Wasteland of Flint

by Thomas Harlan

  "Sometimes." Maggie gave the pilot an inscrutable look. "But the peapods do not mount microwave emitters. There's no way to punch an area transmission through the atmosphere."

  "Really?" Parker started to smirk. He pointed at the main display. "How are you getting a transmission back from your satellites?"

  Maggie showed him a full set of teeth, which did not properly impress the pilot. After a moment she relented, saying "To reduce emissions I am using a point-to-point laser link."

  "You mean," Parker said, grinning, "to get around the main array lockout. And keep engineer stoneface from noticing your violation of the judge's orders."

  "Maybe." Maggie stirred in her blankets and bone-white claws make a sharp, skittering tik-tik-tik on the panel as she queried the peapods. "A highband query failed to draw a response from the Midge onboard comm. So if we try a laser we'll have to drop a whisker right on the comm port, which seems very unlikely if we're firing from orbit and trying to hit a port which is probably underneath the wing."

  "Not at all!" Parker seemed to have forgotten his tabac sticks and slid over the panel to stand beside Magdalena. "Look, let's bring up the mechanical schematic from the repair bay—not the standard manual, mind—but Pȃtecatl's record of modifications she'd made herself."

  The Hesht and the human both began looking through the dead engineer's records, searching for maintenance records concerning the expedition ultralights.

  An hour later Magdalena coughed in delight and brought up a hand-annotated schematic on the command panel. Parker squinted at the diagram and smiled himself.

  'That's it." The pilot ran a thin, tabac-stained finger over a layout of the Midge tail assembly, squinting to read a block of annotated text. 'This is a military-surplus comm aperture bolted to the rear engine housing. Which is great." He frowned. "But why?"

  "To communicate with the ship," Magdalena said, eyes bare sodium-yellow slits. "With the Palenque. Look at the other Midge." A claw stabbed at the image on the main display. Both ultralights were leaning hard against the cables holding them to the sand. Hummingbird's aircraft, despite the patched wing, was obviously newer and lacked the worn, battered appearance of Russovsky's aircraft. Seen from above, there were other differences—the extra comm aperture, larger air intakes, reinforced tail pylons....

  "Pȃtecatl and Russovsky must have been busy." Parker fumbled in his pocket, but found nothing, not even a gum wrapper. "Crap. Stupid Marines.... Okay, see if you can get a lock with a peapod laser! If you can, we'll be set."

  "Perhaps." Magdalena began sending a new set of codes to the satellites. She hummed as she worked, a deep rumbling sound in her chest. Parker became nervous after listening for a bit and sidled off the bridge.

  By the time he returned, looking even more morose than before, the Hesht was watching as a targeting overlay wandered jerkily across the video feed from the surface. Hummingbird was nowhere to be seen and the wind had died down to intermittent gusts. Parker stared at the screen, then turned to Maggie with a perplexed expression. "What's going on?"

  "Comp on a peapod is about as smart as a leaf-eater," she said, flashing both incisors. "It's having a hard time finding the comm aperture."

  "Guide it to lock-on yourself," Parker said irritably. His right hand moved toward the control panel.

  Magdalena raised a silver-frosted eyebrow at him. Long whiskers curving back around her face twitched in amusement. "How far away are we from the planet?"

  "Oh. Yeah." Parker slumped against the console again. The Palenque was steadily accelerating away from the third planet. "How much lag is there?"

  "Three light-minutes," she replied, turning her attention back to the screen. The targeting indicator was jumping from spot to spot, wildly painting the top of the Midge, the rocks, blowing sand, the left wheel as it groped to find the aperture receiver. "We'll just have to wait. Shouldn't take long."

  Five minutes passed with Parker squirming like a kit who had to find some fresh dirt. Then the scatter-search pattern implemented by the peapod comp hopped into lock with the aperture. There was a cheerful chiming sound and a new v-pane opened on Maggie's panel as the peapod negotiated a channel with the Midge.

  A sharp beep followed and Maggie frowned at the v-pane.

  "I think we've got a lock," she announced in a disappointed tone, "but the responder laser is not working properly." The Hesht scrolled through a log, whiskers flat against her head. "This model has a two-part system," she explained after a moment, indicating a sub-schematic. "The receptor itself can modulate a reflected signal along the path of the incoming beam, but only for basic comm etiquette. Real data return is handled by a second, separate laser. But we're not getting any response at all. I think this other laser is blocked out by Hummingbird's comm lockdown."

  "So," Parker said, his brief excitement dampened. "We can only talk one way? How do we get any data back?"

  "I don't know." Magdalena frowned at her displays. Luckily, Hummingbird had not emerged from the cave while the laser-whisker was gyrating across the landscape. The only motion visible below was the slow rocking of both ultralights in the wind. "I could send sets of command codes blindly, but..." She hissed, picking at her left upper incisor with the tip of a claw. "All we see are the ultralights and their immediate area. We need something to change visually in response to our signal. Ah!"

  Her claw stabbed at the v-panel, running along the grainy, pixilated front edge of an ultralight wing. A curving strip of bright material gleamed in the Ephesian sun. "Here we are, blessed furry little kit." Her yellow eyes flickered back to the schematics on the other panel. "These lights are made of a phosphor material which can be controlled by onboard comp."

  Parker laughed aloud. His thin fingers fluttered across the control console, bringing up the specifics of the LuxTerra illumination fabric. He ran a forefinger down a list of wavelengths. "We can pulse each phosphor in ultraviolet—that would cut through the clouds and atmospheric distortion—and the satellite cameras could pick up a datagram as large as the panel array will allow."

  "Good." Maggie ran her claw down the middle of the command panel. Immediately, the workspace split in two. "Get to work on a receiver program to interp a multibyte array."

  "Me?" Parker gave her a horrified look. "I'm not a comp-head! I fly shuttles, aircraft, pogo-sticks. ..."

  Magdalena smiled at him, showing a great number of teeth. "I'm busy, coding blind commands to reconfigure the Midge. So make yourself useful." She paused, nose twitching. "I want to know what the packleader is doing. Right now."

  Parker swallowed nervously and dragged over an equipment box for a seat. "Sure. Sure. I'm working on it." He forced his fingers to the panel and cleared away everything but some editors. "Code—I wrote some code once. In school."

  Maggie's lip curled. The smell of the human's fear-sweat made her nose twitch.

  SLOT CANYON TWELVE

  With the old Méxica helping her stand, Gretchen stepped gingerly out of the overhang. The sun had set and the wind had died down, leaving everything quiet and still. Anderssen was vastly relieved to have the world wrapped in darkness. Her head still felt altered, somehow, and she was sure the full light of day would be too much to take. Even the light of the stars—very clear, very bright, with a pellucid crystalline quality—hurt her eyes.

  "Careful... there's a cable," Hummingbird pointed. Gretchen stopped, staring at the line of shadow stretching from the ground to the Midge. Something like a white flame winked at the edge of her vision, then brightened. After a moment's attention, she saw the cable itself outlined in pale fire. Gretchen swallowed and looked up.

  The ultralight was glowing very softly. Every edge was lit by the same kind of faded, heatless brilliance. Each strut, window, airfoil—all were limned with light. Gretchen's heart skipped a beat, but a sense of delight filled her. There was no fear, only amazement at the glorious sight. She leaned on Hummingbird's shoulder and looked around. Both aircraft were spectral, incandescent ghosts standing o
ut sharp against a limitless black background. The cables made sharp, tight lines to the ground—but the sand, the rock, the cliffs seemed to have disappeared. Only very faint lights winked in deep crevices in the stone.

  "The ... the Gagarin is glowing," she said softly.

  Hummingbird's eyes crinkled up in response. "Yes. I imagine it is."

  "What am I seeing?" Gretchen turned to look at the old Méxica and found him equally illuminated, his kaffiyeh wicking with jewel-colored flames, face blazing with a pearlescent, gold-tinged light. She raised her own hand and saw her palm and fingers glowing in the same way.

  "When first you begin to see," Hummingbird said, voice soft against the respirator's background hiss, "you will see too much. In this darkness, you are sensitive to even the least perturbation. By day, you would be almost blinded by the immense detail of the world. Right now, you are aware of the electromagnetic field around living things. The Midge is illuminated because our aircraft carry vibrations from their engines, from the motion of flight, from the powered systems onboard."

  "I'm seeing an electromagnetic field?" Gretchen started to laugh. "That's impossible!"

  "You see the light from a glowbean or a wand, don't you? This is the same, only much much fainter." Hummingbird took hold of her shoulders and turned her toward the open plain. "The 'helper' I gave you has broken down a barrier in your mind, a perceptual filter to which you've become accustomed since you were born. Look out there, into the emptiness. What do you see?"

  "Nothing ... wait, there's a faint radiance along the dune faces."

  "Heat is radiating from the earth. Soon it will be gone and the sand and air will be the same temperature. Then there will be no difference for you to perceive."

  Gretchen gave the old Méxica a sick look. "Is this what you see? All the time?"

  Hummingbird shook his head. "No. A student on the path must overcome many obstacles—this is the obstacle of clarity. I fear ..." His voice changed timbre and Gretchen was aware of a change in the glow outlining his face. "The drug you took is one given to students who have been training and preparing themselves for months. But we have no time to guide your feet along the traditional path—"

  "You're not supposed to be training me at all!" Gretchen interjected suddenly. Memories flooded back and she remembered the strange conversation in darkness. "I heard voices arguing as I slept—'only men may become tlamatinime' Women must become ..." She paused, trying to remember. The memories were fading, scattering like pine needles in a fall wind. "Skirt-of-knives said ... she said ... ah, it's gone."

  Hummingbird had become quite still, his gaze fixed on Gretchen's face. "You heard a woman's voice? An old woman?"

  "No—she was young—but there was an old man, he sounded like a stage actor."

  The nauallis made a queer barking sound, which Gretchen remembered was what passed for laughter for the old man. "She was young long ago. But I was thinking of that day while you slept." He sighed, an honest sound of regret. Then he began to sing, but only for a moment. "We leave the flowers, the songs, the earth. Truly, we go, truly we part."

  "You were there." Gretchen knew the truth of the matter even as she spoke. "You were in the room, a young man. The old actor was sitting in a wooden chair. He stood up to leave."

  "Yes. And he was right—he is right—and I've broken an ancient law, speaking to you as I've done, giving you the 'helper', setting your feet on this path."

  "I am in danger?"

  "You've always been in danger," Hummingbird said in a sharp tone. "But now, today, you must learn to see again."

  "I think," Gretchen said, "I see too much!"

  Hummingbird nodded. "Yes—listen closely, there is not much night left. Your mind has been forced awake by the "helper.' A veil of perception has been cast aside, letting you see as a human organism naturally perceives the world. Your mind is now exposed to a flood of data—a flood which in normal course is filtered, flattened, reduced to aggregates and symbols—but your consciousness is not ready to operate in such an environment.

  "Now you must learn to concentrate on the important. You must learn to see selectively."

  Gretchen felt itchy all over and shook her arms and hands. The z-suit felt strangely tight. "Didn't I see before? I mean—you're saying this sharpness, with everything seeming in focus all at once, even things far away—is what happens anyway?"

  "Even so." Hummingbird raised his hand in front of her face. But your mind was hiding the true world from your consciousness. Look at my hand tonight and you see every single bump and groove in my glove, you see the fire of my bodily electrical field, you see each pore in my skin. But yesterday? Yesterday you saw an idea of a gloved hand. An abstraction. A great part of human mental activity is devoted to reducing this raw flood of images and smells and sensations to remembered symbols. A hand. A man. A dog. An ultralight."

  He swung his hand, indicating everything within sight. "Those symbols are not real, but they are very convenient. They let the lazy mind operate in such a confusing world." Gretchen could hear a grin in the man's voice. "Have you seen a baby watching the world? Their eyes are so wide! Their entire mentation is focused upon trying to understand everything all at once. A baby becomes a child and then an adult by replacing raw truth with layers of abstraction. By learning speech. By learning to read and to write. All those tools—the tools which build Imperial society and our science and our technology—hide the true world behind symbols."

  "I... I understand." Gretchen felt faint and swayed. Clumsily, she sat down on the sand. The sensation of touching the earth, the sound of sand shifting under her hands, was nearly overwhelming. "What do I do ... to be able to, say, move around?"

  "Your body can handle everything," Hummingbird said wryly. "If you let it remember. Come, stand up. Let's go for a walk."

  Nearly an hour later, Gretchen climbed gingerly across a slab of wind-polished stone and came to a halt, staring down into a wide bowl-shaped depression. To her right, a black lightless cliff rose up into the night. The bowl below her was strangely-smooth.

  "Where are we?" Anderssen slid down a splintered section of rock and came to a halt a handspan from the surface of the bowl. "This is hard-packed dust," she said, looking up at Hummingbird, who crouched atop the slab. "Not even sand."

  The old Méxica pointed to the cliff. Gretchen turned and saw—suddenly, as if the opening had materialized from the rock in her single moment of inattention—a door. She stiffened, feeling the freezing cold keenly through the insulated layers of her z-suit.

  "This is where Russovsky found the cylinder." Hummingbird spoke very softly, though the trapezoidal opening in the cliff-face was entirely dark and still. "Do you see anything?"

  Gretchen felt the cold settle into her bones and the pit of her stomach. Learning how to walk again had been easy—just a matter of keeping her mind occupied elsewhere. The body remembered how to breathe, how to walk, how to keep its balance—as long as the mind didn't try to interfere. Talking to Hummingbird about nothing of any importance had let her mind settle and regain its footing in simple physicality. The encompassing darkness restricted her vision to faint thready ghosts of heat and electricity. In time even they seemed to dim and fade as she got used to them. The nauallis claimed she could focus now, once her mind adapted, to bring clarity to bear on a single object.

  "Go on," he said, remaining atop the slab. "Let yourself see."

  Gretchen sucked on her water tube, eyes closed, feeling her heartbeat speed up. Then she opened her eyes again and looked at the doorway.

  "Nothing unusual," she said after a moment. "Worked stone. I don't see any lights inside. Should I?"

  "I don't know." Hummingbird made his way down into the bowl. "I came here last night and watched for a time. There were no lights, no blue glow. But I feel uneasy. Everything here is so old ... worn down by time. Such places are dangerous, being all of a single cloth. Differences," he said, "are easier to perceive."

  "Are we going to go in?"
Gretchen still felt cold and a nagging thought was beginning to curdle in the back of her thoughts.

  "Yes." Hummingbird looked to her and then back to the doorway. "We have to see if Russovsky left anything behind in there."

  Gretchen put a hand on his shoulder as the Méxica moved to cross the bowl. "This is probably where she was replaced," she whispered, holding him back. "Her flight log shows she headed straight back to the observatory camp from here."

  "I know." Hummingbird's hand clasped hers for a moment, fire mingling with fire. "This would mean her remains are within. And those we must destroy."

  "Do you still have your little pistol?" Gretchen was digging in her tool belt.

  Hummingbird nodded, patting his side. "It's not much use for eliminating evidence."

  "Or for dealing with Ephesian lifeforms." Gretchen produced a compact lightwand. She adjusted a thumb control. "This is set to high UV," she said, handing over the lamp. "Everything else seems susceptible; maybe whatever is in there will be too."

  The nauallis took the lamp with a shake of his head. "If there's something in there which can duplicate a human being almost to the cellular level, I fear it won't be affected by this."

  "Then we need something bigger," Gretchen said, kneeling on the sand. Busy hands detached a variety of tools from her belt and began assembling them. Without looking up, she said: "Bandao-tzin felt he couldn't let me leave his company without proper equipment, so he sent this with me."

  She held up a short-barreled, stockless gun with a hand grip and a fat magazine. Hummingbird grunted in appreciation and held out his hand.

  "I don't think so," Gretchen said tartly, tucking the assault rifle under her arm. "You're going in first and I'll cover you."

  "What does it shoot?" Hummingbird's appreciative smile vanished. He was eyeing the rifle warily now. "It looks like something the Marines would use."