The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  She pulled out her own. “It’s Gavin,” she said, then tapped off her handpad and stuck it back in her bag.

  “Now, hang on—” Fergus started to say, when his own handpad chimed.

  He answered it, still glaring suspiciously at Isla, who made a big pretense of looking at everything around them except him. “Hi, Gav,” he said.

  “Fergus,” Gavin said on the other end of the connection. “Do ye know where Isla is?”

  “Yes,” he said, a little louder than necessary. “I do know where Isla is. She’s right here with me. Didn’t she call you?”

  “No,” Gavin answered. “Where the hell are ye? Ye didn’t drag her off into space with yer weird alien friend, did ye? You know yer lifestyle isn’t the healthiest—”

  “No, we’re not ‘off in space,’ ” Fergus said. “We’re on a birdwatching tour.”

  “Actual Earth birds?”

  “Actual Earth birds. We just saw a greeb.”

  “A grebe? Okay,” Gavin said. “So, she’s not in any danger?”

  “No, she’s not in danger,” he said. “See for yourself.” He held up his handpad and did enough of a sweep to catch Isla on her horse, who was still studiously looking in the other direction, and a nice bunch of very boring, very Earth grass.

  “Okay,” Gavin said again. “Ye know anything about a weird drone thing sitting up on my roof?”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “I sent it there to keep an eye on things after the break-in. I felt bad about bringing trouble down on you. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s fine,” Gavin said. “Birdwatching, huh? Doesn’t seem yer thing. But good. Ye need to do more normal people things so ye can, you know. Become normal again.”

  “Thanks,” Fergus said dryly. “I’ll ask Isla to give you a call when our tour is over, okay?”

  “Right, thanks,” Gavin said, and disconnected.

  Fergus put his handpad away and looked over at Isla until she finally looked back, met his eyes for a split second, then hung her head.

  He sighed deeply. “Normal, right,” he said. “If I just want to be normal enough, it’ll come true, like magic? As if in fifteen years of desperately willing my parents to love me, I just never quite wanted it badly enough. I tried to will that guy not to cut my ear off, too, but me bad, I guess my heart wasn’t in that, either.”

  “Sorry, Ferg,” she said.

  “Yeah, not your fault,” he said. He had intended to hassle her more, but she did look contrite. Also, his irritation had shifted from her to Gavin, and his attention had shifted from her to an undistinguished patch of grass, in a sea of same, that was interested in him.

  This time, it was less like two strangers passing just close enough to exchange surprised hellos and more like the piece was expecting him, was calling directly to him. Which was, Fergus considered, a little creepy and probably more than a little bad.

  “So, why, if you are that worried about me being in danger, are we here?” Isla asked. They had fallen well behind the group, which Batu had brought to a stop for resting and water. From the many glances back, it was clear their guide wanted them to catch up.

  “Because of all the sites I’d skimmed our preliminary data on, this one seemed the safest,” Fergus said. “Out here on the grass, it’s a lot harder to get to us. We’ll have to be careful going back into Ulaanbaatar to catch a shuttle out, but once we’ve got the piece, we’ve got a lot more flexibility in our movements. Also, Mongolia is interesting! Did you ever think you would be here?”

  “No,” Isla admitted.

  “And did you ever think you’d get the satisfaction of watching your adventure-hero brother fall off a horse?” he asked.

  She smiled. “You planning on that?”

  “I am,” he said. “Gaslan here is going to get spooked by something, in about two minutes, and hopefully run off in the right direction before he dumps me out of the saddle.”

  “Spooked by . . . You’re not going to, ye know—” She rubbed her fingers together as if summoning a spark.

  “Well, yeah, that was the plan,” Fergus said. “I—”

  “You can’t zap the poor horse!” she said. She rolled her eyes. “You can be such an asshole. Don’t ye even dare do it.”

  “He’s not a nice horse,” Fergus protested.

  “How do you know? Maybe he’s perfectly nice when he’s being left alone and not hauling tourists’ arses around all day,” she said. “Would you be happy in his place?”

  “I don’t have enough legs to take his place,” Fergus said.

  “You know bloody well what I mean!” she said.

  “Fine,” Fergus said. He slumped in his seat. “I won’t zap the horse, okay?”

  “Great. So, what’s your new plan, genius?”

  “This,” he said. He raised his hand as they approached the stopped group. “Ah, um, Batu?” he asked. “How do we, you know, pee?”

  Batu raised their arms wide, indicating the vast plain around them, then chuckled and walked away.

  One woman near the edge of the group laughed and said something, and his translator managed to catch it. “Pee behind your horse,” she’d said.

  That was, in fact, what Fergus had hoped for. He tugged on Gaslan’s reins, hoping to pull him away toward where he’d felt the signal, but the horse was not having any of it, and several of the others, including Isla, watched him pulling and cajoling the horse with obvious amusement.

  Finally, he dug into the snack packet and pulled out one of the carrots. “Carrot?” he asked as sweetly as he could, and the horse swung his long face over to regard him at length before, grudgingly, he took a step forward.

  It cost him his entire stash of carrots to get to where he felt the fragment calling from. A few of the other birdwatchers, failing to be distracted by the still-wheeling gulls, were watching him, so he made as if he was about to moon the lot of them, and they turned quickly away.

  Behind cover of his horse, he took a few steps, then knelt down and ran his hands through the grass until they found something hard and metal half-woven into the ground by roots and straw. One of the inert frame pieces; he tucked it quickly into a pants pocket and tried again, and this time, his fingers went right to where they needed. He wrapped the core fragment in a handkerchief and stuffed it deep into an inner pocket on his light coat, until he had more privacy to stash it more securely. Then, just to be sure his cover story was complete, he took the expected pee.

  Gaslan looked like he was trying to figure out how to raise eyebrows he didn’t have, but after Fergus surrendered his cookies, the horse was willing to be led back toward the group, which was already remounting for the last leg of the ride to the lakeshore.

  There was another Mongolian there now, his horse standing with its feet in the shallow water of the lake itself. He wore a similar hat to Batu and held in his hands a long composite bow that dully gleamed as if made of horn.

  When the drone that had earlier upset the gulls swung back around, the man calmly pulled an arrow from his hip quiver and shot it down on his first try. He and Batu saluted one another, and then the man rode off again.

  Now Fergus could make out the small collection of yurts away from the trail, each one marked with the logo of the Mongolian Conservation Service. He wondered how many drones Digital Midendian lost per year to arrows, and how you deducted illegal surveillance ops on your taxes. Neither was his problem.

  Four pieces down, he thought, twenty-eight to go. For now, all he and Isla needed to do was enjoy the rest of the day, watch some birds do birdish things, and avoid DM and cultists on their way out. He hoped the competition was inattentive enough that they could try some of the local food before leaving; the heady aroma from a spicy-noodle-and-dumpling place they’d passed on their way in this morning still lingered in his thoughts.

  “White-naped crane!” someone ye
lled in excitement, and then the whole group was moving on toward that new sight, and he followed along with his fragment and his cranky horse and his amused sister toward the reeds and sand dunes and tall, elegant white birds wading along the shore, unbothered.

  Chapter 12

  “You look worried,” Isla said, deftly stealing the last dumping off the plate between them.

  “I am,” Fergus said. It wasn’t that an unmarked white van with way too much electrical signal coming from it had passed the restaurant twice now, between the Ulaanbaatar shuttleport and the tour drop off; the new core piece was now safely settled in his pack inside another of the modified PhobosCola cans, the second of a pair delivered to Whiro while he was in Japan. He could hardly hear the fragment inside. Hardly, though, was the worrisome part—the first two pieces had effectively gone silent in their cans. This piece was louder, and after sliding the noodle bowl closer and shoveling the rest of them onto his own plate—she’d taken the dumpling, after all, so that seemed only fair—he said as much.

  “Maybe you’re just getting more sensitive to them,” Isla said.

  Deep in his gut, he knew that wasn’t it. “Probably,” he said.

  “So, where to next?” she asked, as he paid and they stepped back outside. The shuttleport was a short walk, and the van long gone, possibly after the next tour group. “Somewhere tropical, full of loud an’ colorful birds? I mean, this was lovely, but I’d like to get a chance to find out how much I can tan.”

  Fergus smiled. “Then our next stop will definitely be an unexpected treat.”

  * * *

  —

  The Arctic Union Shuttleport was in the southwestern Nuuk region of the main island of Kalaallit Nunaat, set back from the canyon-riddled coastline on smoother inland tundra, once upon a time covered in invincible-seeming glaciers. Instead, now there were vast fields of solar panels with programmable reflectivity, those not needed for power consumption turned to white to bounce some of the sun’s heat back out of the atmosphere. It was a small measure among many, and less controversial than the vast flotillas of white hexagons, two meters wide each and four meters apart, stretching across the ocean all the way to the Nunavut territories of the Union, taking the place of missing ice to bounce warming ultraviolet light back off the water’s surface.

  Complaints about inconveniencing global shipping didn’t much outlast the unsustainable consumer culture of North America, especially once the former United States fell apart. And the polar bears, so long teetering on the cusp of extinction, hadn’t minded some spiffy new high-tech ice floes at all. To Fergus, the geometry of the ocean panels was unsettling in such a raw, wild place, but as they collectively rose and fell with the swells of the waves in a mesmerizing grid, they were also hard to take one’s eyes off of.

  He found it funny that just about the time Greenland finally began to live up to its name, the island territory had dropped it.

  There was not much there in the way of tourism outside the few small cities along the former Danish territory’s fringes, nestled in canyons and reminding him in odd, hard-to-pin-down ways of the fisherfolk side of town along the Scotland Inland Sea. Nor were there convenient Hikerpods or other such businesses; there were locals and scientists, and most tourists were not hardy enough to venture too far from civilization except in very occasional and expensive organized tours to go visit some of the deep canyons that had found themselves unexpectedly free of ice after millennia.

  Isla heaved a long, vocal sigh, the third such in as many minutes, as they took a small automated tram from the port to the nearby coast. The elderly Kalaallit woman who rented them a boat showed him how to turn it on, pointed him toward the smart console, and switched it over from Danish to English, then patted a deeply reluctant Isla gently on the back as if fondly sending her out to sea to a swift and ignominious death.

  Still, the boat was solid and had a decent if limited mindsystem on board that he let mostly take over operations as he directed it north along the coastline to an island named Qeqertarsuaq. He had practiced the pronunciation on his way down but thought his best bet was just to not talk to anyone local unless he had to.

  This site, like the others, presented practical challenges to his competitors’ vehicles that he didn’t have, being on foot. At the top of the list was the Kalaallit family whose back fields the debris had come down on; five generations of them had fought for independence before it was finally won, and two members had served as representatives of their state in the newly formed Union. They had told the Alliance firmly they wanted no vehicles on the property, and the island and Kalaallit Nunaat government backed them. The brief on-foot search had, from the data Whiro had recovered from the tea set, clearly not been successful.

  Now that he knew what to look for, he found at least one attempt from an obvious front company to convince the owners to sell or lease out some of the fields, equally futile. Digital Midendian, no doubt.

  If the world wasn’t in danger, Fergus would strongly have preferred to leave them alone himself. As it was, the target area was several steep hills and valleys away from the farmhouse and other buildings, and no one should know they were there. In and out, he thought. Time is ticking.

  He sent the boat out from shore and into rougher waters, and felt a small thrill when a big wave sent them briefly feeling airborne. It was only the small squeak from behind him that reminded him that he was not alone, and that his sister was being very, very quiet.

  Fergus glanced back at her. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not been boating before,” she said.

  “Swimming at least, then?” Fergus asked.

  “No,” she said. “After what happened to my da and what everyone said happened to ye? No one let me anywhere near water.”

  “Oh,” he said. He opened his mouth to say something about how space hadn’t bothered her this much and was much deadlier, but he remembered his own deep reluctance to get near water when he’d first left home. “You probably ought to learn, though,” he said instead.

  “Just don’t make me have to learn by surprise, okay?” she said.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. “We don’t have to go too far. Look, you can already see the town up ahead.”

  He directed the boat past the brightly colored houses and windmills, and pulled in just at the southern mouth of the channel separating the island from the mainland, on a rock-strewn beach. As he pondered how to get from the boat to the actual shore, the boat popped up a dialogue asking him if he wanted to beach. Shrugging, Fergus hit Yes, and the boat oriented itself bow-in to the shore and rumbled toward it, sprouting wheels just in time to roll up onto dry land. As the boat parked itself, he turned to Isla, who was looking a lot happier. “You coming?” he asked.

  “Off this boat? Aye, absolutely,” she said.

  “Great.” He pointed to the bag on the floor of the boat. “Camouflage thermal suits. It’s a balmy eight C out. Also, grab the carrot sticks? We may have to bribe some sheep.”

  “Sheep?” Isla protested. “Never mind. Can I just stay next to the boat? I want to think through some math Ignatio gave me.”

  “No,” he said. “You turned your back on science for the world of high adventure, so you get to crawl through the sheep crap with me. Now get your suit on.”

  * * *

  —

  “So, that’s five,” Isla said, stuffing her thermal suit back into the bag with as few fingers as she could, her face a grimace of distaste. The sheep had proved handy cover from a pair of spycams, but they’d done a lot of crawling through the flock on their hands and knees. “I feel like I was spun through an autowash with a load of gravel and dung,” she said. “How many more of these pieces involve sheep?”

  “That I know about? None. But you never can be sure where a job will lead till it’s done,” Fergus said. He had already ditched his own suit on the floor, and as the boat sys
tems navigated them back out into the channel, he opened the modified PhobosCola can to see if the second fragment would fit in with the first.

  It did not, and the burst of signal when he opened the can was the electromagnetic equivalent of getting hit in the face with a giant springy fake snake. Fergus hastily put the lid back on and set it at arm’s length away from him, as he regarded the new piece—still excited, still springy with chatter—still in his hand.

  “They’re louder, you said?” Isla asked.

  “Yeah.” He could feel the Mongolia piece sealed back in its can, subdued as it was, and between it and the new Qeqertarsuaq piece, he felt uncomfortably like one point in a triangle of electrical noise. “Maybe it’s because they’re so near each other. I shouldn’t have opened the can.”

  “Ye said it was like they were talking to each other and to you,” Isla said. “Can ye, like Ignatio suggested, ask them to shut their gobs and go back to sleep? Electrically?”

  “My thing doesn’t work like that,” Fergus said.

  She shrugged. “Ye sure? Ye’ve tried it? Because it seems like except when ye zap people, ye only use this thing passively.”

  “Because it’s dangerous!” Fergus said. He dropped the new piece in his pocket, took out the last, bent carrot stick, stuck it in his mouth, and immediately realized it was covered in dirt and spat it out again. “I don’t want to accidentally hurt anyone.”

  “Yeah, but maybe you’re also avoiding learning what ye can do,” Isla said. “Aren’t ye curious?”

  Fergus would never forget the look on Pace’s face, under the ice of Enceladus, just before his ‘gift’ deflected a lethal shot back on the rogue pilot and killed him. “No,” he said. “I am really not.”

  “Lazy arse,” she said. “Or are ye scared?”

  “Very, very much the latter,” he said, “though I also won’t deny the first. Speaking of working, Whiro was supposed to be figuring out how to sneak drones down to carry them back up to orbit; I’d like to get these two out of my hands and away before our next stop.”