“First we nearly die of thirst; now we drown,” Kilczer grumbled. “Where is this rain from?”
Dorthy was trying to remember something. Something about desert washes and rain. Flash floods. She tugged at Kilczer. “We have to climb,” she said. “Come on.”
He pulled back, hunching his shoulders. “You are crazy. Wait until this stops.”
“We’re in a riverbed, you idiot!” Dorthy shouted. Surprise widened on his face, and then he understood.
The slope of bare rock ran with rippling sheets of water; time and again Dorthy’s thin-soled boots slipped and she had to throw herself forward to stop herself sliding back. Her breasts and hips and knees were bruised, her coveralls sodden. Kilczer, laden by the rifle strapped sideways on his back and the orange sack at his hip, climbed no faster. They were less than halfway up when Dorthy heard an ominous rumble. The rock beneath her fingertips vibrated and she clung tighter, turning her head against cold slick hardness. Raindrops rolled her eyelashes, bejewelled her vision. The vibration was a roar now, so loud that she was unsure if she was hearing it or feeling it with the length of her body. Then a wall of water surged around the bend in the canyon, metres high, one side purling in white foam as it struck the wall (and rocks crumbling into the deluge threw up their own cascades of foam), dropping lower as the other smooth crest came on, forever falling at its feet, a great grinding torrent of tawny water.
All this in an instant. The next, Dorthy was clinging by her hands as her legs, awash to the knees in spume, were knocked loose. Kilczer, a little higher, reached down and grabbed the neck of her coveralls as the current pulled at her. With all her strength, she pushed up, pain shooting through her arms, kicked away from the water, now only the roiled surface of a deep, strongly running river.
When they reached the top of the slope, Dorthy collapsed forward on matted vegetation, uncaring as rain hammered her slicked hair, her soaked coveralls. Curtains of rain blew across the open ground; beyond, trees bent before the wind. The sun was a vast smear in low black cloud.
Kilczer bent and lifted her, and together they staggered forward, feet sinking to the ankles in flooded tendrils, gained the shelter of the trees. The dense canopy more or less screened out the rain, but trickles still found their way through, pattering on the sodden carpet of needles, running down the smooth-barked trunks, rebounding from the humped roots over which Kilczer and Dorthy kept tripping in the near darkness. After the third fall Kilczer simply lay there, and began to laugh. Dorthy sat on a wet tree root, wiped her face. “What’s so funny?”
“If I knew no better, I think someone is really out to get me.” His laughter became a choked cough. She heard him draw a rattling breath, spit. “This is crazy. A crazy thing.”
Dorthy leaned back against the tree trunk. Water trickled down the back of her neck, but she was so wet that it didn’t matter. “They knew,” she said, after a moment’s silence.
“Who?”
“The herders. They turned their…their children out of the canyon in time, and that chrysalis was lodged high up—the flood won’t touch it.”
Kilczer coughed. “This is teleology. Instinct, coincidence. That is all. Not intelligence. You get your Talent working properly, you prove it, then I believe. But truly I think the herders did not build this ecology, they are simply part of it. My readings showed this. Not intelligent, or perhaps a little more than an unmodified chimpanzee. Andrews was wrong. They are not the enemy. They are not even the barbarian descendants of the enemy.”
“I don’t know if they are or aren’t, not yet. But there was something—”
“Ah, yes. You feel it, I know. Your wonderful Talent, so much better than my machines.”
“It isn’t magic!”
“Dr. Yoshida, you must understand—”
She was gripping the smooth tree root with both hands, she realized, and let go. Her palms tingled. She was very tired. “It isn’t magic,” she repeated.
“We should rest,” Kilczer said, as if he hadn’t heard her; and what with the soughing of the wind in the branches above and the multitudinous sounds of water seeking by many ways the common lowest level, perhaps he had not. After a while he added, almost shyly, “It is very damned cold. Perhaps we should share our warmth?”
Dorthy hugged herself. “I’m all right. Please, let’s just rest a while.”
But for a long time, cold and afraid, she could not find sleep. Again and again the events of the long day passed through her mind, the knife-edge by which she had survived. She nodded and immediately awoke, opening her eyes to near darkness, dim shapes of trees receding into shadow all around. Kilczer was huddled nearby. She remembered the glimpse she had had of the herder in the forest beside the lake, felt the depth of silence at her back. There was nothing there, she told herself, nothing but the sounds of the rain. And it was the lulling sound of rain, persistent and as innocent of meaning as white noise, familiar despite the infrequency with which she had heard it during her strange childhood, that at last loosened her grip on her buoyant fear, let her sink into sleep.
It was still raining when Dorthy awoke; or at least, water was still finding its way beneath the canopy of branches, pattering on to the deep carpet of dead needles. But it was lighter, and she could read the black numerals in the skin of her wrist: 0743 of some irrelevant morning in Greater Brazil…perhaps halfway to noon here.
Kilczer slumped against a loop of root a metre away, his face hidden by the fallen shadow of his long hair. His breath sawed raggedly in his open mouth.
Dorthy shivered, crossing her arms over her breasts and rubbing the wet cloth of her coveralls over the ladder of her ribs, then stretched to relieve the cricks in her back, yawned. A tightness around her mouth tugged, then broke; bitter fluid spilled from her lips and she spat, rubbed at raw skin where blisters had burst. She found a still pool cupped in the hollow where a root bent, and drank. Water was no problem now. But, when she was done drinking, she realized that she was hungry.
She relieved herself some distance away, quickly and nervously, then went back to Kilczer and without thinking woke him the way her mother had always woken her, stroking the skin behind the ear. He stirred, caught her hand, and drew her down so that her face was centimetres from his. “So it is real,” he said, and let go.
Dorthy drew back, shaken. Kilczer got to his feet, moving slowly, rubbed his tangled hair with the knuckles of both hands. “Can you walk?” he asked. “My legs have turned to stone, I think.”
Her blistered feet were numb inside her boots, but otherwise she felt all right. Those early mornings, running along the ridge of the crater beyond Camp Zero. She said, “You’ll find that will wear off once you’ve been walking a while. You pushed us hard yesterday.”
“I am eager to get back to civilization.” He picked up the rifle, the orange sack of oddments. “You look as bad as I feel,” he said. “Come on.”
They stumbled out of the forest, and Dorthy saw what she had missed in the darkness of the rainstorm: a smashed track that scarred the broad margin between the edge of the canyon and the eaves of the forest, scored down to bedrock in the middle, merely mud at the margins. It was still raining, but the rain was no more than a thickened mist drifting through the air. High above, a deck of tattered black cloud pulled apart to reveal an airy chasm filled with the coal-red fire of the sun. Kilczer crossed the track left by the herd to look down into the canyon, and Dorthy followed. Black water ran quickly between the rock walls. No path there.
As they tramped beside the track, Kilczer asked, “What did you mean, about magic? About your Talent?”
“What do you know about the way my Talent works?”
Kilczer was carrying the rifle on his shoulder, one arm hooked over it. He looked over the arm. “Do you want me to tell about the quantum correspondence effect, or how you translate synapse firings generated by it into your own sensorium? Or perhaps I tell you about the limitations, for instance your inability to access long-term RNA memory. My machine at least
detects the amount in storage, and the location. I could talk an hour on each.”
“I’m sure that you can.”
“So you see I know it is not magic.”
“But you behave as if it was, don’t you see? As if it is a magical gift that I have, a gift that you lack. Perhaps it wasn’t conscious, but I know that you expected me to instantly find out all about the herders, just by squinting my eyes a little and concentrating. Duncan Andrews felt the same way, and he should have known better, too. The problem is that those creatures are like nothing I’ve encountered before. I don’t know whether or not they’re intelligent; I don’t even know how to begin to make sense of them. If I found nothing at the first attempt, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t something there.”
“Perhaps. But you see no blazing light of intelligence in the herders as you described you have seen twice now. Reading them did not knock you out.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“So,” Kilczer said, “perhaps that is a different thing, something we have yet to find, something that is nothing to do with the herders. Perhaps it and not they are the enemy.”
After four paces, Dorthy said, “You really think that there’s a hidden civilization here?”
“Have you not already discovered something suggesting it? Look around you. Think of the technology in the asteroids around BD twenty. They have spaceships, all crazy kinds. Habitats, weapons. This is classified, but it will not matter if you know it: the enemy has a way of creating a self-sustaining plasma ball. Travels fast, a quarter the speed of light. That is what takes out so many of our ships, down in the gravity well of BD twenty. But here, in this hold? At best this is some kind of park, abandoned, the owners dead or elsewhere. At worst, it is the ruins of something grander, as Duncan Andrews believes. I do not. Think, Dr. Yoshida. If those herders are the enemy but have degenerated, why has the keep awakened as it has? Major Ramaro is right. The enemy is here, somewhere.”
“I don’t know.” Dorthy walked a little more. “Why are you so fired up by this anyway?”
“For the opportunity to discover, not for the hiking, that is certain. It is a great honour, to be asked to join this expedition, although I know you do not think so.”
“But you wanted to come, all you scientists did. For all you grumble about the Navy’s restrictions, you all want to be here.”
“Nervous-system tracing is my life work, Dr. Yoshida. I can do it with humans, but many do that; or with animals, but there are only a number of simple themes to describe. I spent six weeks on Elysium, studying the aborigines—that until now was the highlight of my career. So when I am asked of course I come here. Nowhere else can I study intelligent aliens—when we find them.”
“And so of course you have to believe that they exist.”
“And you hope all there is, is the herders, so you go home quickly.” But he said this with good humour, without rancour. Whatever he was thinking was now completely opaque to Dorthy. Her Talent was biding its time. Perhaps the intermittent seizures had passed: she hoped so.
They walked for an hour without speaking, the constant rain filtering out of the air uncomfortable only when wind blew it across the canyon into their faces. Sometimes the clouds opened enough to glimpse the rising uplands of forest that they had still to climb. Five days, six days to reach the lakeside camp?
Then the canyon bent away sharply, and the track they were following became a path smashed through the forest, trees ripped out of the ground, broken foliage half buried in the mud churned from the needle-covered ground. When the land opened out again it was on to a long, rising meadow of the tendrilled groundcover that had carpeted the shore of the lake. The herd had widened its path here, trampling a great swath through the violet vegetation. And not far from the edge of the forest were the remains of a great fire.
The charred circle still smoked here and there, where patches of glowing charcoal clung to the undersides of great boles that had been roughly heaped together. Kilczer kicked a smaller log over and it rekindled. Blue fire sizzled in the misty drifting rain.
Kilczer held his hands out over the flames. “Those herders are strong, all right. We would need a small truck to haul trees this size out of the forest.”
Dorthy felt warmth rise up, caress her wet face. At her back, a breeze beat the sodden cloth of her coveralls. “How do they light fires, anyway?”
“They carry sparks around, smouldering stuff wrapped in clay. That is what Ade told me.” He was looking at the meadow and the forest that bordered it, the land rising ahead, vanishing into cloud. “Cannot have been more than a few hours ahead of us when they left here.”
“What would you do if you caught up with them?”
“We, Dr. Yoshida. Why do you always talk as if you are not here? You wipe yourself from existence.”
Dorthy, remembering her mother, said nothing.
Kilczer clapped his hands together, began to poke around in the ashes. On the far side of the fire he picked up a long bone: a lump of meat surrounded the strange, pronged joint, blackly sticky with ashes, which Kilczer brushed away before he shoved the end into the fire. Fat sizzled. Yellow sparks danced through the blue flame.
Dorthy didn’t like to think about where the meat had come from, but ate gladly enough, her jaw staggering on crisp fat. Kilczer pulled up a twining length of groundcover, tasted it, spat it out. “Pah. I think we must be carnivores, like the herders. Next time we rest, I go hunting again.”
“I wish you’d let me take the rifle. I really am a fair shot.”
Kilczer said nothing for almost a minute. Then he pushed back long, wet hair and muttered, “I wish this rain would stop,” and started to poke around the charcoaled circle once more while Dorthy squatted by the fire watching the scraped bone burn. Once Kilczer said something in Russian, then was quiet, picking over the ashes. After a while he came back, dropped the things he’d found in front of her. One was a metal shard, another a half-melted plastic beaker. A fragment of muddied orange cloth. A length of braided wire.
Kilczer kicked at the burning log until sparks flew higher than his head. “I wondered why there was so little left,” he said. “Why is it they carry our stuff with them, you think?”
Dorthy didn’t point out the obvious conclusion, that he was wrong about the herders. Instead, she suggested, “Shall we start again? I’m more or less dry now.”
Kilczer picked up the wire as if to keep it. But, after scowling at it, he dropped it into the flames and turned away. “Come on,” he said roughly, and started without waiting for her.
They had been walking for two hours or so, the open ground steeper now and studded with boulders and stands of tall woody ferns, when Dorthy was hit by stomach cramps. She crouched with Kilczer holding back her hair, bringing up half-digested lumps of meat, then thin bile, and finally nothing but strings of clear sticky chyme. Her stomach clenched wetly on emptiness; she felt a dismal humiliation. When at last she could stand, red light beat in her eyes, mixing with the dizziness mounting in her head. The vast sun had been revealed by a widening rift in the black clouds. A few hundred metres on, weaker spasms hit her, but now there was nothing at all to come up. She sat on the ground as everything tilted around her, leaned her head against a boulder, concentrating on nothing but her breathing and the cold gritty contact of stone against her brow and cheek and jaw. All around, the silence of the alien land.
Kilczer sat on soggy groundcover a little way from her, his face a dirty white. “It was a chance,” he said, “eating that stuff.”
Presently he managed to stagger off into the ragged margin of the forest, and returned dragging several long, broken branches. He cut away secondary spurs with his knife and flensed wet bark from the dead, dry wood inside, a crumbling punk that he laid in a nest of brown fern fronds before applying the catalighter. Fronds crackled, crumbling as they were quickly consumed; then wood caught, sending up thin resinous smoke. Dorthy collapsed beside it, grateful for the heat that shook into the air
before her face.
“We rest,” Kilczer said. “Is not a bad fire, considering.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Dorthy said, and for a moment managed a smile.
The fire was their focal point in the next two days. Whoever was stronger would stagger off and search out fallen branches and dead ferns, carefully arranging this fuel around the hearth to dry before use. The fire’s bright light was as welcome as its heat, and it came to seem to Dorthy that if it died so did all hope of survival. Both she and Kilczer developed itchy rashes, diarrhoea, shivering fits, boils: the reaction of their bodies to the alien molecules of the meat. The rain over, the sun again dominated a dark unclouded sky. Kilczer’s racking cough returned as the air grew drier, but otherwise, perhaps because he had already lived for long periods on other worlds, he wasn’t as badly affected as Dorthy.
To pass the time he told her something of those worlds: Elysium, Serenity, Novaya Zyemlya, of the expedition to the binary white dwarf system of Stein 2051, in the days when he’d been more medical technician than scientist, before the Guild had allowed him to develop his interest in neurobiology. And he told her about Novaya Rosya, a world once Earth-like, which half a million years ago had suffered a massive cosmic bombardment that had destroyed all but one per cent of its biosphere. Now only the poles were habitable. The rest of the surface was covered in a water and hydrocarbon mixture, a steamy soup at perihelion of the planet’s eccentric orbit, covered with waxy floes at aphelion. Kilczer recounted secondhand tales of the hunting parties that tracked zithsas in their continual migrations, spoke with nostalgic longing of his home in the domed city of Esnovagrad, and of his partner. He showed Dorthy the little holocube whose loop she’d seen him watch over and over since the disaster: a surprisingly young woman, as young as Dorthy, at least fifteen years younger than Kilczer.
“We make contract only two years ago,” Kilczer said. “Before that I was too much on the move. After I settle to my work on Novaya Rosya we will be able to have a child, I will be important then. You may know, there is a large research centre in Esnovagrad, almost as big as the Kamali-Silver Institute, where I help develop the machines.”
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