by Paul Lucas
Amethyst, already waist-high in the water, shrugged. “It’s good to see you react to something.”
I got deep enough into the river to dunk myself. As the bracing chill water swept up over me, I contemplated not surfacing. Ever.
I stared up at the sun rippling beyond the surface of the water an arm span above me. I could just open my mouth and fill my lungs. A few minutes of pain, then my spirit would fly free...
I broke the surface, gasping.
I was such a coward.
“I lost a brother once,” Amethyst said, lathering up her hair with a small bottle of human soap. “He died almost ten years ago.”
I blinked at her, a little out of breath. “What--what was his name?”
“Steel.” She submerged to rinse out her hair, then stood again. “My little brother, only sixteen. He died a senseless death, hit by a car while walking home from secondary school. I had a hard time getting over it.”
“I am sorry.”
“But a senseless death does not imply a senseless life,” she continued. “Steel lived life as a true Orc, always pushing himself and his limits. He may have only been a teen-ager, but his soul was well-forged even so. No, the only thing senseless about his joining the fires of heaven's forge was how much of my own life I spent drowning in self-pity afterward.”
She balled her fists and mimed punching in the air in font of her. “For months after he died I went down to the gym and pounded on a punching block for several hours a day. Hell, I cracked three of them. I built up calluses a centimeter thick and often my hands would bleed. I could not think of any other way to make the pain of his passing go away other than to torture myself. But then I realized, is this how Steel would want me to live? Was I really honoring his memory, or was I only trying to hide how I felt sorry for myself?”
I nodded. “I know what you are saying.” I stared at the water quietly trickling past my half-submerged tool fingers. Memories of my parents bubbled up, unbidden. “The pain never really goes away, does it?”
“No.” Her shoulders drooped. “But you learn to live with it.”
I was about to ask her more when her eyes suddenly narrowed into the distance and she flung her arms in an ‘X’ across her chest. “That bastard!” she yelled.
“What?”
With her heavy chin she pointed up at a far cliff overlooking the river, not too far away from where our camp lay. Something amidst all the green and browns there glinted from the sun. “I bet that’s Louis with binoculars!” Amethyst growled as she sunk deep into the water until just her head bobbed above the surface. “I warned him not to peek! When I get back to camp I’ll tie his legs around his neck and pull tight!”
I did not move. The water was already covering me from the hips down, so I was not showing anything more than I usually did. “But I thought you always wanted Louis to ogle your naked body.”
Her cheeks turned a bright red. “Not without my permission!”
I could not help it. I laughed. Amethyst could snap a tree trunk in two, yet here she was acting like a virgin at her first ear-nibbling.
Spirits, I could not remember the last time I had laughed, even a little.
Still, she was right. Louis had no right to take liberties after she had asked him not to. Before he could realize what I was doing, I summoned a small light spirit right in front of the location I saw the glass reflection earlier. Just bright enough to dazzle. My Myotan hearing picked up a very surprised and pained yelp. Definitely Louis’ voice. With any luck he would have been looking right into the light spirit with his binoculars when it popped into existence
Now it was Amethyst’s turn to chuckle as I told her what I did. Somehow, it felt even better making her laugh than doing so myself.
* * *
I could probably attribute my new-found lucidity to simple survival instincts. If I had continued on as I had, I probably would have died from sheer neglect. But somehow having friends nearby lessened my self-destructive tendencies just enough for sanity to reassert itself.
That is not to say that everything was sunshine and smiles. Dark moods easily overtook me. It was the worst at night, when I would half-wake and reach for Lerner, only to realize that he was not there. Nor would he ever be, again.
Louis categorically denied ever spying on Amethyst and me, even though his eyes proved unusually sensitive for the next few days, forcing him to constantly wear sunglasses. Amethyst told him it was no surprise that he could go blind holding binoculars one-handed.
Louis just grumbled.
Now that I was thinking somewhat clearly, the realization of what my three friends had done for me hit hard. There was no way back through the Node. If we tried going back through the node, we could have ended up anywhere at a million or more other teleport sites scattered throughout the Shards. Any number of them could be somewhere much worse than a lush mountain forest.
“But why?” I finally asked them as we sat around a small cook fire one night. “Why did you come at all? Why strand yourselves with me?”
Amethyst squared her shoulders. “I cannot speak for the others, but for me it was a matter of honor. It took us quite a while to discover what happened to you. When we did, I knew I could not let you face whatever waited here for you alone, no matter what. If the monster had taken your life, then at least I would avenge you.” Her eyes slid sideways, almost shyly. “To an Orc, brave actions such as yours are the poetry of life. Your courage inspired mine, so I leapt into the Node after you.”
I blinked at her, barely nodding in acknowledgement. It felt very strange to have words of naked admiration spill from her. In truth, I felt very small and dirty.
I turned to Cloud, who had not said as much as two words to me since the three of them arrived. I asked him the same question I had Amethyst. His eyes locked with mine, the answer obvious in his pained expression.
Damn him.
I turned toward the last member of our quartet. “And you, Louis,” I asked. “Why did you come?”
He shrugged his shoulders, frowning deeply. “Because I’m a fucking idiot.” He forked a chunk of meat into his mouth, chewed a moment, and said, “Everyone else was acting so goddam heroic I guess I just kind of got caught up in it. I felt like a spineless coward when everyone was volunteering to come after you, so like an idiot I joined in. It felt like the right thing to do at the moment. I mean, whoever faced that creature would need a Mage backing them up. But now... God, Rumiko is going to kill me.” He glanced meaningfully at Amethyst and Cloud. “If I ever see her again.”
From what they told me afterward the decision to come after me was reached fairly quickly, less than ten minutes, with the three of them assembled after Dumas related to them what had happened. They made Dumas promise to have Jacqueline and the Myotans send them equipment and supplies in case they survived. There had even been a good chance, given the inherent unpredictability of the teleport network, that they could have ended up on a Shard tens of millions of kilometers distant from wherever we were.
But that had not been the case. Louis and Amethyst tried dozens of different coordinates that supposedly could reconnect back with the node a the Tower, trying to send a message back that we were alright, but apparently none worked. The stream of supplies dried up after a few days when it became apparent to those on the other side that we were never coming back, at least not that way. Their last written messages wished us luck and a prayer from Windrider saying she would intercede with the Sky Spirit to watch over us. If we were even there to receive all that they sent, that is.
We settled into a routine as we slowly built a base-camp around the entrance to the node. Cloud spent most of his time away in the forest, slowly exploring and hunting down game to supplement the food supplies sent through the Node. Thanks to him, we ate very well. But I could tell that he also spent so much time alone to get away from me, whose close proximity must have been painful for him.
Cloud also discovered that we were in a large, apparently virgi
n forest. He could detect no sign of any tool-using sentient along any of the game paths that he took or territories he could see. We were in the middle of some remote mountain range, so that came as no surprise.
Amethyst quickly established a defense perimeter with trip wires, shallow pits, and blunted pungi sticks. They were not designed to kill or maim but to slow down anything approaching the camp while simultaneously warning us. She wanted us secure from wild animals, but did not want any local sentient who might come to greet us in peace to be accidentally impaled on a sharpened log. That would make for a very bad first impression.
She also occasionally accompanied Cloud on his hunting expeditions to get a lay for the land and to scout out any potential hazards. The worst thing they found were the spore of a wolf pack that frequented the area, but hopefully like most natural animals they had enough sense to stay away from sentients like us.
Louis busied himself with setting up camp and tinkering with the equipment to get it to work right. With Dumas (or most of him, anyway) out of the picture, he was the most technically-minded of us, which was not saying much. Thankfully, most of the equipment sent through needed little or no adjustment or repair.
Louis also tried to get a fix on our position by studying and comparing the positions of known Shards in the sky. It was a long, slow, inexact process given the limited tools and databases he had to work with. He swore a lot under his breath, too low for a fellow human like Amethyst to hear but clearly distinctive to Myotans like Cloud and myself. When we asked him to stifle his non-stop invective, it led to the first real argument among us.
I kept myself busy by unloading, cataloging, and organizing the supplies that had come through the Node, something the other three had been somewhat lax in doing. Considering that those on the other side could never expect to see us again and could not even know if we were alive or dead, they were surprisingly generous. I had the feeling that in some way sending us the supplies was a kind of symbolic remembrance ceremony for us.
Still, we were grateful for everything we got. We could be on the other side of the sun from the MegaShard for all we knew. Our odds of ever seeing the Tower or the KN again were vanishingly remote.
Survival gear was the most important. Tents. Sleeping rolls. Tarps. Back packs. Rain ponchos. Thermal-reflective blankets. Generously-stocked medkits, including leather pouches full of Windrider’s poultices. Small tool-kits, including collapsible saws. Hundreds of meters of spider-silk cable. Canteens with water purifying filters. Iodine tablets. Several hundred man-days of rations, including Myotan-made salted meat and dried fruit, along with a generous helping of MREs and pre-packaged food from the Niven’s Folly.
Everyone but Cloud was excited to see that they packed along not one but two small, collapsible solar cell arrays for battery recharging. Cloud thought it foolish to depend too much on KN electronics in a seemingly infinite low-tech wilderness. The rest of us did not agree, especially since sophisticated tools like our sensors, communicators, and hand-computers were sure prove invaluable. The latter especially, with the enormous knowledge they each possessed in their databases on Outland inhabitants, flora, fauna, and conditions.
With the exception of Amethyst’s advanced assault rifle, the weapons sent were mainly standard hunting rifles and pistols, thankfully with easily interchangeable 9mm ammunition. They would be enough for providing food and defending ourselves against most mundane threats.
Amethyst’s AAR was another story. Jacqueline sent along enough ammunition and grenades for its underslung launcher for the Orc to conquer a small city. A small paper note, included in a code-locked strongbox that also contained a repair kit, said “better safe than sorry.”
The last transmission of goods occurred five days after my companions had arrived, and contained mostly personal effects for all of us. Almost two weeks after it was received, I came across a large bundle from Windrider. On it was a long note scrawled in our native Myotan pictograms.
I know you are alive, Gossamyr. In my heart, I know. Many of those here believe otherwise and say we are foolish for sending so much through the metal globe, but neither Flier nor I listen. I still feel your spirit in this world.
You will mourn for Lerner for a long time, as is only natural. I just pray that those friends with you now offer you the comfort I desperately long to give you but cannot.
Wherever Lerner’s spirit now flies, I am sure he watches over you with love and longing. He may not be with you in this world now, but I know you will always be in his thoughts.
As you will be in mine.
I love you, daughter of my heart. Be well.
I opened the package, and in there among clothing and several of my favorite human books were a few photographs, ones I had long-since put away. One was taken just six months ago, when Flier, Windrider and I were surprised at an evening meal by a human photographer from a visiting helistat. We were laughing, mock-indignant at the intrusion.
I hugged the framed photos to me. For the first time since coming to this strange land, I realized how incredibly far from home I truly was.
FORTY-SEVEN
The KN’s so-called Zone Of Exploration (ZOE; the slang form is pronounced as zoh-ee, like the girl’s name) represents how far into the Outlands expeditions have been able to penetrate and return. The ZOE extends 12 to 20 earthspans from the KN, depending on which direction one goes. Its official boundary is expanded every year as expeditions venture further into unknown territory.
Despite being constructed to be as self-sufficient as possible, explorer helistats cannot operate for more than two to three years without major maintenance that can only be performed at a fully-supplied base. In simple terms, they just wear down, especially with all the demands expected of them in the Outlands. This limits the distances they can cover and points to why the ZOE has expanded at a snail’s pace in the last decade or so.
However, the OEC is working in conjunction with a number of KN governments to set up advanced bases in the Outlands where helistats can be fully supplied and repaired. Likely sites for advanced bases include the UTSite Tower at X12, the River Kingdom of Corinthia, the non-functioning Teleport Node at X14, and the sooner colony of Llewellyn on the North Sea, all two to three earth-spans away. Once these are completed, hopefully sometime in the next five years, helistats will be able to range farther without having to return to the KN, and the ZOE should expand significantly.
--excerpted from A Basic Guide to the Outlands, 547 “Never Pet A Sleeping Rustalumph” edition, Haggerty Press, Borelea.
* * *
One duty that seemed to fall to me by default was looking after Dumas’ element-body. My earlier revulsion to spider-swarms seemed to have completely abated, probably because it was easier to mentally handle one single tarantula than a herd of fourteen. I made sure she (Louis confirmed indeed that it was a she, mostly by the full egg-sack she constantly carried on her abdomen) was properly fed and sheltered.
I had expected the spider, separated from its swarm, to be like any other spider, basically little more than a hunting and eating machine. I was very surprised when she began displaying a real personality. Sometimes she would catch prey, a large bug or a small rodent of some kind, but refuse to eat it until she joined us around the campfire at night for our main meal. She would quietly suck and slurp at her food while the rest of us ate and talked, glad for the company.
She turned out to be very curious, often rummaging through boxes and piles of equipment just to see what was there. And strangest of all was the urge she often displayed to play. She would pounce on inanimate objects repeatedly just for the fun of it, batting them around and chasing after them if they were small enough. She and I developed a game with a knotted end of a rope, where I would jerk the cord around on the ground and she would try and catch the knot. As the days wore on, she would drag the rope to me whenever she wanted to play.
Spirits help me, I actually began feeling fond of the repulsive little thing.
M
y other companions proved far more dour. The reality sunk in that we were stranded unimaginably far away from everything we ever knew, probably for the rest of our lives. The supplies and equipment sent through the teleport node would help enormously with survival, but in these condition none but the hardiest of the tools could survive more than a few years, a mere fraction of the time we could expect to be out here.
From what Louis could deduce from the Shards in the sky, we were still somewhere on the MegaShard. That led to a brief hope among us that somehow, some way, we could simply walk home. But then he revealed that we were anywhere from two hundred thousand to two million kilometers away from the relatively tiny area of the Shard that held the Tower and the KN. He even did the math. At the minimum estimated distance, taking into account sleep, foraging and natural obstacles such as mountains, oceans, and rivers, it would take us just under forty years to hike the distance overland to reach our respective homes. Using rafts and other home-made water craft, providing we could find a series of waterways favorable to our direction of travel, would cut the time down to about twenty-eight years.
At the maximum estimated distance of two million kilometers, the travel time turned out to be from two to five centuries.
All that provided, of course, we knew which direction to go. Louis was still working on that.
“This is all my fault,” I said with a bowed head as we ate around our meager campfire that evening.
“Pfah, you didn’t drag anyone here,” Amethyst said. “We each made our own decision. We are all adults, Gossamyr. We are all responsible for our own actions.”
“But...”
She held up a hand. “What’s done is done. None of us blames you.”
Louis shifted slightly at that statement, refusing to look in my direction. Did he feel uncomfortable saying anything contradictory in front of the others?
