Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  With the wand held out of her line of sight, Anderssen padded down the slot for another twenty meters or so. The ancient crevice ended, opening out into a larger chamber with a tilted roof of jammed-together boulders. Gretchen halted quietly and pressed herself against the wall, her thumb switching off the wand.

  A queer blue radiance filled the chamber, reflecting from a ceiling covered with pendant crystalline fronds. The branches and whisker-thin needles seemed dead and lightless themselves, but the faceted surfaces gleamed with puddles of cobalt and ultramarine. Below them, the floor of the cavity was a bowl of crushed rock, surrounded by a thin circlet of something like blue moss. Gretchen resisted the urge to dial her goggles into magnification, though she supposed the "moss" was truly a forest of tremendously thin filaments, swarming with Ephesian life.

  The unexpected presence of Doctor Russovsky captured her attention instead.

  Anderssen froze, suddenly, simultaneously aware of the geologist lying on the floor of the cave, wrapped up in an old red-and-black checked blanket, and a muscular, gloved hand pressing against her stomach. Hummingbird was crouched at her feet, one arm out stiff to hold her back. A few centimeters from her boots, the circle of bluish filaments was crushed and broken, leaving a black gap in the carpet.

  Gretchen backed up very slowly, unable to keep her eyes from Russovsky's recumbent form. Behind the sleeping figure was a camp table holding a big service lantern. A gear bag and an insulated foodbox sat next to the table. Hummingbird rose, blocking out the scene, and together they moved carefully back down the tunnel.

  Outside, the eastern sky had darkened further. Winds were playing among the spires of Prion, flinging a constant rain of sand to rattle against the Midges. Gretchen stopped just inside the mouth of the cave and dialed her comm to very short range. "That wasn't the real Russovsky?"

  Hummingbird shook his head. Gretchen could see the corners of his eyes were tight with tension. "No," he said after adjusting his own wrist-mounted comm. "No respiration. No carbon dioxide residue in the air. It's some kind of copy—something like what you saw on the ship—but I don't think it moves or speaks."

  "But she was here," Gretchen said, thinking of the whip antenna. "She must have slept in the cave at least one night, perhaps two, while she was installing the relay."

  The nauallis nodded. "You saw the dead moss on the floor? I think she cleared most of the local microfauna out of the cave to make a safe place to sleep."

  "Yes." Gretchen adjusted her breather mask. At this height, you needed to keep a tight seal to reduce oxygen loss. "Her lantern is a multispectrum one. If she left it tuned to UV all night, nothing would be able to get at her."

  Hummingbird grunted noncommittaly. "But she didn't kill everything in the cave."

  "Maybe she knew what was dangerous and what wasn't. Not everything in this ecosystem will want to consume us and our equipment." Gretchen smiled. "Just enough of them to kill us if we're not careful. So—what is this afterimage made of? Dust, like the other one? Something else?"

  The nauallis shrugged slightly. "I'm not sure that is important, though an interesting question. She looks like the real thing. The table, the cloth—you can't tell a difference with the goggles dialed to hi-mag—but they aren't real."

  "How can you tell?" Gretchen bit down on a follow-up question, seeing Hummingbird stiffen. "Ah, master crow, you don't have to keep secrets from me! We're all bundled up tight together, aren't we? Sharing the same piss-pot and cup." With a mighty effort, Anderssen kept a sarcastic tone from her voice, though she dearly wanted to twit him again. "Your secrets are safe with me. I swear I will never tell another soul—and if you doubt me, then when we're back on the ship, you can have me clapped in irons and sent off to the helium mines on Charon."

  With the mask and breather and hood, Gretchen couldn't tell if Hummingbird smiled or not, though she was fairly certain at least the tiniest ghost of amusement might have creased his weathered old face. There was a distinctive hiss-hiss on the comm channel.

  "The shape on the floor," he said at last, in a very careful tone. "Does not feel out of place"

  "Oh." Gretchen licked her lips. "I see. But it should—if a human being were lying there, surrounded by human-made equipment—then you could tell there was a ... dissonance ... between the stone and dust and moss and Russovsky." She paused, a glimmer of thought brightening into realization. "This is one of your tlamatinime skills, isn't it? To tell when something fits properly or not? Like the debris from the shuttle—you moved those pieces of ceramic and hexsteel until they were properly aligned with the world around them—so they fit properly. And when they did—it's like they had been there forever—or at least, if they didn't fit right, you placed them on the ground as if a Mokuil had set them there."

  Hummingbird shrugged. "Perhaps."

  "Oh, Lamb of God bless and protect us!" Gretchen felt her temper fray. The man was obviously on edge, worried, even a little frightened. But could he admit such a thing? No. "Do you understand I don't care if you have some peculiar skill or hermetic training or secret universal decoder ring? I care about getting us both home, alive."

  The nauallis pushed away from the wall and peered out at the Midges and the jagged peaks. The light in the sky was changing and there was an indefinable sense of gathering darkness.

  "Well? Give over!" Gretchen didn't bother to disguise her irritation. "Just shoot me with your little gun later, if I threaten the Empire with such precious knowledge as you might dispense!"

  Hummingbird turned slightly, face in shadow, backlit by the brilliant sky. "I would."

  "I don't think so," Anderssen said in a tart voice, her nose wrinkling up. "You'd bluster and be all mysterious and withholding and I'd break your bald head open with a wrench before you bothered to put a hole in me."

  "Hah!" Hummingbird laughed aloud, a breathy, thin sound. "You would try, too."

  He shook his head, but the line of his shoulders had already relaxed. "Though everything seems to be in order, I am uneasy. We need to destroy the antenna and this afterimage of Russovsky. The 'ghost' first, I think."

  "Do you know how?"

  The nauallis shook his head. "You've already touched upon the problem. This apparition isn't out of place—most ciuateteo are disturbances of the natural order and their nature is to disperse once matters are set in their proper balance—but this one is already at rest."

  "Hmm. I don't suppose we can leave it be? No? I thought not. Do you have any sense of what this ghost is made of? Is it dust, like the Russovsky on the ship?"

  "No. The dead-seeming crystal fronds on the roof are a likely culprit, though."

  Gretchen wrinkled her nose again. "So helpful. We need to experiment then."

  The nauallis replied with a skeptical grunt. "With what?"

  "With you, for a start." Gretchen tilted her head toward the hidden chamber. "You can tell the apparition is at rest and 'in order', right? Well, go see if you can divine anything more. I'm going to examine the radio antenna before the light fails completely."

  Without waiting for a response—and heartily glad to be out of the cave—Gretchen squeezed out the narrow entrance and set off for the relay. She heard a momentary hiss-hiss on the comm circuit and then nothing. Smiling slightly to herself and feeling entirely pleased to have bossed the nauallis around, Anderssen raised her head and began searching for the base of the antenna.

  ―—―

  The bulk of the mountain had already cast the ledge into steadily-deepening shadow, so the onset of full dark caught Gretchen by surprise. The relay tower had been wedged into a flutelike wind-carved channel. Expansion bolts were driven into the rock on either side to pin the antenna in place. With some tricky climbing—more difficult for the heavy tools and gear slung on her harness—Gretchen had managed to get halfway up the relay. Now, with one boot braced against a lower bolt and a lightwand tight between her teeth, Gretchen was picking away at a thick cementlike layer coating the bottom half of the antenna.<
br />
  "How did this get here?" Anderssen was puzzled by the encrustation covering the lower section of the relay. The material was suspiciously even in coverage and included both bolts and the pole. A hand tool splintered the surface, revealing shell-like layers. "This looks like lime concrete slurry."

  Gretchen stopped and tucked the pick away. Wedging her shoulder into the space between the antenna and the rock, she wiggled a materials analysis pack out of her belt and—holding the cup in one hand—picked broken bits of cement from the antenna with the other. The stinging wind was beginning to die down but the relay was particularly exposed on the cliff, so Gretchen pressed herself into the rock and shivered while the cup woke up, detected a sample to compare against an internal database and went to work.

  An hour later, Anderssen was sitting just inside the cave mouth, a comp on her knees and both feet centimeters from a circular heating element. The wind outside had died down to intermittent gusts, which rattled against a filament screen she'd tacked over the entrance. A second screen closed off the inner cave, leaving a five meter-long space where she'd stacked the camping gear. Among the things she'd dragged out of the Gagarin was a battered steel bucket filled with a cementlike crust. A brush was stuck in the long-solidified mire.

  A noise drew her attention and Gretchen looked up in time to see the Náhuatl unseal the edge of the inner screen. His cloak and legs were streaked with pale white dust.

  "There's food—" she started to say.

  "What are you doing?" Hummingbird came over to her, face tense beneath his breather. "Put that away."

  Gretchen frowned at him, still holding the comp in her hand. It was difficult to use in the thin pressurized gloves. On the surface of the pad, behind a protective covering, indicators were glowing softly as the machine talked to itself. "I'm checking to see if there's a gravity spike here or a strange field reading. Something to ... hey!"

  Hummingbird closed his hand over the device, shutting it off. Gretchen realized the nauallis was furious, his dark green eyes turned to smoke. "You rely too much on your cursed tools. Look around you, let yourself become quiet. This is a very dangerous place. I told you before, we must walk quietly here. Your sensor is noisy, it makes a racket like civets in a trash can! I could feel it down in the cave. They could feel it too."

  Gretchen drew back, her throat tightening. She was tired, sore, and very close to complete exhaustion. His anger was a physical blow, making her start to shake. Oxygen hissed against her cheek as the suit reacted to her rising heartbeat. Grimly, she choked down a bleat of fear. "Step away, crow. We need our machines to survive down here. What happened in the cave?"

  For a moment his gaze locked with hers and Gretchen could sense—dimly—the man's own weary exhaustion. She refused to blink and after a seemingly interminable period, he looked away. Score one for the hard-eyed Swede, Gretchen thought, though she remained impassive.

  "You need to sit down and eat," she said, setting the now-quiet pad aside. Gretchen rose and pushed Hummingbird gently toward the opposite side of the heating element. His bags were already stacked there. "Just sit and be still—you're good at that, right?"

  Anderssen was mildly surprised when the nauallis did as she said. She puttered about for a moment, then handed him a container of heated tea and a squeeze-tube filled with two kinds of threesquares mixed together. Hummingbird's eyebrows rose in surprise when he tasted the evil-looking brownish gel. "It's hot," he said around a mouthful of food.

  Gretchen smiled and showed him a storage bottle with the word "tabasco" hand-written on the side with a black pen. "Very hot," she said, "from Chipotle district on Anáhuac. Smoked and dried, then rendered into liquid fire. Just like home cooking, huh?"

  The Náhuatl nodded in appreciation and ate the entire rest of the tube. Then he closed his eyes and slumped back against the wall of the cave, the djellaba hanging loose around his shoulders. Gretchen sat back down herself, drinking slowly from her own tea. After a bit, the nauallis started to snore and she shook her head in amazement.

  Well, she thought, putting the sensor-pad away. I guess he thinks we're safe here. Or I'm supposed to stay up and watch all night. First I'm a porter, then I make him my special chile dinner and now I get to stand guard. Huh!

  Getting up again was painful—even with the medband's help, she was going to have serious bruises from the day's excitement—but Gretchen was very careful to take a worklight and sweep the entire camping space with high UV before settling down to sleep herself. Tomorrow, if we're still here, I'll haul in all those damned tiles. . . .

  Gretchen opened one eye, saw the wall opposite her was lit by a pearlescent gray light, checked her chrono and closed her eyes again. Too early, she groaned, feeling like her brain had been ground fine and scattered in a toad circle for the gaunts to dance upon. The sun should not be allowed to rise at this hour. Not at four in the morning!

  A particular sensation of grainy ash covering her skin made Anderssen twitch and shake her shoulders. Her fingertips found the medband, but stopped short of summoning up a wakeme injection. Grimacing, she opened her eyes to bare slits and then groaned aloud. Hummingbird was gone, his things neatly stacked, djellaba folded and laid atop a tool bag. She rolled up, rubbing grit from the corners of her eyes. "No showers. What an idiot I am .. . nearest shower is in orbit. Or at the base camp, if the water's still good."

  Anderssen considered using water from the recycler reservoir to wash her face, but the thought of so many more days in this desolation weighed against such extravagance. Sipping from her mask tube, she ate another threesquare liberally mixed with hot sauce. The grainy, over-tired feeling persisted, hanging around like an unwanted morning-after bedtoy.

  The nauallis returned while Gretchen was packing her things away, ducking in through the outer filament screen.

  "Morning," Anderssen grunted at him, but did not look up.

  "Something is attacking the relay antenna," Hummingbird said. He sounded almost as tired as Gretchen felt. "There's this crust all over the lower—"

  Anderssen held up a sample cup with flakes of gray eggshelllike material. "Like this? I took some samples yesterday. My comp was analyzing them when you busted in last night and spoiled the party. It's not something attacking the pole, though." She hooked the battered old steel bucket over with the toe of her boot and upended the cup. The flakes matched the color of the dried goop in the bottom.

  "This," Gretchen said, tilting the bucket toward the nauallis, "is more of Russovsky's work. Local dust mixed with water to make cheap, inert cement. She painted it all over the lower reaches of the relay, making a barrier against the micro-fauna."

  "Oh." Hummingbird squatted beside his gear. "So there's nothing for them to eat."

  "Exactly. In fact, I think most of this gray dust is waste exudate from the different kinds of microfauna." She grinned at the old man. "There is a lot of it around, isn't there?"

  Hummingbird stared at her, impassive for a moment, then his lips twitched and a gleam shone in his eyes. Gretchen took this to be very close to hysterical laughter. The nauallis's usually grim, composed demeanor returned within a heartbeat.

  "Did you find anything in the cave last night?" Gretchen turned the bucket over and sat down. "Anything new about this copy of Russovsky?"

  "Something." Hummingbird did not look particularly pleased. "I thought the shape moved a little bit, from time to time. In fact, I checked this morning to see if anything happened at dawn." He paused, scratching at a badly fitting edge of his mask. "She woke up."

  Gretchen raised an eyebrow, but managed to keep from making a fool of herself by gaping.

  "Or I should say, the shape woke up, threw back the blanket, checked its chrono ..."

  "And then?" Anderssen looked reflexively down the tunnel, as if Russovsky would appear momentarily and want breakfast.

  "Then," Hummingbird's voice assumed a familiar toneless quality. "The shape folded up the blanket, gathered its equipment and walked out of the cir
cle. Then ... then it disappeared. Well, almost."

  "How .. . almost?" Gretchen was trying to divide her attention between the nauallis and the recesses of the cave. The back of her neck was prickling in a very uneasy way.

  "I saw something like a mist, or falling dust, as the shape left the chamber. I was in the tunnel, of course, and the 'disappearance' occurred only about a meter in front of me."

  "And there's nothing there now? Just an empty cave?"

  Hummingbird nodded. "Dust, stone and hanging crystal."

  "Did you feel anything? See anything?"

  Another grimace. "No. All is as it should be. Nothing out of place."

  "So—what now?"

  "We wait for night to fall," the nauallis said. "And see if the shape comes back. I distrust luck, but more observation may reveal something."

  "I see." Gretchen started to sort through her tools. "How tired are you?"

  Hummingbird blinked. "Why?"

  "We still have a relay antenna to dispose of." She passed a wrench and a length of pipe across to him. For herself she hefted a multitool with a cutting attachment. "I'll climb up and cut it down in sections and then you can dispose of them in a suitable manner."

  The sun was almost exactly at meridian when Hummingbird threw the last of the bolts over the edge of the cliff. Calcite-crusted metal spun in the air, then vanished into an abyss tenanted by shrieking winds. Presumably the bolt would make a ringing sound when it struck the ground, but Gretchen didn't think they would hear anything at all.

  "You're sure this will get rid of them properly?" She asked in a sly tone, peering over the edge of the outcropping. "They won't leave traces behind?"