Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “Yeah,” Kati agreed. “Roxanna is small and dark, with a beautiful smile, brown skin, hair, figure—beautiful everything. And Ingrid is the very opposite: a lovely, tall, blonde, a statuesque young woman; she would stand out in any crowd.

  “I’ll start with Roxanna’s story, and I’ll try to tell it as I heard it from her, aboard Gorsh’s vessel.”

  For a moment Kati rooted around in her memory with the granda’s help. She had not had it in her neck when she had heard the stories, but it could, nevertheless, be of use to sort things out. Then she began:

  “Roxanna told me that she had been at a party at a lake with a friend, named Jan. Jan’s parents had owned a cottage in the area, and a two-week visit there had been a real treat for Roxanna; she and her mother lived in a large city, and were not well off. Jan’s parents liked Roxanna a lot, possibly because she was good at keeping their daughter out of trouble; Jan, according to Roxanna, was somewhat lacking in judgement about people and events. When the two of them were together, Roxanna made a point of watching out for her friend.

  “So, they had been invited to a party. Jan had wanted to go, and Roxanna had gone along; partly to keep an eye on Jan and to make sure that she was safe. It had turned out to be quite the party: there were alcohol and drugs, and no parents in sight. Roxanna had clung to Jan, doing her best to keep Jan decent, and, she said that she succeeded, more or less. Her take on it was that she must have done all right, since she had had some of the guys swearing at her and calling her a ‘prig of a bitch’—at a party like that, according to her, you know you’re doing well when the jerks start name-calling you. In any case, Jan finally had passed out on the floor and Roxanna had curled up to sleep beside her—she hadn’t drank much, but had been tired. The party had been winding down by then, or maybe the die-hard partiers had just taken the action someplace else.

  “She had woken up in the pre-dawn hours, needing to use the toilet. She had gone into the washroom, and had stumbled out again right away. Some sweetheart had thrown up all over the place—she had been lucky not to step in the vomit. So she had gone outside, knowing that there was an outhouse, a short walk from the party cottage. On the way back, she had become aware of looming presences on both sides of her, and had got a glimpse of two weird-looking creatures flanking her. Before she had been able to so much as react, there had been a prick on an arm where one of them had grabbed her: the next thing she knew, she was coming to in a strange room, surrounded by strangers, all of them children.

  “The thing was: not a soul on the planet saw her go. As far as anyone knew, she just disappeared from that party. Roxanna figured that her mother must have been frantic, when she found out, likely blaming Jan and her family for losing her daughter. And Jan would have been blaming herself, for dragging Roxanna to the party in the first place.”

  “Not much of a story, there,” Matto muttered. “Girl goes to a party. Girl gets snatched by slavers without anyone seeing it happen. Your point is...?”

  “Just that it was incredibly easy for Gorsh’s minions to pull a snatch on a World where people don’t believe that intelligent life exists outside their particular biosphere,” Kati explained. “Obviously, as long as they don’t show their strange selves—Gorsh used felines for the pick-ups--to anyone on the planet, they can merrily kidnap as many slaves as they want to. No-one will suspect them, since they’re an impossibility. And even if somebody does see something, as was true in Ingrid’s case, everyone will dismiss it.”

  She continued:

  “Ingrid had been staying the summer at her grandparents’ farm. Her Grandfather often hired nearby people of what was termed Native ancestry to help with the farm work. He liked these Natives as workers; he felt that they had what he thought of as ‘proper respect for Mother Nature’. This summer he had had a really good-looking, young Native fellow working for him, Nick, by name, and he had stayed the weeks on the farm, sleeping in a little cabin near the hay barn, and going back home to his Reserve for the weekends.

  “He and Ingrid had fallen in love. Ingrid had not told her grandparents; she said that she had worried that they wouldn’t approve, since Nick had an ex-wife and a couple of kids on the Reserve. Instead she had been sneaking into his cabin in the evenings, after the grandparents had gone to bed, and slipping back inside in the very early morning, before the sun was up. The grandparents had been a little hard of hearing, so the deception had been easy.

  “One morning, when Ingrid had been crossing the yard back to the house in the grey dawn, she had found herself being grabbed from two sides, just like Roxanna said, had happened to her. But Ingrid had had the time to get a piercing scream out before the cats had put her out. She had seen their ship at the same time because its lights suddenly had come on; it had been a glowing, egg-shaped thing, sitting in the yard. She believed that she had heard Nick shout before she slipped under completely. That thought gave her some comfort when she talked about the event to Roxanna and me; she wanted someone back home to know what had happened to her!”

  Kati drew a breath.

  “Roxanna made hash of that wish,” she said. “She laughed at Ingrid, bitterly.

  “’If you loved him,’ she said ‘you’d wish he had been a thousand miles away. A Native guy you were bonking behind your family’s back? He’s in jail right now, Ingrid, in jail for your murder!’

  “’No,’ Ingrid whispered. ‘Surely not.’

  “‘You think that someone’s going to believe a story about a space ship and cat-men?’ Roxanna’s voice was icy. ‘Not a chance. Not when they have an obvious suspect at hand! A Native man “with an ex-wife and two kids on the Reserve”, who you were sleeping with, behind your family’s back! Don’t be naive, blondie!’

  “Ingrid looked stricken, as I recall it. She was not the type to consider implications like that; she had the tendency to believe that the world around her was as good and as reasonable as she herself was. But Roxanna’s a sharp young woman, and she saw right away, how that story would play itself out in our society.”

  Kati sighed.

  “It wasn’t a pleasant thought; that my people would sooner believe a murder had taken place than that something outside of their experience could actually happen. But there it is, leaving me to wonder how things went for my in-laws after I disappeared. Did anyone believe the story that my son told?”

  She continued with her own abduction experience, this time keeping the details of her earlier life out of it. There were cheers from her audience when she explained how she had defeated the first cat-man with a bowl of berries in his face, and had managed, thus, to save Jake from being taken, even if the upshot was that she herself had been captured. She was gratified to see that after listening to her tales, Sany looked more thoughtful than she had before. Perhaps that teenager was shedding some romantic notions of adventuring, in favour of understanding how rough reality could, at times, be.

  “Do you think,” she asked Mikal with some unease as, with Jocan, they were heading towards the tent, “that Roxanna and Ingrid have been sold to some bordello-keeper as additions to a stable of beautiful sex-workers?”

  She heard the Federation Peace Officer sigh in the near-darkness.

  “I’m afraid that’s probably very likely,” he admitted. “Why else snatch lookers like that? But,” and he squeezed her hand, “we’ll find them and get them back. And, if they’re anything like you are, Kati, they are survivors, and they’ll make it through.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By the time the travellers reached GrassWater, the end point of the desert trek, Yarm had had plenty of time to pass the knowledge he had about the place and the grasslands to the north of it, to the curious among his fellow Caravanners. He had been to GrassWater a few times during his fact-finding missions for the Central Council of the Northern Plains, and had made a few side trips into the surrounding, smaller settlements.

  “Although I’ve never been to the northern border with the Wild Tribes,” he conceded. “I’ve al
ways made the trip from the Northern Plains by sea. Seemed easier and faster to do it that way.”

  Narra-herding had, over the years, grown into a co-operative enterprise, he told his listeners. The human population lived in the towns, never on the grasslands, which were left as grazing land for the animals. GrassWater was the largest of the towns, a bustling place, thanks to its location at the end of the Caravan Route, along which goods came to the grasslands, and the Narra-fibre was hauled to Oasis City. The Narra, which lived out their whole lives on the grass, were considered to belong to all the grasslanders, collectively. The work of herding was the responsibility of the majority of the male inhabitants of the settlements. During most of the year, only some of the men were directly involved with the land and the animals: the Caretakers rode around the range checking up on the animals, and helping any that were in trouble, and the Border Guards patrolled the northern limit, keeping the members of the Wild Tribes beyond, from raiding the herds. This allowed the rest of the male population to concentrate on other work that needed to be done in the communities. People could not live on grass, so crops had to be sown and harvested in the garden belts that surrounded the settlements. Buildings had to be built and maintained, businesses had to be run, and meat-producing animals needed to be husbanded. However, when the shearing season came around, which it did once a year, every available male old enough to ride, headed out into the grasslands to shear and collect fibre, and to transport it back to the settlements, where the women’s work began. The women washed the fibre, and then examined it, and graded it according to qualities such as softness and strength. They packaged it into bales marked with the grade contained in each, thus readying them to be sent to the spinners in Oasis City. Sometimes the locals would travel to Oasis City, taking fibre bales with them, to sell them there, but mostly, the fibre was picked up by carriers hired by the City spinners, who dealt with the Grassland Fibre-Sellers, the men entrusted with the selling of the communities’ product. The smallest of the settlements had their Fibre-Sellers, and they could make their own deals with the spinner families of Oasis City. The coins earned were divided among the families in the communities, according to the number of men and women the family could muster for the work, and with consideration as to how valuable their work was to the common effort. Those persons who found that they were ill-suited for any of the work involved, were free to hire on with the stores, the restaurants, the inns, and the alehouses of the communities, or work at any other enterprise which required staffing.

  During this particular fact-finding mission in the grasslands and the desert—and it had already stretched into months, partly because of the back and forth travel involved—Yarm had come across some new developments. One of them had been the discontinuation of the breeding program to increase the Narra numbers, which had come into being when the fibre sales had first taken off. Recently the Caretakers had determined that the grass available could not support any more animals than were already feeding on it. In fact, they were finding it necessary, now, to cull some of the older animals every year, to keep the grass healthy, and the animals that ate it, thriving.

  *****

  Kati’s first impression of GrassWater was that it had the look and the feel of a frontier outpost, perhaps because, in a sense, that was exactly what it was. Most of the (mainly) mud-brick buildings looked new, reflecting the reality that the Narra-fibre trade had not been booming for all that long. The dusty streets were broader than those of Oasis City, and they were crowded, not with foot traffic so much, but with riding animals and burdened beasts, with both Narra and the regular runnerbeasts represented. Kati noted that there were no carts; the beasts of burden carried packs, some of them large ones, strapped directly to their bodies.

  “It probably has to do with bordering on the desert,” Mikal commented when she mentioned this to him. “Carts aren’t much good in the sand.”

  That had to be it, she conceded. There had been carts in and around River City. And bicycles on Sickle Island. The post-Disaster population of this world hadn’t un-invented the wheel.

  Jaymo’s Stables was where Makkaro’s Narra had their grassland terminus, and that is where Kati, Mikal and Jocan headed. Ceta, Wayfarer and Runner had obviously made the trip before because they knew their way to Jaymo’s. Kati regretted the need to leave behind the animal that had faithfully carried her across the desert, but knew well that such a sentiment could not be indulged. She stripped Ceta of her gear, as Mikal and Jocan did likewise with their mounts, and with a last pat to the Narra’s neck, consigned her into the stablehand’s care. Ceta went willingly; she was used to this routine, and was quite content to wait for her next rider, who would take her back to Oasis City.

  “Let’s go and talk to the proprietor,“ Mikal said when he had given up Wayfarer. “Maybe he has storage space for our riding and camping gear, and we can explore the possibility of getting the runnerbeasts we’ll need for the trip to the mountains. We’ll likely have to buy the animals and sell them when we reach our destination; there aren’t too many hiring stables in the mountain territory if I’m not mistaken.”

  “To be honest, Mikal, I don’t want to make any decisions right now,” Kati said with a sigh. “We can ask about the possibilities, but let’s wait at least until tomorrow to get serious about resuming this journey. Right at the moment I want an inn, a real bed, a bath and non-camp food. I want to walk around, not sit in a saddle for hours on end.”

  “No arguments on that from me,” Mikal said with a rueful grin. “I suppose you’re tired of being on the road, too, Jocan?”

  “Afraid so,” Jocan replied. “It was a long stretch of travel on Narra-back.”

  “And likely the next stretch on runnerbeasts will be just as long,” Kati said, sighing again. “Plus we won’t have the benefit of the Caravan.”

  “Maybe we better take a few days to rest up,” Mikal mused. “We don’t want to burn ourselves out.”

  They had reached the door of the proprietor’s office which the groom had pointed out to them. It was open and a tall, lanky man stood behind a table, ignoring the chair beside him, his eyes on some papers on the table.

  Mikal cleared his throat. As the tall man looked up, he walked into the room, awkwardly carrying his saddlebags on his shoulders.

  “Jaymo, I presume?” he said.

  “Oh yes,” the other man replied, smiling. “You just get in?”

  His eyes wandered to Kati and Jocan as they filed into the room with their gear, the three of them filling up most of the open space in it.

  “I’m Mikal and my fellow travellers are Kati and Jocan. We just arrived from Oasis City, and brought the Narra we hired at Makkaro’s, to your establishment. We left the animals at the stables.”

  “Ah yes. Makkaro keeps intelligent riding beasts,” Jaymo said. “They make their way here as soon as they reach town. Makes things easy for the riders.”

  “We were quite impressed with Makkaro’s service,” Mikal said. “And since he trusts you with his animals I’m assuming that we can trust you with our further business. In a few days our travels are going to take us north from here and into the mountain country. We’ll need to have our equipment adjusted for that trip, and I’m assuming that we’ll have to buy standard runnerbeasts on which to make the journey.”

  “Sounds about right. Would you like to leave the arrangements in my hands? Presumably you can pay.”

  Mikal nodded adding: “We’re a tad tired from the desert trek, and would welcome spending a few days in an inn while looking around this town, so there’s no rush.”

  “Yes, you’ll need a rest before heading towards the mountains. Leave the outfitting details to me; I’ve done this sort of a thing before. Most of the travellers who continue on from GrassWater come to me. I have the largest herd of standard runnerbeasts in town, and they are all good animals, not a poor one among them.”

  “Can we store our equipment here somewhere?” Kati asked. “Except for our personal gear, of
course.”

  “Sure can. There’s a tack room with cubbies for customers’ equipment just down the hall. We’ll go there and dump the gear you want to leave, and later I’ll get one of my workers to go through it and see what you can use up in the mountains, and what has to be replaced.”

  Jaymo squeezed by the threesome and led them to the room he had described. There they gratefully shed their saddlebags into the rather large compartments which Jaymo had called ‘cubbyholes’. Kati thought the word a misnomer, but perhaps it was intended to be humorous; if that was the case her sense of humour was somewhat lacking at the moment. She was glad to hear the outfitter’s next words:

  “There’s a rather decent inn just down the street, if you are interested. The price is fair for this town, the rooms are good, and the baths are the best in the Grasslands. There’s a good restaurant attached, with a small Alehouse.”

  “Ah,” Kati said. “All the comforts a body needs.”

  “Indeed. Get yourselves there and relax a bit. Come and see me tomorrow and we can start planning your next stage. Then I’ll start gathering supplies and information for your journey. And I’ll be able to give you some idea of how much of a hole it’s going to make in your coin purse.”

  *****

  The threesome strolled, carrying their backpacks of personal belongings, down the road to Ula’s Inn, a pleasant establishment run by a comfortably-built widow and her several daughters. The youngest daughter, Nili, showed them to their rooms set in the, by now familiar, arrangement of two joined ones, one with one bed and the other with two. After Kati had dropped her things in her room, Nili took her to see the women’s bath, and the laundry adjacent to it. Then they returned to Kati’s room and Nili took Jocan to check out the men’s bathing facilities, while Kati and Mikal sat down at the table in Kati’s room for a short conference.