Wasteland of flint ittotss-1

by Thomas Harlan

  Guwa…guwa…guwa…guwa, sang the children in the yard. They were playing with frogs.

  On the comp display, another level of detail slowly appeared, etching images of tumbling, shattered mountains of ice and stone and iron ever clearer.

  In his memories, Mitsu knew the street in front of the little house was black macadam, potholed and crumbling at the edges. He heard a delivery truck putter past and saw an enameled red panel with the word ASAHI painted in black and yellow. Thick green grass sprouted from every crevice along the sidewalks. The walls of the houses were tinged with moss and tiny blue flowers.

  On this day, as the children splashed in the mud, making frog pens of twigs and glass jars from the kitchen, the sun was shining through heavy gray clouds, making the air sparkle and shimmer. To the east, a line of mountains rose, white shoulders gleaming with ice and snow.

  The recording ended. After a short pause, the scratchy, keening sound of a bow scraping across taunt gut string emerged from the quiet silence. The shamisen wailed up into the sound of falling leaves. A hand drum began to tap in counterpoint. Mitsu settled deeper into his chair, letting the warm fabric carry the weight of his head. The strings and the drum lifted into summer wind and a reedy bamboo flute joined them, carrying falling rain.

  A man's voice — deep, hoarse, rich as the rivers and streams beneath the Golden Mountain, melancholy with longing for a homeland lost beyond the sea — began to sing. One of the musicians coughed, almost covering the sound with the hem of his kimono.

  Kimi ga yo wa,

  Chiyo ni yachiyo ni,

  Sazare ishi no

  Mitsu could see his father sitting on the edge of the porch surrounding the garden, face shining in the light of the lanterns and lamps. The shamisen across his leg was a dark walnut color, faced with amber-tinted pine. In memory, the hands were nimble on the strings, while the porch roof and the house walls gave his graceful voice a full, mellow echo.

  Iwao to nari te,

  Koke no musu made

  On the comp display, the ship continued to move in endless night, skin taut against the fabric of space, straining to hear the slow lilting song of gravity humming in the void.

  Slot Canyon Twelve

  After hiding in a cave for two days, Gretchen felt relieved to be airborne and mobile again. The Gagarin hummed around her, engines chuckling, broad wings spread wide, canopy whistling with the familiar, proper sound of air rushing past. The night around her was blessedly still and the ultralight made a slow, tight turn in the narrow confines of the canyon. Sheer rock walls drifted past, shining glassily in the glare of the wing lights. Gretchen had turned off the collision alarm — though the canyon was hundreds of feet wide, the turning radius of the Midge brought the wingtips almost to brushing distance on each circuit.

  Below, the phosphor-bright illumination cast by Hummingbird's ultralight made the canyon floor a sharp jumble of black and white, boulders and sand. Gretchen could see twin coils of water vapor rising from the idling engines. The nauallis, however, was nowhere to be seen. The tunnel entrance was a void of darkness against the matte nothingness of the cliff.

  The momentary vision swept away as the Gagarin continued its turn. Gretchen tried to maintain focus on the aircraft and keep her slow, spiraling turn going, but she was worried. The Mйxica had been inside too long for comfort. Feels like an hour, she grumbled to herself. How long, she suddenly wondered, would it take for the gray to make a copy of a single ragged crow?

  The Gagarin arced around again, now at least a hundred meters from the canyon floor, and she caught sight of something bright out of the corner of her eye. Gretchen looked down and to the side, trying not to reflexively swing the aircraft to follow her eye movement, and saw the trapezoidal door now lit from within by a cold, pale light.

  "Hummingbird!" Gretchen's voice spiked in alarm. "Let's go!"

  A figure bolted out of the opening, cloak flying out behind him. A too-familiar radiance filled the doorway and in the cold sepulchral glare she saw the man hurl himself into the cockpit of the Midge and slam the door shut. Cold oily light spilled out onto the dust, lapping around splintered sandstone and granite. Both engines flared bright with exhaust and the Midge leapt forward, sand spewing away from the wheels.

  Gretchen pulled back gently on the control yoke and Gagarin soared up into the dark, constricted sky. The overhanging cliffs on either side rushed in, but she adjusted nimbly, sweat beading in the hollow of her neck, sending the ultralight dancing higher. Through the transparent panel under her feet, Anderssen saw the other Midge dart up the canyon, lifting off only meters ahead of the advancing radiant tide.

  The cold light cut off — a shutter slammed on an empty window — and Gretchen felt the air in the canyon heave with a sudden, sharp blast. A cloud of black smoke jetted from the tunnel mouth, drowning the queer light, and Hummingbird's Midge wobbled in flight as a shockwave rolled past.

  Gretchen wrenched her attention back to the business of flying, narrowly dodging the Gagarin around a jutting outcropping. The airframe groaned, complaining at such rough handling, but the Midge swept past the obstacle and soared on down the canyon. Below her, Gretchen was peripherally aware of Hummingbird's ultralight straining to catch up.

  The canyon behind both aircraft filled with a black, turgid cloud of dust and ash. The cliff-face above the tunnel shuddered, still rocked by the violence of the explosion and then — with majestic, slow grace — splintered away from the core of the mountain and thundered down into the canyon. More dust, ash and grit roared up with a flat, massive thump.

  Gretchen heard the blow, and grinned tightly, fingers light on the stick. This business of flying at night, even with goggles, radar and the strobe-white glare of the wing lights was tricky business. I hope that's the end of the nasty dirty color, she thought peripherally, some tiny corner of her mind pleased to see something which had threatened her destroyed.

  The odometer on the control panel began to count the kilometers as they flew on into the night. There was a long way to go before dawn roused the slot canyon to near-supersonic violence.

  Behind the massive barrier of the Escarpment, dawn was much delayed. When the clear, hot light of the Ephesian primary finally pierced the canopy of the Gagarin, both ultralights were far out over the western desert. Hummingbird's Midge was only a hundred meters to starboard, easily keeping pace in the cool, thick morning air.

  Gretchen clicked local comm open. "Shall we land?"

  She hadn't heard a peep from the nauallis since they'd left the canyon. Watching the roseate glow of dawn creeping across the rumpled, barren landscape below them was interesting enough without his company. They had passed over a broad valley filled with pipeflowers in the predawn hours and Gretchen had been very glad the spindly, fluted organisms were quiescent after sunset. There had been places — deep ravines or defiles in the broken land — where jeweled lights had gleamed in the ebon blanket of night.

  The palaces of the fairy queen, she thought, staring down at the traceries and cobwebs of trapped, frozen light passing below her. And by day? Nothing, only desolation and lifeless stone. I wonder if Sinclair has dared see the desert by night, her veils drawn aside…

  "Are you tired?" Hummingbird's voice sounded thick and muzzy.

  "Have you been sleeping?" Gretchen frowned across the distance between the two aircraft. She couldn't make out more of the nauallis than the outline of his kaffiyeh in the close confines of the Midge cockpit. "We should set down before the air grows too thin — we need to conserve fuel after burning so much to reach the summit of Prion."

  "Understood," he said, voice clearer. She could see him shift in his shockchair. "Pick a suitable location."

  He was sleeping, she thought wryly, glancing at the autopilot display on her panel. He slaved his Midge to Gagarin and tagged along like my little brother at a Twelfth Night party.

  Scratching a sore on her jaw where the rebreather strap was starting to wear, Gretchen began to scan the rada
r map of the land ahead, searching for a cave or ridge or anything which would let them escape the heat and brilliance of the sun. I wonder what our trusty guide has to say.

  She punched up the travel maps in Russovsky's log and began going through the notes, wondering where the geologist had landed on her circumnavigation of the globe. After twenty minutes of keeping one eye on the horizon and one on the maps, she opened the local channel again.

  "There's a place ahead," Gretchen said, squinting at the lumpish dun-colored landscape. "Russovsky calls it Camp Six — a canyon, an overhang big enough to pull a Midge into the shade — she'd stayed there two, three times. About an hour, hour and a half."

  The nauallis responded with a grunt and Anderssen was disgusted to see him lean back in his shockchair, apparently asleep again.

  The full weight of day was upon the land, flattening every color and detail to burnt brass. Russovsky's overhang stood in the curve of a long, S-shaped ravine where hundreds of tons of sandstone had crumbled away, leaving a fan-shaped talus slope. Gretchen climbed among the upper rocks, laboring to breathe as she pulled herself up onto a tilted, rectangular boulder. She stood up and the roof of the raw amphitheater was within arm's reach.

  Curious, she scanned through a variety of wavelengths visible in her goggles. From below, where the two Midge s stood in partial shade and Hummingbird was puttering around the camp, setting up the tent and making a desultory attempt at breakfast, she'd seen a faint pattern on this rock, something like interlocking arcs or circles.

  Close up she didn't see anything unusual, which Gretchen admitted to herself was par for the course. Rock fractures or mineral deposits… A little miffed at getting excited over nothing she looked around, taking in the barren, sun-blasted landscape. The ravine was very peculiar-looking to her eye — no water had run on the surface of Ephesus III for millions of years, so the bottom of the "canyon" was jagged and littered with fragile-looking debris. A similar canyon on Earth or Ugarit would have been washed clean, worn down, abraded by flash floods or even a running stream. But there was nothing like that here, only the evidence of constant wind.

  No litter in the shade, she thought, left by those who passed this way before. No broken bits of pottery, flaked stone tools, arrowheads. No detritus of bones from the kill, cast aside from where a fire burned against the stone, leaving soot buried deep in every crevice. Nothing but the spine of the world, open, exposed, left out to bleach in the sun.…Gretchen thought she understood why Russovsky had spent so muchtime alone in the wasteland, drifting on the currents of the air, floating high in the sky in her Midge.

  "Is there lunch yet?" Anderssen began picking her way down through the broken, eggshell-like slabs of sandstone.

  "Yes," Hummingbird said in a grumpy voice.

  Gretchen sighed, but said nothing, preparing herself for threesquares straight from the tube.

  She was not disappointed, though the Mйxica had scrounged up some flavored tea. Still, protein paste was protein paste, even if the taste approximated the reddish dust covering every surface in all directions. Gretchen watched Hummingbird eat, making sure he finished his daily ration and drank all his tea. When the nauallis was done, she lifted her chin questioningly.

  "Can you show me what to do? How to control this sight?"

  Hummingbird looked up, green eyes clouded with distracted thoughts. "I can show you how to begin," he said slowly, as if each word were painful. "Small things. Simple things."

  "Fine." Gretchen squared her shoulders, feeling a kink in her neck. He's worried. "Whatever you think is safe. Just being able to tell when I'm seeing or just seeing would be good."

  The nauallis nodded, looking around him on the ground. "Take a moment," he said, voice subtly changing tone. "Close your eyes, let your mind empty, and feel around among these stones. Find one which feels right in your hands. Don't hurry. We're not going anywhere."

  Gretchen did as he bid, though after finally sitting down to eat she felt very tired. Flying by night sort of implied sleeping by day, a little voice muttered in her head, not crawling about among broken shale. As before, when she closed her eyes a great commotion seemed to brew up in her thoughts. This time, the voices and memories and flashes of things she'd seen or done or heard were overlaid by a patina of exhaustion which made them distant and faded. Old sepia-tone images of her life. Despite a great desire to curl up in her sleepbag, Gretchen moved blindly around the camp, letting her fingers see the sand and grit and broken little stones.

  Eventually, her hand touched something and she stopped. The bit of rock felt warm, almost hot, even through her gloves. Gretchen opened her eyes. She was at the edge of the rockfall, far from the brilliant demarcation of light and shade. The glassy, dark stone in her hand was curved and sharp along one edge. Could make a tool from this, she thought, turning the piece of flint over in her hands. Without much work at all.

  "How does that feel?" Hummingbird said. He was lying down in the tent, his eyes closed.

  "Good," Gretchen replied, becoming aware of the rightness of the stone in her hand. "It felt warm for a moment."

  "Put it in your pocket," he said. "Now close your eyes again and feel about. But this time, find a stone which does not feel proper. One you do not wish to touch. Take your time."

  Frowning a little at the nauallis, who had folded his arms over his chest and gone back to sleep, Gretchen tucked the flint into one of the cargo pockets built into her vest. Closing her eyes brought on a surging sense of drowsiness, but she soldiered on, letting her hands drift across the ground, letting her slow, crawling motion carry her wherever it would.

  A little later, after cracking her head painfully against a boulder, Gretchen gave up the search as a bad job and crawled into the tent. Hummingbird was fast asleep, his partially detached breather mask serving as an echo chamber for a snuf-fling kind of snore. Gretchen made a disgusted face at him, then collapsed on her own sleepbag, utterly spent.

  "This just isn't the same," Gretchen said, late in the afternoon, as she and Hummingbird were eating again, waiting for the sun to set and the air to chill enough to fly. "There's no campfire to sit around. No flickering light on the cave walls, no darkness beyond the firelight, filled with strange sounds…the gleam of eyes as hunting cats prowl by."

  Hummingbird grunted, sucking the last of a puce-colored threesquare from its tube. Gretchen had not offered to share any of her tabasco, drawing an aggrieved look from the old man. "Our common ancestors," he said, wiping his lips, "would not have considered such a scene 'homey' or 'nostalgic'. The cough of a jaguar in the night was a cause for terror, not comfort."

  "I suppose." Gretchen was kneeling in the knocked-down tent, rolling up her sleepbag. "So — I didn't find an improper stone this morning — should I look again?"

  Hummingbird raised an eyebrow at her and then laid a finger on his temple. "Really?"

  Gretchen rubbed her brow, then winced to feel the bump from running into the boulder. "Well, I guess…say, how long will it take me to learn the good stuff?" She started to grin. "Like flying or throwing lightning from my hands or changing into an animal, like in the old tales?"

  "I do not teach such things!" Hummingbird snapped, suddenly angry. His face compressed into a tight frown and Gretchen moved back involuntarily. "The way of the tlamatinime is subtle, balanced. We follow the line of the earth, we do not break balance or distort what is."

  "Oh." Anderssen eyed him warily, seeing an unexpected, fulminating anger shining in his lean, wrinkled old countenance. "Not a problem. I understand."

  "I doubt that," the Mйxica growled, rising abruptly. "You've plighted troth to a science which barely acknowledges balance at all — much less attempts to move in accord with that which is."

  "Wait a minute," Gretchen said, her own anger nettled by the fury in his voice. "Science seeks to understand, not to destroy. I was joking, old crow, joking." She paused, a flicker of doubt crossing her face. "Are there…there aren't judges who can fly, are there?"
>
  Hummingbird looked away, attention fixed on the horizon, where the sun was sliding down toward night, a huge red-gold disk with wavering purple edges.

  "No," he said after a moment. A hand waved negligently at the Midge s parked in the shade. "Though we fly ourselves, with some help. But your science…" He sighed.

  "I don't understand," Gretchen said, trying to keep from sounding antagonistic. "The more we learn, the fuller our understanding grows, the better mankind can exist in this universe. We learn, old crow, our science learns."

  "No. No, it does not." Hummingbird rubbed the edge of his jaw, lips pursed, staring at her in an appraising way. "Your science…your science is about control, Anderssen-tzin, not about understanding. Now, listen to me before you raise your voice in defense of the beast which whelped you! I have met many of your colleagues; on Anбhuac, in the orbital colonies, on the frontier worlds. There are men and women among their number I admire. Many of them mean well. My quarrel is not with these people, but with the doctrine they serve."

  "What?" Gretchen fell silent as Hummingbird raised a hand sharply, though her eyes narrowed in irritation.

  "The basis — the seed, the root, the wellspring — of your science, Anderssen-tzin," he said, settling down to the ground, legs crossed, "is to make things happen the same way not just once, not twice, but a thousand times. It is to learn enough, discover enough, to allow a human being to control the processes of the universe. From sparking fire to forging a bronze knife to making a reliable breather mask." Hummingbird tilted his head a little to one side, amusement glinting in his dark eyes. "Isn't that the heart of your science? The evolution of a hypothesis into a theory? The definition of fact? Of scientific truth?"

  "No," Gretchen said, feeling like she'd stumbled into a first-term philosophy class. "You're confusing the goal of engineering with the process of science. And not the first person to do so, either." She sniffed, tilting up her nose. "Engineering is about reliability and process control — but science…science is about learning why things work, not just how. Science…" She paused, failing to wrestle her words into something succinct and pithy. "Our science is just like your seeing, but born from the mind, from logic, not from an organic alkaloid."