No Skin-Face close at hand; but a kilometer downstream, three humanoid figures tracked along the bank, walking away from me. The Bumbler gave me a telescopic view of the trio: three males, all carrying spears and shoulder bags, all wearing strips of skin on their faces. They had skin on their genitals too, carefully wrapped around penis and testicles. One also had a patch of skin on his chest—I could see it through his transparent back.
Perhaps that was the chieftain: the man who could commandeer the largest share of a kill.
Still hoping I was wrong, I magnified the view a few notches higher. Maybe the skin strips were some kind of harmless ornamentation….
No. In extreme close-up, there was no mistake. It was brown human skin, complete with wisps of hair, fastened to the underlying glass flesh.
One man lifted his hand and pointed at the creek ahead of them. The chieftain nodded, and all three started down the bank toward the water. My guess was they had reached a point shallow enough to ford; they were obviously reluctant to cross where the creek was over their heads. That gave me useful intelligence about the enemy…and already I was thinking of them as enemies, although they had showed no sign of hostility toward me or anyone else.
Explorers habitually regard strangers as threats. Shaking hands is for diplomats.
Simple Prairie Hunters
The men appeared on the far side of the creek a short time later and continued north. On their present path, they would run into the buffalo herd we had seen that morning…and that might be their goal. They might be simple prairie hunters, searching for food to feed their families.
Simple prairie hunters who carried radios.
I shook my head to clear it. Explanations would come eventually…or else they wouldn’t. Unsolved puzzles were a permanent frustration of the job.
At last the spearmen disappeared behind a copse of trees and I waved for Oar to join me. She crossed the creek with the scuba breather in her mouth, even though it couldn’t have much air left in it. I didn’t say anything—if she was happier to get air from a machine rather than holding her breath for the few seconds the water was over her head, so be it. The little tank was self-charging, given enough solar energy and access to air; in twenty-four hours it would be usable again.
From the top of the bank, I led us straight to the nearest clump of trees, to make sure we were shielded from the spearmen’s eyes—even though they were more than a klick away, the prairie allowed for long sight-lines. The men had come from this direction; we found their footprints in the dirt when we stopped to collect ourselves.
One good thing about people as dense as glass: they leave deep, clear footprints.
“Who were those people?” Oar blurted when we were safely under the trees.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” I answered. “You don’t know who lives in this area?”
“No. I thought…” She stopped herself. “I thought something very foolish.”
Her face was troubled; I suspected I knew why. Oar might have believed she and her ancestors were the only people in the world. She had seen the transmission from Chee and Seele talking about another city to the south, but she had dismissed that as an Explorer lie. The three Skin-Faces may have been the first strangers she’d seen…the first non-Explorers anyway. Their presence upset her more than they upset me. They were proof she wasn’t unique.
I didn’t belabor the subject. “You said you came this way once before…when you decided to follow the other Explorers. You didn’t see the Skin-Faces?”
“No.”
“But you did get this far?”
“Yes, Festina. The great river where I stopped is still ahead.”
I frowned. Why hadn’t she seen Skin-Faces on her last trip? Had she just been lucky? Or were the three spearmen outside their usual territory? Maybe they were the only people of their kind here on the plains; or maybe there was a tribe of thousands, but they usually stayed south of the great river Oar talked about.
Maybe we were walking straight into the arms of a horde who had already killed one set of Explorers and now wore their skins.
Jelca? Ullis?
I gritted my teeth. “Let’s get moving,” I said. “But keep your eyes open for trouble.”
“I am ready, Festina.”
She swung her silver axe to her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was meaningful, or if she was simply getting ready to move out. Did she understand that her axe could be a weapon, or did she only see it as a tool for clearing trees?
I shivered. Spears. Axes. Weapons.
Feeling the weight of the stunner in my hand, I headed off at Oar’s side.
Night on the Plains
The footprints of the spearmen had come from the southwest; therefore I headed southeast, setting a brisk pace until the depths of dusk. We camped for the night in a stand of a dozen trees—large enough to conceal us from prying eyes, but small enough that we still had a clear view in all directions.
Before we went to sleep, I tuned the Bumbler’s intruder scan to cover the maximum possible area. With so much ground to cover, the Bumbler wouldn’t be as sensitive—it would probably overlook snakes, for example, especially ones moving slowly—but it would detect glass spearmen at almost a klick away.
Frankly I didn’t give a damn about snakes that night…even rattlers.
When sleep finally came, my dreams were ugly: Yarrun as a Skin-Face, tattered flesh hanging from his disfigured jaw. He tried to kill me with a spear, or maybe it was Oar’s axe; I couldn’t keep my attention on the weapon with that ravaged face in front of me. As sometimes happens in dreams, it kept repeating itself ineffectually—Yarrun would lunge and I would dodge, much too slowly. The weapon came in, but nothing happened, as if my mind didn’t care whether the blow actually landed. The moment passed, then the whole thing started again: Yarrun attacking again and again, with both of us sluggish, as if slowed by water.
It was a tiring dream…like doing hard work hour after hour. Eventually I woke, still in darkness. I lay on my back and stared at the stars for a long time. Maybe the dream really happened then: when I assembled the random nonsense floating through my mind and interpreted it as Yarrun attacking. Some psychologists claim that’s the way dreams work—invented after the fact, when you try to impose order on the mental chaos. Perhaps I owed it to Yarrun to dream about him. Who knows?
If I thought about Yarrun, I would cry. If I thought about Chee, I would probably cry too. If I thought about Jelca…I wouldn’t cry, but it wouldn’t help my mood.
In the end, I passed the time devising ways to fight people made of glass. How to punch them without breaking my hand. Where to kick for maximum effect. Whether their greater density made them harder or easier to take down with a leg sweep. And the perennial question of any martial artist raised under League of Peoples’s law: how to batter opponents into unconsciousness without the risk of killing them.
No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. That made it a good topic for thought in the restless night…letting my mind swirl around the possibilities until finally, sleep took mercy on me.
Dragons
There was frost the next morning—a white feathered coating across the broad green of the prairie. Oar considered it an aesthetic improvement; she also enjoyed the way her breath turned to steam when she huffed out.
“I have become a dragon,” she told me. “Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire.”
“How do you know about dragons?” I asked.
“My sister told me.”
“Before or after she met the other Explorers?”
“I cannot remember.”
Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.
Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren’t a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we s
uddenly see a flying giant in the sky?
Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer’s mind works.
The River
We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.
“I do not like this river,” Oar said.
“Because it came close to drowning you?”
“It is also mean and spiky.”
The spiky bits—the deadfalls—worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dogpaddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn’t the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles…that would take luck.
I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.
To give myself time to think, I led Oar east for a while, tracking the shoreline to see if we’d find somewhere better to cross. Three bends of the river later, nothing had changed: deadfalls in the shallows and sunken trees farther out. Worse, I hadn’t any new ideas and the longer we dithered on shore, the more chance we might be spotted by people we wanted to avoid. The clincher was the sky darkening minute by minute. Rain was coming: rain that would fill the river with fast-running mud.
“Here’s a good place,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “A good straight stretch of open water.” It was only half a lie: the river did run straight for a klick, but it was just as congested as everywhere else.
It took fifteen minutes to find a fallen tree, trim its branches with the axe, then drag the trunk to the river. Oar’s glass muscles did most of the work. Soon we were in the water, positioned on the upstream side of our “boat”—if we did run into a sunken log, I didn’t want us squeezed between the log and our tree trunk. For final preparations, I held the stunner in one hand and slung the recharged scuba device around my neck. Oar wasn’t happy I kept the rebreather for myself, but it was the rational thing to do. She couldn’t die by drowning; I could. The rebreather would also give me a chance to pull us both out of trouble if something went wrong.
The water was not as cold as the stream we’d hidden in the day before, or maybe it just seemed warmer because the air had turned cool. Clearing the shore proved easy enough—we only snagged once on a deadfall, and Oar chopped us free within seconds.
Good axe.
The current was slow but strong, moving about a meter per second. As I flutter-kicked us forward, the far shore slid dreamily sideways. Oar kept up a steady chatter of encouragement. “We are doing very well, Festina. We are going to miss that log there…yes, see? And if we go a little faster…yes, we have cleared that one too. We are doing very well. Very, very…” She stopped. “What is making that beeping sound?”
“The Bumbler,” I panted. “Proximity alarm.”
“Is this where we say Oh shit, Festina?”
“Let me get back to you on that.”
Scanning for Trouble
The alarm scan was still set on its longest range—at least we had ample advance notice for whatever the Bumbler had detected. There were no Skin-Faces on shore, no hypothetical dragons soaring through the sky. That suggested the danger might be in the water with us…and a scary suggestion it was. On this setting, the Bumbler wouldn’t notice anything as trifling as a lamprey, piranha, or water moccasin; it had to be something bigger.
If we were lucky, it might be a freshwater dolphin. If we weren’t…. I told myself the river was too cold for alligators, and snapping turtles seldom bit anything larger than pickerel.
“Keep as still as you can,” I told Oar. “If you don’t move, your legs are almost invisible in the water. You won’t look like anything’s supper.”
She said nothing—her “stay quiet, don’t be seen” instincts had kicked in again. I fumbled with the Bumbler, trying to locate what it was beeping about.
Radio first. No signals.
Visual scan. Nothing.
IR…and immediately it showed a strong heat source in the water, one hundred meters upstream.
The temperature was too high for a reptile; it had to be warm-blooded. That suggested a dolphin; but the heat trace on the screen looked bigger than any fresh-water dolphin I’d heard of. In fact, the bogey looked as big as a killer whale, and as hot as a gas-powered engine.
Holding the Bumbler high out of the water, I dialed “Visual telescopic” and aimed the scanner in the direction of the IR blob. A moment later, the screen showed a sharklike fin cutting the surface in a straight line toward us.
The fin was made of glass.
The Glass Fin
“Have you heard of glass dolphins?” I asked Oar.
Her answer was barely audible. “No.”
I scowled. Possibly, the engineers of Melaquin made glass versions of higher cetaceans as well as humans—the animals were, after all, sentient in their own way. Even so, the blob on the Bumbler’s screen had a furiously bright IR signature. Hotter than Oar. Hotter than any blubber-insulated orca built to avoid leaking body heat into cold surrounding water.
The fin continued straight for us.
Still working with the Bumbler, I tried to resolve a better picture of the thing—particularly its tail. Cetaceans have horizontal tail fins; fish have vertical. The image on the screen was still too blobby for me to be certain, but this tail looked vertical. And the thing’s body wasn’t moving properly: no undulations to provide propulsion. The body stayed completely rigid, more like a submarine than a living organism.
I thought of Oar’s glass coffin boat. Perhaps Skin-Faces had boats too, built with intimidation in mind.
“Shit,” I said.
“Oh shit,” Oar murmured, like the response in a litany.
Raising my voice, I shouted at the onrushing fin, “Greetings! I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg…aw, fuck it.”
Lifting my stunner, I shot the beast right in the dorsal.
Accidental Music
Hit by sonics, the fin sang like a glass harp. The sound reminded me of the hum from running a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass, I could actually see the vibrations, strong on the fin’s tip, damped down where the fin entered the water.
Without hesitation, I shoved the stunner into the river and fired again.
Ouch.
My hand tingled with numbness—in water, the tight sonic beam didn’t hold its cohesion, and a fraction of it radiated back at me. My grip didn’t loosen enough to drop the gun, but I couldn’t pull the trigger again till my fingers got over the shock. Still, the incoming bogey took a hard hit too: water conducts sound better than air.
A moment later, the fin disappeared.
On the Bumbler screen, the bogey’s heat signature veered to one side and angled into a steep dive. If it used sonar, it would have quite a headache—maybe enough to send it running in pain. For that matter, it looked like it was going to….
I swear I felt the jar of impact as the bogey’s nose hit the river bottom. The heat blob on the Bumbler dimmed to half, as muck bloomed up from the collision site and fuzzed the IR scan. Still, I could see the bogey reverse its way out of the mud and angle off in another direction, only to run into a sunken log as it neared the surface.
The log cracked. I hoped the bogey did too.
Our tree trunk rocked wildly as waves swept across us, hard and fast. For a moment, my attention was occupied with keeping hold of the Bumbler and the stunner; to avoid losing the
weapon, I transferred it to my other hand. That left only my numb arm for clinging to the tree trunk. Awkwardly, I slung the arm over the tree, not holding on but only propped up with the trunk snug under my armpit.
I was just turning back to look for the bogey when it jumped straight out of the water.
It was a shark the size of a killer whale, but clear as glass and just as stiff. As it soared upward, head clearing the water, then fins, then tail, I could see its nose was starred with cracks from its collision with the log: the beast wasn’t invulnerable. Without hesitation, I raised the stunner and shot straight at its cracked snout while it still sailed through the air.
The sonics struck the glass like a gong. For one brief moment, the bogey reverberated—a pure deep tone of whale song. Then the arc of its jump brought it splashing into the river, more than a ton of glass bellyflopping in front of me.
Tsunami time.
Submerged
One moment my numb arm was propped over our tree trunk; the next I was hammered by a wall of water, knocking me loose and burying me under its weight. It drove me deep below the surface, battering my head and shoulders, almost stunning me. Instinct was all that kept me holding my breath. I was left disoriented, dizzy…which way was up? And even if I could figure out the direction to swim, could I do it with one bad arm and the Bumbler weighing me down?
Yes, I could. I could do it.
The rebreather was still around my neck. I shoved it into my mouth, cleared it, and took a breath. Air. Yes. I was in control.
Light meant up, dark meant down. The light looked a long way off, but I could make it. I just had to take it easy. Once I found air again, I could search for Oar. Probably she was still afloat; with strength like hers, it would take more than a tidal wave to knock her off our tree trunk.
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