by David Brin
Jenin sighed unhappily. “Oh, Lena. Please stop.” She had been cheerful throughout the journey, until hearing all this talk of fighting. Jenin had joined this trek in order to be a founding mother of a new race, not to hunt down beings who had once been her neighbors.
Dwer’s heart felt the same pain as Jenin, though his pragmatic side agreed with Lena.
“If we have to, I’d rather do it fast,” he muttered, glancing at the donkey carrying their most secret, unspeakable “tools.”
“It shouldn’t come to that,” Danel insisted. “First let’s ascertain who they are and what they want. Perhaps we can make common cause.”
Lena snorted. “Send an emissary? Give away our presence? You heard Dwer. There’s over a dozen of ’em!”
“Don’t you think we should wait for the second group, then?” Jenin asked. “They were supposed to be right behind us.”
Lena shrugged. “Who knows how long they’ll take? Or if they got lost? The urs could find us first. And there’s the human tribe to consider.”
“Rety’s old band.”
“Right. Want to let them get killed or enslaved? Just on account of we’re too scared to—”
“Lena!” Danel cut her off. “That will do for now. We’ll see what’s to be done when the time comes. Meanwhile, poor Dwer should get some sleep. We owe him whatever rest he can get.”
“That ain’t half what he’s owed.” Lena muttered, causing Dwer to glance her way, but in the pre-moonrise dimness, he could make out only shadows.
“G’night all,” he said, and slipped away to seek his bedroll.
Mudfoot looked up from the blanket, chuttering testily over having to move. The creature did help warm things up at night, which partly made up for its vexing way of licking Dwer’s face while he slept, harvesting perspiration from his forehead and lip.
Dwer lay down, turned over — and blinked in surprise at two pairs of giant round eyes, staring back at him from just three meters away.
Jeekee glavers.
Normally, one simply ignored the placid creatures. But he still couldn’t shake the memory of that pack of them, clustered greedily around a dead gallaiter.
He tossed a dirt clod vaguely their way. “Go on! Get!”
Just as vaguely, the pair turned and sauntered off. Dwer glanced at Mudfoot.
“Why not make yourself a bit useful and keep those pests away?”
The noor just grinned back at him.
Dwer pulled the blanket over his chin, trying to settle down. He was tired and ached from sore muscles and bruises. But slumber came slowly, freighted with troubling dreams.
He woke to a soft touch, stroking his face. Irritably, he tried to push the noor away.
“Quit it, furball! Lick a donkey turd, if you want salt so bad.”
After a surprised pause, a hushed voice answered.
“Reckon I never been welcomed to a man’s bed half so sweetly.”
Dwer rolled onto an elbow, rubbing one eye to make out a blurred silhouette. A woman.
“Jenin?”
“Would you prefer her? I won the toss, but I’ll fetch her if you like.”
“Lena! What — can I do for you?”
Dwer made out a white glint — her rare smile.
“Well, you could invite me in from the cold.” Her voice sounded soft, almost shy.
Lena was buxom and sanguinely female, yet soft and shy were two words Dwer had never linked with her before. “Uh — sure…” Am I still dreaming? he wondered as she slid alongside, strong hands working to loosen his clothes. Her smooth skin seemed to blaze with ardent heat.
I must be. The Lena I know never smelled this good.
“You’re all knotted up,” she commented, kneading his neck and back with uncanny, forceful accuracy. At first, Dwer’s gasps came from released muscle strain. But Lena somehow also made each jab or digging twist of her calloused fingers seem feminine, erotic.
She got halfway through the massage before Dwer passed his limit of self-control and turned over to gently but resolutely reverse their positions, taking her beneath him, repaying her vitality with a vigor that welled from weeks of pent-up” tension. Hoarded worry and fatigue seemed to explode into the air, into the forest, into her as she clutched and sighed, pulling him closer.
After .she slipped away, he pondered muzzily — Lena thinks I may die, since my job is to be up front in any fight. This might be the last… the only chance…
Dwer drifted into a tranquil, dreamless repose — a slumber so blank and relaxing that he actually felt rested by the time another warm body slid into the bedroll next to him. By then, his unconscious had worked it out, crediting the women with ultimate pragmatism.
Danel will probably be around later, so it makes sense to use whatever I have to give, before it’s gone.
It wasn’t his place to judge the women. Theirs was the harder job, here in the wilderness. His tasks were simple — to hunt, fight, and if need be, to die. Theirs was to go on, whatever it took.
Dwer did not even have to rouse all the way. Nor did Jenin seem offended that his body performed but half awake. There were all sorts of duties to fulfill these days. If he was going to keep up, he would simply have to catch what rest he could.
Dwer woke to find it already a midura past midnight. Though he felt much better now, he had to fight a languid lethargy to get dressed and check his gear — the bow and quiver, a compass, sketch pad, and hip canteen — then stop by the dim coals to pluck the leaf-wrapped package Jenin left for him each night, the one decent meal he would eat while away.
For most of his adult life he had traveled alone, relishing peace and solitude. Yet, he had to admit the attractions of being part of a team, a community. Perhaps, under Ozawa’s guidance, they might come to feel like family.
Would that take some of the bitter sting out of recalling the life and loved ones they had left behind, in the graceful forests of the Slope?
Dwer was about to head off, following the urrish track farther in the direction of the rising moons, when a soft sound made him pause. Someone was awake and talking. Yet he had passed both women, snoring quietly and (he liked to imagine) happily. Dwer slipped the bow off his shoulder, moving toward the low speech sounds, more curious .than edgy. Soon he recognized the murmured whisper.
Of course it was Danel. But who was the sage talking to?
Beyond the bole of a large tree, Dwer peered into a small clearing where satiny moonlight spilled over an unlikely pair. Danel was kneeling low to face the little black creature called Mudfoot. Dwer couldn’t make out words, but judging from tone and inflection, Ozawa was trying to ask it questions, in one language after another.
The noor responded by licking itself, then glancing briefly toward Dwer,’ standing in the shadows. When Ozawa switched to GalTwo, Mudfoot grinned — then twisted to bite an itch on one shoulder. When the beast turned back, it was to answer the sage with a gaping yawn.
Danel let out a soft sigh, as if he had expected to fail but felt it worth an effort.
What effort? Dwer wondered. Was the sage seeking magical aid, as ignorant lowlanders sometimes tried to do, treating noor like sprites in some fairy tale? Did Ozawa hope to tame Mudfoot, the way hoon sailors did, as agile helpers on the river? Few nonhoon had ever managed that feat. But even if it worked, what use was one noor assistant? Or would Dwer’s next assignment — after dealing with urrish sooners and then Rety’s band — be to run back and collect more of Mudfoot’s kind?
That made no sense. If by some miracle the Commons survived, word would be sent calling them all home. If the worst happened, they were to stay as far from the Slope as possible.
Well, Danel will tell me what he wants me to know. I just hope this doesn’t mean he’s gone crazy.
Dwer crept away and found the urrish trail. He set off at a lope that soon strained forward, pulling him with unwilled, eagerness to see what lay beyond the next shadowy rise. For the first time in days, Dwer felt whole and strong. It wasn
’t that all worries had vanished. Existence was still a frail, perilous thing, all too easily lost. Still, for this narrow stretch of time he pounded onward, feeling vibrantly alive.
Rety
The dream always ended the same way, just before she woke shivering, clutching a soft blanket to her breast.
She dreamed about the bird.
Not as it appeared the last time she had seen it — headless, spread across Rann’s laboratory bench in the buried station — but as she recalled first glimpsing the strange thing. Vivid in motion, with plumage like glossy forest leaves, alert and lustrous in a way that seemed to stroke her soul.
As a child she had loved to watch native birds, staring for hours at their swooping dives, envying their freedom of the air, their liberty to take wing, leaving their troubles far behind. Then one day Jass returned from a long journey to the south, bragging about all the beasts he had shot. One had been a fantastic flying thing that they took by surprise as it emerged from a tidal marsh. It barely got away after an arrow tore one wing, flapping off toward the northwest, leaving behind a feather harder than stone.
That very night, risking awful punishment, she stole the stiff metal fragment from the tent where the hunters snored, and with a pack of stolen food she ran off, seeking this fabled wonder for herself. As luck had it, she guessed right and crossed its path, spotting the fluttering creature as it labored onward with short, gliding bounds. In a throat-catching instant of recognition, Rety knew the bird was like her — wounded by the same man’s taste for senseless violence.
Watching it hop-glide ever westward, never resting, she knew they shared one more trait. Persistence.
She wanted to catch up with it, to heal it, talk to it. To learn its source of power. To help it reach its goal. To help find its home. But even disabled, the bird soon outdistanced her. For a heart-aching time, she thought she had lost it forever…
At that point of harsh emotion, without transition, the dream shifted to another scene. Suddenly, the bird was right in front of her, closer than ever, fluttering inside a jeweled cage, dodging a mist of golden, cloying drops… then cowering away from searing knives of flame!
Frustration choked Rety, unable to give aid. Unable to save it.
Finally, when all seemed lost, the bird did as Rety herself would have done. It lashed out with desperate strength, dying to bring down its oppressor, the agent of its torment.
For several nights in a row the dream ended the same way, with someone’s insistent arms holding her back in shameful safety while the bird fired its own head upward toward a hovering, shadowy form. A dark rival with dangling, lethal limbs.
It seemed revenge was going to be another of those things that didn’t turn out quite the same in real life as she’d imagined.
For one thing, in her heart, Rety never reckoned on Jass taking pain so well.
The hunter lay strapped to a couch inside the scout aircraft, his ruggedly handsome features twisting as Kunn kept the promise he had made. A promise Rety regretted a bit more each time Jass clamped back another moan, choking it behind gritted teeth.
Who would’ve thought he’d turn out to be brave, she pondered, recalling all the times Jass used to brag, bluster, and harass other members of the tribe. Bullies were supposed to be cowards, or so one of the tribe’s aged grandfathers used to mutter when he was sure the young hunters wouldn’t hear. Too bad the old geep would never know how wrong he’d been. That battered patriarch had died during the months since Rety left these hills.
She tried steeling her heart during the contest of wills between Kunn and Jass, one Jass was bound to lose. You want to find out where the bird came from, don’t you? she asked herself. Anyway, don’t Jass deserve everything he’s getting? Ain’t his own stubborn-headedness bringing this on himself?
Well, in truth, Rety had played a role in stiffening the hunter’s resistance, thus extending his torment. Kunn’s patient, insistent questions alternated with grunts of pure glaverlike obstinacy from Jass, sweating and contorting under jolts applied by Kunn’s robot partner.
When she could take no more without getting sick, Rety silently slipped out the hatch. If anything changed, the pilot could call her on the tiny comm button the sky-humans had installed under.the skin near her right ear.
She set off toward the campsite, trying to appear casual in case any sooners watched from the shrubby undergrowth.
That was how she thought of them. Sooners. Savages. No different in kind from those puffed-up barbarians on the Slope, who thought themselves so civilized with their fancy books but who were still little more than half-animals, trapped on a dirty world they could never leave. To a sky-being like herself, they were all the same, whichever side of the Rimmers they led their dirt-scratching lives.
She smelled the camp before reaching it. A familiar musty blend of wood smoke, excrement, and poorly tanned hides, all mixed with a sulfury pungence rising from the steam pools that always drew the tribe here this time of year — a fact that had made it easy to guide Kunn to this pocket canyon, high in the Gray Hills. Rety paused halfway to the campsite, smoothing down the sleek jumpsuit Ling had given her, soon after she became the first Jijoan to enter the underground station, that wonderland of luxuries and bright marvels. Ling had also bathed Rety, treated her scalp, and applied potions and rays to leave her feeling cleaner, stronger, even taller than before. Only the livid scar on one side of her face still marred the mirror’s transformed image, and that would be tended, she was assured, when they all went “home.”
My home too, Rety mused, resuming a brisk pace until all moaning traces of the hunter’s torment faded behind her. She drove out memory of Jass’s squirming agony by calling to mind those images the sky-foursome had shown her — of a splendid, jewellike city, tucked inside a steep-walled valley. A city of fairy towers and floating castles, where one lucky branch of humanity lived with their beloved patrons, the wise, benevolent Rothen.
That part didn’t quite appeal to her — this business of having masters who told you what to do. Nor did the Rothen themselves, when she met the two living aboard the station, who seemed too pretty and prim, too smugly happy, by far. But then, if Ling and Besh loved them, she supposed she could get used to that idea too. Anyway, Rety was willing to do or put up with anything to reach that city of lights.
I always knew I belonged someplace else, she thought, rounding a bend in the forest. Not here. Not in a place like this.
Before her stretched a debris-strewn clearing dotted by half a dozen ragged shelters — animal hides thrown over rows of bent saplings — all clustered round a cook fire where soot-smudged figures hunched over a carcass. Tonight’s meal. A donkey with a neat hole burned through its heart. A gift, courtesy of Kunn’s handy hunter-killer robot.
People dressed in poorly tanned skins moved about at chores or simply slouched through the middle of the day. Their complexions were filthy. Most had matted hair, and they stank. After meeting the Slopies-and then Ling and Besh — it was hard to picture these savages as the same race as herself, let alone her own tribe.
Several male figures loafed near a makeshift pen where the new prisoners huddled, having barely moved since they were herded into camp a couple of nights back. Some of the men chopped at tree stumps with machetes swiped from the newcomers’ supplies, marveling at the keen blades of Buyur metal. But the men kept well away from the pile of crates Kunn had forbidden them to touch, awaiting his decision which to destroy.
A handful of boys straddled a new fence of laser-split logs, passing the time by spitting, then laughing as angry complaints rose from the captives.
Shouldn’t let ’em do that, Rety thought. Even if the outlanders are nosy fools who oughtn’t have come.
Kunn had assigned her the task of finding out what brought the prisoners to these parts, violating their own sacred law. But Rety felt reluctant, even disgusted.
Dawdling, she turned to survey a way of life she once thought she’d never escape.
&nbs
p; Despite the tumult of the last few days, tribal life went on. Kallish, the old clubfoot, still labored by the stream bed, hammering stone cores into flake arrowheads and other tools, convinced the recent influx of iron implements would be a passing fad. He was probably right.
Upstream, women waded through shallows, seeking the trishelled juice oysters that ripened in volcanic heat this time of year, while farther upslope, beyond the steamy pools, a cluster of girls used poles to beat Illoes trees, gathering the tart fallen berries in woven baskets. As usual, females were doing most of the hard work. Nowhere was this more evident than near the cook fire, where grouchy old Binni, her arms bloody past the elbows, took charge of preparing the donkey for roasting. The headwoman’s hair was even grayer than before. Her latest baby had died, leaving Binni irritable with swollen, tender breasts, hissing at her two young helpers through wide gaps between yellow-brown teeth.
Despite such signs of normality, most tribe-folk moved in a state of sluggish distraction. Whenever anyone glanced Rety’s way, they flinched, as if she were the last thing on Jijo they ever expected to see. More shocking than a glaver standing upright.
Rety, the god.
She held her head high. Tell your stinky brats about it by the campfire, till the end of time. Tell ’em about the girl who talked back to big mean hunters, no matter what they did to her. A girl who wouldn’t take it anymore. Who dared to do what you never imagined. Who found a way to leave this stinking hell and go live on a star.
Rety felt a thrill each time someone briefly met her gaze and quickly looked away.
I’m not one of you. Never was. And now you know it too.
Only Binni showed no trace of being overwhelmed by the deity Rety had become. The same old disdain and disappointment lay in those metal-gray eyes. At age twenty-eight, Binni was younger than any of the foray-ers, even Ling. Still, it seemed nothing on Jijo, or in heaven, would ever surprise her.