by Darrell Bain
Gavin slowed his walk and looked sideways at her. “Suppose they aren't open to me?"
“They will be when I tell them you're on my council."
“I am?"
“Yes. As of now."
Gavin resumed his easy stride, being careful not to outpace her. “Are you sure that won't get you accused of cronyism? Most folks are beginning to consider us a couple, you know."
Lyda took his hand. “I know. That's fine with me and don't worry about impressions. Anyone who has dealt with me for any length of time knows I would never promote a person into a position of authority for personal reasons. They have to be capable. And you are. Besides being a nice kisser."
Gavin chuckled. “On that note, I'll accept the promotion. When do you want me to leave?"
Lyda took a deep breath. “Tomorrow. I want you to stay with me tonight."
Gavin halted, then tugged gently on her hand to bring her back within reach from where she had taken another step. He looked down at her face and saw nothing there but acceptance and caring. Nevertheless, he asked “Are you sure you're ready, Lyda? I know what happened to you back on earth. I don't ever want to hurt you."
Lyda put her face against his chest and rubbed her cheek against the rough woven fabric of his jerkin. “Yes, I'm certain, you ninny. I wouldn't have asked if I weren't. What happened is in the past. I want to look to the future. With you."
Gavin took her in his arms and kissed her, very gently and very sweetly.
Lyda didn't care who was watching. She was happy to be where she was, but it made it feel like a very long time before the day would be over. And then she hoped she would be even happier. In the meantime, there were other things before “night” came she had to take care of. She and Gavin parted, reluctantly, as young lovers are wont to. She heard him whistling as he called to Tweedle and hurried off to another demonstration.
* * * *
Lyda was walking back toward her box after stopping by the column at the common watering place to bathe and change clothes. Some alien fabric from earth and the new, very rough curtains fabricated from the tendrils gave any who wanted it a modicum of privacy, though before it was ready she found that she, along with most other people, were losing some of the nudity taboos they had brought with them from earth. It was a good thing, she thought. Her original clothing was gone, deteriorated to rags and used for other things now. She had no bra; the training bra she had been wearing had long since grown too small and been put to other uses. She wore pants made of the rough woven cloth and a blouse fashioned from some of the alien cloth brought from the desert.
She was strolling along dreamily and thinking of Gavin and what the night would bring, for once, not occupied with administrative duties. Buddy had appeared and scuttled along on his six legs, matching her slow walk. She placed a hand on his crest, enjoying the vibrations it sent through her skin to the rest of her body. She wished vainly for a mirror so she could see what her hair looked like now. She had let Rayne cut it several times and now wore it gathered in a loose bundle behind her neck, the best solution she had found, given the limited facilities of their environment. Oh well, she thought, I know he cares for me no matter if we don't have lipstick and hairbrushes and things like that here. I wonder if he loves me like I think I do him? Oh, I hope so, she thought. He is such a good person, and so intelligent and handsome and...
The sudden lurch of the whole world as they had come to know it caught her completely off-guard. Lyda stumbled and fell, cracking her knees and one elbow painfully on the ground. She rolled over and tried to sit up. Another lurch pinned her back to the ground and a surge of increased gravity kept her there.
No! she thought, not now! Not when we were going to...
Her personal thoughts were overridden by the sound of outraged screams and yells from nearby. In the distance, she could hear more of them. She saw Buddy's legs bow outward, then straighten, fighting the gravity. A peculiar mewling sound she hadn't heard before came from him as he struggled to stay upright.
Lyda tried to sit up again and found she could do so, but only with difficulty. She felt like cursing the aliens. She knew another change was coming as surely as she knew that whatever happened, it wouldn't be for the better.
Gravity returned to normal. She stood up shakily and began walking back toward the column, hoping to find Gavin before something else happened. Before she had taken more than a few steps, one sidewall of all the boxes in sight vanished as they did when the hexapods came or went, but it wasn't the creatures the boxes opened for. One after another in quick succession, an unending line of the familiar old spider mechs emerged from the boxes, mandibles opening and closing as they spread out and scurried off in different directions.
Lyda managed to avoid one, then on impulse, threw her leg over Buddy and used her knees to try to get him to run. Surprisingly, he got the idea immediately and paid no particular attention to her rump flattening part of his crest, but it still did no good. The mechs poured out in numbers sufficient to do all the herding necessary. Before Lyda could get back to the column, she found herself and Buddy in the midst of a scared and despairing bunch of humans being funneled toward one of the bigger boxes. Several of them tried to break loose. Two of them were quickly slaughtered by the spiders and the rest went resignedly toward the opening in the box, and to whatever fate awaited them.
Gavin! Lyda thought as she and Buddy passed inside and immediately began falling through a darkness so total that nothing at all could be seen. She felt her mind slipping into the same insidious darkness that enveloped her body. As scary and fearful as the situation was, she tried her best to keep her mind intact and functioning. She felt a fearful certainty that she would need every facility she could muster in the very near future.
A bright light blasted its way into the stygian darkness, giving her just enough time to brace herself by leaning forward and grasping Buddy tightly. They fell a short distance and hit with a thud. She tumbled off Buddy onto a stretch of moist sand like that on a beach, which cushioned her fall. She sat up and gazed around her. It was sand from a beach. She had fallen right at the edge of the tide line. An ocean with waves no bigger than those she might have seen at Galveston beach on a calm day rolled onto the sand at regular intervals. She could see no sign of a shore in the distance and turned her gaze behind her, looking for Buddy.
A series of hillocks held in place by rough bunches of grass and short blue and green bushes covered the near distance, then changed to scrub. Farther away, there was what looked like a forest. A blue mountain range partially hidden by the horizon rose to the sky a long ways off, and it was a sky, with a bright sun beaming down. She was on a planet. Looking one way on the beach, she saw no movement at all. The other direction held her companion, Buddy, and beyond him, another person. Her heart leaped for a moment, then dropped back into its normal position in her chest. Even from this far away, she could tell it wasn't Gavin. She touched the pocket of her worn jacket. The pistol still rested there, though she had been forced to reinforce the pocket with a borrowed needle and thread. And thankfully, her backpack was still on her shoulders. If this had to happen she thought how lucky she was that it hadn't occurred while she was bathing, with the backpack set aside.
Lyda stood sorting out her thoughts for a long moment, then began walking toward the only other human being she could see. There was nothing else to do but start over—and hope that this time, she could find some of her friends and assistants. Partcularly Gavin. With him gone, she felt like a hole had been carved in her heart. She brushed at a tear and put her hand on Buddy's crest in order to take comfort from the pleasant rumble of his vibrations.
* * * *
The other person on the beach turned out to be a grown man, not a child as she had first mistakenly thought. As Lyda approached, she was very surprised to see that he was a short, well developed oriental wearing a kilt-like affair woven from what looked like the same tendrils as the material her trousers were made from. She co
ntinued to walk slowly toward him with Buddy close by her side.
He was the first non-Caucasian she had encountered since being captured by the aliens on earth. From the way he was eyeing her, she thought she might be his first Caucasian sighting.
“Hello,” Lyda said, keeping a wary distance.
He looked at her, then at the hexapod by her side. He showed not a hint of fright, so she knew he must have encountered them somewhere. “I ... some English. Me Chinese. Kailoong."
“I don't know any Chinese,” Lyda said. She didn't recognize the Kailoong reference but supposed it was either a province or the city he was from.
He pointed at Buddy. “Hex flong,” it sounded like he said, but Lyda wasn't sure.
“Hexapod,” she responded. “His name is Buddy,” She added, pointing to him. She curled a finger to her chest. “Lyda Brightner."
The man smiled, showing a row of perfect white teeth. “Bud-dy,” he said. He looked very friendly to Lyda. He pointed to himself. “Kim Tsing."
“Sing Kim,” she said, remembering from an archive in her mind that Chinese gave their first names last.
“Tsing,” he corrected, emphasizing the pronunciation.
Lyda grinned. They were going to have a language lesson right here, it appeared. But which language? She thought a moment, then remembered that Mrs. Long, her last Language Arts teacher, had told the class that with a global economy, English had become the predominant language of business and commerce and was being taught in schools all over the world. Since he had said he knew some English, she decided to go with it. She pointed to the sand and said, “Let's sit."
He understood, but he hunkered down rather than sat like she did, cross-legged on the sand. The trousers she was wearing would repel moisture to some degree, but even so, she retreated to the dry sand before sitting.
For three hours, they stayed in the same place and talked as the sun climbed high in an almost cloudless sky. It became quite warm. Lyda gradually got the impression that Tsing had been a leader much like she herself and had been either in the same spaceship on a different level or in one very similar. She also began thinking of scenarios that the aliens might be trying out by bringing different races together—though so far, Tsing was the only other person she had seen.
Lyda wiped perspiration from her brow. She got up and walked to the line of small breakers coming in. She dipped her fingers into the water and tasted it. “A little salty,” she told Tsing when she came back. “Shall we go find some shade, then look for a stream?” She pointed back toward the hummocks and scrub.
“Shade and water, yes. We be careful, okay?"
“Sure."
“Surr?"
“It means yes. I agree. Okay."
“Ah, okay.” He stood up.
All the time they had talked, Buddy had wandered around but had never strayed far. Lyda got to her feet and called him. He scuttled to her side and came along as they trudged through the sand and onto the hummocks, which proved to be hard packed earth with small rocks abutting them. It made walking difficult, but they soon passed onto the scrubland. Some of the bushes were more than head height, giving them a place out of the direct sunlight. They stopped under a many branched little tree that resembled a willow with less pliable limbs. Other vegetation looked like nothing she had ever seen on earth. Even the sky was different, a bluish gray color.
Tsing pointed to her face. “Sun,” he said simply. His English was improving so rapidly, he was seldom using the wrong word and his accent was fading. Lyda had never heard of anyone learning language so rapidly—but then, she knew her own mind was functioning more efficiently than almost anyone else's she had encountered after her first leadership role.
Lyda touched her cheek and berated herself when she felt the warning sign of a good sunburn, though she didn't complain aloud. In the sunless, always lit environment of the spaceship, she must have lost the tan she had gotten in the desert. She could already feel the incipient pain, though not as much as she would have expected from the length of exposure. She forced a grin. “Too much sun."
Tsing agreed, touching his own face, though it wasn't nearly as red as she bet hers was. “Food?” he said next. “We must eat."
Lyda had kept the habit of storing a bit of food that didn't perish easily in her backpack. She shucked it off and dug inside, being careful not to let him see the box of cartridges for the pistol. The pocket where she kept her food was nearly empty. She had been occupied with thoughts of Gavin and their impending union and forgotten to replenish it, one of her rare lapses. She took out the double handful of column berries that was the total of her supply and split it with Tsing. She also let them each drink a small amount from the single plastic water bottle she still carried; the top of the other had finally cracked, rendering it useless.
“Thank you,” he said gratefully.
Lyda sat down again to eat. She was beginning to worry about not having seen any other humans. Where were they? And the children—they needed to be gathered up if there were no adults with them. No telling what might lurk in the forest or here, or even in the ocean.
“We should try to find the children,” she said to Tsing.
He nodded. “Of course. We both think alike."
Lyda started as she suddenly realized that there had been very few misunderstandings between them as they talked, far too few for a first meeting with someone who didn't know English perfectly. It was almost as if they could sense each other's thoughts. And it was true! She couldn't read Tsing's mind, not in the fashion depicted in science fiction stories and movies, but anytime he spoke, his intentions were perfectly plain. Another change in me, she thought. Him, too, she amended. Where will it all end?
Tsing nodded agreeably at her as he chewed on the berries, just as if he knew what she was thinking. Lyda decided to simply accept what was happening—not that there was anything she could do about it. She did wonder if it would hold true for anyone else they found here. So far, she had kept what she sensed about the improvements in her body and mind to herself, but she had noticed signs of the same thing in a few others. A general phenomena, one taking place in those who worked and thought and tried to cope with harsh conditions? She wasn't sure, but it was very intriguing and becoming more so.
While they ate, both she and Tsing examined the vegetation around them. The predominant color was a mix of blue and green, some growths more of one than the other. Tsing tested the suppleness of some of the branches and trunks of the smaller growths. He found a couple of limbs to his liking and pulled out a folding knife and cut them off. Then he quickly sharpened one end of each and carved a handle at the other, turning the branches into serviceable foot long stabbing knives. When he had finished, he handed Lyda one of them.
She thanked him very politely. She felt they were going to get along fine if the progress made so far was any indication. And she knew why he had improvised the weapons; they might need them. They could hear sounds of small living things in the brush and had caught sight of tiny, insectlike creatures. Small animals implied a food chain, and that in turn, suggested the presence of carnivores.
* * * *
The scrub gradually changed to bigger growths, and alien sounds of the fauna became more audible as they cautiously explored a little deeper into the interior. Before long, they began to encounter other people, some moving in from the beach to explore like them, and others having no knowledge of it. Apparently, the aliens had dumped them at random, some along the beach, and others progressively farther inland.
Lyda quickly convinced the few children they encountered to come along with them; they had lost all contact with the adults previously in charge of them. She had no trouble doing this; it was as if she could pick out the ones who needed special assurance and could tell which children had the confidence to follow and mind what she and Tsing said. She saw only one baby; who was with its mother. Most women who had survived the trials so far had tried to avoid becoming pregnant. At each change, if they did
n't have their children within reach, they had become separated.
Within an hour of beginning to walk, they had almost a dozen children, ranging in age from five or so up to barely adolescent. They were a mixture of races and colors, from ebony black to one redhead like herself. What they all had in common was they were scared and grateful to have someone help them.
They ran across even more adults, but none that either of them had known beforehand. Lyda began to despair of finding Gavin. She thought it was going to be just like the other times; she would encounter no one she had previously known.
Lyda made a point to try to talk to all the adults, albeit cautiously. She had learned. After consulting with Tsing, either one or the other would always ask them if they wanted to come along, then privately, they would compare impressions. They always agreed, another sign of their minds working in similar fashion.
Lyda looked up at the sun with each encounter, and either she or Tsing told those who elected to come with them, “We're planning on setting up a camp in the scrub near the beach where we can bathe, but we're trying to find a stream or river to follow back to the ocean first. We'll need fresh water."
There were three Chinese women traveling together who decided to accompany them, the biggest group they found. Other men and women were either paired or single, but like the children, they were of all races. There were three Hispanics, three more Orientals and a half dozen Caucasian, black and mixed races. Most, but not all, spoke some English. Lyda quickly made friends by being reassuring without trying to exercise undue authority—though she discovered most of the adults seemed to sense her talent for leadership.
She and Tsing walked together as often as possible. She liked him.
“We must have all been on either the same spaceship or the same kind of ships, don't you think?” she asked him.
“Of course. Everyone recognizes your ‘pod. I'm wondering why more of them didn't come with us."
