by Greg Keyes
“I didn’t talk at all, only listened. That may have been a mistake, but I couldn’t risk my sister guessing what I’m about. You don’t know how precariously balanced the three of us are, right on the edge of the abyss. And if we fall into night, your people may go with us.” Tuchvala shook her head, a curiously mournful gesture. “It would have been better if we had gotten lost between the stars, or rounded some sun too closely, better all around. But those parts of us are built the best, with the most redundancy. When all of our sentience is gone, we will still go from star to star. Even when we have forgotten what to do, we will still go on and on. …”
“But you digress,” Sand remarked, sharply. “Do you know how the Whipper could have known where you were? Or even that you existed? I have heard of no mysterious ships in orbit for twenty-some odd years, and I’ll bet that the council hasn’t either. That’s the sort of thing the Tech Society would keep to itself.”
And yet, there was her mother’s book, the one she hadn’t yet had an instant to read. Her mother had known about the ships, of that Sand was sure. Having seen the lander and been stung by it, Pela would not have rested until she understood. Even if there was danger in the knowledge; she would have been careful, quiet about what she found—but she would have found out. Stupid, like her daughter.
“You said your “dad” knew?” Tuchvala asked.
“‘Dad’ means father,” Sand told her. “And yes, he knew. And the people coming up from the coast knew, I guess. But even if someone found the lander, how could they possibly know you have a human shape? My mother’s, on Masaw’s lips! Or that I had you? The Whipper went straight for my house.”
“I don’t know. This is all very confusing,” Tuchvala complained.
“Maybe I’m being too paranoid,” Sand grumbled. “If someone at the pueblo saw you, they probably thought you were a two-heart and called the Whipper for that reason. In that case, this all has nothing to do with what you really are, just what you look like. Actually, that makes a lot of sense.”
But Sand’s heart didn’t lighten. It still didn’t feel right, and that conversation with her father—his part in the whole mess—didn’t fit somehow. Why would her father know? Sand tried to picture an hysterical neighbor calling the council, telling them she saw a two-heart in the form of a dead woman. Would they send a Whipper? Probably not; witches were not the area of expertise for the Whipper Kachina. And if they did send it, why would they call her father first? Her father had implied great—even mortal—danger to her if she were caught with Tuchvala, and that made even less sense. The puebloans weren’t the superstitious buffoons lowlanders thought they were. No one had been seriously punished for witchcraft in a hundred years—and she could easily prove her innocence. Further, Tuchvala could be just as simply be shown to be a clone of Pela. The traditionalists knew and understood biotechnology very well; they were, after all, primarily Terraformers. So what danger was her father concerned about? Did his fears lurk in a whiskyberry? That could be, too. But he had seemed very, very, earnest.
There was something she could do, before the mountains took her and Tuchvala in.
She thumbed on the flat screen and muttered her father’s name and district.
For a long while, there was no answer, but just as she was considering breaking contact, the screen washed with light. Red Jimmy was faded, his eyes growing vague with alcohol. He goggled at her.
“Sand! Oh …” He muttered something she didn’t understand. It sounded like another language.
“Sand, you stupid little bitch. Listen to me! Listen!”
He was raving, slavering almost. He had been drinking a lot.
“You’ll die, unless you do what I say. Do you understand, Sand? They’ll kill you, just like they killed Pela.”
“Who?” Sand snapped.
Red Jimmie stared at her, and then he laughed, a painful, explosive sound. “Everybody, honey … there are more people trying to catch you now than you even know. Listen, listen, and don’t give me any of your outraged-young-woman shit. Pela is dead. I can’t hurt her anymore, no matter what I do.”
“You can still hurt me,” Sand shrieked, tears blurring her vision. She flipped on the gyros and quit trying to hold the Dragonfly steady manually.
“Honey,” Jimmie said, pleading, tears streaming down his face, “Honey, I’m trying to do just the opposite, okay? I’m going to give you some coordinates. It’s a place on the coast where I used to live. On an island, far from the lowland settlements. You’ll be safe there until I can think of something.”
Sand recorded the numbers he slurred.
“Go there,” he said. “Sand, honey. …”
She broke the contact. The mountains were coming up, and she could not fly high enough to get over them. But they would be a good place to hide; a very good place. The hell with her father and his secret island. He was the last person she could trust.
But she kept the coordinates.
I didn’t know what I was doing, and that worried me. At the time I marveled that worry—perhaps it was even fear—could make one feel physically ill. Just as I had never considered that the erratic flight of an air vehicle could make me sick, make me painfully eject half-digested food.
Not knowing what I was doing was worse than physical illness, however. As stupid as my sisters and I became, whatever we lost, our fundamental purpose lay along our backbonebrains, a spine of certainty. I thought when I transferred my tohodanet to the human body that absolute knowledge of purpose would come with it. It had—or at least it had seemed that way for some time. But now I felt it unraveling, growing vague. Though I could perceive the odd creak and flexing of my spine, there was no solace, purpose, or even knowledge there. The rest of my body itched with need, and I remembered a tiny fragment of philosophy, told to me by one of the Makers, before my hull ever strained under acceleration.
Life is need. Its bones are necessity, its organs lust and longing, its skin dissatisfaction. That’s why I envy you, you beautiful, sleek thing. You have intelligence without need. Need does not allow us to think, not really. You and your sisters will be truly sentient.
It was true, and I could feel the certainty of it. This body, this brain of mine, strung my thoughts and actions, not along a core of purpose, but along a wavery strand of necessity. Each moment was just a movement from urination to eating to sleep, and on and on. … In my great body amongst the stars, I had occasionally doubted the reality if time, despite my sensitive ability to measure it. A human being, I decided—and surely the Makers too—could scarcely doubt such a thing. Not when one had to piss, which I did. And I knew enough to not just let it go.
It’s not that the body was all that new to me: I had been building my mind in it for many years. But tohodanet—that which sees itself—was new to this brain, though an alien one had struggled to form when I imposed mine. I suspected now that I had been tricked, that my tohodanet was not all that much like the one I copied it from.
But there was nothing to do about this.
I watched the back of my companion’s head as she flew us into the jagged landscape she called “mountains”. She acted with the kind of certitude that I once had, or seemed to. But perhaps—if I understood her needs—I would see that my old Maker was right about life. My problem was one of being torn between trying to comprehend—why were we flying from place to place, why were people trying to kill or capture me—and merely settling back to let things unfold. I was greatly attracted to the latter idea—after all, I had merely come to see, to observe. Or had I?
That’s what was nagging me. There was a plan of some sort, up there in the sky. Where had it gone?
Sand ducked the Dragonfly into one of the trench-like valleys between the rolling folds of the mountains, night within a night. Radar and infrared painted her a landscape more razored and jagged than light would have, and it seemed as if they were a tiny inse
ct whirring through a giant’s garden of knives. Sand caught herself humming the Dragonfly song, a rhythmic chant with only four tones.
“What are we doing? Where are we going?” Tuchvala asked from behind her, denting the deep silence that had fallen between them since Sand’s conversation with her father.
“We are hiding,” Sand replied.
“From your people?”
“From everyone. I don’t know. I just need time to think all of this through, to make sense of it all.”
“That’s both good and bad to hear,” Tuchvala observed. “Good, because it makes my own confusion seem natural. Bad because I had hoped that with experience, I would understand your society. Yet even you seem uncertain of it.”
“Good luck,” Sand muttered, dropping the Dragonfly a fraction lower. For the moment, only the sky Kachina would be able to track them, and only then if one were directly overhead. The mountains were ample shields against prying eyes, even the ones that saw outlandish segments of the spectrum. And they weren’t leaving a trail … were they? Sand turned her mind furiously to that, welcoming the immediate distraction from even more troubling thoughts.
Their heat trail should quickly dissipate. Any pursuer would have to right behind them to track them that way. What about a chemical trail? What did one get when one burned alcohol? Sand couldn’t think; she had never wanted to be an engineer. That Dragonfly worked, and that she knew how to diagnose and affect common repairs, and that was all she really cared about.
“Tuchvala,” she asked, glancing back slightly, “do you know what alcohol is?”
“My vocabulary is fairly large,” Tuchvala assured her. “I know the properties of that substance.”
“What traces does it leave when you burn it?”
“Water. Carbon dioxide.”
Sand nodded. That shouldn’t be a noticeable trail. But just in case. …
Sand continued a bit farther; the mountains here were very steep, but she seemed to remember a place up ahead, where the clean ripples of the mountains were disturbed by a younger upwelling of magma. Her memory was good, and soon her windshield was enhancing a confused jungle of planes and lines. Sand cut off her afterjets and coasted on her outstretched wings. The Dragonfly settled back over her, caulking the cracks in her thoughts with clarity. The injured wing had torn a little more under acceleration, but now it was performing admirably. Sand banked around the not-so-gentle curve of a thick young dome of basalt, followed the black highway of its lava flow into a twisty maze, losing altitude constantly in the dead, chill air. When she had glided for a little more than a kilometer—turning thrice—she lit the underjets for support, just nudging on the aft engines. She retracted the wings and scanned the windshield for a flat spot.
She saw one, looking like a puddle of smooth, black glass to the Dragonfly’s enhanced vision, but she knew that in actuality it was probably quite rough. She brought the little craft down onto it gracefully, without the smallest bump. She took a deep breath, and reluctantly released the Dragonfly with her own exhalation.
Sand cracked the windshield and pushed it up. A rush of chill night air swept around the two women, and Sand heard Tuchvala gasp—whether with surprise, delight, or consternation, it was difficult to say. To Sand, the night air was delicious after nearly two hours of stale, hot, vomit-smell, but she also understood that very soon the night would begin to suck at them, bleed off their body heat until they were miserable. She stepped down onto the invisible stone, felt its unforgiving strength, and wondered where she could possibly have an ally. It seemed that her world had turned against her, and she expected at any moment for the landscape itself to follow suit.
“We better put up a tent, Tuchvala,” Sand remarked, lighting their immediate area with a small prayer-stick-candle. It was almost better without light at all, so huge and hollow did the world seem around them. As Tuchvala joined her on the ground, Sand had a brief, chilling image of them as twins in a negative-image womb—light, rather than dark—surrounded by a measureless, hostile realm of shadow. A womb that exposed rather than nurtured them. High above, a wind shrieked through some unseen fissure, and even the stars were obscured by a shroud of low clouds.
Numbed, both physically and spiritually, Sand began showing Tuchvala how to help her erect a tent.
Chapter Twelve
The Tech Society Kiva seemed to hum like a tension field, a vague, bone-sawing but unhearable vibration. It bored into Hoku’s skull like a weevil, conspired with the sour, thick tea he had been drinking to keep him both awake and on the edge of a tantrum. And yet, cocooned in the anger and the frustration, Hoku felt a tiny elation. He was being challenged, the challenge of his life. He had always managed to make things fall his way, but he had been a giant amongst dwarves. He was ready to prove himself against other giants.
Hoku addressed himself to a balding, gnomelike man in a bright yellow Tech smock. He was correlating data from the Kachina satellites and two planet-bound observatories.
“What’s the story, Tomas?” Carefully keeping his weariness and irritation from inflecting the question.
Tomas frowned briefly at the cube and the figures scrolling through it.
“The Reed ship is down off the coast, thirty-two kilometers north-west.”
Hoku did a quick calculation in his head. “Wife-Tell-the-Sea-Point”.
“Yes, thereabouts. About two kilometers off-shore. So far they haven’t launched any reconnaissance craft, though I suppose we can’t rule out submersibles.”
Hoku stood and walked to the wall map, traced his finger along the bay that swept north-west from the bright red dot signifying Salt. Below his finger, the bunched elephant skin of the Cornbeetle Mountains puckered out at him.
“Interesting,” he noted. “This is where the girl went—what was her name?”
“SandGreyGirl. Sand clan,” Homikniwa offered from behind Hoku’s left shoulder.
“Perhaps she goes to rendezvous with the Reed ship,” Hoku speculated, his mind wheeling back for the implications of that. “That would mean she has somehow been in communication with the Reed.”
“Or her mother was,” Homikniwa pointed out.
“Yeeeesss,” hissed Hoku. “I see the Reed’s hand in this. Somehow we missed it. As closely as we watched that mesa bitch, she somehow made contact with the Vilmir Foundation. She should have been killed right away, twenty years ago.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make then,” Homikniwa whispered, by way of consolation. “And after all, the woman was touched by the thing. The Tech Society wanted to understand that.”
“Which they still don’t.” And yet, Hoku felt that he was near a revelation. Some obvious truth was dancing in the darkest kiva of his mind, waiting to be called into the plaza. When he concentrated on it, however, it willfully slipped away from him.
“What progress on finding the girl?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“No word from our agent. She’s in the mountains somewhere, hiding. We have several hours before a satellite can cover that area,” Tomas told him. He had been concentrating intently on his job, no doubt trying to give the impression that he was not listening to the exchange between Hoku and Homikniwa. Still, he looked faintly troubled. People were squeamish: it was what kept most from becoming great.
“You should send your own patrol,” said Homikniwa. “You should get there ahead of the pueblos, if they send a flyer.”
“My thoughts exactly, my friend. The Cornbeetle Mountains are nobody’s territory. I don’t see how the pueblos can complain. And if they do. …” He let the threat die on his lips, but it remained in his bunched jaw muscles.
“What about the Reed ship?”
Hoku sighed, felt his stomach churn like crashing waves.
“I’m sure they are well armed, both here and in space. We have to be very careful with them. Even if we succeed in dis
abling the landing drum, we can’t touch the warship itself.”
“How do you know it’s a warship?” Tomas interjected. Hoku smirked at him paternalistically.
“It’s a warship, have no doubt. The Reed gives no quarter and asks none. They know what is at stake here.”
A needle-sharp man in a red jumper walked up and waited to be noticed. When Hoku acknowledged his presence, he nodded and snapped off a few short words about the warriors being ready. Hoku thanked him and sent him on.
“Here we go again, Homikniwa,” he said, and was gratified by the nearly imperceptible smile on his aid’s face. He smoothed his hands against his slacks and went to put his armor back on.
Kewa, the little biologist, intercepted him.
“Mother-Father.”
“You have something to tell me, Kewa?”
“I … I think I have a suggestion, Mother-Father.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“May we speak privately?”
After a brief hesitation, Hoku motioned her into his office and sealed the door behind them.
“What is this, Kewa?”
“I didn’t want to disagree with you in front of your people.”
“Very kind of you, Kewa,” Hoku said, and meant it. The woman rose a bit in his estimation; she had learned her lesson. His people’s confidence in him was probably already a little shaken.
“Here is my suggestion, Mother-Father—but it begins with a question.”
Hoku raised his eyebrows, indicating that she should go on.
“This woman—this SandGreyGirl—why is she trying so hard to elude us?”
“I have several suspicions along those lines,” Hoku answered. “She may be a traitor, like her mother.”
“But you could not have suspected that to begin with. Not when you had the Whipper Kachina sent after her.”
Hoku nearly gaped at her, which would have been most undignified.