Until today, if I were asked to conjure an image of Dr. Duarte immersed in her element she would be climbing a birch tree to study the leaf structure of parasitic ivy flourishing in its limbs, or perhaps kneeling in a meadow, counting growth nodes on the stems of weeds. I suppose it should not come as a surprise she approaches this challenge in her usual, straight-ahead, do-the-best-she-can manner. That is Duarte.
Father offered up a backhanded compliment by saying how proud her parents would be to see their daughter raising a Cro-Magnon cub–despite the fact it breaks several very important Team regulations. Father was a real ass tonight. I certainly expected better. Since leaving the shelf, his mood has been slowly improving. I need to find a way for Father and the Green Turtles to bury the hatchet and find common ground. If we are to travel together, everyone must make an effort. How can he not see?
Over our communal dinner, I shared the details of Fa’s execution and went to great lengths to explain how far removed Father was from both the location of the rhino attack and also the decision to launch it. I absolutely believe we were too distant for Father to be calling the shots. Do I think the Sons would commit such an atrocity without his express permission? Most of them? No. They fear Father too much. Fa, however, was a bad egg. Was he the only one? Certainly not, but I expressed none of these doubts as I made my case to clear Father’s name.
His attitude by the fire said he didn’t give a whit what anyone thought of him or his actions. He just sat there, watching us shovel porcupine stew into our gobs with a look of mild disgust. The general consensus around the fire held if he did not want any, it left more for us!
Underneath its armor of long, sharp quills, the porcupine was insulated by a layer of fat nine centimeters thick. Each and every quill was tethered to a narrow muscle growing through the fat to give it movement. Those muscles imbued the rich-tasting fat with the most wonderful marbling of meat fibers. Under the storyteller’s direction, the fatty carapace was carefully removed from the porcupine, sectioned into pieces and tossed into cook bags with equal portions of chiga-chiga tubers and boiling water.
The chiga-chiga is a new plant to me, but thankfully the sisters and Leonglauix are well acquainted with the pulpy, starchy roots that are about the size of my head, but not nearly so handsome. If I understand correctly, the chiga-chiga is a fast-growing fern that reaches the height of three to four meters over the course of the summer. The ferns transform the landscape, making it much easier for predators to lurk and sneak. In fall, the plant’s leaves convey a slight narcotic effect when chewed. They can also be dried and later reconstituted into a poultice to use as a topical pain reliever.
Green shoots barely poking free of the soil are all the mighty tubers have managed this early in spring, but they were more than enough to alert us where to dig with spears, makeshift picks and muddy, frozen hands. The spongy roots wept creamy tears as they were stripped clean, quartered and added to the bags along with the first of many, many, hot cook stones. We all took turns rotating hot rocks with cold before Pearl declared the stew finished. Despite the absence of sea salt, herbs or any other flavor enhancers (the cupboard is bare), the stew was fantastic. After months of lean meat and organs, the fatty porcupine and fat-saturated chiga-chiga fibers swimming in a fatty broth were like medicine going down–the best, most nourishing therapeutant you ever tasted.
All these thoughts of food make my eyes grow heavy. I believe I shall give bed another try.
Buona notte.
TRANSMISSION:
Hunter: “Which member of your clan would you rank as most expendable.”
Kaikane: “Expendable?”
Hunter: “The one you could most do without.”
Kaikane: “That’s a pretty fucked up question.”
Hunter: “Indulge me.”
Kaikane: “If you held a gun to my head, I’d pick myself.”
From the log of Paul Kaikane
Recreation Specialist
After the crap the Hunter pulled, it blows me away I was trying to be nice to the son of a bitch. What was I thinking?
We met outside the cave. The rain had stopped and the sun was doing its best to burn away the morning fog when I asked him if he wanted to go fishing. Everybody was walking on eggshells around the guy and I figured what the hell, I’d try to be his friend. He stared at me for at least a half a minute before muttering, “OK,” like he was doing me a favor or something.
The brook that runs by camp looks like it could hold trout, but I wasn’t having any luck with my hooks. I knew there had to be a pretty good-sized stream in the valley to our north. We could hear the roar of its water. I asked the Hunter about it and he said he was just over there and saw plenty salmon jumping. That was enough for me. I collected my gear, kissed Maria and Rhino goodbye and joined him outside the cave in about two seconds flat.
I was happy to let the guy bust a trail through the bushes. The tundra may be squat and all bent over by the wind, but it’s tough as hell. Each bush is like an ancient tree made of dense, hard wood. Trunks or limbs any thicker than my wrist are impossible for us to cut or break. I guess plants need to be tough to survive this climate.
The Hunter didn’t let it stop him. Protected and strengthened by his force field, he led me on a pretty direct route north. It was like following a machine the way he leaped roadblocks and charged through dense brush. I suppose if I was wearing my suit, I could have jumped bushes and climbed through thickets without getting scratched up, but I wasn’t. I kept up as best as I could. A couple times when the going got really tough, he stopped to clear openings for me to slide through.
At least I wore my helmet. Not only did it protect my eyes from getting poked out and my cheeks bloodied, but it also let me keep in touch with the Hunter. For a land that looked more or less flat from camp, there sure were a lot of dips and gulches to cross. We’d climb down into the gloom and it was like walking through a lichen-covered forest from a fairy tale. Fighting for sunlight, the bushes in the gulches had stretched into trees 10 and 20 feet tall. Gnarled and twisted, they could have been a thousand years old. (Living with a botanist, you begin to pay attention to stuff like this.)
When we got separated, which was often, I’d give the Hunter a call on the com line to see which way he wanted me to go. Goddamn it, if I had any sense, I would have ditched that sucker, doubled back to camp, and cleared everybody out before all the shit went down.
I’ve gotta admit, though, even after what happened afterward, the stream was pretty cool. I’ve seen salmon jumping waterfalls before, but never like this. Every other second one would fly out of the rapids and take a flapping crack at the falls.
Fed by melt from the cap, the water was milky aqua blue. I’m used to rivers running muddy and brown, especially ones in spring flood. This water was surreal, like we were just downstream from a blue paint factory. A shitload of bears were prowling both sides of the stream, but a few loud blasts from the Hunter’s stunner sent them running. The one old male that didn’t take the hint was zapped so hard his hair was smoking as the current carried him away.
“You girl scouts had bears lurking within 40 meters of camp before I shooed them away this morning.”
“Appreciate that.”
“Don’t mention it. Now is the time for me to stand back and let the great fisherman go to work. How do you propose landing one of those silver missiles?”
The same question was going through my mind. Even if I could hit one with my spear, the current would just carry it away. There were no reeds to make a net or basket, and my hooks were useless in the milky, fast-running water. In the end, I used my longest spear to make a gaff.
I started by using my meteorite club to break pieces of driftwood until I got one to snap in a way that left it with a sharp point. Pulling a circle of twine from the scrip tied around my waist, I lashed the stick onto the end of my spear at an angle to make a gaff. The building project took a heck of a lot longer than it did to catch all the fish we could ca
rry.
I only needed a couple tries to get my technique down. They were steelhead, about three feet long, more than half of them stuffed fat with roe. All I had to do was wait for a salmon to blast off below me, time my grab and yank it up onto the slippery bank. That’s when the fun began. I had a harder time bashing them on the head than I did gaffing them. A bunch flopped back into the river. The Hunter could have helped, I suppose, but even though I lost about half of the fish I gaffed, we had 12 big salmon in no more than 10 minutes. It was all we could hope to lug over such tough terrain. I didn’t bother asking the Hunter if he would share the load, just made him a stringer out of a Y-shaped limb and handed him his half.
As usual, the way back seemed to take about half as long as the way in–even with each of us carrying 60 pounds of fish. I was still trying hard to be friendly, maybe win the guy over, and finally managed to draw him into some conversation. Some of the stuff the Hunter had to say was interesting and some of it was kind of weird and off the wall. His mind was already stewing. If I listened better maybe I could have headed things off, or at least warned my people.
He didn’t need to stop and rest every couple hundred yards, but I did. One of our last timeouts came by the side of a brook even smaller than the one running past the cave. Clearing his throat, he asked, “Would you like me to show you a trick?”
“Is it a good one?”
“I think so. Remove a salmon from your stringer. This one, the biggest.”
Under his direction, I slid the point of my spear through the salmon’s gills and tied its head tightly with twine.
“Use good knots,” he said. “It must not slip off.”
I thought he was crazy when he slit the fish’s belly open and told me to dunk it in the little brook.
“Just pin it to the bottom for a while.”
“And then what?”
“You’ll know.”
In a few minutes I began to feel vibrations coming up the shaft. A couple minutes more and I could barely hold the spear it was jerking so much.
“Now?”
“Now!”
With a heave, I pulled up what was left of the 15-pound salmon and about 40 pounds of black, shiny, slippery eels. They covered the fish from head to tail and when they let go were just as hard to corral on land as a flopping salmon. This time, the Hunter pitched in to help keep the catch from wriggling back into the water.
“My girls love eel.” It was the last thing he said to me.
We could hear laughter before we could see camp. The gang had arranged all the sleeping furs outside in the afternoon sun and everybody was lying down or sitting, watching Lucy and Pearl act out a story. The two sisters were in the middle of a pretend brawl when Lucy glanced over and saw us coming with the fish and eels. Hooting in delight, she tripped her sister into the audience and came running.
You would have thought we had brought everybody bags of diamonds the way they danced and celebrated. Gray Beard used one of his new blades to slit the gut on a couple fat female salmon to get at their orange roe. It was one of those times when everything grows quiet. Everybody was too busy stuffing food into their maws to talk.
The lull ended the moment Rhino bit his tongue hard enough to make it bleed. When I eat roe I just swallow it down, but Rhino must chew his. By this time we know his different cries, which one means “I’m tired and fussy,” and which one means “I’m hurt bad!” Rhino was screaming and Maria was trying to check his tongue through all the blood and salmon roe in his mouth when the Hunter stormed up and grabbed him from her arms.
Lifting the baby above his head with one hand, the Hunter growled in an amplified voice, “Salvatore, it is time you paid the Piper!”
Maria was on the Hunter in a flash, clawing at his face and grabbing for Rhino. She was a tigress trying to protect her baby–a tigress outside a glass cage. The force field blocked her scratches and punches, and made Rhino impossible to pry away. We would have had to cut him in half to get him out of the Hunter’s grip. Maria was pleading for the baby’s life and the asshole was laughing at her.
“Salvatore,” he says, “would you care to explain why this exhibition of power is necessary? Tell them what you did to your suit.”
“My baby, my baby, don’t you dare hurt my baby!” Poor Maria was going crazy.
Hammering the field with my meteorite club, it felt like I was hitting the side of a tank. My strikes bounced off.
“Move left,” Jones shouted a second before a yew bolt flew past my head and shattered against the field. Seeing that bolt blow apart gave me a sick feeling. If our most powerful weapon couldn’t dent his armor, I knew we had no hope.
And then there was Bolzano, walking up with a bone blade in his hand and a smile on his face, looking like he didn’t have a care in the world. Stepping past Maria, standing face to face with his father, Sal sang some word and, just like that, he was gone. It looked as if the force field swallowed him up.
The Hunter got a kind of confused look on his face and disappeared. For a few seconds Rhino was floating in midair, and then he was gone too. The clan had been yelling and running around, pleading for the Hunter to stop, and suddenly all that was gone. All we could do was look around and wonder where the hell they were. It dragged on for a minute or a year, I couldn’t say which, before the force field blazed into a bright, pulsing star. The pulses started out white and then begin shifting into colors. Among the neon, I saw the milky blue of the stream, the gray-green of lichen and the rust-colored bark of the tundra trees from the narrow gulches.
The pulses started coming faster and brighter, some kind of countdown to doom.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TRANSMISSION:
Duarte: “They’re killing my baby!”
From the log of Salvatore Bolzano
Firefighter II
(English translation)
Stepping into the cocoon as it parted, I knew I must strike quickly. Such an opportunity would never present itself again.
Was there forethought? Did I plan my attempt at patricide? I certainly laid the foundation, but the act itself was pure impulse. Hiding blind rage behind a hyena grin, concealing a wicked bone knife behind my wrist the way they taught us in Team training, I expected to be rebuffed by the field right up until the moment it invited me in.
It may sound strange, but I believe I developed a “relationship” with Father’s force field. It trusted me, and I suspect it even appreciated the calming influence my dreams had upon him. Initially, there was always a period of adjustment as the field reacquainted itself with my presence. Though Father didn’t feel the unsettling ripples of energy, I certainly did. In an effort to alert the field of my impending arrival, I developed a catchword which was always sung the exact same way, “Spalancare.”
Father turned with a shocked look on his pale face as he heard the word and his armor opened. Outside, he was a native-looking fellow dressed in winter moccasins and skins. The white man before me was naked except for the wide belt with glowing red buckle cinched at his waist. Thwarting his grab for the gun floating beside his right hip, I buried my multi-pronged knife into the soft spot just below his sternum. My upward thrust had such force it lifted his feet off the ground.
“Ouphhhhh. Hurts.”
“Reach for a gun again and you will receive worse, much worse,” I hissed into his ear, holding the blade deep as the warmth of his blood washed over my hand. With the blare of claxons, his field began to flash and swirl in bright colors. Data readouts scrolled at breakneck speed around the Aurora Borealis, numbers and words careening too quickly to comprehend.
I had requested a man killer from Leonglauix, and that is what he made me. The bone knife had three blades, two on one end and one on the other. In the middle, its grip was wrapped in deerskin. The morning the old man presented the weapon to me, he demonstrated how the stabber was equally effective on upward and downward strokes. In a very matter-of-fact manner, he explained when the blade or blades on one end broke
off, I would still have a usable weapon. The storyteller claimed he smashed several handfuls of elk femurs before coming up with a fractured bone with the desired points and size.
“Give the baby to Duarte,” I growled, dislodging the knife and placing a point against Father’s chin.”
“Sod off, you queer!”
I stabbed him again, none too gently in the shoulder. Movements made herky-jerky by the stroboscopic effect of his flashing field, wobbling on his feet, Father pulled the wailing baby inside the cocoon and wrapped him with both arms against the rent in his abdomen. If I had a plan, this was absolutely not part of it.
“Give me the child!”
“Take a long walk on a short pier,” he moaned, struggling to remain upright.
“You are going to bleed out. Let me help you.”
The nanos had slowed his gouts to a trickle, but the repair was superficial. The microscopic machines had much work ahead to turn back the internal damage caused by the twists of my knife. The moment he stole a look down, adjusted the child to survey the damage, I wrenched the boy from his grip.
Father looked up with hate in his bloodshot eyes.
“I’m going to kill you for this.” The threat was delivered through clenched teeth and a shiver of pain.
“That is not you speaking, Father. Your words are conjured by the goddamn belt and the goddamn nanos. They have transformed you into a monster. How can you not see?”
“But first, I’m going to make you watch every single, sodding one of your friends die.”
“Please, let me help you.”
Galway Page 30
