by Greg Egan
“Suppose Lida sped up, and it’s south of us already.”
“That’s not impossible,” Amir conceded. “It’s a small town and there’s no one blocking them. They could change latitude easily enough if they wanted to.”
They set off to the east, keeping their eyes on the ground ahead. The rainwater was soaking away now, and if they crossed any land that Lida had occupied recently it would take a lot more than a few puddles to hide the evidence.
Seth was ravenous, but the change of gait let him rest all the muscles that had wearied most, and satisfy those that had grown impatient with their disuse. As the midday sun dried his damp clothes he felt clear-headed and invigorated.
“There’s nothing,” he concluded. The gentle east-west gradient had reversed, proving that they’d traversed the width of Lida’s most likely path with no sign of so much as a paving stone left behind.
They crossed back to the western side; apart from a second chance to spot the town’s trail, it was worth it just to switch gaits again.
The weather stayed fine, and after they’d been sidling north again for a while the ground became as dry as when they’d set out from the campsite. Seth could tell that Amir was tiring, not from any misstep, but from the way he kept his torso braced as he ran, as if he feared losing control and overbalancing. But whatever his physical travails, he’d shown no sign of giving up on the plan.
“Are you keen on Sarah?” Seth asked.
“What?” Amir was facing away from him, so there was no chance to read his expression.
“You heard me.”
“What are we, children?” Amir blustered. “I can’t do this for a colleague without you making a joke of it?”
“I’m not mocking you,” Seth insisted. “It was a serious question.”
“Then save your breath for one that’s more serious.”
«What do you think?» Seth asked Theo.
«Does the sun rise in the east?»
«Yes—but does it set in the west?»
«That too,» Theo replied.
Seth had forgotten precisely what these euphemisms were meant to encode. «Did you just tell me that Sarah reciprocates his feelings, or that Aziz feels the same way about Judith?»
«The latter. How should I know what Sarah and Judith feel?»
«How should you know what Aziz feels?»
«He told me.»
Seth ran on in silence. He felt a slight twinge of jealousy, but it was fleeting enough to be more amusing than shameful. He’d thought about Sarah since they were students together, and wondered if they’d ever be more than friends, but it had always seemed too soon to pursue the idea: no one left young children behind to go surveying. But if he’d been serious, he would still have sought to discover her feelings.
And Theo’s. And Judith’s.
No wonder he’d put the whole thing off.
Amir was beginning to lag behind. Seth watched their shadows stretching out across the sand, and tried to urge him on by staying just ahead of him. They needed to reach Lida before nightfall, or they’d risk being too late returning to the camp.
Theo’s view contracted, reaching no more than half a dozen paces ahead. Seth understood: he didn’t want to risk alerting the locals. But there had to be a better strategy.
He said, “We should move far enough west that we’re certain we’ll pass the town on that side, and not run right into it. Then we can still ping our route without worrying that it will give us away, while we keep watch to the east for Lida.”
The others concurred. As Seth tipped his head and backed away, all of his misgivings about the plan that he’d been trying to ignore began clamoring for his attention again. But there was no question of going back now, with nothing to show for all the time and energy they’d gambled.
They sidled on northward. Seth wondered if they should pause to perform a longitude measurement, in case they’d become confused in the rain or misled by some unexpected change in the topography. But then Amir said, “There it is.”
“Where?”
“East-north-east.”
Seth squinted against the glare from a bank of low clouds that was casting back the sunset. Below the clouds, the town was so flat, and fit so snugly into its water-trapping hollow, that it barely registered as an artificial presence. From this distance, he could easily have mistaken it for a few stone outcrops and a few patches of mud.
They approached slowly, then paused and waited for their shadows to disappear.
“Where would you plant the orchards?” Amir asked anxiously. In Baharabad there were a dozen or so, dotted around the outskirts of the city, but you’d walk half a day through fields of grain before reaching them. In the twilight it was difficult to interpret the structures ahead of them, but Seth guessed that they were mostly farmhouses, and none yet showed the glow of lamps.
“All we can do is go in and look,” he said.
There were no fences around the fields with gates to guide them, and at first they moved through knee-high stalks that swished like languorous sentinels. But then they chanced on a track where the well-trampled ground barely betrayed their footsteps.
Amir said, “I can smell it.”
“Smell what?”
He paused and rested a hand on Seth’s shoulder. “Black sapote.”
Seth sniffed hopefully, but he couldn’t detect anything. “Are you sure you’re not—?”
Then the breeze shifted, and he almost swooned.
A lamp appeared in the window of the farmhouse ahead of them. They detoured to the north, with Theo and Aziz cautiously pinging the ground just enough to keep them from stumbling. To the east, there were lights aplenty now: the town was small, and they were gazing right into its center. But to anyone gazing back they’d be hidden in the gloom, and the only people with any chance of pinging them would have to be out wandering the fields.
Seth deferred to Amir’s superior olfaction and followed him in silence. «Can you smell the orchard?» he asked Theo, before recalling that this was only marginally less crass than asking a Sider how fast they could run. «Sorry, I’m tired.»
«Forget it. The only thing I need to smell is your sweet, sweet blood.»
«Which is probably more like sweet, sweet water right now.»
«Try sweet, sweet air: when you’re this hungry, I get nothing at all.»
“There it is!” Amir whispered, pointing to the silhouettes of half a dozen small trees, clustered together at the corner of the farm. Seth was dismayed; they could fill their packs from one of Baharabad’s orchards and the theft would barely be noticed, but here they’d be wasting their time if they didn’t strip every tree bare. The only thing that assuaged his guilt was the likelihood that a single farmer probably owned both field and orchard. No one would be relying on five or six fruit trees for their entire livelihood.
The fence around the orchard was only waist-high, but vaulting it was enough to remind Seth of how weary he was. Amir followed him, and between them they quickly plucked every ripe sapote from the lowest branches.
Then Amir braced Seth as he raised an arm above his head and tilted it northward to reach the higher fruit. It was an awkward maneuver, but it was probably safer and quicker than trying to climb the trees.
Seth’s pack felt satisfyingly heavy as they jumped back over the fence. They retraced their steps in silence, and waited until the town was almost out of sight before daring to stop and sample their harvest.
“Is this enough?” Amir asked, as if he were contemplating a second raid.
Seth resisted the urge to tease him with a joke about the folly of courtship’s grand gestures. “It’s enough to keep the whole expedition moving for eight or nine days,” he said. “And it’s as much as we could carry, if we want to get back as quickly as we came.”
“That’s true,” Amir conceded.
“Sleep for an hour. I’ll stand guard.”
“We should get moving.”
“Half an hour,” Seth insisted
. “Then you can do the same for me.”
Amir was silent, but then perhaps Aziz persuaded him, because he lay down and closed his eyes.
Seth stood beside him, still finishing his meal, chewing every mouthful as slowly as he could.
«Are you getting something now?» he asked Theo.
«A trickle.»
Seth gazed into the darkness, disconcerted by the pity and revulsion he felt. Theo had more than earned his share of the spoils, but he would never know what it was like to bite into a piece of fruit himself. And though he’d guided almost every step of the journey, in the end it was only the free limbs of his Walker that could have leaped the fence and plucked the sapote. Seth was sure that if some impossible circumstance had left him facing the same constraints, he’d rather be dead than live the life of a Sider.
But they were what they were, and there was nothing to be done but to make the best of it.
the sky was still black as they began the journey south. Seth could see no clouds, but the wind was cold and sharp. The sapote had taken the edge off his hunger, and though his body was sore all over, just knowing the route and the destination made every step feel lighter.
As dawn approached the wind grew stronger, whipping up the sand and all but blinding Theo.
“We need to wait this out!” Seth shouted to Amir.
“All right,” he replied reluctantly.
They squatted with their faces to the ground and their arms protecting the Siders’ pingers. «I’m never going to complain about carrying a tent again,» Seth promised. «Ah, that stings!» His clothing barely seemed to be dulling the impacts.
Theo said, «I think it’s a cone storm.»
«Are you sure? I couldn’t see anything from what you were sharing.»
«I couldn’t see the ground, but most of the airborne sand was moving near-diagonally.»
«Wonderful.» Seth started cursing aloud. Even with his mouth barely open, this muttering felt much more satisfying than inspeech.
Theo waited for a break in the profanities. «Remember how Merion used the example of cone storms, to argue that air had to be a liquid?»
«I swear you’ve been to lessons that I never attended.»
«Maybe you just dozed through that one.»
«What could air be, if it wasn’t a liquid?» Seth asked irritably. «Why is this idiot famous for stating the obvious?» He could feel blood trickling down his forearms.
«Barat thought air was like very fine sand: lots of loose particles that were too small to see. Merion replied, if air is like sand, wouldn’t it suffer cone storms? Barat said, maybe it does, but no one’s ever seen them.»
«Isn’t that a fair comment?»
Theo said, «If air was a kind of free-moving dust, so light that it was perpetually scattered above the ground, then the collisions between the constituent particles would see them traveling ever faster, with the energy needed to move perpendicular to the axis supplied by the negative energy from axial motion. The wind would grow so strong that the whole atmosphere would fly away into the void.”
«Really? Then why doesn’t all the sand in the world fly away into the void?»
«Because the air is viscous enough to slow it down. Yet more evidence for Merion’s position.»
Seth had run out of ideas for prolonging the conversation, but with nothing to distract him, his mind became entirely occupied with the prospect of each impending laceration. His muscles were beginning to hurt more than his skin, as they tried to shield him—or maybe just shrink him into a smaller target—by imposing an involuntary rigidity that was as painful as it was ineffectual against the storm.
Theo said, “I think they need help.”
Through slitted lids, Seth peered into the storm. The air was still black with sand, but he could just make out Amir sprawled on the ground, face down.
He waddled forward until he was beside his friends. The back of Amir’s head and hands were thick with blood, and Aziz’s pingers were raked with scratches. Seth bent over and tried to cover as much of the exposed skin as he could, but while his torso gave Amir some shelter, his arms couldn’t keep the storm away from Theo and Aziz at the same time.
He closed his eyes and thought for a moment, struggling not to panic. He took Amir’s pack off his back and placed it on the ground to the right of his head, giving Aziz protection on that side. Then he crouched down further and managed to block most of the barrage from the left with his own body, without compromising Theo.
“This can’t last much longer,” he shouted, filling his mouth with grit. He braced himself and held his position, waiting for the heat of the rising sun to blow the storm away.
it was mid-morning before Amir stirred. He lifted his head and tipped it back slowly until he spotted Seth.
“You should have gone on without me,” he complained. “If we’re back too late—”
“We won’t be. We might not make it to the camp before nightfall, but they won’t leave before dawn.”
Amir struggled to his feet. He’d stopped bleeding, but the red welts criss-crossing his skin still looked excruciating.
He lifted his pack out of the sand and shook it clean, but then he seemed reluctant to open it: if the fruit was too damaged it could spoil in a day, and their whole journey would have been in vain. But the packs were made of sturdier material than their clothing, and Seth’s own stash had come through the storm with nothing more than mild bruising.
“Have some breakfast,” Seth urged him, “then we’ll get moving.” Amir reached into his pack and plucked out a virtually pristine sample.
“Let’s just hope that Lida hasn’t sent out a search party for their sapotes,” Theo joked.
Seth didn’t find the prospect sufficiently improbable to be amusing; in a small town, perhaps a family of farmers could be confident that none of their neighbors were thieves—and could call on them at a moment’s notice to help hunt down the actual raiders.
Aziz said, “Let’s hope they think the orchard was stripped by the storm.”
When Amir had finished eating, he still looked unsteady. Walking east or west in this condition was one thing, but if he toppled while he was sidling he could easily break a leg trying to halt that hyperbolic fall.
“We should castle,” Seth suggested.
“That’d slow you down,” Amir replied impatiently. “You need to get back as quickly as you can. It doesn’t matter if I can’t keep up, so long as one of us arrives in time.”
“Do you really think Raina would abandon us? And even if she wanted to, do you think Sarah and Judith would let her?”
“They might not have a choice.”
Seth was growing tired of arguing; if Amir refused to understand that to leave him injured and lagging in the dust was unthinkable, he’d have to find another way to persuade him. He said, “I’m not walking into that camp alone and taking all the blame, just so you can come limping in half a day later to take all the sympathy.”
And Amir seemed duly chastened. “Fair enough,” he said. “Then let’s finish this together.”
a light flared at the southern edge of Seth’s vision. For a moment he thought he was hallucinating from lack of sleep, but as the image steadied his spirits soared: he’d just crossed out of the dark cone of what could only be a campfire.
“Do you see that?” he asked Amir.
“Yes.”
“It looks like they’re expecting us.”
They sidled further south together, then separated and walked east into the camp. Sarah and Raina were sitting on the ground, on opposite sides of the fire. It was Raina who saw them first.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“We brought fruit,” Seth replied.
Sarah tipped her head to examine them.
“How are you feeling?” Amir asked her.
“Perfect. Whatever that sickness was, it’s passed.”
Amir took off his pack and sat beside her, and Seth joined them, glad he could use Raina’s westw
ard gaze as an excuse to keep the fire between them.
Amina said, “Welcome back, you idiots. Are you badly hurt?”
“Amir got the worst of a cone storm,” Seth replied. “But we’re both still walking, nothing’s broken.”
“Have some bechelnuts,” Raina suggested. “You can’t live on fruit alone.” She pushed the sack toward them; Seth took a handful, then split it with Amir.
As they ate, Raina spoke calmly. “I’m not your enemy,” she said. “And part of my job is to keep you alive. Next time you have a problem with what I’m doing, come and talk to me. If you’re still convinced that my decisions are endangering you, that’s when you’re free to walk away.”
Seth was too tired to find equally gracious words to express his contrition. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Theo, Aziz and Amir followed with their own apologies.
Theo said, «And now we need to sleep like civilized people. In a tent.»
8
Seth and theo were the first of the team to make their way back to the rendezvous point. Seth checked the small stone outcrop for the triangle Raina had carved into one side as a distinguishing mark, then he took off his pack and sat on the warm rock with his head upside-down so he could keep watch for the others.
«If we bring nothing else back to Baharabad,» he said, «at least we can update their useless maps.»
«If it had been up to me,» Theo replied, «we would have gone openly to all the towns along the way, asking for directions to the nearest forest.»
«They would have steered us into the desert, just to be rid of us. Who wants a hundred thousand people coming to fight them for a new river?»
Theo said, «Most of the towns around here are so small that there’d be nothing to fight over. If we find anything like another Zirona, they could even merge with Baharabad if they wanted to; there’s no reason why we couldn’t make room for them.»
Seth was amused. «Ah, now you’re a diplomat.»
«Isn’t that the best way to keep everyone happy? It must work sometimes, or Baharabad would never have grown so large.» Theo waited for a reply, then realized why his Walker had become distracted. «Is that Sarah and Judith?»
