“They are being pushed hard,” Kilczer said. “See, they do not even eat plants, simply trample them.”
Dorthy said nothing. She still felt a strange remote clarity, but felt stronger than she had when perched on the rock, was no longer afraid but simply hungry and thirsty. During one of their frequent rests, she and Kilczer chewed a little of the emergency chocolate he’d rescued from the wrecked tent. The sweet bitterness left her thirstier but was reviving. Savouring the last crumbs, Dorthy squatted on her haunches and sifted a handful of sand through her fingers. Grains clung to her skin. Mica flecks. Quartz. Realization of the enormity of their isolation was slowly settling around her, like a cold cloak. For all her brave talk it seemed impossible that they could climb up to the camp beside the lake, live off the land without succumbing to allergic reaction and histamine shock or simply dying of exhaustion and exposure…yet Camp Zero was five hundred klicks away across empty desert. There was no other way.
Kilczer sprawled a little way off. One outflung hand rested on the stock of the rifle; with the other he scratched at his swept-back hair, looking off at the low cliffs, nervous, on edge. Sand caked his uniform coveralls down the small of his back.
Dorthy said, “I’m rested now. Let’s get on.”
He stood slowly, then bent over and coughed into his fist, afterwards spat on to the ground. “I could drink much water, if we had it.”
Dorthy licked her cracked lips. “Marta Ade said something about water underneath a dried-up riverbed like this one.”
“That was different place. Besides, how do we get at it?”
“We dig with our hands. Come on, it’s worth trying.”
She knelt and began to scoop away handfuls of sand and pebbles, and after a moment Kilczer joined her. They dug for fifteen minutes, Kilczer in the end using a knife to loosen the freezing subsoil, Dorthy scooping it out. The pit grew, a metre deep, twice as wide. There was moisture, but not enough to collect. Dorthy sat back, sucking at a torn fingernail.
“No damned good,” Kilczer said in frustration.
She said, “There’s an old trick I remember reading about. There are plants over there in the lee of the cliff that the critters missed trampling, see them? They must tap into this.”
“To be sure. But the chance of allergic reaction…” He brushed his hands on his thighs, switched off the knife and put it away.
“But what are we going to eat? Sooner or later we’ll have to try them. Anyway, didn’t one of the—didn’t Marta Ade say that the plants were edible?”
“Weird proteins, high metal concentrations. But I suppose we die anyway if we do not eat.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Dorthy uprooted a handful of soft succulent. Dark juice oozed over her fingers, but when she made to lick it off Kilczer caught her wrist. “Wait. Use this.” He wrapped a scrap of orange cloth around the broken stems, squeezed. Clear liquid blebbed the weave; Dorthy bent and sucked. The moisture sank into the parched cavern of her mouth, bitter but welcome. When no more would come she handed the cloth to Kilczer, who tried with a fresh handful. “Not too much now,” he said. “Just in case. Come on, we go. When we are tired we stop. How are you, Dr. Yoshida?” He squinted into her face. “Your pupils are both the same size, so no concussion, I think.”
Gingerly Dorthy touched the pulpy skin at the back of her head. “I’ll be all right. Come on, let’s go before we stiffen up.”
Walking became an automatic process. After a while Dorthy could only concentrate on the next step, on placing her boot in the waffle print Kilczer had left moments before. They rested more and more frequently, each time sucking a few drops of moisture from a plant stem, no longer thinking of the possible reaction their immune systems might raise to the alien proteins, aware only of their unslaked thirst.
The canyon narrowed, its walls growing higher. Still they followed the trail left by the critter herd. No more bodies now; Kilczer said that the weakest must have been weeded out. As Dorthy followed him she felt a dizzy sense of expansion, glimpses of Kilczer’s thoughts like oxen plodding around and around a water lift. The forest-ringed lake with the mountains rising beyond; the nightmare parade of critters; Ade’s smashed body, her unmarked face receiving a handful of dirt; the lake again; a dim glimpse of a naked woman turning towards him in a shadowy room. She accepted these images as a page accepts ink, too tired to think about them. Her legs ached to the bone now, and if Kilczer had suggested they stop she would have fallen on the spot. But he plodded on grimly, in more pain than she, and she shared his grim resolve, too muddled to be able to realize that it was not her own.
And there was something else.
It was weak at first, scarcely distinguishable from Kilczer’s fragmented thoughts, but growing clearer with each step. Watchfulness, a hesitant fear, skittish, fading and returning, but each time returning more strongly.
And then an image, two strange spindly things creeping forward, their distorted shapes radiating menace, danger. Dorthy stopped, and after a moment Kilczer turned to her.
“There’s something watching us,” she said.
He unslung the rifle and looked about cautiously. “Your Talent is working? Where is it?”
“Somewhere up ahead, high, looking down on us. No, wait.” She whirled just as the creature bounded from shadow at the top of a gravel slope, starting a small avalanche as it crabbed down on all fours. Dorthy and Kilczer stepped back and it reared on its hind legs, its arms extended as if in desperate entreaty. A middle pair of vestigial limbs were clasped across the swag of its black-furred belly. Its hood of skin flared around its narrow face; beneath the snout, black lips wrinkled back from ridges of sharp-edged horn.
For a moment Dorthy was overwhelmed. Then sand spat up metres to the left of the herder, which gyred and sinuously ran, on all fours again, twisting around humped boulders as a second shot blew fragments of stone. Gone. Dorthy came to herself just as Kilczer caught her arm.
“I’m sorry, I missed,” he said. He meant it. Drops of sweat stood on his white forehead. “It will do no good going after it, the way it ran.”
“A herder.”
“To be sure.”
His dissonant thoughts frustrated her attempt to locate the creature. She said, “I don’t think it meant to harm us. It was trying to protect something.”
Kilczer said halfheartedly, “I suppose we could look around up there.”
They did not have to search very hard. Above the scree slope, the cliff was split by a high crevice, and wedged deep within it was a blunt-ended shape encased in something like dried leather. Ridged and wrinkled, it was a good metre taller than Kilczer. Dorthy sensed nothing in this enigmatic form, not even the simple knowledge of self that all but the most primitive of terrestrial animals possessed. It might just as well have been a seedpod or a suitcase.
“I will be damned,” Kilczer said, pushing back lank hair. “I swear this.”
“You know what it is?”
“I make a guess. What is Portuguese for the transitional form between larval and adult form of an insect?”
“A chrysalis. Or a pupa.”
“On Novaya Rosya we have bees, you understand? I have the beginning of a glimmering, Dr. Yoshida, of what this is about.”
“I’m not going to read your mind to find out. Look, that herder might be coming back. Oughtn’t we to leave this?”
“I just want to see…” Kilczer took out his knife, pressed the stud. The bright blade hummed. As he reached forward, the tall shape chittered; Kilczer calmly withdrew the knife, moved it forward again. When the blade touched the thing’s skin, the pod jerked and twisted forward, the chittering suddenly loud in the confined space. Kilczer knocked into Dorthy as both fled, tumbling and sliding down the scree in loose falls of grit and sand. Kilczer fetched up against a boulder, coughing weakly. Dorthy picked herself up gingerly, flexing each of her joints in turn. But nothing was broken.
“Yoi-dore kega sezu,” she said. “Drunkards bre
ak no bones.” After a moment she began to laugh. “It couldn’t have hurt us. We’re crazy…”
Kilczer grinned and began to slap dust from his coveralls. “A defensive reaction, of course. Well, I think we leave it. I have a feeling we will find more.” He shouldered the rifle, turned to look up the canyon. “Come on, Dr. Yoshida. We had best get away from here, I think. That nursemaid may come back soon, and I am not so good a shot with this rifle.”
“It’s a pellet rifle, and you’re handling it as if it were a laser. Allow for windage, and don’t hold it so tightly. Squeeze the trigger when you fire, don’t jerk it.”
“You have used one of these?”
She’d once gone on a hunting expedition in the Philippines Preserve as part of her job, nursemaid to a wealthy neurotic, when she’d been whoring her Talent. She said, “Maybe you should let me have it. I might have a chance of hitting something, at least.”
“In all this wilderness I feel better if I carry it. I promise to take your advice.”
As they walked on, Dorthy felt a little more alert, residue of the adrenalin surge from her panicked flight. She tried and failed to detect the herder that had surprised them, then asked Kilczer, “Are you going to tell me what you suspect? Do you think that that thing was the chrysalis of a critter?”
“Ah, that indeed is the question.”
“And what does it turn into?” Then she understood. “A herder? But that’s crazy! The herders eat critters!”
“As that mythological character, Medea, who ate her children. But the herders have so many of them. You might call it a kind of population control. It would explain why there were no immature forms of herder to be found. Rather, why we did not recognize them for what they were. Just wait until I tell Andrews and McCarthy about this!”
“We have to get back first.”
“That is what we do,” Kilczer said, “through all this damned wilderness.”
“I would have thought you’d be appreciating it; as a biologist, that is.”
“I am specialist in nervous system activity, with original training as a medical technician. I pick up some biology when I am on Earth, but I am no xenoecologist. On Novaya Rosya all sensible people stay in cities and farm domes, only rogues and insane persons such as zithsa hunters roam outside. I came out to this place because it is necessity, as no one was willing to bring a herder to Camp Zero. But had I known I would be walking through it, I would have thought again.”
“I wish I had the choice,” Dorthy said.
They went on, following the trampled tail left by the herd of critters up the gentle winding slope between high rock walls. The sun peeped huge and swollen above the canyon’s rim, its apparent immobility mocking the passage of time. At last Kilczer slowly and carefully laid down the rifle and sat on a water-smoothed stone. Dorthy more or less collapsed beside him, lying for a long time without thinking, simply breathing hard and feeling blood throb in her feet. Blistered, she was sure. The light boots she wore were not made for hiking.
After a while Kilczer got to his feet and cast around, pausing now and then to cough drily. Dorthy sat and watched him as he wandered a ways up the canyon, wandered back.
“I think the herders and their children leave this road, went up the slope there.” He gestured at a steep shelf of rock that slanted to the rim of the canyon. Above it could be seen a dark line of trees; they looked like pines.
Dorthy worked off her boots, wincing as she pulled them over her swollen ankles. “How far do you think we’ve gone?”
“At most I say fifteen klicks. How do you feel?”
“I don’t think I have a concussion. I’ve certainly worked up a good set of blisters, though.” She looked at her timetab; it was over twelve hours since the herd of critters had smashed through the camp, twelve hours since Ade and Chavez had been killed.
Kilczer, still standing, tapped his fingers impatiently against his thigh. “I suppose we can stop here for a time.”
“We have to pace ourselves, or we’ll peg out like those critters we passed farther down. Have you any idea when the herd might stop?”
“Perhaps not until it reaches the keep. I suppose we follow their trail, the herders must know where to go. Well now, you wait here, I will take a look at the top of the slope there. Here, take this.”
He tossed her the knife and turned away before she could protest at his transparent, foolish bravado. Beneath it, she knew, he was deeply fearful of the stew of random nature into which he had been thrown; like a shipwrecked mariner, he clung tightly to the flotsam and jetsam of civilization that had washed up with him, the rifle and orange bag of oddments. Dorthy could have told him that now it was better to rest, and that anyway she knew more about survival in the wilderness than he, but she was too tired. She watched him climb the long slope; he moved very slowly, and twice stopped, in the even red light a small black figure splayed against the smooth rock. When at last he disappeared over the edge, Dorthy hobbled over to an untrampled cluster of plants and strained juice from their stems; not even a full mouthful. Afterward she prodded her lips with her forefinger, gingerly traced the hot swollen skin there. A reaction, probably. Well, it had to come sooner or later. She was too tired to be anything but resigned to whatever happened, and she sprawled on the sand and waited for Kilczer’s return. But he was gone a long time. Two alternate fantasies vied in her head: that he’d run into a maverick herder and was lying wounded and helpless, perhaps even dead; or that he’d run off, left her because he thought her a liability. After half an hour of this her panic was quite real, and when at last she saw him begin to crab his way down, his arms full of something, relief and happiness flooded her. Here, at least, solitude was unbearable.
Part of Kilczer’s load was a bundle of dry fragrant branches with brittle brown ruffs of needles that he had gathered in the forest above the canyon. He and Dorthy broke these up and built a fire, which he ignited with a catalighter fished from his sack of booty. The branches burned with fitful yellow flame, a cheerful homely bubble sunk in the well of sombre alien light. Kilczer set a flat stone in the centre of the fire and turned to the other thing he’d brought.
Long-bodied, blunt-headed, covered in fine, lapping scales that shimmered in the firelight, it was a little like a cross between an armadillo and a rabbit. Dorthy wondered if it was a relative of the subterranean scavengers they’d seen out on the plain. Certainly the blunt claws on its powerful forelimbs were adapted for digging, and it lacked eyes, long fine vibrissae springing instead from above its snout.
“I pull easily on the trigger as you said,” Kilczer told her a little boastfully. “Two shots.” He took back the knife and set to butchering his kill.
Dorthy was slow to realize what he intended to do with it. “You’re going to eat that?”
“I try it. We cannot live on sap.” He stripped back the hide with an abrupt motion, connective tissue tearing wetly. Bending over the flayed corpse, he began to slice away the thick muscle bunched over the shoulders, laying slivers on the hot stone. As he worked, he told Dorthy, “It probably is not poisonous for us. I think I remember it from Chavez’s catalogue, something from Serenity. The biosphere there is compatible with Earth’s. No nasty glucosides or cyanogen complexes such as Novaya Rosya animals have. Similar amino acid composition, energy-storing molecules very like ATP and NADPH, complex sugar acids on a phosphate backbone to carry the genetic information. This beast has only four limbs; creatures with six, like the herders, have high heavy-metal concentrations in their tissues, use a copper-binding protein in their blood to carry oxygen instead of an iron-binding one as we and this animal use. Blue blood, not red.”
But in the red light of the sun, the blood on his hands was black.
“I thought no one has ever killed one of the herders. How do you know all this?”
Kilczer laid more slivers on the stone within the fire. The first were beginning to sizzle and curl; he flipped them over. “Creatures like the herders, I said. Chavez had catal
ogued perhaps a dozen such, all small. That was why he laid the traps. And you forget the critter Andrews brought back to Camp Zero.” He reached forward and with the point of his knife lifted a sizzling slice; droplets of grease burned orange as they spattered. “Wish me luck,” he said, and took it into his mouth, made a face.
“How is it?”
His jaw staggered. “Tough,” he said, chewing. “But not so bad. Like a muddy sort of pork, perhaps. You do not eat if you wish not. In fact, it might be best, in case there are side effects.”
But the smell had reached Dorthy; her empty stomach clenched. She burned her fingers getting a sliver of meat off the stone, burned her lips as she ate it, but the greasy fibres brought saliva flooding from beneath her tongue, began to silence the clamour of her starved cells. Kilczer allowed half a dozen small slices each. “Any more and we risk an instant reaction, if one is coming; we lose all the goodness we have eaten.”
A silence fell between them. Eventually, Kilczer took out a holocube and watched its two-minute cycle over and over with yearning hopeless nostalgia as the young woman smiled and whispered hoarse Russian endearments. Dorthy had no such comfort; that book was lost. The world will wail thee, like a makeless wife. Exhausted, she lay down on the hard ground and fell into a fitful strung-out doze.
She awoke when something cool and small touched her cheek. Another splashed her forehead; a third hit her eye and made her blink. Raindrops. For a while she lay with her mouth open, letting random drops soothe her lips. The embers around the flat stone hissed and smoked; after a while Kilczer sat up, cursing.
It was raining heavily now.
They picked up their scattered possessions and found partial shelter under a low overhang. Dorthy’s feet had swollen, and she had to slit the sides of her boot to get them on. Rain sheeted down steadily beyond the lip of the overhang; water dripped down Dorthy’s neck.
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 11
