Maybe the Bumbler had suddenly decided to complain about Oar again: unknown organism, help, help. Still, I had programmed the machine’s tiny brain to accept her as a friend; her presence hadn’t bothered it for days. Best to assume the problem was something else…something I couldn’t see.
What could the Bumbler detect that I couldn’t? It had a small capacity for peering through the creek banks, but not well—its passive X-ray scans could only penetrate ten to fifteen centimeters of dirt. Naturally, it could see farther if something was emitting large quantities of X-rays…or radio waves….
Radio. Someone nearby might have transmitted a radio message. Quickly, I backtracked the Bumbler’s short term memory and looked at the radio bands. Yes: it had picked up a coherent short-wave signal lasting only fifteen seconds. Did that mean an Explorer in the neighborhood? Or someone else?
Silently, I turned to Oar and pointed to the creek. Without waiting to see if she understood, I hefted up the Bumbler and headed for the water. We could hide there, just to be on the safe side—the middle of the creek was deep enough to be over our heads. My pack had a tiny scuba rebreather, only two minutes of air, but enough to stay submerged in an emergency. I’d give that to Oar; for myself, I’d have to make do with,…
Shit. I’d have to snorkel with the same esophageal airway I’d used on Yarrun.
The Peeper
After whispered instructions to Oar, I lowered myself into the water. It was cold; it was also murky, but that was good. The slight cloudiness would make it hard for someone to see me poised just under the surface. Oar, of course, was invisible as soon as she submerged.
I found a depth where I could stand on the bottom and keep the tip of the airway just above the surface. The taste of it was sour in my mouth. I had washed it since the Landing, washed it over and over again; but I still imagined I could taste the rusty flavor of blood on the plastic.
Trying to refocus my thoughts, I aimed the Bumbler’s scanner straight up at the outside world. In the muddy water, I had to amplify the Bumbler’s brightness before I could make out the screen; but my eyes adjusted soon enough to give me an adequate view above the surface.
The sky. The creek banks.
Thirty seconds after we had hidden ourselves, a head peeked over the south bank.
At first, it looked like a fully human head: smooth brown skin; darker lips. But as I stared more closely, bile rose in my mouth. The head had no hair—or rather it had an abstracted glass simulation of hair, like Oar’s but a slightly different style…and the eyes were also like Oar’s, silvery globes with mirror surfaces.
The lips drew back in smile…or maybe a grimace. Inside the mouth, the teeth were clear as glass.
Sickened, I realized what I was seeing. This was a glass person just like Oar; but he or she had glued strips of skin onto cheeks, forehead, and throat.
Strips of human skin.
Part XII
SKIN
Hiding
The skin-covered face peered down a few seconds more, then withdrew. I stayed put, hoping Oar would do the same—she was under orders not to come out until I gave the okay. Still, she had only a brief supply of air, and was inexperienced using a scuba breather; I gave the signal to surface at the two minute mark, even though I would have preferred to stay under much longer.
Oar emerged silently and kept her mouth shut. Good; no matter how she might be given to outbursts, her cultural heritage placed priority on not being noticed. They built their villages underwater, they made themselves transparent, they cleaned all trace of their presence from the environment…no wonder Oar had the instinct to stay quiet when strangers were near.
I wondered if Skin-Face was the reason Oar’s people were so good at hiding.
For five minutes we remained in the water with only our heads showing. All that time, some devil’s advocate in my mind kept asking why we should cower. The skin on that glass face was probably just animal hide—perhaps leather from a buffalo carcass, scraped clean of fur and worn for harmless adornment. Believing it was human skin was morbid imagination…that and the blurriness of looking at the Bumbler screen through muddy water.
But if it had been human skin, it came from an Explorer, not someone with a glass body. And perhaps the accompanying radio transmissions had come from Explorer equipment: equipment stolen from my fellow ECMs along with their skins.
I made myself get out of the water when I could no longer control the chattering of my teeth—not fear, but the physical chill of a creek in waning autumn. For a while I shivered on shore, until the sun warmed me back to a tolerable temperature. Thank heavens R&D made the tightsuit from quick-dry fabric; I would only stay soggy for half an hour, after which the material’s natural insulation would be as good as a dry parka. In the meantime, I had to hug myself for warmth and wonder if Skin-Face would reappear.
He didn’t…or possibly she didn’t, although I was inclined to think of the stranger as male. Some atavistic prejudice in my subconscious still believed men were scarier than women.
Say it was a man, a glass man of Oar’s species: he must have heard the Bumbler’s alarm beeping and came to investigate. It had taken him more than a minute to arrive, so he hadn’t been nearby…close enough to hear it, but far enough away that he hadn’t recognized the sound as unnatural. When he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he must have decided the noise was just bird cry. One quick look, then he went back about his business.
What was his business? It was time to find out.
It was also time to get the stunner out of my pack.
Three Spears
Motioning Oar to stay put, I swam the creek with the stunner in my mouth, in case I might need it quickly. The afternoon continued quiet and undisturbed—the chirp of birds, the light hiss of breeze ruffling the prairie grass. On the far side of the water, I climbed the dirt bank: steep, but only three meters high, the damp earth providing plenty of purchase. When I was almost at the top, I dug my feet firmly into the soil and did a quick scan with the Bumbler, X-raying through the last few centimeters of bank to make sure Skin-Face wasn’t lurking above. The screen was clear except for pebbles and roots; so with straining caution, I lifted my head over the edge for a look.
No Skin-Face close at hand; but a kilometer downstream, three humanoid figures tracked along the bank, walking away from me. The Bumbler gave me a telescopic view of the trio: three males, all carrying spears and shoulder bags, all wearing strips of skin on their faces. They had skin on their genitals too, carefully wrapped around penis and testicles. One also had a patch of skin on his chest—I could see it through his transparent back.
Perhaps that was the chieftain: the man who could commandeer the largest share of a kill.
Still hoping I was wrong, I magnified the view a few notches higher. Maybe the skin strips were some kind of harmless ornamentation….
No. In extreme close-up, there was no mistake. It was brown human skin, complete with wisps of hair, fastened to the underlying glass flesh.
One man lifted his hand and pointed at the creek ahead of them. The chieftain nodded, and all three started down the bank toward the water. My guess was they had reached a point shallow enough to ford; they were obviously reluctant to cross where the creek was over their heads. That gave me useful intelligence about the enemy…and already I was thinking of them as enemies, although they had showed no sign of hostility toward me or anyone else.
Explorers habitually regard strangers as threats. Shaking hands is for diplomats.
Simple Prairie Hunters
The men appeared on the far side of the creek a short time later and continued north. On their present path, they would run into the buffalo herd we had seen that morning…and that might be their goal. They might be simple prairie hunters, searching for food to feed their families.
Simple prairie hunters who carried radios.
I shook my head to clear it. Explanations would come eventually…or else they wouldn’t. Unsolved puzzles were a pe
rmanent frustration of the job.
At last the spearmen disappeared behind a copse of trees and I waved for Oar to join me. She crossed the creek with the scuba breather in her mouth, even though it couldn’t have much air left in it. I didn’t say anything—if she was happier to get air from a machine rather than holding her breath for the few seconds the water was over her head, so be it. The little tank was self-charging, given enough solar energy and access to air; in twenty-four hours it would be usable again.
From the top of the bank, I led us straight to the nearest clump of trees, to make sure we were shielded from the spearmen’s eyes—even though they were more than a klick away, the prairie allowed for long sight-lines. The men had come from this direction; we found their footprints in the dirt when we stopped to collect ourselves.
One good thing about people as dense as glass: they leave deep, clear footprints.
“Who were those people?” Oar blurted when we were safely under the trees.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” I answered. “You don’t know who lives in this area?”
“No. I thought…” She stopped herself. “I thought something very foolish.”
Her face was troubled; I suspected I knew why. Oar might have believed she and her ancestors were the only people in the world. She had seen the transmission from Chee and Seele talking about another city to the south, but she had dismissed that as an Explorer lie. The three Skin-Faces may have been the first strangers she’d seen…the first non-Explorers anyway. Their presence upset her more than they upset me. They were proof she wasn’t unique.
I didn’t belabor the subject. “You said you came this way once before…when you decided to follow the other Explorers. You didn’t see the Skin-Faces?”
“No.”
“But you did get this far?”
“Yes, Festina. The great river where I stopped is still ahead.”
I frowned. Why hadn’t she seen Skin-Faces on her last trip? Had she just been lucky? Or were the three spearmen outside their usual territory? Maybe they were the only people of their kind here on the plains; or maybe there was a tribe of thousands, but they usually stayed south of the great river Oar talked about.
Maybe we were walking straight into the arms of a horde who had already killed one set of Explorers and now wore their skins.
Jelca? Ullis?
I gritted my teeth. “Let’s get moving,” I said. “But keep your eyes open for trouble.”
“I am ready, Festina.”
She swung her silver axe to her shoulder. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was meaningful, or if she was simply getting ready to move out. Did she understand that her axe could be a weapon, or did she only see it as a tool for clearing trees?
I shivered. Spears. Axes. Weapons.
Feeling the weight of the stunner in my hand, I headed off at Oar’s side.
Night on the Plains
The footprints of the spearmen had come from the southwest; therefore I headed southeast, setting a brisk pace until the depths of dusk. We camped for the night in a stand of a dozen trees—large enough to conceal us from prying eyes, but small enough that we still had a clear view in all directions.
Before we went to sleep, I tuned the Bumbler’s intruder scan to cover the maximum possible area. With so much ground to cover, the Bumbler wouldn’t be as sensitive—it would probably overlook snakes, for example, especially ones moving slowly—but it would detect glass spearmen at almost a klick away.
Frankly I didn’t give a damn about snakes that night…even rattlers.
When sleep finally came, my dreams were ugly: Yarrun as a Skin-Face, tattered flesh hanging from his disfigured jaw. He tried to kill me with a spear, or maybe it was Oar’s axe; I couldn’t keep my attention on the weapon with that ravaged face in front of me. As sometimes happens in dreams, it kept repeating itself ineffectually—Yarrun would lunge and I would dodge, much too slowly. The weapon came in, but nothing happened, as if my mind didn’t care whether the blow actually landed. The moment passed, then the whole thing started again: Yarrun attacking again and again, with both of us sluggish, as if slowed by water.
It was a tiring dream…like doing hard work hour after hour. Eventually I woke, still in darkness. I lay on my back and stared at the stars for a long time. Maybe the dream really happened then: when I assembled the random nonsense floating through my mind and interpreted it as Yarrun attacking. Some psychologists claim that’s the way dreams work—invented after the fact, when you try to impose order on the mental chaos. Perhaps I owed it to Yarrun to dream about him. Who knows?
If I thought about Yarrun, I would cry. If I thought about Chee, I would probably cry too. If I thought about Jelca…I wouldn’t cry, but it wouldn’t help my mood.
In the end, I passed the time devising ways to fight people made of glass. How to punch them without breaking my hand. Where to kick for maximum effect. Whether their greater density made them harder or easier to take down with a leg sweep. And the perennial question of any martial artist raised under League of Peoples’s law: how to batter opponents into unconsciousness without the risk of killing them.
No one has ever answered that question to my satisfaction. That made it a good topic for thought in the restless night…letting my mind swirl around the possibilities until finally, sleep took mercy on me.
Dragons
There was frost the next morning—a white feathered coating across the broad green of the prairie. Oar considered it an aesthetic improvement; she also enjoyed the way her breath turned to steam when she huffed out.
“I have become a dragon,” she told me. “Haahhhhh! I am breathing fire.”
“How do you know about dragons?” I asked.
“My sister told me.”
“Before or after she met the other Explorers?”
“I cannot remember.”
Idly, I wondered if her sister heard about dragons from Jelca and Ullis, or if the dragon myth was so old, these people remembered it from long-ago days on Earth.
Less idly, I wondered if dragons weren’t a myth on Melaquin: if there really were fire-breathing creatures, created by bored bioengineers. Exposed out here with open space in all directions, would we suddenly see a flying giant in the sky?
Sometimes I hate the way an Explorer’s mind works.
The River
We reached the great river shortly after noon, having seen no further sign of glass-people. Although the day had started clear, gray clouds stole in throughout the morning, making the sky morosely overcast. The river was none too cheerful either: half a klick wide, muddy, and festooned with deadfalls. Every dozen meters or so, bare branches protruded from the water, remnants of trees that had fallen upstream, floated a while, then run aground in shallows. Here and there, larger logs lurked under the surface, their slime-coated wood a jaundiced yellow.
“I do not like this river,” Oar said.
“Because it came close to drowning you?”
“It is also mean and spiky.”
The spiky bits—the deadfalls—worried me too. Before seeing the river, I had planned to cross using some suitably floatable log: Oar would cling to the log, while I dog-paddled to push it from one bank to the other. Now I realized that was easier said than done. Finding a log wasn’t the problem; we could chop down a tree from the many stands dotting the shore. However, threading the log through the erratic palisade of deadwood, without running afoul of sunken obstacles…that would take luck.
I hated relying on luck. When it worked, it made me feel so damned eerie.
To give myself time to think, I led Oar east for a while, tracking the shoreline to see if we’d find somewhere better to cross. Three bends of the river later, nothing had changed: deadfalls in the shallows and sunken trees farther out. Worse, I hadn’t any new ideas and the longer we dithered on shore, the more chance we might be spotted by people we wanted to avoid. The clincher was the sky darkening minute by minute. Rain was coming: rain that would fill the ri
ver with fast-running mud.
“Here’s a good place,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “A good straight stretch of open water.” It was only half a lie: the river did run straight for a klick, but it was just as congested as everywhere else.
It took fifteen minutes to find a fallen tree, trim its branches with the axe, then drag the trunk to the river. Oar’s glass muscles did most of the work. Soon we were in the water, positioned on the upstream side of our “boat”—if we did run into a sunken log, I didn’t want us squeezed between the log and our tree trunk. For final preparations, I held the stunner in one hand and slung the recharged scuba device around my neck. Oar wasn’t happy I kept the rebreather for myself, but it was the rational thing to do. She couldn’t die by drowning; I could. The rebreather would also give me a chance to pull us both out of trouble if something went wrong.
The water was not as cold as the stream we’d hidden in the day before, or maybe it just seemed warmer because the air had turned cool. Clearing the shore proved easy enough—we only snagged once on a deadfall, and Oar chopped us free within seconds.
Good axe.
The current was slow but strong, moving about a meter per second. As I flutter-kicked us forward, the far shore slid dreamily sideways. Oar kept up a steady chatter of encouragement. “We are doing very well, Festina. We are going to miss that log there…yes, see? And if we go a little faster…yes, we have cleared that one too. We are doing very well. Very, very…” She stopped. “What is making that beeping sound?”
“The Bumbler,” I panted. “Proximity alarm.”
“Is this where we say Oh shit, Festina?”
“Let me get back to you on that.”
Scanning for Trouble
The League of Peoples Page 18