“Actually, I feel a little guilty. After all, you’re married.”
“Married…? Ah, my partner. No, it is not the same as on Earth; we bond not for sex but for child, or perhaps children. Your customs on Earth are too strict, I think, that is why there is so much strife, so much restlessness. When I work for a few weeks down on Earth, in Ascension, a woman who also worked there one day killed her husband. In jealousy of another woman, it was said. I remember the words, ‘husband,’ ‘wife.’ A very bad custom, I think, that makes things like that happen.”
“Perhaps.”
“But this does not relax you, it is not the problem, I think.” He pushed up on one elbow, his face over hers. “You do not like to talk about yourself, I have noticed. We come through all this together, and still I know little more about you than was on your file.”
“What was on my file?” She couldn’t help stiffening defensively.
“Hardly anything. What is it like, Australia? Like Elysium, it has an Outback, I think, but no more the aborigines.”
“I haven’t been there in years.”
“Not even to see your family?”
“I don’t—My mother’s dead. My father…well, he’s a drunk, mostly. Spent all my earnings on a ranch in the Outback, went to pieces after my mother died.” Her uncle there, too. Uncle Mishio. She didn’t want to think of him, or of her sister. Poor Hiroko, the brief riddle of her farewell message.
“You do not have to say, if you do not wish it.”
Dorthy kissed him and felt his lips relax in a smile. She suggested, “You talk, if you want to, I don’t mind.” Even though she did. But they were close now, as close as they could be, and she felt that his talk was an outlet for the pricking of his fear.
“All I try to say, before, was what started me on this road, I think. I wonder if I would be here now if I had not wasted afternoon after afternoon lying among dry grass with heavy binoculars growing sweaty in my hands while I watched the really rather boring to and fro of the aborigines among their round mud huts. You know, I see how people live, and it is as limited as the abos. For all the exploration, all the expeditions, how many people ever look up at the stars, how many wonder what is out there? My first day here, I walked away from the place where they were setting up Camp Zero, much machinery around a great hole they dig for the command centre. It was night then, the sun had not risen. And it was so very cold. Lights were blazing everywhere and people were shouting and banging away at girders and panelling. It was not how I thought it would be. So I walked away from it all, over the ridge so the lights were just a glow against the dark sky. There is a crater…”
“I know,” Dorthy said. She felt sleepy and comfortable, closed her eyes against the red light.
Kilczer said, “I sat down on a boulder at the edge of the rim, the air so cold it was like little knives in the back of my throat, no light but the stars above and the little pinlight of my suit heater. Sat there for maybe two hours looking at the stars as if I had not seen them before. Not so very different from Novaya Rosya or Earth, we have not come all that far. When I return, Colonel Chung spits blood, thought the enemy had got me. I think she is a little paranoid.”
“So I gather. Was it her idea to dig the command centre so deep?”
Kilczer stiffened slightly. When he spoke, Dorthy knew that he was not telling the truth. “On orders from orbital command it was built. I do not know what they think they protect themselves from.” But he knew all right; yet what he knew Dorthy couldn’t quite tell. Something final…But it slipped away. He was in the Navy, she remembered: of course.
“You sleep?” Kilczer asked.
“Nearly.” But she lay awake a long time, trying to grasp what he was hiding from her, the same thing she had glimpsed in Colonel Chung’s mind. A danger, some dark, final deed, and the buried command centre was connected with it.
When they awoke, Kilczer started to make love to Dorthy again; but she resisted, pushing away and declaring that she was ready to get on, they had a long walk ahead of them. The sudden desire she had felt was quite gone; and besides, the little maggot of hidden knowledge within his otherwise unblemished candour nagged at her.
So she stood and suggested that they both take a swim. “I feel absolutely filthy, and we might not get another chance.”
“I think not. We do not know what lives in the water.”
“Well, there are no large carnivores on land, except for the herders, so why should there be any in the water?” She pulled down the top of her coveralls, undid the halter that cupped her small breasts, kicked out of the coveralls’ legs and walked into the cold black water. Her toes gripped rotting reed stems and oozing mud. When she was thigh-deep she threw herself forward, gasping at the water’s cold embrace but doggedly swimming out a few metres before turning, treading water, and calling to Kilczer to come in. But he refused, almost sullenly, and shied away from the water she playfully splashed at him.
It was too cold to stay in long. She clambered ashore and began to blot herself dry with her coveralls, aware now of their rank smell, of the dried sweat of many days walking, of her illness. The drops of water that clung to the down of her arms gleamed like blood, like smooth dull flecks of ruby and carnelian, in the light of the huge, dim sun that hung high above the black lake, hugely mirrored in it.
“There’s nothing out there,” she said to Kilczer. “You should try it. Invigorating.” She rubbed her hair, and Kilczer politely looked away from the upward tug of her breasts.
As she pulled on her coveralls he said, “I will hunt breakfast,” and was gone before she had finished dressing, ashamed of his fear.
Slowly she fastened the snaps of her boots, then shook back wet hair and started to braid it, beginning to be annoyed by Kilczer’s presumption. He thought that making love had settled something between them, but like most women Dorthy knew that the act was only a part of a greater whole, a synthesis she had always resisted. Never more than three times? She had enjoyed most of her partners only once; half of them she hadn’t even stayed the night with. Admittedly it was not a great number. But she knew well enough why she had resisted Kilczer’s waking advances; not to sink into the other, not to have to open up. But here she was with Kilczer every minute, in a way she had never been with anyone before, and he obviously expected her to reciprocate his openness. Well, she wouldn’t, she decided, and where the hell was he anyway? She pushed through the reeds, looked up and down the margin between forest and water, and saw no sign. Scared of creatures in the water that weren’t there, and then compensates by running off to waste shot at creatures that probably weren’t edible anyway, she thought. But this articulation of her annoyance only made plain her need for his company.
It was more than half an hour before he returned, empty-handed. They broke camp and set off, each chewing a stick of jerky. Kilczer kept asking Dorthy if she was all right, and his well-meaning solicitude irked her; that and the burning itching sensation, growing as she walked, that always preceded her period. No doubt brought on by their lovemaking. She trailed sullenly behind him, and after a while he gave up trying to talk with her and walked silently ahead, the rifle slung on one shoulder, the little orange bag bumping his left hip.
In this fashion they walked for a dozen hours, stopping only when Kilczer brought down a fleeing creature something like a dog-sized antelope with horny ridges protruding either side of its blunt head, each knife-edged blade as long as Kilczer’s arm. But it was six-legged, and they left the carcass untouched.
The shore here was rocky, a shelf of granite undercut by the slow-lapping water, scrub growing in whorled declivities and hollows. The forest was shrunken to a distant dark line. Ahead, the rimwall, which they would have to climb to reach Colonel Ramaro’s camp, rose into a bank of haze.
They camped in the lee of a cairn of huge boulders, chewing more jerky for their supper; even after soaking it in water it was barely palatable. Hunger scraped at the bottom of Dorthy’s stomach, and little cramps were starting lo
wer down; she went off, tore a strip of cloth from the sleeve of her coveralls, and bound it between her legs, hating this necessity. Men have it so easy, they don’t know.
When, later, Kilczer reached out and put an arm around her shoulders, she told him matter-of-factly that she was bleeding.
“I don’t mind that,” he said gently.
“Well I do,” Dorthy said, and moved out of his loose embrace.
Kilczer rolled over and sat up, kicked at the little fire she had built; sparks flew up, whirling constellations. Flames staggered blue and white across grooved fragments of driftwood. Once he looked across at her as if he were going to say something. But he didn’t. They settled down to sleep separately.
The next day was much the same, although Dorthy managed to shoot, over a distance of almost half a kilometre, a large animal that had been watching them from the top of a shallow rise.
Kilczer had wasted a dozen shots without even scaring it before giving in to Dorthy’s requests to try. The stock fitted snugly into her shoulder, against her cheek. She sighted carefully, allowing for windage, gently squeezed the trigger. The smack of the recoil was like a congratulatory pat as, far across shelving rock and scattered scrub and boulders, the ungainly animal collapsed as if its legs had all at once been cut away.
Kilczer accepted the rifle without word and they trekked over to Dorthy’s prize; she counted just over six hundred paces, easily half a kilometre.
Her shot had hit the animal’s flat head just behind one of its large, slightly bulging eyes; there was very little blood. Its four legs were long and many-jointed, a swollen body slung between them like the belly of a spider. Except for the ruff of reddish fur at the neck its deeply wrinkled hide was naked. Jaws like those of a mechanical digger gaped to show many flat-topped teeth.
“This is not mentioned in Chavez’s catalogue as I recall,” Kilczer said, as he slowly circled it. “It is perhaps from Earth?”
“I don’t know much about creatures that were living a million years ago, but I don’t think so.”
“Nor I.” He examined it for a while, cut into its hide, dipped his finger into the blood and tasted before pronouncing it edible. He cut thick slabs of muscle, marbled with fat, from its haunches, and these they broiled on flat rock in the centre of a fire; Dorthy ate tentatively at first, then with avid appetite. The meat was delicious, slightly sweet but juicy and fibrous. She ate until she could eat no more and lay back, feeling something close to contentment. “All I need now is a good pinot noir.” she said.
“I am sorry?” Kilczer was shading his eyes as he looked at the sweep of shore that they would have to follow around the lake.
“Red wine. A glass of that, and maybe a baked avocado to follow. What’s wrong?” Because he had scrambled to his feet, still shading his eyes.
“I see smoke, I think.”
Dorthy stood, too. Far in the distance, the forest crept down to the shore. Something seemed to float above the trees there, as small in the distance as her thumbnail, difficult to make out against the dark, star-flecked sky.
“Could it be a camp? Andrews? But why would they need a fire?”
“Perhaps a camp, but perhaps not people,” Kilczer said.
They watched the little distant cloud for some time, but it did not change. Eventually Dorthy lay down, the hardness of the rock not much alleviated by bundles of scrub, and said, “Come get some sleep.”
“You are right; we must get nearer to see,” Kilczer said, and lay down heavily beside her. After a while he snuggled closer, and Dorthy put an arm around his waist, slowly stroked his side. He turned his head, and they kissed.
This time it was slow, a slow building rhythm that climbed a little and stopped, climbed again. Dorthy felt as if she were edging towards a great drop, moved her hips to clasp him deep within herself. There, the edge, there Oh. She fell, softly fell. Oh. Oh. Kilczer thrust, thrust again, gasped. She pulled his heavy head down, and they slept.
She woke with a start from a dream of running in red light across some vast plain in pursuit of something, something…but the dream was already fading. There was a burning edge to her bladder and she went off to relieve it. Still bleeding. She retied the clout and pulled up her coveralls, looked along the shore to the distant forest: the smudge of smoke was still there. Kilczer slept on undisturbed, his face untroubled and innocent in the perpetual red light; her Talent was quiet, she could sense nothing. Tired, too tired to speculate about the smoke, she lay down beside him again, and slept.
The smoke was still there when they started off again. Kilczer suggested that it might be a forest fire. “Too big to be a campfire, I think, but it could have been started by one.”
They walked on. The shore curved back on itself and the rocky margin narrowed, vanishing in a tangle of muddy backwater creeks and boulders and crooked trees. Dorthy and Kilczer thrashed through this as best they could, but it was not easy to pick a path through the dense growth, and again and again they were forced to wade scummed ponds that painted their legs up to the thighs with black mud. At last they gave up and turned to strike farther inland.
Kilczer said, “We turn back towards the fire, or perhaps it is farther from the water than I thought.”
“Suppose it is a forest fire?” Dorthy remembered the swift fierce conflagrations of the Australian coast.
“We take the chance.”
“In case it is Andrews.”
“To be honest, I do not think so. But we must see. If it is a forest fire we can always jump in the lake, yes?”
“I’d rather take a boat ride.”
“I will see what I can do.”
As the land rose it became drier and less rocky; soon they were walking between low, spaced trees, easily picking their way among roots that humped and crooked over the needle-carpeted floor. The nodes of the tree branches seemed different, more swollen. Some were dusted with a powdery stuff that Dorthy and Kilczer kept knocking into the air as they pushed their way through; it made Kilczer cough.
Eventually he plucked the soft tip of one of the branches and examined it as he walked. “Now look here,” he said at last. “Like little flowers in there, spore-producing bodies. The rain perhaps triggered them, or the sunlight. I wonder if they do this every day. Planetary day, that is.”
“Does it matter?” Dorthy ducked under a low, spreading branch, stepped over a gnarled hoop of root.
“Remember the bacteria that produce most of the oxygen, in the sea? They were bioengineered. I am wondering if these trees were, too. Adapted, at least.”
“But what’s so special about bioengineering? They did it all the time in the Age of Waste.”
“After the Age of Waste, in fact, but before the war and the beginning of the Interregnum. But people then did not build up organisms from nothing but an idea. Spores…I wonder how far they blow. It could mean that each hold is not genetically isolated; it would explain why the remotes found no difference in the ecological systems of the holds they sampled, no genetic drift. Well, for the plants at least. But the animals are the same also, I think. Perhaps all the junk has been deleted from their genetic codes.”
“Civilization could have crashed only a thousand years ago. Or it could still be here. What junk, anyway?”
“About half the genes we carry in our cells do nothing. Some of it is parasitic DNA, riding our chromosomes simply to be reproduced by division of our cells. Internal viruses if you like, never expressed, cryptic. Some of the rest is vestigial, no longer with a function. Cut it all out and the potential for mutation plummets. That is why I wonder if everything here has either been built or modified. Engineered. The star up there will not vary its output for hundreds of millions of years, so no climatic changes to shake up the ecology. Maybe that is why the enemy chooses red dwarfs, do you think? They are taking the long view. Think of all the red dwarfs in the Galaxy, Dorthy. What percentage of radiating stars? I do not count the brown and black dwarfs, they are no more than very large planets for a
ll purposes. What is it, fifty, sixty per cent?”
“More than eighty per cent, if you don’t count the substars. Eighty per cent in the spiral arms anyway, more in the halo stars above the plane of the spiral arms.”
“More than a hundred billion stars like that one up in the sky, then. Of course, many are short-term variables. But still…And planets around red dwarfs will have no native ecology, easier to seed after you have planoformed them.”
“As long as you know how to spin them up, overcome the captured rotation. But I suppose there are any number of theories.”
“One for each of the scientists down here, I expect. Andrews makes the most noise, but we all have our own ideas, that is only natural. Well, I was hoping we could make the field small.”
“Narrow it down. I’ll do my best, if we ever get out of this.”
Kilczer pushed aside a branch and was enveloped in a cloud of dusty spores. He beat the air in front of his face, and when he had finished coughing he said, “I hold you to that. Come on.”
Still climbing, they began to circle back towards the shore, towards the fire. The forest opened out and patches of sky were visible through gaps in the canopy, glimpses of the huge soft sun. Dorthy mused on red dwarfs and other suns, trying to imagine the bubble of explored space within the great turning wheel of the Galaxy, a diatom in a lake, a jellyfish hung in some dark sea, the smallest atoll in Earth’s wide oceans. A few dozen suns in the triple-armed swarm of four hundred billion. Lost in reductive, recursive calculations, she didn’t notice that Kilczer had stopped, and almost bumped into him.
Ahead, through layered pine boughs, thick skeins of smoke rose against the dark sky.
The ground dropped away abruptly, trees gripping the rim of the steep slope with gnarled roots as they leaned over it. Below was a wide river valley, black water looped in its broad bottom. The trees on the flanking slopes had been felled, their stripped trunks lying in criss-cross patterns, and great fires burned along the bank opposite, sending up black columns of smoke. Even at that distance, the herders moving among them were plainly visible.
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 14
