by David Brin
“Jass chose to cooperate, so we’re off now in search of the source of your metal bird.”
“But I want to go too!”
Kunn’s reply was cool.
“Jass told me everything, including the reason he resisted so hard. It seems you convinced him I’d finish him off the moment he told what he knew. That he would live only until then. Now why did you tell the poor bastard such a thing, Rety? It caused inconvenience and unnecessary pain.”
Rety thought — Unnecessary for you, but darn important to me! Revenge was only half of her rationale for manipulating Jass. But it would have been enough all by itself.
“Kunn, don’t leave me. I’m one of you now. Rann an’ Besh, an’ even Ro-pol said so!”
Suddenly she felt small and very vulnerable, with urs in front of her and Bom behind at the gate, surrounded by others who would surely love to bring her down. She covered her mouth and lowered her voice, whispering urgently for the little transmitter, “The sooners’ll turn on me, Kunn. I know it!”
“Perhaps you should have thought of that before.” Another long pause followed. Then — “If Rann hadn’t insisted on long-range radio silence, I could talk it over with the others before deciding.”
“Deciding what?”
“Whether to bring you back, or to leave you where you began.”
Rety fought down a trembling that coursed her body, in response to Kunn’s harsh words. Her hopes were a bright tower that seemed about to crash.
“I’ll tell you what, I’ll leave the robot to protect you, Rety. It will do what you say till I get back. Do not abuse the privilege.”
Her heart leaped at the phrase — till I get back.
“I promise!” she whispered urgently.
“Treat this as a second chance. Question the urs. Destroy their weapons. Don’t let anyone leave the valley. Do a good job and we may wipe the slate clean when I return — providing my hunt flushes out the prey at last.
“Kunn out.”
The line clicked, cutting off the cabin sounds. Rety quelled an urge to press the button and choke out another plea to be taken along. Instead she set her teeth grimly and climbed the fence rails to stare as a silvery dart lifted out of the narrow canyon, turned in the morning light, then streaked southward, leaving her with a heart as cold and barren as a glacier.
Dwer
The sooner village was a simmering place that squatted at the base of a canyon filled with dense, sulfurous, listless air.
A hellish place, from an urrish point of view. Dwer’s high vantage point looked down at the captives, in their cramped pen. Long necks drooped, and they lay like the atmosphere, barely moving.
“I count about a dozen, not including dead ones, just as you said,” Lena noted, peering through her compact telescope. “I guess you’ll do as a tracker, fella-me-boy.”
“Thanks, Oh Mistress of Forbidden Devices,” Dwer answered. He was getting used to Lena’s ways. She always had to get a little bite in, even when making a compliment. It was like a noor, purring on your lap, who repays your petting by dipping its claws briefly into your thigh. The funny thing was — he’d actually been getting used to the idea of making a life with this woman, along with Jenin, Danel, and the lost tribe of human exiles. Even discovering the urrish invasion hadn’t made the notion absurd. Danel had been right. There might have been room for common cause.
But now all such ideas were obsolete. Over to the left lay the reason why — a silver-gray machine, shaped like a hoonish cigar with stubby wings. It was the first alien thing Dwer had seen, since almost being killed with Rety by a floating robot that evening in a mulc-spider’s lair.
The sky-car should not be here in the badlands.
It meant the demolishment of all their plans.
It also had no business being so beautiful.
Dwer was proud of this overlook, high on the canyon wall, which surveyed from the village, past the steam pools, all the way to the flying machine, sitting in a nest of crushed vegetation.
“I wish the yokels would stop movin’ around. It’s hard gettin’ a good count,” Lena complained. “At least the kid said the local bully-boys won’t let women use weapons, so they aren’t combatants to worry about.”
She sniffed disdain over such a stupid waste of resources.
Dwer would prefer not to fight Jijoan humans, as well as the alien kind. Anyway, their only real chance lay in achieving complete surprise.
Sharing the cramped ledge, Dwer felt Lena’s breast pressing against his arm, yet it provoked no arousal. Their bodies seemed to grasp that a change had occurred. There would be no more passionate episodes. No life-affirming gestures. Sex and gender were important to colonists planning to raise families, not to a raiding party bent on destruction. All that mattered now were skills. And an ability to count on one another.
“It looks like a standard atmospheric scout,” Danel Ozawa said. “Definitely a fighter. I wish we brought along just one text on Galactic technology. Give me the glass, will you?”
Like Dwer’s and Lena’s, Danel’s face now bore jagged, charcoal slashes that were supposed to muddle the pattern-recognizing optics of alien killer machines. Dwer preferred thinking of it as war paint.
“Well, I’ll be—” Danel muttered. “Here, take a look. I guess now we know how the star-gods found this place.”
When Dwer got the telescope, the first thing he noticed was that the flyer’s hatch now lay ajar, revealing part of the interior, including banks of control panels. If only we were close right now, he thought. With the door open and no guard robot in sight…
“Look to the right, up the. trail a ways,” Danel urged.
Dwer shifted the spyglass, sweeping till he glimpsed a small figure dressed in one of the aliens’ one-piece garments, moving toward the sooner encampment.
“Great Ifni’s Egg!” he yelped.
“What is it?” Lena demanded, grabbing the scope as Dwer rolled on his back, staring past tangled branches at a murky sky.
“Well, well,” Lena muttered. “Looks like she caught up with us, after all.”
“I should’ve strangled her when she stole my bow. I should’ve left her to the damn spider.”
“You don’t mean that, son,” Danel chided.
Dwer knew the sage was right. Still, he grumbled. “Oh, don’t I? She was a pain from the start. Now she’s ruined everything.”
“Perhaps Rety was coerced.” But the sage sounded unconvinced as they took turns with the telescope. Each of them had seen the girl’s clothes, her freshly coifed hair, and her confident stride, swaggering into camp like she owned the place.
“She’s gone to see the prisoners,” Lena reported, a little later. “Talking to one of ’em now… Those urs sure look ragged, poor things.” Lena tsked, and her sympathy was clearly more than sarcastic. “I wish I could make out—”
She stopped as Dwer suddenly gripped her arm, reacting to a faint, high keening that seemed to scrape the inside of his skull. The noor beast chuttered irritably, shaking its head and sneezing. Soon the noise deepened and grew loud enough for the rest of them to hear. Even Jenin, who was on lookout duty upslope, hissed a worried query.
The clamor came from the aircraft. It made Dwer’s teeth feel as if they were loosening in their moorings.
“Something’s coming out!” Lena exclaimed, turning the telescope. “It’s the robot!”
Dwer saw a hovering black dot with dangling tendrils separate from the ship, whose hatch then closed. The air shimmered from expelled dust as humming motors lifted the scout off the ground. The gray arrowhead was larger than the house Dwer grew up in, yet it wafted upward and turned lightly, stopping when its nose pointed almost due south. Then the heavens echoed its fierce growl as it plunged away, receding faster than anything he had ever seen.
“Damn,” Danel cursed. “We missed our best opportunity.”
Lena wasn’t watching the departing scout. Instead, her eyes followed the black robot, now cruising toward th
e tribal village.
“Don’t worry,” she assured. “I expect we’ll get another chance.”
The glavers were back. Of all irksome times for the stupid things to tag along!
They must have followed, at their own lazy pace, all the way from last night’s campsite. Now they mewled unhappily at the sights and smells of the fetid ravine, but that did not keep them from following Dwer as he left the shelter of the forest, heading toward the cluster of rude huts.
Dwer glanced back at Lena Strong, crouched at the edge of the last line of trees. With raised eyebrows, she asked if he wanted her to shoot the idiotic beasts. He said no with a terse headshake. They were dangerous only to a man who was trying to hide. And he did not mind being conspicuous at this point. In fact, that was the general idea.
Still, when he passed a rotting log, he gave it several swift kicks, exposing a rich trove of grubs swarming the interior. The distracted glavers crooned delight and dove in for the kill.
Which left just one irritation, the scampering noor beast, who darted through the meadow grass and between his legs.
Trying to ignore Mudfoot and carrying his bow slung over one shoulder, Dwer walked with feigned nonchalance past a devastation of jagged tree stumps toward the bustling sooner tribe. The. prisoners’ pen lay a quarter of an arrowflight to the left, the huts to the right. Straight ahead, a cook fire fumed smoke that hovered lazily, as if reluctant to depart.
Come on, people, Dwer mused when he was over halfway across the pocket meadow and still unnoticed. Don’t you have any son of sentry system?
He pursed his lips and whistled a tune — “Yankee Doodle,” the first thing to come to mind.
Finally, one of the kids peering at the urrish captives glanced his way, did a gaping double take, and began screaming, pointing at Dwer.
Well, whatever works.
Their reaction might have been different as recently as a week ago. For generations these people had seen no outsiders at all. Now, after making contact with an urrish band, then flying aliens and a lost cousin transformed into a goddess; they took his arrival pretty well. Only three out of four ran away, howling in terror. Hesitantly, with goggle-eyes that showed white around the rims, the remainder gathered to stare at him, edging forward in a clump when he showed no sign of aggression.
Dwer motioned for one boy to come forward.
“Yeah, that’s right, you! Don’t worry, I won’t bite.”
He squatted down in order to seem less imposing. The boy, a filthy urchin, looked like one for whom bravado was as important as life. Dwer knew the type. With others watching, the lad would rather die than let himself show fear. Puffing his chest out, the kid took several steps toward Dwer, glancing back to make sure his courage was being noted.
“What a fine young man,” Dwer commented. “And what would your name be?”
The boy looked nonplussed, as if no one had ever asked him that before. Didn’t everybody in the world grow up knowing each other’s names?
“Well, never mind,” Dwer said, aware the throng was growing larger as curiosity overcame dread. “I want you to run an errand for me. If you do, I’ll give you something special, understand? Good. Please go to Rety. Tell her someone she knows is waiting for her—” Dwer turned and pointed the way he came. “—over there. By the trees. Can you remember that?”
The boy nodded. Already, calculating avarice had replaced fear. “Whatll I get?”
Dwer pulled a single arrow from his quiver. It was made by the best fletchers of Ovoom Town, perfectly straight, with a tip of razor-sharp Buyur metal that gleamed in the sunshine. The boy reached out, but Dwer snatched it back.
“After you bring Rety.”
Their eyes met in brief understanding. With a blase shrug, the boy swiveled and was gone, squeezing past the crowd, shouting for all he was worth. Dwer stood up, winked at the staring tribesmen, and began sauntering back toward the forest, whistling casually. Glancing back, he saw a good part of the clan following at a distance. So far, so good.
Oh, hell, he cursed when he saw the glavers. Get out of the way, will you?
They had finished browsing at the rotten log and now sauntered toward him. Dwer worried — when they saw the villagers, might they panic and bolt toward the prisoners’ pen? The female glaver turned one globelike eye toward the approaching crowd. The other eye then followed, a sure sign of concern. She snorted, and her mate reared backward in surprised dismay. They whirled — and fled in exactly the direction Dwer feared!
With a tracker’s sense of light and shadow, he noted Jenin Worley crouching by a tree, where the forest came nearest the prison-corral. One of Dwer’s objectives had been to attract notice away from there.
He had the bow off his shoulder and an arrow drawn when Mudfoot suddenly reared out of the tall grass, waving its forepaws in front of the glavers, hissing. The glavers skidded to a halt and reversed course with astonishing spryness, cantering away with the noor yipping close behind.
For some reason the locals found all of this terrifically funny. It didn’t seem to matter that they had never seen a noor before. They guffawed, pointing and laughing uproariously at the glavers’ distress, clapping as if Dwer had put on a show for their benefit. He turned around, grinning as he reslung the bow. Anything to keep their regard riveted this way.
Abruptly, the crowd fell silent as a shadow fell across Dwer. A low, eerily familiar whine raised shivers up his spine. Shading his eyes against the sun, he looked up toward a hovering black shape, all jutting angles and hanging tendrils, like a certain demon that still haunted his dreams — the fire-spitting monster that had finished off the old mulc-spider of the mountains. Despite a pen-umbral glare surrounding it like a fierce halo, he made out the same octagonal symmetry. Only this one wore a rounded silhouette, perched on one jutting shoulder.
“So. You made it all the way here, after all,” the silhouette commented. “Not bad for a Slopie. You’re no fluff-baby, I guess — though the trip seems to’ve wore you down to a rag man. I seen you look better, Dwer.”
“Thanks, Rety,” he said, edging aside so the sun would not blind him. He also wanted to get closer to the forest. “You, on the other hand, never looked so good. Been taking it easy?”
She answered with a curt chuckle that sounded husky, as if she hadn’t laughed a lot lately. “I turned down the offer your sages made — to have me hike all the way back here afoot, guiding a bunch o’ geeps. Why walk, I figured, when I can ride?”
Now he could make her out clearly. Except for the old scar, she seemed quite made over, as they said in certain parts of Tarek Town. Yet the same sullen wariness lay in her eyes.
It was also his first chance to have a good look at an alien machine. Eight even rectangles made up its sides, black without highlights, as if sunshine had trouble glancing off it. Below, a pair of tendril-arms dangled menacingly on either side of a globe that was studded with glass facets and metal tubes. Danel had warned him to watch out for that globe. On top, where Rety sat in a lashed-on saddle, the robot’s surface looked flat, except for a spire rising from the center. An “antenna,” Danel had identified it.
Dwer nodded toward the hovering machine.
“Seems you’ve been making new friends, Rety.”
The girl laughed again — a sharp bark. “Friends who’ll take me places you never saw.”
He shrugged. “I’m not talking about star-gods, Rety. I mean the friend giving you a ride, right now. Last time I saw one of these things, it was trying to kill us both—”
She cut in. “A lot’s changed since, Dwer.”
“—and oh, yeah, it was burning the hell out of that bird thing you cared so much about. Ah, well. I guess sometimes it just pays better to join those who—”
“Shut up!”
The robot reacted to its rider’s anger by bobbing toward him. Retreating, he noted movement by the spherical cluster of lenses and tubes under the machine’s blocky torso, turning fluidly to track him. On a hunch, Ozawa ha
d called it a weapons pod, and Dwer’s every clawing instinct confirmed the guess.
A crowd gathered beyond Rety, most of the human tribe, watching this confrontation between a ragged stranger and one of their own who had harnessed a flying devil. It must seem a pretty uneven matchup.
Some things are exactly as they seem.
Dwer caught a flash of movement toward the prison-pen. Jenin, making her move.
“Well?” Rety demanded, glaring down at him.
“Well what?”
“You sent for me, idiot! Did you hike halfway round the world just to try and make me feel guilty? Why didn’t you stay away, once you saw what’s going on here?”
“I could ask you the same question, Rety. What are you doing? Showing off for the folks? Getting some payback? Did the star-gods have some special reason to need a guide to this armpit of Jijo?”
Complex emotions crossed her face. What finally won was curt laughter.
“—armpit? Heh. That just about tells it all.” She chuckled again, then leaned closer. “As for what Kunn is lookin’ for, I can’t tell ya. It’s a secret.”
Rety was a lousy bluffer. You don’t have the slightest idea, Dwer pondered, and it galls you.
“So, where’s that pack of Slopies you were gonna lead out here?” she demanded.
“In hiding. I came ahead to make sure it’s safe.”
“Why shouldn’t it be? Nothin’ dangerous here, except maybe my nasty ol’ cousins… an’ a bunch of smelly hinneys—”
When she said that, a piping whistle, like faint, piccolo laughter, vented from a padded pouch at her waist.
“And killers from outer space?” Dwer added. “Planning to wipe out every thinking being on the planet?”
Rety frowned. “That’s a damn lie! They ain’t gonna do it. They promised.”
“And what if I showed you proof?”
Her eyes darted nervously. “More lies. They just wouldn’t do nothing like that!”
“Like they wouldn’t shoot a poor, unsuspecting bird-thing, I suppose. Or attack those urs without warning.”
Rety turned red as Dwer hurried on.