Vauchelade said that he would wait up until the team arrived, but that there was no need for me to do so. He went up to check the car, and I found a camp bed in the back tent and claimed it, setting up an energy field to keep out insects. It did not take long to drop into sleep, but, in the early hours of the night, I was awoken by the wind. It roared overhead, beating at the tent as though it were a drum. I lay and listened to the wind, and it seemed to me, half-dreaming, that I could hear a voice in the wind, crying out. Toward dawn, the storm blew out, but it was too late for sleep. I got up and made my way around the stacks of equipment to the makeshift shower rig. Then, a little refreshed, I stepped out of the tent into the morning. The sun was coming up over the distant ridges, infusing the land with a gray light. It was very cold. A swirl of wind blew across the ground, rolling the loose earth before it. Vauchelade was perched precariously above the drop, tapping data into the daily log.
"Good morning,” he said, courteously enough. “It's been quite a wild night. Did you get any sleep?"
"I slept a little,” I said.
"Storms blow up fast in this area,” Vauchelade said. “One moment, it's a clear sky, and, the next minute, you're choking with dust. The satellites pick them up, but you can't always get a link."
"Are the others still coming?” I asked.
"They should be, later. I tried to get through last night, but the storm knocked out any communication.” He was staring out across the Rift, his eyes narrowed against the sunlight. “Right. Get yourself something to eat and then we'll make a start. There are a number of things I'd like you to be getting on with today."
My first morning in the Rift was spent with my hands in the sink, washing samples. Vauchelade climbed down onto a lower ledge and did not return until noon.
"You've finished here? Good,” he said. “Haven't they got here yet?"
"There's been no sign of anyone,” I said.
"Well, that's very odd,” Vauchelade said, evidently annoyed. “They should be here by now.” He began to fiddle with the radio, from which a distorted crackling sound emanated. I left him to it, and went into the adjacent tent to vacuum pack the smaller samples. When I came back in, Vauchelade had got through and was conducting a one-sided conversation. I heard him say, reluctantly, “Well, all right then. I suppose that will have to do,” and then he switched the radio off. Leaning back in his chair, he said irritably, “That's that then. They're stuck. That storm deposited half the dust in the Rift onto the Upper Veldt. The road's blocked. They're trying to hire an aircar, which will send us way over budget.” He glared at me, as though I was directly responsible for our present plight. “Well, what are you standing there for? There's work to be done."
Vauchelade wanted samples from the lower cliffs in order to build up a picture of the strata.
"Sort out whatever you need from the stack,” he instructed me. “I presume you're familiar with the relevant equipment?"
"I think so,” I said. I wanted to tell him that we had covered basic tasks such as this one in our second term of university, and I was a post-doctoral student, but I let it go. Instead, I went into the tent and sorted out the necessary gear, but there was something missing. I could not find the sounding gauge. It was such a small thing, and could easily be overlooked. I ransacked the equipment stack and then I went back into the main tent and looked there. At last, it occurred to me that Vauchelade might have taken it for his own testing that morning. Feeling stupid, I went over to the big collapsible box that he used for his personal equipment and opened the top drawer. There was the sounding gauge, stuffed inside with packets of soil. Brilliant Vauchelade may have been, but his working methods left a lot to be desired. I tugged the sounding gauge free, and the contents of the drawer spilled out across the floor. And into my lap fell the piece of rock that Essengene Tesh had discovered, blue as the hem of Isis’ robe. I picked it up and stared at it.
"What are you doing with that? Put it back,” Vauchelade's voice came from immediately behind my ear.
"I was looking for the sounding gauge,” I said. “I thought that Tesh took this with her?"
"No. She left all her samples here, so we could ship everything back at once,” Vauchelade said, with restrained patience. He added, “Come along, Dr. Selu. We haven't got all day."
I placed the blue fragment back inside the drawer and followed him outside. Vauchelade suggested that he should cover the top end of the bluff, while I sampled the lower ledge.
"I'll have to winch you down in the cradle,” Vauchelade said. “It's a damn nuisance, being so short-handed. Still, we'll just have to make the best of it. I'm sure you can handle it. You've done this sort of thing before, haven't you?"
"In the Caucasus. With Jerry Hutton. We—"
"Yes, yes,” Vauchelade said. “Help me with the winch."
Together, we carried the light extendable winch down to the lip of the canyon and stood back as it assembled itself. He had some expensive equipment with him, for all his griping about the budget.
"Keep attached to the guide rope at all times,” Vauchelade said, “And give me a call on the portable when you're ready to come up."
"No problem,” I said. I wanted to show him that I could, as he had suggested, handle it on my own.
I strapped myself into the cradle and was winched slowly down the cliff. The ledge on which I landed was no more than a few feet wide, but there was adequate space in which to work. Methodically, I started my sampling; photographing the strata and then taking core samples of each separate formation. It was very quiet within the valley of the Rift, and very hot. The sun had baked the floor of the ledge into a pavement of cracked bricks, and there was a smell of earth and heat. I worked in a kind of dream, the repetitive action sending me almost into trance. Somewhere at the back of my mind, like a pebble at the bottom of a well, lay the thought of Tesh's blue stone, which should have been with her, but was not.
I did not realize how late it had become until I glanced at the watch attached to my belt and saw that it was well after six. I finished what I was doing and packed everything into the pouches of the cradle. Then I spoke into the portable.
"Professor Vauchelade?” I said. “I'm ready to come up now."
No one answered. I switched the portable to a higher frequency and tried again. I may as well have spoken into the deep and empty air of the Rift. It did not yet occur to me that anything might be seriously wrong. I knew that certain formations blocked out the frequency from the portable, and Vauchelade might have moved out of range. I set the portable on an automatic signal, and sat down on the hard earth. Heat burned out from the Rift wall. My sunsuit protected me from the worst of it, but it was still uncomfortably hot. I was grateful for the little breeze that drifted down the Valley, sending the fine sand skittering across the floor of the ledge.
Slowly the wind began to grow. The entranced complacency of the afternoon faded and I began to feel uneasy. The portable was still transmitting, to no effect. At first, I think I wondered whether something had happened to Vauchelade. The golden light that poured into the valley was hazed with dust, a veil borne on the rising wind. I looked down at my hand, and saw the dark skin dulled beneath a spice-colored film. The dust had crept underneath the wrist seal of the sunsuit, and it itched where it rubbed against the skin. I turned back to the cradle, trying to see whether I might climb up the guide rope to the brow of the cliff, but when I looked upward, I could no longer see the top of the bluff. It was hidden by the dust. I pulled at the rope, and watched in disbelief as it uncoiled down the cliff and fell snaking around my ankles. It had come detached from the winch.
I shouted into the portable, and still there came no answer. A gust of wind buffeted me, nearly sending me over the edge, and throwing me onto my knees. Beyond the ledge, the Rift valley was filled with a shifting sea of dust, red waves rolling up to burst like spray against the ledge. It filled my mouth; I spat and rubbed my eyes, and, for a moment, I saw the sun riding, bright as garnet, throug
h the boiling storm. I thought, I am going to die, and then everything seemed to right itself. I breathed dust, and there at the edges of the storm I sensed again a shadow, vast as the Rift and burning like the sun. It grew as vast as the world. It filled the Rift, welling up from it like water—and then I knew that it was nothing more than the Rift itself.
I understood then what Tesh had discovered: not the shard of rock that would be named after her, but something else, the presence of the land. Each place has its own spirit, born out of rock, and wind, and earth. I was choking on dust, and I was going to die, and it seemed hardly important. I was part of a place; I belonged. I plunged my hands into the dust that covered the ledge, and laughed.
Since I am here to tell you this story, it is evident that I did not, after all, die there. A wave of warm air washed over me, and above the wind, I heard the sound of a propulsion system. Minutes later, Vauchelade and a woman I did not know were bundling me onto a stretcher and I was being lifted up into the bowels of the aircar. They gave me a shot, and pumped out my lungs, and so I did not see the aircar lift out as the storm spilled over the edges of the Rift to engulf the camp and the reaches of the Upper Veldt.
When I came round, we were running ahead of the storm back to Yaounde and I made a thorough nuisance of myself trying to explain what it was that I had experienced. Vauchelade snorted. The others clearly thought I was raving, with the exception of one woman, Gereta Apere, who looked at me strangely and said, “I know what you mean. I was born on a farmstead near New Cape, not far from the edge of the Rift. They call it demelo. A shadow over the land. Not everyone sees it. They say it is a sign that the land has accepted you, that it will save your life when it can, that you will enter its spirit when you die."
She didn't say anything more, and I relapsed into a fitful sleep. We reached Yaounde safely, and I spent the night at the medical center. They discharged me the next morning, and though my throat felt as though it had been sandpapered, I was clear-headed and in need of answers. I went in search of Vauchelade at the hotel, only to be told that he had returned to Irubin.
"He told us what happened,” Apere said. “You must have called him, but he was in one of the side gullies and the portable failed to receive. At last, he went in search of you and found that the winch had disassembled, some nano failure. He was standing at the top of the cliff when we arrived. He was about to climb down to you, he said."
"Can I speak to Tesh?” I asked her.
She looked at the floor and said, “Dr. Selu, there's something you should know. Dr. Tesh and her colleague never reached Yaounde. They were caught in last night's storm. There's been a patrol out looking for them, and they found the vehicle this morning. They'd gone over the edge into a gully. Didn't the professor tell you?"
"He knew?” I said.
"Yes, of course. I told him myself, over the radio. Perhaps he didn't want you to be upset."
"I'm sure that's it,” I said. I was thinking of Essengene Tesh and the azure mineral that would have made the name and the reputation of its discoverer. I was wondering where Vauchelade had been, that first night, whether he would have had time to follow the departing team members, and, if so, what a ruthlessly ambitious man would have done. Or perhaps he was merely prepared to take advantage of a tragic accident, and dispose of the only other person who knew that Tesh had been the one to find the mineral. Outside, the morning sun spilled heat across the parched garden of the hotel, but the atrium seemed very cold.
"I have to get back to Irubin,” I said.
I need not have worried. I returned to find my department mourning the loss of a promising geologist, and celebrating the discovery that she had made. Tesh, it seemed, had possessed the forethought to transmit the details through to the university. They were grateful to Vauchelade for bringing her sample back with him. I said nothing. I had no proof that Vauchelade had done anything. My contract at the university was extended, and they placed me on Vauchelade's research program. We saw one another every day, but he seemed to have increasing difficulty in meeting my eyes. After a few months, he was awarded a chair at the University of Durban back on Earth, and left the department.
My year in Irubin drew to an end. At the end of the year, I postponed an offer to renew my contract. I wanted, I told the Dean, to take a walking holiday, see a little more of Gahran, perhaps revisit the place where Tesh had made her discovery. Presumably, they thought I was referring to essengenite. At the edges of the Ushete Rift, they call it demelo, the shadow of the land, and so I am going to go walking in the veldt, until I can see the Mountains of the Moon, and find again what I hope I have not lost.
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Copyright © 2005 by Liz Williams.
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Bottom Feeding by Tim Pratt
A Short Story
Tim Pratt's story “Hart and Boot” (Polyphony 4) will be reprinted in the 2005 Best American Short Stories anthology. His first novel, The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, will be published by Bantam in December. Tim is an editor at Locus, who has lost both a Nebula and a Campbell Award. He lives in Oakland with his fiancée, Heather Shaw. They co-edit a little ‘zine called Flytrap. “Bottom Feeding” marks his first fiction appearance in Asimov's.
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Graydon sat in a lawn chair beneath a bedraggled weeping willow, by the pond where Shiteater lived. A canvas grocery bag rested in the mud on his left, bulging with his most prized possessions, carefully chosen that morning—a mason jar filled with smooth stones and sea glass that he'd gathered during childhood summers at the beach house; the copy of Watership Down his brother Alton had been reading before he died, tattered bookmark still in place; a twist of braided blonde hair Rebekah had given him to remember her by, the summer she went off to Ireland and met Lorrie; the program from the first play he'd ever directed in college. All the things he was finished with. All the things he had to trade.
Graydon sipped strong coffee from his thermos, and watched the sun begin its day's climb up from the east. Graydon had been here for an hour already, mostly in the dark. He was crying a little, off and on, almost absent-mindedly.
A loaded spear gun lay across his lap, bought two days before at a sporting-goods superstore in Atlanta for more money than Graydon had expected. The clerk had asked where he was going fishing, and Graydon said “A pond behind my house.” The clerk had laughed, thinking it was a joke, and gone over the basics of handling the speargun with Graydon, who'd never used anything more complicated than a rod and reel before.
"All right, then,” Graydon said, wiping tears away from his cheeks. He lifted the speargun in one hand and the canvas bag of treasures in the other. He waded into the murky green water, up to his waist, and upended the bag upon the waters. The braided hair floated, as did the book and program, their pages darkening with water, but the full mason jar sank, ripples spreading around it.
A light rain fell, making more ripples, and thunder rumbled. Those were good omens for this kind of fishing.
"There's your bait,” Graydon said. “Come on, Shiteater.” He held the speargun as the clerk had shown him, and waited for the thing he hunted to swim up from the depths.
* * * *
The salmon of knowledge lived a long time ago, in the Well of Segais, where the waters ran deep and clear as rippling air. He swam there, thinking his deep thoughts, coming to the surface occasionally to eat the magical hazelnuts that fell into the water from the trees on the bank. Every nut contained revelations, but the salmon was not a mere living compendium of knowledge—he was a wise fish, too, and so chose to live quietly, waiting for the inevitable day when he would be caught and devoured. The salmon dimly remembered past (and perhaps future) lives, experiences inside and outside of time, from the whole history of the land: being blinded by a hawk on a cold winter night, hiding in a cave after a flood, running from a woman who might have been a goddess, or who might have been a witch.
The salmon did
not look forward to being caught, and cooked, and eaten, but knowing what the consequences would be for the one who caught him, he had to laugh, insofar as fish (even very wise ones) are able to laugh.
* * * *
Graydon started fishing the summer after he got kicked out of college. Lacking any other direction, still stunned by his brother's sudden death, Graydon had returned to his hometown of Pomegranate Grove, Georgia, and rented a two-bedroom house with a fireplace on the edge of town. He had a spare room full of Alton's things, as he was the sole inheritor—their father was long dead, their mother in a nursing home, victim of early-onset senile dementia. Every day Graydon sorted through the piles of his dead brother's things, touching objects both familiar and foreign, and one day he found a rod, reel, and tackle box. He and Alton had gone fishing often when they were children, and suddenly that seemed like the proper monument, a way to honor Alton's memory and simultaneously pass the empty days, so Graydon made a lunch and took the rod and tackle out back, to the pond by the woods behind his house. It wasn't much of a pond, maybe thirty feet across at its widest, with a few reeds in the shallows and one big weeping willow close to the water. These ponds could be deep, though, and it wasn't trash-strewn or visibly polluted, so he thought there might be fish.
Graydon sat on the bank and put a flashy red-and-yellow lure on the hook. Probably all wrong for whatever kind of fish lived in this pond, if any, but he didn't care if he caught anything—he just wanted to sit, and think, and hold the pole, and watch the red-and-white bobber float. That's what fishing was about, he recalled. Actually catching anything was sort of an optional extra.
He cast the line out into the middle of the pond and settled down with his back against the willow tree, thinking about Alton, who'd taught him how to climb trees, and cheat at poker, and, when they were older, how to take a hit off a bong. Graydon hadn't used any of those skills in a long time. Alton had taught him to fish, too, though neither one of them had ever been any good at it. Graydon wondered if the two of them had ever fished in this particular pond, and couldn't remember—it was possible, as they'd tried little fishing holes all over Pomegranate Grove.
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