Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "Oh." Gretchen managed to smile. "I'm pretty safe then—the Company moves us every year or so."

  Hummingbird nodded, turning a square of folded paper over in his hands. "You don't believe me. But think about your children—how many times have they changed their room around? Put the beds under the window, away from the window, asked for bunk beds, didn't want bunk beds? Decided to sleep in the living room instead? Changed rooms, if they had the option? Didn't you do that when you were younger?"

  The world seemed to gel to a sudden, glassy stop. Gretchen licked her lips.

  Now," he continued in the same implacable voice. "Do you have an elderly relative? Stiff, old, strangely frightening. A housee filled with things you must not touch? Rooms filled with furniture no one uses and which must never be moved? Strict rituals of the home—dinner at the same time, always the same prayer beforehand, things done in just such a way? Do you remember how you felt, when you were a child in such a place?"

  "I was afraid," Gretchen whispered, almost lost in memories of her great-grandfather's tall, dark house. "I couldn't breathe."

  "It was dark, even when the shutters or drapes were open. Musty. It smelled of shadow."

  Hummingbird's eyes were limpid green, sunlight falling through leaves into still water.

  "Memory," he continued, "is a physical change in the human brain. So too are skills laid down by repetition. Perception is governed, interpreted by pathways created by experience. A child's mind is loose, chaotic, filled with a hundred, a thousand paths from source to conclusion. But as a man ages, as he grows old—"

  "I know," Gretchen said abruptly. "I took some biochemistry at the university. Neural pathways in the brain become consolidated. Fixed. Memories are lost or discarded, replaced by different sets of connections. There are diseases which attack the pathways, trapping people in repeated time."

  Hummingbird placed the packet of paper on the ground between them. "Lost in memory. Or they lose the ability to form new pathways, gain new skills, see the world afresh. Trapped in routine, bound in shadows. The mind becomes rigid. A quiet, unseen death—long before the body runs down to silence."

  Gretchen roused herself, lifting her chin. "Don't the tlamatinime have homes? Families?"

  "Of course." The corners of Hummingbird's eyes crinkled. "They are very lively and we rarely remain in the same physical building for more than a year or two. And in the course of our business, we are always in motion. We have restless feet."

  "And this?" She pointed suspiciously at the paper packet. "This is like what you gave me before?"

  "This is different." Hummingbird considered her with a weighing expression. "The first packet was a helper to 'open-the-way'. This ... this is 'he-who-reveals'. For most students this substance will let you find a... a guide, would be the best description. A guide who can help you control the sight."

  "What kind of a guide?" Gretchen's suspicion deepened. "Aren't you my guide or teacher in this business?"

  The nauallis shook his head slightly. "He-who-reveals is already within you, but in most men and women he is sleeping. Sometimes, if a person is troubled or under stress, the guide will speak to their dreams, more rarely in waking life—a voice which seems to come from the air, offering guidance. The guide is outside yourself, yet privy to all you know, see and do."

  "That is disturbing." Gretchen scratched the back of her neck. "A stranger inside my head? Will this ... drug ... let me communicate with 'he-who-reveals'?"

  "This will wake him up." Hummingbird pushed the packet toward her with the tip of his finger. "For a little while. What bargain you strike with him is upon you to effect. No one else."

  "And what does he give me in return?"

  Hummingbird shrugged, an obstinate look growing in his lean old face. "Such things are none of my business."

  "How can there be another... anything... in my mind?"

  "You misunderstand. He-who-reveals is the self which looks upon self with clarity. You are one being."

  "What?" Gretchen felt another chill. The nauallis's words seemed slippery, their meaning darting away from her consciousness, silver fish vanishing into dim blue depths. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  Hummingbird folded his hands. "He-who-reveals is the honest mirror. In your terms, he is the self without affect, without deception, without delusion. Have you ever tried to see yourself from outside? Perhaps, at the edge of sleep, you've seen yourself from above, as though your mind were separated from the body, able to look upon you with a stranger's eyes?"

  "Yes." Gretchen rubbed her arms. "When I was a kid—I was scared to death I wouldn't be able to get back inside my own head. I'd be lost forever and I'd die."

  "Fear," Hummingbird said, rather smugly, "is a barrier to sight."

  "Fine." Gretchen gained a very distinct impression the old man was laughing at her. She picked up the packet. "I just put this on my tongue?"

  Hummingbird reacted quickly, catching her hand before she could open the paper. "You should lie down first. There will be a physical reaction. And drink something. This is thirsty work."

  ―—―

  The storm continued to rage outside. Violent yellow lightning flared among the roaring clouds and drifts of sand crept towards the windows. Visibility dropped to less than a meter. Hummingbird's chrono told him sunset had come, yet there was no apparent difference outside. The flare and crack of lightning stabbed through the murk. The building shivered with thunder.

  Hummingbird waited, half asleep himself, while Anderssen lay on the floor, covered with blankets, a makeshift pillow under her head. The woman twitched and shuddered. Sometimes she spoke aloud, but even the nauallis could not understand the words.

  Near midnight, with the wind howling unabated outside, Gretchen began to cough. Hummingbird rolled over and lifted her head. Her eyes opened wide, staring up at the blue-lit ceiling.

  "Huhhh..." She doubled over, hacking violently. Hummingbird crouched down, supporting her arms. "Uhhh ... it's too hot. Too hot."

  Gretchen shoved the blankets aside, panting, her hair lank with sweat. Without thinking, she tugged the collar of her suit open, gasping for breath. Hummingbird scooted back warily and stood up, a worried frown on his old face.

  "I can see," Gretchen said abruptly, her hands raised and trembling in the air. She stared at Hummingbird. "I can see your face, a sun hiding in clouds, your eyes brilliant jade, your face marked with red bands." Her expression twisted in horror, pupils dilating. Sweat flushed from her skin and ran in thin silver streams down her neck. "You're not a human being!"

  "I am," Hummingbird said, remaining very still. "You are seeing the nechichiualiztli—a mask of purpose and duty—not me! You must be careful or this kind of sight will blind you. Can you see your own flesh, your own hand?"

  Gretchen looked down and her face contorted, the skin stretching back from her teeth. She began to shake, muscles leaping under the flesh like snakes squirming in a calfskin bag. "I can see I can see I can see."

  Hummingbird moved carefully to the side, quietly, without disturbing the air. "What do you see?"

  "Nothing! There is nothing there! Darkness!" Gretchen was shouting, though her whole body was frozen into trembling immobility.

  "Where is your hand?" Hummingbird said, his face close to hers, watching the flickering tic-tic-tic of her eyelids from the side. "See your hands. Here they are. You can see them."

  Gretchen's neck stiffened like a log, the tendons and veins standing out like wire. "My hand is gone. I am gone. There is nothing here. Nothing here." Her voice had the quality of a scream, though it was soft, not even a whisper.

  "Remember your hand, remember what you saw when we were sitting in the desert? Do you remember how clear it was, your hand, so fine and distinct?"

  "Yes. Yes. I remember." Gretchen slumped into his waiting arms, her body loose, each muscle exhausted. By the time he laid her down, she was sound asleep. Hummingbird breathed out, a long, slow, even breath, and a fine mist of smoke h
issed from between his teeth, settling over the woman's body.

  Sometime after midnight the sound of the wind changed. Hummingbird roused himself from meditation and padded to the window. The rattling hiss of sand against the porthole had tapered off. He could see the sullen flash of lightning far away.

  "Hmm." The old man checked Anderssen, sleeping deeply under all the blankets he could find. Her skin was cold and clammy. Worried, he fished a stout wrist out of the covers and examined the medband with an experienced eye. Her body was suffering a toxic reaction, so he keyed a series of dispense codes into the metal bracelet and then tucked her hand away, out of the chill air.

  The pressure doors on the main airlock had frozen shut, forcing the nauallis to detour around through the machine shop and out through a hatch jammed open by a chest-high drift of sand. Squirming out into the night, Hummingbird took care to adjust his goggles to the near-absence of light.

  The smaller buildings—the lab bunker, the ice house, the sheds for the tractors and carryalls—had vanished under lumpy dunes. Hummingbird turned right and half-walked, half-slid down into a trough in front of the main building. He headed toward the hangar, peering out at the sky and horizon.

  There were no stars. The storm had lifted for the moment, but it had not passed. Stray winds eddied between the buildings, throwing sand at his legs. Out on the plain, he made out vague twisting shapes. Lightning stabbed in the upper air, flickering from cloud to cloud. In the intermittent, brilliant light, Hummingbird made out roiling, swift-moving clouds rushing past. A white-hot spark flared in the middle distance and the nauallis saw, throat constricting in atavistic fear, a monstrous funnel cloud snake down from the boiling sky.

  More heat lightning flared above and the bloated tornado danced across a range of dunes a half-dozen kilometers away. Millions of tons of sand sluiced up into the sky, the entire ridge vanishing. The air trembled, a shrieking sound rising above the constant wind, and Hummingbird began to run.

  The main door of the hangar building was stuck again, the bottom of the articulated metal plating buried in a meter of sand. Hummingbird dodged around the side, feeling the ground shake, and found a service door that opened inward. The reflected glare of lightning threw the entrance into deep shadow, but Hummingbird did not hesitate. He threw his full weight against the locking bar and was rewarded with a deep-throated groan of complaining metal. Two hard jerks managed to unlock the mechanism and he stumbled inside.

  Less than a kilometer away, the funnel raced past, shaking the air with a stunning boom. Sand rained down from the raging sky. Hummingbird shoved the door closed, fighting against dust spilling in between his feet. Luckily, the pressure door had a counter-rotating weight and once in motion the door closed itself

  The still, quiet darkness of the hangar was a bit of a shock. The heavy walls muted the roar and thunder of the storm to distant grumbling. Hummingbird switched on his lightwand and made a circuit of the big room. Both Midges were still in place, wings folded up, engines and systems on standby. The faint smell of idling fuel cells permeated the air. More out of habit than anything else, the nauallis shone his light inside the cockpits, into the cargo compartments, ran his hands across the engines and peered underneath.

  And he stopped. His light shifted back, focusing on the forward landing gear of his Midge.

  Most of the wheel was invisible, obscured by a dull gray coating—as if the quickcrete floor had grown up to engulf the landing gear. Hummingbird circled around to the front of the ultralight and found all three wheels encased in stone.

  "Well," he said, jaw tightening. In the questing gleam of his lightwand, he saw Anderssen's Midge was similarly afflicted. He lowered the light, clicking his teeth together in thought. "I'd better check my boots again."

  The funnel cloud broke apart far to the south of the camp, splintering into dozens of smaller vortices and then dissolving into a rush of sand and grit and sandstone fragments. The storm continued to move west, obscuring the plain with towering walls of dust. Clouds thinned, but did not part, over the camp. Stray winds gusted between the buildings, though in comparison to the violence which had just passed relative quiet reigned.

  Russovsky stood on the crest of a dune, tangled blond hair whipping around her head, eyes fixed on the low, rounded shapes of the camp buildings. She wore neither mask nor goggles, though the apparatus of a rebreather and recycler clung to her back and chest. The once-glossy black skin of the suit was matted and dull, abraded by the constantly prying wind. Her roots had crumbled long ago, shredded by rocks or eaten away by the tiny, blind maiket.

  At a distance, she could feel the presence of the human machine like the warmth of the sun-which-kills, hot and sharp, pressing against her face. The pattern of its movements, the residue of its passage, was clear in the air and upon the ground. There was familiar comfort in the humid smell humanity left behind, the traces of exhalation and sweat mixing in the cold sharp air. Far different from the clean, distinct impressions of the hathol or the furry blaze of the deep-dwelling firten.

  A rumbling crack echoed from the north and Russovsky turned her head—a slow, methodical motion—to feel the twisting power in the storm building again. A vortex was building in the upper air, swirling currents rushing into a knot of power building from hundreds of kilometers in every direction. Soon the wave front would smash across the plain, pummeling everything in sight with unbounded rage.

  Russovsky felt steadily building disquiet—not at the pending violence, for the pattern of the storm was as familiar to her as the shape of the camp buildings or the spreading stain of the hathol in the dune below her feet—but at a sense of disassociation creeping through ordered, clearly defined thoughts.

  Black clouds staining a clear blue sky. Plunging ebon tendrils which flattened and distorted in the summer air, driven by-winds at great heights.

  Her memories of the-life-before were dying, fading, replaced by confused, diffracted images of things she was sure did not exist in her world, events she had never experienced herself.

  A night sky so flushed with stars, night was barely different from day. A bloated, dim sun the color of rust. Obsidian mountains rising to unimaginable heights, rectangular black slabs shimmering against an ochre sky. Fields of silver flowers which constantly turned to face the sun. A sense of impossible age.

  Did she see these things herself? Were they dreams? Russovsky examined memories of her life before this life and found them rife with the sensation of dreams and phantoms and half-seen images whelped from confusion or exhaustion. Yet there were no cyclopean towers, no vast cities dreaming under the cruel, brilliant sky of her human memories. These new memories felt strange, foreign.

  They felt as things she'd seen with waking eyes.

  Disturbed, she turned her attention away from such disorderly matters. The slow, comfortable song of the hathol permeating the dune slope drew her attention. Here was respite from the storm, from the bleak thoughts, from tormenting phantoms, from the nagging pressure of the distant machine. Russovsky knelt, hands flat on the unsteady slope. Her fingers sank into the muted glow of the sand-dwellers. A darker hue spread from her contact, spilling through the delicate threads and spongiform clusters forming the hive. Her own skin became tainted with the reddish radiance of the slow ones.

  Russovsky became still, her body locked in position, and the red glow mounted through her arms, into her chest, flooding down into her torso. Even as her body began to crumble, flaking into translucent fragments, skinsuit hardening to stone and dissolving, the darker stain spread across the dune face, rushing through the fragile circulatory system of the hive.

  The Russovsky-shape shuddered into a rain of dust, sand and stone fragments. Wind rippled across the debris, anointing the darkened hive with glowing red dust. A second wave of radiance flooded through the hathol, picking out the threads and tendrils in bright new colors.

  At the base of the dune, where the dust gathered, where the heart-clusters of the hive dwelt under
meters of hard-packed sand, the dark stain pooled, thickened, began to build toward the storm-tossed sky. An outline formed with visible speed, sand and dust and grit knitting into bone, sinew, flesh, blood, the triply-insulated rubbery layer of a skinsuit. In the fullness of time, long, ragged blond hair.

  Russovsky flexed her arms, brushing husks of dead hathol away from her fingers. Bare feet broke free of an encasing shell and she turned toward the encampment. The suit was glossy and dark again, made new, refreshed.

  The strobe-flare of distant lightning washed over her face. A muttered growl of thunder stirred the air, fanning her hair.

  AMONG THE BROKEN MOUNTAINS

  Hadeishi clung to a retaining bar, leaning in over the shoulder of the Fleet pilot at the controls of the work platform. Heicho Felix and her assault team were crowded in behind him, bulky dark shapes—combat armor and helmets matte-black to fade into the background, their tools, weapons and ammunition racks slung tightly against their bodies. Crates of hardware filled the rest of the very limited space. The platform slowly drifted forward, barely nudged by a set of four compressed gas jets. Hadeishi watched a passive plot updating on the tiny flight panel.

  "Five hundred meters," the pilot's voice was steady. An EVA work platform was not the usual vehicle of choice for the shuttle jockeys, but this job required a steady hand and nerves. Though Master's Mate Helsdon had volunteered, the chu-sa had politely ignored his offer. The machinist was far too valuable to risk on a wild throw like this.

  "Four hundred meters."

  Hadeishi clicked his throat mike. Though the comm connection to the cruiser was on a hardline, he had no intention of making any more noise than absolutely necessary. A moment later, Koshō's voice was perfectly clear on his earbug.

  No sign of activity. The exec sounded entirely at ease. No sign of remotes or drones on picket. You are clear to continue.