The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  The alarm scan was still set on its longest range—at least we had ample advance notice for whatever the Bumbler had detected. There were no Skin-Faces on shore, no hypothetical dragons soaring through the sky. That suggested the danger might be in the water with us…and a scary suggestion it was. On this setting, the Bumbler wouldn’t notice anything as trifling as a lamprey, piranha, or water moccasin; it had to be something bigger.

  If we were lucky, it might be a freshwater dolphin. If we weren’t…. I told myself the river was too cold for alligators, and snapping turtles seldom bit anything larger than pickerel.

  “Keep as still as you can,” I told Oar. “If you don’t move, your legs are almost invisible in the water. You won’t look like anything’s supper.”

  She said nothing—her “stay quiet, don’t be seen” instincts had kicked in again. I fumbled with the Bumbler, trying to locate what it was beeping about.

  Radio first. No signals.

  Visual scan. Nothing.

  IR…and immediately it showed a strong heat source in the water, one hundred meters upstream.

  The temperature was too high for a reptile; it had to be warm-blooded. That suggested a dolphin; but the heat trace on the screen looked bigger than any fresh-water dolphin I’d heard of. In fact, the bogey looked as big as a killer whale, and as hot as a gas-powered engine.

  Holding the Bumbler high out of the water, I dialed “Visual telescopic” and aimed the scanner in the direction of the IR blob. A moment later, the screen showed a sharklike fin cutting the surface in a straight line toward us.

  The fin was made of glass.

  The Glass Fin

  “Have you heard of glass dolphins?” I asked Oar.

  Her answer was barely audible. “No.”

  I scowled. Possibly, the engineers of Melaquin made glass versions of higher cetaceans as well as humans—the animals were, after all, sentient in their own way. Even so, the blob on the Bumbler’s screen had a furiously bright IR signature. Hotter than Oar. Hotter than any blubber-insulated orca built to avoid leaking body heat into cold surrounding water.

  The fin continued straight for us.

  Still working with the Bumbler, I tried to resolve a better picture of the thing—particularly its tail. Cetaceans have horizontal tail fins; fish have vertical. The image on the screen was still too blobby for me to be certain, but this tail looked vertical. And the thing’s body wasn’t moving properly: no undulations to provide propulsion. The body stayed completely rigid, more like a submarine than a living organism.

  I thought of Oar’s glass coffin boat. Perhaps Skin-Faces had boats too, built with intimidation in mind.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Oh shit,” Oar murmured, like the response in a litany.

  Raising my voice, I shouted at the onrushing fin, “Greetings! I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg…aw, fuck it.”

  Lifting my stunner, I shot the beast right in the dorsal.

  Accidental Music

  Hit by sonics, the fin sang like a glass harp. The sound reminded me of the hum from running a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass. I could actually see the vibrations, strong on the fin’s tip, damped down where the fin entered the water.

  Without hesitation, I shoved the stunner into the river and fired again.

  Ouch.

  My hand tingled with numbness—in water, the tight sonic beam didn’t hold its cohesion, and a fraction of it radiated back at me. My grip didn’t loosen enough to drop the gun, but I couldn’t pull the trigger again till my fingers got over the shock. Still, the incoming bogey took a hard hit too: water conducts sound better than air.

  A moment later, the fin disappeared.

  On the Bumbler screen, the bogey’s heat signature veered to one side and angled into a steep dive. If it used sonar, it would have quite a headache—maybe enough to send it running in pain. For that matter, it looked like it was going to…

  I swear I felt the jar of impact as the bogey’s nose hit the river bottom. The heat blob on the Bumbler dimmed to half, as muck bloomed up from the collision site and fuzzed the IR scan. Still, I could see the bogey reverse its way out of the mud and angle off in another direction, only to run into a sunken log as it neared the surface.

  The log cracked. I hoped the bogey did too.

  Our tree trunk rocked wildly as waves swept across us, hard and fast. For a moment, my attention was occupied with keeping hold of the Bumbler and the stunner; to avoid losing the weapon, I transferred it to my other hand. That left only my numb arm for clinging to the tree trunk. Awkwardly, I slung the arm over the tree, not holding on but only propped up with the trunk snug under my armpit.

  I was just turning back to look for the bogey when it jumped straight out of the water.

  It was a shark the size of a killer whale, but clear as glass and just as stiff. As it soared upward, head clearing the water, then fins, then tail, I could see its nose was starred with cracks from its collision with the log: the beast wasn’t invulnerable. Without hesitation, I raised the stunner and shot straight at its cracked snout while it still sailed through the air.

  The sonics struck the glass like a gong. For one brief moment, the bogey reverberated—a pure deep tone of whale song. Then the arc of its jump brought it splashing into the river, more than a ton of glass belly flopping in front of me.

  Tsunami time.

  Submerged

  One moment my numb arm was propped over our tree trunk; the next I was hammered by a wall of water, knocking me loose and burying me under its weight. It drove me deep below the surface, battering my head and shoulders, almost stunning me. Instinct was all that kept me holding my breath. I was left disoriented, dizzy…which way was up? And even if I could figure out the direction to swim, could I do it with one bad arm and the Bumbler weighing me down?

  Yes, I could. I could do it.

  The rebreather was still around my neck. I shoved it into my mouth, cleared it, and took a breath. Air. Yes. I was in control.

  Light meant up, dark meant down. The light looked a long way off, but I could make it. I just had to take it easy. Once I found air again, I could search for Oar. Probably she was still afloat; with strength like hers, it would take more than a tidal wave to knock her off our tree trunk.

  I swam upward, filled with the calm that comes when survival demands it. Up toward the light. I could see it better now. I could….

  Bump. My outstretched hand touched glass.

  The whale-shark floated between me and the surface.

  Around the Belly

  Maybe it was dead. No, it had to be a machine; say that it was broken, not dead. But I had shot it three times, it had smashed into the river bottom and the log, then it had suffered the crashing smack of bellyflopping into the water after its jump. All that buffeting must have taken its toll.

  The machine lay still now. I prayed it was too damaged to move. Keeping my hand against the thing’s hull, I began to feel my way around it: under its belly, up to fresh air.

  Clang.

  The sound was soft. I didn’t hear it so much as feel it through my fingertips. Something had shifted inside the glass machine.

  Just broken equipment, I told myself, banging together.

  I didn’t believe it. I gave a good kick, trying to hurry to the surface.

  Whir.

  An engine spun into life. I could feel that through my fingers too.

  Shit.

  I was still palming my way along the hull when the whale-shark started to move. The motion was jerky—damaged. I wanted to press my stunner against the machine’s glass belly and keep pulling the trigger till the gun’s battery was exhausted; but there might be an echoing backwash that left me unconscious in the water. My arm was still numb from that earlier bounce-back. All I could do was hurry, and hope Oar and I got out of the water before the glass monster came to its senses.

  The hull under my hand was starting to curve upward. I was around the bulge. Pu
shing off, I swam hard toward the light. Beside me, the machine moved forward, its wake pulling me around in a spiral. Ignore it—up was up, and I was almost at the surface.

  For some reason, I thought I’d be all right if I could reach fresh air again.

  My head emerged into the light. Some distance away, Oar still clung to the tree trunk, her body frozen, not looking in my direction. I was about to swim toward her when something grabbed my leg.

  I was dragged under again, fighting and kicking. There was time to see glass tentacles stretching from the whale-shark’s mouth to my ankle. Then I was pulled inside.

  Jonah

  For such a big machine, the interior was cramped—too cramped to bend and loosen the glass grip on my leg. The Bumbler pressed hard into my kidneys, the pain stinging sharp; so I wriggled and squeezed to roll the other way, facing the Bumbler instead of having it at my back. Having a Bumbler jammed against my stomach wasn’t comfortable either, but I could stand it for a while. With less than two minutes of air in the rebreather, I had worse troubles.

  The whale-shark’s mouth began to close. I tried to hold it open, tried to grab its jaw and pull myself free; but the hold on my ankle was as strong as iron, chaining me in place.

  Better to stop fighting. My air would last longer that way.

  Concentrate, I told myself. Slow breaths. Wait.

  I had no idea what I was waiting for; but no one builds a river-shark just for the hell of it—not one with tentacles for grabbing passersby. This machine was designed to capture people…and I hoped it took them alive.

  Yes. Of course it must want me alive. If its purpose was to eliminate intruders, it would have killed me by now. It could have zipped out a knife to slit my throat the second I was immobilized.

  Unless it wanted my skin intact. Unless the machine’s job was to supply the Skin-Faces with fresh Explorer pelts.

  Concentrate! I growled mentally. Slow, slow breaths.

  Somewhere inside the shark, machinery started grinding. It was an unhealthy, damaged sound—the stunner had shattered some part of the glass mechanism. Slowly though, slowly, the water around me gurgled away. The shark was pumping water out, and (I hoped) pumping breathable air in.

  Taking a chance, I raised my head into the clear space and inhaled shallowly through my nose. So far so good. I completely filled my lungs and waited.

  No dizziness, no sudden rush of blackness. The shark wasn’t even doping the air with knockout gas.

  What a wimp-ass planet.

  Pumps Clanking

  The water level dropped till half the interior was filled with air. I expected the water to continue receding; it didn’t.

  Why did that bother me?

  The whale-shark contained no light source, but it swam close enough to the surface that weak daylight filtered through the machine’s glass hull. The dim illumination showed why the water level wasn’t dropping anymore: as fast as the pumps sucked water away, more water seeped through the cracks where the shark had hit the log. It looked like the glass bent slightly inward up near the snout—as if the water pressure outside had enough strength to buckle the hull, now that the inside was half air.

  “Okay,” I said aloud, “I am now officially worried.”

  Minutes passed. The grinding noise in the tail section got worse, punctuated occasionally by soft electric crackling. If that was the sound of the pumps, they wouldn’t last long.

  I held the rebreather in front of my face. The gauge was hard to read in the dimness, but the little tank still held sixty seconds of air. Careful breathing could stretch that out, but not forever.

  Lifting my head into the air space, I filled my lungs as deeply as I could. By the time I finished, there was no doubt possible: the water level was back on the rise.

  Arrival

  In an entertainment bubble broadcast, I’d be saved at the last second—just as the chamber was completely full, just as my rebreather gasped out its last molecule of oxygen. Life doesn’t match that standard: you do not find a job just as you run out of money, a couple’s orgasms seldom arrive simultaneously, and salvation may not sweep to the rescue at the point of peak drama. For me, salvation arrived with some minutes to spare—better than mistiming its cue in the other direction.

  To make a long story short, the whale-shark’s gullet still held a few fingers of air at the end of the machine’s journey.

  My first hint we were close to our goal was a sharp dive: I couldn’t tell if we were going down intentionally or some new breakdown was sinking us at speed. The dim and distant daylight from the river’s surface faded to darkness. After half a minute, I asked myself how deep the river could be. We hadn’t traveled far enough to reach the ocean. Perhaps we had come to a lake whose bottom was lower than the river feeding into it.

  Down and down and down. I was glad the water level had risen now—it helped balance the fearsome pressure pushing on the shark’s broken nose. Even so, the damaged area creaked in protest…and perhaps it was in the nick of time that the machine passed through an airlock into bluish-silver light.

  The shark’s mouth opened, spilling water onto a concrete jetty.

  The tentacled grip on my ankle eased. Stiffly, I pulled myself past the Bumbler (still pressed against my stomach), and crawled out of the shark’s mouth. Thirty seconds later, I was on my feet, the Bumbler strapped to my back, and my stunner in hand.

  Silence.

  No one rushed to attack me. The entry chamber was small and empty, with blank concrete walls. At the far end was a metal door with a red pushbutton beside it.

  Enter freely and of your own will, I thought to myself.

  The Colored Town

  There was no way to go back the way I came. Even if I could start the whale-shark again, I’d drown on the return journey. That left two choices: sit where I was, or move forward. Staying put just avoided the future. Better to head out now, and find cover before anyone came for me.

  I walked straight to the door and pressed the button. With a rusty whine, the hatch opened toward me. I stepped through.

  Glass towers. Glass homes. Glass blockhouses.

  It was larger than Oar’s village, but built on the same model. A black hemispherical dome loomed overhead, no doubt holding back a million tons of water. The buildings on the perimeter were low-built, while the ones in the middle reached high into the air, stretching more than halfway to the roof. Like Oar’s home, the place had an abandoned air: quiet and unpeopled.

  But it had color.

  Red plastic streamers lay in the street, like the unswept remains of a Mardi Gras. Purple and orange banners had been fastened above many glass doorways—banners now fuzzed with dust, and corners dangling dog-eared where the glue had lost its stick. The tallest spire in town sported a droopy yellow flag with a smudged black crest in the middle; and other towers had flags of their own, bile green, dark blue, stripes of brown and fuchsia.

  It all looked so sad. Dirt-specked attempts to brighten the place up. Deliberately garish yet futile.

  Wherever I looked was glass, as sterile as distilled water. The scraps of blousy fabric only heightened the austerity of the barren backdrop. How can a meter of cloth enliven a wall twenty storeys high? And from the clashes between adjacent colors, I could tell the decorators had no sense of what they were doing. They had no particular effect in mind—they only wanted to disrupt the sameness of glass on glass.

  I thought of the spearmen I’d seen, wrapping skin on their faces and genitals. Did that come from a similar impulse? Plastering skin on their bodies to break up the sterile sameness?

  But there was no reason to assume this town belonged to the Skin-Faces. For all I knew, the banners around me might be centuries old. The red plastic in the gutters might be that old too. With no rain under the dome and no animals, with air that was likely filtered free of most bacteria, the fallen streamers might last a lifetime. A flat and weary lifetime.

  It might be helpful to see whether this place had its own Tower o
f Ancestors filled with dormant bodies. If the bodies wore scraps of skin, it would tell me something.

  Cautiously, I walked to the middle of town. Like Oar’s home, this place had an open square, a square featuring four fountains, not two. The colored debris was more abundant here: mostly on the ground, but with scraps of colored plastic thrown over the fountains and festooned clumsily above doorways.

  The heavyhandedness of it all weighed drearily on me. I sat on a glass bench and tried to will myself into seeing the color as sincere celebration, not a vain roaring against the bleakness.

  Silence. The emptiness of a place whose spirit had died.

  Many Happy Returns

  With a swish, a door opened in a building behind me. Four Skin-Faces marched out, two men, two women, all holding spears. They fell into position beside the doorway, men on one side, women on the other—like an honor guard lining up to welcome a VIP.

  “Attention!” one of the men called. Attention: the English word. All four spear-carriers slammed the butts of their weapons on the ground and snapped rigid in perfect Outward Fleet form.

  I didn’t move. If I ran, they might chase me; and where could I hide in a city of glass?

  Two imperious hand-claps sounded sharply from within the building. I couldn’t see who’d clapped—the Skin-Faces blocked my line of sight. Very slowly, I adjusted my grip on the stunner, in case the clapped command was an order to attack.

  It wasn’t. One of the women cleared her throat, hummed a musical tone, then began to sing: Happy Birthday. The others joined in.

  On the third line (“Happy birthday, lord and master”), a figure emerged from the building: a person in tightsuit, its fabric smeared with grass stains, brownish sludge, and clots of rust-red. The suit’s helmet had its visor set to oneway opaque; I couldn’t see whether the face inside was flesh or glass.

  Walking slowly, bowlegged, the tightsuited figure passed between the lines of Skin-Faces and continued across the plaza—straight toward me. I raised the stunner, ready but not aiming it directly at the approaching stranger.