“They’re waiting for you,” I said. “And I don’t know why.” I felt not only uncomfortable but awkward. “I guess we better just go on.” I thought of back doors and service entrances—there was one to the hunting union, actually, on the abandoned canal system that you could get to by going about twenty-five meters down and through an archway humans had to duck for … We started forward.
Something made me want to rush on. In the attempt to appear we weren’t rushing, I felt I was hobbling in slow motion.
I don’t know how many knew what we would look like, or how they knew.
I didn’t hear anyone shout (or whisper), That’s them.
I know that the first few women we passed were not looking at us, or if they were, were looking at us as they would look at anyone.
I know that the last ones all stood together, about a meter back from us on both sides, mostly smiling, a few gawking, evelm tongues a-twitter, human ones hidden behind teeth—smiling teeth, but teeth nevertheless.
Someone about three rows back called: “Have a good hunt!”
Someone on the other side said: “I was up on L’kr’l Slopes yesterday, and it was a pretty good gathering ’scape for—” till her friend nudged her.
Because they were smiling, I smiled too. And even felt good about it—though the good feeling wobbled upon a fulcrum of discomfort.
Korga looked around at them with a calm and unsettling expression about his green eyes, over his pocked jaw. The bright stones hung on his fingers.
I lifted the hook.
We pushed through the gate—
—and dropped through onto desert, set about with racks of grapples and radar-bows and portable blinds. Blue sky above us. About us a few union apprentices were carrying equipment here and there for even fewer clients. (I thought about whispering of my uneasiness. But the relief, surrounded by Korga’s silence, was almost as paralytic as the discomfort itself.) Beyond gorse-scooters, sand lay to a horizon under a streaked sky. The Hyte’s fumes twisted in an oestern colonnade.
Korga turned eyes, gone silver under Iiriani, about the union.
“A cassette,” I told him. “Just like my room.”
His hand relaxed on my shoulder as we stepped off the entrance plate onto sand. When a clerk came up, Korga dropped his hand to his side.
“We want a tandem scooter for the day.” My shoulder tingled. “I don’t know if my friend here can handle a number-nineteen bow, though that looks like his size. It’s his first time. He may feel more comfortable with a seventeen, or even a fifteen.”
The clerk reared back and looked Korga up and down. “We have a few half-sizes in. Let me start her out with an eighteen.”
I turned up my hands, dropped my head: “Do it.”
The clerk hurried off between racked radar-bows. We ambled after her, among clerks and clients.
I don’t know how the information followed us across the city; I don’t know how it followed us into the union. But when the clerk came back around the end of the rack with the beautifully scrolled black and silver radar-bow, I knew she hadn’t known before but that she knew now. “Would you …” She held the bow out by its damasked wind-vane. “Would you try this one, Rat Korga.”
Korga took the cross-piece with one hand and with the other grasped the web of bowstrings—clearly he’d never held, or seen anybody hold, a radar-bow in his life.
“Here, just a second—” I grabbed the stock before the clerk did. She settled back, with faintly quivering wings. “Basically you handle it here—” I hefted the forestock—“and here.” I grasped the arched shoulder brace.
Korga took the bow by stock and brace.
“That’s right. Now hook that around your—don’t let your shoulders hunch up!”
He didn’t.
And every seven-year-old human, not to mention seventy-year-old one, who feels for the first time that unsteady weight down on her shoulders (it always seems heavier on one shoulder, but you can never be quite sure which one) tends to hunch up her shoulders for the first few hours, if not the first few days, of wear.
Korga got the stock, with its lateral indentation, under his arm; chest brace and alternate shoulder brace stamped their padded feet against his pectorals. Still, somehow their weights, with his own natural musculature working against them, seemed to pull him into the stance of a (human) hunter to the bow born—though one hand was down at the far end of the boomerang-shaped haft, where I’ve never seen anyone hold it.
“This thing up here …? That’s to hold onto.” I tapped the stained bone handle with my forefinger.
He slid his left hand up the brace.
“Wait! wait! wait—!” the clerk twittered with three tongues, one after the other. She reached forward, released the spring-clamp between the two bone pieces that made up the grip so that it separated to its greatest width.
Korga’s bare, big-knuckled fingers clasped the expanded handle. “What’s this?” Rat asked, looking down with metallic eyes at the cup quivering on three small chains just under his chin.
“Oh,” the clerk said, “you put oil-soaked cactus bark, or various flavored pebbles in there, and lick them. While you’re waiting for your quarry.”
“You seem to have that pretty well,” I told Korga. “Now just see if, still holding it like that, you can get into a crouching position—”
Korga squatted—which ended his natural hunter’s stance. I steadied his shoulder and didn’t laugh. “Not too bad. But try it more like this.”
Diligently and dutifully, we three got Korga fairly comfortable among the vanes, scrolls, cords, sails, handles, grips, and braces of his bow. It seemed to fit. We went down two racks more to find me a size thirteen with an old-style selenium guidance system. (The new ones are supposed to be easier, but I’ve never gotten used to them. I’m offworld too much.) At various times two clerks and three clients looked around and between the racks to stare. At least three times I realized our clerk, even though she was fitting my bow, was a lot more interested in observing Korga than helping me. “We’ll take a couple of daykits,” I told her, as she looked back at me for the third time. “Really, that should do it.”
“Do you want to take a portable blind with you?” she asked for the second time.
For the second time I explained. “We’re only going to try the feeding grounds today, and since this is my friend’s first time, I don’t think we’ll need one.” (Blinds are good for the spawning grounds where the dragons can get a little feisty.) And for the second time the clerk arched her upper gum in faint surprise.
Any other day, I would have stayed around to ask about what the morning’s kollec on the union perches had been, probably gotten into a conversation or two with some other prospective hunters, swapped two or three hunting tales and songs. But as we walked with our bows back among the racks of equipment, with this clerk staring and two clients ceasing their conversation as we came by, I just wanted to leave—and found myself angry and confused at Rat’s even gait, which took the hunterunion’s sandy ground no faster than the run’s yielding floor.
I tried not to seem as if I were hurrying, and looked, I’m sure, like someone both hurried and confused. The clerk came with us to the scooter rack, stepped smartly around the back foils. “This one—?”
“Here, Rat. You sit there—you can hold on either to this strap, or put your hands on my waist if that’s more comfortable.”
The clerk lifted the large bow from him and joggled it down into the scooter’s side braces, guiding its sails into the sail slots and pushing in the positioning ratchets.
My own bow went into the brace on the other side. I got my leg over, slid my bare butt back on the spongy seat, got my feet into the foot guides—which felt wrong. “Excuse me,” I told the clerk, “do you have any human foot stirrups, to fit this one? These are still set up for evelmi.”
The clerk dashed off, dashed back; the stirrups were changed in about forty seconds. Someone came to look; two others, already looki
ng, walked away. I reached forward and pulled up the polarized sand shield.
Through the curving plastic, I looked out on—not sands, lichen, and the far horizon. (They, we know, are illusion. And the polarization cut them out.) The scooter was standing on a metal ramp, with more ramps either side of it. Ahead was an ornate arch in a stained enameled wall, its ornaments gritty with the dirt that collects on the real anywhere illusion reigns.
I glanced back at the clerk, who was stooping on the sand to strap our daykit to the back bar, the Velmian sky brilliant above her, behind her the orange plains and reddish mountains.
“All ready.” She stood, stepped back.
“Just relax, Rat,” I said. “Hold on, and when we turn, lean with it and don’t worry.” I looked forward at the shield—desert outside it, the enamel and metal of an urban traffic-way through it. With my heel I ignited the ignition.
We leaned forward, slid down the ramp—the union disappeared (Korga’s hands were momentarily iron on my flanks); and the view without and within the shield matched.
We rumbled into the tunnel.
Left of us, behind the mesh fence, the transport rollerway carried stacks of cargo at twice our speed. Right of us, a few more scooters scooted through; and once a covered kar overtook us and moved up ahead to disappear in the tunnel lights’ changing patterns.
I felt Korga move closer in behind me. Later I reflected on how well he took the curves—not like someone whose first scooter ride this was; and I’ve ridden with my share of those, evelmi and human. The tunnel curved and straightened around us. We curved. We straightened.
Through the air rush, I heard him speaking down at my ear: “Those radar-bows are confusing objects. They are strange weapons.” And as we neared the tunnel’s end and the true light of the desert opened over us, I realized suddenly Korga had no idea what, in a dragon hunt, we hunted.
TEN
A Dragon Hunt
1.
MORE MICA THAN SAND.
With such an erosive climate, how does this land sustain so many edges? I’d asked the question as a child. General Information had let me over-lick several explanations, all of which centered about the geological forces underlying the markings and measurings of three-thousand-kilometer rock-plates floating and crashing (oh so slowly, over millions of years standard) above magma, as they tend to do on woman-sized worlds. To skim the mica sandshifts—these ten-centimeter ledges that worm the upper plateaus, over which silver falls in veils—was for me to traverse all the informative forces below that underwrite this landscape.
Down a cliff ragged with purple fungi, the Old Hunter moved by boulders, her daykit lashed between her wings with rags. Rags are human-made; our daykit was tied to the scooter’s guide bar with the traditional yellow cord of fine braided cactus fiber. Cultural contamination? Cultural exchange? I’ve thought both over the years; I will think both again.
I halted the humming scooter, leaned it over, and got the triple stand stamped properly into the sand.
The sails on our bows wavered either side. The bowstrings buzzed notes too low for even dragons to hear. I kicked my foot out and swung my leg over the seat. The sand was still cool from the morning chill; kilometers away, a few twenty- and thirty-meter needle-rocks spoke of velmological happenstance.
Korga, all shoulders, knees, knuckles, and heels, dismounted, carefully awkward.
I grinned at him.
He gripped the handrail. Iiriani smoldered and exploded in his rings as he held it, dulled in his palm’s callus as he released it.
“There’s been good cliff-purchase as well as sage-signs for a couple of kilometers now,” I told him. “We should find sizable dragons feeding.” Microscopic and blue, sage is what dragons eat, and the cliffs, in the distance, rising broken, black, and yellow, are where they go to eat it. Korga stood beside the scooter, his broad hand on a bow sail, once more looking like a human hunter born in the brace and handles. “This is good hunting territory, Marq?”
“For what we want, we could probably hike a little further to the—”
Crunching over the heavy lichen at the road rim, the Old Hunter raised her dusty snout. She blinked her black eyes slowly, only tongue tips tasting in the dry air the dust that dulled her upper lipbone.
Korga turned to look, leaving his hand where it was. And what had been a brave stance, by the simple movement, again was comical. I saw the Old Hunter lick that awkwardness with her eyes and not change her expression.
That’s why I loved her.
She extended one tongue: “You women are going hunting.”
I nodded; and still wished she’d look away—or Korga would. “I guess so,” and laughed, finally able not to care, with another memory of my own first hunt. “How’s the catch been?”
Her head wagged a little. “Nothing so far. But there’re dragons to sing of over oestwards.” Her wings, without unfolding, hunched up on her back. She came up another few steps, claws too dusty to tell her origin, their points blunted by the sand she lived on.
She lifted her foreclaws a bit and raised her head, looking over our equipment. “Hello, young hunter.” That was to Rat. “Where do you come from?”
Rat moved his hand a little down the sail. “Another world.”
“Yes,” the Old Hunter said. “I’ve heard of such among you humans. Is your world in the north?”
The young hunter in me jumped to explain. But the older one put her hand on my shoulder (where Korga’s hand had so recently calmed me), and I watched.
“My world …” He paused, turned, and looked at our sun—his eyes momentarily blinded me. The afterimage, as I turned now, starred the landscape black. Rat pointed about thirty degrees above the horizon—“is there, about seventeen-point-three-four-two thousand light-years away.” Sun in a red stone on his forefinger vied with the mirrored balls under his lids. I wondered if galactic orientation were also within those rings.
“That’s where the tiny yellow dragon flies.” Her lip ridge arched and other tongues came out to try the tastes we laid on the air. “The yellow dragon.” Two indicator tongues came close together, miming ‘tiny,’ which Rat, I knew, would miss. “Your world. Yes. I taste your meaning, young hunter.”
The tiny yellow dragon is an imaginary beast and part of a minor but famous and rather complicated local myth cycle; I watched Korga hear it and not understand.
“Your sweat leaves a strangely metallic taste on the air, young hunter,” which, for the first few days after I came home from a mission in some artificial offworld environment, strange evelmi are always saying about me too, though my friends ignore it. I pondered how short a time he’d been here.
“Well, while you are hunting dragons, I shall be hunting you. And maybe when we have finished our day, we can sing of our catch to one another.” Her paws came down on the warm soil. “Remember, young hunter, as you aim through the sights and sails of your bow, I’ll have you centered through my sights and sails.”
I pulled down the release strap of my bow brace; the bow slid toward me and I caught it by the haft.
“You are Marq Dyeth.”
I grinned, as pleased that she had recognized me this time as I had been the first time it had happened on my third hunt when I was a child. To evelmi most humans look pretty much alike. Those living with numbers of humans develop their strategies for telling us apart; and those who live for years in the same house with us have no more difficulty distinguishing us than we—who live with them—have distinguishing them. But the Old Hunter herself had once told me, years ago, that the only way she could tell one human from another was by how she held her bow. “Good luck to the two of you.” Her spurs flexed above the sand.
She turned away down the ridge.
Korga was looking for the release strap. “Marq, what did she mean, she would be hunting us?”
I pulled the last sail out of the brace’s sail slot. “She’s going back to her blind, where her bow and gear are stored. And she’s just letting us kno
w that she’s going to be after us in exactly the same way we’re going to be after the dragons.”
Korga stood. “Then she is our enemy.” It wasn’t fear; but you could read fear into it. “We must avoid her, Marq. Perhaps this is not a good day for us to hunt—”
“She’s our best friend in this world,” I told him. “The Old Hunter, and hunters like her, are the reason that in some of the southern geosectors, evelmi and humans can live as one society. That’s not the strap you want, Rat. Pull the one below it.”
Rat pulled.
The bow brace swung out.
The sails quivered, leaned—
“Catch hold of the haft!”
He did. And stood, the black-scored, light-absorbent sail rising by one shoulder, the white reflectant one by the other.
“Remember how you were holding the bow back at the union? See if you can get it like that again—no, your left hand a little further forward. There. That’s more like it.”
2.
THE VYALOU COMPRESSES IMMENSE variety into a landscape that always looks, from any one position, comparatively uniform.
We stepped over silver-shot sift-ribbons. On foot, we wound the narrow paths between igneous boulders which had cracked in two, the coal-black faces veined with yellow schist. We crossed a natural bridge over a dry gully that had once been an underground river, left there by early human colonists, whose roof had caved in. We paused at a place where white blossoms the size of pinheads, which you had to look at from less than a dozen centimeters to make out their individual petals, lay across the sand, aping the north-polar frosts. We set our bows down on their three-jointed feet; I made Korga put his ear to the sand to hear the subvelmian thrum of waters crashing some seven meters down—in a newer colonial waterway, which an Old Hunter had assured me, in my fifteenth year, would too lose its roof and dry, oh … within three-quarters of a century.
“There, look—!”
Korga’s head came up, sand and mica on his ear’s curve.
“—can you see her flying, toward the crag?”
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 74
