Something rattled up the rise, the sound of battle armor, and the dead desert lord’s abdomen started heaving upward. Another creature was struggling from the hole, pushing the desert lord aside.
"Look!" I said, as a second desert lord stuck its head from the ground.
"It’s just one of the females, a desert lady," Abriara said without turning to look. The creature crawled from its burrow and stared at us. It had a thick abdomen serving as counterweight to an upright torso, a head on a thin stalk. But the female had no front legs to throw stones. The sockets at its upper shoulders were empty, as if the forearms had been pulled free. Our helmets were designed to look exactly like the face of this creature.
The desert lady watched us forlornly, glancing from us to the dead male and back again. A second female pulled herself from the burrow, and a third. Everyone but me ignored the creatures.
"We can’t bury Zavala here," Abriara said. "The females will eat him. Let’s load him on the hovercraft."
Abriara and Perfecto grunted and lifted Zavala up to the rail on the hovercraft, then heaved him over like a sack of stones. Mavro wandered around the hill and went up and looked at the big dead desert lord, then went and stared into its lair. The females barked and snorted and leapt back from Mavro as he approached, yet seemed more curious than afraid.
"These creatures know how to treat their women," Mavro said, eyeing the females. "Pull off their arms so they can’t resist your advances!"
"The males don’t do it," Abriara said. "Their mothers pull them off when they’re born, making them dependent on the males." I wondered how she knew this, then remembered Perfecto’s first rule of battle: know your enemy. Abriara knew we had more enemies on Baker than the Yabajin.
"Hah! You should see this hole!" Mavro shouted. "It’s a perfect circle inside. It’s got cement all around, like a swimming pool. And they’ve covered it so you can’t see it from above." He kicked some dirt into the hole, then walked over and pulled himself back up on the hovercraft.
My limbs felt heavy and my head was numb, yet curiosity drove me to ask, "They make cement? Are they intelligent?"
Abriara shook her head. "Desert lords? No. They mix dung with gravel and vines for cement—it’s an inherited memory. They’re no smarter than monkeys—just more bloodthirsty."
I felt guilty for speaking, for asking inane questions when Zavala was lying dead. I was unaccountably angry at the samurai for not teaching me about these animals earlier, though even if I’d known of them it wouldn’t have saved Zavala.
Everyone hopped aboard the hovercraft and Abriara fired up the engines. She said, "What shall we do with the females? They’ll starve without the male."
"Leave them," Mavro said. "Maybe they’ll find another mate."
We drove off. The desert ladies raised their heads and a trumpeting whistle issued over the prairie. They began chasing after our craft like dogs tailing the vehicle of their masters. Darkness fell behind us as the sun dropped beneath the horizon.
Abriara drove for an hour under the light of Shinju, the pearl, Baker’s smaller moon, till we hit stony ground, then we got out to build a cairn for Zavala. My knees were weak and wobbly and I couldn’t carry rocks for the cairn. I let the others perform the labor.
I felt so down and empty I wondered if others felt the same. I kept expecting Abriara to break down and weep, or one of the others, but they just dutifully carried rocks to the pile. Abriara once promised she wouldn’t mourn if one of us died. Now that Zavala was dead she seemed to be living up to her promise. And I wondered if I’d been right. Was she really alive inside? Or had she too died to emotion?
We buried Zavala under the stones and Abriara had us kneel as she said a prayer. She wept in spite of her promise.
We prepared to leave and Abriara stopped and looked off in the distance behind. "Those three females have followed us," she said. "They’re running toward us, about five kilometers away." My infrared vision wasn’t good enough to discern such details at that distance. "When a male desert lord kills another," she said, "the females mate the victor. Those females will want to come live with us. We’d better not leave them—they might dig up Zavala."
We loaded into the hovercraft and turned back. We met the females only a kilometer away, and Mavro sprayed them with plasma. The plasma burned through their exoskeletons and lighted them from inside, and the pale blue of veins and organs stood out perfectly. Their exoskeletons were remarkably clear, like yellowed plastic, and I marveled how much that clear exoskeleton reminded me of the flesh of other of Baker’s animals.
After killing the desert ladies we turned the hovercraft back, and for the next several hours, intermixed with the sweet sugary turpines of desert plants I could still smell orchids.
Chapter 32
Abriara drove zigzag through the desert all night, seeking the trail of our army. The ringing in my ears lessened, but my head ached and I couldn’t focus my eyes long, so I took painkillers. The night sounds and smells on Baker were intriguing—the whirring wings of opal birds, the whistles and cries of unseen animals singing a strange chorus, the music of a universe where I didn’t belong.
The scents were even more amazing—many of Baker’s animals communicate chemically, and residues of chemical markers along with turpines of plants became a constant barrage. Often scents were pleasant, like the orchid analog of the desert lords; often the odors were offensive, like the bitter musky tang where Baker’s five-meter-Iong armadillos left their slime trails.
I could feel a madness coming on, the madness of ecoshock, of exposure to the alien. I recalled the problems faced by those who gained eyesight in adulthood after having lived entire lives in darkness—a man fell from a four-story building as he leaned out his window to pick roses he imagined to be only a meter from his hand, men driven to fear when trying to negotiate crowds they could easily handle when blind. The burden of sight was often too much for such people. Those who couldn’t cope often resorted to having their optic nerves severed so they could return to the comfortable world of the blind. Those who were impatient sometimes pulled their own eyes from their sockets. Such is the pain of ecoshock.
The night sounds and smells on Baker were intriguing, yet only the afternoon before I’d been buffeted by prolonged contact with the alien. I’d felt relieved that my armor insulated me from the sights and smells and sounds of this world.
But now my helmet was shattered, and I was naked and exposed.
I’d thrown away my dream monitor and had no way to escape the sensory overload to come. Darkness was my friend. By closing my eyes I could cut down on the overload. The desert was my friend, for it was nearly free of strange sights and sounds.
So as we traveled I closed my eyes and tried not to mention my predicament to others. In the battle to come, I reasoned, I could find a corpse that had a helmet that would fit me.
Twice Baker’s huge blue moon, Rojin the old man, and once its small white moon, Shinju the pearl, shot overhead. I had difficulty focusing. My vision blurred. At dawn Shinju rose with the sun; for a few minutes the world was in partial eclipse and long purple shadows shot over the desert while a red nimbus circled the moon, as if fields of fire burned along its edge.
We still saw no sign of the army, and so I just closed my eyes.
Abriara said to herself more than to us, "They must have driven through the night without camping. Perhaps they are afraid the Yabajin will turn back on us. Or maybe they learned something of importance, and decided that they had to forge ahead."
If she was right, we would be delayed in reaching our compadres by at least a day. Already the sun shining on the wings of multicolored oparu no tako assaulted my sensibilities. I massaged my temples and stifled a moan. We had larger matters to worry about. Without the help of Garzón we didn’t know exactly what route to take to Hotoke no Za. We couldn’t hope to find our compadres if they’d traveled too far ahead. Their hovercrafts wouldn’t leave a discernible track on the hard desert.
> With the zigzag pattern we resorted to in our search, we were getting farther behind all of the time.
The ground was covered with many white growths, a whole tiny forest only a meter tall, like hundreds of fungi that had baked and shriveled down to a hard cement. Our army could have raced over this unpromising terrain and still left no trace.
Our compasses were inadequate guides over a long distance. Thee continent Kani is shaped something like a crab, with its face pointing north. Hotoke no Za is situated by the sea on the southeast while Kimai no Ji is situated on the northwest edge of the continent. We could try making a straight line southeast, but there were endless jungles, great canyons, and mountains between us and Hotoke no Za. We could easily waste time trying to find passes over mountains or become hopelessly stranded in impenetrable jungles. However, to the northeast the maps showed great plains and broad inland seas with only a few small hills and mountain ranges. It was a land that often froze during the winter, and not many plants had adapted to this harsh environment.
Perfecto believed we should go north till we reached the sea, then follow the coast down to Hotoke no Za. If we didn’t camp, we might arrive in Hotoke no Za with our compañeros.
Mavro violently disagreed. "We must try to follow the route of our compadres," he said. "It would be cowardly to do otherwise." For once, I applauded Mavro’s macho thinking. I hoped to find the army as soon as possible, but felt too exhausted to speak. Abriara reluctantly agreed with Mavro and began making a broad sweep to the south.
At noon we began to find occasional ribbons of dark ultraviolet grass protruding from the white cement, and in the distance we discerned entire fields of tangled orange vine, a vast savannah of native plants. The thought of traversing that area repulsed me.
The sun brightened, as if over seconds someone turned up a dimmer switch on the lights. I was watching the savannah at the time and thought only that a cloud had parted about our head and the sun was finally shining full on us. I’d have thought nothing more if it except that Abriara said, "Ah, damn, did anyone else see that?"
There was such anxiety in her voice that I immediately looked up. There were no clouds above us.
"Yes, I saw it," Mavro shouted nervously. "The sun just jumped in magnitude!"
Abriara said, "Yes, that is why Garzón raced through the night. He must have gotten word from a Motoki communications satellite and took the others to safety!"
I had never heard of such a thing. I tried to wrap my mind around it, but my thoughts came slow. I asked, "What? What ... will happen?"
"The sun does this here," Abriara said. "The land is going to heat up! This whole planet will heat up by eight degrees Celsius over the next twenty-two hours. We’re in for storms like you’ve never seen—the wind will rage across this desert at 150kph and the sand will cut you apart. The sky will turn dark with dust from the desert. The Japanese call the brown skies the chairo no suunarashi, the tea winds. We have to get out of this desert!"
Abriara turned to see the reaction on my face and asked, "My god, what is wrong with your eyes?"
"They hurt," I said. Everyone stared at me.
"They’re crossed," Mavro said, kneeling before me. "Watch my finger. Concentrate." He tracked his finger back and forth. I couldn’t follow it.
"Your eyes hold a little bit straighter when you concentrate," Mavro said, shaking his head.
"We should have checked you over better after you got hit," Abriara said. "I’m sorry." She sighed. "You’re the doctor. Is there anything we can do for you?"
The news put me in shock. I knew that I had a concussion, but I could not think how to treat it. Perfecto laid me down, gave me some water. He searched the medkit and found an oral anticoagulant and an anti-inflammatory. They were better than nothing. I didn’t have the energy to direct him further.
Abriara desperately plowed east for an hour until we were well into the grasslands, then swept around straight north. The terror of my compadres surprised me. The sky remained clear and no great winds arose for the next hour or so. The heat soon aggravated my condition, making me vomit. If not for my concussion, it would have seemed a simple drive through the country. I was tempted to believe that my friends’ anxiety was exaggerated.
Yet as we crossed the savannah, I couldn’t fail to recognize my own danger. The light-orange creepers with dusty red leaves like thin tongues assaulted me with their acidic odor. Yellow fruits on trees begged to be eaten with a scent like taffy. A lizard with a single eye on the front of its head and another on the back spit an oniony spray at our hovercraft. Tiny eight-legged grubs the size of mice raced along tree branches and emitted a stench that had no earthly analog. I was in ecoshock.
We followed a northerly course for an hour and discovered a broad plain where the grass had been blown flat and crushed by thousands of hovercrafts. We were a day behind our compadres.
"Shall we follow them?" Abriara said, defeat in her eyes. She was worried about the storms.
"It might be safer to go back to Kimai no Ji," Mavro suggested. "It’s only half a day back."
He was speaking in vain. We didn’t dare go back, not after what we’d done.
"Let’s head northeast," Abriara suggested. "There is an inland sea in that direction—Aruki Umi. Once we reach it, we veer straight east for the coast. Mavro, you drive. I need a break."
I didn’t dare speak of my rising sense of panic. We needed to outrun the storm, and I knew that if I told them of my concerns, it would be a factor in her decision. I was convinced that I was being selfless and gallant, and such people should be rewarded with miraculous abilities to endure pain and recuperate from illness.
As Mavro drove I tried to sleep.
I opened my eyes several times to a bleak landscape—rolling hills of red sand with nothing but the tiniest of white starflower plants. The sun was so bright that every shadow was perfectly defined. That which was in light was revealed in crisp detail, and that which was in shadow seemed to have all light sucked from it.
Mavro woke us all once to show us a herd of small red land crabs that stretched for miles in every direction. They were marching northward over a plain of pea gravel, apparently migrating from nowhere to nowhere.
I thought upon Garzón’s plan for conquering the Yabajin. All had gone well so far, but I couldn’t believe that our luck would continue. The plan depended upon too many factors. We’d beat a path through the Yabajin and cowed them from battle. With luck they would take their frustrations out on Kimai no Ji.
We couldn’t worry about the outcome of that battle.
We’d blown up all the fuel in the city, along with Motoki’s zeppelins and industrial parks.
The Yabajin wouldn’t capture much in the way of vehicles. In a few days they might be able to rebuild some zeppelins, but even if they came at us, Garzón felt confident that his shuttle full of men and cybertanks could keep them from entering the city.
But the key was the Colombians. Garzón was counting on them to revolt from the Yabajin and form an alliance with us. He believed that they had no sense of honor. I suspected that his plan would backfire.
We traveled all day and entered a forest of live mizu hakobinin, huge animals shaped like water barrels. We had seen their bones in simulators on our first day and had naively called them "coralwood trees," thinking the mere skeleton to be a live plant.
I tried to cope with my environment by comparing plant and animals to familiar things from Earth. The parasitic yellow vines that hung from the mizu hakobinin like guts dripping from the belly of a wounded jackal were really not so different from epiphytes and parasitic vines in the Jungles of South America. Musky armadillos were everywhere, plodding over foliage on tiny feet, leaving trails of stench and half-eaten plants. They were basic herbivores—deer in function, but more like giant potato bugs in form.
We passed bushes where sweet kidney-shaped fruits rotted in the sun and thousands of opal birds and tiny rodents fed on the fruit. No different from a field of m
angoes being eaten by opossums and birds back on Earth.
We spent hours crossing the great sea, Aruki Umi, then came to a forest of tall, spindly, pepper-scented blue-gray trees that each had dozens of red bladders attached to them, filled with gas, so that the bladders lifted the branches into the air.
These were no different, I told myself, from forests of kelp that live underwater back home.
These trees were sparse, and we had no trouble negotiating the woods.
But my associations didn’t hold. They didn’t relieve the pain, and in my weakened state I found myself breaking up.
We passed a mizu habokinin and Mavro said that he wanted a drink. We stopped, and he shot into the exoskeleton of the huge barrel-like tree. The exoskeleton cracked and thousands of liters of water gushed out. In the water was myriads of creatures—translucent frogs with no front feet, mantas the color of syrup, armored eels with vicious teeth, insects of every description. The tree had within it an entire sea, filled with its own alien ecosystem.
As we watched the mizu habokinin, large platelets of chitin floated to the open hole and blocked the water from draining, like leaves in a gutter.
Instantly the water shut off. The creature had repaired itself.
Yet the animals from its belly writhed on the hot ground and died. The mizu habokinin was not a simple analog of the barrel cactus, and the difference seemed profound.
Mavro refused to drink after seeing all of the bugs. We hovered away and I closed my eyes, shut out the sights; I held my breath to stifle the scents. I sang to myself to drown out the sounds. It was not enough.
From time to time some sight or sound intruded, so that I involuntarily opened my eyes. Everywhere was life: spiders the size of cats sitting in a crevasse of a fragmented rock, whirring bits of chitin together like locusts, cats growling love songs in the dark, I told myself. An evil-smelling opal kite wrapped its plastic green wings around a hanging red bladder like a chrysalis, presumably to gorge itself on some fruit—bats in my papaya tree back home. In a pond of stagnant brown water blue eels swam in circles near the surface, chasing their tails and moaning—the song of a catfish.
On My Way to Paradise Page 45
