Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  He slowed in relief as he saw her straighten up empty-handed. “You must not touch these,” he said sternly, as if to a child.

  “Are they poisonous?”

  He nodded, his long hands gesturing an awkward apology. “Lagri’s Messengers, they are called. Touching brings fire on the skin. If they bite, the fire is inside.”

  “I see.” Abashed, she tucked her spiny cuttings into her pack and climbed down from the rocks. What the hell’s the matter with me? I wouldn’t go around grabbing at strange animals on Earth… of course, there are no strange animals left on Earth. Not any more. She walked back to the wagon at Ghirra’s side. “Are there many poisonous creatures around?”

  He hesitated and once again, she recognized his look of gentle perplexity. I’ve said something he considers stupid, she guessed.

  “All are poisonous,” he said finally, “for their safety. If not, the larger ones would eat them and they would be gone.”

  He possessed an empirical understanding of evolution after all. “If they’re so poisonous, would that be bad?” she prodded.

  His puzzlement deepened into a frown. “You are a doctor, Suzhannah. Do you cut away your arm if it pains? All of the parts are necessary to the whole.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, eager to disprove Megan’s contention that Sawl religious views did not include a system of ethics. “Is this what the Priests teach?”

  “This is what I teach,” he replied softly. He excused himself and moved ahead to speak soothing words into the small ears of the hjalk as they struggled to haul the heavy wagon along the obstructed ravine.

  Susannah tramped behind in silence, feeling obscurely rebuked. She decided that the new tone she had detected in Ghirra’s manner since the incident with Clausen’s rocks was not so much distance as subtly implied moral superiority. Contemplating it further, she found it all too reminiscent of a certain young linguist of her acquaintance.

  Damn, she worried. Now what’s he been telling them about us?

  The caravan rattled around a narrow, stony bend. Ahead, the leafy banks fell away and the ravine joined a wide sand wash, which then curved and dropped to meet a deep, flat-bottomed canyon. The far rock wall was steep and sharply corrugated, with layers of rose veined with ocher and white. A thin yellow river snaked across the canyon floor. A faint stir in the humid air cooled Susannah’s damp cheek and set the dairy herd, straggling at the rear, to bellowing with unrestrained enthusiasm.

  Tall lemon and amber grasses grew in the marshy areas between the river’s tight curves. Where the water wound close to the steep eastern face, tumbles of rock were overgrown with thick palmate fronds and the bristles of tall stalks resembling giant aloe. A few hard-trunked succulents with long muscular roots clung stubbornly to the stone. They were mud-caked and scarred, but Susannah found them particularly beautiful. They were the first plants she had discovered that had clearly been around since well before the recent storms.

  Several dark oval creatures waddled tortoiselike to the water as the rangers led the caravan down into the canyon and halted along a gentle curl of the river. Susannah watched after them hungrily, taking quick snapshots in her mind for later translation into her sketchbook.

  The herdsmen hurried to oversee the unhitching of the teams. The freed hakra and the hjalk were sent downstream to splash and roll among the dairy herd, under the watchful eye of rotating shifts of apprentices. TiNiamar, the aging Master of the FoodGuild, trudged the full length of the line, from one blue-and-red wagon to the next, hastening preparations for the cooking of the dinner meal. Water casks were unshipped. Fire pits were begun.

  The first throw was over.

  Susannah drained her canteen, no longer concerned if it ran empty, then kicked off her boots and walked to the water’s edge. The stream was shallow and lazy, deeper along the inside of each bend where the current was busy cutting a more comfortable channel into the sand and the sparkling bottom was barely visible through several feet of golden water.

  She rolled up her stained pantlegs and waded in up to her calves, then crouched to dip water with cupped hands, splashing the sweat and grime from her face, letting a handful or two dribble down the back of her neck. The water was not cold, having travelled too many miles over hot sand to retain much of its mountain temperature. But it was cooling, and Susannah lingered in her crouch, face dripping, hands trailing in the gentle current, mind dazed blank from eight hours in the Fiixian sun.

  “Thank the lord for state-of-the-art sun blocks.” Megan padded across the sand to join her. “Aren’t you going for a swim? It looks like everyone else is.”

  Susannah rose blinking from her reverie. For half a kilometer in either direction, Sawls were shedding their clothes and hurrying for the water. Small children ran ahead naked and squealing with delight. Infants barely learning to walk waddled intently after their siblings. Older children carried babies in harness on their backs. The adults were no less eager, and soon the riverbank teemed with brown naked bodies easing themselves gratefully into the depths of the stream. Even paunchy TiNiamar and iron haired Ashimmel forsook their duties long enough for a cooling thigh-high wade.

  Megan and Susannah exchanged glances.

  “When in Rome…” grinned Megan.

  The two women dropped their muddy clothes on the bank and threw themselves into the deepest part of the water. Susannah dove and came up for air refreshed and laughing.

  On the bank, still in their sweat-stained trail gear, Ghirra and Master Ranger Aguidran walked along the row of wagons, deep in conversation.

  3

  The silvery landing vehicle was a surreal addition to the pastoral landscape of white rock and cultivated fields. The sheer cliff face, crisscrossed with carved stairs and ledges, pierced with neat, dark rows of arching cave mouths, was solemn, majestic. The Lander seemed almost clownish, resting at an incongruous tilt since being nearly toppled by the flooding.

  A clearing surrounded the cone-shaped tower, a barren no-man’s-land separating alien metal from the burgeoning red-leafed vegetation in the fields. To one side, a large dish antenna lay on its back in the drying mud, its battered spokes and tom golden mesh glinting with amber sunlight. McPherson stood next to it, a fist pressed to her jaw in sober contemplation. In the four-meter-high space between the Lander’s underside and the mud-swept ground, a base camp had been reestablished.

  “I assume we’re all in an experimental mood tonight?” Emil Clausen wiped the wide blade of his oak-handled cleaver on a towel hitched to his belt, then surveyed the ingredients laid out on the squared horseshoe of crates. He chose a handful of brown golfball-sized spheres and set them on his cutting board. The knife made a comforting thunk against the resealable plastic as he chopped. “Rock fungus,” he explained to whoever was listening. “Should do nicely. And this…” He lifted a bunch of vermilion leaves sprouting from broad yellow stalks. “A trifle garish, I know, but they had such a marvelous pungence, cooking up in the Caves, I couldn’t resist. Still and all, you know, Sawlian cuisine will attain no great heights without the introduction of a few crucial ingredients, like garlic.”

  “You mean you didn’t bring your own?” Danforth shifted his cast-bound legs with effort to the far side of his paper-littered bed. The orange sun, beginning its ever-so-slow descent, was invading his precious shade. He gasped softly as his right knee bumped the worktable that McPherson had just rigged up out of one of the smaller hatchcovers tom from the Underbelly during the storm. She had supported it on either side of the bed with upended sections of utility rack, part of which also held a small computer hooked up to an emergency battery. The concavity of the hatch and its various shallow protuberances were minor inconveniences compared to everything else that was bothering Danforth.

  “By the way,” Clausen continued cheerfully, “I did a few basic field tests. The ore samples turn out to have an exceptionally high lithium content for plain old lepidolite.”

  “I’m glad for you,” Danforth muttered.

>   “But I’m thinking, since lithium cools last out of a melt, we can expect fairly pure veins, so maybe I’ll wait the claim a bit until I find one.”

  “Ummm. Say, Weng, have you got a moment?” Danforth pulled himself upright by his arms, the one part of his body that remained strong and whole. The thickly humid air was like weight in his lungs. His chest wound had begun to itch as it healed, encouraging but destructive to his concentration. He settled more comfortably against his pillows and spread a sequence of photos across his work table. Commander Weng came over to stand at his shoulder, hands clasped behind her waist in an attitude of deep attention. “Okay,” he said, “now tell me what you think of this.”

  Behind them, Clausen continued to chat as he expertly sectioned the spherical mushrooms. “You know, I seem to have stumbled inadvertently on a handy way to extort food out of these little fellows.”

  Danforth drew a red diagonal line across the center of a hemispheric photo of the planet. “That storm activity was confined largely to this narrow band.”

  “Equatorial,” Weng noted.

  “More or less, but inclined, as you can see, northwest to southeast.” He pointed to top and bottom of the planetary disk. “Here are the rotational poles. But the axis of symmetry for the recent activity runs this way, northeast to southwest, some twenty-eight degrees off the rotational poles.”

  Weng gave a nod that managed to imply both encouragement and vague disassociation with the matters of planets.

  Clausen’s voice rose to edge out Danforth’s lecture. “I simply hang around the Caves looking like I’m trying to get in without anyone noticing. The clever little buggers have psyched out my weakness: they know they can distract me with groceries.”

  Danforth glanced over his shoulder in annoyance. “And the wind direction is northeast to southwest and vice versa, moving in both directions along the axis of symmetry.”

  Weng said, “Ah?”

  The planetologist’s eyes rolled and his pencil beat a rhythm of frustration on the metal hatchcover. “Under normal circumstances, Commander, the winds should move west to east, zonally, and perpendicular to the rotational poles. A nice simple system. Not like this nonsense.”

  “Ah.” Weng leaned in for a closer study of the photos.

  “So every day,” said Clausen, scraping the chopped fungus into a plastic bowl, “up I go. And every day, they trot out some new Sawlian delicacy to tempt me with. Must keep them working overtime, with so few of them left at home.” He left his horseshoe counter, rubbing his hands, and went to the edge of the shade to turn the four little carcasses browning on skewers above a glowing dung fire. He chuckled, wagging his head in falsetto mimicry. “Oh me, oh my, what shall we put that dude off with tomorrow?” He poked the fire. “They’ve even learned to surrender the goods uncooked. Food for the imagination as well as for the stomach,” He straightened and called out into the sun, “What’s the verdict, McP?”

  McPherson returned an unintelligible reply from her crouch beside the broken dish.

  At Danforth’s worktable, Weng picked up a photo between delicate fingers to squint at the dateline, then replaced it beside the others in the same sequence.

  “The snow clouds breaking up,” said Danforth.

  “Extraordinarily rapid change,” she murmured. “But then, we saw that with the naked eye, Dr. Danforth. And later…”

  He knew she referred to the most recent and bizarre of meteorological events, the storm that didn’t happen during the Leavetaking. “An anomaly due to extremes of heat and cold,” he replied brusquely. “Has to be. I’ll get to that later. Right now, I’m just dealing with the data we had before we lost CRI. When I woke up after Susannah sewed me back together again, I promised myself I’d approach this problem from a completely different direction: tabula rasa. I spent too much time trying to blame seemingly inexplicable data on inaccuracies in the instruments. Then I lost confidence in my circulation model. But plugging some proven Venus data into it came out fine. So after that, I started altering this term or that, tinkering with the Venus measurements, pushing them more towards this Fiixian data, and then the snow stopped and I…”

  He riffled the corners of a stack of mud-stained printout. “Well, whatever. I never got to finish that process, and now I can’t do any complicated model runs until we get CRI back anyway.”

  Weng offered no comment, but Danforth did not require one, only her patient, listening ear.

  “So I’m thinking about it this way: A does not equal B. What does B lack to make it A? It lacks C. C is the term missing from the equation, not just poor resolution of data or some minor imbalance, but a whole term. Some X factor, some anomalous something, some force that’s unique to this planet, that makes the weather behave the way it does but that the probe instruments somehow missed, so it never got into the model. That’s what I have to look for now, the ad hoc that will make the model start churning out the right results.”

  “What are the possibilities?” Weng searched briefly for an empty crate, then slid a stack of papers aside and sat.

  “Weng, don’t get him started,” Clausen warned, testing the heat on his portable stove with a dampened finger. “I’ll have to hold supper, it’ll be cold, not to say ruined.”

  Danforth’s ebony jaw tightened stubbornly. “I started with the snow data, since that’s what’s available. In that case, we had a classic winter warm-front snowstorm: warm, moist air coming in from the northeast to meet cold, dry air from the southwest.”

  “And the moisture was precipitated out as snow,” she offered.

  Danforth nodded approvingly.

  “Why do I get the feeling I’m being ignored?” Clausen complained.

  “That was another anomaly.” Danforth persisted. “On a slow rotater like Fiix, I expected large-scale wave motions, so any weather should be due to mechanical instabilities in the wind flow, not to temperature differences and these compact front phenomena.”

  Clausen cut a corner from a square brick of white Sawl butter and dropped it into a skillet. “Hey, don’t you people talk to the help around here? Don’t you know good cooks are hard to come by?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Emil!” roared Danforth suddenly.

  Clausen hunched his shoulders and shuffled mockingly. “Beg pardon, massa, beg pardon.” He danced an exaggerated tiptoe back to his cutting board as McPherson trotted in from the sun.

  “Whole receiver’s gone from that center shaft, Emil,” she reported.

  “Shhhh!” he hissed exaggeratedly.

  McPherson stopped short in concern. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “He’s the matter,” Danforth growled over his shoulder.

  Clausen lined up yellow leafstalks with the flat of his knife. “The point is,” he resumed in a normal voice, “that the Sawls are going to great lengths to keep me out of those caves. I think they’re hiding something.”

  McPherson wrinkled her nose at the bubbling skillet. “What?”

  The prospector shrugged as he chopped. “How do I know until I get in there to find out?”

  “They let me in,” said the pilot.

  “Way in, McP. Way in. Beyond the beaten path.”

  “Oh.”

  “And why is that the point, Emil?” muttered Danforth irritably.

  Clausen glanced up, grinning in mild surprise. “What?”

  “I mean, what do you think is in there, for god’s sake, dragons and treasure?”

  Clausen stopped chopping. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, haven’t we got more important things to worry about than what the goddamned natives might be hiding in their goddamned caves?”

  “Hey, you guys…” McPherson protested.

  Clausen’s smile jelled, a winter stream suddenly icing over. He looked down at the leaves neatly diced on the cutting slab and nudged them around with the sharp tip of his knife. “Forget it, Tay. Go back to work.”

  Weng’s chin lifted in silent disapproval. McPherson took a ste
p toward Danforth, then glanced back as the prospector returned to his food preparation in chilly silence. She threw up her hands in exasperation.

  “You guys…” she muttered, and stalked out into the heavy sunlight.

  4

  The FoodGuilders cut their swim short. While the other travellers lolled about in the shadows, debating the weather and trade strategies for Ogo Dul, the twenty red-and-blue wagons were turned inside out to produce a dinner meal to fill five thousand hungry stomachs. A dozen emptied two-carts, their hakra still hitched and waiting patiently, were sent off to gather the drying flood debris, the thick root skeletons and the matted brush. Long cooking pits were dug in the sand in front of each hard-canopied FoodGuild wagon. Huge fires were built. River water was set to, boil in ceramic cauldrons that managed the rough journey packed among the sacks of grain. Into the bubbling water went entire bags of reddish triangular seed. Baskets of crooked tubers were buried among the coals to roast. Flatbread dough was mixed and shaped and set to bake on rocks near the flames. Milk was brought up from the dairy herd to be churned.

  Megan rested in the shadow of the Infirmary wagon, fluffing her gray curls dry after her swim. She watched Kav Ashimmel consult with her senior priests, her pants legs still rolled up and damp from her wading. The priests’ apprentices who were not in the water hung around listening for hints of a weather prediction.

  In an earlier time, they would have called Ashimmel “a battleship.” Megan smirked privately, thinking that the Master Priest was an imposing figure even without her white robes and wave-and-flame tabard, but that her impressiveness was more political than spiritual.

  The population was in a mellow mood, resting after their long day. Megan saw very few wagers laid as Ashimmel’s conference dispersed and the apprentice priests wandered among the relaxing families and guild cliques with their lists and pouches.

  Susannah joined her with a handful of plant specimens and her portable chemical analyzer. She sat cross-legged on the sand, her long, dark hair falling loose about her shoulders to shade her oval face. “Won’t tell me much,” she said, wagging the gray plastic box deprecatingly, “but at least I’ll get a jump on it.”