Instead of sluggish, Moira's movements feel more uncoordinated. She's dizzy, certainly, but Moira would categorize this sensation closer to vertigo, like she's teetering on the edge of some imagined precipe. To Moira, it feels like her limbs are moving independently, without command or permission, a substantial delay between her mind and her body.
It's her mood that seems the most bizarrely affected. Rather than feeling drained or ornery, she feels somehow more generous to the fierceness of her surroundings, more charitable to the savage climate and all its perils. Despite the toils and tribulation all around her, Moira feels very slightly giddy, the vestigial beginnings of hysteria bubbling somewhere inside her.
At a guess, Moira would say she feels a little tipsy.
“Hey.” Moira reaches over and taps Nemo lightly on the forearm. “This is maybe a weird question, I guess, but do you feel, like, a little funny?”
“Funny?” considers Nemo after a considerable pause. He trudges on, step by weary step, a slurry of sand and sweat dripping off the slick strands of his beard. “Funny how?”
“I don't know,” it occurs to Moira, unable to communicate all her rigorous mental analysis. “Just sorta funny.”
“Funny,” starts Nemo again suddenly, long enough that Moira assumed he'd forgotten the question, “how these cactus assholes live at the top of a blooming moons-damned mountain? Funny how the driftcart goes bad and there's nobody around that can fix it?” His makes an ill-aimed and half-hearted gesture towards Odisseus. “Funny how somebody managed to get his hairy ass a ride all the way there?”
Moira's eyes follow his gesture and land on the Ortok's inert form, swaying this way and that on the improvised litter.
He'd collapsed an hour earlier, the victim of actual heat stroke. It went without saying that the desert climate came down the hardest on the shaggy, blubbery Ortok, the worst equipped to handle the harsh conditions. Add to that his recent belly wound and it comes as little surprise, to Moira at least, that Odisseus couldn't withstand the overland trek.
His own aquafier empty, the Ortok's companions were hard-pressed to remedy his situation, short of sacrificing their own water reserves. Moira was gearing up to drag his three-hundred-pound carcass to the nearest shade and turn back for the Lover. All Nemo, the Ortok's lifelong saltbrother, was prepared to do was bitch about how sweaty he was.
Their cactoid escorts, however, knew precisely what to do.
As reactionlessly as they do everything, one of the Gitter, the one they called Firstseed Stalkchopper, approached the collapsed Ortok. For a long moment, there it stood, assessing the situation, before it reached into the ruffled leaves sprouting from its elbow joint. With the snapping of a fragile stem, it withdrew a small item and this, in its green thorny paw, it extended to Moira.
It held, wrapped in layers of swaddling husk, a pristine and perfect Gitterpeach.
Even to the staunchly cynical Moira Quicksilver, it was frankly something of a religious experience, to hold something at once so pure and so significant as an unprocessed peach. Tens of thousands died, whole economies rose and fell, entire empires were constructed – all for the sake of this one blue fruit in Moira's hand.
Not to mention, of course, it was the driving object behind this entire caper, everything that Two-Bit Switch schemed and planned and obsessed over.
At Stalkchopper's insistence, Moira broke the peach apart, all its internal juices gushing over her hands, and fed the parched Ortok with its sopping pieces. Unprocessed like this, the Gitterpeach is surprisingly far more liquid than solid, the only thing capable of retaining moisture on this moons-forsaken planet.
Moira wonders, feeding the dripping chunks to thirsty Odisseus, whether the peach is truly a fruit or rather some manner of external bladder, considering the way the Gitter used them.
Whatever its true nature, an unadulterated Gitterpeach works instantaneous wonders on the Ortok. Far from fully recovered, Odisseus nonetheless begins to come around and even manages rudimentary speech.
A makeshift stretcher is constructed from a pair of polearms and some ferny fronds stretched between them. Here Odisseus rests, fed the occasional peach that Stalkchopper donates, while his companions trudge and worry, some distance behind.
Nothing seems to faze the marching column of cacti – not the additional burden of carrying the Ortok nor the hellish conditions. In two long lines, the seventy or so members of the warband climb higher and higher into the mountainous terrain. They navigate the hostile landscape with the cold, robotic certainty of long-time natives, knowing every rise and dell of the countryside without thought.
Moira and Nemo, with tired limbs and shorter strides, would naturally fall behind. The Gitter stay vigilant around their Vesselborn guests, forming a protective barrier between them and the wilderness.
For most of the journey, that wilderness was a bone-dry dustbowl. For hours, they crossed featureless white plains of cracked sand, dotted very occasionally by strange and jagged glassrock formations. This stretch of the walk Moira remembers only as a dusty blur, an endless miasma that hangs around the marching caravan. All the while, she kept her gaze focused on the distant mountains, growing incrementally closer by each mottible.
An hour before Odisseus would eventually collapse, the driftcart shorted its motivator. Lightheaded even then, the Ortok did what few field repairs he could but, half a mottible later, the engine succumbed to the heat and the dust and promptly died altogether. They'd thought ahead enough to bring driftpacks, each one's miniature driftmotor helping to lighten what supplies they could carry from the cart. The derelict they were forced to abandon amid the swirling sands.
Reduced to walking the rest of the way to the nursery, Moira sure was glad she'd insisted on adverse weather gear for this phase of the caper. The one salient feature the crew knew for certain about the planet Gi was its tremendous heat. Moira, for once, wasn't about to maroon herself on some tremendously hot planet unprepared for the local clime. Thankfully, Odisseus, ever the worrywort, thought very much along the same lines and the negligent Nemo was ultimately outvoted.
Moira didn't skimp, either. She purchased the highest quality gear the planeteering adventurer could acquire. Rather than cumbersome kaftans and layers of cloth like the native Duutho of Rith wear, Moira spend the big bucks on something a little more sophisticated. Considering the length of this overland journey stretching out before them, she's extraordinarily glad she did.
DermEndure Pore Sealant is a chalky, curdled substance, the color of tapioca pudding. Packaged in stocky spray cans, the stuff is sold above and around every arid planet in the Outer Ring. Before departing the crashsite, Moira had – in inviolable privacy, of course – stripped down and doused every inch of her body with the sealant. It's undeniably foul-feeling, stiff and crusty on the surface of her skin. Properly applied, however, it should shield her pale skin from the worst Gi's winds and sun can throw at her.
Thrice now has Moira relied on the stuff, tracking runaway bountyheads on Pameer. Pameer, however, is a child's sandbox compared to the sun-blasted wastelands of Gi. Tough though the sealant may be, even Moira could feel it cracking under this unrelenting heat, the lacquer over her skin splitting with each movement.
To this ensemble, Moira added a Whuudi head scarf she'd fancied on some punk-ass bounty hunter that swung their way during the caper's planning stages. Then there were always her invincible jackboots, unimpressed by the worst Gi's surface has to offer.
In true Nemo fashion, the Captain came very close to striking out across the sands of Gi in nothing but bathrobe and flipflops. Disregarding Moira's advise to spray down too many times, it was ultimately Odisseus, with fangs bared, that actually saw the sealant applied.
The necessary weatherproofing of Odisseus proved almost unbearable for the long-suffering Ortok. Not designed for furry sentients, Odisseus was forced to massage three liberal coats of DermEndure into his shaggy pelt. When it subsequently dried in the planet's arid atmosphere, the ha
ir clotted and turned an unbecoming beige color. Add the sand constantly bristling his coat and poor Odisseus became a mangy, albino Ortok, still accursedly hot under the sun's swelter.
As the afternoon wore on, however, the ground began steadily to rise and their road took them twistingly into the glassy foothills. Here, scintillant cliffs rose sheerly on either side of the cacti's path, glittering radiant oranges, yellows and pinks as Gi's sun sank further beneath the horizon. Here, the shade is plentiful, the winds twice as fierce and the road all the more arduous. For the past hour, they'd wound through narrow glassrock canyons that carve deeper and deeper into a looming range of glittering mountaintops. Somewhere among these gorges, Moira assumes, the nursery must be nestled.
She's proved correct when, at the head of the column, the towering silhouette of Foreplanter comes to an abrupt stop. One by one, the long chain of its followers come to slow stops as well. Following suit, Moira and Nemo scowl, exchange glances and gawp stupidly around at the surrounding Gitter.
“So,” Nemo pants, throwing his hands out wide. “We there yet or...?”
{Bring forth the Vesselborn}, comes Foreplanter's decree from the head of the column, {that they might vanguard our procession into the nursery}.
“Hey,” the woozy Moira notices with an uncharacteristically friendly smile. “How nice of them.”
With much effort, Moira and Nemo drag their exhausted asses up to the head of the column. Standing to either side of Foreplanter, they gaze down at the fabled nursery they'd trudged across half the planet to find.
All three stand at the mouth of a box canyon. Great curving walls of crystalline glassrock swoop away and upward to a narrow opening at the top. Approximately a mottible in diameter, the canyon is hedged by towering mountain peaks that catch the last rays of the setting sun on their hyaline sides. Especially now that it's slung so low in the west, precious little sunlight leaks down into the canyon, lending the place a surprising chill, when compared to the scorching heat of an hour past.
It's a gentle slope of spilled sand to the canyon floor and Moira's thankful there's no need to scramble down the razor-sharp glassrock cliffs. At a motion from Foreplanter, Nemo starts to shuffle forward, Moira falling into step. Behind them, the gigantic cactus is careful that none of its impressive strides ever passes those of its Vesselborn guests.
The path they descend hugs the glassrock wall and, before it reaches the ground, Moira is granted a better chance to examine the canyon's contents. All across the canyon floor are littered what Moira first erroneously assumes to be more unusual glassrock formations.
It takes Moira another few steps to discover that they're bones.
In graceful arcs that could only denote spines, skulls and ribcages, the bleached bones of gargantuan beasts are scattered across the floor of the canyon. There's easily more than one hundred, most buried or embedded deep in the sand, their true shapes and sized obscured. From what Moira can see, she's lead to believe these were once true behemoths, large enough to dwarf the tallest cacti.
Something about the serpentine structure of their skeletons suggests great undersea leviathans to Moira. She wonders what once these lands might have looked like, in the primordial age before the Consortium came to Gi.
The bones are scattered across the box canyon in odd patterns that look utterly random. The closer and closer she comes to the boneyard, though, Moira becomes convinced of an alien logic behind the arrangement. Flat fronds are stretched across the space wherever two larger bones come together, creating awnings, tents and the occasional improvised roof. So too does Moira note, as she alights upon the canyon floor, nearly all the bones bear decoration, whether obscure carvings or tribal fetishes or swirling patterns of dye.
Within this graveyard of ancient monsters, the Gitter of the Skyscratch grove have constructed their nursery.
As the warband arrives, gangly shapes start to emerge from the shadows of the structures, glassrock weapons at the ready. Moira recognizes them immediately as Gitter – spines, green skin, faceless trunks – but they're a far cry from the warband that comes trooping on her heels. For one, they're far shorter, standing only a foot taller than the average humanoid. For another, they bear no barbaric garb – the thongs, trophies and medallions – the marauders bear. Though armed, these smaller cacti carry simpler weapons like knives, machetes and the odd spear or polearm.
A caste system is Moira's best guess or perhaps breeding stock. Unable to suss the cultural idiosyncrasies of plant-men, Moira's woozy brain isn't quite in the mood for xenoanthropology.
Initially, even with Foreplanter's escort, the batch of homebody Gitter stare suspiciously at the offworlders, their weapons brandished. The further into the village they venture, however, one by one, each of the smaller Gitter drop to their knees in veneration.
To actually call this place a village feels somehow wrong to Moira. The dwellings, such as they are, don't seem particularly habitable, especially by the towering cacti. Beneath the shaded awnings, all Moira can see are rows of crops, squat greenish bulbs that're squeezed a dozen and more beneath each scrap of shelter.
The smaller cacti are extremely protective of these plants, however, hovering before each with weapons at the ready. It's only when she first spots the stubby spines that bristle from the green flesh of each bulb that Moira puts the pieces together.
They'd invested two years into reaching this moment. They'd spent millions of credits to arrange this meeting. They'd endured a litany of cruel and unusual hardships, from one end of the galaxy to the other, to place the three of them here – standing on this planet, staring at this fat little plant.
A Gitter sapling sits at Moira's feet. What's more, it's surrounded by hundreds of its brothers and sisters.
CHAPTER 9
Odisseus is pretty fucking hammered. Had he been thinking clearly, he probably would have seen this coming. All the clues were right there inside his nose.
Those spores that the Gitter use to communicate with reek of raw spice, so strong the smell was unrecognizable to his companions. It follows, then, that the spores, like the spice and the peach, were naturally intoxicating, even from only a whiff. Give them six hours of uninterrupted exposure to those spores and it was no wonder the Lover’s crew, each in their own way, were drunk off their bloomholes.
Again, had Odisseus been thinking clearly, his advanced sense of smell ought to have caught this early. It should be noted, however, that the Ortok spent three of the past six hours passed out from heat exhaustion.
According to his crewmates, Odisseus had the charity of Stalkchopper and the Gitter's medicinal arts to thank for saving his life. Soon as they’d returned to the nursery, even more tinctures and poultices were brought to bear on the exhausted Ortok. His wits returned, Odisseus can’t necessarily say he feels better, considering how drunk he’s become, but now he’s conscious, at least.
“Define slavery,” Nemo demands as he passes behind the Ortok for the umpteenth time.
“This.” Odisseus sweeps a claw across everything that’s arrayed before him. “This is what I would define as slavery.”
His back still turned, Nemo stops pacing. “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
“Here,” volunteers Moira. She reaches for the Attaché where it’s been forgotten, amid peach rinds and empty nutshells.
“This,” Odisseus tries again, repeating his previous gesture. “Is what I mean. This is the slavery part.”
Nemo spins around, aghast. “We’re not fucking enslaving them. Are you fucking kidding me?” He throws both hands out towards the crowd so fast, he nearly loses his balance. “Look how happy they are!”
“No, no, that’s not what I mean.” Odisseus shakes his head vigorously and the whole world sloshes back and forth. “I’m not explaining this great.”
Three fat moons paint the scene in ghostly green. The soothsayer, a runty and deformed cactus specimen plastered in a layer of sacred soil, twists and contorts in the ecstasy of its st
orytelling. The entire Skyscratch grove makes a captive audience, swaying subconsciously in time with their mystic’s erratic movements.
Odisseus is uncertain whether the seedlings, the spiny little spheres with their single unopened bulbs, should be counted as audience members as well. That was sorta the gist of this latest debate between the two saltbrothers.
As guests of honor, the three Vesselborn are seated on high, in a position of mastership and dominion over the entire grove and their mortal ritual below. Boulders, anointed with dyes, make for their thrones. The feast table, an expanse of unvarnished wood, has reportedly been fashioned from the “flesh of the mighty tuskwood” and Odisseus can only envision another ferocious plant-beast, slain for its meat.
The celebratory feast heaped before them is a smorgasbord of alien nuts, roots, seeds, leaves and fruit, the Gitterpeach most notable among them. It’s a kingly feast indeed, particularly compared to the dry desert rations Moira packed for them.
{Every valley a sea}, describes the soothsayer with great sweeping gestures of its limbs. {Every flatland a forest}.
“The state of being a slave,” reads Moira, her face lit by the Attaché’s screen.
“Like, for them, I’m saying.” Odisseus points a wobbly claw towards the nearest patch of seedlings. “The saplings. For them. That’s the slavery part.”
Nemo blinks. “They’re trees.”
“They’re smart trees,” Odisseus answers and starts to smack his lips. “They can talk. You heard them.”
“They don’t talk,” Nemo argues, as he paces past again. “They stink.”
“The practice or system of owning slaves.”
“Yeah,” Odisseus continues, his lips still smacking, “but that’s how they talk. By stinking. And they talk, so that means they’d be slaves if we kidnap one.” Odisseus scowls, somehow unable to stop his lips from smacking. “Does any of this make sense to you?”
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