by Paul Lucas
I unloaded my burden and turned to Louis. “Are we all set, then?”
He straightened from checking the lashings on the raft for what must have been the twentieth time. “Yep. You had the last of everything we’re bringing from base camp. We’re all set to leave tomorrow morning.” Everything we could not bring with us we had carefully sealed and buried not too far from the Teleport Node, underneath rock cairns for easy location if we ever needed to return for them. We had also included messages with the equipment for KN explorers should they ever happen to find our stashes, explaining who we were, how we had ended up here, and where we had gone.
“Good,” I said. “There is one last thing I must take care of. I will return by nightfall.” I shrugged on a small backpack I had prepared with enough supplies for a half-day and made sure my shotgun was secured at my side.
“Where are you going?”
“To see my son one last time.”
They did it again, Louis and Amethyst and Cloud all exchanging worried glances together.
“Um, perhaps you should not go alone,” Cloud said, stepping forward.
“You are right, chief hunter,” I said, turning ostentatiously away from him. “Amethyst, I would be honored if you would accompany me.”
Cloud looked away, jutting out his lower lip. The slight had not been lost on him.
“The honor is mine,” the Orc said solemnly. She straightened, pulling on her assault rifle and accompanying equipment. She turned to Louis. “That is, if you males will not be completely at the mercy of the Wilds without us females here to protect you.”
Louis grumped. “Well, gee, I don’t know, Miss Big Bad Orc Lady, that chipmunk chittering at me looked awful scary!”
Amethyst told Louis exactly where he could put that chipmunk should it show up again.
We made our way back along the now well-worn trail to the Node four kilometers distant. Once away from the males, Amethyst did not have to worry about modesty and stripped down to her tank-top in the muggy midday heat.
The trail was the easiest we could blaze between the river and the base camp, but that is not to say that it was actually easy. It wound around half a mountain and covered almost as much distance vertically as horizontally. More than once we found ourselves climbing over sloping outcroppings of boulders as high as both of us combined.
“You shouldn’t bait Cloud like that,” she said as we neared the Node almost three hours later.
“He is still clinging to a dream that was unlikely before the humans ever came to the Tower,” I said. “Now that Lerner is no longer with us, he thinks the dream can be renewed. I do not need his sympathy or his help.”
“I think you might be reading too much into it, Gossamyr. Sure Cloud is arrogant sometimes, but he does seem to genuinely care for you. I have not seen him say or do anything improper toward you since we came through the Node. You shouldn’t let your anger distort your judgement.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I have a lot to be angry about! If my mourning my family hurts Cloud, that is too bad for him. Or for anyone, for that matter.”
She nodded. “As it should be. Just remember that if you need a friendly sword at your flank for that battle, I'm here.”
I smiled at her briefly, almost despite myself. “That an odd way to put it, Amethyst.”
She shrugged. “Orcs are fighters. You Myotans have your flying metaphors, we have our fighting ones.”
I stopped and turned toward her. “The sentiment is still welcome. Thank you. You have been a good friend to me these past weeks when I truly needed one.”
“I have only tried to do what is honorable.”
“I must admit that ‘honor’ is still an elusive concept for me. The word doesn't really translate well. But it seems a very admirable trait in your people.”
She looked aghast. “You do not know what honor is? You? But you are one of the most honorable people I have ever met!”
I blinked at her, perplexed.
She continued. “Perhaps Myotans have no word for it, per se, but many of you practice honor nonetheless. It amounts to doing the right thing, at all times, regardless of the circumstances. To an Orc, the ‘right’ thing means being courageous in all things, as you are.”
My eyes lowered halfway as they swept the ground. “My husband thought I was too courageous. Too reckless.”
She chuckled. “He was human, and a male besides. Of course he would think such a thing. But I have little doubt that it was your courage that first attracted him to you. It shines like a beacon in you. It makes people want to be like you.” She took a deep breath. “I want to be like you.”
“What? Why?”
“To my people, courage is expected, but it is not always easy. For me, it’s very hard sometimes. Before I came to the Tower, I had never really challenged myself. I always took commissions on helistat missions that were relatively routine. There were dangers, of course, but nothing truly extraordinary. I hate to admit that I liked it like that. It was comfortable, which to an Orc should be an abominable state of affairs, but it was a situation I could not bring myself to end.
“But when we arrived at the Tower we found you, this little half-naked female, alone in a forest fighting off the most blood-thirsty carnivores in the Outlands. And with only had a rifle and some spells! Ha! That is courage!”
She shrugged her massive shoulders, burying her hands in her pockets. “I would not tell anyone but you this, Gossamyr, but I was shamed greatly by your actions. You were barely half my size and ten years my junior, doing all these extraordinary things, while I whiled away my life in one safe job after another. I could not stand looking at myself in the mirror. I saw only a coward. Do you think I was unafraid when we went into the Tower with all those Xique? I tried to talk big and sound confident, but I was terrified. It was by being with you, and that poor little Brightwind flying to warn us even with his wings torn up, that gave me strength enough to pass into the Tower.”
I snickered. The Orc woman looked stricken. I hastily said, “I am not laughing at you, Amethyst. Hardly. It is just I was so scared when we went back into the Tower that night I thought my wings would fall off. When that first Xique charged us it was all I could do to keep from voiding myself. The only thing that kept me from screaming and running out back to the helistat was that you were acting so brave and self-assured. You inspired me.”
She gaped, then beamed. “Really?”
I nodded. "But truth is that I would much rather have your honest friendship than any kind of hero-worship.”
She smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “Done.”
A half-hour later we reached the spot where my son had died. The earth around him still showed signs of scorching, though his bones had been stripped of any remaining flesh by local scavengers. The Weird which had consumed him was long since dissipated, at least according to Louis’ analysis spells conducted in the days after arriving. The mutant nanites that had not been destroyed by my fire-spirits had quickly been overwhelmed by the mainstream nanites that surrounded them on all sides.
I should have come sooner, tried to preserve what I could of his wings for a proper remembrance ceremony, but I was too troubled and fearful of what I would find when I finally did approach him. His remains represented too much pain for me to easily confront. It took me until now to finally approach him.
Amethyst, who had remained a respectful distance away, was surprised when I asked her to join me in prayer for Sunset’s spirit. But she gladly knelt at my side, crossing her arms over her chest and praying in her Orc tradition.
Sunset had only lived a few days. No matter how deformed his body might have become, no matter how twisted the Others had made his instincts, he could not have been truly aware of what he did. His spirit was innocent and was now thankfully free to fly beyond the Shards. I asked Lerner’s spirit to look after him with love and wisdom, as a father should, as I knew he would have in life.
Somehow I managed to hold off the inevita
ble tears until after the prayers were finished, but come they did. Amethyst comforted me with a light arm across my shoulders, letting my grief pour itself out once again. Thankfully there were no wracking sobs this time. Just water streaming from my eyes as I remembered and mourned.
Just as we were preparing to leave, as we would just barely return to the river before the sun darkened, I spotted something glinting in Sunset's bony hand. I peered closer, and saw the Fractal Dimensional crystal he had retrieved just before our final battle. It had remained forgotten in light of everything else that had happened.
Gingerly, I plucked it from his remains. Obviously, the crystal was very important in some way. Enough for the Others to be willing to kill many people for.
Why? What was its significance?
I pocketed it. A mystery for another time. The Builder city was many months, if not years, away. Plenty of time to contemplate its mysteries later.
Upon returning to the river, we received one final surprise that day: Dumas’ element body had returned after being absent for nearly four weeks. It must have sensed that we were leaving, and scrambled to join us.
We discovered that it had good reason for its absence: it was accompanied by nine offspring, each about half their mother’s size. I was perplexed at first--did not Spider Swarms eat most of their young?--until Louis pointed out that long-hidden instinct must be at work. The young would have been born with their radio-organs fully developed, their tiny arachnoid minds already networking with their fully-developed mother. In other words, they had enough brain power between them to begin the slow climb back toward full sentience. As their first conscious decision, they decided to keep enough of themselves alive to form a full Spider Swarm.
How long such a process would take, no one in our group knew. Having a new Swarm splice off from an already living Swarm was a rare and poorly documented phenomenon outside of Malachon Island, the Swarms’ original home in the KN. How this new Dumas would behave--if indeed it could even still be considered Dumas anymore--remained to be seen.
Still, we welcomed the spiders’ return with gladness. Our little ragtag company of refugees was whole once again.
We began our great journey at first light.
FIFTY-TWO
I just hope wherever Amethyst, Louis, and Cloud ended up, that they found Gossamyr and everything's all right. I just hope my recurring nightmares of them being eaten are just my own anxieties and nothing more.
But my contract here is up. I decided not to renew it a second time. Six months ago, it had seemed an ideal strategy to extend our stay, with all the new discoveries being made. But after what happened with Gossamyr and her son, I just feel tired and burnt out. I have been witness to the Myotans' worst year in living memory.
Our replacement, the unimaginatively-named helistat Sally Forth has arrived, and its time for Dumas and I to take the Niven's Folly back to the KN. Luckily a few Myotans have volunteered to help fill in for my missing crew. What they lack in technical expertise they make up for in raw enthusiasm. Especially Brightwind, which has surprised and delighted almost everybody. Since losing his wings to the Xique, he had been mopey and morose, in a dark depression that was hard to imagine any 13 year old going through. The only thing that had put some energy back in him was the prospect of flying to the KN with me and coming back on the next available helistat.
Of course, we hadn't the heart to tell him until we took off that the only way his mother would agree to it is if she came along. You know how boys are at that age, Myotan and human both. How are you going to explain to a thirteen year old boy that the greatest macho adventure of his life is going to include his Mom?
--From the logs of Jacqueline MvDevitt, captain and owner of the converted cargo helistat Niven's Folly, 24 March 547
* * *
We spent three months on that river.
We had had a lot of trouble with our raft, especially on the rougher parts of the river, and were only too grateful to have any excuse at any time to pull to the shore. The mountains produced many rapids we had to navigate, rapids that looked like no big deal in our aerial recon photos but were quite another matter once you were shooting them on a clumsy platform of lashed-together logs.
When we had constructed the raft, we had assumed that all wood was equal; we just cut trees that were the right length and width. It turns out that the type of wood does indeed matter. You need logs that are tough, but more importantly elastic enough absorb glancing blows against rocks and other debris without splintering. Use a wood that is too brittle and the logs will break apart at the first serious impact.
That is exactly what happened during the first serious rapids we hit the morning of the second day. The far-aft quarter of the raft was pine, which turned out to be one of the poorest woods we could have chosen. A jarring blow against a jagged rock and we lost three outer logs. That unbalanced the raft and we had to scramble to keep it from getting swamped. Despite our best efforts we still lost a crate full of ammunition and one of the neo-Dumas’ young element-bodies when the logs splintered. We did not know of the latter until an hour later when we finally entered calm water and thought to count tarantulas.
Only after we left the mountains and began our winding way through the vast country of foothills did we encounter our first tribe of sentients, a small nomad band of about three dozen humans who called themselves H’rai. First contact was somewhat halting, as they obviously mistrusted our admittedly strange-looking band, but eventually we were able to get them talking enough for our belt-translators to absorb enough of their word structure to allow rudimentary communication. Louis and I traded a few well-placed medical treatments and healing spells (easing an old woman’s arthritis, several rashes from what looked like poison oak, and an animal bite that had begun to fester) for some food and several hours’ company. All members of the tribe painted themselves head to foot in elaborate patterns with powdered dung and affected many ivory piercings. They were somewhat sophisticated for a people who the KN would classify as having an advancement level of “Prehistoric,” with recurve bows and what looked like woven plant fiber clothing. According to them, there was an entire “nation” of H’rai further along the river, which they called the Amiriq, from which they had traded their more advanced tools for animal hides and furs.
This was exciting news for us; the tools carried by the nomadic H’rai indicated a fairly sophisticated home-grown technology, and the fact they traded with outlying peoples indicated an advanced economic and governmental structure of some kind, perhaps even at the city-state level.
Unfortunately, the nomad H’rai could tell us very little about their cousins, as they only met with them once a year or so to trade. They would tell us that they were strange, but not nearly as strange as we. They got no argument from us there.
Over the next few weeks we met other nomad tribes and managed to repeat our healings-for-food-and-information deal with most of them. Only one became belligerent as we approached, thumping arrows into the water around us as we angled toward the shore, but several very loud bursts from Amethyst’s assault rifle quickly put a stop to that.
The weather soon turned miserable as one storm front after another battered the countryside, and we were forced to spend almost a week camped ashore. Huddling in our tents and under tarps as we tried to get mud-encrusted logs to catch fire was a very unpleasant business. Not for the first time I felt the deep pang of homesickness, yearning for the clean--and dry!--metallic walls of the Tower.
When the quick succession of rains finally ceased, Cloud insisted on delaying our departure so he could go hunting, which he said was best after just such a sustained downpour. Unfortunately, that was when he ran afoul of a Wolfling mated pair.
Wolflings were mammalian bipeds similar to Myotans in that they had very human-like body structures and features, except for the fact that their animal genes came from wolves, not bats. They were somewhat human-sized, with angular wolf-like heads, a covering of shaggy body fur, and
a peculiar digitigrade stance. They looked similar to the half-man, half-canine werewolves I had read about in ancient Earth legends.
Unfortunately, unlike us Myotans, they could never evolve a technical society of their own because of a devastating quirk in their biology. They mated for life, and when the female becomes pregnant she exudes a pheromone that triggers a dramatic, hormone-driven transformation in the male. Over the course of several weeks, he will add over two dozen kilograms of muscle mass, his limbs extending to ape-like proportions. His fur grows coarser and his skin tougher, his claws and fangs becoming curved and razor-sharp. Unfortunately, he also loses much of his human-level sentience, becoming little better than a berserker hunting and killing machine, obsessed with only one thing: providing for and protecting his mate and brood at all costs. Anyone even approaching his family is likely to be rent limb from limb. When the female stops lactating she stops producing the pheromone and the male will transform back to his more human-like state, at least until the next time his mate becomes pregnant.
The transformation sometimes is as frightening to the female as it is to non-Wolflings, especially the first time she sees it happen. That is what happened to Cloud; he ran across a newly-mated female fleeing in terror from her just-transformed male. Cloud, dumb gallant hunter that he is, approached her, fearing she was fleeing from some wild animal, despite her trying to warn him away. It took him some minutes to finally realize what she was, and by then it was almost too late. The male lunged out of the woods and nearly swiped his head off with one blow.
I suppose it is a tribute to Cloud’s skill as a hunter that he managed to stay alive long enough to reach the rest of us, the huge slavering humanoid wolf hot on his heels. The creature had over half a dozen arrows sticking out of it from Cloud’s bow, but that hardly seemed to slow it down. After several harrowing minutes of fighting, we managed to drive it off with a combination of guns and spells.
