7th Sigma

by Steven Gould

  Dehydration indeed.

  Kimble looked over the wash. The cart was in pieces, riddled with bug holes, perhaps halfway across the wash. There were a couple of boulders also sticking above the moving sea of copper and steel but none of the bugs sat on them. “Iron rich sands?”

  “I believe so,” said Hahn. “There were dark streaks.”

  Not enough to attract the bugs in the first place but enough to keep them here once they swarmed.

  A woman with a toddler asleep in her lap was sitting in the small bit of shade at the edge of the cut. “Isn’t there something that can be done?”

  One of the teamsters muttered, “Here we go again.”

  Mr. Joffrey turned, anguish twisting across his face like the hat in his hands. “If it would just rain again…”

  Bugs hated water. They’d abandon the arroyo while water covered it. Of course, it was the water that probably uncovered a piece of refined metal to attract that first bug, the one run over by the cart.

  The first rain was unlikely enough this time of year. No counting on a second storm.

  “This won’t do,” Kimble said. “Anybody have a shovel?”

  “What, you gonna tunnel to her?” the teamster boss, Graham, said. “That’s limestone under that sand. Might as well build a bridge above, as long as that would take.”

  “Lend me a shovel and I’ll go get her.”

  Graham, a big man going gray, stared at Kimble, slight, young. Kimble had even depilated that morning so he looked his youngest. “Stupid to send one fool kid after another.”

  “You want to just sit here and let her die of thirst?”

  “All I see is two dead kids instead of one and a shovel rotten with bug holes. No gain in that.”

  “I die out there, you can have my mule and cart and all its contents. That’s a pretty good trade for a fiberglass shovel.”

  Hahn was listening to the conversation intently and Kimble saw him open his mouth, as if to argue on with Graham, but Kimble shook his head. The priest knew of his association with Major Bentham. He’d even passed messages to and from the Rangers for Kimble. Kimble didn’t want him blowing his cover to convince someone to lend a shovel.

  Graham said, “I’ve got kids myself. The only thing worse than losing one is losing two. Forget it.” There was something in his voice that made Kimble think this wasn’t just theoretical knowledge.

  Kimble shrugged. “Right. How about you, Mr. Joffrey?”

  Mr. Joffrey was looking at his wife. The hat was twisted tighter than ever.

  She was biting her lower lip. Her arms tightened around the toddler in her lap and he awoke, complaining. She shushed him, kissing his head, and he settled again. She looked up at her husband and gave him a short nod.

  “Right,” he said. He stared down at the hat in his hand and then touched his sunburned bald spot. “Ow. What a fool thing!” He settled the hat on his head and started up the hill.

  Kimble turned to follow him. “Now just wait a minute!” said Graham and started to walk up the hill after them.

  Hahn stepped in the big man’s way and held up his hand. “Your choice is inaction. I understand that. But she is not your child.”

  Hahn was a good two feet shorter than the teamster but something made that man pull up short.

  Kimble kept walking. At the cart, he took a water bottle, his first-aid kit, and some dried apples and walnuts, and put them in a shoulder bag. Joffrey took a rough composite shovel out of his remaining cart and handed it to Kimble. “It’s seen better days.”

  The edge of the fiberglass blade was worn and cracked but the handle was all right. “It’s perfect,” Kimble said.

  “Be careful, right?”

  Kimble nodded. He started to walk away but at the last minute stepped back to his cart and took the wide-brimmed green cattail hat with him.

  He didn’t walk back down into the cut. Thayet was far closer to the other side and he saw no point in traveling through more bugs than he had to. Besides, this would save arguing with the teamster.

  A quarter mile upstream, where the edges of the arroyo were higher and steeper, a slab of limestone shelved across the bed, probably forming a waterfall when the water ran, but now it was a broken swath of rock with only a little of the iron-rich sands pooling between raised boulders. Kimble slid down the side of the arroyo in a cloud of dirt, dust, and pebbles and picked his way across the arroyo, boulder to boulder. He had to cut steps into the far side with the shovel to make it back to the top.

  He came down the road cut on the far side and studied the space between him and Thayet’s rock.

  Bugs don’t really care about people. As far as they’re concerned, humans are just a slightly thicker manifestation of air.

  Bugs care about three things, near as Kimble could figure. They loved metal. That’s what they’re after, what they’re made of, what they ate to turn into even more bugs.

  You don’t want to have an artificial joint in the territory. Ditto for metal fillings.

  Much as they love metal, though, they crave electromagnetic radiation even more. This means they love radio signals and, really, any of the humming frequencies caused by current flowing through conductors.

  Forget computers, radios, cell phones, generators, and—remember fillings and crowns?—well, a pacemaker, an imbedded insulin pump, a vagal stimulator brings them quicker.

  But there is one thing that brings them even faster than all of those, that makes them swarm.

  A broken bug is to the territory what blood is to a shark pool. They come in numbers, they come fast, and they come with their coal-black nano snouts ready to eat through anything.

  Kimble used the shovel like a spatula, easing it under the bugs, under the sand itself, and lifting. The minute it was up, he stepped there, into the moist sand temporarily free of bugs.

  He sprinkled the shovelful of sand and bugs off to the side, gently, only inches above the others. Some rattled, some spread their silicon-blue photovoltaic wings from under their metal carapaces and buzzed off to land elsewhere, and some just fell to the ground and kept working on the bit of iron they’d separated from the surrounding sand.

  Kimble took it very slow. He’d seen bugs sufficiently disturbed that a whole cloud of them rose up without the usual requirement of one getting broken—not quite a swarm, but sufficient to badly scar the horse that had stirred ’em up.

  More than once one of the bugs buzzed to a landing on Kimble’s clothing. He scraped them carefully off with the blade of the shovel and they’d drop or fly off.

  When he was fifteen feet or so from Thayet’s boulder he spoke. “Hey, lazy girl, you gonna sit there all day?”

  She blinked and turned her head. She did not look good. Her lips were cracked and crusted with blood. Her nose was peeling and there was a hole in her pants above one knee that was brown with crusted blood. “Go away,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

  Kimble blinked. Ah. “Thayet, I’m not a hallucination.”

  “Yes you are. Kim is hundreds of miles from here.”

  He laughed. For some reason that made her open her eyes again. “If you can convince me you won’t drop it, I have water.”

  She shook herself, then slapped her cheek. She looked back across the arroyo to where her father and the crowd watched. Kimble hadn’t been looking at them. They were all standing, many of them with their hands raised as if they could reach out and snatch both of them to safety. Graham, the teamsters’ boss, even had one hand raised to his mouth.

  “Kim?” She looked back at him.

  “Yes, Thayet.” Kimble shifted another shovelful of bugs and sand, moved forward another pace. He stopped again, to let the bugs settle. “Here, catch.”

  He took the hat and threw it like a Frisbee. She clutched it weakly to her, eyes widening.

  “Does that feel like a hallucination?”

  She rubbed it between her fingers. “No.”

  “Put it on, silly.”

  She did a
nd sighed audibly when the rim shaded the sun from her face.

  “Ready for the water?”

  “Give me a moment. I’m numb from the waist down.”

  “Well, you better do something about that.” Kimble’s legs had gone to sleep before during meditation but he was afraid her experience was really more like the time he’d been locked in the stocks by the People of the Book.

  She had to use her arms to uncross her legs. She pushed them out, extended and leaned back.

  Kimble took another shovelful, another step.

  Thayet screamed as the sensation began returning to her legs. There was a sympathetic shout from the crowd across the arroyo. They probably thought a bug was boring through her, but Kimble saw Hahn talking, his hands raised, explaining about the legs.

  Thayet gritted her teeth, then began methodically massaging her legs. “Aaaagghhh.” After a few moments she said, “Water?”

  “Sip first, right? You drink too much you’ll throw it right up.” He swung the bag by its handle, underhand and she caught it neatly.

  She was careful, rinsing her mouth before swallowing. She managed half a liter in small gulps before he got the rest of the way to her boulder.

  “Scoot over,” he said, sitting beside her. “Whew, I’m bushed.” It wasn’t the effort, but the tension.

  They sat there for another half hour. Thayet tried some dried apple and a few walnuts and another half-liter of water and Kimble bandaged the bug score on her right thigh. Finally, he helped her stand and encouraged her to take a few steps side to side atop the rock.

  They went back the way he’d come, one shovelful at a time, with her hands on his waist. She stepped into his vacated footprints before the bugs filled them. The bugs crawled around their ankles and once one took a shortcut through the leather of Kimble’s moccasin and the skin of his ankle, leaving a bloody dribble across the sand.

  He cursed a blue streak but he kept his steps and the shovel steady.

  When they made it back to the edge of the bugs, where the cut dropped into the sand of the arroyo, they staggered up the road several yards. As they collapsed there was a ragged cheer from across the arroyo.

  Thayet bandaged his ankle and then drank more water. “You want some?”

  “No, girl. That’s your water. Until you’re peeing frequently, copiously, and clearly.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “Yes, Little Dove.”

  * * *

  THEY found the Joffreys’ errant horse, Stupid, near the road, its lead reins tangled in a patch of prickly pear, and Thayet refused to move another step until Kimble had gotten its halter and harness off. Its mouth was a mess after two days of chewing around the composite bit. Kimble settled both the horse and Thayet a good quarter mile up the road in the shade of a rock outcropping.

  Back at the lip of the arroyo, across from the teamster boss, he shouted, “You ready?”

  “Yeah,” the teamster yelled back. “We got them back over the hill. Your mule didn’t want to go. Josh was reaching for her bridle and she came that close to biting off his arm. You could hear the teeth come together clear down the hill. But Hahn, here, he bribed her with a bucket of oats and she followed him down.”

  “She’s a lot of trouble. Okay, give me five minutes.”

  What he had in mind wouldn’t take as long as the painstaking slog across the arroyo to get Thayet, but it was probably as dangerous.

  While one might be able to take the carts and saddle horses cross-country downstream to where the walls of the arroyo were less steep, the freight wagons would have to detour thirty miles to a crossing they could handle.

  Unless they could clear this crossing of bugs.

  The spot he chose was a half mile downstream where the walls of the arroyo had been undercut by the recent flooding but a three-foot stratum of limestone kept the rim above solid. There was more limestone below, with shallow pockets that had caught some of the iron-bearing sands and, while the bugs were nowhere near as thick as at the crossing, there were some grazing for ferrous bits.

  He found the first thing he needed about fifty yards back, a place where water running between two rocks had dug a channel, perhaps two feet deep, two feet wide. He used the shovel and made it deeper, but he kept his eyes open as he dug.

  The last thing he wanted to do was uncover an old metal fence post.

  The second thing he needed he found closer to the arroyo, a big chunk of limestone about the size of a large watermelon. It was sunk in the dirt, but he cleared an edge and levered it out with the shovel. Its top and bottom were flat, so it didn’t roll worth beans. He might have carried it a few yards, but instead he just flopped it over and over, thud, thud, thud, all the way to the rim. Then he shifted it sideways a bit and tested his choice by dropping a very small pebble over the edge. Nope. Another pebble, a foot to the right, was dead on target so he shifted the boulder, took a deep breath, and shoved.

  He was running before it hit, but he still heard multiple “pops.” One would’ve been sufficient. He could hear the bugs in the air, a harsh cicada buzzing with ultrasonic overtones. It was mostly from upstream but he still had to dodge a few that arose from the brush in front of him. He dropped into the hole and several buzzed overhead, more than he’d expected. Maybe there was some old barbwire in the neighborhood.

  After five minutes his heart had stopped pounding and his breathing had slowed and he was back to boredom. He stuck to the plan, though. Bugs could keep coming for a while and it was better to be cautious.

  He’d intended to meditate but he fell asleep instead.

  The teamster boss’ voice woke him, yelling at the top of his lungs, yelling his name from about ten feet away, worry and fear in his voice.

  Kimble shuddered awake, his heart pounding, the sick sound of a bullwhip crack fading back into the dreamscape.

  What on earth has happened now?

  Kimble stood up and his head cleared the rocks. The teamster wasn’t looking his way and when Kimble spoke the teamster boss almost fell over.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! We thought you were dead!”

  Oops. “How long have I been asleep?”

  The man opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, then just shook his head and marched back toward the crossing. “He’s all right!” he yelled back toward the road.

  They were all out there, the Joffreys, the teamsters, and the others, spread out across the desert, looking for Kimble. He picked up Joffrey’s shovel and waved it overhead. Kimble started back toward the edge of arroyo, to take a look down at the impact site, but the bugs were thick on the ground before he reached the rim, their wings extended and held flat to the sun, so he veered away. He could only imagine what they were like in the arroyo below.

  Back at the crossing they’d already brought the stock and vehicles across and when Kimble glanced down the cut into the wash it was just sand, clear of bugs.

  Mrs. Perdicaris snorted and walked to meet him. Mrs. Joffrey, with a large smile on her face, handed him a cold apple empanada. When Kimble thanked her for it, she lunged at him and it was all he could do not to throw her in the dirt before he realized she just wanted to hug him. When she let go her eyes were wet. When Kimble gave Joffrey his shovel back, the man nodded gravely and said, “I’ll keep this handy. I see it still has plenty of use in it.”

  Thayet was lying in the shade under their handcart, a jug of water to hand. Kimble approved. “You pee yet?”

  She shook her head.

  “Drink more water.”

  16

  Dancing in the Dark

  Kimble put Thayet up in his cart and Joffrey unlashed the crossbar on the Hahns’ cart so they could hitch Stupid to it.

  “What kind of name is that?” Kimble had asked.

  “Sarcasm,” said Joffrey. “Damn thing can open any latch ever made. I couldn’t tell you the number of times we found him in the kitchen garden as a colt. Mrs. Joffrey kept saying, ‘You get that stupid horse out of my garden!’ It
stuck. He was almost horsemeat before he got grown but he really turned into a good all-round workhorse. Saddle, cart, plow. You name it.”

  Thây Hahn wouldn’t ride in the cart, but he led the hitched horse, walking, his fingers counting through the beads on his rosary, all the way to the edge of the alkali flats. The area below the Manzanos is a closed basin and the flats were where the water ended up (if it didn’t evaporate before getting down there).

  The village of Three Bean Salad sat on two springs and one of the more reliable streams running down into the basin. Beans, as you might imagine from the village name, were the largest local crop—mostly pinto. Las Tres Hermanas—the Three Sisters—was a restaurant and hotel below the village on the last bit of raised ground before the flats began. In the summer, when the winds gusted from the south, there was little shelter from the stinging dust storms, but it was sited around a good spring that flowed year-round.

  The Hahns and the Joffreys and Kimble paid a small fee to camp on the edge of the inn’s cherry grove and draw water. The teamsters paid more for rooms and stabling and an active night watchman for their wagons.

  Mrs. Joffrey wondered at the expense. “You’d think they’d want to save their money!”

  Twelve-year-old Thayet laughed. “They want their visitors more.”

  Mrs. Joffrey had offered to fix dinner for all of them, and while Kimble had accepted immediately, the Hahns were vegetarians. Thayet shared the cook fire, though, to prepare their brown rice and lentils while her father meditated back in the grove.

  “What on earth are you talking about, child?” Mrs. Joffrey asked.

  “The bed girls. The hotel has a deal with them. They don’t go to the campsites and, in return, the hotel cuts them in on a bit of the room cost.”

  Mrs. Joffrey blushed. “Bed girls?”

  Thayet added, “Sex workers. You know, women who—”

  Kimble tried not to laugh. “She understands, Thayet.”

  Mrs. Joffrey turned away, busying herself with the stew she was cooking—the one she’d just checked.

  Kimble turned back to Thayet. “Why are you here, Little Dove? Away from the capital?”