The Valkyries of Andromeda

by Lindsay Peet

CHAPTER FOUR

  We’d left Sandy Aggo a few nights before. The previous nights after we’d eaten I’d settled in for stretches and meditation while Jedub and Lordano would huddle together, their whispers hissing and slithering to me as they plotted ways to get rid of me and keep the treasure. Now, suddenly, they decided we all had to talk, like now that there was nothing to kill me for we’d be buddies. After some pointless exchanges, a kind of eulogy for Drishter, then jokes and jibes, Jedub got to the point.

  “Boss, tell us again, please, how the hell these two balls are treasure?” demanded Jedub. Fair enough; couldn’t say it wasn’t a question I wasn’t asking myself.

  “It’s a treasure because the man paying us to find it says it’s a treasure. I don’t know more than that, and I don’t need to know more than that.”

  “But … but … surely sensibleness has that treasures should as treasures recognizable be, yes?” chimed in Lordano.

  “Look, fellas, I’m as surprised and mystified and disappointed and baffled and, and, surprised as you are. If you like, we can check out the other three sites on the list, see if maybe I got it wrong, and there really is some quaternium-4 buried out here somewhere. We’ve still got the pick-mattocks handy.” They emphatically shook their heads “NO!” “Well, that settles that, then.” Either they trusted my judgment, or they really hated digging – my money was on the latter.

  “But who gave you the job, Boss? What kind of fella pays men to go to a planet and dig up beach balls? And a desert planet, at that!”

  “Beach balls and sand together are going, no?” Lordano nudged Jedub.

  I sighed – I had hoped to get to stretches sooner than later, but here I gave up. “Like I told you when I hired you on, and again the first night, and a couple times on the trail – a guy hired me in a bar on another planet. I call him ‘Mr. Stanley,’ as my kind of little joke – it’s one-in-a-million that’s his real name. He called it a treasure, and he gave me the co-ordinates, and he’s payin’ the bills, includin’ your pay. Now, he got the idea from a grizzled old coot who was peddlin’ a map roundabouts, and if anybody knew what this was all about for sure, the old coot did. But I’m lookin’ around and I don’t see him here, so you might as well just let it rest for the night. And let yourself rest, too!”

  Jedub’s eyes were flitting across the horizon nervously. “Boss, you checked out this desert, right? Any kind of critters we should be worried about?” Funny, now that they didn’t see themselves as predators they were worried they’d be prey. I looked around at the odd angular shadows of the tescoreos and boulders and curved arms of the guarosa ‘trees’ looming around us and understood the concern. How should I play this? If I conjured up a canny predator might it keep them in line, or make them too nervous? Because the fact was, the most dangerous animals in the desert were the small ones who managed to bite or sting you just before you stepped on ‘em. After, of course, your fellow man.

  “Nope, no big fierce beasties. They’ve got the kaiotis, who’re generally timid unless you threaten their pups, and they’ve got the big ol’ ‘horses’ and ‘mules’, which you know already.

  “And hate. How they ever got a riding animal to be both bumpy and nauseating is beyond me, but the Mobahey horse is that animal,” said Jedub.

  “Yes, it’s an experience I could do without,” I said. “But ya know, speaking of animals, there’s a little drama that plays out here, around the tescoreo bush, like that one there. There’s a spidery kind of critter that spins a web – it gathers up the ferny branches of the bush and bundles ‘em together, so they droop down, and lays its eggs inside that bundle. When the dew or rain comes it moistens the eggs so they can hatch, and also runs down the branches to the dirt just below, carrying the little spiderlets away. Now, living just below the surface, in its nice cool little cave among the tescoreo roots, is the Mobahey mouse-mole. And now and then a kaioti digs up the roots of the tescoreo, avoiding the spidery-guy and his little hatchlings, and gets the mouse-mole.”

  I smiled at how it all worked out, like a kind of life-poem or play.

  “Yeah, that’s fascinating, Boss, thanks for sharing that. Did you know that on the remote planet of Temero lives the Temero burro. I guess they call it that because, hell, it burrows. But it’s also kinda like a donkey, so there ya go. So this donkey/burro guy, he digs his home into the dirt, and lives in it. And it just goes to show you that, no matter how far away you go, you’re still gonna find assholes.”

  What do you do with a guy like that? Ignore him, I decided. “But don’t you get it, Jedub? The whole point is survival, every living thing does it, in the desert and everywhere else – you use whatever you have available to make it, all your wits and gifts and luck to get through to tomorrow. That’s my goal, first, last, and always. Because the insurance payout, the brass band, the medal, none of those counts for shit if you’re dead.”

  “Rightness has he, Jedub. When a consciousness lost is, so there also is a world lost.” With that, Lordano got up and went to the balls, still draped on the mule’s backside. Bending over he seemed to be trying to peer inside them, through the netting. “Come you here over! There something you might want to see is, speaking of worlds lost and found we are!”

  Really. Duly I got up and mimicked his stance. Inside the balls were faint lights, swirling and misting; in one ball yellow lights, in the other red.

  Kinda cool, but that still didn’t make them treasure. Hell, I’d seen better gizmos in half the bars I’d ever been in, and there were lots of those. After awhile it was obvious that swirling gentle lights was all the balls would do, so after trying to hypnotize themselves with the lights Lordano and Jedub gave up and headed to their bedrolls, muttering and mumbling with every step. I stayed up and stretched and meditated.

  The desert’s a great place for such stuff, if you don’t have idiots asking questions all the time. The peace allows you to sink deep, and the subtleties of desert survival always intrigue me – in fact, the subtleties of survival anywhere are my life study, you might say. I couldn’t say exactly how, but this little drama of tescoreo struggles reminded me of the stuff I grew up on back home on Kipple, finding how to escape or find shelter or to blend in and make my way anywhere, to be anybody’s friend, and also to fight hard and without rules when I had to.

  Because it is all about surviving, you see. That is Nature’s (and my) paramount value; like I said, if you’re dead, nothing else really matters. So you take the odd jobs, don’t ask too many questions, and keep one eye on the horizon for the next prospect while also keeping an eye on your backside.

  As I sat with locked legs my mind never really engaged with the serenity and purity of the nature surrounding me, and settled instead among the intrigues that were my human environment. My times in the cultures of men, whether I was called Zhav, or Chaff, or Jaf taught me to be flexible, versatile, to read actions and not words, and to be vigilant for the turns of fortune and loyalty. More slowly than usual calm settled upon me and my consciousness focused.

  Jedub and Lordano were snoring softly when I sensed a change in my surroundings. Somehow the balls were drawing me into their history, and I had a vision of sorts, or a dream, where I was an old man.

  I could feel my body was still young enough to do what I willed it to do, but old enough that it complained. Something had lured me to Mobahey’s desert, to the cave, but I couldn’t have said what. Only that this meant something, promised to fill a hole I’d never felt before, and would be more than anything else in my life had or could.

  I had sat in that cave for the longest time, but time did not matter, I did not feel its passing. My body and its demands for attention were ignored, and so it had quieted, as my mind explored further than any human mind had before, deeper into the mystery.

  Just as in reality, in my dream I sat as the blistering days and frosty nights ruled the desert outside the cave, and I basked in the contact of long-gone non-humans. Such a wonder -- their shared universe was so di
fferent from mine, their drives and desires so powerful yet subtle, their achievements immense and eternal, and still … what had happened to them? And what was it they’d left behind, that had lured this old body, from which I’d launched thoughts into the cosmos?

  Globes of color spun and whirled about in impossible hues with no human names, faster and faster, blending and re-combining into astral rainbows, anchored always in some odd unnameable formations, such as would be apparent with alien eyes, and mapped with inhuman sensibilities. The draw was here, in Mobahey’s desert, and I had to find it. But I would need help.

  Gently I lowered my gaze from the third eye, excited and exhausted by my journey. I looked about, just in time to see the hatted silhouette settle behind a boulder. That was no kaioti, nor guarosa, I could see that. No need to chase it down or fret, though; I knew exactly who it was, what he wanted. We’d have our meeting in good time, and then I planned to get some answers. I sensed I hadn’t been the first to have the vision.

  Next morning we got an early start, trying to beat the worst of the heat. My vote was to take it easy, spend two days getting back to Sandy Aggo. After all, we had food for another week and a half, and it wasn’t like banditos were lurking on the way, awaiting an opportunity to steal our balls. My companions, however, were done with this whole expedition, and were eager to get back to town – for what, they couldn’t say, although I figured a bath would be a good start.

  Going out we’d been eager for adventure, and tolerated the place; now, tired and frustrated, it was all torment. You can see why I was kind of grumpy.

  So, we headed on back to town, around the hills, past the scarps and draws, and lastly across the great talcy dry-lake bed as darkness settled in good and thick as it can only in the desert. Anyhow, we finally descended into town – it was an underground town mostly, with skylights here and there -- around midnight; too tired to talk, almost too sore to walk, we unpacked, stabled the horses and mules, and got ourselves some rooms. My head hit the pillow not long before dawn.

  When I awoke around noon I had things to do. I bathed, got some decent food, went to the bank for a draw to pay the boys, and finally left the signal for a meeting with Wanliet that evening.

  Mr. Stanley wouldn’t know if I took one day extra; hell, for all he knew we were still out eating sand at Site Number Three. He could dally while I had a quick meeting with the scruffy old coot with the hat, Wanliet.