House of Reeds ittotss-2

by Thomas Harlan

  Maggie closed her guidebook, nostrils flared. Her hackles were stiffening. "Eeee… can…can the land change so much, in this million years?"

  Gretchen nodded, still cold, and she shrank into her seat, tugging the field jacket around her. The dusty, hot compartment now seemed small and sad and terribly fragile. A queer sensation of weight – building in her thoughts since they'd climbed the endless flights of stairs up to that first horrible little hotel room in Parus – now settled fully on her.

  Everything is ground down here by age, even the land. Everything. Leaving nothing but finely ground dust. What I'll be, soon enough… Anderssen felt terribly sad – not for the Haraphans, so obviously wiped away by the inexorable progress of history – but for herself, knowing Duncan, Tristan and Isabelle would be unrecognizable when she saw them again. And how much longer will my mother live? She's not young, not anymore… Is this artifact worth anything?

  Parker continued to snore, his mouth slightly open. Gretchen hugged the jacket tighter. She had a sinking feeling the kalpataru would be nothing more than a can full of rust.

  "Here isss room." The Jehanan rental agent inserted a cross-shaped key into a lock at the center of a hexagonal portal. Gretchen stepped through the opened door, duffel bag dragging from her shoulder, and stared around at a long, empty chamber. Soot-stained windows lined the northern wall, looking out over the jumble of Takshila and its seventeen hills. The floors had once been lacquered wooden parquet, but years of wear had left some sections black and others an eroded white.

  "There isss cleaning deposit," hissed the rental agent's voice through Magdalena's translator. The slick showed a mouth full of pinlike teeth. "For asuchau. Very dirty."

  Magdalena nodded dolefully in agreement and pressed a stack of Parusian shatamanu – trade coins – into his claw.

  When the agent had yielded up the key and a stack of paperwork with colored stamps, waxed sigils and handwritten signatures affixed, the Hesht spun the door closed and coughed in amusement. "See, Parker? He agrees!" Mockingly, she chanted: "If we lose deposit, your hide will pay me back!"

  "Sure…" Parker stuck his head in the nearest door opening off of the main room. "Toilet? Filled with sand…just like Maggie likes it!"

  "That's the bathing room," Gretchen said absently, staring out one of the window panes. "The toilet will have urea crystals in the cracks between the floor tiles."

  Her calves hurt and her hip was throbbing. The apartment tower – a khus in the local dialect – stood among a cluster of equally tall buildings just to the east of the city center. As in Parus, there were no working elevators. The steam-powered express train had left them at a station on the southern fringe of Takshila. Getting a taxi had proved impossible – where Parus had benefited from an influx of imported Imperial vehicles, the northern city seemed almost untouched by the signs of Mйxica commercialism so apparent in the south.

  Having no way to identify an honest porter from a thief, they had carried their bags through the streets to the apartment tower themselves. A seemingly short distance on their one map had become several miles of pushing through strange-smelling crowds and dodging carts and wagons drawn by lizardlike beasts of burden. That had been unpleasant.

  Maggie slunk in and out of all the rooms, before testing the windows. Each opened along a grooved track, but years of pollution had jammed them shut. The Hesht grunted, running an extended fore-claw through the black gum sticking the window panes closed. "Den needs a good scrubbing – but Parker would be welcomed among his gods by smoking this…"

  Takshila was strewn with seventeen famous hills, and circumscribed to the south and east by a tributary of the Phison. The largest of the hills – a stolid limestone outcropping rising above neighborhoods of tightly packed buildings – stood in full view, bathed russet by the late afternoon sun. At first glance, the massif seemed untenanted and empty, but as Gretchen let her eyes rove over the whitened cliffs and straggling trees clinging to the rocks, she realized the entire top half of the hill was a single enormous building.

  So this is the House of Reeds. Anderssen slid the work goggles down from her forehead and clicked up a magnification mode. Now, without the grayish-yellow haze permeating the city air softening edges and obscuring vertical walls, she could see dark windows piercing the hill, staircases climbing shoulders of barren rock, arcades of pillars, and the ornamental trees filling terraced gardens. Quite large…doesn't seem so old, though.

  Puzzled a little – her first impression of the city was of relative newness, particularly in comparison to Parus, which had fairly reeked of hoary age – Gretchen began scanning the rest of the city within her line of sight. Skyscrapers, more of those odd curved boulevards, wide streets…hmmm…each hill is circled by radial roads…ceramacrete buildings…

  "Ha!" She laughed aloud and pushed her goggles back up. Turning around, she found Parker watching his self-inflating floor pad deploy itself. Maggie was banging around in what had to be the kitchen, though Gretchen wasn't sure she wanted to see what passed as a Jehanan kitchen. "Mags – this big hill to our north is the House of Reeds, right?"

  "Yarrrrr," responded the Hesht. She emerged from the kitchen with a hooked steel blade as long as her forearm. Parker's eyebrows rose in alarm and he backed quietly away to stand near the front door of the apartment. "You wanted a hunting lie close to the prey, yes? Well, there it is. All rocky and grim-looking as any citadel of the slave-lords of Magdag…"

  Gretchen made a face. "Slave-lords? What have you been reading? Is that a cutlass? Why do the Jehanan have…never mind."

  Magdalena sniffed ostentatiously, whiskers twitching and went to the nearest window. The hooked blade proved to be near enoughin size to allow her to pick out the gummy debris clogging the window tracks without getting her claws dirty. The Hesht began rattling the window back and forth, trying to make it open properly. Making a face at being so ostentatiously ignored, Anderssen turned to the pilot.

  "Parker – would you say this is an older city than Parus?"

  "This place?" Parker had a tabac out, but seemed wary of lighting up while the windows were still closed. "Not as old, I guess. Kind of funny, since Parus is so filled with the comforts of home – buses, aerocars, three-d sets, personal comm, six kinds of Imperial beer… – didn't see any of that here."

  Gretchen nodded brightly, running her hand across the nearest wall – smooth ceramacrete – just like the dorm buildings at university. "We have to be careful," she said, considering the material. The layers of bonded polycarbonate were almost imperceptibly flaking away. "According to Petrel's guidebook, Takshila has some of the oldest buildings on the planet. More than just the monastery over there. I think this apartment building is one of them."

  "This place?" Parker looked around. "But -"

  "You thought the buildings in Parus looked old because they were made of crumbling brick, and not more than five, six stories high. Crowded together, blackened with soot from wood-fired stoves – all those things say old to us. To humans. Right?" She gave him an expectant look.

  Parker spread his hands questioningly. "Hey – not an archaeologist! Pilot. Pilot. I fly aerocars, shuttles, old-style air-breathing jets, drink too much, smoke too much, always ready with the clever quip. Figuring out historical strata or long-term habitation chronologies is not in my job packet!"

  "Hah!" Magdalena jiggled the wooden window-frame and the panel moved smoothly in the newly cleaned track. Once open, the window allowed a gust of cold, bitter-tasting air into the apartment. "Eeeww…an entire planet of leaf-smoking herbivores…" She slammed the window shut again, looking aggrieved. "I wear a breathing mask from now on. We'll need one of these windows open for cameras and aerials."

  Gretchen ignored the Hesht muttering to herself. "Think about the societal-crash, Parker – some of the cities, like Parus, were obliterated by atomics. They've been rebuilt new but with the materials at hand; fired brick and wood and ceramic tile. This building is ancient – I'd guess Takshila wasn
't hit with a nuke during the collapse – so it's built from materials the old civilization had mastered. The cues we're used to following? They're reversed here!"

  "Sure, I get it." Parker gave her a puzzled look. "Is that going to matter?"

  "It might." Gretchen made a face at the pilot, annoyed he didn't share her interest.

  "Well, let me know when it does, right?" Parker began unpacking his sleepbag and personal effects. Anderssen looked around to see if Maggie was interested, but the Hesht was already arranging a nest of communications equipment and blankets and coils of cable and other, unidentifiable tools around her. As promised, the technician had already mounted a camera in the open window, pointing across the sprawling city at the hill.

  Feeling stymied, Gretchen zipped up her jacket and leaned on the windowsill, watching the cityscape below. Why didn't I take that post-doc position at the Ney Arkham institute? Why?

  The sun was low in the sky, almost vanished into the layer of smog hanging over the city, and the air at the thirty-third floor level was getting chilly. The hill holding the monastery of the mandire was still glowing with the light of sunset, while the darkened neighborhoods at its feet were beginning to sparkle with lights. From a height, the city didn't look as dangerous and dirty and crowded as it had felt in the heat of the afternoon.

  Anderssen stood at the window for a long time, watching the city slip steadily into night. Then her stomach growled and she shivered, turning away.

  "We should get some food."

  "Hrrr…yes. I should go hunting." Maggie looked up from her equipment, most of which was now humming and chirping to itself. One of the v-panes showed an infrared view of the massif. Figures could be seen coming and going along the narrow staircases.

  Parker turned from the open window, flicking the stub of a tabac out into the empty air. "I can go, kitty-cat. I know what we all like – assuming I can identify the basic food groups in the street vendors' stalls. But grease, bread and meat should be about the same everywhere."

  The Hesht shook her head as she draped a stained and mended rain-cloak around her shoulders. "Not wise, cub. I'm beginning to get the smell of these scaled-runners-underfoot. Humans are not welcome in Takshila. Didn't you hear them hissing and lashing their tails when we were walking from the station?"

  "Yes," Gretchen said, kneeling by her own pile of gear. "This dialect's not working so well with the translator in my earbug though…could you make out what they were saying?"

  Magdalena's tail twitched from side to side. "Distrust – envy – fear – hatred, they all smell the same, even if the pelt is different and one clan says 'hhrrruukh' when the other says 'hhrrruuch.' I will go out – they have not seen my kind before – I'll be no more an oddity than a stray Hikkikit going to market."

  "A Hiki-what?" Parker glared at the Hesht. "I think you're making up the names of things now. That is supposed to be what humans do for a living!"

  Magdalena bared her incisors and hissed dismissively at the pilot. "Read the guidebook – there are more races on Jagan than the Jehanan. I will return soon."

  "Wait, wait, wait…" Parker found his own jacket and goggles. "I'm coming with you. I'm almost out of my delicious 'bitter leaves' and we're not going through that whole 'me-having-no-smokes' business again. Look, I'll wear my potato hat – no one will be able to tell I'm human!"

  "Maggie -" Gretchen raised a quieting hand. "Let him go. Comm me when you're back and I'll open the door so you don't have to lug the key around."

  Gretchen slowed to a halt, feeling sweat trickle down her back, and looked up at the ribbon of dirty brown sky visible overhead. She clicked her teeth, turning on the comm built into her earbug and goggles. "Magdalena, I'm lost again. Can you tell me where I am?"

  For a moment, there was only the spitting hiss of static – something in the local environment threw out an inordinate amount of interference on the bands used by their work radios – and then Anderssen could quite clearly hear Parker coughing violently. A wicked chainsaw-starting sound drowned him out and then Magdalena's voice was filling her ears.

  "Kit kit kit…always getting lost on the way home from the watering hole…ah…you're not on scope here either. Can you see a landmark?"

  "No…ifI could, I'd know where I…what is wrong with Parker? He sounds like he needs new lungs again."

  Maggie laughed. "He…he is trying to smoke the local leaves. They are very strong, I think! Stronger than Parker – he is lying on the floor now. Hrrrr! What a funny color he is!"

  "Great," Gretchen muttered under her breath. "Check his medband – but if he has a seizure, there's no doctor."

  There was momentary silence on the channel. Anderssen moved into a doorway, finding even a little sun too much in the all-encompassing humidity. Lucky it's so cool up here in the hill country, she thought miserably. Not like Parus, where it's really hot.

  The streets of Takshila came in two flavors – wide, curving and lined with broad-leafed trees, apparently part of the citywide network of ring-roads radiating around the seventeen hills, and narrow and twisty. While getting from the apartment tower to the monastery hill itself seemed simple enough from thirty-three stories up, the lack of aerocars meant Gretchen had to use her own two feet for the day's business.

  The close, hot air put Gretchen on edge. The impassive, alien faces of the Jehanan did not make her feel welcome. The tension on the main streets was bad enough – today, she could feel hostility sharp in the air – but the side lanes were claustrophobic. There were doors – but they were all closed and locked and seemed very solidly built. In her experience, that meant a district where the fall of night meant footpads and murder and thievery. By day, it all gave her a stifling impression of being a rat in a maze – with no cheese in sight.

  "Parker will live," Magdalena's voice boomed in her ear, making Anderssen jump. "Good there is no carpet here for claw-sharpening, or it would be ruined. These fierce leaves have wrestled our smelly cub to the ground and pinned his ears right back."

  "Can you find me?" Gretchen tried to keep her voice calm. No gang of murderous locals had come along in the past five minutes, but a twitchy feeling between her shoulder blades was convincing her they would very soon now. She could hear noise ahead – bouncing back and forth off of the buildings – and it sounded like lots of people. Lots of angry people. The thought of continuing down this narrowing lane filled her with dread.

  There was muttering and the clicking sound of Magdalena's claws on her comp panels. "No. Your locator signal keeps hopping in and out of its hole. If you get to a clearing, or a sunny rock exposed to the sky…"

  Anderssen took a steadying breath and her fingers drifted to the medband on her wrist. She could feel her heart speeding up. Right. Time to retrace my steps – if I could remember which way I'd come! Stupid machines, why do they…Her thoughts became still for an instant. Wait. Remember…how do you unravel a knot you can't untie? You close your eyes. Let your fingers – or your feet – find the way.

  Then doubt assailed her. Why should her feet, mended workboots and all, know their own way back to the apartment building? Because Green Hummingbird would say you'd left a shadow on the world while you were walking and if you were quiet, quiet as a desert mouse, you could catch hold of that shadow and follow it home.

  The jarring sound of a clanging gong joined the angry, buzzing noise filling the air in the alley. Gretchen thought she could hear the trampling of hundreds of huge clawed feet on cobblestones. The sway of flickering, scaled tails. She knew how that felt, to have a long counter-balancing tail, to have stiff three-clawed feet digging in the sand as she ran.

  Just like the Mokuil. As I was, if only for a moment…

  Anderssen was surprised by the clarity of the memory, the fierce feeling of the Ephesian sun burning on her face, thin, bitterly cold air biting at her throat. The events she'd suffered through on Ephesus Three were muddled now, both by Imperial memorywipe and time, but every once in a while something surfaced, sharp an
d clear as broken glass. For the last year and a half, she'd done her best to ignore the hallucinogenic visions.

  But now – here in this hot, alien labyrinth – the memory felt useful.

  Suspicious, she looked at the houses lining the lane with sharp interest. Her moment of connection with the denizens of dead Mokuil had only been momentary – an hour, if that long – and suddenly Anderssen was sure the creature she'd shared footsteps with was not so very different from these Jehanan. The Imperial survey notes said the Jehanan had come to Bharat from another world – some kind of interstellar migration – had they crossed the void from lost Mokuil, wherever that might be?

  Did – could – Green Hummingbird know I'd step into their footsteps again? Such a coincidence seemed impossible. Anderssen set the hypothesis aside in her mind. No data. Nothing but a queer feeling. Not enough…

  But sometimes an irritating feeling – a sense of things being out of place – was all she'd needed to find something lost, a missing bit of evidence, a bone, a stone, whatever she needed to find in the rubble of the dig. Gretchen pushed away from the wall and clicked the channel to the apartment open.

  "Maggie, I'm going comm silent for a bit. Watch for my locator signal."

  She shut down the earbug and then went through the gear on her belt and body-webbing, turning off everything running on a fuel cell or power chip. Then she closed her eyes again and stepped out into the lane, fingertips outstretched, feet firmly planted.

  The sounds of trilling and squeaking and drumming in the air around her changed, shifted, fell from chaos into order. Gretchen breathed steadily, her attention focused on counting – a simple series of numbers, no more, no less – and let her feet, her hips, her arms shift minutely, bit by bit, until she felt perfectly comfortable.