The good new stuff, p.55
The Good New Stuff, page 55
Helio pointed out his plantation, a great green delta thrust out into the sea. On the landward side, a long straight north-south fence kept his domestic herds from straying into Tuch-Dah country. West of the fence line was a knoll topped with a black smear left by the burned semirigid. Helio descended, dodging tall columns of vultures. Never a good sign.
Ellenor told Helio to turn out the Joie’s crew. “Have them go through the long grass around the knoll.”
“Looking for what?” The rancher sounded skeptical.
“Whatever they find.”
On the ground, Defoe was struck by how peaceful it seemed. This was the Saber-tooth Steppe, a silent mysterious savanna, its mystique as solid and tangible as a patch of unterraformed bedrock. The semirigid’s small control car was intact, showing no sign of having come down hard. Blackened girders formed big looping curves. They might have been spares ready to be assembled into another ship.
Dire wolves sniffed out two bodies. “Burned beyond recognition” hardly conveyed the horror of the charred skeletons, jaws agape in final agony, held together by shreds of cooked flesh. Riggers watched Ellenor Battle go over the corpses with cool intensity, calling down DNA signatures and dental data from orbit. “This guy’s kinda short,” someone suggested. “Maybe he’s a Thal.”
“I don’t know. Might be human.”
“Human as you anyway.”
“Just bein’ hopeful.”
Glad not to be needed, Defoe conducted his own search, using his navmatrix to find the low black cairn and the fold the Tuch-Dah had burst from. A rigger was down in the grass on his knees, a strip of gasbag fabric tied around his head like a bandanna holding his hair back. Defoe recognized RIG’EM RIGHT on the back of the man’s jacket.
Seeing Defoe, he got up. His name was Rayson, which everyone shortened to Ray. He held up a small finned and pointed object. “There’s a mess of these in the grass.” Defoe recognized the spent projectile from a recoilless pistol. The young AID woman had been firing downslope from up by the wreck. Had she hit anything? Defoe looked for bloodstains.
Ray glanced upslope to where Ellenor Battle was working over the bodies, then walked around behind the fire-blackened cairn, opening his pants.
Defoe called out softly, “That’s a shrine.”
Taking a sharp step back, Ray zipped his pants. “Shit, I thought it was a barbecue pit.” Just the sort of thing that got people in trouble in Tuch-Dah country—you could get brained by a Thai and never know why.
Finding no blood on the grass tops, Defoe stood up, studying the shoreline. The colder north shore marshes were thin, broken by shimmering white pans. Wind whipped fine dry grit off the pans, stinging his eyes, settling in skin creases. He licked the corners of his mouth, tasting tiny bits of the Saber-tooth Steppe. It was salty.
A dark object lay between the steppe and the sea, as still as the shrine. Defoe walked toward it, brittle shore grass crunching underfoot. The big still object was a bison, down on its knees. Vultures flapped off as Defoe approached. Tail, ears, eyes, and testicles were gone, but the bison was hideously alive, managing to lift its head, turning bloody sightless sockets toward Defoe.
“Damn.” Ray was right behind him, letting out a low whistle. “I’ll fix him.” He produced a recoilless pistol with a folding stock. Shouldering it like a rifle, he fired.
The bison jerked at the impact, his head dropping, one horn gouging into the sandy pan. Defoe bent down, examining the dead beast; the tongue was torn out, the muzzle white with salt. There was more salt beneath the sand, where the horn had gone in. Looking east and west along the shore, Defoe saw spiraling columns of vultures.
Ellenor Battle pronounced the bodies to be Homo sapiens sapiens. Male. Two members of the AID team were accounted for. Cause of death unknown. “We should start a slow search, standard pattern, centered on the crash site.”
Helio nodded and they set off again. As Glory’s tight ten-hour day ended, Defoe sat in the lounge, trying to fit together everything he had seen—the mob scene in the hangar, the recording, the silent Thal, the crash site, and the dying bison. Delta Eridani had sunk down almost to the level of the steppe. The joie was making gentle sweeps at less than thirty kph, twenty meters or so above the grass tops. He doubted they would turn up anything. That would be far too easy.
Gathering his things, Defoe climbed up to the keel. Tall hydrogen-filled gasbags swayed in semidarkness. A rigger with CATWALK CHARLIE on his jacket bossed a gang of SuperChimps.
Defoe made his way to the empty tail, unsealing an inspection hatch. Grass tops slid by less than twenty meters below. Unreeling a dozen meters of cable from a nearby winch, he swung his legs through the open hatch, letting the cable drop.
“Hope it wasn’t something we said.” Rigger Ray was standing on the keel catwalk.
Defoe shrugged. “I need room to work.”
Ray sat down on a girder, eyeing the open hatch. This close to dusk, shaded by the giant tail, the hatch looked like a black hole whipping along in midair. “There’s room aplenty down there. Just don’t end up at the bottom of the food chain.”
Defoe nodded. “I’ll do my damnedest.”
“Well, good-bye, an’ good luck.” Ray made it sound like, “Hope to hell you come back.”
Defoe dropped through, slid down the cable, and let go. He had ample time to position himself. The most charming thing about Glory was the lazy falls at two-thirds g.
Steppe floated up to meet him.
Defoe hit, bounced, and scrambled to his feet. He stood staring up at the big tail of the dwindling airship. The Joie de Vivre kept to her search pattern, straining to complete the last leg before nightfall. When she dipped below a rise, he was alone.
Hip-high grass tops ran in every direction, prowled by tawny killers with knife-sized fangs. A cold undertaker’s wind sent waves of color sweeping over the twilight steppe—deep blue, rust brown, old gold, and a dozen shades of green. Hyenas chuckled in the deepening gloom.
As Delta Eridani slid beneath the horizon, darkness rose up out of the grass roots, devouring the light. Night birds keened. Whoever said humans were the meanest animals—“the most dangerous game”—undoubtedly said it in daylight. Certainly it was never said at night, alone and unarmed on the Saber-tooth Steppe. Orienting himself by the strange stars of Eridani Sector, Defoe set out walking toward the distant fence line.
THE SABER-TOOTH STEPPE
Dew clung to the grass tops by the time Defoe found the fence line. He had slept once, to be roused stiff and sore by the cough of a saber-tooth. Throughout the dark morning hours, he heard the catlike predators that gave the steppe its name calling to each other. Dawn wind carried their smell, like the odor of a ship’s cat in a confined cabin. At first light the calls ceased; he supposed the pride had made its kill.
The energy fence cut a shimmering line across the steppe, carrying a hefty neural frequency shock. Domestic herds grazed beyond it. Overgrazed, in fact. The far side looked like a low-cut lawn.
Defoe walked along the fence until he found a knot of horses, Equus occidentalis, tall as Arabians but heavier, with slender feet, reminding Defoe of zebras or unicorns. The lead mare even had zebra stripes across her withers.
The horses lifted their heads as he approached, staring at him and at the hip-high steppe grass. Defoe told his navinatrix to bypass the fence’s gullible software. The air between the nearest pylons ceased to shimmer, but still carried the signal saying the fence was intact. Ripping up some long grass, Defoe stepped through, offering it to the lead mare. They were immediate friends. She took the grass, letting him mount.
Riding bareback, he guided her through the break in the fence. Her little herd trotted after them. Defoe set a leisurely course deeper into Tuch-Dah country. As his navmatrix moved out of range, the fence reestablished itself.
He saw springbok and pronghorn, but no bison or Tuch-Dahs. Steppe thinned into shortgrass prairie broken by black knobs of basalt. Curious antelope came right up to him, heads held high, showing off tiny horns and white throats. Brown somber eyes studied him intently. Defoe doubted they had ever been hunted by humans.
Seeing a spiraling column of vultures, Defoe made for it. It marked a bison kill, a lone bull set upon by hyenas. He got down to study the kill site. Drag marks mapped the struggle. The bison had been hit once and ripped completely apart, probably in seconds. Nothing remained but rags of hide and white bone-rich dung. Hyenas were more to be feared than overgrown cats; their bite was better than a panther’s, and they weren’t as picky as a saber-tooth pride.
A shadow swept over him, a gigantic condor-sized shape among the vultures, circling downward, parting the smaller birds, boring toward Defoe in a tight spiraling dive, hiding in the orange glare of Delta Eridani. Almost on top of him, the big shape sideslipped, spilling air. He recognized Ellenor Battle, wearing an ornithopter harness—a powered version of the wings people flew with on Spindle. She flew like she had been born with them, doing a low-level stall and landing feetfirst.
Never let down your guard on Saber-tooth Steppe. Defoe had been blissfully alone, sharing the day with vultures and a dead bison. Now without warning Ellenor Battle was standing over him, demanding an explanation. What excuse could he have for jumping ship, cutting fences, and stealing horses?
Defoe shrugged. “No one needed me just to fly around in circles aboard the Joie de Vivre.”
What fascinated him was her wings. A really fine pair. Falcoform Condors, solar assisted, seven-plus meters of extendible wingspan, with autoflaps and fingertip trim tabs. An energy pack in the small of her back powered the harness.
He nodded at the horses. “These are my tickets into Tuch-Dah country. What’s your excuse for being here?” When it came to unwanted company, Glory could be more crowded than Spindle.
Ellenor slowly reached behind her back, taking the AID recorder from between her wings—it must have been strapped alongside the power pack. “I’m here because of this.” She weighed it in her hands, then held it out. “It’s my daughter’s.”
Defoe shooed aside some vultures and sat down. So, the woman on the AID team was another Battle. They did not look much alike, except perhaps in the shape of the face. But maybe Ellenor’s hair used to be brown. More important, this explained her readiness to listen to reason.
“What is her name?” Defoe bore down lightly on the verb; no reason to assume she was dead.
“Lila. It’s Hindu, and means the playful will of Heaven.”
He took the recorder, turning it over in his hands. “So, why didn’t your daughter have this with her during the attack?”
“I’ve been wondering. There might be some simple explanation.”
“Might be.” But Defoe doubted it. “That makes another strange circumstance about the crash and recording.”
“What are the others?” Ellenor folded her wings, settling down across from him.
“First—no crash. That semirigid landed intact, then burned on the ground. Second, what sort of shot is Lila?”
“I taught her myself.” There was pride in her voice and a recoilless pistol on her hip.
“So I supposed.” He remembered how cool and unflinching Lila had looked—a lot like her mother. “But there was no blood on the grass. It is hard to believe every shot was a miss.”
Ellenor nodded grimly.
Defoe got up, handed back the recorder, and dusted fine grains off his lap. The soil felt thin and silty. “Can you ride bareback?” Ellenor was not his first choice as a traveling companion, or even his fiftieth, but that was Glory for you.
“I was doing it before you were born.” She fixed up a loop bridle, selected a mount, and they set off.
The prairie thinned further. Sandy patches showed between tufts of shriveled grass. More buzzards appeared, over more dead bison. More than even hyenas could eat. Defoe reined in, asking, “What do you make of this?”
Ellenor dismissed the apocalyptic scene. “A local die-off. We saw it from orbit. Lila’s team was investigating.”
Defoe shook his head. “I’ve been seeing signs of major drought ever since crossing the Azur. And real overgrazing as well. Helio’s horses were frantic to cross the fence line.”
Ellenor sniffed. “Is that a pilot’s opinion, or are you a xenoecologist as well?”
“You don’t have to be a xenoecologist to know a dead buffalo. The water table is falling. You can see the steppe salting up. Springbok and pronghorns are filtering in from out of the wild, replacing the bison.”
Ellenor denied the Azur was in any trouble. “The sea is stabilized.”
“Stabilized?” He reminded her the planet was still terraforming. “Shouldn’t the Azur be growing?”
“A local shortfall,” she insisted, shrugging off the buzzards and dead bison. “Another wet season and this will all be forgotten.”
It did not seem that local to Defoe. Kilometers north of the Azur he could still smell salt on the breeze. Nor would the Tuch-Dah take a “local condition” so calmly—they had to live here. And they were not the types to forget and forgive. Anyone who endured a two-day Naming Fast knew Thals had god-awful long memories.
From time to time Ellenor took off, soaring aloft to do a turn around the landscape, looking for water. Near to dusk she found a dry bed winding through a sandy bottom. Dismounting, Defoe attacked the damp sand with his mattock. An hour of digging produced a small hole full of brackish liquid. He refilled his canteen, then let the horses drink.
Ellenor alighted on a cutbank, saying a rider was coming.
Defoe nodded. Dusk was when they could expect company. Gathering dry grass and brushwood, he made a bed for a fire. Then he took out a heat cap, a capsule the size of an oral antibiotic, breaking it and tossing it on the wood. It burned with an intense flame and acrid odor.
He watched the rider trot warily into camp, separating from the red-orange disk of Delta Eridani. It was Willungha, atop a giant male moropus. Thals did not have aerial recon and orbital scans, but not much that went on in Tuch-Dah country escaped Willungha’s attention.
Despite rumors about him being a half-breed, or even Homo sapiens, the Tuch-Dah chieftain was pure Neanderthal, with bulging browridges, buckteeth, and a receding chin. That chin was the only weak thing about him. Willungha’s huge head and shoulders topped a meter-wide chest; arms the size of Defoe’s calves ended in hands strong enough to strangle a hungry saber-tooth (a perennial party-pleaser at Tuch-Dah fetes). An old scar ran along one gigantic thigh. In his youth, Willungha had been gored by a wounded bison, the horn going through his thigh. Hanging head down, with the horn tearing at his leg, Willungha had clamped his good leg and left arm around the beast’s neck. Calmly drawing a sheath knife, he cut the bison’s throat. Willungha’s mount was an ancient cousin of the horse and rhino, intended to be a browser and pruner—recycling plant material into the soil. AID had never thought a moropus could be ridden.
He grunted a greeting.
Defoe did not attempt to answer. Instead he unhobbled the horses, laying the lead mare’s halter rope ceremoniously before the Tuch-Dah. He kept back only a pair of mounts and a led horse for himself and Ellenor.
Willungha responded with a series of snorts. Wild Thals spoke a hideous concoction of clicks, hoots, and grunts, which some Homo sapiens claimed to understand, but none could imitate. To the Tuch-Dah, Homo sapiens were overwhelmingly deaf and totally dumb, hardly even a thinking species. Powerful and unpredictable maybe, able to tear up the landscape like a mad moropus. But reasoning? Even Willungha reserved judgment. He was tolerably familiar with “man the wise”—which explained his mixed opinion.
Having given gifts, Defoe moved to the next stop in the evening’s entertainment, setting up the recorder by the fire so it would play on the cutbank. Using the eroded rock as a 3V screen, he had his navmatrix sort through the recorder’s memory for the final images, including the Tuch-Dah attack. When Willungha himself materialized atop his charging moropus, the chieftain gave a hoot and whistle. For all Defoe knew, it merely meant, “Hello.” Or, “Handsome fellow, what?”
Lila appeared next, pistol in hand. Defoe froze the image. Walking up to the scene, he stabbed a finger at her, then made as if to look about—hopefully telling Willungha that he was looking for her.
The Tuch-Dah’s eyes fixed him from within their deep sockets. Defoe repeated the signs. Wild Thals were not much impressed with off-planet marvels unless they could put them to use. Without as much as a grunt, Willungha headed off into the dark with his gift horses in tow.
Defoe leaped up, telling Ellenor, “We’ve got to follow.” Willungha was the best lead they were likely to get.
They trekked through most of the short night. Badlands gave way to savanna. Tangerine dawn outlined the tops of black acacias.
Twenty-odd hours without sleep had Defoe dizzy with fatigue—wishing to God he could glaze over for a while. From upwind came the smell of burning dung, denoting a nomad camp.
Beneath the acacias stood a dark circle of yurts, surrounded by lowing herds. A crowd of Thals emerged to click and whistle their leader into camp. Defoe and Ellenor got no such cheery greetings, facing stony indifference leavened by the occasional dirty look.
While Ellenor sat with folded wings, Defoe listened to a lively exchange among the Thals, seeing fists waved in their direction. The discussion narrowed to a debate between Willungha and a tall brute with a broken nose and bold red-ocher tattoos. He must have outweighed Willungha by a couple of stone, but lacked the chieftain’s sangfroid. Plug-ugly’s part in the conversation consisted of low growls and grim looks.
Willungha ended the exchange, turning abruptly and striding over to where Defoe and Ellenor sat waiting. Squatting on his haunches, he made his position plain with signs and finger jabbing. They were free to search for their stray female, with a single exception. Defoe explained to Ellenor, “The only yurt we cannot enter belongs to Mean and Ugly over there.” He nodded toward the tall Thal with the broken nose and ocher tattoos.
