Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Abasio nodded. “Well, when he came out he looked . . . dare I say ‘thoughtful’?”

  “It’s barely possible I got through to him. Maybe we can think of some other image he could work toward, you know, the adventurer or swashbuckler. Problem is, there are no images in these farm communities that would be helpful to us. I’ve been trying to think of stories he might know that have intrepid heroes he might want to emulate, and I can’t come up with one. I don’t know. Something has to get through to him, nothing seems to faze him, and he just doesn’t listen! Ever!”

  “Not unless it’s something he’s curious about,” muttered Abasio. “Then he listens. Xulai, I had one of my rare fits of revelation a moment or so ago. Do you remember anyone in Gravysuck saying anything that you thought was important enough to listen to? I’m not including Bertram, obviously, but I’m wondering if Willum doesn’t listen because nobody in that village listens. They make noises at one another, like chickens clucking, a generalized flock noise to assure the flock everybody’s there, but I never heard anyone saying anything worth remembering. Lorp was the only thing they argued about, and those weren’t real arguments, they were just ‘shut up about Lorp’ retorts.”

  Xulai’s eyebrows went up. “Chicken talk!” She turned, staring into nothing, considering. “Like hive noise, with bees. Just a comforting cackle that lets you know you’re among known ­people. You might be right! Bertram was different, of course, but then he reads books. Willum may just let words flow through.”

  Kim came out in dry clothing and took a towel to Socky. Once they were dry and had had a chance to catch their breaths, there was no reason for further delay. When Socky had warmed up and been furnished with a dry saddle blanket, Kim mounted and headed up the valley at an easy canter. He would get to the town and make whatever arrangements were necessary long before the wagon got there. The actual distance wasn’t great, but the road still followed the river, back and forth, over and over, loop after loop, multiplying the distance. Now dry and relatively calm, Blue and Rags ambled. Abasio left them to determine their own pace. It was a longer distance than ­people needed to be hauled; he and Xulai followed Willum, straight across the pastures. Those that were fenced had gates; if the babies yelled, Blue would let them know.

  As the tumult of white water faded into silence behind them, they turned to look back. A grove of huge dark trees stood along the base of the wall, their drooping branches shadowing and hiding the entrance to the notch, while the road to the west stood open and clear. The river forked into north and south branches some distance east of the notch, not naturally, but because of a V-­shaped diversion wall built of stones and set into the riverbed. As the river forked, so did the road, the north-­half road veering away to accompany its half of the river through the notch while the south road crossed the north fork by a stout timber bridge and followed the south-­half river westward.

  “Abasio, have you ever seen such a tree?” Xulai cried, pointing at the notch. “Look at it.”

  Abasio had been looking at it, or rather looking past it, to see if there were huge hands clawing over the top of the wall. The enormous tree stood just west of the notch, one side of the trunk quite near the vertical wall, a trunk so thick that it would take more than ten large men to make a hand-­to-­hand circle around it. The other side of the trunk reached almost halfway to the south branch of the river.

  “Hundreds of years old, I imagine. I wonder if there are more of them.” He thought the diversion must have been built centuries ago. Neither wall nor notch was recent, yet neither wall nor notch was on the map!

  Willum had removed his shoes and hung them around his neck by the laces in order to better investigate something in the river. When they caught up to him he said, “One time some explorer came to this place, and he asked some fellow, ‘What’s all that white stuff?’ So they gave him some to taste, and he shouted out, ‘It’s salt. Gosh!’ That’s how it got named!”

  “Is that true, Willum?”

  “Gum says it is,” the boy replied, suddenly serious. “ ’Bout those giants back there, I got to thinkin’ about them. How did they make them?”

  “Will you listen if I tell you?”

  “Yeah, I wanna know, ’Basio.”

  Which was, Abasio thought, the key. Willum listened only if Willum wanted to know. There was a key there somewhere. He’d have to think about it!

  “All right. Now, it’s a long story, so pay attention. First, you have to think of time, because a lot of this happened a thousand years ago. Can you get your brain around a thousand years?”

  “Ma Garney teaches ’rithmatic. I c’n add it and divide it and stuff.”

  “One generation is about twenty-­five years. That’s about what it takes for a person to grow up and have children. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but that’s kind of an average. About four generations every hundred years, so a thousand years is forty generations. It’s a long time. Gravysuck wasn’t there. Saltgosh wasn’t there. These mountains we’re in, they pushed up about that time. You with me?”

  “Oh, wow. Thassa a long time.”

  “Right. Now, back even before that, some hundreds of years before that, the world was packed with ­people: cities, roads, things called railroads, ­people everywhere. It got so full of ­people that they were always fighting over space, or over food or over fuel or power. So some ­people got the idea it would be nice to get rid of everyone in the world who wasn’t just like them. ­People built killer machines. The killer machines could read ­people’s minds, and the machines would kill everyone whose mind was different from the ­people who made them. Can you guess what happened next?”

  “ ’F it was me, I’d build me my own machine to kill those ­people that made the first ones,” Willum said belligerently. “Ma allus says ­people oughta think what they want.”

  “They did build their own machines. By the time it was over, there may have been dozens of different sets of machines killing ­people for what they believed, or killing other killing machines for killing the wrong ­people. That’s what finally stopped it. The machines started killing one another. BUT by that time, ninety percent—­you know about percents?”

  “Nuh-­uh.”

  “Nine ­people out of every ten were dead. How many ­people in Gravysuck?”

  “Sixty-­two if y’count the farms.”

  “There would have been six ­people left in Gravysuck. That’s ten percent.”

  “An one of ’em was about seven weeks pregnant, right? ’Cause there ought to be about two-­tenths part of another one.”

  Abasio and Xulai shared an astonished glance. Well! Sparks of light in the impenetrable darkness.

  Abasio went on: “So the machines killed each other, and almost all the machines were destroyed. Last year, Xulai and I were there when the very last one was destroyed. It had gone on killing for a thousand years. Now, that whole time the machines were killing ­people is called the Big Kill.”

  “Whassat got to do with those giants?”

  “Well, during the Big Kill, what would you have done?”

  “Gone n’ hid, I ’spose.”

  “That’s exactly what some of the very smartest ­people did. They left the cities, they went outside the cities into the country, and they dug in. They made refuges for themselves underground. The machines couldn’t read minds that were underground, and these very smart ­people made their places very strong. Because they were at the edges of the cities, that’s what the places were called: Edges. They were full of ­people with very good brains who invented all kinds of things . . .” That they shouldn’t have, he said silently. “When I was a boy I lived near the ruined city of Fantis. Within a one- or two-day journey north, east, or south of the ruined city, there were about a hundred of those Edges . . .”

  “The ­people stayed in there, Willum,” Xulai offered. “Generation after generation. They were safe
there, and they stayed there, and they got awfully bored. So they did what ­people do; they had hobbies, something to amuse themselves. The Edgers decided to create villages copied from fairy tales; have you heard of them?”

  “You mean little kids’ stories. Like ‘Sweet Dreamer and the Seven Dinkies’? An’ ‘Princess Ladder-­Hair’? An’ ‘Three Skinny Piggies an’ the Big Coyote’? Ma Garney tol’ us all a’ them. She used to have a book a’ stories like that, but it wore out.”

  Xulai nodded at him. “Stories like that, yes. The Edgers created places like those stories, and they put ­people and creatures in them to act the parts. Some of them were real ­people. Some of them were machines, dressed up to look like ­people. And some were living things that they created in their laboratories and then put in the villages. Abasio lived near such a village. His mother had . . . an injured mind, and they put her in the village to play a part—­”

  Abasio interrupted, not wanting to revisit old tragedies. “If the story had a giant in it, then the Edgers created a giant. There was one near the village Xulai’s talking about. He was a perfectly nice giant, a little over twice my height, didn’t eat ­people. He was all human, but very, very large. Because we know the Edgers could do that, we’re pretty sure the Edgers made those giants that’re trying to get in here.

  “I lived just over those mountains.” He pointed eastward, toward the final range. “Chief Purple, the chief of the gang I joined in Fantis, had ­people digging into the city, the buried city, finding things, and he sold a lot of those things to the Edgers. When he had something they wanted, he would send some of his gang members to deliver it—­sometimes I did the delivering, so I got to know some of the Edgers. He ended up finding something valuable enough that he used it to buy his way into an Edge. After that, he lived in the Edge, just using the gang members to protect him when he went back and forth.

  “So, this one Edger that I talked with quite a bit was all excited about using the genetic patterns of some animals in the creatures they made. He told me about various kinds they’d obtained from who knows where! One was called a hyena. It had this wild, laughing cry. Trolls cry like that. Some fool had decided to make both male and female Trolls, and the Edger told me there’d been breeding between giants and the female Trolls. That’s where the first Ogres came from. He thought it was hilariously funny.”

  “Part giant human and part Troll,” Xulai breathed. “I hadn’t realized that . . .”

  Until that moment, Abasio hadn’t really thought about it, had, indeed, refused to think about it. He felt his skin turn cold, and he shivered though the sun was warm upon him. He shook his head, forcing the images in there to go elsewhere. The creatures on the other side of that wall were like those prehistoric beasts he had read of in Tingawa: menacing, indomitable, and always voraciously hungry . . .

  He tried to get them out of his head by concentrating on where they were. Xulai put an end to distraction by passing him the ul xaolat she had been fiddling with and pointing to the text screen. He read the line of rolling text and snarled. “Plague?”

  “Ul xaolat said don’t kill the giants. That’s its explanation. It says biting insects will lay their eggs in those huge bodies. The eggs will hatch into larvae that eat the bodies. The giants have some kind of growth hormone in them that will transfer into the larvae, and the next generation of the biting insects will have no limit on their growth, they’ll grow so big they can kill ­people before laying eggs in them. We’ll have substituted thousands of huge insects for each giant.”

  “So we can’t . . . we can’t kill them?”

  “Not unless we can bury or burn the remains, so bugs can’t get at them. So far, the giants have eaten all the dead ones, so it hasn’t happened.”

  “Couldn’t ul xaolat dispose of . . . ?”

  “Of course it could, with enough power, Abasio. It would draw an immense amount of power. There’s no way to do it slowly that would stop the plague.”

  Cursing the Edgers did not soothe Abasio’s anger. It would take half a forest’s worth of wood to burn one of those huge bodies. If they couldn’t kill the creatures, what in the devil could they do with them!

  (“She’s right about the power,” ul xaolat fumed. It had been watching the fluctuation, hoping to find a time when use was low. There was none. Usage was virtually level around the clock. Others had had the same thought, tried the same thing, moved their delayable usage to the lower-­use times and evened everything out.)

  Their road led upward, toward the eastern wall of the canyon, a wall that extended from the north wall without a break, ending in a clean, vertical cut across from a rocky precipice on the south. Through this cut the road and the river climbed on eastward toward Findem Pass. At the north edge of this gap, next to the road, the cliff wall ended in a towering square pillar so regular in shape that it seemed built rather than natural. Below and some distance north of this tower, glued to the vertical eastern wall of red stone as though placed there by a flock of enormous cliff swallows, hung a . . . well, what was it? It appeared to be a glittering collection of refractive gems, mirrors, and crystals, all sparkling and generating rainbows of scintillating light across the valley’s walls, like a diamond necklace for a giantess, or a display of spun and crystallized sugar in a confectioner’s window.

  Xulai and Abasio shared the thought with a glance. “Candy . . .” she murmured, licking her lips. He nodded, managing a weak grimace. In the citadel of Tingawa complicated sweets had been the confectioners’ pride. Sugary elegances had marked the climax of many of the celebratory meals that had honored Xulai’s marriage, Abasio’s “adoption” as an honorary Tingawan (princesses were traditionally not allowed to marry outsiders and this “adoption” was a delayed bow to tradition), and the birth of “her” children. She was, after all, a princess of the realm. Abasio, when in Tingawa, often felt like an appurtenance. Now, of course, all that elaboration seemed remote as a dream. A man whose duty it was to assist in saving the human race should not be dreaming of candy! In the company of giants, no less!

  He shook his head in mock dismay at himself, lifting and staring at his hand. Well, at least that part of him had stopped shaking. He couldn’t say as much for his insides, which still quaked, stopped, then quaked again, as though something in there kept waking up and screaming. The wagon might have reached that corner one second later . . . He could have tripped and fallen . . . If that hand had grabbed the wagon, it could have pulled it back, horses included . . . It had been so close, so terribly, terribly close. His mind was on other things, but his body went on remembering, time after time convulsing with sickening internal spasms.

  He forced himself to concentrate, instead, on what lay below the spun-­sugar town, at the foot of the cliff. As they came nearer, the area of meaningless clutter gradually resolved itself into purposeful order. The patches of darkness were mine-­shaft openings: white-­coated machinery stood against the pale wooden sides of storage barns or warehouses; men clustered at this task or another, variously dressed and equipped and moving among saw pits, crushers, and grinders. Wagons were pulled by horses clad in what looked like raincoats and masks; they moved here and there to be loaded and unloaded, all of the activity surrounded by the pale powdery substance that was being shoveled, ground, cut and piled, bagged, stacked, stored.

  “What do they do with all of it?” Xulai murmured.

  Abasio replied, “According to Bertram, it’s the only salt mine left within hundreds of miles in all directions. They do blocks for livestock, granular for kitchens. Some of the salt goes over the pass to the east, some is bartered for provender from local villages. Some will be sent as far west as Ghastain. Areas west of there, the ­people get their salt from seawater evaporation ponds along the coast. There are a lot of them just south of Wellsport.”

  Socky and Kim were mere blotches, far up the valley, both of them, man and horse, trying to run away from their terror.
If ­people could only do that. Poor Kim. Though the boy had been longing for adventure and thrilled to be picked for the job, Abasio would not be surprised if he chose to do something . . . less adventurous in the future.

  As they drew nearer, they could see the town was set on a narrow horizontal ledge that crossed the face of the cliff. The white cubes topped with domes were houses, many of them multistoried, some edged and faceted like gems, often diagonally slashed by exterior stairways, here and there penetrated by doors and windows that stood open or were covered with brightly painted shutters. Since the ledge itself was virtually invisible from below, the entire conglomeration did appear to have been cemented in place. Not by swallows, however. No bird could have achieved the purity of color: the silver that whitened into snow, then shaded to ivory before glinting toward silver again, constantly shifting shape and hue as the ledge was shadowed or disclosed by an early evening flock of woolly clouds, grazing southward across the glowering sun.

  They passed an area of mire, almost against the north wall. It was grown high with reeds and grasses and emitted a more-­than-­merely-­swampy stench that gradually dissipated behind them. Only a mile of road remained, now swerving only slightly through pastures dotted with small groves where cows lay, placidly chewing. As the road came back toward them, Xulai met the wagon and climbed onto the seat while Abasio walked beside Blue. They were now close enough to see that the buildings of the lofty town were divided by narrow alleys that penetrated from the lip of the ledge back toward—­and possibly into—­the sheer wall of stone behind. As they neared, moving dots of anonymous color became bright shirts, capes, skirts, and head scarves worn by ­people who watched their approach from behind a sturdy rope railing supported by fantastically carved pillars of salt.

  Willum joined the wagon and walked beside Abasio. He said, “See those carved things, up there? The ones t’ hold the rail up? Gum told me ’bout them. They carve all kinds a’ things for fun, the ­people do. See that one at the end. Thassa unicorn, that is. Next one, thassa horse with wings. Looky, Xulai! Thassa mermaid, like Gailai!” And, indeed, one of the salt balusters, though a good deal more bosomy than Gailai was likely to be, had the requisite tail.