by Nōnen Títi
The next morning, Leyon, Gos, Doret, and Kunag dragged the huge net the fishermen had given the expedition to the lake’s edge, which was most easily accessible over on the other side where the banks were not rocky. It took about four minutes to walk there from the camp, but that was guessing, since nobody kept time anymore. From that edge the campsite was invisible thanks to the countless reeds that stood nearby – watching them?
They tried to throw the net into the water, determined to pull out what swam under the surface, but it wasn’t so easy to throw it further than where their feet were. They each slipped and fell several times, and gave up when the net got tangled.
“We need a float,” Doret said.
Having cautiously approached them, Leyon pulled at one of the reeds, which came loose easily. In his hands it looked like an ordinary flattened stalk of grass, yet all three of them stood around Leyon as if he was holding a baby nobi. The reed didn’t respond, nor did the others.
After handling it for a while, Leyon pulled some more and started plaiting them together. He added each new reed to his creation until he had a little bowl, which he set afloat. It sank only a little and then held even when Leyon put a hand-sized rock inside it. Doret pulled some reeds of his own to try and copy.
“How did you learn to do that?” Gos asked.
“I didn’t. I was just looking at the carry-packs.”
“Can it have a sail?” Doret asked.
One rolled-up reed and a piece of cloth from Leyon’s pocket later, Doret’s creation looked like a real sail kabin. He managed to get it floating and they took turns steering it with long reeds until a gust of wind sent it out too far.
Leyon retrieved his own reed kabin. “Maybe I can still reach yours. I’ll check how deep it is,” he told Doret and kicked off his shoes. “Hey, it’s warm; come on, you guys.”
“I don’t know. Maike said no swimming,” Gos protested.
“I’m not swimming, just wading. It’s normal water.”
Kunag didn’t feel like getting wet either; it was impossible to see what was under there.
“Don’t be so boring,” Leyon told them.
Doret threw off his shoes and followed Leyon. Gos then tried for a short moment before saying it was too cold for him, but he’d not said no, so Leyon didn’t consider him a spoil sport. They never reached the boat. Wet up to their knees, Doret and Leyon walked back to camp together, dragging the net. They put up with Maike scolding them for disobeying her, Saski’s accusation of using another life form for their own benefit, and Nini’s warning about dangers, all the while grinning at each other.
Yako looked at Leyon’s toy. “This is really good, guys. Kunag, could you draw a proper kabin shape, so we can make one?”
Kunag could and spent the next half-hour or so drawing while the others went to pull more reeds. A low rumbling noise caught his attention.
“Now what?” Nini asked, also alerted.
Kunag shrugged. How should he know? He looked to the sky, but there was no sign of the fog. Besides, it came from below him.
The others came back saying they’d heard it as well. “We can only hope it isn’t a sign of danger and get on with what we were doing,” Maike said.
“It started when you were pulling reeds, so I think it’s a warning, and I have come to believe that two warnings are not given on Kun DJar. So I think you should use what you have, but not pull any more,” Nini told her.
Maike shook her head slowly at Nini, but didn’t contradict her and no more reeds were pulled. The rumble remained steady and continued until Kundown. Once again, Hani wished aloud for Daili. Once again, that set everybody thinking of home.
The reed kabin took shape over the next day. The reeds, torn into strips, made long, strong fibres which, when braided into rope, could be used to tie the pieces together. Leyon beamed when they expressed their admiration for his handicraft, but when finally launched, the boat didn’t want to stay upright.
“Maybe once I sit in it,” Leyon suggested, but Nini said no and Maike once again agreed with her.
It was a bit of an anti-climax after this period of playful relaxation. Tomorrow they’d move on, further west. Yako and Wolt had been for a walk and found rocks littered with soaking-wet mosses.
That morning, Kunag woke up to see Leyon disappear behind the reed wall when Kun was not yet up. The others were still sleeping. He put on his shoes and followed as quietly as he could. By the time he reached the edge, Leyon was already up to his middle in the water, hanging on to the float in front of him.
“The bottom is so sandy I can’t get a solid footing!” he said.
Kunag kicked off his shoes and waded in, unwillingly, to hold the kabin steady while Leyon climbed in. It wobbled a little before settling.
“I knew it. We put all the reeds in the same way. It had to get waterlogged first. Now all I need is a rudder or a stick or something.”
Kunag looked about him, but nothing was suitable.
“How about getting me the little net?” Leyon asked. The little net had a long handle.
“You’ll float away.”
“Nah, I’ll use my hands to paddle.”
Kunag ran all the way back to camp, but stopped only just in time to remember not to wake them. He picked up the net.
“What are you and Leyon doing together?” Sinti asked, startling him.
“Just taking a walk.”
“In the water?”
Kunag tried to convince her not to tell. They were only trying out the net to look for food.
“Can I come?”
“No.” He ran back. Sinti wouldn’t leave her mat without her shoes on, but she might alert the others. Besides, it was morning; they’d all be awake soon.
With the net handle Leyon pushed himself a little deeper before turning it so he could scoop. The first few times it came up empty.
“I’ll drag it over the bottom!” he shouted, hanging over the edge to get it deep enough. “It’s stuck,” he added a moment later, when the boat stopped moving forward and started turning around the handle. Instead of letting go, Leyon tried to jerk it loose. At the same moment the reed kabin tipped him over the edge and immediately jumped back upright, as if relieved to be rid of its passenger. It moved further onto the lake when Leyon started swimming.
Kunag reached out a hand to help Leyon out of the water. The white handle of the net was visible as a small point in the moving brown waves. A moment later it bobbed up higher and came floating toward them. When pulling it out, they discovered it was full of mud and the mud was teaming with frantic movement: countless miniature creatures.
Leyon’s eyes spoke his satisfaction with the catch. For the second time, Kunag ran back to camp, now to get Leyon some dry clothes and a small jar of some sort. He found them all awake and tidying up. As if it was nothing strange, Kunag collected a bunch of Leyon’s clothes and rolled them into a bundle. He found one of the now-empty food boxes that had a lid. Nobody asked questions, though Sinti was watching him. He sent her a wink just in case.
Leyon poured the contents of the net into the box and dumped the rest into his toy boat. He was scooping the last bits out with his hand when he suddenly yelped and dropped the net. “Something bit me.”
Kunag handed Leyon his clothes. “Just put this on.” He washed out the net himself. “Hurry up already,” he urged when Leyon was still getting dressed, and draped the wet clothes over some rocks to dry, weighed down for the wind with the toy boat, before going back to camp.
Maybe he should have been alert to the lack of chatter from Leyon, but Kunag didn’t notice the swollen hand until Leyon nearly dropped his cup of prut.
“Is that where you got bitten?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. Just an irritation.”
“Have Nini look at it.”
“No way. She’ll want to know what did it.”
Kunag rolled up Leyon’s mat for him and helped him pack. Leyon tried to pretend he was okay during the walk, but he looked pal
e and was too quiet.
“This is stupid, Leyon. Your hand is twice the size it should be. If you don’t go to Nini, I will.”
Leyon agreed, but didn’t speed up, so Kunag did and stopped next to Nini. “It looks ugly,” he told her, after explaining.
Nini agreed. “How long ago did this happen?”
“About an hour.”
“Did it swell up right away?”
“I guess so,” Leyon said.
Nini wanted to know what had bitten him. Leyon told her he didn’t know. Kunag looked away in case she’d ask him.
“Well was it big, small, on the ground or in the ground?” She moved a bit closer. “Or was it in the water?”
Leyon admitted that it had been. “We were at the edge and I got bitten.”
“It looks like a sting to me, and from the way your hair looks you must have been more than at the edge.”
Kunag pulled the box from his pack. “One of these creatures did it. We fished them out with the net.”
Leyon stared at him.
“He slipped and fell in,” Kunag added.
Nini didn’t know any of these creatures. There might be sets of different kinds in there and she wasn’t sure if she could help. She had some leftover DJar cream that had cured the rashes in town. “Better to prevent these things. It always is. I’m guessing just as much as you are,” she said.
“Don’t tell Maike,” Leyon begged her. “Please?”
Nini convinced the others to make the new camp immediately so she could boil some water for Leyon to soak his hand in. It took until Kundown for the swelling to go down and for Leyon to start talking.
“He’s okay,” Maike said. “As soon as he starts being noisy, he’s okay.”
“I don’t know if it was the soaking, the cream, or just dumb luck,” Nini said when coming over to have a last check. “What I do know is that it’s never worth risking your life or even only your hand just so you won’t get in trouble. Next time you’ll need to show me straight away.”
“You didn’t tell though, did you?”
Nini walked away without answering that.
“I thought you didn’t care about getting in trouble?” Kunag asked.
“Those were pranks, just a bit of fun. This is different.”
It took two more days before his hand was normal again. Saski also got a rash from something after digging in the soil. Nini talked to Maike, and from then on nobody was allowed to dig anymore.
They were four days away from the boat lake when they remembered Leyon’s clothing. Kunag had left it lying on the rock with the net and Leyon’s toy boat on top of it.
During the following kor the ground became wetter and eventually so impossible to walk in that Maike decided to turn back when it was already nearly Kundown. By then their feet sank ankle-deep in mud with every step, the smell was sickening, and their bodies were exhausted. There was no place to put the mats down in this slosh, so they walked all night until they were out of the swamp and found a new lake to wash off in. The compass now pointed north-west and there was a new supply of water-drenched moss around.
“Thank Bue for that. I was afraid we’d get stuck in that morass land without drinking water,” Yako said.
“Why didn’t you stop me earlier then?” Maike scolded him and apologized to all of them for carrying on too long.
The new lake was clearer and, when filtered, the water was good for drinking. The ground provided nothing to cook for prut, so they skipped the meal; nobody was hungry and they wanted to preserve the dried zibot meat, since, as Wolt cautioned several times, they still had to get back.
Their clothes were stiff with swamp mud and between them they had two combs left, one of which was Sinti’s and she refused to share it. With his pocket-knife, Leyon tried to make some new ones out of the bits of reed he carried. It worked for a while. …Well, it worked for the men, but Hani had trouble. The reeds broke and the pieces got stuck in the knots of her long, thick hair. She gave up trying. “You’ve got a pair of scissors on that knife right? Just cut my hair with it,” she told Leyon.
She insisted it would only get worse. Leyon did the best he could, but the scissors were small and not very sharp. As Hani’s hair fell onto the mat Kunag noticed something moving. He picked up a bundle. Like the fishing net, the hair was frantic with tiny creatures.
“Oh yuck, what’s that?” Hani exclaimed when he showed her.
Nini made it a point to inspect everybody’s head and found they all had it, except Leyon.
“We have to take a few days so we can collect and boil enough water to wash properly,” she told Maike.
Yako suggested they should all cut their hair. Maike agreed with both of them and this was as good a place as any. Despite her wailing, Sinti had to hand over her comb as well, and of her own accord she then threw away her mirror.
Just when they thought she had stopped crying for the night, when they were all on their mats, Sinti let out an even bigger howl. By the time Kunag had turned around, all he saw was a black cloud retreating from the ground right next to him. It was thinner than the red fog, but moved in a similar way, as if with a purpose. Sinti was the only one who’d had a good look at it, but she was too upset to tell. In the morning they found the bundle of hair that had been on that exact spot missing, along with the tiny lives inside it.
Doret suggested that Sinti had scared it away and saved Kunag just in time.
“I don’t think it was intending to attack,” Nini said. “I think it came for those critters.”
“Why didn’t Leyon get those? He slept on the ground like the rest of us?” Saski asked.
“Because he went swimming in the lake and got his hair covered with mud,” Sinti told her.
She might be right, but instead of praise she got an angry glare from Leyon. Maike never asked what that meant.
“That’s because she already knew,” Hani said. “Sinti told her that same day. We all knew.”
THE BEES, THE FOG, AND THE SEA
The crater looked like it always had. From its rim the landers looked no bigger than insects in a desert. Three still stood upright; but the fourth one had fallen, submitted to the power of the storm. It would be worthless.
Aryan took hold of the rope for balance and started down the slope. Silence filled this empty hole as it had when they first arrived. He’d last been here when returning with the innards of the mother kabin – all but her vital parts. What if she could still fly? What if he could take her away from here? Where to didn’t really matter – space, empty space forever. Imagine their faces, Maike’s face, when she’d return to find him gone. That would show her he was still good for something. He’d show all of them.
The lander he was putting his hopes on, the one he had brought down himself after the storm, looked to be in good shape. The fuel lines had been tampered with and there was a bit of weathering on the tail end, but that could be fixed. He pulled open the door. It creaked and yammered; there was sand in the hinges. A musty smell greeted him; moisture must have gotten in. Must be DJar fungi or there would be no smell. Still, the panel was intact.
Sitting down in the pilot’s seat it felt as if he were here yesterday. He leaned back and closed his eyes. As if master of his little lander again, he felt the upward motion in his stomach and the gentle click as it docked into SJilai. He’d walk to the pilot bay and start up the engines. To see the stars go by, every moment his own, as he had on the fishing kabin for nearly three moons.
That trip had revitalized Aryan. He’d stood for hours alongside Erwin trying to get his head around basic navigation before concluding that sailing an ocean kabin was a skill as much as flying a spacekabin was. The solitude at night on the glimmering ocean, even with six other men, had been a welcome relief. The glimmer was as much part of the ocean as the stars were of the sky. It wasn’t reflected light, but emitted by the water itself. Unable to sit still in the wake of the boat, it could make you dizzy if you stood at the stern; a high you could in
duce yourself, while no thoughts could get a footing in the unremitting wind. No politics, no arguments, no women, just glorious wind and shine, be it night or day.
Erwin admitted that he had worried at first about taking the little kabin away from the coastline, seeing the size of the waves on these massive oceans, but she’d held. In a tank on deck they’d collected their catch: bits and pieces – none of it looked like fish, not even remotely – to be studied.
But back in town there was no Jenet left to study it. A hopeless population with tired, beaten faces had welcomed them. Erwin had returned to find his comate and daughter gone. Aryan had stood by the crying man, unable to do or say anything.
In the meantime, a second expedition had left to look for better places. Maike was leading it. Aryan heard stories about how hard she’d worked throughout the disaster, never giving up. How they admired her.
“Yeah, that’s Maike,” he’d said.
That was how she’d always been, as she had after the storm: right there to pull people out of the mud, while Aryan had been stuck in the crater. Then he’d been good enough to take the children back to SJilai, to sit and watch them take her apart while Maike helped build the new town.
Damn, he didn’t want these thoughts. He’d fix up this lander and get up there. SJilai would fly again. She’d be more than willing to be free from her tether and she needed Aryan to cut the rope. And even if she wasn’t, he’d get her ready.
A sense of urgency took him from the dream. He’d go collect tools from town, come back here and spend some time. He’d be away from people discussing referendums and vandalism, away from the memories still haunting the faces. He’d like to go right away, but it had gone dark outside. No big deal; he’d stay the night. Enough empty seats and silence all around.
Before leaving the crater the next morning, Aryan checked the other landers. The one taken by the storm was not only damaged from its fall, but had been stripped bare: its electrical panels, wiring, wave-connectors, parts of the engine, seats, and big chunks of its framework as well – stripped for trade.