them. They hurled a whole symphony of questions at her, not giving her a second’s opening to respond until the biggest one swung its armored tail about and made some peremptory clicking sounds.
When there was silence, it eased its head from under the hood, raised it on a thin muscular neck until the round naked head was almost level with hers; it stared at her for several moments. Then it spoke slowly, but did not try to mitigate the complexity of what it said, weaving the tones and undertones into a song. Though what Shadith heard the Taalav saying was simple enough when stripped of the qualifications and multiple meanings, it was also a great beauty that pierced her through and through.
The Taalav said:
where do stilter creep (our)
how do (the being that walk the
you are) clumsily
what are stranger invade this
space and hear us
topological landscape and bespeak us
stone/plant/we life and know what others
do not
Included in the question were asides that mentioned her coloring, her size and shape, the features that were like the Taalav and those that were radically different, the features (fewer) that she shared with the Kliu, her smell, her strange attempts at truespeak and other things that were too subtle even for that most subtle of instruments, the translator she’d inherited from Aleytys.
As she contemplated her answer, knowing it would be so crude that she’d better not try anything but the simplest response, she glanced at the guard and was startled to see two of the smaller Taalav standing close to him, making soft steady humming sounds; then one of them flipped its long tail forward and inserted the thorny tip between two folds of the Kliu’s skin. Amazing. They’d somehow understood that she didn’t want the Kliu aware of what was happening.
She sang/whistled:
This person I am that you are touching need
curiosity
Maker of songs called Shadow am I being here
liking you
The Gestalts chattered among themselves, sorting out to their satisfaction exactly what she meant by each nuance of sound, some of their conclusions making her grin, though she didn’t try to correct them.
There was a tickling around her ankles. She looked down. Several of the tiny body forms were starting to climb up her legs.
She didn’t try form a request, just whistled and pointed.
A few slaps of the nose tube by the largest Taalav and the curious infants scuttled away to hover under the legs of other adults and stared at her with tiny pinpoint eyes until she wanted to giggle again.
The Taalav fixed its eyes on her. When it spoke, it had carefully stripped away the harmonics and all it asked was, why?
She drew in a breath, sang/whistled to them:
A part of you adult forms taken away
family juvenile forms the one-bump stilter
plants/land/bugs eggs the two-bump stilter
Her face twisted in a fury of concentration, she told them of her need to find the missing array, stressing that she wished no harm either to them or to the others. She tried to impress on them that the others would be in great danger if she did not find them before those like him-she pointed at the dreaming Kliu-came across the absent and destroyed them…
this one before you politely
with no call on you asks to save the absent
but a desire to help you urgently
… so I ask you to tell me as much as you can about the two-bump person… female smuggler, she thought, just knowing that is a step up… what its colors are, how high it is… do they know about names? she asked the translator, ah! yes, I see they do. Names as descriptions, so intricately nuanced they can only belong to one Gestalt among the many… did you hear the name she gave herself, the sound of it?
Listening with such concentration her head started hurting again, she picked out of the weave of sound they gave back to her an astonishing amount of data:
There were too many sounds exchanged between the two-bump and the one-bump who studied them and whom they studied in their turn. Too many to remember. And they had no way ’of deciding what was name and what was just talk.
The two-bump was wider than Shadith, the bumps were rounder and bigger and it showed brighter colors than Shadith though it had a carapace very like hers.
The growth on its head was longer and thicker than Shadith’s and a different color, it was a shiny black and hung all the way to the bending part of its body; there were two white streaks in the black, very shiny, too.
It came on a flying thing, broad and flat like the creepier, but far more silent and more subtle.
It argued with the one-bump stilter; the argument made lots of noise, but the other stilters didn’t come out to see what was happening.
The speaker Taalav thinks the one-bump fed (untranslatable and untranscribable
noise) to the others; this (noise) was the poison the Taalav collect in their stingsacs. The one-bump had taken sacs from Taalav in earlier days.
It took the one-bump most of four days to collect two full arrays and shift them on the transport. In all this time, none of the six legs or the other stilters appeared.
By the time this was done, Shadith was shaking with fatigue, sodden with sweat rolling down inside the exo, soaking the spongy cushions supposed to protect her body from the abrasion of the metal supports. She took a step toward the creepler, then turned again. She thought a moment, shaped a question, sang/whistled it to the Taalav: When I find your others, shall I bring them home to you?
She expected another cascading consultation, but the large one answered immediately.
Maker of Songs if they thrive, let them
be
Shadow plant the spirit/essence in
another place
Two-bump friend let them shape another
home
After she rode the platform up and settled herself in the reed chair, Shadith watched the Taalav arrays go spreading out beneath the trees, taking up the lives they’d put down to talk to her. She heard the Kliu guard’s breathing start to change and knew he was about to come awake.
She touched the sensor and set the creepier going on the trek back to the lake. A little tact and some patience and I’m off this stinking world. She smiled at the burp from the Kliu’s eating mouth. Sounds like, crocface there OD’d on (noise); may his gut rebel and his head feel worse than mine.
7
A drone from Digby was waiting for her when she reached the ship, but she didn’t access the data inside until she was well away from Pillory and ’splitting for Spotchalls.
Digby was sitting behind the desk again, wearing the face she’d seen when he set her to work. “A bit of information has come into my hands, Shadow, which you might find interesting and perhaps even useful. Word has come from Marrat’s Market that the Broker Jingko iKan has on offer a Taalav crystal. Guaranteed genuine and not stolen. Seems clear to me this is the smuggler’s payoff and he’s getting his money out of it as fast as possible. I want to remind you of the strictures of this search. You’re to be invisible to the Kliu. I leave it to you to figure out how.”
Shadith watched the image dissolve as the message erased itself from the ship’s memory. “Complications. So I’m supposed to get past OverSec without letting anyone know I’m looking for that smuggler. Cover? Spla! Can’t sneak in and disguise won’t do it. OverSec took that template of me when I went into Sunflower Labs. Said it would be erased. Not likely.
Cover… cover… a job that’ll be plausible and get me in without airing the Kliu connection. Lee? No. If she were hunting something, she’d do it herself. Swarda would do, but he and his crew are on a run out to the Hevardee. Aslan’s Mama. Yes. She owes me. Doesn’t like me all that much, but she likes feeling obligated even less. I need to talk to her first, though. Droom. That’s another month of traveling while the trail freezes on me, but with Digby’s strictures… Shayss!”
Sighing, she called up the destination code of the Hegger Combine and fed them into the router, then dealt with the disorientation as the ship phased into the new course and ’splitted for Droom.
5. I Forgot What Home Was Like
1
Lylunda crawled from the sludge of the ocean called the Haundi Zetin, wriggled through the tangle of baifruit vines and into the clump of tall, thin rynzues with their woody braided stems and the dusky black heat-collector nodules on the spray of branches at the top. Half an hour ago she’d brought her ship down through a foaming red light, Ekilore’s sullen fire filtered through an abundance of cloud fleece as the sun rose above the horizon; they were dry clouds because the rainy season was still two months off. She’d settled it in the tangled mass of vines and trees on the largest island in a spray of islands that ran parallel to the coast, covered it with camou cloth and left it with a low-level shield in place, a smuggler’s special.
On her feet again, she looked back at Nameless Island, only one end of it visible past the tangle of vines and the droop of the rynzu branches.
They were all nameless islands. Behilarr notion-why bother identifying something so useless? The Zeal was a soup of poisons infested with eels that were mostly mouth and vast schools of small, black swimmers that could strip flesh from bone in seconds.
All of these died when they ate Behilarr flesh, but the Behilarr died as well, ending as vomited chunks on the ocean floor. She was only half Behilarr. She grinned at the thought; maybe she’d only half-poison the fish.
No one went boating for pleasure in the waters round here and swimming was a skill only the very rich with their pools of filtered water could afford to learn. Her ship would be safe out there until she came back for it, though she didn’t look forward to the long dangerous swim to reach it.
In the strengthening light of the steamy dawn, she slipped off the impeller harness and laid it on the ground, unclipped her dita sac, took out the can of cleanser and the packet of blancafilm, and began the long process of cleaning and stowing her aegis suit and all the appurtenances that let her come safely through the hazards of the ZeOn.
2
By the time she reached the coast road, most of the morning was gone and she wasn’t quite so pleased with herself for finding a perfect place to stow her ship. The burlap sack she’d used to conceal her offworld gear was a hot wet spot on her back, the rough weave rubbing a rash through her blouse and T-shirt. Smuggler on the brain, she thought. I probably could have parked the ship in the tie-down at the transfer station and come in legit. And saved myself a lot of trouble…
She started walking along the edge of the unpaved road, a line of dirt beaten hard by the hooves of cattle driven from the nearby arranxes, the estates of the Highborn Behilarr, to the feed lots and slaughtering houses outside Haundi Zurgile. Zurg. Where she was born. Hutsarte had only been colonized a little more than a hundred years ago, and. Behilarr were slow to spend money on things like roads even though floats did need fairly level ground to operate efficiently.
Dream on, Luna, if you came in legit, your name would be on the list. How long would it take a hired snoop to find you then?
Her ankle turned as her foot slipped into a rut. Arms waving, she found her balance again but winced as she took the next step. “Jaink! I think I sprained the thing.”
She settled herself on a clump of irratzy, the curly leaves and rubbery stems of the fern grass poking at her through the cloth of the long skirt she’d pulled over the underpants she’d worn beneath the aegis suit. The road curved here and a stand of prickle pipes with their twining side growths and spongy foliage blocked the wind and the fine white dust that wind blew like heat clouds along the ruts.
For several moments she just sat, pulling her knees up, folding her arms on them, resting her head on her arms while she wondered if this homecoming business was worth the pain it was going to bring her. Then she sighed, turned back the hem of her skirt, and prodded at the ankle. She was wearing low-heeled boots she didn’t want to take off because she’d never get them back on again. With stingworms, pincer mites, and the other small biters that Hutsarte grew in the millions, walking barefoot wasn’t a good idea.
Barefoot. Every summer when she was a subteen she’d spent a lot of time in a local clinic, waiting for a purge to expel one parasite or another from her system. Jaink only knew what passengers she was picking up right now, just by sitting on this patch of fern grass.
She pulled the skirt down and tucked her feet under her when she heard the hum of a float, the first in several hours. It was a hiccuping hum, as if the lifters were ready to scatter their parts to the, four winds. When it came round the stand of prickle pipes, she saw a small battered vehicle that looked old enough to be one of the firstdowns. The driver matched it, his face a mask of wrinkles, his, clan sign so faded she couldn’t read it. He was one of those rambling peddlers who moved from arranx to arra
nx, selling items and occasionally buying handwork to resell in Zurg.
He saw her and brought the juddering float to a gentle stop, twisted his body around, and called back, “Shouldna sit there, neska. Some mean biters wud soon be chewing your sweet little poto. What’s wrong? You not feeling good?”
“Give my ankle a turn, jun.”
“You aiming for Zurg? Hoy! twanghead question that. Where else would you be going? Want a ride?” He grinned at her, showing a good set of yellow fangs. “Got all my teeth still, but I don’t bite.”
She pushed onto her feet, winced at the twinge in her ankle, bent, and picked up the gunny sack. “‘Preciate it, jun,” she said and limped around to the rider’s side.
“You make it all right?”
“Give me a minute.” She tossed the sack into the cargo bin, pulled herself up, and settled onto the grubby seat. “Drop me at the Izar Gate if you don’t mind.”
The old man tapped and pushed and jiggled the controls, and after a while the float coughed and lifted onto its airpad; he started it wheezing forward, then leaned back, one hand on the joystick. “You a working girl? Izar, I mean, that’s why I ask.”
“Nah, just visiting kin.” She drew her sleeve across her face, grimacing at the smear of mud on the cloth. “Been gone a while. Anything I should look out for?”
“Thought I hadn’t seen you round. You wanna keep your head down. The Ezkop is on a purification rage, he’s got Mazkum and Jazkum in High Zurg wearing out their knees and burning their silks. He’s threatening to harrow the Izar next in the name of Jaink and Virtue. Ever been through one of those?”
The float whined and labored as it began climbing the long slope to the top of the gorge where the River Jostun ran down to join the sea.