“Pauline!” he shouted. His voice echoed.
There was no answer. Not even a male long call in response.
“Hwan//a!”
Again, no surprise, nothing.
He started to head back, retracing his steps around the swamp, his eyes still searching the reeds and muck for some trace of Pauline that he might have missed the first time. He continued to call out her name. Why, he didn’t know. She must be a day or so away from here.
Evening was setting in once he reached the hard dirt of the animal trail, the muscles in his back strained and sore from the humped-over search, the old nausea returning. Two days of tracking, and he had lost her. He couldn’t go back to the shuttle; he couldn’t abandon her.
He looked at her spoor again, traced the outline of her instep with his forefinger. Just next to this particular print was the print of a slazan sandal. He didn’t think this was Slazan N!ai’s print, but he wasn’t sure. At this point he remembered the pair of new-eyes Pauline had stowed away after they had had the preflight inventory. “If you come down with me,” she had said, “you could use these to hunt down some meat for us.” She dangled the pair of glasses, one of the stems between thumb and forefinger, the clear plastic sheen catching the light, the rims thick and full of microprocessed gadgetry.
And immediately he knew everything he had done wrong, from preparing his pack to his cursory reading of this trail. The slazan footprints were also heading toward the swamp, and he wanted a clearer reading of them, a clearer sense of whether or not a slazan had been pursuing Pauline. He wanted to come back tomorrow with the new-eyes.
He used the tracking disc to determine a direct route back to the shuttle, and he set it to cause a ringing in his head every time he began to deviate from the chosen paths. He tried to plan ahead for tomorrow, but the planning seemed useless. Weeks had gone into planning the Way of God’s expedition, months had gone into Dikobe’s preparation for her landing, and in just five days everything was gone. He tried to imagine that things would get better, but he couldn’t. It was as if his body—still walking forward, stopping when the disc rang, his eyes seeking out the proper path—expected more than did his heart.
It was nighttime in the forest, but in the clearing the sky was a deep purple, on the verge of opening itself to the stars and blackness. Strident beeping sounded in his head, and Esoch allowed his training to take over: he crouched low and pressed himself against the trunk of a large tree. The beeping stopped. Whatever had moved had also stopped. He stepped up to the next tree, which brought him close enough to the crest of the hill that he could look out on the clearing.
Across the hillside, on the ridge where an arrow had killed a slazan‚ a fire burned, bright yellow against forest black, and beside the fire stood a shadow. For a moment Esoch felt shaken; then he calmed as the firelight cast its glows on the rough hide of the pubic apron, the tough brown skin of legs and torso. The face was impossible to see, but it was looking in his direction. The slazan must have been sitting by the fire, keeping some sort of watch, and it had stood when it had heard his approach. Who could it be?
He scanned the area for signs of another slazan‚ but this one was the only one. He took several tentative steps down the hill. The slazan did not move, but the dark shape of its head seemed to shift in the darkness. Esoch walked more quickly. The slazan watched. Esoch increased his pace, made it to the shuttle, jabbed thumb against eyeplate‚ waited for the grinding slow slide of the door, the slazan still watching from a distance, its body as still as that of a tree. Esoch stepped inside, and the door slid shut after him. He felt suddenly safe.
The rush of adrenaline drained out of him immediately.
Suddenly Esoch didn’t care about the slazan by the fire nor about the slazan’s purpose. He sat on the bed, his knee touching the hard metal of the medcomp. Each night he had spent in the shuttle, the medcomp had infused his body with refreshed chemistry; every morning he felt better, and every evening his condition had deteriorated. For the barest of moments he remembered dancing at Dobe after his father had died, the boiling energy in him, in the other men, in his uncle with the thin, wrinkled face, N!ai sitting by his mother, and his older sister Kwoba was terribly sick, everyone thought she would die, too, and the next morning she was better, and N!ai spoke to him as if words were honey, and everyone in the face of the huts walked about as if old animosities had been forgotten. He needed something more than chemistry to keep the memories and //gangwasi out of his head. He couldn’t bear to see the spirit of his father or Ghazwan again. Esoch programmed the medcomp to induce a deep sleep. He stripped off his clothes and laid his grimy body down for another recycling of his blood.
The Twelfth Day
Esoch woke before dawn. After a shower he dressed in the cleaned onesuit‚ the torn sleeve still hanging open around his right arm. His face and right arm were still swollen, but the medcomp had given him something that suppressed the itching. He felt neither nausea nor light-headedness, but he felt nothing else, either. Everything seemed distant, as if his mind were disconnected from his body; the contours of the acceleration couch, the plastic of the controls beneath his fingertips, were vague sensations.
The slazan still sat by the fire, and its dark eyes were upon the shuttle as if it knew Esoch were already awake. Esoch knew that was impossible, but he could come up with no explanation for this slazan’s long watch. Had it slept at all during the course of the night?
A magnified image revealed a slazan he vaguely recognized. It had dark scars along both arms, and under its neck were the beginnings of graying pouches. Esoch ID’ed the slazan as Watcher and called for previous images: Watcher sitting by a fire and talking to two slazans at a nearby fire, one with scars across its chest and the other with scars across its arm, nursing a child; Watcher calling out something to a well-breasted woman who was walking away; Watcher standing over Slazan N!ai as she tied her pubic apron around the dying man’s leg. Watcher looked like a man, but he spoke only with women. He sat complacently by a fire, and the men always seemed to be restless and moving about.
On the adjacent screen Watcher sat on the crest of the hill by the fire and still looked down as if the shuttle were the only thing of importance in the world. And Esoch remembered the shock at seeing her (him?) by the fire last night, and how, for the barest of moments, before he was aware of Watcher’s bare skin and the pubic apron, he had thought that the dark figure wore a uniform, that the figure had found the shuttle and had come for him.
Esoch called up the images from the sixth morning, at 0338.52—he remembered the numbers perfectly—to watch again the nuclear explosions form momentary stars against the night sky. He waited for blue shifting light to die out—he was surprised how old pain could feel fresh—and watched the traces of white that cut across the night sky. He waited for the distant line of white, like that of a shooting star, and then he watched it numerous times. Something heavy was falling through the atmosphere. He reversed the image, tried to connect the object with one of the explosions, but he couldn’t. Could it have been the slazan warship that had attacked the Way of God? Or could it have been the slazan’s lifeship? Could the warrior have survived the crash and be out there, somewhere on this planet?
Esoch gave up watching after half an hour. Whatever had fallen must have burned up during re-entry. Anything that survived the explosions and the crash wouldn’t long survive the radiation. There was just he, Dikobe, and the slazans who foraged through these woods. The war had died in orbit.
He had wanted to take time assembling his hunting gear this morning. The sun had risen, and the clearing was free of mist: dew gave fresh color to the grass on the hill. According to the large-scale map, however, a storm front was approaching. He had to reach the swamp before the tracks were erased by the rain. He placed med-kit‚ rain gear, rations, drinking packs, and needle rifle in the pack. He replaced torch, pistol, and tracking disc on waisthooks. Then he searched through the jumble of locker three and couldn’t f
ind them—worried a moment that Pauline had taken them—but his fingertips found the plastic casing. The neweyes were in the case. He hooked them into the computer and spent far too long setting up the programming. Once he was done, he closed them back in their case and hung the case from the fourth waisthook.
Watcher did not react when Esoch stepped out of the shuttle. Esoch faced Watcher, and the slazan did not look away. Esoch walked across the torn black ground toward the same path he had taken yesterday, and Watcher’s head turned, eyes intent on his actions. But Watcher remained seated and made no other move.
Esoch was barely at the end of the first path when the tracking disc, still on his waisthook‚ sounded in his head. He stopped and checked the disc. Whatever had moved was no longer moving. He turned, and saw nothing. In the distance birds called to each other. Farther off insects buzzed. Something scurried through brush. Would Watcher follow him?
From then on the tracking disc was virtually silent, ringing only twice when he deviated from the general direction of the swamp. It was mid-morning when he arrived. Thick black clouds hung low overhead, and thunder sounded from the east.
He placed the new-eyes over his own eyes and tightened the strap until it felt firm against the back of his head. The new eyes had been programmed to look for Pauline’s footprints. Esoch had used the soles of his boots to demonstrate design, and he had the computer adjust for Pauline’s larger foot. He now found a clean imprint so the new eyes could calibrate programmed expectation against this soil’s reality.
At the edge of the swamp, water had sunk into Pauline’s tracks, virtually dissolving them. The other tracks were difficult to read. Animals had walked through them; he, in his exhaustion, had stepped on a few. The new-eyes compensated; thin lines of white highlighted where the boot’s heel had cut into ground and where the toe had made its impression; the new-eyes interpolated what was in between, and thin lines of phosphorescent yellow connected the white lines to create the full outline of Pauline’s boot.
Esoch followed the tracks away from the swamp and back into the woods, taking great care where he placed his own feet. White lines got darker the deeper the print. Thick white around the toes, more interpolated yellow around the arch, the heel. The distance between the steps was more than he remembered. But it was obvious. He should have noticed it yesterday. Pauline had been running toward the swamp. Esoch turned and followed the forward momentum of her spoor. Halfway there, between swamp water and woods, whites and yellows conflicted, overlapped; Pauline’s toes had turned, she had sidestepped once, then twice; perhaps here she had turned her head, tried to look back, before she had run headlong into the swamp.
He removed the new-eyes—more a nervous gesture than anything else, a desire to look at landscape without technology intervening—and held them in his left hand, while with his right hand he examined overlaying slazan footprints. A few drops of rain stepped lightly upon some leaves. He placed on the neweyes, and focused on the slazan spoor, until he could sort out one set of tracks from another. There had been two slazans. Both had worn sandals. One set of sandals was smaller than the other. The lines of the larger sandal matched the smooth outline of a foot. The lines of the smaller sandal didn’t have the fine curves, were almost graceless, as if the sandal had been poorly crafted. He followed the three sets of spoor back into the woods, then turned, to follow the tracks, step by step, back to the swamp. The wearer of the smaller, ill-made sandals had been running—her feet far apart, the toe digging in, the back of the sandal slapping at the ground, barely making an impression—moving in the same direction as Pauline when she had made her own run for the swamp. Wind rushed through the leaves now, and far away something snapped. The trail emerged from the woods—where rain fell lightly on Esoch’s face—and headed down the path toward the water. The wearer of the larger sandals had walked—long, careful strides; nice, full impressions in the dirt. The back of Esoch’s eyes hurt; he wanted to remove the new-eyes. He was now where Pauline had twisted to look back, then raced for the waters. Here’s where the wearer of the larger sandals had taken several quick steps as if to catch up, to see what was happening. And he stopped. Here the slazan runner had stopped. Here the runner had stood, here he had shifted his feet until the back foot was perpendicular to the front one, its weight traced in thick white. Esoch imagined this slazan holding bow and arrow, taking steady aim.
Esoch removed the new-eyes. Without them he could barely make out the forward foot, and the back foot was well mixed with other prints. He looked out at the swamp where Pauline had gone. Why had she been chased? What had she done? She had a pistol. Why hadn’t she turned and used it? Had she been driven toward the swamp, or was the swamp the ideal place to elude pursuit?
The rain was becoming heavier. Esoch removed the brown- and-green rain gear from his pack and put it on over the onesuit. Then he put the new-eyes back on, the dull pain behind his eyes persisting.
The wind was stronger, and leaves rustled together with the sound of a river. And the rain became stronger until it was a downpour. The water ran down his hood into his face and soaked into his boots. The new-eyes compensated for the darkness, and everything looked like a sepia landscape, some kind of alternate world. He watched water swirl into the depressions where the slazan had stood. He was overreacting, he told himself. There was no device to date Pauline’s footsteps or the slazan runner’s, no method to determine if both had run down this path at roughly the same time. The slazan could easily have been in pursuit of something else, perhaps an animal that it had wounded with an arrow, one of those small, plump things that scurried through the woods and hardly left a trail. But then why had Pauline been running? Could she have heard the call of the slazan Esoch had confronted? Could she have run for the swamp to avoid him as he yelled out his territory?
Esoch was shivering. A thin line of muddy water snaked down this trail, over one of the prints, and into the swamp. Slowly the line would widen into a stream, and all these tracks would be erased from the land’s memory.
The slazans’ spoor showed them leaving the area, heading in the general direction of the shuttle’s clearing. They did not pursue her any farther. Esoch did.
He headed off around the swamp in the opposite direction from yesterday. The ground was becoming softer, his boots sticking more readily. He walked and looked and trusted the new-eyes to record whatever he missed. The rain poured, and he kept telling himself that it wouldn’t be long before he found some sign, that she would be alive. He imagined she would be under some canvas shelter that she’d tied to several trees. She had decided to rest by the swamp, away from normal slazan routes of travel. She would see the approaching figure, the flash of green-and-brown rain gear glistening with wet, and she’d know it was someone from the Way of God‚ would know from his stature, his way of walking, that it was he.
And with each break in the reeds he saw nothing but swamp, each drop of rain striking water, radiating across the surface and around some brown stalks. For once he longed for the hot, dry spring back in the reserve, when you spent half the day lying in the dry heat of the shade, awaiting the cool nights, perfect for dancing.
It had been one of those unbearably hot days when Pauline Dikobe had walked into the chu/o‚ the face of the huts, along with a man from /xai/xai‚ where she had lived since winter. Esoch had been old enough that rather than gather with his mother, he could play with other children in the nearby pretend face of the huts, where his cousin /gau tried to talk young N≠isa into lying down with him like they were husband and wife. The woman whom everyone called Hwan//a‚ the name they had given her in /xai/xai‚ was the darkest-skinned person he had ever seen. She wore clothes like the other reds who had come, like the medico who had come to cure his leg a while back, but it was surprising to hear her speak the Ju/wa language with such ease, and the way she smiled so readily had everyone captivated. Everyone talked about her smile when she was off with women gathering in one place. And everyone teased her mercilessly for the
blood she extracted from every arm.
When she was introduced to ≠oma‚ she knelt down and smiled. She said, “I was named Hwan//a for a woman whose husband’s name was ≠oma‚ Should I call you little husband?” Everyone laughed and joked about how she would have to gather for a husband who still hunted anthills. His grandfather, whose name was also ≠oma‚ said that he and his grandson could be cohusbands so there would be someone old enough to hunt for Hwan//a. On nights when he slept at the boys’ hut and played his thumb piano too long, /gau or /tashe told him to go lie by his old wife and play music for her. Sometimes in the evening when she was sitting by the hut she had built for herself between the children’s face of the huts and the real one, he would walk up to her, his small thumb piano cradled in one arm, and ask her if she wanted to listen to some music. She always listened, and on the oracle discs she would record the sounds and play them back. She would tell him how much she liked his music, and he would show her how he was learning to play one song or another.
His father would sometimes come to take him away. “Can’t you see Hwan//a is busy. If she doesn’t do the work no one can see, they won’t let her stay here, and then we won’t have the tobacco and metal knives she brings.” And when Hwan//a told his father how well he played for such a young boy, he told her, “Don’t tell him he’s so good. Don’t tell him that reds all over the world would sit and listen to that. He will think he is the owner of music. He will play music all day and never hunt, and if he never hunts, he will never have a wife.”
He sometimes went gathering with his mother and aunt when Hwan//a went with them. A long rain had filled a pan with water; from the distance it looked like a large, shimmering lake. Since the men were in the face of the huts or out hunting far away, the women decided to bathe. He watched Hwan//a undress because he was curious about how she looked under those clothes, if everything was shaped the same way as on a normal woman’s body. He had sat naked in the water; he remembered how warm it had been, how hot the sun was, compared to this constant rain, and he remembered now how he couldn’t stop staring at her breasts. He had looked at breasts before, how they changed on a woman over time, but his attention had never been held the way it had been then; they were the breasts of a young woman, firm, dark, nothing at all like the hanging, comforting flesh that his young infant brother cried out for and found so readily, that his younger sister still desired, her voice sometimes loud and insistent when she accused her mother of being stingy with her breast milk. Hwan//a must have noticed his stare, because she smiled at him in a funny way and turned her back to him while she bathed, allowing him a wonderful view of her taut rear, something he knew he was supposed to be interested in, but it was her breasts that made him curious, that had awed him, and he watched them closely when Hwan//a and his sister started splashing each other, her breasts moving slightly with each swing of her arm.
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