Bob looked at her wide-eyed. “Free? All … all of them?”
Evelyn nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
Bob threw his hands in the air and gave a whoop. “Then you did helping me to saving them from the Mind, just like you did promising!”
Evelyn felt wretched, and turned away. Matthew caught her eye and gave her a nod, but the look in his eyes told her he was thinking about what had really happened to all those people from the Colony.
Suddenly there was a strange rumbling sound overhead, increasing in volume. They all looked up, but couldn't see anything.
“Everyone hide!” Evelyn called, scrambling for cover. It seemed as if the ground was trembling, and a massive shape burst from the trees a short distance away from them, followed closely by two more: elephants, fleeing the noise. Two were gray, but the third was a pale pinkish color, an albino, and she could swear she saw a darker pink area around its shoulder – an infected spear-wound, perhaps. The elephants passed out of sight and a second later a shadow passed over them, momentarily blocking out what little sunlight made its way through the canopy. The roaring reached a crescendo, then it too passed and eventually faded away.
Evelyn rose, and the others followed suit.
“What it was being? That thing?” Bob asked, looking fearfully towards the sky.
“Something bad,” Evelyn said. To the others, she added. “I'm guessing that was the Jumper. It looked like a kind of drone.”
“Yeah, a drone the size of a bus,” Kenji said.
“If there's anyone in that thing, they don't seem to be looking for us ...” Matthew pointed out. “Where do you suppose it was headed?”
“Probably to try and stop us from getting to Ciso,” Evelyn admitted. “They know we have to get to the Tall Hut. Why look for us when they know where we're going?”
“So, what are we going to do?” Clove asked.
“I don't see what choice we have.” Evelyn said, knowing that it was stupid. “We still have to go there.”
“Haven't we done enough?” Kenji whined. “Why can't we just go and retire in Bob's cave and live peaceful lives in the forest and all that?”
Evelyn gave him a look.
“I'm kidding,” Kenji raised his hand and his stump. “I'd much rather save the human race.”
“But how are we going to get past them if they're waiting for us?” Clove asked. “They're armed. We have nothing.”
“I'm still working on that,” Evelyn said.
“Actually,” Matthew said. “I have an idea.”
They all turned to him.
“That Jumper thing just reminded me: there are two recon drones aboard InDi. They're not big enough to carry a person, but ...” He turned to Bob. “Bob, do you think you could find those elephants?”
Bob nodded vigorously. “Elingphantses are being very easy to finding. Always they are stomping and trampling the ground with their very big feets.”
Evelyn looked at Matthew in awe. “You're a genius.”
Matthew shrugged. “It runs in the family.”
“Wait, I don't see how elephants are relevant to our current dilemma,” Kenji said.
“The elephants are afraid of the drones...” Clove prompted.
“Exactly.” Matthew beamed. “We can use the drones to herd them.”
Everyone nodded in appreciation of this simple plan.
Except for Kenji. “Herd them? Herd them where?”
They all stared at him with raised eyebrows and amused expressions, and waited for him to get it.
“Oh …” he said, as realization dawned. “That's not a bad idea.”
“At any rate, it should keep the higher humans distracted for long enough for us to sneak past them.” Evelyn said. “Now we just need to get to InDi. Bob, how far are we from our big hut from the sky?”
Bob wrinkled his brow while he thought about this. “Maybe it will taking us one day to getting there. But ”–he glanced at the sky again–“ it will being night soon. It is not being so safe at night.”
“Wolves?” Kenji asked with a sigh of resignation.
Bob looked at him blankly. “Many hunters do hunting at night.”
“Wolves and … other flesh-eating beasties of the woods?”
Another blank look from Bob.
“I'll just take that as a yes.”
Evelyn glanced at her friends. They looked like crap. Suddenly she remembered that she and Brenner had found a stream. “Let's go and find a spot near the water to spend the night. I think we could all use a rest, and maybe we can find something to eat.” Here she glanced at Bob, who was the experienced hunter-gatherer of the group.
“You are being hungry?” Bob asked. “I will catching some dinners for us!”
“You read my mind, Bob.” Evelyn smiled at him.
They reached the stream shortly, and everyone had a drink.
“Man, that tastes better than Pepsi,” Kenji said.
Matthew snorted. “What doesn't?”
“Hey, don't be hating on Pepsi man,” Kenji said. “It's the king of sodas.”
Matthew stood and said in an advertising voice, “Pepsi, for when they're all out of Coke.”
Everyone laughed, except Bob, who had no idea what they were talking about, and Evelyn felt an unexpected warmth spreading through her chest. Strangely, she seemed to have developed a feeling of maternal responsibility for all of them. It was good to see them relaxing a bit, and she felt some of the tension going out of her own body. Even as she did so she caught sight of her reflection in the water cupped in her hands. These feelings aren't real, she thought. You aren't real. She let the water fall through her fingers, where it once more became one with the stream. Her mind drifted back to when she had been linked to the higher humans, one larger consciousness made up of hundreds of interconnected minds. What was it Matthew's father had said when she first awoke aboard the hub?
That she was as human as any of them. That she was real.
What did it matter either way. She was here, with her friends, and something inside her – her programming, her instincts, her heart – she didn't care – was guiding her on this path, and she knew, she knew it was the right one.
She drank another handful of the cool water and straightened up, her mind back on the present, back into survival mode. There was a flat patch of ground a short way down the bank that looked like it would be a good place to rest for the night. Or maybe they should each climb a tree, out of reach of claws and fangs in the night …
Just then there was a rumbling overhead, and for a moment she though the Jumper was coming back, but then she realized it was thunder, and almost immediately the light suddenly began to get very dim.
“It will raining soon,” Bob said, looking through the canopy at the rapidly darkening sky, darkened not only by the receding daylight but also the encroaching clouds. “I will making for us a dry place.” He drew a crude stone ax from somewhere beneath his wolf skin cloak and, after assessing a few saplings in the area, began hacking away at one of them at head height. They all watched him in interest.
“Man, this guy’s like a real caveman,” Kenji whispered. “If you had told me a week ago that this is what technology on Earth would look like ten thousand years in the future, I probably wouldn't have believed you.”
“Yeah, I don't know what we would have done without Bob,” Evelyn said.
“What, you mean you weren't programmed with wilderness survival techniques?” Kenji shook his head and tutted. “Reyner Reyner Reyner.”
The first light rain began to fall, gathering on the leaves above and falling to the ground in heavy splats. Bob had succeeded in felling the sapling, and it toppled slowly to the ground. It was still attached to its trunk by a sliver of bark and wood however, so that it came to rest at a sixty degree angle to the ground.
“Hey Bob, is there anything we can do to help?” Matthew asked, wiping water of his nose where a large drop has assaulted him.
“Yes!” Bob re
plied, moving to a second tree several feet from the first. “Bringing the big, most biggest leaves you can finding. And also strings.” He began chopping away.
“Strings?” Matthew glanced at the others to see if they knew what he meant.
Looking up at the trees in the dim light, Evelyn noticed not for the first time that there were creepers and vines tangled in the upper branches. Many of these had come loose or grown up from the ground. “I'm guessing he means vines,” she said.
“Right. You guys look for leaves, I'll get the vines.” Matthew moved to a large tree and began tugging on a creeper the thickness of his finger.
“Hey,” Clove said to the others, pointing back towards the river, “Those plants growing along the riverbank have pretty big leaves.”
“Let’s go!” Evelyn said. “Before the rain gets any worse. Kenji, stay here and rest. Bob might not be able to find us food in this rain and I don't want you doing any more damage to your ankle.”
Kenji nodded gratefully, and the others left him and moved to the bank of the river.
So far the trees had kept the bulk of the rain off of them, but the fat drops were beginning to fall faster now, and the air was cooling rapidly. They worked quickly, using sharp rocks to hack through the fibrous stems of the plants, which resembled some kind of lily.
Before long Evelyn, Clove, and Brenner each had a large bundle of leaves, and they took them back to where Bob and Matthew had begun securing the trunks of thin saplings across the natural lean-to created by the two felled trees.
Bob, seeing their leaves, nodded approvingly. “Very good leaves.” He came around to the lowest part of the lean-to, where the tops of the felled trees touched the ground. He had apparently used his ax to trim off their branches. “Like this.” He showed them how to secure the leaves to the frame by bending the stems to create a hook. Then he returned to help Matthew in completing the frame. Thankfully, the rain seemed to have abated for the moment, but Evelyn sensed it was the calm before the storm, so to speak.
Working together, the three of them managed to cover half the shelter with leaves in a few minutes, but they needed more.
“There are still more of the plants a bit further down the river,” Evelyn said. “Let's go.”
By now, Bob and Matthew had finished the frame, and Bob said, “I will go and looking for some dinners!”
“Bless you,” Kenji said.
Matthew joined the others at the river to collect more leaves, and they worked in silence in the darkening forest. The sound of the stream and the rain dripping from the trees punctuated by a croaking frog and the odd rumble of thunder had them all in a state of primordial wonder. There was something magical, almost cathartic, about being in this untouched forest in the midst of a storm that seemed to have affected them all the same way, silencing them while their minds and hearts wandered. Evelyn felt a tightness in her chest that wasn't altogether bad, a sense of longing for something she could not identify. She secretly wished the rain would return soon.
“Okay, that should do it,” she said, looking at the pile of leaves they had cut. Together, they gathered them up and returned to the half-finished shelter.
Kenji had already crawled under the low section of roof they had completed, and he watched them working guiltily. “Sorry I'm so useless guys.”
“Don't worry about it Kenji,” Evelyn said.
“It's getting cold,” he said, as they continued to attach the leaves to the framework of their rudimentary shelter. “Do you think our resident caveman knows how to light a fire?”
“He had a fire in his cave,” Matthew pointed out.
Evelyn, looking around at the wet forest, had her doubts. Even if Bob know how to get an ember going by rubbing sticks together or whatever, she doubted he'd be able to make it happen with wet materials. “I'd say our chances of fire are pretty slim tonight.”
“We'll have to stay close together. Share body heat.” Matthew said, meeting Evelyn's eyes before looking away suddenly.
Evelyn surreptitiously reached up to touch her own cheek. Did her body generate heat? Her cheek felt warm to her, but that could be just another trick of her programming.
It took them a few more minutes to complete the roof of their shelter, and no sooner had they all gotten under it than the heavens split open with a massive crack of thunder and the rain began anew, this time in a heavy downpour that nearly drowned out their voices.
“I hope Bob's okay,” Evelyn said over the rain.
“He'll be lucky if he doesn't drown in this,” Kenji said.
They huddled together under the small shelter in silence, looking out at the curtain of water. The longing sensation Evelyn had felt before intensified as she watched the storm, and she wondered what it would be like to live here in the forest. She had a crazy urge to get up and dance in the falling water. She wanted to feel it, to allow it into her body to fill the hole she felt in her chest.
“I've always loved the rain,” Matthew said.
“Yeah,” Clove added. “It does something to you, doesn't it? Kind of awes you.”
So she wasn't the only one. “Why does it make you feel like that?” Evelyn asked.
“My dad used to say it's because water is life, and when life falls from the sky it's a kind of magic.” Clove said wistfully.
Huddled under their little shelter, surrounded by the elemental onslaught, Evelyn thought she could feel the magic Clove was talking about. But she was also starting to feel cold, and water was beginning to soak the ground beneath them. Bob had thrust the leafy boughs of the trees he’d felled beneath the shelter to form a kind of carpet, but they only did so much. Evelyn suspected they were in for a long, cold, and probably sleepless night.
“I’m getting worried about Bob,” she said.
“Not much we can do,” Matthew pointed out.
They fell into silence again while the rain continued to soak the world, and without realizing it they slowly inched closer together, until they were all huddled tightly right at the back of the shelter where it was driest.
“Hey, Kenji?” Clove said.
“Yeah?” Kenji mumbled through chattering teeth.
“Remember back at OrbiCor, Reyner spoke to you about a secret project you worked on with the Japanese government?”
“Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“You really wanna know?” He sniffed.
“I want to know,” Matthew chipped in. It seemed as if the rain was beginning to slacken.
“We were building a time machine,” Kenji said. “I was running the equations.”
The silence that met his claim reeked of disbelief.
“I'm serious!”
“Time-travel isn't possible,” Brenner said.
“I didn't say it was for time-travel. Just that it was a time machine. It used a neurological link to change one's perception of time, so that it would seem as if everything slowed down. Like a pigeon.”
“Huh?” Matthew looked around for help.
“Oh yeah, I read about pigeons,” Clove said. “They were these birds that used to live in the cities. They saw the world in like ten times as many frames per second as we do.”
“Exactly,” Kenji said. “Which basically means they experienced it ten times slower than we do.”
“So what happened?” Matthew asked. “Did it work?”
“We never finished it. The project was shut down in the end.”
“Why?”
“We ran out of time. Oh hey, the rain's stopping.”
And indeed, by now it was little more than a drizzle.
Just then, as if he had been huddled somewhere sheltered waiting for a break such as this, Bob returned. They all tensed up as he approached through the darkness, his footsteps making a squelching sound in the saturated ground. They could barely make him out when he appeared in front of the shelter, the fur of his wolf skin cloak plastered down by the rain so that he somewhat resembled a drowned rat.
“Hello my
very good friends!” he said, coming to sit with them beneath the shelter and bringing with him a damp, musky smell. “It did raining a very lot, did you seeing?”
“Nope, we must have missed it,” Kenji said. “Did you find anything to eat?”
“Oh, yes indeed I did finding some very tasty frogs to eating.” He extracted several frogs from somewhere beneath his cape and held them out by the legs. One of them tried to spring away and he slammed it against the trunk of one of the trees that propped up their shelter, putting the poor creature out of its misery. “There we are going, he won’t be jumping in your belly now!” He offered the recently brained frog to Kenji, who turned green.
“Um, shouldn’t we cook it first?”
Bob smiled in empathy. “I also do liking them more better when they are cooking, but we do having no fire!”
“Can’t you make one?” Kenji whined.
“Making … fire?” Bob actually laughed. “No peoples can making fire. Fire does only coming when fire does wanting to coming!”
“But what about in your cave? You know, your very safe place? You had a fire there!”
“Yes, I did catching that fire many long times ago from a big big fire that did coming through the forest beyond the mountains one day.” He looked suddenly worried. “I did keeping it alive since then, but I did never leaving it alone for so long before …”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine, Bob,” Evelyn said, wondering what Bob would make of the cigarette lighters they had aboard InDi. “Kenji, eat your frog. You need food so your ankle can heal.”
Kenji squirmed. “But … I don’t wanna!”
“You? Not hungry?” Clove joked. “Who are you and what have you done with the real Kenji?”
“Hey, come on. That’s not food. That’s … a dead frog.”
“They are not tasting too bad,” Bob said. “I did eating one by the river.”
This went on for several minutes until eventually Matthew, who had had enough, said. “I’ll eat one first, but then you’ve gotta eat one too. Or we’ll leave you behind tomorrow.”
“Wow. Tough love, huh?” Kenji said, but he gave a resigned sigh. “Very well.”
The Cloud Page 25
