Pearson did not protest or even open his eyes while Daisuke and Misha tied the wounded soldier to the sledge. His breathing was very shallow.
“I’m worried about the amount of morphine in him,” said Anne.
“Addiction is not biggest problem,” Misha answered. “Bigger problem is when morphine runs out. Or if someone else gets hurt.”
“No one else will get hurt.” Daisuke pulled a knot tight under Pearson’s armpit. “Misha will be our doctor. Anne will find things like the urchin spines. I will make things with them. We help each other.”
Anne swallowed and smiled, blinking rapidly. “Thanks, Daisuke.”
Daisuke banished his foolish suspicions. “Sure.” The clouds were darker now. “We should get back to camp.” He grabbed a loop of the cord and fitted it above his eyes like a headband. With a grunt, he took a step over the glass. The sledge squealed behind him.
The sledge design came from Greenland, where the ground was snow and ice. Warm glass was a less co-operative substrate, and Daisuke was sweating by the time they reached camp. He tried not to think about pulling this thing all the way to the mountains to the east. And then up them. And down them again. Just think about what a great montage the footage of the journey will make.
“Finally,” said Hariyadi, who was overseeing Nurul and Rahman as they packed the supplies. “Mr. Matsumori, this luggage is for you to load on your sledge. Ms. Houlihan, this is your pack. You will walk in front with me. We need you to scout for danger.”
Tyaney and Sing watched the preparations to leave, neither offering to help nor asking questions. Sing had been with Pearson when he was attacked as well, hadn’t she? Tyaney had told them Sing knew nothing of this environment, but could Daisuke take the man at his word? Tyaney might be lying, Sing might be lying.
But why would the Nun want to harm Pearson? Why would they want anything? They were so distant. So alien. I will have to speak with them, Daisuke resolved as he crawled over the sledge, making the camp’s baggage fast to it. Use Nurul or Anne as an interpreter.
“Mr. Alekseyev!” Hariyadi yelled. “For the last time, make yourself ready.”
Misha was sitting on top of his backpack. “I say we should spend night here. We can be safe in plane. And we don’t know our way.”
“I know the way,” said Hariyadi. “It’s due east.”
“Our compasses are not working, Colonel. And if sky is cloudy we cannot see the sun.” Misha looked upward and held out his palm, catching snowflakes. “Maybe Sing knows a way to navigate?”
“Hm. Well, we can just use the screw-trees,” said Anne.
Misha looked at her.
“Because the thread of the screw is always angled so more surface area faces south?”
Misha squinted.
“Because Junction has no axial tilt? Therefore the sun is always directly over the equator? Therefore the light is always coming from the south?”
Misha blinked. “Oh.”
“We are lucky to have access to your expertise,” Hariyadi said. “Now get up.”
Misha lumbered to his feet. “Colonel say ‘go’. I go.”
So did the rest of them.
The sledge did not work as well as it might have. On flat ground and when the spaces between hills were empty, Daisuke could make fairly good progress. Too often, though, the hollows were home to spindly screw-trees. The ‘plants’ grew into each other and fused into impenetrable land reefs that had to be avoided, with two men heaving on the sledge while another pushed it sideways up the hill. The higher-than-Earth gravity did not help either.
Once, the whole grunting mass of Daisuke, Pearson, and the sledge lost its traction and crashed into the reef they were trying to avoid, prompting the angry response of a swarm of bumblesnails. The coiled-shelled creatures darted back and forth through the air, buzzing their glassy wings and questing with their spines for something they could inject with venom. But by the time Daisuke opened his eyes, the swarm had dispersed. Nobody collapsed of either toxic or anaphylactic shock.
It continued to snow as they trudged dutifully eastward. Water ran down the hills, but did not pool between them. The cracks between the tiles opened to drain away the liquid, and without the support of their neighbors, the tiles became increasingly unstable. Daisuke found himself wobbling, as if he walked on rocks set into quicksand. Which meant—
The sledge rocked and tipped sideways. Pearson groaned. Daisuke cursed.
He turned in his traces to see that one side of the sledge had turned up a tile and fallen into the sandy, watery hole left behind. It took him, Rahman, and Misha pulling in tandem to haul the raft out of its hole and up the shallow incline of the nearest hill. Cursing and straining, they left a trail of uprooted tiles behind them. Pearson screamed with every bump.
The ‘vegetation’ at the crest of the hill was very different from what grew in the wetter hollows. Shorter, denser, more heavily sculpted by the wind. Misha sagged against this hill-reef. “We camp here?” he asked, and at Hariyadi’s nod said, “I will help Pearson.”
“Oh, this snow is dreadful!” said Nurul. “It’s so cold and wet. And we can’t even build a fire. Thank goodness we’re leaving this awful place.”
“Well, we can get warm if we break a tile,” Anne said. “Although I do wonder what will happen if we can’t get dry. Trench foot?”
Daisuke did not want to think about that picturesque English term.
“Yes,” said Hariyadi. “We can erect a tent over him and tie it to these trees. Daisuke, Tyaney, that’s you.” He repeated that in Indonesian, then for some reason switched back to English to say, “Rahman, help Ms. Houlihan erect a steam trap. Nurul and I shall prepare the food.”
Everyone fell to their assigned tasks. All except Sing, who hadn’t received any instructions. She simply sat where she’d been standing, arms wrapped around herself, legs folded against the warm, wet tiles.
“Poor woman,” said Rahman, following Daisuke’s gaze. “She can’t talk. Husband maybe think she is pig or dog. These natives, huh? I tie tarp this tree? This one?”
“You just don’t understand how Nun marriage works,” Anne said, then switched to Indonesian.
Rahman raised his eyebrows at her and asked a question in the same language.
Whatever he said, Anne evidently could think of no response. All she did was shake her head and mutter something about ‘bulletproof racism’.
“Sing knows how to survive out here,” said Daisuke. “We do not.” And, as an idea occurred, “We can ask her about what sort of challenges to expect in the next biome.” It would be a good excuse to draw Sing into their crew.
“How she understand question? How we understand answer?” Rahman asked. “Tyaney translate? I don’t trust him one bit.”
“We can try,” said Anne. “Now, we need to break this branch.” She grasped a corkscrew of glass spiraling out of the mass of the reef under the tarp. “Can you do it with your shovel?”
Glass shattered and steam billowed out of the tree, rising with the mist already coming off the ground to condense against the tarp.
“Go get a bucket to collect the water,” Daisuke said, wondering how it could be that nobody had thought to talk to Sing before. “I will get Sing. And Tyaney to translate for her.”
They didn’t want Sing and Tyaney to feel threatened, so they’d kept the size of the crew small for this scene. Hariyadi was content to review the footage later. Misha had, with some convincing, gone off and amused himself elsewhere. Nurul had argued that she would be a better translator than Anne, whose Indonesian was rather worse than Tyaney’s, but Tyaney didn’t like Nurul. He liked Anne, and Anne liked Daisuke. Daisuke just wanted to make sure nobody got murdered during this important conversation.
Now they sat in a circle around the steam trap: Daisuke, Rahman, Anne, Tyaney, and Sing.
“Rolling
,” whispered Rahman.
Daisuke nodded to Anne. “Go ahead. Just focus on Sing and Tyaney.”
Anne, who had been looking anxiously at the camera, swallowed, and fidgeted against the warm glass. She asked a question in halting Indonesian.
Tyaney turned and snapped something at Sing. Daisuke didn’t speak the Nun language and knew nothing of their customs, but it was very hard not to interpret the man as vilely cruel to his wife.
It was also hard to tell what Sing thought of her husband, or indeed any of the people here. Her round face was expressionless, her eyes slitted. She looked like a woman in half hibernation, waiting for the world to become worth participating in.
Tyaney repeated his question, then interrupted Sing when she began to answer. Sing responded, then stood with the economy of movement of a person who has lived most of her life outdoors. Tyaney flinched back as if afraid his wife might kick him, then yelled something that sounded angry.
Sing didn’t appear to notice. She stood over them, face hidden by the tarp stretched over the steam trap. Water dripped from the underside of the tarp as Sing pressed on the top with a finger.
When Daisuke stood, he saw that the steam trap had cooled and collected a thin crust of snow. Sing was drawing in the snow with her finger. Her whole hand. She clawed four furrows into the snow. She spoke, Tyaney mumbled something, and Anne translated.
“These are the valleys that go in the same direction as the wind.”
Sing shifted position and drew her finger down the first valley.
“To the east, the Deep Sky Country, home of the Nun.”
Sing pointed to the rightmost groove.
“This is here. The Warm Ice Country, which we know of, but which no person has ever visited before now.”
Anne’s brow creased as she translated. “How could you know about this place if no person has ever visited it?” She repeated her question in Indonesian. Both she and Rahman gasped at the answer.
“What?” asked Daisuke.
“He.…” Anne blinked. “He says, ‘The animals that Sing knows visit it sometimes.’”
Daisuke thought of the woodland creatures in Snow White. “Know? What animals does Sing know?”
“I asked him that,” said Anne. “Tyaney is describing them….” She listened to Tyaney, who was still talking. “I don’t understand. Rahman, did he say calamari?”
“Ya,” said Rahman. “Calamari.”
“Like squid?” Daisuke asked.
“He says no, not like squid. Like calamari.” Anne shrugged in mystification. “Now he’s talking about a fancy seafood restaurant he ate at in Jayapura?”
Daisuke suspected there was a translation problem somewhere along this long and unreliable line. “Ask him if these talking animals are helpful.”
“No,” said Tyaney. “Very dangerous.” He was glaring at Sing as if daring his wife to disagree. Not that we would know if she did. Still, Daisuke had the strong impression that the Nun man was lying.
“So we’re going this way?” Daisuke asked, indicating their eastward path to what must be the first of two mountain ranges. “Do Sing’s people know anything about these mountains?”
There was some discussion there, from which emerged that two mountains stood between the crew and their destination. Anne guessed that they were inhabited by two branches of some third biome, an alien ecosystem different from both the glasslands and the wormwood forest.
“‘She knows the place well and we will be in no danger,’” translated Anne, “but that’s just Tyaney bragging, I think. Plus he says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep her under control.’ Whatever that means.”
They would have to keep an eye on the Nun woman, was what that meant. Her own husband didn’t trust her. But Daisuke was already thinking suspiciously about everyone else, so why not add one more to the list?
“Will we be able to eat the animals in the mountains?” he asked. “Drink the water?
Tyaney chuckled.
“Sing says there is no food to be had in the mountains, but after we cross to the other side, we will be in the….” Anne paused. “Uh. Ripe Blood Country?”
Tyaney pointed at the valley between the two mountain ranges, in the middle of the map.
“The Ripe Blood Country. And there we can replenish our supplies of meat and water and….”
Anne stopped translating while Tyaney hissed a question at Sing, who answered with a short negative.
“Just meat and water. You cannot eat Ripe Blood plants.”
Anne asked another question, pointing at the next mountain range, the last before the Deep Sky Country and safety.
“After the Ripe Blood Country, we only have to cross the Death Wind Pass and we will be home.”
That didn’t sound promising.
Sing drew her finger through the gap between the inner and outer mountain ranges and said something Tyaney and Anne translated as: “The Death Wind River runs here, between the Ripe Blood Country and the Ground Sun Country. The river runs through the Death Wind Pass.”
“If there’s a river, I can build us a raft,” said Daisuke.
“No,” came the answer. “No rafts on the Death Wind River. It is impossible.”
Tyaney made an addendum. “If we stay high enough up, though, we should be fine.”
“What does that mean?”
“I already asked him,” Anne said. “He says, ‘Where the Death Wind can’t get us.’”
That sounded ominous. “So this Death Wind,” said Daisuke. “Is that another tribe of natives? Or calamari aliens?”
“No,” Anne translated for Tyaney. “No people until we get to Sing’s village, and there we must be very careful, because they are savage and dangerous witches.”
“What?” said Daisuke, but Tyaney was still talking.
“Then we will be only a day’s walk from Imsame and the High Earth Hole.”
Tyaney nodded as if at a job well done and turned away. After a moment, so did Sing.
Daisuke couldn’t help but notice that Tyaney had glossed over the exact nature of the ‘Death Wind’. And now he was turning as if to leave.
“Wait,” Daisuke said. “Ask him what exactly is the Death Wind?”
Anne did, and Tyaney rounded on her, waving his hands as he shouted in Indonesian. He stomped on the map Sing had made, smearing it into illegibility.
Rahman snapped something that sounded insulting, but Anne held up a hand. She said something, which Tyaney interrupted, spitting what must be deadly invective as he grabbed Sing’s arm. Still cursing, the native dragged his wife away.
“I assume the conversation is over?” asked Daisuke.
“Of all the bloody fucking dipshits!” Anne stomped as well, though not, Daisuke noticed, before checking the color of the tile under her foot. “That sneaky little….” She snapped her jaw closed and massaged her temples. “Sorry. I must have made some mistake. Insulted him somehow.”
“What did Tyaney say?” Daisuke asked.
“Asshole,” said Rahman.
Anne shook her head. “He thinks we’re trying to cut him out of the deal. That if he tells us too many details about the way back to Imsame, we won’t have any reason to keep him alive.” She looked at Rahman. “Benar?”
Rahman nodded. “He say we have map, we don’t need Tyaney, we kill him. Crazy!”
Daisuke thought of Pearson. “Yes,” he said. “Crazy.”
* * *
Daisuke’s suspicious mood only deepened when they rejoined the others and heard Pearson’s agonized ravings.
“Get that goddamn camera out of my face. I’m going to— Jesus Christ Lord Almighty but my legs hurt.” Pearson stopped swatting at Rahman and grasped his upper thighs, gritting his teeth.
“Is there anything you can do for him?” asked Hariyadi.
“No
,” Misha said. “I have washed the wounds and wrapped them in gauze. That is all that can be done for acid burns.”
“Maybe put…” Pearson sucked air through his teeth, “…baking soda on them or something.”
“That would be a bad idea,” Misha said. “Besides, we have no baking supplies. Or water.”
“We have the water from Anne’s steam trap.” Daisuke held up a plastic envelope that claimed to contain ‘BBQ pork’.
“Now sir, you must have another bite of your…” Misha squinted at the bag sloshing in his hand, “…hamburger with bun.”
Pearson narrowed his eyes. “I’ll tell you what, Alekseyev. I’ll eat that whole bag of reconstituted pig vomit if you tell me I’m going to be able to walk again.”
Misha looked at Anne, who stiffened, horror written in every line of her face and body. But if the biologist was no doctor, she was no coward, either. She told the soldier what he needed to know.
“Your legs were injected with sulfuric acid, probably about as concentrated as the hydrochloric acid in your stomach,” she said. “There was no…uh…mechanical processing,” she made clawing and chewing motions with her hands, indicating a shmoo softening up its prey, “and I’m happy to see there’s no sign of allergic reaction…”
“…because all allergens have been digested, maybe,” said Misha.
“…so,” Anne said. “I think you’ll live.”
“I’ll live.” Pearson glared at Hariyadi. “In enemy custody.”
Daisuke quietly ate his dinner and watched.
Nurul made an angry humming noise, but Hariyadi only raised an eyebrow. “Even if I were your enemy, Colonel Pearson, I think you would have greater problems to worry about.”
“Yes,” said Pearson. “Such as being a cripple on an overland hike through uncharted territory on an alien planet populated by monsters, through the snow, and uphill.”
“Exactly,” Misha said. “Now finish your dinner or no injection for you.”
“Oh yes. How could I forget the incipient morphine addiction to add to my list?” Pearson squeezed his lower arm and held out his wrist to Misha. “Give me my fix, doc.”
Junction Page 12
