Ammonite

by Nicola Griffith

  Silence.

  “Basically, we need to get the gig up there, on an apparently normal mission–”

  “Taking someone up.”

  “–and back down again, containing four people when it should only contain one pilot, without Kurstgetting suspicious.”

  “Why don’t we just ask around and see who wants to get off‑planet, there’s bound to be someone, then send her up with the pilot?”

  Danner shook her head. “I daren’t. The fewer who know about this and are in a position to communicate with the Kurst, the better.”

  “Are you asking for one to us to volunteer, then?” Letitia asked slowly.

  “Not yet.”

  The silence was long. Danner watched the snow fall outside. Last winter, the snow had formed drifts of eight or nine feet in places. Hiam had assured her that this winter would be milder.

  “What’s Kurst’s position relative to Estrade?” Kahn asked suddenly.

  “I’m not sure.” Danner tapped a request into her comm. “Variable, according to this.”

  “A regular variable?”

  “Yes.”

  “And are the two sometimes out of line‑of‑sight, obscured by Jeep itself?”

  Danner tapped some more. “Yes.”

  “Ha!” Dogias crowed, reaching over and poking Kahn on the thigh.“Ana, you’re a genius.” She turned to Danner. “How long would the two be out of line‑of‑sight?”

  Danner sighed, and requested that information. “Six hours.”

  “Long enough?” Dogias asked Kahn.

  “Maybe,” the Mirror said thoughtfully. “Tight, though.”

  “Maybe you two would like to explain.”

  Kahn gestured for Dogias to take it. “The Kurstis a military vessel, equipped with the best in sensors and detection equipment. I should know, my assignment before Jeep was working on a cruiser’s systems. The only thing is, when the object you want to scan is obscured by a large body, you have to use a separate set of sensors, which need careful and exacting reprogramming, or”–she grinned–“rely upon rough data. Very rough data. If we send up the gig during this six‑hour period, they’ll have to choose. So what they’ll do is check their rough data first.” She looked to Kahn for confirmation. The Mirror nodded. “All we have to do is make sure their rough data will satisfy them enough so that they don’t feel the need to go through all the trouble of the second, more accurate scan.” She stopped, pleased with herself.

  “And?”

  “And so as long as we stick something alive on that gig, they won’t know if it’s human or not.”

  “An animal?”

  “As long as it’s big enough,” Dogias said.

  Danner wondered where they could find an animal big enough.

  “Would it have to be one large one? How about several small ones?” Lu Wai asked.

  “That should do it.”

  Danner considered. It could work. They could even pilot the gig up by remote. The less personnel risked, the better. Tapes of conversation should satisfy audio requirements. Yes, it could work. For the journey up. “What about the rest?”

  “How badly do we need the station’s systems?”

  “We need them. They control the satellites: our communications and microwave relay, weather information…”

  “More than we need the Estradecrew?”

  “Personnel come first,” she said firmly to Letitia. Do they? a little voice whispered. What about Relman? “Why, what were you thinking?”

  “If we rigged the platform to explode a few minutes after the gig took off Hiam and the others, then it’s likely that no one would bother with a complicated check of the gig on its way down on a routine mission. They’ll be too busy trying to find out why the platform blew.”

  “There must be a better way.”

  “Maybe we could rig some other explosion–maybe one of Estrade’s OM vehicles or something.”

  Kahn nodded thoughtfully. “That might be possible.”

  Danner looked from one to the other. “Any other ideas? No? Right, Kahn and Dogias, I want you to work up the details of what we’ve discussed. Bring them to me by…day after next?”

  Dogias and Kahn nodded.

  “Good.”

  “Ma’am?” Lu Wai asked.

  “Yes, Serg–” Danner smiled. “–Lieutenant.”

  “What about Relman?”

  “Let her go.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “She’s suffered enough. Confiscate her wristcom, and Cardos’s, and send them off on some make‑work mission. As far from here as possible.”

  “Cardos is a cartographer.”

  “Then have them start mapping the area south and west of here. That should keep them busy for a while, and give Relman time to think. She’s safe enough as long as she can’t communicate with the Kurst.” She stared out of the window. “We need every healthy woman we can get. There’s so much work to be done. We’ll have to prepare for wholesale evacuation of Port Central, in case the Kurstdecides to sterilize this area.” Sterilize. How easy it was to use euphemisms.

  The sky was solid gray; the snow was still falling.

  “I miss the sky,” Danner added, to no one in particular. “The thought of never again seeing a light blue Irish morning above wet green fields makes me want to weep.”

  “I like it here,” Dogias said.

  “I miss home,” Lu Wai admitted, “but I don’t think we’ll ever see it again.” She touched Letitia’s hand. “This isn’t such a bad place. It could become home.”

  Danner suspected that for Lu Wai, home was wherever Dogias was. “And you, Ana?”

  “I was born on a station orbiting Gallipoli,” Kahn said. “Earth isn’t home. The place they’d send us if we ever left here certainly wouldn’t be home. This may not be, either, but it’s a good enough place.”

  Yes, Danner thought, it may be a good enough place, but how would they live here? And when the dust settled, what would be her place on this new world? She was a military and security commander; all she was good at was giving orders. She knew nothing of communities and the way they worked. She wished Marghe were here; an anthropologist would be invaluable.

  “If only we really knew what it’s like to live amongst these people,” she said, frustrated.

  Letitia and Lu Wai exchanged glances. “But we do,” Letitia said slowly. “Kind of. Or, at least, Day does.”

  “Day? Officer Day, the one that got rescued from the burn by that skinny native, before the virus hit?” Dogias nodded. “But she’s dead. Isn’t she? The virus.”

  “I believe she’s listed as missing, ma’am,” Lu Wai said.

  “You mean she’s not dead?” The truth hit her. “You know where she is!”

  “Yes.”

  The sled hummed next to what was left of the northern perimeter gate as Lu Wai ran it through ground checks. Though it was only midmorning, it was dark enough for twilight; wind drove thick snow almost horizontally through the gloom. Inside her hood, Danner kept her eyes slitted against the flakes and half walked, half ran across the grass to the sled. Dogias was on the flatbed, securing the last of the supply cases.

  Danner tapped her on the shoulder. She had to shout over the wind. “Remember, tell her it’s all unofficial. According to the records, she’s still listed as missing, and it’ll stay that way no matter what, unless she wants it different. Tell her anything you think will persuade her, but just get her here.”

  “Do my best,” Dogias shouted.

  The foul‑weather cab hatch slid back and Lu Wai leaned out. “Let’s get going. The weather will only get worse.”

  Dogias jumped down from the flatbed and slid into the front seat; Lu Wai pressed the hatch‑seal button, cursed, and began to crank it down by hand.

  The sled lifted off the ground with a whine. Snow hissed underneath it and bit at Danner’s ankles.

  The sled eased forward, gathering speed. Within two minutes, all Danner could see to the north was snow.
<
br />   She felt suddenly lonely. Two weeks would be a long time without Dogias’s irreverence–maybe three weeks if the weather got worse. Danner had ordered them to return immediately if there was any problem with communications; it was too dangerous to be out in this weather if they lost touch, or if their SLICs went down.

  That made her think of Marghe: no SLIC, no communication, hundreds of miles to the north where the weather, according to Sigrid, was brutal.

  She started to walk away from the perimeter. Half‑dismantled, and deserted because of the weather, this part of Port Central already looked like a ruin.

  Danner split her screen: Nyo on one side, Sara on the other. “Is it, or is it not, possible to move that damned satellite to pick up Marghe’s SLIC?”

  “Well,” Nyo said, “we could move it, yes, but we might not be able to get it back. And that would screw up what comm you’ve got down there.”

  “The SLIC might not even be operational,” Sara pointed out.

  Danner ignored that. “Let’s just assume that it is.”

  “It really wouldn’t be wise at this point,” Sara said. “What would the Kurstthink when they saw a satellite being moved? We can’t afford to do anything alarming, nothing that looks like change.”

  Hiam was right. Danner would just have to forget Marghe, trust to the representative’s luck and toughness. And the vaccine. When Day got to Port Central, Danner could see if there had been any word through the viajeras on Marghe’s progress. Without Marghe to negotiate trade and friendship between Port Central and the natives, to gain a foothold on this world she would have to rely for now on the personal link between herself and Day, and the natives who had saved her life, Oriyest and Jink. And upon the more impersonal trata agreement between Cassil of Holme Valley and herself as commander of Port Central. And on hope.

  Damn small things to base a life, many lives, on.

  Chapter Ten

  MARGHE AND LEIFIN were three days traveling through Moanwood to Ollfoss. Later, Marghe could not have said whether it was a year or no time at all. She remembered little: occasional fractured snapshots of trees that were not quite trees, whose roots were greater around than their crowns or which possessed no crowns at all; musty, sharp smells of small nesting animals; pain in her hands and feet and face. Most of all she remembered one day falling down on the snow‑dusted floor of the forest and lying on her back, dizzy, while leaves, or what might have been leaves, whirled around her head. She had laughed aloud, but the forest swallowed her thin bright ribbon of laughter and she quieted as she realized it was she who was the alien here; that the dark and the green around her would remain unaffected by her, could not digest her if it tried. Like cellulose in the gut of a carnivore, she could not be assimilated. Alien.

  The rest of the journey was a jumble: Leifin climbing on top of her, keeping her warm; soft wet stuff in her mouth that Leifin had already chewed for her; Leifin sneaking something from her pocket then shouting at her to stop, stop, and Marghe realizing she had Leifin’s hand between her teeth and her gums hurt, but refusing to let go until Leifin put the vial back into Marghe’s pocket.

  She remembered nothing of arriving at Ollfoss. She had imagined how it might have been, since: stumbling out from under the dark canopy onto the blinding white snow; past the open‑walled shelter that housed nothing but a small metal gong; along the snow‑covered path that ran between the bathhouse, built over the hot spring, and the famous vegetable gardens of Ollfoss; on to the houses and outhouses and gathering places that looked like stone versions of the tents of the Echraidhe, with horizontal slit windows and wooden shutters under their eaves of sod, and careful stone channels running down the corners of the sloping roofs. Low houses, sturdy houses, built to survive snow and the rushing, runneling thaws of spring.

  More days followed spent tossing in fever; shouting in hoarse Portuguese for someone to turn the lights on; trying hard to swallow soup and crying when she spilled it; feeling pain in her hands and feet and face. Being tied down. She remembered faces looming over her, serious or smiling, but all strange.

  So gradually that she could not have pointed to one day in particular and said, There, that was when I began to really recover, Marghe realized that what she thought were restraints on her arms and legs were bandages of cloth and moss. Her spinning dreams steadied down to a world where certain faces reappeared again and again in connection with lifting her over to the fire, bathing her with warm water, feeding her, trimming the wick on the horn‑shaded lamp that sat on the trunk by one whitewashed wall.

  The face that appeared most often, the one accompanied by pain in her smeary fever dreams, was a dark, walnut‑faced woman, Kenisi, who untied the cloth and removed the moss, rubbed something into the pain, replaced the wrappings with fresh moss and clean cloths. She was smaller, quicker than Borri, but she had the same eyes as the Echraidhe healer. Marghe tried to smile the first time she realized what Kenisi was doing, but split open her healing lip.

  After a while she began to stay awake enough to sit up on the narrow bed she occupied, and to greet by name the other faces: Leifin, of course, the one with the shifting‑sea eyes and the thin mouth, who often brought a knife and sat whittling wood; Hilt, a tall woman whose hair, just a fraction darker than the coffee color of her skin, was the shortest Marghe had yet seen on this world. Hilt was a sailor, from North Haven, in Ollfoss to visit her blood sister Thenike, a viajera.

  As Marghe began visibly to gain strength, Kenisi allowed other visitors, women from neighboring families. Some, like Leifin, wore the cap, furs, and sling of the tribes; others, like Hilt, wore felt cloaks and knit caps; still others, a mix of homespun, pelts, and felt. Many wore jewelry: bright olla beads in strings around necks and wrists or dangling from wooden ear‑cuffs, brooches carved and painted in strong colors. Some lived in Ollfoss; others were either living in Ollfoss for the short term or visiting kith or lovers for the winter. All were curious: here was a woman from somewhere totally other, who had survived the Echraidhe and won through Tehuantepec in the winter.

  Marghe ignored all their questions. She found she could not think about the Echraidhe, the snow and ice, the way she had nearly let herself die. She still did not know why she had made herself struggle to survive, nor if she was glad she had.

  Instead, she concentrated on her body. The next time Kenisi came to change the wrappings on her hands, rather than staring up into the thick rafters that sloped to a point over her head, Marghe asked some questions of her own.

  The two crusty scabs where the two smallest fingers on her left hand should have been needed no explaining, but Kenisi pointed to the mottled finger on that hand, and the little finger, missing its nail, on her right. “This one, and this, should heal.” She let Marghe look, then rewrapped them carefully and started to unwind the cloth around Marghe’s head and ear. “There’ll be scars here–” a cool touch of her finger above the left eyebrow–“and here.” Where she touched just behind the ear, Marghe flinched. “Hurt?” Marghe nodded. Kenisi rubbed it gently with the ointment. “You’ve lost part of that ear, too. Nothing your hair won’t hide.”

  Marghe was grateful for the healer’s matter‑of‑fact tone. It gave her the courage to ask, “Is there anything else? My feet?”

  Kenisi smiled, fissuring her face. “They’re a mess, but they’ll heal.” She stopped rubbing ointment into Marghe’s face. “Think we’ll leave these wrappings off for now, see how it goes,” she said, and started on Marghe’s feet.

  Marghe was glad Kenisi had already told her they would heal: they reminded her of half‑flayed baby seals, an unhealthy mix of purplish black skin and red raw flesh. She turned away, glad, suddenly, that she had not been able to look into a mirror since she had woken.

  Later that day, Leifin brought in a young girl with long, unbraided hair. They were both carrying food. Stewed fish, fruit, water: soft stuff. Marghe’s teeth still rocked in her gums. It would be a while before she was up to chewing meat or fibrous vegetables. Leif
in introduced the girl. “Gerrel, daughter of my blood sister, Kristen.”

  Gerrel, Marghe saw, was trying hard not to stare at her. Her face. She touched it gently. “What does it look like?”

  “Like you ran into a tree,” Gerrel said. She appraised Marghe frankly, shook her head. “Like you ran into a tree twice.”

  “Well, it could be worse.”

  Gerrel’s expression said she doubted it. Marghe concentrated on eating the food while Leifin and Gerrel took out her pot and brought it back freshly scrubbed with snow and smelling of some aromatic.

  After that, Gerrel often brought Marghe’s food by herself, and helped wash her down, or moved her to the fur‑draped trunk against one wall while Kenisi and a woman called Ette laid fresh covers on the bed. When Marghe asked, Gerrel went to get lukewarm water and a cake of hard soap. While Gerrel washed her hair, Marghe tried to fill in some of the gaps in her knowledge.

  “Who is Ette related to?”

  “She’s from Kristen’s family.”

  Marghe frowned, remembering. “Your mother and Leifin’s blood sister?”

  Gerrel carefully teased out a tangle. “Kristen’s my blood mother.”

  “But you don’t live with her?”