by Diann Read
Twenty-five minutes from touchdown, directional thrusters fired. The pod oriented itself for landing, decelerating still more. Tristan whimpered with motion sickness, and Darcie, caressing his sweaty face, put back her own head, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply.
She felt momentum ebb under the rockets’ roar. The digital clock indicated twenty-one minutes until touchdown. The pod pierced a bank of clouds like a pebble dropped into a pond.
Eighteen minutes . . . twelve . . .
A pattern of blue lights on the left screen showed activation of landing gear. Darcie heard subtle clunks and pneumatic wheezes as the gear locked. Beyond the cockpit’s viewpanes, the mantle of vapor glowed with the pod’s reentry heat.
Nine minutes . . . five minutes . . . two . . .
Darcie felt the final scream of thrusters like a storm shaking the craft, felt a jolt and a settling before the thunder died and left her in silence. Moments passed before she realized the lifepod had landed.
Environmental sensors fed data to her left screen: atmospheric content and pressure, temperature, gravity, wind direction and velocity. All suitable for human habitation.
Darcie released her breath and gazed on the dark beyond the viewpanes. “Nighttime,” she said, and shoved herself out of the command chair. Her body’s sudden weight surprised her. “Come now, Tris. Let’s get you out of those trousers and leave before the legionnaires come looking for us.”
Something on the console beeped as she stuffed supplies into a duffle. She turned round.
A message blinked across the left screen:
LIFEFORMS APPROACHING VEHICLE.
DISTANCE APPROX 100 YARDS.
Legionnaires already? She moved to the console, switched on the visual monitor.
The screen revealed five quadrupeds moving warily toward the pod. Almost a meter high at the shoulder, she guessed, with eyes like embers and a slinking gait. Canine hunters. Jous, the computer library called them.
She bit her lower lip.
“Mama?” said Tristan.
“There aren’t any legionnaires,” she said. “Not just yet. We’re better off to stay in here ‘til morning.”
* *
Grating noises intruded on her slumber. Lying across the front row of seats, Darcie opened her eyes but didn’t move. She listened as the scraping sounds persisted, noticed how predawn light filtering through the forward viewpanes muted the control console’s screens—and realized in another moment that the warning beeper, not the grating, had awakened her.
The noise came from the hatch. She knew it could be tripped from outside for rescue purposes.
“They’ve found us, then,” she whispered, mouth suddenly dry.
When the first bolt depressurized and thunked back, she turned onto her belly and reached under the command chair for the E-gun. Her fingers closed round its grip; her thumb slipped off the safety.
Staying behind the chair’s back, she watched the hatch. Braced the pistol on the arm when the second bolt shot back.
Tristan stirred beside her. When he yawned and tried to sit up under the blanket, she stayed him with her free hand.
She locked her teeth as the third bolt hissed and thunked. She adjusted her grip on the sidearm—and recoiled at a flood of early sunlight as the hatch fell open.
The two shapes silhouetted in its opening wore no legionnaires’ armor. Except for leather leg-wrappings and loincloths they wore nothing but their own striped pelts. When the nearest one glimpsed Darcie, he ducked his shaggy head and touched his brow. “Yung Jwei!” he said, gazing first at her and then at her child. “Yung Jwei!”
Two
Tristan spread dust around his eyes and across his cheekbones, smeared it in streaks over his chest and shoulders until, in the moonlight, his skin appeared to bear the same dark stripes as his companion’s. He glanced up. Pulou gave him an approving look and held out his knife. Tristan took it in his teeth and followed him, staying low in the long grass.
Peimus clustered in the clearing, bulls on the outer edge of the herd: blocky shadows on stumpy legs, hoofs stamping and tails twitching, heads tossing forward-curled horns.
Crouched beside Pulou, Tristan pointed at one bull a little apart from the others. Pulou grinned, a flash of fangs around his own knife blade, and ducked away into the dark. When the grass stopped rippling, Tristan squinted at his quarry, measuring the distance, and went to his belly.
He could smell the peimu’s muskiness, hear its whuffing breath and the stamp of its cloven feet, before he could see it. He raised his head just enough to feel the breeze in his face, to be sure it hadn’t changed direction. Almost within reach of the bull’s left shoulder, he gathered himself into a crouch, muscles taut. He tongued his knife blade, waiting.
Something rustled beyond the bull. It raised its head, turning away from Tristan, its ears cocked forward.
Tristan sprang from cover in its blind spot, seizing its horns. The peimu snorted, tried to toss its head, but Tristan braced his feet and wrenched the near horn down and the far one up, twisting its neck. The bull’s hoofs flipped out from beneath it, flailing the air; its shoulder struck the youth’s hip as it went down, landing hard on its side. Tristan pressed a knee to its shoulder, pinning it, and said, “Pulou!”
The peimu only bellowed once, kicking, as Pulou cut its throat.
The rest of the herd fled into the trees. Still pinning the dying bull, Tristan watched them go, ambling and awkward, their tails in the air.
Three carcasses lay in the clearing. The other hunters, slim shadows in the moonlight, already crouched over their kills, groping with knives and clawed hands through the entrails to find the choicest parts, the liver and heart.
Minutes later they gathered around a small fire, eight figures squatting shoulder to shoulder, licking blood from their fingers and turning tidbits skewered on knife points over the coals. No one spoke, but Tristan read contentment in the others’ faces, in the muffled growls that rumbled from their throats as they tore at their meat. He bit a mouthful of nearly raw liver from the chunk on his knife. Hot juice dribbled down his chin. He swiped it away with the back of his hand and closed his eyes, savoring his own contentment as much as the flavor of the meat.
Bellies full, they lolled in the grass, and Miru, the youngest, said, “It’s good to be chosen, Haruo?”
By the ebbing emberlight, Tristan saw how Haruo stopped tonguing the half-healed cut at the corner of his mouth. Saw how he settled back in the grass and ran a finger down the white laceration beside his nose. He smiled at them all. “Yes, it’s good.”
“You bite her, too?” Miru asked.
“No!” Haruo looked briefly shocked. Then he smiled again. “But she is with young!”
The others grinned, fangs reflecting moonlight.
Next to Haruo, Faral said, “You aren’t chosen, Miru, because you don’t bring back peimus. You scare them away!”
The youngster swatted at Faral, missed when he ducked, and the others grinned again.
“Malwi,” someone addressed Miru’s older brother, “you need new hunt partner, or your mother puts both of you out in the rain!”
“Maybe you get more peimus, Malwi, if you hunt by yourself!” someone else put in, and the proverbial impossibility of that provoked another round of grins.
“Tristan is good hunter,” said Pulou.
Tristan felt the others’ attention turn to him; he smiled and made a negating gesture.
“Him?” said Haruo, wrinkling his nose. “Mothers don’t want flat-teeth!”
Everyone eyed Haruo, and Tristan saw two or three of them cock their heads in puzzlement before Pulou said, “Shiga wants him, but she’s of same clan.”
“Shiga?” Tristan stared at Pulou. “Your sister? But she’s almost my sister, too!”
“Melu wants you,” said Miru. “You bring back many peimus, and you’re tall. She wonders how tall you would be in her bed robes.”
Tristan cuffed him lightly and laughed off embarrassment. “She chooses me and she finds out!”
“In my mother’s clan,” Haruo said, “no one wants flat-teeth. They scare away peimus and claw up soil.”
The silence that fell echoed with a challenge. Tristan met Haruo’s gaze over the bed of coals, curled his hands like claws, and showed his teeth. He felt the others watching him, saw anticipation in their yellow eyes. But Pulou abruptly nudged him and rose to his feet. “We start home,” he said, stretching. “Long way to go, and morning comes.”
The others rose, too, reluctantly. Pushed soil over the embers with leather-shod feet and wiped their flint blades clean on the grass.
Tristan stayed quiet, scowling to himself, as he lashed the peimu’s back legs to the carrying pole. He glanced up only when Pulou pressed a shoulder to his own.
“Turn your back, little brother. Ignore it,” Pulou said.
“Why?” Tristan said. “I am flat-tooth.”
“Outside,” said Pulou, “not inside.”
Tristan didn’t answer. He took the rear position when they shouldered the pole, and furrowed his brow as they started out.
Gan companions had commented on his differences before now. He recalled how, as a child, adult ganan had fingered his tawny hair and stroked his pale, hairless skin, and gan children had asked him if he saw things in different colors than they did because his eyes were blue, not amber. But their curiosity had made him a desired playmate; they had begged him to join in their games.
When, by the age of fourteen, he’d outgrown even his older hunting companions, he’d begun to notice how the young females stared after him, how they teased him with their looks and their smiles. That had embarrassed him at first, but it hadn’t left him feeling angry or hurt as Haruo’s scorn had. No one before had ever implied anything bad about being a flat-tooth.
He spent most of the journey back to camp watching Haruo and wondering at the reasons for his animosity.
* *
He found his mother awake when he ducked into their lodge. She looked pale even in the firelight, he thought, but she had sat up unassisted to weave her faded hair into a waist-length braid with thin fingers.
“Mum!” he said, in the Standard she had taught him, and dropped down before her to touch his brow. “Are you feeling better?”
“For the moment,” she said. Her voice rasped; she cleared her throat. With one finger she drew a clean line through the dust on his upper arm. “You look as if you’ve traveled a long way.”
“Five nights,” Tristan said. “We had to go that far to find a herd, but we had a good hunt. There’s a peimu outside, gutted but not skinned yet.” He offered her his game bag with a smile. “And I brought you some lomo eggs.”
“New ones?” Darcie reached into the bag and withdrew a ball of leaves. Peeling off the improvised wrapping, she revealed a tan oval peppered with brown. She touched the rough shell —recently laid—and smiled back. “If you’ll bring in some water, we’ll boil these up straight away.”
He felt her watching him as he pulled hot stones from the firepit with wooden tongs and dropped them into the gut cooking pot and then put the eggs in one by one. She watched as he pushed an old scrap of leather into the skin water bucket and used it to scrub his face and chest and shoulders. Watched him as if she had something she needed to tell him but didn’t quite know how. He swallowed when he finally met her gaze across the flickering dimness. “It’s—getting worse, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and muffled a cough.
They both knew how it would end. They had seen it often enough in her gan patients, among whom she had contracted it.
Tristan felt suddenly weak. “How long—?” he asked. He couldn’t finish the question.
“I don’t know, Tris. . . . Seven or eight months, most likely.”
Seven or eight months! He bit his lip. Stared at the soil floor between his knees for a long while, fighting back the pain of the loss to come. At last he rose, pushed aside the doorflap, and went out.
The sun had risen; it would grow hot before long. The camp lay quiet but for a baby’s cry from a nearby lodge and insects buzzing around the peimu carcasses hung from tree limbs to cure. Tristan padded among the squatty dome shelters toward the hill which rose beyond, and climbed to the top.
There were no graves here, just the ashes of the pyre.
He had seen his only cremation at the age of four. Curious, he had crouched at the front of the circle among the gan children, had seen the old matriarch, her face painted white, drive her knife into the body on the pyre. Later he’d learned that the action symbolically released the soul to return to Tsaan Jwei, the Life Taker, but at the time he thought she’d killed the old man.
A wavering moan had torn his attention away from her. The people who brought the torches began it. As they thrust fire among the wood, others took up the cry. He had stood there sobbing, unable to look away from the flames that licked and charred the body, oblivious of the ganan swaying and keening around him, until his mother caught him by the arm and took him back to their own lodge.
He’d awakened with nightmares of the pyre for several sleeps afterward.
He’d hidden in the back of the lodge during the next cremation. Now he just left camp, on the pretext of hunting.
Tristan prodded powdered ash into tiny swirls on the morning breeze, blackening his moccasin toe. He shot a dismal look over his shoulder when he heard someone approaching behind him.
Pulou stopped, settling into a squat and blinking in the daylight. “Little brother?”
“I think,” said Tristan. He shuddered. Fourteen years hadn’t faded his memories of the pyre.
“To think,” Pulou said, “is good to learn but not to be sad.”
“My mother is ill, Pulou. She gets worse.”
“That is way of life,” the gan said. “Yung Jwei gives it and Tsaan Jwei takes it.”
“Gan way,” said Tristan. “My mother isn’t gan.” He used the personal honorific form of ‘mother.’ “She gets well if she’s at her home.”
“You know how?” Pulou asked.
“She tells me about it,” Tristan said. “Her people have good medicines. Their lodges are tall as mountains, and they have things that fly.” Squinting at the misted horizon, he added, “She tells me about my father, too.”
“Father?” Pulou asked, wrinkling his nose.
“Flat-teeth aren’t like ganan,” said Tristan. “They choose once, not every time they come in season. Both choose, and they stay together like hunt partners. She says my father is—Spherzah.”
Pulou blinked with puzzlement.
“He’s—” Tristan furrowed his brow, thinking. He didn’t fully understand it himself, except that his mother had made it sound important and heroic. He drew on the only comparison he could think of: “He’s like Yung Jwei’s Chosen Hunters in clan tales. He’s strong and good and he helps people.”
Pulou studied him for a moment, head cocked. “Maybe he can help your mother?”
“Yes,” Tristan said. “Yes. We bring him to her and he can help.”
* *
“Haruo!” Tristan said at the doorflap. “Haruo!”
He heard stirring inside, a noisy yawn, and nothing more.
“Haruo!” he said again.
Pulou nudged his arm. “It’s daytime, little brother. They sleep.”
But a hand pushed the doorflap aside and Haruo’s mate, all maternal belly and sagging breasts, stared at them from its shadow.
Already squatting, Tristan and Pulou hunched lower still, ducking their heads and touching their brows. “Peace in you, mother,” Tristan said, this time using the form for addressing all mature females. “It’s needed, why I talk to Haruo.”
She said nothing, just let the doorflap fall.
In another minute a different hand shoved the cover aside, a large hand with peimu blood still under t
he long hunter’s nails. Haruo squinted in the sunlight, blinking several times before he recognized Tristan. “Flat-tooth!” he said then, showing his pointed teeth. “Night-sleeper!”
“Haruo,” said Tristan, “flat-teeth are where?”
“Why? You go back to them?”
Beside Tristan, Pulou flexed his hand like claws.
Haruo glanced at him, then back to Tristan. He came out fully, pulling the doorflap closed, and dropped to his heels facing them. “Why?” he said again.
Tristan said, “I need to know for my mother.” He used the personal honorific again, and Haruo raised what would’ve been an eyebrow, if ganan had any.
“That way,” he said, pointing toward the northwest. “Cross flat land with bright twin stars on this side.” He touched his right shoulder. “There are hills. Follow little river up to where it comes from ground, where my mother’s clan is. On other side is big valley with big river. Flat-teeth are by river on near side, in lodges that don’t move.”
“They have—things that fly?” Tristan asked.
He felt Pulou staring at him, but Haruo said, “Yes. In white nests like this.” He shaped a bowl with his hands. “They make fire and noise when they fly. They scare peimus away.”
The humans did have spacecraft, then. Tristan asked, “How many nights to go there?”
Haruo wrinkled his brow, counted on his fingers. “Three hands.”
Tristan nodded his thanks and glanced sideways at Pulou. “This night,” he said.
* *
He could see just well enough by the embers’ glow. Tristan moved quietly about the lodge, poking through baskets and skin bags for dried meat and roots and nuts, groping among articles hung from roof poles to find a canteen made of peimu gut. His hands closed on an object swathed in scraps of leather; he recognized it by feel. He untied it from the rafter and unfolded the covering.
The chain spilled out first, between his fingers. Its metallic discs clattered on the dirt floor. Tristan planted a foot on them, twisting round to see if the noise had awakened his mother.
She stirred. He waited, motionless, until her breathing steadied, audible but even.
The larger object lay heavy in his hand. The embers cast a bloody gleam along its barrel and grip. Tristan turned it over, eyeing its mechanisms. “E-gun,” he whispered. He put the energy pistol into his game bag with the food and crouched to gather up the chain. He squinted at the characters pressed into its ID tags: