by Patty Jansen
Sage looked at Junco. “You ever met any of these people before?”
Junco shook his head. “First time. We don’t get many of them Union people. You should see their tailed little kids. They’re patterned all over.”
It was ages since I’d heard anyone use the patronising term Union. Its use had been common when I started at Nations of Earth.
Sage again glanced at Ynggi.
It was interesting. Sage and Junco hadn’t said any of the things I was used to hearing at Nations of Earth. There was no comparison between Pengali and monkeys or any other animal. He’d correctly identified Ynggi as male and respected him for having outfoxed his farm dog.
“Anyway, I better start the fire.”
He went to his truck and backed the vehicle up to the entrance of the abandoned loading dock.
Out of a box in the back, he produced the aforementioned pumpkins and two skinned and de-headed rabbits, strung by the feet.
He set up a metal drum with chunks of wood and opened a small box which turned out to contain burning coals.
With this, he had a fire going in no time. He strung up the rabbits to cook and placed cut-up pumpkin in a metal dish.
Meanwhile, we gathered up the last information for the day and found a place in the upstairs office for Junco to roll out the sleeping mats.
Whenever we passed the fire, the dog sat at Sage’s feet, beating its tail into the dust and growling softly whenever Ynggi came near.
Sage told it to shut up and get over itself.
Ynggi was fascinated by the rabbits. He asked me what they were and where they lived. Could they swim?
I said, “I guess they can, but they live on the land. They eat grass.”
“How do you catch them?” Ynggi wanted to know.
“I guess he shoots them, or maybe he traps them.”
“With a line, like a fish?”
“I don’t know. We can ask.”
We were done for the day anyway, and went to join Sage at the fire.
The dog growled. There had to be something about Ynggi’s scent it didn’t like. Ynggi flicked his tail at him with a snap.
The dog stopped mid-growl and sat down. Its eyes followed the movement of Ynggi’s tail.
I asked Sage how and where one caught rabbits.
“They’re all around here,” he said, waving his hand at the field that was golden in the setting sun.
“What do they eat?” Ynggi asked, without waiting for my translation.
I translated that for Sage.
Ynggi then remarked that he didn’t see much grass, but Sage said that there was more towards the creek and that the rabbits didn’t need that much.
“They’re tough things and eat pretty much anything. Bark, wood, sticks, hay. Many birds and bigger animals have gone, but the rabbits just keep on breeding.”
He turned the rabbits around over the fire. Fat was dripping onto the flames. The dog was looking at them, slapping its tail in the dust.
“I think the animal is hungry,” Ynggi said.
I translated for Sage, who laughed.
He inserted his hand in the pocket of his jacket and pulled out something brown. Dried meat, I thought. He gestured for Ynggi to come over. The dog retreated with a soft whine.
He held the meat out. The dog came a bit closer. He gestured for Ynggi to come closer again.
You could see the warring emotions in the dog’s eyes. The dog wanted food, but it was scared of Ynggi.
It came closer, stalking carefully, glancing at Ynggi.
Ynggi’s tail gave a little flick, and it froze, the whites showing in its eyes.
Ynggi waved his tail at knee height, and the dog came closer again. The tail went up, and the dog stopped.
“Look at it,” I said to Nicha, who stood next to me. “Tail language is universal.”
The dog snatched the morsel out of Sage’s hand and retreated.
Ynggi sat next to the fire, watching as the dog chewed the dried meat. It was gone in minutes, and then they just stared at each other.
Junco had finished preparing the camp and came to the fire. He brought a bottle with a dark fluid.
“Drink?”
I accepted some, and Veyada, being Veyada, had to try everything. Anyu was unsure and needed to consult with Veyada after he’d tried some, but Sheydu refused. Anyu took that as a cue to refuse as well. Ynggi very much disapproved of drinking, even in Barresh. But Evi accepted, and so did Reida and Nicha.
It was whiskey, I thought.
Ynggi sat next to me. Sage was turning the roasting rabbits on the spit.
“He hunts these animals?” Ynggi asked.
“Yes.”
“And he grows these... fruit?” He flicked his tail at the pumpkins that were cut into pieces and cooking in a metal tray on the fire.
“Yes.”
“People are all the same, right?”
“Yes. They live in a similar way to the Pengali.” At least I hoped that this was what he meant. Ynggi could be infuriatingly opaque.
“What is the other animal, the dog, for?”
“It guards places. Dogs don’t like intruders.”
“We are intruders.”
“To the dog, yes.”
“How does it know the difference between people?”
“Dogs have very good noses. They can tell the difference between people by smell.”
“Everyone can do that.”
Well, the Pengali maybe, and my sense of smell had also increased since my transformation, along with the decline of my night vision, but nowhere near to a level to compete with a dog.
“The dog knows which people are the good people?”
“Yes.”
“What does it do when bad strangers come?”
“It growls and makes a lot of noise, so that if this happens when everyone is asleep, the people wake up and can chase away the intruder.”
“Hmmm.”
He looked at the dog, and the dog looked back. It stopped flopping its tail into the dust and growled softly.
“It doesn’t like me.”
“Probably because it thinks you smell strange.”
“Why does it listen to this person?”
“Because that’s what dogs do, and this man feeds the dog.”
“It’s an animal. Can’t it find its own food?”
“Probably, but I don’t think people would like it. The streets would be unsafe, because the dogs would hunt.”
“Hmmm. Animals are free. People shouldn’t feed them.”
“But dogs are useful. They can guard homes and they can be a friend.”
Ynggi looked sideways at the dog, and the dog was still looking at him.
“Hmmm,” he said again. “Some people in the tribe would probably like to try such a dog. Abri would probably say that animals should live free.”
“I guess Abri will be glad to know that she would never get a dog through quarantine.”
“Yes.”
Ynggi turned around and left, presumably to find a jacket, because the air was quite cool.
“What was all that about?” Sage asked.
“He is fascinated by the dog and what it can do.”
Sage laughed. “Even a silly bastard like this?” But he scratched the dog between his ears and threw it another morsel from his pocket.
“He says the tribe could use a dog.”
“Somehow I doubt it’s an option, huh?”
“Not in the slightest. Some of them also object to keeping animals as pets. He says animals should be free.”
“That’s not an option here, either. There is nothing to eat for them.”
“I suspected as much.”
Junco declared the rabbit done and took the basket with the pumpkin off the fire.
He carved up his efforts with a large knife that
he cleaned in between the pumpkin and the rabbit.
The dog scored a few bones and crunchy bits.
We ate while the very proper and traditional members of my team—Sheydu and Anyu—ate from their own supplies, a sad selection of prepacked military rations, which they prepared with water to which they added red coded supplements. Veyada was happy to share the rabbit, Nicha got stuck into the pumpkin.
The meal was quite tasty, even if I wasn’t used to eating much meat any more.
We discussed our project.
Reida showed the maps and 3D representations he was making of the factory, as it might once have been. Both men were impressed with his presentation. Sage said he’d never been inside when the factory was still in operation, but that he remembered the time that something was still happening inside the buildings.
He said he remembered talking to people in town about it.
“I was only little, mind, and I had some friends whose fathers worked here. Then one day, they were gone. The factory was closed.”
“Did you ever hear why?” I asked.
“Suppose they ran out of money. There were a lot of rumours around town. They said some rich guy in Dixie bought the factory. Never found out if that was true.”
“What happened to the people who worked there? This is such a small town. It wouldn’t have been easy to find work elsewhere.”
“No, it wasn’t. A lot of people left, pretty much overnight, and that started a lot of rumours. They said that the engineers went in hiding, because they didn’t want to give anyone in Dixie the stuff they’d been working on. Then we heard there was a big fuss about this ship that went down after launch.”
I confirmed that he spoke about the very public failure of the launch of the first manned spacecraft by the organisation.
He was.
He told us the story as he had heard it. He’d been a little kid back then.
His story was pretty much like I’d already understood it to be, only uglier.
Sage said the SCAC started as an amateur society with a few rich members who bought up spacefaring technology when the technology was being retired. Their base was in San Diego, in the building we had already visited, but when Mexico took possession of that area, they moved inland. Mexico pledged to continue contributing to the space program, but I guessed that in reality, it was Nations of Earth that these people wanted to keep away from their technology.
President Gonzales—a Mexican—had argued that all parts of the world had to cooperate in space technology because nobody wanted rival factions in space. So the Europeans and the Indonesians and the Egyptians had all joined forces.
I knew about that part, but had been taught it was a good thing.
But the people of the American space programs—affiliated with the SCAC—had considered the president’s requests for cooperation between space programs unreasonable. They had doggedly persisted on their own, culminating in a shuttle launch that may or may not have been planned to fail, and subsequent disappearance of the shuttle when it came down over Texas.
I asked if Junco and Sage had any idea where the shuttle had gone. We already knew it wasn’t the same vehicle we had found in Barresh, because that was a much more advanced vehicle. But if these people could hijack a space shuttle, they could hide extra technology. I thought of the people at Midway Space Station talking about an escape route to a secret place. They could have pretended that the shuttle had crashed, but had landed it on the other side of the border instead. And then they had taken it to their secret hideout.
I had already asked Reida to check if the Exchange held any records about this launch as soon as we were back in range.
Hmmm. Maybe things weren’t as simple as I thought.
Then I wondered. “Where is Ynggi?”
He’d left, and hadn’t come back to the fire, and that had now been quite a while ago. He hadn’t come down for dinner.
“Crap,” Sage said. “Where is the stupid dog?”
Chapter Twelve
I ran into the building and up the stairs. It was pitch dark in the room where Junco had put the sleeping bags, but that would not be a problem for Ynggi.
I turned on the light of my reader and looked around. The sleeping bags lay in neat rows, each on its own mat, and with a pillow. Our luggage stood in the corner, all still untouched. The sky outside the broken and dirt-caked windows was dark.
“Ynggi?” I called.
There was no response.
I called again, “Ynggi, where are you? Dinner is ready.”
Again, there was no response. I walked to the window, but it was too dark down there for me to even see the ground.
When I turned around, I noticed that Ynggi’s bag was open and some of his clothes lay on the ground. I couldn’t see the knife anywhere. What was the bet that he had taken the fishing gear and was trying his hand at catching something? I’d be highly surprised if the creek bed held any water.
Veyada had come up the stairs behind me.
“He’s not here,” I said.
Veyada said, “I don’t get it. We would have seen him if he came down, wouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know. There may be another exit. To me, it looks like he’s gone fishing.” I pointed at the pack.
“But why?” Veyada asked.
“He was upset about the incident with the dog. He probably wants to bring Sage a fish.”
“There are no fish here.”
“There is a lake.”
“You’re kidding. That’s too far away. He can do strange things, but he’s not stupid.” But his face displayed a concerned expression.
We looked around the room again, because it would be very handy right now if Ynggi turned out to be hiding somewhere. There were a few places along the walls where there had been cupboards, although the doors had long since been taken off and probably used to light someone’s fire.
There was nowhere to hide.
Outside, Sage’s whistles for his dog echoed in the dark.
“I don’t like it that that animal has disappeared at the same time as Ynggi,” Veyada said. “You should have seen it when it tried to attack him.”
“I am more worried about the dog than I am about Ynggi,” I said. “Dogs are not nocturnal. He seems capable of defending himself.”
In fact, I was decidedly worried on the dog’s behalf.
We checked and double-checked every nook and cranny. On this floor, there was nowhere except in the large office where Ynggi could hide. And the doors had been ripped off the cupboards, exposing broken shelving and collections of rubbish like bottles and food wrappers.
We went back down the stairs, and into the main hall, where we walked around, calling out for Ynggi. Reida and Anyu joined us, checking all the places where they had worked earlier. We couldn’t see a sign of him.
A cold breeze came in through an open door on the far side of the hall.
“Strange. This door wasn’t open earlier this afternoon,” Anyu said.
I stared into the darkness.
The light from my reader only lit a section of stone-covered ground. Beyond that, the plain disappeared out of sight. The stars twinkled in the sky.
Then came the sound of footsteps and Sage and Junco approached from outside.
“You see him?” Sage asked.
“No,” I said. “Any luck with the dog?”
“None at all.”
His voice sounded as concerned as I felt.
“I think he left the building through this door,” I said.
Sage stared into the darkness. “Does he often do this?”
“At home, he fishes at night,” I said. “Pengali people are nocturnal.”
“Not many fish here,” Sage said.
“I’d be worried about coyotes,” Junco said. “They hunt in packs. We can’t even use the dog to trace him.”
“The d
og’s with him for sure,” Sage said. “He’ll be following at a distance, because he’s a curious bastard.”
The rest of the party joined up with us, Evi first, because he had the best ears and excellent night vision. They confirmed what we already knew: they hadn’t seen a sign of Ynggi either.
“All right,” I said, as everyone gathered around. “We need to find him. What do we know about this area?”
Reida pulled up his map, which showed the creek intersecting the plain not too far from where we stood.
Sage confirmed there was no water in it. “Hasn’t been for years that I remember.”
Junco went to get Sage’s buggy. It couldn’t carry all of us, so I walked ahead with Veyada, Nicha and Evi, holding our lights in front of us.
Evi informed me that he could see a fair bit more than I could, because of the pale light of the almost full moon.
I remembered moonlight. I remembered sitting on the beach in front of the house where my father now lived, but that had belonged to my grandparents back then. The moonlight would reflect off the water and sometimes it was so bright, you could almost see without using a torch.
No more.
For me, everything was pitch dark. I knew that most in my team would feel the same. Dang Coldi night vision.
We fanned out from the building. The vehicle’s headlights showed a landscape of stones with meagre clumps of dead grass and dried knee-high bushes with drooping leaves.
Sage told us to stay within shouting distance of the buggy, because of coyotes, which were vicious wild dogs, he told Reida.
“I really think they go overboard on the dogs,” Veyada said to me in a low voice as we picked our way across the rocky ground together.
He was a big and comforting presence next to me, even if I knew he could see just as little in the dark as I could.
“I guess you don’t like dogs?” I said.
“Not really.”
“Not even Fred?” My father’s poor old dog. I hoped he was still alive, even if I hadn’t heard anything to the contrary.
“He’s all right, but most are annoying.”
“Worse than elephants?”
“Now you’re just poking fun at me, right?”
