Fish Tails

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Kinda drowning in memories,” he said. “That time was all . . . well, it seems a lot longer ago than it really was. The Place of Power, up on the mesa, it was . . . something out of a nightmare. In one sense. And something straight from heaven in another.” He simply stood, staring into the distance, finally saying, “I’ll go over to the wagon in a bit.”

  Precious Wind left him to struggle with the past and went to see if she could do anything for Xulai and the children. Sometimes children did not react well to being hopped. They, like animals, seemed to have an inner sense of place. So far, however, the twins had taken it in stride. Stroke, that is. No, they didn’t swim like that. They wriggled, like fish. They had taken the move in sinuously.

  Xulai met her in the doorway. Kim, followed by Blue and Rags, passed her on his way to the stables. Xulai asked, “Where’s the rest of the herd?”

  “Jumped them into a pasture outside the town just before I came here. Offered any of them to Wide Mountain Mother that she’d care to keep.”

  “Abasio?”

  Kim shook his head as if in sympathy. “He’s out there remembering the last time he was here. I think that’s when he met Coyote and Bear and a bunch of survivor gangers tried to haul him back to Fantis.”

  Precious Wind remarked, “At the moment I think he’s a bit lost in memories.”

  Xulai nodded. “He would be, yes. Did your de-­stinker work? Up on the mountain?”

  “Dear love, once I have poured some of that stuff about, no one can smell anything else for days. It isn’t unpleasant, just very strong. The mountain clearing where our animal friends are does smell very strongly, but it does not smell of the creature.”

  “May I suggest—­”

  “I’ve already poured my de-­stinker on the places the body had been . . .”

  “What’s it for? Why do you have any such thing?”

  Precious Wind shook her head. “It’s used to track animals in doing area studies. You put some on the feet of an animal and turn it loose, then you can learn how far it goes and how it familiarizes itself with a new area. It’s actually diluted before it’s used, and followed by a little smell-­meter. After talking to Wide Mountain Mother, I also had a look at the body and took various samples. I thought the thing ought to be buried, and she agreed, so I hopped it and a few men out into the desert. Ul xaolat is good at digging holes, and we dug a very deep one. It took all the men to roll the body into it. We filled the hole and the men stamped it down, then we poured de-­stink on the soil and piled sagebrush over it. I think something might come looking for it, and it’s remotely possible something might detect the stench of it even through my de-­stinker. Buried deep, it’s less likely to be found.”

  Xulai turned from the door, yawning. “You might want to go dig it up, Presh. As I was about to remind you: you know those devices the laboratory in Tingawa came up with, the ones they were using on the shape-­changed animals so they were sure not to lose them?”

  “Locator buttons?”

  “It might be a good idea to look at the body to be sure it doesn’t have something similar inside it. If it does, and somebody comes looking for it . . . they’ll come straight here. The fact it’s buried won’t matter.”

  Precious Wind stared, glared, and disappeared. It was several hours before she returned, wet hair streaming down her back, deeply layered in towels and carrying an armload of dry clothing. “It did indeed have a locator,” she snarled. “I cannot forgive myself for not thinking of that! Stupid not to have realized something would want to keep track of the things! The device wasn’t exactly like ours, but it obviously fills the same function. It was quite an exercise in . . . arm’s-­length dissection.”

  “Where had they put it in his body?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You’ve had a bath,” Xulai commented, unnecessarily.

  “By the Great Litany, yes I’ve had a bath! Maybe a dozen baths! The bath woman put me through so many changes of water in the bathhouse I thought I was going to dissolve. Have you seen the bathhouse? They have a hot spring feeding it! I couldn’t take the additional samples without touching the thing and I stank to high heaven. She wouldn’t let me out until she couldn’t detect the smell. She said she values her position with the tribes and would not want anyone to complain of an indecent smell.”

  “But you got samples?”

  “There are several full sealed cans of the stuff in that storage compartment under my wagon. They can stay there until I can get them to Tingawa. The body is now reburied, and I took the locator button way, way, way out in the desert and dropped it into a very deep crack in a rock formation alongside a chasm. I left invisibly small devices to record anyone who came looking. If someone or something can trace it and comes looking for it, I should be able to see who or what it is.”

  “Did you look at the button, see what it does?”

  ”Well, it locates, obviously. It broadcasts its location continuously, so it can be tracked. They will know where it’s been. I’m hoping they’ll think it was a malfunction or that it was picked up by some animal or bird: all that flying across the countryside. The device seemed to accumulate some information about the body itself. Measurements of something. There were registers for various categories, but I don’t know what they referred to. I had ul xaolat record the device in detail, so we’ll figure it out later.”

  “I didn’t know it could do that.”

  “The complete list of what ul xaolat can do would make a sizable book. It takes a very long time to master the use of the devices, that is, if one wishes to take advantage of every possible usage. I can’t imagine why any one person would, but then it wasn’t created to be used by just one person.” She picked up the ul xaolat that was lying near Xulai and began to poke at it.

  “Are Bear and Coyote staying on the mountain?”

  “Yes. By the time I got back there, they’d found a comfortable overlook where they can see the clearing without being seen. Behind the clearing where the Griffins and the children were, there’s a rock wall topped with a ledge. Behind the ledge is . . . not what I’d call a deep cave, but it’s certainly a sheltering hollow, small entrance, sizable hollow, far enough out of the weather that Bear and Coyote can stay warm and dry. Something nonsmelly has used it for the purpose. Needly and Willum had carried blankets down there, and Bear had gathered them up, so he and Coyote have something to sleep on. I gathered up the children’s other supplies and provisions and brought them back with me. They had to leave most of them behind, in the cave where Sun-­wings had kept them before they set out to rescue her. Needly says she can find it from the place we found them, if we want to recover the supplies. I thought she and I might go up there and do that in a day or so.

  “The same spring that fed the pool the children used comes down through the place Bear and Coyote found, and though I was prepared to go get provisions for them, there was most of a deer carcass in the clearing. I hopped it up where Bear and Coyote can get at it easily. It had been partly butchered, but it’s fresh enough that Coyote and Bear tell me they won’t need to hunt for the two more days they’ll be there.

  “I set up their overlook as a new arrival point on ul xaolat and erased the clearing as a destination.” She held it up for Xulai to see what she was doing. “I’m taking it out of yours right now, so none of us can blunder into it by accident. We wouldn’t want to arrive there coincidentally with more of the hunter types, whatever they are. We’ll relieve Bear and Coyote in a ­couple of days. If they haven’t seen anyone, we can replace them with pairs of hunters who are used to the woods. They won’t mind spending one or two days at a time, and I think we’ll want to keep a watch on that hunters’ camp for a while, just to see what or who turns up.”

  Xulai whispered, “I’m so utterly thankful Bear was with them. That body was enormous. He’s another like the ones Sybbis has, isn’t he? Have
you any idea what that coating is on the outside of its body? Were the veins in it still moving when . . .”

  “They were, for a while.” Precious Wind shuddered. “Even though the thing was dead.” She sat down to put on the stockings she was carrying, following them with trousers, a shirt, and shoes. Finally, she opened her personals kit on the chair beside her, threw the towel around her shoulders, and took a comb from the kit.

  Xulai said, “I don’t think the wormy things are part of the stinker, Presh. The wormy things take a while to die after their host is dead. They obviously live off the host . . . bloodstream, maybe. Lungs, too, maybe. I believe that smell is the smell Abasio has always called the Ogre stink.”

  Precious Wind separated the left side of her hair into strands and began braiding it. Xulai took another comb and began working on the right side. “According to what we’ve put together, the hunter came back to the camp drunk and said ‘Ahgar’ or ‘a Gar’ or an ‘Ogre’ told him nobody wanted a Griffin hide from a young one, so he should just kill the young one.” Precious Wind burrowed into her personals kit and brought out two beaded cylinders, thrusting one of them onto the end of her braid and twisting it tight. “We’ve now seen twenty-­five of the monsters. How many of them are there?”

  Xulai put the other cylinder on the braid she had finished and left Precious Wind to pin the braids into a crown. “ ‘Yung For’ster’ could have talked with one of the Gars from Sybbis’s camp without much trouble. Or it could have talked with someone who makes or directs his kind of creatures. I feel that makes more sense than another one of his own kind telling him nobody wants a small Griffin skin. That kind of instruction sounds like it came from a human, to me.”

  “How could that one get back and forth from the Griffin clearing to Sybbis’s camp? It would be a two-­to-­three-­day journey from here without ul xaolat.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. That’s what I’m saying. Something that size moves faster than an ordinary human. Longer legs, longer steps. It took Abasio two days to get to that clearing from the foot of the mountain, but if someone from Catland went up the mountain, west of the ridge, it could have met the hunter halfway, at some prearranged spot.”

  “And all we know about them is that there are more than a few of them?”

  Precious Wind nodded. “We’ll know more when we can get some of the samples analyzed. It’s of some importance to find out how many there really are, and where they are, as well as whether they are a reproducing population or individually created. I’m thinking in terms of logistics. Things that size must eat enormously, and I’ll wager they’re carnivorous only. We need to be sure—­”

  “Could Sybbis be feeding them . . . ­people?”

  Precious Wind shuddered uncontrollably. “Captives? It’s probably within the ganger frame of reference, yes. It would explain the attitude of the guards Sybbis left here. The ones I moved to other places. They were very glad to go!” She stared into the distance for a moment or so. “All the ­people here think the hunter Bear killed is at least part Ogre, don’t they? There’s no excuse for these creatures,” she snarled. “None at all.”

  Xulai made a strange, strangled noise, half laugh, half sob. “No excuse at all! Nor for Griffins. Nor for Trolls. Nor perhaps for children like Needly, and perhaps not for ­people like me. Meddled-­with creatures. Living things created purposefully. Nothing natural about us!”

  Precious Wind paled, seeing that Xulai was trembling. “Shhh. Don’t upset yourself. We’ve had this discussion before, and you know it’s nonsense!”

  “I’m not upset. I’m terrified for us, Presh. Terrified. I love the babies but . . . sometimes I look at them and wonder what they are. How are they mine? Are they mine at all? What is my responsibility for them? Griffin says we must guarantee her children’s future as we are guaranteeing our own. Because we made them. I didn’t. You didn’t. What is our responsibility for Griffins? What about our responsibility for these ghastly, stinking monsters! The accusation would be the same in both cases. Mankind made them!”

  “You just said it, Xulie, dear. You didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “Humans did! Is there such a thing as collective guilt?”

  Precious Wind sighed, rubbing at her forehead. “Religious ­people taught so, a long time ago. They called it ‘original sin’ because some early ancestor committed some supposed indecency—­I’ve forgotten what it was.”

  “Committed! And went on committing!” Suddenly Xulai was weeping, and nothing Precious Wind could do would comfort her. The older woman sat beside her, holding her, wondering how she herself would have responded to being created as the new Ave, the birth mother of Homo aquaticus. Raising children totally—­well, no. Not totally, but greatly different from oneself. Children who would not share one’s own childhood experiences. No gathering at the dinner table in the evening. No playing ball in the meadow. No bedtime stories as one tucked them into bed. Children whose own childhood experiences one could not fully share. To love children who might never return that love . . . not as had been traditionally expected. When one really thought about it, weeping did not seem at all . . . irrational.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Abasio from the door. He too looked bathed. His hair hung in wet curls around his forehead.

  “Nothing,” Precious Wind replied, trying to smile. “She just gets overwhelmed about being Ave, every now and then.”

  He grinned, a wry grin. “Avam doesn’t always have it so easy either.”

  Precious Wind made a half bow in his direction. “Has either of you read the daily reports on ul xaolat? The one you and Xulai were using?”

  “What daily reports?”

  “I needed to remove the location of that clearing up the mountain from your device, and I accidentally hit the daily-­report combination. Your ul xaolat has a very low opinion of you.” She showed Abasio the combination and left him reading the reports that popped up in sequence on the tiny screen. As she left to return to her own quarters, she heard Abasio’s explosive “Idiots, are we! Xulai wondered what happened to those burned trees. Well, if it wants work to do, I’m sure I can find just loads!”

  Precious Wind stuck her head back through the door. “Abasio, remember, you cannot retaliate against a device. It’s like kicking the wagon when the axle breaks! And if you’ve got it stacking a winter’s worth of firewood somewhere, some other poor soul may be drowning in a swamp for lack of power to transport out. The revised models are really snippy, and there’s no way to get even with a device. They don’t get bored, they don’t get tired, they can’t be punished. I wish they could. I’ve tried.

  “You can do what I do with mine: ignore it. OR you can retaliate against the man in Tingawa who did most of the revisions while imprinting them with his personality. His name’s Bung Quai. Just tell it, ‘Yes, Bung Quai.’ ‘No, Bung Quai.’ Every time you do that, he gets a resonance itch. At least we can feel like we’re getting even.”

  FROM THEIR HIDING PLACE ABOVE the clearing, Bear and Coyote stood alternate watches. Coyote said he couldn’t stand one, but he’d lie down one. Bear admitted it was the easier thing to do. “Problem is, when I do it that way, I keep goin’ to sleep,” he said.

  Coyote thought about this. “Well then, that’s why humans say they stand watches. So they don’t go to sleep. Though I’ve seen Abasio so tired he was asleep standing up.”

  “If we could figure out when the critter, if there’s a critter, was comin’, it’d be easier. I mean, if we knew it was comin’ at night, we’d sleep through the daytime.”

  “Men mostly move around in the light.”

  “Right. But if this thing’s half Ogre, which is what I think he is, then he moved around at night just as well as in the sunshine. Better, maybe. They’re sort of like Trolls, you know. Trolls don’t like the sunlight one little bit.”

  “Because they’ve got weak eyes. They can’t take the sunlight. The
y go blind.”

  Bear said, “Shhh. I hear something . . .” They rose from their mossy couch beside the tiny pool and crept to the ledge of rock overhanging the clearing below. The trees between allowed a partial view of the clearing. Bear expelled a breath audibly, suddenly catching himself as one of the creatures below raised its head and sniffed the air. There were three of them: one smaller than the hunter Bear had killed; two about the same size. Two male, one female—­that is, both Bear and Coyote believed it was female, though there was nothing specifically female-­shaped about it. It shared the general shapelessness of the dead one, huge stumpy legs and arms, a thick torso, a neck as thick through as the head. The two watchers shared a look of confusion. The appearance didn’t equate with the smell. Part of the smell was one they associated with females in general, and one of the figures looked . . . bulbous.

  “Nah heeer,” drawled one of the creatures. “Ah’gar nah heeer. Nah mell Ah’gar.”

  “Whurs?”

  A giant shrug from another. “Nah heeer.”

  “Whuh mell?” asked the third.

  Another giant shrug.

  Bear whispered, “The little girl said the one I killed talked clearly, didn’t she?”

  Coyote nodded. “Maybe it had like . . . a quarter Ogre in it, ’stead of half.”

  “N’ you think these’re half?”

  Coyote nodded, watching the creatures below. “When these go, I’ll follow. I’ll come back here for you. If Precious Wind comes for you before I get back, have her come back each evening until she finds me. If I don’t . . . get one of my kin to track me and get me out, or kill whoever killed me.”

  Bear nodded ponderously. He could move as silently as Coyote, but not as quickly. Not that the creatures below seemed capable of much speed. Still. He was willing to wait. There was water, food, even a sheltered place to sleep. He rested one paw briefly on Coyote’s back before the canine slithered off one end of the ledge and down the slope among the trees. When the creatures left, he did not see Coyote follow, but then, he hadn’t expected to. That smell . . . either of them could track that without fail, even though this end of the stink trail had been softened by the stuff Precious Wind had spread on the ground where the hunter had bled and died. Maybe tomorrow he’d backtrack that trail and see where the thing had gone.