Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep
Page 11
There was no telling how long her exile would last, and she figured it didn't hurt to settle in and stock up. A ring of stones and ash in the ground hinted at the recent past of the place. She decided that this spot had, not long ago, served as a temporary home of humans, who had made a fire to keep them warm – probably the best voucher of the adequacy of the place she could think of.
A new plan was formed in her mind. She would spend the next day or two scouting the nearby parts of the Wildern, searching for Beast. The lesson she had learned from earlier today, she decided, was not to jump right in, but rather to bide her time and wait for the ideal moment of jumping – and with the first day of the Passing almost at its end her deadline was still days away.
Then, and only then, would she make another attempt at jumping. But if she was ever to reach this perfect moment, when her victory would be made inevitable, she first had to study Beast from afar, learning as much as she could about the particular race of Beast that would be chosen as her target. Movement, diet, habits, weaknesses, strength, location of nest – everything.
Phase two of her plan consisted of her forging weapons and tools. Not just any items, but ones designed specifically with her target in mind.
This knowledge would then be used against Beast, and she would, unbeknownst to Beast itself, be able to herd it in any direction she decided, predicting and avoiding any eventual counter-attacks mounted by her animal adversary. Then she would lure it into a trap, set beforehand, and, with Beast entangled or perhaps stuck in some kind of cage, she would strike Beast at its most vulnerable spot, and then, finally, become Passed.
Yes, she thought. This is good. This is very good.
Before settling in for the night she made one last patrol of the area. No animals were sighted, neither were any dens or nests of possible or temporarily absent predators.
The tree that served as the roof of her shelter looked as if it had been broken into by a strike of lighting. When she finally did lay down to rest she fell asleep in an instant.
Pain woke her up. It pulsated from her arm but circulated in the whole of her body. Sharp currents of stinging pain – not the same kind of throbbing ache that she had experienced before. This was completely different, like there was something moving, inside her.
And there was, she soon discovered – the open wound on her arm was covered in crawling crystalants. The jewel-like insects were biting and tugging at her exposed muscular tissue, all at the same time. Their hard exoskeletons glimmered light turquoise in the dark, and for a second it looked as if her limb was under attack by hundreds of invading, corrosive stars that sought to dig straight through her body.
She jumped up, screaming in pain and fear. Panicked, she tried brushing the insects off, but this maneuver only made the critters dig in deeper. Realizing the futility of her actions, she quickly stopped.
Glistening insects besieged her shelter, and thousands of these omnivorous intruders feasted on her inventory of fruits and berries. As she temporary halted her attempts to get rid of the ones on, and inside, her arm, the ones consuming her flesh bit her even harder, it seemed, and the throbbing pain was almost blinding. The scratch quickly transformed into a gorge-like gash.
The lake, she thought, and set off. About half a minute later she was completely submerged. She remained underwater for as long as she was able to keep her breath – the drowning crystalants lighting up the pitch black waters with the turquoise, almost dreamlike, glow of their small bodies.
Occasionally, she came up for air, and every time she approached the surface, the insects climbed her shoulder, neck and chin, but she saw to it that they never reached the world above water.
Soon they started to die, their lifeless bodies floating upward, one at a time. It was a strange sight, indeed, one that she'd be sure to remember for the rest of her life; the slow ascent of the hundreds of tiny crystal suns that were now burning out, one by one.
When she got out of the water the pain in her arm was gone. So was her entire stash of food, she found out upon her return to the shelter. The invaders had taken it with them. They had carried the melons, pears and blue bananas on their backs as they marched in line back to their crystalant-hill, located somewhere close by.
In the moonlight she saw that her wound had expanded even further. It was now a gaping hole that would soon rot in the same way Amara Hunter's leg had gone bad after she was bitten by Beast.
Norna sat down. Her way out of this whole mess seemed to slip further and further away, as more and more problems kept being added to the queue. First: heal wound, then: find food, then: find some tool to help kill beast, then: find Beast, then: kill Beast, and then, and only then: become Passed ...
"It's like I'm drowning," she said. "Maybe I can't become Passed, maybe it's just better to run away ... just give up and find another Home. Maybe ..."
She didn't allow herself to finish the sentence and started crying instead.
She cried over her plan – once a grand scheme that would guarantee an escape from the predicament that was her current situation, now nothing but the memory of a dream. There would be no time for gathering intelligence and setting traps.
She cried over the ruins of that, which, a mere hour ago, still had been her own private empire: the large collection of sweet fruits and berries – gone ... all gone.
After a few minutes of sobbing, words began to form inside her head.
I will kill Beast, I will kill Beast, I must kill Beast. Or else I'll die.
The hummingmen lived in the cavernous spaces in the walls of Big Canyon, it was said. During the day the big ones flew out to gather food and supplies, leaving the small ones and the eggs at home.
They had two legs and two arms, just like humans did, but the hummingmen were not human, for they had long beaks like spears, instead of mouths – beaks that could pierce anything but stone, and on their backs they had wings that fluttered faster than any eye could see, enabling them to hover in the air while in flight.
Of course, Norna had never actually seen a hummingman, other than as paintings on the walls of the caves and in the form of small figurines as she, prior to her attempt at becoming Passed, had never been allowed to be let out into the Wildern. But the hunters of Home had told stories of their encounters with these flying creatures, accounts to which she had listened very closely. Amara, Rendall, Goiram and the rest of the hunters never told everything at one time, so during the last few years she had memorized every snippet of information that the grown-ups had provided her and then, further down the road, put the pieces together on her own.
From this she had come to the conclusion that they were vicious creatures that hunted in packs. Many spoke of how tough the hummingmen were, how difficult it was to trick and kill them. She decided they would probably have been rulers of Nuhome had the Firsters never made it here alive. Judging by the hunters' anecdotes, no other known animal or Beast or creature, groups of human hunters aside, seemed to pose any real threat to the fierce hummingmen and their sharp, spear-like beaks.
The problem: she wasn't part of any group of human hunters.
She was just a girl, a little girl with a wounded arm, with nothing to use for defending herself, aside from a stick that she had found and carried in her mouth when she needed to make use of her one working arm.
Would the stick be of any use against the hummingmen when she finally encountered them? Time would tell, but encounter them she would, as she had no other choice but to seek them out if she hoped to stand any chance of becoming Passed, let alone survive.
It was said that the eggs of the hummingmen could heal any wound, mental or physical, and that all one needed to do was to break the shell and consume the white or apply it to the wound.
The only place where one could lay hands on a hummingman egg was in a nest in the walls of Big Canyon.
She took her time before heading off to the giant ravine. She thought things through a number of times, analyzed everything she knew about he
r adversaries in waiting and all the factors at hand, then crafted a plan of action so air-tight that she didn't need a plan B.
Only stupid, eager people found contingency plans useful. Thorough planning and careful preparations were the keys to success, and if one did a good enough job in the first place, situations demanding alternate courses of action would never become reality in the first place, eliminating the need for backup-plans all together.
It all came down to mastering the order in which stuff happened, she decided.
In this case, she would accomplish this by arriving at Big Canyon at noon. The hunters at Home had told her that this was when most of the hummingmen were out looking for food. She would climb down the side of the canyon and then, without making a sound, get in to a nest, snitch an egg, and leave without a trace.
Not one second would be spared, as every passing moment of prolonged intrusion was a drop of water added to a cup that would eventually spill over. But by keeping things quick and stealthy, that would never happen.
This, she was sure of.
She used what the already Passed back Home had taught her about the position of the sun and the different landmarks of the Wildern (such as the Tentacle Tree, Coral Pond and The Cliff of the Giant Face), to make her way to the enormous gorge that bore the name Big Canyon.
The calm that had come with her plan was nowhere to be felt.
What if she failed?
What if there was some factor she'd overlooked, or missed all together?
What if she slipped, and fell to her death?
Trembling with nervousness and fear as she approached the edge of the giant ravine, she clutched the stick in her right hand as hard as she could. In the distance she saw adult hummingmen circle in the sky, the sounds of their caws bouncing between the walls of the enormous chasm. The view would have been overwhelming, as Big Canyon's giant divide slithered like a colossal snake all the way into the horizon, but she was too tense and focused on the task at hand to allow herself to be impressed by her epic surroundings.
Instead, she tried to put the remarkable qualities of the place to use. As she started descending the wall of the canyon she sought not to let the heights and grand proportions distract or scare her, but rather function as a sobering factor. The splendor of the landscape was otherworldly, but the threat of immediate death filled every strip of air and sunlight, something she forbade herself to forget if only for an instant.
One slip and she would fall to an almost certain death in the waters at the bottom of the canyon, and this was the serpent in the grass that was the beauty of this spectacular place. Absolute focus and presence of mind was her hope of surviving the climb down the canyon wall. And for a while, all went well.
Having descended about a hundred meters of canyon wall, despite the fact that the wound on her arm was still open and aching with every movement, Norna managed to make her way to a platform of sorts, a flat cliff that bulged out from the giant wall. She stopped for a while to catch her breath and, momentarily taking the stick in her hand, inspected the state of her deep wound.
The pain was numbing, and she struggled to keep it under control by sheer willpower. A short but intense whistling breeze of wind came and went, and almost sent her over the edge as she wasn't really present in mind – instead focusing solely on conquering her pain.
She slipped, and fell – luck keeping her alive as she miraculously managed to, in time, let go of the stick in her right hand, and get a hold of one of the old dried up roots of some plant that once had grown on the wall of the canyon.
She hung like a human rope, holding on to the plant with only one hand, watching her one line of defense tumble through the air as it made its way down to the waters below.
She didn't have time to listen for the splash as the stick's downward journey finally ended, and instead made her way back to the platform beside her.
When she got up, she started going down again, deciding that the break was now officially over and that this spot wasn't suitable for resting anyway.
She faced no further complications as she conquered the last vertical stretch of ancient stone, and when she – at long last – found an entrance to a nest, she was careful not to waste any more time and just entered with no further ado.
The interior wasn't anything particularly spectacular. The nest was little more than a spherical, cavernous space that seemed to have been carved out by some creature of a relatively high level of intelligence. The frame of the entrance had been decorated with criss-crossing twigs and branches, and to her left was another huddle of thin, dried sticks and fragile brushwood. A bed of some sort, it seemed, as the hummingmen had placed four large eggs there.
To her right was a reddish totem pole, made up by antique parts that she recognized as fragments of the Big Canoe that once had carried the human race from Urth to Nuhome, all the way through the starry sea of the Blackabove. She knew this from the cave-paintings of Home, where something called "Shi' Pennjinns" had been depicted – the very same objects that had been stacked upon each other to make up the different levels of the totem beside her.
Feelings of awe and reverence struck her like a flash of lightning and pulsated from her heart, out into every limb and body part. She found herself standing frozen, staring at the monument, completely cut off from the material world for almost a minute.
Was this a sign, or perhaps the climax of her journey, the very moment she became Passed and entered adulthood?
Or, maybe it was all just another riddle, she being far to –
A sharp, high-pitched cawing interrupted her inner monolog, and pulled her down into reality again. Behind the group of eggs, an infant hummingman lay screaming in fear of the giant intruder. The oldest of the brood, and first to hatch, now alerting its parents.
For a fragment of a second, she lifted her arm as to hit the little tyke with her stick, but then remembered the present location of her weapon, and proceeded to grab the chick's long beak, holding it tight.
It had to die, she decided, as her inner eye witnessed the collapse of her original plan.
Just leaving the baby animal would lead to her death, as it most definitely would keep screaming for help. The adult hummingmen would then arrive as she made her escape up the canyon wall, and peck her to death without much effort.
It must die, she thought. Become quiet. Forever.
Initially the plan seemed to work, as the chick did quiet down and started to become limp, but in a last ditch effort to survive, the humanoid avian used its already sharp talons and pierced the skin of Norna's forearms.
She had no choice but to let go, and the baby animal hastily made its way to the entrance of the nest, where it continued screaming.
Norna came up from behind it and kicked its back. The chick, still unable to fly, fell down the chasm like a big pile of rocks, reaching the bottom in a matter of seconds. The walls of the colossal gorge amplified the sound of the animal's last, brief screams of terror, and mere moments later, three adult hummingmen came swooping down to cover the entrance of the nest.
She bent down and quickly picked up a rock. The improvised weapon would probably be able to break the beak of at least one of the incoming birdmen, but would it let her buy enough time to get out alive? Would she manage to win a battle, two-against-one?
Maybe, maybe not. The only way to find out was to stand fast and let the fight commence. But as she got into position, a splinter of doubt lit up like a spark, and things seemed to unravel in slow-motion – the flapping wings of the descending hummingmen, the beat of her heart, and the movements of her body.
Fragments of tactics swirled around inside her head like a whirlwind of ideas. What to do? When to strike? Where to aim?
When the hummingmen had no more than a few yards left to traverse, the opening melody of the song of Holopedia began playing in her brain, followed by the third verse of the song:
Feel the disco rhythm
of my heart and of my soul
&nbs
p; If you don't know how to party
you got to lose control!
This was the sign, the omen. This was it.
The moment of Passing.
The instant when she lost, abandoned every plan and preparation, let her childhood husk die, and just surrendered to the moment and ... jumped up to jump down.
She set off, leaping head first out of the cave, out into the air, to a probable death – colliding with one of the attacking hummingmen, but, being able to clasp onto its wings and torso, managed to pull it down with her.
Together, they tumbled through the air, and in the final moments before hitting the waters of the peaceful river at the bottom of the canyon, she took pride in the fact that she at least became Passed before she died, that her destiny had been hers to decide.
The hummingman came between her and the surface of the water, and Beast died immediately. She managed to stay awake a few seconds more than her defeated adversary, but soon surrendered to the darkness as well, as she became submerged.
Morgo Lookanfind stood beside her when she came to. At first Morgo's face was all that Norna could make out, but gradually, the surroundings took shape around them.
She was lying on a mattress of grass and some sort of animal skin, inside what looked like some kind of hut – probably one of the temporary shelters that the hunters and lookanfinds used for overnight stays when out on expeditions into the Wildern.
I the middle of the makeshift building a dying campfire crackled and made strange shadows dance on the walls.
"It is good that you are waking up," Morgo said in a strange tone. She didn't sound like the Passed did when they spoke to the small ones, but rather like a Passed addressing an equal. "You killed Beast," Morgo said and pointed to the decapitated head of the hummingman she had dragged down with her. "But you almost killed yourself. It was good that the Beast you decided to kill was a hummingman ... a hummingwoman ... with the belly full of eggs that heals. It was good that I climbed down Big Canyon fast. Otherwise you would not be here."